#413 | People Told Us It Would Never Transpire

43:32Colin Moriarty:I think you did. It's at the end, but we'll do it then. Hartford, the whale. God, I love mall rats. Oh, I wanted to speak on this, on his specific scenario. Yeah. I've noticed there's a thing with a lot of our audience that I think we do have a unique audience in that while it is we have a unique audience. We have a unique thing going on where we are not small. We're not huge, though. There's like, you know, many gaming podcasts that are much bigger than us. But our level of audience interaction is super high, whether that's through Patreon, like people signing up or comments or whatever, like our level of interactivity probably blows a lot of bigger podcasts out of the water, I would assume.

44:23Colin Moriarty:So I think that there's audience members that get an assumption about how big the show is based on that. and that's where hartford fucked up it's like no no no as chris was saying it's like it is still very niche it's a niche podcast when i go to too many games which is like one of the main retro conventions in the country nobody knows who i am who i'm who i am there oh god what a dream it's yeah it's nice i mean there are not i don't want to say nobody when we're doing our panel there are listeners there that are there to come to the panel but by and large overall it's not like you and Greg at PSX where you needed security to go to the merch store.

45:01Yeah, that was crazy. Do you remember that? Were you there for that? They shut down the merch store for us. I think I was actually nearby. Did I tell you that it was the one like the one place where I felt truly famous? Oh, I'm sure. PSX. Yeah, yeah. Where I was like, I really am famous here. Which is like everyone knows who I am here. I kind of hated it, to be honest. Well, that was your first interaction with Brandon

45:25Colin Moriarty:that I think I told you about. Oh, right. You were running somewhere and Brandon was like hey Colin you're like hey and then you just kept running and Colin and Brandon was like yeah I don't really know him really yeah that's funny I was calling I uh yeah strange strange um yeah it's it's I um I'm probably much more someone would someone that was working on my backyard was asking me like do you get recognized and I'm like occasionally but like I don't really go anywhere so it's not but I have been dead dead up I'm pretty sure that the person that um we go to this restaurant pretty often and like the owner of it i think knows who i am because he always like he like shakes my hand and stuff like that when i come in like oh funny like during dinner and stuff like that or whatever and i'm like hey and i'm like i don't think i don't think i'm not as famous as you think i am this is also for this area i'm pretty famous i guess he thinks you have a food podcast yeah yeah he doesn't listen he's like And he's a really nice guy.

46:22I like him a lot. I mean, it's great food. But yeah, I've I've I've tried to read into that. It's like I told you when I ran and like I was walking through the neighborhood and I was like walking past these two girls and they were like, are you the streamer? And like my heart sank because I thought for like many years, I'm like no one in this neighborhood knows who I am, which is awesome. You know, and I'm like, shit, someone someone recognized me. And then it started kind of circulating around people who I was. And now like the last year or so, I like people are a little, it's not everyone, but some people are like a little nicer to me maybe.

46:56And things like that. I'm like, that's interesting. I'm not, first of all, I think you're over. I think when you do something where you have like a presence of some sort on the internet, that's like, no matter how big you are, that's a big deal to a lot of people. And I'm like, no, you, you could, I'm like pretty minor actually. But I remember my heart sinking so bad when they said that. Cause I was like, so I think I told you, like I walked by them diagonally. Cause I didn't want to come behind them on the sidewalk and scare them. They're like just two like 14 year old girls or whatever. And I'm like walking really fast, like trying to get my heart rate up.

47:24So I just like, and so like I walked diagonally across the street and then they're, and I'm like, excuse me, I just didn't want to scare you. That's what I said to them. And I walked, you know, and then they're like, are you the streamer? And I was like,

47:33Colin Moriarty:no, no.

47:39Colin Moriarty:It's awesome. And it's probably like their brother or something, or like a dad or someone that they know said. And I'm like, fuck, like who is it? Who? Who? blew up my spot just say no yeah that would have been funny back now i think i did that to somebody recently at a i was at a flea market recently and they're oh no no i was i was at a um do you know those uh boxcar races that they do the red bull i was at one of those recently whoa i'm jealous i mean it was it was really cool the thing is the thing about it though is that like it's so everybody crowds up against the thing so it's kind of hard to get like a real like front row to it and so they have these big screens so it was i was basically i was watching the youtube feed outside for most of it but it was cool but like somebody was like are you chris reagan i was like no which is like it's not real because like i was wearing this i think too so it's like i'm wearing the same shit that i always wear so i'm clearly me i don't know anybody else who has an army patrol cap that walks around like this so he knew i was lying but he laughed about he laughed about it so i think he he appreciated it yeah that's kind of your thing it's it's uh it's always uncomfortable when when you get recognized in like a really uncomfortable i'm glad it's never happened to me at like a doctor's office oh or something like that you know what i mean like oh man i mean i'm literally in scrubs right now i do you remember chris i you probably don't but like when i first moved here like i left christmas 2019 and so i was here like beginning in 2020 and uh i was like like i was here for a little while and i was like just kind of casually dating this this girl and we went to dinner and she was asking me like do you get recognized like free and i'm like no not really you know like i used to do more when i was like did bigger things and then dead ass someone in that restaurant recognized me to the point where i like we thought it was hysterical because i was like it looked like a setup yeah yeah it's like that it's like that fortnight kid that we talk about all the time i love that i love that's one of my favorite memories of me and you is like yeah it's just us bitching about fortnight and walking by that kid in los angeles you can't escape you can't escape fortnight then like immediately like on the dime it's just some kid talking about vbucks or something it was crazy it was like we were just on some random street it wasn't even like not even like colorado or any of these bigger places or beat or ocean or anything we're on like you know some fucking side street walking to the diner yeah we're walking to that what was the diner again the is it izzy's izzy's yeah yeah you brought your straw right i used to bring yeah you remember that so in santa monica i think it was all of la but it might have just been santa monica they they wouldn't give you plastic straws anymore they'd give you the shite paper straws and so i bought plastic straws that i was on it when chris and i were i'd go anywhere i'd bring a plastic straw with me they've largely undone that like there's not a lot of paper straws anymore it's so disgusting people were like this doesn't work no it's fucking gross also who cares i'm sorry like think about like seriously think about it right like think about it who gives a fuck about plastic straws look around the plastic bag thing is much more sympathetic to me we have literal islands in the pacific ocean made of them right like to me i'm like plastic straws like what a bull basically they were like we got to do something the thing that's most annoying that will do the least amount okay let's let's make everyone use paper straws and that will and we'll pretend that we've revolutionized everything give me a go fuck yourselves do you remember how we used to have paper cups and plastic straws yes and then they now all the cups are plastic but suddenly the straw needs to be paper right now that's that's a good observation why that's why we we just made we still we're still in the the like positive on plastic because the stupid plastic cup go back to the paper cup it's fine there's no problem with the paper cup i'm gonna be a paper cup to be honest with you but but i mean i'm not saying it the the paper cup was not as bad as the paper straw i will i will say right but i still hate it i hate it like so the thing about the paper cup is that it always felt like it was going to be as bad as the as the paper straw like it always felt like i always felt like i was going to accidentally crush it or tear it i never did but i was always anxious about it i never liked it it was like a thin there's like a thin layer of wax between you and disaster with those cups you know yeah i i don't didn't uh i don't go to chick-fil-a really anymore because like it's like what you you long for it so much until you have access to it then you're like i don't really want to do this anymore it's exactly what happened to me with in and out and like how i crave the fuck at it in and out now but i couldn't even you couldn't even pay me to go to in and out by the time i left california you know i was like enough and so but they got rid of the Styrofoam cups, right?

52:33Which is a very Southern thing. And because people don't realize it, like that whole thing is to keep your drink cold. That's why they do it. They're not trying to be dickheads. It's because they're huge in like Alabama where it's, you know, 800 degrees. So, and by the way, speaking of temperatures, we're in the midst, I said this on the stream, right, Dustin? We're in the midst of the European air conditioning, the yearly European air conditioning debate on social media right now, if anyone has been privy to that, where it never ends. Yeah. They'll complain about it being 75 degrees, which is like what it's every day here in Virginia.

53:07And then they'll say like they can't do air conditioning. It's like, just get an air conditioner. Just get an air conditioner.

53:18Colin Moriarty:It's fine. You'll be fine. Yeah. It's worth, you know, not dying of heat stroke. I'm telling you straight up that this explains the discrepancy between the European and American economies as far as production per person. they are so heat exhausted. Oh, I bet. I'm not even being facetious. Imagine living in a place where you have no air conditioning and it's just fucking muggy and hot for, and like, what are you going to do? I mean, you can see that. You can see that literally in just comparing New York and LA. The speed that people move in New York, because they're like, I'm fine. You know, I can go.

53:58Colin Moriarty:I'm not exhausted over here. People are like chill. They walk as if they've got nowhere to be. right it's the only way you can live like it yeah it's because i and i get it yeah i've i've done 20 minute walks when the sun's out it's like you're not moving fast why the fuck would you it's gross it's horrible you're in a you're in a catch-22 it's like the old adage about how like the best way to stay dry during rain is to walk slowly because you're lowering your uh i guess the square footage that you that the rain could hit at any one time right because you're not running into like a ton of right forward facing rain it's like you're you're exposed to the i'm a very fast walker by nature and it's like so is the idea to get out of the sun as quickly as possible or is the idea to like manage your time in the sun so that you are not overheated i think there's you know six of one half dozen of the other but i'll tell you man the hottest place i ever i ever was in my life was palm springs palm springs yeah chris you and i've talked about this where i like i literally like i mean i'll admit it like i almost fainted i i got up from dinner and like went outside i like i you know i had a few drinks in me and stuff and i'm like dude like holy fuck like this is crazy this is crazy that people live like this is that clip of uh larry david fainting yeah yeah like yeah when he when he finds out that his wife has cancer

55:16Colin Moriarty:dude i palm springs is i think it was like 117 or 118 degrees or something i was like how does it how the construction workers who built this place didn't know something was wrong why would you why it was it's insane to me that it's as hot as it is over there like it makes no sense to me we have so much space in the united states it's like the one thing we don't need is more space it's like you don't have to live here yeah you don't have to dude you're somewhere else You're like right next to Death Valley. Can you fucking? I just it's awful. Like, I think Palm Springs is really cool, but I was there and I was like, this is insanity.

55:55I can't ever come back to this place. It's like Vegas in the summer, too. It's like, holy fuck.

56:00Colin Moriarty:Yeah. Holy fuck. If you got a really if you got like a really cold pool, I bet it's awesome. Yeah, yeah, definitely. You know, like I bet like that Palm Springs with a pool probably is the sickest thing ever. because you're just you're you're always in the state of like a maximum in like i don't know i don't know how to like maximum comfort i guess because you're always getting relieved from the other thing whereas like here it's just like i'm not really being relieved when i go outside it's just like slightly colder it's like you don't have to live there there's no nothing binding you to this land

56:34like a tithe a tithe right yeah like you're a surf like you you they sell the land and you go with it right oh god heart for the whale um thanks for the fun conversation that spawned off of your uh your inquiry your anodyne inquiry about magic the gathering which is a game people still play by the way you know magic the gathering i will say this as far as video games are concerned i don't know if you feel this way is much more xbox encoded like do you remember that the magic the gathering games were actually xbox exclusive like that a lot of them never ever came to psn

57:06Colin Moriarty:i yes i do i vaguely remember this it was like one of the weird things like if you're a magic fan you're a good chance it's like what we say about mlb the show like you're kind of passively a baseball fan you're probably a playstation player if you were a magic person for some years you were probably an xbox player yeah so get the fuck out of here this ain't the show for you go to go to the defining duke podcast and leave me alone sacred symbols is brought to you by shopify When we started our merch store, figuring everything out on our own felt super overwhelming. Sourcing the products, figuring out the shipping, an inventory system, a website, and so much more.

57:44Colin Moriarty:And as soon as you figure one thing out, another always seems to pop up. Finding the right tool to figure everything out was essential. For us and millions of other businesses, that tool is Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10 % of all e-commerce in the US. From household names you know like Last Stand Media to brands just getting started. Get started with your own design studio. With hundreds of ready-to-use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store that matches your brand's style. The best part? Shopify is your commerce expert with world-class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond.

58:28Colin Moriarty:Start your business today with the industry's best business partner, Shopify, and start hearing. Sign up for your$1 per month trial today at shopify.com slash sacred. Go to shopify.com slash sacred. That's shopify.com slash sacred.

58:49Andrew Singo wrote in and said, hello, esteemed gentleman. About five Five years ago, I wrote in asking what I should name my now four year old son. I'm pretty sure you guys settled on the Tetris piece Smash Boy. Now my wife is expecting again due in a few weeks with a baby girl. The question is simple. What do you guys want to name her? Tifa to be millennia. The naming rights are available and I await your response. How about roll? Oh, we'll keep the Mega Man stuff going a little bit.

59:17Colin Moriarty:Well, I have a problem with the question before we even get to that point. he never confirmed if he named his son smash boy right so why should we even spend time thinking about this and offering suggestions if he didn't use our fucking last one is it at least is smash boy at least the middle name jonathan smash boy singo yeah it's a hell of a name smash boy i think you kind of you fucked up if you didn't take that now two b's kind of a cool name you don't want to Why would you want to name your own daughter? That's the thing. After a deeply like Tifa, like a sexualized character. That's the thing with all that's the thing with all three of these to be quite to be honest.

1:00:01Colin Moriarty:Like, it's just it's a little it's a little millennia is like the least of three. But she's got like a thing going on. Like, I don't know. Isn't she the queen of rot? Yeah, but she's naked, right? Isn't she? Isn't that her whole thing is that she's like kind of she's decaying, I guess. So it's not like particularly nice to see. maybe in phase two oh yeah in phase two she is that's winter yeah i don't know i'm uncomfortable yeah don't name your don't name your daughter tifa yeah don't do that you can't do that um it is a it's a decent it's a decent name to be fair to be terrible how about splash woman woman for megaman 9 Mm-hmm.

1:00:49What else? Yeah. I don't have any good ideas. Aloy. Clyde.

1:00:59From Pac-Man.

1:01:00Colin Moriarty:That's the only Pac-Man ghost I know. Clyde. Yeah. They all have different personalities too, right? Like programming personalities. Like one always follows you, I think. Right? One always tries to cut you off, I think. Something like that. One has anxious avoidance. One has one's on Lexapro. Yeah. One's schizophrenic.

1:01:25Oh, God. I don't know. I don't know that I have any ideas. I mean, I'm really my my all my energies are with Dustin's child right now in terms of. Yeah, that's going to be a big, big one for me. And I don't know. So I don't know. I don't know. I don't have any answers for you. I just don't. Yeah, I think the options you presented are too weird. It reminds me of when everyone was naming their child Khaleesi.

1:01:49Colin Moriarty:Oh, yeah. Without understanding, like without the I remember saying that at the time over and over again, like you don't know how this ends. This could be and you kind of look like a dickhead now. Not to spoil it. You know, you should use Lois. Lois. That's a good name. After. After. Well, I was thinking I was thinking more Superman. but like yeah i guess that is the second most famous lois indeed um that's a good name it's like there's a lot of older names that i think are kind of like they've gone out of style like people don't use anymore but i think it's still pretty perfectly good name like lois is far from a gretchen you know gretchen yeah i knew at least in my opinion yeah you know gretchen i knew one in middle school yeah gretchen yeah is she still with us uh i've never talked to her since then so probably not

1:02:40to be fair probably not

1:02:41Colin Moriarty:yeah um yeah Gretchen's yeah that's an interesting name Lois is a good name I mean there's a whole thing Jerry Seinfeld like having an obsession with that name for obvious reasons I guess um then there are ones where like you don't really know like what are you thinking with that you know uh Edna Edna's rough rough yeah i mean that's fine but it's like you got to be you got to be born 45 years old you have to be yeah yeah no no no younger you have to be born an elderly person there's there's a character like a child character in a handmaid's tale named agnes agnes and i'm like yeah that's another like you got to be old to get you have to be named something else and then when you're 60 we can rename you an agnes that hard consonant into another hard consonant edna agnes rough dude yeah the g into the n yeah i don't like it at all yeah hopefully there's none of no one with that name listening right now yeah sorry don't worry we have no female listeners yeah i'm the silent minority wrote in said hi guys quick question is it just me or does this show have way more drama than any other podcast out there.

1:03:51What is going on? I don't think we have any real drama. It simply can't be true. I think we're just crazy. I think there's a fine line of difference between those two things, in my opinion. Drama, I don't... Yeah, first of all, there's got to be... Podcasts out there probably have real drama. Look what happened with Jaffe when he was on that podcast.

1:04:09Colin Moriarty:Oh, yeah. That's real drama. What did he do? He did something to them. I don't remember what it was. I can't remember exactly. Dustin, what did he do? What did he do that he got in trouble? Oh, he made fun of... the owner's like wife or something. I think he mentioned the owner's wife. Oh, right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. It's a little worse than making fun of her. Javi. Javi has his flares with the drama, like the, the picture of the guy's grave or the dad's grave. And he said, this is an Xbox. He has a flair for that. Dude, that is one of the all time funniest things I think I've ever seen. I know that's, I remember seeing that and be like, man, oh man.

1:04:52because it was everyone just likes being mad at jaffy but that was

1:05:00Colin Moriarty:like that's objectively funny yeah audibly there's so there's very few tweets that i laugh out loud at i think maybe i can count on on my on one hand in the last like five years the tweets that i've laughed out loud at that is that is one of them i have howled when i saw that because i would have never thought to say something like that i know it's so i feel like i'm in that mind i don't mind saying shit like that but like i it wouldn't have even occurred to me that's good shit that's good god bless you david jaffe all right let's get into the news yeah it's time to do that we begin with a few or a couple fyi's i wanted to begin with this first fyi which comes from the playstation blog.

1:05:46In fact, both of them come from the PlayStation blog, but we'll start here. MLB, the show mobile from San Diego studio is now available globally. So we've been covering this game for a little while and we know that it was emerging in certain smaller markets that are baseball friendly, like the Philippines, where they can test out and see what's going on with the game. And now it's available anywhere you are with your Apple or Android device. It's free to play, although there are going to be microtransactions in it for you to peruse if you want. And here's the bullet points they have for the game, by the way.

1:06:20Quote, best in class MLB, the show gameplay on your phone, team building with tops cards, tops the brand featuring today's stars and legends of baseball history, gameplay that combines on field action with a deck building strategy made for fans of MLB, the show shorter experiences designed just for mobile with all new mini game modes for a new way to compete. So you can go check it out. It's pretty interesting. I like what they're doing here and I think this will actually work for them but I will say and I remember I was noting this many times or several times as we talked about this game in the past ultimately this game needs to connect to the game on console and I'm not saying that you need to be able to play it and it carry over though that would be pretty cool I mean remember Vita did that where you could like play on your Vita to carry your season over to the PS4 and then carry it back to the Vita and that's super cool and that would be neat if they could do something like that but rather I look at this is like something like on the old vmu or pocket station like something you can do to make to get a player better or or do do something man some managerial shit or whatever wherein it really makes like a whole ecosystem for the mlb the show because i think that that would be really attractive for fans of the game because people like my nephew's obsessed with mlb the show like the people that play that game love it and so instead of giving them two different experiences, which is cool for now.

1:07:38Hopefully they'll be able to tie them together and make them this cogent one thing. And this is a game that needs to be on mobile. And I'm glad that Sony has decided to pursue this. And ironically, this will probably be their first success story of any note in mobile, and they didn't need an external team to do it. So, good on them. Are you guys, you're not baseball fans. I wonder, I mean, it's kind of worth checking out because it's free. It's like, well, what is like really the big deal? and then you'll get microtransacted into the fucking, into the atmosphere, buying your card packs.

1:08:13Colin Moriarty:Yeah. I don't like video games being on my phone, I think. Yeah, I'm not into it either, really. You know, I like having this. I like, I guess it's an old school mentality now, but I like having devices for specific things. I like that my phone doesn't have video games on it. I like that my video game console isn't a phone. Although I guess you could. Yeah, like the N-Gage. Voice chat or whatever, but yeah. Oh, the iconic engage we're getting to the point where like there are probably a lot of younger people that don't even know what the engage is oh 100 like which is i bear i don't have any reason to know what it is i just i i would only see it at software etc when i would go to get like video games whatever it would be it would be this like a little not even like a particularly big presence but it would be like a little sliver of like a booth or something like engage i'm like no dude I thought it looked so cool when I was a kid am I like I remember telling my dad like oh I really it would be so cool he's like you're not getting a phone because I was like eight or something it's like what would I the phone aspect was kind of cool but the idea of like whoa it's a phone and it's game console dude the games for NGAG just look absolutely terrible there were some weird ones too wasn't there wasn't Morrowind or something like that on NGAG like something insane like that let's see morrow into engage am i making that up the elders scrolls travels shadow key shadow okay shadow key that's so i remember that because i was an intern at ign when engage was like prevalent in any way that we even had an engage part of the site and like hired an engage editor as i recall and it had like its brief moment you know it really never had a moment but it was like relevant for a little while like it had an e3 presence and there were two models of it like there was a launch model and then like a an updated engage so it had they at least tried yeah nokia but yeah it's uh i'm looking at gameplay of this uh eldest shadow key now and uh it's both better than i thought it would look considering it's a phone from like 2005 or whatever the hell but uh saying it yeah it was a weird it was a weird one and the side talking thing do you guys remember that that you had to hold it to the side to talk into it and it became like that was a very early internet meme there was even a website called side talking i want to say where it would be like just pictures of people doing that did i yeah i feel like i remember playing a call of duty mobile game on like flip phones a long ass time yeah i think those yeah that they were there were these like there was this idea that you would really play meaningful game experiences on those screens which is so funny you can barely do it on a beautiful iphone i know do it on this bullshit with like no refresh and like five colors so side talking good times all right so that's available go check that out if you want mlb the show mobile for all you baseball fans out there we are in the midst of baseball season of course and then the other fyi is that marathon season two arrives june 2nd we already know this and this is the day of state of play so i assume this will have some sort of presence in the state of play as well we could talk about this as much or as little as you want but the big news here is that the uh game will be free to play for a week so they write in part on the playstation blog quote what secrets lurk in the dark as night descends on marathon second season Season two is coming June 2nd, bringing new challenges, new opportunities and new ways to play.

1:11:49You'll be able to try you'll be able to try out season two for yourself with marathon open play week from June 2nd through 9th during open play week. By the way, if you look at the PlayStation blog, there is an egregious. It's like four spaces between the dash after two and the nine. What are we doing?

1:12:05Colin Moriarty:Oh, yeah. I mean, that's not even like one space. That's like it's like, come on, guys. During open play week, the full game will be available on PlayStation five. no PlayStation Plus membership required and any progress you make will carry over into season two guys gonna be playing with a bunch of scrubs what do you think of that Chris this will help the game I don't know I mean I think so I think marathons odd like I think that first week of a new season is kind of imperative and so I do think it helps to this is not surprising is what I'm saying like because I think they did this with the first season it's a good way to get people in when everybody's like starting fresh and everybody's like people aren't trouncing you with their insane gear right off the jump although they have map map knowledge and stuff that'll help them no doubt but yeah i mean i they put out a i actually don't think it'll be at the state of play now because they did a uh they already put out like a vidoc and a trailer where they go into things pretty extensively so it'd be kind of redundant now but everything in it looks fucking cool like they've got a pitch black map there's like flashlights and shit it's like actually like truly dark which is something that i've lamented with a lot of games like a lot of games like say oh it's a nighttime level but it's like it's really daytime blue you know it's daytime with blue and it's like i can see perfectly fine i don't need this flashlight at all so i like that they're leaning into that it looks uh i don't know it looks cool but also like there's a lot of factors going against marathon some earned some unearned that i don't really i don't know i think it will bump but like i don't know how much of a difference it'll make it'll depend on how the the game lands when people actually try it captain canada wrote in and said greetings and salutation cdc with the announcement of a free-to-play week for marathon beginning june 2nd alongside the season 2 launch do we feel that this is sony hitting the panic button will this meaningfully move the needle for marathon i'm guessing that the game will be discounted during the free trial week to encourage buy-in players who enjoy it the game looks and plays great but i worry that at some point sony may view it as unsustainable i'll hang myself in a closet for sexual pleasure like the late great david carradine and listen now thank you for that captain canada uh dustin is sony hitting the panic button with this no no no absolutely not i don't think so uh i think a a panic button would be a much more drastic measure like permanently making it free to play i think would be a panic button moment but uh i think this is awesome making this free to play for a week i think it would be a great decision even if the game was doing insanely well in terms of numbers to be like hey it's you know for a multiplayer game like this and maybe your friends asking you to play it or something like that it's like you want to maybe be able to try it out.

1:15:01Colin Moriarty:And the fact that it's a whole week can really give players enough time to get past the terrible onboarding of the game. And that's one thing that they're actively working on. They're saying like, we know the onboarding is bad. We know that the questing at points doesn't work very well. And in that Vidoc that Chris mentioned is all things that they're talking about and addressing. And so what I'm most curious about this is just that the people that have stuck with Marathon in the last three months have put insane hours into this game in three months. And I think that it has been percolating even outside that core player base.

1:15:50Colin Moriarty:People are like, okay, well, maybe there's something to this game. But maybe they don't want to spend the$40 to check it out because they don't know. they don't know if it's going to be for them and so giving people that opportunity after all of the word of mouth of from the actual players not some fucker of the steam chart on twitter from the actual people playing it i i don't know it could really be a big boost it could also not uh it's hard to say like season two they're making some drastic changes to the game the way the gear system works there's like a whole new like character stat section that they're adding and so it's possible while it feels unlikely based on what i've seen i think it looks amazing but it's possible it doesn't land and the seven days just confirms to people that they're like no i'm not interested but i i think it's a great decision and i'm curious too how they in terms of captain canna saying like uh is the game you know is will sony view it as unsustainable in that video doc uh and things that the director said they're already planning like up to five seasons of this game so i think marathon is safe for the foreseeable future um sony could pull the plug early but i just think that there's too much momentum with marathon in terms of like they see the potential they see how many hours the players are playing they know something is here It's just how do they morph that into something that is probably a little more palatable to a general audience?

1:17:26Colin Moriarty:Because they made a very expensive niche game. Yeah. And they have to change things. It's very hardcore. They've already kind of like softened a lot. And they're talking about that PVE mode too, which I think will help. I think I would have actually maybe even maybe even when the PVE mode drops, I would maybe even do another free weekend, to be honest. Like, I don't I don't know. I don't think that's like a bad strategy with an extraction game, really. Like, I think I would even suggest that maybe at the beginning of every season it's available for free for a short period of time. That's exactly what I'm so I'm so glad you said that.

1:17:59I was going to say that is like, why not just make that a thing?

1:18:03Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I just think it it benefits it benefits kind of everybody. and it also i think builds some goodwill in a time where bungie like desperately needs that again for reasons earned and unearned i think uh yeah i don't know i from when i saw the update i think it looks great i think it looks really cool um i think they've tightened up some of the pain points not all of them because it is still going to be like a very skill-based game but i've had some friends who i didn't anticipate jumping onto marathon i've seen them on marathon now uh they weren't on for like the first like they they weren't on until like the last week and i saw them it's like oh you're playing marathon it's like yeah i'm trying to get my feet wet and i just told them like everything's gonna wipe in like a week you know that right and they're like all right i'll just i'll just jump in for season two or whatever i told them they should still play they should learn the maps and stuff but there is a thing with the end of the season where i'm like i'm not really playing that much right now because i'm just like yeah it's it's i'm more excited for what what the season two is going to yeah they need to i'm sorry i didn't mean to interrupt no i'm done i was gonna say i i think they need to make some sort of i'm an outsider to the game obviously but like i and i love the idea of everyone wiping and starting again so i'm not saying that that's a bad idea but there needs to be something about your account or something like some and maybe there is and i just don't know this like you should get like some sort of armor or skins or something like that like carry over and know memorialize forever your accomplishments in this yeah in ways that don't unbalance the game but rather just let people know that you're good or that you did something i think that's a cool idea they they had an emblem they have like emblems right now are that kind of thing where it's just like i have an emblem now it's like it's like level 100 or whatever and i'll keep that like even when even when it resets and we're back to level zero i'll have the that 100 badge or whatever to show that i was there uh and there's some like other stuff too there's like badges for like oh you were in the server slam and the alpha test and stuff like that so i think they've got some of that i do want there to be more in that regard i do think um i understand the idea of going with classes and characters because it's good for like silhouette recognition and it's good for like intel gathering where it's just like if you see a silhouette you're just like oh i know what character that is i know what abilities i'm dealing with but i do i i would be lying if i said I didn't miss that that bungee customization of being able to choose your armor pieces or whatever and be rewarded armor pieces based on what you did.

1:20:34Colin Moriarty:Like that is a cool thing that they kind of left in the dust, which is a bit of a bummer. But I don't know. I like I like Marathon a lot. I know people think I'm like pretending somehow as if I would do. There are games that I really like that. I can't play for more than like, you know, 20 hours. And I put like almost 300 hours into this. I love it a lot. And I'll be playing season two. We'll probably have like a meaningful. I think I talked about it in the discord. We might have a meaningful bungee oriented. Sacred. I would love for you to do that. There's a lot of good people for you to pull from for that.

1:21:09Colin Moriarty:So, yeah, I'm curious. I have to wait and see what that week looks like and scheduling and all that stuff. But there's a lot to talk about, really. I think it's all interesting. Yeah, we'll definitely do that time allowing. We'll let Chris handle that. I yeah, Yeah, I'm interested in how they can salvage Marathon. Salvage is really the wrong word. It's fine. I think it's a cool game. It's doing well. I do think actually in the next story we're talking about, though, we're going to talk about, which is Bungie related. There's an interesting piece of information people are not tuning into because there's other interesting stuff in this story that people are more tuned into.

1:21:45So we'll get into that now. And by the way, I know people are tired. Some people are tired of hearing about Bungie and Marathon. But as I said earlier in the show, and I say all the time, we are captive to the news. like Sony bought this studio for no reason. This game is extremely relevant to the ecosystem. And go blame Jim Ryan, go to the UK and fucking knock on his door and blame him. Don't blame me. But the next story comes from Bloomberg. Jason Schreier over there. This story went live, I think just maybe a day or so after we were last recorded. So people that listen to the show sequentially will remember that we were recording and the news broke and we were able to include the news that destiny two would no longer continue so that's kind of where we left it and then we had a sort of on the fly impromptu conversation about what the future might be including the potential of a destiny three then jason we published the podcast jason published the story and gave us more clarity kind of undoing a lot of that conversation and here is what it says it says quote sony group corpse bungee unit is planning a significant number of layoffs as it ends development on the long-running online shooter game Destiny 2, according to people familiar with the studio's plans.

1:22:53The company doesn't have a new project lined up for Destiny 2's development team after the game comes to an end next month, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because they weren't authorized to speak to press. Bungie doesn't plan to immediately enter production on a Destiny 3, they said. The number of job cuts was unknown. Bungie's staff are looking to pitch and begin development of new projects, including in the Destiny franchise, but none have been greenlit, and there's no guarantee that any will move forward in a challenging market that has led companies like Sony to raise prices and cut costs.

1:23:22Headquartered in Bellevue, Washington, Bungie is one of the most expensive studios to operate, given the cost of paying tech-savvy workers in suburban Seattle and the longevity of its staff. Bungie is also investing more in the Extraction Shooter Marathon, which has not met sales expectations since its March release. So that's new information that I feel like no one is talking about. That's actually maybe the most interesting part of this, but which the company hopes will expand its player base over time. the studio has moved some staff from the destiny team to marathon in recent months so we can expand on this more but again i want to reiterate though the big news here is that there's going to be layoffs and that's sad i felt like that was somewhat obvious um if you're spooling things up and people are pitching you do not need this team and remember we said last week that i think the team has gone from 1400 people to something like it's like in the 700s now right And I think it's going to go down to probably the 500s at the most.

1:24:17And that's some bloodletting. It can't be. I don't I feel bad even saying it over and over again, but it just just to predicate the conversation around like, what the fuck did Sony do this for? Like, this is. A level of financial suicide that I've I've never seen them execute in ever. Even Concord makes this look like they could. This is like five Concords.

1:24:41Colin Moriarty:so um it's trying to be like joe biden this is like five nine elevens

1:24:50so but uh just to just to linger first on the idea that i i think it's fair to assume marathon didn't sell great but i was wondering what sony's expectations were and and if they were savvy enough to understand that this wasn't going to go great for them. And so that it didn't meet their expectations internally makes me feel like you guys are still bullish. Like, why are you what don't you get about what's happening here with the studio and these kinds of games and under your tutelage? I think that that's kind of a concerning point. You think it would have met their expectations and that they realize what they had, especially with the lack of advertising, which seemed deliberate.

1:25:28We talked even on PlayStation Network. It's as if the game doesn't exist. They could very easily plaster it everywhere. they don't and i don't know that's been the true since before the game came out and i i always wondered if that was because it's becoming more tailored to your tastes and so i wouldn't see things like marathon but i see things like football club and call of duty and things i never play

1:25:53Colin Moriarty:so it's not that i don't think i did get a marathon screen on my playstation store the other day but it's ironic because I already own it on PlayStation so I was like ah good one guys yeah I've never seen it before until just the other day that real estate is valuable and Sony has paid money for that real estate whether through lump sum payments or you know different so like if your game is featured it might be a different cut for you you know that kind of thing so you don't want to waste that space but there's no more premium on a game than your first party games i i don't i don't really understand that but let's let's talk a little bit about this chris um layoffs not a huge surprise sad we'll see like what the bloodletting is there the bigger problem i think is what have you what are you doing like what have you been doing did you you didn't get anything else going so gummy bears was taken from them we know that so we have to be fair yeah right like that team and the people working on it and the game were taken i don't think that that was going to be the next big thing they were doing anyway it seemed like an incubation project not on like riots fighting game and all this other shit it's like it's not really the meat and potatoes uh but destiny 3 seems like such an obvious why else would you even bother getting buying the team and people seem really upset about this so yeah so what is your take yeah well i i do want to mention too because like when when the news broke last time we had so little time to really take it in it happened while we were all it was also happened in the middle of discussing something else that was quite serious so like yeah there wasn't really a lot to uh a lot of time to take it in and reflect a little bit and so like the the reaction to destiny kind of going away is actually way stronger than i thought it would have been um but i do get it because like that was a third space for a lot of people and for a long time like there's certain there's not a lot of third spaces really around anymore and that was kind of a place uh and although i felt that they ended it with final shape clearly they even have an end screen for it that is unlike any other expansion that they have like it's literally thank you very much in like latin bungee like you don't really see that unless they're done so i was prepared for it but um it is yeah i get why why it's like a bummer that that's going away in a way that's like probably seems a little bit silly to the outside person it would be like calling like a jets disbanded or something right right you know what i mean it's like well that this has been like a thing for me for like a really long time even i was kind of bummed about it as time gone as time went on i was like oh man yeah it's weird knowing that i can't really go back and there won't be any like it's it's like a friend where it's like i hope he's doing well and then you find out he's gone right right um but as far as like this whole um you know them having incubation projects or not a lot of and look I know a lot of it's rumors and speculation or whatever and none of it's like necessarily you know for sure but like based on what I know about some of the people that I know who have had connections to the studio who have reached out to me or just the stories that I've heard going years and years back going decades back now at this point um the management team is one of the worst team management teams in the business like it is insane how many times proper projects are pitched by the staff that do not get picked up by the executives because it's like i know we're not doing that we're not going to do it they just the executives decided like there was a i think there was something that like it was decided earlier this year that they were going to stop doing destiny and the team didn't know about it they found out like a lot of them found out the way we found out yeah that's not that's unacceptable and you and you can tell by the way you can tell that that's the case based on like their write-up they had all this stuff ready to go and then they're just like i i guess we'll i guess we'll put it out for on june and that'll be the end i guess you know like you can tell like there's like a very unimpromptu feeling to it um and so like and there there were there were uh there was that game payback that luke smith was was heading years and years ago we probably reported on it on the show which is like a destiny oriented project that like never got off the ground i think it was like a third person kind of thing which would would have been kind of interesting yeah definitely um uh there was there were pitches about various other projects in destiny i think there was like a destiny infinity or something like that pitched where they would go back to like one major expansion a year to kind of like tamper things down but also like deliver that was not brought forward and then just nothing and so i don't know i really don't know what to make of it it is it is crazy that they never greenlit anything i get that they had but gummy bears or whatever but that was that was taken out a while ago and destiny 2 in my opinion has been in a transitionary period outside of itself for a while now and i don't think i think the team knew that and were trying to get things off the ground and then there was like no desire from the decision makers to do it or whatever like i don't it is all genuinely crazy like some of the shit that i've heard is insane like i'm fascinated by i wish i cared to like do anything with that shit but like it's it's it is fucking bewildering that um that it's been bungled in the way that it has do you have anything you like that yeah it's the downfall of destiny is an interesting one because in in on one hand i think about it like all right guys you got you're over over 10 years of destiny related content which it was always meant to be a 10-year project so it was more than expected on the other hand though you do see successful mmos like world of warcraft or final fantasy 14 that just seemingly go on forever and they of course have ups and downs expansions that are good uh expansions people don't like so why couldn't that be the case for destiny and it's funny because i think there's a small part of me and Chris maybe you can check me on this but I'm like Destiny died because the Destiny fans weren't playing Destiny anymore and sure there was that hardcore group that was always there but after Final Shape and you could argue that it's like well Bungie didn't deliver in the post Final Shape era and that kind of killed the game because people weren't there if Destiny was still thriving in the way it was then it wouldn't be gone or there would be it would be an easy way to confirm destiny 3 now do you want to blame i blaming the players is stupid because it's like if the content isn't good or not there then why would you expect them to show up so it's like bungie kind of did this to themselves in the fact that destiny was no longer a desirable game for those players to keep coming back to yeah i think that's valid i think the i mean the onboarding on destiny is terrible yeah i mean that is consistently so like it is bungie makes really great complicated games that are like surprisingly deep in comparison to what you think they would be based on just like first look but like at the same time they're also like they're so systems they are so systems heavy that like it's systems on top of systems on top of systems i'm a veteran destiny player i jumped on over the weekend i have no idea what to do you know like it is insane the amount of shit that they've added to the game even in just a short period of time that I've been gone so I mean there's a lot of reasons I think that I think the big reason though is that destiny is expensive like whether we there's a lot of comparisons to other live service games and I get it but like there's no triple a live service game really like there's expensive live service games in the sense that like oh we have you know fortnight's out and it's expensive to maintain there's like a

1:34:26you know, it's not destiny.

1:34:30Colin Moriarty:You can, you can look at it and you can feel how expensive it is compared to like other live service games in the, in the space. And so I think that's a problem. Um, I think onboarding is an issue. I think player retention after you've ended your story is an issue. But again, I thought that I, in my mind, that was intentional. In my mind, it was intentional for them to be like, Hey, the final shape, that's it. we're going to put out marathon now and then uh maybe afterwards we'll do like a third destiny or whatever because the thing that i felt was like well maybe they just don't want to do destiny anymore because that's also valid they didn't want to do halo after 10 years they didn't want to do halo after five years and then they were contractually obligated to do like three more games so it stands to reason to me it's like well maybe they just didn't want to do destiny anymore but then you hear stuff from the team it's like no we we wanted to do a lot more actually and so now i don't really know what to feel because i'm just like if it's something that you did because you genuinely like oh the passion's gone or whatever and it's like if we put anything out it's gonna suck i can respect that in fact i actually think that's like really cool but if you actually wanted to do shit and then the executive's like yeah let's not do it you couldn't figure out a way to make it work what did they buy you for man i don't know if not destiny i don't know and here's the thing too here's the thing too i love and here's the thing too right like i love marathon I think Marathon is actually an exceptional video game in a lot of ways.

1:35:55Colin Moriarty:If you couldn't get Destiny back on track, as far as like, if Sony saw Destiny, right? And they were like, not good enough. Like the engagement.

1:36:10Colin Moriarty:You're going to invest in Marathon though? Which is like way more niche, way more beleaguered technically. technically like i don't the reason people weren't playing destiny anymore is because it was over they finished it if you gave them more new destiny they would come back and i don't mean more destiny 2 i mean a proper like here's a follow-up a lot of people would come right the back so to me i just i don't really understand the logic of like you know destiny 2 is not doing well but it was doing better than marathon and you're committing to marathon like i get is the growth potential i guess the growth potential for marathon is higher than the growth potential for destiny 2 is and i think that that's true i'm not really going back to destiny 2 really i'm probably gonna fuck around with the june 9th update for sentimental reasons and maybe check it out but destiny 3 would be the thing to pull me back and if they're not gonna do that well then i don't know okay i just feel like it's such a safe bet you may you spent all this money on Concord and you just didn't invest in Destiny like I don't know it's just I don't know I don't know I don't know it's weird it's weird to me the irony I think is that there's a there's like a mixture of of these bad cascading domino effect decisions that Sony has made around their their the entities that they own wherein like because there's there's a fundamental problem in games like Destiny that are inherent to all games like Destiny which is that you have to keep spending and the maintenance of the game becomes very expensive and onerous if you don't have a final fantasy 14 or a world of warcraft or something where it makes it worth your while and so you have to know when to say goodbye thus you have to plan for that obsolescence before it happens right and this is where i brought up riot earlier where i actually though these things didn't work out for them really it's like i respect that they realize like we have all our eggs in one basket at the time they did they have what valorant now too right yeah but it's like we gotta do other things we can't we can't we have to spend some of this money on other shit we can't just keep doing league of legends forever now maybe you can but they're like we got they got remember they had the single player role-playing games that didn't really go anywhere they have that fighting game that people are pretty mad about but it's like and other things and i'm like cool like that's a that's a sign that like no we're not obsolete yet if we are obsolete at least we have these irons in the fire and as things go down here we can kind of raise the boat here and or the tide and the boat will stay afloat and i think bungee it's surprising to me that they didn't see this happening behind the scenes and that like you said the obvious there are two obvious things you can do either you take your whole team many people you know of the 800 of your people or whatever and you're like we're going to do something new like totally new which is bold and interesting but you invest in that you invest hundreds of millions of dollars in that or you're like we're going to do destiny again which is the safer bet probably a lower ceiling higher floor and you invest in that instead and it's kind of a surprise that it's it's so i guess what i'm saying is it's kind of a surprise that it's destiny 3 is not only not in development and hasn't been greenlit but isn't probably all deep in development right now that that's the bigger surprise is like it should be years into development and the other the cascading effect i was i was talking about is like bungie came into the sony family with like big balls and we all kind of acknowledge it it's like we're gonna do what we want we're not in playstation studios our games are going to appear everywhere and that level of bravado i think did trickle down to other projects and hurt including the naughty dog project and other things where it's like who where in hindsight it's like who the fuck are you you know look at your own house it's on fire cory sonia wrote in and said hi cdc what do you think about the speculation that bungie's executive team were spinning up so many vaporware projects in order to increase their valuation to prospective buyers and grow their payouts when they are sold again i don't know the ins and outs of no one knows the ins and outs of what happened behind the scenes with this deal back in 2022 apparently there were other suitors including microsoft and i think that that was what allowed the price to get raised to this onerous ridiculous level that they they paid they paid almost as much for bungie as as disney paid for star wars it's a fucking joke um yeah and to be fair also this was at a time where money was free right that's true in comparison like a lot a lot there were a lot of ridiculous acquisitions around that time that were like absurd you're you're totally right but remember chris we discussed at the time like this is such a huge purchase for sony 3.6 billion dollars is nothing for microsoft and other big entities but that's more than they've probably spent on every studio they ever bought combined and i looked i remember looking at it at the time and just kind of being like this is this feels weird it's not part of your culture you have this other thing going it's for what to what end and you would you would thought that at the very least there would be something behind the scenes we didn't know like there were these things that that Sony understood about games that are development ideas, the numbers.

1:41:27So I don't want to go and say like these guys were fucking around intentionally. Maybe they were, maybe they weren't. But like, I do think it's fairly conclusive at this point that Sony got, got bad. And that it's realistic to imagine that this deal will not only cost Sony the entire cost of Bungie, but more than that, because Bungie is probably losing money and they have to sustain it. So not only was that a sunk cost of$3.6 billion, but now you have to sustain this fucking thing. And I just, I can't get over it. Can you imagine how hamstrung they've been because of this? Like financially, not in terms of their performance, but in terms of like allocating your capital in other ways, that money could have gone to a bunch of other shit and it's simply gone.

1:42:16And it's not easy. Like Microsoft can go like, oh, well, we lost money on this Xbox thing or whatever we'll just go and we'll we'll create it with azure or we'll create the capital with this or that it's like sony doesn't really have that option playstation is the capital creator right and even in their entertainment sphere with pictures kind of doing soft and music doing software it's like i just can't get over it i i can't believe it that they just fucked up so badly to the point where they are so buttoned up externally that you have to imagine shit hit the fucking fan and continues to hit the fan behind the scenes because of this.

1:42:53About all the money and time, they've taken multiple hundreds of billions of dollar impairments on fiscal reports just to start eating away at what they know is going to happen. And it gets into this next thing with Dylan Wedniewski. Wedniewski says, hey, CDC, the narrative around Bungie right now seems incredibly bleak with fans deeply split over the shift from destiny to marathon. It feels like the only inevitable outcome left on the table is the total closure of Bungie. Is there a correct next step for Sony here? If Concord hadn't bombed, would Sony have had the capital and patience to bankroll Destiny 3?

1:43:26Or is a full-blown sequel just too expensive to justify in today's market? Curious to hear Chris's thoughts on this one, especially love all that you do. Chris has already spoken a little bit about that. We can get further into it. The one thing that I wanted to say here is that I do think the closure of Bungie is on the table in the mid to long term. I don't know why you would. you could just take you could just like ransack the company for talent and their ip and just close them down you know and it's like you're it's what happened with halo like they lost halo you know um and they're gonna lose destiny in this next deal too like the idea that bungee will because some people will be like oh they'll spin off again and pull this bullshit i'm like any bungee that spins off from this is gonna be so it's gonna be so fucked up and wounded because it's not going to have any IP because it'll all have been taken and their talent will probably whatever top 10 or 20 percent of talent will just be siphoned off and then they'll be like okay bye and I really do think that that's like a realistic outcome and maybe the most maybe the most reasonable outcome as opposed to we always talk about BioWare right as not that they're as big or as important as Bungie they're not but like it's a it's like what is like BioWare what are we doing and it's the same thing with bungee it's like all these people are gone like a lot of them have been gone you you gave them all major buyouts and they took them and left one of them is suing you by the way um for all sorts for getting fired i just think this thing's like like a amazing clusterfuck like this is a this is maybe the worst thing sony's ever done when you just look at it financially remember the entire ps2 era is an example.

1:45:10No, let's let's say the PS3 era. Sony lost throughout the PS3 era a cumulative$1 billion. That was like the net outcome. They lost almost four times that on this acquisition.

1:45:27So I have a little I'm a little it's easy to be upset at Bungie and I think a lot of people are and I am a little mad at Bungie, but it's like be mad at the fucking people that that the hucksters tricked. It's no wonder the longer you go on that Jim Ryan's gone.

1:45:45Right? Like it's, it's, it's like, it sucks that they, that that's their scapegoat because I don't believe he was the ultimate decision-maker. Well, he was the, he was the, he was the yes man, not the yes man. It's the wrong nomenclature. He was the decision-maker at the top, but there are people feeding him information.

1:46:02Colin Moriarty:Sure. Is this good? Like, you think he just like found, he's like, oh, let's just do this. It's like, no, they're like, there are a lot of people probably like, this is a good idea. This is what they're doing. And this is what we can do. and this is what it's worth and these people are still there as far as i understand herman holst is almost certainly one of them yeah i keep saying that yeah i don't know i don't know yeah i don't know i mean it's it's it's possible um i think again it's it's it's such a monkey's paw of a studio because it's just like i really do think they make some of the best shit ever but then they have the they have they have this like team of executives or higher ups or whatever the fuck that just do not know how to manage it i think they willfully also like i i would even go so far as to say is like i think they willfully like i i think they i think they were scam artists like genuinely like that the the executives at bungee who were like in charge of like oh this is our evaluation or whatever absolute and by the way this is not even this was true before that like i think there was like a famous interview that i can't remember where or like who said it but like uh uh microsoft got into bungee and bungee couldn't get them out there were key people from from microsoft that kind of got in there and like kind of brought that culture with them and uh fucked it and i think uh will they close i think it's possible i think it's it would be so crazy i mean i get it but it's so crazy to me that like bioware has been spinning around for 10 years making garbage like objective trash and that and that bungie could uh like i get the i get the price like i get all that but like from a holistic standpoint it's like it's wild to me that like bungie has a bigger shot of shutting down before bioware like it makes no sense yeah like from a quality type of it's like it's just so it's such a sin for the industry but i get it uh and we'll see i don't know uh i don't know what bungee can do really um i do think it'd be crazy of them to shut them down anytime soon just because it's like brother you spent all this money for what and also the thing too is that you can siphon that talent but like that's not really and maybe this is a bold statement to say but there were there were bungee talent on there's bungee talent on the concord team there's bungee talent all over the fucking place but like i think you need like there's a there's something that happens when a group of people is together working on something that i think you can't just like mix and match really you can't bring this guy over there and expect that that's going to have like destiny level success it's like no the destiny level destiny was big because these people were working together and marathon is as it is good and really good because these people are working together i don't know if you can really like piece me on the i think the best case scenario is that you take the p the best people at bungee and maybe like spin them off into like a smaller studio where they remain together but like i don't know if you could really like absorb like oh you go to sucker punch and it's like ah i don't think that works yeah you're probably right i think maybe the best outcome would or the most reasonable outcome is to just pare the studio down to four or five hundred people which would make it like naughty dog sized and then the the burn rate is going to be in the tens of millions of dollars a year just for personnel so they're gonna have to make something big and so you continue maybe marathon's kind of done in quotes there's obviously gonna be a lot of content but maybe you have 150 people on that project you take the other 350 and you make and this is what i wanted to kind of leave with is like everyone wants destiny 3 i'm like yeah i think a new destiny probably is the right call but just make it destiny and just make it so that like you never there's no there's not going to be a fortnight too right yeah like there's not going to be an apex legends too there was an overwatch too and as i understand a lot of people think that was a huge mistake well now overwatch too is just overwatch again right exactly so like you go back and you say it's what we say about gran turismo or like what the potential future of the sports games are from 2k and from sony and others it's like make a platform make it so that like the idea is that this is literally going to be alive potentially for decades right and well shit they didn't they just didn't um in fact i think they did epic not that has anything to do with this but epic just showed unreal 6 i don't know if you guys saw that like there was rocket league footage and it's like we're getting to the point where these things are becoming so beautiful that you could really justify keeping them around for a long time you know and that won't really be a problem mike and i were talking about uh a bit of a non-sequitur but same idea about how uh reggie fizzimi was saying recently that um phil's aim was saying that uh they did the nes and snes classics because they were losing so much money on wii u right and they needed to kind of stay alive um and i just feel like you and then they stop at n64 which i thought was weird because they realize like these games don't really hold up they don't like from a visual perspective but it's not going to be a problem anymore and so you really can have a long view on platform-based games as a service and free-to-play games wherein you could commit to them forever and there really won't be like a resolution or frame rate or gameplay problem inherent in these things that are base 1080 or 1440p and 60 frames and then you can just up res and let things run better and literally commit to this thing forever and have this platform and i think if they had that now i think destiny actually would be in a bit of a different situation instead they disney disneyfied the the vaulting things away and segmenting them and putting it's like no like you have to instead and what would be cool about destiny platform would be like as part of this we're bringing everything back like everything destiny's ever done is going to be on this like from day one and you'll subscribe to it or whatever and like figure it out just figure it out and i just feel like that that might be the future for them but the idea that there'll be a thousand person studio again or anything like that i think that's that's done and i and i always thought that they were looking at their numbers it's like this is a major blow majorly bloated studio anyway so yeah i think um i think you're right i think probably one so there's two there's two things and then we can move on yeah but i think uh the first thing is that like a new destiny game in like three four or five years i think the second that logo pops up it's gonna print money you know what i mean i think people people at that at that point especially where people are like nostalgic about it and they miss it it's like we talk about uncharted all the time it's like how big an uncharted game is going to be now that it's been so long you know and like how excited people will be to see it i think that's true the other reality too is that like dude the economy is so bad like we just had and we'll get into it later because there's a an inquiry about some price hikes but like it operating bungee as it is is so much harder today than it was even four years ago five years ago six years ago uh to the point where like yeah if it was if things weren't the way they were you know the outcome or the the future wouldn't be so bleak i think there would be a lot more wiggle room not that there would be a ton but there would be some and it's uh a lot of that's kind of eroded and that's a bummer because that's that has nothing to do with any of this that's just like extraneous factors but i think yeah we'll we'll see what happens with uh with bungee but we certainly will i'll be i'll be keeping an eye yeah we all will be keeping a keen eye on on bungee moving forward and i i want them to find success with marathon i think they have something there and i think they just have to accept it is what it is it's at least it's something and you can build off of it and and find and buy some time all right We refer next to our story to MP First, the website we've been referring to quite a bit recently as they continue to go into people's CVs and LinkedIn profiles and find interesting information.

1:54:24This one is about Media Molecule. And there's not too much information to work on here, but we do know that Media Molecule is working on something new. And we do know that it's probably something more game-like as opposed to something tools-oriented like Dreams was and to a lesser extent, LittleBigPlanet even was. they write that quote media molecules developer resume points to open world title and it says quote in part the resume contains a brief description of the unannounced project that while expectedly vague explicitly reveals the inclusion of quote-unquote open world content according to the cv the developer is the feature owner main contact and vision holder of various open world content within the title while this doesn't definitively mean the game will strictly fit into the open world genre it heavily hints at a larger more non-linear experience of what the studio has traditionally delivered.

1:55:11The resume also goes on to detail other specific design responsibilities that provide a picture of the game's core mechanics. Notably, it mentions tasks involving quote, level blocking out of main points of interest, moment-to-moment gameplay, and interestingly forge design. The latter mentioned implies that resource gathering systems could be playing a role in the game to some extent, maybe even pointing towards crafting or survival elements. That's all we really have to work on here. It's not much. I will say that I don't care. I mean, that's like my literal answer to anything Media Molecule is doing.

1:55:44I will care when you have something to show me and there's something to be excited about, but you have gone so long and somehow have survived a bloodletting that has, and I'm just being straight, sacrificed better studios at the altar of finance. You better have something fucking good, and I'll care about it when the time comes. but until then you could describe whatever it is and I don't give a shit reminding everyone of course that if you don't count Tearaway and I know some people it's like Tearaway is cool it was made by like 15 people right uh the last full project that they did at Media Molecule was PlayStation 3's LittleBigPlanet 2 that came out in January 2011 2011.

1:56:31So whatever, man, you know, like it's, it's, it's, we just said it about Bioware. It's like this and, and all of the founders are gone. As I understand, I think they're all gone now. That was before the PSN outage, right? Yes. It was the same year, but before the outage. Yeah.

1:56:49Colin Moriarty:Oh my God. Cause that feels ancient. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it is age. I mean, it's, that is in the middle of the PlayStation 3 era and uh it's absolutely bonkers yeah again Tearaway is a cool game Dreams was an experiment that didn't work out very well but I just I don't even know what to be excited about it's like okay it's like some team that's been fucking hobbling around for a long time it's not to say that what they can't do is or what they do can't be impressive I hope it is it's just to say that I'm not giving it any oxygen until like and speculating about it who cares yeah we got to see it um but also i do have to say like hearing hearing that they're working on an open world game with crafting elements is deeply disappointing to me but like i mean maybe it'll be great who the fuck knows but like i mean that from the get-go that kind of sounds like ah it's not really what i was hoping for you know what do you think dusty i think um it i could see them doing something cool because if you think about like games like animal crossing or right now really popular tomodachi life uh those are games with high levels of creator customization and input and so while what media molecule did with LittleBigPlanet 1 and 2 and to some extent dreams of like, we're going to let you create a game within the game, right?

1:58:23Colin Moriarty:It's cool and was neat, but I think for most people at this point, they want to play a game. They want to play the game that is made for them. And so my hope for whatever this next project is, is that I think that that element of creativity is always going to be in Media Molecule's DNA. but hone though that creativity into a game that's already established much like like an animal crossing is a very creative game in that you design your island you decorate things you can you know customize the different uh villagers and stuff like that add that type of customize like a deep level of creator creativity into an established game and so if it's an open world type, you know, crafting game where that's the focus of the creativity.

1:59:17Colin Moriarty:I think then they could really have something. But who knows? This is we're not going off much. Yeah, there's just nothing to work off of. And you're right that the creativity is based to their to their identity. And we need more of that whimsy. That's what that's part of what Astro Bot had brought back. And I think has been missing. and a lot of that had been missing because Media Molecule had been woefully mismanaged for a really long period of time. And imagine if they didn't have the wisdom to let them make that Vita game back in 2013, 2014, they would have released literally nothing in that time.

1:59:51And there's no way that game bought them time because that game didn't sell appreciably. It probably made money, but like, you know, little bits considering they didn't spend a lot of money to make it to begin with. I want good things for them. I just I think there's a With the way assets are moved around and the way money is spent at Sony and that there's only a limited amount of capital resource, which makes sense. I think it's fairly reasonable now to kind of be upset that certain teams were given the boot and certain teams survived. And you don't want to play around with people's jobs. You don't I'm not saying anything from that.

2:00:28I don't want anyone Media Molecule to lose their jobs anymore. They want people to bend to lose their jobs. What I'm saying is, is if you had a cut, why are you cutting Bluepoint? or you know and i again i continue to be a little worried about housemark and i hope that sony's if it's true that because i saw a linear report that that uh saros's budget was 71 million dollars which is reasonable but if that's true it's nowhere close to making its money back and probably never will you know and that kind of shit make if they really sold 300 400 000 copies That's like nowhere even remotely where they need to be to make the money back.

2:01:09And now they'll sell more copies, maybe a million more copies lifetime, but at what price? And it still would be insufficient to make that money back. And so I worry about them. And I think that there's a level of favoritism shown towards certain teams. And that's reasonable enough, but I feel like some of it is unearned. and so I'm rooting for Media Molecule, but it's...

2:01:36And maybe there's a reason to be optimistic. Maybe it's like so good. If you want to look at it, you know, if you want to look at it optimistically, it's like when they were making all their cuts in their budget cuts and stuff, it's like, this is so good. We won't walk away from this. Maybe.

2:01:49Colin Moriarty:Yeah, it could be. Little Big Planet was a revolutionary game. It's just that like they're different now. So we'll see. Dustin, I'm very curious to see what you think of this next story. it's dragon quest 40th anniversary i love the 40th anniversary metal by the way i think it's really cute with the bow um the little icon they made dragon quest 12 has re-emerged it is now called beyond dreams used to be called the flames of fate and it seems to be a more traditional style dragon quest game a little more bright and airy and adventurous as opposed to the darker though unseen elements that we were promised for the original Dragon Quest when it was announced years ago Yosuke Saito and Yuji Horii who obviously are the major players behind Dragon Quest these days at Square Enix put up a 10 minute video did you watch it they were so cute like oh yeah they were like doing their little like hand gestures and stuff like that what's up with Yuji Horii's hair love it love what he's got going on with his hair that is a fucking crazy look man so dustin i'm very curious to know what you think they show a little bit of the game off it looks very traditional not unlike dragon quest 11 um i said this in the discord and someone wrote in about this as well link dv wrote in said dragon quest 12 beyond dreams why does the main character look like he has the spanish plague why is the title so much of a downgrade fires of fate was a killer subtitle total reshuffle Big Daddy Colin 15-minute oral presentation on Square Enix's mishandling of their most storied franchise.

2:03:30Thank you for your donation. I did say in the Discord that the character looks a little derpy. Like his mother drank alcohol when he was in the womb.

2:03:51And I don't know about it. I couldn't. I can't unsee. Like, he looks weird. to me game looks fun it looks like he transforms into some sort of monster um based on the footage which is cool very early to know more to put more of a of a fine point on it for people out there by the way that didn't see the video and didn't see the presentation drag quest 12's development has been restarted they've scrapped the old version of the game and it's realistic to think that this version of the game is years away uh oh wow dustin hit

2:04:26Colin Moriarty:me up what do you think yeah uh so it is was you know really surprising to see uh the fact that they restarted development and while we didn't see very much of what was originally of you know final or final dragon quest 12 uh with the other subtitle and it being a more mature you and i had many times over the years, speculated on what that means. And for me, it was a little I don't want to say the announcement or the trailer is disappointing, but I was intrigued by this idea of like a little bit of a different direction for Dragon Quest. I would still expect it in terms of its gameplay and overall to be very traditional.

2:05:10Colin Moriarty:But the fact they were making a statement like this is going to be a more mature Dragon Quest game, I was like, oh, that sounds kind of cool. So now that we get this new updated new version of the game with a different subtitle and seeing the trailer for it, I mean, of course, visually, it's beautiful and looks so cool. But you're right in that it is it looks just like more Dragon Quest. And maybe that's OK. I'm not a longtime Dragon Quest fan. Maybe Dragon Quest fans just want purely more Dragon Quest that looks vaguely like the previous Dragon Quest games. But there's a small part of me that's like, man, I feel like in terms of ambition, what we're seeing sounds like a little bit of a downgrade.

2:06:01Colin Moriarty:But they had to have had some reason why that old version of the game just wasn't working. So they made the call on it. the fact that what is it with Square Enix is my question I don't know man what is it about them not being able to make games that they've made for decades they suddenly we don't know how they're like make another Dragon Quest they're like we don't know how we lost the technology we just don't know how to do it we don't know how to do it and this keeps happening dude as a Kingdom Hearts fan I remember the wait between Kingdom Hearts 2 and 3 of course there were the side titles in between in the middle there that are you know a quarter of the story but it wasn't kingdom hearts 3 and here we are now kingdom hearts 3 between you know 3 and now the announced 4 it's probably going to be the same amount of time maybe more yeah between maybe more uh so i don't know what it is with square enix and some of these games that they just don't it feels like they don't know how to make them and they have to restart them or they get put on hold or something like that the only thing that they've somehow been well final fantasy 7 remake needed to be restarted yeah that's true in final fantasy 15 um this keeps happening there's something there's something up there well the trailer itself when they show they show it it really reveals the problem of the the timeline right because it's Like Dragon Quest 1, 86, 87, 88, 90, 92, 95, 2000, 2005, 2000.

2:07:42Well, technically 2012 for 10. Then you go to 2017. We're in 2026, dude. Like I understand the NES games were easy to make. They made them in a year, less than a year, comparable to what they're doing now. But I agree with you. and this is what Mike and I were talking about when we were hanging out last night I was like there is something deeply wrong with Square Enix like there's something absolutely fundamentally wrong with it and I was saying remember we bring up that there's that um there's that like activist investor that owns like 10 % of Square Enix that we bring up every once in a while and he releases like these reports about how fucked up the company is and that he wants to like basically seize the company.

2:08:22It's like, yeah, what are you doing? We've been complaining about them for years, and they do get things really right. And I do. This is a whole other topic, but I think a major Square Enix problem is our Final Fantasy fans. And we can get deeper into that if you want. But as far as Dragon Quest is concerned, Dragon Quest should be the most straightforward thing they do of the big three kingdom hearts being a complicated licensed game that's going to take time and final fantasy being something that always changes right uh dragon quest is tradition you and i were both kind of into the dark idea i think it comes from a i'm glad they walked away from it because it was clear that it wasn't working um and i want like you said i wonder what that means like what that looks like but i think i can imagine what that means and looks like if you think about dragon quest 11 dragon quest 11 becomes dark and that's part of the game and it gets darker and darker but it's about a bright and airy like dragon quest games are bright and airy they're they're full of monsters and joy and it's dangerous and there's demons and evil wizards and all sorts of things but like it's got a lighter touch and i wonder if that was what they were missing i found this really interesting thing on the dragon quest fandom that i thought i'd read it's it's a sequence of events right so may 27th 2021 the game was revealed as existing so at that point you assume it was in development since 2019 2018 obviously the game came out in 2017 they ported it to a bunch of places so you give them a little time april 2023 um they changed the logo june 2023 this is interesting yuji hori has a zoom meeting with fellow workers about the game's development difficulties, such as targeting adult audiences and working remotely thanks to COVID.

2:10:17The game at that point had been available for pre-order. April 2024, the Dragon Quest producer of the game had stepped down. I forgot that this happened, that the series producer was gone over the problems and the delays over the game, which I think by this point was probably supposed to be out. And then May 27th, 2024, Yuji Hori announced on Twitter that he was worried about the next mainline Dragon Quest games development because of the recent death of Akira Toriyama and Koichi Sugiyama a while back, saying that Yuji will do his best without them both. And then last year, he confirms multiple times that the game is in development still.

2:10:55It's at this point, I assume that they probably are like, it's we got to go back to the drawing board. And if that's true, then this game will not come out until 2030. I mean, by Square Enix's own, unless they're reusing a bunch of shit and stuff like that. I don't know, but now we've made fun of them ad nauseum at Square Enix about their release cadence and a lot of things that they got totally wrong and fucked up and it's so annoying. Mike and I actually were talking about how I'm like, I think games like Harvest Stella and others actually had a chance of being something more if they just gave them space.

2:11:30But they had no idea how to even do it. And now I said this and I believe this, that a major problem they have are Final Fantasy fans.

2:11:41because Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth are fucking excellent games. And Final Fantasy XVI is an excellent game. The problem is not the execution of those games. The problem is how long it's taking them to make them. And I think the one thing that they have an advantage of in Square Enix, and this is true for all the Japanese publishers, is it's just so cheap to make games there. And so they get to make games under Japanese development rules of capital, and then they get to sell the games on the global market. And this works out to their major advantage. The opposite is true for the Western studios.

2:12:16So without a burn rate that's significant, which they don't have because they don't pay their people anything, they can afford to do shit like this. They can afford for Final Fantasy XV to take forever. They can afford for Final Fantasy VII Remake to switch developers. They can afford for Dragon Quest XII to basically be canceled and revived. But it makes them look fucking stupid. And they need to work and get things better the first time and stop making people wait. Look at their competition with Sega and Persona, right? And what they're doing with the Persona studio and they get out metaphor and they have all the revivals or the Yakuza games or like a dragon games.

2:12:55Look at, and I'm not comparing production values, but look at Falcom. Like they release so many games that their own fans can't even keep up in one series really two if you count ease square enix has these things that like these these bundles of games that are amazing properties and they they don't know what to do so we have dragon quest 12 and then the other thing that's interesting here i thought as well is uh and i don't do you play dragon quest monsters dustin no i've never played it yeah so dragon quest monsters began in the late 90s it was actually a game boy color game The new one is called The Withered World.

2:13:35These games are not unlike Pokemon in a way. You know, you're collecting monsters and all the rest. What's interesting is that this is the first Dragon Quest Monsters game to come to PlayStation. So Dragon Quest Monsters The Withered World is coming to PlayStation 5. What was interesting about this, it follows Dragon Quest 5's story, which I think is interesting. One of the more inaccessible Dragon Quest games. I don't know if you picked this up Dustin when they were talking about the games on the video they were like we hope to get this out before Dragon Quest 12 and I'm like well you hope what are you doing over there what are you guys doing you don't even know the order the games are coming out Jesus Christ they are getting old over there when you look at the videos of them it's like the same dudes forever and Dragon Quest is so old that it's like yeah these guys are getting up there in age but um anyway chris i'm not even gonna go to you i assume you have nothing to say about this but uh dustin dragon quest 12 we'll keep a close eye out on this we need my

2:14:38Colin Moriarty:my only hope is that maybe somehow that we're mixed up and maybe this was restarted earlier than we think and so they're further along than we think and i think you're right colin that there there's certainly some reusing because they want to use a curatorium as designs right so they have to by virtue of that yeah yeah so they they want to use that whether they retool those characters and the story i don't know but i i would imagine they're not starting from scratch they uh say a went underwent a restart and development under a new structure yeah we i'm wishing them the best and i don't want to make it seem like it's all bad i think they've done a great job with the external spinoff games that have come out that are usually outside i think toast makes the um the dragon quest monsters games but they they did obviously the omega force musou dragon quest games that were great dragon quest builders was really well received both of those and the dragon all the remakes right i was gonna say one and two three and seven are all very well regarded.

2:15:45I think the bigger question from there is like, I guess this gives them time to go back and work on five, six, eight and nine. I think nine will be the biggest challenge because it's a mobile game or a handheld game. And I've said this before, is that like I would love for them to get Final Fantasy 10 over here. There is an offline version of that game. Oh, Dragon Quest. I'm sorry, Dragon Quest 10. There is an offline version of that game. And I know that a big challenge is just, it's a lot of translation, but, and that's what has always stopped Dragon Quest games from coming over quickly until more recent history.

2:16:22But they have, so in other words, they do have places to go in the interim if they really map this out well, where it could all, they can really get everything out and then culminate with Dragon Quest 12, which would be pretty neat. And I'm, I got, I just I love the comfort of a Dragon Quest game and we need it. And it's just so sad to think that it's just been so long. And it's a shame. To have nothing for the 40th anniversary.

2:16:51Colin Moriarty:Yeah, yeah, it's it. And we were talking about mismanagement. Look at Final Fantasy nine. Like it's almost certain that Final Fantasy. I don't want to say almost certain, but it seems like Final Fantasy nine remake has just been canceled. And you have to wonder, like, what that looks like. Like, what went wrong with that? that game has been in development forever maybe it'll become like a final fantasy tactics style thing where it will just emerge one day but we'll see but yes the character does look a little derpy i think it's his eyes it well it is his eyes and mike had pointed out and this is true and this is a good point that it seems to be surrounding dreams and sleep hence the name so he could just be tired like that's him like just being and I'm tired I always look tired but the eyes are too far apart

2:17:39Colin Moriarty:I mean that's all there is to it I see what you're saying it's like it looks very awkward so it's not like the bags under the eyes that doesn't bother me it's that he they're just they're too big and they're too far apart you look special all right I'll be the one that says it in fact Dustin when I said that in the chat you responded with a mirror i had to do yeah you set it up too beautifully i couldn't do it i couldn't resist all right we have some news that just broke today from when we're recording i don't know if anyone really gives a shit i mean a lot of people give a shit but i don't know if we care call of duty's new game this year has been confirmed call of duty modern warfare 4 it launches campaign multiplayer and dmz modes october 23rd the logo is shit i think but i think it's supposed to look like an Asian character because the game apparently takes place in Korea which is kind of cool so I appreciate that we already know that it is skipping PlayStation 4 for the first time since 2013 which is awesome so we can finally move on and it is not the last game to be moving off of PS4 I think we're going to talk about others as well you can pre-order the game for PS5 now if you want there is some information on the PlayStation blog about multiplayer and the campaign and all the rest and And it says, by the way, that you play as a young South Korean soldier, which is pretty interesting.

2:19:02Any excitement about this, Chris? A Modern Warfare 4?

2:19:06Colin Moriarty:I mean, I don't know. I kind of like the logo, actually. I like it looks distinct. I'm into it. But honestly, I don't know, man. Call of Duty has to in order for Call of Duty to work for me. It has to have been out already. and I have to hear from people that I trust that it's not the same as it always is and they have no reason to not make it the same as they always do. So like, I don't know. I'm going to assume that this is going to be a skip for me, but I mean, Call of Duty is huge still, even after last year's blunder and many blunders throughout the lifespan of this series. It just doesn't speak to me.

2:19:47Colin Moriarty:I haven't cared about Call of Duty really since the original Modern Warfare 2. Like, I fell off even before Black Ops, which people swear is, like, you know. People consider that to be, like, the apex, I think. Like, the highest quality Call of Duty, like Black Ops 1 and Black Ops 2. It was, like, peak. I fell off before that. So, like, this is not really doing it for me. Yeah, we'll see what happens. I think one interesting thing about this is that it's Infinity Ward's game. That's true. So they go again, no co-development, which they've been doing a little bit specifically with, I think, Raven jumping between Treyarch and maybe Sledgehammer or something like that.

2:20:29So there's that. Dustin, any interest in this game? An interesting wrinkle that has anything to do with our show is this will be the first version to come to Switch, too. Yeah, I saw that.

2:20:39Colin Moriarty:I am intrigued by this. I was very, very critical of the last Call of Duty that came out. And certainly I wasn't the only one that wasn't into it, as we talked about the stats behind the last Call of Duty game in comparison to the ones before it. But I want to give them a chance because I, while I don't consider myself like a Call of Duty guy, I have put significant time into most of them over the last few years uh it's not something that lasts all year until the next one but for a good few months me and the boys play call of duty and so i'm intrigued particularly because there are people that played it um like youtubers and stuff like that and they sound very promising uh their reactions to it there is one really weird point that's in this playstation blog point a post that i also saw people talking about uh where they're talking about modern warfare 4 introduced as ballistic authority a new weapon first technology stack that unifies precision aiming physics handling blah blah blah blah but here's the point at the end the promise is simple no bloom no guesswork no doubt every shot tells the truth and there's i i don't know if it's just in if you are shooting while not ads that there's no bloom really interesting so it sounds like they are making some pretty significant changes uh to the actual gunplay itself and so with that being said and also just i think that the look feels right it feels like a very strong course correction from the last black ops what was it black ops five six i can't remember which one they're on it's uh yeah black ops seven seven holy shit okay so black ops seven now and anything could change in multiple we'll have you know a fucking beavis and butthead skin maybe by the end of the year but um jesus christ as of right now based on what we've seen i'm intrigued by it i want to see with the actual multiplayer and what these changes look like though um we have a letter from andrew feistner who says good day sacred men modern warfare 4 has been revealed alongside some interesting news war zone is leaving behind ps4 this fall do you believe it should have taken this long and will it be a signal to start the mass exodus to start dropping last gen thank you for your donation i did see that and that's great news so call of duty is totally leaving playstation for behind with all of its stuff.

2:23:22We've seen this with other, you know, MLB The Show. We brought up Genshin Impact and others. I think it's just slowly going to happen. I don't know if it's because they want to abandon their audience there as much as they realize that they simply cannot start, they cannot continue to spec to this technology anymore. The games can't be held back by these machines if you want them to be interoperable with each other. So I think that has a major, that's a major impetus behind them doing this. It's going to make it cleaner and easier for them to not do an Xbox One version to not do a PS4 version and to force everyone over.

2:23:52And it's obviously good for the hardware manufacturers as well. Since Activision and Call of Duty is technically an Xbox property now, you definitely want people to move on to new hardware. But I think in a perfect world, they would want to continue making games for PS4. I just don't think it's going to work for them. So Modern Warfare 4 launches in October, October 23rd, pretty close to Grand Theft Auto. I wonder how it'll do this year. There was staunch competition with Battlefield last year, but it looks like Battlefield kind of fell off. I mean, they certainly made a lot of money and they did well, but it wasn't a permanent thing.

2:24:25And I wonder without that resistance if they will do better this year, but then Grand Theft Auto will be right around the corner. We'll see. It feels to me like Call of Duty is a diminishing property. It is all relative, of course. It is still huge and makes a lot of money, but it doesn't seem to be what it once was. And by the way, no Game Pass for this version either. the whole purpose of the of the of the purchase of Activision so funny when you look at it's like what you guys are fucking bungle that one all right Dustin I wanted to go over you to this one I don't know if you saw this did you see this digital foundry video about PlayStation 3 emulation I did so basically the long and short of it I have push square story up here you can explain it a little bit better is that they did this experimentation with the Linux like PS5 Linux so is it a jailbroken ps5 that is then running ps3 it's so funny how sony is pretty cool with big companies like fucking with their hardware and then they don't really care you know um like they work directly with the with digital foundry you think you would ask them like can you not use the ps3 emulator on your jailbroken ps5 but it's cool that they don't care i think the big thing the surprise to me is as i understand is because um of i guess perks in or or quirks i should say in the emulation that while the games run at fairly nice resolutions the frame rates are not great um and it seems like it's just much more complicated so you can massage this a little

2:25:56Colin Moriarty:bit better than than i can yeah so basically there was um a way i don't know through some kind of exploitation that you could install linux on your playstation 5 and the playstation 3 emulator rpcs3 has a linux version of it so they were able to try to attempt to run playstation 3 games on playstation 5 via this exploit and through linux uh and so the the video details like how these different games run um so looking at like the article specifically there are some games that are absolutely amazing they mentioned ridge racer 7 running at 60 fps in 4k uh resistance fall of man they say achieves 4k at a largely locked 30 fps minus some minor frame pacing issues But on the flip side, there are also games that just simply barely work.

2:26:59Colin Moriarty:And to my understanding, it is how much of the game relies on the proprietary weird system, the cell architecture of the PlayStation 3. They mentioned Killzone 3 and Motorstorm Apocalypse offload anti-aliasing to the SPUs. So by disabling MLAA, both games are able to achieve decent results on PS5 via the emulator. So you have to disable your MLAA. So this is not surprising to me at all. When we've talked about getting PS3 games to run on PS5, it's always been possible, but it was never going to be a plug-and-play situation. uh you know it's like right now there's been i don't we're not talking about the show but recently there's been some japanese content creators that got to see metal gear solid 4 running on the playstation 5 uh and it's clear to me at least that they needed to do significantly a lot of work to get that game running the way it is on playstation 5 this isn't just like they're running an emulator i saw a youtube video where they were talking about how like they're in the ps5 version of metal gear solid 4 there's like a totally different save system implemented not that it operates differently but it's like a new menu showing that it's not just like wrapping the game in some kind of you know emulation layer and then putting it on ps5 like metal gear solid 1 i believe and maybe even 2 maybe not 2 but the first one did on ps5 so yeah it it's kind of back to things that we said years ago that's like sony could release some of these games uh on ps5 it's just the the amount of work on a per game basis is going to variate uh drastically just because the ps3 man it was it was it was weird hardware and did thing like games needed to be coded in order to take advantage of it fully just needed to be coded specifically for it so um but yeah interesting work done i mean digital founder always does cool weird stuff like this and interesting to see that like certain ps3 games like they mentioned are just like amazing like they run at many times the resolution originally through an emulator i mean that's cool as fuck but uh just not everything is getting that result it's funny that they they have they show here i can't believe it's like what we were dealing with back then heavenly sword on ps3 running at 18 frames insane um during a very action heavy part but that game is so good it's so funny to think about how it's probably not very good actually now are the are things capped at 30 frames because that is all that would be possible to be rendered i mean you would have to in other words you can't a game can't run in infinite frames right because theoretically because the frames would have to be animated right like there would have to be like you does that make sense yes and no like certain games for example like an esports game like overwatch like in theory uh can run as whatever they're they have those games running at like insane hundreds of fps right but what i'm saying is it's built to do that right like as opposed to these games that they never thought would ever achieve more than 30 frames a second by any means necessary and so they just don't do it well yeah i i know what you're i know what you mean like the frames don't exist so theoretically even if you played like even if you were to play 30 frames per second footage back at like 200 frames per second you would still get you would still get 30 frames per second they would there wouldn't be like a smooth there wouldn't be like a smooth transition like you would see in like high speed footage of something for example where you get you get thousands of frames per second because it's a real life well and you can see i i know is that what you're talking about that's yeah because i'm wondering like why the focus on resolution which i feel like is so much less important in a way you know well yeah well i know well i don't know how true this is of the games on ps3 but i know that there are certain games that are coded in such a way or programmed in such a way that even something as simple as like animations are tied to frame rates and things like that so like uh i i remember uh when halo 2 was being ported to xbox one when they were doing the um the massive collection a big issue that they ran into was a lot of the fire rates and animations were tied to how fast the game ran so theoretically you could fire your gun twice as fast if it was running at 60 frames per second, which was not necessarily how you would want that to go.

2:31:49Colin Moriarty:So they had to do a lot of in-engine tweaking to make it work. But yeah, I mean, I would imagine that there was just a cap because that was the most that it would be reasonable to set it at. There's a lot of PS3 games that run at 60. I think, doesn't Call of Duty... Yeah, Call of Duty runs at 60 on PS3. So I'm not saying the console can't do it. I was just saying, like, I wonder if a gorilla made Killzone so that... they never dreamed that it could even reach that frame rate. And so that's, you know, because it doesn't matter. I just feel like the resolution stuff is because I think they were saying they had Heavenly Sword running at 5K, which is funny.

2:32:28Colin Moriarty:All right. And then again, none of those games were meant to be. Heavenly Sword is probably about 720p or 1080i or something. I mean, it was an early PS3 game. So anyway, just an interesting little experiment that they did. People can go check it out for themselves on their website, digital foundry.net if you'd like uh let's see next story this is a brief one here everyone got emails if you i guess bought or downloaded at some point destruction all stars did you guys get these emails because i think it was i never bought it but it was part of ps plus i want to say and so i might have gotten it that way anyway the email says from may 26th so that's already happened two days ago from when we're recording destruction all stars and all associated virtual currency, Destruction Points, will be removed from sale at PlayStation Store and will no longer be available for purchase.

2:33:18Single-player modes will remain accessible to existing users until Wednesday, November 25th, 2026, when all server support for Destruction All-Stars shall be shut down. After this date, arcade mode single-player challenges shall remain playable for returning players. However, functionality and player experience may be impacted due to the server shutdown. Otherwise, all remaining game services will be taken offline. Any virtual currency, destruction points currently owned by players can continue to be redeemed within available single-player modes until wednesday november 25th 2026 due to ongoing technical issues multiplayer services for destruction all-stars on playstation 5 consoles shall remain offline and are no longer available we appreciate the support and enthusiasm of the destruction all-stars community your statutory by the way the last sentence is funny this your statutory rights if any are not effective oh contact playstation support for assistance in my experience don't contact playstation support yeah right uh for any assistance

2:34:17Colin Moriarty:um statutory and then begin an r and i was like what is happening oh what is happening dude this is this this push square is they they got uh they got funny people there man because this this this image yeah they chose is absolutely great i've never seen that expression captured on a video game character before in my life yeah it's what i see i know that it's like well yeah that's sammy uh good old sammy the um also destruction points dp yeah like what do we do like it's like cod again oh it's cod points it's cp it's like can we do is nobody in the of like how to maybe like avoid these these problems too many too many currencies fake currency many currencies too many star wars imperial credit currencies

2:35:17um destruction all-stars interesting game february it came out in february of 2021 so it was like one of those like launch era games that probably was a little late and so they had to push it it was created by lucid lucid is owed by 10 cent now so they can go fuck off um this was probably the biggest game they ever made lucid did make a game dustin you might remember it do you remember jacob jones it was a vita game it was like a an adventure game that i really like i've never seen this in my life yeah they did two of them but only one of them came to beat him um that's probably i've never seen this the game i remember the most i really jacob jones is a really cute game i really really liked it uh it's got like a costume quest kind of yeah i've to it definitely and um so they they did some of that which was which was fun and um some port work as i understand they kind of a report studio now i think they work with xbox um primarily so they were in over their head with this game and remember lucid was the studio that was originally going to do twisted metal and it got taken away from them and given to fire sprite and then canceled so they're on a little bit of a losing streak there is an interesting part of the email though that i wanted to outline because i think it speaks to um hold on a second let me see if i can find it again i think it speaks to what yeah here it is i think it speaks to what happened with little big planet they and they bury it in the email they really should have started with this due to ongoing technical issues multiplayer services for destruction all-stars on playstation consoles shall remain offline and are no longer available it seems like the game kind of got fucked but but maybe a little more quietly because it's not a very big game.

2:36:57This apparently also happened to Firewall Ultra on PSVR 2, where the game got in some way infiltrated by people. Remember we were mystified by the LittleBigPlanet stuff because LittleBigPlanet servers kept going up and down and then they just remained offline and they were just completely botched. I don't really know how that happens. It's easy enough to understand something getting messed up by hackers and external forces, but you just can't salvage it. Like, it's just like, oh, the UGC is gone. Like, what is going on over there? Like, you're getting your game. It's like, oh, I guess Destruction All-Stars is all fucked up.

2:37:33We're just going to unplug it.

2:37:38Colin Moriarty:It's like, OK. I also wonder how many people were really even playing it. But yeah, Destruction All-Stars, R.I.P. Bozo. All right. Easy. Fair enough. It's R.I.P. Bozo. Fair enough. This is exciting news in the Moriarty household because I live with a big Witcher fan. CD Projekt has revealed a new, a third expansion for the Witcher 3 Wild Hunt, which came back out back on PS4 in 2015, believe it or not. It's called Songs of the Past. It will launch not on PS4, but only on PlayStation 5 for this next gen according to Xbox, and in addition rather to Xbox Series and PC. Fool's Theory, an external team that I think CD Projekt owns, is working on it.

2:38:21They don't have much to say about it. They write, quote, Songs of the Past will return players to the role of legendary monster slayer Geralt of Rivia. Is that how you say it, right? Geralt? Geralt. For a brand new adventure when it launches in 2027 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and S, and PC. CD Projekt Red is co-developing the expansion with Fool's Theory, a team comprising industry veterans who worked on The Witcher 3. More details on Songs of the Past will be released in late summer 2026. The Witcher 3 has sold more than 60 million copies since its release in 2015 and is the winner of more than 250 game of the year awards and 1 ,000 industry awards.

2:38:55All right. What do we think of this, Dustin? The Witcher 3, Wild Hunt, Songs of the Past, the third expansion, the first expansion since 2016. It will have been 11 years. Very much like Borderlands 2 did. Very much like Amalur did. This is obviously leading into The Witcher 4, I assume. What do you make of this? I see what they have, and I think, why can't I have that for me?

2:39:18Colin Moriarty:you know all the games that i don't really care about get this cool really late dlc whether it's borderlands and now witcher 3 and no disrespect to witcher 3 i think clearly it is a amazing game that i have tried i i've put significant time into uh never beat their main campaign i think i was like two-thirds of the way through yeah i couldn't do it either i was so overwhelmed i think modern Colin can do it yeah so it's never a series that really connected with me all that much but I think doing this as a way to bridge the gap is pretty cool and pretty neat I you know joke at the beginning because I'm like man I'm imagine if they did a new Bloodborne DLC I would lose my fucking shit if they did that they won't no so I can just I'm imagining how it feels like for for micah for lockmort and i think maybe maddie too the fact that it's like dude if one of your favorite games of all time from what uh 10 years ago uh over 10 years ago now it's like there's new content for it that's insane that must be so exciting and like i said i want that for me someday well yeah well now it's not we'll try to keep the dream alive for you thank you hearts of stone was the first expansion that came out fall 2015 and then blood and wine was spring 2016 so it has been a long time and it's interesting that fools theory studio is like they said comprised of cd project veterans but they're the team i believe that is remaking the witcher one as well so they have they're doing work over there and this is a better managed team we're going to talk a little bit about Remedy, I think, shortly about like.

2:41:08Managing what you have and making the most out of it. And we were talking earlier about making games in cheaper places like Poland. We were talking about Japan earlier and then selling on a global market. They have made so much money. On The Witcher 3 that it's and Cyberpunk that it's probably hard to imagine. And I like them. I like CD Projekt. I'm rooting for them. I thought I like The Witcher 3. I just wasn't it just didn't hit me at the time. I was overwhelmed by it. It was more of like my media. I was more of like when I was in my journalist era that I just have time. I'm like, I can't be playing this game for fucking ever.

2:41:42Like I have other things to do. I don't really feel that way anymore. So I think I should give it. I probably will give it another chance at some point. But Cyberpunk. Is so good. Like one of the great games of the last 10 years, easily, easily. One of the great games of the last. I couldn't believe how good it was. Like I really could. I was like, this is really fucking great. Like, I can't believe that you almost ruined it. Yeah. Like, how dare you? You know? Because I remember I played, what, 22 when it came to PS5. I wasn't going to play it on PS4. It was going to be a little too stinky.

2:42:17Colin Moriarty:No, Jesus. No. Chris, are you going to play the Witcher 3 Wild Hunt Songs of the Past? No, I'm kind of like with you guys. We're like, I like, I think the Witcher 3 is objectively a great game. I think I've experienced it and I've played. Every time I play it, I get like 30 hours in and I'm like, I like this. But like, I don't know, something pulls me away from it every time. And I just I never stick with it. It's like it's very peculiar. I think really, to be honest, I don't I don't gel well with the combat. And combat is kind of like a big. I'm a big game feel guy, like a big game play person.

2:42:55Colin Moriarty:So like, I mean, like it's cool that it's immersive and it's really well written. and I appreciate all of that, but I just need more out of the moment-to-moment than Witcher 3 has, but I think it's cool that... I like this trend of old games getting this new shit out of nowhere. Me too. I'm excited. You know what? I'm really going to be so over the moon when that late-generation prototype DLC comes out. Yeah. that prototype prototype one yeah yeah wow i never played prototype two so i have no i have no feelings but i did platinum prototype two fascinating yeah isn't it that was probably a spike platinum as well uh it's funny michael bagby wrote in said hi sacred gents with the announcement of the witcher 3 dlc coming 12 years after the base game was released is this going to be some sort of record for the longest gap between a single player game and an expansion what do you think it will cost and is it a good idea to revisit such a beloved game whilst working on a sequel thanks for all you do it's materially a good idea like it's gonna it's gonna drive new copies of witcher 3 it's perfect like witcher 3 is free in terms of what i mean by that is it's from their perspective it's done so every game they sell is just free money and investing a little bit to make that revive that and get people it's brilliant now i would again the only two i can think of off the top of my head i'm sure there are others in the pc space that i just don't know because I think didn't Diablo 3 or something get an expansion like really way after something but something like that that I don't play but I thought of Borderlands 2 and I bought of Amalur like I said now Borderlands 2 came out 2012 and its expansion the last expansion came out in 2019 which was really far away that was to tease Borderlands 3 that was seven years so nowhere near it Amalur came out 2012 as well earlier in 2012 than Borderlands and that expansion came out in 2020.

2:44:53So closer, but still no cigar. So yeah, I think it is. The. As I can tell, it's in the console space. I can't think of anything like that. In the PC space, there's probably some bullshit for civilization or. Something, I don't know. I promised we would talk about Remedy. And we'll do that now. The publication, the games business sat down with their new CEO, Jean Charles Goduchon. who used to work at Electronic Arts. And in fact, he was like a guy that worked on a bunch of weird shit at EA, like free-to-play games and mobile. He worked on Battlefield Heroes and FIFA, and he even worked for CCP on EVE Online, which is interesting.

2:45:34So he's a little bit of a weird fit, I think, and I think he has to do some interviews to convince people that he's the right fit. But he said some interesting stuff here about Remedy that I thought was interesting when he was asked about it. He said, quote, I think I got chosen because I know exactly what Remedy is and what needs to be protected, needs to be supported and needs to be grown. Remedy is a one of a kind studio. It's a studio that has amazing creative drive. It's a studio that has been messy here or there. And that's the beauty of the type of games that were that that were made and how.

2:46:02But I hope I can bring to Remedy his vision on where the company could go and where we can make some improvements. He said something, which I believe 100 percent. He said, quote, Remedy is one of the few studios which is genuinely supported by players. And I agree with I believe that that's true. is probably one of a dozen studios or so that has that moniker. He continues, even my announcement was something I loved because people were protecting Remedy. When I was announced, people from the industry and close friends sent me messages saying things like, JC, that's awesome, congrats. And the last line was, don't fuck it up.

2:46:34It was, we love Remedy so much, don't fuck it up. That shows how much people love Remedy. Remedy is already one of the biggest game authors with very strong signature products. Now, after seeing it from the inside, there's so much more we can give in terms of super strong authored, creative, crazy stories and gameplay. Honestly, we haven't achieved half of the potential in terms of the products that we make. This is something that I believe 100%. And he basically he goes on, people should go read the interview, you can listen to it too. It's pretty interesting. He talks about how and we've reported on this that they made a deal before he came on board with Annapurna to start getting their games in the TV and movie format.

2:47:10And this is the obvious thing for them to do. But one of the things that I was pleased to read is that this guy does seem to understand that they are untapped, that they don't really need to change. They need to figure out a different way to market their games. And I've always been kind of mystified by the lack of commercial success that their stuff sees. It seems like the kind of game, maybe not Alan Wake one, because it was kind of on the Xbox 360. I think Alan Wake one was kind of it was the wrong. Alan Wake one would have done better on PS3. Like if that makes any sense. The audience for that kind of cerebral game was not on Xbox at the time.

2:47:45You know, it doesn't fit. I thought it was cool, but it doesn't really fit. Right. And I don't think they've done themselves any favors. The epic deal with Alan Wake 2 has kept the game off of steam. Some would argue that that is the only reason the game even exists. So you can't like overlook that they needed that money. But the way I look at it, when I look at control, especially, but Alan Wake to a degree as well, and Alan Wake 2 especially is like these games should be selling way more these are the kinds of games that i thought players of games wanted and i feel like a lot of them don't know they exist and it seems like or they're not positioned properly and i feel like this guy understands that chris how do you feel about all that we're both huge remedy fans

2:48:25Colin Moriarty:so it's good to talk about that is true yeah like i mean i'm kind of a mark for whatever they do i think um they just have a a really unique voice and a really weird way of doing this i i appreciate the fact that they actually mix media which I feel like so few studios do if any really that's more of like an animation thing the idea of like mixing mediums but like especially after the DLC for the last the Alienware 2 DLC is so fun dude it is so cool it is so interesting and weird and yeah I agree I think they have a long if they can manage themselves well i think they have like a really bright future i think i think the the best is yet to come i think for for remedy but yeah i mean the the alan way to epic deal thing like i don't know like i i get that like they needed that money but i feel like they could have i feel like they could have justified alan way to exist i feel like they could have gotten alan way to made sold and sold a shit ton on steam like i i don't necessarily buy that i think that was probably a bad deal in retrospect maybe at the at that point it was maybe the the easiest way to go and i guess i can't fault them for that i guess but like they kind of gimped themselves there because i nobody i know fucks with epic at all at all all my homies hate epic all my homies dude i i have i have an epic account i i never go on it i've purchased games that i have for free didn't we get on epic don't we have i think i gave you my i forgot about this didn't i give you my witcher 3 or my uh my witcher 3 my epic account that gives you free access to every game on the on the platform it's not every game it's like weird it's like there's like some i know what you're saying it's not every single game but it's a surprising number of them and sometimes when they just come out but then there are some like like i remember chronos was on there but then there are things that are like weirdly not there like i don't really know what the situation is over there but like and to be fair i do i do go on there sometimes i'm being a little bit exaggerating but it's just such a anytime i have to open something that isn't steam it just like it feels it feels gross and it's not even necessarily because i'm opposed to it it's literally just the way they design these things they designed they design uh epic and and other things too you play was kind of the same thing they designed these things as if they're apps and not computer like i don't even know how to describe it like they feel more like suitable to a controller than a mouse and keyboard where steam feels very dense it feels like it's made for a computer and it's like epic it's like i don't even know how to find like even just clicking around like my library is insanely convoluted and buried under multiple menus it's a bad experience so the epic game store is is that what launches fortnight yeah yeah so that's the main thing i guess but like i don't know anybody who has anything else from them you know it's usually fortnight and that's it or the free game that they get when they log in yeah i i agree with you i i forgot about that epic account because that goes to show you how disinterested we are when we got that now like here this is like a a media pass and like you'll get like basically a bunch of shit for free at all times i'm like yeah i'm good here chris you got it resident so resident evil requiem and arc raiders are on this account i bought both of those

2:52:02Colin Moriarty:poor epic at least they tried yeah uh anything you want to say about remedy before we move on dustin i'm hopeful for them i think that i mean even recently in the last few years there's been some decisions before this guy came in like the um fire break fire break yeah what are we doing let's get back on track with this so you know uh before dude to give fire break its flowers it's not it's it's it's a game that nobody wanted that game plays remarkably well for a first person shooter from a studio that does not make first person shooters like it plays like you know what you're doing it's like oh interesting yeah i just i just don't think anybody cared about like i know I didn't care like right it's like well why would it doesn't make any sense just from the perspective of you have this underserved community of games and then you think that you're going to take those single player narrative games and convince people that play them that they're going to play this this asynchronous multiplayer game whatever the fuck you may like it just doesn't make any sense it's like you got to focus on what you're good at and and you'll worry about this other stuff later when you have a when you have the audience you deserve which you don't have right now yeah it reminded me of it reminded me of evolve where like I remember playing Evolve years and years and years ago, like a decade ago now at this point, and being like, this is good.

2:53:23Colin Moriarty:I don't care. Yeah, right. Yeah, Evolve was, I remember Evolve being really weird. Like, we gave it a great review at iGEM, but that game arrived with like a thud. It's a good game. Like, I remember playing it, and this is good. But like, I just didn't give a shit at all. Like, it was too complicated for what like that game studio usually does, which I think is making really simple, great, easily playable, kind of plug and play kind of games. By the way, I said asynchronous multiplayer. I meant asymmetric multiplayer. All right, two more stories. We'll get through quick here. This one comes from Gamatsu.

2:53:56I thought this was interesting for you, Dustin. Persona 4 Revival has been rated in South Korea in particular. These ratings don't typically happen unless the game is somewhat imminent. I would say this calendar year. Does that surprise you?

2:54:13Colin Moriarty:No, not really. I think that while we only just got a brief tease of it last year, which for some reason people were, I mean, people complain about everything now, but there was nothing wrong with it in my mind. Yeah, they showed like a few screens or videos, right, of like the environments. Yeah, I would imagine, I don't know this for sure, So I'm speculating that they had a really good pipeline set up in making Persona 3 Reload in Unreal Engine. And while they still need to make all new assets, they can, you know, they have a base to work from. So, yeah, I guess it's a little surprising that I was if I if you asked me before this, I'd be like, yeah, probably early next year, which I guess it still could be if it's the Xbox showcase, you assume.

2:55:03Colin Moriarty:Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think we'll see it then. so I man I'm so excited for Xbox to have that game that's so intrinsically tied the PlayStation through both PS2 and Vita to be at their their thing yeah well dude for Atlas Xbox fans aren't gonna buy that they're not I mean maybe it'll be on Game Pass so like Atlas can get all this money from Xbox and they are going to make all their sales on PlayStation It doesn't matter. Xbox fans don't buy games that Xbox fans are fans of.

2:55:38Colin Moriarty:Yeah. Yeah. That's why the whole dream of like the lack of exclusivity going forward. It's like, that's just a, that's a pipe dream. But the, in my opinion, maybe, maybe timed exclusivity would be the best you can hope for, as I've said in the past, but yeah, it, I wonder how Sega feels about the deal they made. Like, does it really matter? Because your shit just kind of gets out there. It really only matters at the point of original release. In other words, the first time you see it, you will have had to have naturally seen it during the conference. But afterwards, it's going to be on place. PlayStation is going to cut your shit out and have a different splash screen and put it on there on their YouTube channel.

2:56:09And it's going to get 15 times more views. And I wonder, I wonder how Sega feels about it. The money is nice, probably. Yeah. You're kind of having your cake and eat it to and eating it, too, at this point, because it's clear that Game Pass is simply a no growth thing for them and it is what it is. And therefore, you're not really cannibalizing yourself, putting big AAAs into Game Pass if you have already taken into account what you would have lost. In other words, there will be probably very few new subscribers. And so you can just get your money and then go to the people that will never subscribe to begin with and you really haven't lost.

2:56:46In other words, other people have done the hard work of differentiating these audiences over the years. And now and now Sega gets in, you know, I don't think I've ever seen somebody do, in other words, I know that's a double. It's a squared, in other words, squared. But Dustin, one other thing I didn't want to include it here. We're not going to show it. Obviously, we're a video podcast. We don't do any show any of this. Have you seen the Persona 6 leaks?

2:57:12Colin Moriarty:Yeah, the protagonists. Where did that come from? Reset era. I saw it on and I guess some Japanese source. and I because I saw that there was like a male protagonist and female protagonist I think I just saw it briefly in passing on Twitter and I didn't know how legitimate it was yeah it seems like people depending on how you feel about the insiders and people that like power users on these various forums it seems like they're real and it's not really a spoiler because all the persona characters look exactly the same to be honest they're all designed in that same motif so it's not like it's really that big of a deal but I'm sure for a lot of it would be very exciting alleged persona six character designs were leaked so it isn't necessarily a male and female lead i was gonna say i don't think they're ever gonna do that again wait p6 this is from vice.com of all places p6 may feature dual protagonists including a blonde male character and a female character with red and black hair however new leaks suggest the blonde boy may actually be the sole protagonist.

2:58:18So maybe we'll see more of that at the conference too.

2:58:22Colin Moriarty:If these things are starting to leak, you would assume it's from marketing assets. You wouldn't let that stuff out. If you've kept that secret forever, it's got to be through some third party, you would assume. We'll see what happens. Sega announcing persona at the Xbox conference. Good for you. All right, finally. That was kind of mean. I didn't mean for it to sound so mean um let's see by the way no one talks about metaphor re fantazio at all anymore no because it's a forgettable game retardazio i really liked it personally yeah but it is it is forgettable and that's good it is forgettable and that i don't really remember the minutiae of the story i remember like how fun it was for me to play i loved the upgrades in the character class system it was quite satisfying anyway playstation plus games for june if you have PlayStation Plus Essential, Extra, or Premium, but this is at the Essential tier, so everyone gets it.

2:59:17You get these games as part of your subscription at no additional cost, and it begins June 2nd. So around the time you hear this on free feeds, the three games in question are Grounded, Fully Yoked Edition, the PS4 and PS5 Xbox first-party multiplayer game that has been fairly popular and was one of the first games to come over in the original four, as you might recall. that's um why can't i think of the team that makes it the one that makes all the obsidian obsidian yeah um so have either of you played it it's supposed to be pretty good this is not my kind of game but it's supposed to be pretty good uh and i think it did marginally well on playstation

2:59:59Colin Moriarty:i played grounded really early like really early like i think it was like probably like didn't have an early access or something back in the day i think i think so yeah so like i played it then and i it's it's good it's a it's a very cute game i think it's for what it is it's very good it's just really not my kind of like survival games are really i'm kind of particular about them and i don't think it really hit for me but i remember thinking like this is pretty good like it's it's better than i thought i had more fun than i thought i would have with it but ultimately i was like i'm not gonna dedicate i know i'm not gonna dedicate a ton of time to this but apparently it's very good now like apparently that game's really grown a lot since I played it because I think when I played it didn't even have like yeah I guess I guess so it didn't have it didn't have like a lot of basic features when I was playing last and I still enjoyed it so I'm sure it's I'm sure it's good that's a particular kind of audience game grounded fully yoked PS5 and PS4 in fact all no two of these games are on PS5 and PS4 the next game on PS5 and PS4 is Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2.

3:01:09The fighting game that came out back in 2023. Published by trash publisher Game Mill. Although I think that this game is better than most of their stuff, right? This game did fairly well. Yeah, it's gotten in the high 70s on Metacritic. That's not so bad. Some of the characters in here are interesting. The Angry Beavers. Let's see. Garfield. Grandma Gertie from Hey Arnold. Jimmy Neutron. What about

3:01:37Colin Moriarty:Nigel from yeah he's in there while he's in there Nigel Thornberry that'd be good pretty good so not so bad and then finally Warhammer 40k Darktide only on PlayStation 5 that came out in 2024 it was originally a PC game in 2022 and then it came to Xbox Series in 23 so it came a little late that's another series that seems to be more Xbox centric we still have not gotten the remake the Saber interactive remake of Space Marine 1 interestingly oh right which is a little annoying because I'd like to play it yeah that comes from the studio fat shark and it's a I think it's a first person like action shooter adventure game I don't really know all right any I think I'm sorry and yeah go ahead I was gonna say I think dark tide is like not a spinoff but it's the 40k version of vermin tide which is sort of like a left for dead yeah horde first person melee game cool and then there is a fourth game this month because it was part of the May lineup and because it's state of play or game of what is it called state what is the sale called A's of play Jesus Christ so much marketing they're going to extend EA Sports FC 26 through June 16th so you actually still have access to that right now you have until June 2nd however to add last month's games to your download catalog if you want to grab them later Nine Souls is one of those games and Wuchong Fallen Feathers, but you have these games to look forward to.

3:03:05Nothing here for me, but can't always get what you want. It is a little bit of a weaker library, I will admit. Toby Queef wrote in about this. He says, hey, Fats, listen, Colin, I understand your point that games as a service are where the money is and that we should expect Sony to focus resources there. However, there are times when it feels like the single player is just flat out being ignored. Case in point, June's PS Essential Games, three ostensibly multiplayer focused games. While I understand the focus on online multiplayer, don't they exclude the single player at their peril? Four of the top 10 downloaded games in April were single player games.

3:03:3740 % isn't nothing. I'm always just a little surprised by the unbalanced PS Plus release lists because it makes it seem like these are made on the fly, these deals, and they're not. You would think that you would be making deals and then trying to put them together in combinations that make the most sense. And so I agree you would want like some sort of, What my ideal double layer, triple a single player game, multiplayer game, indie game. That would be that would be my desire. Is that possible? I don't know. There's no doubt that this is an unusually multiplayer centric month, even by PS plus standards.

3:04:14So, yes, you are absolutely right. And if you include FC 26, then it's that it's all of them. All for.

3:04:19Colin Moriarty:Yeah. Yeah. All right. That's all we have for the news this week. My boys, it's time to get into what we're playing. I'll get out of the way quick. I've been playing Pragmata. I'm just about done with it. I really, really love it. I think it's, it's so impressive and so well-made and so interesting. And I'm really enjoying it. I will be speaking about it more extensively on summon sign next week with Brad. And then we will certainly sit down and do a spoiler cast and review discussion. I, I will play through it again on hard in the next week or two and take notes so we can have a good conversation around that.

3:04:50So I will bail out for now. Both Chris and Dustin are playing double Oh seven first light. Connor Hayes wrote in and said hi guys what's your thoughts on 007 I am loving it from the great tutorial via a cool montage and the crazy pace the story is going four hours and I must say I really miss these linear-ish and high production value games we had so many of 10 to 15 years ago and Ira Dog Mums am I saying something horrible

3:05:19Colin Moriarty:I don't know it's not clicking immediately for me but 00 agents can we just give a special shout out to io interactive and the way they handled the release of 007 a free deluxe upgrade and an extra day for pre-ordering with many reviews coming out just in time to make an informed decision on it i'll go back to drinking too many martinis and sexually harassing the casino staff oh yeah i i love that as well that i will say as i leave it to you guys that i really did dig how they did a pre-order in which there was nothing to gain other than a day of access and return for pre-ordering the game and blocking in that and and not wanting to have a little bit of FOMO as opposed to charging$10 or$20 for it, which is fine too, but that seems a very sensible way to do it if you're confident in your game.

3:06:00And I dug that they did that. All right, guys, take it away. Dustin, let's go to you first. 007 First Light.

3:06:04Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I've been excited about this game for a long time. I fell in love with Hitman when Hitman 2 came out on PlayStation 4 and then played the Hitman before that and then Hitman 3, which is now the World of Assassination. so it was really exciting to see io interactive be able to make a james bond game it felt like a perfect fit uh and while i love the hitman world of assassination trilogy uh i've it's it's a little bit janky like in terms of like the way the characters look the fact it's a a sandbox game it has its own little quirks to it and immediately from the get-go with 007 io interactive this is a huge level up for them uh like levels of quality that uh i'm i'm shocked by uh like this game is crazy good in terms of like across the board like the the the visuals like a lot of people have been sharing on twitter there's like an opening night club scene with like uh you know not only just the lighting but the like the level of density of the amount of characters uh or npcs in the level is really cool not surprising if you're coming from uh some hitman two and three levels but yeah um so initially in the opening level the opening level is like almost felt more uncharted ish than kind of a stealth game and i don't want to say it concerned me but i was like okay so this is the direction we're going in here is like a little more actiony on the rails uh and then you go through the the the cool training montage that that connor mentioned which was really cool but then you get into like the first main level which was uh well i guess there's the nightclub level but then you get to the first main level which is the one that they showed in that live stream and it's really interesting because it's clearly has a lot of that hitman dna in it but it's been tailored for james bond specifically in like you have a cool spy watch that you can interchange different cool spy tech into so like right now the level i'm on i have like a laser beam that shoots out so you can use it to like burn ropes or you can just straight up burn people's eyes out with it which is pretty fun um so it is definitely a more um what's the word a broad appeal in terms of a stealth game like hitman levels as i said before we're like individual sandboxes where it's like okay we have five or six kind of more scripted ways that you can eliminate your target but there's really you can do this however you want and you can find that on youtube where people do insane things so 007 on is a little different in that it's leaning more on that scripted aspect but it's not that that doesn't have that level of creative freedom where normally in the in the few levels that i've played the few actual levels outside of the very long intro uh there will be multiple ways to achieve your different goals.

3:09:30Colin Moriarty:And sometimes it'll be like, okay, well you need to get into this room and it won't tell you how to do that. It's like, okay, well there's a guard out front. Do I distract him by using, by hacking into a vacuum cleaner and turning it on? So he's distracted. Do I find an alternate entrance in? And so that's where some of the cool, like more creative aspects of the game happens. this uh you know you're playing as a young bond which i think is a really neat angle i i think we talked about this last week or on some show that i'm not like a big bond guy i've seen quite a few of the films but i'm not i'm not the guy to tell you like what is and wasn't isn't bond as a character but i think what they've done here is really cool to see him like when you start at the beginning he uh like is in whatever the like british air force is or something and finds himself in this crazy situation and that's how he gets introduced into the mi6 program seeing the other double o's in training uh and those characters are surprisingly interesting and within the first few hours of the game had me caring about them which i totally did not expect from this game at all uh the the guy that's that's playing bond i don't remember what his name is but i feel like is like super charming it's got the right mix of like he's charming and quippy but it doesn't feel like a marvel movie constantly where they're like constant quips all the time patrick gibson is the character patrick gibson i think he's been absolutely excellent so far there's definitely some bond like some bond stuff in there that i was able to identify where it's like you bust through a room and then like he like you know brushes his shoulders off make sure he's like you know still suave and then keeps going stuff like that uh so yeah i i he plays dexter in the dexter prequel yeah he's like yeah someone in my chat told me that he's young Dexter.

3:11:39Yeah, it's interesting.

3:11:39Colin Moriarty:Or something. I'm seeing that. So I'm extremely impressed by this game. I knew it would be high quality coming from IO, but I guess I just didn't expect this level of AAA polish to this game, especially because we were concerned when we first saw this game, first saw the gameplay, it's not running well. And also, I knew this last week behind the scenes, but then people have gone and tweeted this out. so it's not secret information last week reviewers were like they didn't have the game and so it was concerning to me i requested it and didn't get it so i didn't have early access or anything like that um but i was asking i was asking around oh what's that called is it owned owned yeah yeah i mean it happens all the time trust me um so i was asking around And like on Thursday, people still didn't have this game.

3:12:35Colin Moriarty:It wasn't until Friday that people got access to the game to review it. And I was like, oh, no, it's coming in hot. If that's the case, that reviewers, it's like a crunch weekend for people to get these reviews out. So but with that being said, the final thing I'll say before throwing it over to Chris is I'm playing it on PlayStation 5 professional. And it's excellent. It looks excellent. it runs almost entirely perfect from i can tell there's been like a couple times where i've noticed the frame rate drop for just a split second but it's nothing that really bothers me uh to my understanding according to digital foundries reporting if you play on ps5 you have an option between uh performance and quality which is like a 30 versus 60 frames on ps5 pro you don't have any options and from there i haven't seen the the base ps5 version but they said that it looks better than the quality mode on PS5, but at 60 frames per second.

3:13:37Colin Moriarty:So if you have a PS5 Pro, this game looks and runs absolutely excellent. And so those concerns that we had when we first saw it, for me at least, are totally gone. So I've talked a lot. Chris, you're also love Hitman. So you're excited about this. How are you finding it? yeah man i uh i'm i'm kind of surprised by it i think the and to be fair it's not that i didn't think that io could make great games in this way i guess the types of games that they make are so different and so like the things that this game leans into are not things that that io games typically lean into it's it's like the the narrative and the the way that even just the way that cut scenes and characters are portrayed and shown it's just not typical of of their stuff because their stuff is more about like the the sandbox is the star of the show and I was immediately surprised at just the the level of quality um right off the jump I mean it really is crazy i think as somebody who's not that much of a bond guy i think they've done a really good job of endearing me to this world and this character i think again like this dude's really charming and i think it works really really well there's aspects of this though that i do think like you can kind of see that this is their first time doing a game like the gunplay i think is really kind of awkward in my opinion i don't know if it's the weird crosshairs that they have or just how many enemies they have thrown at you at any given moment that it feels like the game's not really built for it the hand-to-hand combat's awesome getting into a brawl and like doing like this arkham stuff like it feels very arkham coded uh which is like i think great but you know what this game reminded me of a lot this game reminded me a lot of splinter cell conviction oh we're like i remember feeling that distinctly during like some of these brawls and being like this is great stuff and while i don't think well i don't think the uh this is a mix of hitman and uncharted and i don't think the uncharted parts feel better than uncharted and i don't think that the hitman parts feel better than hitman necessarily yeah but i do think the fusion of these things at the same time and being able to interact with these things and flow in and out is unique and special enough that makes this game feel like particularly unique and interesting and fresh um I think it's a really golden combination and uh I'm really I'm really loving it there's parts of it that I'm kind of like why did I spend time doing this like there's some like cutscene vignettes not cutscene vignettes even but like there's some gameplay sequences that are literally just about conversation where like I had a moment where I was like in a car and I was driving and I literally drove maybe like 40 feet and like pulled into a traffic jam and then it cut to a different section of the game and I was like I don't know if I needed to yeah I don't know if I needed to play this it seems like they're still trying to figure out like what to do in this new realm that they're playing in and so I see that but I actually I love it I think I think this is a fantastic game I'm on I can't remember the number chapter I'm in but I'm I'm like 10 hours into it oh um I've put a lot of time into it uh and I'm approaching I what feels like the the final act and uh so far it's it's it's it's really really good it's like congratulations to IO So I just saw like two hours ago that they sold 1.5 million copies already in the first 24 hours.

3:17:34Colin Moriarty:So that's awesome. They got to be happy about that. And from what I've played so far, I think they totally deserve it. I think it's I think it's exceptional. I think the just again, the jump from Hitman 3, again, not from a systems perspective, but just from like a presentational perspective and from a game feel perspective. It's so vast that it's actually kind of crazy. and one thing i do want to point out that i did appreciate very very heavily very subtle thing but when they give you the options for the difficulty there's a difficulty called intended which i was like love that i love that you told me like i know that it's obvious for most games because it's obviously going to be the middle one but there's somewhere there's four and you're not quite sure you know it's like i know there's things that are widely understood like halo's heroic and that's like the intended but like i i just i appreciate that where it's like there's no confusion this is how it's this is how you're this is what you're supposed to be playing and you can choose to make it crazy hard or crazy easy from there but yeah i just uh i think it's good it's it's a little campy it's fun uh i love the villains and the characters way more than i thought i would at first i was worried about the villain i gotta be real but But then it gets really good really quickly.

3:18:57Colin Moriarty:And yeah, easy recommend. This is great. Shout out to IO. They're just a great studio. And I hope they... I'm not done with this game yet. I hope they do another one. Because I think they can only get better from here. I think there's only room for improvement. You know what I mean? So I think it's fantastic. Two other things that you made me think of that I want to shout out about this game. that I loved. There is a bluffing mechanic in this game. You can't do it constantly. Like there's like some kind of like point system to the bluffing. I had a situation where I totally decked this guy in the face and knocked him out.

3:19:36Colin Moriarty:And then I saw there were guys right around the corner. So I hit the bluff mechanic and, and, and bond was like, Oh dude, I just saw that guy's attack or he ran off that way. And they're like, Oh, and then they, and I was like, dude, that was kind of like, it was dynamic. And then I, I took that guy out and that's, that was the bluff used i was like hitman it's really cool like they're really good at building these systems and again they're it's not as dense as like a hitman because it's like the whole point but like the fact that any of that flexibility is there in a game that presents like uncharted a lot of the time is like is really fucking cool like that bluffing mechanic i love running out of ammo and then throwing throwing a gun like throwing the empty gun at a guy and like taking it is really it's just it's so cool the uh the other thing i wanted to shout out is particularly from the hitman dna is like hitman the world of assassination the level design in those is so incredibly good and that carries over to this and i'm nowhere near as far as chris but like that first nightclub level is like pretty small but it's kind of meant to be like your first training real mission but then you go to this mansion that that's what they showed off in that stream then i'm like man they they still got like this level is so cool there's a giant chess tournament happening oh yeah yeah and so there's all these people in the center there's these side rooms then you have to be up in like the hotel uh aspects um like the underbelly with the kitchen and i'm like man these levels are so cool the second level now uh that i'm on i don't even know if i should say what it is i'm not going to yeah say it save it because it's so good there's there's stuff even with that level that you're talking about the chess tournament where i almost don't even want to spoil the like the the premise of what that level is but it's so if you're a fan of hitman it's so cool because it's like i i want to spoil i want to do a spoiler cast of this game so so bad yeah i think it's so cool because there's something i want to talk about that i think we are going to do one uh jason polanski from atari is going to lead lead that conversation i probably won't be on it so you guys can because i won't get to it for a while so we'll get that in the next couple weeks i know there's another mode that is more open-ended I if I recall correctly maybe it's kind of like the hitman roguelike mode that takes place in the different levels and I believe that IO has hinted at that they're like once you meet like this is just the beginning of this game which makes sense from their pedigree with hitman but I'm just thinking I was already thinking about that that hotel mansion level and I'm like dude there's a playground here and it while it's used so well in the campaign I was just thinking about like the hypothetical other missions that could be created within it and i really hope that that ends up being the case yeah this uh it's really cool so far this might be well it's too early to say i guess but like this is easily a contender for me for like game of the year yeah i think it's so cool and so interesting it's looking forward to it and so video gamey dude like i just i love it it's like so unashamed of like what it is i'm definitely looking forward to it i am yeah i just don't have time mean is coming out tonight so i'll be moving on to that next and i need to finish up pragmata and then i then i yeah i guess that would be up next after that dude one thing and then we can move on but like there's a there's a there's a character in the game that's like a very main character uh it's the it's the the bosk greenway dustin oh yeah yeah like i kept hearing this dude's voice and i was like who the fuck is this oh is that lenny james yeah yeah it's lenny james and i've heard this guy i was like i've heard this guy before like what the hell is this and i realized like there was a point there was a point where i was like this is he's the destiny to like voice the voice of god he's like he's like the uh the guy in in the in the pvp that goes like double down oh triple kill and i was like oh my god this is really distracting yeah for me particularly but he's great also like everybody's really well casted and really well great performances every all the whole time he um the reason i know that is because i i um i always talk well i don't always but occasionally it comes up that i'm a huge fan of that really obscure cbs show jericho about the nuclear bombing in the united states that was on for like one season and he's a main character in that so i know him from that and then he was in the walking dead yeah he's got a great voice but it's very distinct and i remember like it is because he was screaming he screams at you in the tutorial by the way one of the best tutorials i think i've played in in a long time like the way they present the tutorial is genuinely so cool that it's actually it's actually insane to me that this is the first time i'm seeing that take of a tutorial like it seems kind of obvious in a lot of ways but like I've never seen it before so yeah a lot of great things to say about it I could gush about it for a really really long time and and I probably will at some point in the future well I'll look forward to playing it in the next week or two I've also been honestly a little unexcited about video games the last couple weeks Pragmata I've been trying to like dedicate time to and kind of get out of my funk but I've been playing just a lot of chess and just kind of dicking around watching sports and stuff.

3:25:11I've not really been in it. Need a little break. All right, let's get into six questions, comments, concerns, thoughts, and ideas and wrap this episode of Sacred Symbols up with inquiries from the audience. Remember, you can submit your inquiries over on Patreon, patreon.com slash last stand media. The threads go live in the news feed each week for all of our different shows in our network. Sacred Symbols threads go live on Wednesday afternoons and are deleted Thursday afternoon. So you have about 24 hours. Pedro Alves wrote in and said, hey, CDC, with Mina the Hollower releasing this month with a 93 Metacritic score, topping First Light's 88 and Requiem's 89.

3:25:41I have seen some chatter online about it getting a score boost for being an indie game. While I'm excited to get into Mina and have no doubts of its quality due to the pedigree of its developer, I do wonder if AAA games are treated more harshly. I mostly play indie games and love how they push innovation. Vampire Survivors, Slay the Spire, and Bellatro pretty much created their own genres. But I can see how they will rarely be judged for bad frame rates, outdated facial animations, bad voice acting, because in most cases, they don't even feature such things. Are indies treated more softly compared to AAA?

3:26:08Should games be judged against other games or against their own potential? I'll be curious to see what you guys think of this. I do think that the indies are generally treated definitively more softly than AAA games. But I wonder if that's reasonable. And I also wonder if it just, again, it's just another of these examples why this only really matters because of the scoring rubrics. Otherwise, you could just read the text of the reviews and get the information you need. a hundred million, $200 million game is held to a different standard than a game like Mina. Whether or not that a game like Bellatra, like what standard is a game like Bellatra held by it held to it's made by one person.

3:26:46It's just this random game. So I just think the standards should be different, but I think again, it reduces down to the way we optimize these opinions towards one glance, as opposed to convincing people to read. And there, therefore you have these kinds of issues wherein if you read the review for First Light and for Mina, you'll probably understand where the person's coming from a lot better. Chris, are indie games treated more softly in reviews than AAA games?

3:27:15Colin Moriarty:I think undoubtedly, yeah. But I also think, I mean, AAA games are trying to do more, so they have more opportunities to kind of not deliver, you know? Like, when I was playing Saros, I remember being like, I remember feeling like, yeah, this play is really great. but then there is that the we i think we talked about some of the facial capture and some of the cut scenes and how they're kind of they're stilted and awkward and they don't really feel like they're intentionally that way a lot of indie games don't have to deal with that they're not because they're not trying to do that they're not they're not even attempting to recreate a realistic human you know emotion or whatever most of them don't even have voice acting and that's like fine um so i i don't know i think it's i think it's a number of things i think it's we should understand that yes one person should be held to a different standard than a a fully funded multi-million dollar team of hundreds of people building something yeah i think i think it just makes sense to have different standards um but also i do think it comes down to the fact that like they're just like bellatro is only doing so much you know and like it doesn't really have as many opportunities to fail at what it's doing because it's so singularly focused as a lot of indie games are and to be fair like there's a lot of you know really broad scope into games too that like i would i would imagine are actually probably softer on reception that maybe overplay their hand or maybe are stretched too thin but uh i don't know i don't think it's that big of an issue i think like what you said about the fact that it does boil down to the score i think that's really the issue because again you can just read what people say and then it'd be and then the problem goes away i think it also gets into like what matters more to you like a novel idea or like something that's beautiful and complicated and high production that's a totally subjective question Dustin what do you think yeah this reminds me of how I mean it's brought up already but Bellatra was nominated for the game awards for game of the year and that caused quite a bit of discussion because it's like well how can this card game be compared to what was it Rebirth the same year or something like that and yeah not to repeat both of you but I think Colin you hit the nail on the head on the core of the issue is just like we're trying to apply a standardization which is already kind of hollow and how it's used to something that just cannot be standardized in terms of scores like each game is trying to do its own thing um and often scores should they be based on the own merits of what the game is trying to achieve is it being scored against its relevant peers in each space should it be scored against what the entire industry is doing i everyone has their own approach to these things and so um the comparing and contrasting of them just simply makes no sense and it's what you said colin people need to read the review uh or i hope and i think one thing one like shining light in amongst all the way this is handled in terms of reviews is that people are cluing in on individual people that they look to for their opinions you know youtubers maybe people like us people that listen to the show surely on like okay well what do you actually think not just like here's the number uh applied to it so uh i guess to answer the the other question too is like are indie games treated uh more softly yeah uh probably probably for sure uh i think there's probably some level of if we want to get conspiratorial that it's like oh well indie games are the little guys and they they're not part of the the big corporate system and so there is a softness there maybe to reviewing some of those games not all of them certainly been indie games that have not reviewed well but i think there is as much as i love yacht club games and i think these mina scores are are probably pretty accurate um there probably is a softness for that because it's yacht club and people love yacht club and so i don't know i don't want to take away i don't want to like minimize the achievement that is mean in the hallway because it is fucking awesome but i could see that lingering amongst reviewers everything's contextual you know like i think uh it's like it's like a five-star restaurant versus a food truck you know what i mean like my expectations are kind of set with triple a as far as like okay i'm sitting down at a five star this is hundreds of millions of dollars you spent to make this i better love this right whereas if yeah whereas if i go to a food truck or something and it's just like and i have a burrito that's like absurdly good i'm gonna be inherently surprised you know what i mean it's just gonna be like oh this is like like i don't expect and it's not that i'm expecting trash because obviously a shit food truck is going to be shit regardless and a shit restaurant is going to be shit regardless But I think your expectation of like, like if I have a great steak at a five star restaurant, I'm going to feel either like, yeah, expected.

3:32:41Colin Moriarty:OK. I'm not going to feel great. I'm not going to feel like surprised by it. I just be like, OK, good. And being surprised by something is kind of that that is kind of a big thing in reviews. So like I think I think about many of the games that I've played over times over the years and where games that have surprised me have stuck out way, way more than games that I was expecting to be good and ended up being good. You know, and that plays into it, I think, too. Yeah, I wonder if. Yeah, I wonder. Well, you've played Mina. Yes. Yeah, it's like I I'll I'll be the judge of all this. All right. i've been holding back for you colin colin we'll talk about mina next week yeah i'm excited i'm excited i hope it's available tonight at midnight but i don't know um it's not available for pre-order so it means it's not going to go live at a certain time so they they let you literally press a button to send it live and i don't know if you have to kind of do it manually so we'll see what happens all right um next question comes from birdo 85 says to the podcaster formerly known as magnanimous Colin, Chris, That's Wild, Raygun, and Dusty Boy Dustin.

3:33:52Hello and good day to you all. Quick question regarding the PS6 handheld or the PSSP. With Valve and their endless treasure trove of income being forced to increase the price of each tier of the Steam Deck by$200 to a new base price of$789 and the 1TB model clocking in at a whopping$949, what chance does Sony have at selling a truly affordable handheld system in 2027 or 2028? Obviously, Sony can subsidize hardware costs with software sales and they have access to a much wider economy of scale but surely valve should have been able to subsidize against its own software sales through the steam platform what does this mean for sony's portable gaming future and our collective wallets as always i'll shut my fucking mouth and listen thanks chris i think you were bringing this up earlier weren't you yeah yeah what are your thoughts i don't know man i think

3:34:39Colin Moriarty:uh the best we can hope for is that hopefully this ai bubble bursts and then everything everything kind of deflates but uh it doesn't seem like that's happening it may or may not um i don't know dude it's looking pretty grim to be honest with you like i i that hike for the steam deck is insane because especially because not not just because uh not just for what the steam deck is capable of doing which is just quite frankly just not even close to 800 where i'm not even remotely close um but because you think about valve and what like they don't need they're not in a they're not in a position of of really wanting you know what i mean like they they're not the type of company to like raise the prices of something just because they're doing this because they need to do it and if valve is doing it because they need to do it oh my god i i just i can't even fat like the ps6 is going to be over a thousand dollars like at this rate like there's no shot that it isn't and so ah it's i don't know i don't i don't envy the people who have to figure this out and uh maybe some of the pressure can be relieved because some of this some of this is ai driven which is like global some of this is uh an unforced error on our part with um you know tariffs and all sorts of shit but like the even if all these things got resolved my worry right is is okay we've gotten used to paying this much for x if we get used to paying this much for x is there a reason even if there are no longer any economic factors pushing them to keep those prices high is there really a reason to lower them back again you know what i mean no prices never go back down like no but you could see a reality i i think it's potentially possible because the price hikes have been so egregious and so insane that like maybe you might see something maybe you might see things go back especially if the ai bubble does pop and then suddenly everybody's sitting on these graphics cards that are like half is like half worth of what they what they were when the ab was crashed was uh was exploding i don't really know what what that looks like but what is clear to me is that whatever the reality is today it's not going to be alleviated by fucking next year maybe 28 is when it'll start to feel kind of okay maybe but even then it's like that's that's a big that's a really big if so i i really think every console manufacturer valve playstation xbox certainly they're not in an enviable position right now what do you make of it dustin so yeah i saw this because apparently i'm looking at the ign article that after this restock and the increased price they are sold out again so apparently maybe there was a very small amount of them um i think the one thing that sony and other console manufacturers that the we'll say the main console manufacturers not that you know valve is no small company but in comparison right um they do have an advantage of economy of scale compared to steam deck they've never put out the numbers of how many steam decks have been sold but we've mentioned many times that it is still a very niche device and so they're not making anywhere near as many as they will for an eventual playstation 6 or playstation 6 handout or whatever so i think that will be to Sony's advantage in trying to keep the price down along with Colin what you've talked about with Tom from Moore's Law is Dead is that the other components outside of RAM potentially being made cheaper because of newer processors uh new processes and uh the different smaller chip size chip nodes and stuff like that but I don't know it's gonna be weird Tom has stuck to that they're trying to make the PlayStation 6 a cheaper device but when you see the Steam Deck go up$300 even with everything I just said it's just and how much the PlayStation 5 has gone up in price it's just so hard to imagine that being possible but I I continue not to get it myself like I don't I do understand certain fundamentals like Sony's probably locked in on price for a lot of these things The thing is, is that how can you let's say like they can make millions like in the low millions of these at this price and then they have to suddenly jack the price up because so they have to find like the happy medium on what they think this thing can cost for at its maximal price for as long as possible.

3:39:37And then hopefully we get back into the normal function of prices going down, which I don't think will be is we are in this really shitty situation now. I don't think we'll always be in the situation where prices will eventually kind of diminish for electronics, not a new baseline, like Chris was saying, but something where there would be no expectation that the PS6 will really go up in price. I think we'll hopefully things will be fixed by that point and more steady. We'll see. I will say on I've been saying this, I feel like this has kind of come more to the forefront unintentionally. So I'm not going to say that I intended on this to happen, but I've been critical of the why with this Steam machine and Steam Deck situation, as you guys know.

3:40:17In other words, Valve doesn't need this hardware. One of its advantages is that it doesn't need to do this. It's actually its major fundamental advantage is it does not have to invest in hardware. Everyone else can do that. They can simply sell you software. and I always thought that there was a tension there and I've said it many times who are you really selling this thing to because in a world where the Sony must get a PlayStation in your hand or it won't work like nothing will work and so they're willing to eat as much of the cost as possible and they might even eat some of it and get it like where they're not profitable at all but that and that's what happened with PS3 I you know most famously but they have to go into that position meaning that the console will be conceivably as cheap as it can be right right steam can't really do that there's no way that they're looking at this and saying like well let's just sell this at cost why then what what did we do all this for why the fuck would we sell this at cost they're already steam players they're already on steam and so in my opinion, you look at these prices and I wonder how Moore's law feels about this.

3:41:33And you would know more than me, Dustin, for sure is like, they're charging a premium still. Like they're not taking out their own cut. They're probably making a couple hundred dollars a unit or something like the, because otherwise it makes no sense. It's not the same situation. PlayStation's in where it's like, let's just get these things in the wild and then we'll make our money. Steam's already making their money. They chose to get into hardware. I still feel like I don't want to use the term i remember saying this earlier too some weeks or months ago i don't want to say it's an unforced error i don't think it's necessarily an error i just don't understand what they get from it that's all like i i just don't i think it's that simple well valve is also like you mentioned like they they don't need they don't need to be in any position so they could

3:42:21Colin Moriarty:have a catastrophic failure and not even care about you know what i mean like they're they're the default games marketplace like it's kind of like even if the steam machine like completely fumbles and nobody buys it it's just like all right don't you think there's something there's something unintuitive about it though wherein we always i'm the one who puts this nomenclature on them but like where i'm like it's the small l libertarian marketplace and like everything they do is catered towards a libertarian's philosophy but then you create your own hardware then you create your own operating system sure and at that point i'm like i don't know dude like it's kind of not they were like the vlc or something of like storefronts you know what i mean where it's like we work or interoperable as basic as possible as robust as possible don't worry about it nothing else matters to us and i think the hardware thing they knew this originally right like 15 years ago with the OEM stuff I think they didn't read the market situation properly and this goes into them not understanding hardware you know um yeah well that's true I also just think they're in a rare just because the type of company is because it's not publicly traded because they're so uniquely in an advantageous position in the market as far as like being again just the the backbone of pc gaming and just like they're not they're not really going anywhere I think they're I really do think a lot of what they do is motivated by like a bunch of people in the studio being like this would be cool to do this.

3:43:53Colin Moriarty:Let's try. You know what I mean? Like I they seem more like that kind of a studio than anybody. Like there was no reason to make Half-Life Alyx. At all, like there's literally no there's no good reason to make a triple ABR game. But they could because if it failed, it didn't matter. and I think uh it matters more that uh their hardware might fail but I still think they're in I don't know they definitely didn't read the market right they definitely didn't anticipate certain economic realities but I I think ultimately they're kind of like a we're 300 people whatever which is an amazing amount of power to have really but yeah it is And I will, to the point you're making, I will say that I appreciate their lack of complacency.

3:44:41Like, it's what we were saying about Riot when I was giving them their flowers earlier about at least trying things. And they look at the situation, they're like, all right, like, well, what could we do? If we needed to do something, what is it? And I think they realized, like, well, the only option is to make hardware because we already dominate the storefront angle. I just think that their users like the pliability of Steam. and that if you're going to buy a console just buy a console you know like i still have a hard time it's what dustin was saying like we we people i think that vastly overestimate how many steam decks have been sold sold for instance i think it's probably in the mid single millions which is not nothing not at all that's awesome yeah but that's not the the playstation 6 would be Sony would be dead if the PlayStation six sold 5 million units, you know, they'd be done.

3:45:38The whole company would be finished. So it's totally different expectations. And so I respect that they realize, I think they realize that they are the target. I think what everyone realizes now is like, oh, you're the problem. And it's not a problem for the players of the consumer. I mean, for them, it's like Sony has long thought Xbox was their problem and they've been kind of vanquished and they look around and they're like oh you're the problem and nintendo i think with the handheld mantra and all that it's like you're a problem for us um and i think that they've drawn a lot of ire and now they have to maybe be offensive in their moves so don't blame them for that but i'm very conservative and i mean that in a small c non-political way with my money and economics where if i were them i'd be like we got it like let's just not even like don't even bother let's just we'll just hang out this will be great all right yeah adam wrote in said good evening my succulent sexual symbols our platinum trophies getting easier so often on our trophies i see comments on people saying they won't bother even playing a game because that is difficult or multiplayer trophies which will affect them getting the platinum i did a bit of very light research and noticed a trend in a few places that led me to believe developers are favoring easy trophy lists.

3:46:59The Last of Us on PS3 and PS4 required you to beat the game on harder difficulties. Both The Last of Us Part 1 and The Last of Us Part 2 do not. The Grounded trophies are on separate lists. Infamous required beating the game on hard, both of the more recent Ghost games do not. The older God of War games versus the newer God of War games. There are more examples of studios old versus newer games that spring to mind, but I am sure there are more examples. Is this to cater for the specific audience of trophy owners that play games exclusively for trophies and not for fun? Interested in your thoughts yes um he answered his own question yeah uh you even seen like saros versus returnals a major example i think saros's platinum rate is already like eight percent which is crazy returnals is one and one and a quarter or something um this has been long known and i've said many times that games that were considered easy to platinum in the ps3 era would be considered not easy anymore.

3:47:58Like I've said it a million times. There used to be a little bit of a shame. It's like, oh, I platinumed Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. I platinumed up. I platinumed where the wild things are. It's like looking at the games people are platinum. And now those are way harder to platinum than those are 10, 15. Like I platinumed Rango or Rango, the lizard. Yeah, movie. And that was like 20 or 25 hours, I think. It's like the thing what was easy back in the day was that you could do it. Like you would look at a list and be like, oh, I can do this. I just need to get all the as opposed to the games where it's like beat it four times, beat it on every difficulty, no stacking trophies, that kind of stuff.

3:48:38So that was what was considered easy then. And what are considered easy now are trophies that are truly I think I heard 007's platinum trophy is fairly straightforward. I think the balance is to make it attainable, but not too easy. and that's a that's a tough balance uh to strike but there's no doubt adam that your instincts are correct the god of war 3 is far more difficult to platinum than god of war 2018 or god of war ragnarok no doubt infamous one required you to infamous one and infamous two both required two playthroughs to platinum um so yeah you're not you're not crazy thank you for writing yeah i

3:49:18Colin Moriarty:I mean, games are also way longer now, generally. Like if you asked me to play through a 40 hour game twice to get the platinum, like you can have you can have it. There was even there was a weird one, Chris. I remember when Miles Morales came out that you had to beat it on New Game Plus to get the platinum. And even then, that was kind of weird. Even though it's a shorter game, you did have to beat it twice. And I was like, that's kind of weird. Yeah, because they usually don't do that. Or they'll they'll release a New Game Plus trophy later. that's not for the platinum. But there's no doubt they're getting that feedback and hard trophies are bad for games.

3:49:57Sometimes the game is so overwhelmingly good that it either doesn't matter or people still get the platinum. Elden Ring is a great example of that. But oftentimes... What's the platinum rate on Elden Ring? It's like... It's like ridiculously high. I want to say it's like 15%. I'll look.

3:50:11Colin Moriarty:Elden Ring... You find that on PlayStation Profiles, right? Yep. it's 10.8 if you go to PSN profiles I'll put the link in if you're not logged in it'll show you their rate first you just have to mouse over the number and then you'll see the real one so 37.75 % of people on PSN profiles have it 10.8 % of people on PSN have it that's so high oh that is crazy 37 is insane yeah that's just for people that are logged in though I mean still that's an opt-in oh I see what you're saying hmm yeah yeah because there are 129 000 people on psm profiles with the platinum which is funny marathons is 11 weird yeah marathons i the the thing i wonder what they're going to do with marathon because i've been really surprised with hell divers trophies like they've not added any trophies and i'm like why you should have like literally added a hundred trophies by now i have no idea what you're doing why you don't add them but i don't know do whatever you want i guess what do i know colston wrote in and said hey cdc i'm an avid sports card collector as well as physical media i think like like my other many others i like the history of it all however there is a monetary side of it too of course with some game cube games and rare playstation games fetching upwards of a thousand dollars and had me thinking with emulation on the rise and old hardware breaking controller systems, etc.

3:51:41Do you think these collectors will go belly up? Who would pay $150 for a complete in-box PS3 game when you could potentially play it for free on modern consoles? I have hundreds of physical games, and although they are priceless to me, it made me think, am I sitting on thousands of dollars that'll soon be nothing? As my hardware breaks, will I just have sitting discs I can't play? I've enjoyed the run-up in my collection, but what do you think? Are physical collectors doomed or poised to be the next Scrooge McDuck? I'll go clean the man juice off my copies and listen, Jesus Christ. Dustin, what do you think of this because I do think there is something to this although I think he's oversimplifying it wherein I don't know how long it's going to go on where collectors are buying the shit to play you know what I mean like because it does become a little ridiculous at some point it is cool to have the CRT hooked up and you have the NES hooked up and all the rest but like just go download an emulator go download the fucking Nintendo online stuff and play Zelda like what like why are you doing this to yourself but I'd still believe that people will collect them to have them and it's probably not unlike many other things.

3:52:42The ideal situation of seeing art is not in your house. It's at a museum with the proper lighting and context or whatever, but yet people still buy artwork because it's valuable and they want it. And I feel like games will probably be the same, but I do believe that there are problems with the degradation of this stuff, especially, and I will reiterate, especially with discs, I still feel like that's going to be a problem in the decades to come. And the hardware is going to be a massive problem. So what do you think? Do you think the cost will start going down? Is there a height in which it will plateau and go back down?

3:53:13Or are we just always going to go up?

3:53:16Colin Moriarty:I think we'll continue to go up because collectors do not play the games they collect most of the time. That's been an ongoing joke between me, like my friend Matt and Ben. When we go to these retro conventions, it's like we always joke like, oh, I'm going to buy this, but I'm never going to play it. It's like, that's not the point. now to be fair there are many retro collectors that buy their games and play them i'm somewhere in the middle where like a few years ago i played a bunch of games like even expensive games that i bought for my playstation one i played through all the megaman legends games i played both my tomba games i played suikoden one but that's a small percentage of the collection that i've purchased over the last few years where there's certain things i've bought just to have because i want it or maybe i i had it when i was a kid and i it's like i want to have that for the collection and who knows maybe i'll play it someday maybe i won't um so in terms of the pricing uh because i was doing i was thinking about this last night and then i was i brought up a bunch of examples because he's he was bringing up like if a game is re-released does the value of that game drop and i've always been curious about this as well and the answer is sometimes so some examples that i've thought of in particular a game like suikoden 2 was a high value game normally in the 300 350 ish range so fucking crazy so i just had these stupid games sitting around you know like in dagan's basement anyway go ahead so when did that remaster come out sometime last year yeah last year i want to say yeah so we'll just say from january 2025 the price the average price of a complete in box weekend two is 225 dollars so it had gone down in price since like 2022 or something and now it's sitting at 158 dollars so we are seeing a steady decline in the price this weekend into since the remaster release a big example and one that pisses me off greatly because probably in 2023 2024 i bought paper mario the thousand year door i paid 100 for it and that is about the average price on price charting here we are now in 2026 post remake 47 so yeah there are clearly examples of games that when they get remasters or remakes they do drop in price but it's not always the case like i looked up uh long box rayman on ps1 uh is consistently going up in price it's which it's not crazy it's 70 bucks for that long yeah and the long box stuff is probably all going to be valuable in some way right but that that goes to to it where it's like it's not necessarily about playing it or the availability to it rayman has been re-released so many times and there was a reason this one just came out yeah just came yeah so it doesn't always affect the price um and even like i was curious i'm like okay what about like a remake uh that's like a re like a real remake in terms of like not being the same game a game like silent hill 2 uh the original silent hill 2 while it's on a tiny dip has continued to progress in price over the last five years peaking in february 2026 at 203 dollars for silent hill 2 whereas just five years ago was 89 i have so much money in games it's like not even funny like these games that like are that have no right to even be valuable do you have rule of rose no what is that sounds familiar what is that that's an atlas game uh ps1 ps2 so rule of rose is probably one of the most expensive games and it's currently at its all-time high at one thousand dollars they must have printed like 10 000 copies of it or something i mean it's like it's wouldn't you if you were you would really only be able to control this as a first party but you could invite publishers to do this with you if you made it it's like if i were sony because remember we were talking about how that that canadian retailer has like new print ps3 games yeah like randomly from sony's first party yeah yeah that are undercutting like the aftermarket it's like if you were nintendo i know i know listen i understand because i deal with it personally but it's it's not trivial to make these games it's like why don't you just print like a bunch of gamecube games again we don't know how yeah we don't know how we lost like the technology you know the technology of a tiny disc like to be fair they make gamecube controllers right like they in other words in other words you would just think like if i were these guys i'd be like we could destroy these motherfuckers and like and make a ton of money by just re-releasing the games like and maybe even doing it through your own storefront like go get new gamecube games go get new wii games go get new wii u games go get new n64 games nes games snes games like just sell them yourself and you and you it would be this double barrel thing i'm a little i know that a lot of it has to do with certification but like the especially the first parties can just circumvent that be like the games have already passed certification you're not reinventing the wheel just print them again that's all exact same disc you don't even because a lot of people would be like oh put the newest firmware on it or whatever it's like don't even do that because then it would have to pass certification just reprint the shit and that wouldn't even be a problem before ps3 make UMDs make Vita games I just to me I'm like I don't know that it's it's not trivial but I don't know that it's that heavy of a lift and I think I think if anything the market around all these games shows you there's a huge appetite we got a bunch of DMs and messages from people when I brought up that Canadian retailer about the PS3 games people fucking went and raided that place and you ever talk about fucking Ratchet and Clank collection shit like like you know I mean like not even like meaningful stuff but imagine if they reprinted like heavenly sword yeah or resistance one or whatever i don't know so yeah i would like i guess the the final thing i'll say about this is just that i think it is a it's it's not worth thinking about your collection in terms of dollar because the price is going to go up and down people that use it as an investment are dumb and I hate that that's part of the space just buy the games you want if you can afford it if there's an expensive game you want it's worth it do it and enjoy it and your way of enjoying it may be sitting it on a shelf and that's totally fine yeah I think that's trying to play it that's however you want it's really no different than the GI Joe is behind me I'm not playing with them in fact I haven't played with GI Joe since I was probably like seven or eight and I was still collecting for years after that because i like just having them and setting them up and stuff like that so i have no problem with that i think the you're right about the investment thing i don't take investment advice from me do what you want to do but like i don't understand why you just wouldn't put your money in an index fund like if like you're just gonna if that's what you're doing like hoarding these things to sell later there's safer ways to invest your money and ways that you don't have to deal with any of this shit you know like so i don't quite get it from that perspective.

4:00:49And by the way, I've been enjoying non sequitur a little bit, but I've been enjoying seeing the videos of the target people and the people at these Walmart shutting down. Finally, these Pokemon poachers or these Pokemon. You know, scalpers. Yeah. And I'm getting so upset. It's like, go cry. Fucking jerk offs. All right. Dustin, I want to, or Chris, I want to go to you for that because you don't collect physical games.

4:01:12Colin Moriarty:Yeah, yeah. But I will go to both of you with this one. Graham Waldrop wrote in and said, hey, boys, with news coming out last week that Quantic Dreams live service game Spellcasters Chronicles is being shut down in June after only being out for a few months. I worry about the studio's health. The announcement also mentioned an internal reorganization is coming, which means a fresh round of layoffs. Apparently, development on Star Wars Eclipse will continue, but it's baffling to me that the studio attempted a game like Spellcasters. I know everyone wants their piece of the live service pie, but this feels like the ultimate form of square peg round hole.

4:01:40What do you guys think about Quantic Dream's overall situation? It's been eight years since Detroit. I want more wacky and earnest David Cage experiences, but I'll be shocked if this game actually sees the light of the twin suns. And even if it does, I feel like it'll be a fart in the wind given the apathy around the Star Wars brand. That's a big part of it. Thank you for everything. Keep honking those hogs. It is true that Spellcatcher's Chronicles, which I don't think was ever even really officially released. I'm pretty sure it was in early access yeah um they pulled the plug on that and there is some reporting out of french newspapers i don't know if you guys have seen about how much of a shit show that development was and that they just they actually believed it was going to be big it wasn't like something they were just doing to try they thought it was going to be like a success i am a little worried about quantum dream i mean i'm not worried in the and i listen i don't want to be totally flip i don't really give a shit about quantum dream anymore i used to really love quantum dream but for multiple reasons i don't really care anymore number one they're not really in the playstation ecosystem anymore so they're not like this interesting second party that we paid used to pay a lot of attention to back in the day which we did what what happened what i was just out of curiosity i

4:02:40Colin Moriarty:was i was looking at uh the uh spellcasters chronicles it's it's not it's very generic and boring looking in my opinion the the the steam chart peak is uh 888 yeah good good use of your time damn that's rough the um there are multiple reasons to be worried about them though in my opinion realistic reasons not just like reasons of feeling number one net ease owns them uh they bought them in 2022 i want to say and net ease is obviously pulling money from a bunch of different gaming projects and it seems like i mean isn't that what happened to uh Negoti's game and a few others. NetEase is like getting out of all this stuff.

4:03:24So that's one very dangerous situation that they find themselves in. The second dangerous situation they find themselves in is that their Spotlight brand, which is their internal publishing brand where they publish external games, has been a fart. I don't want to speak about these games from a personal perspective, but I did look them up from a Metacritic perspective the four games they have published through this brand are sea of solitude under the waves a game called lasfanga the time shift warrior which i never even heard of until i looked it up and dustborne which was obviously a game everyone was making fun of these are all no more than mixed on metacritic so they're not choosing the right games and star wars eclipse i think was probably a very good idea when it was spun up and now it's not going to be a very good idea yeah unless that game is extraordinary in ways that can't even be really described no one's going to care about that game in a way that is meaningful enough for them to have justified its extent like i you assume this game might take they might be 10 years between detroit and star wars eclipse um people know i'm a big quantic dream fan from their playstation trilogy i think when they had playstation guiding them and producing the games it worked out pretty well for them generally.

4:04:43Beyond Two Souls again, I think was a little bit of a dud. But Heavy Rain is awesome and Detroit Become Human is a great game. No doubt about it. So I think those things line up where it's like, well, you're not making any money from your publishing arm. You're probably losing a bunch of money from it. You just lost a bunch of money from Spellcasters Chronicles that was in development for a long time. You're about to lay a bunch of people off. You're owned by this Chinese conglomerate that is starting to shed its investments in gaming and you have a Star Wars game in development. I'm not liking the way that's all lining up for them.

4:05:13Colin Moriarty:it's like a it's like a reverse infinity gauntlet right it's like all the worst possible i stay oh a star wars game everybody's gonna love this it's the finity gauntlet

4:05:31so that is so stupid it is it's as stupid as hell it's good i like it so where are you on this chris what do you how you feel about quantic dreams uh future oh man look i was i was never

4:05:41Colin Moriarty:particularly bullish on Quantic Dream. I think they make interesting stuff. I think David Cage is definitely one of those people that I think is interesting and eccentric enough that I'm inherently curious about anything that he does, but none of his stuff has really landed, landed for me. Heavy Rain is interesting, but I feel like I like Heavy Rain for reasons that are not necessarily intentional. I think Heavy Rain is hilarious. I think Heavy Rain is one of the... unintentionally probably like one of the funniest games that the radic was putting up all the clips right of of the no fail states that are hysterical it's just it becomes this like this clumsy idiots like a really heavy story and it's just like it's very i think he makes interesting things i didn't i didn't play beyond two souls at all because i just kept hearing less than great things about and I was like, I don't really vibe with these kinds of games anyway.

4:06:39But what was the one he did after?

4:06:41Colin Moriarty:It was Detroit Become Human, right? Detroit was the last one, yeah. I did like Detroit Become Human. So there is that, but I've never been big on their stuff. And you can't even fathom how uninterested I would be in a Star Wars game in this genre of game that I already kind of don't fuck with that much. so Star Wars Eclipse is already like from the moment I heard about it I was like yeah it's not going to be for me so this does nothing for me like whatever I mean hopefully you know the people there can maintain the ship but I it's of no personal consequence to me we were saying earlier too I think the success of the trilogy like their trilogy on Playstation Heavy Rain and Detroit especially did very well commercially is exactly to what I was saying earlier about how I thought Alan Wake was kind of on the wrong platform at the time.

4:07:39And I feel the same way about Heavy Rain, where Heavy Rain on Xbox would have never been the success it was because it was just a totally different group of people looking for different types of games. So I think I like to Sony's credit, the Quantic Dream brand really was vibrant and useful for PlayStation for a while. And as I knew this, well, after Beyond came out, but like they I've said a million times, like they don't they they didn't get along behind the scenes. There was no way that the three game deal was going to be extended as far as I understood, no matter how well Detroit did. Because I just don't think they wanted to deal with each other anymore.

4:08:11And you can see that ever since Sony cut them loose, they haven't released anything. So what do you think, Dustin? What do you think about Quantic Dream's future?

4:08:20Colin Moriarty:Doesn't sound good. I don't know if I have much to add other that you guys already touched on it. I wonder. It made me think of last week we were talking about shift up and they were like oh we don't need playstation and this is kind of like an opposite situation where it's like uh maybe they need to playstation because they haven't been able to put out anything uh and the thing they did put out is already shut down and was viewed as a a cash grab uh by it's whether it was intended or they thought it would be or not um clearly their uh lack of guidance is is showing right now the uh the detroit become human trailer and reveal is still one of my favorite playstation conference moments do you remember the trailer where it would like show you the clip and then it would zoom out and it would show you like the butterfly effect and it would go into like something else and it showed like exactly how complicated the game was and i was like this is awesome that game it was the rooftop scene they showed over and over and over again of the guy getting shot in the head love that Detroit was awesome Detroit was an awesome game it really was and Heavy Rain I highly recommend Heavy Rain yeah it's weird it's stilted it's a PS3 game but it is excellent it reminds me of like uh it kind of feels like like like if like if Deadly Premonition wasn't just good because it's kind of awkward you know like it's like a proper i don't know like there's something about that game that's like it is good like objectively but it is also very high comedy if you play it right no it is i think what it is is that it's it's very bold and it comes off as campy and weird if you don't play it the way it was intended because you could just like there's that do you do you remember it well the i remember it yeah there's that scene where you're setting the table with the dishes you know i'm talking about and like you could like you could like take you take the dishes out of the cabinet you could like slam them down like but you're not like supposed to right and like everything about like you're supposed to be setting the table nicely and like hanging around but you could just fuck around so bad and the game continues as if you hadn't right right it's it's it's really i think it's bold and interesting and like that was like um i appreciated heavy rain for for that um sorry i just got a text message okay final inquiry my friends jack trenton's illegitimate son wrote in that's psp marcus said howdy fellas with the massive gaps between modern game releases do you feel sony's first party studios are being too protective of their ips sucker punches stance that only they can touch infamous feels less like quality control and more like asset hoarding this isn't just about demanding more games there are talented external or mid-sized studios that would kill for a shot at sly cooper or infamous or the last of us giving them that chance could yield incredible results while letting the original creators focus on new projects.

4:11:15Colin often mentions that Lucasfilm doesn't have a monopoly on good Star Wars ideas. They don't. In fact, I think they have a monopoly on bad Star Wars ideas. Look at Obsidian. They proved with Knights of the Old Republic 2 and Fallout New Vegas that external developers can take established universes and deliver masterpieces. I was 15 when Skyrim came out. I'm 30 now. We cannot keep waiting 10 to 15 years for beloved franchises to resurface. Isn't it time PlayStation embraces a more collaborative, publisher-minded approach to their catalog? I generally agree with you, actually, but I do think there is a difference between some of the franchises you mentioned.

4:11:44Sly Cooper and Infamous are dormant. And at that point, I do think there should be, Sucker Punch should produce it. They should guide it and shepherd it. But someone else should be making those. And that's what I was saying about the Infamous collection. Should they be doing that? And apparently it is external teams that are doing it according to the rumor. It's like, it better be. Like, what a waste of your fucking time. But The Last of Us, I understand the preciousness around that a little more, not because I like it, but because it's theoretically alive. there's an HBO series coming up there's almost certainly going to be a third game they talk about it sometimes so I think once things kind of leave the zeitgeist of a studio for good Sly Cooper's been gone for 20 years the fourth game wasn't made by them not only should you not really have that kind of control but you should embrace someone else coming in and wanting to do something with it you can guide it, you can write it, you can produce it but yeah, let someone else do that stuff.

4:12:38And so I completely agree with you. And I think I do think the level of preciousness though, Jack Trenton's illegitimate son is based on the output of the studio. I think a lot of teams don't don't have any power. I think there are probably four or five teams that have all the power. No one's going to make a Gran Turismo game other than polyphony. That would never happen. Sucker Punch, Naughty Dog obviously have that power. Santa Monica has that power and Gorilla. I mean, that's probably it. I would assume. And even Horizon was made by others and is being made by others i mean there was a lego game made externally there's the fucking mmo being made in korea so the answer is yes you guys have anything you'd like to add to this before we go

4:13:17Colin Moriarty:yeah i can understand being uh concerned because there are examples of like an ip going to a new team and killing it i guess this is kind of like you know older at this point but i think about the non naughty dog crash bandicoot games or the non-insomniac spyro games where it's like oh we'll have someone else work on this now. And they're just clearly not as good. But I think there are examples of games that have gone to new teams. And when there's the right level of care and maybe collaboration with the original team that you can make something great. This is a weird, I'm sure there are better examples in this, but I was thinking about the near replicant remastered slash partial remake that came out that was attached with a toy logic we're like oh no this is gonna be not good uh but then it ended up being really great and had no problems so like i said there's probably better examples but i think that there's a way a path forward where you can have someone working on an infamous game and sucker punch can still be attached to it and and lead you know guide them along the way, not just like, okay, take this IP and do whatever you want.

4:14:35Colin Moriarty:There's a middle ground that I think could be explored. We'll see what happens. I think Infamous will obviously be one of the should it be real and uncharted to a degree too, depending on if you believe a game is in development and then who might be making it. Because when Neil says he's producing another game, it could be a game that's outside of Naughty Dog 2. Should that be uncharted? I don't know. We'll see. We'll see. He is right about Obsidian. I mean, they did a great job and in fact, Bioware began making someone else's a sequel to someone else's game. I can't remember what it was. Right?

4:15:05They made a... Was it Neverwinter Nights? Or something like that? Was it Baldur's Gate? Maybe Baldur's Gate. That's what it was. Baldur's Gate.

4:15:14Colin Moriarty:Was it Baldur's Gate? I thought they did the first one. I'm trying to remember. Baldur's Gate 1. I'm so behind on Bioware. I don't remember. Yeah, I'll just look here real quick and we'll wrap this up. Let's see games developed. Nope, it's a whole different... Oh no, Baldur's Gate 1 is Bioware, so it's not that... Oh yeah maybe that's what it is. Neverwinter Nights.

4:15:38Yeah.

4:15:39Colin Moriarty:But Baldur's Gate still fits because Bioware didn't make Baldur's Gate 3. That is true yeah. Yeah I'm trying to figure out maybe I'm just wrong on that. Yeah I don't know. I think both I think both are valid. Like I think mainline entries in very important living IP should be very very precious but I also think that there should be more flexibility in like spinoffs and and things where other developers should take stabs at it. Like with the ensemble with Halo Wars, like that was great. Like that was really cool. Like I'm still kind of bummed that we don't have like more weird shit like a, like I think a Destiny Tactics would be so cool, you know, but like for whatever reason, those games are just not appealing to pitch, I guess.

4:16:24All right, let's get the hell out of here, my boys. It's time to go. Let's go around the horn and say goodbye. Chris, goodbye to you. Be well. Have a good rest of your day. Any plans to share?

4:16:33Colin Moriarty:You too, man. I don't know. What's the probably just continuing on with 007. Maybe get into maybe start diving into destiny a little bit in preparation for this last. Last major update, which I was reading about during during our break. And it looks it actually looks pretty cool. But yeah, pretty, pretty normal day. I'm going to make some chicken. I'm going to meal prep for the rest of my week. I got a bunch of, you know, when you have, I, I bought a bunch of like fresh chicken and I was intending to cook it the day that I got it. But then I got swept up doing other things. And now it's like, I kind of got to, I got to make, I got to make all of it at once.

4:17:12Colin Moriarty:So I'm going to have like a shit ton of chicken this week. But, uh, it's good for normal day ahead. Other than that. Protein. What's wrong with that? Can't get enough. All right. We'll be well. See you next time. Dustin, goodbye to you. Anything you'd like to share? Goodbye. as soon as we're off this call I'm going to go eat and then I'm leaving to the movie and then this weekend like I said I'll be away the campsite how many beers will I drink God only knows God only knows good luck to you Godspeed to you so should be fun and then fun week next week with the state of play yeah it's going to be some exciting stuff coming soon which is great so join us over there on the YouTube channel for the our streams and you can find everything here on Patreon as well.

4:18:01Patreon.com slash last day media. We appreciate you guys. For me, I don't know. Just kind of hanging out. I got to do some. Oh, my dad's coming this weekend. So see him at least a little bit. I got a bunch of work to do. I'll be recording with Brad on Sunday. Got to pay everyone. Got to do the Q &A for the month. Odds and ends. Yeah, some other things. So yeah, just work. All right. Thank you all out there for your love, kindness and support. Appreciate you. Patreon.com slash last day media for early ad free access and lastdaymedia.store for merch. We'll see you next time. Until then, goodbye.

4:18:31See ya. Take care, guys. Sacred Symbols, a PlayStation podcast, is a product and trademark of Last Stand Media and Colin's Last Stand LLC and is proudly recorded in the USA. The show is conceived by, is written by, and is directed by me, Colin Moriarty. My co-hosts are Chris Raygun Maldonado and Dustin Furman. The show is produced by executive producer Dustin Furman. 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.

4:19:15Thank you. Aaron Betke, Aaron Temple, Adam Refriended, Albion, Alex Cabrera, Alex Gates, Alex Lapierre, Alex Monez, Alan Tiniak, Alan Tremblay, Alan Einer, Anthony Akire, Anthony Vazquez, Anton K, Antonio C, Asak Paredes, Austin Riley, Betty Ann Moriarty, Bjorn Campbell, Blackjack, Boots, Brad Cooley, Brad Lohman, Brandon Runniger, Brian Williamson, Cannonball Jones, Captain Verde, Carlos Algaret, Chad Lewis, Chris Galvin, Chris Morton, Chris Ritchie, Christopher Devayo, Christopher Moore, Christopher Morgan, Cody Benin, Conrad Pennyfarthing, Corey Beacom, Dan Nolan, Dan Root, Daniel D 'Amour, Daryl E.

4:19:55Naaman, Dave Alvarez, Dennis Usel, Denny Woodnever, Don Lee, Donald Difford, Donald John Vaders, Double Duty Dirk, WTF, Eddie Smith, Electric MD, Ellis, Emmanuel Perez, Enrique Perez, Enteshas, Frail Cabbage St. Matthews of the Diocese of Brig, Gabe's New Gabe Cube, Gary Cavallo, Gavin, Ghost Storm 672, Gio Corsi, Grayson Maxwell, Gregory Slavinsky, Gus, Hush, Jad Rita, Jake C, Jamie Fraley, Jason Arzon, Jay Getter, Jean-Francois Forzy, Jeff Mercado, Jerome Ferreira, Jimmy Rodriguez, Joe McPartland, Joey Gondaliger, John Schultz, John Zile, Johnny Waffles, John Cordero, Jonathan Coates, Jonathan Cortez, Joosh, Jorge Pal, Joseph Baker, Joseph Lopez, Josh Godfrey, Josh Gravelick, Josh McKinney, Josh Schullinger, Joshua Smallwood, J.P.

4:20:47Lynch, Justin Payne, Justin Wagaman, Cam Wallace, Keith Richards, Kendrick Caius, Kyle Hagel, Kyle Martin, Lizard King, Logan Little George, Madmock Media, Miranda Grubba, Martin Beck, Mason Bouchard, Matt Flowers, Matt 20, Matthew Ash, Matt MGS24, Michael Buffel, Michael Gates, Michael Mashed potato michael vecchio mr tom morgan ashley mr finckler mr molf my name is mayo nate izod nathan r neil amen nick amato norse nuts ollie fritz omar omar rosa orchard organic produce out of focus bigfoot patrick leslie paul joyce peyton stone phil crone qualia freak randall holsey rallo Relentless Rex Remington James Ray Lijah Robert Byers Robert Schultz Roto24 Ross Marenka Ryan T.

4:21:40Mandel Saqib Alam Saul Balcazar Sean Mason Shane Brecky Shane Miller Shane Rayoum Silent Butt Deadly Simon Conception Jr. Sketch McGetch Spencer F. Steven Glasman Steven Innerfield Stewie 108 Sunny Sides Up Sweaty Magic Sweet Jones Terry Tip The Fandom Traveler The Shady Mailman Throw Seven Toby Rylan, Tony Zuniga, Trelon, Trench Goat, Trey Woodward, Tyler Tremel, Uncharted Shinobi, Vance Cody, Vega the Late, Vitra, Who is Steven Day, Will Williams, William Holbert, Worry-san, Whiskey-Sin, Zach Cohen, Zachary Wood, Zenred, Z-Man 8601, and Zainal Yuichi.