#399 | Step Back From That Ledge, My Friend

15:56Dustin Furman:yeah um yeah so we'll we wish him the best and it's just me and me and Dustin today Dustin you go down I don't know what am I What am I gonna do It's like you do you know do you know the whole thing about The emergency goalie in hockey That like every game has an emergency Goalie that will play for either team Really yeah so like Each team NHL teams typically Carry two goalies on their roster then they'll have like an AHL team with two more goalies so If you have like a goalie and each team Has a starting goalie that usually plays and then A backup goalie that will play sometimes and play On like if you play back-to-back nights it's a lot to ask your goalie to play twice and so on if one of those goalies gets injured you usually find the other goalie plays and then you call in a goalie from the ahl to come up to the nhl and you're good for the next game but there's there have been these situations where goalies just both goalies get hurt and so typically there's like a practice goalie for the home team that often dresses he might be like a zamboni driver or like an ex-college goalie or something and he just plays with them sometimes and he'll and he'll be at the game ready to go and uh every every so often he has to play and sometimes he has to play for the other team which is interesting yeah yeah

17:07Colin Moriarty:interesting yeah i would say i mean you're you're backup goalie for sacred like if chris and i were both out i would assume you would talk to brad yeah brad but then we start like getting homogenous

17:18Dustin Furman:you know uh between all the shows and so i mean that is the obvious choice but it starts getting a little homogenous then if you're both out then i start considering do i just permanently replace both of you right um with mystic ryan and radic mystic ryan and radic yeah okay i mean and sandy bry it's maybe time to get some new blood in here honestly you should replace yourself too yeah i might say you can just replace sandy can replace me yeah yeah the new sacred tables will be hosted by sandy bry with mystic ryan and radic yeah starting episode 400

17:53Colin Moriarty:very good then i don't see here's the problem you own the show that i'm trying to figure out if i could still make some money off this like you could still you own the title of the show so you can just kind of um reap the rewards i'm gonna have to start like a like an aldi version

18:10Dustin Furman:or something of sacred so you have to call it symbols that are sacred or something

18:15Colin Moriarty:symbols that are saying team who say

18:20Chris P.:don't be away Chris don't be away too long

18:23Dustin Furman:you know it's like when a quarterback goes down on a team in the NFL and the and the backup comes in for a few weeks and then the and he plays pretty well and then the starters ready to come back and everyone's like I don't know right I mean things are going pretty well without you here you know

18:40Colin Moriarty:arguably I don't know I mean I know a little bit of what your thinking was at the time but Chris being out is what introduced me into this show so there are consequences to action there's a ripple effect there's a little domino big domino I've I've

18:56Dustin Furman:said it to you I mean I think we've talked about on the show that like I already know who I would ask if either of you left yeah to do the shows I might have said some of their names already um but I think it changes the whole dynamic of the show such that if I were to do a different show you guys were like Dustin's like I quit Chris is like I'm I'm gonna go and research Epstein's Island for 10 years and see what I can discover sure I think I would just rename the show yeah that might be bad branding though to do that but who knows who knows it would be a different show too I kind of like the show we do you know I don't want to I don't want to do it any other way

19:33Colin Moriarty:right it would certainly be different but i like this idea of what is it like the new class oh to say by the bell say it would be sacred symbols the new class yeah

19:46Dustin Furman:god i wanted to like say by the bell the new class but i just i just couldn't get into it it just wasn't for me everyone's like a bootleg version of someone else next week is the return

19:58Colin Moriarty:of Scrubs, which is one of my favorite shows. Reviews are pretty good, but it still feels like I saw a review that was like, it's too much like it was before and it hasn't evolved. I'm like, great. That might be what people want. Yeah, that's what I want. That's because I don't need a new evolved version of the show Scrubs.

20:18Dustin Furman:My girlfriend in college was like obsessed with that show. Yeah, that was during the era when you can download like VLC versions of like every show in like 360 P.

20:27Chris P.:that's how i watched it in seventh grade yeah yeah well what should we do hang out uh we could just wrap it up yeah 20 whole minutes i don't know if that'll be satisfactory i have things to do other things i want to be doing it's raining right now which isn't interesting it's uh let's see what what's the temperature 55 degrees it's getting

20:55Dustin Furman:warming up here oh i got you beat 57 nice nice all right i guess we'll do the show if we have to sacred symbols a playstation podcast goes live each and every week you can get it three days early and ad free over on patreon.com slash last damn media early ad free access to every episode of this show and all the other shows that are recorded and posted in our network including defining duke the xbox podcast punching up the nintendo podcast someone signed the gameplay podcast and so on and so forth rss access for all the shows so you can just circumvent patreon send them all to your podcast app of choice.

21:26Dustin Furman:You can use Spotify as well. Access to our Discord with like 6 ,000 people in it if you want to deal with that mad house and those crazy people. Submit your inquiries to the show on the various threads on Patreon. In the news feed, threads go live for all the shows. They're deleted, posted, and deleted, and so on and so forth as needed. Sacred Symbols threads are posted on Wednesdays and deleted Thursdays, so you have about 24 hours to do that. Sacred Symbols Plus is another major perk. Over on Patreon, that's our supplement every week to this show where we do deep dives and interviews and so on and so forth.

21:57Dustin Furman:This week's episode will be a God of War, Son of Sparta, Sons of Sparta spoiler cast and review discussion. It'll be me, Brad, and Raddick, friend of the show. We recently did episodes. I sat down with Hogue to talk all about Ubisoft and what's going on with them and their evolution. We sat down with Dustin's local friend, Evan Miranda, to talk about his game shop in Butler, Pennsylvania. Jaffe's been on recently to talk about this, that, and the other thing. We did a Kingdom Hearts deep dive and so on and so forth. So those will continue. I have a couple of interesting interviews in the hopper, more data-driven stuff that I'm trying to work out that I think will be fun.

22:30Dustin Furman:We also do sacred streaming every Monday at 1 p.m. Eastern time on our YouTube channel, available for everyone. You can watch the VODs over there as well. Dustin and the boys recently streamed RV There Yet. That's what it's called, right? Yes. That looked very fun. Again, I just thought it was funny that the guy was just smoking a cigarette the entire time I saw. That was incredibly funny. We did the state of play watch along. Xbox developer, direct, watch along. We did a bunch of Mega Man stuff and so on and so forth. I don't know what we're going to do this Monday. We have to figure that out, I guess.

23:03Dustin Furman:I haven't really had time to think about it. And Moriarty crushed Jaffe. Obviously, the hit that's, it's taking the nation by storm. Cool Beans LF wrote in and said, hey guys, just wanted to say I'm really enjoying the Jaffe cross Moriarty streams. I hope they become a regular thing. Jaffe has a chaos agent calling to reign him in and Dustin is a Jamie type figure. Young Jamie really works well. I think this could be a big LSM show and it gives me that old Colin and Greg energy. I think a lot of us miss. It does have that energy. I think it's even crazier than that show because it goes on for so much longer.

23:35And so there's a true delirium factor to it

23:41Dustin Furman:that I really appreciate. But I had tweeted out about Moriarty Cross Jaffe that it's the most fun I've probably ever had live streaming.

23:50Chris P.:I'm just I want to do things a little different you know the gameplay stuff is fun we'll do that but I don't really get it I get this I can do what I understand and it is kind of you know

24:05Dustin Furman:it's kind of I don't know if you can put your you know in your mind's eye see back in 2015 2014 it's like when we launched Colin and Greg live which was an I a big idea I had when we found kind of funny no one was doing that that was like a new and novel thing at that point yeah to the point where that just chatting thing on twitch didn't even exist and we thought we would get banned if we didn't play people might remember the very first episode of colin and greg live which was january 5th 2015 we played smash brothers because we were like you had to have the little pull down of like what you're playing and we were afraid we were kind of circumventing and then now and now everyone just talks.

24:43Dustin Furman:And that seemed like it was like, it was totally anathema to the whole system. And yet that's what was natural to me. And it's still all these years later, 11 years later, still the most natural way for me to do live content. But we'll continue to play. We have, what should we play on Monday?

25:00Colin Moriarty:That's a good question. I don't know. I haven't thought about it either. I mean,

25:05Chris P.:I have a bunch of ideas. It's just like, this is the thing that's bothering me. Let's talk through it. Sure. People, some people, some people are like, we want gameplay, like we want to watch you

25:18Dustin Furman:stream games. But there is no doubt that that is not what a majority of the people that are watching want, comparable to the numbers for the either the talking streams or the coverage streams. so I do think we are courting a different sort of audience from your mainstream not naturally I mean we're not a mainstream outlet at all but your mainstream game consumption twitch style stream people of which I just can't understand you know like I just I don't get it so I think

25:53Colin Moriarty:that sounds about right to you right yeah it's interesting this happens on my youtube channel as well that my streams where i play a game are not as well attended as streams where i just talk and it's interesting to me just because we our product is talking podcasts and so i think the idea for streaming is like well we can do something we do we can do things a little different oh just do things a little differently but i mean the audience you know we the audience is the I think this is a Linus Tech Tips thing that he says, but I agree with him where it's like the audience is the is the guide. You know, we don't you don't necessarily follow the audience to a TV, let them guide you.

26:39And clearly they want more talking.

26:43Colin Moriarty:So we can still do some gameplay stuff, obviously, because there are people that really like that. So and I think for you, Colin, it's like you're you wanted to do streaming because it was something that you found invigorating yeah and so i look forward to it i think what's important is our core product which is of course sacred symbols and our other various shows are not changing at all so if you don't you know if we kind of experiment and play around with streaming it's like let us figure it out for a bit yeah i there are some people

27:20Dustin Furman:that think this would affect something else and it's like the patreon this is one of the things we were talking about with streaming is like, I almost am just kind of segmenting the streaming operation from the Patreon operation. Like they don't, they're not dependent on each other. You're not really getting anything for that anymore. You know, it's the podcast network. That's the core business. But I'm looking at the numbers. It's like, because people are like, oh, we want to see you play games. I'm like, I love, I love, I mean, I tried, I showed you Metal Eden and we played Ball Pit and we played all the way through Marvel Cosmic Invasion.

27:47Dustin Furman:We played Terminator 2D No Fate. But those streams did 15, 12, 16 and 11 ,000 views, which is good. I mean, first streaming is great. Yeah.

27:56Chris P.:The Jaffe streams have done 38 and 43. So, you know, we're going to pay attention to that. It's been a surprise.

28:08Dustin Furman:I, I must admit, I, I'm not really doing this for, or I didn't start doing the video stuff for lucrative purpose, like lucrative purposes, but it's turning into a thing we can't really ignore. And that's, or we would be, we could ignore it, but it would be stupid to ignore that. Yeah. So, we uh we continue on and of course we'll do our interstitial you know live con uh con uh content live content when we you know the state of play or something like that we'll do that as well yeah i wonder how how if like brad and micah and you or someone streamed the nintendo showcases i wonder

28:41Colin Moriarty:how that would do yeah i mean i'm sure it would do pretty well i know i think brad normally streams those on his channel but too bad we can work something out All right.

28:54Chris P.:Merch. Lastdaymedia.store. T-shirts, sweatshirts, hats, stickers. We appreciate you. Thank you for supporting us.

29:05Colin Moriarty:Sacred Symbols is sponsored by Shopify. Shopping online is incredible. You can get practically anything from around the world shipped to your house with just a few clicks. I'm always buying band merch, retro games, and other nerd stuff, if I'm being honest. but I hate it when I'm putting in my order, filling out my address, and realizing my card is in my other pants pocket and it's in another room. Thankfully, the purple pay button has all my information saved, making checking out as simple as a tap on the screen. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10 % of all e-commerce in the US.

29:44Colin Moriarty:From household names, like Last Stand Media, we use Shopify for our merch store, to brands just getting started. And it's so easy to get started with your own design studio. With hundreds of ready-to-use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store that matches your brand style. And the best part is Shopify is your commerce expert with world-class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. See, less carts go abandoned and more sales go with Shopify and their ShopPay button. Sign up for your$1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash sacred.

30:22Colin Moriarty:Go to Shopify.com slash sacred. That's Shopify.com slash sacred.

30:30Dustin Furman:All right, let's get into some topics of discussion, then we'll get into the news of the week. We'll get into what we're playing. We'll finish up with listener inquiries. But topics of discussion, of course, we like to just stretch our legs at the beginning with random things. We have done plenty of that already on this show, but we'll begin with a comment from Maddie, who wrote in. and this is not maddie mr maddie plays but maddie m-a-d-d-i-e dear sacred symbols team i've been listening to this podcast for a year and i'm writing to inform you that it is on the verge of ruining my life the sheer depth of industry knowledge on the show has rendered every other gaming podcast unlistenable leaving the weekly episodes of sacred symbols as the only thing i have to look forward to however last week while listening during my morning bus commute i began laughing uncontrollably as dustin and chris at dustin and chris's chris ray guns impress he says Reagan here.

31:15Dustin Furman:Impressions of Alex Jones. I wonder if he thinks that that's his name. That'd be honestly insane. But also it's probably just an autocorrect thing. I began laughing uncontrollably at Dustin and Chris's impressions of Alex Jones discussing the ritual network. The side eyes from fellow passengers were immediate and severe. The bus driver refused to stop for me to prevent further ostracization for my community. I must respectfully request that sacred symbol cease operations effective immediately. I wish you all the best in your future endeavors. Thank you, Matty, for writing in. Glad to have you on board.

31:44Dustin Furman:The Ritual Network.

31:45Colin Moriarty:The Ritual Network. They're spending a million dollars to bring down Mind's Eye.

31:53Dustin Furman:I can't wait to see what that's all about. What if it's true? The funny thing about the Mind's Eye situation and Build the Rocket Boy is their PR is like, yeah,

32:03Chris P.:this is happening. And I'm like, well, are we going to see the evidence? I guess it's none of our business, technically.

32:11Dustin Furman:You're a private entity, but it's a pretty extraordinary accusations.

32:17Colin Moriarty:Right. It's just funny because it's like, even if, even if there was someone sabotaging, it was like the biggest waste of money ever. It's like, you don't need to sabotage someone that's sabotaging themselves on their own. So I don't know.

32:31Dustin Furman:It is weird. The ritual network is very funny. Like that's a very funny Alex Jones thing. The ritual. And your Alex Jones edit was a big hit. Oh yeah. yep yeah that's on if you guys haven't seen yet it's on the our twitter account it's on the last

32:47Colin Moriarty:stands twitter account um now maddie here says that he needs us to cease operations because of his shame yeah i would say that i mean there that's not an option period yeah the real option is that you find a new community or because of this shame that apparently listening to sacred symbols has brought you, you have to commit seppuku. You just got to kill yourself.

33:18Chris P.:Wow. I don't endorse that. I don't personally endorse that.

33:23Colin Moriarty:I'm just saying what comes first?

33:27Chris P.:Sacred symbols. Yeah. I mean, sacred symbols always comes first. And last. And in the middle. And everything in between.

33:37Dustin Furman:Maddie thank you for writing in you and Scott wrote in and said hello sacred lads this is a message primarily directed at sweet dusty boy as a father to a now 16 month old if you think you can bring up a baby without having to suck snot or boogers as you may call them out of their nose at some point you have another thing coming you'd be surprised how much comes out and yes the filter on the snot sucking device does work they simply can't get it out when they have a cold otherwise sending you best wishes from Great Britain after two fine wins against the US in curling today i feel like every time i put on the tv to watch olympics curling song i'm like oh what's on the olympics right now it's curling oh and then like two days later what's on the olympics curling i'm like i get it and then the other thing i keep seeing is is cross-country skiing i'm like is there anything else is it is what we have going on here but i was watching

34:26Colin Moriarty:holly has been watching like the clips on youtube and there's like the the bobsled stuff like how do you get into doing this yeah i i think about that too like where does it where does it start where you have the opportunity to be like i'm gonna try this it's a little crazy you ever watch

34:40Dustin Furman:cool runnings no you know what that is no it's a movie from the 90s about like the it's a weird a real story about the 1988 calgary games the jamaicans sent a team um for bobsledding and really how did they get into bobsledding in jamaica it's what it's all about yeah and it's like john John Candy is in the movie. It's like one of his last last roles. That's a great. It's actually a really great movie. This is a great cover because it's all it's for it's for black people, of course.

35:14Colin Moriarty:And then John Candy in the background, like pointing.

35:18Dustin Furman:Yeah, pointing. This is a big white guy in the bag. That's great. Yeah, that was like a that's like a classic 19, 93 ish, 94, something like that. I remember seeing it. I remember seeing it, like renting it and seeing it with a babysitter that I had. And I was like, oh, this is this is fun. So they figured it out. But yeah, skeleton is the one I love the most where I'm like, this is insane. Like, have you ever seen skeleton? No. Yeah. Look up. Look up the event skeleton. It's bobsledding by yourself. And they're fucking. It's like a bullet, dude.

35:49Colin Moriarty:Oh, yeah. And you go in your on your back. OK, I have seen this. It's. It's like one wrong move and you're going to break your neck. You're done. You're totally toast.

36:00Dustin Furman:So interesting. Yeah.

36:02Colin Moriarty:Now.

36:03Dustin Furman:Sorry. So you and Scott writes in from Grape Britain. He says.

36:07Colin Moriarty:The snot sucker.

36:08Dustin Furman:He writes in from Grape Britain wondering about the snot sucker. Now, as you guys know, Colin, I have no memory of what is said on a show.

36:17Chris P.:Yeah, I black out completely during the show. But maybe I wasn't clear.

36:21Colin Moriarty:I'll put this up on me, not anyone else. I want to be clear that I am willing to use a device to suck out the snot from my baby's nose. But I will not use the device where there's a tube where I'm using my own lungs to suck that out. In fact, I mentioned this to when I was reading the notes last night. I mentioned this right into Holly. Holly's like, oh, yeah, I wouldn't do that either. But there are other means to do this. there's like a little bulb yeah that's what that's what micah was saying because we we had talked

36:56Dustin Furman:about it on our walk yesterday and she was saying that there's like a bulb right i don't remember any of this i've just seen like heinous videos of like doctors or even just parents doing it

37:07Chris P.:like even just with like sucking it basically out of the nose like almost it's like is that what cavemen were doing how did babies even survive before modernity they can't do

37:19Dustin Furman:anything you know like a baby deer falls out of the deer's vagina sure and it kind of is a little wobbly and fucked up but then it gets on its feet and it's good to go it's weird yeah whales are out there gestating for 18 months come on man yeah so yeah i i don't know where the confusion

37:41Colin Moriarty:is on this i of course i will help my my baby with the snot in uh in his nose i just don't want to i'm sure it's a fact i'm not doubting how effective it is certainly and i understand that there's like some kind of barrier filter i think uh i think that he mentions the filter but i'm not doing that there's other means to do it so that i hope hopefully that clears up the controversy. There was multiple comments and posts about this. I was like, listen, I understand the snot situation. Or I guess maybe I don't yet. I've never had to deal with a baby snot.

38:21Chris P.:You will understand.

38:22Colin Moriarty:But I will.

38:24Chris P.:You will understand. Nick W. wrote in and said, My good men, did you happen to see

38:31Dustin Furman:the video of Chris Chan being removed from HarmonyCon this week? Rumor has it he was incognito until he blew his cover by handing out personal business cards, which claimed he is in his redemption arc. Are we about to witness a Jamie Lannister-like comeback that will define the next era of the Christian saga? Interesting reference to Jamie Lannister of all the people you could have referenced coming back. I see where you're headed. Maybe you're watching that new HBO show that's supposed to be pretty good.

38:54Colin Moriarty:I watched two episodes.

38:55Dustin Furman:Another story that George Railroad Martin will never finish. I had to look up what HarmonyCon is. You're talking about HarmonyCon like it's like some... It has an attendee count of 1 ,630 people. It's in Dallas.

39:09Chris P.:uh it is a i guess some sort of my little pony thing based on the website and the art on the website so there's that did you see this you are a

39:22Colin Moriarty:christian historian and chronic historian yeah so yeah you're right for some reason i thought it

39:29Dustin Furman:was a furry convention someone should write an illuminated manuscript of christian you know what i mean like pre-printing press pre-gutenberg the beautiful thing where it's like you you turn the page and it's like uh christ is the first word so the c is like huge and it's got all the little gold inlays and stuff and then it's and then it's a christian yeah you know um and really like the really a shitty medieval art of like the you know a king and he looks all fucking goofy or like you ever see medieval cats michael loves that oh yeah they didn't know how to draw animals right like they didn't know everyone that looked like a human every animal had a human face why not do something like that for christian anyway yeah uh i did see this and you know dude

40:16Colin Moriarty:this is it could have been a spectacular video huge cameraman fail on this because you don't even it's mostly just audio but is are we getting a new arc of christian maybe i we i feel like Like there's so much unknown right now because many episodes ago at this point we were talking about his girlfriend that was from either Finland or Sweden who looked very, very young.

40:47Colin Moriarty:So I honestly, the the the later Christian lore is nowhere near as fun or as interesting. It feels like a show that peaked in its early three to four seasons. and now we're on season 10 right and they're they're dude they're throwing the craziest curveballs that that interest you maybe they made you dip your toes in because it's so crazy but then you're like okay well actually this is not really that that interesting you know they're just trying anything they can so chris chan on summon sign i don't know if we would get away

41:26Chris P.:with it did you see all the stuff he lives in my he lives literally like in my county yeah

41:33Colin Moriarty:there's a there's been a lot of controversy with um eugenics and him being in it yeah i know

41:38Dustin Furman:i like how they just those guys just don't give a shit there are a lot of people in there or not a lot but there are quite a few people in there that some people don't like and they're just like right nonetheless you know like if i if i were that i'd be like i don't give a fuck yeah um Maybe it would have affected you in a different world, but people are really into that game. I'm looking here. Yeah, it is. HarmonyCon is the ultimate celebration of all things Pony. Oh. This is the seventh convention, and the numbers of attendance have gone up every year. 500 to 624 to 809 to 1080 to 1115 to 1282, and now 1630.

42:19Dustin Furman:So this is growing in power, this particular. the mile I will be honest and like I make no bones about this if you're a grown man into my little pony you're there's like and you're into it like you're not you know like you don't watch with your daughters or like oh I remember that when I was a kid like it was you know around when

42:38Chris P.:I was a kid that's fine if like you're so into it that you want to go to a convention by yourself

42:52Chris P.:Take a seat. Take a seat. I'm saying it's a little weird. It's a little. It would be like what would be. It would be like going there being a Barbie convention. Full of grown men.

43:08Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I don't know.

43:10Chris P.:I don't know. Like there's really no difference. It's for the same exact audience.

43:16Colin Moriarty:Barbies there maybe could be an angle of like a collector argument. investment argument but if it was like we're having a convention about a barbie tv show that uh adult men are into at least barbie at least barbie's a human uh in a in a you know attractive young lady right where we're talking about take a seat ponies take a seat take a seat you you take a seat me take a seat yeah yeah why I mean I'm just saying I mean I don't I don't know much about Barbie I'm just saying at least it makes sense makes some sense right right you know what I was thinking I saw I wasn't I was thinking about our wedding Mike and my wedding where we had the Chris Hansen

44:13Chris P.:board and everyone's seats and it said take a seat on it which I thought was really funny um that was so that was a good micah that was a good micah um joke idea i a lot of whimsy

44:30Colin Moriarty:i really appreciate that she did the i think you should leave photo booth because i'm sure that her family and your family had no fucking clue why there's like a hand like a thing that you can hold that says like 55 burgers 55 hot dogs 55 shakes like they were like they probably are like what the fuck is this yeah i think my family just knows i'm weird surely there's like only like 10 or less than 10 of people there but i was one of those 10

44:59Chris P.:and i very much appreciate it yeah yeah she did it for folks like you oh boy i'm gonna tell you what nick w thank you for writing in christian we'll be waiting to hear from you I'm R.J. Decker, a private investigator uncovering the sunshine state's darkest secrets. Tonight, it's the premiere of ABC's hottest new crime show.

45:23Colin Moriarty:R.J. freaking Decker as I live and breathe.

45:26Chris P.:He's a private eye. It's not a standard murder. It's someone bigger. And a public mass.

45:31Colin Moriarty:Trying to get someone back to prison today?

45:33Dustin Furman:You go to prison one time and suddenly it's all the jokes. R.J. Decker, series premiere. Tonight on ABC and stream on Hulu.

46:09Colin Moriarty:respects you.

46:10Chris P.:Tax Act. Let's get them over with. Jeff George wrote in and said, good day, my fine young cannibals.

46:18Dustin Furman:Fine young cannibals.

46:19Chris P.:You drive me crazy.

46:22Dustin Furman:They sing that song, right? I have no idea. Like no one.

46:27Colin Moriarty:Yeah, that was, that's a great, that's a great song. Were you going away from the mic so it wasn't as loud? I didn't want to spike it. Oh, I thought

46:36Dustin Furman:you maybe you were singing it like out to Micah. No, no, no, no. Micah's not even here. Oh, maybe she is. She wasn't when we started. Who knows where she is? Trying to find another husband.

46:48Dustin Furman:Jeff George says, my question is for Dustin with a brief preface for Colin. Colin, there's currently a gap within gaming conversations covering fatherhood and the role a father plays in sharing adventures with their children. With the recent news that Dustin is expecting a sweet baby boy, my mind can see a future where Jaffe plays the role of seasoned vet. And Dustin navigates how to share his passion with his son. Dustin, how do you plan to introduce your son to this hobby that we all adore? What will be his first console experience? From one dad to a future dad, you are about to embark on life's greatest journey for a man.

47:18Dustin Furman:Don't fuck it up and let him play Roblox. That boy ain't playing Roblox. No. Uncle Colin's going to ensure there are strict rules and parameters.

47:30Dustin Furman:But yeah, like this must be exciting. You could do this with a girl too. Sure. many women like I always talk about my sister Allie played games just as much as my brother and I did when we were kids but it's just obvious that girls have a propensity not to play video games boys do have a propensity to play video games and then there's some crossover there so you you're in the right gender to be able to kind of natively bring this person in and on one hand it would be kind of exciting to have a daughter and do that because you're you have like the home field advantage you can like change the whole arc but this will be easy and uh It's got to be like one of the most exciting parts about it for any young nerd parent.

48:09Dustin Furman:To see like what it's not even about introducing them to things as much as to see what they take to. That's what I would be interested in. I wouldn't I wouldn't introduce my kid to GI. I mean, they would know what it is, but it's like Joe is like a dead IP basically for for kids. It's like I'd be more interested to see what they like than anything else.

48:25Colin Moriarty:Yeah. Yeah. I I definitely am curious about that. I'm trying to I think it's important to get in the mindset where I think a lot of people when they're when they're going to have a kid they start to get ideas that their kid is just going to be a a mini version of themselves but like clearly if you think about maybe not everybody but most people it's like think about how different you are from your own parents i'm very different me and dagan are nothing like my dad you know yeah so i you know i want to make sure that he i want to present him with the things that i like obviously i'd love to push him in that direction but I'm also prepared that maybe you won't like video games and that'd be okay.

49:08Colin Moriarty:But what Jeff brings up here, first of all, the, the no Roblox thing, this is the thing that I have definitely thought about. And I'm so we talked about this to my little cousin and his obsession with steal a brain rot on Roblox. And I'm like, man, I messed up. I tried, I tried to get these kids into proper video games where I was trying, like I, I got them Zelda. I got them. well, this was years ago, but a 3ds and it didn't work out. I wasn't assertive enough. So for the thing for me with just, you know, my kid is just, I want to make sure that he's exposed to real video games and not, you know, uh, Roblox or, and there's nothing wrong with even like something like Fortnite either, but that's something you do in addition to, you know, the other video games.

50:01Colin Moriarty:so i'm not going to be one of those dads that's like well you're going to start on the nes like

50:08Dustin Furman:i did and you're going to play ice today's ice climbers ice climbers uh i'm not going to do that

50:14Colin Moriarty:i think that that's i would i mean i i would love for him to be into that and appreciate that but i think that probably it will be a lot of nintendo switch stuff um i mean playstation as well i we'll see what he gravitates towards we have holly holly just got a switch too so we have a switch light and that's perfect for when he is like around the age where he can start playing and he can have his own console that's not like the newest thing but still have access to all these amazing games it is interesting that i thought about this colin maybe you've thought about this as well my parents weren't into video games and so the games that i got were a huge blessing i was like ah when am i going to be able to get this next game Christmas or a birthday?

51:03Colin Moriarty:Because it wasn't just there wasn't like I was getting a fresh flow of games all the time with me being into games. He will he will not long for new releases as long as there I'm interested. There are ones that I'm interested in as well. Like he's going to have access to all this stuff. Will that desensitize him to that joy that I had or will it save him from the suffering of not being able to play the game that you want so bad because he's just lucky that his dad's going to get it also. I don't know.

51:36Chris P.:Little boy, you want to play Sword Art Online? Sword Art Online.

51:44Colin Moriarty:Dot hack. Dot hack, dude. I wasn't allowed to watch or play Dot Hack because I asked for the manga at a Walden Books at Clearview Mall in Butler and my mom opened it up and the first like full color thing had like a half naked girl on it with her boob out and my mom's like no no no I'm like it's just that picture it's not it's not what it's about she's like yeah sorry but you put it in

52:10Dustin Furman:the spank bank though didn't you

52:14Colin Moriarty:when this happened I was interested but it was pre spanking era right right so

52:22Chris P.:take it easy on yourselves out there take it easy all right what are what are dot hack and sort out online though what are those kind of games called there's

52:35Colin Moriarty:a word for it or that story well that type of anime is called izakai izakai right right right that little boy's gonna like his izakai he's gonna get transported to another world like you know with mates right all right that's all we have for the inquiries from

52:52Dustin Furman:that's it that's the end of the show i don't even want to do any more by the way did you

52:55Chris P.:see Chris popped into the document no for like two minutes it's like he was here spiritually

53:03Colin Moriarty:I didn't see that that's uh it's a little free maybe he's just curious you know he cares maybe

53:09Dustin Furman:what if we tell someone that and they're like what are you talking about Chris died 30 years ago you know and I'm like what but he was in the google doc he was in the he was on 400 episodes sacred symbols i was i've been reading a lot about uh early christian thought and uh what like i'm fascinated and i think you know this because i've even written fiction about it um is like i'm fascinated by this the early like one one maybe like 200 250 years after jesus dies when like there are no rules and people believe everything like if you believe if you read about

53:51Chris P.:like Christianity at that time. They, they believe there's like all sorts of things. And one of them is that Jesus didn't really exist.

54:01Dustin Furman:He was like a, he was like a, like an illusion.

54:06Chris P.:Well,

54:06Dustin Furman:and I'm trying to think of the name of it. It wasn't until the council of Nicaea three early three hundreds that like the rules were really set down. You can read it out of thing called Arianism, unfortunate name, where it's about how like Jesus was, it's like this whole argument on if Jesus was literally the son of God. And if so, he existed inside time as opposed to God who existed outside time, making the religion somewhat polytheistic. And so it's fascinating shit. Yeah. In other words, like the rules and everything we agree, even Protestants and Catholics, like an Orthodox, like everyone agree on certain things that like we're totally not even.

54:45Colin Moriarty:Right.

54:46Dustin Furman:Like, it's really interesting. I don't know why I brought that up. Oh, the actual projection. I enjoy,

54:49Colin Moriarty:I watch it. I enjoy watching YouTube videos from scholarly non-Christian perspectives about like just recently I was watching a YouTube video about like the the historical evidence of if Jesus existed. Oh, yeah.

55:06Dustin Furman:The historical the so-called historical Jesus. Right.

55:09Colin Moriarty:Yeah. And basically it's like most scholars Christian or non-Christian believe that Jesus at the very least existed. Like it's kind of, to my understanding, it's like not really, if you think like it's, it's not realistic to think that Jesus did not exist as a person. Whether or not you believe he was, you know, the son of God or had some kind of mystical powers. Because there were all sorts of messianic figures at that point.

55:37Dustin Furman:Right. So he could have just been another one of those. But yeah, I love that because I think they, they, they say what it's like the, his baptism and his crucifixion are the thing, the two things that like basically all the scholars agree. actually happened. Everything else is, is up in the air. I have a really hard time with, I mean, I believe Jesus Christ existed. I believe a lot of things in antiquity happened as we understand them, but I have a really hard time with antiquity, as I've said many times, because I just don't know why we're so sure we know anything. It's like so funny. Even some of the stuff I'm reading with the Christian stuff, like the early Christians, it's like the only reason anyone knows about them at all is because of the people who wrote to talk shit about them.

56:17Dustin Furman:So like some of the so they like write and they're very clear. It's like we know that this sect of Christianity existed in like the 100s, but literally only because like some of the church fathers were talking shit about it, like not even there because they would burn and like destroy all their shit if they you know, if they were heretical. Right. So it's like with that in mind, I'm like, why are we confident we know anything except for like, obviously, there are facts that, you know, hieroglyphs have these these, you know, in Egypt have these orders of kings and all these things in these dynasties.

56:47Dustin Furman:and stuff. I understand all of that, but like the way we, I read about a philosopher, like an ancient Greek philosopher. And then you go in and you're like, all right, so like, what is this guy's works? And it's like, we know about this Greek philosopher because Cicero talked about him two times. And I'm like, the fuck are you talking like, like, it's so funny when you think about, and then you think about transporting those people to today that the ones that are writing the stuff down that we're still using. And they're like, you're using that. I made that shit up or like, that was like, that was like propaganda or whatever.

57:14Dustin Furman:I don't know. So I just, I'm bothered by older things like that which is a weird thing for a history person to say but i just don't think i don't think we conclusively know like conclusively know like what has happened in granular detail except for like maybe in the last thousand years yeah yeah that makes sense uh and it might even be worse than that it might even be until like the printing press really like might even be like 600 700 years where you like where things people had to write shit down manually right and why

57:42Colin Moriarty:Why wouldn't you if you're copying something. And you have a slightly different opinion than who are you to not skew something to be. That was one of the in the video was talking about like one of the earliest non biblicals, like writings about Jesus existing was a document that was supposed to be. I'm trying to remember. I don't know if it was like written for Jewish people or something, but it had a very clear slant. that was like it called Jesus, the son of God. And the guy was like, whoever wrote this was probably was probably changing it to fit a message that was better fit for that moment.

58:24Colin Moriarty:And I was like, that's I mean, certainly it could be could be true in some instances.

58:30Dustin Furman:All of this because we were talking about Chris being an astral projection in the in the Google document. Yeah, it's it's. it's interesting you know what i always think about like everyone that listens though i went to college for you know i have my undergrad in history so it's not like i'm a historian or anything like that but i obviously i obviously studied history and was in a lot of classes and read a lot of books and all the rest and i oh the one thing i always think about because i went i was in college i graduated in 2007 so about 20 years ago so it's not like that long ago yeah specifically about the peopling of america like it was considered fundamental truth when i went to college that like the Bering land bridge, people crossed it 10 ,000 to 12 ,000 years ago.

59:10Dustin Furman:The Laurentide ice pack had like a, you know, a corridor in it somewhere on like in Eastern British Columbia, people work their way down. Maybe they went along the water as well. And that's how the Americas were people. And like, if you ever questioned that, people would look at you sideways and stuff like that. And that's like categorically not true. And we know like that might've been part of it, but by the time that happened, people had already been in the Americas for 30 or 40 ,000 years. And like, that was, people said that shit with their whole chest. And they were wrong. And like, when we started doing LIDAR stuff with like, in the Amazon, it's like, this site is 40 ,000 years old.

59:48Dustin Furman:So how the fuck did people from 10 ,000 years ago build this thing? Did they travel forward in time? Or did you fundamentally not understand something? And that's the shit that bothers me about scholarship, especially the humanities. which I love, but there's always there's always this lack of under like you don't really know.

1:00:07Colin Moriarty:Yeah, you're putting out your best guess right as a fact.

1:00:11Dustin Furman:And it's frustrating. Yeah, I was reading about the history of linguistics recently and there was this movement in the 19th century. It's not a thing anymore where they're like, we should just stop trying to figure out where language came from because it's unknowable.

1:00:24Chris P.:Like, like, what are we even talking about? But we can't borrow the pun. And it's just so funny. I don't know. anyway this is why we need chris here to rain us in rain us in a little bit let's talk about games wanted to call this first one out this is just a quick rip shutaro slash curry sage

1:00:47Dustin Furman:shutaro aida or aida long time japanese programmer who is the director of the bloodstain series but was a long time programmer on Castlevania before that with Iga at Konami and his last project at Konami was actually Metal Gear Solid 5 before he left with Iga that was after Iga had left of course to go ultimately work on Bloodstained he has passed away a statement was posted on his Japanese Twitter account saying Shitaro known as the Curry Sage who has been battling illness for some time passed away on February 10th due to pancreatic cancer. We extend our deepest gratitude for the kindness shown during his lifetime and respectfully report this year.

1:01:31Dustin Furman:Chitaro's adventures in this world have come to an end, but his works will remain. We sincerely hope that you will continue to enjoy the games he created. He was 52 years old. Obviously not a well-known name, but someone that's close to the games that I love. And so just wanted to acknowledge him. We don't have to get any further into it if we don't want to. it i don't and i don't mean this as any insult this is it's a it's an observation i wonder if this is part of the reason why bloodstain is taking so long the second one yeah if he wasn't well right and if they didn't want to move away from him or there could be a cultural thing or like kind of putting the team in stasis while they figure things out if you don't have a director yeah i you can't really who's making the choices and like you know running the creative and running the technical and doing all those kinds of things so it kind of explains a lot in any way or could maybe has nothing to do with it but i doubt that yeah because it's been seven years so and he and they said he's been battling this illness for some time but yeah i know him from he would go as shatar by shataro in the credits and i think he was pretty seminal in programming all of the metroidvania ones on uh gba and ds like he came in later ega came in later like we give ego a lot of credit for Castlevania and he did work on like I think he worked on like some of the 16 bit stuff but he really didn't start working on the series in a major way until Symphony of the Night so like there's there's these generations of Castlevania and certainly these guys in the Metroidvania reign or realm are well known and beloved so I just wanted to wish him and his family well R.I.P.

1:03:10Dustin Furman:and peace of course yeah and

1:03:13Chris P.:we eagerly await Bloodstained I imagine it'll be dedicated to him when the game comes Let's do it. All right. Another RIP.

1:03:21Dustin Furman:Hideki Sato, legendary Sega designer behind every one of their consoles, has also passed away. Sega released a statement saying, we are deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Hideki Sato, who served as president of Sega from 2001 to 2003. It's funny that they lead with that because that's not what he's really best known for. Sega would like to offer its condolences to his family and friends. Now they get into it. Starting his career with the development of arcade machines, Mr. Sato was instrumental in the development of iconic home consoles, including the SG-1000, SC-3000, Mega Drive, and Sega Genesis, Sega Saturn, and Dreamcast.

1:03:54Dustin Furman:His leadership helped lay the foundation of Sega, and his contributions had a significant and lasting impact on the entire gaming industry. We will always remember his contributions to our company, and all of us at Sega extend our deepest condolences as we honor his memory. um they undersell him a little bit i'm not an expert in sega by any stretch of the imagination but he was a massive player in all of their consoles um and while sega is a is a long dormant i mean it's crazy to think about it dude like we're closer to we're close to like i mean not that close but getting close to 30 years since they you know left the it's like 25 years really since the dreamcast was discontinued um and so they haven't been an entity or a player in a long time and really we look at them as a publisher but they were a hardware presence for a long time and the master system not so i think visually the master system is actually really iconic i love the way the master system looks but certainly the genesis is an iconic console in america especially but certainly around the world mega drive in europe and in japan and um i don't think there's anything to write home about about the the the aesthetic of the Saturn or whatever.

1:05:04Dustin Furman:But I do think there is something interesting about the Dreamcast as well. So I wonder if you have any reflections, not about the man, we don't really know much about the man, but about the consoles he helped design and Sega's legacy kind of living and now perhaps dying with this man.

1:05:18Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I grew up primarily with a Sega Genesis. I mean, that was the first video game that I ever really played was either, I don't know which one was first. It was either, you know, Sega Genesis or playing on PC. but that console in particular and of course in hindsight i fully agree that the snes is the better console but that's the one i had growing up and there's something about it man where the there's such a signature sound to a sega genesis game the sound chip in there i love it any sega genesis game it's like i feel like i can immediately detect that certain sound to it and um so yeah that was such a big influence for me growing up and playing of course unfortunately uh sonic on the sega genesis and uh other games on there it was uh it was awesome it was my like what really got me into video games all those years ago so unfortunately i never owned a dreamcast uh when it was a thing because i was just a kid yeah there was no way i was getting a any kind of new consoles and by the time it was maybe available it was like why would you buy this so um but yeah looking back on it dude this the dreamcast there's something about it that is just so cool and futuristic and the different ideas that had in it like having um the ability to connect to the internet one of the first consoles to do that the the visual memory cards and the way they connect into the controller so many neat ideas with that console so uh rip in peace of

1:07:00Dustin Furman:course yeah i mean they don't get a lot of credit mega net was the thing that genesis or mega drive used in japan it launched in 1990 it's like pretty i mean there was to tell of you and you could do on super nintendo and famicom did connect to the internet as well you could do like weather and shit like that but it's like it's so funny that that interconnectivity stuff was i'm just telling you from someone that was there and I'm sure older people would agree as well like we weren't even thinking about connecting the consoles to the internet it was even when you learn about things like I didn't know anyone that had x-band for instance which was way ahead of its time in the mid-90s but that was a thing and there were like tens of thousands of people subscribed to it at one time and that's like in the mid-90s it's like you're telling me you were playing Street Fighter 2 on Sega Genesis on the internet in 1994 and there were people that were doing it through X-Band.

1:07:51Dustin Furman:So that is pretty interesting as well. But, oh my, I was such a huge Sega hater. It's like, the thing is, is that, and I was, it was right up my alley. Like, I just grew up hating Sega, and I don't know why. Well, I know why, because it was vastly inferior to Nintendo, like you said, but we did have people in our lives. I always talk about Dagon's best friend, PJ. He was a big Sega kid, so we always had access to his stuff. And my neighbors had a Master System and a Genesis as well. And what I remember about the Genesis is, you don't know this as a kid but like the industrial design it's so interesting it was the exact opposite of the super nintendo where and it was earlier too obviously we didn't really they actually interestingly my neighbors did have a genesis before sonic but like obviously sonic in 91 is what really brought genesis to the mainstream but like that whole red band branding and like the it's like shit where even as a kid I'm like what is the purpose of this where like the the volume knob it's like you're gonna sit it's a console like what like what are we doing here and I guess the assumption was your parents don't want to hear the shitty chiptune music and like the repetitive stuff so you would plug your headphones in but just the whole yeah we did yeah like I I like I couldn't it's like we're not that close to the tv I don't know what I'm supposed to do with this even as a kid I I remember that I remember the the flimsy little reset button with the little dots in it and then um the big thing is the controller and specifically the way the controller

1:09:19Chris P.:sounded when you used it that is a very i hate that controller but it did work for

1:09:28Dustin Furman:certain games when they added the three gray buttons later on to the genesis controller that was obviously a lot better but played so much stuff on in the early 90s on genesis even though you know at my friend's houses even though i would never want it myself and um it is a very visually memorable console yeah and then dreamcast i think just went dreamcast and dreamcast was the first gaming console in my opinion and i think ps2 was one in its own way later was it was the

1:09:56Chris P.:first one that didn't look like a gaming console it looked like a an electronic like a late 90s eggshell colored electronic.

1:10:08Dustin Furman:It fit very well. And I remember how and it's so small. Like I think the thing about the Dreamcast that people underestimate is how small it is. It's incredibly small. The Genesis got smaller too in like Mark 3 or whatever.

1:10:23Chris P.:But yeah, so I don't know. R.I.P. to him. And the era of Sega hardware, it was exciting. It's kind of sad because Obviously, the Dreamcast was discontinued in spring 2001,

1:10:38Dustin Furman:and we got the Xbox in fall 2001, but that was literally the last time that something really was born and then died, or died and then was born. And it's kind of been static ever since then in terms of the competitors. And it wasn't always like that. There were people that were trying to get in with differing success.

1:10:58Chris P.:And it was a different time. He was very much part of that.

1:11:01Colin Moriarty:he looks like a nice man doesn't he oh yeah definitely with a nice nice old japanese man all right but the uh after those r.i.p. breaking news calling oh yeah like top news people i was getting alerts on my phone really yes i just sent it to you in the chat breaking top news oh my god if you okay if anyone's watching the video if you rewind about a minute you see me go like this because i was like what the fuck is everyone am i getting tagged in all this stuff what unbelievable audio listeners hate us right now uh well it says here wario 64 on twitter

1:11:44Dustin Furman:has a screenshot of a jason schreier post on blue sky saying breaking playstation is shutting down blue point games the studio responsible for modern remakes of classic games such as demon souls and shadow of the colossus bloomberg news has learned a shocking end for a well-respected

1:11:59Chris P.:studio bro herman holst has got to go that's my that's like my my gut instinct it's like what are you doing what are you doing dude you fucking ruined them dude what a waste what the fuck

1:12:19Dustin Furman:that's so disappointing just because obviously your wish with the best for the people that are losing their jobs they just sold the studio not so long ago so everyone's probably vested i mean there's good news to be had at least people that owned it or had shares in blue point but it seemed like it was a harmonic sort of acquisition along the lines of a nixes

1:12:46Chris P.:where it's like you have this studio that can help you

1:12:53Chris P.:and you have this studio that can kind of create I don't know two or three remakes if they're small a decade and you should just have

1:13:06Dustin Furman:them churning those things quietly like a studio that is the house of respecting your history

1:13:14Chris P.:where do we go next what do we show the respect to what do we what can we modernize and uh i'm eager to learn more but it's like how did you blow that how do you blow that the shadow of the colossus remake's awesome i don't play demon souls but i know people really love that game

1:13:38Colin Moriarty:what do you think i'm looking um it's behind a paywall but i think i can read it this is from the verge um following a recent business review a spokesperson told the publication about 70 staffers will be cut the studio will be shut down in march quote blue point games is an incredibly talented team and their technical expertise has delivered exceptional experiences for the playstation community where is this uh this is on the verge let me let me copy and send this yeah it's behind a paywall so i'm reading it maybe you know how to get around that yeah i'll see uh so yeah this is from a spokesperson quote we thank them for their passion creativity and craftsmanship sony didn't immediately reply to a request for comment who's the spokesperson so okay while you're looking at that i'll say my thoughts uh yeah this is so just like this feels like so incredibly stupid think about whether it's even just from like blue point from 10 years ago that was just doing like more simple remasters, whether that's, of course, this is non-Sony, but like the Metal Gear HD collection, which was the backbone of these new Metal Gear re-releases.

1:14:53Colin Moriarty:And then the Uncharted games as well, the Uncharted collection they did. Excellent. But then even taking it many steps higher with Shadow of the Colossus, which was awesome. In fact, I mean, there were, of course, with any remake, there's going to be some complaints about people they're like oh it doesn't respect this art direction of this castle or something but it's like i think by and large everyone agreed like this this is no pun intended the blueprint as blue point doing this as you were saying colin and then with the launch of ps5 demon souls remake which was awesome in fact i still think it's one of the best games on playstation 5 and as you were it's like they had like this feels like the with the acquisition of blue point i remember when it happened we were like yeah this is the easiest home run ever you have all this ip all these old games that people still love and they want new ways to play them in new ways that they're certainly willing to pay for to play improved versions of them and this is the team to do it like especially around that time it was like no one is remaking or remastering games better than blue point now Now, to be fair, there are things that we there are a million things that we don't know behind the scenes.

1:16:10Colin Moriarty:We do know that Bluepoint was supposedly working on a some kind of God of War live service project, which obviously sounds dumb as hell to anyone who hears about that. Like, I guess a God of War multiplayer live services already seems kind of stupid. But then you have Bluepoint for all the reasons I just mentioned. Is the team doing it? What are you doing? What is this level of mismanagement of a proper use of talent? Whether it was Bluepoint's decision or Sony's decision, we don't really know. I know I remember something that Bluepoint was interested in making their own original game.

1:16:50Dustin Furman:Yeah, and that's a means is almost like I remember saying at the time, like too bad.

1:16:55Colin Moriarty:Yeah. You know, who knows? maybe i maybe i'm being overly generous and fair that it's like maybe for the last since demon souls remake this studio has been incompetent to the degree in which sony is justified in making this decision but i find that based on those games before then i find that really fucking hard to believe it's just the only thing that changed was sony's sony leadership yeah it's um

1:17:30Chris P.:again we're experiencing this in real time so i have to really develop and like think about this but like my shoot from the hip kind of thoughts are this team was there there there should be a

1:17:41Dustin Furman:caveat before i even say anything that and it's like you kind of inferred is like maybe maybe

1:17:47Chris P.:There is something fucked up to this, you know?

1:17:54Dustin Furman:Maybe these guys are in some sort of rebellion behind the scenes because they do want to do their own shit. Maybe they've lost talent. Maybe they've lost drive. I mean, there's a billion different reasons. Their game just got canceled. You know, and I believe that that's true based on the sourcing of that, that they were working on a God of War multiplayer game, And I think that that became because they were basically in contract work with Santa for lack of a better term, even though they're in the family of first party studios, they worked on Ragnarok.

1:18:23Chris P.:So it's like you bought this team, put them on Ragnarok to like help. After Demon's Souls shipped and then. You had them on a God of War multiplayer game for a few years, canceled it and shut them down.

1:18:37Dustin Furman:from the outside i just and it's like out of all i i've said before and we talked about this a few weeks ago the music is like is gonna stop for some of these teams like i know that like we all know that i just can't believe it's them like i don't know no offense but out of like everyone you have like if you're trying to like save money or try to like boost the books a little bit you close blue point not only because they're incredibly talented but they're in texas an incredibly business friendly affordable place to be and meanwhile you continue to fund media molecule

1:19:19Chris P.:i'm sorry even bend i don't want any of these studios fire sprite i don't want any of these studios to close

1:19:29Dustin Furman:in an ideal world they wouldn't but if you're playing musical chairs and the music stops

1:19:34Chris P.:you get rid of your boutique premiere high quality remake studio that like existed in some way to show that you respected the past

1:19:46Dustin Furman:and instead of just doing what was obvious which is to say like what you should do for a team like

1:19:51Chris P.:that instead of say being like you're gonna work on god of war ragnarok now for no reason um is you just provide if you want to give them freedom and flexibility think of nixes like they know what they're getting into they know what they're doing like and what what the

1:20:08Dustin Furman:what the job is and a blueprint if you want to keep a level of creativity you would imagine it would be something like let's present you with a series of options here here's everything we own like here are some things we're thinking here are some games that people want back what infamous or like I know sucker punch doesn't want to have anyone do it externally but it's like just as an example it's like what do you want to do I just don't understand how you can look at all this shit and not it's got the bucks gotta stop somewhere you can't blame Jim Ryan anymore he is not been gone that long and a lot of these decisions that were made take many years to come to fruition and certainly his fingerprints are on some of this stuff but

1:20:53Chris P.:dude i don't know man i just herman holst again i'm just the detective from dexter just staring at him constantly where i'm like i it's got to be you right they need to

1:21:07Dustin Furman:you know what like this would be such a pr move and because the ship is slow moving and it's hard to steer and it's going to take forever to turn they'll get to fucking turn the wheel forever just to make it move an inch i get it it's like the pr move and like the move would be like can we get

1:21:20Chris P.:Shuhei Yoshida back yeah how much do we have to pay this guy there's this idea in like sports when

1:21:29Dustin Furman:a guy gets older he's retired or whatever and you like want it want him to coach and there's not a long-term kind of thing he's going to get he's going to age out of it he's not quite active anymore all the rest but like he's a caretaker he like fixes the culture for a year or two or

1:21:43Chris P.:three and then he leaves you know and there's a culture problem with the way decisions are being made concord fair games even if you i mean i'm certainly the minority on horizon with the new multiplayer game hunters gathering the new god of war game people don't really like very much i think people are being a little hard on it to be honest but um

1:22:11Chris P.:some studios you buy sony owns a studio called valkyrie that no one ever talks about they're

1:22:17Dustin Furman:located in Washington state and they were hired specifically to like do contract work for studios like for people that don't know what I'm talking about a studio is like a is a group of whatever people think about expedition 33 if you've beaten that game and you look at the credits and it's like there's 32 people on that team or whatever but there's a shit ton of people in the credits because you outsource things to contractors it's a common way games are made and it's been like this for a long time certainly since the mid 3d era probably and that's expensive so like you and that's why it's often overseas um to make things a little cheaper but you might need art assets or animation or whatever and you just outsource it and it's actually i think sony looked at it and was like well we could have some internal services teams that can kind of rove about save us the

1:23:07Chris P.:money they're internal to us and that's like what a team um like that is valkyrie in this case and um blue point wasn't supposed to be that and that was the way it seemed like they were being

1:23:22Dustin Furman:treated and there's obviously more to say and more to the story it's just so it's just so surprising

1:23:31Chris P.:because i just think there are so i don't want to say so many but i'll look here at the chart of like what studios they have right now. It's like...

1:23:41Chris P.:Bend, Fire Sprite, although they might be ready to deliver things soon, who knows? I'm sorry, not Gorilla Haven. And Media Molecule all seem like if you're trying to cut Headcount and save a little money, you would cut them first. No offense to those teams.

1:24:02Dustin Furman:After that, you're really getting to the bone because that's when you're dealing with like Gorilla and Naughty Dog and San Diego and Polyphony and Sucker Punch and Santa Monica and Team Asobi and all these teams. So I get that, but what's the feeling out there in the world? I wonder how everyone's feeling about this. I'm sure they're breaking down.

1:24:20Colin Moriarty:Oh, people are losing their shit as they should be. I'm trying to verify i found maybe this is from reset era a letter from herman holst oh really send it out i just i i'm not sure if it's really i haven't been able yeah that's all right but i'll send it to you it sounds like it could be real but i'm not sure but yeah people are i i are our takes here you know not that it's a bad thing are pretty cold because literally everyone's reacting like this is absolutely like insane that a lot of people too are pointing out like how exactly what you're saying colin that like how how is media molecule or bend survived when uh clearly you know blue point when they haven't done anything when blue point is clearly seems like a superior option.

1:25:22Chris P.:I just I don't I don't know why like things are things that tight. At Sony. Like you got to shut the team down to save. What? It's 70 people. It's a lot of people to feed. But. I don't know. I don't know. Unless they have like some sort of idea that they want to expand more. this just seems like a, and you know, they want to have those assets to go and like invest it elsewhere. I mean, even Haven is like,

1:26:01Dustin Furman:it's like, what are we doing? Like what's going on with fair games? I just don't like, so in other words, I, and we, we had acknowledged it and it's just that the, the writing's on the wall with the way the industry is trending. And that's why I wanted to have people on to talk about employment in the industry in the coming weeks and how that's all going. because I think I was reading that there are 4 % fewer jobs this year than there were last year in the industry, like occupied jobs. So that's a major truncation. And so that's going to affect people. But it just seems like Bluepoint is kind of closer to the bone than that and that there are just – that's why I'm wondering if there are mitigating factors to this that we don't understand or whatever.

1:26:46Yeah.

1:26:46Dustin Furman:Where like the culture was just broken or there was bad leadership And like sometimes I remember Phil Spencer said, talked about this, I think in an email or something where he was saying that like, you know, they shut down studios for culture problems and they were talking about why. And a lot of them made sense. Like when Lionhead lost its leadership and I think he said something like ensemble lost its passion or something. And like, you don't want to invest in a bad team. It's just that I don't, I don't think that blue points a bad team.

1:27:12Chris P.:I think they're a great team that did a lot of great work. A lot of it for Sony going way back. Yeah. They developed a fucking... It's funny. I mean, they developed a PlayStation 3 launch game in Blast Factor. That was their only original work. And I just thought that they were a dynamo of respecting subject matter, of remaking and porting things in a really respectful manner.

1:27:42Dustin Furman:The Nathan Drake collection is excellent on PS4. Yeah. You know, they ported Gravity Rush. it's just that they haven't been able, they ported flower and did a bunch of other ship, but it's, and they even did Titanfall on 360, which I think is awesome. That's like the most random thing that they did, but they've really gotten no chance to flex since the PS5 launched. And this is a common trend.

1:28:03Chris P.:It's all fucked up out there. And I want to know who's responsible and who's taking, who's taking responsibility for this.

1:28:14Chris P.:This letter sounds real to me.

1:28:16Colin Moriarty:Yeah. I'm, I'm sending you another link. It's, I mean, unfortunately, but it is on the main Reset Era post. I just was trying to figure out where it came from, unless it's some employee that just sent it to someone. Yeah.

1:28:30Dustin Furman:Do you want to read it? Yeah, I'll read it. It says this is from Herman Holst, apparently to. I don't know who this might be going out to everyone in a first party team. Quote, hello, everyone. I wanted to share an important update from the studio business. As I mentioned in the December town hall, 2025 had some strong highlights within PlayStation Studios. Ghost of Yote launched a critical and commercial success. Death Stranding 2 on the beach further showcase our commitment to narrative excellence. And Helldivers 2 and MLB The Show continue to drive ongoing engagement and revenue. Interestingly, Helldivers is coming up even though it's not a first party game.

1:29:01Dustin Furman:But obviously, it's a PlayStation Studios game. So they're talking about it all as one. He continues, at the same time, we're operating in an increasingly challenging industry environment. Rising development costs slowed industry growth. Changing player behavior and broader economic headwinds are making it harder to build games sustainably. To navigate this reality, we need to continue adapting and evolving. We've taken a close look at our business to ensure we're delivering today while still well positioned for the future. As a result, we will be closing Bluepoint Games in March. This decision was not made lightly.

1:29:29Dustin Furman:Bluepoint is an incredibly talented team and their technical expertise has delivered exceptional experiences for the PlayStation community. I want to thank everyone at Bluepoint for their creativity, craftsmanship and commitment to quality. Where possible, we will work to find opportunities for some impacted employees within our global network of studios. While I know this is hard news to hear, I'm confident in the direction we're headed. Creativity, innovation, and building unforgettable experiences for players remain at the heart of PlayStation Studios. We have a robust roadmap for fiscal year 26 with much to look forward to in the months ahead.

1:29:56Chris P.:Thank you for your hard work and continued support.

1:30:02Well,

1:30:04Colin Moriarty:I mean, there's some... Rising development costs, slowed industry growth, changing player behavior.

1:30:10Dustin Furman:Yeah, the player behavior thing is what I think is interesting. yeah because i think that that is i mean i think all of it is true what he's saying but i think this is the this is a point in my opinion that people simply refuse to grapple with and it is something that has to be grappled with it's what it's it comes up ad nauseum on our show

1:30:31Chris P.:dustin when we talk about it's like smaller games and obviously god of wars are sons of sparta you called it goes to smart i also also called it goes to smart reasonably enough by the way um right they are experimenting and doing these smaller things and some people like them and some people don't but the player base is not the same as it was 10 years ago or 20 years it's certainly not the same as it was 20 or 30 years ago and doubling down on first on on first party single player

1:31:04Dustin Furman:content is beyond, in my opinion, a couple or a few marquee titles a year at most is probably really no reason to do it. And it's kind of what we were saying to one degree about Xbox's studios and to an even greater degree about Embracer, where you own so many teams at some point that you have no culture anymore. And now all your games are kind of just in a whirlwind and some of them will even compete with each other. And there's reasons for people to try to take each other out and try to win on this ladder of survival as things get cut from underneath over and over again um in that context like cutting a team like blue point does make some sense because it's like well how much of this are we really going to do and how much but what this and by the way what this confirms is that this there was speculation about who was making the god of war remakes and it's like well it's blue point doing that and some people were saying i mean and for my opinion i'm Like that's a lot of work for a 70 person team to do.

1:31:59Dustin Furman:They would have to scale up or release these games years apart from each other. We can talk about that a little bit later, but it made some sense because they worked on Ragnarok and then they did all this work on this God of War stuff. So they're very much immersed and enmeshed in God of War and that would make some sense. But this just confirms that that's being done at Santa Monica, which is such a waste.

1:32:21Chris P.:In my opinion. So shitty news. Yeah.

1:32:27Colin Moriarty:Shocking news, really. Man, it's like you're saying, you know, it's it's weird in that we've talked about Sony financials, you know, all the time, every quarter. It's so weird that the company is doing so well. And I think under with its core, it's I mean, shrinking core fan base. I don't want to say shrinking like they're going somewhere else. It's just the market is so much broader now that like the people that listen to this show are just so incredibly unhappy with them. And I think for good reason in a lot of cases. So.

1:33:14Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I don't know, Herman.

1:33:17Dustin Furman:I mean, I know Jaffe feels the same way I do about Herman, which makes me feel kind of good because Jaffe was in the Jaffe founded. two first party studios and was and i mean you know he's co-founded and and helped build santa monica and then he founded incognito as well um later on and of course second party is an eat sleep play and all this so he understands the the context in which this all works and the

1:33:43Chris P.:players and stuff and he's totally skeptical of him too and i just

1:33:50Chris P.:he might be in like a to give him the benefit of the doubt and to play devil's advocate he he might be in a position where he's going to lose either way because it's true that they're the monies and games as a service and live live games that churn no doubt

1:34:12Dustin Furman:it's also true that Sony's heritage is in these single player games that sell appreciably but don't make a lot of money really I mean Ghost of Yote was built pretty cheap they'll make hundreds of millions of dollars on it that's nice for a quarter or two and then they go back into the trenches and you don't hear from them for five or six years and he just might not really be able he might be the he's maybe the wrong player for this role I think he is obviously but also he just might be the right in the wrong place at the wrong time like the job you don't want right now yeah um because things are in upheaval and your your brand doesn't really depend on you any any anymore the way it used to the explosive growth in revenue and the explosive growth in net income that's playstation has seen in the ps4 and especially in the ps5 era has nothing to do with them and that's and that's what i was saying earlier about him saying like changing player behavior it's like yes that is something we just must come to terms with and i i think that in that context yeah maybe blue point doesn't make any sense but i again i just think that if it's about cutting bodies and about saving a little bit of money i i wonder what the fuck bend is doing that that saves them i wonder what media molecule is the one for me where i just can't get over it it's like what the fuck are you doing and we don't know what they're doing now maybe they have projects internally everyone's like this is going to be great might as well continue along with this it's also worth noting and again i want to be fair because i don't want to come off as too negative sony is investing in new teams too like they have more teams now than they did a few years

1:35:44Chris P.:ago even with this closure you know um so you have team lfg specifically and dark outlaw i guess it would be kind of the same because they've lost savage right or whatever the fuck they renamed them and um neon koi so it's about the same but they are investing but what's what's interesting about the investments they're making are twofold in that they are investing in games as a service studios and it seemed to identify a problem that we actually have to invest in those studios we can't take a round peg and put it in a square hole and blue point seems like it was the victim of that but again it's unknowable yeah but i really believe someone's responsible for like the bad decision making can't scapegoat jim ryan forever the

1:36:46Dustin Furman:logical choice of who suffers is the man who was co-ceo of the playstation brand and demoted from

1:36:52Chris P.:that.

1:36:56Chris P.:They need new people in charge of PlayStation Studios. And if Concord doesn't show you that and the way people feel about fair games, which

1:37:06Dustin Furman:I'm more open minded about, but I understand like it doesn't even matter what fair games is at this point, like that game's done.

1:37:13Chris P.:You know, like unless they come out and really. blow the fucking roof off the joint as it were which is possible i don't know man you have anything you want to say otherwise

1:37:32Colin Moriarty:i don't know really what else there is to say other than come on man come on come on man

1:37:40Chris P.:bad news I feel bad for those guys I mean I don't really feel bad I don't feel bad for the people that are in charge of the team because they made an enormous amount of money but still it sucks I want to know more

1:38:01Chris P.:let's see and I think Holst has to go yeah but

1:38:08Colin Moriarty:But you theorize that he was locked in.

1:38:10Dustin Furman:Well, I theorize it's what happens. I mean, I don't want to reference the things I love in real life that are not game related all the time. But the Jets have a new coach last year. They signed him for five years at 12 million dollars, apparently a year. He's going to get that money whether he coaches the team or not. And after one bad year, everyone's like, just fire the fucking guy. And the word is, is like, we don't really want we know we should, but we don't really want to pay this guy to not coach the team. and it's kind of shitty that when you're churning as much money as an nfl team or especially as much money much bigger entity playstation it's like just eat the fucking money dude you know yes he has a contract you've already shown what you think you think of him by demoting

1:38:55Chris P.:him i can't believe people don't bang that drum more often it's like it happened and they got

1:39:02Colin Moriarty:like sony pr is probably like whoo there's people that unpaid sony fans that will defend saying he wasn't demoted yes he was i see that all the time i don't know what the fuck you're talking about

1:39:15Chris P.:he's explicitly demoted so they already kind of don't really like him i guess or trust him and that might have even been

1:39:24Dustin Furman:a move where it's like this guy just signed a five-year fucking deal at x dollars but it's like dude if you have bad leadership like the if the rod is at the top and by the way it's not personal

1:39:37Chris P.:no herman holst is a perfectly nice person but you need a cutthroat fucking laser focused

1:39:48Dustin Furman:great taste it's not always going to come through like i wouldn't be the person to run first party software not because i don't think i have good or bad taste but i don't have taste that aligns It's what it's what Shui said when he left and what he told me in the interview where it's like, I don't really want to be the guy to do this next chapter. It's not really me. You know, this move towards service games and perpetual and perpetuity and games and all the rest. But there are people out there that can nail this job that have impeccable taste. And your taste is not always going to show through again, talking about Shui and dropping the ball.

1:40:21Dustin Furman:He talks about dropping the ball with Demon's Souls.

1:40:23Chris P.:It's like. And I don't think he was really that wrong about that game. I just think people people just took to it. You need to have good taste, confidence in that taste and the ability to execute on it. And all we've seen since Herman Holst has ascended is or not all, but much of what we've seen has been. Nothing. Nothing interesting, nothing good with rare exception, things that were greenlit before him.

1:40:54Dustin Furman:You could talk about Demon's Souls remake or Returnal. Those are shoe haze games. These days you have Saros coming from Returnal,

1:41:01Chris P.:obvious sequel, God of War remakes, intergalactic. We'll see what happens. But this is a job for someone else. And you have players inside that could do the job. Dare I say even a person, and people would hate this. I'm like, you don't even know what, you know what I'm going to say. It's like, it's a job for a person like Neil Druckmann.

1:41:27Dustin Furman:someone who was really in the trenches as a creative Herman Holst helped build and a gorilla and knows how to make games and all that but he is a producer and I think that that's good and important and that could work we talk all the time about the different kind of if you if you look at it as role-playing games like class roles that executives play and how they rise to the top

1:41:49Chris P.:Jim Ryan was a marketer it doesn't mean you have to have that but that might be what you need right now is someone with creative chops, cross media experience now, which is going to be vital and the ability to see good projects through and have an eye for good projects. And I just don't know that you can look at the way things are being run right now and shepherded and he might just be taking all the blame. And it might be other people, but if that's true, those are people under him.

1:42:25Dustin Furman:that he presumably, by the way, also remember, and this is, I think, I think Jaffe will be very tuned into,

1:42:31Chris P.:and I'll be very interested to see what he has to say about this, but also remember that, and maybe this would be a great Moriarty cross Jaffe, just talk about what's going on at PlayStation. It's like,

1:42:49Chris P.:they got rid of a lot of people, like people you wouldn't really know, you know, but people in like the mid rungs and people that were there since the PS1 era.

1:43:00Dustin Furman:I remember Jaffe went off about that and people were making fun of him because it's like, who the fuck are these people?

1:43:04Chris P.:It's like, well, those were the various gatekeepers, tastemakers, producers, facilitators, grease skitters or skid greasers. Yeah.

1:43:24Colin Moriarty:just bad decision-making dude.

1:43:36Chris P.:Anything else?

1:43:38Colin Moriarty:Nope. I think that's it. We will. I mean, I'm certainly we'll have more to say next week. Chris will be assuming Chris will be here so you can hear his stake, but I'm, I'm positive. There will be more that will come out of this as in the next 24 hours. Even.

1:43:56Chris P.:yeah I'm like wondering like what the play is here even like and real in real time for the audience to like

1:44:04Chris P.:a sacred symbols plus episode like I I know we were just talking about not doing Jaffe

1:44:09Dustin Furman:twice in a row right now but I feel like that's the obvious thing on Monday you know don't you think do it yeah because I already asked him to come back for March 2nd but I'll I'll get in touch with him and I think we'll do that because I I really do want to see what he has to say. We already have a Sacred Symbols Plus

1:44:25Chris P.:lined up for this week, so we don't need it.

1:44:30Yeah.

1:44:31Chris P.:Yeah, I don't know.

1:44:36Chris P.:It's disappointing just because it doesn't seem like

1:44:44Chris P.:this isn't an intellectual argument anymore. There's something wrong.

1:44:51and Sony is in a way so lucky that this is happening like if this kind of meltdown happened

1:45:00Dustin Furman:during the ps3 era they they would might have been gone like the like they already they had lost money already on the ps3 era but if they mismanaged and bungled like in one of those 90s infomercials where the guy's like carrying all the shit and he's like fucking dropping it all

1:45:16Chris P.:yeah they they're so not dependent on themselves anymore that they can get away with this kind of shit and they'll continue to get away with it but they're lucky that they don't have to rely on themselves so much anymore that their revenue is basically generated by everyone else right

1:45:36Colin Moriarty:it's like i don't know maybe this is also a factor but it's like if you're a playstation fan who's unhappy with the direction of playstation where you gonna go you're gonna go to xbox yeah i don't think so maybe you'll go to pc some of you have i know because some of you say that you went to pc but you still listen because you like us thank you appreciate that probably maybe i mean there's multi-platform more multi-platform games on switch but if you're hardcore i'm not saying the switch 2 isn't a hardcore gaming device, but it's not it's not your home. It's a place that you visit.

1:46:14Chris P.:Don't you want to go to your home?

1:46:18Colin Moriarty:There's problems at home. Herman Holst.

1:46:22Chris P.:Well, there are more

1:46:23Dustin Furman:problems at home. Time to go to the next story. This was going to be the lead story. Seems a little quaint now. Dustin, will Sony delay PlayStation 6's release from 2027 to even 2028 or 2029? this is being considered via a bloomberg article that is actually about a lot of different things it's called rampant ai demand for memory is fueling a growing chip crisis and uh there's something about playstation in here that is important although it's really just said in passing this is a very long article i don't know if you read it it's actually very interesting too about a lot of the things we're talking about and just how it's so crazy in an era of capitalistic overabundance, which is good.

1:47:05Chris P.:We like living in that world. It is interesting that there is a limit. Don't you think?

1:47:12Dustin Furman:Like only so many factories, only so many assets, only so many minerals, only so many technicians, only, and like it can't meet the demand. And this is obviously the thing for all of computing, but they write here in part, quote, Sony Group Corp is now considering pushing back the debut of its next PlayStation console to 2028 or even 2029. according to people familiar with the company's thinking. That would be a major upset to a carefully orchestrated strategy to sustain user engagement between hardware generations. They also write close rival Nintendo company, which contributed to the surplus demand in 2025 after its new Switch 2 console drove storage card purchases, is also contemplating raising the price of that device in 2026, people familiar with its plan said.

1:47:52Dustin Furman:Sony and Nintendo representatives didn't respond to requests for comment. We talked a little bit about this last week and in weeks past that this seems like it's a thing that's going to be realistic if this continues because they cannot constrain cost enough

1:48:10Chris P.:to justify releasing a new piece of hardware.

1:48:18Chris P.:There's some excitement about it. Some people are upset about it. Some people don't give a shit one way or the other. I think this is just born out of necessity. typically in a normal economy by seven or eight years there would be all the incentive in the world to flip things over

1:48:35Dustin Furman:I think things are just a little different now and I think they're different creatively too games take so long to make now studios don't get a chance to really learn the hardware in the same way, they might only get one game out in a generation doesn't give them time to explore or learn or take advantage of the leverage that they build in getting used to something think about Drake's Fortune and The Last of Us

1:48:58Chris P.:same studio lots of the same people working on it same console totally different experiences in terms of fidelity and they're both awesome what do you think about this this seems a lot

1:49:10Colin Moriarty:more real now that they're reporting it yeah well it's not as you were saying i mean this whole article you know talks about apple and nvidia and and even um you know the motor industry with cars and how they are also in need of RAM storage or RAM chips and how some of this too is not just because there isn't enough. I mean, that is certainly a factor, but it's also because there's a lot of panic buying going on because of the potential and the current storage or shortage of RAM chips. And I even just saw this has been a big story. And I think Jimmy has been covering this, of course, over at Deck Ready.

1:49:51Colin Moriarty:But the Steam Deck is completely out of stock, at least as it was a few days ago. I'm certain it probably is. And I think it's Valve has confirmed it's due to RAM and storage shortages. And so I think I even saw something that they are discontinuing the the lowest tier Steam Deck just because it's like if they're gonna they can't make money on that one anymore. They have to do like the higher tier models with more storage and stuff. So it's affecting everybody. And I can understand the difficulty in that. I think there's a gut reaction to people from people like us and just people on the outside where it's like, well, just ramp up production, build another factory, get another factory going.

1:50:40Colin Moriarty:It's like. First of all, of course, and I think everyone knows this. Yeah, we're working on it. There is a degree where you want to.

1:50:51Colin Moriarty:There's a degree that it takes a long time to make these very specialized factories. They have insanely advanced equipment. They cost probably billions of dollars to make. Presumably. I know that like especially like GPUs and stuff like that. They're insane. But they cost an incredible amount of money. they take an incredible, they take a lot of time, a lot of engineering, a lot of research that you can't just like, you know, we're going to put up a Ram facility in three months. It takes certainly way longer than that, but there's also an issue too, where it's like, do you want to make that investment?

1:51:29Colin Moriarty:Do you like, you have to make the bet as a company. It's okay. Well, if we invest billions of dollars into upping our production, is this shortage going to be around forever? Is it worth that? bet in order to do that and maybe it is i mean there's a million takes on the internet about the ai bubble and what it's going to mean um my take personally it's like i think that a lot of these companies are going to go down in ai but it's not necessarily going to mean it's like oh ai doesn't work and ai goes away it's like there was an you know a dot-com bubble that broke but it doesn't mean that people don't use websites or the internet in the way you know the way they thought just there were winners and losers and i think that's going to happen with ai too so it's uh you know it's tough situation for these companies i mean it's tough and it's also not tough because there's certainly big winners right now that's like if you were in the business of making ram which uh originally just a year ago was like insanely cheap it's like yeah you're you're set right now as far as playstation delaying the ps5 i mean it certainly seems like that would be the smart decision to make if it's going to increase the price of your console to an extremely high price in fact we were talking about uh tom from more's last dead his reporting was saying that sony's in a good place for now because they had the foresight to buy ram before the shortage and the panic set in and so we've been saying this over and over for years now But just to reiterate again, if you're for some reason listening to the show and you do not have a PlayStation five and you want one specifically maybe for Grand Theft Auto six, you should buy it right now because Sony may be safe.

1:53:18Colin Moriarty:But eventually, depending on how things shake out, they might not always have this buildup of RAM chips and they're going to need to start buying them at market value again.

1:53:28Dustin Furman:I mean, you read stories in other sectors and I'm sure it's the same in games. we just don't don't see so much about it is like people basically like representatives of various companies basically posted up in various capital cities and in various industrial towns in middle of china or whatever like just trying to extract whatever they can like any deal any buy um and for all sorts of components for all sorts of different things because there's just a run on everything or seemingly everything and I think the CFO of Sony had said to your point that they should be good for the rest of the year and manufacture with PlayStation but it's like beyond that I think they said even through the holiday season or something like they feel like they have enough to do what they need to do but and they'll always be able to build but it's as your point stands about what will it cost at that point to get and that's I think what makes sense about this delay is um i like how they use the the term careful orchestration in the bloomberg article because it's true like everything about if you think about if you just like look at it as like a russian nesting doll or whatever and it's like sony and then its biggest component is playstation and then the biggest thing about playstation is its console and the biggest you know and so on forth it's like okay so playstation 6 is like the thing that's like really important central to the whole operation going all the way up the nesting doll and it is gonna fuck everything up

1:55:09Colin Moriarty:like they made well think about all the games in development for that hardware right exactly it's like that are planned to come out at launch where it's like now that might be two years after what are you gonna do you know are you gonna like downgrade the game so it works on ps5 i mean maybe those games were meant to be cross gen anyway so they can just come out that's

1:55:29Dustin Furman:actually probably pretty likely scenario but then it's like you have like but then you have to take the the next you might be like green lighting games that would come out two months after or two years after or whatever at this point like those are now you're gonna be your launch games and and so like you have to do this whole creative enterprise all over again stake all your money again on all these things and yeah i think you're right that and we've said this before that i think that this next generation is going to be so interconnected with PS5 that it's not really going to seem like a new generation.

1:55:53I don't think like I think I don't think there will be many

1:55:56Dustin Furman:exclusives for the new console. I don't think that's going to be a thing. I think these are going to be looked at more as like a. A scaling PC, like if you like Steam and PC so much, OK. You know, like here's here's our take on that PS5, PS5 Pro, PS6 handheld, PS6 console. that's the way i read it they played it so carefully even with ps5 that there's no way they're not going to at least do that i mean even horizon and god of war were on ps4 which is like what are we doing at that people were upset about that if you thought that was upsetting just wait until you see what happens next i'm with this new console so yeah it fucks all that stuff up

1:56:36Chris P.:and i wonder also my moore's law would know a lot more about this but my upset my suspicion

1:56:44Dustin Furman:is that when you you have to like fabricate the console you need to find partners to do all this this is shit you get done ahead like way ahead of time you have obviously your r &d people making the console by hand basically but ultimately you have to pass this off to a bunch of different manufacturers and fabricators and so on and so forth they make your console with all these different components that you're going to order sony probably ordered or at least have orders because the components are probably not made yet of a lot of for millions of consoles for the ps6 They might be locked in at a certain price.

1:57:12Dustin Furman:Even the problem might be that you can't, the price is going to spike or something after that, like in a major way, you could imagine them. And I wonder if this is part of the war gaming over there is like, what if we, we have a price of, we have a price goal for PS six of X, right? But because of what's going on with the economy and, and, and the rarity of components, what if we charged X plus a hundred to subsidize the future console? consoles or something like that and and no one is ever the wiser because the console was never even priced at this low price to begin with that we were because it all conflicts with what moore's law is saying and i believe him it's just that the economic reality is changing in that like they were trying to make something cheap if that's if that's all blown up and if the console is not that powerful but it's kind of expensive and stuff like it's all fucked up and and relying on ps5 at that point is the right move and i don't know enough about this as well especially with the contracts and the fabrication and all the rest is like,

1:58:11Chris P.:does this give you time to kind of redo it? Like kick the can down the road. We have two more years.

1:58:20Dustin Furman:Maybe this doesn't make so much sense anymore. Maybe we can get this a little cheaper. Maybe we put this in instead. Or are you kind of locked in because of what you've been speccing towards for developers? And it's very complex. I imagine it's like spinning dishes back there

1:58:36Chris P.:with this at this point. because and they're lucky Grand Theft Auto is coming out yeah um because that will give PS5

1:58:45Dustin Furman:a whole new bro like there are going to be I think people are understating it like I think there's gonna be millions of people that don't own a PS5 that will buy it for Grand Theft Auto and then just be introduced to this whole catalog of shit that they've never played so that's good but after that it's going to be it's going to be tough out there I think maybe console gaming though becomes more attractive even to PC type people as that shit becomes more expensive it's just prohibitive i don't know pc gaming always seemed to me to be a rich man's game

1:59:14Chris P.:i mean it's always the way i've read it since i was a little kid so they're probably the most cost resistant um but it might become such that the economies of

1:59:25Dustin Furman:scale that a sony or nintendo can exercise will keep costs at least constrained in some way that will be more attractive in the future sean sander rude wrote into us on patreon and said hey sacred crew with rumors swirling of the likely delay of the PS6 due to the ever increasing cost of RAM. Did Sony fortunately make the right choice in releasing a pro version of the PS5? They have a premium console that they can push harder now, especially as it will be the best place to play GTA 6 and gamers may be more inclined now to buy the console knowing that there will be a longer wait for the PS6 thoughts.

1:59:55Dustin Furman:I don't know that the PS5 Pro's existence plays into this so much, but I think it gives them Dustin an interesting and unique ability to market it. if cost again can be constrained or re or re become reasonable on a new market with new benchmarks for cost, then this is something that they might've stumbled into. That's a rare piece of serendipity for them in such a chaotic situation because now they can push this new machine for those that are interested. But I also don't know that there's that much fear or fears, not even the right word, trepidation about power. When you see things like the switch to selling Xbox Series S and even that what was that thing that sold the last year

2:00:41Chris P.:that party machine like that Kinect style machine I don't know that people are going to be that afraid of the PS5 just because it's old they're not afraid of the PS4 which is 13 years old so so yeah I don't think they play

2:01:03Dustin Furman:they play too much in each but i think this is something that they can market and i and again ps5 ps5 pro is selling pretty well they said it's um it's equivalent to the sales volume of ps4 pro but what's so much more impressive about it is how expensive it is so yeah there's that yeah

2:01:23Colin Moriarty:i'm most interested in what this means for when it comes to ps5 pro uh again we're referencing Tom Moore's Law is dead quite a bit, but the rumor about them releasing an updated PSSR that's going to be very significant, maybe you lean into that a little bit more where you're like, wow, if you, you know, maybe we're thinking about a PS5 Pro or maybe you already have one. Look at this update that we're bringing that makes it, I mean, hopefully, we'll see. Maybe it won't be that significant, but if it is, it's like, look at how much better it even is now. how much better PSR, the upscaling frame generation, whatever they're doing.

2:02:07Colin Moriarty:Look at how much. If you were thinking about it before, now you're really going to want one because it's going to be a while for PlayStation 6.

2:02:17Dustin Furman:What do you think? What do you think they'll end up settling on? I mean, we have no idea. It's unknowable, but I think it's fairly clear that I'm releasing the machine next year.

2:02:29Colin Moriarty:I would say that's probably true that they're not going to release it with. I mean, we're seeing right now, even just as a comparison, again, not the Steam Deck, but the Steam Machine, where it was like that was supposed to come out right now. And it's it's I think they've confirmed that it's still coming out in the first half of this year. But clearly their planes, their plans have had to change rapidly.

2:02:52Dustin Furman:Yeah, bad timing.

2:02:53Colin Moriarty:Yeah, Sony's in a much better position because PlayStation 6 is unannounced. And so they really do have, they're able to change their plans now. I wonder how long they will delay. And I think a lot of it, they don't even know either because they're just kind of, no one knows what's going on with this market other than it's bad. And it appears like it will continue to be bad. So they kind of just need to act off of what they know now.

2:03:21Chris P.:so who knows 28 i would say delays likely yeah i just don't know how you can enter it's you've

2:03:32Dustin Furman:made a good point it's unannounced like the second you show it and set expectations and then a timeline and all the rest or you're creating a whole new set of problems for yourself in an unpredictable market like this is the stuff where you need everything nailed down and if you can't nail down costs and you can't nail down your own cost and all of the rest and your own timelines then I just don't think you announce it so I also just feel like it shouldn't this is important I think is that I think the PS5 is uniquely uniquely framed as an incomplete console for Sony in that like it's not done yet like we we all feel it it doesn't like the PS3 by this point everyone was like Jesus Christ you know this thing is rough and when we jumped over to PS4 we couldn't believe how bad we had it I'll never forget that like not about the games but about like the way the console ran and the way the hardware was to use and interacting with it it was like this is fucking shit you know and PS5 is even better those kinds of jumps are not going to be present anymore

2:04:35Chris P.:and the ps5 is awesome using it's a dream it's it works great it's fluid and functional

2:04:43Dustin Furman:it's easy to understand it does what it says it's going to do so like even the quality of life stuff or just the usability ui ux stuff is just not really going to matter because they're not going to improve on it and or at least meaningfully and they didn't really improve on the ps4 meaningfully it was like kind of better but not really so i just don't know that there's any demand for the machine. And I think that that's something they have to figure out. There's always going to be, there are going to be millions of people lined up for a PS6, regardless if they announced it now and released it tomorrow.

2:05:12Dustin Furman:The question is, is like, what about the long-term health of it and the shepherding of the ecosystem? And maybe we need a greater gap than, you know, five years for PS1, six years for PS2, though it was supposed to be five. You had seven years because of the financial crisis for PS3. And then you had seven years for the PS4, and now seven years would be for the PS6 or five would be next year, but it's just it's insufficient. And Xbox 360 went eight years. I think it worked out well for that console. They can find themselves in a similar frame here. And I think splitting the difference and going to 2028 fall 28, I think just buys you time.

2:05:50Dustin Furman:And by the way, it doesn't really affect your games either, because if you have games lined up, even if they're exclusive. And again, I don't know that that's really going to be a thing, but we'll see is like you can, especially for your first and second party partners it's like you can buy them another year the games are probably going to get delayed anyway and so this you can make this work for you but i think the bigger thing they have to see is like can we guarantee cost we can't keep having these machines that go up in price it's totally unheard of it can't continue to happen that way there was inflationary pressure and all the rest that that didn't help and then this component rush for ai is not helping either but we'll see what happens but i i just so i just think that's an important point doesn't it's just i don't think there's any demand for it beyond what the intuitive like inherent demand of a new playstation would be i don't i don't think anyone's like going to be falling all over themselves when they feel like they haven't gotten enough out of this machine yeah and as a personal thing i i would ride this thing to 2030 if it was me but that's that's bad business at that point but um but again we're going to have all these machines alive, the PS4 will still be living.

2:07:00Chris P.:Even if the PS6 comes out in 28 or 29, there will still be PS4s being used and there will still be games released for it. Yeah. Speaking of PS6, Sean Layden gave an interview recently. Our friends at Push Square picked it up.

2:07:15Dustin Furman:It was an interview, I guess, with, I don't know if it was Reese Riley on Kiwi Talks. I don't know this particular show, but I guess it's a gaming show. I assume by the name it's something to do with Australia or New Zealand. Who are the Kiwis? Is it New Zealand?

2:07:32Chris P.:I think that's... We don't want to offend those people. They won't hear this podcast for months. It takes a while to get there. I think that is New Zealand.

2:07:45Chris P.:So it says here,

2:07:46Dustin Furman:Layden has asked if he thinks the PS6 will be completely discless with a host suggesting Sony, quote, can probably get away with it now. likely referring to a rapidly shrinking market for physical games. Layden answers, quote, well, actually, I don't think Sony can get away with it now. And it says Layden argues, and his main point is an interesting one about how PlayStation's global dominance makes it a difficult business decision. He says, quote, Xbox has had more success in pursuing that strategy, but Xbox is really most successful in their business in a clutch of countries. He says, listing seven English speaking countries like the US, Canada, UK, and so on.

2:08:17Dustin Furman:PlayStation, he goes, quote, PlayStation, which is number one platform in probably 170 countries around the world, has an obligation or responsibility to say, if we go discless, how much of my market is not able to make that jump? End quote. He goes on to describe scenarios in which a wholly digital console wouldn't be viable, rural locations where high-speed internet isn't an option, athletes traveling with their PS5s to play in hotel rooms, and military bases in locations with no online access. He says, quote, the ability to go discless as a solution, a key point to that is, what part of your market cannot be served by that?

2:08:45Dustin Furman:Which part of your market will be damaged by going to a discless market? He had Sony is probably doing the research on this very thing and that there's probably a tipping point where if reached, the company will be confident enough to drop disc support together. Quote, but Sony's market globally is so huge. I think it'd be hard for them to go fully discless even with the next generation. End quote. What do you think of that?

2:09:04Colin Moriarty:Yeah, that's something that I've said before, but I think on a much smaller scale, not that it's like I said it first, but I've talked about how like in Japan, which they're not number one in Japan, but uh they're still a very physical focused market and so it's important to be able to serve people in the way they purchase games obviously japan a very connected country in terms of their internet way better than us in fact but his point about being in 170 countries around the world slightly unrelated i just watched a video about uh game markets in pakistan um and it was really interesting seeing like these small shops that had like playstation 5s and all these discs lined up and how like the piracy market is huge there and how you can buy like they were saying like xbox 360 in some of these shops is still the most popular because it's the cheapest console they can play grand theft auto 5 specifically and you can just straight up buy a 360 that's already modified and has all this stuff on it um but anyway my point like that is that in a country, maybe like Pakistan, I don't know how good their internet is.

2:10:16Colin Moriarty:I can't imagine it's great. But in many of these 170 countries, it's like, yeah, maybe internet, maybe they have it, but downloading an 80 gigabyte game is not really something feasible. So I think he's totally right though, that at some point there is going to be a day where they're like, yeah, we don't need to do this anymore. It's going to hurt some people and it's going to hurt the business to some degree, but the gains that we get from not having to share any space with physical retail is going to be greater than that. So it sounds like PlayStation 6 is not going to be quite that tipping point yet.

2:10:58Colin Moriarty:You have to think certainly it's the last one though, right?

2:11:02Chris P.:Yeah, well, I wonder because of you can, you can have an external disk drive now.

2:11:10Dustin Furman:Like my assumption about PS6 is that it won't have a disk drive, that you'll buy it. Yeah. That makes sense to me because I don't think we should be expected to subsidize your disk drives. You know, like I don't want one. I don't need it. It's going to cost the it's going to make the console cost more. That's most of us that are playing games at this point, 70 or 80 percent. So I think it's fair to say, like, if you want disks, you go buy the disk drive. But I don't know why you wouldn't make that an option. And even if you stopped printing disks for first and second party games as Sony,

2:11:41Chris P.:you could always have the option of others to do it so like it's a little bit complicated

2:11:46Dustin Furman:like you have to kind of certify things you have to have like factories that make the discs or at least are endorsed to make and print the discs you have to have all these things that people are watching internally and you make less money on those games and that's a really important component i mean that's why they were eager to get to digital to begin with is it just and why it's a little frustrating and i understand like hearing publishers talk about dollars and cents when it's like you are really extracting more money than ever it's just that things are more expensive to make but like the deals are a lot better people you know you have to pay the truck driver the fucking you have to pay for the gas you have to pay for the manufacturer the disc and the box game stops gonna get their cut and all that it's like you get rid of all that but if people still want to jump through those hoops even if you yourself don't want to publish games like that anymore i just don't understand why so you were saying will ps6 be the last it's like maybe just because maybe we will truly be like in literally 2040 or something by the time the next PlayStation after that comes out and or 2038 or something.

2:12:40Dustin Furman:And it's like, well, maybe everyone will finally be off this. Well, you'll have Starlink you can get or something like that. You'll get your Internet wherever you are. Just download your fucking shit. Maybe it'll get to that point. But if I were Sony, I'd be like, we'll just ride this out. I mean,

2:12:53Chris P.:we'll sell hardware. People will pay us for a disk drive. It's like, OK, but it's just that we're going to explicitly make you pay for it.

2:13:03Colin Moriarty:And it sounds like the plan, too, is to make buying a disc even more undesirable with this handheld is my guess is that in the absolute best case scenario for this this playstation 6 handheld is that i could see a situation where if your console if you have a playstation 6 or maybe a playstation 5 console at home if you leave the disc in it that it can do a security check that will let you download that game on your handheld and then use that as long as both the console and your handheld are online that it can do that check at best but they might not even do that they might just like listen if you want to play a game on both the playstation 6 console and also be able to play it on the handheld you have to buy it digitally and that's one of the ways that i mean it's going to be a huge problem for me like do at that point do i make the jump because it's like that that level of usability or that feature is greater than my desire to own a physical collection i don't know i'll decide that when it happens and what the you know the parameters are around that but they will continue to do stuff like that i think to try they really would rather you not buy a disc and also like you said ps5 pro there's no option to buy it with a disc drive with at least ps5 proper when it launched they had the digital version and the disc version and it was a hundred dollars cheaper to get it without the disk drive but now um it's still kind of the same option it's just like you got to go out of your way to actually buy that disk drive separate yeah and you can make

2:14:44Dustin Furman:a sexy kind of option on ps6 to slide the slide the the drive in without it having to be like this thing that sits externally which is what they do now but it could just be this thing that's like remember the HD DVD drive on Xbox yeah yeah yeah that um it's funny I remember when we had those both at IGN like and we would get all the HD DVDs and the Blu-rays and I kind of liked the way the HD DVD box looked more so I was like oh I kind of hope this works and then I did I never had either of them but um well I had a PS3 I guess but I didn't watch Blu-rays but anyway um yeah I just don't know why you would would sacrifice that small market until yeah there there will come a point where it doesn't make any sense anymore you can't quite square the money you're spending on or whatever but i i think they're far away from that and i like that they're watching out for kind of developing markets they know it's what we say all the time about sony like they know that like the growth markets are not in the west or at least not in traditional western markets like africa is a really big growth market for playstation india and pakistan big growth markets for playstation the middle east although they're already pretty well established there and there's a lot of money in the middle east so like they're they're good there but these are the kinds of spots southeast asia china um and people are going to want discs there but again it's what you were saying like i just think there's a fundamental conflict with game collecting and not even game collecting but just like modern game buyers being like i want it on a disc it's like i just the game's not i mean oftentimes as you're saying like the game's not on the disc like what do you buy i wouldn't say often well you're getting a one well you're sometimes you have have to download something and sometimes you're getting a 1.0 version of it which is cool in its own way like mine's eye is supposed to be completely bonkers on the disc for instance um yeah and that's cool but it's like you have to connect to the internet to really play the games anyway properly just download the game it's it's kind of how i feel i mean it's a totally different thing but when i talk about match uh skill-based matchmaking and i'm like it all reduces like it literally all reduces down in my mind to you not wanting to put not you but like the royal you out there not wanting to play with people of their, they want to beat people.

2:16:50Dustin Furman:It's like, that's just always the way it's going to be in my mind. It's the same thing with the disc thing. It's like nothing, nothing anyone can really say is going to change my mind on that at this point. You know, it's like, and it's what you're saying. They're making it more and more uncomfortable for people to make the argument anymore. You're buying the disc to download a package. And you can see why that kind of annoys them, by the way. I mean, not that it's right or wrong, but they're like, it's not, you're literally making a split all this money with people and you're not even getting the game.

2:17:15Colin Moriarty:you know like yeah yeah i think that while that does happen it's often at least on online people think it happens way more than it does there are examples like i think call of duty is often just a you know an unlock from a disc i think maybe it was indiana jones i don't know there's other examples where it's like yeah there are some but many many games still do have a 1.0 version or something like that on the disc as well but you know yeah there's it's it's what we've always said i'm i don't want to retread all the things i've all of my talking points about physical games but you know whether you want to share it with a friend if you want to resell it um there is also an element too this is so minute so maybe it's just if you're worried about something like this ever happening but like if your console gets banned for some reason which people come to us all the time they're like i didn't do anything or someone hacked their account and then it got banned or something usually they end up getting it back but it's like if my if something happened where my account got banned that wasn't my fault because i got hacked or something and sony didn't want to listen to me or whatever i couldn't get it back i still own my library i can go buy another

2:18:35Dustin Furman:playstation 5 sure that's totally 100 true and i feel it's horrible there's like a whole like network of people getting their shit stolen apparently out there like their psn accounts but then did you see the guy that got his psn account stolen that we talked about on the show got it stolen again i think did you did you yeah i saw this guy because this was this the guy messaging us yeah and i i think it was something like they like really got this guy i think because i think that like someone called or something pretending to be something on our subreddit about it i was i read it a little bit of it but yeah that guy i mean i i don't want to speak too much about his

2:19:13Colin Moriarty:situation but he definitely did get got but it sounded like they were sophisticated as you were saying they were calling him it's sophisticated um it reminds me a little bit of that kit boga

2:19:21Dustin Furman:would um the youtuber that we really like that does like the prank not prank but like fucks with the scammers there's that one very nefarious scam i mean they're all nefarious scammers when you think about it like that's really funny content by the way but when you really think about it brass tacks it's like these are just scumbags trying to take advantage of our old people like uh for like it's funny we can laugh at it but there's that this one kind of thing they do where they research a specific person that they think is vulnerable and find family information and then call them saying that like a nephew or something has been arrested.

2:19:54Dustin Furman:They have all the information about where the nephew is or lives and who he is and how old he is and all the rest. And then they like. So in other words, things are quite sophisticated out there.

2:20:03Chris P.:Yeah, I just don't answer.

2:20:04Colin Moriarty:I just don't answer any phone calls. Yeah, someone could easily listen, take this podcast and clone our voices with AI. And if they figured out someone in our family that they could call and mask like it's it's

2:20:18Dustin Furman:it's only gonna get worse yeah it's all i mean it is gonna be bad and again it brings me up to that that i don't know anything about it but i just the anime i bring up every blue moon or if it's a manga or something where it's about it's a future where everyone's online information has been leaked to everyone else so they all wear masks like um i can't remember what it's i wouldn't remember what it was called anyway but it's like things are so dystopic that it's uh it's all fucked up and everyone has to kind of just be anonymous at that point because there's nothing unknown anyway all right there is some speculation speaking about release dates about what's going on with sony santa monica there was some speculation that they would show up in a bigger way at the recent state of play with perhaps cory barlog's new game that didn't end up happening but of course we ended up getting the stealth release of the game they produced out of pittsburgh studio Omega Cat, God of War, Sons of Sparta, as well as promising what we now, I think, understand is going to be an internally developed remake of the God of War trilogy, the Greek trilogy, the Jaffe trilogy, as it were.

2:21:24Dustin Furman:But Christopher Judge, who is, of course, the voice of the new Kratos in the newer Santa Monica games beginning with 2018, was at a convention. And this comes from Reset Era and other Reddits or whatever. They kind of have gone into this video that he's being... kind of interview not interview but just he's live on streaming or whatever i guess and talking to christopher judge at a um at a convention and so here's the transcript of it fan and i just like i have to come say hi are you playing in the remake judge says no well it's going to be tc which we already i i thought we kind of knew that right because it's a it's not a reboot but probably a new technology in it and more stuff a new fighting system okay so that's one thing.

2:22:11Dustin Furman:I don't know why these guys don't understand that they can't be saying this shit, by the way. It's so funny. Like, I don't like, what are you doing? And the fan says, okay. And judge says, so that would be TC, the original. Fan says, sorry, who is? And judge says, the original guy. And fan says, oh, the original. Right, right, right. Okay. Judge says, and then you'll hear about what we're doing probably late summer. And fan says, oh, that's exciting. Now, Now, there's some confusion about this because continuing God of War makes some sense. Ragnarok came out in 2022. Corey Barlog didn't direct that game.

2:22:45Dustin Furman:He's been working on something else. It has been presumed, I thought, that the IP was not God of War, indicating that there's either another God of War project that he's not working on, and that would make some sense to wrap up a trilogy. It wouldn't even be that quick. The game is four years old. I mean, if they're going to show the next God of War, now might be the time to do it if they've really been in earnest making this thing. But then the Corey stuff, I don't know if that's separate or if that's what he's referring to here. And I think people are kind of reading too much into this in a way.

2:23:18Dustin Furman:The biggest thing that I think is kind of most interesting is not that their new game will be shown this summer, which has been the rumor. But that the reboot is going to have like a new fighting system and stuff. So it doesn't seem like it's going to be as faithful as perhaps we had hoped. You sent me a text or a tweet here.

2:23:35Colin Moriarty:Yeah, there's a tweet from Christopher Judge that he put out today, probably after all this blew up. Just a little statement.

2:23:44Dustin Furman:Let me be crystal clear here, right? So I have zero involvement with the original games and what they involve, full stop. As much as I would love that everything I do in the future would involve Santa Monica and God of War, I have other projects that I am super excited about. More info this summer. So, yeah, that's what I'm thinking is like he says.

2:24:00Chris P.:And then you'll hear more about what we're doing probably late summer, like who's we. Right. Because he's talking about TC. It's like, what is the what noun is this entire conversation revolving around, I guess? Santa Monica, God of War. The original voice actor. I don't know. People are excited about this and there are rumors.

2:24:23Dustin Furman:I guess Shinobi and some other notable insiders have said that like that God of War game will or not the guy I should back up to be clear not the God of War game that Corey's game will be

2:24:34Chris P.:revealed this summer and released next year and it's understood that it's not God of War but it is an IP that exists right I think that might be what it is yeah I can't remember exactly I know there was something weird like that but i got a little side tangent about this

2:24:58Colin Moriarty:it's it appears if you watch the video uh this person was streaming and talking to him i don't know exactly but it really looks like he didn't know that he was being recorded yeah that's probably at that moment which kind of fucking sucks like i know that like dude streaming culture has gone so off the rails at this point with irl streaming and stuff like that and there's a million ethical problems but it's like he shouldn't have been saying that whether he was on camera knowingly or off camera to a random person at a convention so i was like come on man And we're like, it just feels weird to be live streaming and not tell somebody and then ask them about stuff.

2:25:46Colin Moriarty:Feels a little slimy to me, but I totally agree.

2:25:49Dustin Furman:I think and that's going to be again that you were talking about big dystopian problems. That's going to be another big problem. I remember being at PSX and this was a long time ago in 2014 and someone was wearing Google glasses when they were talking to me.

2:26:01Chris P.:And I'm like, I'm not really comfortable with this. Like, yeah. It's just weird. you know.

2:26:09Colin Moriarty:Well, yeah, I mean, and now there's like the Ray-Ban glasses where are way less obvious. They have cameras in them, too, but I don't like it.

2:26:18Chris P.:So I don't want to leave my house. By the way, I found information on the next Santa like.

2:26:23Dustin Furman:All right. So, yeah, yeah. Jason Schreier had apparently written the following. This was back in the summer. About the game, about Corey's game, he says, quote, I'll put it this way. It's not a new IP, but it might feel like one. Maybe that's why people are confused please don't ask me any more questions about this if i wind up reporting more information at any point in the future it'll be in an article not on a forum and that sci-fi stuff that people have apparently believed for years now is nonsense um end quote the sci-fi stuff is not nonsense that was the game that got canceled many years ago but i think people are conflating that right with quarry's like these are projects like that was a that was like a ps4 game canceled i'm pretty sure in the ps3 era or around the turn of the ps3 into the ps4 era like i think uh was like a roger moore the battle star galactica guy and i think stig adnison was directing it that game is widely known to what exists and i was the one that reported on the layoffs when that game got canceled but i think so it's i think it's not nonsense i think it's that people are conflating two totally different things with totally different groups of people and just thinking it's the same thing or similar thing or thinking that they know that that's what the game sci-fi but him saying that indicates that it's not science fiction

2:27:37Chris P.:it's not a new ip but it might feel like one is it just god of war that's kind of what i was wondering because that would be fucking whack

2:27:49Dustin Furman:i'm just being honest with you i don't care how cool it is it's like like at the game and i'm sure it'll be a great game but like it's like can you guys make something else please like

2:28:00Chris P.:fucking christ since kinetica we haven't gotten a goddamn game from you that's not god of war it's enough already do you what do you think the chances are of that 50 i feel like the fact

2:28:17Colin Moriarty:the fact that he said it's a new it's not a new ip but it will feel like one like why make a god of war game that is not really god of war unless you can market it like a god of war game you know you kind of lose your luster in the ability to market it unless it's just like so different and cory's really inspired by like man i could in this universe i can tell this really unique story i have an idea for that's totally unrelated maybe there's some inspiration there for something like that. And it's like, they don't want to call it God of War because it's so different. I don't know. So I hope it's something just, well, it's not going to be something completely new, but it would be so cool if it was something obscure.

2:29:06Colin Moriarty:Maybe not even something that Santa Monica did, but some other Sony IP. Well, yeah, it couldn't be something Santa Monica did

2:29:11Dustin Furman:because they haven't done anything else. Now, God of War is built on the same engine as Connecticut. Yeah, that would be, they make, they make, they make Connecticut. That would be, I'd be like, I'm done with PlayStation at that point. Zachary Hale, Cum Sock wrote in, said, lovely morning, my dearest Christopher. Hello, Justin and Colin. Could it be that Cory Barlog's big secret game might actually be the AAA Castlevania game we've been waiting for? Konami had their own segment at the State of Play showing two PS5 console exclusives indicating a strong relationship with Sony. They also said that Belmont's Curse is just one of the projects to celebrate Castlevania's 40th anniversary, and rumor has it that we'll hear about Cory's game this year.

2:29:49Dustin Furman:Eric Williams, Ragnarok's director, said he'd love to work on Castlevania. This also works with Jason Schreier's claim that it'd feel like a new IP without it being one. What say you? I'll kiss my fish, drive my truck, drink my beer, walk my dog and listen.

2:30:01Chris P.:Thank you for writing in. Zachary, hell come sock.

2:30:05Colin Moriarty:That was very compelling. What'd you say? It's so compelling. It's super compelling.

2:30:10Dustin Furman:I would love for Sony to be open to that. It's just they're open to licensing. Really, when you think about it, what's any different than them doing Wolverine? Sure. Or Spider-Man or whatever. It would be the same thing. It wouldn't be as popular, but it could be the biggest Castlevania game ever, depending on what they did. I think that's a fever dream, though.

2:30:32Chris P.:I mean, that would be fucking sick, you know, but like a PlayStation exclusive.

2:30:37Dustin Furman:We can care of the PlayStation exclusive, but it would be a PlayStation exclusive Castlevania game, like a triple A Castlevania game from Corey in Santa Monica would be insane.

2:30:44Chris P.:It's funny, though.

2:30:47Dustin Furman:When I. When I was thinking of Bluepoint, when I was putting this inquiry in last night before the news broke, obviously during the show here when we were talking about it, that they had worked with Konami and did a lot of work with Demon's Souls, which kind of has that gothic feel and all the rest. Maybe they would be cool to do if they really wanted to do original content like that rumor was about them. Maybe they would be a better studio to explore, but I think that that's a very low probability chance that it's Castlevania. But I think that would be fucking sick. And I would love that kind of move.

2:31:22Dustin Furman:but I think Sony's first parties are generally invested though, not always, but generally invested in moving the ball forward on things they own. And I would assume that's what it is. I don't, I don't, it's almost unguessable what it could be because it can't be a Santa Monica game. So it's either God of something,

2:31:41Chris P.:which is possible. And I've seen a lot of speculation about that over the years, God of whatever, and it's not God of war, but maybe in the same universe or it's, fucking siphon filter or something or colony wars pandemonium new ape escape that would be fucking hysterical

2:32:03Dustin Furman:that would be so absurd

2:32:05Chris P.:if they were doing that but I like could it be kill zone

2:32:13Chris P.:resistance could it be a shooter

2:32:18Chris P.:it seems so unstonied to do that but then again they are investing in that specifically with dark outlaw i don't know

2:32:26Dustin Furman:like what other ip would be even applicable i mean again we can go back older things but again like that that's when you and that's why i was bringing up a joke about colony wars

2:32:35Chris P.:and stuff it's like yeah it could be something old that'd be cool could be something old and obscure like ghost hunter or something that kind of shit would be cool it could be the order although

2:32:47Dustin Furman:I think that that was confirmed that it wasn't the order. Man. Come on.

2:32:53Colin Moriarty:That'd be so awesome. Come on, man. I need to know what happens to Sir Galahad.

2:32:59Dustin Furman:Isn't he a vampire?

2:33:01Colin Moriarty:No.

2:33:02Chris P.:Or they're fighting the vampires. They're fighting. That's right. That's what it is. I don't even remember anymore. All right. A couple more pieces of news before we get into what we're playing.

2:33:13Dustin Furman:My friend Kenny Kovnick messaged me about this story last week after of the show and I went and dug up the press release as well. McFarlane Toys is signed a deal with Sony to deliver Helldivers 2 and God of War collectible toys. Pretty interesting. They're apparently going to focus on these two franchises first and then potentially move on from there. They write crafted with meticulous attention to detail the upcoming 7 inch scale action figures based on Helldivers 2 were designed to captivate fans and collectors alike. Boasting ultra articulation these figures capture the essence of these iconic PlayStation video game characters, allowing fans to immerse themselves in dynamic play experiences.

2:33:52Dustin Furman:The Helldivers 2 collection will include Super Earth Soldier action figures with the following armor sets. B01 Tactical, CE35 Trench Engineer, SA04 Combat Technician, and TR40 Gold Eagle. Helldivers 2 and God of War will be part of the McFarlane Elite Edition and McFarlane Gaming Edition lines. In addition to the highly detailed sculpts, paint, and articulation, these incredible action figures will also include an assortment of accessories for maximum play and posing options. The Helldivers 2 action figures are scheduled for release in spring, with God of War following in summer. Products will be available for purchase online and at select retailers with pre-order details closer to release.

2:34:27Dustin Furman:More details to follow on the incredible lineup planned for God of War. In addition to Helldivers 2 and God of War, additional action figure collections will be released that are inspired by some of the most iconic games and franchises on PlayStation, including The Last of Us Uncharted, Twisted Metal, Ghost of Yotei, Ghost of Tsushima Horizon, and Bloodborne.

2:34:47Colin Moriarty:interesting any interest uh i know that people really like mcfarland toys and that they do a very good job it's funny i'm looking at their website and under their featured products they have uh some kind of ape guy that i don't know a black and white robin some guys from dune and tj watt from the Steelers.

2:35:13Dustin Furman:Yeah. Interesting.

2:35:14Colin Moriarty:Are there are there this this is opened up. Are there a jar enthusiasts that put their favorite their favorite football player?

2:35:21Dustin Furman:There might be. I mean, it's funny like there when I was a kid, there were toys and they might still exist. There were there were toys. Do you know the starting lineup? No, they were like they were action figures, but they were not poseable. And like so you would get like a like a baseball player and he would have like a baseball bat above his shoulder or like a pitcher pitching. And these were kind of like this and they were real players. And these were kind of the things that you would set up. But I think that that has kind of been, I'm sure those kinds of things still exist, but have been supplanted a great deal by the revival of card collecting.

2:35:53Dustin Furman:And like, that's the way sports people and sports people just like to be degenerate and bet on games. So that's kind of like their degeneracy is in gambling, right? Like, and not so much in sexual deviance, but more in the financial literacy aspect of things. McFarlane's dope dude when you read about him because like he founded McFarlane toys with the full understanding I think during the spawn era and stuff it's like the licensing is where it's at because I think at that point people had understood that George Lucas had made all of his money on star on holding the Star Wars license it's like so funny when you go back and look at all the all of his suitors like none of them even gave a fuck about the

2:36:26Chris P.:licensing it's so weird they're like yeah we want to we want the film rights it's like you guys are fucking retarded you know meanwhile george lucas is selling fucking c3po shampoo

2:36:41Dustin Furman:and r2d2 towels and all that kind of stuff and i think so i think mcfarlane had realized it's like that this is what we're gonna we we should nail this down license to ourselves and it's smart so yeah we'll see what happens and he's still by the way he's still the ceo

2:36:55Colin Moriarty:mcfarlane toys which is dope yeah i'm personally not into like the figures that i buy i don't really like ones that are articulate like i don't like the the seams and the over articulation yeah

2:37:08Dustin Furman:exactly i don't like the over articulation of it i think it's lame i do think though if you're

2:37:15Colin Moriarty:you know a kid and you're into hell divers this would be pretty sick to have little action figure hell divers would be pretty fun but um i'm curious when they eventually do bloodborne what those will

2:37:29Dustin Furman:look like hunter yeah that'll be cool um i don't know if this i mean i don't i wonder sony seems to have a propensity towards licensing more and more these days especially in merch i i'm looking at them on my couch behind me now i have some spin master toys that they just released last year for like aloy and a couple of other things and i wonder if these are exclusive licenses or just anyone can kind of just make what they want and it's kind of just a competitive scene it seems like an oversaturation in a way so i wonder if they may be turning towards mcfarland now a very high quality not these toys are very high quality too but um you know a very high quality manufacturer of toys i i think i told you recently i i did a little bit of um of it's free it was free but i was definitely consulting for the person in a way like talking to him about this idea he had i think i told you this for like a a really nice idea for a a playstation card game customizable card game and i i sat with him on a call he's a listener of the show and it was a really cool idea i tried to give him my advice but what i was telling him was i was like i think you could crack this nut like this is not oh i think i think uh you could do it if this is not a closed off company they like like look at all the fucking board games people have made there's a bloodborne board game a horizon board game it's like you can definitely do it i remember telling him the big thing for him was he had a bunch of third party cards i'm like you gotta nix those just go with what they can control you know and show them because it's a cool idea people love their cards and their card games and their toys i love my toys oh yeah it's funny like how much of of my toy collecting and just my want for things like that or especially with gi joe but other things too is like just the fulfillment of childhood fantasy it's like yeah there's nothing standing between me and these toys now yeah to the point where i i remember i i reflected to you years ago that when I realized that I basically had bought everything I was like kind of sad about it yeah it's like what now yeah I'm like I did it it wasn't even that exciting you just go on and buy

2:39:30Colin Moriarty:them yeah something that I've come to terms with with certain collections or you know some kind of just something that I would want to display it's like I'm gonna buy this and I'm just buying it to own it I'm not gonna play with it I'm not gonna and and sometimes in some cases it's like where am I even going to display it? Where am I going to put it? I have I max out. So. But I guess that's the way of the road. All right.

2:39:59Chris P.:A couple more things to get through, Dustin. Zane wrote into us and said, I'm sorry, big one. Oh, yeah.

2:40:06Dustin Furman:Zane wrote in and said, hey, C &D, what are your thoughts on the recent Steven Totillo report that Tencent was high guard's biggest financial backer? I think the real reason Jeff gave the closer spot to high guard, the closing the closer spot to high guard and hyped up the game is obvious now i also personally have a lot less sympathy for the devs who left their jobs at respawn to make a game with 10 cent money take care uh so this comes from steven satillo the journalist from his sub stack game file which is at game file.news he writes sources 10 cent secretly funded struggling shooter high guard wild light entertainment has said for years it was fully funded but not shared details now this is behind a paywall but we get the information from the beginning because there's a little little tease Chinese gaming giant Tencent was the undisclosed lead financial backer of Wildlight Entertainment, the studio behind 2026's most tumultuous game launch.

2:40:54Dustin Furman:Sources familiar with the Matt Hotel game file. Neither company has previously discussed the financial relationship, and reps for both did not provide a comment by press time. Wildlight's funding has been one of several mysteries swirling around the studio in its debut game. Free-to-play first-person multiplayer shooter, High Guard.

2:41:10Chris P.:What do you think of that? Does that change things for you?

2:41:13Colin Moriarty:i'm not surprised by this because you can't like even if you do have a group of developers that leave and maybe have some money you you need an investment of some kind uh it's unfortunate that it's from tencent and you know we've talked a million times on the show about taking chinese money and things like that but as far as zane says here about jeff giving the the closer spot to high guard because of that feels a little conspiratorial to me i'm not saying it's impossible it just feels incredibly unlikely that there was some kind of behind closed doors deal like that but maybe i don't know i i'm not surprised there was someone that you know a company like tencent that was giving lots of money where do you think the money comes from trying a game apparently china so well uh listen i have sympathy i people know i have a lot of

2:42:17Dustin Furman:sympathy for the studio um and this game because i just think again it would have failed it just would have failed differently it would have failed organically by lack of attention or lack of interest as opposed to over interest the more i think about that the more i realize that that kind of culminates with understanding that the showcase had something that material to do with its downfall i think it's worth trying to connect not speciously but trying to see if there is a connection let's say between the decision to put this game in their 10 cents backing and 10 cents clear financial backing or at least interest in the game awards through especially last year remember through level infinite which is their kind of whitewashing publisher name in the west or at least part of their, you know, one of their holding companies or whatever, one of their publishing entities.

2:43:05Dustin Furman:And I think that's reasonable to ask. I also think that there's a Tencent executive that's on the board of the Game Awards.

2:43:12Chris P.:So it's not that these things are wrong. It's that, well, let me back up because I mean these things, I mean like putting the game at the end.

2:43:23Dustin Furman:Let me back up and be more clear. It's not that there's any conspiracy here. It's that you can tell that there's some sort of interest around this because there are threads to be drawn and pulled at. That makes some sense.

2:43:39Chris P.:It's not to say that it all will come out the way you think it will at the end. So.

2:43:47Dustin Furman:I don't know. I like to give I like Jeff and I like to try to give him the benefit of the doubt. I think he's trying. I think he's doing things that are cool. I think money changes hands. Did I tell you that someone DM does? I don't know if you looked at this because I had I've long had this theory that that the game awards were a quid pro quo. I mean, that's that. Oh, that. Did you see that message?

2:44:06Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I remember this message, but I'm trying to remember exactly what it said.

2:44:09Dustin Furman:My whole theory was that. The you got to there's a difference between an advertisement and a piece of the show. Right. And of course, then an award. You see like Razor or some, you know, like whatever kind of weird fucking shit they're promoting. and it's clearly a commercial or for a gotcha that's already out or a game that's already out or a pre-order this ads money pay i always in my mind looked at it and i'm just being honest with you as being like well people would fall over themselves to get into this game show this gives jeff a wide selection of games to choose from and he goes around and figure you know he's a gamer and he plays and he understands things and he has connections and friends and he goes and chooses the games he wants to show um and someone messaged us and saying no like some of that is true and some of it is that people pay and that like if jeff likes your game again this is unvetted this is just what someone wrote in when people write in all the time and tell us shit that's definitely true so just telling you what someone wrote in in a similar fashion saying that like basically

2:45:14Chris P.:like if a game's big and it being there would help the benefit the game awards then perhaps

2:45:22Dustin Furman:that game would be included for free, but that often that there is money paid and that the money asked for might even differ depending on the studio and the game being showcased. And if that is true, that is a little disappointing because it doesn't have to be like that. And I don't think it should be like that. And I think it's a little gratuitous if that's true. Not because you can't capitalistically pursue your profit, but because it should be a showcase of what you think is good and exciting. And if it's a paid advertisement, it should be declared as such, in my opinion. So that gets more into the weeds for me about like why this is disappointing more than Tencent's involvement or whatever.

2:46:02Dustin Furman:But I think, as I said earlier, it's reasonable for people to think that there might be collusion of some sort, though I would imagine it probably isn't quite like that. Just based on Jeff's clear relationship with Tencent through Level Infinite and the presence of someone from Tencent on the advisory board of the Game Awards, as I understand it.

2:46:24Chris P.:That's what people have been saying.

2:46:26Colin Moriarty:Yeah. Something I wanted to I think we missed on that is a big part of this Tencent business with High Guard. How do you feel about the fact that High Guard, I can't remember exactly what Jeff said, but I think they were referred to as an independent team right and in addition um i don't think we were able to report on this it's already been deleted there was that post-mortem on twitter that was posted by the guy i talked to that guy

2:46:56Dustin Furman:oh you did yeah the guy that like everyone was dogpiling on yeah i talked to him so in i'm reading

2:47:03Colin Moriarty:from a games radar article because that's no longer available that that post-mortem was deleted i I believe he deleted his account. He described it as an independent self-published dev led studio full of passionate people, just trying to make a fun game with zero AI and zero corporate oversight. So there has been a lot of pushback to the fact like, well, you sold yourself as an independent self-published team. And while that is true from a technicality, now we find out that you have a huge company like Tencent bankrolling the game.

2:47:38Chris P.:It goes into the whole idea of like what is truly independent. And yeah. By the nomenclature of the industry, they are independent because they're not owned by a publisher. Right. But and. Independent studio, all independent studios, including mine, have financial backing of some sort. I think it's where you get your money.

2:48:04Dustin Furman:That also matters. I think if you're owned by a mega multinational corporation or at least primarily funded by it, you're not really independent. Even if you are independently, you're self-publishing. You're not independently publishing.

2:48:23Chris P.:That's different. Self-publishing is whatever.

2:48:28Dustin Furman:Yeah, it gets a little dicey. I just think this gets more into the vernacular. It's what I said. We need new ways and more specific ways to talk about things.

2:48:35Chris P.:and it's why it bothers me that expedition 33 one independent game of the year it's not independent like they're actually less independent than high guard in my opinion and wild light they have a publisher like that is inherently not an independent game you could be an independent studio

2:48:56Dustin Furman:a cell phone studio self-funded studio these are all different things but the game is not independent and right um

2:49:06Chris P.:high guard is not an indie game. But I also think that that's true for other reasons.

2:49:12Dustin Furman:I think it's almost too high budget to be. This is like what I'm saying. Like it's there's it's too. I don't know. People are making games for nothing. And then people are making games for hundreds of millions of dollars. And the differentiator between them can't be like, oh, do I. Who funded us or whatever?

2:49:30Chris P.:It's got to be like a different thing than that.

2:49:35Dustin Furman:so i'm not mad at them for like i've seen it said it's like all these independent studios have financial backers there's no studio if like if you're if your claim to fame is like we're independent because we have no financial backers then that that means you're literally funding it yourself which could be true but is unlikely if you're working in any space greater than indie like well as we understand like indie like one two three team person teams if you have a team of 50 you have an investor I guess what we say is like does it matter who the investor is or should it be known and it's up to you I guess but the Tencent stuff's a little shady I feel a little less bad for them knowing that Tencent lost the money

2:50:17Chris P.:it's like well

2:50:19Dustin Furman:too bad for them I guess and I have no doubt that they have they've aggressively seeded things publicly I have no and they're not the only one

2:50:27Chris P.:NetEase is out there and a few others um they're certainly, they have their claws in a lot of things. There's no doubt about that. And of course, Ubisoft as well. Vantage Studios specifically.

2:50:43Dustin Furman:Anton K wrote in and said, hey, Sacred Men, do you think that Jeff Keighley needs to do a PR repairing media tour over High Guard? Not so much as an apology, but to get ahead of the internet hate monging before SGF. I fear if he stays silent until the summer show, it will be dominated by these idiots going on LSM, kind of funny IGN podcast. It helps subdue that type of idiotic conversation. Thanks and have a great weekend. I don't know.

2:51:07Chris P.:I do think there's something here for Jeff to deal with. I don't know that it's fair. But it's reason again, this is it's reasonable that he's going to have to confront it. Somehow.

2:51:24Dustin Furman:I think his doubling down on it was a bad idea, not because it blew up in his face, but it just reinforced his own position when maybe it would have kind of dissipated more surrounding him if he just hadn't done that, but really brought more attention to himself again. It's also going to be hard for a person to say, because how could you ever call him a liar unless you really know what's in his head, Dustin, to say like, well, he could just be like, I really did think the game was going to be good. I liked it.

2:51:51Chris P.:Like, like really, like what else could you say to that? It's like, okay, like you, you missed. knowing that every game has an audience of someone sometimes you're going to miss and maybe he should just say that like when compared to the way people feel about this game

2:52:10Dustin Furman:in a holistic way I was an outlier and I'm sorry I didn't mean to mislead anyone I really wanted to share passion for a game that I thought was going to be great and I feel bad that this whole discourse and and this positioning of it might have helped undo it I'm sorry I didn't mean anything by it like something like that i think would be more than enough yeah i think that

2:52:31Colin Moriarty:some kind of statement of you know honesty like that if that is the truth then absolutely i think that would be i mean there's always going to people that won't accept it even if it is truthful or very honest or you know there's always going to be it's going to be an albatross for him for a little bit but at the same time he's probably at the crossroads it's like well you can either ignore this and move on and act like nothing happened and there's a very real possibility that by summer game fest yeah there might be some people that are on the internet that are bringing this up but is it really gonna affect things like is it worth making it a bigger deal by acknowledging it.

2:53:21Colin Moriarty:I don't know.

2:53:22Dustin Furman:Yeah, he's got to figure that out.

2:53:24Colin Moriarty:We've talked about it many times. It's like gamers have their 10 minutes of hate towards something, and then they're bored with it, and then they move on to the next thing. And the amount of high guard hate has already diminished significantly because people have moved on. And by Summer Game Fest, I mean, they'll probably be fully moved on, and no one's going to be talking about it then. so why even make a second splash of it? I don't know what the right answer is. I think the honesty would be nice and would be helpful to his credibility as a tastemaker to some degree, but I can also see letting this blow over.

2:54:10Dustin Furman:Matthew Tomopolsky wrote in and said, Hey, CCD, cool, calm, and delectable. Thank you. With regards to the high guard, Game Awards reveal fiasco. What are the chances the studio initially intended on shadow dropping the game on the eve that Jeff revealed it but had production delays that prevented them from it? How would such a reveal and subsequent release have changed the fate of the game if at all? Thanks to Gibb the Chick in my regards. This is already somewhat known, Matthew, in that, and you can go read about it. It's like an interview was given, I think, by, maybe it was the director or something.

2:54:38Dustin Furman:It was before the game came out, though, saying that they were originally going to just shadow drop it, but I think in the window that they were going to drop it anyway, And then it was they had this opportunity to kind of reveal it quick to the to the release date. And obviously that ended up blowing up in their faces. I'll just reiterate that I think the game probably would have failed. I just think it probably would have done so differently. There's a million different ways to fail. And I think. The way it failed will always feel forced to me. As opposed to just letting it die, which is the worst fate a game one way or the other, I guess, can receive.

2:55:14Dustin Furman:but I'll never really be convinced otherwise on that like it's it is what it is in my opinion like it died very intentionally and it was like it's like killing a terminal patient it's like just let let him die you don't need to strangle him you don't need to beat him with a concrete block

2:55:33Chris P.:he's dying can't you tell he's not long for this world

2:55:39Colin Moriarty:I agree with that I think you're right that it's just Just like the game was not as bad as Concord, but I am going to make a Concord comparison. It just was not desirable enough in terms of its aesthetics, its gameplay, and it was always going to not do well based on what the game was.

2:56:04Dustin Furman:Two more very quick stories. I just thought this was funny, so I wanted to bring this up. This comes from Push Square. they relay word of an interview Todd Howard from Bethesda gave on kind of funny and he said the following so we we know that Starfield we don't know but compelling rumors are that Starfield is going to be re-revealed soon in like a 2.0 kind of version and at that point it'll be announced for PlayStation 5 to come out apparently in April and Todd Howard on the kind of funny interview said the following quote we're moving into a phase where we're ready to talk about Starfield We've been doing a lot of work we like a lot.

2:56:39Dustin Furman:It's not Starfield 2.0. I've seen a lot of people talking about that. So for expectation setting, if you already love Starfield, I think you're going to love this. It's updates and things which change the game, not in an isolated way, but in a meta way. But if Starfield is something you didn't connect with or found boring then, I don't think this is going to change that. End quote. I just think that's such a funny-ass quote. I don't know. I just wanted to read it aloud.

2:57:02Colin Moriarty:Surely there's people at Bethesda and Microsoft that are like, come on, man. Why'd you say that? why just say that because to me that's all i need to know because starfield definitely did not connect with me after 10 hours with it and i thought that maybe starfield 2.0 or what we're calling it apparently that's not what it is i thought this would be a chance for me to give it another shot but hearing it right from the horse's mouth god howard himself saying like no no you're still not gonna like it okay save me the time thanks todd so it's still boring. If you think it's boring, it's still boring.

2:57:39Dustin Furman:Fucking rules. Love that. I read that. I actually laughed out loud last night when I was there. I was like, that's fucking awesome. And then finally, just a word of advice, although it's too late to really act on it anyway, is that it seems like, and this comes from a Twitter user, Sly Sinatra, although other people are reporting on it as well. Konami seems to have delisted Metal Gear Solid 4 from the PS3 PSN and Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker. from the PS3 and PSP storefronts, although the PSP storefront wouldn't be purchasable, I guess it would be through the Vita store perhaps, and then apparently the 360 version of that game as well.

2:58:16Dustin Furman:This is on the back of Metal Gear Solid Collection Volume 2 being announced, which is Metal Gear Solid 4 Guns of the Patriots and Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker, the PS3 port of the PSP game, so the higher res, higher quality version of the game. A little disappointing, actually, just because why are you doing this? why wouldn't you and if you're just them dollars and cents why wouldn't you just say we're delisting these games july 31st or whatever do you don't think you would sell thousands of copies of those games you could probably just raise the price of them you know like you could charge 40 for like to me from that perspective like why you're not doing any work these games are living on sony servers and Microsoft servers, you're not doing anything except for receiving a check.

2:59:06Dustin Furman:Very weird. I just so it's not that I begrudge them doing that, especially with the new version out. You want to have people, but it's not out yet. And you haven't given anyone anyone know any notice. So that's what I was saying. It's that they're just gone. So yeah, too bad.

2:59:19Colin Moriarty:Do you think there's it's possible that there's that they've been paying some kind of licensing for, I don't know, music maybe in those games that maybe now there it's like well we've we've re-upped the license but not for this version

2:59:34Dustin Furman:so it's gone yeah maybe but even then you would think they would just ride it out until the game came out or it just like i don't think what they're doing should be allowed like i actually think that there should be a regulations on the storefront saying like you can't just remove a game without notice unless it's like you're being sued or like something is illegal or something in it you can't just be like yeah this game's gone now you have to give notice maybe if it's even 30 days or something and you could say it's got to be noticed on a blog or something so like no one sees it but like I just I'm not comfortable with that I don't like that and I'm usually pretty hands off with that kind of shit but because I think you should be able to manage your like your your catalog to your content heart's content but I don't like that so anyway those will be out later in the year and so you don't have to worry about that anymore and I'm sure these will be much better versions but if you don't have the physical versions of those or have already obviously if you purchase the digital versions of those those will be available to you in perpetuity all right Dustin it's time to get into what we're playing I guess I'll go first but you're playing it as well God God of War Sons of Sparta talk a little bit about that and then we can get into what you're playing otherwise which is Dragon Quest 7 and then we'll get into six questions comments concerns thoughts and ideas and wrap this bad boy up once and for all as we lead into episode 400 um so God of War Sons of Sparta let's present it with some inquiries from the audience Cody Nardo wrote in to the low sacred studs.

3:00:56Dustin Furman:This question is for all three of you fine gentlemen. Can we all collectively agree that God of War Sons of Sparta is the worst rated game in the entire series? I don't think we need to agree on that. It is the worst rated game in the entire series. The fact this game made it through playtesting, charging a full$30 for the standard edition or$40 for the deluxe edition and locking co-op after beating the game is robbery. The voice acting is utterly abysmal and playing as a young Kratos with so many stops for dialogue, it has made it hard for me to continue and finish the game. Mind you, I'm just two plus hours into the game according to my PSN homepage, but with the lack of using a d-pad for a metroidvania game and playing with only a spear makes me wish i didn't impulse buy it and just waited for reviews and thorough gameplay analysis the castlevania game shown during last week's data play looks miles better than what playstation studios shit out with god of war sons of sparta thank you and have a wonderful day dress 47 wrote in actually do i want to read this one as well no actually we'll save this one we'll save this one yeah i thought they went together but they don't all right so i'm uh 20 hours into god of war sons of sparta i'm pretty close to the end i think there's the trophies indicate that maybe there's a couple more bosses or something i don't know i have to beat it tonight because to remind everyone we're doing uh sacred symbols plus uh review discussion spoiler casting with uh brad and radic on god of war sons of sparta so we'll talk about it much more in depth and spoil the shadow of it and stuff there

3:02:20Chris P.:I will say that I think

3:02:25Chris P.:I think the game gets better the more you play it.

3:02:28Dustin Furman:And I don't think it's great by any stretch of the imagination. Like I don't, I don't feel like it's great. I don't think it has the makings of a great Metroidvania, but I don't think it's anywhere near as bad as people are saying it is either. And I think it's fine. It's good.

3:02:44Chris P.:There are major problems with it. And they're surmountable problems, but,

3:02:53Dustin Furman:but their problems nonetheless the d-pad stuff is completely insane the more you play the game the more you realize what they were probably trying to do but this is the same idea that they had with guacamelee back in the day at drink box which is yeah like all the commands will quickly for powers will be on the d-pad just use it's like the d-pad's got to be for movement do it on the analog stick do it on the touchpad

3:03:14Chris P.:but you can't have it like this and you do get used to it But it is not the ideal way to play a 2D game.

3:03:24Dustin Furman:And I understand some people gravitate towards the stick no matter what. But if you're a 2D purist, it's very hard for me to believe that you play your games with a stick. It's like it's ridiculous. I don't know why you would do that. And it really shines through in a negative way with combat, just in that you have so many that analytics so sensitive in what direction you're going. It's like I'm trying to stab up and it's like, yeah, I want to stab kind of this way because you're kind of it's kind of like you're going up. but you're going a little bit to the left. I'm like, I'm just going up, just stab up, you know?

3:03:55Dustin Furman:Um, and so it's too much, ironically, too much control and, uh, it doesn't need it. The, it is, that's a major problem.

3:04:04Chris P.:Another major problem is that the characters do not shut the fuck up at any time in the game. Like run three, three screens, stop, talk,

3:04:15Dustin Furman:Run three screens. Stop. Talk. Run two screens. Talk. Run four screens. They're talking in the background. Go to the save point. Oh, now you can't just save. Now you have to talk. I like story. I think you have to understand what time it is when you're playing in Metroidvania. It's about flow. It's about exploration. Environmental storytelling. And you could do things like... I love Symphony of the Night, like earning... Everyone knows that, but earning the cutscenes. You go into a room. Maria is there you write she you find her and she gives you a little update talks you talk for a minute and then you go on your way and then you can explore and be free and I just feel like the game doesn't quite let you just be it's just it's a lot I don't even know what the game's about because I'm like I don't like whatever just it's so much you know it's like dude I've never played of metroidvania that even has a quarter this much story in my life now that might have been the whole thing and some people might like that and some people might enjoy it i will say that i do like the premise of the game i do like this idea of pre-god of war kratos i think it's a nice idea

3:05:27Chris P.:i just don't know i'd be much more curious

3:05:35Chris P.:what people think about it that really are more into original God of War plot because as people

3:05:41Dustin Furman:will recall and it's why it's why me and Jaffe's relationship is so funny it's like I think Kratos kind of sucks and I always loved to play God of War but it was never something I was super into because I'm like I just don't like this character he's screaming he's mad all the time he has no depth. I've actually come around a little bit more on him over time. And I certainly like the way he is in the Barlog games, I will admit, or the Barlog reimagining.

3:06:08Chris P.:It's not both of his games.

3:06:12Chris P.:There's some really cool components of it.

3:06:13Dustin Furman:I do think it's beautiful. And I really do take umbrage with people saying, like, look at how ugly this game is, shitty game. Like, what are you talking about?

3:06:23Chris P.:What are you fucking blind? Like, I don't, I don't understand. that to me just doesn't I do think the animations are a little weird sometimes everything's a little squat Jaffe and I were talking about this on that I think they could have lowered the y-axis and

3:06:38Dustin Furman:zoom the camera in a little bit but I like a zoomed out camera generally but environmentally I think the game's beautiful like uh I've taken a bunch of screenshots I'll share them maybe on Twitter at some point but I'm like damn dude this game is awesome looking like the way this game looks is the fucking least of its problems. I also like the soundtrack. I'm surprised by how old school the soundtrack is that it's, it doesn't sound all the time or me, even usually like God of War. It sounds like a retro game. Like they understood what they were doing in that regard. I dig it. Um, and I think the price is actually more appropriate than I had originally gauged.

3:07:17Dustin Furman:I was of the mind that maybe this is a 24 99 game. I don't think I would have gone below that$30 seemed like a little aggressive, but the more I play it, the more I'm like, this is a pretty big game. I mean, if you see it through, I can't imagine you seeing the whole thing and maybe I'm overstepping like 25 to 30 hours seems like where it's going to end up. If you do everything in the game, that's about a dollar an hour. That seems fine to me.

3:07:42Chris P.:So I'm a little bit of two minds with it. There are, I could rattle off Metroidvanias

3:07:50Dustin Furman:that are better than this game. Like it's a completely trivial exercise, but it is not a disaster. And I kind of dig where it's going. And I, and I don't mean in a story way. I mean like where this is like, we're trying a different thing. This is a well-worn genre. People enjoy it as a different way to express our story and explore the world of God of War, I like it. Like, I just, again, I don't think there's very much about it that recommends it beyond the, if you're in a Metroidvania, well, let me put it this way. If you're in a Metroidvanias, I actually think it's totally worth playing. But if you're not in a God of War and you're not in a Metroidvanias, I mean, there's nothing, nothing here for you.

3:08:33Dustin Furman:And I'm really curious to see if they do patch it with a D-pad or not. I feel like that's going to require them to bite the bullet and realize that their whole design philosophy is wrong as far as like it's just wrong it's not it i can't i there must have been an argument inside about this on whether they should do it or not but they made the wrong choice the game would be i the game would be much more playable and i think even rising to a higher level if it obviously controlled better so that's kind of what i have to say about it on a high level but we'll get into the nitty-gritty of it on the

3:09:06Colin Moriarty:spoiler cast what do you have to say about god of war sons of sparta so i've played for just over an hour it was on my channel on a stream if you want to go watch me or get my thoughts as i'm playing so take that uh take my opinion as you will with how limited my experience is i gotta say that the feedback or the the negative response i get it I a lot of the way I framed the stream was about like a lot of the conversation about this game, of course, has been about Jaffe's response, creating headlines about this game, because I think that he did he say was total crap. Yeah, it's not total crap.

3:09:50Dustin Furman:It's not even remotely total crap.

3:09:52Colin Moriarty:my takeaway from an hour in it in my opinion that that i was like i don't think i think that the points that jaffe made both on his video and on our stream monday are extremely valid and especially from his perspective where he was talking about um when he found was you know one of the founders of santa monica that it was like we are have a dedication to excellence we only want to put out the best we possibly can and while this game is not total crap it certainly feels like if you are a huge fan of god of war that you would want something better than this particularly from you know sony not that they you know they didn't make the game It was Mega Cat in a good old Pittsburgh PA.

3:10:46Colin Moriarty:But it's funny because I'm sure that they are making tons of money off of this game. Same time, I feel a little bad for them in that as much as they wanted to do this, I feel like they weren't quite ready for it. like this is not the team that you should have had to make a 2d god of war game because the expectations are just so high that being a good metroidvania game that's a god of war game is not good enough for what people expect yeah from that not only from that series but from being a closer at a state of play like this is a sony game so there's going to be way way more scrutiny on it and to be fair and i think this is a great point that a lot of people brought up it's like if this game wasn't a god of war game no one would care about it yeah that's true but i don't

3:11:45Dustin Furman:like that i don't i'm not crazy about that excuse either you know like well i mean there's something to be said about that if it's organic metroidvania x it's just one of many that come out constantly you're right but at the same time it's like it's okay to be attracted to something because it is something people are saying the same thing to me about hunters gathering with horizon and i'm like yeah yeah it's the whole fucking idea don't you understand that that's that's the whole idea i think that the thing too is just that and you were touching on this is just there are so many

3:12:17Colin Moriarty:exceptional metroidvania games now we're coming off of silksong which was nominated a metroidvania game nominated for game of the year and so that's very fresh on the minds of people there that play these games and so when you're comparing it to those other ones as you're saying there's a million other way better ones so i could understand completely the frustration that it's like i don't want a good god of war metroidvania game i want an excellent one and it's not that i think that the angle of young kratos is interesting but i totally agree with jaffy as i was playing it i'm like dude i would way rather be pixel art kratos like really fucking people up right now with the

3:13:11Chris P.:blades of chaos yeah it's a little too sony and i think that they they're obsessed with companion characters obviously um and we'll get into the two player component of the game which i think is kind of neat but and the way they did it i think it's kind of neat i think people are kind of being a little crazy about it but um i think there's some confusion dustin and i think reasonably so

3:13:37Dustin Furman:it's like well what like why are people blaming santa monica it's like yeah santa monica didn't make the game but they're branded on it and they produced it everything runs through them so they had their hands all over it and they deserve some of the blame sometimes they're a little little too aggressive i always talk about the order 1886 people remember i don't know if you recall like their branding was so heavy on the order 1886 when they showed it for the first time people thought it was their game yeah and they and they removed it from that because they were like yeah that is confusing because it's not your game um i think people are being a little harsh on this game but i and i don't think people it's like vocal people if you go on psn it has a 4.5 which is very good for a PSN game and, and six reviewed 6 ,000 times.

3:14:24Dustin Furman:So people that are buying it and playing it are enjoying it. Generally speaking, 81 % gave it a five star 7 % gave it a one star. So, but I, but I don't, I mean, if I know it, I'm there's certain genres. I just know like the back of my hand and Metroidvania is one of those genres and it's not in the top 25 Metroidvanias. I mean, it's, There are a shit ton of like every Castlevania game since Symphony of the Night is is is better than this, you know. So there are games that come out, but. I think they just kind of got lost in the sauce a little bit. I think the characterization is just all wrong.

3:15:04Dustin Furman:It's not even that it's young Kratos and it's like innocent Kratos. It's just too much. It's childlike almost. I. I think the voice acting is a little wacky with with a rare exception. There are a couple of characters that have good voice acting, but then there are these moments. so I didn't want to spoil it here, but there was like a boss fight late in the game where I'm like, this is fucking dope. Like, this is a really cool idea for a boss fight and the way it's all playing out. Mike was watching, I'm like, this is cool. There are moments in the game and they're able to use the 2.5D nature of the game to do a little bit more, you know, even though they're shielding it as a pixel art game, it's just layered differently.

3:15:37Dustin Furman:They can do different things with cameras and angles and models and whatever. So, I don't know. I again if you're a God of War fan I think you should check it out because you're probably curious about it although maybe you could just watch it on YouTube or whatever if you're a Metroidvania fan why not check it out and again I don't think the$30 is that I agree that the pricing was a little shocking for me at first not by that much but when you when you drop it from 30 to 25 you're talking about a 1.6 drop in price I mean it's not nothing and but when I the more I play it the more I'm like this is a very robust game like I think even by Metroidvania standards this is a pretty robust game um a little squirrely kind of how they count percentage in the game it seems like it's structured a little bit around story and a little bit about exploration but it seems like it's really structured around increasing the number based on the collectibles you find and all the rest so i think people are a little confused about how big it is it seems way bigger than it even is but hopefully it's not so much bigger because again i have to beat it tonight and i'll beat it tonight you know what i mean oh dress 47 wrote in and said good morning cdc with With the release of Sons of Sparta and its not-so-pleasant reviews, I myself think it's a decent first entry for a small studio who has never done this style of game.

3:16:48Dustin Furman:I'm wondering, when are studios allowed to hit singles and hopefully elevate to doubles, triples, and eventually home runs? It just seems like if a studio puts out a game that has some good ideas but doesn't hit it out of the park, they're either shut down or dismissed as no good. I guess it is essentially up to the consumer, but it seems like there are no more second chances to get better or build upon what has been created. Whereas back in the day, studios had a runway. the cool thing to do now is to feed negativity rather than see potential thank you all and appreciate what you do thank you for writing in i i can't help but wonder that about this game and it's the shame that it's an external licensor because it's a shame that's even licensed at all what you were saying earlier is like no one would care if it was if it wasn't god of war you're probably right on at the same time it's like i play it and i'm like god i would kind of want to see them do it again you know like do something but get it better than this lean into now i understand that there are games like blasphemous that are very grounded and i understand that there are games in the genre and games like hollow knight that are extremely difficult in the genre or challenging my take on metroidvania is that they're supposed to be arcadey and not very hard.

3:17:58It's about exploration.

3:18:01Dustin Furman:It's about backtracking, about getting that new tool, that double jump and remembering, oh yeah, now we can go and kind of like go around the castle around the map and like get all these things. That's more what it's about to me. I was saying on the stream recently, it's like Symphony of the Night's not hard. It's perfectly balanced. It's about more than combat. and I would have just loved to see them understand that a little bit more it doesn't know quite what it is at least at this point in the game where I am very late in the game and um yeah I they're not going to get another chance at this game they'll be fine they probably made their money up front anyway but it's yeah it's uh it's too bad in a way because we don't need more God of War I don't think you should oversaturate God of War I think that would be a bad idea the show is coming out the fucking games the remake the it's too much but i can't help but wonder like what it would have looked like if they got another shot of this and i think they would have gotten gotten to greatness at that point but we won't find out maybe maybe they will be able to parlay the experience into something else like a metroidvania with an ip of their own the funky monk wrote in about the one of the biggest controversies around the game he says hey sacred fellas i'd like to talk about ethics around playstation store recently there was a controversy around the new 2D God of War game Sons of Sparta where in the in-game description it was written that the game supports single player or two player couch co-op mode.

3:19:24Dustin Furman:What wasn't indicated is that the two player co-op mode is only a special bonus challenge mode that is separate from the main game itself and only unlockable after completing the main game. Is this deceptive marketing? Did Sony or whoever responsible write it in this way to confuse buyers into thinking the main game would be available for two players? Technically the description isn't accurate but is it purposely misleading enough to be deceptive? also I want to call out that the game still has no screenshots or video trailers on the PSN store listing could this be to persuade players to purchase based on the brand name alone should at least screenshots be mandatory thanks fellas love the show well I will say this the funky monk like there's no doubt Jaffe seemed a little more skeptical of this than me but I'm like there's no doubt that they in my mind that they decided to shadow drop this because they didn't want it to receive scrutiny I mean there's no doubt if they if they tease this game out for four months I think it would have done worse.

3:20:18Dustin Furman:And I think they're not stupid. They know what they have when they have it. It's very rare that they don't understand. This two-player co-op thing bothered me less at first and more now that I think I understand. When I read it as like a fully two-player co-op experience, like you can play the campaign with a friend, I was like, oh, they probably have to say that, but it's cool that they hit it like i like that kind of shit we used to have to unlock things all the time in games hard mode new game plus obviously cheats i'm playing you know during the i've been playing through turok one and two the last few weeks as i've been talking about and you're always unlocking cheats and stuff like that and like and and infinite lives and i like that kind of thing like making you play it in a more natural way and then being like oh there's a little perk at the end of it but now that i understand that it's like a totally separate thing yeah maybe it's a little weird but they might not have had a choice like if the game has two player functionality my suspicion is you have to say it i mean i don't know that for sure but that must be in the cert paperwork and stuff like that and we have two player games so we definitely have at lilimo so i don't know i'm not so bothered by this but i understand people's trepidation about it a little bit more now that it because it's in other words it's not hiding it behind the lock of beating the game that bothers me it's that it's maybe insinuating that's a fully playable campaign game when it's not as I understand it that way and I was wondering that when I misunderstood that because I'm like how does this work with the story because they're separate all the time you know the two characters so anyway all right Dustin Dragon Quest 7 reimagined Mike is playing this as well she's loving it yes what do you have to say about it uh it's fantastic I love it in

3:22:03Colin Moriarty:fact i think i'm i think i'm close to the end it's i i was joking with holly because i got to a very climactic part of the game i'm like this kind of feels like the end and i looked online and because i i was looking at like a guide just to see like where am i at right now and it was referred to as the final boss it's like oh i'm at the end then and i was like how much you want to bet this is a dragon quest i'm actually i actually have an entire another act yeah fake out of me so i looked at a youtube long play and i just went to where i was and there were still seven hours left in the long play so i was like well not quite done yet so i will be finishing this up pretty soon uh i i'm trying to think what else there is to say that i haven't said about it the job system is really cool and fun and very different i guess to my understanding of the original where you obviously have all the different jobs you can unlock to do different abilities and to respect your your character but this version of the game has a moonlighting system which basically just means you can select two two jobs at once so you could maybe it's like okay i want to have one job that i have much higher leveled or max leveled and you can have a secondary job That way you're not like severely nerfing your character for a little bit in order to learn a new job.

3:23:34Colin Moriarty:So and there's a lot of things where it's like in order to unlock this job, you have to max out these two jobs. So I've just been going with my different characters and kind of min maxing that in order to unlock the higher tier jobs that you can do. But yeah, it's super cute, super fun, pretty light overall. all uh there are some weirdly really depressing like uh side quest stories in this game that i really liked um so yeah it'll be the first dragon quest game that i've ever completed and i'll be done for sure by next week before resident evil i don't know colin did i show you i bought some dragon quest merch but not for me oh for the baby for the little baby for the baby uh i bought let me see can i just send this as a a link you gotta see the baby gotta see the baby uh okay let me send this to you it's like a a little onesie with a hood and pants i would wear that he won't be able to wear this one for a while uh but i'm gonna have it locked in and then i also bought there's a little slime hat can i get away with wearing that onesie it might be a bit of a stretch yeah you might you might have to the hat's really cute dude the hat so i i actually used i know i know some people in japan but i feel really annoying asking them to buy stuff for me and then mail to me so i'm using like one of those proxy services so i bought it off like an auction site in japan and uh it's gonna cost it it didn't cost me a lot of money but with baby clothes you're spending all this money and they're gonna wear it for not a baby's grow really fast so he's i was

3:25:25Dustin Furman:like i gotta have i gotta have these pieces so yeah this is good shit i uh i would love a slime

3:25:32Colin Moriarty:sweatshirt with like they probably probably oh with a hood like that yeah maybe you look a little bit like a clansman but that's all right it's blue so well that could be like some sort of rank or whatever i don't know as long as the the top isn't a full point needs to be rounded yeah like it doesn't need to be a point yeah but uh so yeah i would wear the onesie though oh yeah yeah

3:25:59Dustin Furman:I mean we can arrange that

3:26:01Colin Moriarty:we can figure something out whether maybe we get one custom made the long johns with the

3:26:05Dustin Furman:knee pads are really cool too

3:26:06Colin Moriarty:I love the slime so as everyone knows dude there's so it's a whole line at ironic Toys R Us alive in Japan I found out interesting it's a full line at Babies R Us in Japan right now all this Dragon Quest kids merch and so I'm very excited for that holly is playing it as well she's not quite as far as me and you said mike is playing

3:26:30Dustin Furman:how's she how's she liking it i think she's really into it i i've been um i've been watching her play it a little bit too it's it's really cute like it looks great like i i do think they nailed the aesthetic pretty well and uh you were noting that as well and um i know she's really liking it so it's so tantalizing it's just because i really do love dragon quest it's just there's so much to play and like you said resident evil is a week from today i think uh tomorrow tomorrow oh friday friday um so yeah i gotta like get moving like and god award totally fucked everything up you know like yeah because it's gonna that's gonna be like two weeks of my life basically and then i have to move on so yeah and i i want to get through resident evil it's not even that i'm like that eager to play resident evil i could wait i mean i'm very excited about it but i just don't want it to be spoiled and as i understand like it's already in the wild and the good news is that I don't know Resident Evil well enough to like, I've played every Resident Evil game and I understand like the ins and outs of it somewhat well, but like I'm not so nerdy about it where like it could be easily spoiled for me.

3:27:30Dustin Furman:You're going to have to like, remember if someone, what did someone spoil for me once where I'm like, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about, so it doesn't matter. It was something, it was something so funny where I'm like, I don't know, like it does, like I like, I literally read it and I'm like, I'm not going to remember this by the time.

3:27:42Colin Moriarty:Oh, was it Wolverine? Yeah, maybe that's what it was. I'm like, I read it. I don't give a fuck.

3:27:47Dustin Furman:Oh, no, you know what it was with wolverine is that i read the script yeah or like whatever whatever leaked and i don't remember it at all that's not a huge surprise all right dustin let's end with six questions comments concerns thoughts and ideas from the audience over on patreon patreon.com slash last day media of course you submit your inquiries over on patreon.com slash last day media into the thread on the news feed each week that we publish for this show and all the other shows in our network too you've heard them throughout the uh throughout the show and we will hear from six more

3:28:15Chris P.:of you now beginning with snake plissken who says gentlemen and lady boy who do you think the lady

3:28:20Colin Moriarty:boy was i don't know we'll say i think i'm used to the abuse so i immediately thought it was me

3:28:28Dustin Furman:yeah you're right you are being you're being overly abused i don't want i want to do something

3:28:31Colin Moriarty:about that yeah so i don't like you know it's fine the name snake plissken i will forgive it because i i love that that's a great great patreon name it is silent hill townfall he writes is a

3:28:45Dustin Furman:Apparently a PS5 console exclusive Xbox and switch to are notably absent from the platform list on the game's website. Why does Sony still spend money on third party console exclusivity deals with Xbox effectively out of the picture as a hardware competitor feels like a complete waste when the game was already going to land on PS5 day one anyway. Keep fondling that foul.

3:29:05Dustin Furman:Um, I'm I feel multiple ways about this because I think you're kind of right in a way where and I think Jez Corden was recently making this point, which is like, what's the purpose

3:29:15Chris P.:really anymore like it's entirely possible that cannot like i don't want to i don't think if you

3:29:25Dustin Furman:were to say like what do you think happened i'm like i don't think this happened but i think it's possible like well within the realm of possibility that konami was going to be like we don't want to release it on xbox i don't know exactly why you would do that because obviously you're not going to sell very many copies but you'll still sell something it's probably worth it still to do that um switch 2 might just not be able to run the game reliably for all we know so i don't want to necessarily read into this idea the reason i say this is because sony is usually quite overt it's what i was saying about black myth wukong why i simply do not believe that there was any sort of exclusivity deal because they didn't say anything and that's the stupidest exclusivity deal of all of all in my opinion when you literally don't say anything that makes no sense in other words kind of the inference is it's exclusive but you're not saying it and that's kind of the way it is here, but they didn't do that with Silent Hill 2.

3:30:12Dustin Furman:So I need to wait for more trailers and more information because maybe there'll be some little verbiage, you know, like, oh, exclusive for six months or whatever. And then you kind of get the idea that there was a marketing play or whatever. On the other hand, I think this is a good way to kind of feed your single player players, abate their concern about the pipeline, which is reasonable as we were talking about with Bluepoint now earlier.

3:30:33Chris P.:It's getting more and more reasonable. And you don't lose anything. like it's free money. You're spending something. You might be mitigating their marketing costs.

3:30:44Dustin Furman:You might be giving them a better split than 70-30, whatever the case might be. But, or you, or, I mean, the other way this works, I think sometimes is you mitigate marketing risk or, you know, lower the downside in order to get a worse split. And that could be a thing too, if that makes any sense. In other words, we offload all of this to you.

3:31:07Chris P.:We get an 80-20 split or whatever.

3:31:13so I don't know I don't know what do you think about this do you think Sony should still be

3:31:17Colin Moriarty:making these plays um I think it depends it depends on how much they're spending on it because maybe uh Konami wanted to do it because they have been Silent Hill in particular like Silent Hill 2 Remake exclusive to PS5 had the deal Silent Hill F did not and was available on Xbox day one

3:31:45Dustin Furman:probably because that one was a little stinky compared to Silent Hill 2

3:31:48Colin Moriarty:yeah Silent Hill Townfall though I don't know if there's more confidence behind it or something but I would imagine in the grand scheme of things it may not cost them that much money and as you were saying it does feed the single player audience that Wants these games. And like you said, Konami is happy to take the money too, because. I would imagine that just the sales, I'm not saying it's not worth releasing it on Xbox at all, but. You know, if you have that delay then, and it's really good, then maybe it creates some level of desire for Xbox fans for when it comes out more so than if it just came out at the same time.

3:32:33Colin Moriarty:And it's a second marketing blitz. then for the game i guess they didn't do very much marketing though when silent hill 2 came out on xbox it just kind of appeared one day so i don't know it probably is not it's not really that necessary but it gives them some marketing it feeds their audience and i'm sure it probably

3:32:53Dustin Furman:didn't cost them very much yeah there's it's like probably low downside low upside um but just deals to make and i i do wonder somehow sometimes what the strategy is of even mitigating the concerns of the core game are about a lack of single player exclusives if it even matters, if it's even part of their calculus at all. But I just don't think we have quite enough information about how this happened because there were, in my opinion, a surprising number, like a third, I think, of the game shown at the State of Play or PlayStation console exclusives. And that, to me, actually seemed pretty high,

3:33:25Chris P.:that things are moving in a weird direction now. We'll see. We'll see what happens. Rube Rupak wrote in, said,

3:33:34Dustin Furman:a good Thursday, gentlemen. Haven't seen too many folks discuss this, but do we think the God of War trilogy is one game or three separate games

3:33:40Chris P.:spread over many years like Final Fantasy VII? What do you think?

3:33:47Colin Moriarty:I think it really could go either way. My gut says that it will be one game. And my thing too, not that Rube brought this up, I would not expect it to be remade to the degree of Final Fantasy VII. I think I mean ideally I'm not a huge God of War like OG God of War fan but I think the ideal experience would be to keep the gameplay as intact as possible and give it a new coat of paint much like the Oblivion remake remaster that came out but I guess they called it they called it a remake

3:34:25Dustin Furman:yeah I personally have different visual expectations than you do I think I think I I expect this to be like a big overhaul of the game.

3:34:34Chris P.:If it's one package and it's early in development, like it's, I wonder how they're going to produce it.

3:34:41Dustin Furman:Like, do you do all three games at the same time with three different teams? One, they get progressively bigger, obviously, and more complicated in the trilogy. Do you focus on the whole team on one at a time? Try to get them out every two years, maybe? that would still be fairly the thing is that it's not so ambitious because you have you have all the groundwork for the games if you just copy the games pound for pound basically which is what blue point used to do essentially then you kind of have a lot of the work done a lot of it is about just the visual the visual fidelity of the game how it plays if it's a replicate if it replicates the experience well so a lot of the work is there it doesn't it shouldn't take five years to remake these each of these games in other words but my other thought is like do they do one do they do like the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings kind of thing where you do as much of the work as possible in the beginning obviously they're all going to share tools with each other and models and all the rest and then you kind of get one out one year one the next year one the year after that you know um is that too aggressive probably

3:35:50Chris P.:but if you don't release them separately then I just think we're going to be waiting

3:35:53Dustin Furman:for a while and i'm fine with that but it makes me wonder why you even announced it

3:36:01Chris P.:like this is a like if they're all going to be together like straight up this is a 2030 thing right from my perspective we'll see what happens and again i'm still curious about who's

3:36:13Dustin Furman:making it because at least i didn't think blue point was making it and now we definitely know they're not but i i still feel like using internal resources to make this is strange and it really does go to show like their first party internal obsession with going back to old games and this is something that should have happened already too. I feel like they've waited too long. Like it doesn't matter because they're going to do great but like why did you even wait this long? Yeah. God of War is 21 years old. By the time the first game comes out it'll be 25 years old. It's a pretty long time for a remake in this environment.

3:36:43Dustin Furman:KB wrote in and said, hey gents, it's been three years since the reveal trailer for Fair Games and a lot has transpired since then with Sony's live service initiative. they've now seen both ends of the spectrum in the space, the cataclysmic failure of Concord and the breakout success of Helldivers 2. Increasingly in today's live service market, internet reaction can bend the arc of a game's trajectory almost immediately, pushing it towards explosive success out of the gate or an instant collapse where the narrative overwhelms the product itself. Fair Games feels like it squarely fits into the latter category.

3:37:10Dustin Furman:From its initial presentation to its art direction and character designs, it feels like the game has an F-16 laser lock trained on it with gamers ready to fire the moment it resurfaces. My question is this. since the project hearts alpha last year does the extended silence indicate a deeper identity shift behind the scenes with both jade raymond and the original creative director now gone what reason would there be to keep fair games exactly aligned with its original vision unless the tone and ethos evolves beyond the punk looking teens robbing the rich concept it's hard to see the game achieving broad appeal if it's re-revealed unchanged it's going to be dead on

3:37:41Colin Moriarty:arrival what say you doesn't certainly that there needs to be reworking i wonder how what's happening literally right now with fair games because with the horizon reveal i wonder if that went the way they expected with that game particularly with how people feel about the art style and you would hope that sony is learning about like what like what why did concord fail like sure they're not stupid so you know with fair games they've certainly been changing it behind the scenes and i'm i would imagine that their response to these other live service games you would hope would have an impact into you know how they develop the game and yeah if fair games looks very similar to what they originally teased with absolutely doa um and even then like with the gameplay that we heard about it's like that's not going to cut it either if it looks uncool and it plays like something you already played before just not as good it's it's as we've always we've been saying on the show i can't remember who said it first but it's like being good isn't good enough anymore so i just wonder at this point with fair games like if it's if it's certainly been changing have they found a direction that they're like okay we can work with this this could be the

3:39:24Dustin Furman:home run it's the only reason it would still exist at this point right yeah that's the big thing i'm confused about is just especially with blue points demise it puts things in the into focus that they They're making decisions based on revenue churn. And they see, obviously, in the pecking order, see something here, right? I mean, I remember we said this about Kill the Justice League when they delayed it for a year.

3:39:49Chris P.:It's like it's not enough to really do anything to the game. And that's true here, too.

3:39:56Dustin Furman:You could give the game a whole new visual identity, and that might be what they're doing. but that's years of work that's not a trivial thing i mean you could use the same animation rigging and all the rest and like there's a lot of work you've done but in terms of like the visuals like the actual from concept to execution like that's a whole thing and they thought they had that nailed down so which does suggest it's like why not just start again or whatever but that's easier said than done and it's just a little surprising the studio can't be cheap Quebec's not a cheap place. They're pretty high-end developers there from UB and Google and others.

3:40:40Dustin Furman:Obviously, they lost their leadership, which is a horrible sign for the game, but they might want to try to save it. I don't know. I don't know. Again, knowing that they have a mind towards closing studios,

3:40:53Chris P.:it is surprising. They're surprising. I don't know what's going to... I'm still not convinced that game's coming out. but we'll see what happens, I guess. And I do agree with both of you, you and KB, Dustin, is that it is DOA if they don't do anything to it. But I think there is a little bit of the high guard thing here too.

3:41:18Dustin Furman:In other words, something so alluring to not ignore when otherwise you would have ignored it and let the cards fall as they may. There's going to be obviously a great outer effect on fair games when it comes to fruition. And when they show it again, if they ever show it again, it's got to be fundamentally different in some way. Otherwise, they already know what's going to happen and they might as well not even bother. So I'm rooting for it. I want them to find success in this space, not only so they find success in this space, but because they can learn from what works. And hopefully Hell Divers has helped them do that and will be the show.

3:41:55Dustin Furman:And I think, by the way, I think Marathon is going to be fine. like I think it's going to be totally fine

3:42:02Chris P.:and I don't mean that as an insult like people are saying like Marathon is dead I'm like no it's not it'll be fine

3:42:10Dustin Furman:Boof Pack Zach wrote in and said greeting Sacred Ones with the new Castlevania game getting announced I was wondering what everyone's opinions are on the best place to get started into the series are the first games too difficult for a newcomer that wants to enjoy the story beats thanks and congrats to Dustin let them hogs oink oh they're always oinking

3:42:32Dustin Furman:obviously I'm the best person to answer this so I'll do that for you the original Castlevania games are extremely hard but the beauty of it is if you play the Castlevania collection like the retro collection on PS4 obviously playable on PS5 there are really robust and generous rewind features like you could just sheet your way through the games if you really want to do obviously you can set up your own like rule set about how you want to play but you can make it easier for yourself if you want if you want to experience those games i will say that playing the early castlevania games like nes snes genesis and so on are not even rondo and stuff like they're not rondo's more story driven but they're not really about story as much as environmental storytelling and then the beginning and the endings and what you kind of glean from the instruction manual from the back of the box and all the rest.

3:43:23Dustin Furman:So you don't really even need to play them to experience that, but you should play them to experience them because they're great games, but they are hard. If you want to get into again, there's three pillars of Castlevania classic Metroidvania 3D 3D is basically dead. I wouldn't even worry about that right now. Metroidvania. I mean, obviously Symphony of the Night is the best is one of the best games of all time. Not just best Castlevania game and then there's the classic games which begin with Castlevania 1. So you have different options, but maybe if you want to kind of ease into it a little bit more.

3:43:51Dustin Furman:You go with Symphony of the Night first and see if you like it. And then you can always go backwards into the more traditional 2D linear side scrollers. I'm the Silent Minority wrote in and said, Dear Sacred Trinity of the Symbols, I played Ball Pit recently after hearing it discussed on Sacred Symbols. Which made me wonder, do you see yourselves as tastemakers within the PlayStation ecosystem? What do you think about your real world influence on what people actually play and spend money on? I'll hang up and be hung. Very well. Now, do you mean like, because that's bad English. Do you mean that you're hung?

3:44:23Dustin Furman:Because you want to be, if you're going to be hung, you mean be hanged? It's one of my English pet peeves. People are like, he should be hung. It's like, no, he should be hanged is actually the proper language.

3:44:37Chris P.:Maybe he's well hung. That's what I'm saying. I wonder if he needs it like that.

3:44:39Dustin Furman:Is he an English aficionado, perhaps? Yeah. All right. So have you ever thought about this? I've thought about this a great deal in my career.

3:44:49Colin Moriarty:yeah i i think that there is certainly among our audience and people that listen to us we have a great deal of influence um because people tell me all the time like oh i decided to play this because you recommended it you and hearing you talk about it i decided to pick that up um and that extends beyond games i love people sometimes message me and be like i started listening to jimmy world because of you and now they're one of my favorite bands i'm like dude that's awesome i love to hear stuff like that but i maybe you colin i don't consider myself a tastemaker like dustin's one of the premier tastemakers in the playstation ecosystem it's like no i don't think so um i i think that would be cool i mean certainly there are like i don't know i have had a few youtube videos that have really popped off that certainly had influence outside of our community like the playstation 5 pro video i did got over 100k views certainly that had some kind of tastemaker approach or tastemaker in terms of how people felt or at least confirmed how people were feeling about the ps5 pro to some degree but i i don't think i'm at the level where it's like i talk about a game on sacred symbols and then suddenly the developer sees a boost on their that day's sales on PSN.

3:46:18Dustin Furman:I think that, yeah, I personally don't have taste making powers anymore. And I don't know that I ever individually did. But when I was a, when I was a critic at IGN for many years, I definitely, and I've talked about this before, like because publishers would tell me, it's like my coverage of games materially helped certain games. I always bring up Ni No Kuni. Like that's definitely a game. my coverage on IGN had a major role in propagating that game in the West. We gave it all sorts of exclusives and cover story footage. We had the exclusive review, all that kind of stuff. Catherine's another game that I had, I think, a lot with helping propagate amongst a more skeptical audience.

3:47:01Dustin Furman:Danganronpa is a series that I think I had a lot to do with helping propagate during my IGN days, but it's not about me. it was about the choices I made and then the platform I had so once that platform that platform is irrelevant now really comparable to what it was or like that was the shit if you if you had like the top story on IGN that was a big deal or GameSpot or whatever um so I think I was a tastemaker in some way at some point but it was really more by virtue of just my proximity to the brand these days like my own people make fun of my own gaming tastes I actually I mean this would be something I think anyone would think is I think my tastes are pretty impeccable um I think I have a great i i like variety i like a lot of different things and i like to try things and i like to keep an open mind about games and sometimes you know you get your ass bit like you did with my like i did with mind's eye and sometimes you're pleasantly surprised you keep expectations low but i like to um i like to play a lot of different things and something like ball pit like ball pit was was huge beyond me like the things i i like more when people like when i know that there are games out there that people are not playing comparable to what they what they should be and that people check those games out and love ish is the most recent example of that where like i think that game is fucking awesome and it doesn't seem like anyone's really playing it and that's not no one's fault it's just crowded out there so i take a lot more i i take a lot more pride in thinking that like i might have sold the audience 100 copies of love ish than i did in turning them on to the last of us factions or something like that um and i do try to take it seriously in that i try to tell you what I think straight up.

3:48:36Dustin Furman:And I do think that me getting, you know, I don't get games for free anymore and haven't for many years. And that really began by choice. And now I just don't talk to PR really at all anymore. It changes your valuation of games, I think. And I think that that's real. And I'm not, I'm not mad at people for getting, I do, I got fucking literally five, six, 700 games for free or something in my career. It was like something, you know, something insane. It's like, that's awesome. But putting your money where your mouth is waiting to play at the same time everyone else plays and experiencing it in some holistic way is me trying to tell the audience that I am taking it more seriously and that I want, you know, or I've always taken it seriously, but I do take it seriously.

3:49:15Dustin Furman:And I want you to trust what I say. You might look at a game like everyone busted. What's a game that everyone busted my balls about? Like Immortals of Avian. I think that game is fucking awesome. And I think a lot of people would like it a lot if they just gave it a try. But people make fun of me and like that game sucks or whatever. And I'm like, well, you can feel that way and I can feel that way. But what I can tell you for sure is that I'm telling you the truth about how I feel about it. Like 100%. I have nothing to, and you can't accuse us of ever shilling or doing any of these or protecting relationships because there is no shilling and there are no relationships.

3:49:44Dustin Furman:There are no game ads. We don't, we turned down a lot of money for, as I said, was this fast fall, we turned down a lot of money from arc raiders. We turned down money from Nintendo last quarter. We like, I don't want, I want people to believe us. so that's that whole ecosystem of belief i think is fed by access and um

3:50:07Chris P.:i'm just trying to tell you what i like and what i don't

3:50:11Dustin Furman:kyle day wrote in said hello to my favorite trio well sorry why don't more studios release demos these days after the state of play last week i decided to download a few of the demos mentioned pragmata mina the hollower and darwin's paradox i had been undecided on mina and pragmata but will be day one on one now. Pragmata was awesome. Other than the work to make the demo, what is the downside to putting one out? I feel like the number of people that play the demo and decide they are in would be a much higher than those that were already in, but the demo scared them off. To be fair, the Darwin's Paradox demo confirmed it was not for me, but I was never buying it absent a demo anyway.

3:50:44Dustin Furman:There are some publishers that are way more aggressive than others, like Square Enix is extremely aggressive with demos, which I think is great. Capcom is fairly aggressive with demos, or at least access. They show games too much though. The downsides are obvious that you don't want to... It really says what you... Not releasing the demo but having the wherewithal to actually be able to do it internally is a sign that you don't believe in your game ultimately. But you do have to take time to polish it. It used to be a big problem. I don't know if you remember that. Like back... Games used to get delayed constantly because of E3, because of Gamescom, because of Tokyo Game Show, because studios would basically be like, all right, everyone shut down.

3:51:29Dustin Furman:We have to shine this 10 minute part of the game to a fucking sheen. That's what we're going to be doing for the next two months as we make a build. And with the with the collapse of in-person game shows, generally speaking, that has gone away. And I think people are more comfortable just keeping cards close to their vests and not revealing anything that could be used against the game. The other side of it, of course, Dustin, is the demos are good tools to market. it's just that you risk turning people off and so i don't think it's quite as obvious what you should do i don't know i'm pretty comfortable with our games having demos but i can see it

3:52:04Colin Moriarty:both ways what do you think i think demos are great i uh i really in particular like demos that are when the game is done so then you avoid the problem of like well we had to i mean there's still time that needs to be taken in order to make that slice but it's nowhere near like we're gonna polish something up and it's not coming out for a while most recent example dragon quest 7 reimagined had a demo where you could play a significant like three hours of the game and that's what's been great for like talking about the game it's like if you're interested in it it's very pro-consumer it's like just go play the demo and you will absolutely know whether or not it's a game for you or not sure and i think it's absolutely important not important but it shows a of confidence that's like yeah if you we're we're putting it out here come check it out and there is an absolutely real possibility that you may lose a sale from someone who was just curious enough and had just enough cash that they were just going to buy it uh but then they played the demo and maybe they weren't so interested in it and so that's a risk that you take but i think it's a super nice consumer friendly move to be like yeah come check it out and it's so nice too where it's like if you play the demo then it's like well when you pick up the game you can just keep playing super cool yeah so i think we are uh seeing a resurgence in demos overall over the last few years and as you mentioned like square annex capcom they're some of the main ones leading the charge and uh i think it's great uh there are definitely demos i've played that made me not want to buy the full game and he brings up darwin's paradox i played a little bit of that demo i'm not saying it's bad but i'm not into it yeah it's like a 2d stealth game i like i like

3:53:57Dustin Furman:that konami's publishing it makes me feel good yeah it's not for me either but but i like that they're there it was surprising when we found out that they were publishing it because i was like really um they're trying to do more which i think is cool but yeah that that's the risk but would you have bought it anyway that's the other thing too i i think it's it's unknowable like you said the dragon quest 7 stuff where it's basically just the final build of the game sealed off by time is basically like the time demo is is the best way to do it but that's with the luxury of going gold really early which japanese games often do go gold really early comparable to to western games don't want to stereotype but all right that's it that's all we have somewhat brisk episode a little below four hours I think but Chris isn't here so yeah

3:54:45Chris P.:if you haven't noticed yet

3:54:47Colin Moriarty:any closing comments before we go any closing comments tonight Holly's actually out of the house without me right now at a dinner so I'm going to eat leftovers I'm going to play some Dragon Quest work on the show and then it's the weekend so hopefully I'll have Dragon Quest completed over the weekend but But, um... I guess that's it. We had a this was a fun episode. It's a it's always different doing a two man show instead of a three. Yeah, it is.

3:55:21Dustin Furman:It is.

3:55:22Colin Moriarty:You know, it's a little nice to change it up. Obviously, we miss Chris. Yeah, of course. But it was fun. I always as much as I don't like the news of Bluepoint being shut down. It's always fun when breaking news happens during the show. Yeah, it has an energy to it.

3:55:37Dustin Furman:Yeah, definitely. I like to ponder more. I have a lot more to say about it. I think we'll get I'll see if Jaffe is available on Monday. We'll just do that on Sacred Streaming. I'll have more to say about it because I haven't really gotten to digest it or even read any of the percolations around the story. I'm sure people are saying things in random places. I got to go look, but yeah, that's good. It's good. At least it wasn't tomorrow.

3:55:57Colin Moriarty:Yeah.

3:55:58Dustin Furman:Then we would have fucked it. Then we would have to talk like, oh, should we unpublish the show or should we wait or like, what do we do? But we don't worry about that now. All right, Dustin, we'll be well. I'm going to, I don't know what to do. I guess I got to work out. It's still raining out so I can't go for a walk or anything like that and then uh eat dinner and i gotta be god award tonight so that's what i'll be doing nice um all right my friend appreciate you appreciate all of you out there hope you enjoyed our show we'll see you next episode for episode 400 we have nothing planned for it it's i'll try harder with episode 500 um just a lot going on just a lot very busy right now but um yeah that's it patreon.com slash last day media for early ad free access last day media store for merch.

3:56:39Dustin Furman:We'll see you next time. Until then. Goodbye. See ya. 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 was conceived by, is written by, and is directed by me, Colin Moriarty. My co-hosts are Chris Raygun Maldonado and Dustin Furman. The show is produced by executive producer Dustin Furman. All of Last Stand's theme music is by my best friend, Ramon Narvaez. As you know, all of Last Stand's shows, including Sacred Symbols, are fan-funded on Patreon at patreon.com slash laststandmedia. The following names are at the producer level on Patreon, our highest tier, and we're grateful for your thoughtful and kind contributions to our independent endeavor.

3:57:24Dustin Furman:Thank you.

3:57:36Dustin Furman:Thank you.

3:58:02Dustin Furman:Root, Daniel D 'Amour, Daryl E. Naaman, Dave Alvarez, Dennis Usel, Denny Would Never, Don Lee, Donald Difford, Donald John Vaders, Double Duty Dirk, WTF, Eddie Smith, Electric MD, Ellis, Emmanuel Perez, Enrique Perez, Entishas, Frail Cabbage St. Matthews of the Diocese of Brig, Gabe's New Gabe Cube, Gary Cavallo, Gavin, Ghoststorm 672, Geo Corsi, Grayson Maxwell, Gregory Slavinsky, Gus, Hush, Jad Rita, Jake C, Jamie Fraley, Jason Arzon, Jay Getter, John Francois Forzi, Jeff Mercado, Jerome Ferreira, Jimmy Rodriguez, Joe McPartlin, Joey Gondaliger, John Schultz, John Zile, Johnny Waffles, John Cordero, Jonathan Coates, Jonathan Cortez, Joosh, Jorge Pal, Joseph Baker, Joseph Lopez, Josh Godfrey, Josh Gravelick, Josh McKinney, Josh Schullinger, Joshua Smallwood, J.P.

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