AI + gaming spent three years searching for PMF—yet Nintendo got there first? And with a sequel released 13 years later? On Reddit, players have hailed it as “Nintendo’s most brilliant bizarre game.” When first announced a year ago, its hype surpassed the Switch 2 reveal post—and it remains Nintendo Japan’s most-liked official tweet ever (400,000+ likes). The game is called Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream (let’s call it “Friend Gathering” for now), launching officially on April 16. It debuted as the #1 bestseller in the UK, outperforming Capcom’s cross-platform hit Pragmata, and topped Japan’s Amazon pre-order chart in March. Here’s the core gameplay of “Friend Gathering”—so simple it’s absurd: You create a bunch of Mii characters and drop them on an island. They live their own lives—dating, having nightmares, fighting over pizza. You can pair two Miis together, but you can’t force them to fall in love. All you do is watch, enjoying the quiet amusement of their parallel lives. Let go of control. Let emergence happen. Isn’t this exactly what everyone’s been talking about for two years: Agent Simulation? While others run demos with five NPCs, Nintendo sold this for $60. Traditional games: players drive the story. AI games: characters generate their own stories; players just screenshot and post. This might prove one thing: players don’t want to control NPCs—they just want to watch them go wild. Someone used face-painting tools to recreate a Taco Bell meal in-game. Others orchestrated elaborate love triangles among the characters. Even Nintendo disabled online sharing features—likely to avoid the content chaos seen with Swapnote. (Because without a profanity filter, give a character a few prompt phrases, and it’ll say anything 😂). But that didn’t stop people from screenshotting anyway. Another interesting detail: Miis can choose same-sex relationships, non-binary identities, and custom pronouns. It finally fulfilled Nintendo’s public promise to LGBTQ+ players back in 2014. Eleven years late—but here at last. In the UGC era, you make content. In the Agent era, you make life. Nintendo may be old—but it’s still Nintendo.
Well written—concise and highly readable. Marcus listed five reasons for PayPal’s failures in his scathing tweet, but this article missed one: the 2016 Visa agreement. Marcus originally said Visa “masterfully structured a deal.” That agreement forced PayPal to give up its ability to route users directly to bank ACH transactions—the very weapon it once used to bypass card networks and generate low-cost profits. The Q4 earnings report a decade later was the final reckoning: TPV rose 9%, but revenue only grew 4%. More money flowed through the pipeline, but now every drop had to pay Visa a toll. Some see this concession as fatal; others disagree. I lean toward the latter view, because the Visa agreement weakened PayPal’s cost structure, not its competitive moat. Even if it must now route through card networks and pay tolls, as long as users still actively choose that blue button, PayPal retains bargaining power and can still defend its moat. As a former PayPal president, Marcus understood the Visa deal was an external constraint—an unavoidable reality. This may also be why @withhazelhu chose not to elaborate on it in the article: it was an imposed shackles, not a voluntary choice. But how PayPal strategically navigated within those constraints was entirely its own decision. And then PayPal made a fundamental misjudgment: it chased payment volume over profitability and differentiation. It focused on unbranded checkout—the least negotiable segment—rather than branded checkout, where real margins, data, and customer relationships reside. The result? Branded checkout grew just 1%, and users are forgetting the blue button. Apple Pay proved an alternative path is viable: it doesn’t care whether transactions run on Visa or Mastercard—it cares whether users choose “Pay with Apple Pay.” As long as users select it, Apple owns the gateway, the data, and the brand. As for PYUSD, it’s a perfect symbol of PayPal’s strategic inertia: it “buys” user adoption with near-4% yields, dumping money on Solana to offer double-digit APYs (I still remember the Solana Foundation replying to an enthusiastic user that they didn’t fund it 🤔)—instead of creating indispensable transaction use cases. The result? Velocity is under 20. The gap between PYUSD and USDT is wider than the combined gap between USDC and RLUSD. Even in New York, I don’t use Venmo (why use the fee-based Zelle, right?). PayPal lost its mojo—but it didn’t lose it. It threw it away.
In contrast to @Pxstar_, I decided to leave the stability and high salary of a big tech company and join the crypto industry during the "apocalyptic atmosphere of the global pandemic." I'm also a liberal arts major. I started to build my belief by self-studying cryptographic hash functions and merkle trees every night. After filling up a whole notebook, I finally felt confident enough to start applying for jobs. My teammate who introduced me to the crypto world once gave me a scarf with a phrase embroidered on it: "Time is Bitcoin." He bought his first BTC when the price was 2,000 RMB. Therefore, I choose to be a friend of time, and also a friend of BTC.