Xbox, Ubisoft, and GameSpot Layoffs - Kinda Funny Games Daily 07.10.26

0:00Nick Scarpino:It's Kind of Funny's Patreon Pledge Month. Support us at patreon.com slash kind of funny. We really appreciate it. Today, in the nerdy news you need to know about, layoffs at Ubisoft, layoffs at GameSpot, and the fallout of Xbox layoffs continues. We'll have all this and more because this is Kind of Funny Games Daily.

0:26I swear we'll have happy news one day. It'll come back, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Kind of Funny Games Daily for Friday, July 10th, 2026. I'm one of your hosts, Greg Miller, alongside GameSpots, Tamar Hussain. Hello, it's me. That's funny how the booking works out sometimes. Tam, how are you? I'm doing as well as can be expected. I'm very, very happy and excited to be at the Kind of Funny Studios among friends. Yeah. Enjoying the vibe here, which is a nice thing. The dishwasher repairman. The dishwasher repairman is putting in work there. He came and was like, I got this, lads. I'll fix this in moments.

1:04Yeah. But yeah, otherwise, you know, the horrors persist. They do persist. Tam, everyone knows you from GameSpot. You've been there forever. We're going to talk about GameSpot later on in the show, of course. and said, tell me about Just Us, a Golden State Warriors podcast. I missed when you launched this. I'm not on social media like I used to be other than Instagram. And so I had run into it months ago now. I was like, wait, Tammy Shazza doing a podcast about the Warriors? Yeah, so my wife is a born and raised Bay Area native. And for as long as she has existed, she's been a fan of the Golden State Warriors.

1:41the basketball team used to be in Oakland, but now they're in San Francisco. And when I was growing up, I loved basketball, but I lived in a football nation, soccer nation, cricket nation. So I was the one kid shooting the ball into a hoop, double ringed hoop on my own in England. And I just, it didn't really stick because I didn't really have the culture around me. I always enjoyed basketball from a distance and it kind of tied into my ambition to work at GameSpot because the local team, Golden State, they abbreviate to GSW, GameSpot would abbreviate to GS. And it was like, I ultimately originally wanted to be at GameSpot and the Golden State Warriors part of it.

2:22Oh, they have a good basketball team that I like as well. So like in manifesting, I had like decided early on I would support that team as well to try and, you know, build my way there, build the energy to get there. And it happened. And the first year I moved over i think they won a championship but i hadn't you're the good luck yeah i hadn't i hadn't met my wife until then and then a few years later i met my wife the year we met i believe we also won a championship but by that point we were in i was in deep she's a season ticket holder so and i'm a leech so yeah i was gonna say now you made out like i made out like a damn bandit on date one you're like i'm sorry say that again season tickets you say marriage now and she's like what do you have and i was like uh video games i was gonna say let me tell you about my extensive collection of video games yeah but yeah so after that she always wanted to be a sports broadcaster and analyst she was also responsible and went into something completely different that is financially viable and as adult thing and i always felt like she had a good knack for doing that kind of thing she's got a like a voice for presenting and like an analytical approach for it and i was like it's a real shame that she didn't get to live that out then it was like i had the ability to create a platform yeah that can make her feel like she's getting some of that yeah and it was like i love basketball love talking about basketball so we created a a podcast uh called just us a golden state warriors podcast there it is there's my beloved wife in our old apartment that was all that was all her knickknacks i was gonna say yeah you contribute nothing to this i i contribute a few of those things yeah some of those signed balls um that is an anthropology cabinet so it's a very high-end expensive cabinet and i remember the first time seeing it i looked inside and i was like she's got funko pops in here i'm safe that's when you dropped and then she was like you keep all your shit somewhere else you keep all that metal gear stuff in the other room exactly um but yeah now now we uh we put that together and the first season last season was like kind of the trial of it yeah and um we learned a lot of things We learned not to do a game recap after every game because that's 83 games and you're doing four of those a week.

4:33And it was a difficult time. But we are going to come back next season once the season starts again. And the idea of it, sorry to ramble on about it. I asked you the question. The idea of it is like we love the sport. I hate sport commentary. You watch ESPN and everyone's mad. Everyone's got an annoying viewpoint. Everyone's there to be a character. and I didn't feel like we had the ability to enter that world. So what we plan to do is like look at the Golden State Warriors through the lens of San Francisco as a culture. And that means going to small businesses, talking to them about their business, but also exploring how their business and their lives intersect with sports.

5:14And you can't be in San Francisco without somehow colliding with basketball. It's one of the big sports as well as baseball. so we're going to be doing a lot of that there's loads of restaurants that i've opened that have hosted like warrior stuff and we're trying to worm our way into the press pool so if anyone's watching that has an in at the warriors for the press hit me up okay i'm a shill as you can see basically my entire wardrobe is warriors now but yeah it's an exciting time um i'm glad she she enjoys it she's getting a little taste of like a little bit of that recognition now where some people were like oh yeah i was wondering so is it catching on with the audience i mean i know it's yeah yeah it is we have a nice group of people who watch it uh it's mainly my family and her family but um it's really you think it's bad like you think games is oversaturated yeah let me tell you about the sports world everyone has a podcast and everyone is screaming at the top of their voice so it's very difficult to make any headway um but it's a nut we're gonna keep like hitting at i love that i love that yeah yeah worst case scenario we tried it for a few years we spent a bit of money and it's yeah it's over yeah exactly um but we're gonna get there hopefully we've started to like line up some potential interviews and that kind of stuff we're gonna be exploring like talking to friends and i like andy's here mike's there yeah you guys like talking about of stuff as well so we'll probably start collaborating so yeah go on state warriors podcast just us i love that let me know we'll talk off air because like when i tried to get indy into the spurs finals games it was really hard but i got escalated all the way to the top of nba media creators that's where i was talking to them and so like afterwards i was like well now and if we ever want to get into the chase that should be easy yeah i've been trying for so long and i've we've got friends who work in various sports fields that also have a pretty pretty like in-depth yeah kind of like love of Golden State Warriors as well there's people who I know we know at Ubisoft and we've all collectively tried to be like what can we get can we like get in it's been tricky but it's fun yeah it's fun but I like that just us a Golden State Warriors podcast for sure I think that's pretty much the last good news you'll hear on this show remember of course if you're watching live you can be part of the show by super chatting on youtube.com slash kinda funny games just like science dog official did who said hell yeah Tam.

7:33Nicholas says shout out to Tamora in his awesome hat. And then Dexter says love you Tam. You need to do a games cast with bless and discuss your love of fighting games and how to get into how to get into them. Oh yeah. We should do that. Yeah. Easy peasy. I'm always looking for you're on games cast today talking to me. Oh yeah. Pragmata and talking to Mike and Andy about it as well. But I also want to know what else is your game of the year. But that's the next show. Instead we're jumping into this show and we couldn't do this show without our producers on patreon.com slash kind of funny. So thank you Carl Jacobs Omega Buster Delaney the Psalm Twining and lax nomad for now let's begin the show with what is and forever will be the roper report i i know i did it yesterday it's another dour day it's not like it feels like another inappropriate day so i'm just gonna say a baker's dozen thank you six items on the roper report uh let's start with ubisoft number one assassin's creed dev celebrate black flag remake launch with layoffs this is ethan over kataku assassin's creed black flag re-synced is out today and is already having one of the best Steam launches in the franchise's history.

8:33Unfortunately, the celebrations are bittersweet for developers who worked on the game at Ubisoft Barcelona. The studio's team there is facing layoffs at the end of the month after not being assigned to a new project. Quote, After seven years at Ubisoft Barcelona, this is not how I imagined it would end, wrote QA lead Isabella Codina Garcia on LinkedIn. Quote, But I am genuinely grateful for the people I have met and everything I have learned along the way. End quote. Layoffs are part of the ongoing cuts at Ubisoft as it restructures amid delays of big games and weak sales of recent blockbusters.

9:08They were initiated back in June alongside the closing of Ubisoft Winnipeg and layoffs across Ubisoft's global publishing division. The Spain Union, La Confederation General del Trabejo, later called the strikes over the planned termination of 51 employees at Ubisoft Barcelona. Oh, called for a strike over them. So trying to nail all the other words. I missed the English words. Classic Greg. The labor group was calling for better job protections and the return of work from home options alongside other workspace improvements. Nearly a third of Barcelona's office is set to be gone by the end of July.

9:44Quote, Assassin's Creed Black Flag Re-Synced releases today. The project I have been working on for the past 2.5 years, Isabel wrote. However, two weeks before launch, the whole AC team at Ubisoft Barcelona was informed a collective redundancy plan of a collective redundancy. Vantage Studios has stated there will not be further mandates for the Barcelona studio, despite the team proposing new Assassin's Creed projects. End quote. Well, then we're into more quotes.

10:41Quote, In other words, a pizza party. The game itself, meanwhile, is already the best reviewed one in the series in over a decade and seems poised to be a big seller for Ubisoft in an otherwise anemic year for new releases from the French publisher. The horrors never end, like I said. Make a bad game, lay off. Make a good game, lay off. Yeah, I literally post. Make money, lay off. Make no money, lay off. I, not to promote myself again, but like I post videos on my YouTube channel. The one I posted yesterday was kind of like a, an outpouring of frustration at the state of the industry. And one of the exact lines I said was, make a good game, you get laid off.

11:28Make a bad game, you get laid off. Make an okay game, you get laid off. Make a game that hits every metric in terms of like, we need to hit these milestones or these touch points to give this game the best chance at monetization you do that laid off like there's there's no it's just from the outside looking in how do you ensure that there's always a fresh crop of talent coming towards the industry and that's one thing that really concerns me it is reckless for anyone to recommend being in video games right now for a lot of people sure and i know i'm never going to tell people don't do it of course but like these days you look at the landscape and you're like how do we not put people off but also not lie to them about what's going to happen when they get here and it's just a conundrum that i think a lot of developers i know have spoken to face and it's i think long term it's one part of the uh kind of slow demise that we're kind of not paying attention to that i think at some point people are going to turn around and be like oh we weren't looking at this element where everything that happened not only were people laid off but we were kind of signaling to new generations of developers and designers not to come near us yeah and now we might be in a good place we might be in a still a terrible place but we have no talent everyone's gone yeah and that's such a worrying thing right now and this is just like one of those situations where it's like you said you do the right thing it seems like you make a good game it's popular you're laid off to tug on your thread a lot because it is one i don't think we talk about but i've definitely thought about here is this idea that the people we're seeing churned and burned laid off at all these places usually as we're talking about are these people who are coming in and they come out they get paid nothing they get to come in and work on this game for a little bit and then they're laid off they get no institutional knowledge they don't get to gel as a team and i know for the record i could argue myself like oh just remember we're We're talking about Xbox this week and people who've been there 20 years are getting laid off.

13:30But I think for the general consensus, we're talking about that. Right. And what I think is fascinating about it, you're talking about, you know, these people. We're going to look back as an industry and go, oh, shit, there's no one here to actually make the next great thing. Yeah. I think that's true to a degree. And of course, the chilling effect of people in school being like, I don't want to be a part of this industry. But it's more terrifying, I would think, for your PlayStations and Xboxes and Ubisofts and any of the big companies. because it really does feel, and I know there are exceptions to the rule, and I know there's great work being done, and I can list a number of great studios, but it really does feel like you are not allowed to come to those kind of places and experiment and create the next great franchise, the next great game.

14:10It exists in the same franchise, but you're getting no room to go out and make something cool. So eventually all it is, I feel, is going to be in a lot of these scenarios, hey, go and remake Black Flag. Okay, I did that. that game was already a blueprint we went and did it people still like it hurrah all right cool you don't know how to make your own narrative you don't have to go make your own thing we're gonna of course come back in a little bit and talk about we're going into the xbox fucking gauntlet of stories here in a second and we'll get back to id where we're talking about hey id go revitalize doom we need to your point of the million different things you can do and still be successful and still fail go revitalize doom okay we did that it's great cool people love it that's awesome we've re-invitalized the brand cool we need it for game pass people you got it all right cool we got game pass isn't doing as well your game didn't sell well you didn't tell us to fucking do that yeah yeah it is there's so much of the industry now where it's you're set up to fail and it is like i said it feels like it's an impossibility where like you said that's a great point where people who are coming to studios like these they're not even getting a good grasp of like skills and experience that they then can use to come up with the next new thing right either at that studio or on their own they kind of come in they do a lot of grunt work they leave and it kind of like is you're still at the same point it's a real real horrible way to exist we don't live in a world where there used to be a little balance where it was like yeah you'd make the thing that is kind of like the obvious thing once you did that you then go away and do this weird stupid thing and then you come back and either that weird stupid thing can be like grown into something new or you know you get that out of your system you come back you learn some new experiences and you put it back into the next entry in a major you know ip or something like that in the twitch chat uh deus morte says ubisoft is not who i think of for creativity I know and that's heartbreaking Assassin's Creed The Division Valiant Hearts I mean everything they've done with Rayman you used to look at Ubisoft and be like wow you are a big publisher and not as big as you are now but you're making cool shit you're experimenting with it they used to make a game I think it was them where you were a robot climbing up stuff was it Grow Home or something like that Grow Up and then there's the sequel something like that That is a, if you told someone who has never experienced Ubisoft before the last five years, they'd be like, that sounds crazy.

16:46That's not what they do. But that was what they used to do. They had Valiant Hearts, was it called? The war game. The arts game, yeah. Yeah. And even like. Child of Light. Child of Light. Even like, and they still have it, but like some of the stuff around music games, they tried like Rocksmith. Yeah. Yeah. A very like mainstream play, but like it was something that they would never think to do in this day and age. And you called out too, you make the weird thing. I know I've said it so many times, especially in the past three months, but Peter Moore on our kind of funny stage in 2015, literally going, FIFA makes the money.

17:20That's why we can turn around and make Unravel. We can finance. It doesn't need to make money. And the issue is we're not at a stage where, I said this in my video, where the metrics or the revenue targets that need to be hit are reasonable anymore. They're so unreasonable that the only thing that you can do is put the full force of your entire workforce and every person who's got a creative fiber in their being towards hitting that target. and the only way you can do that is by relying on nostalgia retreading old ground following trends and only using the most well-known big ips anything outside of that even just for a a few quarters is gonna completely throw you off and you just will not hit the infinite growth which you're never gonna hit anyway and that's the thing is like the chasing the tent poles we're only doing that leads to failure as well yes like you if we're in a creative field of making art and like if you're going to sit there and you're going to shove every one of the xbox franchises down our throat everyone you know assassin's creed classically of like when are you going to stop annualizing assassin's creed when you stop buying it people stopped buying it they stopped doing it

18:29Nick Scarpino:they came back with origins and it was like holy shit assassin's creed's revitalized i want more of this and then they ran that into the ground and now they're like ah fuck throw back black flag do this yeah it's it's such a weird space that i i struggle to see a way out these days and maybe it's because i'm just in a dark place right now i i mean i've said it before and i'll say it again just through the people who are not here every day like the way out is through and sadly that is going to lead to a lot more closures a lot more sell-offs a lot more as we get rid of the fat and we get you have to get this back you have to get these companies either as sad as it said bankrupted and out of business or get them back into the hands of shareholders slash ceos and boards that go cool we understand how much money we can possibly make here and we're okay with that we're not looking for infinite growth we're looking for really cool shit that is a double digit maybe a 10 return on investment to be remember when people used to be like this is going to be the next call of duty we don't even get that anymore like even if it's a complete lie and it's bullshit and you know it's not coming like no one there's no home from always we've all left our yeah we're at we were at infinity ward and we were at ea and now we're gonna make Now we're going to get a quadruple A game.

19:38You know what I mean? It's unbelievable. It is. We're in a quagmire and it's rough right now. Speaking of a quagmire, Xbox is having quite the decade. I have a rock block of Xbox stories spiraling out of the layoffs. But before we get to that, I'm going to go to the ads early so we can just get them all together, okay? Because if you didn't know, this is kind of funny games daily. Each and every weekday, we run you through the nerdy news you need to know about live on Twitch, YouTube, podcast services around the globe. If you love what we do, all the live talk shows we do each and every weekday, head on over to patreon.com slash kind of funny, youtube.com slash kind of funny games, Apple, and Spotify.

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23:00No way, really? I was like, I can't go back to kind of funny after being away for so long, looking like I've been asleep outside the studio for six months waiting to be invited in. We're back with a rock block of Xbox stories for you. Of course, all piggybacking off the fact that, you know, they're going to eliminate 3 ,200 jobs this fiscal year. that's a lot of jobs story number two comes from Andy Robinson at VGC.news Xbox CEO Asha Sharma named as advisor to US Federal Reserve on jobs and productivity

23:38Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has been named as an advisor to the US Federal Reserve for productivity and jobs the Federal Reserve is the central banking system of the United States On Thursday, it announced the leadership and objectives of the five task forces established to, quote, advance the conduct of monetary policy. Notably, Sharma was named one of the three advisors on the Productivity and Jobs Task Force, which the Federal Reserve says will be assessing, among other things, the impact of AI. According to a news release, the task force will look at, quote, the economic impact of new general purpose technologies, including artificial intelligence, to inform the Federal Reserve's policy judgments, end quote.

24:20Supported by Federal Reserve staff, the task forces, because there's three of them, will operate independently with, quote, a mandate to follow the evidence, provide candid feedback, and produce rigorous findings for the Federal Open Market Committee. It's unclear how the appointments were made. Sharma is the only active CEO named on the five task forces. However, the former CEO of Walmart, Doug McMillan, will advise on data. Sharma's appointment comes the same week. She has enacted sweeping layoffs across the Xbox business, initially impacting 1 ,600 jobs and stretching to 3 ,200 by the end of Microsoft's business year.

24:56Prior to becoming Xbox CEO earlier this year, Sharma served as president of Microsoft's Core AI product. She also worked at Facebook as VP product in engineering for its Messenger and Instagram Direct products. Quote, the Federal Reserve's commitment to price stability and maximum employment is unwavering, as is our resolve to pursue our mandate with rigor, said Chairman Kevin Warsh. Quote, the U.S. economy has changed significantly over the last generation, and never more so than right now. each task force will carefully consider whether policymakers means and methods analytical tools and policy approaches can be approved upon i am honored that the best minds from a range of disciplines have agreed to work with us to sharpen our performance as an institution the goal is straightforward to ensure the fed is best positioned to achieve our objectives in this consequential time damn what are you talking about it's like it's this is such take Asha out of it and just the word salad on this for a broken government that we have that doesn't care about the people like it's already word salad and nonsense yeah but then it's fact advisor on jobs and productivity the week you announced 3200 layoffs crushing your productivity you it's It's like if, hey, Greg, you just ate more chicken wings than anybody in the entire world.

26:29Here's your trophy. Thank you. Also, I'm being named to the board for the protection of chickens. What are we talking about? The president of veganism is here, everyone. Here it is. PETA's new spokesperson. What the fuck are we doing? There's a weird kind of, it's, the thing that is, like, obviously now, everything weird that happens i feel like is an audition for that person to do something way worse later on like this is what it now feels like for what has happened with microsoft and asha sharma she comes in she's from the ai world we're like okay we'll give her a chance like some of us are anyway like the unhinged people are being of course yeah yeah but there's no exclusives yeah come on she comes in she starts saying the right things and i could see that like that the temperature around her start to change even in discussing with people within various parts of the industry people being like oh it seems like she's saying the right things people are excited and i just had this like uncomfortable feeling where i was like i don't know this this feels like it's too good to be true and then you know the other shoe drops and you have moments like this where it now looks like everything that has been happening up until that point was an audition to get this because this is a significant appointment right like this is huge like this could potentially this she's in the government now right an advisor to a degree yeah okay okay an advisor right but you're in the you're in you have the ears of people who have the ability to make changes and manipulations that could have knock-on effects yeah i don't know the u.s government inside out but i feel like someone in the position that she's now in could you want political influence political partners yeah and when you're also like in a company that could stand to benefit from some of that what does that mean yeah there's no real checks and balances anymore no they're never and there are situations now where this is the kind of this reads like it's positive right like we've got one of our own in there that's not how it works anymore like that's what you do to get in and then then that's where you can do the real self-serving evil evil thing The thing I think about is right now in the government, I believe they just passed the Children's Online Safety Act, COSA it's called.

28:48You read that act, it looks no parent would disagree with it. They'll be like, we need this for our kids. You look at who's behind it. Look at who's funding it. It's Zuckerberg. It's Meta. It's a bunch of companies that are funding the whole push behind it. They're getting like celebrities behind it. They had what's-his-face from Batman, played Robin. Chris O'Donnell. No, the new one. Oh, Joseph Gordon-Levitt. He's there, like, talking about how important it is. Clearly, obviously lying to everyone, right? You get that now. You have the ability to present something that feels positive, looks positive, is in the background, unless you really check and pay attention.

29:32Yeah, of course. It's just designed to get all the information it can from your kids, you and control what they can say like that's the kind of world we live in now so you read something like this and you're like oh was this what the actual play was was this the thing that you actually wanted when you came along and like prove that you're willing to make drastic changes to get things done and then you end up and you read this and you're like what what what is the real end game here we're not sure yet but i feel like it's going to be really betraying people yeah that seems to be what the government and the oligarchy continue to do uh shout out in a reminder if you didn't see this going around instagram yesterday i'm not sure if it actually went live yesterday but it's when it broke out it felt like a containment and i went and did it you have to go in your instagram settings now and turn off the the approval you didn't give them but they're just letting you get put into that you can they anyone can use you for ai if you don't check these inboxes off fucking insane it's crazy and that's where right now where the the level of like evil now that can be done or positioning ask off evil yeah it's it's just comic like again i go back to my video that i posted yesterday and it was just a tirade of fury because of that mask off evil like the point i made is how does a normal human being that's well adjusted put out a memo that says 3 000 plus of you will not have a job and in the same breath say we want to hit 1 billion daily users like back to back how do you say that in the same breath there's no reason to hide it anymore like you could just be that is that was there for shareholders but they couldn't even separate it out and be like let's at least try to act human and humane and think like we care about this but it's not it's like all these people are losing the jobs we are gonna get one billion you know daily users so everyone here get ready to piss in balls because that's the work conditions that we're going to be putting you under to get us to this unattainable goal that we know we're never going to achieve it's fully mask off and this is just another example of it like to your point i mean especially the billion users and the layoffs all the same conversation right obviously as always we're trying to get the shareholders super excited to keep the stock up to make it look like we're making number go up there's that's wrapped up in this too right where it's like you're asking if this was the plan all along i mean in terms of the timing and the thing and the whatever doubtful sati and adela wanting microsoft people installed in the government so that the it reminds me so much of like before the second trump administration the way all tech was very much like oh no no we're putting our symbols to be pride flags and we're all about this yeah yeah and then fucking trump gets in there and fucking tim cook's giving him some fucking crystal apple in the oval office like get fucked yep yep it's tech tech is completely tech is the driving force behind a lot of what is happening right now because the products they make the technology they pioneer are is what is used to create this essential surveillance state around us right like they are benefiting from this they are benefiting from the ai part of it they won't be here to reap the the kind of consequences because they'll you know they'll be done they'll have their money they're off somewhere else there's like you can do research it's not even conspiracy like there's open discussions from these tech giants about creating their own little islands where they can live completely unregulated happily they have the money to do it there yep take a lot of planes there show up on a lot of lists yeah they get all get redacted yeah yeah you can like and this is not me being like i'm prison planet.com you know that kind of like like i'm not in that vibe right now i'm just saying like they are it's mask off they are putting out reports and detailed breakdowns of how they're going to do it why they're going to do it and how only they will benefit while the rest of rest of us will get die in the heat death of the sun or whatever yeah and all at the same time they're they're building ai powered drones to constantly survey uh survey us which you know has been going on in san francisco for you know a few years uh yeah and so i i think uh you know pay attention to what happens it happens to san francisco in the next couple years because i do very much think that we are testing ground for how they control a lot of people the mayor here what's his name daniel lorry let's go san francisco that dude if i see him on the streets on site yeah i'm coming for you i don't care i'll give up my visa and i'll take one for this city man and his mom fucking bought his way into uh power crazy uh you know is now a mouthpiece for all the tech billionaires here yeah it's super cool to bring it back to Sharma, just a reminder, you know, she's really worried about birth rates and says AI will save us.

34:14To bring it back to this specific story, Greg, about like her being a part of the U.S. government and how silly it is that she's an advisor to jobs and productivity, but that it's always going to come back to this, you know, it's, we got to take the human out of it and the productivity will be AI and that'll save us. So that's why she's going to be an advisor. And that's going to be her, I believe her aspect behind being an advisor is like, oh, jobs, we can cut those, but still be productive as a society with, you know, AI and robots. And you know what? This is not going to be an indictment on anyone else.

34:48I just want to say, like, I think people in this industry, both people who are like on the media side and also people who are like just consumers, people who love the kind of the pastime, the art form, like we need to be less warm to execs. Like it is something that I think very naturally as people who just want to be nice people, we we treat people like personable. like and but i think that time has to end now like we need to be way more severe to people like her not because i'm saying she's shitty or i want to be mad at her but like we have created an environment where they can just be like hey look i'm playing the games and everyone goes oh okay we'll let our guard down this person clearly cares oh they made a xbox that's green like the other one like i feel like i feel like we are people are so easily manipulated these days and i'm like i said in my video i'm talking to myself as well sure like i have had been in situations that now retrospectively now that i see what's happening i'm like i should have been way more knife to throw at you with like my discussion around this i was way too reasonable and i think by having a lot of like those kind of conversations we allow certain things to slip by and i think that has kind of spread out into the audience where it's easy to be for these like execs to win people over and that shouldn't be the case like anymore it should be a layer of skepticism and cynicism around them that i think it needs to be reinforced like she shouldn't have been able to say all that stuff get into this position and then start like posting like i'm playing the games i've got a xbox live arcade or i've got an xbox game attack now look at me i'm one of you we got she got through that phase real quick and like the cynicism the skepticism around her largely felt like it died down.

36:40And now we're in a situation where we're like, oh, I feel like we got done dirty. Well, see, here's my, my problem with that argument is that I don't think it was, she's one of us. Great. I think it was just, and I'm not insulting anybody. I'm not insulting any capital G gamers out there or anything, but it was the jingling keys of, oh, she's saying the right thing. She's giving excuses. But it was like, we had been saying there's clips of us when she got, oh, this means layoffs. This means that blah, blah, blah. And again, to get here where it was like, If Phil Spencer, who was the gamer guy that you either loved or hated or whatever, he laid out a very specific pro gamer, pro Xbox.

37:19We're bringing in these people to make great games. And when he got bounced and Sarah fucking quit in a day, like that was your, Hey, everybody, it's the party's over. So the fact that you, so many people, capital G needed it spelled out of Sati and Adele to be like, yo, this shit needs to be sustainable. The fact that anybody thought Asha Sharma or any CEO slash president is going to be installed and not be like massive layoffs are coming. Like now for me, the big thing of, I mean, like, let's just take all the people out of it. Xbox is cooked. Period. Xbox will never be the Xbox you have fond memories of.

37:58Again, Xbox is being driven by Microsoft to make as fucking much money as possible. So no, like I don't hold out hope that Elder Scrolls 6 will be the one that saves it all Obsidian's making a fallout that is exciting and then you go they just laid off a whole bunch of fucking people and I know that they're everybody working right now has a gun to their head 1600 more of you will be gone in a year fucking make us money like that's all and so it's like I'm not saying this is now everybody sucks and the games are all gonna be but it is you're working under less than ideal correct conditions trying to make fun art and i think we go back to the conversation we had a little a second ago of like what do we even fucking talk about anymore when you say oh but it's a bioware game and i know they're not i'm i'm using bioware i'm going somewhere for example that's not like oh it's bioware right and you look at fucking veil guard a game that me and andy really love despite flaws and the fact that that was supposed to be this multiplayer whatever and then they fucking had to salvage and go and it's like that was never the vision of Bioware for what that game should be and then you step back like well who from the old days of Dragon Age in Mass Effect were there to still do that we're talking about and this sounds way worse but stick with me for the argument we are talking about brands and studio identities that are hermit crab shells I was going to say carcasses, but this is better.

39:28Hermit crab shells were the people who made that shell so fucking cool leave. New people come in and hopefully they can run with it. But usually in that transition of power, fucking parasites. I'm really getting negative and I don't mean to be that negative. But I mean, suits get in there and they fucking change what this is on a fucking DNA level. I thought about this the other day. Do you remember when CEOs of the company were the people who came up with the idea that put the company on the map? yes like john romero for example the people the doctors at bioware for example like oh my god like those were the people who are in that position because they had the vision to come up with something brand new or execute on something now the people who are in charge of those studios those visions aren't the people who have the means of production for me we're gonna we're getting into marxist theory now okay so welcome um like welcome fellow pinkos kind of funny commune i just got i just got my uh copy from the library the other day let's go uh that's why they put an end to that library real soon the means of production these days is an experience talent vision uh any sort of desire to build identity an understanding of design anything like that the means of production is capital entirely if you want to get something made you need to find the person with money to accept it not the person who's got the idea that's good enough to put you in a position where you can make that.

40:56And in a world where capital is the only means of production, those are going to be the people who make all the decisions and none of those decisions are going to be for the greater good of the product or the medium that it's within. Unfortunately, that's where we're at. Those people are no longer connected to the things that are being made, which is why we're in situations where the executives at these companies are just randos. like i worked at 200 people yeah i worked at uh kfc now i'm the head of i don't know bioware for example it's like what the how did you get here like yeah where's you know where are the new the next generation of the doctors for example yeah you know you have a this is a great segue to story number three still in the xbox wheelhouse john karmack responds to the id layoffs and i add poorly we're going to read from wyp at ign john karmack has responded to the significant layoffs at Doom developer id Software, expressing sadness but not, quote, anger or outrage, end quote.

41:55Carmack, who co-founded id Software in 1991 alongside John Romero, Tom Hall, and Adrian Carmack, took to social media to express his belief that the company was a, quote, marginal business for Microsoft and that he couldn't see an obvious way for it to make more money from its games. Here's a statement in full. I've been trying to find something meaningful to say about the id Software layoffs. My, quote, quote, Microsoft will probably be a good steward of the brand, end quote, statement isn't aging well, and this is certainly going to dampen the mood of the founder reunion at QuakeCon next month.

42:27I'm saddened, but I can't muster anger or outrage over it. I don't have access to the books, but I suspect that id Software was a marginal business from Microsoft's perspective. I believe the reports that Minecraft revenues have been carrying several other studios. To continue being produced long-term, games need to succeed, not just be beloved. Games are competing with every other option for spending your leisure time and money, and the competition is brutal. You can't rule out the possibility that executives are idiots, but that shouldn't be your default belief. I don't think there is any obvious path that would have doubled the revenue from id games.