#417 | It's Not Far Down to Paradise

1:10:33I want to express my premature or premature disappointment in Rockstar. Yes, they have everything to lose with a disc, but I argue that I do not care. It is not our fault they spend so much money on making it. I reasonably expected a perfect game and release, and I'm already disappointed. Maybe they will do a physical release later, but it already took the wind out of my sails a little. Thanks for teaching me how to wipe, as always. Zeron21, you're very welcome. Thank you for writing in. I understand their perspective. I just think what I would have done is said, like we're not doing a physical version we'll do one later that's like all i would have said instead of doing this patronizing like here's a case and again like you you like this and that's cool but like well it's not even that i like it it's just like it it it is convenient for me in a way that it's convenient for probably like nobody else right right and i understand that i'm a very weird use case in this in this situation they should just like i i wish they were just more up front because i feel like i i understand people are like a lot of people think gets to control use sales.

1:11:32I'm like, I don't. Maybe I don't know about that. Like, I think that that's a consideration with every game they release. Why would that be an especially acute consideration with Grand Theft Auto, which is probably going to be not resold per capita the way other games are resold because it's going to be a huge game that people are going to hold on to? It's like that to me, I don't see how that calculates any more important here. That to me just doesn't make any sense. I really think that it's two things, although people think it's even other things. One is that I think they're afraid it's going to leak.

1:12:03And I would say that there is a 100 % chance that the discs would walk off the floor. As I noted on Twitter when I just was thinking about it, I'm like, you have to understand the financial incentive is going to be huge. People will probably pay walk off the floor. You have an early copy of Grand Theft Auto, like a month early, three weeks early, and you're going to get fucking copyright struck up the wazoo and probably sued. But if you're if you're like what is that worth tens of thousands of dollars probably you don't think people are gonna do that so and then people say like well they can lock it and i'm like so you want the single player game to be always online so like your solution to the the disc like the solution to that is to do what the other thing that everyone hates yeah like it's i don't understand that either um that doesn't make any sense so i think a lot of it has to do with I know Grand Theft Auto has leaked or Grand Theft Auto 6 has leaked in different ways, but actually it really hasn't.

1:13:06Considering the amount of the sheer number of people who have had access to this game, thousands of people have worked on it over the years. I would say it's probably gotten in and like think about the companies that are licensing, the people that are in the meetings, the all you're talking about probably 10 ,000 people exposed to this product in some meaningful way that is not public right and we don't we don't know almost nothing about it really i mean at the end of the day and i think that they look at it and say like it would be a real fucking shame if uh three weeks or 10 days before the game comes out shit start popping up the only way we can control that is if we literally give no one access to it except for through the PSN and the Xbox store at the time of release.

1:13:51And so they're doing that. I wonder there is a preload that begins September 12th. And my assumption is, is that that's when reviewers will get access to it. And that's when I think they can kind of withstand more of the spoiler stuff that's going to happen. You know this because we got Red Dead 2 when we still got games early. Like Rockstar is still the only. Now, I know IGN and Kind of Funny probably signed company wide NDAs for us at times. But Rockstar is the only company I ever dealt with that made you sign an NDA if you wanted access to the game. Yeah. And so they're dead ass serious about it.

1:14:19I don't think people understand like that. As I noted when I was in journalism, when Grand Theft Auto four came out, instead of mailing copies to reviewers, they sent people on the plane to hand deliver them. Because they were afraid they would get stolen. Yeah. And they probably would have if people knew what they were at that time. So. It's really vital that like people understand that level of it. It's not just like this little thing to them. and it's not just a little thing it's it could affect no the perception of the game in a major way i i again i just don't understand why they're like and by the way chris i think they could just say that we believe you don't want to implicate people right but like it's like putting grand off the auto six on a disc before it's out is a security concern for us sure and we are taking your experience seriously so our promise to you is like q1 we're publishing discs and if you want to wait until then wait but like for the sanctity of the experience and the game we're doing it digital only at first and that's why i think that they could just have done that instead they wanted to have their cake and eat it too and by the way people buy the millions are going to let them have their cake and eat it too i bet you they sell fucking what five million copies of that fucking case so yeah at launch most people are gonna buy it digitally the other thing that the thing too is that Take-Two itself says that only 3 % of its income, its gross income, comes from physical goods.

1:15:47So they don't give a shit. As well. It's also worth noting that.

1:15:54The funny thing is that this is the funny thing, Chris. The cost of manufacture, to put discs in the case is like pennies per game. They're making the case. They've done all of that and they're shipping it. which is the major cost. If I can get, if I can publish a thousand copies of a PS4 game or a PS5 game, which I can for under$10 a unit box sealed and shipped, right? What do you think Rockstar can do? Right? No. Yeah, exactly. Right. The thing too about that is that like, um, I want, cause the shipping is usually determined by weight, right? Like the pricing of, of shipping is usually weight.

1:16:40um i know that because like that's why that's why snapple went to plastic instead of glass so do you like what what is a disc way relative to the case that would make it bet you know what i mean like like how much money they're saving are they saving by shipping a case without a disc yeah and people still being interested in it yeah like i don't know it's it's just weird it's weird i trivial i just think that that from that perspective they could just handle that way better um oh yes i think they i do think though that they are they it's two things i mean it's the unfortunate reality is that it would probably materially affect them at launch i don't think it would materially affect them overall because they're not going to drop the price of the game and then when the when that copy of the game comes out people will buy it but they probably won that full burst at launch so they can release their press release of x amount million numbers sold in 24 hours which they're going to do or pre-order numbers which they're going to do and the other fact is that though there's no disc in the case i bet you nine out of ten physical copy people are still going to buy it so yeah 100 so there's that let's talk a little bit about the uh the price a very special boy wrote in said hi colin and chris what are all these people complaining about gta 6 is one of the most expensive games ever produced Do gamers have absolutely no concept of economics?

1:18:05No. They don't. But GTA 6 is not. Oh, you said it right. GTA 6 is the most expensive game I've ever produced. I mean, by a mile. I would be, I guess. Star Citizen is probably number two. Maybe if you took the cumulative development of a game like. World of Warcraft or Minecraft. or something maybe or like some of these gotcha games that have been around for a while or whatever but like yeah you're talking about a number that is unmet by any product and yeah and $80 is maybe the game fucking sucks dude I mean I have no idea but like you would imagine based on what I think it is that$80 is a steal um I think they still could have gone 70 I think 60 was a pipe dream.

1:18:57I think if you're complaining about it, I think if the difference, someone wrote in about this, actually, and you don't say it to be mean, but it's true. It's like if the difference between a 70 and 80 dollar game is breaking the bank for you, you probably just shouldn't buy the game. And that to me, I think, is true. Yeah, that is true. It's just smart. It's just smart. If that$10 is really everything to you, then just keep all 70 or 80 of it, in my opinion, and wait for a discount or buy a different game. This to me, I will say, though, Chris, I've tried to read people's responses and see how people feel.

1:19:33I don't know. People are not too aghast by the$80 price point. I think mostly because they're not the one to breach it. Nintendo really was the one to do it. Yeah, Mario Kart did it. Right. With which, by the way,$80 for Mario Kart. Like, God bless Mario Kart. That's kind of wild. But like a game's value is like, I don't know. People value games so differently. Like I would argue I've gotten well over a hundred dollars in value from most of the games that I love, you know, like, so like it really is just like Red Dead 2. I've gotten way more than a hundred dollars in value and I got that for free for us.

1:20:07But like I would, well, I did buy it on Xbox as well to just to buy it. But yeah, I don't know. I just feel like I get why people are hesitant because a money's exceptionally tight now. Everything is going up in price. there's a feeling generally that for a while now in this industry, we've been getting ripped off, whether that's valid or not. In some cases it is. In some cases it isn't. There have been games sold under false pretenses that people never got refunds for. There are games that have been dissected and cut apart and sold piecemeal for hyperinflated prices. Like that's, that is something that is real.

1:20:46MTX is kind of everywhere. So like I I get the feeling of being on guard and be being like, oh, man, I don't want to, you know, feeling like everything's a rip off. But I don't know. Rockstar, in my opinion. And by the way, I'm not even necessarily the biggest fan of everything Rockstar's ever made. but like as of late i feel like they've earned some level of i don't want to say faith necessarily but i don't know what what other word would would work best but like they've earned some level of good faith on the players end to understand that they're going to deliver something that's definitely at least worth the price of a full game i i just don't see like after red dead 2 and GTA 5 like I didn't gel well with GTA 5 to be honest but like GTA 4 I I think it's like exceptionally like I think it's I think it's so good I'm underrated in my opinion yeah people don't talk about it as much as they they talk about even Vice City and San Andreas which are both awesome games but yeah I think I think it's the best one arguably I think four is easy like by a mile I think it's easily the best one but I mean that's subjective or whatever but like you know GTA 4 is fantastic GTA 5 is like a not to my taste but it's a phenomenon Red Dead 2 is fucking exceptional um I just don't have a lot of doubt like they've earned enough goodwill for me to be like yeah I'll pay 80 bucks or I'll pay 100 bucks for whatever it is you're cooking now it could suck that's very possible and then you know we'll we'll get to we'll cross that bridge when we come to it if it so happens to be that way.

1:22:28But I just think people are on guard because they think a lot of other companies are going to try to do this shit. And by the way, let them try. Let them try. Let Ubisoft charge$100 for what is essentially the base version of fucking Star Wars Outlaws 2. Let's see how well that goes. I just don't think other people are going to get away with it to the same degree because I don't think there's the same level of pedigree. I don't think there's the same level of goodwill. I don't think there's the same level of interest, quite frankly. Yeah. So I'm okay with it, really. On that note, Shadi Haddad wrote into us and said, Guys, this feels like it could be a turning point.

1:23:07GTA 6's$80 price tag is certainly going to give clearance for$80 to be the new norm due to market conditions. Rockstar locking out key features behind the$100 deluxe edition, knowing that most will pay the extra$20 for a more complete experience, may provide the path for publishers to get better ROI on game development costs, with premium editions being the more complete versions of games. This is what you were saying earlier. Not only that, but the boldness of shipping digitally only may only may also increase the trend of making physical games ship with a code as the new standard. Rockstar is big enough to lead the charge on industry wide changes.

1:23:35Who else do you see falling suit by the time PS6 launches at the end of 2027, presumably as a digital console? It's important to remember PS6 will launch as a natively digital console, which PS5 is too. There will be a disk drive for it. I mean, obviously. So I want to I want to be clear like and listen, the digital game. I mean, come on. I'm so sick of having the physical versus digital games thing. It's like, we all know where this is going. I just don't think they're ever going to throw the physical people away. I just don't think it's going to be an X, an expectation anymore that you're going to get what you want necessarily anymore.

1:24:05It'll be like a boutique, like enthusiast kind of aspect to the hobby. I think it's the same way that vinyls, like vinyls are vinyls are still huge and they're still big, but they're not the default medium anymore. And so like now you're going to have to, you know, it's a lot more convenient for most people to listen to music on streaming or download an MP3 or whatever. but there's always going to be a market for people to have their own like record tables and you know their own sound systems and their hi-fives and and their physical uh records like that's that's always going to be if it's true for music today then it's certainly going to be true for video games for a long time so no i think people should stop worrying about not being able to like you'll have your disk drives yeah you'll have to buy them as you do now um but yeah i just don't he's not that's not the point of his message i just wanted to note that like don't worry about that i agree with chris it's like that that it will be a digital console but so too is the ps5 and you still have the option of putting a disc drive in it but to chris's point uh shoddy i i think you are way too optimistic about others following suit on this right now i think there could be a generational push was it called duty that was the first game that charged 60 dollars i don't back in the day i'll look it up um it's got to be a big player it already has been with Mario Kart we saw that the Outer Worlds 2 attempted it and then walked it back because this is exactly what would happen to most games that tried it right now which is that like there's no way I'm paying$80 for that game just on principle again I don't think it's even the$10 difference being that much meaning having meaning to people as much as it's the principle do you see an answer uh it says there's no there's no um single first one but Call of Duty 2 is is one of them right and think and madden oh six yeah so it was 360 games 50 yeah yeah 360 basically right so 49 to 59 right okay so yeah you need some either generational like the the generational thing is going to even be tough because what i assuming most games are going to be ps5 ps6 cross-gen it's like are you going to just charge ten dollars more for the ps6 version like i don't think you can get away with that either there is this this lack of flexibility and i think the base player's mind about about economics this is what was being asked about a very special boy earlier but like people have no concept of economics and the answer is like no not really but I also do agree that like is it really their problem if they're the market then you kind of have to learn to meet them or you're just not going to be able to sell anything and so that's not really their problem that's the provider's problem and what Grand Theft Auto gets away with what Mario Kart got away with is not what most games are going to get away with maybe there would be some Sony property that can get away with it but I'm not even sure any Sony game would get away with it even if even if it was like something like when God of War comes out next year or Wolverine later this year we already know what Wolverine costs but it's like they're not going to charge $80 for those games I don't think people are going to have the tolerance for that but eventually what you might have to do is just make everything a certain you know in other words not everything but like a triple the triple a baseline price raises like it did during that 360 era and you create a new high-end baseline and then if you want to surpass that then like you do these special editions that get you a hundred dollars if that's what you want to do um but i'm not worried about people following suit in the short to midterm because i again i just i think people will continue to explore the scale and eighty dollars is still going to be a bridge too far i i think i would just love to know what they think they could have gotten away with and and well we'll get to this point next and we'll talk next about this this uh ultimate edition that we brought up Alabama Arkansas wrote in and said hey CDC we finally can put the GTA 6 price speculation to rest I would argue it is a hundred dollar game since the ultimate edition has lots of content you won't be able to access without it also lots of people want to experience this game in its entirety and not miss out on any content how do you guys feel about the price will you be picking up the hundred dollar ultimate edition so we are you and I already said that we will get the hundred dollar ultimate edition I suspect Dustin will as well what I'm curious about is what the split cumulatively with the fan base is going to be because I bet you it will probably won't be half but it will be a lot of people are going to get that$100 version.

1:28:02They're going to make the budget of a normal AAA game just in probably that extra increase of$20. So what we'll have to do when they start releasing, they'll probably be like Grand Theft Auto sells blah, makes X in however many days. And then we'll have to start doing the math and we probably won't have all the data to even be able to do it effectively. We might be able to figure out how, And also, what's Sony's deal with them?

1:28:32Yeah. Is it a marketing deal that Sony paid for? Is Sony getting access to GTA 6 in a special way for a better split on the PlayStation store? Like, there's all these different options. I think people assume that it's like either lump sum or, you know, these period payments of X and Y and Z as you go further and further into the marketing beats and you kind of take that off of Rockstar's books in exchange for access to this world changing game. But I wonder if it's something even more simple. Like when we sell a game, when we sell GTA, we get 85 percent. Or something like that. Yeah. Sony still wins in a major way, in every way.

1:29:14I don't know. I'm always curious. it's so tight-lipped about that reasonably so about that what that shit is how that works yeah i mean they probably have some some deal in play i mean dude like didn't they update the ps app logo to be gta or something like i saw i didn't i didn't fact check any of this but i saw like a bunch of um i think it has its own bespoke animation on the uh on the ps5 home page i also saw these these things could be fake no i i saw that too i didn't i didn't notice that well my PlayStation was sleeping, so I don't even know. But yeah, if you apparently go to the storefront, there's like a special or with the welcome screen, I guess there's like a special animation with the Roman numeral six and all the rest.

1:29:55And yeah, my app hasn't updated yet, but I actually think I have to manually update my apps. So. Oh, yeah, I should try to see if I can do that. And I can verify right now. Yeah, but I think they clearly have something. A big thing for them, though, is that like if they have that deal, like like my my curiosity is. Is the marketing deal like like let's say maybe the split for the game is normal but like the mtx split like the shark cards i wonder if because they know now that it's so huge i wonder if they're like listen we want we want like 90 or like like some crazy deal on the the mtx the little the chip damage like i that could be part of it too like they definitely have some kind of special deal like if they have this own co-written write-up on the playstation blog if they have like this bespoke animation on the playstation home that plays best on ps5 like there's undoubtedly some kind of deal in place um and rockstar has the leverage to do it i think granted sony also has leverage because there's the only real place for them to go if they're not going to go to pc um because xbox is kind of floundering so like they both have some leverage but i think there's got to be some some special deal in place yeah i'll be i'd be very curious to know about that because that's such a huge huge huge i don't i think there was i mean if you're a rock star you're not going to go with xbox at this point they they what were with xbox during the gta 4 era that worked out really well for them remember remember the tattoo yeah gta gta yeah what was that more yeah i want to say fill more but that's not right peter more peter is it peter more yeah peter more because That was when he was moving around.

1:31:34You know, he was moving between these companies. Yeah. Ridiculous. And that was huge. I mean, and they had Ballad of Gay Tony and Lost in the Damned exclusive 360. And that worked out awesome for them. Yeah, I think they ran better, too. Like, it was a good deal. It was a good situation. They had got Ballad of Gay Tony so good. But Sony came back in with five, as you remember, and they were there. And then the PS4 had like the PS4 GTA version. And then and I so I think that the best would have been at best it would have been neutral. But at most, Sony wanted to get in bed with them. But I'm wondering when you wonder what the price is, too, about like it's a huge thing.

1:32:11And yet because your competition seems so disabled, was it even worth it? You'll have to see it play out because it might have just been that your console would have been the default place for this thing, really, for most people. Anyway, the big thing I want to see and they haven't said anything about this yet. And I wonder if they will. and maybe it's a lot of it has to do with pricing uncertainty and all the rest is like, will there be a bundle? Because that to me is like the big thing for Sony. But you think you would want to say that. You can't say it too soon. But then like you have pre-orders.

1:32:41People are kind of pre-ordering and then, but I guess they wouldn't pre-order if they didn't have the console. So it kind of does all work out now that I'm talking through it. So you could announce that later, September or something. And you also don't want to get in the way of Wolverine. So maybe even after that. But that's a big thing. I wonder if because if there's a PS5, imagine a subsidized copy of Grand Theft Auto 6, basically, and a new PS, like you basically get the game for free. That would be huge. That would also be, although like, man, are they even, I guess it's just a bundle. It's not like a special edition console or anything.

1:33:16Yeah, nothing. Like, I'm not even saying anything. Yeah, just like something like, you know, we always make fun of it. They'll just put a new sleeve. they'll have like they'll have their workers open the boxes and put a slip in with the code they'll put on a new sleeve and they'll sell it as the grand theft auto version what a bummer man uh we used to have it so good the um yeah i mean that could that could be huge i i think i don't know do they need it and also like is is hardware would be smart i don't know i i'm I would love to be a fly on the wall for these conversations. Like, like what are they getting?

1:33:53Like you said, like PlayStation would have been the default place anyway. So like they could have theoretically did a Microsoft deal and of no detriment to them really at all. I don't know, man. Yeah, it must, it must significantly allay some costs for, for Mike for Rockstar. Cause as we were saying, like leading up to things as we, we prognosticated for years about this now is I was like, if our Rockstar, kind of just leverage both sides and just be like you can both do whatever you want like yeah you can both have bundles you can both like have these like we'll write things on both your websites well like i'm like i don't we don't give a fuck you know but i think so i think sony probably came to them i'm like we'll take a major portion of like well don't even worry about marketing the game that's hundreds of millions of dollars you know uh now it's probably not quite that straightforward but sure all right what else here um home cooked meals wrote in about something interesting here says hi colin and chris with all the hoopla around gta 6 pre-orders i noticed the playstation store faq says gta 6 is a single player experience in quotes when asked about multiplayer which i assume is rockstar approved language so it's not rockstar approved i mean rockstar is putting that stuff in themselves so what do you think that means for the next gta online is online just coming later as a free update to gta 6 like it did with gta 5 or could rockstar treat it more like its own standalone thing this time and since it launches later will that become a second release date bomb that other publishers have to get out of the way of after already avoiding gta 6 itself i went back and looked gta online released a few weeks later i think on g during gta 5 and i think it took a few months for red dead 2 to come online i think they do that intentionally it might be that things are not ready but i think they do that intentionally to let people play the game and then you and you're not distracted by because i always do find that peculiar to each their own because i think micah does this shit it's like you buy call of duty and then you don't even play the campaign now that that's cool but it's like it's like take a moment take a moment yeah smell the roses you know and and get acclimated to the world i think that's going to be especially important here so i assume they'll just have something to say about that later and my assumption is you'll know before the game comes out what they're going to do with gta online because it is a a massive component of what they're what they're going to be doing but uh the single player stuff i i they are leaning into it being single player which is exciting because it goes to show you like yeah we're getting back to our roots and chris you and I have lamented this we were just talking about these GTA 4s like you got to have a pipeline for single player content like you got to keep that coming there's really no excuse for that I understand GTA 5 GTA 5 GTA online became this runaway train but man some of the best stuff in GTA 4 was from the expansions and to keep that world alive I really feel like they're going to try to thread the needle this time which is very exciting from my perspective so yeah what do you what do you think about this what do you think is gonna happen with GTA online yeah I mean I see no reason to assume that it'll be um too different of a cadence that they've had with GTA online and red dead online previously I do think I I could be wrong I feel like they did eventually decouple GTA online from GTA 5 like I feel like you can just download GTA online now it didn't used to be that yeah yeah um and like I said the Xbox packaging it seems like they're going to do the same thing with this yeah so i think um i think it could be a standalone thing that maybe you get access to if you own like i don't really know how they're going to do it it it's i'm curious about it but it's definitely going to come later it's definitely going to come and it's definitely going to be huge um i would argue it's going to be way way more supported than red dead online red dead online's always been kind of like a kind of like an afterthought which by the way is not even like a bad thing it's just like it's it's how multiplayer used to be and it's all Red Dead really demands in comparison given the success rate but like I do I wonder how long it'll be because I don't think it'll be weeks but I also don't think it'll be months seems too long like I don't it's such a big big big thing and it will be another splash for people to have to worry about for sure especially in live service if you've got like a multiplayer game coming out at some point after GTA 6 and you thought you avoided it.

1:38:08Imagine it comes out in February. Yeah. Oh, my God. That would be I wonder if they'll try to do it in time for like Christmas break. That would be kind of cool. That would be smart. Be like everyone's off. You're all from school. You're hanging out with your family. Go go dick around with this thing. But I don't know. You could look at it. I mean, if you want to be pessimistic, you could look at it and say like it's not ready. I will say I don't know if that's true, though and i will say that i believe i should have said this earlier that i believe another reason they're not putting the game on disc i think the leaks are sub you know are adequate but like they don't really have to commit to a 1.0 version until very late like really late they're allowed they're allowing pre-orders november 12th i think the game comes out november 19th you don't really even have to certify it until probably well you're going to pass certification you can patch it endlessly and not release the packages i guess but like they'll probably be working on the game in a major way i mean they're going to be be working on it through launch but what i'm saying is like they're not ready to commit to anything and so you could look at it through that lens too that like it's the shit or get off the pot moment it's probably very stressful there right now i would assume so yeah i don't know man we'll see what goes on with that and finally landon keith wrote in and said hello my crash out king colin and christoph raimundo gunsmith higgins the price of gta announced today i was thinking about people's expectations for this game, especially with releasing single player only first, as has been done in previous Rockstar releases.

1:39:35How annoying and loud is discourse going to be at launch? There exists an entire generation who only know GTA 5 and GTA roleplay servers that took off in the early 2020s. So I have to imagine that expectations, though already high because Rockstar is high quality, are above and beyond due to the interactivity of these modded RP servers going in most buildings, being full on cops, convenience store clerks, etc. A lot of these people don't know what GTA actually is. So while we should expect high quality from Rockstar, I think a lot of people are going to be unaware of what they will be getting.

1:40:02Thoughts, gentlemen, appreciate you guys greatly. Much love from Portland, Oregon, Warzone. Thank you for writing in. This is an interesting component of it, but I think you're kind of overestimating people's ignorance in a way. I think people understand that these things sprout off of a different product and that if you're restarting the product, you start from its core. I think the bigger problem with the response to it is not going to be from these people. It's just going to be from everyone. You have to understand that like it's going to be insufferable. For reasons that you can't even comprehend human.

1:40:34What did Nikola Tesla say? Like man-made horrors beyond your comprehension. Yeah. It's going to be bad. People are going to be annoying as fuck. But I will say this. It is one of those. I don't like the nitpicky shit. Remember people were like there was a video going around of First Light where they were on like a car sequence and they were just running into the guy and he wasn't responding like i'm like all right dude it's like an on rails asks you're going from point a to point b but with this game i feel like you should kind of tear it apart and try to find the seams and see what works and what doesn't like it's uh the most ambitious and most expensive gaming product of all time so people should be a little annoying i think about it and i'll be very interested to see how much it stands up to scrutiny and i think that's going to be the biggest thing that they have to solve for the scrutiny over the game is going to be enormous yeah oh my god i'll be looking yeah i'll be i'll be interested to see like just sticking around with it and seeing like red dead 2 set a very high expectation i think for people's for what they like the level of ridiculous immersion in the game and like the small things and that's really impressive in that game i think when you're in an urban setting with lots more people it's going to be much more challenging to keep that up and people will find what's wrong with it no no doubt and again i also believe that's why they're not putting it on pc there's really no yeah like it's cool to have a console experience but they want the locked experience they don't want you fucking with it yeah no easily yeah no way and you know that they're serious about that because they're sacrificing a lot of money at launch for that they would sell enormous numbers of millions of copies on on pc at launch so they know what they're doing all this is a very controlled and orchestrated thing in a way that games typically aren't treated because there's no reason to treat a hundred million dollar game like that or a 50 million dollar game like that or even a two or three hundred million dollar game you want to take care of it and treat it well but you don't need to care for it to this level but man they don't want you to see it yeah all right so that's the big news go pre-order gta if you want i have no idea why you'd pre-order a digital game but you can do that everyone who pre-orders the game right before it comes out will get also i think it's in the yeah you get like oh vintage vice city pack a collection of items that flash back to when the neon burn brightest so we will all go back what is it leonida is that what it's called am i saying that right I think so, yeah.

1:43:12November 19th, pre-order, or I'm sorry, pre-loading begins November 12th. Pre-loading begins November 12th for the codes in the box as well. So if you buy one of those, open up Surprise. It's an alphanumeric code, and you're going to put it in the PSN, and it's going to be very exciting for you. I will pre-order it when the pre-loading begins. Yeah. Let's get away from pre-ordering digital games. dude i saw for call of duty now i don't know of how accurate this is because there's probably a bunch of things feeding through it but for call duty modern warfare 4 it said there were like 200 pre-orders on my on my friend's list i'm like really what are we doing what are we doing guys just fucking buy it right before it comes out i i used to pre-order games so i understand that but it was physical games like your game stop or your eb would get x amount of copies of games especially for the obscure fucking japanese bullshit i was buying you know yeah like they're probably the only copy of fucking tales of eternia they would get you know um the only but now it's like pre-orders yeah it's insane to do it now like it makes it like i used to when i pre-ordered games it was it was because i wanted a physical copy to make sure i had or i think like early on when i was going all digital i would pre-order out of out of a force of habit sometimes i think for the first couple years it's like oh yeah i want this game i'll pre-order it because that's what we did and then i thought like eh there's no real reason to do this huh there really is now it's just like if i pre-order now it's usually like the day before the game comes out so i'm basically just buying it so i don't have to deal with it later and there's always like usually some like bits or bobble you know some pre-order bonus or whatever that comes along with it that i don't normally care about but i'm like yeah it's like two hours before it goes live i'll just buy it now and yeah you get the same bonus and the same perk typically they typically don't take those perks down until the game actually launches so like yeah you give them the money six months in advance or six hours in advance the only the only difference is are the early access stuff that i will go if i i think i've only gotten got once or twice i guess it's twice and you do that right before the early access begins yeah i just don't want to send them i mean it's just it's just me but i i don't want to send them the data that that this is like yeah no i agree yeah i don't i don't i just don't i don't i don't get it i don't understand the rush to do that at all especially and people have been bringing this up and i think it's totally a valid point it's like psn's a little dodgy right now why don't you that's you know why don't you wait let's see what happens oh man what are the odds of this thing crashes you know like it's just like this did you think it crashed the psa do you think maybe i mean dude just from a security point of view like i hope sony understands like the time to fuck with them would be then and it could really fuck their shit up bad so hopefully hopefully xbox is on guard for that too i mean it's just i don't know what you would do ddosing and doing all this thing to fucking clog up because it's all digital people are all going to be downloading the package the package is going to be hundreds of gigabytes you know it's it is a i wonder chris it's interesting remember they used to tell the stories about like dragon quest in japan about how like they had to stop releasing dragon quest on weekdays because like people would skip school so that's why dragon quest games come out on sundays or like when uh space majors came out they were running out of like five yen coins and shit like that i wonder if in here in the states and another western europe other places with like mature internet infrastructure if like it'll be like 15 of american bandwidth today was downloading grand theft auto 6 kind of thing you know more like some substantial thing.

1:46:52I think that that would be an interesting little news story. That would be cool. That would actually be an interesting PR thing for them to seed. Look how big we are. You know. It's exciting, man. It's it is very exciting. It's it's the beginning. No early access either, which I'm not surprised by just based on their like the secrecy, although that would be like the way you want to get you want to get got. Yeah,$100 thing give you three days early access um then you'll really fucking get people but they're not doing it i give them credit for that could be a sign that they're coming close to the wire though with this thing as well that is true it's crazy to me that they're not doing it because like that's a completely sound strategy i think if you've got something cool or interesting like there's a lot of games that i'm surprised aren't aren't doing it or that haven't done it yeah me too you could have easily you could have got me yeah and you just didn't if basically any game that I truly care about I'll do it at this point yeah like if Mega Man 12 or the new Castlevania game or whatever if they had I'd be like yeah right I mean I love it I love it enough to do that what did I get got with I got got with Saros and I think there was something else but I don't remember what it was and I was happy with both of those things I was like yeah it's fine yeah I'm fine with this I don't feel like I got abused and used in any way if Control I don't know if Control Resonance doing it but that'll get me if they if they had like a if they had a three-day early access thing i would i would have done that let me see maybe they do yeah control 48 hour early access it's oh it's exclusive to ps5 i remember reading that like that it's actually only on ps5 that you can do that which is sony so shady that is crazy all right next piece of news is uh not good news although it's not surprising news.

1:48:45We knew this was happening and it seemed like it was going to happen this week. So Sony released a statement from SonyInteractive.com. So you know it's serious. This is on PlayStation blog. It says an update from PlayStation Studios. And I like the URL, by the way. It says an update from PlayStation Studios too because there was another update from PlayStation Studios at some point. It says below is an internal email from Herman Hulse, CEO of the studio business group Sony Interactive Entertainment distributed today to SIE employees. He writes,

1:49:42Over the past several months, together with Bungie leadership, we reviewed the studio's long-term direction, development priorities, resource needs, and role within our broader portfolio strategy. We explored multiple alternatives before concluding that a reduction was necessary to align the studio's resources with its current priorities and long-term goals. As Bungie recently shared in its Destiny 2 update, the studio has begun a new journey following the release of the game's final live service content update. What Bungie has accomplished with Destiny over the past decade has been truly remarkable.

1:50:07The franchise has left a lasting mark on players and the industry, and everyone who contributed to its success should be proud of what they helped create. Marathon remains an important part of our portfolio, and we will continue to support the team as they build on a strong foundation established in seasons one and two, and as they work on incubation efforts for future projects. While it's too early to discuss, we are encouraged by the creativity and opportunities that lie ahead. Our immediate priority is supporting affected employees through this transition. We are providing transition support and, where possible, working to identify opportunities across SIE and our global network of studios.

1:50:37I want to sincerely thank every affected employee for their work, their hard work, creativity and contributions to Bungie, SIE and the broader gaming community. I know today's news is deeply difficult, not only for those leaving, but for those colleagues and friends that remain. Please take the time you need to process the news and support one another. Thank you for your resilience and continued support during this difficult time. So that's that. They don't share numbers, but the word is it's hundreds of people. I would assume it's got to be at least half the staff, right? Or if not more. Yeah, I would assume.

1:51:06so a huge bloodletting not a massive surprise considering um yeah just considering the situation that they were in yeah sam hammond wrote in and said colin and chris my lords with the recently announced bungie layoffs what do you think this means for the future of marathon and bungie as a company my understanding is that the layoffs were primarily focused on the destiny side of the studio but i'm sure it doesn't bode well for overall morale just recently they removed Marathon's de facto solo PVE mode, which many players seem to genuinely enjoy, and the community responses have been overwhelmingly negative.

1:51:39Feels like the studio has been stumbling from one controversy to the next. As someone who genuinely loves Bungie and has been having a great time with Marathon, it's a bummer. What do you think is actually going on behind the scenes? Is this the beginning of the end? You'll get deeply into this next week with your Sacred Symbols Plus episode, but yeah, let's begin to talk about it now. What are your thoughts here about the layoffs and what the future might hold for this team that you love as well? Yeah, I mean, unfortunate, not surprising. like you said this has been rumored for a while and and ostensibly i basically confirmed um for a while now i was just wondering when it was going to happen and and uh what the exact head count would be what the uh what teams would be affected i mean we obviously would be the destiny team but like how much of the marathon team is affected i'm curious about that uh yeah man it's it's a bummer it's a bummer especially because destiny 2 is in like the best place it's been in a while like i think it's i think it's regularly got 100 000 concurrence i think on steam and steam is actually i think destiny's like lowest performing platform so i think it's actually closer to probably like 300k or something um at least as far as like broader um broader player numbers on all platforms goes so it's like it is the i i don't i don't know man i i understand that destiny is an expensive game to maintain and i love i think marathon's exceptional i think it's really really good but it is confusing to me to see i guess it's this is just basically them or this is basically sony being like we don't really want live service anymore right this is kind of like because like if you if you put it from this perspective if you have a game like destiny 2 that is expensive to maintain at its current level wouldn't you wouldn't you look at like 100k concurrence and see like maybe we could just keep this going for like cheaper instead of focusing on like fair games or something which in my like just has no shot really yeah doing a quarter of that so like i i'm a little confused at their direction because they seem to have these wheels spinning in in live service but at the same time they're kind of shooting in the foot their only real foothold in that space and again it's not to say that bungie uh or uh destiny has been well managed it certainly hasn't but it's a very high quality game that a lot of people are happy with and i don't think it would demand a lot to keep going and keep making money from relative to the amount of effort that it would take to spool up something like fair games or even something or even really retrofitting marathon to be this load-bearing pillar for the studio that it was never really intended to intended to be um marathon seems like it was always supposed to be like a thing that was going alongside destiny and probably alongside their incubation project that was gummy bears that was since spun off into into its own internal si studio now um so it's unfortunate because i think people are the unfortunate thing about marathon is that like it's it's very good but it's also in a position that it has no business being in which is like the load-bearing pillar for the studio and it's it's not really how it should be looked that either but it is because that's the position that it's in and uh i don't know it could be the beginning of the end which would be a bummer but i mean we're in i don't want to say unprecedented times because it's not necessarily true but it's things everything's harder now man it's it's everything's expensive nothing's going particularly well as far as like you know budgets exploding and and costs rising.

1:55:05It's getting to the point now where even great games are not good enough. And that I think is like, it's going to, that's going to keep going. I think it was a while back now that it got to the point where good games weren't good enough. Now, great games are not good enough. Now it's, it's just the highest performing lowest cost. So Indy and, and Indian quadruple A basically are like, oh yeah you have your your wolverines and your uh your intergalactics and then you have like your peaks or like your um what is it uh your friend slop kind of you know success stories or like balatros or something like that like this uh this middle area that exists for novel kind of experimental uh relatively high budget things is just kind of like i don't know i think i think it's just kind of going away just remember because that's my favorite shit i think but yeah it's what do you think it's funny chris because i was trying to think of an analogy of like bungee with me and you it's like having a mutual friend or like knowing a mutual person and one of the one of the one of us really likes him right and one of them is like this guy kind of this guy kind of is annoying me and like kind of ruining our friend group or whatever whatever weird clumsy analogy wherein i feel like i'm talking shit about a friend's friend you know what i mean and that if that makes any sense that's basically i mean i would agree with probably most of the stuff that you would say about it yeah i know i just it's like i know you and other people really really cog and other people really care about bungie and really care about destiny or cared about destiny and marathons obviously you know i think marathon's really cool in fact if they do a free weekend with marathon when they release that new pve thing i'm not paying for I'm not going to pay for it without trying at first but I'll definitely do it because that's yeah because I think the gameplay in the world looks awesome and I love first person shooters so um so So...

1:57:03I it's almost like what is there left to even say about this? They they this was an awful idea to get involved in this. And it was from the beginning. And Sony did itself no favors. There's this whole part of Bungie. This whole part of talking about Bungie where in like it seems like they fleeced Sony. I think that's true. I don't know. I think that's true, too. But I don't know that I blame them. that happens in mergers and acquisitions all the time and it's up to the acquirer to not get fucking fleeced especially when you're sony yeah because i think microsoft actually didn't right like i think i think i remember a story like like microsoft was in talks to like when they were looking for a buyer or when bunch was looking for a buyer microsoft like didn't want it because i think they looked they they knew or something or like they looked into it deeper right or uh which is crazy because they were they were looking for everybody it seemed like sony was it seemed like multiple entities were sniffing around and like it's the scuttlebutt who knows what's true and what's not but it seems like sony might have purchased this thing without really doing due diligence like true due diligence about what they were buying and like they felt i think cornered into needing to make a move and i think they felt like they needed to acquire a shortcut to get to where their single player apparatus that makes these amazing single player games got there naturally.

1:58:24It took a lot of time, but it happened. They felt like they had no time and they had to engineer a shortcut, but it goes to that old Nintendo quote that I bring up sometimes about Iwata, I think talking about how they don't acquire teams really because you can't just buy Nintendo. You have to be and become Nintendo and Sony shortcut, Sony shortcut. The only thing I can say now is that I hope they learn their lesson. It was a very expensive lesson. Firewalk and Haven make it way worse, but the bungee really is like the the lesson that i hope they're like just don't do that again it's not to say that when mergers and acquisitions become applicable to you in some future sense that you don't want to look into it i think arrowhead actually would have been maybe a sensible team to buy they just are probably not interested it's like just stay away don't do that again and i think they rushed into this into this marriage that they gave bungee all this leverage over them from the very beginning i i remember i was talking about it back in 2022 where it was like what is like the whole letter Bungie wrote where they they're almost like it almost sounded like they didn't give a fuck they're like not we're not we're not changing at all nothing we do is ever changing but now Sony has bought us and all this kind of stuff and slowly I think I think Bungie it's hard to know what to blame Bungie for and it's hard to know what to blame Sony for because really when you buy Bungie it's like well what why didn't you buy them with the idea to green light of destiny three or to have like a big project like it's true that i think that there were going to be these like smaller projects like marathon and gummy bears but based on the team sizes it was never going to be their big project so it's almost like these guys have just been going for years now under sony without a new big thing it's just like where is the management where is the direction and the guidance and the council about like what we should do with this talent and this team it's just i'll reiterate that it's crazy that herman holst remains in his position with this happening and it's crazy that they bungled a truly talented team that just really didn't have the guidance or cohesion necessary to do what they needed to do and when i read his letter and i and he says like we explored different options one of the things that i was wondering is like and i i bet you they did explore this though it makes zero financial sense is what if they just became a support studio while we figured this out like we we we need help on we need they can do shit with intergalactic they can work on all this different stuff in the meantime they already have valkyrie and other internal kind of higher for higher studios to kind of keep costs down but the problem with that is you're not keeping costs down by using bungie in that regard it's like the antithesis of what you do with contract work they're like in washington state they're one of the most expensive teams probably in the entire industry so you don't offload shit to them so no real move made any sense other than sony going we're going to eat enormous amounts of shit for a while and we're going to give you a half a billion dollars and you'll get what it doesn't have to be destiny but like the next big thing but i think they're just unwilling to do it and i think that if you're unwilling to do that then you really have to ask yourself what the fucking purpose of this was to begin with.

2:01:38And so, of course, if you were unwilling to invest the amount of money to make a Destiny style game, which is going to be incredibly expensive, then you really have to go back to point one and be like, well, then we just absorbed this team for no reason. And the other thing I think is that they might be afraid at this point that spending money and even making revenue through Bungie in the midterm will, and certainly the short term, will hurt their ability to take impairments because they've not written down anywhere near the full cost of this thing and that's going to help them on their taxes in the years to come so there is some sort of balancing act to be had with that too but yeah so i don't know man it's a complicated issue we've gone over and over and over again i don't think any of the fundamentals have changed i just think yeah bungee's in trouble like i i he was asking like what is is this the beginning of the end i'm like maybe i mean the honest answer is maybe yeah maybe it is i think a lot of this requires like marathon needs to hold on in a meaningful way and they got to get this next thing going it's and we got a we're not going to know about it for years but they have to be confident behind the scenes that they're going to do something or you'll this team will be gone i think yeah yeah and i don't want to be clear like i really love bungie's output i think i think their output is fantastic i think i i don't think they've made a bad game probably in my entire life but this is a company you know like if the company goes away it is what it is like that happens all the fucking time uh it'll be a bummer for like maybe a couple hours i i don't know i think people are too attached to a lot of uh different entities in this space i think so too and uh i i if they if they went out tomorrow and they were like bungees bungees over like okay good that's that is what it is i mean it's not good for the people involved that sucks but uh marathon's fantastic and i'd rather i'd rather that be the last thing that they put out than like fucking i don't know some piece of shit yeah we'll see i'm sorry what happens I don't know.

2:03:34All I know, all I know for sure is that like, uh, Sony went about this completely wrong. I don't know why you would. And again, the fair games in the room, man, like, I just don't. What is your, like, what is your strategy for fair games? If you're continuing to do that break in, like, if you have this, if you have this team, like a grant, it's an expensive team. I really think you could keep destiny running for like a fraction of what they spent making make spending on it really because the foundation is really there all you have to do is keep adding like this new update that came out is barely anything.

2:04:13It's just a bunch of like quality of life fixes and people are all over it. There's like some new things but it's not expansion tier stuff. And so you look at that and you have like a bunch of new people coming in you have a bunch of returning players coming in 100k concurrently for weeks. which is no which is nothing it's it's not nothing and it's like i don't know i just kind of don't know where that where their heads are at really and that's not to say that bungie is like blameless or whatever again like their executives fleeced sony for sure like i think they inflated a lot of their um incubation projects i think they were they they were bought at the right time when money was cheap so there's a lot of things that go into this but i just don't understand why you would continue to invest in fair games if destiny doing what it's doing with no update at all damn near isn't enough because fair games is not gonna fair games is not cracking 100k i would be like god no way i would be fucking flummoxed if that happened that's like and i I would gladly eat my words like God bless him if they figure that out.

2:05:23But like I just do not see that happening at all. I just don't think there's anything they can really do to the game at this point based on like what people have been talking about Project Hearts and Project Cafe or whatever. These it's like these are just kind of small iterative versions of the same game. I think that's what the whole break in thing is. They're going to try to rebrand it, but it's going to fund them. It'll be like kill the Justice League's year delay. It's going to be the same thing. There's nothing you can do. What are you going to do? You have to. Also, is it? Also, what is it?

2:05:51It's break in. Yeah, break in with and I like people writing it with like the euro symbol, you know, like right. By the way, this means nothing. I've said this a million times. So people are tired of hearing it. I think fair games and break in are both dope names. That's what the that's what the shame is, is like you should have just kept the game at fair games because break in is a dope name. You could have saved that for something else. Instead, you gave this project two cool names.

2:06:20that's a wild way to look at it that's funny though yeah i just i don't know what their strategy is but it just kind of seems like it's all over the place and not really thought out and uh that seems to be the the the mo really of sony lately especially in this live service space where they've just completely fucked up almost in every almost in every conceivable way their most successful ip is one that they just refused to yeah it was uh what was it uh hell Divers and they have no real stake in that really yeah they own the IP but not the developer and they'll have a hard time they're not those guys are not going to make another Helldivers game I don't think so no um maybe they will but yeah it's something I'm very I'm fascinated by the Arrowhead relationship with Sony because it doesn't I don't know very much about it but it seems like there's a culture misalignment between these two entities and that's shocking to me since arrowhead has been with sony forever i mean the original helldivers is a fucking ps3 game i will remind everyone yeah uh and vita and ps4 they might have cut the ps3 version actually at some point anyway um yeah we'll see what happens with bungie i'm uh i'm i'm not i'm neither optimistic or pessimistic about marathon like i think marathon's doing its thing and i think that could be a thing i think it's and i don't i don't think we have any insight into the console numbers i don't know if they're good but we don't have the full picture of marathon and they're not going to talk shit about it like one day we might wake up and they're going to be like marathon's done and and they're not going to like tip their hand what i don't want to see you know what i was thinking about recently what you don't want to see out of them is the uh callisto protocol guys remember when they made they were like dying so they like made this like this game that people liked it was called like redacted or something like that it was like a twin stick shooter or something like that and like you or like what happened with lawbreakers um and right it's like you don't you got to just know when to quit you can't put out this new thing that you're hoping will work or something like you got to have a good idea it's got to be bungee it's got to be big and connected and you and i discussed this what about a single player game i mean it would be i mean i would love that personally it would be cheaper and not to be too too on the nose with it sony could help them not that they really need it but they haven't made a single player game in many years so maybe they would and that could be a marriage of great gameplay and mechanics with sony's expertise and their ability to help the motion capture and do all those kinds of things might be a thing to invest in but again bungee's expensive dude it's just an expensive studio didn't they also have a new building like oh i don't know long ago and like so that thing's probably fucking empty yeah i don't know i would love to know their burn rate it now even it's probably extraordinary i would imagine even with these cuts sony is losing money on them i don't think that's probably i think it was just probably egregious and they probably didn't want to cut everyone loose until they realized they weren't going to get anything going because then you would have to hire a bunch of new people which might actually benefit them because they'd probably be able to get cheaper i think it's a coin flip whether bungee survives the next couple of years.

2:09:35I think so, too. And it's we make fun of, I think. Maybe Microsoft is given more grief than this, this than anyone, but like buying teams and then snuffing them out. EA obviously is a great, but I don't think you blame this one on Sony too much, although you can because they should have never been involved in this at all. And I wonder what I want to happen. Like, I wonder what would have happened to Bungie. The word at it, like the word from people that worked there was like they were in deep trouble. Like even at that time, like they, they weren't going to be able to sustain the operation the way it was in any respect if they didn't get a buyer.

2:10:08So I don't know. I don't know. I wonder too if it would have been better if it was just a more honest evaluation of the company. Like how would that have affected it? Like if they weren't bought for three, what is it, 0.6 billion, but if they were bought for just like a more reasonable acquisition price. Yeah, it'd be totally different. which means which means for this is again if that is the case if if the evaluation price is really the the big thing where it's just like we just spent 3.6 billion dollars we gotta we gotta trim because we're losing money then a lot of this lies at the hands of the c-suite yeah that negotiated these deals and saying like oh we're actually got like we got like seven incubation projects and they're all huge you know it's just like you lied and you fucked over the studio you got your golden parachute i wonder for what yeah i wonder like greed man just bothers the hell yeah i i just like it seems i don't want i i you know this is more of a hoag question but it's like it almost seems illegal if that's like really what happened you know where it's like you would think so if that was true you would think sony would make a big fucking deal about like that we were materially misled and i wonder if they're just trying to make lemon lemonade out of lemons where they're like we we have this this deeply distressed asset uh we got to make the best of it throwing them under the bus is not going to make us look good for other people that we do mna with but at that point it's like well but you just like that's a lot of money for sony 3.6 million billion 3.6 billion dollars for microsoft is like a complete irrelevance right it's not true for sony at all it's as we've argued i i think you can make the argument that that was more than every studio acquisition combined up to that point which is and again a hundred what was it 215 million or something for insomniac it's like jesus god and and you were saying like a more reasonable price based on what bungie it really became and like was under its shell you're talking about in my opinion in the hundreds of millions of dollars like maybe 10 or 15 of what sony paid you know i think so deeply distressed it's like cool you get the ip in the team but like you're in a lot of trouble it's not like you're getting this vibrant thing that's gonna catapult you yeah i think literally around the around the price maybe a little more maybe slightly more given live service and and the potential for profitability over long periods of time over over recycled content um probably around the same price as insomniac or maybe a little bit more but like certainly not like i don't know man i i've said this before but like even even bungie at like peak halo 3 when everything was really insane i still don't think that's like a billion dollars you know what i mean like i just don't maybe i mean what the fuck do i know i guess but like it it doesn't it doesn't strike me in in layman's uh the vibes are off with that to say it simply.

2:13:16By the way, the footnote timing is so fucked up already that I might as well have not even been keeping track of them.

2:13:28Like it's worse for what I'm doing than like you just listening and figuring it out yourself. Well, before the layoff news broke this morning, I did have another Bungie story on here that I just thought I'd put in that was a little more feel good. I guess it doesn't really make much sense now, but this comes from GamesIndustry.biz. I thought it was interesting. They wrote, Bungie devs reportedly pitched Destiny dating game. The project was ever only a prototype, but management didn't want romance or silliness. So they write briefly, quote, Staff at Bungie apparently pitched the idea of making a dating game based on its smash hit sci-fi shooter Destiny.

2:14:02That's according to former community manager Liana Rupert, who responded to a post on Twitter from a fan asking for a dating sim. She said that some developers actually made one, but management was against the idea saying nobody wanted romance or silliness. She says, quote, it was very dream daddy inspired. It was fun getting to be a small part of it, end quote. Former narrative, former senior narrative designer Robert Brooks provided some extra color saying that this was made during the carnival event at Bungie where developers had a week to make fun prototypes. He explained, quote, it was never a full-fledged project.

2:14:29That said, we did pitch this as a full-fledged project every year. Myself and two other narrative team members who both came from romance game design had an entire pitch deck for one complete with costs and real hard metrics on returns. Never got anywhere, end quote. Bungie recently announced that work on Destiny 2 would come to an end shortly, with Bloomberg saying that a significant number of staff could be made redundant. Well, we already know what happened there. So what do you think of that? I mean, it's obviously, they were talking about this carnival thing that's obviously a game jam or a dev jam of some sort where you're seeing, is there any special sauce that you can get going in some sort of weird way?

2:15:01That's kind of a cool idea. I wonder if that would have been the salvation for Destiny was not the dating scene itself, but just expanding out what destiny was. And I know they tried to do that with the phone game. And, you know, it's kind of what Riot is trying to do or has tried to do with League of Legends. It's kind of almost necessary. Would you have played a dating sim? No, I'm not a dating sim person, really. I don't even really care for like romance in games that a lot of people care about romance in. Like, like RP, like I don't, if I'm playing an RPG, I'm not thinking like, oh, what are my romance options?

2:15:33you know every time i play i was because derek's a big mass epic fan and we were talking i can't remember on some episodes we were talking about like uh which which uh partner we chose or whatever and i remember being like i had a job to do i had to save the galaxy right right right i don't got time to i don't got time to be trifling but i mean like it is a weirdly like big thing for a lot of people especially in rpgs it is something that is kind of undisturbed and I know Warframe has like you can get married and shit and I know yeah that's a big one well like there is something to be said about that that is a thing that fans do like and are interested in I don't know if it would have moved the needle or anything it wouldn't have made Destiny less appealing to me if uh more uh more styles of play or like more aspects of RPG game design were a part of it but wouldn't have spoke to me really dating sims are weird like they're bigger than I they're bigger than make sense to me that they are like i don't really understand it personally but they're like there's so many of them that like there has to be something um that people latch on to about these things and there's certainly characters in destiny where i'm like people people would i could see i could see this being a thing what about the we brought up dust 514 recently what about the reverse dust 514 destiny making an eve online right like that like a not something that deep and complicated but something that's about the interplanetary commerce travel space like ship to ship battles that kind of thing deploying people to the surface like they did in 514 maybe that would have been a cool way to buff it out a little bit i've long thought that like there should have been like contractors making like destiny tactics and shit yeah that would have been super cool and it's such an relative to how big the ip is it's real it's like so astonishingly unmined in a way that kind of baffles me they kind of understood it with halo a little bit they had halo wars and and these other things it's like they were smart in some ways but like i'm just like i don't know this wouldn't have appealed to me though well interesting little story i follow liana rupert on um on twitter she she's very open about her time there it would be fun to talk to her about it i don't know how she's so open actually about it but i don't know i don't know all the details to reach out i should yeah i should i think i might have dm'd with her once but i don't i don't know i'll go look all right we have some god of war law law fay right that's how we decided it was said i think it's laufay laufay jesus this is a whole new yote thing it's gonna take me at least two months yota because i call it yotai for like forever and yeah and then it just snaps and then you just get it like that yeah ei is a ai is i right great as far as i understand i only know that because of dragon ball that's wonderful there's so many buddha kai's and like kai and all that stuff that's wonderful so that's wonderful jason schreier a journalist from bloomberg has been releasing these videos been doing very well on youtube and you see the numbers and you're like why have i been doing this forever you know like this is a great way to this is a great um jim ryan-esque virtuous cycle between your bloomberg work and your stuff like people like me get to make money off of your reporting you should just make money off of your report right yeah so he put up a video and he said something in there um that got picked up by the gaming leaks and rumors reddit it says quote he says at some point quote i wouldn't be surprised if god of war lafay lafay gets announced for february or march 2027 pretty soon so it seems like he understands that from his understanding the game is going to come out q1 i love that if true and I believe them because they're really keeping it close to their best and not really showing very much of it until recently which is cool so less than a year I would have even like more time like get the Wolverine and then announce that that thing's coming out in March that would be kind of cool and that comes on the back of an interview that backlot magazine cg mag online.com wrote with or did with Deborah Ann Wall who plays the protagonist in Lafay Lafay and she talks about a bunch of things I was reading about a bit about her because I don't know much about her.

2:19:49She's a pretty big actress. Like she was one of the main actresses in True Blood, which I didn't realize. And she's in Daredevil. And Daredevil, yeah, for all these years, which is cool. That's what I know her from. I never watched any True Blood, but yeah, she's huge. So she talks about all that stuff, but deep in here, there is a conversation about God of War. And Debra Ann Wall, when she's asked about it, says, I'm so freaking excited. Now, I wonder if you read this the same way. do you feel like this is planned pr planting she says um well let me let me i'll describe what she said because i was like this is interesting like i don't know why like it's cool it could be off the cuff but it feels like you were told to say this she said oh my god i can't tell you i still pinch myself you know again i've known about this for nearly 10 years and i haven't been able to talk about it and then so she opens with that and then she says nearly the guy says 10 years and she says nearly he pitched it to me in 2018 and they had no and he's talking about court she's talking about cory and they had known about it before then it's wild like when cory brought me in to talk about doing ragnarok and show me the 2018 game he already had a poster for the laufe game with me and a cube a cube that's been there since the beginning it's deeply part of the lore like to me i'm like that's so on the nose like like media trained i don't want to she's an actress and that's what i love about these these interviews is like you're not talking to a normal person you're talking to a person that can play a bunch of different roles and does it very convincingly and i'm not saying she's even saying anything wrong or bad i'm just saying it's so on the nose because the whole argument about it is like what is this game why are you doing this game what's with the fucking cube and their answer has been like the answer according to this is like i know it's been in like it was pitched to me before ragnarok was even in development and the cube was in the art in the beginning you know like that i don't know maybe i might be being totally unfair to this it is it is kind of crazy i do believe it though like i do like because there's um there's an interview i don't remember where it might have been ign um where barlog was on on a panel with a bunch of people i think alana was on it too and i think i think she brings up like she make fey a playable protagonist and i think he he looks as if he's like he he gives a look where i'm like oh they they were definitely talking about this or like they they definitely had planned it the cube thing is funny because like i totally believe that that's something like i totally believe that that is something that cory barlog would be weirdly obsessive about like that seems like it's gotta have a cube seems yeah like there's something about like that because it's weird you know what it is it's the same reason why i think god of war 2018 works at all because it's like it's a weird idea that shouldn't work you know what i mean it's like oh hey here's kratos he's gonna raise a kid and it's gonna be sad and he's gonna be introspective and it's gonna be don't you want that out of god of war and everybody's like no uh and then it comes out and people are like oh this is pretty good i could see cory barley being like you know what we're gonna have a fucking cube and that's like got its roots in dnd and stuff like i don't know what real mythology it's pulled from but it is definitely a dnd thing and they're dnd nerds over there and i could see it's like let's put a fucking cube in this game and then people are like that's dumb cory and it's like i know you know what i mean like it just it strikes me i could see that being true i like but it is funny how personally it i i the cube bothers me but i also don't um i do kind of i'm fully expecting uh by the time i'm done with the game to be to to uh come around on the cube like it strikes me as one of those things where it's just like all right i'm sure i'll be sad when it gets hurt or something towards the end or something but because it's jack wade and he's just kind of endearing i i love how upset people are that they motion captured him like it's like something that is like deeply annoying to people like it's funny as fuck and if you if you don't know how modern performance capture works i i also like you when you look at that you think your first my the first thing you think of is like how hard kidded do you really need this but they're on stage they're yeah they're spatial it's spatial and like his voice is being picked up and stuff so it's like yeah there's more to it than that but i think it's i think it's hysterical how mad people like people are so mad about it because because on the face of it it does look ridiculous like what do you mean you can't just like why is he wearing that ridiculous like wireframe cube like costume it's the dumbest thing i've ever seen it makes sense i understand why they do it but it looks so dumb i love the idea of cory being so obsessed with the cube like as an i as a conception that like you know he herman and scott roadie and those guys go and he's like all right we got three pitches and like each pitch ultimately includes like a cube and they're like cory what is with the fucking cute like after like the like during the third one they're like so he's like going into and they're like all right so and then the cube cat and like all right cory wait what's with the fucking cube you know and so like no matter what they chose they were gonna get the cube character in there and you're right i said that i said when i first saw it it's deeply dnd and i love that about it but i it must be connected to some sort of shit i don't understand and i don't know the more i've thought about the game the more i'm like i think they just didn't i think they did it a little dirty with the way they showed it i don't think i don't i think we all understand it's probably gonna be pretty excellent i just think yeah it's not a good way to it's not a good first impression of a video game i think especially especially when you lead it with 20 minutes of gameplay i understand that that's literally true but it's not like spiritually true like when you say game like 20 minutes of gameplay people are expecting like the real meat and potatoes of what the game is not like the not like the actual 20 minutes of unbroken play which we all understand in video games has lulls and you know things that aren't inherently interesting um leave that what they showed for god of war laugh should have been the second time we saw it yeah i agree yeah that's that's like a state of play style deep dive with commentary um yeah i'm not i'm not crazy about what it's i don't know that it really matters it seems like people are really excited about it i think it's going to do very well and i think if they just keep the momentum going like tokan wolverine and then yeah right in you know gta obviously and then right into that and then you're off to the races for like hopefully a strong potentially final year of ps5 as we know it i I mean, it's not going to be PS5's final year, but not even close.

2:26:45I mean, dude, if it really does come out, Q1 2027, and we first saw it in summer of this year, that's good. That's what I want more of. That's perfect, yeah. It's perfect. Like, I don't want enough of this, like, four years of waiting after a teaser trailer. Like, I'm over it. I get that those things are done typically to attract talent for new IP. I get it. Avoid it if you can. For my sake. Do it for me. Do it for specifically for Chris. We need you to do more. It's that Simpsons. It's that Simpsons thing where it's all the Maggie. Was it do it for her or whatever? Do it for me. All right. Just a few more things.

2:27:32I saw this pop up and was pleased about it. JP wrote in and said, hey, Goyam, AFL Games, a Brazilian shovelware studio. Good for what you say. I don't like that at all. There's something about that word that it feels weird to hear. It's the Hebrew word for non-Jewish people, right? Yeah, but it's like, why is there a word? It feels weird that there's a word for that. It feels like you're calling me swarthy or something. Goyim or Hebrew in modern usage, it is a standard Jewish term for a non-Jewish person. Equivalent to the English word Gentile. I guess. I don't know, man. He says, a Brazilian shovelware studio, AFL Games, AFIL, confirmed that all of its games are being removed from the PlayStation store.

2:28:20The studio has released over 140 games on PS4 and PS5. Do you think PlayStation will slowly continue to remove entire libraries from shovelware developers? When do you think they'll tackle the never-ending coming soon section that's filled with AI garbage that will never release? Thanks for all you do. I'll go to Antichrist Enjoyer Peter Thiel's secret conference and listen. i just thought about peter teal that he's got like a there was like some weird people on the list too where i'm like what oh are you talking about like that weird list of uh that secret yeah it's like a secret email list or something with about the end of the world or something yeah and it's and it's real yeah it's real it's so crazy there's like a 2014 invitation to jeffrey i've seen that never went out dude it's insane but the only thing i know about peter teal really is that is that that uh oh my god what's his name tim dylan oh he had like a bit he had like a bit on rogan we was talking about like why this guy's like he has two special interests it's it's building autonomous drones and the anti-grace oh man crazy but um so this story is true AFL games or AFL AFIL games a Brazilian studio releasing uh shovelware on PlayStation network the delisted games.com which we cite when these things happen has them as at 87 games they're across PS4 and PS5 though so I assume the 140 or whatever games that some people are citing are just the stacks of games across platforms so 87 is nowhere near as egregious as some of the others that they've taken down but this is I think the sixth or seventh shovelware developer that has reported that sony is basically like you're done um and i tweeted this out because i was like we we give as we already have on the show gives sony so much grief and we gave sony a lot of grief about this over the years but they are finally doing something like they really are doing something about it and you gotta give them credit for it like i i'm pretty sure thousands of games have been removed from the psn because of this over time they're getting to the smaller guys now the ai stuff is different and that needs to be taken care of too but i don't even want to get lost in the mix of like sometimes there are just shitty looking games or whatever and i'm like that's not even what i'm worried about i'm worried about these like these slot farms that's different it's it's different like have your shitty game every once in a while it's fine but this egregious shit that they were doing and with the trophy system is is fucked up and there's something else i want to say too chris which is you're welcome because who is bitching more about this for years years and by the way it's true someone reached someone tweeted about me because they know how bitter i am about like i had a uh adam boys who was at playstation at the time was on kind of funny and he came and we had a debate about this this was like early in the ps4 era like third year fourth year ps4 and i was making the argument then i'm like dude the store is overrun with garbage it you guys need to do something about it and um and someone's like so I guess you won the debate with Adam boys and I'm like yeah I guess I was just way too early that was so quaint if we can go back to that PlayStation Network in terms of the storefront man I would do it in a heartbeat so goodbye R.I.P.

2:31:29bozos and you could still get their games apparently on Xbox one Xbox series Steam and Switch according to them because those platforms don't care I guess but hopefully those platforms will come to care too there's like almost euphoria in the PlayStation trophy ecosystem over this shit and what we're waiting for now is for psn profiles to readjust the leaderboards which is gonna fucking it's gonna be like the most chaotic and like it's gonna be a day of great upheaval on psn profiles because i think they're talking about doing that and people are gonna get so pissed because dude there are dudes with like 10 000 platinum trophies and it's like that you have to you have to listen i'm a trophy guy i love trophies everyone knows that i make no secret of it but i like earning them it's not about the cumulative number it's about collecting the things that you've done.

2:32:15And so I have 212 platinum trophies, I think. And that's a lot. That's like the top 0.1 % or something of people on PSN. To have 10 ,000 platinum trophies, you have to play multiple games a day and get the platinums in them. It's the corniest, stupidest shit. And the leaderboard adjustments that will happen on PSN profiles are going to be awesome. Oh my God, it's going to be awesome. And shout out to PSN profiles, by the way, because they, I don't know if you remember, I used to bitch about it too. And then they took my advice. And I think it was me directly that they were inspired by, although I could be wrong, where I was like, you guys should start hiding these games on your back end.

2:32:52Like you're scraping the PSN, you're getting all this information and then just mark them a shovelware. And they did. And I think that was kind of the beginning of the end for the stuff on PSN, which is good. So we fought back and we won. All right, final two pieces of news here, Chris, are both related to business. and I just wanted to, we do a little business. We're businessmen doing business. All right. And I wanted to talk a little bit about what's going on here with this. So Reuters, the Newswire, reports the following. They say, Katakawa, Japan's Elden Ring powerhouse, faces battle over CEO at shareholder meeting.

2:33:30They write, quote, Katakawa, the Japanese firm behind the dark epic Elden Ring video game franchise is now facing a nightmare of its own. An activist shareholder who wants its CEO gone. wielding a big stake in proxy advisor support. The showdown will take place at Wednesday's annual general meeting. So this was yesterday from when we were recording, and I've not seen any reporting on it since, and is being closely watched by investors in Japan, where activist shareholders have scored some significant wins as authorities pile pressure on companies to improve returns and corporate governance. In one camp, there is Takeshi Natsuno, 61, and CEO since 2021, but under attack for declining profitability.

2:34:05He may have history on his side after garnering 90 % of shareholder support at last year's AGM. Natsuno has also been backed by the company's board, which says removing him would create uncertainty while the company is trying to carry out reforms. Natsuno is facing off against Hong Kong-based Oasis Management, one of the most active activist investors in Japan. Oasis, which says it has been engaging with Katakawa since 2020, is now the firm's largest shareholder, with a 13.76 % stake. While Elden Ring, a collaboration between veteran game director Hidetaka Miyazaki and Game of Thrones author George R.R.

2:34:39Martin has been a massive success. Nitsuno has been criticized for failing to capitalize on it. The 2022 action role-playing game is published by Katakawa Unit from Software in Japan, but by Bandai Namco overseas. That arrangement has led to material profit leakage, says Oasis. Oasis is not alone in thinking it's time for a new person at the helm. While it may seem, the proxy report says, quote, while it may take time to find a replacement for Nitsuno, this is a challenge worth accepting. And then they write, though a drop in shareholder support from 90 % to below 50 % would be extraordinary. Some market participants say it could happen given the firm's poor performance.

2:35:14So the basic argument here, as they note, is that Katakawa logged an equity of just 0.5 % last year compared to 9.5 % the year ending March 2022. So what they're arguing is like they're in a position, they just had their best selling game by far, by a mile. And they're actually not really doing that great as a result because they haven't capitalize on it that's where i think night rain comes from and why they might be a little k and seem honestly a little cagey about dustbloods like i to me i think that that's kind of getting to the point of being a little weird um yeah so there's not too much more to say about this you can you can say anything you want about it of course but this is interesting because if you read about if you read what they're basically saying is that they probably should be self-publishing and I think that that's probably true they they seem very comfortable with Bandai Namco but you kind of wonder why and uh yeah so we'll see what happens in the future with them but it is a good point they Elden Ring was a real high point in Elden Ring 2 whenever that comes out is going to be a huge game but could they have done more I guess so that's what they're saying yeah yeah I don't know I think um if you have a success like that you're always going to be you're always going is like damn we really could have we could have reaped a lot more of this it's easy to say that but then you put something else out and it's not like Elden Ring is so is unique even among Souls games as far as as far as it's like wide appeal and it's massive success it's definitely spread to other Souls games in the wake of uh Elden Ring's success I think other games like people have delved back into the catalog a little bit more but we all figured Elden Ring would be successful i don't think any of us anticipated the degree oh no way maybe dusted maybe just maybe he was a little bit more maybe a little bit more clued in but i certainly wasn't expecting that degree of success i wasn't expecting that degree of um what do you call it when uh something's just like something escapes the escapes yeah like it just get like yeah i know exactly what you mean penetration i guess uh i wasn't expecting like i i didn't expect to hear like uncles and aunts asked me what Elden Ring was.

2:37:28You know, like, that was not something that I would have anticipated. So, or even just, like, the platinum rate, you know, for Elden Ring is insane. So, like, all of that is insane. It's also, it also was not guaranteed before that. So, I mean, I don't know if you could really, like, you made a good call, I think, generally. Banda Namco seems to be a good partner, but Now that you have this thing, now that you've exploded, yeah, maybe you don't need them. Yeah, it's like, I'm trying to see here. The Dustbloods thing is weird also. Yeah, Dustbloods is their first self-published game. So that's interesting.

2:38:15So they are starting to, I think, embrace that. You do have to ask yourself, they seem risk-averse. A lot of Japanese developers seem like they, Platinum's another example, although Platinum is nowhere near from Pedigree at this point. But they seem to be happy to kind of defray costs. And instead, it's really like, you should probably just publish Elden Ring 2 yourself. Why are you... Bandai Namco is extremely lucky that they'll grovel for all your games. Do they own the IP? Yeah, from owns... Katakawa, I believe, owns the IP. I think Bandai Namco just works with them on it. And their relationship obviously goes back to Dark Souls.

2:38:54And I think there's probably a level of loyalty there because they kind of came in when Sony bailed on them. And they've been with them really ever since. I think. Well, obviously, they did Bloodborne together and all that. And then, of course, Sekiro was with Activision. But basically, everything else was with Bandai. So they should they should consider it. I'm sure there are other issues, too. I was doing a little bit of research. It's interesting because if you read a little bit later in the Reuters article, they remind us that. and I forgot about this, that there was a time in 2024 and we reported on it on the show at the time that Sony was in talks to buy Katakawa.

2:39:27Do you remember that? And then it just didn't go through, but Sony ended up getting 10 % of Katakawa. So there's like some weird shit going on where, and this is where I think the Reuters article gets a little disingenuous actually, is Katakawa is this publicly traded corporation. They have like 5 ,000 employees and then they have a bunch of verticals. And their big vertical, I think, is actually Katakawa Future Publishing. That's like all the manga and uh tabletop games and all the shit and all that rest and then they have a bunch of film and tv and anime stuff like and that's where like nico nico and all that they even have a tourism thing it's dude i think i wrote in my notes oh i didn't write the full name they have like an anime tourism bureau basically like where people go to japan to like tour important places in anime in the anime industry and like not only where they're made but also like locations where these things are take place or whatever so i thought that was interesting but in games they have a whole game vertical and they they own a choir which you and i love uh they they made tenchu back in the day and they make way of the samurai and shinobito and they're like a square enix kind of co-developer now they worked on all the octopath games and then they own spike chun soft so that's like danganronpa and a bunch of anime stuff steins gate and shiren and all the rest and then they own 70 percent of from so they're the majority holder of from but they They don't own all of it.

2:40:41And this is where it gets interesting. So Oasis got 14 % of Katakawa, but none of FromSoftware. Sony has 10 % of Katakawa and 14 % of FromSoftware. So a cumulative 24 % of the company, I guess, almost a quarter of voting shares. And then Tencent owns 7%, which we're going to talk about in a minute. So this is a little messy. I think yeah if anything PlayStation should be and I'm not saying as exclusives I'm just saying PlayStation should be publishing the games if anything for them at least like remove one barrier and get a little closer to the home company but they have they have things to think about and I was also reading about Oasis management they're kind of a small hedge fund they only have 14 billion dollars in assets I mean that's a lot of money but it's not a huge fund and they only have 50 employees and I was looking at the other things they invested in and this is really the only thing that we would even know so or care about right so nothing really to say about them from that perspective so there's that and then i thought the final interesting exercise and by the way this i'm not even time stamping things anymore i just stopped uh this comes from bloomberg although i found it for free on a website called the star.com it says tencent is said to mull exits from game studios like marvelous so i thought we would have an interesting um exercise here let me me see if I can find this.

2:42:04Yeah, here it is. Okay. So they write here, and this comes from Bloomberg, quote, Tencent Holdings Limited is negotiating exits from several game studio investments in Japan, including Tokyo Trade and Marvelous Inc. as part of a reassessment of the company's global portfolio, people with knowledge of the matter said. The Chinese game publishing giant is evaluating its minority holdings in many studios and in some cases is preparing to sell stakes back to the original management team, even if it means incurring a loss, some of the people said. Tencent is navigating a prolonged slump in the games industry at the same time as it's playing catch-up to the capital-intensive artificial intelligence race against peers Alibaba Group Holding Limited and ByteDance Limited.

2:42:40The company is casting a critical eye over its investments and assessing which still hold promise to be high performers while also making new bets where it sees potential for growth. Among the criteria for Tencent to exit an investment, the company considers whether its envisioned synergies with the portfolio a company may have lapsed, according to one of the people who have asked not to be named, discussing private deliberations. so um i have a list here of the things that they own and i was i was wondering we should just go through them and see like what what things would be would make sense for them to get rid of so they're saying only minority shares so it's worth noting that they own all of the following teams and it seems like they're not interested in getting rid of these so they own all of funcom those are the guys they're putting out their mmo studio but they're putting out uh the dune game that's coming up soon layout which is the hong kong like the chinese team that they own digital eclipse digital extremes which we were talking about earlier that's warframe they own riot we talked about them earlier in league of legends they own sumo group which uh worked with sony actually with little big planet 3 and some other things and that's a whole series of of developers they own clay which are the guys that like don't starve and shit like that they own turtle rock uh so the uh yeah the back for blood team and whatever the fuck they've done since and then they own uh and they own jaeger which is the studio that made dead island 2 and then they own majority stakes and a few others including supercell and tech land which i would imagine they would not want to get rid of but the minority shares all right so they're talking about japanese minority shares here but they said as part of their global portfolio so let's assume that everything's on the table don't nod they own 42 of that that's don't i think don't not didn't we talk about on the show a week or two ago that don't not release a statement saying that they're going to run out of money in november so they're in a lot they're in a lot of trouble yeah um they own 35 of shift up i doubt they would want to get rid of that and in fact i would assume they would want to increase their um they own 35 of epic i often forget about this they're not going to get rid of that no they own 35 of ubisoft they're not going to get rid of that uh let's see they own 26 of vantage which is so what is advantage is the ubisoft sub member remember they they invested in oh right right like all the ubisoft basically spun out all their valuable shit into a new entity and called advantage right um so they own they own 22 of bloober i wouldn't want to get rid of that so then you start getting into like so they say 20 for marvelous this is probably a good place to be i don't know why marvelous is obviously a really big yeah they they have probably 500 employees or something like that it's a lot of um anime stuff and like story of seasons and licensing stuff i don't know why you'd want any part of that they also did the monster hunter stories games i want to say so those are kind of big uh from soft at 16.2 remedy 14 % Crafton 14 % This is tough dude like I don't know paradox 10 % maybe You get rid of your shares of paradox That's obviously like grand strategy Stuff and maybe not as Valuable So I don't know man there's not a lot of Not a lot of wiggle room Yeah they own small pieces of discord Roblox platinum So I don't know I don't know what they're going to do but they they obviously way are way overextended there's no doubt about that

2:46:10yeah for sure and uh that's all we have for the news all right christopher we're back and we're here to talk about what we're playing it says here you're playing gta san andre it's very exciting where are you playing it so i'm playing it on uh i'm playing it on ps5 uh i was i wanted to play it on um ps2 because i have a copy of the ps2 but like the disc is just fucked so like i must have scratched this thing up like crazy so i figured i have the i have the original by the way i don't i so i'm playing the original uh skew i guess on ps5 so not the definitive remastered edition or whatever what is it called even yeah let me let me look the gta trilogy version right right right i'm playing the original or whatever the the you know the like the ones you can't buy anymore yes but that are still yeah i know exactly yeah yeah so i'm playing that one you listed those i think yeah yeah so i'm playing that uh still relatively early on i just kind of like i i think the gta news kind of got to me and i was like there's stuff that i'm looking forward to playing but none of it's none of it's out yet and it's kind of hard for me to i have a backlog of like really intensive stuff that i want to get to but like it's hard to get into the headspace i'm just looking forward to all these stuff that feel all this thing feels like it's in the immediate future so like i was looking into my backlog from even further back and i was like you know what i'm in a gta mood kind of i still really haven't finished most grand theft autos i finished gta 4 i think a long time a long long time ago i think i finished gta the three i think like a long long long yeah three is fairly manageable they get pretty long after that i might as well not have played it though because i barely remember that and I was like barely it feels like I was barely sentient when I played that so like there's still Vice City for me San Andreas for me and five I got pretty deep into five but I never finished it I was like yeah you know what let me jump into um let me jump into San Andreas this is a game that I played a lot at like my cousin Justin's house uh in the Bronx and I never owned it really until I was like an adult and by the time I was an adult I didn't really play it because it was more of a collector thing and so I'd only caught I'd ever only caught glimpses of it and I would fuck around with it I would do cheat codes or whatever but I never actually played through most of San Andreas I know a lot about it through cultural osmosis but you know I get to catch the damn train CJ you know like I know these things but I never played it and so I'm playing it now it is it's definitely old man it's so funny because like these games were so groundbreaking in a lot of ways like they're so like because it's an open world like seamless open world game on ps2 the narrative and fidelity is like the presentation of it is actually more ps1 like and like it feels a little bit like early resident evil on ps1 like the way that cut scenes are framed and the way that everything happens it's like it happens in these like in these set pieces but these set pieces are part of like a way way bigger game so like they're less detailed and feel it's there's something really like um liminal about these older grand theft auto games that are kind of interesting well said um i'm still kind of wrestling with the controls i gotta be honest it's they definitely i'm spoiled by modern controls you know there's a lot of weird things about it.

2:49:44There's a lot of stuff that I love about GTA that isn't in this. Like the physics aren't too crazy. Although that was only arguably only with four where the physics were really like a main star of the show. I can't hold it against it too bad. Yeah. But it's fun. I'm still in the early game just kind of getting acquainted with a lot of the characters. I love that it's a game that you can make yourself fat in. Yes, it's very cool. Yeah, it's a little much with the exercising and all the rest. Yeah, the life sim stuff is kind of interesting. Like they never really did that again. and probably for for it's probably better off that they abandon that kind of thing but it is fun to mess around with in this like kind of like this proto uh modern gta where like oh yeah you your cycling skill is going up and it's a little bit of red dead 2 actually because red dead 2 kind of has that going on where like your skills increase as you as you i remember that with like your bonding with the horse improves over time and things like that so like there's elements of red dead 2 in this that i didn't expect to see like that that kind of life sim stuff that's kind of absent from 4 and um i believe are absent from 5 as well i don't think you can make any of them morbidly obese as far as i'm aware but yeah i'm enjoying it i like the setting i like the the character so far i think the voice acting is really fun it's just so funny just to see like all this like this narrative heft being given to these character models that look so terrible in these spaces that look so undefined it's like it's very charming in a lot of ways but i'm i'm still kind of wrestling with the controls but i'm enjoying it it's i'm treating it more like uh like i'm going to a museum and kind of trying to take in this thing that i only have tangential memories of and uh really getting acquainted with how it plays and what the mission structure is like and what the city of san andreas really is without giving yourself a jetpack and flying around for five minutes and then turning the game off like i used to do or at least i think it was a jetpack i think there's like all sorts of weird cheats that you could do in that game but still early i do kind of want to get through it i want my mission to be kind of before gta 6 comes out i want to get through all the gta's or at least all the gta's that i care to get through i think i might skip uh three because i did it already uh but definitely san andreas and five i want to get through before six comes out and i think that's definitely manageable uh by november yeah oh yeah i would say so but uh yeah i like san andreas so far it's uh that that opening man is great that theme the theme music and and what is it sam sam jackson being there kind of immediately is awesome it's like what is what a cast for a game yeah it's it's cool like i always think back three came out you know fall 2001 and then and then vice city came out really quickly it was like a year but then they took a little bit of time with four two years right yeah and they and you could see that they were at least trying to do something like some different things and and the world was much bigger like i love vice city just because i love the 80s and i love the soundtrack whatever but san andreas was certainly the most differentiated of those games and it's it's good that you're not going to play three again because it's hard to go back to three if you if you even go to those games because they start really cleaning shit up although these new versions of the games are a lot better although you're actually not playing the yeah I'm not I'm not playing those versions because I played the GTA 3 version of that I don't know if you remember this like I had a really there's a there's a mission in GTA 3 where you have to use the sniper rifle on a ship and like I yeah I just couldn't do it on like the old control like I don't know how I did this when I was a kid but I can't play and they they fixed the controls on the new one so it's a lot better yeah I just remember when those games came out they were completely messed up and i think they fixed them to some degree i don't know i don't know the degree to which they fixed them though like i haven't kept up maybe they're phenomenally better but i think i tried to play gta3 like earlier this year and i remember trying and i was like hmm i don't know about this man i don't know i actually don't know if i can do this uh but san andreas is kind of in that weird middle part where it's just like this is actually this is kind of difficult to do actually it is really cumbersome and weird and it does feel kind of bad but it's also like there's other things about it that are intriguing to me that are kind of pulling me forward like there is like a hint of that physics there like in gta3 like there's like you hit somebody and then they just kind of fall over like if you hit somebody with the car they fall over and they you know there's no physics at all in gta san andreas there's a little bit of it it doesn't explode until four obviously and and five they actually tampered it down a little bit from that euphoria engine which i i lament so much i love that engine but yeah i'm enjoying it so far i think i'm gonna stick with it i i dig the vibe of it especially i love the uh i love the that there's like a narrow narration kind of presentation to it yeah i don't know because i don't think that that's not really true of um five or four um actually it's in red dead a little bit like the chapter titles or like arthur morgan's narrator there's like a weird amount of red dead and like really small hints of red dead in san andreas that i think are kind of interesting but that's really all i'm playing i'm playing uh other things too sort of i mean i'm playing marathon still it's that's still fun although i put less time into it lately there's not a lot of time and i was jumping into marvelous capcom 2 over at friends houses cool stuff like that but there's not really much to say about those games those are dude i absolutely amazing god i if if there is like a hall of fame like mount rushmore of like video game soundtracks like me personally like marvin's capcom 2 is up there for me i just love how that song loops in like eight seconds like it's so fucking no i'm gonna take you for a ride but all the jazzy the jazzy like it's so good dude capcom was like the beauty of the visual beauty of that game is a sight to behold man and like the way dagan always always talks about this my brother for people that don't know it always talks about this about like how it's a masterpiece of taking things that do not belong together and making it all fit together like it's it's almost like the quintessential example of it and it works it's just it's it's awesome yeah that's that pixel that pixel art combined with that soundscape is like a really great match made and like it's just like there's a there's a feeling you get when when those things are combined and you're experiencing them there's kind of unlike anything anything else it's really fantastic and when i met people and like again we always talk about how i thought i was good at fighting games until i entered the industry when i met people that were good at that game and they were good at that game oh and yeah like to the point i used to think i was good i used to think I was good at that game.

2:56:32And there's like, where I had no chance. And I told you like, they used to like, I used to be able to pick their parties. Like a couple of the guys, like, like who you're like, play as like role serve bot. And like whatever bullshit, you know, and they would just beat the fuck out of you. And it's like, I don't know, man, I don't know. I don't have the mind for this. All right. For me, I platinum and pragmata. That's platinum number one, 12 talked extensively about it. There's a review discussion in spoiler cast on Patreon right now for you to listen to and enjoy. I will reiterate. I think that game's extraordinary.

2:57:01I think it's the game of the year, at least for me. And I highly recommend it. I think it's so, so fucking good. And then I was like, all right, I'm like, what's next? Do I go back to Mina? Not yet. So looking at some other things, I'm like, I abandoned Turok 2 a while ago. I'm like, that's a bad use of time. So I bought Lego Batman Legacy of the Dark Knight. And I've played it for maybe 10 hours so far. And I got to say, it's fucking great. Like the people that are saying it's like an Arkham game, they're right it is arkham it is arkham knight specifically and it is a cartoonish ridiculous version of arkham knight but it's the same idea like the you're literally like in the like in a bank like in on the little gargoyles like going like swinging around like swinging down and killing dudes and driving the batmobile to like again to fight criminals and get to your missions and all the rest of the things it's it's really like i would assume travelers what happened with travelers tales was like star wars was a big seller and did well but it wasn't people didn't love it i don't think there i'm sure there were people that did but like it wasn't a critical darling by any stretch of the imagination and i think what they realized was there's a real bloat in our games the games don't have to be like this we can actually keep the essence of and i know lego games fairly well I played them early and then I kind of left them for a while and now I'm back to them in a way Star Wars Lego Star Wars games so like the the Wii complete edition was a really great game for instance um so I have some familiarity with them like where I think I can speak about them without being out of school and I feel like what they did here is they were like we're gonna streamline this thing and make it into a more cohesive and cogent open world as opposed to now it's still fragmented not unlike star wars was fragmented between the games or the movies and then like the different areas but it just feels like a like an adult's lego game even though it is not an adult's lego game and it's a child's game michael was pointing it out and i think so too there are like a lot of references that are not appropriate oh yeah there's an american psycho reference that she noticed the same exact thing about like the business card or whatever i saw it on twitter and i'm i'm kind of because i have um did i buy or like i don't think i i don't think i bought i think i meant to buy it that's one that i want to get to but like i remember like i saw it on twitter and i was like oh it would have been cool to just see that in game but it was hysterical like the business card thing i was yeah i can't believe i can't believe they're doing this it's there's like a lot of that kind of stuff which is cool and i don't think it comes off as too much i think the I think it's about what you're into like I like Batman a lot I would say that I actually like love Batman and I don't feel that way like I like the X-Men I like Spider-Man but I I think I have superheroes I think the only one that I really love is Batman and I love Batman himself I love the the villains I love Gotham so this is kind of for me I think if you're not like into that stuff to that degree I'm not a comic guy or anything I don't know anything about that but I ever since I was a little kid I was five or six when Batman came out like the heat in Batman and that was like a huge movie for people my you know my age and certainly everyone else that was older and so that's always kind of been my my beat I wasn't into like Adam West or whatever and I even like the 90s Batman movies like not Batman Returns everyone likes that but like the campy ones I even dig those and certainly the Nolan ones are fucking amazing so and the new one was good yeah the Batman yeah I liked that as well I saw that in the theater actually which is rare for me yeah so it's i'm kind of into it for that reason i was saying that like how many times are they going to make us relive the death of the waynes but this is like stitching all these things together in a very comical sort of way so that like it's seamless like it's i want to i don't want to spoil for people but it's it's uh it's cool and i i really really enjoy it i will say that it gets a little repetitive where i don't want to play it for more than like a couple hours because I'm the kind of guy in Lego games where I got to beat the shit out of everything.

3:01:08I know you don't have to. And in fact, Mike and I were talking about this. I'm like, there's a real tension in Lego games where it's like, it's kind of a waste of time to destroy everything in a room or whatever, because you don't have good multipliers yet. And like, you're going to get a multiplier in the game later on where you're going to have like billions of fucking studs. So like having like, it's like, who gives a shit? But I can't stop. Like, I won't stop. And then it gets a little repetitive, but that's my fault. But I got to say, man, the game is is shockingly like I'm shocked by it where I'm like, this is really a cool evolution of it.

3:01:42I know it wasn't the core Traveler's Tales game guys that did the Horizon game, but that just kind of took the wind out of my sales. I'm like, this kind of sucks as a Lego game. And it's good to know that they still have the magic and are evolving the magic. And I like that. And I think a lot of it comes from the fact that Lego games were like on a conveyor belt for a long time. and yeah that's cool it's like yeah take advantage of just like you do with your toys take advantage of all these licenses and make all your money and people love them and they were good i actually liked some of the lego games on the on the vita i thought the ports were pretty good i played the lego batman games there as well but i think they i think the slower more deliberate releases is going to do a lot for them and because it allows them to explore and make these more robust games it's no longer about like these a million reskins of like the same three types or anything like that it's like no you have specific characters like catwoman's a character she does this alfred's a character he does this you know um yeah and so on and so forth gordon is a character and he does this so yeah i recommend it like i think it's really really cool so i'm playing that and i'm like i need something else it's an easy game to balance i'm not really in it for the story we all know these stories anyway right and so it's funny you brought up san andreas because i was like i'm gonna go play gta 5 and it's and in fact i was like i'm gonna look into this in the ps5 version came out 2022 and all the rest and then i'm like you know what what was that game that came out where the studio went out of business recently and i went and looked it up and the studio was quali labs and the game is luna abyss and i gotta say man this game is fucking dope and it there's a melancholy to playing it because you know the studio didn't survive but for people that are unfamiliar with it it is a very stylized i would say double a first person shooter story based single player and it's got it's interesting dude it's like one piece doom looks like it looks like it moves like wolfenstein yeah it's yeah a little bit of wolfenstein it's got the kinetics of doom but not the fine control of doom doom is a absolute masterpiece of movement so it's a little bit of doom but let's say it's a little bit of id yeah and then it's a little bit of returnal which is interesting or saros and that it's you'll see it when the enemies attack the way they shoot at you and stuff but it's in first person it's not third person it's a little bit of metroid prime like even down to like shooting doors to open them but like a lot of the platforming and more puzzle solving aspects of it and here's the interesting one it's a little bit of freedom wars because the entire game, the idea of the game is reducing your prison sentence.

3:04:27By doing tasks, although it's more story driven in that regard. And so it's about it's the visuals are dope, dude. And I got to say, like, there's a real artistic merit to this game in the way it's presented that I think is quite extraordinary. It's thirty dollars. I wasn't thrilled about paying thirty dollars for a game in which the studio went out of business. But it's like because the money is going to the publisher probably at this point. Bless you, by the way. And. So. It's about this like lunar. I think the way I understand it is like it's a future Earth. There's like this blood moon that appears over the surface of the Earth.

3:05:03And it's like this thing that has no... It's this thing with like infinite parameters. Like so you go into this like space and there's no... Like the spaces are endless. But like they're all just randomized. And it's not like randomized for the game. It's like this is the way the world is. Like there's no form to this place. and they take prisoners from Earth and send them there and put them into these proxy robots, like these androids, and make them do missions. So they're in a jail cell. They show you in a jail cell controlling this thing in this endless thing with no temporal existence. And every time you do something, the years go down on your sentence.

3:05:48And you start with 9 ,000 years or something like that. And it's pretty cool. i'm digging it i'm really digging it and it's just one of those games dude we were talking about this earlier about great good and great games and not being enough like this is one of those if this game came out in the late ps3 era even in the ps4 xbox one era it probably would have sold 500 000 copies and the studio would be making a sequel right there's just so little room for this kind of thing where this kind of thing comes in a few people recommended it to me over time i think but i just never really looked into it i'm like this is great game i'm fairly early there's six chapters I got through the first chapter last night I was up pretty late doing it actually but people should look into this one I really really like it so yeah it's like id yeah I'm looking at it Returnal meets Metroid Prime meets Freedom Wars so if that sounds interesting to you check out Luna L-U-N-A Abyss from Quali Labs alright and I'll get to GTA 5 soon I think as well and I still have a few other things to do I want to to put replay control i got to beat alan wake too but the summer is long and there's time yet oh yeah that's right you still haven't uh uh i'll wait to you haven't beat it yeah i think i'll beat alan wake too and then i'll think i'll replay control and then i'll probably time that into it's gonna be tough man i don't know what i'm gonna do i don't know because at that point dawn of the blood of the dawn walkers out i don't know man it's i'm being very ambitious i'm always overly ambitious i've been playing a lot of games though i'm on a i'm on a crazy platinum run like i think i think my biggest platinum haul was 23 and i think i'm already for a year and i think i'm at 13 or 14 or something so i think i need nine to match it which is that's that means i'm playing too much because i don't get bullshit platinums yeah all right let's get into six questions comments concerns thoughts and ideas chris and end this episode of sacred symbols as we always do with inquiries from the audience you submit your inquiries on patreon.com slash last day media in the threads on the news feed we respond to them you already heard a bunch of them throughout the show here's six more about random topics that i thought were germane to the things we usually care about and remember our threads go live on wednesdays and are deleted thursdays so you have 24 hours to inquire cj heinz begins things off and he says colin and chris what is valve smoking with the steam machine pricing is this an ominous sign for what's to come for the ps6 maybe what do you think about that what's going on with the steam machine the the pricing is over a thousand dollars for the lowest version of it the rumor is that they were supposed to be somewhere in the$700 range.

3:08:20Yeah. Obviously, the economic realities have changed mightily. I don't know anything about technology, as people know, but I do know people like Moore's Law are saying like this thing is incredibly underpowered and they're ripping people off with the price, even at the component pricing, like they're selling it out of profit. It gets into, which is fine, but it gets into what I was saying at, I don't really know who this thing, remember I was saying this when I was like, I don't, and this was before all the price stuff i was like i don't know who their customer is because isn't their customer someone who already uses steam and therefore you can't really subsidize the machine because they're already there so i don't really know what they're doing with with this thing i don't know they're yeah i mean there could have been a reality where like i would have picked this thing up but like not at 750 not not at 750 and and certainly not at uh a thousand and by the way that's a thousand with no steam controller by the way yeah the no controller thing people are upset about that but it's funny i pitched that as an idea that sony should pursue if that's what they need to do to keep the cost down especially if they use the same controller well right yeah i mean like it's it yeah i'm sorry no well to be fair like it's a steam machine you can you can hook up whatever controller you want to right and that's what i was going to say was they have an unusual advantage wherein sony has to use a proprietary thing but like they could just be like we're using the ps5 controller so don't worry about it i wonder it's it's less that they're selling something without a controller it's the fact that some something that's being sold is a thousand dollars without the controller that's like that's what's insane about it to me but yeah i don't know man i i don't think they wanted this you know i don't think they wanted it to be this much uh it's obviously and look let's be real like this thing's going to sell out like people are going to buy it and it's it's it's it's going to do well um i think it's already sold out in japan or something i think i read that so like there's a market for it like and And I think at the right price point, I probably would have bought it because like I like the idea, especially with having and make no mistake.

3:10:21Like it would never be like my main way to play. Like it would never be like, oh, I'm going to play the newest games on this. But I have a long standing Steam library that goes back to like the. I mean, it goes back to 2013, but even games that I bought, I've bought since then. And it goes back to like, you know, really, really old stuff that I just don't have access to on either Xbox or PlayStation. And so having a really small, simple box in my living room that I could just boot those things up on, that is appealing to me. Because I hate the living room PC thing. I don't like it. Like I tried it in a couple of places that I was living.

3:11:00It's just isn't, it's not, it's not good. more power to you if you like it but there is a market for like a like a bespoke living room friendly pc that just runs as a console and doesn't have any bullshit attached to it i think that's cool but uh i don't know man not at this price and i'm sure they didn't want it to be this way either but honestly even at 750 i think maybe a bit much i can see maybe like six yeah it's it's a it's a lot man i mean well again i not knowing that the power differential apparently makes it weaker than a ps5 like a base ps5 so that's what they say and i'm like at that price that's fucking crazy i mean but again this goes into valve i think actually uh gabe said it recently where like they realize they're kind of over the barrel with the manufacturers and i think he had said something like if they like refuse to buy at certain prices then they're kind of out of the loop.

3:12:01You know, like you, you, I would, I would believe that because you're getting allocate, like limited allocations offered to you and they'll just offer it to someone else and then you're out. So there is a level of urgency, but I think I would be very curious. Like, I feel like this is a, this is a bit of a mind that they, they walked over. Like they didn't, and they said it themselves. I didn't mean to be so like, I always, I always kid around about how I'm right about things. And sometimes I am and sometimes I'm not, but like, I didn't intend on being so right about the steam machine for this reason right like i was like who is the customer for this period but now like it's acute because the pricing is nuts the 512 gigabyte might like you said just the model with no uh controllers 1049 with the controller 1128 two terabyte 1349 with the controller 1428 now there are i will compliment that for a few things is first of all it's a really good looking thing i love the industrial design of it and it has a lot of little ports and things like a lot of usb ports and like a lot of accoutrements which is cool as sd card reader i think and so it's not like this cheap stripped down like fat ps3 where they started taking everything out of it it's not like it's not like an ouya or something right exactly i um so i think the industrial design is cool and i think it's gonna you know it runs uh steam os3 and it'll probably i i heard that on there i can't keep the fucking page for it up because everything moves is animated it's so distracting you know i'm like trying to read shit about it and it's like this fucking dancing literally a dancing console gif and like it's like oh my i feel like i'm on geo cities or something like that so uh so anyway you can go get this thing if you want but i so all right so what does this mean for PS6, is it ominous?

3:13:46Yeah, it's ominous. But I think there are certain things, as we've discussed, that Sony controls that Steam doesn't. Steam is... Valve is not an electronics manufacturer. Sony is. Valve is not making a lot of these. Sony is going to be making many millions and tens of millions of their units, hopefully at some point. So the economies of scale are different. Here's the thing, Chris, is that there is... They can't release a$1 ,000 console. like i sony like i just refuse to believe that they are literally going to release a thousand dollar console because it just seems like whoa what are you doing you know it would be crazy um and i really i i will say like i'm not gonna bet on anything but dollars to donuts you have to assume that like they'll get that thing they're not gonna sell a thousand dollar console white maybe 899 or something like that just the psychological value of not seeing that i think will go a long way for its audience but if the if the consoles are really going to be this expensive then it really does show you that the ps5 is going to exist forever and right by the way mike and i were talking about this on one of our walks last yes last night which i was like you know i've been compelled by this because we've been talking about like what are you going to do about timing fall 27 spring 28 those are really your only options if you want to manufacture now and if you bail out of manufacturing as we've said then there's all these costs you incur it's just they're going to make the ps6 we i think i think that's well understood it's not like they're going to back away yeah i've been kind of compelled chris by this argument that like they should just release it when they were going to release it for whatever it costs and the argument is and i i was like this is a good point is that like all right so like the argument is you're there are millions of people that will buy it or whatever you whatever you sell it for first of all right like i'll buy it as long as it's not like like so agrees i'm getting kicked in the balls for some note but like whatever it is i'm gonna buy it i'll probably buy both the handheld and the console i'm definitely gonna do that i think and there are probably millions of us so even if the adoption is slow and there's a lot of cross-generation support why wouldn't you want to just sell it to those people and then later on you can just release drop the price and then you'll capture all those other people and their argument is is basically like you're you're never going to get those people without the price being right you will get these people with the price regardless if you get to that point at some point then just keep the timeline and you basically have two bursts and i'm like yeah that is a decent point like there almost is no reason to back away from it you kind of just got to do it and and by the way we might not see as much of an a price intolerance as we think it's like the complaining going on about grand theft auto six with the physical edition reasonable enough but this is a non non issue for most people who are going to buy it physically anyway never were and they don't give a shit it might be that like the complaining about the pricing is this acute thing online that's amplified by people being upset but people might be willing to pay a thousand dollars for a playstation and by the way a thousand dollars for a playstation next year will be cheaper than a six hundred dollar ps3 was in 2006 i don't want to give sony any excuses but that is true if you adjust it for inflation so i'm like that's now it didn't work out great for them with the ps3 but they did sell millions of them at that price now yeah i i want to be clear i do think it this kind of goes into the same thing about like uh you know how many how many gamers are women it's like it's it's not a big percentage but it's still like millions upon millions like there's there's like it's there's a number of people who are like you know what i I mean, so like when you when you look at the machine like the PS6 at a thousand dollars, yes, there will be millions of people who will buy it.

3:17:35The issue is like. I just. I guess it depends on like whether or not it matters to you. That you're not going to sell nearly as many as the like it's going to be like a numbers wise, surely. A failure in comparison to the PS5 generation. yeah almost certainly if it comes out next year definitely um if that doesn't matter to you and you just want to get your money and you and you want to um just kind of stay the course and understand that you'll pick people up over time that's sure that's that's fine i mean the only other choice you have really is just not make a ps6 and they're not going to do that so i guess i could see the argument of just like just doing it it's just nobody wants it yeah it's it's it's hard for me to visualize and yet the reliable leakers like morris law and kepler and these other guys are like they're doing it like they're doing it you know and i'm like yeah i guess you just this is what i think was happening i guess in what you're doing i guess but i suppose yeah and i think they look at it as i think they've embraced what they have been forced to embrace with the ps4 into the ps5 and so on was is like the ps5 isn't going anywhere so like we can like it we don't want it to go anywhere and it's not going anywhere so like could we just have the best of both worlds keep our timeline and keep the ps6 supported through the 2030s basically and have iterative versions of it as well because i think when and we we know this and i think we've said this our audience knows better but like when people say like you just got to walk away and like not do it it's like you can't it's not something yeah that's it's just like it's you could i i told you it would be the most consequential thing playstation ever did was to to be like we're we're not going forward with this machine the machine as i noted i think on stream like the machine exists i'm not telling you that because i've seen it or i know that it's like it exists like they have them they're not manufactured yet but they're making them by hand they probably have a bunch of different stuff people are specking to them when they make games and by this time next year i assume they will be manufactured or at least beginning to be manufactured and sitting in warehouses so you pulling out means they have to start over again and that's not a small thing for your r &d and for the health of the company and they can't take big risks and by the way i think this is what asha is saying with the xbox situation where it's like it's clear it's fairly clear that the next xbox is going to be an oem because they don't even want to deal with it yeah like i think they're just like we don't even and i think this is what she's saying when they're when she was saying like the previous generation the previous leadership made decisions that make this really expensive for us yeah they made the decisions that they're not in line right now for components you know so they have to like buy things at current rates or future rates and they just want to offload that shit so they're going to so i i really believe that above all else like this ultimately affects xbox more because they're apparently not well positioned and sony is maybe it maybe it'll be impossible for sony to ever well positioned themselves in this regard but well maybe you can do what almost you could position yourself i mean if the steam machine is coming out right and it's a thousand dollars granted we know the economic reasons for that we also know that valve doesn't have a subscription service that they can use to kind of leverage a lower cost for the machine they have to make profit on every every unit sold in order for it to be a worthy endeavor um like we know this intrinsically but your average person they look at sticker price and that's that's kind of where it begins and ends you could see maybe a future where like because we all understand that the ps5 is not going anywhere because we understand that even the ps4 is still sticking around in some in some late respects that i like i could see a future where they're just like you know what no the ps6 is a thousand dollars and it's a boutique this is for hardcore people i guess if you want to you know you know what i mean like i like why not really at that point if you know because we know i i just know if this thing comes out next year it's not going to sell ps5 numbers no no way i mean there's no way it just isn't and if you already know that you're almost it's almost better to position yourself as you know we're gonna make a profit on this thing we're gonna it's gonna be a hardcore machine it'll be like the thousand dollar uh third uh what is it 30th anniversary um ps5s where it's just like this is for the you know for those among us who care and those among us who really really want it it's a thousand bucks um and maybe you know a year from now we'll drop it we'll drop the price if that's possible and we'll take it from there because we've already kind of accepted that this is going to be a concession year and or a concession machine or it's going to be a machine that's just it has no hope of doing the same at the same rate um i always wonder if that's maybe a better position for them so that way they can at least understand or they can at least telegraph it's like yeah it's a it's a more expensive machine they're deep in let's at least make money on it sorry i didn't mean to over talk no no i'm sorry the uh the um they're back into the conversation i think of having to subsidize this thing like truly subsidize it and that obviously really hurt them with ps3 i mean they they were at 600 they were subsidizing the ps3 deeply i mean that's what's so fucking crazy about that you know is like you're start charging 600 for this thing and you're subsidizing it hundreds of dollars you know and i don't i don't that's why they lost so much money i mean we've talked about the the the irony of like the more they sold the worse they did because they had to saturate the market but they were taking these short-term losses that were like insurmountable in a way and it was because they lost money for the generation the thing that i think with that's so fascinating with what they do with ps6 is if they position it as a more niche device which is fine i don't think that that's necessarily a bad idea it's just it goes into like well what does this mean for games like at that point you can't have ps6 games like it's got to be basically this modular right and then i think that that lowers the tolerance for the machine even more there i will tell you i mean they're in a tough spot with this thing they really are i mean there's there's no there's no doubt i agree man like i don't i'm also kind of of the mind like i'm not and look I know that I know that sometimes look we're talking about how like well they can't make PS6 games for this thing if it's going to be a more niche product it's going to be a more niche product anyway because it's again it's just coming into a market where nobody like people comparatively are not that interested like you're going to have to how many units did the PS5 sell in the first um i don't know couple like let's say the first year uh how many what was that number oh look he has five five sold in first year 17.3 million well so all right so that's the thing it's like are you going are you comfortable making a triple a game in the modern ecosystem right where AAA games are like what like 300 million 300 million dollars to sell in the first year at full price with keeping 100 of the profit for probably I would guess like maybe like 13 million in the first year and that's like being like relatively nice you know like 13 million the first year um although granted like maybe maybe it'll have a similar adoption rate because like it was it was difficult to come by the PS5 in comparison so I don't know I I just like I think you're kind of you're kind of fucked either way because you have budgets that are ballooning you're going to have this thing these games that are going to be locked to new hardware that people are going to have to buy to play it like i i kind of see a reality where the ps6 comes out and there are no ps6 games anyway like whether it's niche or not because why would like it's kind of insane to do that in the modern in like why would you why would you lock out tens of millions of people in this environment where games are this expensive to me yeah it's gonna be like it just i don't know what you do about it really like i it's it's crazy and look to be fair we don't know what this machine is we don't know what it looks like we don't know necessarily what it does we have rumors we have specs we have all of it on paper and uh you know seeing it on paper and seeing it in person is one thing there is an ooh ah factor to seeing a new machine and you know the allure of a new shiny box and maybe there's functionality in it that we don't know there's obviously that ps6 handheld that's in the conversation as well as to like how that fits into all this whether it's part of it whether it's a separate thing like i have no idea how they're going to go about that so it could be that like by this time next year there is appetite for it uh we see it and there's more interest because it's it's doing something novel or interesting that justifies it beyond just the normal machine but i look at it as a ps5 owner now or ps5 pro owner right now who just kind of isn't wanting like and i don't know what i would really need out of a new machine to even be excited to pay a thousand dollars for it like i don't i don't know what more they can do short of doing something like almost like nintendo switch level stuff where it's just like i can take my ps5 pro basically with me out of the machine and that That would be something that would get me to buy it for sure.

3:27:06That's what I'm wondering. But I don't know. I'm wondering that with Chris with the handheld shit where I'm like. Micah and I were again, we're talking about this over our walk last night where I was like, I wonder. I wonder if like the PS6 itself, like the console will be like the boutique expensive thing. And what they're going to say is like the handheld is dockable like a switch. And that's like the base console. and then if you want this like really souped up thing then you go with this even more expensive machine like i wonder what they're gonna do i don't know man i'm so excited like we're gonna know in the next if they're gonna really release the next fall i would imagine the next six to eight months not six eight eight months i think they're gonna get through the holidays and then they'll go for sure yeah i think you'll have like you you might have like a a little a little cerny fireside chat yeah in in february or something indeed but um but who i don't know yeah i just i just think it's a rough position to be in um and i really like i really i don't think it being just a simply more powerful version of what we have right now is going to cut it for most people again millions of people will buy it right that's that's for your average person it's yeah it's i don't know it's the early adopters the early adopters were there for Wii U.

3:28:23I mean, like really the it's the stories told as time goes on. And I think Vita showed it in a pretty significant way that it's like the PlayStation community is more fickle than you think. You know, the Vita's failure was surprising to me based on the furor around PS3 at that time. But that's a whole other story. Anton K wrote in and said, hey, Sacred Crew, if Xbox is spun off, I hate Xbox and all caps, and I hate it. I don't know why they did that. It looks like shit. Would Sony have any interest in investing? True, they will be getting most of Xbox's games on PlayStation, but is there something about buying low and investing in possible future success?

3:29:02Similarly, in the way Sony is invested in Epic, would it make sense to diversify by adding Xbox to the portfolio? Thanks and have a great weekend. So what Anton is referring to is the idea that there's this idea that was reported and therefore I think is probably going to ultimately happen, which is that not that they're going to be sold, but that they're going to be split off as a subsidiary now people that don't know very much about video games were making a big deal about this and i'm like guys playstation's a subsidiary of sony like like xbox was actually operate operating way closer to its parent company than playstation is operated and uh sie is its own corporation that is a subsidiary and wholly owned by sony and that allows for people from outside to play around easier now sony didn't do it for that reason i don't think in the beginning they just keep all their shit like that like the pictures unit and the music unit is the same um microsoft might do that in order to distance itself from risk and attract investment however if this happens two things it's going to be that's it for i mean i'm not even saying kind of making it a subsidiary but if they start attracting outsiders the hardware is over at that point i think like even oem hardware i don't think they would do it because people would want to make games and the entertainment quality of the ubiquity of games but i say this not to be a dickhead but i just mean it is that i think part of the reason xbox has struggled is because they don't own very much of consequence and the things that they've acquired they either overpaid for or mishandled so i think the only example of something that seems to be fairly healthy continuously healthy is minecraft um and that would be something that would be interesting to have i guess but none of the xbox studio like none of the experts there's a lot of talent within all these places but nothing that sony should want and especially because as you said anton the they're getting all these games anyway so there's no reason to invest in it but maybe some bethesda properties would be interesting but i don't know it would be it would be interesting if if they had a ubisoft like thing happen to them where like there were investors externally that didn't want to be exposed to the larger risk of the brand and we were talking about vantage earlier with ubisoft it's like you spin everything that we care about into another entity we'll invest in that and all this other shit will remain here because there are some great studios i think obsidian's a great studio playground's obviously a very capable studio and some others and then of course like id and machine games plus you have the whole call of duty apparatus and blizzard there's things they're worth investing in i just don't think sony should want to have to do with any of it and i don't know what they would have to gain from it so i say no personally yeah i mean i don't know if I have a particularly unique stance on it.

3:31:44I think you've kind of put it out pretty well. They're already getting these games. There's no reason to put more money into it. And I just think that this idea that this is where Xbox fans got lost in the sauce with like expanding the first party. And what happened to Embracer, I think most significantly is like, you actually don't need to own all this stuff and you can't even handle all of it. Like even if you own all of it, it's like, what are you going to do with all of it? You're going to have like your teams making like rival shooters, rival role-playing games, rival racing games. It's like, it doesn't really make any sense when you really think about over-expansion of your, like you have to be very deliberate.

3:32:22That's why I always thought Quantic Dream was such an interesting acquisition target way back in the day, not any time recently, where it's like you actually fit in an interesting way. You make things that no one else makes and your games are part of PlayStation's identity, but it's like, you don't need all, even id and machine games existing in the same space is kind of, alongside Call of Duty, alongside Halo, alongside it's like. You don't see a conflict here like you and this is why I keep making the argument, though people don't like to hear it is like Sony should really consider shortening its roster and investing way more money even in each of the games and making them truly distinct behemoths and let everyone else do the work for you and every other space.

3:33:04Have a shooter, have a role playing game, have an action game, have like and just do it. You know, I don't know. maybe that's too simplistic, but there's no doubt that these pieces cannibalize each other. And by the way, you saw that even internal tension with grand Turismo and drive club back in the day about how those games didn't really make sense. And polyphony wasn't thrilled about it. They just weren't. So I don't know, man, the Xbox stuff can stay far away from us as far as I'm concerned. Please. We have enough. We have enough problems. Okay. We're struggling enough as it is. You go ahead and keep whatever you're doing.

3:33:40oh man all right simple-minded steve wrote in said hey sacred bros what do you think sony's new initiative will be for this upcoming generation their live service push has been disappointing and the sales of their first party games haven't been as impactful as during the ps4 generation i wonder if they'll revert to the ps2 generations approach focusing on second party partnerships with timed exclusivity which i believe is a positive move additionally will studios be able to concentrate on smaller gaming experiences that would appeal more to the upcoming handheld ps6 i'd love to hear your thoughts thanks we kind of talked about this actually already and and I didn't really realize it just just earlier and like what the strategy will be for ps5 it's or ps6 itself and what the complexion of the generation will be but I really believe that this idea of more and I was just saying this with the studios just more more it's like I don't know man I don't know what people don't understand about this we were just talking about um the quality labs game I'm playing uh quality labs game I'm playing Luna Abyss it's like there are a million of these you you don't you need true differentiators the the era of small playstation games is dead it's dead i don't know how people don't like it's been dead open your fucking eyes they're not when japan studio went away it was over um and astrobots about as small as you're gonna get out of the first party now and i think that that's good i i don't want more small things That's not how you attract people to your console.

3:35:08And you know that because these games don't sell. So we have to dissuade ourselves and disabuse ourselves of this notion that like we need to have this complexion of lots of different things flooding the ecosystem. And it's like, no, you have to have great shit flooding the ecosystem. That's what you have to have. And I do believe one of the things you said, Simple Minded Steve, is true, is that second party relationships will become more important. and it is my assumption that this is the part of what Sony is doing right now and has been doing maybe for the last 18 months is we got to just go back to the way we used to do things, which is just getting bets started that limit our exposure to their failures.

3:35:49We can act as publishers and stewards and IP owners. And then if things work out, we go from there. But a game like Wolverine is going to pay dividends for a PlayStation for PlayStation's brand in a way that 10 small games combined wouldn't. And I mean that both from sales, like Wolverine will sell better than 10 of those games combined and from the way it's going to be covered and treated. And the same thing is true for Intergalactic and the same thing is true for the God of War game and so on and so forth. And the same is going to be true for the new Uncharted game. And we really can't go much beyond that because we don't have any games to talk about.

3:36:25I mean, I'm just going to be honest with you here. so that's my stance is that they need to they need playstation's got to be the triple a box i mean otherwise why do you have this machine at all go play your ps4 yeah i mean i agree and disagree i think i think you're right that triple a like they need to focus on triple a but i also think triple a needs to i think there needs to be a re-evaluation of what triple a means because i just think what triple a means now is just not sustainable like even if even if it was all you were focused on and you like spun off like let's say you spun off a bunch of different teams that were doing smaller games off and you downsize you have like maybe like five studios or something something drastic um that's a lot of pressure riding on those games and it's a and the budgets man they're getting crazy i understand why they're getting crazy obviously economic realities aside but also just because like the audience it reacts so poorly whenever things aren't up to snuff and to a most ridiculous degree you remember puddle gate with like spider man yeah and like and like i i talked about this a lot too but like uh the craig thing with halo infinite it's like it just becomes this big pr nightmare whenever something isn't like a hundred percent fucking perfect and i that's an attitude that i think needs to really fucking die and i don't know how you do and it's not again it's not to say that we should accept less than you know great games but i also think like the things that we the things that we identify as quality markers aren't necessarily as important to what a video game is as what we do as what we think it is i think we're really miscalibrated and i think part of granted i think this would have happened anyway people always chase fidelity and and it as technology increases but like i think this is the this is kind of the the unforeseen consequences and the damage of of i think the last of us in some way where it's just like these games were so like above above the the board and and so above um fidelity wise like what we anticipated or what we could have expected that like everything that isn't that is considered not real or not legitimate and uh i don't know i don't know what the answer i don't know how you really fix that because they've kind of dug this hole themselves they've kind of established themselves as like we make things that are you know we make hbo we make we make cinema we make the cinema of video games that's what we do we make high fidelity high narrative you know highbrow stuff that demands hundreds of millions of dollars and damn near a decade of development time and i just don't we gotta be we gotta grow beyond that i think for the health of the industry and also just like the health of the medium i think yeah i think i think you're right downscale you're absolutely right they all know this they all know that you can't keep they can't keep this up and you're right they've painted themselves themselves into this corner it was their strategic advantage and by the way it's kind of backfiring now because now a lot of those games are reading the same yep and now it's like a point of criticism that like oh it's the movie games and it's like well now look now it's like you can't even downscale because it's gonna it's gonna look embarrassing compared to your previous work and if you keep going the course you're going to make your money i guess but it's going to be more expensive to continue and people are going to be less and less interested as the novelty of that kind of cinematic you know once of a one of a kind like hyper real experience wears off like god of war was god of war using the one-shot camera and looking as good as it did and being as narrative focused as it did in 2018 was like a it was that That was new.

3:40:30That was like a breath of fresh air relative. Now we've seen it twice already and we're going to see it again. And again, it's not to say that game is going to be bad, but like. There's it's less novel. It's like actually the switch and switch two is actually a great example. Like switch two is like it's not that it's not that they don't sell or that people aren't interested in them. But like the novelty of having that functionality in a machine is significantly less this time than it was the first time. Nintendo's got their hardcore, you know, audience and it's going to sell really, really well.

3:41:00but the novelty, the appeal of that machine to absolutely everybody is missing in comparison. I don't have a desire to get the Switch 2, purely because the entire desire I had for the Switch 1 was that idea of just like, oh, what a weird idea, a novel idea to have a console that is a home console that docks and then you can take it on the go. It's interesting. It's not that interesting anymore in comparison to how it used to be. So I don't know. I think you've got to be careful, man. I think you're right where the machines and the first party need to focus on AAA, but we really need to reframe what that means because we can't be doing this.

3:41:36We can't be having seven-year dev cycles for$400 million budgets, and it's insane. Yeah, something's got to give. And of course, AI is going to be a major part of that drive that they're going to. I don't know if you saw that Tim Sweeney interview, actually, about how he was castigating Valve for making developers put AI warnings on their games, which he feels like is unfair and is causing those games to get beat up, but they're trying to find the efficiencies and development or whatever. And I'm like, I think you got to find a different way, but we'll figure it out. Probably won't actually figure it out.

3:42:05Everyone's going to continue to eat each other. And that's, that's the scary thing about the industry. We've said before, it's like, there's no crash coming. It's just like where the money comes from. More and more and more and more and more and more and more money spending. People are spending on games. It's just, there's so many losers in the market that it become, everything's going to become, I mean, I think you're already seeing the risk aversion. And in fact, we're going to talk about a game that was decidedly on risk verse, but for some reason completely ignored by its publisher. Benjamin Schroeder wrote in and said, hi, sacred symbolists.

3:42:33Midnight Murder Club received its final update this week. If you don't recall, this is a multiplayer horror FPS game that was released on PS5 and Steam in August of 2025. More notably, this was published by PlayStation, which means internally they consider it first party. I played it upon release and had a lot of fun for a few days, but then fell off quicker as player numbers stagnated and it became nearly impossible to find a match. As far as I can tell, PlayStation never did much market the thing, and it didn't even receive a last-ditch pity release on PS Plus to bolster its numbers. In fact, PlayStation didn't really even acknowledge it at all.

3:43:01I feel like I'm taking crazy pills every time I think about this game. Is there some conspiracy about why PlayStation people want to let their own published game die so quickly? Is it a matter of never having faith in it to begin with, or do you think there's a juicier story in there? Your insight is appreciated. Midnight Murder Club is a weird one. This is, of course, a game made by Velen. Those are the guys that made Knockout City or whatever that game is called. And I was reading about it today because they did, in fact, released their final update to the game. The game is$7.99, by the way, right now on Steam.

3:43:30It's probably also that way on PlayStation Network as well. But if you read the update, you'll see, I thought this was kind of cool. They say that, you know, the game will continue and all the rest, but obviously it's dead now. And they say, quote, at Velen, we feel strongly about game preservation. And they say, see also Knockout City private server edition. So we'll come back to Patch Midnight Murder Club again if anything in the future prevents people from playing it the way they can today. so that's cool the game will exist in perpetuity i am deeply confused about what happened here and i don't know why sony was so gun shy about it considering the things that they're willing to talk about and showing it behind a la foam stars or something like that which probably wasn't bad it was a splatoon ripoff in a way but this game i thought was kind of neat and And clearly Sony saw something in it.

3:44:21I would have seen something in it too. I don't, you know, I wouldn't have expected to be so unpopular. And I don't think Sony talking about it or tweeting about it or whatever, putting it in a state of play would have mattered. But it is peculiar that they just let it die because these are the kinds of bets that I thought that they would want to make. This is what I always say. It's like, just go make 10 bets. Yeah. And this is one of them. And it's like, okay, it didn't work. But like, did you try? I mean, it didn't seem like a bad game. it didn't seem like that was the problem. It seemed like people just weren't that into it.

3:44:52I don't know, man. I don't know what happened with this game. And you're right. It didn't even get a PS plus release or anything. They just, I think there was like a single PlayStation blog post about it. And that was it. And it is a PlayStation published game. It only has 250 reviews on steam. That means it's sold in the low thousands probably. So I don't, I don't know. I don't know what happened here. Did you ever, I know Dustin tried it and he liked it. Did you ever try this game? Midnight Murder Club? No, I never got around to it. It just kind of felt like I had a sinking pit in my stomach with that game where it's just like, this is a really cool and novel idea.

3:45:32It's unconventional and interesting and subversive. It doesn't stand a chance. It became clear too when it came out. I think that probably put other people off too where it's like, well, it's clearly not working. So why? yeah it's like watching a tv show that got canceled right exactly uh it it is really it's a bummer because i think it's a really good idea i think it's interesting but i really do believe this i just think the general audience is just not interested in things that are conceptually challenging or intriguing or interesting i think i think they want stuff that's easily digestible i think i think i think it's why third person narrative action games are so big it's because like it's the kind of thing that even a passerby or like an observer can kind of get into they can watch it kind of like a movie there's like a casual aspect to it more so than there is i think it's why the first person shooter is kind of dying in a in a broader sense it's just like it's it's a lot more video game it's a lot more intensive it's it requires a lot more so you know you see a new not only is it an fps but it's also this really unique idea and it's it's playing with light and dark and it's i don't know man it's it's a cool idea and unfortunately that's not what you need you need like you need safe yeah now it's too bad and that and i knew that when it came out i was just like even before it came out i was just like this is a really cool idea and i'm really into it not gonna happen yeah it's too bad it would have been like this is one of those things where it's like again if this was xbox live arcade or whatever it would have been huge if this was like it reminds me a little bit even knockout city i remember playing knockout city it's like this is monday night combat this is like that kind of game many such cases many such cases and it's just it's a different time now and uh i'm telling you man many many great games are uh and to be fair like i don't know if midnight murder club is great but I don't think it's a simple I don't think it's as simple as it used to be in the sense that when something fails I don't think it's a simple clear-cut case where it's just like it's terrible or even that it wasn't good or even that it wasn't great anymore I think I think there's going to be a lot of great games that just die because there's not a lot of attention there's not enough room and there's not enough interest because a lot of the audience now is just not really hardcore about it and what's what's a shame too Chris is that these a lot of these games are contingent on community so like it can't even find a nature be enjoyed by itself hopefully this will be solved in the future i mean this is where ai could be useful it's just populating these places with bots and like where anyone could just go play anything at any time i mean i guess that would be kind of cool but um it reminds me of you know i really think that that that typing battle royale is a really great idea too and i wonder it's like that seems like such a fucking sick idea and yet who will people really play it i don't know i don't know r.i.p.

3:48:27and peace midnight murder club we barely knew you yeah eugene aka wrote in and said good day to you colin it's funny man moriarty and good day to chris really really really raygun would either of you be opposed to allowing gambling software on your gaming devices if there were safeguards and proper regulations in place i personally don't really like to gamble but i'd maybe occasionally do it if it was embedded in fun experiences on my nintendo or playstation consoles i'd imagine something like vampire survivors or peggo with real monetary investments with every other pastime dipping its toes in the gambling maybe is it maybe inevitable thank you i'll now return to the receipt the receiver and hearken i wonder dude like there's multiple layers to this i have no problem with gambling uh we are sponsored by prize picks occasionally i think that's cool prize picks is founded by or run by mike yabara which is so interesting um and in the past we've had other gambling sponsors too and i think if you're a responsible adult it's up to you and it's incumbent on you to know what you're getting yourself into and i gamble occasionally i don't really use the apps to do it i gamble on fantasy football like my fantasy leagues are pretty high stakes in my you know um for both my serious league and my family league it's you know to the tune of hundreds of dollars a year it's not anything crazy um so i have no problem with with that and that's one layer because some people just have a problem with it and and a lot of people have a problem with its overexposure in society but again i I think it's about what society will tolerate.

3:49:49For instance, cigarettes still sell pretty briskly, even though they're labeled about how badly they're going to kill and maim you. Right? There are people that are responsible enough, and then they're irresponsible. And then no matter how much you make someone try to be responsible, they're just not going to. That's why there's like these 1-800 numbers at the end of gambling commercials and all the rest. It's like, got to take a little bit of agency over your own life. The second layer to me, Chris, is what would you bet on? and it's like you're talking about pegel and vampire stars like those are weird to me that's like brain rot gambling shit that you see on like calci right or um polymarket which are really cool websites that i really actually i think they're really interesting and neat and i love that people can bet on anything but that's like that's the example of betting on anything right right what if you could bet on evo what if you could bet on a halo tournament Madden tournament FC something like that maybe I think there are way too many complications to make it viable though the major ones being PlayStation is an adult brand kind of but there's a lot of kids on it and that's going to get dicey real quick the second thing that I think is more important is about the sanctity of what you're betting on this is already a huge problem in sport and you're not a football fan but this recently came to fruition with a college player Brandon Soresby and they were Brendan Soresby who was a quarterback uh most recently at Texas Tech but played for Cincinnati for a couple years and was betting on games including games his team was in or playing in and is not allowed to play in the NFL for the whole year because of it because it is a it's not that anyone really gives a shit about his five dollar bets it's about the sanctity of the game itself and if you can't trust the people that are playing to not throw games and not do things.

3:51:39It's just so dicey at so many different levels that cannot be controlled for. It's not a real sport. You don't have bookies. Bookies keep people honest in Vegas, like the odds makers, because they're experts. They know what the fair odds are. There's so many things to answer. So is it a cool idea? Yeah, sure. I have no problem with that, and there could be money to be made on it, but man, that would be complicated. Yeah. Really complicated. I don't know. I think it's a net negative. I just don't. I'm not big on it. I think adults can do whatever they want, but the reality is it's different. Cigarettes are different than games because it's trivial in comparison to circumvent.

3:52:26I was 13 playing M-rated games. You know what I mean? Right. Because my parents were like, yeah, whatever. It's fine. My parents wouldn't let me smoke at 13. And if I really wanted to smoke, it would have been very difficult for me to do it. Right. That's a good point. And I think like it's just the triviality is so is so so vast. And gambling addiction is actually kind of like crazy. Like it's actually like it's I didn't really know much about this until I like met some people. But it's like, dude, that's dangerous. That is really bad. And it's not to say that people should be babied or whatever.

3:52:58But it's like I think generally speaking, the more the more friction you can create between people and those kinds of things, the better generally. um adults are going to do what they do but like definitely in these ecosystems where kids are like kind of everywhere like it's best to it's best to leave it out there's already there's so there's such a plentiful gambling ecosystem already like i don't really think it needs to be everywhere yeah it just creates a lot of regulatory problems too and problems between countries and you know in terms of what's legal here and what it's just yeah like you said like the amount of attention that would have to be paid to every aspect of it would be would cost more than what they would get out of it and i think the audience would also probably recoil it's funny chris like there is a problem with gambling in the united states but i think a lot of it has to do with like gambling is as old as humanity people were probably gambling 10 000 years ago about shit making bets about who was going to kill this or what is going to do this in the hunter like you know what it's about and i like i've always liked gambling as a even when i was younger like i was my i used to occasionally buy like scratch tickets when I was a kid.

3:54:06And it's like, I think I understood early on, but I certainly understand as an adult, it's like, you're not going to win. You can win in the short term. And there are professional gamblers that win in the long term, but they are scarce and they are they're basically hunted by these companies. Like, I don't know if people know anything about this. Like you can get banned from casinos, you can get banned from apps for being too good and so so they're like they'll if you win if you're sitting at a blackjack table and you're like racking up wins they can come to you and be like get out you can keep your money but you're not coming here anymore you're not playing here anymore you're bad for us and you have to understand that that's the fucking mentality so you have to know that it's it's supposed to be a thing that like where you feel a sense of excitement betting on a game and you win and that's exciting and then so you go buy dinner or something like that it's not supposed to be a thing that you do and chase losses and that's what people do and then you end up in major trouble and which is yeah which is by the way why i think it's it's kind of the thing that like you if if at any point you should be introduced to that stuff after you've after you're a kid yeah agreed you know what i mean like you should be able to be like because it was dude it was so trivial for me to like undo the parental lock on my on my home consoles it was ridiculous you know it's insane you remember you might be a little young do you remember the v chip this was the thing that was going to go into like tvs in the 90s and it was supposed to like give parents parental controls that sounds right and then like people realize that like their kids are the smartest tech people in the house and will easily just bypass all of this shit rendering it moot yeah i think i i think i had a tv with a v chip in it and i think that's where you know how they started you know how in the early 2000s they started rating everything on tv i think that was all connected to that like they would have the rating in the corner that was like a new thing on tv that never happened anyway i yeah it's it's not worth opening this pandora's box but i i want to say that like i think gambling is fine like i because i think some people have a real moral problem with it and i'm like i don't like i i just think you have to no one should hold a gun to your head and force you to gamble but if you're if you're preposterously gambling money your money away that's your own problem i mean it doesn't like you can do whatever you want right like i love going to casinos and gambling but i always look at it as i actually heard mike florio a guy listened to in the football space say it recently where like you have to look at gambling as like having an amount of money that this is like you going to the movies or you going out to dinner or you're doing it's like this is the money i'm spending tonight on gambling you can't go into it being like i'm gonna walk away with this much money and more you have to walk away with it you have to go in assuming you're just gonna lose the money as if you bought something you're spending money on an activity right and if you're doing that which I've always done and many people have done then I think you're in good shape but if not call that 1-800 gambling number I guess and watch out for yourself because it's a bad scene out there and I do unironically love Cal She and Polymarket just because the idea that you can bet on anything is hysterical to me like I think that's so fucking awesome and so ridiculous like anything anything you want All right.

3:57:20Final inquiry comes from Arian YN, who says, hello, sacred gents. Recently, we've been seeing a lot of negativity and criticism directed at Sony Studios for doubling down on existing IP, but isn't that essentially how Nintendo has operated for decades? Heck, most Zelda games revolve around familiar themes and story beats, yet each entry feels fresh, thanks to its unique world, mechanics, presentation, and sense of adventure. Working within an existing IP doesn't necessarily mean repeating the same gameplay loop characters or stories. A strong franchise can serve as a foundation for new ideas rather than a limitation on creativity.

3:57:49With the cost of AAA development continuing to rise and publishers increasingly relying on established brands, is it time for Sony to embrace a similar strategy within its first-party studios? Instead of focusing primarily on brand new franchises, should they be leveraging their existing IP catalog to create new world settings and characters and gameplay experiences under familiar banners? Anyway, I'll hang up and listen. Well, I think part of this is, part of the answer is yeah, kind of. But you have to understand Nintendo is a unique thing. and i think people don't don't consider that deeply enough nintendo gets away with shit that no one would get away with and i i've observed this long before i abandoned nintendo their games are i mean i've said this before their games are often overrated they revisit these same and i don't mean that in a bad way that the games are bad i'm saying that they're rated really high um they do the same thing over and over and over again release the same shit over and over and over again.

3:58:45People like it, but they're still a fairly small entity compared to the competitors. And so you kind of have to choose your lane. They're highly dependent on themselves. And I find their lack of new IP to be distressing and weird. I don't like it. And it was one of the things I had a problem with the Nintendo literally 20 years ago. I had a problem with Nintendo doing that kind of shit. And it was always exciting to get a new Zelda and a new Mario and this and that the other thing but like the lack of newness i think will wear eventually and they are in a unique position where they deliver and they have a very tight pipeline and people that know what they're doing i don't think most publishers and developers have that and thus and i also don't think it's creatively fulfilling and aren't there other nintendo fans out there that are also tired of the same old thing doing the thing The games are differentiated from each other, yeah, kind of, but also not really.

3:59:43A 3D Mario game is a 3D Mario game. I mean, some of them are more special than others. Galaxy, of course, was very unique and special. Odyssey, a little bit more straightforward. The Zelda games are sometimes stylistic. You have Wind Waker and whatever, but they're dungeon-based, and you're getting heart pieces, and you're finding weapons. It's like, it's not that different. I think they just kind of get away with things that others wouldn't. And I don't even say it as an insult. It's just an obvious observation. I think that's true, but I also do think they do. They are a little bit. I don't know, Zelda and Mario and all of their big IP are so game play.

4:00:18The reality is that Sony would have a difficult time doing that because Sony's IP are so focused on narrative and inherently narrative focused on characters and inherently characters have arcs. And if they don't have arcs, it becomes ridiculous. so like characters will have an arc and then they'll be done and then to do more with them is insane or it comes across as forced Mario doesn't have an arc you know like Zelda doesn't have an arc like you could make you could make a case maybe that they have like mini arcs or whatever but like not really like it's a it's always generally a reset like no one knows what the fuck the Zelda timeline is like how they feed into each other and and I think it's confusing by design it gives them a level of freedom where they could just kind of reinvent the wheel every time and it's fine like breath of the wild is is is not wind waker is not ocarina like they are fundamentally different games although they they have a they have a shared kind of i don't even want to say skeleton but necessarily like they have a shared kind of um they have a shared makeup i guess foundationally um mario 2 also like there's 2d marios and 3d marios that are quite different from each other's that there's that mario 3d land or whatever that's like kind of like this weird like hybrid of the two i uh they're more experimental and i think that yields them a lot more goodwill because they do like i don't know man like you look at halo on the xbox side it's like oh here's halo one again again you know what i mean like or you look at god of war and it's like god of war is probably the the closest analog that they have because it's been going on for a long time and they actually have reinvented it a great deal um over time but they've reinvented it in such a way that like you really only have so much left on this um god of work can't be turned into something like breath of the wild in the same way and so like i don't know they're i think you're right they get away with a lot of crazy shit that makes no sense the 80 mario kart the the insane uh what is it the the voice app on the phone that let you talk to each other over that was awesome i loved that they're terrible they're terrible net code for super smash brothers which is like their their their premiere multiplayer game basically and it runs like absolute shit it runs like a game that's it dude the the latency on smash brothers um is it brawl no not brawls we ultimate for the switch is insane even on like a wired connection it's like this is a fucking unplayable and nobody plays it that way everybody plays that game in person right right um because of that and so they do get a lot of leeway but i also just think their ip are just uniquely poised to continuously reinvent themselves i think mario is due for a reinvention quite frankly and i think they could do just about damn near anything with it and they could probably pull it off um focus them focus them yeah i i'm a little they did they like Metroid Prime was a reinvention of Metroid.

4:03:18Mario 64, obviously a reinvention of Mario Ocarina of Time, a reinvention in a way of Zelda.

4:03:27Yeah, I'm just tired. It's what I say. I think you and I both agree. It's like they're just unique. I don't think I don't think they can really be replicated. I don't think they'd be replicated from a quality standpoint. I don't think you're replicated from a culture standpoint, but they're also just a very different like they just aren't as. it's just important to remember they don't sell nearly as many games as PlayStation does because PlayStation sells other people's games and that's where the money is. So... They don't sell as many games, period. Their first party sells insane. Oh, their first party sell copies of games that Sony would never even sniff.

4:04:01Right. But that's... It's awesome for them. If they didn't do that, they wouldn't have a business. The point I've made is with Sony is like you could theoretically imagine them stopping making first party games and they would just be fine. like that's that's the weird that's the weird part and i think sony i think you'd kind of want to be a sony maybe not i mean you you want to own the ip and you want to own this iconic ip but i still say and you know this chris i've said this over and over again ad nauseum is sony superpower has always been when to move on and they've been stymied by that because they because they do need to extract more out of their ip they do it made sense to make a second ghost game yes we can't have a third one not under not under this timeline let's not let's not fucking get crazy with it let's not get carried away anyway five years six years yeah you're gonna get like you're gonna get the third ghost game 14 years after ghost of tsushima came out or something like come on man like this is crazy we you gotta move on it's i know it's not your fault i get it but i don't want i don't want them they're lingering too much and that's just the nature of the reality of making games today anyway yeah arian yn thank you for writing in that's all we have chris for this episode of sacred symbols it's over now it's time for us to go any closing comments before we leave um no i've gotta i've gotta get dressed and ready uh i gotta make a trek south oh to anaheim anaheim oh godspeed you're gonna drive you're take it take an uber uh i think i think there's people who are going also so like i'm gonna hitch a ride cool but that sounds good i'm already so tired well godspeed you have fun yeah thanks you'll wake up no doubt i'm gonna uh i'm gonna get in the pool it's nice out uh float around i have a really hard time i'm like it's like pavlov's dog like when i go in the pool i have to have a beer and smoke a joint or i feel like i'm just not in it so i'm gonna go float around and it is a it is part of it yeah it's like i i i just uh i turn it on a little bit when during these these brief summer months you know having a nice little time and then by late august early september it'll all be over all right chris will be well have a good weekend it's good to see you as always we'll see you next time and uh thank you all out there for your love kind of support we appreciate you too patreon.com slash last day media for early ad free access and last day media.store for merch thank you again as always we'll see you next time until then goodbye Take care, guys.

4:06:34Sacred Symbols, a PlayStation podcast, is a product and trademark of Last Stand Media and Colin's Last Stand LLC and is proudly recorded in the USA. The show is conceived by, is written by, and is directed by me, Colin Moriarty. My co-hosts are Chris Raygun Maldonado and Dustin Furman. The show is produced by executive producer Dustin Furman. All of Last Stand's theme music is by my best friend, Ramon Narvaez. As you know, all of Last Stand's shows, including Sacred Symbols, are fan-funded on Patreon at patreon.com slash lastdaymedia. The following names are at the producer level on Patreon, our highest tier, and we're grateful for your thoughtful and kind contributions to our independent endeavor.

4:07:15Thank you.

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