#418 | Nevermind, These Are Horrid Times

35:13Now, I do remember he – I didn't understand this. like suddenly he had a dog right like out of nowhere and i'm like i'm like johnson has a dog but then like so what ended up fast forward it's like his son left his dog with him because they had a baby and the baby and the dog like the dog didn't like the baby or like some weird shit so like for a few so for a few years like this dog just randomly lived with him and he would lock him in the back room when he wasn't there um and she and it was like a yappy dog and you just hear it and it was right above my room and that was one problem but like i used to just take a broom and just boom boom and like and the dog would stop and then when when and then I realized I was leaving these little divots in the ceiling and like when I moved out and everything was empty I like looked up and they were just like these like little like not even like a millimeter but like you could see where I was bashing on the ceiling um that's crazy that's crazy that a dog

36:09Colin Moriarty:that's I gotta be honest with you like I would if that happened like if I had a kid and the dog hated it immediately i'd be really concerned about that it's like rosemary's baby right yeah it's just like you know how difficult it is to piss off a dog as like a completely docile stranger that's like half the size of it you know what i mean like i don't know like there's something that's like oh i don't know we gotta keep keep an eye on like that would actually unironically determined how strict i was with the with that kid you know like if the dog growls at the baby it's just like no grand theft auto yeah right right right you got we gotta there's a like a perhaps a sociopathic or psychopathic tendency within this child yeah like i don't know i don't know what's going on but like uh it's concerning that's concerning andrew as as chris said you have to you have to it's unfortunate we it's one of the the hallmarks of this show you've been put in a situation and i hate that shit i hate it i hate being in situations.

37:11I hate being put in situations, but nonetheless, you find yourself in a situation. I think you got to just put your shoulder into it and be like, we're going to, we got to talk to these people and just let them know. Like you got to, and then, and then you go from there, but that's where you begin the campaign and it could just, and then at every, every choice you make from here, it could end like that. But like Chris said, tat, like it does go from the difference between tattling and reporting is giving the person the opportunity to self correct first and then at that point you have to go to the powers that be sure same if you have a dispute with your neighbor or whatever uh i i my my it's funny because i just had everyone over for father's day and so people have now observed this like three seasons in a row i live in like a neighborhood with like you know like kind of windy roads so my backyard is actually like a like if you look out in the backyard it's like a circle kind of like an oval of properties that all like look into each other's yards and so i i i border like four houses like my yard is like a like a weird parallelogram i don't know what the fuck it and uh one of the guys like never moses back long it's just like dead like long like wild looking grass and dead and and every time someone like like we have people like oh it's like across a culvert we both have fences it doesn't bother me really I don't give a shit and people like oh like what like what's this and I'm like well what am I going to do like it's not like what do I care right you know I actually told them and I'm fed up I'm like this just makes my yard look way better you know right like you're looking around like oh nice yard nice yard welcome oh not so nice yard nice and then so on so forth I'm like this is good for this actually works to my advantage in some way but also you have to understand that so like it would be easy enough for me to go to the HOA this is the example I was going to bring up is like but I would never do that to someone unless they were like preposterously dickheaded and i actually know this person and see knowing a little bit maybe you have to learn a little bit andrew about about the situation you find yourself in because i happen to know this person he's a he lives by himself his name is anthony he was a long-haul trucker and uh he actually used to park his like truck like his little cab in front of his house and he's like he has like he's retired now and his knees are shot and he's all fucked up so you gotta just so i'm like i'm not what am i getting like who cares man this guy's got bigger fish to fry um now if he was like blasting music or his house was like true disrepair or maybe if i was selling my house and you didn't want like people to be like be like what the fuck is this you know i could turn a buyer off or whatever maybe maybe you get a little but even then i'd go and be like can i mow your back on like that's what i would probably do is like i'll mow it yeah it'll take five minutes you know right um andrew good luck to you it's a tough one but you'll persevere I mean I wouldn't I wouldn't I couldn't live in a situation like that like that would there would have to be a resolution to that you can't just live like that

40:11oh man you can't you can't live in like an like a truly yeah I remember when I was a freshman at Northeastern like my roommate who was fine but like he snored and it ruined like I was just I was prepared for it like every night where I'm

40:27Colin Moriarty:I have to deal with this again you know like yeah there's some noise there's some noise that uh I like noise but like there's there's a type that is kind of in indefensibly irritating city noise yeah I grew up in the city so like I'm used to it being loud like even like even like car horns and shit like it really it just reminded it all it did was give give me the calms it was like calming in a way that because I just I knew that the world was still there which is like a weird way to frame it but it's just like oh everything's fine things are life is still going on like i can i can relax knowing that their car is going by and people arguing in the street and you know just loud conversations and whatever uh but if it's but if everything is silent and then there's just like bashing footsteps above me that's a different scenarios right right you know i yeah i like uh yeah city noise like random noise my apartment in san francisco was near lincoln which is a thoroughfare on the south end of golden gate um park so a lot of traffic on there and like yeah that didn't bother me at all but i am having a situation now in my backyard like so my uh the compressor and my pool pump broke so they had to replace it and he used to the pool pump used to make like a white noise loud but like a white consistent white background noise now it makes like a kind of like whirling noise but it's it's low like you wouldn't even pay attention to it but then i i email the pool people because i'm like listen dude i go into the pool and i space out that's what i do i just like looking that i like look in the sky like drink a beer and i just look at the fucking clouds or something i got and i'm like it's distracting the shit out of me like it wasn't like this it is now like i'm sorry i know this is a weird thing you're probably rolling your eyes but like someone's got to look at this it's like it can't it can't stay like this you know like i needed to go back to the white noise right white noise is good yeah yeah dagan dagan has white noise a white noise machine in his house which i had never seen people use something like usually something for to make white noise like i have a fan that makes white noise but there's like a white noise manufacturer which is so strange that's people like couldn't you just play that on your phone or something or yeah i mean there's probably a fucking spot if someone's probably making a million dollars a month on spotify which is white noise yeah white just white noise the track is seven days long and people just play it oh man all right jp morgan John Doe wrote in and said, afternoon, Colin and son.

43:06I write today to ask Colin what his succession plan is. Should tragedy befall you? Will you let a woman, Mama Micah, inherit your throne? Your right hand man, Dustin Mayhaps, your brother, the wild card Jaffe. Are you serious? Will you divide the fiefdoms amongst your generals like Alexander? Or will you name baby Leon and let a council of regents tend to your kingdom in years before he reaches the majority? That's a good idea. Or will you simply cry havoc and let slip the dogs of God of War? thank you uh jp morgan john dove for writing in we've talked a little bit about this i think on constellation back in the day but um i would assume micah would take the company over interesting i just don't really know i'm the sole owner of it so if we didn't have it in a will otherwise she would just inherit the company along with everything else so but i think i would want everyone to do what they would want to do like i think what would be important would be to like for everyone to get together and say like do you want to continue and if so like how does it go because i i think that would be important that like we don't want to have prisoners and then you would have to kind of reimagine what the company was and maybe it becomes more of like a collective at that point i don't really i don't really know yeah yeah the big question is to

44:21Colin Moriarty:whether or not micah if she were to step into the role whether or not the audience would uh assume she killed you. Right. And that would be a safe assumption, by the way. What does she know about any of this?

44:39That would be, yeah, I mean, I am not suicidal. I'm not suicidal.

44:47Colin Moriarty:Oh, man. I really don't know. Can we stop talking about me dying? Yeah, it comes up a lot. It's getting a little grisly at this point. it comes up fairly often my friends let's get into the news dylan gibson wrote in and said another slow news week i bet by the way we had almost 400 inquiries submitted this week which i'm pretty sure is a record when i saw it i looked at i was like oh god i mean i gotta be honest with you that's what i that's my that was the first thought in my mind i'm like oh my god i gotta read all this fucking shit um christ but like the thread goes live at 3 p.m on wednesdays eastern and uh i went look i usually don't even look at it until like midnight i put the show together that afternoon and then i usually patch it everything else in at that point give people time but i went and looked at it like 4 30 or 5 or something and it already had like 150 comments and i was like oh christ i gotta like start tearing through this.

45:44So multiple times yesterday, I started going through and getting the threads together. So thank you guys so much for submitting. But on a slow news week, it is certainly not. Indeed, we'll get into the first topic now. And Jack Feining says, what an unfortunate news week to not have Dusty Boy in the house. Physical defenders rise up. Oh, you want Dustin? Okay. Dustin Furman, it's good to see you. Welcome to the show. Welcome back to the show. It's been a few weeks you're not back permanently yet no but the bat signal by the way pretty good meme pretty good very good someone tweeted at me said that took you three hours didn't it and i'm like it took me like 40 minutes oh yeah i mean i'm saying that and being like it took an exorbitant

46:31Colin Moriarty:amount of time for me to make that is a very long time for what that image was i was like i was like i had you know i'm using the magnetic lasso i'm doing you know i'm just not very good also now Now, when I load Adobe products, it tells me that it doesn't no longer supports my operating system. I'm like, OK, so everything's going on really well. But Dustin, it's good to see you. Pleasure to have you. Where's the baby? The baby's downstairs. I believe he is satiated. He like literally 30 minutes ago, Holly changed his diaper. Go to pick him up. My hands are just covered in piss. and that's the reality i've learned in the last two weeks is that i was just a lot of piss you know not too different from your normal life no no he's uh i've been baptized a few times already just straight from the fat like a man has pissed on me in the last two weeks yeah that's so uh but it's great everything is going fantastic that's wonderful really like legitimately though like he um i know things can change very quickly but as of right now he's not like colicky he's very uh easy overall to deal with he eats a ton so that's like the hardest thing is just like stay staying consistent with the the feeding i mean it's mainly holly holly is being drained figuratively and mentally come on man so what's wrong i just thought that word drained is like i don't know there's something about that word i learned something yeah and i'm sure holly will be okay that i mentioned this you know they say like oh when a mother when they're breastfeeding if the baby starts crying they'll start leaking it's absolutely true i didn't know it seems like something that wouldn't be true but it actually is true that the babels start crying and then something activates it's actually pretty fascinating that is that does sound fake to me but i also believe it yeah now one other baby thing because we'll you know as colin said i'm not actually back but one thing i do want to bring up is chris before i left you were talking about uh evolution and how much of a having a kid is a debuff and how did this even happen right and i've been thinking about that on and off since he was born it's amazing right like when you have a baby when they're in fresh baby they have you have to wake up every two to three hours for weeks and he as you said he cries he's can attract predators the mother needs like constant like the baby needs constant attention but the mom also needs help like it's it's crazy yeah so it's not yeah things are very good good good good good good i'm glad to hear it um little leon little leon little leon all right guys there's a lot of news this week and dustin we have you here for the first one only i don't know if you're going to stay for the second one too you can stay as long as you want but this is the one everyone wanted you and this is why i put the dust and signal in the air yeah uh it seemed like you simply had to come back although i told you i'm like no pressure i mean you can do what you want but i felt you probably wanted to i thought you probably felt it inside of you i was i felt it inside me and before you said anything there were many people in the audience that were like this is dustin this is your moment and i'm i'm here to answer the call well on the playstation blog two different posts were posted and we'll get into the first one first in the second one second as as the order usually goes both written i was thinking about this sid schumann had to write both you know they put sid schumann's name on both these which i think is hysterical he is the comms guy i mean it is kind of his job yeah physical disc production ending in january 2028 for new games releasing on playstation consoles it is written says quote as consumer preferences in the broader entertainment industry continue to shift away from physical discs to digital.

50:30Physical game disc production for all new games releasing on PlayStation consoles will be discontinued starting January, 2028. Following this date, new games will be available on PlayStation Store and at retailers in digital formats only. This transition has no impact on games that are that already released or will be releasing prior to January, 2028 in disc format. This is a natural direction for Sony Interactive Entertainment to adapt to consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs. This transition will enable us to align more closely with how most of our community prefers to access and play games today.

51:02We'll continue to prioritize our resources to drive innovation in how players can access games. I don't even know what the fuck that's supposed to mean. And provide choices as to where players prefer to purchase new games, whether that's at retailers or on PlayStation Store. We remain committed to delivering a world-class gaming experience to our fans, and we thank you for your continued support. End quote. It is worth noting, I don't know how many people actually go to the PlayStation blog that listen to the show. I mean, it's like their official mouthpiece. It's an interesting place to be you'll note that many posts have you know dozens of hearts and maybe a few comments a couple dozen comments at most maybe a hundred comments if it's big this post has 6 ,856 comments on it I've never I've never ever ever ever ever seen that and no that might be as many comments as every post over the last year on PlayStation blog has gotten combined so guys this is huge news it's all anyone wants to talk about as we said earlier in the show where Chris and I did, we had a record number of inquiries, almost 400.

51:59So I've been doing a lot of reading. Now, the thread or our document that you guys don't see out there is very long this week because I put a bunch of inquiries in here with different topics that we can touch. I don't think we'll get to all of them, but they're just a way for us to structure things. William Jackson wrote in and said, I'm personally glad that physical games are going away. It's well past time. This call was made by someone with the grapefruits to do it. Bravo, Sony. Good riddance. Why would you ever want to share a game with a friend or family member they're all pos casuals anyway make them pay full price why would you ever want to walk into a retail store and see that physical disc garbage displayed you don't need to feel the excitement of browsing for sales mixed with nostalgia grow up why on any planet would you want to proudly display your dumb ass collection to signal to the world you don't have sex why do some people still insist on preserving the spirit of video games nearly 90 of games are bought digitally get on the train grandpa the time for spirit community identity wonderment and warmth passed you by long ago bravo sony good riddance i love that little pieces a little piece of sarcasm to begin things out dustin let's hear

53:03Colin Moriarty:from you first what are your thoughts yeah well this certainly came as a surprise uh i because i we all knew that someday this would happen uh i just think that we expected it to be another generation before this happens and so this news is also really interesting coming after the gta 6 news that you guys i'm sure covered last week being um basically digital only with the code in box only uh existing on at retail so uh you'd have to imagine that sony tipped rock star off about this and was like yeah it's not even like worth doing the disc for because we're kind of wrapping this up um but yeah it's uh extremely disappointing news clearly there's um thousands of people that as you mentioned in the playstation blog and across twitter and everywhere and our own comments as you said that are are deeply deeply upset about this and i think it makes sense as i think the hardcore gaming base that is plugged in to these different um outlets are going to be the most likely to have physical games and be the most vocal about this decision um so that's kind of my my pie in the sky thoughts are um they're they're doing this because was partially for the handheld i think because of course that's going to be digital only like i don't think anyone expects uh any kind of like they're not going to attach a disk drive to the the handheld right so they're doing it for that um but i really do think the main reason for this is to have greater control over the marketplace and the sale of these games now the playstation blog does point out uh that they do plan on uh having codes i don't know whether it's going to be a box with a code in it or just a card like you see nintendo and xbox do that and what playstation used to do uh being at retail so it is um as i i had a tweet that went pretty big a few days ago that was i got apparently it was on asmongold and moist critical uh over the last few days which was crazy uh just pointing out some of the pricing discrepancy between uh a site like amazon and the playstation store um and we've pointed this out before in the past on this show in fact colin i believe it happened to you with the kingdom hearts collection that you bought for what was it 50 60 50 bucks or something yeah 50 bucks or something so which is a good value i feel like i just it is always going to annoy you when you see that kind of shit pop up later you know um right like i don't mind i think it's a bunch of games but yeah it sucks when that happens yeah so i guess the the thing i'll conclude on for now since i think we should get everyone on the record for this is just that um as i feel like this is such a it's such an interesting decision right before as they're getting ready to talk about PlayStation 6 and with the rumors about PlayStation 6 and what the bill of materials is going to cost and they're looking at ways to increase their profitability and so they make more profit on digital games simply I mean there's no middleman there's no shipping there's all these different people that need a cut with a physical game and so this is an option for them to make more profit uh not only in the short term uh but in the long term with their ability to really set the prices on on games well well we had a satirical right and we'll have a more serious one now and we'll pitch it to chris after this paladin of pain wrote in and by the way as i said a shit ton of you wrote in i tried to be as i tried to distribute as much as possible please be patient with me.

57:19Hey, CNC Podcast Factory, what do we think of Sony's decision to discontinue the production of physical game discs in the years to come? I feel that this can lead to less than desirable outcomes. Imagine getting banned on PSN. I don't have to imagine that. Or getting locked out of your account and losing all of your games. Also cutting out the second hand in retail markets. Anyway, I'll pack your Amazon packages and listen. So Chris, let's get you on the record. What are your thoughts here? And by the way, I will say this at the top as we lead into what you're saying. People are thinking that this is a very simple cutter dry thing is what is right or what is wrong i think this is an exceptionally complicated situation with many many layers and i want to get in all of them so let's hear let's chris let's stay 40 000 feet and see what you think yeah man

57:59Colin Moriarty:not good not good in my opinion i think i think again it's just it's too early to do something like this i think uh and and i know i understand it's like oh well this is just the announcement it's going to happen in 2028 2028 also i think is just too early like i feel like there's there There needs to be more of like a there needs to be more of a lead up to something like this. And it also just there's a lot of arguments. I understand like they want to keep there's the middleman and they want to keep a really tight control over the marketplace in which people buy their games. but this coming so soon after the news about them revoking licenses to digital purchases from the tv side of things and from the movie side of things like it's it it just doesn't look good they don't do that with games as far as i'm aware like it's a games business so they're they're better about it but this is just another example in my opinion of just this this war on the concept of ownership that is happening that is broadly designed to keep you paying consistently for the same shit and we've seen and this is like a broad topic in general too like the subscription model and like all of this stuff that's kind of eroded the concept of even just owning these things i i don't like the idea that our only option to own playstation games going forward will be just digital i'm a i'm a digital uh customer primarily but there's some games that i get physical if i can like if i love them if there's like it's like kind of it's the way that i treat platinums in some way where it's just like oh i really love this game i'll get it i have a couple of discs um but even lately it's just like the the special editions of games are just coming with no no game at all and it's like this is disappointing and i don't i just think this is broadly this feels just nefarious and i get the inclination as a business i get the desire to cut out a middleman believe me but i don't know man i think as the prime as the prime uh how should distributor i guess playstation is the default console right steam is been all digital forever xbox is long done away with uh with uh physical games at this point i feel like there's some level of responsibility that you have i don't know if it's i don't know if i'd go so far as to call it a moral responsibility necessarily but like i'm tired of everything being a profit motive purely like i'm tired of everything just being like we don't we don't design buildings in an aesthetically pleasing way anymore because we need to make sure that we can resell a mcdonald's to a bank if we need to like it's all this other shit it's like can we just have something nice can we just invest in something nice for just the consumer base and just and just for people in general.

1:01:10Colin Moriarty:I think investing in the broad, I guess, I don't know, emotional health of your consumer base, I think is a good investment, I think. And I don't know. I just don't like this, even as a digital customer myself. But that's my broad feelings on it. There's deeper things that we can get into, I'm sure. Oh yeah, there's a million different threads to pull at. That's very well said. I mean, I totally agree with a lot of what you're saying is like when we say it all the time for us too is like we don't we as a small company we don't have stockholders that we have to please or whatever and that's maybe part of the problem certainly a big part of the problem of runaway capitalism but like i don't maximize profit at all like not even a little bit i know that's kind of like that's kind of crazy to some people but i'm like no like we're we're fine and like things are good and we don't want to like ring everyone dry you have to worry about a lot of things other outside of the immediacy of what you're doing like like loyalty goodwill value and i don't think there's any doubt that like sony is fucking its reputation up i think in a way with in in ways that are not they've been here before it's not like it's unrest you know unretrievable from the depths of hell like where they've been right now like think about the ps3 era for instance and like how bad that was it was bad like for and i know we have a lot of younger people that listen or just weren't playing games that during that time it was fucking bad like the ps3 in in 2006 2007 2008 was fucking bad it was in bad shit was getting walloped right um and there was a lot a big question of if so like so if playstation was going to survive sony was much more diversified at that time too so it was like a little less dangerous than it is now now i want to preface everything i say with a few things that i think are important number one is similar to Chris like it not similar to Chris like even more extreme like it doesn't affect me at all I'm the gamer that is in the majority is in the vast majority of people that play on PlayStation like I represent actually the mean gamer from a distribution standpoint there's just no doubt um my purchasing behavior is not normal I play way more games and buy way more games but people interact with PlayStation digitally and I'm one of those people And so this has zero effect on me at all.

1:03:36I haven't bought a physical game and I haven't bought a physical PlayStation game. It's funny to say, actually, because we'll talk. Chris and I will talk about it later, but I'm playing Grand Theft Auto 5 right now. And I think that was the last time I bought a physical PlayStation game. So 2013. And. To me, I. The thing I'm confused about with it is that it goes into what Chris was saying about. all right the the the prophet says this and our and our margins are this but like at what cost do we sacrifice this to get the numbers to go up without all sorts of deleterious effects following us in other words is it really worth it um and that's my big surprise here is

1:04:27It's important to preface another thing, what I'm about to say, what's saying like Sony didn't just pull the pin on this. Like they know they've known this for a long time. This indicates a lot about PlayStation six, which there's only two things about PlayStation six, which could be true about this right now. Right. Either they were going to have a disk drive and they they removed it. Right. Which is hard to believe. There was never going to be a disk drive in the PS six. that you that came natively with it. That would be so. And a lot of people are saying like, oh, this is to remove the cost of the, you know, get the cost down.

1:05:00I'm like, no, like it probably just never had one internally. The question is, like, would you have some sort of external drive that would connect to it? And I think that's what we all assumed they would do. And it's hard for me to square the financial realities of that where I'm like, well, you have this shrinking base. They have more data than anyone about the way people interact with their games. So they're they're being informed by the way people are acting and it is important to note that if like if physical games were were more if there was a preponderance of physical game purchases in the in the space they wouldn't do this so it is important to note something like they do say something very true right which is quote this is a natural direction for sony interactive entertainment to adapt to consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs.

1:05:48That's true. If you read the Serkana data on physical game sales, it peaks in 2009 and it's at an all-time low. It does seem like this year will actually be better for physical games than last year, which is interesting. I think it has to do more with quality releases. Think of all the Capcom games, for instance, that are coming out. And things like Crimson Desert. There's big games this year. But nonetheless, the trend is the trend. So I think as we're all incensed for this and I think for different reasons, it's important to note that to be fair, that like they are right in a way. Like this is what the consumer is doing.

1:06:26The question is, why wouldn't you just allow now to back up one more space? It's like the question really is, who are your hardcore audience? Who's your hardcore audience? and there are probably some casual playstation players probably a lot of them actually that buy games physically but they don't really buy games that much they play fifa or they play like um call of duty or whatever and they like to go to the store and they buy those games but really the people that buy your physical games are like your core gamers these are the people that are really important to engage immediately it's actually kind of worth not making as much money on them per se by selling them physical discs to keep them engaged because the vibrancy for playstation comes from people like that and there's also no denying that right um so i guess the big thing that i'm confused about is like they can they have all these financial excuses they're not going to talk about any of it but like there's a lot go that there's a lot that goes in the physical games manufacturer that they can just get rid of from the internal management like people will get laid off at sony right to like shutting down, presumably the entire factory apparatus of making Blu-ray discs for PlayStation.

1:07:39All of those people are laid off. Like it's not a trivial thing. It's not to say you want these people to lose their jobs. Of course you don't, but it's like they're going to save a lot of money by doing this. The question is, why wouldn't you do the opposite, which is to go to the audience? And this is why you have to give interviews and you have to be media trained and you have to be able to talk about this in a sophisticated way. And they really have no one that can do it. I don't think it's to say like, listen, here's the data for PlayStation. It's in our financials, but we want to outline this stuff for you.

1:08:07This is the digital sales of games. These are the physical sales of games. You can see the numbers are going down. It's becoming difficult for us as a company to justify the costs in doing this. We want, we don't want to abandon you though. It's important that we don't, it's important that we, you guys understand that we understand that a lot of you, millions of you like physical games and we don't want to abandon you, but we have to let you know that it's just, it's becoming difficult. We're raising the price of all of our physical games, $10. If you want to buy the digital game, starting in 2028, you can even say, right?

1:08:38Starting on January 1st, 2028, physical versions of games that publishers choose to publish on our platform will be$10 more than they will be digitally at launch, right? Disc drives are going to go up in price$50. Like you could just pass along the cost and it sucks, but that's kind of the way it is because what you can what they can say is like we refuse to let the majority of our audience subsidize this anymore and i don't know if that makes sense to you guys but that's the way like you could just position it like that you would obviously want to massage it but like yeah you could just say like this is becoming this is untenable for us at this current time but we don't want to abandon you this is the this is the deal what do you think chris i don't know

1:09:23Colin Moriarty:anything to maintain the option i guess i i guess to me it's like i know you like oh they're they're right that uh you know physical is shrinking or whatever and then digital is is the prime way that people play like and i i agree i am i am primarily digital but it's important that like i don't know data data can often i think about how xbox was right in 2013 when their data suggested hey most people use their xboxes to stream netflix let's have a let's have a showcase where we just focus on like you know you know the media apps because that's what most people are interested in and it killed their entire brand so i think it's important like data is useful and you can even you can act on it i think it's not even unwise to not act on it but like what you were saying it's like that's a way to do it or or you know what make physical physical games a more boutique thing that that would deserve a higher like make it so like hey we get the manuals back but it costs more or whatever right and it's it physical games become like a kind of collector's edition or something right just something to maintain that access and maintain that option because like just relying solely on the data and just like going like all right the data says this let's do it it's just like you're not thinking you're not thinking about about the splash damage of what you're of you're suggesting what you're doing i mean dude like this is the worst press that playstations had probably ever yeah i mean it's probably the worst press out yeah i mean certainly since the hack but i in 2011 yeah but but and the internet's different now than it was then they would have gotten roasted oh for that during that era now but it just wasn't quite like oh it would have been it would have been apocalyptic if the station network was down for three and a half weeks but i don't know again data is important it's valuable it's worth looking at and it's worth acting on but like you gotta you can act on that you can act on the right data in in ways that can fuck you entirely as xbox has shown us as other companies have shown us too but that's the xbox is the most analogous and the most obvious and in this instance where like you just got to be careful and i don't think this is careful well yeah let me pull on a thread here yeah please to kind of tie what both of you guys are saying together is that uh if i remember correctly colin the insomniac elite had data which is now of course old data about their physical versus digital sales for playstation first party uh and i remember that that split for those games was not what we'll call industry average like if i remember it correctly playstation fans specifically buy first party playstation games physically like i i feel like there were splits that were like 30 40 for certain games were buying them physically yeah i'm trying to find gemini is saying oh yeah the insomniac league shows some 70 yeah it's that some games sell up to 70 physically and one game 53 physical in the u.s alone the ratio is at that time for first party physical to digital was 35 physical 65 digital but it seemed like it spiked for games like um spider-man so yeah so that's one of those things where chris you're talking about like the data has hidden information that you don't know it's like well sure maybe it not maybe it is trending that direction but as colin was saying this is something that is clearly deeply important to your most hardcore of hardcore people and those are the people that you do want to accommodate and compromise with to some degree and we haven't even opened the can of worms that's like okay well what about everyone who has ps4 and ps5 physical games for playstation 6 yeah like i just go fuck myself i wonder that's one of the things i was saying on twitter was i was like i always assumed that the disk drive would work on ps6 like well i always assumed that there would be a disk drive for ps6 but maybe yeah yeah that would be fucking that would be so fucking crazy in my opinion if they did something like that where they're like oh we're not making the games but if you want to play your old games like we'll make a disk drive for ps6 like holy shit really i mean is that really that uncommon i mean uncommon nowadays but think about like it wasn't there for the sega genesis or something like a master drive adapter oh yeah for like for for the master system yeah yeah it's not unprecedented that you buy something to gain back yeah that's true i guess it's just like kind of rubbing salt in the wound where it's like well this is like this is almost the harder part is making the drive making discs pressing discs been pressing discs since the early 80s dude sony is like the master of pressing discs yeah right it's unquestionably more expensive to make a bespoke drive than it is to make make dude i hope they do something like that because that would be fucking hysterical well i know xbox is talking about like and who the fuck knows what the hell xbox is even doing anymore because they just it just seems like a i don't even i don't even know but like i think they said something or i heard something about them working on like maybe a way to digitize like a way to a way to digitize physical games going forward or something like that yeah i saw i saw that which i don't i don't understand how you would i don't understand how that works like yeah i don't know i don't know the the only thing that i would think is like is each disc printed with like a unique key maybe on it or like a code it has to be that i don't know enough about discs yeah it would have to be the only other option would be that you would have to burn like something onto the cd or something to like disable it or something and that obviously can't be done with the lazy like what their hardware so it's like there's got to be like you either have to disable the disc or you have to right and i'm not saying disabling it from working like like on your console maybe i don't know i don't know i know it sounds it sounds ridiculous i think it's like you gotta program the uh the game to install it off the disc and then and then laser scratch it yeah exactly that's right like you have to do something i think that that when i i can't remember who posted that um that rumor or leak or whatever i was looking over and it was saying that it wouldn't work with xbox one games but it would work with series x games and that it would so if you put it in and you convert it to digital it will remain as a digital game but it if you put that game in someone else's console it will revoke the digital status of the game that's interesting that's a kind of cool that's a cool idea that would be an interesting compromise because basically you're at you'd have to have some kind of online drm for that that's be like hey we'll let you use this digitally but you have but you have to be online and because there would be ways where it's like okay make it digital and then turn your like unplug your ethernet forever and then you can just use this game and give it to a friend or something but it would at least be a compromise of like okay we'll let you use these games but you have to be online in order to use them yeah it's it's it's interesting i mean i guess my whole thing with this guys is and i think we all we all agree on this is like i just don't understand why you would do this i i would i'm sure the math is compelling from a numerical standpoint.

1:16:54I'm sure they're like, we're going to make so much more money now. And I think that their strategy probably even withstands the fact that they're going to lose people because of this. The problem for the people that are leaving, and we'll talk about this a little later, is like there's nowhere for you to go. I mean, like the status quo that PlayStation will enter in 2028 has long been the status quo on other platforms. The only place you can go is Switch. You're going to go there?

1:17:19Colin Moriarty:Well, come on. Well, the issue isn't necessarily I don't think it's necessarily that people are going to they're leaving to go find other places where it's physical. They're going to places where like, all right, well, if I'm going to go, if I'm going to be on a platform that is all digital, I'm going to PC. Because why the fuck would I not do that? Like, yeah, that is that is I have access to everything. I theoretically can I can alter everything that I do have. I have cheaper access to the stuff that would otherwise be incredibly expensive. like if if if we really are entering a situation where like there's no physical games anywhere then i'm gonna go to the most flexible platform that offers me the most that offers me the most to play with then because then there now there's nothing really holding me to this there's no yeah doesn't and the other thing worth pointing out about pc because everyone has their different things that they care about with this issue and so if your issue is drm related a lot of people assume every game on steam has like steam drm in it and that's just not the case like for example i just looked up i've been playing dragon quest 11 on steam uh because i'm like have mods in it and stuff i just looked up uh you mod it so it looks better it looks like the original version because the s version is a switch version we'll talk about it when i get back um they the the drm that they had in it is removed so i own that copy of dragon quest 11 i can play it i can copy it to something i can play it without the internet connection i own that copy forever steam is the client that i play it through but i don't have to anymore i could just open i could remove steam from my computer and i could click the exe i could copy it to a drive i could put on a fucking disc if i wanted to so it's worth pointing out that there's people like well you're gonna have the Yes and no.

1:19:16Yeah, it's. You guys make a compelling point that I don't think I would disagree that the best place to be. In this digital ecosystem is Steam. If you have the rig to run the games you want to play and all the rest, as I understand, even at the heightened prices for pro, the pro is still the cheapest way to play high end games. and will probably remain that way but it's a matter of your own we're going to discover this with the new consoles when they come out period but like your own financial resistance towards these market forces and where you want to be like there's no doubt that this is invoking in people this idea that they need to kind of figure out where they're truly going to settle and I think that there was an assumption that physical gamers would be able to settle kind of nicely at least for the next 10 years, let's say on as like their sales plummet and plummet and plummet, which they will, you know, until it's just it comes to a point where.

1:20:19All right, guys, like but even then. Right. You can imagine, first of all, who knows what PlayStation looks like in 2040? I mean, I have. Fucking I have any idea what we're going to be doing at that point. But like you can even imagine then there being OEM disk drives and like boutique disk manufacturers. in other words this gets into the difficulty of not the difficulty the complexity of what it goes into making a disc the out the output of the disc is cheap but there's a lot of work that goes into making it and you have to certify it yourself and you have like so in other words like sony has to kind of it's sony's responsible for all of it and even if you like downsized it they would still have to certify everything and whatever you'd have to offload a lot of that and that could just be too much for them to withstand and it's like we got to do it now now i want to get a little bit into their strategy because susan b anthony bourdain wrote in and said hey guys irrespective of your thoughts about ending physical discs how do you feel about sony's strategy seems to me the broad options were ripping the band-aid off like this or ending with the whimper of rapid year over year reductions and physical pressings until the market was 98 % digital, then ending it.

1:21:34I'm surprised they went in this direction. It's unusually bold, for better or worse, thoughts. This, I think, is part of, like, there's multiple hearts. It's like some sort of beast in a video game. There are many hearts of the matter, but this is definitely one of them, is both the strategy of what they're doing and why they're doing it and when they're executing it. I will say that for PlayStation 6, this is a good strategy. let's let's assume you let's put aside that none the three of us don't agree that they should be doing this for various reasons right like i don't think they should be doing this but let's assume that it is what it is right okay so it is what it is what's a good i are we going to announce playstation 6 and tell everyone at that time no we're going to say it six months before we announced the PlayStation six so that when we start hyping everything up and everything, there will be no disappointment when, when there is no dish drive and no option for a dish drive and that it's an all digital platform.

1:22:35We have to do it now. And that's why I think that there's this idea, like, will they reverse course? Right. And I'm like, I think they could for PS five. And in fact, I might, might not be surprised if they do. Right. Like, it's like, all right, we will still keep, we're going to shut PS4. down maybe this is what they did with the when they tried to shut the psn stores down in 2021 they they tried to shut everything down they're like all right we'll keep the vita on the ps3 open we're shutting the psp down and that's what and that's what they did maybe they do a similar thing here where they're like all right we'll keep manufacturing for ps5 blu-ray discs open but not for ps4 but they're in a they're they're handcuffed now to this decision because if they reverse course now, they can't acknowledge PlayStation 6 yet.

1:23:25So when the PlayStation 6 stuff happens, people will be like, oh, maybe there'll be a disk drive. And it'll be like, dude, it's been decided three years ago. This thing wasn't having a disk drive. We've known this thing wasn't having a disk drive. I think that the other option, which I don't know how quickly you can work in this regard, and maybe this existed and they decided to pull it is like the external disk drive, which is what we always thought was going to exist for it. Right. Right. Maybe at some point they were just like, we're not doing it. Or maybe it never existed at all. And that's a reasonable expectation when you think about it.

1:23:58Right. Because think about the strategy of. They were already going to have a problem with the handheld. And what they're basically doing is tackling it from the other direction, which is to say, we're either going to have to describe to people that if you buy the physical version of the game on PS6. You can never play it on your handheld. that's one poison pill or we shut disc manufacturer down for ps6 entirely because no one's really playing on disc comparable to digital and we don't have to explain any of that and then we can have true interoperability with our console and our handheld and i think that that seems to be this poison pill they they took again i don't know what the right strategy would have been but i think it's probably better to just give people the disc option and again i think just removing it to a a boutique level.

1:24:46Like you guys were saying, like even saying like we're selling the games ourselves. Like if you want physical games, like you buy them from us. You know, like this is the way it's going to work. Like we're going to sell a disk drive. You're going to subsidize it. We're going to sell these games from us for$10 more. You're going to subsidize it. That's it. And I think like. You there are just so many more options that weren't so that were dramatic, yet not so dramatic, and they didn't really explore any of them. And so I just feel like there. I'd like to be wrong because it would be an interesting story for them to turn things around but I'm like I'm probably I'm pretty sure they're not gonna walk away from this like I think this is they can't set a precedent that every time people complain like obviously you want to listen to your customer right but like you bitch a bitch enough and we will reverse course even though it's against our entire strategy I don't know how many times they can really do something like that before it becomes like who runs the company and who has the direction and who has the strategy and i don't know that's why i think it's just that's why i'm fascinated by this because i think it's

1:25:43Colin Moriarty:truly complex yeah well i was listening to tom our buddy tom the moore's law is dead about it and i kind of touched on some of this earlier but a lot of his thoughts are like they're with the bill of sale of playstation 6 potentially being very high and we are long we are far from the era of subsidizing consoles uh this is a way i guess you could argue that they can try to keep their profits higher while trying to keep the cost of the playstation 6 down because they won't need they'll still make money off it but maybe they won't feel like they need to make as much because they can be certain that they're going to make 100 or you know you know i mean they're going to be making the full split or 100 on all their digital sales they don't have to worry about people sharing or letting someone borrow it or anything like that they're like we can feel confident going into playstation 6 that we are going to make as much as possible from each game sale as opposed to before.

1:26:52Yeah, like there's, I agree that that could be part of the strategy and that's, I think they didn't just do this, I guess is what I'm saying. Like to be fair to them, like they didn't just do it. It might blow up in their face. Like I said, it might be the wrong choice, but there's probably deep analysis into like how this all works and their war plan. And they must have known that this was going to be the response. Like I wonder if like this is exactly what they expected as well. You would be curious to be like, fly on the wall with them i'm much more interested in the strategy behind it than like the execution

1:27:23Colin Moriarty:i guess is what i'm saying so here's one thought about the strategy that we touched on earlier that i just think is crazy that it wasn't acknowledged because you're right that they're getting ahead of playstation 6 because they want playstation 6 however many months from now you know everyone will have dot you know uh simmered down right well well doesn't imagine imagine ps6 being announced and then they said this this is all it would be like this it would be horrible it would be like the worst thing that ever happened it would be like xbox one yeah it would be awful so yeah they're definitely nipping into the bud they're they're getting ahead of it and i think that that makes sense but the thing that i just think is crazy is that when i read when i look at this and they they go through everything it's like okay i'm reading between the lines everyone's reading between the lines about what this means for PlayStation 6.

1:28:15Colin Moriarty:PlayStation 6 is not mentioned in this, but everyone knows what this means. And so for me, and I'm sure many other PlayStation consumers, it's like, okay, well, what about my collection of games? And what does that mean for me moving forward? Like for PlayStation 6, am I just going to have to leave my entire PlayStation 5 library behind because i bought them in a way that they sold them to me am i not going to be able to play my playstation 5 disc games on playstation 6 it's it's introduced a huge question about the backwards compatibility that i think has again it's not it's one element of many where it's like okay well i guess i i guess i just don't know for months potentially about what the status of my library is if there was a it would require them to acknowledge that something's on the horizon but a line like we're investigating options for people to take their their physical library with us into the next into the future of playstation okay good yeah i feel like my investment is taken care of at the same time to play devil's advocate with myself it's like i'm buying a PlayStation 5 game to play on a PlayStation 5.

1:29:39So backwards compatibility is like a bonus in some ways,

1:29:44Colin Moriarty:but it is become such the norm that we just expect it. Yeah, it is standard. Well, PS4, PS5, PS6 should be interoperable with each other. There's like no doubt about that in my mind. We already have we have a machine for people who want physical games called PlayStation 5. Yeah. I mean, I saw that going around. I was like, that's so man. It's crazy. It's crazy. This is this is just like, I don't really I got I just wish I understood the full texture of the decision and all the different things that went into it, because it's like I don't really get it. I don't really I understand the trend lines.

1:30:28I understand all of that. It's just that you didn't you couldn't find any off ramp along the way. like i've already presented all of them like just jack prices up like do anything the thing is

1:30:37Colin Moriarty:the thing is there's a market for it like i can i can and i said this on twitter too it's like i can buy vinyls from like my favorite modern band still and vinyls have been a dead format for nearly 40 years like 30 years or something that's about right yeah 40 i mean definitely by the 90s. So like if I can, it's just, it is, it's just, it is crazy to me that I'm able to buy a vinyl for a new band in 2026, but like in two years I won't be able to buy a new PlayStation game physically. That option won't be there. That's crazy. I don't know. That just seems insane to me. Like it doesn't, it doesn't compute.

1:31:18Colin Moriarty:Like it doesn't make sense. It doesn't square. And there's no reason why they, I don't think there's any reason why they shouldn't look at that uh analogous kind of market and say like well we could make boutique physical games maybe we'll print fewer of them or something right but like we can have something that we can have something for the physical collector that is clearly out there and clearly passionate and clearly engaged um and by the way while we're while you're at it again i know i said this before but just like make make physical games a little because i part of the reason why i stopped buying physical games is because like they stopped like it just it became a bare minimum kind of thing it's like okay here's a box here's a cardboard cut here's a cardboard square in it that gives you like i don't know three days of xbox live gold or something no manual and it's just like here's the disc you know what i mean like they just kind of stop putting effort there's like there's you know what i mean like there was there was something special about physical games at a certain point where like it came with a nice stylized manual and all that stuff so like you you know you can imagine a scenario where like this is the the shrinking market for physical games becomes a bit of an opportunity where it's like actually okay this market is shrinking but maybe we can maybe we can make this something maybe we can put a little bit more effort and bring some of the magic back and yeah maybe we'll maybe we charge more for it actually because that makes sense but at least acknowledge that it's there i it's the vinyl thing blows my mind because music way beyond games is an infinitely more dead medium physically than anything else i would i would imagine maybe there's no maybe tv has it beat maybe tv has it beat yeah sure but or something like that because it's streaming and all that but like i don't know it just seems crazy to me the thing about vinyl as much as i i want to just agree with you is that vinyl is on on an up upward trend and i think an artist an artist will make way more money selling a vinyl to you than you know however many listens they get so there's like more of a financial incentive to sell someone a vinyl the with i guess it's more like A better comparison might be a Blu-ray movie or a 4K movie versus a stream, where it's like those are also way on the out.

1:33:45Colin Moriarty:Many retailers don't even sell them anymore. Target doesn't sell Blu-rays or 4Ks to my knowledge anymore. But they're still available. They're still very boutique. And there are these boutique manufacturers like Criterion Collection or something like that. and major movies still come out on on disc there's still there's not as much money to be made there but the people that do want them show up for them and are willing to spend the money on it right yeah i mean well that's kind of what i mean i i think i think you can again if make this not you don't have to i guess what i'm suggesting is like you could take the i just know what you're saying vinyls are growing but like vinyls are growing specifically because like there's a lot of factors going into that and it's i think a large part because for a long time they weren't you know i mean like they were stagnant for a while and then like and then streaming becomes this thing and it becomes over it becomes really oppressive and i think there's a general trend i don't know if it's like a majority but like there is a general trend among younger generations where there is kind of this championing of physical media again like i don't know if it's like this big thing for universally but i think people are even younger people are kind of looking around and realizing that like there's i don't really own anything and this sucks yeah and i i think there's there's something to be said like if you can be a company and you can take advantage of that and you can like really like service something like that and like again you can make these physical copies of these games maybe a little bit a little bit more boutique yeah you can charge more and maybe and maybe if you make something more special maybe you you would see like somewhat of an upward trend um if you treated them seriously if you had like these in-game manuals like gta 6 comes with like a map you know what i mean or like and i don't know there's there's a number of things i think that you could do to bolster these things in a way that could also net you more money um and more goodwill more importantly because goodwill is like a it's a hidden it's a hidden cost that i don't think a lot of people consider um a lot of businesses uh consider i should say uh but you're you're right i think uh the the blu-ray comparison is probably more accurate and maybe there's an and you know maybe there's even an argument to be made where like look there's not a lot of investment in disc technology we haven't seen an improvement in disc technology what we're going to need for ps6 is probably like could we even fit what of a ps6 game could we even fit on a disc but like none of this is communicated there's no communication on any of this and also but what is communicated is this weird kind of tacit admission admission like does this does this uh initiative or does this move of like saying it's like okay or january 2028 is when it stops does that kind of implicitly imply that like okay ps6 is coming out in november of that year yeah because why would you because if it came out in november of the previous year you're gonna you're gonna put effort into printing like three months of playstation 6 discs if that exists that's interesting we have that quite i think we someone might have asked that later like what it implies about the release of ps6 and i think a lot of people are getting the implication that it's like spring 28 at the earliest and i think some people are saying fall 28 i think that's an extraordinarily long time to hold on to the ps6 which will be manufactured next summer it seems like so sure i actually still think it could be 20 20 27 it means basically nothing because they're basically because i was thinking about that same thing chris and i was like well it allows them to withstand that last fall of ps5 releases like your sports releases call of duty you know that kind of shit and it might mean really nothing for ps6's release because it will ps6 just simply won't have the option to have discs anyway but you'll still get this for ps5 that's why i wonder if like the way that they ameliorate this ultimately is to say like listen the ps6 is a digital machine the problem is they can't say that yet you know like they can't they haven't ever acknowledged the machine like they they kind of tacitly do and we know it exists i saw some people are that are more out of the loop and i don't blame you for being out of the loop a few people responded it's like you why do you talk about it what like like it's going to have a handheld in a console like because it's going to have a handheld in a console dude like this has been known by people that have had access to this information for a few years you know um but they can maybe be like all right we'll just keep making ps5 discs and i think that if there is a compromise on that that's what they're going to do they just can't position it like that because they can't announce not acknowledge ps6 so what they'll end up saying is something like we're shutting the ps4 shit down again the analog to the psp vita ps3 right yeah we're shutting the ps4 shit down we'll keep the ps5 games alive and then they will say nothing about ps6 and then they hope that they kind of did a little chip damage to the idea that when they announced the ps6 and well where do you put your discs and you're like you don't we tried to tell you that um maybe they can thread that needle but that's probably not the pr ideal for them i would assume at this point Like, I think the, unfortunately for them, I think since they let this out of the, out of the, the genie out of the bottle and since they can't probably, I mean, they can't alter what their plans are with PS6.

1:38:42Colin Moriarty:Like, yeah, what are they going to do? It's a runaway train, I think at this point. I mean, I just, they could make a disc drive for it. And I feel like you would have to imagine one was in development for it at some point that like, yeah, I just know from my own conversations with people at Sony over the years. and even when I was at Sony HQ and I've talked about like the PS, the DualShock 4s with like offset sticks and all the things they were talking about there. Like they probably R &D a lot of shit. Maybe you just, maybe one of them is on ice and you're just like, all right, like we got to go back and fix it.

1:39:14I mean, they do, Dustin, they do have the opportunity to, if they wanted to eat shit, like release a Nishino video in Japanese, subtitled, 30 seconds. We've heard you. We are we made the wrong choice and we are working behind the scenes to do what we have to do. Little bow. And, you know. And I'm sure they're probably considering the possibility of that, but maybe they're not. Maybe they're like, maybe when they came up with the strategy a long time ago, they're like, this is going to be really hard and you better batten down the hatches. So I don't know. I don't know what they're going to do.

1:39:56Yeah, they could become the good guy again. but I don't know if that's going to be the case.

1:40:00Colin Moriarty:Speaking of the strategy, do you guys think that, I think you're right that this, they were obviously planning this out for a while. Do you think the timing was specifically done? Like they were like, okay, we're going to, we have really bad news. We got to figure out when we're going to say it. Why don't we just wait till we can sandwich ourself between other bad news? Or like, and if we can't, then this is the final day. It's like, is it possible they're like, man, Xbox has taken so much shit. If we can just slide this news in here before the Armageddon of Xbox Studios happens next week, then people will maybe move on a little quicker because there will be other stuff.

1:40:44That's possible. I think I think that that's totally within the realm of possibility. Should they be able to move that quickly? And they and certainly they've understood what we've all understood for a while now, where like this could have even been this could have always been the plan and unleashing. It could have happened later. And they're like and they had a few weeks to say, like, what if we just did it now? You know, although I would say this doesn't to be fair. Yeah. Early. They announced this July 1st, the beginning of a new fiscal quarter. This isn't their fiscal year because their years go March to March, I believe.

1:41:13But our March or. Yeah, March to April. No, March to March, I guess would be. and it's also, and this is important, is this might be one of the best times in the entire calendar to release bad news, especially in the United States, although it doesn't really translate overseas, which is like the 4th of July is a dead zone for news. Like people bury, there's like shit buried around this time in politics and in sports and in all sorts of shit all the time. Yeah. And it's happening right now with a few different things. So there could be that angle too, where it's like, this is just a good time to do it fiscally, and this is a good time to do it in terms of positioning with our biggest market, but I don't know.

1:41:53Colin Moriarty:Right. And so, yeah, I mean, I think that for me, that was more of like a fun idea of like, what if that could, I mean, that shit happens, Dustin. It's not that outrageous. I mean, they definitely play off each other like that. There's no doubt. And I think that I wonder, like certainly it was timed with GTA, right? Because maybe a lot of people that maybe, or the few like die, really truly diehard physical people were like, all right, fine, I'm going to preorder GTA. I'll do a digital game, rip that bandaid off a little bit. And then also they made like what, like a billion dollars already in preorders.

1:42:30Colin Moriarty:And they're like, look, see, we don't, we don't, we can feel confident about this because we just made so much money on GTA off exclusively digital. Yeah, it's, I just hope they're smart enough to know that you can't learn lessons from Grand Theft Auto. We talked about this, so you weren't on the show, but we talked about this last week about like, because people were talking about like what can you get away with pricing what can you get i'm like you can't read anything into it that they're unique they're basically selling a hundred dollar game as chris has pointed out with an 80 gimp version of it you're not that guy you're not that guy you're not that guy yeah it's a quintessential you're not that guy yeah it's like you can't it's so i'm excited to see that like the next person try that you know what i mean like the next uh i don't know like a ubisoft game comes down it's like it's 80 it's 80 bucks beyond people too right well they would probably they would definitely they would need that game to be 80 dollars at this point like how much money they've been how much time they've spent on it but you're not that guy i want to get into this next inquiry because again we've we have so much to talk about still but it's like and we're gonna be here for a while i think but if that's all right but um there is this idea of like well all right why are they we've gotten a little bit into this but like why are they doing this right daniel's son wrote in and said hey cc without the d oh yeevil little fate why are you gay why are you gay i'll keep it simple why doesn't playstation just give us the option i totally understand that i'm in the minority nowadays and that 80 to 90 percent of game sales are digital i want to put an asterisk into that because i think it's we have to kind of double click on that but i would bet that physical collectors are among the most hardcore engaged customers on every platform i don't expect to be subsidized by the majority of customers which is to say I am absolutely willing to spend extra money on a disk drive and physical editions of games.

1:44:16I think it's obvious that beyond practical reasons, Sony has financial incentives for the decision to end disk production on their platforms because it gives them complete control over their customers and they don't have to split revenue anymore. But still, as someone that spends money on games literally every month and that purchased hundreds of games on PlayStation in the last decade, I'm 44. I have to say I feel a little bit left behind by Sony and it feels frustrating because they just have to give us the option in all capital letters. Now, I want to say the we brought this up already, but he said 80 to 90 percent of game sales are digital.

1:44:45It is fair to reiterate and to say that this is heavily skewed by most games not being available physically. And so if you bought a silk song. It's like, well, what are you going to do? You know, you bought vampire crawlers. You bought like these are only available digitally. And obviously these numbers skew heavily. But it's also worth noting that we even know publisher level numbers of like take two says that only 3 percent of their revenue is derived from physical. sales so when you take everything into account like shark cards and shit like that it's like yeah it is what it is you know it is what it is um but just to be fair i'm sorry you're gonna

1:45:21Colin Moriarty:say something chris no no i i just wanted to that that's that's a good art point to make too is that just like the the availability of digital games and the cheapness of them by the like a lot of indie games are that like it's a steam game so it doesn't count but like there's a lot of games like this on um on all platforms where it's like like mecha chameleon is like five bucks and it's like a huge game right but it's like five dollars right like yeah of course right um but yeah i just wanted to reiterate so i want to get look i think we all understand that this is being done for as companies do for monetary reasons i do think that there probably are a few other reasons to do this that have nothing to do with money but could have major complications and i i tweeted this out yesterday and I don't think a lot of people understood it, but I just tweeted out that like there are all these different, you know, reasons like consumer habits and cost savings and all the rest that Sony would be doing this.

1:46:13But then I just I was like, what about this? And I tweeted out a picture of the PS4 version of Star Wars Racer Revenge. I think most people didn't understand it and it is a little bit of a niche joke, but that's the game that you need physically to jailbreak the PS5. And without it, you can't do it. And I wonder if part of the calculus, maybe not an important part of it, but a part of it is Sony said, like, we can just shut this entire vector down. Like we literally PS five was literally fine until someone split it open with that fucking physical copy of that game, you know, and that's a big problem for us moving forward on our all digital platform.

1:46:51And I think that's got it. I don't know, Dustin, you're more much more technical to me. Certainly that probably played somewhat into it, right? It's to say, like we don't even have to worry about that anymore. Like that was a freak thing. And we just because like if we had a vulnerability like that, like the vulnerability is on the digital version, I think, too, but they just patch it and then you can never download the original version again. Like you have no access to it. You would have to keep your PS5 offline forever to not download the patch. So do you think that that might have played a I mean, that's an extraneous

1:47:23Colin Moriarty:role but a role nonetheless yeah well i think sony got lucky too that it was that game right and not some mass market like fc24 or something right yeah i i would imagine that's certainly part of it i i'll be honest that i'm not super aware about what the playstation 5 jailbreak scene even is i usually just see like uh bloodborne running on ps5 at 60 fps 4k you know Videos like Digital Foundry has done a bunch like that. And people are running Linux on PS5 now. But certainly, yeah. Sony, of all people, would know the pain of having jailbroken consoles. I mean, just look at the PSP. How easy that thing was to hack.

1:48:08Colin Moriarty:How much money they probably lost because people were just downloading games. I was a teenager. I was one of them that was hacking my PSP and downloading ISOs. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I to be fair I didn't know what to do with it my my uh someone at IGN did it for me and I only had an NES and an SNES emulator on it but uh right but you had what I remember was you couldn't play anything on it like you either had to have the PSP dedicated to that or you had to dedicate it to playing new games because the new remember the new games started coming with the UMD updates like the firmware updates on them yeah and so you just basically made it a digital only right and piracy only PSP.

1:48:47So yeah,

1:48:48Colin Moriarty:that's certainly I think a factor. I touched on this earlier. I think it's a good time for me to point out. I mentioned my tweet earlier and I wanted to address two points about it because there are so many replies about it. This isn't the first time you've addressed the tweet, I feel like. No, well, there's no nuance in Twitter. Yeah, right. I think it's worth putting some nuance on something. number one is that on Amazon, a lot of people are like, well, those games are on, you're comparing an on-sale game to a not on-sale game. And it's like, dude, those games, while it shows like 20 % off on Amazon, that 20 % off is showing like what their standard MSRP is.

1:49:30Colin Moriarty:Go look at the price history of those games on Amazon. Those haven't been MSRP for months or even years. It's not like a Amazon Prime Day sale. those are pretty close to just what the relative i mean they do fluctuate a little bit if you look at the price history on amazon but that's you know they're not really like what we consider a sale uh the second thing and this was a mistake on my part but i think the point still stands right now on playstation some of those games i listed like i believe god of war and gran turismo their special editions are on sale right now on playstation and they are the same price as the physical version on Amazon maybe even slightly cheaper uh so that's something I just didn't realize like it's weird to me that PlayStation would put God of War digital deluxe edition or God of War Ragnarok digital deluxe edition on sale but the standard version is not on sale so I I just didn't even realize that when I was making the tweet but the point still stands because right now when I happen to make those screenshots it's the summer sale that they're trying to compete with steam summer sale so as soon as that sale's gone the point still stands no i i i i agree with you like there definitely is a a price control angle here though i think it is more sophisticated and complicated than people are letting it on to be like i don't because amazon is buying these games on mass i'm pretty sure they can just then i don't think sony's the one telling them to charge less for them i think they're willing to do that right like and and there i can put we can put our game on sale whenever we want on psn so like a lot of the stuff is up to 99.99 of the games on psn are not playstation's games and so people can really think so they like i i'm not saying you're wrong what i'm saying is it's kind of passing the buck for publishers because and this is i think a big part of it dustin is that big entities don't want discs small entities do want discs so think about like like what we just saw with take two but like the general reality i saw reese elliott actually tweet out about this and it's true it's like making a game you have to have a master of a game the idea of going gold is from the idea you guys know this but for the audience that doesn't know this like when we say games go gold that's terminology because you said the gold master of a disc an actual physical disc to send to the manufacturer that's where it comes from and that's a thing you have to do you have to commit to a build and you have to do it early and big entities are like we don't want to do this anymore this is annoying we literally can deploy a preload like they're doing with grand theft auto a week before the game comes out not three months before the game comes out you know i mean and so and and they're like and we'll make more money selling digital games too we all like if you're ea or take tour like we also benefit from from getting rid of the middleman what's really interesting is it fucks the cottage industry shit bad and i i noted this on twitter yesterday it was like to be a fly on the wall limited run games right now man like oh yeah you're in a lot of trouble you know um i'm in danger you know like uh it's they're a little more diversified than some of these companies and i know my i'm really good friends with the guys at East Asia soft and I'm not so worried for them because they are truly like in digital distribution and have been forever and limited limited run is started to do that like the Rugrats collection that just came out like they print they publish that digitally so they're they're getting to where they need to be but that's going to destroy the retail side of their business and I don't think there's any respite for companies like that because Nintendo I the the worst kept secret about all this Nintendo's just sitting back and like kind of smiling because uh they want out too like they've already showed you that with the key card stuff and they don't give a fuck and they'll make like the normal cartridges for big games and they'll do all that sort of stuff but they like they don't want to do this shit either so like but like the thing that they benefit from is just being the last man standing and the fact that their hardware that just came out is accepting they'll be physical Switch games for years, but that's not enough to withstand the damage that's going to be done to these niche boutique publishers.

1:53:56And I can speak from my perspective too, is it kind of sucks for us. I mean, we make pretty good money on the physical games for Lillimo that we sell through Last Stand. And so it's funny, like the smaller the company is, that somehow is attached to these different things, the more they're going to be injured while the bigger companies i wonder even dustin like when they knew because i i'm like they couldn't have been told right then but i wonder if they were just told like last week or something because that shit would have leaked you would assume at that point that would be bad news for sony that leak they need to control the messaging on that but i would imagine they probably told them and the ea is like okay i mean yeah that's fine with us we don't have to we we don't have to fucking get time at your fucking indiana factories and manufacture discs in austria and all this random shit and then hear people bitching about how there's no instruction manual and all that i'm not saying any that's right but like from their perspective they're like cool and you saw that again take two is the proof in the pudding and i think you're right about that is like it's not going in the opposite direction the biggest game though you can't learn much from it the biggest game was like all right well we'll do it and i I think that that at least sets a predicate for thinking about it moving forward.

1:55:12But I do feel, I feel for those little companies because they're that, that this is like an extinction level event for them. Do you think that GTA did that because they knew this was happening?

1:55:23Colin Moriarty:Oh yeah. I think so. Yeah. Dustin was saying that earlier and I feel like for sure, but I wonder though, Dustin, it's like they can kind of play this both ways because they can be like, Oh, uh, next fall we'll have a disc. and it'll be a much more robust version of it and we'll just sell it to you again and uh better get it now you know kind of shit like i i almost think like you're kind of just like sitting rubbing your hands together being like this is like the black eye behind the tree peeking out meme i love that one new suit i love that love that meme you know and uh so i i think i think they're just they're gonna get away with it and then they'll make it work for them later that I think people are vastly overestimating why take two did that though like I really do think a lot of it has to do with the security of the game and I think I think people are I think people are mistake they're not saving any money by manufacturing cases and shipping them and then just not printing a disc and putting it in like this is like pennies on the dollar dude you know they're doing it because they don't want the game to leak so anyway different story entirely all right so yeah i wanted to point those things out like it's obviously monetary and this gets a little more into it crackling bone says you boys did not sony co-invent the blu-ray and get a licensing fee for every blu-ray produced i love the way you wrote that why would they ever want to kill disc production if like colin had said producing them is dirt cheap they are i have said that and they are i'll go into a little bit of that wouldn't you want that little passive income forever not just from games but from movies so i'll tell you right now that like i can get the lowest run of playstation games you can do is a thousand i've talked about this it's actually like 1015 and you can be the smallest developer and you can get those games met a thousand of those games manufactured in a disc or in a case disc in case you know cover sheet all wrapped around sealed in cases shipped to your house for under$10 a unit.

1:57:38Okay. So that's if you're buying a thousand of them. What do you think that number looks like if you're buying half a million of them? What do you think that number looks like if you're buying 2 million of them? I mean, so yeah, it's, it is, there's no question that it's cheap. They just don't want it. I'm not even sure it's the manufacturing that's the problem. I don't think they want to ship them. And I don't think they want to split the money with the retailers. They don't need to anymore. And that's a big part too, guys, is remember we've talked about this. I remember judging and balancing this many years ago during my journalistic career is like, there was always this idea of Vita was the first crack actually in it, which was like, we got to play nice.

1:58:19We can't fuck the retailers over. We rely on them too much still. And I remember the first crack in the armor was Vita when Vita started differentiating prices between digital and physical games, which is why it wouldn't be that unprecedented for them to do that again. This is a sign that they're like, yeah, we can actually kind of just drop a bomb on these guys now. We don't really need them. And that's another sign that physical sales are waning. And even the way you get physical games are waning and that most people probably get their physical games from non-game stores. Another very, the biggest game seller has to be Amazon, you would assume.

1:58:56I would assume the second biggest game seller is Walmart. I know for decades, the biggest music seller in the country was Walmart. Which is crazy because I don't think they carry explicit content, by the way. So you're always getting the clean version when you bought it there. But I don't know, man. It's a deep economic question. But yeah, Sony did co-invent the Blu-ray and they do get money. They are a licensor of it. Dustin, doesn't that just go to show you, though, that they're like, yeah, it's not worth it? What does this mean for Blu-ray movies, by the way?

1:59:33Colin Moriarty:probably nothing yeah but i would say probably nothing but because that that would be kind of unimaginable as well although that's again a vanishingly small group of people too you know so i don't know i don't know interesting question though yeah i would imagine that their their licensing fee from a disc is pretty minuscule compared to the amount they have to get from a retailer as you were saying colin i think the blu-ray like as far as movies it's like a totally different business uh where because so many movies are streamed from a service like netflix or amazon or something like that i'm not talking about like a one-time rental or something i'm saying it's on their subscription service they will gladly sell you a blu-ray because they will make so much more off that individual purchase than one what you watching it one time on netflix yeah i um yeah you're right and it goes also into what you were saying earlier about gaming is kind of a unique place where like there's multiple ways for a game to make money but it's all in the game like there's no there's no external externality to it for them like the the process of cd tour you know whatever kind of thing merch obviously merch exists all that but it's it's these are edge cases pax was really good for that for a long time not so much anymore where like developers would go there and make a lot of money just selling random shit but um there really is no externality for them they have to make the money through or in the game and so there's like fewer places for them to go and escape these increase in pricing and by the way those small licensing fees do add up i mean the scuttlebutt about we was that nintendo didn't want to pay the dvd licensing fee which is why there was no dvd player in it right yeah so well an x i'm sorry the xbox played dvds but you needed to buy the remote right in order to use the dvd feature of the xbox because that's where that licensing fee that's how they were able to pay for it that's right jonathan churlin wrote in said hey guys just read the news that sony is going to end physical disc production on all games on their platforms.

2:01:49Was wondering, do you think that this means the price of physical games is about to shoot up? Because aren't they essentially saying that all PlayStation physical media is going to go out of print on January 1st, 2028? Or do you think that if publishers still wanted to print discs for their games on PS4 and PS5, they would still be able to do that after the date? How does that work? And what does that mean for companies like Limited Run Games? Personally, I just bought four games for my Amazon wishlist that I've been on the fence about just in case. So I wanted to bring this up because there are a few clarifications that are probably going to be needed.

2:02:17I would imagine game prices will stay stagnant until this is done. Maybe they'll jack up the last run of them. I think that would be pretty shitty of them to do. And I don't really know that that has much play here. I also think that, like, he brings up the PS4 and PS5 thing. This is kind of where I'm a little confused about. This is where I think they can get out of this. If they were choosing to get out of it, which is to say, like, all right, we'll continue to make these older games. and there simply will be no physical games on PS6, and you'll have to decide if you want to opt in or not at that time.

2:02:50But they still have to, again, they still have to run and certify those things. It's a dangerous kind of thing from a quality standpoint to offload that. And I think that they realize that. There's a lot of trust implicit in something like that, and I just don't think they really want to do it. But I do believe, so to answer the question more succinctly, it's like once Sony stops certifying those discs, it's over. You can't make them anymore. And so there are a few things we're considering, like I haven't even talked to the guys at Lilium O about this because I've been thinking about it. It's like one thing I'm really disappointed we didn't do is print a Vita game and then just hold it.

2:03:32Like we've published Vita games, but like that we didn't, like when we knew we were running out of time, it's like just publish the Vita game, don't even sell it. And then like in five years, sell it. And I think I want to do that for some like some of our games is like just get them like get reprints of them and then just sit on them. Because I think it would be kind of cool to and not like charge a fortune for them in the future. That's not the idea at all. It's like in other words, I have like this really cool thing that like if you're just patient, like planting the seed and watching the tree grow, are you patient enough to sit in its shade?

2:04:07Like, yeah, like I think that I think doing cool things like that would be cool. And I imagine a lot of companies will be smarter about that this time around to be like one of the last Vita or one of the last or like Vita game. We were one of the last Vita game sold. But I think we were. We were like fourth or something like fourth. We knew back in the day. I don't remember.

2:04:26Colin Moriarty:Here's a mentioning companies like Limited Run and also what we do, an option that makes me wonder if Limited Run will be totally OK. maybe not totally okay but they will survive is that a lot of people that buy limited run games either a first of all they keep them sealed uh and also if they want to play the game that the the physical version of it takes so incredibly long for it to show up that they have already bought it digitally um i wonder if some of these companies can survive by making uh video game less special editions like for example like colin when we do well saints saints layer i think we'll we'll be able to do it before oh yeah way before we'll we'll get more than saints layer yeah we have we have a year and a half but after that for so a lily limo game far in the future would people be interested in us selling a special edition that has a manual it has uh the sticker like all of our stuff it just doesn't have the game in it and we charge less for it yeah but it's like here's something a physical product to celebrate the release of it and like let me just run they do all they do like figures and all kinds of garbage that you don't need yeah i've you're right and i've thought about that too and i think what will what will determine that is like who who are buying these games is it people that want the physical version of the game or is it people that want to collect it like i know that i feel like i'm kind of an edge case where i like with the castlevania special editions for instance like i could give a fuck about those games on disc i own them on on digitally we'll own them in quotes on digitally i wanted the accoutrements but i don't know that most people are like that i think they get the accoutrements they want them but they want the game and i don't know i i would be if i i would be if i were at these companies these small niche publishers i'd be liaison you know liaising with sony as quickly as possible to see like what what can we do i mean what i don't know i i think it's it you're right that there's a way out but like these companies will have much smaller effect moving forward if you're not if you if you don't control the actual product and you just have like a like your fan gaming you know fan gamer that website which is good and they do some physical run stuff too but like you you're really more about like the uh the pins and the the posters and it's like that there's money to be made there but the margins in physical games that's what i was saying earlier it's like ironically the margins for physical games comparable to what a third-party published digital indie game would get are way higher you want to sell physical in other words when you're when you're an indie while it goes in the other direction because of different caustic constraints and all the rest so um let's see this is an important one Declan wrote in and said hey boys with PS6 reportedly going digital only does Sony have any plans to actually improve the storefront before pushing us off physical media no alternative to the PS store poor discovery weak sales compared to competitors painful refunds and still no way to gift or share games like switch to his virtual key cards backwards compat is then too with PS3 PSP and Vita purchases already stranded and after Sony pulled purchases purchased movies and shows from people's accounts why should we trust that licenses are any safer.

2:07:40Dustin Furman, if you can hear us, please save us.

2:07:47So this is a, and this gets in, I think the nitty gritty of the things that if this is going to be the status quo, then there, there need, there are things that need to happen. And this is one of them is, and I would imagine that they know this and I would imagine that the PS6's storefront will probably be different in some meaningful ways. You already kind of see evidence of it rolled out. Like there's ways to leave like text reviews on PlayStation, you know, like in some different ways now on like the website, like all these things that I think they'll integrate later. But yeah, Chris, let's go.

2:08:19We haven't heard you from you in a while. I mean, the PlayStation store is not great. And they are improving things. I want to give them credit. Like the shovelware purge has been awesome. I love that. but they have big problems before we even get to the technical stuff is like, it's just not a great storefront compared to steam. And they need to do something about it. If they're going to go into this all digital future.

2:08:43Colin Moriarty:Yeah. I mean, they, they definitely should. I, I think it's actually kind of up in the air as to whether or not it would be a different store. I think it's up. I think it's up in the air as to whether or not the PS six is UI will really be any different. It wouldn't be, there is a precedent with Sony specifically going from PSP to PS three, where they've just taken the UI and just kind of ported it over. And given the console's position as it stands now, this is a very unique time and a very unique market and a very unique environment and audience that it's releasing into. And we talked about this last week where it's just like the appetite for this machine doesn't really seem to be there.

2:09:28Colin Moriarty:so the strategy around it feels like like let's put it this way we already know that ps4 stuck around for a very very long time we know for a fact at this point ps5 is going to be around for for for a while arguably ps5 may be just the baseline for how things are going to go i think it's up in the air as to whether or not we even get a true ps6 exclusive honestly um but like truly like only runs on ps6 like i i don't know if it's as clear cut or obvious as as we might assume so if this next machine is really going to be looked at as like i think there's an argument to be made that this may be like a a ps5 pro pro type situation where like the big gimmick or the big change will be the the handheld element the fact that like yes it's a stronger machine yes it's more capable but the main thing about this is that you can take it on the go and or something like that and that'll be the thing that differentiates it and that'll be the main the main draw and so because that's the main draw and it's not like this whole new machine and ecosystem they can probably price it in a way that's a little bit more boutique and then you know make make more money on it it can position itself as a more optional hardcore machine and there's not really that much need in that case to really make it a different user experience than the previous machine anyway you kind of in some ways might even want to have it as similar as possible series x did this from xbox one where it's the same exact ui and ps3 to ps uh uh or psv or psp to ps3 similar so like i could see a similar thing happening with ps ps6 and if that is the case there's they need to overhaul the ps5 quite drastically i think especially with the storefront because dude i don't even understand like i there's such a simple thing that i would i think would go a long way which is just like have upcoming games be its own thing i hate looking at like most recent or whatever and it's a bunch of shit that's not available yet because it's just like tens and tens of pages of stuff that like is is for pre-order or something like that's not most recent brother that's not what that's not what that means yeah agreed at all agreed or or new games and it's like this is out next year pre-order it now it's like this is not a new game this isn't a game yet so like there's little things like that obviously they're doing a good job with uh you know getting uh some of the shovelware out and uh you know i i commend them for that that's a that's good news in in a string of negative games industry news but like um i don't know i i really don't i don't think it's a guarantee that the next ui or the next front's going to be much better or much different um we'll see in fact i think there's precedent that the opposite might actually be true yeah i mean there is an idea i mean with psp and ps3 they were trying to make like a playstation os almost and there is this idea i guess that like you would want to make things consistent and unify them but part of getting a new console too is like the new the new feeling they have to balance that so we were saying about the controller as well as like you don't really need a new controller and it could be a way to kind of save money by not you know you want to sell dual senses still but obviously you would have to but people have them so maybe you do that yeah this other question i think gets it this next question my opinion is for me so obviously people are aghast because they're physical gamers whatever that doesn't affect me at all this affects me and i think this is a major component of what i think needs to change.

2:13:03Hashim Barakat wrote in and said, good day, sacred gents, with an all-digital gaming space seemingly inevitable, do you think we should get more guarantees on our ownership of our digital purchases? We are paying the same price for a physical copy and sometimes even more by buying an expensive version and the DLC. I feel like it should be fair to upgrade the license to a full ownership of our digital purchases and maybe a cheaper price since they will stop manufacturing physical copies. Thank you for the amazing content and I wish all a great week. I'm not entirely sure much can be done about the things that we've already bought.

2:13:36But I feel so strongly about what I'm about to say that I actually think that like there might like the government might even need to get involved at some point. And it will probably be the EU more than like Congress or whatever. But there needs to be this idea of digital licensing needs to change. I understand that like, I understand what it is, but it is a weaselly way out of truly selling a good that takes advantage of long Bible length EULAs and consumer misunderstanding going back more than 20 years, going all the way back to really iTunes. about like what you own and like what you what you don't and what you have access to and what the difference is between owning a physical good and a license and this is the fundamental pivot point of owning a physical game versus that you know people always say that to me it's like you don't really own the game you like i'm like i know dude i know my assumption is is that we'll always have access to them and really and we're going to talk about the playstation movie thing later which i think is a kind of a different story if i'm being honest with you but like we really have had almost none of none of games get delisted but like you have access to them and there hasn't been a lot of like chicanery with rare exception behind the scenes of of like them being like no we're just getting rid of this game entirely and you can't play it anymore this really happens more in the multiplayer and games as service space where the games are just inoperable i was trying to think about like what could they do because the licensing thing basically gives them a way out if like and this is what i always say about like if you're if you lose access to your PlayStation games.

2:15:19Sony's going out of business. Like there's just, there's just no way that they would let that happen. You know, yet as we're going to learn with the PS3 and Vita stuff, like they do say, like there will be, they basically say there'll be a day when you can't download the games anymore. And to me, that's a bridge far too far. And I wonder like what kind of legislation might be necessary or what kind of guide guardrails might be put on. wherein licensing means more than that because we live in a different paradigm now, a digital one. And I've said this ad nauseum, but your accounts, like your digital presence, is actually extremely vital to protect.

2:16:07And if you're like a 10-year-old on PlayStation Network, you should conceivably have access to that account when you're 70 and what does that look like and how do you do that and i think it's complicated it's what you know the the stop killing games thing we were talking about how complex that is because it's like well you can't really do very much to keep a multiplayer going game going and they have all these solutions about like bots and all this i wonder if like some of it is like does sony enter money on from every sale into escrow or something where it's like this is the money that like the pennies per purchase that we set aside if sony ever gets into existential trouble and like these will keep this money will keep the servers live for like i was trying to think about like what do you do i don't know but like i think i think people should be guaranteed permanent access to these things and i think this goes all the way into i mean of course we went into this a lot when my account got boosted and I told you guys that I said this to Sony that they didn't acknowledge PS6 to me I'm not saying that they did but I said to them I'm like you guys are about to sell this digital handheld and people's accounts can get stolen by calling some fucking call center and they can just lose it I'm like I don't think so there are a lot of things that need to happen if you're going to move in this direction I don't mind you moving in this direction it's convenient and I like it but I should never have a true worry in my heart that I can lose access to this stuff unless I do something truly egregious.

2:17:46Right. And I just think that like there needs to be more pressure about this because they're not taking it seriously enough. And I think this gets to the heart of it is like, yeah, you got to figure out a way to make this more than a quote unquote license it's too slimy and it's it's treating your customers like vagrant ephemeral customer you know vagrant ephemeral consumers of you of a good in a time as opposed to treating it like they might want to revisit it at some point like the expectation was and i know that like there are things that disappear and like and i'm saying and some of the things people bring up really annoy me like i'm sick of hearing about pt for instance like i'm sick of it like pt was a demo for that you didn't pay for for a game that never came out and for it was available for many years like in other form like other ways and it's been played a bunch of times and all this like enough already about fucking pt what i'm really worried about is like the shit you buy and it might be as easy as that escrow fund going into refunds if games disappear or prorated refunds or whatever you might want to look at there might be you might you might release a pro rating table about x years distant at this price you get this much money they got to do something they have to yeah so i agree with you um hashiman yeah what do you think about this

2:19:14Colin Moriarty:it is i was when i was thinking about this it's interesting that uh like even a console like the Wii, for example, to my understanding, you can still re-download your Wii purchases. Nintendo still has those servers up. But you have to have the Wii itself. Yeah, you have to have that Wii. Yeah, yeah. But because it was long before their account. Yeah, I was talking about that recently in another context where I'm like, it's so crazy, man. I probably literally spent$500 or more, maybe even closer to$1 ,000 on that stupid virtual console. Right. And same for like 3DS. The 3DS store has been long gone.

2:19:58Colin Moriarty:But if you made purchases on your 3DS, and I believe that is account based, you can still go and redownload those. But it is a good question. It's like, should a digital good be treated the same as a physical good? Because it's like. if you think about it like nintendo doesn't have the right or playstation right like sony can't be like hmm uh your copy of crash bandicoot uh we need to come to your house and take that back sorry you can't own that anymore we know you sold it to us and we know you've used it a long time but uh no it's got to go it's got to come back it would be like absolutely fucking not you can't have that back you sold it to me but because a digital good doesn't exist in the physical plane of our world uh suddenly then that is like oh well no they totally legally can just say oh i don't know we're taking that from you or you can't you we're not going to allow you to to get access to that anymore which i guess that's the argument it's like well we're going to give you a cutoff date and make sure you if you want to keep these you have to download them and have them on a hard drive or something it's like i don't think so yeah it's i understood the the i've been let me say this i've been very understanding i think of of all of the shit that people didn't anticipate about this era i brought up recently the wonder years using a cover of a cover of a of their intro song you know the joe cocker cover of the beatles song like they they didn't have these these perpetual licenses then because they didn't anticipate any of this shit so like instead of paying joe cocker's ask they were like no we'll just have a cover of that song over it and i was saying about 90210 when i went back and went through that again uh back when i lived in california like there were just episodes missing because there's just so much fucking music in it and i'm patient with that because i'm like yeah that sucks but you really couldn't have known we've had more than enough time for you to figure it out at this point yeah you know like we like all these different ways out and these different cagey little things it's like it's enough already you gotta you gotta just you gotta like this is what it is man you gotta sort it out

2:22:24Colin Moriarty:asap yeah it's yeah go ahead please okay i was gonna say before you read the next question i I need to dip out for a second. Holly has to use the bathroom and needs me to watch the baby. Okay. Do you want to stop? Do you want to stop the recording? Oh, no, no, no. You can keep going. Okay. Okay. All right. Chris or Ponderer wrote in to us and said, hello, Colin and Chris. Did you catch that? Sony is now going to be selling digital games again at retail stores. This was a small part of the noise this week, but appears in the PS blog outlining the changes to physical games in 2028. Sony stopped allowing digital license sales at retail back in 2019.

2:22:58and this return means retailers could sell these for cheaper than PSN, which is a small silver lining. It's funny because I didn't really pick this up, but it is there, but I didn't really pick it up when we first read it, or when I first read it yesterday, which is that they do say that. They say, following this date, so January 2028, new games will be available on PlayStation Store and at retailers in digital formats only. And yes, this is something that was discontinued back in the PS4 era. I assume this is some sort of make good to the retailers I guess and that gives some sort of perception of optionality to the audience you're getting it through the same thing really but like yeah because it is a weird reversal I you have to assume that's what it is right that they can't maybe they don't want to burn them completely and they can have a little yeah and they'll have

2:23:44Colin Moriarty:retail presence which is important I wonder what that means though like I wonder like is it are they gonna is it gonna be like the rock star thing where it's just like a it's gonna be a case still no i think it'll be more like when you're just a car like yeah like i think it's what nintendo does like when i go into target i always go to look at nintendo's thing and they just have the these lines of cards um and i wonder if that game yeah i wonder if yeah right for each individual game and i wonder if they'll do that because because i think they would do that they have actually kind of backtracking they kind of have to do that because otherwise they will have no footprint on right you know like their space is going to go away at all these different stores and you don't want that um so just an interesting thing that i get it is a silver lining it's just that it's it doesn't solve the problem it just gives you multiple places to buy the game and i wonder how price resistant those are too like i wonder if those are basically akin to and it could be this way now i really don't know how it works but are those akin to like you know when you go and buy like i'm gonna buy a barnes and noble card for someone and you pay for it and then they scratch it off and then like the point of sale is like the money exchange I wonder if it's like one thing lower than that where it's like Target is basically selling this on consignment and like Sony will pay them at the point of sale in other words it's just Sony doing it themselves as opposed to giving them any sort of flexibility in pricing I don't know if that's actually the case or not we'll see yeah i mean it doesn't really it's it seems like a band-aid you know it's like okay you can get your digital copy you can get your digital code at a retailer uh that's not i don't know that that means so little to me it's i i remember when i saw those cards or whatever at at stores or whatever i just remember being like why would i why would i buy this why would i do this here like it's it's what a what a roundabout way of getting to the same exact and it doesn't solve the problem of ownership as well no no i mean that's the big thing that's the big thing i think the key the key issue i think um i don't know man i think i think we have to start waking up to the reality that like the motive isn't even like it's not even it's not even a profit motive it's it's just like a bare minimum viability motive in a lot of cases or it's at least getting to that point or it's just like it's the bare minimum like whatever yeah i think it's about control in a way too which i think the next inquiry gets into sure oh i'm sorry though about the codes at stores yeah well i guess maybe it relates to but the one reason why someone would chris is that they have a gift card for that store i guess like a kid like they get yeah a 50 target card then they can buy that code via that gift card yeah and no you're right you're Gift cards are just insane to me also as a pro.

2:26:38Colin Moriarty:It's like you're like, I never understood the gift card thing. Like you're going to buy, I'm going to buy money. That's worth less. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, dude, that's, I mean, we're, we have a lot of gift cards right now for our baby stuff. And I'm like, well, I really want to buy this thing for the baby, but I have this gift card here. So it's like, I guess I'll just spend my own money and save the gift card. But, and there are still people too, that don't want to put their credit card online. in this day and age which is like kind of like it feels weird in a way because all you know the three of us spent so much money online and my credit cards wherever but like my credit card's not on playstation network right now that's true yeah because of uh recent happenings it eventually will go back in there but it's like i i kind of understand it uh to some degree yeah and it's worth reiterating to like that because we were talking a little bit about access to your games or whatever but it's like the security situation on playstation needs to be ratcheted up to an extreme degree and i hope they know that like if you're going to go all in like this which is reasonable enough that's your decision then understand they're going to be serious and far reaching ramifications if you fuck this up that is the texture to the background of this conversation I think as well is like the reliability of Sony in general as as a as a purveyor of these goods in the first place and I and I like the security of the PlayStation Store is a massive issue the um UX of the PlayStation Store is a massive issue uh I know you said it's a different thing uh talking about like the the movie purchases and I do think I agree but it does say something about how much they respect at least a portion of your digital library like they would never they're playstation so like games are the center of their business and and playstation is the center of is the center of sony really it's like the core of sony and so like they're not going to be stupid with games like they're not going to like revoke your access to to games that you've paid for i like in pretty much 99.9 percent of scenarios tv is a little bit secondary like what are you doing even in buying tv shows on playstation it's weird but it does say something yeah you know it might not be that important but it is something well no i agree with you like like what i was saying earlier is like they need to be in a position and again i think this comes from legislation and new kind of corporate governance of let's not even call it governance let's call it the stewardship of your stuff like and taking it seriously is like they should what happened with studio canal and playstation and playstation with their movies and tv shows should simply not be possible right yeah like and and again i'm i'm a little more patient with old deals like you haven't even been able to buy tv and movies tv shows and movies on playstation for a while now um so i'm a little more patient with that than i am with like anything moving forward it's like you have to know better now like it's it's yeah you're right i mean well we'll talk about that later because it's it's it seemed like it was a bad story it's a lot worse than that as we've been talking about them just the fucking movie thing but all right few more things to get through um yeah abdl wrote in said hello gents sony's announcement that they'll end physical game production in 2028 reminded me of an episode a few weeks back of on an audience question about external marketplaces selling psn game keys or lack thereof dustin mentioned steam offers something like that but that was mischaracterized steam does let developers sell steam keys but only 5 000 are provided by default which is nothing at scale what's 5k copies for something like gta 6 their docs say additional keys requests are reviewed case by case and more keys aren't guaranteed.

2:30:18Right now, no digital game marketplace offers a service like that truly, and that makes sense to me. But given the recent news, do you think that that will have to change soon? I have a really hard time understanding how it changes. This would only be forced by legislation. And again, something that would probably happen in Europe that would force them to bend around the world. I get nervous about this. I don't like this idea that you have to sell things in multiple places. Why? To me, I'm like, I don't know. I think you should explore all avenues to reach your consumers, but at the barrel of a gun?

2:30:59I don't know. He's not saying that, by the way, but it would have to be that way because no one is going to voluntarily join a system like that where you can undercut each other on each other's... You'll have this universal platform where all of all of the the uh the hardware manufacturers compete with each other on games that are on each of their platforms like that's insanity you know like it would it would it would be why it would be very pro-consumer but as we're going to talk about i'm not so sure pro-consumer really works for businesses all the time as we see uh as we see with a certain competitor um so you have to do things with like some sort of rationality to it and like i don't think the monopoly PlayStation has in selling games on their own platform, that doesn't bother me.

2:31:46I don't know. It just like I just think that that's almost normal and reasonable. It's like, yeah, of course they do. They're going to they're going to have like a they're going to make proprietary hardware and then give you access to four different storefronts. That would be the end of PlayStation. And by the way, I remember saying this when we discussed this a while ago, is like, I'm going to be pretty fucking pissed if people actually try to do this, which they which they might through lawsuits and all the rest because it could ruin everything. like it's it's one of those things where it's like it's what i said about helix and like the multiple storefronts to be very careful it would be no different playstation would get fucking destroyed from like from a parasite within running on its own hardware like i don't know i don't i'm not i don't know if you guys have any opinion on it but i can't even compute how a digital storefront that allowed you to like buy whatever you wanted on psn or you buy it on psn with modular pricing that seems like that would all again only happen to the barrel of a gun and undermine playstation's business and i don't i don't i'm not into that that that to me i think is a bridge too

2:32:46Colin Moriarty:far yeah i think um across the board there's a lot of i mean this also relates to the steam machine which is a whole different thing that i have not been here for in the pricing but uh valve and and sony are two very very different companies uh i know they're selling the same kind of product but they operate and make money in different ways um similar ways but um i as far as like the selling on multiple storefronts i this is something that maybe before i come back i need to read up on more because i i agree with you colin that it's like seems crazy that steam is able to do that and just be like yeah we're fine not making that money but i mean they are a private company that has way less overhead and maybe that's just part of their ecosystem yeah like i don't i i really don't know how it works because we get steam keys when we when we publish games and i think we get a lot of them but i don't i don't think i mean i know this is true right for psn and xbox and whatever is nintendo's like you can't sell those keys no those are for like distribution it that whole that completely undermined like it's just well i want to read this real quick because it's what i was referring to before um will wrote in and said xbox has been the most pro-consumer brand in the console space for the past seven years.

2:34:04They're on the brink of hardware extinction. That is all. I think there's something to that. You have to watch out for the business or there will be no product. You know, so you have to be careful. Well, I mean,

2:34:22Colin Moriarty:their business got shot in the foot specifically because they weren't pro-consumer and they had to very very quickly pivot to the point where like nobody really trusted them there was really again like dude that 20 that 20 to 13 uh like always online drm machine that was not a pro consumer idea you know that was not a very that was like the like the fact that playstation won a generation and arguably like carried inertia for like a damn near a decade off of a video of two people handing a case to one another you know what i mean that's all it took bare minimum again this is what i'm saying bare minimum bare minimum viability it's just like oh you can share your game cool that's it we'll reward you for it and xbox didn't do that and it nuked their brand and they tried to pivot like you can't go pro consumer after you've already like shat the bed immensely i think like you kind of have to you have to you kind of have to have a consistent philosophy of that and you have to employ it and i think that generally does well you obviously have to look after the business side as well but like i don't think it's necessarily fair to say like oh xbox was pro-consumer and look how that turned out it's like no they don't they're in this situation because they weren't and they only survived this long actually because they pivoted a little bit.

2:35:47I would argue. Well, there are certainly contrary arguments happening out there as well, although the prevailing wisdom is that this is a bad idea and people are upset. We do have a write in from Brandon Price who says, gentlemen, with Sony announcing the end of physical disc production, I have noticed yet more doom and gloom spreading throughout the industry and in gaming discussion circles. I wanted to remind everyone that the consumers have spoken. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the ratio now about 80-20 with digital media dominating. We live in a world where the majority rules. I just can't stand all this nonsense about the hobby is dying and how could they do this?

2:36:18This is not going to affect the overall quality of games, which is ultimately all that matters. P writes it on out. I want to just say that like based on the margins, and this is where I think it's dangerous to kind of throw the baby out with the bathwater based on like the kind of slim margins that Sony is running on right now and PlayStation is running on. I mean, you can't afford to kind of throw away 20 % of your audience. you can't even afford to throw away really half of that audience or even a quarter of that audience. So I don't, the consumer has spoken with their behavior, yes. And the inevitability of where this is all going is undeniable, but they simply didn't need to do it now.

2:36:56They didn't need to do it like this. And I think they have more explaining to do. I do want to say one thing. I've been very nice about all of this, but there is one argument I want to bring up that I am a little tired of hearing about. and uh there are other arguments by the way that i'm tired of hearing about too but we've gone into these a bunch of times like i'm so tired of like the game preservation shit it's like shut the fuck up please like they're these games all like these these machines are hacked to such a fucking degree at this point that like everything's playable and most games are on pc like i just hate when people are like game preservation acts i'm like all right that's not that's not why we necessarily need physical games but to each their own this is a an argument though that i hear sometimes that I'm like, I feel like we need to really talk about it.

2:37:40David Rector says, hey guys, I know Colin and Chris are all digital as am I, but I think Sony is making a mistake removing discs as an option. There are plenty of people who live in rural areas that don't have great internet that still rely on physical games. I wish the world's internet infrastructure was good enough to make going all digital and non-issue, but I think Sony has jumped the gun on this one. I don't think this is true anymore. Like you can get Starlink anywhere and it's it will run on your PlayStation or on it. You can tether a fucking 5G connection to your PlayStation through your phone.

2:38:16Like I'm not saying that these things are ideal but like I feel like it's not 2010 anymore. You know, it's not even 2015. It's not even 2020. Sony cannot make decisions about like people who are somehow buying PlayStation sixes and not connecting them to the internet. I'm sorry. Like that whole thing, just, just, it doesn't strike me the same way anymore. Who is going to buy a thousand dollar console and not have an internet connection? And if you're in the middle of nowhere, there are options there, by the way, there've been options for like 30 years to get internet in the middle of nowhere. Satellite.

2:38:55I was using satellite internet at my friend's house in like 1998. It sucked. But I just, I feel like, I don't know. I'm just tired of this argument. Like it's time to accept that like the internet is ubiquitous that you have it. And if you don't have it, it's kind of by choice at this point. And I mean that in a gaming context. I don't mean that in an affordability context. I don't mean that in an access in developing or third world countries. I'm not saying any of that. I'm saying like here in the United States, like it's kind of preposterous that you would buy a PlayStation and then be like, why are I don't have the internet what am I crazy like I think there's an argument about very very slow internet that it's like well uh it takes like I don't know a five megabyte 10 megabyte

2:39:42Colin Moriarty:connection I'm there's certainly people in rural areas that still have that that it's like a huge chore to it's like okay we'll let the game download overnight or something like that I just think that this is like it's what we were saying about the military access right and people someone some guy was like i'm on a submarine and i'm like yeah that sucks and like i i want i think in an ideal world like you would have access to whatever you wanted and whatever but like we can't like things that become more and more of an edge case i think like we can't keep all edge cases in mind anymore. And it's just kind of, it's 2026.

2:40:22Yeah. I understand there are people that live in the middle of nowhere. I understand that there are people that don't have like, but it's like, there are options for you now. It's not the same as it was 10 years ago. And it's just weird for me to believe that like someone that's like a technologist that would buy a PlayStation six and put it on his beautiful 4k TV. He's like, but I don't have the internet. I'm like, I think you do. And I think I'm tired. I think I'm tired of hearing this, this conversation.

2:40:49I'm going to hear from him on that one. Finally, just to reiterate, poopy face tomato nose wrote in. It's a question for Lily Mo. Do you plan to print physical copies for your studio's future games after their cutoff date? Thanks. That will not be an option. Again, just to reiterate what I reiterated earlier, like when Sony cuts it off, it's done. There is no, it's not like, it's not like the new Cuphead game is going to be on Master System, like a native Master System game, but that's not like they can just make those now. their cartridges that it's it's different on these newer machines so we're not gonna have a tension run of games i'm sorry god right no like i was gonna ask is there like just like a point

2:41:31Colin Moriarty:is there like an allotted amount of time that passes where like you can just kind of freely make something for an old machine and and the manufacturer just doesn't care like like what's the what's the rules on that well i i think you know because i know people just i know people can just make playstation games like ps1 yeah yeah i i don't i think things by the way that's it's actually an interesting i'm so glad you brought that up because it's in my notes which i have barely read because i uh i think we've covered almost everything but it's like in an ideal world and i don't know how much money this is a complicated thing but it's like really sony should just be like you can kind of publish on whatever you want we'll facilitate it you want to publish your game on ps1 you're like your homebrew ps1 game or you want you want to sell a thousand copies like that would be the fucking true ideal that would be really cool um and i did note right like is that there's that that um video game plus whatever that canadian retailer is selling new copies of ps3 games like there's some weird shit going on so i don't know i like that almost indicated the exact opposite that they were maybe going backwards and i don't know but it reminds me chris of what i was saying like color dream intention and like the the guys that we're trying to manufacture like bootleg games and i think it doesn't even have to do with the physical manufacture them it has to do with like the boot sequence and like whether you are allowed to bypass it or not that goes into the nintendo galoob uh game genie um thing about like whether a game is being changed or not and accessed in an illegitimate way so i think it's so i think i in other words i just don't think sony gives a shit anymore about ps1 and i don't i don't think they and i think sega doesn't care about the master system but they they probably could i think it's probably not worth going after sure yeah you know i just wonder like what the like what the rule like because surely that's surely at a point in time it would have been illegal but i guess it's only illegal so far as the company is willing to defend it i guess yeah presumably and i also think that there's like dustin would know more about this but i think there's there's different rules about hardware and software where in like the the the new n64 and like the new snes like the things that people are making are illegal.

2:43:37Is it legal? But I think that like the games are a problem, could be a problem. Sure. And the homebrew stuff probably isn't a problem because they're not claiming, like I guess if you took like some sort of homebrewed NES game that they release and just didn't put it in a Nintendo, you're not technically breaking the line. I mean, who gives a shit if you did, but. Right. You're playing it on like some bootleg NES and you're playing some bootleg NES game. So really. Right. But I don't know. Hogan, I talked about that at some point about like the circumventing of boot sequences and like how that's kind of like the.

2:44:14And again, the tension NES cartridges, they look different, too. I don't know if you guys remember them. They were they were black.

2:44:19Colin Moriarty:Yeah. There were some good tension games, too. They did. They need to RBI baseball. Yeah. And they did their version of Tetris. Which that was a big that was like the big one. Nintendo was freaking out about. Yeah. All right. That's all we have for this topic. Dustin, are we saying goodbye to you now? yes we are all right you've had enough i've had enough i want to make sure holly's taking care i gotta make her dinner you know what are you making take care of the baby feed the baby from my my breast yeah not my breast but i would like we're doing the bottle feeding and i enjoy it it's really fun it's it's nice feeding the baby what do you think of dragon quest uh he he's into it he's he doesn't like sylvando which is questionable because i'm like i like sylvando you know what are you trying to say he's eccentric yeah is your is i gotta be honest i hate sylvanda and it's not because of any sexual overtones it's because i don't like theater people i've been around them i've worked with them and he reminds me of that time of working with theater people and i'm like i can't do it yeah i understand it's incredibly valid fair enough well it's good to see you we'll see you when you decide to come back in the future and hopefully nothing catastrophic happens that calls you back in the meantime we shall see this was fun i'm glad I could hop in and I will return at some point.

2:45:36All right. We'll hop out. Well, we've disappeared. Dustin back to the phantom zone. Right. He's stuck in a parallelogram. Yes, indeed. Indeed. But the news keep the hits keep on coming. We have to get through these. I am less bothered by this for the most part. I'm bothered by a specific part of this, but this isn't a huge surprise. so Sid Schumann also published this at the same Sid Schumann who is the the content the comms director at PlayStation and he's been there forever I've known him for a long time I just for people that oh you were listening earlier it's the same show I was saying it's just so funny that they made him put his name on both of these so they published the thing that we've already discussed for two hours and now they publish this as well an update on PlayStation Store for PS3 and PS Vita quote after nearly two decades of supporting the PS3 console generation, we wanted to let you know we will be closing the PlayStation Store on PS3 as well as on PS Vita.

2:46:35PlayStation Store on PS3 will close in select markets starting this year, followed by global closures for PS3 and PS Vita next year. That means new content purchases will no longer be possible once the PlayStation Store closes on these devices. To ease the transition, players will still be able to download previously purchased content after the closing date for the foreseeable future. Underline. I'm going to underline that for later. As the PlayStation Store continues to evolve to support modern commerce systems, including updated payment processing standards, PS3 and PS Vita are no longer able to support these updates at the level required.

2:47:06As a result, we will need to close PlayStation Store on these devices in the timeframes as follows. So Mexico, Honduras, and Nicaragua, PlayStation Store on PS3 will close starting August 2026, so imminently. Additional Latin American and Middle Eastern countries, PlayStation Store on PS3 will close starting late 2026. And then in all other countries, PlayStation Store on PS3 and Vita will close in July 2027. We know that this news may be disappointing to PS3 and PS Vita players who hold a special place in their hearts for this generation of gaming. PS3 and PS Vita represent an important era in our PlayStation history, so this was not an easy decision for us to make.

2:47:39As we continue to expand the PlayStation experience on newer devices that most of our users are playing on today, we need to focus on more of our resources on delivering the best gaming experiences on these platforms as we look forward towards the future. Look ahead towards the future, I'm sorry. I brought up and I put a link in our document as well that it's been five years since they tried to do this. And it was in April of 2021, as people might recall, that Sony announced that they were going to shut the PS3 and Vita stores. And for those that are excited about the potential that Sony will reverse course on the disc thing, which I think is possible, but unlikely, just based on the semantics we discussed, this was the last time that people complained about something so loudly that they reverse course.

2:48:23I didn't think we would get a reprieve of what is essentially six years and it's kind of hard for me to be too upset about that yeah at the point that this was done by the way and we know this from the insomniac hack which happened the next year um there were still a couple million people a month playing on ps3 that number has got to be down to hundreds of thousands and so from the perspective of if you're using these devices actively you have not even been able to publish games on them PS3 hasn't gotten new games I think since 2015 and Vita hasn't gotten new games since 2022 so that's you've kind of had your opportunity that's not what sucks what sucks is the sentence that um they will that there's an indefinite nature or what they say the foreseeable future you'll be able to download the games and this is no bueno to me at all Clark Petrie wrote in and said Colin please discuss the whiplash from last week's sacred and summon sign comments about the PS3 and Vita stores remaining open into the news this week.

2:49:23Did you bring this calamity upon us? It is possible. For those that didn't listen to Summon Sign last week, I was on it with Brad and I talked about the PS3 and Vita stores still being up. So I brought the Eye of Sauron upon it and I do apologize about that. What are your thoughts, man? I guess there's multiple tethers. One is the stores going away and then two is they will simply not commit to making these things available forever. Part of me understands the technical ramifications but i'm surprised that chris that they just haven't figured this out yet like yeah abandon the hardware like that's reasonable enough but like not the games

2:50:03Colin Moriarty:you know yeah yeah this is um like i i i agree largely like it's it's fine the storefront closing and not be able to download new stuff it's like i i that's yeah okay um it's hard for me to be mad at like a five-year heads up you know i mean it's it's pretty ample time to collect what you need to collect um but yeah i i don't this whole like for the foreseeable future you have access to the things you bought that you bought and download it's like i don't that's not good and i think it would be less of an issue if just a lot of this software was just brought forward in the first place which like again so much of it is just stranded on that machine uh really important stuff too like to the history of the brand and to the history of the machine and and the the ecosystem you know resistance um you know kill zone uh uncharted was there for a while and then it got it got brought forward thank god but you know it's it's too much it's stuck there in my opinion and and i think you gotta to i don't know like i don't know what the cost is of maintaining that ability but like i it's gotta be cheap given how many people are going to be using it and i just i i think it's probably worth keeping with really like i don't i don't see a benefit to uh getting rid of that the storefront i get it like but like i i get it yeah like like that bothers me a lot less like especially because like you said, it's a five year reprieve plus another year.

2:51:43Once I said it. Yeah. Like so if there's something on there that you want, go get it. You've had all of this time to do so. And I have no like it's like whatever, man. I it's sad for those that discover PS3 late because I've made the point, Chris, many times in the past. Like I could make the case that PS3 is my favorite PlayStation console. Like I love the PlayStation 3. It's an awesome machine. I mean, it's we have stock. Like we said, Stockholm Syndrome up the wazoo with this thing. But it's got a great catalog of games and it was such a unique and interesting console and experience and how it roared back that generation and just ended on such a high note.

2:52:16It was awesome. And so I feel for people that discover them so late. But like, yeah, I think we agree. Interacting with the store in terms of being able to buy things like I understand they don't want to deal with that shit anymore. And like there's a lot of security issues and like your credit card and you're interfacing with a fucking machine from 2006. They don't want to do it anymore. And I'm like, yeah, OK. what I'm so concerned about though is this idea that like I guess they basically admitted in so many words right like we can't figure it out like we we simply aren't going to be able to get these games over and and I I think that creates a level of urgency um Austin Prentice actually wrote in about this but he says hello boys with this week's news that the PlayStation is closing the PS3 and Vita stores and signaling the PS6 will be all digital it makes me shudder all the games that are at risk of being left behind on old platforms, especially Sony's own games.

2:53:08If only they had a studio built specifically to port and a remake old games for new hardware, alas, I guess there's no point in feeling blue over it. Just thought I'd point that out. And he says blue in point. Looking forward to the discussion this weekend. Best wishes to the Furman family. It goes beyond that, man. Like they need to have an external team much smaller than or at least cheaper than Blue Boy. Maybe they would be as big churning a lot of this stuff out like for pressure. This is where I was making fun of preservation earlier. it's like this is a preservation issue although it really isn't because these games have been pirated a million times and they're on like you can just emulate them well yeah well the ps3 though

2:53:40Colin Moriarty:is like in particular particularly uh a preservation issue i think because the cell cell architecture makes it so it's so impossible to emulate relative to other other you know software there is actually i think a really good case to be made that like there's a real there's a real imperative um for ps3 to be brought forward you know what i mean like i think um yeah i don't know yeah no no you well i was gonna say like certainly i think you you could be right i think certainly like they must have invested a bunch a bunch of time and certainly some money into trying to figure it out and i i wonder if they just are like it especially because maybe they're planning on you know maybe sucker punch did tip their hand about doing more infamous like you know remasters and stuff and maybe they just have a plan to get some of the biggest stuff off of there and celebrate it in some sense but like there are things that are going to inevitably be left behind that will not be playable outside of those illegal outlets and at that point that's what i always say about piracy it's like i really don't support it for things that you can easily play or buy but like if they're going to do that to it then it's like well it really will be your only option at that point and that's kind of their problem not yours i i do agree with him though that it is a it is a sad state that even if they act now like there will be games that will just be like force of um uh folk folklore or haze like these games that are not necessarily great but like or uh layer like all these these are never getting ported and so they will literally just die and that is some something to be sad about although those games are physical games and i guess you could just always buy them yeah and i assume they'll say that that's this would be so much more dramatic chris if it was ps4 or beyond because right that's when you're really heavily invested digitally but or uh but i was invested digitally in ps3 i had a shit ton of ps3 games digitally i bought ps3 games all the time yeah i had a bunch of xbox 360 games that I don't have anymore and they shut their shit down recently too right like or they announced that they were going to I could be wrong I feel like it happened a while ago yeah um I don't think that's unreasonable but also I well because I bought and downloaded Lost Planet 2 kind of recently from the Xbox 360 so maybe it's available it's just available as a mirror I don't know Well, that's what they really did.

2:56:08That's like the one feature on Xbox that I'm jealous of. It's just like the interoperability between the consoles that doesn't exist on PlayStation side because they just didn't have the foresight to do that. And they realized with PS4 that they had to get out of that. So they made the decision they had to make. It just so happened. Like nothing, no decision they were going to make was going to make the PS3 easy to deal with. So they did what they had to do. But it's just all these years later. And it's like, really? like You don't want to question the engineering talent. It's just like, wow, this really is.

2:56:42I guess insurmountable. Actually, didn't we talk about how Digital Foundry did a thing with a PS3 emulator recently where it's like surprisingly bad?

2:56:49Colin Moriarty:Yeah, yeah, it's that generation in general is not the best. Because I've I've tried only recently did I really get into trying to do emulation again because it's just like, all right, you know what? It's getting ridiculous. Like a lot of these games aren't coming forward. I own the physical copies of these games so like honestly fuck it and I tried to emulate Marvel Ultimate Alliance and Mercenaries 2 I think on Zinnia which is like some some Xbox 361 and even those are kind of borked and fucked up like the lighting on Mercenaries is broken and I don't know how to fix it and Marvel crashes like 5 seconds into the game so I'm like it's tricky but I don't know preservation is important I think there's a lot of games on that old machine that are that are worth being remembered I think but I don't know I just don't know what you do yeah there's I obviously they have no solution yeah and it's crazy but and to be fair to them not that I'm like deep into the homebrewing world or anything I'm not but no there's been no like major push from outside being like we figured it out like we did it here's how you do it like nothing no like white hat kind of like yeah you have to assume like if you did figure it out you'd go immediately to sony right yeah i would think like how much can i how much can i get for this solution right and i just think it's not figureoutable as it were in that easy of a way it's too complicated and yeah i think that's what digital foundry was saying was that like you need such so much horsepower to circumvent all this shit that like it basically like you you almost need like a ps6 level console to deal with it which is funny when you think about it um skull king wrote in and said hey sacred men what i am most upset about is that sony suggests that someday you won't be able to download ps3 games you own anymore they said foreseeable future they can't actually expect me to never need to download ps3 games again and that would mean they expect me to have everything downloaded and to never need to download stuff ever again how would that not be illegal i'm already looking for a lawyer for this and if they announced no more ps3 game downloading i will be taking legal action if i need to but what's your opinion on this my opinion is that i think what hoge would tell you i don't want to speak for him too much but i guess i will hear is there is no doubt that in the language that you of of ps3's eula that they can do whatever they want now it doesn't make it right and this is why i was saying earlier chris is there's got to almost be legislation around the shit like where you just can't do this um and i don't know if you can almost grandfather old things in as much as you can make a preparation for the future at this point right but that's the fucked up reality is that and i don't think sony wants to be punitive towards their their because i really don't think any company wants to be punitive towards their audience and towards their consumer base like that doesn't make any sense um it's what we were saying earlier about like the the specious kind of reporting around bungie and like sony taking revenge on bungie it's like i don't think so yeah um that would be the most insane they've done enough damage i don't think they need to now take revenge on the damage they've already wrought.

2:59:55It's the same thing here where it's like Sony doesn't want to do this. It's like, I think that they can make the argument that these are more vectors in the PlayStation network. I don't know what their thing is, but like, you almost want the long arm of the law to say like, you can't do this to people. At least not going forward. Yeah, when I bought Super Rub-A-Dub or whatever in 2006, should I have expected that in 2026 I'd be able to play it well we weren't really thinking about that I don't think yeah but now that we have hindsight and now that we've seen the evolution of everything and as I noted earlier it really starts with Apple and iTunes this entire idea of owning this digital good right yeah right and like this idea that like well do you own it and how much control do you have and what can you do with it it all begins with them and I think I think it's it's a and and it's funny playstation network is only a few years it's like five years after that it's not that long after the ipod ipod is introduced and actually i think yeah no yeah 2001 so and 2006 for the psn so as we understand it now so it's all nascent it's in the ether like it's all no one really knows what they're doing someone's got to do something about this and i don't know if something can be done for ps3 because you're saying you can sue them as the saying goes you can sue anyone for anything yeah i just don't know if they're just gonna you might not even get to court they might just be like this is what you signed we have yeah you know unfortunately you didn't read it or didn't understand it no one does i don't read it yeah

3:01:28Colin Moriarty:which is insane also like i feel i feel like the eulah's the eulah in general is so great like i don't know man what's that joke about like how a eulah stands where every user loses access right exactly and um i understand too chris like this is what people argue it's like the whole this is they want you on cloud they want you using like external infrastructure to access everything and and like you know offload local computing that's where this seems like it's all going probably and one thing i'm sure they'll do is obviously they'll have all these games in the back end and they'll have your records and all the rest and maybe they just reintroduce it sometime in the future and maybe they charge you to access those things in the future you know um yeah i wouldn't put it past them at this point let's see um anything else to say i want to i'm going to skip this next one but the i do want to end with this inquiry it would have been interesting to hear dustin's talk about this as well because we could have ended the last one with this too but i thought we would get all of this in first sure sl wrote in and said hello ss crew not since the announcement of the Xbox One, have I seen a console manufacturer piss away their brand equity with such violence and velocity?

3:02:44Under different circumstances, the announcement that Sony is ceasing production of game discs might not have been received so poorly. If this were a normal generation where consoles were steadily reducing in price, Sony was releasing exclusive first-party titles at the same cadence as the late PS3 and PS4, and video game prices weren't steadily escalating, and Sony hadn't just voided the digital purchases of hundreds of films, PlayStation gamers likely would have reacted with, I don't like it, but I'm getting enough value that I will accept it. Those are not our circumstances. And I'm not confident Sony understands just how quickly a brand can go from trusted to hated.

3:03:14Sony is at this time demanding higher prices on hardware while offering fewer first party games per year while demonstrating openly just how flimsy digital ownership is within their ecosystem. And that's without considering how much of a shitshow PSN security has proven to be. I'm not sure Sony understands just how bad the perfect storm of PR nightmares they're creating is. Do you think they understand? or do you think they feel they're so untouchable they can get away with anything? This is a very 20-year-old coded question of the same exact things that people were asking reasonably so about PlayStation nearly two decades ago for different reasons.

3:03:52And I will say, SL, that I don't blame Sony for all the things you're blaming them for, specifically the hardware stuff. There's no fucking universe that they want to be charging you$900 for a PS5 Pro. And there's no universe where they had any prognostication from their analysts and their strategists that it was going to cost that much. This is the reality of tech right now. And I forgive them for that. And we'll talk a little bit more about that later on because they talk about, you know, the idea of subsidizing hardware. But so I want to throw that away. I don't think that the hardware thing sucks, but everyone's victimized by it.

3:04:30No one is immune to it.

3:04:31Colin Moriarty:it's unfortunate timing, right? Uh, it's bad decisions. It is. These are not good decisions, but it's all, it is not helped by the fact that the over, the overall timing of all of this and the realities of the, uh, the, the economy tech, uh, big tech and where it's going. It, it just, it, it is a perfect storm, you know, to me, I, I wonder, Chris, like. I don't even wonder, like I've said this, I articulated this already, like in recent episodes where I'm like, I think Sony's kind of got a problem. Mm hmm. Easily. You don't want to overestimate it. You don't want to even overestimate the effect of this on their business, like what's going on right now.

3:05:26Certainly the PS3 and Vita thing has almost no like no one cares about that. Like we care. but like no one gives a flying fuck about that they're definitely they definitely care a lot more about the disc thing but you can even say like well they've they've they're going to withstand that it's negligible ultimately and they understand that that's what's going to happen but i think like death by a thousand cuts is a pretty real thing and i think the one thing that i will say about sony and just their approach to marketing and speaking is they do come off like they feel like they're above it. And I think if you, if they don't start, if they don't start lubricating the lines of communication and they don't start acting like an entity that gives a shit about their customers in a meaningful way, they might come up for a rude awakening next generation.

3:06:19Because as you were saying, everything is conspiring towards these these insane hardware prices that are turning people off again through no fault of their own. They want to make this thing as cheap as they can. I, we all know that and understand that it's the, it's the product by which everyone plays the game. They, they would give it away for free if they could, you know, but they're, they're constrained within the financial reality. In other words, they're not trying to make money on their hardware and they know they're not going to. But like, they just seem like they don't give a fuck.

3:06:55Colin Moriarty:Yeah. And I think that they're encouraged by that, by what I've noted for quarter after quarter after quarter, which is like, they're just making a lot of money and they've calculated so far that it doesn't matter. And I think at some point it will, because if you abandon your hardcore and there's no one there to, to buttress your, your ecosystem and make no mistake, your, your, your heart, your ecosystem them is buttressed by people that buy a few games a year and all that but there are heavy users that are the tastemakers that open up the channels towards finding a lot of games and they cover the games and they're the influencers around the games and all the rest like i don't know man i i i just think they are they are so insulated at this point that it almost becomes like you don't even know like all right so imagine if they were like we're gonna talk who who's gonna do it yeah well like there's there's not even really a logical person anymore that like speaks yes sir you have cerny who will hear from no doubt in the next six months probably or eight months you have nishino who would be interesting to hear from and he did give we'll talk about him in a little bit he gave an interview to famitsu recently you have herman holst who has no credibility in my opinion yeah and shouldn't be talking about anything and there's there's they're really like the the Geo Corsi's and the Adam Boyes's and the Shuhei Yoshida's and the Jack Trenton's and the Sean Layden's and even the Andrew House's and like I'm not even entirely sure I know what Nishino sounds like when he talks right like I can hear in my mind's ear all of those people speaking I'm not even really sure I know what Nishino sounds like I even know what Herman Holt sounds like you know but they do I hope they understand for their sake what yeah let's not overestimate the splash damage from these different decisions playstation will continue they're going to be profitable they'll make money but what does the mid to long term say and what do you lose by leaning more into an explanation if the right i said that earlier about the game the physical game stuff right chris if if this is the reality than just explain it to us like we're adults right and say like this is becoming unsustainable here are the numbers and wouldn't it be god forbid here are a few examples of recent games from third and first party and you got to make the case right right um when you when you make decisions like this and and again it's it's the strategy of not talking facts i don't know facts are the way they are often because of the tapestry of reality that surrounds them it was a good idea to not talk at a certain point but variables change things change realities change um economies change standing changes desire changes hunger changes appetite changes demand changes all of the all these things changes all these things change and the same strategy simply cannot work for all of them there is no one size fits all strategy for anything that exists so if your strategy still to to this day is we're not talking when the reality of everything that surrounds that strategy is completely different to what it was you're bringing you're bringing cleats to the nba brother like this is not you're in the wrong outfit dude you got to start talking because now like you're the last guy really like in this space anyway in this space there's nintendo and they're doing their own thing i get it but like xbox is off doing fucking they're off having a manic breakdown uh you know um pc is kind of you know they're there and they're doing their thing but even they're kind of you know they're um they've got the the bad press too for um you know the steam machine through no fault of their own i would imagine um but you're the last guy in this space and you can't be like a creepy silent guy like just like not explaining himself as he makes all these like moves that are obviously not good facing the consumer um i don't think most people really earnestly gave a shit that the xbox one was always online in their heart of hearts i bet if they didn't know that they would have bought the machine and they they just simply wouldn't have been aware of it and they would have gone on as if nothing was was going on right or nothing was wrong but everybody knew that it was always online and everybody knew that a lot of people knew that it was a problem and that spreads that's a wildfire and even people who don't care you know i don't i don't use physical games really i think it's bad that they're doing this and there's undoubtedly going to be and i think there's going to be a lot of and and i understand we've moved forward from that and into a different space but like dude like i think um i think you're gonna have a lot of people who also don't necessarily care but are making decisions on what they hear and that's not what you want in a in a time when your next machine is not really that enticing to people like people there's no appetite there's no hunger there's no there's no yearning for this next machine this is a this is a bad confluence of ingredients in my opinion and again you're right we shouldn't overestimate the the splash damage of it it's not nuclear or anything but it's not it's far from fucking ideal dude and uh that's yeah it resets the whole war of like the commercial war going around around playstation it just resets it under different bounds we don't know where it's going to go now it's not the bottom won't fall out now it's just to say like did someone just like launch a missile into like the foundation of this thing that might come back to haunt you later and i just the the one thing I'm I feel certain about with Sony is that they they like we've we've said about Microsoft is like they just won't shut the fuck up and I think there is a notion in in PR and in media where it's like if you are explaining you are losing and I think that there is something about that but Sony has to understand that they have a lot to explain now and that might be because they're losing and they're they're not losing to the old competition obviously they're losing in different ways right and it requires some level of explanation and i just i wish they understood that you can talk to us like adults that like you can explain things to people there are people there are things i read their financials like i i go through they they do say a lot of things but like they can just try to be more overt about what they're saying and stop stop nipping around the issues like go and explain why hardware is more expensive do a really deep dive interview put send send your hardware guy in the fucking digital foundry and explain it and so like guys and yeah and i deal with like you can even be honest and say like we thought we like hey hey guys i'll be honest with you like when we were kind of gaming this out before ps5 even launched we thought the console was going to be 300 by this point and by the way the 300 of dollars would have been no profit for us.

3:14:33We were just willing to sell it at that cost that we're selling it at this cost goes to show you how out of control things have become out of our hands and that we're doing the very best we can do to deliver the goods. You can do things like that. You can do things like that. They're afraid. I think that they're they that maybe the people that they don't have maybe they do and we don't see them anymore, but they've kind of dispatched their talented speakers. The people that can go, you know, glad hand and massage things and yeah and i will also say that i i feel

3:15:07sony just needs to they need to be it comes off as holier than now in a way sometimes and there's something very prestigious about that when brands do that people like that apple does it a little bit but apple talks a lot too they have these big events and reveals and then they manage those expectations and i just think that what worked for a while is good but it has to change and maybe they know that and maybe it'll all change around ps6 and maybe they just don't want to talk yet and maybe we'll see much more around this next year but it just feels like yeah they don't seem to understand the gravity of the situation in the mid to long term and the major thing of course is that and we bring this up all the time right Like, Chris, Sony's incredibly dependent on PlayStation.

3:15:58It's like what's going on with Xbox and Microsoft is not that serious comparable to Microsoft. They can spin it out. I mean, Microsoft makes probably one in ten dollars or whatever from Xbox. Sony makes like one in two dollars from PlayStation. So. They got a this is the golden goose, dude. There is nothing left. Your movies, movies are good. Music's good. But like, there's really nothing left. you've got to be careful i will say this though and this is not something that's come up very often but like uh the stock market liked the announcement which is yeah um of course but it is worth noting it is worth noting like this year sony's down almost 20 points i'm sorry not 20 points 20 percent down to 20 points so they're not where they used to be i I mean, Sony, you know, at one time, let me see if I can find it here, Max.

3:16:56Yeah. Sony's trading at$20 now. It was trading at$28 just last summer. And even in the summer of 22, it was trading at this point. So they're down in the short term, but up in the longer term. But it's, I don't know, it's a precarious thing. and I don't necessarily worry about them because I do think they have a level of inertia um yeah but I think that they and they they they've just benefited from becoming the default

3:17:32Colin Moriarty:yeah the thing that saves them is the fact that they're they are the default and a lot of people have already invested a lot in them you know like uh xbox had a lot of inertia going into xbox one but like they just kind of it was the start of a new generation so this is different right like this is like the mid the mid to late point of a generation that already exists and by the time the next generation exists there's not going to be real competition in the way that um in the way that there would have been um just because people have established their digital libraries um it's funny you can almost imagine like i wonder like if mike if xbox hadn't already um done away with physical games for for the most part uh it's funny it's funny to imagine like the layup this would have been for them you know they could have reversed they could have put out that video kind of if they were in like if they were in like a completely you know if their if their situation wasn't so fucked and um you know they they were still doing uh physical games it's just like damn dude that would have been that would have been an interesting reversal full circle moment it's like well here's we're still doing discs here yeah and And I mean, they they tech.

3:18:46I mean, Helix is not going to have a disk drive, I imagine. But the they are technically still doing this. Like they haven't announced the end of their disk manufacturer for Xbox series or even Xbox one, I think, still gets disk games. It's just that they're more seldom and that there's really because of game passes. We know that there's really no appetite for that stuff over there.

3:19:03Colin Moriarty:I mean, I could be right. I feel like some some first parties skips disks or something like that. Like I can't I'm not I'm not super sure. I feel like I remember hearing something about like how they don't really do it. yeah well there's I think there the thing is is that it could be an interesting opening for them but it's what I was saying earlier about big companies versus small companies like they don't want to make these fucking things no yeah for sure yeah and and that's why I even think Nintendo having some sort of advantage here it's like they're like yeah we have an advantage and we're going to continue with with physical games because that's what our our modern hardware allows but like we don't want to be doing this also so if you have you got them in an honest moment I don't know man we'll see what happens yeah it is it is a lot and uh we'll see how this all goes moving forward but um let's get through the rest of this news here the hits do keep on coming i promised earlier that we would talk about hardware subsidies and this comes from video games uh video game chronicle that writes sony says it doesn't plan to sell hardware at significant losses but is monitoring the market with ps6 in mind and they write quote during a q a session held at a recent meeting based around the company's game and network services division, one attendee asked Sony executives to provide an update on their current thinking regarding hardware pricing and profitability, specifically referring to the next-generation platform.

3:20:14The attendee asked the execs whether it was, quote, reasonable to assume that your pricing will continue to prioritize profitability of the hardware as it does today, end quote. The official answer given by Sony's transcript from the Q &A noted that it considers its hardware to be one of the most important parts of the gaming experience and that it wants to make sure users recognize the value offered by its hardware, but it also stated that the company doesn't plan to sell hardware at a loss as a matter of principle, but that it's currently monitoring the market situation. Quote, and this is from, I think this is with Nishino specifically saying this, quote, First, we regard hardware as the base for providing the gaming experiences, and by offering products such as PlayStation Portal Remote Player, we aim to provide experiences tailored to users' play styles beyond the living room, which has traditionally been considered the primary usage environment.

3:20:54As for pricing, it is not realistic for us to absorb all component cost increases, and we have already implemented some price increases outside Japan. At present, however, sales are proceeding as planned, and we do not believe this has led to a decline in customer demand. Asterisk there, because I disagree. As a principle, we do not intend to sell hardware at significant losses. At the same time, we are carefully monitoring the market and continuing to evaluate our approach. We believe it is important for us to make every effort to ensure that customers fully understand the value we provide in relationship to pricing.

3:21:22end quote. This is important, Chris, because there's recent rumors, I think, from that guy Kepler saying that the bomb, as they say in that space for the PlayStation 6 right now is about 900. If they don't want to subsidize the cost of everything, then you can imagine that you'll have a$899 PS6. I still feel like there's a psychological barrier to$1 ,000. And I think at that point, they probably would start subsidizing. And I also wonder if they already signed the contracts, like with Micron, they recently announced that they signed a deal with 16 companies but didn't list who the companies were to lock in prices for five years and I wonder if Sony's one of those companies.

3:21:59What do you think of this? I mean, this isn't a huge surprise. This is part of the honesty that I'm talking about. You just don't bury this in a Q &A published on Sony.com's investor relations website and you don't say it in such a mechanical way.

3:22:12Colin Moriarty:Yeah, they're very robotic and it doesn't really do them any favors. i mean again like i i largely agree i don't know if i have much to say about it really like i'm not surprised by it um this is ultimately going to be like we'll see what comes of this when the time comes really like i don't know if there's really much value in even speculating and also the same thing too where it's just like that's what they're saying now you know uh the reality is that like Everything is changing so quickly and so sporadically. Nothing feels predictable now. It doesn't feel like there's a... They're monitoring market situations, but how much monitoring can you really do to this completely schizophrenic world state?

3:23:02Colin Moriarty:So we'll see. We'll see what happens. But I'm not surprised to hear this. the reason i said by the way that so he says and nishino had said that there seems to be no effect on demand for the increased pricing like that just seems to be not played out at all and uh in the data um because gamesindustry.biz reports playstation hardware and this happened right after we published last week so this is a little bit of old news but we should add it to the record playstation hardware sales fall to their lowest may total since 2000 so based on unit sales not cumulative money, which would be a really bad sign since the consoles are so expensive.

3:23:38But based on unit sales, there's been a 58 % year on year drop in the United States for PlayStation 5. And that its total in May for May 2026 was the lowest number of PlayStation units sold in a May in the United States since 2000, which was the last year of PS1 when everyone was waiting for PS2. So not a huge surprise there. PS2 would only be a few months away from that point, you know, that fall. This is catastrophic because it doesn't show that there's a low demand for the console itself. It goes to show that there's just the price tolerance that we've been talking about is starting to be breached in some way.

3:24:16And I was thinking about this. I'm like, dude, this includes May 2007, May 2008. These are pretty bad months for PlayStation. and that they're selling. So that suggests they're selling. 100 ,000 units a month or something in the United States, like some some really bad.

3:24:40Colin Moriarty:Yeah. Number. So I don't know what he's talking about when he says that, although they I guess they didn't have that data at the time because this was this Q &A apparently was in early June and was just published. But oh, yeah, fair. But I still think that's kind of like, what do you mean? I feel like you should know that intrinsic. it like i don't like that doesn't even seem like you really need uh you could kind of stick your finger up to the wind and feel that yes you know what i mean i don't even i don't even know if you really need the numbers to know that like yeah obviously yeah duh the price of the machine is insanely high most people already have it who are interested in it so yeah it's not doing well and 900 is kind of nuts yeah that's for the pro to be fair 650 for the regular ps5 but still crazy price best investment best investment ever dude hilarious at launch yeah yeah i think about i think about it now where it's just like um man what a good what a good idea this whole this whole time it's funny man like they i don't know i i i just feel like that the situation is is is rough for everybody but like there is a a ridiculousness about charging so much for these machines again i know it's not their fault but it's just like you can't blame anyone for not wanting to spend this much money on a piece of hardware at this point and I guess Grand Theft Auto or Wolverine and these other games are going to be guns to people's heads but yeah it's just and this is why I was saying earlier it's like it would be cool if they were just honest and said like this has gotten so out of control like we didn't anticipate this and we're sorry but it's out of our hands as far as software sales since we should just get into that here since we're talking about Serkana May's best selling game in the United States was 007 First Light not a huge surprise there Forza Horizon 6 was number two, and that will kind of stay up there.

3:26:40PlayStation release comes later this year, of course. Legacy of the Dark Knight was number three, the new Lego Batman game, and Subnautica 2 at four. And as I understand, Unknown Worlds has gotten their bonuses, which is cool after being, you know, after suing and getting fired and all that kind of shit that went on. You can listen to Sacred Symbols Plus if you want more about that. We covered that quite a bit there. Tomodachi Life, Living the Dream, stays at number five. MLB Show 26 at six. Crimson Desert, number seven. Yoshi and the Mysterious Book at number eight Call of Duty Black Ops 7 number nine and Mario Kart World at ten now I will be clear what I said a month or two ago when Serkana started doing this I think Serkana data in some way is well it might be more reliable but it is less exact than ever because now they're including projections for those that refuse to sell their digital sales they just kind of make it up based I'm sure on some sort of algorithm that makes sense but it's worth noting that Nintendo games are showing up in a much bigger way now because of that.

3:27:36And that's good because I'd rather have some level of accuracy, but it's not exact. Year to date, Resident Evil Requiem remains the best-selling game in the United States for the year. Crimson Desert, number two. MLB The Show, 26, Sony's own, number three. 007 First Light is already the fourth best-selling game of 2026. Forza Horizon 6 is already the fifth best-selling game of the year. And Lego Batman Legacy of the Dark Knight is already number seven. Tomodachi Life is number eight, believe it or not. pretty incredible stuff so those are the sales numbers we'll have june sales soon enough i assume they haven't been selling um matt piscatella hasn't been from cercana hasn't been breaking down the console sales recently which is a little annoying they used to really yeah i noticed that

3:28:19Colin Moriarty:the i noticed that the thread was like kind of bare yeah it has a lot of like interesting data but not not anything i really want to go into here all right next up is let's see oh yeah

3:28:36so this oh yeah this so this comes from a uh i was i was promising earlier sorry i'm trying to keep footnotes here for blockmore ww wccf tech interview uh translated an interview that hideaki nishino the ceo of playstation um gave gave an interview with famitsu it's in japanese obviously so they translated it and i think one of the major things there was a few things in there that he talked about because he talked about pc ports as well we'll talk about that shortly but the major thing he talked about here that i thought was interesting is um this idea of live service games now sony's approach to live service outside of hell divers and of course mlb's annualized kind of success they really haven't found any meaningful success in this space and we've been we found some of their approaches a little peculiar obviously we were talking about midnight murder club last week and how they kind of just abandoned that game which was kind of a cool idea meanwhile they just seem to not be able to quit fair game slash break in so here w w c c f tech writes that nishino was asked if playstation will continue to pursue live service games and he says this quote with live service games it's important to continuously provide something the genre itself is relatively new and i think many people are trying various things so we also want to continue to take it take on challenges with that context um i don't think that this is a bad thing i don't know i know a lot of people disagree but i just don't know that they can stop investing in these things and i know this this before everything went off with all this other news that we've talked about this was really making the rounds in a pretty um fiery way around the internet because people were were pretty upset about it and like i said he also spoke about pc games and um where they're going to put their their various games and he he reaffirms that you know their their live service games will come to pc i think i think we already know that but that they really want to kind of maximize the single player stuff for ps5 so i think that was probably the reason he they sent him out to famitsu but as usual sony kind of says things in a mealy mouthed and weird way instead of just being more straightforward but i don't mind that strategy What do you think, Chris?

3:30:49Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I mean, it's not that I mind the strategy. It's just like the again, this is so much of Sony lately and their messaging has been so poorly timed. Because for them to be like, all right, like we're going to yeah, we're going to double down on live service. And I think we all knew this. If we just if we know the industry, we know that they're not going to stop to hear something like that. literally 24 hours after you shut destiny down you know it's like that's not the best look for people you know because they're gonna look at you and you're like what like i do think so i i the reality is unfortunately and to be fair they've done this to themselves sony's name attached to a live service game now is sort of it's a bit of a toxic association now it's almost like uh i don't know it'd be like hey you win a free dinner with benjamin netanyahu it's like i don't know if that's even if you feel either way about it it's like this is not the most this is not how i want to spend my night you know like this is uncomfortable yeah so like i think i think they just kind of unfortunately with concord and not even just concord but just like um and not even just concord as like as the game and the disappointment it is but just like the budget behind it and like the passion behind it and you know herman hall's like championing of it and then like how it ended up and like how quickly it died and all these things um that's a stain you know and it might seem unfair or whatever and it probably literally is because like not every team working on a live service game is the concord team and you know um but if you're familiar with just how people act and how people receive information and how people behave like it's just like this is gonna this it's gonna be a stain on their reputation forever and if and now i think the destiny thing is is kind of on top of them too where it's like okay you've put out concord and you've shut down destiny arguably the only live service game that you have that had any capability of really blowing back up or like not to say that destiny wasn't financially struggling but like there was a way i think to keep doing destiny in a way that was cost effective i don't know how that would have looked or like what it would have been like but people were happy with that last update and that was not even really a full expansion at all you know like it was just like quality of life changes and like some you know things here and there and and i think that game had like 100k on steam i think destiny 2 was like 100k on steam concurrently and steam by the way is destiny's least played base like steam for marathon and destiny are like inverted in that way where destiny most players are on console so like that's a pretty healthy space or like a healthy number of players like and and i gotta be real with you man like if you're hoping to get dying destiny numbers out of breakout or break in whatever i don't know what to tell you really because i don't think that's in the cards i would be astounded if i if i'm wrong like holy shit like you know god bless you know like amazing amazing for them because that would be like a massive uh subversion of expectations oh definitely i don't see fair games or whatever the fuck it's called um doing what they needed to do and so with that on the horizon it's just like to hear this it's like yeah we're committing to live service we've got a destiny uh we we've fucked up with concord and now we're uh we're committing to uh fucking up in the immediate future like and maybe a lot of that is unfair maybe a lot of that is assumptions and a lot of that is like you know it's how it comes across and not necessarily how it is but how how things come across is often often more important like Perception is kind of reality in these spaces and bad perception can influence reality in a way that's not to be trifled with or underestimated.

3:34:56So I don't know. We'll see what happens, man. I'm rooting for them in that space. I know it bothers a lot of people, but I just feel like I understand what a lot of people just seem to refuse to understand, which is that that's what it is. by the way if you read the interview he they consider token one of these games so i think their their their um definition is both loose and and quite vivid in that it's just games of that have some some level of interactivity storefront expansion stuff like that so it doesn't have to be the games we necessarily envision but i just uh true true they they i don't know i don't know how many times i can say the same thing over and over again they see the numbers they know they

3:35:39Colin Moriarty:In fairness, though, like Tokan is a Marvel life. You know what I mean? Like that's it's almost separate. Sure. Because it's just because it's Marvel. Yeah, we'll see. We will indeed. We brought this up earlier and it's just something to add to the record that the French film outlet or film publisher, Studio Canal. Is stripping its game off of the PlayStation Network. Sony writes on PlayStation.com that, quote, from September 1st, 2026, due to our content licensing agreements, you will no longer be able to access your previously purchased content from Studio Canal, and it will be removed from your video library, end quote.

3:36:15So as you recall, for many years, you were able to buy TV shows and movies from PlayStation Store. That's not been functionality in some years now, but that stuff's still available in your back catalog, except for the stuff that they've started taking down, and it includes these 500 and something films. There's nothing too big here. I mean, there are some big things, like I saw Terminator on the list and some other stuff, But a lot of this is foreign language. I was reading a little bit about Studio Canal. I don't know anything about these guys. They're French and they don't even have, outside of Europe and outside of the French-speaking world, they have no native distribution.

3:36:45They use others to distribute. And I wonder if that has something to do with this. But this, again, just goes into not knowing the rules when you really should have known the rules. I think that this is worth being upset about in a way, but I will say that I imagine this doesn't affect very many people. at the same time no one was very few people were buying any of this stuff on that's why they stopped selling this stuff after a while it's like this is not even worth having this um but for those that wanted to go back and watch the stuff in the future it obviously sucks and you obviously bought

3:37:15Colin Moriarty:it under different pretenses yeah it's funny it's like i don't know man because i'm looking i i just remember that like the so the movies and tv app on uh windows connect is the same movies and tv app that connects to your xbox live account even from back in cool even from back in uh like 2005 or whatever so i have like like a season of the andy milanakis show and shit and just shit and like uh just really random one season of x play the video game awards 2008 that's awesome but i bought for like back then that i still have access to the seven 2007 video game award like it's i don't know it's it's weird like it's too bad i don't know how i don't know how i don't know how difficult it is for for sony to do that but like i guess it's weird and i guess they're different machines and they're they're they're different companies and they're different everything everything i guess from inside and out is different but like it's weird to see i guess in both ways where it's weird to see xbox do things so easily that sony can't figure out and i guess vice versa right like with just like like delivering first-party titles that are good like as far as like playstation is concerned uh and xbox is like kind of like floundering and like constantly mismanaging and then meanwhile on the side of back compatibility and like honoring your digital purchases it seems like they're really good about it um it's odd yeah i i think i i think this sucks like i don't want to give sony too much credit like i imagine they just don't want to pay right you know yeah so it's like and they might be right where they're like whatever man it's obviously we're not doing anything technically illegal it's in the yula when you bought this stuff and um this affects almost nobody but yeah nonetheless it's just it's a it's not not a taken into account with everything else that's going on it's just a sign of things to come i think or a sign of the times let's say yeah agree all right next up is uh sean laden giving an interview recently on a podcast video games chronicle went in um and uh transcribed it which i appreciate kb wrote in and said hey gents sean laden's recent comments about being surprised that sony reverse course on publishing games on pc made the rounds this week his point was that pc releases were a way to expose playstation ip to an audience that wouldn't have considered buying the hardware i know you've gotten into detail about why you think Sony should have been more aggressive in that space, but I think his analysis is coming at this from the wrong angle.

3:39:44While the chances of PC players moving over to PlayStation are extremely low, there may actually be a higher chance of PlayStation players moving over to Steam once they realize they can get those games there too. My question is this, do you think the PC strategy may have been underestimated the risk of PlayStation players migrating to Steam rather than overestimated the chance of PC players buying a PlayStation? Well, this gets into what Sean was saying, obviously, KB, and I'll read that out for people that are not familiar, but he gave an interview with a podcast called PSI. And he says, they basically talked a little bit about, I guess I never really thought about this.

3:40:16Like Sean Layden was the one who decided to do this with PC. So obviously this is like one of his pet projects. And he says, quote, first of all, the games don't go on PC for like a year or whatever it is. It's not day and date. And if they think that a game coming out 18 months after its launch on another platform somehow stopped a sale from happening 18 months ago in a hardware business, I would like to see how they can prove that thesis. You can feel that is true, but I don't happen to feel that's true. If someone's waiting 18 months for something to come on PC, we didn't lose a sale to them.

3:40:42They weren't going to buy the hardware anyway. And he goes on to later say, quote, there's been a lot of misunderstanding about my decision to put games on PC. I think exclusivity is very important to a platform business. That's how you differentiate. If you want Zelda, you go to Nintendo. If you need Mario, that's where you go. That's where you find it. And at the PlayStation business, we did exclusivity through PS1, PS2, PS3, and that was just the standard of the day. We had Japanese companies who would be exclusive to the PlayStation platform through our relationships with them. And so that became the standard way you sold the platform.

3:41:09Moving into PC or multi-platform releases is really about two things. The PC thing in my mind anyway at the time was not to make money, frankly. It was how to get my intellectual property in front of people who wouldn't normally see it. How do I get the world of Horizon to be seen by people who aren't in the PlayStation world? Not necessarily because they're going to buy a PlayStation. I wasn't that crazy. I didn't think that was going to happen. But as we take our intellectual property across other media, whether it's in the films or it's television or in comic books or in merchandise. You need to have as many eyeballs that are aware of this character, of this story, end quote.

3:41:37I thought this was interesting, Chris, because he says something here, I think kind of low key, that punctures a hole in a lot of people's thoughts as to why they were doing this, which was, well, maybe if they buy Horizon, they'll buy a sequel, they'll buy the PlayStation. And he's basically saying like that was never what he thought was going to happen. And that it hasn't happened. I think he kind of ignores something no important, which is that they're and it's what we had noted when this when they started pulling back which was this works if you he says they're not really in it to make money but to spread the ip and i'm like i don't know about that i think if you were making 2x 3x 4x what you were making on pc you probably would have kept them there so i think i think money did dictate it and i think you just weren't it's the it's the saying he said juice of this juice not worth the squeeze it wasn't worth the squeeze 300 million dollars cumulative money most of it held divers means that it's simply not worth it but i think if you're making 1.5 billion dollars off of those sales might have been worth it

3:42:37Colin Moriarty:yeah i guess i can understand it but like i think um especially in the train if you're looking at it from a transmedia perspective like i i can understand it uh but i also think the reality again the reality has just kind of shifted where it's just like where you're operating under the assumption that this is a machine that people are hungry to you know what I mean like you're operating under the assumption that there's an appetite for the machine and right now there's kind of no appetite for the machine and a lot of people are looking more skeptically at it and it's not to say that everybody's going to become a PC gamer that's obviously not true but like you know I think there's more curiosity now than there usually is because of price and once you breach a certain price once you breach like 999 and you're into the thousands you're kind of in the territory of like well i'm already kind of spending a lot of money you know like i i mean why not get a pc at this point you know like that was a different it's a different um it's a different thing and i think they need to make the ps6 as appealing as possible and the way to do that is exclusives and i think i think that's the re i really do believe that that's at the heart of the reason why why they've pulled back I do think the money is a part of it, but I do think just like they need to make a case for this next machine in a way that they probably haven't had to in a while and in a way that they didn't anticipate having to.

3:44:00Colin Moriarty:And yeah, I really I mean, it's an interesting thought experiment or like an interesting. You know, initial desire, which is like, all right, we want to spread our IP around so we can do transmedia stuff. but like how much transmedia stuff is PlayStation really like we had twisted metal but there wasn't even it wasn't even a twisted metal game right well they were supposed to be it got canceled but we never even we weren't even supposed to know that which is so funny that's the thing I do so everyone's always like Sony canceled all these games I'm like they did but they didn't really announce any of them they announced the last of us you know but to be fair they didn't get that that far along you're right like yeah there's uncharted obviously the last of us has benefited a lot in game form from hbo until dawn wasn't supposed to be very good they and what's funny about horizon going first and he chose horizon to go first was they have nothing ready for horizon still in in trans in transmedia so a little strange from that perspective and i i feel like that's gonna be a really difficult thing to do cheaply but um we'll see man i i uh the audience knows how i feel about this i think sony should should have remained more aggressive but we'll see how this how this works out for them i know i know that the main the mainline core playstation fan is thrilled they're not releasing their games on pc anymore i was never that precious about it yeah i also think the switch experiment didn't necessarily work very well because i just don't think they did very much with it they they offloaded all that shit the bandai namco and then they went to like b and c tier stuff so you'll never really know how it all would have worked out that's the thing that's the thing that bothers the fuck out of me is like i would have just been curious how it would have worked even releasing a game on pc like single player day and date just to see just to see let's not get carried away and promise too many of them but like just like what what would one have done and what they might have realized is the data would have been very front-loaded like it was with the pc releases to begin with where i think they got lulled into a false sense of security which is why i don't believe him when he's like well i mean i believe him but it's like well it wasn't really about the money i'm like well it must have been about the money you know uh it's gotta be part of it money's always part of it with a right like what are we talking about of course but um i would i would have loved to the one thing i would have loved to ask him if i had i should reach out to sean lane you'd probably do the show i've i've he unfollowed me on twitter a few years ago when i was critical of him about working for 10 cents so i i don't i feel like maybe he doesn't like me anymore but so i don't want to like push myself on him but what i would have asked him was after the you know after he answer some of the stuff was like what do you make of the novelty factor you and i have always discussed that like how do you like do you did you see that too like that there was a did you bake in the novelty factor because i do believe that's why games like zero dawn and days gone did so well and they might have just read that and been like this is the baseline boys you know uh it's all uphill from here and that wasn't the and that wasn't the case right all right a few more quick items chris and then we can get into what we're playing we can wrap things up with the inquiries from the audience.

3:47:03We talked about Marvel Tokan earlier, and we know the game is coming very shortly to PlayStation 5, but they've announced three new characters, and they did so at Evo. The characters are in, they joined Ghost Rider as the Samurai Outrider, so we've known about Ghost Rider since the game was announced, but the three new characters are Blade, Loki, and Deadpool, and Deadpool is voiced by Nolan North, interestingly enough. Didn't he do the voice in the PS3 game? Yeah, he did, yeah. you don't see him very much anymore. Yeah. They also reiterate that the open beta for the game on both PS5 and PC will run from July 24th through 26th and Blade will be playable there as well.

3:47:49Game launches, what, August? So we're getting pretty close now to Blade, or to Marvel Token Fighting Souls. I'm not into it, but I know this is a major game for PlayStation and I feel like maybe a little juice with this game. I mean, it's a fighting game. It's going to be constrained. Even the biggest fighting games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat sell in the single millions. It takes them years to reach five, six, seven million copies. So you got to be patient. But I think Arc System Works, this is a great relationship for Sony to have. And I hope it's the beginning of a fruitful relationship that I've very unpopularly said, I hope spans and other things with Sony outside of Marvel.

3:48:30Again, I would love to see them make an art like a guilty gear style or blaze boost style game with playstation characters i think i'll be fucking insane and so cool maybe this is the beginning of that or maybe no one cares i still feel chris you and i disagree on this a little bit i think a little bit i still feel like there's something to that that would be cool to do again yeah playstation all-stars sold a million copies i'm not saying that's a huge success but that's pretty good for a fighting game

3:48:59Colin Moriarty:um yeah i i don't know like i would like to think that i just don't know there's something in the way of it for me and i think it's just um the ip is so specific and i i think if it was in the in the rich tapestry of playstation ip i think yes i think you know like in in the in the every generation like ip that were that was like associated really heavily i think you'd have something but like if we're just operating on just like modern first party um and things that they currently own i don't know i feel like a lot of your iconic characters are ironically like characters that you no longer own you know like i think crash and spyro and and like seeing those it's crazy to me that those characters weren't in smash already yeah it's it is interesting and obviously i was annoyed as fuck back in the day that playstation all like they just couldn't figure it out with Activision.

3:49:54It's like, yeah, and I know they were frustrated behind the scenes because it's like, of course, we've tried. Like, they're not they're not like, oh, yeah, Crash Bandicoot. It wasn't like they would say that kind of shit behind the scenes. Like, of course. Right, right. It just didn't work out. But yeah, I don't know. That's a little pet project of mine, maybe for the future to talk more about. But we'll keep an eye out for more Marvel token stuff. I'll be very intrigued to see how it does when it comes out, both critically and commercially i'll have to rely on other people because it's certainly not gonna be me all right uh this was interesting i don't know if you saw this i believe that this broke this morning sorry i'm trying to keep footnotes again uh anemusha got moved up anemusha way of the sword or onimusha way of the sword people make fun of me how i say it you was going to come out september 24th it is now going to come out september 4th so they're giving they moved it up about three weeks and I think it's kind of it's poisonous either way.

3:50:56I mean, now they're like in like around Blood Walker or Dawn Walker rather Blood of the Dawn Walker and some other stuff. I can't wait for this game, dude. I'm really, really excited for this game. Yeah. And excited to see by the way, this is the second time this year Capcom's pushed a game up. They did it with Parkmata as well.

3:51:18Colin Moriarty:Yeah, that's true. Confidence. they're like we're done boys we can get this thing out there I mean when you look at it that's two months away I mean I assume the game's going to go gold soon yeah fairly imminently I would imagine so there's that for Onimusha Way of the Sword which I think all three of us are going to play on the show when the time comes and then we have new PlayStation Plus Essential Games Jamie wrote in and said hey boys lots of other news this week so I'll touch on the PS Plus Essential Games this month Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 for the King 2 and CrossCode are all cross-gen titles.

3:51:52No doubt a nice addition to the millions of PS4 users libraries. Is this another effort to show value to get people to move off of PS4? Just a happy coincidence all titles are cross-gen. Thanks. I'll hang around and listen. It is probably a coincidence, but it could be a nice little gesture. I mean, remember it was just last year where they said that they were going to kind of stop even really including PS4 games as much as they used to. I think this just happens to be the games that they've selected or gotten access to. The big one is Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3. which will be available on both PS4 and PS5.

3:52:21This game came out in 2023. Obviously, Modern Warfare 4 is the next Call of Duty game that comes out this fall, so they're trying to get you ready and prepared to play that. So I'll check that. I won't check that out probably, but I'll add it to my list. For the King 2, I had to look this up. This is a game that came out a couple of years ago. It is a strategy role-playing game. There was a PS4 game called For the King that came out in 2019 or 2018 as well. So there's that. And then there's this game, CrossCode, which is a role-playing game that didn't come out to ps4 i believe until 2020 maybe but i think it came out in the late teens and the thing about crosscode is i believe i bought it i'd have to look but i remember being told that it was very puzzle centric and i just that kind of turned me off from it because i thought it looked really great it's a very 16-bit styled jrpg styled game so nice little selections there i think this is a pretty good month what do you think yeah i mean

3:53:14Colin Moriarty:I don't know nothing for me really like I I from what I know I mean for the king 2 and cross code are just not my not my kind of game and um modern warfare 3 from what I remember is uh I think that's the campaign that had like I think that's the that's the game where like the campaign was built on like the bones of the oh right I forgot about that where they yeah I forgot about that yeah it was it was like a like a huge tutorial for the extraction I could be that sounds correct though in my memory. So this is kind of a week, a week month for me personally, but I mean, it's good. It's going to be good for somebody, you know.

3:53:52The final thing, this would have been good to have Dustin on the show for, but he's obviously not here. Variety reports, Persona live action TV adaptation in the works at Netflix. They write, quote, Netflix is developing a live action series based on the Persona video game franchise. Variety has learned from sources. Christopher Monfet is attached to write the adaptation in addition to serving as executive producer and showrunner. Sean Levy, Dan Levine, and Robert Atwood of 21 Laughs will also executive produce. Let's see. Is there any other information here yet? Persona has proven to be a wildly popular RPG franchise with the plot.

3:54:24While the plot varies from game to game, they typically focus on Japanese high school students who must go through normal daily routines and build and maintain friendships while also dealing with supernatural threats. Netflix declined to comment for Variety's story. We have really I would just read about this because I was thinking maybe I would even bring this up to Dustin, but he's not here. Just wanted to add that to the record. I have nothing to say about it. I hope that they don't use Japanese kids so everyone gets really offended.

3:54:53Colin Moriarty:Probably. I know this Sean Levy guy is. I don't know. I mean, I know he's a big name at Netflix. I don't know if he's really made anything of consequence, though. Like he's he's in charge of, I guess, like free guy. And I guess Deadpool and Wolverine he was a part of. But most recently he was attached to, I think, Stranger Things. Oh. And that last season of Stranger Things that everybody hated. I loved that thing with Stranger Things. Remember when everyone had this theory that there was going to be a secret episode? Yeah, which would have been dope as fuck. Yeah, it would have been awesome. It would have been so cool.

3:55:32Colin Moriarty:They were smart enough for that. Because it's so cool, you just kind of knew that it wasn't going to happen. Right. You know, it's like, that's too good. to have a fake out like fake out ending you're so boss all right that's all we have for the news chris let's get into what we're playing and we can linger here as long as we'd like yeah i'll go first uh i platinumed luna abyss that's my 213th platinum i really really liked that game i i highly recommend it if you're into uh shooters first person shooters i think it's a really really interesting again it's uh it's like i said id or doom you know id like game meeting returnal meeting metroid prime meeting uh freedom wars and i think people would really really enjoy it so take a look no one really played it so it'll probably be new to you and the game i'm otherwise uh hanging out with is grand theft auto 5 soulful bison wrote in and said colin i apologize for accidentally sending you an invite to my gta heist last night will you forgive me for clouding your gamer focus more importantly how does gta 5 hold up in a post red dead redemption 2 world has your opinion on the game change in any major way i'll celebrate the birth of this great nation and listen um so i played grand theft auto 5 when it came to ps3 but i probably played it for like 15 or 20 hours and i just wasn't really into it and i stopped playing it and of course you have to remember like ps4 was about to come out and we were kind of focused on other things and before you knew it you were just kind of gone and the ps3 they they released it natively later i had the ps3 added on disc and um you couldn't put it in the ps4 right so uh kind of conspired against me at that point so i've been spending a lot of time with it i'm probably i've probably played it for 15 hours maybe um it it's so funny man like first of all i think the one thing i'll say is that it holds up a lot better than you'd think from a cultural point of view.

3:57:29I think the major thing that they got in into the game that was lacking in, let's say, four and certainly in the trilogy on PS2 was like you would be using beepers or like flip phones and stuff like that. And they got the smartphone into this game. You know, it was probably like it's probably the equivalent to like an Apple for, you know, iPhone four or something like that. But it's like that changes the whole game and makes it feel very grounded and modern one thing i will say chris about this game and this is not something i appreciated it at the time i've been to la many times at the point that it came out but i wasn't very familiar with it but i lived in santa monica for almost three years as you know that's where we met and the version of la in this game is pretty impressive yeah i was like i know where i am right now like what what now it's all truncated and it's not quite right but i was telling michael like i was when i was like in venice and marina del rey and then going into santa monica and going to the pier and then going up into malibu i'm like this is exactly right like this is to the point where i'm like this is kind of creepy because it's a it's like a it's like a it's a not quite right space but like there's so many things about it where like specific buildings these staircases and i'm like this is all exactly the way it is and i didn't i didn't realize it and then i would i went to like uh hollywood or what do they call vinewood or whatever in this and I'm like this is This is like, right, this hotel is here and this thing is here.

3:58:54I'm like, it's just kind of cool. Again, it's a much smaller version. LA is such a sprawl, obviously, and so is this game. It's a huge sprawl comparable to the previous ones. But I was like, wow, this really captures Los Angeles. I know that better than ever now, having lived there. And I don't think I appreciate it to the point. But it makes it makes a lot of sense because you and I have reflected on Liberty City, specifically in GTA four capturing New York so well. And it's like, well, we know New York well. That's why we understood that. and that might be lost on other people. So why wouldn't they get this?

3:59:21And then I don't know Miami at all. I've been there, but I don't know it. It's like I can't wait to see what people have to say about GTA 6 from that regard and how true to form it's going to be. The other thing I'll say about this game, and this is not a huge surprise, it's really well written. And the voice performances are exceptional. I actually feel a little bit bad saying this because I met him and he's a really nice guy and I even did like a skit with him, but Danny Tamburelli is probably the worst of the performers. Who is that? he's uh he's he plays the um the son like the red-headed kid oh yeah he's probably like the because like some of the performances like there's the character lester who's like the handicapped guy or whatever and it's like he's like i'm like damn some of these performances are just they're all really well done and i was i was laughing specifically about like a group of white guys writing all of this franklin dialogue and shit um right and just a flagrant use of the word and all this kind of stuff it's just really really funny but it makes me excited this game is old I mean Mike and I you know I've been playing it Mike and I've been talking she's a really big fan of the game and I was talking I'm like you know this is the PS5 version of the game that came out in 2022 but this is a PS3 game like under the hood and what it is it's a PS3 game it's a late PS3 game it was an expensive and long in development PS3 game although it only took them five years to make it.

4:00:40I mean, it's so funny when you look. I know it's and and and that was considered like an extraordinary weight. Even though we waited four years between San Andreas and four, it was like, yeah, five years, like everyone was so annoyed. The other there's so much to say about it, but one other thing is that it is so much more than the campaign. And I know this intuitively, but I never experienced it because when I played the game, it was right when it came out and gta online didn't even exist right in those weeks so when you i'm fascinated that when you turn the game on there's like these three verticals like these blades almost and you have to write you have to write r1 twice to get to the campaign that like doesn't even want you to play the campaign it was which is not a huge surprise it's like gta online shark cards heists like all of these different gta plus all these different options i'm like damn dude this like you can and then i look at my friends list i'm like jesus i have a friends list of 2 000 people I'm like 13 people are playing this right now.

4:01:40And like and like Soulful Bison said, I'm like, I have a whole in-game friends list of people playing the game, people sending me requests to go do things with them and stuff. I'm like, damn, this game. Again, you you understood what it was, but being in it, it's like, Jesus Christ, like this really is. A lifestyle for people and. The next game is going to. my expectations for the game for the next game are even higher now when i see the way this game functions where i'm like this was pretty cool in 2013 i'll be very interested to see what a couple billion dollars and a few thousand few thousand of you can do with this new version of the game the one disappointment of course is hearing gta 6 and this is not a surprise is going to probably run at 30 frames even on ps5 pro which is i yeah and i was hoping for 40 on PS5 Pro.

4:02:26I'm still kind of hoping for that, but it's going to be pretty stinky from that because I am playing it at a very clean. Hopefully it's a PS3 game, a very clean 60 frames. And I had to keep reminding myself and I was saying that to my get to Chris is like I have to remind myself it didn't look like this and it didn't play like this. Like over and over again, it didn't look like this, didn't play like this, didn't look like this, didn't play like this, but it is pretty fun. And I'm using the FPS controls because the native controls on Grand Theft Auto are fucking nonsense. That's one thing that I'll be very interested to see what they do as well.

4:02:59The Rockstar button combinations are always fucking weird. It's insane. But yeah, shout out to the game. It's a really great game and it doesn't feel dated or antiquated in very many ways at all. I mean, the biggest antiquation of it is not even the graphical look. It's really the characters and the models. The world actually looks fine the lighting looks good the cars drive awesome I mean it's a fun game and it's just funny it's just a funny fucking game and it's just silly and over the top and stupid so yeah I'm really really enjoying it I'm really hooked into it and I was talking to Micah about this too is like because she used to play GTA online a lot I was like maybe I'll jump online at some point I don't know what to expect I don't even know what's going on online but we'll find out I guess at some point

4:03:53Colin Moriarty:yeah i don't remember like i played a fair bit of it i never finished it i actually jumped into it again kind of recently just to get my bearings and before i decided to jump into san andreas um because that's the one i have no real experience with outside of like borrowing it or like playing it at cousins houses but i played gta online for a little bit at the beginning and i remember i kind of swore it off because i tried to i tried to steal this other guy's car but i couldn't because he had insurance oh and i remember being like what is this i can't steal another player's car in grand theft auto felt ridiculous to me like that's interesting it really bothered me i don't know if it works that way anymore because it's definitely a very different game now but um because i was in like literally maybe like the first week or two of it um but Grand Theft Auto 5 is great.

4:04:44Colin Moriarty:I still, like, I think 4 just resonates with me the most. Just because it's, again, New York City, and I think that story is, like, really good and really interesting. I love the story of, like, immigrants in that space. It's just, like, I feel like it works. And that theme music is great. But I'm kind of running through Grand Theft Auto San Andreas right now. Because it's always been this game that, like, I've had tangential experience with. Like, I played it I would play it at my cousin's house or my cousin's apartment in the Bronx. And I was like kind of fascinated by it. But I only really fucked around with like cheat codes and stuff.

4:05:21Colin Moriarty:So like I never really played the story. I didn't really know who any of these characters were. So I'm going through it right now for the first time. And it is not like Grand Theft Auto V in the sense that it is quite dated. It is monstrously confusing. As far as like the controls go, it's like, dude, it's and you might remember this, actually. Do you remember in Spider-Man PS4, like base Spider-Man PS4, how like whenever Spider-Man was indoors, it felt like he was just. It felt insane the way he was like moving around because he was he was calibrated for like outside. Right. I remember I was talking about that at the time.

4:06:01Colin Moriarty:San Andreas feels that way kind of all the time, like the way that you can just increase speed with CJ at any moment and then just turn on a dime. like it's completely like there's no weight to it which like arguably like you could make a case that like it might control a little bit better but starting with four five and and you know i guess starting with four and red dead like the weight behind the character i don't know like i remember when i was a kid kind of being annoyed by it like that in gta4 and gta5 like you had so much weight and you you couldn't move as precisely or as like um as quickly but like now i kind of miss it because at least in four and five i kind of i at least i knew where i would end up but like in san andreas you're like it's it's insane and like there's a lot of there's a lot of driving missions where like i'm in a driving mission right now where i have to i have to chase a guy uh i i picked up somebody from prison who he just got out of prison and he's on his way to kill somebody uh who very clearly just molested the hell out of him in prison and that's like the entire he's like he's like it's like a bicycle chase or like a motorcycle chase and you're like chasing him through these like really windy paths with like these really precise and imprecise controls it's it's not a fantastic play experience but similarly to five and and i guess like every rockstar game since there is an element of like the world that is like really even in this like neutered kind of like dated ps2 environment um i am just impressed by like the map of it like these neighborhoods feel real even though they're clearly like four polygon boxes with like really low low grade textures on them and the characters even though they're like they're giving their dialogue through like mics and they're peeking it's so funny like the quality like the overall quality is so funny but like they're all but they all feel real and they're all like really enjoyable characters to spend time around it's like damn this is um this is cool like i i didn't know it was cool in the way that it is when i was a kid i just thought it was like oh you can get cj in a jetpack and fly around and just shoot people it's like all right that's that's fun but like what's here like written is it is fun um a little strict you're kind of weak early on and you can't take a lot of punishment and like they hadn't figured out third person shooting quite yet arguably nobody had until probably like years um maybe resident evil 4 you could make an argument but like yeah you like aim with r1 and it doesn't always lock onto people but sometimes it does and it's like it's it's the play experience is a little rough but but it's a good game like i really i really enjoy it um i'm getting my ass kicked constantly i got an achievement or a trophy completely by accident where like i wanted to swim to the bottom of the ocean just to see like what was down there and see how far i could get and i drowned and i think they're like the the the try i think it's the the trophy's called like the tragedy of the santa maria and you open it it just says drown and it made me laugh it was just like that is so blunt but yeah i'm on a grand theft auto kick cool um lately and i'm excited to move on to five uh which i dabbled in a little bit before i started san adres just to get a feel and get motivated but yeah i think it'll i think it'll be fun i still haven't fucked around with three or vice city i think i played a little bit of vice city like 10 minutes of it i was like this is rough man um yeah vice city is a vice city is arguably my favorite but it's just the setting and the music for is probably as we said probably my favorite my favorite favorite but yeah they are rough games what's funny is that the one that's available now like the controls are much better like the oh and in the and like the trilogy version as opposed to the ps2 port versions yeah i might i might if i'm feeling up to it after five because i do want to go from san andreas to five um and then maybe i'll go back to Vice City in that collection or something because I do want to get these games off my list like they've been like these these big tentpole games like these huge games that have just been kind of like I've only really experienced four in its entirety um but yeah I'm enjoying my time with it yeah I'm gonna try to be ambitious with this July and into August if I can and just try to get through some stuff as well but I don't want to bite off more than I can chew I know that after this I'll probably I gotta probably do like Alan Wake or something Alan Wake 2 and and we're kind of running out of time how animusha moving kind of fucks me up too because i wanted to play animusha one and two again as well and actually animusha four is out soon so it's like geez man how far into alan like two did you get pretty far like 30 through i think but i just don't really remember so i'll just restart it again i think that's what the psn says though when i look um yeah i hope you get to it i love i definitely will there's no way i'm playing control resident without doing that and replaying control one as well more importantly in some way all right so that's what we're playing we'll have more to say next week of course as we always do let's end the show Chris as we always do with inquiries from the audience 12 questions, comments, concerns, thoughts and ideas from the audience over on Patreon, patreon.com slash last day media you submit your inquiries on the threads they'll go live each week and then I go through them and I select what I want to use and most of you won't get used each week because that's just the nature of it but I try to be as equitable as possible and as I said this thread was incredibly out of control this week so I did the best I could Josiah Elmer wrote in and said hello Hello, gents.

4:11:40I write to you with sorrow in my heart. With more console price increases, discontinuing physical disks and anticipating more layoffs, it has been a grim few weeks for the video game space. I don't want to sound like an apocalyptic apocalypticist. I didn't ever even hear that word, but I can't imagine that. But it says it's a word, but I can't imagine that these decisions won't have a permanent negative effect on the industry. When will enough be enough? When will consumers vote with their wallet? For me personally, I feel like taking a break from one of my favorite hobbies as this new wave has bummed me out.

4:12:08I will say this, Chris, I don't know what you think about this, but people are onboarding too much of this stuff, I think. Like, we're observers. And we're obviously complicit in all of it as consumers as well. Like, our behaviors dictate things. And our responses will dictate the future. But I wouldn't let this, like, spill into your real world. That was kind of what happened with my PSN account thing, where it's like, that spilled into my real life. Where, like, it made me feel like shit. and I understand that but I just I try to ward people off of those things and I'll also say this idea that like we're in a crash I think is a little misguided I wish I had more time to do things because I would write a write a video about this but like the conditions that crashed the industry in 1983 simply don't exist anymore and yeah so yeah so video games are I think on the precipice of 200 billion dollars in annual revenue it's not going anywhere the thing that people have to remember as they as we wade through this space and and whatever is the only thing that will change is that more money will come in and then there will be different winners and different losers as time goes on and the volume of those winners and losers might change but this idea that like when gaming crashed it was because people thought gaming wasn't permanent it was looked at as a fad i mean there's a lot of reasons bad games and all the rest but they were like yeah all right that's well that's video games everyone and then and everyone was ready to move on and there were certain people that were like wait what are you talking about like we barely scratched the surface but they're a permanent silo of entertainment now and it's and they're not going

4:13:46Colin Moriarty:anywhere and people are not going to stop playing them i think people miss uh mislabel like i i think what people mean when they say a crash is not necessarily what the crash refers to i think I think what they think they're saying is that like the games industry is going to go through a massive period of upheaval and all and rapid change. And a lot is going to go wrong. I think that's absolutely true, but like that's not what a crash is. I just think people just don't really know what, what the games industry crash of the eighties is. I think they just kind of hear about it and just assume things about it.

4:14:16Colin Moriarty:What, what I think will happen. And I mean, you can, this can either bum you out or you can feel completely neutral about it. Is I just, I just think I think American triple A game dev is, kind of going away that's kind of my like i really do feel like it's going to be like american games are going to be indie games i think or like really really really really really really really really really small teams and i think a lot of the money is going to move overseas to emerging markets like uh india china for sure um uh i think maybe like places like eastern europe will stick around for a for a while i think but like the triple a like west coast um machine i think that's that's got a that's got an expiration date yeah i think you're i think you're right and yeah i'm especially worried about california-based triple-a devs and i i i assume the it's funny because you were saying like things might go wrong it's like actually i think things have already gone wrong and now we are in oh yeah the ramification like the ramification state.

4:15:25And it's just that I think a lot of the arbiters of these different decisions haven't come to grips with it yet. You can see a lot of this with the way people talk about Phil Spencer. Like when Phil Spencer was still at Xbox, he was the savior of Xbox. He was the only reason Xbox still exists. Now that he's out, it's like, oh, this guy fucked everything up of a lot. It's like, well, what is true? Both those things can't possibly be true. And I think it's because we're in this tumultuous period of not really knowing. But I just want people to onboard too much of this stuff because it's like yeah it seems negative but don't let it ruin regardless of where you play don't let it ruin your experiences the games are still the games there and i and i still stand by that we are in a perpetual golden era there are so many games dude when i see games every day on my social media if you were i'm like what the fuck is this and there's just and i i don't even i don't even think about playing them usually because it's like i don't have any time that's a yeah so just focus on the games i think the people that are going to be happiest moving forward are just going to be the pc people because it just kind of is what it is right like there's none of these fights over when's the last time you bought a physical pc game i think the last time i bought a physical pc game was literally in like 1999 or something so it must have yeah

4:16:38Colin Moriarty:for me it must have been like no later than 2001 um so yeah i think it might have been no Command and Conquer Red Alert, I think, was the last PC game that I got. So whatever year that is. But I think, yeah, I think PC is going to flourish. I mean, and like you said, we have so many good games now. It's not even... And by the way, every year is better because more games from the past are being brought forward to modern hardware too. So those Toy Story games are coming. Who the fuck ever thought that that would be? I didn't think. a bug's life the bug's life the licensed video game is coming like we're just getting all the stuff that we used to have that and having it run better and and the stuff that is coming out i i do want to you know warn against cynicism in the sense that like the industry might be in a rough place and there's a lot wrong with it and there's a lot bad going on but like the software itself is really it's really good and even even some of the stuff that's coming out of just like the really really small indie space like that mecha chameleon game is exploding like 10 million copies in like a day or not not a day but like in a really really short amount of time it's like one dude or something made it and it's uh there's there's cool stuff happening all the time yeah it's like it's a it's a roulette wheel now really without with lacking guardrails and predictability with really bad odds and i think that's the major the major change Nick Fury agent of ice wrote in and said, dear travelers, how do you feel about the news that Exodus will no longer feature a full character creator as initially intended?

4:18:12My favorite kind of games are those with the potential for meaningfully different choices across different playthroughs. I beat the mass spectrology with every permutation of class and choice, and I'm halfway to doing the same for Baldur's Gate three, being able to create visually distinct player characters makes these subsequent playthroughs feel fresh. It's much easier to project personnel, personal personality differences, pardon me onto characters when their appearances reflect those distinct sanctions. In Baldur's Gate 3, it made sense for my muscle-bound half-orc barbarian, God, you're a nerd, to choose different dialogue options and make different moral decisions than my posh elven paladin.

4:18:43Finally, a robust character creator can curtail criticism from players on both sides of the aesthetic divide. Traditional gamers can create conventionally attractive characters, while those who advocate for realistic depictions can create characters as plain-looking or outright ugly as they'd like. There's no need to pander to one group to the potential exclusion of the other. I did see this, and I was a little confused by it because it does seem like the kind of game that is kind of based around that sort of thing. I mean, it obviously is a spiritual mass effect game. And so making your own shepherd, male or female, female Shep, Fem Shep, or a male Shepard.

4:19:13Now, I will say Nick Fury, Agent of Ice, that I always went towards, even if your game has a character creator, unless you truly don't market it in a certain way, there's going to be a default for the protagonist. Like, not only is there a default commander Shepard for male or female, but like they're literally on the box art and then they give you and frankly when i think of mass effect i think of male commander shepherd with his shaved head i mean that's that that was my character i do like the idea of having both worlds so i so i but i think you're right like getting rid of the character creator is peculiar i wonder if it's just a technical thing maybe they're just running out of time and money and they just don't want to do it maybe they're afraid of the various ways their qa team has bastardized it which i'm sure is a fun process and makes horrible things.

4:19:59I really I don't know. But I don't want to beat a dead horse because I know you and I've talked about this before, Chris, but. I don't really give a shit about creating a character personally, so it's not what I'm really in for typically. And I got to be even more honest with you and tell you is that when I when I do make a character, I make them as grotesque as I possibly can. I'm never trying. I don't think I've ever tried to make like a truly cool character. I'm always trying to like jack it up.

4:20:30Colin Moriarty:so maybe not for me yeah my oblivion character is fucking hideous uh i i yeah i'm kind of with you like i i like a character creator and when it's robust and there but if it's not there i don't really care about it like my um my commander shepherd i think maybe the first time i played it was different but like every single time i've played massive x since then it's been default commander shepherd because i just it's it's not really the part of the game i care about i care about the gameplay and the decisions and like the narrative that's in front of me so like i mean it's a bit of a bummer but like i can't say it's gonna affect me too too much um i'm not that interested but uh generally speaking i err on the side of like if you're gonna put a character creator and it's like definitely i would i would prefer to have it than to not i guess yeah i mean if it's it's cool for people that enjoy because i know people just lose a lot of time to it and they really like to make a character but to me and i know it's like uh the wastelander in fall out 3 or whatever where it's like it's not really a specific character per se but in something like mass effect it's like well commander shepherd's a person i kind of just want hit i'm not i'm not commander shepherd like i know i guess i just never went in and be like this is me like when i play a first person shooter i'm like this is my perspective i'm like i mean no not really i mean i'm not doom guy i'm just playing a first person shooter and so maybe it's just a way of you look at the like look at your fiction as opposed to being it being i will say it's like um it comes off to me in not a bad way just like it's very the character creator thing is very feminine to me it reminds me of like what people say about like um the different ways that men and women generally like read books or absorb fiction and how they how an average man and an average woman might perceive a certain situation put themselves in it or observe it from the outside it comes off as a very similar thing to me but each their own i nick fury agent of ice they called you a bitch yeah i don't know i think they're just fun things to tool around with i i look at them as just i i always mess with them as far as like um it's fun to see like what the game will let you do and what the game will let you get away with but i did trent tend to make ugly fucking saints row was great for that yeah it was i do remember you could make the most disgusting absurd creatures ever like I that might be my favorite character creator I think Saints Row because it just like there's clearly no rules they didn't give a shit if it broke animations or anything Matthew Boone wrote into us Chris and said hey guys I'm a little late to this one but I had a question about game sales numbers why are companies so reluctant to share them I assume part of it is because they're competing with each other but if you're deep enough in the industry can't people get a pretty good idea of the numbers anyway it made me think of Colin mentioning that he was asked not to talk so much about sales numbers.

4:23:15Why is that such a big deal? If everyone found out your game sold, say 50 ,000 copies, what's the downside? What does a company actually lose by making those numbers public? I wish we sold 50 ,000 copies. It's funny you ask this, Matthew, because I think that it's a reasonable question. And yet I think if you're deeply connected to the industry these days, it's fairly obvious, right? Like look at the way people bastardize steam numbers and concurrent numbers and try to read things into them and like where something is on a leaderboard and where something is on most downloaded or most pre-ordered and part of it is like well now you're giving specific data that pegs things which is kind of pardon not a sexual one pegs so like your game x is number 14 on surkana and then you discover it sold 50 000 copies so then it's like all right 50 000 copies everything above this sold more everything below this sold less.

4:24:07It's not scientific because that's not global, but you're right in that. And this is what I always say about Alinea and there are others where it's like people pay a lot of money for access to these numbers and people that think that they're really like devastatingly wrong or crazy because people pay a lot of money for these numbers and it's all algorithmic. And then they go in and they correct things. It's what VG charts has done for many years where they like make up numbers and then they'll go in when there's a specific number and peg it to what it actually was and then go from that number.

4:24:36So I think private and public companies alike don't want to give out too much data. And I've always. If it was up to me, I would tell you how much our games sold, but like I would be told not like that people think I talk too much because one of the arguments I made was that I really loved how I love how open and I wonder I think they've done the same thing with Mina, but they haven't done it granularly yet is like Yacht Club Games is like one of the most transparent companies about how many copies their games sell. they do like these deep blog posts about like console splits and where people are buying the games and all the rest they even do these for the games that they publish um they did this for uh cyber shadow they did this for shovel knight treasure trove um or not treasure trove the shovel knight dig game and so on and so forth so i i understand it's a little peculiar and some companies are very comfortable doing it but i also think that that i i i think numbers are misrepresented and mischaracterized we always talk about final fantasy 16 and 3 million copies in like a week and it's like 3 million copies it's like are you fucking kidding me it took street fighter 6 like 3 years to sell that many copies you know um yeah but again then you have these arguments so i think they just look at it as being like yeah we'll either sneak it in like a financial statement that's what sega does that's what nintendo does or we'll like tangentially talk about something that's what sony does sony has the long list of sales numbers but you have to look at the dates because they'll have like it'll be like bloodborne and then it'll be like last updated uh july 2015 and then it'll have like a number but they do that kind of shit so that's the reason matthew i think all right josh kiss call wrote in and said to c-men push square reported that doom the dark ages is dropping an incredible sounding dlc new missions weapons and something they're calling endgame.

4:26:26Not only is this an incredible, incredible as Dark Ages was great, but it sounds like something a lot of single player games could do to keep players engaged for longer. Do you think meteor and more frequent endgame DLC for single player games could generate much needed revenue or do you think it's usually wiser to move on to the next thing as soon as possible? Thanks and see you at the Freedom 250 fair. I don't think you will. I don't think you'll see anyone there.

4:26:48So. This is an interesting question, Josh, because I think that the the. it seems to me, I don't know if you observe this, Chris, and I don't know the math behind it. Per capita is probably true, but there are so many more games wherein single player expansions and support seems to be lagging heavily. And I think that there are two reasons for this. Either you do like map pack style thing like Power Watch Simulator does. You have like full fledged expansions like Cyberpunk's. But the era of like really hitting a game with DLC is kind of done unless it's a multiplayer game or a game as a service.

4:27:28And I really think a lot of that stems from the fact that like during that era, people were excited to sell you things, of course, but they were also excited to compel you to never sell your game. And right. Events have conspired. We've talked about some of them already on the show where it's like, you're not selling your digital copy of anything. And if they don't have to worry about that, then. they really like I I am not entirely convinced that expansions make much sense and DLC makes much sense from a financial perspective because it's like it's a way to boot the game back up to get people to to Borderlands 3 or Borderlands 4 for instance has a shit ton of expansions that are coming in a vertical there are certain types of games that I think can absorb it but generally speaking I just don't know that this is cool but I'm kind of over the Dark Ages It's too late for me.

4:28:19There's no reason for me to return to it. I don't really see the financial benefit of it. They'll probably sell a bunch of copies of the game at a cheaper price than they were originally. And so that's kind of free money in quotes. And I know that Doom the Dark Ages didn't do very well. So I think that's mostly because it was in Game Pass. But I agree with you, Josh. I think Doom the Dark Ages. I'm much more hot on Doom the Dark Ages than Chris is. I thought that game was dope. But yeah, I'm not, I don't know. I'm not, I'm not interested in it. And I think a lot of the raison d 'etre, as I've been saying recently, is for this kind of stuff doesn't really exist anymore.

4:28:52I think people are excited to move on. There's too much competition. There's way too much competition. Be like, you want to go back and play Doom? You platinum did you want to go back and play it again? I'm like, not really. I mean, like, it's a lot of other things for me to do right now. So what are your thoughts?

4:29:05Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I mean, we've talked about it before, but like, I mean, I'm generally not a DLC person. I like to like if I'm done with the single player game, I like to I like to just be done with it. and i also like selfishly when i'm done with it knowing that i could come back to it and it's the same game that i left um you know there's uh there's some dlcs that kind of fucked the game entirely like there's one um for deus ex oh my god what was the first one of the reboot mankind divided was the sequel right yeah i don't know look so it's human human revolution uh deus ex human revolution had a dlc that like it inserted itself into the middle of the story and just it was clearly designed for people to play after they beat the the game but it's in the middle of the story and just completely fucked my experience of that game um and so that's a bummer because i i would read reviews of like human revolution being like oh this is great and then i would hear about like the the definitive edition with the dlc like thrown in there and it was like this is rough and so like i kind of i have a complicated relationship with dlc i think doom the dark ages uh that dlc looks good i might actually play it i i like doom the dark ages as well it's just not my favorite i just think eternal is so good um and it hits exactly what i want out of like a game like that it's like really difficult and challenging and it like makes you play it a certain way doom dark ages is more kind of go with the flow which i also like um so i might play the dark ages dlc but that's an exception that i really kind of only would make for a game like doom or like cyberpunk or something where it's just like it's it's exceptional so like all right i'll give it a go and see what's see what's going on um but i generally agree with you that like the the financial imperative to do it kind of doesn't really make a lot of sense to me because you'd imagine that dlc has a ceiling of however much the game sold yes like you're never you're never going to get more than your customer base so i always thought standalone dlc made more sense like i like standalone dlc more i mean i want to play it more than rego dlc yeah i'm more inclined like like a far cry 3 blood dragon like when that came out i was all over it because it was first of all what an insane yeah it was a cool idea it was really insane premise uh and things like that like i'm more inclined for for that kind of thing um but yeah i think it's wiser to move on zach wrote in said hello my sacred slitters colin you've been saying recently that it would be impossible for sony to delay the ps6 but i am failing to understand why you keep saying that the that the consoles have to get made and i totally get that they have to manufacture them to keep their place in line and all the rest but why would it be impossible for them to sit on the consoles for a year to delay the release the rate that technology is improving has slowly slowed massively so it's not like delaying a year would put them so far behind in terms of power differential.

4:31:52The biggest thing they would have to worry about is the money it would cost to manufacture and house the consoles with leaks being a secondary concern, but I still don't think it's as impossible as you say for them to kick the can down the road. Let me know what you guys think and keep on fucking that chicken. Remember, Zach, like, we don't know how big the PS6 is. We don't know how big the box is going to be, but imagine manufacturing, I don't know, many millions of them, single millions, but many millions of them and then storing them for a year. I mean, no, it's not impossible. There are warehouses, bonded warehouses, and so all over the place that would do that for you.

4:32:24It's expensive. I want to reiterate what I reiterated last week about kind of the revelation I had from other people's thing where I'm like, really, Sony's in a position where they should just sell it as soon as they can. And if that's fall 2027, just do it. You'll still sell millions of them, the people that are going to overpay for them. And then you lower the price later. That's that's your best bet, as opposed to like, think about it. Think about it, Zach. you're asking them to hold the console and then sell it for cheaper later when they could just sell it earlier there are people that will pay almost anything for it i don't i'm not saying you want to you want to take advantage of those people but you kind of do i mean if they exist and you're going to sell them and they'd be like yeah we have nothing to lose and everything to gain by selling it now and then we can drop the price even precipitously later and look genius and maybe people complain that they paid too much for it but that's just the nature of the market so So I mean, they could manufacture it and hold it for more than a year.

4:33:16But I also think you have to understand that, like at some point, the tech does become old. And it's also in danger of all sorts of problems. I mean, imagine all the issues that could happen in a way. I'm sure you trust those people with air conditioning and all the rest. But you never know. You're just tantal. You're tempting fate in that regard. It's a shitty situation for Sony to be in. it's a shitty situation for all the hardware manufacturers to be in yeah i actually think i

4:33:44Colin Moriarty:agree um generally i don't think it's a great idea to launch it next year just because i feel like the appetite is not there but that also depends on the fact that like we haven't that's also heavily contingent on the fact that we haven't seen the machine we don't know we don't really know what it does we this is all hypothetical like when it's real and we and we see it and we see the sleek you know whatever the form factor is going to be and and you know like maybe that'll change and more people certainly more people will be excited to see it once it's real um and they know more about it but yeah i i think uh i i think it's just better to just get it get it over with really um well they're going to be sitting in a warehouse forever yeah you don't want that and moldy and shit right you don't want that all right chris final inquiry comes from brinsley logic who says greeting sacred symbol symbolologists pardon me two weeks in a row dust 514 has come up so i thought i'd make it a third what a great idea it was although the format of the ground missions could get competitive knowing that fury was being rained down from the heavens was far what from fellow players vying for control of the skies above us really added to what was otherwise would have been a mundane effort to expand the eve online player base my son and i spent many hours on this title and had some great bonding moments during it all right p and peace and thanks for the memories outside of hell divers what franchises do you feel could benefit from a dust five like a dust like shared world supplemental experience i'll hang up take one look at eve online and go back to mining my business i mean that's the smartest move if you're looking at eve online because no one understands how it's played um yes we've we've fellated dust 514 a lot recently and yeah it is chris and i have said like i love the idea of it and there are games that it can be done in and and the it's just a matter it's so risky games are so expensive now I'm pretty sure CCP ate shit on heave online I mean I'm not an even line on a dust 514 they also made it a ps3 exclusive which I think was probably a dubious decision although that that was the the decision they made to I think defray some of the cost of it but I mean dude like Grand Theft Auto 6 is one of those games where like there there could be like millions of key components of that game obviously i think that the the duet of two games is what he's really talking about and there there are really interesting like um like ace combat right or like uh imagine being like on the ships like the aircraft carriers or whatever um a lot of games like battlefield field could benefit a great deal from kind of this really having a game in the sky really having a game on the ground I know it's kind of going between those two things but imagine if you had a really fleshed out game in both places and they interact with each other but I do wonder Chris is it's an idea that has never really been re-approached and I think there's a reason for that is that it's complex and it requires two vibrant multiplayer games and you're asking for a lot with that yeah that's a that's a tall order i also just think like generally like novel ideas like that i mean we talked about midnight murder club not too long ago where it's just like these are this is a great idea but sometimes there's not appetite for great ideas sometimes people just want something that they kind of understand and that doesn't demand a lot of um that doesn't demand a lot of thought it's it's a little bit easier to sink into a little bit more of a background experience and that's what most people kind of are into and as good as an idea is like you kind of can't force people um to adopt it i've long thought it would be like a really cool idea to have like a like like an rts kind of game where like one person on each team is like the guy in the sky and like everybody else is like everybody else on the team is is like fps and like they're directing and like they've got a guy on the mic and they're like you know what i mean coordinating and stuff.

4:37:40Colin Moriarty:Yeah, that's cool. But that's a lot. I think it's a great idea. I don't think it would do well. Yeah, it requires too much luck. I mean, you could, and that's what it would really need, right? Because we've talked about so many times the idea that good and great is not good and great enough. And so, like, you could say, like, yeah, we have these two interchangeable games that interact with each other. And they're both great. It's like, that's step one. Now you got to deploy them both into the wild to get people to play both of them. And that's yeah. And with 514, that was an easier prospect than than it was now.

4:38:15And ironically, Eve still is played by hundreds of thousands of people. So they're doing fine. It's just. I think the commercial realities of it are stop it from happening. It's it's not unlike we say about Mass Effect and what's so cool about Exodus and a few other games that really are really all about choice and bringing Banner Saga was another of these games, bringing choice between the games. But that doesn't happen a lot, not because it's not cool and fun, because it's really fucking hard. And you can't. And it locks you in. You have to have like plan. You have to have knowledge for knowledge of things you're about to do.

4:38:45And you have to have the guarantee that they're going to happen. And your EA wasn't going to pull the plug on Bioware at that time. They might now. All right, Chris. That's all we have was a nice long episode. Lots to talk about. It's good to be here with you. And it's good to see Dustin a little bit as well. But just a little bit. I don't want to see him too much right now. Just a little. We'll ease back into it. What's going on with you the rest of the day?

4:39:10Colin Moriarty:It's a little bit later because we got a media episode today, so it's almost three. I'm still in the middle of deep cleaning, so I want to get my deep cleaning done. But I guess I've got to figure out what I'm going to do for dinner. I really don't know. You've got time to figure it out. Yeah, I've probably got to go grocery shopping, too. It's a whole errand, all of this. Yeah, it's good, though. It's good to do it. But tonight I'm probably going to put together the document for the Destiny. bungee uh sacred episode that we're gonna do cool yeah i'll get that thread up now when we're done here um but outside of that my day is pretty i'm gonna be indoors i think yeah me too it's 98 degrees out right now it says so um that is crazy it's like i think what's the temperature right now in in in good old burbank 76 yeah i wish i wish that would be beautiful perfect i'm afraid to look outside and see what condition my plants are in right now they're gonna need they're gonna need my health tonight um yeah yeah for me i'm just gonna i'm gonna go work out and uh yeah i'm waiting for the sun to go down i'll go float in the fucking hot tub or the i mean the pool but it's a uh it's a hot tub it's ostensibly hot tub um and have a beer and just kind of bake for a little while and then uh yeah back to grand theft auto tonight and have you been watching the world cup at all no i really i know what's going on with it like i've heard i know mexico won or something like i really yeah all three host teams have moved on to the the round of 16 which is cool so yeah i have no um i just i i just don't i i can't i can't care yeah i saw they did a i saw they did a uh like that i cared at all about the nba that was a lot the next one like that that was a miracle on all the people all the people in the audience are sports people that's a miracle on your part that that I cared at all.

4:41:03Yeah, that captured a lot of people. It did. Yeah, it did. That would otherwise.

4:41:08Colin Moriarty:Let's not push it with soccer, though. Right. Fair enough. It's a little too foreign for our tastes. All right. Chris, it was good to see you as always. Thank you for your time. Be well. Thank you all out there for your love, kindness and support. We appreciate you. Patreon dot com slash last day media for early ad free access and last day media dot store for merch. We'll see you next time. Until then. Goodbye. Take care, guys. Sacred Symbols, a PlayStation podcast, is a product and trademark of Last Stand Media and Colin's Last Stand LLC and is proudly recorded in the USA. The show is conceived by, is written by, and is directed by me, Colin Moriarty.

4:41:43My co-hosts are Chris Raygun Maldonado and Dustin Furman. The show is produced by executive producer Dustin Furman. All of Last Stand's theme music is by my best friend, Ramon Narvaez. As you know, all of Last Stand's shows, including Sacred Symbols, are fan-funded on Patreon at patreon.com slash laststandmedia. The following names are at the producer level on Patreon, our highest tier, and we're grateful for your thoughtful and kind contributions to our independent endeavor. Thank you.

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4:44:19Who is Stephen Day? Thank you.

4:45:05Thank you.