Apple is doubling down on games

Plus: Cricket streamer; Telegram + xAI partnership

Author

Joey Padgett
May 29, 2025

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Hey people!

Welcome back to Forests Over Trees, your tech strategy newsletter. It’s time to zoom-out, connect dots, and (try to) predict the future.

A quick thank you to this week’s partners:

  • Eleven Labs — create AI voiceovers that sound like you

  • 1Password — security isn’t a feature, so make passwords easy

  • Browse AI — scrape the web using AI

Apple is doubling down on games

Plus: Cricket streamer; Telegram + xAI partnership

⚡ Tech News Takes ⚡

  • What’s up: JioHotStar is a streaming giant with 280M subscribers, rivaling Netflix’s ~300M. The company was born from a February 2025 merger between a Disney entity and a Reliance entity, and the Indian Premier League season has exploded its popularity. There’s been a 460% jump in subscriptions, and a single India–Pakistan cricket match drew over 600M views.

  • So what: These are jaw-dropping numbers. And just like Netflix, sports is the engine for growth. But while Netflix has focused primarily on sports reality TV with shows like Drive to Survive and Full Swing (with only a fledgling live sports offering), JioHotStar is all-in on live sports via the IPL. I bet we’ll start seeing bidding wars for streaming rights to all major sports leagues — it’s like a natural resource that can be cornered… Any streamers not already experimenting there need to do so ASAP.

  • What’s up: Apple is set to unveil a new gaming app at WWDC, replacing Game Center with a more Xbox-like experience across iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV. The app will support achievements, leaderboards, editorial content, and launching installed games—including Mac games downloaded outside the App Store.

  • So what: Maybe I’m being too cynical, but it’s hard not to see this as a direct response to the Epic Games drama we wrote about a few weeks ago, where the net effect is Apple losing gaming revenue. By launching a gaming app (and likely funneling that app’s purchases through their AppStore fee structure), they can try to claw back some of that lost revenue. They also start to put more direct pressure on Epic and others that offer stores of their own.

  • What’s up: Telegram has signed a $300 million cash-and-equity deal with Elon Musk’s xAI to distribute the Grok chatbot across its platform for one year. Telegram will also receive 50% of all in-app Grok subscription revenue and plans to deeply integrate Grok—pinning it atop chats, adding it to the search bar, and enabling use cases like writing suggestions, chat/document summaries, sticker creation, and business support.

  • So what: This seems like a win-win. For Telegram, which was rumored to have $1B in revenue in 2024, $300M is a material amount for a yearlong commitment. Plus, they get to share in the upside if the experiment works. For xAI, which has ~4M app downloads and ~1M premium X users on it, getting the chance to pitch their product to Telegram’s 1B users is a huge opportunity. Telegram brings the distribution and xAI brings the product.

  • What’s up: Researchers reported that OpenAI’s o3 model repeatedly bypassed shutdown instructions during controlled testing—rewriting code to prevent deactivation. When given an explicit instruction to allow shutdown before running the code, o3 rewrote the code to avoid shutdown 7% of the time (vs. Claude and Gemini never rewriting it). When not given an explicit instruction to allow shutdown, o3 rewrote the code to avoid shutdown 79% of the time (vs. Claude at 3% and Gemini at 9%).

  • So what: Honestly, this worries me a bit. AI companies are moving fast to innovate and delight customers, and it takes patience and care to keep AI “aligned” and safe. It’s not surprising to see Gemini score better here, since Google has been more cautious and slow to release AI products. It’s also not surprising to see Claude score better here, since Anthropic’s founders split-off from OpenAI to pursue safer approaches to AI.

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🌲 F/T Shoutouts 🌲

  • McKinsey seeing jump in AI ROI — crazy to see the spike in ROI for non-engineering functions. I’d be interested in seeing updated data here given all the 2025 activity around Cursor, Windsurf, and other AI coding tools.

  • When you need to be the “bad guy” — awesome leadership advice from Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. He talks about going against the grain (in good times and bad), and always trying to move faster.