#410 | The PR Transmissions Will Resume

21:04Dustin Furman:Really, really proud of how it's doing, and we appreciate everyone's support. Clark Petri wrote in and said, Colin, how did it feel to come back to your roots writing the trophy guide for Saintslayer? Any comments on the process with PSN profiles? Even though I only have 30 minutes in the game, I'm glad I have your guide waiting for me when I get back to it. The podcasts are great, but as someone who has taken to consuming your writing for many years, it's always refreshing to find some Colin Penmanship. Take care. thank you that's very kind of you yeah so i wrote a i wrote the official psn profiles trophy guide for my own game it might be a for it might be the uh first time that's ever happened i don't really know um but you guys can go check that out on psn profiles if you'd like very proud of it have you guys seen it i'll put it here in the chat for you in case you haven't seen it uh unnecessary amount of time it took me to do this really really unnecessary amount of time and it took so long to publish it it took almost two weeks for them to publish it because you know it's like a you know that they don't it's like a volunteer thing where they have to read it and scan it or you know do all this kind of stuff make sure it's good so i like kind of broke my ass getting this done for a launch but it didn't even really go up for launch but there it is nonetheless and it's good to be uh it's good to be here with this guide and um back in the back in the fold for the first time since 2010 with my first strategy guide so thank you for that thank Thank you for noticing.

22:22All right.

22:23Dustin Furman:Let's get into some topics of discussion, then we'll get in the news. But we'll we'll touch base with a couple of things that happened last week, starting with Alicia H said, hi, sacred crew. I'm writing in to close the loop on the misconnection inquiry last week from a listener named Justin, who said that the girl sitting next to him on a flight was listening to sacred symbols. I can confirm that he was telling the truth as that was indeed me. Funnily enough, I also noticed that he was a listener and hesitated to say anything. I saw Sacred listed in his YouTube feed, among other videos, but I hesitated to speak up as I was worried he might be offended that I looked over at his phone.

22:54Dustin Furman:Though we all do it, don't we? While I know Colin joked about Justin missing his chance, I can confirm I am in a long-term relationship, and I believe I saw a ring on his finger as well. Regardless, I'll never pass on the opportunity to make a new friend, especially when we both share an appreciation for video games. I'm following up in the Sacred Symbols Discord after posting this comment, so if Justin is down to connect, he can find me over there. To my fellow listeners, let this be a lesson to never hesitate to say hi to another member of our community if you come across them in the wild. odds are they are just as friendly and willing to spark a conversation about our favorite hobby so there you go um yeah now i don't never say never this show brings people together but it's also known for um bring tearing people apart right just because justin had a ring on his finger doesn't mean that this show won't be responsible for his divorce um and then maybe you'll find your way to each other after that you know no big deal right no big deal it's a little have a little aerial liaison at 40 ,000 feet.

23:52Dustin Furman:Goodness.

23:56Colin Moriarty:So she's part of the 3 % then, right? Is it one or 3 %?

23:59Dustin Furman:I think it's 3%, something like that. Yeah. Yeah. There are dozens of women that listen to this show. Dozens. There are probably, I mean, based on the numbers, I guess there would be hundreds. Right. Oh, I mean, it's not nothing. No. I mean, it might even be, I mean, like, hundreds might even be underselling it too. You know? Between audio and video, Patreon and free feeds, we probably, like I say, it's like an NFL stadium. It's like, depending on the week, it could be 50, 60, 70 ,000 people or more. So if 3 % of them, that would be like a couple thousand, I guess, of women listening. so alicia is one of many but we don't we don't hear from them too often which is fine i don't blame you um but don't under look don't underestimate the power of this of this show to get you divorced lickety split sure yeah now i'm on our youtube analytics page for the last 365

25:01Colin Moriarty:days the percent audience that is female 1.2 1.2 this is youtube youtube okay cool so that's that's gonna that's how many people are watching maybe they're they're on their wife's account

25:14Dustin Furman:right you know on the tv or something but how many wives are watching on their husband's account or how many wives are hostage to the conversation right right right many oh many yeah you have to take that into account it's like taking like individual it's like how how many people tuned in to watch the like a halftime show or something it's like that's easily like 10 people per screen you know in a lot of cases so who knows although you'd be a psycho to put this on for a group of

25:44Colin Moriarty:people these uh these demographics are i always forget about them and then i go and look at them i'm like wow this is interesting would you like some more stats colin yeah sure sure okay ages 13 to 17 years old 0.1 percent yeah we're not popular among the kids no doubt 18 to 24 3.4 percent And then here's our made audience, 25 to 34 years old at 47%.

26:09Dustin Furman:Yeah, those are our people.

26:11Colin Moriarty:Then the next step, 35 to 44 years, 39.9%.

26:15Dustin Furman:Yeah. So we have the older, we have an older crowd, which is good. I don't, what am I going to say to an 18 year old about a video game? I'm not even playing the games they're playing. Yeah. They're a bunch of losers anyway. They're playing fucking Roblox. and uh zenla zone zero and shit like that what am i supposed to say about that genshin impact genshin impact there's that new one too right there's a new one that just came out do you know what it is dustin it's not it's uh they just reviewed it on push square let me see if we can find it oh this game mixtape is getting really oh nte do you know i've not even heard of that i've never heard of that i did see me neverness to everness it's called

27:00Dustin Furman:neverness to everness are you serious what's one of the most played games on psn profiles right now so it's doing it's doing well with the playstation peeps gonna lose my fucking mind yeah neverness to everness is the third most played game on psn profiles right now saros and pragmata are the only ones ahead it goes saros pragmata neverness to everness hades to Diablo 4.

27:24Dustin Furman:Truly bewildering, man. That's good shit. Love that. Neverness to everness. It's no infinite undiscovery, but it's close. Yeah. Dude, if you open,

27:34Colin Moriarty:so I went to Google and I searched the sponsored result at the top. You click it and the first thing it says, get 120 plus free pools. Yep.

27:43Dustin Furman:Get the first S class.

27:45Colin Moriarty:It's the first thing it tells you on that website. Look forward to your 120 plus free pools.

27:50Dustin Furman:It looks just like engine impact from me, from my uneducated point of view. But it's supposed to be pretty good if you're into that fucking, and if you're into that trash.

28:03Dustin Furman:All right. Alicia, good to hear from you. Hopefully you guys connect and become friends. That would be great. Yeah. Trent Miller wrote in and said, hello, voices in my head. Our wife and I are excited, I'm sorry, to be welcoming a baby boy into the gamer battalion coming this October. Colin will you be available for another naming ceremony. I give you permission to do the whole Lion King spectacle on top of Pride Rock if you so desire. Currently we've been referring to the baby as little Colin or little little they're right little Colin. Dustin and Chris have come back out the offers extended to you and you can take his place where the naming duties will be bestowed to you.

28:37Dustin Furman:Thank you for writing in. I don't know what I want to do here because I have I have my I've kind of had my hands full with with Dustin's kid. It's hard enough to come up with a name for this child. So I'm going to let you guys pick the name for Trent's child. The last name Miller. Miller Miller.

28:57Dustin Furman:You guys don't have to. We can figure it out later. It's not a huge deal. I just I don't have a good answer because I'm my mind focused fully on the Furman boy. Right, right. You've got to pick it. You want a unique name. You know, you want something that's going to stand out. It's going to be like, oh, he's going to a natural leader. maybe smunt how about that how about name your name your kids smunt smunt miller sounds like a viking name sounds vaguely like a slur like something that you're not allowed to say i like it oh well i mean i always gotta say that i gotta bleed that sorry it's youtube guys i'm

29:40Colin Moriarty:not trying to protect you guys from the word that everyone knows but it will get us we will

29:46Dustin Furman:lose you money on youtube has been shady for a lot of people lately like people are just getting demonetized and like no what's oh what else is new yeah i just don't understand how they can get away with it i know that there's probably like some sort of tos and a yula like that lets them do whatever they want but it's like you can't just like have people making a living on a youtube channel and then suddenly they can't make money on it and they can't talk to anyone it is it's kind of fucked up when you think it's like fucked up to do that to someone yeah and they just don't they do not give a shit it's correct like youtube doesn't care they don't care and that bothers the fuck out of me you know so it's good it's good to play by the rules i don't want to have any problems with these people either because i was thinking about it like what would happen if we got demonetized right we would i mean that would suck we would survive because of patreon but it's like that would obviously cut into our money a little bit i'm like could you sue them like if you wanted to pay for the lawyers and stuff like could you present can you be like what is this and then would they just come back and be like we can really just arbitrarily do whatever we want there's nothing to be sued over you know it says it here they must have something in the eula then like a like because otherwise it would have happened already right it's right you would assume someone would serve them you know if that happened but i don't like that happening to people i don't like that i mean if you break a rule and you break rule even if you break a rule you should be warned and given a strike or whatever but like people that claim they've done nothing wrong are like yeah my shit's just not monetized anymore it's like either they're lying which is possible maybe they did something awful but i don't like it it's very uncertain it's not okay to do that i don't think what i don't understand is like the the strangeness of like how how the penalties and punishments are doled out because i swear to god i curse in a lot of videos almost like on purpose and with like very little care and it doesn't seem to really specifically correlate to any demonetization or anything like i kind of or at least it didn't when i was you know doing videos and so like i don't really understand what the what the rules of engagement are really like it kind of doesn't make it because i see people like doing the the newspeak thing where they you know like oh he he on a live yeah great you know what i mean grape that's the one you and i were like we can't take it he's a greatest uh grape in the mouth that whitest kids you know sketches such that's classic shit but but i'll i'll say just the words in a video and I won't get like a yellow ding so like I don't I don't know what data people are getting that that's what they have to do because it clearly isn't I remember there was like a thing where like in the first like 30 seconds of video you can't say it or something like that you can't say uh controversial stuff or whatever and then after that they don't care I don't know how true that is or if that was like a an assumption that was like widely just assumed to be true I don't know it just seems like there's no real consistency and there's no there's no actual rules there's just kind of like a vague idea of what you generally shouldn't shouldn't do and whether or not they affect you is kind of up in the air so yeah i agree yeah you and i have discussed this in the past where like i i've said heinous things on on these pot on these shows like yeah it can't just be that it's yeah there's got to be like more to it but you would think i understand youtube being largely algorithmic and ai driven behind the scenes but you have to have real people like that vet the the massive decisions you're making i understand a person can't vet every demonetized video like i get it like at some point like you can't hire enough people yeah there's so much shit going up but you like when you're saying like yeah this channel with a hundred thousand people we're just demonetizing it that's it no one's going to look at it no one's going to see it no one cares and i'm like you can't do that like you can't I just feel like you shouldn't be allowed to do that you know like at some point it's like YouTube's almost like a utility in some way I don't want to be too dramatic about it but you can kill a whole a person's whole earning potential it's why you need to you know it's it's why I and you and I've talked about this in the past we laugh about rumble and stuff but it's like I want rumble it's rumble's not gonna be the one but like I wanted them to do well because it's like there does need to be like some competitor that nips them in the bud a little bit you know like there should yeah there should be theoretically it's just so they're so impossibly big the um yeah i remember i was told uh by i can't remember if it was a youtube rep this is years ago that like the fact that my channel has gone in the name of it is is is a problem oh interesting that's interesting i was thinking like oh it's interesting i wonder what to i don't really know what to do about that but we'll see you gotta go by your birth name chris maldonado it's too long it's too long we have the same i have my name is longer than your name colin moriarty chris maldonado i mean you can go christopher and then you'd have an you have one yeah yeah that would be it yeah i don't know tofer tofer tofer miller dude it blew my mind when I found out like I remember I learned like in my adult life that Topher was like short for Christopher I had no idea growing up that that was a thing I don't think Topher Grace in Spider-Man 3 yeah that's the only one I know and then somebody was like oh yeah Chris so I think somebody was giving an interview where they were talking about like oh yeah me and Chris for like for the for that 70s show I'm like Chris fuck is Chris on that 70s show like Topher Grace that's funny yeah weird Topher tofa um god i was gonna oh you know what i here's another non sequitur for you have you guys ever had anything frozen off your body before no no i i had it for so i had i had a little bump on my my pinky i have a band-aid around it you probably won't be able to see it because it's it's kind of flesh colored but i went to the dermatologist because i had like this little bump on my inside of my pinky they're like it looks like maybe it's just a little wart or something so i thought they were gonna i people out there have been with me for a long time now i had skin cancer and i've had many things cut off me like cut off my face scooped out of me that kind of again again with this

36:14Dustin Furman:so but i never so i i went in and i was like all right obviously they're gonna remove it i thought for some reason they would just cut it off right right but they froze it and that shit hurts dude i i don't want to say i'm like i'm not like mr macho man or anything like obviously but there is people like when you go i get blood drawn or something like that like i'm not squeamish about that it doesn't really hurt me you know it's like a little pinch but like it's gonna hurt and then they do it or like you get a little and i'm always like whatever man you know but but this time you know i've gotten tattoos and i've broken bones and fucked up my body and i have massive scars on my hand from when I cut my hand open and all sorts of things happen to me.

36:56Dustin Furman:But so the woman got, she's like, she got that little, it's like a little, it almost looks like a whipped cream can or something. And, uh, she's like, all right, this is going to hurt. And I was like, I kind of just like, was like, all right. And then, and then she, and I was like, fuck, like, I was like, holy shit. You know, like, I'm like, and I said, I'm like, that really did hurt. And then she's like, yeah, we got to do it one more time. And then she did it. She did it again. and I was like oh my god and it was just this little it's just this little thing but it's literally freezing your body like giving you like basically you know just yeah I don't know dude I just wanted to throw that out there that I was like damn pain through cold is is wild it's a wild that's like when I woke up during like surgery for like that split second that I was like conscious and it was I just felt like immensely cold and then I passed out again this It's a weird feeling.

37:52I've never had anything frozen off me. I would imagine it's painful in a way that you're not prepared for because you've never experienced it. You know what I mean? So not only does it hurt, but it's also like a new sensation that you're not acclimated to. I think we're all acclimated to cuts. We can kind of understand what that would feel like probably. And it's not going to be good, but you can brace yourself for that. Freezing is crazy.

38:15Colin Moriarty:I find it interesting the nurse was straight up with you that it was going to hurt. because when I got I got a shot in my bad thumb I was like so what am I in for here and she's like oh it's it's uh not too bad and then about three seconds later it was the single most intense momentary pain I've ever had in my life yeah I was like ah I I don't know if maybe they're worried people chicken out if they're like yeah that's a tough and I'm like no no no I just I want to be mentally prepared like I'm gonna do it but you know I wasn't I wasn't ready for it maybe that was the right move I don't know though but she was straight up

38:51Dustin Furman:she said this is going to hurt that's between a rock and a hard place kind of situation yeah because it's like yeah what do you do you can be honest straight up or Mike and I were talking about it recently too like people well I don't really blame I've never gotten a tattoo big enough where I would need to be there for like 10 hours or whatever but people like just going under now and getting like the whole so if they're getting like a chest plate or whatever that's crazy they'll just they'll literally go under and just do it all at once and I'm like the interesting thing about that is like that sounds so painful like you're not absorbing any of it and letting it heal and then going back and getting it more like you're doing it all like this big thing on your chest or something like damn that's gonna hurt like fuck

39:30Colin Moriarty:you know that's gonna hurt like crazy well don't they have gel now that can numb like I think that they do yeah yeah oh do that I never got my tattoos with the with a gel I'll tell you that i mean mine was not done with a gel i think my mom most of her tattoos have not been done with the gel but there was one in like i don't know if it was like on a like sensitive part or arm like near armpit or something and they were like you should probably use the gel like you're gonna

39:59Dustin Furman:be glad you did i yeah that wasn't a thing like although i haven't gotten a tattoo since 2005 i guess or something like that so it's like what what but so it's obviously very different now but when i got join or die tattooed on my arm that when it got towards my elbow that was horrifying and when i got moriarty on my back the spine was horrifying i would imagine yeah horrifying bad place to get tattoos good thing i good thing i did it yeah the the wrist tattoo for me was like the the most painful one that i had but i only have two tattoos i never like went crazy with it yeah i i i've only gotten uh three and i don't think i will uh four technically but one of them is too like one of them I consider they're two pieces but it's really the same tattoo yeah the joiner diving my arms are too skinny to get it together that's why it's on my arm like that because it's supposed to be underneath it yeah and they're like no you're you're you're built like an eight-year-old girl you can't get your tattoo like this on here you have we have to figure out some other place for you to do it but I'm not I it's so funny like I got those tattoos when I was 18 19 and then and didn't give a fuck and now I'm like I overthink I'm 41 and I overthink everything where I'm like I don't know if I'll even get another tattoo because I can't commit to anything yeah I think about it sometimes I don't know I don't know where I would put it at this point like I'm out of this the two places that I have tattoos are where I would have put both like any tattoo that I would have gotten so like now it's just kind of like I don't really know where i feel comfortable with it now and now if i have three that's kind of thing it's like now i feel like once you cross three in one area like i have one on my right wrist and my right shoulder at this point like if i get a third one it's gonna have to be on this arm and then it's gonna be in it then it's gonna necessitate a sleeve of some kind it's like i can't just leave three random tattoos i like how it is right now it's like the beginning like beginning end that's like a nice closed loop but another thing in there is like i don't know feels unfinished now if i get another one i would uh i'm fine with my arm tattoos i don't mind my arm tattoos at all but my my i would remove my back tattoo if i could easily do it not because i'm embarrassed by it or i think it's bad or anything like that i just want that i've said this to you guys before i kind of want that space back it's it's so big and it takes up such and i want i would love to get a shoulder piece or something you can't, you know, like, because this stupid thing I got when I was 18, which my, it's so funny, man.

42:32Dustin Furman:Like I remember my dad's like, you're going to regret that. You know what I'm like? I loved it at the time. You know, it's my ears. I got my ears pierced during that era too. And, uh, these earrings have never come out of my ear since I've had the same earrings for, uh, 23 years, 24 years, something like that. It's pretty crazy when you think about that. You know, they're just part of my they're just like part of my body. There's like they fused in. They just I don't know. I don't even know how to take it. I always picture taking them out one day and then just taking a picture and putting it on social media of just them like on like on a table.

43:12You know, you've never taken them off at all.

43:14Dustin Furman:No, never. Wait, what do you mean? Like not even like to do the shower or no, no, I shower with them in and stuff like that. Airport. No, that's the thing. They never there. They don't have to. That's what I thought was going to happen because I got them right after 9-11 and that was when shit was really crazy. And then the first time I went through, they don't even ring. I think they're titanium. I don't know if that matters or whatever. And they're hollow. So, but yeah, like I just clean them in the shower and like I just I have this whole system now. That's what's so funny. Like everyone has their little thing in the shower where like when I clean my ears, I like take some soap like I off the bar, you know, my fingers.

43:51Dustin Furman:and I just roll the earrings in them and like roll them around to get the hole and stuff like that just to keep it nice and clean, you know. But it's like part of like, it's like more than half my life. It's as if it's an appendage. Right. I could take them out and I'm going to have phantom earrings.

44:11Dustin Furman:The phantom paint. Right. Oh my God. The fuck are we talking about? Jonathan Turner wrote in and said, hey boys, I need an official update on the current status and whereabouts of magnanimous Colin. Is there any possibility of him making a triumphant comeback at some point? And if so, what would the terms and conditions for a potential return be, even in a limited or part-time capacity? The people deserve answers. Thank you for your donation. This is what I was saying earlier when we talked about doing Moriarty cross Jaffe is I feel like people really have killed him. And I don't know that he is coming back.

44:42Dustin Furman:I'm in a different phase of life now. And magnanimity is not what I'm trying to show anyone anymore. Now it's something else. Magnanimous Colin I don't know he's gone he he's uh he's cut up in the back of a Tesla somewhere

45:03Dustin Furman:remember because Magnanimous Colin he was a good man ah but he was not allowed everyone held him to the highest standard and whenever he made a you know he speaks for hours and hours and hours a week right and whenever he makes he says he gets it all almost all right but he makes a mistake or he misspeaks you know right he the tommy situation in the last of us part two is a good example that's a big part of colin magnanimous colin being killed right that's a huge part of it it's it's all these little things you keep you keep dinging him and you expect him to just take it and eventually any man will go crazy under similar circumstances i'm just imagining i'm imagining you as that uh you know that scene of uh in the beginning of joker where joaquin phoenix is putting the makeup on oh yeah that's good stuff i can't win you know so now this new colin he's a different man.

46:11Dustin Furman:He's a different beast. We're still getting to know him. We don't know everything about him. We don't know his whole story. We don't know his outlook. We don't know. There's a lot to be learned about it. And I feel like on Moriarty Crush Jaffe, the live stream, when we go to the phone calls, we're going to we're going to find out exactly where everything stands with Magnanimous Colin. But he's dead and he's buried. Let him go. What do you say, Chris? Who's this then? Is this a Darth Colin? Darth Colin. Yeah, I don't know. He's still unnamed. He's still a shadowy apparition and we haven't quite

46:41Colin Moriarty:nailed down what we're going to call him yet a visage on the horizon right shadow colon shadow colon liquid liquid liquid liquid liquid might be good we'll keep that in mind but did i love god liquid just the idea of liquid being a surname for just like a like a opposite i love it because it makes no sense without solid no without without solid because there is no solid chris right right so the fact that there is a liquid chris is insane

47:14Dustin Furman:like what chris

47:18Dustin Furman:jonathan thank you for writing monty pearson wrote in and said hey guys i and we're going to get into some of this stuff later in the inquiries because there's a few things we can kind of pull from our conversation about drm last week but i wanted to touch on this in the beginning monty pearson wrote in and said hey guys i feel like you were being too hard on people that were upset about the playstation drm situation last week. Yes, be mad at the bad actors, but we live in a world where every service getting worse and more expensive is the norm. If any change is made, Sony needs to communicate that clearly.

47:46Dustin Furman:Otherwise, people are going to assume the worst. I think this is a good point. I just want to touch on this because I agree with you 100 % Monty and my wife and I talk about this all the time. Everything is getting worse. And I know this comes up on the show sometimes, but everything sucks. I want to go back to the 90s so bad. And certification, right? Is what it's called and is yeah and shitification right it's crazy i'm an older man now you guys are old enough to remember as well but like i don't think it's a nostalgia speaking per se like everything was better in the 90s like food was better service was better entertainment was better like it's it's people treated each other nicer it was more peaceful it was more prosperous things were more affordable gas was like 90 cents a gallon in like 1995 you know like yeah i i i i hear you loud and clear is what i wanted to say i know i see it i feel it within reason everything used to be better like i think i think by a lot there's things like vr right no like like yeah vr wasn't better vr was significantly worse lawnmower man whatever the fuck that movie was called yeah and so and so yeah like i mean i i do i wrestle with this a lot because i do i'm aware i'm like cognizant i'm like unfortunately like a deeply self-aware person it doesn't seem like it but i'm aware when i'm making stupid mistakes but like i think about like i'm i'm aware of the fact that so much of childhood is like colored with this like nostalgia and with like the surrounding vibe of not having a lot of responsibility and so inherently things do feel like they were better and i'm very aware of that but also i look at like things that i used to be able to buy and own and now now there's subscription services there's stuff that's built into your car that you don't have access to unless you pay a fucking monthly subscription to it even though it's there and it's just like and that's it's that times a million and it's just getting worse i don't know if you saw that they were there was like a proposal to put like mini data centers in new homes and shit you see this just like so now you so now you're so now you're gonna be that's first you're gonna be first of all it's gonna be amazing direct like the local meth heads it's like look at how much copper is in every single but beyond that the precious metals in everybody's house i know it's like all the lithium and the and all this shit yeah it's it's insane but like so like you look it's like wait wait so like you're gonna pay the electric bill for micro data centers that's gonna be siphoned off to like run chat gpt so some dude can render a picture of himself younger hotter and in a bikini in a speedo and shit like it's insane like everything everything is worse within reason um but it's a lot and i don't think i don't think it is just nostalgia i think there is something tangibly provable to it and i think even younger i i actually do think even younger generations are aware of this too like i talked to some of my like um younger gen z or like even older well i guess there's no real gen alpha yet really realistically right is there what's gen alpha right now yeah i don't know what let me see i don't know if i know any gen alpha but like i know young gen z and even they're like yeah i mean gen alpha is 2013 to the mid 20s so yeah they're still kind of like forming they're yeah 13 right now yeah yeah so i i can't speak to that but i i know younger i have younger gen z like family or whatever and they're like they're nostalgic for when they were younger but like it's a different thing you know like they miss the shows that were on or whatever but like it's not they don't feel like it was like a romantic

51:35Colin Moriarty:time i would imagine like i'm thinking about some like my younger cousin i would assume he's nostalgic for five nights at freddy's at this point because he's very young and he was super into it and that was what eight years ago maybe even i think about that with fortnight like people

51:53Dustin Furman:getting older um or call of duty just random things people can be nostalgic for that are newer. I, I, uh, yeah, I've said before that I think nine 11 seems like the hinge point and it was, but I think it's also a coincidence. Like that's a whole geopolitical thing that changed the world, but like it just so happens to be placed perfectly at the beginning of the millennium when the nineties were over. Cause that's the other thing that I think is really important. And this is the shit that pisses me off and people seem to not understand it is that. So like 1990 is part of the 80s 2000 is part of the 90s right right right other because there is no year zero again again we know this fluently from seinfeld but like and that's what taught me that's like really it's so funny one of those things we always talk about what we learn from video games it's like one of those things where i'm like that i remember that all the time i'm like yeah there is no year zero it starts at one therefore yeah there has to either be a nine year decade somewhere or the decades include the zero so 2000 so the 90s really do encapsulate that whole thing and then 9 11 happens like right the like right when the millennium turns you know and so it really it did cap off like with this there was something special about that era and so i wanted to just acknowledge that like yes monty everything sucks like i don't think it i don't think it changed with 9 11 though to be honest i think it was the smartphone the smartphone i think the smartphone did it well yeah certainly that i mean the smartphone broke me and i've said a million times like if I were a child today I'd be done done yeah finished I mean it's easy enough to make fun of them for not being able to read and we do that all the time but like can you blame them yeah I mean like really like I was I was I read books prodigiously I we had no choice like it's just it's just a different it's just a different thing man I don't know but it's funny that I'm a millennial and you guys are millennials, but we're on totally opposite ends of the spectrum.

53:53Dustin Furman:I'm considered, I guess, elder millennial. Yeah. Geriatric, geriatric millennial. I never heard the term elder millennial until my nephews told me that that's what I was. And I was like, oh, okay. Because I feel spiritually like I'm with generation X, but it's because my three siblings are all generation X. And so that's just kind of the situation in which I came up in. But I'm not Gen X, you know, myself. so yeah like you guys are kind of spiritually gen z in a way and i i think gen z has been used as a an insult but really it started in the 90s the first gen z people i think were born in the 96 97 something like that so that's what happens with every you know the people used millennial that way also right yeah yeah everyone hates millennials so it's like uh yeah we're in like a like 90 i'm like late 93 so like us like December 93 so ostensibly 94 which is like that's like in like that weird kind of transitionary period like I have more in common with like because I have nieces and nephews who are like I think about like maybe like five years younger than me because they're like my half sisters kids and I have more in common with them than I do with like uh like elder elder millennials you know what i mean like i don't i i don't know what the hell you're talking about the fuck is beast wars beast i don't know any of this i don't know what any of this is i think the only thing all of us agree like gen x millennial gen z i'm sure gen alpha will come around to this too although they're gonna be older and so they probably won't even really get to experience it fully as a we all hate the baby boomers that's that's the thing i think we can all kind of agree on we all hate they kind of they kind of fucked everything up i know plenty of people in that generation that are wonderful people like my parents for instance but generationally yeah they fucked they fucking shat the bed man they really did they really did and and what's funny is that their parents and grandparents were the really tough ones you know yeah so like pretend to be that they pretend to be their grandparents right Like the greatest generation would be like the depression and world war two people.

56:05Yeah.

56:06Dustin Furman:And then the silent generation of the ones that came up during the depression that were born in the depression. And then they had the baby boomers who were born into the post world war two American boom. And then they took it and then they fucked it up and then they, and then they bestowed it upon us. Which we appreciate. The parents were eating nothing but potatoes for like 20 straight years. and like they inherited like this crazy boom and then they're like i bought my house for a quarter and a banana and it's like it's like it's fucking insane ridiculous people are sitting on incredible real estate wealth right now older people and i don't the one thing i don't understand and i see this a lot is like now i mean i don't know how my parents would feel about this none of my siblings really need their help which is good like their economic help everyone's doing fine but like the this this generation is like sitting on an enormous amount of wealth and allowing their kids and grandkids to like like fucking you know swim around and bullshit instead of like helping them in some way and i just couldn't imagine having like that much that much means and the ability to like do something about it and not do something about it i guess is what i'm saying so yeah shitty shitty situation monty you're absolutely right thanks for bringing the entire show down all right let's get into the news of the week now a few things to get into this week nothing too crazy but a few things that i think are fascinating to talk about i wanted to start with kind of an fyi or a psa at the very top this comes from games industry up is although this is circulating around the industry if you are an american like the three of us are and like most of our audiences but not all of our audience and you purchased a video game from playstation network between spring 2019 and the end of the calendar year 2023, you may be eligible to join a class action suit that has already passed muster and whatever about anti-competitive conduct due to monopolization of digital games in which Sony has to pay out something like$8 million in PSN vouchers to people who bought specific games.

58:21Dustin Furman:Basically what this, I had to go read about like what this is all about. I tried to read the lawsuit and I like glossed over like three pages and I'm like, I can't do this. So then I started trying to just read like more synopses. What basically happened is that in spring of 2019, and I don't really remember this, but I guess this is what happened is that Sony pulled digital vouchers for all of their games. So like you used to be able to buy digital vouchers both in store and online. I don't know if you guys ever did this for like you could go buy like, oh i want to buy um wild arms or something and then you would just be able to go and buy a voucher for it and like from a third party and sony shut that all down so this basically made you have to go to the psn to buy games digitally at the price that they're asking in other words there's no competitive balance there if you look at it from that perspective so they pulled this in 2019 and these guys so this law firm severi law firm uh led a class action suit against them claiming that this violated antitrust law.

59:18Dustin Furman:And in 2024, they actually won the case. And this has been passing, I guess, some sort of legal muster since then about how they will execute on this, how the monies will be paid out or whatever. So as I understand it, you can go to PSN Digital Games Settlement dot com. That's the URL. PSN Digital Games Settlement dot com. There you will find a full list of games. And here it is for you guys if you want to see it.

59:44Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I'm looking at them

59:46Dustin Furman:now there is i i don't know i would call this a hundred games or so that if you purchased one of these games between spring 2019 and end of year 2023 you're eligible for a part of eight million dollars in psn credits that will probably come down to like a few dollars per game per person um is it really worth your time to do this and by the way as i understand yet i put into your wallet digitally is it worth it i don't know this is the kind of i feel like this is kind of spurious and weird to like sue over but to each their own now the reason i wanted to bring this up is this isn't some sort of fringe thing the games on this list are big games there's some irrelevant shit on here too like beach buggy racing and shit like that but like for instance if you bought battle front if you bought demon souls persona for golden if you bought destiny or destiny 2 call of duty classic if you bought god of war collection the uncharted games reso gun journey until dawn dead nation oh commie hd is on here yeah like so i guess the rules were chris and this was i was looking into is like so the vouchers for this for games to be eligible vouchers had to have been available before vouchers were pulled entirely.

1:01:08Dustin Furman:And the vouchers must have sold. This is like, I'm like, who comes up with this shit? The vouchers must have sold more than 200 copies each. So there must have been a demand for the vouchers. Right. It's a weird one. But anyway, go check it out if you're interested. And maybe you can make a few bucks. Again, the URL is PSN Digital Game Settlement dot com. Are you guys going to go and we're almost all certainly eligible for something on this, but I'm not going to because I spend thousands of dollars a year on PSN. There's no doubt I bought something in here. but um i'm fine i don't i don't need to go through all this yeah i don't need uh i don't need this at all i do think it's funny like there i'm a bungee guy right but like i look at destiny 2 on here and i'm like that's one of the few games where i'm like you probably should be able to get something because they did delete like half of that game yeah yeah i understand why as a player like why they would do that but like at the same time i think like from from a basic standpoint of like the basic rules of commerce where it's just like hey come on i buy a thing i should have it they probably they kind of got away with pretty massive they were too cute by half with a lot of that shit i don't i get what they're doing i guess and you would know better than me but i assume it's to like obviously it's like the disney vault remember that shit yeah yeah where it's like this is going into the disney vault so you better buy this fucking vhs right now uh kind of shit and i felt like they were probably doing that plus because it's an online game they're probably trying to drive player count to things and keep them populated right you would assume as well they yeah i mean i don't want to get into a whole thing with it but like i think they were updating the game pretty drastically to the point where like it the things that they were adding would have broken previous like previous campaigns the way they were designed they didn't account for certain things also it's old content that people weren't really playing anyway and as a player i could tell you like nobody who was playing the game gave a shit but principally like from the principle of i buy a thing i should have it it is it is a problem but like i wasn't sad to see like that first campaign go because like nobody's you play that the first week and then it's done you know um and then you're moving on to the new shit because that's what that's what those games thrive on but i don't know okay what are you what are you losing Okami?

1:03:26Yeah, I don't know. This is kind of strange. I get that's a voucher thing, but it's just

1:03:30Dustin Furman:odd. I don't know. What I would assume is that the number is going to be divisible because Push Square was saying they had some interesting information about this will come out to like$2 or$3 per person. I don't know where they got that from. I don't know if it's per person per game, I should say. I don't know if it's... Would it be the$8 million or$7.8 million divided by the number of people? so if that's true then you would actually want no one to know about this to keep his i don't i don't know i don't know if that's how it must work like that somehow and then the lawyers have to get paid too so yeah they're not like doing it for free this is like the kind of shit this i don't know i i to me i'm like i'd uh whatever it's the legal remedy you're allowed to sue these companies it's fine i just get we were talking about this the other day i I get I get afraid of needling these companies too much where like they start to really get an annoying because they have to protect themselves in some weird way.

1:04:30Dustin Furman:And as opposed to like being flexible on both ends. Anyway, it doesn't matter. Dustin, you were going to say something.

1:04:35Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I was looking at the list because I mean, especially during this era, I would have been entirely physical if possible. but there are some digital exclusive games that I think I would qualify for, like The Witness and Journey.

1:04:53Dustin Furman:But did you buy those games between 2019 and 2023?

1:04:58Colin Moriarty:Hmm, that's a good question.

1:05:00Dustin Furman:Probably not. I mean, you probably bought Journey in 2012. Well, not the PS3 version. Oh, the PS4 version.

1:05:08Colin Moriarty:I played the PS4 version when it came out. So I will have to look, but I do think that Sony getting rid of the vouchers is stupid and a way for them to try to exclusively monopolize their digital purchases on the PlayStation store. so i mean both xbox and nintendo have these vouchers as well uh and i don't think they've gotten rid of my last i checked it i definitely know that switch still has them so if i'm eligible for a few games and it adds up to like 10 bucks and it takes me 15 minutes to sign up then why not i'll go through it i'll let you guys know yeah do it yeah because i i would assume you're gonna

1:05:53Dustin Furman:have to connect your PSN ID somehow. Yeah. Yeah. Because I assume this is all gonna have to be done manually. Then they're probably going to have a little mark in your back and be like, this guy is a problem.

1:06:07Dustin Furman:Yeah. I mean, it is. Let me let me say this, though. I don't I feel like I'm coming down on the side of corporations recently and I don't necessarily like that, but in our conversations, but you own a store, right? Like a brick and mortar store. We always use Walmart as an example, but it'd be anything. And you sell like tchotchkes. I just went to Walmart and bought, you know, I love, I love my plants, right? So I just bought a bunch of new pots and some soil and stuff. And you go into Walmart and you buy it. Now there's nothing about Sony has, obviously a lot of these games are exclusive, but a lot of them aren't.

1:06:45Dustin Furman:I can't like go in there with third party money. And or like I was like, all right, I'm going to this shit is cheaper at Lowe's. So I'm going to go to Lowe's and somehow extract the money from them. And then I'm going to go to Walmart and I'm going to buy the shit at Lowe's prices. You understand what I'm saying? Like there isn't something that's not so clean cut about this. It's their store. like if they want to say like this is what it costs we don't like this circumvention of the pricing anymore i don't really see how that's a problem like i don't yeah i because if you don't want to buy to kydan or whatever one of the games is on there go on fucking steam but go buy it physically go buy used oh they're trying to date and not do that i understand that, but what am I saying?

1:07:40Dustin Furman:Make any sense at all? Like, I don't know how, like how much control you should be allowed to have on the operation of a private storefront to be like, no, you have to offer the games this way, too. It's like, well, why that cuts into our profit margin? That's why we I mean, that's obviously why Sony doesn't want to do it. Yeah, so and I understand like you go, you go to target Xbox sections, all those game cards. I get that like there's people that still do and switch. That's a huge thing there, too. I get that. But I think it's okay for a storefront to say, no, we want to control this point of sale.

1:08:12Dustin Furman:The game costs what it costs. I don't think there's anything really wrong with that, personally. I don't know if people out there, I'm sure people out there disagree. I think in a vacuum, that makes sense. I guess it's also in the context of, it's in the broader context of a lot of other things being done as well, like the lack of, you know, physicals kind of taking a backseat and uh i feel like there was something in the news kind of recently about oh the dynamic pricing you know these kinds of weird i i understand what you're saying and i i agree generally like i've never used a voucher i think the premise of them kind of feels like there's like a middleman thing going on i just hate the idea of that like i just i hate i just want to be direct um but it does come under the context of a whole other host of problems if If it was just this in isolation, I don't think it would have been as big of a deal.

1:09:08I think it's this in addition to everything that surrounds it.

1:09:12Dustin Furman:Right, right. I wonder... I guess... What I would assume about those codes is that they're bought gross at some sort of markup, very similar to physical games. And then I guess they could be sold for whatever you wanted to sell them for, but you would lose money. So from that perspective, it doesn't really hurt Sony. Unless they wanted to get undercut by some really... really aggressive mark uh consumer like consumer product like target or something wanted to be like yeah we're just going to undercut everything on psn but it's like you already paid for those cards so i don't i don't i don't know how exactly how it works but to me it just doesn't i don't feel like this is something worth suing over there's like a lot of problems that i don't think this is one of them in my opinion but because what they're basically saying is like you're not getting a different product like grand theft auto 5 on psn and grand theft auto 5 gotten on psn via a voucher are the same thing.

1:10:05Dustin Furman:And I think what they're saying is, why would we sell that when you can just come to the PSN and get it? What is even the purpose? Maybe you have a gift card for that retailer? Wait, what did you say?

1:10:22Colin Moriarty:Maybe you have a gift card for that retailer that sells it. Maybe you are uncomfortable with using your credit card on the internet, which I know is very, very minor at this point. Well, that's like antiquated.

1:10:34Dustin Furman:That was the thing. I was even nervous about that. Like when I was in college, like when I remember when I went on Netflix and I, I finally got Netflix in like 2004 or something like that. And I was like, I don't know about this.

1:10:42Colin Moriarty:Maybe you want to pay in cash. Yeah. I mean, sure. The card. I mean, the thing for me is just that while it may not be relevant, I think it is important that consumers have options on how they want to pay for something. And Sony will continually push out all these things until they have total control from. I mean, if you look at first party, it's like practically a top down monopoly where it's like we make the games for our hardware and we sell them to you end to end. And maybe that's OK. But I mean, we've talked about on the show before, like where PSN prices are often astronomically higher than a physical game.

1:11:25Dustin Furman:Yeah, yeah. The margins are better and there's no splits. Which is another thing. So like they actually get two bites at the Apple, which I understand that would be frustrating from the outside. Yeah. But why would they split money with it? It's what we always say about PlayStation Direct. It's like, well, why would you? I would be running as much of my commerce through PlayStation Direct at this point if I were them. It's like cut everyone out. Who gives a fuck? Because what you're saying, it's an end to end vertical monopoly. And it is. I wonder if. Has anyone ever tried to sue over this? I guess like maybe Nintendo withstanding some of the lawsuits in the 80s and 90s about trying to break open the NES would be some sort of predicate for this.

1:12:05Dustin Furman:But like to me, it's like that is their ecosystem. Of course, it's a monopoly. It's like it would be like going after Apple for being like, yeah, everything Apple does is for iOS. It's like, yeah.

1:12:14Colin Moriarty:Well, Apple did get sued and now they have to. Isn't there a thing they need to allow third party app stores? Yeah, wasn't it? Oh, what happened? Yeah.

1:12:22Dustin Furman:I don't think that that's a I don't know that that's a good thing. I'm just I remember I was talking about this when that happened. And I think a lot of it. Oh, you know what? It came up when Epic laid everyone off. We're talking about their legal bills and stuff. I don't know that I like that. I think a lot of these lawsuits happen on behalf of people. And I'm like, I don't want you to change it. Like, I like this proprietary thing they do because it means that like they care about this thing. And it's good. And it is good. it's great i think it's very trusting of a brand yeah it is to not take advantage of you later on

1:12:59Colin Moriarty:once they have full control but they've had full control for decades right no well not with i mean between the cards and the physical games like it's i would say it's very recent oh we're back talking about sony now so yeah oh yeah yeah so okay i'm just saying in general but like apple too i mean they had total control top to bottom of the app store and anything on the iphone

1:13:24Dustin Furman:and to me i find no issue with that that i know that that's been broken open but now we're going to deal with like i think that that's like a pandora's box in some way but but that if i wanted to be on android i'd be on android right but but i do think the that is the that's the first step of in shitification really is is making sure there's really no reason there's no reason to improve there's no alternatives if there is a better thing out there then there's there's no way for that better thing to get to you it is kind of the first step to the degradation of a lot of these things is like ensuring that like oh hey you know what we had the iphone do we remember the app store you'd buy guess what you used to do on the app store you used to buy an app and it would do it would be like a buck or two dollars and it would do the thing forever now it's like really basic shit i saw an app because i was like looking for like a planner app because i was just like i don't like the calendar on ios like it doesn't work for me like it's it's kind of out of sight out of mind i want something that's like a little bit more like in my face and every planner is fucking a subscription everything menial apps that used to be like i i bet even that's stupid do you remember that iphone like drink beer app thing yeah yeah i i bet even that's a fucking subscription you have to you know what i mean like you have to pay to have to to keep access didn't that guy make millions of dollars on that app or something like that it was so probably yeah because it was like one of the first apps or whatever like one of the first viral apps i think smart yeah um but yeah it is i don't know i feel a bunch of different ways about it but i generally err on the side of uh you don't want to give these people too much too much control over everything right i do think like because i mean coming up bringing up steam

1:15:11Colin Moriarty:because like steam steam was also like apple where i believe colin you'll know is a 30 cut

1:15:19Dustin Furman:is it yeah i think i think it's actually less than that until you reach a million dollars and then and then it grows and then it goes up to three oh yeah so when you have another store

1:15:28Colin Moriarty:I mean, in this case with Steam, it's the Epic Games Store. I was like, I felt so conflicted about it that I wanted there to be another store to compete with Steam in order to maybe drive down those prices for, I mean, eventually you would assume that some of that prices pass down to consumers. But also just that there's a competition between Steam and another store. The problem is Epic Games Store did it in a way that made people actively hate them. um so tying it back to apple it's like apple takes their 30 and i guess their argument which is valid is like well we keep everything secure for our customers everything is run through us and has to be up to a certain level of quality which arguably i guess it's quality in that hopefully if an app you download from the app store isn't going to fuck up your phone is it going to be a good app?

1:16:23Colin Moriarty:Who knows? But if there's other stores that can lower a reduced fee for publishing in any kind of microtransaction you do on it that becomes popular, then there's competition between that and Apple. And that's good. Is it worth the loss of Apple's quality standards? I don't know. It hasn't been around long enough to see. I don't know how locked down the iPhone is outside of the app store.

1:16:53Dustin Furman:Yeah, I think, well, it's as we say about Steam versus PSN versus Switch and so on and so forth. There should just be options at the consumer level so that you can join into any ecosystem that you want. But I don't think that there being a closed down. What I don't like about it is people coming in, everyone knows what Apple is. It's been this way forever. I mean, literally since the 70s. But it makes things for itself. It only started adopting other people's shit when it felt like it had to and even remember remember um even the original ipod didn't work if unless you had an apple computer then like the ipod would only work with music you bought from apple and slowly they did break it open and like you could like download mp3s and you know whatever do what you want to do and i understand that but i don't like people coming in to these places that are well established and being like you know what i want it to be like this other thing it's like that other thing exists just go over there like if you want android go there and fuck around with it.

1:17:49Dustin Furman:I don't give a fuck. I don't want it. I don't want anything to do with that style of openness. I'm not sophisticated enough for it. I don't like it. And I don't think it's a high quality. I've been with Apple long enough, certainly as an iPhone user, especially where I'm like, this is an insanely high quality, like insanely high quality, in my opinion. Don't fuck with it. Just leave it alone. That's that's my whole thing. Like it's this is not worth fucking with. And clearly everyone agrees, at least in the United States. I know that iPhone is not prevalent in a lot of places in the world, but in the United States, everyone has an iPhone.

1:18:24And so it's like, why are you fucking with it?

1:18:28Dustin Furman:That's my thing. And but you're right. I mean, it's not out of corporate allegiance because I barely spend money like I use an iPhone as actually was it was I was reminded of it because I had to use like the Gmail authenticator and like on my browser was like go to your iphone se and type in the number or whatever my jesus christ so i'm not even a real big apple consumer i just like what they do um and the same thing with playstation it's like i i think it's awesome that we have all these other storefronts to compete with them but like don't fuck with this let this live or die based on what it is don't try to make it into that other thing sure if that makes sense went way longer on that than I anticipated.

1:19:10Dustin Furman:But it is an interesting story. So yeah, go check that out if you want. Again, PSN Digital Games Settlement dot com. All right, we're going to talk a little bit about Take Two. Strauss Zelnick's been doing interviews, CEO of Take Two. Obviously, he comes up all the time on the show, but I guess they're getting ready to talk more. So he spoke with Bloomberg, and then there's some other things about Take Two as well that came from Gamefile, which is a pay-for newsletter of sorts that circulates in game spaces. So we'll get into all of that. Bloomberg, though, begins with writing about this. They say, Take-Two CEO says Grand Theft Auto 6 expectations are quote-unquote terrifying.

1:19:52Dustin Furman:I thought there were some interesting things for us to pull from here. It says, Strauss Delnick, the chief executive officer of video game publisher Take-Two Interactive Software Inc., has overseen a lot of big releases in nearly two decades on the job. But none have been as massive as Grand Theft Auto 6, which is expected to be one of the biggest entertainment launches of all time when it arrives on November 19th. Anything less than an earth-shaking blockbuster would be seen as a disappointment by analysts and investors, so the stakes are high for the crime title developed by Take-Two's Rockstar Games subsidiary.

1:20:21Dustin Furman:The company has already delayed the release twice from its originally scheduled debut last year, so Zelnick said the following when he was at the Interactive Innovation Conference in Las Vegas and talked to Bloomberg. He said, quote, I think our goal is to deliver to consumers something that's never been experienced before. Being on the sidelines but pretty close to the front of the sidelines is very, very exciting and terrifying because the expectations are so high. End quote. Jason Schreier, who wrote this, notes that GTA V is the second best-selling game of all time at 225 million copies sold.

1:20:51Dustin Furman:And that the new game has been in development forever, has cost an enormous amount of money, and that some analysts expect that it'll sell 25 million units on the first day. Zelnick said the following about all this. I thought this was really interesting. He says, quote, at a lower level, that's true of Take-Two's entire business plan on the console side. Development costs have gone up and up, and we really do aim to deliver the highest quality entertainment on earth, and that is costly. An AI influence is not withstanding. We haven't seen those costs decline yet. Maybe we will. Maybe we won't.

1:21:20Dustin Furman:So that's the end of the quote. Then Jason writes, Take-Two's strategy is to make blockbuster games, according to Zelnick. To do that, the company has to spend more freely than rivals who may be targeting a much lower number of units sold. Here's what he said about this quote. That's a high stakes game for big boys only. And I'm cool with it. End quote. Jason continues, early indications are that Grand Theft Auto 6 will shatter sales records. The two trailers released so far have combined for nearly half a billion views on YouTube and other big video games are steering clear of November releases to avoid the competition.

1:21:49Dustin Furman:Zelnick says this, quote, we never claim success before it occurs. We have, what happened? Sorry. What was that?

1:21:57Colin Moriarty:It was my phone. what happened someone texted me and i thought it was important and i clicked something very it's okay unbelievable these things happen zelnick wrote or zelnick said the following to

1:22:10Dustin Furman:jason quote we never claim success before it occurs we have the most amazing creative teams we not only encourage them to pursue their passions we insist that they do it we try to give them unlimited financial creative human resources and they aim to deliver perfection end quote. This is interesting. Big talk. I think the thing that people are pulling out of this, by the way, and it's worth noting, is that it seems like this confirms that PlayStation has the marketing deal for this game, which is going to be huge. And that was the story that was circulating about this piece. But I think there's way more interesting stuff in here than that, because to me, that's cool to get confirmation about that.

1:22:50Dustin Furman:But that's obvious, especially with the leak of the GTA online numbers, two thirds of Grand Theft Auto's business goes through PlayStation. There's just no way that they weren't going to obviously do something with them. And if they can offload the marketing cost of Grand Theft Auto 6 on the Sony partially, or maybe even wholly, I don't know why you wouldn't do that. So, because they talk a little bit about the, on the end of this piece, if people want to go read it on Bloomberg about why they're going to console first and not PC. And he was saying that like, well, we're basically trying to serve our core audience and there's just no denying that that core audience of these games is on console and we the numbers themselves speak out about that Grand Theft Auto Online is actually really weak on PC compared to any of the consoles including Xbox so yeah so anyway uh Dustin let's go to you first about this what do you take out of this there's some interesting stuff here about the big game that they're playing here pardon the pun of trying to align cost with quality and expectations and knowing that this is a huge endeavor that they either need to nail or the entire publisher can collapse based on the amount of money that they spent on all of this.

1:24:01Dustin Furman:But what I'm surprised about it, Dustin, is that he seems pretty confident because he's using pretty big terminology like perfection that we give them unlimited money. That's what he said.

1:24:13Colin Moriarty:Yeah. Unlimited. You know, so what do you think? I was thinking about this like what what could possibly happen that could make this game not be a success between now and launch is there anything you can think of that would make people decide like people that are in the millions that are planning on buying this day one that would make them decide no maybe if they were to do you know months ago we were talking about that will GTA 6 be$100 certainly that would make some people decide not to buy it would that extra price recoup all of those people because many people like us and listeners podcast would still buy it anyway would it be some kind of bad PR thing as they start to show the game a little bit more I don't think so like I feel like it's so locked in it's like yeah this there is nothing reasonable that they could do that would make this game not be the biggest launch of all time yeah and i said reasonable because it's like yeah they could show it and it looks like a playstation one game it's like that's not gonna happen well i think i think that the oh

1:25:29Dustin Furman:that's what i was gonna say unfortunately for them because i the only thing that can really hurt the game i think is if it leaked like if if someone actually had it like very early somehow And I just don't think that that's because then you can like really dive into it and make it look however you want and show whatever you want out of any context. But I just don't think that that's even really possible. So.

1:25:49Colin Moriarty:Right. And if it leaked because it's only coming out on PlayStation and Xbox, the amount of people that would be able to play the leaked code is so low. So you wouldn't have like a Nintendo situation where Tears of the Kingdom is someone steals it from a warehouse a week beforehand and then it's uploaded. and there are so many soft modded switches that could play it that may or may not affect sales. I guess it could leak the entire story out. Is that, again, is that going to affect the sales of the game even? I don't think so. I think it will, but not enough to make it a failure. This is so locked in.

1:26:38as like a guaranteed like it's it's it really is crazy i think people are people are going to find out you know this game could launch as i i really think this game could launch as like ps4 day one cyberpunk and still make a stupid fucking like it probably would still recoup all of its money in like a day oh definitely because there just wouldn't be enough time to even process that people people would just be curious it's so big there's people going to be buying it there's people going to be playing it that like don't pay attention to like i would imagine the overwhelming majority of the people who play gta online are not even aware of like the broader games industry and like what it what it does and like who the players are it is one of the more casual massive successes that exists and so even if something were to happen catastrophically your average person who plays is it's going to be like oh there's a new grand theft auto out cool i'm going to go buy it right this is it's going to be an interesting situation with this game from multiple fronts

1:27:44Dustin Furman:yeah i one thing i'm interested in is when the when the advertising is really going to start it's talking a little bit about this micah since we watch football so prodigiously and i was like I imagine football is going to be covered with GTA beginning in October, maybe right away, right when the season begins in September. Like you imagine that they're going to have a huge spend with the NFL. And another thing I was considering, this wouldn't be unlike what actually would be a little less dramatic even than what happened with Grand Theft Auto 5, because GTA 5 famously had that PS3 bundle. And then there was the PS4 bundle as well when it came out.

1:28:22I wonder if that's the plan here, because one thing I was thinking about this should

1:28:27Dustin Furman:PlayStation six come out next year, which it seems like it's going to. There is kind of a double edged sword here where you sell a shit ton of PS fives right before PS six comes out on the back of this game, and then you kind of satiate some sort of latent demand. And I wonder if the plan is to do it with PS5 and then do it with PS6 and have a PS6 native version of the game either ready at launch or the next year or whatever they did with GTA 3 or GTA 5. Because I think that's kind of a complication. I mean, it's a good complication in the moment, but that's a bad complication actually for the long term.

1:29:09Dustin Furman:I don't know that you would consider it so bad because they're going to make so much money on it. but something I was considering. You want people to kind of buy PS6s. Like, obviously you want to sell as many PS5s as possible. I also wonder if they're going to drop the price, which is something that I imagine they might, they might do or at least subsidize the games, give it away for free, pay for the copy of the game.

1:29:32Colin Moriarty:I would imagine, I'm not going to be on your Sacred Symbols Plus episode predicting the PS6 launch lineup, but I would imagine history is going to repeat itself where I believe it was the reveal of the PS5. The first thing we saw was the Rockstar logo. And they were showing GTA 5 on PlayStation 5 and saying it's coming. And I think that'll happen with PlayStation 6 when it's shown. Yeah. It'll be like, hey, we're going to... Will it be ready at launch? GTA 5 took way longer than I think anyone expected for its PS5 version. So, but I think they will be like... Just so you know, guys, the GTA 6 is going to be better than ever on PlayStation 6 same time as far as you selling units like I think you can quantify it but it's going to be pretty unthinkable I think how many

1:30:23Dustin Furman:PS5 Sony sells based on this thing if they can get if they can readjust the price back downward which is entirely based on the tensions of the economic market with components and or subsidize Grand Theft Auto in some way, which I think would be pretty dangerous because you're looking at subsidizing potentially millions of copies of the game. I mean, it would be a lot of money. But like to it would cost them hundreds of millions of dollars to do it. In addition to all of the marketing and everything else. I don't know if you really want to do that. I mean, that's a lot of money, but you could push a lot of PS5s.

1:30:56Dustin Furman:And then you have what we've been saying, or at least what I've been saying is that I think we're going to end with a pretty nice run of games on PS5. And so you'll want to be there for that and, you know, whether it's intergalactic, you know, and so on and so forth. So I just, and Venom, obviously and all these other things, although I assume Venom's probably going to be on PS6. I wouldn't be surprised if Venom was a PS6 launch game. That's going to be on both, just like Miles. Yeah.

1:31:27So, yeah,

1:31:28Dustin Furman:I don't know, man. I don't know. This is a very interesting situation, but I think PlayStation is going to benefit so much from there's a question undoubtedly yeah something i just thought

1:31:38Colin Moriarty:i mean sony doesn't really have any control at this point but and they might as well take advantage of trying to sell playstation fives for gta 6 but at the same time does selling a shit ton of ps5s now or you know in november create a problem when they try to sell the PlayStation 6 where a large amount of people are like I just bought a PS5 though well this is what I was saying is like is like yeah that the there is going to be some sort of tension they're going

1:32:09Dustin Furman:to have to solve with this I think it is not as dramatic though as what happened with PS3 because remember Grand Theft Auto 5 came out months before PS4 launched and they still they still launched the PS3 console with the bundle. I think it was easier to move people over at that time. Remember also that Grand Theft Auto 5 on PS3 couldn't be played on PS4. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, I think it's going to be... That's what I was saying. It's like in the short term, it's a problem. In the medium and long term... No, I'm sorry. In the short term, it's good. In the medium and long term, it could be a problem just because people are going to be committed to this.

1:32:51Dustin Furman:That's why I think what the funniest thing about this to me is just that Sony is going to benefit so much more from this game than any game they ever made to the point where. Like really looking at it, it's like, damn, like you are going to sell more consoles on the back of this third party game than you would have sold like a new one charted or something. And because you're on charted fans probably already have a PlayStation. This is their last major chance to make this thing go. And that's why I think that the new pricing parameters have made it more complicated, this guess I had, but that the PS5 will probably outsell the PS4 based on things like this.

1:33:32Dustin Furman:I think pricing now is going to kind of constrain that, but we'll see. If PS6 also comes out and it's whatever price and they really precipitously drop the PS5's price, that's also going to sell millions of units, especially in emerging markets in the third world and stuff. So we'll see what happens. but uh the bigger thing i well not the bigger thing but the other thing here just to focus on is just their level of confidence i i'm just surprised by zelnick willing to say things he's saying like he's he believes in the game i think you can understand like i mean he obviously knows what it is they've seen it deeply his people have seen it and played it and they know everything about it but i think he says quote i think here our goal is to deliver to consumers something that's never been experienced before these are things you don't say if you like Like you would definitely not double down.

1:34:19Dustin Furman:You would say if you were like not confident, you'd say things like, well, it's a grand left auto game. People are going to understand what it is when they play it. And it's going to be great. Well, you know, you would temper things. And he says, quote, being on the sidelines, but pretty close to the front lines is very exciting and terrifying because the expectations are so high. Well, he's like doubling and tripling the expectations by speaking like this about the game, which I think is great. Because I said before, we all agree on this. your expectations for this game should be out of control high and now he's basically telling you they should be and i don't think you should really ignore that um no quote that's a high stakes game for big boys only and i'm cool with it end quote is a pretty baller statement you know um they have billions of dollars riding on this thing so yeah i don't know i just wonder when we see it man

1:35:14Colin Moriarty:because I'm always surprised if you look at the reveal trailers for, I mean, particularly Red Dead Redemption 2, and then when it came out that this is not a situation. I don't think Rockstar, I don't want to say never, but their games don't get downgraded as many other companies we've seen where it's like, oh, you see the E3 trailer, and then when it comes out, you're like, ah, it doesn't look quite that good. Yeah, they're not watchdogs or something. Yeah, they're not watchdogs. They get significantly more impressive. and there's like videos breaking down like the the the beer bottles have realistic liquid physics inside of them which of course is not going to appeal to everybody there's a million jokes online where it's like people lay out like look those the railroad workers in in red dead redemption realistically lay out and hammer stuff and it's like okay but does that make the game more fun and to me kind of it's not going to be more fun to everybody but if you appreciate finer details

1:36:10Dustin Furman:then sure if you look at a game as simulation then it's very impressive yes it's not something that i want out of every or most video games but out of out of rockstar it is what i want yeah right like because they've shown that they can they've shown that they're they're really good at it and so like i want to see i want to see you do what you're really good at which red redemption 2 convinced me it's like oh it's it's building this like real it's building this kind of simulated reality in a way that very few will pour the resources and time into doing and so like yeah

1:36:41Colin Moriarty:absolutely am i remembering correctly that rockstar purchased was it one of the companies that does rp servers or something at some point i i know what you're i remember that vaguely i i do i believe i don't know i i don't have any information on this obviously but like i i really do think that they're going to really double down on whatever GTA online is yeah it's cfx.re that they bought that's gonna be really interesting because I think the idea of RP is much cooler for a general audience much cooler than it actually is it's like wow you get to play as a mechanic and you log in and you do a job and you and you role play like it's like that sounds kind of cool but I bet you the moment to moment is not very fun.

1:37:27Colin Moriarty:Oh no, I bet. Yeah. So can Rockstar make a more general audience RP mode? That would be kind of interesting. That is fun for a general audience. I think they're going to build something weird, man. Like I'm expecting, I've said this before and I don't know why I'm so intrigued by this idea because it probably isn't all that doable or even all that worth it. but like it would be so interesting if like because we all know about like especially in the last two gta games where like you have the phone as like a central kind of ui like i wonder if there will be like you pull out your phone and you can record something going on in the world and post it to an in-game fee like i i wonder if you'd be able to scroll on your phone in gta 5 or gta 6 like a real news feed of videos from other people playing the game i mean like like it just i'm so fascinated not that i would care that much about doing that but just the fact that that effort is is being done and i don't know if that's what they're doing but when when when you say things like something that's never been experienced before i don't look at that necessarily as just meaning like a really highly detailed single player single player story you know what i mean like that strikes me as we've we have seen that before you've you've done that before what you're indicating to me is that you're going to do something more than you've done and uh i have to assume that that that's built under the framework of whatever whatever this new GTA online is going to be if if they're even doing it like I wonder if GTA I don't know GTA 5 still makes so much money that is another thing too like will they keep those both of them running and I don't know I'm fascinated endlessly by this game I'm really excited me too to see like what becomes of it um it's also the last big the last truly big game that we know about like there's gonna be elder scrolls later but like even that's gonna be like nothing in comparison to this so yeah yeah you got me thinking an in-game gta online tiktok yeah creator that you could become like oh i'm viral and they'll have some stupid name for it like talk tick or something i don't know right yeah like you could have an account within it and it's all with like a yeah that's hmm i don't know i feel like they're gonna do weird shit like that i feel like they want to make it some kind of second life thing not exactly that but like you know like i think they want to build upon whatever the the role play scenario is because that that stuff makes a lot of like a lot of people tune into that stuff um still it's under it's under it's underrepresented in like our feeds or whatever but it's kind of like roblox and in some sense where it's just like we don't see it often but um i mean people endlessly engage with that shit so that's what i was about to say chris yeah could it be possible that rockstar makes roblox for adults triple a roblox with but specifically in could they create a user-generated content economy where because that's where roblox makes all their money is people make stuff they sell it within the game they make money but rockstar takes a cut on each one yeah i really don't know that would be i mean that would the the the this is what's so exciting about whatever this game's gonna be it's just like there's so many potential ways that they can go and each of them every potential route for them feels both insane and possible and so it's just a matter of like what it's what it's going to be when we finally see it and i'm i'm really i'm not even that big of a gta guy i love gta 4 gta 5 actually for me was kind of like a it was okay like i didn't get that into gta 5 i think the split protagonist kind of fuck with me i like having you know single um character focus but I mean there's no doubt that like I'm so transfixed by whatever this is going to be I'm excited I'm watching it like a hawk

1:41:34Dustin Furman:I love I just as I love the machinations of big things like like companies and how the marketing like how they're going to roll it out what they're going to say what they're going to talk about their beats yeah these are all planned and they're being very coy and I think Zelnick isn't speaking out of school so I think that this is kind of laying the groundwork and it is interesting we said before what money and time can do they are themselves using the term unlimited so with that kind of there that means there are basically no holes barred like you can do it like whatever you want like you can put 50 people on the phone app you're talking about chris and have this entire in-game social network you can the the big thing is it's grand theft auto is entering gta online is showing that this is really important but it's a time economy and they understand that they have to win there they they need to give you enough to never want to leave and i think that that's what you're going to see whether or not it's any good or not i think is remains to be seen but i think it's going i think we all know it's going to be great i think what's exciting is that like and then we can move on after this but like I think we're so used to seeing we're so used to hearing about companies making a lot of money and like spending a lot of money on games but I feel like so rarely do we see that money on screen you know we think about like the Callisto protocol and how that costs like what like 200 something million dollars or what was it do you remember what it was I think it was 130 yeah and it just didn't feel like you play a game like that and you're like why like this didn't need to cost you money 162 um you play a game like the callisto protocol i actually liked the callisto i thought it was okay um but you play that game and you're like where's the where did where did that money go in a lot of ways because it just doesn't feel like it should have costed that much and so i understand some people get a little bit reflexively like well gta is gonna be like triple a slop it's gonna be you know like it's gonna be high oh cool great motion capture like whatever is the game fun or whatever but i'm just like the most tantalizing thing to me is to finally see like what a billion dollars looks like on screen.

1:43:53Like to get something that's worth spending that money. Like prove to me that it was worth you spending all that money. And I think, I think they reasonably can, which is exciting. I don't need every game to cost a billion dollars. Like Lord knows it's completely horrible idea. But for the people who've shown that they can deliver like really high quality stuff like rockstar, I just like, I don't know. I just believe. That might be naive and I might be wrong, but like I just,

1:44:21Dustin Furman:I think they're going to do something really cool. At least I hope. The last thing in postscript about this, I wanted to say something, feel good thing for console gamers out there like me is I think people are constantly in reasonably so demeaning consoles about their, their increasing irrelevance, I guess in a world of PC gaming. and it's interesting because Zelnick says and obviously PC has gotten much bigger because he talks about NBA 2K going from 5 % of sales to about 45 or 50 % of sales from 2007 to today but two things I wanted to say there are maybe 120 million applicable modern consoles between PS5 and Xbox series and half or a little more than half of the sales of their biggest games are on those platforms and the other half are on what could be literally a billion machines so i think there's something to be said about that that there still is massive power in the console space and that is proven by the fact that they are not interested in releasing the game on pc right away that they're the that the biggest entertainment release of all time the biggest video game certainly that's ever going to be released comparable to its era that it's coming out in is a console exclusive i think that's pretty significant and worth worth noting and And by the way, Jason says this.

1:45:46Dustin Furman:I don't know if it's because if it's him kind of thinking about it or if it's something Strauss said to him, but it's like. PC gives them another marketing boost, which is what I was saying when we were talking about it a few weeks ago, and people buy the game again. So they can also take advantage of that, but like for all of the talk about the weakness of the console space, I don't think it's I don't think it's irrelevant to say like the biggest video game potentially ever. Is going to be on console. and you'll have to have a playstation or an xbox to play it and everyone's going to want to play it and so big things are coming i think we'll keep an eye on gta 6 of course i'm sure we'll have much to say about it as time goes on all right uh i'll stick with this stradzelnik was giving other interviews as well i guess while he was at this uh same conference in vegas i'm using video games chronicle to talk about these because they both come from a game file which is steven totillo's um paywalled newsletter and blog or whatever his his pieces go behind this thing i don't have a subscription but they said a couple things here i wanted to touch on dustin i wanted to touch on this one first with you the civilization 7 um civ 7 obviously came out february last year so it's a little more than a year old and it did well commercially but critically it is kind of has kind of struggled and people aren't crazy about it.

1:47:10Dustin Furman:Here's what he said about it. Quote, every time there's a new Civ, the team at Fear Access thinks about how do we push the envelope far enough that it makes sense to buy this new game? And how do we preserve what people love enough so that they're not disaffected? And we got it wrong with Civ 7. But it wasn't for want of trying. And again, I take responsibility for it. So we've made a bunch of fixes. We'll continue to make fixes. The game is really a good game, and it's certainly a profitable enterprise for us. But this is one where I think what we tried to do was a bridge too far from the consumer perspective.

1:47:38Colin Moriarty:what do you think of that yeah well first of all i thought it interesting that he takes responsibility for it uh from the top that's a real boss where the buck stops i appreciate that about him yeah i have a controversial take on this that most people don't agree with that there are six previous civilization games and so when a new one comes out i very much support them trying new things. The controversial thing about Civ 7, and you can tell from the update and the comments on the YouTube video about the update, is that Civ 7 required you to change your civilization during the game. During one of the three, each era you change, your civilization adapts and change.

1:48:27Colin Moriarty:Much like real history, civilizations come and go, their leaders come and go, who they are. People did not like this. A lot of people didn't like it. And so that's what this update is, is that you you will be able to play as the same civilization throughout the entire game. If you so choose. When this game came out, I played it hours, probably like, I don't know, 80 to 100 hours, maybe. I'm not sure. But I thought the changes were really great. It's not that everything was perfect in Civilization 7. there was definitely issues with it particularly in its ui and the information that it either did or did not present to you and so i am i felt frustrated with the civilization community that they immediately rejected this game because i thought it was awesome but again i was in the minority and clearly it had a bad effect on the brand and so i think they're doing the right thing by changing and listening to the fans.

1:49:31Colin Moriarty:But to me, this just says future civilization games will be more and more safe and less ambitious in what they change because Civ fans do not like change.

1:49:43Dustin Furman:Yeah, it is a rock and a hard place of why even... Maybe they should just consider not making new Civ games anymore and just endlessly... Like World of Warcraft. Now, obviously, that could use a big upgrade, but people still play it by the millions every month and it's 20 years old, 21 years old and they just release shit for it and maybe you just find the Civ that everyone loves, whatever that might be or just make a Civ platform in the future maybe even make this really robust thing that incorporates all the different rule sets graphical styles and just let people make their custom game you know I don't know I am with you and I am one of those Civ people I'm not as big of a Civ fan as you and especially your wife is, but I started with Civ IV and I loved IV and V and VI.

1:50:35Dustin Furman:And when VII came out, I just went back, as you might recall, I just played VI for like 50 hours last year. I was like, I don't even want to play VII. So you have to kind of know where your place is, but it's going to be hard for them to make money if they don't release new games. But the funny thing about this, Dustin, is that if they just released a Civ VIII and it was what everyone wanted, then that's kind of, it almost makes it seem intentional.

1:50:56Colin Moriarty:Reskin Civ VI. right exactly that's what they want all right so he talked a little bit about that with game file

1:51:03Dustin Furman:and then uh i thought that was interesting and i wanted to ask you about that dustin but he also talked about bioshock and i thought we could all talk about this but chris i thought this would be interesting to go over to you on um so as the as video games chronicle reminds us the new bioshock game was first acknowledged back in 2019 and people that listen to this show will remember that i'm the person who leaked a bunch of the details about what that game was that it was in an Antarctic setting and all the rest. I don't know if any of that's true anymore because the game seems to be in some sort of stasis.

1:51:33Dustin Furman:What we understand about it is that the game's leadership, so like it's director and producer and stuff that were replaced last year after what Video Games Chronicle calls a quote disappointing internal review end quote. So with that in mind, Gamefile asked about Cloud Chambers game to Zelnick. And if he was surprised that, and I guess Gamefile used the word like, are you surprised that you haven't gotten Bioshock out yet? I mean, the last Bioshock game came out 13 years ago. He said, quote, think about what surprise implies. This is another really straightforward answer. That's like one day everything's awesome.

1:52:13Dustin Furman:And the next day I'm like, holy shit. And I don't run businesses that way. But I think if you're saying disappointed. Yes, deeply disappointed. So he was later asked to kind of expand on that. And he was saying, quote, he's feeling a lot better, end quote, about the project now. And as we discussed earlier this year, they think they have something good, but they don't think that that's sufficient for Bioshock. And he said, quote, I think finding the right creative purchase was hard, as it turns out. I think we, in retrospect, wasted a lot of time and money chasing down some creative alleys that turned out to be dead ends.

1:52:46Dustin Furman:And he said, What do what we do is a big team activity in the same way that making a movie is a team activity. And with big team activities, you can't necessarily tell how it's going to be until it all comes together or begins to come together. And that could take a while and can be very costly. But he said that, quote, right now we have a good game, but we are committed to delivering a great one. And actually, that was his comment last year. So that's where they stand now. Chris, what's going on with why are they having such a hard time with Bioshock? i mean i think i i've dude i that's a big those are big shoes to fill you can't put out a new bioshock game and have it be just fine you know like it's especially after this long there's some level of pressure um there's a legacy to live up to now even the retro even even though like there's like been a what do you what would you even call it like a revisionism around infinite to some extent like i don't think it's pretty i don't think it's particularly debatable that that game is uh pretty important and was very highly esteemed and did very well and so i think it's it's it's difficult the framework of bioshock is it is kind of narrow so in some ways like there's an expectation of what it of what it should be it's it's kind of like okay there's like a dystopia the the you know the abilities and the guns and then there's like supposed to be some really deep themes and some really big i don't want to say twist necessarily but something that really pulls the rug out from under you and when you build that cadence i think it's very easy to be like well if we do what everybody expects then it like if you're expecting a big twist in a dystopian Bioshock game, right?

1:54:37And you get it. That's faithful and accurate, but it's also kind of disappointing because you're expecting that because it's Bioshock. And I think what they're probably having a tough time figuring out is like, how do we, like, how do we get that vibe out of something when people are expecting it? Because the expectation of it kind of ruins it. And I could see why that's like a really tricky thing. There's also so many, there's only so many places you can go as well. like the underwater was like really novel and fascinating and weird. The, the, the cloud city with like Zeppelin's is also, you know, inspired and interesting and strange, but like there really is only like underground space, which we, which is like the, you know, the, that's kind of what Ken Levine is doing right now, but also just what, what system shock is before it.

1:55:30So that's kind of off the table. If it's just, a tundra it's not really doesn't have the gravitas maybe like an ice city maybe like i don't know i i don't know what it's it's it's difficult to expand beyond that because then you're then you're getting into realms of like are we just doing this to do it i could see why like i do i do not envy the people who have to take up the mantle of bioshock like that's a really i wouldn't even know where to begin like i have endless ideas for franchises that i love and would would love to see them do Bioshock. I have no clue because it's so perfect as it is that I would imagine it's a very difficult project to work on creatively.

1:56:11And you can't just hand that off to just random people. Like you got to have like a really like a really accomplished, like visionary guy. And even then it's like, I don't know. It's not, he didn't create it. So it's, I don't wish that on anybody, man. That's a hard nut to crack.

1:56:33Dustin Furman:though are we good yeah oh yeah sorry i thought i froze sorry oh no no you're good um i it's funny chris you say this my mind because you're right like uh obviously rapture in columbia i would maybe even just go back to rapture i've i've thought about like just embrace that that is what bioshock really kind of is and yeah i was wondering like it could kind of be cool like what if it was what if it took place so rapture it bioshock is what in the 50s bioshock one yeah it would be cool what if it was the 80s and like someone discovered like like uh some people like got really fascinated on the mainland about this idea like all this shit that happened at the city rapture and they like spend all this money and they go back and they like fix it or take it over and it lives again or something and some shit happens there or they discover some greater mystery or whatever.

1:57:31Dustin Furman:In other words, like if you could just figure out how to use the key component of Bioshock, which is Rapture, then maybe that's what you do instead of trying to have an Antarctic city or the underground city or just like always trying to replicate that feeling of the weirdness. And like you said, Judas is already doing the space thing right now. Judas plays into this though too because they obviously know what's going on with that game too and they're giving everyone time. That's one thing you got to kind of give them credit for is yeah take two is kind of just like they didn't cancel bioshock they haven't canceled judas i mean judas obviously is not going to get canceled but like judas has been in development forever at some point it's like it's like what do we like i love ken obviously but i'm curious to i haven't spoken in a while but it's like what are we doing here like from their perspective just because i think i think it's really dangerous to hold on to a game this long because I think yeah you are setting expectations now if no one knew about the game and then you announced it later and then it you found out it took so long I think that's kind of different the reason I say that is because I don't think you announce something and then let years and years pass like that wasn't what you intended it's what we were saying about pragmata right like you didn't intend on the game coming out this year there's no way right obviously right Yeah.

1:58:48Dustin Furman:So you you kind of can read into the marketing play. It's like, yeah, this kind of had to go dark again. You're not where you thought you'd be. I mean, how else can you possibly read that? And I wonder if even showing Judas a couple of years ago was them kind of feeling like they had to do it. Knowing that they really still don't want to go. what I assume is going on with Judas is that it's probably and I don't want anyone to misinterpret what I'm saying I don't know this but what I assume is that the game has probably long been complete and I assume what is happening is that all the intricacies of the Legos as it were the narrative shit is what is the problem or like making it work, making it fun, making it like you have to assume that's it because they've had all this time to make the game itself and now it's about making it breathe and like be what it's supposed to be.

1:59:39Dustin Furman:Right. That's my assumption. Yeah.

1:59:42Colin Moriarty:Yeah. My only hope for this new Bioshock is, you know, they got to reclaim that era Bioshock 1, Bioshock Infinite back before politics was expected in the games, you know? That's what they got to recapture in this new Bioshock, man.

1:59:57Dustin Furman:Oh my God, dude. Jesus Christ. The funniest thing though is that like you always have people use Bioshock as media literacy. like Bioshock is about a dystopian libertarian world like I and Rand world run amok. And I'm like, yeah, if that's what you read about it only, then I don't think you really do get the game, actually. Like it's it's it's not lampooning it as much as it's it's using it and taking advantage of it and bastardizing it. And those are two different things, you know, and this is something that Ken and I talked about on one of the episodes is that I think people don't lean into like the true meaning of Bioshock that it's much deeper than bastardized you know Ayn Rand or whatever but anyway and I think that's especially true with Bioshock Infinite and Columbia itself like that game is so deep and so interesting I love that game Bioshock Infinite I've loved more and more as time has gone on I didn't like it at first when it was yeah I was like I remember it so well because I played through the beginning like multiple times where I'm like this is a shooter and really it is it is it is yeah and I'm like I don't want this to be a shooter and then you kind of just accept it for what it is and then lo and behold it's this wonderful game Bioshock given it is like Halo 2 to me where it's like the fact that that game had such a messy development and it is so cobbled together but comes together in such a the fact that it is as good as it is despite all that is is kind of amazing and uh that alone kind of makes me appreciate it deeply i think it's a i think it's more flawed than bioshock is um and uh it's it's definitely messier the only real flaw with the original bioshock is that last fight oh yeah and really that's like them feeling like they had to do that yeah and and then and then there is like the the the like the closing moments after the big thing happens it does kind of feel like well it kind of feels like the game ended and now I'm kind of keep, I'm keeping it going.

2:02:00But like the rest of the game before that is so good that it doesn't, it doesn't even matter. But like what you're talking about, it's like, Oh, they should just go back to Rapture. It's like, I, I don't, it's not that I wouldn't like to see that because I love that space, but it's also one of those things. It's like, do you, is that worthy of Bioshock to just go back to, why even bother? You know what I mean? Like why even, why even bother? And then you run the risk of, tainting this thing like i don't know it's a lot it's it's i again props to the team who took that on because like i would have like i love bioshock if somebody was like if somebody came to me and i was an i was an accomplished director of any of any stature and they were like do you want to direct the next bioshock game i would have been like fuck no what the hell am i gonna do that is

2:02:51Dustin Furman:a crazy those are crazy shoes yeah it's it's you gotta have some big balls and you have to have you have to have I assume Ken's bought in like you have to you need him to at least know what's going on right you're all in the same publishing family I'm still not totally unconvinced that Judas isn't associated with Bioshock in some way I'll continue to die on that hill until the game comes out and we find out right in fact I kind of want it to be I don't know how people feel that way and again I don't think it needs to be like this like look like bang you over the head with it but it could be something like the expansions the dlc for infinite where it's like dude this is awesome you know like how it ties it to the first game and stuff and it's the same thing here where i'm like you should just do something like that so maybe we'll get two bioshock games but yeah cloud chamber has been cloud chamber up in canada has been kind of spinning their wheels on this and god i would love to see what they have but yeah but we uh we don't god bioshock so good if you guys are out there and you still haven't played Bioshock, you're so stupid.

2:03:56Dustin Furman:You're so dumb. Like there's like Bioshock is so good that you can be virtually there's almost nothing you could be playing right now that would be more important than you playing Bioshock.

2:04:07Dustin Furman:Not nothing. Like, what are you playing right now that's more important than Bioshock? Pragmata? Roblox? Vampire crawlers? Get bent. Come on.

2:04:19Colin Moriarty:I just remembered, I think I've said this, shared this on the show years ago, but when I got my dad a PS4 when he was off work for a surgery, a couple weeks later he sent me a text, like a picture, and it was the screen of him playing. but it was the opening of Bioshock Infinite and I was like the Breaking Bad meme. I was like Hank from the car like no not that one not that one and he's like oh okay and then he never played his PS4 ever again after that

2:04:49Dustin Furman:you kept it from greatness you know you did the right thing it's like when I yelled at Ega in my apartment because he was unwrapping the burrito I scared him right but I saved him at the same time yeah right right

2:05:02Colin Moriarty:I tried I did everything I could to try to get my dad to play a game bought him a ps4 hooked him up

2:05:08Dustin Furman:with some some classics the olds just don't get it a lot of these guys you know they don't get it I don't think they get what a machine is no they don't understand strange like my I gave my dad like I gave my dad like one of my old one like a console I gave my parents both and they just like I understand it's like a cable box I'm like I was this over yeah it's like I don't even understand I don't understand what's so difficult about this.

2:05:31Colin Moriarty:My dad is young enough that he grew up playing NES and Atari and something about, I mean, he kind of just stopped at the NES. Like after that, he was like, I'm good. I've heard a lot of people say that the analog stick fucked them up. Yeah, the sticks are bad for people. They're intimidating.

2:05:48Dustin Furman:It's too much for people. They are. I mean, if you imagine we all know how to do it. You know? And the best part, The thing I love the most about it is why inversion and just that you have to assume that one out of 10 people that are like, I don't know, this doesn't feel right to me. Like they have to invert the controls and they don't even know to do it. Like there's a lot to get through. Right. Because they don't know that that's what's wrong. Right. That that might be what's wrong. I always think about that. Where I'm like, there's like two barriers. It's like, all right, so this doesn't feel right to you.

2:06:20Dustin Furman:I remember doing that with my mom, actually. I'm like, why don't you invert? We'll do this. And she's like, so like, I'm trying to figure out, I'm like, are you just not getting it? Is this easier for you? I don't know. But yeah, a lot of people just kind of tuned out with the 3D era of games. More people obviously tuned in, but I think that that's reasonable and okay. There are some older people. I won't say his name, but there's an older gentleman in his late 70s that I've communicated with on and off for years. He was a kind of funny fan and he found games. He was a police officer and he found games.

2:06:52well what's what's no no you're like i won't mention his name he's a police officer he's a kind of funny it's like all these oh yeah all these things i like yeah it's it's like that like that uh was it curvy enthusiasm that that guy who tells yeah he's like i have a patient and i won't say what i won't say who he is but he's a big time director he directed star wars

2:07:12Dustin Furman:and he would get prostitutes for an hour but he would only need five minutes i love i love that scene it's so funny that that scene is awesome that's so stupid it because that he's freaking out that he's like telling stories about him or whatever but anyway this guy this guy was a cop for many years and he found games in his retirement um as like a way to pass time and he's like a huge nerd but it was something that he didn't even know he liked until he was in his like mid-60s i think and now he plays like you know he plays like skyrim and witcher and all these guys i think it's hysterical and so to me i'm just like there is hope you just have to and i'm pretty sure he plays on pc as well which is even nerdier so like it's like that's that there's that video that goes around that old like that old u.s sniper that was playing that was playing like one of the video games and he's like destroying everyone oh yeah yeah he's playing like battlefield or something like that yeah it's like i i um there's hope but i feel like by the again we say this over and over again when our generation and really it's going to start with gen x when they get older like they'll be the first old people that play games like that really do play video games it's just something you have to be Batman like you're born into it yeah so it's going to be so funny

2:08:26Colin Moriarty:that old guy on battlefield I saw a clip where he was explaining how to read the sights on a sniper rifle and he knew from personal experience I believe yeah of how to set the range and what like because there's like a graph on the side of certain sniper rifles he's like oh you do this and then dude was a legend that is cool and the fact that it works in like his knowledge transfers to the game is actually kind of crazy yeah that's it that's like a massive like if i was building a shooter there would be no way that i would even be thinking about that shit like oh making the the scope real and like oh let's have a realistic bullet drop and like realistic wind physics it's like it's insane uh yeah using a little knob it's so cool like i i i see those every night i'm seeing them more now presumably because as as we age old people are you know becoming you know they're they're the generations are sliding and so there's more people like just playing video games in general yeah by the time we're old it's gonna be hilarious i'm so excited assuming i make it like that like that there's that all these nursing homes are gonna be just full of like like there's gonna be like land parties it's so funny to imagine you're gonna have robots changing your diaper it's a completely alien thing to me to see old people playing video games you know it's just kind of it's kind of like how i feel about like my because all the old people in my family like speak exclusively spanish so like what i remember when i first saw like somebody's grandma talked to them in english that was like a culture shock thing to me i was like oh my god imagine being to understand your great grandparents

2:10:08Dustin Furman:all right this next story here i thought was somewhat distressing people are circulating it for one reason but we'll go into some of the other numbers too ign has um along with uc berkeley and i guess an organization called kantar released a generations in play report so like a really deep poll that talks about um digital consumption and social media consumption and all the rest now everyone in the world comes up all the time i did work at ign for a long time and ign does spend a lot of money on this shit um to try to learn more i mean during my era to try to learn more about what people are doing and how they're playing and stuff and it's quite valuable and you can sell this information and you have the data for your own websites and all the rest so this is one of those things and that's why we're reporting on it so you can go read i think the full report but games industry up is has a little breakdown of it now the big thing that people are circulating here guys is and it is a massive problem is 62 percent of people polled six and these are audiences for game this is these are players of games gamers 62 percent no longer buy full price games 62 percent six out of 10 people don't buy full price games now that's two things one is people waiting for sales of course which is reasonable we talk about all the time i really don't know why you wouldn't and unless you're like a real enthusiast i don't know why you'd even bother paying full price or anything but the other thing is that people are just not playing games which you can buy so like uh what was that game never never never everness or ever never just to everness yeah whatever they're playing that by the millions so there's that and that's a big problem also the same number of shows it's or the same polling shows 71 percent of audiences no longer purchase physical music that seems i thought that would be like 95 percent or more so it's crazy that three out of ten people are still buying physical presumably vinyl i would assume yeah vinyl is the big thing now um gen x respondents prioritize Google search to discover new games, while millennials favored 85 % YouTube and Gen Z respondents prioritize social media.

2:12:21Dustin Furman:Millennial and Gen Z audiences are much more likely to buy games at full price, while Generation X lags far behind at 20%. So older players are the ones that are not buying games at full price specifically, which is fascinating. Generation X prefers single player games and Generation Z prefers multiplayer titles to almost exactly the same degree, while millennial players remain almost evenly split. That's not a huge surprise either. It's like an evolution graph. Yeah. Generation X and millennials are more likely to return to games in order to complete or master them while Gen Z are primarily motivated by new customization or community content.

2:12:55Dustin Furman:That also, I think, tracks based on the kinds of games they're playing. Consumption of guides and game help varies by generation with Gen X indexing higher on tip videos, millennials on map tools, and Gen Z on build guides. That's interesting. Yeah, so there's some interesting stuff here, but I guess we can focus in more on full price games. And actually, we got a letter that speaks to this a little bit. Jeff Buss wrote in. He's bussing. That's a good thing, right? Says, greetings, gentlemen. I see a huge argument on Twitter taking place around 007 First Light's story length of 20 hours. Many people are saying that 20 hours is way too short for a$70 game.

2:13:32Dustin Furman:In what world are we living in where a 20-hour campaign without side stuff is too short? Not every game has to be an 80-hour slog. Thoughts on game length in 2026. These things are totally intrinsically aligned, unfortunately, I think. Neverness to everness is free and unlimited. And that's going to be pretty tough to compete with. No matter how robust your game is, people are always going to. This is why the race to the bottom was such a bad thing for games. And obviously, it's good for the games that win, but it's bad for a lot. how many times you see on twitter it's like this random game you've never heard of after three weeks is getting pulled like that the servers are being pulled it's like every day i see that shit where i'm like what is this and then i go on steam and i'm like this is a multiplayer game it came out two weeks ago and they're already shutting it down um i am uh chris let's go to you i'm deeply concerned by the the lack of uh willingness to pay for games yet i also as i said understand why in certain circumstances you are so inundated yeah that you really if you're just patient we say this all the time if you're just patient you can get away with murder basically like you can wait a year and pay 20 bucks for some of these 70 dollar games easy um yeah so why why so what do you think about this well i i would like to know like does it say or did i miss um the time frame that the that this data was collected uh i'm going to let me go to the full report yeah because uh because that i would find curious too because oh yeah august through november 2025 oh okay 5 500 participants in the us uk and australia okay so this is not a particularly high point for people's uh you know money but so that does probably factor into it at least somewhat I would imagine.

2:15:28But I mean, yeah, I mean, there's a lot available for free. There's there's no reason really to buy something the day it comes out at full price. For us, it's different. We like to be, you know, we like to be current and we're just excited about it. We're enthusiasts, our jobs. So that kind of paints things differently as well. um i i don't know what to make of this really because it just seems that it just seems to be the trend for most things like you would imagine that most people these days watch movies on streaming they're probably not going to the theater you know which is the equivalent to like a day one purchase in my mind so like i just i just saw project hail mary like a like a about a week ago and i went to i went to the theater to see it it was great it was like 25 it was like 20 bucks or something for like two hours and change and uh i felt all right with that but i know a lot of people who don't go to the movies because it's like it's expensive and then the food is like a whole nother fucking thing there's like 50 bucks to go to the movies like it's it's insane yeah it sucks so i understand in a time of like especially when money is tight things prospects are not fantastic things are uncertain job security is low layoffs are high i i get why you wouldn't be like oh yeah let me spend 70 on this brand new video game that i'm going to spend 20 hours on or even 100 hours on um i get it i don't know if i have much more to say about it because it's just kind of like it is i would be more curious about this man it sucks because everything is painted by like the the the circumstantial kind of timeline that we're that we're in right now and everything else that's affecting purchasing power and all this i would love to see what this data would look like without that economic strain and just based on the availability of technology and just based on pure competition metrics of like oh just the availability of these free-to-play games uh you know as they are the quality of triple a games as they are uh the the the stickiness of full price games as they are without these extraneous factors i think would be a lot more telling and a lot more interesting but we do kind of have this albatross of like a greater economic downturn to kind of muddy the waters a little bit um it's still interesting data though because it is ultimately reflective of just the reality that we have one thing that i want to note is that like I'm looking at this part, which you read earlier, where Gen X prefers single-player games, Gen Z prefers multiplayer titles, and Millennials remain almost evenly split.

2:18:14The Apex gamer, if you will. Sorry.

2:18:20Dustin Furman:Yeah, one foot in each camp, really. We get everything. They absorbed it all. Yeah, it's an interesting point. Dustin, what are your thoughts here? Anything you want to pull out?

2:18:30Colin Moriarty:Something that about game and it's not just games, but I guess, I don't know, people aren't really buying Blu-rays and stuff anymore. But I guess this isn't necessarily the case with that is that for some reason, games are almost treated like disposable products. They have a freshness to them. Soros comes out at$70 and over time it loses its freshness. Maybe it's$50. And then a year from now, it's stale. $20 on a Black Friday or something. Maybe not. Sorry, Sony's a little different. Sony has become more resistant to lowering the prices of their games, which is probably good. But look at like Nintendo and people hate Nintendo for this, but it works.

2:19:17Colin Moriarty:And it does make sense to where it's like, why would why would Mario Kart be worth less later than it is at launch? in fact the game is really in most game cases now the game has improved significantly since launch there may be even new content that sometimes you don't even have to pay for so game consumers particularly millennial and gen x who have been gaming for years and years now why would you if you're not the type of person that needs to play it on launch day why would you you have been trained you've been trained that the game will lose its quote-unquote freshness and you can buy it on the what is it like at a bakery where it's like oh yeah the baker's extras section or something end of day the end of day it's like well why wouldn't i do that only that case that there actually is a a reason that it's cheaper is it's not going to be as good but in a game case it's often going to be better if you wait that is interesting i didn't think about the yeah they are better games the cheaper they get yeah like dude someone sorry to pick on crimson desert again but the person that spent 70 at launch a launch day of crimson desert who eventually will pick it up in versus the person who will eventually pick it up this november on black friday like dude in that case especially you are getting so so much better of a game it is stupid for you to buy it at

2:20:52Dustin Furman:full price and that applies to almost every game yeah i i and it is stupid i totally agree i think this isn't going to collapse in on itself at some point i think because and by the way i don't think it's going to like have a detrimental effect on the gaming space i think the gaming space is just changing but the full price market it's why pragmata is selling two million copies which we'll talk about in a minute it's a pretty big deal because it's a short new game no one knows what the fuck it is i think people have confidence in capcom or whatever but like that's a big win for them because I think it's what you're saying Dustin it's like I buy full price games and I say it all the time like like I care a lot about this space and I have a I have a lot of disposable income a lot of people don't care a lot about the space or just casual in the space and don't have a lot of disposable income I try to put my money where my mouth is to show support especially owning a developer myself and knowing how important that is you know like and to that end we said this that we stole Tom Hap's kind of style with Axiom Verge many years ago.

2:21:50Dustin Furman:And we told the audience with Saintslayer, we're not lowering the price for at least a year. Now we're talking about a$10 game, but it's like to show that there were even back then when Axiom Verge came out, there was this expectation games to get cheaper. I'll just wait. Now we have that same push of waiting with an influx of games at all times that are creating an endless back catalog for you that you can dip into at any time and buy these games if they're not Nintendo games on the cheap. Therefore, if you're totally dissociated from the health of the gaming space, and really, why wouldn't you be unless you're an enthusiast of some degree?

2:22:25Then there's no reason for you

2:22:28Dustin Furman:to spend full price on games. It is just the reality of the situation. There's no way around it, unfortunately. It is what it is. It sucks. And the push and pull are the endless amount of free-to-play games and cheap games. And the game you've been waiting for that was$70, That's now 40 bucks. And there's no way in. I mean, it's not going to it's not going to ultimately work out very well. I don't think.

2:22:51Colin Moriarty:Well, and I want to back up to about what I was saying is that I don't I don't think a game. It's it's good that a game remains the same price every like I don't think every game should remain its launch price forever. Yeah, I agree. I think Nintendo can get away with that because they're Nintendo. know but i think it's good and healthy for our ecosystem that games do reduce in price because the it opens up for gamers that maybe can't afford to buy new new games sure you know but they can they can afford a console and it's like okay but i can't keep up with all these new releases at 70 but i still want to play them and it's like well there's still an option for you And I think that's great and healthy.

2:23:42Colin Moriarty:It's weird. It's healthy. It's healthy, I think, for the gaming audience as a whole, that it can be accessible, that nearly outside of Nintendo, almost any game at some point will be accessible at a lower price. I think that is a good thing and healthy but at the same time it's not healthy in that if the companies making these games aren't making money at launch uh that's bad yeah but it's the same argument that uh you know that game pass trains you not to buy games that like sales kind of train you to wait and so just like well why wouldn't you yeah I mean the sales are extreme

2:24:21Dustin Furman:that's the whole thing you remember remember back in the day like when you'd go to GameStop or EB or something and you'd have to and they'd have the thing in the front of the store with like all the games they wanted to get rid of and you would you would thumb through them yeah that those were the discounted games then you'd have like the used games but then everything else would kind of cost what it cost especially in the cartridge era and yeah it's crazy i'm astounded at some of this some of the stuff that i'm able to get for like dirt cheap dirt cheap and modern money by the way which is extra cheap like a two dollars for like so it's so inflated but it's what i bring this up all the time Chris but it's like when I bought Mass Effect trilogy for five dollars I'm like you shouldn't even bother selling it for this cheap like why like what are you saying about the value of this at five dollars you know it is crazy that yeah I bought every single I think I owned I think I bought every single Tomb Raider that exists up until I think uh I think it was before Rise and Shadow but like after the new one yeah um but like every single Tomb Raider game up until that point including the new one i think i got it for like four or five dollars and i remember being like what the fuck is this i'm not gonna play half of these but i have to buy like what what am i stupid it's strange like i i don't understand that level of discounting it's not because of the competition it creates that's fine i just don't even understand why you'd bother i mean i appreciate it i like it's great it's awesome for me i just don't understand how it's worth it for for them it's cutthroat as hell yeah because you figure after the split too it's like what the fuck are you even making on this yeah you'll make three dollars and fifty cents on the five dollar game or whatever it's like you make maybe like you'll make maybe like 50 grand on this game yeah it's weird it's weird it's weird i i do think that and and you're it's a great point where you make too dustin about nintendo's games just in that the argument could just be made of like well what why would the game delineate over time that's just the way capitalism works with the market with entertainment especially but there is an argument it is nice to see a little bit of pushback though everyone's upset about the star fox game you don't like your remakes of star fox you're not into that yeah he looks like uh every that that new star fox model looks like um there are you that human resources meme where you know what i'm talking about it's like the the woman calling oh yeah it's like star fox but it's like star fox behind him it's like hello human resources.

2:26:47Dustin Furman:He looks so fucked. I wonder if they'll ever come up with a new idea. We'll find out. Yeah. All right. Let's move on with the news here. Call of Duty's Twitter account tweeted this out because there were rumors going around that Call of Duty, the next Call of Duty game for this year will be on PS4. But in fact, this forced Call of Duty to confirm it is not going to be on PlayStation 4. They tweet out, quote, not sure where this one started, but it's not true. The next Call of Duty is not being developed for PS4, end quote. This is the confirmed Call of Duty account saying this. This is a big deal because I'm pretty sure there were 13 consecutive Call of Duty games on PlayStation 4.

2:27:31Dustin Furman:The following Call of Duty games are on PlayStation 4. Ghosts, Advanced Warfare, Black Ops 3, Infinite Warfare, World War 2, Black Ops 4, Modern Warfare, Black Ops Cold War, Vanguard, Modern Warfare 2, Modern Warfare 3 Black Ops 6, Black Ops 7 so this will be the first one with no PS4 version we're finally moving away, I don't know if there's anything to really be said about that but it's big news as people start turning off PS4 I wonder if Sony's starting to push behind the scenes a little bit on this as well that's gotta be the longest run right? yeah it is because Call of Duty last came to PS3 in 2015 so that would have been only two years after the console came out but this went on for five years after the console came out

2:28:10Colin Moriarty:that's crazy yeah i think there's probably a push from sony for sure and it's the year to do it right because it'll come out well i guess gta is in november they're gonna come out right near

2:28:22Dustin Furman:each other i assume i don't know if there's any avoiding that for them for call of duty

2:28:26Colin Moriarty:yeah unfortunately for them it makes me slightly more optimistic just that the last call of duty game was lame and bad and so i'm hoping that being totally on the current generation that we do get some kind of upgraded experience from the last one but i don't know man black ops 7 i loved black ops 6 a lot so it was very sad yeah gotta change it up though i mean we talked we talked about Call of Duty's downfall. This is the year they got a fix.

2:29:04Dustin Furman:Yeah, it's not looking good just in that they're going to be they're going to necessarily have to be near Grand Theft Auto based on the cadence of when their games come out and they're kind of on a decline. So two hills to climb for them. Yeah, but no cot on PS4. So if you're still holding on to PS4, come on, man. Move on already. It's enough already. You know, it is. It's enough already. It's 13 years old. it's about to start high school

2:29:35Dustin Furman:all right I wanted to touch on this real quick this was revealed through an Xbox little presser Sega has revealed further the game that they actually first revealed back in 2014 Stranger Than Heaven I don't know if you guys had anything to say about this the thing I want to note about this is so this was first shown off at the Game Awards I want to say in 2024 at that time it was called Project Sentry and we knew at that time that Sega was publishing obviously with Ryugaa Gotoku their internal studio developing this game Dustin I don't know if you have any information on this but I don't think it's still confirmed is this is it like a dragon related

2:30:17Colin Moriarty:I'm not sure it's Japanese

2:30:21Dustin Furman:it is Japanese it takes place during five eras of Japanese history but I don't know I don't I couldn't I don't know enough to know if it is or not I feel like that might be the mystery and they're pushing you know sega is obviously very much with xbox now in a lot of marketing so they're pushing it on game pass so it's just a stranger than heaven will be on xbox game pass xbox series x and s xbox on pc xbox cloud steam and playstation 5

2:30:43Colin Moriarty:so yeah what do you think uh i didn't get to watch all of this uh special look that xbox did but i did see the beginning first of all they got snoop dog in this game which i sounds initially kind of lame but then when i saw him in it i was like this is actually kind of sick and he he seemingly fits in it this game's got a lot of style um what's so appealing to me is that this is a way that i can jump into the realm we'll say of like a dragon yakuza but not have to have a million game lead up. I think it looks pretty cool. I like that it takes place across multiple parts of Japan. I was looking at the list.

2:31:30Colin Moriarty:It's like Fukuoka, Hiroshima, Osaka, Shizuoka, and Tokyo.

2:31:37Dustin Furman:It'll be just like being at home for you. Yeah.

2:31:39Colin Moriarty:Well, the one part in Osaka, that's where I went to a music festival in Minami. Kind of cool.

2:31:46Dustin Furman:It'll be a little touch of home for you. So Stranger Than Heaven, and you guys can go check that out. There's a whole video presentation for it if you're interested in more. And then a big thing that I wanted to talk about here just briefly for me anyway is Mina the Hollower finally has a release date. After being revealed and kickstarted back in February of 2022, they raised about$1.4 million to make it. These are, of course, from Yacht Club, the guys that did Shovel Knight. They released the true final release date. The game is coming out May 29th on PlayStation 5 and elsewhere, of course. There is no PS4 version of the game.

2:32:21Dustin Furman:20 bucks looks awesome now there's a little bit of a conundrum with me in this game although I've already solved the conundrum but I want to speak on it misantropic altruist wrote in said Colin I think there are more people who would be happy knowing you're enjoying early access to me to the hollow or the not you're just giving a bunch of miserable nutsacks the satisfaction of watching you suffer fuck them and go get that code looking forward to hearing you gush over it peace I don't have to go get it it was sent to me like many codes are I that's why I think people to understand is like I'm getting these things and just not using them.

2:32:53Dustin Furman:Yacht Club, I have a very friendly relationship with those guys over there, as I think everyone knows. So they reached out to me and spoke. Actually, I was talking to one of my friends over there, the lead programmer at Yacht Club, and he was talking about how he played Saintslayer and he really liked it. I thought that was really cool, but he sent me a code and he's going to be on the show in a couple weeks, I think. On Sacred Plus to talk about Mina. I kind of wanted to have him on afterwards. He's available for either, but I think it would be more interesting to have him on after I played the game and can talk about it.

2:33:19Um, I was good.

2:33:21Dustin Furman:People are bringing this up because I tweeted about it being like, this is the first time the reason I brought it up because some people are like, Oh, are you bragging or whatever? And I'm like, no, I'm sorry. It comes off like that. What I'm saying actually is I get all of these offers all the time and it's not a problem for me to be like, I'll get to it when I get to it. Mina was tough for me. Um, is tough for me because I really, really want to play it and I'm really looking forward to it. But you know what? It's good to practice self-restraint as well. Be a little bit Zen as it were. um and so i'm i really want to play it but i can wait i've come we've come all this time this is what i've always say to people it's like we've come all this way it's like i have to wait a few more weeks to play mina i'll wait and um i want to be clear that oh well steven bonnell wrote in about this steven bon or maybe bottle i don't know what that's destiny that's not him though oh that's his name i think he's saying it because of that's like are you trying to be funny or is do you think that's his name i that there's no way that's his name destiny destiny the streamer his name yeah destiny the destiny the streamer bonnell bonnell hey gang small piece of feedback on the early access and review codes topic he writes thank you for writing in destiny it seems everyone has their own standards for taking codes early which is cool but it kind of nukes the flow of the game's discussion section when one person has played 20 hours of a game and has to do a verbal gymnastics to avoid saying too much about it there's something really special about the audience and the host all hitting a game around launch together makes the conversations feel more grounded instead of half preview half spoiler discussions where no one can fully talk i don't know that i totally agree with your synopsis of what really happens i think people can't really talk in these conversations because we don't want to spoil the game i don't know that we're worried about spoiling it for each other i think everyone understands internally like what each other's um limitations are about what they might want to know about a game and so on and so forth.

2:35:13Dustin Furman:So I wouldn't read it as that. It's like we don't, we leave our full breakdowns of games to the spoiler discussions where you can opt in and know what you're getting as opposed to maybe potentially spoiling something for someone, which I wouldn't want to do.

2:35:28Dustin Furman:The bigger thing that people are asking is like, well, why is it okay for some people to get the review codes and some people aren't? And what I answered on Twitter is like, I don't really want to tell people what to do. If I had full control, none of us would get access to anything. And that would include the Xbox guys, Brad and the Nintendo people and all the rest like no. But I don't really want to wield that level of control over people. I don't think it's really my place to do so. Everyone, not everyone, but most people here have their other businesses that are also intrinsically tied to games and the access to those games.

2:36:03Dustin Furman:One thing I'll say, and this is something Dustin and I, I think, disagree on, but and I understand his perspective is. I don't think anyone needs to do this to be relevant. I think it helps, but I don't think that level of access is necessary. I think there are plenty of people that have found their way in the industry without any access at all. And we don't, and I personally don't leverage that access, but I also want people to do whatever they're comfortable doing. I think having that level of access creates inherent conflicts of interest. And I believe that that's totally true but i don't think that those conflicts of interest are necessarily played upon or even acknowledged i just think that they exist and i know that they exist because i was in that world for a long time so and what and what i mean by that is you're kind of friendly towards this person or you're like the idea of like everyone's using each other i guess that's the easiest way i can say it and i don't really want to participate in it um the marketing is using you giving you a copy so you say something about the game and then you better believe if you say something really bad about a game you're not going to hear from them again that is a conflict of interest because for all the people that don't that don't care there are people that are going to care and then there's of course the perception of conflicts or whatever I don't think we suffer from those I just don't want to open them up or even give my whole thing is like I don't want to give anyone anything to discuss there's no way you can possibly think I'm on the take with any in any way how could I be how is that even playing out so but that's my own thing and the reality is that people are like some people are like well you should tell everyone what to do and i'm like listen and i'm just being dead ass honest with you if i had to do something like that i would shut this whole thing down and do my own thing like right i would just be like i i don't want to tell you what to do you should just do whatever you want so that's that's where we are and that's what i want to do and i appreciate people writing in about this because it's fun to talk about but I also have to say like I find it kind of relieving to be in this situation and I've said that many times like where I'm like I don't want to play this game anymore so I hope that makes sense to people and uh so to each their own yeah yeah I don't think of I don't think it's that like it's whatever works for whoever's making their show you know whatever's integral to their process and whatever helps them um it is what it is I've gotten codes for things and I'm like I I don't know I'm not that interested or I don't need it I don't accept them not because I think it's particularly that big of a conflict of interest I just like most of the codes I get I'm just like genuinely just like not that interested in it's like it's fine like right it's like okay you have to understand like I've been blacklisted by major publishers for what I've said about their games so for people to say like that there's no conflict there's no perception of conflict of interest in those situations you're crazy because I like I ruined the IGN's relationship with Konami for years.

2:39:00Dustin Furman:You know, and all I had to do was not say the things I said. And you better believe that there are people that let that get into their thought processes and they don't say it. And that's what I'm talking about. I will say, I think there's an overstated, there is something that's overstated about it. And it's the argument about like, well, like I like to, I want to, I want to pay the full price. So I know, so I so it's not free it's not given to me I know I know the sticker price and I'm putting some of the skin in the game I used to think that was like valid and as the years have gone on I kind of think like well this doesn't really this doesn't track with what we do because like we are kind of already in the like we we buy the game like we have to so like that money's already spent anyway so like I like when I when I get like Saros or something I don't even really feel like i've spent the money on it because i like it's it's a it's i expect to do it it's kind of like groceries to me where it's like i don't really care how much my eggs cost because like i need eggs you know it really kind of doesn't matter so like that's it's ostensibly i don't want to say it's ostensibly free because that's not necessarily what i mean but it's like it doesn't factor into like how i feel about it so i think that's that's the thing that's a little bit overstated if you have to buy games and you're using that as like a kind of like oh well i didn't get it for free it's like you kind of it's not really saying anything because like your average person isn't doing the same thing like they buy a game and it doesn't help them at all other than they get a new game like we make content at least right we write it off there's like a million ways

2:40:31Colin Moriarty:to technically kind of profit from it um but i would agree colin that it it does and maybe even i don't know if often is the word but i can i can agree that it can create conflicts of interest for people particularly if it is your only avenue yeah right like i need to make money for my youtube channel i need to have good connections with the people in order to get the content or to get the codes to make the content um but i guess i don't agree that i don't think that's the case for everybody because like for you like you received codes at ign and you said you blocked up like ruined your relationship with konami and others yeah sure so it didn't affect me what you said

2:41:25Dustin Furman:no it didn't affect but do you understand what i'm saying when i say like knowing you're at that hinge that there are a lot of people that are definitely taking the other route sure and so to me i so i don't i just want to remove their perception and then there's pressure like you don't want to be the person that like ruins it for other people and there's like there's a social pressure there like i get it right i mean honestly the kanami thing really was half damon's fault if i'm being honest it's just that like god they were fucking babies man cannot those people at kanami were fucking such babies what happened with the kanai i don't even i'm not even privy to this oh it was we talked about it a long time ago i think i even did a video on it at some point like a long time ago but like damon gave shadow lords a shadow like a seven or something like that kanami got like really upset about that then that's crazy i um gave the ds the 3ds castlevania like a four or something like that and they flipped out and then um they i was supposed to see them in germany behind closed doors and they refused to see me and then they stopped responding to us for like anything pez related and all the other things they were doing at the time metal gear um and uh yeah it was all over this i basically had to have like a sit down conversation with like konami and like our people and like the producer over there that they had like a so they were so mad at us like for the things we were saying about castlevania and thinking and it was so funny how it was like i i remember saying in the meeting i'm like you don't understand like i'm a huge castlevania fan like i understand castlevania and when i really and what i said to my bosses when i really wanted to say was like i clearly understand castlevania a lot better than you.

2:42:57Dustin Furman:You know, if this is what you think, but I didn't, I would say that now, now that I'm unaffiliated and you're right, Dustin, like I got, I got hundreds of games for free at IGN. I got hundreds of games for free at Kind of Funny and when we started Sacred Symbols, we got games for free. I eventually cut that off. The thing I was saying about Mina was that like, I still to this day get things in the, all the time and it's relatively easy for me to say no i agree with you that access helps of course it helps however i will say this i feel like the access corridor is so crowded that in fact your best bet to break through at this point is to not be an access media guy is to be more of what i always bring up like an angry joe guy like review the game a couple months later do it really weird be like donkey or yeah like that that to me is like way more likely for you at this point than than being another another access person getting a project helix box in the mail you know i actually agree i think especially if you're going to put effort into it like i i do think that's that's totally accurate we're like a video about like i don't know a game that came out three months ago comes out and it's like a 20 minute video essay or something and like people people line up for

2:44:11Colin Moriarty:that shit people love it yeah there's definitely something that i mean jimmy has told me this and he was right i've experimented against what he thought anyway where it's like if you are a smaller youtube creator like myself and you release a video at embargo you're part of the meat grinder and you will get a bunch you may get a small increase in clicks but those people are probably going to not watch very long and then they're going to disappear forever so you're better off waiting till after the embargo date by like even a few days or something but my thing has always been like with this being my full-time job for me to make a video that I feel happy with that can inform people if I want to be able to do that around the golden window where people are actually going to care i have to kill myself if i do it at launch and i've done that before with many videos some to great success like games that i didn't get access to like uh uh dragon quest like dragon quest was one of my most successful videos i played it for a weekend then made a video i don't know if it was the most helpful or informative thing to the audience since i hadn't had a full experience with it but um i don't know it's a it's tough i get i totally understand your views on it i guess i just would be hasty to paint people that get review codes as obviously compromised in some way right i don't mean to do that what i mean to say is that

2:45:56Dustin Furman:there are obvious conflicts that exist that have nothing to do with the person yeah you know and really it's about knowing how the how the how everything i've just been behind this i've dealt with these people for fucking years you know i and i just there's a lot of nice pr people i'm not saying that there aren't i deal with nice pr people at sony when we want to do interviews i deal with nice pr people when i have to say no i don't want to deal and i try to respond to people too where i'm like i don't and not even to save them their code because again the codes are like fucking water it's like they it's crazy how many codes you get but just to be like i'm not don't even just take me off your list you're wasting your time and that often does work and i don't say quite like that but i'm like i appreciate you thinking of me i don't do this anymore please consider my other friends and people in my network if you want to you know give them games or whatever and that they want to say but i believe for our i will say this for our network everyone in it right from the dukes to gene to brad and every none of you need access i believe that i think that's true too yeah like i don't i believe that each of you are interesting and dynamic enough to not need it.

2:47:09Dustin Furman:But if it helps you, more power to you. Now, King Ryan James wrote in about Mina itself and said, Mina, the Hallowar has a release date of May 29th. What are your hype levels? Dustin?

2:47:20Colin Moriarty:Very hyped. I played the demo when it came out on Switch 2 for about 20 minutes. So the same with when I played Vampire Crawlers that I played the demo for a tiny bit and I turned it off and I was like, i'm good uh i'm pumped i'm excited yeah i've not played it at all so i'm just i'm i'm so excited

2:47:39Dustin Furman:to play this fucking game game boy color game it's gonna be such a blast are you gonna play it chris i don't know i i think i'll have to wait to see like how people feel about it like i'm not a mark for these for the for the 2d stuff really like i like it but like it's i fall off of it quick and then like i get distracted by other things there's a lot to play right now so i don't know it really depends on like what the consensus is if it's this like really on like unavoidably like phenomenal game like i'm gonna be forced to check it out because my curiosity will get the better of me and even to be honest if it comes out if it turns out to be a massive disaster that also would probably that would also be like what the hell is i gotta see what's going on everything's riding on this game for them um yeah i mean it's crazy how much how much is it gonna be 20 bucks was it 20 that's not that's totally reasonable i think yeah um i could see myself like maybe picking it up and not touching it for like months but they said what did they say dustin we went over it like they said if we sold like 50 000 copies we're done so it was something like that like if we they have to sell i think 250 he was saying or something like that i think they can do it but that's going to be a fairly tall order i think i i don't want to say a tall order i don't Yacht Club doesn't have the juice they did because they waited so long to release a game.

2:49:01Dustin Furman:I mean, the crazy thing is that it's been 12 years since Shovel Knight came out, and this is their first game. If you don't count all the Shovel Knight expansions, right? They haven't released another game themselves. They've published other games. Everything's a lot riding on this game. I'm really, really rooting for them. and certainly I'll be asking I think David D 'Angelo will be the guy I have on the show from there and I'll be asking them all the tough questions for sure because he was even I won't say what we were saying in our email but it was funny he was email me back and he's like and he said something where I'm like oh you're listening to what I'm saying like about like kind of a little half snarky about something I said you know okay gotta be a little more careful perhaps conflict of interest alright finally last piece of news PlayStation Store top downloads for April 2026.

2:49:52Dustin Furman:People are focusing on this for a reason, which I think makes quite a bit of sense, which is that Saros charted at number 11 for the month. Now, people are like, okay, it came out April 30th. It counts for one day. I don't know, guys. Do you want to use that argument? Because here, I'll put this in the chat for you guys. Why don't you look at this list? Remember that Returnal came out April 30th as well. And Returnal in April of 2021 was the third most downloaded game on PlayStation 5. Now, there are a few things to note. When Returnal came out, PS5 was six months old, which is crazy to think about.

2:50:39Dustin Furman:So there weren't that many games comparable to where we are now. So that's important. But it doesn't seem like Saros has the same juice that Returnal does. And I think people are being a little too like Push Square wrote a story about how like the sales are bad. I'm like, I think it's way too early to judge it, but it doesn't seem like it has any runaway success attached to it or anything like that. It's clearly basically that it at number 11 on the PlayStation chart on the PSN chart for April 2026 ingests all of the pre-orders and random day one purchases. And that's it. So we'll get a better story next next month, I think.

2:51:14Dustin Furman:But it doesn't look great for Saros, but I think it's a premature as well. um yeah mlb the show 26 was the most downloaded game followed by pragmata not a huge surprise since it sold 2 million copies across platforms crimson desert holding at number three it's not a huge surprise either nba 2k 26 at four pretty big deal we're in the nba playoff season now so people are excited starfield at five and then this game content warning at six and then we get the gta 5 at seven mouse at eight great for them minecraft call of duty and then we get the saros at 11. Hades is at 12. Hades 2. Ark Raiders is at 14.

2:51:52Dustin Furman:Resident Evil 4 Remake is holding on at 17. Ready or not 18. Invisible versus 19. And Requiem falls down to 20. So almost falling out. Now, on the EU chart, that's for the North American chart. Poppy Playtime Chapter 1. What is that? That was number 20. I don't want to say like a brain rot thing because it's not exactly accurate, but I think that's like an internet.

2:52:15Colin Moriarty:Kind of like Five Nights at Freddy's, right? it exists the same part of my brain Poppy's Playtime and Five Nights at Freddy's Mob Entertainment

2:52:24Dustin Furman:it's kind of like that yeah interesting and they're American too and yeah they're doing better in Europe so yeah that peaked up on the European charts and by the way Saros on the European charts is 17 PS4 Red Dead 2 obviously continues to dominate nothing really interesting over there PSVR 2 games number one Star Wars Tales from the Galaxy's Edge I assume that was on sale for May 4th Oh, yeah. Well, no, that was April. But maybe they did it in advance. Beat Saber 2 Among Us 3D 3 Job Simulator 4. It's crazy that Job Simulator is still there. And then free-to-play games. Roblox number one, Fortnite number two, Rocket League number three, Call of Duty Warzone number four, and Neverness to Everness.

2:53:06Dustin Furman:We'll never escape it. It's number five. Good Lord. All right. Where's Marathon? Marathon wouldn't be in there. Oh, you mean on the... Yeah, it's not anywhere on the sales charts for sure on the download charts. Oh, we'll talk a little bit about Marathon later. Although I think we're all getting a little tired of it. But for now, that's all for the news. All right, my friends, let's get into what we're playing. We're all playing Saros, which we can talk about more deeply here. I'll just quickly say that I'm also playing Vampire Crawlers. It's totally addictive. I love it. It's kind of difficult.

2:53:37Dustin Furman:Like the one thing I like about it is it's kind of more difficult, as I was saying last week, than Vampire Survivors. So like I die fairly regularly when I don't really want to be dying or I don't expect to be dying or I'm not getting very far. There was that one stage, Dustin. I'm sure you've gotten to it. It's early on. There's like a bridge you have to call the mini bridge. Yeah. And it's like, this was kind of tough. Yeah. Like I had to build myself up to that a little bit. So I'm enjoying that. And as I said, I, I platinum St. Slayer, my game, Spear of Sacrilege on PS4. That's my 207th platinum trophy.

2:54:07Dustin Furman:I did that all in one sitting. You can watch that on NVID on YouTube, on our YouTube channel, if you'd like to check that out. It took about four and a half hours for me to do it. So there's that. All right. So let's get into Saros. Chris, let's go to you and we'll hear from you. We're going to do a review discussion and spoiler cast for Saros in the coming weeks. I don't know what permutation of people is going to be on it, but I'll be taking care of that. Dustin's going to be taking care of the Pragmata one, which I imagine will maybe even happen first. Oh, yeah, I was.

2:54:33Colin Moriarty:Well, we can talk business later. I didn't know which I should be prioritizing in terms of play, Soros or Pragmata, because I've been prioritizing Soros.

2:54:42Dustin Furman:Yeah, I guess we'll just play it by ear. It doesn't really even matter. No. All right. So, Chris, let's hear from you. Soros, what do you think? Yeah. So I'm about I've played Soros for about like, I think, six or seven hours so far, and I like it. I like it quite a bit. I actually there's elements of it that I like a little bit more than Returnal. there's elements I like a little bit less it plays very very good like the game feel of it is like very very it's snappy it's very good it still feels like in my view the best feeling like moment to moment movement kinetic kind of gameplay in Sony first party I think like in my view it just kind of feels it's less focused on giving you kind of like a realistic heaviness and more focused on just giving you like a really really playable um experience and that feels great uh the combat i think is great i love seeing i'm reminded about of how much i loved the like the bullet hell aspects of it just seeing like the patterns and how like hypnotic they are uh it's really cool and the boss fights are i think in particular really fun um i've only beaten i think i think two or three main bosses i like these areas too that you can go into that's like a really there's like portals i can't remember what they're called um but they're like challenge portals where you go in and what yeah what are they i'll look because you get trophies for them i'll look it up yeah i can't i can't remember the name there's like a proprietary name for it uh i like the characters are kind of like whatever to me like i've never really been focused on that anyway but like i do like the computer character primary yeah primary i like i like how cold it is uh but i will say there is something about it i'm finding it a lot easier than returnal and i don't mind that really because i do think it's hard in the areas that it needs to be those challenge areas when you start the eclipse and the boss fights can be challenging and in particular there's one boss fight that kind of had me like, it got me like a couple times and I was like god damn I can't I can't move like it takes some adjusting for some of them but I'm finding it generally a lot easier than Returnal definitely is and the issue that I have the main issue that I have with Saris really is I feel like so there's a lot of weapons in the game there's like a crossbow there's like a shotgun there's a pistol um i don't know why you wouldn't just use the machine guns that's what that's exactly what i said in my conversation didn't i say that on the stream doesn't did you say that on the stream yeah i was like i was like i only use the machine gun that's i don't i i i don't know what the value like i don't know why i would ever pick a shotgun in a game like this like it doesn't make it like i understand that it's like it's a shooter and so you want representation for like various types of firearms but really i feel like they should have just had various types of machine guns because like i don't know why because because i do like because there's one there's two machine guns there's one that's like homing and i've been using that a fuck ton like the auto rifle yeah the auto rifle it's so no brain there's especially one i think where like it releases like an extra round every couple every couple i don't know exactly what the terminology is but like it releases extra bullets and so you could do like insane damage really quick it homes down your targets there's almost no reason not to use it i also do like the the not auto aim uh machine gun just because you could get people from really far away if you're aiming well and uh it does more damage per second which is nice but i pick up a shotgun and i'm like why am i using like why would i use this the pistol why would i use this the crossbow the crossbow is cool it would be it would be a cool weapon i would argue in like almost any other kind of game or if you or if you were in danger of running out of ammo and you had to switch you know what i mean like a do like a like well not like a doom i guess but like a typical arena shooter um but that's just not really what this game is you have infinite ammo so there's no reason to not stick with the gun that works the best and right now i don't know if that'll change really but like the the machine gun seems to be that that gun and because the machine gun is that gun when the game presents you with like a choice that you're supposed to be like oh you're supposed to weigh the differences between you know do i pick this or do i pick this the answer is kind of always obvious because if your option is any gun that isn't the machine gun and a buff.

2:59:36I'm going for the buff like almost 90 % I've rarely found myself conflicted about what to choose. And so and that then to be fair that might just be like a personal thing like I'm sure there's maybe some people who feel that way maybe they like a different gun better. I know some people really like the crossbow for example but so I'm willing to chalk that up to just a personal thing. Maybe that's just the way that I play games and maybe that's a projection of in some way, but I feel like it's a little bit less varied than what I remember Returnal being. It's been a while since I played Returnal, but I feel like I remember there being like a parasite system that was a little bit more interesting and and and things like that.

3:00:21But but overall, I am enjoying my time with Saros. I enjoy it like the moment to moment gameplay of it. just it feels really good um i just think it's a little bit less it's a little bit more um rigid and i feel like my runs are a little bit more identical if that makes sense yeah i i it's

3:00:42Dustin Furman:funny man first of all i i echo completely what you say about the machine gun like that in fact i had a run a day or two ago where i got a new weapon i won't say what it is it's even beyond what we discussed and you pick it up the first time you get it that it adds it to your like repertoire but it fucked my entire run up because now i had this shitty fucking gun yeah that i don't want anymore and then and i was and it was things were getting harder and harder there is well let me let me say this from soul cracker number one first says howdy cdc how are you all finding the difficulty curve of saros after dying a few times through the second boss i got so powerful so quickly via the skill tree that i didn't die a single time until i got to the final boss getting hit is even important as you get a ton of ways to heal i played returnal for the first time this year and I died more times trying to beat the first boss than I have during my total time with Saros has this been your experience thanks y 'all the game is definitely easier and I think there's a lot of reasons for that I want to get further into it because I think that there's it's what it's going to be the the my whole thesis about this game is that and and what I want to kind of predicate the spoiler cast about ultimately we'll get really into it and be able to spoil it for those that want to come is it's a reaction to everything that re-eternal did everything saros does is a reaction nothing is really quite the same so it truly isn't return to like everyone who thought it was gonna be like oh it's like maybe even just call it returnal to it's like it's really not i mean like other than the shooting third person shooter everything else is kind of different all the trappings the way the game works the systems it felt like they they didn't it felt like they were uncertain if returnal really worked i mean that's kind of the way i look at it and i really think it's going to be a matter of taste it truly will be like which one you like better but there's just no doubt in my mind it's a reaction to Returnal as opposed to a spiritual successor or a sequel.

3:02:39Dustin Furman:It is a direct reaction to it, I think. Dustin, do you have anything else you want to say about Saros?

3:02:44Colin Moriarty:I, sorry, I completely agree. I mean, Colin, you and I talked about this on the street Monday, but I, at least for my preference, I can't say with authority. I haven't done like number stat crunching on the different weapons, but I don't feel like the weapons are balanced at all because I, I would rather stick with a lower level auto rifle that I've maxed out because I have, you know, gone past the level point on it, then pick up some of these other weapons, then like a higher level pistol. It's like, I know I'm not going to perform as well. The enemies are not going to die as quickly. I've tried to.

3:03:22Dustin Furman:It's funny you say that because I'd be on like, I'd be on like level 20 of a machine gun and then I'll be like level 40 something and there'll be a pistol. All right. And then it just sucks.

3:03:29Colin Moriarty:Yeah. It's like, surely this gun will improve because with my stats, it should and it simply doesn't and maybe it's a play style thing partially i'm not you know some people may do crazy with some of these other weapons i personally do not and it sounds like that's the case with you guys too and so i find that aspect of it really annoying i actually think that aspect of it is worse than returnal because i had the same case with returnal where there were certain weapons I simply did not like or I felt like I could not do well with them and I think this game has more there's a larger disparity of weapons that I'm like I'm never picking that up because Colin you you mentioned that you decided to just go for it well then you're fucked because now you need to try to find the weapon you like again and you can like I like it's funny I know

3:04:20Dustin Furman:it's all RNG but you get eventually the idea thing where you can like reset what you get yeah and sometimes you could do yeah you could do like three four five times and i i almost never get what i want in the reroll either so it's like yeah it's so annoying but um yeah oh well do you

3:04:35Colin Moriarty:have more to say well yeah i did notice this is just kind of interesting it was going around on twitter a few days ago there's the system in the game i can't remember what it's called where you can add modifiers to your runs yeah and there's the balance where it's like okay these will help you and they cost this amount but you need to be within this golden window so you have to add modifiers that make it harder and there was one where you stack the damage modifier by three so you get like three times the damage and then you put on like you get slightly more of the yellow health bar from like what is it corruption yeah uh you get that and there's like one other small modifier i put this on the other night just to try it and it did make things so easy and then when i booted up the game the next day they changed it i was no longer balanced somehow oh they they yeah

3:05:25Dustin Furman:they probably think it's being abused yeah yeah it's funny man because that that whole system have you unlocked that system yet chris in your game the uh the dial thing yeah yeah yeah yeah the car cogent whatever they call it it's like this is a major problem for me um actually i'll get into this inquiry from John because I think this gets into it even deeper. He says, I am torn on Saros. I'm hoping I'm not the only one that feels a bit duped by the marketing. From a gameplay standpoint, it is completely immaculate. I agree. But there's no doubt that it is significantly less of a roguelike than Returnal was.

3:05:59Dustin Furman:And as a result, has much less depth to its systems when you're out on a run. By pivoting the game's currency system to being in run only, from being in game only to being able to extract with it back to your hub area, it loses a lot of the magic of Returnal, which felt like each run was a fresh start and the stakes were much higher and saros if i'm having a bad run i am no longer frantically searching for the next health bed or a unique artifact to purchase but my attitude is more along the lines of who gives a shit i'll just take some currency back with me for upgrades anyway it's beautiful it's fun but they drained all the sauce from the formula of the runs to make it more accessible the marketing made it look like return with deeper combat but they made too many trade-offs on this one i actually this is exactly what i said right on the stream dustin which i was like it is a game where it's like be careful what you ask for because I think they needed to tweak Returnal to make it better.

3:06:47Dustin Furman:But I think that they went pretty far, like further than I would have imagined that they felt like they needed to go. The big thing about the Carcosen modifiers, whatever they call it. So I didn't, you unlock that pretty deep into the game. And I didn't, I was seeing people talk about how there are these accessibility options. so I was like oh that's interesting and I was thinking that they were just accessibility options like like what Sony does like where you go into the menus and you just kind of like make it comically easier whatever and maybe there are those things I haven't looked but what they really meant was that there were these modifier system and I'm like what do you what is your intention with the modifier system what do you want me to do with it the placement of it indicates that it is a central part of the game and that they intend for you to use them like like the intention is for you to actually do it because they're right next to the map where you quick travel it's not like it's something you go into it's like it's there it's like it's beckoning you to look at it and i agree with you dustin now i haven't played in a couple so i'll have to get the new patch i'm sure i already have it but like i noticed the same kind of things where it's like it is cool where it's this meter and if the the the line goes outside into the red like you have to make adjustments to make it easier or harder so that you fit into this level system and i'm like well that's not a cheat or accessibility system this is part of the game yep and so and you're right like so i started playing around with the two and being like i think what i did was i was like i'm gonna turn off all the halcyon or whatever pickups which is like six points and then i can triple my damage output in return for that and then i can triple my my resistance to attack my defense by giving away like you said like i get more corruption or whatever and i'm like this is too easy and what i started doing was i was like i can't i feel like i'm cheating yeah i'm playing with like this so what i did was but i was like i don't want to be dicking around with this game as long as I dicked around with returnal it doesn't have the spirit of returnal it doesn't even require that so I'm like I'm gonna only use defensive options so I was like I'm gonna take less damage and I'm gonna give up and I will take more corruption like in other words I'm working within this subsystem to be like how can I make it fair you have to balance breaking the fuck out of this game and I don't want to it's like you have to balance the game right exactly and it's like like this is so weird like this is this is what i'm like why are you guys making it so easy that wasn't the spirit the spirit of growth is what was missing in returnal it wasn't the challenge of it it was that people felt like they were getting nothing when they were dying after an hour and that's true you were getting nothing people are always like oh you got like weapon modifications that you can find later it's Like, who gives a shit?

3:09:50Dustin Furman:Like, I just spent an hour, an hour and a half on this, and actually, I'm going to be weaker when I go back with a pistol and all my health gone and all the rest. And I understand they're like, yeah, let's have an upgrade system. Yeah. Like, why couldn't you just stop there? You know? Instead, they're like, no, we're going to have this upgrade system. It's going to be massive. You're going to have so much currency, multiple kinds of currency. You're going to make yourself so powerful. And then we're going to have this other thing. and we're going to suggest by gameplay and by it by its its nature in the ux or whatever that it's central to the game and we're going to let you break the fuck out of it it's like what like because of this guys for me the central mystery of the game is gone it doesn't matter there's a lot of stuff where the presentational stuff is all wrong i think in the game now this is again a matter of taste returnal was mysterious and lonely this game is like constant chatter talking cut scenes interactions with people bad in-game cut scenes that don't look good i like it when

3:10:52Colin Moriarty:you're standing there with your gun like talking to someone with one foot from their face and he's

3:10:56Dustin Furman:standing there with his gun i gotta say like i think the gameplay is great and i think it's fun to play i really like playing it but i kind of like everyone was bitching about that ign score And I'm like, I mean, it's not I don't think I would give it a seven flat, but it's kind of it's no more than an eight. Yeah, like it's it's not a solid return. It's not returnal. Like it's not return. Yeah, I can tell you. I played return for 140 hours. It's there's no way you could even play this game for that long. Like, how could you even do that's the whole thing? It's like anyway. Yeah, I yeah, I want to be clear.

3:11:36I like I like it a lot. i think it's uh i'm a very gameplay first oriented person like even in returnal like yeah there was a mystery but every i remember every time i got to that house i remember i would feel like i would feel like dread because i knew that i knew that it was gonna it was gonna try and do some david lynchian shit and just try to be it it felt returnal did feel a little pretentious this feels more i'm not saying it was i'm saying it felt that way yeah oh look at this yeah look at them as oh who's the astronaut you know like all it's very mystique and a lot of mystery this is a lot more straightforward this is kind of i don't want to say schlock necessarily because that's not it's not right quite the right terminology but this is more i guess what you would see in like a standard it's it's more straightforward with the storytelling it's i

3:12:29Colin Moriarty:agree and disagree with that though it is more in your face but at the same time i'm on the second the last boss and i'm like i don't think i really know what's going on yeah like it's trying to be more up front but it's also trying to be mysterious at the same time and it's storytelling and it's not working for me i agree it is trying to be both i i also didn't know what the fuck was going on in returnal either i didn't care i i and i kind of don't care here the gameplay is great and i love playing it i think it's great i think getting a perfect dodge on like the projectiles and understanding that you've just barely missed it and and like avoiding corruption and absorbing blue uh blue orbs with the shield and doling it back out i think all of it is very fun it's very playable and i still do think like from a gameplay perspective it is it is some of the more you know kinetic um best it's some of the best feeling gameplay in sony first party i i even with all these caveats that we're talking about that dial system i've been largely ignoring because i just i i'm familiar with this from like the the the premise of like skulls in halo where it's just like oh there's difficulty modifiers that you can add or there's things that make it easy um that's cool maybe for like a if i play it again i'll fuck around with this in a little bit more depth but like i've been largely ignoring that dial if anything i've been adding so i have myself my dial up to the point where like the uh it's right on the verge of the red so i'm making the game like harder for me because I like it.

3:13:55I like it to feel that way. It's frustrating because like there's they give you many reasons to not do that. Right.

3:14:04Dustin Furman:But it's funny too, Chris, because like the reason I deferred to defense in the game was because I was like, I did feel like I was taking an enormous amount of damage where I'm like, why am I taking so much damage? Am I supposed to be using this? Like that's my whole conundrum. Is that the idea? This is why I would love to sit down and hopefully I'll get to interview them in the next month or two is like what is this? Like, what, what, what was the intention behind all this? I feel again, it's so reactionary. It is, it is, it is, it definitely reads like a response. I like it. I like it a great deal.

3:14:40Like I love gameplay. I'm a gameplay person first. So like this, this is, it ticks the boxes for me. I'm sticking with it. I'm thinking about playing it pretty often, which is good. there is like a one more run kind of feel to it it's a different kind of one more run feel than it was in Returnal but I'm enjoying my time I think I think Returnal is slightly stronger than this just because I just think I think the parasite system was a little bit better I think I think the crushing difficulty was maybe not charming is the right word but there was a character to it that i thought made everything feel a little bit more accomplished um and by the and by everything feel more accomplished i mean like everything i i still feel like when i'm done with a boss fight in this i'm like oh okay that was that was fun i like the way that they i like the patterns and i like the what it demands of you i like that it's a very multitask oriented things like you got to move and shoot there's a there's a debuff in the game that like oh i can't remember what it is but it's it's centered around uh doing less damage when you're or like it's something about when you're stationary oh yeah you know what i'm

3:15:54Dustin Furman:talking about yeah yeah if you stay still you do less damage yeah and i'm like i always pick that because like i'm never who the fuck is staying still in in any of these games but i think it's i think it's great i think i think it is really good i just um i think there's a lot of trappings around it that are that feel a little bit less thought out that feel a little bit too it feels like they're kind of offloading some of the design on the player by giving them so much control over you know modifiers and debuffs and buffs in that dial particularly where it's just kind of it feels like we can't figure out how to balance this in a way that will satisfy it so you figure it out you figure out what works for you you figure out how much damage you want to take you figure out how much damage you want to do uh you know there you go which is a little bit you know i i just wish i got a little more because yeah like clarity i i want to just ask them directly and i i will hopefully because they're even there is even a when i saw there was a trophy for using the carcose in modifiers 33 times for 33 runs it's like well like you could theoretically beat the game in 33 runs probably so like this to me indicates like yeah they want you to use them i think and now by the way this is wrapping things up from a long time ago but you would ask what those gates were called like the challenge gates nightmare gates yeah yeah is what they're called and there are some little interesting easter eggs in the trophies i mean they're not really that exciting but like that was one of them carcassian cartographer used the carcassian modifiers to embark upon and survive 33 expeditions.

3:17:36Dustin Furman:So that's an Expedition 33 reference. There's one for killing 1 ,995 enemies, I think. I believe that's a reference to 1995, the year, which is when Housemarque was founded. The two studios that combined to create Housemarque were called Bloodhouse and Terramarque back in the day. And Bloodhouse is the studio that made the original Stardust and Super Stardust. So I think there's that reference. and then there's another one to do i think to that like something about 2021 let me see if i can find it and that oh yeah absorb 2021 projectiles using the shield and that's a reference i think to the release date of returnal um so there's like little cool little things like that in there but yeah um saros i mean what i and i want to be clear too because i feel like i'm being very negative about it i really think it's great i just think that returnal i feel like returnal makes you earn it and i liked that i liked how much returnal pissed me off yeah like it wasn't fun in the moment but looking back i don't like that's such a unique experience about how it just kept drawing me in and it was a game where it's like no you just have to become good that's really all you can do and i was like yeah like and and it challenges you and in this game it's quite the opposite well this is yeah this is the uh the thing where it's returnal probably had people drop off of it certainly um probably far earlier on and so yeah a more accessible game doesn't always mean a better game we'll see i'm very curious to learn more about how everyone feels and we'll obviously get into it on our spoiler cast like we said and it's great to have the game here i want the game to do well for housemark and i think they're a wonderful studio but i wonder yeah um maybe you got a little too much into the telemetry with this one but it's certainly a pleasure to play and i think for a lot of shit man if you were really frustrated with returnal but you like third person kinetic action shooters i think this game is going to be right up your alley because it's doing everything it's fixing the entire game basically for you i want to be clear too it's like it's an easy recommend from me i think it plays great i just think it feels good to move around and play and that's what a video game is really sure like and uh if you're a third person shooter fan like i think it's like there's a lot here um it just plays so good but yeah it's it's a different kind of game i think that's fine but uh oh and i didn't write it in because it had been several days but i also finished pragmata so like if uh if we do like a yeah we'll do that chris dustin's gonna handle that so it'll probably be you you guys and Brad and Hogue or something.

3:20:16Dustin Furman:I don't know what the fuck. Yeah, we'll figure it out. Yeah, but I finished it. I do finish it in 10 hours. Perfect. Love that. Love it. And there's a reason to replay, right? There's a new game plus, I think. Yeah, there is a new game plus. There's a bunch of stuff that unlocks after you. I was I just want to move on to Saros, but like there's there's reasons to replay it. Yeah, Capcom is like kind of the master of the replay. They do a really nice job in a lot of their games, whether it's Resident Evil. They did a nice job with Konitzugami with that. they did a nice job with uh dead rising deluxe remaster i love games that were like yeah go now break it resident evil has always done that but it's fun for that kind of shit where it's like yeah now just fucking dick around like a maniac yeah all right i think we all recommend saros by the way i mean i think with caveats i think if you i think in some ways saros is gonna be most intriguing to people that didn't like returnal as uh as weird as that is i think i think yeah it's I think a lot of people will like it you know what they fucked up because apparently it's it's not doing as well it's because the male protagonist that's what it is they should have stuck with the woman yeah there's that whole other thing that's going on I still don't really know exactly what's going on with this too yes Celine or whatever where it's like he's some people are saying it's woke because he's Indian some people are saying it's woke because there's like a I don't want to get into it, but like a storyline.

3:21:42Dustin Furman:I don't even know if it's really true. That's like, I'm like, come on, guys. Like. It's getting along in the tooth. This Indians are not allowed to be protagonists in video games like. What? I don't. That just seems. I'm tired, boss. Seems a little racist, to be honest with you. Yeah, I'm tired. I'm tired. All right. That's all we have for what we're playing. So let's get into listener inquiries as we wrap up our episode. Six questions, comments, concerns, thoughts, and ideas from the audience over on Patreon, patreon.com slash lastdaymedia. Remember, you submit your inquiries. You've heard them throughout the show.

3:22:18Dustin Furman:You use the news feed, the thread in the news feed each week for ours. It goes live Wednesdays, deleted Thursdays, so you have that time. But they go live for all of the different shows in our network. So keep an eye out, a close eye out. We start with Declan, who wrote in and said, hi, Dustin and crew. After listening to your guys' conversation about the pseudo scandal with DRM and true ownership only being with physical. It made me think, is there a better way? I think about the physical owner who buys intergalactic on disc to play on their PS five or six, and then can't play it on the PS portable.

3:22:46Dustin Furman:Can we have an honest discussion about tying a physical game to your account and then maybe being able to give up the digital license if, or when you decide to sell or trade the physical copy, they send humans to the moon with a calculator computer or something. Surely we can figure this out. This is interesting. This is one of the interesting conundrums of the next gen with PlayStation 6 should everything be true and I think it is that they're going to have a console and a handheld the handheld will obviously not be able to run your digital your physical games maybe there's going to be a solution to that about about some sort of tethering what what does this look like Dustin would you have any idea about how this might be done I mean is there a even just generally like you wouldn't be able to like do something like a console wouldn't be able to mark the disc somehow right like no it would have to burn it somehow right like it's it's just not possible to interact with a a it reminds me i always said about final fantasy 7 when i bought my ps1 and i didn't understand why i couldn't save on the disc right um yeah so what what do you do about this like i don't or maybe they're just looking at it being like that's kind of your problem most people buy these games digitally for most of our audience it's not going to be an issue at all and by the way psp and especially veter were digital ecosystems two decades ago yeah they're not going to have a solution they're going to use it as a way to push physical or uh digital i would imagine yeah i don't think sony

3:24:08Colin Moriarty:wants to have a solution to this but i think they completely could and it's exactly what declan lays out here i think for the most part is that i could see a solution where if you want to play a physical game on your playstation 6 portable whatever it's called you have to have that disc in a console that is online and you also must have your portable online and it will do a check to see if it's in that console and then it will let you install it and play it but it has to do that check every time i would like that's the only thing that i would assume sony would be okay with doing because it is a check to make sure that person has that game but are they going to put in the effort to do that when their end they don't want you playing physical games they want you buying stuff from the playstation store where they get the full cut no i i just i'd be very shocked if they put in the effort to uh take care of a not the largest but a significant portion of their audience and so yeah it's highly annoying to me but yeah i will deal with that problem and that conundrum when it comes yeah i just don't say it's even that solution to me sounds like i mean it sounds like it would work but it also sounds like from their perspective if sony really is in this position where they're kind of trying to be the i mean we've talked about it before where they kind of want to they they want to position themselves as the apple of this space and make like really intuitive and and like really like high quality machines and software that solution feels too clunky for them to consider like there's a lot of steps to explain and then also like it it is just one of those things where it's just like well if you want access to this on portable then you just buy digital or if and from their perspective they'll be like even if people want to buy physical they might they might get people to double dip that's possible like and so uh i mean they would sell the disc presumably afterwards but like i mean yeah i just i don't i don't think it's a solution i don't think it's a problem that they're particularly keen on even trying to solve.

3:26:23Dustin Furman:It's going to be interesting. Yeah, because I get I think this is not going to be an issue for a lot of people, but it's going to be made into an issue. I'm telling you, like this is definitely one of those. Physical beach heads that people don't want to give up, and I get it to each their own. But I think Sony has enough data to know that, like even in the Vita era, and this is what I was saying certainly PSP always had digital games UMD was big but there were a lot of digital and digital only games on PSP but by the time you got the Vita there were and there are physical collectors but most of those games were sold digitally no doubt and so there even then be like if you want a handheld you're kind of on the go I think you get it what this is like but they're gonna have to figure out something to do here and I don't know what else they can do but it's certainly one of those things that needs to be fixed I can't wait to see the fucking handheld I want to see like how big it is like how big is this bad boy going to be all right dustin stasic wrote in said hey fellas colin i am mad at your take re sony's new drm but it is not for the reason you may think i completely agree that pearl clutching over online requirements is ridiculous and that we should all be angry at dirtbag behavior that causes companies to make sweeping changes like this it is it all comes it always comes down to dbs dirtbag shit what angers me is the obvious solution was overlooked by like everyone.

3:27:43Dustin Furman:If the issue is truly refund abuse, fix the refund system. You can't go to Kohl's and get a refund for a pair of pants without returning said pants. If someone has installed a game they want to refund, require the console to be online and the game uninstalled before processing the refund. Why would Sony implement a more complex solution like this time gate DRM where the path of least resistance is just sitting there begging to be taken? Because you're right in that there needs to be a refund system that works on PSN and it should be something that they work on closely. And there's reasons why I think they don't do it.

3:28:12Dustin Furman:And I can explain what I think those reasons are. But. You're ignoring the problem that people are taking the game off offline and playing it. If and when they if and when they go back online, why would they care if they lost access to it? At that point, they're like, OK, I'm back online now. I abused the system. I played the game and you can have it back. Yeah, so I played it for free. It doesn't solve that problem.

3:28:35Colin Moriarty:Well, no, I think it does. How? The idea is that you cannot process that refund unless you're online. So. You wouldn't be able to do that.

3:28:48Dustin Furman:Well, this is where I think he's half right, though, Dustin, is that he's saying like solve the problem. The problem is, is that it seems first of all, it's totally amorphous. It seems like it's only for certain games. I think what he's saying is that if you have like maybe a time limit or a clock, that would be read very similar to Steam, even if you're offline, when you're back online to get the refund, it's like, well, you played the game. I mean, I guess I guess you could do that, but that's not what's happening. So yeah, I you're right is that the end solution is to force the person back online.

3:29:14Dustin Furman:But by that point, the person has already played it. Right. So I guess then you would decline the refund.

3:29:20Colin Moriarty:I if I understand this for PlayStation, what they do is that they buy the game, install it, go offline and all the refund stuff is done offline and they will approve the refund while you're offline.

3:29:34Dustin Furman:I see.

3:29:35Colin Moriarty:So the idea that I think Dustin here is bringing up is the idea is like in order to approve and process the refund your PlayStation must be online so they can yoink that out it's

3:29:48Dustin Furman:interesting they do need to they do need to create a more cogent refunding system I do understand why they don't though the one thing that I think people ignore about the refund system on Steam and I've never used it, but I assume it works like this, is that you have this certain time, like, you know, two-hour play period or whatever. I think because they're a private company and they don't have to be beholden to shareholders and they can lose a little bit of money doing things, is that the credit card, not chargeback, but the credit card fees for giving people's money back has to be substantial for Steam.

3:30:28Dustin Furman:You buy a game and then they have to refund you a month later when you decide to play it for an hour and whatever the case might be. And it's like, well, they already paid for that credit transaction. And now that they pay for another credit transaction, I guess what I'm saying is I get like, this can easily turn into many millions of dollars a year of just refund transaction, just refunding people. And Sony doesn't want to lubricate the wheels, I don't think, for that. They want you to be like, just be careful about what you're buying. Maybe it would be easier for them to have some sort of solution like Steam.

3:30:58Dustin Furman:But I've said before, I think the two-hour play thing is a little too generous. If anything, I just think every game should have a demo. Now that's and maybe it's just like a timed thing where you actually get a certain amount of access to the game for free. And then maybe it's a half an hour or an hour and it's like, all right, do you want to play it? Pay the price or we're deleting the package or whatever that I don't know. I don't know how you would do it, but it is annoying that like you have to we learn this, I think, really with cyberpunk with a lot of people where it's like you really kind of have to go out of your way.

3:31:33to find like to figure this out it's not there's no way to do it i don't think on the console

3:31:39Dustin Furman:no so they should fix the system to make it more accessible but i think the system is easily abused and it shouldn't be as open as steams that's my opinion oh hi mike wrote in and said hey fat interesting what if scenario i'd love you to look at with at with me the new 007 game coming out at the end of the month about the 007 game coming out at the end of the month In simple terms, back in 1999, Columbia Pictures, owned by Sony, relinquished their rights to create 007 films and in return acquired the full right films to Spider-Man from MGM. I didn't know really know anything about this. I went and read about it last night.

3:32:15Dustin Furman:It's true. In a way, it's a massive butterfly effect moment for PlayStation. And in an alternate universe where this didn't happen and Sony still held the 007 rights, what do you think PlayStation would have done with the Bond franchise? Obviously, in the PS4 era, Insomniac was the studio that took the helm on Spider-Man. but what studio would have been your pick to make bond games when no i dog be the bond studio and uncharted never exist love to hear your vision of this new timeline p.s colin i'm a long-time listener and you are responsible for my love of dredge hoping one day to see them live or we can at least get the next album before the world ends thank you uh that's that's so wonderful to hear thank you for writing in mike first of all do you guys know anything about this story because i i know i i know that sony acquired the spider-man rights and all the rest but like i didn't know the full thing about the 007 stuff did you guys know this let me see if i can um i know very little about 007 in general like it's not it's not that's not like a series or like an ip that i've meaningfully interacted with so like i definitely did not know the the ins and outs of like the behind the scenes negotiations yeah it says in 1997 the sony corporation acquired all or some of mcclory's rights in an undisclosed deal which were then subsequently acquired by MGM.

3:33:29Dustin Furman:So I guess what's interesting here is that like, I don't, what's funny about this, first of all, is that in that era of Sony 007 bond stuff, they, the big 007 game came out on N64. And I guess what I'm saying is that I don't know that there was any, I don't know that Sony ever looked at it as there being an obvious play for bond games. because if they did we would have seen them on ps1 you would assume right so that doesn't really that doesn't hold for me i don't i don't in other words this this bond game looks great that's coming out at the end of the month it's the first bond game that's has the potential of being really great since golden eye i mean when you really now i liked some of the games like i like night fire and some of these other things but they're not great games by any stretch of the imagination not even a little bit they're not all time by any means so i don't know if you guys agree with that but i just think 007 no i'm not a big 007 guy either i did know uh nick scarpino that kind of funny it's a huge bond guy um i've not even seen most of the bond movies i grew up in the pierce brosnan era so i'm very familiar with those movies which is like a six or seven year run and then i've never seen any of the daniel craig stuff so yeah and i saw some of the um the older stuff with sean what is that connery Sean Connery and so on there's that Dalton one that like he was he did it like one movie or two movies so there's all and the books they come from books I mean there's this whole thing I don't know anything about but I guess my answer to the question Mike is that I just don't know that there would be bomb games yeah I don't I don't and I don't think it even still remains to be seen whether or not um I mean I think I think the new 007 looks great I'm really I'm really I'm really jonesing for it I'm hearing a lot of good things about it and I am excited but I'm wondering like how big of a draw 007 even really is today you know like whether or not it even matters like could they have just made a spy game you know what I mean like could the Hitman devs like from the creators of Hitman could they have made an original kind of spy thriller kind of action game and done about as well.

3:35:52Undoubtedly, it's going to do better because it's Bond, but I don't see many people talking about James Bond really ever. So I just don't know the power. I don't know the power of that IP in the game space outside of Goldeneye.

3:36:04Dustin Furman:I wonder, though, did the deal work out for Sony? Like, is Spider-Man theatrically bigger than Bond? Yes. So the Daniel Craig Bond movies? I look, I could be talking out of my ass here. I very deeply assume that Spider-Man is more profitable than James Bond. Go ahead.

3:36:27Colin Moriarty:Yeah. I was going to say, if you include, I don't know what Sony gets, if they get merchandise and toy rights as well, particularly for those movies as well. Yeah, I can't imagine Bond being bigger. Maybe at a point in time. Although I don't even know if that's true. because like even like the the first toby movie was huge massive all right so yeah you're you're

3:36:55Dustin Furman:right like it i think they probably it's not so cut cut and dry but they definitely made more money with spider-man yeah so let's see worldwide box yeah i definitely worldwide box office so since the deal went through they made one two three four five six seven eight nine ten spider-man movies with so yeah so it's like the spider the the raimi films are are worldwide grosses of 825 million 784 million 891 million the mark webb ones are 758 and 716 the cinematic ones like the marvel cinematic ones are 880 1.132 billion 1.9 billion and then the animated ones are 390 and 690 the so the daniel craig movies there's only five of them and the the worldwide gross is 240 291 273 331 348 yeah so they're big movies but they definitely got the better end of the deal and by the way that deal cost them 10 million dollars that's so crazy but i didn't know that that bond was part of that deal i didn't know either but that makes sense why like the bond movies stopped for a while because brosnan was big yeah that was like that was i remember that i remember dagan saying that when i was a kid it was like it was his movies were kind of the revival of 007 like 007 kind of sputtered for a bit a minute I think that's when in the 80s they brought in that guy that like played Bond once and and also they didn't really know what to do so that's interesting anything else to add on this topic before we go no I I'm really excited about that that new game though me too I'm looking forward to playing it as well it looks like Hitman meets Uncharted yeah so I'll take it that's so Jimbo wrote in and said good day sluts of Sony, I recently completed Lies of P on my PS portal, and I'm now 100 % convinced that all games need some sort of difficulty setting.

3:38:50Dustin Furman:I've tried to complete several FromSoft games over the years, Bloodborne, Sekiro, Demon's Souls, etc. I've always enjoyed my time with them and often progressed past the halfway point, but I've usually hit a wall or become frustrated and moved on. The same would have happened to me with Lies of P, but after getting stuck on a boss for an hour, I simply bumped the difficulty down to normal, beat the boss and progressed on. I even bumped the difficulty back up to hard again for most of the game, only bumping it down here and there. I can't help but think that games like Sekiro and Bloodborne would benefit from having this option as well.

3:39:16Dustin Furman:Options and accessibility are a good thing, and games that don't embrace this will no longer be bought by me. Saros is now next on my list to play after enjoying, but struggling a lot with Returnal. Do you agree with that? In this modern age, there really isn't any excuse for developers to not include some kind of difficulty or accessibility options in their game. Choke on these nuts. Oh, wow. He finishes off. Aggressive finish to that, I would say. Dustin, I thought you might have strong opinions on this.

3:39:40Colin Moriarty:yeah i think this comes down to what the developers want to do and well oh yeah not so jimbo uh i totally respect your decision that or your desire to want an easy mode because a game like lisa p which dude what are you doing playing lisa p on the portal just to get that out of the way yeah that's insane to me but i mean god bless respect for doing that uh but that might have been part of the reason why you need an easy mode just saying uh with that level of lack of latency or a black there you know what i mean it's not ideal for that kind of game so i think that from software very deliberately designs their games around this and outside of sekiro bloodborne demon souls elden ring all have ways that you can make the game easier for sure uh if you desire to do so uh but it's not through an easy mode it's through going and leveling up getting better weapons grinding out a little bit and to me that's just like i respect they're trying to think if there's a game that i wish had an easy mode that didn't i guess i'm just like i don't want to demand a creator to make something or not.

3:41:03Colin Moriarty:And I'm not saying he is. I mean, he's choosing not to buy it, so that's making a statement about it, but I guess I just, I see the vision with these games behind their difficulty. And I respect what they're doing. And it might not work for everybody, and that's okay. Yeah. Yeah, I'm in agreement. I just feel like you know there's he says there's no excuse for developers not to do it there's one really good excuse which is I don't wanna which from like a creative it's not our intended way for you to play this game yeah it's the intended way like Zelda Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom don't have easy modes or like hard modes it's just what the game is as far as I know maybe I'm wrong I don't interact with those games too deeply to be fair and it's been a while but like I don't remember being given a choice when I started Tears of the Kingdom or Breath of the Wild.

3:41:58The game just is what it is. And in a lot of cases, games that are designed that way are better because they only have to focus on one type of, you know, one type of difficulty as opposed to other games where like you think of games where, oh, it's like easy, normal, hard and like easy is too easy and like legendary is like unbalanced. It's ridiculous hard or like, you know, regardless of whether or not you have options, there's always going to be a developer preferred way to play or there's always going to be like a prime difficulty that is ultimately what the game holistically is for halo it's heroic for um uh i think uh i think call of duty has one too there's like canon difficulties or whatever so there's always going to be the one that you should be playing anyway and if you play any of those games on easy you're missing out on like a lot of what makes those games tick like if you're making the like respectfully like if you're if you're playing on Halo on easy mode or whatever and you're dumbing down the AI it's like the AI is like one of the most impressive things about that game like you're robbing yourself of a pretty specific experience by doing it so like I understand why developers have single focus difficulties I understand why they some choose to give you choice as well accessibility is good gets more people playing but I don't know I think ultimately it's a matter of what the developer wants to do.

3:43:22And if they think that's too big of a compromise, then that's fine.

3:43:25Colin Moriarty:It's, it's worth adding to that. I don't think every developer can get away with, you know, slap, slapping their dick on the table and saying, you'll play it our way. Yeah. I think from software is in a unique position that at least for their audience and the people love their game, which is in the millions. They, they have made that part of their appeal. And part of the balance and design of the game. So, yeah, I guess it's worth saying I agree with you, Chris, too, that it's like there's I think easy modes are a good thing overall. And I've used easy modes before for games. Not I don't default to easy mode when I play a game almost ever.

3:44:09Yeah.

3:44:10Colin Moriarty:But I have used easy modes before in the past, and I'm I am often glad that they exist. but i respect the developer intent as well if that's desired and earned yeah portal is another game that i think of like i don't think that has a difficulty either i just think yeah i i think um i i i generally look at easy mode as like that's the option if you want to get like a child to play or like an old like like a grandparent to like ease them you know what i mean just to introduce them in a way that's like not so serious or like not so high stakes they can experiment a little bit um in rare occasions if i'm struggling with like a boss or something and i'm just spending like too much time on it i'm just like i'm whatever i'm bumping this down one and then i'll bump it back up when i'm done i've done that before like for sure just for the the basic elements of just saving time but i don't think it's necessary for everything

3:45:10Dustin Furman:blue moose wrote in said hey super sacred studs i was gonna say sluts i was blown away by seeing nintendo randomly drop an entire direct with basically five minutes notice just to reveal a new starfox game new in quotes that's for me i put the new in quotes it felt like such an old school internet breaking moment where everyone immediately stopped what they were doing to tune in do you think sony would ever do something similar for a major first party reveal or are they too locked into the announced everything ahead of time marketing cycle now i feel like something like a surprise sly cooper resistance or even a new astrobot reveal with no build-up would completely melt the internet love all the amazing content and stay sexy my friends i mean these kind of reveals do happen things just randomly appear on social media a trailer randomly appears all the rest um the nintendo thing i think is unique because this seems to have been done from my perspective to injure an insider right like a leaguer it seems like perhaps i mean that seems to be what they were doing.

3:46:04Dustin Furman:And that comes on the back of word kind of circulating that these things are happening more with Nintendo. And I don't cover Nintendo at all. So I don't know what's true and what's not. I don't talk to anyone there, but that they are making moves to kind of try to figure out who's leaking their shit. And and I'm sure other companies are trying to do the same. So I thought that was more interesting from that perspective, because I think that this was leaked to have happened and then it didn't end up happening. And people like thought that the leaker was lying and then randomly this thing is dropped.

3:46:28Dustin Furman:So clearly he had a good inside track. I don't know that I really believe that I think there's a lot to. I don't know if you gain anything from doing this, actually, like what would be the quantifiable thing you would gain? I guess forcing being forced to be exposed to it like you have no choice but to not tune in. If like if you're on social media or whatever in the Star Fox thing is happening, there it is. It's there like you can't avoid it. But why wouldn't you want to alert someone? to there being more information about this thing and then you let people know and then more people find out.

3:47:06Dustin Furman:It's not like shadow dropping a game, which I think is different and can work. I don't know. I don't know how I feel about it. I know it was annoying for everyone involved with punching up. So yeah,

3:47:18Colin Moriarty:it wasn't fun. I think Nintendo in this case is, this is a unique game. Not that the game is unique. It's the positioning of the game is unique. Star Fox, this is not a spoiler. At this point is in the Mario Galaxy movie. They showed him off before the movie.

3:47:36Dustin Furman:Yeah, I don't know again why they did that.

3:47:39Colin Moriarty:Yeah, not putting him in. It's cool. So then why, why, why reveal? So the Mario Galaxy movie came out about a month ago in the US, two weeks ago in Japan. It's still fresh on people's mind. There is an entire new generation of kids that was introduced to Star Fox. And maybe Nintendo isn't ready to do a Nintendo Direct, but they want to capitalize on this moment right now where star fox is somewhat in the public conscious be like hey you saw the movie a few weeks ago you remember him you like him here you go new game now i guess they could have announced the day before like we have a star fox direct tomorrow but i kind of like the i wouldn't want everything to be like this but the hey surprise we're doing this right now if you're available right now come check it out if not you can watch the trailer whenever nintendo's marketing has been different though in the Switch 2 generation in a few different aspects.

3:48:36Colin Moriarty:Particularly like there's a new Splatoon game coming out. It has never been featured in a Nintendo Direct. It was announced on their app and then randomly a few weeks ago they're like, here's what it is. It's a single player Splatoon game. Here's a trailer and kind of like a direct like presentation and a release date. Very interesting for what's now a big IP for Nintendo. So they're moving. Nintendo's moving a little different and it's been hard to figure out exactly why. But the Star Fox thing, I think, is just a synergy marketing moment.

3:49:14Dustin Furman:Star Fox. By the way, we were talking about a little bit earlier. I don't find him that unsettling looking because I feel like they've always looked like this. Well, yeah, well, I like the old Nintendo power shit and stuff like that. They always looked unsettling and fucking weird. Right. I just think because you have the movie version of him and then you have the game, the movie version is a lot more, I guess, like appealing. Dude, his neck looks crazy, dude. Yeah. His neck looks insane in the game. Like, it looks like he's got a bit of a. Like a triple chin going on, but it's like covered by fur.

3:49:49Like, it just looks very odd to me compared to like the movie render that they have of them. And even just like his render and smash and other things. it's it's whatever it's not the biggest deal it's like you said it's always looked unsettling to some degree but uh yeah i don't know i'm not the biggest starfox person so like it does it it means very little to me in fact when everybody was talking about like i can't believe they spoiled that starfox is in the mario movie i'm like is that a do people give a shit yeah i mean like I was really I don't know I missed I missed I missed that entire IP I played it years years years and years later and I remember being like yeah okay yeah I'm not a huge star I'm not a huge

3:50:33Dustin Furman:Star Fox guy I will admit the most interesting thing that ever happened with Star Fox was when they randomly released Star Fox 2 a few years ago which which ironically was made by Q Games wasn't it oh wasn't that like an abandoned where thing or like it was it was just really late and I think they just didn't want to release it uh that is actually interesting i remember uh starfox adventures on the gamecube people had a big issue with that and then i remember really the only thing i know about starfox is that he's in smash i don't i don't have any other real real exposure to him other than smash brothers yeah he's not one starfox is not one of the important franchises to me i'm a big starfox adventures fan remember that game yeah

3:51:17Colin Moriarty:I've never played that

3:51:18Dustin Furman:it started out as a dinosaur planet or whatever the fuck and then they made it it was like a girl fox or something I can't remember what the fuck I think I said this before out of my memory of that is I went to Coinstar and dumped a bunch of it was like the summer after high school and I went I had like a bunch of coins and I went to Coinstar and like dumped them all in and then used the money to buy Star Fox Adventures probably not the best use of my money alright Right. But it was on GameCube. I had to own everything on GameCube, of course. Right. Patrick Garrison wrote in with a final inquiry, says, greetings, gents.

3:51:52Dustin Furman:I'm a big fan of Bungie and of a long history with their games, but initially avoided Marathon because extraction shooters have always felt a little too intimidating. After seeing gameplay and hearing the glaze from Chris and Dustin, I bought Marathon about two weeks ago, and lo and behold, my friend and I are obsessed with it and can't put it down. And this is coming from someone who almost always plays single player games nowadays. My question is this. Am I the only one that feels like there's absolutely zero marketing push from PlayStation with the discourse online around its lower player counts.

3:52:19Dustin Furman:I can't help but feel like Sony silence might be part of the problem. They'll have Sony's resources. I'm shocked. I haven't seen more TV ads, pop-ups on social media sites, et cetera. This feels unfortunate because Bungie really has something special with this game. What say you? I'm curious what you guys think about this. I do agree that I don't quite understand why you would invest in the studio in the game if you weren't going to try to sell it. And I've just from my own perspective, and I think I said this at the time, Marathon has like no presence on PSN. Now, I know that's not where most of its player base is, but it's your game.

3:52:52Dustin Furman:Why aren't you plastering this place? Does it matter? I don't know. Is it more lucrative for them to use those positions on the store for others that they buy those positions and they realize like maybe it's not really worth it? We don't really make that much money we can make more by letting other people sell their games there i don't know but i am a little surprised by a seeming lack of push for this game i don't know that it's for to blame i don't know that it would have mattered but you would certainly gotten more and maybe they think it's like a losing play it doesn't matter what we do it's gonna this is what it is but i it is a little confusing what do you think chris my feeling is that they they're saving marketing pushes for seasonal updates and for like new seasons i would i would imagine that by the time season two rolls around which i would imagine is i think probably i think early to mid june is i think like generally like the slated time i'm not sure exactly i think somebody so i was streaming like i was streaming like a day or two ago and somebody said 30 days to season two so i think like early june uh is probably when season two is going to kick up and i would imagine that if they're going to make a marketing push it'll be for that because that's going to be new seasons for extraction shooters are generally seen as like the new entry points it's what separates it from a game like destiny or like other live service games where people are building up their their shit forever and ever and ever and it kind of leads to a consistent state of FOMO or like a consistent state of like and no matter when you jump in you're kind of behind because everybody has so many more hours than you um extraction shooters work on like kind of like a cycle basis where like at the end of at the end of a season there's a wipe and then everybody starts to square one again and so i would imagine that using a marketing beat for the middle of a season it's probably not that smart relative to just saving that for when there's actually new content to bring in when it's when people aren't insanely ahead and when a bunch of new balancing changes come in when a bunch of new stuff is added i think that's the wiser time to do it and they might be saving it for that the other thing too is that like um now i wonder when they're going to start doing that because i i don't know what i don't know what the general uh decorum is in this space i'm relatively new to following extraction shooters so i don't know exactly like how long before a season they start marketing that season um but i am curious as to when we're going to start seeing more stuff about that season too because they've been pretty responsive they're fixing a lot of stuff they're like constantly implementing like experimental playlists they're responding to feedback really really quickly so like i would imagine that season two is going to bring with it some fairly substantial changes to it and i think yeah i don't know i i would imagine that that's where the marketing beats are going to happen so i don't know if it's that surprising i do think it's weird that in and of itself it's like the presence is lacking on playstation i do think that i do think that's weird but a full marketing push i think you save that What do you think, Dustin?

3:55:57Colin Moriarty:Yeah, well, the reality is, I mean, Chris was touching on this, is that now is not a very good time for a new player to get into Marathon. Because everyone's going to be, because of the ecosystem of players, once you get outside of the beginner matchmaking, everyone is going to be very kitted. And the next month that you invest in the game is going to get reset on June. It doesn't matter whether you were there on launch day or if you start playing the day before season two starts, it's going to wipe your account. So it's not really good time to market it. And so I think Chris is right that with season two coming, it'll be a good time to rev things up again.

3:56:46Colin Moriarty:um i do think though there is some degree that even when it came out there's a little bit of a lack of confidence from sony with this game and as someone who who loves the game and i i looked a few minutes ago i have 170 hours got the platinum the other day so uh i can understand why maybe Sony wasn't very confident in this game with all of the, you know, the controversies we talked about the reception to the alpha and beta that are night and day different looking from the game now. And I think also the more I've played, I think marathon was coming in a little hot, especially from what originally marathon was supposed to be and what it changed into and the the director changing i think there was a lot of changes that came pretty close to that first alpha and so i could see them being a little skittish about it and also dude just i mean the amount of people that bought it and then bounced off of it was clearly an indication at least to me that the onboarding process of the game is not very good and it's also that they spend a lot of money making a game in a niche genre that is not going to be for everybody.

3:58:08Colin Moriarty:That's actually, I think, the most baffling thing to me about Marathon is that this idea where it's like, oh, Battle Royale's on the wane. Is it possible that extraction shooters are going to be the next Battle Royale? And I could see that, but I don't think that's true inherently just based on what extraction shooters are. They are too high stakes. They are too punishing to be multi 100 million dollar plus games 300 million dollar whatever they spent they're very hardcore and it's uh even our creators you know like is uh it's not at all where it used to be and uh that's not surprising it's like it's a it's a very intense genre i think they've made a brilliant game but it is going it is inherently going to have a smaller more dedicated kind of hardcore audience i've noticed anecdotally too just uh i've had people randomly just hit me up from like like people that i know but like don't know that well hey i just bought marathon so it's like there's a weird slow thing going on and i do think again this is i've likened it to rainbow six siege a lot and i think i think a very similar thing happened will happen with this i don't think it'll be the same degree of success because again rainbow six siege is a very very different game it's it's a lot more accessible in many ways but i just think this is a game that has inherent seasonal beats built into it i think it is a slow burn and i think uh it's just objectively a very good game and so like i think people are going to the people who play it are going to stick with it and i think the people who uh don't get it will just not get it yeah I think it's inherently very hardcore.

4:00:01Colin Moriarty:I agree with you, Chris. I also think there's an element that it's not as hardcore as people treat it. That is true. I think there's a loot loss fear where it's like, there's too much of an emphasis when people lose stuff that they feel like they don't want to play anymore. And it's like, dude, maybe if you came kitted with gold stuff, insane loadout, then yeah, that sucks. But it's like getting loot back is really... not that big of it's very trivial yeah and they're doing again they're rolling out so many experimental accessible playlists they had like an entire free kit dire marsh playlist for like two straight weeks and it was like a really great way to just kind of jump in and interact with the sandbox without risking anything with a chance of like getting some stuff they're doing a new thing now where they're like upping they're doing the same they're doing the same experiment on the opening map with better kits for free so it's like you've got like a the floor for a starter kit is like higher than it used to be in the beginning months which is good because it makes it gives you like the weapons that feel good you know at the very least like you've got attachments on it you're not dealing with the base guns that all kind of feel bad intentionally because you're supposed to customize them into feeling good but yeah i mean they're they're working really hard And I'm wondering, I'm really curious as to what these seasonal beats are going to be.

4:01:24Because one thing is clear to me, and it's that you can maintain a game like this for relatively cheap for a while. I think the way that they've implemented the storytelling in Marathon and the way that they're going about telling that narrative and the way that they're going about throwing new content in and how quickly they're able to respond to certain things. it doesn't strike me it doesn't strike me as a destiny level expense where like for every new expansion people were expecting you know motion captured cut scenes you know an entirely new zone with RPG elements thrown in like an entirely new system thrown in like a couple of PvP maps like that's a massive expense but building a new map every two seasons or something with like A story that's told primarily through like still images and text logs and audio vignettes.

4:02:20It just strikes me as a very lean game to support. I don't know if that's true. Like it just it reads that way to me. Knowing how expensive Destiny was and knowing how much production value was placed into Destiny in like the parts that were like obvious. They're very different animals. And so I don't know. I wonder. I'm curious what what's going to happen with it. because You know, it's definitely not the runaway success that they wanted it to be. And it's definitely not like this million, you know, this, you know, millions of players. It's not 100 million players like Battlefield wanted on day one.

4:02:58So like, you know, I'm curious where they're going to end up with it.

4:03:02Dustin Furman:We want the whole population of Canada and Mexico together playing this game at the same time. Yeah. Well, insane. We'll be monitoring Marathon. Yeah, I think it's it's chance of a second life will come when it's rebooted in June or whatever. And they wipe everyone and start again. So we'll see. But that's all. That's it. That's all we have for this episode of Sacred Symbols. A productive and thorough episode, I thought. Let's go around the horn and say goodbye to everyone. Chris, goodbye to you. Be well. Any big plans for the rest of your day? I don't know. I'm getting this. There's a huge group chat.

4:03:39Dude, I've been having this thing. I don't know what's wrong. I don't get group texts until like a day later or something. Like there'll be a group chat going on. And then like a couple hours later or like a day later, I get every message at once and it's a fucking nightmare. I have Verizon. I don't know if, I don't know if other people in the audience are having this problem. There's nothing wrong with the phone. Like I have storage, so it's not like a memory issue. I really, I have no earthly idea what's going on. Interesting. But it's really annoying. It's probably for the best. Well, yeah, but like, so I might, have something to do today, but I don't.

4:04:13I'll check. I'll catch up on 50 messages.

4:04:17Dustin Furman:The video you sent me, by the way, the other day was really funny with the homeless guy. Oh, yeah. Give him a hand, guys. Homeless dude. Yeah, homeless dude. Dude, that video has tickled me so deeply. I like it. Because a few days before that, I sent Chris a picture of Robert RFK catching the starling or whatever in the airport, and he just got it in his hands. Insane. insane people well godspeed to you chris good to see you as always you too dustin goodbye to you

4:04:46Colin Moriarty:anything to share before we go i think my mom is here helping holly and her are working on the baby's room i think they have a dresser or something that they're painting or something so check in on that and this weekend you know just i'm so excited for this stream that's happening now for listeners because once once i do this final thing once we fight the compiler i can i can let go of marathon for the time being it's like the final so i gotta finish the fight as bungie once said right yeah that's right can let go but that's about it for me yeah i don't know

4:05:27Dustin Furman:what i'm gonna do i have uh well i gotta record tomorrow and uh i'm gonna probably go for a walk with the dogs after this and uh let's see what else i want to finish saros i gotta gotta kind of get that out of the way. I want to get into Pragmata. Just kind of want to clean my plate in the next couple weeks as we're going to be getting into another club of games with Mina, 007, and so on coming out. Got to be mindful of all that, but otherwise, just hanging out there, hanging out, and hanging in there, I should say. I'm not hanging out there. That doesn't make any sense. All right, my boys. It's good to be here with you again, and good to be here with all of you out there.

4:05:56Dustin Furman:I hope you enjoyed yourselves today. Thank you for being here. Patreon.com slash Last Day Media for early ad-free access and LastDayMedia.store for merch. And of course, buy Saintslayer on a platform of your choice. We'll see you next time. Until then, goodbye. See ya. Take care, guys. Sacred Symbols, a PlayStation podcast, is a product and trademark of Last Stand Media and Colin's Last Stand LLC and is proudly recorded in the USA. The show is conceived by, is written by, and is directed by me, Colin Moriarty. My co-hosts are Chris Raygun Maldonado and Dustin Furman. The show is produced by executive producer Dustin Furman.

4:06:33Dustin Furman:All of Last Stand's theme music is by my best friend, Ramon Narvaez. As you know, all of Last Stand's shows, including Sacred Symbols, are fan-funded on Patreon at patreon.com slash laststandmedia. The following names are at the producer level on Patreon, our highest tier, and we're grateful for your thoughtful and kind contributions to our independent endeavor. Thank you. Aaron Betke, Aaron Temple, Adam Refriended, Albion, Alex Cabrera, Alex Gates, Alex Lapierre, Alex Monez, Alan Tiniak, Alan Tremblay, Alan Einer, Anthony 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.

4:07:33Dustin Furman:Naaman, Dave Alvarez, Dennis Usel, Denny Would Never, Don Lee, Donald Difford, Donald John Vaders, Double Duty Dirk, WTF, Eddie Smith, Electric MD, Ellis, Emmanuel Perez, Enrique Perez, Entishas, Frail Cabbage St. Matthews of the Diocese of Brig, Gabe's New Gabe Cube, Gary Cavallo, Gavin, Ghost Storm 672, Gio Corsi, Grayson Maxwell, Gregory Slavinsky, Gus, Hush, Jad Rita, Jake C, Jamie Fraley, Jason Arzon, Jay Getter, Jean-Francois Forzi, Jeff Mercado, Jerome Ferreira, Jimmy Rodriguez, Joe McPartland, Joey Gondaliger, John Schultz, John Zile, Johnny Waffles, John Cordero, Jonathan Coates, Jonathan Cortez, Joosh, Jorge Pal, Joseph Baker, Joseph Lopez, Josh Godfrey, Josh Gravelick, Josh McKinney, Josh Schullinger, Joshua Smallwood, J.P.

4:08:25Dustin Furman:Lynch, Justin Payne, Justin Wagaman, Cam Wallace, Keith Richards, Kendrick Caius, Kyle Hagel, Kyle Martin, Lizard King, Logan Little George, Madmock Media, Miranda Grubba, Martin Beck, Mason Bouchard, Matt Flowers, Matt 20, Matthew Ash, Matt MGS24, Michael Buffal, Michael Gates, Michael Mashed potato michael vecchio mr tom morgan ashley mr finkler mr molf my name is mayo nate izod nathan r neil amen nick amato norse nuts ollie fritz omar omar rosa orchard organic produce out of focus bigfoot patrick leslie paul joyce peyton stone phil crone qualia freak randall holsey rallo Relentless Rex Remington James Ray Lijah Robert Byers Robert Schultz Roto24 Ross Marenka Ryan T.

4:09:18Dustin Furman:Mandel Saqib Alam Saul Balcazar Sean Mason Shane Brecky Shane Miller Shane Rayoum Silent Butt Deadly Simon Conception Jr. Sketch McGetch Spencer F. Steven Glasman Steven Innerfield Stewie 108 Sunny Sides Up Sweaty Magic Sweet Jones Terry Tip The Fandom Traveler The Shady Mailman Throw Seven Toby Ryland, Tony Zuniga, Trelon, Trench Goat, Trey Woodward, Tyler Tremel, Uncharted Shinobi, Vance Cody, Vega the Late, Vitra, Who is Steven Day, Will Williams, William Holbert, Worry San, Whiskey Sin, Zach Cohen, Zachary Wood, Zen Red, Zman 8601, and Zainal Yuichi. Save big money and start your spring project with help from Menards.

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