#379 | Money, It's A Crime

54:40It just seems obvious to me, but clearly Saudi Arabia across the board is just doing this all over the place. And there has been significant pushback, which I think is good. Colin, you and I were talking about that comedy festival that was in Saudi Arabia. I just watched a video about that. And it's particularly interesting because Bill Burr was part of it. And he's notoriously saying very against wealth inequality, which is good saying billionaires need to be put down a little, you know, very, we'll just say abrasive language, whether you like it or not. Uh, but then it takes like a cool million dollars in agreement to not say anything bad about an extremely oppressive regime, you know, not so, not so good, but yeah, it sucks.

55:29A lot of questions. I, I'm trying to remember if any of these writings are about this, but like, it's obvious to me at least that it's like, no, Nothing's going to change in terms of what content is or isn't allowed from EA to put out. It's not like they're going to impose cultural restrictions because as you were saying, Colin, the whole reason for this is to make money for their wealth fund. And so I think that they understand that it's like we can't if if we were to impose that on this, then it's going to hurt it. And that's not why we're doing this. So it's unfortunate. it. I don't really know what else to say about it other than this keeps happening and more and more American companies seem to get swallowed up by foreign entities only to just funnel the money out.

56:17Indeed. I mean, that's one incredibly valid point of view and one of many things that we can discuss about this. I want to get you on the record, Chris. How are you feeling about this? This is big news. Everyone has an opinion. Yeah. I mean, it's the almighty dollar, man. i've talked about this i don't even know how many times on the show but like when your guiding principle is the dollar then nothing matters but that and then yeah you're going to like you're going to sell your shit to the highest bidder whether it whether it's detrimental to you your your culture your society your country whatever it's like it does it's not going to matter to you because that's that's that's the religion that you have is the dollar and this is ultimately and i know people are tired of hearing this but it's like dude this this is the ultimate end of this kind of system that we have this is like where it always goes you can't have capitalism is like a garden man like you got to like maintain it you have to prune the weeds you know you have to make sure things aren't like you know wrapping their tendrils around other things you got to make sure you manage it you can't just leave it just unmanaged because then it just it gets to this that this is always what happens and we haven't pruned in a fucking long time and it looks like we're not going to prune a long time because jared kushner isn't he like donald trump's like son-in-law that's yeah he's married to avante trump that's real sick i wanted to bring that real awesome but i don't know about you know both i mean our current president and this and the former president they all got deals going on in other countries seems real it seems legit it's it bothers the shit out of me too just because i would invest here but the it's so frustrating man whether it's whether it's like clandestine and secretive or like out in the open like that's one thing i see like now it's like well at least they're doing it out in the open it's like that's not better that it's just like if there were if if bill cosby was like out doing tours about like yeah i've been raping it's like that doesn't that doesn't that doesn't change you mean at least he's honest you know i'm raping oh yeah that's right that's right yeah i forgot that's uh that's a great uh norm mcdonald bit where he's talking about like i think the i think the worst bit about cosby was the hypocrisy and i don't think that's the worst part but no i think i don't know man this is it's this is this is where this leads man and it's um it's unfortunate because i don't see it really stopping i think we're in we're in a very um we're generally in a very get the bag kind of environment now like i I don't think people think about the morality of these things as much as they used to, because we're just kind of surrounded by people telling us to just like, you know, grind, get the bag, do whatever you can.

59:05And it's you when you're in that environment, you don't really think about the effects. And like, this is a real bummer, man. I don't know when this is going to go through, but like, presumably that'll be like a that's that's a lot of big games. I saw people being like, oh, it's a good thing that they got EA because EA doesn't make good games. And I was like, only if you don't play games, can you think that? Yeah. What are you talking about? They made It Takes Two, which was one of the most impressive games I'd played in the year that it came out. Split Fiction apparently is very good as well.

59:38I haven't had the time to check that out yet either, but that was a unique game. Battlefield is having its resurgence now at the worst possible time, I guess. Because now I'm like, well, I guess I don't know. i don't i guess i'm not playing battlefield because this is that's that's insane battlefield being on my saudi arabia is hysterically weird yeah it's awesome like that's a very weird it's it's happening all over with the riad comedy festival too like there's so many people who are just so unabashedly selling out like tim dylan to me was the most egregious because like you sold out and you got fired so you got you got double you're like a double loser after you had like dinner with like the president like all this stuff it's like you can't like i don't know man i don't it's so shameless the degree by which like there's so much intermingling and just like yeah sell your assets to this sell your assets to that whatever get your bag i'm just like brother this is so sad but whatever it's just gonna keep going this way until everything's owned by like two companies and then we're gonna be like why does everything suck now or why does everything continue to suck and it's like gee i wonder could it be because like there's nobody competing with each other anymore because everybody's agreeing to stay out of each other's turf like it like it's cable companies and shit yeah that's a whole other thing or cartels it's just yeah that's that's where we're heading really and there's no there doesn't seem to be in any earnest um a real attempt to get in the way or to to combat it in some way it just seems to be just like this is where it's it's where we're at and it's just how it's it's how the game is played and it's like all right race to the bottom i guess off we go so andrew wilson is going to remain seen CEO of the company, which is interesting.

1:01:19In fact, I feel like it's up to the board to figure this out and the board approved this. So, but it almost feels like a conflict of interest because usually like in massive sales like this, there's often a turning over of the C-suite. And so he's running the company and driving forward this purchase that will just further enrich him specifically. but um and he already makes i mean again again i've said this a million times i don't think being the ceo of ea is easy i think it's incredibly fucking difficult uh but he already makes like 50 million dollars a year or something like that so after all of his options and and all these things so but i thought that his letter was interesting hogan i were making fun of part of it because it's just such...

1:02:03PR people, you could just put this through a fucking AI bot now and have them write something like this. So it says team moments ago, we announced that the board approved an agreement for EA to be acquired by PIF Silver Lake and affinity partners. You can read the press release, blah, blah, blah. Under the terms of the transaction that we already know this, this moment is a recognition of your creativity, your innovation and your passion. You have built some of the world's most iconic IP, created stories that have inspired global communities and helped shape culture through interact through interactive experiences.

1:02:33Everything we have achieved and everything that lies ahead is because of you. we are entering a new era of opportunity this is one of the largest and most significant investments ever made in the entertainment industry our new partners bring deep experience across sports gaming and entertainment they are committed with conviction to ea they believe in our people our leadership and the long-term vision we are now building together um i thought this was funny though there's a state if you guys um read his letter and there's a thing at the bottom we went into so i don't mean to be redundant because we talked about this extensively on a sacred plus but i just think this is so funny and i think you guys will find it funny there's a thing here it says cautionary statement regarding forward-looking statements.

1:03:07So this is underneath his letter. Some statements set forth in this communication contain forward-looking statements that are subject to change. Statements, including words such as anticipate, believe, expect, intend, and estimate, plan, predict, seek, goal, will, may, likely, should, could, and future, and similar expressions that predict or indicate future events or trends, or that are not statements of historical matters, may identify forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding the benefits of and timeline for closing the transaction.

1:03:52this is it's just dude it's like the craziest lawyer should have ever seen oh i was dying where i'm like they're going through the words then it's like will may should the whole though every single just the entire dictionary oh it's so fucking good dude i was like dying when i was reading that i was like i can't even believe that that's real um all right so here's what i have to say about it and again sorry for the redundancy if you already listened to the show, but most of you have not. And we got into it so much deeper because there's so much to say about it. But I have four bullet points that I want to bring up here on this show.

1:04:27The first is the major concern that I've seen from people, which is, oh, now they're going to like, you know, pray the gay away and like all these things are going to, you know, it's like, I think Dustin touched on this. It's like, no, they're not. Now, there might be casualties that get rid of studios like Bioware, and I wouldn't be surprised if that happens to be perfectly honest and and hogan i talked about this where i'm like they're gonna lay people off like understand that they're definitely coming in and public companies have so much more leeway to waste money and resources and space than private companies and so there's definitely going to be a culling there and i don't i don't wish that on anyone but that's going to happen but i don't i want people to kind of understand that these people are not stupid and they're not going to inject their mores onto the games.

1:05:17I don't think that that's a relevant concern. In fact, they're complete hypocrites. And we already know this because Savvy Games Group has Western style developers run by women and populated by gay people and stuff working out of Riyadh. So they're willing to totally just pretend that none of their rules and regulations exist for these particular companies because they want to extract what they do best out of them. They don't care. I think people think that because of the Riyadh Comedy Festival and the stuff that came out about that, about like how there's like a specific sheet that was like leaked by one of the comedians that ended up not going that was like you can't joke you can't joke about this this this and that right and so people are like kind of but those are those are two very different things i think what people have to understand it yeah right and i think what we have to understand is if so if a gay a game comes out of one of these studios that does something that would be unsavory or untoward in saudi arabia it won't be released in that state in saudi arabia but that's not what they're going after right they want the global market so they're they're hypocrites totally china does the same shit so it's it's no different like they they want to work they want this is the kind of deal that gives them their lets them have their cake and eat it too but i think people are worried about the wrong thing right um and that's that's the big thing i wanted to say here was if you're worried about them saying like oh no more gay gay fucking romance lines and mass effect i'm like no oh, dude, that's not what it's all about.

1:06:37They just want money. If only they were that dedicated to the cause, you might even have a little respect for them, not because of the anti-gay or anti-thing, but because they were consistent. But it's not that at all. It's the same as them selling all their oil to us. It's like, okay, we don't even like each other. The 9-11 hijackers were Saudi. Everyone just pretends all these things don't exist. So I wanted to, I understand that concern. Like you said, the comedy bit, but that's because it was in Riyadh. In other words, if Saudi Arabia, a Saudi Arabian company was doing an America, like a comedy, you know, circuit in America, that list wouldn't exist.

1:07:17They just want money. Exactly. So you have to give them that kind of credit and they, and they have proven it out over decades because like I said, the sovereign wealth fund is a trillion dollars. It's a lot of money for a private entity. That's, that doesn't, isn't any specific company. trillion dollar market cap is nuts. So I get it. I understand that. I think you're concerned about the wrong thing. Here's where I think you should put your concern is in the sports washing or games washing angle of it. Saudi Arabia is populated, no doubt, by many millions of very good, decent people. But the reality of the situation on the ground, though it has been liberalizing a little bit, and it's all relative, of course, like women can drive now, for instance, right wow is they have a series of bronze age level laws and regulations and mores that i'm personally not interested in changing because it's not my business but that we nonetheless choose to interact with and endorse by having deals like this and it's the same thing about it's the same china got out of its like especially in the 90s as trade normalized in the 80s and 90s.

1:08:33It's like they kind of got out of the straitjacket because they're like, yeah, we can just be a communist dictatorship in quotes, but have a capitalist market and everyone just buys our shit and we just interact on the market like everyone else. So we just have our cake and eat it too. It doesn't matter. While you could actually hold economic leverage against these countries and say like, well, we can't do anything to change your situation on the ground. We don't have to endorse it. Right. And there's some pretty dark shit going on in Saudi Arabia. Make no mistake about it. The reason Tim Dillon was kicked off, as I understand, was kicked off of that Riyadh thing was because he was making fun of the fact that they basically have slaves.

1:09:08Right. And it's not like they're literally slaves, like chattel slavery or something like that. It's that they import foreign workers, pay them almost nothing and treat them like absolute shit as an almost underclass that does all of the hard, tedious work that their moneyed society doesn't want to do. That's the least of it, frankly. They'll cut your fucking head off in public, in a public execution for being gay, for not worshiping their particular religion, for apostasy.

1:09:51the thing that bothers me just the most is the way they treat women out of all the other shit that's fucked up this idea that we have to pretend that the women in the desert kingdom on all the sand near the equator want to dress like that and and walk around like that is preposterous sorry and i just think it's an awful situation it's not an implication of the individuals that live there it's not an implication of their right to have their own society but i think we have to call out a reasonable stance of like why would we want to deal with a country like this and it's just it's like what chris was saying it's like because the money, money, oil, China, cheap goods.

1:10:39Yeah, we'll make, we'll have our, our, our factories with suicide nets around them, make your tchotchkes for you. Sure. You buy them from us. You undercut your own working class and we win. And it's the same thing with the Saudis. So I really think like when people are focused on the end product, I'm like, no, you're not focused on the right thing. Nothing's going to change about FIFA or football club. Nothing's going to change about Battlefield. What's going to change is that you're just giving them more and more and more money to normalize themselves.

1:11:19And I think that that should be called out. No matter how much things are kind of softening with Saudi Arabia, it is still so out of bounds with the way that it's human rights record that I'm not willing to fight a war over it. that's not what i'm you know what i mean i'm just saying like can't we can't we agree to just have enough disdain for it to not economically interact it's like very weird to me it's like a north korea situation to me where i'm just like what are we doing you know like would we really like would it would be like if we sold ubisoft to like north korea are you like why are we doing that you couldn't get money elsewhere you couldn't like you couldn't find anybody else right that's that's the whole thing for me too chris is and i don't i think this it would be too easy to manipulate it bad actors could totally drive prices up and everything but when something like this happens it would almost be interesting if there were some sort of government mechanism where they they don't force anyone to do anything but they basically say like would anyone match this would any american company match this price right not drive it up not have a bidding war just say like okay this is what they're willing to pay is anyone willing to pay this to keep it domestic you know i don't know how again that could be so easily manipulated you don't want the government too overly involved but as i said on and a lot of people are like oh um actually i think we might have inquiries i should probably get into some of them

1:12:47um well yeah i'm sorry go ahead well can i well the thing too is like this is going to continue to happen right like there's there's going there's probably going to be more wealth funds and all these things you know like there's probably going to be other governments that are going to be that are going to be on the hunt for things to invest in like uh going forward and so like my my thing is like well do we do we just leave it like how and i'm not even saying that i'm necessarily in support of this either but like i almost wonder it's like would it wouldn't it be better to have our government do this than another government you know what i mean yes like i wouldn't i wouldn't want that necessarily like in a perfect scenario but like if this is the name of the game now where governments are going to be investing in X, Y, and Z.

1:13:29And, you know, there's going to be American properties that are going to be essentially working at the behest of, you know, completely foreign governments. Like at a certain point, it does kind of behoove us to just be like, all right, well, this is, this is the, these are the rules of the game now. I guess, you know what I mean? Like, I guess, I guess we've stepped in there as well. because I don't know what you do if if if you're the only person if you're the only person not cheating you're just dumb yeah I agree it's kind of it's kind of how it feels like to me yeah I agree especially because we're letting you know electronic arts is a great American company I know a lot of people have problems with them sure but like they're great they have a they they're an old Silicon Valley generation one company and came from nothing, you know, Trip Hawkins and all those guys.

1:14:24And like I said, when public in 1990 at 50 cents by volume is share, this is a really impressive organization and we shouldn't want it to be. And again, it's, it's, it's true. There are, you know, affinity and silver Lake are American. That's true. JP Morgan is American. That's financing it, but it's just, um, I agree with you. and this is so this is uh deuces bro wrote in he said in the latest sacred symbols plus colin expressed profound enthusiasm and support for a u.s public investment fund this is literally a definition of socialism public ownership of private assets as an anarcho-capitalist i hereby revoke colin's capitalist card chris please welcome colin to the communist party thank you for your attention to this matter i was so hoge hoge punched some holes in it which i think is totally reasonable because i didn't i haven't thought it through too much but and i tweeted this and a lot of people were saying similar things to deuce's bra about like oh this is like you know socialism and stuff and i'm like we should have a sovereign wealth fund why wouldn't we like to your point if other companies or other countries are investing like this and it's often but not always totalitarian countries that do or totalitarian slanted countries that do have sovereign wealth funds so like china has like a bunch of sovereign wealth funds um you know hong kong has a private sovereign wealth fund singapore has a sovereign wealth fund kuwait has a sovereign wealth fund uae there are as uh hogan i were talking about there are sovereign wealth funds at the state level in the united states the alaska permanent fund which is the oil fund that pays everyone there every year is a sovereign wealth right everyone gets eight eighteen hundred dollars a year every year if you didn't know that if you just live in alaska from this thing that was basically an agreement to say like if you're allowed to pipeline and drill and fuck things up here you're at least going to pay us and that's righteous as fuck and by the way alaska is one of the most red deep ruby red states like no contest so they're into it and the second biggest one is is the texas pension for their government so anyway go ahead no i was gonna say that's that's what's so funny about a lot of that stuff because that's that's essentially a ubi right 1800 and it's just like and it's and it's in a in the context of a red state and it's just like these are not i don't know it's getting political but I wish people would really understand that a lot of these things aren't really as black and white as they think they are.

1:16:45There's a lot of crossover and there's a lot of things that you could argue a lot of things from any perspective, I would argue. But I don't know. I think if we're going to, if we're going to be in this battlefield now where there's just governments investing this way and that way, like it does kind of behoove us to not complacently like sit by and just, just because like we have like a, a cultural like history of just like, Oh no, I'll keep the government out of everything. It's like, yeah, I mean, generally, but like, I mean, if it helps us, why, why not? yeah i i'm i feel the same way where i'm like i first of all you said it's getting pulled like you're what you're saying is getting political it's like hey guys wake up um the sovereign wealth fund of saudi arabia buying electronic arts is deeply political right if you don't understand that i'm in off topic political no i understand what you're saying but i'm just saying for people out there they're like politics politics i'm like guys this is a great example of what i'm saying about the in in inescapable crossover between the political world and the game world It's all the time.

1:17:49You just have to keep your eyes open and understand that that's what's happening.

1:17:57So this is what I was saying to Hoag was, we should have a sovereign wealth fund and it should be populated. And this was kind of the idea and obviously it would have to be massage, but basically companies can just give 10 % of themselves in non-voting shares to the government, to a sovereign wealth fund in exchange for zeroing out their tax bill forever. and the government just gets, so the government would just own 10 % of Apple, have no voting shares, cannot have any say over what happens, but they just own and control a tenth of the company, and they get all the revenue from dividends and all the things like that, and so in exchange for that holding, they just don't get tax revenue, and that would, in a lot of cases, like, what's worth more, like Apple's tax revenue or 10 % of Apple?

1:18:43Right? Yeah. and you not to get overly political but the reason that I really believe we should be aggressive in these kinds of things and I don't care if you call it socialism or whatever it doesn't matter to me I'm not a partisan in that way it's like a good idea is a good idea it's like our debt and our spending is so out of control that we almost have to be aggressive and actually as a government extracting value which is not really a government's job but when the US government just randomly acquired 10 % of intel a few months ago I was like that's fucking awesome. Like to me, I'm like, that's, that's like a blue chip style thing you would want in a sovereign wealth fund.

1:19:21And we should embrace that sort of mentality, I think, in the United States. But apart from that, I agree completely, Chris, it's like, I'm a capitalist, but I am not a free market capitalist. And I am not an unabridged, like capitalism is always good. And the outcomes are always good. It's like, it's, there is an amount of wealth accumulation in these different companies in these different situations, that is wild. I mean, Elon Musk is the first person to have a$500 billion net worth. It's almost impossible to explain how much$500 billion is. That's more than the working capital of many countries combined.

1:19:58And it shouldn't be concentrated in a single person's hands or a single entity's hands. I believe that. And so I'm concerned by the accumulation of wealth. I'm concerned about the sports washing. I'm concerned about the cultural mores. I'm concerned about all these things. But there is another angle that I want to say to put out there to be fair. And this is for the investors and for EA itself. The board has approved this deal. But as Hogan and I were talking about, there are ways that it can be disrupted. The investors could rebel and ultimately refuse to sell. And there could be lawsuits from the government stuff, which I don't think would happen because there's really no antitrust law or antitrust infringements here or whatever.

1:20:40But my big question for this is, why sell now? I feel like they're undervalued considering what they might be on the cusp of doing and why I think that this buyout is aimed right now in this moment. Battlefield can end up being very big. And it's weird to me that you would want to bail out before you know the outcome. Now it's risky because Battlefield can go fucking south and ruin the deal. And no doubt it's attractive because there is a viable, although probably part-time Call of Duty competitor here, because the only way you can really compete with Call of Duty is to go yearly. But at least for this year, there's going to be a Call of Duty competitor.

1:21:28And that's something that Hogan and I were going into as well, which I was just like, if I were an investor, I'd be like, I don't know, man. like 25 premium awesome i might have bought my shares at 70 i'm gonna cash out at 210 i might own 10 000 shares i mean it's an enormous amount of money to say no to and you got to think twice about that but it's like but if i hold it ea just experienced in august it's all time high it said it in the letter itself so i wonder where what everyone's appetite is Hogue was saying, and I think reasonably so, 25 % is a nice markup and people are going to, they're probably going to be very little problem selling.

1:22:07But I would be, I'd be interested to know if there, especially any large holders like that own a fraction of a percent or a percent or whatever in these different funds. Because you hear from these people every once in a while, like, will they come out and say something about this? Or are they just kind of all down because it's a lot of liquid capital right now that they can put into something else? But I just feel like it's a weird time to sell. yeah that's anything that's like that's like a tertiary concern but that's that's my yeah if anything it's a weird one to specifically just because like of the ones of the entities that you would imagine are in dire straits enough to want to sell like ea's probably like not rea's not even really at the top of that like i would have imagined like ubisoft is in dire need of like you know someone to come in well they got it they got it already right i guess i guess so doesn't feel that way i feel like ubisoft still kind of feels kind of off but yeah i'm ea's kind of i mean ea still has that bad reputation from like the late 2000s like kind of following them around in certain circles there are certain definitely people who are playing games who just weren't even around for that period of time and don't even really know anything about it who don't really carry that but i would say like in the last like seven years they've kind of not to say that they're like an amazing company but like they've definitely done a lot of work to shed that in some way like obviously bioware has fallen pretty hard but i mean you know even just take uh what is it um i just said it it takes two alone was kind of like a weird like that's an interesting thing to put out as a studio like that and that entire studio with joseph farris and battlefield kind of coming back i don't know it just seems they don't feel like they need this yeah i i agree i mean again it's a way to keep for people for people to cash out bring the company private they're gonna streamline it people are gonna get laid off that's the thing with bioware people are like oh they're not gonna want like the gaze of bioware anymore i'm like no they're just probably gonna shut bioware down though because it's yeah they haven't what was the last relevant bioware game was 13 years ago it's it's over you know um well well yeah i guess there's been many relevant a lot of their games have been irrelevant not in the way that they would necessarily want well there's well dragon age inquisition so let's say dragon age inquisition was the last well because anthem was not anthem died and dragon age died yeah i mean anthem died and but anthem was if there's anything you could say about anthem is that it was very relevant oh yeah yeah sure when when when anthem came out that was one of the more relevant things that you could probably talk about but uh they've they've struck out i would say like three times in a row at this point uh on track for another i don't know you know fourth they're in a fourth times to charm kind of situation now where it's just like ah they might look at it and be like yeah let's cut our losses with this um which i would not be surprised at but yeah i think it's i think it's a weird move just from i agree it's like you just released the second edition of college football which is arguably the biggest game in the united states you which is dominating absolutely dominating you have madden which is a dominant force and then you have the two together that you sell in a bundle, which is a dominant force.

1:25:20It's often when those games are all available, it's usually one, two, and three in the sales charts, like the bundle and then the two games a la carte. It's crazy. You have Battlefield coming up. I just, yeah, I just, I would just hold my cards and just be like, well, let's talk next year and see where the stock of EA is then. That's what I would do. I mean, I would believe that like, but who am I to say? It's like, who am I to poo-poo that much money? It's obviously life altering money from many of the people that are going to cash out, including a lot of people at EA that probably have options.

1:25:51So yeah, I don't know how deep that goes there, but there are probably a lot of people excited about EA. I am at EA for this deal, but I am also interested in their own mentality about you are working for an oppressive regime, money regime, regime, basically. It is a little bit of a weird thing, but if you can just listen, dude, there are many companies like look at Riot. Riot is 100 % Chinese owned and no one gives a fuck that works there. There are thousands of people in the United States that work there and they don't give a fuck. So, and by the way, it's up to you to care or not, but sure.

1:26:26Yeah. But I think that that might cause a little bit of a complication. I know there have been some stories about it, but there is that wrinkle. It's going to be very hard to explain this stuff away. This is why I just think being consistent in your principles is easy because then you don't have to kind of squirrel out of these sorts of things. Just don't interact economically with these systems and you don't have to worry about it. And if you do, then you do. Now, I don't really buy EA games, but occasionally I do. And that's not going to stop me from buying an EA game. So am I part of the problem?

1:26:57Sure. If that's what makes you feel good. I think the last EA game I played was Immortals of Avium. And I think the next one, I might be missing one in there somewhere, but the next one will be Plants vs. Zombies. So, which comes out in a couple weeks. Is there anything else left to be said about this? We have another letter, but we already went through so much of this. I'm going to delete this too. Sorry, guys. Dustin, do you have anything you want to add? I have a question for you guys because Chris brought this up earlier. But what do we do? Chris, it sounded like earlier that you're hard out on EA now.

1:27:35And I find that that interesting because often when we talked about tough decisions we make with purchasing, everyone has to find their line. Right. And sometimes like for Battlefield, it's like, I don't I don't like that. This is where my money is going to go now. I have to make the decision. Do I still buy it? Do I not buy it? I don't know the answer. But you indicated earlier that you're you might be out. well i mean i said this about metal slug when um snk was uh purchased by i think uh the fuck was it i know it was saudi arabia but like what the what was it was i think it's the same i think it's savvy game savvy yeah it was the same it's the same thing i'm just play more or whatever the i think that's what it was right yeah and so like i was like well i guess i can't i can't interact with that the thing for me is it's like it's one thing if you're interacting with a government that is um you know every government you can make very good arguments to suggest that the american government isn't all that much better than a certain places elsewhere like the the shit that we engage in overseas particularly is pretty it's pretty fucked but like i think there's a distinct difference between like you know dealing with a company that happens to exist on like in a country that is lorded over by a government that also does bad shit i think there's like a difference between that and like this where like the investment is is so direct where like it's it's it's like this guy this guy specifically has like a like an actual interest in gaming is the reason like colin said that this is likely going through is undoubtedly directly like seeing like moneyed benefits from these interactions like i don't know it's hard because you know the it's a dude who kills journalists like you got the that khashoggi situation it's so it's there's not enough degrees of separation for me personally to feel like oh i guess i'll just buy it and not think about it it's like no i'm gonna be thinking about it i'm gonna be thinking about the fact that like i'm buying this from from a guy who chopped up a journalist essentially and put him in a fucking bag i'm just like i don't i don't um i don't know again it's one thing when a government exists over it and it's just kind of like it's like you can imagine that like a lot of companies in china like the guy the people in charge of like the government over there aren't like sitting there being like they aren't clued into everything at quite as they're just kind of collecting everything you know what i mean they're just like oh that's that's coming in from that area that's coming in from this area this feels so direct that i just can't i don't know it feels uncomfortable for me if someone's if i happen across a copy of uh battlefield uh that i didn't pay for or whatever i guess i'll play it i don't have any objection to that because ultimately it's still a game that's built you know it's not like it was built under the under the regime or anything um but i just i feel weird about buying these things now and that's just that's just my line everybody's gonna have a different line and people could people could even make it the case that like oh well there really is no difference between this in China it's like you probably you probably could be right but I also don't really engage with much 10 cent stuff either you know so it's it's unfortunate because I was really looking forward to it but there's other stuff to play there's like a there's a ton actually so it is what it is if anything it kind of just helps me focus yeah I'm I'm not so strict as to be able to say that I'll never buy a game from a certain publisher or developer.

1:31:16It's like we were saying with limited run games. It's like, I just want to, I'm actively limiting my participation in their particular markets, and I keep it in mind. And by the way, it's hysterical that we're wearing these hats while we're talking about this. It is, yeah. I think it works. Yeah, it's fine. So anyway, that's happened. It is what it is. Go listen to the Sacred Symbols Plus episode with Hogue to get more of a legal and financial deep analysis on all the rest as well as our thoughts there. You'll get a lot more information, but certainly the big news of the week in our industry, a lot of people upset about it.

1:31:52It is what it is. No one cares. No one cares. It's money. That's all they want. Okay. I thought this next one was interesting. I just wanted to bring this up. Push Square wrote the story. It says, Sony is a terrible company that's blowing it in the games business, says Michael Pachter. and they write quote business analyst michael pachter seemingly really has it in for sony as he's now said it's a terrible company that is currently blowing it in the games business this is followed on from suggestions he made last month of clueless management that doesn't know what it's doing the latest comments were made during an interview with yahoo finance as part of a discussion around the news of an ea acquisition from three partners pachter believes connect to tv is the future and when talking of any further acquisitions the analyst responded the following to the idea of buying sony uh quote no sony for sure not sony is a terrible company they actually are blowing it in the games business games are moving to connect to tv so think about all the participants that are going to deliver the way we get movies via netflix forget the subscription model just think about ios becoming on your tv so free to play games on your tv who is going to deliver that cloud providers ai end quote um dustin what are your thoughts on michael pachter over the years because you know famous business analyst obviously a well-known name in the game space for 25 years at least um i have to give some level of deep respect to michael pachter because growing up probably when i was even in junior high i would watch on game trailers dot com pachter factor uh and i attribute watching those videos as one of the reasons i became interested in video games outside of just playing games getting interested in the the business and And so he has like almost like a nostalgia for me in learning about the business and at a very pretty young age.

1:33:43Right. With that being said, I think they're still doing Pactor Factor or it's called something different. Yeah, it's unsifted. Yeah, it's unsifted. And yeah, I don't I don't want this to come off as any kind of like super disrespect towards them. but I recently watched one of these videos and it was so blatantly wrong and not from an opinion. I'm not saying his opinion was wrong. He was factually incorrect because they were talking about switch game key cards and games that are that the game isn't on the disc, right? He's his argument was that publishers want to, didn't want to put the game on the disc because it would get rid of the resale value.

1:34:29And that's not true. the game doesn't redeem on a disc like that like call of duty is an example where some they've done it where it's not on the disc um those games install but it's not like that locks permanently to your account we all know this that you can then take that disc you can trade it in you can let a friend borrow it or whatever and i was like why did no one tell him before they published this video or just i don't get it and over the years we've seen these types of statements where it's like what what wasn't he big on um the like he in what what year was this like a while ago where it's like oh consoles are gonna die yeah that was in the ps3 era i believe he was kind of a champion of that but i don't want to know he was i think he said the ps3 would be the final playstation console at one point right so yeah yahoo finance um and i mean clearly he still has is doing what he does is as an analyst, but it's like, I don't get it.

1:35:31He's sorry. He's an analyst for an organization called Wedbush Securities. And he must be decent at his job. It's not because he doesn't only focus on games. He focuses on just like tech and entertainment generally. And he's like, so it's a wealth management firm. and they obviously have a bunch of experts that look to invest in all these different spaces and then they kind of speak and pontificate about those areas of expertise and people buy into their funds so they have to make money so to be fair to michael pachter like he would simply not be in his position if he was bad at what he did it's just that he does say he doesn't seem to have a great and he says a lot so he it's what i say all the time like i get things wrong all the time i'm like always talking i'm gonna get a lot of things wrong but he's gotten some really big things wrong and I think it's just directionally incorrect on a lot of things that he says.

1:36:22I find Sony being a target weird right now to be kind of weird just from the perspective of Sony is murdering by their own. You know, it's all relative, obviously. For instance, Microsoft's a much bigger company than Sony, but they're doing a great job. PlayStation 5 is killing. They're making more revenue and more profit than ever right now. It's just kind of a weird, you think you would have a little more humility in some sense to be like maybe i don't quite understand what's going on here um but i just i just found it an interesting comment i wanted i wanted to bring it up because uh yeah go ahead let's take this a step further colin because it's true yeah sony's killing it right now in terms of across the board playstation 5 console business but let's even take it from the angle that he's talking about which is this idea He says games are moving to connect to TV.

1:37:17So the idea of a streaming a game to your TV or whatever, it's true that PlayStation doesn't have like a TV app that you get on your smart TV, like Xbox does, but in terms of streaming, they're not behind. In fact, if you have the higher tier of PlayStation plus there's always, there's like not always, but consistently when I'm going games, it's like, you can stream this game. you can stream it on your playstation you can stream it on your portal so yeah they don't they don't necessarily want that to be the way the primary way people interface with playstation but to say they're not prepared to pivot in in the situation where it's like okay people don't want consoles anymore it's like they have the streaming infrastructure they're ready to go and in fact i would argue in my experience in butler pennsylvania playstation game streaming is way better than Xbox's.

1:38:12Now, is that a server-related issue? More than likely. But I found that it's way less, it has way less latent, it's more responsive, better visuals, whatever. So to say they're like super behind in that just doesn't connect to me. Yeah, I generally agree because that's what I've heard. It's not the way I would play games, but I've heard that as well, that technology, basing the technology or the fidelity of the technologies, it seems like Sony is actually doing decently well and has been invested in that for a long time. I mean, going all the way back to Gaikai and trying to... They understand where things are, I think, going, but I think things are going so much slower that they're kind of well-positioned to be a player in both worlds and are a player in both worlds.

1:38:59Chris, does it strike you as preposterous to say that Sony is a terrible company blowing it in the games business? It doesn't seem like they're blowing it too much with their 80 million units sold and uh their all-time high revenue yeah it seems that seems like a weird take i think um it almost comes across like he's just kind of eager for us to get out of the cycle so that he could finally be right about like consoles dying i do think consoles will die like i think that that is that is true eventually um i even even i thought it would happen earlier than this um although i didn't think it was going to happen with ps4 or anything um but yeah i don't know i i think i think it's a weird way to talk about this i i do think if you're looking at streaming there's an argument to be made about because like i have the kind of opposite experience with dustin where like ps now or whatever you want to call it the playstation streaming has been kind of rough for me but like whenever i tried to do like the the xbox streaming it works um granted it's it's always like it's it's choppy for both of them but like it's it's more i found it more consistently playable on the xbox app back when i was using it granted it's been a while since i've even bothered with it but i don't know i feel like sony's pretty well positioned to to it's almost like they're in a good position to react in in an agile way wherever like to whatever sea changes happen i feel like they've got a really strong console business they've got a really strong traditional business and they've really got a strong case there but they're also they they've got enough of a foot in the this kind of digital world where like if they needed to pivot i think they could uh i think they could do it meaningfully and in a way that doesn't really leave um leave the other angle of their business out out to dry i feel like xbox is probably technically better positioned in some way but like they're also they're also really putting a lot of they're more unbalanced like they're they're more deep into that you know oh the app on the tv um you know game streaming all that stuff they're more in that pocket and so i think they're like leaning into something that may or may not be the case they might be too early for a lot of the things that they're trying to do uh which is kind of a danger it's par for the course for microsoft to be too early to something but because they're leaning so heavily in that direction now it really is it really is a toss-up as to how the industry goes like if the industry does tilt in that favor then microsoft is going to be in a pretty good position but there's a chance that they've just they've leaned in far too early and it actually takes longer in which case if it does take longer sony's actually in a more beneficial position because they're they still have the strong you know traditional model and they're able to kind of pivot if they need to so like that's that's how i would look at it but i don't know i don't know much about michael pachter i think i've heard his name every now and again i'm sure we brought him up on the show yeah he has he has like a very mixed reputation you don't hear about him too much anymore 10 15 years ago more than that you would hear about him all the time yeah i never um i don't know and wedbush security still goes you can go to wedbush.com and look at their their portfolio if you want but um he's had a lot of bad predictions i mean it's but it's like he said that i think he said xbox one without tell ps4 that was obviously preposterous that was that was in the second xbox one was even revealed that was impossible so yeah was that was that prediction made after the reveal yeah it was that's that's crazy because i could have seen that happening like before you know before we knew anything about it because they were they were running off a pretty good inertia from the 360 even if ps3 did out take it in the end it was kind of like people still had like a lot of loyalty but like but that um i mean i did like for certain i was like and i remember i remember the reveal being like why would you why would you do this i think about that all the time man that that reveal for the xbox one is so legendary and how that's the biggest little domino in the world yeah it's probably yeah it's not revealed right it's like because they could have i really earnest i don't know how you feel about it but like i earnestly feel like the order in which they did it fuck them because i actually i actually think like because they did their like console reveal and how like oh it's fucking football and a cable box and then three weeks later it was e3 where they just they focus their entire showcase on exclusively games right where it's like i almost wonder it's like damn if you would just reorganize this yeah yeah we're like you had e3 first and then it would still would have had a lot of problems because it would have been like you know the connect would have been an egregious inclusion but it wouldn't have at least had the first impression of being a cable box right and instead it would have had like the secondary like oh look at all this secondary stuff you can do instead of it being like the the first way to you know what i mean first impressions are everything and they fucked themselves over so hard it's so crazy there's also all this stuff about the the drm yeah the drm yeah i'm not saying yeah i'm not saying it would have been like fixed but i do think like the order i agree with you just because it would have shown what was most important and that would have and it just seemed like what was most important was the secondary and tertiary functionality of the machine, which was connecting it to ESPN and using Kinect.

1:44:22So I actually agree with you. I mean, I think it could have set things off, but they would have still never executed on the plan. So it would have been better in the beginning. I think he was saying after a year, PS4 would be outsold by Xbox One, which is nowhere near being right. But I think his biggest prediction recently that was like nonsensical was when he was saying that, I think it was a few years ago, that Game Pass would reach 200 million subscribers. It's like you're delusional. i remember even at the time being like just absolutely delusional that's like a hot that's that's twice as much as microsoft's rosiest expectation it's ridiculous it's a ridiculous thing to say so but i've been wrong too i'm not beating him up for any of those things i what i'm beating him up for is saying that sony is a terrible company blowing it in the games business when sony is basically the the gold standard of how it's done in the core games business like not for nothing i know we're a playstation podcast and all the rest but give me a break well you could maybe make the argument that nintendo is technically yeah but well not on a money basis i mean i guess that's what i'm saying oh yeah i guess like he's talking about revenue i mean sony's playstation makes so much more money than nintendo does no that's true yeah but nintendo doesn't spend as much and they have a smaller footprint and they get a lot more out of a lot less i mean when you think about they have the best selling hardware so but it's just because they don't you don't make money on hardware and yeah i think i'm looking at it more like a granular like like the attach rate from software to hardware kind of thing but what he does like yeah i guess if i guess if that's not what he's talking about then like yeah it's weird it's weird for him to just single out sony is like as the one that doesn't get it well the thing about nintendo is that they can't scale to what playstation is doing because they are just not the default third-party platform and they don't have the technological heft to be that and they don't really want to be that they're a viable and vibrant indie community with a lot of amazing first party games that sell preposterous amounts of units and but without that fortnight money and all the 30 rips it's not it's not to say people don't play that stuff on switch it's just that that's not the primary platform for any of those games and playstation is and pc and so just that money going through the system it's in other words nintendo probably makes it a substantial amount more money on their own games than sony does but it's it's it's outbalanced by just the fact that most people aren't playing their games so um i don't know it's it's neither here nor there i just wanted to bring that up because i thought it was an interesting talking point and um thank you michael pachter for sounding off all right i was curious what you guys thought of this this comes from video games chronicle they write sony is reportedly set to release an updated ps5 dual sense controller with a removable a removable battery and it will replace the existing models they write quote polish site APP.pl says Sony is working on a revised version of the PlayStation 5 Pro along with a revised DualSense controller.

1:47:12The site cites its source as Grazdari, who it says correctly revealed that Microsoft Flight Simulator was coming to PS5 and leaked the boxed version of the Elder Scrolls 4 Oblivion Remastered. According to the source, the new DualSense controller, known internally as the DualSense V3, will launch in November and will feature a removable battery. Although this hasn't been clarified in more detail, the wording appears to suggest that this doesn't mean the ability to use AA batteries, but rather a rechargeable battery similar to that already in the current DualSense controllers with the ability to replace it with a new one or potentially one with a higher capacity if needed.

1:47:44The report says the revised DualSense will be released in November and will replace the DualSense controllers currently on sale at retailers. As for the revised PlayStation 5 Pro, the report suggests it will be a minor revision which will use 3 % less power than the current model and will include one of the revised DualSense controllers. Dustin, what's this all about? yeah if uh this is true which it sounds like this is fantastic news in the well it feels weird to say retro world but with playstation 3 controllers if you're in the market for one some the problem is often that the uh the battery in them is shot or just not very good and so it you can't go and replace it which is very annoying this is one thing about xbox controllers as loud as they may fucking oh my god they're so fucking loud clicking stop with the clicking yeah uh they're just you know you can replace the battery in them which is great so being able to do that with a dual sense is awesome especially i would hope they would do it with the the edge as well because it's like man you spend 200 on this controller someday the battery is going to die in this thing or not be as good just because that's just there's no battery that lasts forever they get old they need to be replaced everyone knows this with their phones right you check the battery health on your phone same with the controller so this uh is good from a consumer perspective that it's replaceable obviously the dual sense still has problems particularly with its sticks that i would have i mean i would have rather seen that fixed first and foremost but we'll take what we can get i'm sure sony is happy to sell you an official battery for your dual sense uh but there'll probably be third third party ones as well but i think it's good i'm curious to see how it's implemented whether it's going to be like a typical um like a latch or a shell or whatever or if this is going to be something where not that you need like to be able to like fully tear it apart because you technically could replace the battery in a regular dual sense but it's going to be annoying as fuck so i wonder if it's going to be like that if it's going to be like a think of like a nintendo ds where you have to get a little screwdriver and take it out so curious about the mechanics but overall it's a win what do you think i'm sorry chris um a new dual sense controller with a removable battery i must say from a perspective of changing the batteries out on the fly it's cool but i would never need that because i don't use the controller that much where it would die in one use but the idea i guess of keeping your controller alive and vibrant for a longer period of time is certainly tantalizing yeah i mean this is i i've always i've always gotten flack for this whenever i would stream because i i would always say like no i prefer having a a battery that i can take out because again like i've had i remember i remember a really early experience i had with ps3 where like i don't know if like the battery shorted out or something but like i couldn't like it just wouldn't hold a charge and it was like a relatively new controller and i couldn't really do anything about it and i remember just being like well this is this is really lame because i know exactly how i would ameliorate this if i could and it always stuck around with me like even with ps4 like i never had the issue with ps4 or ps5 or anything but like i remember thinking about it just like man that is a really annoying situation and it's not really it i don't know like i just remember feeling like it's not a worse controller for having that modularity you know like they're not worse for having that flexibility so i think it's cool i'm i'm into it uh i can see for dual sense in particular why this would be useful because like i i have two controllers specifically that i just kind of like charge alternate alternatively i'll just oh this ran out of battery i'll switch to the other one but that's how i have to do it because i don't have the availability of extra batteries so it wouldn't really make much of a difference to me but it's it's valuable just for the prospect of um longevity and uh you know modularity i think it's cool it's better it's better than having something just it reminds me of like when the phones became that way do you remember when like it got to the point where like i remember the transition point where like oh you can't take the battery out of the phone and i remember just being like this is this is worse like it's sleek and whatever but like this is worse um and that's how i always felt about the playstation playstation controllers post ps3 and uh yeah going backwards is kind of nice i don't mind it at all i'm looking up i never looked at really look at my battery health what is it how do you i see it here uh on your phone settings yeah i see i'm under i'm yeah i'm I'm in the battery, battery health and charging service.

1:52:34Maximum capacity, 80%. Mine is, I think, close to that. That's fine. My maximum capacity is 86. Yeah, so you're beating me. Mine's 83. Yeah, that's okay. I'll deal with that, I guess. I will say, I mean, it's cool. I will say two things because I like to buy a new DualSense every year. So I've never experienced like a battery getting worse on a controller noticeably because I just like to replace it with. you know, get that nice, tight, new controller, clean controller. But I'm a little surprised by how friendly this is. It seems like Sony just makes more money if they just don't do this. And it's, it's actually kind of straight.

1:53:17It's like, fuck you buy a new controller, you know, instead they're making it easy to buy, you know, either, I guess their own batteries or some alternate battery and they'll make some money there too. But I'm surprised. I actually I'm just surprised by it. It's nice. Yeah, it is friendly, but it is I in my estimation, it is more likely that your sticks are going to go bad on your dual sense than the battery, at least in the current time frame. So it's nice, but the major problem is still there. Yeah. Another piece of hardware news. This is not anything we can linger need to linger on, but it also comes from Video Games Chronicle, and I just thought it was interesting is that so they've kind of brought in this new revised down from a gigabyte or i'm sorry a terabyte to 825 gigabytes the ps5 digital edition slim model but they actually have a visual difference between them we don't have to put it in the show but for you guys to see they have a picture here of them standing together and um they got rid of the glossiness on the console it's now all matte and i gotta say big improvement huge improvement visually it's way better yeah so i wanted to just bring it in there because i think the white plate at the top is now matte and then yeah that black middle part is now matte and i'm like oh that's so much sexier and cleaner no fingerprints no scratches no scratches i don't know why you'd have either fingerprints or scratches on it but you could but dude it just happens yeah it does if you have to move your or take your ps5 anywhere one time it's going to get scratched so i just wanted to point that out i thought that was interesting because they didn't you know this thing kind of just got pooped out by sony that never really acknowledged it and it could be another uh cost cutting thing i don't know maybe it's cheaper to make these matte pieces of plastic and when you're making millions of these consoles i'm sure that begins to add up yeah it's crazy that glossy is more expensive despite the fact that it clearly sucks it does suck and i don't know if it really is more expensive or not i think it is um okay let's get into the you know chris this is your news here um so it seems like according to the games leaks and rumors reddit subreddit that proto type is being remastered and the evidence is i think fairly definitive um this guy this user here and they have images of it um it says that the the credits have been updated for the game that iron galaxy studios is now included they're one of the spyro remaster and they've done a bunch of shit but it says that here it's there um now in the credits and there are lots of other new names in the credits from activision studios and i put in here a different link too because it was noted that last year prototype one and two did find themselves on the australian classification ratings board as if they were coming out again so it could be that both Prototype 1 and Prototype 2 were being remastered, maybe together.

1:56:22Prototype 1, of course, came out in 2009 and the sequel of Prototype 2 came out in 2012. These are kind of open-world-esque supervillain sort of games where you're mutating and morphing and killing and doing a lot of... People really liked them and they were made by Radical, which no longer exists. In fact, I think Prototype 2 was their last game. They worked on Destiny 1, I think, as well as an outside studio, but they're done. I'm not a huge fan of Prototype. I wrote the strategy guide, actually, for Prototype 1, and I got the Platinum in Prototype 2, so I did play it extensively. But these were Activision-published games, so these are under the umbrella at Microsoft now.

1:57:04And I wouldn't be surprised if they were just spooling something off. These games can probably do pretty appreciably. There seems to be a lot of revision around these games, because people always liked them. Obviously, there was a sequel, but I think people always found them as being a little bit imperfect. And now I think over time, history has been somewhat kind of them. Chris, it seems like you've willed another thing into existence. We have no information on this, but this is pretty definitive. I don't know why you would update your, you know, so iron galaxy and be knock specifically are in the, in the credits now for the games.

1:57:33What are your thoughts? Right. I am very weird. Cause I feel like they, maybe it's been a while and in retrospect, it must've been a while, but then they, they came to PS4 natively. um i think in what 2017 maybe 18 something like that like i feel like they came natively yeah it's 2015 oh so even earlier um yeah so i mean i'm curious what this could be i've always been prototype has uh like a pandemic games kind of feel to it like there's a lot of a lot of people talk about like oh what great games do like what perfect games from like earlier generations would you want remade and early people even talk about that with movies and and the more interesting conversation to me is like what games that were pretty good but not perfect should be brought forward and given that extra you know what i mean like given given the extra time to maybe realize what they could have been not to say that this is what it's going to be it's obviously this is obviously going to be just a pretty standard remaster of of the type that we're kind of used to now um but i've always been of the mind that like there's something special with prototype that was not fully realized necessarily with what the games are and i always appreciated like the potential of it like there's something about it like it feels like a like a carnage simulator like a spider-man villain simulator and that was always very cool to me and i always felt like there was more to it than that um or that it could be extracted for more than than what it's than what it was extracted for same i feel the same way with destroy all humans as well like i just think there's like it's a great premise there and i feel like with the right time and attention like there could be something really really really special um beyond it but i mean cool i'm i'm down to check it out i i have a fondness for prototype i don't think it's even remotely perfect as a video game i think it's got a lot of weird jank i just there's something endearing now especially in 2025 of just um we're in like kind of like a post meta ironic state now and i just feel like there's there's a level of earnestness in how cool prototype thinks it is and i think that that kind of loops around from being like cringe inducing to just kind of being cool again it's kind of like how i felt about the first watchdogs as well like that game that first watchdogs took itself like very seriously and you know and a lot of people were like oh this is too serious or whatever and then the second game tried to go like the it tried to ride like i don't know this rick and morty ass like you know like oh it's not that serious it was still grounded somewhat but it was more wacky and i feel like it actually lost something in doing that um and so i don't know i'm down to have like a hooded edgy protagonist kind of running around you know changing his arm into blades and shit it's cool i don't know i'm looking forward to it whatever whatever the fuck this is it's weird to me that they updated the old credits um because that seems to indicate that it is just kind of like an oblivion style thing maybe at most um i don't know if you're going to get that much of an improved experience compared to like the base ps or like the the brought forward ps4 version maybe better performance um i wonder if they're going to maybe throw it into unreal 5 or something maybe give it that extra pop i think that would be probably wise maybe but although maybe not because the engine's so shit apparently um i don't know we'll see how this what this ends up being but uh i have a fondness for prototype and i never actually played prototype 2 at all um for some reason i don't know yeah i don't know why i did play it so i did um curious i don't really remember prototype 2 comparable to prototype 1 but yeah radical is such an interesting was such an interesting studio because they were basically just making a lot of random sports games like they made bread hole hockey in the 90s which i liked and stuff but it wasn't until they got their hands on the simpsons that they became a more notable you know they made road rage in 2001 and then of course hit and run which people love in that's i would love to i would love to see that in 2003 brought forward and then they did a bunch of like the late crash games too and that was like right before they did went in the prototype and then they were going to do prototype three or at least that was the plan and they got shut down so they did um if i remember correctly i could be wrong but they did uh that hulk game as well right like hulk's yeah hulk 2003 hulk um the movie game i think or yeah i think it's hulk's ultimate destruction i swear to god if if they didn't make that they did they that's yeah they made two hulk games they made hulk in 2003 and hulk ultimate destruction in 2005 dude hulk ultimate destruction was awesome but that game was also basically just prototype with the hulk it has good reviews on metacritic 84 it's fucking cool man like you could like break you could turn cars into gloves so that you could punch things even harder it's ridiculous it's absolute nonsense but it was fucking cool and it feels very much like prototype like i remember playing prototype and i was like is this hulk's ultimate destroy and you obviously you look back at it and it's like oh they there's like a through line there um Um, they're pretty lazy.

2:02:43john benet ramsey's brother wrote in i think his name was burke hey crew i read we may be getting a prototype remaster in the near future i understand the financial incentives behind similar remakes and remasters but are there other incentives for these developers and publishers keeping the source code current returning the well-egged mechanics maybe even reintroducing a concept that was ignored in a different console generation do devs and publishers even think of these as reasons to remaster or remake a game they probably do but i really do think that a lot of the reason i mean there's an obvious reason you do this which is to make a little bit of money you're not going to make an enormous amount of money but it could be like a test bed to see if things come back or if you could revive something as well so i think there's very little to lose to go back and kind kind of reorganize a game, modernize it a little bit, get it out there, maybe do some museum content and all the rest to give it a little bit of pop and then see.

2:03:28It's like the best kind of data you'll get. And these games are. But then again, as Chris has already said, like prototype and prototype one or prototype one and prototype two rather are already playable on PS4. So PS5, you could just play them now. Dustin, what are your thoughts here? Are you a prototype fan? I don't i don't recall i don't know i don't think i've ever played prototype i may have played a demo for one at some point so i don't really have any experience the the most interesting thing about this story to me is just that it was discovered from my understanding i'm looking at a video game chronicle article that it was discovered because there was an update on steam that broke a mod that the mod was designed to from the vgc article fix some of the issues encountered while running the game on modern pcs so very weird um it sounds like because they're updating the old game that this isn't going to be anything crazy just because i would imagine if it was going to be an oblivion level remaster that it would be an entirely new thing like why would you even be fucking with the old steam version right so maybe it will be some kind of larger update that makes the game run on modern pcs much better and an update for playstation 5 uh i'm i'm not sure this is a very weird situation mechanically of this leak yeah i want to be clear when i when i was talking about like the oblivion thing i was like that's the most it could be right like it's that we're not looking at like a final fantasy 7 remake you know what i mean tier like recreation a prototype and i think ultimately it is going to be just like that'd be so ridiculous if it is that would be insane i think yeah i think ultimately it's just going to be like maybe like an upres maybe a performance boost um maybe some changes to light maybe they'll fuck with unreal engine in some way like i don't really know but um it is weird that they would go back and fuck with the credits of an existing game like i feel like i i don't i can't remember if that's happened before i'm sure it has but like the frequency by which it does happen i would imagine is pretty sparse.

2:05:39But yeah, I don't know. We'll see. All right. Prototype. RIP and peace for now. We might see your revival soon enough. A couple of more pieces of news we can move through pretty quickly. Forza Horizon 6 was announced at Tokyo Game Show. We talked a little bit about that, but they've confirmed that the game will not be coming to PlayStation 5 day and date. If you go to the Xbox Wire to read about it, you'll see that At the bottom, they don't talk about PlayStation at all. And then at the very, very bottom in italics, it says Forza Horizon 6 will launch first on Xbox consoles and PC in 2026. With the excitement for this franchise on other platforms, Playground Games and Turn 10 Studios are also working together to bring Forza Horizon 6 to PlayStation 5 post launch.

2:06:21And they'll have more details to share about the game generally. Early in 2026, terrorist Jerry wrote in and said, hey, CDC, am I the only one confused by Xbox's decision to make Forza Horizon 6 a timed exclusive? Horizon 5 sold over 3 million units on PS5 almost four years after its initial release. Why wouldn't Xbox want to capitalize on the massive Forza PlayStation fan base on day one? I understand that the game will likely sell millions of units on PS5 anyway, but I just feel like the collective consciousness moves on so quickly it might be best to capitalize on the hype immediately instead of months down the road.

2:06:52To me, timed exclusivity seems to contradict their supposed focus on becoming a dominant third-party publisher. Am I looking at things too simply? Dustin, what do you think of this? Why not bring it day and day? what do you think that do you think it's a motivated by the game simply won't be ready and they don't have the resources to get it ready for ps5 or is there something deeper there may be some element that they're just focusing all their efforts on the xbox version and then the pc version first honestly i don't i don't really know now i know that i don't want to get into the next question too much because sony or sony microsoft has had a bit of a on-off strategy with different ways of how they're releasing their games to PlayStation 5.

2:07:36There's clearly some level of protection where they understand that exclusives are important to their platform. But the way that they're treating their platform, for reasons we're going to get into later in the questions, comments, and concerns, thoughts, and ideas, it's kind of like, I don't even know what they're doing at this point. If they're really after being the largest third-party publisher and they know how much there is to make on PlayStation, then just do it. I don't not sure. I mean, maybe Forza. Maybe the idea is that they released Forza Horizon 5 on PlayStation. PlayStation fans, a lot of them maybe never had a taste of that franchise.

2:08:14And now they're all in. And they're hoping that some of these people that this game will be enough to get them over to an Xbox. But for what,$800? I'm not sure. I think the barrier is too big at this point. I think my personal opinion on this is I think it's maybe deeper on the marketing level is that because Forza Horizon 5 did so well, it will be one of the top 20 selling games, I think, in the States for the year, which is crazy. The game count in 2021. And that's going to be based only on the sales on one console. I think they might have looked at it and said, like, we can just get the marketing pop again.

2:08:53like like why like there's one built-in advantage which like our people like we it's actually a win win situation for us from their perspective where they're like we get our game from our first party studio that's really popular on our platform it looks like it's a timed exclusive it is a timed exclusive that kind of shuts our people up and then and we can focus on making those the best versions they can possibly be and then in six months or a year we'll just release it again and have the best of both worlds spread it through different quarters it makes a little bit of sense to me i don't but i think that you could it's it's chris it's what we always say it's like uh should fair games come to xbox immediately it's like well yeah the trade-off is simple you either get a bigger pop immediately or you get a second pop later you have to decide like what you want um what are your thoughts here on forza horizon 6 potential well not potentially it will not be on ps5 day and date well i i had the same exact kind of thought process as you where i was just like i assume that this is going to be like they're going to get they're going to extract as much value out of the people that they have and actually a lot of people are probably like the price hikes i mean there's no there's no good way to spin the price hikes but there's there's also like the idea of just like oh shit if you but if you bought a series x at launch like suddenly you're technically a pretty good investment you know so you're probably looking at it's like i want to all right this is expensive machine now i want to use this thing you have a lot of people who are already there who you're going to deliver this big ip to and um yeah you get the second pop it forza horizon will deliver you know like i mean i mean these games rarely if ever miss um so there's not really much worry about like it coming out in like a fucked state really in comparison to other games so like yeah i guess my feeling is that they're just they're they know they're going to get that second pop so they might as well just get it um it's kind of how i read it um there's one other inquiry we have here about this sl wrote in said hello sacred crew pardon the second question but i just got through this week's episode i didn't know if you submitted a first question i don't really look at the names until i read the questions so you got one by the goalie i'm not sure i understand colin jesus christ i'm not sure that's my own name i'm not sure i understand colin's confusion regarding xbox's multi-platform release strategy thus far it's been a consistent xbox and pc now ps5 later strategy to date microsoft has released zero new games day and date on both xbox and ps5 god of war reloaded or sorry, Gears of War Reloaded was a 4K update to a game that has been available on Xbox and Game Pass since 2015.

2:11:18Even Indiana Jones, a Disney licensed product, was released on PS5 six months after it was available on Xbox and Game Pass. This doesn't seem like a difficult pattern to figure out and not particularly scrambled either. I imagine when Halo arrives on PS5, it will be either it will be Master Chief Collection or Halo Infinite, after which a new Halo game will arrive on Xbox with a six month to one year lead time on PS5. Where is this confusion coming from, Colin? Thanks. There are no games that are coming day and day from Xbox? what are you talking about the outer wilds 2 is about to be a day and day game doom the dark ages was a day and day game oblivion remastered was a day and day game so I'm a little confused about where your confusion on my confusion actually is indeed I think that they're being quite strange with it they announced Indiana Jones to come out you know six months afterwards but the Indiana Jones DLC comes out at the same time Forza Horizon 5 is a smash hit they announced forza horizon 6 at in japan but then the both the game taking place in japan and they announced the game in japan to an audience that does not and will not play xbox and then you bring it out later i actually think it's quite i don't know what they're doing yeah so no i disagree i think that first of all there are there are examples of them bringing day-to-day games there more to come and i don't know i don't really give a shit about forza so it doesn't really bother me at all but there certainly is an inconsistency.

2:12:40And I think that they're trying to probably figure out internally. I think that they're trying to bend things towards them when they can. And I think games some games are going to make more sense. You see like so Halo is a great example. We'll talk about Halo more deeply later, but if a new Halo comes out and it's announced for PlayStation 5, this gets into the exact question I just posed to Chris, which is like, do you get the bigger pop first or a second pop later? You just have to ask yourself what you want. yeah the playstation halo thing would probably be a good second pop to be perfectly honest with you but because it's not going to need players right it's not going to right hell divers coming to xbox they needed the player base maybe you want to let it drop and then and then inject it and it's gonna be such a such a big deal that you might want you might not want to even you might want to say like it's actually good marketing for us to do it later because it is such a big deal that we can focus entirely on that yeah yeah i don't i don't know this guy says mcc or halo infinite i'm not really sure about either of those i don't think i don't think so i don't think either i think they've already winded down development on halo infinite already they're not going to then build a separate skew and then put it on another platform and then and then be beholden to keeping it updated into deep into the generation like they're just i just don't see that happening and mcc is not laden with micro transactions so there's no way to make money on it outside of the first initial sale and if they were going to put mcc on playstation why wouldn't they have done that for the gears collection it's just it doesn't none of that logic tracks i i think those games are not coming to playstation maybe i think i would probably bet that that's probably the case um or at least not anytime not even remotely anytime soon like i would give it like maybe five years before either of those games even see and more likely the collection but i don't know what xbox is doing really none of it makes sense to me final piece of news this week before we get into what we're playing is just a quick thing to add to the record this comes from euro gamer and i actually didn't see many people reporting on this which i thought was i thought it was an interesting piece of news they write here the title ubisoft and tencent form new subsidiary vantage studios to lead development for the assassin's creed far cry rainbow six franchises quote and they write quote the breakout game development business co-owned by tencent and ubisoft finally has a name vantage studios euro gamer understands from a source that it's starting operations today and will be responsible for new games across many of ubisoft's biggest ip such as far cry rainbow six siege and assassin's creed vantage studios is composed of 2300 employees across multiple ubisoft game development teams including those from montreal all sherbrooke saguenay sofia and barcelona the studio will be run by the duo of christopher duranay and charlie guilmott who is um yves guilmott's brother vantage studios operate under a less centralized model compared to ubisoft proper with each development team having more ownership over its own respective project.

2:15:27This in theory would allow developers to be more fluid and pivot according to industry changes and player expectations per Eurogamer sources. The formation of Vantage Studios comes at the climax of a tumultuous period for Ubisoft, which reportedly was considering this new venture with Tencent in January of this year following years of lacking performance. This new venture, which would bring many of Ubisoft's biggest IP under a new roof, was officially announced in March, with Tencent taking a 1.16 billion euro stake in the new business entity. As for Tencent's involvement, the Chinese company will have a 25 % stake in Vantage Studios and will act in an advisory role to the subsidiary's leadership team.

2:16:01However, Gilmont and Derenay will retain control over both creative and business decisions. Ubisoft hopes that this allows the teams to have a better degree of creative freedom per a source familiar with the subject. Now, this is the big one for me. How other studios, most notably massive entertainment, will operate going forward currently remains unclear. Eurogamer understands the publisher wants its devs to operate in a more decentralized way with developers taking more ownership over the titles they're working on. The company employs approximately 20 ,000 staff and how the other 17 ,000 will fit into this new vision remains to be seen.

2:16:36Of course, we reported on it earlier, I guess it was in the spring and into the summer, that Tencent is increasing, it's drastically increasing its investment into Ubisoft. They've spun out their biggest IP into this new subsidiary that is co-owned, I guess 75 % Ubisoft. 25 % Tencent with some of their most valuable properties. There's not much to say about this other than adding it to the record. Like I said, other than that, that last paragraph is the big question for me too. Where is the value in Ubisoft once you have Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and Rainbow Six and the Clancy stuff out of the wheelhouse?

2:17:09Now you're left with so little. And it is a good question to ask about some of the really respected studios. Like Massive is the is the biggest part of the pun about uh where they might fit so i don't know if there's anything else to say about this i just wanted to throw that out there that this has a name now but it has not been officially announced yet which is probably why most people are not reporting on it but this comes from euro gamer sources they are of course trustworthy and being in europe they would have much decent or much more decent and closely connected sources in say france so okay all right let's get into what we're playing here um i'll go first and just get out of the way quick um i'm playing ghost of tsushima director scott i'm like 25 hours in it's funny how little i remember the game i remember playing it and all you know like what what it is to play at the world whatever but the story yeah well coming back to me as i go some of the different characters and whatever i will say man um the game is visually incredibly fucking dark i don't know what that's all about like it's it on ps5 with hdr and everything it's just like impossible to fucking see the game and you can't at least for me it is and you can't really mess with the brightness you can mess with the brightness but then it just saturates so like when you're outside in night at the night it just looks so bright so you can't really find the right balance and it's annoying me so that's like a frustration but the game's really fun to play great combat really forgot how fun it was to play I will say that a lot of this and Mike and I've been talking about it as I've been playing I'm like man a lot of the PlayStation stuff really is kind of the same when you when you look at it from a structural point of view it's like God of War Horizon Days Gone Spider-Man man it's like it's they're all kind of the same game and i think when i first played this i played it back when it came out in 2020 so it's been five years i don't think i felt that quite as acutely as i do now now where i'm and it makes games not to fillet it too much more but it's like it makes games like uncharted and the last of us just stand out so much because they really are different they play differently they are different they're in different worlds different stakes they're asking you to do different things but in this game it's like clear the enemy encampment like find the collectible and i'm like dude i live for this shit i'm not making fun of it i love far cry right i love my check check mark checkbox games but as i'm playing it i'm like wow this this is aging differently um and i'll be i've seen a lot of people complain about death or death of i was gonna say death strain of ghost of yote saying that it's kind of more of the same and I'm like, well, yeah, it's kind of always been more of the same though, hasn't it?

2:19:56So you're into it or not. But that's kind of what's standing out to me the most is I'm enjoying it. I think the game is fun to play. I think the character and the characterization, the writing, the voice acting is excellent. There are just beautiful moments everywhere in the game, just the visuals, the leaves falling off the trees, the rain, the moonlight. There's so much to really marvel at. But structurally, I'm like, yeah, this is interesting. Like sneak through the... Actually, I've been saying I've been calling it when I've been playing it. I'm like, go into the sony grass the sony grass yeah like oh now you want to be fair even death stranding the last of us on uncharted have sony grass so it's like really like yeah you remove like spider-man from the list and then you put in those games it's just funny i don't know so i feel like i'm always being so harsh and i don't mean to be that way because i am enjoying it and it is a you know objectively a great game it's it's a it's a samey sort of thing it's a ubisoft game it is i remember and i say that in a complimentary way like i remember when i played i was like this is what i this is what i want assassin's creed to be like it's not that i want none of what ubisoft does to you know um be in that game or whatever like it's just that they do it in a way that's annoying and i feel like goes to yote does like or when i go see yote goes to tsushima i haven't played yote yet obviously but i feel like it does a good balance of the ubisoft stuff and it does it well and it plays really well which is what you know more can you ask for really but it is that kind of game so i purchased ghost of yote it's on my cross media bar i'll get to it when i'm done with this one thing i noticed is because i never played the icky island dlc and it's cool the this isn't a spoiler i don't think is that the icky island dlc kind of becomes available halfway through the game maybe even a little less but the thing that bothers me about it is it's a different location you kind of go to it but it's like why make it available so early if the game gives you a stark warning it's like this is very hard you don't want to do this kind of where it's like but why are you making it available right now this is why i don't like dlc man yeah i don't i do appreciate because it reminds me a little bit of you know you know what game did dlc really well was fallout 3 where they would put the things in the map like that it would all just be available there and there would be little triggers that would activate them but it's like just go they just add themselves to the map i like that and that's what they try to do here but because it's kind of gated yeah it's it's it's uh it's jointed bethesda games in general do dlc pretty well from from from my remembrance of them i haven't engaged too deeply with a lot of them to be fair i can't wait for fallout 3 remastered just because or remake or whatever just because i'm gonna go on that mothership zeta dlc so quick oh yeah fuck around the aliens the racist alien shouting the n-word at you it's gonna be in 4k yeah love it and their gun is so strong that gun is so fucking strong that they have that little alien blaster it like trivializes the game almost yeah i just remember i'm sorry no no you go ahead i was gonna say before mothership zeta came out there was just a crashed spaceship that you can find in the in the wasteland and one of the alien bodies had that gun on it and once you found that gun it was like it would kill death in one hit it was awesome it's very cool um all right so yeah that's it for a ghost of shima director scott chris and i did a spoiler cast many years ago on it you can go listen to that i people have asked are you going to do another one because we've we have gone back and revisited games i'm like i don't think anyone else is really playing it so it's not really worth doing and i don't know that i have very much to say about it i think it's really cool um i'm very interested to see how ghost of yote is different and this is why i like playing the games back to back i think i'm getting a lot out of doing this it's so again i started doing it really with spider-man where i was like spider-man one and miles morales right in spider-man two and it's just i understand the game's better and i'm and Death Stranding, 200 hours of Death Stranding between the two games back to back.

2:23:47So I'm enjoying them. It's not for everyone, but I'm enjoying the process. And the thing is, is that I don't think I'll get to Ghost of Yotei probably till next week. And then I have to go to Long Island for a few days. So I'm not sure if I will get to it until the middle of the month, maybe. But we'll see. But I have bought it. I also bought Final Fantasy Tactics. So that's sitting there. But I don't know when I'm going to get to that either. And then the other game I'm playing, there's not much to say about it. I'm still playing Puzzle Quest Immortal Edition on PS5 via the portal. playing it a little bit each night in bed, playing it during some sports, been watching a little baseball, a little this and that.

2:24:17It's just the same thing over and over again. But there's something very fun about it. You're just making your character stronger, but you're still doing all these match three puzzles. I feel like, again, the AI is a little annoying. It just seems to know things it shouldn't know. It bothers the fuck out of me. But I like my repetitive rote sort of things. I think it's really great for football because it's just turn base and it just sits there so like i look up at the screen to see the play and then i look down and i play a little bit and i look up and it just kind of freezes and stays where it is so it's it's quite nice i think plants versus zombies though is an it's an active game it's gonna be a little more difficult that's gonna be another great portal game very very excited for that all right chris let's go to you and then we'll finish with dustin uh says here you're playing bioshock 2 very interesting yeah yeah i kind of i was looking for something to play i kind of wasn't feeling anything i was having one of those days where like i would start something and then I just wouldn't I just I don't know it wouldn't stick with me I think I jumped into like maybe like a couple seconds apparently there's like a new trials game which is funny I haven't thought about it in a while and I still had game class for game pass for a couple hours before I canceled it after that egregious price hike and so I was like I doubled around with in that a little bit it's like it's more trials it's fine and I saw Bioshock 2 just sitting there and I was just like I still haven't I love Bioshock I have a Bioshock tattoo I love Bioshock 1 and Bioshock Infinite I remember I played like the first maybe hour of Bioshock 2 when it was like more when it was newer and I felt like something was off I didn't really like it and then I learned later that like oh Ken Levine wasn't a part of it and and it kind of retroactively like because of that I was like oh that's why and like oh I didn't like it for a good reason and so I just I never got around to it but it's been sitting on my cross media bar forever and i'm just like i should just i really should just at the very least know what this is and give it another shot and so i'm i would say i'm still pretty early into it i gotta say like i think maybe like maybe three hours i think i just had the fight with the the big sister boss um and it's it's interesting it's better than i remember it being and to be to be clear i am playing like the remastered version i don't know what that does from what i remember of the bioshock remasters they weren't they weren't too crazy it was just kind of like light performance stuff like graphical stuff i don't think they i don't think they went in and did any like oblivion level stuff so no it's still pretty much the original game and i like it more now like i'm i'm more okay with the conceit or like with the core premise of the game where you okay you play as like the you play as like the big daddy and that's kind of the entire twist of it that's the entire framing of it i think when i was a kid i just wasn't into it i felt like it lost some of the horror and i think it actually and i think it still does i think i still think bioshock 2 is way less of a hard horror game than the first one is and the first game isn't too hard it it opens as like a real horror game and then it kind of gradually becomes less so this game i feel like kind of starts off and it's immediately not horror it's not comedy or action either it's just kind of like in this weird kind of middle ground um and so i think it's a little off in that way but i am enjoying it more than i thought i would i didn't get deep enough to really see a lot of the mechanics i didn't know that you had to track down like corpses with adam in them by like teaming up with like a little sister and you'd have to you have there'd be like these wave encounters whenever you had to harvest them i think it's i think it's cool and interesting there's the trap rivet gun which i don't i don't normally deal with like guns that set traps in games i usually just go for like you know assault weapons and whatever but like i've been fucking around with that quite a bit i like the drill is weirdly fun to use and so strong that it feels it feels like it feels really mean to use the drill uh like even more so than any other weapon there are things that i miss about the original bioshock for sure like i miss the i miss being a person i i miss the wrench there's something about the wrench that i think is like a real a real staple but i i'm i'm more open to it now i think the writing is actually still very strong um the atmosphere is pretty good i i don't know it's i i'm i'm mixed on it but i'm more positive than i was when i first tried it out i'm gonna i think i'm gonna stick with it i don't imagine that it's very long it's from this era of of games where like they actually developers actually wanted you to finish the fucking game that they put in front of you so i'll probably get through it but uh i'm liking it so far i'm i'm enjoying what this is as like kind of an alternative and as like just spending more time in rapture is nice i think it's that's also the case too it's like i do miss rapture and i think by the time bioshock two came out in comparison to bioshock one i didn't really get a chance to miss it you know know i didn't really i didn't long for more rapture i had gotten such a great full experience out of it just a year or two prior and i was looking for something else and now it's been you know very very long it's been ages since even just the burial at sea dlc for uh bioshock given it which i also loved um so yeah bioshock 2 is pretty good so far i i still feel ultimately that it will be my least favorite of them yeah it's the weakest one there's no doubt about that that's yeah but but not in the way that i thought it would be like i really thought it would be just like this is like slop and it's just kind of like they're just reusing you know the the work that was done in the first game just kind of sprinkling a a poorly thought out story on top of it and there are definitely some story conventions that i feel don't really fit in with bioshock there's some weird i don't want to get too into it because i do think it's i do think these games are generally worth experiencing still to this day um but i think it's it's good it's it's way better written than i thought it would be like character wise like there's some lines of dialogue in in bioshock 2 that really like that's a that's a dope line like and i know that like when the when the person when the writer wrote it i you could tell it's just like oh that felt great i bet to hear in the booth uh for the first time as like a script supervisor or whatever but it's it's quite good but that's really the only thing I'm fucking around with now I have baby steps on my computer right now but I haven't really jumped into it again I played the trial on PlayStation but I think I want to stream it um so I got it on PC I'll have to go through the first hour again so I don't really have anything new that I would really say about it but that's really all I'm engaging with and then me and then probably go see Yote now that I'm not really going to be pulled the way from battlefield i guess so that's that's the plan going forward i think cool appreciate your commitment then dustin it leaves us to you and lame dumb and gay wrote in and said greetings slop enjoyers there was some turmoil amongst the community that you spent a sacred streaming episode on baby steps and i gotta give you the smoke i gotta give you guys the smoke for years now the ss crew mostly calling to be fair has been complaining about the curation on the playstation store with too much low quality stuff getting past the goalie but now you play fucking baby steps one of the most sloppy one of the most sloppiest games who have ever slopped it up come on man do what you want to do with the streams but if you're going to give oxygen and money to the slop you best not complain about it anymore thanks i'll hang up and listen it's interesting way to talk about baby steps i feel like this is a gross misunderstanding yeah i don't understand first of all did was anyone disappointed that we did baby steps second of all sony literally is it's a timed exclusive it's like that has been in like multiple states of play it's not a random product i have played some of the slop games on playstation network when i was streaming years ago just to see what there is and this is i i guess some background too i was looking at this so one of the designers of baby steps is bennett foddy and we talked about him on the stream um he was one of the designers of the game we talked about this recently bvv bvb um and of course he did the qwop game qwop it's kind of was like his main thing but he also worked on ape out um and of course the most famous getting over it with bennett foddy which is a pc game but this is by no means a slop game could you argue that it's a streamer bait game maybe and i think that's what some people were saying in the chat like oh why are they playing the streamer bait game and it's like okay well i don't know enough about streaming to even know that that was a thing but i get it i get it now i understand because it's funny right yeah to see whoever's playing suffer or whatever um i guess the difference is to me at least is a streamer bait game might not be that fun to play on your own but after our stream that very night i went back to baby steps and i have played it consistently every night and i fucking love this game i think this game absolutely rules i am consistently surprised by it i'm consistently laughing out loud at it uh just and it's it's funny too because and you can go check out our stream there's like characters and dialogue and those are like cute and kind of funny the funniest moments of baby steps are through the environment where the game just is basically just saying yeah fuck you uh we're gonna we're gonna put a challenge here that is so stupid and doesn't make sense and i i would say one of them i don't want to give it away though in case you want to play it not everyone's gonna like this game for those who didn't see our stream or maybe you don't know anything about this game uh this game is a literal walking simulator you play as a guy in a onesie who's a big dork uh and you control each foot when you play with a controller the left trigger raises his left foot the right trigger raises the right and you lean him forward with the stick and you can see if you go back and watch our uh stream archive if you're on patreon you can see how initially like i I couldn't even walk in this game.

2:34:33And it was funny, Colin, because we were talking. I was jokingly, of course, being like, man, I'm pretty fucking good at this game. Look at me go. You were impressed. You were everyone would thought so. Keyword were because that night. Sure. I think the first hour. I mean, it makes sense in a game design perspective. The first hour is easing you into it. And there are challenges there for sure. But after that, dude. this game gets so insanely hard game rage. Dustin came back a few times playing this game where it's, it's designed much like, um, getting over it. And there's like that, that, uh, PC game chain together where it's like, if you fall, you are going back a comical degree.

2:35:22Like you may have just wasted the last 30 minutes. That's brutal. If you fuck up, sounds fun. And I, as frustrating as it is at certain points where you're like, oh, I was literally at the very top and made one misstep and then I fell down this giant hole and I have to go all the way back up. Something about this game that's a little bit zen to me at certain points where it's like I get in the flow state. I'm locked in. I think this game is awesome. Now, Chris mentioned this and we talked about on the stream. There is a trial for whatever tier of PlayStation Plus. if you have that i recommend trying the game first because not everyone's gonna like it uh it is insanely difficult it will it will this game will straight up taunt you to your face on numerous occasions and so yeah it's not you might not necessarily like that aspect holly was watching me play it and she's like why do you do this to yourself like what are you doing i was like that's a great question i ask that all the time but particularly right now when i'm playing this game I don't know there are moments in this game I was like fuck this game I hate this game and then you take a break you know pause for a second you take a breath I'm like I'm gonna keep going I'm gonna keep there's something about it that can compels me to keep going I am my PlayStation thing says that I'm 70 or 80 % of the way through the game maybe off off camera whatever I'll tell you about the particular challenge i'm on right now it's so stupid but it's great it's by no means a slop game i understand the connection though but it's a misunderstanding so who who was it uh yeah the lame dumb and gay stand down stand down respectfully stand the slop that we talk about is like sushi flip you know like on the playstation store where there's like this is there's no discernible reason why this should be there at all like baby steps is clearly a real game it's a it's a comedy game which is not too frequent we we i talk about um you know eat lead and death spank and things like that you know it's not a common genre but like i mean benefit is a real guy he knows how to make a compelling it like i love getting over it i love it it's a it's well i hate it but like it's very good you know like i i have 38 hours in getting over it with ben and faddy which is a comical a comical fucking amount i've never beaten it also i i cannot i cannot for the life of me get to the top of that garbage heap but yeah i mean i'm looking forward to playing it i think uh that trial the trial period definitely take advantage of that trial because it is it's definitely not going to be for everybody but i totally like after an hour i was like yeah i do i want more of this and the tone of it is so weird like i don't even know i don't know if i've ever played a game with this tone of comedy in it like even getting over it with bened faddy's like more it's more traditional like it's like it's more you know what the game is and you know what the what the general sense of humor of the game is it's like the idea of just like being philosophically lectured after every failure and like that's supposed to be like irritating but like this game is like there are characters that come up to you and you're just like what the fuck did you what was that interaction even like i feel like i have to watch i feel like i have to watch the cut scenes over and over again to even understand what the fuck it's very sad it's it is i'm looking forward to playing more of it when you stream it maybe you interact it got to this point i don't know what twitch's rules are or youtube's when it comes to video game nudity but you can censor it we had it censored on our stream i turned off the censoring when i played it this game's got dick like lots of dick in it um it's crazy but two two other quick points about it is just first of all one thing that i really appreciate from a game design perspective is that there are certain points in the game where i would get really high up and then fall and you fall like unimaginable heights into a stream that takes you down a river and you're like well i'm never getting back there and i like that the way the game's designed is that like a fall is an opportunity where you may find an entirely different route there is not from what i can tell at most points in the game there's not just one way to go and that's what is cool is like there's clearly a lot of replayability to this game where you can go i was looking back i was really high up and i was looking down and i was like holy shit there's like key markers of stuff that i didn't do that It probably is hilarious and awesome.

2:40:11So that surprised me too. Like when I first played, I was like, it was way more open than I thought it would be. Like, yeah, cause I thought it would be not, maybe linear is not the right word, but like, I guess more, I don't know, more focused, I guess in like a particular direction, like there was a right way to go. And your goal was just not to fall down. And like, if you did, you'd have to get back to the golden path. But I got to a point where I was playing in the, in the trial where I was like, oh i could go i feel like either direction here is going to take me in like an interesting way right and it really is a matter of like making a choice so i do think it's yeah it's it's deceptively deep i think like it's not like you know a full-blown rpg or nothing but like it's it's way more than i think it looks like it is yeah um and i'm excited to dig dig deeper into it the other point um just as from an uh interesting uh industry side is that i was looking at the steam charts this game's all-time player uh peak on steam is 1032 so i wonder i mean it doesn't this is a devolver digital published game i would expect more than that i wonder with sony's marketing maybe it was hopefully selling a lot better on console but not so good unfortunately yeah baby steps check it out it's a pretty cool the other two games of silent hill f i completed over the weekend i did a video about it uh if you want to see like very extensive thoughts really good i really really enjoyed silent hill f a lot more than i thought that i would i think when i i think i had started it and played it last week and i believe i talked about it last week.

2:41:54The combat is probably going to be a sticking point for some people. It's very deliberate, where you have to commit to attacks. The dodge feels kind of weird. I'd say all the combat is very serviceable. It gets annoying and repetitive by the end. My number one recommendation to anyone picking up this game, this is so stupid the way they designed this. At the beginning, when it comes to difficulty, you are presented with story mode, and you are presented with hard mode. And that's it. And for my gamer mind, I see story mode and I'm like, oh, that's baby mode. I don't want to play baby mode, but I also don't necessarily want to play hard mode.

2:42:33I started the game on hard. I probably got through 40 % of it, maybe a little more. I'm not sure, but many hours in hard mode. And it was really fucking hard. I believe that the intent should be that you the first time you play this game is that you play on story and you get a bunch of upgrades, level up your character. and then on your new game plus try hard. So don't waste your time with hard the first time. It sucks though, because story mode is really trivially easy. It would be nice to have a third option in the middle. My last complaint, and this was kind of the core focus of my video, is that this is not a spoiler.

2:43:11There's no story spoilers. So if your spider senses are tingling with what I'm about to say, take it easy. The game is very clearly designed for multiple playthroughs. In a way that I find annoying where the game ends and there are more endings and the game is very is slightly changed throughout, which is cool. But with the combat and I mentioned how it becomes very repetitive when I beat this game, I'm like, I want more of the story, but I don't want to play the game again, even if it is shortened and there is like new elements thrown into it. I'm good. so it felt kind of disrespectful for the game to say hey thanks for beating the game but uh we need you to play this game at least at the very least once preferably and we were talking about this in the staff discord uh three times according to gene and gene and i were going back and forth a little bit about this that he totally disagrees with me and love he really enjoyed the multiple playthroughs i started my second one and i was like i want i want the story i just don't i don't want to do this right now so very annoying and i know that's like kind of standard for the writer of this game ryukishio 7 he's done like a bunch of visual novels that require multiple playthroughs but he does what is overall it's super cool i recommend it it's very silent hill perfect for the spooky season we are now in the last thing quick shout out is to a game that is blowing up on steam right now called mega bonk colin we discussed this lightly on sacred streaming chris i'm sure you've seen this floating around i've seen it floating yeah i don't know what it is really but like i've seen it it's very easy of it mega mega bonk is 3d vampire survivors and that is all it is now that's i mean that makes it sound like there's nothing new here but the game being in 3d is actually really cool your character can jump and your character can slide and so it's all of the like the auto attacking the level ups of vampire survivor the hordes of enemies but there is a verticality element to it and so there's certain power-ups you can get where it's like you do 30 more damage when you're in the air so you're like constantly hopping around uh i think it's early access right now i think it's only like 10 bucks but for for my perspective of playing and platinuming vampire survivors i i still love that game but i feel like i've gotten all i need out of it for now it's been fun to go to a game that scratches that same itch but adds new elements to it not out on console right now but based on the success i would imagine at some point but if you're on pc maybe you got a steam deck i think it runs i would imagine it runs all right on that so check out mega bonk mega bonk it looks it looks cool I've never seen extended gameplay of it I've only like I've only seen like screenshots or like maybe like like really quick like three second snippets and I never I didn't know it was a vampire survivors like at all yeah this is cool yeah not bad so that's it for all we're playing quite a few games that's it all right very well okay let's get into listener inquiries then six questions comments concerns thoughts and ideas from the audience over on patreon.com slash last day media couldn't do without you look for the thread in the news feed each and every week for this show and all the other shows submit your inquiries you've heard them throughout the show and this is six more of a random variety and the first one comes from john mehan who wrote in as many many people did and although it has nothing to do with playstation we will talk about it nonetheless why ignore the people he writes hey guys i am writing in as a long-term xbox fan that was in denial this brand and larger corporation i thought cared about value for the consumer every move they have made recently i would justify price hike for game pass wasn't that bad games on playstation will keep the game pass affordable now i feel like they're trying to squeeze dry the few loyal fans they have left with a handheld costing over a thousand dollars the console being almost twice the price it was at launch and now 30 for ultimate this is the straw that breaks the camels back for me and i'm sure other fans like me time to laverne and shirley myself off a cliff in my warthog yelling this is an Xbox.

2:47:26It's not Laverne and Shirley. It's Velma and Louise. You have the wrong Laverne and Shirley. Laverne and Shirley. Aren't they like a comedy duo or something? Yeah, that was a show. They were like roommates that worked at like a beer factory in Wisconsin. That's an amazing recast, dude. Love that. Time to Laverne and Shirley myself off a cliff in my warthog yelling, this is an Xbox. I love that.

2:47:56one of the one of the one of the seminal uh series finales in um sitcom history so in laverne and shirley careen themselves off of a fucking shlemiel shlemazel that's what they that's what the song was in the beginning of laverne and shirley that's what they're like you know it's funny my only reference to that is wayne's world do they reference it in wayne's world i don't even remember is that i'm i'm pretty sure that's the thing where they do like the bit of the intro and the songs playing. Oh, maybe. I haven't seen Wayne's World in fucking forever. My parents, we were just talking about it.

2:48:30My parents saw Alice Cooper last night. So we were discussing the We're Not Worthy. I was friends with a kid when I was younger that I actually wrote with at GameFAQ. He's a great guy. He loved Alice Cooper. Like, absolutely loved him. Would go see him all the time. He has a really interesting stage show, apparently. So I've never seen him. um dustin what was uh laverne and shirley a spinoff of i have no idea happy days come on oh come on you know what my connection to happy days is oh boy the weezer video oh buddy ollie yeah i used to watch it on uh the windows 98 in my grandma's living room yeah yeah that's a great video great video great album great oh my god fucking awesome album incredible album all right so the big news here as john had written is this and what we'll talk about specifically we talk about whatever we want but um a lot of people wrote in about it so again i wanted to not ignore it game pass prices have been raised dramatically and now the ultimate edition or the ultimate tier which is the top tier where you get day and date games is 30 a month which is crazy that's 360 a year right yeah 360 a year yeah so more than the xbox series s in a year um very interesting topic there's so much to say about it i'm very curious to see what you guys think uh chris let's go to you first how do you feel about this raise and so and and take it all together of course i mean say whatever you want but there's just a lot going on in xbox land right now worth discussing yeah no doubt no doubt about that i think um yeah man i mean i think uh look i get it i understand they've got to make money uh it's i find it to be a little bit too egregious i still think look i still think 30 for what you get with game pass is a good value but now it's no longer good value to have a consistent subscription on you know i feel like i feel like xbox game pass is now and arguably always has been but like now especially is one of those things where it's like all right i'll pop in for one month pop in cancel you know and then just get them ride the month out if it's a busy month or if there's a lot of shit that's available that you want to check out at that point maybe it's worth it right but back-to-back months 30 bucks a month to engage with games that you're probably not really like i mean a lot of people don't really have as much time to play games like we're you know very special case you know it's our job to kind of keep involved in these things um and so like your average person is going to look at that i i would imagine and be like i i'm not getting nearly enough value out of this to spend this much money even if it is technically worth that money it's not there's not enough time to extract that value and so i look at it as like well i'm not you know i don't need this i've been a pretty passive subscriber to game pass for a while even at its like highest price which was like yeah i think it was like 21 or something i i would see it i'd be like yeah i mean that's a lot but like i i play it i play enough on xbox and i i dabble in game pass quite regularly especially like when when they had that that big push of like oblivion and clear clear obscure it's like i felt like i got my money's worth out of that for sure um but now it's like no i'm i'm good i think at this point 360 360 bucks a year for subscription service is just outrageous um in my opinion here are the prices by the way over time in case you're curious game pass launched in 2017 so this is the ultimate subscription launched at$10 and then in 2019 was raised to$15 and then in 23 was raised to$17 and then the 24 raised to$20 and now raised to$30.

2:52:36So that's the trajectory over time. Not unlike other subscriptions raising a price. It's just that they're getting to a much higher cost now. Dustin, I'm curious what your high level thoughts are on this whole situation. it's not surprising that the price of game pass is going up i think we've been saying for a while the price would go up i didn't expect it to be this much at once and to be fair they are adding things to it like i think you get the fortnight crew subscription which i think gets you like the battle pass and some v bucks and so that could be and ubisoft and ubisoft right so they are adding stuff to it but i think most people i don't say they don't care about that but that's not really why they're there they're there for the main catalog and particularly the day one games so there are there is a particular type of xbox user that 30 a month if that is the way that i don't want to say exclusively but that you mostly interface with games and you play all the day one stuff and you want to check out the different things they add to the service and maybe you play fortnight or whatever then that would still be a good value arguably for sure but i don't think that that's most of its users that do that i think they you have game pass and then they also purchase games elsewhere and things like that so it's uh yeah it's it's shocking i really at this point have no idea what they're doing particularly between this and the the price increase of the console it's it almost feels like a white flag and i think that the the writing from john here i totally would understand that if you're like man i've i've been here with xbox this whole time um and now i feel like i'm here and i'm being taken advantage of to some degree uh yeah i i I totally get that.

2:54:34That totally sucks. So it comes back also to me, Colin, something that you've said for a long time. And that's just the idea of a subscription model where if you think about the common subscription model, most people are associated or know about interact with is a movie TV subscription model, something like Netflix. Right. And you think about how much it costs to feed that subscription model. and netflix is still really high if you want the 4k i think it's 25 a month but which is which is a lot it is yeah it's definitely or you get more you get so much more in my opinion as well i mean that's but go ahead but yeah but you think about how much it costs to make these tv shows and movies and yeah it's expensive and the licensing rights is expensive but compared to the price of what it costs to feed a game you know the games on game pass and obviously that's not the only way they're making money they're making hand over fist money by releasing these games on playstation as well for full price but it's just a completely different economic scale that they were working at and it's why it's obvious that they were probably bleeding money initially with game pass i did find it interesting maddie on twitter posted an article where apparently Sarah Bond at Tokyo Game Show, she was being asked about the profitability.

2:56:01Bond responded that in the last fiscal year, Xbox Game Pass took in$5 billion in revenue, saying that, quote, it's a profitable business. And as more creators joined Xbox Game Pass, payments to creators increase. So we think it's a good business decision for creators. I believe that was from Game Watch that did the translation of that, just for proper citation. But so, yeah, it's not a good look to one minute be talking about how we're taking in all this money, five billion dollars, and it's great for everybody. And then immediately raise the price. That's the other thing, too, about this whole situation.

2:56:35I'll end with this is just that the Xbox cannot help not only doing the wrong thing, but doing it in the worst way possible. That video they put out where it was framed like, look how much more you're getting with Game Pass. Look at all these things we're doing. you should I mean it kind of had this feeling of well actually should really be thanking us for all this about yeah your subscription is going to go but look at all this extra stuff don't worry about it and the tagline you kind of got a Chris Chan voice going on there we're working on it we're giving you the best deal download all those games off the internet now unsubscribe to these subscriptions

2:57:25so the tagline for all this change i think is like this is how we game now was that it this is how we play now i think this is how we play now which is just very much like if you don't like it sorry this is how we i know that's not exactly what they mean but that's how it reads to people so yeah just xbox consistently putting their footing their mouth and as i was saying doing the doing a thing that doesn't make any sense and then doing it in the worst way possible maybe not the worst way possible but a really off-putting distasteful way for their consumers yeah that tagline is very funny it just like every time I saw it like when I saw it in the video I immediately thought of and it's probably not the best it's probably not the best invocation but like I immediately thought of the what is it Captain Phillips I think like the guy on the ship where he's like this I am the captain no yeah it's just like alright alright I think there's a lot to say about this yeah First of all, the positive.

2:58:23I actually generally agree that there is value even at$30. However, I think there could even be value at a higher price. It is really all about the nexus of your engagement level and the games that are available. If you're willing to play a lot, which many of us are, and you're pigeonholed into this kind of very specific set of games, which are very high quality games, it's not like there's nothing there. There's a lot of good things there. then have at it i mean it's a great rental service it's a much cheaper on pc it's worth noting so there is that that's why i feel like it's kind of alienating to your core consumers like they're really if i think that we're learning one thing from the pricing of the console to the pricing of game pass to the um incompatible pricing between pc game pass and console game pass with price of the rug ally they're moving people over to pc that's like what they want it's so fucking obvious that that's what they want that it's preposterous to act like that's not what's happening and i get it i think they kind of they want to do hardware but they kind of want out of it they're always kind of wishy-washy with hardware you're in you're out um and i'm not talking about just game consoles i'm talking about you know with a lot of their other initiatives and they're fundamentally not a hardware company at microsoft they don't want to be in the hardware business and so i think that with rare exception they want to be in a software business but i generally agree with you if you're a high high engagement xbox player that loves call of duty and bethesda and exposition 33 and fucking hollow knight and whatever it's like cool that's awesome but i think that that is a permutation of gamer that is not necessarily very common when you put all of the things together.

3:00:11And at$30, you're starting to get to the point where it's like, based on the normal use case of the average gamer, you really should just buy your games. At that price, yeah, you're getting ephemeral access at$30 a month to something that for just twice as much as your monthly stipend, you can just get that one game that you're playing right now and just have it. And over the year, you get six of them for the same price. Now, that doesn't seem like a great value comparable to what you can get for the ephemeral rental access. But think about your own interaction with the games. I think that now that's why it's so important for us.

3:00:46I mean, not to compare us to fucking Game Pass, but the$5 price point is so vital because you don't think about it. It's just an affordable like, OK. Yeah. Kind of price, even at$10. It's like, OK, I get all these podcasts,$10 a month. It's not really that much. I can go buy a fucking subway sandwich and a bag of chips maybe for that maybe but you're getting in the 30 dollars and now it's like hmm this is a notable amount of money this is much much i was saying before i think the average american makes what 24 an hour or something like that between when you divide hours work that salary jobs plus our you know people that work hourly natively it's like that's a lot of money.

3:01:30And you really have to do the value proposition math in a lot more serious of a way. I did say this on Discord to, we were all talking together and I was talking to the Dukes. And I was like, my feeling is that they did some sort of risk analysis where they're like, we're going to lose a lot of people when we do this. But the people that will stay, since we're literally doubling the price, the people that will stay will overwhelm the amount of money that we would have otherwise lost. So we're going to lose probably millions of subscribers. But as long as we don't reach the halfway point of what we were at, we're actually just going to make more money.

3:02:06And I said on Discord, I'm like, they're right. I don't think they're going to get anywhere close to that break point. There are some theories like, will they reverse course and put the price back down or make a more reasonable price of perhaps$24.99? That was the biggest thing to me was I was like, yeah, you get to$30. You might even get above$30 at some point, but you go in increments. I know you kind of want to eat it now and then you have to do it half as much. In other words, you just take the marketing hit and then you just don't worry about the price for a few years. But that might be an error.

3:02:39But there are bigger things to say too. The average player will not get value out of Game Pass at$30 an hour. And the reason we know this is because Ampere analysis tells us that Xbox gamers are already the least engaged and most flighty of all of the gamers in all the different ecosystems. Their data for August shows that PlayStation players played for an average of 12 hours for the month, while Xbox users played for about seven hours. And while PlayStation users engaged with three games over 12 hours, Xbox users engaged with up to five games over seven hours. What this tells me is, is that you're going to have access to choice and that's what they're taking advantage of, which is why they're playing more games.

3:03:19but at some point the rubber hits the road and you're going to be after like, well, what am I really doing? Right. What's what's, this is where I think demos come in. Why steam has such a huge advantage in this respect. It's just almost more worth it for you to be like, all right, I have like, you know, I'm gonna have 15 hours this month to play a game. I'm going to go try a few games out and just see what's out there. It's just, it gets back to my whole theory that Microsoft was right to try Game Pass. I believe that. I would have greenlit it too at the time that they came up with the idea. Bend the arc back towards you, try something new and novel.

3:03:55We just didn't know about people's behavior and perhaps didn't think it all the way through about the ability people engage with games. That access to tons of games is actually not that alluring because it's not the way we really interact with video games. They're not movies. For instance, Mike and I rented, it's finally on VOD, so we rented the Downton Abbey movie. It was 20 bucks. And it was over in two hours. That's it. Yeah. It's done. There's like no going back to it. So it being in some sort of subscription service would have been incredibly valuable to me as opposed to Ghost of Tsushima being in a subscription model where it might take me two months.

3:04:34I mean, not me, but a normal person, months. to get through the game, you should just buy it. And that wasn't so tempting at 10 or$15 where like the math still kind of lined up, but now the math doesn't make any sense. And so again, you have to be mega engaged. And so I think that Dustin's right. Fundamentally, there is value for people like us, but for normal people that are going to drive game pass, it's there's no value there anymore. And I think, I think the bigger thing is this, and this was what I was tweeting out that people were getting a little upset about was like, this thing isn't profitable.

3:05:09I know that that's what they're saying. And I want to be very clear about what I've said in the past, that I do not think they're looking at a holistic picture of all the fungible aspects of the business that are affected by Game Pass. This is the very thing that we saw in the internal emails from the FTC that leaked, where their own people were saying this very thing about how does this affect everything you can't put a number on it particularly but you can financially model around it and the one thing that xbox has that playstation has that nintendo has is incredible amount of data there is no when you bought a nintendo entertainment system in 1989 nintendo really had no fucking idea what you were doing with it the only thing that they could do is say like okay this guy bought a console this many games sold we have this many consoles this is the attach rate we assume people interacted with it like this it got this reviews in magazines they had no fucking idea what anyone was doing that's why they used to include the little cards in your games and have you fill shit out you guys remember that like what's your name and uh what what magazines do you subscribe to yeah shit like that like that was like fill that a single one of those and it's like it's so funny to me it's like now they know everything about you and i just feel like there's something deeply missing about the way that they're measuring the value of game pass comparable to what it has done to its business.

3:06:32And it's disingenuous to present it like that. So again, money in money out on the ledger is no doubt profitable, but that is not the equation. And there is, so there's two things to look at it from this perspective. If they're really being honest, and I think they're being honest in terms of the ledger numbers, but if they're like really being genuine, let's say that game pass is profitable and it's working for us, understand that they just doubled the price on you. Right. On something that they just said was working just fine. Doesn't even make any sense. No. Or what's more likely is, is that they're looking at it and saying like, we are eroding other parts of the business to such a huge degree that we simply must make more money on Game Pass.

3:07:19Like, period. And actually, the virtue of spending more money on Game Pass, this is kind of the catch 22 I've talked about in the past, is like there's probably an idea internally with some of their financial modeling that it's like it's actually behooves us to get people off of Game Pass. And maybe the best way we do that, keep the whales on it that are just going to spend, but everyone else just bounce them back to a la carte sales. That's where we need them to be. because we're not selling games anymore. And you see the percentage breakdowns over and over again. The newest one that came out was Silent Hill F, which I think they were saying was something like less than 10 % of the copies sold of that game were on Xbox.

3:07:57That's really bad and lines up with the numbers for Mafia 4. So I don't want to get too deep into the weeds other than to say if they were being honest, totally genuine about their internal measurements of Game Pass's success, then they literally just doubled the price on you for no reason. Other than, of course, to extract more value. And you don't care about that, right? Because I guess you love corporations. But the other way is probably the more accurate way to look at it, which is that this thing is hurting. And people are like, they make$5 billion a year. I want everyone to keep this in mind.

3:08:34Microsoft owns the following teams. Okay. The Coalition, Compulsion, Double Fine, Halo Studios, In Exile, Mojang, Ninja Theory, Obsidian, Playground, Rare, Turn 10, Undead Labs, World's Edge, Bethesda Game Studios, ZeniMax Online, id, Arcane, Machine Games, Beanox, Demonware, High Moon, Infinity Ward, Raven, Sledgehammer, Treyarch. Do you have any idea how much money they're spending on this shit? On just making games? They have three Call of Duty games in development at one time, each of them at the cost of what, six, seven, 800 million, according to numbers from 2021, 2022, they are spending an enormous amount of money on making games.

3:09:20And they're making good money back. That's why they're selling their games a la carte. But to pretend like there is no consideration to be made about how that is effect. In other words, you can't have the ledger of Game Pass being like, this is what we spend in licensing. The third party games, this is what we get back profit. It's like, no, you have to look at, And this is where the financial modeling comes in. How much how many copies of Doom didn't you sell? How many copies of Call of Duty didn't you sell?

3:09:50And then that needs to be included. In the car, because that cost is therefore subsumed by the people using Game Pass, period. And it's either a thing you get or you don't. I don't know how else to possibly explain that, but that's where I think the problem probably lies for them. and in that they feel like it's actually just a win-win for us squeeze the whales and get everyone else off of game pass yeah yeah basically i think um okay no no you go ahead i was just gonna say the problem with that is just like if you squeeze the whales get them off game pass but those people that are getting off game pass are people like are right in here that are pissed off now and maybe they'll just go buy their games on playstation he's gonna go over and surely himself right yeah he's gonna get a job at a bottling factory but then they'll buy the uh but then they'll buy the game a la carte somewhere else and then they'll get like that's the thing it's like they are kind of in like a weird i've said this for years where it's like they're kind of in like a weird position where it almost behooves them to have fewer people on xbox but like a lot more of like it's almost like you want like it behooves them to sell their games everywhere have uh games available on game pass on their platform make their platform kind of like a niche exclusive kind of club where only like a large subset of people are on but like not the not the not the overall audience is on there so that way they can keep reaping like a subscription service cost from all the people who stay there and sell most of their copies a la carte elsewhere where they'll rake in more money it's like it's it's a weird they've got a weird situation set up but like the um yeah the fact that they raised the price on you should should kind of tell you everything you need to know really uh it reminds it reminds me of like back in um 2017 there were all these uh companies talking about it was like a big thing it was around the super bowl i remember where there was like a big push to talk about like uh the the what is it the pay gap at companies and a lot of companies put out put out ads about how like we we should get rid of the pay gap but like if you're a company making that case, are you kind of admitting that you don't pay men and women equally?

3:12:03Or are you not the type of company that does that? In which case, what are you even talking about? Indeed. It's kind of one of those things where it's like every option confirms the other thing. If they're charging more for you and they're profitable, then they're just greedy. if they're charging more for you because they need it then it's not profitable if it's not profitable then they have to charge you more money it's it's like it's it's a complete cycle there where like there's no real way to spin it without without it coming across as like microsoft is not in a good position this is the thing when i realized this what i'm about to tell you guys which is is understandable but i think a lot of people haven't thought about this it's like oh wow all right so game pass is now 30 for day and date access right so the outer worlds too 70 bucks a la carte right and available on pc available on playstation available on xbox you get game pass on xbox for 30 to play the outer worlds 2 for a month you cancel your subscription because as we were noting you have to be more conscious now with the subscription running it for two or three months it's going to cost you 60 90 bucks it's a lot of money right so you're going to come in and out or so what what benefits microsoft more this is where things i think get interesting you subscribing the game pass for a month is less valuable to them than you buying it on PlayStation.

3:13:20Right. The amount they will make $49 when you buy it on PlayStation. They will make $30 from you for a month of Game Pass, which also has to act as the subsidy for all the other games on Game Pass. It makes no sense. Zero. Zero sense. The only way that this gets fixed, and this is the whole move. I mean, this is the whole play. This is why I think Microsoft understood this and why they were so ambitious with their growth growth numbers is the cost is never going to get decreased it's only going to go up like as far and i'm not saying the cost of the consumers i'm saying the cost to make games but they're like we got to grow once you hit a certain threshold this is what happened with netflix once you hit a certain threshold and you get over that it's like everything's profit because now you're finally paying for the the product and now you have once you so you get 10 million subscribers above that break-even point that's the profit but they are nowhere near that.

3:14:15Remember, I think it was by 2027, right? 100 million subscribers is what they thought they would need to have. They're more than two thirds of the off of that number. And they're going to be way lower now. So that's the stuff where I'm like, this is, there are competing interests that I think that smart people at Microsoft saw ahead of time as seen in emails where they were wondering about the walled garden and the tension that would create in their business and that tension has come to fruition and the reason it's come to fruition is because that game passes adoption has not been good that's why i feel like there would be some level of urgency for them to get game pass on playstation and i've said that for years and again i mean up a spoke version of it just first and second you could mine the fuck out of playstation people for 30 a month and say like here's all of our games xbox's first and second party games like the legacy all of it yeah um and maybe you spread the field that way but don't sit here and tell me i'm not saying you guys are saying this but a lot of people are being like it's profitable.

3:15:10And I'm like, OK, cool. So they just spike the ball on your fucking face. And by the way, should Sony because people like Sony is going to raise the prices of PlayStation Plus like they probably will. The difference is, is that PlayStation Plus is wildly profitable because they don't spend anything because they don't put their own games or virtually anyone else's into it until they're in the back catalog and then they adopt them later. You have to understand the cost of doing business in that in that way are totally different. They're not losing anything. And remember, also, we've said this a million times when they put Forbidden West in the game and the game catalog as an experiment, they predict they lost one hundred million dollars.

3:15:48This is why they know. And they were so confident to say on the standard, you know, Jim Ryan said, like, they're losing. They're not making money on Game Pass. Like he was pretty confident in that. He's like, it just doesn't make any sense. And remember, Bobby Kotick himself. The CEO of Activision before the merger, when he was on the stand, was saying, like, we would never put a game in Game Pass. I thought that was like the funniest part of the whole trial where it's like this whole deal is happening and he's championing this thing. He's like, oh, we would never do that.

3:16:18And then, of course, Strauss Zelnick and others and who liked and responded to my tweet about it. But Sean Layden. When I was like, there's no way they're making money on this, basically, and he was just kind of like a nodding meme. I'll go with those guys. Personally, over like what their instinct is. And of course, they're all talking to each other. I'm not saying Sony and Microsoft. I'm saying people that interact with Microsoft or interact with Sony speak to the other people. It's how they get a lot of information on each other. It's the way it goes. Right. So it's a very interesting situation.

3:16:49But I feel like the one thing I'll say is this, and I say this with all earnestly, and it's not meant to be like an insult or like to put anyone off or whatever. Because I was talking about this with Micah. My own wife is an Xbox gamer where I'm like, if you're not, if you're on Game Pass and you're happy with Game Pass and all that, you have years of happiness ahead of you, right? Not only on the Xbox platform and maybe what comes next, but on PC and so on. If you're an a la carte purchaser of video games, I would think very carefully about what you're doing now because I just feel like you're relying on some sort of accessibility to these games in the future that might not really exist or might only exist through Game Pass or might only exist throughout some other subscription of PC access and access across these different platforms and your saves and whatever.

3:17:39I feel like you, and I'm not saying get a PlayStation or whatever. In fact, I think if you're an Xbox person, you might want to really start looking at PC. I mean, that's my kind of layman outside perspective on it now is like, I don't know, man. If you're buying things just to play them and have them and you don't really worry about it in the future, then just do what you want to do. But if you're looking forward to having this huge back catalog of games that are readily available for you, I don't know. yeah i haven't i feel like i've i've bought like such a hand such a sparse amount of games on on xbox specifically because i'm like i don't know i don't know what the future of this platform really is um and i know it sounds like it sounds like concern trolling it's not that it's literally like no it is literally like i i specifically have not i've specifically thought like do i buy this on xbox and i thought like no why would i do that like why why would i do that given what's happening right now and given like the weird state of everything they don't seem to it seems like they're not really committing to any specific strategy it feels really all over the place and i'm just like i don't want to i don't want to put 70 bucks a pop on this on this thing it's by virtue and i like the machine by the way like i'm a fan of xbox generally but like the machine is cool the machine is very nice i just don't know what you can i just don't know how you can really spin this as as anything other than just like yeah they're clearly like in a weird spot and it's it doesn't feel the most stable from a consumer perspective yeah it's that's a great way of putting it it's readily unstable and i just i'm just telling you like it doesn't seem like it's going to get any better i don't see how it ever gets better from here yeah maybe it stays the same maybe they find some successes but it just feels like it is what it is and i'm very curious to see their strategy to me is fairly clear now about kind of segueing to pc and segwaying to windows and so i'm really curious to see this new machine like what is it really and i'm curious to see it it seemed like this is just anecdotal but just on social media and the comments on stories on forums and whatever people post on youtube and whatever seems like this is really as was noted like the straw that broke the camel's back for a lot of people were and but but to me i'm like i don't know what you kind of expected you would have got i just didn't expect you would get to this point so quickly but you were going to get to a 30 subscription and you're going to go higher than that.

3:19:56Even the Call of Duty middle tier$15 subscription where you get the games like after a year, it explicitly excludes any Call of Duty game. This was another tell to me that one of the downstream effects of having Game Pass is eliminating the small but steady stream of back sales, back catalog sales. It's just had a real effect. And there's no doubt that they're making an enormous amount of money on their games, but they remember they bought into this shit. They bought Activision, they bought Blizzard, they bought Bethesda, like they asked for this anchor around their neck and now they're going to pay for it.

3:20:31And the biggest thing that I see of all is it's so scattershot and weird now that it's so obvious that the people in charge are not of Xbox are not in charge of Xbox anymore, that they're basically following through with orders from the board and from the CEOs in the C-suite. And they're basically stewards. And it really makes me wonder why you didn't just fire everyone and put new people in place that never said the old shit that never felt the old way and believe in the new message because it's obvious that they don't really believe in it i don't know how you can say one thing and then execute on the other other than that you have a fiduciary obligation and a contract probably just to stay in that position but i i find it just weird that they haven't gotten rid of these guys and again i don't want to play flippantly with people's jobs but again we're talking about people that have made many, many, many, many tens of millions of dollars doing what they do.

3:21:19So I don't feel that bad. Is there anything else we want to say about this before we move on? Very interesting thing. PlayStation Plus is so you got to give it to Sony for PlayStation Plus because though they've invested a lot more into it over the years than they used to, it really is a facsimile of the old Xbox Live Gold kind of thing of just having online play and some features and just feeling kind of boutique. And if they were smart, and I don't know how smart they are. Obviously, Michael Packer doesn't think they're very smart. But if they're smart, they won't touch those prices. Just make the value proposition so much more stark.

3:21:58Don't use it as an excuse to raise your own prices when I know for a fact you don't need to raise those prices because you are making, as you say over and over again, enormous amounts of money on your subscription because you don't spend any money on it. That's the difference. they don't have they're not saying like go see yote on playstation plus they would never do that because it costs them probably 200 million dollars and you can't make it back so that's the difference but we'll see sony has made foolish there's also no real the funny thing about subscription services is that they're not they have nothing to do with if you want to even blade trade policy or tariffs it's like no that's not the thing like you're you're really just trying to extract more value out of it and so either way you go you're kind of fucked in terms of your explanation for the situation but buy your games even if you have to wait to play them there's something comforting about having a back catalog of games even though i don't really ever go into it.

3:23:01It's there. And my suspicion is it's going to be there for decades on PlayStation. But maybe I'm wrong. We'll see what happens. Micah still buys all of her games physical. So she got the physical Switch 1 version of Final Fantasy Tactics. There's no Switch 2 version. Yeah, that's what she was saying. Yeah. Kind of weird. Freehead is weird. It's an old game, though. It should be fine. You would think you would just sell both SKUs just because you could. Yeah. Yeah, I don't really understand, but it's nice that it's free at least. That's the number one bestselling game on Switch right now, apparently.

3:23:38Yeah. On the e-store, which is. Holly's playing it maybe even literally right now. Awesome. On Switch. Time all time age run. She was having difficulty with it last night. It's a hard game. She overcame. It's a hard game. It's a fun game to spoof. Like it really you can fuck with it so deeply that if you just take the time, you can make super characters in it. It's awesome. It's so fun. Yeah. All right. I promised we would get to this topic earlier, and here we are. Cody Young wrote in and said, Hey, Sacred Sodality. What does that mean? No idea. Halo Studios announced that they would share more about their next project later this month.

3:24:11I would be curious to hear your opinions on what that might be and what it can mean for PlayStation. Am I the only one wary of yet another Halo reboot as seems to be the rumor? Halo's 4, 5, and Infinite were all resets to one degree or another. Would it be so horrible for Halo Studios to simply continue one game story into a sequel? I have no learned information on this, Chris. We of course go to you for this. What are your thoughts? So to be clear, they've noted that in October, they're going to show the next game, right? Yeah. Yeah. That's they, they say they're going to be showing something, which a lot of people are taking to mean they're going to be showing the next game.

3:24:45I think I'm going to go to this thing. I think I, is it in LA? No, it's in Seattle. But like some friends, some friends of mine have reached out to me saying like, Hey, I got, there's room free if you want to go. And I'm thinking about it. maybe the issue is like i have a wedding that week in new york so i'd have to go to new york and then fly from from new york to seattle and then from seattle home so it's kind of it's a lot of traveling i don't know if i necessarily want to do that but it could be interesting i don't know i um my assumption is that this is going to be combat evolved remake um there's a lot of leaks around this from people that i kind of trust uh that suggests it's going to be um a big a big rework uh big level design changes happening presumably unreal engine operating over the original kind of or whatever they have working as the original halo engine so basically the halo the bones of the halo engine originally i think it was called blam to uh handle the uh the way it feels and then unreal handling everything the way it looks is similar to i guess you know um a lot of recent unreal engine remakes i think i think metal gear is the same although maybe not but i know for sure oblivion is where they have um creation engine handling all the you know the underlying things in unreal over it i don't know man i i want to be clear because i get this i get this a lot where a lot of people think i'm too hard on modern halo games or like the more recent halo games because uh they don't um i don't know like i think a lot of studios would if they if a lot of studios put out the games that 343 put out they would be in a pretty good spot you know what i mean like they make good video games halo 5 is a good video game halo 4 is a is a pretty good video game halo infinite's a great video game but i think following you know what that original trilogy was and what it meant i think in comparison it's far worse or or far more compromised or far shakier than it should be given the layup that a lot of people felt was just in front of them by just continuing and so i want to clarify that like they're good games it's just like they miss the mark a lot they've misstepped quite often to the point where like i don't know i don't know if i care what they do with halo now it's like i'm good like i had i had a great run with it the it's never going to be what it was like you can't recapture that that entire generation like 2000 to 2010 like there's a lot of things about that generation that will never be the same way they were again bioshock this new bioshock i'm sure whatever it is it's going to be good it has no shot of being as transcendent of a game as the original bioshock was i mean you could even see that with bioshock 2 and and infinite like i like infinite in some ways more than the original bioshock but like the original bioshock has an impact that like dwarfs infinite i think and a lot of other things like it was a special time a special point in you know the development of the the internet the development of social media it was like it was a very particular time that led these games to being as seminal as they are and I don't expect them to be I don't necessarily need them to be but because of that I'm just kind of like I'm over it like I don't know like they they could do something really cool and maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised maybe I'll check it out I'm sure I'll be curious but there's not a lot riding on this for me so I'm I'm only kind of at an arm's length away from being interested in a lot of this stuff and I'm gonna probably keep my distance I don't know if I trust the studio to handle things well i don't know if i even want a reboot to this degree like comet evolved i guess needs it the most because it is the most dated and it is the one that like even the developers are like why did we make this level this way this is so repetitive like there's a there's a famous commentary track that you can listen to of the developers playing through the the original comet evolved and i'm just making fun of each other because they're like why did we make this so repetitive like why did we make this level so tall and why why is this account like why is this encounter happening over and over again there's a famous clip from like you can look it up on the halo ce director's commentary the library if you want to look it up it's just it's just the developers themselves being like this sucks and so you could make an argument that maybe this next this this will be cool and maybe they can realize a lot of the stuff that was cut from the original game like having wildlife and and maybe expanding on some of the level design a little bit more it could be cool but i don't know i'm just uh i'm curious but not enthralled at the idea of the next proper halo game being combat evolved again even if it is a major rework and and really from the ground up i just there's rumors that they're putting sprint in there which is like already like a whole like all right i don't know why doom is so confident that they don't need it but like whatever that's a whole that i could i could spend hours talking about that but i'll leave it there do you want to add anything dustin there was an insider gaming article that was just posted i think while we were recording uh it says halo ce remake is in co-development by virtuos studio so that would make sense if they are doing something of the old game engine being layered on uh hopefully it doesn't run like shit like the last two virtuose games that were released this year yeah and i just do the thing about the sprint that's the thing where if you try to remake halo with modern graphics cool but if you're using the underlying code and then adding sprint that's what's confusing to me i don't know what they're because from what i've heard about it it's like it's a major rework they're still so they're building the game from the ground up still but they're using the original engine base or the original engine base for halo to make it feel right but they're not but they're not using the combat evolved and so it's not like it's from what i've heard it's it's not um like like, Comet of All the Anniversary, which was literally, you know, the original game with, like, a new coat of paint running over it.

3:31:21This is apparently, like, I would imagine, like, a complete rework of the original game from stem to stern using the most modern version of whatever the Halo engine is at this point. And then on top of that, you know, using Unreal to handle fidelity. That's my understanding, which is weird. That's not something that's too common like oblivion and metal gear i believe are just the original metal gear i'm less less sure of i don't really know what do you know anything about that con like whether or not that that's the original base and they just kind of layered visuals over it or did they actually like but i i don't it plays so it is so unchanged from the original that my assumption is that they put everything over it but i i never heard i never really read much or listened to much about the making of that game yeah if somebody in the comments can can let us know but like i i know i know a rework to the degree that they're talking about or that i'm hearing about for this game is not is not a common practice um although i would imagine it will soon be a little bit more common like this this unreal engine over another engine thing is happening a lot more often now for whatever reason like this used to be fairly unheard of um so we'll we'll we'll see i i don't know the sprint thing is a whole game design philosophy conversation too like that's that's a whole nother thing but i don't know i'm not excited about this i'm curious about it i'm really eager to see like how they're going to justify this because from the perspective of a halo fan like we've had so many versions of combat evolved already at this point like we've had the original one we had the the hd re-release on xbox live arcade we had the anniversary version in 2011 which was 343s i believe their first proper project before they actually like went up and put out their original game with the fourth one and then we had the you know comet of all the anniversary as a part of the the collection so this feels like skyrim except i just like oh we're putting out skyrim again except halo combat evolve to me is like the least it's kind of the worst one and i say that with affection you know it's like of the bungee games it's easily the worst one like from from a play style from level design it's not to say it's a shit game but it's it's very clearly dated and maybe it could benefit the most from like this kind of overhaul i just i don't know what to make of this and the biggest question that i have about it is like whether or not this is going to be the big splash for coming on the playstation like and in what way because Because I really don't believe they're going to put the MCC on PlayStation.

3:34:01I don't believe it. I think if they were going to do that, I think we would have seen them do something similar with the Gears collection. And because they're not doing the Gears collection, that leads me to believe that they look at the Master Chief Collection as too much value to give away at once. That's what that says to me. It's like, we learned from the Master Chief Collection that a lot of people will pay for this, but we could make way more money selling these a la carte. and the way you can do that technically with the mcc but it's not as elegant i think they want to just if they were ever going to do that they would just do you know them a la carte and maybe this is the first step of them doing that maybe they'll do combat of all that this remake or whatever and that'll be the first game and then they'll start hey there's going to be a halo 2 now although god help you with that one god help you uh reworking halo 2 and halo 3 in a way that people will be happy about those are damn near perfect games i don't know how you i don't know how you would even touch it's like metal gear solid three where it's like you want to touch that as little as possible um so i don't know they've got they've got a task ahead of them and i don't i really don't know how they're going to pull it off i i'm as big of a halo guy as you could possibly get probably and i feel very little to nothing about seeing this outside of morbid curiosity and seeing like whether or not it'll look fucked or whether or not it'll look okay i don't know i think it's weird i think the thing with mcc that's so interesting is it's just old like i think at this point it's come and gone like you can almost just make make an excuse of being like we can just do more to these games now again and maybe and but i agree with you that just the a la carte kind of functioning of these sales i think would just make more sense especially extracting value out of off platform people um i would want to nickel and dime playstation people as much as humanly possible i just i i agree with you i'll be curious to see what they do with halo as far as if it will be day and day and again we talked about it earlier when i was foreshadowing this topic on do you get the pop earlier do you get the pop secondarily depending on the choices you make um but this gets into but my big thing and that's why i was disappointed with them like when they renamed it you know 343 or they had 343 and then they renamed it halo and kind of same thing with the coalition where it's like you're just pigeonholing these studios and the big thing that i would love to see is like what if you um moved on made something else make up a new series like make this new like we're gonna spend hundreds of millions of dollars on something crazy triple a whatever and i understand that yeah i just want to reiterate that outside of Gran Turismo, I believe that Sony's major advantage, one of their major advantages has been their willingness to move on or at least to let things breathe.

3:36:49And without that, you'll never know what could lie beyond the series because you've never given them a chance to even do anything. And that's kind of a shame. I think Halo is really cool. I love the Halo trilogy. I think Halo is dope, but you can feel them trying. You can feel like in the games that they've made, like Halo 5 in particular feels so little like a Halo game, but it's really cool like from like the way it plays is like it's really neat it's but it's something else and you can feel them trying to do something else within the framework of that of that ip which is i don't know i feel two ways about it i think it's not that bad of an idea to have like because i do think halo is is like a mario type thing where like i do think they do it so differently where even halo infinite i i still to this day that's a it's a really good game and it plays very very particularly like there's not another first person shooter that plays quite like that game like there's not a lot of games that have vehicle combat and an emphasis on physics engines and like and like it's very unique and i think i think you do it would be wise to kind of create a studio that like this is our specialty and a lot of people are going to get into game development potentially because they like this series and they want to make their mark on it and maybe it would be cool to have like just a place where like listen if you want to work on halo like we've got a studio for that it's almost like how like um you know you have studios like gorilla right where they they worked on kill zone for a while and then like imagine kill zone 3 comes out and then you're like damn i love this studio i want to make first person shooters and then you join gorilla and then they make horizon you know what i mean like that's probably got to be some kind of disappointment or that's got like to some people and there's definitely going to be turnover for when that happens so maybe it is wise to have like a thing that's like dedicated to a particular thing to draw people in draw talent and to know like this is what we're making we're not going to do some crazy switch up um and to the degree that we will do crazy switch up they'll be within the realm of like this thing that is very clearly what you want to work on the issue is that that's not really how the industry works uh specifically with microsoft who relies heavily on contract heavily heavily heavily on contract work it's insane like i was getting leaks of like the halo infinite campaign years before the game came out because like i just knew people who were contracted to work on it and they got and they got booted and then they're like well fuck this there's no there's no loyalty yeah they would basically turn people over like when they had to hire them they would just release them right like there was a certain time they can use them as contractors i knew a lot of animators who would just send me like hey this this vehicle is going to be in the game just so you know they just let me go so like fuck it and it's like there's no love there and so you can't really you can't build a studio built around like i really want to work on this thing when all the people who want to work on this thing who are excited about working on this thing you just kick them to the curb because you rely so heavily on contract work so i mean that's a deeper industry problem but yeah i i don't know man it's it's a weird it's a weird thing i love halo i i think the the core i think as a multiplayer game it should probably continue i think um there's a lot there that i think could be done well into the future that could be really cool but i don't know narratively like i don't know what the fuck they're doing i don't know if i really care that much and we'll we'll see i saw rumors i i should address this too because i saw some speculation that some people might care uh i think there was some tweet about like they tweet out a picture of a comet or uh as like a teaser and a lot of people were saying like oh that looks like the first shot of halo 3 i think so there's like oh halo 3 anniversary which that could be cool but i think it's more likely like I looked into it.

3:40:21It's like that comment. That comment was, I think, the last spotted in November of 2001. Oh, okay. Interesting. Which would be Combat Evolved. Everything seems to be looking like that. Yeah, why would you skip ahead? I would just go back to the original one. Just take your time. Take your time. I don't know, man. I feel like they've got a hell of a... If they thought it was hard making their own games from scratch, like good luck to you making halo 2 better than it was or making halo 3 better than it was i i don't i wouldn't wish that on fucking anybody we'll see what happens cody yep appreciate your inquiry this goes into what i move these around in our document because this kind of speaks into what i was talking about steve wrote in said hey cdc when it comes to future games from your favorite studios do you prefer direct sequels such as the last of us one and two to spiritual spiritual successors i'll allow return to saros or completely new types of games such as intergalactic from Naughty Dog.

3:41:22Appreciate all you do and hope you continue to rizm with the tism. I will. Thank you. This is really all highly dependent on the game, the nature of the game in the studio. I feel like some games beg for a sequel before you even play them. You know, that's going to be a trilogy or some sort of series. I think some games can stand alone. I actually think Ghost of Tsushima is one of those games where it's like we're getting a new ghost game. It's awesome. It's out. But this is, and they're not connected to each other, but it's like, this could have actually been a one-off game. Then you see games like Days Gone, I think, where it's like, you could have gotten a sequel off the ground.

3:41:56You made bad decisions. The window is shut. You move on to something else. I think the beauty of where we're at now though, and why I'm so optimistic about the future of Uncharted, ultimately the last of us, God of War, is that there's just so much time between games now where nothing really feels like it's it's rung out to dry like in the time and in the time it will take you know a new uncharted game to be made naughty dog made the uncharted trilogy so we're talking about just different timing and these things came out so quickly it almost felt like an anthology that you were waiting for like the star wars movies coming to theaters and you knew and you anticipated but now i feel like a series like god of war halo or whatever could conceivably actually live forever simply based on the fact that they can't get many of them out um yeah so it really all depends for me uh i don't really have a i i want i want studios to be able to explore sequels for sure because i think it's so advantageous to them to be able to do that they have all these ideas it's what you were saying about the walkthrough of halo with the creators where it's like yeah you know what you did you've made so many mistakes you understand what your series is and then you can iterate on it it's why everyone loves uncharted 2 it's yeah because uncharted 2 could i mean obviously literally uncharted 2 can never exist without uncharted 1 but literally you know also figuratively it's like so many questions are answered now you can just make a fucking awesome game yeah you know your tool sets better you know like um you know what works and what doesn't work better the sequels are just normally just like where you hit your stride i think and so i think there's there's value there the argument you could make though is that like games take so long that the game games take so long to build now that ultimately by the time that a sequel would have come out would be the time where you're ironing out the first game already you know because the development cycles are so crazy um so you you maybe do get the same amount of learning it's just like you don't see it like maybe you don't see version one of god of war where like they did make all the mistakes and they put it out maybe now that that that version just kind of dies internally and then you just maybe so maybe it still happens i don't know um i like a spiritual successor though i i like me i like me some uh i like the spiritual sequel i'd say it's why it's what got me into bungee so so like i think bungee did it so well where they were just like okay like marathon marathon is very clear like the original marathon is very clearly like oh that leads into halo and then halo leads into destiny and then you know you're seeing marathon again um and it's all built on kind of the same it rhymes it's like poetry it rhymes marathon is the key to all this literally but uh yeah i don't know i i think it it's case by case there's some games that i wish got sequels um that never got them and then there are games that got sequels that really i think like mirror's edge is a great example where like i i thought i loved mirror's edge like when i first played mirrors that i was like i can't believe how cool this is and like how fluid it is and how how great that game looked at the time yeah it's sterility i always said it looked like the perfect fascist representation like it was so clean yeah and monocolored and so it was beautiful beautiful game i wanted to i i loved it i just wanted to spend so much time in that space and um and then when catalyst came out i think they just kind of like they just missed the mark in like pretty much every way and it's just like that's a bummer dude like that's always the saddest thing it's like when when you could see how something can be improved and then it just gets worse granted it had been a while like i think that game came out like what like eight years after or something i can't remember if it was like a beleaguered sequel that was being worked on for a long time or no i think it was like something they greenlit later and then yeah no one really cared and then you see people kind of bringing it up and being like dude there was a sequel you know like yeah there was a sequel it just um i know i played mirror's edge i wasn't super into it i'm not huge in the 3d platforming but the one thing i will always remember about playing it for you know five hours wherever i played was it was i could feel the oppression of the society that they were in just by looking at the game it was a very it felt like a police state like just looking at it was really cool and it was so simplistic in its delivery but it might have just been a different time for me in my life where i was just like i don't want to play this and i go back to it now and i probably love it but at the time i was just like it's cool it's got a it's got a portal quality to it not exactly in like the way it plays or anything it's just like there's it's like a very quick experience it's very like singularly focused on like a particular type of game design and it's just very strong it's got that clean look about it actually Portal is a pretty good analogous kind of thing to point to as far as like clean sterility yeah and there's other games too like Prototype was another example where I feel like they could have done more with a sequel to Prototype I feel like they could have done more with like Destroyer, there's a lot of games that I feel like a lot of games get their first go and they're good and the second go makes it great and you know halo is a great example uh not uh uncharted is a great example um but i'm always sad about the missed opportunities the ones that could have been it's like oh damn just more money and more time into this could have been so sick or just like a better vision or like a different direction squandered potential makes me sad i'm so excited for the return of uncharted one day we'll see one day unless they just made that shit up in that in that commercial yeah it's just it's so weird like i don't know why more people are not into like what that was all about but anyway um richard wrote in said hey cdc just wondering if you saw the sony magic the gathering secret layer crossover dropping october 27th i know you guys don't play but any interest in getting the cards as collectibles the art and unique abilities that pay homage to the games have me super excited to add some of these to my collection and build commander decks based around them.

3:48:13Nathan Drake and Aloy in particular. I look forward to your reaction. I'll do something depraved and listen. So here's a link I put in the chat. I was going to put this in the news, but it just didn't feel like that newsworthy. But then someone wrote in about it and I'm like, okay, well, we should definitely talk about it because I think the art is kind of cool. Magic the Gathering, obviously the long running decades long card based game that I actually played in the mid 90s, late 90s a little bit. So it's a game I'm somewhat familiar with announced that they are going to that they have a PlayStation collaboration coming up.

3:48:42And you can get the cards October 27th at 9 a.m. Pacific time. So that's noon Eastern time at magicsecretlayer.com. This is, of course, officially from Wizards of the Coast. It seems like, boys, there's going to be five Last of Us Part 1 cards, five Last of Us Part 2 cards, five God of War Greek cards, four God of War Norse cards, five Uncharted cards, five Horizon cards, and five Ghost of Tsushima cards. And they've only shown fewer than half of them. so like only two of the five last of us um for each of the games is available so there's gonna be a much more but these are pretty cool and i like how they split them up from the greek and norse mythologies as well for god of war it's a great licensing opportunity sony's always been pretty open to doing cool licenses and this seems like an especially cool license i am curious there are two things about magic that i think are fascinating and just card games based basically generally right now there's something about it where people just buy them because they're valuable and that's cool and i get it but i assume people are still playing the game as well and they make the high-res versions of the cards these aren't the high-res versions but they make them so available readily available and if you just care about playing you might these must get pirated like no like nobody's business like if in other words if you don't give a shit about having the real card but you can just get some bootleg card with the the pertinent information about how to play the card in the game i imagine that's fairly that's the thing that must happen out there in the world of magic, but I don't know.

3:50:08The cards look cool, like the art. Joel, Resolute Survivor. Whenever a creature token dies, put a plus one counter on Joel and draw a card. This ability triggers only once each turn. I don't know, man. Ellie, Vengeful Hunter. Pay two life, sacrifice another character. Ellie deals two damage to target player and gains Indestructible until end of turn. nerd shit yeah dustin what are your thoughts here if i'm gonna waste money it's gonna be on one piece cards these look cool though they do they do look cool listen my one piece cards are investment i'm looking at there's an app called collector it refers to it as your portfolio this nami card here portfolio that i pulled 186 bucks wow uh am i still deeply in the red on one piece cards yes absolutely but that's not why you bought them right or did you buy them for some sort of investment no that's what i was saying i feel like it's sad that people don't buy them just have fun with them yeah i like to know like if i pull a card that looks cool i'm like i wonder is this worth something and so i'm just curious because it kind of feels good if you pull a card and you're like oh this card is definitely worth 20 cents more than the value of the pack i'm up big boys you know definitely uh but i'm not i've never sold a one piece card or anything like that magic the gathering they've kind of become the fortnight of trading cards where there is like every i think there's like spongebob magic the gathering cards there are spongebob uh spider-man do they all play together do all the cards play together in the same rules i assume so you can have like a i think so i think so yeah so i mean these are not cheap.

3:51:53I mean, they're not horrible price. Like if you get the Last of Us Part 1, if you get the set of five, the non-foil,$40. It's preposterous. Rainbow foil,$50. It's totally preposterous. I have to give them credit, though. This is such a high-margin business that it's almost comical. Oh, yeah. You're obviously paying for high-quality art. The license fee is obviously going to be pretty significant. But even think about their own cards. They don't have to pay licensing on anything. It's like, this is a joke. It's really interesting. to think about that there's no there's no good there's no did you see by the way the warhammer apparently all the warhammer schematics leaked for a few hours so so like people got the ability to like 3d print basically anything they want like the actual models not like the bootleg ones so fucking crazy here's the thing i'm a true card degenerate which i'm kind of backing out of because I've just started to lose the thrill of the hunt.

3:52:50But it's like, oh, actually, you would be better off buying individual cards. This is good. And just buy these cards. No, you got to rip. You got to rip packs. That seems to be the fun. That is the fun part. It's gambling. It is just gambling. Yeah, sure. Gambling. I collected hockey cards when I was in elementary school, middle school for probably five years or so. And that was fun. You go and you don't know what you're going to get. Yeah. You know, you just. cat i'll walk into target i've been good recently i'll buy one pack maybe two but still that's like eight or nine dollars and then i get home i open them it's all shit and i'm like well i am retarded and i will do it again you know what i mean where it's like man i could have bought like a quality indie game for ten dollars could have bought a meal for ten dollars but instead i have you know this collection of paper that I don't care about.

3:53:46Good job, Dustin. Appreciate it. But that's the thrill of the rip, dude. Yeah, I totally get it. Cause I played magic when I was younger and I also played the Star Wars customizable card game when I was younger in the nineties and it was, it was exciting. It was expensive, but I played the game. So it was cool. I mean, it wasn't cool. It was definitely not cool playing magic in like 1996. I'll tell you that we've talked about it in the past. Have you guys ever seen the video from the magic to get the first magic tournament ever in 1994 dude it's i gotta send it to you it's so good it's like proto nerd shit like no one really knew what like what magic really was yet at this point it's so good it was in new york city i think and someone just took a camcorder around for like a long time and it's uh it's such a blast i love that kind of shit blast from the past that's funny it's nostalgic and i never um i don't know i never got into it i never got into any of this stuff i have like a deep i i think i have some resentment also with how big card games have gotten over because i now i like it used to exist on like the fringes of like nerddom like you'd see it every now and again but like people like now it's like i go to a party like a proper la party with like and there's people playing magic and i'm like what the what is what is happening here why aren't you doing coke like they get used the card to get the coke together and then i think honestly i just i think it's it might be like an adhd thing but like i cannot focus on the rules that i have to know to play card games like i can't do it like i just i get it it breaks i would rather if i'm going to spend time also also the thing is too like if i'm going to spend time hanging out with people in in like in like a group setting i would rather just kind of like shoot the shit and like just crack like joke or like i don't know like i'm not really like in it like let's play a board game i'm like okay oh there's nothing worse you're like two or three beers in and that one guy at the party's like oh i got this board game yeah like i don't i don't like cards against humanity oh my god i hate cards already cards against humanity was exactly fun for like a year like i remember seeing i i get it haha you know oh rush limbaugh's shitty body yes funny i like that it's written on a card that they printed out very cool significantly less funny seven years later and it's the same card again right and it's like the idea of a comedy the idea of a comedy based game where like all of the suggestions are pre-written is so insane to me because that can't work.

3:56:24It's a chance for Jackbox is way better. Like, although even that, like, you know, people always default to come, you know, or like, you know, naturally, naturally, everything comes back. Everything's comes back to come, I guess. All right, well, we'll leave the magic discussion there, but those are available October 27th. If you want to waste an enormous amount of money on them. And by the way, I love seeing the videos of people fighting and arguing over pokemon cards especially that's one of my favorite things grown grown adults really sad shit i collected pokemon cards for the first 150 i have somewhere in a binder which is frustrating because i just i don't even know where you were collecting them you weren't a 45 year old man scalping them no yeah joy of children who want to go there with their parents to get like a pack of cards so fucking pathetic i want to say that i got that i would get my i would get my cards at the sports authority or um or sports it was like something like that it was in yonkers it was like a sports store but they had probably was i mean they probably did have shit like that just to make a little extra cash and my dad would take me to go buy like a new glove and then i'd be like can i get a pokemon card maybe like sure nerd nerd sure but i remember i collected them and i never played like the card game though like i was playing the video games because there was like way that was way cooler to me um but i never people would be like you want to play with the cards i'm like no why would i ever and i that was before i even had any inkling of like that they could be worth anything like i was not thinking about they even like that breaks my heart kind of because you know that they're like nine-year-old kids who are thinking about like what's the best investment yeah like you know for sure you have this on slab what's the what's the psa rating you want to see my portfolio i can't even imagine using the word using the word portfolio in in in relation to investments as a nine-year-old that is like completely alien to me the one one wrote in and said hello cdc question all especially to chris is destiny 2 dead if you haven't been keeping up with the news of destiny it's not looking good mixed to low ratings for the newest expansion lowest player count of all time their portal system which makes 90 of the game useless content creators leaving the game for good feels like destiny Tuesdays are numbered the only thing that can save the franchise might have been destiny 3 but we all know that is not going to happen anytime soon if ever I shut up and listen while I jump off a tower and not be revived it's interesting yeah so this is an interesting conversation particularly now because as I understand it there's a new destiny game out called yes destiny rising that's a which is a it's a mobile one but you can play it on pc I i think i don't know if i don't know if it's like you can find ways to play it on pc as far as i know i don't know if it's like a legal thing fully but um i don't think you're i don't think you're gonna get in trouble for doing it you know it's kind of one of those soft things it's like it's like jaywalking we're like they're not gonna bother you but as far as i understand it people are really liking it like apparently it's very good um there's a lot of destiny streamers who have gotten really into it and they're surprised at how good it is there's features in that game that are sorely missing from core destiny 2 um that people have been championing i remember i saw one clip of um a player who was like dual wielding something and i remember being like dude they got dual wielding in a fucking mobile destiny game before they got it in like the official that's crazy so i don't know what to make of destiny right now it seems like they're kind of they're in it seems like they're in the worst place they could possibly be while also simultaneously having this like weird resurgence in a way that i didn't think was really possible for them because destiny rising is like huge like people are really like like it's a i see it all the time um and it's uh people are talking about it i i don't know i'm personally of the opinion that like destiny 2 has been around for what 2017 now so it's been around for quite a while there's only so much time you can sink into a game like that before you're just kind of like all right i've i've done this you know like i get it and it plays really well like i still think destiny 2 plays like immaculately well like it's every time i jump onto it and play it i'm never like oh this sucks i'm always like oh i remember why i like this but at the same time there's a lot of other things to play now there's a lot of your attention is being diverted elsewhere even within the realm of destiny content if you want new destiny content there's a fucking completely new mobile game with completely new mechanics a bunch of features that have that you've been asking for that are now in this version of the game i would imagine that destiny 2 might definitely be be waning and it might definitely be on on the path to like yeah we're this is it's kind of over um but i actually don't think destiny as an ip is in like a bad spot i think i think it's shifting over right now to this new thing that everybody's kind of excited about or that everybody's kind of surprised by um that is very accessible because it's a mobile game um and i think that might be the future of it until like you know maybe maybe marathon comes out and it flops and then maybe i wonder what you do at that point because you do own an ip here that is valuable in some way and you do have a studio that knows how to make it do you like what do you do do you shut bungee down entirely do you then like okay this isn't working but we have this ip we know you know how to steward it we know that you're being held back by the fact that this game is also on ps4 maybe completely restart this thing make a destiny 3 build it off a destiny rising have it so it's like more maybe not future-proof but like you know more modern as far as like it's running off off ssd it's not it's not held back in any way and maybe you get something out of that maybe maybe you give some time for people to miss destiny on console before you come back with it in a way that people can be like really excited about in a way that actually feels like a genuine jump in technology and capability get all these missing features that are in rising into this new uh new game like maybe that's something you do i don't really know it but i'm kind of of the opinion that like i haven't i haven't played destiny in quite a while um i i dabble with it every now and again i think the last time i tried it was like maybe like a month and a half ago and it's good it's it's just like you know i'm good i i i've done all i really care to do in this world at this point and if you're not going to give me like a new sequel with like a fully new jumping off point some fully new systems uh you know i i there's other stuff to play that's completely new and i think i'd just rather go over there but destiny rising is something i i want to check it out because i'm just curious as to what people are talking i can't fathom a mobile game feeling good at all especially in the type of game that destiny is you know what i mean i can't imagine a first person action magic shooter it's third person is it third person the entire time uh to my understanding when i played it for a little bit it was all in third person oh interesting oh you played it that's fascinating hmm okay yeah i gotta i gotta check it out because even that to me is kind of like i'm i'm still like i think about mobile games as like i understand that fortnite and call of duty have been on mobile and i get that intrinsically but like when i think of a mobile game i think of like snake on like a samsung you know flip phone you know what i mean like that's that's my barometer of like the difference between a console and like a phone it's just like it's i'm not gonna play on that but um i might check out destiny rising because i've seen a lot of people making a big stink about it and it's apparently pretty interesting but i i don't know if i also don't want to get sucked into this shit again that's another thing for me personally like from a selfish perspective like i don't want to i don't want to spend 10 more years attached to something that's what's so refreshing to me about marathon where it's just like okay cool like this is a pvp multiplayer game i can play like whatever matches i want and then like it doesn't feel like a second job where i'm going to be doing like you know quest lines and you know i don't need that again so yeah but destiny 2 is definitely on the way out i think anything you want to add dustin or should we move on to the final inquiry nope okay i haven't played destiny in a very long time so you you played rising though like when you play rising i played for maybe 30 minutes like two weeks ago and i want to get back to it and i'm gonna play it on my ipad with a controller but i just uh there's just too many this sounds so rude i'm like there's too many real video games where i'm sure it sounds like the most real video game on mobile and i'm sure it's awesome but with multiple games coming out every week it's like i just i can't yeah no i don't think anybody would begrudge that all right final inquiry comes from michael blackwell who wrote in and said good evening and good morning chaps after enjoying mafia the old country short and well packaged story i was wondering if there were any other existing ip that could benefit from being spun off in such a manner to target the 50 price point on such a semi-regular basis.

4:05:40Something more along the lines of a smaller Uncharted game, perhaps with a different studio. Enjoy the content you guys create and keep it up. Dustin, any thoughts here? We haven't heard from you in a while. Actually, I feel like Uncharted is kind of not a good option for a cheap$50 or cheaper. They did it. You know, people liked it, but it did feel like a, it felt like a lesser Uncharted game to me. Yeah, I think people at this point associate Uncharted with groundbreaking visuals and cinematic moments that just necessarily won't work for. this is i mean it kind of i don't want to say it's cop out but something we talked about before that this is the type of stuff that i would love to see sony license out their old ip get a good team to do sly cooper uh and make it at a 50 price point and it's nothing crazy um so yeah i guess i'm trying to think of what other twisted metal i guess they were almost going to do that just not everything Sony has such a problem where they're so focused on like these top tier, high quality games that I could understand not wanting to mix the messaging too much with like, here's some$50 games of our old IP.

4:06:46But I guess that's mainly what us hardcore fans would really want, but they're just not going to do. Yeah, I still think that games should explore these various price points. Expedition 33 being a$50 game, that's obviously a new IP. Great price point, very attractive to a lot of people. but the reality is I think Mafia is probably a pretty unique situation where the series was somehow able to evolve I don't know that I think that what they did with it was pretty impressive but I'm not so sure that many IP would get away with being so different so you might want to just do new and different things at different price points and then stay consistent within those new and different things so if you do another Expedition 33 or whatever obscure game it should probably be$50 and so on and so forth but maybe maybe they raise it to 60 but i want new things so but it sounds like as we reported last week it sounds like there's going to be a mafia five and i assume it will be the same sort of situation where they do something short and sweet and the mafia the old country is fucking dope one of the great games i think they learned proper i think they learned kind of the right lessons from definitive edition where it's just like people respond well to these like kind of like shorter kind of like more truncated or not truncated it's not the right word but like more focused experiences I should say Mafia 3 I would love to get into Mafia 3 but I'm like so turned off by like the way that everybody says you have to play it where I'm just like I don't know if I have that in me really I'm sure there's like maybe a mod that kind of on PC that probably does away with that stuff that lets you like play it in like a like a more traditional like Mafia 1 kind of way it just like kind of gets you to the places that you want to get to the big story beats without grinding too much but like I also don't like modding my games really yeah people people say i'm weird about that but like i just i don't know i feel like you know the games less because like i know i know a lot of people who mod the shit out of their games i talked to them about it and they like they're talking about shit that's just not in the base game because they just modded it into it and they didn't realize that it wasn't there it's like ah you don't really you don't really know the holistic version of the game that you're talking about and that kind of bothers me well we'll see what happens with these different price points people are very sensitive to this i mean this goes back into the conversation about xbox and game pass where there's going to be a high sensitivity to even the slightest changes in people's consumer behavior because the economy is weak and obviously inflation is just so permanently eroded the value of money that it's it's tough out there um but i guess it's on that note time to go all right let's go around the horn say goodbye to everyone chris goodbye to you be well have a good rest of your day any plans um no i'm just probably uh more bioshock gonna cook some cook something i haven't decided yet i might have to go do a grocery run meeting with a friend of mine for dinner to talk some business stuff uh so that's something but uh yeah until then pretty chill dustin goodbye to you be well any plans goodbye my plans for tonight my copies of of ghost of Yote and Mario galaxy one and two have arrived from Amazon.

4:09:54It's going to be doing a little bit of gaming tonight. And this weekend, it's a Pittsburgh retro gaming convention. So if you're there, you see me say hello. Don't be weird. Just say hi. Don't be weird. Um, but yeah, I'm looking forward to that as well. Uh, pretty a lot. I don't know what I'm shopping for though. At this point, I need to branch out my collection because I've kind of tapped out on PS one. There's plenty to collect, but I'm at the point where the stuff I want is at least$100, if not more. And it's kind of less fun. Like you get one of those every once in a while. But so I got to figure out some new stuff to collect for.

4:10:36But looking forward to that. All right. Well, fair enough. Enjoy. Be safe. Be well. Anything this weekend? Well, football tonight. I'm going to go for a walk after this. I think it's kind of nice out. um like walking weather and then this weekend i don't know probably just hang i got a lot of work to do and um and so on and so forth and then next week uh late next week after the show actually the day after the next show i'll be off to long island for a few days so that's on the on top of mind right now as well but in the meantime appreciate you guys thank you for your time today and thank you all out there for your love kindness and support all things last day media sacred symbols etc could not do it without you uh patreon.com slash last day media for early ad free access and a bunch of other great perks and last day media store for merch we'll see you next time 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 the show is conceived by is written by and is directed by me colin moriarty my co-hosts are chris raygun maldonado and dustin firman the show is produced by executive producer Dustin Furman.

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