#401 | Minimum Waste and Maximum Joy

14:18Colin Moriarty:There's no change.

14:19Dustin Furman:Yeah, that's a good point. nothing's really changed Alicia thank you for writing in and yeah we'll be back to Moriarty Cross Jaffe but I want to I think it'll be a lot of Moriarty Cross Jaffe but I want to leave open the idea that we can do you're typing into the window and not to the

14:33Colin Moriarty:oh thank you

14:37Dustin Furman:I want to be able to do whatever we want but I'm just going to stop listening to the to the feedback mostly on it especially because it's frankly has nothing to do with Patreon and has nothing to do with the core business it's just something I'm doing because I'm enjoying it Yeah. Stop sucking the life out of everything that I want to do. Why can't I enjoy anything? I'm not allowed to have any fun. Very strange. You can enjoy things.

15:03Dustin Furman:Merch. Last at media dot store, the Allegheny hogs. They're moving and they are oinking. Dustin, how many have we sold at this point?

15:12Colin Moriarty:I haven't checked since I last posted with you. I know it was over 300. I can look. Oh, it's way over. It's over 400. I think. Wow. So that means for the audience that, I mean, this shirt is absolutely being made. I think our threshold is like one 50. And so we have long surpassed that. So thank you guys

15:29Dustin Furman:for now we're getting into territory where we should get better pricing on volume.

15:33Colin Moriarty:Yes. Yes, that is true.

15:35Dustin Furman:Uh, me, not for you. Yeah. I said it's true. No, no, I know. I'm saying for me not for the audience it was supposed to be a joke there are 467 hogs ready to oink 467 that's incredible instincts good hogs ready to oink technically so you said 467 yeah that's 934 hogs ready to oink i don't like that metric how many hogs i had to use the old calculator there for that um pretty good now we had a i don't know if you saw this dustin we had a um a guy tweeted us tweeted me saying i tweeted at you last year about making a fake team now you'll know that this was an idea i had over the summer last summer and then we finally got it going this fall but what i actually and i told to talk to mike about it whatever so it was a it was a thing i came up with independently no doubt but that's a great idea great minds think alike and i went and looked and I tweeted at the guy because I was like I went and looked at the provenance of when this was brought up in the discord like when we made it official and it was a picture it was me saying we should make a fake like hockey or baseball team and it was a it was a link to his tweet um and so I tweeted him back and I'm like dude that's really funny and I I've been corresponding with him privately we're gonna send him a bunch of free shit including a free Allegheny Hogs uh shirt he didn't come up with the idea per se but he definitely did put it out in ether and he was that tweet as an example to convince everyone that I wasn't crazy, that this is a good idea.

17:12Dustin Furman:And it's our biggest pre-order easily. I mean, I think like I'm pretty sure the holiday sweatshirts were in the 200s and so on and so forth. So the hogs are oinking. They're going to be out there and we hear you about all the other stuff. We know you want hats and all the other things. We'll figure it out. But the fake baseball season is about to start. shirts are available to pre-order at last name media.store you haven't you have a couple more weeks yes till march something you haven't told march something just do it now because every time

17:45Colin Moriarty:every time we do a pre-order the week after we end it someone's like oh can i still get one it's like if you're don't do that don't be that guy don't be that guy if you want it i'm not saying you have to buy i'm just saying if you think you want it just just pull the trigger bro and then And don't ask us later because we can't do anything for you at that point.

18:03Dustin Furman:Inflation is so bad that if you buy it now, it's like Weimar Republic shirt buying. The price might go up by the time you order it. That's not true. It won't happen. Nevitz wrote in about this, though, and said, hey, sacred gents, I'm glad to hear that the Hogs are going to the World Series. They're minor league.

18:17Colin Moriarty:Yeah.

18:17Dustin Furman:We have to get. Come on. Get the story straight. I love the idea of these shirts and the insane lore that will spread across the United States about this great American team. That's good. sadly my wife would not allow me to purchase such an amazing product i would have committed seppuku if i had found out that the short funding failed by a single vote i ask that you bathe in the glory of your achievement and don't forget to let him oink don't forget nevitz to get a divorce

18:40Colin Moriarty:dude thank you for writing in come on man don't you if your wife isn't letting you spend i don't know if anyone your financial situation so maybe maybe you're down bad and she knows that you are an overspender that might be a different situation but i find the people that tell me that say like oh my wife i have to i have to clear it with my wife or something they're never they're never down and out they just got someone that's a little too controlling yeah so you got to sort that out yeah you got it this might be a sign it might be i don't know why we tried it we're

19:19Dustin Furman:trying to get people divorced at this point i don't understand we're trying to speed run yeah

19:24Chris Santis:i think uh i don't know man like it seems this kind of this this feels like um if if your wife is not letting you spend that money on a shirt you must have done something yeah yeah you know i mean that's kind of also where i look at it too it's like i could see it both ways but like it's really 50 50 you just caught me at a good moment where like i'm just i'm not really on your side there, but what are you doing that makes you makes it that makes you so untrustworthy with like a couple, a couple bucks? I don't know, man.

19:58Dustin Furman:It's a wonderful shirt. It's a good logo. Love, love it. Love the look. Really excited about it. We'll get those out. We'll get them made and shipped in late May. I believe they will start going out. So get your pre-orders in. We appreciate you. I don't know. I've been married for almost three years. I don't know, Dustin, you've been married much longer, but. I don't have to ask my wife anything and it's not because I'm like the man of the house or whatever it's like we just it's like I'm gonna buy whatever I want and she's this is also why it's important some people ask well why does your wife work for you and do all these things I'm like I it's very important to me especially you know my my mom was in a really bad relationship in the 90s after she got out you know divorced my dad or whatever and it's like I want my wife to have her own money her own choices to make her own flexibility you know so she doesn't have to ask me and worry about what i think about things too and of course we have we have joint accounts and things that we buy together but that's so anathema to my entire experience beginning marriage i'm like i gotta

20:57Chris Santis:ask my wife it's very old school it's a lot older you know i mean it's old world mentality kind of thing like all of us like everything about us is intertwined and it's like i don't know about that

21:09Colin Moriarty:yeah holly and i have shared finances and i mean she doesn't make any income right now but what a loser i know she's unemployed come on man um so it's one thing like if i wouldn't wanted to spend if i was going to be like i want to get a a car yeah and we'd have a conversation about that right or if i was even going to spend like like when i bought this computer a few years ago i was like hey i'm thinking about doing this what do you think you know but like she'll ask this is the thing that that it's embarrasses me but she luckily she doesn't do it in front of anybody she'll be like can i buy this thing for four dollars i'm like why are you asking me it makes me feel like like i i appreciate the level of respect that you have for me and the money but you really you don't have to ask it could be twenty dollars it could be fifty dollars you

22:04Chris Santis:don't need to ask me yeah i but thank you yeah that is nice that is nice i feel like if you're operating as a unit it's got to be like several hundreds yes of dollars right before you're like because i understand like if you have joint finances and you got you kind of have like an understanding of what you have you kind of you kind of have an understanding of what your flexibility level is and if somebody's just out there making rogue like 900 purchases yeah you know that's that's kind of you know makes sense to at least communicate it maybe not ask permission per se but at least communicate like hey I'm thinking about doing this yeah yeah definitely it's valid but like I mean yeah like a$50 like I don't know like a shirt to me is you gotta be you gotta be quite a

22:50Dustin Furman:quite a vagrant yeah I didn't know if you're gonna wrap it up or not or just kind of let

22:55Chris Santis:it just float off I had a bunch of words come to mind I was like I shouldn't say that on a show that's why i was filtering um jeremy jones wrote in as well and said look fats can you all help

23:08Dustin Furman:the husky boys out and get more four xl shirts on the store i want a hog shirt but 3xl isn't doing it for me i don't know what i don't know what we obviously like i think there's a threshold where like carrying these things doesn't make a lot of sense for us but i do but i think the shirts we select especially for the hogs i don't even know if they make this particular shirt bigger than 3xl And I think that's why we stopped. So we have no problem with the obese and the morbidly obese. You're very welcome. I just, I don't know like why they don't make the shirts bigger than that. But we would, we would sell you a shirt if we could.

23:44Colin Moriarty:Yeah. If, if there's enough demand, we, so the premium shirts, you're right, Colin, the premium shirts only go up to three X. We could technically, well, no, because we can't order just like five, four X. shirts of another type.

24:00Dustin Furman:We could charge you more for that shirt for the volume discrepancy, because obviously the volume would not be there. And so we would be paying a lot of money. The print, the silk screen, I guess, would already be done or whatever they do. So I don't know. I don't know. It's something to consider in the future. We're not doing that for the Allegheny Hogs right now, but I feel bad because I know a lot of people are in that range and would want to buy merch, but it's just hard for us to accommodate things within the constraints of the material we're using because we're trying to source things if not domestically from fair trade you know fair not fair trade but fair well yeah fair trade fair trade trade and fair treated countries and like honduras and sure um so it's tough i can give you some shitty chinese stuff if you want they'll probably make it up to 7xl yeah and then and then the guy who made that shirt will have jumped in the suicide net and he wouldn't have died unfortunately for him no no he'll be safe

24:52Chris Santis:worse than death yeah safe and sound they're gonna put him back in bed for his next shift get him ready i don't know man but like i i we i've gotten this type of request as well and it's like go to the gym until you can fit into the shirts that we have like i don't know like i don't know what to tell you like what what is i want to see a visualization like um now he could be like a like a shack maybe he's like you know maybe he's like actually maybe it's not fat per se but he's like mega like super built like super tall he's like six eight he's listening to a playstation podcast i'm betting that it's probably the other thing um but i'm trying to find like a visualization

25:40Dustin Furman:of like how you know like a person in each of the shirts like here's a small here's a medium

25:46Chris Santis:right it's hard to do especially because like different companies have different like you know like medium in certain companies is like a large yeah yeah whatever so it's all

25:56Dustin Furman:completely fucked actually something happened with adidas at some point where i i wore a 10 shelto forever and then suddenly i started like i'm like these don't fit anymore yeah and now and i had to actually go down to a nine and a half which i'm like a nine and a half and then i but all my other shoes are tens still yeah these things just uh happen i guess i don't know yeah maybe i'm just getting smaller i'm foot binding like a japanese woman sacred symbols is sponsored by better help a novel way to seek to talk therapy you may need learn more now for yourself at betterhelp.com slash symbols where you can get 10 off your first session my friends it really is quite easy.

26:35Dustin Furman:We're all human, being human means we all deal with extremely similar life experiences, and there are people out there trained to listen to you and help you through whatever life might be throwing at you, so you can find your way through to the other side. And I don't recommend therapy flippantly or without any sort of knowledge. I first went to therapy as an elementary school student in 1992 when my parents got divorced, and ever since then, I've dipped in and out of therapy when needed, throughout various chapters in my existence when things got to be a little too much. While therapy can be useful in perpetuity for many people, I challenge those of you out there who might be skeptical to keep an open mind and simply try it for a season, see what it might do for you.

27:12Dustin Furman:And with BetterHelp, the barriers to entry to therapy are basically all eliminated, ensuring that the only person stopping you from getting therapy is you. BetterHelp is extremely affordable, for instance, so if you don't have health insurance or if you're underinsured, it might be a viable option for you. All sessions are conducted remotely, whether via audio, video, or just by text, maximizing the convenience factor. And with a legion of more than 30 ,000 licensed therapists at their disposal, BetterHelp's practitioners have scored an average of 4.9 out of 5 stars over 1.7 million client reviews and counting.

27:41Dustin Furman:It's time for you to worry about your mind, spirit, and outlook. And BetterHelp is here to assist. Your emotional well-being matters. Find support and feel lighter in therapy. Sign up now and get 10 % off your first session at betterhelp.com slash symbols. That's B-E-T-T-E-R-H-E-L-P dot com slash S-Y-M-B-O-L-S. Again, for high quality, remote, affordable, convenient, and effective therapy, head to betterhelp.com slash symbols today.

28:07Chris Santis:Blizzard Entertainment presents Midnight, the newest expansion for World of Warcraft. Midnight calls every hero home to Azeroth. All paths lead to this moment. Zalatath rises, the void follows, and the Sunwell stands in peril. Raiders, explorers, storytellers, newcomers, and legends alike. This is your world, your story, your moment. Because Azeroth is home, and home is always worth fighting for. Available now at worldofwarcraft.com.

28:38Dustin Furman:Let's get into some topics of discussion. Stretch our legs a little bit. Kalman Boko wrote in. Said, hi, Kalman, Chris, and Dustin. A long-time listener, first time writing in. I'm going through a rough breakup right now. I moved to New York City from Baltimore about a year ago to be with my ex, and we broke up last Friday through a loud public argument in the middle of midtown Manhattan. I had even saved up for a ring, which was unfortunate. I've really appreciated sacred symbols this past week. It's been the only times I could forget I was going on and just smile. I wanted to ask if I could get a shout out to my old college roommate, Brady Rubenstein, or Rubenstein, for helping me through this difficult time.

29:11Dustin Furman:We became friends through discovering we both listened to sacred symbols back in 2018 during college, and I gave him a call a few days ago and wanted to thank him for his advice he gave me. He's a great guy. I'm really grateful for you guys for providing a distraction for Brady and the rest of my friends for keeping checking in on me these past few days. Thanks for the laughs and your donation. Keep fucking that chicken. Sorry to hear this, but I wanted to tell you that there is a bright spot. You said this verbatim quote, I had even saved up for a ring, which was unfortunate. You didn't buy it, right?

29:41Dustin Furman:Hopefully.

29:42Chris Santis:Yeah.

29:43Dustin Furman:There's nothing unfortunate about having many thousands of dollars. Propel yourself forward with it. you can you can go get a pretty decent escort for that too if you wanted to if you really want

29:54Colin Moriarty:to forget about everything but look temporary forget right yeah right i think uh i don't know

30:01Chris Santis:man that's that's that's a bummer but like i do you're you're in a you're gonna be in a better position as a result of it i think uh you know these things happen and it's ultimately good for us i think also low-key manhattan's a fantastic place to break up that's like it's a perfect place it's like the perfect mood you go outside it's like nighttime people are still walking around smoke a cigarette in the rain oh it's just it's it's there's there really is no better place than to sit outside in public in somber motion than in than in that place at night so like have

30:31Colin Moriarty:a good time yeah enjoy yourself enjoy yourself the thought of smoking a cigarette in the rain in new york city after a breakup like i almost i don't want to get broken up i'm in a very happy

30:40Chris Santis:relationship but that sounds awesome yeah it's yeah i've never smoked a cigarette uh i don't think i knew never once i've been i've been close that's so interesting i've been close but like i think it's really the smell you know it's just like i'm just like you say just smoke a cig you never smoked a cig no i've never smoked a cigarette in my life that's so interesting i've been around you never took a hit no never wow i found it so like there's something i don't know I just I was around a lot of people who smoked and I dated a girl who smoked for a while and I remember being like I don't know if I I don't know if I appreciate whatever whatever's going on yeah

31:16Colin Moriarty:here I get it but I think that habitual smoking is I don't know if gross is the right word but I wouldn't want to be around that absolutely not and it's been at least a year plus since I've had a sig yeah and you know like there's like a bunch of memes like you know second beer you're like most of the way through the second beer and the urge begins. It's like, ah, man, the Sig, man. Yeah. Oh, if only it, dude, if it wasn't, if it didn't make you smell terrible and kill you, I'd be.

31:50Chris Santis:Those are pretty, those are pretty big.

31:52Colin Moriarty:If those two things weren't part of it, man, I'd be smoking right now on this show. Yeah.

31:58Dustin Furman:Yeah. Well, not anymore.

32:00Colin Moriarty:Locks locks off the side. Good for him. Good for him.

32:02Dustin Furman:That's very difficult to do. Is he really? i guess i know that's i mean maybe he does it off camera but yeah it's just surprising because i

32:09Chris Santis:always i always imagine lockmore like waking up in the morning and having a cigarette and egg

32:13Dustin Furman:sandwich you're right right yeah i could see that but yeah apparently he's uh he's stopped and that's that's wonderful um yeah it's funny because like my growing up no one in my life really smoked when i was very young except for my dad who smoked and he i was talking about this with michael like even into i want to say even into the early 2000s like he was just smoking in the house and i don't remember it really being a everyone did that it's just so funny how things changed like everyone used to smoke inside like change smoke inside my grandma's house and all that kind of stuff and i don't remember it being like extra funky or anything like that but maybe it's because everyone did it and so like you would go you'd go in between these houses where everyone

32:55Chris Santis:was smoking cigarettes and you get inoculated to the aroma it's like when you go into um like a farm town and everybody's like it absolutely doesn't smell like shit 100 % of the time here

33:06Dustin Furman:right you come nose blind to it and uh smell this manure but what's so funny about cigarettes are so interesting to me for multiple reasons is like I've never been a regular cigarette smoker I've never like I don't think I've ever even bought a pack of cigarettes I I did smoke as I've said before I have de jorams for like a semester in northeastern and I did buy those but um and I realized they would like get me they would almost make me more stoned than smoking weed because the BBs like they like don't burn like they go on forever and ever it's crazy it's like smoking a cigar but the thing about cigarettes that always strike me as someone who smokes joints is cigarettes are so harsh that like I can't compare to a joint that I can't even believe that actually like these are like proliferated over many generations and overall it's like people like oh man weed or am I I'm like, dude, weed is like the smoothest thing in the world compared to a cigarette.

34:02And when I smoke a cigarette, I still cough to this day, which is crazy.

34:08Dustin Furman:Do you understand how weird that is?

34:11Chris Santis:Like, not if you not if you know what's in a cigarette, you know, that's kind of the thing that it always turned me off. Like everything I would hear about is just like, that's not good. And then it smells bad. And then it like it cakes the walls after a certain. Yeah, the walls bleed nicotine. the walls bleed and it's like i don't know dude i just i never was attracted to it i like the aesthetic of it i appreciate it for like you know like i get it i get what's cool about it but i was always i don't know yeah i like cigars oh cigars every now and again cigars are great

34:41Dustin Furman:but but i always cross the threshold of cigars this is the thing and actually when my friend mike patelli was here last summer and he brought cigars and we were smoking in my backyard there comes a point where like i get really nauseous if i go beyond i don't want to say maybe a little beyond half like i have to put the cigar up and i don't know what that's all about and i'm not i know how to smoke a cigar i'm not inhaling it or anything like i'm not fucking stupid there's just there's something about it where i'm like dude i gotta go literally lay down because i feel like i'm gonna throw up after a while i have to know when to put it up

35:14Chris Santis:no no more than half i think yeah it's like the safest like that's how i do it too like i put it down it's just save the rest for later or something but there was a uh there was a cigar

35:22Dustin Furman:there was a place in san francisco i don't know if it's still there i don't remember the name of it there's a cigar bar it's the only place in san francisco you can smoke inside and it was because it was like grandfathered in and uh i went there with fran mirabella who used to be the director of video at ign oh yeah yeah and um and nick scarpino and a couple other people and i like almost threw up outside the place because i like smoked too much and i don't know yeah i don't know what that's all about and i'm like dude like i can smoke like literally joint after joint to my head and be fine i smoke one cigarette and really inhale it and i'm fucking like coughing like i have never smoked in my life um and i thought you guys would find this funny too i don't know if i've ever mentioned this my dad rolled my dad my dad my dad is a very new age dude which is very funny when you know him and look at him because he's a built buff dude even in his mid-70s but he like he loves like all this you know he takes like all these supplements and he like fucking meditates and does all this kind of stuff.

36:17Dustin Furman:And he loved American spirits, right? Like that was his, that was, but then he started rolling his own cigarettes. And I was too young to really even know why it was funny. But like my friends would come over and be like, dude, is your dad smoking joints? Because like there would be an ashtray with like, you know, and it would be like joint looking things. But I'm like, no, it's tobacco. And like everyone thought my dad smoked weed, like really 100 % when I was a kid. And I'm like, he really doesn't. He just likes rolling his own cigarettes for some reason. you know it's probably cheaper to buy the tobacco oh it's easily i would imagine but uh yeah and you know what else is what else is funny is like weed smell i've known i've known this my whole smoking experience because of college and how much trouble we would have gotten into if this wasn't true is weed kind of just goes away i don't know what that's all about like the smell like it'll stink in a room you'll have like smoked in it and then like you'll go and like you'll leave a window open and then you'll come back hours later and it's gone yeah like it really is and cigarettes just stick to everything like if you smoke a if you smoke a joint and have a sweatshirt on and you smell it it's like oh it smells like weed and you just put it on your couch or everything you wake up the next day and you smell it it doesn't smell like weed anymore but if you smoke cigarettes in that sweatshirt like the only way it's not going to smell like cigarettes is if you wash it now that's always been interesting to me too same thing with cigars yeah but i think but

37:36Chris Santis:I think cigars I think cigars smell way better like I like the vibe of a cigarette like like if I can smell a cigar on my jacket I feel like I've done something if I smell a cigarette on my jacket

37:45Dustin Furman:I feel like oh god I gotta get degenerate shower I do love you know what I love the smell of Chris is is pipe tobacco I've never smoked it I don't know if I know it but it's so good it's so distinct

37:57Colin Moriarty:you don't talk about Dustin yeah I used to smoke a pipe in college oh shit it was awesome me and the boys and the boys smoke pipes smoke cigs smoke dude we were are you talking about

38:09Chris Santis:like uh like sherlock holmes like pipes yes that's awesome i mean that's good shit yeah like

38:14Dustin Furman:where you keep it it just stays lit right which is so cool like as long as you puff it every couple minutes probably it'll stay right yeah yeah yeah i love that like you light up once fucking monocle on hell yeah so it was it was great it was it was very good whenever i smell that I'm like damn that's so good and it's I've never done it though I mean I actually never even

38:36Chris Santis:never done it but I would yeah if you're if you're if you're smoking a pipe you can't not use the word splendid while you're using it at some point splendid it's a splendid bit of kush

38:52Dustin Furman:someone wrote in I didn't I didn't use it but apparently on SNL this weekend Trump they did like a Trump thing and he brings up the GameCube did you guys oh no I didn't see that yeah I gotta look into that it would just remind me of your impressions George wrote in and said

39:08Chris Santis:the GameCube I love their small discs so cute I can't even imagine the context of how that would even come up in anything like like the war in Iran has anything to do with like GameCube I guess I don't know yeah I don't know let me see I can't imagine that

39:27Dustin Furman:Yeah, yeah, there is there. Yeah, there is. I just looked it up. It was from a cold open, I guess. Oh, that makes sense. Those are always weird. George wrote in and said, no time for preamble. This is important. Joey Doria has been in film acting in film, television and video games since the late 70s. While he has lent his voice to some video games, we surely know Ratchet and Clank, Future, A Crack in Time, Bioshock Infinite. His most prominent role was as Bozo the Clown on the Bozo show from 1984 to 1994. thankfully mr dioria is still with us but when his time comes we'll be the world's first rip

39:59Chris Santis:and peace bozo i never thought about this somehow i actually was under the assumption that every bozo related person was dead yeah me too long dead like 1994 i didn't even know there was a bozo that late i don't know that's late that's that's a late era that's like bozo shipwden like very late into the into the bozo timeline oh not an episode chris ups me with an anime joke yeah he got you he fucking nailed you wow so you said something that people really enjoyed last week what was it oh like uh was it like autism and cursive or something like that i don't remember what i said people were like i have no idea that's very funny oh brain damage and cursive i don't remember what i was talking about though i don't remember what the conversation like what the context was um i don't know jory that's a great question i just i have nothing to say about it i

40:47Dustin Furman:just thought it was funny and it's true we'll have to kind of confront this at some point an r.i.p

40:51Chris Santis:in peace bozo so do you say r.i.p in peace bozo or do you say r.i.p bozo r.i.p bozo i understand yeah i think r.i.p bozo flows a lot better i get r.i.p in peace is funny but bozo is funny as well and i feel like it's two competing jokes well yeah it is but i guess what he's saying is is like

41:06Dustin Furman:would it be the fusion of these two ideas wherein and i think that like yeah i guess it would be

41:13Chris Santis:we'll have to well i think what he's saying i i read it more as like this is the first legitimate

41:18Dustin Furman:sincere r.i.p bozo oh i see i see what you're saying you know what i mean well we'll have to kind of play this by ear i mean when this man passes away inevitably yeah i might be first for all i know yeah fingers crossed i'm sure he's a well no nothing i mean if it's going to be a true r.i.p and peace bozo then we want him to live right that's true like like dick van dyke live dick live i that guy scares me man it is scary it's just scary like that he was an adult like a cognizant adult for all of this time you know yeah he experienced like so much for both of our

41:53Chris Santis:lifetimes he's been a cognizant adult like both of our lifetimes put together and and like added

41:58Dustin Furman:yeah and like my mom's life yeah it's like yeah it's like so upsetting trevor reed wrote in said sacred boys just wanted to say i appreciate the show every week i've had a rough year moving back from atlanta back to my hometown in chesterfield virginia that's where i live don't know how you deal with ear colin but through the job searching and door dashing i've been doing since i moved back lsm and sacred symbols have been great to throw on while my mundane day-to-day this past year or go i don't know there's something wrong with that sense keep on keeping on and give that chicken a day off from the fucking it deserves it um just wanted to say this because i don't ordered DoorDash very much.

42:35Dustin Furman:I would say we ordered DoorDash once to twice a month at most. Micah cooks most of the time or we'll go out to eat, but we don't really even go out to eat anymore either. Things are so getting, it's like, I'm just getting annoyed about how expensive everything is. It's like, we can afford it, but like to what end? Why am I paying this much for everything? It's getting pretty crazy, huh? Yeah, it is. It sucks. A lot of the damage was already done to be frank frank but now like kind of coming into this realization well it's not a realization it's the way it works it's like the price increases are permanent they're never going away so all that inflation that we incurred it sucks but i wanted to bring this up trevor because um maybe i'll doordash a little more and see if i can i'm just going to keep doordashing actually until you deliver something to my house i had someone i don't know if you dustin you probably remember i don't know if you back in uh santa monica i used to doordash all the time um actually it was like uber eats and shit like that but whatever same thing and it's crazy because that's

43:34Chris Santis:when you were most walk most close walking distance wise to the stuff that you would have been

43:38Dustin Furman:oh yeah ordering anyway i used to as i've said i would i would uber eats the mcdonald's two blocks from me because as you know the mcdonald's was a fucking scene out of mad max scene that place of the scene. And I refuse to go there. But you're absolutely right. But I did have a guy delivered to me once that was a listener. And it's like, it's not as awkward as you would think. It's kind of like how I ran into that woman in my neighborhood when I was walking the dogs and she's like, oh, are you a podcaster? And it's because like her son listens to the show and she lives in my neighborhood. Very interesting.

44:14Dustin Furman:You better keep it on the DL lady. I'm watching you. Long piss big balls wrote in. wow i said hello boys this question is for dustin since you're now just keeping polaroids of complete strangers on your fridge can i send you one i want to feel like someone loves me hope you boys are

44:31Colin Moriarty:well what is this allure so here's what happened and if you listen to summon sign or sacred dream you already heard this but i know there's not 100 crossover here's what happened a listener reaches out to me and says hey i have a great coffee that i like i'd like to send it to you i said that's very thoughtful here's my p.o box i get the coffee uh inside is like a receipt and it says written thanks for your order and there's a polaroid of a young man holding the coffee so i messaged the guy on twitter i said hey i got your coffee thank you so much it's excellent and i put the i put the picture of you on our fridge and he's like that's awesome that's 100 percent not me it's like oh and i look back at his message and he said it was from a local shop but because the package and it was so personalized that i thought oh he works there because i've had people that work at coffee shops reach out to me plenty of times sure so i was like that's funny i don't know who this is he's like dude this is the funny part he's like i've ordered from this place

45:41Dustin Furman:dozens of times i have never gotten a photo damn so who is this man and i was like well he lives on my fridge now he's not going anywhere yeah he's there he's there permanently we don't know

45:54Colin Moriarty:who this guy is i don't know if he listened to the show recognize my name i don't know if maybe it was because of it's a first time order that's something they do that's new i it's a mystery i

46:06Chris Santis:I don't know. Is it a clear photo? Is it like a grainy off-putting one?

46:11Colin Moriarty:Yeah. Here, I put it already on the stream. Where is it here?

46:18Chris Santis:Load him up into Palantir. We'll find him. Find him in fucking two seconds.

46:27Colin Moriarty:I can't find it. I can't find the picture. But anyway, so, oh, here it is. Here it is. So this is the young man here. who are you yeah what do you know that guy looks like a person i've seen two million times well he texted me i was like oh no what is she texting that i'm immediately showing to thousands of people it was something about our uh parents dog not eating yeah this is the man hmm okay so interesting now as in terms of long piss big balls i don't know do if if i start accepting people's Polaroids, my fridge is going to get filled up with strangers. It would be kind of a fun thing as part of the set.

47:09Colin Moriarty:If you have an area where people can send you, I don't really have any room back there.

47:15Dustin Furman:Don't send me any Polaroids. And don't send me any Polaroids to send Dustin. Yeah. Because they won't arrive. I'm just letting you know right now.

47:26Colin Moriarty:LinkedIn is pretty

47:27Chris Santis:amazing at helping you grow your small business. We cannot make your email response time faster. We can help you sell, market, and hire in one place. We cannot help you find space for your three desk drinks.

47:40Dustin Furman:Why do you have three? And while we can't help you find the perfect volume for your presentation video, LinkedIn can help you find the perfect audience for your business. Grow your small business on LinkedIn. Learn more at linkedin.com slash small business.

47:57Colin Moriarty:Tax Act is here anytime you want to easily file your taxes. Tax Act is here for the early birds who like to knock them out as soon as the season opens and for the procrastinators who like to wait until the very last minute. Tax Act is also here for the middlers who file right in the middle of tax season. No one ever talks about the middlers, But TaxAct sees you and TaxAct respects you. TaxAct, let's get them over with.

48:26Dustin Furman:Thank you for writing in, long piss, big balls. It's good to hear from you. All right, let's get into the news. There's a lot of news this week to get through a lot. And we begin with, well, actually, we'll have two separate Bloomberg articles from journalist Jason Schreier to go through today, which is interesting. So that's a lot of Jason Schreier. You can go months and months without hearing from him in any way that's relevant to our show. But now we've heard from him twice in one week. And we talked a little bit about this last week, about the rumblings about this, but this is basically confirmation considering the reliability of the outlet and the writer.

49:02Dustin Furman:He writes on Bloomberg, Sony pulls back from PlayStation games on PC. He writes in part, Sony Group Corp no longer plans to release its big PlayStation 5 games on PC, a major shift in strategy that sees the video game maker returning to console exclusivity after six years of flirting with multi-platform releases, according to people familiar with the company's plans. Online games such as Marathon and Marvel Tokon will still be released across multiple platforms, but single-player titles such as last year's samurai hit Ghost of Yotei and the upcoming action game Saros will remain exclusive to PlayStation 5, said the people who asked not to be identified because they weren't authorized to talk publicly about the company's strategy.

49:40Dustin Furman:the people caution that things could change in the future due to the unpredictable nature of the video game industry and that sony's plans are constantly shifting but in recent weeks playstation scrapped plans to bring ghost of yote and other internally developed games to pc two games made by external developers but published by playstation death stranding 2 and the upcoming kenna scars of cosmora are still planned for release on pc this year there are likely a few reasons behind this shift he writes one is that several recent playstation games have not sold well on PC. A faction within PlayStation has also expressed concerns that releasing their games on PC risks damaging the console's brand and will hurt sales of the PlayStation 5 and its successors, according to people familiar with Sony's inner workings.

50:20Dustin Furman:I guess I'll keep reading because there's a few more interesting things here. For decades, Sony's tactic of selling Playstations was to keep 10-pole franchises exclusive to its own consoles. In 2020, it pivoted and began bringing games to personal computers via Steam. Since then, the company has put most of its biggest franchises on PC, such as God of War and The Last of Us. But the strategy has been muddled and confused many players. Most PC releases arrived months or years after the games came to PlayStation. The cadence was never consistent, and the announcements appeared to be haphazard. The company also upset PC players by asking them to create PlayStation Network accounts to access many of the games.

50:51Dustin Furman:Now Sony is looking to take a more straightforward approach, going back to console exclusives. Very interesting indeed. There's a lot to say about this, I think. Dustin, Let's hear from you first. What are your high level thoughts?

51:05Colin Moriarty:This is surprising for sure. And something that we've been in support of over the years, because I think the idea, at least our shared thought overall, was that this wouldn't necessarily hurt anything for them by releasing these games on PC, particularly much later, because PC gamers are kind of just locked in there. You're not going to get them over to your console either way. so why not meet them where they are but clearly uh as outlined here and as we've talked about for years now is that there has been a decline in the novelty of playstation 5 pc releases and so i am guessing you know they're looking at their data they have analysts it's their job to figure this stuff out and thinking like yeah um what what is the point of doing this and that's something that we've talked about many times whether you know in this case we're talking about pc ports but also just sony not being really interested in small amounts of money they are focused uh in putting their time and effort into large amounts of money so uh i guess just not quite adding up for them which is interesting i think there's been a lot of discussion about like well they're doing this because xbox is go is going to have pc on their platform and they don't want you know piece them to have playstation games i'm like i don't think it's just xbox i think it could be all the reasons i already listed but like an additional push in that direction is like okay well xbox is going to have a steam like approach steam has a box coming out and there could be a shift maybe it's not xbox maybe it's not even valve but maybe there is a new market of home theater pcs that could profilate proliferate and so we are technically putting ourselves a little bit at risk if that happens but again i don't think that's a big factor but i think it's probably a factor where they're like this isn't really doing anything for us financially and maybe they do have some research that shows that it is damaging potentially long-term what the console ecosystem is like then i i get it uh it's disappointing for me a little bit i honestly i don't really care that much it's been fun for me to check out these games on pc i'm always playing them first on playstation because that's where i want to play them but it's been fun to see like oh uh ultra wide support which on spider-man or high frame rate or being able to play returnal with a mouse and keyboard i've always thought that stuff is cool but it's not essential for me so a little disappointing but ultimately does not change much for me christopher what do you think about this from a high level yeah i mean i think i agree with a lot

54:05Chris Santis:of that i think and i think another factor though is and i've brought it up a couple times i do think i've seen some people say it's just like oh well this is your lack of excitement for the next generation comes from the fact that you're just kind of ingrained in it or you're like involved in it very heavily like and also like there's a uh a write-in earlier i forget the name but they were talking about like oh maybe the handheld is is the push for the uh the excitement of the next generation that's very possible like i i will say like straight up if there is a if there's a handheld component to this next generation and it arrives sooner i will be a lot more interested than I would otherwise.

54:41Chris Santis:But I do think there is something to take note of in the fact that people generally are not that excited for a new machine this late into the life cycle of their current generation machine. I think that's worth noting. I think that's notable. You know, So I think they look at that in conjunction with all these other things, the economy being crazy, the possible proliferation of a new home theater PC market. Maybe even Xbox is a prime thing in that as well. But I think they look at all of these things and say, like, we really have to kind of make a case for our machine. And the best way to make a case for our machine is, I mean, let's look at the other two people in the space.

55:32Chris Santis:you have xbox who went completely multi-platform and basically tanked their entire home console business um and you have nintendo who has a completely walled garden and they're killing it even if we remove ourselves from the equation and we're doing very very well why would why continue to open ourselves up to that possibility at all when we can simply just revert to our old standard that was working and it and is working for competition and will create an inherent need for our machine where currently there may not there might not be um i think it's i think it's a lot of these things but yeah i don't know i i think i think these are very

56:11Dustin Furman:interesting times it sounds like i agree and it sounds like um well let me start at the top And I very much championed this move for years. I think it's cool too. I think, and this show did. I think it's fair to say that we were in a vanishing minority of PlayStation people that wanted PlayStation games to go, but I never really quite understood. So I guess I will say that it was never the prevailing wisdom in the space that Sony should go multi-platform. And I don't really consider it going multi-platform per se. I consider it being strategic with, you know, multi-platform releases, multiplayer, legacy content on certain consoles.

57:00Dustin Furman:And literally with PC and Switch, I think that they should have stayed away from Xbox and largely have except for with Helldivers because they're such direct competitors. so i just wanted to acknowledge it's like i thought this would work way better than it did and it it's clear that it didn't work very well at all um in fact if you remove hell divers 2's assumed revenue gross revenue from the numbers the numbers become way worse for for their pc releases on a per capita basis and so i just wanted to i you have to acknowledge at the top that like I've been kind of beating this drum thinking that it would be good for the ecosystem.

57:42Dustin Furman:And I don't think it was bad for the ecosystem. I think what the math though shows is that the gains were insufficient. It was insufficient revenue. And we know from their own financial statements that they thought that the level of off platform money was going to explode in ways that it didn't. I mean, you only have to go back to the 2022 and 2023 fiscal year reports to see that they had these like presumed graphs, not unlike the game pass graphs that we saw leaked during the ftc stuff from xbox where it's like yeah this is the growth we kind of anticipate and we know now that that growth was not met because they said that publicly so now i think there's a there are a lot there's a lot to say about why this is and what has happened here and i think we can touch on each of these things the first thing is like what sony's thinking is and this is what i was going to say a moment ago was in jason's story.

58:32Dustin Furman:He says again, quote, there are likely a few reasons behind this shift. One is that several recent PlayStation games have not sold well on PC. We know that he says this though, to a faction within PlayStation has also expressed concern that releasing their games on PC risks damaging the console's brand and will hurt sales of the PlayStation five and its successors. According to the people familiar with Sony's inner workings, the successors thing I think is important because I think that he's talking about PlayStation six home console and PlayStation six handheld. And those things are almost certainly happening concurrently to each other, as we understand from all the different leaks and from Tom and a bunch of other reliable leakers as well.

59:10Dustin Furman:So we have, I guess, a good idea here of what they thought were at least the two big problems, which was insufficient sales, number one, because this is the thing that I think is bothering me, guys, a little bit about this conversation with some people is they're like, they're like, see, like they're going back, like they're taking it away. And I'm like, you have to understand that there was a threshold number where this wouldn't have been a problem for them. It's a diminishing return and it has deleterious effects on other things. And so the number has to reach whatever. It's what they discovered about Horizon in PlayStation Plus.

59:41Dustin Furman:And at least now they know. But you understand at the same time that there's a lot of. There's a lot of evidence that this is a new, a very new directive. And he said that these games were canceled, like the Yote port was canceled just a few weeks ago. the PC hardware that they were making, like not hardware, but like monitors, keyboards and mouses, mice or whatever, like assumptions people, you know, the headphones and the like, these were all for PC. And it seems like that. So you could just see that there's a conflict and a tension between these directions and that they're, they're turning the ship in that way.

1:00:18Dustin Furman:I wanted to know too, we have a couple of write-ins here because there is a big, there is a big reason for this as well. Bren Rose wrote in and said, hello, crew. And this is the bottom. I'm going with this one first. With news today of Sony axing the Ghost of Yote PC port along with future PC ports, presumably, do you think this decision is the result of diminishing returns from Steam releases after the novelty wore off, as you have discussed before, or something deeper? Thank you and be well. The novelty factor is huge. We've been talking about that from the beginning, and I identified that a long time ago because there's no other way to make sense of the games that sold better than others, except for the novelty factor.

1:00:50Dustin Furman:That is one of the major things that has happened here but i also think that the diminishing returns came from and this is written in the piece a little bit just kind of the he uses the term haphazard but the the way that the games are released and the scheduling and like when what comes and what doesn't and why like why is demon souls remake not on here but ratchet is why did you bring return all over and why like all these different things and but this timing and this and you go to this old game and you ignore this the problem though is that you can't telegraph any of this stuff because then you're giving people a reason not to buy playstation and they might have been they might have been just caught between a rock and a hard place with that it's like we can't have a fuck we can't let people identify a pattern they're they're literally by definition cannot be a pattern or people will know when all the games are coming and they'll wait i just think that the the demand wasn't there.

1:01:46Dustin Furman:I liked this write-in as well from a gin pig who says, people spent years joking on YouTube and Reddit that console exclusives are dead, expecting every big title to hit PC. This comment has been posted thousands of times. When those former exclusives did come to PC, the same people didn't actually buy them to prove their point. Now we're back to having console exclusives again. PC gamers are also master complainers, all literally chronically online by default. Dustin, what do you think of that?

1:02:13Colin Moriarty:damn um yeah i think that there is an argument because i've seen this floating around but there's always details left out that i think playstation's pc experiment would be very different in terms of sales if they were day and date i don't think anyone can deny that that if when the excitement of the game happens if ghost of yote released on pc at the same time i think certainly or i guess one of the previous games that maybe didn't sell um as well i think if it was released the same time it certainly would have done a lot better because i've seen people point the finger to that it's like well they're not they're not doing as well because the hype's down and people don't care anymore it's like certainly but playstation certainly knows and i think anyone uh that's willing to look at it honestly knows that if you did day and date release that's like a bridge way too far to removing a reason the reason to have a playstation so um i i'm not sure about you know exactly it's odd to me that that it didn't sell super well to some degree when these games were so hyped at certain points but i guess it just goes to show that gamers really are motivated by what's exciting at the moment almost above all so if a game is not as old then it's not as desirable even if it is a very good game yeah

1:03:47Dustin Furman:i don't what there is something strange about the way the games just totally fell off regardless of the quality of them. It's I would have made it's very similar to what I say about Game Pass in its early days. It's like I would have probably made the same bet they made. It's like, but you're right. Like they can't. You just can't tell it. You can't do day and date and you can't because that would destroy PlayStation, the console or at least begin to erode it away. But at the same time, you can't telegraph like a meaningful strategy for your PC releases because then people just wait. I think Sony wanted to have its cake and eat it too.

1:04:27Dustin Furman:I don't blame them, but I don't think you can. And I think that they've realized that you have to make too many concessions. And look what it did to your competitor, by the way, when they made those concessions. So yeah, what do you have to say, Chris? Anything to add?

1:04:40Chris Santis:I mean, I think the awkward part of it too is that even their success on PC, they kind of have to, they're looking for like a very hyper-specific place. You know, like, cause you don't, you don't want to sell so little on PC that it, it essentially makes the porting effort useless, but you also don't necessarily want to sell so much that it clearly erodes the purpose of your machine. you know it's kind of awkward like if you had spider like if spider-man 2 came out and it sold you know many many many many many millions more on pc you'd be like oh well that's i mean good we're making money but like ah you know that's not necessarily a good it's not necessarily a great sign for the machine in some weird way it's like so you're right they're they're in a bit of a rock and a hard place really with it they they had two kind of completely competing philosophies they were trying to do things and i i agree i would have made the same bet um and to be fair they are still kind of doing it like they are doing it for the things that make sense and i think live service games uh should they continue to pursue those yeah i think i think that those have a home on pc in a way that makes sense for playstation as well um but yeah i'm sure they look at i'm sure part of them look at hell divers and they're like man we could imagine all those on our machine though like imagine if we could have sold that many more millions on the many more millions that we sold on pc imagine we could have had that on console yeah even a fraction of

1:06:17Dustin Furman:that i mean that that's that's the thing is that they would have never reached the heights of hell divers without the pc release and and they are keeping the multiplayer stuff on pc which i think is smart but right it is true that like there would have been a portion of those hell divers players on pc that would have bought it on playstation not all of them not even half of them but you would have gotten maybe 20 of them or something and like i don't know it's it's a uh it's a different a friend of mine a friend of mine bought a playstation device for hell divers yeah like i'm sure like it was a phenomenon i mean especially for sony it's never they've never really had a multiplayer phenomenon to be honest i mean not even when things were going good with the ps2 and and some stuff like no one i mean so calm is cool and like Killzone and stuff, but those, those weren't phenomenons and they finally captured it and they did it with a multi-platform release day and date.

1:07:05Dustin Furman:And so I think they realize multi-platform and I think this is, this is good wisdom. I mean, this is, this is conventional. It's like, let's keep releasing these things everywhere. And I've said before, like we talked about, you know, marathon coming to Xbox immediately, but it's like, Xbox is a good place to keep the momentum going. Like once you feel like you have a hit with Marvel token or whatever, then like, maybe you you buy time by bringing things to xbox or switch 2 or whatever so you have like a a wait and see approach but you definitely have to get things on pc immediately in that space and i think that they they understand that that's important and they see the numbers of hell divers it's two thirds of the player base is on pc again it would have been a totally vibrant game by playstation standards on ps5 but it's way better and bigger because of that and sony's making a lot more money i think there are a couple other things i wanted to say it part of this goes into the the strategy I'm curious what you guys think of this is like, I just continue to be convinced that part of what Sony is realizing is that they will always be a cheaper solution to PC gaming in this new era.

1:08:10Dustin Furman:There was a time where things were getting pinched, where components were cheap, and you could put together really meaty rigs. And that's not really the case anymore. And depending on what you read, there's some people that are more bullish about this than others that Like some of this might not abate for close to a decade, depending on how, you know, components are built and new factories are brought online and the aggression in which these companies pursue new profit. And so I wonder if Sony's saying like we want to PC playing nice with PC was a good idea. And yet. What if we undercut PC? The people that are already on PC or want to be on PC will be on PC, but there will never be a reality, at least in the near future.

1:08:50Dustin Furman:and certainly when PlayStation 6 launches, if it launches on time, where their economies of scale and the way that Sony can flex that economy of scale is going to be way better than the PC manufacturers. And so the PS6 will always be cheaper. And I wonder if that is part of the play. Is to say like, actually we're not going to lose to PC after all, maybe. We might become really attractive in this new era of hyper cost. and I think there's something to that I think that that's part of it I think the other part of it though because we were talking about Xbox earlier is I think it's Steam Machine like I think and I'm not even sure it's about PlayStation having their games on Steam Machine I'm not even sure it's that I think it's like that might be a problem for us you know and you know if you listen to my conversation on Sacred Plus tomorrow with Moore's Law, you'll hear like he's talking about how these things are going to be cheap and they're going to figure it out and they're using old components and they're going to push this thing.

1:09:56Dustin Furman:And it's an unusually aggressive play from an agnostic storefront that people come to. They don't promote themselves. They don't like people go to them by default. And for the first time, really, they're going to play offense. It's never really been done before. The OEM steam machines from 10 or 15 years ago were not the same the steam deck is not the same because the steam deck is not it's like people think the steam deck is sold no it's like it's not sold that you know it's sold a few million copy units i think this might not do very well and they might not have the economies of scale we'll see but it is a new play to bring a storefront to your living room where sony is and sony's like i think we gotta fight back against this because it can kill us.

1:10:41So I think that there's some, there's some hardware strategy involved in this

1:10:46Dustin Furman:piece strategy as well. In other words, again, not taking games away because again, to the Xbox Magnus thing, it's like, oh, they don't want these games on. It's like, they don't give a fuck about that. It's free money there. Again, it's the threshold argument. Like if they were just making enough money on these things, they would just do it because it would override the deficits, whatever they perceive those to be. I don't know. So what do you guys think about this argument about the Steam Machine maybe being the reason.

1:11:12Colin Moriarty:The thing about Valve right now and specifically the Steam Machine, they've already kind of done this in the handheld space. Colin, you mentioned Steam Deck, of course, and how it's, while it is a successful product, it's still a very niche product. But Valve opened up the floodgates of PC handhelds. They weren't the first people to do it, But certainly after they designed and made an operating system with SteamOS, now we have other manufacturers coming in and making more handhelds. And it's certainly become an interesting slice of the market. And with Steam Machine, it's also they're going to make SteamOS open.

1:12:00Colin Moriarty:that any manufacturer can come in and make a box and someone can run steam machine on it so while while the steam machine might be one of the early they're not the first living room pc but it's clearly one of the first that's fully focused on being small being focused on gaming comes with steam os their version of linux out of the box and it very well could be like steam deck where we see other manufacturers hop in and then suddenly we have a new vertical of the market that is around living room based PCs running SteamOS. And whether that's going to become a mainstream thing, I don't know. It really hasn't happened in the in the handheld market yet, but we do see other players jumping in there like Xbox doing it as well.

1:12:50Colin Moriarty:And now we see PlayStation eventually making their own handheld, too. So clearly there's something there. so I could see as you were saying Colin that's like this isn't a problem now it might not even be a problem in two or three years but maybe it's a problem in five years or even 10 years

1:13:10Dustin Furman:who knows yeah it's it's interesting because I think if you look at steam is valves private so everything we assume about them is just that assumptions but if you look at their assumed rise in gross revenue, they're becoming real. You know, for instance, in 2014, it was assumed that they made about$1.5 billion in revenue on Steam. That's it. And last year, it's up to 17 billion. So all that in 12 years. That is now people are like, Steam is so much bigger in this and it's like Steam makes Valve. Steam brings in way less money than the PlayStation Network still. people still want to be on console that's more akin to the money that xbox makes on xbox is a um equivalent to steam but it is the growth sector of of gaming and they just might feel threatened by it so that's interesting and you don't want to play ball with your direct competitor and it's what i was saying earlier about having your cake and eat it too like you have to kind of choose who you're going to play with and who you're not and who your friends are and who your enemies are but i i feel like because of the affordability the presumed affordability of the steam machine comparable to like what xbox magnus is because i again tom was saying that the xbox sounds like it's going to cost a thousand dollars you know that's not going to be a competitor to playstation but a 500 steam machine is like yeah um so yeah it's it's quite intriguing to see the cascading effects of this and how they've come to this decision and And I just think it's important for people to understand this underlying factor, which is we've never been in this space, but a lot of people are in the space of like, they do it for money.

1:14:53Dustin Furman:They want to make money. And I'm like, yes, but it is not a linear operation. It's like, you don't do this and then you make money and everyone's fine. It's like, no, you do this. And then there's all these things that happen that could affect the outcome. And that sum of money must outweigh those effects. and that takes time to figure out. You have to see, you have to put it into play again, bringing up the PlayStation Plus Horizon 2 thing when they put it into play and they realize, oh, we can't do this. Now, you know. But I will say this, guys, the PlayStation fan base is loving this.

1:15:27Colin Moriarty:They're loving it. And hey, to a cringy degree, I would say some. Yeah, like I don't.

1:15:35Dustin Furman:People know where I stand on this. I think exclusives are cool, whatever, but I never really found it to be like the most important thing about a platform just by virtue of the fact that it can't be the most important thing about a platform the only platform where it's the most important thing is nintendo that's why they make so much less money because they have as it was noted earlier a really strong walled garden but sony makes their money on others so you would think the pc releases would just be in that same vein same similar thing with bandai releasing second party stuff on switch it was like well it's not quite as linear as just saying money in it's what does the money in mean I would love to know how some of this stuff performed as well and I also would love to know what it means for Switch like they've never even really acknowledged that they've released stuff on Switch but I wonder if those probably haven't worked out very well I would assume Freedom Wars came and went like a fart it seemed like everybody's golf was actually fairly well bought but i don't know because people love that series i don't know guys it's

1:16:40Colin Moriarty:interesting stuff i had a question for you colin sure something that i've been wondering is that obviously we know about this shift because of jason's reporting and people on the inside know will sony have some kind of marketing in the future are they going to bring back

1:16:59Dustin Furman:only on playstation i would assume so right like are the how are they going to make this known

1:17:04Colin Moriarty:to the general audience that's like hey if you were waiting for our pc ports

1:17:10Dustin Furman:good luck bozo yeah i mean maybe it's it's it's as it's a you're right i mean it's something they have to communicate and yet i think it might be as simple as just bringing back that that box branding and and just put it in s on splash screens and you don't even have to sony doesn't release press releases like i i've realized like i was thinking about that when i was going on my walk last night yesterday i'm like they don't really even release like you know the hashtag press releases like san mateo california march 5th you know sony corp and then like the nasdaq symbol and all the rest and it's like they don't do that shit anymore so like they don't they have to communicate it in some way but i feel like to those that are most in tune to pc gaming this will get through that to them in the grapevine through the grapevine if it hasn't already in some way i also want to say that i don't think they're gonna i don't think this is the end.

1:17:58Dustin Furman:I think that they might reconsider this again. You know, in the next few years, but you got to do what's good for you in the moment. God, I would love to know about the internal arguments and the arguments people are making internally about what the right move is and why. Fascinating stuff. Colin Sparling wrote in and said, hey, boys, with the recent reports that Sony is looking to pull back from porting their titles to PC, what do you think will happen in Nix's if this is true? Will they be sold or shut down? Will Sony have them pivot to some other projects entirely? Cheers, as always. I feel like a lot of people are concerned about Nix's.

1:18:36Dustin Furman:I think reasonably so. Sony bought them very similar to when they bought Neon Koi as Savage Game Group with different ideas in mind and Bluepoint, which we'll talk about in a little while as part of these services that you would do internally. None of this just seems to have worked out. I don't know. The Bluepoint shit didn't work out because they're stupid, but not Bluepoint, but Sony, but you might not need Nix's if you're not going to do PC ports. But I feel like there's going to be enough multiplayer PC stuff that they'll probably stay busy with that. And you could just let them do other things.

1:19:09Dustin Furman:If you don't feel like it's worth, and by that, I mean like work for other people and you own them, you're going to make the money. but I don't want to be too optimistic either it's like if the mobile initiative didn't work and that neon koi went down if the remake initiative didn't work in blue point went down now we know the pc initiative isn't working and well the logical yeah the logical conclusion is that nix is gonna is gonna go down but similar to blue point I feel like there's some viability to that group like you could sell them. Someone will want it. Why wouldn't Microsoft want that even?

1:19:51Dustin Furman:But they ported Titanfall to 360, which is hysterical when you think about it. But am I worried about Nix's? I don't know. I feel like there's enough for them to do. I just hope they understand their lane. And if they're going to shut them down, I would maybe seek a buyer. And certainly that group could stay together and do things in the future, too, which is what I think is going to happen to Bluepoint as well. So, but RIP in peace, PC releases, RIP Bozo, maybe. I mean, I feel like a lot of people really are happy about this. I will acknowledge I was definitely in the minority in the core PlayStation fan base about this.

1:20:27Dustin Furman:I just thought it was smart business. And I just didn't think that I will say this, Chris. I don't believe there was a deleterious effect on PlayStation by selling games on PC. I think they're simply saying like to extract more out of this, we need to hurt ourselves more and we can't do that and yeah not yeah i think so too yeah yeah one to two percent of your gross revenue since releasing pc games has come from pc games it's a lot of money because it's pure profit in a way so that's going to increase your margins but again at what cost i don't think we've heard the last of this though again not in the immediately but in a few years i think they've depending on how everything goes with ps6 what happens with Xbox Magnus, what happens with Steam Machine.

1:21:15Dustin Furman:I think there's going to be room to maneuver here. And by the way, I don't personally give a shit. I mean, fine. I play all these games on PlayStation anyway. It doesn't matter to me. So, but I was definitely too bullish on it. I will say that.

1:21:32Chris Santis:Eczema is unpredictable,

1:21:34Dustin Furman:but you can flare less with Epglis, a once-monthly treatment for moderate to severe eczema. After an initial four-month or longer dosing phase, about four in ten people taking EBCLIS

1:21:44Chris Santis:achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing.

1:21:51Dustin Furman:EBCLIS, LibriKizumab LBKZ, a 250 milligram per two milliliter injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema. Also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies. EBCLIS can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to EBCLIS. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems.

1:22:19Dustin Furman:You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with EBCLIS. Before starting EBCLIS, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Ask your doctor about EBCLIS and visit EBCLIS.lily.com or call 1-800-LILY-RX or 1-800-545-5979. All right. The next story is an interesting one. These come from leaks. And they're concerned the new God of War game, the new God of War spinoff game. So first, let's go to a story from our friends over at Push Square who write rumor with a U. God of War dev working on a new franchise within the God of War universe. And he says, quote, you know, that rumored God of War project that's supposedly been in development at Santa Monica studio for a good few years now.

1:23:00Dustin Furman:the one being headed by veteran director Corey Barlog. Well, if a fresh leak is to be believed, it'll signal the start of an expanded universe for the legendary PlayStation property. A now-deleted LinkedIn post from a former employee, a senior writer, no less, seemingly confirms that this is the plan. As spotted and screenshotted by Reset Era, the poster worked at the first-party outfit for over five years before departing last September. They, quote, helped shape the narrative vision and creative direction at Sony Santa Monica for a new franchise within the God of War universe, end quote. Going into slightly more detail, the poster had a hand in, quote, developing character storylines and original lore that expanded the acclaimed IP, end quote.

1:23:33Dustin Furman:Assuming that this is all 100 % real and applies to the next God of War title again, the one that Cory Barlog and his team have been working on since before Ragnarok's release, is going to be somewhat removed from the existing adventures of Kratos. Previous whispers from insiders have suggested that this project will feel like a new IP, and this leak certainly lends those reports some additional weight. Then, there was a leak from Nate the Hate, who's a reliable leaker, unfortunate name, but a reliable leaker in the space nonetheless. He's one of those interesting guys too that follows no one on Twitter, which I think is so interesting.

1:24:06Dustin Furman:He says, here's what I've heard. Yes, the game is set within the God of War universe and the lead character will be Fae. Gameplay is said to differ from the Norse God of War games with more focus on action. Reveal this year, release first half 27. seven. Chris, this is so disappointing that I listen, I don't want to judge. Let me even back up further. The game's probably going to be great. I mean, why would we assume it wasn't? I thought God of War 2018 and God of War Ragnarok were both great. I just don't want more God of War and that Corey Barlog didn't direct God of War Ragnarok to direct a different God of War game that has somehow taken something like eight years, right, between God of War 2018 and now, is so catastrophically disappointing to me.

1:25:07Dustin Furman:So again, I think the game's going to be great. I'm excited if people are excited about it, whatever. But it's like, damn, dude, why couldn't it be something else? Yeah.

1:25:16Chris Santis:I'm in agreement, I think. I think it would have been cool to see him direct something new, something different, maybe a new IP. That would have been pretty exciting. I just feel like God of War, we're already... I really liked God of War Ragnarok. I actually really, really vibed with it. I thought the way it handled Norse mythology was really cool. I thought it was very clever and very well written. There was a lot I loved about it. But I don't know if I needed it. Like it didn't feel like I remember when God of War 2018 came out and I was like, this is great, but I don't know if it needs more.

1:25:55Chris Santis:I don't know if I need to see more of this. And we got more of it and it was good and I enjoyed it. But like it felt unnecessary. And so I'm like, all right, well, that's good. That's enough God of War. All I really need, honestly, the only God of War that I want going forward is those original games playable on modern hardware, which we're getting with the remakes that Bluepoint should have been making this entire time. but we're getting them and so that's that's cool and then we're getting and then we got this kind of 2d side-scroller game that's you know not great uh by all accounts it seems like it's just kind of like definitely not top 50 uh metroidvanias even so that's a little bit disappointing and then so to see that it's continuing with i don't know fey and it's more god of war but it's it's both more god of war and less in some way yeah you know because you you you're not really getting what you want out of god of war from it presumably i guess that's i guess they're betting on that side of it being uh or that side of the the demand being met by the remakes which is going to be kratos centric obviously so i guess i guess they think like well it's gonna be a lot of kratos if we make uh you know a sequel to ragnarok alongside the remakes like that's probably like kratos overload you know which i could actually see happening it's like i could see the fatigue of that but if that's the case i don't know man do something else you don't have any you don't have anything in incubating that's you don't have anything new incubating at all that would that would have been a better use of your time and i agree by the way i also do want to set say the same thing that colin said i think whatever this game is going to be is probably going to end up being good i think it'll be good whatever it is i can't pretend i'm excited to play as fey yeah in a god of war game i can't i cannot at least it's not atreus that is true like i will i will say i will say if i if i heard this was atreus it would have been significantly more did you hear that the god of war multiplayer game at blue point was about a try like that you played as a trace in that game the guy can't man he's uh collecting that character is collecting disappointments like it's his business yeah and the uh the screenshot from the um the show too we'll talk about that later oh yeah i don't know man um yeah disappointing because i think cory barlock did a really good job and like i said i i think i can't remember if i I said this on the Sacred Symbols Plus that we did or on the last episode, but I think Cory Barlog has proven himself in such a specific way with revitalizing old IP and making them feel new again that I just think it would have been cool to see him, if not do something completely new, do that with something else.

1:28:58Chris Santis:It would have been cool to see him do that with Uncharted or something. you know or any number of other things but yeah another god of war game not exciting fey i don't really remember much about fey i don't i don't i can't even really remember if that's interesting or not um i i can't even piece together her moveset in my mind you know what i mean like what is that character going to play as if i i can't conceptualize it

1:29:25Dustin Furman:right now people are talking about like the game i play like devil may cry or something but i don't

1:29:29Chris Santis:know like where that comes from that particular rumor yeah i i don't know we'll see but yeah a little disappointing where are you on this doesn't it really depends on how hot fey is

1:29:41Colin Moriarty:on whether or not i whether or not i care about it you know right is she fuckable so clearly kratos thought so maybe that's the end of the game yeah the quick time a quick time mini game that's crazy uh i don't know if i really have a different opinion than you guys like it's 100 it's probably going to be awesome the focus on the action side is interesting just because the last two god of war games are very action focused still i was thinking the same thing so and i also heard the devil may cry thing and if if that's true then having a resurgence of character action style games both with this and uh control resonant awesome i'm totally down for that but it does feel a little creatively unfulfilling uh at least the concept and i think you guys touched on this but i'm totally open-minded that maybe we'll see the first trailer and be like holy shit this is gonna be actually amazing i'm sorry for doubting you but with that being said yeah a new ip would have been more interesting just seems like playstation early like i don't know 10 years ago at this point xbox got a lot of shit for it's like all you do is the same types of your same IPs over and over again to the point where you name your studios.

1:31:15Colin Moriarty:It's like this is the coalition. They make Gears of War. Halo Studios are 343 at the time. They make Halo and in some ways PlayStation is kind of feeling like that where it's like Santa Monica they just make God of War games.

1:31:32Dustin Furman:They have only made God of War games for more than 20 years. Yeah, that's the that's the thing is like what are we doing?

1:31:39Chris Santis:yeah so it's then we've got a war and then gorilla now with horizon with all the horizons

1:31:43Colin Moriarty:right exactly um right yeah i mean and i mean sucker punch it's it's hard because they've only they've made two ghost of games but that's occupied the last i mean uh ghost of tsushima came out in 2020 right so and was announced years before that so that's occupied the better part of a decade as well so it's a oh and the other point I mean this is what one of the write-ins brings in but I agree with Gene I think Gene said this at one point that clearly PlayStation I don't know whether it's a coincidence or if it's a strategy but they are like full in on female leads yeah

1:32:26Dustin Furman:really I we do have an inquiry on that and I want to get to that as well because I think that there is something to be said about that at this point. I want to be clear about my own perspective is that I think the game will be great. There will be nothing about the game, though, that will indicate to me that it shouldn't have been something else. In other words, I'm not a God of War fan, a big enough God of War fan. I'm like, I'm so glad this is God of War. It's like, well, no matter how good this is, it should have just been something else. But I understand that that's also foolish. It's like, why not lean into God of War?

1:32:54Dustin Furman:God of War is huge. God of War is bigger than ever. And God of War has always been big. I mean, since it came out, since Jaffe's first game came out in 2005, it's always been big. Ascension might be its lowest point. Even the PSP games from Ready at Dawn were huge. Those games sold millions of copies. So

1:33:13Dustin Furman:I just want to be clear. It's like, yeah, I have confidence in the quality of the game. I just want, I'm just desperate to see something new. And I do think that it is kind of a shame in this era of really protracted development cycles. I mean, look at this, dude. They released God of War in 2018. They obviously supported it. They had to spin things up. Let's be generous and say that around the time COVID began is when this game got greenlit. It's a long time to be spending on another God of War when you already had another God of War game in development and you're going to make another God of War probably in the mainline game, in the mainline series, you would assume.

1:33:48Dustin Furman:So what's even funnier, guys, is that this was all spun up while Bluepoint was also making a God of War game. So they were like all in. And you could tell that they had some sort of mantra internally, though it didn't come to fruition, of like Spider-Man, multiplayer, right? The Last of Us, multiplayer. And they were going to try to like do this conversion. But I think because of these protracted development cycles, it's a real shame. God, I've said it ad nauseum, right? Like one of Sony's superpowers for a long time was knowing when to move on. It's hard to walk away from Uncharted. It's kind of crazy.

1:34:29Dustin Furman:To do it when you think about it, it's hard to walk away from even something that's established like a kill zone or whatever it's like, or a Sly Cooper or Ratchet kind of still goes on, but, you know, Jack and Daxter and whatever it's like. But these bore fruit that are bigger than all those games. Ghost is bigger than infamous. Uncharted is bigger than Jack. the last of us bigger than uncharted. It's to me, that's, it's like, I can't believe they didn't go into a room and said like, what do you want to do there? I just refuse to believe that this is what they want to do above all else is more of this more God of war.

1:35:08Dustin Furman:I don't think the universe is that interesting. And I wonder how interesting it's going to be when it's not about Kratos. Yeah. I just, so again, thematically it's never going to hit for me i'm sure it'll be maybe it would be so divorced from god of war that like you won't even know which would be kind of cool yeah and i'll also i mean

1:35:29Chris Santis:that would be that would be really interesting but like and and maybe that maybe that is true but like yeah i'm just i just hunger for something new and you're right uh that their that their strength was knowing when to move on and i feel like they don't really have that strength anymore

1:35:42Dustin Furman:they're risk averse because i think and they're i feel chris they're going to be even more risk averse with all the write downs on all the multiplayer games and all the money they've had billions of dollars.

1:35:53Chris Santis:Now get ready. Get ready for God. Get ready for many God of War games.

1:35:57Dustin Furman:It's just a shame because like you would think these guys would want to express themselves in different ways. And there's nothing wrong with wanting to work on a series or even going to a developer to work on a series. We talked about how Gorilla was so open about how they had to flip a bunch of people out when they worked on Horizon because those guys were there to make Killzone and they didn't want to wake Horizon. They wanted to make shooters. But it's like what would a Santa Monica game look like that's not God of War? We've only ever gotten one, and it's Connecticut, their first game. That was the engine that God of War was built on.

1:36:26Dustin Furman:And obviously, that's a stupid IP. No one wants to go back to Connecticut. But the point is, is that like, I don't know. I just the risk aversion is a bummer because. It makes the problem more distinct. For all of the intergalactics that are taking forever, Fizzint is in, you know, in its infancy. that's it. I mean, I'm sure there's more, but we don't know about it yet. Everything we do know about is like the, the, the whispers of an uncharted game, which is cool. It's time or the, the whispers of this revival or that, or second party stuff like token and whatever. It's all good, but I just feel like their risk aversion is going to hurt them in the long run.

1:37:08Dustin Furman:And it already, I think it already is hurting them because they can't, you can't spit out a game in two or three years anymore from fucking embryo to, to release. so every moment you waste on god of war is a moment you're not spending on new ip that could be even bigger it could wash out and be nothing but sony doesn't really to their credit like when they put first party assets behind a big new thing like it typically works even when things commercially i mean even when things like days gone came out and everyone's like yeah still sold millions of copies it did great commercially yeah i'm just so i'm just bummed about the opportunity cost.

1:37:47Dustin Furman:Let's call it that. Yeah, but I'm sure people are really excited about it. At least it's not more Kratos God of War right now, but it's a lot of God of War, man, because it's like God of War, Sons of Sparta, the kind of multiplayer game was a development. These three God of War remakes, this God of War spinoff and presumably God of War three, like God of whatever the new. The all the rumors of the Egyptian pantheon and everything like I think that's all true, too. I don't know that personally, but you hear people talking about that, That's a different game, probably being made by the Ragnarok people.

1:38:19Dustin Furman:So we'll see how this all looks in 2030 when all these games come out, and we'll see if we're happy with all this God of War. But it's so strange to me because I've just never been attached to this IP. So it's hard for me to... I like the IP more now than I did in the PS2 era and the PS3 era. I'll say that. Because I hated Kratos. I was like, what a stupid character. Sorry, Jaffe. Adam Dietzman wrote in and said, Hey, CDC. Is a God of War prequel featuring a character that no one would have ever guessed or cared for really the best idea that Santa Monica and Corey had? Why are they going for a prequel to the Norse duology instead of a new spin with Kratos in another mythological setting?

1:38:59Dustin Furman:How loud will the internet be that a God of War adjacent title will feature a woman as the main character and not a man? Why is PlayStation insisting on shoving franchises down our throats rather than letting them rest and investing in new ideas, especially from studios with room for multiple teams and projects? and the famous words of the podcast how can this be i will say um the risk aversion is well founded i just don't think they need to worry about it they're dumping hundreds of millions of dollars into these games so when you do that it's like well we want to build you don't you don't move on like we already did all the work god of war exists we don't have to do all the branding and all the marketing and the and all the fucking focus testing and whatever way we know it works and i understand that but you're gonna run into a wall if you continue doing that and pushing that and i don't know i think i think the industry and certainly our ecosystem is worse off without the new stuff yeah infamous was a big surprise when it came out you know um yeah i remember resistance was everyone's like you're making a first person shooter like like the guys that made ratchet and clank and spyro are making a first-person shooter about an alien and invasion but it's dope you know the guys that made the fucking hell gas are making this weird open world role-playing game about a red headed chicken robot dinosaurs pretty cool I get excited if I were at a studio I'd be so excited to do the new thing so it's just hard for me to relate yeah i if i'll i could play devil's advocate for a for a

1:40:41Chris Santis:minute here though and say you know he says you know why oh is it is it the best idea to do fey or like a character that we've never heard in why why not go for another spin with kratos and it's like if if you want to get technical um there is more risk involved in doing a game about fey set in the God of War universe than there is in just doing another safe Kratos game. I agree with that. Like technically speaking, it's like risky risk aversion in some way where it's like we're operating within the realm of an IP that kind of has like a floor of how much we'll fail because like people are inherently interested in what we're doing and like there's always going to be eyes on it.

1:41:26Chris Santis:But we're trying to do new things within it that people might not expect, that people might not even think that they like. And, you know, credit to Barlog, him making Kratos a dad, in my opinion, seemed like a really stupid idea. Or not that he, like, I understand he had kids in the original God of War. But what I mean, like, you know, the whole sad dad thing, which is a joke now. You know, I remember hearing about God of War and just kind of thinking, like, this looks good, but, like, I feel like this is doomed. Like, how are they going to, like, How are they really going to reinvent this character?

1:42:00Chris Santis:And they did it to his credit. And so maybe this is kind of the best that we can hope for right now in economic times like these where like, okay, well, look, we got to hedge our bets here, but you can still do new things and flex creatively within the realm of this IP. We're not going to make you do another Kratos game that's largely the same which for for as much as i like ragnarok it is 2018 again like it's slightly better um in some ways slightly worse than in others but it's it's god or 2018 again so maybe the best that we can hope for right now at a first party unfortunately is is that yeah they're operating within ip that are proven and successful but they are taking spins with them that wouldn't typically be seen if they were really truly, like truly playing it safe.

1:42:57Chris Santis:Like Horizon Hunters Gathering isn't really safe. You know, it is a bet. It's risky, perhaps for the wrong reasons, perhaps for the right reasons. That's up to the people who play it to decide, really. But, you know, there is that argument that I do want to at least lay out. I don't know if I really buy it myself, but I could see people making that case. And I could see that even being true. Yeah.

1:43:20Dustin Furman:But yeah, I think that's totally true. It is a it is kind of a safer way to try new things. And then maybe you have a like a like we always talk about backdoor pilots and stuff.

1:43:29Chris Santis:Yeah.

1:43:31Dustin Furman:Juice Worth Squeeze wrote in and said, hey, CDC. And this is getting into what we were talking about earlier. I think you brought it up to us in or maybe it was Chris. I don't know. I don't remember anymore. With rumors of a God of War game starring Faye and an uncharted game led by Cassie Drake. Why do you think Sony First Party is abandoning male characters? Horizon, The Last of Us, Ghost of Yotei, Intergalactic, Returnal, Ratchet and Clank, even the multiplayer games like Marathon, Hunter's Gathering, Concord, and Fair Games heavily lead with female characters. I don't know anything about those personally.

1:43:57Dustin Furman:I know they have, well, Hunter's Gathering, I guess, a little bit. I know they have a history of strong female characters, but it seems like they're going all in lately. Is this a corporate decision or are their teams coincidentally doing this? Take care. I don't know. It is getting kind of peculiar. I will say that. I'm a noticer. I notice things and I'm not making a real judgment value on it because I don't really think it matters per se but it is conspicuous at this point it's a lot and I feel like it's happening organically to be perfectly honest it would be hard for me to believe that they're like make we want women protagonists it's like I think people are just attracted to I don't mean in a visual way attracted to doing that kind of thing maybe something a little bit different and I was thinking about my own experience and my own experience writing our games is i lilymo is like saint slayer is actually the first game i've written like about a about a specific person that didn't exist yet that i made into a male like that i've made a male protagonist the other two protagonists that i that i've created one of them from the role-playing game which is you know on ice and the other one from Herboxia of Sabrina they were female so I'm wondering if I'm also doing the same thing of trying to write something that's a little different and it just feels a little different to write a woman or whatever and that ends up kind of bearing fruit you could use the the very corporate insular like I'm going to try to find any angle thing and be like we want more women to play our games but I just don't think that that's happening but it is weird and I do think like the buff like playing Leon in Resident Evil so refreshing because I'm like this is dope you know just like the male badass protagonist

1:45:47Chris Santis:last action hero

1:45:48Dustin Furman:that's cool too and I feel like Drake in a way was like the last one we ever got in the PlayStation ecosystem so yeah expand on this doesn't

1:45:57Colin Moriarty:yeah well I was making a joke at some point me i don't know if it was oh about her being hot enough or not i guess it's not quite related but i personally do not care i choose to play as female characters when i create characters which people think i'm weird for but that's fine um it is interesting though that across the board like juice squeeze lays out here that all of these ip um are female-led or they have transitioned to being female-led specifically with Last of Us, Ghost of Yote. I guess Returnal Sorrows isn't. So it's not a full sweep or anything.

1:46:36Dustin Furman:Yeah, they went back to a male character.

1:46:38Colin Moriarty:Yeah. So I don't think there's anything or someone at Sony HQ that's like we would really like to transition all of our main characters into females. We'd like to transition all of our characters. Transition them one way or another. Period, end of.

1:46:57Colin Moriarty:I don't think there's any kind of conspiracy like that. I do think it is a thing, Colin, where the people making these games do think maybe they've done a bunch of games with male leads or they just think it would be more interesting. And this is the way things have shifted. So I'm not a conspiracy theorist on it. But as Colin said, it is noticeable.

1:47:20Dustin Furman:Yeah, I mean, you you have to be blind and stupid not to notice that at this point. like I don't know you know it's like yeah whether or not it matters whether or not there's anything there entirely but obviously if you've been in this space for any number of years you'll realize what's happened um yeah yeah I think so but I also don't really give I I it would be disingenuous for me to say I really gave a shit either it's like I just want games to be good I don't really I don't play games to play as myself or to play as someone that I can relate to or whatever. That's cool. That's what you're into.

1:47:56Dustin Furman:It's just like I want good games. So if the good games are all female led, it's like, well, whatever. I mean, that is what it is, I guess. There could be a play maybe to get more female attention. I don't I just don't think that that's true. Although there is this Ampere analysis thing. Did you guys see this that Video Games Chronicle wrote about this about the split of male and female gamers? I'll put it in the. the uh um i was going to talk about this with jaffe next week is like so they have this this graph here of the way people like um function as gamers so like um console gamers pc gamers smartphone gamers and tablet gamers and they suggest that when it comes to console gaming for instance there are 300 million um male console gamers and 200 million female console gamers and i'm like horseshit i've been saying this for i've been saying this forever is like there is this idea that half of gamers are women and it's like no they're not i would dude i wish that was true do you have any idea how good that would be for not only in my business but all business in the games industry if you had this like unisex truly um like approach of like it doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman everyone plays everyone you know but it's not true and i hate when i see these things and i'm like that's pc gamers it says 500 million male 400 million women it's like no way i'm sorry like i'm it's just there's just no way that that's true like there's no evidence in my entire experience in this industry that that's true not ign's readership was never never represented anything like that our listenership certainly doesn't represent anything like that i just feel like maybe there are some people chasing phantoms based on data that just doesn't square you know like it just i and again i'm not saying it as an insult my wife is one of those female gamers like hardcore core console gamers my sister is one of them i wish it were true

1:49:57Chris Santis:but it's i don't think it is i think it's more true now than it was back back when i was like a kid or back when you were like at like ign i think i think because now what i'm seeing now is like it is kind of shocking we're like i'm not even exaggerating when i say this you guys like you you guys are the only people that i know who like in my circle who play games that are interested in resident evil and every girl i know cares about it like it's kind of crazy like resident evil is like weirdly yeah leon and not just this not leon resident evil like all of it it's kind it's like crazy i'm like oh i didn't read i didn't even realize women like grizzly shit women like grizzly like like true crime and shit i don't it's very interesting but um yeah i don't know like i think i think the advent of streamer culture has shifted things a lot i think like there's a lot of like popular female streamers who stream a lot of video games and i think that has opened up a lot of younger people and younger women specifically to potentially being involved in this space i don't think it's equivalent by any means but i do think it's i think it's more than you would expect today than like maybe like 10 years ago or like 15 years ago because even just anecdotally in my life i'm 32 most of the people i know are like you know 27 to 27 to 35 you know generally generally speaking.

1:51:21Chris Santis:And what I noticed in, in the people that I know who are younger, it's just like, yeah, like they all like, like there's a lot of, there's a way more female players, like of proper games, not like just animal crossing and like fucking Tomodachi or whatever, but like, Oh, you're playing fucking even my niece, my niece, who's like 28 or something. Like she, she, I caught her the other day playing something that I was like, you're playing that. I think it was like vampire the masquerade I was like you're playing vampire the masquerade what the fuck I couldn't get through that at all so like I think things are different now I would never say they're equivalent because that's crazy I think I think there will always be like a male dominated kind of culture around it not necessarily in a negative way just like I think men are just going to be more drawn to these things in general but I do think that I do think the female audience is significantly large than I think we give it credit for and not just like Candy Crush and all that.

1:52:17Dustin Furman:Yeah, yeah, yeah. That goes without saying. And I think that that was the original. That's like moms and grandmas. And that was always the big diversion of like half of all gamers are women. It's like, all right. Like, what do we talk like? And then, like you said, if you break it down to PC and console gaming, probably becoming more female. I was, I mean, we always had women working at IGN and writing about games and very knowledgeable. Again, I want to be, I mean, I think people understand it's like, I think the ideal would be to have an equal gender split because it would be so universally attractive.

1:52:43Dustin Furman:Like the industry would benefit to like an enormous level if that was at like but i also think it's 70 30 personally what'd you say i'm sorry i think it's like my my gut feeling says it's like 70 70 30 yeah that might be true i feel like um i mean it's not a huge surprise we make fun of ourselves all the time it's like i wish we had a bigger female listenership i understand why we don't but i also think it goes into like the way people the differences in the way people absorb their information and the amount that they're in or out of a specific ecosystem. And I imagine there are like podcast brands that are more female than ours, like more female, not female oriented, because there was like What's Good Games and all the things that were like for girls or whatever.

1:53:26Dustin Furman:But it's like, which I think is kind of corny. I want to make something for everybody personally. But certainly there are. Yeah. In other words, the range of female audiences are probably bigger in other places and we're not seeing it. Although I would like to see it. I don't think it's in stream.

1:53:41Chris Santis:It's in streaming a lot. Like women tend to trend towards streamers in my, in my experience from what I've seen. And they don't really like podcasts at all,

1:53:52Dustin Furman:but it's from what I, I don't blame them. I wouldn't, I wouldn't like this podcast if I was anyone, no one can. If I was. Yeah. So it's, it's, I don't want to be, I don't think there's a play being made here, but I think that we have to figure out like what the data really says. and what it indicates and and maybe chasing more like-minded people if you're trying to get a female and so you put a female in the game i mean that's a possibility but i don't think i don't

1:54:18Chris Santis:think decisions are being made to that effect yeah but it is getting over over i think it's getting

1:54:22Dustin Furman:a little overboard personally with the female protagonist just for balance not for any other reason i don't really give a shit but i'm a noticer i don't know i just can't care i i like

1:54:32Chris Santis:i think about like all the i think about all the the male-led games that women have played and loved and not cared about and i think about like oh now there's like a bunch of female like games like and if i and if i complain about it it kind of makes me okay i don't know it's not very macho in that case you know what i mean if if like women can play like god of war and they're fine and they're not really complaining about it and then i like i'm playing intergalactic i'm like it's a woman oh well suddenly suddenly i'm more fragile than they are and i can't have that she has a shorn head sure i think i and i think saros to be fair is like is kind of like the obvious thing in the in the in the in the picture that kind of disproves a lot of that i do i do think ultimately it just it's just naturally like a lot of people working in the industry it's like yeah we've worked and we've made a lot of ip and we've written this type of character a lot and let's just try this thing um i think it's just natural to want to branch out creatively and try try things that are not in your wheelhouse um whether that whether that works out or not i mean you know that remains to be seen but it seems to be working out okay i mean horizon's huge and um i know intergalactic's going to be big maybe not for the right reasons but it's going to be a lot of conversations around

1:55:45Dustin Furman:that yeah i think people are a little my personal opinions i think people are heavily deluded about about this idea that intergalactic is going to fail like it'll be the end of no idea like i'm like yeah sure it will be yeah i bet i bet it will be um anything else to say about this before we go fey we'll see you i guess this will be announced this summer i assume um maybe if they're releasing it first half next year maybe maybe vgas will be um yeah i will say i'll tell you this if it's a quick announcement to release window cool i'm all right with it what would really break my heart is

1:56:20Chris Santis:if we heard the first thing we heard from cory barlog in forever is like here's we're working on this fey game and then we get a trailer and it's a teaser trailer and then and then we get the full game in like three more years you know that would that would that would be devastatingly annoying but uh if they keep if they're if they're if they're wise and they keep it brief and they're like hey this is what we're working on you can play it in six months or maybe even less it's like cool okay let's move on to the next story oh dustin you you you get on

1:56:50Dustin Furman:this topic i'm good okay yeah we'll hear more about this i'm sure in the coming time all right we move back as I promised guys for our third story to back to Bloomberg and Jason Schreier. He writes another interesting scoop here. Sony's Bluepoint pitched Bloodborne remake before closure, he writes. He writes, quote, in part last week, Sony Group Corp announced the closure of Bluepoint games, the Austin based subsidiary behind acclaimed remakes like Demon's Souls and Shadow of the Classes. Around 70 people will lose their jobs, although Sony is giving them opportunities to apply for positions at other studios within the organization.

1:57:22Dustin Furman:The decision came just five years after Sony purchased Bluepoint, a period during which the studio failed to release a game of its own. How did Sony executive Herman Hulse go from writing in 2021 that Bluepoint's vast experience in world building and character creation will be a huge plus for the PlayStation Studios properties to shutting the studio down? The answer is a little complicated. Following the purchase, Bluepoint continued its work helping Sony Santa Monica Studio with the development of God of War Ragnarok released in 2022. After that, the newly acquired PlayStation Studio had ambitions to make its own games rather than co-developing or remaking games made by other companies.

1:57:52Dustin Furman:uh-oh, the klaxons are already going off. At the time, Sony was all in on live service games, games designed for continual monetization after launch. One of those games would be Bluepoint's first original title under PlayStation, a live service game in the God of War franchise, which the organization hoped could help support several sequels and spinoffs, like its own smaller version of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Bluepoint began working on a game in which the character Atreus would fall into Hades, according to people familiar with the project. A loose idea was for players to control different versions or aspects of Atreus as they battled through Greek hell and to have some sort of cooperative gameplay and ongoing support, although much of the game's design was in flux.

1:58:28Dustin Furman:Sounds like shit, frankly. It was an awkward fit for the studio, which hadn't released an original game since 2006. Dustin, what was that game?

1:58:37Colin Moriarty:It's a PSN game.

1:58:39Dustin Furman:Yeah, Blast Factor.

1:58:39Colin Moriarty:It wasn't very good.

1:58:40Dustin Furman:And had never tried to develop a live service game. Bluepoint was a small team that mostly had expertise in art and engineering, not design. Developing a game that hooks players for the long haul is a challenge that even the most experienced studios have struggled to conquer. Some Bluepoint staffers grumbled that they should be working on another traditional action game like Demon's Souls or God of War Ragnarok. Rather than a live service project, a few of them seem to want to make. Great. Even with help from Santa Monica, Bluepoint struggled to make much progress and spent several years floundering.

1:59:07Dustin Furman:In January 25, Sony canceled the God of War live service game. There was one, and they were going to work, they were working closely with Bluepoint at this point to determine what was next. There was one idea that seemed perfect. Bloodborne, a gothic action game released in 2015 for the PlayStation 4 developed by From Software Bloodborne is widely considered to be one of the greatest games ever made is it one of the greatest games ever made I don't think so oh yeah but its original release suffered from frame rate drops and other technical issues making it a natural fit for the Bluepoint treatment fans have been dreaming of a Bloodborne remake for years and the idea had been strongly considered and at one point even expected within Bluepoint but never entered production is that right Thank you.

1:59:44Dustin Furman:Because I got a lot of shit when I said that back in the day, when I reported that back in the day, but it was true. And now that Jason wrote it, you know that it was true. In early 2025, when Bluepoint again pitched the idea of Bloodborne remake, the studio was told that the numbers made sense, but from software didn't want it to happen, according to people familiar with the process. Faced with a rejection of the remake that made the most sense, Bluepoint had to whip something else up. The studio spent some time pitching an updated version of Shadow of the Colossus. the classic PlayStation 2 game that Bluepoint had previously remade in 2018 for the PS4, but Sony turned it down.

2:00:18Dustin Furman:Still burning to make an original game, Bluepoint pitched other PlayStation studios on developing new projects and other franchises, such as a spinoff of Ghost of Tsushima, but nothing was greenlit. Some of the other studios, which have already been facing heavy financial pressure in recent years, were concerned about dedicating significant resources to another team's project, according to people familiar with their thinking. By February of this year, Bluepoint had gone more than a year without securing a new project. On February 12th, when Sony announced plans to remake the original God of War trilogy without Bluepoint's involvement, some employees at the studio began to grow uneasy.

2:00:46Dustin Furman:Exactly one week later, they got the news that Bluepoint was shutting down. Very interesting stuff here. Chris, let's hear from you first. I heard you, I saw you reacting viscerally. There's quite a bit to pull from here. But basically, Bluepoint was left to do its own thing. Didn't find its way. never released a game since Sony bought it full write down for Sony. I assume not only did they have to buy the team, but then they supported it for four years as they did nothing. So complete loss. What do you think?

2:01:17Chris Santis:Yeah, I mean, it seems like it's it's it seems to me like a culture problem, really. I mean, that's I mean, that's what I'm reading from it is that like, OK, you're the studio that build that does remakes. You secured a financially secure place in the industry doing this and making a name for yourself doing this. And so you should kind of, I don't know, man. I don't like the idea or the sentiment of staying in your lane necessarily. But I mean, I don't know, bro. The games industry is not a secure place. Beggars can't be chosen. And if you're working at Bluepoint, you're Bluepoint. You're the remake people.

2:02:00Chris Santis:if you want to make your own game I don't know bro go somewhere else I don't know that's just not what you're there for and so like it seems to me that yeah they were just looking in all the wrong places like a shadow of the glasses like no what are you doing and like a spin off why if you were working on Ragnarok and you were working with Santa Monica how do you not pitch the God of War remakes? Yeah. How does that not? That's the obvious thing. So I don't know, man. This is just a bummer. I mean, I guess it's like in some ways a little bit illuminating that it's not just the Sony thing. I mean, Sony should have, I think, stewarded them a little bit better and like kind of guided them a little bit more.

2:02:52Chris Santis:Not that they have to be babied, but I mean like put them on god of war remake you should know you need that you should know you need that you shouldn't need to be pitched that quite frankly he's like hey we're looking to make this who wants to do it oh us we're blue point oh let's do that so like i don't this is all of this is deeply frustrating to me because it just it feels like um the studio itself um seem to be the problem and and you know to be fair from software not letting them i mean bloodborne would have been the obvious thing you know um and that being shot down is is a bummer but it's not from software's responsibility necessary to look after uh to look after sony's best interest or even sony first party best interest so like i get it but the fact that they shopped around all these like weird ideas before even landing on god of a remake and then found out they got a remake obviously was the thing that they needed that's gotta that's gotta suck man and uh i don't know this is just viscerally annoying this whole thing i agree there's a lot to

2:04:00Dustin Furman:say about this dustin i'm very curious to see what you have to say about this especially from a soul's perspective um well let's start high level i mean what are your thoughts and then i'm gonna

2:04:09Colin Moriarty:ask you some things yeah well the i feel like i laid out my thoughts on the you know the whole fiasco with the live service game a few weeks ago but the new information here that's most intriguing to me of course is the bloodborne uh remake thing and yeah of course it sounded like a match made in heaven because they did demon souls remake to um somewhat success clearly some people didn't like some of the stylistic changes they made but it reviewed very well wasn't necessarily a like monumental seller but um bloodborne clearly i think would have been and so it made a lot of sense that that would be the next thing but from this report um and from things that shuhei yoshida has implied is that from software said yeah we would rather you not do that and i've seen a lot of things float around over the past few weeks there was like miyazaki hated demon souls remake he didn't like what they did to his game and you can see interviews and maybe he's just being nice you know very professional uh very japanese respectful where he's like yeah i haven't played demon souls remake but it's because play i don't like playing my old games because they they can bring me back to where i was when i was making them and making Demon's Souls was one of the most stressful times of my entire life.

2:05:40Colin Moriarty:And I believe he also commented that he really thought it was interesting to see another team work on that project and bring new things to it. And he was overall very positive. Did he have to say that? Maybe. I don't know. But I think Miyazaki is aware enough that Bloodborne is clearly one of the best things that they have ever made. And in terms of its visual direction and the story and what they were able to do with the gameplay is all like top notch, which is why in this article, maybe you disagree, Colin, but it's one of the greatest games ever made. And so I was surprised

2:06:20Dustin Furman:to see it categorized like that. I mean, I don't agree or disagree. I just think it was. I never thought about it like that.

2:06:24Colin Moriarty:Like, I think fans of Bloodborne would agree that they think it's one of the greatest games of all time. And so I could see him being a little more protective of that if he maybe he has a vision for a bloodborne 2 or going back to bloodborne one way or another and he's like yeah i would really rather rather you not do that um now you brought up a really interesting point i don't remember when we were talking about this colin where it's like well sony should just kind of be like well piss off because we own bloodborne we paid for it and you made it for us and so we're going to just do this anyway but i i feel like sony is smart enough to know like yeah miyazaki is one of the most important creators from software one of the most important developers in the industry right now uh we want to keep our our relationship with them good because who knows maybe they maybe there is a reality where from software makes another exclusive game with Sony.

2:07:30Colin Moriarty:They're making an exclusive game with Nintendo right now. So they're not opposed to working outside of Bandai Namco. They also did that with Sekiro where they worked outside of Bandai Namco. So I think it may be a wise decision for Sony to just be like, okay, well, we're just going to let it rest.

2:07:51Dustin Furman:I think you're right. I mean, the point I was making though was assuming that they won't make another PlayStation exclusive, which I don't think is a guarantee. It's been years and years since they did. And, you know, it seems like Sony mishandled that relationship in some ways with Demon's Souls. And they obviously got them back into good graces with Bloodborne. But as you noted, they're with Bandai Namco pretty heavily now. I just feel like it's unfair for them to hold this game hostage. You know, it's it's. If you're not going to do it, if you have no time, if you have no inclination, it's like we got to do something with this game.

2:08:27Dustin Furman:Like we can't keep just keeping like. I said how many times have I said this in the past years? It's like Sony's not stupid. They know you want Bloodborne on PS5. They know you want a Bloodborne remake. They know you want patching and all this stuff they know. They've known for years. It's one of their most critically acclaimed games ever. And it's kind of a shame that like some external force, though the creators of it are kind of holding it hostage. When they. this is what I was really saying is like, what is, what are they going to, what is from going to do? Like that's that ultimately like the only thing that cuts off from you is like the possibility of them working exclusive with you again, maybe, but in reality, like what are they going to stop publishing the games on PlayStation?

2:09:08Dustin Furman:Fat chance. So I just feel like it's a thing that maybe you push, but you know, the Japanese are very, they do things a little bit differently. It's much more cultured and stayed and slow and respectful. and you get there when you get there. And I appreciate that. But I just it's kind of a bummer. Because they've been ready to make it remaking Bloodborne when they should have remade Bloodborne, which is when I reported it before Sony bought them, when that was in the work, like that was being discussed and considered. And that was seemed like it was going to happen. Would have saved the company.

2:09:44Dustin Furman:You know, so it's a bummer. Now, Chris, you were making up the point, too. And this is one of the things I want to say is like, Jason writes this in part. it and I don't want to be too harsh on Bluepoint but it's like they say quote after that so after they worked on Ragnarok the newly acquired PlayStation studio had ambitions to make its own game rather than co-developing or remaking games made by other companies it's like if I were Herman Hulse I would have went there and been like too fucking bad you're not vested yet you guys don't have any control over this we didn't buy you for this reason you're going to remake games that's what you do and they note and he notes that like their whole skill set is is art and engineering because that's what they need to remake the games as uh tom tells me on sacred symbols plus with oblivion the oblivion remaster apparently that game is totally untouched except for like they used ue5 to tap into like one pipeline that they could like enhance the graphics and the animations and stuff like everything else is untouched so that was kind of a similar situation that they were in with their games it seems like so they were they thought they had the the audacity i mean this is what i'm saying i think you were kind of saying this too it's like they had the audacity to think that they were equipped to do more than that after knowing what it takes to work on a mainline god of war game by the way because they did it as a support studio i do look at this i'm sad about blue point but i do look at this more of like what are you guys doing what are you doing yeah it makes more sense yeah it does and i i'm knowing where their heads were at in the direction they were going in and the things they were trying to pitch it's like yeah i don't really i don't think we're gonna miss you very much to be honest where i thought you were because you were not you were never because you were never doing what i thought you were supposed to be doing the entire time so what was the purpose you think you would have bought them and said like this is our plan you know we need a little help with Ragnarok whatever but after that like we need this this is what we're going to line up for you this is why we're buying you we want to secure you and this is when it's going to come out and all the rest and like none of that happened they were without they went out more than a year without a green light after they got a war game got canceled it's brutal so yeah it does put things into a little bit more context and I don't want to say I'm not happy they're closed I wanted them to be used properly and they they just were these it's just it's like it's what I say over and over again about Sony.

2:12:09Dustin Furman:It's like resource mismanagement. It's just incredible resource mismanagement to a degree, a criminal degree at this point when you when you read some of this stuff, it's like, what are you guys doing? So stupid, so annoying.

2:12:27Dustin Furman:So anyway, it gives us a little bit more context into what they were doing, but the Bloodborne stuff is not a huge surprise. It's just. It's just frustrating that Sony let I mean from so I mean I don't want to be too annoying with it but it's like from software kind of closed blue point down or at least Sony let from software close blue point down and so there's got to be like some sort of uh responsibility somewhere as we always say

2:12:55Colin Moriarty:I don't agree with that think of how many potential projects there could be sure Bloodborne might be the most obvious one. But like a few weeks ago, when we were talking about this, we're like, look at all of the back catalog that Sony has control of. You're telling me they couldn't find one thing other than Bloodborne. So I don't I don't think we can say like, oh, this is from software's fault at all.

2:13:18Dustin Furman:I just hope that one way or the other, Dustin, it bears fruit. Like if Sony is protecting this relationship for no real reason, because again, from is not going to stop working on PlayStation hardware. They might not make exclusives anymore, but they're not going to so it's like okay by the way sony owns a piece of from

2:13:36Dustin Furman:so and owns you know a piece of katakawa group so it's like it's like what you your your board member couldn't even like make a move like no one had any and yet you'll go and make this fucking dusk bloods game on switch it yeah i mean i understand what you're saying and i think you're right but it bothers me a little bit because bloodborne is the obvious choice it's the obvious choice the obvious one well it has been the entire time it's it's that and it's the god of war right exactly the two yeah and knowing that they saw it internally and were like oh no is not a good sign either because it's as you say chris it's like why wasn't your head just

2:14:18Chris Santis:there to begin with and it is a crazy thing to not immediately immediately now i do want to

2:14:25Dustin Furman:acknowledge one thing it's very important for me to acknowledge this for the record last week we were calling into question that that leaker detective seeds and he was right now i said at the time i don't know him from adam i just know the way people talk about him that i do trust and a lot of those people were talking about things that were they were like that's not true from what i understand well it was though so you got to give him a little bit of respect there because he did because i didn't believe it i'm like a shadow of the colossus remake remake and a ghost of tsushima spinoff sounds like something like again we were saying like the leaked state of play things that people leak makeup it's like that just sounds like a made up but yeah the shadow of the colossus thing

2:15:11Chris Santis:in particular like i i could maybe i could maybe see because because ultimately it's pitches right it's not it's not saying that these things were in development it could be i could very easily see blue point being like let's pitch um uh let's let's pitch a ghost of jishima spinoff you know i could see that and then them being like well no we we don't let other people touch our stuff and it's like okay well that was a pitch um but the shadow of the colossus thing felt impossible to me like i like that more than anything is kind of an indication that like oh you've lost it yeah it's like what like i don't know what you i don't know what you had necessarily I know that you were very good at doing very specific things at one point, but like that's how that's how I knew that that it was.

2:15:58Chris Santis:Oh, well, you've lost the sauce if you're pitching a. A shadow of the Colossus expansion or whatever the fuck that they were doing.

2:16:09Dustin Furman:Nah, brother. Yeah, it's that's a weird one. Like I feel like a lot of it was scrambly, too, with like like, you know, with Ghost of Tsushima, it's like Sucker Punches explicitly said that. no one's working on these games but them yeah but everybody's got a pride like if you have

2:16:24Chris Santis:you know what i mean it's like maybe like maybe our idea is so good that like they'll they'll let it because i mean they there is a sly right but that was saying that was long before

2:16:35Dustin Furman:sucker punch had this level of power you know um true but maybe they see that and they're like

2:16:40Chris Santis:maybe if we have something really good and just something objectively it's like undeniable it's a great pitch and we come to them maybe they'll lift it maybe they'll be like you know what we hadn't we hadn't thought of this and the answer was like no we no yeah we're straight in fact we meant we might have even thought of this actually and we decided not to do it it's funny because

2:16:58Dustin Furman:they jason does write in here quote some of the other studios so they're talking about the studios that they were pitching alongside so like they were pitching this a sucker punch would have which have already been facing heavy financial pressure in recent years were concerned about dedicating significant resources to another team's project because basically they would have to put producers and writers and stewards on that project if they wanted to really have control over it like they think they should so yeah it makes sense to not do that but ghost of shima spin off i'm like that would be a i mean that's like to me that's ridiculous the shot of the colossus yeah it is like it is it's like like those are stupid i and by my opinion stupid ideas the the uh as i said last week when the rumor was written why i didn't believe it believe it it's like i'm not a ueda fan really but it's like you have to have some balls to think that like you're gonna like rework like you remade shout out the colossus and it's great but it's like you're gonna like add it's like come

2:17:49Chris Santis:on man yeah you can't you can't add to that man what are you come on man sorry can't do it man you're gonna add to shadow the colossus can't do it man sorry motherfucker can't do it man sorry yeah like any any idea would have been better do you like i don't know man simpsons hit and run i would have been stoked for you know what i mean like i don't figure out how to get that license

2:18:09Dustin Furman:party stuff would have been cool like they should have that's the thing i mean you're absolutely right chris is like they should have been working with a konami or with a capcom or something just be like what could we crack open like what can we what can we do it's just disappointing because i as i as i noted i thought sony was lining up a strategy that just made so much sense and they just fucked it up so badly and it does and again it doesn't matter that's the thing it just doesn't matter so it's like why do you like it's like nothing changed they just sell more and more consoles and make more and more money so it's it's like but it could have been so much better

2:18:43Chris Santis:it you're right that it doesn't matter now it doesn't matter now in the immediate because like ultimately like playstation is where to go you know and it's um and to be honest i don't see that really changing for the even in the next generation i think like of the of the big three you know i think playstation is still going to be the place that you go for like you know really you know high performance high production value like anything that isn't switch where it's running at 30 frames at 1080 you know what i mean um but i do i don't know man i i see a lot of this mismanagement i see the long truncated development timelines i do think it's having i do think it has an effect on the way people see the ecosystem and when this is like all blue points down six years with nothing you know god of war remakes way way late compared to where they really should have like we should have been sons of sparta the the day that release should have been the god of war remake really like that should have that should have been the thing um but they were just too late with it because they just they couldn't manage their time properly the last of us online obviously a mess um a lot of time taken away so like i don't think it matters now but i do think it's it it is affecting the reputation in the long term how these decisions are being made like we might not see like how this really manifests until like maybe early next generation yeah i

2:20:19Dustin Furman:think you're right and that's what i think you're right too and you know another interesting thing chris is just like should sony have an eye towards acquisitions in the future i'd be much more wary if I were now it's easy to it's easy to say like oh I'd say no if Sony walked in and like we'll give you a hundred million dollars invested over five years to come work for us it's like okay whatever but you if you have options I mean this is what we saw with Arrowhead in my opinion is like or what we're seeing with ShiftUp where it's like we don't really need you you know like we could there's rumors that that that um I don't know how true they are but that Stellar Blade 2 for instance from shift up will not even be exclusive to playstation for any amount of time and like that that's that's them first of all sony should have been way smarter if that's true about locking that down but um it just goes to show you that like if you have options and you have this hindsight now sony's closed a bunch of studios so like obviously that hindsight has always existed zipper's gone and big big's gone and evolution's gone whatever like an incognito but i think in this new generation it's like yeah you actually had some great studios and you kind kind of fucked it up.

2:21:24Dustin Furman:And you had some great talent and you kind of didn't take advantage of it. One of the things that I always, I'm always going to wonder about is like, what happened with the mobile stuff? Like they hired amazing talent. Dude, they hired like, what's that guy? Nicola Sebastiani who ran Apple Arcade. Like they bought Neon Koi, which was Savage and they like just didn't do any. It's like, what is going on? Like, what is wrong with you guys? You had this great approach of segmenting like federalizing the studios we got the pc support studio we got the internal services studio we got the fucking remake studio and the mobile studio and it's like

2:22:00Chris Santis:nope you know what it reminds me of it reminds me of the ps3 generation not necessarily with ip but with just like overall business models where they have like so many plates spinning that none of them just none of them really hit with the exception of like a handful um and even that handful is just the stuff that was already hitting before which is like you know first party console triple a um we're like you know here's a playstation battle royale here and here's like a you know here's here's this this and that and here's starhawk station home you know uh yes warhawk and uh uh what was the motor storm i i love the motor storm actually but but yeah it just kind of just feels like yeah we're gonna do mobile but not really here's a wipeout game that we don't give a shit about.

2:22:45Chris Santis:Here's a here's you know

2:22:50Dustin Furman:rat or something right. That was like in oh yeah. That was like in Europe only or like in certain and I don't I don't I don't yeah I don't know. I don't know what their yeah that was that was yeah it was like in the last few months. What happened to that? I that's the thing is like if their PC stuff is done they're definitely done with this like they're because they never because they never even got anything going like they never even they never even got anything. You know, like remember when Mario Run or whatever came out and everyone was like kind of confused by it, but it was like, OK, and then like and then it did pretty well.

2:23:19Dustin Furman:And then that will segue into Pokemon Go. And then and then like the strategy kind of became more clear. It's like they never even got anything out there. And I'm like, I would love to know what the fuck they were doing. They must have had plans. They invested seemingly hundreds of millions of dollars into this idea. So. That whole mobile thing, like I'd love to know more about that, just because I think that again, I'm that guy. I thought that was smart. I was like, yeah, sure. Why not? But like you have to who is running this thing? Like who is running the show? Here's one interesting thing I wanted to say as we exit.

2:23:55Dustin Furman:This is the last paragraph of the story. Quote, in recent days, as Bluepoint's former staffers hunted for jobs and tried to figure out what was next, other companies were making phone calls to see if there might be a way to salvage the studio elsewhere. The prospect may be unlikely, but Bluepoint's technical expertise remains respected across the industry. Again, I feel like this is why things are surprisingly quiet. And I said this when the studio was shut down. Usually you have, there's only 70 or 80 of them. So it's not like there's that many of them, but like they usually have this outpouring of like, I'm looking for a job.

2:24:23Dustin Furman:It was a fun time. They must have been discussed, talked about internally, been like everyone shut up because we might have a suitor that keeps us together. And I wouldn't be surprised. I mean, I said that at the time long before the story came out, that Blue Point's one of those teams that serves a purpose. if you know how to use them. And you got to come. And by the way, they're going to be at the beck and call of whoever saves them. So someone can come in and say like enough of your cute ideas. Seriously, like you're for real. You're you're not game makers in a traditional sense. You are you're recreators.

2:24:58Dustin Furman:You have expertise in engineering and art. You are very good at it. Like own that. It's very similar to Nixx's. Imagine you went to Nixx's and like we want to make a game. It's like who gives a fuck what you want? You know, like we didn't buy you for that.

2:25:10Chris Santis:yeah michael jordan doesn't have to play exactly you know you don't got to do that you're already really good at this very specific thing that by the way is in demand and very rare to be good at and there's a lot of remakes that come out and people fucking complain all the goddamn time about them you know all this fuck the art design oh everything's ruined oh it barely works bro the massive i think about the massive collection all the time i was broken for seven years so like there's there's room for that expertise it's very highly sought after understand the position that you're in and understand that it's a yeah it's a great position to be in um and so like yeah like whoever gets i mean any publisher would be would immediately benefit from having blue point i think like almost instantaneously if they're smart exactly and they just know where to direct them it's like konami could make really fucking good use out of them um anybody even ea or take two or someone like they're they're like yeah take two can put them on gta4 i said that before it's like that would be fucking a a blue point gta4 remake would be sick um metal gear solid one for konami like any number of publishers could like really leverage what blue point does and the fact that sony couldn't is bewildering the fact that they were just like oh you pitch us and you oh you tell us what you want to do i get that i get it because you want to foster a development community where like people feel open to pitch but but respectfully that's for your studios that build from the ground up new things it's not for nexus right it's not for you have to prove yourself first and then even

2:26:53Dustin Furman:then it's like yeah like you have to understand you're right i mean you have to understand this new era of acquisition and like it's like enough they have to go in there almost be like enough of

2:27:02Chris Santis:your highfalutin ideas sweetheart you know like highfalutin dude it's the the the cortisol is spiking man like i can't i just i they were working with they were working with santa monica on god or on greek assets and they didn't it's so stupid it's so stupid it's incredible it's

2:27:27Dustin Furman:incredibly stupid and you're right like you want to give enough i just feel like when you buy a team and like everyone has to understand it's a business. I feel like a lot of people, even in the industry don't understand that it's a business. And like the end of the day, what you want isn't all that important. It's like what, it's like what you want, what makes the studio happy. It's like, cool. You have to be happy. I want you to be happy. You want to be well-paid and successful, but you have to submit to the needs of the organization. And well, they've got to

2:27:55Chris Santis:intersect that those things need to intersect. What you want to do also needs to be something that makes sense, you know, and that's not always true, but certainly they clearly wanted to work on God. They clearly wanted to work on God of War. That's what's that's what really fucks me up. Yeah, because I'm just like, you could have had it right off the you could you could have avoided. It could have already been out.

2:28:18Dustin Furman:I mean, that's the thing is it's like it would have in time for the 20th anniversary, especially last year. I feel like, yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right. It's just. I will say, I mean, I'm very sad about Blue Point closing down, but after reading this story, it's like these guys, their heads weren't in the game, man. Like the way I thought they were. It just it just. So I don't know that. I mean, it's a loss. I feel bad for people losing their jobs. I really I feel like there's a good chance, you know, a reasonable chance. Let's say a good chance, a reasonable chance that they stay together.

2:28:49Dustin Furman:But. It's like if this is what you were doing and this is what you're pitching, it's like just launch them into the sun. It's it's over. It's like whatever.

2:28:57Chris Santis:Yeah, I bet there's a guy there, too. I bet there's like one dude on the on the who's like, we should probably do this obvious thing. And everybody's like, nah. At this point, get that guy up. Put that guy up. Promote that guy, because there's always that guy at the studio who's like, we shouldn't be doing this. We should be doing the obvious thing.

2:29:14Dustin Furman:Single eye guy. Very frustrating shit all around. Incredibly frustrating. But again, I aim back just to this lack of this. It's like someone it's paper champ shit. It's like, here's the plan. It's like, damn, this is a great plan. what a great plan and then and then you you know you you meet reality and it just fucking shatters and it's like damn dude you guys fucking suck and i'm not talking about blueprint i'm talking about the leadership it's like you guys fucking suck right right you guys suck that's like i can't believe i can't believe it even the stuff with the fey game right it's like what are you guys fucking doing what are you doing who is the tastemaker here oh oh i'm getting frustrated let's move on to the next story you have nothing else to say you don't want to add to this dustin you're good right okay very good this comes from a french publication deal labs which is a great resource of leaks to the psn obviously this person billy bill coon has some sort of bespoke access to the PSN.

2:30:22Dustin Furman:But he writes, he always leaks things about the PSN, whether it's PlayStation Plus games that are coming up, sales and so on. So he's 100 % trustworthy. And he has confirmed that on March 17th, Starfield will go on pre-order on PSN and will launch on PS5 April 7th. So about a month from when this podcast launches or when this podcast publishes on Patreon. This was formally reported by the Polish website PPL, which we also sometimes reference. They seem to have insight as well into things that are happening. And they also said April 7th. So Starfield, April 7th. Now, Starfield came out September 2023 on Xbox Series X and S and on PC.

2:31:09Dustin Furman:Incredibly divisive game, but sold, I think, pretty well. Got supported with DLC and Shattered space. I've been trying to wrap my mind around not playing the game, but being open to playing the game. That's where my mind is right now is like, just be open to it, Colin, be open to it. But I fear when it's coming, it's going to come. It's going to be on the PSN and be like, I don't think so. But we'll see. We'll see what happens. So April 7th, you guys both played it. So you won't go back, I assume.

2:31:39Colin Moriarty:This is going to be I'm listening to what Todd said.

2:31:41Dustin Furman:Yeah.

2:31:41Colin Moriarty:if you didn't like it before you won't like it so funny love that so thank you Todd for saving my time I'm sure they were thrilled about that when you said that funny I mean I did like it I like I put like let me see actually on steam what do I have got 94 hours in Starfield I enjoyed it

2:32:00Chris Santis:I uh thought it was a good vibe but I'm into I like lonely space shit and that also came at a point where I was like really not feeling the typical Bethesda style where like I didn't I really want to roam around i kind of was looking for like a more like mass effect to kind of you know give me give me places to go but don't don't give me a wide open i don't want i don't need this right now and so like it hit me at a really particularly good time but i'm good i think i saw all i needed to see if starfield it was a solid time but yeah we'll see i mean i look at it

2:32:32Dustin Furman:and i'm like i intellectually this is a game for me i love space and i love sci-fi and all the rest but I look at the gameplay like I watch gameplay, but sometimes like, I don't know, man, like, I don't know. I'll keep my mind open to it. The good news is, is that for PlayStation 5 players, and this isn't, I guess, so unreasonable because it's so late. It's going to be two and a half years old by the time it comes out, almost three years, is it's 50 bucks on PS5, but it will be $70 for the premium edition. I wonder if that will be like Shattered Space plus maybe Early Access or something. I don't know.

2:33:03Dustin Furman:But dollars to donuts, Starfield's coming to PS5 on April 7th. I assume they'll announce that in the coming days since it's leaking. And I think the leakers had said it was always planned to be announced this month. So there's that Starfield coming to PlayStation 5, April 7, 2026. Please look forward to it. We'll talk a little bit about Marathon later because you guys are both playing. But Sony did announce or Bungie really announced that Marathon will get post-launch content, including free seasonal updates, a new runner shell and more. they write this in part quote first thing to know marathon seasonal updates will be available to everyone no expansions or dlc required each season you'll be challenged to discover adapt and master new skills and at the start of each season everyone will start fresh with nothing in their vault seasonal resets mean that the game stays dangerous loot feels meaningful and there's always an opportunity to get back into the game or bring a friend along without feeling behind the curve as you progress throughout the season completing contracts and collecting faction upgrades you'll be granted access to stronger base stats and better gear in the armory.

2:34:06Dustin Furman:Your power floor will rise over time and recovering from a loss will be easier as you're crafting your ideal build. You'll carry over things that express your identity from season to season. The titles you've unlocked, the codex progressions you've earned, as well as the cosmetics you've purchased and earned will not be affected by seasonal resets. So at launch, Marathon will include six runner shells, access to the rook frame, six factions, 28 weapons, and earnable cosmetics achievements and storytelling throughout the codex. You'll earn this in three zones, Perimeter, Dire, Marsh, and Outpost.

2:34:36Dustin Furman:Season one, we'll find players touching down Planetside as the Tau Ceti Gold Rush begins. And then there's going to be more. So season two and beyond. In season two, the UAC has noted your criminal activities will be responding in kind. Prepare for a fight. We'll be bringing new content your way, including a new shell, codenamed Sentinel, new weapons, mods, cores, and the new cradle system to give you more autonomy over your runner and so on and so forth. So there's that to discuss as well as. And I saw this. this was being circulated by a website called clausum gamer but they found an esrb rating marathon was rated for ps4 is it possible huh maybe i i mean it it's pretty general like the the the lowest recommended specs

2:35:20Chris Santis:on it are pretty inclusive so maybe i mean there's nothing announced but i'm wondering if

2:35:28Dustin Furman:they're if they have it running on ps4 with a plan to release it there eventually because not unlike what they owe it uh ea did with star wars jedi survivor not unlike what happened with hogwarts legacy um right because that went backwards too so yeah maybe they're just again that player base is undeniable unfortunately yeah i don't know about that that's strange what do you the post post launch uh support plan so am i reading it right that you buy in once and then everything's free i mean that's what it seems like so what it seems like to me is that like

2:36:04Chris Santis:there there are so there are season passes but they don't expire i basically and so like it so if there's no like um oh i gotta get to the end of this because destiny had that uh and to be fair like the first time i ever saw this really in triple a was like halo infinite did this with like the non-expiring battle passes which is good because it prevents you from being like it prevents you from paying money for a for a battle pass that you don't see the end of it then it expires and you can't do anything with it it's like it's kind of insane uh that that was ever even that that was ever even a thing but um but yeah like it's it seems like big like big centralized updates like big new like spaces and stuff i think that's going to those are going to be free for everybody which is nice um seems like it's a really consumer friendly model.

2:36:53Dustin Furman:I'm into it. I think it's good. We'll save most of our marathon talk for when we get to what we're playing. But Dustin, I want to know what do you think about it? Some people are saying the ESRB rated this as a mistake. I assume that's possible, but those mistakes don't happen on their side. I don't think. I mean, these things are submitted. You don't for people that don't know, you don't submit bills to ESRB. You submit information and video that's supposed to be all inclusive of whatever is important so if like there's drug use in your game you have to show that if there's like blood like show us an example of the violence like all this kind of stuff but i don't i don't know it doesn't seem like this is a mistake that bungie would make i mean it and it's rated for xbox one as well so if it was like a pull down thing where it's like oh we

2:37:36Colin Moriarty:selected the wrong box well they did it twice yeah yeah it doesn't seem like a mistake i i could see this potentially running on ps4 at 30 frames per second maybe i don't have enough time in the game to truly know like how expansive certain things are to know if it would run well but with this being a live service game they probably want it on as many devices as possible so i think it makes sense that they would do that but just get a ps5 you know it's time already like are you kidding me it's get over it come on man are you kidding it's hard for me to imagine that somebody would be

2:38:22Chris Santis:playing a hyper competitive extraction shooter on a machine that barely runs you know what i mean like that's kind of that's why it's a little confusing for me i think i could see the game like a really scaled down like you just kind of get rid of a lot of the effects um because it's very scalable it's very like it's it's very friendly for from that perspective like you could run it on pretty modest hardware i think so like maybe um i just can't imagine it being a good

2:38:49Dustin Furman:experience yeah yeah i don't know it could be a mistake could it could just be them covering themselves too like well it's rated and now we can port it if we want but yeah maybe it'll come

2:38:59Chris Santis:later um that happens occasionally because then that happened with um oh my god uh star wars

2:39:07Dustin Furman:Star Wars Jedi Survivor, the second one. The funny thing is, is that I've said this before, is like I've dealt with the SRB directly. This is one of the funny things about them is that they have a full physical catalog of games of every physical release. And when we rate our games at ESRB, we have to send them three copies unopened for their library, which is so interesting. I love that. Even our little like, you know, shitty runs of 2000 copies, like they need a copy of that physically for their library. I was like, man, this library must be something else. Going all the way back to the SNES and Genesis era, presumably.

2:39:46Dustin Furman:Maybe the most impressive physical catalog in the world, actually. Probably, yeah. All right, a couple more stories to get through here. I don't know if you guys saw this. Amazon and MGM Studios released the first screenshot of the Amazon God of War live action series showing Ryan Hurst and Callum Vincent. So playing Kratos and Atreus. People are not liking this screenshot. Dustin, this would be it's too bad. I don't this would be a very funny. Thumbnail.

2:40:18Colin Moriarty:It's already made. Oh, Jesus Christ. I made it last week after the show in this. Do you see it? I put it in the staff chat under sacred symbols. And it it came out really good, man. like I think I'm going to make it the thumbnail for this video oh yeah here it is oh my god it's so bad I got it it's got to be the thumbnail wait where'd you put it it's in our staff discord under sacred symbols it's just a few days back

2:40:51Dustin Furman:you might you might want to I don't know is this the one to use this time for this show

2:40:58Colin Moriarty:listen Colin you can't decide now that you care about the subject matter of you've already you've already staked your claim you don't care it's stupid as possible

2:41:06Dustin Furman:that is good it's good it's real good man um what do we think well Dustin what you got a good look at it since you edited it what do you think a lot of people are shitting on this um including Jaffe who I Micah was I think pointing out the like variety wrote about yeah I saw what Jaffe

2:41:23Colin Moriarty:said about it which is so funny to me um I think it looks pretty bad it's the here's the problem I mean there's many problems I think one of the main things is that you have the exact outfits of both characters so like in some ways it looks exactly right but that emphasizes the things that don't look right you know his beard their faces what's interesting too did you guys see this the guy that plays Kratos posted on Instagram and he said like don't believe everything that you see bro you really amazon released a press release it's a press release what are you talking about what are you talking about dude dude i saw this and i thought it was ai because it looked so shit and you listen i know that all men even if you're fit if you were leaned over like that you're probably gonna have a little bit of gut but kratos looks like he's got a fucking gut in this too it looks like he's farting yeah it's just what a crazy image i'm not i'm not the type that's like oh i see one image it's it's doomed forever but i'll tell you that i don't think it's

2:42:36Dustin Furman:a good first impression for sure yeah it's not i don't know what i don't like about it as much as i know i don't like it like i i i know exactly it's it's not in my so i guess what i'm saying chris is how can it look any better than this if this is the what you're doing it's what we we we expressed this concern when they announced the show to begin with. It's like, I don't know, man, like Kratos is not human. Really. It's, it's gonna, you need either a massive person. Even like the, the size differential between them. Cause also a trace is really young here in this picture. So it doesn't look right.

2:43:12Dustin Furman:It just doesn't look right. And you know what, what someone pointed out to me, Chris, which I actually can't not see now. And I don't have a good eye for this stuff. Really. I don't know enough about makeup and stuff. It's like the dude's bald cap is like, is so obvious you know that's not a big deal but it's like it's just i i can only see that now it's like it's like yeah it almost looks like it's like adapting to his brain if you look at the texture of it it doesn't look right you see what i'm saying yeah as if he has no skull

2:43:40Chris Santis:you can see the wrinkles in his brain it doesn't look right fucking yeah and this was this was a

2:43:47Dustin Furman:fully vetted picture. That's the thing is like this and this is presumably from production. Yeah, dude, Photoshop it at least. I don't know. I don't know. So I don't I don't know what to make of it. To be honest, it has a two season order. They reiterate that in the press release. So this is going. I'll keep an open mind. Sony has not failed yet. I guess until dawn will be their biggest kind of bust in terms of their productions, their live action productions. They've done a nice job. Maybe this will turn out to God of War is obviously an obvious thing to want to do, but I still think animated God of War would have been more interesting.

2:44:26Dustin Furman:Yeah, God of War should have been should be a lot of the shit they do could be live action and it's going to be dope. But like this should have been animated. Horizon's the same in a way, too.

2:44:37Chris Santis:But yeah, I agree. I don't know. He looks like he's got I can't for every time I look at the image like he looks like I don't No, man. I see Pennywise, but like, I know it's not him. Like, I don't know. He's got like a Skarsgård face kind of almost. And that beard is wrong. Like, yeah, I don't know, man. This is not a great first impression, but you know, it could be.

2:45:00Dustin Furman:I have the high res version of it now. It's 8K resolution. I don't know. Even the rock behind them looks fake. It looks like Styrofoam. It probably is.

2:45:12Colin Moriarty:It is probably. boy what's happened with the ghost of tsushima movie that's the one that had the most promise

2:45:19Dustin Furman:that's the guy that john wick right guy yeah can i real quick can i just be just getting back to this god of war picture before we move on to that yeah why can't you just film it in the woods in

2:45:30Colin Moriarty:front of a rock well you gotta find the right rock that costs money more money than building a rock

2:45:37Dustin Furman:it's funny because probably actually it's funny because uh ronald moore is you know the guy that Battlestar Galactica and he's the showrunner and EP of this show and that's one of the things that they did really well in that show. They did a lot of really things well in that show is that they did a lot of like live action on scene like woods and field scenes like on planets and all that kind of it's like go to the place and do it. What is there a styrofoam rock behind him?

2:46:02Chris Santis:Look, I will say I don't know enough about production. I'm certainly not what one would call an outdoorsman. maybe that's a rock might look like that. That could be a real rock for all we know. For all we know, we sound really stupid and that is a real rock. Yeah. Who the hell knows? But it looks fake. If it's real, it does look fake. And his gut is funny.

2:46:31Dustin Furman:That's the way I look. It makes the thumbnail work. It's perfect. It's perfect thumbnail in every way. Perfect column. All right. Well, that's that. nothing else to say about that all right high guard our favorite topic the game is done yeah they write high guard's final update arriving soon thank you for playing with us and on social media they say the following quote today we're sharing difficult news we have made the decision to permanently shut down high guard on march 12th since launch more than two million players stepped in the high guards world you shared feedback created content and many believed in what we were building for that we are deeply grateful despite the passion and hard work of our team We have not been able to build a sustainable base to player base to support the game.

2:47:14Dustin Furman:Long-term servers will remain online until March 12th. We hope you'll jump in with us one more time to show you support, show your support and get those final great matches in while we still can. The team is excited to release one final update to enjoy in the remaining life of the game. We'll be adding a new warden, a new weapon, account level progression and skill trees. Full patch notes are coming and we're targeting tonight or tomorrow morning for patch release. This patch is already out by the time we're recording this from all of us at wildlife. Thank you for playing, for supporting us and for being part of high guards story.

2:47:41that's it the end what do you think awesome i think the main thing that we can take away

2:47:48Colin Moriarty:from not only high guard but concord as well and not that i think these are the same level of uh fuck up but um these games need to be play tested i think that i think it was herman that said in an interview that we covered after the concord thing is that he's like we're going to start playtests we need to get more feedback from outside us earlier on in the process to avoid this and that's i think one of the main things that brought down high guard there's many elements but it's just like the you're not ea uh you know i'm sure that apex legends had a lot more play testing behind it that ensured a level of success um and so yeah the things that high guard and Concord is just it's like you can't just release it based on your own gut feeling of what's good anymore and clearly Sony's learned its lesson they're doing playtesting already for uh Horizon Hunters Gathering we've heard about playtests for uh fair games and so you know they've learned their lesson clearly I don't will it pay out I don't know but for big open uh live service games you can't just shadow drop it anymore yep uh and you you gotta play test it that's these games live

2:49:12Dustin Furman:and die by that at this point yeah it's a it's a difficult lesson for everyone to learn on their behalf no doubt chris any final thoughts on high guard before we never have to talk about it again

2:49:22Chris Santis:no i mean uh it was fine you know i think uh i think there was a good game in there i think it was just like there was they could they should have cut like i think like 30 30 percent of the stuff that they were designing like i don't like i i i could have looked at this game and been like okay this is what we're going to cut and this is what we're going to focus on and you probably would have had a pretty decent game i think uh but it's just it's overwrought there's it's over complicated for what it is it demands both too much and too little of the player at the same time it's very it's a walking contradiction in a lot of ways it's very odd it's a looter shooter where there's no persistent loot and the loot that is there is like very minimal and very static it's a tower defense game where your only option for fortify for uh you know tower defense is fortifying walls once it's uh it's a hero shooter but the heroes have abilities but no distinct weapon of their own they're just kind of running around picking up weapons off the map so it kind of wants to be an arena shooter it kind of wants to be a MOBA but there's no AI it's just a very messy game that I feel like could have been focused and I again I I really do feel like there's a good game in there it's just not in this state and it's just it's it's too overwrought and it is what it is you know these things happen I I will I would like to say though that like I think there's something is being overstated about this game and it's I've seen a number of posts like oh another victim of uh you know the the for-profit uh content negativity minds or whatever right and while i do agree that there are a lot of drifters in the space who do not play games who make a lot of money off of being negative for the sake of just for the sake of negativity um there's a great fucking clip of that smash jt guy oh dude i saw that oh my goodness it's it's my favorite it's one of my that's that's a that's a legendary that's that's a cuphead yeah that's like cuphead art or geese playing doom yeah like oh yeah yes snipe with that sub machine good brother do it yes but uh i i do want to say like well i do think that that's real and that is a problem and it's a and it's a negative thing for our industry especially for the people who are hardcore and pay attention to a lot because it's just like it sullies kind of everything and it's and it's annoying and it's it's all of those things there are plenty of games that are hated that are played extensively there are plenty roblox is one of those fortnite is one of those destiny 2 is one of those marathon seems like it's one of those the way people are talking about you know the disparate yeah marathon debt i mean dude destiny 2 is one of those games too where is like the people who nobody hates destiny to more than the people who have played it for 2000 hours and who are still playing okay if a game is good though people can feel however the fuck they want to feel about it they can hate it they can love it they can feel it's not for me but if a game is good people will play it and whether people think they agree with that or not if they're playing it they think that's fair and they can say they hate it i've dude there are many games my favorite games of all time I've played games where I was like I fucking hate this game I've said that outright many a times during like Halo 3 competitive matches under no circumstances that's true High Guard if it was good could have lived through the hate because people would have played it anyway because they were like well yeah people hate it but I'm having fun and that just didn't that just didn't materialize for a number of reasons that i think will be very very interesting to dissect um i'm glad i put time into this because i just think these are this is this is what's fascinating and what's so pertinent about multiplayer games to me is that they are so ephemeral inherent i mean all multiplayer games even if they are good are ephemeral even now especially in live service where like a season will come by and change everything the version of fortnight that exists today is not you can't play that version of fortnight anymore it's gone so it's a place in time thing and you kind of only get your time with it while it's there um resident evil resident evil is going to be there until i die you know and it's going to be the same resident evil so it's interesting to play these games that have like two week long life cycles 45 day life cycles because it's kind of like a i don't know there's

2:54:01Dustin Furman:something there's something yeah no you're absolutely right like it's a moment in time you were there it's like seeing a band live or whatever and like they broke up and you can never see them again but even then it's like right can't you can still listen to their music and stuff you guess you could still watch videos wherever but i i do think there's what you're describing is a real mystique i think around these games and in the sense that they are these ephemeral products that simply cannot be played and will not be played anymore someone revived concord right and then i think they got they had it running on private service and i got a cease and desist so I will say I think you're right Chris like I am a little softer on this like I still think that the hate brigade around this game was insane um yeah it was but I also think that if you can attract two million players to play the to download and play the game and you can't retain any of them really or a small infinitesimal fraction of them then yeah I mean that is ultimately game over and yeah I think Dustin you made a good point too it's like you can't this is a lesson learned like you can't release games like this in the space not unless you are a big boy in the space with like a game Apex Legends is one of those examples in my opinion because it spawned off of Titanfall and Respawn and they were trying to do that I mean obviously they were just replicating what they knew since they all worked on that game but uh yeah it didn't it didn't work out uh but dude

2:55:26Chris Santis:even apex i remember when apex legends came out people were like what is they're doing a fortnight ripoff what are they oh it's a oh it's a battle royale great where's titanfall 3 ah this is so lame another live service apex legends is yeah it is it's not the biggest but it's like i actually i feel very strongly that apex is like of those um battle royale games it's easily easily the best like from a game perspective it's like it's so good. It's very consistent. I just am not into that.

2:55:59Dustin Furman:It just seems a consistent game like people just like it. It reminds me a little bit of that game Warframe where it's just like it's just consistent. It's just somehow it's just there and just doing well. Exactly. Zach wrote in and said hey sacred sluts with Highguard announcing it will be going offline March 12th. There is a whole new round of people comparing it to Concord online and I must say this trend of labeling every single game that underperforms this Concord is highly concerning to me because as the years go by we are going to lose the plot. Concord will become synonymous with games that didn't do very well, and we will begin to forget how truly unbelievable its whole story was.

2:56:30Dustin Furman:As a quick reminder, PlayStation thought it was going to be their Star Wars, and it sold 25 ,000 copies. There is no comparison. These other cute little live service games like High Guard that got millions of players and then fell off a month after, which they can compare to the horrors of Starchild. Please put some respect on the biggest video game failure of our lifetime and never forget. Anyway, shout out to my boy Herman Holst, whose ability to skirt any and all accountability for his actions has been a true inspiration to me. I'm going to fill up my Aloy jar in his honor while listening to sacred symbols the best podcast out there cheers thank you for writing it you were right the Concord well because if people are calling a marathon Concord and I'm like

2:57:10Dustin Furman:I don't think so.

2:57:12Chris Santis:Yeah, I get I get in this instance because it had a similarly short life. I get the comparison, but I am in agreement where it's just like we're really kind of underselling how crazy like Concord is a. Magnificent failure, like not just for like a number of reasons, but like because what was the budget again?

2:57:36Dustin Furman:between yeah my source said between probably monsters and sony's investments in 2018 is

2:57:41Chris Santis:something like 400 million brother brother that's yeah like high guard for whatever it is did not it lost it might it might have lost everything didn't lose no 400 million dollars

2:57:59Dustin Furman:if it did good lord i can't imagine that that's true though no there's no there's no way and and I will say this too Chris knowing that it's 10 cents money I don't really give a shit but I do feel bad for the team sad sure yeah

2:58:16Chris Santis:I have one other thing I want to

2:58:17Dustin Furman:I'm sorry were you done for my minute

2:58:18Chris Santis:they just got to get out of their own way man it's so funny because I remember I feel like we all remember do you remember where you were when you first saw Highgarden I really vividly remember I vividly remember being like oh what's this and then that fuck ass haircut shows up and being like frame one you lost me it's a bummer it's so funny man like it will the game awards next year I wonder if they'll acknowledge it and the game in that slot they better be careful that's like it's like a Christian right exactly it's cursed it's a cursed slot now it's great it's great careful j reed wrote in

2:59:09Dustin Furman:said greeting sacred slayers to close the overly predictable chapter that was high guard i present an inquiry before launch they had said they had a year's worth of content ready to go and they didn't need a huge base to keep the game going now a mere two months later they were closing down completely why don't they release all the content they had ready in a bid to keep the game going how much did they expect to make in the first month that they had half the team size and then Shudder. It feels like after the hate brigade, they just gave up and didn't even try. While understandable that the negativity would affect the team if they were really passionate and truly believed in the game, it feels like they should have fought harder for it.

2:59:37Dustin Furman:I don't know what you want from these people, dude. I mean, they said they had, they didn't have a year's content ready. They had a, I highly doubt that they had a year's content planned out and in development and they've released in this last patch, I think some of what it was going to be. And some of it makes the game kind of cool. I mean, the skill trees are kind of neat. There's a new warden, new weapons, but it's like you can't you can't just release this shit it's not done you have to certify it you have to make sure you have to test it make sure it works it's just you're being a little harsh on the team i think they obviously had major expectations the bigger thing i'm focused on in my opinion with this and this is the thing i can't escape from from a human angle is this team's entire existence fell apart in the last three months you you have to understand that they were probably riding extremely high.

3:00:22Dustin Furman:They had good investment from a solid backer in Tencent. They are skilled and worked on big games. And they had Jeff Keighley courting them away from their own marketing plans to be the game award cap with a release date right around there. It's kind of sad just from that perspective of like, it must have been rough, man, because it was if you were unless you're stupid, it's obvious where this is all going and that they weren't going to be able to turn it around and it is my hope that a lot of the people immediately started looking for other jobs but it must have made christmas pretty shitty and the new year pretty shitty because you have to come back and know it's like it's this is not going to be a thing and there's no time for you it's what we were saying about fair games or we said about suicide squad back in the day there's no time for you to fix this whatever's wrong with this it's baked into the cake it's it's done you can't can't do anything about it yeah so i can't help but think about them from that perspective of like that's a sad that's a sad state of affairs for them it would have been different if they if they followed their original plan of just stealth releasing it they would have gotten into february and i i do wonder what would have happened i still think it would have failed but i think it would have failed differently and i think it would have failed slowly not not not a super slow but over maybe half a year or a year i don't think this was i i think they fucked

3:01:40Chris Santis:themselves maybe yeah i don't know i i just i maintain that just the game just isn't where it needs to be. It's a very unfocused mess. I think it probably would have died slowly and more quietly. Less catastrophically. And it is possible that without as many eyes on it, it could have more naturally grown. Maybe. I do think there was something there. I don't know, man. It didn't keep me playing, and I love these kinds of things. And I even thought it was good. Relative. But... You know what it is? I never had that one more game. Yeah, sure. I get that from most things that I play that are of a certain quality.

3:02:27Chris Santis:Especially a game like that which the learning curve is very low. It's not very difficult to figure out what it is. And to not have that after I played for like seven hours, many, many, many, many, many matches. I'm good.

3:02:41Dustin Furman:I can totally understand. Again, these games are going to consume themselves. It's just the nature of the beast. I don't even know. I don't even know. I don't even know what you you have to just have balls at this point to do it. And people will continue to have balls and do it. I'm not even sure what the special sauce is that's going to differentiate and peel people off from these games. People are still playing fucking League of Legends, dude. It's like what are we doing? You know? Yeah, it's crazy. All right. Three more quick news stories, and then we can get to what we're playing. Dustin, I wanted to share this with you.

3:03:20Dustin Furman:This one's from Matt Piscitella over at Blue Sky. He obviously works at Circona, and they've been tracking American software and hardware sales for 30 years here in these United States. He says, in 2025, U.S. new physical video game spending fell 11 % compared to 2024. This is the lowest rate of decline since 2021, which was negative 8%, and far better than the negative 28 % recorded in 2024. However, spending on new physical video games reached$1.5 billion in 2025, an all-time low, tracked all the way back to 1995. So it's safe to say that goes back to the mid-80s. What do you think of that? Does that hurt your feelings?

3:03:58Colin Moriarty:No, not really. I think there's still a very dedicated market of people that want physical games. You saw this last Friday where people were desperately trying to get copies of Resident the evil requiem but they're were sold out everywhere uh which was really strange so i think they're still figuring out like what that dedicated market is going to be and it's what we talked about a few weeks ago too with that sean layton interview that's like it's not i don't think it's going anywhere for another generation so you know at some point i'll have to adapt but for the time being uh i think feel like i feel okay this is this is the crazy precipitous decline

3:04:41Dustin Furman:i think this is fascinating the highest u.s physical video game spending year was 2008 at 11.6 billion for physical games so the numbers fall to 1.5 god damn you know that's in in 18 years you've shed almost all of it it's no no wonder that no one you know games are hard to find because they're not printing many of them and then people that want them come and get them these dedicated game stores are obviously dying for obvious reasons i just think it's a crazy stat all right uh downloads for psn are out for february 2060 the top downloads just some interesting stuff resident evil requiem was only on the market for two days and it was the top downloaded and selling game on PSN for the month of February.

3:05:30Dustin Furman:Not a huge surprise there. Arc Raiders holding in at number three. NBA 2K26 at two. What else is interesting here? Rihannable at number seven. Have you guys played that one?

3:05:40Colin Moriarty:No, I want to. I want to.

3:05:42Dustin Furman:Yeah, same. God of War Ghost of Sparta at 10. So that's interesting. And this is not, I think, on cumulative downloads, though, not money. Nioh 3 at 12. high on life 2 at 15 I think 14 and what else is on here that's interesting Helldivers 2 falling down to 19 Resident Evil 4 remake popping back up through anticipation to number 20 and it's interesting looking at the PS4 games Resident Evil 6 was number 4 and Resident Evil 5 was number 6 so people were getting ready to go PSVR 2 Rogue Incursion was the top game with Pavlov and Creed Rise to Glory as 2 and 3 and free to play games fortnight roblox rocket league warzone marvel rivals siege overwatch highguard apex legends delta force so nothing really changing there and then finally and we can kind of just linger on this for a moment because we're going to be talking about the game extensively is uh resident evil 5 has already sold i'm sorry resident evil 9 has already sold 5 million copies which i think is the fastest velocity to 5 million in the series history.

3:06:51Dustin Furman:And very well-known Resident Evil leaker, Duska Golem, confirms on Twitter through his sources that Resident Evil 1 Remake is underway and early in development. So you assume it's going to go something like Code Veronica 27, 028, 1029, RE1R, 30. that's my assumption on the timeline of these games and that's all we have for the news all right my friends let's get into what we're playing there are two games of note that between the three of us and some permutation we're playing and those are marathon those games are marathon and resident evil let's start i'll start and we'll go with resident evil dustin i'll kick it over to you to talk about resident evil then you can talk about marathon we can end with chris talking about marathon and i won't say too too much about resident evil i don't want to spoil it for anyone of course but also we are going to do a very deep dive spoiler cast and review discussion that will go live next week by the way i was going to put it live this week but i was making fun of earlier people being upset about re9 being streamed and spoiling or whatever i'm like well okay we were going to put a lot the spoiler cast and review discussion live this week but i was like we'll just kick it and we'll put it live next week instead and give everyone a little bit more time so i want to be mindful of that um resident evil it is excellent i am a little more than halfway through my second playthrough there are four difficulty levels there's like an easy difficulty level and then there's like normal and then there's classic which i would consider kind of normal like hard normal hard and that's like we're using ribbons and stuff that's what i'm playing on now and then when you beat the game one time which i've already beaten then you get insanity mode um and that's how always that's gonna be fun to do once i unlock you know enough of the collector points to to um to unlock like unlimited ammo and shit you just go fucking nuts it is it is a sophisticated and masterfully created game that reminds me that you can get the feeling of exploration and place without big open worlds it's something we say over and over again and like people are like the immersion of an open world the immersion of choice it's like well what about the immersion of walking around a hospital?

3:09:09Dustin Furman:And we were saying this on the stream, Dustin, like the Metroidvania aspects to Resident Evil that I had never really acknowledged, though they had always been there. They seem to shine through even more in this game. I love the interplay between the characters. It works a lot better than I was very excited about this game, but I was like, I'm a little skeptical about this. I would rather just play as one or the other. I like playing as both of them. I like that the first and third-person camera options are there and that they kind of try to encourage you to do one and then the other. The writing is great.

3:09:46Dustin Furman:The voice acting is great. The sound design is elite. I played through the entire game with headphones. Highly recommend doing it that way. I'm playing it now on TV speakers so I can just be more aware of my surroundings. But that first time you're playing through and everything's a surprise to you, you should definitely play with headphones. the game scared the shit out of me multiple times you know jump scares and just be like oh shit like just even things that are not set up like when you're just like walking around a corner and there's and like the zombies there on his like on his path you know oh fuck and you have to like walk it's just the game is just it's not unlike the other resident evil games in that it's just it's really fucking good and i'm impressed by it and i'm thrilled for their success with this one it seems like resident evil is somehow growing which is remarkable and i think a lot of that comes on the back of really good remakes and good solid support that doesn't never that never steps on itself yet is always present you have a game a year a game every 18 months whether it's a remake or a new new title um it's just very high quality very very high quality and i'm i really really liked it a lot certainly one of the games of the year i mean i don't so many games coming out still so much time to go, but it's an elite game.

3:11:01Dustin Furman:Heartbreak Kid wrote in and said, hey, CDC, this is mainly for Colin. We have to talk about how RE9 was clearly influenced by Naughty Dog in this game. I saw a lot of The Last of Us inspiration and a bit of Uncharted in there as well. Would like to hear your thoughts on this. Also, did you see the Mega Man reference? I didn't. I'll keep an eye out for that. But there is a lot of The Last of Us in this game. I don't, Dustin, did you do you agree with that? We talked a little bit about that, but like I see it a lot. certainly in one specific section of the game that I won't I won't talk about that is very naughty dog to me like no dog and it's not an insult and it's not saying they're copying this is a good thing to copy and it's what I said on the stream is that they're one of the few publishers in one of the few studios like the resident one you know the resident evil kind of tranche of developers at Capcom they're one of the few talents that could do it and that can like do it at that level and they do do it at that level in many different ways.

3:11:55Dustin Furman:The Last of Us is a substantially better game than Resident Evil 9 in my opinion but Resident Evil 9 is, that's like an elite, amazing all-time game. Resident Evil 9 is one of the great Resident Evil games and I highly, highly, highly recommend it. Just period. If you're a Resident Evil fan and you haven't bought it already, that would be hard to believe but just for people that are, here's the thing. We were making fun of this a little bit on the stream, Dustin. I've played every Resident Evil game except for six. A lot of the spinoffs, I played many of them multiple times. I don't really know what's going on.

3:12:29Dustin Furman:Like I understand, I know the stories of specific games, obviously the characters. And this game, without spoiling, I think has a lot of odes to old things. And that's cool. And so if you're new to Resident Evil, you're going to miss out on all that. But it's one of those series, perhaps not on like Assassin's Creed, where you kind of can jump in. There is a continuity. It's going somewhere, but you don't feel alienated from it if you jump in. And so I would recommend just playing all the Resident Evil games if you can. But nine is not a terrible thing to jump into. It's going to be a lot of it's going to be downhill from there because it's so good.

3:13:04Dustin Furman:But yeah, I want to just give them a shout out. I think it's wonderful. And what do you think about it?

3:13:10Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I did beat it. So let me start by saying I think this game is awesome. I really, really liked it. I am less hot on it than the general consensus, I think. First of all, I mean, just some more positive stuff. Like it visually is absolutely incredible. Playing this on PS5 Pro with the new PSSR is very, very good. Not totally perfect with some of the ways. It's either the RE engine or the PSSR. it can get a little smeary in certain situations or have some noise, I guess, but overall big improvement. The opening, I don't want to say the opening of the game, but the first main area that you're in the hospital.

3:14:01Colin Moriarty:And I won't talk about any area other than that is very good. Maybe one of the best locations in a resident evil game. The zombies in this game are so cool. cool particularly because in previous resident evil games it was like oh here's another zombie and they're just kind of what you would expect a zombie to be in this game the zombies have a lot more personality and that makes each encounter a lot more interesting and there's a lot of different characteristics to these zombies that i really appreciated um the leon the action sections are also like the gameplay itself is very very good the negative aspects i have of this game is there was a concern before it came out that the two the dual protagonists would maybe not work because they were splitting their time and i think that it it mostly works for me because the gameplay of each of those sections is so good like they nailed it but i think that splitting your game up between these two characters makes this resident evil game less cohesive than other Resident Evil games.

3:15:27Colin Moriarty:For example, I think that in these games you are able to upgrade your character and you get a broader set of weapons throughout. So if you compare what you had in your equipment at the very beginning of the game to the very end, it's vastly different. And because you're splitting that between two characters, that is severely truncated in this game. Maybe that will matter to you. Maybe it won't. It's not that you don't get new equipment as you play, but there was a rumor about this game years ago that they were working on a more open Resident Evil game starring Leon. And this game to me feels like two, maybe even multiple ideas fused together throughout somewhat of a development hell that they managed to pull up very, very well.

3:16:24Colin Moriarty:And like I said, I love this game. It's going to be in probably my top five games of the year, for sure. So the last thing I'll say, and this is the thing I'm so excited to get into on the spoiler cast, because I think this is going to be the very most contentious between all of us. And I'm very curious what Brad and Locke think is the nostalgia stuff Did not really work for me. In fact. My point of comparison for this game. This is what's going to get me killed. Tonight or whenever this podcast release. Resident Evil 9. Is the force awakens of Resident Evil. It's new. But safe. But it's got a lot of old stuff.

3:17:06Colin Moriarty:And I think the old stuff does not earn it. I don't. It's like oh well. This is our Death Star. But instead it's a planet. it only worse in certain situations where like well we're just it's it has a bit of that like i can't deny and i can't get into specifics there are certain things as resident evil fans you're gonna have a pop for absolutely in this game but i think in reflection they feel it feels like empty calories in some ways where it's like it has a bit of marvel effect to it where it's like okay so we're we're doing this again why because it's cool and and that's totally fine i mean resident evil is always been to me like stupid popcorn fun horror game but in some ways and i do i think the story kind of starts to not make sense it's not that it doesn't make sense it's just the writing i think significantly gets worse in the second half of the game where there are things i'm like why what are we doing why are we doing this that's interesting too because i think

3:18:14Dustin Furman:the the nostalgia plays for and i and i want to be just specific like some of them are like whoa that's fucking dope like so it's it's so interesting like just the the familiarity and the i was like this is cool as fuck in my opinion but i think some yeah we'll talk about we'll talk

3:18:30Colin Moriarty:more i'm so excited to talk about it because there's yeah there's just certain things i was Like, I want to love this, but I can't. I can't love certain things. Like, I can't do it. So overall, I think it's very, very fun. I think it's one of the best games I'm going to play this year. But I'm not like I'm seeing people saying that they think it's the best Resident Evil game, period. And I'm like, no, no, it's not.

3:18:57Dustin Furman:But it's it's not. It's maybe number three. I mean, I get I've not played six. it's not six six isn't the best one don't worry i know that but i do have to go and play it at some point like and just just fill that that gap in but especially because there's like ada chapters in there right and stuff like there's like a bunch of interesting stuff in there but but um it's gonna be two the the top three in some combination are two four and nine i think and it used to be two four and seven i think seven kind of got bumped by this and they're now and I think it's some so some combination of those I think would be pretty reasonable and I assume that's where a lot of people are if they feel like it's one of the great ones yeah I would put two four and seven above this there's it's been too long since I've fully replayed village

3:19:50Colin Moriarty:I almost want to put it on the same level as village which I think I like that game more than some people did I think village declines it has a pacing problem where the best part of the game is at the first section of the game but yeah there is something i i think the factory that factory sucks i hate that fact yeah the factory's bad well i don't even want to say it's bad it's just not anywhere near as good as the stuff for it but right i i think that the the cohesiveness of the game i can see through the the seams a little bit um of it so that's still very good

3:20:29Chris Santis:I'm looking forward to playing it the only reason I haven't played it yet is because I'm waiting to play it on ps5 and I don't have access to my ps5 yet uh but I'm really everybody everybody that I know who's played it is having a pretty good time with it so I'm like I'm kind of I'm I'm that squidward meme where he's like kind of looking out the window they're sliding down the yeah and they're having fun and he's like just like oh man I guess I could downplay on a pc but like I want

3:20:52Dustin Furman:to play it on ps5 I want to yeah I gotta say man it sings on ps5 pro like it's that's what I keep

3:20:58Chris Santis:really is great hearing that so it's it's gonna be like yeah i mean i'll wait i'm not i'm not like i'm not like a huge resident evil fan in the sense that i'm like clamoring for it but like i'm i'm

3:21:07Dustin Furman:getting antsy about it yeah i'm excited i'm i'm very excited to talk to you more about this with you dustin because i i feel like there's a lot to say about about i so my set i don't know that i'm gonna get all the way through the game doing this game because i only have tonight to do it before we record but i'm a little more than halfway through the game now and i've been taking like really extensive notes as I played so we have like a shit ton of things to talk about regardless um because the first the first time I played it it's like I don't want it's funny my my cumulative um I always make fun of it Mike I always I always make fun of it to Michael where I'm like my my screen time on my phone is ridiculous you know how it shows you like your average screen time yeah it'll be like six or seven hours a day because I have my phone on typically when I'm playing some games and I just have YouTube playing and I'm in my ear and I noticed because I wasn't doing that when I was playing Resident Evil because I was just locked into the game.

3:21:55Dustin Furman:My average screen time precipitously fell this last week, which is so funny. It's one of those games that's just so, in my opinion, so deeply engaging. And Leon's quips come a mile a minute. Love it. He's like, I'm afraid I'm not on the menu or something like that. I'm like, yes. I want a second opinion. Yeah, I want a second. He's great. All right. Trickster Mixter wrote in and said, hello, Staker Cuties. is obligatory. What did Chris and Dustin think about the marathon server slam question here? For me, I went in with relatively low expectations, but came away really enjoying it. The more I played and learned, the more time slipped away from my squad as we did run after run last weekend.

3:22:35Dustin Furman:Any favorite moments from the boys? Cool details or observations that you hadn't seen discussed too much. Thank you, kind sirs. I will now make like a tree and fuck off. Thank you, Trickster Mixter for writing. So Dustin, let's stick with you and then we'll go over to Chris because I know everyone's really eager to hear about marathon from him too, but you guys have also been playing marathon. It's out today for when we're recording right so it's out now um all right this is suffering again let's

3:22:55Colin Moriarty:hear uh i don't have a lot to say about marathon but i do have a little bit i'm very curious what chris thinks because i because it was resident evil weekend i really was like dude i don't i can wait for marathon but i want to check it out a little bit particularly so we could talk about it on summon sign so brad and i put about two hours into the service land the last night that it was available and right off the bat i thought this game was going to be really cool in its visuals and it's even cooler than i thought and it has me very excited that when i boot it up tonight i think i'm going to play by myself tonight because i want to be able to sit and take in some of the lore stuff that they have going on uh i think the visuals in game are also excellent but i can see those being a little bit more uh you know give or take depending on what you like in a game yeah the only problem i have well no let's let me say the gameplay also the gunplay i shot my gun one time i'm like oh feels like a bungee game i don't know how to describe that but i know chris know i'm talking about it's like you just immediately feel it it's the engine

3:24:11Chris Santis:it's the engine or something like i don't know like it's so it makes me sad about like a lot of games like going to unreal and like even cd project going to unreal for like witcher kind of makes me sad because you know like there there's so much there's so many micro details in the way games feel and the way games feel identifiable that are like so intrinsic to their proprietary engines that like seeing that go away generally is is sad so to feel that again i know what you

3:24:35Colin Moriarty:mean yeah like it's you feel it the i really liked that when we first started playing we were very uh we were going around just shooting npcs without a care and we very quickly learned that they you you've got to be careful fucking around the npcs are can be very very powerful in this game we learned that very quickly um the issue i had with my two hours and i think chris you touched on this is the onboarding of this game is not very good um i played the tutorial i've played arc raiders so i understand the format of these games but going in i was like man um i'm trying to figure out what to pick up what not to pick up what i can drag to put on a weapon what i can't um how to like where do i get my quest i figured that out pretty quick so that's i don't want to fault the game for that but i was noticing like man it feels a lot less intuitive getting into it than arc raiders for sure and that concerned me just in that i was like man i mean it's out now so we'll know the answer to this very soon but it's like i wonder if their lack of better onboarding is going to hurt this game in that the service land people uh arc raiders fans might come in and be like hmm this isn't as pickup as play as i thought it would be and i'm gonna have to learn this so i'm just gonna go back to arc raiders now i don't think that's a good mindset because my thought at the end was like man this was really fun i don't know what i'm doing but i can tell that if i invest the time into learning what this game wants out of me that i'm going to have a very good time it's just not as immediately accessible as those other games so those two hours were fun we got into some good firefights we had brad and i were just playing duo and up against trios so It was more difficult.

3:26:43Colin Moriarty:That's a rough one. We did team clear at least twice. So that felt very good when I was like, yeah, we still got a little bit of sauce in us, but, um, but yeah, I was like, Hmm, I can tell there's something here. It's going to require more out of me and I'm okay with that, but I'm going to, I just, at this point, I'm just going to wait till it comes out. So I bought the game this morning. It's installed. I'm going to play it tonight. I'm going to play by myself because I think there was some pressure, even though like, you know, Brad doesn't care if it takes me a while to like read something or whatever.

3:27:18Colin Moriarty:But it's like, let's just get into it. Like we're we're here to play this game. Let's just get into it. So I think I was skipping over, not skipping over tutorials, but it's like you feel more flustered to like read and figure things out quickly because you're in a group situation.

3:27:31Chris Santis:Yeah.

3:27:32Colin Moriarty:So I'm going to play by myself tonight and really take it slow. Do free loadouts for quite a while as I just learn things. so so yeah i'll take this now to throw over to you chris because i think you said last week maybe it wasn't last week but that the onboarding is classic bungie not necessarily ideal

3:27:57Chris Santis:yeah yeah so i mean i'll start off with just how i remember because i played marathon i played marathon a while ago i think i can't remember when the i can't remember when the public alpha was I think it was like May or March or something of last year maybe April early last year and what I remember vividly about those first several matches those first several hours basically was like I like the way this feels and I kind of dig the presentation here but I don't I don't necessarily know what I'm doing I don't know what's important I don't know what to focus on I don't know what points of interest hold what.

3:28:39Chris Santis:And it took it took me a while. I think it took me like maybe three and a half hours to really like I was still playing it and enjoying it. But like it took me three and a half hours for things to really kind of like, oh, wait, I've seen that before. Oh, I need that for this thing. Oh, I know where that is. That's there on this map. Oh, but that's where the that's where the boss is. Oh, so I need that. And it's a game that's like very, very, it's weirdly like rewarding to just learn and figure out. There's a lot there that isn't really apparent in the beginning. And I think Arc Raiders is very approachable in that way.

3:29:19Chris Santis:Like, I think Arc Raiders does a better job of bringing people in. But I think the reason Arc Raiders does a good job of bringing people in is because there's, I mean, respectfully to Arc Raiders, I thought Arc Raiders was my favorite multiplayer experience last year, bar none. but there's not a lot there really like the loot is it exists and as an extraction shooter it's very casual it's it's arguably more of like a like vr chat than than an extraction game proper and so like there's not a lot really to confuse you because there's not a lot of depth in like the build crafting or like what you can do but in this game there's a lot that you can do and i didn't really clue into that until i got some time with and i started learning the areas and i started learning the maps and i started learning how weapons work and like what mods work and like what mods are applicable to where i think the ui could do with some improvement in that on that front i actually like the style of it i appreciate that there's like i appreciate that it's not a hulu menu and that there's like actually like some stylization going on but i think there's some like some pain points that they could solve making some icons a little bit more readable at a glance i think would be good um because there's definitely some work to be done there but overall dude like i put dude i put 46 hours into that server slam over the over the over the the couple days that i was playing that's great and i did not and i did not intend to do that i intended to be like listen i the full game's coming out i'm i'm gonna be playing this game soon anyway i'm gonna try out the server slam because i'm excited about it and i'm curious about it and i want to kind of learn I kind of want to learn how the game works but in my mind I'm thinking oh my gear is going to wipe at the end of the at the end of these four days anyway like what am like why am I like why am I going to bust my ass chasing for the good guns or like you know build my stash like what's the point uh that's how I felt the first day and then the second day I was like yeah I think I want to play again because I want to try that shotgun again and I lose the shotgun and i'm like fuck well i can't lose my shotgun i gotta go find another shotgun and then i'm back in and then i find a better gun and then i'm like and then suddenly i'm learning like oh the boss spawns here and there's like special loot in this container in this oh there's a code for this secret door underneath this building that gives you a deactivation code for a room that's normally full of gas that is toxic to enter but has a bunch of good shit in it that i can now winter is like and it the it's interesting because like so this game is going to be built around the fact that like every three months or so your your entire vault is going to wipe and you're going to lose all of the progress that you've made all of the um all of the you know upgrades that you've gotten all of the weapons that you've acquired they're all going to wipe and so it kind of brings the focus into like well what are you gaining from your experience and you're what you're gaming is what you're gaining is oh you're learning the inside and outside of this map like intuitively like you're gaining a lot of knowledge about like how weapons work and like how much damage certain things do so like even if you lose all your shit at the beginning of an of at the end of a of a season or whatever you're going to start that next season off better off anyway because you're going to have this intrinsic understanding of like oh i know i know what's i know that that's a dead end in that hallway i can't get caught in that hallway again because i remember vividly when i lost that really cool piece of shit that really cool piece of gear that I ran into a I ran into a bathroom by accident because I thought that was going to be a way to escape and I got molested by like seven other teams and so like it just it's a very I don't know man it's it's got this it's it's got its hooks in me and what I noticed what I was very curious about because I wasn't sure how I was feel about the wipe because i'm a destiny guy and i like you know if i'm gonna invest time in something and i'm gonna collect a stash of cool stuff i'm not really sold on the idea of having all that stuff taken away from me arbitrarily at the end of a season just to have it all reset but what i found at the end of the server slam is that like when i realized that there was only like a day left or like a couple of hours left what i noticed was that we were all getting really brave we're like you know what yeah let's go in with all of our great shit because we're gonna lose it anyway and that is a fun feeling because now you're feeling like oh that's what that upgrade really that's what this purple upgrade really does and how much it changes the way you play and what this purple mod on this on this shotgun does to make it crazy and i i got it like it kind of clicked where it's like there's gonna be a point at the end of the season where everybody's just going ham and no one's afraid and then it's going to be like it's absolute peak chaos and i really dude i mean i played for 46 hours i obviously loved i obviously you man i'm happy for you i loved my time with it i lost a lot of sleep i was going to bed at like seven in the morning many many days i didn't regret it um it just feels good to play it's rewarding to learn there's still things 46 hours in that i'm like i haven't even scratched the surface of which is impressive to me there's like still another map that we haven't played there's the marathon ship itself which is going to have a barrier of entry to it where like you're not even going to be allowed to go in there with like free stuff you have to go in there with like a loadout value of like thousands of dollars that's interesting so like and it's i don't know man and and i gotta say like i know that i know that it's um i know that it's contentious for some And I get it because the art style can be it's like one of those things where it's like you either love it or you hate it.

3:35:00Chris Santis:I personally I just love the way this game looks. I think it's interesting. I think the fact that this takes place in the 2800s or whatever. Yeah, a laboratory shouldn't look like an office building like it would look today. It should look kind of like even though this is human construct, it should look kind of alien. And it does. and there are points where like i've seen some criticism of like well i don't really know what any of these buildings are and then like as you spend more time in the world you realize like oh this is like a this is a quarantine facility these are like tents with like containment pods and like oh this is a laboratory and like oh this is like a drone factory and like all these different things and the narrative setup is awesome too like i love the idea of a generation ship carved into the like carved out of a out of the martian moon and going on a voyage to taoseti for 300 years and shit goes wrong and you know you're trying to figure it out and and all the all all the corporations that sponsored that sponsored the voyage are wondering what the fuck happened and trying to recoup their cost trying to trying to recoup their technology from the surface of a planet that's suddenly uninhabitable and using mechanical like synths of like detached consciousnesses to do mercenary work to find all that shit the factions have all this personality behind them i love that one of them one of them nukal nukal orc is like my favorite one like they're like the they're the corporation that provided all the food for the for the ship and for the colony and so they have these things like these really dystopian like it's like a pit like you'll see ads for like a pill and it says like tastes like meat isn't and like this and or like a drinkable cheeseburger you'll find and it's like this like this really disgusting like ways around getting food to uh survive for 300 years um i just think it's fucking awesome and and the ways it ties into the original marathon trilogy are fucking dope that's gonna be like that's gonna be lost on a lot of people ain't no there's a lot of people who say they played marathon they did not fucking play marathon you know it's just and i get it like it's it's a fucking old game it's difficult to get into it's not particularly accessible it's hella cryptic so like i don't blame people for not doing that but like hearing certain lines and certain characters given voice for the first time is really cool like it's it it kind of hit me in a way it's like this is it's so cool to hear these voices for the first time because i've always imagined like how these characters sound and now I hear it um and yeah man I'm loving it I don't know how it'll do I think I think ultimately I think ultimately like here's what I think is going to happen I think this game is going to have a long tail on it I think people are going to bounce off it pretty early and the people who stay are not going to shut up about it and there's going to be a lot of videos about it and I think it's going to have this weird word of mouth effect where it's going to be like oh I did try it but like I didn't like it but like maybe I did I miss something I must have missed something and I feel like it's just going to grow slowly I don't know if it'll be like the immediate like arc rate arc rate is just so accessible to almost to the point where it's just like impossible to replicate I don't think you can really do that especially not with a game that's actually a proper extraction shooter like it's just this is because this is real this is like this made me realize actually like how like uh i hate to bring it back to spongebob but it's like it's like a arc raiders is like very weenie hut jr in comparison it's like oh hey friend who let's be friends it's bloodthirsty up in here man like it's it's no it's not and it's awesome i love it i love the fact that like these these provide very very different experiences i almost feel like they are somewhat complementary to each other because like it's almost like this is like the sweaty version but it's still it's still approachable it ain't tarkov tarkov is the sweat sweat sweat version of this um but this is like the approachable way this is like ranked halo 3 or something where it's just like i'm not i don't gotta be gold in counter-strike to play this um and arc is gonna be chilling there for like when you just want to i don't know sit in a room and just kind of chill and not think about it too much but i found it really rewarding i love my time with it i'm excited eager to jump back into it today um and uh see where it goes excited to check out that new map uh excited to check out that new shell and i'm really curious what that what the marathon map is going to be like what like what's because i have a feeling that that's that's eventually going to be that will be the vault of glass to make a destiny comparison like that'll be the moment where i think the game cracks open and people realize like okay this is the end game and I'm excited.

3:39:55Cool.

3:39:55Chris Santis:I think it's very, very good.

3:39:57Dustin Furman:I'm happy for you. We'll get it. We'll spin up a marathon review discussion and spoiler cast. I won't be on it, obviously, but we'll get the appropriate peoples on it in the coming weeks to discuss the game more in depth as well. I'll look forward to that. Yeah, the games. I love the visual flair of the game. It's not a game for me, obviously, but I love the visual flair, but all the deep lore and how they keep reiterating that the lore is really important, I think is pretty cool. I like that kind of thing, too. I'm on Steam right now it's at about 85 ,000 concurrence it just came out a few hours ago and people are still at work and stuff I think and this is only for PC I think the game is going to be just fine I mean I've always said that so and I'm rooting for them actually with everyone being such so annoying and assholes about the game I'm actually kind of rooting for it like yeah okay you guys are going to be that annoying about it

3:40:42Chris Santis:although dude even the people I saw who were kind of rooting against it or whatever like I've seen so many videos over over over the course of the weekend and it's funny because this was my experience as well where like video one will be like doa or like i have problems with marathon and then day four is like i've put 30 hours into marathon and i think uh i think it might have miscalculated it's and it i get it like it happens it's mega satisfying to learn but it's like you gotta you got to want it and uh that'll be what's interesting what what is interesting is that like i wonder there is an argument to be made it was like well did sony buy bungie for a game that demands attention i guess like that demands uh a level of uh intention or intellect from from from the player or did they buy them for like a very accessible kind of thing that is an argument because i bet they thought they were getting something more like our creators and what they got is something that's close but it definitely definitely needs more from your average person who's going to try and pick it up we'll see because it's not friendly it's not it's not if you're trying to make friends in marriage you could but it's possible like i've done it but like they're out there to kill you bro i didn't hear a single person talk yeah there's my two hours i've you have you have to break the ice basically like ain't nobody breaking the ice because like they don't want to give themselves away but like i've i've negotiated deals i actually like so they asked about a moment and i'll tell you this i've negotiated a deal i I negotiated a great deal on Tau City 4.

3:42:38Chris Santis:It was crazy. I was being chased by ticks. No, I did have a moment where me and a friend of mine, my friend Jake, we went in as a duo. And I do think they need a duo queue. That is one thing. Here are the things that I think Marathon needs to improve on. Just for fair criticism. I think the UI needs some work. I don't want them to lose all of the style because I actually do think after the third hour or whatever, it's actually pretty fine. like and it works like it's really not as complicated as it seems it's just a lot of style and you kind of get lost in what is and is not flourish but it's pretty simple i do think it could need it could stand to have some like more readability on the icons just at a glance there are some button mapping things where like i found myself the drop and pick up button in game is is are reversed in the menus and i found that being kind of like that kind of fucked me up a little bit and it's still i mean i haven't played in a couple days but like i would imagine that that's probably still gonna so there's stuff to be done there um i think there could be more variation in the enemy ai but that's really i haven't seen all of it i feel weird you know what i mean because i haven't seen all of what the game is but from what i've played anyway in the first two maps that could that could stand to be fixed and i do think the tutorial is not good yeah like i think it's fine but like it could be way it could be way better i just feel like what i don't understand about these games and this is not the first game to do it i don't understand why why so many of these games so many of these live service games that have hero mechanics or class mechanics that are integral to team play i don't i do not understand why these games launch so often without a practice room where you can try things out before you go out and risk a bunch of stuff now i get it the practice should be you go in with a free kit and you don't risk anything and that your practice is kind of playing the game i get that but the tutorial is with one class and that might not even be the class that you want to play so like it doesn't you know what i mean like it it needs a little bit onboarding needs some tlc i think but i think but i also think the onboarding is way better than destiny 2 so i'm kind of conflicted um but yeah that's how i feel but the we we negotiated i was playing with a with a friend of mine on duos and we matched with some random guy he didn't have a mic and so we were going around and we met these other people and we were like hey we're gonna take down we're gonna take down this boss do you want to help us and they were like yeah yeah yeah let's do it and you know they could have betrayed us later who the fuck knows but before we could even really broker this deal our mic-less teammate starts opening fire on them he doesn't get the message at all and so there's a panic happening and we and me and my friend are like no no no he's we're a duo he's on our team he doesn't hear us go kill him and so we were just like we basically sold this dude out that's awesome and we were like and we were telling them it's like oh he's running but he's running he's running in the back he's like behind the he's behind the crate natum natum and uh we basically just executed our teammate it sold him out completely just to save our own skins that's great i mean that's the good shit

3:45:53Dustin Furman:that these kinds of games it's fascinating the kind of storytelling the meta storytelling

3:45:56Chris Santis:in the game yeah it's fun it's good shit i recommend it i recommend giving it a try if you i mean you should have tried it during the server slam realistically uh but if anything about that server slam like if you bounced off after like two hours or whatever and you felt like there was absolutely nothing there then fair enough go your way but if you felt like there was even an inkling that you might have been enjoying yourself i think it's worth trying because it gets so fucking satisfying the build crafting is insane already so yeah i'm quite happy good yeah i'm

3:46:32Dustin Furman:excited i'm happy for you because this is such a we've been waiting for this bungee's your shit yeah this is this is for you enjoy you'll have hopefully years with the game um i think so yeah I think it's going to be fine I think it's going to have to find its way and who knows what it means for Bungie I don't think it's going to be big enough to support all of Bungie so I'm curious what I mean it's definitely not going to be so I'm curious what they what their plans are yeah Destiny 3 you assume is in the that would be the obvious thing but I mean that's probably years away so they're going to figure that out it shouldn't be years away but it is going to be yeah all right well very good so that's Resident Evil Requiem and Marathon we'll have more to say about those on here, I'm sure, but also much more in depth on Sacred Symbols Plus in the coming weeks on Patreon.com slash Last Day Media.

3:47:19Dustin Furman:All right, let's get into six questions, comments, concerns, thoughts, and ideas and get the hell out of here. As we always end our show with six inquiries from the audience over on Patreon.com slash Last Day Media. Use the thread in the news feed for the different shows, including Sacred, every week. I go through them. You've heard a bunch of them throughout the show already. You'll hear six more now. I tried to give you guys tips earlier to get your selection read. Try to say something unique and novel and be pithy. KY's life wrote in said hi all what's the word on horizons multiplayer i signed up to play with sony but didn't snag an invite hmm that's too bad but you know what i have two people that told us all about it so i thought i would give you information uh from people that claim to have played it now i can't verify this but i will say this the first person that i'm going to read has been a listener and i know the person's name been a listener for many years i just don't believe the person's lag so i'll read what this person said first i'll go to the second person as well take it or leave it this is what they say says call on sacred 400 you asked about horizons hunter gathering i played a little the closed test here's my thoughts it doesn't feel good to play enemies are sponges and even the weaker watchers take way too long to put down you get a choice of three classes initially but two of them are melee with some slight differences one was range but it didn't feel anywhere as good with any of the bow options compared to the main game onboarding for this was non-existent outside of an initial tutorial that taught you the melee buttons and the specials you could do once you built up enough melee points.

3:48:44Dustin Furman:The specials were just stronger attacks, but even those felt very weak. The design of the game is supposed to make you feel stronger as you go on, but I didn't feel any differences. To compare this to say Hades, at least in Hades, it feels good from the start and then you feel more powerful as you go on. This never felt good to play and that's why I bounced off it fast. The overworld area hub is like those multiplayer games where characters stand at spots and you click through menus. Probably not a fan, personally, I'm sorry, not a fan of that when you load into the main game the main area after picking what challenge you want to do you have to wait for two other players to load in and pick their character this surprisingly took longer than i expected and the loading screen is bare the order who gets to pick first seems random players cannot be the same character i ended up preferring the ranged one because he was the only one not melee focused but there's no real winners there once in i was playing the incursion mode mainly you can go to spots on the map which shows enemy locations with a number of difficulty and rest stops where you can use your credits to buy health and buffs what i forgot and the game doesn't really tell you is that this is timed because there's a Fortnite-esque circle of death coming in on the map.

3:49:42Dustin Furman:But even at the lowest numbers, enemies take too long to put down. Then a little bot comes up and you can pick a little reward after the area is cleared, usually like a small buff, do more damage, etc. I never noticed any difference at all with the damage outputs, so I would pick anything health-related if it came up, mainly because as you go through the higher numbers, there's more enemies on screen and the bigger robots come out. Not only are they also sponges, but some of their special attacks can wipe out a lot of your health fast. Overall, I'd most compare this to Monster Hunter, but I'm not a fan of that game either, so this isn't for me.

3:50:11Dustin Furman:I don't know if I'll be tuned in, tuned for, I'm sorry, I don't know if it'll be tuned for single player at launch, but I don't think this game will be one you'd like. And I'd go on to say that this game will be another dead on arrival live service style game. I expect six and sevens based on what I played, but there are way better options out there. Hope this helps. So that's one person's opinion, right? I got another person. Both these people gave me explicit permission to use their stuff verbatim. This other person is a newer listener I don't know. So again, I don't know why people would lie about this.

3:50:43Dustin Furman:Take it for what you will. This person says, I thought I'd provide some background on Horizon Hunter's Gathering. I played six hours in the closed test so far and we'll be putting in another three tonight. I've seen pretty much everything currently on offer. Here are my thoughts. Release window. This is likely a 2027 release, not because the game is in bad shape, but because it needs polish. Animation smoothing, voice acting refinement and UI and UX revisions would go a long way towards elevating the experience. Game modes. The game features two genuinely fun, repeatable modes that feel distinct from one another.

3:51:12Dustin Furman:One mode feels similar to Elden Ring Night Reign, a large map with multiple branching choices, roguelike elements, and escalating challenges that prepare you to defeat a boss. The second mode is more straightforward and randomized. You enter a cauldron where a random room generates, and some starting rooms are surprisingly challenging. After clearing a section, you're offered two or three room options with rewards, such as new ability synergies, ability upgrades, additional resources, shops where you can spend gathered resources, platforming challenges, and more. This sounds like what the other person was describing.

3:51:41Dustin Furman:Three, art style. The art style and character designs look significantly better in motion than they do in promotional material, similar to how Marvel rivals impress people once they actually played it. You'll likely be impressed even if part of you misses the original Horizon aesthetic. It's a bold stylistic shift, but one that I think will pay off. Four, cosmetics and camp system. The game is clearly leaning heavily into cosmetics, including camp cosmetics. Unfortunately, the camp system is currently underwhelming. If it isn't meaningfully iterated on, it may need to be scrapped entirely. As it stands, it's not comparable to even the most competent base building or camp systems in other games.

3:52:14Dustin Furman:That said, the camp exists within a hub world where up to eight players can gather and each can build their own space. All costumes are rendered in-game and extremely high quality. Customizations including leg pieces, head pieces, chess pieces, boots, weapon skins, and more. Five, gameplay and combat. Even at this early stage, the gameplay feels very good. There's clear horizon style melee combat here and it feels weighty and impactful. The system is combo based, but the inputs are simple, primarily R1 and R2. Holding L2 and pressing a face button triggers a special move. You build energy for these special moves by landing basic attacks on enemies.

3:52:45Dustin Furman:Six, machine parts and roguelike integration. This could fall under gameplay, but it deserves its own category. Machine parts have been integrated into the roguelike structure. You can gain additional supplies, such as grenades, for detaching parts from enemies. Importantly, enemies behave differently once specific parts are removed, which is a great touch. Some parts are still used for progression, but that system has been streamlined compared to the mainline Horizon titles. 7. Battle Pass Surprisingly, there was a battle pass in the test. It unlocked cosmetics and new seasonal abilities. It appears that currency can be earned in-game, similar to Helldivers 2.

3:53:15Dustin Furman:There is no indication that it was paid, so it may be fully earnable through gameplay. To close, this is a very straightforward game with unique visuals and a combat system that blends well with the Horizon universe while making it more streamlined. I'm genuinely excited for it. And honestly, the longer they take to polish it, the better it will be at launch. Two very different opinions. Dustin, what do you think?

3:53:35Colin Moriarty:Sounds like the first person went in not wanting to like it a little bit, but I don't want to disregard their opinion. It sounds like also they don't like, I think he said, I don't like Monster Hunter.

3:53:48Dustin Furman:Yeah.

3:53:49Colin Moriarty:Right. And so it's not surprising if you don't like Monster Hunter and they're making a Monster Hunter style Horizon game that you he doesn't like it. The camp system somewhat sounds like Monster Hunter because I know previous Monster Hunter games let you customize it. I don't know if Wilds did does or if they updated it to allow that. But having eight people in the camp that, you know, you that shared space makes sense. the night rain stuff sounds kind of interesting to me in terms of like a big map that you can go multiple directions to level up your character as you play in order to fight a bigger boss pretty cool um but the main thing i guess i don't want to make it sound like i'm overly rooting for this game and or that i'm being too hard on the first guy writing in but he's talking about how bad it feels to play or how this isn't tuned right or whatever and it's like that's the point that's what that's why they're having you play the game is to tune it the question is whether or not the core the unchangeable core of the game at this point isn't good which i think that second write-in i don't know maybe he was being overly generous though he had a lot of negative things to say about saying it needs a lot of polish but i would say overall this sounds i don't want to say it sounds like oh overwhelmingly positive or promising but it's certainly not bad it's it lines up with the expectations of what i thought it would be like but i guess that's because that's what they presented to us so i'm definitely interested still i i mean if i got in this playtest i wouldn't be able to talk to you guys about it right now i'm hoping eventually they'll do some kind of open playtest at some point because i definitely want to see what it's about yeah um yeah and to reiterate i like i i'm not gonna play it i didn't play it i'm not going to

3:55:46Dustin Furman:do any of that but um these people i i should reiterate like these people could be lying to us but i just don't i don't know what the purpose of that would be or why um chris what do you have to say about this i honestly think i'm in pretty much complete

3:56:03Chris Santis:agreement with dustin like i i think um i think it's like if you're not into monster hunter oh well there is something to be said about like if because i want to be into monster hunter and i just kind of can't like there's like there's like a barrier there for me so like um but i appreciate like what it is i just i haven't found like an approachable way to play monster hunter in a way that isn't like you know demanding and so like i'm looking to this as something like oh yeah i'm looking for something like monster hunter i just um that can maybe fill that fulfill that vibe and hopefully this is it but if he's saying like oh he doesn't like monster hunter and it's not filling that vibe it's like oh that's a bummer but i also feel like you know it's it's a closed tech technical test um i don't know it sounds like basically what i thought it would be which is fine i'm kind of looking forward to it like i don't know i uh i don't hate the idea i don't hate the art style i i never hated the art style or at least as far as like the world looks i think the characters could look a little better but like the world i think looks cool and i'm just not really as opposed to this or like offended by it as as um people seem to be uh whether or not this is going to be a massive success or whatever like i don't know probably not but like or maybe not like i don't know maybe i i doubt it just because of the trend that a lot of live service games are going right now but i don't know man i'm open to it i'm not trying i don't feel particularly negative about what i'm hearing you know this is far from a disaster is

3:57:40Dustin Furman:what it seems like yeah we'll see it's early still well not that early but yeah next year sounds about right yeah owen s writes in says hello sacred crew do you guys think playstation has put forward enough of an effort to attract younger audiences? It's an interesting question. My answer is no, but I also don't know that they're there for the taking, really. I know people make fun of this idea of graduating from certain consoles or graduating from certain ecosystems. I don't mean that as like you're like, I know the implication, but it's like. You're not necessarily moving up a grade or whatever.

3:58:16Dustin Furman:You're just moving on to something else. And I think that people are more likely to graduate into PlayStation than they are to start there. And I think that's more likely now than it's ever been, not only because of the slant of PlayStation games, which were much more childlike back in the day, but because they don't seem to really be investing in that outside of Astro Bot, of course. But I just Astro Bot's not a huge hit. I mean, it's a it's a critical darling and it's great game, but it's sold a few million copies. It's not this thing that's saturated the market or anything like that. But I just don't know.

3:58:47Dustin Furman:I don't know if there's anything there for them to get. It just seems like in the game space, the child is kind of locked down to Roblox, to whatever, plus Minecraft, plus Nintendo. They have to deal with them. I'm not even sure what the play would be other than investing in more kids games. But I just don't know that they're I don't know that you start on PlayStation anymore like you used to. What do you think, Chris?

3:59:08Chris Santis:Yeah, I mean, I think that's true. I also feel like things are different now, man. I feel like there just used to be more kids playing games, quite frankly. Maybe I'm wrong, and maybe I'm just not clued incorrectly, and maybe it's a vibe that I have that's way off. The audience can tell me, but it kind of feels like children are gravitating more towards phones and apps, and the video games that they are playing are kind of forever games as opposed to ecosystems. systems and so like i i don't know if i don't know if it's even really necessary to court that audience i think i think it is i think it is necessary to be there for them when they're interested in expanding and i think that's what playstation's done a good job of but also the ip that playstation's playstation focuses on are older ip now at this point like it's you know horizon's been around for a while um god of war's been around for fucking ever uh so yeah this we we are slanted to an older demographic now more so than we used to be uh and i think that's fine i don't know i i it's a different world like there's a lot competing for our attention now a lot competing for kids attention a lot competing for teenagers attention i don't know if it necessarily i don't know if you can really compete with like the phone you know like you just kind of got to go for the people that are going to that are going to be there for you and I think PlayStation has done a fine job of doing that obviously because they sell a shit ton

4:00:45Dustin Furman:yeah it's interesting because PlayStation seem much more saturated with people back in the PS1 era for instance but the PS5 will easily outsell the PS1 so probably the next two quarters so yeah something has changed you're right too the time economy is just so complex and people are playing games in quotes or they might consider themselves playing games and whatever i don't give a shit but they might be doing it on a browser they might be doing it on a phone a tablet whatever and that's all we didn't really have those options back in the day so the way the whole way it's defined now i think is different but dustin what do you think um you have a young one coming um obviously gonna be years away from playing games, but will you get the young child and Astro Bot plushie and a, and a sack boy stuffed animal?

4:01:34Dustin Furman:You should just, here's what you do. You engineer this child socially, right? You expose him to PlayStation so much that he just assumes that that's like the default and he has no idea. And so he goes to, you know, he goes to preschool in a few years And he's like, oh, I, you know, did you play Saros? And right. And they're like, what? And the kid's like, what the fuck are you talking about, little boy? I play Roblox. You got to fight against this prevailing. This prevailing situation.

4:02:01Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I am trying to have him avoid knowing what Roblox is as long as possible. Hopefully it's shut down because of all the pedophiles. And the fact that they make no money.

4:02:10Dustin Furman:That's also another big part of it.

4:02:12Colin Moriarty:Yeah. But it's PlayStation doing enough. I think that they look at it and they don't really need to. I was trying to search to see if there's any information on this. I don't think there is. I think maybe a best epic Apple documents show PS4, not iPhone is iPhone's cash cow. So I think that. As you guys were saying, like Roblox, unfortunately, but also Fortnite, those are the games that already are attracting kids to the platform. If they're not playing it on PC and I think it might be on phone now, but I think PlayStation looks at it and they're like, well, we've kind of the kids are already coming to PlayStation.

4:03:01Colin Moriarty:We don't need to make games and spend our money. I mean, Astro Bot is universal appeal, so maybe they could make more games that are like kids games, but also mostly played by old men like us. But I just don't even think it's really necessary for them to do. They'll show up eventually.

4:03:23Dustin Furman:Yeah. Yeah. I think I think it's a little risky. Yeah. Just in that. You want to have that child like Mario still fills me with a childlike wonder. It goes back to that primal era. That is subjective based on your own experience. So if your own experience, that's why I just feel like Fortnite will never die. and really realistically Roblox is never going to die either nor is Minecraft or any of these things because they have they don't die the same reason Mario doesn't die it's just a different generation of people that are always going to be attached to them in some way and that's the thing that I think Sony's missing so it's not to say that they can't get that and it's not to say they didn't try Astrobot's it's funny because Astrobot's not really a kid's game I mean I it is but it is an Astrobot's hard as nails like it's not a it's not a kid's game it's a kid's game like Kid Icarus is a fucking kids game it's like you kidding me you got a part of the bun so there is that too but our kids really looking forward to like playing platformer collectathons and shit i don't know it just doesn't even it's all it seems kind of antiquated like that new lucky tales game or whatever is coming to playstation soon and i was reading about it it's like thousands of collectibles and the collective i'm like i don't know if people play this games like this anymore

4:04:37Chris Santis:it's cool i like it but i don't know if i necessarily even want thousands of collectibles

4:04:41Dustin Furman:It's a lot. It is. It's like and they'll count every gem you find that are 10 in a row and shit like that. But it's like

4:04:47Chris Santis:maybe hundreds. Yeah, hundreds. You know, hundreds is fine. Crackdown.

4:04:55Dustin Furman:The best collectathon was so insane, dude. I'll never forget that because the guide I didn't write it, but I remember my boss at the time was writing the guide and I was like, this is insanity. It was orbs, right? Like the little orbs you found.

4:05:08Chris Santis:Yeah, they had. Well, there were orbs for different Yeah, I think there's because there was agility orbs, which is like those are the platforming ones. And you get to the point where you can just like leap a building. My favorite thing in that game is like you get so strong that you just kick a guy across the map. Basically, it's like I think Crackdown is such a dope name for a game.

4:05:29Dustin Furman:It's just one of those. I remember the first first time hearing about like that's such a great name.

4:05:35Chris Santis:It's kind of crazy that it took that long to happen. Yeah. You know, I mean that it was like 2006 or 2007 or whatever. six I think alright

4:05:44Dustin Furman:Kony 2012 Fun Run wrote in said what's up boys if you would indulge me for a moment I'd like to revisit the matter of the first two resistance games being disappeared from the PS Plus premium catalog months ago the common theory at the time was lack of engagement and dying server blades but how can this be in the year of our Lord 2026 games like Heavy Fire Afghanistan and Wakeboarding HD are still available for streaming but two multi-million sellers from the PS3's early years get the boot if it's true that shovelware is somehow more popular and deserving of preservation. Please strap me to the next one-way drone launching into Tehran.

4:06:14Dustin Furman:We might need you. So stay tuned, Kony. I still feel like there could be something to this because it is weird. It could also be that the games just didn't run very well. I mean, is the acuity of wakeboarding, HG, I remember that game actually. Is that really hurting as opposed to a first-person shooter and people might just be... It could be like... If you're not wish casting, what probably happened was that a lot of people were complaining about the fidelity of the resistance games

4:06:44Chris Santis:and i think i did i think i think i tried to play one of them and i just couldn't know it's like this is unplanned but i'm i'm a stickler for fps games i guess so like your average person probably doesn't care as much especially if they're streaming a game in the first place they're probably like a little bit more open to it um i don't know here's what i think i think i think they did it on purpose because uh hey guys who knows maybe blue point's making a fucking resistance remake. Maybe that's happening. I wish. Wouldn't that be something? I wish.

4:07:17Dustin Furman:It's so funny. That would have been a pitch. That would have been a pitch, huh? It's so funny because I went and looked Resistance 3 PS Plus and it's like Resistance. The first thing that comes up is Reddit. Resistance 3's PS Plus streaming version looks awful. Yeah. But then Push Square wrote a story. PS3's Resistance game is not playable on PS4 or PS4 at all after just six months. It feels like it probably has nothing to do with those games because as I understand, Resistance 3 is still up, which is the best one, and Retribution is up, which is a PSP game. So it's not running off the PS3 blades.

4:07:51Dustin Furman:It's an actual port, native port. But the wish casting, I guess, is it's gone because they're going to bring them back. Something tells me they're not running very well. And that's not a huge surprise. Not that they didn't fix it, but I love the story that Insomniac told me about Resistance Fall Man when they played it at E3 and there was a 50 % chance it was going to crash. And they just did it. And it worked. What? Balls! Oh my god. Balls. I love balls, Dustin. I love them so much.

4:08:21Colin Moriarty:That's scary, man. I have a theory. A much simpler, very boring theory. Is it... I haven't played these games. Do either one of them have any licensed music in it? Maybe.

4:08:35Dustin Furman:Let me look.

4:08:35Colin Moriarty:is it possible that this was it wasn't music but remember how remember how the metal gear solid 3 hd collection or the the blue point collection on xbox got removed because of some kind of

4:08:50Chris Santis:copyright stuff and you see oh yeah it was like it was like war footage right or like some uh yeah like b-roll for for like the montages yeah but you see games all the time even like games

4:09:00Colin Moriarty:that are for sale on steam or something like that they're like oh the license is up so we can't sell it anymore it's gone is there something that maybe there's a license up for those two games it might

4:09:13Dustin Furman:be i can i can't find soundtracks i can find scores um which will obviously be proprietary and not a problem yeah i don't know i don't know it's too bad but yeah resistance 3 still being up is peculiar. Again, that is the best one. In reality, these games need to be made or ported like yesterday. You've never played Resistance, Dustin? No. I think Resistance is phenomenal. Especially two and definitely three. One is a little rough, just like Killzone 1 is a little rough. Yeah. Most ones are rough. And Killzone as well. Come on, dude. these are good games Killzone 2 is an iconic PS3 game it's too bad dude

4:10:02Colin Moriarty:I think Chris and I are laughing about two different things I'm laughing because on a stream the other day I said that I think that Killzone while very important is extremely overrated isn't the word the importance of Killzone is so vastly overstated by Playstation fans because someone in my chat was like it is the best shooter of that generation i'm like it's insane i've not i've played kill zone 2 and it's not it is it good different question but i think the importance of it is vastly overstated

4:10:38Dustin Furman:yeah i mean that's fair it they seemed they were insularly very important to the playstation community because it was some of especially during the dark era it's like kind of some of

4:10:46Chris Santis:all that was there um it was all you had in that respect i i always i gravitated towards resistance personally me too but i mean i like to kill i like the hell gas in kill zone but that was kind of it yeah the hell gas design of the hell gas i thought i thought it was really good i do truly believe

4:11:02Dustin Furman:and this could this is just out of my ass whatever it's like i i really do believe in kill zone's potential to live again like the idea of it being bigger than ever if it came back which would have to be to justify because there's so many more people tuned into playstation now than there were or when like shadow even when shadowfall came out i feel like maybe and they're not available that's the thing is like no one wants to play these fucking cloud games like no one even knows if you like how do you even know if anyone wants resistance like it just seems like such a no break like you would think honest to christ you could port the three resistance games just port them remaster them for under 10 million dollars studio to do that yeah yeah if yeah yeah hmm like this is a cheap like i'm not saying it's cheap or easy but it should be relatively doable i mean and kill zone because people say like well kill zone one's a ps2 game but there is a port of kill zone one on ps3 so like you can just start supermassive did it so you can just get going from that it's very frustrating just because i think i think and and again shuhei kind of admitted it my conversation with him is they made a mistake by abandoning first person shooters.

4:12:06Dustin Furman:It was bad timing. Really bad time. They had two pretty good franchises that were doing their thing. Nonetheless, and I think it's a shame about Shadowfall, especially because Shadowfall really was great. They fixed so much that was wrong with Killzone as far as its aesthetic and finally made it something other than this gritty black because they were obsessed with the hell gas eyes. Right. And eventually it's like, all right, guys, I get it like we got something it's got to take place somewhere that's not brown like can we and remember they showed it for the first time in that city on vecta yeah and uh again the whole i'll just reiterate as i've said many times guys like the whole vibe of kill zone is very politically timely if you want to lean into the events of the day like it's about a partially about a planet that is separated two sides by a wall around the entire planet between these two sides.

4:13:02Dustin Furman:It's super fucking cool. And it is what it is. All right. Ryan Cavalli wrote in and said, hi, folks. I know you guys are big Seinfeld fans. Well, Chris and I are anyway. If you could have a game made in the Seinfeld universe, what type of game would you want it to be? Who would you want to develop it? You have any ideas for this, Chris?

4:13:24Chris Santis:Yeah, I've said this. I've probably said this a million times, but like I want I want a character action fighter. I want I want to I want to fight. I want to get an arc system worse or like or like a Marvel versus Capcom to style pixel art fighting game with with just the Seinfeld characters. I think it'd be great. I can think of so many like already like the Elaine Little Kicks is like a super like that's already there. Little Kicks do a shit ton of damage. Kramer sliding into the door like using the door is like a like a you know what I mean? Like I could see it in my head. like i can see this so vividly in my head it's actually it's actually really sad i can't do pixel art because i probably would have done this on my own already like in my free time over the over the course of like how many however many years but i just i like the idea of looking at a game and being like why on earth would you make that like why would you make a seinfeld fighting game that's so stupid and it is it is it's awesome though but i would love i would love to play i I don't know if there's a really other genres you can really do.

4:14:25Chris Santis:Like it'd be kind of, it'd be kind of cute to like have like a first person horror game set in like the building or whatever, you know, you're like walking around with the flashlight and you're like, you got the flashlight going through the apartment or whatever. Maybe there's something you could do that. I don't know. It's not, it's a sitcom, you know? So the absurdity, I feel like you have to match like the, the mundanity and like the, the kind of, um, safeness of a sitcom with almost something that's bombastically like antithetical to it. And, and to me, that's a pixel art fighting it. I would do the same thing with with I would actually want the same thing with just sitcom characters in general I'd love to beat up Urkel as Kramer as Kramer and like a fucking you know

4:15:02Dustin Furman:what I mean it's so funny man because I've said that we've said this before when this has come up because you have brought up this idea before and we've discussed it is that like the first time I met my brother-in-law Derek in the summer of 1996 um we I was like I was in seventh grade wherever we biked to the local pizza shop on Long Island he was spending time with me wherever we getting to know each other and we brought he brought up the idea of doing celebrity street fighter that's what he called it and it's like exactly what you're talking about i was like even then it was so it's so funny man and so that definitely reminds me of that 30 years ago yeah um you know it's funny when i saw ryan's question i was like you know what would be interesting would be a disco elysium style like very deep mostly talking role-playing game because seinfeld is so about the little things and the stacking of little things and like the observations and on your and your behavior in person and all the rest and a statistically driven game that can track the the insane shit like having i don't even know what they would be but just random stat qualifiers instead of strength and stamina or whatever you know it's like insanity and depression and like all these different things and you would make choices and it would kind of you'd have this very deep conversational uh livable sims like game almost that took place in the world where you were making you were encountered with these seinfeldian choices and then it kind of created even maybe you're even a character in this world or around them or something you're not even one of them right be pretty interesting yeah it would be it's funny man because like castle rock and all these different nbc and all these different people have their hands on in it but it would be cool if they were smart enough and cool enough to know that i've seinfeld game would be dope like if yeah and they have so much money that like you could invest tens of millions of dollars in it easily and do something fun and stupid it could be anything like that's the thing is it could be anything as long as it was cool it reminds me a little bit of that lego set where it's like this

4:16:51Chris Santis:is cool it's just it's random exactly the lego set's a good example just like do something small it doesn't have to be like no one's expecting dude brother no one's expecting no one's expecting the last of us part two out of a seinfeld game you know what i mean you have relative freedom to do it i'm already just thinking about this is is i'm thinking of all the different like uncle leo grabs you by the arm and you won't let go like i'm just like as a grab as a tactical grab or whatever like i there's so much i don't know it would be cool to have like ice climber type

4:17:20Dustin Furman:characters with like the gay guys with the ribbon you know that and the ribbon and the furniture and stuff yeah the arm war guy the soup nazi there's so many good characters that you could

4:17:28Chris Santis:put in that game in like a fighting game i uh i've been obsessed with this idea for a long time

4:17:33Dustin Furman:yeah like a brawler would be cool with end bosses yeah that were maybe about different episodes or something yeah it'll be it'll be interesting anyway they're not smart enough also it's like you have that much money and it's like it's like they're obviously very afraid of doing too much too which i respect uh they did like that random american express commercial back in the day they did the season of curb but like they've been you have any idea how much money has probably been thrown at them over the years and like how much time has been spent trying to get them to come back and do anything especially in this era of revivals like i assume it would be something insane like five million dollars per person per episode or something to get them to come back for whatever and yeah it's not it's not gonna happen which is too bad they made a fucking home improvement game yeah they did i remember it yeah they did and the it's funny man like it doesn't have to be stupid shitty like like we've learned so much about licensing at this point and right so you could you could it could if you said they were 20 years ago they're gonna make a sign.

4:18:36Dustin Furman:Oh my God, it's gonna be like some fucking bootleg PC bullshit. Like those old, uh, or, uh, law and order games. And yeah, Scarface, the world is yours. All right. Gabe owner wrote in said stuff guys. People always cite no man's sky as one of the great comebacks in video games, but is there even, is there even a chance for games to make a comeback nowadays? When was no man's sky just safe to keep funding because it was a small team on a seemingly smaller budget? was it the fact that they had a definitive vision or was it just a different time keep on keeping on thank you Gabe owner for writing in I actually think this is a great question because I don't know cyberpunk is probably the what's what's what huh no okay I mean I know the name is Gabe owner that's what you guys are laughing you didn't get me again

4:19:29Chris Santis:it was like it was like it was up in the air whether or not like I was

4:19:32Colin Moriarty:like i i assume he knows chris and i were communicating telepathically that we're like

4:19:38Dustin Furman:we're not saying yeah no that's fine i i thought i said it in a way that acknowledged it though but maybe not you're very you never know deadpan you're very dead yeah i am i know that's this is

4:19:47Chris Santis:exactly why we didn't i didn't say anything last time yeah right because i just it's you delivered it exactly the same fair enough that's fair cyberpunk's probably the last comeback right yeah I mean what what else would have really done it at pub G kind of came back but but it was but

4:20:06Dustin Furman:it was big and then it declined and then it came back so that's different I feel like people are so

4:20:17Dustin Furman:aggro increasingly in these social spaces and that I don't know like if no man's sky came out the way it did today. I don't know, man. In fact, I think its vision and its big promises and its lack of delivery would have been its death knell in this era because they were given the benefit of the doubt. People like Sean Murray and PlayStation obviously kind of was behind it a little bit. And Cyberpunk, the thing about Cyberpunk is that it's fucking excellent. So underneath all of the technical bullshit that they couldn't get going, they should have, as we said a million times they should have just canceled the console versions of the game release it on pc and said we'll worry about the console versions later but they didn't but they turned it around but i think it's because the game is awesome and so there was right there was

4:21:04Chris Santis:something there already right that was very good even even baseline i mean i played on series x and i had a fucking blast like i didn't i didn't have any bugs i didn't have any crashes um yeah i played on PS5 and it was it was superb superb yeah um yeah I think the biggest difference with the

4:21:22Colin Moriarty:comeback stories we've heard of whether it's no man's guy or cyberpunk it's money you know where a lot of those cyberpunk made a lot of money on launch day despite it being broken also no man's sky made a lot of money and whereas something like high guard you can't go and fix it if you have no income from your free to play game failing you've already burnt your investment money they're not going to keep giving you money if you're not making any money so that's the main the main games we see failing now are live service overall but who i mean it's it's just been so long since we've had a triple a game that's like this is absolutely completely broken at launch no you've had server

4:22:09Dustin Furman:issues right right and no man's sky wasn't broken it was just barren it wasn't yeah well what it

4:22:17Chris Santis:was supposed to be it was kind of broken because it crashed on ps4 like a shit ton um it wasn't i know what you mean though like it wasn't like i played it for only a few hours when it came out

4:22:30Dustin Furman:it wasn't for me i think you chris do you remember that there was a controversy remember you about like if you could really meet someone in the game yeah and they tried to coordinate meeting two

4:22:40Chris Santis:players tried to coordinate meeting with each other and they met up in the same spot and then they but they weren't on in each other's game at all right it's so interesting like so there were

4:22:46Dustin Furman:but they like they really they literally lied yeah it seemed like it like i they just didn't the game was not it would be funny not funny it'd be really interesting to go back and watch all the times they showed it and the way it was discussed and everything and then like what the game itself but I'm sure other people have done it. But I don't know that situations like that can really exist today because I think your game would be obliterated at this point. And in some way, they're lucky they got it out when they did and not 10 years later or whatever. And Cyberpunk might have just like Cyberpunk's the last helicopter out in fucking Saigon or whatever, you know, like.

4:23:24Dustin Furman:Right. So I don't I don't. And again, those both of those games at their core are exceptional in their own ways. so you have to also have that going for you but i think there's so many more games now and so many people churning through things and time as currency and all the rest it's like there's not even time to fix it it's like all right dude your game sucks it's over yeah i think two things can be

4:23:46Chris Santis:true at once right and i think these are these are these are the two things um a game can be flawed and get to the point where it's quite good. And this goes with any media even, like even TV shows, I think. Like there's TV shows where I'm like, they should have got more than one season. Because like this isn't there yet, but like, I mean, very few shows are there yet in season one, you know? And it kind of bums me out. I actually think that 2015 Muppet show is actually pretty good. Like it's like an office version of the Muppets, but like it kind of, I think it works fucking exceptionally well.

4:24:23But like it just kind of,

4:24:26Chris Santis:they didn't really give it a chance and it's like i feel like back in the day we gave gave we gave a lot more things more chances or like at least like some time to find itself we gave shows time to figure out their characters and like figure out what dynamics work we gave games time to figure out like you know um destiny one's a great example like destiny one came out people were like this plays really well uh but the story's kind of whatever and then the and then the raid came out and then suddenly it was just like oh wait wait wait wait wait okay and then the expansions like kind of expanded on and so like i don't know if you it's it is a different time now where like now you have an economy there's an entire industry now based on like rooting for your thing to fail now in in a way that there really wasn't back then like you had hate videos and stuff but it wasn't like this monolithic like you got the sense that hate videos back in the day were like authentic you know what i mean like it was just like that's these were real people like voicing their opinions and if it and if they weren't they were clearly playing a character it was like ABGN or something where it's like clearly just like a joke whereas like now it's like I don't know dude you got people sniping with SMGs I don't know and there it's it's a different time DJ's sniping

4:25:44Dustin Furman:with the SMG

4:25:45Chris Santis:but the two things that can be true is that like games should probably be given some time to figure themselves out and also there's too many games released now that are just undercooked and underbaked right that is also like both of those are true right yeah i think 100 and

4:26:02Dustin Furman:i don't know it's just it's just interesting the idea of giving things a second chance in and of itself is interesting when you're paying for something like the patience the underlying belief in the end result of a product you have to buy that kind of respect with previous content which I think CD project also benefited from. Yeah.

4:26:23Chris Santis:No man's sky didn't have that. they didn't. They didn't. I think they were just going on vibes, man. Yeah.

4:26:29Dustin Furman:And that is the most PlayStation at a very opportune time as well. I think where everyone wanted to give them a benefit of the doubt. I mean, to be frank, if they were on the Xbox stage and they released that game at that era. I don't know.

4:26:40Chris Santis:Yeah.

4:26:40Dustin Furman:I don't know.

4:26:41Chris Santis:I, uh, no man's sky is one of the, one of those games where like, I feel like that was a point in time where I had my radar tuned fucking perfectly. Because I remember when they first showed that game. And I remember being like, I feel like we're skipping a step here. This looks really cool, but I doubt it. And they showed it again the next year. And it was the same exact gameplay demonstration of leaving the atmosphere, landing. And I'm like, I've seen this before.

4:27:06Dustin Furman:Mm-hmm. Weird. Yeah, it is weird.

4:27:09Chris Santis:Everybody called me crazy. I remember that. I still have messages from back then. People are like, you're fucking crazy. And I'm like, all right. I hope I'm wrong. Wasn't no, but, but people like it now. I still actually think like in its current state, even as a good game, like it's just kind of not for me. Like I've, I've actually tried to go back and like give it another shot. And I just think fundamentally like what it is. It's like, not really like, I love the idea of like flying off into space and like the tech there is fucking sick. Like going into atmosphere and like landing on the planet.

4:27:38Chris Santis:I think it really is exceptional. It's really magical, but like everything else is just kind of like, I don't, I don't give a shit about shooting a rock with a laser and then building Yeah, that's right.

4:27:46Dustin Furman:Yeah, it's a lot of like resource management. And yeah, it's cool. I get it. Like why people would be into it. But yeah, it's not for me either. Yeah. Final inquiry comes from Brett Kahn. He says, hi, gents. I noticed today that the Prince of Persia Sands of Time remake for PS4 showed up in the new trophy list section. Do you have any idea why an unreleased game would be showing up in PSN's trophy data? Have you ever seen this happen before? Could a surprise shadow drop be imminent? That last one was probably just copium. Take care and keep fucking that chicken. He says KFTC. Never had that one before.

4:28:14Dustin Furman:No shadow drop. No. I went and looked this up because I know this existed for you and I think you would find it very interesting and maybe others but Brett I know you'd find it interesting is there's a PSN profiles forum post that's pretty old at this point it's called all known non-syncing trophy list this is what the nerds like me do I'll put it in the chat here for you guys if you want to check it out and they have it separated out by console and hardware so PS4 PS3 PS5 and Vita and then the different kinds of games that have been released including like trophy lists with missing or incorrect trophy tiles unreleased or canceled games with non-syncing trophies orphan trophy lists legacy platforms which they call lost causes of things that will never be fixed so you can like there's a there's collapsible if you go to this forum post there's like collapsible lists of all these different things you can even find lists of trophies that have been delisted because they're like scamware and stuff like that so it's not common comparable to how many games are published on PSN for things to show up that are just random, but it does happen.

4:29:13Dustin Furman:And Dustin, you might remember this better than Chris, but do you remember that the first PS4 trophy list that was listed in this? You would remember this because it made stories was like some shooter that never existed. Does that ring a bell for you? It was like some name and it was like basically a sample trophy list for a game that doesn't exist. And that sounds really familiar. So yeah, there's things there. The things that frustrate people are not so much the unpublished. I remember NBA Elite or whatever was cancelled one year by EA and they still publish the trophy list for that. So there definitely are unreleased games with trophies.

4:29:46Dustin Furman:But the bigger thing are the trophies that don't work. And people far up these developers' asses sometimes for years until the developer or publisher go out of business or confirm that they're not going to fix the trophies and then they add them to a list of trophies with games with permanently busted trophies. So people are on it. People much more autistic if you could believe it. than even me are all over this so go check that out Brett I think you'll enjoy it all right guys that's all we have for this very special episode of sacred symbols of PlayStation podcast as we enter the 400s let's go around the horn and say goodbye to everyone Chris goodbye to you will I see you next uh in California are you going to be in New York for a while longer I think I'll be

4:30:29Chris Santis:back I said that last time though so who knows who knows who the fuck knows I guess I live here now i don't know but uh yeah we'll see we'll see how it goes i'm excited man it's uh gonna install marathon i saw i saw my name is bife the destiny lore guy just dropped like a 20 something minute marathon video so i'm stoked about that brush up on my stuff i wonder if i wonder if they gave him

4:30:54Dustin Furman:access to the game early to like kind of get some things prepared or something you know uh they would

4:30:59Chris Santis:they would be smart to do so but uh i mean there's uh there's been a lot of marathon i mean marathon's 30 plus years old right so like there's there's a lot to there's a lot there already but i got to brush up on my stuff too so gonna install that eat maybe listen to that video while i while i eat and then uh and then the day is done yeah sure i'm gonna be oh is that the fire alarm yeah they're cooking oh okay i remember they were like yeah that would imagine my house burns down oh my that's all you need and marathon's like the top of my list is like Dan that's the primary I'm going to lower my mind

4:31:38Dustin Furman:Dustin goodbye to you any plans for you I'll see you tomorrow for the podcast

4:31:43Colin Moriarty:right yes I'll see you tomorrow tonight we have to go to Target to get a prescription for Holly so I think we might go out I'm kind of thinking McDonald's tonight I'm in the mood for a double quarter

4:31:57Dustin Furman:oh it's my favorite dude i love the dual quarter pounder it's so good the onions

4:32:00Colin Moriarty:they put on that i'm in for that love that in for a shamrock shake uh i'm also gonna pick up pocopia tonight the new pokemon game that is uh from the developers of dragon quest builders 2 looks very good one of the highest rated games of the year and i have marathon so it's gonna be a pretty good evening i think uh so yeah thanks uh thanks for a great show as always yeah it was it

4:32:28Dustin Furman:was a great show um yeah i'll get back into i'm just going through resident evil i'm eager to get through it again so i can earn enough i wasn't making fun i forgot to make fun of this we'll make fun of it on the podcast no doubt but mike and i keep her like like they they count the cp that you have in the game and i'm like come on guys we got to come up and then they're like all right we came up with a new acronym c sam and it's answered something else i'm like no that's an awful that's awful that's an awful thing too you it's like you can't call the the the stuff cp

4:32:59Chris Santis:you know dude that's the same thing in in call of duty because it's cod points it's like oh and it's like oh my god it's all cod is already an acronym

4:33:10Dustin Furman:ah it's just it's just so funny i'm like what are we what are we what are we doing here someone's got someone's got to tell you that that's not that's not good but i'm trying to earn enough cp in the game to uh to unlock like infinite ammo whatever so i could get through and get all the trophies i've never planned them to resident evil game oh interestingly enough so is this are you are you aiming for this yeah i want to do this one and then i i mean i'm not gonna have time because crimson desert comes out there's a few games there was there's like arcade shooter that's kind of like zelda have you seen this uh that's called what is it god it's mini shooting something let me look it up it looks someone actually recommended it it looks great um crimson desert looks actually i mini shoot adventures it's called mini so i want to get into that at some point and there's a few small things i want to get into oh but i but i would like to uh i'd like to go back and play a bunch of the resident evils again but i just don't think i'm gonna have the time to do it but yeah it would be good to it would be good to platinum this one in the interim.

4:34:11Dustin Furman:And yeah, so I'm just trying to get the, I won't use that acronym anymore. I'm trying to get the collector's points to unlock your infinite ammo. I will say the infinite knife for grace in my playthrough has been huge because you have no ammo. So you can kind of do like the little swingy knife thing and try to kill the zombies. It takes like 30 seconds, but it works. All right, my friends. Well, I appreciate you guys. Be well, be good. Thank you all out there for your love, kindness and support. We appreciate you. Remember to go to patreon.com slash last day media to support us. We could not do it without you over there.

4:34:42Dustin Furman:Last Stand Media dot store for merch, including getting your preorder in while you can for your Allegheny Hogs shirt, like approaching 500 of you, which is pretty crazy. We have ourselves a little brand here, boys. We'll see you next time. Until then. Goodbye. See ya. Take care, guys. Sacred Symbols, a PlayStation podcast is a product and trademark of Last Stand Media and Collins Last Stand LLC and is proudly recorded in the USA. The show is conceived by, is written by, and is directed by me, Colin Moriarty. My co-hosts are Chris Raygun Maldonado and Dustin Furman. The show is produced by executive producer Dustin Furman.

4:35:19Dustin Furman:All of Last Stand's theme music is by my best friend, Ramon Narvaez. As you know, all of Last Stand's shows, including Sacred Symbols, are fan-funded on Patreon at patreon.com slash laststandmedia. The following names are at the producer level on Patreon, our highest tier, and we're grateful for your thoughtful and kind contributions to our independent endeavor. Thank you. Aaron Betke, Aaron Temple, Adam Refriended, Albion, Alex Cabrera, Alex Gates, Alex Lapierre, Alex Monez, Alan Tiniak, Alan Tremblay, Alan Einer, Anthony Akure, Anthony Vazquez, Anton K, Antonio C, Asak Paredes, Austin Riley, Betty Ann Moriarty, Bjorn Campbell, Blackjack, Boots, Brad Cooley, Brad Lohman, Brandon Runniger, Brian Williamson, Cannonball Jones, Captain Verde, Carlos Algaret, Chad Lewis, Chris Galvin, Chris Morton, Chris Ritchie, Christopher Devayo, Christopher Moore, Christopher Morgan, Cody Benin, Conrad Pennyfarthing, Corey Beacom, Dan Nolan, Dan Root, Daniel D 'Amour, Daryl E.

4:36:19Dustin Furman: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, Ghoststorm672, Gio Corsi, Grayson Maxwell, Gregory Slavinsky, Gus, Hush, Jad Rita, Jake C, Jamie Fraley, Jason Arzon, Jay Getter, Jean-Francois Forzy, Jeff Mercado, Jerome Ferreira, Jimmy Rodriguez, Joe McPartland, 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.

4:37:11Dustin Furman:Lynch, Justin Payne, Justin Wagaman, Cam Wallace, Keith Richards, Kendrick Caius, Kyle Hagel, Kyle Martin, Lizard King, Logan Little George, Mad Mock Media, Miranda Grubba, Martin Beck, Mason Bouchard, Matt Flowers, Matt 20, Matthew Ash, Matt MGS24, Michael Buffel, Michael Gates, Michael Mashed Potato, Michael Vecchio, Mr. Tom, Morgan Ashley, Mr. Finkler, Mr. Molf, My Name Is Mayo, Nate Izod, Nathan R, Neil Amon, Nick Amato, Norse Nuts, Ali Fritz, Omar, Omar Rosa, Orchard, Organic Produce, Out of Focus Bigfoot, Patrick Leslie, Paul Joyce, Peyton Stone, Phil Crone, Qualia Freak, Randall Holsey, Rallo, Relentless Rex, Remington James, Ray Ligia, Robert Byers, Robert Schultz, Roto24, Ross Marenka, Ryan T.

4:38:04Dustin Furman:Mandel, Saqib Alam, Saul Balcazar, Sean Mason, Shane Brecky, Shane Miller, Shane Rayoum, Silent Butt Deadly, Simon Conception Jr., Sketch McGetch, Spencer F., Steven Glasin, Steven Innerfield, Stewie 108, Sunny Sides Up, Sweaty Magic, Sweet Jones, Terry Tip, The Fandom Traveler, The Shady Mailman, Throw7, Toby Ryland, Tony Zuniga, Trelon, Trench Goat, Trey Woodward, Tyler Tremel, Uncharted Shinobi, Vance Cody, Vega the Late, Vitra, Who is Steven Day, Will Williams, William Holbert, Worry San, Whiskey Sin, Zach Cohen, Zachary Wood, Zen Red, Zman8601, and Zainal Yuichi. Get that Amex gold card ready.

4:38:48Dustin Furman:I'm too tired to cook.

4:38:49Colin Moriarty:We feeling five guys or the Cheesecake Factory? Both. Earn up to$120 a year in statement credits of participating partners. Up to$10 each month when you pay with the Amex Gold Card. Learn more at americanexpress.com slash explore-gold. Enrollment required. Terms apply.