#373 | That's Okay Man, 'Cause I Like the Abuse

29:13Colin Moriarty:i'm in there i don't i don't pop around that often but there's i mean there's so many there's so many different projects going on i don't know which one you're talking about specifically but how what do you like i think i've said this i love barry barry has so many games going yeah at the same time that it's actually insane i think so i'm looking right now it's uh well our discord channel has one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen fifteen games like channels for fifteen different games and a few of them are out so like harbroxia one and two are there tri breaker and twin breaker their perils so about 10 games new games that we've been working on and uh yeah so we'll have something to show about that soon but i think it looks fucking sick and it plays really cool too it plays exactly like you'd want it to play um so if you were born in my era i think you're gonna you're really gonna dig it and then um so yeah we'll have more to say about that soon but um anything else to say before we get the topics of discussion oh yes merch lastdaymedia.store for merch t-shirts sweatshirts get your copy of Habroxia on PS5 if you'd like.

30:17We appreciate your support. Couldn't do without you. Merch sales doing great and becoming a. And I don't want to say, well, it's an important part of our business, a growing part of our business. Diversification. Right. Exactly. We are we are still heavily reliant. I don't say mono reliant, but heavily reliant on Patreon. We would be destroyed if not for Patreon. So but merch is a nice, you know, merch, AdSense and the like streaming now. all these are nice little chip damage to the overall bills we have to pay every month so we appreciate you thank you guys all right let's get into topics of discussion for this first one guys i present i prepared a little something and i'm now sending this to your emails it's google drive link simon bell sprout wrote in and said is last stand in trouble but by the way great name on your very own hate reddit multiple posters are convinced your company is about to go out of business because you're hitting your patreon subscriber count can you confirm or deny i'll hang up and listen thank you for writing in so i told you guys a couple months ago that we hid our patreon subscriber numbers because we're not entirely sure what's accurate and what's not and uh this caused some conspiracy theories amongst um our you know not not our audience I think most people take my word for it, but some people are like, oh, my God, are they in trouble?

31:41Are they going into business? And I was thinking about it and I'm like, yeah, I mean, I can kind of understand the conspiracy theories. Like, why would you believe what I had to say necessarily? I lie to you all the time, right? So I'm going to lie to you about this soon. So I want to say at the very top and Dustin, you have to do a little bit of light editing. Oh, for this, because this is for public consumption, not just for you. um if the company was in trouble i would tell you because we would have to do something right um if we were hurting or not able to pay our bills and all the rest i would alert the company or the audience because we would be at a do or die nexus the nexus of the universe first and first if we were in some sort of trouble.

32:32We would have to say, like, we really need the audience to step up or we're going to have to make cuts or we're going to go out of business or we're going to go do other things or we're going to split up or whatever. So just at the top, I would never keep those things from you guys because we're reliant on you. And we've always had for all these many years now, a honest, hard on sleeve discourse with each other about things. so i want you to know that if we were in trouble the first people that would know outside of us would be all of you because we would have to be like how do we save it or what do we do so i don't want anyone to worry about that but to allay people's skepticism about my reasoning i present i went in and did some you know went into patreon or whatever and i have some things to show people to just show everyone what i'm talking about when i tell you that we're not confident that the numbers being publicly displayed are accurate.

33:22And if we're, if they're not accurate, good or bad, if they're not accurate, I have no idea why we would continue to display them. The reality is, is that we have what appears to be like three different sources of data that actually four, if you count the mobile app, which I really just don't even use, that give us different data. And so Dustin, I've numbered these one through 11 PNGs. So I'm starting here now with number one. Okay. So when you're on the Patreon backend, this is, you see a lot of things and you can see on the top there, it says membership, earnings, posts, surveys, traffic, et cetera.

33:59You can click around and look at all the data. So this is, I got, I did, I got these this morning and no, I wasn't up at eight 22. I think this just probably updates once or twice a day or something. So, so don't worry. I was absolutely not up at eight o 'clock in the morning. I would never be up at eight o 'clock in the morning, but this is the screen that we kind of work off of, um, for ourselves. And it says here on the left, active members, 18 ,750 with 459. So over a month. And by the way, this is in the last 30 days. You see the little pull down on the top left. You can make that into, uh, I think multiple months, half a year, year, year to date.

34:39And then there's like customization options. Like if you're searching on Google or something like that. So the 18 ,750 number is a combined the combination of 12 ,748 paid members and 6 ,002 free members. And this cumulative number is up 459 users combined month over month. And then this is where the rub really comes in. So you see here new members and canceled, right? So there are basically three types of patrons, or at least the way they're moving economically on the system. New people, canceled people, and people that move between the different tiers. And you can see in the bottom right corner, or actually, it's all the bottom, upgrades and downgrades.

35:27So that's a whole other thing. People that are at the$10 tier go to the$5 tier. People that are at the$5 tier go to the$1 tier, and so on and so forth. But these numbers here, the new members and canceled numbers are the ones that have been confusing me for a long time. and the reason why starting late last year, I started bringing this up to patron to ask them like, what's going on? Like, what are the real numbers? It's hard for me to tell like what, what I'm supposed to be looking at at a glance. Right. And I have some emails later on in these things that I'll show you. Well, some of what they had to say, but you'll see here that the new members are 644 and then 306 paid and canceled is 185 with 126 paid.

36:06These, I didn't want to go through like every month and show you, but these numbers are always in this balance, not necessarily in this ratio, but there's always more new members than canceled members on this chart. But the number to the left, the active numbers, so it says 12 ,748 paid, that number continues to just kind of go down like 50 or 100 a month. And we're a little confused by how that could possibly be. If these numbers are all accurate, then that can't be true. Does that make sense? Well, Dustin knows this already because we've talked about this ad nauseam behind the scenes. So this started to confuse me because, and by the way, this insight module is not new, but kind of somewhat new.

36:51This is actually more sophisticated than anything they had on Patreon for years. And I'll show you what it usually looked like and how you had to usually figure out like your numbers. So we were a little confused about why this was. So if we go up to to the second, you can just see, and this is just more data and more information about traffic and all of the rest, but you can see that the numbers are reflected here too. And as I was saying earlier, you can see that the dark green is, you know, the podcast$5 a month tier. And that's makes up most of the people coming in. And there's a minority of people coming in among all the other tiers.

37:33So this is like kind of what we see. And so I'm like, okay, the 12 ,748 number could be right in this example of paid subscribers, which would be, I guess, off by, I don't even know how many, like a thousand from our higher or whatever, even though our numbers have been pretty flat as I'll tell, I told everyone and I'll show you guys that in a minute too um but i don't really understand how the number is quite synced up um and you can just kind of scroll through more of these kinds of things and see um so if you go now to i guess number four dustin well did we skip three oh three wait oh yeah three so yeah this goes to show oh so this so two and three really go to show you new members and canceled members.

38:21So just like what that looks like when you click on them. Right. So you can see that most of the movement is in and out of that$5 tier. Um, and so I'm sorry, onto number four. Um, this is now you can see the past year, right? So now I've, I've made it in the top left corner instead of 30 days for the past year. So through late last summer. And this is where the numbers again start getting confusing. You can see again, it says 12 ,748 paid. New members, we're at 4 ,521 paid and then canceled 2 ,563. So there's a plus 2 ,000 differential on those numbers as reflected in other data. But that number on the left is down year over year, hundreds of subscribers.

39:14those two things don't add up the top line numbers do but none of this makes any sense if the trajectory of the numbers are going in the direction they were and i was i was starting to get concerned about that i was starting to get concerned where i'm like i don't know how to make sense of this and you can see on on the fifth um plot which is our graftron page this is a graftron is an awesome tool that just scrapes patreon data and you can see that so over that same year so this is what I'm saying. If you go to number four or look at number four, I'm sorry, Dustin, you don't have to like go back and forth like this, but just if people are looking at number four, you'll see that we should be up based on new members to canceled members.

39:562000, but at the same time in the publicly related numbers, we're down 500. Is this making any sense to you? Do you understand what I'm saying? Like where I'm like, I'm like, the numbers don't make any sense to Chris. Am I crazy. You're not really. Does this make sense to you? Like what I'm saying? I mean, I see I see what you're talking about. So. If you go to. Number six, there's another way to kind of figure out numbers, and this is where I started to do like some of my own math, because I was like, there's this notification chart. This is what it looks like when you go on to it. I'm patron, and it just shows like how people have been interacting with everything and if they join or if they leave or whatever.

40:36And you can see on the top right that there's a filter and if you go over to number seven i've selected the filter to just show join members and canceled members and i started to do the math on these every month and you can see here that there's more canceled members than there are joined members in the last week usually we get it starts the inverse in the later like we get more cancellations than these days more cancellations than people coming in according to the notifications tab um like from Monday through or maybe Sunday through Thursday or something. And then from Thursday through Saturday, usually the numbers invert.

41:15So it kind of evens out. But I start this is what it looks like. And you can see this was taken today. So we're kind of getting back. If you look at the bottom, you can see that the numbers kind of invert. But I started doing the math and been like, so like, what does this say if I just count people coming in and people coming out? And that's a different number than the numbers. I have the two different sets of. So like, that's a different set of numbers that don't seem to be incorporated. And then if you go to number eight, there's a link for CSV. And the CSV is a comma separated values document.

41:52This is how we would usually, so you usually would click on this in years past. it would open a new window and then it would create a google sheet for you and you or like you can save it at the microsoft or whatever you want to use and this is another way to look at how many people are in your system or whatever and we've been on so this would have been another set of data for us but we've been unable to even download the csv for most of the year i actually had to solicit them to make one for me so this would be another set of data for us to be able to double check things but then just to show you and there's a shit ton of emails between patreon and i um about this going back from last year and i'm not going to show you nearly all of them because there's so much data and personal information in there but i wanted to show you guys that i i alerted them of this back in december and this was a few of the responses um this is from someone over there and i've i've gotten rid of the names in the emails because i didn't you know these are private people but hi colin thank you for sharing the screenshots i I understand these discrepancies are concerning and definitely don't align.

42:59Well, I want to be clear. We do not recommend creators rely on Graftron for an accurate representation of data. These inconsistencies are worth investigating further. I've shared your feedback with the data team and have looped creator support in as well. And then she says, we may need a day to get back to you. And then if you go to the next thing, document 10, this is from it. So pardon the different format here. So once they got creator support and like their internal people, it enters like a sort of like a system. internally. So it looks a little bit different in an email, but I'm talking to this person and they say, thanks for raising this or whatever.

43:32We've been making quite a few changes to how data is reported and presented on membership insights. Since we don't have any official relationship with Graphchrion and thus are not iterating in tandem with them, I'd imagine there's some kind of disconnect that's resulting in these wild graphics. I recall in our last conversation that Graphchrion was suggesting a cataclysmic loss in membership when there was none. um so based on these emails and further conversations and the final slide is number 11 we i don't really know what to do like with that information and since we don't not even patreon is confident that the numbers are accurate and because as i've showed you here these numbers make no sense because as you can see here we either we even had the the module says new members 48 that so this is over time we've had 48 ,727 paid subscribers over time but we've only had 15 ,761 cancellations how can that be that also makes no sense and the graph under a graph underneath it shows the growth trajectory of the different tiers so as i said on patreon or on twitter because it was and what i said earlier the dark green line is our five dollar tier and that's the prime meat of everything.

44:42So you can see that that's at an all time high. The light green one is the dollar tier and then the blue, purple and all that arrests are like the$2 tier, the$10 tier and the$25 tier. So we're looking great on$5 patrons, but I just don't know what the numbers are. Like, I don't know what's accurate and what isn't. So I hope that shows you like what I'm talking about, you know, kind of another heart on sleeve moment to give you a little bit of insight into why I'm saying this and why we made the decision that we did. And that if the company was in trouble, I would tell you. Like straight up, because we would need you to spread.

45:20So does that make sense? I hope that makes sense. I just wanted to show everyone because I understood your skepticism and wanted to allay your fears. Dustin, anything to add? We've talked about this a lot, but.

45:35Colin Moriarty:um yeah it's i mean it's annoying because especially with graftron graftron is a secondary source that we use for a lot of years just to see how we were doing and compared to our competition and and other patrons in general but uh at some point it just started to not make sense and i think that's graftron has become a way a lot of the public is able to check in on various patrons to see how they're doing but clearly the numbers don't align um so i don't know if i have really anything to add um hopefully patreon can figure out i think maybe what it has to do with is that we have been in numerous patreon betas including when they switched the monthly billing cycle to be at the point someone signs up instead of the end of the month right right uh and i wonder if that fucked around with things for us specifically but honestly don't know yeah like the the

46:41annualized like we are patreon was founded as a monthly annualization subscription and this was frustrating to creators just to give people a little bit of background this was frustrating to creators because there would be and you could see it on graph around represented on any old and any old patron although i don't think it's like that anymore at the beginning of the month you would drop and then you would have to climb back up because everyone's cards would get run the same day um and then they would have to re-up if you know a card expired or some some information wasn't right or whatever and so the they changed it and we were incorporated into that beta early so that basically it charges credit cards every day now so in other words if you join on the like if you're on netflix or something if you join on the eighth you'll get charged on the eighth.

47:25What it used to be was you would join on the 15th and get charged on the 30th or the 31st or the first. And then, and so, and over and over again. So that could be one of the reasons why. My theory is that there, and this is why I think that we can't be the only patron that is seeing this discrepancy. Like this doesn't make any sense. And I should be clear that the publicly facing number on Patreon agrees with the Graftron number. Graftron, it didn't do anything wrong. I think Graftron is an awesome tool. It's scraping that number. What we're confused about is how that number can be true if those other numbers are true.

48:02I mean, you just saw the charts. They make no sense. Those numbers don't agree with each other. All the numbers on the bottom line add up, but the trends don't line up into that final number. It can't be, you know, we can't be down 500 cumulative subscribers, but up 2000 subscribers. And that's what it says. So I think it's some combination of like legacy shit because we're old on Patreon, a bunch of the betas we probably been incorporated in. And I couldn't find the letter, which was a little frustrating because I don't know why I responded to it, but maybe it was in like a backend system or maybe it was even in DMS or something.

48:41But one of the people on Patreon said something to me like, it's entirely likely your number was never as high as it was at its height or as low as it's been reflected recently. And I was like, what? It's cool. I appreciate that information, but I'm like, this is strange. And the reason that I showed the CSV link is because it's like that information would be really useful for us too. I wouldn't show everyone the data because it's like everyone's information, not their credit card information we don't have access to that but like how long you've been a patron and how much you've paid and all the rest and then it's and chris you've probably seen this on your patreon if you ever downloaded that document and it'll it'll be organized by like active patron decline patron canceled patreon patron and all the rest and like i would like to like try to go through those numbers and figure it out too because i'm just kind of confused so the long and the short of it is like we turn the number off because we don't think it's accurate so like what is the point of even putting it out there

49:39and I hope that makes sense to people so I wanted to kind of say like I understand people's skepticism maybe I owe maybe because we've had such a personal relationship with the audience we owed more of an explanation as to why we did that but I hope that makes sense and you got to see a bunch of back-end stuff that we look at every day so yeah that's it all right so and by the way i mean i appreciate the concern i mean people obviously make fun of us and want us to go away and that's great but and we're not gonna go away but i appreciate people's concern like there's real concern out there too like about things um but i'm like no we're doing great we're like we're good don't worry about it um and trust me i will ask you guys for help or at least if we're going down and like we're not going to survive then we have to gauge things and say like does this even continue and what do you like it's really up to you right like what you want to do but i'll bring that to your attention we're not just going to disappear one day don't worry simon thank you for writing in nice name clankers with attitude wrote in and said hey sacred no question today just wanted to let you guys know i got into an accident and totaled my car while listening to sacred last friday i was driving home from work and had the sun in my eye so i went to adjust my visor and when my eyes came back to the road i realized that i was driving directly into a stopped car doing about 40 miles per hour i slammed the brake but it was too late next thing i know an airbag has deployed into my face and my car is mangled and smoking around me i try to collect my thoughts but all i can hear is the sound of the sacred boys complaining about how doll man takes too much or talks too much i felt like i was in the twilight zone luckily no one was seriously hurt and the biggest nightmare of the whole situation is dealing with the insurance claim thanks for being with me in the lowest moment of my life glad you're okay glad you're well it's scary man scary times um 40 miles an hour into a parked car is uh pretty serious shit yeah glad you made it out of there glad we could be there for you

51:44Colin Moriarty:and uh were you there for him i don't know we could be there for him now and say we're happy you're safe but at the time maybe maybe our voices were a comfort in the chaos yeah maybe so perhaps yeah yeah lowered his heart rate so that he would easily easily make it into the light if he needed to the the thing about like the thing that blows my mind about like because i think about this every time every so often i will i will drive right and there will undoubtedly be a moment in the day where the sun is like at that exact angle where you're kind of flummoxed than anybody could see anything. Like that it's kind of a, it's a mesmerizing thing that not everybody is careening into one another.

52:31Colin Moriarty:Right, right. And it's kind of astounding to me that we've had, I don't know, it just, it feels like this is a problem that we should have a solution for. Like, I don't know how or exactly like what that mechanism would be, but we've had cars for a long time. And this is a pretty consistent problem where you're just like oh i can't see i'm gonna have to feel it out yeah hope for the best yeah hope for the past echo locate yeah it's weird like there isn't like kind of i don't know

53:07Colin Moriarty:some windshield tech i don't know it just seems to me that's weird like the the amount that certain technologies have evolved over time and how other technologies have just not is kind of confusing to me like there's an incongruity there it's weird that we have ai you know doing all this shit but glass is the same i don't blame it i guess maybe we've done all we could but like just kind of feels weird i don't know well be safe be well glad to be there for you yeah don't do it again Goon Eternal wrote in and said hey CCD several months ago our favorite son Dustin was in a bit of a funk due to an a-hole due to a a-hole behavior in the comments prior to that column was laying out new policies to address this uptick in edge words fast forward to now what is your guys relationship with the comments section these days better worse I think things are better personally um I don't know if you guys agree I don't know how much you're really in there I don't read the comments on YouTube too much so I can't speak to that But just like social media interactions seem nice.

54:18If I pop in on Discord and read around, it seems like people are being fine. I don't know. I mean, I'm not around for like it's anecdotal. But it seems to me that things have gotten markedly better. Like our subreddit is like so much better, which is nice. I don't want people like constantly just arguing in our comments and stuff like that with each other and being mean to each other and being mean to us it's like yeah i'm good on all that so i think that like and as you saw in the slides like this has had no real material impact on the growth of our core tier and all the rest so i think we shed some people by doing that but i think we gain even more people by making a more normal environment i want to have fun and be silly and be inappropriate and do all those kinds of things i just don't think people need to like be so hostile to each other and to us i just don't i don't think that's too much to ask so my personal opinion is that it's gotten better um and will continue to be better you know um i hope and if things are getting out of hand let us know and we'll try to clean it up dustin you're in there more than i am and what's your feeling yeah well partially talking about uh

55:33Colin Moriarty:the the funk when several months ago this was so this was probably in january uh which to be clear i was in a bit of a funk overall yeah of course uh just because christmas was was pretty tough and i think the context of that was i was annoyed because uh some people didn't like our holiday content and were really rude about it and it's like come on uh most people go on break and do nothing uh and we're cramming three weeks of work into one week to make sure everyone has because that's i was salty uh about that at the time so and like i said i was kind of in a funk at the time but as far as right now i mean my key is just like uh i know the spaces where people are not helpful and i don't go it's like there's there's no reason for me to go and read any of that uh so i avoid that and so i still people you know check around here in our our subreddit and uh youtube comments and stuff like that and i'm mostly focused on patreon where it's like these are the people that are supporting us financially these are the people that really care so they're the ones that i want to put most of my attention into and that's been good yeah good good yeah i think i think if you just i don't know i don't i mute some people but i don't really ban block anyone on social media and stuff and i think part of it is you kind of get back what you put out but i also think part of it is that you just can't control other people's behavior and so like what is even the purpose um people melt down about everything it's like i don't people have like serious political problems people have like these serious social issue problems obviously video games and entertainment and all these things it's like dude i can't control like your behavior you know your reaction is your problem not mine so i trip up every now and again but i generally am on that upward arc of just realizing like you gotta just control what you can it's what my dad used to say another thing that i just always would be like i don't know you're like just ignore your parables and shit but you know you control what you can control and i always that's kind of one in on one ear and out the other but it's true you can't control almost anything so externalizing like your feelings to things that are out of your control is kind of unfair to you it's living in this like state of constant dice roll peril where you don't know like exactly what the face of the dice is going to read but you had nothing to do with it um so i don't worry too much about it to be honest Chris how are you feeling out there on these those internet streets you get very political so you probably get a lot of shit from people yeah but I like it I like I like arguing I can't help it like it's just like I think it's interesting and I think it's it's fun to uh play play a role I don't know I like I when I when we started this I kind of went by the the stage name that I had and it's in retrospect it was kind of not the smartest thing to do because like I kind of always anticipated i kind of always intended that for b to be like a a separate kind of thing than me it was kind of like this is like a persona kind of that lets me be like a little bit more abrasive than i normally would be i think generally interpersonally i'm a very like easygoing kind of person but do you want to go by chris maldonato no i well i mean at this point it's too late it's just i just remember thinking about this like oh it's interesting that i'm i'm I didn't think about that ahead of time is all I'm saying.

59:16Yeah.

59:16Colin Moriarty:And it's kind of weird. Yeah. True. But yeah, I don't know. I don't really, I don't mind it. I like arguing. I think arguing is kind of fun. I think it's not very good, but I also kind of don't, I don't know what you do really at this point. It's kind of just the main way that people communicate online. And I think the unfortunate reality is that it's, I know that there's a general kind of sentiment where oh you shouldn't get political because it alienates or whatever but like on our on our personal show like we have not seen that at all in fact that like the crazier shit the the more unhinged crazy shit that we say the more people we get on board to just like listen to it that's i think i know it's like i don't know i don't really know what to make of it in that regard well i think there's an authenticity factor to being yourself yeah you saying what you feel to being there's going to be like a large contingent of people that agree with almost everything you say.

1:00:12I mean, just generally, you know, not because it's you and not because it's what you're saying, but because there's like just people out there that believe all sorts of things. It's easy enough to define those people. I think like what I'm proud of with us is and I mean me and you and I mean the three of us and I mean all of us in the company in different permutations that we've done this is that like there really is an ideological difference between a lot of us. And I think it's valuable not only in the content, but in showing that like people can have normal interactions with people that they might disagree with on fundamental issues of politics and policy and whatever, apart from the things that we cover.

1:00:48And I personally find that really valuable.

1:00:53But at the same time, I know that there are some people that are turned off by anyone and anything that doesn't agree with or espouse the things that they say. and because Chris and I are so different I think that that has alienated two groups of people from our shows for as much like I'll see a comment that blames Chris for not watching it anymore and then I'll see a comment blaming me for not watching it anymore and it's like well it's kind of a good thing I mean I want I want there to be like an open mind in this even if you feel strong I do. Trust me. I feel very strongly about things. Believe me.

1:01:34Like, believe, believe me. But I have no interest in alienating people. And it's not a business move. It's like I like being around different people. I like being challenged. Let me and I like I like being presented with things that I just never thought of. I had a funny example of this the other day is totally has nothing to do with what we're talking about, but it's an example of. I was I like talking to chat gbt and just asking it questions like instead of saying like what happened here it's like so i'll be like i believe in evolution so i was i was speaking for myself i'm like i believe in evolution but i'm really fascinated by this idea that maybe things are so complex that there is some sort of creator like how could it be right and had this back and forth with this computer like a few questions and then it ended up presenting me with like a few things that i had literally never thought of.

1:02:29And I was like, yeah, I'm much less curious about not intelligent design or anything like that in this example, but just like the idea that like was there like someone putting a finger on the scale and there was all these compelling reasons why that's not true. Right. And like, yeah, it's interesting to be curious about it, but probably not true. And the major reason that I never considered is the inelegance of everything. In other words, if there was a creator, why is everything so fucked up? Not in reality, but like they were using examples of like your eyes have blind spots in them. They see things upside down.

1:03:00Oh, yeah. Like if a creator made that, like, wouldn't it be perfect? Why is there so much junk DNA? And so the example of this is what I'm saying is like, it's fun to just like put yourself out there and you never know what you might. Learn and Chris has definitely changed my mind on some things. I'd like to think maybe I've changed Chris's mind on some things. But regardless, I feel like when I see people react saying. like Chris and Colin must hate each other or they must be holding back or whatever. And I'm just like, I don't know why you think that like, that seems to be you projecting onto the situation.

1:03:42And my, that is crazy.

1:03:44Colin Moriarty:I wouldn't be here. Right. Like, why would we be doing this? Yes. That's so crazy. I don't know. I don't know. I think people like to, I don't know. It's a, it's a mix of like parasocial stuff and also just like people like needing there to be something. I think people need something to latch on to. And it's like, we, I need conflict that isn't, that isn't here with me. I need, I need something elsewhere to focus on so that I'm not thinking about how fucking miserable everything is. Right. But, and it wraps back into like the idea of just like projection and out of control things, literally out of control.

1:04:20So my personal opinion is that I think things are kind of improving. Like people say, people say me. that's why like I always laugh when people are like this person said they're like people have meltdowns about things like dude you should see the things people say about to me on a fucking daily basis like the horrible shit about me right and it's like yeah that's true like the our hate reddit came up earlier and it's like yeah that place exists it sucks but it's the same 20 people like just saying things about you over and over again go read the comments on patreon go read the comments on Twitter of people saying nice things about you, thanking you for the content.

1:05:00Enjoy. You kind of like I've known people in my past that have been really good at at filtering through that and seeing it for what it is, because it's always that. And I've tried to remind people in my own life about that, that aren't, you know, Micah gets a mean comment or whatever, and it affects her differently, you know, and I'm like, I get it, dude. Like it hurts. It hurts to read bad things about you but just remember like there are so many people that love you to look at all these nice things and it's just that one thing it's like getting a bad grade or something it's like you focus on that one thing and so when you really are able to kind of rise above that you realize like you can't control those things you're gonna have haters and like you can focus you can like focus your whole life on it if you want but i hope you choose not to the best advice i think i got was like just let you gotta let

1:06:00Colin Moriarty:people be wrong about you right that's great that's all right that's fine it's had no real i think this comes this is another piece of wisdom and i'm sure you were you were involved in creation chris so young i mean i was too but it was different like web 1.0 was just like different place you were like here on video audio doing things and fucking around for so long that I actually think you and I have gained the wisdom probably in a similar cadence, though you're so much younger than me, which is like, and it comes with a level of wisdom, which is like, this hasn't really affected me professionally.

1:06:35You read these things and you think it's like what everyone thinks. In other words, you read these things and you think it's going to have this real bearing, this mean thread or this mean comment or this, this dunk on Twitter is going to have this like catastrophic effect on you, but it really doesn't, right? like it's just and that's like and and and you get beat by that over and over again and you learn eventually like yeah it hurts but like it actually is not going to affect you so just let it go grew

1:06:59Colin Moriarty:up we also grew up like obviously at slightly at different times but like i think like there was always this there's an old world kind of idea of propriety that uh you know it's always kind of dang it's like oh maybe because i do think sometimes like i maybe i shouldn't have said that but then i'll see like because that might alienate so and so or whatever and then like it'll get like can interact like it'll it'll get like a like from somebody who's like you're liking this oh i'm fine right like it's it's it's kind of it's it's funny it's funny because you just have to snap out of reality and be like oh nobody first of all none of this shit lasts for longer than four hours anyway people's brain spaces and like it really it really is out into the ether and then nobody cares so like i don't know it's hard to care it is i i get that that comment every once in a while, which is true.

1:07:48And that's why I always try to answer DMs and like, you know, emails and have, you know, talk to people and spend time with people or whatever when I can, but it's like this, there's this idea that, um, we have to just dwell on the negative and, and that we're kind of responsible for all the incoming and that we can't clap back and can't be ourselves and can't generate negative attention without that in itself being negative and i don't know it's it's kind of like it's it's a very it's a very um freeing feeling to just like learn over time like when i was in my 20s um i would really take like if there was like a bunch of bad comments on an article of mine uh i would like i would be feel so bad about myself because because I would not because it hurt me necessarily because I felt like other people were seeing it you know yeah um anyway I was gonna say something else but I'm not gonna even get into it my phone oh by the way I got a new phone case no blue yeah it was it was on it was the one that was on sale but I actually kind of wanted this color anyway can I ask you something about that

1:09:05Colin Moriarty:color sure did you get that specifically because it's unlike any color that naturally occurs in your house so it stands out when you're looking for it yeah that was a big thing for me is that i i was i had a black case and it was like the worst stupidest thing i ever did yeah it's like it's like having it's like having uh like camouflage on your on your phone right basically what was i thinking and then my case also was like this ratty mess oh yeah red i mean perfect Oh, yeah. See, this is this is what I would probably lose. Dustin showing a black case is a one piece case with Luffy. I would lose that.

1:09:39Colin Moriarty:I would I would lose that one. Monkey D. Luffy. Monkey D. Luffy. Monkey. It's monkey Luffy. The incredible monkey Luffy. Monkey D. Luffy.

1:09:50That's which one is it?

1:09:52Colin Moriarty:Luffy. It's monkey D. Luffy. Yeah, I know. But it's actually a monkey D. Luffy. But I said Luffy the monkey Luffy the monkey Luffy the monkey That's like something you're fucking your Korean War grandfather would have said. Yeah. Anyway, there's so much more to say about this, but I wanted to just say like I really appreciate the general kindness and that's kind of what I wanted to make sure I noted and what we were saying earlier is like and I stopped myself from going down deeper holes. I don't want to go down right now, but it's like there are a lot of really good people and um we're supported by them every day and a lot of people are just silent and i think about the silence that i express in the things that i love the people that i love right never fucking know with rare exception right in like the entertainment space they never know yeah i gotta remember that too like it's it's like it's easy to forget that because like most people don't interact like most normal people don't don't necessarily interact with all the stuff that they love like i don't really do that either and every time i go out so like every time i'll go to like some packed area like i'll i'll i'll be um like someone will be like oh hey i love your videos and it's like that's crazy i haven't posted anything in a while and then i'll be like oh and then they'll be like they'll they'll want like a picture or something and i'll be like oh hey i'll take it it's like you want to tag me it's like oh I don't have social media.

1:11:21Colin Moriarty:I'm like, what? Oh, interesting. There's a lot of you out there. Yeah, it's good. It's good. So thanks. Thank you for letting us navel gaze for a little while, just because it's. It's therapeutic and good for us to to get some of these things out there, because I don't want to do. Our show is so predicated on the audience. Yeah, we read a shit ton of your questions. I don't listen to any podcast that does stuff like that. So I'm just kind of flying by the seat of my pants anyway. And it just feels like that's what our show is. And people just can skip around on the timestamps if they want. And they do.

1:11:58All right, let's get into the news. I'm going to delete this one because we're just we're running too long here. I don't want to be here forever. And people get mad if we go longer than an hour. I think they have a tolerance for an hour. Intros stretching our legs. I mean, that's like the funnest part of the show for me in some way. I mean, it's fun to talk about the games and stuff, too, but I like to just stick around. Yeah. I think about things I want to say throughout the week like this will be funny to bring up by the way did you watch did you guys check out the video I sent you on on discord I love that video it's it's based on the what's that is a country kitchen or something old country buffet old country buffet it's like the old 80s famous 80s old country buffet employee video and but I guess they used AI with the guy on anyway I just I got a number alert oh really oh that's fun oh boy that's used to scare the shit out of me i don't think i get

1:12:53Colin Moriarty:them here in virginia oh it's one of the ones for old people someone kidnapped an old person they're called silver alerts actually silver alerts see amber would be better for that because amber is so old right i guess gotta rename this whole thing now yeah sorry to interrupt to you with an ambulator no that i i remember i used to get those in california and it's it's so loud and they scare the fuck out of you at least they scared you scare me yeah trust me i'm in i'm no use for you if someone's on the lam maybe they would come and hide here or something and i would have to go and like let cops in my backyard and reminds me the boston bomber thing where like they were hiding like under a boat and someone's like backyard's like jesus that's fucking crazy My favorite thing is when it's like, oh, it's a silver Corolla.

1:13:45Colin Moriarty:I'm like, oh, yeah, that really narrows it down. Yeah, I know. That's funny. All right, my friends, let's get into the news. Big news of the week that everyone wanted to talk about. Obviously, we should definitely talk about it. And by the way, I assume we should warn that I guess this is an inherently political topic. Yeah. So if you don't want to hear that sort of thing, I get it. But maybe just skip ahead because I don't know how to even talk about this without unless you want to just talk about a top line or whatever. But anyway, PlayStation, PlayStation blog reports. And this is obviously now in effect because it's as of the 21st.

1:14:31We're recording this on the 21st of August. PlayStation 5 price changes in the US. And they write briefly, quote, similar to many global businesses, we continue to navigate a challenging economic environment. As a result, we've made the difficult decision to increase the recommended retail price for PlayStation 5 consoles in the US starting on August 21st. The updated recommended retail price for PlayStation 5 consoles in the US are as follows. PlayStation 5,$549.99. PlayStation 5 Digital Edition,$499.99. PlayStation 5 Pro, $749.99. The recommended retail prices for PlayStation 5 accessories remain unchanged, and we have no other price changes to announce for additional markets.

1:15:14So that's$50 more. It's a basic$50 increase across the board. We had a lot of letters from in the audience about this on Patreon. Of course, you can write into the show via the threads in the news feed each week on patreon.com slash last day media. That's what you hear throughout the show. And Jordan Peterson's 10 minute rendition of the Joker baby monologue wrote in and said, morning boys, whether you think Trump's economic policies have been pure idiocy or a necessary means to some end, they have undoubtedly played a part in Sony's decision to raise the price of PlayStation 5. The amount of people I have seen attribute the price hike to simple greed is fucking astounding.

1:15:52I'm losing my my damn mind reading these people's comments. I don't know why I keep letting myself be disappointed in the intelligence or lack thereof the general gaming community, but I am. Take care, dude. Jordan Peterson's 10 minute rendition of the Joker baby monologue. There are a lot of people out there that are straight up stupid. You can't. And they're loud. They're like the loudest ones. You gotta just I know, man, I read shit out there every day of my life. I'm like, dude, what are we even doing? What are we talking about? What are we saying? Of course, this has to do with tariffs. And if you do the math, I would actually argue that Sony isn't...

1:16:32I mean, it's great that they're only charging$50 more, but that doesn't even cover the full tariff, depending on the product you're talking about. It's important to note that... Well, it's two things that we've reported in the past. Sony had said in their recent financials that they had a three-month stock of PS5s in the country. They've gone through them now. And so we said at the time, I believe that we would be revisiting this almost no doubt, which is unfortunate. But the other thing to keep in mind here is that they've also said publicly that they're moving their American... So consoles that are going to the American market, that manufacturing base is moving out of China, but that there are still 10, 15 % tariffs in these other countries as opposed to higher tariffs out of China.

1:17:21So if you do the math,$50 on a$500 console is not the 15 % tariff. So they're eating something and that gets worse if you go to PS5 Pro. So there's no excusing it. It sucks, but it seems like they're actually trying to mitigate it and they are taking a little bit of their own hit. So I would actually argue in corporate terms, they're being the opposite of greedy because you would expect a larger increase. And I think Microsoft's increases on their consoles were larger to account for that percentage that I'm talking about, possibly also because they're manufacturing in China. And so it's going to cost them more.

1:17:57So there's no getting around. In other words, that this is about the tariffs. So, Chris, let's go to you. What do you make of the$50 price hike? And where do we go from here?

1:18:09Colin Moriarty:Well, well, I just want to reinforce like yeah i don't think it's i don't think it's great there's a lot of greed in a lot of industries and i think a lot of a lot of the greed in the game industry comes down to really like the the software level or like specifically the the services rendered end of the pipeline as opposed to the hardware hardware typically actually like i think historically sells at a loss i don't know how much but like um generally speaking like i remember that being a pretty widely known thing that like yeah they're kind of eating a lot and hoping that they get you on the software and the subscription services and all that so i wouldn't necessarily attribute this to greed um but i mean look this is this is the reality this was what the promise was in some sense and so like you know we've got it um it doesn't necessarily help that things just aren't great economically speaking right now it doesn't help that uh you know it seems like every every which way you look there's like a there's like a new round of layoffs it's it's bad it's it's this is not anybody who tries to you know present this as like a positive thing it's just like i mean it's subjectively not whether or not you want to you know dig deep into that or that's up to you but i mean it's it's objectively not a a great thing to pay 50 more for a console that's been out for five years it's not a good indicator so where do we go from here i don't know like i the the real issue is the the flippancy with which the administration's kind of handled this.

1:19:36Colin Moriarty:It kind of seems like they go back and forth a lot. It seems like things change almost on like a weekly, sometimes hourly basis. And it feels like there's no real commitment. And I think that in and of itself is not the greatest hand to play if you're trying to either negotiate or trying to strong arm certain new realities into effect in countries beyond your jurisdiction. So like, if you want this, like if if the goal of increasing tariffs is to move manufacturing out of china or out of our competing um nations and then maybe into the u.s i think it it'd be better to not have such a fluctuating you know inconsistent push and pull with how we do this because it signals to other countries that like we don't really know what we're doing it's kind of signals a lack of commitment to what it is we're there and and who's to say that the next person that comes in isn't just going to undo this immediately like there needs to be a certainty in some sense and that's not necessarily being projected we'll see how it turns out i i would imagine we'll be paying more for these consoles for a for a while i don't see things getting better for uh for quite a bit because there's nothing really changing um but i don't know what do you think Like, do you think this is like a positive thing?

1:21:02Colin Moriarty:No, of course, it's not a positive thing. I am. I believe in protectionism. I've said that for many, many years. So people that get upset, get upset. I mean, you would know this, Chris. I mean, well, maybe you wouldn't actually know this before Trump because we didn't know each other before the first Trump administration. But long before any of that was being discussed, I was talking about how I didn't believe in free trade. like for many years so people that get mad at me now it's like dude i've been saying this consistently like my entire career that like one of the things that i believe is that we need to do something about our industrial economy because it's fucked um and um what i but so i never it's similar to a few things politically but it's like in my experience i just never thought it would ever happen, right?

1:21:55So my whole idea of tariffs was, and I think I've said this on the show in the past, was my strategy would be like super targeted, not only in industries, but in countries. And the ironic thing is, is that I would be so punitive against China that you'd probably be paying a lot more than$50 more for a PS5 if I got my way, you know? But they would have moved manufacturing out and then there would have been no tariff because I probably, it would have been in Vietnam or some country where we had free trade with, or like some sort of equitable trade. right um so we're getting a tariff strategy that's broader than i would have done from both a country and from an industry level um and in a lot of ways that lack of targeting i think is bold but also a little dangerous so like if you target iphones it seems unreasonable that we would maybe build an iphone in america but then you do get apple investing hundreds of billions of dollars into american manufacturing in kentucky and indiana and all these places where they're going to make things.

1:22:54And my whole thing is this. I get people's frustration over this, but I guess, and over just the increase in prices and tariffs on anything you're interested in. But I guess my confusion about it is that I always thought everyone understood that there was going to be a literal price to pay to have this sort of thing. And I know that's why people are fundamentally against it. But for me, I feel like people seem to be against anything that might bring them short term pain for a long term benefit. And like, it's the reason why we are in all of these fucked up situations, whether it's with Social Security and Medicare, whether it's with our military industrial complex and the insane, unnecessary amount of money we spend on these things, whether it's with like immigration policy, which got completely out of control and all these things, just people constantly kicking the can down the road.

1:23:51And for me, I really worry about people that were not born into the incredible level of privilege that I was. And not only was I born into a level of privilege, but I had a lot of lucky breaks in my life. And there are people that just are at that crossroad at every turn that I made the right turn or got brought on the right turn, get turned on a different route. And they're not able to do a fake fucking job like this. and that's what it really comes down to the thing that radicalized me economically because i used to be i never believed in free trade but i was much more of like oh never never medic medicare for all never any of these things where like now i'm like well i believe in a certain level of quality of life for people um i just don't the better my life has gotten the more bad i've felt that like there are so many people that could have done this done this better done this just as well made a name for themselves if only they were given any sort of opportunity and they have fucking no opportunities and the and there are towns that are and cities that are gutted and people have nowhere to go and they're doing drugs and they're living off of the government dole and they're doing all these kinds of things and to me i'm like i look at that and i'm like This is so horrible that we have just undercut many, many people's ability to make things, to manufacture things because we're obsessed with the cheapest possible item on a market that forces our workers to compete with borderline slave labor and then expect that they're going to be able to make a living when these companies are happy to sell them the fuck out.

1:25:35And anything that bends the arc or tries to bend the arc back in any way, I'm down to try because it's better than the status quo in my opinion and then if it doesn't work and it blows up and i agree with you chris like i just think the lack of consistency is what's really annoying like if you have conviction just do it you have to just do it right and see what happens but like the constant will they won't they it's been it's not been well handled but directionally i do agree with it. Because to me, I'm like, there's this argument that like people don't have, you know, you need to be able to buy cheap things now, right?

1:26:14Like you can't wait for a year or two years from now, you got to survive in the moment. And I get that. And so that cheap access is awesome. But it's come at a huge cost too. And I just would rather have people have jobs and work and make things. And I hate this idea that that anything I had this conversation on one of Jaffe shows with one of his listeners where they were like, we shouldn't be even making this shit and do wasting our time with this. And I'm like, why have we made it so that like there are jobs that are too good for us or we're too good rather we're too good for these jobs. So.

1:26:50I just want to bend the arc of the economy back towards people that. That work here, and I've tried to live my life like that, too. that's why when people get mad at me now i'm like dude i've been saying this shit for years we are we use all american made merch we print that this is like a great expense to us compared to me fucking doing this overseas are you crazy i want to make sure we're employing americans because that's what matters to me is employing people in the united states so yeah so i hope that makes sense i understand people's conversation i understand it's an unpopular opinion but i want it for i want it for people i want them to i want them to have security and a life

1:27:28Colin Moriarty:yeah well i mean i want to be clear too is like a tariff the concept of a tariff is like that's not really the problem and you like you said it's it really is the scatterbrained kind of inconsistency uh by which it's been doled out and the kind of broad seemingly well not seemingly like definitely thoughtless way that it's been carried out in the majority of places where it's been applied where it just kind of it it doesn't seem really like there's a strategy and and and if you pay more attention to like just what what is going on internally over there like it becomes very clear that there really isn't that that broad of a of a line of expertise with which to follow and so like that's kind of concerning um and i'm not necessarily against the the concept of a tariff or even a tariff with the goal of bringing manufacturing to America.

1:28:22Colin Moriarty:My concern really is that, dude, I think there's a scapegoat situation happening where a lot of people tend to blame, where it's like, oh, there are no jobs here because X type of person came in and took it. Or it's like, no, listen, you're not being paid for these jobs because they don't want to do it. like they would automate your job in a second they would and you come from a different place because i know that you like you're a we're generally like all middle level like we're not even even close to these you know mega conglomerates right but like if manufacturing is brought here they're going to be working day and night to make your job not real like they're going to replace you with a fucking robot or like an ai or something you might have that stability for like maybe like five years or something or 10 years but that's gonna go away at some point and that's kind of the that's the unfortunate thing is like i don't know how to reconcile that because i also want us to build shit here but i also just i know i know the thought process at these companies too well to really trust that would even really be like an altruistic goal without some major unforeseen side effects and it bums me out because i think there's a there's a human nature thing that i all kind of are aware of and why certain things might not work and might not not to say that we shouldn't try certain things because if they blow up then like you know it is what it is but I don't know I don't I don't share the optimism necessarily that manufacturing here would work I just I feel like I live in the the hollowed out remains of like a an unrevivable body in some sense where I feel that way too.

1:30:17We've let there's almost no going back. The reason that industry in the United States is such an uphill battle and why there's so many non-believers is because it can't be done at a cost that would be competitive. But it's because we let people fucking undercut us to begin with. Right? We bought into this idea that we should just ship everything overseas and that we just wouldn't make things anymore with no consequence. And it's blown up in our faces. Dude, I watch these terrible videos. They're TikTok videos that I could put on Twitter. Sometimes there was this one of this kid going around his town and he was like, I'm just going to record myself every day until I get a job.

1:30:58And he went to like dozens of places and there's just nothing for these people to do. And I just feel like it would be so easy for me. Like the easiest thing for me is the status quo cheap things are i'm never going to need one of those jobs and cheap things are great for me but like from my perspective it's like i believe and maybe and this is why i always said like it would be awesome to have the option to buy like to put your money where your mouth is to buy like a domestically made x y or z i mean it would be a ridiculous thing that would never happen but just to kind of put your money where your mouth is it's like going to the farmer's market i remember saying like yeah or paying a little more for animals that are better treated when you're buying eggs or milk or whatever.

1:31:40Having that option is nice to at least try to bend the arc back towards reason. And I had so many doors open for me in my life. And the easiest thing in the world would be for me to just sit here on a perch and say like, free trade is great and fuck this shit and stuff like that. And I'm like, I don't know, man. Like, I think it's I think there's tens of millions of people that feel it differently. And that would be desperate to make a fucking iPhone in the United States. And they're the ones that were sold out. And maybe there is no going back. Maybe I'm 20 or 30 years too late, but. I'm thrilled to at least see someone trying to do something now.

1:32:25if it was me there would be no tariffs on playstation 5 not because i give a fuck about playstation 5 but because i think that there are certain many things where it's like this is too targeted and you and like this is not what we're after right like right we're after like silicon manufacturing of like on a major scale we're after like cars and electric cars we're after batteries we're after solar panels we're after like that's like to me that's where my mind would be right And that's not what's happening. So I can't sit here and say it's a good thing. It's not a good thing. But I also would argue that it's directionally right.

1:33:05So, yeah, we've gone on. Dustin, I want to get you on the record. How do you feel about all this? And where's your mind at?

1:33:11Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I don't know. I feel bad because I don't have anywhere near as many thoughts as you guys. It's not that I don't think about these things. I do. I'm a little surprised by that because of where you're from. Western Pennsylvania to me is like not obviously a lovely place awesome place but generally Western Pennsylvania is known for being one of these hollowed out places sure so it's surprised me that you haven't that you know it's not that I don't think about it I think that over the past few years I've just and I'm not saying this is right I'm just being honest with you guys that I I have so little control over any of this it's difficult to care I have so little control over my own life sometimes.

1:33:54Colin Moriarty:And it's not that I don't care. I just can't do anything. And sure, you can vote. And that does like a tiny, tiny thing. There has never really been a politician that I've truly ever believed in, except for maybe when I voted for Ben as mayor. I knew he was a good guy and I really cared about my local community. But I've never I've never voted with a passion in my entire life. And that's unfortunate. Right. I guess just goes to show the state of our politics. And, you know, it's not just here. I think it's everywhere. And so when these things happen and, yeah, they affect me, like everybody like, yeah, you're everything is fucking more expensive.

1:34:46Colin Moriarty:I think we were talking about maybe it was on a stream call and that it's like yeah I've lightly looked around at trying to buy a new house and over the last you know whatever five years six years even though I make a lot more money than I did when I bought this house every move is is linear or not linear but lateral like I cannot upgrade into a new house it's like what the fuck and I'm sure there's a lot of like millennial angst about the economic situation that it's like, man, some of us feel like we finally are here from an economic standpoint about how much we're making, or maybe a lot of us haven't gotten to a point where it's like, they're feel like they're making more money.

1:35:30Colin Moriarty:And it's like, Oh, so now we're, we've made it to this point in our lives and everything's shit. And the money I make is worth way less than it was just even a few years ago. It's like, I don't know. I like what you said, Colin, though. It's like, So I guess I have a defeatist attitude somewhat. And I guess where I do focus is like, yeah, I'm I support my local businesses, try to help the people around me. Those are the things I actually can't control. And so, yeah, it's I know that that there's would be a lot of criticism like, oh, well, you don't care because they don't affect you. And it's like, no, it's a lot of these things do affect me.

1:36:11Colin Moriarty:They affect literally inflation and the tariffs are affecting everybody in this country to one degree or another. I guess the difference is how much it's truly hurting you. And so, yeah, I'm in a privileged position where it's like, yeah, it feels like I'm making less money, even though I'm not. But I'm able to deal with it. So I'm not trying to say that my pain or financial pain is just as bad as other people's because clearly it's not. um i guess i just feel like i can't do anything um so why would i use my brain power on that there's a i don't know no i there is a general powerlessness that i think uh kind of consumes a lot right because uh you know you can feel as strongly as you want but like what like what are you gonna do yeah um you can really only vote and even in that situation i mean like who it's very slim pickings right as far as as far as like anybody out there who not even that you necessarily fully believe in but like even just people who are even on the the cusp of being trustable sure i think maybe twice in my entire life that i feel like there were people who i thought like yeah you know what sure but like even that's like begrudging and it's a it's a bummer it's it's a it's a it it really is a shame i think um i just think there's a lot that's happened over the last 40 to 50 years um i do think a lot of it stems obviously i think i really do think a lot of it stems from you know uh corporate lobbying and all sorts of things i mean like there's no dude i mean it's no coincidence that like black rock is what it is it's crazy yeah like it's insane like just objectively it's not even like a i don't think it's a left-wing or a right-wing conspiracy there's just like real like you're like half like most of the houses are just like not you can't buy them not because you couldn't afford them but because like they're not they're they're grabbed up and it's like what do you do in that situation i don't know yeah and in the grand scheme of things a ps5 costing 50 bucks might not seem like a lot and i guess it is like you know it's a it's a luxury hobby in the first place we always say that on the show that this is not a cheap hobby to invest in anyway but um I don't know, man.

1:38:35Colin Moriarty:It feels like we're just running with inertia in a not great direction. And it's so fucked up, too. I can't remember what YouTube video I was watching. It was something about the housing crisis and why the United States sucks at building houses and the expense of it all. And I was learning about how these private equity firms are buying up, quote unquote, local businesses like electricians and plumbers and stuff. So it's like, even, even in my sense where it's like, Oh, the only thing I can do is support local businesses and local craftsmen, whatever. It's like, sometimes even then they're, they're like buying out and making a, a localized monopoly on a fucking plumber.

1:39:17Colin Moriarty:It's like, there's literally nothing you can do. It's like, for me, it really comes down to, it's like, okay, well, I could be generous with my money to people who need it. I can support the businesses that I know, whether it's like just eating somewhere or like he mentioned on the show a lot, Evan, who owns the game store downtown. It's like, I know when I go buy a game from him that that's helping support his business and his family and things like that. And it's like, yeah, maybe I wasn't wouldn't normally buy something, but it's like I can I can at least do like a little something. Right. So.

1:39:54Colin Moriarty:Yeah, it's a dude, even with even with food. like do you know what the ghost kitchen stuff oh yeah there's all these like fake restaurants that are just like on these delivery apps it's like here's the the thing that i don't see a lot of people talking about and we can move on after whatever like i don't know we're we're off on tangent i guess but yeah when things are desperate for when things get more desperate for the lowest amongst us it kind of drags it drags everybody down in the sense of like well what used to be kind of off the table is now like oh well i get it you know what i mean like it kind of makes it so it's like oh well things are so bad that yeah why wouldn't someone make a bunch of fake restaurants and flood an app to try to get like one over and try to get their bag like sure i respect it you to get your bag but like it ruins everything for like a small community who runs on like local restaurants and stuff like that it makes it it makes it so people don't bat an eye that a president crypto scams their entire audience the day before they get to the white like i mean like i don't know like that you that would have you in a normal society in a normal time where things weren't so desperate that would be like yo what the fuck that's crazy that's insane that that happened and that's not even political that's just like yo what how is this how did this happen and everybody's just chill it it drags us all down and i think we're just we're fallen men i don't know it's i want things to get better i think they can i don't think it's all doom and gloom i know we've kind of waxed poetic about things being like really really dire um and i think in some ways things have always felt that way in in certain points of in history i'm sure people were felt really weird about i'm sure artists felt weird about the camera coming out or whatever and like Like the same thing's happening with AI now.

1:41:49Colin Moriarty:But we just got to adapt, right? And I don't think anybody's really nimble enough to do it well right now because things are moving so quickly that like even just reacting to it feels slow. Yeah. I'm sorry to interrupt. Well, no, go ahead. I have some thoughts about actual the PlayStation tariff or the PlayStation price increase. But if you have another thought before we head back. Well, I was just going to say, things are happening so quickly on the AI front, especially that AI companies, it seems like when you read around the last few weeks, there are some AI investments in AI companies that are about to get undone because they're spending so much money and not making any money.

1:42:29But the chase has been so fortuitous for a select few that this power is going to be continuously more and more monopolized. it's actually what i think we might have brought it up on the show months ago that there was like that article that that i was suggesting people go read and it was like a it was about like this different ways that ai can go and that like we're basically a few years away from this getting completely fucked yeah because there's gonna be like one monopolist that gets there six months sooner and that six month gap will allow them to then like triangulate and take advantage of their advantage that they can just like go create like at a crazy speed and uh so i think we're entering and I think these things are all interconnected.

1:43:07I think this is all about what we're talking about. It's just a general trend that I think I'm willing to take.

1:43:15I don't say I'm willing to take a hit. It's like we have to make a move. Or and it's probably going to fail. But I think the. The alternative is that we just fail sooner. And we didn't even try to do anything about it. And to me, I believe that there is a future, one possibility, an unlikely one, but one possibility of there being an America that does build things again and that can support a base of people. and I don't know. I just, I'm just uncomfortable from my perch shitting on the potential of people actually having like gainful employment like we did. Dude, everyone is so fucking pro, which is great, pro private union and look at how the good things used to be and everything.

1:44:15It's like, dude, what was different then was that people were building things here, period. Yeah. Like, that's the that's the difference. And. So anyway, now, Dustin, you were so, by the way, it's cool if you agree or disagree with any of this stuff, but I think it's important to have these kinds of conversations around. Like, I hate when people in our space and in games like who cares about video games, like, dude, this is all about what we're talking about. The manufacturer of the good, it's like the fundamental to all of this. but yes i understand that it's an it's a pipe dream that they would ever manufacture the ps5 in the united states but it would be awesome if they did and by the way like a lot of these companies very easily could manufacture things here and it's sad that we find it cheaper to to make ideas here make concepts and all these different things and then send it overseas and then ship it back to ourselves built by people that are paid a dollar a fucking hour yeah slaves

1:45:20Colin Moriarty:essentially. Yeah. So it's no wonder that like our people can't compete with that. And yet we want to we want to just continue to support it with just our eyes closed, I guess, about like the cost that it's it's ravaged the country. But I think you might be right, Chris, about what you were saying earlier. It's like it's probably just I mean, we were saying this is like it's maybe just too late. But we've we really screwed ourselves up. It's a shame. We could have had it all. We could have had it all. We're rolling in the deep. Like we could have Silicon Valley and like we could have had all these things, but we could have also had.

1:46:04We could have had all the components of the of the economy. We just we we sacrificed it at the at the these major corporations. threw away where like generations of workers our government imported an enormous amount of new people also that undercut prices to make it seem that no one would ever clean a bathroom or ever pick a fucking crop as if that never happened and now people are walking around addicted to drugs on fucking government benefits doing all these kinds of things and everyone just throws their hands in the air and I'm like dude the biggest the biggest threat to our country and the biggest threat to our our way of life in our society is income inequality yeah so I'm sorry Chris you

1:46:49Colin Moriarty:were going to say something well no I just like you're right like it is like this um the lack of manufacturing the uh the the exodus outside to other places that could get a lot of that labor done for literally criminally cheap uh prices and and expenses and that was that was a result of that was a result ultimately of of corporate power getting a lot of political power and in this form of like there's a bunch of different forms but like citizens united is one of them where it's just like oh well now corporations are people now so like they can vote it's like what no that's insane uh and it turns out and dude you can literally look at the graph every single relevant graph like changes around that time like everything gets fucked at that moment everything and it's i don't know what to tell you man it is uh it's rough i i wish i wish we understood that broadly but i i would like to believe that we could bring manufacturing back here and that we would have companies that were honest enough to be like yeah you know what we'll will pay our people very well to do what we were doing for pennies on the dollar but do you understand why that's kind of you know yeah i mean i i get it inherently it's an inherently difficult thing for me to believe and we again we come from a different place because we are smaller or we're small businesses so we care about that but like i just think i just don't think that exists yeah i get a certain echelon but the one thing that i hope that i can impress on people and maybe even on and i think dustin would know this fundamentally but it's like we can make a difference i know it's it seems like it's nothing but i think if we all directionally do try to go do the right thing and live a certain way and make a certain choice that maybe there is a contagion to that, or at least like, you know, that you're doing your part.

1:48:51It's like, I bought all American made appliances for my house. Maybe it doesn't make a difference, but maybe if a bunch of us make that choice when the time comes, that it's like a thing that can help people survive and work a real job instead of my fucking fake job. And again, that's why I'm so I become so radicalized on on this is because like I am so lucky.

1:49:16Colin Moriarty:Right. And I want to use my perch to try to. Say something about it, at least, you know, so that's why I always say about putting solar panels on my house. It's like I feel like I'm doing my part, at least in a small way to try to better the environment. in. So, cause it's, it is all, I can't do nothing or I can do nothing and I can't do very much, but I could do some small thing. And, um, and I do try to just like, certainly I buy foreign products. I mean, we all do, but I do try to like pay attention to those things when I can and make choices. And I would make, and that's the thing I'm saying is I would love to make, I would love to have more choices in that regard.

1:49:58And by the way, we're an American podcast. So we're talking about it through our lens, but like, I would want this for everyone's country that has an economy of scale where it's like, it would be great for you to also have a great working class base. The working class that like built my families into my parents' generations.

1:50:19I really worry about like the haves and the have-nots. And I just can't believe that like so many people got away with undercutting and destroying and gutting an entire group of people without any regard for them and then they they took their jobs and then they at the car plant and then they sold them the cars made by their competitor overseas it's so cruel so yeah it has nothing to do with ps5 because we wouldn't do that we never made ps5s here but right yeah i think that's an interesting conversation yeah now people will be very i'm

1:50:58Colin Moriarty:where people would be very mature about it yeah whatever yeah if you if you find the discord i'll kill you you'll be gone no one said anything bad like it's like i know you're right you're right it's like um dustin you had something you want to say now about ps5 there are a couple more things i wanted to say about ps5 yeah yeah uh the first thing that i just found interesting uh just referencing a a ganky tweet uh he's obviously the information's not oh geez back in May he you know posted this tweet about I think it was from a financial call or something about how the Sony CFO Lin Tao said they had three months worth of stockpile in May and it's funny because they were quite literally right it's been as yeah just over three months and so now here it is here's the price increase the thing that is interesting to me coming back to the very beginning of this conversation where I was talking about this not being about greed that's probably mostly true but I do question it a little bit maybe not particularly with PlayStation thinking about how Nintendo just raised the price of Switch 1 um I don't maybe there's things I don't understand there's many many things I don't understand in life in general But we're talking about hardware that was budget hardware in 2017.

1:52:28Colin Moriarty:And it's still you're now raising the price on that. That doesn't really add up to me. Now, of course, there is the aspect where microprocessors, silicon, whatever is just continually more and more demand. Everything has a fucking chip in it. Your TV, your car, your toaster. your your refrigerator there's so many more things ridiculous it's right yeah we got to go back to dumb appliances dumb appliances i yeah i would pay a lot of money for a dumb tv right oh my god yeah so i wonder with playstation 5 where i'm like you made a revised version of the console that would make it a little cheaper is it really true that you're you're the your cost for the manufacture these parts that were you know in whatever when you were putting the console together in 2018 2019 over that the period of time before play stage 5 came out are those really the same price even after you revise the console to probably make it cheaper with a smaller heat sink and a lower footprint overall i don't know i i honestly really don't know i'm asking the question like yeah um someone that's more aware of like the raw cost of these materials maybe maybe he's Moore's Law is dead would know.

1:53:46Colin Moriarty:But I'm like, sometimes I'm not so sure when we're five years out from this console, you're really telling me the cost of your materials has stayed exactly the same. Yeah, I think this is this. Well, there's two things. I think one of the things you're saying gets into the theory of the case with with what Moore's Law is that is hypothesizing about PlayStation six, which is that it could be a cheaper console than you think, because it's using i guess less silicon or newer things that are getting smaller and um maybe thing and you know will be dealt with in a different way and some because you're buying out obviously a massive economy of scale of many millions and if you're cutting off little dribs and drabs it's why consoles were were remade over and over again to begin with is to like just removing like a few square inches of plastic from your console could save you millions of dollars um and so maybe there's something to that, but I'm not deep into the weeds on that.

1:54:43And I forgot the other thing I was going to say anyway. So there is this idea that, oh, that's the other thing. What I was going to say next was corporate greed. I think that there's going to be many examples of corporate greed under the auspices of tariffs. And that's where I think things get a little unfair too, where like you can't really judge whole cloth one way or the other. This was actually happening with inflation, to be fair. And this is one of the things I was saying. You know, there were things that I agreed with that Biden was doing, you know, with chip manufacturing and the Chips Act and all those kinds of things.

1:55:20And I also think it was a little bit. I mean, inflation was completely nuts during that entire administration. But companies were definitely gouging the shit out of people and blaming it on that. and that's why I thought with Sony in particular Dustin it was important for us to say like well if you just you if you assume it's being made in Southeast Asia so like 15 % not China but they've moved it to Vietnam or something or maybe they'll move it to India eventually or whatever then they're actually not even charging the full amount of the tariff and so it's like the antithesis of corporate greed and so you have to look at every example and see like, well, what are you getting charged?

1:56:04What is the old price and what is the new price? And then we can see. And we saw that on the stock market for years of like the shareholders where everyone was getting gouged. Everyone knew it and the shareholders loved it, which is why judging the health of the economy on the stock market one way or the other is always kind of the specious and stupid thing because it's not reflective of the reality on the ground. But there are two other inquiries we got from the audience that I thought would allow us to explore some interesting angles of this before we move on. Raisin wrote in and said, greetings, Sacred Boys.

1:56:32Not to get political, but with PlayStation raising the price of the PS5, I have to ask, if the PS6 is rumored to release in 2027, why not wait until after Trump's second term? With economic instability and tariff uncertainty, why not wait for a new administration? We've seen how widely unpopular these tariff policies are across the political spectrum. Obviously, there's more important things to worry about than the price of our consumer electronics, but something's got to give. What say you on this query? Any and all insight would be appreciated. a hop on my girlfriend's only fans and sit on her strap on and listen got to afford that ps6 somehow that's goodness disgusting thank you for writing in little raisin um someone's knocking on my door oh really who is it

1:57:17Colin Moriarty:Uh, I don't know. So I'm not going to answer. Okay. Fair enough.

1:57:23All right. So raising, this is interesting because I, there is a lot of, um, it's what Chris was bringing up earlier actually about the major Achilles heel of this entire tariff strategy. Whether you agree with it or disagree with it is the inconsistency in it. I think like, it's like having a war strategy. Like you got, once you deploy it, the game's on. like like you have to you have to believe in what you're doing and be willing to stand by it and see what happens um and that level of inconsistency i think has really hurt the major purpose of the tariffs generally which is to encourage consistency saying like this is the new price of doing business will you move your manufacturing here as opposed to saying well we're a little wishy-washy on it and like then and corporations don't know what to do with that or whatever so the status quo is kept and then prices go up.

1:58:12So it's like the worst of both worlds in some way. But I think this is a risky maneuver for two reasons. Number one is I don't think that like companies, it's cool to strategize around and it's important to strategize around the realities of the markets, politically, socially, economically, whatever that you deal in. And the United States is Sony's most important market for all their products. But the other thing is, is that you can't really hold on to a console for a full year and a half and then hope that someone wins because if the republicans win in 2028 which is entirely possible this might not change at all um and so you're not only holding on to the console and not for getting a return like an roi on your investment you know or roi return it's the new rip and piece roi on your investment um not only are you able to exercise that and you have to wait a whole year and so you're amortizing these losses and all the rest all the while but you're counting on a political outcome that you cannot control and if your entire strategy is based around that and then it doesn't go that way then you've just like really wasted your time so i think you just got to make your decision about timeline regardless which is probably going to unfortunately be fall 2027 unfortunate just because i don't think we need the fucking playstation 6 but we're going to get it it seems like um yeah the reality too

1:59:34Colin Moriarty:well the reality too is that like um even if the opposing party were to win you're still ultimately going to be releasing in some kind of in an environment of the inertia of what's happening now anyway you know like a lot of administrations have this kind of continue continuing inertia you know like you have these things that continue uh even into the next uh presidency and even certain things like uh even just certain things that are outside like even like tax policy that doesn't go into effect until like you know sometimes into the next administration so like these things it's it wouldn't be wise i think to just wait uh to see what the outcome of the election is because materially it wouldn't a you don't have any control of it like colin said and also you just you just might as well it's better to just rip the band-aid off in some in some sense if you're ready to go like i agree with colin we don't need the ps6 that quickly but like if that's where that when they're going to do it it's best to just do it than it is to in the same thing in you know uh 2020 when the pandemic was happening you know like i think i remember i remember people saying like oh why don't they just wait until the pandemic is over it's like that would have been that would have been a while that would have been a good year and a half uh almost two years that they would have been sitting on that machine yeah and what a mistake that would have been too because everyone was so into it because no one can go anywhere right no no exactly like so that's that's the kind of thing you got to keep in mind it's like listen it's best to just go when you're ready and you know the only time that i would i would imagine it would be worth it to hold off on releasing a machine is if there's some fatal flaw that like you did not anticipate that you just discover in like the last few months leading up to it somehow like a three like a 360 red ring of death type situation um that manifests sooner obviously but yeah i wouldn't i wouldn't be on the on the committee that says like you know let's let's hold it for the future if anything japan wants another fucking pandemic right yeah it did it did very well for uh for certain industries um yeah yeah the thing i was gonna say was like yeah you gotta and i i think you and i agree and we'll see how dustin feels is like you got to focus on your timeline and execute.

2:01:53And then the question will be price. I think that's the thing that just changes is like, you might have to just be very flexible on what you think you can charge for this thing one way or the other. Dustin, what do you think?

2:02:04Colin Moriarty:At some point, the rubber will hit the road on price increases and what the market can tolerate, but all signs to point to that not being right now. in a lot of different ways. Look at the Switch 2 and how much everyone complained about the price. There was the whole thing where their chat was spammed. Lower the price. Look how it turned out for Nintendo with their most expensive console yet at$450 and then the bundle being$500. There was no problem despite the economic conditions. So I think right now I mean this is still a few years away so times could change and the rubber could hit the road between now and then but I agree with you guys that you can't just you kind of just got to deal with what you're in at the present and go from there so but right now like I guess this is related but not directly related to this question it's just that this PS5 price increases I don't think going to make any difference for them I don't think so either no at all um in fact when grand theft auto 6 comes out it's not gonna it's not gonna be a problem for the ps5 pro at all um that brings up a couple of important things that we should say for balance because i think we're all we all think that this sucks and certainly not something that i would have wanted although like i said if it means things are i'll take it if it means things are gonna get better elsewhere if like it has to be this blanket thing then that's fine we'll see how it all plays out but it's not not an ideal thing of course but there are important caveats The first is that, and I went and looked this up actually in preparation, I put it in my notes.

2:03:47The average worker in the, well, a worker in the United States on average makes$28 an hour. So the price increase is what we're talking about is a couple hours of work. Not saying it's nothing, not saying it's not a lot of money, but well within the range of normal people. To your point, Dustin, I think that that doesn't make it preclusive of people being able to afford it at that price. The other thing I'll say is this, and we've said this many times, so this will be no nothing new if that is a deal breaker for you in terms of like well now i won't buy the console or whatever which is totally fine and i get it people have financial reasons why they have to do all sorts of things they're living hand to mouth paycheck to paycheck to paycheck so i i mean this with no animosity it's just true it's like if that's the case and it is my opinion that you should not be buying a video game console at all um and you should save your money until you're in a better financial state.

2:04:40So I think you're right in that sense, Dustin, where though it's an unfortunate reality, though$50 is a lot of money,$50 is a lot of money to all of us. I mean, I don't just fucking throw$50 away. It sucks. I would suck. And, but I also must say that that I really, I was actually looking last week about like what I've spent this year just generally. And it's like, I don't buy fucking anything. So I'm not, I'm not interacting with the economy really at all, but I haven't really noticed anything in my my personal um like any increases of note um but i know people in my life that have all said like

2:05:10Colin Moriarty:i'm sure micah has at the grocery store oh no yeah well food but food has been going up and up for fucking since post-covid i mean that's that's no surprise when i go to the supermarket and 85 percent of our food production is domestic so right so you could very easily never buy a foreign food item if you don't want to but um and you know this is the other thing though it's like you can't just this is why to me it's like directional is good but like there's just certain things you can't grow here or whatever it's like what do you do like you know but i don't even i'm not really paying attention to that also i understand that like vegetables are apparently really expensive right now because of like trouts um and all sorts of things vegetables are expensive i i know like dude the thing that i've noticed particularly was like bro rideshare is crazy really rideshare is nuts at least where i'm at like i i remember looking at it i think it cost i was trying to get to somewhere that wasn't even as far like wasn't even really as far as like where i would used to go to you in santa monica and it was like 60 bucks before tip and i was like brother that is i'm not going yeah that's that's just i'm not y 'all can pick me up if you want i'm not i'm not going i'm not paid 60 60 hours both ways yeah it's crazy plus plus plus a tip to the fuck absolutely not that blew my mind i was like yo it's it is oh who is who is paying for this insane yeah absolutely nuts absolutely things are getting crazy for certain things but that's what i was that's what i was gonna say was yeah yeah food prices have been have been going up so i'm kind i'm not i want to say like i'm my feelings are immune to that because i i always go into the supermarket and i'm like what like we were buying cold cuts whatever like i'm like dude when I was in college.

2:06:53So it was a long time ago, 20 years ago. I would buy a pound of boar's head pepper turkey for five bucks. Like in Shaw's in Boston. So like not in a cheap place. Now it's like 13 bucks. Yeah, that's a quarter pound now. Yeah, it's like, whoa. But like, that's not really a product of now. But I have what I was saying was that like, there are many people in my life where they're like yeah man like this is really expensive now or like this price went up um the only thing i think i did notice it in one way i went and bought a um a new battery for like i have like this multi-use battery for my outdoor equipment like you know your blower and your weed whacker and shit like that and that was like kind of expensive um yo but that's kind of the thing that maybe we i would love to have a battery manufacturing in the united states i'll be fucking

2:07:39Colin Moriarty:sick what are you gonna ask you guys can i ask you guys about because i look this it's always been a joke that there's been like you open up a bag of chips and it's mostly air uh but i feel like it's getting it's getting a little ridiculous yeah like i feel like now it's like 65 percent air in these in these bags of chips and it's it's i'm not okay with it yeah i think i think they argue that like it keeps them safer in the boxes and shit like that but i i'm i i find a lot i have a lot of disdain for that too when you open like when you break that seal and then the air is let out so now it's like a normal bag and then there's just like it's just like crumbs you know on the bottom it's like yeah everything's the shrink flation as they call it right that's that's a we could all use a little shrink flation in the united states but um some of the portions are a little still a little crazy but i i agree generally it's just everything's just fucked up man i didn't i express this on the show that i my parents were born both born in 1950 and so like i think about that they were literally like alive and like when they were a teenager you can just go get like a burger for a fucking a dime yeah and like they're still alive and now all these years later they're paying like you know ten dollars and it's like dude what the fuck that is such a crazy erosion of value it's it should be it's criminal like people should be fucking killed for doing that to the to the dollar it's like whoa man crazy shit because even when i saw that average wage of 28 for the average worker in the united states like jesus christ that's a lot of money like compared to what i thought it was but at the same time you do the math and then you're like actually it's not that much money at all because i still have like two that like 1999 brain yeah it's still it's still it's still technically less than it was i mean way before we were right like my my instinct is like oh that's a lot that's a good wage and then you're like no it's not yeah not when your rent is 2500 a fucking month i think genuinely a dime used to go way further than$20 does now, which is crazy.

2:09:42Colin Moriarty:Fucking insane. Final inquiry is a good one. It's an interesting one. Rubber nipples 209 wrote in and said, hello, crack bandits. I see Sony now raising the prices by$50 for console hardware. I got the pro model back in December. I feel lucky now. But also, I can understand waiting for this holiday, hoping for a price. I think he means price drop probably. I'm interested in this. Sony has kind of set up an interesting thing here. Potentially, if they're but the like I said, the price increased the price increase for the base PS5 without a disk drive. It would be about 15 percent. It's it's$50.

2:10:21But if you wanted the disk drive and then you wanted the pro, they're eating a little bit of money. So this would force them to eat even more of the money. But you can imagine them saying like, wouldn't it be interesting if they just if they drop the price back down for Black Friday or something like that? But Black Friday. I don't think that's going to happen. I like the entire idea of like, yeah, maybe, maybe there's something happening. It's important to know we have a huge international listenership, obviously, and viewership is like, you guys have been dealing with a lot of price increases that weren't affecting us, few of them over different territories.

2:10:54Now, this price increase doesn't affect any of you, but you've already kind of incurred the price increase. And that goes to show you like the inflation situation around the world, because the tariffs shouldn't be affecting most of these places. they have their own tariffs obviously like brazil for instance has like insane tariffs on fucking import electronics that makes the playstation like you know thousands of dollars but um so yeah a little bit of what's good for the goose is good for the gander all right well anything else to say about ps5 and ps5 pro i i hope you guys listen i mean we did try to say over and over again on the show that the console in this economic environment simply will never get cheaper.

2:11:32It's just not going to happen. Like, so yeah, I really hope it was cool. I mean, it's not cool, but it's cool that they at least gave people a day because I wonder like what sales looked like yesterday. I mean, if you were on the fence, there was no reason for you to wait at that point. You might as well just do it. Yeah, if you could find one, I don't know if they sold out or whatever, but they at least gave everyone a little bit of a notice. So, but as the time you hear this, the prices have increased. The cheapest PlayStation you could have gotten was at launch. that's so crazy it's fucking unheard of man it really is this this is the first time this happened oh yeah that's not it's never this is never price prices have never gone up on consoles until this generation ever never happened not one time fucking crazy man and that's why it's like yeah and that's why we have to bring up both blade you know both the edges of the blade as it were it's like yeah tariffs in the united states are catastrophic to the price of everything but inflation yeah it's bad dude yeah yeah covid covid really ravaged everything and people the government just spent so much money it was not necessary to do that and one of my favorite sports i don't know if you guys have done this is like you ever go up and look at like ppp loans people got you can just look at them up like see what people got dude there are companies in our space where I'm like, dude.

2:12:55Yeah, it's come on, man. It's like we didn't. You can go look. We didn't take I didn't we didn't need like we were. That's what bothers me about it is that like companies like ours were booming at that time. And these companies, these like, you know, our peers or some of them are still going and taking this money. It's like you don't need it. Like, where's the patriotic spirit of leaving that for someone that fucking needs it? And it's what you were saying earlier, because everyone just took advantage of it. Why not? Why not take advantage of it?

2:13:18Colin Moriarty:That's that's exactly what I was saying. It's like desperation is just like it makes everything OK. it's really like it's like it's what happens like yeah get your money why wouldn't you you never know what it's gonna just go away tomorrow why wouldn't you take it it's like people a lot of people really and a lot of companies really needed it and that's cool yeah but a lot of people in our space definitely didn't so that's one of my one of my favorite sports but that kind of that kind of rampant government spending tens hundreds of thousands millions of dollars per every entity or company that asked for it yeah man it fucked everything up and it was so predictable and it was it's so you know what's so sad about that is that value never comes back like inflation is a permanent tax the prices will never return to what they were you would need to have deflation which is even worse um so it's a trap like that's why that's why people that's why occasionally you have like a readjusted currency and shit like that and like people taking drastic actions on non-usd currency but we're getting to that point where it's like damn dude what is the i remember i used to my my allowance was five dollars in the 90s and that was enough to like go to the movies yeah or buy an action figure or something you know crazy which i was buying way too late in my life doesn't yeah i remember four and four ninety nine for like a good really good action yeah like a Marvel figure or something or Star Wars figure totally yeah what were you saying Dustin yeah I just want to throw this in for the the console warriors out there hey could have been a hundred dollar price increase that's what Microsoft did four months ago series X series X is$5.99 now yeah that's I'm sure they're flying off the shelf Xbox you could have gotten was at launch insane yeah really insane it's I can't I really can't over that the early adopter was the financially sounded person that's never true inflation has tamped down now to the point where it's a little it's still a little higher than i'd want it to be it's like two and a half percent you don't want to get too low it's actually bad to get it you know below a one and a half percent maybe something like that as i understand but maybe the new console generation will just go back to normal where the console hopefully i mean that would be great i I mean, let's say this.

2:15:39If this trajectory begins with a whole new set of hardware, we are fucked. It's so far beyond games at that point where it's like, dude, this can't be the case. Electronics are one of the few things that are supposed to get cheaper. We all know that. You bought a CD player in 1985. It was a lot different than buying it in 2005. You bought a flat screen in 2000. It was a lot different than buying it now. But you buy a PS5 five years ago, cheaper. and now more expensive. But you're right, Dustin. It is a lot about the drive for silicon, I think, or silicon. We're back from a bathroom brick. Before we go on, though, I went and got this just to show you.

2:16:20This is a G.I. Joe from 1989, unfortunately named Night Creeper.

2:16:24Colin Moriarty:Oh. I don't know if it's going to come through, but there's a price at home price tag of$2.79. Damn, that's a nice-looking one, too. Toys R Us for even a third of this price. Three times this price, rather. It's just crazy how cheap toys used to be. I love those old Toys R Us orange tags. Very nostalgic. Yeah. Okay. Next piece of news is a big one. It's that Hollow Knight Silk Song has finally emerged from a five or six year slumber. I don't think they've really given a proper true update right since... wasn't it 2019 and then they kind of reappeared a little bit in 2022 even but um first of all over at bloomberg jason schreier we're gonna cite bloomberg twice today actually jason schreier wrote why silksong took seven years to make and so it's an interesting little article and the basic gist of it is um these guys have made an enormous amount of money hollow knight has sold 15 million copies they're a small team of a few people and they had the luxury of taking their time and so they did and i think that they basically even i won't go into the article but they basically say they just kept adding more and more and more to the game they had more and more latitude to do so because the games you know hollow knight came out in 2017 on pc and then 2018 on switch and ps4 and xbox and i saw even when i was researching it that it came was it was it no no know that's a different game actually we'll talk about that later um and this the team team cherry the team behind the game has been kind of just toiling away on this which was originally supposed to be an expansion as i recall and now we got a lot of inquiries about this as well but before we go to it i wanted to uh see what you guys thought dustin hollow knight has a release date the crazy thing about it is that it's in a couple weeks the release date is september 4th yeah pretty exciting of course this is to be fair not to be fair to be honest i guess is what i should say audience for this game has been getting pretty annoying uh no offense but i get the situation they've been in where it feels like they've they've had their you know they've been teased a little bit here and there and so i can understand the frustration yeah yeah um you know I've been teased a million times with Kingdom Hearts games.

2:18:53Colin Moriarty:You don't see me complaining every day online for every event, though the Kingdom Hearts complainers are there too. So they're just as annoying, if we're being honest. With that all being said, maybe it's time. Let's see, we have about a week until Metal Gear Solid Delta. Can I beat Hollow Knight in a week? I've never played it. Well, I shouldn't say I've never played it. I've started it, but I didn't. I wasn't really that drawn into it. Me too. i had the same experience you can uh easily beat it in a week um yeah i it's a great game i think hollow knights are i played it on ps4 back in 2019 it's challenging it's unique it's uh memorable i do not understand the fan base of it as far as like the the depth of meaning it has to people and stuff like that but it's cool it's not it's just it doesn't resonate on that level for me and I can rattle off quite a number of metroidvanias that I think are better games um so it's it's not even in that top most echelon for me but for a lot of people it is I think a lot of it has to do with its mystique it's just been kind of behind closed doors I think a lot of people thought maybe it was not a lot of people I think there was something like what's wrong with this thing or like why is it taking so long or will it ever come out is it vaporware and I was and to me it seemed fairly obvious Chris that and and it's they kind of confirm it it's like we don't have any there's no rush we're publishing it ourselves um everyone will play it when we're ready and i gotta say i kind of dig them talking about it and then just saying like yeah two weeks you would expect it to be like you know february next year or have this long annoying marketing campaign but this is the considering the circumstances this is the best possible move in my opinion yeah yeah no i think it's i think it's awesome it's great news uh i like that it's um this small team that's just been given a lot of runway to do cool shit.

2:20:49Colin Moriarty:Even in this article, they say we didn't want to constantly bug people because all we could say was that we're still working on it. And that's not really substantive. No, it's a dope way to come back into the spotlight. Immediate re-reveal and immediate release date is dope. It kind of quells a lot of... A lot of... Whatever kind of ill will would have been... just festering in the background of not having heard from this game in so long is immediately kind of done away with given the immediacy of how it's being released it kind of was like oh i guess we'll i guess we'll see like what the game's gonna be right it gives you almost very smart right it gives you almost no time to be upset the only the only different thing they could have done which i think would have been even crazier and more interesting as if it was like doubt now yeah shadow drop yeah that would i think maybe i knowing what i know and knowing that they have the date and all this i would have been like let's just do that we're one of the few games that will it will mean nothing to the bottom line for us to do that it will probably actually be a huge benefit people freak the fuck out yeah that would have been that would have been a very smart idea i think but like i mean it's this is also smart i think it's i think it's cool it gets i'm a little frustrated because i uh picked this game twice on my draft and the year that i choose to not trust them they suddenly become reliable i picked it i think right i don't know i don't think i don't know if anyone picked i don't think anybody picked it okay i think because i think i looked back i was like damn it who got it oh i see and uh we none of us oh i have it here okay yeah you're right you're right oh i'm in trouble yeah happens do like uh i i guess it was in the the bloomberg article i saw it on twitter though that there's going to be no reviews for this game because they said it would feel it would be unfair for critics to play before kickstarter backers and other players they don't need they don't need the critics they don't need it's really unique as long as and if they deliver they have the mystique continuing into the next game which is cool yeah i think it's kind of kind of based no reviews i yeah i believe that there are games that don't benefit from reviews and it's the very best games it's why i said uh when we're talking about intergalactic some time ago i was like they shouldn't even put they shouldn't even this shouldn't even be available to anyone until it comes out no review is going to do it justice people are going to spoil it they have nothing to gain and it's probably the same thing with hollow knight they really have nothing to gain they yeah they have millions of wishlists apparently i i don't know if i think it said in the bloomberg article which is the most wishlist game ever yeah well yeah it has had a long time to have seven years right but that's yeah but that's an extreme advantage yeah of millions of people just getting a prompt when they sign into their platform of choice that it's a built-in free ad basically right um so they're in a very unique situation i mean i'm i i'm so jealous of them like that's such an awesome you sold 15 million copies of your game so you each you know all you made tens of millions of dollars in profit and you know per person probably and then um you're gonna sell another game that's gonna sell millions of copies i mean how much are they even charging for probably 25 bucks or something i even know i don't know silk song uh steam let's see maybe my pricing is totally my calibration is totally off oh it doesn't have a a um date on here page yet it has a steam page but not it it's not a price i see yeah i don't think there's a price i just searched silk song price i don't think the price has been confirmed hollow night right now itself is 14.99 you would assume maybe 29.99 i mean you probably can do 39.99 i think that would be the ceiling well they could really charge whatever they want ironically but i would go i would probably if i were there i'd probably be let's just do 29 yeah 29 we're gonna make a lot of money we're gonna make a lot of yeah you're gonna sell whatever millions of copies i'll buy one for sure yeah i'm definitely i haven't played i have hollow night i don't know where i have it i think i have it on playstation i think i also might have it on switch i don't want to bust out my stinky switch to play it though yeah I might just buy it on Steam.

2:25:23Colin Moriarty:Fucking whatever. Play it on the Steam Deck. Because I am curious about it. It's got me. Now that it's real and not a fictional thing. Yeah, all right. Now I'll dive into this thing that I've been sitting on for way too long. And I want to be clear. Although I said it, I think most people understand. I think Hollow Knight was great. Like a really great game. Fluid to play. fun to explore lots of secrets lots of things for you to discover if you put in the time and effort and i know people have gotten really really into the game for that it's just i don't understand the level of fandom comparable to the actual product that's that's my thing i think it's no disrespect to the game i think it's a lot of art direction too i think the art direction specifically is striking with a lot of it because that's the one thing particularly that it's it struck with me like i love these it reminds me of like um not quite like these old flash games but like it's it's got like uh it's got that dna like not quite a behemoth but like probably like a dishwasher sure kind of thing going on which is a very niche beautiful thing to bring up but yeah um okay we have one inquiry here from john that i thought i would read he says hello gents hollow night silksong just revealed a release date for september 4th as excited as i am i can't help but feel a little bad for other teams hell is us launches 9-4 and chronos new dawn launches the very next day both of which look fantastic but will now no doubt be a bit overshadowed my question is this at what point does the team's marketing become irresponsible i feel like team cherry should have some self-awareness on the social cash cache that the silksong release will garner and this leaves other times no this leaves i'm sorry this leaves the others what did you and this leaves the other games i think you meant to say no time to pivot it says times no time i know that one team doesn't owe another team that level of courtesy but it came off a little strange to me all the best i mean that's capitalism baby you know um yeah if i was holland i devs i'd say fuck them yeah if i i mean not really well no to me i'd be like I mean that's the way it goes I also just don't believe that like the two games that you mentioned are going to suffer from it hell is us is going to be big and Kronos I think will probably be a slow burn I think yeah yes Corden played it and I think it was who I read and he was saying that it's really really good and I believe it actually based on Bloober and their pet you know they're increasing pedigree now with Silent Hill 2 and they're doing silent one remake now so i'm gonna buy all three of these games they'll have to be played and and by the way this is what you were saying earlier doesn't was it's it's amongst metal gear and um the uh the fucking china hero project game the last lost soul aside lost all aside the well another thing i would say like i i feel like i would argue that hollow knight specifically is really not like hollow knight and hell is us i don't think are going for the same audience necessarily like there's going to be overlap obviously for people like us who play um you know a lot um but silksong is is going to be one of those games that like is it's it's big in a way that like i don't think i don't think your average person who plays silksong is would have been a mark for hell is us necessarily or crow or chronos like i if anything i think those two games are more in competition with each other as far as what they're trying to do or the vibe that they're trying to do.

2:29:02Colin Moriarty:I feel like they're more conflicting than Hollow Knight being there is. But there's no doubt it's going to be a big game and it's going to get a lot of the coverage for sure. Yeah, it'll affect something but I think these are all different games. It certainly has a unique gravity that will attract many millions of people. It's going to be a huge game on streaming. People are going to discover secrets in it. and so on and like we said no criticism of it before you know there's no embargo before release date so everyone's going to be discovering at the same time so there's going to be kind of a gold rush on that gold rush on guide writing and getting your videos out it's gonna be a messy affair but i don't think they have any responsibility to anyone but themselves so and yeah it's what you said dustin it's not you want to say necessarily fuck them but it's like you take a little bit pride in that it's like yeah we we are more important our game's more important where wherever you put it, we're going to attract attention.

2:29:56We're not going to avoid other games coming out. It's not the way it goes.

2:30:00Colin Moriarty:And they're competing with big publishers. Right. It is a competition. It is a competition. There are only so many dollars. And you're chasing them, whatever fraction of the pie you get. So interesting question, John. But my opinion is that that's just raw capitalism. Real raw, dirty raw. all right we had the gamescom opening night live event earlier this week when we're recording and publishing on patreon and you guys on that tuesday did a live stream for several hours i joined you at the end but you watched uh it with brad from summon sign and so you guys already got a lot of your thoughts out there on the fly um however i wanted to do two things here is to just ask again we want some time to think this is what i think is kind of it's nice but you know streaming getting the stuff going right away is cool but getting time to think and have an opinion is actually even better in my opinion and it's kind of a bummer that you had to shoot without looking and then maybe you change your mind about things or whatever so but we'll give ourselves the opportunity to do that now and uh and i was also curious and i put in our document a push square article that just had all the games that were announced and all the different things um and i just wanted to ask if anything stood out to you that you want to talk we can talk about any and all of this stuff if you want but i assume there's really not too much to say so dustin let's go to you first what did you think in hindsight of opening night live and i know you were we were all i i didn't have so much of an opinion on it i didn't see most of it i know you guys were down on it and then is there anything you want to reflect on that you saw yeah opening night live was okay the the problem particularly with this live show is just there was too many times where the show was dragged out on one particular announcement where there's a particular spot you guys go watch in the stream where they were talking about they spent like 15 minutes talking about a monster hunter final fantasy 14 crossover uh and they like brought some of the developers on stage and talked to them and there was a back and forth where they were translating everything they were saying chris nearly died during this part couldn't keep it together i just i saw some people confused so i was laughing because i think the stream like the the we were all watching our own version like our own link for the street like we weren't watching the same stream so like mine was a little bit either faster or slower i can't remember so i left a little bit earlier than it would be obvious but like they kept saying it was a crossover as if that was like impossible to understand as if it was like a crossover yeah we call it a crossover like it it says like it says collaboration crossover on the giant screen they say it once then they say it again in japanese then they say it again and then they said it again i was like like it broke me because i was like who doesn't know what this is at this point like why does it why does it need to be this way and i just busted i couldn't i couldn't i was already giggly as it was because we were it was already like in like a glut of like i think anime announcements or something like that i can't remember exactly the kind the context but it broke me but as far as the the quality of the announcements and what we saw a lot of updates on things a lot of updates for games that i'm already in on silent hill resident evil um all that kind of stuff it's cool to see more but i also don't need it in terms of games that i'm interested in there's one i can't remember it's it's the divine comedy but it's in oh yeah i can't remember what the title i think it's literally i'm looking i'm looking i think it's literally la divine comedy i don't even have that on this list that sounds like an interesting concept but the trailer was meh you know whatever i think it didn't it didn't have gameplay um so i'm interested in the idea of that game I'm looking at this list here.

2:33:57Colin Moriarty:Oh, one of the standout announcements is this Lego Batman legacy of the Dark Knight, which looks really fun. It looks like they're they're like, hey, they're not making Arkham games anymore. We're going to do it ourselves. We're going to make this Lego Batman, which clearly has at least Lego or Batman Arkham inspired combat. I was watching a different video where they're talking about it being open world. and I'm not big on a lot of Lego games, but this looked pretty cool. Dude, pretty neat. Loved, loved, loved the marketing bait of having the rainbow suit. Batman, did you see this? No. Oh, I did see that.

2:34:36So, excuse me, I have something in my throat. There's a Batman apparently in Detective Comics in the 50s that wore like a rainbow suit and they showed that that was one of the costumes and you got some response And they totally did it on purpose because they got some responses really. Ooh, this fucking gay shit. Gay Batman. But then like the real Batman OGs were like, this is actually a real costume from like the Detective Comics or whatever. I thought that was just so funny. It was so intentional and I know it. Good.

2:35:04Colin Moriarty:Wait, Batman's gay always has been. I know. I know it was intentional. It's a good it's a way to disarm people and trivialize future things they'll say. It's very smart. Yeah. um anything else to say about any of the games that you guys saw was i interrupting anyone no i i well i mean i i'm definitely with dustin where like the lego batman thing intrigued me the most and purely because i love i love the idea of like anthologizing that kind of thing like taking every single like if they did like a lego spider-man and it was all the raimi movies and every and the animated show and like all that like mixed together into the same like i'd be over the fucking moon about it so seeing it with the context of like you know keaton's batman and then ledger's joker and then all this stuff but like kind of like lego matt matt berry as bane is fantastic casting i don't really play enough lego games to even know if they typically do voice stuff i think that was a new thing that they started doing kind of recently as far as i understand but that was the big thing for me i was just like oh yeah i'm definitely gonna play that i was actually i don't know like there were some things that like i think dustin was saying that like there's some stuff that we didn't need more of that like i actually felt like showcased kind of poorly like i think of the big like resident evil like i feel like resident evil and silent hill i'm very interested in both of those but i actually feel like this was like the least interesting bits of each game that we that we've seen so far personally like it just kind of felt like this didn't really do anything for me you could you might as well just shown like a jpeg really and i would have had the same amount of excitement um cult of the lamb looks cool uh i i like i love i liked cult of the lamb but i haven't played in a while so the big thing for me i guess would be like vampire masquerade bloodlines because like i think it looks i feel like i've seen this before and it's it's never looked quite right it's always looked kind of rough and i just kind of like uh my eyes kind of glazed over it this time it presented really well and obviously like i'm a little bit more clued on this stuff ever since people have been recommending it to me after my um after i dived into uh the original deus ex and human revolution where like i'm i didn't realize that that was even an immersive sim and now i do and now i'm aware of that and it's like okay now that's that's something on my radar now but i don't know i was a little bummed out at the ghost runner thing oh right the more i thought about it because like now I'm looking at this article that we have linked here it's like ghost runner dev changes history for ps5 souls like so ghost runner is making a souls like yeah great according to them which you know who the fuck knows if that's even real like it's like crash bandicoot is a like the market is speaking I guess I mean it's it's easy to judge these I certainly do but there's does seem to be a market for and also this is an example of people just taking five or six years to make a game that they were inspired to make you know yeah I want to be clear i think i think it looks good i think it like presents really well i think the art's very good i just i was really into what ghost runner was doing as far as like flow state kind of i don't know there's something about that kind of style of game that i feel like we don't get a lot of so to see them go in a direction that i feel like is if anything like hyper competitive and over served um was just a little little bit of a letdown to me but i'll probably play it i I think Ghostrunner is great.

2:38:38Colin Moriarty:Just a really great feeling video game. So I have no reason. I have no reason to believe that this wouldn't. It's not gonna be the same kind of game, obviously, but I have no reason to believe that this wouldn't feel good to play too. Yeah, it is interesting. That game is a first person souls like. So I'm curious what that will be like in the trailer. It looks cool. One other thing I forgot to mention, Colin, because I know people have been asking me about this. they did show off the sekiro anime that was already leaked at one point that that was coming uh and it looks cool but i gotta be honest i just ranked sekiro as the top s tier from software game so i love sekiro but i just don't care you know a lot of these games that get anime versions uh i i end up watching like one or two episodes and i'm like i've already i already know you know there was a near anime that i watched an episode and bounced they did a persona 5 anime yeah and i watched a few episodes like i know i know what happens and i had a better time playing the game than watching this so who knows maybe we'll add something new to the the world the lore and maybe i'll go back to it but uh i can't say i'm particularly pumped i'm not offended by it i just don't don't really care yeah i'll probably i'll probably check it out maybe i'll um maybe i'll actually know what's going on this time

2:40:08i'm looking here at the list i did a little catching up there a few games i wanted to call out as well i think the lego batman game looks pretty cool like you said resident evil requiem obviously looks great like we said i don't need to see any more of that and and by the way resident evil requiem coming out in what february february pretty quick very nice love that love the the tight timing of of showing things and announcing the date we don't have to wait too long so that's awesome the um bitmap bureau the studio that's making the terminator game that comes out later this year that looks awesome announced another game which is a he-man beat him up i'm not a he-man fan but i will definitely play that game i think it looks great and it's just like damn dude let's get a gi joe one going like this we got turtles we got he-man we got all this wonderful stuff happening with these different licenses let's give a little love to my favorite license in that world that would be awesome silent hill f obviously looks great we already know that and then animusia way of the sword looks awesome too we don't need to see much more of that so a lot of good things but i did want to clue in since we are a playstation podcast we should dive deeper into one of the announcements there which was ghost of yote's online mode legends um which is going to be coming out in 2026 i modified your thing here

2:41:21Colin Moriarty:earlier say immediately yeah you said you said at launch oh yeah yeah i went i went and fixed it that's funny because i was like i don't remember writing this i thought it was out at launch but thank you for doing that i meant to tell you before we started and i forgot oh no thank you um so yes okay ghost of yote legends dlc coming in 2026 uh article written on the official playstation blog by my old comrade at ign andrew goldfarb who's been a long time sucker punch senior comms manager there and uh they announced this at opening night live as we just said we were just discussing the show so it's basically the online mode i i took notes earlier where was it yeah so i don't remember this but this was apparently so ghost of shima came out in june 2020 which we remember but legends came out in october that year for i don't know i don't know why i don't remember it coming out i thought it was like a year later or something like that like when it came to ps5 i did not remember it coming out that soon um so similar timeline seems like and of course you want that extra pop you don't need it right away that's no no one's playing ghost of shima for that right away you want people to come back and then maybe after legends then you get a dlc pack like an icky island style dlc pack in the wild and you kind of have like a year's worth of kind of play as this game being prominent um people are looking forward to it i'm looking forward to it as well it launches in early october october 2nd specifically that's my dad's 75th birthday actually and so i'll have to get that i'll have to get him ghost of yote for his birthday i love that um i don't know that there's so much more to say about this game i'm again i read a very interesting theory actually i've read this theory several times um about me that i don't like i don't like ghost of shima even though i do think ghost of shima is great but i don't like ghost of shima because it outshone the last of us part two and i'm like about like why would you think i gave a shit about that i could be the only person in the world that likes last of us part two and i wouldn't really care it wouldn't affect my ability to enjoy the game so that's a kind of a weird argument my argument rather is that i just have never really been very compelled by samurai fair and these days again east asia slot as we've been we had a different name for a bunch of different names for it but just the idea obviously this game isn't slop a lot of games that come out of there aren't slop but just the idea that there's like this just a lot of asian historical sword play third person it's a lot man you know like and it's cool it's cool that people are into it but it's just that's not i could take a lot of the same kind of thing it's just not this so that's just where i stand on it so i'll play it i'll i'm sure i'm gonna love it but it's not gonna be one of those games i don't think for me that's gonna like blow me away and that was the way i felt about goes to tsushima at the time so um where are you guys at on this one yeah um okay i don't know i i mean i i just christ

2:44:24Colin Moriarty:you're usually good about like no no you're right i'm sorry yeah you're right i didn't but um no i mean i'm looking forward to it the legends mode is more enticing to me like now that i know that that's happening i'm definitely more into it because like that was surprisingly very good um like it was just a very solid time i think i remember i think the only reason i would i would have clocked that it came out sooner like the original came out sooner is because i remember it being one of the first things that i tested on my the ps5 when i got it but um i just feel like yeah i mean i i like ghost of shima i think i really liked the first ghost of shima i thought it went in really interesting directions it felt like it felt like a really beautiful kind of 360 era game in a complimentary way.

2:45:05I mean, you know, and it felt it felt like, oh, this is what Assassin's Creed kind of

2:45:09Colin Moriarty:should be. Like, I loved the art design of it. I love the way they contextualize all the game elements into into a diegetic way. Like, I think it's very, very cool. But I also I am kind of in the same boat where I'm just like, I'm not necessarily excited for it because I wasn't excited for it in the first place. I was just kind of like I was just kind of looking forward to seeing what it was about. And then I ended up liking it. And so there's a probably pretty good chance that it happens again with this where I'm like, yeah, maybe this will be good. I'm interested in it. And I come away from it very impressed.

2:45:42Colin Moriarty:But there is a lot of this kind of game now. And it doesn't feel as novel. Even when it was new in 2020, it felt like it was kind of hopping on a trend, even if it wasn't. So we'll see. how it goes i think it'll i think it'll be good um but it's it is kind of hard to get excited yeah yeah go ahead doesn't the legends mode i wish i had put more time into it in the first um first game just because i thought it was awesome i played a few rounds i was like this is good and then probably something else came out so i'm hoping to put a lot more time into this one uh because yeah it was really great and i like i like how the the main story campaign is more grounded and then they can kind of like let loose in the legends mode being more crazy and mystical so i'm glad to see that they're following it up with this it's kind of crazy because this is what i would have expected sony to try to make a live service out of is the legends mode based on how good it was but um it's kind of nice to keeping it a more limited scope as chris was saying kind of like a 360 era multiplayer mode that uh is done with a lot of care as opposed to a lot of those 360 games kind of just having a tack on yeah yeah i could see that at a first glance you're like what uh especially when ghost of tsushima came out it's like what is this tack on multiplayer update and then it was like oh this is actually pretty sick so more value for the money you already paid for the game can't complain about that yeah for sure um i think sony has done a really nice job as we've noted ad nauseum of keeping these arcs going and new game plus trophies hell divers and we're going to talk about hell divers in a moment i think has done a fairly done an awesome job of engaging people with content with its war bonds and all that kind of stuff in the different attacks and all these surprises but trophies no not so much but let's speak on hell divers now last week we talked about the tease of hell divers 2 cross halo odst and it is indeed real and ironically it's on the xbox wire which we're going to cite here.

2:47:56It says, quote, Helldivers 2 arrives on Xbox Series X and S next week, August 26, and it's dropping in with a magnificently Xbox-themed surprise. Introducing the Helldivers 2 cross Halo ODST legendary warbond, a collection of equipment you might just recognize. In the world of Helldivers, ODST stands for Obedient Democracy Support Troopers. As every good soldier knows, nothing is more important than complete and total obedience and support of democracy. The set of gear is inspired by storied heroes and will allow you to join the ranks of the best of the best of the best. Compromising four weapons, two armor sets, and more, this war bond will let you outfit yourself like those heroes.

2:48:29Let's dive into what's included. So the weapons, an MA5C assault rifle, an iconic rifle, the definition of reliable and having taken down countless aliens bent on wiping out humanity, it is time to turn its sights on enemies of managed democracy. It comes equipped with a convenient ammo counter and built-in compass. Let it guide you to victory. And other weapons include the m7s smg the m90a shotgun and the m6c socom pistol and then there's armor a9 hell jumper armor uh a35 recon armor and feet first armor passive so actually it's two pieces armor and then a passive and then capes honored heirloom cape i have the clandestine cape and there will be more as well um this will obviously be available on playstation as well but this is being done to tease the launch on xbox very smart marketing i think chris i'm really eager to hear what you think about this and if it will drive you back into the game and if you will buy this war

2:49:23Colin Moriarty:bond yeah i don't know i i look i think this is dope i think it's a great idea i think it's an obvious fit um i mean even from uh even from like when hell divers was initially initially shown it did kind of feel like oh this is an ods this is this is an odst game and they would fit perfectly into it so i think it's very smart uh it's very smart marketing they did more than i expected i didn't expect there to be weaponry necessarily or like all this other stuff i did i i assumed that it would be the armor and i i don't know maybe maybe the pistol maybe i didn't expect to like the the actual like halo assault rifle in there the shotgun which is ironically that that shotgun's not even an infinite so it's it's a little funny that that's the most recent we're going to be seeing it but i think it's it i think it's really cool i like hell divers enough that and i love halo enough that i yeah i might jump in and spray like how much is this like like i think i saw like 15 bucks or something yeah i think that's what it costs i can look does it say that's fine i can't imagine that being worth it for most people but like i'm curious i think it's i think it's interesting i think it's a smart collab the thing though that it's i will say it's not exciting because ultimately this does kind of feel like it's it's a cool crossover it's a cool collaboration it makes sense but it's hard to look at it and be like it's it's hard to look at it as a fan of the ip and be like man everybody seems to be doing this better than the people making it you know what i mean like it seems like the like i saw a lot of people talking about this like way more than i anticipated to see and just to know that halo still has this much cache despite this long long downward spiral is just frustrating because it's just like you know it doesn't have to be that way and so there's it's a little bittersweet seeing this interesting to note that it's a new logo for halo odst like halo 3 odst is what the game is so that's kind of interesting to i don't know what to make of that it is a new it's not just a three photoshopped out it is it is new i don't know what to make of that necessarily but i feel weird i find it interesting too i mean it's just a little back but this doesn't really matter but just an interesting observation is the odst crossover announcement on xbox wire is written by their editor-in-chief um like joe scrabble's Xbox, who I think worked at IGN at one time after my time.

2:52:01I think I recognize that name. But the original post that announced it was written by Arrowhead. So there's a little bit, I say that just because a little bit of a latitude on the messaging and the marketing, a little more cross company than you would expect. Dustin, are you going to check out Helldivers 2 Cross Halo content? Probably not, but I think what they did is really cool.

2:52:24Colin Moriarty:I like Chris I wasn't expecting them to go this far in particular thing that intrigues me most is the weapons seeing them in the trailer they looked really neat and I gotta appreciate that the war bonds are kind of like what they did in the only other game I can remember that does this is Halo Infinite I'm sure there's other multiplayer games now where it's not a limited time battle pass where in Fortnite and maybe they changed this since I played Fortnite years ago is that you bought a battle pass and it eventually expired when the new one came out. So if you didn't unlock everything, it's gone.

2:53:00Colin Moriarty:Uh, in this, if you buy this war bond, you can take as long as you like to unlock everything. And so it's a little bit nicer, uh, especially, you know, you don't want to have to be a slate to playing just this before it unlocks or something like that. Yeah. All right. Well, we'll check that out. Well, I'm eager to see how hell divers does on Xbox. I think it's going to do pretty well. I really hope it does. I hope that they're like final, like we've been talking about Final Fantasy 16. And I don't know if you guys saw more recently. I think we brought it up to the Godfather or not the Godfather Mafia.

2:53:36Both soft sales on Xbox. Helldivers, I hope, has a better trajectory there. It could use the boost in players, not because it's a dying game, but I just think that the high tide raises all boats with these sorts of games. and it's why I hope that they're ambitious with should fair games still come out and I think it will. I mean, we'll see one way or the other. I don't know. But should it come out, they should just get it on Xbox right away. There's really nothing to lose by doing this with your games as a service. But it seems like with Marvel, Tocan which is a game as a service to a degree, they're going to treat that more of like a proprietary product, at least initially.

2:54:15And I don't know how much of a fighting community is even on Xbox. It seems like PlayStation kind of has taken that space over, so I don't really know for sure. that would even be worth it okay um this is the interesting news comes in two pieces rod ferguson is going to take two in fact returning to take two rod ferguson for people that don't know was a long time epic producer who was the original producer of the gears trilogy and he produced i think bullet storm as well actually the original bullet storm has been re-released like 7 000 times but the original bullet storm as it was released on playstation 3 he was also the executive producer of shadow complex which is one of my we talk about metroidvanias i truly love that's one of those um and then he went over to the coalition the xbox studio and a sort of lateral move people might remember that after gear what was it gears three i guess um epic relinquished the ip to son or to microsoft and microsoft started the coalition which I think was was that Black Tusk or am I thinking of Capcom with that sounds right I don't know and so they made and are still making Halo or Gears games and he was the head of the studio for Gears 4 and Gears 5 which I played a little Gears 4 I never played Gears 5 I know they're not super beloved compared to the trilogy but I would imagine they're all really good and then famously he went over to Blizzard and helped manage Blizzard during the release and the post-release of Diablo of four.

2:55:45But there was a little interstitial in there between his time at Epic and his time at the coalition to take on gears again. And people kind of forget about this. This is important to the story is that in 2012 and 2013, Rod Ferguson was at a rational and was basically co-directing the game with Ken Levine to get Bioshock Infinite out the door, which was long in development and famously at that time a little tortured um so there's a full circle element to the story which is that rod ferguson going to take two specifically working at cloud chamber and we'll be heading up bioshock and getting this new bioshock game out the door and we reported in recent weeks that the word out of there was the game is not in the shape that it needs to be in it's not the bioshock standards they removed the head of the studio and the director of the game and it looks like he's coming in, but this doesn't come off with some bloodletting.

2:56:43So Bloomberg, I promised earlier we would cite them twice today. They report that Cloud Chamber, which is a two, it's got two studios, one in Canada and another in Northern California, have laid off 80 people, leaving behind a team of about 170 people. And this comes on the heels of losing their leadership and then Rod coming on. Now, my assumption about this is that the game is probably, I would assume, fairly content complete. In reading about what Rod Ferguson did with Bioshock Infinite, as far as I understand and what was said was that he and Ken Levine kind of worked together on the content complete version of Bioshock Infinite as it stood, like what the game's arc was going to be and all the things that were going to be in it.

2:57:28And they went and basically cut shit and reordered things and did stuff like that. And so my assumption is, is that obviously the team probably has low performers that needed to go because the game isn't shaping up, but also people's jobs in some disciplines, or at least to the volume you would need it as you're spooling the game up. There might not be a need for all those people now, as they kind of just figure out how to get the game out the door. And as Strauss Zelnick had said in an interview on CNBC and with IGN last week, and we noted this was that the game's coming out, but it's, it's only, he said, it's good.

2:57:59it's not and and he said the really interesting thing about like good is that's not enough anymore like you can't release a good game and it's got to be great and so i'm fascinated by this entire story of him rejoining and getting going um on this new bioshock and i'm curious what you guys think about this chris we're both mega bioshock fans i'm super excited about an an Arctic Bioshock four. I wonder what you think. Rod Ferguson joining to save the day, but a third of the team laid off in the process.

2:58:37Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I mean, I think seeing is believing for this one for me. Like, I think the idea of a new Bioshock in an Arctic setting without Ken Levine is not particularly exciting to me. I feel like what's really going to sell me is like seeing what this is going to be, how this is going to look, what it's going to play like like how how bioshock will it be how different will it be um these are kinds of the things that i i'm thinking about as this story continues to kind of develop and as as it has developed over the last like several years we've heard about but we've heard about bioshock 4 or that rumored bioshock 4 for a while so yeah i think my leak about the story was 2021 if i recall fucking crazy but um yeah i don't know it's i'm i'm really in just a wait and see kind of place right now like i can't be excited i can't be doom and gloom necessarily either i just kind of like i'll i'm open to it i'm open to a great new bioshock game lord knows it would be really awesome if we managed to get a a new bioshock game that was even a fraction as good as you know those ken levine ones like it'd be amazing but i don't know i don't know what we're working with yet um remains to be seen surprising and parachute in a ghost story get them to ship judas god i'm so anxious to play it i can't take it anymore that's what i was really hoping was that going to be at opening light not opening opening light Yeah.

3:00:10Fuck me. Dustin, where are you on this?

3:00:14Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I'm glad to see that it seems like they've found a very capable person, of course, in Rod Ferguson coming in to fix things, hopefully for this game. As you guys were saying, it takes a very it's been around and floating around for a very long time at this point. And somewhere where was it in this article? the take two president said while we're excited about the foundational gameplay elements of the project we've made the decision with studio leadership to rework certain aspects that are core to a bioshock game um so thus reducing yeah and i guess i'm just glad i'm glad the suits at the top understand that it's like no we can't we can't just haphazardly make a bioshock game you know we gotta it people are expecting a lot more than just a a game that's fun to play uh needs to be much more than that profound in my i mean this is a crazy thing to say but it needs to be profound to be about shocking exactly so yeah it's a it's a shocking level of uh understanding from higher ups when i'm sure that they they could have probably finished up whatever version they had released it it would sell millions and millions despite it not like no matter what the three of us i think if a new bioshock came came out and even if it was rated we'll say in the 70s the three of us are gonna buy it and play it and then we'll bitch about how it wasn't as good as we wanted it to be uh and move on and be disappointed so they really could i think had the bag regardless but the fact that they're taking the time to really get it right i mean it sucks that we're waiting forever, but I'd rather that be the case than get a mid follow-up to Bioshock.

3:02:06Yeah, I'm looking at the article now. I mean, people should definitely go check it out on Bloomberg. If you want to Google it, it's entitled Take Two Guts Bioshock Studio After a Decade of Development. I will say, so Dustin, you seem to be more in the middle. Chris, you're pretty pessimistic about it. I got to say I'm pretty optimistic about it. I think Rod Ferguson has a really good reputation. And even in a truncating industry where jobs are becoming a little more fraught and studios are kind of being up, you know, there's a lot of upheaval and less steadiness. It's the kind of guy that can kind of go and get a job, do what he wants.

3:02:42My working assumption is that he saw the game deeply before he was hired and believes that he can fix it. And obviously his experience on Bioshock Infinite is one thing that's very important and i think bioshock infinite if anything has just gotten better with age just in in hindsight what it's about what it says the way it positions itself it's a fucking awesome game i mean that's why it's not as good as the original bioshock but it's a major reason why i just believe judas is going to be this revolutionary thing like i just believe it's not just because of my my friendship with ken it's like and it's i'm a homer like for bioshock like i'm really rooting for it and anything that that floats off of it especially after my experience uh late last year with with a system shock and but i just feel like a guy that like that doesn't jump into the him leaving blizzard and you know going to do this or not necessarily disconnected and i i think jason writes about it is that he's known as a so-called closer you know typically a business term for deals and in sports a a closer is the last pitcher that pitches an the game and having a great closer is like a vital thing.

3:03:54Mariano Rivera famously was the Yankees closer for many years and he is coming in at the end of like he has a reputation for this now. This is what he does. Yeah, and he did it with Diablo and I just feel like this is great news for the project. Now, whether the game is going to be any good, I don't know, but this is like this is the guy I think. Go ahead Chris.

3:04:17Colin Moriarty:Well, I do want to be clear like I think it's The pessimism doesn't necessarily come from like whether or not this can be salvaged, although that that is a question. I think for me, it really does come down to like, man, I Bioshock is so important to me that like I'm not like I don't know if I could even really truly in an objective sense. Like even if it was very good, like would it still mean as much to me? Because that's kind of the bar for Bioshock for me. It's like it like both of those games meant so much to me at the time that I played them. They were really impactful games to me. And I just don't know.

3:04:55Colin Moriarty:And I don't know if like as a 31 year old guy, like if I even have that capacity to be moved by like, I don't know, like it's an internal question really as much as it is just a business reality of just like, oh, I wonder if they'll be able to fix it or like what's wrong with it? like will it live up to the the gameplay standard or or the um or the you know the performance angle or like anything the art design like that's that's up in the air but like for me i i just worry that like like even if it is very very good it just might just might not hit that that height that i know that i get from bioshock mega maddie wrote into us on patreon just like you can he says hey my big daddies i wrote in a couple weeks ago about the turmoil about bioshock 4 was in and since then there have been some restructurings most notably rod ferguson stepping in as the new studio head at cloud chamber what are your thoughts on this and the other shakeups is there any way this game can be salvaged it's already been six years so at this point they might as well take all the time they need to get it right but that begs the question why even announce it so early in the first place thanks i'll have waluigi executed by a firing squad and listen he knows what he did jesus well maybe he probably doesn't waluigi is an unholy creature yeah he's a dastard yeah oh yeah sure sure um i just want to say that just to reiterate and i just feel like this is the most positive news that can come out of the situation as we understand it right and i would say that take two is a fairly canny operator at this point not all their games hit but and you don't want to compare Bioshock to Grand Theft Auto, of course, especially Grand Theft Auto being made by the native team that makes Grand Theft Auto games.

3:06:40But they let the teams kind of marinate on these big projects for a while, and it could be pretty straightforward for them to just cancel this game. If they really didn't believe it, if they really didn't believe it, they would cancel it and write it down, try to recuperate some of the money, fire everyone on the team and shutter the team. But they shed weight. They brought in who I imagine is a fairly expensive hire. and they're going to give them more time because the game had a release window apparently that could have been originally maybe as of a year ago this year you know um and they realized that and if not next year now they're saying maybe 2027 so it sounds to me like they have a game and now they need to figure out they need to probably do a lot of pickups a lot of extra motion capture a lot of cleaning things up cutting maybe adding a few things cleaning you know but the game exists it seems like it's fairly obvious um and this is a different project of course than the park side project which was the original bioshock 4 and that was certain affinity was making that game and i think jason writes a little bit about that as well the cloud chamber you say seven years that's about right i guess because it's 2017 2018 is when this game started to form and um to dustin's you know term of ship of theseus it's like that team that team has had so much turnover at this point it's crazy people usually don't stay put and release nothing for seven years so yeah and to mega maddie's comment

3:08:12Colin Moriarty:here why even announce it so early to a new bioshock game has not been announced yet uh it It was what I'm seeing here, a tweet from the official Bioshock Twitter account, December 9th, 2019. It says, today, at 2K announced the founding of Cloud Chamber Games, its newest development studio, blah, blah, blah, to take on Bioshock. So they never announced this game. They announced the studio probably as a hiring measure. But yeah, it's not like they announced Bioshock in 2019, a new Bioshock. I guess it was the announcement that it was coming. right but it wasn't like hey get excited right now for bioshock but they were looking for talent yeah like we still haven't seen like a teaser image or like a trailer or anything like that so it's it's not technically i know what people mean because it is it is ostensibly it has ostensibly been announced and subsequently confirmed but like i i don't know if i don't know if i would put it on them to for announcing it early when it was that was clearly a hiring post and there was no real trailer and it wasn't for like a mass market consumption type thing.

3:09:20Colin Moriarty:So like that. Rest the rest a little easy. Yeah. Yeah, I I think that's fair. That's a good pull. Dustin saved us from some comments. No doubt. I have faith right now. I think take two is letting things I mean, dude, go his story. Yeah, they're just letting him go. that that's too is not in danger and judas is much more officially announced all right let's move on to a few more items and then we can get to what we're playing we'll wrap things up with listener inquiries just a few news items i just wanted to get us on the record about this because this was announced that uh or during gamescom opening night live call of duty black ops 7 comes out november 14th and there will be a beta on october 5th and we'll run through october 8th this information i'm gleaming from our friends over at insider gaming do you guys where are you on on this game i mean i don't i don't play call of duty especially yearly i don't know where micah is on it um but because she she does play most years but i just it feels like we're lost between this idea that this game is going to suffer somehow maybe due to fatigue maybe due to battlefields prominence maybe due to being on games game pass but then you just you just know it's not going to be affected by any of those things and we'll be just fine so i'm wondering where our guts are on this chris let's hear from you first yeah i mean i i've never really been a mark for call of duty i've always kind of felt that it was somewhat archaic um even in even at its height when it was you know call of duty 4 modern warfare 2 kind of um world of war black ops era like i i thought they played well but they also felt to me like just that they weren't really deep or that they weren't really doing anything interesting i always felt like they kind of relied heavily on unlocking things as like a carrot on this a carrot on a stick kind of luring people forward and deeper into their game as a way to disguise the dopamine of making progress towards unlockables as having fun and i always i just prefer i always just preferred other other shooters to call it like almost always like i always i was always more of a battlefield guy um i did enjoy uh the early days or like the early weeks of uh this what was it what's the most recent one black ops 6 right 6 i enjoyed it like it was it was surprisingly pretty decent like i had a good time with it um i love the multi-directional sprinting i thought that was a good a good call it was it made it feel like materially different than previous call duties which was always like the main lament for me but um that game immediately got fucked because it just i can't even remember what something happened really early on that i was like oh okay it's it's i'm not i'm not really uh it's fine i'm good i had my time with it and then obviously beavis and butthead shows up and then it's just like all right well this is this is not really this is not really of any consequence to me so i've never really been high on call of duty ever even even when it was like popular to be high on it and this didn't really move the needle for me i think what are doing is interesting i think um like the single player level design that they kind of showcased where it looked almost like psychonauts like shit where it's it's trippy and mind bendy i think it's cool i don't know if it's very call of duty um but it's it's interesting i just don't know if i care at this point because it's we're so deep into this franchise and it's i mean even making a sequel to the same sub series this quickly is highly unusual for call of duty because usually there's like an alternation it's usually like modern warfare then world at war uh then modern warfare 2 then you know black ops then modern warfare 3 then black ops 2 like so to have black ops 6 and black black ops 7 like back to back feels a little weird they did modern warfare 2 the new modern warfare 2 and 3 back to back but modern warfare 3 was like the crappy like they just added maps right yeah it's it's what i mean it's like that that even when it does happen like there's an association there for it to be like almost like a cash-in kind of like it's a low it's a sub par kind of version so that's a little weird it reminds me a little bit of how it reminds me a little bit of how i felt about left for dead 2 when that first got announced because that got announced so like awkwardly quickly like after the first game and i remember feeling like what the fuck are they doing obviously left or dead was left for two was fantastic so there was no real reason to be concerned but i remember feeling like man that was awkwardly fast what are they what are they doing to justify this but i i just don't care about it really like especially in in a year where there's just a lot more interesting things happening in this very space you i mean i think i'm i'm pretty sure somebody right wrote in about ready or not later and we'll get to that when we get to it but like that's happening like in this kind of like almost independent space and obviously battlefield is doing really well like i'm actually surprised at how like great the reception for battlefield 6 has been and and the in the participation in these betas has been kind of outstanding i've seen a lot of people that i i wouldn't necessarily assume were battlefield people playing it over the over the weekend and and not just diving not just you know dipping their feet in but actually like playing it fairly deeply like upwards of 10 hours for a lot of people um and so i i just more than ever call of duty has no room for me or like i don't have any room for call of duty this year at all to even care so we'll i don't know how the i think that's generally the sentiment also it's worth noting that black ops 6 and black ops 7 are the first call of duty games back-to-back Call of Duty games made by the same team since the first two.

3:15:11Yeah. Which were made by Infinity Ward and that they were both in development at the same and have been in development at the same time. So really, really interesting. There's a shit ton of people working on these games, no doubt. Dustin, where are you on this?

3:15:25Colin Moriarty:Yeah, Black Ops 6 didn't really have legs for me. I really enjoyed it at launch, but fell off within a month or so. So the trailer for this, I appreciate that as chris was saying there's it looks kind of different and and weird particularly the campaign they're doing some kind of like um co-op campaign mission thing that's like a bunch of players i can't remember the exact details but it sounds kind of cool that trailer during gamescom shamelessly had an ad for the special edition with some stupid looking skins so that's not very promising from my perspective this year for Call of Duty since me and the group I play with is primarily really excited for Battlefield I'm going to game pass this one game pass PC I'll check it out because the changes look interesting enough but not enough for me to just go ahead and buy it so I will be taking advantage of that game pass PC deal to give it a shot I'll check out the beta too when the time comes and at least can have a little bit more of an idea of the changes but it's always weird the it ebbs and flows where call of duty everyone you know it's very traditional and then they're like well we're gonna go crazy running on walls and jet packs and shit and then everyone starts to hate that um we won't we want boots on the ground boots on the it's all it's always boots on the ground is the term then they went back to boots on the ground uh and more of a grounded Call of Duty and now we're just the pendulum keeps swinging where it's going to be a little bit more wacky.

3:17:06Colin Moriarty:So I'm open minded to it, but not particularly excited. We'll see what happens. November 14th beta October. I'm sure many of you will be playing and we'll hear from you when you do. All right, Dustin there's a few from or a couple for us here we can go through. This is an interesting one. Triangle Strategy randomly appeared on PlayStation and is now out as of yesterday from when we were recording. This was, of course, a Switch and PC exclusive. And what I was saying earlier, where I was like, wasn't this on a weird platform? This is what I was thinking too. That triangle strategy was on MetaQuest as of 2023.

3:17:41So it came to Switch and PC in 2022, MetaQuest and other devices, VR devices in 2023. And here in 2025, we get it on PlayStation 5. It's not on PlayStation 4, interestingly. This is a game that was published by Nintendo on Switch. Because of that, I always assumed it was either in some sort of sunset overdrive territory where we were just never going to get it, or it had some sort of time situation. I didn't think they would just release it, especially right when Tactics is about to come out as well. But this is an art dink game, kind of a studio that's been around for a while, but not one that I've interacted with too much until recently because they're responsible for the Dragon Quest HD 2D remaster, the third one, and they're the ones doing one and two as well.

3:18:25So I've never played this. Michael loved it. I'm going to buy it, but I don't know that I'm going to get to it anytime soon. I just want to make sure to show a little bit of love and a little bit of support. And it's 30 % off for PlayStation Plus through early September. So you have a little bit of time if you want to check it out there as well. So what I hear is that this is a so interesting little tidbit is that it's a the trophy list is 99 bronze trophies, zero silver trophies, zero gold trophies, one platinum trophy. And apparently it's 400 hour. Three to 400 hours. You have to beat it. apparently like if you use a guide it might take a little bit a lot shorter time a lot of choices and characters to recruit and shit like that so what do you think any interest here yeah i

3:19:06Colin Moriarty:it's weird because these games like triangle strategy and octopath traveler these kind of square enix 2d hd games should be really appealing to me but when i've played them or checked out their demos i can't really get into them octopath traveler in particular i watched holly play hours of it and they look so beautiful but i i think for a lot of jrpgs i just i really need a compelling story and the octopath games didn't appeal to me in that way so triangle strategy strategy i know the least about so uh i'm potentially interested to to know more i did play the demo for the Elliot game, Life of Elliot.

3:19:51Colin Moriarty:It's Adventures of Elliot. And I thought that was great. So the action RPG format in 2DHD was really interesting. So I might check out that. But yeah, weird that it's just kind of dropped. I think it was on an Xbox stream because it's available now on Game Pass. But nice of them to put on PlayStation 2 for those who are looking for it there. one other piece of news i wanted to actually let me get into this inquiry first real quick jeff and nola wrote in and said hi cdc this question is mainly for colin with square shadow dropping triangle strategy just what is there a pardon the pun strategy is it to generate interest in a game somewhat similar to final fantasy tactics coming up next month is there most likely no rhyme or reason seems to be a very inconsistent company these past few years with without a defined plan i'll hang up and keep kicking this cancer's ass and go on living too many games to play oh yes please be well yeah it's a weird one i mean i agree with you it is weird i don't know why they're releasing it now i feel like they're not putting any marketing behind it maybe because of that reason you don't want to confuse people too much will it really ultimately affect final fantasy tactics probably not but it might affect triangle strategy i just don't know why it's a game you would even just it's been so long just hold it release it later so yeah it's a little weird but i don't know that it really matters i'll buy them both but i'll tactics is much more of a priority to me and then the other one that i wanted to run by you dustin is a tales of xilia remaster this has been rumored for a while it's finally real they bandai namco uh press release has destiny's intertwined with tales of xilia remastered releasing october 31st so on halloween it comes with all of its uh bonus dlc some gameplay tweaks and so on and so forth there's some minor i don't they're not clear about what it is but they have made some content edits that people are upset about but i don't know exactly what they would be and i've played and beat tales of exilia it's uh i reviewed it back at ign um it's not i don't remember it being like an inappropriate game in any way the disappointing thing here is uh tales of exilia so um tales of exilia was from that generation still where we had to wait for games we don't really do that anymore but that was like towards the tail end of that so it originally came out on ps3 in 2011 and we didn't get it in the West until 2013.

3:22:08And I remember being really excited about it. I actually had the exclusive review for it. And then what I was going to say was it had a sequel and the sequel came out in 2012. So the sequel to it, Exilia 2, came out before we even got the first one in the West. And then that came out in 2014. It was one of the last games I reviewed in my journalism career. And it's kind of a significant game for me for multiple reasons. I really think Exilia is underrated and if anything, one of the better if not best Tales games. But it's also Tales Studios' final game and one of longtime producer and lead Hideo Baba's last Tales games.

3:22:41I think the last one he actually did was the stereo, which was the next one that came out in 2015. So it's this penultimate Tales game, but I'm really looking forward to this. So I'm a little disappointed and a little confused why they didn't combine the two because as I recall, when Tales of Symphonia came out, they also released the sequel and I thought you bought them together, but maybe not. I'm curious if you're going to check this out. I think Tales of Exilia is highly I highly recommend the game and I was looking at they have the cool little graphic slider on their website where you can see the old screenshot then you slide it over and you see like parts of the new screenshot and what it looks like and they did a really nice job of cleaning it up

3:23:15Colin Moriarty:what do you think tales games when I see them I imagine it's what Chris sees when he sees most JRPGs that the tales game I don't again I'm just looking at a surface level a lot of these games all look exactly the same to me. And I don't know. I hear about all the different made up words, tales of, you know, whatever. Legendia. Tales of Listeria or whatever. Tales of who knows what. Eternia. Eternia. I don't know. So I see this one. I'm like, this looks cool. It looks like the other Tales game that was remastered however many years ago or how many years before that. And Tales of Arise is the only one that I have played.

3:23:58Colin Moriarty:And I... liked it but i didn't love it so i don't know it's because you have no taste i but that's just the way it goes sometimes um no i'm only kidding i understand tales tales is like it's funny because tales is probably the most anime thing i actually really love um and i wonder if a lot of that it's a lot of it i think is predicated in the introduction of something i really loved I wasn't a huge anime fan. My brother obviously introduced me to a lot of anime when I was a kid and manga and all the rest, but I was really intrigued by the art style in video games. It's one of the reasons why I loved Lunar when I was in high school.

3:24:41Silver Star Story and Eternal Blue. And Tales of Destiny was another one of those games. I got it for my birthday in ninth grade, and I think I just loved it. Wild Arms, again, with its anime opening, I think I just, it's very comfortable and old for me and i've always just kept up with the series because even all this time later i've played most of them and you're talking about the made up name so fantasia but with a p ph destiny which is my favorite one that's the one that so we didn't get tales of fantasia in the west until much later etternia destiny 2 symphonia rebirth legendia of the abyss so tales of the abyss innocence vesperia hearts graces exilia and exilia 2 zesteria berseria arise so tales of listeria listeria that's bores had had that that's what bores had had jaden prior wrote in and said Good day, CDC.

3:25:46In honor of the Tales of Exilia remastered being announced, could Colin please let us know what his favorite games in the series are? Which ones are must plays for someone looking to jump in? A lot of... So the popular answer is Symphonia. And that was originally a GameCube game. And I think that that's a great answer. I think, though, I have a soft spot for Fantasia and Destiny. I have a soft spot for Symphonia. I have a soft spot for Legendia. And then Exilia and its sequel. And I really like Tales of Arise. I thought Tales of Arise was really good. And Tales games used to come out at a rhythm of a year to 18 months apart and there was a what if it was like a five or six year gap between berseria and arise so and we're gonna get no doubt a similar gap now between these next ones they have so much more to remaster so i'm not in any rush but um i would highly recommend tales of arise i think that's the newest one it's gonna be the friendliest one to play it's really long it's i platinum did it took me more than 100 hours so there's a lot of gameplay there and for people that are curious about tales of exilia i really would check it out i really loved that game i thought it was really really great and really charming i actually oh he's back there i i love there's a little cat character in exilia called rolo and i i actually bought the stuffed animal of him in japan when i was there because i was like when will i ever see like when will i ever have merchandise for the tales character rolo ever again the answer is never so i picked that up so jayden you have the world is your oyster and i think the more patient you are the more you're going to get but the ones that are readily accessible are like the symphonia games um zysteria berseria arise because a lot of them are locked like tales of destiny has never been ported to anything it's a ps1 game what they gave the names yeah

3:27:32all right um two more quick pieces of news just wanted to get this out there in a in interview so this was the uh the reddit i've recommended before gaming leaks and rumors they just haven't people kind of dive into these various interviews and different things and different localities languages find some of these little secrets and interesting tidbits and they wrote over there glenn schofield who of course was the producer of dead space and uh the director of callisto protocol had noted that according to his sources and what he understands that the cluster protocol sold between six and seven million copies how did they how did they not how did it all fall apart for striking distance in them like they spent too much money yeah and it and the game was like eight hours long but people wanted to like it that's pretty good sales too bad man just wanted to throw that out there yeah it's a bummer and uh finally there's just an update about um evo so of course evo is the long time fighting game tournament and community that was founded in the mid 90s and sony made a proper investment in it in 2021 they've announced that sony is i guess divesting from evo now but selling its shares or i guess allowing its shares to be subsumed by an entity that it owns a piece of so it's basically transferring it along and that company is node win or nod win n-o-d-w-i-n in all capital letters so nothing to really say here but i just wanted to acknowledge that that's happening on the not on the eve but as um marvel token fighters is developing i really appreciate sony getting involved and i i actually think so i don't i think some people are wondering why this is happening i don't have any information on it personally and any insight into the fighting game community that would be useful to you but my assumption is that sony was saving the company they there was like there was a good remember that there was like a lot of i don't remember the exact specifications but there was a drama around ebo around one of the founders right and he like got in trouble for impropriety of some accused of impropriety or something as I remember and then the brand was kind of toxic and then I think Sony kind of came in at its low and bought it and so maybe just an investment and I don't know that they need to be distracting themselves with Evo so I don't really know that I give a shit about that one way or the other but it's cool that that happens.

3:29:55By the way there is one more piece of news and Chris I don't know if you saw this yet it's on bungee.net it says passing the torch a message from p parsons oh to the bungee community and here i'll put it in the uh sorry i'll put it in the chat interesting he writes quote after more than two decades of helping build this incredible studio establishing the bungee foundation and growing inspiring communities around our work i have decided to pass the torch this journey has been the honor of a lifetime i am deeply proud of the worlds we've built together and the millions of players who call them home and most of all i am privileged by the opportunity to work alongside the incredible minds of Bungie.

3:30:32When I was asked to lead Bungie in 2015, my goal was to grow us into a studio capable of creating and sustaining iconic generation-spanning entertainment. We've been through so much together. We launched a bold new chapter for Destiny, built an enviable independent live ops organization capable of creating and publishing its own games, and joined the incredible family at Sony Interactive Entertainment. Today marks the right time for a new beginning. The future of Bungie will be in the hands of a new generation of leaders, and I am thrilled to announce that Justin Truman will be stepping into the leadership as Bungie's new studio head.

3:30:57I have worked alongside Justin for many years. His passion for our games, our team and our players is unmatched as a leader in engineering, production and design. And most recently as the general manager for Destiny 2 and our chief development officer. He has been instrumental in bringing some of the most memorable moments in Bungie's history to life. He lives and breathes a studio and I have full confidence that he is the right person to lead Bungie forward. And then Justin Truman writes, do you know who this person is? You know this name? I've never heard this name.

3:31:21Colin Moriarty:I have to study up a little bit on this is really fresh. He looks familiar, but I don't know that much about him. It says he writes, quote, In the 15 years I've been a developer at Bungie, I've worn a lot of different hats. As an engineer, I wrote some code I'm really proud of for our original weapons, abilities, and networking in Destiny 1. As a designer, I helped craft many of our Destiny 2 systems, including some of the endgame systems I got terribly wrong at Destiny 2's launch. As a producer, I helped our team build and roll out Destiny's first seasons, but recently I've helped with our overall talent strategy as chief development officer and have been helping the marathon team as we build our next world.

3:31:56Across all of these different roles, Bungie's purpose has stayed clear. We create worlds that inspire friendship. When we're at our best, we create those worlds alongside you, our player community, and build something that matters. Something that's worth your time, your passion, and your investment in us. Something that I've learned, hopefully, over delivers. I've also been part of these efforts at Bungie when we've maybe not been at our best. When we've stumbled and realized through listening to our community that we have missed the mark. I know I've personally learned a lot over the years, as have all of us here from those conversations.

3:32:21I'm committed to supporting and working alongside every member of the team here as we continue pouring our hearts and souls into these worlds. worlds that we love and that we hope that have been worth your time and your passion because ultimately those worlds only exist and thrive with you in them we are hard at work right now on doing that both with marathon and destiny we are currently heads down but we'll have more to show you in both of these worlds later this year in closing i know i can speak for all bungie when i say i appreciate your passion your perspective and the time you spend with us does or i'm sorry chris i gotta go for you first i apologize uh no you have any thoughts here um well my first thought is immediately that uh anybody that isn't pete parsons is good quite frankly but uh what's the

3:33:01Colin Moriarty:feeling what's the feeling on him with people i don't even know it's he not good the sentiment the sentiment for pete parsons is not particularly positive um he's largely kind of um because i if i'm not mistaken pete parsons i want to this is by the way fresh off the yeah this is this just this was published 15 minutes ago so i didn't necessarily prepare for this but i'm pretty sure pete parsons was a microsoft guy before uh and he joined bungee and that was like kind of a big point of criticism where like i think like uh he brought like a bit of a he brought microsoft kind of into the studio culture yeah it says parsons came this is from the destiny wiki parsons came to Bungie from Microsoft in 2002 as an executive producer and studio manager.

3:33:53Yeah.

3:33:54Colin Moriarty:So he was a Microsoft guy and he kind of jumped in and I've heard different things that I don't really know if I I've got to really brush up on this. It's been a while. But the general feeling about Pete Parsons is like it's it's it's not it's not been great under him. A lot of the kind of boneheaded leadership seems to be seems to fall at his feet a lot. Whether that's fair or unfair, like I really don't know um but i do know the sentiment of the studio is probably a lot more positive now that he's not involved this justin truman guy i'm i'm getting like a i think this is good like i feel like he's one of the people i know less about honestly because he came he came in around reach time or um maybe pre-production on d1 like early early yeah i'm looking at so oh you're gonna find this interesting Chris I'm looking at his games page his first game was full spectrum warrior as lead game gameplay programmer but his second game as senior programmer was the saboteur then he goes and he is the engine works engineering on halo region and engineering on destiny and destiny 2 yeah so there you go yeah so I mean that's I'll have to look deeper into it I might have more to say about it next next time but That seems like a pretty good thing.

3:35:19Colin Moriarty:It's not a name that I'm immediately familiar with, but like having somebody that has that deep of a history, it's not necessarily deep into the Halo days, but early into D1, the Sabaturer is an interesting poll. That's fucking fascinating. But yeah, this is a good change, whatever this is. If Pete Parsons out, anybody would be better probably. But the fact that it's somebody with a deeper history as far as like, or at least a deep, deep way back history in Destiny itself, I think is probably bodes well um well we'll see how that shakes up that's good news though generally what do you think dustin i don't know if you again fresh news i don't know if you have any insight into it that you want to share but um let's go to you before we move on i really have absolutely nothing i cannot give my 15 minutes but it sounds like it's probably a good thing because bungie since sony bought them has not been so hot.

3:36:13Colin Moriarty:So it sounds like maybe some new leadership might might be needed at this point. So off the cuff sounds like a good thing. Yeah, I will say that I just think that this purchase continues to be a complete fucking boondoggle. Part of the reason why Sony wanted them was the leadership of people like Pete Parsons, who was supposed to be good at this job. And I'm not going to speak too out of turn, but it's like, again, just what is the fucking point of this? Just like, what is the point? Everyone's gone. Like all the leadership all the people that you you wanted to help shepherd you into this new generation of games of the services is and i i wonder if p parsons is leaving on his own it's often i don't you always make assumptions like maybe he really is just done maybe he's well respected internally and he's like i just don't want to do this anymore but it's also possible that everyone's like this is kind of fucked and this has been kind of fucked the entire time and he made an enormous amount of money no doubt from the purchase yeah so you can't feel too bad for him i imagine based on what the the based on his position within bungie when the studio was purchased and the amount of money that they purportedly spent on bonuses for the entire studio he made probably tens of millions of dollars easy so yeah i'm looking at i'm looking at the response and it seems it seems to be mixed but skewed negative because i guess like let me see uh it's it's like it's like that you know that meme of the guy going into the fridge and he's like excited and then he turns away disappointed that's saying that it's like uh p parsons leaving just in time for justin truman to step up so like he's i guess somewhat controversial what is this man i wish this happened a little bit earlier uh justin truman shouldn't even be employed his philosophy ruined d2 i don't know i don't know I don't know anything about this shit.

3:38:06Yeah, I guess we'll get back to it next week.

3:38:09Colin Moriarty:We'll be better than Parsons, I'll tell you that much. Whether it'll be good is... That's another story entirely. Alright. Let's get to what we're playing. And we'll begin with you guys. You're both playing Battlefield 6 Beta. I don't know if you have anything else that you want to say about it that hasn't already been said, but I leave it to you. Chris, let's go to you first. um yeah so obviously the beta ended uh this past weekend super solid i think i put a i think i put around 15 hours into it i really enjoyed my time with it there's i have some gripes with it there are some minor things that i think uh kind of irk me a little bit but it's definitely a way better experience than 2042 was at launch it's um it's definitely i feel a lot better than battlefield 5 when that was when that was new um there's just certain changes that they made like i think open weapons is open weapon classes is generally not my preferred i think there should be rules to battlefield but like it's it's not a big deal the way the medic is handled is better than better than battlefield 5 but still kind of awkward and weird like i don't like that you can just choose to so to get to get deeper into it i'm like i play medic pretty much always medic and recon like sniping and and medic is that's that's what i do in battlefield and in battlefield one which is like probably one of my favorites how it worked is like a player will die and then when they die they get kind of like zoomed up to the menu and they get to choose like what their next loadout is going to be and they get to make the decision about where they're going to spawn next and there's a little timer that lets you know how much time you have and then you can choose to do it if you were a medic and you revived somebody while they were dead and down they would basically be yanked out of the menu and brought back to life and i thought that was like a way better way of doing it it's disorienting but in a way that actually is like thematically like on point um whereas like now how it works is if you die you're down on the ground and you're kind of like begging you're kind of like writhing in pain and you can choose to like ask for a revive and there's a little timer that goes down to show you how much time you have but players can often choose to just skip that entirely and then cut the timer short which in my view leads to like an unreliable it's just an unreliable metric of information for the medic because i i think if i think i have that much time to go to you i'm gonna go and put myself in like a potentially treacherous situation trying to save you and then when i'm five feet away from you up it ends because you've just decided to give up on the rebound i think that's i think it's lame i think it kind of ruins it makes it so me as the medic i'm less likely to go and help people that aren't immediately in my immediate vicinity because i don't know if they're just going to give up on me or not i way preferred the days of just you you oh you're dead i'm gonna i'm gonna get you back minor gripe those are my biggest gripe with battlefield 5 actually and why i didn't really play it that much but battlefield 6 does enough in every other area i think to kind of offset that it's not as annoying as it was in battlefield 5 it's um i think the the gunplay feels really good it's really atmospheric it's chaotic it's fun the destruction is awesome and yeah i think they nailed it some some readability quirks aside um i think they have a really good thing here and uh i'm looking forward to seeing what the what the full product is going to be like i i hope i do hope there are bigger maps i do feel like they're a bit small in comparison to previous maps in battlefield but it might just work better for the the balance that they're going for i'm not really sure yet we'll see but they've got a good they got a good game here i think yeah yeah i'm sorry i uh i'm trying to remember let's see i can look on my steam how many hours i played the beta oh no but just disappeared from my library so i guess i can't tell you how many hours it was pretty significant though on weekend two they added the brooklyn map and yeah it was kind of kind of a neat map oh that's cool yeah you see the bridge that was awesome um it was a pretty cool map there's like two buildings and there was a um like a bridge between them that you can blow up so i enjoyed the second weekend i think by the end of the second weekend people are getting a little cute with it though between i just saw that they announced that they're already making like an announced change is that they're they're nerfing some of the movement stuff because people were totally exploiting it like sliding around all over the place it was like almost like gears wall hopping but not quite where it's like people sliding around glad to see they're changing that and then another match i think was the last night that I was like, man, fuck this, is that there in the one map, it was like I think it's in the Cairo map is that there's a lot of buildings and so people have figured out how to like parkour and get on top of buildings that they're not intended to be on top of which is kind of cool and fun until it's like someone sets up a respawn beacon on the top and you just and they have all the cover and they have the high ground in this situation where I was like, dude, fuck these guys on top of this building that are just annihilating everyone because they're not somewhere they're supposed to be.

3:43:39Colin Moriarty:So hopefully by the next when the game actually comes out, they've addressed some of that issues. I'm sure they're just diving over all the data they have right now. They probably have so much data on what weapons, where people were on the map and being able to tune some of that stuff before launch. So the whole point. I'm I'm really excited about it. I still I'm holding true. I'm not pre-ordering this game. I still will most likely buy it on launch day after I see and look around and see like, hey, are people able to play this game? Are the servers working? So remember, no pre-order until until launch day on this one.

3:44:21Colin Moriarty:They don't even though the beta was great. I'm holding true to that. Yeah, fair enough. The other game I don't have a lot to say about. I just thought it was so funny that I needed to tell you guys on the show. I downloaded Indica last night because it was added to the PlayStation premium library. Seems like a really cool and interesting game. Do you? I was going to ask, but I know that you guys sometimes there's a mood where you like you sit down, you want to play a game, but there's part of you that's mentally checked out. You're like, I probably shouldn't play a game right now. Like I'm just either like last night, I kind of had a headache.

3:44:55Colin Moriarty:I was kind of tired. I really need to play something new to talk about on the show. So I booted up Indica. And I guess light spoilers for the first 20 minutes of Indica, if you really deeply care. At the beginning of this game, you're a nun. And it's clear that you're like an outcast amongst your peers. And so they're like, go and pick up these potatoes on the other side of the monastery. And you're like, okay. There's no run. So I'm like walking slowly, some like intriguing narration. I get the potatoes. I deliver them to another nun. Southern nun's like, okay, go fill up this water bucket. Okay.

3:45:39Colin Moriarty:So I go to the well and I fill up the bucket and it wants me to put it in this other bucket. It then when you do that, there's an indicator at the top that says one of five. Like, okay. So they want me to fill up this bucket. five times and it takes there's a whole animation where you got to go up to the well you got to click on it you have to draw you have to move the crank to drop the bucket to the bottom and then bring it back up it probably takes at least a minute so i'm like dude you want me to spend the next five minutes filling up a bucket i was like maybe maybe this is a test maybe this is a trial of some kind i don't know why they would do this so early in the game i'm not expecting like crazy gameplay from this but i was hoping to at least not be doing something more annoying than watching paint dry at the beginning of this game so i do it and i'm dude i'm like loudly complaining to holly at this point that i was like i what the fuck am i just filling up this bucket for once you do that another nun comes out and dumps it out just dumps out all of your work it's like okay so then i i kept playing and then the next part of the game they want you to deliver this letter and this is kind of where it really starts at this point they turn on the run button which is much appreciated and i'm looking around i go up to this river and i was like oh cool there's a river here and i walk forward a little bit and then just like straight drops in and dies at this point like i can't do it i can't do it tonight this game seems kind of interesting there's like weird pixel art graphics in mixed in between this weird like unreal five realistic non-monastery uh but between the bucket filling uh and then my character just straight falling into a river it wasn't like fall flat into the river yeah like it was just like down in hours I was like, well, I can't do it.

3:47:43Colin Moriarty:I can't do it right now. Will I return to Indica? I don't know. I guess the lesson here is you should never force yourself to play a game that you're not in the mood for. But also, what were we doing? What were we doing with this bucket thing within the first 10 minutes of the game? Asking you to the most boring task ever. I get it. It's a more story driven, creative experience. Yeah. Yeah, but sorry, it does. It didn't work. It didn't work for me. Yeah, you've you've sold me on this imagery of a nun collapsing completely vertically into a river like the fucking Twin Towers. Fascinating. Fascinating image.

3:48:24Crumpling.

3:48:29Cool. And by the way, it's Indica with a K in case people are curious and want to go find it themselves. And it's yes, it's in the game catalog. You can obviously buy it. you can you could google indica with a c and see what yeah i mean that's that's a reasonable indica as well but just to you know in case you're curious about it yeah all right few things for me so first of all i'm gonna be on summon sign uh this next week so i'll talk about all these games extensively but i'll go into each of them a little bit here and i've already gone into one of them pretty deeply so i'll start there uh doom the dark ages i platinum that's platinum number 186 awesome fucking game loved it loved it highly recommend it i think it's a blast to play so smooth perfectly balanced gameplay uh love the the melee stuff i just feel like i again i think doom 2016 just hits differently and i think that's still the best of the three it's the purest doom game in my opinion but this is the second best i think of those of those three i mean the reimagined id games from 2016 onward so highly recommend that and then uh i platinum Mind's Eye 187.

3:49:33Nightmare, Nightmare, Nightmare wrote in and said, I can't believe Colin Platinum Mind's Eye, but can't play the remaining two hours he has for Kingdom Hearts. We'll believe it because that's what happened. I have a lot. I have a surprising amount to say about Mind's Eye. And what I think a lot of it focuses on for me is that it's a bad game. But there is something so strange about it that's so above and beyond being bad. The entire city, I'm focused on the game as being, I keep saying this, but that there's like a Truman Show quality to it where the game is so badly optimized and there's nothing going on in the world that it feels like only what's happening directly around you is actually happening at all.

3:50:21And I think on Shaker streaming, I use the example of like there was a scene in the Truman Show where Jim Carrey's walking by like a gardener and the gardener's like fastidiously working and then when he walks by he just stops working because he knows he's doing it all as a performance for him now i'm not saying games like you know great enough auto are running their entire city in the background well when you're doing things somewhere else that's not the way it works but this game is surprisingly dead to the point where it comes off eerie and like red rock is a liminal space. And it's too bad this game isn't way cheaper because I almost recommend it for that reason.

3:50:59There's something so unsettling and strange about it. It's undeniably bad. And I'm not going to even try to defend it in any way. But it was weird in how I was like, I kept saying to Micah, the further I got into it, I was like, I really should have just recorded of this whole thing because i could have done something fun with this like there's something to say about all of this weird shit yeah the game is is isn't fine in any way the shooting is rudimentary the story is nonsensical i was laughing about uh gene and i were laughing in that so much happens in the first day of the game where it's like this is fuck like who fucking wrote this the game has five credited writers which i think is hysterical um it's a game where like you have a framework for something that maybe could have been good, but would need something like two more years to figure out how to like got to refine all the systems, got to make it's just boring, drab, nonsensical.

3:52:04I don't know, but it's for 10 bucks. You got to play mind's eye, you know, like they don't make games like this anymore. This goes into what we were saying earlier about strouselnick saying like you got to make great games you can't make good games it's like if you're making a game like mine's eye today i don't even know like what you're doing this is it's and i played 1.09 so nine updates of it really playing it off the disc is probably sublime

3:52:38um 40 bucks i mean the disc version on amazon the price is holding on and my suspicion about this is that I don't know like so there's so much weirdness around this game just in I again I don't know how they courted IO interactive with this game with what I think is IO's first major published game that's not their own like it's part of the weird the partners program or whatever and I know that Leslie Benzies had said something like we're going to relaunch the game basically and I wonder if the price is staying stubborn for that reason that they're going to try to no man's sky cyberpunk whatever this game but i just unlike those games like cyberpunk i i didn't play till i played it on ps5 cyberpunk's fucking excellent like underneath whatever was going wrong with that game when it launched especially on ps4 was fine by the time i got to ps5 was a truly great game and no man's sky is not my kind of game but speaks for itself i mean the game has a deep level of relevance many years, 10 years later, basically.

3:53:39So they figured it out. There's not enough under the hood of mine's eye. I don't know how you fix it without really putting so much work into it that you might as well make something else. Yeah, I guess there to be charitable. The one cool thing I like about the game is that or one thing I would say was cool about it is its setting the i didn't read too much of the documentation and like what they but what it reads like to me is that it's vegas but it's like a future like it's literally lost vegas in the world but it's a future version of vegas where gambling has been made illegal and so all these weird businesses come in and have like and operate like under the radar and there's all this weird shit happening there and and chris you've been to vegas and dustin you've in there too but maybe you don't wouldn't recognize the the skyline or whatever it's like dude this is vegas there's the encore you know there's the fucking cosmopolitan there's treasure island there's like straight up but without like the markings on them there's the win and uh i was like that's kind of cool unfortunately everything around it is fucking crazy and uh but dude when it gets like if it ever gets to a dirt cheap price i really you gotta play this game if you're like if you're interested in just How wrong something can go and how, again, what Gene was saying was that like this calls into question everything Leslie Benzies ever did.

3:55:09And I'm like, no, it calls into question Leslie Benzies maybe delusions of grandeur that he was more than a producer. And again, a producer is a vital component of what you do. he definitely played an important role in Grand Theft Auto he was the one herding the cats keeping everyone on schedule getting the game out that's important but don't think that you are the Hauser brothers or Laszlo or something like you're not and that I think is the problem it's okay to embrace being a producer I think maybe similar to what has happened but happened with Jade Raymond over the last 10-ish years, more than that, since Watch Dogs came out.

3:55:56So, bad game. No way in hell you should pay anywhere close to full price for it. But I'm curious for people that have played it because a lot of people have played it. My suspicion is it sold hundreds of thousands of copies. So people have definitely played it. I would be curious to know if you feel what I'm saying, that there is a horror element, like a soft horror element to it that you're in like one of these liminal spaces like almost like an abandoned mall but it's a city there's a part of the game where you're going up to a rooftop on a drone and a drone with like a camera angle facing forward and it's like all these balconies and windows and stuff and i just was flying up to them to see like is anyone in any of the apartments is anyone on any of the balconies it says it's like i i made my laugh because i'm like this is like peon yang you know like when western tourists go to peon yang and there's like no cars on the road and like no one in the stores and it just kind of it's just here but it's like what is it's even here for weird shit um and then i've been playing mafia the old country finn germy wrote in and said hello colin now that you've played mafia the old country i'd like to point out that even with the game having a fantastic story and phenomenal acting the thing it does best is respect my time it's so refreshing to play a game that moves beat to beat without padding play time with mundane fetch quests.

3:57:14You can even skip drives across the map if it's not necessary to the story. Meanwhile, I see some people online saying they won't buy it because it's not long enough. I think this is a blast from the past in the best way. What say you? Dude, Mafia the Old Country is fucking great. It really is a great game. I love it. It's got me interested in what's going to happen. Now, I was going to say, it got me interested in what's happening next. I'm pretty much at the end of the game now. There are 14 chapters. I'm on chapter 13, so I'm pretty much at the end. but it's really good. It is what it is. I think it's perfectly appropriately priced at$50.

3:57:53Unlike Mafia 3, which I think is underrated, but that a lot of people beat up for being too big and too bloated. I think if anything, this game leaves you wanting more and maybe that's good. Not unlike Dead Space 1. We're like, yeah, I could have probably gotten a couple more hours out of this, but this is fine. I think I'm 12 hours in or something like that um I don't I don't want to spoil the story or anything I'll just say the old world meets new world stuff is really cool the characters are cool the voice acting is great the writing is great I love the interplay between Italian accents and Italian words and English obviously it's just a very flippant way to speak it's not the way you know but they're kind of every sentence has an Italian word in it but it's in English right um everyone's crossing themselves all the time and one of the things i was saying to micah as i was playing it was even just seeing certain things certain elements of like people's garden statues and like weird mugs they have in their house it's like you know my mom and my mom's side are sicilian and it's like i had that like but in my family it's like this weird like ornate thing i'm like i didn't even know that that was like something from the old world or like an old world themed thing but that's exactly what we had in our living room or like that's the exact fucking motif of this or like that's so interesting and there's even so my mom's maiden names for giro and there's even a character named regiro in the game which i thought was hysterical um so it's like a little bit i don't want to say sentimental but it's i i was as i was playing mike has been watching me play the whole thing and i was like you know in a weird way this is probably going to be about as close as i ever get to and not mafia stuff i mean it's not whatever but just like being around my ancestors the game takes place in like 1905 1906 1907 and that's like literally 20 years before my family even left so it's it's like really it's cool like it's a cool way to be in that space i guess yeah yeah it sounds like uh representation yeah it is interesting i'm

4:00:01Colin Moriarty:it is interesting like I because I I totally get it because I felt the same thing with Miles Morales and I was like I didn't I didn't think I cared about that stuff and I guess I don't really but there is something there that like it enhances the experience if it if it if it relates to you you know right it's yeah and I got to say too man like it's a beautiful game the one thing that I'll say about it and I don't want to give it too high credit but it's got a naughty dog quality to it in certain respects there's this chase sequence through one of these like village villages and i was like dude this is like it's not as high quality but it's one of those moves where it's like dude they really rendered and like went into the work of like making the internals of all this house and people like washing dishes and jumping out of the way hard work for very little payoff very naughty dog and that's what i think you get from these catered linear experiences love it um I really, I've said it many times in the last few weeks, like that no Mafia game has gotten out of the 70s, including this one on Metacritic is a fucking insult.

4:01:09All the games are better than that. And Mafia 2 maybe is the worst one. And this game, I think, deserves a lot. I was glad to see that it seems like it's selling well. When Strauss Delnick was on CNBC, he was saying that they're happy actually with the Mafia sales and that they finally got the game out from Hangar 13. And this is, I think, a future for Mafia. what i'm really eager to see because i don't know the answer yet is how it connects to the other mafia games i think i haven't i won't even get into it i don't spoil it but i'm like i think i see where this is going but um it's beautiful it's it's it's atmospheric it's riveting it's violent it's romantic it's all these different things that i think are really it's personable you're riding horses you're driving these oh you have to like wind the car up in the front when turn it on which is kind of cool you're you can you can get new suits and new new cars and new weapons and you're buying things and there's an open world it kind of reminds me a little bit i bring up this game every once in a while the old soho studio london studio game team soho the getaway where it takes place in a world and the world exists but it's bringing you from like one point to the next and you're really not going out of that world and then there's like kind of ways to free play it i will say that one of the times i tried to free play it in a mission where it's like oh go do this thing i'm like i'm gonna go drive to the store and see if i can buy stuff and it's like you can go but the store is closed it's like all right so it's really trying to it's an open world you can kind of go around it but it's really trying to bring you in a direction

4:02:39Colin Moriarty:and that's kind of like how the first one that's kind of like how definitive edition was right i prefer that way more than the the gta clone kind of thing exactly i think two is even a little bit like that. But yeah, this is more like one in that regard. I agree with you there. And but the world's there for you to explore and there's like collectibles and shit to get into it. And it's I will say it's bucolic. It's pastoral. It's different. It's Sicily. I don't know that I've ever played a game in Sicily. Maybe there's like maps in a World War II game or something. But I don't I don't think I've ever even played a game located there.

4:03:11So I highly recommend this game. Yeah, it's a shit sandwich really because it's like doom the dark ages is the bread mafia is the bread in the mind's eyes the fucking meat but the bread's damn good dude the i would say there's a little bit of recency bias with maybe doom but like i think low-key mafia is probably my second favorite game of the year after death stranding um it really really resonates with me i'll be very curious to see what other people think of it yeah go ahead yeah i have no i mean i have it on my uh I was going to start it tonight and I was really looking forward to it. So like, I'm excited to hear all the good things that I've been hearing about it.

4:03:51Colin Moriarty:Well, let me spoil the story for you. Oh, please, please go on. What were you going to say? I'm sorry. No, I'm just excited. I'm glad that it's good. I'm glad that it seems to be more of taking after taking more after definitive edition than two and three as far as like pacing and scale and the type of open world game that it is that's like really encouraging to me because i really loved i really loved the first mafia game like way more than i thought i like way more than i expected to when i played it so it's nice to know that it's it seems to be carrying on that kind of design or uh or at least that kind of presentation and elevating it yeah i dig it pro great price i think production value like so you have and again not to i'm not trying to i thought expedition 33 was awesome too but in terms of like production value you have these 250 games 250 games like the graphics the production value the fidelity like way higher than mafia you know now these are what these are two different games one stylistic one's more realistic but for the lack of length you're getting a higher production value while in expedition 33 i think you're getting a longer game that's a little lower production value um i think both of those games are really mega appropriately priced for what they are and in fact i was saying i think you could even get away with charging more for expedition 33 i don't think you could get away with charging more for mafia and having people not complain about it but yeah go check it out it seems like it sold more than a million copies at this point which is nice and that's a game that's going to burn and it'll probably find its way in the game pass and find its way in the ps plus and shit at some point but yeah definitely go check that out bazinga wrote in hate that name he said hey cdc colin now that you've been playing mafia the old country how does it stack up so far against the other mafia games I'm personally really enjoying it but I don't understand why the mafia series is always rated so low on Metacritic is this the most underrated gaming franchise I'm very confused on why this series isn't more highly regarded anyways thank you for all that you do I will go kiss my new Irish wife now and listen you have a new Irish wife or is it a reference I don't know that or any I don't know what you're referencing to be honest with you maybe it's another mafia game I certainly don't know so yeah like I said I would I would rank the games

4:06:06it's funny man like i would maybe rank the games old country one three two something like that that seems like the correct order but i think all of them with the exception of maybe mafia 2 which i think is the weakest one and by the way it's the only one that hasn't been remade so or like isn't more modern so it's definitely showing its age but that's probably the worst one and even then i think that game's awesome so maybe i just i'm just hotter on this maybe I just like this crime, this Italian crime shit and mafia shit more than most people do, but it's definitely right up my alley. And really, really loved seeing a little bit of Sicily back in the early 1900s.

4:06:41Really cool. A lot of political background to it too. It's pre-World War I. It's like a lot of anarchists, corrupt cops and all the shit. It's pretty cool, man. And then Baz Blaster wrote in and said, hello, Sacred Squad. Over the past week, there has been some controversy online about mafia of the old country with its lack of swim animations in comparisons to animations from the original Red Dead Redemption. it's really easy to dismiss these complaints because obviously animations don't make or a good or a good or bad game by themselves however thinking further on it why is it that comparisons like these are even possible you cannot pull a triple a game from 2010 where you could compare them to a game 15 years prior and they would be in the same stratosphere on a technical and detailed level research is showing that gamers are more and more sticking with older games and when expensive triple a games today mostly feel like a nice coat of paint over the same old underlying mechanics that makes complete sense to me why is it that we shouldn't expect all triple a games today to have a baseline attention to detail and immersion as games released a decade ago a decade and a half ago i'll open the barn door to a firing squad outside and listen

4:07:36Colin Moriarty:so you're shaking your head chris yeah i just i don't like this mentality like i just i feel like i just games when you're designing a game you're designing for a specific experience and if your specific experience does not benefit from having certain things then there's no reason to pour resources into making it i think we're too i think we're too focused on these little things things like like the halo infinite craig's face not being fucking animated when we should be focusing on like well does that make the game any worse or better like maybe like a fraction of a percent what's something that is more important to like what the experience that the game is going for what is this game trying to do it seems like it's trying to root you into sicily and like if you're wearing if you're a fucking mafia dude in you know sicily and you've got slacks and a fucking collared shirt on with suspenders you're not going to be waltzing into the river you know like i just i don't know i get it i understand what people are saying but also even just comparing like 2010 to 15 years prior to 2010 that would be 1995 yeah it would be impossible to compare those things because the technology the technology available to you is nowhere near comparable now it's significantly more comparable like games in 2010 games in 2007 still look great compared to today like bio like you look at the water effects in the original bioshock and you're like damn that still looks incredible like still to this day sure with the with the exception of just obvious things like resolution and and things like that but we're in a different place now we're like yeah as time goes on there's going to be a wider and wider or like a less wide differentiate between like how good things used to look and how they should look now because we are at a point now where games have looked good for a long time and red dead redemption is going for something completely different it's going for like this open world kind of simulation simulated kind of cowboy thing whereas it seems like mafia is a lot more linearly focused and i think that's totally fine i i don't i don't want developers spending seven to eight years building a game because they have to make sure that the fruits fall in the right way or that you know there's the the grass shines as accurately as possible i don't need these things if the game is predicated on it and that's exactly what the point is absolutely go for it i would like grant the thought of six for example like that i'm excited to see what what all that time and attention does but not every game needs to be granted thought of six well well said i don't think we have to say anything else about that and thus we end the show as we always do with six questions comments concerns thoughts and ideas from the audience over on patreon.com slash last day media with listener inquiries of course you can submit your own on patreon patreon.com slash last day media if you're a patron at the two dollar level or higher and the five dollar level of course is the sweet spot where you get all sorts of great perks.

4:10:34And we were saying earlier, we're at the higher level than ever with$5 tier, which is awesome. That's where I want people to be. I want it to be that's enough. It's like, you know, enough money for us to kind of make a little something if you kind of multiply it by many people, but not enough for each individual to feel like they've spent much of anything at all and that they get a high value. So we appreciate your support over there. Smega Man wrote in and said, howdy, gents. I've been subbed for about a month now. And while I enjoy the content, I've had an interesting thought about the parasocial aspect of podcasting.

4:11:03None of my friends and family have an interest in video games like I do and don't really care to have conversations about them. So I absolutely use you guys to have an outlet for that sort of friendship. I felt that way before subbing, but now that I have joined the Patreon and have some of my comments read on the shows, I feel like that parasocial relationship has become more obvious to me and it feels kind of unhealthy. I'm starting to think that the overabundance of podcasts and secular media are having a negative impact on society as I find it more and more difficult to make and maintain friends.

4:11:28Maybe we should spend more time socializing and less time divulging into countless hours of media so we can restore a bit of that community we all seem to lack these days. Am I making any sense where I would just sound like a whiny bitch? Sorry for the long write-in. I'll jork my penis and listen. Thank you for writing in. Dustin, we haven't heard from you in a while. Smegaman is thinking things are getting a little too parasocial. Can you relate? I maybe.

4:11:52Colin Moriarty:I guess it really depends. I think for shmegaman here, you don't have any friends that are into gaming family, as you mentioned, and you're looking for conversation about games. If you're listening at a, in a healthy way where maybe it's when you're driving or doing something else, not when you're jerking your penis, right? Uh, the best way I don't see any problem with that, you know, and you can feel a connection to the three of us. the term parasocial relationship is not necessarily a bad thing because you have a parasocial relationship with us there's somewhat of a parasocial relationship we have with the audience as a whole back it's just a different type of relationship and there's creators that i have a parasocial relationship i don't know the guys from red letter media personally i've never met them never interacted with them i have an idea on what their personalities are like from their content but I don't know them.

4:12:49Colin Moriarty:So I guess you could say that's a parasocial relationship, I guess. I was just saying, I want to be friends with them. So yeah, it's definitely parasocial. It's exactly the definition of fucking parasocial in some way for me. Right. Right. I think that there are people that take it too far where and I think we've talked about this in the show in the past, Colin, where you do meet a listener you have a good interaction with them um and then they just can't let it be just that interaction where suddenly they're they're messaging you all the time or trying to get your attention you're like it's not this isn't what this was you know i've always had the mindset for our events and for our listeners in general i'm i'm always trying to give as much as i can of myself because the audience is what makes us able to do this so i i feel a debt of i feel a debt to them to some degree so i always am trying to do that um but it can go the other other way where people are trying to get too much of you as well and that's unhealthy so i think it's perfectly fine especially in the a weird modern day with media and how uh you can listen to someone talk about pretty much literally anything uh but you got to keep it in check where if you're choosing that over anything else or getting a little weird about that parasocial relationship then yeah it definitely can be unhealthy yeah but it doesn't have to be don't be weird yeah don't be weird this is kind of like a this is somewhat paradoxical in some way because it's one of those things where like if you're even like if you're even aware that there is a parasocial relationship you you're already somebody that is that shouldn't worry about it yeah i think i think i think a key problem with parasocial relationships is the fact that people aren't aware that that's the type of relationship that it is like you have a relationship with a content creator or like you you know you um you watch somebody day and night and so you just assume that you're their friend without it without thinking any deeper than that um and you overstep boundaries you you know you that that's that's the problem parasocial relationships in and of themselves are fairly neutral like there's nothing there's no value judgment or a moral position placed on them they just are what they are and what happens as a result of them is like really up to up to the people involved but the fact that you're aware that it is a parasocial relationship means like you're not you got nothing to worry about man you're perfectly salient and perfectly aware and perfectly grounded in reality enough to know that that is a problem and because of that it just seems like you're not really you're kind of worried about nothing it's like it's like it's like how crazy people don't know they're crazy right right right and so like if you think you're crazy you're probably fine like at least relatively you might be a little crazy but it's I could just I get what people are saying is I could just I can relate and it's like you said red letter media is a great example um I listen to this uh Jets streamer named Jake Asman he does like a he does streams almost every day I don't I don't listen to maybe half of them because I just don't have the time but I always tune in and I'm like oh man I would and I think in my mind like I get along with this guy it's like what do i why am i even thinking of that it's just because i like him and i relate to him and it's cool that people are like that with us too so yeah you got to keep it all in check but yeah there's always people that cross the line and then there's the other side of it which is and i say this all the time too and and this is why i understand where people are shooting their shots with you dustin right it's like there are people in my life that i became good friends with that were listeners.

4:16:31Yeah.

4:16:32Colin Moriarty:I just had dinner with somebody that is yesterday that I've become friends with that is was I met through he's a patron. So it does happen. Yeah. So like I get why people are shooting their shot and that used to happen a lot more during fireside chats because remember the whole thing with fireside chats which we ended in 2019 but was like people pitch themselves. I never like chased anyone really for to be on the show or most people I didn't. and um and that's when you know people would be my space and we would maybe go get lunch sometimes and stuff like that but yeah it's like you got to read the and it's gotta you gotta have like a simpatico kind of thing like sometimes you just know and there's a thing and there's a there's a connection i always bring up my old roommate in uh in san francisco mike mitchell who was an ign fan and i lived with him for seven years yes he was funny i haven't talked to him in a while though all right kb wrote in and said hey gents over the past couple of episodes you've mentioned ready or not crossing the 1 million sales milestone on consoles and how remarkable that is given the lack of traditional marketing and reliance on word of mouth.

4:17:31I think I may have an answer to where some of that momentum is coming from. Shane Gillis recently praised the game on a podcast. I don't know if, I mean, that might be able to move it. I think Shane Gillis is awesome, by the way. He's funny as fuck. Do you guys like Shane Gillis? You know who he is? Yeah. My question is this. Do you think, oh, he does that show Tires and I did watch an episode of that on Netflix when I had it maybe last year. It was pretty funny. my question is this do you think this points to a larger cultural shift where players are gravitating back towards grounded boots on the ground military shooters without all the extra fluff or hero abilities rainbow skins and over designed operators just look at the like to dislike ratio for black ops 7 maybe it won't actually materialize into anything concrete but it does feel like we're seeing a real shift in real time gamers clearly want an alternative to the neon hair goofy crossover skins and out of place characters like beavis and butthead or dr Dre showing up in Call of Duty.

4:18:21What say you? I guess this could have gone with the when we were talking about Battlefield earlier, but I put it here. Yeah, first of all, you said it, KB, the like to dislike ratio on Black Ops 7 is fucking irrelevant. No one cares. That's the case for fucking 15 years. At this point, it doesn't matter. I do believe there is something to this. It's the pendulum swinging in all things, as we were saying earlier. um i want to feel like there's a place for both of these things i am just surprised that call of duty is the franchise that seemed to embrace this kind of zaniness and it comes off to me as desperate and it's a weird word to use for a game that dominates the sales charts but nonetheless it comes off as a little desperate like be what you are this is why I asked guys like if EA and dice can pull this off with battlefield, it will end up being a pretty big game because I think the pendulum is swung, but it'll be back.

4:19:23Like it's not that it's permanently in that place. Yeah. Anything you want to add, Chris?

4:19:30Colin Moriarty:Yeah, no, I agree. I think, you know, as as everything becomes crossover central and it becomes expected. the more earnest and more grounded types of experiences become just by sheer contrast more bold and more interesting and i i agree yeah like from call of duty like just throwing you know throwing i don't know the fucking the noid into into call of duty matchmaking you know it comes across as like trying to be cool. Like you're already successful. Like you're already like at the top. Like, why do you need, like, why are you so doubtful of what, what got you there? Like, what is it that, I don't know.

4:20:21Colin Moriarty:It, it kind of strikes me. It almost has the same energy of like Elon paying that person to play games for him. It's like, why do you need? that's weird. Why do you need to be something that you aren't to appease people? you're already you already have more than you need just just enjoy that like just be call of duty you don't need to do all this weird shit but i also understand that it's a it's a yearly series that you know doing the same thing over and over again will tire people out more and so you need some experimentation there but like beavis and butthead ain't the answer when people say like i want more experimental games i don't think they mean i don't think i don't think they mean like oh yeah i want uh i want spongebob on the on the fucking beaches of normandy you know like i don't think that's necessarily what people are talking about um do you have anything you want to add dustin before we move on yeah i think that i don't want to say this is overblown because ready or not success without all the marketing crossing a million is crazy and totally unexpected for me uh but at the same time i i don't feel like we're getting there's like a major shift in like fps culture back to one thing or another i think that for a while uh some big ip particularly call of duty probably ate up a lot of the market for um different types of fps games like tactical military games and so now that uh there's more room in the market for something like this then there are people that are gonna gravitate towards that but think about like ready or not selling 1 million like how many copies it's hard now with game pass but like call of duty sells many many times right yeah a million copies so um i think there's just more room in the market now for something like this and ready or not is also really good uh so there is that i'm wondering too if it's I would assume it got big on Twitch as well.

4:22:20Colin Moriarty:So it's not just like I'm sure Shane Gillis helped move copies of this game, but it's not what pushed it to be a million seller there. I don't know if this just hasn't been updated in a while, perhaps, but I think it brought. Yeah, no, it has been updated as of the late 2024. Anyway, they haven't announced numbers at Activision for Call of Duty since Vanguard and Vanguard sold 30 million copies. Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare in 2019 sold 41 million copies. black ops 3 until vanguard was terrible to 43 million people hated people hated vanguard yeah exactly so you can assume things are there's a there's a floor and maybe a higher ceiling um it's quaint call of duty 4.5 call of duty 2 5.9 they've come a long way i mean those are big numbers still to this day i just think that i'm seeking i personally am seeking realism in a lot of my game experiences but not all of them this next one gets in a little bit of that drake kind horse to run in and said hey gents hype levels or lack thereof for borderlands 4 i was in the mood for a shooter after death straining 2 and decided to platinum borderlands 1 and 3 in anticipation of 4 the experience left me very excited about 4 i had forgotten that the third game actually had incredible gunplay if they could just deliver a somewhat solid story i think this is going to be a surprise for many people this fall now we just need a sacred stream or some co-op gameplay when the game launches cheers i'm not gonna be surprised by it borderlands is awesome dude like i think borderlands is dope my my now my expectations for it are fairly high i think it's going to sell millions of copies no doubt didn't we talk about how what how many copies we were like what borderlands sales copy borderlands sales numbers

4:24:01uh let's see well 90 million for the series let's see on the borderlands vg charts thing here oh Oh, yeah. Borderlands 2, 30 million copies. Borderlands 3, 23 million copies. I mean, it's going to sell an enormous amount of copies. So I'm feeling good about it. I think it's going to be great. I just don't know if I'm going to get to it. Probably in my mind's eye, pardon the pun, I feel like this is going to be a holiday for me when we go away for a few weeks, as we do every at the end of every year, we preload everything and just go away um that seems like a game i'll probably get to at that point so yeah i'm not that and i'd love to because i replayed borderlands one and two all the way through this year as well i would have loved to have gotten a borderlands three i just don't think that's going to happen but i did play borderlands three really extensively so my expectations are high i'm looking forward to it i think it's going to do incredibly well i think it would have done incredibly well regardless of the price but i mean you don't want to go to like a hundred dollars but i think even at 70 because i think it's 60 right um i think it would have i think it would have well i think it's 70 oh 70 oh yeah it was gonna be people thought it was gonna be yeah i still think it's gonna be great at that price and um and do great sell millions of copies so hype levels pretty high looking forward to it want to see what other people think about it and i'm also very curious and i mean we've talked about this a lot on the show is how do they deal with the subject matter how do they deal with the the dialogue how do they deal with the zaniness but undo the direction they were going towards in borderlands 3 that i think just wore wore thin for people because as i mentioned when i replayed borderlands 1 and 2 i'm like they're not as bad as you remember as far as the dialogue and the and the cringiness but borderlands 3 is a little bit different and went overboard for some people so i'm very interested to see that too chris where are you on borderlands 4 what is your hype level or lack thereof

4:25:56Colin Moriarty:yeah i mean i'm i'm looking forward to it uh i wouldn't say i'm excited about it i've i've i was never that like borderlands 2 was the most i was into borderlands and i i got into the first one a little bit with like some i remember my friend justin my friends justin steve and justin we were always on it but it's always been like a kind of tertiary series to me like it's very good i appreciate it three i really turned me off for like a number of reasons i thought the writing and the villains were kind of lame and i also just i don't know if you remember i know you must remember because we i think we talked about it recently on an episode where just like the i just remember every time i opened the inventory of the game chugged and i was just like i can't i can't be experiencing the borderlands is such an inventory intensive get like you're always kind of opening that menu and so for it to chug constantly and that is like nah man i can't do it um but yeah like i just um i don't know i think it'll be good uh the previews seem to be very glowing i like that it seems to be going in more of a destiny direction as far as like movement and and gunplay because although although borderlands one and two are very fun like definitely the the gunplay was a step up in three entirely like undoubtedly and to see that kind of carried forward is is cool um taking inspiration from other other players in the looter shooter space is wise destiny is like one of the best feeling shooters ever so like i mean like yeah it's it's wise for them to base on that but like my main my main it's it's the same question that you have really is like the one thing that we haven't seen a lot of feedback on is the writing and like how the tone of the game is gonna land but everything that i'm seeing so far looks really good i just don't know if i'm like it seems like one of those games that it's gonna come out and i'm gonna be like oh shit it's out cool and then i'm gonna go download it and play it probably but i'm not like counting down the days or anything Dustin Skip I will not be playing Borderlands don't care I hope people enjoy it I'm not saying it's a bad game just not for me I played some of Borderlands 1 and 2 never finished them the last thing I played or tried to play was Tiny Tina yeah it was good I like the gameplay I didn't I just skipped everything in the game I strongly dislike the art style the writing of these games they're fun they seem like good first person shooters but there's just a million other ones i'd rather play than borderland so will i play this one not definitely not a full price if i do it'll be a year or two from now at best card captor cory wrote in and said hi cdc i floated this idea out in discord this week should gorilla kill aloy at the beginning of the next horizon game and have you play as someone else since the world is so compelling and the criticism of Aloy being a Mary Sue type character that's hard to relate to since she rarely does anything wrong is a big problem.

4:28:46Maybe they should have her die in some heroic way and then someone else who is more flawed should take up the mantle. This gets by some of the biggest criticisms of Horizon and draws those of us who think Aloy is not a great character back into the fold. Chris, you find this funny?

4:28:57Colin Moriarty:No, because I registered it immediately, but how that registered in my head was like a literal gorilla killing Aloy. Not even a robot gorilla. yeah just like a standard the one you like it like a malnourished one that you'd find at a state zoo i think with this i i get what people are saying here aloy is probably the weakest part of horizon or at least in my view from as somebody who's like really repeatedly tried to get into it it's it there is something about her but like clearly that's a minority opinion or at least like it's a minority opinion so much as that it would matter because like i mean horizon sells really really well so people clearly there's many millions of people who like aly so i don't know if that would be necessarily the the wisest thing to do it would be bold and interesting but it would also be kind of like i feel like it would also feel like a committee response you know what i mean it would kind of read in a way that like feels like the nielsen ratings or like the head of studio like people don't like this guy bring in a new guy it would almost feel too much like that So like even if they even if they earnestly felt like that would be a good idea for the story, it probably wouldn't come across that way.

4:30:13Colin Moriarty:So I don't really know how you handle that. Yeah, I have a wild idea. Just write her to be more interesting in the third game. I mean, I know we know her backstory at this point, but. I don't think you need to kill her to make her a more interesting character, depending on what situations she's in and how she reacts to them, her dialogue, all those things. that's that's what you could do first I think if you kill her it's not going to be good I think you're going to have a it's a relation to a similar game that people even despite not liking her overall I think people would like that even less yeah I was going to say I mean it goes I believe you're both right Chris brings up the points like people like a way I like a way I don't want a way to be killed off and then there's the other idea of and I'm a huge horizon fan, obviously, but there's millions of us, obviously that like it.

4:31:11So I think that the idea, I think, and then this gets to one of your saying, Dustin is like, yeah, write her better or more appealing for people that will give her a broader appeal, but also remember that she's probably done after this next game and horizon could and will continue without her because if the MMO is real and obviously the multiplayer game, it's like, these are not going to revolve around her. And I think that they're trying to get into the meat of what makes the game truly great, which is the gameplay in the world. and then populating that with different sorts of people. And to be fair, this is what Tencent and Level Infinite was trying to do with their ripoff, which is to say, what if we set it in Asia with different characters and all the rest, which maybe would have been cool.

4:31:48But alas. But there's a big... I don't want to spoil the games, but you literally can't do that. Because Aloy is... And her access to all of these different things is... i mean that's how she gains access to all the the different cauldrons and shit like that so like yeah so not to be too big of a horizon nerd but like the game wouldn't operate and dustin maybe you blurt out blurt out when i said the character's name

4:32:20Colin Moriarty:they get a really dramatic beat that it's it's it's funny because that's like uh yeah no we we run the risk of spoiling it but that's that's the exact reason why i'm just like this doesn't this doesn't work yeah like you can't do it you can so iris yeah it's irresponsible of you to be out here doing all this shit if that's true like what are you doing like i don't know whatever that's another and it's funny man because i know a lot of people soured on the series with the second game but i think the second game story is fucking awesome like i love it love how sci-fi and weird it gets oh my god so good anyway nutless squirrel wrote in said greetings married men of lsm and chris i have a relationship question for all of you as it pertains to gaming as a 36 year old married man of five years and no kids it is not uncommon for me most weeknights to come home from my nine to five spend some time eating dinner with my beautiful wife cassandra please highlight her name starts with a k and enjoy my favorite pastime of gaming for a couple of hours however an interesting conundrum has occurred in our home my wife feels she essentially cannot interact or interrupt me while i game so to her i disappear for hours each night while i immerse myself in the world such as the french world of claire obscure the bowels of hell and doom she is a casual gamer as well which is why she's afraid to disturb me despite me telling her it is okay to do so this leads to our question since gaming is such a large part of your lives as it is mine do you and your wives girlfriends and significant others have a set of rules about when or how much you can interrupt each other's gaming sessions my wife and i both listen to you all so we will both shut up and listen now um dustin how do you guys operate on this level you and holly you're both gamers so you play i'm sure together sometimes but at the same time i should say but how do you guys interact with each other when this is happening i'm sure i assume you're game you game pretty often maybe you're maybe you're a poser i don't know me not gaming is that what you're saying oh well this week actually no i've been a little light on gaming but uh for holly and i is there a do we have any kind of rules no absolutely not uh and i don't mind holly interrupting my gaming at all it's actually part part of the reason one of the draws of consoles to me is that when I play PC games, I'm up here in my office, totally separate from her and whatever she's doing.

4:34:36Colin Moriarty:And we like being alone together. Yeah, I totally love that, too. I get it. So I like playing console because she's either playing on her switch or booking her phone, whatever, reading a book, all kinds of different things. So we can be together at the same time, but not necessarily doing the same thing. so she does know like she knows when i play souls games that i cannot pause them and so like let's say if she's in the other room or something she comes in she's not that i've ever scolded she just knows that like she'll look at the screen and be like okay he can't pause right now and then turn around um and so i'll usually know then or she'll be like let me know when i could when i could talk to you and so that's very appreciated she's very respectful in that way uh but she can interrupt me anytime so sounds like mr nutless squirrel i mean you have the ideal opportunity i know there's all these memes online of like guys that women can hear the sound of the play state the beep and then it's like what the fuck are you doing you know they care they're scolding a hobby so you count your blessings here that was so fucking hostile you did so it's such so indignant i know well i just hate those guys like it's like there's a really funny i don't even know who it is i think it's someone on tiktok but i see it on twitter every once in a while where it's like a woman complaining about some trivial thing about a man and then on the video he pauses it and goes to his notepad and it's like it's like a list of hundreds of things and it's like do not be comfortable do not eat food do not and i don't have a do not have a mom yeah do not have a mom things like that i love that it's like oh my god just stop complaining about things all the time like get a goddamn hobby um my uh my experience with my wife is awesome because we're both gamers that play a lot and we play i love what you said about being alone together she lays out like you know sits on the couch or late like lays in the corner of the couch i have like a recliner next to the couch and we just sit there all you know all night usually together for five six seven hours sometimes we're watching something like during football season we're gonna be watching a ton of football and hanging out that way sometimes she's playing on the tv and i'm on my laptop or my phone or doing work or whatever and sometimes i'm playing on the tv and she's on her switch or whatever so there are games i think where if i really want to be focused in and she knows like that like if i want to i wear headphones for a game like the last of us or bioshock or something it's like i'm gonna and then there are games where i'm like we're talking the entire time i'm playing or i'm talking to her while she's playing her game so a lot of these things we don't really have a rule set but i am i am very lucky in that my wife is a is like a is a capital g gamer and so i don't have to make any excuses she wants to play games just as much as I do.

4:37:29She has things she wants to do and wants to get into. So we have a very simpatico relationship. And I've said before that I always had this, this idea in my mind that I should never, I shouldn't date people that and be with people that play games. I need to bring something new and different into my life. I need to bring balance into my life. And there's something, there's something about that, but the it's no, I don't know if it's any coincidence that the relationship by far that has been most peaceful, tranquil effective kind and growing and all the things that i have now with my wife is the person who actually also plays games so that's probably not a coincidence all right i thought you guys would appreciate this last one i'm not creative enough to think of a funny name wrote in and said greetings sacred sex crements last week colin said he doesn't play driving games because he doesn't drive this made me curious what does that mean in regard to all the other games you play Colin am I to assume you like God of War because you normally go around brutally massacring anyone in your way or Horizon Zero Dawn because when you're not podcasting you're a redheaded badass who fantasizes about hunting animals to extinction please make this make sense I'll hang up and listen yeah it doesn't make any sense

4:38:40there's no no sense to be made with that I have to go back and listen to the I probably was being a little bit facetious when I said that so let's not be too serious with it but I don't know the exact context anymore but no totally there's no sense to be made and I wanted to as we go out tonight today I wanted to just note that I agree so sorry about that alright fair guys let's get the hell out of here time to go this is a good episode we did a lot today a lot of different information a lot of conversation a lot of camaraderie games talk i don't know i don't even know what i'm saying chris let's go to you first and say

4:39:23Colin Moriarty:goodbye be well any plans for the rest of the day uh today's pretty relaxed i got to do some uh snark tank work and then i think it's probably gonna make myself some rice and pork chops oh i love dinner and then i think tonight's tonight's gonna be i think uh mafia cool excellent i'm gonna gonna binge some mafia tonight most excellent very good well enjoy i think you'll i think you're gonna love it uh i'm excited dustin goodbye to you any plans for the rest of your day my friend goodbye plans for us today well holly and i've been getting into an old show it was uh i guess one might call it an anime because the some of the animation was done in korea but it is american it's called a king of the hill my favorite anime i don't know if you guys have heard of it yeah uh there's the new season out i'm not watching that holly always talked about how much she love king of the hill so we just started at season one shows awesome yeah it is the show is really legitimately so like laugh out loud funny regularly uh so i've been i've been all about king of the hill we're already on season two we're watching multiple episodes every night i'm like yeah this shit absolutely slaps i'm curious about the new season i heard that it's surprisingly good i saw the trailer for it uh the animation looks it's just not the same it's not the animation the animation will never be the same as it was but the writing is pretty it's pretty it's it is pretty good like i finished the entire i actually did the same thing where i was just like i watched the new season and i was like oh i should watch it's been a long time since i've seen the rest of it so i started season one again i'm surprised at how early that how early really iconic lines are like it's like episode two i think or like bobby's like they're talking about sex ed or something and he's like i don't know dude i'm a little worried about being a slut that's an amazing line i think bobby is my favorite character uh there's like like some of the lines i don't even know if when i quote it'll be funny at all but he's like yeah you're you're the best dad ever and you're the best mom ever and i'm the best son ever like he just says stuff and his face is so like i don't know the way they animated his face is so good it is so we'll be watching more king of the hill tonight and maybe i'll get into hollow night we'll see cool clock's ticking oh my god you have you have if you do it now you have you have time more than enough time yeah um cool yeah tonight i will uh i think football's on tonight and then uh preseason still but something to watch and then i'll probably finish mafia and i'm gonna platinum it but i think it's gonna take a little bit of time because i just have to go find all the collectibles and shit so it's gonna take a little bit of effort and then uh i don't know what i'm gonna do next because we're on the precipice of a bunch of games coming out.

4:42:10I think I might get into System Shock 2 if I can, remastered. And see if I can just bang that out or at least get through some of it and experience it a little bit. And that's it. And then I'm recording on Sunday, actually, this weekend, so I have to get ready for that as well. But it was good to be here with all of you guys and everyone out there. Appreciate you guys and gals. Support on Patreon.com slash LastDayMedia and LastDayMedia.store for merch. We'll see you next time for more. Until then, goodbye. See ya. Take care, guys. Sacred Symbols, a PlayStation podcast, is a product and trademark of Last Stand Media and Colin's Last Stand LLC and is proudly recorded in the USA.

4:42:50The show is conceived by, is written by, and is directed by me, Colin Moriarty. 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.

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