#416 | Stare Straight Ahead, Ignore the Responsibility

53:52Always happy to see someone go to Long Island. Because again, it's a place I always say you have to try to go there. You can't just pass through it. You have to have like some deliberateness to go. And so it's a place that like if you shit ton of people live there. But if you don't live there. By the way, there is a rumor going around. I think it's probably specious, but that the Jets are thinking are talking about moving back to Long Island, which would be fucking awesome. I would flip out New Jersey. They play in New Jersey where the Giants play. And they have since the 80s. Oh, they used to play.

54:22at Shea Stadium and the Polo Grounds, which are on Long Island. But that was before I was born. So Monroe's girthy doctrine. So glad you enjoyed the homeland. So a little bit of Teddy Roosevelt, the greatest president. Because he's obviously a Long Islander, but also because he was fucking crazy. Love that. I love the story about. So he was William McKinley's vice president. William McKinley was assassinated, so he became president. And they couldn't get in touch with him for days. because he was first of all it's like 1902 or whatever and second of all i think he was like in wyoming or something like at a cabin and like they had to like send people for him like to go find him and be like you're the president of the united states you gotta come home you know and everybody's like all right he was fine he's so such if you read about him he's fucking dope he's awesome awesome guy yeah it's it's things like that where it's like this country's always been crazy um it's like uh i mean i mean even just like i mean we've talked about i've mentioned on the show before like that that elephant we lynched in 1916 yeah now you hug him from a crane you look at that and you're like we lynched an elephant from it from a crane in 1916 maybe things are just maybe things have always just been this dumb you know what i mean like if they did that like back then like a hundred years ago over a hundred years ago it's like yeah of course like why not like all the crazy shit that's happening now it's like fine I guess it is in keeping I just want to believe and I hope that there were people like us with deep senses of irony and fatalism you know seriously like people that just thought it was funny like shit that they were just laughing as things were happening it was just a very fatalistic resigned posture I would like to believe that that goes back all the way to the beginning hopefully like sarcasm that's a human development it no Adam no other animal is sarcastic right no other yeah there's no other animal that like ironically does things you know right yeah like a monkey's not gonna ironically peel a banana like oh I'm definitely gonna eat this

56:39finally Chris wrote in and said hello guys Colin I'm curious if weeks like you have had recently where there has been a ton of recorded content due to all the showcases and events come with increased challenges. Is it difficult to talk that much about video games in such a short period of time? Love the show and love all the extra content we have gotten recently. I felt kind of invigorated by recent events personally. I feel like we needed a shot in the arm, not as a company or a content farm, but like just as an industry. Like it just felt, you're right. And you've said it for years that we're missing a, we're missing these cultural beats now without E3 and a more traditional games comment on a more traditional Tokyo game show.

57:15So it did feel good to get into the weeds again. And does it come with increased challenges? I mean, it's good to work. I don't mind. I mean, I'm blessed to be able to do this. These are sometimes long, grueling days where like you work all day and you realize you don't even know what's going on in the world. You haven't looked at your phone or talked to anyone or whatever. But that's like that. I don't mind that makes me feel alive in a weird way. I think the biggest challenge is just not being redundant because you don't know what people are listening to what. So you're kind of, you know, you're repeating yourself, but you have to kind of assume that you haven't the same audience at all these different places.

57:47So that's a difficult thing. But how are you feeling after all that, Chris? We did a lot together. Yeah, I mean, I feel good about it. Like, I like I like when there's a lot to talk about because it means that there's just a lot of different threads to pull at. There's different muscles to flex to. Like one of us might know more about something and then the others. And the more news there is, the more likely that kind of thing will come into play when it's just when it's a, when it's a singular topic kind of week it it it's you know it is what it is but it's it's not as interesting in in in my opinion just because there's less there's less threads to pull i do think the biggest challenge is the redundancy because like sometimes you're like i i go through this sometimes too when we're recording where it's just like i would man they said really everything that i would say it feels it feels a little pointless to be like uh he said kind of everything I say I don't got anything to say about it you gotta have something to say but so like that's kind of the thing where it's like trying to figure out like what can I add to this without making it seem like you're trying to force yourself to say something that you you know what I mean like it's it's trying to fill you don't want to catch yourself filling time I guess yeah yeah I try to I it's funny because I don't often have that problem because I introduce everything right so it's kind of unfair yeah actually but that's the way I mean it's fine I'm in the captain's year.

59:14All right. That was me doing the Somalian pirate thing. I'm the captain now thing. I'm the captain now. Still, I've never seen that movie, but I know the meme. All right. Chris, it's time for us to get into the news. And there's quite a few things to talk about today. Some big items, some not so big. But we begin here with a very big item, in my opinion, which is that Rockstar has finally broken their silence on Grand Theft Auto 6 in the sense that they've announced digital and retailer pre-orders for physical versions will begin for Grand Theft Auto 6 on June 25th. They are committed to this date.

59:48I don't think there can be any more conversation about will they or won't they be hitting their date. I think they've made it fairly transparent all year that they would hit this date. Strauss Zelnick, of course, is giving interviews where they're feeling confident. And of course, they need to shit or get off the pot. So if you're looking for Grand Theft Auto 6 on PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X or S, the pre-orders begin on the 25th. And the game, of course, comes out in November. If you go to rockstargames.com slash VI for six in capitals like Roman numerals, there is a small page that shows some interesting stuff we've seen.

1:00:28We've seen a lot of this stuff already, and there's not very much new. But if you go to the website, you see Vice City and you can actually see it in motion. and it does it's it obviously this is website graphical kind of flare and it doesn't look the way the game will look per se but it just goes to show you the depth of the and the breadth of the game yeah I'm so intrigued by this game because I just want to see it like more than playing it and seeing what the story is like I don't even care about that like I want to be in the world and it's not very common for me to feel that way about a game so anyway I don't know why you would pre-order and also by the way i don't think they've said what the price is and i think we might have a letter about this aj white wrote in and said good day to you all cue the clip of michael scott running around screaming it's happening rockstar today confirmed pre-orders for gta 6 are going live june 25th the post on their website ominously leaves out the price so i ask what are your final guesses guesses for base price 70 80 100 what should the collector's edition include and how much should it be i'm thinking a bag of cocaine and american flag tank tank top so we can all live the true florida experience thanks gentlemen um cocaine's very that's very sophisticated i don't know that that would be the average that would be maybe the average miami experience so you have good for vice city um fentanyl would probably be the average uh experience for for people in other parts of florida don't do any of those things um chris what are you thinking gta 6 price where's your head i my head's at i i don't know if there's what's the standard price right now 70 70 i would say yes still 69.99 some a couple have gone to 80 but no almost no one and then 60 is still pretty common too yeah i mean i could see them doing i don't think they're gonna go 100 i think i could see them doing 80 like i think 80 would be in that realm of reasonability but i also feel like i don't know like why they're gonna make so much money anyway why rock the boat at all you know like why give anybody a reason not to you know like they're one of the these this is one of the few games that like they could sell at 50 and make like billions of dollars that's the whole thing is that you can make different arguments about what you really think you should do here and i'm sure that they gamed it out sure yeah i think shaw zelnick said on a cnbc interview because he was asked about the price like months ago and he was saying like we're not going to charge like an unreasonable price or whatever something like you know in so many words to me that indicates like because internally so as you said it's like the expedition 33 effect right like the game's 50 it becomes much more attractive the thing is you don't really need to do that you're grand theft auto so like i think the only question is if you settle at 70 or go up to 80 i i agree with you i don't think it would go any higher than that but i think 70 is probably what it's going to be.

1:03:18And I think they realize you just don't need to like, you don't need to be the game that forces a new model on people. You can, you're one of the few products that can very easily take advantage of the old pricing model and be perfectly fine. Right. That said, I'm sure the game is worth a lot more than$70. This is what I always say about, about the idea of exploring the price range. And yet I also think they understand that there's going to be such a huge GTA online environment ultimately built into this. And this is going to be their new platform. They're going to make a fucking. yeah they're good they'll be they're like yeah we'll be fine at 70 i do think they can get away with 80 and by the way chris it would be fascinating if they tried to charge 100 because i think they get away with it so they really are holding themselves away from that level of money but i think they have to be smart and i think they're just excited to get it i saw this quote from stralzel nick where he said about the marketing that's going to begin soon we are in the business of eating red meat for breakfast guys fucking he's a psychopath that's such an insane thing to say for any reason yeah like there's no context in which that isn't an insane thing to say um yeah no i i think they're gonna make money hands over hand over fist man i'm excited to see this i'm so intrigued by this game i'm excited i'm anticipating it not even necessarily like i'm sure by the time i'm done with it i'll i'll like the story and i'll like you know and i'll be deeper ingrained into it but i'm just like fascinated with this what this game is from like a just a broader industry perspective because this really is kind of the last big highly anticipated game really of this stature like and i don't really know when the next one of these is really ever going to be um there's some that we have like interpersonally in you know at at lsm or whatever like judas is probably one of those for me where like i'm i'm personally like stoked but that's not like you know millions of people like billions of people like like with bated breath waiting um it's just such a different beast and i really can't remember i can't remember the last time a game like this came out and i don't know when the next one's going to be like i guess elder scrolls 6 is probably like the next comparable but even that's like quite a way and And it's also small, way smaller.

1:05:40Way smaller. You're right, though. That is a comparable kind of event for the mainstream. I guess it would be a little different because I don't know how. I mean, those are mainstream games. I don't want to undersell Skyrim or the Elders World games. It's just GTA is just is substantially bigger. You make the argument where this could be the last of its kind, really. Just in that if you assume Grand Theft Auto games will always be distanced from each other like this now by a decade or more. I made the argument it's kind of crazy to say it and it's probably not true but like it could be the last Grand Theft Auto game just because like they might just build off of this forever I assume it is my sincere hope that they have a better single player pipeline built into this game than they did with GTA 5 I think they kind of got lost in the sauce a little bit and reasonably so because of what where they were making money but so it is possible based on where games are going and the fragmentation and micro fragmentation of all the audiences because like you're saying like we're excited about Judas and Judas will sell millions of copies but it's nothing like Grand Theft Auto will sell in one second in pre-orders what Judas is going to sell so it's reasonable to think that there will never be another game like this actually which is kind of unless it's free and phenomenal like a fortnight right like I guess like that's what I mean it's like there's there will be games that are overnight successes like there are things like Ark Raiders where like people were kind of looking forward to Ark Raiders and then it came up but like to this extent where everybody just knows it's going to be huge and and and they've known for years and they're anticipating it and then it finally comes out and it is huge and it breaks records like i don't know like i feel like the only surprises i feel like the only big things left are those like kind of surprise out of the gate you know like like a hell divers you know what i mean where that just kind of came out of nowhere and everybody loved it and even that like the hell diverse the gta is like a massive i mean that's a disparity but the disparity is insane so like it's in a league of its own i'm really excited about it i hope it's great i'm sure it's i'm sure if it's if it's going to be anything it's going to be fucking very interesting um and that's reason enough for me to be excited so yeah games that make a billion you know in the billions of dollars are incredibly scarce and are typically free-to-play games um or you know service games to let me see here to sell 100 000 is that that's 100 million that's a oops shit i messed up dude it's so it's so common i know you're doing math right now it's so comical to think that this is going to be 70 or 80 dollars when like i think what is it um i think et for the atari retailed for like 40 in like 1982 yeah it's it's just like what is that in in today's money it's like probably like a hundred more dollars it's probably like a hundred and thirty dollars or some shit all right so good lord yeah that can't be right what the what's what are you trying to do oh no this is right you to make a billion dollars gross so not even like with the splits at 70 to make a billion dollars you have to sell 14 million copies so it's something more like 20 million copies once you figure out all the splits with all the platform holders.

1:08:53Sure. Games at full price. Games don't do that, except for very rare things like Red Dead is another game that would do that. But again, these are fractional compared to Grand Theft Auto. This is going to be a true event. And I think the I don't want to say the industry needs it. I've been thinking about doing a video recently about the video game crash of 83 and people always saying like there's going to be another video game crash and all that. I'm like, no, like there won't. The problem because that people don't understand the video game crash was so bad. that like the amount of money being made on video games, so like 82, 83, and then 83, 84, 85, it was a small fraction of the amount of gross revenue by 85 that was being made in 83, and it wouldn't recover until the mid-90s.

1:09:35That's never going to happen. Games are making more and more and more and more money, and that's going to continue. It's about who wins and who loses. And that is where the crashing happens in the seams. we'll talk a little bit more about that with studios and the structure of the studios and all the rest later in the show all right number seven is more of a oh i don't know why i said number seven i said it because i put in the document that's number two for you guys i have these numbers lined up for for a lot more for the um for the time stamps but uh just wanted to do a psa in case you still play playstation 4 which i know a lot of you do there is a new firmware update for it and uh it is mandatory apparently so these are public we remember we've talked like Like they do a security update like every year.

1:10:18And even PS3 still gets firmware updates. So I just like to let people know that in case you're going to play it. Because it is a little bit of a hassle. If you're turning on your console, you're like, oh, fuck, I got to sit through this shit. Especially on PS3. So when the PS3 gets updated again, which I'm sure it will, I'll definitely let you know. And by the way, isn't it fascinating that they still haven't shut the PS3 store off? They tried to shut off five years ago. And then they're like, ah, the same thing with the Vita. That's right. That's right. And then they were, it wasn't even five, maybe it was three or four years ago.

1:10:47And then it was like, they just didn't go. I was expecting they like gave us a six month reprieve, but they really are just leaving it alone, which is dope. Appreciate that. Yeah. Appreciate that. And I wonder if maybe they're trying to like stretch it out to try to integrate these, its functionality into PS4, I would assume, which would then allow it to be backwards compatible. But I think we all understand that's, that's impossible. As we discussed on re in recent weeks, uh, didn't digital foundry do this stuff about like ps3 emulation and like some of the games they were running on these like top of the line emulators and they can't even get these games to run it's like what the fuck was going on with this thing it's weird the cell architecture is so funny it's such a funny thing that they did it's just so funny that you can't emulate it like you it's so bad it's you can't emulate the environment because like yeah it requires too much processing power i can't i guess it's also just such an unorthodox way to do like as i i think um i don't want to talk out of my ass because because technologically I'm quite layman as far as that stuff goes, but I'm fairly certain just the number of cores that the PS4 had or the PS3 had, all the cores are specified to specific functions, so they couldn't dynamically integrate.

1:12:00It's like, oh, this needs more X, and this needs more Y, so let's allocate. It's like, no, no, this is just for this. It's like, why would you? It's such a crazy thing to do. It really puts in the context the contemporaneous conversation around PS3 development at that time about people being like, this sucks. Yeah. And like, I kind of went in one ear and out the other. I'm like, just do it. Just make the fucking games and shut up. And then like all of these years later, you know, it's like, see, like the weird shit we had to do. Mega funny. You almost have to give them a credit for figuring it all out.

1:12:36Yeah. Especially on a console that was at that time struggling. Because that's the shittiest thing is that like they were doing all this in the early PS3 era for a console that I think it was going to die. so yeah that was the uh it's the ps3 generation there was something something special about that generation the the roaring back of that machine is is i don't think i don't think sony gets enough credit for it like they figured it out they really did they did it quick i think because it was existential yeah for sure and they still ended up losing money that generation which is even the craziest thing like the ps3 generation was a loss but they ended up winning which was kind of crazy like they pulled it out i don't know how they did it man because i think we used to write the mpd stories every month at ign and i think it was like something like people can correct me but i'm pretty sure something to the akin of like 30 something months xbox 360 outsold ps3 in a row like buried it yeah and it wasn't until the slim 2009 started turning things around and it was uncharted 2 that really that was i remember that was i remember in high school that was like the big thing it was like oh there's finally that was i remember the conversation being like oh there's finally a reason to have a ps3 middle girl solid 4 was kind of like that but like middle girl solid middle girl solid so weird because i remember it being a lot more niche than it is now like compare i guess compared to like nobody i knew at school was talking about Metal Gear Solid 4.

1:14:03Yeah, it was. It was like I remember it sold fairly well, like a few million copies maybe, but it was not the phenomenon that it would become later on. Like I feel like it's just wildly unplayable, you know, for a lot of people. Because not because of the game. I'm saying it was on PS3 and like it never well this summer finally. So like I just don't think people have even really had the opportunity to play. That's true. Yeah. So anyway let's see. So yeah, just a PSA for the PS4 firmware and keep an eye on that if you're still playing over there for some fucking strange reason. All right. The big news of the week is a story that is not being widely reported, though I'm going to use Push Square's report that ironically cites me at the bottom of it.

1:14:48It says, thank you, Sacred Symbols, for the tip. So here's what has happened. And it's disappointing that more people don't report on this because I think only via a... an overwhelming amount of media coverage. And I think pushing will Sony be forced to take a lot of these security issues seriously. So, of course, people remember last month, my account got boosted through customer service and what they call social engineering. So not really hacking, but pretending you're someone else and getting them to give you information. And of course, we obviously lost my mind about this and got really upset about it.

1:15:31got my account back through my connections at Sony. Everyone knows the whole story, but a major security flaw in which people can basically very easily fake your find a weak link customer service agent. It's one of these third world agencies that they use, no offense. And so you just need the weakest link. And then you just need nominal information, like a person's email address and like maybe games they bought. and they'll shut your password they'll change your password and shut your two-factor authentication off um so that's that's fun that's wonderful so i i solved that problem for me um but as people know i became very animated for others because my account was my account's apparently been flagged and like there's only so much you can do about it and as i understand like a lot of the changes to my account now have to happen in San Mateo by a managerial level person.

1:16:27But I couldn't simply walk away at that point because it's like, well, first of all, I didn't take this issue very seriously until it happened to me, which I think is a character issue. And so I was like, well, the next best character thing to do is to try to help others. So I've been doing that behind the scenes. And I actually I've been talking a little bit on PSN profiles forums with some of the users there about some stuff. It's like, I actually have not said many things that I know and understand about the situation publicly because I don't want to, I want to be useful. Like I'm not trying to like be, I'm not trying to put my reporter I had on here and like nail Sony.

1:17:01I'm actually trying to like help them. And I'm, I'm overtly and honestly doing that because I think it's important. I don't know that they necessarily need my help, but maybe they needed my push. So anyway, that issue seemed to be solved and as we i don't think we noted this on the show chris and i don't know why i forgot to do it but they hired they they posted hirings for anti-fraud people i saw that both in san mateo and london um you're welcome so um so that's that's one thing that and i've been talking to them behind the scenes about that or whatever and i and and i recently exchanged emails with them about stuff last week all right so there's this whole other problem now and this is less do you know anything about this have you been reading about this at all i read a little bit okay it was it was the one the one thing on the document i was like i gotta i'm gonna look up everything i can about this because this is hysterical so it's a it's a i have to admit and i even said this in my correspondence with sony where i'm like i must admit this is funny but you have a major problem on your hands so right yeah all right so i'm going to kind of work in reverse people know pork poncho you know him played marathon play marathon with him he's an it and like infosec guy so he's been doing a lot of stuff for us i'm not i didn't ask him to he's just interested in researching and understanding these things so here's here's what happened okay and then we'll work backwards and i'll show you guys what what we think occurred if you go on psn and you go to your profile it shows you a series of widgets right one of them is like your trophy widget one of them is like recently played and like the games that you all played one of them is the most played games and one of them is your friends list these are all and i know this from from pork these all run on different like server like i don't know we would call them stacks or blades or whatever i have no idea i don't know the terminology but they're all like these separate things that are integrated in the psn so like on one of these servers is your trophies on one of these things is like the psn store the playstation store and like your licenses and there's this other stack and it's the one that runs your recently played games and like your entire game library list and the hours you've played so not really important but like one of these things that feeds into this greater playstation ecosystem and they drag all this data in and show it to you.

1:19:30What ended up happening is that they, nefarious actors have figured out how to fuck with those lists.

1:19:41So it's not really a security issue per se because it doesn't really matter on one hand, but it shows that the PlayStation network is incredibly vulnerable to random things and I think we already know this. yeah so here's the way i'm gonna quote pork poncho and he has this huge um twitter thread i'll put it here for you thank you yeah uh hold on a sec but i have it open oh you have it okay great yeah um so oh yeah it's in the it's in the chat so he says this these are the different service blades so it's like service one is your game library and activity this is where your recently played games live things like play time last play date play count it uses cusa or ppsa title IDs.

1:20:27Okay. So like there's like these new alphanumeric, you know, badges that attach to each game. Service two is trophies, a totally separate rest API using NPWR IDs. This means you can't write trophy data through the game library. It's a different service entirely. So if someone does target you via this method, the method they're using here, your trophies are safe for now. Service three is entitlements. This tracks the games you actually have purchased or a license for. It uses product SKU IDs and content IDs to an entirely different format. So again, these things all fold together and it's only that first service one game library and activity that has been that has been breached.

1:21:04What these guys figured out is that like you can just add whatever game you want to a person's game history. And they've also figured out that you can mess with people's hours played and even nominally mess around with people's libraries by adding things to the library, but you just don't have access to them. So they're all like padlocked. And this all goes through the service. So people started noticing. And this is where I think it gets funny, right? Where they're like, dude, there's a game called sex store simulator, which exists on PSN. It's in my play history at the top. I've never played it.

1:21:40And it says I've played it for 8000 hours. Now, the reason that this matters is because other people can see your play history. So if like you're a normal person with friends and family and coworkers and you play, you know, a few games on PSN and then someone's like, oh, what's Tommy doing? And they go and look and it's like the last game he played was sex store simulator, a game he's played for 8000 hours. And they started adding these games to different people's lists. So like hentai princess and all these kinds of games. Right. And people were like, what the fuck is going on here? Now, some people, including me, got hit extra hard.

1:22:12I had tens of thousands of games, I think potentially every game that's on PSN. added to my list so what happened was that the widgets wouldn't even load and people started noticing this so they would fail it reminded me on ps3 i think i remember told you if you had 100 friends on ps3 how smart games like wouldn't load like detonation would just freeze like there are things that just don't work anymore so these widgets are are experiencing a load that they never in like a in a test ecosystem never no one at sony was like what do we what how does this work if you have every game right so like at some point it gets overloaded so my shit got extra fucked but for most people it was like sex sex store simulator hentai princess sex shop simulator that kind of stuff yeah and it all goes through this so here's what pork poncho says when a phantom game appears on someone's psn profile it only shows up in service one that's why affected players see recently played entry, but don't see it appear in their trophy list or purchase history.

1:23:17Someone is injecting fake data straight into the game library without touching the other two services. This is likely done through Sony's activity feed submission API. It lets apps post stories like play the game. There's a document OAuth scope for it, which has been mentioned in public security disclosures before. You can see a bit more of that here. So he links to hacker1.com. This is a place where you get hacker bounties. This is important. So do you know anything about this stuff? like where like white hat or gray hat hackers will discover vulnerabilities and company and they'll report them and companies will pay bounties to fix them um so this is a known vulnerability going back to the beginning of ps5 apparently that endpoint accepts target account ids and title ids without ever checking that the account actually owns that game and that's where the hole is apparently in the security so he writes this so that's almost certainly what's happening the endpoint trusts that the authenticated user is allowed to write information to whatever psn account id they supply to the api it doesn't verify that your token actually matches the account you're writing to and that's a classic example of a broken object level level authorization issue and bug and he says as i mentioned before it also doesn't check into that account actually owns the game it's trying to inject into the game library activity so there's no license validation going on and it's not even checking for the system level proof that the game was launched by the user simply put it's basically someone saying here's a title id that exists in the store back end be a deer and slap it onto that account for me it even works with unreleased or delisted games which is exactly what happened with gta 6 earlier in the year back in march people found that they could spoof their recently played lists using uncovered pre-release store ids for gta 6 obviously they weren't actually playing the game and there were no trophies recorded but the solution Sony seemed to apply was just to scrub those IDs from the store rather than actually fix their authorization gap.

1:25:08So he gives a solution of like what they need to do or whatever. So I've been talking behind the scenes. I've been trying it like so I emailed Sony about this a few days ago and I'll leave that for now. They know because they took that entire stack down. Now, I don't know if you saw this, like they just basically took it all off the Internet, like offline again. So like if you went to your PSN ID or your profile for like two days and you went to those widgets, they wouldn't load. Right. And that was universal for everybody, even though only certain people were affected. And it seems and I keep saying this and it sucks because it's a great website and it's not their fault.

1:25:43It's like PSN profiles is the vector. Like this is where they're going to like target people for sure. It might not be the only place, but it's definitely a major source of it. And a lot of people there got hit. So Push Square reports. So I messaged Push Square about this. Hence the thank you to Sacred Symbols for the tip. And they reported on it and they reported on it in three different waves. First that it was happening. The second way was that they took the stack down so nothing was appearing anymore. So if you would go to recently played, it would literally say once you play a game, your stats will appear here.

1:26:17So they literally like they made it seem like no one played anything for a long time. And then slowly they've been restoring functionality. I noticed last night, they're basically reporting like things seem better for people. And I noticed on PSN profiles, some people are better and some people aren't. It seems that the hardest you're hit or the harder you're hit, the more unlikely it is that this is going to be unwound for you quickly and maybe at all. I don't know. I don't know what they're going to do. What's interesting is that you're I'm getting interesting insight into the PSN just by like what is appearing.

1:26:46So like when I go to my games now, my games were flooded with things that like I never owned now it's like showing me reverse order stuff beginning in like 2015 like things that I bought like it's showing me things that I all the stuff I own but like when I'm at the top it's like here's LA cops which is a game from 2015 here's pure solar another old role-playing game darksiders 3 like it usually shows you the things you bought at the top so like there's something they must be using they must be using cached information or something to try to fix this for people i don't really know what's happening but that's the latest scare on the playstation network so i think the biggest thing people have to understand and i tried to explain this to some people they're like oh this is a oh this pissed me off let me let me bring this up as well um so on psn profiles like people have been reporting you know being saying like so i've tried to talk to um customer service or whatever and like you know you just get like the chat with a random person they said that so the person says like these games hentai princess sex store simulator whatever have been added to my list what what should i do it's embarrassing to see this and they write this thank you for sharing this we are aware of this issue and want to confirm that your account is safe and secured there is no foul play involved the appearance of these games is a technical glitch and our engineers are actively working to resolve this issue as fast as possible that's not true yeah what there is foul play involved and it's not a technical glitch

1:28:19like now here's another part of it and i can't substantiate this there is scuttlebutt that what and i think this is what pork believes as well and someone who i don't know but had talked to behind the scenes about this like just a random enthusiast he could be the hacker for all i know i have no idea but dm'd with this person and they're giving me some information but this is what um pork thinks is true as well is that it seems like it's possible that the person who did this or discovered this reported this to sony and sony according to this theory was like this is not bounty worthy this is not a security risk and so the person just unleashed it oh um so who knows if that's true or not but that message from and i'm not blaming the support agent they're getting their whatever they're being told they don't know anything but it's like it's there is no foul play involved yes there is yeah that's a crazy thing to say and and the appearance of these games is a technical glitch no it's not it's a it's a sorry guys a sex store simulator sex shop simulator and hentai princess have appeared in many tens and hundreds of thousands of your accounts that's just a technical glitch but oh important thing about hentai princess the game hentai princess us never published but that's just it's just it exists as an object but it's not a game that exists so yeah just a glitch awesome and no foul play no foul play involved don't worry about it that when i saw that that pissed me off that's such a ridiculous thing to say who would believe that well when you read these threads and like you go to reddit or these places where people are talking about this stuff a lot of people don't don't believe it they think it's like oh it's a glitch it's this some people like oh it's like um guerrilla marketing i'm like you guys are absolutely retarded i am telling you what it is um so we just continue to try to you know like it is just listen what happened to my account and the stink i made twisted sony's arm into hiring new fraud people that's good that's a good first step this thing shows that even if the problems are incidental, their quality of life issues for your audience.

1:30:35And it was as easy as people accessing your API and telling it whatever they wanted. And to me, that's crazy. Now, there are, of course, bespoke access things to the PSN and people understand this, like PSN profiles scrapes trophies. And like Sony lets that happen. And Sony doesn't have to let that happen. So like you want a level of access to like what is going on on the PlayStation network, the store ID. Like when we talk about that guy, Billy, Billy Coon or the fuck his name is that like leaks everything. He has like some sort of access that like to the PlayStation store. So I'm not saying we don't want that stuff, but anyway, that's what's happening, Chris.

1:31:14Now, was your account affected? A lot of people, most people's weren't affected. It should be noted. noted um i don't think i don't i didn't check to be honest like i didn't because i've been playing a lot on like old machines over the last like over the last week i'm playing on like ps2 and shit so i just haven't really turned my stuff on but i tried to log in earlier i tried to log it in the middle of this just to check on my pc but like it's now it's giving me a thing where it's it forgets my login all the time whenever i do it from pc so i'd have to go to my console but i feel like can you check mine can you can you check mine yeah does it show i could actually because i don't know if i'm actually logged in on uh on my any of my i'm only logged in on my console i think playstation ps app you see how do i even search for it doesn't no recently played it's in recently played right and stuff like that yeah like it would it would show like it would if you there's a decent chance you weren't targeted yeah yeah i don't think so like because it says says destiny 2 007 time crisis which is all accurate uh so i got out scot-free yet again but uh that's i don't know man i saw that i saw this whole thing going on i was like what are you what are you saying first of all i didn't even realize that that shit was on the ps the playstation store in the first place like sex shop simulator and stuff like this like i mean i i kind of i guess intellectually i knew that the games like that must be there but i just never i've never seen them um so that was kind of like oh okay interesting but the fact that this was the fact that this is a thing that actually happened and that you had 70 000 games added to your account is fucking bewildering it's just like um it's i'm sad that this keeps happening to my account like ruining my ability to enjoy my time on playstation but at the same time i'm trying to make it so that maybe it's a i'm a good person for it to happen to so that i can bring attention to these things and not try to sweep them under the rug as i told you and i don't necessarily blame anyone for doing this and i'm not going to out anyone it's not personal but it's like what happened to my account when i got boosted i am not i am far from the first notable person that this has happened to and other people just chose not to try to run it up the flagpole and do something about it but that's just not my nature and i understand people don't like want to instigate nefarious forces and all that i'm like i i don't want to instigate nefarious forces either i just I want to be left alone like if you're gonna fuck with me and my shit it's like well what else is there to do um so yeah hopefully this is so someone on the PSN profiles noted that it looks like the these they say quote looks like the Sony's band-aid fix was to filter from the games played etc any games that your account doesn't own the license to seems like a decent way to quickly remove most of these absurd games and play times for many profiles but at the cost of removing the tracking for many legitimately played games like physical games or shared games so there is a problem and also i think the hours for a lot of people's games are busted and it's unclear if they can really fix that shit like so i'm i'm gonna like they i am positive they can do it on a case by case basis like go in and fix it but it's like i don't know they're not gonna do that so like there has to be a batch solution or the other thing it's as you were saying like people had bring bring this to my attention like your shit's all fucked up and it's like i would have never noticed because I don't look at that stuff either like everything works fine when you go on PSN for me it's just those widgets don't load but I never look at them so it's like I so I'm glad people brought it to my attention and I was able to try to help so we'll see what happens what a crazy I don't know man PlayStation Networks kind of kind of sucks it's kind of a mess to say the least excuse me I was saying that on on a PSN profiles I'm like I just feel like things haven't really changed like psn has always kind of been a joke and i think we have a level of stockholm syndrome with it because it's what we're used to but like you just don't hear about the shit on the other networks no you know i do i i remember a big a big thing back when uh when the hack happened the the big like the big one that took playstation network offline for three weeks or something like that i feel like i remember it being three weeks some people say it's a longer i think it was about I'll look I'll look but in my memory I remember it being three weeks about a month um I remember the big that was the only thing you really had to say for a while as like an Xbox guy you know I mean because it's just like everybody would be like oh you're paying for you're paying for your online it's like yeah well it doesn't go offline for an entire month like yes it was a joke for a for a long time yeah arguably arguably still is it's kind of amazing that they recovered um yeah it's an insane it was that really is insane there to be fair that is a i wouldn't say it's the best time for that to happen but it's definitely a better time to happen than if if it were to happen now when like so many games are online and so like so much of the ecosystem revolves around digital licenses and purchases like that um they kind of got lucky that it happened in 2011 and not you know 2018 or you know 2017 or something like that um just less online dependent back then compared to now it's funny man like it i was looking it's 24 days so you're right and um i'm just reading some of the stuff on wikipedia and it's like yeah because i reported on this so much i think some of this actually cite my cite my work but yeah at all you might remember that particular situation so like there was a guy named george hots who's like still a dude in like the tech industry who at the time was like a younger person like a hacker and he jail broke the ps3 i don't know if you remember this and and sony sued him like personally and apparently this was done in retaliation for that oh wow so damn that's crazy yeah and i i remember it so well i just remember the whole situation so well because it was such to be frank i mean it was like peak ign and it was it was uh such a boon to just having things to write about and things to talk about and and yeah it was a lonely kind of period with and i feel bad for the game like uh it killed socom and a few other things just by by sheer timing and sony recovered which is kind of amazing actually it was a bad it wasn't something where it's like oh function like they exposed every user's personal information their credit card information, their addresses, like it was bad.

1:37:44And I actually remember talking, I was kind of like quick on it. Cause like I was in the industry obviously. So like we learned about it very quickly and it was spreading quickly, but I remember calling bank of America, which I was with at the time to talk to like, and be like, my credit card is exposed. I need you to like take it down. And I'm like, and I remember telling to the lady, like you're about to get a lot of calls. And she was like, she was like, Oh, like kind of, kind of thing, you know, like, and lo lo and behold, that's what happened. So bad, bad, bad, bad, bad memories, but good memories.

1:38:14All right. Well, speaking of PlayStation, there is new reporting out. We'll stick with Push Square. Our friends over there, our friend Sammy writes about this Embracer report. So Embracer, of course, is the mega publisher that we've made fun of for many years that vastly overexpanded, but they're doing their thing still and they've truncated and they're surviving. They released an annual report as they get through their fiscal year about what they think is going on. And there's an interesting statement in it. We don't need to get in any further than this statement. And it's, quote, some analysts believe that Sony is now considering pushing back the debut of its next PlayStation console from 2027 to 2028 or even 2029, end quote.

1:39:01I don't think they would talk, they would know. and I don't think they would talk out of their ass like this. Analysts are wrong. I'm an analyst and I'm wrong about things sometimes. Right. Usually, right? I mean, ask Xbox how right I am.

1:39:16But there's an argument, Chris, that Moore's Law makes that moving is not a trivial thing. Right. And it would even be cheaper to manufacture and store it than to move because you get your place in the line, you have your assets allocated. And yet I really have a hard time believing they're releasing this console next year. It just doesn't like when you listen to Asha Sharma and others speak about Xbox, like they're saying like, you know, they've been buried by component pricing in a way that Sony hasn't. And they say that, that like they're a uniquely affected entity in this regard. But everyone has to deal with these problems.

1:40:00And again, I just feel like there's a lack of demand and and they spring 28 seems like it would be more ideal but even pushing it further than that but that's also selfish of me because i just don't really feel like we need new consoles what do you think of this about some about now embrace or a big publisher saying like that their place they understand playstation might move the console yeah i mean i've been saying this for a while man like i just i the energy is not like you can feel it in the air man like it's just like it's not people aren't stoked about seeing what the next playstation is or what it can do like and obviously these things change when we get to see them you know people always like new shiny hardware that does new shiny things when they see it uh but usually beforehand there's like some anticipation there's there's buzz about like oh what could it be you know there's like all these like hypotheticals like this uh this wishing that's going on it's like oh i hope it does this I hope it does that.

1:40:58I don't seem to see that really in any of the spaces that I'm in. And the spaces that I'm in are fairly video game oriented. Like no one seems to be wondering what the next PlayStation is going to do because the PS5 does everything they they needed to do. uh and people are struggling to find things that they want out of it that aren't already taken care of really and and there's i don't know man i it does seem the idea that there's going to be a new playstation out next year feels just fundamentally not real like it just i i don't of it i can't base that on it it just doesn't feel correct and um i i could see them pushing it 2029 would be wild um although to be honest i think that is probably the most appropriate time for them to do it uh that would probably be the time when people would be like kind of more excited more interested there would be some feeling that enough time has passed that the technology would be worth investing in at that point um we don't know how long the economy is going to be kind of fucked also so like that that leaves the rest of this year kind of wishy-washy um but i could easily see a 2028 you know push instead of next year because next year just doesn't it doesn't feel right man yeah i don't know i this is just intuition really but like it just doesn't i don't see it i totally agree i think uh like you were saying like you have nothing to go off of if you feel this way i think feeling is a good intuition is a good thing to to follow if you've been doing this for a long time which we have and it's like there just seems to be no i say it over and over again there seems to be no energy for this thing that by this point in previous generations there was like a real energy for the next thing and in this generation we see tens of millions of people still playing playstation 4 right i think things are i think times have just changed i also think that the economy is obviously making things very complicated because at this point like the ps5 should be dirt cheap and they should be selling them briskly and they're not i actually think i read a report that like playstation 5 sales are like really low right now because of the price hikes like even for them unusually lower they're kind of stuck a little bit and uh well we have this this question that i think this was originally a question at the end of the show i brought it up here because and i replace it with something else because i think it speaks to this a little bit monday busk wrote in and said hey boys with most of the week's gaming buzz around the xbox studios bloodletting, a trend that will no doubt come to Sony's first party studios.

1:43:32I agree. Do you think that Sony needs their own Asha Sharma and subsequent poison pills to get things back on track for the PS6 launch? While Sony isn't even close to the dire straits Xbox is in, the PS5 generation will no doubt be looked at as wasted opportunities. Thanks for the great content as always and get consent from that chicken. Get consent from anyone. Not only the chicken. It is true that PlayStation is not in the same position Xbox is in. Xbox is in a truly dire situation for their for their gaming hardware brand however i think the pressure is much higher on sony because play state they have to make playstation work or the company i if xbox goes away nothing really changes for microsoft it's not an important component of what they do um playstation is a vital component of what sony does it's become more and more vital the longer it's existed and everyone who looks at their financials knows that so there's like a lot riding on getting this right like a lot more is riding on this for sony than it is for microsoft and it's probably a little bit scary.

1:44:30There are advantages they can leverage. They, of course, have deep decades old electronics expertise, credible, Morzal talks about this, like incredible relationships with all these different companies. He says like the people at these companies like the Sony people a lot more than the Microsoft people because they're much more serious like engineering level people. So they have certain things that they can leverage. However, I think that the financial reality is like I'm not entirely sure if they can, like if you're manufacturing something much later, like so you're going from 27 to 29 it's like well at that point why would you manufacture the same machine right you're gonna be so far behind right exactly like i can see them going spring 28 or even manufacturing on time and say fall 27 and holding them um but i don't if you go much further than that you have to really ask yourself like what are we doing and it could be that they're going to do that where they're like we're just going to scrap this entire thing we're going to eat a lot of money um we're gonna lose our place in line and that's fine because we'll get in line in 29 with this new machine this different machine like a different ps6 and i i don't know if that's i don't want to say i don't know if that's possible it's definitely possible i don't know if that's viable or feasible and i don't know how nervous they are behind the scenes because i think one of the major things that they're they're struggling with is just price for the ps5 and if you can't get people to move over to ps5 then i don't know i don't know what you do with the ps6 And I just, I think there, I think there, this is just a, a cosmic situation of, of the, the tariffs and the economic stuff is like not even really the major issue anymore.

1:46:07It really is now this, like the component crunch.

1:46:13and we're it's we were saying it earlier about buying things now because things are just getting more expensive it's what we've been saying about playstation 5 for years it's like ironically you would think if you ask me like what would ps5 cost now in 2020 it's like colin in 2026 like what do you think ps5 would cost i'd be like 300 bucks yeah and if that were true by the way we'd have a bonanza on our hands but it's the exact opposite i would love to see the ps5 generation extended but i just don't know if it's i don't know if it's free i'll have to have more's law on to talk about it again too i don't know if it's feasible or practical i mean he really makes the case it's just not as easy as you think to move um oh yeah no i mean it's definitely not as easy as it looks and and to be fair i do want to say this it's not necessarily that i don't think and maybe i should have been how i how i've talked about this i what i feel like what i feel in my in my soul is that if sony is to put out a machine next year that's an insane thing to do that's really what i feel like they could do it because it's like this is what the timelines have determined um you know it is what it is we got to get it out now because if we wait another year or two then it's going to be an outdated machine although you could make the argument that there's not really another console to compare it to really so like outdated machine in comparison to what if no other home console is really even competing in the same ground you have the switch doing its own thing you know and xbox is kind of gone um so arguably like maybe that's not even really that that big of a deal for them because it would still be miles ahead or potentially miles ahead of what the base ps5 or even ps4 ps5 pro is um it just feels like that just seems like an insane thing to do even if it even if it is just like oh here's the timeline because nobody wants this thing it's not going to be affordable like i know that there's like this thing about like oh the components of it are probably going to be cheaper because of xyz it's just like i don't know man i don't know i don't know like i don't i'm sure that there's people way smarter than me that can figure out why that makes sense to me that just i can't square that i can't square a playstation 6 coming out that's cheaper than a ps5 pro it doesn't register to me as possible and if and if such a thing is possible it would it would it would kind of imply to me that there's a compromise being made on what's being sold to the point where why would i buy that right right i already have a ps5 pro if like what you know what i mean like could it possibly be better than what i have even though it's cheaper like i feel like a lot of people are going to be wrestling with that because it doesn't make sense that's not how things are that's not how anything works yeah it's it's funny you say that because I had seen that brought up in the context of, I hadn't thought about it.

1:48:59It's like, all right, so if that's really true, and again, like intellectually, I understand how that could be true. If it's true, but if it's true, then wouldn't you immediately discontinue the PS5? Like, why would you even sell it? If it speaks PS5 and PS4, which it does, or will, then you would just immediately pull the PS5, I would assume, and just be like, we're shutting it down. Like, there's literally no reason to manufacture this machine. And that's what I struggle with. because I don't think that was part of their plan either like every console comes out and you still kind of were able to marinate in the old console for a couple years NES to SNES sure no uh Genesis to Saturn like there's no there's no exceptions so I don't know man there it's gonna be I am I was saying this on another show recently where I was like what's exciting is like we'll kind of know this time next year and we'll probably know early next year what they're really gonna do and it's going to be so exciting just to have sony finally acknowledge and talk about it yeah in like a real way they they're going to have to do it too they have to make they have decisions to make dude about and they probably already made them about what they're going to do with this machine but i i agree with you the only place that i've been where i felt like there was real excitement for it was when i was on moore's laws dead's show and and i was like and the hardware people which is what listen to his stuff like people that are really enthusiastic about electronics and whatever they're into it but and i'm like i understand it and by the way i'm into it i'll buy it i just yeah i just it's me it's not like you're not making you're kind of making it for me but you're not really making it for me you're making it for a much broader audience than me so right i always like new hardware i like opening a new box with a new shiny thing in it even if it does barely anything different i have a ps4 i have a ps5 pro and it's like it's it is better than the base ps5 but like it doesn't feel like a you know a revolutionary change it doesn't feel like a monumentally different machine to me uh but it's fun to get those things like i like that stuff but i like i'm not the average person you know like it's just like it's a very different thing and you're gonna have to convince a lot of people who are a lot more casual there's millions of people on ps4 like you said like tens of millions tens of millions and and i gotta be real like on ps4 and i keep wanting to say ps4 pro for some reason ps4 pro so ingrained in my in my memory um the ps5 pro runs everything at a degree where i'm like i'm completely satisfied with it like i just finished 007 and it was great and i had i had literally no problems with it at all whereas like i feel like by this point the ps4 generation i was starting to notice you know what i mean i was like i was like oh man that's that's a little rough you know this isn't oh we're at 30 still like i i'm just left i'm not i'm left with no wants really like they're going to have to find new things to to sell me that i didn't even realize that i wanted and maybe they'll do that to their credit like it's it's possible um i just literally cannot fathom what it could be that they could show me that would make me really really excited for a machine that is going to be essentially a PS5 that runs things even faster and even better.

1:52:11Oh, it's 8K resolutions. Like, I don't care about 8K. Yeah, I don't even have an 8K TV. So it doesn't matter. 120 frames is cool, but like 60s. 60s great. Perfectly fine to me. Yeah, I agree with you entirely, Chris. Like, I'm very satisfied right now. Between Resident Evil Requiem, Pragmata, 007, that kind of stuff. It's like, these are great games, dude. And they look great and they run great. I agree with you. I'm not much of a graphics horror, but this generation doesn't feel long in the tooth to me. If anything, it just feels like it's unsubstantiated and almost didn't exist. And yeah, so we'll see.

1:52:48We'll see what happens. But I thought that was an interesting little story nonetheless about the potential future. If publishers are kind of talking openly about that. Something to keep in mind. They're certainly taking it seriously. Yeah. All right. Over on the website, the games business. the host of this show, Christopher Dring, sat down and spoke with a couple of guys from Housemarque, and I thought that they had some interesting stuff to say. So I thought we would go over this a little bit. Of course, Housemarque is the Sony-owned first-party studio that just released Saros and is best known, perhaps, more recently for Returnal, and of course, Resogun and Sardust and Dead Nation and all the games we talk about so much.

1:53:28So he sat down and spoke with two different people. One of them is Michael Havari, who I spoke with on our show a couple weeks ago, and he's an old friend of mine. and the other one is a larry kooten who is the uh longtime studio head of house mark and the co-founder of the team and of course house mark is the is the unity is unification of two finished teams in the 90s bloodhouse and terramark hence the name house mark um so here's a few quotes first of all he says uh they're talking a little bit about about saros and i thought you'd like this chris he says uh they use a term here about the playing the game he says quote if you get into the flow state it starts to be what we call bullet ballet it just starts to be second nature and you immerse yourself in this world what do you think of that as a as a genre bullet ballet that's cool i like that yeah i like that because it does bullet hell people some people call how smart games bullet hell i don't agree that they're bullet hell games i think bullet hell games are way harder and i also think bullet hell games are 2d so like there's there's more of a 3d feel to the ballet and i like yeah yeah you could tell that i mean it's definitely you could tell there's bullet hell in it but it in and of itself is not a bullet hell yeah like for for bullet hell games to be as hard in 3d as they are in 2d you would have to saturate the world with an order of magnitude more bullets because you have more places to go so that's why i feel like it doesn't quite read like it's like i've been seeing with me to the holler recently people be like oh it's like a souls game and i'm like just because it's hard doesn't mean it's a souls game that bothers the hell out of it it's like how is it a souls game what are you talking about yeah what do you mean if there's a pair if there's a parry it's a souls game it's like oh my god it's like okay it's a soul game whatever and do you remember that article that was like crash band when the insane trilogy came out and they were they were calling it like dark souls a platform oh my god It's like, shut up.

1:55:17Fucking relax. We got to have a wider lexicon, vernacular things to say. They also talk a little bit about what they're trying to do. And I thought it was interesting. They use From Software as like kind of a North Star for them. Says, quote, and this is Kootenant talking again. He says, quote, From Software has been doing a similar genre for a very long time and built up their fan base over that period. We have two unique games out, Returnal, Saros. It's kind of a new thing that you need to educate the market about so that people say, hey, these flow states are really cool. From software's journey from Kingsfield to what they are today, we're not presuming that we would be anywhere close to that.

1:55:53But like them, we will keep our core, keep educating the market that these are the coolest games you can play. That's our goal. I kind of like that. I mean, Housemarque on one hand lacks the financial emphasis that Sony needs right now. And yet they are experimenting in a way that I think is useful. It's just hard for me to imagine them breaking through. in the way from soft did maybe maybe that will happen and he's right like king's field is fundamentally the same game as like demon souls it's just it's a demon souls a more robust more hardcore version of it but they got there you think housemarque can follow a similar trajectory i mean it's possible i i gotta be real like i kind of i don't like i liked saros i liked returnal i worry though that the transition between those things like i feel like they're going in the opposite direction kind of are they not because like they like saros is actually less like if you're going to use like if king's field is somewhat is similar to dark souls but dark souls is a more hardcore version of of king's field if we're using saros and uh returnal as as the analogous kind of factors here like they've kind of gone the opposite way where it's like is more hardcore than cyrus is so they're actually arguably like making it making the game less itself yeah that's a good point as it goes along now granted you could make an argument that like fraternal is a more hardcore version of the stuff that they made before um you could you could make that case and you'd probably be right um so it's i guess there's there's room for experimentation um like i think elden like elden ring night rain is not a particularly hardcore game it's like you know it's it's a very different kind of casual or casual in comparison to their prime their prime stuff so like there's room for experimentation but like i think i think I don't it's hard for me to imagine it breaking through, but I also I'd be foolish to count anything out, count anything out.

1:57:54You know, it's just they seem like very niche games and they seem like niche games on purpose. And that's good and bad, depending on how you slice it and depending on what you're looking for, depending on what Sony's looking for. I know that Sony is in the market right now of making big blockbuster stuff. And the same thing with Xbox, by the way, they're refocusing entirely on big name IP. So maybe that's just not what they need right now. but I like that studios are out making weird experimental shit I just I think it's a bummer that that stuff isn't as rewarded as it should be and I think the reality is it's like that stuff isn't rewarded as it should be is because the main audience is a lot more casual than it used to be you know it's a way different audience than like the game's audience is way more different today than it was in like you know the PS1 PS2 era Yeah, you're right.

1:58:45You're right. And I. I wonder, like they were purchased in 2021. At the time we were we were I mean, I still believe Housemarque and Bluepoint were excellent purchases and exactly what Sony should have done. And it is my sincere hope that though they're under new leadership since that era. That they understand what they have with Housemarque. i get a little nervous about housemark just based on the performance of saros and how much the game purportedly may cost and that they're not going to make that money back i don't think at least not anytime soon and they actually speak a little bit to this um the game business says housemark isn't at the from software scale today saros launched in april during a competitive window for video game releases and although it found an audience it didn't light up the sales charts but there's still time, Haveri says.

1:59:33And then they say, quote, it's funny, Returnal, when we shipped, it started gaining traction a bit later. A lot of the community got to unlock it a little bit more, and then that tends to trickle down and people get more interested in it. And then Kooten says, quote, this is just the start of the discussion and conversation with the gaming community. If you have played Saros, you know that there are a lot of things we can do to tweak and add. We hope we can keep doing that for a while, end quote. And I did ask Gregory Loudon, the director of the game, when I interviewed him, what the future was for Saros, because they do like to upgrade their games and he didn't have anything to say they did release a photo mode though and i must say this i i maybe should have brought this up last week i think it's when i first noticed it but they did something very clever where the photo mode has like a series of trophies attached to it where it's like go take a picture of this go take a picture of this creature doing this go take a picture of this boss like i'm like that's kind of cool um yeah i do wonder what sony's fixation sony has a typical fixation on first party games of updating and sticking with them for a while.

2:00:30And yet we saw with Ghost of Yote that like legends kind of came and then they're like, oh, we're done. It's over. And I wonder if a similar trajectory to get you on the next game, which is probably going to be more lucrative. Now, there are a couple other things in here that I thought were worth talking about as well. And I think the major thing that I want to say here is, well, first of all, they've gone from, they were saying Stardust, 10 to 12 people, and now they're up to 120. so a fairly expensive studio to run in Finland. But he says this, Kooten does, about what they want to do next, and this goes to your point about where they might be going.

2:01:11He says, quote, we just pinch ourselves. Are we dreaming that we were given this opportunity to create this thing, a new game, a new IP with these resources? He's talking about Saros. We are quite grounded as well. We were 26 years as an independent, just managing to survive and moving from one game to another. Right now, we are talking about how to proceed with Saros and discussing with the community. But then, of course, what should we do in the future? There are interesting opportunities we'd like to look at that might not be at the scale of Saros. There are so many things that we want to explore and we will find whether it's possible or not.

2:01:41I am so deeply attracted to the idea of Housemarque reverting back to what it used to do, which is not AAA games. I just don't know that that's a safe place for you to be either. Like, I think that that's going to create, unfortunately, an economic tension for them where they're going to get themselves shut down if they don't. produce games that sell and make money and i know people want those games and i appreciate that it's just not where the future is for playstation anymore those games other people can make those games in spades you don't need to pay for an expensive cow to get this boutique milk you don't um and so i would love for them to go back like super stardust and these games are incredibly special they really are but at 120 people i don't know man unless what you want to do is do a tear away style thing where you have a small team make something while you move on to the next thing that's bigger i don't know but i i will say this chris because there's a lot of conjecture around what will happen to house market i don't know like i think layoffs are obviously coming to sony studios um and i i wouldn't be surprised if they even shut one or two of them down i think that's unfortunate but true i'd be especially worried if our bend for instance but on the other hand And so that's true and that's happening.

2:02:54And I think that that will happen next quarter.

2:03:00But they have to remain, I think, vigilant in allocating these resources properly and understanding, I think, what the purpose of the first party is at this juncture. And unfortunately, it's just not to make small things. So I do think that there is a potential tension there. And yet I would also say that I feel like Sony wouldn't be letting them do all these interviews if they were going to really hit them. at least I, at least I would, I would hope that they would be organized enough to know, like, we know we're going to hit these guys. Let's not put them on the media. You know, well, wasn't there like a whole thing where like Jim, didn't Jim Ryan go to like a party?

2:03:36London. Yeah. And then they shut it down the next week. So they, I mean, they don't have the best history with that. And then, right. And I mean, even right now, like in, in the news with, with a hell blade and sent Senua with Microsoft, where they let, they let them show off their game. And then that's brutal, man, knowing that they were going to shut it. So it's like, I know what you're saying, but I never put it past these companies to make really weird decisions like that. But, I don't know, I think Housemarque can be... I think they can have a really compelling future, but I do wonder what their purpose is in this new paradigm.

2:04:15Do you see a potential future where they just get spun off? or not spun off, but I don't know, get independent. Yeah, I mean, it is my hope that if it is my hope that. Because people are talking about this a lot with some of the Microsoft studios, and I'm like, I really find Double Fine might be able to find investment, but I find it some of this stuff dubious. Like, I don't know why you would want to invest in these teams. Frankly, I don't know why you even want to invest your own money in a Double Fine. They haven't released a game that has sold in a long time. and Housemarque has stature and like they're one of Finland's most important game developers but like it's like could they run at a would they be able to split away and sustain 120 people very unlikely but like will they be able to go back to their independent roots and and be able to solidify themselves as an independent studio again that would be my hope that they would be given that option yeah but we'll see we'll see yeah I just think it's it's it's just I think what's bothering me a lot about like modern game development right now is just like the the the inflation of these budgets and like just like Gears of War being like 400 million dollars.

2:05:24Like what do you like look make no mistake as a player I'm really excited to see what a 400 million dollars Gears game looks like. But if you have to be like OK we got to sell fucking we got to sell 15 million copies first party to break even. like at a certain point it's like what do you unless you're gta which like you know you're gonna you know you're gonna be fine i just don't understand why a lot of why most studios aren't operating from the aren't operating from the break even sale number backwards you know what i mean like shouldn't you shouldn't you be more focused on that like shouldn't you be like okay we get it'll take we need to sell we want to make a game that we can break even with like a like 2 million copies you know what i mean right i understand that's like difficult to figure out and i understand that there's like a lot of economic factors that get in the way of that and i get that but like i think it's so unhealthy to be like we gotta we gotta break even at 15 million copies like this is not sustainable we can't keep doing this no exactly like i i agree with the assessment about saros that it clearly sold softly i just don't know what that means i don't think it's a sign i don't think saros is as good as returnal i don't i also think that a lot of people love it and it's a very good game and i just think maybe player it's ironic like five years player behavior has kind of changed it could be that if you put returnal in this place and saros back then the sales will be identical because i think people just are behaving differently maybe there's also like that was that was kind of when was a returnal was that 2020 it was it It was April 2021.

2:07:08It was five years to the date of Saracen's release date. So it was a launch window game. So that's a pandemic era game. That was like during a very different time also. Right. A lot more people playing games. I don't know, man. There's a lot of course correcting that needs to be done as far as like right sizing and just scaling things in an appropriate way. Like I don't want to be waiting six to seven years for new video games. And I especially don't want to wait for them just because like they got to put fucking peach fuzz on every on every character to make sure that they're hyper realistic, because if they're not, everyone's going to freak out like they did with the Halo Infinite Brute that looked looked bored when he was getting melee than that one.

2:07:51That's that's the thing that that's bothering me, too, by the way, like this demand for like we want things quicker. And it's like, why are we putting this much money into these things? Like, why do we have four hundred million dollar games? It's because if it's because when people skimp on a fucking animation for one frame, you guys single it out and then freak out over all over the place. This is why people are scared to not put that money in because they're afraid of a frame going viral. That's going to fuck their entire game up. It's like, I don't know. You get you get what you you get what you you wish for, I guess.

2:08:20Yeah. I'll be interested to see. I am. I'm trying to read positively in the house. Mark doing a lot of media rounds, not saying he's going to happen to Sucker Punch because I don't think it's going to. They might have layoffs, but they didn't do nearly as many interviews for Ghost as. That's true. As I don't know what that's all about either, to be honest. but they were not nearly as accessible. All right. And that game's probably sold 10 times better, literally, than Sarah's. Okay. Chris, I'm very intrigued to see what you think of this next story. We have a letter from John who says, hello, gents.

2:08:54We're a little more than a month away from Halo finally coming to PlayStation, a very legendary moment. The trophy list was recently revealed and I wanted to hear from Chris. What is your take on the platinum requirements, which include a lasso run? Correct me if I'm wrong, but up until recently, there was still a bounty open for anyone who could complete a last run of halo 2 and now they expect us mere mortals to do this what are the odds you'll break your fingers obtaining this one so on halo waypoint uh they show the gamer score for the achievements is here too but the trophy list is here i don't really know how to interpret it i'm very curious to know what you think of it yeah these are these are cool man it's it's surreal that i'm gonna be able to get a platinum in a halo game that's kind of that's really cool uh but i mean these seem interesting i like the idea of some of these like there's one without taking damage like i want like there's definitely going to be a meta right where it's like there's definitely going to be like oh uh there's a there's a best level to do that on you know or things like that but as far as the lasso run goes that's legendary all skulls on so legendary difficulty the highest difficulty with all all the difficulty modifiers turned on um the halo 2 bounty was cleared it took about it took a couple weeks i think it took either two or three weeks for somebody to do it which is crazy it's like yeah it's really difficult but also halo 2 is notoriously difficult because that game was put together in about 11 months based on like an old scrapped version of the game that couldn't run on like a stencil engine that they had running on xbox that they could not actually ship and um so they didn't have a lot of time to balance legend like normal legendary on halo 2 without any difficulty modifiers as fuck i have not done it like i haven't done it i played the shit out of all those games i have not done it's fucking so hard um so that was comical is what i'm saying every other game i think is achievable lasso it's difficult it's definitely difficult and it's going to be stressful but i think this will be possible i wonder though because some of um some of the skulls in this game the skulls used to be entirely difficulty modifiers so they used to all just make the game harder with the exception of i think one or two that were like kind of gimmick skulls like i think one made rare combat dialogue a little bit more oh cool like way more uh that was the i would have been your daddy skull which is awesome but uh so that made uh rare combat dialogue more common and then i think another one was like run birthday party where like if you get headshots confetti explodes and that one's in this too but like there's other skulls that like give you infinite ammo in this one and there's skulls that let you fly around the map like without like they just like hover across the map just to break the game open so i wonder i wonder if there's going to be like a particular set that is legendary all skulls on that excludes some of those trivializing skulls because i actually feel like last time in this game if it is true to the name where like it's just all the skulls that are available be fucking mega easy um but i feel like there must be some caveat to that but it looks achievable to me like this is uh this is exciting man this is cool i like i like what they're doing with it and i especially i especially like that it's a halo game that doesn't have any multiplayer trophies because those were the those were the hardest in uh in every i think i got all the achievements in three and odst and i almost got an unreached but they took away one of the playlists and so like i just couldn't oh i just couldn't do it and that was that was always a bummer to me so to know that that's not a danger here is is nice and a lot more enticing to me did you do you remember it was like an early achievement and trophy thing that they stopped doing because they realized it was annoying where you like had to get within the top one or five percent of like like all people on a leaderboard or something like that it's like eventually it becomes impossible you know and yeah thank god as far as my memory serves like I don't think any halo game ever did something like that that would be so that would be so aggravating yeah I think it might have been like an early Forza game or something did that and it was basically impossible yeah probably but they were learning how to do these things I mean they didn't really understand how achievements worked at that time but I do like the where is it God I wish I oh yeah activate all 13 terminals lore have mercy I thought that was a funny name for a trophy yeah I'm excited man July 28th for Halo campaign evolved on PlayStation 5 as early as the 23rd if you preorder it which is $20 or not pre-order it if you get the special edition which is$20 more I'm not going to do that$10 I would have done it we'll see how I feel at the time we'll see you yeah if there's nothing there's nothing to play I might yeah right exactly I think I'll I think I'll wait I gotta say I'm looking more forward to it than I thought I would I think it looks a lot better than it did last year my main concern was like that Unreal Engine stuttering that they had when they first showed it off and that seems to be gone now I have my own minor nitpicks I'm really attached to the series so like I'm really sensitive to really hyper specific art design things that like nobody gives a shit about but me and like maybe like a handful of other hardcore people but I think they it looks like they've done a pretty good job bringing it forward and again I'll say this again it's just like it's way it's so much nicer looking than that 2011 anniversary thing they did I really hated the way that game looked that game is fucking ugly as sin I cannot get over how ugly that game is but surreal shit man with the trophies you're right though with halo be very curious to see uh how if they really do continue to bring them all over or not at this point i don't i don't think anything's gonna change yeah yeah all right this is a quick story i just wanted to acknowledge this is that uh according to a website the in snyder.com this is apparently like an entertainment newsletter that's fairly famous that you have to subscribe to i didn't subscribed to it so i don't have the full information however people have been linking to it because it is entitled exclusive mark hamill joins season three of peacock twisted metal so i don't have the details of exactly what he's doing what he's playing because i'm not paying for this but uh what do you think of that mark hamill coming to a peacock twisted metal by the way i have peacock for free in quotes now because it's part of my comcast subscription i got an email being like activate your free peacock subscription i'm like all right so yeah so i I have Peacock.

2:15:07There's nothing. Well, I think Seinfeld and the office are on there. So it's good for that. But so, yeah, I still haven't watched the second season of Twisted Metal. But I should do that. It's supposed to be good. I mean, obviously, it's good and it did well because they renewed it again. But Mark Hamill. Yeah. I wonder who he'll play. I actually don't like it. Does he has he ever played anybody interested in metal? I genuinely don't know. I don't think so. No, I don't think so either. But like maybe I don't know. I'll look. That's that's cool. I mean I like Mark Hamill's performances I think he does a really good job I think he's a good actor I don't know what to make of that though really like if I were casting Mark Hamill or anything I'd want him to do a voice for something like maybe like a faceless character or something like that and he like he'd voice it like I don't know like he's just got a great voice like that would be what I would do like but I'm struggling to remember if any character in Twisted Metal even can function that way if there's like a robot like I don't it's been such a long time I only really remember Axel and the fucking clown what's the clown's name?

2:16:10Sweet Tooth yeah I'm not like a big Twisted Metal person myself I'm trying to find live action roles television he has a lot of roles here voice roles okay nothing for he's got a ton of voice roles yeah nothing for Twisted Metal television

2:16:31are there video games? yeah here we go i wish i could remember no no you know wing commander that's the one i remember him being a big deal in back in the day that was a big deal that he was in those games wasn't he also in star citizen or am i insane yeah i think who was that actor who was like maybe it was him or maybe it wasn't but like there was like some i remember they like they announced like some crazy big actor who was in star citizen and i remember being like oh weird the cast for squad trailer for it and everything. Let's see. Star Citizen's single player campaign Squadron 42 has Gary Oldman, Mark Hamill, Henry Cavill, and Jillian Anderson, Andy Serkis, and Mark Strong, according to Gemini.

2:17:12What a weird... That's a stacked cast for a game that I've never heard anything about. That whole game is so... It's like a total mystery to me. Yeah. Obviously, it works. I mean, obviously, they wouldn't be able to keep doing this, I don't think, if it wasn't something. which is what's perhaps most fascinating about it, actually, if that makes any sense. Where it's like, actually, they maybe didn't rip anyone off. But I don't know. Maybe not. I don't know. It's a very Eve online kind of game to me where I was just like, I'm not even. I don't know. You do what you got to do, I guess. I'm never going to wrap my head around any of this.

2:17:46Yeah, I remember this. The Wikipedia says, I remember reading this last month. They surpassed a billion dollars in crowdfunding. So clearly people like it. Like, that's what you can't really hate on it because it's not. It doesn't seem like a shell game or something like that. It actually they're actually and Squadron 42 is supposed to be like the single player shooter, which is kind of neat. So, right. I don't know if they're going to like dust 514 or anything like that. I think hopefully it'll just stand on its own. God, dust 514. Ah, what a good idea. It's that is a great idea. It's a bummer.

2:18:16Like that's all execution, man, because that is a that is a dope idea. Oh, shit. My my AC just. Yeah, go ahead. Do you.

2:18:27Chris is just shutting his AC off if you're not a video listener. So we'll wait for him to come back. All right. He's returned. Yeah, I swear to God, I always wake up and I feel like I I must like in a daze, like turn it off. And I accidentally set it to auto or something. Because I feel like I make a note to just know I don't want the AC getting on. It's like I freeze. It's funny. Yeah, that's I've been experiencing that, too, is we actually just we're talking about it last night because I'm like, it's so fucking cold in here like why is it so cold like why doesn't the ac ever shut off you know and and it's because it's so hot out i think that it's like humid and it's confused or something i'm like i don't know i'm like i'm like it's fucking frigid in here like why is it so cold i'm like i'm not comfortable you know all right uh i keep the lock where i'm sorry i keep fucking the the just just figure it out.

2:19:21I keep fucking the timestamps. Do something. Yeah. All right. Some quick Call of Duty news here. Treyarch, the one of the Call of Duty studios owned by Activision, which was in turn owned by Microsoft now revealed that Black Ops and Black Ops 2 are both coming to PlayStation. They'll be released in July. Iron Galaxy, the port studio, is doing the ports on their behalf. Black Ops and Black Ops 2 are of course of PlayStation 3 games and are therefore on our ecosystem isolated and locked off of our platforms this is not a problem on xbox where these games have been playable for years so black ops came out in 2010 black ops 2 in 2012 both from treyarch i played black ops 1 i don't think i played the second one i think i might have been kind of out by then well no 2012 i think i was still playing them i don't know i have these lofty goals all the time of playing all the call of duty campaigns i've been saying it for years now i used to when they would come out i just stopped you know it's one of those things where you say something over and over again and then you reflect back and you're like it's not true anymore like it's not even remotely true that i play call of duty every year and it's like yeah right except for like the last few years and then you look back it's like con you haven't played call of duty in like 10 years yeah um so no it's not true so maybe i'll get back to these i don't know but what do you think about these coming over cool like i'm i'm always going to be a proponent of uh old games coming forward and getting off of stranded hardware um i think it's cool i think it's cool for preservation sake um and black ops 1 i have vague memories of black ops 1 i played i remember on my uh my sister was dating this guy and he had a and they had moved in with us because they were like moving from arizona uh to new york and they just needed they were just in our house for a while and he had a ps3 that he wasn't using and he let me borrow it for like several months.

2:21:13And that's how I got a lot of time with the PS3 in that generation. Played some Infamous. And I remember Black Ops 1 was the Call of Duty game that he had. And I remember kind of playing a little bit of it and being interested. It was really more of a novelty thing for me because I was like, what is a multiplayer game? Like, what does a shooter feel like on PlayStation? And it was weird. It was very odd. Yeah, I can see that. Very weird to get used to. But... I only have experience with a little bit of the multiplayer of Black Ops 1. And I think I played Black Ops 2 split screen at like nephews at like my cousin's houses or something like that.

2:21:51I don't have a lot of experience with these games, but I would play Black Ops 1 campaign again because or I guess for the first time, because like that's the one that people talk about. You know, I think I played the first level when like back when it was new and I'm like, I'm not really feeling it. I feel like now I'm more in the mood for that kind of thing. but I'm glad to see games moving forward there's too many games stranded yeah yeah we're getting fewer and fewer of them which is good like Metal Gear like we were saying earlier Metal Gear Solid 4 will soon that's like I would argue that's probably the most notoriously stranded game at this point on PS3 I mean there's there's other first and second party ones but as far as like mass accessibility I feel like MGS4 is what that was actually severely hurt by being on PlayStation 3 and yeah at that time too yeah I don't know man I think I think it's there's an argument to be made that like well do we really need these old games coming back if we're always talking about there are too many games it's like well let me tell you I would easily trade 1 million like the 1 million sex shop simulator games and all that's like if we can get rid of all that and just bring every other game that that used to exist that was good forward I think that'd be a way better trade off in my opinion i have no qualms about getting old good games onto the store just because it's more games you know what i mean get fucking sushi flip out of here yes yeah exactly well they are there were i mean i'm so pleased that they seem to be they i would love to know i should reach out to some of these developers to see like what are they saying to you behind the scenes that you're doing it yourself like these guys are like oh we'll just take them off it's like what

2:23:30I would love to know more about that because they got a drone circling the the premises it's you know you gotta we bust Sony's balls a lot and I think reasonably so and they don't talk and they don't communicate but they're clearly listening and yeah I I feel like listen I don't want to pat ourselves on the back too much but like I feel like the show plays a role like we bitch a lot about a lot of things and they're solving a lot of these these random things and it's good and no one else really bitches about these things like i do yeah this issue specifically i feel like is the thing that we're all really passionate about like it bothers the fuck out of me yeah me too me too and i'm so pleased like every i stopped i don't want to dunk on them on twitter and like hurt their feelings or whatever but like every time i see one of these guys be like we have to take our games down it's like good fuck you fucking losers go fuck yourselves like for you you fucked everything up you fucking greedy assholes all right like as a lover of playstation network i would never do that to playstation network you know what i mean like i would never i would never i would never flood the storefronts with garbage knowing that though i can make money i'm ruining it i feel like as a lover of video games yeah sure which to me inherently like means like you're just this is inherently nefarious to me all right a few more pieces of news for us to get through chris I thought this was interesting.

2:24:54I don't know how much people this audience will want to talk about this, but I think this is fascinating. This is an Electronic Arts press release. It says Electronic Arts introduces EA advertising, launching brands directly into gameplay and live experiences. So there's a few things. I'll read some of this, but there already are plenty of live ad. There's already plenty of advertising in EA games. And you and I have had the conversation in the past, chris and i am specifically called ea sports games where it's one of the ironic things about ea sports games is that they are more authentic because they have real brands and advertisements in them because that is part of it and i'm watching the world cup right now and there's an advert you know they have the little wall in the back where you and it's like just constant array of ads and stuff and i'm like this is the way it works and if you didn't have those or it just said like ea sports or it would be it would feel fake like an like an exhibition or something so right i've long thought that ea is uniquely positioned to take advantage of that and they already do but what they're doing here is they're creating like a real brand to do it and it says quote ea advertising is expanding ea's ecosystem by enabling brands to integrate directly in the gameplay through dynamic real-time placements from stadium signage to custom in-game content designed to enhance, not disrupt the player experience.

2:26:12In these interactive gameplay environments, brands become part of the game itself, reflecting how players engage with advertising in real-world contexts. Brands can activate across live environments, tailoring placements to meet campaign objectives and update campaigns with ongoing optimization informed by aggregated engagement insights. So I won't get too deep into the weeds here because it's boring for a lot of people, but I'm like, this is not a bad thing. And by the way, that$20 billion leverage buyout, it ain't gonna pay for itself. So EA's got to figure out new ways to generate revenue. And this is it.

2:26:42I mean, this is definitely deeply connected to that. But there are some interesting stats they already have about how this has already worked for them. Where is it? Is it here? Yeah, here it is. So they already have they say EA advertising has already started to partner with leading brands to deliver in-game experiences across the EA portfolio. So this is already what's happening. Visa, a proud partner of EA Sports FC and EA Sports College Football, is partnering with EA Sports to deliver immersive, participatory experiences in and beyond the game, connecting its global network with a community of hundreds of millions of players.

2:27:15Lowe's, which integrated into EA Sports FC, Madden NFL, and college football through ultimate team challenges and branded player content, drove more than 987 ,000 games played and more than 200 ,000 challenges completed. Red Bull engaged EA Sports FC players through branded in-game objectives, team kits and athlete ambassador collaborations driving more than 128 million matches played 1.2 million objectives completed and strong engagement in game and social engagement and on and on they have Mountain Dew Xfinity Peacock and so on so like it's already going on and I like that kind of shit because they're like yeah you didn't even notice and it's already working for them so I don't know that there's much too much more to say about this but it's just so funny because people are talking about in-game advertising and how deleterious that would be and I agree with that for the most part right but what they're saying is it's not alan wake with the verizon and the and the duracell batteries or whatever the fuck it was or energizer it's going to be like these dynamic things that make more sense either timing or people or who you are and i don't kind of hate that because it it just unfortunately we are so commercialized in society that it i it makes things real so yeah that is the uh the weird kind of ouroboros of it i guess where it's just kind of like yeah everything is so hyper fake that the more fake it feels the more real it feels it's odd that is odd about that but like i i do think like i think you're right ea sports and even i i said this in a previous episode where i think even crazy taxi is like one of those one of those ip where it's just like there there aren't really many ip that i would want product placement in but like these are these are them really now ea sports is not to my taste like i don't i don't particularly care but like i also i agree with the idea that like i because i think i remember playing a sports game a long time ago and i think the banner ads along the stadium was just like ea sports or like it was it was just something that was clearly wouldn't be there and i remember feeling like oh this feels kind of weird like i remember thinking like i don't like that really um so i think there's a case to be made that it fits in these things like i i want i want people in crazy taxi to tell me like take me to pop up right right you know like i want that like because it's that adds to it it makes it it actually juxtaposes how absurd what you're doing is with the fact that like you're being you're taking these people to completely mundane real places i love that but this is one of those like give an inch take a mile things where i think you got to be careful because like i do think well i while even in sports games the you know the the banners on the side of the stadium and and those kind of ads make sense and even maybe billboards and certain certain areas that's cool where it begins to be annoying though is when like the pop-ups start coming in like when they start deciding that that's okay to do that's gonna be fucking annoying under no circumstance would i would i want like a thing popping up during my gameplay like completely breaking the immersion of it you know what i mean it's like oh pizza or like a qr code for like pizza hut in the middle of a fucking crazy taxi you know what i mean that pops up like that shit is like you got to be careful with it yeah agreed and uh i don't know if i trust publishers to be as careful with that type of advertising as they should be uh so it's hard for me to be like yeah do it um but i do think there is like a there's a gray area there or like there's there's nuance to uh the types of games where it makes more sense in i just don't want to see it in splinter cell you know i don't want sam fisher being like goldfish the snacks that smiles back you know i mean like i would want i would kill myself i think on the spot it's funny too much for me yeah it's funny as a whole i don't play sports games anymore but i did since the early snes well nes had sports games but they weren't very good but the the early snes period all the way through ps into ps3 and ps even a little ps4 i was playing sports games still and uh ads really started to introduce themselves like real life things in the ps1 and really in the ps2 era the problem with it was it was the same everywhere so like even if you went to like different buildings or different arenas different stadiums would always be the same kind of and it just so it actually made things seem even faker and so yeah getting into more i think the dynamic part of it is what's important for the realism and they can listen it's advertising and they're they're making money off of you but at least they can spin it in a way that makes the game seem better and i think that that puts ea sports specifically in a very unique position because it's going to be much harder to do that with others yeah oh by the way speaking of pizza i saw a video going around i never saw this when it was out but did you see the major nelson pizza hut video that what i thought i thought that might be what you brought up why you brought it up so oh no back in the xbox i just saw it because it was circulating recently but back in the xbox 360 era i guess there was a a pizza hut app on xbox 360 oh i do remember that and like there's an app of there's a video of him like doing it and using it and i'm like jesus this is so interesting it's so cumbersome it's such a product of 2008 or whatever it is you know yeah the idea the idea that you would log out like turn your xbox on to order a pizza isn't actually he's using connect in it so it must be like 2010 11 something like that maybe i think i remember i think i feel like i i did this because it was he says it was 15 off if you did it on the on the xbox like the pizza yeah i think i think i might have done it and like just to just to do it because i remember even at the time being like this is so silly like i want to order i want to order a pizza from from my xbox that sounds so absurd to do i think i did it was fine but then i just never did it again because why the fuck would you that is so funny though i've i totally forgot about that all right um yeah so if you haven't seen that by the way out there go look up the major nelson pizza hut video it's interesting i'm looking i'm looking i do remember this he's kind of back in the fold i think a little bit yeah i always liked major nelson yeah i had no problem with him i mean he like he that was there they had like a real personality at that point in my opinion yeah and then it just immediately stopped really crazy like after connect it kind of went all downhill yeah true all right this actually should have been i guess noted earlier so the we talked about gta 6 earlier but that's because that broke this morning so i i didn't even account for this but we're gonna talk about gta 5 here briefly um and it's that if you are so put your listening ears on if you're still playing gta 5 on ps4 for some reason rockstar's sick of it they don't want it anymore it's annoying them so now right now you can begin to get a digital upgrade of gta 5 on ps5 for free if you have the ps4 version of the game so you can migrate your story mode and your online progress everything your career rewards everything migrates over however it's worth noting because i went and read about this because they have a migration website i went read once you do it you can go back but your character on ps4 will be in stasis like the stats don't carry over in the other direction so like it migrates everything as it is one time over to ps5 and you can you don't have to pay the upgrade fee now you can do it for free so if you are doing that still psa for you go have fun i saw this on uh circulating a website called cheat happens.com which i feel like is familiar but i don't know what it is they have an interesting report here it says quote sony patents playstation controller with buttons that harden and soften based on gameplay.

2:34:35And they say, quote, we at Cheat Happens have dug up a new Sony patent that will change the feel of controls by altering button hardness in real time. The invention discusses contact parts whose hardness changes dynamically via a new hardness control unit. The contact part or the buttons can be made of magnetoviscoelastic elastomer. Jesus, a mouthful, I know. That softens or hardens based on magnetic field strength. Other hardware methods like fluid-filled membranes are also explored that aim to achieve the same goal. Sony's goal here is to let players experience different tactile fields for an enhanced sense of realism and adaptability.

2:35:10The patent says, quote, The operating device can dynamically change the hardness of the contact part in response to external controlled commands. Therefore, by sending control commands to the operating device, the information processing device can change the hardness of the contact section in real time. So as they note here, it's like a more extreme version of haptics, I guess. And I got to say, I don't really hate it. I was the idea of resistive buttons bothers me until you consider that DualSense now has those in the triggers. And it's actually kind of cool. And Saros uses them that way. Actually, it gives you four buttons instead of two.

2:35:49Which I which I kind of dig. So I'm not saying you would have that functionality on the face buttons per se, but resistance, I don't know. I don't hate it. By the way, as we always say, Chris, when we talk about these, Sony almost never uses their patents. So yeah, they patent them and just protect their inventions. That's it. So what do you think? Sure. I mean, the first thought that goes that comes across my mind when I read something like this is like, we're how cute are we going to be getting with this? You know what I mean? I appreciate that there are strides being made. I think the haptics on the PS5 controller, the DualSense are cool.

2:36:28I always turn the adaptive triggers off. They kind of bother me. But that's also because I play a lot of multiplayer stuff, and it feels distracting and disadvantageous for no real reason. I don't know. I don't need my controllers to be more complicated than they are, really. And I feel like we're just trying to be cute with a lot of things and trying to find like novelty spin. It reminds me of like the 3D TV era, you know, where it's like, it's a 3D TV. And it's like, wouldn't you want that? It's like, yeah, I guess in theory, but then like you do it and you're like, yeah, it sucks. Not really.

2:37:01I hated that shit. Killzone 3 was one of those big games that they were trying to like push. I think with that 3D TV that they were making. Remember that dude, combat of all the anniversary had a 3D TV mode. And I remember I tried it out because my parents had got, I think I told them not to do it, but they just wanted it. Because avatar, that was around avatar time so like avatar was huge and like it's like oh there's a 3d blu-ray that you can buy and the 3d tv and you can have the 3d experience at home and it was like a big deal and i remember i tried it and it was cool it was interesting but uh it was not preferable to just not having to wear glasses you know not having to wear 3d glasses to play your video game like that was way better to me so i a lot of a lot of times when i hear things about this i just see like all i see really is another part of my controller that is that is susceptible to breaking right yeah the more moving parts and all these things it's true right i i i never got over this i had like an uncle tell me like i i opened the recline like we had a recliner in our living room and i i i remember i opened it once and i was sitting down and he told me it's like that has one fewer lever pulls in it now that you've done that and i that stuck with me in a way that like i don't know why now i think about it all the time it's like every time like i i drop my controller on my sofa a little bit too hard i'm like oh fuck that's like that's like maybe like a couple hours off this so like from whatever like from whatever its expiration date would have been like now it's like maybe like a couple hours earlier and i think about these things all the time like i have a lot of controllers that like the triggers stick you know and i'm just thinking like damn so i don't know i i look at it as just over complicating things and just making things more expensive and making the components a little bit harder to find and making it more tedious to repair and like i'm good with my controllers as they are really i don't know if i really need much more than what we have now i'm still fascinated by the idea i've been bringing up about using the same controller on ps6 oh it's like a cost cutting maneuver i don't know i i could does a console feel like a new console without a new controller i mean ps3 did and it had an old controller it was just wireless but i want i wonder i wonder if they'll do that playstation had a history up up until four of using basically the same form factor right so like they kind of got away with it in a weird way for a while uh although obviously we know the intention was not to have it's so funny when you think about it they're like uh like they're like what do we do and they just use the same mold it's so funny it is it is an awesome story i love but it's also funny because ps1 like they kind of arguably put the ps2 control controller out for for ps1 with the dual shock yeah and and so like so and there's that first version the dual analog which which is like that obscure PlayStation controller that they did first.

2:39:52You know, the dual analog, there was like a dual analog controller that was not a dual shot controller. Dual analog. I think I might've had one of those. It had concave, like really concave sticks. You'll see, you'll notice it. Just one controller. Concave. Original. Maybe you see it. Cause I, uh, no, I'm not. Yeah. I'm trying to, cause every time I look for it, I'm just seeing like standard. i'm not seeing any concave anyway maybe i'm misremembering this one original controller oh this one doesn't have yeah oh yeah here oh this is the one i think it oh no yeah it's just got dual analog but it doesn't have right it was it was before they put the the rumble in it and it was a different controller it's the same and it's got like different sticks like i don't it's funny man like i don't even remember that controller like being on the market i know it after the fact but I'm like I remember going straight into DualShock so there was like this brief period of time where they had this like other controller which is weird too when you think about it yeah I had this one because I remember it had no DualShock branding and it had analog on it and I remember hitting the analog you'd hit the analog button it would glow red and you'd be like what the fuck is this doing because no games really used it for a while right yeah I love that but yeah and the you're exactly right and the I think they put the convex sticks on the DualShock to differentiate them um i always i always felt like i i don't remember concave i remember concave was was xbox was that oh wait yeah i'm sorry concave was convex the convex right pardon the rounded um the uh but yeah man that's that's so funny yeah i'm looking at pictures of them now like a like a dual a ps1 dual analog controller so not the dual shock uh is a hundred dollars on ebay used because I think I think it is a fairly rare controller yeah oh for sure I was really up shit's ass at that point and I don't remember it which is just but I also wasn't much of an excuse yeah you can't say that I can't say that I'm sorry you say up shit's ass what the fuck does that even mean that's awesome boy that's so much better than whatever the correct thing to to say.

2:42:02Yeah, I was going to say, like, I was so into video games is what I was saying. I was up. It's that's awesome. Boy, oh, boy, oh, boy. All right. We need Dustin. We need you. All right. A couple more things to get through here, my friend. I just wanted to acknowledge that Epic keeps talking about Unreal Engine six. In fact, they've been talking about it for a little while and we haven't talked about it too much on the show. Some people have written in a little disappointed about that. I don't think there's much to say about it yet. What I thought always interesting here a few things they are changing some things around in within pipelines on unreal engine to incorporate uh ai which is i don't know if you saw this now i don't think this is a bad move for them they're a tools maker it's about how people utilize and leverage the tools i think they'd be kind of stupid in effect not to maybe do that but yeah it's gonna have a consequence for them and i don't know if you saw this that um ponkle which is the creator of vampire survivors vampire crawlers um has an activation with fortnight which he has said they are not going to do now because of it oh interesting so like there are going to be consequences for this but i gotta say from that because they say here quote we're building development pipeline features such as an mcp with integrations for claude gemini and others as creativity and productivity multiplied suppliers so that teams can focus their efforts on the essential creative and technical tasks of development rather than time on time consuming manual tasks so that's the way they're kind of putting it the big thing about this is and this is the thing that i think is going to really differentiate unreal 6 although unreal 5 does this already i think they're just really leaning into this is quote we're enabling content code and economies to become portable and interoperable across games ecosystems and engines through open standards to enable developer collaboration on a much greater scales than ever before the big thing is through open standards what they're basically trying to do is trying to fold everyone to these ideas that things will just work a certain way and you and i have talked about this in terms of gameplay which i don't think is really a way that you would want to do but we always said like jump should just be x we should just have an agreement that's like you when you jump you press x right when you shoot it's r2 right like that's a different sort of standard but what they're saying is like they want to make development standards so inoperable that interoperable that you'll be able to bring them between engines and obviously between seamlessly between hardware, which is pretty exciting.

2:44:26And I think we'll make things much cheaper because you have to license this. So you need to keep costs down. And if they can do that for you, I think they have something kind of interesting. People can go read. There's a full, it's called the road to UE6 and you can read it. It's a big, big blog post. But what they say is it will release in early access at the end of 2027 and that by 2029, mid 2029, it'll be ready to go. yeah they said like 12 to 18 months right exactly um and that sounds about right because ue1 was 98 2 2001 3 2006 4 is the big gap that's 2014 5 2022 so this will be like within that 8 7 8 year period which i think will work for them and uh we'll see yeah yeah i mean i read up a little bit on this and it's like it is there's parts of this that are unfortunate i mean the gen ai integration is kind of a bummer because it means it means ostensibly that like most games in unreal will have to kind of have that disclaimer of like made with ai because it seems like it's going to be so integrated into the engine that like it'd be dumb not to use it um i don't know ai is such a weird rabbit hole to go down because it really is just gen ai is my main issue um yeah me too me too i'm the same one i'm fine with ai tools like making things easier like they just did a premiere they had an update for premiere recently where they had like they had an ai uh mask tool that uses like data to under like basically you highlight an object and it kind of understands what it is you're trying to separate from the video it's like this is great this is a tool and it's not like and if i need to iterate on it i can the issue is like i was like oh make a character give him a hat yeah i mean like that to me is just like fucking lame yeah i totally agree you and i are the same place the gen ai stuff is the the problem yeah we'll see uh unreal engine's weird like it's gone kind of because i remember when it was probably like 360 ps3 era when unreal engine started to really be like a big like i remember seeing it a lot in that generation and it was associated with like really cool like really big like i remember Gears of War was like the big showcase for them on the 360 and uh it was like impressive and people wanted a part of it but like it feels like this generation Unreal Engine has been kind of like a mess it's had like a lot of memory leak issues there's a lot of a lot of great games that I just can't really get into because it just runs so poorly um Borderlands 4 is one of those games I think Oblivion is one of those games as well Oblivion Remake or Remaster more what's it called whatever whatever that whatever that game is yeah what is it called uh remastered remastered uh it's unfortunate man it's uh because like i think unreal engine used to be like a like a it used to not have a stigma and now it kind of does um and even with the halo campaign evolved like a lot of the issues have been kind of ironed out like the big issues like the memory leak issues are not a problem with that game but like i've seen like similar complaints of like oh yeah there's some like there's some there's some lens flare smearing and there's like a general fizziness to the look of everything with the way it does nanite rendering and things like that it's like man it's kind of a bummer because like i i don't remember unreal engine having so many caveats in like early on yeah unreal what the unreal 3.x was the the big one right that everyone loved that was the one that like was at the turn of the generation the ps3 and 360 like a lot of games ran on unreal 3 yeah huge huge games yeah the batman games i always think of famously were on unreal 3 yeah yeah the arkham games the uh years games i feel like every i feel like damn near every great game back then the mass effect trilogy bioshock um but we'll buy shock infinite i don't know about bioshock specifically but oh yeah bioshock just a lot of good shit the uh the oblivian lands obviously oblivion remastered it's called by the way in case you're curious yeah oblivion about spring 25 remember if it was yeah that's a bummer too because i liked both of those games i really i liked borderlands 4 and i liked oblivion but i was just like i bro i can't keep did you did i did i ever tell you like what the deal was with those games where like you they would run fine and then you'd play them for like maybe like 45 minutes to an hour and then you'd start noticing it would slow down like a data leak or whatever they call it yeah so so basically you'd have to like restart the game every hour and it drove me in memory that's what it's called yeah yeah yeah especially with uh not so much with borderlands borderlands i could i could kind of deal with it maybe but like specifically with with uh oblivion where that's a game you're kind of supposed to get lost in to have to reset every hour was like i'm not getting i'm not getting what i wanted yeah i remember that was what i believe that's what turned me off from borderlands when it came out and then kind of it kind of because i love borderlands but i'm not gonna play it like that i'm sure they've fixed it now and that's probably why they didn't they just canceled the switch 2 version because they're like all right fuck this um that's right we can't do that we can't we can't really can't make it work uh can't do it man sorry can't do it man so yeah ue6 uh we'll get more information i wonder what the uh the i well i guess it's gonna be some of their own games because i think they already teased rocket league and stuff but migrating over but i wonder like what will be the first big third-party games i'm sure they're already in development on ue6 and we'll see and uh it's funny man i i totally agree with you like there we do need to begin differentiating and the ai conversation so tired but about generative ai versus just kind of the usefulness of ai i always think we used to use these really bespoke um word programs at ign to write strategy guides because we can write macros into them and then they would replace and do shit for us in them and that's kind of we had to write them ourselves so like you had to do it like you would say like you would write like these things where it's like every three you have these things where images needed to be inserted across a guide or whatever but you didn't want to do it manually so you'd like write this macro that would do it and i'm like that's kind of like one step further i won't pretend that i really interact with ai very much because i i don't i i think i interact with ai most when i'm just googling and that google is just just gives you whatever you know like whatever it is now so i'm like i'm not trying to use it but the one place i do try to use it as i use um uh chat gpt and just ask you questions about gardening and like because i'm always in my gardens and i'm always planting things i'm was asking questions and I have like a dialogue going with it basically like what is this plant what do I do with this is it good to do this and it remembers things and Mike is like I'm really I think she's really disturbed that I have like this ongoing dialogue about my gardens and my plants with this AI chatbot kind of but I'm like it's been really helpful and basically it's what I was saying about strategy guides last year I think where I'm like it's just a search engine it's like a dynamic search engine but I'm not at I have it's funny like I do try to test out like what did I do to it the other day oh I I was like this is where it gets crazy and I'm like you guys are in so much trouble man I was like make a save room in a Resident Evil style game that looks comfortable and like you would be able to rest and kind of collect yourself there and it made a room that looks like it's out of Resident Evil with a typewriter on the desk and an umbrella logo and I'm like you guys are shot like totally shot it's like you're not even hiding it and I'm like this is different and it's always got that same it's like why I can't believe people use this shit seriously it's like the images all look the same they have the same quality to them this like very shiny supernatural thing going on whenever you ask it to me and i'm like damn i can't believe people really find value in this like it sucks it it's so funny like i it's so funny that you said i was just having this conversation with like a friend of mine we're talking about like it's it's kind of actually interesting that early ai like or like early will smith eating spaghetti you were that like crazy right right horrible yeah it it's funny to me like when you think about that like where it's just like that was actually more like visually and uh artistically distinct than it is now that it's better at rendering will smith eating spaghetti like there was actually like a it's not a style because it's not a person doing it i guess but like there was a way that the computer would render that stuff that was so unlike the way a person would do it that it actually kind of made that in and of itself interesting like if ai had frozen in that way way where it just like made this like these really like these weird fucking facsimiles of people that were chimeras of what like a real person would be from the through the lens of a computer that barely understood anything that was actually a more artistically interesting vision than what it is now which is just like photorealistic but shiny it's weird like there's act there is actually a style to older ai art yeah that's compare in comparison that's interesting uh but yeah that's interesting yeah well because i think everything's reducing as a computer would to efficiency maybe or not even like what people it's it's like the we keep saying the introduction of the m dashes and how bad that is for me into like into ai writing um it's like maybe this is just the best way to do it and it doesn't really know to explore the textures between that i don't i don't know but i i just think so it's like when i when i when i use it in in ways that i think are more practical like a replacement for a search engine or just knowledge it's like it's kind of cool when you're replacing the intuition of a human or the creativity of a human or whatever uh yeah whatever we've talked about it so it doesn't matter yeah i used about it i i used it that way for a while for like a for like about a month and then I started doing like an experiment where I would like I would ask it something and then I would google like google what I would have asked it or like in search engine terms I guess because you can't just like speak to it as casually or you can't speak to google as casually as you can to chat gpt and I just I saw too many like disparities where it's just like oh this is just not right at all and so I just kind of stopped using it but I'm sure it's probably getting getting better as time goes on but i don't know man these are weird ass times that we're in right now i agree can't tell you how many videos i've seen of like a anthropomorphic strawberry cheating on a banana oh boy you know i'm just like what are we what are we doing well this is what i didn't we talk about this recently chris that i was like i'm getting fooled by ai videos to the point where it's content they're contextually wrong they're not really visually wrong right it's like this isn't this isn't this isn't feel human but that the aesthetic is not necessarily off as much as what is happening is off and that is a scary place to be with moving pictures especially still shots are a little easier to discern but those are also contextual as well um yeah but it's as we've said for a long time the the they will become perfect and then it's going to become about deeper philosophical questions All right.

2:55:50Final news is about actually we have another piece of news to some of the add something which we'll do in a minute but two pieces of Capcom news quickly. I thought this was really interesting. The website automaton had Trent which often does this translated a Famitsu interview. Famitsu of course is the famous Japanese gaming publication from you know going since the 80s. They spoke with the president and CEO Haruhiro Tsujimoto. and he said something extremely interesting because they were basically saying and I was like, wow, this is fascinating and I wonder if this would be more divisive if this was making the news more or if people were noticing this more.

2:56:26They write here at Automaton, Capcom's flagship IPs like the Monster Hunter, Resident Evil and Street Fighter series have maintained their popularity and continue to produce hit games decades after they were originally created and Tsuji Moto considers Capcom's organizational transformation to be one of the biggest reasons why this was possible. I don't know how I feel about this. This is what he says. Quote, In the game industry, when a title becomes a series, it often ends up depending heavily on a particular developer, becoming what you'd call an individual-driven title. If that person doesn't make one, there's no next installment.

2:56:55The direction of the series becomes tied to the ideas of a single creator. We discussed this issue with the central figures behind each franchise, and ultimately agreed that we should abandon that approach. What we came up with instead was the idea that every title should essentially be rebuilt from the ground up. We didn't mind even if sales temporarily declined as a result, and by switching to a team-based approach to game development, Capcom changed dramatically, end quote. And then Automaton picks back up and says, Tsuchimoto believes this decision has paid more than paid off, allowing new entries in Capcom's most valued IPs on a regular basis.

2:57:27This also means that knowledge and expertise accumulated by development teams is handed over generationally, securing each franchise's longevity. Additionally, he considers this to be just as important when it comes to developing new IPs. with 2026's Pragmata being a symbol of Capcom's team-oriented development structure. What do you think of that? Usually we are so focused on the Kevin Levines and the Miyamotos and the Miyazakis and, you know, all of these guys. And he's basically saying, like, we're not doing that anymore. What's so funny about that is that they created some of those people, whether it was Inafune or Mikami and others.

2:58:00And they're realizing, like, it's not necessarily working. And I think they realized that with Mega Man, Mega Man didn't really work without Inafune for a while, and now it works fine. so what are your thoughts on this i think it's a pretty i think what he's saying is a pretty dramatic thing actually yeah i mean i i understand it like i mean like ken levine god bless him it's been like 10 years you know um and there's probably like a hyper there's probably a perfectionism that that comes along with auteurship uh in a way that doesn't really exist when you know you're you're a team building a product and i'm sure by the way the people on the team building a product uh care also but it's just a different uh it's a different level of emotional investment I guess if it's if it's your baby versus the teams and so like I understand what they're saying on the other hand though with Capcom I don't think I would never how should I say this Capcom is doing very very well right now and that should not go under appreciated but i don't know man i kind of finished resident evil 9 and i was like yeah this is a team based a team definitely made this it's good it's a it's a very good game i enjoyed it but it's like it's a it's a nine hour game it's it's very kind of i don't know i was expecting more out of resident evil 9 to be honest and what i got was fun and and nice and i but i like it less as as as i get further away from it i do think that beginning area is great that what's that the care center yeah yeah the uh yeah i think after that i think after that it just kind of feel it does kind of feel like a committee kind of game like you're in this room for a while and you do the thing and then you go to the next thing and everything's like barren you're in a lab like i don't know like i i don't want to say it's they're doing a bad job because that's not necessarily true but like there is something that i felt in that game where it's like there's some there's like a vision here that's kind of missing i think it's interesting yeah because i really like the tuba you're right i mean you in my opinion with requiem which i thought was awesome but like there are the bones of the open world game are there you know like there's there's another game there that they were making and they've they put them together you you can feel the stitch but like i remember getting to that point where like the the there's an entirely new menu system that opens up midway through the point of the game midway through the game and you're like oh my god god this was stitched together by a team that needed to get something out and like you know no disrespect like i think it's a again it's a great game it's it's one of my favorites of the year i think um i don't think team-based games are inherently bad or negative and i think that a lot of a lot of team-based games happens to happen to be some of my favorites but um you can definitely feel that that difference in like a resident evil 9 versus something like a bioshock infinite like You know what I mean?

3:00:48Like you can feel that. But if it works for them, it works for them. I mean, who am I to argue with them? They're making money hand over fist. Their franchises are in a better place than they've ever been really. So it's clearly working for them. But also like it's hard, you can't ignore from software, you know? Like they're kind of dominating right now with like the opposite mentality. So it really is a matter of like what works best for your team, what works best for your IP, what works best for the types of games that you're making and how well you can execute on those ideas. I think either, I think or tour-driven development and team-driven development are both valid as long as you can deliver on the execution and as long as you're in a healthy place to do so.

3:01:27Yeah, props to them for figuring it out. It's well said, and I think it's funny with Capcom, you can't argue with the results, both financially and critically. They're just in a really good place. I also feel this though, Chris, as we exit this story is, I think it's kind of like having your cake and eating it too, or at least the publishers, if you know enough about how games used to be made in Japan and how crazy people used to be in Japan about personnel, the powers that be, like I think Tsuji Moto is the son of the founder of Capcom. So his dad was one of the people that made it so that Keiji Inafune couldn't use his real name in the credits because they were afraid he was going to be poached.

3:02:13people at konami i've told this before do you know i think i said this on the show i don't i don't think it's like this anymore but if you would email people at konami they all had alphanumeric email addresses so like you would email oh i have to email like this guy it's a a1372bx at konami.com and that was so that like no one could email anyone and no one knew how to find or contact people because the people that had the operational and institutional knowledge were who were important and that's so great so if you go read like the like castlevania credits or whatever it's nonsense because it's no one's allowed to use their names and and you hear the stories we make fun of the story about how nintendo stopped letting miyamoto ride his bike that's a real story because they were afraid he was gonna hurt himself so like they created this environment and so then what's ironic in my opinion chris is that capcom then was the company that got hit hardest when those guys turned um because it wasn't just in a fune always gets you know the most shine i think from that but and of course ego with konami and later kojima but we had brought up mikami earlier like and kamiya the clover guys at capcom capcom spun them into their own studio they made like okami and stuff like that and they're like bye and they got kind of burned by it and i'm surprised it took them so long to acknowledge it though i think you can see in their output that they have known this for a long time now and it does work for them generally speaking i do think there is a level of inconsistency though like you're saying we always bring up resident evil 3 remake which is just markedly weaker than everything else and if you had the same teams making them it would take way longer and that's undesirable as well but it would have been a better game so i don't know i don't know yeah yeah it's tricky um but yeah it makes sense to not want to rely on like an individual like i think about konami a lot where they they've got they're sitting on metal gear and they kind of can't really they kind of can't do anything with it really like they can port old games forward and maybe remaster some stuff they definitely got like they've got the break glass in case of emergency metal gear solid one remake sitting there i guess but they can't really do anything with that series really because like their their main creator left and everybody kind of knows everybody who's in the metal gear knows there's no casual metal gear fan who doesn't know about kojima you know what i mean like no one on this earth likes metal gear and doesn't know anything about kojima so like they they're just stuck with this ip that's like really really valuable that they can't really do much with and i i can see why uh a company might not want to be in that position ever ever so yeah if you look at the castlevania one credits this is a konami so it's not capcom but the director is trans fishers which is a which is not a real person it's it's actually hitoshi akamatsu the screenplay was written by vram stroker that's insane and music by james banana like it's like this is what they were doing to hide their talent so that's so psychotic man it's okay it's 100 % true um just a quick story uh as well kind of an ancillary to this or a corollary i should say is uh devil may cry 5 video games chronicle had so this game came out in 2021 no 2019 i want to say right something like that let me see here yeah yeah no 2019 March 2019.

3:05:51Devil May Cry 5 sold 2.1 million copies in its first fiscal year. All right, so that was 2019. And then it's sold appreciably ever since then. But this last fiscal year, it sold more than any other year. 2.7 million units. So Capcom is creating like a really impressive back catalog of games that people are revisiting. Granted, I'm sure it's not anywhere near full price, but that you're pushing IP by the millions for a game that came out in the PS four era bodes really well for what they're doing they have a really good i know we beat the drum with capcom or capcom but it's like they're killing it they really are and they're not done this year i mean what's so crazy two of the three best games of the year in my opinion are theirs pragmata is definitely my favorite game of the year and resident evil and then they're not done they still have a onimusha coming later so it's just i don't know man they're just killing it and I want to congratulate them for that.

3:06:49There is a final story though and let me put this in the chat here. I saw this pop up and oh wait, shit, I put it in the footnotes. God damn it. There we go.

3:07:03We've had these rumors so Jason Schreier the journalist reported some time ago that Sony is just not going to release its games on PC anymore unless they're multiplayer games and a lot of people doubted that or whatever. I don't know why. Listen, you can feel how you want about Jason Schreier. I've had weird interactions with him in the past. I've also had good interactions with him in the past, but like he obviously knows what he's doing. And I don't, I can't think of a single thing he's ever said that didn't come true. Could be wrong about that. So I don't think you needed this in other words.

3:07:35But Hideaki Nishino, who's the CEO of PlayStation, as we know, he used to be co-CEOs with Herman Hulse, but he's now the lone man at the top. He also was interviewed by Famitsu soon. And Push Square has a translation of part of what he was talking about here with PC games. So I just thought I would add this to the record. I don't know that there's much more to say about this because we understood that this was true, but here's confirmation. Quote, platform selection has always been determined based on the characteristics of each individual title. If releasing a game on PC allows us to maximize the value of that game's experience, we will continue to consider it.

3:08:06As our primary policy at present for first party single player games, we intend to further refine and enhance the unique value of gameplay experiences that can be delivered on PlayStation. On the other hand, for live service games, we believe it is important to enable as many people as possible to play through online multiplayer. And so we will continue to regard releases on both PS5 and PC as the basic approach. Regardless of which platform a title is released on, our decisions will be guided by the principle that players should receive the best possible experience, one that maximizes the strengths of that particular game.

3:08:33End quote. So there you have it from the horse's mouth. So I doubt that's going to stop everyone, anyone from saying anything still to this day but here i mean there it is um if you needed more proof if you didn't believe jason's reporting do you have anything you want to say about this before we move on no i mean this is pretty obvious i mean this is what i was saying it's just like you they got especially and again i know i've said this before on other episodes but like dude like in a time where uh people aren't really hungry for the next playstation machine people aren't uh clamoring for more of it uh you've kind of got a double down and you've kind of got a you kind of got to showcase value and the way you do that is by just making sure that your exclusives are by making sure there's a reason to own the machines and be in the ecosystem and being on pc does kind of undermine that and it also like to the to the effect that it like helps them to the effect that they make money on pc it's just like it's negligible in comparison into the amount of money that they would gain if they just bolstered their uh console ecosystem so well seems obvious yep i agree and we'll see uh how this looks moving forward but we'll obviously see tokan this summer releasing on pc and ps5 but then we'll see wolverine releasing only on ps5 and so we'll get a little bit of taste of both of those things all right chris it's time to talk to us about or talk to everyone about what we're playing uh i'll get out of the way quick i don't know how much you have to say either to be honest i don't have much to say this uh i platinumed Yeah.

3:09:59007 First Light. That's platinum number 211.

3:10:05The trophies are. There's a cool system in the game where you can go to any chapter and then any checkpoint in that chapter. And so if you have a guide, you can get all the collectibles really quickly. However, there are two things. There's one where I think in chapter 10, you need to have a certain weapon on your or like ability on your watch. Oh, the laser. Yeah, right. So you must actually play through from chapter nine to get those particular things, which is a little annoying. So there's something to keep an eye on. The other thing is, is that the trophies are a little janky and I thought they were totally broken and I think they were.

3:10:36But I was told that you can do a certain thing to make them pop. So when I started getting all the collectibles, some of the trophies weren't popping and I was getting annoyed. So I sent the save to the cloud and I was like, I'll try this again. But actually, the trophies are just mega latent because the game is always online. I don't know if you've noticed that about it. So like if you wait like literally 30 seconds or so, like the trophy will actually pop. And there was a so I was apparently aware of this and they patched the game, I think, on the 11th. And the patch inadvertently stopped the game from disconnecting from the servers as well and going offline.

3:11:11So you couldn't even play it that way. So I think it'll be worked around much easier in the future. But that's what I had to do. So, yeah, that that's out of the way. And then I'm back to Pragmata because I'm preparing and taking notes for the spoiler cast and review discussion. I already beat it once but I'm playing through on insanity mode it is pretty hard um I really really like it though I think one of the cool things about it is it really forces you to hack a lot and use the things in the game that you don't like it depends on how you want to play it but I wasn't like trying to overheat enemies or necessarily or try to like fill up necessarily intentionally the bar that lets you use like your overdrive attack or whatever but like the insanity mode is all predicated on that stuff and it's it's really cool i'm really really enjoying it i'm there are five sections in pragmata i'm in the fourth section maybe i'll beat it tonight i don't know so that's all i'm doing for now says here you're playing crazy taxi on playstation 2 which is uh interesting i i never played the ps2 version of crazy taxi yeah it's it's uh it's fun like i don't have much to say about it either i just kind of like i was there's a bunch of games that i'm really looking forward to and it's it's when i'm really looking forward to stuff it's hard for me to really get into um it's hard for me to start anything that isn't those things I don't know what it is uh so I've been kind of looking around like what's a light game that I can play uh and crazy taxi was just kind of sitting there it's like you know what I haven't turned my ps2 on in a long time let me uh let me let me let me fire it up and it's fun it's just like dude like it's it's I love how janky the physics are like the it's the funniest shit in the world like hitting a car and watching it like like just barrel in a way that makes no sense uh i hope that's retained yeah when they when they go back to it for the uh 2027 uh the new game but yeah i was just enjoying it trying to what i forgot about it though is and it's because like so much game design has happened since the original crazy taxi is that like there's so you have to toggle between drive and reverse and to accelerate and reverse you have to hit the trigger as well that's right so like it's the same button to go whereas it used to be like I think there's other games where like you either pull back or like maybe it's the the opposite trigger or whatever so that took some getting used to I'm shit at the original Crazy Taxi I played more of Crazy Taxi 3 High Roller on the original Xbox yeah the Xbox exclusive one but But it's just, it's great, man.

3:13:39Crazy Taxi is just good fun, great soundtrack. Not much to say about it. It is what it is. You know what I mean? It's very much what you see is what you get. But it is deceptively fun to play. Like, it's one of those games that looks so simple and is. But, like, the joy of interacting with it and the joy of actually, like, moving through it and watching your impact on the world happen, like, watching traffic get fucked up and watching people dive out of the way as you barrel-toed. It is satisfying and fun. so uh shout out to crazy taxi um i'm in that headspace now i've been listening to a lot of bad religion oh i was like you know what i'll i'll jump on i'll jump on a crazy taxi um i'm looking here on psn profiles like yeah i remember um when they ported it to ps3 in 2010 i played it a little bit um that might be a fun one to play on stream at some point but to reacclimate myself maybe i'll keep that in mind yeah shout out to the original crazy taxi wonderful game but yeah i was a dreamcast guy with that for sure at that time all right let's get into six questions comments concerns awesome ideas chris and end this episode as we always do with inquiries from the audience you've heard your inquiries throughout the show but you'll hear more of them now and uh you can submit your inquiries via the thread in the news feed on patreon each and every week they go live on wednesday afternoons and are deleted on thursdays so you have about 24 hours Patreon.com slash Last Day Media couldn't do without your support.

3:15:01We appreciate you. The first inquiry comes from Leon, Dustin's new baby infant, who says, hello, sacred sluts. Has PlayStation lost its riz? Many of these recent E3 season game announcements would have debuted exclusively at Sony's State of Play just a few years ago. Instead, Sony's competitors got first dibs to show games like Final Fantasy VII Revelation, Persona 4 Revival, Persona 6, Stellar Blade 2, Resident Evil Veronica, Woe Long 2, The Dragon's Dogma 2 DLC, and many more. This doesn't spell doom for Sony, but it is a worrying trend, especially when it comes to their partner relationships.

3:15:30Is PlayStation simply the default console now where these games will sell regardless so third-party publishers are trying to get the bag through marketing deals with Xbox and Nintendo? Is Sony overconfident now and not paying to have these games associated with their console? Is Sony failing to manage its relationships with third-party developers? In particular, ShiftUp's decision to show Stellar Blade 2 somewhere other than the state of play seems like a canary in the coal mine considering Sony's hand in the first game's success. Thoughts, gentlemen? I did notice some of this. So like the persona stuff is not a huge surprise because Xbox has a relationship with Sega developing around Game Pass that they've had for a couple of years now.

3:16:05And so they're locked into that and they're going to do that. The Final Fantasy seven and Resident Evil stuff. I mean, I think the summer summer games fest is just kind of bigger. I'm not saying that you're necessarily wrong. I think Sony does. I don't know if it's losing its riz per se. I've said before, I think Sony has kind of an image problem, but I don't know if that parlays to the developers and publishers. I think Sony is probably in the position to be the least aggressive in trying to net these guys. A lot of this stuff is also determined ahead of time, and they have to show things that others wouldn't show, and they have to make room for that.

3:16:37So like the new Silent Hill game, for instance, is a PlayStation console exclusive, so that has to take up space there and so on and so forth. So can you read into this a little bit? I'm sure you can. I don't think Wolong 2 is that big of a deal. The Capcom stuff is big, but not a huge deal. Stellar Blade 2, yeah. I'm not crazy... shift up doesn't seem to I don't want to say treasure that's not really the right word it doesn't really seem to value its relationship with Sony as much as it used to anymore and I think a lot of that is driven by the fact that Stellar Blade's success though it was early because it was a PlayStation console exclusive its success really I think its wider success came from Steam and I think that its wider success came from overseas yeah so i don't think playstation like if i were them i wouldn't want to be with playstation either unless they were really really offering to like blunt our costs in a way that made it make a lot of sense so i almost feel like you're talking about two different things which is like sony's lack of quality image these days i think is real people are really hard on everything they do and they've kind of put themselves in that situation and that's something to deal with but i don't know if i see it through the state of play lens because i still think they had a lot of good premieres and I just think summer games fest is just a bigger deal and then when you see the persona stuff at xbox you're like well they had to do that they're with sega I mean that's what's going to happen they're game pass games so what do you think chris uh has playstation lost its riz um I I don't I think you could even maybe read somewhat the opposite in the sense that i don't know if you're trying to if you're one of these big games um i feel like you kind of want your moment right like you kind of want your moment in the sun you want to make your splash and to be honest i just don't think there was room like final fantasy 7 needed to have that ending splash but so did god of war and so like you know where are you gonna go really and like doesn't it help to be you know uh the biggest story of the event as opposed to being just one of the biggest stories of the event you know like would you would you rather have your resident evil veronica code veronica remake going up against a new god of war announcement you know like is that something that you want maybe maybe not like i don't know like i i don't know what the logistics are i don't know how they view it i don't know if they view it as like we we could be part of like a star-studded show or if they look at it as like we want to kind of have some attention of our own i would imagine it's more that than the other um so i really i really just think it's a logistics issue i i literally just think like they had 20 minutes of god of war gameplay and they had 20 minutes of i mean ostensibly 20 minutes of uh final fantasy 7 for uh summer games fest you know it was it was like four trailers or something yeah it was ridiculous so i really just think it's a matter of just like there's the games are the games are where they make the most sense i don't think i don't think it i think people are reading into it a little bit yeah i think so too i thought i thought all three shows were really strong actually uh consistently strong where they were all like in the bees and i can't really complain about that but i i yeah i also want to remind everyone chris that the losing party so in this case like an xbox for instance, is has the greater desire to spend more and make it more tantalizing for people to play ball with them.

3:20:19And so that's going to obviously be. Irresistible to studios that can literally think about it. Xbox's showcase showed 24 PlayStation games. They only showed 28 total games. All the PlayStation logos on it. Sony just gets those for free. Those guys still get to release their games over there. And then they're like, all right, fine. You can pay us for this or we get on game passing, whatever. It's like, all right. Yeah, doesn't hurt us. I mean, it doesn't affect us at all. No, do I really do I really believe in my heart that P studio wants Persona 6 at the Xbox showcase? No, I don't believe that for one second.

3:20:56But they that's where it is and it'll sell fine. And they showed a shitty logo. It's not so I again, I agree with Chris. I wouldn't read too much into it. I do think Sony has an image problem. That's another question entirely. And I'm not entirely sure how they turn it around except for to deliver the goods. Make sure Wolverine's great. Make sure Lave is great. Make sure Intergalactic especially is great. And just shut everyone up. Yeah. All right. Second inquiry comes from Brent Lindquist, who says, hey, fellas, I'm a lifelong resident of Washington state and it's prohibitively expensive to live here.

3:21:33Starbucks recently relocated to Tennessee. And that got me wondering, is it worth it for Sony to consider relocating studios like Bungie or Sucker Punch to more economically friendly locations? I know it wouldn't solve all their problems and I'd hate to see them leave my home state, but it's getting ridiculous around here as always. Thanks for the show. This wouldn't work because I think, first of all, anything's theoretically possible. And like you said, Starbucks is moving, like everyone's moving out of these, like, frankly, these bluer states to redder states because it's just cheaper to do business in these places.

3:22:00But that comes at a major cost. The first thing is, is that like, you have to bring your people with you. You could do that. Companies do that and they pay for your moving and they and they set you up and they try to help you out but if the point is to say move sucker punch from bellevue to knoxville are you going to go to all of them and be like all right we're moving all of you and they're all in and it's like all right and you're all getting a 25 pay percent pay deduction in other words like how does it really help you it actually it's actually enormously helpful to the people at sucker punch be like so you're going to pay us seattle prices in tennessee and from that perspective it's like okay and then it just kind of defeats the purpose.

3:22:39I guess real estate would be cheaper. You're also leaving places where people want to be. And it's not as simple as like up and leaving. When I got my first job, like a corporate job out of college, like I could do whatever I wanted. But if you have like a child in school or you have like a house, it's like it's not that trivial. And so it's a nice idea, but it's not going to work. The bigger thing is, in my opinion, is to also I should say this Starbucks moving its headquarters and like its operation is a much bigger deal that saves way more money than a studio of 100 people or 150 people so that's another thing yeah yeah um it's like if you were saying like should SIE move to whatever Florida be like yeah that might be a good idea actually but that's that's different that's a way different scale of money um you also just have to realize that I think if you're going to invest in new projects or invest in new teams you just do it in different places.

3:23:33In other words, you keep your legacy shit like you'd be crazy to have another studio in Santa Monica or another studio in Bellevue. You wouldn't be so crazy to have a studio in Seoul or spinning something up in Tokyo or even in Prague. So I think those are almost like they should be more anticipatory of future costs than trying to blunt the cost they've already incurred in which I don't think they would really be able to do it because because like I'm saying, like if you're going to move all these people, so it's like, well, so they all just work for Sucker Punch still and now you're just paying them the same amount of money.

3:24:06Yeah. And that's also expensive to do to move. Like it's not, you'll probably lose half of them as well. So yeah, you'll lose, you'll lose a lot of your talent. If you're moving to, if you're moving to a place like Tennessee, your town, you better hope that you retain the talent that you do have because it's going to be hard to attract talent there. There's not a really, there's not a reliable pipeline. I mean, dude, even New York when I was uh when I was in when I was in high school when I was graduating and I wanted to do game development there were there was no meaningful game design anything in New York and that was in 20 fucking 12 you know that wasn't like in the 80s or something so like you have to imagine the Tennessee is even more dire where it's like there's just like who the fuck who the fuck is over there building games so like there's a lot of cost that goes along with it it is not trivial to move an entire operation even if it's even if it's just like a hundred people or like a studio it's not trivial for a person to move so like i don't know that's it's the wrong way to think about it i think you're right though like if you're going to reload if you're going to open studios anywhere you're probably looking overseas yeah i don't i yeah again i think the anticipatory thing is just easier and then just kind of dealing with the fixed costs you have now and is it ideal to have naughty dog at the water garden in Santa Monica it's like it's unimaginable that it could be much more expensive than that so no it's it's not ideal um and then you have to pay people to live there and stuff like that but as long as they continue to deliver the goods I think everything will be okay but it's a nice idea and you're right like major corporations do move all the time and thousands of people go with them I just think it's it's different and it's also more staggered.

3:25:51Like, as I understand the Starbucks move, it's not like everybody's moving. And that might be the intention eventually. And I don't blame them. And by the way, a major thing that's happening in Washington is not only the, and you know this, Brent, because you live there, but it's not only the cost of living, it's that they just got rid of, they introduced an income tax. And now it's only for people that make a million dollars or above, but it's going to obviously trickle down as it always does with new tax law. And that scares a lot of people, especially business owners. And I think that's why people are fleeing Washington.

3:26:18And that's a bummer because that was always the coolest fucking part about being in Washington state for a lot of people was the no income tax thing. You basically get a blue state kind of metropolitan. Life with the perks of a red state, like not paying income tax. I mean, it's unimaginable in a way. And it's too bad, man. I was I don't give a shit about Washington as far as like a municipality. Like I don't live there. But like I was bummed when they said when they did that, because I'm like, dude, I knew so many people that were that worked at Microsoft and people at Sucker Punch and other places where I'm like, damn, dude, they had it good, like real good.

3:26:52Yeah. And they still do for now, but it won't. It won't last. All right. Connor Reese writes in next and he says, hi, guys. Why are game studios so often shut down instead of sold? If there's a willing buyer, wouldn't selling the studio talent or IP bit be a better financial outcome than simply closing it for the tax write off? I mean, Connor, don't you say what the obvious thing is if there's a willing buyer? Yeah. The thing with we talked about this a little bit earlier with the Xbox studios, you see the studio like compulsion, like who in the world is going to buy compulsion? Why would you ever do that?

3:27:28Why would you buy double fine? And by the way, I'm not entirely sure that the IP is going with them. In fact, I would think I would think Microsoft would be fucking nuts. to let them take the IP. It's like you guys can go. We're keeping your shit. You don't just get to walk away with your games. Now, it could be an Activision Bungie like thing, right, Chris, with Destiny or what IO did with Hitman and Square Enix. Sure. Yeah. But I don't know why you would do that. Yeah, I mean, it it does depend. It's kind of IP dependent, isn't it? Because there are. hitman really is an io like i i don't i really kind of don't know who else could make a hitman game really like that is a very specific skill set it's like i couldn't imagine really being interested but don't you think square also did that because they realized it was just bad pr you know and they're like i think that's i mean that's also true but it's i what i'm what i'm saying is i don't think i don't know i it seems to me that the reason studios sell or the reason studios shut down is because the a there is no buyer and and b and also just like it's kind of easier to just be like hey it didn't work we can shut the studio down and we retain the ip i'm fairly certain that's how that works if you should if you shut down like if you shut down

3:29:01double fine today you would own Psychonauts and those things so there's really you don't lose the IP if you shut the studio down you get to save money and you get to retain that IP and you it's not like a Sony it's not like a Sony Spider-Man issue where like oh we got to make a new Psychonauts game every three years to renew the license it's like they just have it so I don't know I just think it's like there's I think the real issue right now is that there's not a lot of buyers the market people aren't looking to buy right now right i mean if in my opinion chris if like people are not interested in blue point which seems like there's no interest in it which is crazy in my opinion then there's not going to be any interest in ninja theory i mean maybe if you scaled i mean i would imagine regardless if these studios manage to save themselves they will be massively scaled down i assume and probably lose their real estate and all that kind of stuff.

3:29:54But if I were Microsoft, I'd be like, well, we invested in you. Obviously, things have changed. I think with compulsion specifically, you never really delivered anything meaningful for us. The very least we can do is we'll let you go, but we're and we're not going to try to like. You can I'm not even sure they're letting themselves buy themselves back. I think they're trying to find them investors, which I think is. I think that's above and beyond, actually, because really, you could just. write down impairments on them and absorb that. But if you let them walk away for like a dollar or whatever, whatever they have to pay, like some nominal fee.

3:30:30So I think Microsoft's kind of doing right by them. But I also feel like that's also an optics game, especially because I think they're like, what do we I'm just making this up? And it's like, what do we pay for compulsion? Twenty million dollars? Like who gives a shit? You know, like we don't need to sell them. We can just let them go. And if they and if they want to be shut down then or if they can't find investment which they're not going to i imagine then again i think the best double fine has the best chance because i think tim schafer is just so deeply connected right remember i believe tim schafer was one of the co-founders of that website fig we haven't talked about that website in a while i don't think they really do anything anymore and i wonder if that might be the future considering psychonauts 2 before microsoft bought the team in 2018 or whatever it was they crowdfunded that game so on fig so they have options i think tim schafer is a well-known auteur of sorts microsoft just let them make whatever they wanted and that was really stupid um that game kiln i mean i it's cool but it's like when i saw that game i'm like are you serious like you're serious this is what you seriously have them doing in their san franc they're on like third avenue near king street in san francisco like premium real you guys have these guys just sitting there making kiln you got your fucking mind so like to me i i look at that and i'm like you kind of feel bad for them because they were mismanaged like they actually it's what i always said it's like these guys aren't making any money like how is this working and it's like they actually almost believed the hype when you saw a game like south of midnight or whatever that game's called it's like god almighty are you serious i mean it's a cool idea i'm not i don't hate it it's just like you can't have your first parties making games like this in this era and this is not the way it works anymore no way I understand the Game Pass fodder idea.

3:32:14Right. But since Game Pass didn't, I don't know if you saw this. I went and dug up the old image that they circulated or that leaked of like their projections. And they literally thought they were going to be at 75 million right now. Like right now. They're at maybe 25 to 30. So under the auspices of like their expectations, a double fine and making kill and works. Maybe, but not, not here. So it's a long winded way, Connor, of saying like there are no, there are, I think, very few studios that would find buyers right now. Look at what happened with the Negoti. I didn't put this up, but like that game's dead, apparently.

3:32:53Like even he couldn't find investment. They needed$40 million to finish the game. It's a lot of money, but it's like, I'm actually authentically surprised like Sony or someone didn't come in and be like, well, you can finish it for us as a second party game or something. But if he can't find it, investment you think these guys are going to find investment i mean i mean i guess we'll see but it's rough out there the bigger thing this is my sports poison brain but it's like i'm surprised publishers don't trade that's that's like the more interesting thing because you see studios sometimes in people's families where you're like you know that studio would make more sense here don't you and this studio will probably make more sense with you let's make a little deal um instead what you find is that studios leave hands and enter other hands that's what happened with rare which is of course a famous nintendo studio and uh what happened with bungie which went from xbox to independent to sony i think everyone's scared of m &a right now and i think that's perfectly reasonable and by the way i think you'd look pretty stupid buying or trading or acquiring anything when you're about to lay a bunch of people off and and just to reiterate what i said earlier sony's definitely not immune like they're definitely gonna lay people off there's no doubt yeah i think they're just waiting to the next fiscal quarter if i'm being honest because they're already incurring impairments from the bungee write downs, which they're not done.

3:34:11That's the other thing is they're not done writing that down. Not even close. Yeah. They just took a$700 million hit or something. It's like, holy fuck. Like, my God. All right. Fourth inquiry, Chris comes from Nick Stolte. Says afternoon, gentlemen, congratulations on the birth of Leon S. Furman. Close. Colin, Lately, you've been talking about how PlayStation and Xbox should exit the A and AA space. My main objection to this idea is Nintendo's success. Oftentimes, their cheap casual games like Animal Crossing or Pokemon outsell nearly every first party game Xbox or Sony has ever released. Tomodachi Life and Pocopia both seem to capture more attention than Xbox or PlayStation this year.

3:34:52It seems to me Nintendo is PlayStation's primary competition and Sony has ceded vast swaths of the audience to them. Is it really wise to double down on the AAA hardcore audience? I don't know how you feel about this, Chris. I mean, it's an interesting conversation to have, Nick, but like Nintendo is different. Nintendo, Nintendo. It's a little different right now with Switch 2 because it's it's getting a lot of ports. And obviously it has a very vibrant indie and a scene. But Nintendo isn't Nintendo without its own games. And I've been making the argument that not only is PlayStation PlayStation without its own games, it is literally right now PlayStation without its own games.

3:35:31I mean, if you count like Death Stranding 2 and Yote, these are great games, but there's no identifiable quarterly or twice quarterly releases from them like there is a Nintendo because Nintendo has to do that. And so I just think it's different. Would Sony want to be in Nintendo's position? I don't think so. Sony makes way more money than Nintendo on a gross revenue basis, like more than twice as much. So I think they're just in different spaces and I'm not diminishing what Nintendo does. Nintendo makes an enormous amount of profit and they drive their own revenue, but it all sinks on and hinges on them.

3:36:07And you can see people's disappointment with the last Nintendo Direct. Obviously, Ocarina of Time Remake is going to be huge. It's going to be bigger than anything PlayStation does this year. Maybe not. Wolverine might be pretty big, actually, but it's like, yeah, that's their bread and butter. Zelda, Mario, Donkey Kong, random sports spinoff. a thing like Animal Crossing or Tamodachi Life, like you were saying, like Kirby, and there's a Yoshi game that just came out. This is their thing. And these games do drive sales. And I think more than that, they drive a sort of stickiness on Switch that I don't think exists on the other platforms by virtue of the fact that the other platform holders don't have to treat their catalogs like that because everyone else sells their games on their platforms and if you're buying something like resident evil on switch two you're buying the worst version of the game yeah and so i don't know if that makes sense to you but that's that's kind of how i see it there is no future for sony and a and double a games i don't know how else to impress this upon you out there yeah i know you hate it i hate it too i love those random games the thing is that you and i we bought them and played them but most people didn't and some people say like oh they took a rider on journey or they took a ride and it's like true like those games were big and they were really important and you could you can have those but you don't need to buy studios and you can have second parties do that and that's where i feel like that's the differentiation between the first and the second party and that's why i keep saying chris sony should just really be making triple a games at this point like there's no other excuse yeah i mean i i feel so many different ways about this because i i i do think Sony should focus on AAA games, but I also feel like AAA doesn't need to be so AAA, I guess.

3:37:56I don't know. I look at Nintendo, and Nintendo's operating on a different wavelength, though, because Nintendo is in Japan. Their studios operate in Japan. It's a very different situation. They have a lot to gain in comparison. And by the way, their one American team released a game no one bought. Which one was that? Metroid, was that Prime or Dragon? Yeah, Metroid Prime 4, I guess, or whatever the fuck it was called. yeah and Metroid Prime 4 was like a very I don't know to me that did not read like a triple A and to be honest like none of their games really read to me even even Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom like those are really really great games I really I really quite like them but um they they're not they're not up to the same I don't want to say quality because it's not necessarily the right right word there's a lot of different ways to measure that but like they feel like really really good double a games like in my opinion you know like all of nintendo stuff and they're operating in japan it's it's like way cheaper to run you're competing in with playstations all in in america now basically like there's yeah playstations operated out of america yeah so it's just that it's a different ball game entirely it makes more sense for nintendo to focus on these smaller games not only because that they not only because they rely so heavily on first party in comparison to a lot of other um or their all their competition but because it's it yields more it yields more rewards to do that because the expense is lower there's a tolerance on switch for and i want to say lesser quality because it's not necessarily the right word although that is true for Pokemon specifically they really shit Pokemon games all the time and and they don't nobody seems to care I think that's a I I don't know I was about to say I think that's a good thing but that's not that's not necessarily a good thing I do think we need generally as a space to be more okay with things that aren't fucking you know triple a hyper real like look at how, oh, it's like a tech demo that you can play.

3:40:07I think we need to get away from that. I think we need to be more okay with just playing a video game that's unapologetically a video game. Not necessarily losing quality or anything, but just not so focused on the stuff that costs hundreds of million dollars to make look perfect. And we need to get back to the joy of play that I think Nintendo is so good at. Those Legends of Zelda games are janky. you know like tamadachi life is the fuck even is that it's yeah it's ridiculous it's a weird one i watched it it's it's a weird game and it's it's got nothing it's arguably got nothing but rough edges but people love it and i think that's actually a great thing about nintendo's audience is that they for all for all the shit talking that we do about like you know their their their platform and their shitty hardware and you know uh their audience understands the joy of software in this space in a way that i don't think that the other two do i feel like we've gotten lost in the sauce of like chasing fidelity and uh that's come to bite us in the ass because it's made everything more expensive and for very little return in comparison so i think everything needs to be shifting i think i do think playstation should focus on triple a but i also think triple a needs to downscale what triple a means there's this um necessary let me find it real quick this is actually an interesting I didn't include it because it's not really an important game but there was a game that came out recently that everyone loved yeah Luna Abyss do you know this game it's a shooter first person shooter I actually want to play it it's from a studio called Quali Labs K-W-A-L-E-E it was in Game Pass and it got really good reviews and people liked it and the game came out and then it's like a double A or even an A first person shooter and then they just shut down it's like it's just the era of a and double a games rose as as tonics to a triple a space that simply couldn't keep up with demand right the great like there were interstitial games for many generations i say this all the time we all know this we grew up in these eras in a time crunched game crunched industry you have to be pretty special like a vampire crawlers or something like that to get people's attention outside of the free-to-play major games the 10-pole games the sports games there's just too much there can it would be people always long for Japan studio especially and I'm like you don't understand like or maybe you do understand you're just refusing to really grapple with it is like there's no future in those games like they it makes no sense for Sony to create pipelines of having to support these games and I'm not even talking about it from a developer perspective but now you have to put PR on them you have to market them you have to manage them now we have to mock review them now we have to do this now we have to do that these are like these things stack up and it never worked for them Sony was putting game after game after game after game out all the way through most of the PS4 era yeah that's why Santa Monica used to produce all the ex-dev stuff from America there's a fucking dude I could rattle off the amount of games that came from there that no one played you know, bound counter spy, you know, Doki Doki universe.

3:43:30Like the, there's a million shadow of the beast. There's a million of them. Like you could just, there's a shit ton and they were coming out of X dev in Japan as well. And some of them out of Britain as well. And some of those worked and some of those didn't, but it's just like, I feel you and I hear you. I think Sony should just let other people make those games. Yeah. And if you really are passionate about a Kenna, which is a double a game i would say maybe they're trying to kind of get into triple a ember labs is obviously a very talented studio it's like go make a relationship with them say like give us the game on playstation we'll cover your marketing costs we'll do the pr representation for you we'll offset some of your costs you don't have to do anything more than that and you certainly don't have to invest in studios that make those games and in terms of being first party it's just it's i hate to say it it's over like open your eyes you didn't play rain right a lot of you didn't play tokyo jungle a lot of you didn't play trash panic right like there's a come on man we all existed in this universe and those games had a chance because there was actually nothing coming out around them now you imagine imagine releasing fucking calling all cars today oh my god yeah so for what how who's gonna play it

3:44:49all right i don't know the diddler wrote in as he sometimes does no no he says hey guys do you think the re engine should get more praise since they use the same engine for every game it's probably why their output is so high what do you think about the re engine you have any thoughts i i think it's a good engine i think the thing with re engine though is that like it's it's become immediately obvious to me when it shows up you know like it's not like surprising anymore yeah you you recognized uh resident evil i want to say yeah yeah it was just like you could tell by the hand or like i could like i've or even before that or like not before that but like just after that like the face on that on that old lady i was like oh this is resident evil and i knew i knew that not only because it's just like okay this engine's really identifiable but also there's context clues also it's like if you were a new ip you wouldn't you wouldn't be it's doing this slow lead up you wouldn't be doing a slow burn like this has to be something that we know um so that kind of helps too but like it's a good engine it's it's clearly very nimble they're clearly able to do a lot very quickly um which is a very very under that's that's a very important feature that an engine needs to kind of have um they're able to iterate quickly it seems so i mean it's a good engine i don't have any any qualms about it it's definitely uh one of the better ones that i've interacted with and i do like that it's again i like that it's its own bespoke thing i like when games feel distinctly themselves um and i think that's going to become less and less common as the industry moves forward yeah i won't presume to speak about this from a technical level because i'm unprepared to do that but i will say the reason i wanted to use this inquiry was i do think capcom deserves a lot of credit for normalizing the use internally of a static engine and this can really pay dividends for your organization if you can figure it out obviously this has tanked others other developers look at bethesda with the creation engine and look at what happened with telltale they got completely fucked by their engine after a while it was over for them um but if you can get it going and you create an engineering pipeline and something this is what ice used to be at not the ice everyone's talking about now but ice at sony uh the initiative for the common engine the idea was to like get something for all of the studios and i think the closest sony has ever gotten to that in recent memory obviously is decima yeah but it can't be understated that if you have an opera if you have a this is what's so impressive about forza tech working with fable is like they've they've broken open this idea of of multi-genreizing these technologies that save some significant money if you don't have to pay 5 % licensing fees or even more and have all these tool sets.

3:47:34And then you have to hire people that specialize in these external tools. On the other hand, Capcom no doubt has RE engine experts. Now they won't be able to go anywhere and use that anywhere else, but they will be incredibly valuable. And this is what's happening with Decima as well. And why people are always like in the Netherlands trying to like get expertise about that. And Kojima's talked about that a little bit. specifically with Death Stranding 2. So just from the capitalistic perspective, like they've done a really nice job of investing in something that really matters. Like it's the different, it could be a differentiator between your game being profitable or not.

3:48:12It's like, oh, our game's looking pretty good. Okay, do we pay our licensing fees and like all of our middleware fees? And it's like, no, not yet. Okay, now how are we looking? Oh, no, the game's in the red now. So Capcom just doesn't have to worry about that. And that's nice. Yeah, that is true. There is a, yeah. I mean they've they've got a really good system going well right that's why I was saying with the creation like the creation engine for instance that thing is fucked them beyond belief like it's horrible the star like starfield it's like it's like this feels like it's ancient this game we even playing it on ps5 yeah so it's not not everything's good and and I was and I brought up telltale is the other example because that's just the most famous example I can think of where that that engine started to degrade to such a degree that it was actually hysterical like what it was doing I think we brought it up on the show somewhat recently that like game of thrones when they released that game it started to just delete people's saves and like do weird shit it was crazy like and that's what i think destroyed them yeah i i think i i feel i'm so weird with with this stuff i like i like the jankiness of like certain i like i like when creation engine does something that makes no sense and feels janky and weird like i just because i like that it's distinct and again i value that more and more as as we default to unreal and i I know CD Projekt Red is ditching Red Engine to go to Unreal for Witcher 4, I believe.

3:49:28And obviously Halo. Although Halo, I think it's like that new Halo game, I think is like running the Halo reach engine underneath a layer of Unreal or something like there's some weird thing going on with that game. But so I don't know, like I know what people mean when they say like creation engine sucks and I and all those things. And that's not necessarily wrong. um i think it's it's a double-edged sword really with with that type of thing like capcom obviously has has it set because they've got a really nimble engine that seems to be easy to work with it seems to be easy to iterate on not all engines are like that obviously uh i think fable like with forts attack undoubtedly it's taken them a long time to figure out how to jerry-rig that that engine to do an rpg and i i would imagine that that's why it's taken so much time not only not only from an engine perspective but just like trying to figure out how to design for a game like that as a studio that's only done you know racing i'm sure that was like a challenging thing the issue that you run into i guess is that like you have all these hyper specialized talents that like really can't go anywhere and so like when so when they're gone it's like where the fuck do they go like they don't have any and and that's kind of the benefit of unreal it's like you can cut your your talent pool kind of widens because now everybody has this industry standard tool that they're familiar with that they have access to at home like i have on like i can open up on real engine right now and tinker around with it which is cool like the accessibility of that it allows people to practice it it widens your talent pool it allows you to get help on things really quickly it allows you to iterate a lot quicker um but you do lose a bespoke kind of quality and so like it depends on what you're what you're what you value i wonder if the benefits of not paying the licensing fees for an engine like is that better than spending like three more years than you thought you would have trying to figure you know what i mean like what's the cost of like if you're building a game for three years and then that that gets three years added on to it because the engine is bespoke and very finicky and very weird like is that better than just paying the licensing fees for an engine that's easier to work with that only allows your game to work have a three-year development cycle you know what i mean yeah i wonder i wonder if that's math that's done yeah because fable's definitely in a predicament i think um as far as like just just from the sheer time that it's taken to develop this game um not to say that it'll be bad or whatever i I think it'll be kind of cool, actually.

3:52:02But that game's got to sell how many copies to make its money back at this point? You figure like, because where's that studio? Where's Playground? They're in the UK. They're in Sheffield, I think. Right. So, like, I mean, that game's been in development for. Well, I guess they also have they also have forts of both random. They've put out forts of stuff. So, like, oh, Levington Spa. That's that's actually like the hotbed of game development in England. So, yeah. Yeah. I mean, that game is undoubtedly very expensive at this point. but right very interested to see how it all works out for them yeah all right final inquiry comes from Herman's March who says Colin in last week's episode you decried anti-wool critics for selling out for little profit incentive but I think you're missing the enormity of the cultural backlash this noise isn't just coming from some niche of YouTube creators from some of the biggest streamers like Asmin or XQC to Jaffe the creator himself even if unwittingly pointed out the obvious trend of male replacement not that female oh female main characters FEMCs I've never seen that in my life are generally a problem when the industry has routinely dismissed or berated their core audience for noticing the pattern anything that looks woke or feminine in a masculine franchise will drive gamers up the wall I'd ask that you keep an open mind and find goodwill critics such as Luke Stevens in my opinion I'm not going to find any critics necessarily because I don't give a shit really about this argument in a deep way it's not to be dismissive as much as it's to say like it's just not something that's naturally interesting to me and so I'm not going to not going to get too crazy about it, but Herman's March, I wanted to be clear about something.

3:53:34I'm not saying that there aren't people out there making an enormous amount of money doing this stuff. What I'm saying is, is that the people you often hear about, like, stop, he's making money off of you, like the normal suspects, those people, I'm like, no, they're not. And Chris and I have talked about this privately and publicly. Chris knows better than anyone what people are making on YouTube. He has a great intuition for it. And he's very experienced on the platform. It's like, yeah, of course, people like Asmongold and all those guys. First of all, I don't really know much about that guy, but I have heard him speak and I'm like, he's eloquent.

3:54:06He has, he can articulate his opinions. You might not agree with what he says or who he, I don't know. I don't know. But it's like, well, I heard him speak for the first time. I'm like, well, he's not nearly as crazy as everyone was saying he is. I can see why a person like that would make a lot of money. That's not the kind of person I'm really talking about. I'm talking about like the bottom of the barrel barnacle, like creatures that are selling out for nothing. And then people, when you bring up their names, everyone's like, you're just making them more famous or you're giving them attention.

3:54:31I'm like, dude, you at a normal office job are making more money than them. So just think about that. Next time you think that everyone that is, in fact, Herman's Marge, I'm kind of making a case for you in that like the grifting angle in quotes, I think is a little disingenuous because grifting for what? You could just go get a job and make the same amount of money. You're not making that much money if you have to crowdfund to your lawsuit. I'm just letting you know. Yeah. I'm not saying lawsuits are cheap. I'm saying people that make, you think Asmongold, if you got sued by someone, would crowdfund it?

3:55:06Right. That to me is the difference. And I'm not trying to make fun of anyone's financial position as much as I'm saying you don't, for all of the Asmongold, I don't even know who XQC is, but like these bigger people that do that sort of thing, it's awesome. There are a lot of grifting no nothings that do it almost for free that's what i'm saying and that's the difference and that's the embarrassment of it in my opinion so that's what i wanted i wanted to say that because i want to be clear about that it's not that of course there are people making a lot of money on this but not the people you think or at least a lot of people they think say it's like these people stream for 100 people and get super chats and do all that kind of stuff you probably make more money at your fucking shift that's all that's all i'm saying yeah i don't know as far as like the enormity of the cultural backlash like i just i don't know dude i i i think i'm at a place and again because i've seen i've watched these spaces for a very very long time like i i've been in the weeds i've been in rooms with some of the people who are huge now and i've seen i've i knew them when they were normal and i've heard the way they talk and i i've been behind closed doors with them and it just kind of like I I just know intuitively that it's just like I just don't buy I just don't buy it like there's there's a lot of a lot of this is performative a lot of it is just for money um and I'm also just kind of quite frankly like not very impressed now seeing like when I was younger I was impressed by people who did well and then I was in rooms with people who did well and I became significantly less impressed like good for Asmund Gold he's making a lot of money and and XUC and you know like fine but it it doesn't in inherently imply a level of validity or it doesn't imply a level of intellect or it doesn't imply a level of knowledge about a subject I've seen how far people can coast with like fucking no knowledge of anything it kind of blows my mind like there was with respect and i want to be respectful here like there's a there's a destiny creator who i've been watching for quite a while his name's astacross he's like he would he would make videos about builds and he's like kind of he knows a lot about destiny and he he was giving a he tweeted something about like how like oh sony laying bungee off has nothing to do with business it's just revenge or whatever and i'm like you must know more so either you're pretending to not know this or you're pretending to not understand like the obvious facts of the industry which is like no one does anything no one no one tanks a company for revenge that they spend billions like it makes no sense like it's intrinsically stupid um or you just straight up don't know what you're talking about and i kind of don't know what what's scarier that's the most disappointing to me it's like either way it's bad because either people are incentivized to pretend they're stupid because it's more interesting to people and that's what gets clicks and that's what people aspire to be now stupid or people are just not knowledgeable about anything that they're talking about and they're finding success in it anyway so like i don't know i a lot of it just kind of i glaze over for a lot of this stuff because it's just like okay you have a problem people are making videos about uh a lot of female characters in video games and people are angry about it it's like okay fine but it doesn't mean it's justifiable anger and it doesn't mean i i care about it yeah well said you know yeah well said yeah i don't it's like i i believe i i'm interested in many things and i think it's interesting enough to like see what people are saying but i think it's just so predictable and wrote that and and the champion many of the champions of it so bankrupt morally intellectually whatever i just i think a lot of these people this especially these smaller people like i again, the Asmongold guy, in hearing him speak, I'm like, you put him in a room with that smash JT guy.

3:59:16And you, is it smash? Is it T? I don't even know which one's the real one now. Yeah, I don't know. I think that might actually be the real name. Like Asmongold is probably 10 times smarter than him. And that's kind of the point I'm making. It's not a defensive person I don't really listen to either it's to say like there are different echelons that become quickly and obviously clear to one that listens or interact and as i did interact with these people and you realize wow these people are dumb as fucking rocks and you're almost giving them too much credit like you think that they're it's like this guy is like the fucking scrooge mcduck in the gold coins i'm like no he's not and that's that's that's the point i was making about very specific people where I'm like, no, you'd be surprised.

4:00:04And I don't, I don't believe. I'm not saying he's making peanuts. I'm saying like, would you sell out to make, would you sell your soul like that to make$100 ,000 a year? I wouldn't. Yeah. Not for nothing. I wouldn't. And I think that's like the max of what he might make. And I'm not saying that that's not a lot of money. I'm saying, look at what the cost is, dude. Look at how much a clown these people look like. Look, look, look at how stupid, like just it's it's hard it's hard for me to respect because as somebody who had the opportunity to sell out for way more and didn't like it's just like i look at it i'm just like what are you doing me too and and as been going and as been like uh i do think he's smarter than smash jt uh i i also like i don't know i've seen a lot of as been over the years and i think he's also kind of like a little bit dim but it's but it's also like he's not borderline disabled that's what feels bad about smash jt it's like i don't really know what i don't know how to feel about it because i think he might be just genuinely retarded uh so like there is like i mean i really mean that like i think there's something like it feels kind of mean but uh it's funny i felt i said that i said that on the show right when i was on his show i felt that way where i'm like i feel like this is kind of like we're not in the same weight class and i'm not trying to be a dickhead to you but it's like you are not on the level no and and there is some but he's so pernicious and aggressive to people and so annoying that like you can't help it you can't help but criticize that level of interactivity that to that like he is so i mean i don't really know what he does on a day-to-day basis but my in my experience with him it's like damn you really i don't know dude like i like it's it's rough you don't meet people like that in your adult life very much like i'm not trying to be an asshole you don't like you don't meet people very much in your adult life you're like holy fuck like rarely if ever if you just if you go outside you don't run into these people so it's just it's it really is fucking fascinating so i don't know what to do about it either sometimes what i'm dealing with it i'm like oh my god like It's worse than I thought, you know, and and so how can one not help it?

4:02:18And some people be like, oh, the attention helps them and all that. I'm like, maybe it does. But I'm actually of the mind that you have to fight for your space. And also. Not all attention is good attention. And if those kinds of appearances like. Follow a person, you do it over and over again, that becomes their whole. Then you become like a little cow. And then you have to ask yourself, is that is that how you want to live your life? because usually people in that experience, that's all they can do. So then that's like a total trap. You know, it's, I'm not trying to count other people's money at the end of the day.

4:02:53I'm just telling you like, you would have to pay me extraordinarily better than that to sell out like that. And like Chris said, like I've also been offered money to sell it. Now, not selling out has been even better for me, but it's like, it didn't have to be that way. It's very easy to take that money. It's just surprising what people will do for so little. Maybe that's what I'm saying. Yeah, that's that's the thing, too. And I really don't care how much money you're making. Like, to me, it's just like it's embarrassing. Either there's either one of two possibilities. Either you are legitimately.

4:03:23Freaky, either you are legitimately deeply perturbed by a trans ghost in the skyline of the of the of the box art for Halo campaign evolved. Either that's genuinely a thing that you're experiencing where you're like experiencing this like psychosis. or you're pretending to for an audience of people that you know are just stupid and are going to eat it up and that's neither of those are like good or interesting or well they're well they're interesting i shouldn't say interesting neither of those are enviable positions to be in in my opinion like either you're insane or you're pretending to be insane for for money and it's like i'm good i've seen a few people say too like well why do you want to you talk bad about some of these audiences like why do you want to alienate people and i'm like generally i don't want to alienate people the thing is is that if you watch that level of content earnestly and you like it and you're into it it is impossible for me to understand how you could possibly listen to this show right yeah like we're not the same we don't have the same like there there can't be crossover it's not it's it's impossible you can't listen to something like this or anything in our network where people that actually play and understand video games talk about video games and then listen to that and then vacillate back and forth and be like oh i don't like the way you treat that person it's like i think you need to i think you're in the wrong place i think you fell here somewhere from the sky like a stork dropped you or something you know because i i don't know so that's why i'm also comfortable doing it's like we're not this we're not going to the same audiences there's no way like the average iq of the people that that listen earnestly it's like the purple box art like that kind of shit that's like we're talking about in the 80s for your iq at the most and that to me is that's like you're like an elementary school student or something.

4:05:10It's self. Yeah. It's like self evident in a lot of ways that it's the audience overlap is not there. That's why I like, I'm okay with like alienating certain people because I feel like the old, it's kind of one of those things where it's just like, I've said this before. A lot of people are really eager to squeeze into shoes that don't fit them. Hmm. Right. Where if I'm talking, if I'm talking about people who are like freaking out a bit, like actually freaking out about like the the bisexual lighting in halo or whatever and people are offended by that i'm only left to assume that that's your you consider yourself one of those people in which case you're not watching me anyway so like i just i i can't care there's enough people and there's enough there's plenty of audiences yeah exactly that's exactly right all right chris that's all we have show's over dustin don't ever come back we were fine without you no i can't we miss you dustin yeah and we'll have you back whenever you're ready but uh chris this was fun it was good to talk to you and good to see you as always any uh any closing comments before we go no man what's what's what's today looking like uh it's thursday i feel like i definitely have stuff to do i have to check my calendar i haven't i haven't looked at it in a while you still have your calendar on your fridge yeah i have a i have like a dryer well not a dry erase i have like a liquid chalk kind of uh clear calendar that i just because I hate having to replace.

4:06:31Yeah, I understand. It's like modular. But I've been kind of like lazy with like keeping it updated. So I've tried in the last couple of days, but I've got a busy week. I know VidCon is happening. Oh, I don't know if I'll go. I don't think I'm going to go, but like I think people are going to be in town and around. So I'll probably be making the rounds, seeing some people over the course of the next week or two. but outside of that it's more more crazy taxi i don't know crazy cool crazy taxi make some crazy money don't mind if i do love it um yeah for me i'm just gonna i don't know maybe it's 89 degrees that's hot man i'm gonna maybe maybe walk the dogs or something and i gotta work out and gotta get back to pragmata and continue taking my notes prepare for the spoiler cast tomorrow the united The day this goes live on Patreon, the U.S.

4:07:23plays its second World Cup game. So I'm also looking forward to that, seeing what that's all about. And yeah, pretty much that's it. And Father's Day this weekend as well. So happy Father's Day to everyone out there, all the fathers. To Dustin. To Dustin especially, yes, of course. All right, Chris. Well, good to see you. Appreciate you. See you next week. And we'll see everyone out there next week as well. Thank you for your love, kindness, support of all things we do here. Patreon.com slash LastDayMedia and LastDayMedia.store for merch. We'll see you next time. Until then, goodbye. Take care, guys.

4:07:52sacred 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 firman the show is produced by executive producer dustin firman all of last stands the 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.

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