I'm John Ford. You're listening to CNVC's Tech Check. Our show is live weekdays at 11 a.m. Eastern. Listen in.

Good Thursday morning. Welcome to Tech Check. I'm Carl Kintania with John Ford and Dear Durbosa. A big day today. Why GameStop has an obsession with Amazon, plus some news from Microsoft that Ryan Cohen is not going to like.

Then if you can take the heat, get out of the app store.

Creators feeling the pressure from Tim Cook and are fighting back. And then later, put a sock in it.

Bill Ackman makes a pitch to retail investors, D.

He does indeed. Also ahead this hour, PayPal Mafia member Max Levchin, as his company Affirm announces

a partnership with Spotify this morning.

Plus, the tech stocks to watch this AM as the street makes calls on Clover Health, Zoom,

Fastly, Service Now, and to more, John.

Yeah, but first, some news out of Microsoft that can only be bad for GameStop announcing Xbox is actively working with TV manufacturers

to embed a cloud-based gaming experience into smart televisions with no additional hardware needed to play outside of a controller.

Basically a Netflix for gaming and a development that could push gaming business beyond the console. And that could

make GameStop in particular, despite its relatively strong earnings last night, look more and more

like Blockbuster Video, as Ryan Cohen and company continue to rely on sales of hardware, either in-store

or online, not software, to supply growth.

Carl, what we've increasingly seen happen is whether you're talking about Microsoft

or Amazon or, I mean, down the line, Google, others, moving to this streaming model

for gaming, trying to bring it to the cloud, that cuts out the middleman. I mean, look at

unity, look at what we've seen Tim Sweeney doing, also with Epic. I mean, all of this is fitting

into this new gaming economy, which would be bad for GameStop. They get cut out. Yeah. It's true,

and it's part of the reason we've spent part of the morning, Dee, talking about

the streets' reaction to Ryan Cohen's memes, Webb Bush and Baird at least saying, look,

...