#412 | They Disguise It, Hypnotize It

15:07Colin Moriarty:Yeah. But our people are.

15:09Dustin Furman:Yeah, I can't control that. Yeah. You can't control psychos. Right. I think people were like, you didn't press her enough. And I'm like, you don't watch my interviews very much because that's not what I really ever do. I want people to say what they want to say. I'll push back when I can and challenge you. Give people rope. Sometimes you can do really amazing things with it. Sometimes you hang yourself with it. but you got to start the I don't think what people understand is that like you just get more let me back up I've been doing this for a long time you interview people in a way where they talk

15:45Dustin Furman:you understand what I'm saying like you don't go into these and I'm not fucking Piers Morgan and I like Piers Morgan but I'm but I'm not like trying to get you uh i've never once i've never i don't think once in my entire career ever had a gotcha question like i'm on 60 minutes or some shit right and i'm like but and then i like tap my my you know says right here that you know and i'm like well i just don't do that um you gotta have a you gotta have a foundation and hope to have another conversation and another conversation and that's how Jaffe and I have done it for years now. And she herself said on the show, which I thought was interesting.

16:25Dustin Furman:She's like, I'd love to get in it with you, into it with you about representation. And I was like, yes, we'll do that. Now that we've gotten all this shit out of the way, that can be another conversation. And I was thinking of you when she said that, Chris, because I, we, the conversation went in a different direction. I wasn't able to do it, but I wrote in my notes, mafia, because I was like, you would find interesting that my cohost, Chris Reagan nailed me last year. I don't know if you remember this,

16:48Colin Moriarty:Oh, yeah.

16:48Dustin Furman:When with old country, when I was like, yeah, I really liked the Sicilian vibe of it. It felt kind of at home. And you're like, yeah, it's like representation. And I was like, to be fair. So I was kind of bringing that up. But we weren't we weren't, you know, so I think there's yeah, there's too much binary. Right. Yeah. One of the things that I really respected that she said, because I feel the same way about myself, is that you're not always at your proudest. Like just straight up, like you're not always reacting right to things you're not always saying the right things you create like this aura around yourself that's inaccurate speaking to her for five minutes made me made it clear that she's smart uh interesting and has something to say and that's more than 90 of the people in the space so i'm just i'm just

17:38Colin Moriarty:letting you know yeah it was a good it was a good episode i listened to uh i had it on in the background while i was uh cleaning my entire apartment oh thank you but it was like really it was really like i was like surprised at how you guys had a really good back and forth sometimes you could tell like there's like chemistry with people and sometimes there isn't like i've definitely been in conversation with people it's like i don't get along with this like this isn't this is like definitely like running the clock but that seemed like really really well paced

18:03Dustin Furman:it was good yeah she i was telling this to michael after i'm like she's a long islander and there's something about that like they're like about like the and i think she felt the same about me we're like we just kind of it's just kind of a way of a way of talking and we were able to break the ice with something like that about being from long island about our parents both working you know public service you know she her parents are cops in new york city my my dad was a firefighter in new york city so we had all these connections and then right into the conversation and i think that that kind of thing is great to have that kind of what you might call social lubricant although i don't really like that word very much no yeah god this new fucking google docs icon man you really hung up on it yeah i really can't i can't get over it

18:50Dustin Furman:all right so thank you so much for the kind words on there other recent sacred symbols plus episodes uh we we're gonna do um saros and pragmata soon we were gonna do saros tomorrow and publish that next week but my week has been burned to the ground i need more time to get notes together so We'll record that next week. I'm sitting down with the Uncharted 4, the guy who did the Uncharted 4 real story or original story thing next week as well. Oh, cool. So we're going to have a stack of things going, which is going to be fun. Other recent episodes, you know, kind of deconstructing what we would do with PlayStation 6 and all the rest.

19:19Dustin Furman:So we appreciate you guys over there. Sacred Symbols Plus on Patreon.com slash Last Day of Media. And then Sacred Streaming continues. We did Pragmata before everything went down. Ironically. Legendary stream. Very ironic. Yeah, it's a... And an ironic game to play as well. We've done a bunch of marathon stuff. Obviously, I platinum Saint Slayer, my most recent game in one sitting, played vampire crawlers. I don't know what we're going to do this coming week, but I was thinking for the next week. Well, Adam Kelm wrote in and said, greeting gents, since Sony was gracious enough to give an extended lead time for the next state of play, which is interesting.

19:55Dustin Furman:We'll talk about that later. Can we get a predictions secret symbols plus episode just like the old days? Now that they usually only announce it two to three days ahead, we've been missing out on the wild speculation along with punishments for not being first. Keep up the good work and hold your PSN accounts close and safe in these troubling times. Adam, thank you for writing in. Because Sacred to Most Plus is so crowded right now, I think the move is, so it's on the second, right? The state of play. So the first would be a Monday because it's Tuesday, which is interesting too. So we'll just do a predictions episode.

20:26Dustin Furman:Should Chris and Brad, well, we could do without Brad, but if he's not available, but it should Chris be available. We can do that the first on sacred streaming. Stay out of the way of this barrage of content that's just going to push everything back on Sacred Symbols Plus and have the best of both worlds. So I think we'll do that. Please look forward to it. And then merch, lastdaymedia.store. Micah just sent out a bunch of stuff recently. T-shirts, sweatshirts, stickers, remaining copies of Habroxia. People have been asking about St. Slayer's physical version. Our intention is to do one. Nothing finalized yet, but I think it will happen.

20:59All right.

21:00Dustin Furman:let's get into topics of discussion stretch our legs a little bit and then we'll get into everything that i know you guys want to hear about but we have to do things the right way or not at all it's like when i mow the lawn i notice like for instance my neighbor occasionally he mows the lawn but he doesn't weed whack and i'm like well why bother that's me you got to get that weed whacker

21:19Colin Moriarty:out you got to do it i hate tying it up like stringing it up it's the worst i hate it i hate

21:26Dustin Furman:that too well because like you eventually get to that point where you have to replace it like you know you like it shoots out because like the rolls and i'm like god damn it last time i mowed my lawn

21:38Colin Moriarty:and i was weed whacking and i was pretty close to being done and then it flew out and i'm like well that's it yeah that's it for today like that little bit's not getting done i'm not yeah i've

21:47Dustin Furman:i've been in that position and because i'm so ocd i've like gotten scissors oh yeah i'm gonna finish like this this thing like this way yeah so we got to do with the right we got to do sacred symbols the right way or not at all and we begin here uh boss 10 george wrote in and said gentlemen by the time this episode airs my family and i will be trapped in a car i added like an extra syllable to family there i don't know what that was all about my family and i will be trapped in a car for a six-hour road trip to visit my in-laws naturally i'll be forcing my wife and kids to listen to this podcast for the entire drive.

22:23Dustin Furman:Please inform my young impressionable children, Grace and Leo, what a good father they have. Also let my wife, Allie, my sister's name, know that she truly selected the finest possible life partner from the available pool of candidates. Maybe we'll have a relaxing Memorial Day weekend. I don't know if I can do that. I mean, did she make the best choice? Are you the best father to Grace and Leo?

22:45Colin Moriarty:She's married to somebody who's forcing an entire car full of people to listen to a podcast that they don't normally listen to. Yeah. Not a great start. Little boy. Little girl. Little girl. Woman. Respect the man.

23:02Dustin Furman:Hey, woman. That's what I've been doing. I call Mike a woman all the time. But it's losing syllables. Come over here, woman.

23:13Colin Moriarty:It's like the Trucker Diet guy. Chris, surely you know the Trucker Diet guy. I do. I was telling Colin about it. I'm like, he's like, gotta get some peanut butter crackers. Like, he doesn't even, he can't even say crackers. There's no enunciation. Oh, man. Yeah.

23:29Dustin Furman:Come on over here.

23:32Colin Moriarty:This is a heinous audio experience. I know it is. It's horrible. They get a, like, surround sound, too, depending on, like, this type of car they got. They're all crying now.

23:42Dustin Furman:Little boy, you want to hear griping about the PlayStation Network for three hours? Yeah.

23:46Colin Moriarty:I can't think. Oh, my God. I can't even imagine like I thinking about my like being that young and being in the car with my dad and he's listening to like the equivalent of like. And if I was like eight or whatever, and like he's listening to three hours of like baseball commentary, that's not even like a baseball game. I would be losing my fucking mind.

24:09Dustin Furman:Yeah, it'd be awful. It is interesting in a way, like sometimes I hear Michael listens to a lot of interesting like stuff that I would never listen to. She's really into like grilling and smoking and all that kind of stuff. so she listens to these pockets they're huge like like some of these guys are like mad like they have their own spices their own rubs and like they win competitions and it's cool so i listen to it every once in a while i'm like yeah i get this is this is not my ship but it's so interesting that there's something for everyone like these guys are getting into into like charcoal for like four hours and i'm like cool it's not for me but yeah that's the internet baby i guess what confuses

24:42Colin Moriarty:me is like how much could there be to say about you is like is there like is is there new grilling you know there's new games all the time there's a new grate or something new kind of meat a new cut oh we're doing a new kind of cut there's speculation on a new cut of meat we got frog shoulders notorious meat leaker do they have leakers in there charcoal leaker

25:12Dustin Furman:charcoal leaker his name's like Kingsford fan or something and he like No one really knows who he is. It seems like he might be an insider.

25:21Colin Moriarty:Weber is coming out with a new grill. It was leaked on 4chan.

25:24Dustin Furman:Someone leaked the grill on 4chan. Indeed. Grace, Leo, and Ali, I hope you're enjoying the show. Wait, hold on a second. Did that come through?

25:36Colin Moriarty:Yes. And I'll make sure of that. It did come through, but I'll amplify that.

25:42Dustin Furman:And Sony, I know you're listening as well. I hope you enjoyed that too. Crazy. Insane.

26:17Dustin Furman:It's that last part that's perhaps most important right now because PrizePix is a preferred partner of the National Basketball Association, and the Do It Live 2026 NBA final sweepstakes are currently underway. Picking live squares with at least one NBA player during the duration of the playoffs can net you a trip for two to the finals, which is pretty dope. But if you're not a basketball fan, fear not. In addition to hockey and baseball, golf, tennis, and esports are just a few other seasonal targets for you in PrizePix fantasy-style game, where you pick individual players from any of the sports and leagues in their purview and try to successfully tag each with a more or less designation.

26:49Dustin Furman:Think a pitcher throwing more than seven strikeouts, a point guard grabbing fewer than three steals, or a goalie letting in more than two goals. You get the idea. The mix and match nature of PrizePix is what really makes it stand apart. You can have daily teams full of players from all of the different leagues in sports. And since it's daily fantasy, you always have a chance to reset and try again. Simple to play and available in all 50 states, PrizePix has a number of ways to participate. From flex play, which allows you to still win even if you miss a pick, while power play allows you to double down, raise the ceiling, but also lower your floor.

27:18Dustin Furman:How you do it is up to you, but remember, it all revolves around stat projections, and what sports fan doesn't love that? Download the PrizePix app today and use the code SACRED to sign up, that's S-A-C-R-E-D, to get$50 in lineups after you play your first$5 lineup. That's code SACRED to get$50 in lineups after you play your first$5 lineup. PrizePix, a preferred partner of the NBA.

27:43Colin Moriarty:fucking stinks you did this to yourself

27:50Dustin Furman:good lord king of chickens wrote in and said hey guys i know this is going to be the top question on everyone's mind to ask so i'll just get out of the way please ask chris who is reverse jesus

28:02sony's listening to this the uh i mean to be fair they listen to it every week but i feel like

28:09Dustin Furman:they're going to be especially interested in this episode so yeah go ahead and tell them guys use the time time stamping way ahead yeah use the time stamps sony sony use the little sony

28:20Colin Moriarty:little Herman Herman use those timestamps Herman little boy

28:30Colin Moriarty:who is reverse Jesus we were doing an episode we were doing a Star Trek episode Kingston's in Hawaii celebrating his engagement uh so he's uh he's gone for I think a couple other days it was me and Derek holding down the fort and we were just we I don't know we were just riffing And we were just talking about like, what if, what if there was just a, instead of the Antichrist, what if there was just a reverse Jesus who was, who was hated by everybody except one guy, you know? And like, he was like, I don't know, taped to an X and he was like, taped to an X, put in a cave. And after the third day, he's still there.

29:10Colin Moriarty:I don't know. We were just like riffing. And it became like a really dumb, like 40 minute conversation about like the lore of reverse Jesus. He had a bunch of bread and fish, but he turned it into nothing. He turned everybody's wine into water and everybody's like, reverse Jesus. It was fun. I particularly like reverse Moses coming down with the zero suggestions. Mount Sinai.

29:38Dustin Furman:He comes and takes what they've written and then brings it back up. Right. Right, exactly.

29:45Colin Moriarty:It's way better. yeah i don't know this is the type of show it is it's just it's just nonsense i didn't expect to be asked about it on this show because don't listen to start tank garbage twice a week right you guys do it yeah yeah we do it twice uh we we usually do it in person but kingston's gone we'll be back uh i think early next week should be you should be back so

30:12Dustin Furman:jeff pronounced with oh pronounced g off because i maybe it is i don't know this time greetings to my little sexy sacred nuggets yeah shut up don't say that what are the children of wealthy families i like this question i'm very curious to see what you guys think of this this is a serious question what are the children of wealthy families supposed to do with their money if they live quietly they are criticized as being unproductive if they start a business and fail, they are accused of squandering their wealth. If they succeed, they are labeled Nepo babies who only won because daddy paid for the trophy.

30:42Dustin Furman:Personally, I prefer it when the wealthy use their resources to give back, much like the affluent patrons who funded artists after the Middle Ages sparking the Renaissance. Without the Medici family, much of the world's greatest art and science simply wouldn't exist. In today's world, if a Nepo baby like Megan Ellison wants to start a company like Annapurna to bring new art to the market, why is that a source of criticism? Many of the games and movies she helped greenlight were massive risks that traditional Hollywood studios or risk-averse game publishers would have passed on. Social media harbors a resentment that creates a catch 22 with no path these people choose that will free them from public cynicism.

31:12Dustin Furman:I'm sure they are crying into their money Woody Harrelson style, but I find this pervasive attitude exhausting. What say you, Colin? Well, I want to get on with all this. This is an interesting one. Yeah, I feel like you're right, actually, and I never really thought about it quite in those terms. You can't win. Maybe that's the cost of wealth, but it's not really fair either because you were born into it. You didn't ask to be born and you were maybe lucky to be born into it. Certainly you're lucky to be born into it. This goes into the question of, let me even ask you guys this. Chris, if you had like an enormous amount of money and then you had a child, would you give all the money?

31:50Dustin Furman:Like, would you take care of that child forever and give them a ton of money? Because even as an adult, because my answer to that question for me would be yes. i feel like that's like the whole game it should be some level of reasonable nepotism

32:02Colin Moriarty:you know like you do well but you write by your own people you know yeah i mean within reason you know like i think i would still want that i do think there is a scrappiness that is required right on some level even if it's not like even if even if from like a i don't know like a millionaire billionaire perspective it's not real in the sense because you kind of maybe know that maybe at a certain point you you get to like 21 years old and you kind of like um i think realistically i'm gonna be fine but there there does need to be like some kind of um i think you can have that from the very beginning you can't just be given everything when you're like five yeah right you're just gonna be the most insufferable person right be put in a trust

32:43Dustin Furman:yeah until you're an adult for sure that's the big thing to me though is that a lot of people the reason i ask is because you always hear these stories of like i don't know famous person x is like oh when he's 18 he's cut off and i'm like what that's crazy to me what a fucking dickhead are you crazy you're like you're i think jim carrey might have said that about his kids or something and i'm like what like you're not gonna like give your shit to your kids what is the purpose of hoarding all of it um that kind of bothers me actually like you're gonna send them out like they could just have an easier life and you're sending them out um and they'll be like well I had to do it and I'm like yeah but you did it it would be like my family coming from Italy you know or your family coming from Puerto Rico and then they're like alright when they die they're like everyone back right you gotta come back again go back to Sicily get on the boat go through Ellis Island like I did it live in a fucking tenement house it's like no like you did that so that I didn't have to do it doesn't make any sense you know that's why I wanted to ask

33:46Colin Moriarty:yeah I feel like The level of what you give to your kids is probably when you're in that position of extreme wealth is probably determined on how responsible you think they'll be with it. Like maybe let's say in the case where someone's like, I'm cutting them off at 18. Maybe all they've done is party and be a lazy asshole for the last seven years. And it's like, if I give you access to all this wealth, what's going to, you know, what's going to happen to it. Right. so but a lot of times with these wealthy you know people that have kids not always there's certainly examples of people that went off the kids that ran went off the rails but a lot of times they are also successful like go to harvard type people so it really just depends on the upper yeah of what they can handle yeah some of them might need that awakening that rude awakening of what life is like without money in order to gain responsibility yeah sure yeah i that's that's the thing it's like i don't know i think i think there's a fundamental like i don't trust people who haven't worked service or retail or like they've not had they've not had that experience because you can tell like i've met people who have who don't have that experience and it's like you can it's like i don't even know there's like something that you can like register immediately it's like oh my god you don't know how to treat people you don't understand how people treat strangers it's it's kind of it's it's fascinating and i do think like i mean i was lucky i guess in some way because i only worked retail for a little while before i managed to like somehow make a lot of money on my own but but i worked retail i've seen firsthand like just like the the way that people treat people and i think you need that um i think you need to experience that yourself everyone needs to experience someone snapping at you because they want something and then yeah a bad tip for no reason yeah and then you're wrong yeah like no matter what because like the customer's always right or whatever it's like you nonsense but i don't know as far as like the the question of like you know the ellison or whatever like the nebo baby stuff like i you can't free yourself from public cynicism in any way and the way that i think about it is like think about the people who aren't free from public cynicism who don't have a ton of money to fall back on and like you know don't have like that safe now so like i think it's fine like you can put a lot of money behind something and i think it's cool that like uh some rich people will patron the arts like that i think it's great but like i mean just i don't know deal with the cynicism like what do you mean we're all dealing with the cynicism who gives a shit yeah i it's

36:23Dustin Furman:funny like i agree with you that i never worked retail um i did work service and like at a deli you and yeah people were fucking work with people

36:34Colin Moriarty:you know right yeah well what I was gonna say

36:36Dustin Furman:was like imagine doing that on Long Island dealing with like me you know cynical loud annoyed people friendly and boisterous but you get guys like I bring a bagel boss I brought a bagel boss on the conversation with Alyssa and she knew what I was talking about because that's such a Long Island iconic Long Island thing do you guys you guys know Bagel Boss yeah

36:59Colin Moriarty:I think wait I think so is he that um that like short guy from yeah he's like the short guy that like freaks out like free

37:04Dustin Furman:and then he freaked out in the deli and then people found a youtube channel of like him freaking out at like at the 7-eleven at like dude it's so like he is date one digging i that all happened when i was in philadelphia at dagans recording knockback and daggan and i were like fucking over the moon about like how funny we thought that like that shit was i was like oh my god what because we saw it i'm like that's like five seconds and i'm like that's gotta be long island did he before anyone knew what it was i think he might have died like did bagel boss die do you think it says bagel boss i assume so no but no i hope so bagel boss guy chris morgan is still alive though he has largely faded from the public eye after facing severe health setbacks

37:46Colin Moriarty:oh i think i saw i think i saw something like he had a stroke yeah he had a stroke or something oh okay all right that's what the new ai gemini google.com tells me so god help us but i don't know man but yeah like i like the question though like the uh because that is like an interesting kind of the whole where does money come from the nepo baby thing i i get though like i don't blame somebody for being a nepo baby it's like yeah take every advantage you can but also there is something about it like there's a new movie out obsession made by um some youtube people and it's apparently very very good and i was really looking forward to see it and then i saw a video of him like doing uh he's like a 26 year old youtuber and i or like tiktoker i guess specifically more more specifically and he was doing an interview uh where he was just talking to his dad and his dad was a screenwriter and i remember being like oh well i'm significantly less impressed but i'm forward to seeing it anyway but it is kind of one of those things it does kind of dock a few points off for me it's like oh it's not that impressive though like no shit the um it's funny

38:52Dustin Furman:too with just talking about experience and it like i treat i try to treat everyone with respect regardless but my real learning everyone has these jobs to teach them i you know you work a really hard job as a waiter or you work whatever the job for me was just being a groundskeeper at Northeastern being with like real blue collar dudes for five years while I was there. And that's sucked. I mean, it was a cool job. I made actually pretty good money considering the time I was making like$10 an hour in 2002, you know, which is for an 18 year old, pretty great. But, you know, I've talked I've talked about in the past, like I would walk around and pick up garbage.

39:34Dustin Furman:I'd change like garbage. pit like i would get in a fucking stinky golf cart and go around and change like every garbage can on north the northeastern throw these things in the dumpsters and do all that kind of stuff and be called at four in the morning to like shovel snow and you get time and a half which was kind of cool but um that kind of like you just learn the blue collar way about how did these guys the full-time guys we had an apartment actually where we would all meet for lunch and we kind of like hang out when it rained on campus and this guy's bodies are breaking down you know they're working all the time because they're hourly and you know family drama and it's just i don't know it just puts in a lot of your a lot of perspective how how lucky i've always been actually so yeah that's not lost on me that's never never ever ever been lost on me my dad was a firefighter i don't have to i could do that but i'd be a fucking awful firefighter but uh i don't have to risk my life like that and that's actually goes back into what we were saying is like you people do things to make things better for the next generation and so on and so forth and that's why i'm trying to give a good life to rush and trouble of course all right let's see shard of odium wrote in said colin you're often referred to as cobra commander if that's the case who would that make chris and dustin in cobra i'd like you guys to tell me out there because there are a lot of good options um there are cool options i don't know if do you want cool options like would dustin be storm shadow or would like they be dreadknocks like is Chris torch and Dustin buzzer I don't know I don't know I don't know are you guys just vipers like just kind of anonymous

41:12Colin Moriarty:transformer they had crossover

41:13Dustin Furman:right yeah they do we're going to talk about Hasbro and transformers a little later actually I want to be

41:18Colin Moriarty:a sound wave sound wave I always thought sound wave was cool I like how he had the tapes yeah he did yeah that toy was cool

41:25Dustin Furman:yeah right Dagon was a big Cobra sound wave scobra sound wave yeah they might make it they do make those things kind of things sometimes where there would probably be a Cobra sound wave I always like the name I was never really a Transformers guy Dagon's a big Transformers guy um like what do they call G1 or like the metal Transformers oh um that was his shit he I always liked the name Starscream I always thought that was the fucking dopest name I'm like what a great name there's a good name yeah um so I don't know I want you guys out there to tell me because I think there are a lot of options and we got to really verify do we want a cool option for them or do we want to embarrass them you know and make them into the shitty cobra characters so you guys tell me yeah i don't know a single thing about gi joe at all yeah yeah i i know i i uh i was thinking too like gi joe you guys could be gi joe as a good guys as well and i would actually maybe be even a little easier yeah but for me i don't want to be i everyone you know well not everyone cog started calling me Cobra Commander, which is where that comes from.

42:26Dustin Furman:Cobra Commander's great. I've never been a huge fan of Cobra Commander. He's not my guy. I like a bunch of the more rank and file dudes I think are more interesting. Metalhead, as I always say, that's my guy. And that's the dude that I would dress up as. I said before, if I went to Joe Fest, which is every year in Georgia, and I dressed up as I would pay someone in one of these very professional cosplay designers to make me a Metalhead costume be fucking sick because he has he has like a little beard and goatee so i'm gonna shave this stuff off and then he wears missiles all over his body that's like his whole thing and he has a safe and he puts like a goggle in front of his face and he says bang that's what he says and then and then that is this is such a crazy what an insane design oh you look them up yeah metalhead he's

43:19Colin Moriarty:got like a some of the action figures make up look like fucking billy maize and yeah he does easy suit yeah yeah he i loved that character as a kid just because you know i got the toy

43:31Dustin Furman:and the new one i don't know if you if you search for it and saw the new one like the new one is so

43:34Colin Moriarty:cool i actually know new yeah i have him right here he doesn't have his missiles in but like

43:42Dustin Furman:there he is that's metalhead oh yeah look at him wow that's crazy it's it's cool like that all the

43:46Colin Moriarty:missiles like on his legs yeah and like on he's got like the shoulder mounted missiles it's so

43:50Dustin Furman:you can see a boy a little boy loving that toy you know oh 100 yeah so and he's a doofus as well in the in the cart in the cartoon and in the comics so it's also fun you guys tell me shard of odium thank you for writing and finally luke bernard wrote in and said hey cdc i'm writing in response to an inquiry from tommy bacon last week i too suffered through living with a woman obsessed with letting in natural light. I love her dearly, but my God, nothing poisons a gaming session like sunlight. I totally agree. However, I've been able to strike a compromise with her. Anytime I'm home and ready to game, I can shut the blackout curtains, but she is then allowed to poison our air with the stench of the only thing women love more than natural light, burning candles.

44:29Dustin Furman:I suffered through each gaming session not knowing what smell is real and what is pumpkin spice fall morning, but hey, at least I can see the screen. Tommy, if you're listening, perhaps it's time you struck a bargain of your own. Yeah, it's all about bargaining. What can you guys do for each other? I really like this letter, Luke. You're setting the right cadence. You're setting the right example for young Grace and Leo. We're listening to the show by no choice of their own. All right, it's time for us to finally talk about things. Let's get into it. The great hack. It wasn't really a hack, but here's what happened.

45:07Dustin Furman:For people that are unaware, we'll set the stage and then we'll talk about everything surrounding it. Monday afternoon Eastern Dustin and I were streaming as we usually do on YouTube and we were streaming ironically Pragmata which is a game about hacking so I do wonder if there was a sense of a real sense of irony there I wonder if they were I would hope so because why would you want to squander a situation like that you know yeah by the way can you guys hear the noise coming outside my ass no okay good because like someone's using like a saw outside and it's really loud oh i hear it slightly but it's fine no i can hear it okay it's gone now it's gone now um so we were playing and we were going and then we were just doing like super chats or whatever and at that point i basically got booted out of my psn account uh my email got flooded what is that called email bombing email bomb so i got like flooded with all of this stuff in my email i supposed to distract from the eat the real emails from sony that i would be getting when this would be happening so i got a bunch of emails from things i've never signed up for like aliexpress and stuff like that easy enough to deal with um to relegate to junk or whatever and just block those email addresses but at that point simultaneously i got a text message saying that my two-factor authentication was shut off on PlayStation Network.

46:34Dustin Furman:And lo and behold, I lost my account on PSN. Now, to allay fears, I got it back three hours later, which is like by Sony and PlayStation standards, lightspeed. And it's because of my connections to Sony, no doubt. And I want to acknowledge that and we'll acknowledge that more. So my account was boosted from me. And a lot of people were wondering, well how did this happen and why and all the rest and the reality is is that it's a fairly complicated situation in a way though there are simple explanations as well um i don't even really know where to begin i have a whole list of things to talk about that i wrote down um where do i even begin i'm dustin where do we where do we even start

47:23Colin Moriarty:well to add a little flavor to the situation uh so colin left the stream because he was like i gotta figure this out so i had my garth moment uh where he's live on air by himself oh no i was fine i was totally fine so what was funny about that was i probably kept the stream going for another 30 minutes or so just finishing out the super chats and hanging out we were having a great time uh and i'd like to go back and watch that stream not only for when the moment when colin got hacked but right towards the end there's a moment where i look down at my phone because i'm like oh i'm gonna check to see if colin said anything and i can update you guys and i look down and i've received a message on my playstation account from long island viper that says you're next uh so at that moment i was like hmm all right guys we're gonna wrap up the stream now uh let's and i didn't say anything on the stream because like let's just i'm gonna wrap this up whatever uh and so i very quickly tried to i we at this point we had no idea what was going on so it's like do i change my change my password make sure my two factor is good or whatever um so despite that uh threat i've not been hacked i don't know if it's from lack of trying if they weren't able to get in through some of the means that we're going to detail here shortly on how this quote unquote hack works.

48:50Colin Moriarty:This it's more of a vulnerability in the system, I think is a better way to put it. So, but I think Colin would be interesting. I think what the audience would most want to know is like, walk us through what happened after you got off air, because I know you detailed that in the tweet, like who were you calling? Where did you have success? What, what did all that look like?

49:12Dustin Furman:And yeah, so I was at my desk, I got off the stream and I'm like, all right, this is a problem. This is a problem. I'll get into a little bit. And I, this is so complex to talk about in a way because there are things I can't talk about. not because anyone really asked me not to talk about it because, but because I think it is probably wisest to protect certain people involved in this and make it easier to solve the problems. So what I will say is that someone warned me that this was going to happen. And a lot of people, and I put that picture out actually from a Patreon DM that Dustin, you've seen this.

49:52Dustin Furman:I've been talking to this person for a long time now about this shit. I'm not going to say the nature of who this person is. Sony, in my conversations, we'll get on everything I've talked about with Sony, but Sony, anything that I'm not going to tell you here, I've told Sony. The reason is, is because we want to be helpful and we'll get into that. But I just want to protect certain people's, how they have access to this information and who they are and all the rest. I just think that, and some people have requested that. So I ask people to kind of understand that it has, it's, it's kind of not materially important to be honest, but it gives us a lot of insight into things.

50:30So number one is, is that

50:33Dustin Furman:like, I was like, all right, I got to figure out like PlayStation support. Right. So I Google PlayStation support and it's impossible to find a number. Like, thank God for, we were talking, making fun of Google AI, but it's like, thank God you could just Google. Like what is the fucking phone number? Cause you go like, go to PlayStation cert and it's like, Oh, what do you have a problem with? And then you click all these things. And it's like anything to not call a number, anything to just typical customer service, like anything to not call a number, anything to not talk to someone to not get resolution.

50:57Dustin Furman:And then the tech seconds and minutes are kind of ticking away where I'm like, we got to get on this because, you know, the ultimate goal here is to sell the account as we'll get into. And it's bizarre that that's even possible to be perfectly honest with you. And I don't mean like in the moment, but like that, that's just allowed to happen. And then it's just like, yeah, the account sold and we can't do anything about it. It's like, what are you talking about? And that's going to be, and that's going to be a lot of this conversation too is like what do you mean you don't know what to do what do you mean you can't do anything about it what do you mean this is final like all that that's really where we're getting to so i eventually find a number and call them it's an overseas uh call center that i get in touch with not surprisingly that's just typical american late capitalism we don't want to pay anyone in our country to do anything so we have to call some indonesian call center paying it paying its people five dollars a day it's wonderful and they are of course and they of course are really passionate about their job.

51:51Dustin Furman:They definitely care. Um, and they're really invested heavily in the, in the client, um, experience. So I call this place up and to be fair, the guy I talked to is perfectly nice. And I say that in the tweet, he's perfectly nice. I know he's a low level dude. He can't do anything, you know? Um, but I tell them what's happening and we go on and on. They ask for like some verifying information. This is important. Um, by the way, they're like, they asked for like serial numbers of consoles um you know other other identity like basic identifying information um and they're basically like all right they gave me a a uh at the end of the 15-minute conversation whatever they're like there's nothing we can really do for you um and we're gonna put you in some sort of queue we'll call you back or he's i think he believed i I believe he said, well, email or call back within a week.

52:47Dustin Furman:Okay. So that is kind of like set, right? So that's like one angle of it. So I try to go like through the normal course of action. I try to explain to them, by the way, and the guy goes away for about five or seven minutes when I do this to like go talk to his manager, presumably, maybe he just put me on hold and pretended, but I'm like, I'm like, I tried to reason with them and I think he understood he was nice. And I was like, I didn't get phished. Because the one thing he said to me, which was interesting, I'm like, does this happen a lot? And he's like, actually, it kind of does with like, people on Fortnite or 2k getting like scanning QR codes and doing things and then they get their boosted.

53:25Dustin Furman:And I think he thought that was my similar situation. And I'm like, I'm not trying to be a dickhead. I know this is not your fault. I'm trying to tell you that like, I'm a member of the media. I'm like a prominent PlayStation content creator and was, and was, and I'm not asking for a special treatment because of that. What I'm trying to say is I'm explaining to you, this is a different vector than what you're, you don't know what I think you think is happening. Like, I think you think when I tell you that I didn't click a bad link or I didn't get fish, I think you think I'm lying to you, you know, and I'm just telling you, and that's an important thing to say at the top is I always play up.

53:57Dustin Furman:Like, I don't like technology. I don't know anything about technology and I don't really know very much about technology, but I'm not stupid. I've been on the internet for 33 years. I've been on computers since the early 90s. There are certain things I know. And one of the things, you know, especially in this century, don't click on links from weird places. Don't put your password into fields. You don't understand look for the little padlock, right? Examine Gmail is really good about this. Like, is this an authentic email? Look at where the emails come from. I always look at that shit. I don't think that in that in that respect I've ever gotten got.

54:30Dustin Furman:And there's nothing wrong with getting got that way. I got got in a different way as well, as we'll talk about. But I wanted to be clear. I was trying to be clear to them, like there are ways where it would be more your fault. And even then you should be treated with care and respect as a customer. But I was trying to explain that to them. I'm like, I really think you need to do more because like this is a product like this. So they went away and he came back and he's like, we really he's like, we literally do not have the permission in in the system from leaks sony apparently uses this system internal system called parsec um which they've made themselves that's like a conduit to psn um and he was saying that he went to talk to his manager and he's like we like literally don't have the power to do anything because these things have all been changed too many times in recent like you know like the emails have been changed the 2fa has been shut off like all these things So it's like we actually are locked out.

55:27Dustin Furman:And I believe them. So he's like, you have to enter a queue. They have to do like an investigation. We'll get back in touch with you via phone or email in within a week. So at that point, I'm like freaking out. I'm like, all right, like the jig is going to be up by a week. It's going to be over. Either they're going to fuck around my account. They'll get a band or whatever, which we'll talk about that, too. Or they'll sell it or whatever. So at that point, I am like, all right, I got to use my connections. like there's there's just no shame in it at this point so i do two things i email a high-ranking pr person that i've always been very friendly with who's always been very helpful to me um who's been at sony for since the 90s i want to say and uh so i got conversation going with her and uh i won't say her name here she doesn't like being you know being out front because remember she was we actually talked about her in a video dustin and she was like can you please oh yeah Yeah, because because because then people are like, they go to find these people, I think, and, you know, like, see if they come to target.

56:29Dustin Furman:Right. But I want to I thank her personally or whatever. I even told her on the phone. I'm like, I'm going to send you like an arrangement or something like you've been so incredibly helpful. What do people send like baskets of like fruit and like, you know, nuts and jams and shit, you know, like something nice for her because she was really, really helpful. So I got I emailed her and with an email urgent. Like my account got hacked. I also call Greg Miller. My mind goes to like, all right, who do I know and what can I do? I thought about all my connections to the first party. Now that's important in a minute.

57:06Dustin Furman:But I was like, all right, I can get in touch with this person who I know can help me at Sony and get things moving. High ranking person knows everyone. Who knows everyone though? Like in my experience, like who is the mayor of the games industry? And it's Greg. And it goes all the way back to the beginning of his time in journalism, but certainly when he did up at noon and he would always have people, he just knows everybody. And I knew he would know someone. So I call him, he's recording. So he texts me back and he's like, I can't talk right now. First of all, it must've been like, why the fuck is, you know, like what, what is this?

57:42Dustin Furman:So he's like, all right, what is the, uh, what's the email attached to the account or whatever? And he sends his shit over to like his connection. I have no idea who he talked to. so that's where things sit the person i reach out to at sony then calls me and because i she has my number but i i was like call me at this number and she was like is this really you which i really respect and appreciate you know because like i could have been compromised and i'm like yeah and i told her things that only we would know or whatever right and she's like okay plus we can recognize each other's voices so she like gets some information from me we talk on the phone for a little while, accelerates it towards internal PR that can get in touch with like the tech people in San Mateo, like engineering fraud and all that kind of shit.

58:30Dustin Furman:So that's like one tether that's going. That's the tether that ultimately solves my problem and it does it quickly, but that's going. I don't know who Greg reached out to and it might've worked, but I don't know where that tether ends up. Right. So that's kind of like not a dead end. Greg did what he could. I don't really know. I promised that I would say also about the first parties. So the funny thing about this is I'm getting text messages from people in the industry as if I die, like someone died, which I really respect and appreciate being like, I can't believe this happened to you. Oh my God, I'm so sorry.

58:59Dustin Furman:But people from multiple first party studios that I'm friendly with, and it's not an audio dog and it's not Neil. So I want to be clear about that. Although it would have been awesome. I'm not, I wasn't gonna bother Neil with this. I, that was kind of a break glass in case of emergency thing where I'm like, I guess I can get really in touch with like certain people. If I really want to be like, please, like it's very urgent. Neil, stop directing intergalactic. I need you to get me my PSN account back. But a couple of people at different studios reach out to me, including one person at a studio that Sony owns that's very high ranking.

59:28Dustin Furman:And he and he was like, I've forwarded this to SIE like we're going to get this solved. All right. So that's like where things sit. This is all within like an hour. Now, here's where things get dicey. I get a phone call. from the number from the sony number i answer it it's a dude on the other end seems like again like vaguely ethnic non-american right um and he starts he's like all right i'm following up on our call that you had earlier in the day now to me this didn't seem untoward because i'm like okay they said that was going to take a week someone got in people's ear up the chain. This is a problem for someone that of some level of prominence.

1:00:18Dustin Furman:It seems like it's not the usual course of how people get their accounts boosted. Maybe we can help them. So it wasn't unusual for me. I was like, oh, they're actually like, this is all working between all the first party people talking, Greg's contact, the PR person talking like upping it to fraud and to engineering and everything like things are moving. So I was OK, so I talked to this guy. He doesn't really he doesn't really give me any information. He tells me it's going to take he's like, all right, well, we're settling in. It's going to take about three weeks for us to solve this problem as you enter the queue.

1:00:49Dustin Furman:And this person asked me he didn't ask me any serious, like super serious questions, but he asked me certain questions. He was like, well, what is the original email account? On the he actually asked me a lot of I should be clear. He asked me a lot of similar questions that they had just asked me. So it's like, what is the the bar like what are the serial numbers on a couple of your consoles like what's the original email address where where was it made like that kind of thing and i gave that information to him but nothing like credit card information or anything like that like any anything truly identifiable and then the connection so i tweet about that the connection that dustin and i have been corresponding with or i've been corresponding with and dustin under dustin's purview for months reaches out to me and says you just talked to the hacker here.

1:01:34Dustin Furman:And I'm like, what? And I call, so I call this guy and he's like, dude, they spoofed the number. They, he's like, they're not even really interested in your information. They're trying to create trust. And then they'll, they'll call you back again later. But like, he's like, you just talked to the hacker. Like you didn't talk to Sony. And I'm like, but it's from the number. And like the guy knew the questions. He's like, yeah, these guys are professionals at this. So at that point, I get pretty freaked out because I'm like, wait a minute. He's like, and he was right. And I should have known this.

1:02:08Dustin Furman:He's like, didn't they give you a reference number? And I'm like, yes. He's like, anyone calls you ask for the reference number. So I was like, fuck. So I gave this guy some identifiable information, nothing too crazy. Like my email address. I think you could find that where I live, my birthday. These are, but the thing, the one thing that I gave this guy that I'm, and we'll talk about this a little bit later is the, the serial codes from two of my consoles. now I've probably connected my PSN literally to especially when I was in media and we had a bunch of consoles probably 50 plus consoles but those are on there so I was like fuck so this is all going about an hour later I get another phone call this one is from a California number I answer it it's an American guy American accent talking to him what's funny here is ultimately this guy ends up being a very helpful person, a managerial level person in, um, like, I guess like Matt, like PSN management or whatever.

1:03:07Dustin Furman:And it's funny because I'm like, all right, dude, he's like, I'm calling you, uh, to hell about with your situation. And I'm like, okay, I just, I think got tricked by someone who spoofed your number. So can you give me the, the, um, the reference number? And he was like, and at first he's like, yeah. And he's like typing. I'm like, ah, fuck, I'm like getting got again. He's like, all right, yeah, I got it here. And he says it. I'm like, okay, so we're good. This guy whose name I will not use as well is the second person. The other person I talked to at Sony who was extremely helpful, friendly, asked the right questions and seemed to know what was going on.

1:03:44Dustin Furman:Now, this person had what seemed to me to be a bespoke high level access to PSN. The person I was talking to now, he shut the account down. um so he basically was like i'm locking everyone out of the account for now so he just like did whatever you think it's like it's it's a joke in a lot of movies but i always think of meet the parents in the airport where like the the woman is just typing the entire time yeah and it's like what could you possibly be typing is that kind of thing he's probably typing notes doing his thing so extremely friendly extremely helpful locks the account down at this point i start getting phone calls from that sony 1-800 number again because the dude realizes they're getting bounced out of the account.

1:04:23Dustin Furman:And they are used to people getting bounced out of the account because they set dead man switches, which I'm going to get into in a minute, but they don't usually lose them this quickly. So I think at that point they were, they weren't really prepared to, or he or whatever, wasn't really prepared to lose the account. So they start calling me and leaving me voicemails, like being like, we're, we're calling to help or whatever. Then I got a text message saying i'll give you the account back um i never responded to this text message um so they lock the person out and they change some settings behind the scenes and i get my account back um it actually takes a couple hours so there was like a moment of like letting steam out of the pot i was trying to explain this and i think i said this to dustin actually is like i'd much rather the account be in no one's hands right like so like once so once i knew that they didn't have access to the account they couldn't fuck with it anymore my stress level went down significantly because i'm like all right i'd rather i'd rather just lose it forever than someone else having but at least like it at least it's like locked out and then the guys like because they change so much shit it might take like a few hours for everything to work through because we've put your new email address on there like i have a bunch of other email addresses so i just like all right use this email address and stuff and they were like okay and and the stuff wasn't going through like i wasn't getting the email so like get in touch with us in a couple hours let's like let's let it let it straighten out a little bit um because it's probably catching up ends up not working so i get back in touch with the guy again very friendly very helpful he's like all right i'll try it again he does it i get the email to this other address and boom i click the link and i have access to the account again and it's over um i then so i i brought up earlier dead man a dead man switch here's what these guys do when they steal psn accounts is they have access to they know different people and have access to different accounts and also they'll do this to random people they'll start sending inappropriate like racial epithets or like other things that get you banned often permanently on playstation network but they won't do anything with them what if they lose if they lose the account and aren't able to sell it they then start reporting those dms and playstation network shuts your shit down automatically if you use like you know an inappropriate word or whatever until someone can look at it and so right after i got my account back i was i went on psn and i was permanently banned right so and it said like your account is permanently like when you log in your account is permanently banned so i get i knew this was going to happen and i get back with the guy and he's like yeah all right i like i think he like i could sense from him that he understood what was happening that they've dealt with this before and he was i don't want to get into the things we were talking about on the phone i want to respect that but i will say that like when i said like i i suspect i'm going to get banned because they do this dead man switch side i think he sighed that's like something i remember about it because he's like he knew you know and so he's like all right he unbanned me quickly and he's like you're not gonna like he's like there this is all fixed um my account basically has like flags on it now and apparently like nothing what i was told is like nothing can happen to my account unless like a manager level person overrides like all the lock like a lot like so in other words like even if you call the call center like they even their managers shouldn't be able to mess with it at this point um and i was especially nervous about that because like my console i don't know if he was recording me or writing things down or just like playing a confidence game but like having given him the console serial numbers i'm like these could be identifiable um and sufficient people have gotten back into their PSN account with those numbers.

1:08:03Dustin Furman:So I needed to make sure that things were like locked down, especially because I was tricked by this spoofed number. So the guy was like very helpful and he was just like, yeah, like everything's fine now. He's like, if there are any other problems, reach out to me directly. Here's my information. So I have like these direct tethers already to Sony, people in the first party. Plus now I have this other guy, a new friend of mine that I made that I'm also going to send a jam arrangement to probably at some point in San Mateo, jam and honeys and crackers, whatever you send people. Maybe I should send him like a beautiful rose bouquet.

1:08:35Dustin Furman:You know, and he was like, so I have these connections. So suddenly I'm like, all right, I have these bespoke sort of solutions and everything's fine. But the problem is, is that this is not fine for almost anyone else. When when people say like most people don't have these connections or these advantages i would say like almost no one has them and i'm not saying it's because i'm special i'm saying like how many people could really like what are there like a few like a few hundred people in in games media in the youtube space whatever like in the entire world i could really like run things up the flag pole at sony and get things done if i was a normal person my account would have been lost to the wind i probably i would maybe be able to get it back eventually but it would have been totally compromised they would have either fucked with the trophies or whatever they would have done or stolen, you know, use your credit card or there's a million different things you can do.

1:09:28Dustin Furman:And again, not wanting to reveal, this is where I think you come back in Dustin, because one of the interesting facets of this, and this is one of the things I was explaining to Sony in my conversations with them is like, our audience started activating in a really interesting way. I don't know if we want to use individual names of people in the audience, right? I don't know if they've been public about this, but there are IT and OPSEC people of some repute, let's say, in our audience that started going after this stuff for us. We didn't ask them to. I haven't even personally communicated with these people.

1:10:08Dustin Furman:I know they've been communicating with Micah and Dustin and others, and they've discovered enormous amounts of information.

1:10:17Dustin Furman:I am not going to get into a lot of that stuff here, I assure you that everything that we and I have learned about this is, has been, and will continue to be forwarded to Sony. Um, because again, and this is what I was saying to them on the phone to my one connection there, um, that I've known for a long time where I'm like, I know we've had, we have a little, you know, we, I've always had a friendly rapport with her. It's, it's nothing like that, but I'm like, you know, sometimes I hate a game or sometimes we have a tough interview or sometimes we don't see eye to eye and, you know, we get a little cross or whatever over the years.

1:10:53Dustin Furman:It's like, I want you to know I want to be helpful and useful. I'm not coming after you guys. I don't want any problems with you guys. I'm not trying to be a dickhead. I think you guys have a massive problem on your hands. And that's what we're going to get into because of all the things we've learned. So here's the thing. Here's what happened. And I guess this is an important thing too. All a person needs to get into your PSN account is your email address, a mundane piece of information, like the day you bought a game and a susceptible or understanding customer service rep in one of these overseas centers.

1:11:35Dustin Furman:That's it. I want to reiterate that. Your email address, something like when you bought a game, a transaction or some other easily identifiable piece of information, and they'll give you access to someone's PSN account.

1:11:51Colin Moriarty:Can I bought in here, Colin? Please. This is not something that we know in theory. Colin was mentioning some of the people have been looking into us, some of our audience members and people that I know and trust. uh the i have information of a person that was able to quote unquote successfully hack or get into not only their own account with this information but also a family member's account that of course gave consent to do it uh so two successful attempts that they were able to get in force their way into account via this method. So it is not a theory. This is possible and we know it firsthand.

1:12:41Dustin Furman:Yeah. And I told Sony that and cause I know what you're talking about and who you're saying. And I'm like, yeah, so like there was like, it's happening now. Um, and here's the thing that I think people don't understand because everyone has an opinion on this, which I appreciate. And some of the, and I appreciate people's feedback, but it's like, set up two-factor authentication, get a passkey. I don't think you understand. Your password doesn't even matter. I want to reiterate that. Your password doesn't matter. Your two-factor authentication doesn't matter. Your passkey doesn't matter in these situations.

1:13:16Dustin Furman:They will override it on their end and they will give access to something. So this is the big thing I want to tell people out there. And this is the crazy thing. And this is what fucking sucks about modernity and the modern Internet as it stands. Email addresses were meant to be shared. They are meant to be shared. They are ways to correspond with each other. They aren't these bespoke things that should be hidden away and hashtagged as a way to get in. It's nonsense. And yet, if you know the email address attached to a PSN name, as Dustin just said, because someone in our community did it twice yesterday.

1:13:58Dustin Furman:You can wedge your way into almost anything. On the PSN, and that is a. Crazy, crazy level of insecurity. For individual PlayStation accounts. Ironically, keeping your email address in this fashion and like what's going on here, keeping your email address secret is the most important thing you can do. if without the email address, it is presumed that you really can't proceed. So I want to reiterate. Your password doesn't matter. In this situation, your two factor authentication does not matter and your passkey does not matter. Now, I can't speak to the passkey thing specifically because I didn't have a passkey.

1:14:46Dustin Furman:I had two factor authentication. But why would it be any different with that?

1:14:51Colin Moriarty:Right. A distinction to Colin is that this was

1:14:53Dustin Furman:not email two factor this was text right exactly right exactly that's exactly right now we're going to get into like what i think this and we can all get into like what we think the solutions are to this there has to be solutions to get people into their accounts no doubt it can't be this and this has to stop now one of the things i was going to say at the top and i want to say now is i have a deep level of contrition about this

1:15:22Dustin Furman:this is a problem that's been going on behind the scenes for years and you hear about it in dribs and drabs and it really goes back to the ps3 era in fact the more i was thinking about it the more i was like being itched in my head of like there was a time where people were suggesting like change your email addresses on psn because people were getting in during the ps3 era and then eventually i was like i think eventually people assumed that that problem was fixed. And so people went back to like the convenience of having things on an email address, like, like you would use your email address instead of keeping it secret, like a weird thing.

1:16:00Dustin Furman:I'm sorry. Like I, I, um, am overwhelmed by the amount of things people say and send to me on a weekly, but I mean, Dustin knows like people send me so much shit. Look into this. What is this? what's going and I can't keep up with nearly all of it and this is something that has been brought to my attention over the years and I we reported on it and we talked about it but I was generally overwhelmed and disinterested and I could have been helpful before it affected me I wasn't and I'm sorry and I am not responsible for the things that are happening obviously but perhaps I could have pushed harder for a resolution instead of it classically affecting me and then me getting involved.

1:16:54Dustin Furman:And I understand the irony of that. And you're right.

1:17:00Dustin Furman:I mean, you're right. I got kicked in the fucking head and then I suddenly was worried about the boot. And yeah, I mean, I just want to throw that out there that like people saying people tried to tell you you're right. People, but you have to, I hope you understand from my perspective, to be fair to myself, that people try to tell me a lot of things. So it's, you know what I mean? I'm not like, I'm not even trying to be funny in the sense that like people say a lot of things and a lot of it is nonsense and a lot of it is uninteresting and a lot but like I knew that this was a problem I knew this was happening to people I just didn't realize I guess I just didn't compute pardon the pun how comically simple it is now people are like all right so they had your email address what else did they use and it's like well what people think and this is where like mikey can tell you i got really upset about this because i saw i i was like first of all i've slept like 10 hours in the last like three days but also because i've been like obsessed with like trying to figure this out you know and like learning about it and writing about it and talking to people on the phone and emailing and corresponding um what it seems like they might have done let me back up sammy from push square our friend reached out to me and by the way thank you to the outlets that covered this push square kataku people were really harsh on kataku because they didn't use my name in the headline i'm like the headline is prominent playstation podcast or was like what like what column where it's like guys it's fine it's fine like we don't have to be mad at kataku for everything yeah a few others have written insider gamer wrote about it i appreciate that um but sammy had alerted me to like he's like, did you ever tweet out at any time a transaction number?

1:18:54Dustin Furman:And I'm like, probably like at some point in going back to Vita and PS3, people used to do all the time. Remember, take a screenshot of your email or take a screenshot of the, and just put it up. Cause it's like, who gives a shit? Like really, like who cares? Like really think about that. Right? Like, who cares about like when you bought a game or anything like that? So I was thinking like, yeah, I probably put up some thing. And then people had started sending, I guess, to Michael, like, no, it's these things. And a couple of times in arguments, I posted like credit card statements of PlayStation purchases to be like, no, I buy my own games.

1:19:34Dustin Furman:And Michael was telling me like, oh, these things exist. I'm like, oh, OK, I think I know what you're talking about. And I was kind of going on like, I'll get to that. Maybe we should delete those at some point, whatever. and I kind of just forgot about it and then she's like did you did you look at these yet and I'm like no let me let me see what let's send me a link like what are you talking about and I had this vision in my mind of like these statements with all this information on it and she showed me she's like this is what people think the neck the the vector was in and it was a list of dates and prices and I was like are I she I was like are you fuck I was like not at her but I was like are you because in my mind I'm like oh I must have left like some number some something on here and I'm like, what?

1:20:12Dustin Furman:This is it. This is the kind of shit you find on a Walmart receipt. You know, like like. And what I was saying to her was I was like, this is a this is literally akin. I was like, you know, when you go on like the 10 items or less a line and someone's like, oh, I'm buying a little something. And then they're like, OK, here's your receipt. And it's like, oh, no, you can keep it. Yeah, thank you. How many times have you seen that happen? Right. You go to a restaurant. everyone leaves their fucking receipts signed with all sorts of information on it and those are irrelevant because and everyone knows that you can you can go into target and find a target receipt it's going to have everything it's going to have the person's name the last four digits of the credit card number it might even have like your target id for like like all the stuff and i under these conditions i should be able to call target.com to get access to your target credit card.

1:21:04Dustin Furman:Yeah. Here's the last four digits of the number, email address. And I just bought these things recently. You go to a restaurant and you, and you could start just like, if you needed a pattern and you have, and you're like a waiter at a restaurant and people leave their receipts behind, you can just take a few of those and then call Visa one day and be like, yeah, the last four digits of the number is this. And actually you would, you could even theoretically have the whole number because you work there and then say like, yeah, and this, this, and this, and I want it into the card. Like that would be how easy it was.

1:21:33Dustin Furman:I think there's like, so I was actually infuriated when I saw that because I thought that I like actually had some identifiable information. And I'm like, dude, prices and dates of purchases. You could figure that out by looking at someone's trophies. Do you understand that? Like you don't even need the receipt. Like you can go and say like, oh, did this person play Resident Evil Requiem the day it came out? They must have bought it. and then you say like yeah i bought resident of requiem on this date and here's my email address and they give you access to the account so i feel like there's a lot of victim blaming going on with not only this but with other people that have done it as well where i'm like i completely refuse to believe that a series of a ledger that shows dates and prices it should be everyone's like

1:22:22Colin Moriarty:why would you ever publish that i'm like what it's it's insane that that would be considered

1:22:30Dustin Furman:private information like i'm like because i again chris like it's so funny because when mike was telling me i'm like i'm so fucking stupid i left some hash and like some hashtag in there like some number sequence like things but even then that shouldn't be useful because you should be able you could find that anytime but then i'm like i'm not even sure it could have been those things I could have bought a game on PSN when we were streaming. I've I've it could be anything. And if it's the things that the people are saying it is, I'm like, so you got into my account. With my email address and transactions from three years ago.

1:23:06Dustin Furman:Like, is anyone computing how insane this is? It's like why when you get credit card statements in the mail, like someone can boost your credit card statement, but they can't do anything with it. It'll have all of your information on it. but like there's not enough, but for this, it would be plenty. You understand what I'm saying? Yeah. Does that make sense?

1:23:28Dustin Furman:So what should I have done that? In hindsight, I wish I didn't. Do I know that that was the vector by it? It probably was, but I don't know because I probably have posted a bunch of things. It's impossible to know because who gives a shit? Like that, like that's the whole point. It's like, and that is insanity to me. that that that that's sufficient enough

1:23:53Dustin Furman:so email address plus trivial receipt information equals complete access so again now a lot of people are nervous about this and i was explaining to sony as well like people are people talking about moving to steam people are like taking their credit card information out. They don't trust you. And it's a big problem. And I don't know why you don't get that. It's a big problem and that everyone is vulnerable. Everyone is vulnerable to this. It's it's. In dealing like in learning what our IT and, you know, infosec guys have learned about the situation in just a couple of days, it made it pretty clear to me that people can find pretty much anything about you that they want, period.

1:24:39So you need to do so much better.

1:24:43Dustin Furman:Now, people were asking, like, what do I think the solution is if you lose access to your account? I'm like, well, there's multiple things. First of all, and I want to reiterate this, even the most blunderous person that lost their account by fumbling like a fucking clown and clicking on QR, you know, using QR codes and clicking on bad links and all this kind of stuff, they should have a right to get their account back. So too should the person that had their account stolen like I did really through no fault of my own. The first thing is just to say like you, even if it's sufficient to give certain information, why would that override two-factor authentication?

1:25:24Yeah, it's like, so in other words, I've changed.

1:25:28Dustin Furman:I've been on the phone with X, Y, or Z where it's like, oh, I need to change something. I'm like, all right, you're going to get a code to your phone. you know, like that kind of thing. So like, why would that circumvent that? That's my biggest question. So that's number one is like, okay, change things, but you don't even ask for the person's password. Now, and I'm not sure that that should be being talked about, and they might not, it might be hashed on their end anyway, but like, you're just skipping all of these steps. Like your password could literally be QWERTY. And it's like, well, it doesn't matter.

1:26:05Dustin Furman:Or you can have like the most Google can choose the most hashtag bullshit password you've ever seen in your life that only a quantum computer can break. It doesn't matter. It's nuts.

1:26:20Dustin Furman:So people are saying that and I'm like, you could also do something, God forbid. I mean, this would be hard, but maybe you do something hard is to say like, okay, we need like a notarized affidavit and like your email. We here's a mailing address. Send us this, this, this, and this. Please give us two to four weeks. Please note in the meantime, we will shut down this account so no one has access to it. Why can't you just do something like that? Why?

1:26:51Dustin Furman:It's just so strange. But Dustin did this like the money symbol. Yeah, the money. But I'm like, this is what's interesting. And this is the thing I tried to impress with Sony and they understand this. I'm like, they are going after your most prominent, highest spending oldest customers you want to talk about money

1:27:11Dustin Furman:so i wanted to put a few things in there about the targets of this yeah that's what i was gonna say there are three types of targets there are people like me and by the way there are so like prominent playstation or games industry people i've learned and i don't know if you've talked about this dustin behind the scenes too of people people would know that this has happened to where they've not said it publicly i did hear that and um so it's not just me that this has happened to by the way um and i'll tell you guys offline but because i don't want to see people's business but it's like that happened to that person and but they kind of kept it quiet and it took them apparently months to fix the problem which is crazy so there's they go after three types of people like people like me so like people that are prominent and easy targets they go after people that are trophy hunters both the number one and number two all-time trophy leaders have both had their accounts stolen and not given back i want to reiterate that the people with the number one and number two most trophies in the entire world both had their shit boosted and sony didn't do anything that's crazy the third type is the most interesting type and these are the people that I've been talking to people with rare, low character names.

1:28:29Dustin Furman:I know this sounds weird, but this is what people are after. Oh, what? Like John or something. So people that were, and this is what I was trying to explain the PSN. I'm like the people, so I'm like, think logically about this. I vaguely remember that you could log in. I don't know if this is true or not, but I vaguely remember that the Dustin, you might remember the summer before PS3 came out. I think you could squat on your PSN name. So, but regardless, let's say it was November 2006 when you really made your PSN name. I'm like, these are your people that were there so early and so enthusiastic that they got ABC.

1:29:03Right.

1:29:04Dustin Furman:They got Ocean or Rock or like just crazy names. I'm like, do you understand that you had to have been there like the first second to get these names? These are your people and you have let them, you have left them out to dry. So these people get their names, their accounts stolen for multiple reasons. They want the name and they want what would presumably be a digital games catalog going back to 2006. So like potentially tens of thousands of dollars of games. And no matter what group or silo you fall into, you kind of experience a similar problem, which is Sony doesn't seem to give a shit. And at some point they are like, we can't help you anymore.

1:29:51Dustin Furman:Because the deadlock. right exactly part of that right and i'm like this is unacceptable and that's why i want to say that i have two goals and this is what i said on on twitter there's the whole i there's a whole thing of like who did it i was using this reference with people i was talking to at sony where i'm like and and other people i was having meetings with other people too where i was like do you guys know about the whole kia thing about how kias are easy to boost do you guys know anything about this yeah yeah a little bit right exactly like there's something about kias and i think hyundai boys.

1:30:22Dustin Furman:That's it. Where like they're easy to steal. And I'm like, OK, or they were. They probably fixed it by now. But it's like, OK. You can go after the people stealing the cars and that's interesting and useful. And maybe you can do that. But what you really have to do is make sure the car can't get stolen anymore. And then you worry about everything else. I don't want to use like a political example. It's just the only example I can think of is like it's like immigration. If you want to if you have to stop the inflow before you deal with what's here. Otherwise, you just have this roving sieve of water, right?

1:30:55Dustin Furman:Coming and going.

1:31:00So it's, I'm not even really sure where to go.

1:31:05Dustin Furman:It's like,

1:31:09Dustin Furman:I just can't believe that people are left out to dry like this. And one of the major things, so back to what I was saying was, I'm not even worried about who did it. it's interesting um people are looking into that sony on their side is certainly investigating things our people in our community have found a lot of interesting things based on the information we've given them given them as well but i have two goals the first is i we have to convince sony to stop this from happening the so-called closing of the border right in my clumsy analogy make sure that nothing just stop this right like you have to stop this you can't allow this to go on like this and then the second thing is reunifying people with their stolen accounts because that's the thing that makes my heart so heavy because i felt it and my whole i was i was like laughing with sony on the phone where i'm like i know it sounds so lame, but like my whole life's kind of wrapped up in that account.

1:32:21Dustin Furman:It's not a joke to me. I've had this, I've had this PSN account since 2006. Actually this particular account since 2008 and when trophies came out and I started like earning trophies and I was saying this to people too is like, and we'll get into a little bit of this is like, I want to be honest about all things. And what I will say is that I didn't think once about my library. I know that that's like a rare thing. Like, and people be like, what are you talking about? Like, that's all that matters. And I'm like, I'm not going to play any of these games again. I don't really give a shit. I want to keep them.

1:32:53Dustin Furman:I should own them forever as a license and I don't want to lose them. It's nice to have them. I'll go back to some of them. But what I was thinking about was like my trophies and my saves.

1:33:04Dustin Furman:Like unique things about timestamps and experiences and where you are and all that. And it's and it sucks. And my heart is so heavy. I've talked extensively with people that have had their accounts stolen. How it happened, why and I'm keeping these people's names private and some of them have been incredibly helpful. And I want to put some of these people in touch with Sony as well. But my second goal after they shut it down is to say, like, can we get it's not can it's like, let's get these people their accounts back, because that's the thing that really bothers me. these so people maybe we should have explained this to is like well what is the goal of stealing these accounts and it's like well sometimes it's the fuck with you but often it's to sell and that's the fucking craziest part of all right i mean really think about that that's what mike and i were talking about this like just think about this an account is boosted from one of your customers sold on the black market to someone else who now logs into this account for years years.

1:34:04Dustin Furman:Sony doesn't even shut it down. They're just like, yeah, that's it's over now. That accounts that that guy owns that account now. I'm like, what are you fucking talking about? You have the controls in front of you. Shut it down. Shut the account down. Get at least kick the the the people out of like, what are you doing? What do you think you're doing? these are your customers how can you just throw them away like that because that's the thing that I was trying to impress on them too and I think that they do understand is like a person who has bought four games and has a thousand trophies might not give it too much of a shit they have they also haven't given you very much so like you let them loose fine you're gonna let the guy loose with 20 ,000 trophies and ten thousand dollars worth of games or 20 or 30 thousand dollars worth of games who do you think you are and then you'll point at something like the EULA and say like well it says here we can shut you down for any reason we want we can remove the licenses for any reason we want and this is that reason I guess and I'm like no absolutely not I don't care what it says the EULA says that you can't have class action suits against them and yet we just talked about a class action suit Sony lost.

1:35:20Dustin Furman:So certainly there's ways around that. It should never come anywhere close to that because this should be the thing that is the most secure. And the one thing I also said was, and I think we could all, we could all say that. I mean, I've said they're selling a handheld PlayStation six that is digital only next generation.

1:35:45Dustin Furman:We've had things like the PSP go. We've had things like PlayStation TV, but this is the first truly digital only device. You have to get it together and I am going to beat this drum. Like it is, there is no other way around it. So stop this from happening. That's our first goal. We have to convince Sony and I'm working hard. I'm on the phone. I am making myself available. I am using everything I can to say, like, you got to do something about this. And the second thing is you got to unify the people who lost their accounts with their accounts. The answer cannot be you lost your account through no fault of your own or you lost the account through phishing or whatever.

1:36:32Dustin Furman:Your account got stolen. Too bad. Start again. goodbye to your games goodbye to your trophies goodbye to your saves sorry we have to take the next call at our indonesian call center could you imagine could you imagine

1:36:53it's got to change this is a fucking shit show

1:37:00Colin Moriarty:so

1:37:03Dustin Furman:that's it i mean that's basically i think i'm looking at my notes i don't think this is in my opinion and maybe it's dramatic the most important thing they have to do right now because it is all about the security of the playstation network the playstation network has already looked at frankly as a joke it always has been by the way as we're going to talk about later, they're raising your prices again. Yeah. So they can maybe continue to pay people$5 a day in Indonesia that don't give a fuck. Now, the other thing, there are two other things that people wanted to know is like, who did it? And, and to me, I'm like, we, I won't go into that.

1:37:42Right.

1:37:43Dustin Furman:Like, again, I don't think it's that important actually, but these people boost, these people openly sell these accounts on places like Instagram and Telegram. They have open conversations about what they're doing, who they're targeting, how they're doing it. And the other question people are asking is because I said this and one of my things is like, are there people on the inside? And this is something that was asked in my conversations with Sony as well. Like, why do you think this? And I'm like, well, I don't know. And I would suspect that it wasn't an insider involved in this. But what I do know based on my research, if these things are real, and I think they are, is that there are definitely people on the inside that have leaked the interface, what it looks like, what you can see.

1:38:26Dustin Furman:There are screenshots and videos of it. There are also people that steal accounts that claim that they have inside connections to Sony, and that's how they get a lot of the shit.

1:38:37Dustin Furman:Bottom line, you can't have the keys to the castle in the hands of underpaid people in the third world. That can be easily bribed. If you're making, this is what we talk about on Twitter, right? The reason Twitter slop has gotten so bad internationally is because like when we look at Twitter and we're like, oh, I can post a bunch and make$300 a month. Who gives a shit? In India,$300 a month is an enormous amount of money. And so they'll post all day for that money in USD. So think about that. And it's like a guy in Indonesia and they're like, we'll give you$100. we'll give you$500 because they're selling these accounts for thousands of dollars.

1:39:20Dustin Furman:Yeah. There was even an ad that one of the guys put on Instagram openly saying like, I'm looking to hire an American speaking woman and I will pay a lot of money because they know they can spoof the numbers. They'll use that to call people, get the information. This is a sophisticated situation. You got to shut it down. It's not going to be that hard. And, and the big thing is, is like, well, how will people get access to their accounts? I want to reiterate you you have a right to get access to your account if you get locked out of it it's got to be substantially more difficult to get access to it at some point and as i'll just reiterate it's got it's got to have something to do with your your id and a notarized affidavit like that kind of i'm not kidding yeah like if and and it sucks that that happens and it sucks that you have to do that but just like do it just something where it's like let's see who you are and make sure it's someone in your home country.

1:40:09So if this is how, and they, as I understand also, they target mostly

1:40:12Dustin Furman:American accounts because our laws are so lax about data. So in Europe, you have the right to ask PlayStation, as I understand for any data they have on you. And we've talked about this before, right, Chris, about how every once in a while, the over, the over, what would you call it? The red tape capitalism of Europe occasionally comes up with a nice little diamond. One of them was the universal plug for everything, right? Like making Apple use USB, right? Like that was. That's from Europe suing Apple. And this is another one of those things where it's like, yeah, so they don't even go after European accounts because I think there's too many breadcrumbs.

1:40:57Dustin Furman:Instead, it seems like they go after old American accounts. And when they sell them, they brag about it. It'll say like American flag. Oh, six name American flag. Oh, seven name. It's fucking crazy. And and I'm just telling you, Sonya doesn't give a shit now. And it's one of the things where it's like, I want to be clear about this. The people I'm talking to are wonderful and have nothing to do with this. It is a story about where the buck stops, as we often talk about on our show. And at some point, someone's got to say we have to do something. we have to do, we have to do something.

1:41:39Dustin Furman:And it goes back into my contrition and my apologies of being like, I'm sorry it had to happen to someone of my quote unquote stature for me to get animated. You'd think when Sony lost their two trophy, most prolific trophy hunters and told them that they were shit out of luck.

1:41:58Dustin Furman:What do you, what do you fucking, like that guy, Hakum, that was like the major trophy hunter that lost his account has theoretically bought almost every game. I mean, think about that. Think about the amount of money that guy has spent. You should be groveling for that sort of fucking client. You release these numbers saying like, oh my God, we made$500 on every customer during the PS4 era. I'm like, I spent$500 a quarter.

1:42:31Colin Moriarty:so a question colin about this that i was thinking and obviously we're not gonna have any proof and i don't know what you want to say specifically but what i find so disturbing about this which there's many disturbing things maybe not the most but a disturbing thing is just that it's clear to me or it seems true i don't know i don't want to be speaking out of turn that Sony knows about this problem and has chosen not to do anything. I don't know if it's a situation where they're like, well, the moment we acknowledge the problem, it becomes a story and it makes us look bad. And so we're not, we're just going to continue to sweep these people under the rug.

1:43:18Colin Moriarty:And if that's the case, I don't know if that's the case. that fucking sucks and you're exactly right colin that this is something we were discussing on my stream last night it's like i wouldn't wish this on anybody and i particularly wouldn't wish it on one of my friends you but in this case you're kind of the best person for this to happen to to and to hopefully enact some kind of change because if again i'm using a lot of ifs if it's the case that Sony knew and was like, okay, well, we know this is a problem, but we don't want the bad PR from it. Let's just sweep it under the rug. Now they cannot ignore this.

1:43:59Colin Moriarty:Hopefully.

1:44:00Dustin Furman:There are others that have written about it. Like there's a French journalist who had this happened to him. Did you read that story that was going around? Like he, because it like it happened to him last year. I think the shitty thing is, is that it happened to him around

1:44:12Colin Moriarty:Christmas and so he had no recourse for like a long time and it's happened to other like you're

1:44:21Dustin Furman:right like I understand that I am ultimately powerless like Sony can just as has happened in the past just cut me off stop talking to me and move on but I am fairly I don't think that's going to happen and I'm fairly insistent that I'm not letting this go I don't know how much power I have to fix anything but I want I was making I was Micah didn't understand because she's never seen Schindler's list I'm like I'm gonna be like the Schindler I'm gonna have this little list of like of four character PSN names and I'm gonna go around and try to let you know like I want to I want to be useful and those who criticize me and say like you didn't care until it happened to you you're right and now the second best thing I can do to show my character since the first best thing to do which was to have been something try to do something about it before it happened to me was the set now that my best my best choice is to stick with it and and I'm going to the the pressure has to come from all of us though and respectfully none of this nonsense right but press the issue ask your ask the websites you you read can you write about this ask your podcast the podcast hosts or the youtubers the streamers like let's start getting this going let's make it if we can into something that can no longer be ignored things that can.

1:45:54Dustin Furman:And this is one of the things I had said is like, I understand that these are the kinds of this is the kinds of things like I don't want to have I don't want anything I to say to have ramifications on your business. And I don't think it ultimately would. But these are the kinds of things that like should Bloomberg write about it that could hurt your stock. You know, by the way, the PSN is radically insecure. It hits a little different when it comes from the Washington Post or the New York Times or whatever. And it's like, let's not let it get to that point. Let's just nip this in the bud. You know, you have to do this and you know, you have to do this, especially in preparation for PlayStation six.

1:46:28Dustin Furman:And if you think I won't be beating this fucking drum, if it's not fixed, leading in the PlayStation six, where they're going to be asking you by the millions and tens of millions to invest in a handheld that will have no disk drive.

1:46:43Dustin Furman:It's not happening. Like this is going to like, Like it's got to be done. And if it means that it's just way harder to get back into your account and there are different protocols. But that's the that's the thing that blows my mind is that like a person's account can be stolen from under them. Sony will eventually tell you that they can't help you anymore, even though they absolutely can. They just don't want to. Then that account will be sold to someone and someone with complete impunity will play with that account and nothing will happen. How can that fucking be?

1:47:19Dustin Furman:how can this be how could this be

1:47:26Dustin Furman:like you have you're in charge sony you're in charge now i want to say two other things and i wrote this on my notes because i should have said this to be fair at the top but i'll say at the bottom

1:47:40Dustin Furman:valves steam accounts get stolen nintendo accounts get stolen xbox accounts get stolen It happens, as I understand, way differently and way more seldom. And it's often easier to reverse those problems at those places, too. So I don't want to make it seem like only PSN accounts get hacked. Everyone has a problem in some way. But this is a unique problem in its ease and how it's done and then how impossible it is to get it undone. That's unique to Sony. The second thing that I want to say is there are and this is one of the things that I think I was over reliant on when we talked about it earlier is that obviously there are bad actors.

1:48:15Dustin Furman:There are people that lie about their accounts. There are people that do things that they should have gotten banned for. There are people that, you know what I mean? Like, I'm not trying to speak to those people. And I know that those people also use the rules and leverage of this libertarian utopia that they've made on PSN, apparently, where you can just do whatever the fuck you want. It's like, I know that those people exist. That's not what I'm talking about. And that's not most people. Most people are honest brokers that simply want to rely on what they're buying on the PSN and their access to all of that in time immemorial.

1:48:44Dustin Furman:And I've said in the past that I believe PSN will exist in decades from now. And I do believe that. The question is, is your account going to exist? And the hope is, is that, yeah, I hope so. So I want to, again, two steps. Stop this from happening. Let's let's fix this with your customers. That you've lost. Fix it. Fix it. You can fix it. I know you can fix it. I know that there is no such thing as a truly permanent ban. I know that there is no such thing as like, I was saying this to Mike. I'm like, what they're basically saying to people is akin to like, the computer tells me I just can't do anything else.

1:49:26Dustin Furman:I'm sorry. It's like, what the fuck do you mean? Like, it's all there. You just changed my email address. I'm pretty sure. And, and shut off my two factor authentication. I'm fairly sure you can unban this person. I'm pretty sure. I'm, I'm pretty certain.

1:49:45Colin Moriarty:So annoying. It's so, it's so, you know, it, imagine, imagine if there really was no way, if there, if there really was no way, what kind of system is that you've built a system where it's just like, Oh, well you're banned. And there's like literally nothing you can do that. That's insane. Yeah. It's like, Oh yeah, I'm sorry. You would never build a system. You would never build a system like that ever.

1:50:07Dustin Furman:It's, it's, if you believe the the the leaks of the parsec system that they use or whatever to to deal with psn account names the banning is literally a series of check boxes have you guys seen this before where it's like one box is like it's like um temporary ban with like a time under it the next box is like permanent ban the next box is like a green like clear or whatever it's like just click the box right just click the fucking box what are we doing and by the way i don't know this for sure but i believe that you can even do more like i believe that like you can take trophies away i believe that like if someone because that's one of the things too is like as i said one of the one of the things they do too to get if they don't like you to get your account banned is they'll buy a shit ton of like cheap games and then get a shit ton of platinum trophies this is annoying to people like me obviously but it also tells the system that you're cheating and it and it bans your account for that and i'm like so like oh so my account got banned my i got my account got stolen through no fault of my own they spoofed the trophies it convinced you to ban the trophy and they're like yeah that's it i'm sorry we can't help you anymore yeah i'm like but i'm the victim of the in that situation i'm like you're what do you mean like what are you talking about it's it's on it is an unthinkable situation to put your your user base in and i'm so it's a tale of two it's it's two tales right it's like really how people at the individuals at sony have always been great and they and they are very helpful and they've been incredibly kind to me they've asked all the right questions they've taken notes they've they've started looking at all like all that stuff's great but at the same time like certainly someone at sony has to be responsible and is like we're going to do something about this and I wonder when that's going to happen and we have to bring pressure to make it happen so that because no one understands more than me what just happened and how lucky I was because if I was a normal person that account would be gone gone and I might get it back in the future but it's going to be heavily compromised and all the rest so that's it i mean that's all i have to say do you guys have anything else you want to throw in there

1:52:30Colin Moriarty:here's a question um so obviously you mentioned like putting keeping the pressure on uh asking people to write about this youtubers to cover it stuff like that but should playstation users take any action with their account like for example i mean i'm in a different space because I was directly threatened by the hacker, but like I immediately removed all of my payment options from PlayStation. And what's interesting is that everyone on, not everyone, but other people on our staff have all done that. And I've even seen user or like our listeners be like, yeah, I went and removed all my payment options from the PlayStation network.

1:53:12Colin Moriarty:And it's like, it's hard because it's like everyone is at risk, but not everyone is a target. But at the same time, it's like, does sony have data it's like oh suddenly like people are removing their the the likelihood of them making a purchase is much less because they can't impulse purchase something right like should i go and buy playstation uh cards like gift cards to make my purchases until i know that i'm safe because like i'm technically not safe right now nothing's happened right but there is no guarantee that something could happen to me especially as we're bringing more light to it like i understand it's a possibility um at the very least though they're not going to get the ability to buy a bunch of shit on my account right like the i think people's worries i don't want to say what people should be worried about i don't think the credit card stuff

1:54:08Dustin Furman:is even that important because for two reasons, in my opinion, one is they can't see it. So like if you go into PSN and look at it, you can see the last four digits, which you can see on a fucking receipt. This is what I was saying earlier. Right. So yeah. And the second thing is, is that you can just charge that stuff back if like worse came to worse. Like there's no way like that a visa or a mask or that that now charging back gets your PSN account banned too. But apparently those can be undone. There's like a whole, even Sony has like a website about how to get that ban undone if you've had to charge back in the past.

1:54:41Dustin Furman:So yeah, that's something worth worrying about and thinking about. The bigger question is literally just losing access to everything you already have. And you were asking like, what can people do? It's as I said earlier, because this isn't really hacking, obviously your password and your 2FA matter in that regard, But that's not the vector, right? With what we're doing here, the reality is, is changing your email address into something that is not used anywhere else, like a literally one off email address only for your PSN is frankly, probably the best way to secure your account. From this, from the social engineering aspect, your password doesn't matter and your two factor authentication doesn't matter.

1:55:22So and people were like, oh, I enjoyed people reading people.

1:55:27Dustin Furman:They must have got access to your email. they must have like i'm thinking you're way overthinking this dude you're i'm just telling you you're way overthinking it first of all if you got access to my email i would assume you would have much more interest in the email than the psn account um so no nothing like it is what it is but it's it's got to be fixed and it is a it is an awful situation and I feel bad there was one it's funny too like there is one wrinkle that I well there are a few wrinkles we'll get into these later maybe I don't know but I wanted to thank everyone for like their kind words some people like oh I wish you lost your account forever like they wanted to see me suffer but most people were really kind and I thought it was funny that some people were messaging with the um with the hacker on PSN so I don't think oh so I there are a few things to say about this one is be careful like I appreciate you guys coming to bat for me but some people have said things in inappropriate things to this guy where I think they got in trouble like where if you go into the messages it says like removed by PlayStation support and all that kind of stuff I saw one guy calls him the F word for instance like the F slur and And the second thing is, is that there was one person who DMed with the.

1:56:56Dustin Furman:The hacker in quotes, who was like asking if he can get my account banned or whatever and all the rest. And then we figured out who that person was. He was a Patreon member. And then I emailed him and he emailed me back this snarky thing. And based on his I'm I don't know who's involved and who isn't. I really just don't know. But based on the nature of his conversation, like what he said to the guy and like and they're back and forth and then what he said to me in the email, I'm like, I'm not entirely positive you're not in on this.

1:57:30Dustin Furman:So, nonetheless, so instead of outing that person, I'm just going to be forwarding that information along. And we'll see what happens with it. I don't know for sure, but I'm like, huh, I wonder. Sadly, there are people amongst us that might have been involved in this or certainly were cheerleading it. And so that's interesting as well. I think that's it, though. I mean, we have a bunch of inquiries. I don't know how many of these we can really even need to get through. But is there anything else you want to say, Chris? I'm sorry. I've been talking forever. You have not spoken for.

1:57:57Colin Moriarty:No, I mean, it's I wasn't compromised. And I also, you know, I just didn't experience it. I feel like you guys were really dealing with the brunt of it, communicating and whatnot. So, like, I don't know if I have really anything to say other than, dude, like, this is I mean, you mentioned earlier about, like, some of the red tape in Europe that makes it difficult to go after those accounts. And it's just like, yeah, man, I mean, the red tape in Europe's not fun. But the flip side of it is that you get red tape as well. you have some red tape as an individual over there in, in ways that you really don't over here.

1:58:32Colin Moriarty:And there's like, I don't know. I, I, I lament the, just the sheer amount of leeway that is given to anybody or any corporate entity that just has enough money to just kind of be like, ah, we don't care about the customer or like whatever. It's not a big deal that like your biggest trophy hunters are gone. And like, that's, that to me is crazy. Like that's new information to me. I didn't know any, any of that. So like, to me that like some of the bigger, the top two accounts of the most trophies just lost it and they had no recourse despite the fact that they're obviously like some of the biggest customers and like can you imagine doing

1:59:07Dustin Furman:that can you imagine doing that to them like can you imagine a world chris and somewhere and where sony's like listen guys hakum the biggest trophy hunter in the world lost his account let's get someone on the phone with him and let's get this fixed that's literally all it takes like that's

1:59:19Colin Moriarty:literally all it takes yeah but there's no incentive to do that somehow because it's not like oh that well whatever it's not we our time is better spent hiring five dollar an hour help in indonesia you know what i mean it's like it's like i don't know man it's it just it's it's um it's disappointing and it's one of the many reasons why i just feel like everything's just objectively worse now people talk people talk about like nostalgia poisoning or whatever it's like i'm sure that's real but like it's just this is way worse this is way shittier than it used to be and um yeah i'm sorry that happened to you i'm a little disappointed that it got resolved so quickly because we could have had a hell of an episode today even oh my god like the timing of it i feel like could have been could have been better for content you know what i mean like if it happened on a wednesday yeah yeah you know you're right from that from that perspective i'm kind of like i'm glad you got it back obviously but like yeah it was the worst it was the worst few hours of my life that would have been that would have been such a beggar episode though you know what i mean yeah yeah oh my god we have some inquiries about that we should get into some of these i guess yeah the first question is perfect jordan campus wrote in and said hello

2:00:28Dustin Furman:my supple young lads this week is more of a comment than this week i have more of a comment than a question but can we take a moment of silence of what could have been the best series of content sacred symbols could have ever produced on its own i'm glad to hear colin had his psn account restored within a very reasonable time period but i'm also jolted as i imagine the content in my head i see the amazing turn of events that could have inspired legendary levels of lore, merch, spinoff series, and God knows what else. We could have had a fake funeral in Colin's backyard where he dressed, rushed up in a suit and buried Colin's PSN account.

2:00:54Dustin Furman:We could have had Colin join Defining Duke for a series of parody podcasts where he bends the need to Xbox or maybe a Colin becomes a PC gamer series. Frankly, I would have just loved to see a live stream of Colin freaking out and trying every protocol possible to restore his PSN. But above all, I want to implore everyone, but mainly Colin, that we are always here for you. I've realized that I've never even really been a PlayStation gamer. I tune into Sacred Symbols for my boy Colin and the great and amazing crew he has curated around him. Colin, I know you're speak for many when I say we're here for the journey time and time time after time we've seen you not only bounce back but soar back after what could have been perceived as a downfall or setback remember that we your viewers enjoy every aspect of the show the ups the downs and the boring in between this would have just been another roller coaster we would have enjoyed every second alongside you glad everything worked out but never forget you're more than your psn account and it's only one piece of what makes this whole thing what it is godspeed I think this was a startling reminder I'm just being honest with you guys like a reminder of like I am too wrapped up in this and in what way i felt like i was losing a piece of myself like when i was like when i was really thinking i'm like this might be it like it literally might be over now for me and as far as like not as a human i'm saying like professionally it's like what this was the major thing is like how could i do how could i continue to do the show when the company like the we're not we don't work for Sony, obviously, but it's like as a customer, it's like you're just going to throw me away.

2:02:19Dustin Furman:It's all right. That's it. Now they did the exact opposite. And I appreciate that. But it's like that's where my head was. I was like, well, what do I do? I mean, like, what do I do? I've been covering PlayStation. I've been with PlayStation since the mid 90s. I've been covering it for 20 years. What do I do? And is it really all wrapped up in this digital presence and your trophies and your games and all these things. And it's like, yeah. And I try to kind of be honest with that about that, knowing it comes off as a little corny to some people where I really have no shame about that. It's like, yeah, that is that's this is my hobby.

2:02:56Dustin Furman:This is my job. This is my life. This is my my my passion. This is what I've dedicated my whole life to. It's a horrifying situation to be in to see like, well, maybe that can just be taken away from you through no fault of your own, through social engineering and a corporation that if I was just a more normal person probably wouldn't have given a fuck and I have to acknowledge and understand and accept that and I appreciate like that people are pointing out and I know I know and um now to Jordan's point it's like I appreciate your sentiment I don't think you realize the state I was in so and I am so glad it was solved so quickly just to like that, that, that pit in my stomach kind of went away quickly, but like the stress of the situation, the interest in the situation.

2:03:49Dustin Furman:And this is the big thing. And what I was saying to Micah was we can't back away. It would be very easy for me to say, like, I got my account back moving on. Like my account, they, they put a flag on my account. Only managers can even mess with my account. Uh, I've talked directly to like high ranking people at Sony. They know what's going on. We're good, but that's not the play, right? It can't be the play. We have to use this and I have to be contrite enough to know that I could have done something before this. So this is me being grateful for my reality and trying to make it up. And I really do.

2:04:36Dustin Furman:I like, I know in talking to people, I know how much, like it sounds sad. Like people are like, dude, I, I, I've been, I was depressed for a month when my, like, you know, some guy that had his account stolen a four character account from the beginning of PSN. He was like, dude, I'm, I'm married. I have kids. I was like in a complete funk. Like I was totally depressed. Like I, I got something stolen from me. Someone else is using my name. Someone else is using my account sony won't help me they don't care what i have to say they won't get like oh it's crazy and i so what i really want to do is i want i want to help them yeah and i believe we can we just got to keep the pressure up but ultimately it's out of my hands but i'm not gonna i'm going

2:05:22Colin Moriarty:to do what i can it's good i think uh i i do think it's like it's in it's important to acknowledge that like um and you've acknowledged this by the way and i and i think this is true not just for you i think this is true for most people where i think these types of things it's a good time to look it's a good time to examine like there's a lot of things that happen that uh people don't care about until it happens to them i think this is broad this is true of like literally everybody but it's just a good moment of just kind of like okay you're great you gotta it's a good grounding moment where it's just like maybe things are kind of like important even if they don't feel that way to us because they're not like directly impactful or whatever and that's just like something that i think we all should keep in mind because i i've by the way i'm not singling you out this is happens to me all the time we're just like ah whatever and then i'm like and then i'm in the center of something it's like oh maybe i shouldn't be yeah it's a it's a

2:06:20Dustin Furman:Stanch reminder, dude. And. I don't want to make it seem like I'm jumping on a grenade where it's like, dude, it's not like this was the only thing people were sending me again, as I said earlier, like I have to show a lot of discretion about the things that people say to me. I just made a bad decision. And.

2:06:41Dustin Furman:That's it. Now, it might not have mattered. Like the thing is, it's like when the guy warned me that this was going to happen to me and my response was like, there's if this is what's going to happen. And the crazy thing is, is that there's nothing I can do. I have a complicated password. I have to F.A. If they're going to just do it. They're going to do it. Yeah. And by the way, like the whole serial number thing even got me crazy where I'm like, think about that. Like. You buy a console on Facebook. It has the old account on that, like the person sold it to you, you have the serial number of the day and then you can call Sony and be like, oh.

2:07:17Dustin Furman:Um. Here's the I'm trying to get into this account. Here's the email login that's on the machine already. Oh, and here's the here's the serial number of the machine. That's it. That seems like it would be. I bet you that I don't know that the stealing like that happens every day, but those kinds of transactions happen every day. Constantly, people selling consoles, buying consoles. Now, often people format them, but many times they don't. They don't even know how to do it. They don't even know to do it. can you imagine like you can go be staying at someone's house watching someone's house go into their playstation and steal their account that's why like when people are making excuses like you shouldn't have done this you shouldn't have done i'm like think about what you're saying really think about it think about the purposes of passwords and actual things that only you really could know as opposed to the things that could be perceived by others and things that could be perceived by others even not easily probably shouldn't be the differentiator between access to things and not act and not having access to things that's just like that's the thing that's really startling to me and there's nothing about the information again

2:08:23Colin Moriarty:that should be there's no reasonable expectation that that type of thing is so private as to be a status like a an inactable vector into private into truly private information people were saying it's like oh you shouldn't have like had it shared an email address it's like with that like you said earlier it's like they're supposed to be shared it's like you shouldn't have walked your dog on the morning of the chernobyl you don't know that that's you don't know that some fucking moron is flipping switches in a soviet bunker you know like it's completely unreasonable that walking your dog where you live would it would expose you to like five thousand you know new newtons of radiation like it's like it's yeah i don't know it just it bothers the hell out of me that that's like that that was some of the responses it's like oh you shouldn't have

2:09:15Dustin Furman:shared your email it's like yeah or like you shouldn't share shared like the statement and i'm like that's why i was like maybe they're right and then i went but that's what i was like so infuriate when i looked at it i'm like this is it well they're right literally yeah they're right

2:09:27Colin Moriarty:literally in the sense that in this stupid world that was somehow enough but like there's no sane

2:09:32Dustin Furman:world where that should be enough right exactly because that goes back to what i was saying is like that dude like you could get your shit hijacked so easily like there are p there are mail carriers carrying your credit card statement to your mailbox right now right there's way more information on that than anything i've ever shown anyone in my life and and people just throw them away they don't even open them you know like like you it's so like it's so unthinkable and I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. So anyway, Magnanimous Colin wrote in and he is certainly dead and said, I am sure you are going to be getting a lot of ton of write ins.

2:10:10Dustin Furman:I'm sorry about what happened on Monday. Unfortunately, here's another one. Seeing you getting hacked in real time and following your tweets later on that day really got me concerned for myself. I made my entire account private among many other various other changes to protect my account. You had a major advantage when it came to the situation, and I am glad you recognize that for the masses, though, we would basically be robbed of our entire library because PlayStation help is useless and someone out there is the biggest cunt on planet earth all this really got to me that day and maybe dustin is right perhaps our library is not as safe as we would like to believe maybe going physical is the only way to truly protect yourself has this changed your stance on anything how do you think we can make sony listen love the show keep being awesome the funny and ironic thing and so for most people what you're saying is i would say like yes kind of not everything is available physically but like if what you cared about the most was that access to all the games you've ever purchased, which is completely reasonable and normal to want that, then like, yeah, that is a protective thing.

2:11:02Dustin Furman:But imagine that like you would still lose your account. Under that circumstance, like all the saves for all those games are gone, all your trophies for all those games are gone, like all your friends list, all of your experience on that thing, that's still gone.

2:11:18Dustin Furman:I understand that I am in a unique position. I am one in probably 100 people where I'm like, that is not my biggest concern when I lost my account. It just wasn't. yeah I know that most people feel differently I and I get it I I think you're not all of you are fucking psychopaths I totally understand that he did touch on something that I thought was interesting too which is it's like these people are going after individuals and robbing them of their joy robbing them of their fun this is their hobby this is like potentially for decades It's what they've done. And. I don't think it's cool that people go after companies and stuff like that, either and hack them or whatever, but it's kind of different.

2:12:03Dustin Furman:Right, like you're literally like. Hurting people for no reason. And, you know, you can do it and it's like a science to them. And I find that level of predation. Sickening. It reminds me a little bit of. you know I love Kit Boga who's a great I don't watch his streams but he's a I watch his YouTube videos but he's like a streamer where he cons like the con artist or whatever and he's so funny and he's so good at it oh

2:12:34Colin Moriarty:yeah I think I've seen these things and

2:12:37Dustin Furman:it's like they there are people there are people out there with no conscience like sociopathic like absolutely no conscience and those are the kinds of people you're dealing with when this happens like they don't give a fuck they don't they have no they don't have a soft spot in their entire body they don't care about your joy they don't care about your money they don't care about your the continuity in your life they don't care about what this does to you or how it affects you they don't give a fuck and and and he deals with much more serious things than this but this is serious to the people in whom it affects as well and i was just thinking about that it's like yeah it's too it's true like scum of the earth dbs like no doubt you know you know what's really sick about

2:13:18Colin Moriarty:it to me is that like the the detachment of it because it's because it's uh internet oriented it's like just through emails and through like you know xyz like completely detached you know it's one thing it's if you're stealing from somebody's house you know what i mean you gotta you gotta break it you're you're breaking in you're walking past like you know family photos you're like you know but they're just like whatever done thousands of dollars yeah all

2:13:46Dustin Furman:in the name of not working a real job you know which is yeah yeah and it's that's what's so i've i've said this but i know i've said this before on the show is i'm so fascinated by these kinds of people because they clearly are capable of doing something else you can't you can't be incapable and do shit like this that's the shit that bothers me yeah it takes a lot of preparation it's barnacle behavior but it's like you don't have to be a barnacle barnacle you know like you're a much more sophisticated sea creature than that you choose to be that that's the most painful part you can't really be stupid and do shit like this that's kind of the you have to kind of accept that that people know what they're doing and that really i just don't have that in my heart dustin said it earlier like i wouldn't i like literally wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy i know that sounds crazy but like knowing what it meant to me and knowing how it hurt me and affected me it's like i wouldn't wish that on anyone man i really wouldn't yeah i think in

2:14:50Colin Moriarty:in going back to what some of the questions said about your digital versus physical library i think just part of the problem is that the security and this may not just be the case for sony but we talked about other companies as well and it's not even necessarily just video games is that the security for playstation network clearly has not evolved to be at par to what people are spending on it you know right where like okay maybe early on where people were just buying like playstation minis and some ps1 classics you know we're not talking we're still talking about a sizable amount of money but like now in this day and age where people like the person who wrote in has their entire library.

2:15:37Colin Moriarty:We're talking about thousands and thousands of dollars that is not secure. And I totally understand, Colin, that you don't, like, that's not, wasn't your primary concern. I think it is worth pointing out, though, that, like, you can afford to rebuy any game that you would want to go back and play if you lost your account.

2:15:56Dustin Furman:Yeah, that's true. 100%.

2:15:57Colin Moriarty:And so a lot of people, like, if this happened to them, they are losing everything uh and that's like even at first for someone like me where a majority of my collection is physical i don't want to be like i'm safe like gotcha boys because it's like dude it's nobody has a pure physical library anymore it's just simply not possible with so many games now uh so and also like the thing about the trophies too is that like that's going to depend person to person like if i lost all my trophies i'd be pretty annoyed but it's like whatever i'd be fine starting a new account um it would be the purchases it's like dude i don't want to go back and rebuy anything or if i lost all my fit like if i guess equivalent is like if my house burned down i lost all my physical library i guess that is a counter argument it's like those are are also tangible items that could be lost that would be saved if they were digital but so so yeah the the point i guess i'm trying to make overall is just that Sony security needs to be in line with what people are spending now on.

2:17:08Colin Moriarty:And especially if they're expecting that they are, they want you to have everything locked up, all of that investment in your account. And eventually as Colin said, they are going to release a handheld that presumably we don't know for sure, but presumably is going to be digital only with no way to use physical games. It's like, okay, well you need to make sure that people's investment of literally tens of thousands of dollars over the years needs to be secure it it's also crazy to be it's like and i understand this is like 15 years ago but like sony like the psn already has had a history of like front-facing very popular complete failures in security like that that psn hack in 2011 was crazy it was it was it was crazy and you like it really is still to this day like kind of like is in it is insane people who are like maybe like newer to the audience or like not even necessarily to us as an audience but like the playstation ecosystem is not it's like that was like three

2:18:07Dustin Furman:straight weeks i think it was i think it was more i wasn't more that it was more than wasn't a month

2:18:11Colin Moriarty:or more than that it was like bare minimum three and a half yeah it was and no it was comical it was like ridiculous and and that is like unbelievable and so when they switched over to ps4 and they were like you know we're gonna we're gonna charge for uh for access to the psn in some ways there was an there was an argument there it's like well that kind of thing never happened on 360 and they've been charging from the beginning so maybe that money goes goes to something right and maybe there's maybe there's a value proposition there in in spending that money that's arguable debatable depending on the person whatever but you can't have that front facing of a failure that that big of a thing no matter how long ago it was and then this far down the line you are ostensibly still the least secure among the the major accounts or among the major like players you know like i i've never never had an issue with my xbox account never had an issue with my steam account i've had these i've had those accounts way longer than my playstation account now granted i haven't had issues with my playstation account yet but like knowing that that's a crazy that vector knowing that it's that easy is crazy and it's just like i i don't know i don't know what you what you do about that like they've got a it's not something that they can't address in my opinion i think it's worth adding too i think maybe you said this colin and our staff chat not secret information but like it's not sony doesn't have security issues with just playstation no clearly uh between the sony pictures hack no insomniac hack uh what else was crunchy roll like so i mean obviously something's up with them

2:19:48Dustin Furman:because that's what i was saying is like you just don't hear this about a lot of companies like like you just don't hear it's like amazon got hacked again or it's like you know it's like yeah it's like it just like you either have to invest you're obviously not investing enough in this and you it's not a huge surprise that it wasn't secure because they really didn't understand what they were doing with PlayStation Network, you know, in the beginning, it was kind of a thing where they're like, they looked at Xbox live on, you know, on the original Xbox. And I think like, I think they realized at some point they're like, we got to get something good.

2:20:17Dustin Furman:And they had the modem for PS2 and all the rest, but like this entire idea of a network, like an actual system, not a game by game Dreamcast style. Like you're connecting to the 2k server. Now you're connecting to the Powerstone server. Now you can like, and I just don't think they've ever been caught up. Like that's my whole theory of the case. And it's like, uh, you're an electronics company, dude. like you got to and it's funny like it is true it's like these are big things that are happening like the sony pictures hack was a fucking disaster for them i don't know if you guys remember that

2:20:44Colin Moriarty:like it was crazy i mean the insomniac hack is insane like all of it all of it is like how are you less secure than fucking ashley madison

2:20:54Dustin Furman:like what do you mean and and and how do you not know that you're going to be a target most of these companies are self-aware enough to know like we are going to be targeted like people want this information they want to fuck with us like you have to be vigilant we have to be aggressive and what's so funny about this too is uh chris i was thinking about this specifically with you is sony has ironically purchased a company in bungie which we're going to talk about later where these guys are so hardcore that they literally sue their cheaters like into the ground, like for monetary damages in the hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars.

2:21:33Dustin Furman:Like they bought this company that is mega aggressive about protecting their walls and their barrier around the company. And they're absorbed by this company that doesn't seem to give a shit that the bubble is burst on every literal angle of the sphere around them. And the Crunchyroll thing is the most recent thing. I don't recall Crunchyroll maybe they did but i don't recall crunch rule getting hacked before sony bought them

2:22:01Dustin Furman:yeah so anyway a few more things here james york wrote in and said hey cdc quick one given the recent psn hack if sony could guarantee the safety of your account through more thorough data collection such as uploading an image of your face and or id would you do it these types of verifications are pretty despised and not trusted but will but will it be the only way to protect ourselves from scammers and hackers i think sony said they already have to do it in the u and probably it will happen in the U.S. in the foreseeable future. Would you give your personal data to Sony to protect your account, or do you feel it's an even greater risk, seeing as how they let this happen in the first place?

2:22:31Dustin Furman:Stay safe, protect yourself from the ritual network, and keep those tinfoil caps snugly on your heads. I was wondering if it was the ritual network. That's gross.

2:22:39Colin Moriarty:Now you get Cal Moriarty's trophies.

2:22:45Dustin Furman:There's a deep sense of despair with this question, because the answer is like, yeah, that is the solution. But would you trust Sony with that data? Yeah. I mean, yeah, like it would be, I think it would be, I've said this before, like I think you should be able to like, there are companies out there that have my ID and all that stuff and I don't worry about it. Like, I do worry about Sony having that. That's what's so funny about like biometrics and stuff where it's like, yeah, do you really want them to have it though? Like, yeah, it keeps you really secure, but what if the whole thing gets hacked and then that shit's just leaked anyway?

2:23:20Dustin Furman:and then like your whole ID is out there. So it's a catch. It's a complete catch 22, like a total catch 22. That that would keep things safe if they were like, listen, we're really like investing billions of dollars into fixing these problems. And like we are going to we are dead ass serious about this and all the rest. And it's like that's different, but I don't think they're that serious about it. The obituary of Kane wrote in and said, Colin, let's say you hypothetically lost your PSN account permanently. What would you do? Would you burn your graduation certificate and regress back to being a Nintendo gamer?

2:23:49Dustin Furman:Would you become an Xbox fanboy and go into pictures of Asha Sharma and font changes? Jesus Christ. Maybe become a full-time gardener and host a Green Dumb podcast. Jokes aside, as we all know, you're a PlayStation gamer at heart. You host the world's number one PlayStation podcast after all, and the show must go on. Plus, you surely wouldn't be able to resist the allure of intergalactic Judas and the like. Do you think you'd take a break from games for a while until the anger and frustration subsided? Do you think you'd still focus on so much on trophies if you had to start from scratch? Absolutely not.

2:24:14Dustin Furman:Regardless, we're all relieved you were able to get your account back. I think it's safe to say we as a community were all angry for you. it's funny because I was going through it where I was like all right so like what does it look like and what I was even thinking like could there be content around like getting all your trophies back and I'm like that would take forever like oh god I was think I did the math like loose math and I spent something like 20 ,000 hours on PlayStation since the since trophies launch that's something like I think let me let me let's see 20 ,000 hours divided by 24 yeah so

2:24:54Dustin Furman:it's like 2.3 years so no

2:24:58Colin Moriarty:of play time right right exactly yeah

2:25:02Dustin Furman:that's like an almost impossible thing to do again and I but I did think about like what I would do and what I think I would do is I probably would just gotten a really nice PC and gone on Steam

2:25:17Dustin Furman:I don't want to say I would never have touched a playstation console again but i think that i would just not what i thought would like it's where my mind ultimately went because i told dustin i'm like i'm being i think i said something like verbatim like i'm being honest with you it's going to be very hard for me to continue if if this isn't solved um but we the show must have gone on and we would have kept it in but it would it would have just been like i'm not playing on playstation if that's that happens to me we can continue to keep the show going i guess maybe i would buy one for intergalactic when it came out or something like that but i'm like i'm not playing it like you said judas i played judas on pc like there's no way there's no universe where i would spend money for the amount of money i've spent on a company if they didn't fix this problem but the reality is is that the concierge style service that i got which i'm really appreciative of from really nice and friendly people that were very thorough and helpful that's just not the advantage other people have and i understand that so yeah i think that's what would have happened it's like I would have just gotten the steam.

2:26:13Dustin Furman:I probably would have just bought a new PC at an exorbitant price and been like, well, at least they seem to give a shit. And most of the games are here anyway. So, you know, I really like the trophy thing would be really difficult for me. I don't think people I think people maybe realize because they've listened to the show for a long time how deeply OCD I am. And that would be very difficult for me to let go of. Um,

2:26:41Colin Moriarty:yeah i mean it's it's a crazy thing it's it's it's interesting to me because like i saw that it happened and i was like i was so sure you were gonna get your account you know what i mean like it was never even a doubt in my mind i was like oh it's like well he's like he's safe he's probably he's probably safer than anybody like you uh well not anybody obviously there's people at sony probably were obviously way safer but like i just i i was not not worried about it at all because i I was just like, it's Colin Moriarty. He's going to get his account back. I think something worth pointing out, because that is true, Chris.

2:27:15Colin Moriarty:But some of the information we got is that things happened because they happened so quickly. That's why Colin's account has kept its purity. Oh, with the speed, right? If things had not happened sooner, we'd be having a very different episode. right well that's my understanding i mean colin mentioned that the like some of the weird trophy stuff that people can do like the hacking of the trophies yeah that was on the table yeah as we

2:27:49Dustin Furman:like yeah i don't want to get crazy that's like where i'm trying not to get too deep into things it's like right there's so much more to this that we know and the people that need to know know but good but it's yeah that's part that's part of it is and that's what's happened to more prominent people and that's what one of the people that I heard about is like that happened to them they did get their account back but they did the trophy thing to them it did fuck up their shit it got them banned and

2:28:20Colin Moriarty:yeah it's crazy that that's even possible dude like I still like it's still crazy to me that like that any of that is and that it's unreversible or whatever like that like i it just building so you're saying like there's like trophies that were like like either deleted or something and there was no way to reverse that like yeah like

2:28:39Dustin Furman:so what the people do is like yeah they'll go into all these games and like ping you know like a flip you know taco jump or whatever and then they'll just play them like in a quick succession and so they'll add them all permanently to your list but then like these date timestamps i think ping PSN because they're so close, unnaturally close to each other. They think you're cheating or you're playing on a modded console and then they ban and they might even ban your console for that, actually. So it's insane. So, yeah, it's it literally when you like the more I think about it, the more I'm like, none of this makes any sense.

2:29:13Dustin Furman:Like this could be so easily stopped. Even if you had to go and play whack-a-mole, you can do it. Like, obviously, there's there's 150 million people on PSN at any time. this is happening to probably thousands of people but like you gotta do something about it dude like i i i don't know i don't know what you don't get about this you want the other thing with psn is you they want you to buy digital games they make more money when you buy digital games and now it's up to according to their recent fiscal year report up to 85 of sales are digital fix the fucking system yeah jesus christ um let's see finally i did want to read this and maybe i should have read this earlier too people do have good experiences with sony kenneth bridge of spirits wrote in i love that name says hey sacred studs colin i read about your terrible time with getting your account back so i thought i would share my actually good experience a few years ago i was a brand new dad overly tired and not paying attention i fell for a phishing scam i know yours was zero fault of your own but i felt like an 80 year old at that moment embarrassed but desperate to get my account back.

2:30:12Dustin Furman:I went through the chat support with PlayStation. While I don't remember who it was, he was an absolute angel. He changed the email back, removed the scammers to FA, and I was back in business all in my 30 minute lunch break. I'm sorry to those that have had terrible experiences, but when you get someone that actually gives a shit, it can make all the difference. Good luck to those that have had their accounts wrongfully taken. I hope your situation helps raise awareness and elicits action on PlayStation's part, though I think we know not to hold our breath for that. Thank you for all that you do.

2:30:34Dustin Furman:Yeah, I did want to know that I heard some from some people to me like it worked fine for me and I believe that. I believe you and I think that's great um it's not like that for a lot of people and we got to make sure that everyone is getting a consistent experience so i don't expect everyone's going to get the experience i had from the quality level and the access but i don't think you should expect to be ignored and kicked at the curb period right you are the customer they need to remember that and i'm i'm the customer too. I mean, I'm not one of the typical media people. I pay for everything I play.

2:31:12Dustin Furman:I am also the customer and I am easily, there is zero doubt in my mind. I am in the top 1 % and probably in the top 0.5 or 0.1 % of purchasers of games, right? Like you have to assume that I buy everything. I play like 30 or 40 games a year, you know, like there's no way people are buying one game a year. maybe didn't they say 60 of people don't even buy full price games at all we just went over that a few like guys open your eyes to who keeps the who keeps who the kind the type of person that keeps us afloat so all right we leave it there all right there's a bunch of other news to get through this week and we'll go through it here and talk great deal a lot of playstation news begins with an fyi which is that sony has announced that there will be a state of play on Tuesday, June 2nd.

2:32:02Dustin Furman:We talked a little bit about this earlier in the show. And I think our plan, that's a Tuesday, like I said. So Mondays we stream. I think we will do our prediction stream that Monday, June 1st. So I think that will be a nice little fun run. And then we'll stream the show on June 2nd and whoever is available for that can join in. You're still around then, right, Dustin?

2:32:18Colin Moriarty:Yeah, it was funny. I celebrated because I was like, thank God it's not on a Thursday. That makes my life so much easier. Then I realized Holly had three appointments that Tuesday, but we've worked it out. i'll be home before one o 'clock for this is more important than whatever's going on over there right now yeah well it's it's a good there's a different reality where like we have an ultrasound that day and it's like i can't but that's the one in the morning what if you what if you have

2:32:45Dustin Furman:the ultrasound and you're like what's on that baby's hand and there's a little adamant manium

2:32:49Colin Moriarty:claws coming out oh a little marketing op marketing marine i could could i stream it from the ultrasound like i'm like there and you can see him in the background like did i break you chris it's just so like it's it's it's just the stupidest thing you've ever heard in your life yeah well the thing about it is like it doesn't even feel unlikely it like not like it seems like it's like someone would take that money to do that you know we're so shameless someone would

2:33:21Dustin Furman:do it we joke about it but someone would do it so yeah someone would do that baby can do his own c section.

2:33:27Colin Moriarty:Oh, yeah. With the claws. Jesus Christ.

2:33:31Dustin Furman:He'll be gentle. Yeah, he knows what to do. All right, so State of Play Tuesday, June 2nd. It'll be more than 60 minutes, they say. They've confirmed that it will begin with Wolverine, so that's pretty exciting. I think there are some assumptions that we might see God of War as well, or God of whatever it's going to be called. There were some rumors that there's even more than that. I think, as always, we should keep our expectations, highly tempered. PlayStation Spectral Super Retardation wrote in and said, hey, CDC, PlayStation has just announced a 60 minute state of play two whole weeks in advance.

2:34:06Dustin Furman:This is unusual and reads to me as high confidence. Any predictions? I have a feeling this will be the big one and I'm fucking horny for more intergalactic info. I'll post my PSN transaction receipts on Twitter and listen. Please don't do that.

2:34:20Dustin Furman:Yeah, intergalactic. I mean, that would be kind of cool. I feel like it's not time yet if they're not going to release it i mean that would be fucking awesome if it was in there but my mind is not even there for some reason um my hope is that they stay away from the games as a service stuff again not because i don't think they should be in that space we've covered this endlessly because i just think it's a distraction you don't want to give anyone you know like for loop being there something it's like just just let people focus on on this stuff i also think the two weeks ahead of time that the lengthy though not unprecedented length of it e3 vibes I mean, it is early June.

2:34:54Dustin Furman:It might be kind of like what their intention is in a way. Chris, what are you expecting?

2:34:59Colin Moriarty:Yeah, well, the timing of it's interesting. So June 2nd, I don't know if I necessarily expect a ton of live service stuff, but I expect just based on the timing of it, I would imagine that there's probably going to be some marathon season two stuff in there. Maybe the timing just seems conspicuous because season two, I think, begins three days after that. so it would be a good opportunity especially just get a marketing beat which we've specifically been talking about how like it's odd that Marathon doesn't have marketing beats like that would be a good place to do it especially considering these seasonal resets are considered officially or unofficially like the times to jump in for new players or lapsed or returning players so I would imagine seeing some of that I know obviously Wolverine I'm not that excited to see Wolverine to be honest I'm already kind of sold on it I don't know if I want to see that much more of it it's reminding me of like when when spider-man 2 was starting to ramp up it's uh advertising and you just couldn't fucking get away from it and you felt like you saw the whole game or was that the first spider-man i can't it might have been both but as far as what i'm what i'm expecting i'm not expecting intergalactic um i'm not expecting fair games uh i don't know we're gonna talk about fair games in a little bit yeah i don't care games anymore oh yeah well oh boy we're uh yeah i don't know i really i i kind of like that i don't know it's it's there's a lot of plates spinning presumably uh i don't know what the timing is for a lot of studios i would imagine santa monica is probably about ready to show something right yeah it's gonna be their god

2:36:38Dustin Furman:of war god of the fey game yeah i don't i don't i don't know maybe something second party

2:36:43Colin Moriarty:yeah second party

2:36:45Dustin Furman:I do believe I've said I've long said that I think PS5 will end with a bang and I think it's time to get that going I mean I think showing intergalactic would be awesome I just think that's such a huge distraction right now I think you got to do that a little later yeah if you're not releasing until next year which you're not then just I would say get through Wolverine at least and then you don't really need to show it I would say even the game awards would be a great place to show

2:37:08Colin Moriarty:it but yeah I would say like just just based on the cadence of you know we we saw intergalactic a while ago it's still kind of a ways off we saw wolverine a hell of a long while ago and then we saw it again a little while ago and it seems like we're we're approaching that era that that point time where wolverine's about to be center stage now based on the time frame of like when a game is announced and when a game is unveiled and when a game is shown fully and then when a game comes out it feels like based on that timeline it's too early for another intergalactic but it seems right around time where they might unveil something from santa monica for release in like you figure like 28 um just based on you know the existing timeline hopefully they've learned that a quicker timeline is better but i just don't think that that's really something that they're going to be championing all that much dustin what are your thoughts anything you're looking forward to i do think that the details around the state of play are very interesting the the two-week lead-up but in addition on this blog post you will be able to go see this state of play in theaters uh particularly uh select alamo draft houses uh specifically in like los angeles san francisco you know the pluralist alamo draft heist yeah passes

2:38:35Colin Moriarty:so that's a little interesting now i specifically used this cup today my my uh playstation e3 experience 2016 look at that cup that i got from going to one of these theater things it wasn't alamo back then uh they just did it like a bunch more places but i believe they also did it up like 2016 17 and 18 if i remember correctly so it has been quite a while since they've done this. And I think you're right, Colin. And we should always temper our expectations for state of play. And honestly, a showcase also, whatever they decide to call it. But with that being said, it feels different. Something about it feels a little different.

2:39:21Colin Moriarty:And so, yeah, like Wolverine, I'm in the same spot as Chris. Like, I don't really care. I care about the game. I don't care about seeing it again. right now uh potentially this god of war fey game i kind of am 50 50 on intergalactic like i could see them kind of wanting to start getting it going the thing though with that dustin is that i i agree

2:39:43Dustin Furman:with you it's totally pot within the realm of possibility but the next time they show what they have got to show gameplay and i just wonder if it's like that's his distraction that would be like all anyone talks about you know um they cannot show a trailer right yeah they can't do

2:39:58Colin Moriarty:like a they can't do like a like a cg or like a like a cinematic they cannot do that in my opinion that would be such a bad move yeah even even an in-engine fly-through or something like that would be too too minimal i mean we saw multiple last of us part two trailers before we saw gameplay

2:40:17Dustin Furman:that's true but i don't think that i don't think that the level of skepticism around that game has anything on this game sure i think that like they're not going to do themselves any favors is by not shutting people up. And I think they'll shut people up when they see it. You know, so now you maybe want to do that now.

2:40:35Colin Moriarty:You figure that's a November next year, right?

2:40:41Dustin Furman:I would think that would be their big launch era game. It might even be a PS6 game. It'll be on both, but it could very well be. I do think it would be pretty cool, actually, if that was a PS5, PS6 game. That would be pretty sick.

2:40:54Colin Moriarty:I'm honestly more excited about the possibilities of third party in this state of play yeah uh i think we could see a onimusha uh date on this with capcom i was kind of thinking judas would be amazing but i can't i can't i can't even say it out loud yeah i can't get uh possible it feels like square enix has been um the director it's like every time he opens his mouth he's like oh we're doing this like he wants to talk about it now Square Enix and Sony maybe not necessarily on the best terms but maybe maybe Final Fantasy Remake Part 3 is a possibility that'd be pretty sick I think that at the very least while we should always temper our expectations I think this will have at least a few good ones yeah I think so too

2:41:53Dustin Furman:the level of confidence of announcing it so early is unusual and that's why again why i think it's

2:41:57Colin Moriarty:just got e3 vibes to it yeah it's the length the the the the announcement time in between and the time of year that kind of has me feeling like oh this might be a really good one so my expectations are kind of high actually i think they should be to be honest well and as we identified you know

2:42:15Dustin Furman:last time it's like that we had a we had a showcase under the state of play moniker so you really never know what you're going to get now what and there is something exciting about that in other words they folded down everything into this one moniker and it could be a deep dive into fucking saros or it could be this amazing 90 minute presentation that shows you a bunch of first party things and anything in between so we will see what state of play is on june 2nd of tuesday it's at 5 eastern expect us to go live with our stream on our youtube channel i would say 4 or 4 30 yeah and uh we'll do sacred streaming the day before june 1st at 1 p.m eastern where we'll do our predictions.

2:42:52Dustin Furman:And there'll probably be leaks by then, so we'll probably have a better idea of what's actually happening. All right, next up is news from reporter Jason Schreier confirming his earlier reporting from March in which he said that Sony is no longer going to be putting its single-player games on PC. In early March, he noted that at that time that while Marathon and Marvel Tocan would be continuing naturally to embrace multi-platform, really PC releases, um ghost of yote which came out last fall and saros which just came out were both planned for pc but those ports had been pulled and he reported that then in march and there was some skepticism but he tweeted out he blew what is it i'm blue sky what is that called he skeeted you blew yourself he blew out says scoop playstation studio business ceo herman holst told staff in a town hall monday morning that the company's narrative single-player games will now be playstation exclusive confirming Bloomberg's reporting from earlier this year.

2:43:45Dustin Furman:He links to the original report that I just cited. So we have that confirmed. I don't know why people were so skeptical of this. You can feel how you want about Jason Schreier, but like he's not wrong. I don't know why people would ever think like I can't think of one article like one thing he got wrong. So when there was skepticism around this, I'm like, I'm not so sure why you're so skeptical about it. So, yeah, they are indeed pulling their games from PC while not pulling them, but they're going to stop releasing their single player games on PC. I feel like I don't know. I don't know how I feel about this.

2:44:15Dustin Furman:Dustin, what do you think?

2:44:16Colin Moriarty:I'm disappointed, but I understand. I'm disappointed because I would have loved to see a situation where it was healthy for the PlayStation console. It was and the PC release was able to help support those teams. They would get good sales and it would kind of just be a good situation for everybody involved. but uh as we've touched on throughout i mean really the the years at this point that playstation has been publishing their games on pc is that there has been a significant uh lack or or a there's been diminishing returns on the playstation pc ports and it makes sense that it's like why are we even doing this why would we lessen the strength of the console uh for this if this is the kind of money that we're going to make from it so i'm disappointed uh because i think it was cool that playstation that pc players could get in on it potentially a lot of them that were never going to buy a playstation ever but as i said before i get it so it is what it is um yeah i

2:45:33Dustin Furman:I think Andrew Feistner's inquiry gets into a little bit of what I think here. He says, hey, lads, now that it's official, Sony will no longer do PC ports for their single player titles. Do you believe this call was made with enough information? All of their releases of these types of games were months and years post PS5 launch as opposed to launch for the live service ones. I think they could have tried once to do day and date, but I suppose that's letting the genie free out of the bottle Aladdin style. Wasn't really a good idea with a soon PS plus drop for Horizon. So what do I know? What say you as I try to find more information for games instead of trying to sound smart on a write in?

2:46:01Dustin Furman:Andrew, thank you for writing in. I wonder, they were, I always use this Icarus reference of like flying too close to the sun and the wax wings, right? It's like they never really wanted to get too close. They never really knew. It's to the point like they never really tried. And I think they might be afraid of what they found out in a way, or at least what it suggests about the.

2:46:33Dustin Furman:the susceptibility of PlayStation and they want to now reinforce the walls instead. So I totally agree, actually, that they never really knew. We talk about Game Pass and how like Xbox deployed this idea and now they know. Now it was an expensive idea and it was ultimately a bad idea, but they know. I don't, this is like one of those things where I'm like, I don't think you'll ever really know because you never really did it right in quotes. But I also understand what they're trying to do. Chris, what do you think about this?

2:47:00Colin Moriarty:i think uh the realities of economics and just the the way things have changed taste wise and the way people's purchasing habits have changed i think they're looking and i've said this before but like i just feel like they look they're looking at a very different world now and they're looking at a place where they're making a next-gen console that nobody seems to be that excited about there doesn't seem to be a lot of reason to get into it especially if you're just going to be posting your games on pc and so like i think i don't know like i think they look at it and they look at what xbox did to their brand and and in many ways diluting it by publishing elsewhere not just on pc but xbox as well i argue the pc thing is just as just as valid i know a lot of people who didn't buy an xbox because they could just play on pc and the the money that they were making on pc wasn't that great compare in in comparison and i think they look at a situation where it's just like listen we need a good reason for people to jump into our next machine and if we have this other thing that people can do instead that's that we're making pennies on the dollar comparison wise like why are we doing that why not just make a case for our next machine why not make a case for our ecosystem uh that has literally never steered us wrong that's literally always been the way this has worked and we're seeing on the other side with xbox that it's just ignoring that doesn't work either and so yeah i mean i i think it's probably the smart decision for them selfishly i'm bummed out about it because i just i like i like the agnostic nature of things i like everything to be available everywhere i think selfishly from like a consumer perspective that's really fun and really cool and it's really it's it's fun to it's fun to mod the shit out of got a war you know it's funny and uh i like that level of flexibility and freedom but from their perspective i told it makes complete sense to me like if i were there if i were over there and i looked at the forecast and like just like the level of bubbling up excitement for the next generation which i don't know we're we're in the trenches and i don't fucking see it at all yeah i don't either i don't know anybody in my i don't know any anybody in my life at all that is like really pumped about the next machine at all yeah that's what i'm saying like i don't i don't see that either and by this point and by this point in the console's life cycle you would expect to see that um at least more so than than you would right now now obviously it could be the case that like once we see this thing and once it's tangible and real then you know that'll be exciting and then people will be all about it that's entirely possible but just i think i think they have enough data to look at from behind the scenes and be like all right listen we we've we've got to reinforce that this is an ecosystem that people need to be to play the best shit and i i can't fault them for it really although i selfishly wish they they would keep you know being in pc as a space for me because i think it's cool yeah it it just goes

2:50:02Dustin Furman:into like it's like you're saying like the money was that wasn't that impressive but it's not going to be that impressive because you you know like they you they really did want to have their cake can eat it too and that's that's a little surprising to me i thought they i thought they kind of should have understood better what was necessary you know if that makes any sense like you got to kind of play the game or you'll never really know like once the diminishing i think they thought there wouldn't be diminishing returns and i think that that's reasonable but i don't believe it worked out very well in other words i think they saw the early sales of days gone or zero dawn and stuff and they were like this is gonna work great you know right and it didn't i mean like and they're there i bet you every project except for maybe a couple were profitable on pc but they're like yeah at what what unknown cost and and what's interesting about um the original reporting from jason what i was reading last night was he was saying and this is what i love about like corporate backroom like fly on the wall shit we always talk about is he was like there is a there is a like a group of people internally that are making this argument like it's always interesting to think like who who are the different groups and little city states inside and like what are the arguments that they make and why and how does that all play out and who makes well I think we know who makes the decisions but how are those I would love to be

2:51:25Colin Moriarty:privy to those conversations dude it would be so fascinating well I I just think I agree I think the conversation even like right now on the Xbox side is like, you're seeing all this stuff. Asha Sharma is saying all the right things and, and really doing all the right things too. But they're, you know, they, they did a new logo and everybody's freaking out. It's like, Oh my God, it's green again. Yeah. It's, it's really,

2:51:46Dustin Furman:it's fucking ridiculous.

2:51:47Colin Moriarty:And look, I appreciate it. Like, I like it. I think it looks great. But like, I mean, what is it like? Ultimately, if you're not going to, if, if your next generation machine is also just going to be like, everything's on PC, like what is, and on PlayStation, what is the point? right like i don't and i'm not saying that as like as a fan of exclusivity necessarily like i i kind of like from a selfish perspective i don't like it actually like it fragments potential audiences like i think it's lame but also i mean dude like if if i can get everything on xbox on my pc and on playstation your logo doesn't make a damn bit of difference and i think that's a big conversation that's happening right now i think it's happening on a on a lower level and i think it's happening on an executive level too and i think they're just like we're not gonna do that why would we do that the audience is not gonna respond well and like maybe maybe there'll be like some out uh some backlash or whatever but like the backlash to people not getting uh play station games on pc is gonna be what the people who weren't showing up to buy them anyway yeah i don't know they probably look at that as like kind of like a win-win in some ways like we just we focus on the people that we care about and the focus on the people that um actually participate in our ecosystem that give us the most money.

2:53:05Colin Moriarty:Unless they, you know, buy every game and get every trophy and then they get banned, then we don't give a shit about it.

2:53:08Dustin Furman:Yeah, we don't care about those guys. We care most about the person who buys one game a year. Arkham wrote in with a Q. Says, good morrow, sacred gentleman with PlayStation pulling away from releasing games on PC. Do you think that Sony will delist the games they have already released on Steam? Anecdotally, I've heard multiple people online say they left PlayStation this gen because of exclusives going to PC. Sony could pull the games off Steam to send a clear message to everyone going forward that PlayStation is the only place to play these games. If Sony wanted to be really extreme, they could remove the games from people's Steam library and refund them the full amount.

2:53:40Dustin Furman:But obviously that would be incredibly stupid. Thanks for all the great content. Have a great week. I mean, that would cost them hundreds of millions of dollars. I don't think that they would do that. I am now knowing what their plan is. It's like, I don't know that it actually kind of makes sense to pull them down. In other words, like not like, why would you? Why keep them there? You shouldn't take them away. and you couldn't um take them maybe you could i don't know take them away from people that already bought them but yeah maybe you if this is what you want then you should just do that um but i don't i don't think they're gonna do that and i don't know i know that they're not gonna like refund everyone for like concord style that's not gonna happen they you could i could maybe see them maybe they do like a nintendo thing where they're like uh with like

2:54:26Colin Moriarty:the Mario game that they like the the all-stars collection that they did was just temporary uh it's gonna be up for this long if you want it go get it because it's done and that may that may incentivize like uh some boost in sales for these things before they they go but I I think it's just better to keep them there I think it's it's not necessarily a bad thing to have examples of what you do elsewhere um even if you've decided to go you know uh and and undo it I think people will got the message yeah i think it would be an unforced error to take them off i think that would yeah reflect very poorly on them and people would be mad about it whether they were going to buy them or not uh and they'll continue like they're going to continue to make money off those games for in perpetuity maybe it's not going to be crazy money as if like when it came out at launch but i'm sure they don't mind making a little scratch on like when the new god of war game presumably gets announced in two weeks they're probably going to see a nice uplift in sales on the god of war games on pc so i understand the message that would send but i just they've already they've already made the investment those games have already exist there's no undoing

2:55:40Dustin Furman:of that that's the big thing i was thinking too is like you it is you it is pure profit it's not a lot of money but you you don't have to spend money on any of this stuff you've done it you did it already yeah i i don't see them doing that i i think there's a lot of people that wonder what their feeling is on games on their games being on helix i think this is less relevant these days because it will be nothing new and the multiplayer games will already be there anyway so the other thing i see i see i made and we've talked a little bit about this on the show in the past is i know people are concerned about this in regards to nixus but i just don't think there's anything to be worried about maybe i'm totally wrong in this new playstation there seems to be quite a bit that we worried about but nixis is still going to be extremely useful for for their pc ports that come from the multiplayer space and they're now co-developing games they worked on deeply on saros or anyone that beat the game you can look at the credits so um so i think they'll be okay and it's funny because they were doing a great job it just it just wasn't just wasn't worried that again they didn't want to play the game they wanted to like be on the field and be like we're going to play like soccer instead of football it's like well but we don't play soccer here and you can't expect people to sit in the stands in great numbers when we play football weird kind of analogy but anyway all right this one broke while we were recording yeah and uh we have a perfect person here to talk about it destiny 2 is uh done yeah bungie writes destiny 2 every end is a new beginning and they write in part quote for almost 12 years we have had the joy and honor to explore the destiny universe with you all through all the ups and downs, surprises and triumphs.

2:57:17Dustin Furman:Building Destiny alongside our players has been a monumental privilege. While our love of Destiny 2 has not changed, it has become clear that after the final shape, we have reached the time for our shared worlds and Destiny to live beyond Destiny 2. As our focus turns towards a new beginning for Bungie, we will begin work on incubating our next games. To that end, on June 9th, we will release the final live service content update for Destiny 2 to begin the new journey as a studio. Though active development may be concluding, we will ensure that Destiny 2 remains playable just as the original Destiny is today.

2:57:44Dustin Furman:Many changes in this final update will aim to ensure that Destiny 2 is a welcoming place for players to return to. We're proud of Destiny 2, the places it took us to, and the legacy it has created. Because of you all, our universe is vast, built on years of shared stories, adventures, and victories. From the Cosmodrome to the Pale Heart to the Lawless Frontier, we have forged lifelong memories and friendships with you all. We are incredibly grateful to everyone who made this journey with us from the deepest part of our hearts. Thank you. And we'll see you in the stars. They talk about the update monument of triumph that comes out June 9th.

2:58:13Dustin Furman:you can get into that a little bit. There's a bunch of details here. We won't, we won't dive too deep. I do wonder what, I mean, I'm very curious what you think, Chris. I mean, obviously you're the great, greatest person we can imagine to talk to about this. Also the confirmation of multiple games.

2:58:27Colin Moriarty:Yeah, it's interesting. It seems so, man, I think a lot of things about this. First of all, I think destiny to hit already ended a while ago. I think most players kind of feel this intrinsically. The final shape was just a great ending. Like it really, like it was a better ending than anybody anticipated it it was an ending for a live service narrative which is typically not something that's seen usually those things go on forever and and maybe from a business perspective it would have been wise to maybe continue leading players on forever for a story that just never ended um but they gave a great ending and like i remember when i finished final shape i was like all right i feel kind of good like i'm kind of satiated with this that seems to be a great game uh for all of its onboarding ills and the fact that like the beginning of it is kind of cut off i do think i don't know man i think i do think it would have i maybe they just don't have it anymore or whatever but like i think it would have been a really great thing to do to just since it's not a prime focus for them anymore clearly and they're moving forward like to not do something in the realm of like a d2 classic or like a d2 beginning chapters kind of thing to like have the beginning playable in some way like i think most players would have rather seen uh the the beginning red war campaign come back and forsaken as as and and not necessarily have a star wars expansion you know like i think uh that would have been a lot better but i think it's not really surprising i think people who are caught off by this i always i was always confused by the people latching on to destiny 2 as if as if they didn't clearly telegraph to the audience that it was kind of done um with the final shape but uh yeah it's bittersweet it's weird um it'll be playable in perpetuity i mean destiny one is still playable so like i don't i don't really worry about the playability of destiny from that angle but it's interesting what's i see i've seen all like we were getting into the the account hack earlier while this broke so i was like kind of like compiling a bunch of like reactions of what people were saying i've seen a lot of people suggest that this uh oh this means destiny three is happening it's like i don't know about that man like it's it's i don't know if you would be working on destiny 3 while announcing the ending of destiny 2 without communicating that and actively telegraphing that like this is not the end or whatever this seems fairly i don't want to say concrete that destiny's over but like at the very least like it'll be a while before we see destiny again and it seems like they're in the stages of incubating their next games plural and so like they're kind of fucking around with things and they're trying to figure out what works and what doesn't.

3:01:09Colin Moriarty:I don't know how long they've been incubating those games. It could be like really, really early. It could be like something that they've been toying around with for a little while. They say begin work incubating our next games. Right. So like that implies that they're kind of in the early stages of anything. So I don't know. I'm fascinated by it. It seems like Marathon is going to be a prime focus for them now, though, which is interesting. uh selfishly i'm look i'm done with destiny 2 but like i kind of dude i i really do love destiny it would be great like if if a destiny 3 were to somehow exist i would be stoked about it as like a new ground floor and as like a new kind of like hey you don't the previous stuff doesn't matter like whatever this is a new jumping in point with like proper next gen stuff and a break from you have to remember destiny 2 is a ps4 game at its heart you know like so So it would be kind of cool to see that type of game brought forward in some way with like a brand new, maybe like an updated engine, some new capabilities, next gen stuff.

3:02:12Colin Moriarty:But I think it'll be a while before we see that. And I think it'll be it's a good thing that it's a while. Like, I think you need people to miss it for a little while. So I'm all for them doing other things in the meantime. But I don't know if I were them, I'd I'd be working on Destiny 3 immediately personally.

3:02:30Dustin Furman:it yeah i i was i'm trying to find their employee count right now because i'm a little surprised so as i can as far as i can tell at their highest they were up to like 1400 which is insane they're down to probably below 800 now maybe even something like 700 i was thinking like how do you not have another game in development already and then i remembered they did and that game was spun off into a first party studio. So because at first I was like gas. I was like, what? Like when I was reading this, when we were taking a break, I'm like Destiny 2 is over. Marathon is great, but struggling a little bit.

3:03:09Dustin Furman:I think they're going to stick with it. You don't have another game in development. The fuck are you kidding? And then it's like, no, Sony actually took that game. So it is a little bit more reasonable that right. Yeah, that maybe they wouldn't have anything going, but it's kind of a shame in the sense that if they're starting the incubation now, I mean, you're looking at early 2030s you would assume for anything past marathon from them which is

3:03:30Colin Moriarty:kind of nuts yeah presumably i mean that is yeah i don't know like it's it's weird like the verbiage is very specific begin work incubating doesn't imply um that they're far along with anything like you like you said they did they they were and it was stolen ostensibly so like can't necessarily fault them but I don't know man I I like Marathon a lot I think the potential is pretty high actually but That's people want destiny. Like, I don't know. Like, I don't know. Like, I don't know why you would necessarily bust your balls. Maybe they just don't want to do it. Maybe they want to do other things.

3:04:11Colin Moriarty:And like, I get that from a creative perspective.

3:04:12Dustin Furman:And yeah, at this point, if I were Sony, I'd be like, we don't really give a fuck what you want to do. Like, yeah, the last thing we're curious about is what you want.

3:04:20Colin Moriarty:Right. If I were Sony, I would be like destiny three. Right. Come on. Like people want it. Like it's like people need to understand like destiny to floundered for a number of reasons. None of those were because people didn't like playing the game. Like the reason destiny to doesn't have a lot of engagement anymore is because the game's done. And like, there's a lot of other stuff to play and like, there's, it's not, they've already, they did their end game. It's like Marvel. Now it's just like, Oh, fantastic. Ford. Do you give a shit? Who gives a shit about the fantastic for it all? Like they already did their end game.

3:04:54Colin Moriarty:And so it's, it's, it's over. but like it's over for destiny too doesn't mean they can't like go into the future or maybe the distant past and do something else in that universe it's a rife universe it's like there's a lot to do and marathon just kind of cements to me it's just like they just they still know what they're doing gameplay wise like i just like i would love another game from them in that universe i think it'd be i think it'd be cool so and obviously like the business practices of like you know the destiny content vault where they like took took content from early on and like shoved it away I think that stuff needs to be addressed, obviously, if they're ever going to go forward.

3:05:28Colin Moriarty:But there's not no path forward to destiny. I think the doom and gloom around it is like kind of weird because I feel like it's obvious. It's I feel like it's the obvious trajectory of a game that ends. It's like how many people are playing? How many people right now concurrently are playing The Last of Us? You know what I mean? It's like it's over. Like you played it. It's done. I guess it's a multiplayer game, but like it's a multiplayer narrative game. that had an ending that was, by the way, great. So I don't know. I don't know what to do. But like, I would be all in on a D3 personally.

3:06:00Dustin Furman:Well, my assumption, Chris, is that everything's so intentional. The use of the plural games indicates to me that it's Destiny 3 and something else. So that is true. Yeah, I think that maybe and maybe they'll even incubate both and then see what direction they want to go in in a year or something. But I would be I would have a hard time believing that they have much flexibility anymore. Yeah. Those days are done. Those days are long gone for Bungie. I agree. And I just can't believe... Sony lost billions of dollars on this. It really is. There was no reason for them to buy this team. I'm sorry.

3:06:35Dustin Furman:I know how passionate you are about them. I know we've talked about this a lot, but this made no sense. Well, it doesn't make sense,

3:06:42Colin Moriarty:especially if they were just going to go undo their live service. I always thought the price was obscene. like 3.6 billion dollars this doesn't really make any sense no none none um i mean to be honest like most billion dollar acquisitions for for game developers don't make any sense like 69 for activision like there was it 60 69 for activision yeah 60 yeah 68 or 69 that's fucking insane i think 7 billion for uh bethesda is also insane like i think these are really valuable teams and really valuable studios i think bungee is a really valuable studio but like 3.6 billion dollars was always crazy to me I think if they wanted to make a deal on Bungie and they wanted to get Bungie for a reasonable price like I think that would have been I think that would that would have been smart probably if they were going to actually do live service stuff which apparently they just aren't going to do anymore so like now it's like yeah it's a really stupid idea now it just doesn't

3:07:36Dustin Furman:make any sense yeah I wonder if you just I don't know I don't know like what their what I don't know what their feel is on it it's like a team you almost feel like you just cut loose you know um you don't shut them down bungee's been cut loose twice already um i think at some point you have to realize it's them and i i wonder if you just do that it's like we've just had we is it enough already like we've lost enough we're gonna get your game anyway why do we have to pay for it well like that would be that's like my whole question is like we would just get this that that is true yeah they would have gotten marathon they would have gotten it really it really was nonsensical and i agree with you it is the price that is offensive disney basically bought all of star wars for the same price so just so like that's insanity

3:08:24Colin Moriarty:it's completely bonkers yeah like and that's around that is a big price but that's that is that actually is around where star wars would be yeah i agree i agree that's the point i'm making

3:08:39Dustin Furman:it's like you would think that i mean respectfully you think that this would be a sub billion dollar

3:08:43Colin Moriarty:deal yeah i could see this i i could see that no more than a billion no more than a billion

3:08:50Dustin Furman:by the way now i think they're they're deeply wounded and we're like yeah like halo 3 era

3:08:57Colin Moriarty:bungie arguably maybe maybe maybe 1 billion maybe maybe well because think about it like you can

3:09:05Dustin Furman:only put out so many games like you have to make that money back plus you're now absorbing the fixed cost of the company so it's right it's like unthinkable that it doesn't make any sense yeah it was it was a lot a lot of and again it's it's not even a matter of like i think they're i

3:09:21Colin Moriarty:think they're a fantastic team i think they do a lot of great work i think uh uh i just think marathon's great i think destiny's great i don't think it's a level of um talent bleed or a level of like what even are you anymore in comparison to like something like bioware where like they've had string after string of failure and and like you know it's destiny 2 had like four fantastic expansions that people really regard highly and that's not that's a far cry from mass effect andromeda to anthem to dragon age the veil guard you know what i mean and so like it's like i think people who lump the like bungee in with those studios like i don't think they really understand what's really going on but the price is ridiculous if you were then just going to cut live service loose anyway then the the impetus behind the purchase for any price doesn't make any sense and so it is they're in an awkward position now where they've got a really good team doing really cool stuff but like it's so fucking expensive i don't know what you do i think the move is destiny three personally i just think i think that game will like if that especially if it's been enough time dude oh my god i think seeing a proper like the amount of time it's going to take to incubate and see destiny 3 exist is going to be so much time that it would actually be exciting to see destiny again and that's kind of actually the most exciting part of it to me it's just like to know that it would it would theoretically be so far away that's that the technology would meaningfully change and that like we talk about games going away and how we wish like more games did like the uncharted thing where it's just like oh it's been a 10 year break I'm not saying 10 years necessarily but I mean final shape was what two years ago or something like that figure another four or five I don't know I think people would be excited to see it as a three again I do it I do think

3:11:21Dustin Furman:it would break in a lot of money but like we'll see yeah i think i think there'd be a lot of nostalgia driving to it the question is like would you ever you're never going to make the investment back it's the same thing with activision like microsoft will never make that money back it's a matter of like what from that product it's a matter of like what you i guess extract from it in the meantime and what you think is destiny 3 will cost hundreds of millions of dollars so you've already paid all this money and now you're going to sink costs into this other thing you just got to be careful with it i i wonder what yeah i wonder what they're going to do.

3:11:50Dustin Furman:Dustin, let's hear from you on the end of Destiny 2 and anything you'd like to say.

3:11:54Colin Moriarty:I'm a bit mixed on what I think Bungie should do next, but before I get ahead of myself, I think it's time. And I know there are online MMOs that continue to go on seemingly forever. world of warcraft final fantasy 14 things like that um but i i've never felt like destiny was quite like those games in the first place uh with its heavy emphasis on characters and story and cinematic and again i guess final fantasy 14 does have a lot of that and people really do deeply care so maybe it's not a good comparison but um it it's clear that like i feel like the vision of destiny has been fulfilled and i get there are people that will endlessly play the same game for the rest of their lives but it's clear from the player numbers even with the final shape that it's like they people had enough and so that's kind of partially where i disagree with chris is that i wonder if destiny 3 has too much baggage to be successful or to be the the not to be successful i think it would be successful to be the right next move i could see a spiritual successor to destiny or something that is like this is our new version of what we created what we laid the groundwork for with destiny one and two but i wonder i think the hard part for me and what i assume is the core amount the majority of destiny players that fell off at some point is they see destiny three and they're like well i never finished destiny two there is so much shit i'm behind on maybe that wouldn't matter to some people it would matter to me and maybe i would go back to destiny 2 and finish all that stuff which i did most of destiny 2 i think there's two i didn't do beyond light and i didn't do final shape and the stuff after that no one cares about truly no one cares about so yeah i think that oh good no no because i was thinking like i i get that but like i think that's why any perceived destiny 3 would not be like a continuation it would be like it would be like either like uh however many years in the future whatever or however many years even in the past i think i think a destiny 3 as a prequel would be fucking sick actually but i i get what you're saying whereas it's like i didn't even finish destiny 2 it's like well you don't have to it's not part of it you know what i mean it's like a separate thing destiny 1 and 2 are actually like farmer intertwined and somehow people were like yeah i'll go ahead go into destiny 2 um so like i don't know On a personal level, and this is not me thinking from a business sense or like what would work best.

3:14:59Colin Moriarty:I would want to see them make something that's like we're taking everything we learned from Destiny 1 and 2, all the ways that we fucked up and all the ways we succeeded in those games and we're doing something new. because i guess i see bungie as like a company that is very creative and visionary in its worlds that it creates and so to see them return to the world that they've worked on for and put out content for 12 years is boring that's what and i get you can make the argument like well they returned to marathon it's like dude it's chris you've pointed out this is like yes marathon current marathon is very very very different from that old marathon but it is still very true story-wise yes but in a new way it they've been able to reinvent marathon into something new and who knows maybe they could do that with with destiny at some point maybe i'm wrong about this but i would be disappointed to be like oh we're going they've explored that they have done so many different types of things and gone to so many places in that world and explored so many different stories that i'm like dude give me everything you built in terms of an mmo fps from destiny and then do it in a new thing because i trust bungie to come up with an idea in a new setting in a new world that will blow my mind because i didn't care about marathon i never cared about going back to those old games and now that i'm playing the new marathon i'm like this world's sick and i want to know about uh durandall and i want to know about these different ais and what happened on tal seti and stuff like that they're masters at that so from a creative standpoint i'm like i want something new i think they should continue to feed those destiny players that want that experience clearly they've created something incredible with that i mean i put hundreds of hours across PlayStation and on my PC into both destiny one and destiny two.

3:17:08Colin Moriarty:So I was in it for a long time. So that's, but like I said, that's a personal one that I'm like, let's, these guys are masters at creating worlds. We've done that. Let's, let's, let's give them something new and something the same at the same time. Yeah.

3:17:27Dustin Furman:We'll see what happens. I, I, I will be watching this with close eyes because these projects will suck up more money than almost anything that Sony probably does in the first party. And so it's certainly worth keeping a close eye on all of that. All right, let's see. Next article, oh boy. Our friends over at Push Square report on a trademark filing for a game called Break-In. B-R-E-A-K space I-N in all capital letters, interestingly. But I don't know if that matters or not. This can only be one thing. I think it's pretty clear what it is only from the name, but Dustin, what else? Did you look at this?

3:18:12Dustin Furman:There's a subtle hint in the filing if you look at it. Oh, well, yeah.

3:18:17Colin Moriarty:I feel like everyone's making the assumption. Well, yes, but there's something that indicates

3:18:21Dustin Furman:that that's what it is other than the name. It's the filing language. It says filing language, English, second language, French. And there's only one French speaking first party studio under PlayStation's umbrella. And that is Haven in Quebec. And thus, I think all these clues fairly because break in and by itself, I think fairly obvious. But that does it to me. And so I'm like, this is a fair games. And at least they're wise enough to rebrand it. I don't know. and that's too bad because I've said from the very beginning I think fair games is a dope name it's too bad that it's wrapped up in this I gotta say I also think break in is kind of a cool name and I'm surprised that it's not taken but I wonder if they'll do like break in with some weird fucking I don't know what they're gonna do but this is what it is and so they also report that Gamatsu they relay reporting from Gamatsu I should say over a push square that there are also play break in accounts on Instagram Reddit TikTok X and YouTube So this is just like what happened with Hunter's Gathering, where it's play horizon HG on all of their stuff.

3:19:35Dustin Furman:So this is Dustin, almost certainly fair games. What do you think?

3:19:40Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I'm because they have these accounts ready to go. We were talking about the state of play earlier. I feel like it's time, man.

3:19:48Dustin Furman:I hope they don't do it at this one. They're going to, though. You're probably right. It's so interesting because what I what I understand is that it's not very good. but we'll see. I mean, that's one man's, you know, one man's opinion of someone saying that they play it, you know, they played it extensively or whatever. So maybe other people liked it. I don't know. Yeah, we'll have to see

3:20:06Colin Moriarty:when the game, when we finally see what it is for real. But I, it certainly was an essential move to rebrand the game at this point. It's been so long. It already has a stink to it because of all the various things between Jade Raymond leaving and Sony's live service kerfuffles over the years. And so the rebrand, I think, is the right move. But will it be enough? It won't, particularly if the game is not showing very impressive. And it's a little bit of a smoke and mirrors. It's like, well, it doesn't matter really what it's called. Is it going to be interesting? is it going to as we said about Concord being good is not enough or even acceptable is not good enough you know there's a huge uphill battle with with break in or whatever break in as a name though I agree with you Colin it's not bad no I think

3:21:12Dustin Furman:both games are names are fine if not really good yeah fair games is tainted it does seem like they're going to stick with it Chris what do you think

3:21:23Colin Moriarty:that's the most surprising part of this to me is that I think we kind of assumed maybe not maybe not that it was so certain but like there was it was on the table that they would just write this down you know based on some of the stuff that we had been hearing based on the director leaving and all that kind of thing and just based on like Sony's general feeling towards life service now which is a lot different than when this game was originally incubating and when they were originally more committed to it, there was a reality that was not too far-fetched that this game would just not exist going forward.

3:21:58Colin Moriarty:Like, why? Although you could argue that having announced it publicly already, canceling it is arguably an equivalent black eye to just releasing it and having it not do well. It's not like they were incubating this and they were working on this in complete secrecy and then they get canceled. Like, there's millions of games like that, you know, like where it's, oh, they were working on it, never announced it got canceled and no one's any people are none the wiser um and then it's like a it's not really a problem for anybody but yeah i mean it's wise to rebrand it break in i guess is fine um fair games is a little bit more distinct to be honest but like uh break in i guess is is removed from the the stink of that name um i don't know i mean if they have those accounts ready then we probably will see it at the state of play just crazy i just you have to so here's the thing right you have to imagine that this is so weird so if it's going to be at the state of play all these accounts are ready they've gotta know that people are going to be immediately negative about it and so i feel like the only way to get ahead of that if you're going to show the game at the state of play is it's playable now you know like just like get it like make it so like people don't even have time yeah i like that idea uh because i i think there's no i think there's non-zero chance that like if this game comes out if this game like is shown or whatever and then it's like release date and you know four months it's just like it's over like i don't think people are going to be that impressed by it if they see it and then their curiosity is peaked even if it doesn't look very good but like they are allowed to like sink into it immediately and like figure it out that could help a lot i feel like i remember like when when oblivion remake or oblivion remastered did that shadow drop i mean that was anticipated in some way shape or form anyway but Like when they shadow dropped it, everybody loved it.

3:24:07Colin Moriarty:And it was kind of unanimous, even though that game has some really major problems, not even stemming from the original game, but like stemming from how poorly it runs, how poorly optimized it is. Like the story of that game has changed very, very drastically over the year or so that it's been out from this kind of like big darling love letter of a game to something that's just like completely poorly optimized and kind of like a not a great way to play that game for most people on most hardware. so I think it's probably wise for them to just if if they're going to show it at the state of play there's got to be like a public beta or something that they shadow drop as well right I mean I don't know I wouldn't show it if people couldn't immediately play it yeah in this environment like I don't know you look at high guard where like I I almost wonder what the reception that game would have been if they if people didn't have time to ruminate on how much of how weird it looked or how unfun it was not that it would have survived uh necessarily but i do wonder like what that would have been if people could just jump in immediately without having any preconceived notions without consuming any like clickbait hate media you know i don't know i think that i think that kind of thing matters now in ways that it didn't used to yeah i i agree with you actually and i i do wonder what the situation is with it like horizon hunter's gatherings in

3:25:30Dustin Furman:it's second closed beta right now i think it begins this weekend i wonder if they're gonna skip all that or if that's what they're leaning into next when when the game goes yeah i don't i don't know where they are i just i don't know that changing the name is going to be sufficient paper clip paper paper clit slitter which is just awful oh jesus because like what paper cut clit slitter is actually the name it's like well what do you don't like don't open your mail with your with your vagina. You know, that's not what it's for. Greetings, CDC. Sounds like Sony has trademarked break in ahead of the state of play and the general consensus is that this is a rebrand of fair games.

3:26:07Dustin Furman:Simple question. Will it be enough? Is there anything they could reasonably do to change the perception of the game, the game that doesn't exist yet, but everyone's mind is already made up on or is the Internet hate mob too strong for a course correction? My bet would be that it's not going to be sufficient.

3:26:22Dustin Furman:Changing your name is not really. I actually so I like the name. I like both names. I've said that a million times already. I almost feel like changing the name is an admission of failure. Like just lean into it. It is what it is, dude. It literally is what it is. It's nothing you can do about it. And we'll see what happens. If it's if it's a$40 game, it's dead. If it's a free to play game, which I know that Sony didn't want to do originally but maybe they're going to do it with this game i don't have no reporting on that i just you know it's just a feeling i might have um maybe it has a chance yeah i don't know yeah the game lost its director it lost its producer the studio founder's gone new name obviously way later than they wanted it to be uh and they they also have horizon going both horizon games because they have the horizon mmo as well they have four loop going they have the team lfg game going gummy bears there does come a point it's the square enix problem of like you're actually competing with yourself at some point you should have these games incubating you should separate them by like six months each and just see you know you got to be you got to be more deliberate so we'll see what

3:27:38Colin Moriarty:happens actually i actually wonder about like maybe do you think it's too early for that gummy bears game to show up at the state of players maybe may i don't know i don't know you would

3:27:46Dustin Furman:assume that it's further but that's a good question chris because you would assume if they're this goes back to the bungee thing if you if you assume that they really have nothing else going in those those two games that they're incubating then yeah it might have been taken from them when it was quite far and and if they were able to take the team like the literal team that's making it it indicates that you know a team had coalesced around the project they're not being stretched from one game to the next so maybe yeah maybe i'm worried about that game too yeah we'll

3:28:11Colin Moriarty:see i uh it didn't look appealing to me personally but i think um yeah dude i don't know if this game is not playable the day of the state of play it's i don't know man i think it's kind of dead personally i think i think you got to get people in and have people form their opinions before the before the internet does i also feel like it's a terrible timing for that because i mean june 2nd presume let's presume that it's playable that day right and it's it goes for like i don't know like about like a week it's a playable beta or maybe it even comes out who the fuck knows i don't know marathon season two starts in like two days so like you're kind of cannibalizing yourself in a way where you kind of need a lot of eyes on that yeah if you're going I don't know man I'm seeing like this feels like I'm getting bad vibes dude there's a this is a square enix conundrum

3:29:02Dustin Furman:it really is actually it's kind of an interesting way of looking at it like you're actually maybe making too much on top of one another yeah so we'll see because yeah for loop is for loop seems like it's going to be... I'm a little surprised how hard people are being on Forloop, but I think it has a much better chance than Breaking does. We'll see. All right. Also from Push Square. Well, this was announced by Sony, but Push Square has a nice little chart. So PlayStation announces starting May 20th. So this was yesterday for when we're recording. It's too late for you. PlayStation Plus prices for new customers will increase in select regions due to ongoing market conditions, which are unknown because it's a digital service.

3:29:43Dustin Furman:Prices will start at$10.99 USD for a month and$27.99 for a three-month subscription. The annual subscription, unless you are in certain countries like Turkey and India, will not rise. So if you buy your PlayStation Plus subscription all at once, it will not matter for you. But if you buy a one or three-month subscription, the prices are going from, for one month, PS Plus Essential,$9.99 to$10.99. PS Plus Extra,$14.99 to$16.99 and PS Plus Premium,$17.99 to$19.99. Three months will be$24.99 to$27.99 for Essential, $39.99 to$43.99 for PS Plus Extra, and$49.99 to$54.99 for the highest tier, which is what I already forgot.

3:30:27Dustin Furman:Premium. Chris Kendricks wrote in and said, Hey CDC, I recently read Push Square's coverage of Sony increasing the price of shorter term PS Plus subscriptions in the follow-up article showing only a small percentage of readers still view PS Plus Essential as a good value. With Sony seemingly steering people towards annual subscriptions and a larger ecosystem commitment, do you think PlayStation is slowly conditioning players into treating PS Plus as a utility bill rather than a gaming subscription? At what point does the value proposition start working against player goodwill? I do think the annual, leaving at least for now, the annual pricing alone is smart because that's where you want people to be.

3:31:00Dustin Furman:It's more expensive and actually makes them more money if you buy things on a month or three month basis, but you really shouldn't be treating PS plus like that, in my opinion. The way I look at it, and this is just me, especially with extra. So the middle tier, the game catalog tier is like, I think you got to choose what you're going to do. Like, I think you got to kind of choose your space. Now it's more a la carte and multifaceted in PlayStation than it is in the Xbox space. Like, I think it's weird to be on Xbox and have game pass and then have this conundrum of like, oh, this game's on a game pass.

3:31:29Dustin Furman:Do I spend money on it? And it's like, well, yeah, but then am I getting value at a game pass? And like, I would be so caught up in that cycle. I really feel like choosing your path is right. And so if you are committed to the game catalog, for instance, which a lot of people are, especially for legacy games, they don't even care about new games. They just want to play legacy games. Just get a month or just, pardon me, just get a year subscription. I know it's a larger investment, but it's just straight up cheaper even before the price increase. And since the yearly prices aren't yet affected and you won't be affected by the new pricing unless you cancel your subscription or it lapses.

3:32:01Dustin Furman:So make sure on PlayStation Plus or on PSN that you have selected that you want to continue your PlayStation Plus subscription when it expires so you don't get hit with these new prices. But the pricing is kind of getting out of control, I think. PSN was free in the PS3 era and it was free on Vita. I think everyone knows that, but like we started paying for it. I think it's fairly reasonable to pay for it. it's funny that we're paying more money for this thing that they can't even protect. Maybe they'll use that to move the call centers to the United States. Although I highly doubt it.

3:32:40I just feel like if I, how do I put, I'm paying like$80 a year for cloud saves at this point

3:32:49Dustin Furman:or whatever it is. And I'm like, God, I feel like you should just give me cloud saving, first of all. And second, but even if I have to pay for it, it seems exorbitant. PS, PS Plus has gone up substantially. And I do think that there's a lot of good perks in terms of the games you get and whatever. And I think we play a lot of games. So the games are not often for us. But if you're kind of a regular person, it's not quite a lot of content for you. So I don't want to diminish its value. I just I don't think it's it's it's much like what happened to Game Pass where it's not like a no brainer. It's certainly like not a no brainer for a normal person to spend 20 or 30 dollars a month on this thing.

3:33:26so we'll see what happens.

3:33:27Dustin Furman:This is, you guys are both at extra, right?

3:33:30Colin Moriarty:No, I'm at essential right now.

3:33:32Dustin Furman:Okay.

3:33:33Colin Moriarty:Every once in a while, like they'll give you the option to pay for the rest of your year in premium. So I've done that towards the end of my subscription just to see what's on there. The, the classic stuff like that. So I'm just on essential right now. And I'm just on the 12 months. So this technically does not affect me. but I do agree that the pricing is getting very annoying and I think in general the PS Plus free games have been a little they felt a little more lackluster to me personally but it's as you were saying Colin like we're in in the core group that if there is a game that is desirable I'm probably have already bought it and i would assume that's also the case of push square readers as well that they would find it less valuable so um yeah it's annoying that everything keeps going up and i guess just be i'm thankful that they didn't increase the 12 month but i'm nothing is sacred so it'll

3:34:39Dustin Furman:probably come at some point um what does darth vader say to uh lando pray that i do not alter yeah pray do I not alter it further Chris where are you on PS plus right now are you on essential

3:34:54Colin Moriarty:I don't even know I think I bumped up to premium for a month but I can't remember if I really don't know I bounce back and forth but then sometimes I'll just like do like an annual premium you know I'm just like

3:35:10Dustin Furman:what I wonder with them is like they're talking about market conditions I'm like I don't think that's really sufficient market conditions for what for your subscription service. Like, I don't understand. Now, I know that costs are going up across the board. Obviously, there's massive server farms involved in all this. I get that, but I don't really like that explanation.

3:35:26Colin Moriarty:Yeah, it feels it feels fake.

3:35:29Dustin Furman:It seems designed to get people to just sign up for yearly subscriptions, which, again, I think you should just do. Just choose your lane. Yeah, whatever that lane might be. That's my advice. I think we have to I don't want to say we have to grin and bear it. I just think that if you are intentional about your decision making with Game Pass or with PlayStation Plus Extra or whatever you use, I think you can even with these price increases, you can get massive value out of them. So you and. I think this is this is obviously a high gross thing for Sony. You really can't. Interact with PlayStation in a modern way without PS Plus.

3:36:06Dustin Furman:It's not really possible. So. Something to consider. All right. We'll keep an eye on that. The next piece of news I wanted to get into is just that Jordan Midler, a friend of mine over at Video Games Chronicle, had discussed, I guess, on a podcast that as he understands, Infamous is going to be returning in some way. I think he was actually on the Kind of Funny Gamecast, or at least he, no, he was on VGC's podcast first, And then he went to kind of funny, I think, to elaborate on it.

3:36:40Dustin Furman:So he says, I think on his own podcast, quote, he's under the impression that there isn't an infamous thing happening somewhere in PlayStation at the minute, end quote. And he goes on and talks about how it's probably, I think, on the kind of funny games cast then about how it's probably related to the older games, presumably infamous one and two from 2009 to 2011, both excellent, excellent sucker punch games. probably my favorite soccer punch games i would say um and actually a friend of the show radic was tweeting out some image some videos from infancy and i'm like god this game was good dude like videos of like the the dropping like the electric drop or whatever and all the rest i'm like this game was fun there are a couple things i want to add to this not that i have reporting but just that like um i i said i know jordan um i trust jordan i've talked to him extensively about many things behind the scenes over the years and he knows what he's talking about So it's someone that you can trust, in my opinion.

3:37:36Dustin Furman:I think he would know. So I wanted to throw that out there. The second thing is, is that I discovered a little something. No one really picked up the reporting and it's not maybe that interesting, but you'll remember that in 2022, we discussed how Sucker Punch posted a news article on their website about how there were no infamous or Sly Cooper games in development and basically implying that like there aren't going to be because we're not going to make it. and this was at the time that we were talking about how these studios of some repute have control more than others i went to i was like they said that right i went and looked it up it's deleted hmm she gone um i went on the way back machine to make sure and it's there on the way back machine says what it says what it says and all the rest so i think there's something here dustin infamous one and two hmm yeah a little remaster collection five i mean would you even just do a ps4 version of it but maybe you just do a ps5 yeah like some sort of collection plus a festival of blood as well the infamous 2 expansion i have sounds pretty tantalizing to me yeah i think that sounds great

3:38:48Colin Moriarty:i i think i played a little bit of infamous one this was so long ago you never played infamous

3:38:54Dustin Furman:infamous i played infamous the ps4 oh second son the the uh really dude those those are great games man like i was really i'm surprised by that i'm actually surprised by that i'm trying to remember

3:39:08Colin Moriarty:why i fell off of it i mean this was so long ago it's probably because prototype took your attention right yeah you're right it's prototype that got me but uh yeah so i love the idea of these games coming back and being modernized to some degree i'm curious if with that level of control that you were mentioning colin like is this something that sucker punch is like okay well we're done with yote maybe while we are really getting the next main project going do we have a team clean these up and it's a much quicker like in betweener yeah project right

3:39:47Dustin Furman:because nate people had noted nate fox who's the longtime creative director of sucker punch both of infamous and of ghost um he had said that they would be amenable to returning to the like to doing that i don't know if you remember that during the ghost of yote like media tour i wonder if it was an implication of what they were going to do um at the same time and i wonder what you think of this chris i don't really want sucker punch itself to be doing it it feels like a waste of time and i and i will say this as well i definitely don't want a new infamous game i am I am absolutely. I don't know.

3:40:19Dustin Furman:I am. I'm staunch about that. I don't know what people don't understand about. You already have your superhero games. You've chosen your lane. And by the way, Spider-Man and Spider-Man two and miles Morales and all the, and what we're going to see with Wolverine and all this, I'm there. They're all selling substantially more like in two months, Spider-Man probably sold as many copies as every infamous game combined. so it's not a why and i know they're different studios but you have your superhero game so go so i guess what i'm saying is i wonder if you agree with me this is a good idea have an external team do it you move on and i don't want you to do another ghost game either and i definitely

3:40:58Colin Moriarty:don't want you to do sly cooper make something new yeah i think well i i get it i i mean i'm torn because i don't think it's the best use of their resources but i think a new infamous game would slap but like i i do think you're right where it's like they have chosen a lane with their superhero with this type of game and it would it would be a little awkward to do and and arguably it would be better for them to just move on to something new uh from the ground up um that isn't ghost or infamous give them the chance to flex their muscles a little bit and something completely different um i don't know i i like infamous actually i i really like second

3:41:44Dustin Furman:son i like second son as well i think the first one i i think there it's a beautiful game and it runs great i think the uh the first two are better though in my opinion i yeah i don't i don't i don't

3:41:55Colin Moriarty:have as much experience with the first two to be fair like i played i played infamous one and two on a borrowed playstation in like 2012 maybe 11 um and i liked what i played but it was just it wasn't my console so it was just kind of like i would just dick around in it and i would i would i would just kind of move on to my my 360 where like i owned my stuff but second son i thought was like just that that the video like the type of powers that you use i just remember being like this is so creative and interesting and it's like it's way more interesting than just like lightning to me yeah I agree um and from that angle I just like I'm into this whatever this is but I do think it's kind of done I think the the biggest thing is just like getting those games playable again would be more than sufficient for me you know moving those forward getting them off the ps3 um I don't know if I need a new infamous game yeah the powers that be um have a decision

3:42:53Dustin Furman:to make here I think and they've already probably made their decision and some people would disagree and say like well infamous and spider-man and the marvel stuff don't occupy the same territory but i'm like no i think they do and in fact i think like infamous could kind of look silly next to what you're trying to do with the stuff so embrace we don't have good ps3 access infamous one and two are beloved cult games from the ps3 which a lot of people didn't have um they have no good way of playing them second son you're right is a is a is a great game with great powers like yeah concrete neon like it was cool it was a cool and neat approach to things um but yeah i don't want i don't want more infamous i mean would i be disappointed if sucker punch made it like a new infamous game not necessarily i would just be surprised it's like that's what you want to do you have to be so choosy these days you only have so many projects in your career and so much time you want to make another infamous to me that just i don't mean to diminish it it's just like it's how it's why i'm so indignant about like going back to sly cooper it's like you want to make a Sly Cooper.

3:43:55Dustin Furman:Come on, man. Like go spend four years and make something new. I will reiterate this. Sony has been very good about generally about knowing when to move on. And sometimes we feel like they move on too soon. And it doesn't mean that things can't stay alive forever so that you get them later. Like I think we're going to get more uncharted. But it's been dormant for 10 years. Doesn't really feel like it's too soon. Feels like it's appropriate. Now it would be a similar timing, actually even more so with Infamous because Infamous came out early 2014 on PS4. So there's been an exorbitant amount of time, but I think the situation has changed.

3:44:30Dustin Furman:We don't have an Uncharted, another Uncharted game. If that makes sense. We don't have an action adventure globetrotting indie series. So, and I mean indie, I-N-D-Y. All right. So we'll be monitoring that as well. Warhorse Studios on their social media page, War Horse, of course, being the studio behind the Kingdom Come Deliverance games. They announced interesting stuff here. There is no article or anything. They just say it on their Twitter account here. I'm looking at it. They're making two games. Of course, earlier this year, Kingdom Come... What was it? No, it was last year, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 came out, right?

3:45:12Dustin Furman:And then it was earlier this year that the first one came to PS5. That's what it was. And the original one, of course, came to PS4 in 2018. team beloved michael loves them beloved uh very accurate historical plotting deliberate role playing games that locks a big fan too so they're making two games they say the first is not so surprising a new kingdom come adventure i think that that makes some sense but they're also making an open world middle earth rpg dustin what do you think of that i think this sounds awesome

3:45:48Colin Moriarty:sounds like the team to do it i'm trying to remember because they're who was it that had like the lord of the rings license was it embracer which we're going to talk about shortly they own they own fellowship entertainment or whatever so so yeah this is a license presumably yeah so i am very interested in this i wonder what they're going to do like what time frame of the lord of the rings world they'll do this i think it'd be really cool to do something totally separate from the core lord of the rings you know frodo uh adventure of the ring that world is so rich in terms of the history of before and during uh the main events that we know from the three lord of the rings books of course there's like samarillion and all the different stuff that tolkien did so there's a lot of different ways they could go with it so i'm i'm very intrigued because lord of the rings has kind of been out of the spotlight in terms of video games for well I will say out of the spotlight for any good games for quite a while yeah so I I think it's

3:47:06Dustin Furman:awesome Chris are you interested in a kingdom come style Lord of the Ring game I guess some more grant I don't know what they're going to do with something presumably more grounded

3:47:14Colin Moriarty:yeah I mean I think it's I think it's a great idea I think it's interesting I think that is the team to do it I think yeah Lord of the Rings is weird because I feel like there's been so many return of the king i remember on the original xbox playing the shit out of it and i remember thinking that it was actually really good i haven't played it in forever so maybe it hasn't aged super well but i remember loving that game when i was a kid and thinking it was way better than it had any right to be lord of the rings conquest i was also like a big fan of that was the um pandemic uh built kind of battlefront lord of the rings game it was way that also was just way better than it had any right to be and so like i think lord of the rings has is a really flexible ip there's a lot you could do in video games that just hasn't really been done they've chosen instead to uh build i don't know fucking golem and that's it lord of rings you know but middle uh shadow of war though was was great and so like um they've done they've dabbled but things could be better and i think uh yeah that's a that's a great studio and a great idea have at it

3:48:21Dustin Furman:Pedro Alves gets a little bit into the potential of Lord of the Rings and all of this he says hey CCD with the announcement that War Horse is working on an open middle earth RPG are we finally getting a good Lord of the Rings game? YouTuber I finished a video game once did a 5 hour retrospective covering all the games based on Tolkien's books there were a few games here and there but overall the list was bleak since he made that video we've gotten the likes of Lord of Ring Gollum and Tales of the Shire a cozy life sim how come such a ubiquitous work with a unanimously loved trilogy of movies could perform so poorly in the gaming sphere it's my favorite work of fiction and yes i'm a big nerd who has been playing the wow clone mmo based on the lord of the rings since 2007 it's still going what are your expectations for this game is warhorse the right studio to bring some needed quality to this franchise could lord of the rings work in first person perspective i think there's multiple things i'm i consider myself a fan of the lord of the rings i i often say my dad is a mega fan of lord of the rings and was since the books came out before long before i was born and and all the spin you know all the like little spin-offs in the similarian and all whatever it's called similar similar really and I think it's called although like there's like so much there's so much more than I even knew plus the stuff Timmy Tolkien did when he died and and all the rest we haven't talked about Timmy Tolkien in a while Timmy Tolkien Timmy Tolkien so I think one of the things that Lord of the Rings is so iconic and so complete

3:49:46Dustin Furman:that it's hard to wedge your way in. On the other hand, the world is so alive and vibrant and full of story that it is hard to believe that you can't figure it out. And certain studios have figured it out. We've noted, and he's, I think, says the EA games back in the day were pretty well respected on PS2. And of course, the Shadow of Mordor games are people love those games and have like longed for those games to come back. So people have gotten it right in the past, but I just wonder like they're caught in between two things where you got to find the right story in the right angle. It's very similar to why it seems like that Amazon show just kind of failed.

3:50:24Dustin Furman:It doesn't, I mean, it's still on and I guess people like, but no one seems to like it. Where it's like, it just does, it's not right. It's not right. And you got to get it right. Now, I'm not going to be the one that really speaks on that. Michael would probably be much better than that for me, but it is. So on one hand, it is a little surprising. On the other hand, it's like, yeah, it's not that surprising. You're in Tolkien's world, dude. Who do you think you are? You know, like you really have to think about it in that lens sometimes. It's like you. You have you don't have the vision. His son didn't have the vision.

3:50:52Dustin Furman:He had the vision. He's long gone. So, of course, everything's going to be kind of different. Then you think about things like the Peter Jackson movies that are perfect. And so I don't know. I don't know.

3:51:03Colin Moriarty:Well, they're adding to those now to the hunt for Gollum. What is that? What? that's a new Lord of the Rings movie that's coming out. Um, is it being directed by Andy circus? I don't know. I'm trying to remember, but they're doing new Lord of the ring movie. And there's the Stephen Colbert Lord of the Rings movie. That's in production. Oh, that's right. Yeah.

3:51:30Dustin Furman:I remember that. Oh my God. That's so annoying that to be fair, he is apparently like a huge nerd with that shit. So maybe, yeah,

3:51:36Colin Moriarty:I remember seeing that and like rolling my eyes at it. And then I was, and then apparently like he's actually like i understand why they would pick somebody like that

3:51:45Dustin Furman:i just find him i find him supremely unlikable so but that's like that's a yeah i mean i mean i don't like him either really yeah that's but that's a problem he's going off the air by the way i think that the day after like he's done on cbs did you see him and uh letterman throwing the uh the furniture off the building yeah that's an old throwback to letterman show i used to love that shit yeah did you ever guys ever watch letterman when you were younger um very minimal very minimally I loved Letterman when I was younger and I liked Leno as well. But yeah, they would do a thing where they would go onto the roof of the CBS building and just throw shit off of it.

3:52:16Dustin Furman:So like, and I remember, I think they did one with bouncy balls, but they like did like they did one with like thousands of bottles and like all like, I think they did one with like pinball machines and weird shit. And so I thought that was a, I loved, I used to think Letterman was like the funniest man. I mean, Colbert is a fucking shadow of a shadow of a shadow of a shadow of Letterman and Leno, not even fucking fit to be in that seat so that's another thing yeah i mean all of them compared to conan i think are pretty weak yeah conan for letterman yeah letterman i liked leno when i was i like actually when i was younger i liked leno a lot and then i went to letterman when you know my teen years like in high school and college and stayed there but i realized what i liked about leno it's just very approachable it's very friendly it's silly um i dug that and of course carson is the great you know the greatest but um but i was i was 10 when carson went away i i don't remember that very well i watched so many and chris and i i think have reflected on this i've watched so many of his clips though over the years and how much of a master he is at at the art of staying out of people's way or feeding them like when he has rodney dangerfield on and yeah and rodney be like oh i'll tell you johnny my wife and he's like he's like well what's about what's going on with your wife uh rodney you know that kind of thing and i'm like yeah it's just so it's just so good he just knows he was he was great yeah but he is like colbert is like weirdly like

3:53:40Colin Moriarty:i don't he's like he he has like the simarillion like in his in his head somehow like i don't know i don't know how it's but so it makes sense to me on some level yeah whatever i mean do we got to do

3:53:49Dustin Furman:he'll have plenty of time yeah all right um we can go through this one quickly this is a pretty big story but i don't know that we have much to say about it embracer group and i promised we to bring this up earlier, is separating themselves into two publicly listed companies. And this is planned for calendar year 2027. So they're working on this right now. We don't have to get into all the business realities. In fact, Lars Wingsford, who you guys might remember, was the longtime CEO and shepherd of Embracer Group, who's now the chairman of the board. He was kind of the one that was overseeing the company when it was mega expansion heavy and then started to kind of fall apart.

3:54:28Dustin Furman:so they say the strategic rationale quote increase management focus to capture the full potential of the valuable or strategic assets and ips within the group enable fellowship entertainment which we brought up earlier to accelerate the formation of a group of world-class studios with leading publishing and licensing capabilities and allow embrace or more flexibility to pursue a creative but opportunistic bolt-on mna oh god you guys are so stupid especially to strengthen it's already successful and sizable niches in for example mobile distribution retro films remakes and masters. I can't believe they're even using that term after what they did.

3:54:59Dustin Furman:But here's what the structure of the two companies will be. Fellowship Entertainment, quote, aims to become an IP led entertainment company built for growth and enduring momentum with some of the world's most beloved franchises at the center as its stewards of the Lord of the Rings and Tomb Raider intellectual properties. As a standalone company, Fellowship Entertainment will have a better structure to maximize the potential of its highly strategic franchises. Fellowship Entertainment will be the home of critically acclaimed studios and companies for a games so that's the metro series guys crystal dynamics of course the tomb raider studio damn buster those are the guys that do uh that did dead island 2 dark horse of course the longtime comic company idos montreal that's like the deus ex studio fish labs is a uh like a production studio internal production studio flying wild hog we know all about them they lasted evil west gunfire games is the studio that did um um uh why can't i think of it chorus i want to say and they do a bigger game remnant that's their big game and then middle earth enterprises we know red octane is a is used to be a music studio but they do other stuff now and warhorse is one of those studios so actually that's an interesting point it's not really a license warhorse is owned i forgot about that embracer bought bought war warhorse so that's not even a license which is great for them because they don't have to split the money um and so those are the studios and the ip that they'll be overseeing include darksiders that's the other one um gunfire to darksiders two and three darksiders dead island kingdom come deliverance metro remnant the hobbit the lord of the rings tomb raider and many more fellowship entertainment will report through two business areas development and publishing and licensing licensing will focus on dedicated ip management aiming to transform franchise ownership into the recurring revenue streams across game, film, consumer products, and additional areas.

3:56:42Dustin Furman:I mean, that sounds good to me. This is where I think it's becoming a Ubisoft-like thing. I remember when Ubisoft split into five houses, I was saying they're basically trying to isolate the things that are valuable from the things that aren't. And they can easily sync the group that isn't maybe necessarily as valuable to save the rest of the company. I don't know that that's necessarily what's happening here. I don't think that's what their intention is right away, but I think it gives, in other words, it segments them from their risk and they can pursue two different courses, but one of them is clearly the better course.

3:57:11Dustin Furman:It says, quote, Embracer will be a natural home for proven entrepreneurs and creative talents supported by a more efficient structure with enhanced governance, tighter cost control and disciplined capital allocation. This will be combined with optionally optionality from structural initiatives, including a continued focus on profitability and M &A to drive shareholder value. I just, what is wrong with these guys? Like, what do they, what do they not understand about what happened to them? Anyway, the studio will include the following or the company will include the following teams, Aspire, Beamdog, Crazy Labs, Deca, Demiurge, DPI, Limited Run, Milestone, PlayOn, THQ Nordic, which is all their studios and subsidiaries.

3:57:56Dustin Furman:There are 35 of them. Tripwire and Vertigo games. Intellectual properties include owned IP such as Arizona Sunshine, Biomutant, Destroy All Humans, Desperados, Gothic, Killing Floor, Kingdoms of Amalur, MX vs. ATV, Re-Animal, Ride, Screamer, Titan Quest, Wreckfest, and many more IP, as well as licenses such as Hot Wheels Unleashed and SpongeBob SquarePants. Embracer operations will report through four business areas, PC and console, mobile, entertainment and services, and other so i mean that's not a bad group of studios nor ip but it's clear which one is the is the important one and which one isn't dustin you have anything you want to add i don't think so uh i'm mostly interested in them and the the lord of the rings stuff that

3:58:38Colin Moriarty:was connected earlier but well right and what's interesting about what wasn't it they acquired the lord of the rings license at some point where was it nakon no it was someone else published the

3:58:50Dustin Furman:shot. Well, no, they published Shire. The Gollum game, I think, was outside of Embracer, right? That was Datalic.

3:58:56Colin Moriarty:Right.

3:58:57Dustin Furman:So I think so now it's kind of like you got to give them a chance, I think, to see what they can do because they haven't really done it yet. Yeah. And they and to Embracer's credit, they have released really good games, like not all of them, but they've released some great games. No doubt. Dead Island was awesome. Yeah. I just don't understand this this obsession with M &A. Have you seen interest rates? dude i saw mortgage rates are like at six and a half percent like now is not the time lars chris do you have any uh anything you'd like to add

3:59:28Colin Moriarty:i mean i'm looking at the the business stuff like this is always like all right we'll see how this shakes up you know like i don't really know what to make of any of this it like you said it is clear like which one is the prime focus and which one is kind of like uh the b team so to speak but I don't know man like it's selfishly like personally I'm kind of more interested in the weird in the weird B stuff than I am in like I mean Tomb Raider I like and you know Lord of the Rings obviously cool Metro obviously but I don't know man I like me some destroy humans yeah yeah

4:00:01Dustin Furman:they use the terminology to that to that point Chris and this will please you they use the term with with what will become the new embracer is a slash double a so they're not even trying to make triple A games, which I think is good. I think it's like being at a table in Vegas, though, and you'll just spin out if you don't make big bets. You can't really sit there forever and play$100 hands. At some point, you've got to play$1 ,000 hand. Not that I would do any of that kind of stuff. I'm just saying, you want to win big, you've got to bet big. If you want to release a$20 million double A game, then I understand you'll make$40 million and that's cool.

4:00:37Dustin Furman:Yeah. yeah so and there are other IPs so if you guys I put another link in there we won't really get into it but Lars Wingford released a letter to the like an open letter to the board or from the board it's it's really interesting because he goes into a lot of shit that they don't get into in the in the announcement but they they really he goes into it they own so much shit dude Saints Row Legacy of Kane Deus Ex Red Faction Thief Time Splitters you know like more than they even own the mask which is kind of weird so that's very odd they've gone and bought like obviously they got tomb raider from square and they um a lot of other things from other people and obviously their absorption of deep silver gave them access to like home front dead island which they've already exploited there's just a lot of promise here i just think that they're too big it's what we identified when they weren't there like 130 teams at one point it's like the reality is is that like you really can't operate like this not only is it it's an interesting idea but you're just going to compete with each other.

4:01:34Dustin Furman:You're going to be releasing games like every other week. You know, like you can't, you can't do that. I mean, realistically, 35 teams taking five years each. No, not even that. 35 teams taking three years each.

4:01:51Dustin Furman:You have a game like every three and a half weeks or something. I don't know how that works for you. Again, this is a Square Enix problem. So good. It's good that they're talking about M &A. They've learned their lesson, it seems. Finally, Serkana data for sales, obviously from Matt Piscitello over on Blue Sky, who is an analyst at Serkana. Now, there is an important before we get into the numbers, there is an important point here because the numbers are fundamentally different now. Phil wrote in about this and said, hey, Colin and crew, what are your thoughts on Serkana of changing their publicly available monthly sales charts to a projected top 10 list.

4:02:23Dustin Furman:It is somewhat timely considering your hilarious discourse with one smash JT a few months back regarding games that are missing from the charts. I'm of two minds about it. I think overall, I preferred having a list using real hard data with the understanding that some publishers and self-published devs do not share. That said, as the world of publishing and self-publishing blurs and true indie games are selling millions of copies, I can understand why they would have wanted to adopt their formula. So it is true. If you look now, it says includes digital sales projections. This is the first time as I understand that Serkana or NPD, as it used to be called back in the day, has ever had projections.

4:02:59Dustin Furman:At the very least, you would have incomplete data that didn't that didn't incomplete data, let's say that didn't give you the full picture, but didn't obscure what was true. Right. So a Nintendo product, for instance, it would say very clearly doesn't include digital copies. And you would understand that there's no way, for instance, that Pokemon could have been the second or third bestselling game. It must have been the first, but they just can't say that. On the other hand, the projections could be valuable in that

4:03:33Dustin Furman:what is their methodology? That's the big thing. They know the numbers. Maybe they have an insane level of methodology that is pretty accurate, but I'm not crazy about it, to be honest. With that said, here are the sales numbers for the month, April 2026. The period, by the way, of reporting is April 5th through May 2nd. This is important because we kept saying that Saros would only be counted for one day, but it was actually counted for three. On that chart, Saros was the ninth bestselling game of the month in the United States, which is not great, but not bad. Number one was Tamodachi Life, Living the Dream with Projections.

4:04:16Dustin Furman:And Mike is obsessed with that game, so that's not a huge surprise. Pragmata, number two, we know that that game's already sold a few million copies. Crimson Desert is number three, falling from number one. MLB The Show 26 is number four. Windrose, which would have otherwise not been shared with its sales data because Kraken doesn't share its data with Serkana necessarily. That's number five. Pocopia is six. Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Galaxy 2 is seven. Starfield, based on its release on PS5, is eight, up from 218th the month before. Saros at number nine, and then Mario Kart World at 10.

4:04:53Dustin Furman:I think what we're going to learn based on these projections is that Nintendo is going to be much more present now because they were kind of unfairly treated. And I don't know why they want to do that to themselves. It's especially weird because they are the most transparent with their numbers. That was the thing that always made me confuse me. Anyone who's ever read their financials knows you they talk about their numbers constantly. And you can go to their website right now and they are like, you can go in and see like how much the fucking balloon fight sell. It's just weird. Like, it's weird that they're like, yeah, but we're not going to say.

4:05:20Dustin Furman:it's like you look like a dominant company when you do shit like this so that's the way it looks year to date requiem is the best-selling game of the year in the united states followed by crimson desert with mlb the show from san diego studio at number three arc raiders by the way is number eight on that list which is especially interesting because it is based again on revenue and that is a 40 game uh let's see playstation 5 hardware spending is down year over year 30 percent. Not a huge surprise there. And PlayStation five came in second. It was bumped out of the first spot in both revenue and units sold.

4:05:56Dustin Furman:The revenue number is less interesting because the PS five is so much more expensive than the switch to at this point. PlayStation five's lifetime installed base is tracking 2 % ahead of PlayStation four in the United States. So that's pretty interesting. And that is not adjusted for money that is installed base. And I think there might be some other interesting stuff here let me see i guess that's basically it i don't think he he usually shares yeah he didn't do it this month he usually shares platform by platform numbers but he didn't do that this month uh anything here stick out to you the thing that sticks out to

4:06:32Colin Moriarty:me which is not playstation related is just how dominant tomodachi life living the dream is i knew this game was very big i'm starting to realize it's very very big and it's funny because it's it's kind of a game that would be a mark for me but I played some of the 3DS version and I didn't love it I played some of the demo and I was like maybe but clearly it's a bit of a phenomenon for the Switch and Switch 2 audience it's only a Switch 1 game which is what's interesting so people are playing it Switch 1 game on their Switch 2 so I want to check it out at some point but I'm not sure if I'll like it

4:07:16Dustin Furman:all right uh that's it for the news we can get into what we're playing now do you guys want to take another break or you want to just roll i'm good to roll all right let's get into what we're playing i don't have too much to say uh i platinumed mouse pi that's my 209th platinum that would have almost been my last one uh and uh so that i got that out of the way that was a little frustrating because the trophies were broken for a while but it was a pleasure to go back into the game and play you know play through a lot of it again it's it's so good i i highly highly recommend it$30 is a fucking steal for that game it's just so beautiful and then I started pragmata as we know on the stream ironically getting hacked during it I am not very far in it it says I'm 25 % through the game on PSN that seems incredible since I played it for like two hours it's like how short is this game I just don't know if that's actually accurate but I really like it I'm like really impressed by it it's really good it's so novel and fresh and I think it's beautiful it's It's fun to play.

4:08:15Dustin Furman:The environments are interesting. The characters are interesting. The characterization, incredibly Japanese. You know what I really love is the start screen of them sitting together.

4:08:25Colin Moriarty:It is a good screen.

4:08:26Dustin Furman:Yeah, I'm really quite enamored with it. So that's what I'm playing. Chris, it says you're playing Saros. Anything you'd like to say about it?

4:08:34Colin Moriarty:I'm at the very end. I'm pretty sure I'm at the last boss. Hitting a bit of a wall because I'm very stubborn in the weapons that I use. i know that there are uh probably damage like weapons that do more damage or whatever but like the game's like i don't know the game's kind of easy in a lot of ways so like i'm trying to give myself i want to beat it with specific weapons just to make it a little bit harder so like i mean not much to say i'm still kind of hammering away at that last boss i like it still i don't know what's going on but like i like it i think i get what's going on yeah it is a little bit

4:09:10Dustin Furman:I got it like I want to sit with that's why we're not going to record this week we were going to record tomorrow actually I lost like two and a half days this week so I'm just like totally behind on everything but I need to sit with it's like what we did with control I need to sit and really yeah read the end game shit and like really understand it because that's not what I'm really playing for and I think that's that's part of what Saros makes Saros suffer for me is like the story and the ambience are cool but it's really about the gameplay and it's too much in my opinion you know it's a lot yeah but uh I mean I like it still I'm I'm I like the boss

4:09:40Colin Moriarty:I like the boss encounters a lot. I think they're really fun. I think they're really beautiful. I think there's like a big spectacle aspect to them. That's like really, really enthralling to take part in. But not much else. I should be done with it within the next like two or three days. I would imagine.

4:10:01Dustin Furman:Dustin, marathon.

4:10:02Colin Moriarty:Yes.

4:10:03Dustin Furman:Big news.

4:10:04Colin Moriarty:Chris and I early on said that we wouldn't talk about our marathon playing unless there were major updates. And while there hasn't been a major update to the game, there's been a major update to my progress in that on Saturday, I completed the compiler, the final boss of Marathon. And it was really hard. It was so fucking hard to do this. It is one of the hardest things I have ever done. And I'm not even necessarily saying the boss itself, which once you know what you're doing like once we got it down the fight that we did it wasn't that bad it's actually pretty trivial now the three fights before that while we were figuring it out uh he he totally creamed us multiple times like it was bad uh so my the take that i wanted to put out there about marathon now that so i've played it a little bit since then a few hours but my steam player time is 212 hours and my take is it's if you the compiler fight is too hard it takes too much investment to get to it you're saying to get to it the process i would agree here's why i say that i have no problem with there being end game content that is very very hard and hard to achieve.

4:11:35Colin Moriarty:But as I'm looking at Marathon on my Steam account, or if you bring it up on PlayStation, the image I see is literally the compiler. It is the aspirational content is to go and fight this guy. And it's also, I mean, I'm not a super big lore head necessarily, but in talking to Pork Poncho, it's like it's a key part of the seasonal story is beating the compiler. And I just think that while I want crazy hard aspirational content, I think that specific fight should be easier to do. And they are changing some things. And by I say easier, I don't want people to immediately zone out. But like you have to do all six vaults.

4:12:24Colin Moriarty:In order to do those vaults, you need to find keys. The vault six key in particular, I have seen in my 200 hours. I have picked up one of them. Pork somehow managed to get two of them and we stole one from a team, but that's how fucking rare these keys are. And at least one person on your team has need to have done all six. And maybe that makes it a little easier, but it's like, I'm not doing it that way. Right. I, I want to have done all six of us, which I did. Yeah. But then like the merit, the, the compiler fight itself, you need to have this thing called a DNA access card. and if you've done all six vaults you've probably gathered up some of them to do to do that which we did if some people saw our stream i think poncho had like eight of them uh we burned through all eight on that stream so in order to get more of them go back to running vaults uh to get more of those dnaxas cards and there's no guarantee that you'll get one in some of the earlier easier vaults and the harder vaults maybe you'll get one but again you're in the cryo archive which is infamously known as the lose everything factory so uh yeah as someone who has done it i think it is it requires too much investment and it's probably i mean that's been the ongoing conversation about marathon is like is it too hardcore and they've already announced like some of the season two stuff like a PVE mode is coming and we've talked a little bit about that and that's all exciting um but with all that said I loved it I loved every second of it I'm glad well I shouldn't say I loved every second of it that's not true I didn't love every second of it but I'm glad I did it it felt like a huge accomplishment and marathon is so exciting from seeing what they're going to do with it going forward because i think i don't say a major pivot is happening but certainly it's going places they did not expect uh because of how people have received it so yeah that's the marathon update i can take it easy on the game for a couple weeks i'll still be playing here and there but uh that was it was very important for me to finish that before season two began yeah I'm gonna try and do it like I still dude I'm two I have 300 hours in this game technically between between my time and in the alphas play tests and playstation and pc it's just like it's I still have not even come close I don't think I've done this the sixth vault either so like I'm there's no reason why I shouldn't have seen this by now like it's kind of it's kind of crazy and I do think that's insane like they could they could they could tune that a little bit more so it's like it should be a hard fight and it should be hard to do but it shouldn't be like brother I'm I got 200 some 250 plus hours into this and I'm not even close yeah what are we what are we doing yeah and I feel like it's one of those things I think that I feel confident well I don't want to say I feel confident I could do it again they've already changed things like I think DNA access cards can now appear on like outpost so that's helpful but it's like part of our problem when we streamed on fridays we were playing at 1 p.m on a friday and it was with the absolute sweatiest players i've ever played with ever so we only had success when we did it on a saturday night where the player pool was much larger so that's also i mean a probably a problem they did not expect or we're not hoping to have yeah we're hoping to avoid yeah i uh they did update it there's a lot of new stuff in the game now that is actually really cool but the big thing is going to be June 5th so I'll save anything that I have to say about Marathon until then but I'm still playing way more than I should

4:16:25Dustin Furman:alright that's what we're playing let's get into some six questions, comments, concerns, thoughts and ideas from the audience, some of these comments we've already heard from you a bunch throughout the show but we'll read six more of these of course you can support us on Patreon, patreon.com slash last day media to get your inquiries onto the show You submit them via the post on the news feed each week for this show and all the other shows. Our threads go live on Wednesdays and are deleted on Thursdays. So you have about 24 hours. Turd Ferguson wrote in and said, hey, CDC. So Shuhei Yoshida posted a photo of himself at PlayStation Japan HQ this week.

4:16:55Dustin Furman:What could this mean? With the Sony Japan brass back in charge of SIE, could a Shuhei return be possible? This could be the video game version of Michael Jordan returning to the NBA after a two-year stint playing baseball. this would easily become the most popular decision PlayStation has made in the past 10 years if they brought Shuhei back Jaffe and I talked about this like that would be an awesome move I really just don't think he's interested now I would love to be wrong I just think he's older he's made an enormous amount of money and it's a lot you know then again his kids are older he you know like maybe dude I think that would be so sick I just don't think that that's really going to happen it probably didn't mean anything at all and I'm sure he knows a lot of people there and he can probably go visit whenever he wants but I don't think he's coming back anytime soon or ever.

4:17:44Dustin Furman:Do you think otherwise?

4:17:46Colin Moriarty:You said exactly what I was thinking that I don't think it's worth overanalyzing the photo there. But it's a fun, it's a nice dream.

4:17:56Dustin Furman:It would be, I would, I don't usually like dreamy sort of things like that where it's like, dude, this crazy thing but I'm like actually that would be awesome yeah but but uh I don't I don't think so I don't think so especially because like why would he go back to help in some way it's like you threw me

4:18:14Colin Moriarty:out so yeah maybe they went in and they they cloned his brain into an AI and they'll just use

4:18:21Dustin Furman:that we're gonna have uh Mark Cerny coming out in a shoe a skin suit right we've built this

4:18:29Colin Moriarty:realistic Shuhei Yoshida.

4:18:34Dustin Furman:Squint Eastwood wrote in and said, howdy, fellas. Sorry for the long write-in, but hoped you might find it thought-provoking. In a previous episode, you discussed the PSN digital game settlement largely through the lens of consumer choice, but I think there's another angle that may be more important, vendor choice. Currently, Sony prohibits publishers and developers from selling PS5 digital games through third-party retailers using game keys. That means developers and publishers are effectively forced to sell digital copies exclusively through the PSN rather than choosing alternative marketplaces.

4:19:01Dustin Furman:It's like if Sony operated a physical store but also prohibited publishers from selling physical copies of their games through places like GameStop or Walmart. It's less a consumer choice issue and more Sony restricting where vendors are allowed to sell their products. Sony would still receive its standard platform royalty either way, so preventing other digital storefronts or key resellers doesn't seem necessary to preserve their revenue share. It feels more like control over the marketplace itself. By allowing publishers and developers to sell digital copies through other retailers, those sales could happen at wholesale prices creating actual retail competition between storefronts that can naturally lead to better pricing and promotions for consumers without cutting Sony out of its platform fee.

4:19:34Dustin Furman:I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on whether framing the issue around vendor restriction changes the conversation. I don't know if you guys agree, but I don't quite follow the argument in that there has to be a, in this particular situation, you would have to have a cache, and I mean C-A-C-H-E of games that you would buy from Sony and then sell however you wanted?

4:20:05If what you're saying is Sony wouldn't suffer under that situation, and it's like, yes,

4:20:10Dustin Furman:they would. Now, whether or not you give a shit about that is another example, but it's like, well, the game at$70, they get 30 % of it. Now, if what you're saying is could the company buy 10 ,000 digital sale, like digital copies with alphanumeric codes to retrieve them, paying Sony their 30 % on the$70 and then selling them for whatever they want? Because that's different. And I could give a shit less about that. But that isn't the way it works. The codes manufactured, first of all, are always free or they're put on placards or whatever that would go inside a physical edition of a game um you you know obviously when you're buying cards and stuff that's different when you were able to buy a la carte digital copies of the games but i'm not sure i really understand your argument because this the the marketplace isn't disallowing anyone from selling their games elsewhere and that's not what sony's doing you can sell your game however you want on any other platform i just sold a game on every platform available so does this track for you Dustin I don't really quite understand the argument but I know you're more in this space and I wonder if maybe I'm misunderstanding it I wish I knew more about how

4:21:23Colin Moriarty:this works specifically when I think about a site like Steam where it's like you you really have three options to buy a game on Steam in that you can buy it directly from them you can buy it through a third party party site something like Green Man Gaming sells Steam keys and these are totally legit, normal Steam keys. And then there's kind of more of a gray market, something like G2A or CD keys or something where oftentimes those codes are cheaper through to my understanding, like regional pricing variations. So it's like on one of those sites, you'd buy like a worldwide key that is a lower price because it's not intended for the US market or something.

4:22:11Colin Moriarty:And that's a bit of a gray area. So but focusing in on a site like Green Man Gaming, I don't know how their business model works or how they buy games from Steam. What's the Steam cut on those? I am really not sure. So in terms of what Squint here is proposing, I don't know. I do think that in terms of like selling the digital games on cards in stores, I mean, we already discussed that. Then like, yeah, I think that was an important marketplace for them to be a part of. But Sony wants to be the only place that you go to buy digital games. They want to have that level of control as pointed out.

4:23:02Colin Moriarty:So that's why they did it.

4:23:03Dustin Furman:But doesn't it make sense that they do? I mean, from more than a capitalistic point of view. Like they lose all of the control at that point, don't they? Because if you are. What you're saying, like what I think what he's saying and I think what you're saying is, is like these third parties can sell the game at any price and Sony would be forced into 30 percent of the price chosen outside of their walls. And that to me doesn't wash like that doesn't actually make sense. That's why I was saying like with the steam codes, for instance, that are on that green man game or whatever. I wonder what those are.

4:23:36Dustin Furman:You know what I mean? like are they are they purchased wholesale at a discount and then steam still gets the cut of the original price because otherwise why would they allow that it doesn't really make any sense he uses as an analogy of of um it's kind of funny because he's using the analogy of like it would be like them not allowing game stop or walmart to sell games and i'm like no it's not It would be like going into GameStop and trying to buy it through PlayStation Network. It's like these are two different places, you know? And so I wonder if it is, I wonder, in other words, Dustin, say the game's$50, right?

4:24:21Dustin Furman:So 30 % of 50 is 15, right? So the cut of your game would be$15 gross for Sony. would Sony sell all of the codes so again sell you 10 10 say like I want to buy 10 ,000 codes we'll pay you 15 for each of them then like whatever happens you're unaffected you made your money then we sell them for whatever we want and we cut into our own margin that to me is different but I don't know exactly how that works and I've always been kind of been confused about that because it's like compelling it's like compelling them to take whatever price you want but i'm like that's not what walmart does you know what i mean there it's more complicated than this i think what do you think chris i really i'm kind of in the same boat as you guys where it's just

4:25:13Colin Moriarty:like i i just this has always been an avenue of game purchasing that i've just i've never really interacted with because it just seemed so slapdash and like kind of like I just didn't really understand it I like why would I why would I get a digital key from anywhere but the place that I'm shopping like why yeah exactly I just never it just seemed like an extra step to me which like for me I've my my value is what I value is is the convenience you know like if if if I can avoid another click through or another sign into a separate thing, I I'll do it. So like, to me, it's just like, it never really made sense to go to those other, but even though it's like, Oh, it's$5 off.

4:25:59Colin Moriarty:It's just like, that's okay. This is my, my$5. I'm spending in time and convenience by like not having to deal with any of that. Right. Like it's just, it's just truthfully for, for me, it's just never been, it's just never been a fax. It's so like green man gaming, all these other places. Like I have literally zero experience. I think I might've gotten a game key code on Amazon a long ass time ago. And I don't even remember why I did it. I think I was just like curious about it and it worked, but I just remember being like, Oh, this really is really, it's just kind of an extra step. I don't really, I just never did it again.

4:26:38Colin Moriarty:I can't even remember what I bought. I wonder if I could probably find it in my history, but, but I, yeah, Yeah, it's just never been a thing for me. So like, I don't even know the intricacies of like what he's talking about necessarily. I've just got no insight at all into that space. I have some more info about the Steam keys that is quite surprising to me. And actually the person that really that would know is Ben about this stuff. I'm reading from a Steam community post, but I'm verifying the information through actual like Steamworks documentation. And I believe that it is true. It says, Valve simply does not take any cut from keys that are sold outside of Steam.

4:27:17Colin Moriarty:Sites like Greenman Gaming buys directly from publishers generating keys through their Steamworks developer interface, which subsequently allows lowering the prices. Publishers make a better margin. And I looked. Okay, this is from the Steamworks documentation. Steam keys are single-use, unique alphanumeric codes that customers can activate on Steam to add a product license to their account. steam keys are a free service we provide to developers as a convenient tool to help you sell your game on other stores and at retail or provide for free beta testers or press slash

4:27:52Dustin Furman:influence yeah i don't get it i don't understand what they get out of that a good a lot of good will certainly but i don't blame companies for not wanting to do that that's nonsense squints yeah so so to follow squints like for example it's like no it would be like going into walmart getting something and not paying walmart it's like what like you came into our store you bought it from our shelves it exists in our ecosystem and then you just bought it from someone else that's insane i don't i don't believe i'm sorry i don't blame sony for that like i i don't really blame them even for taking it's what chris was saying it's like you know when you go into target and you see all the switch games or the xbox games and they're like with the you know on the shelf and the cards or whatever and it's like well why would sony want to do that it's what it's what chris said it's like just go buy the game on psn you don't need

4:28:41Colin Moriarty:a code yeah so it doesn't make any sense so out of curiosity i went back and i looked and i found it i found it on october in october of 2019 i bought a ps4 digital code for destiny 2 shadow keep interesting don't know it's my only game purchase on amazon that's and that was the year

4:29:00Dustin Furman:that they stopped doing it i think right um although you probably did that for pc oh no you would have played that on console right yeah it was ps4 maybe you had a gift card

4:29:11Colin Moriarty:maybe something maybe maybe i bought it for a you know what maybe i bought it for a friend of mine i could i could have seen back in that back in those days i was just trying to get everybody in but uh i don't remember the context of it but it's forever ago but it's funny it's interesting but that's amazon you know like i don't i've never i've never done like the other the key sites it's

4:29:31Dustin Furman:incredibly cool and pro-consumer that they do that i just think that that's kind of suicidal like it's well clearly it hasn't been for steam but they don't have the they don't have the fixed cost that everyone else does either it to be fair they're choosing to get into hardware but they don't have to there's 300 people or something that work there that's the size of one of sony's teams you know um so i just think it's they can play a different game it doesn't really matter that they're in i mean they are working the capitalist system to the nth degree which is great they make enormous amounts of money their headcount is really low their fixed costs are low and they can just do whatever they want and they do and everyone else has to kind of deal with it but that's the nature.

4:30:15Dustin Furman:It reminds me of the race to the bottom that Apple employed with mobile game pricing. It's like, yeah, unfortunately, this is the kind of what has to happen. Like this is a member of the market and it's the same thing. So I think it's cool. It's certainly undeniably pro-consumer and incredibly friendly, but I don't blame the companies for saying we don't really want to do that. We can't or we literally can't afford to do that because imagine this, Dustin, like they don't take a cut of it. Say I did that for Saint Slayer and I'm like buy Saint Slayer for$10 on Steam or buy it from us for$5 and go play it on Steam now we all make less money doing that but they make nothing and I don't know what I just it's

4:30:58Colin Moriarty:unfathomable to me I don't get that yeah well there are there is documentation in here like Steam keys should not be given away for free if you aren't offering uh also offering the same deal it's okay to run a discount for steam keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to steam customers within a reasonable amount of time so there are rules there are strings attached to these in order to protect themselves from like us selling saint slayer codes for steam for five dollars instead of ten or something in perpetuity levi bordet wrote in said greetings from a dejected sabers fan

4:31:39Dustin Furman:a few years ago. I'm sorry for your loss, by the way, we were rooting for you. A few years ago, it seemed the industry couldn't go more than a month without some sort of studio acquisition or consolidation. Recently, however, it seems like the acquisitions have almost entirely stopped or become less high profile. What do you think is the cause of this? It's funny because we brought this up during the embracer thing and I didn't even think of this question, but there's multiple reasons for it. Money is not cheap anymore. If you're leveraging in some way with borrowed money, it's kind of nice and even free and even discounted to do it with borrowed money if rates are really low because inflation could even erode away that interest rate and you will get a better price long term on an item that you think could last, you know, a studio, for instance, that you'd want to buy.

4:32:27Dustin Furman:Money is no longer cheap so that and it hasn't been for a while. So that's one major part of it. The second major part of that is COVID is long done. And this, it really, we've, we were reflected on this many times in the past, but like the amount of buy-in around the industry on how this, this burgeoning of game interest was going to be permanent was so miscalculating and just off base. And I think a lot of purchases and a lot of consolidation happened on the back of that too. That's the kind of stuff that also drove up costs. That's why Bungie costs so much. Because a lot of people were interested.

4:33:05Dustin Furman:The rumor was that Microsoft was interested. So there's that as well. And then I think the third reason why M &A has stopped is because I think people realize that games take so long now to make that it's probably safer to be in a licensed second party agreement as a publisher with a developer than have to buy the cow and then incur the cost of the cow. And this is what I keep saying. As games take longer and longer to make, I said this actually in the Alyssa Mercante interview, reiterating my stance that games should be made more like movies in the AAA space. It's like, it's kind of unrealistic to expect these people to pay.

4:33:38Dustin Furman:Like, yeah, we have to pay our writers, even though there's really nothing for them. Like, I guess they can kind of dawdle around or we have animators on staff that we need to do this and that. Like, there are high costs involved in buying these whole teams games that are soup to nuts operations. In other words, you don't need to go outside necessarily to get help. They do everything. It's expensive. You don't want to buy that. I've been saying this over and over again. You make deliberate organic acquisitions and that's it. And I would also make the argument as I've been making the last few weeks that you can even make an argument that Sony's first party might be too big at this point because they can't manage all of them effectively.

4:34:13Dustin Furman:And you really want to invest in expensive AAA games. So maybe you want one from maybe you have eight studios or 10 studios that release a game every four or five years with a cadence of one per two quarters. So I don't know if that makes sense. I don't have anything you want to say, but that's where I feel like that's what I think has slowed things down materially. And it's almost in that order, I think, too. The cheapness of the money, the necessity of consolidation based on trends, and then the idea of having to pay for all of it. I would imagine Sony is majorly spooked about M &A. I don't think that they, I don't think they've acquired their last team by any stretch of the imagination.

4:34:54Dustin Furman:I am very curious when they will do it again. Remember, there were years in between the closures after Vita until they bought teams again because they got scared when they had to close Evolution and Zipper and Liverpool and so on and so forth. So I don't think they've purchased their last team, but I wonder where their heads are at. and by the way, Sony's shut down other things too. What was that thing they had? It was like an animation thing that they shut down recently too. That was like a huge deal, apparently, that they had acquired. Oh. Mondo something or Picto something. I don't know what the fuck it's called.

4:35:29Dustin Furman:Oh, yeah. Anyway, Billy, but not so talented, wrote in and said, sup fellas, it seems like PlayStation will soon start showing player analytics for specific games just like Steam does. I see a lot of people talking about the loser grifters who will use it for hate, but I think more data is always good. Fuck the haters. they'll hate regardless. Do you think PlayStation will take more features from Steam? I'd like to see both the discovery feature for game curation and the ability to ignore games to make searching for new stuff easier. It is my hope that like PS6 is going to be a highly consolidated, we used that word before, but like a very consolidated offering wherein you don't really have to leave it.

4:36:04Dustin Furman:And that is what Steam is. I said that when we really got, became engaged with Steam with Saintslayer in particular, that I was even more surprised by the robustness of the tool set. your forums your game help the ability to just communicate directly reviewing all everything is on there media in terms of screenshots and videos people being able to share things there needs to be a cogent object like that around every game on psm and maybe ps6 will have that i don't know i would like so i'd also like to see them wholesale steal from steam as well chris what do you think about this i don't did you see that they're starting to play around with the numbers the player numbers on PSN specifically for the top 10 games.

4:36:45Dustin Furman:And it's based not on concurrence, but on monthly or I'm sorry, on weekly players. It's pretty interesting.

4:36:52Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I don't I don't really know how I feel about it. I think it could be interesting. It's it really is unfortunate that so much of it's unfortunate that so many cool tools are viewed through the lens of how they might be abused. I get why but I don't know I think more transparency is cool I think more transparency is good and interesting for the people who are good faith enough to really care about it and so like I don't know if people are weird about it online I mean that's just that is how it is I guess I do think they might be opening themselves up to shit that they really don't need to but I also think that's cool like it's cool that they would so I don't really mind it what do you think Dustin I have no idea why they would do this because as Chris was saying like when it's like oh horizon hunters gathering isn't look at how the the player numbers dropped off from last week to this week it's like why you're opening yourself up to that but um I think it's neat to see the info so I don't really have much to say that Chris didn't say it's it was it was surprising to see that from my perspective i'm not i'm really curious what the what the thought process is and like oh this would this this information will benefit us in one way or another i'm not sure yeah i think less is more

4:38:22Dustin Furman:from sony's perspective in this regard and i wonder it is part of a beta so i wonder if they'll actually remove it it's it's not they're not doing what steam does well first of all there's important things steam's not doing shit people are scraping steam's api and steam is allowing it i I mean, that's the thing that it's the same thing with PlayStation. Like I say, like every once in a while, I don't think it really happens anymore, but like things would break where like you can no longer scrape trophies and then people would figure out how to do it again. So like you could get the PSN profiles and everything working.

4:38:51Dustin Furman:These companies kind of choose to let people in. And what I think Valve has done is actually kind of clever, wherein they've let people access this really bespoke data, but take no credit for it. So like it's not their problem. them and i wonder if major companies have kind of tried to press them to be like you could just close this it would be really simple for you to not allow this information to be accessed it is date more data is good but i think people don't understand all the time is what i was saying about saint slayer when someone was making fun of us for having like 50 concurrence on steam and i'm like dude that's like huge for us i don't think you like you don't know what you don't know what you're looking at or what you're talking about.

4:39:29Dustin Furman:You know, for our standards, that's wonderful success comparable to our previous games. So I think people look at these numbers and have these kind of universal expectations for things that don't really make any sense. You can use that as an argument of like, well, that's not anyone's problem with those people and those who listen to them, I guess. But I do think I would say that the almost undeniably in a way that the the exposure of steam numbers have been a net negative for everything because i think it even scares people away from trying shit i think it scares people away from giving things a chance i think it scares people away from like you know or no it's self-reinforcing game is big i'll play game isn't big i won't play but if you didn't know what would you have played right like that's kind of an interesting thing and so i don't really i'm a data guy i love the data i think it's great but i do understand the destructive nature of it as well and i think it's the evidence of that is everywhere so but then again maybe people would argue it's like well why wouldn't we want to know that and then i'm like okay fair enough then why doesn't steam itself tell you because they know that it's not necessarily good to do so in my opinion okay john tom black wrote in said if ps6 is close to ps5 and bomb it's bill of material i've learned over the last year or somehow even cheaper for sony to manufacture does it make any sense for sony to keep selling ps5 once ps6 launches normally the previous generation sticks around for a few years as a cheaper option but that only makes sense if the old console is actually cheaper and if the new console has an obvious reason to exist i'm not sure either will be true this time, especially for casuals.

4:41:13Dustin Furman:PS6 may end up being a more economical box for Sony, while also feeling like the most incremental console upgrade we've ever seen. To a casual consumer, there may not be a big you need to upgrade feature. Could or should Sony do something unprecedented and intentionally wind down PS5 stock before PS6 launches? Making PS6 a full market replacement right away. Not here is the more expensive next gen new box and next to the cheaper old one, but more like this is the next PlayStation now. With generations mattering less, game spanning hardware longer and libraries carrying forward maybe keeping ps5 around would only make the transition messier a ps6 plays the same ecosystem of games better costs sony roughly the same to make or less to make and can sit at a similar price point then ending ps5's hardware might not really be much of a loss my van full of nuns loves the show it's not a bad point i don't know i think the problem i think is the ability to manufacture sufficient machines so I don't think you could turn it off before like right before and I don't think you could turn it off at the launch but I think you could turn it off once you're confident you can make the new machine sufficiently because the last thing you would want for instance to say we're going to stop making this thing and then you the bomb becomes too expensive for this new machine you're like oh we got to kind of go back to the old machine Dustin have you considered this

4:42:32Colin Moriarty:yeah what's going to be really interesting about this next generation is that will it be like this one or which was very unique in that the previous generations stuck around for i mean it's still around it's not it's not until this year we're finally getting a call of duty game that's not coming out on the previous generation is how long uh ps4 has been hanging around a lot of that was though due to the situations in which this generation launched with the PS5 and the availability of it. And it wasn't necessarily that COVID kept the PS4 around, but it certainly got the ball rolling where it's like, okay, well, they're not available.

4:43:15Colin Moriarty:And now people, you've kind of fed the PS4 audience and now they're kind of just staying there. It's like it started, the PS4 sticking around had like momentum to it because of the launch of the PS5. So now if the bill of materials is somehow cheaper and for what Tom speculates, maybe the PlayStation 6 is a cheaper box in general, then certainly it would make sense to really try to push people over to the new device. Because I wonder, I mean, I think ideally that's what Sony would have wanted to happen with PlayStation 5. They didn't necessarily want people sticking around with their super old hardware for most of the next generation.

4:43:59Colin Moriarty:They wanted people to move over, but the situations around the console didn't make that financial sense for them to do that so i wonder if we'll be going back to the traditional playbook we'll say uh for playstation 6 and that it will be tried to be moved on to uh not immediately but in a much quicker pace what do you think chris i don't know man i i think it's i think the lack of availability on ps5 as a core for of PS5 as a core reason why so many people stuck around with the PS4 I think it's like a largely overstated I think I think I mean PS there's still a bunch of people on PS3 the reality is things got so expensive that ignoring that massive audience was no longer viable or reasonable to do and that's not getting better that's that's like if anything we're getting further and further away from the next console being the thing that you have to get i think what's more important to sony is that you're in their ecosystem at all and i think that's kind of like the new like the daily active users like the you know that's what matters and so i think it almost makes a little bit more sense to just be like hey listen there really kind of isn't that big of a reason to get involved with our next machine so let's just make it a stupid premium box and just keep the ps5 at like a lower price point or like discounted whatever because the important thing is that you just get and the enthusiasts that they want people they're always going to bite you know they're always going to be like what's the shiny new tech um what's available how cool is it how shiny is it what's the unboxing experience like there's always going to be those people those people keep everything afloat really so they're not going to not do it but i just uh the idea of just like oh let's force everybody to buy the new machine i i guarantee you people just won't like if they just if they don't want it they don't want it it kind of is dude the fact that people are still on ps4 it's kind of wild and i i don't think and the ps5 is an even better machine so i actually think it's going to be harder for people to get people off of ps5 and onto ps6 than it was to get people off of ps4 onto ps5 i just think economic realities tie into that i think the diminishing returns of new machines and the technology that we can visibly see as an obvious improvement tie into that i think the fact that these older machines are now actively interacting with the online space in a way that they didn't necessarily interact previously you know it was easy to move on to ps2 because you weren't selling games digitally on ps2 you know like and even that lasted a while you know yeah so so i don't know i think this idea that everything's going to go back to normal i think it's just going to keep going in this direction i think there's even a case to be made that there really won't be any ps6 exclusives i think there will just be games that are on ps6 that are clearly, clearly better on PS6 than they are on PS5, or just that offer like, hey, here's like, you know, 124K, you know, or something like that.

4:47:16Colin Moriarty:Even that's kind of like maybe a little too ambitious, but like an uncompromised version of a PlayStation as opposed to, you know, you can stay on PS5 and you can continue to play your Fortnite and continue to play your, you know, Windrose or, you know, whatever, just keep buying expansions, keep spending money in the store. on ps plus and elsewhere but uh i i see a reality almost where the next machine is simply a an enthusiast machine not to the same degree that the next xbox will be because that'll be like way more optional but i see a future where like the next playstation is just crazy expensive and the hook will be that handheld kind of synergy that they're going to plan with that with whatever that whatever that module is or whatever that skew is and that'll be the big deciding factor but like i don't know man even that kind of implies something doesn't it like the fact that like they're planning a portable kind of thing to go along with it or at least tied to it in some way kind of implies that they're not necessarily like that game's gonna have to run on a portable machine you know like i don't know like everything about like the rumors going on with the next generation like seems to imply to me that like that we're not going back to the way things were.

4:48:31Colin Moriarty:And it's just going to get more and more like this.

4:48:35Dustin Furman:Liam Neald has the final inquiry for us. This is greeting, sacred gents. My question revolves around the fine tuning of difficulty in video games and what degree of challenge we seek from our favorite pastime. For example, I felt like Housemarque didn't know how to best balance Saros and left too much choice to the player. If I started at a newly unlocked biome, I got destroyed in two hits. And if I did a complete run through previously unlocked levels, I comically melted most bosses in an instance with my trusty crossbow. Let's not even mention the modifiers. Am I meant to use them? Colin, you might have greater.

4:49:01Dustin Furman:This is that was a big question for me, too. It's like, I don't know what they're thinking with the modifiers. It feels like you are meant to use them. Colin, you might have a greater insight with your work with Lillimo. How do devs find the right difficulty balance that gives the player a level of satisfaction that doesn't trivialize proceedings, but also avoids controllers being lodged in the nearest wall? Thanks for everything that you do. All the best to Dustin and Holly and keep on popping those platinum trophies. The reality is that I think most companies, most studios focus on this quite a bit and often get it wrong.

4:49:30Dustin Furman:And I think one of the big things about dynamic, just hot fixing a game, nonetheless, patching it is like you can kind of fix these things on the fly based on feedback that you would have otherwise in previous generations before, let's say PS3, you would have never otherwise been able to get. And I know that for our games, we let people play them. And I've said before that I think we've skewed towards making our games too hard based on the expectations of the audience. But games become so much easier when you play them that you lose sight of them. That's why you have to let people play your game.

4:50:03Dustin Furman:And it's why major AAA studios that take many years to make their games let roving groups of heavily NDA focus testers play their shit. because they have at that point, they have lost complete sight of the game. You can't play it properly. You're not going to play it the right way. You know how to play it. And it's what I realized. I think I played Saint Slayer more than any of our games in pre-release, maybe combined. And I became really good at it. And you can't kind of shut that off. And you watch people play it, normal people, and you're like, yeah, I don't even have that grounding anymore.

4:50:39Dustin Furman:I'm so far beyond, you know, the fundamental in the door gameplay experience that I simply must let other people play it. And then even then you kind of get it wrong. So a lot of it, I think in the modernity is about like listening to people. And we've definitely nerfed things in our games in the past and made things easier over time. I don't I don't know that we've ever made anything harder. So it goes to show me that we have kind of we do the best we can, but we've also missed in our own way. saros i think the greatest mystery of the saros is what you're supposed to do i think with with the modifiers they're front and center there are trophies around using them extensively i'm like i don't know i don't know what you i don't really know what you want me to do with these and it does seem like kind of a cop-out i agree i wouldn't because that unlocks like pretty deep in the game comparable to everything else in the game and i was i was surprised when that pop i was like what is this like you could just make the game way easier or way harder it's cool, but you're putting it front and center.

4:51:39Dustin Furman:It's like, it's literally, I think in the HUD front or the UI front and center, when you go to a menu, it's like the middle choice, I think too.

4:51:45Colin Moriarty:Yeah.

4:51:45Dustin Furman:So it's like, I think it's trying to tell you that this is them saying like, yeah, use it. It's literally, it's literally central to the experience. Right. Exactly. That's why I got a little annoyed when people were like, you're not supposed to use it. I'm like, I don't think you're interpreting their intentions right. You can of course use it however you want, but I don't think the intention was to bury it. I think the intention was to make it as prominent as possible I don't know if that was them kind of like I would even wonder where that even came in like you can imagine the car coasted modifiers coming in really late and it might and it might be an answer to like the game is being focus tested and it's too sporadic about how people find it so we need to have something that like we can't inherently balance it maybe a cop out that's just me putting words in people's mouths so I don't really know

4:52:32Colin Moriarty:yeah

4:52:34Dustin Furman:do you guys have anything else you want to say about this or should we get out of here

4:52:38Colin Moriarty:I think I'm good I think just the thing I'll say real quick is that I imagine that difficulty tuning is probably one of the most difficult parts of making a game because it's like you want to continue to challenge the player and have them have that sense of progress and I mean certainly we've all played games where it's like oh there's a huge difficulty spike here and I wonder if there's times where developers are like we know but it's like what how do you the the problems if you solve a difficulty spike ones in one spot then it's like how does it affect all other parts of the game if you're more powerful at that point or this is easy or whatever so um yeah I can't imagine it's it's easy to to figure out and uh yeah like you said a lot of playtesting.

4:53:28Dustin Furman:Yeah, playtesting is key. We've learned that over time. And just letting more and more people play. People break the shit out of the game, too. I mean, that's what's so funny is they don't even mean to break it. I was breaking Saint Slayer deep into development, not intentionally. And so you just discover those things by playing it over and over again. But it is a tough nut to crack. And I am more forgiving than most over that, I think, because I know that it's difficult. And you can also ameliorate the problem by just having difficulty settings. But I don't think all games need that either and even within difficulty settings I find there to be imbalances yeah so anyway alright let's get the hell out of here it's a long episode important episode we're gonna get it up right away for you I'm always getting it up Chris good to see you let's say goodbye to you be well any plans for the rest of the day well

4:54:14Colin Moriarty:I mean I think I think I might I think I might jump on to D2 I don't know oh yeah I wonder if the numbers

4:54:20Dustin Furman:I should look at SteamDB and see if people are like congregating.

4:54:24Colin Moriarty:I don't know. Now that I know that there's nothing coming, nothing serious coming down the pipeline that I'm at risk of falling behind on, it's actually a little bit more tantalizing to me. It's just like, oh, okay. So it's kind of like there's like a complete Destiny 2 now that I can kind of go and deal with at my leisure. And that's actually a little bit enticing. I love Destiny 2. I really do. so maybe I'll spend some time in there tonight polish off some trophies maybe because I think I'm actually kind of let me see because I know I've synced them with steam so I can check my steam but like I think I've gotten What's my achievements looking like?

4:55:06Colin Moriarty:19 out of 23. So like I'm pretty close. Maybe I'll dedicate some time this week to polishing these off. But yeah, I think that's really it. I've got some cleaning to do. Oh, I got to go grocery shopping too. I'm running low. I'm at that point where I've got like all the seasonings and no meat. And all like I have the trappings of I have like I have sides. galore but no like you know central i was like i gotta go get meat i gotta go get

4:55:40Dustin Furman:real shit but normal day outside of that cool man enjoy dawson goodbye to you any plans goodbye

4:55:49Colin Moriarty:no plans i'll be working for you uh getting this episode so i'll probably take a short break probably eat dinner but be working on uh getting this episode out let's get it up asap for the uh

4:56:01Dustin Furman:the audience and we'll get, we'll get it free for everyone immediately to, you know, tomorrow.

4:56:04Colin Moriarty:Yeah. For tomorrow. And then no plans this weekend right now. Last weekend was like super busy doing a bunch of stuff. So keep it low key. Cool,

4:56:15Dustin Furman:man. Yeah. I'm going to go walk the dogs and I'm behind on emails and I haven't really been playing too much. It's kind of like kind of took the joy out of it for me this week, to be honest, but I'm trying to get through pragmata, which I'm really enjoying and, you know, we'll see what happens this weekend. it's supposed to be rainy as well so that'll be nice because it's so fucking hot here all right guys appreciate you thank you so much for listening and enjoying our show supporting us on patreon patreon.com slash last day media and merch over at last day media dot store couldn't do without you guys we'll see you next time thank you again for your all your kindness for the most part about what happened to me as well scary shit talk to you next time goodbye see ya take care guys sacred symbols a playstation podcast is a product and trademark of Last Stand Media and Colin's Last Stand LLC and is proudly recorded in the USA.

4:57:03Dustin Furman:The show was conceived by, is written by, and is directed by me, Colin Moriarty. My co-hosts are Chris Raygun Maldonado and Dustin Furman. The show is produced by executive producer Dustin Furman. All of Last Stand's theme music is by my best friend, Ramon Narvaez. As you know, all of Last Stand's shows, including Sacred Symbols, are fan-funded on Patreon at patreon.com slash laststandmedia. The following names are at the producer level on Patreon, our highest tier, and we're grateful for your thoughtful and kind contributions to our independent endeavor. Thank you.

4:58:00Dustin Furman:Thank you.

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