#404 | Every Single Hope You Had Shattered

45:07Like, cause it was such an odd, like that's not really like a thing that people do. Right. And China is kind of expected at some point. Like, Oh, I wonder when, when they're going to do a China thing. And it's kind of surprising that there hasn't been one, but they don't want to, they don't want to offend the sensibilities. Right. Yeah. You know, I know, which is bullshit. It's like, why not make it not for them? How about that? You know, like, first of all, it's complimentary to them. It's saying that they're going to invade us and probably win. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Home front. The angle was cool.

45:40Did you play home front too? No, I did not play home. To be fair, I don't think I really played home front one. I played a little bit of home front one. I was just like, ah, this isn't really. This isn't really hitting like I thought it would hit. It's actually fairly competent. Like it's fine from what I remember. Like I remember being like, oh, it's totally fine. It's short. This works well, but I just didn't care as much as I would have liked to. Yeah, the the it was it was an interesting home front to or home from the revolution or whatever, which was made by Dan Buster, which are the guys that made the revival of Dead Rising or not Dead Rising, Dead Island, Dead Island.

46:15And it was great. So I was no one was more shocked than I was about that. But that was a cool one because it was not a good game. I didn't play it very deeply because it wasn't good. I've heard it's been improved a lot over the years, but because it came out in 2016. But that's about like the occupation of Philadelphia. and that's a pretty cool idea because nothing takes place in Philadelphia and it's about how the North Koreans have now won and you know in home front one I guess and they've taken Philadelphia and you're kind of like a revolutionary like doing like guerrilla war in the city and I'm like that's such a cool idea it's too bad that not unlike the saboteur actually uh but um I brought that up recently and said how much you loved that game I don't remember what context it was in but yeah Yeah, I love that game.

46:58Anyway, Big Solo, as far as New York City is concerned, again, there are three New Yorks. There's upstate New York or western New York. Those both go together. There's New York City, and then there's Long Island. I am from Long Island. I don't presume to know very much about New York City. I've spent an enormous amount of time in New York City, have a lot of fun stories about New York City, and there are things that are fun to do. Like, my favorite spot in New York City is Washington Square Park because I used to go there to play chess. You know? Oh, yeah, yeah. It's not that far from my union.

47:25Right, exactly. blocks and yeah we would take the me my friends would take the train and i would cut school sometimes in high school to go play because i was a huge chess nerd and so that's always a fun thing to do if you're into that but um and you can go play blitz with like the homeless people down there and get fucking rocked if you want because they're always excellent um but for me i don't really you know my most memorable new york city two things uh going to canal street with my dad to buy clothes or something when i was a little kid and i remember looking this is a such a random memory but i remember looking down an alleyway like they're like we were just walking there was down and there was a homeless guy like rummaging through things and he looked at me and he went like he like jumped and went like like kind of like thing like to like be scary or whatever i can see it perfectly still to this day in my head the other thing is uh being in my dad's firehouse in brooklyn we would go in there sometimes just to you know he would be like oh we gotta you know like my mom would sometimes i think drop us off or something because then we would spend the last few hours there with him and then he would bring us to something or whatever like whatever they were doing I don't know why I was there but uh long story short being brought to a fire yeah that's probably one of my greatest New York City memories and then realizing and so what happened was like there was a fire alarm I guess and then my like my dad was like all right like you can't stay here by yourself so like I just went in the cab uh and then finding out that my brother that also happened to my brother so I was like all right it's a little weird at this point.

48:50Yeah. So those are my New York City memories. Maybe you go to go to a firehouse. You can get taken to a taken on the job. Yeah. Can I go to a ride? I'm sure they'll love that. Can I get can I get can I go on a ride along?

49:06Why have I asked my HVAC guy I found on Angie dot com to change my grandpa's trachea tube? Because I was so amazed by how quickly he replaced our air ducts. I knew I could trust him to change Pop Pop's tube while I was on vacation. Make it quick, young man. Aw, see? Pop-Pop trusts you. Uh, I think we should call a doctor. Connecting homeowners with skilled pros for over 30 years. Angie, the one you trust to find the ones you trust. Find pros for all your home projects at Angie.com. Why have we asked our contractor we found on Angie.com to be our kid's legal guardian? Because he took such good care when redoing our basement that we knew we could trust him to care for our kids, It's all eight of them.

49:48Should something happen to us? Are you my dad now? Uh, no, sorry. I do basements. Connecting homeowners with skilled pros for over 30 years. Angie, the one you trust to find the ones you trust. Find pros for all your home projects at Angie.com. Finally, Jeff wrote in with a G. I love the G-E-O-F-F. Very stylish. I used to, when I was a little kid, I used to think it was G-off. because there was a player on the Vancouver Canucks. I had his hockey card, Jeff Sanderson, but I thought it was Geoff Sanderson, and I said that, and someone's like, it's not fucking Geoff. It's Geoff, idiot.

50:29So unkind. It's Long Island for you. Colin is a fellow lover of typing games like typing of the dead, Jeff writes. Have you ever checked out the website nitrotype.com? It's technically for kids, but it's very well made, has great achievements, and has a pretty competitive clan system. some clans are run by teachers while others are just random kids and adults i think you'd really enjoy the site and there could possibly be an lsm clan in the future be well and love the show i went and looked at this i never heard of this i love typing typing games there are whatever happened to that wasn't there that game that was announced some months ago where it was like you were it was a it was a what's the best battle royale battle royale right a typing battle royale really cool idea yeah the demo was really cool it just didn't work very well like it took it was the matchmaking was bad but i mean it was a demo so but i i don't know what happened to that it's a cool idea typing in the dead was awesome um i still want to make a typing game we talk about it i think it would be a bad idea unless it was like really really novel just because i don't think it would sell very well and you really couldn't put in our console but uh dude right Mavis beacon license love that idea just love it who owns the Mavis beacon license and can and can we acquire the rights to it a Mavis beacon first person shooter and then and then we we get it and they're like all right so what did you make and we're like oh we just made like a shooter they're like it's not even a typing game we're like no it's just a Mavis beacon shooter it's just completely straight-faced it's uh yeah this is Mavis Beacon Fall of Liberty I will say this though a Mavis Beacon depending on how well you did and how you lean into it a Mavis Beacon spinoff that was not about typing would be fucking hysterical and probably pretty awesome if it was just like her doing something like something else insane just this like middle age black woman they should do a biopic like like one of those like uh like the way they do um with the queen one right or uh right where there's like there's an addiction at some point that mavis has to overcome i don't know i'm i'm looking at the google image search results for mavis beacon and there's just an array of different middle-aged black women that are pictured yeah for so she kind of has her own like you know multiverse of Mavis Beacon yeah it's like a mantle it's like a mantle that gets passed it's like the arbiter or something right it's passed down from it's not a symbol right from one Mavis to another the cowl getting passed down the cowl this is Mavis this is Mavis Beacon this is Mavis Beacon beyond this is Mavis this is Mavis Beacon 2099 this is Penny beacon oh man maybe speaking came out in 1987 yeah like the original Mavis beacon I like her um Mavis beacon is an entirely fictional character created for the Mavis beacon teachers typing yeah man we gotta there's seeking Mavis beacon is a documentary I dude I was just reading that I'm and so here's the here's the synopsis Mavis Beacon teaches typing taught millions globally but the software's Haitian born cover model vanished decades ago two DIY detectives search for the model while posing questions about identity and artificial intelligence Jesus Christ guys 2024 rated our documentary someone cut that down to the five minutes it needs to be and let's see let's find out where this Haitian woman is but which one yeah right the original the OG.

54:16Well, the original. I remember her being different. I remember for some reason her having like longer hair. I don't know. Oh my God. It's like a Berenstain fucking thing. The cornucopia. All right. Thank you for writing in about that, Jeff. And thank you for the heads up on that. We should do nitro type a nitro type cigarette streaming. That would be fun. We can like have everyone roll in from the team and like all of us and just just for a few minutes and so I can judge how you type because I'm a fast typer I I'm not no way well I might be a fast typer but the accuracy is bad yeah real bad yeah like I don't I don't know why like you guys are huge computer nerds like like I I was when I was a kid really in the computers and not really into the technical aspect of it but I loved computers i loved being on them i was always on them it's like why did i become a really good typer but you didn't like what there's no difference you know i maybe i was i'm older than you maybe i think that i i think for me i can't speak for everybody obviously but like i think for me i didn't like i liked mavis beacon as a game but i didn't like that they were telling me that there was like a specific way to type because it was like it's just as long as you hit the fucking things it's fine right yeah the home keys i didn't like that they were telling mean it's like oh you gotta have your hands it was like 10 and 2 right right right i mean for driving it's like don't tell me how to fucking don't tell me how to hold the steering wheel i hold it i don't even know how i hold the steering wheel but i kind of i do one hand on the on the right like kind of like two o 'clock right three o 'clock and that's fine for me i'm not gonna i'm not gonna 10 and 2 for you so i don't have my i don't have my hands on the keyboard like this oh yeah see i do actually that's interesting okay no i don't because i'm just like first of all this is crazy like i feel i feel insane like my arms are this is not natural at all yeah i thought about maybe getting those like split keyboards i used one of those for a while yeah they're nice but that'll definitely discipline you into typing properly good yeah my theory is that at least for me like there's a picture of me i think as like basically an older toddler on a computer and so as a you know very little kid three or four years old i'm not learning how to type but i'm mentally just figuring it out so by the time that i had a typing class in seventh grade it was like i'm too far i'm too far gone in whatever way i've taught myself to type to ever learn how to properly type because i've been doing it quite literally almost my entire life how do you do it um are you a precision are you a sniper no so i mainly just use these three fingers oh interesting i almost never use my pinky so there's a lot more moving around on the keyboard but it's not like i'm hunting and pecking with one you know with my pointer fingers so i think it's not efficient certainly but i think i do the same thing i don't i'd never i feel like i never use my pinky i wonder if that's what it is i wonder if it's because you guys are like about a decade younger i wasn't we didn't we didn't have a personal home computer until the early 90s so i was like eight or nine and we had computers in school but you didn't really you like we went to like the apple 2 lab and then they would like put a game in and you'd use it like no one really knew what they were doing and i wonder if it's because of that that like then they were like all right you're gonna learn how to type and you go to take typing or like the computer class and And so but you guys just kind of grew up with them.

57:55Like they were always there. We were born into it. Right. You were molded by it. Yeah, I think that's probably it. That's it's that's the only reasonable explanation. Yeah, makes sense. Makes perfect sense. Because like my mom is like an exceptional typer and she's in their mid 70s. But that's because like she was an adult when that shit all began. So you kind of have like a different different way of looking at things, I guess. all right well thank you for writing in Mavis Beacon R.I.P. in peace I don't know if you're dead the documentary figures it out probably that's probably what the whole documentary is about but again I only need to see probably seven to ten minutes of it I don't need to see the whole hour and a half we come to you from the future we recorded the entire show yesterday we're now recording Friday early afternoon the show should already be live this morning and actually it was rumored yesterday but i just didn't include it because i didn't know what was happening and i'm glad i didn't because otherwise it would have been a waste uh playstation 5's pricing has gone up ps5 pro and portal have also gone up in price this is yet another price increase i believe there were two price increases last year i was trying to find information on the historical nature of the price increases and i feel like both gemini and i I just asked Google.

59:16So to use Gemini, then I tried to use chat GPT, which I don't really ever use to ask practical things. I feel like they're not right. Like they're not finding all the price increases for some reason. They're like, there's been two price increases. I'm like, I think there's been more than that. But maybe I think some of them have been Europe. Right. Right. And not U.S. So maybe that's why it's confused. Yeah, maybe that's what it is. But I think it's supercomputer 2025. I think there were two price increases. And so now there's one in 2026. Here's what they say on PlayStation blog. I assume this is in a press release that they've released more widely.

59:45With continued pressures in the global economic landscape, we've made the decision to increase the prices of PS5, PS5 Pro, and PlayStation Portal remote player globally. We know that price changes impact our community, and after careful evaluation, we found this was a necessary step to ensure we can continue delivering innovative, high-quality gaming experiences to players worldwide. The updated recommended retail prices for PS5 consoles are effective starting April 2nd. you have time if you're really thinking about it to make your move especially on a pro I think for all other territories. So they have the U S the UK, Europe and Japan here, but other territories are affected as well.

1:00:19This will include, you know, between the U S the UK and Europe, this is a vast majority of our audience. So in the U S PS five will now be 649 99. The PS five digital edition will be five 99 99. And the PS five pro is eight 99. In the UK, the PS five will be 570 pounds. The PS five digital edition will be 520 pounds. and the PS5 Pro will be 790 pounds. In the rest of Europe that uses euros, PS5, 650 euros. PS5 Digital Edition, 600 euros. PS5 Pro, 900 euros. And then in Japan, 97 ,980 yen for the PS5. PS5 Digital Edition is 90 ,000 yen and the PS5 Pro is 138 ,000 yen. Remote Player, PS Portal, also on April 2nd, will go up in price.

1:01:10this has stayed the same the entire time so this is kind of a bummer the u.s is 249.99 so that's up 50 uk will be 220 pounds europe will be 250 euros and japan will be 40 000 yen so um bad news we've said this many many times i know it sucks because you have other bills to pay and things to worry about, but you really should have bought your PS5 a long time ago. I felt like this was inevitable, especially because of the AI crunch and just everyone. We had Tom from War's Law is Dead on the show just a couple of weeks ago, and he was explaining like, we're talking about these component companies.

1:01:57I'm not nearly sophisticated enough to be able to talk about it too deeply, but that these companies are sometimes having like 60 or 70 % of their stock totally. And I don't mean their their stock on the market i mean the stock of what they make just spoken for um and so they're they're basically now putting 30 or 40 percent of ram or whatever whatever components there are in it um i think previous price hikes especially in the u.s in 2025 were more tariff driven this to me unless they're just trying to deflate the tariffs based on and and blame you know and make everyone else pay for the american tariffs seems to be more component based i must admit because otherwise you would just be able to scapegoat them.

1:02:37Remember the government is being sued by these various companies. And I'm pretty sure we reported that Sony is one of those companies that's litigiously going after for, you know, for rebates on the tariff taxes. So though people I think want to attack this for tariffs, which is fine, I don't see how American tariffs on Chinese goods affects the price of the console in the UK. and if they're doing that it's a bad look because i think in some ways europe is a more important market than the u.s though they're both incredibly vital for playstation because it's just such a playstation home field so dustin how much ps5 when it came out was 499 yeah 500 and the digital is 400 right yep and ps5 pro came out at 700 yep so now the ps5 is 150 more than it was in 2020 the ps5 digital edition is 200 more than it was in 2020 and the pro already which came out what 2024 the pro um that's 200 more than it was when it came out gotta listen to me when I tell you to go buy these things don't eat for a while make sure and go and get your PS5 Pro.

1:03:53Chris let's hear from you what do you think about this I just woke up to this a little while ago so and by the way I've slept for like four hours so definitely going back to bed after this. I was up really late playing Marathon so I'm a little out of it I was up late sadly playing Returnal which is like what am I doing not cool. Yeah that's a good use of your time honestly it is better than many things I could be doing. Yeah I don't know, man. I'm just... What can I say, man? I'm tired of winning, I guess. I'm tired of all this winning. I think... I think... I understand, like, the idea of just like, oh, hey, you should have bought this.

1:04:30You should have got in earlier, understanding that AI was going to... That is true. But it is also worth noting that this is, like, fairly... The degree by which this has happened, too. Like,$200 more is, like... I don't know, dude. Like, that's not precedented, really. Like, in the console space, like, this is all, like, the idea that a console is worth, the idea that getting a console on day one is the cheapest you could ever get it, that's a new thing. Like, that's not built into the, you know, the buying, the financial muscle memory of people who've been around for a while. Like, that's not how this ever worked.

1:05:18And so I don't necessarily blame people for waiting because that's been conventional wisdom for as long as time has gone on. Like, yeah, as time goes on, things get cheaper because they're less relevant. They're less in demand. They're cheaper to make all X, Y, Z. Obviously, that's a factor that's not true anymore for a variety of reasons. I do think it's primarily component based. obviously i do think it's ai driven which is fucking embarrassing because unlike a lot of economic turmoil in the past we kind of well i don't want to say a lot because a lot of it has been self-inflicted but this is like all of this is particularly self-inflicted we did this because we wanted better we did this because we wanted more convincing video of will smith eating spaghetti it's so fucking stupid it's insane that we there wasn't a pandemic driving this there wasn't like a mystery virus there wasn't like a grand terror attack or fucking anything like that it was it's all of this is just so we can make will smith eat spaghetti better and it's just it it's infuriating i don't know man like i i feel i feel a little bit better about getting my ps5 pro now i guess you know getting in like when it was uh already pretty expensive it makes me all of this does make me wonder how how absurdly expensive that xbox is going to be or what this PS5 or what PS6 is going to be good Lord or the steam machine or the steam machine that's easily like 1100 1200 bucks now I mean I'm here well that's the thing Chris is I'm here to tell you that out of the three companies that we just mentioned right so Microsoft and Sony and certainly Valve Sony has the greatest manufacturing economy of scale by a mile so if it's getting this bad for them then yeah it's gonna the prices are gonna get jacked up pretty badly for more niche manufacturing which is where xbox is right now and certainly where steam is gonna be yeah um i'm looking right now on a playstation direct it looks like you can still like you can add a ps5 pro to your cart for 750 right now i mean if this is something you're on the on the fence about i don't know why you would wait i really don't um i know i mean obviously there's all sorts of financial realities i'm saying like if you're in the position specifically to be able to buy one there's really no reason to wait the other thing i have to say though chris and i'll be interested to see what you think of this too dustin is i think these things are getting expensive enough now where it's like i don't know i love console gaming i'm always going to be a console gamer first and only really that's why i want to play gotta kind of be like well if i'm paying like 900 or a thousand dollars for this maybe i do see what the steam machine costs or maybe i do buy a pc or that's where it's getting but i agree with you too chris that if this is what's happening to playstation then those without economies of scale like i said are also going to see prices jacked even more so i don't know yeah it's an interesting conundrum for them yeah that's all that's i don't know that's all i got well i was gonna say like two it's now it's a bummer because now is the time to push the issue like um dustan let's get you on the record on this i will i will add this to the conversation it's like sony doesn't want to do this i would really love to know what the tumult is behind the scenes on like what they're seeing in terms of manufacturing and acquisition of assets to make their components to make these consoles specifically because uh i was even told by tom and i thought this was interesting there's a lot of like subterfuge going on where where companies are actually even buying this stuff just to keep it away from other companies like they don't even he was saying like there's just warehouses and warehouses full of shit like that can't even be leveraged or used yet that might even be out of date by the time that they would be deployed in a center an ai center or something like that so what are your thoughts dustin you you texted me at a nine in the morning today or on the discord yeah you were all over you look at you right you're gonna be up early soon enough when the child arrives yeah well honestly i didn't know i'm like is this is this big enough to try to delay the show, but then people kept, I keep getting tweets.

1:09:27They're like, oh, the sacred curse. I was like, okay, people are clearly really interested in this. So the sacred curse used to be a lot worse when we would record on Mondays for whatever reason, which was so stupid. I don't know why we ever did that. Anyway, good. But yes, I mean, 650 for a PlayStation 5 that originally was$499 and particularly the Pro at$899. I remember the conversations around when they announced the price of the Pro at$700 and how that was like absolutely insane at the time and what's funny too i was thinking like man uh that ps5 pro anniversary console at a thousand bucks that had the the pro controller the charger all that stuff i'm like kind of a hell of a deal now now in hindsight so yeah something that i i think i'll bring it up later in this episode when talking about switch carts but I'll bring it up now in that it's not even necessarily just the RAM price that's going up that's probably making their manufacturing costs go up but also the price of the SSDs as well because this memory shortage is affecting RAM and just memory in general so this is I mean the thing that makes me sad seeing a$650 price point or I guess the best price point is$599 I just think about like how much this is cutting people off from maybe upgrading or like a kid that wants a PlayStation 5 that doesn't you know he has to get that from his parents for the most part and so it's concerning as gaming i mean gaming has always been expensive to some degree it is unprecedented that we've seen the prices significantly go up go up at all uh during a a console generation and so it's like man this is really starting to get out of hand And I think that I wonder what effect that has on the industry as a whole where, I mean, PS5 sales still have been doing just fine and keeping in line with PS4 up until this point.

1:11:45But now as we're getting later into the generation and there might, I mean, more than likely anyone who's thinking this far ahead already has a PS5, but it's like, do you get a pro now? do you wait because it's seen it seems like 2027 is when the next playstation is coming out and how much is that gonna cost i just you know like i don't know man it's hard to say because you know tom's reporting was saying about it being cheaper or trying to keep it cheaper but now it's like man you got the pro at nine hundred dollars yeah i i intellectually understand what he means but i still don't fundamentally get it you know like i i understand what he's saying like that the die smaller and like all the component costs should be less at scale a lot of these contracts are already locked in at least for the first run of consoles anyway so but it's like how but so i didn't literally get all that but i don't understand how you could release the ps6 for cheaper than what the ps5 is going for at the same time and you were saying earlier and i just want to reiterate like as i mean it's the only generation the console has ever gotten more expensive it's it's it's totally back in the nes you guys know this i mean we can go all the way through to ps4 these consoles were heavily redesigned over time each of them the nes the snes the master system the genesis uh the ps1 the ps2 to remove as much cost of them as possible over time yeah um and things get like and by the way i understand also and this is an interesting point that technologies used to advance much more quickly like i saw a tweet recently someone saying like younger people will never understand that if you had a computer that was two or three years old in like the 90s or the early 2000s that shit was like horrible like it was really weird like it was it sucked you know like like it really you really were so of course like what was in the box the gray box nes in 1985 should be a lot different than what was in the top loading nes in 1994 for.

1:13:43I get that. And things have not moved as quite as quickly, but there seems to be no way for them to remove cost from the console comparable to the increase in global pricing forces, which at first in America, like we said earlier, we're tariff driven. That sucks. As I said before, though, I am against free trade. I don't understand tariffing, broad, broad spectrum tariffing things that you would never make anyway. You know, now you have to deal with these mega conglomerates all chasing after the same limited components and the component manufacturers love it. Of course, they want to scale and they are.

1:14:20It takes years to get these new factories off the ground. We see that in Arizona and other places and Wisconsin places that they're building in the United States, but they kind of love it. I mean, the scarcity is good for them. They're never going to say that. The thing that I was interested in, and I think I touched on this a little bit with Tom at some point was, and this is anti-capitalist in a way, But it's like, because of course you want to sell to the highest bidder, but it's like the companies that make these goods and know how important they are to the global markets are making choices nonetheless to sell much of their component, like to make more money.

1:14:56And I get it, I get it, dude. I'm a businessman. I totally get it. But like, it's like, we haven't to look too much at them where it's like you're contributing in part, let's not, you're participating in the chaos and you're willingly doing it. now again I get it the shareholders are the in the bottom line sure cool but I think this is there's a few things to talk about it's almost like another episode of sacred like a sacred plus we can do at some point it would be interesting to get into it it's like gaming has actually always been a relatively affordable hobby the Atari was$200 when it came out which is a lot of money but it's actually cheaper or about as much as a PS5 would have cost today in real money and that was in the 70s and they sold like 20 million units um the nes was cheap at a couple hundred dollars the ps3 was considered preposterous at 600 which is so funny like it was preposterous like it so preposterous that it almost killed sony the whole company yeah and it's just 2009 right what the no oh the ps3 what year was that 2006 oh you're okay so well it was pre-recession yeah right and then 2009 was when they finally dropped it to what it should have always been which was 300 bucks yeah you know so they cut they look and that's classic that's classic components getting cheaper look at how much smaller the ps3 slim is and the fat ps3 they would do little things like if you look at you guys probably remember this like the fully set up launch ps3s yeah had like four usb ports i think they had multiple hgmi out like weird like just all this weird shit they had sd card readers sd card readers like it was like firewire or some shit like some weird proprietary cables that like you'd be like why do i even have this so they were able to chip away at that and get rid of that cost i'm sorry go ahead it had an entire ps2 built into it right like they had that's the main thing i'm like holy shit they put an entire ps2 on the hardware pretty much to do.

1:16:55Yeah, it's like on the board, right? Like, and so the point is, is that they were able to look at this and quit very quickly because there's all sorts of like, there's all sorts of permutations of that PS3. It's like, and then you get the PS3 a couple years later, the fat PS3, and it's like totally been wiped of all that. Like you can't, they like sealed the little door that used to open where it had like all of the shit in it. And PS5 is kind of bare bones from that perspective. I mean, it's obviously a very powerful machine, but there's just nothing. If anything, I'm frustrated by the lack. Like that was what was so cool about the PS5 Pro was always like, oh my God, there's another HDMI port.

1:17:31Like it's a very exciting moment. So I don't know what they're going to do to remove price on their end. They're kind of captive, I think, to market forces. And this is happening at a kind of bad time. I mean, not so much Saros, but which is going to be a niche game, but Wolverine and then Grand Theft Auto. And yet, Dustin, you say something that's so interesting, which is so true, which is the velocity of PS5 is through the roof still. Like they're basically, I keep saying it like I, and now I don't know how confident I am with this new price increase, but like all things being equal, the PS5 is probably going to outsell the PS4.

1:18:11And I think that that's actually especially true right now if you consider what the PS6 could and probably will cost. The PS5 is going to become so much more infinitely attractive. It's crazy to think that like these two consoles can be on the market together for many years and the PS5 can rise to 125, 130. You know, if it just remains this this cheaper option, it just reiterates what I feel about PS6, though, that we don't want it and we don't need it. Of course, I'll buy it and I'll be interested in it. We're excited about the handheld and all the rest, but it just none of it makes sense. And in this in this in this market, and I do wonder if they're just eventually going to be like.

1:18:48Yeah. we can't we how how in the world like would it cost us more to just get out of these contracts which would cost an enormous amount of money all the r &d costs sunk i was even asking tom and i wonder what you think of this too dustin is like does it give them i mean it's so preposterous to even think about but i'm like does it even give them a chance to kind of rework the ps6 and say like we want to we'll make another a different ps6 but it's just like the the parts are so the parts of Sony move so slow, the ships turn so slowly. Like, I feel like it's just baked in like this thing is coming.

1:19:21You know, there's nothing you can really do about it. It's just. I don't know. And I really think this, you know. I believe Sony. I think one of the things that they see with PC gaming and why they're removing their games from PC is not only, you know, I think if their game sold a lot better there, they would just keep them there. And so I think there's no loss to it. But I think one of the things that we were talking about was the playstation will just become this de facto attractive machine because if if the mass market console is getting more expensive then imagine what's going to happen to the pc that's still true but you're getting into astronomical amounts of money now where like the middle class is just going to get cut out completely and then there is no real winner because if you have enough money then what's the difference between a thousand dollars and thirteen hundred dollars or a thousand dollars and fifteen hundred dollars like it's at that point it's like well whatever i mean you're obviously and that's that's gonna be a problem for sony that's kind of the thing of that price point right where it's like you're getting you're getting into price territory where it's like obviously prices for pc are going to increase as well obviously because this is just kind of how this works but you are going into territory now where you are spending like premium amounts of money and you're probably thinking like well i'm already in this realm you know why don't i just get a pc for like a couple more you know what i mean like it it it was different when it was like six hundred dollars whereas like that's that's maybe the graphics card on a on a really good pc you know and like maybe some components not even including like a lot of the other the you know the the core components um now nine hundred dollars is that's that's you're you're more than halfway there really to like a a reasonable rig at that point you know yeah i think you're far more than halfway there to be honest yeah the economy of scale is just not crushing the price anymore so right i don't know man so i think that that's a problem because because i guess what i'm saying is is that like i feel like sony you probably looked at this whole p the price component in in situation is actually advantageous to them if they always remain the best price that's like what we've that's the argument we've made for a long time now but yeah like you're like what we're saying and i think we're all on the same page chris is like a person who has 1200 in their pocket to spend capriciously on a fucking video game console is more likely to have 1600 to spend in their pocket to just buy a pc have access to steam and get away from the console ecosystem so i think it's it's going to start hurting them because it's it's too bad Nintendo is also going to be in a world of hurt I think for this I mean I switch to now yeah right exactly it's like and by the way I think I do think both of these things will still continue to sell I just think your gaming has I'm an old man like gaming has never really been accessible to the to the like poorer class or the you know like the it's always been this thing that's kind of been a little out of reach and that's too bad and so that's why like consoles that are older stay relevant in some households and certainly in some countries we always talk about segas dominance in south america and so on i i feel like now there's simply no prayer actually it's not even like a thing where like oh dad works a couple overtime shifts and he goes and buys you your nes or whatever it's like this is a substantial amount of money this is probably like much of your rent or your mortgage or whatever, your car payment, certainly more than your car payment.

1:22:59So I worry about their long-term health if they're going to continue to chase the cutting edge because it just seems like the component pricing situation is working against them. And I would love to be a fly on the wall there because this is not good for them. They're not doing this to make more money. Ironically, they will gross more money now, but they don't want to do. This is going in the wrong direction. When they were spinning PS5 up back in 2017, 2018, and if you were like, I come from the year 2026, your console will be one and a half times more expensive six years in than when you launch it.

1:23:40And then you say goodbye and you recede back into the mist. And you leave them to ponder that reality. It seems almost unbelievable. You couldn't give consoles away at$50 or$100 back in previous generations. Now they're asking you to... I don't know, man. I don't know. It sucks, but it's just the nature. I know people want to blame politics and all those kind of stuff. It's cool. There's a lot of blame to go around. No doubt. This is about the AI shit, man. It really, it is. and it's counterpoint on that colin yeah hit me i was thinking because we didn't discuss this i don't know why the portal is going up 50 dollars they're out of experience apparently the only thing i can think and i haven't been following this very closely but is it like i know gas is more expensive right now uh is shipping these things going up in price as well that's fair certainly i'm talking about I'm talking about tariff specifically.

1:24:42I do think that the war in Iran is certainly going to have a deleterious effect specifically because, and I don't know how much it's baked in, like anything can happen in a, the markets are so fickle if you look at like the oil markets, especially the last month or so. So this can turn on and off pretty quickly, but China especially gets a lot of oil from Iran. A lot of this stuff is made there. so that's a problem in and of itself and i feel like the portal i that's why i was saying like the portal has finally been breached like the portal had been resistant to price increases it just stayed the same and i think a lot of that was literally because as we said they just had these tablets and now i think they have to make new ones so because i think that i think the the the the portal has been much more successful than in other words the portal seemed like an experiment and a way for them to get rid of shit they had and then i think they're like oh people really like this thing um and by the way the portal is fucking sick that's another thing like go buy your portal if you want it at 200 bucks there's absolutely no reason but i'm sympathetic to this dude it's like we're in an economic situation no matter what level you're at where you have to put your shoulder into what you think you're going to want because there's just no reality in which you're going to get a better price and uh it's something i'm thinking about with you know the home improvements i want to do around my house like i'm doing in my backyard it's like i don't want to do this yet i just got this shit done but micah and i have had this you know a few years ago but micah had this guy and i have this conversation where it's like we don't really like it we want to make changes and the reality is is that if we wait we're just going to pay more so you like and that sucks that that's totally the opposite of the standard that we should be have come to accept in capitalism and capital markets as availability makes prices go down.

1:26:31So it's a very unnatural situation. And it shows us how just realistically, it just shows us how beholden we are to these various economic forces and like how limited component manufacturers. We saw this during COVID with pharmaceuticals. It's like really like when things are going well, it's like, oh yeah, you know, you're just kind of going about bopping about your life and going about your business. But then you realize it's like, oh shit, only a few companies can make any of this and now the same things are happening here and it's a it's a it's a bummer all and like you said it really is all for cat videos with you know machine guns it is yeah it is also worth noting too that like if we were if we were truly building ai like true ai cool cool that's not what we're doing we're not building like a digital replicated human consciousness that can think on its own you know what i mean we're not doing the cool sci-fi shit with ai the fact that we even call it ai is actually like a shame because we really shouldn't be like it is kind of like a bit of a psyop and a deep misnomer of like what ai actually is it would be one thing if we were chasing ai and the rising costs were all um you know to do with like oh we've got to figure out how to how to crack this code because this is going to help us you know greatly what we're doing is we're building glorified search engines that can that can kind of condescendingly speak back to you right or you know automated photoshop you know or automated like i don't know fucking video uh creators like it's not this isn't real artificial intelligence as we understand that word to be it's it's the it's it's a bummer that that's essentially a marketing term that's been used to convince people it's like oh well this is all really stupid but it's probably important right it's like no ai kind of is important that would be like amazing that would be a breakthrough the likes of which would be fucking insane we're not doing any of that sam altman isn't going to give us the first like replicated human consciousness sorry there's something about sorry to tell you that i don't like these guys believe they're like they're high on their own supply and they they believe that it's worth crushing the global economy to do this they believe it i mean if you read shit about like sam altman and the things apparently he says and feels and whatever behind the scenes it's like this guy is like a bit of a messiah has like a somewhat of a messiah complex in my opinion um and it's video games are trivial but but it is affecting everything it's affecting the manufacture of cars it's affecting manufacture of imaging equipment and medical equipment and i don't know it and you know you know it's not trivial to get this shit spun up and made when no one is doing it because it is so hard and takes so much money in so much time because otherwise they would that capitalism abhors a vacuum to someone will fill it but like it's it's difficult to do yeah um it's what makes taiwan so important and all these it's like it's it's very complex it's very complex and fucked up and we really are beholden to these corporations it's really sucks these companies are i don't want to say they're evil I just want to say that their indifference is noted

1:30:18Colin doesn't have to say it I'll say it we'll have the broad spectrum of representation here I think it's straight up evil I think it's crazy so that's that Dustin you have anything else you want to say before we go you have to re-read do everything now yeah my uh old thumbnail was was great it was uh uh herman holst as steve urkel and shows all the studio here did i did did i do that i just put it in the sacred symbols chat i need the live reaction oh man did i do that yeah it's too bad but the new thumbnail i think is better yeah the new thumbnail is the glasses that's good let's be honest you should have put him in blackface gone all the way blackface that's oh yeah but then it makes it seem like and then people get mad at him because like herman hall stressed in blackface they were they were sued into oblivion it's a reference to the last of us on pc to the bug oh right joel blackface bug that's right Right.

1:31:26That's exactly right. Who can defend us, right? I don't know. I don't know if anyone wants to defend us from anything anymore. No. That's it. I mean, that's it. So the prices have gone up. You have until April 2nd to get your console. There's going to be a run on them. I'll tell you that. So if you are, if you're going to and they don't give a shit, this actually benefits them in a way too, because these consoles are already paid for and spoken for and they're in the channel. So it's like, yeah, buy them up, buy them up. We're really worried about the ones we have to make. and uh so these things are going to go aggressively i assume and um yeah godspeed out there hold your ps5s tight tonight especially if you have a launch one yeah because they are uh precious little cheap babies couldn't even believe we didn't know what we had back then i know dude what's so funny too is like you know everyone everyone used to say the nonsense about like scalpers are buying them and then not selling them and just sitting you know like all the shit we used to make fun of around launch like the shit that didn't make any sense and yet if the scalper did sit on their consoles yeah they would have been smart if you had the if you had the foresight and the patience to say like i have all these launch ps5s and i'm just gonna sit at them i paid 500 for them and now i can sell them for a hundred dollars more 150 more each and still sell them for cheaper than the ps5 is on the market new from sony even directly who could have foreseen it?

1:32:51He would have been sitting pretty. The Super Mario Galaxy movie hits theaters on April 1st and it's easily going to be one of the biggest film events of the year. This time the stakes are cosmic as Mario and his friends travel across entire galaxies to stop Bowser Jr. from destroying the universe as we know it. You've got all your favorites, Mario, Luigi, Peach, Toad, Bowser plus Yoshi and Rosalina joining the adventure in a way that fans of all ages are going to love. It's funny, it's epic, and it really leans into the wild, imaginative energy that has made Mario a pop culture icon for the last 40 years.

1:33:28Whether you grew up playing the games or you're just looking for a great time at the movies, this is one you'll want to see on the big screen. Experience the Super Mario Galaxy movie only in theaters April 1st. The galaxy is waiting. All right, my friends, let's get back into the show. There's so much other bad news to get into. We'll begin with that now. All right, guys, let's get into the news of the week. Big news this week. I mean, it's not the biggest news in terms of headcount, but it is just big news in terms of directionality and what's going on at Sony and surprising news, I think, too.

1:34:00And it's that Dark Outlaw Games, the first party studio led by Jason Blundell of Call of Duty fame, has been shuttered. So the provenance of this news is Jason Schreier, the reporter for Bloomberg, reported via his Blue Sky account, the social media account. He wrote, quote, more layoffs today. PlayStation is closing Dark Outlaw Games, a studio formed last year by Call of Duty lead Jason Blundell. his previous and he said jason corrects himself here because he says later because he says his previous playstation studio deviation was shut down in 2024 deviation was not a playstation studio he writes also and we'll get to this next playstation is also making other cuts including in mobile development about 50 people laid off we'll get to that the next story so we'll focus for now on the jason schreier report of the layoffs of dark outlaw games which have since been confirmed because there was a stream by a guy named JC Backfire on Twitch, who is a junior game designer or was a junior game designer at Dark Outlaw.

1:35:01And he actually follows me on Twitter. I'm not familiar with him. It's no offense to him. I just don't know the streaming world very well. I should see if he wants to come on the show. I think that would be interesting to talk to him about it. But he had Jason on his stream and they were talking about what had happened. and according to Push Square, because I didn't watch the whole stream, they write, while the pair didn't delve into specifics out of respect for their relationship with Sony, they did stress that the title they were working on was a title fans would have been excited for and the outcome fucking sucks.

1:35:31They clarified, however, that they hold no ill will towards PlayStation and chalk the cancellation down to a tough business environment. Blundell said in part, quote, times change, focus changes, but the project we were doing and what we were doing, fans would have been very excited, end quote. So we don't really know much more about it. I think we learned throughout the stream that there might have only been about 20 or 30 of them there. So they were still obviously spooling up. A lot of these guys came from deviation. So we'll get into the nitty gritty of all this. But just to explain what's happening here, Dark Outlaw Games and why I'm confused and concerned.

1:36:01And I just. I just continue to reiterate that I feel like Herman Hulse has to go. Is this is all him. As far as I can tell, just by the timeline. This has nothing to do with anyone. and anyone else dark outlaw games was confirmed in march 2025 i don't know if you guys remember at that time sony never even really sony's been kind of peculiar about this the whole time because they never even really acknowledged it they later the logo and shit later appeared on playstation.com and all the rest but it was on jeff gerstman's podcast i don't know if you guys recall that he jason blundell was interviewed and he um and he confirmed that he had started a new studio a first studio, Dark Outlaw.

1:36:44And that, as we know from LinkedIn and others, that they had kind of been circulating there, maybe a couple dozen X deviation employees at Sony under some umbrella we didn't understand for a while before that, probably as early as 2023, actually. So people might recall that deviation in 2021 was, if you guys go transport ourselves back to 2021, first half of 2021 in early 2021 so in march i believe of 2021 sony announces that they're in partnership with a studio called haven in quebec on a game that would be fair games which is still percolating somehow and then the next month april they announced that they're in business with a studio called Firewalk for a game that would become Concord.

1:37:37And then the third game that's kind of less discussed because it was canceled was Deviation that June was announced to be a partner of Sony's. And this was a studio run in part by Jason Blundell of Black Ops fame and Zombies fame from the Treyarch days and a guy named Dave Anthony, who was a longtime Call of Duty producer. He was the executive producer of Call of Duty 3 and the co-director of Black Ops and Black Ops 2. So these guys had a Call of Duty pedigree. At this time, people assumed, and I think reasonably so, that they were working on a game as a service or a multiplayer game. I went back and read everything that I could find about their announcement and how people were talking about it.

1:38:18They never confirmed what they were working on. And you guys might recall, so they never confirmed that they were even making a multiplayer game. And you guys might recall that, remember we watched it some months ago, that footage of it leaked? And what it seemed like was it was actually at least a campaign structured, maybe co-op game, but maybe even a single player game. So Deviation now fast forward to 2023 reported right here on sacred symbols. Deviation gets its funding pulled from by Sony. This was this was told to me by people at the studio or a person specifically at the studio at the time.

1:38:52So we reported on that. It was true. and the game is canceled. So something goes wrong with the game and Deviation actually stays alive with a skeleton crew for another year as they try to find work, but they closed down entirely in 2024. In the interim, I think Dave Anthony had stayed there and Jason Blundell had left. At that time, ex-Deviation people and Jason started popping up at Sony. Like they never really left Sony. They were brought internal to Sony. And at that time, we started hypothesizing. I think and the inference was reasonable that they're making a game like they're maybe salvaging what the game was or they're trying something new.

1:39:30They didn't want to let go of some of this talent. And then the studio was announced in March 2025 and then March 2026 the studio shut down. So that studio is finished with all that said now we can go around and see how we feel about it. Chris what are your thoughts on the death of Dark Outlaw games? We barely knew them. I know man it's just it I don't know what I can really even say at this point like I do feel like the leadership at Sony has been so I don't want to say incoherent because I still remember the Microsoft leadership for the last like several years that's a little bit more incoherent to me but it's certainly

1:40:18i don't know ill ill thought out or poorly thought out if this was how it was going to go um so quickly after they spooled this up to to kind of yank it away like i understand businesses change and like realities change and economics change and all that but uh this speaks of at least some level of is incompetence too strong of a word i don't No, I don't think it's too strong. Clearly. I don't know, man. It kind of blows my mind. I do think... I think they've just mismanaged this talent because Jason Blundell is not like a no, but that's a person to focus on, I think. And so to, in my opinion, screw this guy over twice is kind of...

1:41:10It's a lot. Yeah, he seems to be taking it in stride, I think reasonably so just because he's rich and I'm not trying to be a dickhead. That's awesome. Like he's made an enormous amount of money. So it's not like the end of the world for him. He'll he'll he I think he understands intuitively like he'll be fine and he'll be able to make a game at some point somewhere and do something. So and they don't want to fuck their relationship with Sony up, which to me also indicates that maybe they're like. There could be a life again for something in the future, but I just the important thing I should note here is they also confirm that it wasn't a live service game.

1:41:42So I think that just indicates that Deviation probably was never making a live service game. And that makes it that makes this whole arc more disappointing because it actually wasn't one of those games. And I would have loved to have seen more of it. From what I remember, it kind of read. A little bit like Mass Effect or Dead Space, like third person sci-fi action. Seemed to be like what they were doing. Yeah, but who knows? I don't know. Maybe we'll learn more. But what do you think about this, Dustin, when you heard about the news of Dark Outlaw? Where does your mind go? Yeah, well, it's definitely disappointing just because we've been saying how, I mean, aside from the other closures and huge failures, it just seems like Sony isn't doing anything that new overall.

1:42:30Outside of a couple examples, we have a new IP in Sorrows coming out in just a month or two. But I wonder to play a little devil's advocate, which I know is very popular when I do this. But is it possible? Like right now, there was I don't think this is a news item. It's not really a news item to bring up on the show. But Schreier, who is we already mentioned, recently said like game budgets are at least 300 million dollars in the AAA space. the bets are getting so massive we've talked about that being unsustainable many times and we already just saw sony shut down blue point and we assumed more cuts were on the way and it's not just sony either as we're going to talk about in a few news stories about the epic layoffs and fortnight not really being seemingly in a good place with the amount of cuts that they're having to make that again i really hate to defend herman holst and i'm not i'm throwing this out as a hypothetical sony's like we need you to cut and we need you to figure out where that's best to do and maybe they're like he was looking at this project is like i have to cut something and this is going to be another potentially 300 million dollar project and I'm not willing to take that bet.

1:43:59And that's kind of where the cards fell. Yeah, well, I actually agree with you that like

1:44:10the reality is the winds change and they're not where the game isn't where it needs to be. Obviously, yet it's in pre-production. They're figuring out what it is, but that whatever it was is it at its cheapest. as they begin to scale the game is going to become more and more expensive and yeah it's going to and it's so you know jaffe and i have talked about this ad nauseum on moriarty cross jaffe and i know you guys agree is like the funny thing about this and sony did this to itself because they're the ones that are responsible for the arms race right you know so right like single-handedly the late ps3 into the ps4 era like they were the ones that are like it's all about cinema, you know, cinematic, story-driven, narrative-driven.

1:44:52And when you play a game like The Last of Us Part II, which is immaculate, you realize like it's, you can only get games like this with money. It's like what we're going to find out with GTA and what we knew about with Red Dead. It's like, it's only, it's not about money being the be-all end-all, it's about how many resources it allows you to buy, the time it allows you to buy. And if you get enough talent and enough time, you're going to make something really extraordinary. And I think this is a reminder that everyone has to kind of back off the budget kind of constraint thing and get back to a more reasonable.

1:45:26I think being over$100 million, I think is fine. But like one to$200 million, that's a big difference between$300 million or being at 115 is a lot different than being at 220, which is what I believe Last of Us Part II cost years ago, by the way. I mean, can you imagine how much Intergalactic is going to cost? like there's just no way that that game isn't 300 plus million dollars and i'm not saying that out of knowledge so no one report that because that's not what i'm saying i'm saying there's just simply no way that that game is not some extraordinary price so i think you're i think you're right dustin that he kind of have to play the ball where it where it lays and it's like yeah like so now we have to make we have to adjust to these new the new win conditions and we're on the rough and like also like now little collins big hole wrote in which one do you think he's talking about i'd like to think he's thinking about talking about the urethra he says hello cdc with the recent news of sony shutting down jason blendell's second studio under them at what point do they turn a critical eye towards herman holst just seems like every week playstation studios are in the headlines for all the wrong reasons are big games like wolverine and intergalactic enough to justify the studio malpractice or does Herman have some serious dirt on Sony?

1:46:43Thanks for all the entertainment over the years and remember to give the chicken a break. I want to be as fair as I can in my analysis. I was thinking about this specifically with Matt Booty, right? We were making fun of how like Phil retires, Sarah's obviously pushed out. Matt Booty is promoted. Like Matt Booty is promoted, right? Like of all of them, that's the one? Like the guy in charge of your studios? you're in your incompetent studio chain and we looked at it though we're trying to look at it as objectively as possible and you're like okay maybe there's just i mean certainly there's more than meets the eye but like maybe maybe he's the victim of circumstance like you just look at you're like i don't like i don't know and i kind of feel like a similar thing with herman holster i'm like how i don't want to beat a dead horse but like how i want someone to explain to me how it's not his fault

1:47:38like whose fault is this how is no one paying the price for this and by the way how much shit did i get over the years even of talking about organic growth and the idea of keeping the team small and being very deliberate with acquisitions and everyone was like no that's bullshit that's nonsense and it doesn't make any sense and look look like dark outlaw like is is almost when you really look at it as saying like yeah deviation failed in that second party you know that second party um tryout as it were yet we just gave them rope anyway and pulled them to shore it's the same thing i was saying about haven and firewalk like why did you buy it it's not that they're making I want to reiterate this.

1:48:28It's not that the games are bad. That's its own thing. It's that you invested in the two studios that made the bad games. That's the thing that doesn't make any sense. Instead of saying like, oh, the game's canceled or Concord. Like imagine how differently Concord's cancellation would have went and it's like, well, we don't own you. This is a huge loss for us. This sucks. You guys suck. But we didn't buy the cow. Bye. Right. You know, and then they go and then they go out of business and you limit your losses. Instead, these guys make bad decision after bad decision. And I only think you can scapegoat Jim Ryan so much.

1:49:01And you certainly can't scapegoat Jim Ryan for this because he wasn't fucking there. He was there when the deviation stuff went down. He was there when they started bringing some of those guys internal to Sony. He wasn't there when they allowed them to go on Jeff Gerstmann's show and say that they're making a first party studio. So at some point. The what is it? The killers in the house. It's like, I don't know what you want me to tell you at this point. obviously there's a major problem with first party management. It's not the output at first party. That's bad. Right. You know, one of the stories of the last week, I didn't go to it here is like the Metacritic rankings and how Sony tanked in the Metacritic rankings.

1:49:41And I'm like, yeah, but a lot of that is like lost soul aside. Sons of Sparta. It's not Yote. It's not that stranding, you know, like these games that are excellent. And I don't think anyone thinks that Saros is going to be anything less than excellent. I don't think anyone thinks that a second party game like token is going to be anything less than excellent. I don't think anyone thinks that Wolverine is going to be anything less than excellent. And intergalactic and all those kinds of things. It's not about that because those teams know what they're doing. They don't need the guidance. Everything else is fucked.

1:50:12And the big note of thing that bums me out the most guys and I was thinking about this way to articulate this. I've lamented that. Sony was directionally right. Like games as a service. I still believe it to this day. And we'll talk about it more when we talk about Epic and Fortnite. Like there's the reality of the situation. Again, not what I want. But what I think is the right move based on where things are, because I'm not the normal gamer anymore. And in a lot of ways, I never was. But they mismanaged and botched this entire thing to such a massive degree. That number one, though, Marathon is excellent in most people's opinions, it seems to be withering under the weight of Sony itself and Sony's attachment to it because of the stink of some of the other things that they've done.

1:51:02And I think even more critically, we're never going to know how it would have went if they just did it differently. And I know that goes without saying, but this could have gone so different. and I think that that's what's disappointing is we don't really know if the strategy was good or not because the strategy was botched from the word go like everything they did was wrong and that bums me out and I think there's the little thing not even little things anymore but like not buying Bungie not buying Firewalk, not buying Haven, not investing in a Bluepoint game as a service, not investing in a Bend game as a service and all these things like just those choices alone being reversed makes everything else more palatable.

1:51:49The Last of Us Online probably still comes out if that if that actually happens. You still have games that might have been canceled, like Twisted Metal and other things. If Concord still sucked and it would have, it wouldn't have mattered. It would be equivalent to Midnight Murder Club. Right. I mean, like, yeah, certainly much more costly, but like it's like, all right, I mean, that sucks that was a waste of production resources but it's not really instead like you waste your internal studios time you bring these studios internal you change your entire game plan like it's so disappointing because like they're and so now it's i mean from my opinion it's obvious that sony is getting scared off of games as a service and again it has nothing to do with even with dark outlaw itself which claims that they weren't making a game as a service.

1:52:34But it's obvious that they're spooked and that they're probably never going to get a fair shake at trying this strategy again. And I think that that's reasonable. Why would you trust them again? But unfortunate in that, like if you can reverse five or six years and be like, do this instead. Like key game investments and maybe none of them pan out. Maybe you have hell divers that's still panned out and you could you would have gotten marathon one way or the other like i don't you know like it would have been on your console so you would have gotten the good games but i think guys that there is a trio of games well beyond concord where they look at it and they're like this isn't going well for us man and it's for loop where they're like no one seems to want to like this game.

1:53:24This game seems to be DOA fair games, which is, I can't believe is still going. And I have more information about fair games, by the way, someone emailed me that, that again has played it. And I'll more to say about that soon. I need to kind of go back and forth with the person for a little while and get more information. And then the third game is, and I think maybe the most key in terms of response is Horizon.

1:53:51Where I think they're realizing and by the way, Horizon had this play test and I'm sure they got a lot of feedback. I don't know what it is. Remember we got feet. Remember I talked about on our show. Here's a person who played and liked it. Here's a person who played and didn't. I don't know like what feedback they got, but I think they're getting and they're collating all this information. They're like. This isn't going well, man. Hell, if anything, Hell Divers is a complete outlier. Like we just stumbled into Helldivers and we're lucky. The so I don't know how you guys feel about that, but that's kind of where my mind is at, is that the greatest shame is simply in.

1:54:26Them there now Sony is not going to be a reasonable player in the most important space in gaming. Yeah, period. End of story. Yeah, like and they've curated that they've curated that themselves, though, in like because they are they are the you know, we are HBO. Right. You know, we're the single player, you know, like you come here for the high fidelity cut scenes and like the thespians, you know, doing doing, you know, acting exercises in your in your game engine, you know, they weren't really like their the audience is just different. granted the playstation audience is most normal gamers now like at least on console anyway like xbox is kind of withered on the vine and all that so you do kind of have a lot of x you know 360 people in there um kind of kind of i would argue like holding up that flank a little bit like the the only people that i know who play multiplayer live service games that i that i've known all my life are the people who used to play xbox like who have who have migrated since migrated to playstation it's like it's interesting like i don't know why that's true but it is um and yeah i don't know it's just it's a culture problem it's definitely a management problem it's it's and that's and by the way none of that is even to mention the the blue point thing which is also fucking psychotic like it would be one thing if it was any of these things individually right like oh concord oh man but everything else is great ah blue point ah but everything else is working out the fact that it's all of it is crazy with the exception of i guess like your obvious third party or first party outliers which is you know they're always going to hit generally um and even the ones that don't hit are still going to hit like spider-man 2 didn't hit but it hit you know like a lot of people regard that game softly in comparison to the first one but it's still sold a fuck ton um so it's just crazy i think the one of the things that's sticking out to me and maybe with sony strategy you're talking about hell divers and it's amazing and maybe this is in my head but some of these games you can tell like if you set out to make a game in order to create a highly monetized environment above all and i'm not saying that at gorilla they're like they don't care about how fun the game is i'm sure that's a deeply important thing but a game like hell divers to me and again this might be in my head i'm not saying this is factual but it's like the monetization aspect of that game feels secondary to everything else like it could exist without the monetization aspect at all but it succeeds because of how fun it is how good of a game it is and it's funny too with marathon which obviously you know marathon is not had the success they expected when i play marathon like every time i pop into the shop and i look at the uh i look at the battle pass and like it doesn't I feel like this game was built to have a good monetization in it because everything in it sucks, but it is so fun.

1:57:49And it makes me sad that that game's not succeeding because of that. When I think about fair games, Concord, all these other things that I'm like, when you're, when your primary objective from your funder and publishers make something that prints us money above all else, seems like the products aren't coming out very good for that with that goal in mind so i don't know we'll see though you have to assume fair games there's no prayer that that game's coming out like i i just can't i don't know what they're doing with that studio i don't know what they're trying to do with the game obviously the play tests were late last year um the game lost its director it lost its executive producer and studio founder I feel like that I feel like people are desperate for that game to come out so they can shit on it I don't know what the if I was at Haven man I'd be pretty nervous um sadly and yeah I don't know I just there are two things about well there's a lot to say but it's like Herman Holst, someone has to pay the price for this.

1:59:02Like I don't understand what Sony doesn't understand about that. There has been like a series of bad choices made for PlayStation Studios and the output and the output that has been affected by PlayStation Studios that is generational. And it's a catastrophic situation. And I'm sorry that it's happening under the stewardship of someone who was very well respected. And Gorilla was it was and is a great team. And he helped build that culture. There's no doubt about that. It's very similar to Matt Booty. Like as Jez always likes to remind me, it's like Matt Booty, you know, made his bones at a claim, of course, but he became famous because he ran Minecraft.

1:59:38But it's like, that's cool. That was one skill. And you did a great job with Mojang and all the rest. That doesn't mean it translates. It obviously didn't with Microsoft, and yet he fails upwards. And it's a similar thing with this. It's like there's got to be people both internally and externally externally that can do this.

1:59:58and I don't understand how tight things are where it's like and this is why I think you're right Dustin where they're like they just don't want to make they just want to kill this in the crib because they don't want to invest in it but it's like you can't let 20 people just dick around and try to build things that's how desperate and dire things have become I was talking about this on an interview I did off-site a few weeks ago I tweeted it out it was an interesting an interesting interview, a fun interview. And I was using the reference of in political science, the idea of political capital, right?

2:00:28This intangible currency and you do a favor or you vote the right way or you get the right investment or, you know, donation from someone or whatever. And you do all these things and you build up this war chest and then you utilize it when you need something or when you need to gain a little space from a situation or buy a little goodwill or whatever. Sony had an enormous welling of that type of political capital, but capital with their own audience. PlayStation's excellent as a hardware environment. PS4 and PS5 have both been excellent machines. People buy these consoles as the default. they spend a lot of money there with the hardcore audience in which they rely the most i think the political capital is gone i think that they have to work now and execute in on all these games and build a well of capital back with people because i think it's entirely reasonable to say like you guys blew this generation as far as like what the output could have been it doesn't diminish the games we've gotten it just may it's what we say over and over again it could be so much better for as good as it's been it could be so much better and i don't i've been made fun of many times for saying like i don't really care about exclusives like i i ultimately don't because most of my gaming diet my entire life has not been exclusive games on any machine i saw someone tweeting out um sony's output or everyone being i missed the ps1 and ps2 days, it's like the PS1 and PS2, like about their first party.

2:02:14It's like Sony didn't even really have a first party in the PS1 days. What are you talking about? You know, like it's not unprecedented. It's to say like whatever resources they have are just mismanaged and misused and it sucks. And we should have probably between first and second party, in my opinion, six to 10 more games right now. People have this idea that it's like we should have fucking 12 games a year and they should be it's like no there's not room for that but there are there is room for more a game or two a year over the life cycle of the series of the of the console i think it's perfectly reasonable and something about this generation feels empty because of it to a lot of people and it's why i think it's so funny that we're moving on to ps6 where this feels incomplete.

2:03:03It doesn't feel bad. It just feels like it's not done. And so either they're going to, and that's why I think there's just going to be a bunch of cross-generation games. I don't think there's going to be PS6 games per se. I don't know. I'm just disappointed with for so many different reasons, but I think the things that I lament the most are just the loss of opportunity. It's gone now. The opportunity to do this is gone. Sony will now not have a presence, a meaningful presence in games as a service, and it's going to hurt them bad. I'm just telling you to mark that in the years to come because if you're under some sort of delusion that single player games and expensive single player games and all these things are going to suddenly have this massive resurgence you're delusional for every Crimson Desert or Resident Evil Requiem there are tens and tens and tens of millions and hundreds of millions of people playing these other games and Crimson Desert's a big hit at 3 million units and Roblox has more daily active users than PlayStation Network so if you don't understand yet you will in the years to come and Sony was right to try to make a play they made a play in the stupidest way possible and now it's lost and the audience will not tolerate it again so if they do it they have to do it quietly

2:04:29and very deliberately moving forward. The spread shot approach that they were trying to take, which was a good idea, gone forever. And then Herman Hulse, that's the other thing where I'm like, I just feel like he has to go.

2:04:43There's something not right about this era. It's intuitive if you read between the lines when he was demoted as co-CEO. I'll just reiterate that. they know and people might say it's like well there might be an explanation it's not his fault okay whose fault is it and why are they still at Sony because cool it's like okay it's not his fault the other guys these acquisitions people like the money people and the bean counters it's like someone made a bad call someone made a series of really bad calls but I my eyes go towards the tastemaker internally, the guy who's supposed to run your creative apparatus, the guy who saw Concord a year before it came out and instead of freaking out about its state, bought the team.

2:05:37Okay? Everyone and their mother hates fair games, and these guys saw that game and bought them. Who did that? Who's responsible for that?

2:05:52strange it's just is it like where is the accountability and people might say like well it doesn't matter you know we're not stockholders or we're not it's like but it matters to the players like we need to know things are going to be different and i i just don't get it i don't know i just don't get it so i don't think and even when you look at things like wolverine is by the time comes out is probably something like two years late so it's not it's not it's not also like this idea that they announced it alongside spider-man 2 to release it three years after spider-man 2 is fucking hysterical you know are you kidding obviously it was going to go like one year the next year right so whoever the powers that be Nishino and all these guys start cracking some skulls dude because I don't know and I internally it must feel like shit that's another really important thing to consider is like there are studios that are very safe no doubt sucker punch just delivered an excellent game they're going to be fine And Naughty Dog's working on intergalactic.

2:07:07Obviously, intergalactic is going to be big. Santa Monica is going to do their God of War thing. I think that's stupid, but people are going to love it. And I'm sure it's going to be great. But if I was at Bend or Media Molecule or Fire Sprite or whatever, I would be worried. Because the people that are in charge obviously have no idea what they're doing. And they don't care about you, obviously, either. So they didn't care about Bluepoint. I don't know why they would care about you. Hashim Barakat wrote in with another very interesting inquiry. that I think is worth considering. Good day, sacred spring boys.

2:07:41Do you think that the recent closure of Dark Outlaw and Bluepoint would have a negative effect on Sony's future acquisition prospects? I think it's possible no one would trust their studios with Sony's disastrous mismanagement and would rather sell to another one of their competitors. Thank you for the great content as always. I wish you all a great week and a wonderful spring season. I think the days of acquisitions are kind of over now for everybody. Yeah, I think that they'll still be like targeted acquisitions from all the team, all the publishing arms, but this idea that you own the cow, I think games just take too long.

2:08:13It's too risky. You just should invest in games. If you're interested in a team and investing in a game, Bandai Namco and Rebel Wolves, for instance, with the vampire RPG that they're making, it's like, that's just an investment. Here's the money. We'll see what happens. And then maybe we, I mean, look at Bandai Namco and FromSoft all these years, they're working together beautifully without ever, without, you know, a massive ownership stake or anything like that. So I think that's the future. Part of me feels like if Sony is interested in your studio. You'd be crazy not to sell because you can just cash out.

2:08:43It's not going to affect your money. But if you but if you if you feel like you have options, if you feel like you truly have options. Then you would be kind of stupid to go into business with them. And I refuse to believe that Sony didn't try to buy Arrowhead. So there's some precedents you can read between the lines, I guess. of people saying like, we don't really need you, you know? Um, but I'm sure that's really difficult to do when you, you have five owners of the studio and each of you are going to walk away with$20 million or whatever, you know? Um, and you'll be vested no matter what. And even if the vesting period is three or five years, you'll probably survive long enough to get that money.

2:09:23So on what's, what's up? No, probably survive. Yeah. Right. so part of me is like i don't know that it would affect the bottom line because i think people will just sell out if they're given the opportunity and i think that's perfectly reasonable the other part of it is just that i think if you have options you have no interest in working with sony and there are no obvious acquisition targets anymore i still think the most obvious acquisition target is kojima and i just don't think that that is neither wanted nor necessary necessary the other ones that were outstanding for all those years are done now house mark and Bluepoint.

2:09:56Those were the two that made sense. And for a long time, Quantic Dream made sense, but that never came to fruition because they didn't like each other, it seems. But that was obviously the trajectory Quantic was on. They had a three-game deal. And now you don't even make deals like that anymore because a three-game deal today, that three-game deal took eight years. It really took like 10 or 11 because obviously Heavy Rain had to be developed. But Heavy Rain came out in 2010. Detroit came out in 2018. it's like the quantity has even released a game since then it's been eight years you know so and their star wars game is like that's that's a deal where it's like oh my god you made a deal in a different time man i don't know if anyone's gonna give a flying fuck about this but then you see galactic racers and people are excited about that so who knows um so hashima i think it's an interesting inquiry i think i don't even know who sony would want to buy at this point or like what would make any sense but i'll tell you again man i stand by and i was so right about the way they were growing and how bad it was going to go that's a definite colin was right moment it's just not naturalistic they can't do it it doesn't work nintendo had always had the right idea they had verbally said at some point remember we have no interest in buying studios that we don't work with like you you you don't just buy something and make it nintendo like that's not the way it works and I feel the same way.

2:11:17It's like you don't buy something and make it PlayStation. Naughty Dog became a PlayStation studio. Sucker Punch became a PlayStation studio. Gorilla became a PlayStation studio and so on and so forth. And I think for as romantic as that sounds, it's not for that purpose. It's because it works. You know each other. You've produced a game or two or three. You've dealt with the business. You get all the intermediaries. You understand the politics. You've had success. you know it took sucker punch four games before sony bought them it took naughty dog five or six i know times are different but house mark like 10 when you think about it going back 20 years i don't know i want there to be accountability and if and by the way in this in the financial call, which will happen for this quarter in a month or so.

2:12:21They always have like the financial calls with the analysts and stuff at the end. And it's always good business questions, but no one ever asks hard questions. And that pisses me off. And someone should ask, like, what is going on with this, man? Like, what is going on with? The question should be like, do you realize how lucky you are? That you have so much momentum and such goodwill that none of this seems to matter, but you have to understand that if you continue to do this, it's going to matter a great deal. And maybe it's time to get someone else.

2:12:55And that someone else is me. No, I'm kidding. I would never want to do that job. I'd fucking kill myself. Can you imagine being responsible for billions of dollars worth of investment, like asset, like calls? Yeah, I can. Because it seems incredibly easy. because you just don't not do a good job and then just leave get a golden parachute through that lens you're absolutely right yeah there seems to be no okay there's i mean there shouldn't be a you have like a like an immunity in some sense there shouldn't be a personal consequence it's like sue this man for 1.5 billion dollars it's like but yeah there is like a level of like well whatever yeah kind of like with matt matric or matric when he left xbox it's like well see ya yeah see i'm gonna go i'm gonna go be a ceo somewhere else i feel like that's the thing that's happening too is is a lot of this um and granted this is not just games that's having this problem but like i was reading i was reading some articles and then i was like watching some videos about it but like this uh this idea of like the the ceo mercenary or like the ceo for hire like a lot of studio a lot of studios and businesses are hiring people who have been ceos for completely different businesses and not really like people who like are in the company and it's been awful it's like it's like that mcdonald's guy when he tried to eat the burger and he just couldn't he couldn't fucking bring himself to do it yeah yeah it was so awesome that was that guy was i think that guy i think was the ceo of some other random company before that and so it's just like this i don't know man i just don't think this worked and to be fair herman holst was you know this is not like a an equivalent situation necessarily because he's from you know playstation like he's been doing this in the studio system for a while and so like and it's a different position and i get it but some people just aren't right for the job either yeah and uh you know it's it's i i wonder if this is um somebody brought this up i think in a previous inquiry in a previous episode but like i wonder if it's just like a well listen like we we we hired you to do this job and we we you know we want somebody else but we're not going to pay you to do nothing kind of thing yeah um by firing you now and like you're you're kind of contracted for this money and so like you're gonna you're gonna serve your time in some way but i wonder how quickly by the time that contract or whatever his deal is is done um how quickly they'll be like all right let's get somebody else in here yeah yeah it could be it's reasonable to expect that he might not even be calling the shots anymore um at which point it's an interesting optics game because like you're kind of letting him get bodied for things that are not even necessarily his choice anymore but it's all based on bets he absolutely made so so either way it's in my opinion deserve it and if I'm misunderstanding the situation or someone else has a different understanding of it I'd love to hear it because I don't understand how else it could work also I mean even when Jim Ryan was still there he must have been the creative liaison he has to have been he's got to be the tastemaker like I know it's a weird thing to say because it's subjective but I think people felt this way with Kathleen Kennedy actually during the Star Wars Disney era is like you have to have taste.

2:16:05Like it's a thing. Like Shuhei talks about that a little bit and about how sometimes you miss. But like you have to have like a good idea of what works outside of yourself. Importantly. Otherwise, you're making games for yourself or you're making games for no one. but this situation is incredibly unfortunate and i i do wonder like when it ends but this might be the end of like what we see for the purging of sony for now and and again dustin i think you're right on that this is clearly them saying like this is not even worth don't even bother you know like it's cool what you're doing is cool we don't have the money we can't invest in another one of these right now and i also will say this that uh the go the idea that ghost of yote caused i know that this is why i was saying at the time like there's got to be some sort of serious caveat to what sucker punch was saying about how tsushima and yote cost around the same amount of money it's like no way man it's just no way all right the other thing that i wanted to get to from this news uh so this originally i think began on reset era the the uh the forum and then jason tweeted later confirming this.

2:17:20And the original post on Reset Era had said something about how there's like a direction, a moving direction in mobile development internally at PlayStation. The user here, J-Soul, had said, so the reason I'm connecting these is because all of this actually was posted on Reset Era by someone else, I think, before Jason had even reported it himself. And this person had said Dark Outlaw is closing and there are other layoffs within PlayStation. And then this is what the person had posted as his third bullet point and final bullet point, quote, PlayStation is moving away from the mobile game market.

2:17:58They will continue to support previously announced titles like MLB, the show mobile, Ratchet and Clank, Ranger Rumble and the NC soft titles. But outside of these titles, we will be scaling back in the space to focus our efforts on a few select high impact projects. That's a quote from someone, I guess, at Sony. I don't know who it is. Jason later confirmed this on Twitter or on Blue Sky in the same message that he talked about Outlaw Games or Dark Outlaw Games. He said PlayStation is also making other cuts, including a mobile development around 50 people laid off. I wanted to kind of delve into this a little bit because I feel like more than than less than games as a service, but more than the PC stuff.

2:18:41So in other words, I feel like this is less important than making having success in games as service, but more, more important than being successful in PC is the mobile space. And I feel like PlayStation also blew this. And the worst part about this is they never even had anything to show for it. Like not even one thing to really be like, yeah, we try, we made an earnest investment in mobile. And so it sounds to me like they're just unwinding from that. And I think that just like the games as a service thing going into mobile was a good idea they blew it and now they've used that capital and no one cares anymore and like the idea that they can do anything cool there is done so you might as well walk away from it but it doesn't mean that it was a bad idea it means you blew it and this is like a five-year thing in the making of them like trying to do something and not being able to get anything out the door it's just like what is wrong with you guys.

2:19:37I mobile gaming is huge. You couldn't get any footprint there in any way. You, as I said before, hired Nicola Sebastiani, poached him basically from Apple in summer 2021, who ran Apple Arcade for eight years, was the head of content of the Apple game store and was a producer at Ubisoft. So he had some experience in games outside of that, two more traditional games. He comes in. They the next year by Savage, the European mobile game studio. Did I think had a base in Germany and a base in Finland. They became neon coy later in their shutdown last year. And Sebastian, he leaves after two years. So he comes in, does all this stuff, buys this, buys Savage, then just bounces, I guess.

2:20:29And they have these other guys, Chris Davies and Olivier Courtmosh take over for them. And then What's interesting about this is I was doing a little bit of research is Sony was like doing puff pieces on these guys like Sony or facilitating puff pieces. If you go to like if you search around, like there are these pieces about like, look at the staff of Savage Game Studios and look at the staff of PlayStation Mobile and look at all these impressive people. Sony is building around this massive PlayStation Mobile initiative and. Just a huge fart in the wind is if it never happened at all, like I wonder how much money they spent on all this nonsense.

2:21:05so again just like i felt like being on pc was a good idea just like i feel like games as a service was a good idea i feel like mobile games were another obvious place that you'd want to at least flex and i thought we were seeing some fruit with mlb the show it's like yes this is the kind of game that should be on mobile of course it should intimately connect in some way to like a vmu on Dreamcast to like the game itself, whether you're training your players or even playing the games or whatever. It's fucking disaster. It's too bad. And I think that I think most PlayStation hardcore fans are excited about these developments because they're like no PC games, no games as a service, no mobile games.

2:21:51And I'm like, no growth. So have fun in the long run with this. I think this is going to portend poorly for Sony. I don't think it's like the end of the world for them, but I don't think it's good. So that'll happen here. Remember also Wipeout Rush 2021 announced for 2022 release. That's basically it. There was the Ratchet game, like they said, that I think is still going. I don't know. Anything you guys want to say about this? I wanted to acknowledge it. It's not the most exciting topic, but yeah, I immediately thought of the Wipeout Rush game and it's clear that you mentioned those puff pieces but when it actually came to making and releasing these games they clearly had very little confidence it was either that they had no little confidence in it or just an extreme amount of uh mishandling the releases of them because that wipeout game like uh i remember that it got announced but it was like there was no official messaging from PlayStation about it.

2:22:58Yeah, they didn't even, I don't think they even branded it, which I also thought was weird. I remember saying little things like that. I'm like, why are you like trying to do it with one foot in the door and one foot out? Like, do it. Do it. Right. Man, it's annoying. The rollout of that Ratchet and Clank game, which I know isn't fully out yet, has also been a little weird. So it's like they've never, they've done and spent all this money, but then they never actually did it. even with the products they did have and i don't know if it's just because they weren't like i said they weren't confident in them so they're like well we already spent the money let's just see if we can get a couple whales in here to spend money on wipeout rush or something but the wipeout the wipeout whales the wipe dude the wipeout whales that's all they need to justify it so uh yeah it seems all so stupid and i'm glad colin you mentioned about having the head of apple arcade because it's like dude you had you had everything you needed yeah it's crazy it's crazy like obviously what happened was he came in with a head of steam had a lot of power bought savage left the next year so i think things started going kind of pear-shaped pretty quickly and then i think they had to restart with new leadership and then i think they that neon koi became expensive and i don't know it's i again i think it was not a bad idea to buy a mobile game studio.

2:24:23I don't like to just say like, yeah, let's, but I thought you like had an idea, you know, like I thought you had a plan to like, this is what we want to do. This is why we need you because you're being courted by others. And also I think an important piece of this, and it's worth saying, but it's just, it's obvious is that this is also the flush cash COVID post COVID era where I don't know what these companies were thinking, but they were just spending money as if the growth was going to be permanent and that also came to rubber band back on them so that has to be acknowledged as well no doubt um do you have anything you want to say chris about this before we move on no i mean it's the how many times are we going to beat the drum i guess but like dude the mobile initiative is just that if we thought the live service initiative was like poorly thought out and poorly delivered on like the mobile initiative is i mean this might as well not have been there really um because even that uh ratcheting client game uh or that ratchet game whatever it is like i don't know anything about it ranger rumble yeah we we uh yeah we only covered it once when it was announced and then it went into it was like in singapore or something they were like testing it yeah and it was just and you know it's it exists in some way shape or form i haven't heard anything about it um i'm sure it's fine you know but it's clearly not it's clear it clearly didn't illuminate a path forward for them to think about like in other words like if it was like this really resounding you know kind of like people were really resonating with it or whatever um i don't know if you would necessarily see this decision you know because then they would because you would see sony be like oh we have a template now like we have something that kind of like oh this this is something that works um you know let's try and do this elsewhere with with different ip or whatever and you're just not seeing that so clearly i'm sure that game is fine um might even be very good compared to mobile games you know mobile game standard i don't really know we're not none of us are really in that space also so it's hard to really speak on it but it's not surprising to me that this is going this way if their live service push which a lot more center stage has not gone the way that they that they want it either.

2:26:42Yeah, it's an it's an I don't see embarrassing moment kind of is for Sony. I mean, this could go a different way if they weren't in the same. And I know it's like, well, so it didn't go that way, but it's like it could have gone a different way if they were not in the market position they were in. This could have crushed them. These kinds of things, you know, right? Yeah, but they're not. I don't know, man, like maybe it's too harsh or whatever, but like they're just not they're just they're just not this company like it's in in the same we we talk about xbox a lot and how like you know they're they're a service company right and that's what that's kind of what they do and it's what they've done and so like it's why a lot of new ip that they've tried to figure out just don't work it's why a lot of their biggest ips were purchased elsewhere even halo was a mac game originally um and so at a certain point you have to look at the dna of like a company and be like no you're you kind of don't know how to do this you can probably figure it out over time but you have not allocated the resources correctly to figure that out in any way um you're stumbling in ways that are kind of trivial and a little embarrassing but like i mean it's it's not nintendo's also not that company either to be fair you know like they they still got like the fucking are they still doing that the voice chat app on the phone forgot about that no game so they integrated it and now there's a chat button on the switch too oh that's right i forgot about that right you have to be subscribed to use the chat fuck shout that's right it's like i get this is i get nintendo is is most obvious that they are just not that company because they just because that that phone app thing lasted a long ass time the net code for nintendo consoles has always been tremendously bad like i remember i remember playing brawl super smash brothers brawl on wii online and thinking that i was like maybe being i thought maybe it was like a joke like it was like like a big prank was happening right right because it was it was so so it was unplayable it's bad it's horrendous and so sony's kind of like in that middle area where it's just like no you're a single player you do these things and even when you don't do them well you do them pretty successfully spider-man 2 is a good example right like i like spider-man 2 we've talked about this before but it's it's just the reception of it was softer right um so even when you stumble in that environment you kind of come out okay mulverine obviously like a massive amount of problems going on behind the scenes the director all that stuff the the obvious delay that the extended development time and then that re-reveal trailer looks pretty fucking good yeah it does i'm looking forward to it and i and honestly like if i think about it even under the circumstances by which you know this game's been pushed forward and you know development has been extended and obviously there's been a tumultuous development cycle behind it i'm not particularly unconfident that i'm gonna have a good time playing that game like i'm pretty sure that game's going to be very good there's almost barely any it's almost no doubt in my mind it's going to be very very good great completely and so i don't know man uh they just they haven't acclimated to this world they haven't pivoted in the places that are necessary and maybe part of it is just like maybe you don't want to really maybe some part of you is just kind of like maybe we shouldn't because like when naughty dog was making that live service last of us factions multiplayer game they made a call that said we can dedicate a lot of resources to being good at this or we can go back to what we know works in in typical sony family and so maybe that's the call and maybe it's not even like a conscious thing necessarily maybe it's not they're making that choice up front in an obvious like this is what we're doing this is the psychological reason but i think on some level i think they understand that they're not equipped they're kind of like it's almost half-hearted or like there's a half measure going in where it's like yeah we're gonna start development on this live service game and then bungee comes in and they're like do you understand what this is going to demand of you or have you thought about this at all how how truncated you're like how much this is going to affect your output and they're like oh we had we somehow had again the fact that they somehow didn't consider that is crazy it's nuts like that alone is kind of actually that alone is a really good indicator that their premiere studio was making this thing without any idea of the upkeep that it would take to keep it running for any foreseeable amount of time in any meaningful way so yeah you're absolutely right you're absolutely right that was embarrassing I think that is an underrated embarrassing thing that they kind of got away with I'm like what is this fucking mealy mouth yeah what why i realized this was going to be a massive undertake what do you mean so straight we needed another studio to come in and tell us it's like oh okay that's crazy it would be one thing if that happened in like 2017 2016 you know when this was kind of starting and it was a lot cheaper like it would be one thing to be like ah we don't want to focus on this it's not like the tumultuous nature of live service is like a new thing like oh my god it's it's a war in the trenches it's a war of attrition every day it's a battle of like being able to respond in like a matter of moments to massive problems that are wrong that we didn't catch in the testing period oh it's it's it's consistent engagement off off game in forums online community oriented like oh it's all that yes it's it's been that way for nearly 10 years yeah it's it's fortnight's not new it's interesting so yeah i don't know i don't know if there's before to say about it i went off on it no it's great it's great it's awesome i i uh i agree with you completely and yet i also kind of wonder that at the fork in the road like there was a different decision to be made there which is like we could invest more in this right i still i still am haunted by knowing people that have played it and just them like and talking to people that have played fair games and and how concord went and all these things and like being like dude people like that game yeah and by the way none of the stink existed yet like that that was right last of us online was was announced at a more quaint in a more quaint time so like part of me is like you what you should have done is you should have just scaled the team and then split off and went back to intergalactic but but who knows i i mean i would i would agree i actually think that probably and again a lot of those decisions could have just been made like correctly right but i do think like the last of us online whether it would have taken a lot out of the studio and i think that is true like maintaining a live service game is crazy i do think they could have managed to again scale that team maybe split them off and do like a i don't know like a like a sub company like team lfg kind of splitting up from bungee sort of thing right and and just be like we're we're we're i don't know team firefly or something right and they're just like they handle um they handle the last of us and and and that going forward and they they work maybe with naughty dog prime and like a production capacity like maybe they'll get notes or whatever back and forth but they're responsible for maintaining and they scale appropriate to the to how well it's doing then naughty dog can go do intergalactic right that would have been and i don't know the money i don't know the moneyed realities i don't know what you know this is we're all armchair ceoing i guess but um that would have been i think the call to make because i think the last of us online coming out would have a been good enough i think that game would have been good enough to at the very least to at the very least deliver confidence onto the audience that maybe this was a good idea and also get a lot of the stink out of their live service push in general because that with Helldivers that's a one-two punch that's pretty good and granted Helldivers isn't the first party I get it but like that's still seen as like a you know it's a PlayStation game that migrated elsewhere um a one-two punch of last of us online and held hours i think would have would have done a great deal to kind of turn around the the general perception around this push even with concord i think i think concord still would have been fucking embarrassing um but would have been different would have been lesser um or maybe not lesser but like it would have had lesser of an impact on their games going forward i think if they if they showed that they could at least deliver twice yeah agreed agreed right now they haven't present another option yeah go if possible please sure okay naughty dog made a very good online version of the last of us already called last of us factions why i understand that there was the the online service push but i'm like why why is it that a team like uh sucker punch can make a very competent free online mode that isn't a life online mode game in ghost of yote legends and i don't know if it's just naughty dogs hubris of like oh we're gonna make an online game and we're gonna make it last you know the quality of the rest of our games but online like to me the scope of the project was maybe part of the problem where it's like i mean don't get me wrong a full-scale live service last of us online game probably would have been awesome but it's like it also it didn't necessarily need to be that yeah it could have been it could have been still way expanded over factions and even maybe had live service stuff to it but without committing you know hundreds of people to it as as what it needed well this is again man they're they're i've been saying this a lot but like they're hbo brained man like they were looking at they were looking at their game they were looking at a live service multiplayer game and then they were like we gotta put a lot of we gotta make this fucking grand we're naughty dog you know i think that's kind of what it is like really yeah i think i think they're like we're not we're not just we're not just gonna do like some spin-off multiplayer thing it's like no we got to put our uh our signature tlc we got to have these like if we're gonna do a live service game and and we're gonna put a story along with it as you know a lot of live service games are doing um we can't be outclassed you know where you know we have a pedigree you know we have a reputation to live up to and i think that the the yeah the scope creep of it um it's just too much for it i think i'm also of the mind of just like why not just the maybe i was gonna say dinky little multiplayer but like you know what i mean like just like a it's fine it's fine to just have like a a temporary not something that isn't supposed to be fucking forever i agree um i miss that personally um but it's just not the world anymore i guess except for a fucking sucker punch for some reason yeah it's it's it's straight i gotta we gotta we should do a stream for the uh legends mode at some point as well i should make note of that yeah i guess yeah that'd be fun it could be argued that the legends mode is a waste of time.

2:38:54I'll be honest. It came out. I have not seen a single clip about it. And I maybe saw one person online mentioned that it came out that day. Nothing else. Yeah, it might have been radic, but and that's it. So, you know, I compared it to that, but maybe that they're looking at this like, man, don't do that again because no one cares. Yeah, I think I think it's a play to we've said this in the past like I think it's a play to just in the time war to make a game stickier to just stop like almost stop you from leaving it's like an opportunity cost in a way to to let you go and potentially spend money and time elsewhere it's just it's a weird thing I feel like they did it because I feel like I felt like Tsushima's was somewhat notable and you're right I don't feel like anyone and what's funny is that this came I think quicker than maybe even substantially quicker than Tsushima's update.

2:39:53But I don't quite recall the timeline. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe it's like a Switch. Maybe it's a Switch thing where it's not as novel anymore. Like the idea that you would get a free updated Ghost of Tsushima multiplayer is like, oh, this has happened before. You know, it's kind of like it lost its luster a little bit. I haven't tried it yet. I am curious to maybe jump into it, but I do have to say nobody that I, nobody that I knew who was into legends has mentioned it or brought it up to me at all. So I don't, the people that I would be playing with are not playing it. So like, I don't really, I don't know what to do about that really.

2:40:37Yeah. The time war is on, man. I mean, it's who's going to go back to Yote is one of those. It's one of those temporary games that it's still sell. It was awesome. I loved it sold really well, but it was a moment in time and to try to make it any more than that, probably a losing battle i'm still kind of blown away that that spider-man game never happened because like i feel like a multiplayer spider-man game is obvious yeah the great web right that was what they were making in insomniac yeah i i guess maybe it's a i mean i don't know a lot about this but like i would assume it's licensing maybe they didn't want to be deeper into that because they have wolverine i guess and but they're already like in there you know they're doing next and stuff so they're in yeah so like why not commit i don't know it just seems that seems like it would have been an obvious hit like i would have played it yeah i've been wanting a multiplayer spider-man game forever it's so like we said that too chris is like their mind has been on multiplayer and spider-man from the very very very beginning like that i think there's that code right spider-man one where like they were experimenting with like co-op or something right exactly and the the great web all that stuff leaked in the insomniac leak we found out about how deep that that game went there was a trailer that never got released i think that leaked and it's interesting and yeah that that's another that's why i'm confused for all the things they like i'm thematically and in terms of ip i'm a little surprised they canceled the twisted metal game but considering lucid was making it it's like less surprising but there are games that i'm surprised that they did cancel and or that they didn't pursue all the way and yes spider-man is one of them where it's like just based spider-man 2 say what you will about it because i think it's a really good game but i agree with people it's it's over time you kind of realize how much more special that first game was and how repetitive and kind of redundant the second game was in a lot of ways but that game is just like the 17th 15th 13th best-selling game every month you know yeah it's like jesus christ like that you can't you almost have to and they're probably kind of you know befuddled because like what do you want us to do really like the normies love this shit as it were yeah yeah i mean yeah spider-man is spider-man is unreasonably big do you see that the trailer for that new movie had like it eclipsed gta 6 oh really geez like the like the trailer views for it which is that's awesome in like a day is crazy for what we expect to be like the biggest entertainment launch in probably history up until this point with GTA 6.

2:42:59So I don't know. I don't know, man. Well, we'll see what happens. Can't do it, man. Sorry. Sorry, man. Can't do it. We don't need this right now. All right. Let's get into this next piece of news. I thought this was an interesting one. I don't know if you guys saw this going around, but basically a guy named Travis Howe, who is an animator at Sanzaru, he was an animator during Sly 4, then left and then went back and was there from 2018 until they closed, which I think was earlier this year, unfortunately. He revealed with permission, which is interesting, so I wonder who he got permission from specifically for this, that Sanzaro was spinning up a Jak and Daxter remake that they were going to pitch to Sony, that I think upon him returning to Sanzaro in 2018, basically his first task was to take a cutscene from the original Jak and Daxter, which was released on PS2 in December of 2001 and remake it shot for shot.

2:43:59And he shares it on social media and on his LinkedIn account. People can check it out and see what they think. It's a 27 second clip. I think it's really nice. Some it needs a little work in terms of maybe not getting things quite right, but it's a nice pitch. Now, what I think is interesting about this is that this wouldn't be Sanzaro's first time trying to do something like this and that it I found the lack of context in a lot of the stories out there interesting because i'm like no this is so interesting because this they did this once already and it worked and so they were like let's try again and this was obviously pre asgard's wrath pre meta like when they became a oculus studio basically which was a good call for them in the beginning but didn't turn out well for them at all in the end unfortunately but um so sly cooper for people that don't know we've discussed this piece of lore in the past.

2:44:50That's a soccer punch trilogy on PS2. And Sanzaru, without permission, made a sample of what they thought Sly 4 could look like, like a vertical slice of it. Without permission, no one knew they were doing it. And they're in Foster City in California. So Foster City is near San Mateo where PlayStation is. So they probably had some intermediaries there and they knew some people to get an in. And what ended up happening was that Sanzaru presented this Sly vertical slice and they're like yeah this is really interesting let us think about it let's see what you're made of you will port the slide games to ps3 and while you're doing that we will figure out how this all works and during the development of that slide four got greenlit and as you guys recall if you platinum all three games in the slide trilogy you unlock the trailer for the new sly cooper game um which was a really cool thing no one does cool shit like that anymore and maybe reasonably so because a lot of that stuff would leak or whatever because i remember it was days later until people finally like did all three games and like holy shit there's a trailer for the new slide game here so that was like a gambit that worked for Sanzaru and they tried it again and so from that perspective I thought it was really interesting Dustin what did you think about this Jack and Daxter commission here and they note not commissioned by Sony so Sony didn't know they were doing this I wonder who gave them permission I guess maybe Sanzaru or whatever what do you think?

2:46:16I think it looks awesome it reminds me kind of how they remade Ratchet and Clank and it Jack and Daxter is an interesting one because I hear about people that love this series but I don't know like if it was actually like really big in the mainstream and the date on this is 2018 so the Ratchet and Clank was 2016 right the yeah the ratchet remake yeah yeah yeah so this seems like this could have been like a good time for it this was back when playstation was still willing to make games that were maybe a little smaller and didn't necessarily need to be the biggest game ever for every release they do so in in some ways you see this and you're like man this would be so cool for them to do but it's like if it didn't if it didn't get past then it's never happening not at this point like not in the current day Sony are they ever going back and doing this because they're not interested in making a little bit amount of money at a time I just had such a sad they'll probably just get an AI to do it yeah

2:47:27so it's unfortunate I mean Sansaru such a promising team in a lot of ways and then of course eventually getting bought by meta to release one of the highest rated VR games on the meta platform to be rewarded by being shut down. Yeah, unceremoniously shut down. They made a sequel to I think to that Asgard's game, Asgard's wrath game. But it's funny. I was looking up the sales because one of the things I remember about Jak and Daxter was that it was expensive to make at the time. And yeah, the budget was like 15 million dollars, which was like crazy. Not quite Final Fantasy 7. I think Final Fantasy 7 was like 30 million or something, but all very quaint.

2:48:07at this point, but according to Wikipedia, by July 2006, so that's almost five years later, Jak and Daxter, the precursor of Legacy, sold 1.7 million copies and earned$49 million in the US, becoming the 19th highest selling game launched for PS2, Xbox, or GameCube. Okay. As of December 2007, Jak and Daxter had sold 2 million copies in the United States alone. Jak and Daxter received a gold prize at Sony's PlayStation Awards in Japan for selling over 500 ,000 units there. So, games just didn't sell like they sell today. Right. But I don't know what that like they're worse like we always say that like the best-selling ps2 game i think sold 20 million copies or something which is a lot of cotton i think it's gta3 maybe it's san andreas and then a spec is up there as well but that's a lot of copies but comparable to 150 million units of consoles out there it's actually not very many copies well even just uh gta like you look at gta5 right and how many copies 200 million or whatever the fuck it is it's like fucking absurd number this is uh this is cool though like this i think this would have been a good time for it too like you're totally right like 2018 would have been like a great a great time for a jack and dex remake i've dragon actually is like somewhat fresh in my mind because i've i played it sort of recently i'm actually really close to the end but then i got derailed by resident evil and marathon but this looks really good to me like if i saw this i would have been like yeah do it like absolutely you know one that one note i do have and this is absolutely this is absolutely nitpicky but i think i think it's kind of important daxter needs work yeah right i don't like it like i don't know if this is like i don't know if this is too for me it's the mouth man the mouth has got to be the the mouth has got to be almost coming off his face you know what i mean his mouth is too small it looks too it looks too legitimate it looks too real like you got a you gotta make this more cartoony his mouth's gotta be coming off his fucking face that's one thing i remember most about it having no nostalgia for it is just like how he speaks and it's just like it goes off his face it looks ridiculous but it's striking and it reminds me of just like that that old school like almost uh what is it style over uh what is it a form over function yeah substance style over substance form over function style over substance where it's just like yeah it doesn't need to make sense it doesn't need to be anatomically like this you're making a cartoon have fun with it but it looks great i think this this looks uh as good as you could want a jack and daxter remake to look to be to be fair here's a another interesting point to bring up just because i totally forgot about this uh in 2019 there was the release of a playstation remake that they had a third party make with medieval so i wonder if it was like yeah we're kind of already doing this with something else let's wait and see how it does because that came out well if this was pitched in 2018 i mean we're totally grasping at straws as far as like the timeline of like medieval is 29 you know the pitch was in 2018 when were they told no well they also had other remakes going to like the one the one remake that no one talks about i think it was a shadow of the beast which was like an obscure Psygnosis game that Sony basically just owned because they acquired Psygnosis and I believe it was on the Amiga and that was another remake they had going that like no one that might be like the that might be in the contention for one of the most obscure PlayStation published games ever there's a few of them and that's definitely one of them yes Sansaru Jack and Daxter interesting idea Long Piss Big Balls wrote in and said, boys, did you see the clip from the pitched remake of the original Jak and Daxter?

2:51:50If so, do you think this could succeed if Sony were to pursue it now? I think this could be a great move. It wouldn't have bloated budget, and I genuinely think it could have reached a more general, if not younger, audience for PlayStation Thoughts. I think Jak and Daxter would do fine. I just, again, to the point, I think there's a little bit of redundancy. We kind of have like Ratchet. I would even argue that you know astro bot kind of is in that lane now and you have sack boy kind of still percolating i'm not saying you can't you can't have an infinite amount of more childlike kitty platformer style things but i i just don't know that jack and daxter is super relevant today i would be interested to see it just because i would be interested to see how it did like you could imagine a reality where it was really big but you could imagine a reality where that stuff is easily magnified which is i think exactly what happened with astro bot like where just in the gaming space, Astro Bot was such a big deal, but it's not that big of a game.

2:52:42Like it's, it didn't like succeed in any notable mainstream way, but people loved it and it was game of the year. And those, those things can both be true at the same time. I always think about, I don't know if you guys remember the, I don't think we ever saw it, but there was reporting and I might've been even the person who reported, I don't remember, but back in the day that when they were making the last of us, they were messing around with Jack and Daxter and reviving Jack and Daxter. that like I think that the story was that it looked creepy I think was how they felt like Jack and Daxter didn't translate well to realism in a way or like not realism but high fidelity and I'm like that's interesting I don't think you have to make it look like The Last of Us though you know just so you know all right a few more stories I'm very interested to see what you think of this one Chris MP first which is coming up over and over again.

2:53:37They're doing real journalism over there, and I really appreciate it. The writer, Ephraim. We cite him or her once every so often, and he or she writes report. Oops, got a pop-up here. PlayStation's Firesprite studio almost made Breaking Bad VR, as well as a new sci-fi horror game. So we can focus on that as well, but the VR stuff is what I think is most interesting. Firesprite, of course, is the team behind Horizon Call of the Mountain and the game The Persistence, which was on the original PSVR, and then ported, I think, in 2021. that came out PSVR in 2018 I think it was ported as a regular non-VR game in 2021 and they were also the ones that I think took over Twisted Metal for a while after Lucid got pulled from the project so we don't really know what they're working on now but they still exist I was going to say I couldn't remember if they were shut down yet initially I was like is this one of the teams that got shut down?

2:54:27No surprisingly but they're European and I think Herman likes to stay away from the European teams I'm only kidding hmm They write here, quote, through a small investigation, we discovered that Fire Sprite was developing a Breaking Bad VR title for the PSVR around 2017 and 2018. While the name carries a lot of weight, the best way to describe it wouldn't be a traditional game, but rather a narrative experience. This would have been similar to early PlayStation VR games like Stranger Things, the VR experience, short length titles mainly focused on cinematic stories. The production would have featured several iconic locations from the series, such as Walter White's backyard in the New Mexico desert.

2:55:00So it's safe to assume players would have stepped into the meth cooking chemistry teacher's shoes. In fact, this isn't, and this is where I think the journalism really comes in, and I appreciate this. In fact, this isn't the first time the game has been mentioned. Variety reported in 2017 that series creator Vince Gilligan was collaborating with Sony Interactive Entertainment on a VR title. But the specific studio behind the work remained a mystery until now. From what we could gather, the project would be canceled just a year after that report. The last time we would hear about the collaboration was in 2022 when Gilligan first acknowledged the existence of the initiative and revealed that it was ultimately canceled despite a significant amount of effort being put into it.

2:55:32As Gilligan put it, quote, Quote, making a video game is damn hard. It takes years and millions of dollars, especially when you're trying to break new ground with VR. It never came to fruition, though, which is a shame. End quote. What are your thoughts? Chris, would you have liked to play Breaking Bad VR on the original PSVR?

2:55:49Man, no. I love Breaking Bad. Breaking Bad is one of my favorite shows ever, probably. Probably my favorite. But like, I don't know, man. Like, what would this have been? like i guess i guess it says like stranger things uh the vr experience i don't know anything about that i have no context for it i've never played i was thinking about the batman but too that came out at launch of psvr that was another one of those like experiential things yeah like i'm i don't know that's i just can't even like would it just be like job simulator but you're walter right and you're making mad is that like the idea is like i don't i i can't see it personally like i just don't understand how such a thing would even make sense that was back when they were all right hold on let me look this up just to make sure el camino when was that that was 2018 i think so that was around that time that was around but yeah that's around the time where they were getting to it was it was too much too much i didn't like el camino at all i was like i don't do i don't need i don't remember anything about it other than that i remember not hating it where i was like oh this isn't bad i guess you know like exactly this isn't bad i guess is exactly that it's exactly what you don't want uh you know uh a prestige tv imagine if they had like a movie after the sopranos you know what i mean like it's dumb god imagine i wonder what they would have done if gandolfini didn't die i think that was like the whole hinge on if they would have that ps2 game that's true we're like all the actors were in it that's true that was during the big like mobster because there was like a godfather game and a scarface game yeah yeah it's so interesting and they did do a film right like a sopranos film but it's like a prequel yeah i watched it and it was forget yeah yeah that's not bad that's how exactly this is how all of them go like it's just like this is a tv show like we don't so i don't know this is it this is funny to imagine um i just this seems to be around the time where they were doing too much with it um and it just kind of seemed like they were just kind of they had their they had their hands in a bunch of different pots and i don't know if this would have turned out to be good i doubt it um breaking bad is great i don't think it would translate to vr at all unless you were literally making meth which is illegal to depict in in any way can you imagine if there was a vr game that was like here's a here's an interactive tactile tutorial on how to make meth no yeah i know exactly it's like like the legal legal would be a mess rb rating when it wouldn't even get an rb rating so it couldn't get launched no it'd just be like no it's over it's washed so if they weren't going to do that it would have just been a i don't even know what could that's the only interesting thing that a breaking bad game could be so dude hank pov with walter in the car screen Yeah, screaming simulator.

2:58:46Hank! That's the whole thing.

2:58:53That's just hours of gameplay. Dude, there's a whole level. You're trying to catch the fly. I unironically think that you could turn anything into a pretty good platformer. And I think you could probably do it with Breaking Bad somehow. I don't know how you would do it, but I think you could do it. vr is almost the opposite problem where there are so few things that lend itself well to it that i just i don't know pacific rim is the only thing that i get that you know what i mean like maybe it's like the uh the home improvement super nintendo game it's like completely nonsensical but it's breaking bad like you're platforming there's like i don't know like projectile vials coming at you in like a lab level you're trying to fight like the collect-a-thon is like you're collecting you're missing meth or whatever it's like you can you can make anything work in that fucking ridiculous logic but vr is like inherently grounding like it's supposed to immerse you and so it's especially around that time like oh my god no well i do appreciate one part of it which is like the the attempt of synergy with sony because sony has act right you know rights access to breaking bad and so like it's cool to because they help produce the show so it's it's cool to try i guess but i don't know the thing did breaking bad ever come to fortnight i don't even look that up i don't think so no highly no it's a rumor for now that would be cool that's so funny that'd be funny as fuck um what was i gonna say oh what what what i just i saw i'll it doesn't matter i just saw an image that i'll send it to you okay uh the interesting thing with uh this news about breaking bad as well as just talking about fire sprite which again we don't talk about very much and they are rumored to be making until dawn 2 which is all right interesting i think until dawn 1 is awesome so if they could make it as good as that and not whatever that remake was from ballistic moon which has gone out of business.

3:01:01That would be nice. We'll see. All right. Oh, did you send? Where's the image? Is it in Discord? I have to send it in. Yeah, I'm putting in the Sacred Symbols staff chat now. I love it because other people on the team just get to see a random image pop up. It happens to all the shows. With no context. Someone signed and punching up. Definitely do the same thing where you'll just go in that channel and there's just images.

3:01:31it's the it's a concept of what fortnight could look like or bringing back to and the gus off to the left is crazy yeah it is yeah like the explosion gus explosion gus

3:01:47all right so dumb we uh foreshadowed this next story earlier but it's worth noting that Epic has laid off a thousand people. This is what they, and this is shitty for just North Carolina, man, because we were just talking about Red Storm, you know, and now Epic, bad news down there. This is quote, today we're laying off over 1000 Epic employees. I'm sorry we're here again. And by the way, this is written from in first person from Tim Sweeney's perspective. I'm sorry we're here again. The downturn in Fortnite engagement that started in 2025. So underline this, the downturn in Fortnite engagement that started in 2025 means we're spending significantly more than we're making and we have to make major cuts to keep the company funded this layoff together with over 500 million dollars of identified cost savings in contracting marketing and closing some open roles puts us in a more stable place some of the challenges we're facing are industry-wide challenges slower growth weaker spending and tougher at cost economics current consoles selling less than last generations and games competing for time against other increasingly engaging forms of entertainment and some of our challenges are unique to epic despite fortnite remaining one of the most successful games in the world we've had challenges delivering consistent Fortnite magic with every season.

3:02:55We're only in the early stages of returning to mobile and optimizing Fortnite for the world's billions of smartphones. And in being the industry's vanguard, we have taken a lot of bullets in the battle, which is only in the early days of paying for ourselves and off for ourselves and all developers. We'll underline that too, because that's a major reason why I think they're here right now. This is a thing now, I should note that the layoffs aren't related to AI. To the extent it improves productivity, we want to have as many awesome developers developing great content and tech as we can. What we need to do now is clear.

3:03:23Build awesome Fortnite experiences with fresh seasonal content, gameplay, story, and live events. Accelerate developer tools with greater stability and capability as we evolve from Unreal Engine 5 to UEFN to Unreal Engine 6. And we'll begin kicking off next generation of Epic with huge launch plans towards the end of the year. This isn't our first time being here. Epic survived upheavals in the 1990s with the move from 2D to 3D with Unreal 1. In the 2000s, building console games with Gears of War. and in 2012, moving to online gaming with Parion and Fortnite. Each time, we built our foundations and earned a renewed leadership position.

3:03:55Market conditions today are the most extremely seen since the early days, with massive upheaval in the industry accompanied by massive opportunity for the companies that come out as winners on the other side. That's what we're aiming to do for our players, and we aim to bring other like-minded developers in the industry along on the journey to build an increasingly open and vibrant future of entertainment together. They announced this at the same time that certain things are being removed from Fortnite, including rocket racing, ballistic, and Fortnite festival battle stage going offline at different times.

3:04:22And you can read about that online. I wanted to underline a few of these things as we get into this conversation, just because I went to make sure and I went and looked at this. Fortnite was PlayStation Network's biggest game last year. So what do you want exactly?

3:04:47what is it that you want? you are the most downloaded game on the entire psn soon to be whatever else it's going to be called who knows so that just kind of bothers me and i want you guys to underline this other part too he says in being the industry's vanguard we have taken a lot of bullets in a battle which is only in the early days of paying off for ourselves and all developers they're talking about the lawsuits or he's talking about the lawsuits with google and with apple and all these things and this has cost an enormous amount of money and it's hard to sustain that level of legal spending you're fighting mega corporations way bigger than epic way bigger they they have infinite legal resources internal they don't pay them anything extra they have all of them epic no doubt has to do a lot of this externally it's cost them an enormous amount of money it hasn't always they haven't always won and they're right that they're doing it to democratize in some way small d democratize the industry and try to get better rights and and access for developers but no one asked them to do that right and they're sacrificing their it reminds me a lot of what happened with meta where it's like you know mark zuckerberg made this in 80 billion dollar investment into the metaverse.

3:06:07No one gave a fuck. And then everyone suffers. And that's the way business goes. I'm not saying I don't understand that, but if your game is the number one game and you can't figure it out, it's what I say about Roblox. It's like, I don't give a fuck about Roblox and its success financially. It's impressive its domination in terms of time spent, but its financial outlook is much less certain. They can't make they're not making a profit with that level of player. There's something deeply broken at the highest levels of games as a service where it's like you're dumb. You're in a dominant position.

3:06:46You should be fucking making so much profit. It should just be happening and they're just fucking it up. So I don't know. What do you think, Chris? I don't know, man. Like, I'm looking at this and I feel the same way as you, where I just kind of look at it and I'm like, I don't understand how you can't be making money in that position. Like, why is it that it seems it almost feels like, let's say hypothetically, this is a completely, this is not, these numbers are not specific. Let's say our game makes$500 million. That's how much it makes. Okay. Time to spend$500 million. that's what it kind of feels like right right because like how are you losing this money like i i it it doesn't register to me how it's possible like how it costs so much to get a skin out how it costs so much uh why you need so many people like i'm sure there's like people that you need obviously like you got to maintain servers and all the all these things you got have designers working on stuff but to the point where you're losing money in the in the most dominant position or in roblox's position where you're fucking damn near in the red like i don't know i don't i just don't i don't i can't fathom having that much money and then somehow not making anything yeah it doesn't i just it doesn't register to me as possible and so like yeah something there there seems to be like a midpoint of success right like there seems to be like this weird like middle almost like a goldilocks zone right of success in live service where like we're making a lot of money but we don't need to spend a lot to support it that's the goldilocks zone then the the the extremes on the other side it's like we're making a lot of money but it costs us that the amount of money that we make to sustain it or we don't make a lot of money and you know we die on the vine there seems to be this goldilocks zone that like i don't know what operates in there but it seems like at this point nothing operates in there and if nothing operates in there why do it i don't understand i don't understand i fundamentally somebody needs to sit me down and explain this to me like explain to me like i'm was i read it explain to me like i'm fine yeah right yeah it's it's preposterous really again going back to roblox it's like it's incredible how dominant they are in terms of saturation and then you read their financials like i'm looking at their finances right now the financial 2025 they lost 1.07 billion dollars so there's something less impressive about it if you're spending so much money to do it that you can't make money it's not a charity it means that there's something unnatural about it like it's not working you can either try to wedge it in like Amazon did for a while or Netflix.

3:09:47Yeah, but that's that's tough. And by the way, like so what? Maybe in a couple of years, they were like, all right, we made a few hundred million dollars. It's like you made a few hundred million dollars in like. You've lost billions and billions and billions of dollars like you have investors. That that want their money back like this is an urgent this is this can't go on forever. Figure it out like and if by the way, if you're buying your dominant level of dominance, then it's not natural and you haven't earned it. Which is, I also think, a really interesting thing. Well, Dustin, before I go on any further, what do you have to say about this?

3:10:23I wonder if there is an element to that Fortnite, since I played it, which was primarily, I mean, pre-COVID, like within the first few years, when I when I booted up recently, it's like an entirely different game both in terms of what epic has added which they are cutting out some of the features and things you can do in fortnight but also that now ironically we're talking about companies that don't make sense have made fortnight to be a lot more like roblox where there is an entire creator economy now built into fortnight where people are not only making levels and experiences and stuff like that but i think i saw recently now that you can like if you build a farming sim game within fortnite as a level there is now options for you a player to spend v bucks on things within that level which is very roblox like so So it's like I can buy the the the diamond tractor and it will let me, you know, be able to farm faster or something.

3:11:40That's now part of the game. So super gross and not ideal. But I wonder if just like they have expanded Fortnite too far and tried to go, which I think maybe a few years ago when they were looking at the success of Roblox. Like, yeah, we can do this and we can do it better. But clearly Roblox never had it figured out either. This also an important detail of this story. These layoffs come off the heels of them raising the prices of V-Bucks pretty substantially where I was looking on their post about it. An$8.99 V-Buck pack would get you$1 ,000 V-Bucks. And now it gets you$800. Wow. Inflation. I wonder if they announced that early like they do.

3:12:27You know, like when the post office will announce that stamp prices are going up. but the stamp prices are forever. That's why it says forever on stamps. So, so like you go and buy a shit ton of them at the lower rate. I wonder if people did that with V-Bucks where, cause that would work out either way where it's like, yeah, go buy a thousand dollars worth of V-Bucks. Cause we're about to inflate everything. It's funny. The opening, it says the cost of running Fortnite has gone up a lot and we're raising, raising prices to help pay the bills. Yeah. I think prices are going up in other ways too, Tim.

3:12:57But it's funny, man. I, I, I, I just read this. uh, in Roblox, if you take the thousand richest creators, so like the thousand people that create on Roblox that make the most amount of money and you average out the amount of money they make per person, it's a$1.2 million each. Also, it's so funny that they're losing more than a billion dollars a year. Their revenue is$5 billion. What are you guys doing? How are you spending so much money five you're spending six if you're losing a billion dollars and making five billion you're spending six billion a year how your game looks like shit

3:13:47also i think the catch-22 and i've said this before roblox this is just an outsider's perspective i don't know if this is true or not is that it's a very young user base and they don't have money you know like yeah well their parents might although maybe not now

3:14:04it was a lot easier to it was a lot easier uh you know to convince my parents to get me fucking microsoft points back in like 2008 even during the housing crisis you know than uh than it is now um i don't know man what are you gonna say dustin you said so calling yours wondering about how they are burning money so much i know i saw this last year i'm gonna send it to you i'm not gonna link it in the the video just because it's not our video um and unfortunately it's being linked through a grums tweet but they post someone that worked at roblox posted this like day in the way yeah dude and it's i don't want to call it adult daycare no this shit is crazy i mean i i these i can't i like that companies do this kind of thing for you you gotta be sustainable first before you start getting crazy with it like a patreon it's not this big of course but like they feed their staff breakfast lunch and dinner every day and i think that's kind of cool yeah but like they're good and it keeps people engaged and it increases happiness and it keeps you at the office frankly and yeah if you've gotten if you've got like a lot of money and like a relatively light staff or or even not even light staff but like a staff that you can afford to do that for like cool but if you're losing a billion dollars like what are you doing it i interned at a company that did lunch every day every day they would order lunch for the entire office and like when it was crunch time they would like bring in a masseuse and everyone would like get massages and so maybe well i didn't yeah but i also didn't get I had to call them.

3:15:46I had to call them to bring them in as an intern. It sucked. But and I also think that, yeah, it is nice. There's also, in my opinion, a big difference between like this Roblox video and like some of the things like I like if you go to Twitch, I mean, this is what back in the day. I don't know what it's like now, but if you go to Twitch, you go to Naughty Dog or Sucker Punch or whatever or Insomniac. It's like there's a nice kitchen. You can get snacks and drinks. There's like a bunch of drinks stocked and everything. But that's different than like having catered, cooked dinners and like cafeterias with very sophisticated food.

3:16:14You know what the biggest thing is about this video and a lot of other videos, Dustin? What's the thing that sticks out to you the most in your opinion? Is there something specific about these videos that sticks out to you? To me, it's there. They never show them working. Well, there's that. Yes, because a lot of these jobs are which I'm sure they do. They do, but a lot of these jobs are definitely fake. I've said that about corporate tech world forever. Like a lot of these jobs are dead ass fake. Like there's no way companies. I'm sorry. You don't need to employ hundreds of thousands of people.

3:16:39No way. No way. but the I don't care how big you like what you do is or like what it's it's actually preposterous it's how empty these places are I remember that being a thing about Twitter when when Elon bought Twitter and they were still kind of going on as business as usual so they were making all this food and they had all this things like you guys are wasting this is this is fixed capital this is this is what are called fixed costs you know or part of your fixed costs it's like this is completely decadent. You know, like it's not even like it's not even competitive. It's crazy. You guys aren't nearly that talented.

3:17:18You're losing a billion dollars a year. So you got to figure that out before you start serving all this. It's it's great. Those videos, I think, were. The video like the day in the life videos I've had for several years, I wanted to do my own like funny like one, but it's like so late now. because I had this idea of like being like day in the life and it just keeps showing my clock like over and over again as it gets like later and later and then like into the afternoon and then I wake up finally or whatever oh yeah but there's there's a I think there was something destructive about it because I think it showed people like I work I worked in Silicon Valley like I worked in a tech company like a web company there's a lot of bullshit dude like I know that I know a lot of people that worked at Apple and I know a lot of people that worked at Microsoft and all these different places.

3:18:09It's a common tale. There are people it's like no one knows who what half these people even do. And I've said that before when I worked at IGN, we weren't a very big company. There were a few hundred of us. I'm like, I don't even know what half these people like. Literally, I don't know what you even do here. Like people on my own team. Like in editorial or in video, I'm like, what do you do? Why are there just people like work work working but not really doing anything it's strange so i think those videos really illustrated that for the greater world that there's a lot of nonsense uh going on out there a lot of coddling and it is i think you said chris daycare adult daycare i didn't say that oh i said that i'm sorry i agree with you there it's like it comes off that way sometimes so anyway staying the life of roblox try making a profit sometime slippery one went wrote in and said what's good gents i'm using a lot of sexual ones today but i don't mean to you've got a special special aura about you as the kids would say today oh do i special juice that's fun thank you i like i haven't really slept very well so that's probably why because i'm delirious slippery one what says what's good gents can we please now for fuck's sake stop with the sony's live service pushes a great choice agenda if epic can't maintain satisfaction with fortnite what hell does sony think they're going to release that will ever be bigger i don't think they want to release something bigger i'm just we can't talk this is like becoming the ai conversation where it's becoming circular either you see it or you don't all i need to all i need to do it's like xbox helix project helix people can argue about it i know that that thing is just in my gut is not going to be a very relevant thing it's gonna be too expensive or whatever all i have to do is wait it's the same thing with this like you'll see in the years to come and all i have all i have to do is wait that's that's it so the issue is that they make a lot of money and i think a lot of the money that's spent on them is unnecessary that's how i feel about it so like i don't even think it's necessarily like oh even epic can't make it work no epic just didn't epic's just not it's very like i i don't understand what and maybe it is like maybe it's the the public nature of these companies where it's just like the fiduciary obligation is to grow forever as opposed to just like keeping like a you know a reasonable like the idea it's just like oh we made 900 million dollars this month and then next month we made 800 million dollars so everything's a failure we gotta lay off everybody we're not you know what i mean it's like it's it's not i don't know this system that we've set up is really stupid and then it's it doesn't it no i i totally agree i'm gonna i'm gonna lose my mind no i i i am i've already lost my mind i think yeah but uh no it's it's incredibly frustrating and i just i also think it's like i'm not saying these are the biggest games in the world hell divers isn't the biggest game in the world but it's a great success what about warframe what about eve online world of warcraft league of legends rainbow six siege yeah games that just like at varying sizes and different genres that all stuck around for or stick around for a really long period of time don't tell me it's not possible the evidence is everywhere and i will just reiterate fortnight was the biggest game last year on our own platform if you can't make and I'm sure that's true on Xbox as well and it's probably true on Switch right I mean I assume Fortnite is huge on Switch PC is probably a different story but it's like if you can't make that work you're doing something wrong and I'm not entirely sure it's even softening Fortnite sale first of all if your sales in Fortnite are softening and you still were in the dominant position you must be really killing it good for you congratulations and they're like no it's the Christmas point it's like no everything's fucked what are you talking about it's like oh I didn't know that I didn't know you could have the number one game in the world and and it'd be fucked the number one game in the world for years all right a few more pieces of news did you guys see this I don't really have much to say about this but this AI situation with Crimson Desert I did see this people have found I guess I guess specifically paintings in the game that are clearly AI generated.

3:22:28These are AI generated. Crimson Desert is acknowledged as such. And here's what they say over Pearl Abyss. And I think they've already started patching because they've been patching a lot, both hot fixing and just straight up releasing patches. I think there might have been three patches in one day, which is excessive. They say, quote, we would like to address questions regarding the use of AI in Crimson Desert. During development, some 2D visual props were created as part of early stage iteration using experimental AI generative tools. These assets helped us rapidly explore tone and atmosphere in the earlier phases of production.

3:22:57However, our intention has always been for any such assets to be replaced following final work and review by our art and development teams with work that aligned with our quality standards and creative direction. Following reports from our community, we have identified that some of these assets were unintentionally included in the final release. This is not in line with our internal standards and we take full responsibility for it. We also acknowledge that we should have clearly disclosed our use of AI while these tools were primarily used during early production with the expectation that these assets would be replaced prior to release.

3:23:23We recognize that this has not excused the lack of transparency. We sincerely apologize for these oversights. We are currently conducting a comprehensive audit of all in-game assets and are taking steps to replace any affected content. Updated assets will be rolled out in upcoming patches. In parallel, we are reviewing and strengthening our internal processes to ensure greater transparency and consistency in how we communicate with players moving forward. I'm not crazy about them using AI anything to create the it's like the rapidly explore tone and atmosphere okay but nonetheless it's I don't think it's that big of a deal I just think it's worth noting I also think it's worth noting the game has sold 3 million copies which we had said earlier and their Pearl Abyss's stock had started diving after the game came out but it has recovered so So some people made a little bit of money there, maybe if they bought low.

3:24:14So there's that. I haven't looked at the games we're playing or either of us. Are we going to talk about Crimson? We are Dustin, you're playing it. So we'll talk about we'll leave that for then, I guess. But I wanted to acknowledge that. And I don't really give a shit to be honest about that. It's not the end of the world. It's not. It's a painting on a wall. I'll keep my powder dry for bigger things. All right. I want to acknowledge this Microsoft Flight Simulator. 2024, which came to PlayStation 5 late last year, is getting a PSVR 2 mode. And they write about it on the PlayStation blog. You can read all about it.

3:24:50It looks pretty cool. I think this game obviously makes it a great deal of sense for PSVR 2. I don't know if it's is it the full experience, though? Or is it just part of it? Because it feels quite ambitious to do the whole game. I know the whole game is so many planes and so many. I think it's you can go anywhere and do anything, but maybe it's easy enough to do. I think this is very attractive and actually we were talking a week or two ago Dustin about how they seem to have been tapering off on the VR2 announcements. This seems like a notable one and they actually had a different one today too.

3:25:21Where is it? Virtual Hunter they announced today. I mean it's not a couple days ago. It's not a huge game but it's a hunting game and that's coming to VR as well. So they are still trickling these things out. Are there if you're going to check out Flight Sim in PSVR2? I think that'll be very attractive to some people. i would like to i don't know if i want to buy flight simulator to play this psvr 2 mode but i've i've mentioned before that i think one of the best vr experiences one of one of the times i've had the most fun in vr it's not on playstation but on pc you can play google maps vr which sounds really stupid on the surface but you can go and look at anything from a sky view and then you raise your one hand up to your head and you look and then you're on street that's kind of cool and you can look around anywhere i spent hours in google maps vr just looking around like being like oh what's this place here's a place that you know in butler that i grew up here's a place in pittsburgh here's a place that i visited when i was a kid here's a place in japan you know just going all over so flight simulator might have a little bit of that to it where you could It's like, what is it?

3:26:31I've done the flyover of my hometown in regular 2D flight simulator, but in VR, that might be kind of cool. I need to put it on the most baby mode possible or else this plane's going down. Oh, yeah, you're going to take it into a building. Yeah, I mean, it's not going to be pretty. So I would like to try this at some point. I think this sounds like a really awesome, and again, if you're on baby mode, very relaxing and really interesting mode for VR. I don't like them releasing this on the 25th anniversary in 9-11. Come to think of it, it makes me a little bit uncomfortable. On the day. It doesn't have a date when this comes out, right?

3:27:10No, it doesn't. It's something that they said when I was reading it that it's something that they had wanted to do for a while. And that makes sense. It's funny when you hear about, I guess it would be people from Asobo, but certainly Microsoft producers as well. They kind of had an eagerness to bring it to PlayStation for a long time. And remember we covered the story months ago where they pitched it. Like before the Project Latitude thing started bringing Xbox games to PlayStation, they were like, can we bring our game to PlayStation? And they're like, no, you can't. So they've wanted to do this for a while.

3:27:39Chris, will you train with the PSVR2 Terror Simulator?

3:27:46No, no. Look, Microsoft Flight Simulator is impressive. I think it's really cool. I think I messed around with it in the 2021. I might have that year wrong, but that general area. um that version on xbox and i thought it was cool uh but i just i don't know i'm not i don't care enough about it i'm not that kind of guy i'm not that kind of player i'm not that kind of guy i need i need i need combat you know what's the combat you know me me the combat is me wrestling with how confusing everything is that's the combat and i just i don't like that yeah the the um it's cool though it's an impressive piece of software yeah it's there is something you're right like there's something incredibly attractive about it as like a lifestyle game and I know people play it like that which is cool it doesn't seem like something you dip in and out of I'd be very curious to see how it's doing on PlayStation well enough to support PSVR 2 although I'm sure Sony is probably paying for it you would imagine I don't know if they would do it voluntarily I don't know why anyone would do anything for PSVR 2 voluntarily at this point not because I'm disrespecting the hardware but there's just not a user base that makes it worth your while alright I know none of us care about this, but I thought it was a notable thing to announce for other people.

3:29:00Minecraft Dungeons 2 was randomly announced at Minecraft Live back on the 21st. We're recording this almost a week later so we didn't get to experience it within the last or experience this announcement within the last episode, but it's here and Minecraft. So Minecraft Dungeons, I was looking at, I thought it was more recent, but it came out in 2021 and I think, yeah, May. Oh, no, I'm sorry. May 2020, even earlier and And I didn't think anyone really gave a shit about it. That was one of those games that came immediately to PlayStation at the time, PS4. But it made sense. Minecraft, when Microsoft bought Minecraft in what was it, 2014 or whatever, the game never migrated off the PS3.

3:29:38They ended up bringing it to Vita. So it's a very, they've always been very democratic with the game. So that's not a huge surprise. I'm more surprised with them just doing another one. I guess, I guess there is a fan base for this game. Minecraft is huge. I just feel like people love Minecraft, Minecraft. and the other stuff maybe is less like minecraft story mode or whatever the fuck that thing was called none of that so there's that well did either of you play minecraft dungeons i doubt it no i am trying to i might have checked it on a game pass for half an hour at some point but i like the idea of because isn't it like a diablo style yeah it is it is yeah that's kind of cool yeah it's not a bad idea i just wasn't uh wasn't for me but it's more that I just that I felt like no I felt like a fart I felt like a fart like no one even I don't remember anyone caring about yeah I'm looking at this game okay no what were you saying I was gonna say I bet you this game was is huge for 10 year olds yeah it's probably big on switch or something yeah because like on steam I was like you know it's on steam it's not really that big of a game you know it doesn't have a lot of interactions you know yeah so might have doing well on Game Pass.

3:30:48Enough. Oh, yeah, maybe that's true. Was it on Game Pass? It must have been if they were because it's a. Oh, that. Oh, yeah, that makes sense. No PS4 iteration of it this time, which it makes sense. I it's time. Please stop. Yeah, it is. Please stop. It's it's 13 years old. Let it. First of all, it's horrifying that it's 13 years old. Scary as fuck. But it is. I was 29, man. God. oh and minecraft no one ps4 came out oh and ps4

3:31:24what i was what was minecraft 20 2009 i bought it before 1.0 and we've because we were playing it in study hall on the computers at school because we found a way to boot it off a usb drive all right so minecraft 2 or minecraft dungeons 2 coming by the way so i was reading about um notch and minecraft like what's going on with all that because i know he's kind of been spooling something up and like a sequel and like a spiritual sequel of course but i didn't realize that like so he's doing this thing and i forget what the name of it's called but that the there was like a originally like a vote online of what it should be called do you guys know this and people voted to call it minecraft 2 so for a while they were just going they obviously weren't gonna but they ended up like acknowledging it for a while as minecraft 2 which i think is just so funny such a stupid so stupid people are so fucking stupid I love it alright stupid in a good way by the way there's so much funny funny shit going on out there man for as bad as things are we're always so dire I'm like I'm always laughing too I'm always like what the fuck there's always something out there making me laugh or I'll cry if I don't alright marathon we'll talk about marathon later too because Chris is still playing with the cryo archive and I'm very interested to see what's going on with that.

3:32:45But, um, Reese Elliott, friend of the show over at Alinea analytics wrote that according to their prognostications at his firm, marathon has sold in the region of 1.2 million copies so far, which is fine. I think, I think that's certainly not on the high end of what they had wanted or expected at the height at highest heights of this project's incubation. Um, and I think he agrees what I'm more interested in is, And this is where the Bungie acquisition, I think, kind of gets magnified a little bit because it's like, well, what is Sony really trying to do here? PS5 accounts for less than 20 % of the user base.

3:33:27And Xbox is nearly 10%. It's 11%. With only 217 ,000 copies sold on PS5, that's nothing. And that's, I'm pretty sure, I mean, Helldivers has had a lot more time. but just comparing them that's i think 20 times less than hell i've ever sold on playstation so it's not that the game is awesome i dude i think about the game i i was mike it knows i'm like i look at it on the store every day almost where i'm like i i like i watch people's like rook um i would want to be a rook oh the rook yeah that's what i would play as and the fact that you know what a rook run is is hilarious because you you guys taught me we're right but like that you've retained yeah yeah well because i really i'm not being i'm not trying to like blow smoke up your ass or be interested in the same thing you are i'm like there is no i know there is something about this game that's very intriguing to me and i want i want to play it i just feel like i can't do it right now like there's just it's just there's just other things but i want to support it but i'm but i do notice i always talk about my anecdotal evidence wherever it doesn't seem like any one of my friends list is really playing it.

3:34:34It is obviously a very PC heavy game. If this data is right, we can kind of garner at any given time this total player base based on Steam charts and then do a little math. I'm just wondering, Chris, I'll be very curious to see what you think. Yeah. What do you think about? Well, actually, Brandon M wrote in, so we'll let him pitch it. He says, hey, CDC, I want to say thank you to Chris and Dustin for showing off marathon in a much more casual light during sacred streaming last week. It got me to give it a shot and I've ended up really enjoying it. However, it's been hard to ignore the overall discourse around it in the last week in terms of estimated sales.

3:35:091.5 million with it's not 1.5, it's 1.2 with 70 % being on PC versus the estimated budget anywhere from two to$400 million. I don't think it costs anywhere close to$400 million, but I think it was very expensive. It's likely fair to say that so far it's underperforming whatever targets Sony had in mind for it. What do you think the chances are that this game could be in danger of having future support taken away and being sunset within a year of release? I don't know if you're if you feel any different, Chris I feel like Sony I it is my hope my sincere hope that Sony understands that they actually have something here and that they should try to maintain and build it this is kind of like it's a beachhead it's a now I want to be very clear I don't think this is going to save Bungie from layoffs and I'm not entirely sure the layoffs have anything to do with this game as much it might a little bit but as much as like they have a huge headcount and it's lower than it's been in since the halo days but it's going to get lower.

3:36:01I just hope and I'm that sad makes me sad, but I hope that they know this is kind of what you're fighting for is like some, some sort of salience and relevance. You got it. You're on the beach. You're on Omaha beach. Now fight, fight, get off the fucking boat, you know, like, uh, yeah. So I hope they see it that way. What do you think? I hope so too, man, because like this, it's, it's just, I think from an objective standpoint, if you, if you were just to, analyze like the the sheer quality and just design complexity of a game like this is a this is a great fucking video game and i think most of the reviews that have come out now um a lot of people were holding off before cry archive some people didn't you know and they still gave good reviews or whatever but like seems to have cemented for people i'm seeing a lot of nines you know like it's it's it is a fucking great video game with a stickiness to it that the people who are playing are playing it deeply i've anecdotally understood too just like just based on my familiarity with it like most of the time that i play this game solo and queuing with other people or whatever i am seeing people interact with like i'm seeing things it's like that's a skin like that's a purchased skin which is crazy because like in my opinion like the skins there are just like i don't know i i don't i i get maybe like from like a level of support it's like yeah I love this game or whatever, but like there's nothing in the store that I'm particularly looking at being like, I gotta, I gotta put that on, you know, like it's, it's pretty negligible, but like a lot of people, like a lot of the people that I'm murdering out there on the streets of Taosetti are like dripped or dripped in stuff that, that is purchased after the fact.

3:37:41So I'm like, I don't know, man, I think, I think this is a really special game. I think it's unquestionably the most high quality live service game that Sony, Sony first party has ever put out like by a fucking mile. and I think the people who are playing it are playing it very deeply and engaging with it deeply, and I think that Sony should be smart and understand that that's not something that they've had before in first party. They've had it with Helldivers, which they do not own, you know, or like, you know, Arrowhead, which they do not own, and so, yeah, I look at it and being like, if they're smart, I think they would, yeah, they'd double down on it.

3:38:21This is not a game, in my opinion, that this is not a game in my opinion that has its highest player count on day one this this this strikes me as the deeper i play it and we'll get into it obviously when we get into what we're playing but like again i'm a i'm 100 over 150 hours total with with you know the server slam and all all of it there's still shit i have not seen there's still weapons i haven't found i still there's still shit that i haven't seen in this it's deep as fuck there's stuff that i'm learning yesterday that characters can do i'm like i could have been doing that this whole time this is a a surprisingly deep deep game and i think it takes people some time to realize that i'm seeing all over my twitter or all over my twitter people quote tweet it quote tweeting their old tweets about marathon and being like nah i was wrong you know and so i think that that will i don't know if that necessarily will be a broad feeling but i think as updates begin to roll in as seasons begin to come in as new stuff's added i don't know man i think it has pretty high potential personally like the ceiling for this is pretty high i don't know if it's like it's definitely not fucking fortnite high or roblox high or anything like that that it doesn't have a prayer doing that it's too hardcore of a game it's a real fucking video game you know uh but But I think they would be wise to look at this as a Rainbow Six Siege type situation where it's like, no, we have something here, man.

3:39:51Exactly the game. And if we if we nurture this, we could have something pretty. Acclaimed and very special. That's up to them. I don't know what they're feeling. I don't know what they're thinking. It doesn't seem like they're making the smartest moves as of late. So like who the fuck knows? But. I wouldn't look at this. and I say this I say this not even just as like a fan of the game right I say this is like looking at it from a perspective of like the people who are playing are playing this fucking deeply and we would be really stupid to just be like ah this is Concord let's chuck this in the trash it's like no this is not this is not Concord this is not High Guard this is something else you got a different beast on your hands here yeah it is it is my personal feeling again being disassociated from the game right now and not knowing you know I'm not following it too deeply.

3:40:42It's just, I don't know why anyone thinks this game is in danger. Like, I think the player base is certainly getting smaller, but that happens with all sorts of games. It's about where it steadies. And I just think this idea that it's imminently going to go away, I just don't think, I don't know, maybe it just doesn't jive with reality in terms of my own opinion. But it is my hope that Sony realizes like this, they've already spent all this money on Bungie. Like you did all this work. it was probably for this game when you really think about it like at least one of the things that they were encouraged by and it's like well you i hope you take the time to figure it out and rainbow six siege is the perfect example because i was thinking about that like i'm like they have a chance of say if the game gets pretty dire in terms of player count they have another option which is like they can make it free and i'm pretty sure that's what happened to rainbow six Siege.

3:41:36And I'm pretty sure that's why, right? Or it became radically cheaper because it was like a full box game. And I think you, I think, but then they experienced their all-time player count, high player count many years later. So maybe it's wishful thinking because it's so much more competitive. And Rainbow Six Siege is, I think, a lot more of a distinct game, frankly, than the marathon, just from what it was trying to do. There are other marathon-like games. So there is that is there is that problem but um there there are but they're not it's weird like it's it is an extraction shooter but it's it's so there are no class-based hero-based extraction shooters with like a deep emphasis on like story i don't know it's weird or like raid like this is a very unique video game even in even in the realm of like extraction shooters which i in fairness i have limited experience with i've played arc raiders i played a little bit of archive i played a little bit like a little bit of uh what was the um the cry tech one hunt showdown hunt yeah um this is like and we'll we'll talk about it later with cryo but like this is uh not something i don't think this is something you can get somewhere else um broadly it is like the general kind of like fundamental gameplay loop i guess is but like uh yeah i don't know i don't know even cryo is kind of maybe a little bit too hardcore in my opinion we'll get into that uh i don't know i don't know what to make of it i think it's sad i think it's a bummer that it's underperforming because it's definitely underperforming in some way like uh like undoubtedly you know like but only i think to point out sorry to jump in but like it's it's only underperforming i mean it literally is underperforming but it's an important point that you already brought up to emphasize it is not underperforming for the people who are playing it right which is not actually playing this game and giving it a shot like brandon who writes in and i mentioned this last week i think is that after our stream there have been so many comments they're like wow i didn't realize this is what marathon was i didn't realize i i wasn't going to give it a chance until I saw you guys play it I'm telling you I was saying this for a long time I'm telling and people are seeing it now but I'm like I'm telling you this is a good this is a special video it looks cool as hell dude I was totally I loved reading that I read the comments I went back to the stream and read the comments and people were saying like one of the top comments was like it was fun seeing Colin authentically interested in the game like yeah and I was I was really intently watching it and like you know like are you doing are you winning son kind of kind of mentality, but like I, I, I understood, I understand what an extraction shooter was.

3:44:20I think what I got to see, and I think what a lot of people hopefully got to see during the stream was, and you can go watch it in VOD on our YouTube channel if you want, is the beauty of the game, the style of the game, the substance of the game, the audio cues and the, the fear intention. I think it's very compelling, but I also think it's up to a market. It very much like Helldivers where it's like, I think it's cool. It's really up to what other people think. And people spoke loudly on Helldivers and we'll see how they speak with Marathon. But I just, I think there, and I was looking to make sure like, yeah, Rainbow Six is free to play.

3:44:54It definitely wasn't when it launched. It was definitely a box game. So yeah, so there is a way for them to like get a second act if they really want to. And that might juice the, I mean, that would juice the player base. It's just a matter of how much, how do you make money on that? And that's like a totally different story. but hopefully they see it as a nice little like i said a beachhead and then maybe they'll get fucking shoved into the ocean i have no idea yeah but they're there i mean dude concord sputtered out you know the the wehrmacht was fucking gunning these dudes down before they even got out of the boat at least at least at least the marathon boat like landed and it's like people are getting on the beach yeah yeah there's a camp there's like right you know they've they've said they've set up camp i think it's good man i think um anything can happen you know titanfall 2 was also fucking fantastic and you know who the fuck you know amazing even amazing games suffer sometimes at the hands of like bad placement or bad decisions or whatever you have you know like market realities like there's a ton of things that that go into this but if i were sony i would look at this and be like this is not nothing this is this is far and by the way i know people are going to be like oh well it's you know high guard was good for the people who are playing it too but yeah but high had 200 people right like right concord was not this is this is tens of thousands of people like hundreds technically on all platforms like daily active users i think it's like um over 300 000 people logging in every day to a stressful high tension extraction shooter every fucking day that's kind of nuts yep i agree like so like and i would i don't know i would look at that and be like no it's a success it's not the success in the way that they wanted it to be because i'm sure they wanted most of i'm i'm sure maybe they wanted most of these sales to be on playstation i don't know how realistic that was ever going to be given the nature of the type of game it is it's a it's a highly competitive fps even i'm you know i'm playing it on pc i play it on playstation sometimes but uh you know so i i don't know what their expectations were on on that front but and especially you have to consider too they're stepping back from pc so maybe that's not as important like i i don't know what their metrics are i don't know what they're thinking but it'll be interesting got something here you're right it's not like concord to put it in the context as i recall the reporting around concord was that it's sold 40 000 copies so right at the same price point so this is this game is doing like 25 to 30 times better and so that's not like you said yeah it's not nothing it's not great but it's something to build off of and um yeah we'll see and we'll see what happens.

3:47:32I mean, again, I feel like this game was fairly central to getting their attention earlier in development to buy Bungie to begin with. And so it would be kind of foolish to let go now. I mean, you've come this far. If you didn't believe in it, you should have just canceled it. Yeah. All right. Let's get into this final story, which is just more sales from the Circana data released monthly by Matt Piscatella as always. So back in February of 20, February, 2026, PlayStation 5 was again the best-selling console in the United States and in North America and I think that's three months in a row Dustin I'm curious what do you think this means I was talking to Mike a bit about this switch to I like I and you saw recent reporting that they're like cutting manufacturing goals and stuff like that I still feel like the sales velocity of switch to eight into the hardcore fan base a lot more and a lot more quickly so there we have to wait for time adjustment for like another year to see where the numbers actually sit because i just think people bought it much more quickly than they did the first time but it it's but it is a little ps5 is not new and it's also way more expensive that's why it's important to note dustin it's units sold they won but it's money made because those can be two different things you can sell more switches and places you can make more money so what are your thoughts on all yeah i honestly the switch stuff is interesting i outside of mario kart world i don't think the system has really had its true system seller yet so like mario kart world you get as you were saying all the people on launch day immediately and that's you know it's probably the ultimate launch title to have with it with Mario Kart 8 being the best selling Switch game on the platform.

3:49:20So it makes sense to launch with that. And don't get me wrong, like Bonanza is an incredible game. Amazing. But I don't know if it's the type of game that moves the needle. Pocopia has been interesting to watch from an anecdotal perspective because I have been seeing like people go out in droves to buy switches for Pocopia to the point where even some stores are like selling out of switches for this game. But what that really telegraphs to me is that Nintendo needs a new Animal Crossing and things like Animal Crossing, a new Smash Brothers, things like that are really going to move the needle for Switch 2.

3:50:03But scaling back production, it does feel it feels so weird overall because as we were saying like the the initial sales so strong fastest selling video game console of all time to now it's like they don't they just don't have that momentum so i don't know if that's software or or what but as time goes i mean surely we're gonna have a new 3d mario in the next i would hope so year we'll see other sales data overall platform data between PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo, and PC. Resident Evil Requiem was February's best-selling game. That's notable because I think Requiem was only on sale for two days, right?

3:50:45In that month. So obviously we know it's sold many millions of copies now. Helldivers 2 popping up to 5. I thought that was kind of interesting. And Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined slotting in its first month at number 9 overall. Wow. So other notable games include God of War. So I was surprised by this pleasantly. So God of War, Sons of Sparta at 14. I think this is notable because it's by Money Made. And that's a$30 game, right? So that's pretty good. There's not very many sub 40 or$50 games that make the MPD. But it's not very impressive when you look at the year to date. So that would only be January and February, where God of War, Sons of Sparta is not even on the list.

3:51:30so it falls off almost immediately but i just thought that was pretty cool to see that pop up i think it did i'll be honest with you i think that indicates it did a lot better than i thought it did um you know what i think colin the power of the shadow drop yeah i we have a new god of war game it's 2d but don't even think about whether or not it's good or whether it's what you want you should just play it right now just spend the 30 bucks buy it right now i agree it was the it was that game wouldn't have benefited one iota from a preview cycle i'll say that i i do think that i do firmly believe that god of war sons of sparta gets better the more you play it and by the end it's pretty good but it's not like a anything special i will say that and then if you reduce it down to best-selling games on playstation platforms only resident little requiem obviously the best-selling game on ps5 black ops 7 popping back up at number two it's interesting because battlefield six is down at number nine sons of sparta was the sixth best selling game and ghost of yote at number eight and it's still in the top 20 overall as well so there's that and then if you go into the top the overall sale so it's not so interesting right now because it only counts january and february requiem is the best selling game in the states now listen to this two through nine okay and now you can see like it just never stops nba 2k 26 black ops 7 madden minecraft ea sports fc 26 battlefield 6 grand theft auto 5 red dead redemption 2 and then we pop back out of it with hell divers too at 10 so hey ghost of yote the 13th best-selling game of the year so far not so bad code vein 2 beating ghost of yote yeah that's rough code vein came out this year though right it's newer that's true yeah it did come out this year.

3:53:21So that's it. That's all we have for the news. Alright, let's get into what we're... Let me settle in first here. Let's get into what we're playing. Sorry, I started a little too prematurely there. I don't know if it'll be in the show or not. I guess it'll be up to Dustin. Let me get out of the way with Chronicles of the Wolf I beat. Got all five endings in it. Talked about it a little bit last week. I think, right? Yeah, yeah, you did. Really smitten with this game. I think this game is really, really. I love it. I love its comparisons, of course, to Castlevania 2, but I just I love the art. I love it.

3:53:57It's quite different. It's very vague. I needed I needed I would have probably spent twice as much time with it if I needed to walk around and not know where I was going. It's it could it could stand to have a quest log and some other stuff, I think, in my opinion. But I really, really liked it and like the story behind the guy. And by the way, I'll be on Summon Sign soon. So I'll be talking about that much more deeply there. And then I downloaded a while ago and was like, I got to get to this before Saros comes out. So a few days ago, I started just playing Returnal again. And I messed around a little bit with the Tower of Sisyphus DLC, which are expansion, which I never messed with before.

3:54:37And it's cool. Got a few trophies in there and messed around with that. But really, I'm more interested in trying to see if I can clean up the platinum trophy for it, which I don't know if you guys remember. like there was a lot of frustration back in 2001 or 2021 about the collectibles and how they're kind of randomized and you don't really know what you're missing or like and things just pop up randomly and it's just it's very frustrating so i want to get to that point but right now i'm just trying to reacclimate myself with the game and i gotta just say man it's so fucking good like you almost forget how good this game is it's really really incredible game yeah and on ps5 pro it just flies like it's so it's so wonderful and the gunplay that i gotta say dude that the use of the dual sense the haptics it's probably second to none or there are very few games that are anywhere close to the way it uses it the way it feels like when you're getting the orbs like are sucking in the little little particulates and the rain is hitting in and you're using the triggers but you only like kind of go down a little bit on the trigger and you shoot or otherwise it uses your secondary fire and really really wonderful game but i the thing i'm frustrated with right now and i really got to sit down and i was saying to micah like i gotta i if i want to do this i have to like study what i'm supposed to do because there's like a way to figure out you got to like brute force it so like for instance the second part the crimson wastes which is like mars kind of as you guys might recall i'm missing one thing there out of everything and I don't know what it is and what I know what I unfortunately know I have to do in my heart right like right in my soul I know I'm gonna have to sit there with a fucking video guide with my laptop on my lap going from place to place in the guide and trying to hope that that gets spawned good because I don't know if people remember returnal is not necessarily procedurally generated it's rooms that are put together randomly and in those rooms things are replicated like the collectibles.

3:56:37So you have to hope that somewhere within this puzzle of different pieces that has been put together randomly that you have that piece. Then you have to go find the thing. I just it's going to be so annoying, but I think I'm going to do it. And I want to prepare a little bit more for Sarah. So that's what I've been playing is Chronicles of the Wolf. I might go back to there is no platinum in Chronicles of the Wolf. So I'm frankly not that tantalized to go back and get the trophies I missed. I did get all five endings. So I feel like I've seen the game. Returnal, good to be back. the Sisyphus thing is pretty cool it's just a never-ending tower you go up I think it goes up 100 floors or something I got to like the first boss and I beat him and then I I died after that so but god what a game dude and again just enchanting to look at where we talked about it back in 2021 about what when I would just die all the time just being like like enchanted by it like the bullet the way the bullets come at you and how slow everything is and the lines the enemy dies and there's like a burst of lines coming around them and they just slowly travel across the screen can't wait for Saros dude only a month away I think there are previews up I think people have gone hands on with Saros but I have no interest in I don't need they don't need to sell me on the game yeah so that's where I am Dustin let's go to you next Crimson Desert you're playing what are people calling him John Desert John Desert yes and I saw you put up a video on your YouTube channel about it as well so people can go check that out yeah Yeah, yeah.

3:58:03This is a really, really weird game. One of the main things when the reviews came out, I think it was Jake Baldino that posted a tweet that was like, it took me eight hours to get into Crimson Desert, but now I'm really into it, which sounds ridiculous. That's preposterous. But I think he's 100 % right. the beginning of this game is so mundane in the things that having you do because it's slowly teaching you all the different mechanics and things you can do in it but it's doing it in the most boring way possible so it's like you're you're up in your zelda sky island you know so it has a lot of zelda stuff in it a lot of red dead stuff um and then it's like okay well you need to get your crew back together the gray manes uh but before we do that we need you to go here and we need you to help sweep someone's chimney uh and you need to go and do these like very go arm wrestle at the pub and all these little tiny things and it feels very much like if this game was originally intended to be an mmo some of that remnants is still in the game it does pick up and it does have a nice kind of red dead like mechanic where you have your camp where the gray mains and you have like you can donate to the camp you got to go and try to get more of them back on your camp expands it's very cool so i i'm enjoying the world aspect of it now that i'm past that opening initial sequence uh the man there's so many different ways to take this game the open world like visually this game looks incredible uh i'm not playing it on playstation 5 i am playing this one on pc just because uh i wanted to be able to play it on my you know expensive graphics card and stuff like that and it looks amazing it seems like the ps5 pro version very good the base playstation 5 version uh has not been horrible it's not like a cyberpunk situation but it's very obvious why uh they didn't show off this game basically if you're playing on a base ps5 you you really should probably play it at the lock 30 fps mode because the performance mode is all over the place so there's that the combat in this game is awesome like this the combat is probably my favorite part of it and a lot of people have talked about the controls being weird I found that I got used to the controls very quickly there is a move the move that people are complaining about is in order to do like a specialized attack you have to hit r1 and r2 at the same time so a lot of people are like well that is that is odd a lot of people i mean some people hold their controller like this with with two fingers or you know a finger on each uh shoulder button i personally usually am like this and occasionally bring them up yeah me too so i understand the the the complication of the controls a little bit but for me what the the cool part about the combat is there's all these wrestling moves in the game where like you're picking people up and slamming them on the ground you can pick guys up and throw them either into other enemies or sometimes if you're on the side of a cliff just yeet them off a cliff which is really cool the environment is super destructible so there's times when you're in fights and there's stuff flying everywhere so it's pretty pretty fun yeah for the combat the main gripe that i have with this game is it seems small but it involves everything you do in the game and that's how your character moves around i mentioned about some of the zelda inspired stuff and red dead stuff this is one of the things they ripped almost directly from red dead so my explanation here is that this is gonna be when you move the left stick cliff your main character walks he always walks when you move just like john marston or uh what's his face uh morgan why am i forgetting arthur arthur morgan or arthur morgan they walk right and if you want them to walk quickly or like a light run you need to tap x it's like okay then if you want them to use your stamina to run you have to double tap x and i didn't even know this someone responded to my video about this they're like oh and if you keep tapping x they'll actually run faster so something that i think uh maybe it was when lockmore was streaming i was watching his stream and he was talking to people about it he's like well you like the controls in red dead what's the problem with the controls here it's like well first of all i don't know if i necessarily like those controls in red dead but it's a overall much slower paced game but because this game has so much exploration where you're like i'm trying to get up this mountain i'm climbing up rocks it's like i'll climb up and then he starts walking again i jump a few feet down i start walking again it's like dude i don't want to fucking walk i just want to move at a normal pace my suggestion is that when you move the stick a little bit you walk and when you push it all the way you move quickly and then if you want to use your sprint the double tap to x is fine the other weird thing too is that one of the core things the game gives you at the very beginning of the game is a breath of the wild style glide in in zelda it's a like paraglider thing in this game you like have these like wings that shoot out of you they look really sick which is cool because i always really like the gliding in breath of the wild and in a game that has this big of an open world it's important that they introduce fun ways to traverse around the world because you're going to be doing that i would say even maybe most of the time at least in my 15 or so hours with this game.

4:04:26You're getting from point A to point B. It should be fun. Yeah. The glide is worse than Zelda in nearly every way. Specifically, when you go like one of the things in Zelda and you would think would be fun in this game. So you go, you run off a clip, you jump and then you glide off, which is kind of what happens. But you run and you jump and you hit the glide button and your momentum just slows to a halt. while the wings protrude out of Cliff's back. So it's like you lose all momentum. And then on top of that, the glide burns your stamina so fast to the point where it's like, what's the point?

4:05:09I want to use this glide. And every time I do, I'm disappointed with it. I'm like, ah, so I know that later on in the game, there's like jet packs and dragons and stuff like that. And that all sounds great. which apparently the dragon has like an extremely long cooldown at the end game it's like okay a little odd so it really those those things kind of like really bother me that it's like if i'm the game is constantly in these quests being like okay go from where we are currently to this really far location and there are and apparently they've already added a lot more fast travel points but they're pretty far between them so you're gonna have to walk yeah it's like you're just gonna have to ride your horse there's not gonna be you could try to use some of the things that they incorporated but honestly i just find them more cumbersome than just getting on a horse and going and so that's a little disappointing in this kind of open world sandbox game that has all these features they've done as you mentioned earlier colin they've already done a massive patch which fixed a lot of the issues like for example the jumping in the game was really weird like running and jumping at the same time didn't really work in the launch version of the game and they went and changed that they changed the combat how how my theory about this game is that it really needed a few more months which already was delayed but i it's feeling to me like this game is coming in really hot so it's already improved significantly and it's already been out less than a week i hope that they make changes to the stamina and stuff like that um but it's uh despite all those annoyances i have with it i'm finding that i'm wanting to go back and play this game almost every night because i'm liking the progression like the new abilities the new things it adds to combat there's an addictive quality of expanding your base your camp and i'm really curious about where the game is going to take me next because in this first 15 hours i could go as far as the the titular crimson desert uh but i haven't yet it's huge it is a giant giant world so it's a weird game it's highly annoying to me in many ways but i keep playing it so seems to be the way it is with a lot of people yes yeah the defense force for this game is weird though i'll tell you that i posted a tweet about my early impressions and some people jumped down my throat for it i it's this game in particular has something weird about its fan base around it which you know god bless them to each of their own it's just weird when i'm like man i i see something in this game i want to keep playing it to anyone that's interested in checking out this game no going into it that you're probably not going to like it at first you're probably not going to like it at first and any unless they redo the beginning of this game no amount of patching is going to fix the beginning of this game unless they totally redo it so interesting the end game stuff does appeal to me i'm thinking about it because like i do i do like what i see from like when the game gets going it looks fucking cool and so like i think i might just like at some point pick it i might wait for a sale or something but there's a lot of really okay well i was just gonna say that i just know in my heart there's no shot i'm finishing that game oh yeah that's what jaffe said too he doesn't finish anything though but the the uh i've kind of put this game out of my mind for now.

4:08:53I think I'm going to approach it more like I did Cyberpunk where I got the Cyberpunk like two years later or something. And by that point, it was perfect. And it was on PS5 at that point, too, so it was great, but I'm not in any rush considering like that. I'm on pro, obviously, but I'm still not in any rush to play an underperforming game that's still being fixed on the fly. Yeah, yeah. I'll just wait. And it's not even the price. The price is fine. It's just like, well, what's the purpose? There's other things to play. There's a lot coming out. Yeah. Yeah. all right very well crimson desert john desert doing his thing john crimson sounds like a porn name jonathan crimson jonathan crimson the illustrious actor god bless him christopher you're playing resident evil requiem and marathon so i'll leave it to you yeah yeah i'll uh start with resident evil first i i uh i'm about i don't know how you would approach like an hour count in resident evil i don't remember i don't know if there's chapters or what because i i think it's it's broken up based on the character that you play and like the time but i don't know if i pay attention to like the time is nonsensical too at the end like it told me it took me like 13 hours and i'm like no it took me way longer than that but yeah so i don't know man i'm like 10 hours in it's what it's what the clock says I just got through a fairly interesting, very different section with Leon.

4:10:21Spent a good amount of time with him. And I'm liking it, man. I think it's, I'm still, I'm consistently impressed with how it looks. There's a part of this game that feels awkwardly empty. But I kind of dig it anyway. It's getting, I just, I'll put it this way. I just got to a part that was so over the top. I was like, this is ridiculous. I think I already know what you're talking about. You, you probably do. It involves bicycles. Yeah. Yeah. And I was like, I was like, this is so fucking dumb. I love it. I love, I love everything about it. There's a line in there. He says he like, he runs into like those dogs and he's like, these pups need more training.

4:11:05It's absurd. It's absurd. And it's absurd in all the ways that I want it to be. I'm having a good time. I do think the deeper I play this game, the more I'm convinced it's like, yeah, this isn't my favorite Resident Evil. I do think my initial concern about the split protagonist focus not landing with most people, I'm aware that that was now just projection for how I feel about these things. And I feel like it is kind of how I feel about it, where I lean so much more heavily into liking exactly half of this game. And the other half, I'm like, this is good. But I don't gel with it nearly as much.

4:11:48I'm talking, of course, about Grace's first person parts. I'm just not that into it. I feel like the game kind of wants to have its cake and eat it too. It wants to give you this action. It wants to give you this horror. But if you give me both of them, I'm kind of, I'm just naturally going to lean more towards kicking, roundhouse kicking a zombie in the face. you know and shooting its hand and blowing it up with like because it's got a grenade you know or like using there's like mortar fire it's ridiculous yeah the mortar the mortar like when that happened i was like this is awesome it's so stupid but like yeah i don't know i i just think for me it's it's it feels it does feel a little unfocused not necessarily in a way that like the disparate halves are are poor or badly done i think all of it's like very well done i just think they each would serve themselves better being their own solo focus for for an experience if that makes sense yeah um and so i kind of find myself whenever i switch to one i'm like man i'm really eager to get i'm really eager to get back to that other half um and so I don't know.

4:13:01I'm a little mixed on it. I think it's up there, though. I don't think I like it more than Resident Evil 4. Not really. Not close. I don't think I like it more than Resident Evil 2. I think I'm feeling about it as much as I feel kind of like where I am with Village about it. I like it a lot. And I'm into it. I like Village more than most people, I think, actually, too. Village is good. It feels like no one really talks about it anymore. which i like that game a lot i dig that i like that too the setting is there are parts of that game that i don't you know obviously with everything where i don't love that factory at the end but every other part i was like this is a good this is cool this is like you know that first person resident evil 7 but mixed with like a little bit more of a resident 4 kind of set up and structure i dig it um this is obviously very different but uh i'm liking my time with resident evil i i explained to you guys where i was that's how far in i am i don't i don't have any context for how close to the end i am or how close to the middle i am i really don't know but uh that's at the point that i'm at about nine ten hours in some of that time was focused some of that time was spent lollygagging admittedly i spent a lot of time in the care center just walking around because i really liked i really liked that location but uh i like resident evil 9 quite a bit uh looking forward to finishing it and the other game that i'm obviously still playing this is a given by the way on any week that i don't mention it but i thought it would be fitting to mention marathon this week because i had some chance to go through a little bit of the cryo archive that's their big end game map it takes place on the marathon ship from the original game specifically the cryo archive and they do they do like a zoom out of like where the cryo archive is and it's like the ship is so big in theory that you could probably have like an endless array of like insane locations coming out if they if they want to put it in but right now it's the cryo archive and it's their big end game map it costs 5 000 credits to get in so basically your loadout has to you have to be kitted up to get in in the first place you have to be level 25 so you have to have some level of faction progress uh and you have to basically have put something on the line now that could be a lot of good guns it could be one really good backpack and a fuck ton of really good health items any number of permutations that you want but you have to put something on the line basically uh if you want to set foot on the ship uh it's it is one of the most intimidating uh oh we lost it dustin are you there oh dustin oh your camera just went out your camera went out oh okay keep talking i'll see if i can turn it on and off uh it is one of the most intimidating spaces that i've seen in this game so far it is incredibly hostile and it's very puzzle oriented so how it works is basically like i think i don't know how many teams exactly spawn on i think five so it's a smaller or maybe even four but like it's a smaller number of teams than the other maps uh there is a shit ton of ai oh my god there's a shit ton of ai uh and basically you spawn in these these really separate quadrants of the map the map is massive and how it works is basically like you need to you need to get security clearance to get further into the ship that you get security clearance by finding security tags that can be on enemies that can be in drawers on tables on other players obviously if they pick it up and you know you loot them uh and that security clearance determines the level of door that you can open so like there's security level one security level two security level three you can hack security clearance two from certain panels if you can locate them if you can find them to raise your security clearance level up that gets you into the middle um where there's like a lot of stuff to find and fight obviously the inherent tension here is that it's a really claustrophobic space it's not like the other maps that take place on the planet side surface where there's like fields and like you know there's fog it's really it's a really densely compacted area so it's still huge but like it's very vertical um so you can hear shooting and you're not exactly sure like is that it could be close in distance but far in traversal if that makes sense um so it's it's really it's really nerve-wracking there's also batteries that open vaults which also have their own thing and basically the goal is like there's a lot of good loot on this map so like your goal is to get out you can't get out normally there's no normal extraction points all you can do is you find these certain terminals they activate a ping for a little bit and for a little while you have access on your map to where that's located and you better you better save it because that's going to be your exit route and you just have to know how to get there um i think if you ping it it saves it but like it's a really short window So you could just go in there, kill a bunch of bots, get some good shit, kill all the other players and leave.

4:18:31But the big mechanic of this map is that it's essentially a destiny raid, not just with the security clearance and the batteries to open the vaults. I believe in the vaults, there are subroutines that you can pick up. And if you get, I believe, seven of them. I didn't do this. I never got that far. got that far i'm hoping to do it today or tomorrow over the weekend because it opens on weekends to get to the boss at the very top of the cryo archive which behind that boss door and by the way the boss is like a compiler from the original marathon it's very fucking cool um and it's got this it's got its own like kind of destiny raid mechanic where like a bubble kind of spawns and you have to be in the bubble to damage it and it's it's it's all sorts it's it's if you've Destiny before you kind of have some idea of uh what that boss fight might look like and behind that door is the behind the boss door are the best weapons and materials in the game it's like the biggest the best crafting materials the most rare shit and there's even like a specific gun that only spawns behind the boss door it's a like high high high tier weapon it's like alien and human it's like this hybrid i think it's like the toxic disinjector or something i can't remember what it's called but it has like grenade fire and like a laser fire boat and it just fucking mops i've seen people go into like the starting area with it and just completely completely destroy other players with it but yeah it's just i haven't gotten there yet i'm hoping to do it maybe tonight maybe i'll stream it maybe i won't i don't know but uh it's really fucking cool i've gone in there i've only left i've only left successfully about like maybe like 20 30 percent of the time i've never gotten to the boss room uh 10 out of 10 it's a really it's a really fun really tense experience losing a ton of gear sucks but it also feels like now we can't we can't leave we can't leave it that way we got it we got to go and gambling we got it we got to end on a good yeah it does it's it is it is gambling essentially with uh the stuff you found but yeah i just i don't know man the the lore you get too from it like you you get a lot of story from like x filling with like certain valuables like certain valuables have audio logs attached to them and you can only listen to them if you extract with them and and you get some more details about what happened on the ship and like what's going on and why everything's happening it's just i'm i'm just infatuated with this game man i just think it's i think it's so surprisingly designed like and i guess it shouldn't be surprising because destiny raids are very complicated and and so they have a lot of practice doing something like this it's just it's interesting that it works in this environment where other players can completely stonewall your progress like you you'd intuitively kind of feel like that would be a big um mistake to do that um and maybe for a lot of people it is maybe it is like kind of like too hardcore to get past for a lot of people and i'm sure it is but yeah i'm just transfixed by this game i just i think the the narrative is really compelling i think the the aesthetics are really compelling i think the the the mechanical depth of what's here for how simple it reads is uh it's just a startlingly deep game for for just like a shooter or just something that you would expect to be like you know shoot click the heads and you win um there's just a lot here and i'm just uh i really love it um i'm excited to go in today i'm gonna try and beat that boss i don't know how that's gonna go probably not well but but i'm excited to try and and see it for myself but it's it's been really cool cool man i don't know if i'll talk about marathon i don't know if i'll talk about marathon again because like at this point like you know i've said everything there needs to be said there is i haven't done ranked mode yet because i'm too scared but like i'm already pushing it i'm 32 playing this really hyper competitive fps like i don't i don't know how much longer i'm going to be even remotely competent at this so uh ranked is just i don't know maybe i'll dabble with it but i doubt i'll have much more to say about it until i don't know a new season or some new stuff happens in it which i'm sure will happen but i think it's a superb fucking video game i I think from a live service perspective, I just think it's...

4:23:05There's an incredible amount of quality here. Even in ways that you wouldn't expect, which like narratively and like the incredibly rich like 400 plus entry codex. That's just full of stuff. Yeah, I love Marathon. I think it's easily... I think it's better than most Prime Halo games and both Destinies by a lot. Wow. and that's not a light thing to say for me but yeah it's great i'm thrilled that you're enjoying it i mean that's awesome yeah i'm happy it could have been it could have been a mess i was also i was on the fence about it because i was like oh i knew i was excited to play it but i was like oh man they could just like not land but in my opinion they landed and it's cool dustin are you um still playing i am still playing i am not done the cryo archive i wasn't high enough level last weekend and i think i just reached 25 oh cool so so maybe me and the boys will do it this weekend we were playing last night had some pretty good moments nothing dude chris yesterday we killed a team that tried to drop in they had the jump on us we killed them nice looted them i walked out with i think 6k worth of their their gear i'm like you must feel like a fucking idiot got to jump on me on a free kit and i'm walking out with your shit the saddest thing the most insulting thing is uh killing a teammate they have good shit taking it and using their shit to kill their oh yeah it's like it is so insulting but it's it's really yeah man it's just uh it's good i want to well in the same dude we've mentioned marathon taketh and giveth away later that not later last night uh we took out a team we had awesome loot we were ready to go ready to leave right after we took out a team rook shows up oh yeah one v threes us because we weren't ready like we were we were hurting after that last battle we were like okay we killed them and immediately rook shows up killed all three of us we're like well yeah how it goes that's how it goes marathon give it the marathon take it away it goes down there marathon marathon yeah man it's good that's how it goes down there and marathon all right my friends that's what we're playing good to hear from you guys on that let's end as we always do with six questions comments concerns thoughts and ideas from the audience though it might be five because i think we might have already talked about one of these things we'll we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

4:25:45But this is, of course, from the audience over on Patreon, Patreon.com slash Last Day Media. You can, amongst other things, get early ad free access to all the episodes of this show, access to Stigrid Symbols Plus, access to the Discord, RSS feeds, all the rest. But one of the perks you get is to submit your inquiries into the threads in the news feed each week, and then we pull out from there. I love pulling out. Who loves pulling? I mean, no one loves that. The one one wrote it. God, it's vulgar. One one wrote in and said, Hello, CDC. Is Final Fantasy a doomed series. A Games Radar article came out about the Final Fantasy 4 director Yoshi P, how he sees the future of the franchise.

4:26:18He said, many younger players are not connecting with the series as many of them are accustomed to action games and competitive online games. Matt Piscitelli even supported this claim as he wrote on Blue Sky, quote, according to Serkana's player pulse, 62 % of US players of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth were aged 35 or older. That number goes to 77 % if you go 30 plus. Making it an official status game. What do you guys what do you boys think? How can Square save Final Fantasy's future? Drop the numbers finally like Resident Evil? More remakes? More Final Fantasy games a year? Or let the franchise die with all of us unks?

4:26:50I see you boys in the draft while Naruto as I like to say it run into the battlefield. I'll tell you right now people are saying like did you see they raged the age of 42 so now I'm involved in this again? Very cool. Oh yeah I did see that. Yeah. Two things. I don't believe there will ever be a draft in the United States again. I just believe that because I just don't think it's going to go very well if that happens. but number two is I'm not going so you could you could yeah yeah I'm not I'm not fighting in some foreign war so good luck yeah um okay so I think Square I don't think Square Enix is run particularly well and I think a lot of that comes back to Final Fantasy's struggle um did we bring it up when did we bring it up Dustin was it on the stream that I brought up that like there's that there's that activist investor in square enix that like writes reports about how bad the company is it's like so funny if you like he he literally wrote i think like in it most recently like an 80 page paper about like how fucked up the company is um and we've long been critical of square enix going back to that 2021-2022-23 era where they were just releasing game on top of game on top of game like with no strategy for how these games would sell they're all being sold to the same people which are me and Dustin.

4:28:04So you got to kind of be a little bit more selective. I don't know that Final Fantasy is old coded. I think that they've made decisions with Final Fantasy in recent in the last, let's say, decade that are inherently affixed to old things. So whether it's Final Fantasy 14's continuing move forward after all these years, Final Fantasy 16, in my opinion and I remember saying this at the time and I feel vindicated on this is like for all of its new action trappings or whatever it felt like a very old Final Fantasy game in my opinion in terms of thematics and or the thematic you know Final Fantasy 4 like nature of that game in my opinion and then Final Fantasy 7 is based on a game from 1997 so something that has that a lot of people have a lot of nostalgia for if you're older and it's weird to me that final fantasy is the ones that struck that one that is struggling and dragon quest is the one that's not because i feel like dragon quest is in and we'll talk about it in a little while and in many ways it feels so much older and like it would be for older people and yet i guess it's resonating in a lot more of a deep way with younger players if i saw those numbers though i'd be pretty concerned then again I think that that is the probably the average age of a fucking console player I mean I don't I don't know that those numbers would be too too different and because they had staggered releases with those Final Fantasy 7 games in particular I wonder if they would have certainly done better with a with a the PC and Switch audiences that are going to trail younger I think or trend younger and I don't know Dustin what do you think about this Final Fantasy is it's is it is it simply run its course is it no longer the powerful behemoth it once was it's funny that this comes up because when i was in japan last and hanging out with genki this is something he mentioned to me that he was like yeah it really seems like final fantasy fans in japan are much older uh like kids don't care about final fantasy so when i read this last night when you were when I was going over the document like that's so funny because I had this exact conversation over like over a year ago now but seemingly it's at it's actually like 100 % true it's not just anecdotal it brings in a lot of more context wasn't there something that someone at Square said about the possibility of dropping the numbering of Final Fantasy yeah I think that that yeah i think that might have been in that investor report actually of the idea of doing that which is yes you could release a game just called final fantasy i mean you could do that one thing that is also worth considering is that final fantasy 16 i don't want to say it's the least anime looking final fantasy game because they still look anime but it's certainly more it's leaning more western yeah i agree with that yeah i think it has more of a game of thrones feel than an anime feel and i think that is maybe a little bit of the problem i'm not saying that i want final fantasy to look like a trails game or like a tales game or anything like that but with how big anime is now and how many kids the fact that kids can freely watch anime is insane still to me as someone who grew up liking anime and the amount of scrutiny and how much of a loser that made you so it is interesting that they went for a more at least i guess at the time like oh we're moving away from an anime aesthetic and now it's like no actually you kind of want that like that is something that i think younger kids would be more interested in um i guess final fantasy 7 remake has that but it's as you said colin it's like that's still rooted in a much older game right that's why i think final fantasy 9 remake while no one really knows what's going on with that anymore it's like that wouldn't move the needle either it probably moved the needle even worse because that game is even more obscure though it is a little bit older or newer rather it's not that much newer and it's way more obscure so that's not gonna do anything for anyone it's not about going backwards it's about going forward i think it might have been the same interview i can't remember where i saw this but there was also something it's like the the the slowness of Final Fantasy releases also might have something to do with this where it's like they can't build up a new audience because kids might not like between Final Fantasy 15 and 16 let's see Final Fantasy 15 came out what 2015 and Final Fantasy 16 came Mountain 20, 20.

4:32:56Three or three. I think so. I'm losing all. I'm looking right now for both. So either way. 2016 for. 16. And I think it's going to be 23 for six or for 15 rather. Oh, come on. And then 23 June 23 for PlayStation 5 for Final Fantasy 16. Yeah. So yeah, it felt that felt right. It's sad that it's been already three years. Yeah. So the release window, like how often they're releasing these games, I think also might have something to do with it. And I am on status because I don't understand why kids aren't drawn to things like this or drawn to fucking normal video games. Yeah, just normal in general.

4:33:51Yeah. I don't think this is distinctly a Final Fantasy problem I mean of course kids are interested like Pokemon right now in Japan is selling like crazy the new Pocopia but that's you know a given always they're going to sell that but I don't know I don't know what they do to turn it around because it feels like every move for that franchise is risky the move away from turn based uh how did it move the needle it didn't make it necessarily a bigger more mainstream game it pissed off a lot of people i think they executed well but i don't think it necessarily did what they were hoping it would do for the series yeah i mean my my major frustration has been consistent with this which is that i think final fantasy 15 was trash and final fantasy six I didn't I didn't beat it I couldn't do it it was how much of it did you play five or ten hours at the most I would say ten hours at the very most I think eventually there will be revisionism on 15 there's revisionism on 13 right now I mean I think that I think they I I wonder what the plan is with 13 because I think the revisionism is already here for 13 and I think that they're it's unfortunate for them that they don't have a product to take advantage of it, just re-releasing it.

4:35:15Although it's available on like Xbox and PC, you can play it pretty easily. And I will reiterate, well, I will rephrase, trash is a heavy word. Final Fantasy XV was majorly disappointing. It was disappointing immediately. As soon as I played it, as soon as I like started dealing with the characters in the world, like this is, I don't know what this is. XVI is so profoundly a Final Fantasy game that I actually am frustrated, like really frustrated that people are like, this isn't, what is this? It's like, what are you, what are you, what are you fucking blind? Like, I don't, I don't understand because it's in more of an action oriented game, more like a Final Fantasy seven remake.

4:35:48It's not a Final Fantasy game. We've been over it a million times. Final Fantasy is always reinvented itself. But Final Fantasy 16 outside of 14, which people love is in my like for me, for me, the first game Final Fantasy game I liked, like really liked since 12 and 12 was really controversial to when it came out. so if ironically with Crimson Desert that was the complaint about that game if you guys might recall you were younger but it's like it's just like a fake MMO like what is the pseudo MMO thing that you're doing here but I loved it personally I just think 16 was so extraordinarily good that it bums me out that like they're getting this message that it's like no not this and I'm like no this this is this is good it makes me scared for Final Fantasy 17 like are you going to make some fucking tails shit or so are you going to or like or are you going to what are you going to do because i i don't understand people's visceral reaction in the other direction we already have the traditional role-playing game series at square enix it also makes me interested dust in what this means for dragon quest 12 just and there are rumors about dragon quest 12 that you know that i've seen like circulating i don't know anything about it but this idea that i might re-emerge soon and it's like so you have this series you have these two you brought together in the merger between square and x and x the two iconic japanese role-playing game series and one of them is considered too old like the audience is getting too old so what you did with the other one was make a game for adults i obviously that was made in a vacuum and they wouldn't have necessarily known but it's i'll be interested to see how that does because that's arguably the exact opposite thing that they need to do if this is the case especially if you don't want the two series to be similar and they're not so we'll see what happens uh chris you want me to say anything about this you want me to spare you on this particular i just don't know if i would have anything to i mean like final fantasy final fantasy has never really like deeply appealed to me like even back in its heyday so like i kind of just missed this um i've liked some like i think i liked a lot of what i played of uh 16 i think i just remember hitting a point in that game where it just it wanted to be i was we were doing a lot of high octane action stuff and then it was like acquaint yourself with this town and i was like nah man i was already on like a i think what i remember about that game is it felt like many many games were happening at the same or like not at the same time but in rapid succession where like i'd have like a full arc and then it would and then it would end and then it would keep going into a different one and it would end that's i remember that feeling and being like i don't know if i have it i don't know if i have another beginning arc in me right now uh but i liked it i'd like the the way it looked i liked the soundscape i thought the combat was fucking cool um so i liked 16 quite a quite a bit i liked final fantasy 7 remake i i played rebirth pretty deeply.

4:38:50I was like 100 %ing locations in that game, which is not something that I anticipated myself doing when I started. So I like Final Fantasy, but I've never been the key demographic of people to have a say in where it goes or what it should do. I do think that the most perplexing thing regardless is role-playing games are bigger than ever. Japanese role-playing games seem to be bigger than ever. I mean, there's definitely more of you. I've been playing them since the early 90s that there's a more ubiquitous love for JRPGs than ever. Whether it's not just Square Enix, it's a bunch of other studios now too.

4:39:24Neon Falcom and obviously Bandai Namco and others. So there is something about Final Fantasy. I just don't know. I'm maybe blind to it. It's always kind of been part of my gaming life. So I can't see it for what it is, I guess, at this point. Even though there are entries that I like and entries that I don't. I find there to be massive inconsistency with things like with the love of 10 and 15 specifically where I'm like, you like this. which is really different than Final Fantasy. And then you didn't like the Final Fantasy that kind of reverted to the old spirit of Final Fantasy. You didn't like because it was too different.

4:39:59It doesn't even make any sense. The hell is everyone talking about? Thank you for writing in. PhoenixDown711 wrote in and said, look fat. A very common criticism of the Pokemon series is that it doesn't change or progress enough. Progress. And as a big fan of the series, I agree. However, I often see fans of Dragon Quest rejoice in the game, keeping a simple tried and true formula. I can see both sides of this, but I can't help but feel like that there's a double standard here. My question is this, is there a series you like that you wish would stay the same format forever or vice versa? A series that you think needs to innovate?

4:40:31Keep respecting that chicken. We can talk about that part if you want, but I wanted to speak about Dragon Quest specifically, Phoenix Down in that. I think you're kind of talking about apples and oranges. Dragon Quest began 40 years ago, and there are 11 of them.

4:40:52And by the way, there's been for this millennium. So I think the lack of change is only heightened by the re-releases of the Dragon Quest games that make it seem like these games are coming out on top of one another when in reality, they're not, or they didn't. They did in the beginning. I also think that there's a major differentiation between the Dragon Quest games, though they i think what you're conflating in my opinion is the idea of something being traditional and it's staying the same and those are two different things in my opinion dragon quest remains consistent and does stay the same in many different ways it has a lot of um elements that are drawn throughout the games whether it's enemies or items or worlds and so on and so forth but um pokemon began 12 or 13 years after well actually really more like 10 or 11 years in japan after Dragon Quest and has way more games.

4:41:46And I think that the thing that bothers me about it the most, I think it's just that it's so much bigger than Dragon Quest, which is fine. I think that's great. Pokemon is another example of the role-playing game, ever-present role-playing game fandom. But it demands its sales heights and its fandom, I wish demanded more out of the games themselves. And I always long and hope to see, not that I'm going to play because I'm well over Pokemon at this point, but just to see a triple a pokemon game like a real one not not whatever they're making now which is not and they're all the same and by the way there are so many pokemon now i can't even oh my god mike is playing poketopia poke pokeopia and i've been watching her play it and uh she's playing tamadachi life or whatever it's called now is that what it's called oh yeah oh tamadachi life yeah it's it's perverse um but i was watching her play and she's like oh who is this pokemon sometimes i would know because of my old days but then like i'm like i don't even know man like there are just so many pokemon it's all very trite at this point but man it does feed into that that ocd of the characters and knowing the characters and they're numbered and they got their skills and all i was a little kid if i was a perpetual child which in some ways i am I would probably be into it and that reminds me of Christian and I wanted to ask you this earlier Dustin I saw Gino Samuel is just doing everything again I saw that and I wish I knew more about it but I don't I don't know if it's a remastered version my other theory when I saw it pop up on my YouTube was is it on a new channel because his previous channel was demonetized oh is that And so he's trying to make some scratch off of it.

4:43:37You know, I don't know. Yeah, maybe don't act like you're not fucking interested. You are. You know more than than me. I don't. I certainly don't at this point. I have seen you vomit Christian information. No, but this poor unsuspecting listener at a hotel lobby at one in the morning. Maybe not that late, but it's not. It's not that this is happening. It's just that the idea of like the idea that we're getting a Christian documentary remaster is hysterical to me because it's just like brother like, oh my God. Christian documentary remake definitive edition. Yeah, it's he doesn't really explain it in the in the chat or in the description says this is the new remastered version of my attempt at making a documentary showcasing the life of Christian Christine Weston Chandler as comprehensively, entertainingly as possible.

4:44:32I listened to the first part of it, but I wasn't, I was confused at what it was. I don't know, man. Because my assumption was that it's like, it's like how every generation has like new histories written about like the Civil War and like the revolution because there's like new interpretations and new, you know, and stuff like that. But it's usually not done by the same author, you know, like another generation will pick up and do his own documentary and it'll have different information in it. I like the, we got we really got a Christian documentary remaster before GTA 6. Yeah, indeed. It's listen, Gino Samuel.

4:45:10What he did was amazing. Questionable. Very questionable for someone to make that. Yes, but I'll allow it. To make it again. We're reaching uncharted territory here now. What made him this way? What is the attraction? What keeps us fascinated?

4:45:36So good. Underrated Gino Samuel impression. Oh, thank you. I, again, I'm disturbed by it because I was listening to, I actually stopped and showed it to Mike a certain times. I'm like, dude, he went to the middle school, like the middle school down the street. He like went to the local high school. he they say chesterfield county over and over and over again i'm like this is so weird like it's so weird nothing happens here you were this place isn't notable for anything you were pulled there by a force greater than yourself i think so i think colin when i when i come to your house next we're gonna have to do christian sightseeing tour yeah we'll go to providence middle school that's where he went i think right we'll go to uh manchester high school he went to i think Is it called the fun spot?

4:46:24He should do like a Kramer bus reality tour. You know what I mean? Right, right. It's good shit. Put his pizza bagel on a cinnamon raisin or pizza on a cinnamon raisin bagel. I'll always love that. Oh, my God. So gross. What is the what is the fascination? Maybe it's called the game place. There's like the iconic store that he got kicked out of and they had to call the police. Yeah, we'll go. We'll definitely do it. We can do a whole tour. It'll be fun. the game place. I wonder if it's still, oh, it's closed in 2011. It's been a while. Oh, wait until close. Wait, maybe not 20. It's, I think it's closed though.

4:47:02Too bad. All right, let's just move on. Inspector dong flashes badge at me, wrote in said, good day, sacred overlords. I started developing my own game with the Godot engine and have had a blast learning the mechanics of game design and programming. Being a musician, I am also recording the music, but the art assets have been coming strictly through communicating with AI. the architecture and code are all coming from yours truly but the idea the games but the idea that games can now be developed by individuals without graphic design or art backgrounds has for better or worse enabled a new group of amateur game developers and hobbyists to create fully fleshed out game worlds which much of the discourse around ai surrounding triple a games what do you think of the encroaching indie flood of games coming from us little guys appreciate your time and thank you for reading i hate it but can't do it man okay i mean but but to each their own i listen i more power to you i mean do you want man good luck i mean i'm not going to stop you but it's what I said to Jaffy when we had this conversation last the same conversation we have over and over again about AI which is um I don't want to see art from people who can't make it I don't know what else you want me to say I don't care the most the the upsetting thing about it It isn't even like, because to me, it, it allows, how should I put this?

4:48:18It allows for like a reinforced laziness in some way, because like how many, how many creative teams, right? Exist because like X person is really good at this and they sought someone out who was really good at this. Right, right, right. And they sought someone else who was really good at that. and then a team formed and then suddenly you have like you know the cohen brothers and or you have like you know like uh i don't know a band you know what i mean like at a certain point like and and and who's to say even that you couldn't be good at something because you've ultimately just decided well it's easier to do this it's easier to kind of offload the effort that's what i lament most about a lot of this is that like it's convincing people that they don't need other people it's i in a time where i think like you need we need to be less isolationist and not more not broadly globally or whatever i'm just saying like interpersonally i think it fosters like this this this really weird idea of just like no i can do everything it's like you can't the pull yourself up by the bootstraps is like that's like ironic you know like you need people around you bro like you need help like everybody does and so like i don't like the idea that somebody might be kind of good at drawing but they're like nah you know what i'm not going to nurture this talent at all because i'll just have an ai do it or or i can't draw and i'm not going to find someone who can and build like a good partnership with them because i could just have an ai do it i think it just it robs a lot from the field that isn't just strictly like just the the jet the generic argument about like ai like you know you know offloading creativity it's not just offloading creativity it's you're selling yourself short you're selling your potential collaborative future short I just think it's there's no shortage of people wanting to do this with skills that they have and the last thing we need especially now is just slop from anybody who can just throw a prompt together like I don't know man like it's cool that you're learning Godot it's cool that you're learning that stuff because you're you're actually doing the stuff um that i find tedious the programming and although i'm actually trying to dabble into programming now um friend of mine's kind of helping me with it but like that's the part that i have i struggle with i'm really good at like building stuff in a game engine i just i have no idea how to implement it or make it work um but when i fuck around with that stuff i work with people i i do it with people who do and it's interesting because you learn from each other that way i don't know if you learn much from ai doing everything for you and that bums me out because it's just a lack of curiosity and a lack of like desire to learn and it's just like it's reinforcing all the worst things about people i think and i just i don't like it yeah i'm um i'm of the same mind that's a great that's a great point though of like the the the lack of humanity and interest in interconnectivity and all the rest and people trying to seek easier, less social roots, which is good because I was thinking the same thing when I was reading his stuff where it's like, yeah, you're doing in my, in my opinion.

4:51:37Now, a lot of people would differ of this, of course, because I'm much more of a humanities, like right brain person, I guess, but it's like you're doing the hard part. You're doing the exotic part that I would never in a million years attempt. Never. So now you have to seek out people like me now and good at different humanities of course to make your art for you why would you put so much personal work into something to to muddy it with bullshit it you're doing like hey i don't know i don't understand that i would like to see you try to find an artist to work with yeah and work with other people and it's weird because it's just like oh i don't want to work with anybody it's like okay so you want to work with everybody at once filtered through like a you know what i mean like that's that's what ai is you're working with everybody but without and then it's just like it's it's completely there's no personality i don't know man i get we're old and like uh you know the younger generation is going to grow up in a world with ai art and they're just not going to think twice about it and uh that's sad as well i don't know man i don't like the isolationism that comes from it man it's just i think it's not good yeah i mean you're absolutely right socially it's it's very deleterious i think a big thing for me though is just like i don't want to hear music from an ai i don't want to read a book that ai wrote i don't want to play a game that was made by it's just it's just my own personal consuming preference but obviously people will speak differently and obviously there i i get i think tangentially on youtube like sometimes i'm recommended like book tube shit i'm not really in that space but every once in a while like a video will come up i'll watch it and there's like people like trying already trying to figure out like you know there are books out there that people are dead ass like they're like hey i absolutely wrote this book like no way to prove it i guess or whatever and i'm like yeah why would you want to read something that some fucking computer wrote i just don't i don't know what people don't get about that it's it's a totally a fight worth having i don't know that i'll yeah i don't know that i give a shit if i win or lose too because i always think there'll be games for me so i don't think that like it's gonna like eat everything what were you gonna say i well i think there's the idea of just like well other people people have experience it like if for a book for example right it's like uh oh well sometimes people have stories and they're not good at communicating and it doesn't mean they don't have a story worth telling they're still storytellers because they have a story to tell and if they can get better with ai then like why shouldn't they and and to me it's just like well then you're not a story you're a story haver yeah you're not a storyteller you're a story uh you're a story like uh i don't know you have stories but i don't know man get better or you can't communicate or work with someone who's good at it i don't know like i don't know i don't give a shit like to me i just um i don't like movies because they're entertaining or because they're movies like the only reason i got into film at all is because i I started seeing like behind the scenes stuff and like the director commentaries and like Spider-Man 2.

4:54:38I remember being like an eye opening movie for me, not just because it was it was cool and it was like my favorite hero or whatever. But like I remember looking at behind the scenes and how they built the they built the tentacles like and they were practical and they had like puppeteers and they had them like moving it in real time personality, like in real time on screen and like all this stuff, like all of that is so fascinating to me to the point where like without that movies have no value. And I get that that's subjective. like somebody else might look at it um like an automaton or like it's like oh i just want the end result and it's just like well why do anything then the end result of life is you die so why not just kill yourself right now actually like it's just like what like i'm serious i'm so serious if if the point isn't what you do to get there then why why are you even here yeah i don't get it i really don't get it i think fundamentally like logically it's fucking stupid but you're i mean your logic is is completely right please don't hurt yourselves out there but your logic is completely yeah don't i don't that wasn't like me telling you i'm just saying i mean people are but crazy but you're yeah you're right like i i don't i mean this is the argument i have all the time i i just want to retain my humanity like and i i want to enjoy every species sleeps and eats and procreates and like, like we are, we are unique.

4:56:00We're, we're conscious, you know, like it's, it's don't throw it all away. And it's getting so much deeper than the message was saying, but like, it's like, so as an indie game developer, am I excited to see your game on the market? No. And, and frankly, I hope you're, if you, if people are releasing games with AI littered all over them i hope they get destroyed on the market um as we've said in recent weeks sony has been unusually aggressive recently and getting rid of entire catalogs of like these these shovelware developers games off of psn and i think this is good and not quite the same thing of course but similar it's like it like again i'll just reiterate if you have an idea for a painting but can't paint it um too bad go learn how to paint i don't know how to paint i i could see all sorts of beautiful images in my mind.

4:56:47I can't replicate them with a, with a paintbrush and a palette because I'm not a fucking painter and I would never assume to be a painter and I would never assume to try to paint something and then sell it to you or put it into something I, I'm, I can write. So that's what I do. That's how I contribute. Right. Uh, I would say this, and I'm a little bit more lenient too. Like I actually don't mind if it, like, if, if, if you are like, let's say you have like, you're trying to build a game and you're just trying to practice and you're trying to figure stuff out and you're not an artist and you're not even, necessarily sure if you want to even pursue this long term if you want to use ai art or whatever as like a hobbyist and you're you're the programming guy just to see if you can put stuff together fucking cool like whatever like that's fine like that's actually like a perfectly like reasonable thing to me like i i think it's i think it's still a little bit deleterious just because of the amount of power that it uses and it's like kind of inefficient but like whatever that's like that's a lot of things google uses more power than i would like it to but i think the second you start taking it seriously and you start wanting to like you know bring it outward I'm just like, I don't know, man, like maybe it can work as like temp stuff being like, hey, I can't do art.

4:57:50I'm a programming guy. This is what I have running. All this is AI. I was hoping to look for like, you know, put it out there and be like, I'm looking for X, Y and Z type of person to kind of help flush this out in a way that isn't, you know, completely stolen. and you know like I think that's that's fine also like my feeling is that like the end result I just don't want or the or in the project in building it you know in building it like for real I would prefer knowing I be there but we're older we're undoubtedly going to be the minority at some point so good luck to you I guess yeah it's I don't want to it's a part i think i i think i'm inherently a fairly kind person so i don't like to like shit on people or shit on their things or whatever i just yeah of course i have a problem with well it's not his thing that's the thing right well right exactly it's like i just think it's it's preposterous it's it's how i feel about jaffe always argues like well they have this idea and they can't they can't get it on paper they don't know how to do it's like fucking too bad man find some like like yeah like you gotta that's what creativity is that's what art is that's why when Da Vinci was, you know, walking around 500 years ago or 600 years ago painting the shit he was, everyone was like, whoa.

4:59:09Like, how did you how do you know how to do that? How impressive? You know, that's what it's all about. In my opinion, I mean, I don't know how else to possibly interpret it. Do you have anything you want to add, Dustin, or we should we move on? No. Nashville Nibbler wrote in and said, what's up, Judds, as part of the physical Games Defense Force, and you'll be able to sound off on this much more, Dustin. I see an alarming pattern with recent physical releases. Both Pocopia and Resident Evil Requiem are sold out practically everywhere here in Sweden, which is starkly different from past years, where I was able to just waltz into a store on a launch day and comfortably find a copy.

4:59:43Is this some sort of scheme to force customers towards digital games, or did the publishers really underestimate the demand for these multi-million dollar selling franchises? I think it's probably both, to be honest. you have to understand that if they overprint there's a real diminishing return on the digital storefronts we talk about it all the time right like sony controls the price of the game much more staunchly as an example if you only make enough yote copies to satiate a certain level of physical demand and then you can dominate the digital pricing forever but if you make too many copies and then they sit there then you're going to have this copy that you sold that's undercutting the price that you could sell a new digital copy at.

5:00:26And I think that that has a lot to do with it, too. They don't want you to buy these games. No, they want you to buy it on their store where they have 100 % control all the time. Yes. So hail the digital future. I don't know how to solve for this problem. I wonder, we were talking about pre-orders earlier and I think I was talking recently about, oh, we were talking about our games and pre-ordering and then how difficult that would be. I wonder if like some of the bigger companies could do it that way. being like, we're going to make enough copies to satiate initial demand at Best Buy and Target.

5:00:59But we're also going to sell from PlayStation director from Nintendo. Like we'll, we'll like you buy from us in this period and you'll definitely get a copy, no doubt. And I wonder if that's now that's putting kind of a gun to people's head because they're going to have to make decisions before the game comes out. Or you do these special runs later when people are secure in the knowledge that they actually want the game. But I don't know how else you get around this. And I think they are trying to squeeze both sides, especially because I think they're realizing more and more that they don't really need their retail partners as much as they used to.

5:01:30So they can kind of start squeezing them. And by the way, Nintendo's doing the same thing with the pricing of that Switch stuff, which people, again, got to have a little more knowledge of the market because Vita did that. People are acting like this is a new thing, but I'm like, Vita did that. Vita made the digital games cheaper than the physical games to try to encourage you to buy them. So what are your thoughts here on this, Dustin? I think it is both that they are having a hard time figuring out what the demand of certain physical games are. A game like Resident Evil, people for some reason went out and really wanted it physical.

5:02:07Pocopia is a no-brainer to me because it is a Pokemon game on Switch where physical is still very much alive. but absolutely these companies want to want to push you off physical so they can uh control the entire end-to-end market of the game and so that's the thing with like switch and you know they're saying it's like oh it's well the it's not that the the price of the physical is going up it's that the price of the digital is going down and i'm like hmm okay yeah we'll see you can put it that way yeah when we put it that way as the first but from the comp the first company to sell a game at 80 i don't believe you um and so yeah it's like they this is a move that it's like oh well we don't why would you buy the physical it's ten dollars more expensive and you know i get it money games are expensive uh push people off put them on to digital and then you're like you you're more likely to get a deal on a Nintendo game physical than digital.

5:03:15I would say overall or used copy and the publishers, the, the platform orders hate used copies. So they'll make anything. So what if they can just eliminate from that, from the equation and slowly push you off? So there's no other competition, but their store enjoy it. They've been very fair to us so far. so much bitterness but i understand i understand again i'm not saying i'm not saying just one or the other I'm saying that I want a healthy market for both in order to keep balance. Yeah, I think I don't. I really truly believe that they're just the physical games market won't go away entirely because there will always be money to be made there.

5:04:04It'll be incumbent on the hardware manufacturers to turn it off because there's always going to be even if GameStop goes away completely and people stop selling physical games, there's always going to be a limited run games. There's always going to be an East Asia soft or whatever. So I just don't I just I personally think they're going to start jacking the prices up on physical media and obviously the ps6 will not come with a disc drive you will buy it separately yeah i think nintendo has maybe a little bit of an excuse not that i want to give them one but i though they're the only ones producing games on cartridges and being that while while the nintendo switch doesn't have a ram chip in it the memory shortage covers everything whether it's RAM or if it's like SSD covers all that and so I'm sure the prices on their Switch cartridges are is going up and it's already significantly more expensive because those chips a Switch 2 cartridge is not the same as a Switch 1 cartridge in terms of the speed and also a lot of the games requiring a lot more size so I think there is probably some element where they're like man we are uh getting fucked with these cartridges and it really sucks so i get that but i think the other things can also be true that they want to get you off uh physical oh they want to get me off all right oh yeah pine cone steve we were going to go to you next but we kind of answered your inquiry earlier this is what i was referring to because he talks about bungee kind of saving naughty dog from itself with the last of us we went into that too deeply i wish i remembered because i would have read your inquiry at that time but too bad pine cone steve back into the woods you go we end the show instead with steven b who says hey guys i've been listening to for i've been listening for about six months now so i finally decided to join the patreon and this is my first time writing and welcome steven b just wanted to say ever since i heard about you guys i've been hooked on all of your shows and they really help make the time fly while i'm at work with that thank you with that out of the way i am currently 80 hours into my witcher 3 playthrough i've beat the main game hearts of stone and i am now in the middle of blood and wine i've loved every second of it so far with the game turning 11 in a couple of months in those lingering rumors regarding a mysterious new expansion coming to the game do you guys personally think these rumors actually hold any weight if so do you think it will interest you enough to make you want to come back to this behemoth of a game thanks for all that you guys do you all seriously help make me a day better thank you steven you're very kind yeah um i think that there is serious weight if not an almost guaranteed weight to those rumors mostly because they come from polish websites as far as I understand and they would have the best knowledge of their home market so it's not to say people can't make shit up there but we we've cited some of those Polish websites about other things in the past and I think they have a good idea and and and we've talked about in the past too we brought it up Borderlands 2 getting that DLC so many years later after it came out to connect it to Borderlands 3 I thought was really cool ironically I dig so I either like almost the idea of day one or very quick DLC, which people don't like.

5:07:00Mass Effect famously had that and other things like people don't like that. But the idea that like if you like a game enough, here's like some expansions to buy. Fallout 3 did it very similarly where I think came out in October and then the DLC started rolling out in January and there was something every month. So that by May, I think it was over. If you wait too long, then I'm not interested anymore. But if you wait a really long time, then I can actually replay the entire thing again to prepare myself for something else, especially if they're doing this to kind of bridge the game to Witcher 4, which is my assumption that that is what they're doing.

5:07:31So I feel like maybe I would just get back into. I never beat The Witcher 3 and I liked it. It was cool. And it really is old now. It's funny, like it came out in 2015. It is not a new. It came out around this time of year. So it is 11 years old almost to the month. I remember it very well. So I kind of am interested in going back and re-experiencing it. Mike is a huge Witcher fan. She loves the books, all the expanded lore. She obviously loves the games and all the rest. So I would like to get into it more for her as well. But there's no way. I know Witcher 3 is kind of a standalone thing in that that was when the game became a phenomenon.

5:08:08Like it sold orders of magnitude more than the other Witcher games combined ever did. But I kind of feel like a loser having played and never. I don't really even know about the Witcher 1 or 2. And Witcher 1 especially is quite inaccessible. But those games were only released as you guys recall those were xbox games or at least the second one was and second one i know aren't they remaking the first one wasn't there a rumor about that or something like that that sounds right i feel like i remember that being a thing that people were talking about i don't know i don't know how true that is anymore yeah so i'm open to it i wanted to just throw that there i'm totally open to it uh which are three chris 10 years 11 years old yeah very interesting what do you think will you play its expansion if it comes out i think i might because like that's a game that i've spent a lot of time like i've talked about it before where like i've tried on multiple occasions to get into the witcher um because i just knew that it was good and i knew that i liked something about it but it could never hold my attention that deeply and i think when the show came out and i was a little bit more ingratiated into the universe or whatever or some some version of that universe i played it and i put about 30 hours into it and i liked it like i i liked my time with it it's just like other things were happening and even at that time the game was pretty old so like there were just newer things that demanded my attention more but like i i have a romantic notion about that game about going back and like properly getting into it and properly finishing it because it is like a big game that i did enjoy so i don't know i think i think i'm with you though i like i love the idea of like super late like what the fuck like really like 10 years later you're putting out like an expansion pass kingdoms of amelor a similar thing which was cool i i think that that's yeah that's that's cool it reminds me of world of warcraft like i think it's kind of cool i don't know i don't know all about it but i'm pretty sure you can play almost all of world of warcraft still right like all of it um going back to yeah and that's and they're still releasing content the game came out in 2005 it's 21 years old it's like it's crazy i love that level of support dustin will you go and swing swords and in euro jank fashion no three no no i i thought witcher three was cool i never finished it i got really far into the campaign the third time i attempted to play it i i like it i don't love it but to answer the question if they went and made a dlc now for bloodborne or something you know i oh yeah i'd be so pumped for that so i totally get it for what your fans that like this would be you know super exciting even if there is a new game on the horizon to go back have something new for that game that honestly i mean at this point being as old as it could be considered nostalgic you know imagine maybe if you're you were 15 when the witcher 3 came out and now you're a full man you're just a grown back you're not a little boy no more you're not a little boy playing that witcher you're playing that witcher you're a big you're a grown man you're a grown ass man you'll be playing that borderlands you playing that marathon and i'm gonna tell you borderless

5:11:22um yeah i i you know there's something you were talking about nostalgia but there's something about using old saves too um about reigniting a 10 year old save and going back in and being back in that place again in your life. I love that kind of shit. It's what I love about trophies. That's one of the things I love is going to look at the timestamps. I was looking at that with Returnal and trying to remember when I played it in that era, that spring 2021. It's like, yeah, okay, so what was going on in 2021? There's something sad about it. Something melancholy about it, which I dig. It goes around every once in a while on social media for years.

5:11:57The picture of the guy who was saying he was playing his deceased brother's ghost in Mario Kart or something. That is so there's something so so specific to games really that's so interesting about playing with some representation of the person i love that very eerie anyway my boys that was it that was a nice long girthy episode of the show yeah and a lot of fun and good to be with you guys let's go around the horn and say goodbye to everyone chris goodbye to you be well um what's on your agenda uh gonna go get groceries gonna clean up a little bit and then it's uh cryo tonight with some uh probably uh john pork yeah some other some other people um don't work say oh yeah for sure so i'm excited to jump into that but that's that's probably for later and then Resident Evil.

5:13:02I usually like kind of cap the night off with some Resident Evil. Cool. But slow day. Sounds perfect. Dustin, goodbye to you. Be well. Any plans you'd like to share with us today? No plans. I am. Chris, I would I would like to do another marathon stream on Last Stand. Maybe the move because we talked about this lately, Colin. Maybe the move is to do a Friday stream of Cryo Archive. Yeah, that'd be cool. we call it the return of john pork yeah sure we can do that just have to coordinate chris you'll need to coordinate with him yeah yeah i can do that because i want it here's should i have my first cryo archive experience be on the stream or should i try it this weekend um i don't i think you should try it this weekend there's too much on the line i'll probably try it this week there's too much there's too much too much pressure on the stream like we will yeah like there's a lot to learn it's it's not that much but it's it's a lot to learn like when you have to like when you also have to be on dude i don't know how to get in the pinwheel yet okay this is how far behind i am so i've been we were in the pinwheel on our stream but yeah so there's various ways but uh but yeah yeah we'll we'll we'll spool something up it's uh cry archive is gonna be that's a fun yeah we'll see how it goes i'm hoping to clear it at the very least because i do want a little bit more experience before i i can't have john pork doing all yeah you can't have like getting me and dustin you know we gotta have at least yeah at least two people who somewhat know what the fuck's going on yeah uh and john pork is he's a decorated veteran he is of tau setty Tau Ceti campaign alright my boys yeah that sounds good let me know when you guys want to do that I'm totally amenable to that we'll be on sacred streaming on this Monday so the day this goes live for everyone we'll be on YouTube doing sacred league like I said I want to stream Returnal at some point to prepare for Saros and we'll do a bunch of other stuff we'll have Jaffe back on I'm sure at some point in the future as well but for me I think it's 80 degrees I think I'm gonna go for a walk with the dogs and then work out eat dinner and then I guess play Returnal nice back into that i gotta really sit down and figure this out because it's frustrating me like i'm like i ran around the crimson crimson waste like a dozen times last night like looking for this thing where the fuck is this thing so i know i just gotta i gotta just do the i gotta grin and bear it i there also is that like secret ending where you have to go through the house a bunch of times and then there's like a third act i never did any of that um so yeah i don't know there's some things that i have to do like to get the real ending i guess all right my friends well be well good to see you guys as always and good to see all of you out there and be with you out there.

5:15:50Thank you for joining us. Patreon.com slash Last Stand Media for early ad free access. Last Stand Media dot store. We'll see you next time for more. Until then. Goodbye. See ya. Take care, guys. Sacred Symbols, a PlayStation podcast, is a product and trademark of Last Stand Media and Colin's Last Stand LLC and is proudly recorded in the USA. The show was conceived by, is written by, and is directed by me, Colin Moriarty. My co-hosts are Chris Raygun Maldonado and Dustin Furman. The show is produced by executive producer Dustin Furman. All of Last Stand's theme music is by my best friend, Ramon Narvaez.

5:16:26As 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 Akire, Anthony Vazquez, Anton K, Antonio C, Asak Paredes, Austin Riley, Betty Ann Moriarty, Bjorn Campbell, Blackjack, Boots, Brad Cooley, Brad Lohman, Brandon Runiger, 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.

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