#366 | And If Anything, Then There's Your Sign of the Times

12:24Colin Moriarty:no way man like well you gotta learn what fireworks you can fuck around with and which ones you can't you know like any kind of firecracker no yeah i am not fucking around with those at all brandon will like light them in his hand and then throw them uh i'm not doing that like no no way with anything that explodes a little fountain you know a little thing that it's you know it's it's bootleg firework shit it just kind of shoots out sparks you're fine uh with that it's not going explode blow off your hand it could severely burn you of course but you know so you just got to learn

13:02Dustin Furman:the way of the road yeah it's not attractive to me my micah's dad loves fireworks too and it's just like man what is this like 1750 like i don't i can imagine how spectacular that was

13:18Colin Moriarty:back in the day right yeah it's like a caveman showing a caveman right firework would it would be it would be truly mesmerizing right like during a thunderstorm that just happened a day or two ago

13:31Dustin Furman:mike and i were watching it through the windows and it was like crazy lightning and i was like this makes perfect sense why everyone was like oh my god like what the fuck is happening you know what what is happening and a firework would be a very similar thing it's like a comet coming through the sky or something like an omen um so i'm sure it was very very impressive just like we've talked about before like parades i guess that would be fun at some point if you never saw anyone never did anything and never left your house like within 10 miles of your where you were born then i think a parade would be very fun but these days like parades like what are we doing yeah we're having parades we're shooting off fireworks like you gotta let go.

14:13Colin Moriarty:Everyone go on their phone. You got to let go. It's crazy. You got to let go of the concept of parades. Let it go. It's over. It's over.

14:24Dustin Furman:It's over.

14:28Dustin Furman:All right. Well, welcome to Sacred Symbols, a PlayStation podcast. It's good to be here with you guys today. It's good to be here with the audience as well. Hope you guys are doing well out there as well. Remember, you can get our show three days early and ad free on patreon.com slash last stand media patreon.com slash last stand media early ad free access to the show and all the other shows we do on our network we have an xbox show that mr maddie plays and lord cognito do we have a nintendo podcast led by bradley ellis we have a gameplay podcast also led by brad and so on and so forth so lots of different perks over there five dollars is the sweet spot where most of you subscribe and we couldn't do without you you can also submit your inquiries to the show we'll hear you from plenty of you this episode lots of inquiries this episode access to our discord if you want that level of chicanery rss feeds for all the podcasts so that's nice if you don't want to use patreon you can just feed it right into your apple podcast app or whatever app you use and spotify as well and more sacred symbols plus as well a weekly supplemental podcast to this podcast sacred symbols where we dive deeper conduct interviews and do the rest james solar our friend james solar wrote in on patreon just like you can and said i enjoy collins autism we need more numbers and more data deep dives not really i love the show and the cast the way it is well whether you want it or not you're getting it because uh what i just recorded um yesterday was a really great episode that will go live the day after our episode that you're listening to now goes live with reese elliott from alinea analytics and you've probably heard of alinea over the last year or so maybe a little bit more we've cited them many times they are a new firm and the numbers for instance, of the Xbox games on PlayStation come from Alinea.

16:04Dustin Furman:And we get into their strategies and how they figure out the numbers. And we get into some numbers too, including a lot of exclusive stuff. Guys, did you know that Forza Horizon 5 on PlayStation 5 has sold a comparable amount of copies as Astro Bot on PlayStation 5? Wow. No, wow. No. And that Microsoft, if not for the cut, that Sony would get from those Forza sales would have actually grossed more money on Forza Horizon 5 coming to PlayStation 5. Four-year-old game. Fascinating stuff. I think you guys are really, really going to like our conversation. We talk a lot about PlayStation's performance on Steam as well and some other stuff and what the future holds for a multi-platform approach with all these different companies.

16:49Dustin Furman:And fairly timely, considering the Helldivers news that broke right before we started recording. And we'll get to that in a little while. So please look forward to that. Also, I will be recording an episode, I believe with Brad and Gene about Death Stranding Director's Cut. I've beaten the game now. I'm still working on the platinum, but I want to just get it all out before I start playing Death Stranding 2 next week. So that will be fun. You can look forward to that as well. And we also have sat down and did our betting special results. We'll keep the answers to ourselves, but there was a winner and there were definitely two losers.

17:26Dustin Furman:So please look forward to that as well. Merch, last stand media dot store. Remember, you can get your copy of Herboxia right now. Liam Fagan wrote in and said, yo, no question, just wanted to shout out the Herboxia special edition. It arrived to me in the UK within a week of placing the order. The attention to detail is incredible. I absolutely love the artwork. I wish I could have bought two. You could buy another one. We've actually, so I think we're still sitting on like 600 of them or something. So we we didn't want scalpers and people to just buy. But if you want to buy an extra one at this point, we're not going to stop you.

17:57Dustin Furman:And I really appreciate everyone coming out and supporting the game. I'm still struggling whether I want to do one or two thousand copies for our next publishing, because even though we didn't sell through all the copies of Abroxia, I think this is the crazy part about buying more copies is that I think we still made more revenue. like because this the the cot 1001 to 2000 those copies are like substantially cheaper to buy so i don't know i'm still struggling on what to do but we'll figure it out because like we have to sit on these games for all but we'll sell them all ultimately and if we're making our money back earlier then it really is just profit regardless so i have to i have a lot to think about with this yeah um i don't know i don't know what to do but in the meantime you quick yeah go ahead please

18:47Colin Moriarty:I was going to say a quick note from Micah. Oh, yes. Yeah. So when you ordered your copy of Abroxia and let's say you're waiting for it on the page, we noted there's a 12 week shipping window just because the sheer volume of copies that Micah is diligently sending out. She's been getting a lot of emails to our merch shop asking about when her order is. She's getting many, many emails.

19:14Dustin Furman:It's driving her insane.

19:14Colin Moriarty:um so just because you're seeing people get their copies now uh you may get yours next week you may get it in unfortunately like five weeks and that's just the nature of our small scale operation so if you're wondering when your order is coming we're still within that 12 week window um so unless it's about maybe you got your copy and something's wrong or you're getting a shipment notification somewhere else please don't email the store asking when your copy will come once are outside of that window and you haven't gotten it, then absolutely. Please email us at that point. But because of the amount of copies and one person shipping them out, it just takes some time.

19:54Colin Moriarty:So please leave Micah alone unless there is an issue outside of that. Right. We didn't have one issue. Please bother Micah.

20:03Dustin Furman:Yeah. We had one issue with one package that was going to Poland. I know that was getting bounced back and forth for some reason. Yeah. Keep it up and maybe you'll never get your package. So it'd be a shame if something happened to it. Yeah. Um, yeah, it's it Mike, it can only do so much, but also because there's a lot of random rules. Like I've even gotten people from the USPS writing and like that, like mailman and stuff written into us kind of seemingly unaware of some of the rules around it. Like as a. We don't have a commercial license with the USPS, so I think we can only ship 50 copies a day, even if we could do more like you're not supposed to be able to drop off like in other words, we drop off like a shit ton of packages, leave them on the desk and they take them.

20:42Dustin Furman:but imagine like a real company just dropping all their shit off to the usbs like at some point you have to like be like no you can't you need like a license and like they come grab things from you and things of that nature so i think that that's also a major reason why we can't like we literally ship 50 a day max um because i don't think they'll accept any more than that so um so yeah your patience is appreciated she's doing a great job toiling away the children mine micah yearns for the mines yeah um clearly yearns for them all right oh i thought this was a fun one as well because on last day media store not only can you buy hubroxy of course but our normal run of t-shirts sweatshirts stickers hats etc christopher wrote in and said i'm thankful somebody else opened the weird fan interaction faucet because i had a story i'm walking down a local target in hartford connecticut hartford uh new england's rising star do you remember those billboards chris in Connecticut.

21:37Dustin Furman:The rising star? Yeah, like everyone would make fun of it because like they were trying to call Hartford New England's rising star for a while. So you'd see like billboards for it. It's like, dude, it's Hartford, Connecticut. Please give me a break. I'm dressed like shit, sweatpants and just my stand down sacred symbols hoodie. As I'm walking around, a man starts staring at me from all the way across the store. I think nothing of it, but keep an eye on the situation with this man. Suddenly his eyes are fixed on me and he's moving faster than one should in a store. My heart is racing. I'm sweating, wondering if I was targeted, being targeted by a murderer.

22:05Dustin Furman:Instead, he kindly points and he says under his breath, sacred symbols, nice and walks past me and leaves before I could react. There was no stand down or anything like that. Just uncomfortable eye contact. And then his approach minutes after I'd spotted him. I'm just writing this to say I would have loved to have a conversation with a fan about the podcast. Instead, I either met a fan or will be murdered in the next few days. Sorry for the longer write in. And thank you, Christopher. Christopher, thank you for writing in. Glad you had a positive interaction out there. You too can have an interaction by wearing your shirts from lastdaymedia.store.

22:33Colin Moriarty:I saw a guy in the distance at Too Many Games wearing a sacred 300 shirt. Oh, cool. And I was able to, he didn't catch, like, see me as I was walking closer. At least I don't think. I said, hey, nice shirt. I was like, oh, thanks. And then, like, he didn't realize that it was me at first. Gotcha.

22:51Dustin Furman:Right, right, right, right.

22:52Colin Moriarty:Nice young man, though.

22:56Dustin Furman:Very nice young man, I'm sure. A swell young man. A fine young person. All right. Quick note before we get into topics of discussion. Matt Danger87 wrote in and said, hey, CDC. Unfortunately, the Reddit basement dwellers and their infinite need to try to take down others a peg to make themselves feel better about their immense inadequacies in life. That's pretty harsh.

23:17Colin Moriarty:Jesus Christ.

23:17Dustin Furman:I have noticed that the LSM Patreon numbers are no longer visible and I proceeded to surmise all the worst possible scenarios. So I figured I would ask in order to hopefully squash this narrative immediately. Colin, are you taking a page out of our favorite corporations and hiding the numbers because the sky is falling and the business is about to go under in spectacular fashion? Or are the Redditors doing what they typically do best, shouting into the void about nothing? Take care, boys. No, they're not shouting into the void about nothing. The numbers are hidden. This is kind of Dustin and I talked about this last week.

23:43Dustin Furman:This is a culmination. So when the month was turning over, I well, let me back up. I should explain the whole thing because I'm assuming everyone knows like what we've already said or what I've already said about this. The numbers are wrong. um we've known that the numbers are wrong like the publicly facing numbers and apparently this is a problem with other patreons as well like older patreons and as i've said the the working my working theory and what i've shared with patreon itself is that like it seems like elderly patreons patreons that have been around for a long time have a lot of like legacy noise data um and these numbers haven't been purged and so what i think i said to the audience at the time when I talked to them was Patreon said like the numbers have probably never been as high as your highest number has noted.

24:30Dustin Furman:And they're not as bad as or, you know, not they're not bad, but not as low as they were at that time or whatever. So like they're somewhere in the middle. And so we have this feed on Patreon of when everyone signs up, when someone leaves a comment, so it'll say like, you know, John and eight other people signed up, Fred and five other people left. Chris and seven other people left a comment like that kind of thing. And I started going through the numbers for the month of June and just kind of, you know, adding them together, subtracting them. So it's like eight plus five minus seven plus three.

25:04Dustin Furman:And like the number that came out and then the number that showed, I was like, these numbers are not right. Like these numbers are not like, what is this number? And I was like, well, the data is wrong. Like, and so I was like, we shouldn't be sharing wrong data. So it really has nothing to do with anything other than that. I just feel like it's annoying to me. It's what we say with Chris and I have said many times with our Twitter accounts and our YouTube channels, which is like, if I could purge all of my dormant bot, whatever followers and subscribers and have a real number, that would be lower than what I have now.

25:37Dustin Furman:I would do it. And the answer, and it's the same thing for Patreon, but we don't know what the numbers are. So, you know, Graphdron is a really great service I use. you check it on other people's Patreon, see how they're doing over time, but they're just scraping the numbers available to them. So it's not, it's not graphed rounds fault. And this is probably not a huge problem with other newer Patreons, but there's something up with the numbers. Like they don't make sense. Um, and the other big thing that I was kind of, I've said this to the, to, to the, um, the company, everyone in the company, as we were meeting over the last few months is figuring out kind of like new things we want to do and how we're feeling or whatever, where I was saying, I think I use the term, the money is supernaturally flat.

26:23Dustin Furman:Where like the income doesn't match like the vacillation and numbers of subscribers and stuff like there's something just missing. So for those curious, I didn't know if anyone would even really notice or care. And then I said to Dustin, I was like, why were these ever public to begin with? Like who, what, what private corporation gives away this level of sales data about themselves it's strange that that's even the expectation you know public companies don't even tell you sony won't even tell you how many people are on ps plus so microsoft won't tell you how many xboxes they sold and they're public so um so yeah that's the answer and i hope i hope it i shark snark tank is not a very old patreon right do you feel like your numbers are accurate

27:12Colin Moriarty:um well we started in 20 i started that patreon i think in 20 20 or 2019 no 20 it must have been 2018 fuck i don't even know how old it is i think i feel like the numbers are relatively accurate but to be honest i look at it and i'm just like as long as we're getting paid i really don't give a shit what the number i really don't pay attention all All I know is that the money keeps going up, you know, which is really the only number I give a shit about. Yeah. So like to me, I'm like, I'm sure we've noticed some weird shit with like numbers fluctuating in ways that don't really match how the like how the money goes.

27:53Colin Moriarty:Like it doesn't really make a lot of sense, but I don't know if it's so old to be affected by because how old is your Patreon? It's probably like 2017. Oh, so well. Yeah, I don't know because my real my original Patreon. on is like 2014 yeah so like yeah i wonder what i would really wonder is like what kind of funny

28:12Dustin Furman:because like that's like a really old one and i wonder they hit their numbers a long time ago because i think that they they like had a different strategy of like kind of trying to spread the field i want to keep people on patreon i just think patreon's way more valuable to get five dollars on patreon is way more money the less than say five dollars on twitch or five dollars on YouTube or whatever. Yeah. Like substantially more. So and what I mean by that are, you know, for people out there that are not realizing or like the cuts, the fees that you pay. On Patreon, we are grandfathered into amazing like fee structures that don't exist anymore for anyone.

28:51Dustin Furman:So. So, yeah, the money in money out thing is the most important, but the money has been we're pretty flat with money, which is fine. I cannot complain about that. But yeah, the numbers don't really match up. So until I'm confident in them matching and making any sort of sense, whether up or down, then we'll put them back on. I guess if it's that important to people. Matt Danger 87. Thank you for writing in. All right, let's get into some topics of discussion. We'll get into the news. We'll get into what we're playing. And then we'll get into listener inquiries to wrap everything up as we always do connor rafter wrote in said hey guys i've been i've listened to colin i'm sorry read out countless write-ins about sick or dying dogs well sorry guys we got to do it again always knowing in the back let me back up real quick before we even said i asked you guys not to write these in anymore right but and no one has but when you do it's very hard to ignore it like some fan is like talking about how horrible this is and and it's like so i had to do it i'm sorry connor says um always knowing in the back of my mind it would come for my nine-year-old golden retriever benji one day well that day has taken one massive step closer this week benji has been diagnosed with papillary squamous cell carcinoma a very rare cancer what started as a small lump last month has developed into multiple masses across his gum line even since his biopsy two weeks ago the growths have doubled in size and numbers he will now see a specialist to undergo surgery to remove a chunk of his bottom jaw whether he will be okay after that or not we just don't know it breaks my heart that he doesn't understand what's going on though perhaps he's better for it apologies for the long-winded write-in i just wanted to encourage everyone to hold their pups a little closer today everything can change in an instant anyway love you guys and thanks for the incredible content that goes for the whole lsn team can you imagine this is why i have a hard time with with believing in an active god not to get too philosophical a creature as decent as a and good and like as a dog like a golden retriever classic dog classic family pet doesn't do anything everyone loves them comet on full house for instance and they give him this and he gets this fucking really rare cancer for just no reason and and it is inexplicable to him because he's not smart enough to understand that he's going to lose a piece of his jaw it's like it's fucking crazy man that's so sad i'm sorry that that's yeah dogs are so they should be immune to cancer in my opinion we should we should work towards that yeah our fight with cancer let's make sure

31:37Colin Moriarty:the dogs are also taken care of i mean as far as we know you know like so here's the thing right like dogs are great from the perspective of a human but like I don't know like surely there has to be somewhere the worst dog right like the most the most violent irredeemably mean like that must exist sure in some way like a pit bull and yeah like a pit bull that's been viciously abused it turns into like a you know a cretin i don't know uh oh look all i'm saying it's like i don't i don't know benji all that well that's all i'm saying yeah that's true well he might be evil he

32:27Dustin Furman:might be secretly evil you know i don't know i don't know it's golden retrievers the thing i i didn't know i don't know very much about dogs to be honest like i you know i didn't get in into them in quotes until my 30s and i'm still learning a great deal every day like i i said that like you know when i i fell in love with um my ex's boss and terry or lola who listeners chris knew lola um that was like the dog that was my gateway dog or whatever and it's funny when i think back about me taking care of her and spending all this time with her and she recently passed away which i was devastated to hear about um and uh because she was like my we were just like boys she was a girl but um you know as i was working playing games or whatever and i just really came to to um to love her and um i remember all the mistakes i made along the way like things you just don't know that are so common sense in the dog world that like you are below rookie status like for instance when i took care of lola once i like i just went to the store and just bought dog food and just gave it to her and then she shit all over the apartment like my apartment in san francisco because you can't dogs need to eat like the same food like the same dog food they get used to it you can't just give them like one thing and then the other thing and she just like shat everywhere and i was like and everyone's like what are you doing like you don't you have to give them like the food that they eat i'm like i didn't know i didn't know that so so with gold so with golden retrievers i didn't realize that they don't have a long life um which is so sad

33:49Colin Moriarty:you know bigger dogs tend to uh have shorter lifespans or at least that's something i've noticed i don't know if that's scientifically true but most of the dogs that i know that are like like they're huskies or german shepherds or like golden retrievers or something they they they tend to live shorter lives than like mini poodles or like terriers or right or and dogs

34:09Dustin Furman:like that it's horrible yeah nine years is such it's so it's just it's too bad they don't live to be like 30 or 40 in some way losing them would be even more painful probably oh yeah it's probably at least you would deal with it more seldom but like you see the things every once in a while where there's like a 25 year old dog or a 20 year old dog and i think the oldest dog didn't we talk about it like the art the dog saw 9-11 or something we thought it was hysterical yeah yeah and i'm like damn that's fucking crazy if your dog's bouncing around for like 20 years that's awesome

34:40Colin Moriarty:but there i mean there are there are animals that live that like parrots are fucking parrots live they'll parrots will live longer than you will you know turtles are too right yeah turtles turtles live in ungodly long periods i i learned recently that camels apparently live like really like well they live like long compared to it i think they live about like 50 years or something yeah 40 to 50 years it says that's crazy so like as i was seeing this video on uh instagram it just kind of popped up on my feed while i was scrolling last night of some guy like like hugging his camel who just like passed away and i'm like bro that must be crazy yeah that's that's that must be like that must be because that's like that's probably like a 30 year old relationship you know what i mean it's just like that's that's next level

35:27Dustin Furman:that camel saw that camel saw the bombing of the USS Cole

35:34Dustin Furman:that camel watched the Seinfeld finale in uh Times Square yeah right right horses 25 to 30 years says here uh I didn't know that about the camel that's so interesting yeah and I saw a story recently that there was a turtle that I guess is in captivity that's like 150 years old and just

35:54Colin Moriarty:got another turtle pregnant i'm like damn dude he was an incel he was an incel for so long

36:05Dustin Furman:connor we're wishing you the best we're wishing benji the best terrible situation um please everyone stop writing it about your your dead or dying dogs because it's very hard for me to ignore dante martins wrote in said good afternoon kings of gooning this week my baby daughter was born and since we stayed five days in the hospital, I thought it was a good idea to introduce my wife to the podcast. Within four minutes of listening to you guys, we're talking about mouthfucking Princess Peach and Shy Guy, then proceeded to talk about going to the doctor to have your ass fingered in less than 30 seconds.

36:34Dustin Furman:Thank you guys very much. This impression now makes my wife look at me side-eyed. Please say hi to baby Cora and wife Ashley. Regards from an immigrant that didn't cross the border illegally. Well, that's good. Why do you guys insist on listening to this around? family members. Let's move on. Josiah Elmer wrote in and said, Hey CDC, I may have another marriage to lay on the fire of the sacred symbol sacrificial altar. My wife and I went on a date on Monday and I had been listening to the latest episode on my way home from work. When we got in the car, the podcast auto played and happened to be the part where you were talking about 69ing Teletubby characters.

37:10Dustin Furman:She hasn't looked at me the same since and I feel the growing divide between us. Are you happy with yourselves? Do you derive sick pleasure from ruining relationships? Yes. I guess the jokes on me considering I subscribe to Patreon just to share my woes. Anyway, I'll hang up and start looking for cheap divorce attorneys. Now, theory of the case, guys. These people want divorced divorces.

37:32Colin Moriarty:They're looking. We've had so many.

37:35Dustin Furman:How much relationship upheaval can we be responsible for and telegraph and communicate to you? Before you are walking in eyes wide open, knowing exactly what's going to happen.

37:46Colin Moriarty:and so i ask you to look inside yeah yeah this is your fault dude like i just what do you this is so clearly the thing to me right about listening to this show in front of like a spouse is that this is so like so much of this show is predicated on either having listened to it for a long time there's a lot of lore running gags or just straight up this is news about an industry that chances are your spouse or partner or whatever gives zero fucks about that data analytics about shit that she has no concept of why would you subject listen why would you subject them to this this is yours this is yours right this is your show listen to it on your time right don't make somebody i i i have had to listen to like i remember being in situations where i've had to listen to like i've been in like a a car for a long period of time and i've had to just listen to like a podcast that i had no interest or care about and it is kind of a miserable experience regardless of how good the podcast i really have no idea how good those shows are but you never know because like i've never willingly listened to them it's always been like this this circumvention of will and so like just be strategic with how you play this i have a different outlook on this maybe sacred is the litmus test you know if she if you play some sacred and she gives you a side eye maybe she's gotta you know get out take it to the curb kick her out she's done if she's not down with sacred she's not down with you who's been here for you every week for years years we have yeah that's right you can't be having her give you a side it's a really good point it's so disrespectful it's actually i would honestly want the ultimate disrespect if i'm being honest that's a really good point like

39:58Dustin Furman:who has been more consistent in your life than me? Sit down and ask yourself that question. Who's been as consistent as Colin Moriarty? Man.

40:12Colin Moriarty:This is dire. This is a dire situation.

40:18Colin Moriarty:How long has she been around really? Yeah, I know, right? She doesn't know you like I do.

40:25Dustin Furman:This is like the counter. this is like the counter uh parasocial relationship right exactly i know you so much i have your

40:33Colin Moriarty:credit card information it's in patreon you fool yeah i literally do i don't i can't see your information please don't worry about that i forgot that there are people who might take that seriously

40:45Dustin Furman:yeah well there are people that thought that walt disney was the last boss in the lies of peace so anything's possible and you're right whenever i read comments on the internet or see anything i always remember we've brought this up it's like the statistic that half of people don't have an inner monologue it's like yeah what what but if you take that and you internalize it everything makes sense right every interaction you've ever had weird shit that's happened to you in your life you're like yeah you're dealing with people that have no inner monologue you can't expect too much of them you can't expect yeah it really is that's a

41:24Colin Moriarty:wild thing that's true that like i i even don't think i've really fully digested what that even means because i don't i don't want to chris remember what was the same i think it was the

41:34Dustin Furman:same study saying that i think it was like half people can't conceptualize an apple

41:40Colin Moriarty:i don't know what that means though that conversation is really strange to me though like the one about like is is the concept that like you can't induce a hallucination upon yourself where you see a literal apple in front of you or is the idea that you just can't conceptualize it

41:58Dustin Furman:in your mind's eye yeah that's i think it's about you conceptualizing it in your mind's eye but the way that people talk about it the way that people talk about it is the way that they say

42:08Colin Moriarty:or the way that they address this is that like yeah like i can i can look dead ahead and like just create an apple in my mind i can see it and i can rotate it around and stuff like that i don't think that's true i don't think you're i i have a i have a theory that like just our vocabulary is not sophisticated enough to talk about these types of things like i don't think the english language is like sufficient and to be fair like i don't think any like any language is really sufficient enough to really explain these things but like every time i've gotten into a conversation about like can you conceptualize an apple i'm like yeah but i can't like live photoshop it into my vision like so many people are suggesting is how it works right like an asset an unreal engine right like i can like really i can close my eyes and like really visually like imagine that but i can't see it you know yeah people talk about it that way and i'm like i don't know i don't know

43:02Dustin Furman:i'm much more concerned because you're right that is very vague and who knows how to communicate that i'm much more concerned about the inner monologue thing me too i really hope that it's not true that people are going through their lives not talking to themselves and not having a running commentary of things going on in their lives in their minds it's like that's fucking crazy that how can that be true how can this be how could this be i don't know it'd be true though But if you plug that knowledge into the equation of life, right, doesn't everything make a lot more sense?

43:41Colin Moriarty:Yeah, most things fall into place at that point.

43:43Dustin Furman:I would say so. Yeah. I just thought this one was funny. Milky Moon 84 wrote in and said, hey, Sacred Stooges. I stuck my foot in my mouth, eight crow or whatever the fuck you want to call it last weekend, and I needed your input on the situation. I was at a pool party with my in-laws extended family and enjoyed a few pool beers before the conversation floated onto tattoos. A few months ago, my wife and her sister got tattoos in their grandmother's handwriting to honor her. Grandmother is still alive and well, by the way. Much to my bewilderment, their sister-in-law got a tattoo in the grandmother's handwriting as well.

44:13Dustin Furman:Now, the sister-in-law is 39 years old and first met this grandmother when she was married into the family at 25. When the sister-in-law started talking about this particular tattoo, I, with a little bit of liquid courage and stupidity, blurted out, I don't even know why you got that tattoo. She's not even your grandma. This caused a bit of drama and I've since apologized profusely, but secretly I fully stand behind my criticism of this tattoo. So boys, is it as, is it as fucking weird as I think it is for a person to get a tattoo in their grandma, grandma in-laws handwriting or am I a total piece of shit?

44:43Dustin Furman:I profess to be in my apology. I'll sit back and accept your judgment. I just think that's funny. I don't know. You shouldn't have said anything. What's the purpose?

44:50Colin Moriarty:shouldn't have said anything there's not enough context of this situation to say whether or not he's the asshole now how close was this woman how close were these two women right just because she's married in doesn't mean that they weren't close now if she was doing it to bandwagon then maybe you got some ground to stand on but you still shouldn't have said anything yeah you it's not it's a no-win scenario but also i don't know 25 to 39 that's a reasonably long period of time to know somebody it's a pretty good i mean again we don't know the context but like i feel like that's a like if it had just happened like if they if she had just married into family and then she got that tattoo i'd be like what the fuck is that's i would actually have said something probably because i'd be like that's what are you doing that's crazy but like that's 14 years i don't know that seems like a plausible amount of time to grow close to somebody i agree and maybe i don't know maybe they don't really have a grandmother and or or whatever like i don't know there's not enough context here but i'm leaning towards you being a complete idiot

46:00Dustin Furman:in this regard yeah i just thought it was funny it's funny yeah idea behind me not for them yeah the idea behind marriage is that you are her family the families joined together

46:14Colin Moriarty:right right so they're your family i mean there is the in-law part but i don't know that comment i think kind of backhands like oh well you're not really even really part of our family yeah she is yeah it was uh yeah you're gonna load it you're i feel like that's not gonna be let go of for a while if ever no yeah that's uh that lives that's that's got a good shelf life on it man yeah definitely yeah the half-life of that is

46:42Dustin Furman:not good staggering yeah not good milky moon 84 good luck to you and that is hilarious though

46:48Colin Moriarty:control your alcohol intake i don't even know why you got that tattoo not even your grandma i can so vividly imagine the delivery of it too yeah me too me too like that's why it's so funny

47:03Dustin Furman:It's a it's a funny again. It's funny for me. It's good.

47:05Colin Moriarty:Yeah. Now he's roasted by. I mean, I assume his favorite podcast as well as being viewed as a dickhead by his whole family.

47:14Dustin Furman:Sorry, Milky. It is what it is. He doubled down. It's not like he was presenting it to us and asking us for advice. He presented his side and then he said, I feel I'm actually lying when I apologize. So now everyone's now everyone's lied when they've apologized before. That's not sure that big of a deal because you're doing it. sometimes you do it for yourself, but most of the time you're doing it for the other person. You know, I've said some things to people where I'm like, oh, I'm sorry, but I meant it, but I'm not asking for people's advice or trying to present it, you know, agnostically. Right.

47:50Dustin Furman:Alan Joseph wrote in and said, Hey boys, quick request during a packed week. Can you shout out my best friend and fellow sacred symbols diehard Nick for his 40th birthday this Saturday. We met nearly a decade ago through a PSN profiles boosting session for red Dead Redemption and it's been nonstop gaming life talks and mom jokes ever since we still game all the time and take yearly trips this year's is a month-long Final Fantasy Platinum Marathon wait you still game all the time and take yearly trips this year's is a month-long Final Fantasy Platinum Marathon I don't know what that means like how are they getting like an Airbnb to play games for a month maybe together maybe that's sexy Dustin and Brad spent a week together recently rookie numbers boys oh so that's what he's saying let's pump those up happy birthday nick love you brother so these guys are whatever you and brad had going on these guys are right you know eclipsing you sure let's call it i don't want to spend a month with anybody but

48:47Colin Moriarty:uh holly really is the only person i can put up with i thought you're just because i think I was about to say good save. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She's I mean, yeah. So, I mean, God bless you. Sounds like fun. Maybe too much fun. You know, I feel like if I was with even some of my best friends for a month, there's at some point where I'm going to want to kill them.

49:10Dustin Furman:Oh, definitely. I don't want to be around. I need a break from everybody at some point. You know, Micah and I obviously are married and live together or whatever, but we also are doing our own things and stuff like so i never get tired of her but when you have a guest you have to tend to the guest leaving the guest alone is rude letting leaving them to their own devices is not why they're there and that create that's what creates the tension if my guy and i had to treat each other like that we would also get mad at each other so um have fun yeah that's a romance unlike i've ever heard before i think chris good no i mean it sounds like a it sounds

49:47Colin Moriarty:I like stories like that where people meet people through video games. Because I met, I think in the last two years, I met somebody that I met on Halo 2 way back in the day in person for the first time. He flew out here from the UK for like a month. We weren't just playing video games. I was showing him shit. I got him really high by accident and he greened out hard. It was the best day probably ever. He just kept repeating, I'm so sick. i'm so sick and i was just like recording him

50:23Colin Moriarty:he will never forget that he thinks he had ego death that day and you're laughing because like he was drinking uh what is it the you know the thc drinks yeah oh yeah okay and i was like listen you have to keep it to a cat full it's not it's not a drink but he was like i'm thirsty and he drank the whole thing i was like what i told you so like i mean it's this is this is not on me whatever happens yeah can have fun have fun yeah yeah he's getting it was it was awesome it's like i'm so sick someone help i'm so sick someone over and over again like it was like like it was like a broken record and he was like stumbling it was amazing i have it on video it's wonderful i watch it all the time all right let's get into the news uh and i wanted to start

51:08Dustin Furman:with a little not a correction but just a clarification or just to be fair let's put this out here will smith wrote in i didn't know he was a fan of the show oh hey jiggy with it yeah he put out that new song that everyone's making fun of yeah oh pretty girls yeah pretty girl yeah i listened to it it's pretty bad and then someone sped it up and was like this makes the song way better and i'm like yeah it does actually yeah it's still it's still pretty not good yeah it's not it's not good for a man of that age for a man of that provenance doing a song it's just a little

51:39Colin Moriarty:weird he's too old to be writing songs like that like he should be writing songs about like i don't know 401ks right or like um or he should be i don't know out was it that it was ted nugent or like one of those other guys that like killed a bunch of coyotes and spelled out the president

51:54Dustin Furman:oh yeah that was ted nugent i think yeah you gotta go you gotta go off the rails when you're that old if you want to be a part of this at all right i mean he was getting there he slapped him slapping the shit out of Chris Rock is still I can't even believe that that happened it's crazy it's fucking awesome it's awesome like it's an actually crazy thing that happened and I was like where were you? It's like when JFK got assassinated Will Smith wrote in said hey sacred boys I wanted to write in to defend the Playstation concert I went to the London show and it was a near sellout at Wembley Arena at circa 12 ,500 capacity the music.

52:36Dustin Furman:I never I guess that would mean that that's right. Like I never it's funny. I was like kind of caught up on that because I was like, I've never seen circa used outside of a date, but it does mean around, I believe. Yeah, music and visuals were absolutely amazing. Even the ghost music, which I agree isn't particularly memorable, was immaculately performed. As I mentioned, it was just as much a visual experience as it was an audio one, although I suspect that will depend on the venue. If any of you get a chance to go, I'd highly recommend it from an immensely hot 95 degree london stop complaining about the weather 95 celsius

53:06Colin Moriarty:five degrees away from boiling

53:15Colin Moriarty:everybody looks like fucking it's like it's like the end scene from total recall they're all just boiling and exploding on mars the um i mean to be fair look to be fair to the to the to london and the uk and all those places they have no ac anywhere yeah i don't know why that like it is it is kind of valid like when somebody says if i had to deal with california heat which is by the way only recently like not like recently not even that hot with no ac i think i might lose my mind i'm amazed that like the united kingdom isn't full of just

53:52Dustin Furman:psychos have you seen that i i've seen this i don't know where i read it so i don't want to cite i can't cite it but there is this theory that american modern like post-war american productivity and like how it's we become like a bastion of business and like people make a shit ton of money or whatever is that in part fueled by air conditioning that like we embrace air conditioning and when you think when you think about like your demeanor your ability to function and think when it's hot and then you put yourself in some of these places around the world with that are either natively really hot like tropical or subtropical places or places that are just really hot right now and how it just sucks everything out of you and you can't you can't you just can't produce like and it's so funny i'm like that's so interesting and because there are places in the united states where it would be completely unlivable i would say half of the country without air conditioning.

54:48Dustin Furman:You can't live in Arizona without air conditioning. It's not possible. No one lives there without air conditioning. That's not a thing. New Mexico, Texas, the Gulf States, Florida, all the way up to where I am in Virginia. And so I was like, wow, that's so interesting, just that one technology. But I think it's because a lot of our, I don't know for sure, but I feel like, well, air conditioning is really expensive and the United States per capita income is higher than it is in Europe. So people have more money to pay for it. But I also think it's because a lot of our buildings are newer. And so we have central air and HVAC and all that kind of stuff.

55:23Dustin Furman:Like Dustin lives in an older house. Your house is from the 1800s or early 1900s. So like the front of it. So he has a window unit AC behind him. You can see. And for him to have what I have in my house, they would need to do an incredible amount of construction and put ducks in. But since my house was built around the ducks, basically, I can have central air. And I think that that's just the nature of how it's gone and why it's so embedded American culture, but I could be wrong with it.

55:48Colin Moriarty:I do have my whole house does have air conditioning. Like it goes through the heating ducts.

55:54Dustin Furman:Oh, that's called pumped air, right? Or something like that. Right. Yeah.

55:58Colin Moriarty:It just doesn't work very well in this room, especially when my door is closed. So I have this additional unit so I don't die during sacred symbols.

56:07Dustin Furman:Like, yeah, the house we had on my original house on Long Island did have central air. And then when I moved right before high school into another house with my dad, that was an older house, like a pre-war house. And we had to use air. We had to use window units in all the rooms that fucking sucked. And that's where I told the story about how I had an air window unit from the 70s. That was so cold. It was fucking crazy how cold it was.

56:32Colin Moriarty:I love those. The wooden, the wood panel. It was exactly what it was. Yeah. Air conditioners that went down to like fucking 10 degrees or some shit. like that's the best shit like coming home to a cold room in the summer like like with that ac specifically is like so refreshing it's crazy but i would i would be not surprised at all to learn that like productivity is entirely tied to temperature in that way like i've always i've always felt that way like having lived in like new york and in la i've always felt that like it's interesting that new york feels so much more busy because it's cold there half the year and when it is hot you're never really that far from air conditioning like i remember even just like walking down this down the in new york city when it was like sweltering and every like couple every like minute or two you'd walk by a door that would like blast you with ac because like every building is like it's just better whereas over here i feel like because it's so sweltering or because it used to be so sweltering people just have like a more laid-back kind of lackadaisical kind of tone and nothing's as serious nobody's as precious with time everybody's kind of like i'll just chill you know that's clearly temperature driven i think yeah yeah it's it's really interesting um so but then yeah so i i but the 95 degree thing it's like dude it's it's gonna it's 95 degrees here for three months so it's hard it still is hard for me to to just like to be like oh i'm so sorry i'm sorry but i'm sorry you should uh you should turn your you should not turn your ac on at all for for for like a week in the heat and see how that see how it feels not gonna do that you see you understand yeah

58:25Dustin Furman:I wouldn't be able to live down here without without it dude like I told the story recently on the show where we have like the the we have like a deal with the AC company that they just come and like preemptively check it twice a year just to make sure it doesn't break because I'm so paranoid that right we're gonna have some sort of problem well sorry I'm sorry it's so hot over there though i know i it seems to happen every year there's like a week or two where the europeans are having a tough go of it um so so hang in there and i just wanted to i wanted to read will smith's comment about the playstation concert because we have been fairly critical of it based on what we've read and heard from other people i've not seen it and it is coming to richmond which is strange as i noted i think last week so i'm not going to go but um will smith says it's good so just wanted to provide a little balance endorsed by will smith yes indeed i see speaking of your mind's eye i just see the fucking the slap yeah insane crazy great that's oh my god will be well all right this news broke right before we started recording i woke up to it this morning and it is big news indeed hell divers 2 is coming to Xbox and will be published by PlayStation itself.

59:41Dustin Furman:So no intermediary like a 505 games or a Bandai Namco PlayStation is indeed publishing this game on Xbox. Dead wrote into us on Patreon. Many people did and said, well, boys, it's happened. PlayStation is publishing Helldivers 2 on Xbox. Colin, I've been promised this wasn't happening. Do I throw my PlayStation in the garbage now? Unsubscribe from the Patreon. Kill myself. I need guidance. No, you don't do any though. I mean, definitely don't kill yourself. If you want to unsubscribe from the Patreon, I don't know why you would, but that's fine. If you want to throw your PlayStation in the garbage, it seems needless.

1:00:09Dustin Furman:I'm not going to control you, but don't definitely don't hurt yourself over this, this news. This news is true. Helldivers 2 is indeed coming to Xbox. The news comes by way of the Xbox Wire, which is interesting. And it's written by Catherine Baskin, who is the community manager of Arrowhead. It says Helldivers 2 is coming to Xbox on August 26th. Pre-order today. And people already are. You can pre-order right now on Xbox for$39.99 or your local equivalent. It says, quote, A new dawn is upon us. Super Earth is expanding its operations and opening new enlistment centers. Xbox players, your opportunity to enlist is coming when Helldivers 2 deploys to Xbox Series X and S on August 26th.

1:00:47Dustin Furman:And then they have a quote from Mikhail Erickson, who is the director of the game, says, quote, We know gamers have been asking for this for some time, and so we are so excited to bring more Helldivers into our game. We have so much more in store for the future months and years, and the more players we have, the more stories we can tell. The fight for Super Earth has only just begun, end quote. So you can get the Helldivers 2 regular edition for$40. You can pre-order that now and you get armor sets and so on and so forth on Xbox for pre-ordering if you'd like, not unlike the PlayStation version.

1:01:14Dustin Furman:And you can get the Super Citizen edition as well, which is$59.99. So that is$20 more. And you get a bunch of perks as well. Got to know what you guys think. Big news, surprising news. I definitely didn't think this was going to happen. And definitely I would have put money that on this not happening. So I was definitely wrong. Chris, what are your thoughts?

1:01:38Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I mean, I'm also genuinely surprised. This doesn't happen. This is as far as I'm aware, the first time outside of like the show or something, which was obviously compelled by licensing or external licensing agreements.

1:01:55Dustin Furman:And not published by Sony itself either.

1:01:57Colin Moriarty:And not published by Sony. Yeah, exactly. so like this is a fairly unique thing wild I'm sad that this broke so recently because if this had happened like last night I could have had some time I have a friend who bought a Playstation 5 specifically for Helldivers 2 and he had it he's an Xbox guy so I'm curious what he makes of this or if he cares at all if he's like oh man I could have just waited but But this is, I mean, it's cool. Like I'm always for generally more people being able to play games, especially like these. Like I always felt generally, and I still feel really, that like multiplayer games specifically, as far as like their exclusivity on PlayStation and really elsewhere, it really behooves the game itself to be on as many platforms as possible.

1:02:50Colin Moriarty:So this to me seems like a smart thing to do actually. I think it's totally fine. I wonder how many Xboxes are out there to even take advantage of this. is held ever to a ps4 game or no no no no right no yeah so that's like yeah so you're limited to series x presumably so like yeah i don't i don't know i think it's cool i uh held ever is great uh it is a very xbox coded game in a lot of ways like it feels kind of like it belongs there um and we obviously know that marathon is coming to xbox as well um so i for a multiplayer game i think it makes sense i'm just surprised to see it and i'm also just surprised to see playstation themselves publishing it and it's not arrowhead or you know what i mean like some weird deal

1:03:34Dustin Furman:yeah sony owns helldivers sony is helldivers is a sony ip so it's not even like a a weird sort of what you might expect could happen with neo or what we've seen happen with death stranding and so on right so um yeah this is uh interesting news surprising news for sure uh dustin what do

1:03:53Colin Moriarty:you think yeah it's super surprising just because we've never seen sony play nice with xbox unless they are absolutely forced to as we saw with mlb the show a few years back um so it's you know shocking in a lot of ways i was thinking from the sony perspective though as great as helldivers 2 was and continues to be the zeitgeist is over for this game and to be clear it's not it's not to say that it's over it's not doing well or anything like that but the full-blown mainstream takeover where everyone was playing it is done at this point and there's probably a lot of people like chris's friend that bought a ps5 to play this game and so you know mission accomplished success and here we are uh however long later it came out february 8th 2024 on playstation 5 and pc so a year later and what did we say just the other day with those numbers like the the microtransactions have sold have made more profit than the game itself yeah at this point i was talking about

1:05:04Dustin Furman:this with with uh reese from alinea analytics where i was saying i don't know they never qualified the numbers because i think what they're saying is like it's settled into a position where it's making more money in microtransactions than it has made than it is now making in a la card sales. Right. I don't know that I believe that it's true that because it would otherwise suggest that people are spending per capita more than$40 after buying the game, which is no way that's true. So I think it's something I think it's what it's settled into, which is still an impressive stat.

1:05:32Colin Moriarty:But right. So at this point, again, from their perspective, why not? they can sell it for full price over on xbox start ranking racking in microtransactions as well and that's kind of the whole model for live service games and what chris was saying too with these multiplayer games it makes sense to be in as many places as possible so from the business side i get it uh i guess you know all of us are just surprised because nothing like this has happened before where a game like this has come over. So it just goes to show this. We're in a new era in a lot of ways and seeing what, how these live live service games, at least when they're successful are treated by Sony.

1:06:16Colin Moriarty:And I wonder if we'll see the same thing with other, if they ever have another successful live service game, if we will see a, a year or so of exclusivity and then trickle to Xbox.

1:06:27Dustin Furman:Yeah. Yeah. Ultra Giant writes in and gets into this inquiry, gets into this question with his inquiry, rather. It's what I kind of want to focus on. He says, hey, CDC, with the news that Helldivers 2 is on its way to Xbox, do you think this is always on the cards or did Sony change their mind? With both Gears of War reloaded, we don't use the G.O.W. acronym in the PlayStation world to mean Gears of War. I almost read that as God of War. With both Gears of War reloaded and Helldivers 2 launching on the same day, are we headed for a summer of brotherly love? every bullet fired in the name of super earth is a bullet fired for freedom that is indeed true um so i went on record saying so i people are making fun of me today over this because i said that this wouldn't really make any sense for sony to do this was back last spring um but i listened to the actual video that i circulated or whatever and i say in the video which is why i was like oh all right it's not that big of a deal that people are making fun of me they're not even watching the video where i'm like i wouldn't mind seeing this happen because I'm curious about like how it would go.

1:07:25Dustin Furman:But that I don't think it makes any sense from what you could be sacrificing. Let's look at it from an economic position only. And this is where I think that money can be extracted and they're going to find out. I mean, there's only one way to find out really. But Sony owns this game. Arrowhead is going to be servicing it for many years. we know from the xbox wire post that nixis is the one that ported it so sony uses internal kind of production resources to bring it over to xbox whatever cost that is x to do that is going to be exceeded i think by the money they make y or whatever on the xbox store um and so from a monetary position, it probably makes some sense, especially because there are more sizing so many losses now from what I would assume is between one and$1.5 billion worth of cancellations.

1:08:25Dustin Furman:When you're talking about The Last of Us Online, the God of War Online game, Ben's game, you know, Twisted Metal and so on and so forth. Like these numbers add up and that I was actually noting on my conversation with Reese that goes live on Sacred Symbols Plus tomorrow where i was one of the things i was saying was it's it's actually kind of astounding how sony's books seem to be unaffected by all the bad decision making whether it's bungie or concord or what is probably going to happen with fair game certainly marathon is becoming a money pit um for them as well whether they make it back or not and when you see so when you see so i guess what i'm saying is when you see the xbox or the news of hell divers 2 going to xbox and you're like, can this make money?

1:09:10Dustin Furman:And you're like, yeah, it can. It will make money. Do you need that money more than ever, really, to kind of continue to keep the status quo financially? Yes, you do. The big question is, and this is what you're getting into, Chris, although I would look at it in the other direction of how PlayStation fans feel about it, is like, is there a value erosion to your platform by doing this with such a big and important game? And if so, what is the cost of that? And that's unquantifiable. But I actually think that Sony can't really know until they do it. As the audience knows, I've been very bullish on them.

1:09:48Dustin Furman:I guess you would call it going multi-platform in some way, being aggressive with Switch 2 ports, being aggressive with PC ports. Really, Xbox would be no different. I just think the equation with them from Sony's perspective is a little bit different. You can see something like this in a different era blowing up in their face and eroding value and giving people less or fewer reasons to own a PlayStation. But perhaps they look at the situation with Xbox. We'll talk about later because so many people wrote in about it. We were going to dedicate some of the end of the show, the increase to what's going on in that ecosystem.

1:10:21Perhaps you see it from a much different perspective where you're like,

1:10:26Dustin Furman:yeah, things are kind of going the way they're going now and are releasing games on this platform is just value addition without really eroding our position on the market. And that's not the way it always was, but that is the way it is now. So I think it's a bold move, but I got to say I'm a little bit confused simply because they seem to go out of their way to withhold games from Xbox that wouldn't really matter going to Xbox like Freedom Wars and Everybody's Golf and Patapon or whatever. It's like you're not publishing those on Xbox, but you're publishing this on Xbox. so i think i think the signals are a little confused it's like why not just if you're gonna do it you should just do it and see what happens yeah go ahead i i think the only thing

1:11:16Colin Moriarty:that i can think of is i my assumption is that they have some kind of and to be fair it's not it's not hard to guess the metrics of the type of player that is on xbox but like i would imagine that they look at something like held diverse 2 which is a live service which is multiplayer and you know benefits greatly from being on other platforms not just from a la carte sales but but also obviously microtransactions. There's a cut of that that goes. So I feel like they look at that and they understand that the type of player that is on an Xbox is likely a multiplayer oriented player who will undoubtedly be in for something like Helldivers, whereas something like Everybody's Golf or Freedom Wars maybe wouldn't make the necessary splash to be worth the time to port over, if that makes sense.

1:12:03Colin Moriarty:like where I feel like it's more about like audience and how much they can extract out of the, the project. And I feel like everybody's golf is probably like not a huge, if you put everybody's golf on Xbox, like I don't imagine that you would see much in terms of like benefit, you know, like I think that's like a very limited pool of people, I think. And also it, and also that begins and ends at the purchase. as far as i know i don't know much about everybody's golf but i don't think there's like is there microtransactions in everybody's golf um i really have no idea i don't think we

1:12:41Dustin Furman:i would imagine there probably will be i mean well maybe not maybe you just unlock everything but there's so many outfits and characters and shit but maybe that's just something you would

1:12:48Colin Moriarty:unlock i don't know yeah i don't i i just think it's it's a it's a kind of game that doesn't really lose much from being elsewhere because it just benefits from being a multiplayer game and multiplayer games benefit from being everywhere and it's the kind of game that's going to get a lot of people playing it's the kind of game that's going to get a lot of xbox players playing and paying consistently and i think they look at that as like a lot more valuable than just putting freedom wars out there to make like trump change in comparison i think yeah yeah i'm i'm i

1:13:17Dustin Furman:feel like it's a little i get what you're saying and i think you're right i also just think yeah it's a little bit weird like i wonder what they're we know that marathon is now going to be published by and I think it was always probably going to be a PlayStation published, but it was obviously this more internal Bungie project. And so that was always coming to Xbox. So that's going to be published by PlayStation as well. And we've noted that Sony games have long quietly gone to other platforms. I mean, we were talking about how, you know, a game like Wipeout went to N64 during the Sony during the PlayStation one era made by a PlayStation studio.

1:13:51Dustin Furman:So but they didn't publish it. so it is it is them kind of doing the heavy lifting and i guess there's really again only one way to know and it's putting your game out there i am interested in how this is going to do i wonder if it will benefit from what i think early playstation releases on steam benefited from that the later playstation releases really didn't which is just a novelty factor and if i were an xbox fan and i wanted more playstation games on xbox i would absolutely buy this game and even if you're even if you're just trying to tip the scales or something like you gotta buy this game if you're on xbox if you want to prove the point because if this game doesn't do well i don't know that they'll put themselves out there to do it again and it makes me wonder where their minds are at with their single player affair um i i'm curious too i don't know if you guys saw the comments a lot of people asking if it's coming in the game pass and all that kind of stuff like i wonder i just wonder if it's if people are really gonna buy it or not but yeah i hope they do because um i think injecting more people into hell divers too will only naturally keep it alive for longer so it's fine with me i don't really care but i'm surprised by it i'm definitely surprised i was definitely wrong about my instinct that there was just no reason to do this and i still think that there is downside from sony's perspective for doing this but they're doing it and um now i think the ball is in the xbox fans court to support the game and it's a really for people that if we have a lot of xbox players listening to our show if you're not familiar with hell divers or you you're interested in it it really is great and it's it's a wonderful game to to go check out and i think 40 is a really reasonable cost and you really don't have to spend any other money you get a lot of well you can and people do as we just noted but there you get a lot of um kind of in-game currencies that you can spend on things that you would otherwise buy so it's a fun game to grind through maybe i'll jump back in i don't know i doubt it but all right any other thoughts on hell divers 2 coming to xbox very very shocking news yeah definitely the biggest news of the week from from our perspective

1:16:08Colin Moriarty:oh what the part of the question about was it sony's plan all along oh yeah yeah we didn't get into that okay oh yeah that's a good question i honestly have no idea i my gut says no because it seemed like they didn't i don't say they didn't believe in this game but it definitely felt like a major surprise and i think that maybe based on the success and now the money they continue revenue they're seeing from this game has got their mind thinking like oh well yeah there's a whole nother base of people that play these this type of game that are hungry for it they actively want it why not yeah there's a high novelty factor that i think will really do a nice job in buttressing

1:16:53Dustin Furman:these numbers on xbox because if i were over there i would definitely buy it it's very similar to when hi-fi came out and i just i was like i gotta buy this are you kidding right like i gotta buy it's so weird but then as other games started flowing out like i didn't buy sea of thieves or grounded or anything like that. I didn't buy Forza. And so I think there'll be a tailing effect probably. But I'm still, I'm curious what the a la carte sales reality truly is there because you do hear from different sources, you know, on the net, who knows who's trustworthy and who's not, but you hear a lot of scuttlebutt about some publishers questioning whether they want to bring future games to Xbox at all, if it's worth the lift of doing that.

1:17:36Dustin Furman:And that's what's interesting about this too is that Sony must assume that this is going to work out well enough for them to keep like a concurrent two builds going because it's Xbox Series X and S are different. And updating, you know, new core games and sending updates to these various platforms and having them speak to each other. It's not a trivial thing. So I assume that Sony's projections are pretty good for this. And it's going to be necessary, I think, to find new players for these multiplayer games for sure. I just again question why they're so catty with so many other things I just think it would have gone in the other direction that's what happened with Xbox and I think that that made more sense before we got fucking gears we got pentiment yeah so you would just think that they would have thrown something else out there first and so I really let's go around the horn and say this like will there be more and will they get into the single player games for Xbox Dustin what do you think

1:18:36Colin Moriarty:No single player games. And I think the only reason that this would happen again is if they have another successful live service game. If they ever are able to pull that off again. And in that case, even it's going to be a similar year plus till they do it. I guess there is marathon.

1:18:58Dustin Furman:Yeah, marathon. Right. But that was like a little different. But who? Yeah, right. If Bungie wasn't in such a powerful position upon their purchase. Right. would that have ever been announced for xbox if now in this new reality it would come to xbox but i wonder if that would have been the same i think the answer i think the answer to that well the answer to that question is like obviously concord and fair games didn't come

1:19:22Colin Moriarty:or are not slated uh to come to xbox and so like i don't think if if if marathon was a sony thing and bungie didn't have that power i think obviously marathon would have been exclusive but i feel like do i think that the do i think that there will be single player games i don't think so i think i think playstation's smart enough to understand that that is kind of the the siren song for the console it's the thing that kind of draws people in and multiplayer things um their multiplayer perspective or their their multiplayer projects are very very ill-fated with the exception of hell divers and i feel like that's kind of the only reason that they're even trying this and so i feel yeah i don't think you're gonna see single player games and to the effect that they that you would it wouldn't be until like every last bit of values extracted out of steam like you might see the only way that i could see that happening is like maybe god of war 3 the third whatever the third one is going to be called um comes out and then maybe maybe you see the first one like a little after that or something like that like but it would be on such a delayed cadence as to be completely meaningless so my short answer is no you're not gonna see single-player stuff moving and i i don't know if there's gonna be really any more um after this because this is really their only big live service of any note you know i i think uh i think the show would be the show would be the other one and that's already on xbox so yeah yeah and so i just don't um yeah i don't foresee i think this is a very special kind of case and i think it's them testing and my gut is going to be that it's um the xbox audience is not trained to buy games so like even though this is totally up their alley i actually feel like it's going to do a lot softer than it should interesting yeah you would know better than me

1:21:24Dustin Furman:I guess another question a reasonable question is like Switch 2 could they get this running on Switch 2 if Series S yeah

1:21:33Colin Moriarty:I would I would think that they would be able to get it running on Switch 2 being that they got it running on Series S it's hard like right now we're still kind of figuring out what the Switch 2 is fully capable of and I certainly don't know enough about technical stuff is like to see comparing like a series s versus switch two but um it would probably not be a very good experience with switches uh wi-fi and network capabilities but

1:22:09Dustin Furman:maybe well we'll see what happens this is a really interesting news there is an opportunity cost here and i think sony has done the calculation or at least they're going to test the theory that the opportunity cost, at least on these multiplayer games, and I think you guys are right. It's not like, I do think it would be a very dramatic thing to bring Uncharted to Xbox or something like that. You know, I think it would be a very dramatic thing to bring God of War, like we're saying, or Horizon. But you almost wonder, gosh, I wish this happened like yesterday so I had more time to really think about it.

1:22:45Dustin Furman:I literally woke up and did the notes and stuff. And like, there's so many things going through my mind about it. It's like, wouldn't you, if you're willing to do this with Helldivers reasonably enough, then wouldn't you want to just have the next one, like fair games, just come to Xbox immediately? Isn't the best chance of the game's success having the biggest player base at the beginning and then trickling away from there? There's obviously the other argument of like getting these new bounces by, all right, we release it here and then we release it here and like new. but I actually think you would want just everyone when the Zeitgeist was hot there.

1:23:22Dustin Furman:And so it's like, wouldn't it be reasonable to consider, should this work for them? Let's say it works and Chris is wrong and more people buy it and it does well. Yeah. Would it make sense to just announce fair games for Xbox and just say like, well, we're just going to release it everywhere at the same time and bolster these player bases. I don't know. I don't know. So I think there's a lot going on here because I think, to answer the question which i've been avoiding why not not intentionally but like did they always have this on the cards it's like no i don't think so i think that yeah first of all i think hell divers 2 was the last game they thought was going to do well this well i think that that's fairly obvious from the way they treated it pre-release not that they did anything wrong but they didn't make a big deal of it they weren't like it wasn't like this splashy release by any stretch of the imagination.

1:24:12It's people became obsessed with it when it came out.

1:24:16Dustin Furman:And that's the funniest part of it is like they didn't even know what they had. And they've made bigger bets on other games that have blown up spectacularly in their face. So I actually just think the situation has materially changed where they probably look at it and say like, we need money. We're profitable, we're doing well but we should be doing way better and we've spent an enormous amount of money and like now it's time to explore where that money is going to come from and so i think that's how you get things like hell divers 2 on xbox but yeah if that if that experiment works out well i know it's hard i listen so much of the playstation audience gets mad at me all the time because and i know because i'm very i'm very aggro about going multi-platform in a lot of ways where i'm like i just think they should lean into some of these things with specifically with pc but also with switch um and again the only reason i don't feel like they should do it with xbox is not because i dislike the brand it's because i think that that interferes with their own business that's where you would draw the line that's why hell divers coming over is surprising not that they would go multi-platform but that they're they're playing around in a in the one space that is a mirror image of their space they don't want their customers to go there because they rely so much on all of their tangential purchases which is why i've been arguing about the steam xbox thing making no sense so that's it that's the reason why i'm surprised that anything would come to xbox it's not that they shouldn't or wouldn't necessarily it's that i thought that there was a real opportunity cost there that they didn't identify with say switch where people really rely on first party content there and that and or the switch is like their tangential machine and pc where i think the the crossover between console and pc gamers has been vastly overstated and i think you see that in the shrinking of the numbers of PlayStation games as the je ne sais quoi surrounding their release on Steam dissipates after every release.

1:26:06Dustin Furman:That's how you get games like The Last of Us Part 1 substantially underperforming a game like Days Gone on PC because of that specialness. So we'll have to revisit this maybe next week because there's so much more to say. I just got to, I need more space to think about it.

1:26:23Colin Moriarty:Yeah, it is kind of like hot off the presses

1:26:26Dustin Furman:as we're recording. interesting date and i think it's been noted in one of the letters august 26th is the same day that gears comes out is there does let's a postscript would be like the is there room for the idea that there is a for better lack of a better term a quid pro quo where like is sony and my are sony and microsoft speaking and extracting value out of each other knowing it's going to cost both of them some of the shine they have with their hardcore audience or are they acting independently from one another? Because I wouldn't be surprised to deals like that are made all the time in other venues.

1:27:10Dustin Furman:You give us this and this, we give you this and this. You are willing to do this, we're willing to do this. I just would love to know how these conversations went. And I want to know, Nixis has been working on this. I assume this has been in play for all year. so you would assume if it's coming out in August so secret well kept they must have they must have been really told to shut the fuck up because this didn't leak at all yeah and I don't think I wouldn't have believed it if it did leak I mean people were saying conversations around this were happening and I didn't believe it now who knows if they were really privy to those conversations but in the main they were right

1:27:56Colin Moriarty:so you gotta it is gotta be crazy it is just a weird it's just so unprecedented and again not just from the show and you know marathon there's there's a very like hyper specific situations like this is like it's it's it's interesting times man well and the date is interesting the date that it's like that it's on the same day as gears is interesting to me

1:28:17Dustin Furman:that's what i'm saying like i don't know if that's a quick like i don't want to say it's not not a coincidence but it's it's not not not a coincidence yeah yeah but i and again so when i woke up to the news i was reading about it i was like and i was kind of groggy eyed whatever and i was like yeah all right like and my assumption was arrowhead itself was going to just do it and that they had permission or for something in there maybe even i mean this gets really deep into the weeds but you have to assume that arrowhead have have contracts that were set up before the game came out to support the game.

1:28:49Dustin Furman:And now that the game is so much bigger, they probably have an insane amount of leverage over Sony. To say like, imagine it's like we sign a con, I'm just making these numbers up because I don't really know. We have a contract for X amount of money to support the game for 12 months after it comes out. These, these contracts were signed two months before the game came out. Now this is what the game looks like. And these are our terms to proceed we need more we have a revenue split we want a bigger audience we're bringing our game to xbox but i don't think that that's the way it happened but you can imagine conversations like that happening and and the amount of leverage arrowhead has over sony and that they're very willing to not only not work with sony in the future on a future game but be public about that indicates to me that there's a weirdness i don't know i feel like sony kind of fucked up hell divers with the PSN stuff through the eyes of a lot of people.

1:29:41Dustin Furman:And I wonder if so you would just love to be a fly on the wall for all these kinds of things. But what I was saying was that so I was I saw the news and I'm like, that's truly surprising. I would have bet a thousand dollars that that wouldn't have happened. I would have lost my thousand dollars, like no doubt. But then I was like, oh, I wonder who's publishing it. So I assumed Arrowhead was. And then when I went to the store, like the Xbox store page for it, it was like PlayStation publishing. I was like, what? Yeah. Like they didn't even feign to use a five Oh five games or something to, or a bandai to keep distance.

1:30:15Dustin Furman:Not that those would have been good partners for this game, but you understand what I'm saying. And five Oh five actually probably would have been a fine partner for this, but that they're doing it themselves. They're like, no, we want the money. So that's another, we're not like a sub licensing at that point where, and again, it's not like death stranding because death stranding is not, no longer owned by Sony. So yeah, there's so much to say about this really, really interesting news, big news of the week and came at the right time. I think for Xbox to kind of, there was a lot of, we're going to talk about it later in the show because people really want to get into it, but everything that happened with Xbox this week.

1:30:52Dustin Furman:Yeah. Good news, right? Right off the bat from their arch rival. Very interesting. Very interesting. And, but that date was identified probably months ago of like this is when we're gonna announce it and so they did hell divers 2 xbox series x xbox series s august 26 believe it or not show future column this all right we have some information here that well otherwise would have been the biggest news of the week that's not very big news or no it's big but not very interesting i don't think comes from Naughty Dog. It says, quote, and this is from Neil Druckmann himself in a little statement. I've made the difficult decision to step away from my creative involvement in The Last of Us on HBO.

1:31:38Dustin Furman:With work completed on season two and before any meaningful work starts on season three, now is the right time for me to transition my complete focus to Naughty Dog and its future projects, including writing and directing our exciting next game, Intergalactic, The Heretic Prophet, along with my responsibilities as studio head and head of creative. Co-creating the show has been a career highlight. It's been an honor to work alongside Craig Mazin to executive produce, direct, and write on the last two seasons. I'm deeply thankful for the thoughtful approach and dedication the talented cast and crew took to adapting The Last of Us Part 1 and the continued adaptation of The Last of Us Part 2, end quote.

1:32:09Dustin Furman:Very interesting news. Aram wrote in and says, hey guys, as I'm sure you've heard, Naughty Dog's Neil Druckmann is stepping away from The Last of Us on HBO to focus on the studio and developing Intergalactic. I can't help but feel that the second season's metrics not reaching the heights of season one may have influenced his decision. And dare I say, might have left HBO a bit unimpressed. Dustin, what are your thoughts on this news?

1:32:32Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I think there's multiple ways to look at it. First of all, they are at the point where with Intergalactic and assuming some other projects that they really do need his full focus as they are trying to ship these games. And being a showrunner on HBO show, I'm sure is very time consuming. so that makes a lot of sense that now is a clean breaking point um from my perspective it's hard to tell like with this most recent season season two uh i think universally people agree it was not as good as the first season diverted made a lot of changes um some scenes just read completely differently and not in good ways.

1:33:24Colin Moriarty:I don't know if that was Craig Mazin. I have to assume it is and not Neil. So to me, I wonder if there was already some conflict in the writer's room between them. This is pure speculation, no idea. And it was getting to the point where Neil felt like he might've just, this might not have been for him anymore maybe he was getting in the way because the episode that he directed of the show was awesome um probably the best episode of that season so for me this less of us on hbo already was massively down for me and based on my assumptions of neil's involvement with season two or the lack thereof in certain ways.

1:34:17Colin Moriarty:I have very little optimism for season three now, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

1:34:26Dustin Furman:What are your thoughts, Chris, on Neil stepping back from the HBO show and moving back into his tasks at Naughty Dog? I will say, I mean, to preface your answer is that when we spoke on sacred symbols plus weeks ago, he did note that like, We talked about the cycle of like people cycling out of games and into TV and movies and kind of never coming back and that he was really a game maker first. And so maybe he was kind of alluding to this move ultimately.

1:34:54Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I don't know. I think my instinct is to say that the the write up isn't wrong. You know, like I do think that Naughty Dog probably doesn't need their studio head back, especially as they like start ramping up. I mean, it's July 2025. This Heretic Profit game is, you know, presumably about a year away. No more than that, I think. You think so? Yeah. Unfortunately. Presumably like bare minimum a year and like some odd months, you know, and so like you got to get your guy back in. And I also just feel like it might not be all that hard to fathom that people are not having a great time with The Last of Us 2 again.

1:35:42Colin Moriarty:I don't know if this is really an environment that I want to be in again. I think it's a completely human thing. It's like, all right, people are being weird about the cast. People are being parasocial about the actors. and you know I feel like he did what he could and it's kind of like a bucket list thing it's like I got to direct for HBO cool I'm going to go back to my job now

1:36:08Dustin Furman:you know yeah I don't think

1:36:09Colin Moriarty:I don't read too deeply into it yeah I don't

1:36:11Dustin Furman:I don't think there's he's you know Neil's written other things like comics and stuff like that like he yeah he wants to be like a multi media writer but I do think he's a game maker first and I do feel like people are a little too hard on. Listen, like, do I have a bias? Yes. So take what I say with a grain of salt. I mean, I should present it that way. But I feel like it's fairly clear that people are blaming him for what is going wrong with the HBO show when I think it's fairly clear it's not him. And if anything, it's his lack of involvement. Or like, I don't want to say lack of involvement, that he's not involved more is what stopped it from being better.

1:36:57I'm looking now at season two. It's like episode one written by Craig Mazin,

1:37:04Dustin Furman:episode two written by Craig Mazin, episode three written by Craig Mazin, episode four written by Craig Mazin, episode five written by Craig Mazin. He doesn't even start co-writing until the sixth and seventh episodes in which Craig is the lead writer along with Hallie Gross, who wrote, co-wrote The Last of Us Part II, the game. He directed one episode, which I would argue is, maybe the best episode of the season, which is The Price, where they go to the museum. And so I think the show is worse off without him. And I think that... And again, I don't speak with him about his work stuff and think like we don't...

1:37:47Dustin Furman:So none of this is coming from any conversations we've had or whatever. It's just like my assumption is that he has to make a choice. because there isn't enough, there aren't enough hours in the day to do everything to the proper degree. And why associate yourself with something that's not quite the way you would have made it probably if you did it yourself. And again, I don't know that for sure, but that's kind of my feeling on it. In other words, if he had the, he is the head of Naughty Dog. It's not like he's just the director of Intergalactic. And he's also the producer of their unannounced game, which some people think is an uncharted game.

1:38:21And it's like, that's a huge,

1:38:24Dustin Furman:huge it's like me with last stand and then having lily mo very different things of course but it's like i can barely pay attention to lily mo i have like my hands full and it's probably frustrating to see something be poorly received or more poorly received by many people although again that's relative because a lot of people really loved it it seems like people that aren't familiar with the games really love the show like my sister i was using as an anecdotal piece of evidence like she has no idea about the drama around the game and like that doesn't she's like this is fucking awesome. I can't wait for season three.

1:38:54Dustin Furman:So I don't want to be too harsh on it, but I think it's probably difficult to kind of tangentially be involved with something, but not involved enough to have your hands deepened enough to have crafted it deep and molded the clay deep enough, but then people still stamp your name on it. And I wouldn't want to be in that position. Now that's just, that's just me spitballing. That might not be it at all, but I feel like there's, there's probably something to that, especially because if they haven't started work on the new season yet they're not going to film it till next year and it won't be out probably till 2027 and he's going to be fucking ass deep in intergalactic by that point i mean now you're going to start talking about when the game's going to start coming out and stuff so there's no you got to make a choice and i think he's more valuable to the gaming industry than he is the film and television i think he knows that and it's probably exhausting to have all he has kids and shit you know like it's probably really demanding so that's my i mean i don't have any other thoughts other than that i i do think it's interesting though and i'm glad he made the choice he made because someone like that could be will be and would be and probably was being courted in many different directions but knowing a person like neil like what i think he would think is like what when you've risen to the head of a studio in which you were the intern for at one point which he was and now you lead the studio and you direct their games and stuff it's like you've made it you're at the top of the mountain you don't want anything else and i get that so yeah that's awesome that's what i used to want at ign i started as the intern and i rose and rose and rose to senior editor and stopped but it's like i had dreams of being like you know the bottom to top kind of person too and i get that so these are all just notions and ideas who the hell knows what's in his head i have not to talk to him about it so all right neil get to work on intergalactic all right guys uh i saw this piece that's been circulating on the tech website tom's guide entitled ps5 pro is getting a big upgrade in 2026 and i asked mark cerny that that being them what's coming and why amd's future pc gpus feel more playstation than ever so the big thing i took out of this there were two things that I took out of this that I thought were interesting, but I kind of told you guys I need you to study this piece and explain it to me a little bit better because this is kind of out of my wheelhouse.

1:41:14Dustin Furman:I'm not a technical person, as everyone knows. You shouldn't listen to me on that sort of thing. But the two, so Dustin, tell me if I'm right about this. The two big things here is that PS5 Pro is getting an update to the PSSR upscaling technology next year that will make the games even better looking, apparently. and that the PS6 is a real thing now that's being bandied about and worked on. And you see a vacillation of dates kind of noted, not in this piece, but just other places where some people are saying 27 or 28, some people are saying 28 or 29. But it seems like Sony's in bed with AMD to work on something.

1:41:58Dustin Furman:This connects in some way to, I guess, this Project Amethyst that's being worked on between PlayStation and AMD. So explain to me what's going on here.

1:42:08Colin Moriarty:Yeah, so PSSR, PlayStation Super Sampling. I can't remember. What it does is it works like DLSS or FSR, which it uses an AI algorithm in that the game can render it like, I don't know, 900p, 1080p, and then it uses AI to upscale the image. So your device itself is rendering at a lower whatever, a lower resolution, and then it's using AI to get the rest of the way there. So because there's less strain on the hardware, you're able to do more things. That's not just like brute forcing either the resolution of the frame rate. So in the PC space with DLSS, we have seen things where they've updated the algorithm in order for it to run better.

1:43:02Colin Moriarty:There's less AI artifacting. In fact, there's even programs where there's older games that run on an older model of DLSS that you can inject the new model in order to get a better image overall. So my assumption, this is kind of the same thing happening here, is that they are continually working on and improving PSSR. And so it'll be neat that through a software upgrade, you're going to see an improvement on PS5 Pro without needing new hardware. It's just going to be a software update because they're continually working on PSSR to make it better. I'm curious about how significant this will be.

1:43:47Colin Moriarty:I'm playing Death Stranding 2 right now, which we're going to talk about that uses PSSR. I assume I guess I should double check that. I would assume it does. but even other games that use PSSR, you can kind of see the cracks in it every now and then, whether it's like in darker scenes, it being a little grainy in Silent Hill two, you could definitely see some of the ghosting of different particles on the screen. And both of those are results or artifacts of upscaling via AI. So yeah, it's, it's interesting. They talk a lot in this article about how AMD and Sony are working together. That's Project Amethyst.

1:44:29Colin Moriarty:And so they're working on this together in that you're going to see those improvements on PS5, but also in AMD cards in general on PC. And my big question is that Xbox is working with AMD for their next hardware platform, whatever that is. and the future of game rendering is is ai uh ai upscaling ai frame generation things like that so in a way it seems like we're going some of that playstation technology and research is going into possibly that next xbox as well not that xbox is going to be running their brand of pssr but certainly it's going to use FSR 4, which is FidelityFX Super Resolution.

1:45:18Colin Moriarty:So the same concept though. So it definitely seems like PS5 Pro, and I think they mentioned this early on, is that this is their, they are really working out the kinks on this technology. And so this is going to be one of the primary things in PlayStation 5 Pro is using AI in all these different ways to make games better.

1:45:43Dustin Furman:Chris, are you compelled by anything in this article? I shared this with you guys on Discord yesterday because it really is a little, I mean, I don't want to say a little, really out of my wheelhouse, but it's been wildly reported, widely reported everywhere. And so you guys being much more technical than me, I figured we'd present it through your lens.

1:46:02Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I mean, look, I got to be real. I do feel like the PS5 Pro as it exists or just PlayStation in general as it exists, for my needs is, is completely fine. Like as long as I'm hitting frame rates that I, that I deem appropriate, like I really don't care about like the deeper, you know, hidden masses of quality that I might like, that I might not be seeing. So a lot of this is like, it's, it's good to know about. It's good to know that it's being worked on and things are improving or, but like, I don't, I don't know if it really materially changes things for me in any real way and until we until I start seeing games run like ps4 games again you know in which case I'll be like you know the first person to be like yo yeah let's get this sorted please yeah but I don't get excited

1:46:57Dustin Furman:about graphical stuff really myself anymore like jeep like it's clear that their focus on and I know that graphical could also be frame rate obviously but I'm talking about like the aesthetic, the resolution, the depth of the picture and all the rest like color quality and everything. I think that's all really cool, but it's clear that. Because I agree with you, I'd rather have a pretty game that runs really well. And it's clear that we seem to be in the minority on this, that people want these really beautiful pictures and they're really focused on making it happen. And while for me, I'm like, damn, this I look at Death Stranding, too.

1:47:36Dustin Furman:I have not started playing it, but I just see people's screenshots from photo mode and stuff. And I'm like, this is pretty fucking impressive. I mean, it's it's getting to a point where I'm like, I don't know how much more. More real you want it to get, and I can't really understand what the push for better graphics are, like the finer graphics and the high resolution stuff, unless you're going for. You know, realistic aesthetics, which is cool, but it's not necessarily what I'm looking for. I'm like, everything's kind of good now. I want you to maximize what you can do inside a game now, as opposed to the way the game looks, you know, more dynamic NPCs and AI and quests and things like that.

1:48:15Dustin Furman:Like that's more interesting to me.

1:48:17Colin Moriarty:The thing to me too, that really takes a lot of the wins out of the sales is that like, I've just, I feel like we've reached, we reached a point a long time ago, I think where how good a game looks really isn't about the hardware anymore. It's really more about like the dev talent. like because i look at i look at something like um red dead redemption 2 on the ps4 right and red dead redemption 2 on the ps4 looks gorgeous it's a beautiful game and i look at that and i'm like well that's on a ps4 so clearly like even if you had twice this power five times this power it's like cool your average your average game is going to look better that's nice but i'm ultimately it really still comes down to like well look what rockstar did with the ps4 i wonder what they're going to do with the ps5 you know what i mean it's it's more about like the devs individually anyway at this point where you know a game looking good is no longer impressive to me because i just know it's relatively trivial compared to how it used to be so so so so long ago um so while i think a lot of my fair share of digital foundry videos where i like i watch them and i am interested although i have no idea what's going on but i nod along like i do like i like i know what the fuck they're talking about like oh yeah of course yeah the pixel density yeah yeah yeah yeah i find it i

1:49:44Dustin Furman:find it kind of boring personally but i i appreciate that people are into it and that it matters to them and obviously it is foundational to the to our the video games we play but yeah i'm the technology is then again dude like don't listen to people like me because true i probably would have said this five other times in games history like when i first saw a fucking ps2 game

1:50:05Colin Moriarty:or something holy fuck the bouncer is crazy this is the the shadows in like the original splinter cell you're like how could it get better than this it right like i remember water specifically

1:50:19Dustin Furman:in like the ps2 gamecube xbox era where i was like damn there's something some really like wind waker and i was like these games are beautiful stylistic obviously yeah and then uh ps3 the same thing seeing game early games like heavenly sword and and you're like damn and so so don't listen to me but it's something it's something worth uh noting nonetheless ps5 pro getting its pssr update in 2026 and then some chatter about playstation 6 as well and we'll see i mean i i wanted oh i'm sorry go ahead oh no no no i was gonna say like we have to start we have to start getting our minds right that we have to start talking about playstation 6 earnestly soon and you're about to find out why but how does that strike you been doing the show for a long time

1:51:13Colin Moriarty:that's so disgusting man like i i don't i don't like that at all because it doesn't feel and again it's it's not even necessarily about the fact that we've been doing the show for that long to enough to see this happen but more so that like this generation has been so uniquely i i look i know that the sparseness of things to play on this generation has been greatly over over exaggerated but like the the output per per developer per studio with the exception of insomniac who's actually been doing a pretty good job upholding a fairly old school cadence um it's it feels like it hasn't really even happened yet it kind of feels like it's at the beginning still um in a lot of ways and so and i'm sure a lot of that has to do with the weird time warp of the pandemic those those weird two years but yeah it's uncomfortable that the ps6 is just like not a a joke hypothetical anymore no it's not because i remember i remember distinctly when we started the show that that was that sounded absurd like when we started this it's like a ps6 it's insane what are your thoughts how do you feel in your and are you girding your loins um i'm excited i don't know for me it's it's i'm in a weird spot because with pc and having a a 4090 i would be really surprised if a ps6 is as good as a 4090 um so i kind of feel like i'm already uh like the way that pc graphics have been moving compared to console graphics which they are different demographics at very different price points.

1:52:58Colin Moriarty:And I think that's something important to point out. But either way, I still end up playing most of my games on a console because it's just easier and convenient. I like playing on a couch. So we used to have console cycles that were five years. I don't know. I just don't feel like I'm ready to start talking about PS6. I guess. Too bad. surprised by it.

1:53:26Dustin Furman:It's too bad because it sounds like Fire Sprite is hiring for a PlayStation 6 game. That's our next... Oh, hey, Colin.

1:53:31Colin Moriarty:I was waiting to make a correction on myself, but I didn't want to interrupt you, but now I have to. Death Stranding 2 I don't think uses PSSR. You wrote a comment about it. Delete it. I don't want you to delete it. I want you to edit and apologize. Just quickly. I think it's because Decima uses their own in-house scaling technology. I was wrong about that. Um,

1:53:56Dustin Furman:please, please burn me at the stake. By the way, we're going to talk a little bit about this because I beat director's cut, um, a day or two ago. And, um, Insomniac and bend are in the credits. Hmm. Interesting. Pretty interesting. Um, but speaking of first party studios, as I was segwaying before fire sprite, this is of course the Sony owned studio over in Liverpool. school england that is best known ignominiously for horizon call of the mountain although they made the game the persistence which was a fairly well respected horror game that was originally psvr and then they brought it over to be playable on you know just normally on a normal screen and then they did call the mountain and they're working on a new game we don't really know exactly what it is but i thought so this job listing is circulating because it seems to indicate maybe a little bit about the nature of the game that it's triple a story driven and all of that.

1:54:53Dustin Furman:And so people are focusing on that, but I'm like, what are people missing about what I think is the most interesting part of this? So here's what it says, quote, we are looking for an experience driven planner with a background in cinematic production for games. You will be leading interdisciplinary teams. And I don't know why the L is capitalized and leading, including camera VFX and lighting artists, editors, cinematic designers, and animators. You are an expert in collaborating across cinematic fields to make memorable, emotional, and cinematic experiences with a strong understanding of narrative, cinematic production, and post-production pipelines within video games.

1:55:25Dustin Furman:This is an ambitious AAA project with a heavy focus on atmosphere, storytelling, player agency, and immersion into groundbreaking territory on next-generation hardware technologies. Seems pretty blatant to me. And as I saw the various websites reporting on this, I'm like, no one is talking about it. It says next generation hardware technologies. It's a PlayStation six game. Chris, what are your thoughts?

1:55:51Colin Moriarty:I mean, why not? Let's let's get it over with. Let's just pull the bandaid. Put it out now. Get the machine out now. Yeah, I mean, look, it's I can't say I'm necessarily all that interested in. look it's cool that we're getting these now or it's interesting that we're getting these now and the language is a lot more clear where it's just like yeah this is clearly PS6 I didn't play Call of the Mountain I heard almost exclusively negative to almost worse than negative which was kind of apathetic commentary about the game so I can't say I'm necessarily all that peaked I don't know if my interest is all that peaked by this studio making something for next gen specifically but it is interesting that it's it's kind of open with the language and it's like oh well this is happening now full steam ahead um for ps6 um I don't know man it's it feels so weird

1:56:52Dustin Furman:still to be even saying that Dustin am I reading this right oh yeah certainly next generation

1:57:01Colin Moriarty:hardware. It's interesting. They're not working on a VR game, but not surprising.

1:57:07Dustin Furman:Yeah, that would be a waste

1:57:08Colin Moriarty:at this point. Sony's first party VR days are over. Enjoy your global warming demo, whatever. That's the best you're getting.

1:57:19Dustin Furman:It is funny how they never really were able to get anything meaningful spooled up internally. Not that they tried very much, but even a game like Rigs, which I thought was kind of cool. It wasn't a game people really cared about. They just, and I think call the mountain was, I didn't finish. I was like, this is fucking boring.

1:57:39Dustin Furman:Yep.

1:57:40Colin Moriarty:Yeah. So I'm curious to see what this, what this team can do outside of the, the VR space. And so kind of be their first really big outing for Sony because call the mountain as, as we've been saying was cool. it's cool to get that triple a vr experience visually technically beautiful game just not very great to play so um the game part of it was yeah the whole game part was kind of made so the whole central thesis for why it exists right right right um so people can go check this

1:58:19Dustin Furman:out on the playstation careers page if you want it's always a good place that if you're a nerd you can troll around there and find things this is for a lead cinematic producer um in liverpool for fire sprite and um i'm particularly interested in this part of it because i think that it shows that they're looking for someone of a high enough skill that they're going to have room to maneuver it says ideally quote ideally individuals to be based in the studio for one to three days per week to take advantage of on-site shoot facilities but we may consider those who have a preference for remote working in the UK, end quote.

1:58:55Dustin Furman:When you see things like that, they're looking for a very high caliber person, in my opinion, because those are the kinds of people that can really move around and easily find positions if you are able to exercise remote working potential, even in this far post-COVID era where a lot of people are being sent back to the office. I think that's pretty interesting. All right. Well, keep an eye out on that, I guess. I'm sure we'll see more of this. that they are basically, I don't want to say they missed the generation because they really didn't. They made a PS5 game technically, but.

1:59:31Dustin Furman:OK, this is interesting to me and huge news, actually, in that EA Sports and 2K Sports are both hinting that they are going to bring back college basketball. And EA Sports hasn't published a college basketball game since 2009. and I think it's even been earlier since 2K published one, but they both had fairly vibrant products. 2K College Hoops, I think was one of them in college, EA College Basketball, I think was the other one. I know you guys won't have anything to say about this, and frankly, I don't have much to say about it either. I'm not really, I like the game of basketball. I think the game of basketball is dope, but I'm not a college basketball fan by any stretch of the imagination, so I don't watch it, but I know how big it is.

2:00:16Dustin Furman:Very, I'm a sports person. I'm always, I always got SportsCenter on in the background. If I'm, you know, dicking around in the living room or whatever and you know listening to sports podcasts and so i'm i'm aware of the things that are going around and similar to college football though not anywhere to the degree of college football um college basketball has always been big but it is seems to becoming bigger and more mainstream and now is the time to jump and leap into these these products especially because from the player there's no player associations really covering college athletics but from the player association type perspective there's money to be made now these guys can make$500 ,000 or whatever each appearing on the rosters of these various games.

2:00:53Dustin Furman:And I was reading a piece from a website that covers, I guess, the economics of sports. It really has nothing to do with games. But the guy was basically saying, it was a substack, and he was basically saying that there was really no intention of ever returning to college basketball until EA's college football came back and was so huge that according to this person, it even broke EA's own internal high end projections. That's like, that's how big it was. And as we said, it was arguably the biggest game of the year in the United States, which is crazy. And so I think they looked at that and said, man, if we could even get half of that from college basketball.

2:01:33Now, the interesting thing here, and again, you guys wouldn't know or care about this,

2:01:37Dustin Furman:but sports game fans will know this well, is that EA used to make an NBA game that they would intermittently release in more recent years and then they just stopped releasing them you guys remember like they canceled it one year they like released it and then walked away from it one year they didn't even announce one one year i think it was called nba elite and then i think in 17 or 18 they just stopped making them completely the nba scene on in gaming is now dominated by take two and 2k is arguably the best selling and most important sports game in the united states at least before college football came back out um so just from the rivalry between ea sports and 2k in which they really don't like ea doesn't make an nba game um but 2k doesn't make a hockey game and 2k doesn't make a football game but you know uh ea doesn't or until recently didn't make a tennis game so they kind of like they almost had like a comcast verizon cartel situation going on you know what i mean we're like just coincidentally you can't have any choice with your cable provider.

2:02:41Dustin Furman:But so this is an interesting thing where they're both going after the same prize. And I do think Take-Two has a huge advantage because they already have a basketball product, not only up and running, but one that is incredibly popular that they can build off of. So I won't put it to you guys to talk any further about it, but I wanted to acknowledge that that happened. And then finally, just a little bit of fun news here. This comes from Yahoo, but everyone's talking about this. The Street Fighter live action movie is being cast. And I I was curious if you guys had any thoughts on who's playing who and anything that makes sense to you.

2:03:11Dustin Furman:We have Jason Momoa as Blanca, for instance. Kalina Liang as Chun-Li, one of my favorites. Anything stand out to you, Dustin? Oh, 50 Cent as Balrog.

2:03:25Colin Moriarty:The one that is odd to me is that Andrew Scholes is in this movie as Dan. Oh, Dan.

2:03:32Dustin Furman:Yeah, Dan's a joke character in Street Fighter. Interesting. Interesting.

2:03:37Colin Moriarty:Now, I'm looking at it because I was trying to find an article that had photos of all the actors. This describes him as a comedian and manosphere podcaster. Boys, are we manosphere podcasters?

2:03:49Dustin Furman:I hope not. But we are inherently. We have a very male dominated audience, but that's not. I don't think we're in them. So maybe we're in the manosphere. I don't know. Are we in the manosphere? I saw that casting and I thought that was interesting. But if you know Street Fighter, Dan is like a. Do you know anything about Dan? he's like an awesome character he comes from i believe street fighter alpha one um is i think the first game he was in but he's in the in the same vein as a ryu and ken but he's like calm he like doesn't know what he's doing so like he throws a fireball but it just it stops like right in front of him or he does like a hurricane kick but he only does one hurricane kick because he's like not as talented as as ken and ryu and it's super awesome like he's like you can really play as him and actually win as him but it's super awesome because he's like basically an inhibited ryu character ryu character ken character and ken has been my guy for a long time um so it's really really funny and he's like super he has like bravado and he's super arrogant and i remember in street fighter alpha 2 everyone has a super move or whatever and his super move was just to like it was just to taunt you like it didn't do any damage he would he would just like talk shit like like wave his fist or whatever it was it was super cool so yeah that that casting through that lens makes sense in my opinion um dan habiki dan habiki uh chris any thoughts here on the casting

2:05:09Colin Moriarty:are we in the manosphere chris i don't think so no manosphere is so specific where like it's it's like uh the man when i think of a manosphere podcast i think of those like uh just like a bunch of people sitting at a table and they have like uh i don't know an only fans model on and they just like trasher or something and it's just like that's the whole show and it's just like i don't know it's weird it's weird stuff but um as far as the casting like dude i don't know street fighter enough to know if this is good or bad like my first instinct when i saw andrew schultz was like what why why it's almost like kevin hart in borderlands where i'm just like you don't need

2:05:49Dustin Furman:you don't need these well it is a little weird just i don't know i don't know andrew schultz's like build but ken is jacked that i'm not sorry that ken dan is jacked which is another funny part of it andrew schultz is definitely not yeah so that's that's gonna be like a miss is like he is like a jacked character like i mean yeah um yeah no i i think i think andrew schultz is weird

2:06:09Colin Moriarty:like he presents like he wants to be but he's very clearly not i don't know andrew schultz is weird like i've seen some of his comedy and i like it but like every time i see him on a podcast he comes across is like very i don't know it's almost like the it's like reverse charisma i don't know

2:06:26Dustin Furman:it's crazy i you guys have to look up dan gameplay at some point it's so fun like it's so funny like what he does like i just love how he has like a hadouken but it just like it like it only is useful if the guys are right in front of you and then it disappears off the screen it's really cool dance all right and like yeah the hurricane kick with just one kick instead of like going in the air all right all right my boys it's time to talk about what we're playing um i'll go first i'm and i can go relatively quickly although we have some inquiries i want to get through i guess uh death stranding director's cut still playing it uh but i did beat it once you get it's funny the middle of the game is so it's not bloated it's fun but there's no pacing to the chapters there are there are chapters that like are 20 minutes long and then there are chapters that you can literally play for 25 hours so by the time you get to the end of the game it you actually get to kind of a point of no return you can after the point of no return the game cleverly does figure out a way to put you back into the world so you can finish what you were doing but um which i i didn't do the first time i played the game and when i discovered that i was like oh that's really cool how they do that but um once you reach that point of no return you're like five chapters away from the end but only like five hours probably and most of it is cut scenes so i beat it it's awesome i have I have some complaints about it in that I think this is what I said the first time Chris and I covered it back in 2019 is it's most fun when you don't have to fight and even the director's cut adding a lot of things to make fighting easier and more pleasurable as it were I just feel like the game would have been much better to have been focused on non-violence and in fact compare to contrast the nonviolence of the potential game with the violence of the world as opposed to making you participate in it and i still think it's the worst part of the game um but i think the the story is awesome the characters are awesome the voice acting is awesome and the delivery gameplay is so fun has no business being so fun and i'm sure death straining 2 takes that to a whole nother level and i'll let you guys get into that but i um just want to give my compliments to the game again i actually went and looked at my trophies for the ps4 version after i beat the game and it's crazy how much more complete i played at this time so like i didn't even get the trophy for doing like 55 standard orders or something in the first time i played it which i got like really quickly this time around i didn't get the trophy for getting 50 000 likes i have like 320 000 likes in my game right now so i'm playing it so much more deeply and i think i've gotten so much more out of it from playing it that way.

2:09:10Dustin Furman:So while the game I think is imperfect, it is unlike anything and I highly recommend it. Let's see here. Jay Bird wrote in and said, hello boys. I have a rather deep and heavy inquiry this week. Wait a second. Hold on. Is that a new road that can be built? It must be built. Every road must be built. Every road must be maintained. Every road must be built. Every road must be maintained. I can't stop. Someone please help. Wait, I see a new road that can be built. I get it. I just get it. I do hate the time fall decay of the things you built that you have to maintain things. It's a little annoying, but I get it.

2:09:46Dustin Furman:What is, what is Sam Porter bridges wearing by the way that allows him to go unaffected and why isn't everything made of that?

2:09:56Yeah,

2:09:57Colin Moriarty:I don't know. the fragile has that umbrella too, right? Yeah. Just build everything out of that.

2:10:04Dustin Furman:Right. Like I'm just, I guess I'm just curious, like, you know, Sam has his suit on. He's unaffected by the time fall. He has packages on his back made of metal that are affected by the time fall. Yeah. It's like just place a get like a little cape and pop it over the packages and then nothing affected by the time fall.

2:10:27Colin Moriarty:Isn't that something you can get in the game?

2:10:30Dustin Furman:I didn't get anything like that, but maybe I think there

2:10:34Colin Moriarty:is even the first test training. There's like

2:10:37Dustin Furman:a cover for your packages oh yeah i don't i don't i never built that but i have to do the trophy for building everything so i will eventually build it yeah believe me i'm pretty sure yeah i think

2:10:46Colin Moriarty:you're right because i think i remember seeing like it's like it's like a foil or something that goes around it's like a space i believe you i i didn't i didn't build almost anything in the game

2:10:56Dustin Furman:except for roads and i would make the occasional gun or vehicle you know like a car or whatever or the little rover van or whatever fucking Volvo. Vicolus wrote in and said, howdy, home slices. Let me start by saying LSM is my favorite podcast and gaming news source. And I played and I've been listening since day one. Thank you. But I find myself getting earnestly mad when I hear Colin talk about playing Death Stranding for as long as he is. This isn't just a Death Stranding thing. I kind of get mad anytime I hear you LSM or you people at LSM are taking 100 plus hours to finish games as I age.

2:11:28Dustin Furman:And I'm now into my 30s with a full time job and other responsibilities to attend to. I have significantly less time to play games, but I have no less interest in games as a hobby. And it can often feel like people who play games for 100 plus hours are almost flaunting their free time in my face. Let me be clear. I don't think that any of you are doing. I don't think that this is what any of you are doing. And I want people to play games how they enjoy. But I guess I almost feel left behind by the games industry and gaming news shows like I can't enjoy games how I want while I listen to people who get to do it for their job.

2:11:55Dustin Furman:Are you getting a full experience that I am for playing for 100 hours? It can often feel that way. Like I'm not getting the experience the full game with my limited free time and there are games i might enjoy but shouldn't even bother with there's not really a question here just some statements about my weird feeling on listening to new shows maybe i need to take a break or maybe this is my new normal anyway lsm is the absolute best and i am stoked to hear your thoughts on death stranding too i thought this was an interesting letter it was mildly funny a little sarcastic but there's something here to it that i understand and i feel this way about sports as we were talking about it earlier, something you guys can't relate to, but a lot of the audience certainly can.

2:12:33I watch every Jets game every year and I have for many years, but that's very manageable.

2:12:38Dustin Furman:It's one game a week for 17 games now and the Jets never make the playoffs. So there's nothing after that. And so if you have to make up, if you have to plan your life around one game a week or like plan to just be available, that's easy enough. But when I was younger, I was a huge huge baseball fan, huge, loved baseball. And I was a huge Yankees fan. And I shit you not, when I was 14, 15, 16, 20, I would watch basically every Yankee game. That's 162 games plus playoffs to the point where you're watching six games a week on Yes Network in New York. And that became totally untenable by the time I was midway through college, where it's like, I have no time.

2:13:32Dustin Furman:Like, I used to look forward to it. The games usually would start at seven. If they were on the West Coast, they would start at 10 or whatever. You would like do what you had to do during the day. And then you kind of settle in. And it wasn't like you were actively engaged with all nine innings, but it would be on in the background or you'd be doing something else. And sometimes you would be engaged with it and you'd watch it. But I was always aware of it and I would never really miss anything. and then as I became older and I became busier and then I got a job and all these different things and like a real job and how to work and I couldn't do it anymore and I stopped watching baseball completely because I was like if I can't watch it to the to the way the way I want to watch it I don't even want to participate in it and Nicholas's letter kind of struck me because I was like yeah I can kind of relate I get exactly what you mean but here very similar to being a Yankee fan here's what you have to understand about gaming.

2:14:18Dustin Furman:A minority of baseball fans watch every game. I would argue most baseball fans miss most of the games. It's not possible to watch them all. There's life going on. You pay attention to the box score. You watch SportsCenter. You watch highlights, whatever. 13 % of people that play Death Stranding Director's Cut beat it. People that are spending 100 hours with it are in the vast minority of people. a vanishingly small amount of people have played it as extensively as I have. And you see people all around you by seemingly the millions that profess that they've gotten something meaningful out of this game.

2:14:57Dustin Furman:And they're not playing it as deeply. So there's a strata in which you're going to fall in time-wise, but you're going to get something out of it regardless. And you shouldn't worry about what other people are doing. But it's easier said than done. And that's why I wanted to bring it up because, again, I get it. it's exactly what happened to me with the Yankees. I started to resent like how I would turn on AM radio when I was at IGN, you know, doing my work and I would turn on like the radio module to listen to New York radio. And it would be these guys talking about the game last night and I missed it.

2:15:24Dustin Furman:And then I'm two games behind it. Then I'm three games behind it. I just don't have time to catch up. And it's like, yeah, fuck this. I get it. But try to disassociate yourself from that. If you can. Yeah. The great Santini wrote in and said, Hey, boys, with Death Stranding and its sequel currently on everyone's minds, a question has come to mind. Does anyone else play these games in offline mode? I played Death Stranding for the first time when the director's cut came out for PS5. I started my playthrough in the default online mode, but quickly came to lament how much of the game was already completed for me.

2:15:55Dustin Furman:Bridges were built, roads were largely completed, etc. I decided to switch to offline mode and had a great experience building everything myself. I just started Death Stranding 2 and have opted to stay offline once again. I can only assume this goes against the way Kojima intended these games to be played. But with that said, choosing where to play structures, gathering the materials for them, et cetera, are all parts of the phenomena, phenomenal and underrated gameplay mechanics that these games have to offer. I'm wondering how you guys feel about this. Do you agree? Disagree? Am I spinning on Kojima's vision here?

2:16:21Dustin Furman:Thanks for reading. And thanks for all the great content. I'm trying to, I wanted to read this letter because I'm trying to remember back to when Death Stranding first came out, we first played it. And we played it immediately when it came out. I remember. And we, I went and looked, we did our, I think our, I beat it in like late November. So probably that's like maybe a few weeks after it came out. And that was like when I was moving around and I was like a bad time in my life. But I was dedicated to beating it. And like I said earlier, I played it kind of incompletely, but I feel like I don't remember it being as populated with other people's shit as it is in director's cut.

2:16:55Dustin Furman:And I don't know if that just was the way it naturally became in the original too, as more people played it and ingested the game and then spit their own shit into the universe. But I feel like a lot of my enjoyment of Death Stranding director's cut came from not having to do all that shit, but rather focusing only on my thing, which was the roads. And watching the roads kind of get constructed by others, phantom builders as well. I don't know how much of it's algorithmic and how much of it's real. I don't really know. But like, other than when the game forces you to like build a power station, build a or a generator, build a bridge.

2:17:29It's like, otherwise I didn't build anything and just use other people's shit.

2:17:33Dustin Furman:And I feel like I would have been really frustrated if I had to play it offline. So I would imagine it's a radically different game if you're playing it offline. And that's like hardcore mode in Fallout or something. Yeah. I'd be like, I'm going to be responsible for building everything and I'm going to be responsible for maintaining everything. That's a lot, dude. I mean, that's like hundreds of hours, I would imagine, to do all that. All the timefall shelters, the random generators that come in the clutch, the fucking hidden rooms that you like delve into when you're in the middle of nowhere and you need to rest.

2:18:03Dustin Furman:I don't know. It seems like a lot to me. Are either of you guys playing? Did either of you play Death Stranding one or two offline? No, definitely not.

2:18:12Colin Moriarty:No, I feel like. In Death Stranding two or Death Stranding one, when I played it recently, a lot of stuff was built like a decent amount of roads, but certainly not all the roads. And that's also been my experience in Death Stranding two, that some of the roads are getting built on their own. but there is a lot of roads for me to build. And that's what I've been trying to figure out is that I'm getting a shit ton of likes from the roads I've built. I am. And my question is, is are other people just not building the roads? All right. Is there a small minority that are doing the service or is it the way the game is structured that it will build, it will let some of the roads be built by other players for you, but not all of them.

2:18:57Colin Moriarty:because I'm certainly reaping the rewards of building these roads in terms of likes. So I'm curious about how the game balances that.

2:19:06Dustin Furman:Yeah, like I am. I'm I've really looked into it too deeply and I'm sure it's well understood if you read about it, but you have like your social connections. I don't know how it is in Death Stranding 2, but like in the first one, you have your social connections and then the more you do in the game, the more social connections you can make. And so I wonder if it is just a random assortment of even in the credits, it says like here are all the people you played with very much like journey and i was like yeah that's cool are these people that like is it just a randomized thing where we're connected now because you can even go through each person's thing and like some of these people haven't been online in years like or haven't logged into the game in years and their stuff still appearing in my world so it's interesting like all of these instances are kept and then i guess put over each other in this very mystical way that i that i don't quite readily understand right and then it all starts decaying in your world, which sucks because it's like then you start getting messages and it's like I didn't even build that fucking thing.

2:20:00Dustin Furman:I don't care your timefall shelter near, you know, central not city is decaying or whatever. I'm like, all right, it's not mine. So all right. Anything else here to oh, the webs wrote in before I kick it over to you and says hello, LSI LS LSA simps. Oh, I see LSA simps. That's good. Colin, are you in danger of burnout by the time you play Death Stranding 2? I don't think so. I'm like really enjoying it. I'm different though than a lot of people. I could see people being different. I'm differently abled. Yes. I can see a lot of people being turned off and put off by playing these games back to back.

2:20:41Dustin Furman:And Micah even suggested to me, she's like, why don't you just play like Doom or something for like a few days? Because I haven't played the Dark Ages yet. And then moving to Death Stranding 2. And I'm like, yeah, maybe I'll do that. But I feel like I'm feeling good. I'm enjoying. I'm not. I'm also thinking that here's the problem. You guys can tell me what you think. I'm like ready to go into Death Stranding 2. And I'm sticking with Death Stranding because I want to clean up the Platinum Trophy. I wonder if I should just go on to the second game, but as I understand the second game changes some fundamental controls.

2:21:16Dustin Furman:In other words, I know how to play this game right now and I really feel like I should just put my shoulder into it and get it over with and then just move on it's definitely yeah you should definitely do that so that's what i'm doing now

2:21:27Colin Moriarty:yeah go well because i played like a little bit of death stranding director's cut um before going into deciding to assuming that not much would have changed in the way of controls just to kind of get acquainted with it so i didn't fumble at the beginning of death stranding or at the beginning of the stranding too when i got it and uh there's enough there that is actually quite different um menu wise uh some buttons are different i can't remember off the top of my head which button is

2:21:50Dustin Furman:like i heard they reverse like even the buttons of like getting in and out of vehicles and stuff

2:21:54Colin Moriarty:like just weird things like that that are just muscle memory that are yeah so i i would i would honestly just say just like if you're if you're that deep into death stranding director's cut just just finish it just just do what you got to do because it's going to be a pain in the ass going back and reacquainting yourself with the controls just for like a a brief closing period with with the first game after finishing the second one so yeah i just put your

2:22:21Dustin Furman:shoulder into it just just finish it yeah i think i will like what i what's remaining for me is you have to do the legend of legends deliveries which are only on hard or above which is why i've been playing the game on hard and i beat the whole game on hard i did drop the difficulty uh in two boss fights that were multi that were annoying me because they were like three or four parts and if you died in like the third part you'd have to go all i'm like i'm not fucking doing this like this is so fucking annoying specifically with it's not it's not a spoiler i don't think it's um specifically with cliff like a couple of those fights where i'm like this is so fucking annoying it's not hard it's just like like the the fights in the in with the huge enemies like the kaiju style enemies were so much easier and hard than than the these other ones anyway um so what i have to do is i have to do the 80 legends of legends um deliveries and you have to do 20 in each category so it's like 20 by volume 20 miscellaneous 20 by time whatever and i'm slowly chipping away at those and i'm probably like halfway through that or whatever and then i have to find the the data chips which are like the collectibles that i didn't find which i didn't find probably 40 of them or something so that's going to probably take like a couple of days for me to do i have to find like a map and figure that out and then once that's done everything else that i have to do is just building and upgrading things and i have so many supplies at all the different not cities and distribution centers that i think i'll be okay it's just going to take like time and i'm going to need like a checklist of everything i have to do the one thing that i read on psn profiles and i just learned this recently which i didn't know and this sucks but i'm going to do it oh i'm going to try i think i'll be able to do it is that there is a they added races to the game and oh yeah the races don't have to be beaten per se except that there's a trophy for constructing all the blueprints and you earn two blueprints by beating certain races.

2:24:08Dustin Furman:Those aren't in the original one, but are in the new one. I was like, damn, that fucking sucks. The vehicle control is really bad in the game, I think by design. I got to figure that out, but I think I can do it. I was really intimidated by the Mafia Definitive Edition race, and that was really tough, but that I did that. And I don't think that that hopefully this will not be that hard. So, so yeah, I hope by the, I don't want to be too ambitious, but by the end of the weekend, maybe midweek, I'll be on to Death Stranding 2 and have put this game away. But I've really, really enjoyed my time with it.

2:24:42Dustin Furman:So shout out to Death Stranding Director Scott. If you own the original Death Stranding digitally, it's a$10 upgrade and it's well worth it. And you can even send it. Oh, physically too? If you have it physically, you can pop the disc in and then get the$10 upgrade. Oh, interesting. I wonder what stops people. I didn't know that they did that because you could just share your disc with people. Right? Yeah. I mean, they would each have to buy the$10 upgrade. Right, right. But they wouldn't have to buy. Yeah. So I'm surprised by that.

2:25:06Colin Moriarty:You still need that disc to pop in every time to run the director's cut upgrade.

2:25:12Dustin Furman:Oh, I see. That makes sense. Yeah. That makes sense. So yeah, shout out to that. Highly recommend it. And it runs so much better and it's such a joy to play. But again, I just think less combat, less confrontation, I think would have actually benefited the game, made it feel more sorrowful, more scary. If you're truly defenseless, but that's neither here nor there. And maybe the second game gets more into that. All right, guys, let's leave it over to you. Chris, since you're playing two games, we'll go to Dustin first and then he'll segue to you and you can talk about the straining and then get what you're playing as well.

2:25:41Colin Moriarty:all right so Dustin take it away sure Death Stranding 2 I am I think I'm on episode 9 my percentage on the PlayStation home menu itself I think is around 60 so I'm pretty balls deep in at this point and I absolutely love it this game fucking rules it's everything you loved about Death Stranding 1 but better uh I really also I'm still at the point where I really don't I don't know what people are going to be mad about and what they aren't going to be mad about, even in terms of gameplay mechanics. So I guess some other broad strokes things that I've picked up on since last week is that this game is a lot more silly.

2:26:31Colin Moriarty:It's a lot more Kojima. It feels more Kojima in a specific way in that I think for Death Stranding 1, it still had some Kojima silliness in it, but it felt like it was reigned in. This is I think it was Gene who maybe on Twitter or something said this is Kojima unleashed. and i'm surprised continually as i'm many many hours into this game at this point that there are new things being introduced that are either fucking awesome or hilarious like i cannot believe he put this in the fucking game type stuff i will not spoil those things and there are there are many of them where I'm like holy shit he I think there was like a lot of Kojima when he was making this game and the team were like I think there were points where he's like oh I think this is cool just randomly out and about this is cool I should put this in the game like Kojima-san will that fit?

2:27:35Colin Moriarty:I don't care put it in the game and it works at least for me it works I think there are some things in this game that people are going to see like this

2:27:44Dustin Furman:is lame as hell it uh and that's fair it's funny man you say that because i was thinking the same i mean i'm sorry to interrupt you but and i don't play the second game yet but i was thinking a very similar thing as i was playing death stranding specifically looking at like die hardman and heart man and all these things where i'm like this is so fucking stupid yeah and yet it's so awesome why is it so awesome everything he seems to do is awesome like i don't think you can juice this guy up enough in a lot of ways like there's something he has it's it's called taste and style

2:28:17Colin Moriarty:like he has it in impeccably there's also which i think is like uh it's gonna sound like a it's gonna sound insulting but i i don't think it's i don't mean it in that way there's genuinely just a complete lack of shame as to what he finds funny or interesting or cool that he just doesn't care if you get it or not like he'll just throw it in like die hardman is such a dumb name that like if most people would be like yeah maybe everybody's right maybe i should change it to like i don't know fucking something completely unmemorable you know but he's just like nah it's die hardman well you know what i mean it's just like there's like a commitment to like whatever it is like it nothing seems to matter to him which is like great it's awesome it's uh I can't even imagine being that confident in any idea as he is with the dumbest ideas that he has.

2:29:14Colin Moriarty:There's Die Hard Man. There's Dead Man. There's Heart Man. And in the new game, this was revealed very early on. There's Doll Man. There's Tar Man. There's just mans. Mega Man. Oh, yeah, this guy. Some of these could be Mega Man villains.

2:29:34Dustin Furman:Hard Man is a Mega Man villain. Not Die Hard.

2:29:37Colin Moriarty:Die Hard. Die Hard. Die Hard in particular is the craziest one where I'm just like the homo demons, dude. Oh, yeah. The homo demons. Homo demons. It's crazy. Like, yeah, I don't know. I we're we're sorry.

2:29:51Dustin Furman:We interrupted you, Dustin.

2:29:52Colin Moriarty:Go on.

2:29:53Dustin Furman:Take it.

2:29:53Colin Moriarty:Oh, no, it's all good. But yeah. And Colin, you mentioned the pacing of Death Stranding one is kind of all over the place. this game is much better paced there are times though where i want more of the story because i really want to know what happens and it is it's a very even drip feed sometimes i get to the end of a story bit and i'm like man i just want a little bit more from it but it's i mean it's a good motivator for me to keep playing the last thing i'll say colin you mentioned about death training one and the combat not being very good i agree and i really didn't want to do almost any combat in death training one at all in death training two i want to do combat as much as possible because it rules i am when i'm have done so many missions like man i hope the next mission is a combat mission because i they are so much fun and that's where the some of that metal gear solid five comes in and it's it's real good i didn't when initially death training two when i first heard that it was going to have more combat in it and when you think from the context of death training one sounds like a bad thing like i don't want that was the least that part sucked of death training one those complaints were heard and addressed thoroughly in my opinion and i i I love going into bases and fucking these guys up in all kinds of different ways.

2:31:27Colin Moriarty:And they give you all kinds of different ways to do it too. And you can also sneak around. It's like middle gear five, dude. Yeah.

2:31:38Colin Moriarty:So good. Yeah. This, the stealth stuff is so, I mean, well, I'm eating quite well as a stealth guy with this game. Although I do wish there were more of them, like more opportunities to do it. Yeah. So I, I think that's all I have to really say about it. I'm guessing I think I'm going to be done by next week of the main story. I'm still, I am doing a lot of the sub orders. I'm building a lot of the roads, but I'm not being full completionist before moving on. Cause I think that would drive me nuts personally. So I am doing some side stuff. I do think that when I complete the story though, I haven't even looked at what like the platinum requires.

2:32:20Colin Moriarty:but I think I want to, I think I'm going to be thorough later on.

2:32:26Dustin Furman:Yeah. I mean, if it's anything like the first game, it's going to take forever, but it's very, in my opinion, quite rewarding. Yeah. At least so far, I don't know how I feel about the second game yet. Very excited to hear this and really interested to, to get into it. All right, Chris, you take it away. Do you have anything you want to add about death training too? And then we'll get into the other game you're playing peak. Yeah.

2:32:45Colin Moriarty:I mean, I'm in much agreement, honestly, like I, I'm not as far as Dustin is because I've, not had as much time to play this week and also also quite frankly like there's a there's a chapter in this game where i just got into a loop of i could do the next mission or i could go get materials to build this road and then i would go build the road and then i would be like oh i don't have enough materials i gotta go to this thing far away and then oh i found a package i gotta deliver it i just got into this crazy loop of just spending an inordinate amount of time in this one chapter where i'm like i don't really need to be doing this but i've i've got a i got a nice i got a nice you know system of transportation going which is nice and i feel it really rewards you for just like investing in the world it's really it's really it's a really rewarding game to play in that way but um but i'm enjoying it a great deal i think uh dustin said something about the pacing where it's like it's it's paced better but i but you were talking about how uh in death stranding one some of the chapters go by like immediately and some of them are are long that is still true in my experience like like i remember i breezed through one chapter and i was like oh shit okay um not that it's like badly paced because i think every chapter is better paced but you still have that weird kind of like you don't really know what you're getting into chapter to chapter which i think is actually kind of nice and cool but um yeah not much more to say about death stranding 2 other than i i think it's fantastic i love it it's got so much middle gear solid 5 energy this time i don't know and again i don't know how much of that was in the director's cut versus the original versus all new to this but the sheer volume of tools available to you in your sandbox is so um it's like a mouth-watering amount of stuff that you can just fuck around with and it seems like everything has like a secondary and tertiary purpose not like explicitly not like a like a doom weapon has an alt fire but like there's always some weird creative way that you can use something that you didn't think about um or just just a complete consequence of the the equipment that you're using and and the physics engine interacting with it and the ai interacting with that and it's so dynamic and and fun and i i love sneaking around and using the the strand to like you know take people out but it's mega satisfying.

2:35:12Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I think it's a great game. It's wonderful. I'm enjoying my time with it a great deal. I'm taking my time. I'm taking probably too much time with it. I do feel like maybe I'm falling a little bit behind, but I just love spending time in this world.

2:35:25Dustin Furman:There's no such thing as falling behind, in my opinion.

2:35:28Colin Moriarty:True, yeah. I guess more from how I'm used to playing. I don't normally care about this kind of thing, but I'm for some reason so deeply invested in my highway system. It feels it feels insane. I feel like a like a 50 year old, like like like a middle aged dad who's like has like a train set, like one of those model train sets in his basement or whatever. You're just like, oh, it's almost perfect.

2:35:54Dustin Furman:They were the original nerds, those guys.

2:35:56Colin Moriarty:Yeah. Yeah. Those you talk about like autism didn't exist before recently. I'm like, I'm not so sure about not so sure about that.

2:36:04Dustin Furman:Do you ever see? I think it was C.S. Lewis or maybe some of those guys like used to play like these really complicated war games too like in the turn of the century like in the 1800s and the 1900s that were like so nerdy

2:36:13Colin Moriarty:that it was almost impossible to believe it was happening and right yeah but uh but that's all really i have to say about this strange there's a lot more than i want to talk about there's even like really small gameplay mechanics and little changes that i noticed from game one to game two that i think would be interesting to talk about but i thought was actually like a really pleasant surprise to encounter on my own so i don't want to get too deep into it i think i think it's a a game that's worth kind of protecting and uh we'll have plenty of time to get into that stuff when we get into spoiler talk when we do our inevitable spoiler cast on it but the other game i've been playing is this game called peak and so peak is this uh this is on steam at the moment it was i think as far as i am aware it's uh it came it originated out of a game jam uh and then they like the idea so much that they spent like six hours six hours six months six months making it uh or building it out further but the idea is like it's it's a repo kind of game lethal company kind of game but it centers around climbing this mountain and uh you play as these cute little guys you can customize your faces it's proximity chat so like uh when you when you talk your character's mouth moves um and uh if you get further away it you know it trails off if you're in a cave it echoes it's really cool and the whole premise is you you just have to climb the mountain and reach various peaks and um you know you get various items like ropes and harpoon guns but you only have a limited carry capacity and you know and if people are climbing and they don't have enough salmon you and you're at the top you can pull them up it's a it's a fun kind of little cooperative sandbox game that i've been having a quite a bit of fun with i i like it i'm watching it yeah it's fun it's it's i like it a little bit a little bit more than repo although i think repo is going for a very different vibe obviously there's something i'll say i laughed the hardest i've laughed this year at a game playing this game because seeing somebody like not have enough stamina to reach the top of this thing and then falling and screaming and then seeing them tumble and hearing their voice trail away is hysterical and it's like it's i highly recommend it's like cheap i think it's like um i don't remember what i paid for it it's it's very worth it for seven bucks i think it's like a very fun game to play with your friends it's um it's silly it's very not serious it's not like so deep that it becomes like a hassle to kind of figure out but it's not so shallow that um it becomes mindless um there's a bunch of different hazards and little things to learn about you know what can harm you like certain plants will poison you there's energy drinks where if you if you drink it you'll get a boost of stamina but like you'll you'll get drowsy at the end of it and sometimes you get too tired and you risk like passing out and like tumbling over and it's it's it's fun it's a it's a fun little physics climbing game that uh i recommend i i think it would i think it would do really well on console too like i hope uh at some point it it comes out lord knows there's uh i don't know i would certainly prefer it to uh pig escape 2 on the playstation store right now and go check that out if you want are you familiar by the way this is a complete aside yeah please but uh yeah highly recommend peak it's great but uh really nice the are you familiar with these uh italian brain rot games that have been showing up on the playstation store i don't know what there's so i was looking because i was having a conversation with a friend of mine who's a game dev and um i was just talking about how much garbage there is in the playstation store as we often talk about on the show and i was just going through like some of the more recent releases obviously by upload date not by best selling and i noticed that there was this fucking character showing up on various thumbnails or various covers for a game and it's this like stick character it's like this wooden it's almost like a cinnamon stick with a face and he's holding another stick and he's on the cover of like so many of these games and i was like looking i was like what the fuck is this is this like a royalty free character that like people can just like use and it turns out that there's this entire like cinematic universe of like ai generated italian brain rot meme characters that people have just been like making video games about so the one that i the one that i can so i'll spell it out in the chat for you but it's tongue tongue tongue sahur is one which is insane by the way but like here it is i put it in the chat so you can like copy paste it this this character is in so many oh this guy i've seen this guy bro this man who is he this man who is who is this man who's this many of these games and it's like obviously it's the shovelware that we keep seeing like the 99 cent what is this I'm sorry to have to be the person to let you know about this but I was just this one character was on so many covers and by so many different developers and I was like what the fuck is going I felt like I was going crazy by noticing this I was like is anybody else seeing this but there's a shit ton of these on the PlayStation Store now

2:41:48Dustin Furman:yeah this is like italian italian brain rock games jesus this is a really horrifying character there's something really unsettling about this character oh the whole everything about it from stem to stern it's unsettling yeah it's very strange he's like he's a he's like a log with a baseball bat yes oh my goodness i searched the that tongue tongue sahor in the store and it's just

2:42:17Colin Moriarty:there's two whole pages of this shit oh my god there's two pages i only saw like six i only saw six like games but like the fact that there's that many is not surprising but also deeply upsetting and there's two announced that aren't even out yet oh great well three announced one of them's in vr the great it was a wonderful wonderful era we're living in now what about this uh this shark that has shoes on i he's associated with this i've seen that character this is what i'm saying this is a an entire cinematic universe i think that's tra la la

2:42:53Dustin Furman:tra la la if my yeah yeah you're right that's a kojima character right there yeah tra la la is definitely like

2:43:03Dustin Furman:these are actually all metal gear solid like a cast of metal gear solid villains

2:43:07Colin Moriarty:yeah it all makes sense yeah but there's there's it's i don't know i stumbled across this rabbit hole recently and i thought i'd share with you because i just i couldn't i couldn't suffer from this by myself but uh if anybody's curious about these brain rock games go go check them out undoubtedly garbage there's even one that i was reading the description of and it's like this really long like winded like ai generated paragraph and at the end it said this is not a game

2:43:38Dustin Furman:like in the description of it tra la la tra la la tra la la tra la la that's fucking psychotic

2:43:46Colin Moriarty:it's all it's like i'm like but all is this i bring this up to say ultimately to say that like uh peak should definitely be on the store if this bullshit is allowed you know fair enough peak is good so yeah i don't know all right um that's everything let's i have one last inquiry

2:44:07Dustin Furman:here I thought I'd ask because I was curious about this too. Gababoo3 wrote in and said, one single greeting you can divide among the three of you. My question is for Dustin. Where are you in your Ace Attorney journey? You briefly discussed the first games and mentioned that you might play the entire series without necessarily talking about it on the podcast. I hereby declare you guilty of non-transparency and sentence you to a weekly status update on your trials and tribulations in the legal profession. I will sit down on my bench and listen. Thank you for making me unexpectedly laugh while I'm in public in front of strangers.

2:44:34are you continuing

2:44:35Colin Moriarty:I will continue at some point but I was at a clean break with that first game being done so at some point I'll go back to it but not right now so I will I will be transparent about that and when I do play the next one I'll let you the audience I'll let you know but I guess until then I'm am I guilty I don't know yeah

2:44:59Dustin Furman:the judge the bald judge with the beard it's the you're guilty and you will be playing 20 hours of tongue. So whore supermarket simulator. Ah, well, all right. Well, well, let's end the show as we always do with six questions, comments, concerns, thoughts, and ideas from the audience over on patrion.com slash last day media. Remember you could support us on patrion.com slash last day media for early at free access to everything we do here. We appreciate you and couldn't do without you. We would simply go out of business without your support on Patreon. So thank you so much for that. Um, we typically have inquiries guys, as you know, that touch on a bunch of things we didn't talk about throughout the show.

2:45:38Dustin Furman:And this is true here. However, many, many people, we had about 200 submissions this week and I would say 50 to 60, at least we're about the Xbox layoffs and the studio closures and the game cancellations or studio closure and game cancellations. So I felt like it would be a little disingenuous to ignore that. I was trying to think about how I wanted to do it because I guess you could make the argument and I think it's actually very easy to make the argument and it might indeed be true that as Sony's biggest publisher now, these happenings are important to PlayStation's audience. However, the Dukes covered it up front, felt like it would have been a little redundant to do that.

2:46:16Dustin Furman:So instead I put it out back here. And so I think three or four of the inquiries have to do with it either directly or tangentially. And so just wanted to kind of frame that for everyone. Big Boss BE starts us off and says, Hey, CDC. I've been following your discussions closely, and I wanted to share some thoughts on the recent Xbox news and how it ties into what Colin has been saying for years. At this point, it's almost surreal watching the unraveling of Xbox under Phil Spencer's watch. The grand vision of buying Bethesda, Activision and dozens of other studios promised a new golden age for gaming.

2:46:44Dustin Furman:Yet here we are with multiple studio closures, canceled projects like Everwild and Perfect Dark and thousands of layoffs. Colin called this years ago. You saw that Microsoft's massive acquisitions weren't about nurturing creativity, but about controlling output for Game Pass. and Game Pass, it's a double-edged sword. While popular among gamers, it's not a sustainable business model. It's cheap for consumers, but expensive and restrictive for developers. What's more baffling is how the top brass at Xbox remains firmly in place despite this ongoing fallout. Phil Spencer and Matt Booty have overseen some of the worst management decisions in recent gaming history, yet there's no shakeup at the top.

2:47:14Dustin Furman:Contrast that with Sony, where leadership changes have happened and where, despite missteps like their own struggles with live service games, studios have stayed mostly intact and the focus remains on long-term quality. Sony's recent moves, holding off on price hikes, focusing on strong single-player exclusives, show a company that's learning from its mistakes and adapting organically rather than trying to force dominance through the sheer spending power. It's ironic that the company once written off as lagging is now outlasting the one that tried to buy the entire industry. Colin wasn't just skeptical for the sake of it, he was pragmatic, and with Xbox bleeding from the inside, the proof is painfully clear.

2:47:43Dustin Furman:Thanks for keeping the conversation real and insightful. Your podcast remains one of the most consistent and genuine voices in gaming discourse. Thank you. He touches on a few things here. I guess we should frame everything first, in case you're unaware, although I think most people that were listening to this would be plenty aware of this by now is that Microsoft had massive layoffs of I think nine or 10 ,000 people thousands of them came from Xbox Bethesda and Activision and as you noted big boss in your inquiry this saw some game cancellations so Perfect Dark got canceled and the initiative shut down which is a Santa Monica based studio that never put out a game I saw turn 10 lost more than half of its staff which seems unimaginable.

2:48:21Dustin Furman:I don't even understand that. I thought Forza Motorsport was huge. I guess I'm just disconnected from the reality of what's going on with their studios there. Everwild always seemed like it was in trouble, but they just reiterated earlier this year that they were still working on it and then it was coming along. That was surprising to see. I think Rare actually lost one of its founding members that was there since 1990, who was the original designer, who I think was the director of Everwild, who was the designer of Donkey Kong Country. So that's how long he was at that game. He designed a Super Nintendo game in the early 90s.

2:48:53Dustin Furman:Really amazing stuff. And he was there the entire time. So he's out. And yeah, I think there were layoffs at Compulsion. They canceled the MMO at ZeniMax Online Studios. I saw some contracts were canceled. It seems like that game Contraband that was being made by Avalanche is never going to come out. Romero Games apparently shuttered their studio because they lost their contract with Microsoft. So there's a lot of fallout over this. But what I wanted to begin the conversation and what I wanted to focus on from this particular inquiry is one thing just as a pre, you know, kind of a preface, which is.

2:49:32Dustin Furman:Sony's not in great shape, and I don't think we should over like PlayStation is doing very well, but they made a lot of bad mistakes and they made a lot of bad mistakes that are going to haunt them for a long time. You can't understate that or kind of sweep that under the rug. They're very lucky that things are going the way that they're going right now. I don't think it has much to do with them. I think it has a lot to do with just market forces, and they stumbled into the situation because all their games aren't coming to fruition, at least in the multiplayer realm. So I appreciate what you're saying about Sony, but I don't want to blow smoke up their ass and bolster them too much.

2:50:09Dustin Furman:Like, I don't... Again, I think they're incredibly fortunate. Like, specifically what happened to Xbox One with PS4 to give them that momentum to survive and thrive during a moment when they are losing a lot of money on bad bets. So just wanted to throw that out there. But the big thing that I wanted to say is, yeah, I don't understand how the leadership still works there. And I don't think that it's, it couldn't be any more obvious, as I've said for a long time now that these people have no power. Because they, Gene, I don't know if you saw Gene Park, Washington Post, who does our Nintendo show punching up and a friend of our show he was circulating i think a euro gamer article from february where they were where phil spencer was talking about ever wild and how great it was coming along and all the rest and then five months later it's canceled um this mmo the more i read about it from xenomax online studios that's been in development apparently for years and had hundreds of people working on it was apparently like really really good and they just pulled the plug on it um the initiative remember they used to they were chris and i made fun of it at the time because they were calling it the quadruple a studio and i'm still fairly convinced that was a typo um but it's hysterical that they called it a quadruple a studio and i'll never forget that and they how much money did they waste on they didn't do anything they did nothing for seven years.

2:51:36And if I'm being fair, maybe you have to be really directional in the decision and who

2:51:44Dustin Furman:like loses their job. But, and maybe you don't want to go after Phil, who I really believe, again, is a figurehead right now. But you look at Xbox's numbers and they did buy a lot of things and stuff, but the numbers are good and they're making money. But you certainly have to look at Matt Booty, right? What does this guy do? For people that don't know, Matt Booty is apparently what Shuhei Ushidi is the equivalent, I'm sorry, of what Shuhei Ushidi used to be or what Herman Holst was, where it's like you're in charge of all of our first party studios and like the output of the first party. And it's like, damn, dude, pretty bleak shit.

2:52:23Dustin Furman:Because I think even the games they're getting the market by and large are not that special, whether it's avowed or whatever. It's just Indiana Jones. I didn't think it was that great. I just can't believe no one pays the price. And then I'm not one of these people. I think it's really naive to say, and it just is what it is. I mean, because it's a symbolic thing. When a CEO or people executives take pay cuts. It's symbolic, and maybe they should be doing that. But it's not going to save anyone's jobs. You're not talking even about enough money to be able to save jobs. So when people always point out like a lot of taking a 50 % pay cut during the Wii U era, it's like that was a symbolic thing.

2:53:06Dustin Furman:What would that have saved? Like 10 people's jobs for a year or something? It's a bigger systemic issue, and the people that should be paying the price don't seem to be paying the price the game or the games industry is has grown too large from a personnel perspective and it needs the right size and it's going to continue to right size and i wouldn't be surprised if xbox got smaller than this even maybe much smaller than this between activision but there's an xbox as they streamline things but i just can't seriously look at someone like matt booty and be like whoa i mean jeff he's been banging that drum for years like what is going on with this dude who what what does he have on these guys or something like i don't know it's just so weird so um chris let's go to you first what are your thoughts on the on the recent situation with microsoft and you can take it really in any direction you want yeah i mean i think it's

2:53:56Colin Moriarty:embarrassing i think it's ridiculous um that just the sheer the sheer scope of the failure is is it just feels almost impossible to do without trying to do it on purpose like it's it's um i was tweeting the other day about just like it really is wild to imagine um just the situation that xbox used to be in versus where they are now it really is kind of next level wild because while while we have examples of of entities going you know third party or else like sega or whatever um i don't like the 360 really was an insane win even in spite of like a 50 plus failure rate that i think skyrocketed to like 80 90 at a certain point um the 360 was so beloved and was so good that people stuck with it even after that and then they fought they they squandered all of this like inherent goodwill and this inherent um fandom like almost overnight with that xbox one reveal and they just never came back and every decision since then seems to have just been a double down on just fucking up entirely like in in ways that they that feel so avoidable because the initiative going away and uh perfect dark particularly is is a is a rough one because that to me was quite frankly the only thing that i've seen out of them that looks or that looked to be um genuinely something special in some way and and not to say like i've seen a lot of people be like that gameplay was faked it's like i have no idea if it was I don't know um but even if it was like the premise of them going like putting triple a resources into a perfect dark immersive sim like the idea that that was the the the fact that that was the idea in on the face of it was like so interesting and so cool and so like I was so on board for that um and so for that to go away it's just like what do you have now fable which is still a no-show uh like a 10 chance that the next halo game might not suck like what is going on over there like what even is there to look forward to really at a certain point like gears eday i don't know how confident i am in that now like like what like it just seems like a sinking ship and uh i'm with you or it's just like i'm truly bewildered that the people who have been steering this ship are still there after all this time because they've been there a while this isn't it's not like new like like because how long ago did phantom dust vanish oh my god that's you know seven years ago probably or something at this point right i mean it's the beginning it was like and so like this what i'm saying is like this isn't just like a rant like oh this is a problem of from microsoft in the last like two years or like oh this is like a an Activision acquisition problem.

2:57:12Colin Moriarty:It's like, no, they, they've, they've not been able to run their first party effectively in a very, very, very long time. And I just, I don't, I don't get how you fuck up that badly for so long.

2:57:30Dustin Furman:I don't get it straight up. Yeah. The game was canceled by 2015, I guess.

2:57:37Colin Moriarty:Yeah. And then scale bound was another one.

2:57:39Dustin Furman:Yeah. Scale bound. They just – they don't – Sony is obviously really struggling getting games out too. So this is a kind of a universal thing, although it's for different reasons. I think like, I just don't think these guys really know what to do entirely. And it's not personal. You don't want to like throw around people's jobs, even executives that make millions of dollars. Like it, it's just like, damn dude, Matt Booty is not the man for the job. Just, just isn't clearly the man for the job. And I just wonder if they, Microsoft is very comfortable keeping these guys installed as figureheads.

2:58:12Dustin Furman:Like why bring new people in and you could also imagine that maybe they're happy with them in some sense but i don't understand how um dustin what are your thoughts i i think the thing that keeps coming

2:58:25Colin Moriarty:back to me is and you mentioned colin that um i wonder how much control they still have after all of these huge purchases and a lot of people have been pointing out particularly i think was phil spencer on xbox era uh their podcast it was either earlier this year or late last year talking about everwild and saying like it's coming along great uh we're really excited stuff like that i think he may have maybe i'm misquoting but said that they like the fact that they can give them the time and space to work on it and i think that at that time he probably meant that but i think now the expectations are very different when you spend that much money on studios and of course across the industry things have been bloated and i think that he got a phone call or he or you know knock on the door whatever it's like yeah we you got to make cuts like and you need to look at these teams that you've been you've given them so much rope and so much time and they need to deliver and if they're not going too soon they're done they're out so i guess you could still blame that on them specifically that it's like there's always i i feel like there's been this feeling where or at least they've touted that's like we want to give our developers time i think it was either maybe it was on uh when i was editing defining duke or maybe it was just comments i was on twitter that phil spencer has like the cool uncle vibe that's like oh i'm gonna let you guys we want to give creatives as much time as they they need in order to do something um but now the rubber's in the road and these games they they need to ship games and some of these teams just aren't doing that is that those teams fault is it because they've been falsely given more time than they actually have probably somewhere in the middle and it is funny too uh not to just repeat things that were said on duke but really interesting about the initiative first of all it's ironic that the team is called the initiative and this was a team that microsoft was putting together themselves in order to make the quadruple a game um and could not deliver in fact it seemed like that studio was in absolute chaos the entire time to the point where they needed Crystal Dynamics to come in and work on the game.

3:01:01Colin Moriarty:And now it's just completely shut down. And this comes back to a lot of what you've said, Colin, and that's just that Microsoft is not a creative company. There are creatives that work in it, and their most successful teams are ones that they've bought, and that's fine. I was looking because I was trying to remember, the Coalition, I think that's a team that they formed.

3:01:25Dustin Furman:yeah they formed coalition to specifically to work on gears after they used to be called zipline

3:01:30Colin Moriarty:studios it's weird in um in wikipedia it says formerly zipline studios microsoft game studios vancouver and black tusk studios right so it's not that they've never formed a successful team

3:01:44Dustin Furman:but yeah they formed turn 10 as well i mean that was yeah so it's not yeah it's not it's just that typically that's not where they're finding their success and the the reality with microsoft in my opinion is they made bets that i don't i think some of the bets were really stupid like i do think the activision deal ultimately is what blew this all up and they should have never done it like it was not worth it for what it did to their ecosystem and like the amount of pressure it put on them it's so obvious that that that was just like they went too far they should have bought like, not that anything's things for sale, but something the size of like Sega or something was probably about the most that they could probably get away with before it really started to implode and the pressure started to implode on them.

3:02:29Dustin Furman:But it's, it's not that they've been wrong to make the bets that they've made for the most part. It's that we didn't have, and they didn't either have all the data to know how these things would work out and it didn't work. And it wasn't made any better by the fact that they didn't perform well in making it work. So what I mean by that is we talk about Game Pass all the time and think that was the right move. And it would be interesting to know how it would have gone if they had the games ready quicker, if they were more aggressive in getting it going, if they weren't so complacent for so long to the point where it didn't really matter anymore.

3:03:07Dustin Furman:Would they have still met the saturation point of the mid 30 millions or whatever, even with Call of Duty? Maybe. but you could also imagine, it's what we were saying earlier about having more players in the beginning on multiplayer, right? If you draw more people quickly, then the baseline grows and you grow quicker or at least potentially grow quicker. And so it's not that they were wrong to make the bet. It's that they didn't execute well on it from multiple different perspectives. And the purchases that they made, I think were, and I articulated this many times, like when those emails leaked from the FTC hearing, where it's like they wanted to buy anyone.

3:03:40like they had no directional interest it wasn't like these are the eight studios that we really

3:03:46Dustin Furman:think will make sense for this this this and this it's like we want everything we want nintendo we want sega we want warner we want square enix we want tech mocoey like any company you can fucking think of was in that list i remember there were studios like level five it's like what like what does that do for you and i think that they learned that in some way with some of their purchases. I was very critical of them buying Compulsion from the beginning. I was very critical of them buying Ninja Theory. It could be easily argued that neither of the studios have panned out at all for Microsoft. The Ninja Theory studios, Ninja Theory has made good games and the Hellblade games, one of them before and one of them after the acquisition, but was the juice worth the squeeze as the saying goes.

3:04:30Dustin Furman:And so I don't begrudge Phil Spencer and his company for failing in certain ways, in ways that I think made sense to test the market. It's just that you can't be the person placing the bets anymore. And I just don't get it. So, I mean, that's a big thing for me. And I feel bad for people that got caught in these situations. It's horrible. And that will move us on to the next inquiry. Dwindle wrote in and said, Cotteris, that's our three names put together. Am I wrong to not care about or perhaps even tacitly be in support of the layoffs? the industry has been massively bloated over the last 10 years why are 2 000 people even working at king a mobile game house in the first place why are studios given half a decade to produce nothing i think it's time to shake the tree even more trim the fat i couldn't care less and he said could and then nt in the parentheses i appreciate that care less about people who are doing nothing but blasting labor costs to the moon if these studios don't want to lose entirely to chinese or eastern european development teams they need to be nimble and that's to say nothing about the impending apocalypse that's sure to hit sooner rather than later.

3:05:41Dustin Furman:Are you wrong to support the layoffs? I mean, yeah. I mean, I get what you're saying. And I say the same thing in the sense that the industry has the right size. The industry is too bloated. There are too few dollars and too few game hours chasing too many games being funded by too many investment dollars. And there's no way to make that stuff square. So this is nowhere near the bottom and Sony will probably lay people off, more people off. Xbox will lay more people off. All of these studios are going to lay people off. And some people want to blame it on AI. I know a big thing with Microsoft especially is AI because they have a co-pilot or whatever.

3:06:25Dustin Furman:And I don't know if you saw the reporting that they're basically making co-pilot kind of like a mandatory part of everyone's workflow. It's important to incorporate all of these different tools and these scaling tools and all the rest. And I'm sure that's something to do with it, but it's just that Microsoft learned another lesson that was really unknowable until it happened. Although you could have strategized around it, and we saw it in a great way with Embracer to an even greater degree, is that there is such a thing as too big. And it's not too big money-wise, it's too big resource spending-wise, production-wise.

3:06:57Dustin Furman:you do not need to make this much stuff. It doesn't make any sense. You could compile the IP and put it in a vault and figure it out later, but all the studios and the heads and these teams making things that all ultimately compete with one another, Embracer met that in a major way. And Microsoft's going to reach that in a major way as well. They should be getting a game a quarter hour or so from their studios. But even then, that would mean teams were working on like six year cycles or something. It's just so do I think you're wrong to be tacitly in support of the layoffs? Yeah, in the sense you don't want anyone to lose their jobs.

3:07:36But this isn't an altruistic exercise. It's to be if the money is not going to be made, if you're not making money for the company, even if the company is wildly profitable, they don't want you unless you're in some way producing as a loss leader.

3:07:52Dustin Furman:But anyway, Dustin, what are your thoughts on this? the the do you believe the industry is bloated and do you believe more layoffs are undoubtedly coming because of the way people spend their money now and the way that people

3:08:04Colin Moriarty:maybe more importantly spend their time right yeah the industry is definitely bloated i mean we've seen insane layoffs and as you said we will continue to see them i think that the part that's frustrating or annoying or what feels wrong is giving the leadership behind the teams that are setting up a situation where people are dedicating and pouring their lives into products that are just going to be canceled. I'm not saying there's no blame on the studios. And this is kind of what i was talking about earlier where it's like phil was talking about how everwild looks great and we want to give them time and so was rare under the impression that that's what was going on and then suddenly it's a switcheroo where it's like well actually we gave you too much time and there's no game yet so you're out you know um it comes back to that management aspect so i understand yeah um i understand the industry uh correcting itself it's just the fact that a lot of it is it's bloated because of poor decisions and so literally thousands of people tens of thousands of people are the ones that suffer the true consequence because of that

3:09:35Dustin Furman:it's a bummer um what do you think chris about keeping costs in check and certainly there are a lot of dominant studios now coming out of europe and eastern europe and china south korea but there are obviously very nimble and productive american studios too but this is going to become a bigger situation about the cost of making games and the difference of paying someone in poland $30 ,000 and someone in Washington, 120 ,000. Yeah. I don't know.

3:10:03Colin Moriarty:I've always, I've felt that budgets for video games are fucking way too high. I felt that for a while. I just, I think, I don't know. I think there's just like a core frustration that I have when decisions are made that result in thousands of people losing their jobs and the people on the hook of the consequences of those decisions are never the people making them it in furious being a no end that the people who who actually need their jobs don't get them and the people who only do their jobs basically as a courtesy to just kind of keep busy get to keep them it's it's truly insane like Matt Booty if he lost his job today would be completely fine it would be so much finer than any one of us could ever hope to be and just the sheer lack of humanity in it like I get that there are business realities I get it.

3:10:49Colin Moriarty:But like, it's, um, I think you should go down with the ship, quite frankly. I think you should get, step the fuck out of there. Like, I know there's like, oh, we don't want to play, um, play with people's jobs, but quite frankly, like jobs are not life or death for these people. And for a lot of people, they are like, I know people personally who are still like, they're, uh, I have friends who were laid off from Sega. I have friends who were laid off from elsewhere. And they're still like flounder. They're, they're still like in there. They've been completely fucking uprooted. And so, uh, My sympathy for like a Matt booty is like damn near negative.

3:11:24Colin Moriarty:So, yeah, I don't know.

3:11:25Dustin Furman:Especially because he's clearly not good at his job. He's not good at his job. You can make an argument for Phil Spencer based on the money they're making and some of the moves being questionable. But the dude in charge of the teams. Right. Is not good at his job.

3:11:40Colin Moriarty:That's that's that's ultimately what I'm saying, to be more clear. I am a little I'm feeling like a little heated, honestly. But like because it's personal to me. I know a lot of people affected by this shit. So I don't know. I think there is a lot of bloat. I think there was a lot of irresponsibility in deciding to grow the industry the way that they decided to grow during the pandemic. And maybe we're still right-sizing. Maybe we're not. I'm sure AI plays into this because if they can get work out of a computer for free, what is the incentive to pay for it? I know a lot of QA in certain sectors of the industry are being handed over to AI, which, by the way, is like, you know, that's the entryway into the industry.

3:12:21Colin Moriarty:So that's a fucking terrible idea. But, you know, there's a lot of factors going into this. And I think it's equal parts greed, equal parts decision like poor decision making. um but i think i think in the context of commentary i think there's just too much of a there's too many kid gloves played with the the people ultimately making decisions that cost this money and and um cost these jobs and lives in a lot of cases so no that's really all i have to

3:12:53Dustin Furman:say i agree with a lot of what you guys said but yeah i think frustrating i think that people are often too reductive in these conversations about, well, the company makes this much profit and they should just keep all these people employed because they make this much profit. And I'm like, that's really not the way it works. Unfortunately, I understand that in sentiment, but that's just not a realistic capitalistic exercise for a publicly traded company that has to constantly feed, unfortunately, its investors. And so if you have a thousand people that are productive, but not making you money, and you try to go to the investors, and you're like, we want to keep them.

3:13:36Dustin Furman:They're good people, and we don't want to uproot their lives. And they cost us this, and they're making us this. And obviously, it doesn't all equal out, but who cares? And they're like, we have all this money. And they're like, we don't give a fuck. And that's just the unfortunate harsh reality which is and this becomes more and more mechanical the bigger the companies get which is why i'm inherently against one of the many reasons that i'm inherently against mna a lot you have to understand a lot of this happened not to the microsoft more widely but to the xbox family because of their expansion and the idea that everyone was going to be better off under the microsoft that protective microsoft umbrella it was bullshit.

3:14:15Dustin Furman:And it's not working out the way that they thought it was going to work out. I hope that this is the end of the layoffs, but it won't be. And it's why I think that I don't know. I it's I see my brother, my own brother struggling with it. I mean, he is an animator. Obviously, he only worked on a couple of games, but, you know, obviously he was mostly working in TV shows. But he basically took a marketing job like kind of outside of the industry because he just couldn't take the volatility anymore and this is something that's going to become more and more common in the creative fields and i feel bad for people that are not only in the industry in places that are a little more like if you were at larian or something you're going to be fine or if you're at valve or something you're going to be fine but most people are not in those positions and i feel especially bad for people that want to get in how do you how are you a young student or a young person an artist or a programmer or something looking at all the stuff and having any hope that you can get in.

3:15:13Dustin Furman:Why would you bother? So I think this will have long term ramifications. Another related inquiry comes from Slit Licker, which I don't like that name. It says, hi, CDC. So another studio closure was Microsoft's initiative, which is based in one of the most expensive cities in the world to live. I realize it is not only based on this reason, and I imagine a company would look at the cost of personnel and upkeep of buildings and rent in their decision. Yes, there is significant talent in Santa Monica, but if I owned a developer, I would set up shop in a city like Pittsburgh. The pay would be appropriate for the city where the cost of living is significantly lower, and I would give incentives to developers for signing on.

3:15:48Dustin Furman:For example, a Santa Monica employee would not work for less than$200 ,000, my guess, but probably more. But in Pittsburgh, you could offer$100 ,000, and after a year of work, give the employees $50 ,000 in housing bonuses, which will go a long way towards the house. Am I making any sense? I mean, you are, but it's simply not that easy for it to work that way. first of all no one is going to move for a to and make half as much money as they used to make even if you're moving from fucking alabama to new york city or something that's like that's not going to happen but you have to understand that the most desirable people in any industry but in games especially have choices and they are not going to choose by and large to go to pittsburgh unfortunately pittsburgh's a great city it's what we always say about bend in oregon like that attracts that studio has a lot of long-time employees because there's nowhere else for those people to work in that area they would their their careers unless they could work remotely would be done and you're asking people to take really big risks to go to somewhere where they're where they would it would be a dead end it's not only uprooting people's families and doing all these things but it's about making them about like if someone did that you would have to five year seven year fucking contract or something it's like no one's it's it's just not that easy and that's not a good way to connect to collect talent i think the the better thing to do and i keep saying this is remote work remote one-off games it's going to be the most cost effective and it's going to be the easiest for people to get products out into the wild and test their success with as little overhead as possible i don't understand when you see studios like um ci games is remote moon studios is remote like these guys put out real games like good games and i'm not saying it's the best way to make games but it's what we always say about our podcast our podcast would be better in person 100 but at what cost a lot of cost i mean people have to all be around each other we have to go to each other it's like it's it's and then at what point does it become what does it become too inconvenient i feel the same way here so as much as that's a nice idea and there are studios in random cities there probably are game studios in pittsburgh i can't think of any off the top of my head but i bet you there are

3:18:01Colin Moriarty:shell games what do they make they made uh well they made the new among us vr and they made the the spy uh i expect you to die oh okay yeah and there's also mega cat in pittsburgh which they're

3:18:17Dustin Furman:like smaller indie mega cat is the studio that i think is working on the god of war game that's the rumor um so it's not to say that there are random studios in random places all around the

3:18:31Dustin Furman:You're going to attract the local talent, but you're not necessarily going to attract the best talent. The best talent for game development in the United States is on the West Coast. And again, it was why Sony getting involved with Haven made some sense because you want to lock down another place with great talent. Quebec, Montreal. You just got to go where the people are. But remote working would solve this entire problem. We'll leave it there, though. Matthew Erso wrote in and said, hey my fellow porters with the news of the massive layoffs hitting microsoft this week i am left with one question what the fuck is going on this generation this generation whether you're on xbox or playstation feels like it will be remembered as the generation of wasted potential ps5 is a runaway success and has some great games but sony forced and bungled their entire live service initiative and has since shuttered teams and others we won't hear from until the ps6 speaking of initiatives xbox on the other hand has gone full multi-platform is selling way more games and is putting out great games at a much steadier pace but they continue to have massive layoffs and have now shut down the initiative of a studio they touted for years, making a so-called quadruple A game only to have nothing to show for it.

3:19:34Dustin Furman:It's incredibly frustrating and I feel for the talented devs that have lost their jobs, but what can be done if anything? More pressingly, why does this continue to happen? And will we ever see an end to it? Thanks. I'll hang my laundry and listen. Dustin, is this a lost generation? Will this be looked at as a generation where there's something a little off about it? Because I think that it will be for sure.

3:19:55Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I think in particular for certain types of players that really care about console exclusive first party games, then absolutely. I don't know if I'm I think I can look at it analytically and say absolutely. Yes. When I think about my personal tastes and all the games that I've played this generation, it hasn't been off for me at all because there's been many excellent games. but I guess the question is why I think that I mean there's many reasons why one of them is just their reaction to the live service game really blowing up last generation and like on PS4 games like Fortnite things like that and now we're seeing you know first first party PlayStation wanting a piece of that pie and trying to do it and not doing it very well and then of course on the Xbox side the whole Game Pass experiment has led to completely blowing up what their formula is, causing a whole new strategy through that they have this service that they need to feed content to.

3:21:07Colin Moriarty:How do you do that outside of just buying it? Well, buying individual games is buying entire not only just entire teams, but entirely publishers to feed the beast. And so that has consequences to it as well. So So I think that, yeah, looking back, it will be particularly looking at first party output and things like that. And also just that we're at the point where games take so long to make because they are so much higher fidelity and people, the market expects so much more out of them. So in that sense, yeah, we're getting less games because, well, are we really getting less games? we're getting less individual games in series or from established players or i guess established publishers in some ways but in other ways it's like we're getting more games than ever

3:22:00Dustin Furman:at the same time where are you on this chris will this be looked at as a lost generation

3:22:06Colin Moriarty:yeah i think undoubtedly i think uh i think the the narrative's kind of already already been written in a lot of ways and i think um i don't know if it's necessarily true but uh these types of things really only matter as far as like people feel them like like how you feel about a generation or how like the uh the culture feels about a generation is oftentimes how how that generation is remembered regardless of any you know we talk about even just the ps1 generation being you know not really defined by first party at all but people remember it that way because you had so many games that were associated so heavily with playstation that were so big and were so iconic and important to the industry things like crash bandicoot spyro things like that um and so yeah i mean i i look at this generation as i guess the i i guess this is the the cost of having multi-generational ecosystems that interact with one another is that they end up feeling less distinct inherently because you know xbox to 360 you know distinct libraries you know 360 to one like it was some crossover not really um and so this was the first generation really like ps4 to ps5 xbox one to xbox series where like there really wasn't that dividing line and you know you could throw a new ui on the ps5 and and it's much appreciated it's more than it's more than they did with the series x which was kind of a disappointment in my opinion um but ultimately like you're kind of still playing the same games and in some cases with the same people um you know the biggest games of the last generation are still the biggest games this generation things like fortnight things like call duty although that's been that's been true for a while um and so i think this kind of not cross-contamination because that is a negative connotation but like this uh this harmony between the previous generation and the current one just gives the this console just less of a definitive style it gives it less of a definitive feel it feels less like we've had a distinct generation more like we've just kind of had uh a more powerful version of the one that came before that interacts in a lot of the same ways and and in some cases has less than we had before things like themes go away and you know there's certain bespoke functionality that uh was was cool and interesting at the time that is kind of now not deemed as important enough to carry carry forward in in the tradition um and so yeah i think uh yeah i think this is definitely going to be remembered as kind of like a weird like a weird generation with not a lot to show and long dev times going to be defined unquestionably by these layoffs.

3:24:55Colin Moriarty:I think this has been happening for like how long now? It's been crazy. Just the sheer devastation as far as I go, the sheer number. And so yeah, I think the writing's on the wall for this generation really. You can get your intergalactic maybe before this generation wraps up and maybe get something out of it. Obviously, you're still getting great shit like Death Stranding, but I mean that's you know that's technically that's running to is started on ps4 so it doesn't feel i guess like ps1 you had crash and then it ended and then like ps2 you had you know jack and then it ended and the ps3 you had uncharted and then it ended all right well it didn't like it kept going but this generation a lot of the cool shit is stuff is continuations of things that we've seen before and that kind of that contributes to that feeling as well so i don't know and the next generation is going to be the same in some way because this is just the new way that machines interact we're going to get ps4 we are going to get ps4 games on ps6 you're you're going to do it

3:25:56Dustin Furman:you're going to see that yeah i i do believe that there are a few ways that this generation will be remembered in that in that regard that's true like the the tri-generation kind of approach and it can't be understated the the money will also be remembered how much it costs to play games this generation and how the cost went up the longer the generation went on that the cheapest ps5 one can get was in november of 2020 and that's unheard of and we haven't we haven't experienced a really inflationary economic cycle in gaming history before this because the last time you would see something like this was in the late 70s and into the early 80s and gaming existed and game industry the game industry existed but it was largely unaffected by this and it was also like a toy niche it wasn't a vertical of entertainment so this is the first time we ever experienced that and so that the consoles and the games you're playing are demonstrably more expensive later than they are earlier and i hope that that changes technology has been really good about becoming cheaper and more affordable rapidly and i hope that they can get back to that because i think people have to understand that the console manufacturers are not charging an arm and a leg for these consoles because they want to.

3:27:18Dustin Furman:They want to make money on the purchases of software and goods and services and subscriptions. They have to charge this much because it's what's costing them. It's close to what it is costing them to make. And that's a complex problem that needs to be solved. Or this generation, I think, will be remembered a great deal for that as well. And that might just be the new normal, which is unfortunate.

3:27:38Colin Moriarty:Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I think... Oh, yeah, sorry. i think what's weird about it is that like the thing that i think defines this generation more and it's not even it's weird because it's not even from the console space it's just like how i've interacted with games and and the things that i've observed is like this generation seems to be defined in from a gameplay sense or like from a game experience sense primarily on pc with like all these like weird kind of smaller um proximity like like lethal company peak uh repo like these like kind of big smash hit indie indie darlings kind of exploding like i almost think of that as more emblematic of like the period that we're in now as far as like the positives go than anything happening in the console space which seems to be just a lot of again a lot of big budgets a lot of long development cycles tons of job insecurity it's just it's unfortunate um but i think i don't know do you i feel like the writing's pretty much on the wall personally yeah i i think i think so too i i just think things are it has been noted just rapidly changing i don't think we're able

3:28:45Dustin Furman:to adjust quickly enough in the more hardcore space to what is happening and people's behaviors are rapidly changing too did you see that statistic um it was something like kids under 18 in the U S have spent 25 % less on gaming year over year. Yeah. It's like, wow. Well,

3:29:10Colin Moriarty:that makes sense. They're competing with phones.

3:29:13Dustin Furman:No,

3:29:13Colin Moriarty:I know,

3:29:14Dustin Furman:but that's, that's bad news. Um, in my opinion for, um, for the, in other words, it's going to become, it's going to be like, our show is relying on older and older people. and that's not what you want it's bad it's like that's a that's like a death spiral you have to i was just watching a funny i was watching the show i like paolo from tokyo the youtube channel i'm really into him and he does like the day in the life of like different people working at these different shops in japan and he went to like a fish cake factory and one of the things they were talking about is how like young people don't give a shit about fish cakes and that like to sell them they've kind of started leaning into the fact that they're really healthy protein sources of protein for like bodybuilders and shit like that.

3:30:01Dustin Furman:In other words, you have to constantly evolve or you die. All right. Matt 728 wrote in and said, hey all, questions for Colin. When you were in games journalism specifically IGN, was it commonly discussed among your peers that most were using journalism as a path to marketing or development jobs? I'm in my mid-30s and I've been following games for 20 plus years. Nearly every voice I used to read or listen to is now part of the machine. I'm just curious if that is what most people plan when they get into the gaming journalism or if so many eventually fall into these roles as they look for better paying opportunities.

3:30:34Dustin Furman:I do think it's both. It's so different now than it used to be, but when I became a freelancer 23 years ago, I would have done anything. And I think a lot of people are the same. It's like whatever you like that were passionate enough and wanted to be part of it. It's like whatever you want. And I think if they found their way into fucking marketing, they would have done that. And if they found their way into PR, they would have done that. And if they found their way into game dev, they would have done that or writing. And a lot of them, a lot of us found their way into games journalism in quotes, because that was what was most available to us in that early internet period, that web 1.0 period that like was formative for all of us.

3:31:15Dustin Furman:I do feel like I am unique in that, or at least one of the unique people in that I really have never had any desire to go work at a game studio. And I've had my opportunities. And as I discussed previously, the one one I remember very just one of the examples I remember is like really being interested in an associate producer role at Giant Sparrow. And the reality is, is like when I sat and thought about it and I never pursued it or anything, but when I sat and thought about it and I was like. I don't really want to do this, like I don't really want to make games. and then when I found that I did want to make games I found that I wanted to make like very specific very niche games people often ask me like what would in like our q a's every month on patreon get questions like what would you do with like a hundred million dollar budget and stuff and I'm like I don't want to make a game like that I don't I have no interest in making games like that I really don't I I guess it's akin to a film critic not wanting to make films or something but I just I want to make smaller more true NES style games as everyone knows but I really don't have that in me.

3:32:21Dustin Furman:So that was not a jump that even when those opportunities presented themselves, either literally or tacitly, I never really pursued them. But I knew a lot of people that were eager and did jump in. And I know people that jumped back and forth between jobs too. They would jump to a developer, then back, then jump to a developer again or whatever. I don't think there's anything untoward about it. I really just think the games industry, like many enthusiast industries, draws excited people that are just willing to do whatever to stay and that's what happens and by the way there's no room in games media anymore who's hiring who's going getting into games media so now the funny part is that the easiest way to get into games was like was through the door was often as a freelancer and something on one of these sites and now honestly the easiest way to get into games development is at a studio which is a total inversion of the reality like you're way more likely to get hired at a fucking game developer than you are at IGN.

3:33:20Dustin Furman:So I wouldn't read too much into it. I don't know that it was part of the plan. It was probably part of the plan for some people. But as I said, if something else fell into my lap when IGN fell into my lap, I would have been excited about that. No doubt. Whatever it was. So Matt, thank you for writing in. Finally, Eric Smith, the bartender, wrote in and said, hello, boys. I was wondering if you could share your thoughts on the Stop Killing Games initiative that has gained a lot of traction over the last few weeks. Colin, when discussing things such as piracy, you've mentioned how we shouldn't expect games to exist in perpetuity and that just because a game exists, it doesn't mean that everyone should have access to it.

3:33:54Dustin Furman:With this said, do you believe that developers should have an end of life plan when developing a game? Do you believe that storefront should change the wording on a game's page to something along the lines of rent instead of buy? Buy now to illustrate to consumers that these games could go away or offline at any time. I'll hang up now and listen. so i've only heard of this tacitly and um so i read more about the stop killing games have you guys heard about this i sent you links but it's a petition i think being circulated in europe primarily or for european players but it says quote stop killing games as a consumer movement started to challenge the legality of publishers destroying video games they have sold to customers an increasing number of video games are sold effectively as goods with no stated expiration date, but designed to be completely unplayable as soon as support from the publisher ends.

3:34:42Dustin Furman:This practice is a form of planned obsolescence and is not only detrimental to customers, but makes preservation effectively impossible. Furthermore, the legality of this practice is largely untested in many countries. Over the past year, we have successfully escalated complaints on this problem to consumer agencies in France, Germany, and Australia, and have brought forth petitions for new law on this problem to various countries. A list of the actions taken today can be viewed here. As of 2025, most consumer action on this matter has concluded, and we are awaiting decisions on it from several governments.

3:35:09Dustin Furman:However, there are a few remaining avenues left where people can participate if they're eligible. And one of the major things here is that there's an EU petition available to sign. It has 1.4 million signatures as of now. And it says European Citizens Initiative, quote, this is the most powerful option at our disposal, but it requires a massive number of signatures from citizens of EU countries in order to pass. If we can pass the signature threshold, there is a very strong chance that the European Commission will pass new law that will both protect consumer rights to retain video games that customers have purchased and advanced preservation efforts massively.

3:35:40Dustin Furman:There's also a petition going for the UK and so on and so forth. So you can go to stopkillinggames.com to see all this stuff. But Dustin, let me go over to you. Have you heard about this? So you have heard about this. What do you think about it? And what are your thoughts on this runaway petition, the popularity of it?

3:35:55Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I've been hearing about this and it's very deeply tied to a YouTube creator. I don't know if you know him, Colin. I'm sure Chris does, Pirate Software, who has been vocally against this. And I think that that's kind of what made this such a big story. So, yeah, it's interesting that this is coming up, especially now because they just announced while we were recording that Anthem servers are going offline in the future. And so you will no longer be able to play Anthem soon. Damn. Yeah, unfortunately. So I think I agree overall. I was looking through and reading some of their FAQ about this, and I think I agree overall with the idea that Anthem has a single player campaign.

3:36:51Colin Moriarty:You will no longer be able to play that even if you bought it. I think that something like this makes sense for that, where games that have online servers but single player elements that go away, I like this idea of like hey you bought the game even if the servers aren't live you should be able to play those single player portions of the game they make some cases about because my thought was like okay you can't expect every single game to have like particularly like games that are intrinsically built to be online to have a single player thing i feel like that's just kind of the deal uh when you buy a game like that that's so deeply connected online um and maybe there is a need for better communication about what you actually are purchasing but um in in parts of this faq they're talking about like what about large-scale mmorpgs isn't it impossible for customer uh isn't it impossible for customers to run those when the servers are shut down and they're talking about how there's like server emulators that people run and stuff like that and i'm like i've never been interested in doing something like that because i don't want to connect to some random dude's uh homegrown world of warcraft server or something like that so i'm not necessarily in support that every game developer should be forced to have some kind of offline component to their game that if you buy it you can still expect to play that um but in many situations where these games that just have online server connection for very little reason and then when that goes you can't play anymore then yeah i think that there should be protections that people should be able to play those offline in the future chris what are your thoughts yeah man i think i think i'm in agreement with this thing generally like i think there's a lot of games that kind of they're tied to servers for no real real like i think about i don't even really i'm not even really sure how destiny one works necessarily i don't know if a lot of that is server side or if a lot of the server handles like just like player interactions or whatever but like it is weird to me that there's a potential reality where destiny one just goes away to the point where like okay you can't even load into an empty map and run around like that's kind of that's that's bizarre to me it it sucks i think it's weird that uh these things can just be revoked especially because they clearly function in some way and to be to be clear because i've seen some confusion about this too it's like the initiative isn't necessarily pulling for like okay retroactively now uh every every online video game needs to abide by this or or else you know they'll be sued into oblivion it's really more about like creating an ecosystem where this is something that developers should think about going forward as they're building games in the future where like, okay, well, this game really, really requires, and the sole part of it is being online and there is a single player component here.

3:40:13Colin Moriarty:How can we build this game in such a way that when our contracts with third-party software that we need to use in this game ends or any other number of things that lead to the end of the life cycle, how can we more efficiently build our development pipeline to allow for an easy way to sever those connections at the end of life so that people can still interact with the software that they've rightfully purchased without necessarily just having a glorified launcher screen a press start button and then a cannot connect a server screen so you know i think um that's ultimately the core of this and i i think i agree with it for for the overwhelming majority of cases i think obviously games that are only online where like the only like if it's like a pvp like marvel rivals for example like i don't know what the benefit necessarily would be of playing marvel rivals single player you know what i mean like that seems kind of i i don't know that seems completely purposeless but a game like anthem a game like destiny which has a ton of single player oriented content i think it makes sense that uh if you buy that you should you should have an expectation that you would have access to at least certain portions of that experience in perpetuity uh even if the core functionality of a lot of broad strokes functionality of that game does not is no longer supported or no longer works um i think about even even just games from a long ass time ago where like i think about halo 2 or like the halo 2 servers shut down uh i think in i think april of 2010 or 2011 i can't remember which which year and uh you couldn't play halo 2 online anymore and that wasn't really a big deal because there was still a single player campaign there but even to the extent that you had access to the multiplayer you could still either set up a server online or you could still interact with the multiplayer space in a split screen capacity or even just by yourself to run around the map and fuck around and uh you know if you wanted to make a video about it you could you could capture that footage like i mean there's endless utility from like game preservation spaces from or from game preservation perspectives to just having a reasonable expectation that the thing that you bought for will remain in some way shape or form interactable even after the broad strokes of the flashier elements of certain aspects of the design fade away and i think i i largely agree with that i think there should be a place or there should be a there should be a system in place to account for that because I mean preservation is important it sucks that games go away not to not to expect that they are supported forever but Jesus Christ at least let me run around the destiny one cosmodrome with nobody else you know I don't think that's too much to ask for really going forward I think it's

3:43:07Dustin Furman:perfectly reasonable yeah i think i think it's reasonable i i just think it's substantially more complicated than it's than it than it's ever been and that going back yeah obviously it's not retroactive but it also doesn't really need to be very retroactive because most games are physical in history and will be available on those various platforms unplugged from the internet if you just do the math. You know, this isn't really a problem even until the PS4 generation and though the PS3 generation will become a problem if and when they take the PSN store offline, which remember they tried to do years, like a couple of years ago and they didn't and everyone got mad and they just haven't even tried again.

3:43:45Dustin Furman:I thought they would have done it again. Yeah. I just think that he says in here, like the idea of renting games instead of buying, you're not renting them, you're licensing them and i wonder if there is a better the solution to this is just to communicate the license better the sure and even if it says like buy license and then you can read the license thing and it's probably going to say something in legalese but something like this will literally exist on the server probably forever unless playstation goes away or whatever and at which point we can't guarantee the access to your game and that's the thing that i think i have the biggest problem with is that i with digital games that require a third party basically i mean it's a it's first parties but it's a third party sony you have to download the game from the psn then store it on your console i just think there are too many moving parts to say like we need a universal guarantee of games game availability moving forward i just i really think the easier solution is to just make it so that you're not buying the game that you're indefinitely licensing it and that it probably won't really matter.

3:44:54Dustin Furman:Because that's the thing that I think we were talking about how 14 or 13 % of people that played Death Stranding Director's Cup beat it. Now imagine how many people are going back to games that are 5 or 10 years old. Almost no one. I think that this is a problem that is real because as I understand that the Stop Killing Games movement began specifically around the game The Crew. The Ubisoft game. And about a lawsuit filed which we covered on the show. about them taking that game offline and everyone's like why are you taking it offline doesn't really make any sense but from ubisoft's perspective i think they're legally okay because they they did communicate somehow that it's a it's it's an indefinite game but also it's like we sell you an online game and then we have to keep it up forever well i think the issue with the crew is that like there was a single-player component to the game that is no longer interactable right right so so that would and i agree i think that would be a different story but you're dealing with a lot of granularity.

3:45:51Dustin Furman:Again, I really think the easiest catch-all solution is to just, as you said, rename the button when you buy it to just say, buy a license. And will that turn people off? Maybe, but who doesn't know that in some deep way about the digital product that they're buying?

3:46:10Colin Moriarty:Well, I would argue the overwhelming majority of people do not know about that.

3:46:14Dustin Furman:Well, I guess I'm not saying, I guess I understand what you're saying, Chris but to me you just think you're gonna have access to a PlayStation 5 download forever it doesn't really square to me it's just it's just strange that sure yeah that would be ideal and nice and I again as we've spoken about ad nauseum I think from PS4 onward that stuff will be available in perpetuity even if it's available as a mirror on PC one day or something I think that that's because I think that's ultimately the way Xbox is moving too and I discussed that in my conversation with Reese Elliott where I think they're ultimately going to have a really robust very pro-consumer emulation solution for all Xbox games to play on PC.

3:46:50Dustin Furman:And then that's how you're going to be able to let go of the platform in the future. But I don't know. I think it's a great idea. Pro consumer is good. I just think it's way more complicated than that. And, but I think we all agree single player games, as long as networks are still up and available, I have no problem with that. And this is why I understand people like digital games. Although as we've covered also ad nauseum on the show a lot of these games are like it was a big deal with that straining too which is actually on the disc i saw reported as opposed to a lot of these games that are coming out that are basically just prodding for download files so they're not really on the disc and you don't really own them even when you own them physically it's a very complex thing that's going to come to a head at some point but i don't know when in the meantime go to stopkillinggames.com if you want to check out what they're doing specifically in europe and australia and on that note we wrap this episode of sacred symbols a playstation podcast it was a great episode uh thank you guys for being here let's go around the horn and say goodbye to everyone chris goodbye to

3:47:46Colin Moriarty:you be well yeah goodbye to you man i'm gonna you know you know what i'm having a craving i want texas toast real bad right oh yeah i love texas toast like having a hankering so i might might

3:47:57Dustin Furman:see if that's possible they sell it like you just we buy that like when we make pasta we we often just buy the frozen Texas toast and then they're not bad at all. Not at all.

3:48:07Colin Moriarty:Like they're quite good.

3:48:09Dustin Furman:I like making homemade garlic bread, but it's like, why bother? Just it's a lot. This is good. This is good. Yeah, go get it. You know, what's really nice is like a as like a hero or a sandwich on on Texas toast. Like I've never had that. Oh, my God, dude. That sounds that sounds crazy, though. Oh, it's so good. Yeah. All right. We'll enjoy. Good luck. Dustin, be well. Goodbye to you. you gonna go go around the pigskin with dad yeah hold on i'll do a

3:48:36Colin Moriarty:do one of these um but yeah thanks for having me as always on this show um thanks everybody for coming out to too many games yeah you had a good time hanging out with everybody which was cool dude the fun dungeon shout out that place rules um so if you're in the philly phoenixville area Yeah, go check out Fun Dungeon. We had a great time hanging out there. And yeah, appreciate everybody for that. And as far as for me and the rest of my night, it's not interesting. I'm going to eat dinner. I'm going to play Death Stranding 2. I'm going to edit this show. I'll go to bed around 1.30, 2 a.m. And that's about it.

3:49:19Colin Moriarty:But that's the way I like it. It sounds like a fantastic evening. When you swapped the hat to the backwards hat, did you feel as i do where like you're astounded that anybody ever wore their hat like this in the first place backwards yeah i like wearing a backwards hat what do you mean i can't like i wore a backwards hat like i like i wore my hat and i was like you know what let me let me turn it backwards and i immediately felt like i should be killed oh like i immediately felt like there's something like even just like sitting down to like watch tv i was like hitting the couch and i was oh my god yeah that can't be like what the hell is this yeah how did so many people do it for so

3:50:00Dustin Furman:long i haven't done it so dumb looking you look dumb do you just said no i'm just saying like i

3:50:05Colin Moriarty:felt like i look dumb wearing it it could just be me i don't pull off that shit but i also don't pull off hats very well i that's why i wear patrol caps primarily yeah like a flat kind of like i like that look but yeah i i feel like i overall don't look that great in hats but sometimes i see a hat that i like so much like this uh the jaguar hat's pretty pretty dope i guess yeah it's jaguar hat says limited on the side and it's got a nice atari logo on yeah i noticed that that's nice so i'm going for it and i'm wearing it back you know what i'm wearing it backwards on next week's show just for you chris own it since you said i look like a fucking retard with it jeez louise you could usher you could be a trendsetter you could usher in uh everybody's gonna start wearing backwards hats now because it doesn't all right guys good to be here with you

3:50:57Dustin Furman:thank you all out there for your love kindness and sport i'm gonna go in the pool have a beer smoke a joint um and then yeah played the straining tonight just relax on this thursday eve happy fourth of july to everyone this will go live on fourth of july enjoy yourself be safe stay away from the fireworks stay away from the parades just have yourself a good time don't do anything I wouldn't do and enjoy yourselves enjoy your time off and we'll see you next week for more and remember of course not only actually just a teaser real quick two episodes of Sacred Symbols Plus this weekend please look forward to them we'll talk to you soon until then goodbye see ya take care guys Sacred Symbols a PlayStation podcast is a product and trademark of Last Stand Media and Collins Last Stand LLC and is proudly recorded in the USA The show was conceived by, is written by, and is directed by me, Colin Moriarty.

3:51:50Dustin Furman:My co-hosts are Chris Raygun Maldonado and Dustin Furman. The show is produced by executive producer Dustin Furman. All of Last Stand's theme music is by my best friend, Ramon Narvaez. As you know, all of Last Stand's shows, including Sacred Symbols, are fan-funded on Patreon at patreon.com slash laststandmedia. The following names are at the producer level on Patreon, our highest tier, and we're grateful for your thoughtful and kind contributions to our independent endeavor. Thank you.

3:52:38Dustin Furman:Dennis Mirom, Simon, Andreas Wessling, Frederick Bach, Indigo Blue, Skygin 100, Kaiman Togru, Lars Cerny, Fake Viking, Basil Frank, Sander Svedson, Nashville Nibbler, Teddy Anderson, Nicholas Johansson, Uppercut, Hypeguy98, Youngstream, Marcus Mossberg, Evan Bake, Havard Oya, Fugjug, David, Sammy Rocklin, Pabzi, Victor Blomberg, Thomas Person, Panic, Detective McNulty, Johannes Magnuson, Axel M. Bjork, Adam Shiblawi, Zixton Larson, John Oman, Octo Fontas, Berg, David G., SHP87, Victor Fallin, Eric Steinsland, Philip B. Rainsford, DDDDDCCCCC, Havard, Rocketman, Fred Carlson, Jonas Johnson, Dennis Lofgren, Jorgen Stenhammer, Gilfie Tratterson, Marcus, Marius Carson Peterson,

3:53:38Dustin Furman:Thank you.

3:54:03Dustin Furman:Thank you.

3:54:30Dustin Furman:Guilherme Dos Santos Merlin, Eduardo Perez, Alex Porto, Diego Dos Santos, Matthias Philippe Badowski, Victor Elmo, Bruno Baxter, Pizza Fria, Henrique Coelho, Guilherme Figueredo, Matthias Garces, Stove, Deadpool 2099, J.P. Lynch, Sweet Jones, Ethan Linares, Jiraiya, Wizard Infantry, Zen Red, Matt MGS24, Angry Living Meat, Hugo de la Guia, Eddie Smith, Uncharted Shinobi, WTF, Wesley Mullins, Logan Little. George, Timothy Tolkien, Brian Williamson, Jorge Padua, Rallo, Danio, Adam Refriended, Jordan Vallett, Ross R. Lowe, Will Williams, Shane Brekke, Michael Mash Potato, Aaron Temple, Sweaty Magic, Nate Izod, Hargeet Chani, Josh Sullinger, MyNameIsMayo, Eddie Medina, Jason R.

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