#411 | Neon Signs Flash Other Choices

15:01whenever I'm in Starbucks I'm like what size you're down I was like I usually say whatever the medium is I'm not going to say you're fucking I don't remember what it is yeah stop being weird and stop charging$10 for coffees fucking i think it's something that they've that they did and they they associated with their success so they're afraid to stop doing it yeah you know what i mean it's like well we've always done this and it and we're a successful business i'm like i'm not i'm not arguing necessarily but i don't think people are coming to starbucks because they are excited to say give me a venti yeah and venti's what is that medium i don't know i don't know either because there's no etymology to suggest at least at least like at least uh like it love it gotta have it is like there's like a crescendo right like you can you can at least it's too much work to put on the customer to say any of that shit but at least like there's like oh i understand intrinsically like the order of these things yeah venti i have i guess grande i understand but i think grande's

16:01Dustin Furman:medium yeah is that right so like yeah i don't know man yeah the thing about the cold stone is

16:08Colin Moriarty:that okay so it's like it kind of implies like is there a psychological aspect of like you're a food addiction like if you just like it then you're okay with getting a small you love it you will get the medium but if you truly have obese of mind it's no it's you gotta have it it's like it's an essential i gotta have it i gotta have the largest size oh my god this made me so upset just reading it so like the sizes for starbucks listen to this listen it's tall grande and venti in that order so venti's large venti's large and tall is the smallest that is so that is deeply infuriating get fucked i hate that so much and grande's the medium

16:54Dustin Furman:insane oh yeah i don't like that at all that's that's obnoxious as hell that's like that's uh that's too much for me they're trying to confuse us it's the ritual network this is part of the ritual network yeah exactly oh man um what's going on in my life you know what i went to the nursery yesterday the flower nursery and i got flowers and uh planted flowers oh you know you got to get the annuals going and you got the perennials going they come back every year you got to get the annuals going the nice really flashy and i bought these huge i love marigolds just basic marigolds i think they're so pretty i love orange flowers you can get yellow ones too but i always go to the orange ones and i got these ones that are just huge i'm like damn these are some fucking mutated crazy mutated marigolds so i got those going i got some i bought some just regular gerber daisies which are technically perennial and i planted those around i got some firecrackers like these little low-lying red flowers they're beautiful oh my goodness we got so much i ran out of soil though so i gotta go get more soil for our little baskets and whatnot gotta buy that miracle grow and then you gotta use miracle grow as well i just bought a six pound bag of miracle i'm also plant steroids i'm also so it's not coming out because i have the window closed i am so tan already that it's so funny i think i said this on the show last week it just turns on suddenly i look italian and then like september october is like nope you're irish again you're done and then uh and then it vacillates back and forth but i got a great base going on right now you're like uh what is it um like a holographic oh like the card yeah like a yeah that's very good that's very good that's nice i like that what else is going on anything else interesting going on uh no not really everything's falling apart um that's about it oh i've been reducing i i uh i'm i'm now only on 10 milligrams of lexapro that's a new announcement down from a high of 60 60 50 40 30 20 15 10 well look at that and how does that make you feel uh i am uh i can feel it like i am more anxious and like yeah tied up but i'm like this is colin that's you like this was actually my life until 2018 uh then i stopped feeling things for a few years now i'm back now when i when i sent you those grinning megaman figures that i found at this flea market i went to yeah i stared at them did that did that did you realize in that moment that like i'm feeling way more anxiety than i than i felt it yeah i was like maybe i gotta i gotta call dr rosenblatt and get get this going again coming back to santa monica dude i saw those and i was like what the fuck is yeah that's i thought you i thought you immediately because i was like thank you why i need to show this to golem their licensing is um interesting trying to see if oh yeah here it is yeah like these are official yeah and that's like what's so funny about it it's like what so if anybody's curious about what we're talking about like there's these like megaman grinning fake like i don't even know how to describe it yeah i think they were literally called grinners or grinnings or like i don't know zero yeah yeah zero grin for zero megaman grin yeah and it's just megaman smiling with like a dumb smile and i just don't i i've never even heard of this brand or i don't think i've ever even seen anything else licensed under like i've never seen like a homer simpson with that right thing you know what i mean that's it was an entirely all of it was new and i was like why is this person selling that guy had no other video game stuff wait a minute i think i have a clue here is pop what is is pop life the the the what is that pop life i don't know is it uh is it labubu related oh maybe pop life pop life is a marketing agency in miami florida okay when i search pop life of course the floridians did this what are those little shitty figures called that everyone loves uh funko pops funko pops i wonder if that's like a spinoff maybe or something maybe I don't know that's it's really disturbing also the art is kind of weird if you look at it like not obviously the face art is weird but like zero's mega buster looks weird it's just a it's a strange I hated it and yeah it unsettled me uh a lot Capcom just will license anything to anyone at this point I think so yeah go get your go get your Mega Man license and make some fucking go get like a pet rock and you can find you can find it pretty easy you look up Mega Man grin figure it's it's there it's like one of the first things that pops up it's going on ebay for 150 bucks yeah it's probably like some limited bullshit i'm there's too much i i can't believe i'm saying this but there's actually too much megaman merch now there was a time when there was like nothing megaman related and now like every five seconds there's like new megaman stuff i'm like guys like choose a lane and really build it out you know but i know this is licensing and they don't give a shit they're just making money on whatever so thank you for that that was great yeah you're welcome

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23:28Dustin Furman:Welcome to Sacred Symbols, a PlayStation podcast. We go live each and every week and get us three days early and ad-free. over on patreon.com slash lastdaymedia. We really appreciate your support over there. We couldn't do without you. $5 a month is the sweet spot, and that gets you early ad free access to all of our shows here on the network, including Sacred Symbols, Defining Duke, the Xbox podcast, Punching Up the Nintendo podcast, Summon Sign, the gameplay podcast, and of course, Sacred Symbols, plus our weekly supplement on Patreon to this show. We did recent episodes on PlayStation 6 and what we think is going to happen with that, which is really exciting.

23:59Dustin Furman:We're ready to kind of go, I think, with Saros and Pragmata. I don't know what's going on with what we have to figure that out. I guess the three of us will do Saros. Maybe we can get a fourth. And maybe we can record that like a week, like next Friday or something like that. Yeah, we can do that. I'm ready. Yeah, I have to do the secret ending, but I apparently it's way easier in Saros than it is in Returnal to do that. In Returnal, it's like insane. So you have to find all in Returnal, you have to find all six sunstones, which are just randomly appear in all the and you have to collect them all.

24:29Dustin Furman:then you have to beat the game again and then do and then you have to like in this one you just beat the game again i think you just like go to the last boss again as i understand so i was like all right that it saros literally is a response to return it is so funny everything about it um so we'll get saros going we'll get pragmata going i was talking a little bit about mouse pi i don't i think we're just going to move on from that um what else yeah i had a hogan recently we're going to record it i don't know what we're going to publish it but next week we're also going to record um me and so it's gonna be me and all the lily mo people uh that were that were responsible for saint slayer so barry josh one josh two lachlan who does all of our like um trailers and then ben um who did the pr i'm actually most eager to talk to him on the show i think because i i have he's the most mysterious last end of the the run the last uh lap as it were which is kind of the most important lap is what we always say about like making a one thing that was instilled in me that i really agree with at ign was uh and we've said this before is um don't bother making a video unless you have the thumbnail and like the headline and like it's good otherwise like why are you wasting your time similar thing with the last mile of the race for the game you know like if no one knows it exists that's so funny then how do you do it what is that is that a similar thing do you feel that no because it's it's i had the exact well i mean i was making like different types of content i guess but like i had the opposite thing where I was like I don't I have no idea what the title or thumbnail this is gonna be I'll figure it out in editing like what makes the most sense that's the way I've been since then for sure yeah but I understand that I always think about at IGN I I must have brought this up because in the past because it it still bothers me is that like I made this really great Castlevania I wrote this like for Halloween it was like Halloween 2012 or something I played all I played like Castlevania 1 2 and 3 in a bay and like captured them all and like did this thing about this great, like horror, the original horror and like the gothic elements and all the rest.

26:26Dustin Furman:And like, no one gave a shit. And I was like, yeah, that was a really great video, but it sucks that you can't get anyone to watch it. And so I understood that whole mentality of like, don't even bother. Yeah, no, it makes sense. Yeah, especially at a place like IGN where there were a lot of high caliber people putting things out all the time. And so you're competing with each other as well. And so I would dominate IGN if I was still there today. Let's be honest. Maybe we'll go back. Maybe they'll buy sacred symbols. We can go back.

26:53Colin Moriarty:we'll all move to san francisco oh i was worried you're gonna say that i'm not going anywhere

26:59Dustin Furman:i'll commute yeah you can people do do like people do that you know if you don't have to be in san francisco every day you can go like once or twice a week and just take the like la in the morning san francisco at night kind of plane thing oh yeah yeah oh yeah that's right yeah i forgot um because our art at the site our uh our entertainment people were in la so like the music people the tv people the movie people all of them were in la and then we'd have to go back and forth it was that makes sense it was great all right uh so that's sacred plus oh so then so we'll get those episodes the next episode of sacred plus i'm going to interview alissa mercante finally um she's giving me only an hour which i respect i told her in an email i'm like that's nothing for us like we don't shut the fuck up so i have to be very deliberate about that but that'll be interesting I think some of the audience is going to be upset about that it's almost important for me to do interviews like this though for any other reason than to remind people that I'm not beholden to anyone and that I'll talk to and I want to talk to anybody I don't want to be captured by my audience so I think it'll be and ironically I was saying this maybe on the stream or something that like the worst response we ever had to an audience to a um a sacred symbols plus was uh was a right-wing person which was and i've said it was stuttering craig who i consider a personal friend i like him i think he's a nice person i think he's interesting he's a businessman obviously does his own thing and it's very different than what we do but interestingly that was like the most overwhelmingly negative response we had from the audience and i didn't see it coming that was that was what was so interesting about it i'm like why would anyone remember that dustin it was about the real game awards and i'm like isn't it interesting just to talk about a topic and everyone's like no we don't want to talk about a topic yeah well yeah

28:49Colin Moriarty:i think the audience can watch it and make their own conclusions about it and they can even you know there's no problem expressing that you thought that what he said was dumb in a comment but it's the you know being being respectful thing where it's like you can say that you don't agree and you don't like what he said uh without calling him a moron or something yeah yeah hopefully

29:13Dustin Furman:everyone brings you know let's let's keep it respectful and try to be productive if we can

29:17Colin Moriarty:to to the audience's credit when you had um is it stacy from the gamer oh stacy henley yeah very respectful so i think the audience you know it's i have i have confidence in them yeah we'll see

29:29Dustin Furman:we'll see how it goes all right uh what else secret streaming um guys did matter so you guys did marathon again recently i don't want to talk about it really pork poncho says good day colin And on May 12th, I witnessed Dustin single-handedly kill three runners with a level of skill and precision that even John Wick would be jealous of. He ran headfirst into danger to protect the lives of his fellow teammates without even considering his own safety. In my exceedingly humble opinion, he is the most courageous man I have ever met. Can we please award this man the first ever LSM Medal of Bravery? Or at the very least, can you let him know you're proud of him?

30:03Dustin Furman:Sincerely, Pork Poncho.

30:05Colin Moriarty:That's very nice. You showed up. pork to say i did i did for the first time ever 1v3 a team and and succeed it was oh you clutched i clutched to be clear with the audience i'm an exceptionally average marathon player this is not a common occurrence uh but i did it but on may 12th this was not was that it was it friday it's friday may 12th no friday that was may 12th with tuesday for our stream on friday me chris and pork was a fun time entertaining for the audience yeah but full-blown hell for the three of us our goal was to fight the compiler i called the stream chris dustin pork versus the compiler i renamed that stream afterwards to chris dustin and pork fail miserably we never even saw the compiler that day yeah not even close did we even successfully exfil from cryo we we left a couple times i the the issue was like there was one where like the the puzzle like we couldn't find the the letter and so we're just like are you kidding me and we thought like is this bugged or something and we just like left with it so we succeeded but it was a failure it was like the worst kind of success it was like this is awful what a miserable time i had fun being miserable if that makes sense I don't know it's fun to ham it up but like it's just like goddamn dude I was discussing with pork after on Friday and I think that are choosing to go with the normal stream time of 1 p.m.

31:40Colin Moriarty:I think was a problem for a low player count game like marathon 1 p.m. on a Friday it's all the sweaties you got the unemployed the unemployed people like losers yeah so yeah so i think that was part of the problem the southern drinker wrote into us and says hello fellows can we get an update on magnanimous chris i heard he died during the marathon stream and i just wanted to make sure he's okay what happened thoroughly thoroughly executed yeah it's thoroughly

32:10Dustin Furman:like it's not even a question yeah everyone's magnanimity is is withering on the vine yeah completely completely like he's in an acid bath basically he's in a drum barrel somewhere in the

32:22Colin Moriarty:south pacific it i there was a moment on the stream i'm glad it was from my point of view because i was slightly behind you guys where you opened a door um and it was like d-day or something just grenades rain down goes down explosions immediately wiped out both of you so it was crazy it was bad i remember it very vividly like i think about it i lost that i lost such a good weapon too like and i was like it was the best feeling gun i've ever used in a video game and i lost it the second the second i started using it i was like okay i'm gonna take a break for for a day or two yeah there's something i don't know there needs to be a term for like map memory it's not quite right where it's like you'll be on that map a few days later and you'll be like i remember what happened in this spot i remember how brutally i was killed or for example pork wrote in about my 1v3 and it was on top of flight control uh in on outpost and i'll always anytime i'm walk past that spot i'll be like the one time i clutched yeah these these games are interesting because like the losses are so defeating that like you have these intrinsic like these really detailed memories of spaces that you kind of like you like grow a relationship with a space yeah in a way that like you don't in a lot of other pvp multiplayer games that's what was so fascinating to me about this genre in general when i first started playing the alpha and even in arc raiders too or it's like god damn dude this hallway is hell like i i've had so many i've had so many terrible memories in this hallway i don't want to be here for too long let's get it and get out and it's it's just funny now that's your uh tranquility room yeah that's a place in the cryo archive that chris is i'm deeply haunted by i'm never going back train i love it's called the tranquility room too yeah that is funny we'll get back to marathon later we have a question at

34:18Dustin Furman:the end that someone wanted to ask about which i think we'll yeah we'll get into it get into a little more deeply black detective and black detective and dexter wrote him it's a little bit of confusion about something so wanted to talk about this in regard to sacred streaming hey cdc colin many people want an audio version of sacred streaming particularly the episodes with jaffy which are essentially a podcast with very little visual components i read your response to this inquiry in the recent comments section of Sacred Streaming, and I must say, I still don't get it. Something about wanting to grow the YouTube channel and Sacred Streaming isn't part of our Patreon membership.

34:48Dustin Furman:Okay, fair enough. But how does providing an audio link to your already subscribed Patreon members who are already likely subscribed to YouTube as well limit your YouTube growth? It seems like you're overthinking this and then in turn creating a worse product for your customers. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Sacred Streaming was a replacement for Constellation. You're wrong. Which was a part of our Patreon membership. Also, Moriarty Cross Jaffeon Sacred Symbols Plus, which we did get an audio version of, has essentially been replaced by Moriarty crush Jaffe on sacred streaming. I'm sorry, dude.

35:12Dustin Furman:I just don't get it. You guys are doing a podcast. Sure. It's live, but it's still a podcast, which is an audio medium. Honestly, dude. How many times did he call me dude multiple times or my only scene? Yeah, it's too much. It seems just like you're pushing back on the audience for no reason. So please explain it to me like I'm a retarded five-year-old. I would also appreciate Dustin's thoughts on this. Thanks, fellas. Take care. Clearly you are a retarded five-year-old because you wrote in your own in your own paragraph here because i wrote a you know someone was complaining about this and i wrote back to them and i explained it to them thoroughly like what the idea was and what we want to really do and it's like he says something about wanting to grow the youtube channel and sacred streaming isn't part of our patreon membership okay fair enough but how does providing an audio link to your already subscribed patreon members limit your youtube growth something about wanting to grow the youtube channel and sacred streaming isn't part of our patreon membership okay fair enough that's what he says you just that's what it is well i don't understand what's so difficult to comprehend about that so i think moving forward to avoid this level of confusion i'm sorry for people that this might be inconvenient to because you like look for the links on patreon but just blame people like this.

36:27Dustin Furman:I'm just not going to post post sacred streaming on Patreon anymore at all. That's it. It's over. So sacred streaming will just be on YouTube. You can find it there. We'll be live on Mondays, but I think we'll just avoid even posting it on Patreon anymore at all. And then there'll be no more confusion about it anymore. And then you'll realize that in fact, quote, something about wanting to grow the YouTube channel and sacred streaming isn't part of our patreon membership end quote will actually shine through so you won't just write it instead you'll imbibe imbibe it and comprehend it is my book yeah does that make any sense to you i suppose like i guess it does like i get the the general idea of oh it's the association of like oh if it's on the patreon it's also available in audio you know like generally and it's the one thing that's like not there i could see that i guess maybe being a source of confusion but right what I said and I understand that which is why I said in my little thing I was like I get why this would be confusing I posted here just for your awareness like I post Lily Mo stuff you don't get anything from Lily Mo for patreon patreon so I don't I kind of feel like this isn't really confusing I think people are just kind of being annoying about it but it's okay that's fair fair enough it is what it is I hear you nothing's going to change this isn't part of your patreon subscription and things move around so like we used to do two episodes of sacred symbols plus a week we only do one of those now we used to do constellation we had to stop because the host couldn't do the show anymore um and it just didn't seem like it was really working anymore you know like those kinds of things some things come in as replacements and then things change so as you were saying it's like i had this different idea for sacred streaming this is where i appreciate most about people's confusion is because last year when I wrote the I wrote a letter I haven't read it but I know what I said and it is like we want to have like some sort of component to support the streaming on Patreon so like we're going to do VOD here and we're going to do other things and the reality is and Dustin and I realized this quickly and we talked about it's like no one cares like the audience for sacred streaming and like what might benefit sacred streaming like that's not what people are on Patreon for they're they're on Patreon for the podcast and the audio podcast and the reason that we don't do the audio stuff is not only to fill people's feeds with things that they don't want but i'm totally right like i know how to do this well enough where i know exactly what will happen and i tried to explain this to where it's like okay so here's moriarty cross jaffe in audio and then next week we do sacred league right and and everyone's like well where's the podcast for this and i'm like well it's more visual it's supposed to be like a jeopardy game or whatever and like yeah but i want the audio for that then the next week we do a a stream and people don't like the game.

39:10Dustin Furman:Right. And then they're like, well, we don't want to watch this game. We're like, why are you doing this? And I'm like, all right, enough already. Yeah. So like, I'm just like, we're just gonna. Or we do like a trade show kind of thing where we like we watch like an entire showcase. And it's like, where's the audio for this? Right. That's exactly right. And it's like, I have done this a long time. I'm not stupid. I know exactly where it's going. Yeah. And so I'm just nipping that in the bud. It was not the idea to do that. Like we wanted to have a stream. We want people to watch it on YouTube.

39:43Dustin Furman:We don't care about YouTube. Like I care about you. I want people to subscribe to YouTube. But like you're like, what does it matter if these people already subscribe to YouTube? I'm like, it's not for that. It's to draw people to the channel. Most people that watch everything on YouTube aren't subscribed to your channel anyway. Yeah. So I just just trust me on this. I this is what I want to do. And like, can I just do anything that I want to do? No. Can I just be my be Colin? you know I always have to be I'm always something for every I have to be something everything for everyone I'm always giving that's what I'm always giving yeah yeah so also I'm sorry one other thing we've never ever raised prices and only just added more and more to it so give me a break man

40:29Colin Moriarty:you know like yeah he so black detective and dexter asked for my thoughts on it i i agree completely with colin that's like let we're we're trying to do a youtube thing we want to drive the traffic to the youtube channel um i would say that if this is something you desperately desire there are options for you to just listen to it whether it is a uh and this one does involve a cost but if you have youtube premium you can listen to it like a podcast or uh there are like tons if you search like youtube to mp3 you can just immediately rip that file off there and then listen to it on your phone um so but so yeah there's options if you want to listen to it on just the audio you just have to do it yourself because it's just not something that we're

41:18Dustin Furman:choosing to offer at this time yeah just like i don't know man it gets a little i get i i get we get a lot of feedback and i i read it and i understand it and some of it's true and sometimes we make changes or whatever but like

41:41Dustin Furman:like just give me a break you know like i don't know what you want what you want i'm trying to do different things. The one thing I tried to explain in that letter too, is like the only like true growth opportunity we have now is to try to like make YouTube better as well. Like we've been between 12 and 13 ,000 Patreon subscribers for two years or so. It's awesome. I love that. But, and that's great. That's the core of our business, but I don't know that that's going to grow very much. So to like, we have to find other ways to do things. And I don't like the idea of saying like you you took something out and didn't replace it's like dude five dollars a month in 2017 got you one fireside chat a week and then it got you in 2018 fireside chats and knock back then it got you fireside chats knock back and sacred symbols then it got you fireside chats knock backs sacred symbols and sacred symbols plus then we removed fireside chats and it gave you defining duke then it gave you summon sign then it gave you punching up and we had things like Constellation and Super Knockback and all those things in there.

42:44Dustin Furman:And the price remains exactly the same. I feel like I've been kind of cool about that. And by the way, that's intentional. I was just explaining this to someone recently is like, we don't want to charge too much. We want it to be fair. And we want you to feel like you get mega amounts of value. And then when you see it on a credit card statement, you're like, well, this is high value. As opposed to seeing like a$20 thing on your statement, like I did with Netflix one, you know, last year. And I'm like, why am I paying for this? I don't even watch it that much or I don't need it or I don't get the value out of it.

43:13Dustin Furman:Like you can't contend with the value. So I just feel like that's an important part of it too. And I think looking at it like we're taking things away from you is a little disingenuous. That's my opinion.

43:22Colin Moriarty:I realized what I said. It had shades of dawn matrix to it. Oh, if you need an audio only podcast, we have a product. It's called Sacred Symbols Plus.

43:31Dustin Furman:Yeah, it's called Sacred Symbols Plus.

43:32Colin Moriarty:We have a product. It's called Xbox 360. Good old metric, man. Colin is... Yeah, yeah. Is that a SCP shirt? Is that a, is that the sane clown posse? What is the sane clown posse? It's yeah,

43:44Dustin Furman:it is. It is. It's a Sterling Cooper and price. This is from Mad Men. This is from Mad Men.

43:49Colin Moriarty:Okay. All right. What does the sane clown posse get up to? They just go to church. Yeah. They go to church. They do their taxes on time. They don't file extensions. Yeah. I don't know. They have a nanny, you know, really like 1950s standard American living. I read about the stock market in the paper. Right. Exactly. They have newspapers. Daily newspapers still.

44:16Dustin Furman:Dude, by the way, I just I'm so glad that came up. I saw like a picture. I've seen this a few times and never really thought of like thought to say anything about it. But you see the Sunday newspapers, you know how the Sunday newspapers always like the big like the big New York Times or like. Yeah. Like when I worked at a deli, I used to have to put the New York Times together on Sunday. It was so annoying. You get like all these different bundles and they used to be like two bucks. Yeah. Like the big, like you used to get a paper for like a dollar and then like the Sunday paper was like two bucks or a dollar fifty or whatever.

44:41Dustin Furman:I think I saw like the Boston Herald or whatever, something like that for the Sunday edition. It was like seven bucks. I'm like, who the fuck? Is paying seven dollars for a newspaper? Seven dollars for a new nature. That's the nature of things, man. It's. It's going up. That's insane. That's insane. No wonder no one reads the newspaper anymore. You're like, you're not even trying. you got to have the guy out there being like oh you know like with his weird like old-timey voice extra extra i feel like it's got to be like at this point almost like vinyl you know where it's like like there's like a nostalgia to the newspaper it's it's more of like a like it's less of it's less of what it's supposed to be and more about like what it represents if that makes sense like it's almost more like a toy about like like a nostalgic toy or like a trinket than it is a meaningful way to like digest news right like i can't imagine that anybody's like oh this is the best this is the most efficient way for me to read the news right here yeah it's been on the newspaper yeah it's weird it's very weird like it's funny because it was a long time ago now but like oh nine and 2010 my girlfriend at the time got me like for my birthday in new york's time subscription, which I appreciated because like I, the Saturday and Sunday times were kind of interesting.

46:00Dustin Furman:The Saturday times had some stuff in it. And then the Sunday times with all like the crossword puzzles and yeah, it was cool. And, and all the news and the op-eds, it was interesting. And the New York times was kind of a little different back then too. So I was, it was much more palatable. And so I would only get it on Saturday and Sunday. And at first I started really looking forward to it. I would like make like a breakfast burrito or something like read the paper. And then slowly I would fall behind. And then like I would get the next week's news, weekends newspapers and I wouldn't have read the weeks before and then I would and I'd be like I can't get to these I got to read the last weeks to like see if there's any interesting stuff because a lot of it's not very timely and then before you knew it I had like stacks of these fucking things and I'm like I can't even I can't consume the news like this it's crazy that people did this every day for you know time immemorial like every day instead of instead of just weekends like going through these broadsheets and then be like all right next and I'm like what you read that like you're done with that it's just like this and that's what's funny about the seven dollar paper is like at a dollar or two dollars or 25 cents it was disposable so it didn't really even matter but like it doesn't feel so disposable now so i was just i i just i tried i actually tried to be like a newspaper person at some point i'm like i can't you can't it's it's for a different time man it's like it's i like i like the aesthetic of a newspaper but like i just i can't give a fuck i can't i can't pretend like i care like also it doesn't help that like 50 of my association with the newspaper the first 50 is obviously like you know reading the paper and then the second half of it is just like i'm gonna put this down so the dog can pee on it right you know like it was like it was always viewed as like this disposable and i just throw some newspaper on it or like you know just like fill the the lizard cage with newspaper like some some random shit like that was always viewed as like garbage after you were done reading it and it's like okay well what's paying seven dollars for this yeah it's it's it's i delivered newspapers one summer as well when I lived in New Hampshire.

47:48Dustin Furman:It was a really I wasn't even there for the summer. It was really the spring. My friend Chad at the time, it was like his parents got divorced. I think he went to stay with his dad for a while. So I like took over his route. And that was also interesting, you know, like having to put the newspapers together and then putting them in the little bags and all that and throw it, toss them. And some people have like different little. It was such a different culture. It's I grew up with what reading Newsday, which was Long Island's newspaper and I loved it. And it was one of those newspapers. It wasn't like the New York Times where it was like a broadsheet.

48:18Dustin Furman:It was like a book kind of newspaper. You know what I'm talking about? Kind of like the post. Yeah. And I loved that, man. And I loved, I would get the my dad would get the news day and then I would just flip it over to the sports section because the sports section was always in the back and then you read it backwards, basically. Yeah. And the other thing I remember too about newspapers is when I went to college in Boston and I would take the T, which was the subway there. It was always fun. They always had the guys handing out the metro the free newspaper or the phoenix but then like you'd get on the train and every once in a while a person would leave behind like a real paper like the boston herald or the boston globe or something yes and then like you'd go like go read it or whatever for free and it's just it's so it's so different now you just have your little phone you know your smartphone you just read whatever you want up to the minute i'm not even that old like i can't imagine how really old people feel yeah how do my parents feel they were born in 1950 can you imagine they're they're completely whiplashed yeah can you it's like i'm fucking whiplashed you know what i mean like i was like what do you mean everybody's playing roblox like what the fuck is this you know like i'm i'm 32 you know i can't even imagine it like it like 30 more years and i'm like 64 and everybody's everything's fucked i don't the other thing i realized chris too and you guys you guys are probably getting into this because i think it was around your age when i started realizing this is like i also don't know who anyone is anymore like i look like you look at the red carpet at an event or uh uh coachella's you know the coachella thing goes around it's like day one and there's all the bad and i'm like dude i shit you not i don't know what one of these fucking acts is i've never heard of one of these people i don't know i'm not even being ironic how can i have how can this person be headlining coachella i uh that started happening to me around like 23 24 to be honest with you like like things move things are just moving way quicker um i think i actually know more about who's current today than i did when i was 20 23 or 24 25 which is weird but uh i don't know that really is just a matter of like whether or not you care to keep up like every now and again i get into i go through like waves of like really like hyper fixation on specific special interests and i have many of them so sometimes like i'll be in like a two week long bout of just like really thinking a lot about music and then just like okay i'm fucking around with like music software or whatever and i'm like listen i'm just like kind of like listening to like whatever's new and so i become familiar with that shit and then like and then i get interested in like fucking around with like unreal engine for like four months and then i and then i'm and and then like some new person is like headlining coachella or whatever and i'm like i don't know i don't know who that is yeah i don't know who squidward is squid you know with no vowels so one that i saw recently that everyone was circulating because they're like it was at the Grammys.

51:05Dustin Furman:There was that. I don't know who he was, but it's a German DJ named Gestapo Stein or something like that. He wears like a mask. He looks like a Metal Gear character. He wears like a black like like ceramic mask. He looks kind of cool, actually. But people were like, who the fuck is this? Like they're like people were like infuriated by it. They're like, no, like, no, that's a dope. That's a these. That's actually really cool. Yeah, it reminds me of, you know, I'm not a huge fan of electronic music, but I think it's fine. but like Daft Punk I always really liked their look like I like how they wear I think that's so fucking cool like how they always wear those helmets I love that I love that I that's neat I miss that element of uh theatrics because it's just like it's it's just more effort and you can just tell like it's just like they care about like putting on they care about like maintaining an illusion and I think that that's really cool that's what I loved about I mean it's it's different because it wouldn't be looked at as artistic because it's new metal and I understand that but like that's what I loved about Slipknot back in the day or like Mudvayne or Mushroom Head and like I not every band needs to be dressing up on stage and having like a thing going but I like the like I love Devo they have a thing like that still to this day you know where they like all like they all dance in unison and like and wear like the same outfits or like the same like whatever whatever motif they're going to I like that kind of thing I also like you know Limp Bizkit's one of my favorite bands I also like how like when only one of them does it so like in limb biscuit the guitarist west always has like some weird shit going on but everyone else is just normal i i dig that as well i think that's really cool so like all of their pictures together yeah like look insane i think guar should do that i think guar should be like everybody everybody's normal and then there's just one guar yeah one guar richmond virginia's own guar oh are they are they richmond yeah they're like they're like honestly one of the most famous things that like acts that have come from here that's so funny yeah i my brother-in-law invited me to see them last year and I'm like I don't I don't think I can do that

53:04Dustin Furman:I'm sorry I can't I can't go see Guararder tonight I am going to go try to see so like remember a couple of summers ago I went and saw like we I live in we talk about Richmond but I live like 45 minutes south of Richmond in like a more rural suburban kind of area so like we get acts here every once in a while remember I saw the Jim Blossoms and like Sugar Ray a couple summers ago this summer it's going to be Spin Doctors oh my god um yeah it was like one other one other band i'm like oh i'm going to this it was like no no tonic was the last one might have been like filter or something like that and i was like yes like this is the kind of shit we're getting here i love it you go sit in the middle of a field basically just in the middle of a field and that's like in uh i think 2016 2017 something like that i went to see might have even been a little bit earlier but i remember that was i saw tears for fears and hall and oats at the uh god that's awesome at the oh my god it was um colin i don't know if you actually i don't know if you know queens that well it was like a it's like a big venue in queens forest hills forest hill i know forest hills queen i know the stop maybe but there's like a i think they do the u.s open there or something like that oh yeah yeah my dad used to work the u.s open so i know that i do know that area yeah yeah it was at that stadium It was an outdoor stadium.

54:25It was like, it was like raining. That's a little bit. And it was like, it was really fucking dude. That was a great show. Oh, hell. I imagine dude. Paul knows kind of rips. Like it's, it's kind of crazy. They're like shredding. And I was like, what do you mean? RIP? They hate each other. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah.

54:42Dustin Furman:One of them kind of went crazy. Right. Or something like that. Or like had real beef with the other one. Oh yeah.

54:47Colin Moriarty:They got mega beef. Yeah. Cause I watched that.

54:50Dustin Furman:I watched one of them. I guess it's Hall. He has like his, youtube channel i've seen that which is awesome it's like like random bands and actually come play with them at his house and it's so fucking dope it seems like a hidden secret that youtube channel like sometimes i look at the videos and i'm like this has like 5 000 views are you serious like this is dope that's so i'm so jealous i've always tears for fears is a realistically a top 20 band for me i'd probably say top 15 band for me like um the hurting is obviously awesome but songs from the big chair is like songs from the big chair is like fucking insane you know like i just love them i love them and my sister saw them a couple years ago i remember um in california they would play every once in a while they lived there but they would always play like wineries and like weird shit like that was like mega high end you can tell things that they were trying to do up there for a while so it's um god god they're good they're good they're so good that was a great pairing too it's a i'm glad i saw i didn't think they would i was surprised that they were still playing but i didn't think uh they would hate each other so like i'm kind of glad i got in got to see them before uh before everything oh yeah you so you definitely tears still tours i think but yeah you definitely still hollow notes uh in the window in which you should have seen hollow notes which is amazing uh ramon and i are our um man eater always was our karaoke song in college yeah um all right let's see what else here oh merch last day media.store now guys we're going a little long here with like the intros should we do the normal topics of discussion or should we just go right into the news because i didn't mean for us to go that long i don't know what we kind of got off i mean i don't know how am i going long okay we can keep him at a nice clip sure okay yeah this nba playoffs with fan duel you're not just watching the playoffs you're a part of them.

56:41Dustin Furman:And we're back. Steve's got the

56:43Colin Moriarty:phone, opens FanDuel, locks in player points, quick fingers, you love to see it. Now he's going for threes! Big night for Steve-O.

56:51Dustin Furman:Be a part of the action and get better payouts this NBA playoffs on FanDuel. 21 plus and present in select states. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER or 1-800-MY-RESET. Orion Virchow wrote into us. Remember, one of the perks you can get on Patreon if you support us over there and we really appreciate it. Patreon.com slash last day media. You get early ad free access, sacred symbols plus discord, RSS feeds, all the rest, but you can submit your inquiries to the show as well via the threads on the newsfeed on Patreon that go live each week for all the different shows. So keep an eye out for those.

57:22Dustin Furman:Our thread goes live on Wednesday and is resolved. And by resolved, I mean deleted on Thursday. So you have about 24 hours. Orion Virchow says, hello, sacred Jensen response to Jeff Buss's letter from the last episode. So we heard from Jeff Buss last week. Can you tell him to stand down? We happen to be friends, past coworkers, long distance friends that I wrote to you about a couple of years ago. This man texted me how he was relieved that you finally used one of his letters on the show. Please remind him that including this one, I now have three of my submissions read to his one. I know this sounds really fucking petty, especially between friends, but I need at least one win against him.

57:53Dustin Furman:I'm desperate. Keep up the great content. I'll shut up now. I love that. Yeah, that's good. Who can who can catch my eye? As I go through the thread. Well, Ryan, congratulations on your three to one victory, but it's not over yet. perhaps Jeff will have something powerful to say in a future episode I'll be keeping a close eye out Luke wrote in and said hey CDC hope all is well this one is mainly for Colin if you're reading this on the show I'll be halfway through my five-hour drive to pick up my new Boston terrier puppy named Daxter any advice for a new Boston owner he is the runt of the litter seven weeks old and currently five pounds thanks for all you guys do appreciate it every week oh how exciting how very exciting indeed nothing is cuter than a boston puppy and uh mike and i always say this we're obsessed with boston terriers we have the boston terrier calendar in the kitchen with pictures of other people's boston terriers i was going through my phone recently i had to like you know i'm getting like warnings from my iphone being like you have way too much shit on your phone you're gonna have to increase your storage on on iCloud or whatever like i'm not doing that so i started like going and deleting things i'm like it's all dog pictures yeah yep not only rush and travel but Lola I still have a fucking million pictures of Lola I don't know what I'm supposed to do with these I feel bad deleting them especially because she's dead you know where I'm like I got I feel like I got him so I got to like get him on a folder or something yeah and we were saying I'm like we can never breed Boston's because I literally and I'm not I'm not kidding I would never be able to get rid of them if the litter was five dogs we would have five more dogs like they're just I couldn't even I feel this way with a lot of puppies I mean obviously everyone one of those puppies, but I see Boston puppies and I'm like you, I bought both Russian trouble from a breeder in North Carolina and great people.

59:36Dustin Furman:And I'm like, you can have one of these and then just sell it for the nominal fee of like$1 ,200 or whatever. I'm like, look, look at it. Look at it. So when you get Daxter, it's gonna be very exciting for you. Boston's are like any other dog that he's going to sleep a lot. You got to bring them out every hour. You got to potty train him. Thankfully, Russian trouble were potty trained fairly easily. You remember this, of course, Dustin, right? This was my first time ever having to do this. It's like, you got to just bring them out constantly, like not wait for you. And you got to give them a treat when they pee and poop and like reinforce it.

1:00:13Dustin Furman:And then suddenly they just get it. But that's going to be a challenge. I will say Rush was better about this, but not really. Rush ate an entire windowsill. He used to like sit in this bedroom over here. What? And he used to sit. This is like this was a guest room over here. this is like Micah's office now next to me it's a bathroom next to me and then next to her another room and um so Rush would like sit on the guest bed and you know look out the window but there was like a wooden windowsill and then he just ate it like it was just all got like all like wood pieces whatever and then but he was generally okay treble destroyed the corners downstairs of every molding on the ground so like we had to get it all fixed that is crazy Um, they're, I don't, I'm not an expert in dogs at all.

1:01:01Dustin Furman:I'm not even an expert in Boston's. I've had three now, but they're crazy. And I think you have to kind of know that about Boston Terriers, like they're wild dogs. But once they settle in, like after they're two or three, they, they settle in, they have their moments or whatever, but incredibly exciting time. They're so, here's a piece of advice because I get a lot of letters about this. It's surprising amount of people inquire about this. I would say dozens of people have inquired about this over time is get dog insurance, health insurance. Get it now. Like when you're listening to this, like now, right now, you'll lock in, you'll lock in a low price, a lower price.

1:01:42Dustin Furman:And I highly recommend this. I don't know other people's experiences, but we've had amazing experiences, like almost to the point of like, I don't understand how this can be so good with Drupanian, the company where it's like, really? Like you'll just, it's amazing. like like they really aren't ball busters at all at least not yet um get dog insurance it's worth it it'll cost you like 30 a month or something and it's it works the way that i wish human insurance worked which is it's about ailment over time instead of ailment by year which is what it is for us so rush has like a really bad right leg he had to get what he had a luxating patella and how to get knee surgery that we pay for everything up to two thousand dollars and then we pay ten percent of everything above that and it doesn't reset so like if he ever has a problem with that knee or that leg again we've already hit the cap and now it's just ten percent forever it's like literally better than human insurance highly recommended have fun exciting times

1:02:44Colin Moriarty:Dustin do you want to get another dog no uh Holly and I have always said we there's only like so much love we can give and we love Frisk so much that we couldn't share that love with another dog

1:02:57Dustin Furman:I understand that I I felt that I didn't know I didn't think that I would that I could have an a true affinity for another dog the way I do for Rush or like one dog at a time I get it with Lola so when we got treble I loved her obviously and spent a ton of time with her but I'm like I will never but then like over time you're like oh yeah and this is just like I assume it's like having a second kid although not as serious I know I understand I'm not saying I'm a dog dad not saying that but then you but I do say like Rush is mine and Treble is Micah's and

1:03:34Dustin Furman:they're kind of trend towards us you know at night just snuggling on the couch that kind of thing yeah so it probably happened with you two like that Frisk is a very

1:03:43Colin Moriarty:demanding dog in terms of attention i feel like it would have a negative effect on her that she wouldn't get all the attention at all at all times so yeah rush rush gets jealous for sure

1:03:56Dustin Furman:uh still to this day of micah because we always say like you know we have our fake stories and conversations with the dogs and it's always like rush is always like i've been here longer you're like i've known him longer kind of thing and so like when we're especially when we're in bed not doing anything inappropriate we're just like talking to each other like facing each other or whatever and like or the tv's on he'll just like come in right in the middle and like and lay down like right in front of my face there's such a there's such attention hogs it's so funny it's interesting

1:04:25Dustin Furman:Trelon wrote in said hello sacred crew speaking of Brad caring about LSM the most Chris how far have you gotten in Saint Slayer heard Dustin Jaffe and Brad talk about it but not you you must be on the nose to the grindstone getting the plat right you are a founding sacred member and whatnot cheers I've not started sacred I'm not sacred I've not started Saint Slayer yet too many SS's by the way yeah I've done I've done that too I didn't name Saint Slayer so I'm not I am planning to get to it's just like we have so we had Pragmata that we needed to finish then Saros is there with the marathon streams that we had to grind for so I haven't added a lot of time to play anything that isn't immediate but once I'm done with Saros I think I might want to jump onto it I've been itching to have something to play on my Steam deck and it seems kind of perfect for that I don't anticipate I'll be very good at it though to be honest with you I'm okay at these types of games I can play through like Mega Man and like some of these older 2D games but like Castlevania is always giving me trouble like early Castlevania like the stilted kind of you know like that's what we go for yeah so good luck it's always giving me trouble like I remember I played the demo of Saint Slayer and I like that carriage level fucked me completely and I was like all right well we'll see how this we'll see how this goes well godspeed to you yeah I just thought it was funny that people are trying to put you on the spot trail on thank you for writing in good to hear from you Billy but not so talented wrote in and said now we're getting in a little bit into corrections and some show related things So we'll get into the news here now as well.

1:05:52Dustin Furman:Billy, but not so talented says this isn't actually a show submission. Just a quick thought for Colin, since I know you check these. You mentioned a PS6 poll on last week's Sacred Symbols Plus, and it got me thinking, have you considered running your own polls for Sacred? You could drop a poll when posting and run it until the next episode's recording. I bet you'd get a good response between Patreon and free feeds. Maybe not a lot of question ideas would be, but it would be interesting, especially for similar things to the PS6 question release or release question. Thanks for the great content.

1:06:16Dustin Furman:I guess that could be a fun idea. the one thing I'm afraid of is when I was thinking about this was the way people report the things that we say so now we're going to put this like wildly unscientific data you know that's like irreplicable into the wild and expect people not to take that seriously like 6 ,000 PlayStation fans say or whatever like however maybe and I'm like I don't know like but then I was thinking like it is fun and it is interesting it's anecdotal and it's not really our problem how people cover it so i don't hate the idea it's something fun to consider he's basically referring to on push square when we talked we talked about a story they had about ps6 they get they had a little poll and we mentioned that so that's what he's referencing um it's an interesting idea and we and it could be good anecdotal stuff but yeah i wonder what people would do with that like we say almost anything and people misrepresent it so or misquoted or whatever um i saw i guess we'll get a little well i guess we'll talk about it a little bit later but like uh that quote that was going around where christian svenson from sony had said something about nishino noting that playstation 6 is a plastic box without content did you guys see that i did see that and and everyone's like oh he's talking about how it's a it's a it's a plastic box without content i'm like that's not what he said like that's not what he meant what he meant it was that it's nothing without the games on it but like you just say anything you You know, like you say anything and people misrepresent it.

1:07:47Dustin Furman:It's like crazy. So that's one concern I have. But again, I don't know that that's really our problem. Yeah. And finally, a correction here. Johnny Questicles wrote in. And said, were you guys Johnny Quest fans? I'm not even really sure what Johnny Quest is. Like it was a cartoon that I saw commercials for when I was a kid. But I don't really even know what it is. Like it was just a thing. I don't know.

1:08:08Colin Moriarty:I didn't really like it. It was like when you have nothing else to watch. I guess I'll watch Johnny Quest.

1:08:13Dustin Furman:Yeah. Since it's on. Sure. Quick note on last week's news about the PSN settlement. He writes, you mentioned not wanting to take the time to pursue participating in the lawsuit to get store credit. But unless I'm misreading the website, it looks as if everyone is automatically a beneficiary and will have credits deposited into their wallet without having to do anything. The only course of action available on the website is to opt out of the settlement. Obviously, no one would do that except maybe corporal apologist Colin. guys let's opt out of the uh let's save sony a few bucks and opt out of this yeah they need it they deserve it well that's an important caveat so it looks like everyone's just gonna get the money i guess you'll just find out how much you're getting back based on the things you purchased and all the rest but uh godspeed to you out there i apologize for misrepresenting that really if that's true then there was no purpose of talking about it at all actually but

1:09:06Dustin Furman:but I digress. Let's get into the news this week. We did that pretty quick. You're right. Your instinct was right there. I wanted to have an FYI. A few people wrote into this and a lot of people tweeted it at me. And so I want to make sure everyone knows it exists. I have not finished it yet, though. I go with my friend's letter, Oakley Waldron, who wrote in and said, hey, guys, what do you make of the Uncharted 4 blow up from the Kempe? I feel like this was genuinely a great video that he obviously put a ton of work into. As for the content itself, there's certainly some interesting stuff here, and I love the fact that we have gotten more Sully and Elena, but I do think we ended up with a fundamentally better end in Nate's story.

1:09:42Dustin Furman:I appreciate it's hard to compare one-to-one, given it wasn't anywhere near finished, but there's enough here to see why PlayStation wanted it going in a different direction. Colin, specifically, did any of this line up with what you remember seeing during the creation of the history of Naughty Dog? Thanks, guys. So he's referencing a video that many people have been bringing to our attention, as I said. It comes from a YouTube channel, The Kempy, T-H-E-K-E-M-P-Y, about 25 ,000 subscribers. And the video is called Uncovering Amy Hennig's Uncharted 4. And somehow this video only has 93 ,000 views.

1:10:08Dustin Furman:Now, that's a lot of views for us. But I'm surprised that a video of this caliber that's talking about a topic that's pretty interesting to people hasn't gotten more play. I've only gotten a little bit into it. The video is an hour and a half long. I will say a few minutes into the video, I simply paused it and emailed him, the guy. And I was like, you want to come on Secret Plus to talk about this? I have not heard back from him yet, but I hope that we can sit down and talk about this because it didn't seem like he realized. Well, he did a lot of research. I haven't like I didn't like search for my name in the transcript or anything, but like I did talk a bit about Uncharted 4.

1:10:45Dustin Furman:And what he's saying is a much more deeper and much more fastidious confirmation of some of the things that I understood. But I've told people before that Uncharted, like it's all mixed. The Uncharted 4 we got is a mixed up version of of the original uncharted 4 and an all fucked up version of it um whether you like it or not is up to you i think it's awesome but it was not what it was meant to be and you see relics of it maps and so on and so forth so and characters and models they yeah because they reset it in 2014 and the game count came out in 2016 now a game of that quality you have to understand like there's only so much you can do you're kind of moving shit around you're going and getting new voice acting, maybe motion capture and some of the other things.

1:11:25Dustin Furman:But anyway, I wanted to recommend this video. There's nothing else to really say about it. Did you guys see it though? Dustin, did you, did you see this video going around?

1:11:31Colin Moriarty:I am in the same spot as you that I watched 20 or 30 minutes of it. Uh, but I've not seen all of it, but you're right. The level of detail and research seemingly, uh, is very good. And it's very interesting. I'm curious about like some of the there's like gameplay parts of showing the game in a very lo-fi state that is cool and it's interesting the part that i was on is he's going through and breaking down what the original uncharted 4 would have been and it's like there's the scene of them going into the auction and how different it's like it's the same it's same setting as you were saying like they had this level but they reworked who's in it the dynamics of the situation it's uh quite interesting yeah Chris did you see this going around yeah I watched the whole thing I was uh fixated on it because it is really I love these deep dives I love seeing shit that never happened in in a in a in in such a complete way so like I I inhaled this video this I like the second I saw it came out and it was as long as it was and people were talking about it I was like I made like a night of it I was like I'm gonna make food cool I'm gonna sit down I'm gonna watch it and it is really fascinating stuff like they they showed like there were some early builds that showed like a like a like an on-screen health bar that was like kind of doled out in three segments kind of implying that like if you lost like you could almost like you could only recover right to the amount like that you lost or something and there was like there's a big focus on like no guns which is like that's not new information that's in that's in blood sweat and pixels even um but like there's some like yeah there's there's like shootable handholds there was like a whole section i guess apparently where it would flash back and you would you would be playing as like the pirates that you're hunting for or something and like it was there was like a flashback on the ship like however many hundreds of years ago that you would play through from the perspective of the you'd play as like sully as well in the auction there was like a mid a dancing mini game in the auction that I remember that was I guess cut because it just wasn't wasn't fun probably I can see that some characters that were cut replaced I know that what is it there was it was showcased that Nate's brother had like a very very very very very different role in the story too it was like more antagonistic Rafe as Alan Tudyk would have been kind of fun I'm kind of sad that it's not Alan Tudyk to be honest with you I like I like Alan Tudyk a lot but yeah it's a really i highly recommend watching that video it's really fat if you're like a game design nerd it's really like dense with like a lot of interesting stuff there's a lot of cut dialogue too that's like in the files that like he kind of like um puts together in like what is the most logical order for them to be um really great video like great work it's it's crazy that

1:14:33Dustin Furman:we still that was that would have been still amy hennig's most recent game like that's how much this has been stretching on with her yeah and uh i know jaffe has like some concern about her new game not that he knows anything but rather that like it's just kind of weird like what is going on here with like all this shit she's doing and i don't know that it's really her um you know what really bothers me about this is that like i have such a clear visual of spending that day with her especially when i was writing the history of naughty dog and um being in her office and sweet water's calling me right now answer it no come on man you know you want to

1:15:13Colin Moriarty:ask about your new symbol no i don't they're nice i don't know how's the symbol doing man i don't

1:15:18Dustin Furman:even know why they're calling because i haven't bought anything from them in a while but like yeah i how's the kid didn't we talk about this where i was like i wish i appreciate sweet water's like attention to customer service it's dope and they've been really useful to me like where i just message them or whatever text the guy and i'm like i i think one of the things i was like i really want like a i want like a more piccolo snare sound but i don't have a piccolo snare like what kind of you know skin would you recommend or head and he was and he said you know it's like it's cool but i wish there was an option and there isn't as far as i can tell on their website to be to like select it's like don't call me you know like i don't i'll call you yeah like i don't need to hear i appreciate it i don't need to hear from you though that should be like it should be the default option but you should be able to opt out of that if people don't know sweetwater is like an online very famous online music store for music like for instruments and it's awesome highly recommend it and their customer service is crazy good but like they call you and text you and email you like you like not like some form thing like they get in touch with you to like talk about the things you bought and uh it's it's neat it kind of loses its luster for me a little bit though after a while like all right yeah what the fuck was i talking about oh uncharted so i have this very clear picture of being with her and being in her office and again i've said it a million times over the years it's like i saw the whole game on this whiteboard that had like index cards taped to it with a bunch of index cards under it it was this whole sequence of things it was at a 90 degree parallel actually i remember saying it to her like it was a second floor or third floor window they're in the water garden which is a um a office park in santa monica and it has like it was like a 90 degree angle to a window and like people can see in and like read this stuff and that's not that's not totally out of left field because you remember people were looking at super bot entertainment through their windows to steal shit about playstation all-stars you guys remember that and then they had to start putting stuff over their windows and stuff like that so that was after that um so i think that's probably why i brought it up but i like so i can see it but i'm like i wish i could just see what are on those cards again because you know it's you know it's in your memory somewhere right right exactly it's like i and i know what some of them said like one of them was like scotland one of them was like you know i think like uh i guess what would i think it was like colony or something like that which ended up being like liberi like liberary or whatever the fuck they call libertarian libertarian and uh i'd be yeah but like it is in there and I'm like that's it like I because she had no I I don't think the funny thing is I didn't even sign in the any NDAs people always think like in the games industry you're signing shit all the time like I very rarely ever signed anything like Rockstar was really the only company that made you truly sign shit to see things um yeah often IGN would sign on behalf of us and it would be like an overarching thing but like they just let me in and showed me things and talked to me and I saw I mean I saw a bunch of stuff and I'm like yeah it's exactly what you said because I'm like it's in there like yeah I would and I was trying to be kind of polite too I didn't want to be like you know an inch away from it like reading it I didn't really I don't really care about spoilers to that degree I was curious so it's I wanted to give a shout out to this guy I hope he responds to my email but whether or not he does is up to him but I'd love to talk to him more deeply about it's very impressive video so go check it out it's the YouTube channel is the Kempe and the video is called uncovering Amy Hennig's Uncharted 4 and it was published a few days ago so you will be able to find it quite easily, I think.

1:18:41Dustin Furman:All right. And thank you for everyone that wrote in about it and brought it to my attention as well, because I don't think I would have seen it otherwise. Although I guess it's been since reported by some places, so I probably would have probably would have picked it up at some point. All right. It is a financial reports season. I picked out three that I thought were interesting to kind of clue in on. Two of them are Capcom and Sega. We'll get to those in a minute and we won't get so deep into them. I just think there's some interesting stuff in there because they're both quite transparent, especially Capcom with their numbers.

1:19:07Dustin Furman:So we have like series numbers and game numbers and all sorts of things. Oh, what did he say here? Hi, Colin. Derek at Sweetwater here. It's been a while since we connected. Checking in to see how everything is going for you these days. Anything new going on with music? What projects can I be helping you out with this year? Hmm.

1:19:27Colin Moriarty:Hmm.

1:19:28Dustin Furman:And I feel bad because I have like three other texts from him that I never answered. Yeah. yeah they're probably sending the sms on their computer you would assume so it's probably not

1:19:38Colin Moriarty:that bad what did you say doesn't yeah i was he's thinking about that when he goes to bed at night he's like ah that column we're already that's son of a bitch i thought we had something yeah yeah we had a we had a good conversation i don't know what happened what if you were you flipped the script and became really annoying to them yeah ask him like what's your girl like do you have any advice you know you could even just that's funny you could even just like i could get on the phone

1:20:03Dustin Furman:with him and be like just hit my and be like so what does it sound like am i tuning this right you think like what do i do you know uh like that and that kind of like just be really super annoying you got to call him at 2 a.m on on uh on monday you know wake him up like hey how's it going i just want to know how things are going for you yeah what's going on how does it feel you get it and then like a year later you're like have you had enough you do it for a year straight every be monday at 3 a.m yeah it's ridiculous all right so uh sony but all right so what i was saying was i want to talk about capcom i want to talk about sega there are others too like and there's interesting stuff nihon falcom i don't know if you saw which is the trails and e-studio had a 1200 1200 percent increase in operating income which is hysterical i'm like okay that's insane uh i guess that was based on trails the first and some other something they did there are a few other things konami announced sales numbers for silent hill that are pretty good um there's a lot out there for you to get the check but i thought those were the two interesting ones to get into but sony obviously we'll get into more deeply it's also worth noting that these are fiscal year reports so quarter four is over in the fiscal year fiscal years typically go april 1st to march 31st so these would cover april 1st 2025 through march 31st 2026 um so that's true for everything, but the Sony ones, I guess, will be more interesting to us.

1:21:28Dustin Furman:And there are a few things worth getting into. So here I took I sat down and just took a bunch of notes last night that I thought were interesting. So Sony overall is what I would consider fairly flat as a company overall. Sales are up four percent year over year, which is modest operating income. However, profit is 13 % year over year up. So positive for them, but not incredible. Cash flow is flat as well from an operating perspective. The PlayStation contribution seems nondescript. So Sony has this thing they do, and if you read their financials where they have pluses and minuses under each of their sections, so like film, music, imaging, whatever.

1:22:15Dustin Furman:And it'll say like this positive plus contribution, negative contribution. But for the overall picture, PlayStation is neither positive nor negative. And we'll get into that in a little while. I think it just is what it is right now. The big winners for Sony over the fiscal year were music, interestingly, and imaging because their camera sensors are in everyone. I think they're in iPhones, but they're in a bunch of other shit too. So they're doing really well with that. And remember this coming year, what's the Chinese company? Dustin TCL.

1:22:46Colin Moriarty:TCL yeah that sounds right

1:22:47Dustin Furman:they are so they're going to start making Sony's TVs so they'll start getting good licensing fees from that as well so those are the winners the losers were kind of interesting one of them has to do with Sony though they don't outright say it because there were others that like Pixel Moto or whatever that company and other things that they've shut down but subsidiary closure acted as a drag on them financially this year which makes some sense the Honda collaboration is another one they were making a car if you guys remember with honda they canceled that that's another thing that they had a write-off and sony i didn't know this owns three percent of spotify and spotify is not doing great apparently so that was a drag on them as well um well we get the playstation sales year over year were essentially flat for the overall unit and operating income was up slightly.

1:23:42Dustin Furman:So I guess a small win, but with global forces as they are, you can look at that as a win or a loss. So flat with inflation means you probably lost a little bit. Flat with the global economic, especially when you're making electronics situation, is probably positive for you. They took a substantial impairment on Bungie. This isn't the first impairment that they took on it. I imagine it will not be the last one. This one is$760 million. so um three times what they paid for insomniac they just wrote down on their books for the cost of uh to to incur some of the costs of bungee i imagine they'll be writing it down more unfortunately so that was a major impairment for them that hurt the brand if that didn't happen they would have been closer to like a billion dollars in profit um so worth noting that um fiscal year 26 forecast is flat they expect operating income to go up 10 again but they have a decrease in game segment forecasting based on late era playstation 5 plus your natural latent i i wonder there's a slowdown that's that occurs at the end of every generation with every console we see that in the numbers and i'll get into that in a minute i wonder if they i mean they're not stupid they must be accounting for the boost in grand theft auto sales i mean not only the 30 rips on every copy of grand theft auto sold although they probably have a deal with rockstar that's probably lower than that but the console sold as well i'm sure they're accounting for that um so the forecast is flat with higher operating income and the game segment seems to kind of be in stasis i guess let me think here yeah so like they'll have announced ps6 before this fiscal year ends, the new fiscal year.

1:25:36Dustin Furman:And then that next fiscal year will be the interesting one, right? Because we'll be able to see like what their fiduciary obligated forecasts are for the launch of the console. So this time next year, we'll have a pretty good idea of what's going on if they haven't already said themselves. Talk about games only for fiscal year 2025. So this is the calendar year we just or the fiscal year we just went to. They benefited greatly from foreign exchange rates. That makes sense. Network services are doing well for them. So that's things like PlayStation Plus and third party games. And we'll talk about that in a little while as well.

1:26:09Dustin Furman:Down hardware sales year over year. Not a huge surprise there. And like I said, the bungee impairment of$760 million. This was a little concerning. Monthly active users year over year are only up 1%. I guess people are moving from PS4 to PS5. that would not give you another monthly active user that would just be the same monthly active user maybe you can look at it like that quarter four technically was the highest ever for their quarter but it's 125 million versus like 123.8 so not a lot of growth for playstation from that perspective 26 forecast like i said hardware continues to go down this is good news first party sales up.

1:26:56Dustin Furman:That's not a huge surprise. Saros is not going to be a relevant factor, though they say in the thing that it's coming up. I don't think anyone's going to care. They're going to lose money on Saros, I think, actually. Because I think Saros, Alinea had said Saros's budget was presumed to be something like$70 million, and they've made not even a third of that back. So I don't, that's not looking good. I'm a little worried about Housemarque. But we'll have Tokan, which we'll probably do respectively, and then Wolverine, of course. And then there might be a game in quarter one, but we don't know about it yet.

1:27:30Dustin Furman:So we'll see what happens there. This is I thought this was funny. I don't know if you guys. And so, again, the pot, they always put positive as negatives. And I always I loved this is very Japanese. They put as a positive for PlayStation, quote, absence of impairment losses. So that's what they're trying. They're like trying to scrape some. So what that's saying to them, what's that saying to us anyway, is that they have no intention of closing anyone. Now, those things can change, but they're literally saying like they don't intend on taking impairment losses this year. And the cost of doing business is getting more expensive and therefore arrow down for them.

1:28:09Dustin Furman:Sure. Sony, this is interesting. Sony is becoming mega, mega reliant on entertainment. I mean, we've been talking about this with PlayStation. We know this with pictures and music as well. but 67 % of Sony's gross sales now came from PlayStation movies, TV or music. Um, so that's pretty interesting as well. And I saw this, this has nothing to do with us, but crunchy rolls at 21 million subscribers. That's pretty impressive. It sounds about right. It's affordable.

1:28:40Colin Moriarty:I want to say it's like$10 a month compared to like something like Netflix. now the diversity of content is not necessarily going to be there but uh yeah crunchy roll is ten dollars a month yeah so if you like anime it's a no-brainer like there's that's the type of service that you know for me i just keep all the time 10 bucks in this economy 10 dollars for a service 10 dollars is the new three dollars yeah you know you know so it's like it's it's kind of nothing especially if you're unemployed and know what jujitsu kaizen is i think there's also a free version of crunchyroll that has ads oh that yeah is that true that would make sense actually i'm looking at their tiers and it's there's a check mark for the lowest tier that says no ads so i i believe you can watch maybe limited access with ads sony doesn't make a lot

1:29:39Dustin Furman:of great decisions i don't think but it was a great decision to go in on anime like oh yeah um i that's a that was a very very smart thing to do i think for them um so there's that now i'm going to put this well there's a few other things i want to talk about but i'm putting this link in here as well because i'm going to have you guys use it in a second because i know there's a lot of stuff here so i want to make sure you know where i'm getting this stuff from in a minute but the other things i wanted to say so playstation 5 overall 93 million plus units sold things slowed down pretty drastically though for the for the um console so 18.5 million units sold in fiscal 2024 16 million sold in fiscal 2025 that number is intent is expected to go down again um they are reaching a certain saturation point they're getting pretty close to ps4's numbers now they'll easily be into the hundred million plus range this time next year so that's a massive success regardless of what happens i think from that point and then games finally thus and i thought of you 78 digital up two percent year over year not a huge surprise i guess game sales are up the um let me see here yeah 300 30.3 million first party games sold versus 28.9 million the year before and ps5 only software went from 317 million up to um to 321 million i guess so decent sales uh let's see what else i guess that's it now the the final thing people were writing in about or not right no one actually did write it about this people are talking about it circulating i must be honest i don't think that someone yeah um is ai the link i sent you here is a corporate strategy presentation.

1:31:29Dustin Furman:One of the six or seven pieces of documentation they release. Page 23 is what I'm looking at on this. Just so you guys know that I'm talking to the guys on the show. You guys can go look at it. You can go to sony.com slash EN slash Sony info, I think, and get all the stuff. Actually, I was reading Capcom's financials from 1999 for no particular reason yesterday. It was really interesting. I'm like, wow, this is so cool.

1:31:50Colin Moriarty:Some light reading on a Wednesday. It's so funny, dude.

1:31:53Dustin Furman:I was going to share it with people, but it's like, I'm sure a lot of the companies were like this, but I was in high school. I wasn't reading the shit. I didn't even know the shit existed, but like reading it where it's like, we got to like have an emphasis on online gaming. Every game needs to have like an online component. We need to worry about e-commerce and, and like things like they don't use the terminology microtransactions, but like, and I'm like, wow, they were thinking about this in literally 1999. Pretty interesting. So AI is the big thing that people drew out of the Sony's financials.

1:32:20Dustin Furman:Did you guys see any of this, the kind of stuff going around that, that Sony's kind of talking more about AI and even collaborating with Bandai Namco on a new project. So here's what it says. And this comes from the perspective of, I think Machina would be the one saying this, because these are transcripts of speeches. They say, quote, now I would like to turn to the topic of AI. When we think about further growth at Sony Group, AI is one of the most important themes for us to consider, specifically the potential it holds for us across the Sony Group businesses to unlock new value creation and capture new opportunities for growth across our entertainment businesses.

1:32:53Dustin Furman:Let me start by stating a core principle that guides are thinking about AI. Human creativity must remain at the center. AI is a powerful tool, but it is not a replacement for artists and creators. It is an amplifier of human imagination and a catalyst for new possibilities. They go on, great content comes from deep personal experiences, unique perspectives, and a strong inner motivation to express something meaningful. Fans are drawn to such stories, characters, and worlds that offer deep emotional connection. We believe the most memorable experiences will always be created by humans and enjoyed by people.

1:33:20Dustin Furman:AI can assist in that process, but it will not replace human imagination, creativity, and emotion. So I think they are putting a stake in the ground here, but I think they're doing it for a reason because they have more to say about this because they continue. Quote, AI brings new opportunities to the world of entertainment, not only in terms of efficiency, but empowering creators to expand their creativity. productivity. Additionally, we believe AI will make it easier to take on more innovative and ambitious projects, projects that were previously difficult to pursue due to constraints of cost and time.

1:33:52Dustin Furman:So this is where I think the rubber hits the road for all of these people is like, yeah, all right. But all of the ease comes, not all of it, but a lot of the ease comes at the sake of employing people. Now that's your, that's your prerogative. Rockstar could employ AI to make a bunch of Grand Theft Auto and save a ton of money if they did it. But it's like at what cost to the human capital? So they get more into how things are going to be going with PlayStation Pictures, PlayStation Music, or I'm sorry, Sony Pictures, Sony Music and PlayStation. So they write, for example, the shift represents a significant opportunity for PlayStation as a platform.

1:34:29Dustin Furman:As more diverse and innovative content is created and the overall game industry continues to evolve, PlayStation can connect more with fans, more fans, more with games, further strengthening its value. Now, this is something interesting to me because they're talking about more diverse and innovative content and you finding it. So this is inoffensive. I think what they're basically saying here is ability of game search tools. Like when I turn on PSN, it should just know what I want. And that's not a bad use of AI. In fact, that's a fairly effective use of AI for everybody. For them, they'll sell more games.

1:35:05Dustin Furman:I'll realize more games for me exist. that will they only know that by our behavior that I don't really mind. That's not what bothers me. Perhaps what bothers me a little more is this. Quote, alongside our own efforts, we are currently engaged in a collaborative pilot initiative with Bandai Namco Holdings to explore how generative AI and the latest technologies can most effectively contribute to realizing a creator's vision in the realm of video production. Through these explorations, we have identified massive gains in speed and productivity per person, as well as how to concretely address the shortcomings of generative AI based on the understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the models.

1:35:39Dustin Furman:One example of the weaknesses is the lack of consistency and controllability, which is demanded by creators and those involved in production. We have accumulated know-how to resolve such issues by utilizing various AI models, as well as fine-tuning models with technology and proprietary data to consistently generate output of intended style with the accuracy and cost that would be necessary for deployment. What he's basically saying here, and this is the Achilles heel of AI, is that you have to keep prompting the AI to do things again and again and again, as opposed to being having control over aspects of it.

1:36:06Dustin Furman:That's why at least for a while, people were making a lot of money by being digging with talked about this, about how knowing how to prompt AI became a skill because you have to get it to do everything again, except for like change this little piece. And until a few years ago, that was really difficult to do. He says, quote, on the other hand, we have also identified opportunities where AI can produce highly sophisticated and realistic outputs, which were not feasible before due to production time constraints. We hope to contribute to the overall growth of the industry through such collaborations and by combining Sony's expertise in audio, video processing, spatial and CG technology with generative AI to create a creator first production environment that is safe and secure to use while maximizing their artistic sensibility and output.

1:36:51Dustin Furman:Well, there's more to say, but we'll stop here. Like Sony's telling you they're going to use generative AI. Now, I don't know how we feel about that. I'm not crazy about this, but at least they're saying it to their credit. So now you can make an informed decision on if it really matters to you. And the reality is I keep saying this over and over again. Like, I don't, I don't know that it's going to matter. I don't think people are going to stop. So it's about the tolerance of like what you let these companies do. And they're going to continue to push. They, and none of them want to be the loser.

1:37:22Dustin Furman:They don't want to be the one that didn't take this seriously. It would probably be better for them to take it seriously. And for them to blow up in its fate in their faces, then it would be for them to not take it seriously. Chris, how do you feel about the use of generative AI here in PlayStation? Do you feel like it's something that's necessary? No, but it's going to happen. I think what you said, I think they want to pursue it and they want to be, like you said, they don't want to be the loser. And so I get why a company that doesn't care about anything but money, because that's the whole goal, would do this.

1:38:00it makes perfect sense to me but it reminds me it feels a little bit like i don't know if you saw that publishers were doing this thing where they're going back and like updating books like

1:38:11Dustin Furman:and they're just going back and like i saw yeah i've seen that i can't remember what i can't remember what book it was but like somebody like some book that came out in 2004 has like a paragraph where it's like a character saying like hey come over and watch this tiktok i found and it's just like all right well it's it's just weird everything's just bastardized then it's it's over yeah it sucks like it's fine it's fine whatever i think there's the thing that's sad about this is like there's a i i can i can see a realistic future where judas is the last game i truly give a shit about because you assume that's coming out after gta 6 that's what i assume um it either has to come out really sooner after gta 6 right it needs to be either be imminent or like after gta and it's just like that's that's a that's a real that's a genuine bummer like i don't know if i care i don't know if i have interest in in games that are like spooled up by generative ai models like it really completely robs everything from it for me so like i don't know we'll see how it shapes up and maybe there's like maybe they found some impossible way to ethically use this but i know that the goal behind this is to a be the first people to really crack that code uh be the kind of reliable in some ways maybe even like position themselves to be like the unreal engine of that space where it's just like all right well we've cracked this come to us to figure out everything because we've done it or just or the other goal is to just ultimately

1:39:39trivialize tasks to the point where you can then justifiably fire thousands of people that you no longer need because those jobs are now supplemented by or not supplemented but replaced by you know some model that's a lot cheaper. Theoretically, it's probably more expensive overall for everybody with those data centers being put it put everywhere. And then you're going to have to pay the electric bill for subsidized. It's crazy. All of this is insane, but more power to you. You can figure it out if you want, but I don't know what this bodes for my interest in this, in this medium, to be honest with you.

1:40:15Like I'm, I'm concerned about it. Anything you want to add?

1:40:19Colin Moriarty:I have many thoughts. Let's buckle up for my 15 minute rant here. Not really. Give me a solid 15 minutes. I think there's good and bad here over about all of the AI stuff. Sure. Specifically, when they're talking about tools, and there's even good and bad amongst the good stuff, I would argue. They specifically talk about a tool they created that they're calling Mockingbird. And it says that quickly animates 3D facial models based on performance captures. You know, work that had taken hours can now be completed in a fraction of a second, which is interesting. And they go on to say that Naughty Dog San Diego Studio and other studios have adopted this tool in titles already released like Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered.

1:41:08Colin Moriarty:uh little small lowercase dustin was right moment where when we talked about i ai i've told and said many times studios are already using ai tool sets no yeah consistently like i'm i'm confident of this i guess i can't be positive because i didn't know firsthand i'm like this is happening guarantee it lock it in so that so they use it for facial capture for facial animation in uh Horizon Zero Dawn remastered? Well, no. Yes and no. It says that they're emphasizing that they're still using human actors, but the process in turning that motion capture into what you see on screen, that's what has changed.

1:41:49Saros could have used some of that,

1:41:50Colin Moriarty:to be honest with you. Yeah, probably. Something I find really funny about this, this tickled something in my brain that's somewhat related, that i guess pixar back in 2006 they lost uh the oscar for cars to the the movie happy feet and so uh in in their next movie they put in the credits so fucking petty of them that said our quality assurance guarantee 100 genuine animation no motion capture or any other performance shortcuts shortcuts were used in the production of this film that's where we were in 2006 where animators believed that if you use motion or i guess the purists believed that if you use motion capture that you were using a shortcut yeah now we're talking about film and not games but i you know there's a lot of crossover but they did that in the next cars movie well okay i'm looking this is a reddit thread but it has a screen capture so i'm trying to figure out oh it was in ratatouille oh okay all right all right i was gonna say if that was for cars it's like yeah no shit you did performance capture a car you dumbass no yeah you gotta hire the car they were pissed because i guess the movie happy feet which is penguins but you can use you know motion capture to some degree sure happy feet used motion capture and that was viewed as a shortcut so fast forward to where we are now 20 years later um where and again this is games and not movies but still very similar you're both animating 3d models where it's like we're using motion capture and the process that we use to turn that into something into a game we're now using ai to accelerate that sure what you could argue on a good side that this is helping speed up development and using these tools for efficiency that can be viewed as a good thing it can be viewed as a bad thing if there if you look at there is like okay this job this was someone's job or this was a team's job uh and i guess if you want to look at it glass half full you could say it's like, well, now they can be deployed to do more creative things.

1:43:59Colin Moriarty:Sure. Yeah. It's like, but is that actually what's happening or what's going to happen? Do you just need smaller teams at this point? And I'm kind of in the middle on that because throughout human history, we have had jobs for people doing things that then we found a much more efficient way that eliminated that job. Right. You know, we don't we don't have very many scribes around anymore. We don't need someone to write out a book anymore. So it's a tough one. But yeah, the way they're using AI in that way, I'm I'm not like immediately vehemently against. Another thing that I found really interesting in this, they talk about the Gran Turismo AI powered racing agent, which is interesting.

1:44:48Colin Moriarty:but I want to read this part here because this is something that we have touched on. Taking this further, our world-class creatives have shown the ability to create amazing prototypes where NPCs with their own personalities can create a living dynamic world for the player to explore. Do you remember when I suggested this, that this would happen a long time ago? It's happening. It's actually happening. It's stated in the Sony financial. who are getting dynamic characters through AI. And I'm really curious about what this could mean. When I suggested it a while back, which I'm not acting like that's some kind of crazy novel idea.

1:45:29Colin Moriarty:I'm sure many people thought of this. Obviously, that's why they're doing it. But what does that look like? Does a writer write a character, an extensive character, that includes guardrails? Like this character will never do this. This character could do this. This character will always act this way. You feed that into an AI. And then that character is still a written character from a human in a story that is hopefully written by people, but then is able to be interactive in a way that just simply is not possible. Without something like that. It's very interesting. I'm very, very curious. about that um and i'm not saying it's good or bad but at least at least it is novel right at least it is a way that we're using the technology in a way that is bringing something that we simply could not do before so jury's out on that and then the last thing which i don't have too much to say is the bandai namco stuff and i i think you guys hit the point right on the head that it's like yeah well that sucks uh and it goes back to the point that i've always tried to say is that like we need to differentiate we can't just say ai bad or all ai is this because there's so many different ways that it's being used and there's going to be positive and negatives of all of them and i think there are some that are clearly have more negative than good and figuring out generative ai for whether it's video or it sounds like it's more video based in this bandai namco thing that is trained on the hard work of tens of thousands of artists yeah and has zero creative soul to it is not in my opinion a good use of ai so there you go that's my 10 minutes that's great also stolen it's also stolen consent as well yeah exactly that's the thing it's like a lot of these models are trained on people without their permission like so it's like i don't know man you could and that's where it gets so messy is that you could argue like if you're using an ai to program that ai needed to learn how to program somewhere sure so in a way you could also argue that the other stuff the anime like it's learning that from a place from a human that probably didn't consent to that unless i mean it's possible that sony's like we have all this information data from decades of doing animation work we're training the ai off our own work yeah um and that's the thing where it's like if an animator is working for a company they don't own their work so to me and that's always been the case across the board so it's like okay well i guess that could be ethical that's also with the sony video thing like did they train it based on only their own copyrighted work that's like no ai has shown that level of uh care or efficacy to their product yet so why would i expect them to do any different yeah yeah i don't know it's uh i don't know i just look at it this is all unfortunate i don't think it will ultimately matter i think this is just like where things are going i i know personally it's kind of for me I think a lot about like the chess robot you know what I mean like we're like was it like 1996 we made that machine oh deep blue that could like yeah like deep blue like we we made a machine that could beat any that could beat anybody at chess but and that was like 1996 but I think I was looking up kind of recently like what are the popular like what's the popularity of like chess championships between people and they actually like peaked a couple years ago you know i mean like in like 2020 in the 2020s or something and it's just like i think there was

1:49:28Dustin Furman:something with with uh stockfish is like the new chess engine where i think it got so powerful that people just accepted that it was over and then they got back to like got back to just playing you know not worrying about it anymore because like yeah well yeah because well that's true but it's also just like i mean it's interesting that a machine can have it will be interesting when an ai movie comes out you know in the same way that it's interesting that like a robot could beat somebody in chess in 1996 like it's it's interesting for a moment it's like oh cool that can that can be done now i guess but ultimately like chess is like the only reason chess is interesting is that it's people playing with each other right like and so to me it's just like without without that without that core humanity to it like i could i could give a fuck about a video game if nobody made it like who the who the fuck cares yeah what are you giving me like that's how i think about it it's just like i don't know i would easily much rather watch people play chess in a park than like watch the robot do it again because who cares I think this is just a tough one because I think in my mind I can see very clearly the differentiation between what I think is acceptable use in my personal just personal subjective opinion of of what is good use of AI and what is you know unacceptable use of AI and I think it just comes down to the generation of of original things i don't want that i don't need that but using it in ways like um pssr is ai driven isn't it um yeah and that's fine like i really don't have a problem with that and people would say like well what is the difference and i'm like well it's just making what's already there better than someone would say like well that's what ai can do too and i'm like yeah but you understand that it's different like it's it's a resolution issue it's a frame rate issue it's technical it's not and we and when it gets stylistic we make fun of it look at the new shit with that just what was that nvidia or whatever what that like it's like this is awful like they yassified ashley and yeah it's like no that's that's horrible i mean that's and and yeah there should be a line drawn between those two things and hopefully they get more sophisticated because i see things in this presentation where i'm like this is great where they're like um Because they talk a little bit about the difference between how it's good for players and how it's good for publishers and developers.

1:51:46Dustin Furman:And the way it's good for developers is actually similar to the way it's good for players in that they talk about this. It's like discovery of games, like your games finding the people that are they're meant for. I think that that's a not only a great use of AI, but could really be a boon. I really believe. Yeah, I'm a I'm a I'm a professional in quotes in the games industry. right right we're all heavily immersed in this space i encounter games all the time where i'm like what the fuck is this and why didn't i know this existed i think of um last year the game that jaffe recommended to me that i ended up loving and platinum iron meat i'm like why didn't i ever see that like i don't know and it would be cool if playstation just knew that like my playstation or my PSN or whatever was like Colin really does like 2D games instead of basing it on tags which is what they're doing now I think they really get into like the nitty gritty of your search history your how does he interact with these games and how often does he buy them and if he watches a video or looks at assets and what is his like they can just crunch all of these numbers and then give you exactly what you're looking for and I dig that that would kind of be fucked for you though because you platinum everything yeah right they wouldn't really they i don't think they would get that meaningful of a data set for you particularly micah says that to me about youtube about why why my youtube is so confused all the time because she's like it has no idea what you want like yeah it literally doesn't like are you a middle-aged woman watching crime drop like like true crime shit or do you want to watch red letter media or do you want to watch this guy mowing a lawn it's like make up your mind anyway i'm sorry to uh chris i interrupted you no no i i mean i think i know what you're saying but even that even that use of ai kind of like i'm all right with it it's fine like it's way less intrusive i think than like some of the generative ai stuff but like it's still it still feeds into this it's still feeding into this thing that i think is even a problem that's outside of ai which is just like the lack of anybody to knowledgeably find things on their own and relying on algorithms to show them the things that they like like i i lament that this even happened in the first place because like even even in the earlier days of youtube and by earlier days i mean even as even as short as like 2017 you know 2015 um if you wanted to find youtube videos you would you would look for them or like if you wanted to look for something that you would be interested in you would search for them or you would you would subscribe to channels and like you know you would find things that interest you and then you would get fed a list of those things and now it feels like nobody really looks for anything they just kind of scroll and trust the algorithm to find something that they're interested in and largely it works but i think it's like trained to people to just not be able to do even basic searching i mean that's me in a way chris i agree with you i let youtube tell me whatever i like i don't i barely search for shit so i still search i'm so outdated i'm a dinosaur i search for everything like i guess like there's like apps where like you can't or like it's not even really the point like if you're scrolling on instagram or whatever it's like fine but i i do like i think that that's not a bad use of ai like curating a list of like oh this is well this is what the this person's more interested in so we'll show them this more often but i do think it just kind of it's it's just another it's just a reinforcing thing of just like yeah everybody's going to be really reliant on these algorithms and then also it kind of absolves them a little bit of it's like well now we can just shove everything on the storm we don't actually have to care because it's going to be like maybe some people like fucking sushi flip and then we'll just recommend you know what i mean like it kind of it's kind of like i have your cake and eat it too for them in in a way that i don't love but at the same time that's like a really it's a dinosaur like take because it's just everything's going in that direction the algorithms have um owned everything for the better part of a decade at this point so it's like it's it's pointless to fight against but i i do kind of it's it's depressing to see that it's just like it's never going to go back to like people just being smart enough to like look for their own shit yeah you're right you know what i mean you're no i i know exactly what I mean, I think we are a victim of assuming a computer can know us better than we know ourselves, as opposed to using it as a discovery tool.

1:55:54Dustin Furman:We lean on it too much. Yeah. The thing I get concerned about with PlayStation is they say this in one of their graphics. This is on page 31 of that presentation. It says, quote, AI will increase the volume and diversity of content. Trusted franchises promising high quality experiences will stand out. So what they're basically saying is like, and they better get this right if this is what they're really doing, because what they're basically saying is like AI tools will make games easier to make they will there will be more games and things that are quality and that matter will come to the fruit forefront based on these various ai tools i'm like cool if it works because otherwise you have just more i don't know how you can have more games on psn than it exists right now but what you're saying is they're gonna be more but then they'll find the right people that sounds kind of utopian in my opinion like right like like i say this about that game bat boy where i'm like how the fuck did no one tell me about this game and i'm sure there's a million games out there you guys are telling me like oh you should play boulders gate and i'm like but you're not telling me about iron meat so i have to rely on the computer to tell that to me i guess but then it's as you say and it's what i was saying about youtube earlier and Twitter's the same thing where it's like I just kind of use it I'm like oh and it kind of knows me it's like here's a football video from Rich Eisen here's a red letter media video here's whatever but then like you do get stuck in these ruts and then it gets to didn't I say this about Meghan Trainor that that singer where I looked her up once on Twitter because I was like who is this because people and then it just showed like for a week I didn't click on any of them so it went away eventually like it just scrolled through past them on Twitter.

1:57:32Dustin Furman:But like, I'm like, this is too weak. You need to know me better than that. I need to be able to have one off searches and things I'm curious about without you thinking that's like my life. Right. So these tools need to be really fine tuned, I think. But I, I agree with you, Christian. I'm generally fairly defeatist about this where I just think it is what it is. But I want to encourage people to have standards and really like whatever that might be for you. and really like my standard for this is i expect transparency right if your game is using it it's got to you got to say it um i was watching a uh david attenborough documentary last night about ants it was awesome and he's like so old you know he's 100 years old yeah yeah and he's still doing this shit dude and it was awesome they should do a nature documentary about him right at this point all this narrated by all this narrative this is the oldest narrator in the world this is natural habitat this is on a i'll get into why i brought that up in a minute but the reason i brought that up was because it was really it's a beautiful documentary beautifully shot nature documentary and in the very beginning i'd never seen this before it basically had like a whole splash screen about how i was like no ai anywhere in this and i'm like this is good communicate that and i think it will become a selling point for people like us that care more about the humanities now going off that beaten path for a minute i was saying this to michael when we were watching it i'm like because everyone knows who david attenborough is it's like this guy's a fucking g man like the way he presents the the way he he like he'll like walk he's a hundred right yeah and he like walks on like he they're in the middle of a field and there's like these anthills and he just walks up and he like kneels next to one and starts talking for 30 seconds like beautifully perfectly like with his with his with that with that delivery he has and and i'm like damn this guy's so good he's just so he's such a good good entertainer good performer interesting it's like that video that goes around every once in a while of that british guy i don't know who he is where he's doing like some sort of thing on he's like at i think he's in florida came cadaveral and the rocket is going off behind him do you know what i'm talking about and he's walking and he's talking and then the rocket goes off at the perfect time and it's like how did you time that so amazingly how are some of these guys so good at presenting i'm so jealous yeah but um i saw that and i'm like yeah so my big thing moving forward and the only thing i ask and i don't think it's too much to ask is just total transparency and this is let me know yeah like just you got if your game uses ai maybe it's okay whatever generative ai let's say then right you maybe I mean, maybe it's up to the first parties to say like you got us.

2:00:16Dustin Furman:I mean, Steam does this, I think, to a degree already. But to say like, you got to have a splash screen in the front that says like this game was made in part with generative AI or on the storefront. So before people even buy it, like which is what Steam does to make it more obvious. As long as I think everything's communicated, then everything can exist and we'll see what happens. But I think that under even those circumstances, unfortunately, we lose. Well, I think most people will. I think ultimately most people don't care you know like i think most people just you know it doesn't it doesn't it's not going to matter they won't care and i don't blame them i i gotta be honest like i don't i don't have this idea that that everyone should hold the same sanctity over the written word or like art or whatever i think you should because i don't know what else makes us human but that's kind of up to you and i understand that the argument is true like we didn't care about a lot of things that affected other people so yeah no i mean i i get like i don't care if people like i mean i care from a fundamental perspective but like you can do whatever you want i say i i do say personally for me like if it if it turns out that this entire industry just becomes like nothing but just generative i just like i'll just find something else to do because i just i really just don't care at that point like i'll have a i guess enough of a backlog that i haven't gone through or haven't finished that like i'll be fine for video games for like the rest of my life probably but um that would be like a death nail for me where i'm just like oh okay well this is just clearly not the space for me um which is a bummer to even think about but i mean it's possible i do want that transparency that should be like on the esrb or something you know what i mean or like or maybe not that specifically because that's more that's going into like other things like violence and stuff but like it should be like on the box yeah There should be a sticker on the box.

2:02:03It should be on the cover art. It should be as obvious as possible. Because otherwise, I don't know. At least give me the choice. I agree 100%.

2:02:12Dustin Furman:And the knowledge to make the choice. 100%. And with penalties, real penalties. Just like the SRP penalties for a line of the SRB are serious. Yeah. Yeah, 100%. That's why. Yeah, and it's... I figured... It could fuck your whole thing up. Like your whole... Like you wouldn't... You can theoretically never be allowed to publish again. You could put a game on your... on your you could put a game on poopypants.com and have people download an exe or something for it but you couldn't put it on any of the source you couldn't publish it you can print it um sushi flip three not an independent game that's what i want to see i want to see david edinburgh do a game documentary that'd be awesome the team at naughty dog he's great man it was so funny because there were times where I'm like, dude, he has just ants all over him.

2:02:59Dustin Furman:Yeah. Like he's like next to the end. They're just crawling all over. As you can see, I'm covered in ants. It hurts. What a what a God, I hope I'm I hope I'm literally 10 percent. What David Attenborough is at 100 years old if I live that long. Yeah, if I can't if I can't be that, take me out early, you know, like I don't I don't need it. There's 80 year olds that I've seen that are just like crumbling. And I'm just like I we talk about this all the time. Dick Van Dyke, too. I'm just like, how like what are you doing? it's funny you say that because i was uh there's like a twitter account i see sometimes where they talk about like oh on this date this finale aired on tv or this show premiered or whatever and one of them was for diagnosis murder which was like his big show in like the late 80s and into the 90s and i'm like at that point dick van dyke was in his 70s like like like that was considered like his golden era show like he's like this is dick van dyke's big thing yeah and then he's going to go off into the sunset and it's like that was so long ago it's truly it's truly bewildering man i also forgot scott baio was in that show i totally forgot about that i only know scott baio from uh that reality tv show he has oh he had in in on vh1 or yeah yeah yeah what what it was it was a play on joanie loves chachi right um i i can't remember what the fuck the only thing i remember about it was that there was a teaser a teaser that would come on for a new episode of it that had Crazy on You by heart as the intro.

2:04:37I always get happy when that teaser would come on because I was like, yeah, I love Crazy on You.

2:04:43Dustin Furman:Yeah, he was a child of Brooklyn. What is that TV show? Scott Bay was 45 and single. I remember that. Right, that's the show. Yeah, that's the one. It's Scott. I love it. Scott Bay was 45 ellipsis and single. Yeah. Oh, God. All right. Just a couple of...

2:05:12Dustin Furman:Just a couple of other things. I talked earlier about Capcom and Sega. I just thought there were a few interesting things. Capcom is just absolutely murdering. If you look at their financials, they've had their best year ever, sold more games than ever. it's 12 consecutive years of operating income increase it's pretty pretty wild there's a statistic that i'm really fixated on i'll show i'm gonna send you guys another link this one's on the fourth slide which would be on page 23 and it says market overview this really means nothing to us it's about market growth the market that like the the appreciable market of video games do you guys see this thing here though that's that catches my eye it says game global game player population 3.5 billion 645 million console players uh so i went and looked at this and i'm like i wanted to find where this number comes from apparently comes from like new zoo and like these studies and i'm like i don't think so i don't think there's anywhere near that many i just thought it was weird that's like i i literally stared at it for like 10 minutes i'm 645 million how do you get to that and i guess their argument is that multiple people playing on each console but then i'm like but there are consoles that are abandoned there are people that own both a ps5 and an xbox they're like there's no way that that number comes out to like more there are i i can't imagine there are more people playing on the consoles than are our consoles does that make sense like yeah i don't think so i think the number is probably pretty close to one and i'm not saying that there aren't lots of consoles that that are like that i'm just saying that there are a lot of people that own all of them.

2:06:48Dustin Furman:Therefore, if you own an Xbox, a Switch, and a PS5, you're a third of a person based on this number, right? But that's not the way they counted it. So I just saw that number and I'm like, that seems outrageous. I think the number is more like 250. Sure. You add PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and S, Switch One and Switch Two, you don't get anywhere close to 645. So I just thought that was interesting. They also shared a bunch of numbers. I don't know if you guys saw this. Resident Evil is up to 201 million cumulative sales as a series. Monster Hunter is up to 127 million and then the fall down from there, Street Fighter at 59 million.

2:07:29Dustin Furman:Do you guys know what number four would be? The series? So Resident Evil, Monster Hunter, Street Fighter.

2:07:36Colin Moriarty:I'm looking at them. Oh, you're looking at them. Sorry. That's alright.

2:07:40Dustin Furman:It's Mega Man. Interesting. 44 million. And then Devil May cries at 38 million dead rising at 19 million ace attorney at 14 million which is pretty soft i thought for ace attorney i don't think it would be that high but 14 million seems a little low considering there's like a million of them dragons dogmas at 14 million marvel versus capcom 13 million animusha 9.1 million that also seems soft that's between four games and xbox ports what were they called genma animusha or whatever on xbox i can't remember i don't know and then Okami down at 4.8 million so we got a good view of their top 11 series by volume which is cool and they did share some interesting sales data about which slide is this on here it is this is on page 8 of the thing it's a Resident Evil Requiem 6.91 million units dang and you can see cumulative lifetime sales for various games here it still shows that Resident Evil 6 is the third best selling Resident Evil game ever only behind Resident Evil 2 remake which is still the king and Resident Evil 5 so interesting stuff here fascinating so Capcom is killing wanted to talk about that and then the Sega stuff is interesting just because they are in a little bit of a different position let me see here oh there's a bunch of links here the big thing here that people wanted to discuss is that they canceled their super game

2:09:14Colin Moriarty:do you guys remember this yeah i was kind of interested to see what it was what do you think it was dustin well it sounds like was it supposed to be like multiple games it sounded like it was

2:09:23Dustin Furman:supposed to be a universe of yeah and they were spending a shit ton of money on it too um i don't

2:09:29Colin Moriarty:know what it was supposed to be though yeah because i i saw some either a headline or someone tweet about like the new crazy taxi and some other stuff have survived despite the cancellation of the super game. So I don't know.

2:09:45Dustin Furman:They're in just such an interesting and different position. Like there should they have some interesting numbers here, too. So like Persona 5 is up to 13 million units sold. Persona 3 Reload 2 million. So like there's I'm surprised by the lack of back catalog interest. I thought the Persona Persona fans were way more hardcore than that. It seems to me that the numbers suggest that most everyone that played Persona 5 never played any of the other Personas, which is like the average Persona 5 player never played another Persona game. I think that's kind of weird, don't you?

2:10:18Colin Moriarty:I mean, Persona 5 was so explosive and well, I guess once they remade three, like three and four are from a gameplay and graphical standpoint, nowhere near as good, quote unquote, as Persona 5. And I could see that being off-putting, but I'm surprised more people weren't drawn to Persona 3 remake because it was awesome and arguably better than Persona 5 in certain ways, in my opinion. So it's sad to me that so many Persona 5 fans did not play that because it was good.

2:10:56Dustin Furman:I don't think they've ever shared how... I could be wrong about this, actually. I should probably look this up. About metaphor. how it sold. Because it seems like it didn't maybe do good.

2:11:13Dustin Furman:Yeah, 2 million worldwide, they said during in 2025, 1 million units the same day it launched and the fastest selling game ever developed by Atlas. That's interesting because it seems like people don't seem to give a shit about it. I really liked it. I think people, as things settled, it was like Phantom Menace. As things settled, people were like, nah. but I I I thought it was awesome I really liked it a lot to touch on the persona thing again yeah

2:11:41Colin Moriarty:just because this may be an important factor it lists persona 5 series oh so you think it counts like the musos and stuff like that yeah that probably includes like strikers and the dancing game and the you know persona 5 persona 5 royal persona 5 royal uh on playstation 5 because it's separate and they made people buy it again and Persona 3 Reload is just one game.

2:12:06Dustin Furman:It's interesting I when I played Persona 4 Golden which is the only one I've played and I loved it I thought it was interesting it made me I'm much more interested in going backwards than I actually am in going forward because I want to see where it all began and that's now that we have fairly reliable leaks that it seems like Persona 1 and Persona 2 are in some way going to be revisited it's like I wonder or do people actually care because I'm most intrigued by that than that I am moving forward. I also think, and we've talked about this, is that I think Atlas generally in the Persona series and their whole brand has really suffered from re-releasing their games over and over again.

2:12:40Dustin Furman:And I realized that that's kind of wearing out. And that might be one of the reasons why Metaphor didn't sell as strongly long term as, you know, like, let's assume Persona 5 sold 8 million or whatever. So Metaphor sold a quarter of that. And that's not a good decision then to have them do that. If that's what you're doing, But I wonder if they're scaring people off because they're dedicating all of this time towards this core game. And then the next year, they're like, oh, here's the fucking better version with a new character and more content. And you'll have to pay for it again. So I'm going to play Persona 5 on PS3.

2:13:16Oh.

2:13:17Dustin Furman:Just to piss everyone off.

2:13:19Colin Moriarty:Sure. All right.

2:13:21Dustin Furman:Speaking of sales, I did want to get into this. This comes from our friends at Alinea Analytics, specifically our buddy, Reese Elliott, over there. they hypothesize that sorrows according to their metrics has sold about 300 000 units in its first two weeks um i i've seen it described as lukewarm i think that's putting it nicely if that's true um i'm wondering what you guys make of that i i don't know i i'm surprised i'm not i don't think it was going to sell a million copies or anything. I just, I'm like, I thought here, I'll let Florida man say it. I don't want to say it. I'll let Florida man say it.

2:14:03Dustin Furman:Hello, gents. As I sit here recovering from food poisoning, I have to ask, why do people complain that there are no first party games, which yes, there haven't been a huge amount, but when one comes along like Saros, the game doesn't, does soft sales. Yes, it may not be for everyone, but you have to wonder why people complain and then don't buy. I mean, I, I'm sorry, but I've said this for years. It's like people long for these days of games like Saros, you know it's like oh remember when starhawk came out and and it's like but yeah but no one bought these games and our puppeteer no one bought puppeteer puppeteer bombed i it doesn't mean they're not great games puppeteer is awesome i don't think anything's different with saros it's like yeah you can't i i really i'm kind i was on a creator called reforge gaming show yesterday from when we're recording and we were talking a little bit about this and i'm like i'm kind of playing around in my mind of this idea of playstation shrinking its first party and focusing a lot more on major marquee games.

2:14:55Dustin Furman:And that's it. Like, as much as I love the idea of a game like this existing and I bought it, I bought it early. I paid$10 more for it to play fucking two days early. It's going to lose money. There's almost, if the budget is really$70 million, which they say in this piece, and it might even be something like 76 million, I think that the chances of them making that money back, if the game really sold 300 ,000 units after two weeks is zero. Like there's no way. How? You're going to have to drop the price to get more people to buy it. And maybe it'll reach 1.5 million all told or something like that.

2:15:33Dustin Furman:And it's not a reflection on Saros. It's certainly not a reflection on Housemarque, a studio I've loved for a long time. It's a reflection on the player behavior of and the buying behavior of the player base. And it's true. Like everyone asks for these games. This game, by the way, is a highly recommended, highly recommended highly square 88 on metacritic or whatever and no one bought it i have a theory

2:15:53Colin Moriarty:yeah uh which may require a little bit of research colin if you could help me sure i can help you is it possible returnal was an early launch era ps5 game what are the completion numbers in terms of trophies on that game because i wonder is there a possibility that people were starving for ps5 games particularly maybe first party returnal comes out and it's very we'll say it's non-traditional for sony first party of this time frame and i wonder if a lot of players did not connect with returnal because of its more hardcore roguelike nature and bought it and then maybe felt maybe not burned isn't the right word but like oh this isn't for me and games like returnal aren't for me and then so now you have ceros which is as we've been saying a direct response to maybe the things that they didn't like in returnal but people have already those people that bought returnal have made up their mind and they're like yeah if this is soft returnal 2 then i'm out because returnal 1 did not speak to me yeah i think that's probably fair though so there are

2:17:10Dustin Furman:three acts but i think act two is technically beating the game act three is the secret ending so that's 11.2 percent and i don't think the game was ever on playstation plus as far as i remember it might have been on ps plus extra but i don't think the numbers are spooked from that regard the i think the platinum rate on saros i'll double check is already substantially higher than it is for yeah so 4.4 platinum rate on saros compared to 1.5 on returnal as well so the game is also shorter. I think the price might have been wrong. This is something I'm kind of fixated on. Like it's unclear what the tolerance of people of like the mean gamer is in terms of like$10 differences or$20 differences.

2:17:51Dustin Furman:But I think a game like Expedition 33 did really well because of its price. It's also a really great game, but I think it was very attractive to people because it was 50 bucks. I wonder if Saros was just overpriced. There's also a thing where 300 ,000 might not be very weak, comparable to how it did, how Returnal did originally. What's bad about it is that there are, as you said, there are so many more consoles now. So I looked this up. This is actually in PlayStation's financials. They always have a supplement with game sales numbers, but the problem is they never update them. So if you, it'll have all the games.

2:18:26Dustin Furman:I don't know if you've ever seen this, Dustin, specifically, but like it'll have all the games and then it'll have like a list of numbers, but then it'll have dates next to the numbers and the dates are like when they last reported it so it'll be like 2010 2012 like the numbers are useless but like what was interesting is returnals on that list and the last time they reported numbers was july 18th 2021 and it was so let's remember the and this is what makes it useful for right this minute but won't be useful for much longer the game came saros came out five years to the date after Returnal. So July 18th, well, I guess we would say is like, will it be to 560 by then?

2:19:05Dustin Furman:The answer is probably. But there were I mean, what? I don't even know. 10 million PS5s or something at the time Returnal came out. 15 million, something like that at the moment. I don't even know. That might even be high. And there are almost 100 million now. yeah so the number is so yeah you're you're probably right i think some people theorize that the competition was bad i think that that could be true too and people will get to it later i think what it really means and i i like that sony invests in these kinds of games i don't mind it like i think it's cool i just think it's kind of a dead end for for it's why studio japan studio doesn't need to exist it's like yeah no one need i like yeah rain was cool that's not gonna move the needle you need wolverine you need uncharted you need god of war intergalactic that's the kind of shit that i think moves the needle and yeah and that's why i've been thinking in my mind like why not reconstitute things with heavy triple a major like otherwise just go and get the other games you don't need to you can do second party games even but like why bother I'm

2:20:20Colin Moriarty:worried about housemark I really am another thing I was thinking and well I mean everything we do is armchair analyst stuff here but armchair marketing as much as I dislike this would it have been better to call it returnal subtitle something like returnal Sarah's burning eclipse for eternal eclipse something and kept it so it has that like maybe well i guess i'm i'm playing devil's advocate with myself because maybe they wanted that separation from returnal because they felt like they burned people or it was like this is we don't want people to associate necessarily with returnal i know there's two ways of looking at it still so crazy to me though because they just built they did build returnal like it is so clearly like it's almost impossible to not associate it with returnal

2:21:08Dustin Furman:yeah because what other game plays like this that's exactly right that's why i think i wonder if the solution was to just make something else now i know like that you want to you don't want to waste time right like they it took them five years to make saros and it is the bones of returnal i mean it's and it still took all that time so i understand you don't just throw shit away and you want to iterate and you want to try new things but i think if you if you want to look at housemark as a studio that has some sort of advantage it's that like they've kind of made a lot of unique things it's not to say they didn't return to stardust they did of course they returned to the nation games with you know dead nation and alien nation and yeah it's fine but like maybe something else and yeah i don't want to be dramatic about listen if the blue point shit didn't just happen i would look at this and i'd say like sony understands house marks a valuable entity and that they can eat a little bit of money to keep them going and try something new they're very talented they've worked with them for a long time they know each other but now like blue point being gone i'm like i don't know i i would i hate to say it but like i would argue blue point was way more important to playstation modern playstation than housemart their game certainly sold a lot better you know so it's like yeah or at least they're equivalent they were both bought in the same burst of jim late late jim ryan purchases i just i look at it i'm like i don't i don't know man like if these it all depends on if alinea is right if that budget number is right we can easily get the pricing out of it because they they get all the money you don't even have to have like oh oh, maybe they have a bespoke split.

2:22:38Dustin Furman:It's like it's Sony. They get 100 % of it. So that comes out to like$21 million. Right? Like if you sell 300 ,000 copies. I know what you mean and I think you're probably right. But like the difference between Housemarque and Bluepoint is that Saros at least delivered something and they were working out. Like the thing with Bluepoint was that they were just completely unfocused and they just weren't. It felt to me that the reason and maybe this is just like the way that I'm interpreting like that entire situation but it seemed to be that blue point closed because they were no longer blue point essentially yeah you know like i mean they were they wanted to do all this other shit like this isn't what we bought you for um you wanted to do x y and z and you had all these like weird pitches that turned that were so insane that we didn't think they were true because it seemed insane a shadow of the colossus 2 or like some shadow colossus update or some weird thing and god of war multiplayer like so like i i think there is a different because at least you know you greenlit returnal returnal came out and then you greenlit another one and they delivered it it just didn't light the world on fire which i think is within their scope of potential expectations you know like it's not quite blue point where it's just like you spent six years doing nothing basically or just like getting project after project canceled canceled canceled um i don't know or maybe that's me just trying to rationalize it but like i'm not that worried about housemark and relative to or at least in comparison to the blue point situation because it's just such a different set of circumstances at that studio yeah daniel walker wrote in about this said what's up my sacred bitches with saros being considered a bit of a disappointment sales wise do we have any concerns for housemarks future these days it feels like the possibility of sony prematurely pulling the trigger on a fantastic team wouldn't be so far-fetched thanks for providing endless enjoyment as i drive my delivery truck all over virginia debating daily whether to drive off a bridge or not it's a good debate geez louise be safe out there daniel thank you for writing in yeah i i think um i think it's reasonable to wonder but we'll see i i hope they know better than that like but again i i just i feel like the smaller stuff can just kind of more easily and cheaply come from second party and then you really just dump your resources your money your internal production your pipeline all everything should be kind of directed towards major triple a games that's sony's bread and butter if you want to see the game sales really move then that's what you have to do like go see yote sold very respectively because it's much more of a playstation game at the same exact price but i think also yeah returnal probably did turn people off and i don't want to i i want to just reiterate i don't need to reiterate about housemark everyone knows i love them but i think saros is great i don't think it's as good as returnal i don't but um it's not the game it's maybe just people's tastes but again it goes back to what florida man was saying and i agree it's like everyone complains and they don't buy shit yeah okay i mean that's all that matters at the end of the day to them they don't your goodwill is like well at least they tried well it's like someone's got to go buy this thing you know there's there's a couple of aspects to this that I think, well, first of all, things are bad economically.

2:25:48Like people aren't necessarily going to drop. How much is Saros? I don't even. I think it's 60.

2:25:54Dustin Furman:I think I paid 70 for the early edition of it. I'll verify.

2:26:00People's money isn't as flexible as it was when Returnal came out, which is funny. Oh, it's 70. It is 70.

2:26:05Dustin Furman:So I paid 80, I guess. Okay. So it's$70. That's a lot of money to drop on anything right now that isn't like guaranteed. I think the economic realities right now are like a bigger factor than people might assume. You know, like, are you going to spend, like, gas is$8 in some places. You know, like, it's not great. So I think that has something to do with it. The other thing that I think is like slightly controversial, and I don't know how you guys feel about this, but I think there's a part of it that's kind of true, is that Returnal and Saros are very, very gameplay-oriented games. and I really do believe on some level that the Sony, like the PlayStation audience, I don't know, man.

2:26:50Like, I think they like their HBO. I don't know. I think Sony trained them to like it. Right, but that's what I mean. It's like, I think they've been trained over the course of the PS4 generation to be a little bit more like, well, can I see the peach fuzz on this character's face? I do think there's an element of that. It's like, this is too much of a game for me. And like that kind of that bums me out because I do think like from a gameplay perspective, Saros and Returnal are like the best feeling games from PlayStation first party, like earnestly. Yeah, that might be true. But it doesn't seem to translate because it doesn't it doesn't you know, it's not a.

2:27:27I don't know, it just it's it's too gameplay focused. I don't know how true that is. I don't have any data for that necessarily. it just it that's the sense that i get from the audience because you see like every other audience seems to not give a shit about graphics or like you know like you got the switch out there running at like 12 frames a second selling like you look at tamadachi life yeah you know like it's an insane like i have it you know and it's like tamadachi life's probably made more money than any playstation games ever made right and but like they've been trained to be more they've other audiences have been trained even even you know honestly even xbox to you know even though they've been trained to not buy games and all that stuff like you have something like sea of thieves which is just it's entirely gameplay oriented and it's it's incredibly successful forza is getting massive reviews and sells insane and it's literally just driving it's all about the gameplay there and it's just like i do i do wonder if this audience is just the there may be a little pretentious maybe they maybe they want more story and you know i think you're right chris and i

2:28:30Dustin Furman:think that they think they're not like right i'll admit i don't know that i would call a pretension but that's what i want like i as much as i love even journey was pretentious sure you know like it but that was kind of sony did i mean i believe this 100 i say that as a descriptor by the way like i like that pretentious i like journey as well right right but i understand exactly what you mean like i think i honestly think that was kind of sony's vibe it's like yeah you and it's no disrespect to halo gears or forza like or these games that are obviously like very important for xbox but they're like yeah you go play halo and whatever gears we have uh we have uncharted or we have like the last of us or something that's like more like just people just take it more seriously and you i don't know that you can have it both ways and the audience did that you know like so i don't think you can have your cake and eat it too you gotta you gotta buy these things or not i mean do you want but yeah but then the bar gets so raised too because then you have a last of us part two right and even like maybe like something from rockstar which is like impossibly expensive and then they raise the bar to the point where like anything that isn't those things looks comparatively weak yeah like cyrus i think is a pretty good looking game but like there's undoubtedly like you get to those cut scenes or whatever yeah they're not yeah and it's like i remember there's this there's this one cut scene i got to um i don't know how deep into the game i I think I just beat a character called the architect or something.

2:29:49And there was like a scene either just before that or just after that, where this character is like giving this like really like intense performance. And it's like, it's like crying and wailing. And you can tell the voice actress is doing great, but like the face is like fucking dead. And I'm, I'm looking at him laughing and I feel so bad because like, this is a really good performance and it's just not captured at all. And I, it's funny because I don't think I would feel that way if I wasn't playing a PlayStation game. like i don't think if i i don't think i even would have cared right or noticed right but because it is first party like i i am even i'm conditioned to kind of look at like something that's like not quite up to that insane level and market for it in an area where like i don't know sea thieves looks ridiculous like the characters in that game look ridiculous i don't i don't think twice about it um it's because they've set a different cadence and a different standard for their audiences i don't know how true that is i don't know i don't have any data again it's just Like it's the sense that I get that, uh, that's probably a factor again with everything else in the economics and, you know, I'm sure there's a competition angle to it too.

2:30:50It's a lot of, I mean, I would argue earnestly that we're in a pretty long streak of pretty great years. Like it's kind of crazy. Um, the like years, like 2022 through now used to be fairly sparse in my, in my memory. Um, And so there's just a lot out there. It's a lot out there. People's money isn't going as far as it is. And also, they just didn't really market the game, to be honest. Yeah, Saros.

2:31:17Dustin Furman:I feel like I never really saw it. I don't even know if you could. That's the other thing is if the development budget was 70 something million dollars, hopefully that incorporates the marketing because then that's even going to make it worse. And they must have done something somewhere. And so they probably spent some X million dollars on that. And yeah, you're right, though. And to the economic situation, Golfer Pro 10 wrote in about this, said, hi, Sacred Babes. I know Saros isn't selling well. At least that's what I'm hearing. I am part of the problem, I guess. I'm a hardworking father of just one daughter.

2:31:45Dustin Furman:My wife and I make a household income of$125 ,000. We don't buy a bunch of stuff we don't need. But with everything going up in price, we are not able to spend on most things if we want to save money. I feel like a lot of us gamer dads are in similar situations with low amounts of money and with so many games asking for our time. I think games like Saros are going to suffer. I'm really concerned, not just for the gaming industry, but the economy in general. Apparently, I'm upper middle class where I live in Tennessee, and I definitely don't feel it. just wanted your thoughts on my excessive thoughts no i think you're right i mean chris i think just articulated that pretty well 120 what's so fucked up about the economic situation is 125 000 i think close to twice the median household income in the united states but i understand exactly what you mean like that's just i always think about this like in the 70s or 80s you'd watch a tv show or a movie or something from that era and it's like he's a millionaire and like what that really meant yeah like oh back then yeah like what that like like that was serious shit you know like when when you can go to mcdonald's and get you know a meal for two or three dollars um you having five million dollars your name is like insane like generational level wealth um i'm watching oh i'm not watching it anymore but uh it will come back soon but the gilded age there's like an arc where a guy makes he's like becomes rich off of three hundred thousand dollars like and people are like whoa like what like what are you even gonna do with three hundred thousand dollars and i i it's so we have this we have this almost old-timey expectation of what money really is and so when you look at 125 000 like it when i was out of college i would have shit my pants to make 125 000 and now i understand oh my god you know that that's not what it once was to even the people that make it and you kind of got to feel bad for people across the spectrum not necessarily because of their expectations of what they can spend, you know, like, oh, you live a ritzy life.

2:33:32Dustin Furman:So you have ritzy expectations. It's more like, no, it's just kind of the cost of doing business now of like making sure your child has good education and, you know, getting food and do it. It does suck. And so, yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I also think all for pro that the back catalog, there's got to be a better way, like an academic way we can talk about this one day, but the back catalog stuff is going to become a serious problem. And what I mean by that is like you're like every millisecond that goes by becomes less necessary for you to spend money on games like there's something there's something kind of devastating about it but it's true like you if you're if you're truly strapped for money like you're out there you're unemployed you have no money or whatever like you can only it's like i would just wait for the best sale i would be i would be laughing about how cheap i was getting shit it wasn't even possible during the disc and cartridge area to get games to sheep so like impossible even if you went to like the the shitty game stop thing we were talking about like with a bin like those games are still 10 or 15 or 20 bucks it's like uh i i i think i do think a lot of forces are working against just new releases full stop with rare exception grand theft auto might be one of those exceptions but like you can bet you know dollars to donuts saros is going to be half price or so by the end of the year so if like you're not that eager and you're strapped for money you should just wait um and i think that's also a big problem so i understand completely the economy is not good the reality is like right now i think i can't remember i was reading this but i was like doing some research on it because i was so curious i was like that can't be but it is it's like this is like worse that than gilded era shit like it's it's it's getting real bad so like i i mean sarah's not doing well it's not surprising yeah nothing to it anything doing well would be amazing i'm actually getting to the point where it's like i think even grand theft auto might be softer than it otherwise would like it's still gonna break fucking records and it's it's gonna be like but you have to wonder like how how big could that how big would that game have been i'm obviously talking in the in the past senses if we're in the future but like whatever grand theft auto ends up being you know that there's like an alternate timeline where things are good where that could have done way crazy yeah i i generally agree with you um but it's it's tough because you just don't um yeah you just won't know until like there will be an expert it could be i remember during the financial crisis that like uh it was different than though in 0708 like the gaming industry was different but like gaming really benefited from it and i remember specifically a game like fallout 3 came out at like the perfect time it was this 50 or 60 i guess at the time yeah infinitely large game on consoles that had a huge install base and people were broke and had no and they're like yeah but but now the propositions are even different more different because now it's like back then the only free-to-play games you had were like maple story and uh and shit like that like you know shitty browser games and utopia and shit like that and now it's like everything now the biggest games in the world are that so you even have these bigger economic draw like draws downward it's a it's a different race to the bottom and attention sinks on your on your phone that you're competing with as well for for attention and time and you know you can laugh at you can laugh at instagram reels for like an hour just feel like you've not wasted your time somehow and so like i don't know it's a wild time well we'll see what happens again these are alineas numbers these are not sony's numbers and we'll find out i if they if they follow the same path i guess in uh because we i said what was the date it was july it was july 18th 2021 so that would have been quarter one financials of that fit that new fiscal year and maybe they'll do the same thing and release numbers and they'll be similar or better um it's the exact opposite problem that yote was experiencing where yote was launching stronger on a on a smaller install base so it's not that all things are bad with sony first party Just to say, I think they need to be more selective and we'll see what happens with housemark.

2:37:34Dustin Furman:But again, I hope I think I think housemark will be OK, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were like consumed in terms of like working on someone else's games. That that to me wouldn't be surprising if they were like if housemark or if a girl is like they're just working with us now, not unlike what happened with Nix's and Saros. I don't know if you guys went through the credits, but they worked on it in a major way. And we knew that. But all right. second party news we were talking about um stellar blade recently about all of this and how we didn't have uh clarity on what was going on with the game in terms of publishing because there were some rumors that so stellar blade they they acknowledged they were bringing it to switch right but they still haven't released it because then they give everyone and shift up a switch too i'm pretty sure that i remember xbox i don't know what they're going to do with that they might have an agreement to never do that with uh with sony because sony did act as the publisher of that game but there were rumors that and and i think even markings that sony was publishing the second game i think we now know based on shifts ups shift ups financials released in south korea on the 11th of this month uh we know that that's not happening so first of all if you go into the financials and you go into the q a for anyone out there that's interested they bring up goddess of victory nakai first which i just think is interesting meaning that that game is so much more important than the stellar blade so obviously we're dealing with a company that is not really wholly interested in us as console gamers, but they do have Stellar Blade going and it's a big thing along with Project Spirits, which is also going to be a console game.

2:39:03Dustin Furman:They're asked here, what is the expected performance of Stellar Blade in 2026? They write, quote, Stellar Blade has maintained steady sales since launch, solidifying its position as an evergreen IP in the PC and console market. This quarter, seasonal promotions and discount events continue to drive new player acquisition with stable long-term sales trends confirmed across all platforms. Leading up to the release of the next Stellar Blade title, we will continue to efforts to broaden the franchise's brand awareness through collaborations with global IPs and other initiatives. Looking ahead, we plan to sustain momentum through seasonal and holiday promotions as well as strategic discounting while also actively exploring further platform expansion.

2:39:36Dustin Furman:We remain committed to maximizing the long-term value of the IP to repay the support of our global player community. So here's where things get interesting. They're asked in this next question, what is the development and publishing strategy for the next Stellar Blade title? They write, quote, development of the next Stellar Blade title is progressing smoothly on track to meet our targeted quality standards by the way did you see that they brought in the model and but that that eve is based on into the office recently so there which is always interesting so notably starting with this next title shift up will transition to a first party service model this will allow us to lead marketing strategies that fully reflect the distinctive identity of the stellar blade ip and we expect to communicate the unique appeal of its universe to players more directly and effectively building on the strong fandom and evergreen ip status established by the first stellar blade we are formulating an optimal go-to-market strategy designed to maximize sales and reach a broad audience from day one with three tail key tailwinds high quality self-publishing capabilities a sales maximization strategy and proven ip fan base we're confident the next title will deliver meaningfully improved results compared to its predecessors so it sounds like these games will be or at least this game because they're also talking about there's other games too like um again there's this unbound project and project spirits it seems like they're going full multi-platform what i assume happened here is you can't really blame either side for this is i would imagine sony was smart enough to say like we want the sequel under similar circumstances and i think shift up was smart enough to say like we don't really need you you know and yeah i would have made the same decision why wouldn't unless they're i think stellar blades i think they wanted to wait and see stellar blade success on pc as i understand it is substantial um comparable to wonder what i'm sorry wonder why yeah exactly so i think they probably wanted to wait and see and they're like we don't really need you to like take the marketing spend off of our plates or whatever we're we're hurt and limited by not being able to release the game and publish it now sony has very friendly second party publishing pipelines these days hell divers is probably going to be the last substantial second party game sony publishes that they own i imagine that's not going to be a big thing anymore we talked about how fizzin is not is owned by kojima uh neo remains owned by kohe tecmo and stellar blade is shift ups shift ups so i i think they just did what is logical but it is my hope that sony at least tried because that's the perfect second party game and i don't mean the game's perfect i mean it's kind of a great game to be associated with sony like playstation wasn't heard at all by stellar blade being associated with it it it's a weird it's a sony kind of style of game it's almost got the ps2 quality weird shit going on that was like the hallmark of a lot of games so any thoughts on this on stellar blade moving on from playstation exclusivity or seemingly so yeah i think you're totally right colin that they don't need it

2:42:26Colin Moriarty:anymore and i think if they did work with playstation it was a playstation exclusive at launch it would severely hold them back at this point based on the pc sales and um even I mean, I know they're a Korean studio, but in Japan, like they probably want Stellar Blade. Well, I looked up to they are their intent is to bring Stellar Blade to switch to the first one. And I assume that they want to have Stellar Blade 2 at launch on PlayStation switch to PC. Xbox, maybe.

2:43:00Dustin Furman:Yeah, that it's not appeared on Xbox yet, I think is a sign that they can't. Or maybe just not yet. And that might be why they want out of this deal. because that's probably frustrating. I assume Stellar Blade would sell in the hundreds of thousands on Xbox. It's it's decent money and it would be easy. It's not easy, but it would be very it's much more straightforward to port between the platforms now than it used to be. So, yeah. Yeah, so I guess we'll still be enjoying Stellar Blade 2 and Eve's jiggly bits, although I assume you guys will play it when it comes out on PC if that's your opportunity, right?

2:43:32Dustin Furman:No, that's a couch game for me. So it'll be on PlayStation. It's a bad game for Chris. Am I right?

2:43:38Colin Moriarty:Oh, oh, I'm going to mod that shit to hell, hell and back and hell and back.

2:43:44Dustin Furman:I love that term.

2:43:48Dustin Furman:All right. Well, shout out to I mean, shift up is great. It's cool to have a presence in South Korea with console games more prominently. I think stellar blade was awesome. And I'll just reiterate. I think Eve is obviously overtly sexy and overtly sexual. I kind of think it's overstated in terms of the quality of the game comparable to that. Like, I don't think it really matters. That's what I thought was so interesting about it. I'm sure it drew a lot of people into it. I have no doubt. But like, it's not really what the game's about. It's arguably less sexualized than Bayonetta, even though your tech, it's technically, I don't know, it's weird.

2:44:22It's technically more and technically way, way less. It's odd. It's an odd, that's an odd duck.

2:44:29Dustin Furman:That game. We just got, I just got emailed. I just heard the buzz on my phone and I pulled it up here. Video cannot be monetized. Colin and Dustin watch PlayStation's E3 1995.

2:44:38Colin Moriarty:dude why now i love when this happens i love yeah it's always like so so late it's insane a and e i don't know what that is i get emails like that from videos from like that from like 2009 and i'm like okay those are private so like who gives a shit yeah like like insane you can have the pennies that we were going to make on the stream um yeah you can have the hay pennies

2:45:01Dustin Furman:that it would have cost to even post this thing. Insane. Insane.

2:45:07Colin Moriarty:Well, that happened with our NVIDIA when we reacted to the DLSS 5 and some news company copyright claimed everyone who posted about DLSS 5. That got reverted. But so dumb. It's a we don't need to open the YouTube is broken. Yeah, I can't. It's just frustrating so much. Yeah.

2:45:28Dustin Furman:All right. We're back. We took our cut at an interesting time there. Chris was going to pee his pants. Yeah. You got it. We got to go, you know. No, I understand. We're kind of going along here a little bit. At least at this point, I don't think it's going to be an unusually long episode, but I think we're going along at this point where we are. Right. Yeah. The next piece I want to talk about comes from the sub stack, the game business. It is entitled PlayStation. We have a responsibility to the whole industry. This is an interview with christian svensson who is the head of third party um relations at playstation and there's a lot of interesting shit in here i wanted to just go through a few a little bit of it but you so there's a video version of it you can listen to it or you can read the story that they spun out from it i'm just going through the story um so christian svensson's official title is vp is technically vp of second and third party content ventures so um i think the second party stuff more falls in line with the more Indian A-space games that they get than the like Helldivers, for instance.

2:46:29Dustin Furman:But nonetheless, this guy's been there for a long time, too. He confirms that at first that there are 10 ,000 developers and publishers working with PlayStation right now, which is horrifying. And they talk a little bit about how they get into all of that. But there are a few things that I really thought would be interesting to just kind of talk about. We don't have to get into any of this too deeply. But again, I wanted to call a few of these things out. one thing he says is that this generation playstation has funded partially or wholly 120 games um that are outside of like playstation studios so not first party and not like hell divers and other stuff like that i i would love to know what games those are some of them are obvious pacific drive seems like one of them right as an example callisto protocol callisto protocol yeah we know that that's a good point yeah their playstation studios is in the credits to that which is interesting um he said that they've also given money to small amounts of games and and i wouldn't i wonder specifically what games you guys think these are he says they've also over the last few years given small funds for a handful of games that otherwise wouldn't port to playstation i wonder what those what those games are yeah it's hard to know um so i thought that was pretty interesting then he talks a little bit about hero projects.

2:47:48Dustin Furman:So, of course, we have the China Hero Project, the India Hero Project, and the Mena Project. The first India Hero Project game, I think, just came out, actually, last month. We've already gotten a bunch of China Hero Projects. I don't think they've even announced Mena Hero Project games at all. But that game Fishbowl, or whatever, that came out. It's like an adventure game. That's the first India Hero Project game. And that kind of just came and went. A lot of those games kind of do. At least they're getting going on that. So, I thought this was pretty interesting here. they basically and i think this is what we already know but he says quote this is a long-term play there's not a commercial near-term angle this is growing the dev community first get local content that hopefully resonates with local audiences which helps grow the player community and then it's about how do we bring regionally relevant voices to our globally massively engaged audience how do we expose that global audience to themes and content that they may not have had access to before but these are five or ten plus year visions for ecosystem growth both from a plus a player a supply side and a player side.

2:48:41Dustin Furman:I really like to hear that. I think it's great. He talks about how they're like further behind in like China's already borne a lot of fruit. And he said, actually, and I don't think we knew this yet, that they're going to announce soon their fourth round of games in China. So that'll be exciting. But he said that the India, we already know about the first wave of Indian games. We already got the first one, but he says they're kind of further behind China. And then he says the menace stuff is even further behind that. So like we're not going to get anything out of them for a while that they're but they're basically trying to find the right people.

2:49:05Dustin Furman:And I think it's good to be in these territories for your brand. The ironic thing is that in some of these places, your shit is unaffordable to most people. But you still need to, not so much in India, but certainly in places in Africa. But you still need to have a presence there because there's going to be like, the best game developer in the world could be in Kenya right now or something and you just don't know. Or not a great way to get their games going on our platforms. They talk a little bit about China and South Korea being growth places. We know all about that. I thought this was interesting.

2:49:41Dustin Furman:Christopher Dring writes, one thing I was interested to find out is whether Sony helps studios with their release windows. We always talk about this. For example, PlayStation is releasing Marvel's Wolverine on September 15th, he writes. So before that date was announced, if a developer had come to PlayStation with a similar release timing, would they have said anything? This I was surprised by this answer. He says, quote, air traffic control, we have to be very careful with. Games move all the time. You could tell a partner, hey, you might not want to be in the first half of September. So they set their game in October, but then the big first party game moves to October.

2:50:08Dustin Furman:You have to be very careful with that kind of telegraphing. It can come back to bite you. End quote. I wonder if there's an example of that behind the scenes where they're like, we can't do this anymore, or if it's just a trust issue as well. And then he basically says this. I thought it was a cool way to end. They feel like games are, and I agree with him. He says, quote, I'm in an incredibly privileged position to have amazing visibility into what games will be for the next three to four or five years. I literally cannot explain you. Last year was an amazing year for games. This year will be even better.

2:50:38Dustin Furman:next year will be better still the trajectory of content is unbelievably positive and we as an industry should be super optimistic about where we're going in spite of the headwinds now obviously sony is going to come out and kind of say that but i feel like that's pretty bold definitive statements and he would know i mean the second and third parties are obviously communicating with him plus he has insight in the first party he might be like one of the most fully aware people at all yeah so yeah sounds good but you think it's you think it's salesmanship well i mean imagine imagine it was the opposite and he was like yeah i've seen where things are going and it's it's a fucking train wreck yeah it's bad like it's real bad so we got you know he's not gonna say that so like i think it it's always awkward with these kinds of things because like he could be right like fuck fuck if i know like he he would know but he's also not in a position to tell us if the truth was so negative and so bleak.

2:51:33I do think from their perspective, from their perspective, it's great. You know what I mean? Because it's like, oh my God, we're going to have all these tools that can make games for us. We're going to have lower head counts. You know what I mean? Like everything from their perspective would be great. It's just a matter of like how that materializes for the players and obviously the community of people building these things and a myriad of other places and a myriad of other groups and demographics. But I have no doubt for them. It's looking great.

2:52:03Dustin Furman:You know, I'm I feel, Chris, incredibly optimistic for some reason about the end of PlayStation five in terms of the way things are going to go out, whether or not people will let it end right. Another story entirely. And whether people are interested in moving on to the next thing is another story entirely. But I think that next year is going to be strong. I think it's always been aiming towards that. It's probably always been true. um we'll see anything you want to add dustin before we move on nope okay just a few more pieces of news to get to um let's see here i just thought i'd note this 007 first light is gold the game comes out may 27th now they don't even say this on the tweet for the game from io interactive but it's worth noting and i noticed this i don't know how many people note noted this maybe maybe it's more known than i thought all you have to do to get early access to this game is pre-order it so there's there's no and it's only one day early access but i thought that was pretty cool it's not the first time i've seen that but it's unusual not to charge for it but the so the game comes out may 27th if you buy it and just pre-order it before may 20 26 by may 26 you can just play it beginning may 26 and it's not an extra cost you're just paying the same amount of money so i noticed that and i thought i would pass that on so i'm not i haven't pre-ordered it yet i'll pre-order it when it's ready to preload which now that it's gold it'll be soon but um you know if you want to get a game a day early for basically nothing then it's worth noting that you can do that are you guys looking forward to your noticing skills

2:53:35Colin Moriarty:colin i'm a noticer you're a noticer and you used your noticing i think for good yeah for once well not that the times were it was for

2:53:42Dustin Furman:for positivity for positivity yeah I mean I don't I just thought it was nice instead of like you know paying that the get got premium you just you just get it yeah yeah by the way I Jason Polanski from our friend from Atari senior producer over there reached out to me and he had the idea which I love of he was like would you mind if I hosted the 007 first light spoiler cast because he's a big Bond fan oh yeah and I was like oh yeah dude because i'm totally unequipped to talk about it from that perspective yeah none of us none of us are i'm pretty sure i've always wanted to go down the bond rabbit hole i just haven't i just and there are people out there i've said that to in the past over the years and they're like colin you would love it like because it's so campy and weird especially at the older stuff um like with the villains and like i think there's one that takes place on like a space station and shit like it's it's strange so i've always wanted to do that but um but i don't know double this i want to play this game though i think it looks great are you guys going to pick it up for may 27th and will you pre-order to get the day early yeah i might as well i mean for no for no extra money like why not i am looking forward to this i this is one of the few games this year that like i think i'm like kind of i'm not chomping at the bit necessarily to play it but like i'm gonna be it's gonna be one of those things where it's like oh it's the 26th oh yay you know like how nice definitely um but like yeah i think this looks great i i'm a big fan of IO I think uh Hitman is just uh a strangely like deceptively immaculate series especially these last three modernized Hitman games like the last Hitman game had like a level in it that I think is like one of the best um play spaces I've I've played in in recent memory and so that the prospect of that design being merged with like uncharted style set pieces and in the realm of James in the realm of 007 and stuff like I don't know I think it's a really good recipe and I'm excited for what they got.

2:55:32I hope it's good. I'm really looking forward to it.

2:55:38Colin Moriarty:I'm absolutely playing. I'm excited. I was thinking I probably have seen five or six Bond movies. I've seen all but one of the Daniel Craig's, the last one, and I've seen a few of the older ones as well. And I like them. I don't love them. But to me, it's the IO Hitman connection here that it's like, yeah, I will play anything that IO puts out for now. I mean, based on the Hitman World of Assassination, as it's now called, is just so incredibly good.

2:56:16Dustin Furman:I think I've seen I think there were three Brosnan movies and I've seen those. I don't think I've seen any of the Daniel Craig movies. And I've seen some of the older ones, but just sporadically like on TV or whatever. So I don't know.

2:56:26Colin Moriarty:Is it Golden Eye? The World is Not Enough?

2:56:29Dustin Furman:tomorrow never dies or something like that uh or maybe that's like i don't i don't know i don't know who cares yeah i don't remember i don't know i do have to i have a lot of catching up to do with all that maybe this will put me in a i wonder so this is the thing that's interesting about this right because like that indiana jones game came out and i remember being like i liked it but i remember before i played it i watched the entire indiana jones trilogy to kind of get in the headspace i don't think you could do that with james bond realistically there's just so many different takes and so many different you know tones in that series like i know that daniel craig is a lot more like bleak and a little bit more serious than something like brosnan but i wonder i wonder what i can do to get in into that headspace or maybe the game will just put me in that headspace and i'll want to watch the movies after that yeah i'm sure there are people out there that can reach out to you too on social media if they want and and guide you all right just a couple more quick ones these both come from the playstation blog the first one is there is a new third party officially licensed playstation dual sense revealing the scuff omega they write a performance controller officially licensed for playstation 5 consoles i was looking up what the scuff gaming is i never heard of it do you guys know the brand it's it's owned by corsair i guess so it's in the same family as elgato and origin and all the rest but i don't know anything about this stuff so i i had to look it up this controller is like a specialized high-end controller that's going to cost$219.99.

2:57:58Dustin Furman:It is available right now for you to purchase around the world for your local equivalent. I guess the thing about this is that it's just super well-made and there's even like an app where you can calibrate it like to your liking with like using the special app I guess with dead zones and button configurations and all the rest. So kind of like an edge that I guess is a little more advanced. I don't know. I, I'm, I like the standard stock controller. I don't want for this, but I do know Dustin, especially you, you like your, you have the edge, right? And you like, you like the edge and like edging.

2:58:37Dustin Furman:Yes. So would, are you interested in this? I don't know why Sony would even allow anyone to do this just because I feel like it draws attention away from their own proprietary stuff. Like doing this OEM style stuff is interesting, I guess, but yeah,

2:58:51Colin Moriarty:I am not particularly interested in competitive gaming controllers for console. I know I do have an edge, but my main reason for that was the back buttons. In fact, I wish that Sony released a way for the standard DualSense to have back buttons, even if it was like this stupid thing.

2:59:13Dustin Furman:Right, where you'd have to plug it into the thing.

2:59:15Colin Moriarty:This thing was actually pretty brilliant. I forgot about that. This was a cool little cheap way to add it. And I thought it was good. So literally the only reason I bought the edge was for the back button support. So I'm not as far as like a competitive controller. I don't need it. I can't. I can't play like actual highly competitive games on controller. I don't think specifically, I guess I'm thinking of FPS games. like I mentioned buying Marathon on PlayStation to try to do some casual play on my couch and it is it's horrifying how how much I've lost that ability to play first person shooters in a competitive way on a controller I just can't do it anymore

2:59:59Dustin Furman:you got a man up

3:00:01Colin Moriarty:I think we've got a man up to mouse and keyboard

3:00:03Dustin Furman:no I don't know how I saw you know I saw mouse PI has mouse and keyboard controls on PlayStation oh I didn't know that so it's becoming more more common, I guess. Yeah. All right. Finally, PlayStation Plus games for the game catalog. So the game catalog, of course, is only available to you on PlayStation Plus if you have the extra premium tier. So that's the middle and high tier, not for PlayStation Plus essential, which is most of us, including me. Pretty good month this month for new games and a fair. We knew that this classic game was coming as well, but it did indeed come. So here are the new games that are coming to PlayStation Plus game catalog.

3:00:40Dustin Furman:This all begins May 19th, by the way. So in the coming days, Star Wars Outlaws 2024 game from Massive and Ubisoft. Red Dead Redemption 2 is going back. This is its return to the game catalog. And that's obviously 2018 from Rockstar. Bramble, the Mountain King, kind of a third person action adventure platform style game from Dim Frost Studio and publisher Merge Games. That's 2023. The Thaumaturge. I think I'm saying that right. I hate it. yeah I don't like the name no terrible terrible fucking yeah studio fools theory publisher 11 bit studios that came out in 2024 that's an isometric RPG uh Flintlock the siege of dawn from studio a44 and Kepler interactive the publisher came out in 2024 that's an action RPG broken sword shadows of the Templar reforge that's from revolution software this is a remake of the original Broken Sword game from 1996.

3:01:37Dustin Furman:There is a director's cut of the original Broken Sword game that is different. That was from 2009. And then finally, Enotria, the last song, which is an action RPG from Jayama Games that came out in 2024. So those are the new additions. And then finally, this will only be available either a la carte or at the premium tier specifically because it's a retro game. Time Crisis, the PS1 port of the 95 classic, 95 light gun game from Namco ported famously to PS1 in 97 with the gun con. Do you guys remember that?

3:02:07Colin Moriarty:Yeah.

3:02:07Dustin Furman:Yeah. That was for people that don't know. That was kind of like the PlayStation blaster. And I think I might pick time crisis up at some point. I like time crisis.

3:02:16Colin Moriarty:Yeah. It adds gyro aiming. You got to have that. Yeah. You got to have some kind of pointer.

3:02:22Dustin Furman:That's why we was so good. And for like really weird shit like that. We was great for first person shooters randomly and some third person shooters as well. And then like the point click adventures like Zach and Wiki. And then, yeah, like like like on games like Link's Crossbow Training was another example. I love that. I don't know why, but I loved it. Anything here for you guys on the game catalog? No. Well, Chris, you like this Bramble game, right? I feel like I remember playing Bramble and actually really liking it. But it's been a while. Like, when did this game come out? Like, I have a...

3:03:00This was... Let me see here.

3:03:01Dustin Furman:2023. Really? Yeah. Why do I feel like I... I feel like I played this, like, seven years ago. But I remember quite liking the presentation of this game. Like, this is kind of like a little Nightmares-esque kind of... It's got that... It's like... it's like little nightmares and like brothers tale of two sons kind of like it's not exactly that, but it's like, it's got that vibe going on. I remember liking Bramble, the mountain King's definitely worth picking up and playing. Uh,

3:03:32but I, aside from that broken sword, I appreciate, I don't know if I could like it though. Like I'm just so like past this type of genre. Like, I don't know if I can really like get myself into even the headspace of enjoying this type of thing again. but I know that this was like this is an old game right like Broken Sword yeah Broken Sword came out

3:03:52Dustin Furman:on PS1 in 96 yeah okay because I remember I had something like I think I might have had a version of it Broken Sword was a fairly I don't want to say prominent but it was like a console like a kind of a uniquely console adventure game I mean it was on PC as well I think but i remember it having fairly high like on p on early psms in like 97 98 like their broken sword was a fair i wasn't that i was like just flipping through to find like role-playing games and shit like that but i just remember that character the male character like with the handsome guy with like the blondish hair the dirty blonde hair yeah all right and then time crisis where i time crisis dude i'm so i'm so i'm amped about this i love time crisis i have so many memories

3:04:37Colin Moriarty:of this series it's so ridiculous it's worth saying i because i said no when asking if there was stuff for us red dead redemption 2 on here if you are somehow engaged with the playstation ecosystem enough that you have playstation plus premium and you somehow have not played red dead Redemption 2. First of all, what's wrong with you? As Reggie would say. What's wrong with you? It's time. It's time to do it. It's very good. I guess, I don't know, but some people are waiting for a PS5 port of Red Dead Redemption 2. But I don't know if that's even happening at this point.

3:05:13Dustin Furman:Yeah. Let's see here. Yeah. A Notria, I've seen that game bounce around. Yeah, there's not Red Dead. I didn't. Yeah. Star Wars Outlaws, I'm sure a lot of people will be interested in now that it will be part of your subscription. So anyway, these will be available May 19 if you're interested. All right. Let's get into what we're playing. I don't know how quick we want to go here. We're all playing Saros. I guess we'll just leave it now for the spoiler cast. Is there anything else anyone? We've said so much about it already. Yeah. I feel like I want to say what I need to say about it now, but we need to do it on Secret Symbols Plus so we can spoil it.

3:05:51Colin Moriarty:yeah i think that it's a consensus for people that maybe are interested they're still maybe interested or on the fence about saros is that by the end i was less impressed with it i would say like i think that its shortcomings became more hard to ignore by the end of the game and as we've said on every episode since saros came out it plays very very well to me there are just really annoying or just things i don't like about it that makes it significantly less enjoyable than returnal overall i still think it's good and as i think it's great that you pointed out colin that uh the people that were giving ign shit for the seven out of ten that's i think it's it's a little maybe lower like than i well i don't know i mean i wouldn't give it a seven but i i wouldn't

3:06:48Dustin Furman:7.5? I don't know. I don't know. Maybe an 8 at the most, I would say. Which is great. I mean, it's great. That's literally great on IGN's scale, but it's not as good as Returnal, in my opinion. It's no more than an 8 and no less than a 7, I would say. You know, like, I think that's kind of the sweet spot of where it is, if we're entertaining the, you know, the score conversation. But, like, I'm kind of in the same space where, like, I love the way it plays, but, like, I feel like it gets in its way a lot. like i don't this skill tree is so boring like i don't know i i don't give a shit about like what what the skill tree is it's just like it's i almost kind of like you could have just did this automatically in the background to my character like without my input and i probably would have noticed it just as much um so like that's kind of it's a lot of the stuff that surrounds it that's just not that engaging or interesting um but it's it plays very well like i like fight like i like the boss battles i think they're engaging they're clever i think it's fun um i'm up to the i just beat the architect whatever that means if you if you haven't played it that means nothing to you if you have played it you you know it's not a spoiler or anything but like i just got to that point i don't know how far away from it finishing at finishing it i am but it's good it's good those cutscenes are like yeah i i mean i'm definitely i'm definitely not drawn to it anywhere close to what the way i was drawn to returnal and i i must say that i'm kind of again i think it's great i really like it i think the gameplay is awesome there's a lot of cool ideas in it it's beautiful um i based on my own expectations and this is why expectations are the thief of joy is that like i just had i had higher expectations where i definitely did like I just I don't know what I was expecting from it but not this and I know that sounds right yeah that sounds weird and bad but I'm like no this just doesn't no I don't know it's but I want to I got to keep playing it I got to get the real ending which I'll just do in the next couple of days and I'll get all my notes we'll get our notes together and we'll really get into it and I'll see if we can find a fourth I don't know who else played it did Brad play it I think he's

3:09:00Colin Moriarty:playing it.

3:09:01Dustin Furman:I think he's playing it. Maybe Lockmore. Does Lockmore know it? That doesn't really seem like a game he would play.

3:09:06Colin Moriarty:Some people are requesting Radek.

3:09:08Dustin Furman:Radek?

3:09:09Colin Moriarty:We could maybe. If we don't have enough of our own, of course.

3:09:13Dustin Furman:No, I like Radek. We can make him one of our own by bringing him in more in when it's necessary. Acquisition. That'd be a nice idea. Yeah, he did great on the God of War. I mean, he was really good on the God of War conversation about Sons of Sparta. Okay, and then we're each playing something different so i'm playing vampire crawlers i'm still trying to get the trophy all the trophies it's a little bit of a grind literally i mean it's it's i think vampire survivors was actually harder to grind trophies in and i never got the platinum in that you did does and so you can speak more to that but i have 93 of the platinums including so or 93 of the trophies in the game it's 100 i have 150 bronze trophies from the game and that brings me to 93 i think i'm missing like six or something like that so i have to still do that saros i will clean up in platinum i want to clean up mouse pi for hire i said this a week or two ago that there's something funky going on with the trophies and i just don't want to i don't think it's fixed yet it hasn't even been patched on playstation since april so i uh i'm just gonna wait but i'll i it's a no i hate lingering platinums like that i hate it like my ideal would be to like just i want to get one or two of these games out of the way so i can get the pragmata but i don't i don't know if i'm even gonna be that before 007 and Mina so it's tough out there right now for your man Colin M but Chris you're playing mixtape yeah what's what's going on with that well I played it yeah it's not a game it's not a game that you can be playing really got it but but I finished it took me about I think three and a half hours maybe towards four but no more than four it's a kind of a narrative based um adventure game it's like life is strange sort of but not really either it's like i really don't know what to compare it to it's interesting but it is in the vein of these types of um uh like a mouth washing or like a like a very short kind of narrative experience and for the for the first bit of it i would say for the first like maybe 40 of it i was like yeah this is kind of exactly what i was expecting it's like yeah okay it's uh it's life is strange it's definitely better in my opinion it's not nearly as annoying and and to the degree to the degree that it is annoying it feels like it's like purposeful like there's something about life is strange that feels like it's trying to portray it feels like old people writing kids you know what i mean and this feels that way but it feels like it's the point like it kind of feels like people looking back and reminiscing uh and uh thinking about childhood as they remember it not as how it was like there's like some weird fantastical elements to it that i think makes that obvious but there's a point in the game that like you're kind of skipping rocks on a lake with these characters and they're just kind of talking and you can spend as long as you want in that space just kind of soaking it in and there's like little like mini game stuff that pops up like there's stuff in the in the in the water to hit with the rock and there's like a technique for the rock like you can't do it too high otherwise it'll plop it you can't do it too low otherwise it'll shoot to the bottom you got to get like a sweet spot you can guide it kind of towards different things to hit and as you hit more stuff things keep popping up and as you're doing that they're like the characters are talking and i remember like i got to that point i was like i kind of don't want to stop doing this and i kind of and it kind of clicked with me where i was like oh this is kind of this is interesting like i kind of i kind of like this it did make me cringe and the characters are annoying but i liked it it's weird i don't i don't really quite know how to experience how to explain it it is kind of a game that you do just kind of have to either watch or play for yourself to really get it.

3:13:05It's also definitely not going to be for everybody. It's a very minimal. It's not so drastic that like, oh, you don't have to touch the controller at all. Like you definitely need to input to finish the game, but it's very light. And I want to say that if this was like four years ago, I don't think I would have cared or even tried this, but I think there's been a lot of games that have come out that have opened my eyes to these types of like, less competitive, less, I don't know, reflex, reflex driven types of games. Mouthwashing is one of those. There are other games too. Like I'm, I'm blanking on the names of, but I know, I know gone home back in the day.

3:13:47Like I just did not vibe with personally, but like I take those games a little bit more seriously now than I used to because there is something there, even if it's not for everybody. I liked it. I don't think it's a 10. I think that's kind of crazy, but it is interesting. and it is kind of strange and i recommend like it's for 20 bucks it's just it's hard to be mad at four hours for for 20 bucks considering i i just recently came out of project tell mary which is like a two and a half hour movie that i spend like more on and uh i liked as well but like it's kind of in that space of like yeah i could i could entertain this and you either like it or you don't and your your investment is very minimal uh but i dug it it's interesting

3:14:31Dustin Furman:cool yeah i want to i'll check it out at some point um we're going to talk a little bit about the discourse around it in a minute but um the one thing i will say that bothered me a little bit about this was now i think the character is like they're in like their last days of high school so they were older than i was right i entered a yeah right i entered 19 the 90s in first grade and i exited the 90s in 10th grade so i was a kid throughout the 90s um and i remember it very well but I wasn't their age right I graduated high school in 2002 so I must admit that I'm a little further behind them but I I heard people in my life complain like the music's kind of bullshit in the game as far as what people were listening to at the time and I went and looked at it now this is obviously going to be all anecdotal based on everything but I looked at this list of songs I'm like these were the songs that define the 90s to you like I I feel like well no that's well that's kind of the thing it's like that's not what it is tell me more like like so the story like just the long and short of it is like the story is about this this girl's last day or the last day after school in high school it's like she's leaving to New York because she wants to be a music supervisor for like uh for films and and tv and all this stuff and she wants to be like the the head of she has all these grandiose ideas of like she's going to be the top of everything it's like really arrogant and it's really unbecoming but like i think it's honest it's like how a lot of people so it's supposed to be like a pretentious yeah she is supposed to be pretend like she's not she's a hipster back then okay that puts it in a lot more context because i look at this list of songs i'm like come on man no yeah she's listening to stuff from like the 60s and 70s because she thinks it's way cooler like she even talks about like there's a scene like if you spend enough time in the room you get to hear like extra conversations and she's talking about like how like oh yeah i was seeing that guy or it's like what does he listen to it's like oh green day and like uh some other thing and it's like oh he's a meathead oh you know like so she's he's not she doesn't like and it's so funny because like i think i finished this game and i was like oh it was kind of neat and interesting i liked it it was cute and then i saw the discourse online and it's so funny because it's the exact like like you are this person like you like a lot of the discourse about like this is just this is fucking tripe you know what i mean like what is this is even a real game and it's like and in the game it's like that's not even real music and it's so funny because like you would identify with this person probably actually you're you're all that insufferable yeah they well they sound they sound like my well i i heard my friend was telling me it's like you know well one of that one of them was like well what do you associate with like the 90s and i'm like i don't know like green day was one of them and i'm like weezer sound garden pearl jam stone temple pilots the offspring yeah no doubt uh like now but it makes a lot more sense this list because some of them i understood what they were saying too some of these are decidedly 80s bands joy divisions in here yeah devo is in here the devo song is that's good which is one of my favorite devo songs so that's super dope i love that fucking song it's the opener and it's a it's a great the soundtrack i the soundtrack i will say and this is something i do want to say about it i talked a lot about on summit sign but it's also such a short game i might as well like as somebody who edits material and edits and makes content or used to uh there is i'm very well aware of the power of licensed music and how manipulative or not manipulative necessarily but like how much of a cheat code it is neurons activated neurons activated like i used all sorts of licensed music in my videos and like and even though they would get copyrighted like i was like i want to i want to make this like i need i need this otherwise it doesn't work and i'm fine with that it's fine but the game does that like i would argue that without the soundtrack here it there's not too much there like it's fine but the soundtrack does elevate it and it is just a great soundtrack and it's kind of hard to be like oh without this it wouldn't have been this and it's like yeah well without the without the level design what is halo you know what i mean like it's kind of like this is what it is ultimately the licensed music is a part of it and it does elevate it a lot like there's a lot of great music in there that like takes a scene that's like kind of like fine and makes it feel like kind of like oh i'm kind of digging this like whatever this combination of uh neurons firing is making something kind of new and interesting and i do i do kind of i do appreciate it i came away from mixtape not regretting my time with it and kind of feeling like that was a neat little kind of detour uh on my way to something else i don't know if i'll ever play it again i can't imagine yeah it doesn't seem like a game you replay but yeah maybe there's like i do like that rock skipping section and i could probably maybe platinum it but it's like i don't want to platinum mixtape like it's not really have some self-respect yeah like i have my platinums are like like they mean something and i was just like nah it's like it's it's fine but yeah i don't know i think the discourse is largely surrounded with people just aren't playing it and it's fine i also think well i was looking at something because it's like all right like they have the cure on here for instance that's like some of these songs are not going to be cheap to license as well but i was also thinking like this is a much cheaper licensed song than having like fucking basket case from green day buddy holly from weezer sex type thing from stone devil pilots like that you know uh yeah yeah glycerin from bush like that kind of shit that's going to be like way more expensive and even some of the bands where i'm like yeah these bands make a lot of sense here so like portis had deeply 90s band uh silver chair another deeply 90s band and smashing pumpkins another deeply 90s band they're all in there but they they selected weird songs songs so i think it might have been like with an eye towards like how can we get more of a volume of songs than the songs we have to pay a substantial amount of money for um yeah there might be a look to that as well this is certainly not cheap to get these songs though no and i also feel like the songs that they chose work well for the for the sequences that they do because they are choreographed like to like to the music in some cases so like it's yeah i don't know it's it's a weird i don't know i really do recommend it just for like it's just so cheap relative to anything else and it's so short like your time investment is so low if you're into these games if you're if you are a life is strange person like this is kind of a no-brainer if you're not maybe maybe don't but i but i'm not either and i kind of i kind of dug it i think it's the it really is the time thing man like i do think i think about tiktok and vine a lot right where like vine was like six seconds right there were that was the whole premise was it was like a six second videos and that and that was it so if somebody sent you like a shitty vine like you were you were just like ah whatever okay right it's over in six seconds if someone sends you a shitty tiktok that's like it could be three minutes it's a lot more insulting um and so like mixtape is weird because i think it's good it's not great it's not like a greatest game of all time or nothing but for the time investment that you sink into it four hours it's a nice way to spend some time uh relative to a lot of the games in that genre that i think are just like too unbearable like i just i can't i can't do life is true i can't do hella shut up like i can't do it i can't do it people were not saying hella in 2013 when you did like what do you do i don't i do whatever whatever i didn't we didn't grow up in the right place for all that shit too um just like micah says wicked yeah you know um yeah right exactly yeah which is like anathema to long island which hello would be that's i didn't even know i didn't even really thought that was a real thing until i uh moved to california i'm like wow people really do say that it's interesting yeah wicked that's boston yeah that yeah exactly it's wicked awesome all right dustin do you have anything you want to say he says you have the steam controller here

3:22:21Colin Moriarty:yeah well I wanted to talk since the DualSense was my go to PC controller and I'm sure is for a lot of our audience and maybe they're curious about the Steam controller I did get it here it is you like the way that looks Colin?

3:22:37Dustin Furman:I don't know what else they were going to do it's like did you see the leaked Xbox streaming controllers? It's like Jesus does anyone have an industrial designer anymore? Christ's sake but I think they have I don't know what they're going to do because they have to put those pads on there or whatever so

3:22:51Colin Moriarty:yeah uh but yeah i've been using it since tuesday and the main reason i wanted it is that the i don't know what's up with sony i don't know if it's the controller or whatever to use this thing on bluetooth on a pc absolutely sucks uh if you use bluetooth you do not get the haptic or trigger features in it the connection is unreliable like i would have my pc which is beside my tv and i'd have my controller in my lap and it would lose connection so i'd have to like hold my controller up in certain points to have it connect the steam controller has like its own dedicated wireless puck that connects to it that has been excellent and uh i gotta say in terms of hand how it feels in my hand i vastly prefer it to the dual sense uh but i've always been a critic that i like the dual shock for in terms of how it feels over the dual sense dual sense has a lot of cool features Don't get me wrong.

3:23:49Colin Moriarty:But in terms of how it feels in my hand, the Steam controller has been really, really great. And I have been testing a bunch of different games on it. But something I was really curious about was like the experience of playing games that aren't intended for controller support on the Steam controller. And Steam, one thing that PlayStation can learn from them is that you can customize this controller to do so many things. it's not necessarily always intuitive but i've always thought it was lame that if you want to customize your controller on playstation i believe you need to have a dual sense edge in terms of like customizing the six you might be able to remap some buttons you can remap ones i think

3:24:31Dustin Furman:i think you can remap some things through yeah the system settings but yeah the full breadth of customization i think only comes with with the edge i was playing the game i don't know if you guys have heard of this it's called scritchy scratchy i do know that why do i know that it is

3:24:47Colin Moriarty:a i mean everything's a bellatro like now i don't really know how to describe it other than that but it is a game about scratch off oh my god oh i did see this i did see this yeah this game rules this game is actually really fun where you're uh you use your money to buy scratch off cards then you get modifiers like increase your luck or increase your coin size that's funny eventually you get a little robot because you're buying so many scratch off cards that will scratch off the cards for you and you get like a fan that will blow the cards into the robot instead of having to manually drag

3:25:22Dustin Furman:them each time so ridiculous it seems like it's a uh parody almost yeah it's i'm shocked i thought

3:25:30Colin Moriarty:it would be fun for a few minutes and then i think i spent two hours playing and it is not a controller compatible game so the you're able to map everything to either the touchpad or you can map the mouse to the stick and the the your triggers are your clicks and stuff like that and it worked flawlessly i don't know if i'd want to play like a heavy rts on this though to be fair i have not tried i've heard of examples of people mapping games like world of warcraft to a controller and it's been great so uh there's definitely a bit of a learning curve to it but in terms of it being a lot of people were hung up on the price point i think in this economy and the fact that it has uh magnetic i think it's tmr joysticks so this is better than hall effect so these are not going to get the dreaded stick drift uh and the feature set that it comes with the fact it has its own wireless trackpads the customization and just overall how it feels the back buttons on there i think it's a fantastic controller uh and i really hope i don't necessarily want sony to put like i don't need a dual trackpad system it's not required on a console controller because you're not playing pc games on a console but i really do hope at some point that sony either I mean it's as as uneloquent as it is give people an option to have back buttons that isn't a$200 controller whether they're in my personal opinion on the steam controller they're built in I think that would maybe bother some people but it feels so good on this one that it's like if

3:27:12Dustin Furman:you never want to use these that's fine wait a minute wait a minute Nishino's calling me he said I'm sorry I can't we can't do that you should have bought Saros should ah

3:27:25Colin Moriarty:i bought it i tried so yeah steam controller pretty cool goodbye dual sense for pc

3:27:34Dustin Furman:should have done a little better he said that either the r d money for that goes to house mark or they get closed down you can have your controller but you should have bought saros and then we would have had to make this difficult choice unfortunately yeah bummer the way it goes sometimes. Bummer. Cool, man. Glad you're enjoying it. And you did it. Yeah, you did. You streamed with it, right? And that's that's when I came in and talked to you a little bit. But yeah, it seems like people are really into it.

3:27:56Colin Moriarty:So yeah, I think that so there was a lot of difficulty with the initial allotment where people were not able to order one. Some may remember the sacred streaming. I was like, yep, I'm pressing the continue button over and over. There is another preorder round where I think they're trying to combat scalpers by just like anyone. You can put in a pre-order at any point and you will eventually get one. But so yeah, look forward. If you're interested, you can get one from Valve. Who knows when their Steam machine or VR headset is coming out. Sounds like they're ramping up to do it because they got like a shipment that like on declarations or I said game consoles.

3:28:34Dustin Furman:Oh, really? Two tons of people are so nerdy. They're looking at their fucking shipping declarations now. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. So who knows? All right, man. All right. Well, that's what we're playing. Let's get into six questions, comments, concerns, and end this episode. Perhaps on a high note. I mean, it'll be up to where we go with all of these. Of course, you could submit your inquiries on Patreon. Patreon.com slash Last Stand Media. Use the thread in the news feed each week for the different shows. Please enjoy submitting your inquiry and seeing if I select it or not. Going with Andrew Walsh, who says, Hello, Sacred Boys.

3:29:07Dustin Furman:I think I'm getting to my breaking point with social media. I've never seen a so-called fan base hate something they supposedly love more than gamers. from Resident Evil to Pragmata and Marathon, Saros and now Mixtape is next on the chopping block. What is it with these people? What games do they actually get enjoyment out of? It truly is at the point where staying off social media and just enjoying the games you enjoy is the way to go. I just can't handle the constant negativity on a hobby I love. What say you guys is the gaming space in its worst state it's ever been? Why are people not allowed to enjoy stuff anymore?

3:29:37Dustin Furman:I think part of the audience is tired of talking about these kinds of things, which I get. However, we had a lot of inquiries about this this week and this was the top ranking inquiry or one of them. So I thought we would go with it. Chris, what's going on out there with the people? I don't know, man. I really do think it's just a matter of we've incentivized the wrong things. I think being able to buy verification on Twitter is a nightmarish decision that was so dumb. That was obviously dumb in the beginning. I don't know why anybody thought that there was even a modicum of a good idea there.

3:30:14Dustin Furman:I don't think it really worked because they just gave me mine back. Like, I think a lot of people didn't even I think a lot of people didn't even buy it. And then they're like, all right. Yeah, because I was like, all right, I free. I don't I don't care. I'm not going to buy. I'm not buying. I'm not paying for that. So Twitter is and Twitter is like, you know, it's kind of the new public square. I don't think it really is because there's a different like that's always been a kind of a problem with me where it's just like it's not really a public square if you can just run out and anonymously scream random shit yeah then just and then disappear it's not really analogous but like it is kind of the front page of the internet now and it's it's where a lot of discourse is there's a profit incentive to be negative because it's inherently more interesting it's more juicy it's the same thing it's the same reason why tabloids and shit are were more enticing than like you know real news it's just like well what i want to see what britney's what i want to see how britney spears and that alien hooked up you know in 2007 or whatever like national inquire type nonsense um i don't know i i think i think it's that i think it's the incentivization of that for profit or attention that's what's sad about it too is like it's it's not even profitable really for a lot of these people it's just like they're getting attention that's that sustains them somehow i think i think it's just a lot of posers to be honest with you um i think a lot of people don't play games yeah i think that's obvious and spend a lot of time i mean that was more obvious with mixtape than anything for me where it's just like because i i only saw the discourse after i had finished it really like i saw some people complaining about it but like that was expected uh it was more people complaining about the 10 out of 10 reviews and then i went online and saw like the criticism of it it's just like oh well you didn't actually play this you didn't even do the due diligence of like watching a playthrough of it to know that like yeah it's not like the like the song of like the criticism that you were bringing up earlier about like um oh these aren't the songs of the 90s and it's like yeah it's like it's very strange and i see that a lot uh not just from mixtape but like other games too it's just like where it's like you clearly didn't engage with this thing that you're that you care about so deeply somehow and of course it's not real care it's like it's just what's going to get clicks and what's going to get money it is a bummer but yeah i would argue that now is kind of the worst time to talk about games probably ever just because it's conversations are rewarded by inauthenticity or being inauthentic is actually like the best way to like get ahead really because it's just like oh it's it's the most inflammatory or it's the most like wrong but sensational and then it gets the most replies it gets the most engagement people comment on it and even the people who comment on it earnestly who are like hey you know this is not exactly how this is that's feeding into it because it's it's rewarding it with a response and it's just like you can't really win like the best way to do any of anything now really is in person and it sucks because in person is like the least accessible type of way to do things now compared to how it used to be because it's no longer the default and i really don't know how you fix that really but it's it's bad and uh i don't really i don't think there's a way out of it really what do you think awesome yeah it is bad

3:33:25Colin Moriarty:In some ways, I don't know if it's any worse or just more in our face, probably because of what Chris is saying is like algorithmically, it is feeding these things to you all the time. And I totally get Andrew like some for some people. And I don't think this is like a greater than or less than situation. It's like sometimes you got to get out like to me. I think of the whole marathon situation where I've seen this for me. I've seen it for Chris. I've seen it for our beloved pork poncho. You tweet about marathon. You are going to have people come after you and it doesn't matter what you say. Doesn't matter.

3:34:04Colin Moriarty:It can simply be a statement of enjoyment. Um, and I guess the question is whether or not you're going to let that bother your enjoyment or not. and I choose to I don't know if it's a choice or just like personal desposition or something where it's just like that's fine like I don't I don't care that people when I tweet about marathon that people are mad about it it just doesn't I guess it's bothersome because it's annoying and I wish it wasn't that way but it's not going to stop me from trying to elevate the conversation around games and i think that's important and i'm i i don't know if everyone should do this or everyone again has the fortitude to do it but it's like the conversation's bad because the the normal people that can talk are retreating and yeah yeah so i i i don't want to tell anyone what to do but i encourage people that if you're disheartened by this that number one you don't engage in in that as much as possible and i get this like i gotta take a swipe or two at people every once in a while oh yeah i do like everyone has to yeah every once in a while like a marathon tweet i i swipe back at a few people because i was just so stupid and it's fun but like when i see people that are even in my own like a marathon tweet that i made there's people that are going back and forth 17 20 replies back and forth i'm like what are you doing like give it up on either side defenders or haters whatever but my encouragement is that like be we got to change the conversation around and how it operates and we have to try to push that as norm normality i yeah i mean i i think the thing that the thing that annoys me the most about it is that like i think i think the type of discourse is indicative of a population that is cognitively incapable of doing that sure that's what that's what that's what makes that's what's depressing about it it's not even that like you hate this game like whatever like i there's plenty of games i can't stand or they're just like that don't do it for me but like the inability to articulate why because you actually don't you actually don't know that you feel that way about it because you actually don't engage with it is crazy to me like and it's just like that from that perspective it's disappointing i'm like oh my god like people can't speak anymore people can't like articulate themselves anymore and they're not even there's not even uh an incentive to be educated about what it is you're talking about because it it yields no benefit because you'll get less interaction probably if you're speaking from a place of like actual authoritative like i've i've done this or i've played this or i've experienced this or i've watched this movie or i've listened to this album like it's right it doesn't change the outcome really in fact it makes it worse because you're going to have a new a more nuanced take that is less sexy that is less you know shareable uh sure and so like i don't i don't really i don't know it doesn't affect my enjoyment of video games like video games i still like i could give a fuck i could give a fuck how many people were bothered by me playing marathon if anything it like enhances the experience in some way for me because i'm just like i know somebody's seeing me on marathon right now and they're upset and that's funny yeah but but it does make the social media experience worse i i really do think i really do think the social experience media experience is worse than it's it's ever been yeah i one other thing i do want to say is that i think um andrew is is mostly targeting in on um like the hater mentality culture sure i just want to point out and i'm not saying andrew is ignoring this but i think it does go both ways too where like criticism of a game you can be constructive about it or you can state your opinion and it's perceived as what the same as an inflammatory person at the same time and that also is like something that i would love to see ease up i don't know if it's going to but like when i did my review video on resident evil i was pretty critical about it i was pretty critical on our spoiler cast and on sacred as well and some of the not from sacred listeners on my own channel which it got a lot like a wider audience people that were like you didn't really understand the game you didn't play it eight times you weren't there when Resident Evil came out on PlayStation 1 how could you even have this type of criticism for it I'm like no simply no this is not how this works um so yeah it is a little bit of both ways but my i guess to to summarize and reiterate my point is that i think it is important that people try to push back in a way that does not as chris was saying like don't engage with certain people um and i think like i don't know like twitter really shouldn't be it's a source of entertainment for us i think in a lot of ways and it is a way that

3:39:16Dustin Furman:we receive news yeah it's a useful tool unfortunately it's certainly not where i want to

3:39:22Colin Moriarty:read informed gaming takes i would hope that people like i hope that with this show that we're able to give informed nuanced opinions and or youtubers or whatever conversations out there um the thing that the thing that really confuses me is that like it's like oh you're paid to be positive about this game it's like you know how much money i could make if i was just negative about literally all of this insane like i've seen i've seen i've seen what makes you cheer like i could i could milk you people for like a lot like very easily like insane like it's it's trivial

3:39:57Dustin Furman:yeah i feel the same way i feel i feel like it actually goes both ways too like i talk about how we always you know um arc raiders for instance wanted to sponsor us last year and stuff like that and we get all these other opportunities pretty often to the point where we still have to most of them are turned down for us now but still every once in a while i Remember when something bubbled up with Nintendo last year and like our people, I told you guys our ad reps came to us. I'm like, are you sure? You know, like I could very easily stream a game for you, tell you how good it is, not criticize it and make$10 ,000.

3:40:29Dustin Furman:I could do that all the time, by the way. $5 ,000 here,$10 ,000 there. Like that's what you're right that it goes both ways. people are deeply inauthentic based on various strings being pulled that get them towards the end that they want which is usually money i respect that i want money too but i think uh and we've reflected on this recently is i like the i like them experimenting with twitter and doing all sorts of different x or whatever and doing all sorts of different things with it i think some of it has worked i think some of it hasn't and i think one of the things it's like game pass what we say about that all the time where it's like you don't really know until you try right and i like the idea of them saying like well what if we paid people to use it like what if people made content here i just don't think it works and i think you ultimately have to have the forum mentality of you're in it for the love of the game right or you're not in it at all and let it be a tool to get let it be a a promotional tool for and and twitter makes this difficult by throttling this sort of thing but it's like show off your youtube upload your videos or your essays or whatever, make money on being a personality or an influencer of some sort.

3:41:42Dustin Furman:But the platform doesn't have to pay you. And I think if you just got rid of that one thing, I think a lot of this would change. It's you used to have to gravitate towards the place to go to bitch like this about video games. You're right, Dustin, that like people have been bitching about video games like this since the 80s. I mean, if you were I wasn't on the Usenet, but you can hear plenty of stories about people on there and they were nuts. and then of course the 90s era web 1.0 and forums where i the era i come from everyone was crazy but you had to go to those places a lot of it was just as bad it just wasn't as voluminous and common it seems to find you if i wanted that kind of shit i had to go on game facts then go to like the message board of the game and then i had to click on the thread and then it's like now I go on Twitter and because I like video games, it assumes I want to see all this bullshit.

3:42:36Dustin Furman:And it does feel sometimes like I've been using social media less just by virtue. I've just been like it's springtime. I'm outside. I'm doing things in the yard. I'm just busy with other things like I'm not just not on it as much anymore. But I kind of resent that in order to avoid the drama and the nonsense, you have to just not use it. And I think what they need to do is to fix that. And I just think that some of the fixes are easy. Geo blocking, I think is a huge thing in social media. I said it on Staker streaming, then I doesn't like I would block 90 % of the world like that. No offense, but like, I don't need to hear what you think about our politics or like this or that.

3:43:12Dustin Furman:I don't care about what's going on in your part of the world or things I don't understand in another language, all this kind of shit. Just reduce it to its bare essence of like why you're actually there understand your user base better stop mixing everyone up in this global bowl you know they don't want that because it's like it's not to fix that would mean there's less sensationalism and less engagement and less traffic right and we said that exact thing and you're absolutely right and what i was saying was like couldn't you have a story like a pitch for your ad people being like we're going to reduce our traffic and it's going to be much more meaningful.

3:43:47Dustin Furman:Now our CPMs go up because the people here are real or they matter or your ad for an American restaurant is not in it playing for someone in Pakistan or something. You know, I mean, like, is there a way to sell it? And could you make the product better? Some of the things they did made sense. They fired most of the Twitter and it was fine like that. They weren't doing anything. It's the it's the system of the underlining system in it. And Twitter has been so successful that like X is bigger than ever. And I think it's seeping like the mentality of the small libertarian. Yeah, because I love what you said, Chris, like you can't really have.

3:44:27Dustin Furman:And I think this is a great point. You can't have the town square without knowing who you are. That's why I'm not terribly offended by people being forced to kind of ID themselves. themselves i think like that's a slippery slope yeah it's too as long as it's opt in you know what i mean then it's like just don't use it go use some other anonymous thing but at least we know everyone here is real and whatever here might be i don't know what here is i i yeah i agree i think um no one should be no one should be forced by the barrel of a gun to say like who are you on the internet but if you're using a service maybe you should want to know who that person is and maybe it's important for everyone to know that person's real and maybe your name should back up the shit you talk yeah um it's easy to say things anonymously people say it to us every day you know exactly who i am what i say what i say right that's that's the thing that kind of like it makes me like i i just i don't know man i say everything i say regardless of like how controversial it is with my face and name attached to it like so like whenever somebody's like i'm too scared like i get that there's some places where it's just like some countries or whatever where you could be like executed for for like saying whatever it is that you want to say it's like i get that but in america it's just like i don't know man what do you are you really that afraid now like just the rfk is like cutting penises off of raccoons you know like you're fine he's catching starlings at airports right like i just don't know what everybody's so like worried is going to come out about them like it almost makes me mega suspicious of a person who's like you're that anonymous now with all the shit that flies you know what i mean like what the hell are you doing also people are unmasked all the time too it's like almost easier to just be yourself and not have to worry about it right like and it's true like i've always said what i've said i've never had an anonymous account my old you my my game facts name is c moriarty right you know like i've never been anonymous like my my ig name was moriarty dash ig and i never had an anonymous name really and then social media obviously erased all that in my public facing thing in media i've had the i mean obviously i've gotten paid for it all the rest and it's been successful but like i've i've had the balls to say everything with my chest right regardless of how you feel about it yeah the the cowardly and not a minute and anonymity thing only works if you're like fucking if you're like an insider in the government or something or you're like right like a whistle blower otherwise like whistleblower maybe just don't say off out of pocket crazy shit and you won't have to worry about your anonymity and again i i think that you shouldn't be forced to say or do anything but i just think it's maybe having a gate of saying like okay but if you want access to this then i yeah yeah i don't know technology we have a we have a responsibility to steward technology i think and we haven't done it we haven't done it well i agree so yeah andrew i hear you wanted to present a lot of you wrote in about this a lot of you want to talk about it i think we're kind of beholden on the show to the the reality of the ecosystem so like that is kind of what it is right now i think hiding from and pretending it's not happening is stupid it's it's similar to what i think has happened um on social media we're talking about twitter and we always bring up blue sky as well as like i've said before i think the people on blue sky have made a massive strategic error by alienating and isolating themselves from the conversation you know you've got to be where the conversation is unfortunately we have no choice as sacred symbols but to be wherever people are wherever the PlayStation conversations happening, wherever the games are being released, wherever the conversation might lead us.

3:47:55Dustin Furman:So we're kind of behold into this and like doing it without that insight into the greater ecosystem, I think is disingenuous. Um, and I don't want to cover games like that because then it makes it in that. Then you're really making games into products and not social phenomena. And that's fine to a degree, but not really what I want to do personally. Right. Connor McCurdy wrote in and said, Hey, sacred gents. I saw Game Informer getting some heat this week for obsessed GTA 6 fans. He says four, but he means six. Over a stream they were building hype for when they would reveal their next cover game.

3:48:29Dustin Furman:It obviously wasn't GTA, and now people are going after them for sabotaging the devs. My question for you boys is this. Is it fair to place any blame on Game Informer for doing the stream on a day where a GTA trailer was rumored to drop, or should fans do a firm stand down? I personally think they shouldn't be responsible for unsubstantiated rumors created by the internet, but that's just me. Thank you, boys, for all you do. this is interconnected with the first question in my opinion the game that they were revealing i guess was the blood of dawn walker right um which is one of my most anticipated games this to me is a common sense issue although maybe that's asking too much as you said earlier like you're what is the average iq of a person out there these days i don't know i don't know anymore it worries me when i saw this rumor going around which was happening like a day before the stream i think in the day of the stream and everyone's like i'm like i want you to understand that you're suggesting that rockstar is going to reveal in a meaningful way grand theft auto 6 in game informer in 2026 i want to make sure i understand this argument like that's what you think is going to happen you think that rockstar is going to go to game the revived post closure game informer without their connection to GameStop anymore, which is the only reason Game Informer was relevant for the last 15 years of its existence.

3:49:48Dustin Furman:And it's like, I just, it's just one of those things where I'm like, I just see things every once in a while. I'm like, that's not, obviously not happening. And I don't understand why people don't know that that can't have, that couldn't have possibly been Grand Theft Auto. That, that, that game, that, I'm pretty sure GTA 4 and GTA 5 were both on Game Informer covers. And probably before that, I wasn't even really a game. I was never really a Game Informer. Oh, I'm sure, yeah. But that's a different era. Like I've said it to you. I've said to people before, but just to reiterate, even in the days of IGN, we would go around and try to get exclusives and reveals.

3:50:19Dustin Furman:And everyone would always say like the thing that's most valuable to us, even though we know you're bigger, we know you have bigger reach. Two things. Number one, GameStop. Gameform is right there. Pre-order our game, blah, blah, blah. Number two, I walk into my boss's office with a magazine in my hand and I'm like, and I drop it on his desk and there's our game on a magazine. and it's just so easy to sell to the executives. That's an antiquated way of looking at things these days. That would have been the boon of the century if, by the way, if somehow this new Game Informer got them to reveal Grand Theft Auto 6 in the new game.

3:50:49Dustin Furman:I mean, come on, guys. No, it's not Game Informer's fault. It's everyone else's.

3:50:54Colin Moriarty:Yeah. Yeah. Mental retard. As a mental retard. There's the thing, too, about like, wasn't it like, so this, so there was a stream that they were building hype for cover yeah a cover reveal um not only is what you guys said perfect because it's just like what what is why would rockstar go to game informer um but like also what is game informer going to do if they've already had these things and you know what i mean it's a magazine like it's kind of established what it's going to be like all these these are moving parts that take a while it's not like they're going to be like oh gta's rumored let's push it you know i mean let's let's let's push our magazines like that's not how that works either none of this i didn't even catch wind of this happening because i just didn't even assume that any of that would be a relevant factor like none of this i'm bewildered that this was even a story it seems like something's going on

3:51:52Dustin Furman:concurrent to when we're recording this with grand theft auto like there are i guess there was a leak about a pre-order thing going live on the 18th right so it seems like the new trailer might be coming. I think people are conflating all of these things and leaks, I think, are starting to happen more materially if you like know where to look. And I'm not saying I do. I'm just saying like, you know, there are like deep GTA forums and like 4chan and like all sorts of shit where like people actually say things that are true all the time. You just have to know where to look and like what to believe.

3:52:17Dustin Furman:We're going to talk about one of those things in a moment, actually. But yeah, I mean, I guess they could do a Grand Theft Auto 6 Game Informer cover in the future. I just feel like that sounds insane compared to like the post reveal. Right, exactly. And just knowing the way the magazines worked back in the day, the magazines would always get games before us, which always annoyed us. But it was they would even get pre gold builds of games that were basically done, but not certified because they needed all of this lead time. So a lot of they used to always talk about like how much of a risk it was because you really had to trust these dudes like they were getting access sometimes six weeks before everyone else or something like that.

3:52:55Dustin Furman:Like they had all of it. They were capturing footage. They had all the layout. they had all the assets they had the interviews ready to go i just don't know why you would put yourself in that position for game informer in 2026 i understand putting yourself in that position to game informer in 2010 completely i'm just 100 um but maybe i'm wrong maybe i look like an idiot for thinking that randy's whore ex-wife wrote in and said greetings and salutations that's of course a reference to uh sacred streaming care to comment doesn't i'm really curious what you think about this care to comment on the fromsoft leaks detailing a pirate setting for the new game God bless all ceruleans.

3:53:28Dustin Furman:I'll hang up and listen. That's a reference to what the game's title might be. I don't know if you guys have been following this. I have a I'll put it here in the chat. A game ran article. Apparently on 4chan, there are some interesting leaks going on about what the next game might be, and it seems to be pirate related. And I don't know. Do you believe any of this stuff?

3:53:48Colin Moriarty:As soon as I hear it leak from 4chan, I kind of tune out. Really?

3:53:52Dustin Furman:Because I was just saying like shit leaks there. That's real pretty regularly. People say shit. that's true all the time there. Like, I'm not saying I'm not saying everything's real or most of it or even a preponderance. I'm not saying anything. I'm just saying, like, people clearly go there to say shit because they're going to get away with it.

3:54:06Colin Moriarty:Certainly.

3:54:06Dustin Furman:I feel like it's a broken clock is right twice a day situation with with 4chan where, yes,

3:54:13Colin Moriarty:there has been absolutely things that have leaked there. There is also many, many fakes that have come from 4chan. I think part of this said that they were going to announce it from at a summer game fest and then release in August.

3:54:29Dustin Furman:I was like, that doesn't make any sense. It's like, well, they might be they're bigger than we think, I think at this point, but that would be like, what about the dustbloods?

3:54:37Colin Moriarty:Yeah. So I don't know if there's like multiple leaks going on or something. I guess if I want to entertain the idea, uh, this idea of a from software pirate, dark pirate fantasy where you're going to different islands that are each their own you know dark souls type level sounds very cool and i'm sure that the um art directors and the artists from software would make the sickest pirate designs ever and it sounds really really cool but i i just on a personal level i like speculating on things i guess there's only so much effort that I could put into speculating on this slim of a rumor to me so we'll see it could very well end up being being true I just within this in this current leak culture it's harder for me to see that and be like oh man what what could it be yeah I just am prepared to be disappointed I think you're right in that it needs to come from a certain person that we really know

3:55:47Dustin Furman:is trustworthy. Typically, I think everyone gets something wrong sometimes. But and the other thing is, is that I think I'm especially acutely aware of this. I mean, this has been talked about for a few years now, but especially when that happened with Star Fox, where I think. I think the companies are starting to fuck with people. Like to try to out who's leaking things. And this might be one of those things for all I know, because if I were working out like we love the leaks, we eat them up. If I were at one of these companies i'd be fuck i would i would literally go to the ends of the earth to know who was leaking the shit if we were like working on a game or something like that and people were leaking information about it'd be fucking furious like if i were uh cory barlag and he's clearly upset based on what we can observe on the fae leak for the god the new god of war game or whatever what it is if i were him i'd be like going up and i'd be talking to everyone literally i'd have people in one-on-ones go here did you leak the game like are you talking to people at least try to like figure out you know you gotta it's a high trust thing to make a game for four or five years and rely on everyone to not say shit even your own family a lot of times so we'll see sounds neat the timing all get i mean they could do anything because obviously duskbloods is a switch only game they could obviously do things on other platforms at the same time i just don't know why you would want to do that even for your own internal finances you want to spread things out so i'm

3:57:10Colin Moriarty:trying to find because that i was looking i'm actually unfortunately i clicked the link to see the 4chan post so i'm on a watch list now yeah that's all right it's not on there so i'm trying to remember where i saw that maybe they were talking about duskbloods where was it on

3:57:24Dustin Furman:was it on a um i saw a thing on gaming leaks and rumors on reddit as well i always go there every week to see what what people are saying that's like the that's a place where we've said this before i love all these websites we use them a lot video games chronicle push square i my old stomping grounds ign all the rest i respect them and i think they're all doing great work in their own ways but they are all very careful not to fuck with the companies too much and so things will happen that they won't talk about on their sites that are clear leaks like i'm pretty sure the insomniac stuff was that right like some of the sites like wouldn't even acknowledge the insomniac leaks yeah and i'm like dude that's specifically that i think they said specifically that they wouldn't right right exactly that's like i don't know about that i'm not saying you should be the one leaking it although maybe you should be i mean if you if someone like leaked it to you do you have a some sort of obligate journalistic obligation to leak it i don't know we had a lot of those conversations back in my media days like when we famously leaked destiny one that was literally that I we've talked about this before literally someone found a book in a bar that's literally what happened as I recall it's like someone left like a folder like a binder and then I'm pretty sure that person shopped the binder around um like knew what it was because I think most people would have just put it in a lost and found or thrown it away or maybe even contacted the people or somehow but this person knew what he was looking at yeah like the bartender or the waiter or whatever.

3:58:54Dustin Furman:And so it's fucking crazy. Yeah. And what I recall about that was that like Kotaku had it first and I think that they wouldn't do anything with it. And that's, I think, why we did it. But I don't I don't think any I'm not saying anyone paid for it. And it's not like TMZ pays for shit all the time. Like information. I think. I don't think you should be the one cracking in the companies. I don't think you should be like gray hat hacking. I don't think you should be like. But like if things exist in the ecosystem, I think you have some sort a responsibility to report on it. Sometimes, unfortunately, because again, we're the recipients of reality as it is.

3:59:30Right.

3:59:31Dustin Furman:So anyway.

3:59:32Colin Moriarty:So just to follow up, because I want to clear what I was saying. In this GameRand article, it says, quote, there's no information as to when the game could release, which again clashes with the initial leak as it had claimed from software's pirate game would debut just months after its reveal in August. So there is multiple leaks with clashing information and that's where things get fucky but i wonder if those i mean again it's

3:59:56Dustin Furman:impossible to know but i wonder if the multiple leaks indicate that the the core of it is real right two people are leaking independently about this pirate game or whatever it is now it sounds like it takes place in a huge ship right that's what they were saying it's actually which was kind of disappointing i'm like well what is that like it would be cool to take place in like the

4:00:15Colin Moriarty:open ocean that sounds kind of dope well i think you take the ship two different places right but

4:00:19Dustin Furman:I was like, it would be cool if you like boarded people's ships and like, like the crate, like it was crazy dark souls or Elden Ring, but like on the open ocean with like archipelagos and armadas and flotillas. Yeah. You can have that from. So I know you guys are in desperate need of ideas. Only kidding. Free. Bloated belly of milk wrote in and said, hey, Krispy Kreme didn't trio. This goes out to Chris and Dustin. I'm sure people are getting tired of the marathon discussions, but I don't care. I'm all for it. What are your thoughts about the upcoming season two update coming next month? I'm excited to see Nightmarsh finally in the changes, but I'm also interested to see player attention since this will be the real growing pain for a lot of players with the factory reset for everyone coming with season two.

4:01:03Dustin Furman:Anyway, I'll hang up and listen as I find more Krispy Kreme donuts for no reason at all. What's with you and Krispy Kreme? Yeah. Yeah.

4:01:09Colin Moriarty:And the his name, the bloated belly of milk. I'm uneasy.

4:01:14Dustin Furman:Yeah, I'm uneasy about the whole thing. Krispy Kreme's too rich for my taste. So we I talked about this a little bit on the Reforged gaming show that I was on. I was talking about where I was. I'm also fascinated specifically by retention, also by the idea of new sales, because from an outsider's perspective, I look at it and the way I described it, I was like, I think the game is getting increasingly sweaty and I think the only way you can unleash that valve is to reset the game and then maybe that will feel more welcoming to other people but the reality is is that the people that are getting reset are still going to play and they're just going to be better so there might be a problem here but I I don't I don't know I'm very curious to know what you guys think as players yeah uh so

4:01:58Colin Moriarty:I guess to make this not so in-depth about marathon for the people that are in but for the people that are on the outside looking in um season two is not going to fix marathon in fact i would maybe even kind of expect season two to get a little bit worse because the the player number thing is twofold number one is that people don't want to get into the game this late into the season and i think that makes total sense second thing is that the crazy hardcore players are either still playing and just like fucking around because they've done everything in the game basically they fought compiler and so now they're just hanging out in cryo and trying to find and kill teams and get better loot but like for example someone like me if i beat compiler this weekend i'm putting marathon down until season two i've done everything that i want to do and i'm sure there's lots of people that did that they were like yeah i'm i'm good for now in season two there isn't been enough time for them to make anything radically new for new player so i expect to put less time into season two than season one now as we've been playing or playing as we've been talking chris i'm maybe you saw this they just put out a long thing about in season like more things they're doing in season two they're adding an experimental pve mode um which is very they said that they want to do experimental pv pve experimental pvp modes because right now the game is technically pvp ve so like exclusive pvp modes exclusive pve modes and i do think that will help certainly um i think there is an element there probably want to capture some of the destiny audience the destiny dads that don't want to sweat every night yeah um so i guess getting back to my original point is like season two isn't going to fix marathon and i expect the player counts will continue to be low but and and it's tough because we're based you know this some of this information just came out like within the last hour uh but it's clear that they want to continue to work on the game they mentioned specifically in this post that they want to work on player onboarding which is maybe one of the most important factors to bringing this game back is having people try to understand the game at an earlier point instead of floundering around for five hours like I did and many other people as well so I think they are smart enough to understand that there is something here and the people that play this game and get it absolutely love it uh and they in order to make an extraction shooter at this budget and have it be commercially viable they need to figure out ways to make it more appealing to casual players which is kind it's like it's two opposites so the pbe mode is going to be a step in the right direction but it's gonna it's gonna take a while anything to add chris no i mean i was uh my eyes were darting around because i was like this this is a really long write-up yeah it's actually like i'm excited to like have a cup of coffee and read it because it's it's extensive yeah like there's the section what we've learned number one marathon is overwhelming to learn right i can't wait to read this too so sorry yeah so i wish i mean i i agree with a lot of what doesn't said like i'm i don't know man i think marathon's such a weird game because it is it really is like i understand that people think we're paid or whatever but it's like it's insane to think that but like i mean it really is just so good as a first person you guys pay us that's like you're confused Yeah, like I so like I just I think they understand that they have something good.

4:06:01I think they have and I think there's a lot of conversations about like player retention, like from their metric. It's good from Steam player counts like concurrent. It's it's bad. I don't know what to make of that. Really? I think what's more interesting to me is like less how many people are playing at once and more like what are the daily active users? Like that's that's the thing that I want to know, like because that's more indicative because I know personally anecdotally, like I've spent less time playing. marathon than i did the first week because obviously you know there's other things to do there's other things to play there's just like a life that you've then put aside to play this fucking game that you got to get back to i know pork is the same way so like i think um like what i would be so what i would be curious about is like what are the daily active users looking like um what does that say to you and it clearly says enough for them to be like no we're gonna keep sticking with this because like we have enough retention people are playing maybe less because it is a demanding game you know like they're i still play more or less every day like maybe it's but it's like maybe one or two runs and like the second i die with the second i lose i'm like that's enough for today it's enough for today i can't handle it so it's intense but i do think they're they're going about it in the right ways i think they've got a great ip i think they've got a great foundation i think they've got great lore to pull from i think they've got great places to go the second they start adding the aliens from the original marathon into this which like i imagine that will happen at some point is like it's going to be i would imagine this game is going to be very very different in the in the coming years than it is today and i'm excited to see like where that goes i think bungie is really really good at growing a great foundation into something that people really give a shit about i think they've always been good at that so you know hopefully they have the time to figure that out and uh hopefully they're hopefully they're given some level of leeway in the sense that like they have a strong community here that's invested that they're happy with it that they wish it was better but that they understand that if you're going to get involved in live service the game is evolving and the game is capturing people and like enticing people to come in over time and uh yeah i don't think season two is going to be like a magnificent like grand overhaul but i do think they've made a lot of progress in season one and i think season two is going to do a lot of that as well i think the pve mode is smart i think i even pitched on Twitter a long time ago like they should do like a firefight type thing that just takes place at the individual POIs where it's just like it's just waves and waves and like there's some boss or something there's already bosses in the game you can do it but I'm curious to see where it goes because I think I think it's really really fucking good and we'll see I think we might do for season two are we planning anything for like sacred or like a sacred plus or something we could I know

4:08:42Colin Moriarty:absolutely i know brad wants to have pork on summon sign for a season two episode yeah yeah

4:08:50Dustin Furman:we can get something going for that if we don't we want to do it there instead i'm fine with that i want to keep talking about marathon i think i keep saying that i think it's exciting that we have a game internally that people are really excited about i don't really give a shit about how it's doing personally i'm happy that the people i like and know are enjoying it and i think my i love my i love my weird analogies obviously i use them all the time but i do think my analogy of like this is a beachhead you like you lost a lot of soldiers on this thing like you you die you like you bled to like get this little piece of land you got to keep it like i don't think you i don't think you abandon it look around you it's a fucking world war out there man like you got a little piece of land here just see what you can do with it um and see if you can expand and get off the beach you know like but don't give it up i think that would be a mistake people like it it would be different if it was shedding players and people were like this game sucks but really the people that play like it it has a real group of it's so funny man steam db and like and and the cat it's fucked so much shit up and it's i don't mind more data i like data so it's like it's more it's less obfuscated than ever like people know how have a material view into how games at least on pc are doing it's valuable and it's interesting but like i don't think people know how to read it quite right like because i saw the same thing with mixtape where it's like it's only got a couple this only got a couple thousand concurrent players and it's like it's a four hour single player game like i'm not gonna sit here and say that it's like mixtape is like it's gonna sell like six million copies or some bullshit like that there's no shot that that happens although at 20 pot maybe it sells pretty well but like concurrent player counts for a game like that isn't like i i don't even know what you're trying to glean from that like it's almost useless yes someone someone said that to oh yeah we are all-time someone was making fun of me on on twitter for having we have 44 players all-time peak on on saint slayer and i'm like dude that's like you have any idea how big that is for us on PC I'm not trying to I'm not trying to like be like that's like the biggest hit in the world but I'm like dude our game has already sold more on PC I think Saint Slayer outsold most of our games on PC in like a few days like PC was where it did really really well for us actually along with PSN and so it just it gives people this like distorted vision that everything needs to be doing this certain amount and I'm like it's really kind of dependent on the product right anyway marathon season two coming in june reset we'll see what happens yeah i'm excited to read through this this uh article holden tudix wrote in and said hey guys this one is mainly for colin and dustin so on a recent japanese podcast yuji what what holden tudix holden tudix yeah holden it's a bad one holden tudix it's holding two dicks Holden 2Dicks Oh, Holden 2Dicks Oh, I didn't get that one Holden 2Dicks

4:11:38Colin Moriarty:I didn't until Chris laughed and I was like, oh, what is it? That's great

4:11:42Dustin Furman:Holden 2Dicks writes in and says, hey guys, this one is mainly for Colin and Dustin So on a recent Japanese podcast Yuji Hori, Dragon Quest series creator was quoted saying the next Dragon Quest game will be shown on Dragon Quest Day, May 27th So my question is, are you guys as hyped as I am? Will you be doing a stream for LSM to watch all that could be revealed for the 40th anniversary? thanks for all the content guys I'll go fuck off now and listen I was thinking May 27 3 4 5 6 it's a Wednesday we could stream that but if it's in Japan it might be a weird time I don't like I'm totally open I am very interested I'm trying to read between the lines like I'm trying to I'm trying to assure myself they're talking about Dragon Quest 12 and I'm giving them all these outs that that's not actually what they're talking about you know that they're gonna be like oh here's like a dragon quest 4 or whatever and all we want to see is dragon quest all at this point it's been a dude it's been a long fucking time it's been 8 years since dragon quest 11 came out it's enough already dude like I there should always be a mainline dragon quest game in development and it shouldn't take this long and it's annoying so I definitely want to see this new game and it's supposed to be they we don't know anything almost anything about it it seems to me like it's taken so long and they're so cagey about it that it's maybe not going great i don't know i don't know i don't know how else to interpret it it's like why is this taking so long um so yeah what do you think dustin uh dragon quest 40th anniversary on may 27th is that what it is yeah yeah so um yep there it is so we'll definitely watch that as long as it's an appropriate time that's not so super inconvenient we'll stream that and then we'll talk about it the next day on sacred but um what are your thoughts yeah i am

4:13:30Colin Moriarty:excited i'm still a pretty fresh fan of dragon quest not that i tried i played a decent amount of 11 but it fell away from me so it wasn't until seven reimagined that i'm like fully was in that game wouldn't end play it it's much shorter the new version yeah um i'm very curious because i believe they said they want this to be a more mature Dragon Quest title. So what does that mean? Who knows? This is a big one too because didn't one of the main guys behind Dragon Quest die? And I'm not talking about Kira Toriyama who obviously now has passed RIP.

4:14:11Dustin Furman:Who was it? Oh, Koichi Sugiyama, the composer. Yeah. That was a few years ago though. Toriyama. Yeah, I mean let me see what what does Gemini say yeah I mean it only shows Toriyama which we all know and then Sugiyama who died who is the composer of the games yeah and uh and he already apparently his work on

4:14:32Colin Moriarty:12 is done yeah so it is a little sad that this is uh the final Kira Toriyama Dragon Quest game so uh but yeah I'm very excited I want to know more uh I would expect also on this day it sounds like i wonder if we'll get ps5 ports of dragon quest 11 there sounds like they're releasing a switch 2 port uh on that day there was already like rated somewhere so maybe we'll get some playstation for that which it's probably not even really necessary dragon quest 11 s already runs at 60 on ps4 but any kind of update that that might draw me in what the fuck is this nx game i'm

4:15:11Dustin Furman:looking at the soundtracks for Koichi Sugiyama, like his career. And he obviously worked at Enix for a long time because he worked on Dragon Quest. That was one of his first things of course and he did all the Dragon Quest. But he worked on a game called Jesus. Which I've never heard of in my life. Here I'll put it in the chat. It's an Enix game that came to Famicom in 1989. It's a graphic adventure. There's a sequel called Jesus 2. I'd like to play Jesus 2. sometime all right dragon quest 12 we'll hopefully know more about that by the end of the month i am um i really hope that that's what's gonna happen but i just these motherfuckers square enix seems to be in a little bit of uh a little middle space right now between you know some cool games coming out uh promising titles some good performance but something's missing with them i don't think they're being well run I mean, that's what that activist investor that released that he remember that huge report we went over and he was basically saying like the shit is these guys just don't know what they're doing, basically.

4:16:17And I kind of am led to believe that that might be true, considering how long Dragon Quest all was taking.

4:16:23Dustin Furman:Anyway, Tommy Bacon wrote in with the final inquiry. Is that a funny one to Tommy Bacon? I have to read every word now. I don't think so. Holden Tudix. Holden Tudix. If I just said it like that, would you have Holden Tudix? No, I wouldn't have. but it's like TUD Tudor would be TUDOR like the name Tudor so it would be Tudix Tommy Bacon wrote in said hey CDC I've been playing Assassin's Creed Origins lately and the feature that lets you fast forward time between day and night is very handy for me I usually play in a bright sunlit living room which makes seeing dark scenes on my TV almost impossible because of the glare I much prefer daytime maps and missions just so I can actually see what I'm doing does anyone else struggle with nighttime gameplay like this in case you ask why I don't close the curtains I have a wife and we all know women are obsessed with letting light in the house take care yeah to me that's just that's just too bad um i literally got new curtains i got them put in here too we have like these pull down uh norman curtains and they some of them are like some not opaque but like it'll if it's light out you'll know and other ones are darked out so i got them put here but i got them put in my living room too because the glare was insane on my tv it's like that's intolerable tell your wife to cool it with the sunlight it's horrible i've been watching uh the handmaid's tale i'm almost done with it now with micah and that show is so dark and if you even have like a lamp on in the living room you can't see anything in that fucking show gotta be you gotta be like like in space like deep space to be able to see it so uh i just thought that was a funny one why are you letting your wife ruin are you the man of the house or aren't you

4:18:01Colin Moriarty:yeah blackout curtains

4:18:02Dustin Furman:yeah you gotta get the blackout curtains you can open them

4:18:04Colin Moriarty:she can have them open when you're not playing when you're playing that's all

4:18:09Dustin Furman:shut them down that's all it is that's all it is Tommy Tommy Bacon good luck good luck to you my friend and be well good luck brother alright my dudes let's get the hell out of here it's time to go that was a good episode it was fun good to be here with you let's go around the horn and say goodbye to everyone. Chris, goodbye to you. Be well. Any plans for the rest of your day? No, I'm going to stick my teeth in this marathon article. I think I've got some cooking to do. I've got to use this chicken. Oh, yeah. I don't like to buy frozen, but sometimes I'll buy it and then I'm like, I'll leave for the next day.

4:18:44But now it's like, yeah, we're getting... I don't have much time left. Yeah, you've got to use it. I've got to cook this. I've got to prep it. Low-key day, I think, going forward. But trying to think of like I do want to finish Sorrows I wonder how close I am I really have no idea I haven't looked up I can look at your trophies and

4:19:02Dustin Furman:see I don't because I don't know that I don't know the names yeah I know the art text one of the bosses it was the it was the bus where like the the the stage kind of falls down like parts of it get parts of it get knocked down and right right yeah yeah whatever whatever that one is oh someone has looked at your trophies in the last 15 minutes because I can't I can't wait what oh your trophies are private you're Chris Reagan right oh not on PSN no on PSN it's like Nemesis CRM oh that's right I couldn't get Nemesis CRM update

4:19:44let's see

4:19:45Dustin Furman:let's see Saros yeah so the the defeat the overall to the desecrated fortress is last when you did that's 37.3 so you have three more okay kind of bosses so you're probably like two-thirds of the way through okay yeah i could do that i can do that by next week easy cool man yeah we'll be ready to go i mean that will probably be one of the next episodes i don't know exactly what order they're going to go in but we'll have a nice little back catalog of stuff to get through uh yeah dustin goodbye to you be well

4:20:18Colin Moriarty:anything you'd like to say before we go well holly is out having dinner with somebody so i'm home alone so i gotta figure out fend for myself or food uh but i'll be fine and then this weekend probably keeping it low-key there's like a food truck event the tomorrow night which is a good excuse to drink in public oh yeah that's one thing i miss about city living is the food trucks

4:20:43Dustin Furman:uh like the the there was a place in san francisco in the marina we used to go every friday that like had like a whole gathering of food trucks and just awesome you know i think food trucks might be like my fit like so i've had some of the best food ever out of fucking food truck oh

4:20:56Colin Moriarty:definitely kind of crazy food truck is a little bit of a roll of dice maybe it's the area i'm in i'm either gonna have the best food i've ever had in my life or i'm gonna pay 25 for like absolute shit you never know and you're gonna wait 20 minutes in line for it that's true here it's usually pretty like i i don't think i've really had a bad thing out of a food truck here there's one that I remember that I'm so sad that I never found again it was like a chicken and waffles and it was so fucking incredible I was like yo what is this they used to park outside my building and then they left and I was like is the saddest thing when they left I love chicken and waffles

4:21:32Dustin Furman:what a great combination just unholy and how good it is it's like damn why does this work absolute cinema oh definitely my boys it was good to spend the day with you today recording sacred symbols episode 411 thank you all out there for your love kindness and support of listening to us supporting us on patreon watching us on youtube and all the rest uh we'll see you uh next time on sacred symbols and of course on sacred symbols plus we'll see on sacred streaming and uh yeah thank you for everything your love and support patreon.com slash last time media for all that last day media dot store for merch well next time goodbye see ya take care guys sacred symbols a playstation podcast is a product and trademark of last stand media and collins last stand llc and is proudly recorded in the usa the show was conceived by, is written by, and is directed by me, Colin Moriarty.

4:22:19Dustin Furman:My co-hosts are Chris Raygun Maldonado and Dustin Furman. The show is produced by executive producer Dustin Furman. All of Last Stand's theme music is by my best friend, Ramon Narvaez. As you know, all of Last Stand's shows, including Sacred Symbols, are fan-funded on Patreon at patreon.com slash laststandmedia. The following names are at the producer level on Patreon, our highest tier, and we're grateful for your thoughtful and kind contributions to our independent endeavor. Thank you.

4:23:14Dustin Furman:Thank you.

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