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The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on all things vertical video, follow David Pierce. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.

For a while, every social and media platform had its own identity. YouTube was for clips of TV shows and movies, and the home of so many members of a burgeoning creator community. Instagram was mostly pictures. Netflix was trying to be the on-demand HBO. Facebook was about friends. Twitter was about news. Snapchat was a messaging app.

All these apps did have one important thing in common, though: They were growing up alongside the smartphone. Billions of new people were coming online for the first time, and they began to make content that made sense for the tall, skinny new devices in their hands. Selfies were a vertical art form, both because the photos filled the screen better and because it was just easier to hold the phone and take the photo that way. Some resisted the idea of vertical video for years — they’d argue that our eyes are meant to scan horizontally rather than vertically, and that vertical video looked bad on widescreen laptops. But ultimately phones won, and we hold our phones upright, so our phone experiences turned upright. That includes entertainment.

As has been true so many times, Snap figured this out before anyone. It launched Stories in late 2013 as a slightly more relaxed way to see what your friends are up to. CEO Evan Spiegel called it a “totally new way to share your day with friends — or everyone.” It took off in a massive way, and by the middle of 2014 was the most popular feature on Snapchat. That’s the kind of virality that Mark Zuckerberg tends to notice, and by August of 2016, the feature had been copied more or less exactly into Instagram. Kevin Systrom, then the CEO of Instagram, said of Spiegel and Snapchat that “they deserve all the credit” for Stories. The implication? That this was no longer a proprietary feature of a single social network; it was just in the air. Stories were for everyone. They started showing up on LinkedIn, Tinder, Medium, and so many other places.

Stories weren’t always video, but as cameras and upload speeds improved, video became the dominant medium in many ephemeral spaces. And video stories had two semi-magical properties: They were perfectly suited to endless, mindless scrolling, and they made it really easy to integrate ads. Only a few months after turning on Stories in Instagram, by which point half the platform’s users were already using Stories, Facebook began flooding ads into the product. The semi-randomness of Stories made ads actually seem less intrusive — you’d see a photo of a dog, a video of a hike, an ad for jeans, your friend’s makeup routine, brunch pics, an ad for blush. Video ads felt more premium, took up the whole screen, and were thus far more lucrative for the social platforms.

With apologies to the short, brilliant life of Vine, the six-second video platform that helped invent so much about the video-first social network, it wasn’t until TikTok took off that things really turned again. The platform launched in the US in 2018, but had been popular for a few years in China as Douyin and elsewhere as Musical.ly. TikTok combined the vertical-first format of Stories with the permanence of YouTube, but it also made video easier than ever. It had filters like Instagram and Snapchat, but also supplied a steady stream of video ideas through the platform’s many trends, offered access to music and sound effects, and made it easy to stitch or duet a video.

By defaulting to the purely algorithmic For You page, TikTok also freed creators from caring about curating their profile or worrying about posting too much — you could just pump out videos and trust the algorithm to deliver them. And so that’s what people did. Pretty quickly, TikTok became one of the fastest growing apps on the planet, and its daily usage numbers became the envy of the industry. Instagram may have had more users, but TikTok users spent far more time TikToking.

When TikTok became a phenomenon, just about everyone jumped on the vertical video bandwagon. Reels launched in 2020 and became a core feature of both Instagram and Facebook; YouTube created Shorts a year later. By the end of 2021, Twitter had both launched and killed a similar feature called Fleets. By this point, this kind of full-screen, vertical-scrolling video was part of the lingua franca of the smartphone. At the same time, in a search for ever more engagement, these platforms were learning another lesson from TikTok: to stop relying on your friends to post interesting content, and instead to show you whatever the algorithm thinks you might like. Social networks were gone, replaced by social media — entertainment with a comments section.

Short-form, vertical video has effectively won the internet. Business is booming, and viewers show no sign of tuning out. Meta said in 2024 that Instagram users were spending more than half their time in Reels, and said in 2025 the feature was turning into a $50 billion annual business across Meta’s apps. About 63 percent of young adults and teens are on TikTok, per Pew Research Center, and one in five teens reported being on the app “almost constantly.” YouTube reported 200 billion daily views of Shorts at the end of 2025, and said that Shorts earned more money per watch hour than standard YouTube videos.

The last three or four years have been about relentless standardization in social media. The pace with which these products copy each other, and regress back toward parity, has been absolutely astonishing. First, Shorts and Reels both aped TikTok’s design, its duetting and stitching, and its close relationship with sounds and music. Then they bought into TikTok’s idea of prioritizing content over connection — followers are dead, long live the algorithm. TikTok pushed hard into shopping, then suddenly Reels and Shorts became a lot more shoppable. YouTube began to grow on TVs, and suddenly TikTok and Instagram started investing in its own TV apps. Videos got longer and longer across platforms, to allow more ads. All the apps got really into livestreaming for a while. And micro dramas. They’ve relentlessly copied each other on big things like letting users control their algorithm, and small things like Clear Mode.

As the social platforms spin endlessly around each other, they’ve gotten some surprising company. Company after company started to notice their content floating around social media platforms, often in dubiously legal ways, and tried to take some of the watch time for themselves. Spotify decided it, too, wanted to be a video service, and built a vertical-scrolling feed for users to explore. Disney built a TikTok clone for ESPN and another for Disney Plus, both called Verts. Netflix, Prime Video, and Paramount Plus all called their clones Clips.

There are two reasons for the ongoing onslaught of short-form vertical video: time spent and advertising. The endlessly scrolling video feed turns out to be one of the most engrossing forms of entertainment ever devised (to the point that it has become a regulatory problem for the social platforms), and in a relentless competition for eyeballs and attention, it has become everyone’s best idea. In 2024, when Meta switched its default video player to a vertical-first layout across all platforms, the race was officially won.

Meanwhile, as those platforms have captured more of our time and attention, short-form video has become a dominant force of advertising on the internet, which means advertisers are already comfortable making ads designed to go between videos in the feed. And as so many companies turn to AI to do their ad targeting, all they really need is the creative to get started. “So long as clients give us different assets — a six-second ad, a 15-second ad, a long-format, a vertical ad — AI is essentially powering everything else,” YouTube’s Brian Albert told me last year. “From the audiences you’re reaching, to the contextual placements, to the ad that’s actually showing.” The combination of AI and vertical video has become a self-fulfilling prophecy: The more it wins, the easier it becomes for everyone else to get on board, and so it just keeps winning.

Vertical video haters, I have bad news: It’s only going to get worse. TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram are if anything going to become more short-form and vertical, since those short videos are easier to make and easier to load into endlessly scrolling feeds. Video services used to require you to pick something and press play, but now all they need is for you to open the app and they can start showing you ads. They’re not going to want to go back. Here’s how dominant video is: Facebook is testing a new version of the app that loads a full-screen video feed when you open the app. If that happens, there will be no Facebook — only Reels. After all this time, they’ve trained users to want and expect this kind of fast-paced, instant-gratification entertainment, to the point where even a full-length movie can feel like a chore.

Meanwhile, after years of raising prices, streaming services around the world are hoping they can turn to advertising to keep growing. For a while, they could coast on the back of linear TV, borrowing those ads to run on digital platforms. But a TikTok ad won’t make any sense on Netflix, so Netflix decided the best thing to do is build something that looks more like TikTok. A recent HubSpot report found that short-form video was by a wide margin both the most-used and most successful form of marketing content in 2025, and that it was the format in which marketers planned to invest the most this year.

All that said, there are glimmers of a bigger shift beginning to happen. Fed up with the algorithm, some users are starting to demand the return of friends and family in social media. But more broadly, more and more young people are deciding to put down their phones, resist the invasion of AI into their lives, and look for different kinds of entertainment. Movie theaters are having a big year; one of the year’s most exciting new phones is a flip phone. As long as we live in this era of social media and entertainment, vertical video is going to win. It would take a cultural revolution to stop it — and there might just be one brewing.

  • The best way to understand TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat in particular right now is as a combination of two things: a streaming service and an inbox. Studies have found that the most popular thing to do is watch videos, and the second most popular thing is to send videos to someone else. Actually posting? Way down the list. (YouTube, by the way, is desperately trying to make DMs happen.)
  • If you’ve made it this far and you’re thinking, no way, you’re way overstating it? I’m so sorry to say this, but you might just be old. At this point, YouTube and Facebook cross generations and demographics, but Pew and others have found that TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram are effectively ubiquitous among young people in particular.
  • It’s important to remember that views are lies. Everyone on the internet has an incentive to make their platform seem big and vibrant and popular, and they will invent whatever new metrics they need to do so.
  • New York published a great piece earlier this year about the shifting vibes on YouTube, and the ways in which the creator economy is being unmoored in part by the shift to vertical video. Yeah, the platforms have figured out how to make money from your video feed, but it’s not as simple for creators.
  • All the way back in 2015, The New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo made a good case for vertical video. It’s a fun reminder of just how contentious the idea was!
  • You should read my colleague Mia Sato’s story on the clip economy, which turns shows, movies, podcasts, and more into bite-size pieces for social platforms. It’s a weird industry, but it works — and you can see why the streamers want to compete.
  • Here’s a really good breakdown of all the things TikTok got right, from its algorithm to its whole approach to content. Every bit of it has been copied relentlessly ever since.
Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.
#vertical #video #takeoverColumn,Creators,Facebook,Instagram,Meta,Social Media,Streaming,Tech,The Stepback,TikTok,YouTube"> The vertical video takeover is hereThis is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on all things vertical video, follow David Pierce. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.For a while, every social and media platform had its own identity. YouTube was for clips of TV shows and movies, and the home of so many members of a burgeoning creator community. Instagram was mostly pictures. Netflix was trying to be the on-demand HBO. Facebook was about friends. Twitter was about news. Snapchat was a messaging app.All these apps did have one important thing in common, though: They were growing up alongside the smartphone. Billions of new people were coming online for the first time, and they began to make content that made sense for the tall, skinny new devices in their hands. Selfies were a vertical art form, both because the photos filled the screen better and because it was just easier to hold the phone and take the photo that way. Some resisted the idea of vertical video for years — they’d argue that our eyes are meant to scan horizontally rather than vertically, and that vertical video looked bad on widescreen laptops. But ultimately phones won, and we hold our phones upright, so our phone experiences turned upright. That includes entertainment.As has been true so many times, Snap figured this out before anyone. It launched Stories in late 2013 as a slightly more relaxed way to see what your friends are up to. CEO Evan Spiegel called it a “totally new way to share your day with friends — or everyone.” It took off in a massive way, and by the middle of 2014 was the most popular feature on Snapchat. That’s the kind of virality that Mark Zuckerberg tends to notice, and by August of 2016, the feature had been copied more or less exactly into Instagram. Kevin Systrom, then the CEO of Instagram, said of Spiegel and Snapchat that “they deserve all the credit” for Stories. The implication? That this was no longer a proprietary feature of a single social network; it was just in the air. Stories were for everyone. They started showing up on LinkedIn, Tinder, Medium, and so many other places.Stories weren’t always video, but as cameras and upload speeds improved, video became the dominant medium in many ephemeral spaces. And video stories had two semi-magical properties: They were perfectly suited to endless, mindless scrolling, and they made it really easy to integrate ads. Only a few months after turning on Stories in Instagram, by which point half the platform’s users were already using Stories, Facebook began flooding ads into the product. The semi-randomness of Stories made ads actually seem less intrusive — you’d see a photo of a dog, a video of a hike, an ad for jeans, your friend’s makeup routine, brunch pics, an ad for blush. Video ads felt more premium, took up the whole screen, and were thus far more lucrative for the social platforms.With apologies to the short, brilliant life of Vine, the six-second video platform that helped invent so much about the video-first social network, it wasn’t until TikTok took off that things really turned again. The platform launched in the US in 2018, but had been popular for a few years in China as Douyin and elsewhere as Musical.ly. TikTok combined the vertical-first format of Stories with the permanence of YouTube, but it also made video easier than ever. It had filters like Instagram and Snapchat, but also supplied a steady stream of video ideas through the platform’s many trends, offered access to music and sound effects, and made it easy to stitch or duet a video.By defaulting to the purely algorithmic For You page, TikTok also freed creators from caring about curating their profile or worrying about posting too much — you could just pump out videos and trust the algorithm to deliver them. And so that’s what people did. Pretty quickly, TikTok became one of the fastest growing apps on the planet, and its daily usage numbers became the envy of the industry. Instagram may have had more users, but TikTok users spent far more time TikToking.When TikTok became a phenomenon, just about everyone jumped on the vertical video bandwagon. Reels launched in 2020 and became a core feature of both Instagram and Facebook; YouTube created Shorts a year later. By the end of 2021, Twitter had both launched and killed a similar feature called Fleets. By this point, this kind of full-screen, vertical-scrolling video was part of the lingua franca of the smartphone. At the same time, in a search for ever more engagement, these platforms were learning another lesson from TikTok: to stop relying on your friends to post interesting content, and instead to show you whatever the algorithm thinks you might like. Social networks were gone, replaced by social media — entertainment with a comments section.Short-form, vertical video has effectively won the internet. Business is booming, and viewers show no sign of tuning out. Meta said in 2024 that Instagram users were spending more than half their time in Reels, and said in 2025 the feature was turning into a billion annual business across Meta’s apps. About 63 percent of young adults and teens are on TikTok, per Pew Research Center, and one in five teens reported being on the app “almost constantly.” YouTube reported 200 billion daily views of Shorts at the end of 2025, and said that Shorts earned more money per watch hour than standard YouTube videos.The last three or four years have been about relentless standardization in social media. The pace with which these products copy each other, and regress back toward parity, has been absolutely astonishing. First, Shorts and Reels both aped TikTok’s design, its duetting and stitching, and its close relationship with sounds and music. Then they bought into TikTok’s idea of prioritizing content over connection — followers are dead, long live the algorithm. TikTok pushed hard into shopping, then suddenly Reels and Shorts became a lot more shoppable. YouTube began to grow on TVs, and suddenly TikTok and Instagram started investing in its own TV apps. Videos got longer and longer across platforms, to allow more ads. All the apps got really into livestreaming for a while. And micro dramas. They’ve relentlessly copied each other on big things like letting users control their algorithm, and small things like Clear Mode.As the social platforms spin endlessly around each other, they’ve gotten some surprising company. Company after company started to notice their content floating around social media platforms, often in dubiously legal ways, and tried to take some of the watch time for themselves. Spotify decided it, too, wanted to be a video service, and built a vertical-scrolling feed for users to explore. Disney built a TikTok clone for ESPN and another for Disney Plus, both called Verts. Netflix, Prime Video, and Paramount Plus all called their clones Clips.There are two reasons for the ongoing onslaught of short-form vertical video: time spent and advertising. The endlessly scrolling video feed turns out to be one of the most engrossing forms of entertainment ever devised (to the point that it has become a regulatory problem for the social platforms), and in a relentless competition for eyeballs and attention, it has become everyone’s best idea. In 2024, when Meta switched its default video player to a vertical-first layout across all platforms, the race was officially won.Meanwhile, as those platforms have captured more of our time and attention, short-form video has become a dominant force of advertising on the internet, which means advertisers are already comfortable making ads designed to go between videos in the feed. And as so many companies turn to AI to do their ad targeting, all they really need is the creative to get started. “So long as clients give us different assets — a six-second ad, a 15-second ad, a long-format, a vertical ad — AI is essentially powering everything else,” YouTube’s Brian Albert told me last year. “From the audiences you’re reaching, to the contextual placements, to the ad that’s actually showing.” The combination of AI and vertical video has become a self-fulfilling prophecy: The more it wins, the easier it becomes for everyone else to get on board, and so it just keeps winning.Vertical video haters, I have bad news: It’s only going to get worse. TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram are if anything going to become more short-form and vertical, since those short videos are easier to make and easier to load into endlessly scrolling feeds. Video services used to require you to pick something and press play, but now all they need is for you to open the app and they can start showing you ads. They’re not going to want to go back. Here’s how dominant video is: Facebook is testing a new version of the app that loads a full-screen video feed when you open the app. If that happens, there will be no Facebook — only Reels. After all this time, they’ve trained users to want and expect this kind of fast-paced, instant-gratification entertainment, to the point where even a full-length movie can feel like a chore.Meanwhile, after years of raising prices, streaming services around the world are hoping they can turn to advertising to keep growing. For a while, they could coast on the back of linear TV, borrowing those ads to run on digital platforms. But a TikTok ad won’t make any sense on Netflix, so Netflix decided the best thing to do is build something that looks more like TikTok. A recent HubSpot report found that short-form video was by a wide margin both the most-used and most successful form of marketing content in 2025, and that it was the format in which marketers planned to invest the most this year.All that said, there are glimmers of a bigger shift beginning to happen. Fed up with the algorithm, some users are starting to demand the return of friends and family in social media. But more broadly, more and more young people are deciding to put down their phones, resist the invasion of AI into their lives, and look for different kinds of entertainment. Movie theaters are having a big year; one of the year’s most exciting new phones is a flip phone. As long as we live in this era of social media and entertainment, vertical video is going to win. It would take a cultural revolution to stop it — and there might just be one brewing.The best way to understand TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat in particular right now is as a combination of two things: a streaming service and an inbox. Studies have found that the most popular thing to do is watch videos, and the second most popular thing is to send videos to someone else. Actually posting? Way down the list. (YouTube, by the way, is desperately trying to make DMs happen.)If you’ve made it this far and you’re thinking, no way, you’re way overstating it? I’m so sorry to say this, but you might just be old. At this point, YouTube and Facebook cross generations and demographics, but Pew and others have found that TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram are effectively ubiquitous among young people in particular.It’s important to remember that views are lies. Everyone on the internet has an incentive to make their platform seem big and vibrant and popular, and they will invent whatever new metrics they need to do so.New York published a great piece earlier this year about the shifting vibes on YouTube, and the ways in which the creator economy is being unmoored in part by the shift to vertical video. Yeah, the platforms have figured out how to make money from your video feed, but it’s not as simple for creators. All the way back in 2015, The New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo made a good case for vertical video. It’s a fun reminder of just how contentious the idea was!You should read my colleague Mia Sato’s story on the clip economy, which turns shows, movies, podcasts, and more into bite-size pieces for social platforms. It’s a weird industry, but it works — and you can see why the streamers want to compete.Here’s a really good breakdown of all the things TikTok got right, from its algorithm to its whole approach to content. Every bit of it has been copied relentlessly ever since.Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.David PierceCloseDavid PiercePosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by David PierceColumnCloseColumnPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All ColumnCreatorsCloseCreatorsPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All CreatorsFacebookCloseFacebookPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All FacebookInstagramCloseInstagramPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All InstagramMetaCloseMetaPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All MetaSocial MediaCloseSocial MediaPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All Social MediaStreamingCloseStreamingPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All StreamingTechCloseTechPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All TechThe StepbackCloseThe StepbackPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All The StepbackTikTokCloseTikTokPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All TikTokYouTubeCloseYouTubePosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All YouTube#vertical #video #takeoverColumn,Creators,Facebook,Instagram,Meta,Social Media,Streaming,Tech,The Stepback,TikTok,YouTube
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The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on all things vertical video, follow David Pierce. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.

For a while, every social and media platform had its own identity. YouTube was for clips of TV shows and movies, and the home of so many members of a burgeoning creator community. Instagram was mostly pictures. Netflix was trying to be the on-demand HBO. Facebook was about friends. Twitter was about news. Snapchat was a messaging app.

All these apps did have one important thing in common, though: They were growing up alongside the smartphone. Billions of new people were coming online for the first time, and they began to make content that made sense for the tall, skinny new devices in their hands. Selfies were a vertical art form, both because the photos filled the screen better and because it was just easier to hold the phone and take the photo that way. Some resisted the idea of vertical video for years — they’d argue that our eyes are meant to scan horizontally rather than vertically, and that vertical video looked bad on widescreen laptops. But ultimately phones won, and we hold our phones upright, so our phone experiences turned upright. That includes entertainment.

As has been true so many times, Snap figured this out before anyone. It launched Stories in late 2013 as a slightly more relaxed way to see what your friends are up to. CEO Evan Spiegel called it a “totally new way to share your day with friends — or everyone.” It took off in a massive way, and by the middle of 2014 was the most popular feature on Snapchat. That’s the kind of virality that Mark Zuckerberg tends to notice, and by August of 2016, the feature had been copied more or less exactly into Instagram. Kevin Systrom, then the CEO of Instagram, said of Spiegel and Snapchat that “they deserve all the credit” for Stories. The implication? That this was no longer a proprietary feature of a single social network; it was just in the air. Stories were for everyone. They started showing up on LinkedIn, Tinder, Medium, and so many other places.

Stories weren’t always video, but as cameras and upload speeds improved, video became the dominant medium in many ephemeral spaces. And video stories had two semi-magical properties: They were perfectly suited to endless, mindless scrolling, and they made it really easy to integrate ads. Only a few months after turning on Stories in Instagram, by which point half the platform’s users were already using Stories, Facebook began flooding ads into the product. The semi-randomness of Stories made ads actually seem less intrusive — you’d see a photo of a dog, a video of a hike, an ad for jeans, your friend’s makeup routine, brunch pics, an ad for blush. Video ads felt more premium, took up the whole screen, and were thus far more lucrative for the social platforms.

With apologies to the short, brilliant life of Vine, the six-second video platform that helped invent so much about the video-first social network, it wasn’t until TikTok took off that things really turned again. The platform launched in the US in 2018, but had been popular for a few years in China as Douyin and elsewhere as Musical.ly. TikTok combined the vertical-first format of Stories with the permanence of YouTube, but it also made video easier than ever. It had filters like Instagram and Snapchat, but also supplied a steady stream of video ideas through the platform’s many trends, offered access to music and sound effects, and made it easy to stitch or duet a video.

By defaulting to the purely algorithmic For You page, TikTok also freed creators from caring about curating their profile or worrying about posting too much — you could just pump out videos and trust the algorithm to deliver them. And so that’s what people did. Pretty quickly, TikTok became one of the fastest growing apps on the planet, and its daily usage numbers became the envy of the industry. Instagram may have had more users, but TikTok users spent far more time TikToking.

When TikTok became a phenomenon, just about everyone jumped on the vertical video bandwagon. Reels launched in 2020 and became a core feature of both Instagram and Facebook; YouTube created Shorts a year later. By the end of 2021, Twitter had both launched and killed a similar feature called Fleets. By this point, this kind of full-screen, vertical-scrolling video was part of the lingua franca of the smartphone. At the same time, in a search for ever more engagement, these platforms were learning another lesson from TikTok: to stop relying on your friends to post interesting content, and instead to show you whatever the algorithm thinks you might like. Social networks were gone, replaced by social media — entertainment with a comments section.

Short-form, vertical video has effectively won the internet. Business is booming, and viewers show no sign of tuning out. Meta said in 2024 that Instagram users were spending more than half their time in Reels, and said in 2025 the feature was turning into a $50 billion annual business across Meta’s apps. About 63 percent of young adults and teens are on TikTok, per Pew Research Center, and one in five teens reported being on the app “almost constantly.” YouTube reported 200 billion daily views of Shorts at the end of 2025, and said that Shorts earned more money per watch hour than standard YouTube videos.

The last three or four years have been about relentless standardization in social media. The pace with which these products copy each other, and regress back toward parity, has been absolutely astonishing. First, Shorts and Reels both aped TikTok’s design, its duetting and stitching, and its close relationship with sounds and music. Then they bought into TikTok’s idea of prioritizing content over connection — followers are dead, long live the algorithm. TikTok pushed hard into shopping, then suddenly Reels and Shorts became a lot more shoppable. YouTube began to grow on TVs, and suddenly TikTok and Instagram started investing in its own TV apps. Videos got longer and longer across platforms, to allow more ads. All the apps got really into livestreaming for a while. And micro dramas. They’ve relentlessly copied each other on big things like letting users control their algorithm, and small things like Clear Mode.

As the social platforms spin endlessly around each other, they’ve gotten some surprising company. Company after company started to notice their content floating around social media platforms, often in dubiously legal ways, and tried to take some of the watch time for themselves. Spotify decided it, too, wanted to be a video service, and built a vertical-scrolling feed for users to explore. Disney built a TikTok clone for ESPN and another for Disney Plus, both called Verts. Netflix, Prime Video, and Paramount Plus all called their clones Clips.

There are two reasons for the ongoing onslaught of short-form vertical video: time spent and advertising. The endlessly scrolling video feed turns out to be one of the most engrossing forms of entertainment ever devised (to the point that it has become a regulatory problem for the social platforms), and in a relentless competition for eyeballs and attention, it has become everyone’s best idea. In 2024, when Meta switched its default video player to a vertical-first layout across all platforms, the race was officially won.

Meanwhile, as those platforms have captured more of our time and attention, short-form video has become a dominant force of advertising on the internet, which means advertisers are already comfortable making ads designed to go between videos in the feed. And as so many companies turn to AI to do their ad targeting, all they really need is the creative to get started. “So long as clients give us different assets — a six-second ad, a 15-second ad, a long-format, a vertical ad — AI is essentially powering everything else,” YouTube’s Brian Albert told me last year. “From the audiences you’re reaching, to the contextual placements, to the ad that’s actually showing.” The combination of AI and vertical video has become a self-fulfilling prophecy: The more it wins, the easier it becomes for everyone else to get on board, and so it just keeps winning.

Vertical video haters, I have bad news: It’s only going to get worse. TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram are if anything going to become more short-form and vertical, since those short videos are easier to make and easier to load into endlessly scrolling feeds. Video services used to require you to pick something and press play, but now all they need is for you to open the app and they can start showing you ads. They’re not going to want to go back. Here’s how dominant video is: Facebook is testing a new version of the app that loads a full-screen video feed when you open the app. If that happens, there will be no Facebook — only Reels. After all this time, they’ve trained users to want and expect this kind of fast-paced, instant-gratification entertainment, to the point where even a full-length movie can feel like a chore.

Meanwhile, after years of raising prices, streaming services around the world are hoping they can turn to advertising to keep growing. For a while, they could coast on the back of linear TV, borrowing those ads to run on digital platforms. But a TikTok ad won’t make any sense on Netflix, so Netflix decided the best thing to do is build something that looks more like TikTok. A recent HubSpot report found that short-form video was by a wide margin both the most-used and most successful form of marketing content in 2025, and that it was the format in which marketers planned to invest the most this year.

All that said, there are glimmers of a bigger shift beginning to happen. Fed up with the algorithm, some users are starting to demand the return of friends and family in social media. But more broadly, more and more young people are deciding to put down their phones, resist the invasion of AI into their lives, and look for different kinds of entertainment. Movie theaters are having a big year; one of the year’s most exciting new phones is a flip phone. As long as we live in this era of social media and entertainment, vertical video is going to win. It would take a cultural revolution to stop it — and there might just be one brewing.

  • The best way to understand TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat in particular right now is as a combination of two things: a streaming service and an inbox. Studies have found that the most popular thing to do is watch videos, and the second most popular thing is to send videos to someone else. Actually posting? Way down the list. (YouTube, by the way, is desperately trying to make DMs happen.)
  • If you’ve made it this far and you’re thinking, no way, you’re way overstating it? I’m so sorry to say this, but you might just be old. At this point, YouTube and Facebook cross generations and demographics, but Pew and others have found that TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram are effectively ubiquitous among young people in particular.
  • It’s important to remember that views are lies. Everyone on the internet has an incentive to make their platform seem big and vibrant and popular, and they will invent whatever new metrics they need to do so.
  • New York published a great piece earlier this year about the shifting vibes on YouTube, and the ways in which the creator economy is being unmoored in part by the shift to vertical video. Yeah, the platforms have figured out how to make money from your video feed, but it’s not as simple for creators.
  • All the way back in 2015, The New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo made a good case for vertical video. It’s a fun reminder of just how contentious the idea was!
  • You should read my colleague Mia Sato’s story on the clip economy, which turns shows, movies, podcasts, and more into bite-size pieces for social platforms. It’s a weird industry, but it works — and you can see why the streamers want to compete.
  • Here’s a really good breakdown of all the things TikTok got right, from its algorithm to its whole approach to content. Every bit of it has been copied relentlessly ever since.
Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.

#vertical #video #takeoverColumn,Creators,Facebook,Instagram,Meta,Social Media,Streaming,Tech,The Stepback,TikTok,YouTube">The vertical video takeover is here

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on all things vertical video, follow David Pierce. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.

For a while, every social and media platform had its own identity. YouTube was for clips of TV shows and movies, and the home of so many members of a burgeoning creator community. Instagram was mostly pictures. Netflix was trying to be the on-demand HBO. Facebook was about friends. Twitter was about news. Snapchat was a messaging app.

All these apps did have one important thing in common, though: They were growing up alongside the smartphone. Billions of new people were coming online for the first time, and they began to make content that made sense for the tall, skinny new devices in their hands. Selfies were a vertical art form, both because the photos filled the screen better and because it was just easier to hold the phone and take the photo that way. Some resisted the idea of vertical video for years — they’d argue that our eyes are meant to scan horizontally rather than vertically, and that vertical video looked bad on widescreen laptops. But ultimately phones won, and we hold our phones upright, so our phone experiences turned upright. That includes entertainment.

As has been true so many times, Snap figured this out before anyone. It launched Stories in late 2013 as a slightly more relaxed way to see what your friends are up to. CEO Evan Spiegel called it a “totally new way to share your day with friends — or everyone.” It took off in a massive way, and by the middle of 2014 was the most popular feature on Snapchat. That’s the kind of virality that Mark Zuckerberg tends to notice, and by August of 2016, the feature had been copied more or less exactly into Instagram. Kevin Systrom, then the CEO of Instagram, said of Spiegel and Snapchat that “they deserve all the credit” for Stories. The implication? That this was no longer a proprietary feature of a single social network; it was just in the air. Stories were for everyone. They started showing up on LinkedIn, Tinder, Medium, and so many other places.

Stories weren’t always video, but as cameras and upload speeds improved, video became the dominant medium in many ephemeral spaces. And video stories had two semi-magical properties: They were perfectly suited to endless, mindless scrolling, and they made it really easy to integrate ads. Only a few months after turning on Stories in Instagram, by which point half the platform’s users were already using Stories, Facebook began flooding ads into the product. The semi-randomness of Stories made ads actually seem less intrusive — you’d see a photo of a dog, a video of a hike, an ad for jeans, your friend’s makeup routine, brunch pics, an ad for blush. Video ads felt more premium, took up the whole screen, and were thus far more lucrative for the social platforms.

With apologies to the short, brilliant life of Vine, the six-second video platform that helped invent so much about the video-first social network, it wasn’t until TikTok took off that things really turned again. The platform launched in the US in 2018, but had been popular for a few years in China as Douyin and elsewhere as Musical.ly. TikTok combined the vertical-first format of Stories with the permanence of YouTube, but it also made video easier than ever. It had filters like Instagram and Snapchat, but also supplied a steady stream of video ideas through the platform’s many trends, offered access to music and sound effects, and made it easy to stitch or duet a video.

By defaulting to the purely algorithmic For You page, TikTok also freed creators from caring about curating their profile or worrying about posting too much — you could just pump out videos and trust the algorithm to deliver them. And so that’s what people did. Pretty quickly, TikTok became one of the fastest growing apps on the planet, and its daily usage numbers became the envy of the industry. Instagram may have had more users, but TikTok users spent far more time TikToking.

When TikTok became a phenomenon, just about everyone jumped on the vertical video bandwagon. Reels launched in 2020 and became a core feature of both Instagram and Facebook; YouTube created Shorts a year later. By the end of 2021, Twitter had both launched and killed a similar feature called Fleets. By this point, this kind of full-screen, vertical-scrolling video was part of the lingua franca of the smartphone. At the same time, in a search for ever more engagement, these platforms were learning another lesson from TikTok: to stop relying on your friends to post interesting content, and instead to show you whatever the algorithm thinks you might like. Social networks were gone, replaced by social media — entertainment with a comments section.

Short-form, vertical video has effectively won the internet. Business is booming, and viewers show no sign of tuning out. Meta said in 2024 that Instagram users were spending more than half their time in Reels, and said in 2025 the feature was turning into a $50 billion annual business across Meta’s apps. About 63 percent of young adults and teens are on TikTok, per Pew Research Center, and one in five teens reported being on the app “almost constantly.” YouTube reported 200 billion daily views of Shorts at the end of 2025, and said that Shorts earned more money per watch hour than standard YouTube videos.

The last three or four years have been about relentless standardization in social media. The pace with which these products copy each other, and regress back toward parity, has been absolutely astonishing. First, Shorts and Reels both aped TikTok’s design, its duetting and stitching, and its close relationship with sounds and music. Then they bought into TikTok’s idea of prioritizing content over connection — followers are dead, long live the algorithm. TikTok pushed hard into shopping, then suddenly Reels and Shorts became a lot more shoppable. YouTube began to grow on TVs, and suddenly TikTok and Instagram started investing in its own TV apps. Videos got longer and longer across platforms, to allow more ads. All the apps got really into livestreaming for a while. And micro dramas. They’ve relentlessly copied each other on big things like letting users control their algorithm, and small things like Clear Mode.

As the social platforms spin endlessly around each other, they’ve gotten some surprising company. Company after company started to notice their content floating around social media platforms, often in dubiously legal ways, and tried to take some of the watch time for themselves. Spotify decided it, too, wanted to be a video service, and built a vertical-scrolling feed for users to explore. Disney built a TikTok clone for ESPN and another for Disney Plus, both called Verts. Netflix, Prime Video, and Paramount Plus all called their clones Clips.

There are two reasons for the ongoing onslaught of short-form vertical video: time spent and advertising. The endlessly scrolling video feed turns out to be one of the most engrossing forms of entertainment ever devised (to the point that it has become a regulatory problem for the social platforms), and in a relentless competition for eyeballs and attention, it has become everyone’s best idea. In 2024, when Meta switched its default video player to a vertical-first layout across all platforms, the race was officially won.

Meanwhile, as those platforms have captured more of our time and attention, short-form video has become a dominant force of advertising on the internet, which means advertisers are already comfortable making ads designed to go between videos in the feed. And as so many companies turn to AI to do their ad targeting, all they really need is the creative to get started. “So long as clients give us different assets — a six-second ad, a 15-second ad, a long-format, a vertical ad — AI is essentially powering everything else,” YouTube’s Brian Albert told me last year. “From the audiences you’re reaching, to the contextual placements, to the ad that’s actually showing.” The combination of AI and vertical video has become a self-fulfilling prophecy: The more it wins, the easier it becomes for everyone else to get on board, and so it just keeps winning.

Vertical video haters, I have bad news: It’s only going to get worse. TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram are if anything going to become more short-form and vertical, since those short videos are easier to make and easier to load into endlessly scrolling feeds. Video services used to require you to pick something and press play, but now all they need is for you to open the app and they can start showing you ads. They’re not going to want to go back. Here’s how dominant video is: Facebook is testing a new version of the app that loads a full-screen video feed when you open the app. If that happens, there will be no Facebook — only Reels. After all this time, they’ve trained users to want and expect this kind of fast-paced, instant-gratification entertainment, to the point where even a full-length movie can feel like a chore.

Meanwhile, after years of raising prices, streaming services around the world are hoping they can turn to advertising to keep growing. For a while, they could coast on the back of linear TV, borrowing those ads to run on digital platforms. But a TikTok ad won’t make any sense on Netflix, so Netflix decided the best thing to do is build something that looks more like TikTok. A recent HubSpot report found that short-form video was by a wide margin both the most-used and most successful form of marketing content in 2025, and that it was the format in which marketers planned to invest the most this year.

All that said, there are glimmers of a bigger shift beginning to happen. Fed up with the algorithm, some users are starting to demand the return of friends and family in social media. But more broadly, more and more young people are deciding to put down their phones, resist the invasion of AI into their lives, and look for different kinds of entertainment. Movie theaters are having a big year; one of the year’s most exciting new phones is a flip phone. As long as we live in this era of social media and entertainment, vertical video is going to win. It would take a cultural revolution to stop it — and there might just be one brewing.

  • The best way to understand TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat in particular right now is as a combination of two things: a streaming service and an inbox. Studies have found that the most popular thing to do is watch videos, and the second most popular thing is to send videos to someone else. Actually posting? Way down the list. (YouTube, by the way, is desperately trying to make DMs happen.)
  • If you’ve made it this far and you’re thinking, no way, you’re way overstating it? I’m so sorry to say this, but you might just be old. At this point, YouTube and Facebook cross generations and demographics, but Pew and others have found that TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram are effectively ubiquitous among young people in particular.
  • It’s important to remember that views are lies. Everyone on the internet has an incentive to make their platform seem big and vibrant and popular, and they will invent whatever new metrics they need to do so.
  • New York published a great piece earlier this year about the shifting vibes on YouTube, and the ways in which the creator economy is being unmoored in part by the shift to vertical video. Yeah, the platforms have figured out how to make money from your video feed, but it’s not as simple for creators.
  • All the way back in 2015, The New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo made a good case for vertical video. It’s a fun reminder of just how contentious the idea was!
  • You should read my colleague Mia Sato’s story on the clip economy, which turns shows, movies, podcasts, and more into bite-size pieces for social platforms. It’s a weird industry, but it works — and you can see why the streamers want to compete.
  • Here’s a really good breakdown of all the things TikTok got right, from its algorithm to its whole approach to content. Every bit of it has been copied relentlessly ever since.
Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.
#vertical #video #takeoverColumn,Creators,Facebook,Instagram,Meta,Social Media,Streaming,Tech,The Stepback,TikTok,YouTube

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech…

This interview has been edited and condensed.

You’ve made so many films about grief. What have you learned about processing grief through making all this work?

What have I learned about grief? I think it’s that everyone experiences it differently. It’s very diverse. And when I made my first film, Maborosi, that was exactly about grief. And that was around the time that I read books by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, books on grief work. And I learned about the process of grief work and used that as a kind of framework for the film. However, it’s not as if grief linearly follows a specific process. So I would say that I’ve learned that it varies from person to person.

In Sheep in the Box, memories become information. There was something about that that felt a little unsettling or cold for me. How did it fit for you? How did it work for you?

I’m not sure I’ve been able to arrive at this fact through this film, but as I was filming, one thing that I was thinking about was that the memories that are input into the humanoid Kakeru are preselected by his parents. So it’s not really the same as memory as we experience it. It’s preselected data. I think that once memory is severed from our physical form, what we experience inside as memory, it’s not the same. It’s not the same when it’s input as data. It’s not the same as the things that we recall that stir up the emotions that make us human.

There’s so much noise about AI in our world right now. What made this theme feel so urgent for you to tackle?

In Japan, there’s a tremendous increase in various initiatives involving AI. When you get in the taxi, there’s a screen that’s constantly telling you of all these commercials for raising your rate of productivity through AI. But I was interested in the rise of AI used toward a kind of grief work. Just a few years ago in Japan, a famous singer who had died was re-created through AI and then was singing a new song. I also heard about in Korea a young girl who had passed away being re-created through AI for processing the grief of the parents.

And then in the film, what started as a seed for the film was the businesses that are being generated in places like China where AI is being used to re-create people who have passed. I wouldn’t call myself an expert on grief, but as a person who’s made many films around grief, one thing that I thought about was how the shape of grief would change through this use of AI in both good and bad ways. That’s what drew me to this idea of how new technologies impact this married couple who is trying to restart or redo their family life through the use of AI.

One of the big conversations around AI is about the resources that it uses. I thought it was really interesting that the humanoids don’t drink water or eat food. Can you talk about that decision?

You thought it was kind of ironic, right?

I actually spoke to an expert on these types of technologies and when I talked to them, they were saying that the big obstacle to creating these humanoid robots would be the fact that they generate so much heat in having to move very smoothly, in processing information, and that there would be no way to release or process that heat.

In order for me to write this story, I needed to clear that obstacle of the fact that they would be generating so much heat that perhaps it wouldn’t even be possible. So I decided to shelve that one issue for the sake of the story. They don’t consume resources. It’s more of a means for them to become independent, that they don’t depend on these resources in order to live.

A still from Sheep in the Box

Neon

Because it’s set in the near future, I had a hard time discerning between fiction and a possible reality. When it was fiction, I loved it. But when it was reality, I was a little afraid. What is it for you?

It’s difficult to say, and I don’t want to talk about it in a roundabout way, but I spoke to a robotics expert and I showed them the outline of this story and they said, “Well, this isn’t possible. There’s no way that we’ll make humanoid robots because of the difference in the physicality and the construction of just bodies that humans have internal organs and bone structure inside whereas robots are built from the outside.”

So that there would be no way that we could achieve humanlike movements or that you could touch a humanoid robot and they would feel like a human. But if we were to put ethics aside, they said that we would sooner have clones of humans than we would humanoid robots. And that sounded way scarier to me.

A robot is a robot no matter what way you think about it. But I think that as long as we don’t live in a world full of clones, there’s still a sense of hope there. We’re already in an era where we can clone our pets. I think that’s already happening. So when you think about it from an ethical standpoint, even nations are dealing with it in this ethical way in different ways. So now that if cloning is possible, the way that we manipulate life is becoming more advanced and strange. And that to me is a much scarier prospect.

This film has a lot of blue in it, especially with the wardrobe. That felt intentional.

As far as the costumes and the use of blue, that might just be the decision of Sachiko Ito, who did the costuming. One of the concepts that I brought up to her was that I wanted to use earth tones for the people, the leads in the film. And also one of her concerns was that 10 years into the future, climate change would mean that we live in a hotter climate. So there were a lot of things around thinking through the materials and the construction of the clothing, that perhaps there would be fewer buttons and drawstrings and zippers and fasteners and things like this.

I’m really curious to hear you talk about how AI has permeated your daily life.

I don’t think I’ve incorporated AI intentionally outside of the use of translation AI. I think that it has become so skillful that I often use AI in order to translate my Japanese into English in order to send messages and communicate.

This came up in the Q&A yesterday at Japan Society. I described how it was my first time using ChatGPT in a way where I fed it the script for this film and said, “Give me feedback.” And we did a few exchanges between myself and AI and every time I would make edits to the script, they would say that it’s great. They said, “You’re going to get into Cannes.” But first ChatGPT said, “I think you’ll get into the Un Certain Regard section.” And I said, “Only Un Certain Regard?” Then my producer said, “Well, the director of this film is a person named Hirokazu Kore-eda.” It said, “Well, in that case, you’re getting into the competition.”

And I did get into the competition, so AI is not wrong, but I think that any person could tell me as much. So I don’t think that I found any utility in that exchange. And the fact that there’s no humanness in the background to this exchange is what makes it mostly unattractive to me.

I think that the more that you train an AI, for instance, on a person who is maybe known for giving romantic advice, then that advice also becomes more normalized. So I think that I’m not personally sold on it and I don’t find that AI is all that useful to me. What I find more problematic is that human beings are becoming so geared towards a kind of productivity mindset that this is even affecting activities on set for filmmaking. I think that safety is important, but for instance, we’re no longer filming driving scenes on the road. We’re doing it in studios by compositing backgrounds. I think that stunt work is also going to maybe fall to the side and then slowly be subsumed by AI or VFX.

It’s really not about us excluding AI from our day to day. Already we’re using things that we would have used our imagination for and then offloading that onto computers. For instance, with this film, I shot a driving scene at a studio and we composited the background.

But I don’t find it all that interesting. I’m going to stop writing scenes that require this type of VFX or compositing because I think that the more that we are being subsumed by productivity, it’s actually the antithesis of creativity.

Sheep in the Box is in select theaters Friday, July 24.

Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.
#scifi #movie #imagines #isnt #dystopianColumn,Entertainment,Film,Q&A"> The sci-fi movie that imagines AI isn’t so dystopian after allImagine you are the parent of an inquisitive seven-year-old who loves his family, playing baseball, and hanging out with his friends. It’s the life you’ve always wanted. And then the worst thing that ever could happen happens: A freak accident takes your son away. But as it turns out, you don’t have to live with the grief for long, because now there’s an AI company that can bring your kid back in the form of a robotic double that looks indistinguishable from a human.This is the world that acclaimed director Hirokazu Kore-eda, who won the Palme d’Or for his 2018 feature Shoplifters, has created with his latest sci-fi drama, Sheep in the Box. It’s the type of story that might have seemed far-fetched a few years ago but feels less so as AI encroaches on every aspect of our lives. This is a tension Kore-eda is acutely aware of — so much so that he sat down with a robotics expert while he was writing the script to get some answers of his own. They told him that because of the robots overheating, “we would sooner have clones of humans than we would humanoid robots,” Kore-eda recounted.But don’t let the robots fool you into thinking this isn’t a human film. Grief work is a common theme in Kore-eda’s vast filmography. Though it might be set in a near future, the core of Sheep in the Box is still a family learning how to move through their loss. And if we give ourselves permission to suspend disbelief and go on this journey, we might see ourselves in it too.The Verge sat down with Hirokazu Kore-eda at Neon’s offices days before Sheep in the Box’s US debut. Speaking through an interpreter, Kore-eda tells all about writing and directing this picture, including what happened when he fed the script through ChatGPT.Robyn KannerThis interview has been edited and condensed.You’ve made so many films about grief. What have you learned about processing grief through making all this work?What have I learned about grief? I think it’s that everyone experiences it differently. It’s very diverse. And when I made my first film, Maborosi, that was exactly about grief. And that was around the time that I read books by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, books on grief work. And I learned about the process of grief work and used that as a kind of framework for the film. However, it’s not as if grief linearly follows a specific process. So I would say that I’ve learned that it varies from person to person.In Sheep in the Box, memories become information. There was something about that that felt a little unsettling or cold for me. How did it fit for you? How did it work for you?I’m not sure I’ve been able to arrive at this fact through this film, but as I was filming, one thing that I was thinking about was that the memories that are input into the humanoid Kakeru are preselected by his parents. So it’s not really the same as memory as we experience it. It’s preselected data. I think that once memory is severed from our physical form, what we experience inside as memory, it’s not the same. It’s not the same when it’s input as data. It’s not the same as the things that we recall that stir up the emotions that make us human.There’s so much noise about AI in our world right now. What made this theme feel so urgent for you to tackle?In Japan, there’s a tremendous increase in various initiatives involving AI. When you get in the taxi, there’s a screen that’s constantly telling you of all these commercials for raising your rate of productivity through AI. But I was interested in the rise of AI used toward a kind of grief work. Just a few years ago in Japan, a famous singer who had died was re-created through AI and then was singing a new song. I also heard about in Korea a young girl who had passed away being re-created through AI for processing the grief of the parents.And then in the film, what started as a seed for the film was the businesses that are being generated in places like China where AI is being used to re-create people who have passed. I wouldn’t call myself an expert on grief, but as a person who’s made many films around grief, one thing that I thought about was how the shape of grief would change through this use of AI in both good and bad ways. That’s what drew me to this idea of how new technologies impact this married couple who is trying to restart or redo their family life through the use of AI.One of the big conversations around AI is about the resources that it uses. I thought it was really interesting that the humanoids don’t drink water or eat food. Can you talk about that decision?You thought it was kind of ironic, right?I actually spoke to an expert on these types of technologies and when I talked to them, they were saying that the big obstacle to creating these humanoid robots would be the fact that they generate so much heat in having to move very smoothly, in processing information, and that there would be no way to release or process that heat.In order for me to write this story, I needed to clear that obstacle of the fact that they would be generating so much heat that perhaps it wouldn’t even be possible. So I decided to shelve that one issue for the sake of the story. They don’t consume resources. It’s more of a means for them to become independent, that they don’t depend on these resources in order to live.NeonBecause it’s set in the near future, I had a hard time discerning between fiction and a possible reality. When it was fiction, I loved it. But when it was reality, I was a little afraid. What is it for you?It’s difficult to say, and I don’t want to talk about it in a roundabout way, but I spoke to a robotics expert and I showed them the outline of this story and they said, “Well, this isn’t possible. There’s no way that we’ll make humanoid robots because of the difference in the physicality and the construction of just bodies that humans have internal organs and bone structure inside whereas robots are built from the outside.”So that there would be no way that we could achieve humanlike movements or that you could touch a humanoid robot and they would feel like a human. But if we were to put ethics aside, they said that we would sooner have clones of humans than we would humanoid robots. And that sounded way scarier to me.A robot is a robot no matter what way you think about it. But I think that as long as we don’t live in a world full of clones, there’s still a sense of hope there. We’re already in an era where we can clone our pets. I think that’s already happening. So when you think about it from an ethical standpoint, even nations are dealing with it in this ethical way in different ways. So now that if cloning is possible, the way that we manipulate life is becoming more advanced and strange. And that to me is a much scarier prospect.This film has a lot of blue in it, especially with the wardrobe. That felt intentional.As far as the costumes and the use of blue, that might just be the decision of Sachiko Ito, who did the costuming. One of the concepts that I brought up to her was that I wanted to use earth tones for the people, the leads in the film. And also one of her concerns was that 10 years into the future, climate change would mean that we live in a hotter climate. So there were a lot of things around thinking through the materials and the construction of the clothing, that perhaps there would be fewer buttons and drawstrings and zippers and fasteners and things like this.I’m really curious to hear you talk about how AI has permeated your daily life.I don’t think I’ve incorporated AI intentionally outside of the use of translation AI. I think that it has become so skillful that I often use AI in order to translate my Japanese into English in order to send messages and communicate.This came up in the Q&A yesterday at Japan Society. I described how it was my first time using ChatGPT in a way where I fed it the script for this film and said, “Give me feedback.” And we did a few exchanges between myself and AI and every time I would make edits to the script, they would say that it’s great. They said, “You’re going to get into Cannes.” But first ChatGPT said, “I think you’ll get into the Un Certain Regard section.” And I said, “Only Un Certain Regard?” Then my producer said, “Well, the director of this film is a person named Hirokazu Kore-eda.” It said, “Well, in that case, you’re getting into the competition.”And I did get into the competition, so AI is not wrong, but I think that any person could tell me as much. So I don’t think that I found any utility in that exchange. And the fact that there’s no humanness in the background to this exchange is what makes it mostly unattractive to me.I think that the more that you train an AI, for instance, on a person who is maybe known for giving romantic advice, then that advice also becomes more normalized. So I think that I’m not personally sold on it and I don’t find that AI is all that useful to me. What I find more problematic is that human beings are becoming so geared towards a kind of productivity mindset that this is even affecting activities on set for filmmaking. I think that safety is important, but for instance, we’re no longer filming driving scenes on the road. We’re doing it in studios by compositing backgrounds. I think that stunt work is also going to maybe fall to the side and then slowly be subsumed by AI or VFX.It’s really not about us excluding AI from our day to day. Already we’re using things that we would have used our imagination for and then offloading that onto computers. For instance, with this film, I shot a driving scene at a studio and we composited the background.But I don’t find it all that interesting. I’m going to stop writing scenes that require this type of VFX or compositing because I think that the more that we are being subsumed by productivity, it’s actually the antithesis of creativity.Sheep in the Box is in select theaters Friday, July 24.Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Robyn KannerCloseRobyn KannerPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Robyn KannerColumnCloseColumnPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All ColumnEntertainmentCloseEntertainmentPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All EntertainmentFilmCloseFilmPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All FilmQ&ACloseQ&APosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All Q&A#scifi #movie #imagines #isnt #dystopianColumn,Entertainment,Film,Q&A
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This interview has been edited and condensed.

You’ve made so many films about grief. What have you learned about processing grief through making all this work?

What have I learned about grief? I think it’s that everyone experiences it differently. It’s very diverse. And when I made my first film, Maborosi, that was exactly about grief. And that was around the time that I read books by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, books on grief work. And I learned about the process of grief work and used that as a kind of framework for the film. However, it’s not as if grief linearly follows a specific process. So I would say that I’ve learned that it varies from person to person.

In Sheep in the Box, memories become information. There was something about that that felt a little unsettling or cold for me. How did it fit for you? How did it work for you?

I’m not sure I’ve been able to arrive at this fact through this film, but as I was filming, one thing that I was thinking about was that the memories that are input into the humanoid Kakeru are preselected by his parents. So it’s not really the same as memory as we experience it. It’s preselected data. I think that once memory is severed from our physical form, what we experience inside as memory, it’s not the same. It’s not the same when it’s input as data. It’s not the same as the things that we recall that stir up the emotions that make us human.

There’s so much noise about AI in our world right now. What made this theme feel so urgent for you to tackle?

In Japan, there’s a tremendous increase in various initiatives involving AI. When you get in the taxi, there’s a screen that’s constantly telling you of all these commercials for raising your rate of productivity through AI. But I was interested in the rise of AI used toward a kind of grief work. Just a few years ago in Japan, a famous singer who had died was re-created through AI and then was singing a new song. I also heard about in Korea a young girl who had passed away being re-created through AI for processing the grief of the parents.

And then in the film, what started as a seed for the film was the businesses that are being generated in places like China where AI is being used to re-create people who have passed. I wouldn’t call myself an expert on grief, but as a person who’s made many films around grief, one thing that I thought about was how the shape of grief would change through this use of AI in both good and bad ways. That’s what drew me to this idea of how new technologies impact this married couple who is trying to restart or redo their family life through the use of AI.

One of the big conversations around AI is about the resources that it uses. I thought it was really interesting that the humanoids don’t drink water or eat food. Can you talk about that decision?

You thought it was kind of ironic, right?

I actually spoke to an expert on these types of technologies and when I talked to them, they were saying that the big obstacle to creating these humanoid robots would be the fact that they generate so much heat in having to move very smoothly, in processing information, and that there would be no way to release or process that heat.

In order for me to write this story, I needed to clear that obstacle of the fact that they would be generating so much heat that perhaps it wouldn’t even be possible. So I decided to shelve that one issue for the sake of the story. They don’t consume resources. It’s more of a means for them to become independent, that they don’t depend on these resources in order to live.

A still from Sheep in the Box

Neon

Because it’s set in the near future, I had a hard time discerning between fiction and a possible reality. When it was fiction, I loved it. But when it was reality, I was a little afraid. What is it for you?

It’s difficult to say, and I don’t want to talk about it in a roundabout way, but I spoke to a robotics expert and I showed them the outline of this story and they said, “Well, this isn’t possible. There’s no way that we’ll make humanoid robots because of the difference in the physicality and the construction of just bodies that humans have internal organs and bone structure inside whereas robots are built from the outside.”

So that there would be no way that we could achieve humanlike movements or that you could touch a humanoid robot and they would feel like a human. But if we were to put ethics aside, they said that we would sooner have clones of humans than we would humanoid robots. And that sounded way scarier to me.

A robot is a robot no matter what way you think about it. But I think that as long as we don’t live in a world full of clones, there’s still a sense of hope there. We’re already in an era where we can clone our pets. I think that’s already happening. So when you think about it from an ethical standpoint, even nations are dealing with it in this ethical way in different ways. So now that if cloning is possible, the way that we manipulate life is becoming more advanced and strange. And that to me is a much scarier prospect.

This film has a lot of blue in it, especially with the wardrobe. That felt intentional.

As far as the costumes and the use of blue, that might just be the decision of Sachiko Ito, who did the costuming. One of the concepts that I brought up to her was that I wanted to use earth tones for the people, the leads in the film. And also one of her concerns was that 10 years into the future, climate change would mean that we live in a hotter climate. So there were a lot of things around thinking through the materials and the construction of the clothing, that perhaps there would be fewer buttons and drawstrings and zippers and fasteners and things like this.

I’m really curious to hear you talk about how AI has permeated your daily life.

I don’t think I’ve incorporated AI intentionally outside of the use of translation AI. I think that it has become so skillful that I often use AI in order to translate my Japanese into English in order to send messages and communicate.

This came up in the Q&A yesterday at Japan Society. I described how it was my first time using ChatGPT in a way where I fed it the script for this film and said, “Give me feedback.” And we did a few exchanges between myself and AI and every time I would make edits to the script, they would say that it’s great. They said, “You’re going to get into Cannes.” But first ChatGPT said, “I think you’ll get into the Un Certain Regard section.” And I said, “Only Un Certain Regard?” Then my producer said, “Well, the director of this film is a person named Hirokazu Kore-eda.” It said, “Well, in that case, you’re getting into the competition.”

And I did get into the competition, so AI is not wrong, but I think that any person could tell me as much. So I don’t think that I found any utility in that exchange. And the fact that there’s no humanness in the background to this exchange is what makes it mostly unattractive to me.

I think that the more that you train an AI, for instance, on a person who is maybe known for giving romantic advice, then that advice also becomes more normalized. So I think that I’m not personally sold on it and I don’t find that AI is all that useful to me. What I find more problematic is that human beings are becoming so geared towards a kind of productivity mindset that this is even affecting activities on set for filmmaking. I think that safety is important, but for instance, we’re no longer filming driving scenes on the road. We’re doing it in studios by compositing backgrounds. I think that stunt work is also going to maybe fall to the side and then slowly be subsumed by AI or VFX.

It’s really not about us excluding AI from our day to day. Already we’re using things that we would have used our imagination for and then offloading that onto computers. For instance, with this film, I shot a driving scene at a studio and we composited the background.

But I don’t find it all that interesting. I’m going to stop writing scenes that require this type of VFX or compositing because I think that the more that we are being subsumed by productivity, it’s actually the antithesis of creativity.

Sheep in the Box is in select theaters Friday, July 24.

Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.

#scifi #movie #imagines #isnt #dystopianColumn,Entertainment,Film,Q&A">The sci-fi movie that imagines AI isn’t so dystopian after all

Imagine you are the parent of an inquisitive seven-year-old who loves his family, playing baseball, and hanging out with his friends. It’s the life you’ve always wanted. And then the worst thing that ever could happen happens: A freak accident takes your son away. But as it turns out, you don’t have to live with the grief for long, because now there’s an AI company that can bring your kid back in the form of a robotic double that looks indistinguishable from a human.

This is the world that acclaimed director Hirokazu Kore-eda, who won the Palme d’Or for his 2018 feature Shoplifters, has created with his latest sci-fi drama, Sheep in the Box. It’s the type of story that might have seemed far-fetched a few years ago but feels less so as AI encroaches on every aspect of our lives. This is a tension Kore-eda is acutely aware of — so much so that he sat down with a robotics expert while he was writing the script to get some answers of his own. They told him that because of the robots overheating, “we would sooner have clones of humans than we would humanoid robots,” Kore-eda recounted.

But don’t let the robots fool you into thinking this isn’t a human film. Grief work is a common theme in Kore-eda’s vast filmography. Though it might be set in a near future, the core of Sheep in the Box is still a family learning how to move through their loss. And if we give ourselves permission to suspend disbelief and go on this journey, we might see ourselves in it too.

The Verge sat down with Hirokazu Kore-eda at Neon’s offices days before Sheep in the Box’s US debut. Speaking through an interpreter, Kore-eda tells all about writing and directing this picture, including what happened when he fed the script through ChatGPT.

Robyn Kanner

This interview has been edited and condensed.

You’ve made so many films about grief. What have you learned about processing grief through making all this work?

What have I learned about grief? I think it’s that everyone experiences it differently. It’s very diverse. And when I made my first film, Maborosi, that was exactly about grief. And that was around the time that I read books by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, books on grief work. And I learned about the process of grief work and used that as a kind of framework for the film. However, it’s not as if grief linearly follows a specific process. So I would say that I’ve learned that it varies from person to person.

In Sheep in the Box, memories become information. There was something about that that felt a little unsettling or cold for me. How did it fit for you? How did it work for you?

I’m not sure I’ve been able to arrive at this fact through this film, but as I was filming, one thing that I was thinking about was that the memories that are input into the humanoid Kakeru are preselected by his parents. So it’s not really the same as memory as we experience it. It’s preselected data. I think that once memory is severed from our physical form, what we experience inside as memory, it’s not the same. It’s not the same when it’s input as data. It’s not the same as the things that we recall that stir up the emotions that make us human.

There’s so much noise about AI in our world right now. What made this theme feel so urgent for you to tackle?

In Japan, there’s a tremendous increase in various initiatives involving AI. When you get in the taxi, there’s a screen that’s constantly telling you of all these commercials for raising your rate of productivity through AI. But I was interested in the rise of AI used toward a kind of grief work. Just a few years ago in Japan, a famous singer who had died was re-created through AI and then was singing a new song. I also heard about in Korea a young girl who had passed away being re-created through AI for processing the grief of the parents.

And then in the film, what started as a seed for the film was the businesses that are being generated in places like China where AI is being used to re-create people who have passed. I wouldn’t call myself an expert on grief, but as a person who’s made many films around grief, one thing that I thought about was how the shape of grief would change through this use of AI in both good and bad ways. That’s what drew me to this idea of how new technologies impact this married couple who is trying to restart or redo their family life through the use of AI.

One of the big conversations around AI is about the resources that it uses. I thought it was really interesting that the humanoids don’t drink water or eat food. Can you talk about that decision?

You thought it was kind of ironic, right?

I actually spoke to an expert on these types of technologies and when I talked to them, they were saying that the big obstacle to creating these humanoid robots would be the fact that they generate so much heat in having to move very smoothly, in processing information, and that there would be no way to release or process that heat.

In order for me to write this story, I needed to clear that obstacle of the fact that they would be generating so much heat that perhaps it wouldn’t even be possible. So I decided to shelve that one issue for the sake of the story. They don’t consume resources. It’s more of a means for them to become independent, that they don’t depend on these resources in order to live.

A still from Sheep in the Box

Neon

Because it’s set in the near future, I had a hard time discerning between fiction and a possible reality. When it was fiction, I loved it. But when it was reality, I was a little afraid. What is it for you?

It’s difficult to say, and I don’t want to talk about it in a roundabout way, but I spoke to a robotics expert and I showed them the outline of this story and they said, “Well, this isn’t possible. There’s no way that we’ll make humanoid robots because of the difference in the physicality and the construction of just bodies that humans have internal organs and bone structure inside whereas robots are built from the outside.”

So that there would be no way that we could achieve humanlike movements or that you could touch a humanoid robot and they would feel like a human. But if we were to put ethics aside, they said that we would sooner have clones of humans than we would humanoid robots. And that sounded way scarier to me.

A robot is a robot no matter what way you think about it. But I think that as long as we don’t live in a world full of clones, there’s still a sense of hope there. We’re already in an era where we can clone our pets. I think that’s already happening. So when you think about it from an ethical standpoint, even nations are dealing with it in this ethical way in different ways. So now that if cloning is possible, the way that we manipulate life is becoming more advanced and strange. And that to me is a much scarier prospect.

This film has a lot of blue in it, especially with the wardrobe. That felt intentional.

As far as the costumes and the use of blue, that might just be the decision of Sachiko Ito, who did the costuming. One of the concepts that I brought up to her was that I wanted to use earth tones for the people, the leads in the film. And also one of her concerns was that 10 years into the future, climate change would mean that we live in a hotter climate. So there were a lot of things around thinking through the materials and the construction of the clothing, that perhaps there would be fewer buttons and drawstrings and zippers and fasteners and things like this.

I’m really curious to hear you talk about how AI has permeated your daily life.

I don’t think I’ve incorporated AI intentionally outside of the use of translation AI. I think that it has become so skillful that I often use AI in order to translate my Japanese into English in order to send messages and communicate.

This came up in the Q&A yesterday at Japan Society. I described how it was my first time using ChatGPT in a way where I fed it the script for this film and said, “Give me feedback.” And we did a few exchanges between myself and AI and every time I would make edits to the script, they would say that it’s great. They said, “You’re going to get into Cannes.” But first ChatGPT said, “I think you’ll get into the Un Certain Regard section.” And I said, “Only Un Certain Regard?” Then my producer said, “Well, the director of this film is a person named Hirokazu Kore-eda.” It said, “Well, in that case, you’re getting into the competition.”

And I did get into the competition, so AI is not wrong, but I think that any person could tell me as much. So I don’t think that I found any utility in that exchange. And the fact that there’s no humanness in the background to this exchange is what makes it mostly unattractive to me.

I think that the more that you train an AI, for instance, on a person who is maybe known for giving romantic advice, then that advice also becomes more normalized. So I think that I’m not personally sold on it and I don’t find that AI is all that useful to me. What I find more problematic is that human beings are becoming so geared towards a kind of productivity mindset that this is even affecting activities on set for filmmaking. I think that safety is important, but for instance, we’re no longer filming driving scenes on the road. We’re doing it in studios by compositing backgrounds. I think that stunt work is also going to maybe fall to the side and then slowly be subsumed by AI or VFX.

It’s really not about us excluding AI from our day to day. Already we’re using things that we would have used our imagination for and then offloading that onto computers. For instance, with this film, I shot a driving scene at a studio and we composited the background.

But I don’t find it all that interesting. I’m going to stop writing scenes that require this type of VFX or compositing because I think that the more that we are being subsumed by productivity, it’s actually the antithesis of creativity.

Sheep in the Box is in select theaters Friday, July 24.

Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.
#scifi #movie #imagines #isnt #dystopianColumn,Entertainment,Film,Q&A

Imagine you are the parent of an inquisitive seven-year-old who loves his family, playing baseball,…

The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on video games and physical media, follow Jay Peters. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.

As a kid, I relished trips to Best Buy, GameStop, and the nearby mall so that I could browse video games. I loved sifting through games and chatting with my friends at the store about upcoming releases. On the lucky days I actually got a new game from the store, I treasured reading through every page of the manual on the drive home. Over the years, I built up a collection of games that I was proud of.

That was a long time ago. Shortly after college, I sold my collection of older games and hardware because I wasn’t using them and wanted the money for other things. (Probably weekends out.) Starting with the Nintendo Switch in 2017, I started buying games digitally because it was easier to just download stuff, and I wouldn’t have to accumulate physical game cases. Now, I don’t own any physical games: My Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, and Steam libraries are all digital.

I’m not the only player who has moved to mostly digital games. Digital libraries are increasingly convenient, especially as console makers have made efforts to keep backwards compatibility across generations. Some players can’t play physical games at all, as PlayStation and Xbox launched the PS5 and Xbox Series consoles with all-digital console options that were cheaper than the versions with disc drives. On PC, digital libraries through platforms like Steam have been the reality for quite some time. Capcom, one of the biggest publishers around, reported that an astounding 93 percent of its game sales were for digital copies in its last fiscal year — a figure that it expects will rise to 95.4 percent over the fiscal year. Many of the most popular games are only available digitally, like Roblox and Fortnite.

For better or worse, video game players overwhelmingly buy and play digital games. But in the span of a week, two industry giants put nails in the coffin of physical games — or perhaps even poured concrete into the grave.

On June 24th, Rockstar Games finally put a price tag on Grand Theft Auto VI ahead of its scheduled November 19th release on PS5 and Xbox Series X / S: $79.99 for the base edition and $99.99 for the Ultimate Edition. The prices themselves weren’t too unexpected, as even Nintendo has dabbled with $79.99 games for its biggest titles. But what was more shocking was something buried in Rockstar’s post: The physical version of the game won’t have a disc, instead containing a download code in the box.

The announcement was a worrying sign for physical games. Selling games as codes in a box isn’t a new concept, but GTA VI will be the biggest game to do it so far. Rockstar’s choice could push more publishers to do the same for their future titles. By making the game only available on digital storefronts, players can’t easily share it with a friend or sell the game when they’re done with it.

It’s also becoming increasingly clear you can’t rely on digital storefronts. Titles can get pulled for things like licensing or the store closing down. This may not be a problem for GTA VI, as Rockstar will almost certainly make sure the game is easily available on many digital platforms for the foreseeable future, especially if it wants to give the game the same kind of legs as the 13-year-old GTA V. But with digital storefronts, you also have to hope that you aren’t locked out of your account, even by mistake, and lose access to your games. (In 2023, some PlayStation users were unexpectedly banned through no fault of their own, though Sony eventually restored access to their accounts.)

Speaking of PlayStation, just days after Rockstar’s news, Sony dropped an even bigger bomb: It announced that, starting January 2028, it would not make physical discs for any new PlayStation games.

The decision led to widespread criticism online. Sony and PlayStation got yelled at everywhere online, as Kotaku reported, and the PlayStation account didn’t make a new tweet until six days after its announcement about dropping discs. The comments section of Sony’s famous 2013 PS4 game sharing ad where one person just hands a disc to another — an ad made after Xbox announced restrictive DRM plans for the Xbox One — is filled with new comments taking jabs at Sony. Heck, Sony itself showed why killing discs is a terrible idea by, on the same day as the disc news, saying that it would be closing the digital stores for the PS3 and the PS Vita.

Sony’s announcement also drew criticism from retailers and games preservationists. “This is unfortunate news for those who still prefer buying games on physical media, and is certainly a significant hit to consumer rights, the resale market, and game creators whose businesses rely on the physical market,” said Frank Cifaldi, executive director of the Video Game History Foundation.

Sony’s own statement was clear as to why it’s making the change. “This is a natural direction for Sony Interactive Entertainment to adapt to consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs,” Sony said in its announcement. “This transition will enable us to align more closely with how most of our community prefers to access and play games today.” The company’s numbers prove it, too: In the fourth quarter of its 2025 fiscal year, Sony reported that the “Full game software digital download ratio” of games on PS4 and PS5 was 85 percent.

We have to see if Grand Theft Auto VI actually releases on November 19th and if it will ever come out on disc. Despite two major delays, it seems likely the game will at least launch as planned, especially because Rockstar gave the game a price and is pushing preorders.

We’ll also have to see what Microsoft and Nintendo might do. Xbox hasn’t announced what it’s thinking about for discs for Project Helix, its next generation console, but The Verge’s Tom Warren reports that Xbox will “likely soon” stop making physical discs for Xbox games. However, Warren reports that the company is testing a feature that would let you digitize your physical game collection.

Nintendo will probably stick with physical games for a while. According to its last fiscal year report, digital makes up 54.6 percent of game sales, so physical is still a big part of its business. The Switch 2 is also only a year old, and it seems extremely unlikely that Nintendo would stop making physical games for hardware it will be supporting for a long time to come. However, with the Switch 2, Nintendo gives developers the option to sell game-key cards, which are physical carts you can borrow and resell but don’t actually have a game’s data on them. Instead, they serve as keys to let you download a game to your system.

Game stores and preservationists also have to adjust to the fact that physical games are going to be harder to come by. Cifaldi noted that museums and archives have already been preparing for this kind of future “with the expectation that putting discs on a shelf isn’t going to be a long-term solution for preserving new games.” But he called on trade groups to offer solutions to legally preserve digital content for research — efforts that the Entertainment Software Association has previously opposed. “The industry needs to meaningfully come to the table on this issue, because asking museums to download a copy of Grand Theft Auto VI and hope it’ll run in 50 years is not a preservation solution,” Cifaldi says.

Sony now has to navigate an awkward period where it’s launching new games but dealing with pushback from players wanting physical discs. While Sony has been subject to severe blowback after its announcement, it seems unlikely it will reverse course. It’s already repurposing its last PlayStation disc-making factory, after all.

  • The PS5 Pro, Sony’s top-end PlayStation, does not come with a disc drive; that costs an additional $79. Following a recent price hike that spiked the PS5 Pro’s cost to $899.99, that means a PS5 Pro with a disc drive costs nearly $1,000.
  • PlayStation’s own studios are now in the awkward spot of having to confirm that physical versions will be on disc, as Insomniac has for September’s Marvel’s Wolverine and Santa Monica Studio did for God of War Laufey. That Laufey confirmation also signals that the game, which hadn’t been given a release window, will launch before January 2028.
  • For music, physical media sales — including CDs — are reportedly on the rise.
  • Comedian Trevor Noah weighed in on PlayStation’s news, saying that “for a lot of gamers physical discs are the only way they could afford to play games because they could get them secondhand. You can also give games to your younger siblings, which is a great way to introduce them to the games you were playing.”
  • In a post titled “Sony Nerfs Videogame Ownership,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out that “Unlike other digital media like film and TV, video games require a ton of storage. Access to high speed internet is still abysmal in the US, making the high-speeds needed for digital game downloads a luxury some of us may take for granted.”
  • A day after the GTA VI news, Circana analyst Mat Piscatella posted a chart that neatly sums up what’s going on: sales of physical games peaked long ago, back in 2009.
Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.
#future #physical #games #greatColumn,Gaming,The Stepback"> The future of physical games is not looking greatThis is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on video games and physical media, follow Jay Peters. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.As a kid, I relished trips to Best Buy, GameStop, and the nearby mall so that I could browse video games. I loved sifting through games and chatting with my friends at the store about upcoming releases. On the lucky days I actually got a new game from the store, I treasured reading through every page of the manual on the drive home. Over the years, I built up a collection of games that I was proud of.That was a long time ago. Shortly after college, I sold my collection of older games and hardware because I wasn’t using them and wanted the money for other things. (Probably weekends out.) Starting with the Nintendo Switch in 2017, I started buying games digitally because it was easier to just download stuff, and I wouldn’t have to accumulate physical game cases. Now, I don’t own any physical games: My Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, and Steam libraries are all digital.I’m not the only player who has moved to mostly digital games. Digital libraries are increasingly convenient, especially as console makers have made efforts to keep backwards compatibility across generations. Some players can’t play physical games at all, as PlayStation and Xbox launched the PS5 and Xbox Series consoles with all-digital console options that were cheaper than the versions with disc drives. On PC, digital libraries through platforms like Steam have been the reality for quite some time. Capcom, one of the biggest publishers around, reported that an astounding 93 percent of its game sales were for digital copies in its last fiscal year — a figure that it expects will rise to 95.4 percent over the fiscal year. Many of the most popular games are only available digitally, like Roblox and Fortnite.For better or worse, video game players overwhelmingly buy and play digital games. But in the span of a week, two industry giants put nails in the coffin of physical games — or perhaps even poured concrete into the grave.On June 24th, Rockstar Games finally put a price tag on Grand Theft Auto VI ahead of its scheduled November 19th release on PS5 and Xbox Series X / S: .99 for the base edition and .99 for the Ultimate Edition. The prices themselves weren’t too unexpected, as even Nintendo has dabbled with .99 games for its biggest titles. But what was more shocking was something buried in Rockstar’s post: The physical version of the game won’t have a disc, instead containing a download code in the box.The announcement was a worrying sign for physical games. Selling games as codes in a box isn’t a new concept, but GTA VI will be the biggest game to do it so far. Rockstar’s choice could push more publishers to do the same for their future titles. By making the game only available on digital storefronts, players can’t easily share it with a friend or sell the game when they’re done with it.It’s also becoming increasingly clear you can’t rely on digital storefronts. Titles can get pulled for things like licensing or the store closing down. This may not be a problem for GTA VI, as Rockstar will almost certainly make sure the game is easily available on many digital platforms for the foreseeable future, especially if it wants to give the game the same kind of legs as the 13-year-old GTA V. But with digital storefronts, you also have to hope that you aren’t locked out of your account, even by mistake, and lose access to your games. (In 2023, some PlayStation users were unexpectedly banned through no fault of their own, though Sony eventually restored access to their accounts.)Speaking of PlayStation, just days after Rockstar’s news, Sony dropped an even bigger bomb: It announced that, starting January 2028, it would not make physical discs for any new PlayStation games.The decision led to widespread criticism online. Sony and PlayStation got yelled at everywhere online, as Kotaku reported, and the PlayStation account didn’t make a new tweet until six days after its announcement about dropping discs. The comments section of Sony’s famous 2013 PS4 game sharing ad where one person just hands a disc to another — an ad made after Xbox announced restrictive DRM plans for the Xbox One — is filled with new comments taking jabs at Sony. Heck, Sony itself showed why killing discs is a terrible idea by, on the same day as the disc news, saying that it would be closing the digital stores for the PS3 and the PS Vita.Sony’s announcement also drew criticism from retailers and games preservationists. “This is unfortunate news for those who still prefer buying games on physical media, and is certainly a significant hit to consumer rights, the resale market, and game creators whose businesses rely on the physical market,” said Frank Cifaldi, executive director of the Video Game History Foundation.Sony’s own statement was clear as to why it’s making the change. “This is a natural direction for Sony Interactive Entertainment to adapt to consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs,” Sony said in its announcement. “This transition will enable us to align more closely with how most of our community prefers to access and play games today.” The company’s numbers prove it, too: In the fourth quarter of its 2025 fiscal year, Sony reported that the “Full game software digital download ratio” of games on PS4 and PS5 was 85 percent.We have to see if Grand Theft Auto VI actually releases on November 19th and if it will ever come out on disc. Despite two major delays, it seems likely the game will at least launch as planned, especially because Rockstar gave the game a price and is pushing preorders.We’ll also have to see what Microsoft and Nintendo might do. Xbox hasn’t announced what it’s thinking about for discs for Project Helix, its next generation console, but The Verge’s Tom Warren reports that Xbox will “likely soon” stop making physical discs for Xbox games. However, Warren reports that the company is testing a feature that would let you digitize your physical game collection.Nintendo will probably stick with physical games for a while. According to its last fiscal year report, digital makes up 54.6 percent of game sales, so physical is still a big part of its business. The Switch 2 is also only a year old, and it seems extremely unlikely that Nintendo would stop making physical games for hardware it will be supporting for a long time to come. However, with the Switch 2, Nintendo gives developers the option to sell game-key cards, which are physical carts you can borrow and resell but don’t actually have a game’s data on them. Instead, they serve as keys to let you download a game to your system.Game stores and preservationists also have to adjust to the fact that physical games are going to be harder to come by. Cifaldi noted that museums and archives have already been preparing for this kind of future “with the expectation that putting discs on a shelf isn’t going to be a long-term solution for preserving new games.” But he called on trade groups to offer solutions to legally preserve digital content for research — efforts that the Entertainment Software Association has previously opposed. “The industry needs to meaningfully come to the table on this issue, because asking museums to download a copy of Grand Theft Auto VI and hope it’ll run in 50 years is not a preservation solution,” Cifaldi says.Sony now has to navigate an awkward period where it’s launching new games but dealing with pushback from players wanting physical discs. While Sony has been subject to severe blowback after its announcement, it seems unlikely it will reverse course. It’s already repurposing its last PlayStation disc-making factory, after all.The PS5 Pro, Sony’s top-end PlayStation, does not come with a disc drive; that costs an additional . Following a recent price hike that spiked the PS5 Pro’s cost to 9.99, that means a PS5 Pro with a disc drive costs nearly ,000.PlayStation’s own studios are now in the awkward spot of having to confirm that physical versions will be on disc, as Insomniac has for September’s Marvel’s Wolverine and Santa Monica Studio did for God of War Laufey. That Laufey confirmation also signals that the game, which hadn’t been given a release window, will launch before January 2028.For music, physical media sales — including CDs — are reportedly on the rise.Comedian Trevor Noah weighed in on PlayStation’s news, saying that “for a lot of gamers physical discs are the only way they could afford to play games because they could get them secondhand. You can also give games to your younger siblings, which is a great way to introduce them to the games you were playing.”In a post titled “Sony Nerfs Videogame Ownership,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out that “Unlike other digital media like film and TV, video games require a ton of storage. Access to high speed internet is still abysmal in the US, making the high-speeds needed for digital game downloads a luxury some of us may take for granted.”A day after the GTA VI news, Circana analyst Mat Piscatella posted a chart that neatly sums up what’s going on: sales of physical games peaked long ago, back in 2009.Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Jay PetersCloseJay PetersPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Jay PetersColumnCloseColumnPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All ColumnGamingCloseGamingPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All GamingThe StepbackCloseThe StepbackPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All The Stepback#future #physical #games #greatColumn,Gaming,The Stepback
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The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on video games and physical media, follow Jay Peters. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.

As a kid, I relished trips to Best Buy, GameStop, and the nearby mall so that I could browse video games. I loved sifting through games and chatting with my friends at the store about upcoming releases. On the lucky days I actually got a new game from the store, I treasured reading through every page of the manual on the drive home. Over the years, I built up a collection of games that I was proud of.

That was a long time ago. Shortly after college, I sold my collection of older games and hardware because I wasn’t using them and wanted the money for other things. (Probably weekends out.) Starting with the Nintendo Switch in 2017, I started buying games digitally because it was easier to just download stuff, and I wouldn’t have to accumulate physical game cases. Now, I don’t own any physical games: My Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, and Steam libraries are all digital.

I’m not the only player who has moved to mostly digital games. Digital libraries are increasingly convenient, especially as console makers have made efforts to keep backwards compatibility across generations. Some players can’t play physical games at all, as PlayStation and Xbox launched the PS5 and Xbox Series consoles with all-digital console options that were cheaper than the versions with disc drives. On PC, digital libraries through platforms like Steam have been the reality for quite some time. Capcom, one of the biggest publishers around, reported that an astounding 93 percent of its game sales were for digital copies in its last fiscal year — a figure that it expects will rise to 95.4 percent over the fiscal year. Many of the most popular games are only available digitally, like Roblox and Fortnite.

For better or worse, video game players overwhelmingly buy and play digital games. But in the span of a week, two industry giants put nails in the coffin of physical games — or perhaps even poured concrete into the grave.

On June 24th, Rockstar Games finally put a price tag on Grand Theft Auto VI ahead of its scheduled November 19th release on PS5 and Xbox Series X / S: $79.99 for the base edition and $99.99 for the Ultimate Edition. The prices themselves weren’t too unexpected, as even Nintendo has dabbled with $79.99 games for its biggest titles. But what was more shocking was something buried in Rockstar’s post: The physical version of the game won’t have a disc, instead containing a download code in the box.

The announcement was a worrying sign for physical games. Selling games as codes in a box isn’t a new concept, but GTA VI will be the biggest game to do it so far. Rockstar’s choice could push more publishers to do the same for their future titles. By making the game only available on digital storefronts, players can’t easily share it with a friend or sell the game when they’re done with it.

It’s also becoming increasingly clear you can’t rely on digital storefronts. Titles can get pulled for things like licensing or the store closing down. This may not be a problem for GTA VI, as Rockstar will almost certainly make sure the game is easily available on many digital platforms for the foreseeable future, especially if it wants to give the game the same kind of legs as the 13-year-old GTA V. But with digital storefronts, you also have to hope that you aren’t locked out of your account, even by mistake, and lose access to your games. (In 2023, some PlayStation users were unexpectedly banned through no fault of their own, though Sony eventually restored access to their accounts.)

Speaking of PlayStation, just days after Rockstar’s news, Sony dropped an even bigger bomb: It announced that, starting January 2028, it would not make physical discs for any new PlayStation games.

The decision led to widespread criticism online. Sony and PlayStation got yelled at everywhere online, as Kotaku reported, and the PlayStation account didn’t make a new tweet until six days after its announcement about dropping discs. The comments section of Sony’s famous 2013 PS4 game sharing ad where one person just hands a disc to another — an ad made after Xbox announced restrictive DRM plans for the Xbox One — is filled with new comments taking jabs at Sony. Heck, Sony itself showed why killing discs is a terrible idea by, on the same day as the disc news, saying that it would be closing the digital stores for the PS3 and the PS Vita.

Sony’s announcement also drew criticism from retailers and games preservationists. “This is unfortunate news for those who still prefer buying games on physical media, and is certainly a significant hit to consumer rights, the resale market, and game creators whose businesses rely on the physical market,” said Frank Cifaldi, executive director of the Video Game History Foundation.

Sony’s own statement was clear as to why it’s making the change. “This is a natural direction for Sony Interactive Entertainment to adapt to consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs,” Sony said in its announcement. “This transition will enable us to align more closely with how most of our community prefers to access and play games today.” The company’s numbers prove it, too: In the fourth quarter of its 2025 fiscal year, Sony reported that the “Full game software digital download ratio” of games on PS4 and PS5 was 85 percent.

We have to see if Grand Theft Auto VI actually releases on November 19th and if it will ever come out on disc. Despite two major delays, it seems likely the game will at least launch as planned, especially because Rockstar gave the game a price and is pushing preorders.

We’ll also have to see what Microsoft and Nintendo might do. Xbox hasn’t announced what it’s thinking about for discs for Project Helix, its next generation console, but The Verge’s Tom Warren reports that Xbox will “likely soon” stop making physical discs for Xbox games. However, Warren reports that the company is testing a feature that would let you digitize your physical game collection.

Nintendo will probably stick with physical games for a while. According to its last fiscal year report, digital makes up 54.6 percent of game sales, so physical is still a big part of its business. The Switch 2 is also only a year old, and it seems extremely unlikely that Nintendo would stop making physical games for hardware it will be supporting for a long time to come. However, with the Switch 2, Nintendo gives developers the option to sell game-key cards, which are physical carts you can borrow and resell but don’t actually have a game’s data on them. Instead, they serve as keys to let you download a game to your system.

Game stores and preservationists also have to adjust to the fact that physical games are going to be harder to come by. Cifaldi noted that museums and archives have already been preparing for this kind of future “with the expectation that putting discs on a shelf isn’t going to be a long-term solution for preserving new games.” But he called on trade groups to offer solutions to legally preserve digital content for research — efforts that the Entertainment Software Association has previously opposed. “The industry needs to meaningfully come to the table on this issue, because asking museums to download a copy of Grand Theft Auto VI and hope it’ll run in 50 years is not a preservation solution,” Cifaldi says.

Sony now has to navigate an awkward period where it’s launching new games but dealing with pushback from players wanting physical discs. While Sony has been subject to severe blowback after its announcement, it seems unlikely it will reverse course. It’s already repurposing its last PlayStation disc-making factory, after all.

  • The PS5 Pro, Sony’s top-end PlayStation, does not come with a disc drive; that costs an additional $79. Following a recent price hike that spiked the PS5 Pro’s cost to $899.99, that means a PS5 Pro with a disc drive costs nearly $1,000.
  • PlayStation’s own studios are now in the awkward spot of having to confirm that physical versions will be on disc, as Insomniac has for September’s Marvel’s Wolverine and Santa Monica Studio did for God of War Laufey. That Laufey confirmation also signals that the game, which hadn’t been given a release window, will launch before January 2028.
  • For music, physical media sales — including CDs — are reportedly on the rise.
  • Comedian Trevor Noah weighed in on PlayStation’s news, saying that “for a lot of gamers physical discs are the only way they could afford to play games because they could get them secondhand. You can also give games to your younger siblings, which is a great way to introduce them to the games you were playing.”
  • In a post titled “Sony Nerfs Videogame Ownership,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out that “Unlike other digital media like film and TV, video games require a ton of storage. Access to high speed internet is still abysmal in the US, making the high-speeds needed for digital game downloads a luxury some of us may take for granted.”
  • A day after the GTA VI news, Circana analyst Mat Piscatella posted a chart that neatly sums up what’s going on: sales of physical games peaked long ago, back in 2009.
Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.

#future #physical #games #greatColumn,Gaming,The Stepback">The future of physical games is not looking great

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on video games and physical media, follow Jay Peters. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.

As a kid, I relished trips to Best Buy, GameStop, and the nearby mall so that I could browse video games. I loved sifting through games and chatting with my friends at the store about upcoming releases. On the lucky days I actually got a new game from the store, I treasured reading through every page of the manual on the drive home. Over the years, I built up a collection of games that I was proud of.

That was a long time ago. Shortly after college, I sold my collection of older games and hardware because I wasn’t using them and wanted the money for other things. (Probably weekends out.) Starting with the Nintendo Switch in 2017, I started buying games digitally because it was easier to just download stuff, and I wouldn’t have to accumulate physical game cases. Now, I don’t own any physical games: My Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, and Steam libraries are all digital.

I’m not the only player who has moved to mostly digital games. Digital libraries are increasingly convenient, especially as console makers have made efforts to keep backwards compatibility across generations. Some players can’t play physical games at all, as PlayStation and Xbox launched the PS5 and Xbox Series consoles with all-digital console options that were cheaper than the versions with disc drives. On PC, digital libraries through platforms like Steam have been the reality for quite some time. Capcom, one of the biggest publishers around, reported that an astounding 93 percent of its game sales were for digital copies in its last fiscal year — a figure that it expects will rise to 95.4 percent over the fiscal year. Many of the most popular games are only available digitally, like Roblox and Fortnite.

For better or worse, video game players overwhelmingly buy and play digital games. But in the span of a week, two industry giants put nails in the coffin of physical games — or perhaps even poured concrete into the grave.

On June 24th, Rockstar Games finally put a price tag on Grand Theft Auto VI ahead of its scheduled November 19th release on PS5 and Xbox Series X / S: $79.99 for the base edition and $99.99 for the Ultimate Edition. The prices themselves weren’t too unexpected, as even Nintendo has dabbled with $79.99 games for its biggest titles. But what was more shocking was something buried in Rockstar’s post: The physical version of the game won’t have a disc, instead containing a download code in the box.

The announcement was a worrying sign for physical games. Selling games as codes in a box isn’t a new concept, but GTA VI will be the biggest game to do it so far. Rockstar’s choice could push more publishers to do the same for their future titles. By making the game only available on digital storefronts, players can’t easily share it with a friend or sell the game when they’re done with it.

It’s also becoming increasingly clear you can’t rely on digital storefronts. Titles can get pulled for things like licensing or the store closing down. This may not be a problem for GTA VI, as Rockstar will almost certainly make sure the game is easily available on many digital platforms for the foreseeable future, especially if it wants to give the game the same kind of legs as the 13-year-old GTA V. But with digital storefronts, you also have to hope that you aren’t locked out of your account, even by mistake, and lose access to your games. (In 2023, some PlayStation users were unexpectedly banned through no fault of their own, though Sony eventually restored access to their accounts.)

Speaking of PlayStation, just days after Rockstar’s news, Sony dropped an even bigger bomb: It announced that, starting January 2028, it would not make physical discs for any new PlayStation games.

The decision led to widespread criticism online. Sony and PlayStation got yelled at everywhere online, as Kotaku reported, and the PlayStation account didn’t make a new tweet until six days after its announcement about dropping discs. The comments section of Sony’s famous 2013 PS4 game sharing ad where one person just hands a disc to another — an ad made after Xbox announced restrictive DRM plans for the Xbox One — is filled with new comments taking jabs at Sony. Heck, Sony itself showed why killing discs is a terrible idea by, on the same day as the disc news, saying that it would be closing the digital stores for the PS3 and the PS Vita.

Sony’s announcement also drew criticism from retailers and games preservationists. “This is unfortunate news for those who still prefer buying games on physical media, and is certainly a significant hit to consumer rights, the resale market, and game creators whose businesses rely on the physical market,” said Frank Cifaldi, executive director of the Video Game History Foundation.

Sony’s own statement was clear as to why it’s making the change. “This is a natural direction for Sony Interactive Entertainment to adapt to consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs,” Sony said in its announcement. “This transition will enable us to align more closely with how most of our community prefers to access and play games today.” The company’s numbers prove it, too: In the fourth quarter of its 2025 fiscal year, Sony reported that the “Full game software digital download ratio” of games on PS4 and PS5 was 85 percent.

We have to see if Grand Theft Auto VI actually releases on November 19th and if it will ever come out on disc. Despite two major delays, it seems likely the game will at least launch as planned, especially because Rockstar gave the game a price and is pushing preorders.

We’ll also have to see what Microsoft and Nintendo might do. Xbox hasn’t announced what it’s thinking about for discs for Project Helix, its next generation console, but The Verge’s Tom Warren reports that Xbox will “likely soon” stop making physical discs for Xbox games. However, Warren reports that the company is testing a feature that would let you digitize your physical game collection.

Nintendo will probably stick with physical games for a while. According to its last fiscal year report, digital makes up 54.6 percent of game sales, so physical is still a big part of its business. The Switch 2 is also only a year old, and it seems extremely unlikely that Nintendo would stop making physical games for hardware it will be supporting for a long time to come. However, with the Switch 2, Nintendo gives developers the option to sell game-key cards, which are physical carts you can borrow and resell but don’t actually have a game’s data on them. Instead, they serve as keys to let you download a game to your system.

Game stores and preservationists also have to adjust to the fact that physical games are going to be harder to come by. Cifaldi noted that museums and archives have already been preparing for this kind of future “with the expectation that putting discs on a shelf isn’t going to be a long-term solution for preserving new games.” But he called on trade groups to offer solutions to legally preserve digital content for research — efforts that the Entertainment Software Association has previously opposed. “The industry needs to meaningfully come to the table on this issue, because asking museums to download a copy of Grand Theft Auto VI and hope it’ll run in 50 years is not a preservation solution,” Cifaldi says.

Sony now has to navigate an awkward period where it’s launching new games but dealing with pushback from players wanting physical discs. While Sony has been subject to severe blowback after its announcement, it seems unlikely it will reverse course. It’s already repurposing its last PlayStation disc-making factory, after all.

  • The PS5 Pro, Sony’s top-end PlayStation, does not come with a disc drive; that costs an additional $79. Following a recent price hike that spiked the PS5 Pro’s cost to $899.99, that means a PS5 Pro with a disc drive costs nearly $1,000.
  • PlayStation’s own studios are now in the awkward spot of having to confirm that physical versions will be on disc, as Insomniac has for September’s Marvel’s Wolverine and Santa Monica Studio did for God of War Laufey. That Laufey confirmation also signals that the game, which hadn’t been given a release window, will launch before January 2028.
  • For music, physical media sales — including CDs — are reportedly on the rise.
  • Comedian Trevor Noah weighed in on PlayStation’s news, saying that “for a lot of gamers physical discs are the only way they could afford to play games because they could get them secondhand. You can also give games to your younger siblings, which is a great way to introduce them to the games you were playing.”
  • In a post titled “Sony Nerfs Videogame Ownership,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out that “Unlike other digital media like film and TV, video games require a ton of storage. Access to high speed internet is still abysmal in the US, making the high-speeds needed for digital game downloads a luxury some of us may take for granted.”
  • A day after the GTA VI news, Circana analyst Mat Piscatella posted a chart that neatly sums up what’s going on: sales of physical games peaked long ago, back in 2009.
Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.
#future #physical #games #greatColumn,Gaming,The Stepback

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech…

hollywood copy - alina watson

Alex We all love action movies and kick-ass fight scenes. Throughout film history, there have…

please subscribe here. I promise that your money will not go toward paying for a drone-proof ballroom for The Verge staff, no matter how much fun we’d have throwing parties there.

Speaking of parties: The Verge normally wouldn’t do a party report from the White House Correspondents’ Dinner week, also known as “Nerd Prom,” because it’s a bit too much Washington insider circle-jerking for normal people to stomach. (This year was weirder than most, considering that the dinner was targeted by an attempted shooter, it was immediately canceled, and the media insiders kept partying anyway.) But I will make an exception for the party thrown by Grindr — “a midsize tech company that happens to be gay,” as Joe Hack, Grindr’s head of global government affairs — which took place the night before the dinner and can therefore stand on its own. And really, there’s a lot to unpack with this event: In an era of resurgent LGBTQ panic, why did a gay dating app with a reputation for facilitating hookups decide to throw a house party for those Washington insiders? Why did they do it this year, during peak Washington insider social season? And why did they let the media cover it?

Before we answer that question, as always, send any tips, notices, etc. to tina.nguyen+tips@theverge.com.

If someone had said that lobbyists for a publicly traded tech company were hosting a cocktail party on the eve of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, no one would pencil it on the calendar. But when Grindr began sending out invites, Washington immediately convulsed with thirst: Grindr? The “gay dating and hookup app”? Throwing a party? The scandal-hungry TMZ interviewed Hack for a segment and sent their Congress reporters to ask Republican officials for their opinions. The Advocate wrote about the power jockeying inside LGBTQ circles to get a ticket. Writer Josh Barro tweeted that he couldn’t RSVP in time. The Onion wrote an article about the “poppers lobbyists” expected to attend. DC seemed to vibrate with a hope that this party would be somehow different from the usual fare.

But even if they were horny for, well, horniness, they’d be temperamentally incapable of expressing it. Washingtonians, Republicans and Democrats alike, are too afraid to ever break decorum in social settings, because their coworkers, bosses, or James O’Keefe might be lurking around the corner with a camera. (James O’Keefe later insinuated that he sent an undercover mole to the party.) By the time everyone was kicked out at midnight, the most risqué thing I’d witnessed was one passionate kiss (no tongue). The shenanigans were pretty much limited to people thinking about jumping into the pool fully clothed in suits and cocktail dresses — but only, they shrieked, if people put away their cameras. “Please, god, I hope someone jumps in,” muttered a Washington Post reporter with a notebook, as his photographer colleague snapped pictures of the free spirits brave enough to stick their feet in the pool.

Still, this was the Grindr party, the hottest ticket of Nerd Prom, and every journalist, senior administration official, politician, publicist, staffer, lobbyist, influencer, you name it, had been trying to get on the invite list for the past week. For once, the social order was flipped: Sure, a tech company was throwing a party to curry influence in Washington. But this time, influence was begging to be let in. By 9PM, when I arrived, the line was already out the door, and well-connected people arriving in black cars were directed to the end of the street. “We’re at capacity,” the PR assistants at the front told me, frowning at their iPads, and for a moment I wondered whether they were strategically implementing artificial scarcity.

It turned out that the party was at capacity. I just had to do some aggressive name-dropping to get in and go past the foyer.

There’s a general slate of high-end fancy places that party planners fight over for the week— Meridian House! The Four Seasons! The French ambassador’s residence! — but this unassuming Georgetown mansion, built in 1840, was new to the scene. In 2022, a luxury real estate group purchased the mansion for just under $9 million, gutted the 11,000-square-foot Federal-style interior, and reopened it in late 2024 as a high-end rental aimed at the modern, discreet billionaire or Saudi royal: soothing beige walls, designer statement chandeliers, massive tables for huge floral arrangements and pyramids of boxes of burgers and french fries. But the gardens. Oh, the gardens. Somehow, over the past two centuries, the owners had carved out a full half acre of real estate in Georgetown and transformed it into a lush paradise of wandering pathways among boxwoods and trees, burbling fountains and marble statues, terraces enclosed in hedges, hidden greenhouses, and a swimming pool behind ivy-covered walls about two stories tall.

And the gardens were packed with hundreds of DC’s “power gays” (as UnHerd’s John Maier put it) from across the political spectrum, all of whom had been working in Washington for decades and knew the traditional party spots, but had never known this mansion even existed until now.

Not that it was a party strictly for the power gays, mind you — but their allies had to be powerful and connected, too. “I had 10,000 people message me about this,” Hack told me (a straight woman) once I got in. The intrigue over a Grindr party may have done a bit of the heavy lifting, but this was supposed to be just a cocktail party, just one stop on the Friday evening party circuit between the Washingtonian party at the Four Seasons and the UTA event at Isla. Except people weren’t leaving. It might have taken five minutes to get a glass of wine, to say nothing of a made-to-order espresso martini, and getting up the stairs required too much crowd navigation. They wanted to stay, even when the liquor ran out well before midnight.

“Obviously there’s a huge number of Democrats in this country who have done a lot of incredible work on behalf of gay rights, and we work very closely with them,” Grindr CEO George Arison told me, yelling over Daft Punk blasting on the outdoor speakers. “But there are also plenty of Republicans we work with as well, and they are both on the Hill and in the administration. It is a fact that there are a lot of very powerful gay Republicans in this administration. If you probably add up them in total, they have more power than gays have ever had. I mean, one of the four most powerful people in the world right now is a gay man.” US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent — the gay man who “runs the economy,” as Arison described him, laughing — had been invited, and though he didn’t attend, Shane Shannon, one of his senior officials, did show up, according to Hack. In Washington insider terms, that’s basically tacit approval.

WASHINGTON, DC - APRIL 24: General atmosphere during Grindr White House Correspondents’ Dinner Weekend Party 2026 at LXIV DC on April 24, 2026 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images for Grindr Inc.)

WASHINGTON, DC – APRIL 24: General atmosphere during Grindr White House Correspondents’ Dinner Weekend Party 2026 at LXIV DC on April 24, 2026 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images for Grindr Inc.)
Getty Images for Grindr Inc.

When he started planning the event, Hack, a political strategist who’d worked the WHCD circuit for two decades straight, made a deliberate choice: Grindr would not partner with a media organization for the event, bucking the trend of companies collaborating with news outlets for a proper celebration of the free press pretext. Instead, Grindr was celebrating the First Amendment right to freedom of expression, which does count as a pretext to slot the party into Nerd Prom week — but also, Hack emphasized, allowed Grindr’s priorities to take center stage. “I wanted this to be clear that this was our event. I didn’t want to dilute that attention.”

Several Washington outlets published articles focused on Grindr’s political priorities, in the very staid way that Washington outlets tend to do. Vanity Fair reported that Hack, a Republican and former chief of staff to Sen. Deb Fischer (R-NE), had built Grindr’s relationships with House Republicans to shape the App Store Accountability Act, which placed the responsibility for age verification requirements on the app stores rather than the apps themselves. Politico noted that Grindr had “poured $1.6 million into its influence operation since it registered to lobby federal lawmakers in April 2025,” and was now working on a slate of hard policy issues beyond the App Store Accountability Act: kids’ online safety within the national AI framework, IVF and surrogacy access, and its biggest goal, federal funding for HIV prevention. (Hack told me that they were about to announce the hiring of his Democrat counterpart.)

But there was more to the party’s objectives than the lobbying disclosures. Without a second brand involved, Grindr had full control of the party’s atmosphere and how to present itself. It was Grindr’s decision to host the party in this mansion, to opt for burgers and oyster shuckers over passed canapes, to curate the guest list and select their invitees and set the tone of the evening: somewhere between networking event and tie-loosening “having a good time,” as one Republican told me, but well short of anything that could give conservatives ammo in the culture wars.

In short: Grindr was a good political partner for Democrats and Republicans, even in Donald Trump’s administration. And while several big names did show up to the party — Don Lemon, Ken Martin, David Urban, Keith Edwards, Jon Lovett (who ribbed the alcohol situation on Jimmy Kimmel Live the next day) — the vast majority of people at the party were arguably more important to win over. It was senior political staffers, journalists, lobbyists, advisers at interest groups, pollsters, and everyone with some hand in drafting the laws before the electeds vote on them.

Was it typical quote-unquote allyship? Not in the public sense, and don’t expect Trump officials marching hand in hand with the progressive caucus during Pride. But Hack emphasized that while Grindr was “in many ways, just another midsize tech company that happens to be gay,” company leadership felt an urgent responsibility to protect their user base. The upfront way to do that was through policy wins and shaping laws, but he also felt like Grindr had to go one step further than other dating apps: “It’s also a moment where you see a lot of corporations stepping back from their commitments to our community.”

Implicit in his statement was a painful reality: After a decade of advances, LGBTQ rights are slowly being eroded across the country. Several Republican states are petitioning the US Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark ruling that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. Funding has been stripped from health services for LGBTQ Americans. The federal government is quietly eliminating benefits for same-sex couples. And if certain online safety laws pass and the anonymity of the internet disappears, the possibility of a Grindr user being outed and punished for expressing their sexuality is all but a given.

And that is what the politicking is for. “We feel, I think, even more of an urgent need to have a seat at the table,” said Hack. “There’s an old saying in Washington: that if you don’t have a seat at the table, you’re on the menu.”

The boys were also there:

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#Grindr #Grindr #won #WHCD #party #circuitColumn,Policy,Politics,Regulator"> Grindr — yes, Grindr — won the WHCD party circuitHello and welcome to Regulator, a newsletter for Verge subscribers about technology, politics, and technology learning how to politick. If you’re not a subscriber but would like to support our work, please subscribe here. I promise that your money will not go toward paying for a drone-proof ballroom for The Verge staff, no matter how much fun we’d have throwing parties there.Speaking of parties: The Verge normally wouldn’t do a party report from the White House Correspondents’ Dinner week, also known as “Nerd Prom,” because it’s a bit too much Washington insider circle-jerking for normal people to stomach. (This year was weirder than most, considering that the dinner was targeted by an attempted shooter, it was immediately canceled, and the media insiders kept partying anyway.) But I will make an exception for the party thrown by Grindr — “a midsize tech company that happens to be gay,” as Joe Hack, Grindr’s head of global government affairs — which took place the night before the dinner and can therefore stand on its own. And really, there’s a lot to unpack with this event: In an era of resurgent LGBTQ panic, why did a gay dating app with a reputation for facilitating hookups decide to throw a house party for those Washington insiders? Why did they do it this year, during peak Washington insider social season? And why did they let the media cover it?Before we answer that question, as always, send any tips, notices, etc. to tina.nguyen+tips@theverge.com.If someone had said that lobbyists for a publicly traded tech company were hosting a cocktail party on the eve of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, no one would pencil it on the calendar. But when Grindr began sending out invites, Washington immediately convulsed with thirst: Grindr? The “gay dating and hookup app”? Throwing a party? The scandal-hungry TMZ interviewed Hack for a segment and sent their Congress reporters to ask Republican officials for their opinions. The Advocate wrote about the power jockeying inside LGBTQ circles to get a ticket. Writer Josh Barro tweeted that he couldn’t RSVP in time. The Onion wrote an article about the “poppers lobbyists” expected to attend. DC seemed to vibrate with a hope that this party would be somehow different from the usual fare.But even if they were horny for, well, horniness, they’d be temperamentally incapable of expressing it. Washingtonians, Republicans and Democrats alike, are too afraid to ever break decorum in social settings, because their coworkers, bosses, or James O’Keefe might be lurking around the corner with a camera. (James O’Keefe later insinuated that he sent an undercover mole to the party.) By the time everyone was kicked out at midnight, the most risqué thing I’d witnessed was one passionate kiss (no tongue). The shenanigans were pretty much limited to people thinking about jumping into the pool fully clothed in suits and cocktail dresses — but only, they shrieked, if people put away their cameras. “Please, god, I hope someone jumps in,” muttered a Washington Post reporter with a notebook, as his photographer colleague snapped pictures of the free spirits brave enough to stick their feet in the pool.Still, this was the Grindr party, the hottest ticket of Nerd Prom, and every journalist, senior administration official, politician, publicist, staffer, lobbyist, influencer, you name it, had been trying to get on the invite list for the past week. For once, the social order was flipped: Sure, a tech company was throwing a party to curry influence in Washington. But this time, influence was begging to be let in. By 9PM, when I arrived, the line was already out the door, and well-connected people arriving in black cars were directed to the end of the street. “We’re at capacity,” the PR assistants at the front told me, frowning at their iPads, and for a moment I wondered whether they were strategically implementing artificial scarcity.It turned out that the party was at capacity. I just had to do some aggressive name-dropping to get in and go past the foyer.There’s a general slate of high-end fancy places that party planners fight over for the week— Meridian House! The Four Seasons! The French ambassador’s residence! — but this unassuming Georgetown mansion, built in 1840, was new to the scene. In 2022, a luxury real estate group purchased the mansion for just under million, gutted the 11,000-square-foot Federal-style interior, and reopened it in late 2024 as a high-end rental aimed at the modern, discreet billionaire or Saudi royal: soothing beige walls, designer statement chandeliers, massive tables for huge floral arrangements and pyramids of boxes of burgers and french fries. But the gardens. Oh, the gardens. Somehow, over the past two centuries, the owners had carved out a full half acre of real estate in Georgetown and transformed it into a lush paradise of wandering pathways among boxwoods and trees, burbling fountains and marble statues, terraces enclosed in hedges, hidden greenhouses, and a swimming pool behind ivy-covered walls about two stories tall.And the gardens were packed with hundreds of DC’s “power gays” (as UnHerd’s John Maier put it) from across the political spectrum, all of whom had been working in Washington for decades and knew the traditional party spots, but had never known this mansion even existed until now.Not that it was a party strictly for the power gays, mind you — but their allies had to be powerful and connected, too. “I had 10,000 people message me about this,” Hack told me (a straight woman) once I got in. The intrigue over a Grindr party may have done a bit of the heavy lifting, but this was supposed to be just a cocktail party, just one stop on the Friday evening party circuit between the Washingtonian party at the Four Seasons and the UTA event at Isla. Except people weren’t leaving. It might have taken five minutes to get a glass of wine, to say nothing of a made-to-order espresso martini, and getting up the stairs required too much crowd navigation. They wanted to stay, even when the liquor ran out well before midnight.“Obviously there’s a huge number of Democrats in this country who have done a lot of incredible work on behalf of gay rights, and we work very closely with them,” Grindr CEO George Arison told me, yelling over Daft Punk blasting on the outdoor speakers. “But there are also plenty of Republicans we work with as well, and they are both on the Hill and in the administration. It is a fact that there are a lot of very powerful gay Republicans in this administration. If you probably add up them in total, they have more power than gays have ever had. I mean, one of the four most powerful people in the world right now is a gay man.” US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent — the gay man who “runs the economy,” as Arison described him, laughing — had been invited, and though he didn’t attend, Shane Shannon, one of his senior officials, did show up, according to Hack. In Washington insider terms, that’s basically tacit approval.WASHINGTON, DC – APRIL 24: General atmosphere during Grindr White House Correspondents’ Dinner Weekend Party 2026 at LXIV DC on April 24, 2026 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images for Grindr Inc.) Getty Images for Grindr Inc.When he started planning the event, Hack, a political strategist who’d worked the WHCD circuit for two decades straight, made a deliberate choice: Grindr would not partner with a media organization for the event, bucking the trend of companies collaborating with news outlets for a proper celebration of the free press pretext. Instead, Grindr was celebrating the First Amendment right to freedom of expression, which does count as a pretext to slot the party into Nerd Prom week — but also, Hack emphasized, allowed Grindr’s priorities to take center stage. “I wanted this to be clear that this was our event. I didn’t want to dilute that attention.”Several Washington outlets published articles focused on Grindr’s political priorities, in the very staid way that Washington outlets tend to do. Vanity Fair reported that Hack, a Republican and former chief of staff to Sen. Deb Fischer (R-NE), had built Grindr’s relationships with House Republicans to shape the App Store Accountability Act, which placed the responsibility for age verification requirements on the app stores rather than the apps themselves. Politico noted that Grindr had “poured .6 million into its influence operation since it registered to lobby federal lawmakers in April 2025,” and was now working on a slate of hard policy issues beyond the App Store Accountability Act: kids’ online safety within the national AI framework, IVF and surrogacy access, and its biggest goal, federal funding for HIV prevention. (Hack told me that they were about to announce the hiring of his Democrat counterpart.)But there was more to the party’s objectives than the lobbying disclosures. Without a second brand involved, Grindr had full control of the party’s atmosphere and how to present itself. It was Grindr’s decision to host the party in this mansion, to opt for burgers and oyster shuckers over passed canapes, to curate the guest list and select their invitees and set the tone of the evening: somewhere between networking event and tie-loosening “having a good time,” as one Republican told me, but well short of anything that could give conservatives ammo in the culture wars.In short: Grindr was a good political partner for Democrats and Republicans, even in Donald Trump’s administration. And while several big names did show up to the party — Don Lemon, Ken Martin, David Urban, Keith Edwards, Jon Lovett (who ribbed the alcohol situation on Jimmy Kimmel Live the next day) — the vast majority of people at the party were arguably more important to win over. It was senior political staffers, journalists, lobbyists, advisers at interest groups, pollsters, and everyone with some hand in drafting the laws before the electeds vote on them.Was it typical quote-unquote allyship? Not in the public sense, and don’t expect Trump officials marching hand in hand with the progressive caucus during Pride. But Hack emphasized that while Grindr was “in many ways, just another midsize tech company that happens to be gay,” company leadership felt an urgent responsibility to protect their user base. The upfront way to do that was through policy wins and shaping laws, but he also felt like Grindr had to go one step further than other dating apps: “It’s also a moment where you see a lot of corporations stepping back from their commitments to our community.”Implicit in his statement was a painful reality: After a decade of advances, LGBTQ rights are slowly being eroded across the country. Several Republican states are petitioning the US Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark ruling that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. Funding has been stripped from health services for LGBTQ Americans. The federal government is quietly eliminating benefits for same-sex couples. And if certain online safety laws pass and the anonymity of the internet disappears, the possibility of a Grindr user being outed and punished for expressing their sexuality is all but a given.And that is what the politicking is for. “We feel, I think, even more of an urgent need to have a seat at the table,” said Hack. “There’s an old saying in Washington: that if you don’t have a seat at the table, you’re on the menu.”The boys were also there:Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Tina NguyenCloseTina NguyenSenior Reporter, WashingtonPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Tina NguyenColumnCloseColumnPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All ColumnPolicyClosePolicyPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All PolicyPoliticsClosePoliticsPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All PoliticsRegulatorCloseRegulatorPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All Regulator#Grindr #Grindr #won #WHCD #party #circuitColumn,Policy,Politics,Regulator
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please subscribe here. I promise that your money will not go toward paying for a drone-proof ballroom for The Verge staff, no matter how much fun we’d have throwing parties there.

Speaking of parties: The Verge normally wouldn’t do a party report from the White House Correspondents’ Dinner week, also known as “Nerd Prom,” because it’s a bit too much Washington insider circle-jerking for normal people to stomach. (This year was weirder than most, considering that the dinner was targeted by an attempted shooter, it was immediately canceled, and the media insiders kept partying anyway.) But I will make an exception for the party thrown by Grindr — “a midsize tech company that happens to be gay,” as Joe Hack, Grindr’s head of global government affairs — which took place the night before the dinner and can therefore stand on its own. And really, there’s a lot to unpack with this event: In an era of resurgent LGBTQ panic, why did a gay dating app with a reputation for facilitating hookups decide to throw a house party for those Washington insiders? Why did they do it this year, during peak Washington insider social season? And why did they let the media cover it?

Before we answer that question, as always, send any tips, notices, etc. to tina.nguyen+tips@theverge.com.

If someone had said that lobbyists for a publicly traded tech company were hosting a cocktail party on the eve of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, no one would pencil it on the calendar. But when Grindr began sending out invites, Washington immediately convulsed with thirst: Grindr? The “gay dating and hookup app”? Throwing a party? The scandal-hungry TMZ interviewed Hack for a segment and sent their Congress reporters to ask Republican officials for their opinions. The Advocate wrote about the power jockeying inside LGBTQ circles to get a ticket. Writer Josh Barro tweeted that he couldn’t RSVP in time. The Onion wrote an article about the “poppers lobbyists” expected to attend. DC seemed to vibrate with a hope that this party would be somehow different from the usual fare.

But even if they were horny for, well, horniness, they’d be temperamentally incapable of expressing it. Washingtonians, Republicans and Democrats alike, are too afraid to ever break decorum in social settings, because their coworkers, bosses, or James O’Keefe might be lurking around the corner with a camera. (James O’Keefe later insinuated that he sent an undercover mole to the party.) By the time everyone was kicked out at midnight, the most risqué thing I’d witnessed was one passionate kiss (no tongue). The shenanigans were pretty much limited to people thinking about jumping into the pool fully clothed in suits and cocktail dresses — but only, they shrieked, if people put away their cameras. “Please, god, I hope someone jumps in,” muttered a Washington Post reporter with a notebook, as his photographer colleague snapped pictures of the free spirits brave enough to stick their feet in the pool.

Still, this was the Grindr party, the hottest ticket of Nerd Prom, and every journalist, senior administration official, politician, publicist, staffer, lobbyist, influencer, you name it, had been trying to get on the invite list for the past week. For once, the social order was flipped: Sure, a tech company was throwing a party to curry influence in Washington. But this time, influence was begging to be let in. By 9PM, when I arrived, the line was already out the door, and well-connected people arriving in black cars were directed to the end of the street. “We’re at capacity,” the PR assistants at the front told me, frowning at their iPads, and for a moment I wondered whether they were strategically implementing artificial scarcity.

It turned out that the party was at capacity. I just had to do some aggressive name-dropping to get in and go past the foyer.

There’s a general slate of high-end fancy places that party planners fight over for the week— Meridian House! The Four Seasons! The French ambassador’s residence! — but this unassuming Georgetown mansion, built in 1840, was new to the scene. In 2022, a luxury real estate group purchased the mansion for just under $9 million, gutted the 11,000-square-foot Federal-style interior, and reopened it in late 2024 as a high-end rental aimed at the modern, discreet billionaire or Saudi royal: soothing beige walls, designer statement chandeliers, massive tables for huge floral arrangements and pyramids of boxes of burgers and french fries. But the gardens. Oh, the gardens. Somehow, over the past two centuries, the owners had carved out a full half acre of real estate in Georgetown and transformed it into a lush paradise of wandering pathways among boxwoods and trees, burbling fountains and marble statues, terraces enclosed in hedges, hidden greenhouses, and a swimming pool behind ivy-covered walls about two stories tall.

And the gardens were packed with hundreds of DC’s “power gays” (as UnHerd’s John Maier put it) from across the political spectrum, all of whom had been working in Washington for decades and knew the traditional party spots, but had never known this mansion even existed until now.

Not that it was a party strictly for the power gays, mind you — but their allies had to be powerful and connected, too. “I had 10,000 people message me about this,” Hack told me (a straight woman) once I got in. The intrigue over a Grindr party may have done a bit of the heavy lifting, but this was supposed to be just a cocktail party, just one stop on the Friday evening party circuit between the Washingtonian party at the Four Seasons and the UTA event at Isla. Except people weren’t leaving. It might have taken five minutes to get a glass of wine, to say nothing of a made-to-order espresso martini, and getting up the stairs required too much crowd navigation. They wanted to stay, even when the liquor ran out well before midnight.

“Obviously there’s a huge number of Democrats in this country who have done a lot of incredible work on behalf of gay rights, and we work very closely with them,” Grindr CEO George Arison told me, yelling over Daft Punk blasting on the outdoor speakers. “But there are also plenty of Republicans we work with as well, and they are both on the Hill and in the administration. It is a fact that there are a lot of very powerful gay Republicans in this administration. If you probably add up them in total, they have more power than gays have ever had. I mean, one of the four most powerful people in the world right now is a gay man.” US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent — the gay man who “runs the economy,” as Arison described him, laughing — had been invited, and though he didn’t attend, Shane Shannon, one of his senior officials, did show up, according to Hack. In Washington insider terms, that’s basically tacit approval.

WASHINGTON, DC - APRIL 24: General atmosphere during Grindr White House Correspondents’ Dinner Weekend Party 2026 at LXIV DC on April 24, 2026 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images for Grindr Inc.)

WASHINGTON, DC – APRIL 24: General atmosphere during Grindr White House Correspondents’ Dinner Weekend Party 2026 at LXIV DC on April 24, 2026 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images for Grindr Inc.)
Getty Images for Grindr Inc.

When he started planning the event, Hack, a political strategist who’d worked the WHCD circuit for two decades straight, made a deliberate choice: Grindr would not partner with a media organization for the event, bucking the trend of companies collaborating with news outlets for a proper celebration of the free press pretext. Instead, Grindr was celebrating the First Amendment right to freedom of expression, which does count as a pretext to slot the party into Nerd Prom week — but also, Hack emphasized, allowed Grindr’s priorities to take center stage. “I wanted this to be clear that this was our event. I didn’t want to dilute that attention.”

Several Washington outlets published articles focused on Grindr’s political priorities, in the very staid way that Washington outlets tend to do. Vanity Fair reported that Hack, a Republican and former chief of staff to Sen. Deb Fischer (R-NE), had built Grindr’s relationships with House Republicans to shape the App Store Accountability Act, which placed the responsibility for age verification requirements on the app stores rather than the apps themselves. Politico noted that Grindr had “poured $1.6 million into its influence operation since it registered to lobby federal lawmakers in April 2025,” and was now working on a slate of hard policy issues beyond the App Store Accountability Act: kids’ online safety within the national AI framework, IVF and surrogacy access, and its biggest goal, federal funding for HIV prevention. (Hack told me that they were about to announce the hiring of his Democrat counterpart.)

But there was more to the party’s objectives than the lobbying disclosures. Without a second brand involved, Grindr had full control of the party’s atmosphere and how to present itself. It was Grindr’s decision to host the party in this mansion, to opt for burgers and oyster shuckers over passed canapes, to curate the guest list and select their invitees and set the tone of the evening: somewhere between networking event and tie-loosening “having a good time,” as one Republican told me, but well short of anything that could give conservatives ammo in the culture wars.

In short: Grindr was a good political partner for Democrats and Republicans, even in Donald Trump’s administration. And while several big names did show up to the party — Don Lemon, Ken Martin, David Urban, Keith Edwards, Jon Lovett (who ribbed the alcohol situation on Jimmy Kimmel Live the next day) — the vast majority of people at the party were arguably more important to win over. It was senior political staffers, journalists, lobbyists, advisers at interest groups, pollsters, and everyone with some hand in drafting the laws before the electeds vote on them.

Was it typical quote-unquote allyship? Not in the public sense, and don’t expect Trump officials marching hand in hand with the progressive caucus during Pride. But Hack emphasized that while Grindr was “in many ways, just another midsize tech company that happens to be gay,” company leadership felt an urgent responsibility to protect their user base. The upfront way to do that was through policy wins and shaping laws, but he also felt like Grindr had to go one step further than other dating apps: “It’s also a moment where you see a lot of corporations stepping back from their commitments to our community.”

Implicit in his statement was a painful reality: After a decade of advances, LGBTQ rights are slowly being eroded across the country. Several Republican states are petitioning the US Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark ruling that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. Funding has been stripped from health services for LGBTQ Americans. The federal government is quietly eliminating benefits for same-sex couples. And if certain online safety laws pass and the anonymity of the internet disappears, the possibility of a Grindr user being outed and punished for expressing their sexuality is all but a given.

And that is what the politicking is for. “We feel, I think, even more of an urgent need to have a seat at the table,” said Hack. “There’s an old saying in Washington: that if you don’t have a seat at the table, you’re on the menu.”

The boys were also there:

Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.

#Grindr #Grindr #won #WHCD #party #circuitColumn,Policy,Politics,Regulator">Grindr — yes, Grindr — won the WHCD party circuit

Hello and welcome to Regulator, a newsletter for Verge subscribers about technology, politics, and technology learning how to politick. If you’re not a subscriber but would like to support our work, please subscribe here. I promise that your money will not go toward paying for a drone-proof ballroom for The Verge staff, no matter how much fun we’d have throwing parties there.

Speaking of parties: The Verge normally wouldn’t do a party report from the White House Correspondents’ Dinner week, also known as “Nerd Prom,” because it’s a bit too much Washington insider circle-jerking for normal people to stomach. (This year was weirder than most, considering that the dinner was targeted by an attempted shooter, it was immediately canceled, and the media insiders kept partying anyway.) But I will make an exception for the party thrown by Grindr — “a midsize tech company that happens to be gay,” as Joe Hack, Grindr’s head of global government affairs — which took place the night before the dinner and can therefore stand on its own. And really, there’s a lot to unpack with this event: In an era of resurgent LGBTQ panic, why did a gay dating app with a reputation for facilitating hookups decide to throw a house party for those Washington insiders? Why did they do it this year, during peak Washington insider social season? And why did they let the media cover it?

Before we answer that question, as always, send any tips, notices, etc. to tina.nguyen+tips@theverge.com.

If someone had said that lobbyists for a publicly traded tech company were hosting a cocktail party on the eve of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, no one would pencil it on the calendar. But when Grindr began sending out invites, Washington immediately convulsed with thirst: Grindr? The “gay dating and hookup app”? Throwing a party? The scandal-hungry TMZ interviewed Hack for a segment and sent their Congress reporters to ask Republican officials for their opinions. The Advocate wrote about the power jockeying inside LGBTQ circles to get a ticket. Writer Josh Barro tweeted that he couldn’t RSVP in time. The Onion wrote an article about the “poppers lobbyists” expected to attend. DC seemed to vibrate with a hope that this party would be somehow different from the usual fare.

But even if they were horny for, well, horniness, they’d be temperamentally incapable of expressing it. Washingtonians, Republicans and Democrats alike, are too afraid to ever break decorum in social settings, because their coworkers, bosses, or James O’Keefe might be lurking around the corner with a camera. (James O’Keefe later insinuated that he sent an undercover mole to the party.) By the time everyone was kicked out at midnight, the most risqué thing I’d witnessed was one passionate kiss (no tongue). The shenanigans were pretty much limited to people thinking about jumping into the pool fully clothed in suits and cocktail dresses — but only, they shrieked, if people put away their cameras. “Please, god, I hope someone jumps in,” muttered a Washington Post reporter with a notebook, as his photographer colleague snapped pictures of the free spirits brave enough to stick their feet in the pool.

Still, this was the Grindr party, the hottest ticket of Nerd Prom, and every journalist, senior administration official, politician, publicist, staffer, lobbyist, influencer, you name it, had been trying to get on the invite list for the past week. For once, the social order was flipped: Sure, a tech company was throwing a party to curry influence in Washington. But this time, influence was begging to be let in. By 9PM, when I arrived, the line was already out the door, and well-connected people arriving in black cars were directed to the end of the street. “We’re at capacity,” the PR assistants at the front told me, frowning at their iPads, and for a moment I wondered whether they were strategically implementing artificial scarcity.

It turned out that the party was at capacity. I just had to do some aggressive name-dropping to get in and go past the foyer.

There’s a general slate of high-end fancy places that party planners fight over for the week— Meridian House! The Four Seasons! The French ambassador’s residence! — but this unassuming Georgetown mansion, built in 1840, was new to the scene. In 2022, a luxury real estate group purchased the mansion for just under $9 million, gutted the 11,000-square-foot Federal-style interior, and reopened it in late 2024 as a high-end rental aimed at the modern, discreet billionaire or Saudi royal: soothing beige walls, designer statement chandeliers, massive tables for huge floral arrangements and pyramids of boxes of burgers and french fries. But the gardens. Oh, the gardens. Somehow, over the past two centuries, the owners had carved out a full half acre of real estate in Georgetown and transformed it into a lush paradise of wandering pathways among boxwoods and trees, burbling fountains and marble statues, terraces enclosed in hedges, hidden greenhouses, and a swimming pool behind ivy-covered walls about two stories tall.

And the gardens were packed with hundreds of DC’s “power gays” (as UnHerd’s John Maier put it) from across the political spectrum, all of whom had been working in Washington for decades and knew the traditional party spots, but had never known this mansion even existed until now.

Not that it was a party strictly for the power gays, mind you — but their allies had to be powerful and connected, too. “I had 10,000 people message me about this,” Hack told me (a straight woman) once I got in. The intrigue over a Grindr party may have done a bit of the heavy lifting, but this was supposed to be just a cocktail party, just one stop on the Friday evening party circuit between the Washingtonian party at the Four Seasons and the UTA event at Isla. Except people weren’t leaving. It might have taken five minutes to get a glass of wine, to say nothing of a made-to-order espresso martini, and getting up the stairs required too much crowd navigation. They wanted to stay, even when the liquor ran out well before midnight.

“Obviously there’s a huge number of Democrats in this country who have done a lot of incredible work on behalf of gay rights, and we work very closely with them,” Grindr CEO George Arison told me, yelling over Daft Punk blasting on the outdoor speakers. “But there are also plenty of Republicans we work with as well, and they are both on the Hill and in the administration. It is a fact that there are a lot of very powerful gay Republicans in this administration. If you probably add up them in total, they have more power than gays have ever had. I mean, one of the four most powerful people in the world right now is a gay man.” US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent — the gay man who “runs the economy,” as Arison described him, laughing — had been invited, and though he didn’t attend, Shane Shannon, one of his senior officials, did show up, according to Hack. In Washington insider terms, that’s basically tacit approval.

WASHINGTON, DC - APRIL 24: General atmosphere during Grindr White House Correspondents’ Dinner Weekend Party 2026 at LXIV DC on April 24, 2026 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images for Grindr Inc.)

WASHINGTON, DC – APRIL 24: General atmosphere during Grindr White House Correspondents’ Dinner Weekend Party 2026 at LXIV DC on April 24, 2026 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images for Grindr Inc.)
Getty Images for Grindr Inc.

When he started planning the event, Hack, a political strategist who’d worked the WHCD circuit for two decades straight, made a deliberate choice: Grindr would not partner with a media organization for the event, bucking the trend of companies collaborating with news outlets for a proper celebration of the free press pretext. Instead, Grindr was celebrating the First Amendment right to freedom of expression, which does count as a pretext to slot the party into Nerd Prom week — but also, Hack emphasized, allowed Grindr’s priorities to take center stage. “I wanted this to be clear that this was our event. I didn’t want to dilute that attention.”

Several Washington outlets published articles focused on Grindr’s political priorities, in the very staid way that Washington outlets tend to do. Vanity Fair reported that Hack, a Republican and former chief of staff to Sen. Deb Fischer (R-NE), had built Grindr’s relationships with House Republicans to shape the App Store Accountability Act, which placed the responsibility for age verification requirements on the app stores rather than the apps themselves. Politico noted that Grindr had “poured $1.6 million into its influence operation since it registered to lobby federal lawmakers in April 2025,” and was now working on a slate of hard policy issues beyond the App Store Accountability Act: kids’ online safety within the national AI framework, IVF and surrogacy access, and its biggest goal, federal funding for HIV prevention. (Hack told me that they were about to announce the hiring of his Democrat counterpart.)

But there was more to the party’s objectives than the lobbying disclosures. Without a second brand involved, Grindr had full control of the party’s atmosphere and how to present itself. It was Grindr’s decision to host the party in this mansion, to opt for burgers and oyster shuckers over passed canapes, to curate the guest list and select their invitees and set the tone of the evening: somewhere between networking event and tie-loosening “having a good time,” as one Republican told me, but well short of anything that could give conservatives ammo in the culture wars.

In short: Grindr was a good political partner for Democrats and Republicans, even in Donald Trump’s administration. And while several big names did show up to the party — Don Lemon, Ken Martin, David Urban, Keith Edwards, Jon Lovett (who ribbed the alcohol situation on Jimmy Kimmel Live the next day) — the vast majority of people at the party were arguably more important to win over. It was senior political staffers, journalists, lobbyists, advisers at interest groups, pollsters, and everyone with some hand in drafting the laws before the electeds vote on them.

Was it typical quote-unquote allyship? Not in the public sense, and don’t expect Trump officials marching hand in hand with the progressive caucus during Pride. But Hack emphasized that while Grindr was “in many ways, just another midsize tech company that happens to be gay,” company leadership felt an urgent responsibility to protect their user base. The upfront way to do that was through policy wins and shaping laws, but he also felt like Grindr had to go one step further than other dating apps: “It’s also a moment where you see a lot of corporations stepping back from their commitments to our community.”

Implicit in his statement was a painful reality: After a decade of advances, LGBTQ rights are slowly being eroded across the country. Several Republican states are petitioning the US Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark ruling that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. Funding has been stripped from health services for LGBTQ Americans. The federal government is quietly eliminating benefits for same-sex couples. And if certain online safety laws pass and the anonymity of the internet disappears, the possibility of a Grindr user being outed and punished for expressing their sexuality is all but a given.

And that is what the politicking is for. “We feel, I think, even more of an urgent need to have a seat at the table,” said Hack. “There’s an old saying in Washington: that if you don’t have a seat at the table, you’re on the menu.”

The boys were also there:

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obvious reasons, I’ve had Moon on the mind all week. So I was trying to figure out what I should recommend this week that would thematically fit. Brian Eno’s Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks is incredible, and if you haven’t listened to it, go do that now. But it also seemed a bit on the nose. Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool also came to mind. But it also felt a bit obvious. Then I remembered Kate NV’s Room for the Moon, a record I had on repeat in 2020.

Russian artist Kate Shilonosova chases ideas across 11 tracks inspired by Russian and Japanese pop from the ‘70s and ‘80s, as well as children’s movies. This obviously leads Room for the Moon to indulge its most whimsical impulses. It’s a fairytale rendered in snappy Talking Heads-esque bass, proggy synths, and reverbed drum machines.

The opener “Not Not Not” is almost goofy, its chaotic melodies constantly dancing around each other in a perpetually disorienting way. It lurches forward asymetrically, grooving like a flat tire. The instrumental “Da Na” follows, drawing on a familiar yet slightly uncanny palette of sounds. The clarinet (?) drifts in and out of dissonance as if drunk. The tuned percussion elements flit around what might be a kenari seed shell shaker or someone running their fingers over the tines of a comb. It’s truly impossible to tell, and both seem as likely as the other.

“Sayonara (Full Moon Version)” is the fantastical daydream counterpart to Oingo Boingo’s nightmare new wave theatrics. The least strange track on the record is probably “Plans,” which fully embraces 80s dance pop aesthetics. But even that song finds room for a minute-long instrumental passage featuring a bleating, almost atonal saxophone solo.

While the sounds are strange, uneasy, and almost queasy at times, the songs are light and fantastical. Despite not understanding the lyrics, which are mostly in Russian, it’s impossible not to get a sense of hope from them. Kate NV’s Room for the Moon is not a somber lunar lullaby, but the pleasant dreams of an innocent mind.

#Room #Moon #thrillingly #weird #experimental #popColumn,Entertainment,Music,Music Review"> Room for the Moon is thrillingly weird experimental popFor obvious reasons, I’ve had Moon on the mind all week. So I was trying to figure out what I should recommend this week that would thematically fit. Brian Eno’s Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks is incredible, and if you haven’t listened to it, go do that now. But it also seemed a bit on the nose. Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool also came to mind. But it also felt a bit obvious. Then I remembered Kate NV’s Room for the Moon, a record I had on repeat in 2020.Russian artist Kate Shilonosova chases ideas across 11 tracks inspired by Russian and Japanese pop from the ‘70s and ‘80s, as well as children’s movies. This obviously leads Room for the Moon to indulge its most whimsical impulses. It’s a fairytale rendered in snappy Talking Heads-esque bass, proggy synths, and reverbed drum machines.The opener “Not Not Not” is almost goofy, its chaotic melodies constantly dancing around each other in a perpetually disorienting way. It lurches forward asymetrically, grooving like a flat tire. The instrumental “Da Na” follows, drawing on a familiar yet slightly uncanny palette of sounds. The clarinet (?) drifts in and out of dissonance as if drunk. The tuned percussion elements flit around what might be a kenari seed shell shaker or someone running their fingers over the tines of a comb. It’s truly impossible to tell, and both seem as likely as the other.“Sayonara (Full Moon Version)” is the fantastical daydream counterpart to Oingo Boingo’s nightmare new wave theatrics. The least strange track on the record is probably “Plans,” which fully embraces 80s dance pop aesthetics. But even that song finds room for a minute-long instrumental passage featuring a bleating, almost atonal saxophone solo.While the sounds are strange, uneasy, and almost queasy at times, the songs are light and fantastical. Despite not understanding the lyrics, which are mostly in Russian, it’s impossible not to get a sense of hope from them. Kate NV’s Room for the Moon is not a somber lunar lullaby, but the pleasant dreams of an innocent mind.#Room #Moon #thrillingly #weird #experimental #popColumn,Entertainment,Music,Music Review
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obvious reasons, I’ve had Moon on the mind all week. So I was trying to figure out what I should recommend this week that would thematically fit. Brian Eno’s Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks is incredible, and if you haven’t listened to it, go do that now. But it also seemed a bit on the nose. Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool also came to mind. But it also felt a bit obvious. Then I remembered Kate NV’s Room for the Moon, a record I had on repeat in 2020.

Russian artist Kate Shilonosova chases ideas across 11 tracks inspired by Russian and Japanese pop from the ‘70s and ‘80s, as well as children’s movies. This obviously leads Room for the Moon to indulge its most whimsical impulses. It’s a fairytale rendered in snappy Talking Heads-esque bass, proggy synths, and reverbed drum machines.

The opener “Not Not Not” is almost goofy, its chaotic melodies constantly dancing around each other in a perpetually disorienting way. It lurches forward asymetrically, grooving like a flat tire. The instrumental “Da Na” follows, drawing on a familiar yet slightly uncanny palette of sounds. The clarinet (?) drifts in and out of dissonance as if drunk. The tuned percussion elements flit around what might be a kenari seed shell shaker or someone running their fingers over the tines of a comb. It’s truly impossible to tell, and both seem as likely as the other.

“Sayonara (Full Moon Version)” is the fantastical daydream counterpart to Oingo Boingo’s nightmare new wave theatrics. The least strange track on the record is probably “Plans,” which fully embraces 80s dance pop aesthetics. But even that song finds room for a minute-long instrumental passage featuring a bleating, almost atonal saxophone solo.

While the sounds are strange, uneasy, and almost queasy at times, the songs are light and fantastical. Despite not understanding the lyrics, which are mostly in Russian, it’s impossible not to get a sense of hope from them. Kate NV’s Room for the Moon is not a somber lunar lullaby, but the pleasant dreams of an innocent mind.

#Room #Moon #thrillingly #weird #experimental #popColumn,Entertainment,Music,Music Review">Room for the Moon is thrillingly weird experimental pop

For obvious reasons, I’ve had Moon on the mind all week. So I was trying to figure out what I should recommend this week that would thematically fit. Brian Eno’s Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks is incredible, and if you haven’t listened to it, go do that now. But it also seemed a bit on the nose. Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool also came to mind. But it also felt a bit obvious. Then I remembered Kate NV’s Room for the Moon, a record I had on repeat in 2020.

Russian artist Kate Shilonosova chases ideas across 11 tracks inspired by Russian and Japanese pop from the ‘70s and ‘80s, as well as children’s movies. This obviously leads Room for the Moon to indulge its most whimsical impulses. It’s a fairytale rendered in snappy Talking Heads-esque bass, proggy synths, and reverbed drum machines.

The opener “Not Not Not” is almost goofy, its chaotic melodies constantly dancing around each other in a perpetually disorienting way. It lurches forward asymetrically, grooving like a flat tire. The instrumental “Da Na” follows, drawing on a familiar yet slightly uncanny palette of sounds. The clarinet (?) drifts in and out of dissonance as if drunk. The tuned percussion elements flit around what might be a kenari seed shell shaker or someone running their fingers over the tines of a comb. It’s truly impossible to tell, and both seem as likely as the other.

“Sayonara (Full Moon Version)” is the fantastical daydream counterpart to Oingo Boingo’s nightmare new wave theatrics. The least strange track on the record is probably “Plans,” which fully embraces 80s dance pop aesthetics. But even that song finds room for a minute-long instrumental passage featuring a bleating, almost atonal saxophone solo.

While the sounds are strange, uneasy, and almost queasy at times, the songs are light and fantastical. Despite not understanding the lyrics, which are mostly in Russian, it’s impossible not to get a sense of hope from them. Kate NV’s Room for the Moon is not a somber lunar lullaby, but the pleasant dreams of an innocent mind.

#Room #Moon #thrillingly #weird #experimental #popColumn,Entertainment,Music,Music Review

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