#419 | Don't Break the Silence, Don't Let Me Win

41:03it's it's very funny just in uh that's true that's like what people were but nothing surprises me really anymore i'm being honest the internet has uh has destroyed all of that that mystique about people in me that is true god help us but i so we had a fourth of july no that fourth of july we had a father's day party and so we had like 15 or 16 people over our house and uh we have wet wipes in every bathroom in our house but we know what to do with them right but i had i took them out of the bathrooms when people were over because i'm like i can't i can't risk anyone flushing these you know i can't i can't i can't risk it i think you'll get i think you'll be fine even if people flushed a bunch of them you don't want to do it regularly but i've never flushed any of them can't can't do it a perfect

41:53Dustin Furman:record right exactly so i had to i had to remove them from the scene um but i think i did pull i think i did pull a very sophisticated move during this party you know when you go to parties like house parties family parties wherever and then you go to the bathroom and then they have like a towel you want you you would dry your hands off with after you wash your hands but it gets like really wet and damp after a while and it's gross i just was like we got to just put let's just put a garbage can with paper towels clearly available in the bathrooms and then people can just use the paper towels to watch you know very something we wouldn't do it's very it's very opulent to waste that many paper towels but i thought that was a classy move on my part yeah to do that yeah i think so i was thinking about the guest experience you got to tailor like a guest experience and like a a normal living experience is very different like you you've got to all you've got to modify your house right you're hosting something right always indeed all right let's get into the news there are two psas of sorts that i wanted to begin with we don't have to settle or uh linger on either of them but they're worth bringing up uh the first is is that uh infamous 2 released on playstation 3 in 2011 has user generated content a feature a pretty robust feature in the game that I'm sure people are familiar with.

43:13Dustin Furman:And the UGC, somehow the UGC servers are still live for Infamous 2. But as of August 31st, you will no longer be able to access UGC missions. They write on PlayStation support website that after the state, players will no longer be able to access, browse, upload, download, or play UGC missions through the Infamous 2 online servers. Offline features, including the main campaign, will remain playable. a really important thing to note here for those that have never played infamous to or are curious about it especially for trophy people is that as i recall there are trophies attached to the ugc and infamous too so if you want to get the platinum it will soon become unattainable if you don't act now so get going on that infamous 2 is a wonderful game i'm sure most of you guys have already played it it's the best infamous game in my opinion yeah and god forbid we ever get to play it again who knows who knows no i don't i don't even remember like i i i guess i only really played a little bit of infamous one so i didn't really play infamous two but like there was what's the ug what's the user generated content for infamous i can't even fathom what that would you created like mini like you could go places like anywhere in the open world and then like create missions basically and then share them oh weird yeah i never heard about that like that I guess the UGC stuff was always like LittleBigPlanet.

44:35Right. Back then.

44:36Dustin Furman:Well, Sony was, I mean, it was like, what was the trademark that they had? Like, share, create, create, share, play, or whatever. And they were trying to, like, Infamous was the next step of trying to get that out of Media Molecule. And it was, LittleBigPlanet, I think, was earnestly doing it because they wanted to. I think by the time you get to 2011, I think some of it is like, what can we do to stop people from selling this game? it's why infamous 2 also got an expansion you know um festival of blood or whatever it was called which was pretty good actually right so yeah the ugc stuff was just about it was a mission creator i remember it fairly well just because i wish i i could recall the actual trophies but i think you have to like make one and then i think you have to rate others and stuff so you have to you have to like be involved a little bit so i just wanted to throw that warning out there not just because of the UGC servers.

45:27Dustin Furman:I don't think anyone gives a fuck about it, but maybe if you're a platinum guy. And it's funny, if you go to this website, by the way, this PlayStation website for game servers, it's just a list of things they update. So like you can see all the things that they've recently discontinued and we've talked about all of it. So like Destruction All-Stars, before that LittleBigPlanet 3, before that Guns Up and Tearaway and Tearaway Unfolded are on here and stuff. Grand Tourism Sport, it's funny. An interesting little list they update. And then the other PSA I wanted, it's not really a PSA, but just an FYI as it were.

45:56Dustin Furman:is um that christopher barrett who was a director i believe the original director of marathon um yeah i think so yeah he's i mean he's been a bungee for like since the original myth or myth two or something so he's been there a long time right i think what basically happened so right christopher barrett was there for a long time in 2022 sony buys bungee as we know unfortunately um and so people are paid out and we've talked about this ad nauseum more than a billion dollars of the purchase price was just for retention bonuses and and money going to the employees that work there christopher barrett as a as a you know a director level employee and a long-time employee would have made a bunch of money and i think he claimed it was something like 50 million dollars or something um and in 20 and sometime in 2024 he was fired quietly by Bungie for and I had to catch up on this like I was like what happened with him I had to go to game developer.com and look this up and I did he uh it says here he was fired in March that year for a series of misconduct allegations and he was actually a board member on Bungie so he was he was deeply involved in approving the Sony deal.

47:13Dustin Furman:So he knew he was going to make a lot of money. They say at least eight women claimed he had behaved inappropriately towards them. So he was fired. Obviously, he wasn't nearly fully vested yet. I don't think the vesting has still fully happened at Bungie, even all this time. It might be next year when everyone's fully vested, whoever's left. So he claims he was removed kind of to based on this kind of spirit is what he thinks. I think or claims or spurious allegations to avoid paying him what he's owed. And I believe he said that he was still owed$45 million of his bonus. So anyway, that all happened and then went quiet.

47:51Dustin Furman:Now we have an update from Christopher Barrett. And he basically confirms that he, they settled out of court, but he won. It says, update on my lawsuit against Sony and Bungie. I am pleased to share that Sony, Bungie and I have reached an agreement to resolve the lawsuit. the outcome is one I am very satisfied with and I am grateful to everyone who stood by me closing this chapter allows me to focus my attention on what's next in my gaming journey and I look forward to what lies ahead they released a joint statement by the way so Sony and Barrett they say quote the litigation between Sony Interactive Entertainment Bungie and Christopher Barrett has been settled for 25 years Mr.

48:27Dustin Furman:Barrett contributed to some of Bungie's most successful games Mr. Barrett was the original game director for Marathon and his name has been added to the game's credits to reflect that end quote and of course christopher barrett and he signed his letter also as the co-creator of destiny so a fairly prolific person so i don't really have i don't have anything more to say about it but it is closing a loop on something that was pretty interesting it sounds to me chris like he won um yeah i mean even the joint statement says like yeah chris he's a he was a veteran and he was the original director we're putting him in the credits but i wonder what what kind of money he got yeah i'm curious about that too yeah i don't know it's it's one of those things we'll never know like what like because there's also the things too where it's like you can win lawsuits with while still being wrong or whatever so like who the fuck knows but um at least this whole thing is over i guess you know yeah because i i guess hog would know more i mean obviously way more about this but i assume what could be true like the accusations could be true but it might still not be possible for them to avoid paying him out that's true yeah right like it might just be two different things and sort of fire him for one thing maybe that firing was was allowed but you can't just not pay him the payout for the acquisition that happened when he was there I mean that's my assumption but yeah I only just all I remember were like messages that I think came out that uh like leaked texts or something that were kind of crazy which is not elite it didn't feel illegal but it was also just like what do you i think for me personally i'm like you've got 50 million dollars on the line just yeah just what do you just shut up just shut up yeah what are you doing like i don't i don't know it just seems kind of whatever he's a prolific person for sure like he definitely did like he's really instrumental for a lot of uh a lot of old bungee stuff so like respect but also like what like he clearly got a little bit too big for his britches there you know like what are you doing sending these messages out though according to the the bloomberg article that released a game developer cites and he says he allegedly quote called lower level female employees attractive asked them to play truth or dare and made references to his wealth and power within the studio end quote suggesting that he could quote advance their careers end quote in addition sources speaking to bloomberg claim he befriended several women across various departments within the studio he then reportedly sent a barrage of texts that blurred the lines between professional and personal.

50:51Dustin Furman:Then in December of 2024, Barrett sued Sony and Bungie, alleging he was fired without cause and that both companies were withholding a$45 million payout from him. In the suit, he alleged Bungie and Sony deliberately destroyed his reputation. Defendants did not seem to care that none of it was true. They had blatant motivations for their brazen scheme, end quotes. I mean, the way, based on what he's saying in his suit and then the way they seem to have resolved it and their joint statement that is very conciliatory seems to me that he one and it simply didn't go to jury you know jury so he might not have gotten 45 million he might have gotten like 30 to agree not to you know something like that but yeah and i gotta say i mean to his like i don't know what's true and what's not and you're right like the things leak and people i do feel and i'll just say it i've said it before is like i do think a lot of this stuff not all of it maybe not even most of it but a lot of this stuff is predicated on bad communication miscommunication and not and no ill intention oh i agree yeah i think i don't want to get too deep into the weeds because i really don't know for sure but like based on the things that were that people i used to work with at ign were accused of over the years three people in particular um you know i'm like i don't know that i believe that about them like you know what i mean like i don't know that like i feel like that what though you don't you never really know someone i guess but based on like years of being with someone and understanding their cadences and how they are and all the rest i'm like i don't know about that you know like i think it was maybe awkward i think maybe people got a little drunk and said things they didn't mean i think maybe text got misinterpreted but i'm like i don't know about it reminds it reminds me of the aziz and sorry thing right right right sorry thing i remember like the hammer came down hard on him and i was like i don't know about this like this is kind of like like they're talking about aziz and sorry in the same sentence that they're talking about Bill Cosby.

52:42And I'm like, this is kind of crazy.

52:43Dustin Furman:Yeah, it's fucked up. I mean, that sounded like a bad, like a regretful one night stand that people didn't wish didn't happen or something or whatever. It's like, that's different. That's different. Take some responsibility, you know, for yourself. Yeah. So I always think that I think that I don't, I don't want to bring up, bring up old wounds, but I feel that way, especially with my old friend Vince, where I'm like, maybe bad things happened. I don't, but I just, I'm like, I know him. And like, I just, I'm like, I just feel like it was clumsy. and whatever happened happened and it was bad but i'm like the ill intention of like being a predator or something i'm like i don't know about that dude like that's that bothers me because i just feel like everything like you're saying everything gets conflated and so perhaps he was uh in a simple felt like he was in a similar situation where it's like yeah maybe he was flirtatious yeah maybe he was inappropriate but like there is a difference between and be professional in the workplace for christ's sake i mean it's it does it's especially as like i don't know you're on the board of directors you know what i mean like right like you're on the board that's kind of the thing where it's just like i i just i don't know bungie is a very like it's they're kind of an inherently scrappy team and so like i remember even like even back in the early and even late halo days like they didn't really have like there was there were directors but it was kind of like you're doing this now you know what I mean, like everybody just kind of it was it had a very indie mentality.

54:07And that probably meant executives fucking, you know, yucking it up with the QAs. And you know what I mean? Like, it was probably like a lot more. I want to say like communal, I guess, like it was probably like less corporate and less rigid. And he's been there the entire time. I could imagine him being like, yeah, what the fuck? Who cares if I'm on the board director? Does that matter? You know what I mean? Like, I could see that level of like, who cares?

54:32Dustin Furman:but yeah and and you got to know better when you get to get to a certain size like working in the creative fields as you have and and i i worked at a you know a pretty major corporation in the company in the media space of this it's like it is a deeply inappropriate deeply oh yeah you know like there's just there's different expectations of it doesn't have to be abusive or weird that's different you know but like it is irreverent let's say like it's totally it's not like your normal it's not like your normal company at all there's nothing normal about it and and people flock to it people flock to it in large part because they don't like that aspect of anywhere else like i know i i did all this because i was like i don't want to deal with i don't want to deal with this weird red the the like the red tape and the bureaucracy of everything like i'd rather just do my own thing and like somehow make money and like whatever that's fine um so it's it's yeah i don't know i don't know but maybe he's maybe maybe he's a terrible person maybe he isn't i really have no idea i'm just i'm just glad that this whole thing is fucking done i guess right and i also think it just comes from a like a different like times have changed too where i think i always felt bad for people in the last let's say 10 years of people that really did go through like a really serious situation of abuse assault shit like that that happens and then yeah like they get thrown in with this really weird group of like so what did this person do and like this person said something in a text message and this person like yeah flirted with you like i don't i like what are we like what are we doing to people like we're we're like i just people have been destroyed for it you know and i'm like damn like it's what what what is this what are the specific facts of each situation and i feel like people just don't even really care and i think i'm like that's really essential stuff so yeah maybe he did the worst shit possible maybe he did nothing i don't know but like this to me seems like he didn't lose i'll say that yeah he didn't lose and dude i gotta say i bring it up sometimes with the chris avalon thing like he was accused of serious shit by two women and they were lying you know um and he won that like it's it's really hard in the united states not like europe like it's really hard in the united states to win like a suit like where it's like what you're lying about someone or like you're libeling or slandering someone and and whatever and it's like so for all of the horrible things that definitely happen and victims should be heard there are people that just make shit up out of fucking whole cloth and you can't and i just i make fun of myself all the time like i believe everything everyone says like yeah i have no i i can discern things but i just assume you're not lying to me but then you see things like that and you're like damn dude people will lie about anything anything crazy shit out there man be safe out there let's be smart be respectful be tactful read the room yeah read the situation there's a lack of social awareness i think with a lot of people that leads to a lot of this shit like it's funny too because uh at ign like people were dating and like i dated a sales girl yeah you know greg dated another person editorial for years uh there was like all sorts of there were there was there was a couple between video and editorial but it was just it was it was surprised for such an irreverent place it was surprisingly professional in that regard.

58:16Dustin Furman:Seems like everything went a little haywire after I left. Maybe there's maybe that's not a coincidence. Maybe I was the glue that was called holding it all together, perhaps. I doubt I doubt that. All right. Let's get into the news as it were. Wet Dirt 28 wrote in and said a simple request. Can we get a moratorium on all the physical disc talk, please? I'm already exhausted by it. That's great. That's a great idea. Let's the biggest PR blunder blunder and disaster Sony's experience in 15 years. Let's ignore it. Let's ignore that. Yeah, let's go. On this note, people want to talk about everything going on.

58:54Dustin Furman:Everything is kind of settled over the last week. I thought an interesting way to frame this would be based on, ironically, an IGN article. They write over there. They now wait for this storm to pass. PS5 owners are canceling PlayStation Plus subscriptions to protest Sony killing discs, but analysts say it won't make any difference. So IGN spoke specifically with Dr. Sirkin Toto. He's the CEO of the Cotton Games consultancy firm in Japan. It's a little bit of a controversial person because he's not always right. A lot of these guys are not always right about things. I mean, what was that one analyst?

59:29Dustin Furman:Why can I never remember his name? He was really big. People, oh, Pachter, David Pachter. And he's wrong about like shit all the time. so like you you you don't know or was i don't even know if he says anything anymore i don't you don't want to put too much stock into anything any individual says but he does know a thing or two and it is an interesting story so here's what ign reports speaking to ign dr circuit toto ceo of japanese game industry consultancy firm cotton games suggests that even if half a million people cancel their playstation plus subscription and protests it would just be a drop in the ocean for Sony, which is not going to change its mind.

1:00:04Dustin Furman:He told IGN, quote, I sympathize with physical media fans, but Sony will not reverse this decision. They, of course, knew what the online reaction would look like, and they now wait for the storm to pass. Sony has over 120 million active PlayStation users. Around 50 million people subscribe to PlayStation Plus. As a thought experiment, let's say 500 ,000 cancel and protest. That would be just 1 % of that business gone. Of course, not enough to Sony to start rethinking. Digital is just too lucrative, end quote. So IGN continues, of course, digital downloads now dominate video game sales and Sony can be seen as simply reflecting the prevailing taste of its customers.

1:00:37Dustin Furman:But as Toto states, there's also a huge financial advantage to this move, which saves on manufacturing and distribution costs, ensures it no longer pays a portion of sales to retailers and captures more platform fees on the sale of third party games via the PlayStation store. He goes into all the math that we've gone over a million times about how, you know, Sony, well, a third party publisher might make something like$35 on their physical games. Like this is what I was saying is like Sony's jumping on the grenade, but no one wants to be in the physical game space. Like I'm telling you. Yeah, only the boutique publishers like it and smaller publishers because they can drive margins.

1:01:09Dustin Furman:But the big companies want to be digital. And that's why they're all not saying anything. Because you think some publisher would be like an EA or a Ubisoft or somebody would be like, ah, we have to follow the rules, but we're not into this. They don't feel that way. They're really into it. um so i don't know chris it seems like uh it's been about a week they started tweeting again it's funny man on tuesday so that would have been the seventh i felt it in my gut i'm like they're gonna start talking today i'm like either they're going to announce that they're reversing course in some way or punting like they did with the vita and ps3 stuff later where they're like we'll revisit this later.

1:01:54In the meantime, nothing's going to change or they're going to

1:01:58Dustin Furman:just start posting through it. I'm like, they can't stay quiet for too long. It's too conspicuous and weird. It's like you knew you did something wrong. So you have to kind of just do one or the other. And so I actually woke up to go to the bathroom at like, you know, whatever, nine or 10. And I was up for the rest of the day, even though I'd only got to bed like a few hours before because I saw that they had tweeted and I was like, I knew it. I knew it. You know? So they seem like they're not going to reverse course. The brownie bro wrote in and said, hey, sacred studs, I have a bunch of things from the audience here.

1:02:30Dustin Furman:We'll see what we can get through. Yeah. Is it a hopeless cause in trying to get PlayStation or reverse their decision on physical media? After the announcement, they were silent for six days as the denizens of Twitter clowned on them in the comments and retweets with every community note removed. Another took its place. Hilarious, by the way. Canceled PS Plus subscriptions, retracted pre-orders, and review bombing the PlayStation app was all there to be seen. They finally broke their silence promoting their new fight stick, continuing to ignore the masses. Evidently, everyone's complaints fell on deaf ears.

1:02:57Dustin Furman:Is there truly no recourse for the PlayStation community? It's disheartening to see PR boiled down to arguing with a brick wall. Not to advocate for it, but would a repeat of the 2011 PSN hack be enough to show them that their proposed fully digital infrastructure is unreliable. Take care and have a lovely day. I mean, maybe it would, it would require that where you were, what do you think about all this? Like, what did you expect was going to happen? And what, like, what was your feeling about it? Because I felt like Like we said, like they war gamed this. They're not stupid. Yeah, they didn't think like they published these things.

1:03:33By the way, I think it's brilliant PR.

1:03:36Dustin Furman:I'm not saying I support it, but they did two really smart things. They announced it during the fourth, like right before the fourth of July. And like right at the beginning of the fiscal or the fiscal quarter for them. And they they bury the PS3 and Vita shit in it. Like so like they do these two different posts and like you really only be mad about one thing at a time. So they're like, oh, we'll get this one by the goalie for sure. So so that's like no one's even talking about that. So from a PR perspective, it's like. Not bad, I think that from the from the PR angle, the other PR angle, though, is they didn't they didn't want to do this around PS6 and they're going to have to.

1:04:11Dustin Furman:So. They're in a little bit of a tight spot because of that. But what are your what are your overall thoughts a week out? Yeah, I mean, I didn't expect them to reverse course necessarily. I think they've wanted to be digital for a long time. that's obviously true the math of it is obvious as well to anybody who pays attention so I understand I still think I still think it's a mistake to not consider the fact that there is a boutique market that would pay more for this kind of thing I think that's like something that in my opinion should be considered but I didn't expect them to reverse course like I think we mentioned it last time where like they can't set the precedent that every time there's a big uh uproar about a decision that they make that they just kind of cave because they did that with the ps3 store last time right um and probably other times too as well that i that i'm not thinking of and so like this was this is clearly a not not a random decision this is clearly a set up decision for the next generation the next generation probably won't have discs it probably has something to do with the handheld capability that we know about but they can't really publicly address um and so yeah i'm not surprised that they just stayed silent and then just tweeted about a fight stick you know it's better uh it's better for them to not have to explain it i guess uh but i i do look at this in the in the context of like man you've got such people are not people are not hungry for this next machine uh people are not wanting for this next machine now you've kind of made yourself a target for the loudest the loudest consumers on on the internet which as we've seen isn't not effective in you know affecting trajectories and all that kind of thing and the thing to me is just like man you made yourself a target at a time where like it's very clear by the way that the playstation network is deeply insecure so like my my my wonder or my curiosity now is like is there going to be an example made like is there is the retaliation to this the fact that there is no addressing the situation the fact that there is no reversal of course is this going to make it more enticing for like you know keyboard wizards and like hackers to kind of like fuck with the PSN in ways that they know that they clearly can um it's possible um I don't I don't know man this it's a it's a bad situation uh none of this is surprising though to me yeah it's uh I'm I didn't know what they were gonna do I I my gut feeling as I said was that the play state there is nothing to do with the PlayStation 6 like there's it is what it is and that is not going to change my feeling was I was like I wonder if they're just like all right well just the PS5 I just thought it would be an interesting it might even been like it might have been engineered as like an intentional like say like fail safe of like what we were saying with PS3 and Vita I said this last week like PSP was also shut down at that time but they still shut it down they just were like all right we'll give you ps3 invita we're not going to shut the psp down i was wondering if they were going to pull a similar move here where they're like all right we'll just keep they can't say anything about ps6 yet but they'll say like we'll keep the ps5 manufacturing going beyond january 2028 and that would kind of be a win for them maybe they can get ps4 off the board and then the problem is like i don't think from a pr perspective their strategy totally worked for them because i think i think it was like a partial victory they're still i believe 100 % the reason they are saying this now is to clear the deck for PlayStation six so that when it is announced, you know that it is a digital machine and they don't have to explain that.

1:08:17Dustin Furman:They will explain it, but it will not be a surprise to you. It could not possibly be a surprise to you. And I think that was the entire reason that they're doing this now because they really didn't have to do it now. They could have done it then, but then I think this would have happened and it would have been way worse. And all of this happening around the launch of your machine, it would have been an Xbox one type moment for them and the problem is is that I don't think they've blunted that blade right it's not as sharp anymore but they didn't break it like they're going to have to deal with with it again because I think there's going even if they don't say anything about reversing course with PS5 there's going to be this hope I think that when they announce it it'll have a disk drive and do all these things and I'm like I think you should dissuade yourself of that like i i think that yeah this all is for that and the only thing that can really be turned around is what happens on ps5 and because ps5 will get games i believe until the mid until the early and maybe even mid 2030s i mean if it goes if it goes into if it responds like the ps4 does you'll get games into the early 2030s no problem yeah i know people are saying it's an xbox one slash xbox 360 we have a machine for people i understand it comes off like that but i think it's a little different for for microsoft or sony to just say like and this is where ps6 comes in and like how you have to sell it and you can't really undersell it right because really the answer is like guys listen all the games are going to be on ps5 we can't tell you that yet right that's true like like so just don't buy the new hardware you're not going to be missing almost anything you'll just be playing maybe worse versions of some of the games at some point but you can still get if what if physical games are what is important to you you can still get them here, but they can't say any of that.

1:10:00Dustin Furman:So from a PR and communication standpoint, they're kind of bound. And so I think it's an incomplete victory for them. And that's why I was wondering if there would be any way for them to wiggle out of it. But as we, I mean, I'll add this because I was going to talk about it a little later, but Sony has indeed already started repurposing their factory that makes the discs. There's a German website. Obviously, as I've said before, discs are made in Austria for Sony. And this German language website says Salzburg, ORF.AT. Sony will rely on micro optics in the future. The Japanese corporation Sony plans to offer an all new console game exclusively online in the future.

1:10:46Dustin Furman:The elimination of storage media, such as compact disks, necessitates major restructuring of central production at the Sony plant in their town. I the number of employees is expected to remain unchanged. 600 ,000 discs still roll off the assembly line at Sony's Thalgao plant every day. From 2028 onwards, this number is expected to decrease significantly as new PlayStation games will no longer be released on disc. The company's decision will have direct impact on production at Thalgao. And they say that PlayStation currently accounts for 50 % of the volume of their Sony plant publishing. So everything else would be Blu-ray, presumably.

1:11:24Dustin Furman:And of that, approximately 20 % are new orders. So that's interesting. So only 20 % of the discs they're publishing for PlayStation right now are new. So they're filling back. 80 % is backorder filling. We are talking about roughly 10 % of the volume in 2028. So the volume will go from 600 ,000 down to 60 ,000 a day in backorder publishing. And they write here that 300 employees are being retrained and that they've already invested 30 million euro in the project at Sony and that they're already on their way to the micro optics thing. So there's nothing. So it seems like they're going to be able to make discs.

1:12:00Dustin Furman:And this is what I believe was reported by Steven Totillo last week. And it's a thing that I'm not even, again, I can't cross the wires between Last Stand and Lillimo. Like there are things that we are privy to at Lillimo that I can't talk about. They're not major secrets about anything, but we sign NDAs to have access to the PlayStation suite of development software and they communicate with you through those things to the developers. Things leak from there. I'm not going to be the one to leak them, but I've not read anything or seen anything about any of this. But apparently someone leaked something to Steven Totillo where they have been communicating behind the scenes to developers saying like, you can still publish your games that have already been on disk.

1:12:39Dustin Furman:Basically, certification will stop, but you can just republish discs and they're saying they'll have a capacity of 60 ,000 a day it's not very much but you'll have some sort of option they didn't say that immediately which is a little weird um but they let everyone else know that which I think is relatively important but it just seems like the jig is up like it's yeah I I don't know that and I think this is why it's like yeah we don't even have the production capacity to support new games anymore at 60 ,000 a day. And that's just for the discs. That's not casing them or anything like that. Steven Totillo also reported though, Chris, and this is where I think things get a little weird, is like you will apparently still be able to put your game in a case.

1:13:24Well, you'll still be able to have a game case in 2028 and beyond

1:13:28Dustin Furman:with a code in it. And I'm like, okay. And you could sell that at retail. That's apparently what's going to happen if you want to do that. So like something to give to someone or whatever. And I'm like, that's so weird because that doesn't get rid of the cost constraints that I thought would have been at the center of this. In other words, was Sony doing this to repurpose this factory or were they doing it to save money on physical goods? Because they're still, they're not making the disc anymore. That's true. Nothing to certify. It's a little bit cheaper, but they still have retailers to split the money with.

1:14:02Dustin Furman:They still have to ship this cases. they still and i'm like so this doesn't really it's kind of confusing as i'm like this doesn't really ameliorate your problem if you're trying to like create better better um splits for yourself on your games you're still playing ball with the manufacturers but not giving them the discs it seems the only logical conclusion i can draw is that they're they're sabotaging it intentionally they're like we know no one's gonna want this like this is nonsense and so we hope that we'll just be out of this completely by 20 yeah you know it's like a weaning kind of move right where it's just like oh okay well now it's it was the games it was the it was the the game case the disc and the instruction manual then it was no instruction manual now it's no disc and eventually it'll be no nothing um it is a very odd choice i get it from like some it's so funny because like I'm such a weird customer in the sense that I like the idea of having a case.

1:15:00I used to make, when I was a kid, there were games on Xbox Live Arcade that would come out that they wouldn't have discs for. They were like some of Arcade XBLA games. And I would make my own cases for them. I can't remember if it was Staples or something, but I would print something out and I would make a case for it because I liked to know what I had. And having it on a shelf. and that was kind of fun. So even though like it was kind of ridiculous, it is kind of nice to be able to have that option. But ultimately, I think most people are going to look at that and they're going to be like, this is dumb.

1:15:36I'm just going to download this from the comfort of my living room or from the comfort of my bedroom or wherever your console is. They're not going to spend that money at retailers. They can still have the face of goodwill of like playing nice with retailers. maybe maybe actually i wonder if this has anything to do with it is do they feel like they have to play nice with retailers because ultimately right now still retailers are the way to get your machine out yeah presume and that's what i assume is that yeah they want to play somewhat nice but

1:16:08Dustin Furman:at the same time chris it's like i feel like sony's flipped the script where it's like they have the leverage in this regard it's like you're not going to sell the playstation seems like you're hurting yourself more than us you know um sure well maybe yeah yeah i'm i'm thinking about like what the next machine is like the the reputation of that this next machine kind of already has fairly or unfairly um and i wonder if that's maybe not the leveraging tool that they maybe think it is surely it is like surely there's going to be inertia and it's all and it's also going to be the only real thing available like that's like the switch 2 is already out helix like god knows what the hell's going on over there so it really is going to be the de facto console so they they do have leverage i'm just like i'm i'm wondering like what the if they're still going to do the cases the only rational reason why they would do that is to just kind of toss a bone into the you're basically like throwing something out to die on purpose because no one's gonna buy those yeah i i don't i don't again you can't learn anything from grand theft auto 5 doing it it's like it's or six it's it's a uh we'll see we'll see i i that i'm really confused by that because i thought they were going to do more of like a nintendo like nintendo has the little cards that they sell like and you go to target and you like go through them or whatever and they're like it's the same idea but they're just cheaper to manufacture they're probably really cheap to ship you can ship like so there's some cost savings there but really like as long as you have an interactive nexus with with retail you're still losing money it's just it's just weird that it's like a half effort but doesn't really make any sense when you look under the hood it's like yeah but you're not the the cost savings wasn't in the disc manufacturer it was in splitting it with them in other words you should have just done what my suggestion was last week which is to say like we'll make the discs and we'll sell them yeah yeah and that way like playstation direct or something right exactly yeah and then the biggest cut of all that is the retailer stuff the second biggest cut is the shipping and all that and it's like well you just cut all that out and then and people wouldn't like that it would have been monopolistic in a way but it would have been an option i that's right chris that remains the thing i'm most flummoxed about is just like they didn't seem to explore any of these options where they could have squeezed money out of people or neutralize the cost then again when you look at the numbers it's like yeah we were saying a ten dollar increase for games at retail it's like really to make it worth their while it would have to be something like a thirty dollar increase that's that's the crazy thing and that's the thing i don't think did physical customers understand or appreciate and i i think they have to think about it from a numeric standpoint it's like you're kind of worth like half as much as a digital customer sadly like you have to buy twice as much product to make to for them to make the same amount of money.

1:19:01The thing though, is that like, if you built, if you had these physical cases and these physical games ship with some of the, some of the things that we used to have, I could see people spending that money. Definitely not at the same scale. Like people are, people are definitely going to default to the digital if they see like, okay, this is$80. This is 110. You know what I mean? They're definitely going to go for the digital but not always and at the very least in those minimum cases if you can make more money and kind of you know give people like a physical again like i think i mentioned it last time but just like make it make it a sort of pseudo collector's edition type deal where it's just like you're really paying for the fact that you can hold it and you're really paying for the fact that you have something physical to own and display and it's got a map or like or like you know codex like i don't know what the hell i don't know whatever you're gonna put in it but just having a product in general.

1:19:57I think people would pay, people pay like 200 bucks for like a statue that probably costs like 30 bucks to manufacture. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like I think, I don't know. And maybe that would have been a PR nightmare as well, but like I don't think it would have been the same, you know, because it would have still been the options there, which is ultimately the big issue here is that like the options going away.

1:20:22sorry i lost you for a second you didn't oh what did i like cut out yeah but i think if it's it's

1:20:28Dustin Furman:recorded natively on your side so i think we're fine i'll just make sure we uh yeah have a time okay okay um chris the next inquiry comes from i got a hernia holst in my mat booty it says hello gentlemen have you been surprised by the sheer amount of vitriol hurled at sony over abandoning physical disks. I know a lot of this is just the Twitter echo chamber, but it reads to me that people are upset about larger issues. They're fed up with a lackluster console generation, and if I may zoom out even further, fed up with the current economic condition. Could this just be the straw that broke the camel's back?

1:20:58Dustin Furman:Thanks, and make sure to digitize that chicken before it's too late. Thank you for writing in. I am not surprised by the vitriol because I think you have nailed exactly what is really at play here. The data speaks for itself. physical gamers are a vanishing minority of players on PlayStation. They make a lot of noise like a lot of small groups of people can, and they can affect change. And I'm not saying you're wrong for doing it. I'm not making fun of you. I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm not saying you did anything to be ashamed of. But I do believe that there is more to this than that. And it is what I have been describing about goodwill or what I would call political capital, where it's like Sony is shot right now.

1:21:42like they are they are i don't know if they understand what's happening to their brand and i don't know that it will really matter to them if they are truly money focused be all end all with no other consideration but they are pissing their fan base off and their fan base is different than their customers if that makes any sense a customer might own a playstation

1:22:11Dustin Furman:buy a few games a year, play Fortnite and play FC and some of this free to play stuff and dick around with their friends and they make a little bit of money off them and the Sony's happy to have them. But you are fan base. We're your fan base, right? People like us. I'm not particularly mad at Sony over this, but I know a lot of people are right. You they we might not constitute a majority of your players, but there's a significant amount of capital wrapped up in people like this. and even if a physical as i described a physical a physical purchaser of games is about half as important as sony as a digital purchaser of games right now even so i don't know why you would spurn them they're the people that make up like the the toughest concrete of your foundation and you build on them and without them you have a transient player base this is why i say over and over and over and over and over again and people just discounted it's like sony is so vulnerable because they don't own any of this shit.

1:23:11So they have to take care of the foundation to draw people

1:23:15Dustin Furman:gravitationally towards their platform. And that doesn't happen with casual drive-by players. It happens with people like us. And I'm not saying you should use that to your advantage or not as a player. What I'm saying is, is that I remain flummoxed why they would do this to physical players on PS5. I want to be clear about that. I'm not particularly mad about the PS6 situation being all digital. That's fine with me personally. But just like cutting off all of those people, all of their goodwill, their ability to interact and transact with you, knowing I think from Sony's perspective, and I hate to say this, Chris, but like you would have to imagine they war playing this from every angle.

1:24:01They're like, they really have nowhere to go. Right? Like, the only other manufacturer of physical games is Nintendo. They're used to a different, PlayStation players are used

1:24:14Dustin Furman:to a different standard of fidelity. Xbox is done. By the way, I saw Kind of Funny did reporting on this where it's like, Xbox isn't going to manufacture discs. Yeah. Like, they don't want to make, no one wants, that's the thing that I think that physical gamers have to understand and what they're fighting against. is this idea that it's like no one wants this except for you. You are a really important component of it, but you have no friends on the inside, right? So it's an overall tough situation, and I think a lot of it goes into Sony burning its goodwill. If Sony had a robust... Let me back up, because I want to be clear.

1:24:54Dustin Furman:I don't really give a shit about this stuff personally, what I'm about to say, because I've always been a third-party player of games, first and foremost, my entire life. I think people have to understand you all have been. But nonetheless, from an optics standpoint, Sony has really no PlayStation games anymore, right? Like you had Ghost of Yotei and Saros in the last calendar year. You have Tokan and Wolverine coming up, God of War, probably Q1, Q2. It's fine, but it's not what people want. It's not the volume that people want. It's not the distinct nature of PlayStation that people want. they're losing on that front to like they're losing people on that front and then the pricing situation which is out of sony's hands and i think people have to kind of just understand that and i understand that and you understand that i think most of the audience understands that but it sucks and it pisses people off then you have things like the grand theft auto thing with like the digital code only and it seems like a lot of chip damage and chinks in the armor and i think people are just tired of it so when they plunge into the water the water's flooding through all the fucking chinks in the armor you gotta stop saying you gotta stop saying chinks oh like like what is fine we would do in rapid succession it's kind of crazy i know what you're saying though i think yeah man i don't know i i this uh the uh look i i where do we even begin man like i i i get it is the chip damage it is it is the the the little the thousand lashes like the death of a thousand cuts kind of thing and it it builds up over time and you know it it's bad news it's funny bad news can be bad news even if it doesn't necessarily affect you it's it's the same thing with like uh you know them kind of tampering down on the pc stuff it's like that's technically bad news for consumers you know what i mean like it's not good i don't feel any kind of way about it necessarily but like i'm not left with like an elated feeling you know what i mean i'm not like oh yay it's just kind of like okay that's happening and then there's the the general kind of feeling that like your digital ecosystem is not that respected it kind of goes away there's something that uh that we're going to talk about later on about like a wording in a specific eula that is that is particularly interesting but like i really do think it's it's the chip damage over this generation everything that you said the fact that there There is no real meaningfully distinct or culturally relevant, I should say, like first party posture.

1:27:27But then even beyond that, like we're all living in the same world. You know, Sony, it's expensive for Sony to do all this. It's expensive for all of us to exist at this very moment. There are economic realities to this. and when it's when everything everything is becoming like you don't really own any of this that adds up over time like it adds it when you get when you buy a car that has seat warmers in and you got to pay a subscription fee to fucking unlock the seat warmers that are there it's psychotic yeah it is it's not normal it's not this is it's not good none of this it's crazy i think it's like mentally really negative for like generally like the populace and so when something like this happens that's a big blow to something that a lot of us are nostalgic over um that's a it is a straw breaking the camel's back kind of thing it's like man even my even the thing that i used to escape all this shit is now just now it's just ethereal and it's not it's not mine now it's extra not mine because i don't even have the option to have a disc even if a disc is like half the game like that like the first couple a couple prints of a spyro um reignited trilogy like how like i think the first wave didn't have two or three in them right right like they weren't even on the disc yeah right but like even even in that scenario where it's like and even i would imagine like when ps6 comes out if there were to be discs like you'd probably get a similar situation where it's like what could possibly fit on a on a blu-ray from p from a ps6 game if there has been no meaningful evolution of of the technology that goes into the formats Remember, we went from cartridges to compact discs to DVD-ROMs to Blu-ray to 4K Blu-ray.

1:29:14But since 4K Blu-ray, there hasn't really been an evolution or an advancement of that technology to keep up with what the software that we would print on it would demand. Because there is no demand to invest in the consistent improvement of that technology. So that's another factor. I'm almost wondering like I wonder if that's even part of it maybe I'm talking on my ass it's no I

1:29:36Dustin Furman:it would be relevant I think you're absolutely right Chris and I think it goes even a step further than what you're saying which is like who is the company that does that research yeah so yeah exactly yeah right um like that's that's the that I think is the biggest that's the canary of all canaries really where it's like they own like they are part of the major consortium that that gets a licensure on on blu-ray discs they're they're the ones that benefit from every blu-ray that's sold like right i'm pretty sure microsoft pays sony a small stipend for every xbox series console because of that so it's like they're the ones telling you like ah now is that so because look what happens with sony and their tvs and bravia right and how they've spun that off to tcmc or whatever the fuck that company's called sure it's like is it is this them just saying like we are an entertainment company now part of me feels like it's like well they've been an entertainment company for a long time but part of me is also like nah not really you're doing optical lenses in the same factory like you can't kind of have your cake and eat it too are you the entertainment company are you an electronics company are you both the one thing i mean if you follow obsolete sony the wonderful twitter account you know this full well is like sony's heritage in electronics is deep and meaningful and beautiful They used to do crazy shit, amazing things.

1:30:58Dustin Furman:And it's a shame that it's no longer profitable for them. And it's why I always give them their flowers on realizing this really early. Before PlayStation. They realize we might have a problem in the future. And so they got heavily invested first in music. Then they get heavily invested in movies. Then they get heavily invested in the 90s in games. And look at them now. I think something like 70 something percent of their business is entertainment. Yeah, if you if you consider music and film as well, so and TV, of course, so. It's funny, though, man, I was going to bring this up later, but you're talking about what you were bringing up about the digital stuff.

1:31:37About ownership, this is everything. I think this is the whole ballgame.

1:31:43Dustin Furman:And the drunken merchant wrote in, said, hey, CC, who cares how much money Sony is burning, keeping old stores open and our digital purchases available our whole lives? Digital ecosystems have made big corporals like Sony very successful without actual physical goods. I find it to be the company's fault for lacking the foresight that a customer should always have access to a non-physical good, regardless of how old or outdated a machine is. Physical things can burn in a fire. I thought the benefit of digital libraries is that they'll always be there throughout the years. Maybe Sony should instead cut a couple million dollars from designing a random NPC's face pores to assure we can keep the things we buy.

1:32:18Dustin Furman:can any company ever ever do anything good for the customer instead of scraping off all the neat benefits until they become a sterile husk of something that used to be dope as hell i'll hang myself a picture of me hanging myself while hanging a picture of me hanging myself and listen that's very deep yeah chris this is the whole ball game in my opinion it's that everything rides on this i disagree with something drunken merchant said and i agree with a major part of what he said. I don't blame companies like Sony and every other company for not understanding where things were going while things were going there.

1:32:54Dustin Furman:So for instance, we make fun of, as we have many times, the Wii virtual console in which you would buy games that would be attached to the Wii and you had no option of redownloading it. If you deleted it, it was gone forever. If that Wii went away, you wouldn't have access to it. There was no account. it seems insane but like it actually we all knew it kind of sucked back then we were like and then we just bought virtual console games by the fucking hundreds of millions of dollars right i feel like it's i always bring up wonder years or the 90210 recently about these shows that were altered or whatever because of their music tracks and like people just didn't know like you have to understand like wonder years comes out in 1988 or 89 they're and they're like what about physical home media?

1:33:38Dustin Furman:And they're like, wonder years on DHS? Like, what the fuck are you talking? Like, anyway, can we sign the documents? You know? And then you get to DVD and then it becomes practical and then TV shows start appearing on these things and then you realize you didn't have your T's crossed and your I's dotted. Like, I kind of forgive that personally. I understand that people have different opinions on that, but I don't think anyone really understood what was going on at that time. We're not there anymore. Right. We've now known, I would say with certitude for 20 years since the since the since Xbox Live, not even the original Xbox Xbox Live, let's say Xbox 360's launch with a true digital ecosystem.

1:34:16Dustin Furman:Remember, you have to have a disc to buy games on Xbox Live, which is funny. So we've known for 20 years, 21 years, and it seems unforgivable that there is no solution from the companies. And we have to remember that sometimes the threat of government interference makes the industry act in a certain way. The ESRB is a great example of that. The government basically said, you either figure this out or we'll figure it out for you. That's the exact same threat that they gave to the movie industry in the 70s. It's where rated R and all that kind of stuff comes from. The ESRB spawns in the early to mid 90s out of a threat for the government to get involved.

1:34:53Dustin Furman:And I wonder if it's going to be there will require another threat for the consortium of hardware manufacturers to get together and say like, we can't do this to people's digital libraries anymore. And that in fact, because we have this fucking bullshit in our EULAs and all these things where we can pull plugs and ban you and allow your accounts to get stolen, all this bullshit, like, and we have no accountability for it. It undercuts our ability to go all digital, which behooves us. So in fact, you think it would benefit them to say like, yes, yes, we agree with you. Like you're absolutely right.

1:35:28Please buy digital games. Please buy them. We will do anything. We will promise you

1:35:33Dustin Furman:access and do all these things, but they don't. And so that's the biggest surprise to me, Chris, is that they make their jobs so much harder when really just a little bit of investment in the back end, in your security apparatus, in licensing, in doing all the hard work sets you up for a dominant digital future where no one is worried and no one gives a fuck. yeah but they won't do it so you can't have i said before you can having your cake and eating it too it all rides on this this is it and this is what i think we should be pushing for what do you think i think that's uh i think it was perfectly said i don't know if i feel like i would just be reiterating what you said i it's bad it's it really is insane that like we're at this point there's still no real good solutions because we again like you said we've just been in this we've been in this digital ecosystem for a long time now there's really no excuse

1:36:32yeah it's it's ridiculous it's like when like when these days when it's like oh the music license expired it's like what are you talking about

1:36:40Dustin Furman:yeah how'd you let that happen what do you mean or yeah like those kinds of things and again i have these novel ideas because it's it's what i said and it would be fun to really get deeper into this unsacred plus at some point with the appropriate cast or whatever is like like me and you and i don't know who hoag or i don't know some people where it's like the stop killing games movement like there are there are multiple achilles heels it's not even an achilles heel there are multiple of them there are multiple multiple weaknesses to this argument a lot of it comes from like the idea that things will exist infinitely because there'll be infinite money backing it.

1:37:16Dustin Furman:In other words, you have to start thinking about what it looks like if you really believe PlayStation can have perpetual licenses beyond their own corporate governance, where you would require, and this is where I was like, you got to get clever. Like, is there some sort of, is there some sort of escrow account that grows by enormous amounts of money where like pennies on every purchase go into it and if some company goes down there's like some way to save the digital goods like i don't even know like could you even promise such a thing in other words will the limit always be as long as we exist you'll have access to your games and if so is that good enough and to me i'm like yeah i mean i i don't think that that's crazy i just think it's crazy to say like um as long as we exist and also a b c d e f g h i j k it's like come on guys you know come on man it's too much so i really feel like if you want to solve this problem it starts and ends here actually ironically now the problem with this of course this is a problem for physical games lovers though This is kind of the little civil war going on, right?

1:38:40Little uprising is like if they solve this problem, it really is over for you because there really will be no excuse anymore. Right. The answer, the question is like, will they do it voluntarily? It seems unlikely. I'm not a guy who I think government should be used as brute force when necessary against corporations. They're here to serve us. You can't just rip us off. Right. Like it's like the FDA protected, protecting your drugs and your food and all this are like, it's like, yes, of course, I have no problem with that. I have no problem with like with with the government coming in and saying, listen.

1:39:19You can't just steal from your your your people anymore and your EULA doesn't protect you. Right. Like and you have 18 months to figure this out, whatever kind of thing, which is exactly what happened to the SRB back in the day. Good luck. we'll be back and then and then you come back and see and they'll fix that shit in two seconds yeah they'll re they'll redo all these fucking licenses and all these deals all these companies in two fucking minutes if if if any if any government that's what i'm saying it's the

1:39:50Dustin Furman:european commission in the european union that would be most likely to do this but it could be the congress of the united states or the ftc or something else up your ass and they don't want that so yeah i'm willing to say like yeah use the leverages of power leverage power to make this happen um it's it wouldn't be the first time true there is less of that now though there is because this what is it the uh the cfpb is gone that was gutted that was arguably the only really like good like objectively good government institution that never really missed as far as i as far as i was aware so like that government better business bureau it's interesting like i i don't i didn't really have a problem with it personally either you know it's like it was really good like i mean i know people who like personally were just like saved from like uh complete scams and shit like that so like i have a good opinion of that that place that thing's gone now so like there's just there's a lot more there's a lot i don't want to say a lot but there's definitely fewer guardrails uh now on this type of thing and it's easier for companies to do this kind of thing now uh we'll see i think uh there needs to be an answer there needs to be an answer to this because the real issue like like we said earlier is just this this ownership thing is uh it needs to be solved yeah you just have you just have to get clever and be explicit in what you like the the limit in which you can do something if sony's limit is like basically like listen like we can't this idea of a consortium and like and and money put away to like save the so it's like this is all insane it goes into the same thing as like games like the the state and that's why I always I always put them together as the stop killing games movement where it's like yeah what you're saying sounds nice but it's not practical like the idea that like a game just exists in perpetuity and it's like that doesn't really work it's and or like forced refunds for games that go bad it's like yeah that's a nice idea and that happens a lot but sometimes the company went bankrupt you know like like there are all these mitigating factors but it's like what is the limit that you can make this good for your audience how can and i i feel like this people talk a lot about the security of psn which i think is a big thing of course like what happened to me with account spoofing and all the rest this all is part of this all goes into the same these are salmon all swimming up the same stream right and and it's like yeah you gotta the ps6 is going to have an uphill battle regardless because of the economy and its price, no doubt.

1:42:22Dustin Furman:And PS5 kind of feeling fine for a lot of people and not wanting to move over. You have all these problems. The last thing you want is another front opened up on you in this war. And now it's going to be about your accounts. So it's like, you got to sort this out, man. Like you got to sort the security thing out. You got to sort the fucking ownership and the license stuff out. And I understand even if you can't renegotiate a lot of old stuff or things are what they are. But like moving forward, Like you just you can change at any moment. The status quo can change and you can do things a different way.

1:42:51Dustin Furman:And the further you go along with the old status quo. The more the bigger the problem is. I bring this up as not not something that will probably resonate with you, but I think about baseball, Major League Baseball. they've put off having a salary cap for so long for many many many years that now there's a major discrepancy between those who spend and those who don't and they want to introduce a salary cap and everyone's like a gas and there probably won't be baseball next year you know it's like because you fucking kicked the can down the road you just kicked the can down the road and now you have a big problem big problem foundational and fundamental to the way you do business and uh i hope i hope Sony understands this more than any other part of this.

1:43:35Dustin Furman:Ignore the physical games people if you want, but ignore them at your peril if you're not going to fix this. And by the way, if you fix this, you disable them. Right. You would think that this would be all part of the plan. You would think that it would be like a prime motivation. And maybe it is, and maybe they're not ready to talk about it and say, yeah, maybe PS6 is just a totally different thing that runs different and operates differently and there's nothing to worry about. but I'm like, nah, we've been here before. I've been, I've been covering him. Well, I've been playing on PlayStation since the beginning.

1:44:05Dustin Furman:I've been covering PlayStation for a very long time. You've never had a good reputation for technical fidelity on PSN. You've never had it like PSN has never been looked at as a respectable place. Comparable to its competition. Sony gets hacked regularly. It's like, as we've talked about from, from insomniac to Sony pictures to fucking a crunchy roll recently. Right. Not to mention what happened in 2011. It's like there's something wrong with your company. I hate to tell you. Like, there's something wrong with you guys. This doesn't happen to any of the other companies. Fix it. They're lucky 2011 happened and they were able to kind of get over that.

1:44:51Dustin Furman:Not because what happened itself was like this catastrophic thing. People getting their credit cards stolen and all that is scary. but it's like they had enough goodwill to overcome that sort of thing because yeah that's a company killer yeah and there wasn't this um front page of the internet kind of thing going on back then either like you had twitter but it was a lot smaller i remember when the 2011 thing happened like barely anybody on twitter was talking about it like ign was talking about it and things like that but like it wasn't like trending from what i remember no it wasn't like it was big in our circle this would this would absolutely break containment yeah all right let's see what else we have here luke nocton wrote in and said hey gents just writing in and looking for some thoughts from the experts can sony actually ride this bad press out or do they have to say something eventually surely they don't think this will go away it will seep into the comments of states of play trailers twitter posts and everything else and do you think it's fair to feel insulted as a consumer at this point or is it a Paris or is it parasocial to feel that way unlucky on the World Cup column you'll always have the Jets yeah great yeah I don't I have no emotional attachment to U.S.

1:46:01Dustin Furman:soccer I'm going to be honest with you I wanted us to win and of course but like they lost four to one to Belgium I'm like all right I'll think about soccer in four years yeah um but I'm glad that I mean it's it's been fun like the United States definitely is more enraptured with the World Cup than it's ever been in my lifetime. Anyway. All right. So is it parasocial to feel that way? No. Will they ride it out? This is an interesting question, Chris. Yeah. They.

1:46:32If the next time an executive from Sony is interviewed by anybody. If at the top of the question sheet isn't. What's going on with this? then you're in a real suspicious situation.

1:46:49Dustin Furman:They are, by virtue of having to communicate at some point, you assume, going to have to say something about this. And I wonder if they will use that opportunity, although they should have used the opportunity of announcing what was happening to do this, is to explain it in finer detail. Here's what's really happening. Here's what it looks like for us. Here are the numbers. Here are some interesting examples of games that are selling recently and how they excel digitally versus physical. Here's the complexity of making physical games. By the way, as we'll talk about a little later, our machine was hacked by virtue of a physical game.

1:47:22Dustin Furman:There are all these things that people might not consider when they think about them. They can't not talk about it at some point. Their option is literally to never say anything ever again. Or let's not even say that. Their option is to never talk to a journalist ever again. Or get ahead of it and say something before then. or ignore it, I guess. I will say that they seem fairly, it's fairly obvious to me that they, I think, are going to ride this out. And I think it is working. And I think that like, over the time, we'll erode this away to something much more manageable for them if they just, as the saying goes, post through it.

1:48:07Dustin Furman:And this might have been part of the whole strategy the entire time is like, we'll be quiet for a week, and then we got to get right back to it. And at first we'll get 50 ,000 comments and then we'll get 40 and then we'll get 35 and 30 and 20 and then 15 you know and then the the thumbs up we'll start getting you know the ratio will start getting better and better and better and that's probably what they're counting on um so yeah I think they can ride it out uh the some professionals think they are are riding it out I think I will say this Chris I think it gets less likely they do anything the more time goes at this point that they have to gain i mean i guess they would have to figure things out out behind the scenes but you would think you would be able to like for instance if you were like the ps5 manufacturer thing of like we'll proceed past january 2028 you think you would figure that out fairly quickly yeah so what what do you think they're riding it out i think they're gonna try i i'm not that convinced that it it will work necessarily like i i i think this is one of those rare instances is like I don't think Sony's really been in this situation before where they're in a uniquely they're in a dominant position in the sense that they are the de facto console they are also in a uniquely powerful position in the sense that I want to say powerful necessarily but like they're in a in a very relevant position in the sense that this generation has been broadly uninteresting and not worth the squeeze for a lot of people they're in the unique position of and by the way this is irrespective of like what we know to be true about like broad economic truths and like why certain decisions are made a lot of your your average person is going to see the playstation rise a hundred dollars two hundred dollars in price and think like well fuck this you know i mean they're not going to think deep deeper about it um and it's not really their responsibility to either um ps4 ps5 pro is at 900 uh probably i mean who knows but like maybe maybe potentially go up they're looking at this entire situation i think they're they're in a unique position now in comparison to any position they've been in before where they they're the guy on top and they've also got the most like the brightest weaknesses that i think they've really ever had at any given moment like at once like there's this ownership to issue there's the price in the machine there's the hunger for the next machine not even being close to what it should be by now there's the the broad feeling of disappointment that a lot of people have in the generation that they've currently delivered it's they've become a fun entity to attack in ways that prior to maybe the last of us two they weren't you know like there's like there's a target on them whether that's fair or not like i mean that's up to everybody that's up to any individual but like they're the punching bag now like xbox is also but like they're not even really like they're kind of like off on their like they're they're they're a mess like to the degree that we we show on xbox rightfully so it almost feels like we're doing it from the outside but this is from this is the inside man like this is the core pillar of what console games are right now at least like modern you know boutique console games so it's just like i'm not that convinced that they could just kind of ride this out because they're not really headed in a direction that looks particularly optimistic at least when the ps5 was coming out you know there was a hunger there you know there wasn't this their first party was firing in a way that was like satisfactory to a lot of people i actually found the ps4 generation to be kind of okay but like a lot of people love that generation that's not true for this yeah i agree and these long development times and these like these franchises going on and on and another god of war and like last of us remastered three parts two you know what i mean like it's it's memes and it's jokes but these memes and these jokes you know they they permeate popular culture and they do affect how people feel it's i don't know yeah it's uh i'm not as convinced but like uh you could be right though i mean ultimately like people do have short memories they well they do i mean i think it gets into this next inquiry i think we'll we'll be able to put a finer point on this avery ilius wrote in and said who is the most to blame for the current state of the games industry i argue it's primarily consumers to blame they accepted the inferior battle pass model they buy microtransactions out the wazoo and they buy games full price when they claim they will boycott i think that developers publishers and everyone else involved in the pipeline shares the blame but i'm curious where you guys land on this everyone can agree that in the industry is sour right now i learned this from you colin vote with your wallet i'm not a fan of the ps6 going disc lists but could it be as simple as not buying the rather unnecessary console to send a message this to me is a vital part of things to understand is that though i think physical enthusiasts are a minor a significant minority on PlayStation.

1:53:13In other words, they're not the majority of players. You're more than big enough to affect change. You can make Sony pay for this. It requires incredible discipline and a universality of your opinions that I don't think you guys share. You don't, like, by virtue of being millions of you, presumably, like spread out or whatever, each of you are going to have a different opinion on things, each of you are going to have a different feeling on how far you want to push it or whatever it's like but if you all cut playstation off they would feel it no doubt they are counting on this not happening i think and i think they're probably right i mean i hate to say it i think that you bring it up all the time chris the call of duty modern warfare um steam group right yeah and like how funny that image is of like all of them boycotting and then they're all playing it the day comes out it's like yeah i think that many of you won't be able to stay away from grand theft auto i think many of you won't be able to stay away from intergalactic

1:54:21Dustin Furman:i think many of you won't be able to stay away from wolverine i think many of you won't be able to stay away like i i and all the third-party stuff that you and you don't want to go buy a pc and you don't want to play an xbox you don't want to play it's like this is going to whittle your numbers down. But in a perfect world where you guys created like a Roman phalanx and you did what was necessary, you could hurt them. Would it work ultimately? Would they not recover? I don't know. But like if you disconnected your PS, if you canceled your PS Plus subscription by the millions, right? Cirque and Toto is saying, you know, 1 % of you canceling is 500 ,000 and that's not going to be enough but what if millions of people did it what if you all disconnected your your playstations and just didn't log in with them at all anymore removing their monthly active users by the millions which is like as we know the source of great pride at these companies and it's hard to report downages you know in those on your reporting like yeah we we are down five million if you didn't buy any games anymore canceled all your pre-orders i know some of you are doing this and you have to act on your own volition and speak to your own principles right i mean i think we all understand that to me i i feel like on the individual level there's more than enough furor and more than enough discipline but can it be put together to make a true consumer movement and it would have to be a true consumer movement of millions of you not millions of casual drive-by PlayStation consumers or whatever like enthusiasts but I think that it's possible I just think it's highly unlikely and that's what breaks all boycotts and what makes boycotts that even seem kind of meaningful and powerful I think Hogwarts Legacy is a good one like Hogwarts Legacy had there were entire major websites and YouTube channels that refuse to even acknowledge it at all there were there were people up the wazoo saying we're not buying it and it's so it's sold like tens of millions of copies sometimes things just it's just out of your hands and you the the tough thing about boycotts chris is like you can't bend everyone to your will you'll have like different spectra of supporters like i support the physical of games people doing what they want.

1:56:51I hope you win. Doesn't affect me at all. But I'm not going to I'm also as a PlayStation player, not going to change my behavior to make it happen. Right? I'm not. I'm one of those. I'm one of those people. That's like, yeah, I'm with you, but I'm

1:57:07Dustin Furman:not going to do anything about it. You need people that are not me. You need people that are going to stand in solidarity with you. And that's each other. So that's the tough part about and you said is this is it you know is it as simple as not buying the next console yeah it's not only as simple as not buying the next console it's as simple as stop using the current console well that's kind of the thing if you're really that enthousy you know if you're if you're that you know anyway i'm sorry good well i was gonna say like the next console i mean let's be real it's gonna be very easy to boycott the next console because it's gonna be over a thousand dollars you can boycott it right it'll be very easy the issue is ultimately like i mean it's important for the next console to sell well obviously but we've known for a long time and especially now where there's like multiple concurrent generations operating in tandem with one another like the the big the money's really in the software and and the the subscription services and the the active player bases and all that stuff like that's where the money is it's less so like so even boycott even boycotting the next console which i would imagine is probably going to be more likely now than ever just because cost is prohibitive and also just there's not really a hunger um not necessarily fair because we haven't seen it like maybe that hunger will appear in fact i'm sure it will to some for some people but like even the most effective most likely boycott of the next machine out of sheer cost prohibitance like that's like ultimately like That's not really going to do anything to the degree that it should, because ultimately, even the first wave of sales for those machines are always going to be enthusiasts who are going to jump on anything no matter what.

1:58:52And if you're just going to stay on your PS5 to show them, well, I'm not really interested. Well, it's just like, well, they're still getting your money, though, because you're on PS Plus.

1:59:00Dustin Furman:Yeah, arguably they're passively getting your money and they might even subsidize new console, meaning you're saving them money. Yeah, you have to bounce out a PlayStation. you got to disconnect entirely you got to go to pc or something yeah 100 percent um uh but i don't know that's that's a tall ask it's a tall order especially if for people who have built their entire ecosystem on places yeah i think you're right chris like there's a um i really can't intellectually disagree with the argument that all things being equal p pc is the best place for you to be in this new world like yeah if you could if you're like a fresh you know bright-eyed doe coming to games for the first time right and it's like where do i go and what do i do it's like oh you don't know you don't really want to come here you want to go like go there it makes more sense for you to go there i love it here i think it's very nice here but I've been here for a long time.

2:00:01I'm quite comfortable here, you know, and I think that it is a lot to end this again in this price constraint. Sony will always win the price argument always. They will never not win it. It's a simple law of economy of scale. That's it, period. Whatever the comparable PC is will be cheaper for Sony to make. As a PlayStation. And they'll always have that argument. So you're asking people to like, yeah spend more and go to these other places or whatever and it's gonna be tough but this is what i was getting to with avery's inquiry is like boycotts are serious sony runs on high single digit low double digit margins it's not great just a little bit of a tweak to that can send this thing going into a bad way.

2:00:52And I think any large group of people have the potential to do that to them.

2:00:59Dustin Furman:And that's true, not of Sony uniquely. It's true of any brand, but you have to, it's what I was saying earlier. It's like when what happened to my account happened, what I didn't ask anyone was to do anything about it because I understood it was like, I have to find my people, like the like-minded people that are in this and like learn more about it and kind of congeal with them and all the rest. And you have to look at it the same way. Like you have a friend in me. But it's like I'm playing Grand Theft Auto. I'm going to play Wolverine. I'm buying all these different games. I can only help you so much.

2:01:35I hope you guys stay strong and understand what it takes if you really, really care about

2:01:40Dustin Furman:this to solve it. But I also understand that it seems probably fairly hopeless at the same time. And I'm sorry about that. Thank you. Yeah. Let's see. Oh, the ambiguously gay duo wrote in. You remember the ambiguously gay duo? Yeah. I love that. It was an SNL skit. It's like a cartoon. Hi, CNC. I can't. It was SNL, right? Yeah, I think so. Hi, CNC. I can't help thinking that Sony's announcement to discontinue physical discs would have gone over better if only they gave a longer runway for the transition to all digital. They should have announced this at the time of the PS6 reveal and stated that this generation, the PS6 generation, will be the last to have a disk drive.

2:02:17Dustin Furman:In addition, they could have announced that going forward, the official PlayStation store will be the only place to buy physical discs for PS6. This way, they give plenty of notice to affected gamers and retain full control of the retail sales that they so desperately desire. Thanks for reading. And please tell AI Dustin that he's doing a great job. Thank you for writing in. I would agree with you only if the PS6 had a disk drive, but I'm not entirely sure they're making... This is where I think I might. Some people don't are going to disagree with me. It's like, I'm not entirely sure them not putting a disk drive on the PS6 as an option is even that like.

2:02:50Based on the interoperability of the handheld and the and the and the console, it's like kind of makes sense. You might not like it. But this stops them from having to explain why your physical PS6 game doesn't work on your handheld. Instead, they're just like there is no physical PS6 game. Yeah. So because of that, so like in your reality where the PS6 had a disk drive, which would be cool.

2:03:15Dustin Furman:Not something I want, but it's like whatever. Then, yeah, you're right. Then there would be no reason to say anything at all to anyone. And I would agree with you. But based on what we think we understand about what this means for PS6, this is the only option. And that's why I was saying earlier, it's an incomplete victory. It kind of sucks for them. They're like, yeah, like we got to we drew a little blood and. We didn't lose. but like we got a fight again it was just a skirmish and it's like yeah that sucks because i'm telling you i don't know anything like i haven't talked to anyone about this i'm just telling you they did this for the ps they did this so they didn't have to do that 100 there is could you imagine the nuclear fallout of the playstation 6 announcement in which they're like oh uh it's digital it would be bad yeah instead they basically really insinuated to anyone with two eyes and a brain cell and so like when they say it they'll be like yeah you know this already though you knew it in your heart and and but but i think it's just going to be like this again yeah what they could now the funnier thing this would be cutting off your nose to spite your face this would be fucking so stupid but like because if they have a solution they should just say it now but it would be funny if they like waited until the ps6 was announced and we're like, yeah, we're just going to keep making discs after all.

2:04:34Dustin Furman:Here's the disc drive for PS6. And by that point, hundreds of thousands of people have bailed out and sold their consoles and like fucking sworn off the brand or whatever. I just don't think that's going to happen. But that would be a pretty cool thing for them to do should they want to turn it around. But I just don't think they're going to. Yeah. All right, let's see. The acute cinephile wrote in and said, hey, CCD, hope you're all well. One angle of Sony killing physical media that hasn't gotten enough airtime. Growth outside their established markets. Whatever you think of the move for existing PlayStation owners, how does Sony attract new audiences from regions without great internet infrastructure?

2:05:08Dustin Furman:And then there's populous countries like India. I'm Indian, and while the country actually has decent internet penetration for its size, console gaming there thrives on the used game market because of lower purchasing power and how expensive new titles are relative to local incomes. Secondhand discs are what keeps consoles viable for a huge chunk of that audience. Now that's effectively done for. Sony can keep extracting more revenue per user from their customers if it already has, but if the door where do these markets is closed? Where does the actual growth come from? The strategy hits the ceiling at some point, does it not?

2:05:36Dustin Furman:Curious to hear your thoughts, wishing you all the very best. This gets a little bit, Chris, into something we're going to talk about later with Marvel Tocan. Because the one thing that people lose sight of with PlayStation is that they don't really do business in a lot of the world. Like, they're available in quotes, like almost anywhere, but like, you're like using VPNs and proxy servers and like attaching yourself to foreign PSNs because like, they're really only operating out of like 40 or 50 places and right should they want to spread the field yes but my theory on this especially with india like they've been very aggressive in china i mean they have a huge presence in china now but like you would assume that they're a business so like if it's like oh we can do we should really open a local shop in ghana and like have like an office of like 20 people and like get the shit out there like they would do that if they can make money on it um you're bringing up i understand what you're saying about india and i think it's kind of a double-edged sword because at one point you're talking about console permeate permeation which is important but then you're talking about used games and it's like this is exactly the problem right like i like like unfortunately like used games that right now like for ps6 for instance their sony is like used games like we don't have to worry about that that's done you know um they hate used games.

2:06:53They hate used games. This is one of the things I'm saying about Chris too about

2:06:56Dustin Furman:like and I'm not saying he's even part of this group like people that want to affect change. It's like you gotta get your talking points down. And the used game thing might speak to each other. But that's not that's like they've been fighting against used games forever. Nintendo sued Blockbuster in the 80s. Don't you understand that these companies have hated this shit? forever. The online pass. The whole idea of DLC comes from like, it literally has been adopted to the degree it has been to stop you from selling things. So I just think the used game thing is, but on the other hand, what you're saying is true in that they're playing it on a PlayStation.

2:07:45Dustin Furman:The answer though is like, does that have real value to Sony? You buying the console, maybe interacting with a little bit and then buying all the games used. It's like, I don't know that they care if they're going to have you or not. And that's that's kind of a shitty thing. But I think it's kind of. True. Yeah, where their heads are at. Yeah, it's undoubtedly true. I mean, you're not really from their perspective, you're not contributing to the to the overall economy of the ecosystem. So. You might as well just not have a PlayStation as far as as far as they're probably concerned. it's uh i made the argument about the internet stuff last week where i just haven't really zero tolerance for the internet and stuff not because people don't have the internet but it's like if you're going to spend a thousand dollars on a console and have a 4k tv buy the internet yeah it's kind of like that that's more the argument i'm making by the internet do that first you need that more than the ps6 you're not going to put on the internet for some reason i don't know what you think you're going to do with it but um but the the locality thing is more interesting from a pricing structure and from like a a penetration point of view about like well playstation really doesn't have a presence in a lot of these places anyway and they do seem interested in breaking india open but you could look at it as like maybe they're just interested in breaking india open for its developers I think that would be kind of stupid.

2:09:13That's like half the battle. But I don't know. We'll see what happens, I suppose. Christopher Stewart wrote in and said, hey, CC. And when we need it most, D. No, not this week. I think Sony's decision to skip physical media with PS6 is a two part decision, wherein

2:09:30Dustin Furman:the first decision necessitated the second. Every generation, Sony makes a renewed attempt to protect the hardware from jailbreakers. Every generation, Sony loses. This generation, the PS5 wasn't jailbroken through the PSN or by trying to alter the hardware directly. It was jailbroken through physical media. As you've mentioned many times, Colin, PlayStation has become too important to Sony to take any risks with. It would be a risk to allow any data from physical media to come into contact with the PS6. All data must come from Sony and PSN directly, no exceptions. Perhaps someone will be able to still jailbreak an offline PS6 using game data.

2:09:59Dustin Furman:The difference is this time that game data can't be transferred between consoles. It can only be downloaded until Sony catches wind of things. Jailbroken PS6s will be like PT, only accessible to those who downloaded it while it was available. Decision one, no data on disks. Sony could still sell disks that act as game key cards like Nintendo, but as you've already articulated, to what end? To lose money to secondhand resale? To deal with an entire generation of whining, people constantly complaining, if I can have the disk, why can't I have the data? No. Best to take all the heat at once and let the situation blow over.

2:10:30Dustin Furman:This isn't about whether Sony could make more money selling physical media. It's definitely not about customer satisfaction. It's about Sony's unwillingness to relinquish any inch of control over their ecosystem. And because it's so it's about control and security, I expect Sony will say as little as possible about this. Talking is a no win scenario. Add PlayStation to the list of casualties caused by modern Star Wars. Well put. I don't agree necessarily that they're not in this for other reasons. They want more money. But I said this last week, Chris, this is an understated and underrated part of it, I think, is they don't have to worry about that anymore.

2:11:03Dustin Furman:And it is true. that physical media is a major nexus by which they break open these machines. And I'm kind of surprised that more people aren't talking about it. But I will say this, Christopher, is Christopher who wrote in. I did just call Christopher like I'm mad at him.

2:11:21If they sold enough disks and it was viable enough, they would take the,

2:11:27Dustin Furman:they would be willing to have the potential of being hacked, or at least they'd be willing to risk it. it's easy for them to wrap this whole thing up because it's not worth it. It all comes back down to that for them. I know that they're in a tough spot where it's like you can't acknowledge people hacking your machines. They really have never acknowledged that stuff. They do things about it, but they don't ever talk about it. But it would be an interesting thing for them to say that, to be like, yeah, like this is make, like in a world, again, with a cogent communication strategy. Part of it could be like, you guys care a lot about the security of PlayStation and we do too.

2:12:02Dustin Furman:And physical media has been a huge problem for us in terms of keeping things secure and keeping our machines secure, which is another reason why we feel like we should probably just, you know, focus our engineers and our talents on the digital ecosystem and worry about that solely. Like you can make a part of your communication strategy. They just are incapable of doing that. But I agree. Like it's all about cost. And I disagree with Christopher. Like it all comes down to money. But it comes down to the tolerance of what you lose and what you gain. and I think that this is a good thing for, this is certainly a good thing for the security of PlayStation.

2:12:39I don't know if anyone cares about that. So Alex Porter wrote in with the final inquiry and we can then move on. He says, Hey CC, how are you feeling about PlayStation

2:12:48Dustin Furman:after last week? I've never felt less excited about it. $1 ,000 PS6,$80 digital only games, PSN dynamic pricing, dark times are ahead. It's not a natural direction. It's about increasing margins, profit for shareholders, shareholders and controlling the market at the expense of consumers. No price cut in games, no improvement in digital ownership, no benefit for players. If digital only games start in 2028, then I'll stick with the better option, Steam. I'll get Intergalactic and The Last of Us 3 on PS5, but after that, I'm done. Where are you at? So let's exit now. Where's your head at moving forward with the brand and with what they're doing and how they're acting?

2:13:24Dustin Furman:And do you have any closing thoughts i guess i don't i don't agree with all of what he's what uh alex said here but i don't disagree like i i feel like it's in a bad spot it's not exciting um the things we know about it like through you know leaks and rumors and all that stuff is intriguing like i'm intrigued at the pro at the prospect of a handheld but at the same time yeah like i it's there's a question that i have that i ask myself sometimes specifically in moments like this where like where things seem like really bad it's like would i would i were i not on a playstation show would i buy this machine like would i be day one for like a ps6 and right now like based on again based on the fact that we don't know officially what it is

2:14:23no i'm happy with the ps5 like i don't really need anything more than what i have i'm not wanting for anything i'm not you know hungering for new features and as if we as if new features would really feels like ever since the ps3 we've actually gotten fewer features actually like like so i don't know man it's the the brand's not in a good spot um i understand the economic realities that brought us here, and I understand that not all of it is necessarily unreasonable, though all of it is ostensibly, you know, profit-driven, for sure. It's business.

2:15:03I, it's not good, man. Like, this next machine, you have to understand, like, the PS6 has to make such a strong case for itself. And I think that's why, again, I brought this before, I think that's why they tampered away from PC. I think that's why they were just like, we need to make a case for this machine. We got to make sure that our ecosystem is the only ecosystem where you can play these things to make it more enticing. I think they're exploring some interesting things, but like. They're going to have to really show up. In a way that I don't think they had to before, like the PS3 probably was the biggest thing.

2:15:38And that was because they were a year late. The PS4 had like a perfect opportunity. the PS5 was coming into a space where Xbox was already kind of gimped you know like this is the most and not to say that there's other places to go but PC is clearly like if you're going to be spending upwards of a thousand dollars on a thing that plays games like you kind of might as well because now you're in that that's how people think about whether it's logical or not that's how people think about pricing I know for sure that's how I think about pricing like if I'm looking at like like an appliance or something and the the the cheapest appliance that i could find is like still relatively offensive i was like well i'm just gonna go up another tier then like if i'm already if i'm already in the ballpark of spending this money i might as well just get something better and there's kind of an unquestion it's unquestionable that like pc like if if you're going to be in an all digital space pc is the space to be like you've got the least guardrails you've got the least um restrictions on you and you have the most available to you and i don't think most people will do that necessarily there's always going to be a market for console i think i'm probably going to be part of that you know i like the convenience of having a machine that i don't have to worry about that i don't have to like you know i'm gonna install my drivers you know the worst feeling ever i hate it the worst but i could see like at a thousand bucks people be like i might as well spend two if you're in that market if you're in that space we'll see i'm not uh i'm not thrilled about how things are going i think there's a way to bounce back i think there's a way to fix things i think there's probably like ways that they can undercut but that machine has to show up yeah i i am i think what's going on

2:17:24Dustin Furman:with sony goes a lot deeper than what's going on with the physical games thing and yeah again it's funny that like they just snuck the ps3 and vita stuff under like we don't even really have time like we have all the time in the world but like there's no bandwidth to even consider that it's like that's happening right so yeah it's like no we don't have we can't fight another front it's like world war ii where the where the americans were like we got to fight the japanese and the nazis at the same time it's gonna be very difficult but dude they guess i guess in that i'm talking the sony or the japanese and the nazi i don't know i don't i don't like that i don't like that analogy i'm sorry well dude you know what's crazy about it's like we got a we got a far longer heads up about the ps3 and vita store closing than this because this is what 2028 yeah 28 yeah so it's we've got like like a year and a half two years and we got a five year lead up to this right and what you're referring to for people that don't know is that this was originally announced in 2021 that they were going to shut the ps3 and vita down and then everyone flipped out because they they learn they learn their lesson they're they're like oh we have to bury this in another thing and they did it man with again that's why i'm saying like i don't hate the pr strategy from their perspective it kind of worked uh no yeah but i also think they would have been fine because again it's been like the heads up is so long it's just interesting to me that like in the in the ps5 generation like at the beginning of the ps5 generation they they were going to cut ps3 and they've given us a five six year head start on like understanding that that was coming and for ps5 the current generation physical disc there's two years yeah yeah not even that's fascinating yeah it's it's an interesting sitch no doubt like i don't i uh i am so yeah like all right so to answer his questions my feelings on on playstation i think they i think i think they're gonna have some problems like i i don't i don't know and i don't think it really has anything to do with well not anything to do with this this is another thing they feel they feel somehow incapacitated like like like as if they they don't know what to do like they they have these instincts of like of these tech instincts in these games instincts that are fairly good but they don't know how to communicate them they don't know how to make them into this in this cohesive strategy that can be articulated to their audience and as i believe i said on the stream earlier in the week i'm like who would even articulate it who the fuck's gonna talk they they have like hidey you know hideyaki nishino i was saying like we don't even know what nishino i don't even know what nishino sounds like in my like when my mind's here i have no idea you know uh herman holst who has no credibility at all like who they don't have any they don't have any personalities anymore to even speak cerny to a degree but he's not the guy for that yeah you don't want to wheel sony out there you You don't Sony Cerny.

2:20:19You don't want to wheel Cerny out there to deliver that. That news, you know what I mean? Definitely not. Definitely not like. They. And this is what I think was getting lost on some people when I was saying this is like, I'm not saying I agree with it. I'm saying that they have a strategy, a calm strategy that works. And the only way that you can make it not work is to make it not work. like if you're not going to communicate then there's got to be a then there's got to be a penalty and i think a lack of communication gives them a certain mystique and i think that they've they've overridden their mystique at this point and they've run out yeah it's like now they look at the numbers and they're and and we we noted last week like the stock market liked this like they look at they look at the numbers and they're like we're fine and but i'm like i i think you are misunderstanding what is happening on the ground and you're making yourself unnecessarily vulnerable and i think there's no question that their competition is steam and they should be worried about losing people to them it might happen gradually and it might

2:21:35Dustin Furman:happen slowly and it might happen with small numbers, but there's definitely going to be a draw to that platform if what PlayStation becomes is ultimately just a replica of that platform in a closed ecosystem, which again, some people are attracted to. I have no problem with that, but a lot of people are going to. And yes, they'll always, we've talked about this, about the distinction of when you get to a certain amount of money for something, you assume the person has a certain amount of money. So when you're getting to the$1 ,000 console it's like well it's it's more reasonable to ask a person that could afford a thousand dollar console to be like you could just buy a fifteen hundred dollar pc you know and it's not as big of an ask for them as the person buying a four hundred dollar console and saying well you could buy a fifteen hundred dollar pc you know what i mean so like you you could cut more like people can be shaved off people are already if you're already in that ballpark like if it's easier to jump from a thousand dollars for a video game machine to two thousand dollars for a video game machine than it is to jump from four hundred dollars to nine hundred dollars because it's a different ballpark right we're in we're in different spaces right and so yeah i think you're right i don't think i don't think it's going to be like overnight it's going to be this mass exodus but like i think you're going to start seeing a case being made for a lot of people um especially if they already have computers and all they need is a graphics card or something you know what i mean like it's a lot of people have computers already and they don't necessarily game on them i think when this all settles like the the run-on components in the late 2020s early 2030s should it ever settle i think things can be restructured in such a way where sony might not like where the board sits anymore and how the pieces sit on the board like they did before all this happened and i think it requires a level of aggression there's no doubt in my mind that they have learned from microsoft in terms of like these people don't shut up but I think they've learned and they've believed their own hype too much and that hype might get checked.

2:23:33Yeah.

2:23:34Dustin Furman:They quietly ride a lot of things out like that. All the Helldivers 2 stuff, like they barely ever officially communicated about that. They left it to Arrowhead and a lot of that stuff even happened on Steam. If you were just like in the PlayStation ecosystem, you would have never known all the shit that was going on with that game for all that time. And they might have another problem as we're going to talk about shortly with Tocan. Although Tocan's not as big of a game and therefore it will be lessened. but again these are all uh not i don't want to say it again all dings in the armor

2:24:05right and yeah go ahead well no i was just gonna say like you you mentioned that it's not just this it's it's a lot of things sony's been taking a lot of hits for a while obviously herman holst's uh guidance of this of this brand for a while has been obviously a mass from concord is the the concrete i think is the big stain that's the thing that really is like broke containment and everybody knows right you know right um and and obviously you know it's uh network insecurity all these all these things so like it's it's not just physical games it's it's it's a pile i do feel like there's a lack of fun i always say video games don't have to necessarily

2:24:44Dustin Furman:be fun as by definition i feel like we play games for different reasons i'm not always having fun I'm immersed, I'm enjoying, I'm interested, whatever. But like, we call them video games. And there should be a level of fun. That fun has to be communicated. You need to have fun people. I never, we, the one thing I took for granted with PlayStation for a long time is that they always had really interesting people working for them until this generation. And so like, there were always people, even Andrew House and like people that were a little more controversial right like Jack Trenton certainly certainly and we've talked about shoe and Adam boys and Gio Corsi remember Gio Corsi with the Vita on the stage and like there's like all sorts of great stories about that like Sony was mad I've told the story about how Sony was mad at him for that like he went rogue and did that because they're like we fucking want to kill the Vita what are you doing you know and um it's like that's that kind of renegade spirit and that and how they were all different and you get different things out of talking to them.

2:25:48And I knew them all. And so I did talk and it's like even Sean Layden. I mean, he's really the last one.

2:25:55Dustin Furman:That like could talk and can talk about games in a meaningful way. Jim Ryan didn't give interviews. And I think a lot of the stuff came from a lot of this direction came from him. And I'm surprised it hasn't changed. And I know Nishino just gave an interview with Famitsu, but Famitsu is I don't I don't want to like defame them. I don't read Famitsu. It's like but like they don't have a they don't have a reputation for journalistic excellence. you know like they they have they they exist in a japanese culture that's a lot more respectful of the many happenings going on around them it's what we always say like do you have any idea how much crazy shit probably happens at these studios we never hear about it oh yeah the crazy shit can't be endemic to western teams only you only get evidence of it later like when nakamura left when she wasn't at Tango anymore or when Inafune and Iga left, their companies were like, obviously, or Kojima, of course, that was the breaking containment.

2:26:50Dustin Furman:That was the one that broke most containment. But even then, we don't know anything about it, about what happened. Yeah. So Nishino giving interviews to Famitsu is not sufficient. And so I consider myself first and foremost an observer and chronicler of the brand. I'm a fan of PlayStation. I love PlayStation, but I first and foremost, I'm an observer and I observe interesting times ahead. I think. Yeah. Which is good for our show. Frankly, I would be remiss to, to not end this segment, I guess, noting that our friend Dustin notified us that even Chris Chan is weighed in on this. Oh yeah. I saw, I just saw this on, on a, yeah, he tweeted.

2:27:37And it's like, it's funny because it's so eloquent and normal. like the tweet is like very normal yeah he uh let's see here i'm loading it now

2:27:47Dustin Furman:uh chris chan says i am making a rare exception about my twitter and talk about this both here and blue sky physical media i am very much in favor of it digital media was okay for the option but to have it as an only way to play modern console games i feel like it is simply wrong there you got it and yeah yeah oh my god there's a bunch of yeah there's a oh yeah there's a lot more. There's a lot where we don't got to get it. I'm disturbed. He says physical media. I am very much in favor of it with a you. Chris, you're from Virginia. What are we doing here? Thank you for letting us know that, Dustin.

2:28:23We really appreciate that. Yeah, we had to get it in. All right. A few more pieces of news to get through here. This I brought up a little bit or maybe you referenced this a little bit earlier, actually.

2:28:36Dustin Furman:we're using we're using push square to kind of report on this everyone's mad at sony right now i get it this is one of those things where i think you got to check yourself a little bit from in my opinion but here's what they write ps5 fans panic over lost games clause but there's more to the story a clause in the european version of playstation's terms of service has caused confusion and chaos this weekend as fans rally against the company's decision to cease manufacturing physical games in january 2028 as can be the case with social media though a lot of the reactions don't take into account the greater context of the statement and what it actually means.

2:29:09Dustin Furman:So what they they've Dell Carter, who's actually going to be on the show soon. On Sacred Symbols Plus. Oh, Dell Walker, I'm sorry. What is it? Oh, the Carter Dell is his Twitter account. Dell Walker. He tweets out. So if I buy 100 digital PS5 games and then don't sign into PSN for three years, I can lose them all and the account. And they even want me to buy a digital only PS6, LOL, LMAO even. and he has a picture of the TOS on PlayStation and it says closing your account to section 21 closing your account section 21.2 if you have not used your account for at least 36 months we may take steps to close it in that case we will contact you via email address registered to your account and give you six months to either log into your account or contact us and tell us to keep your account open after your account is closed you will not be able to access the PlayStation online services or use the digital products purchased on that account and they say later that it's permanent.

2:30:01However, this is only in the European TOS. And as Push Square points out, this has to do with European law.

2:30:12Dustin Furman:They write, while I'll gladly criticize Sony when it deserves it, I think it's important to note this probably exists to hear the broader European GDPR laws, as the same clause doesn't feature in the US TOS where there are different regulations in place. In fact, as I understand it, Sony's approach to this is actually much more lenient than many other companies allowing for three years of inactivity before it may take action and then a further six months to give you time to do something about it. So as I understand, Chris, these laws exist and I don't know enough to know if they're reasonable or enough.

2:30:39Dustin Furman:It's like these fallow accounts, I guess, are possible ways in to hacking. Like they can be hacked, they become just sitting there and they're just not doing anything. And I guess part of European online commerce requires this sort of behavior on the part of the companies so this is again what i'm saying is like well let's let's let's stick within the realm of reason i believe that sony would never want to delete your account and i'm saying delete you like delete your existence we're talking about what happened to you about listen to what i'm saying i don't think sony would want to delete your fallow account because it counts as an account that exists and you can just have that number you know so you always have to look at things a little bit logically like well why would you want to do that and apparently it has to do with european law so i've seen that circulating and uh i think we all need to calm down a little bit about that have you seen the hullabaloo going around about this yeah i did and i i did read it and it is it is crazy i also don't like it's it was weird especially because i just got i just bought a 360 at like a at like a games shop or whatever and i've been picking up some old physical games that just aren't playable on back combat for whatever reason and i when i logged in i downloaded or i went into my like account history and i found a bunch of like xbla games that i could re-download again like oh this is cool um i'm glad i can do this even though i haven't been on the 360 in like like 10 10 plus years you know it's that's cool i also don't know if that necessarily counts because i don't think i've ever been i don't think i've been logged out of psn or xbox live for longer than a couple days you know what i mean like it's one of those things like i haven't used the 360 in a long time but i've been i've signed an xbox live how how how likely is it that i would have been inactive for three years if i wasn't dead i don't know yeah it's still kind of crazy it's it's but it's a european law or whatever um but yeah i like you said i they would never want to they want you there even if even if you're inactive because it boosts their numbers it boosts um it's a it's a it's a feather in their cap that they can use to to boast so like i don't think they would want to delete anybody yeah everyone's got to focus you want to be mad at sony more power to you a lot to be mad about but yeah them are complying with local often onerous european laws is not something to be mad about, about them, about with them.

2:33:14Dustin Furman:All right. We brought this up earlier. IGN wrote about this. And it is interesting to rehash this, although I think we all understand what's going on here. They write Marvel Tocan blocked in 132 countries. And it looks like PSN requirements are to blame. They write PlayStation and Arc System Works. Marvel Tocan Fighting Souls has been blocked in 132 countries and what appears to be another example of Sony's PSN requirements barring players from access on Steam. Fans of the upcoming tag team comic book fighting game have prepared to skip out on its August 2026 launch after it was revealed that a long list of regions will be blocked.

2:33:45Dustin Furman:The full list of 132 countries, this is what I'm, this is the ones that IGN pulled out. The full list of 132 countries include Afghanistan, Haiti, Serbia, Zimbabwe, Egypt, and more. Why those? Afghanistan? Is there a vibrant Marvel token fighting souls? Serbia makes a little bit more sense. But anyway, there is a full list of them a lot of these are there it's like a ton of african countries a ton of small southeast asian countries some south and central american countries um middle eastern countries some of some middle eastern countries and then a lot of like pacific islands and uh so on and so forth places where psn and this is what i was saying earlier in the show i promised i would connect back to this these places playstation exists in a lot of these places but they're not really the PlayStation customers.

2:34:37Dustin Furman:They've received the hardware somehow. They are probably connecting to an overseas PSN account. As I've noted, Russians, I think, which are banned from PSN right now, I believe, are connecting through Turkey, Turkey's PlayStation network and so on and so forth. But because there's a higher expectation, I guess, of availability off of PlayStation and on Steam, I guess people are kind of upset about this. And this is what happened with Helldivers. Although it is interesting to note, and I didn't know this, IGN noted this, that 177 countries and regions were blocked for hell divers and this is 132 so it is getting better and you assume that some of them the lower hanging fruit that was on there are not on there because i don't i want to be fair there are some countries where i'm a little surprised right like i'm a little surprised the dominican republic yeah that caught my eye as well um i'm a little surprised that estonia is on the list right like i'm a little surprised jamaica i'm surprised jordan is on the list.

2:35:33But then there's countries where I'm like, I'm not really that surprised

2:35:37Dustin Furman:that this country is on the list. So I think you have to go look in. Yeah, North Korea is on the list, which rules like Yemen. Oh, OK. And so on and so forth. But yeah, there are some interesting ones that I'm like, yeah. Hopefully they continue to make this work, but because you have to connect to the PSN, I guess this is for cross play and online play, of course. It just is what it is. We'll see if it holds. Helldivers was both hurt and helped by a bunch of like fan I don't know what you would call them fan driven campaigns about something they like or something they didn't like I don't know that Marvel token is ever going to have that kind of energy and I think Sony I don't want to excuse this but it's like it's not unreasonable for them to say like if you want to play online you have to connect to the PSN and we can't have the we can't have these problems you can't connect to our network you can't do all these things if you're in one of these countries it sucks but as I said earlier in the show I feel like they would be in these places if it made sense for them to be in these places they want to spread the field and make money and if they if the country count chris goes from 177 to 132 maybe they're making some progress i don't know yeah maybe i mean yeah there's just some that there's just some here that i'm surprised to see estonia is one of those two because estonia has like better i think estonia i think this is true at least it was true a couple years ago like so estonia has better internet than we do yeah I believe a lot of a lot so yeah let me look at the list again because I wonder are the other is like Lithuania on there for instance and yeah yeah I think these are like these are the old Russian satellites like the the Balkans are not the Balkans the Baltic countries and so maybe there's I don't know maybe that has something to do with that's too bad because they are just European countries Latvia would be one of those two I assume right is that on here yep so So those are probably the most notable amongst the most notable.

2:37:31Dustin Furman:Also, the Vatican City is on here. So the Pope will not be playing the Pope or his people on Marvel token, unfortunately. What a bummer. All right. So a lot of stuff, Chris, will end our news with a lot of stuff that's been going on in Xbox world. We're not going to cover all of the stuff that has nothing to do with PlayStation or studios that we would interact with. And even for those studios that do interact with PlayStation, we're not even getting all their stuff either for instance the elder scrolls online team bethesda online studios has been gutted apparently that heavily affects playstation but i i thought i'd pick out a few things that i that i thought were notable for us to talk about here um yeah for people that don't know microsoft laid off 1600 people with another 1600 layoffs coming this year from the xbox brand and spun off five of their teams we have none of the details yet on what any of these teams are doing in terms of who stepped in to either fund their game or buy them outright.

2:38:28Dustin Furman:But there are a few things that have happened that have bothered me as well, and I thought we would cover those. The first is that id has been gutted by Microsoft. id Software, according to Game Developer, had 158 layoffs at their Texas studio, Texas-based studio. That leaves maybe a fifth of the team left or maybe two-fifths of the team at most. It's an awful situation. And basically, people that are familiar with it or worked in or around the studio have basically said, the studio can't go on like this. It seems like, and a lot of the technical people have been let go as well, apparently, which is id tech people.

2:39:12Dustin Furman:So they'll certainly be, I would assume, a contract studio at this point or a support studio working on maybe call of duty or something i don't know what they're going to do with them but um i will say this this um really pissed me off and i don't usually get too in my feels about layoffs and stuff like that because i just think it's a part of it sucks it sucks there are individual i we all have we it's like we're checking boxes we all know we feel bad for these people i don't have to articulate that but it's part of the business and it's part of analyzing the business and there have been teams that I've cared about that have been gutted and people that have left that really bothered me.

2:39:50Dustin Furman:This one really bothers me. Yeah. The reason that it bothers me, Chris, is well, there's multiple reasons. One is that id is one of the oldest still running game developers in the world. And you could argue Rare is actually even older. Another studio Microsoft ruined. um and other than that it's like i think that that studio sign worlds the guys that do like um mist are about as old as id and neon falcom are like like going all the way about the dragon fantasy and all that kind of shit like they're they're old it is in like rarefied territory we talk about the ship of theseus all the time and it's not carmax you know it anymore or romero it's long not been Romero's in.

2:40:45Dustin Furman:Carmack was there way longer than Romero. But they have been a incredibly consistent, high quality team for basically their entire existence. I would imagine people would say maybe, maybe like Rage would be like the low point for them. But even then it's, which is like just post Carmack. And even then it's like, well, well, it's actually not post Carmack. It's actually post Bethesda acquisition though.

2:41:09I don't understand what Microsoft thinks they're doing. and I take this somewhat personally, where I'm like, wait, what do you mean? Yeah. It released three games in 10 years. What do you want? Some of your other games run on their technology. By the way, this is just what bothers me. They have proprietary technology here that they could turn into their own re engine or whatever they don't have to license ue they don't like there have been talk about how the new doom or the new quake would be on unreal engine it's like are you out of your fucking are you out of your mind that is crazy it's it's oh man so it feels to me like the whole thing with id feels to me like they don't really know what

2:42:05Dustin Furman:they're doing like the powers that be don't understand like what why are you doing this to them you sent their game out to die on game pass i'm sorry to be that guy do i understand the dark ages wasn't as well received critically and commercially as the other doom games but it has an 83 on metacritic which is not nothing and they were bragging about how three million people played the game in a few days on game pass what if what if a quarter of them bought it and you added that to the PlayStation and PC sales. You you you set these guys up to fail. They fail. And then you blame it on them. Even though they are demonstrably, in my opinion, one of, if not your best studio in any of your little, you know, an Xbox game studios in Bethesda in Activision Blizzard, they're top three no less than and i think you can make an argument and you and you punish them i understand asha is not a gamer but hopefully matt booty and other people familiarize herself with who it is and that they invented the first person shooter that their technology is amongst and their engine is amongst the the most highly considered technology in game industry history that people like John Carmack used to obsess over the technical fidelity of their games.

2:43:31Read Masters of Doom, if you haven't out there, which is an excellent book. These guys are nuts. And they deserve to, even though it's a name only, and there are a lot of people that, there are people that worked on Doom 3 that got fired. There are people that have been there for a long time. But having no respect for not only the legacy of the team, but that they are not a Bioware, that they are not one of these other teams that lost themselves. Not at all. In fact, I'm really annoyed about it. I knew it, Chris. I knew it. I tweeted out about it a couple weeks ago. I'm like, I hope that they are smart enough to know

2:44:13Dustin Furman:that if they're looking to cut heads, they don't do it at id. And they don't do it at machine games. And apparently they didn't do it at machine games, which is good. But what were your thoughts here? Yeah, I don't know, man. I'm also, it bothers the hell out of me. Doom Eternal is probably, I think, my favorite first-person shooter of the last, certainly of modern contemporary generations of consoles, for sure. It's so good. It is so unreasonably good. Doom 2016 was also immaculate. It was a big meme originally on this show when we first started that I wouldn't stop talking about Doom 2016. It was like, and it was, and we started in 2018.

2:44:53So it was like it was well after, you know, so I loved that game and Dark Ages. I also was like a lot more high on it than than most people were. I think it's an exceptional trilogy of games that each does something different. And it has been great. And there's been there have been personalities at it even, you know, yeah, post Carmack, post Romero that have really given that studio a personality and a vibe and a feel. people like hugo martin um you know who he just had that video where he's where he's talking he's kind of selling the dlc and the dlc looks awesome it does by the way and so to have this happen on the eve of their dlc to gut the team i think 75 percent and i think they have like one or two people left on the id tech team or some shit like that like some insane do they do they understand that you need people who know how to do things to do to do things well no i don't think like i i i don't i i'm i was really flummoxed by this like when i saw this i was like there's not i actually was like there's no way this is true because i was like if anything look and i'm not saying you would you would cut machine games either but like but i'm sorry between it and machine games like what respectfully respectfully respectfully what what is this what is happening doom i don't know yeah it's it's and like the architects of like id tech and like just like all these people who just like knew how to do shit well and and and at a respectable cadence at a cadence that is like basically the way that we used to get games in in earlier generations you know it was like once every four years or whatever instead of once every three oh okay yeah it's it's still it's by modern standards they are

2:46:43Dustin Furman:they're one of the few teams that have done it you know like that you've had you've had undead labs working on state of the cave for seven years the entire time this trilogy the entire time the entire time you've had uh what is it what is this other uh oh perfect dark never mind oh fucking oh scalebound never mind oh uh what is it what is that other the other game that they've got in development for fucking ever wild ever wild oh never mind oh fable it's been eight years or whatever the hell it's like what are we what the fuck are we that's that map booty magic cut it yeah that's that map booty it makes i'm sorry man it makes no goddamn sense to me at all and uh yeah this pissed me off too like i saw this i was immediately furious because i was just like Like, and again, it's not to say that there are other teams aren't talented or whatever.

2:47:36Like, I have a lot of respect for machine games for sure. Like, and a lot of respect for a lot of, a lot of the teams under Microsoft's umbrella. But like, id is the one that I thought was like, you don't, you'd be stupid to touch that at all. At least, at least I could see like a cynical corporate motivation behind like some, some person at Microsoft being like, well, young blood was rough. and you know indiana jones was good but like i mean you know i know how you feel about that game i liked it but like not as much not as much as doom brother yeah no i don't know i'm sorry like it really yeah i don't know if i have anything to say that isn't just he's screaming into the void but like it's just like i an absurd cut to an absurd team to an absurd degree that makes absolutely no logical sense at all to cut the team the people who know id tech well out of your out of your first party ecosystem is insane like i just i don't know yeah it's it's on it's unacceptable i i uh i resent microsoft for ruining them and i've often said and i and it's true that like

2:48:45Dustin Furman:i am i tweeted this out a lot of people got mad about it but i'm like we are so lucky that microsoft didn't get their hands on capcom or sega or square or these companies that they absolutely wanted like we know they wanted them at some point and might even bid on some of them i think some of the emails indicate that they did insert bids on things like sega and stuff like they would have obliterated them and i am we i am lucky from my own taste that they bought bethesda and activision it's like all right you're about as far away from anything i care about as humanly possible but bethesda happened to buy id back in the day and spawned machine games and I happen to have a great deal of affection for both of those teams and it so yeah they did get they finally did get to something that I care about after all of this time like I was kind of able to avoid it for a while and I'm like yeah I don't only care about it for the Doom trilogy the new Doom trilogy which is excellent or old Doom games old school fans me know that like I'm a big Doom 3 stan and like Doom 1 and 2 obviously like we're so game-changing, pardon the pun, for me as a kid, especially as a console gamer, where I'm like, what is this?

2:50:00Dustin Furman:And Masters of Doom was a book that I read many years ago now that I was like, these guys are so impressive. The heart and soul of this team is, it still exists. Again, I was like, they didn't lose, in the ship of Theseus, they didn't lose themselves. And I think that's what we always say about Bioware. It's like, who cares about Bioware? Like they've not been consistent or impressive at all. Yeah, I just but there's a few things that bother me. Well, let's get this out of the way. Cream Lord wrote in and said, Colin, I get your stance on DLC is I don't usually return to games later for it either, but you should make Doom an exception.

2:50:37Dustin Furman:Eternals DLC was some of the best and most fun content in the game. And so far, the Dark Ages is shaping up to be the same bittersweet, though, considering the layoffs that just hit them. I hope they end up being all right. And this doesn't kill the franchise. I'm not buying that. like i i i'm not i'm not giving them money for that no way um you just you launched the dlc the day you killed them that's bush league and i'm not i'm not going to sit here and be one of those guys like i'm not going to be able to not interact with microsoft i'm on windows right now first of But I mean, even if you're talking about Xbox, it's like I'm going to buy Halo.

2:51:21I don't know what else I'll buy after that, to be honest, because I'm not really interested in that many other things.

2:51:26Dustin Furman:But like they're going to get my money for me for that. But I'm not going to go out of my way to buy the Doom DLC. No way. Everyone has to kind of do what they want to do. Here's the thing that. All right. So here are the two major things for me, Chris. I had brought one of them up already, but I want to kind of put a finer point on it. a smart corporation with a long view, right, on their situation would look at id tech and say, like, we should invest in this. What's stopping us from putting Halo, future Halo games on id tech? what's stopping us from just like, guess what runs Fable? Forza Tech.

2:52:12The engine Forza Tech runs Fable. It's cheaper and easier to do that if you invest in it because you don't have to pay licensing fees and you have institutional knowledge on how to extract it. And God forbid, Chris, you could even license it out yourself to others and make a little bit of coin on it too. But at the very least, you will have a technique... no one talks shit about EdTech. You never see it. Like, I remember, like, the level of frame rate fidelity alone on those engines and, like, the ability to hit 60, and I remember Rage being a big deal back in the day on that even. But, like, Doom 3 and all these, it's like, that's number one for me.

2:52:57It's like, why wouldn't you look at this from a broad view and say, like,

2:53:01Dustin Furman:this is actually a money saver for us not only are these guys talented not only do they make great games but their technologies can be the basis of more of our stuff moving forward we're we're think we're rethinking what we're doing with halo we're doing all this with gears in the future all this like we really should be harnessing id tech why haven't we and really the question should be asked like why haven't we been doing this since we bought bethesda like where has everyone i think in my opinion because you see this with the creation engine too it's like and i think a big question on what what obsidian will be building on moving forward we'll talk about obsidian it's like right i think developers are we're given too much leeway and are often given too much leeway it's like we don't know those tools we're going to stay with these tools and at some point you got to be like too fucking bad like let's take some time it's like the old telltale conundrum like if you just fixed your engine you might still exist today like if you just fixed your technology you might still exist today let's take it easy and let's see if we can use these these shared technologies like the old initiative for the common engine at Sony to make things more fluid.

2:54:03So that's number one. This is the bigger thing that bothers me, though. And I haven't mentioned this at all yet.

2:54:11It's easy to look good from Microsoft's perspective and say, like, yeah, we're not going to shut these teams down. We're going to give them a heads up and let them go find either a buyer or a publisher for their next project. it's easy to do that with compulsion yeah guys uh um we're so sad to see you go here's your um we happy few ip and here's your award for south of midnight games for change um by you know it's a little harder to put your money where your mouth is and be like, we can't let it walk. We can't let Doom walk and Quake. Wolfenstein is wrapped up in a whole other team now that we own.

2:55:06In other words, they took the one team that would have a buyer in a millisecond, okay? I want to be clear. If Microsoft made it known behind the scenes that it was on the block, that team in its entirety would have been bought by one of a half dozen suitors in about two seconds but they didn't want to do that and i understand that they don't want to let go of the ip i understand that they want to have again their cake and eat it too but in a way it's like how dare you lean into the positive optics of you not shutting these

2:55:46Dustin Furman:teams down when you had nothing to lose but the second you had something to lose you didn't make it work for you and you didn't make it work for the team anymore you made it work for you that's not lost on me a lot of people that's gotten by a lot of people or people haven't computed that but it's like no fuck you guys oh um we're gonna let double fine go what are we going to do without double fine uh we won't have the san francisco fucking office space to pay for anymore and i guess we won't have the brutal legend ip but if if id and i hope it's some the people leadership at some point was like well let us take quake and doom and fuck off you can sell us for a lot it's not even like one of these fly-by-night deals like they weren't so i'm telling you right now microsoft wasn't getting dick for some of this stuff right and i'm really curious who bought or is funding what or whatever but i don't know if you thought of that about that chris but i thought about that immediately and i'm like fuck you guys i i understand you you have the nerve to say you want to invest in things like doom and quake and then you lay them all off who's gonna make it you're gonna you're gonna ship doom out now you have another machine games in the waiting you better hope so it it it is as i'm sure the audience see under my this one is under my skin yeah no me too man like oh applaud us guys we um we allowed undead labs to walk away and we even let them keep state of decay okay oh cool did you do that for the other teams that were in peril did you let obsidian walk away with pillars of eternity oh no no no no no no no no sorry but no no no but sure you let id maybe maybe you just let it take doom even and like no no no no um but we let compulsion take a contrast oh so

2:57:51yeah the thing about that too is that like um the thing that came the thing that came across my mind was like you that exact thing not necessarily with the doom thing because i've just been in a spiral of anger over it so i haven't even really thought that deeply about it but when they when they let those studios go with their ip and everything i just kind of it seemed like they just didn't have the like they didn't have the stones to close them so they just kind of sent them off to die or at least that's what it feels like because like i don't know man i like i like double fine um it's expensive to run that studio and like where it is and so like i don't know man i just think it's kind of the priorities here are just so confusing i don't i don't get it it's it's it's the moves of people who don't know what they're doing and it looks like i guess so you've gutted the entire id team it's like 75 of the studio is gone oh pretty much everybody but one or two people who works on id tech are still there you got hugo martin there which is is good i mean hugo martin was kind of like the the the voice of these modern doom games but like i mean he needs people what the fuck they're they're gonna be i'm telling you they're gonna be these motherfuckers are gonna be working on halo

2:59:07Dustin Furman:or something like i know it i know it i feel it in my fucking gut and it and it's Thank you.

2:59:16And I want to be clear because you said like you like double fine.

2:59:19Dustin Furman:I like double fine too. I'm not trying to insult double fine. I'm saying no one cares like respectfully. Yeah, like, yeah, you let them walk away with keeper and kill. No one gives a shit. It's like it would be it's like a parent kicking their kid out of the house when he's 25 and be like, by the way, take your shit out of your room and get out. but then like one of the people you're trying to kick out one of your kids is like oh i i bought the tv uh i bought the stereo system and they're like oh you can't leave we just want the dude out of here with all the bullshit you know and i'm like well it's easy to take credit for that it's even worse because in that scenario he kicks them out anyway they kick him out anyway and keep their tv and shit right and then well that's exactly right it's like well we can't we can't let go of the tv yeah we're not letting go of the tv they're not letting go of the stereo yeah like you can go you know like like crazy and to me i'm like i get it dude you don't have to explain the business of it and the rights aspect and xenomax and bethesda owning that and buy i get all of it i understand that what i'm saying is that they are trying to do a goodwill thing with the studio thing by not by the way this also allows them to not report all these things as layoffs because you better believe these studios will all have layoffs like like when they're with their new buyer or in their new situation i had suggested even well we'll get to it in a minute with well i don't want to get into ahead of myself with undead labs but i don't know man it it it really it bothers me a lot and um yeah beast mode activated wrote in about something else says good day sacred gents with the gutting of id software is the triple a single player first person shooter effectively dead they were the last studio making big innovative single player fps games on a consistent basis and something tells me that machine games may meet a similar fate when wolfenstein 3 inevitably underperforms to microsoft's expectations oh my god i'll go ballistic if they do something to machine games i know we'll still probably see a new doom or quake at some point down the line but watching it get treated like this just sucks especially since they always make great games i'll point the bfg under my chin and listen oh be bad news to do that.

3:01:27There seems to be a lessening appetite for single-player shooters. There's no doubt that Doom, the Dark Ages, didn't perform very well commercially. I'll get into it in a minute a major reason why I think that is, but I think that, like, yeah, there's no doubt. Also, it's funny that no one ever wants to hear me or a lot of people make fun of me when I try to suggest

3:01:50Dustin Furman:these kind of not AAA but good first person modern shooters not boomer shooters everyone kind of pooh poohs everything so it feels like it's like oh i don't want to play like mouse pi is like the last one that i feel like got a lot of respect but that's kind of like a boomer shooter when you when you think about immortals of avium or um even third person shooters like um outlanders or outriders i'm sorry um some of the magic shooters that are coming out that people don't like it just doesn't seem like people are really into it and it's a bummer because i love single-player first-person shooters but i think the problem is if you're not making a or double a games and you're not making boomer shooters specifically it's kind of expensive to make a first-person shooter they can only be so long that's why i was so impressed with cyberpunk i was like damn dude this is a first-person shooter role-playing game and and there's really yeah there's really nothing like it but i i i personally really love the first person shooter perspective and i would love to have more of these games and i was all over the doom the dark ages and i think chris and i agree on this is i think that game's really underrated like i i know that it made some changes and i know that people have different opinions on the three games and like where i'm a i'm a one three two guy like where i think doom 2016 is the best and doom 2016 is fucking awesome that game is dirty dude like like the way that it handles the way I play it like and I think Eternal gets a little too crazy with it but a lot of people like the subsystems in the game and how it has a circuitous sort of way through it and I think that's cool too but all three of them are excellent but in another universe those games would have been huge and they really weren't I mean Doom 2016 was certainly the biggest of the bunch and it's like you said I think that game snuck up on people and they were surprised by it and they were because remember you remember everyone was really down on it actually no one was even focused on the campaign in the pre-reels environment everyone's like this came kind of looks like shit they've been working on this remember they scrapped the original doom 4 and and then it came out they had that multiplayer they had that multiplayer beta or demo that people were like really really under underwhelmed by um and so everybody just thought it was going to be shit and it ended up being and the doom eternal was really good and the doom eternal was huge too because it came out like right at the right at peak pandemic right at the beginning like along with animal crossing and they had that big like barbenheimer kind of synergy thing going on um i don't know i i have a lot of feelings about like why that is though i i just kind of think and this is maybe i'm maybe i'm not on the money with this at all but like i just kind of feel like first person shooters aren't the big ticket item anymore for video games i feel like there was a time where that was the case and i think maybe it even cycles in and out like i think like like when doom originally came out like it was huge and it was like everything wanted to be you had golden eye and you had the original halo and then i think it had something happened around resident evil 4 years of war uncharted where like the third person third person kind of became the thing like that's where you flex your budget because it's more immediately apparent that like your character model looks great all the time as opposed to just being like a floating gun in the center of the screen i just think that the time of like fps dominance is kind of gone even with call of duty existing um and and first-person shooters do still do exceptionally well and especially live service ones and you know you have them but the big money i think is being pushed into you know things like i mean grand theft auto grand theft auto is inherently third person but like that's the biggest game ever and it's going to be third person fortnight is the biggest live service thing ever it's third person you know it i don't think it's a coincidence that the games that read the most as playable movies and games that even people outside of the industry, outside of the niche of this medium can look at and follow effectively and well.

3:05:47I don't think it's a coincidence that those are kind of the new top dog. And I knew this when I was a kid too. Like when I would play third-person games, my older family members would be a lot more interested in what I was doing. like first person looked insane to them they just couldn't follow what the fuck that's interesting like i don't know i don't know i don't know what's happening and i remember noticing that a long time ago and thinking like oh yeah because it's like they're watching a movie they see the character right like it's easy right and i think that ease breaks through to casual spaces a little bit more and so like i think a lot more people get sucked in to those kinds of video games definitely a lot more people played fortnight than i don't know fucking i don't know some first person live service game that came out instead and so i think that's part of it i think the the fps's dominance is just kind of gone but it also isn't helped that doom that doom eternal and uh doom the dark ages were just kind of sent out onto onto a subscription service on a console that was dying and on a with a brand that had no had zero confidence yeah it's that doesn't help also yeah it sucks They like you.

3:06:57This is a this is a universal experience for Microsoft's ecosystem, and there are just so few exceptions of games that break containment.

3:07:05Dustin Furman:You know, like Forza Horizon is obviously one of those games that breaks containment, but they are. And I think even Sea of Thieves and Grounded are examples to a lesser degree. But I think. The amount of damage they've done to themselves with Game Pass is enormous, and this gets us into the final inquiry. Anthony Watson says, hello, gents. A longtime listener from beyond. This is mostly for Colin, but feel free to chime in, Chris. I saw your reply to Ryan. He's talking about Ryan McCaffrey at IGN on X. Ryan was talking about what happened at id, and you said something along the lines of Xbox sent their game out to die on Game Pass in reference to id.

3:07:39Dustin Furman:Isn't this more of the people I've spoken and less of Xbox sending them out to die? Xbox also put Forza out on Game Pass and it's thriving, also launched on less platforms, fewer platforms. Also, I saw a post from Matt Piscitella saying that the negative impact of Game Pass is highly overrated from data he's seen. Thoughts? uh i don't i don't agree with matt at all i and i i don't think microsoft agrees with matt i mean if you read their own letters and their own idea of why they were um why they were expanding into what end i think game pass undid i don't say undid it activision undid xbox game pass undermined the entire business forcing consumer behavior that you can't this is the one thing that i see over and over again chris and i try to articulate this as best as I can is I don't blame the consumer why wouldn't you take the good deal no one blames you for that what people blame people for what I blame people for is not realizing like this can't last for something's wrong with this like this this is good like you're looking around being like all right I guess like I guess like that that's the way I feel okay I mean and you just kind of hope that like it's like getting free drinks at a bar or something it's like all right I don't yeah I Yeah.

3:08:50Dustin Furman:So I don't blame, I don't blame people for that. What I, what I blame just the powers that be and people around it being like, if not, of not being skeptical of like, there's no such thing as a free lunch, dude. And it's, as I said earlier, Microsoft would always brag about how many people played the games, but they would never talk about sales because players are worthless unless they are spending money or you have a confluence of them, which is what they were trying to grow with Game Pass and it didn't work. So when you have a flat 25, 30, 25, 30, 35, 30, 20 million people, but you're spending more and more and more money on games that take years, hoping that the numbers look different by the time the game comes out, but they don't.

3:09:36You are by definition sending the game out to die because you are not sending it into a growing subscription with more

3:09:43Dustin Furman:and more people, you're sending it into a flatline subscription of people trained not to buy games. And that's why when you say something like 3 million people played Doom in the Dark Ages in a few days, it's like, damn, who gives a shit? Cool. You basically gave it to them for free or for a cut rate. I bought it and I platinumed it and I loved it. Well, dude, even in that scenario, like, I mean, 20 million players played Halo Infinite and they didn't even reinvest. They didn't even really meaningfully invest in a game that had 20 million people checking it out consistently like on in the first month so like three million for doom is like you think they're gonna invest in that i i i don't know it's it's a fucking mess but like is it more the people have spoken no because like the people are the people are going to speak the language of the of the land you know like the language of the land of xbox is i'm gonna get this for nothing and i'm gonna get a refund by the way that they're not they're just gonna allow me to do it's preposterous it's so crazy yeah i i mean this is the whole thing chris and this is what i'm trying to explain to people is doom eternal comes out on the game pass at like 20 25 million right and microsoft goes in reasonably enough from their perspective and says all right the next one will go into development now and based on our own numbers it will launch into a service with 70 to 75 million people.

3:11:14And we're going to be drawing from much more money. So even if you judge it by cumulative downloads or minutes or hours played

3:11:19Dustin Furman:or whatever, your payout as a studio or your responsibility for P &L and this fungible monetary experience that you have at this publisher will be better for you. But what happened is that never materialized and so people are in what I would describe as insane levels of denial about Game Pass at this point where I'm like you're fucking crazy like if you're if you're and no offense to you of course but it's like if you're really making the argument that this wasn't at the very bottom of all of this I don't even fucking know what to say to you at this point like I don't I don't even know because as I said if just a fifth of the people that played Dark Ages on Game Pass bought it, it would be fine.

3:12:08Yeah. That's all there is to it.

3:12:10Dustin Furman:I mean, that's literally all there is to it. So, yes, there are games that break containment. You brought up Forza. Go ahead and rattle them off. Go ahead.

3:12:21I want to know, like, what Game Pass game broke containment outside of Forza. And, like, the games-as-a-service stuff, like I mentioned. Nothing. Nothing. from first or second party of theirs. Nothing. And I would argue that there are success stories like Expedition 33 from the third party that benefited in spite of it.

3:12:44So I know that like it's getting old for a lot of people, but you have to understand as the deconstruction of Xbox continues, it's because of this. And they can't hide from the numbers. And by the way, Chris, it was very fun for me. I've said this before. I'm trying to get too salty. That's not really true. I get salty about a lot of things, but I occasionally see things people say where I'm like, you absolutely stole that from me or you absolutely.

3:13:08Dustin Furman:I don't want to say stole. You got that from me or you observe that. It's been fun watching people observe the. The game pass numbers and like where they should have been and like all that, which I said two weeks ago and now it's circulating like it's this new thing. I'm like, I said I said that like and now people are writing all these news stories about this about this discovery. I'm like, isn't that interesting? Yeah. So that's Microsoft's major problem from an optics standpoint is they can't hide from the data. They leaked it. Well, they have to see leaked it. But we know what they thought.

3:13:45Dustin Furman:So seriously, if you're making an argument about how Game Passes affect, it's like it's so preposterous. Like that's Mathis can tell us saying it's preposterous. Sorry. It basically eliminated the commercial viability of one of the platforms. no that's just that's that's under that's that's no big deal okay the other thing that happened that i thought we would talk about well there's two other things we can move through these a little quicker yeah another studio that was affected was obsidian and obsidian of course was bought in 2018 when xbox studios expanded that's when they bought double fine and uh undead labs which we'll talk about in a minute and a couple others and according to a article on Bloomberg, Obsidian Entertainment has canceled multiple projects and will begin working on a new game in the popular Fallout franchise as part of the division's broader restructuring, according to people familiar with the matter.

3:14:37Dustin Furman:The video game studio based in Irvine, California, the home of Brad Ellis, also laid off around a quarter of its workforce, said the people, who asked not to be identified because they are not authorized to speak to the press. So I wanted to bring this up for two reasons. Again, we can talk about this as much as you'd like. number one is that it is hysterical that Microsoft bought Bethesda all those years ago now and at no point had anyone working on a Fallout game okay that's number that's number one that's fucking awesome like that is so insane that like it belies actual belief absolutely insane and again that all no doubt comes from the internal politics at Bethesda and who has control over what.

3:15:24Dustin Furman:And I'm sure what Asha has basically done is gone to Todd Howard and been like, no, we're not waiting for another fallout from you guys under any circumstances. You can continue working on Elder Scrolls and we'll see what happens from there. These guys are gonna make fallout. Josh Sawyer is directing it. He directed New Vegas. He also directed My Beloved Pentiment. But so that's good. That's five, six, seven years away. You'd have to assume. They also apparently were pitching, according to some reporting, another perfect dark game. Which is interesting. As well as like this John Wick style action game.

3:16:04Or no, that might have been it actually doing that. Yeah, that was it. I think you're thinking of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

3:16:10Dustin Furman:So that's one thing I want to bring up is like the no fallout thing is hysterical. The second thing that bothers me a lot more is that there simply is no accounting for performance. Obsidian is Xbox's Insomniac. They're basically one of the only teams that does anything. Granted, their games don't sell very well. And when you hear things like they were making a vow to and stuff like you guys are out of your fucking mind. I don't even know what you're doing. That is crazy. It is crazy. What are you doing? that's when you have too much rope and you're hanging yourself for sure but like there's no account like can you imagine working at obsidian and getting laid off and looking around and being like it's what you were saying about undead labs or something it's like um we've released games like we've put games out you're sending our games out to die on game pass and then we get punished by losing a quarter of our team if we were mad about id getting sent out to die and and the the prestige of that team obsidian is just another one of these where i'm like damn dude that sucks because if i were there i'd be like i can't believe you're i can't believe you're even touching us to be perfectly honest like i can't i i know our games aren't like huge sellers but we are performing like we are releasing things for your fucking stupid subscription service aren't we and you're sending them into the subscription subscription service to die yes they're a little bit better than kiln and keeper probably they do a little bit more for you than the you know than tower born i just get for me i'm just like i can't believe i'd be so pissed oh yeah for sure so that's happening as well yeah it's absolutely insane i mean i like obsidian i i bought i haven't played the outer worlds too yet i have it though i bought it full price um i remember i quite liked the original outer worlds as well uh new vegas is huge i didn't like pentamon but that was not my that was just never it was a good game this is objectively not my cup of tea there are great studio and they and they've consistently dude they delivered two games last year now i gotta say one i haven't played one i didn't like very much but like they're working yeah i just i just don't understand how if it's like if everyone's like guys it's all about game pass it's all about game pass it's all about the subscription we got to feed the subscription no one took it more seriously than obsidian and you would just think that even if times have changed you you'd look around and be like well this yeah this is kind of the thing that bothers me generally about like the corporate structure of a lot of these things where it's just like okay here's the directive that we're going to give you and uh understand that this is the directive okay we we need we need content for our subscription service we're not expecting banger like we're not expecting you know generation defining titles out of you guys we just need stuff to put on the service and so people are like okay and then when things change on a dime those studios are now penalized essentially for not having been working on these big banger you know triple a massive genre defining kind of games like they're essentially punished for not putting time into doing that which they should have always been doing apparently right exactly and this because this goes back to one person man it's matt booty yeah i don't know not only did he help guide all these teams into the rut like this but then he was he's got to be central to who's getting laid off like what what the account we have we have to meet this head count reduction or we have to meet this reduction in money and like fixed cost and you would think he would look around and be like it's like what alex jones would say it's like is he a mental retard like what like you you go around you're like yeah id obsidian uh it's like you you have nowhere else to cut from nothing else can be done you just i i am i cannot believe he still works there i can't believe it it is impossible for me to imagine that he could have some sort of all hands meeting or some sort of town hall meeting with his studios and his people and anyone takes him seriously it's it's impossible like it's impossible for me to believe that what the fuck there are people that would fall all over themselves to be in that role and would fix things and at least make things better i and i there's so many apologists out there they're like maybe he was one of the guys that was right maybe he's just i'm like i don't know man at some point it's what we always say about herman holz it's at some point if none of this is a responsibility then the question is what does he do right if the if if the studios he's supposed to manage are failing isn't him his fault then what is his responsibility we need uh we need to really start taking occam's razor seriously again you know what i mean simplest explanation i feel like it's it's oftentimes the simplest explanation is the right one and it's not like a there's no and i guarantee you no matter what the situation is no matter if it's if it's in games if it's in your real life there is no 40 chess going on i can assure you anybody who played 40 chess died with died in the renaissance probably you don't got those people no more right so So we just you got a high degree of incompetence, I guess.

3:21:47It's the nicest thing you could say. Really? It's wild. This entire industry is on fire right now.

3:21:54Dustin Furman:I tweeted out. I deleted it later because I felt like it was so mean. But I tweeted out. I was like, Matt Booty makes Herman Hulse look like Albert Einstein. Yeah, it's like. Like. What do you like? What the fuck? are you doing and i find it funny by the way this is an interesting thing they're gonna have a chief operating officer for the first time within xbox studios which is i don't know how the fuck they didn't have an operating officer but but that's not i mean we talked before like some weird things happen no i don't didn't have producers for a long time like there are weird things but the co the new coo comes from minecraft from moyang and i'm pretty sure she's the one that took over when matt booty left because he ran moyang and that's why he found his way into xbox studios in the leadership role and i'm like i really feel like this moyang machine that probably prints money by itself is making some people look good that maybe are a little over their head i'm not saying for this woman she might be great what i'm saying is that the same pipeline that gave us matt booty seems to be giving us this cheap operating officer and i don't know if you can it's like what we say about grand theft auto can you really judge anything going on at Mojang when Minecraft is just such a powerhouse.

3:23:11Dustin Furman:And there was even some reporting that they're just taking a lot of the profit from Minecraft and splitting it up amongst, you know, that's just helping Xbox go. I also would say this, Chris, is that I can't escape the feeling that they're going to try to sell this brand. And I know that that was a rumor, but it seems like they're really tightening it up to make it maybe more attractive to outside investors. Although you would think outside investors would, outside investors are already picking pieces off of it you would think yeah you would think you would want to come in and pick off more pieces i i wonder if outside investors have come and been like is this for sale or is is like is that for sale kind of thing specifically obsidian no no just like any like any sort of piece oh i see i see like oh you're letting these guys go like would you sell this or would you let this thing go oh interesting yeah sean mason our friend wrote in and said hey sacred boys as much as i love fallout i would much rather see obsidian create the outer worlds 3 and then work on someone else's IP.

3:24:08Dustin Furman:It's frustrating that we haven't received a traditional Fallout game in over 11 years, but I can't help but feeling this move suggests that Xbox doesn't have enough confidence in Obsidian's own franchises. Since acquiring the studio, Obsidian has released Grounded, Pentiment, The Outer Worlds, and Avowed, all of which are original projects that showcase the studio's creativity and unique identity. If Xbox is now positioning Obsidian to work on another developer's established IP, what message does this send about the future of Obsidian's own games? Obsidian has built a reputation for creating memorable worlds, compelling choices, and deep RPG experiences.

3:24:35Dustin Furman:I'd rather see Xbox invest in those strengths and allow the studio to continue expanding its own franchises instead of relying on the legacy of someone else's. Oh, sweet summer child. Yeah, those days are over. It's done. I hate to say it. They've been doing that, basically. In chasing what needs to be chased for a subscription model to survive, they've allowed everybody to do what they want, which is cool, honestly. Like it's, it's, it's, it would be cooler if it worked. Yes. But it's like, I mean, I appreciate the fact that like Pentium, the fact that Pentium exists at all is incredible. And that's, that's really awesome.

3:25:14I love that. I love that a game like that exists. It was always the more interesting thing about Xbox to me than PlayStation. It was that, was that they did facilitate an environment for these like really weird off, offbeat games. But I mean, the reality is just haven't bore out. I really do think that it really all comes down to the fact that like Game Pass probably could have worked if it just didn't have that first party guarantee thing like if it was just this like it was more like I guess like PS pluses I guess yeah um more understated that way it didn't undermine so many first party IP and and this is getting into a whole nother conversation I guess but yeah yeah good I I guess I don't know like it is I understand what you're saying the outer worlds is cool i actually think there's there's legs on it yeah but

3:26:05but it is crazy that they haven't that obsidian has not done a fallout game like you'd almost imagine that under a microsoft uh structure you would kind of have like a one for them one for me kind of deal going on like like that's been a hollywood thing for a long time directors famously talk about this was like one for them one for me one for the studio one for me and the studio projects fund the me projects and then i you know and vice versa um you almost imagine like i could have seen like a world where instead of avowed it was a fallout game you know and then after that would be outer worlds 2 and then maybe after outer worlds 2 maybe maybe a fallout game or maybe maybe avowed but you know it was treated better or something or and it had more you know uh time instead of needing to kind of go go go right um i don't know i i just think the days of them doing really bespoke odd offbeat shit are kind of they're gone until they can somehow right this ship and i just don't foresee that happening i think obsidian has a bright future ahead of it in the sense of making fallout but and that doesn't make me happy to say that but yeah i i it's funny because i i do think it's a part of it a part of creating such a massive

3:27:29Dustin Furman:creative house of studios is that you have to kind of respect everyone's preferences and there's probably a pecking order and you don't want to piss certain people off and you're afraid of certain people and it really see i mean it's fairly clear to me that the whole idea was like we can't do anything with Fallout because Bethesda won't let us. Like Bethesda Game Studios wants to do it themselves. And no one came in over the time and said like, we don't give a fuck. Like you're killing us. You know, like you're taking, you're taking all of this. You made Starfield. No one likes it. Now you're like, now you're making the Elder Scrolls for all these years.

3:28:02We're taking Fallout and giving it to these other guys. Forget about it. And if like, you know what I mean? Like at some point someone's got to, but you don't,

3:28:08Dustin Furman:you know those kinds of conversations have not happened until recently. and that's why I think someone had said and I was like you might be right like I think it was Ryan McCaffrey or maybe it was Matty or someone saying like I wonder if I wonder if like Todd Howard ends up leaving because like you have to assume for these kinds of things to happen he has been somewhat defanged right to be like no no more you guys don't you guys don't wag the you know the dog anymore like this your game was announced all these years ago you haven't even fucking put it out Starfield's been a disaster figure your shit out and yeah and obsidian meanwhile is the one that's actually like doing things you know but that's it got late had the layoffs too though i mean a lot of people got laid off from but that's the game studios and that's that's the crazy thing too it's like that's just gonna make elder scrolls harder to make that's why i feel like i re i am starting to get this idea that they really are gonna sell this thing because i i think that they it feels like things are getting lean and they're focusing on and that's why i was saying sean is such a sweet summer child it's like come on man like it's gonna be halo gears forza they say doom you know fable will be in there it's all about big things and you're right like the small weird shit made perfect sense when you thought this game pass was going to work and it was going to continuously grow you need that stuff not now you definitely don't need it now no way all right a couple more things to get through we talked about undead labs uh i just wanted to bring this up too because uh their game is coming to xbox and i had actually put out and posited the idea that sony might itself be interested in this game i i don't i don't know anything about that it just struck me as that so undead labs is the it was the xbox owned studio is working out of washington state that has not put out a game the entire time xbox has owned them um and state of decay state of decay 2 was 2017?

3:30:00Dustin Furman:2018. I think it was 2018. And then Undead Labs was bought that year. State of Decay 3 is well on its way. It's been in private alpha for a long time. They've talked a lot about it. I think there's even like a 40 minute playing like video of gameplay of it and everyone going through it. But as I was saying earlier, they're one of the five teams that Microsoft has allowed to go find new buyers or new investors into their projects. And Undead Labs released a statement according to Push Square on their Discord said, quote today on Dead Labs begins a new chapter we're transitioning out of Xbox and while we can't share all the details just yet we can tell you this State of Decay 3 is still coming the team is working hard and our commitment to this community has never been stronger more news soon survivors stick together this to me out of all the opportunities that have come out of the sale or divestment of Double Fine Arcane Lion or Leon is one of them but that's going to take months to figure out and they're working on blade which is licensed and i'm not entirely sure how attractive that's going to be to a lot of people so we set that aside and then there's like you know there's double fine there's compulsion whatever i had posited on twitter some people like the idea some people didn't i was like would sony be interested in this and some people misunderstood it as me saying they're interested in undead labs and i'm like no would absolutely not would sony want to come in and take a game that's been in development and probably is 90 plus through and give it the 20 million dollars or so that it would take to get the game out the door like in other words stated the k3 like like like they would act like uh what is it um what's that uh the dead space game that wasn't dead space callisto protocol yeah there's like really heavily assist at the end of it well yeah like even right i hadn't even thought about that from a logistical point of view like my whole thing was go to undead labs or like you know they're making themselves available i'm sure that sony caught wind or even had an opportunity to talk to these teams and they're like all right like what how much money do you guys need to get the game out the door like and obviously you have to do your due diligence this is i think part of why we don't really know the answer as to who is investing in these games or these teams and if any of the teams have been bought or whatever is because it's kind of like uh if you read about shark tank the show not your show snark tank but shark tank the show on cnbc where the deals aren't done until like due diligence is done like you're on the trajectory towards making the deal but you can pull out at any time and you don't really know what you're getting so it could be that like these things have happened quickly and they need to figure things out behind the scenes but i was wondering, it's like Sony needs a game as a service.

3:32:43They need them. State of the K3 is almost done.

3:32:53Microsoft has sunk probably, I don't know, man, a couple hundred million dollars into this game at this point. I mean, it's been in development all of this time and they're in Washington.

3:33:01Dustin Furman:It can't be cheap. You're kind of getting it for free. You know, like if you just put it's like the it's like a car coming out of the out of the factory but it needs like a paint job and then it's done it's like but like if you just pay for the paint job you can have the car and i wonder it's like will you like would because i'm sure state of decay probably has attracted some interest from others too because i think it has a decent chance of succeeding at least for a little while and i was just wondering from sony's perspective it's like yeah would you just make this a second party game and just say like we'll publish it and i would even say like undead labs keeps the IP.

3:33:36Dustin Furman:We have no interest in getting in bed with you. We'll see what happens in the future, but let's get this game to market. We'll publish it. It will go to all the different places that it was supposed to go, but we'll see it through. And I'm like, yeah, that might be the most interesting opportunity available because compulsion is just put out their game and they have nothing going. That's why I can't believe they found an investor. That to me is crazy. Double Fine, Tim Schafer's well-connected. He's also wealthy. They might be able to figure things out just on their own uh remembering of course that they even invented fig which found found private investment for psychonauts so they they can probably figure that out arcane you would assume people would be interested in arcane but they're so wrapped up in this licensed game that it seems to not be going great or at least be going over budget and over time that maybe people don't want to get involved in that but this one i find kind of interesting what do you think yeah Yeah, I mean, it's of the games that are coming out.

3:34:33I mean, I'm generally interested in a lot of the Xbox portfolio generally, but like this is the one I'm most curious about just because I. I have a history with the previous two games in a way that I don't really have history with other things. So like it'd be a fascinating prospect. I would I wouldn't be opposed to seeing it. I think it could make sense. It really just depends on how much money they need to finish it and how close they are.

3:34:53Dustin Furman:Yeah, if it's if it's low double digit millions, I think it would be interesting. Yeah. yeah like what would be the ceiling like maybe like like i would say like 25 or something would be the ceiling for me like you know like something reasonable manageable like you'll need another year and then we have to market it a little bit we have to spin it up and do all you know do all that so yeah i would say like 20 million 25 million yeah because because at that point you're getting you're getting a triple a game for 25 million dollars i mean that's the whole thing it's like i i feel like there's going to be interest in this game to like finish it and i think that's why they're like we're fine because they're probably they probably are uh for now it might not be a good investment i mean it's taken them a long time to get here it's it's preposterous i'm sure when asha came in with no attachment to any of this and really unaware of like what it goes on in the games industry i'm sure her response to a lot of this is like this is preposterous like a lot of what's going on with these games you know so and it is it is preposterous but yeah i wanted to throw i would be curious to know what our audience thinks of that like what you think Sony should publish State of Decay 3?

3:35:55A little second party action? Could be cool. It could be exactly what they need.

3:36:00Dustin Furman:It's not going to be huge, but it'll be a nice success story and kind of a little goodwill for them to come in and save this game, although I think they'll have other suitors to save it. I am very... That's what I said on Twitter. I'm like, I can't believe more people aren't talking about and trying to prognosticate through, like, who's... Who are the buyers? Like, who... What do you figure? I don't know. I have no idea. I think a lot of people think it's like Saudi or Tencent or something like that. I'm like, I don't think so. I don't think their money's as fluid anymore. Right. It would be funny as hell if Sony ended up publishing.

3:36:29And again, I don't want them to buy Undead Labs. Publish the game. All right.

3:36:35Dustin Furman:Quick one here is second party Fallout. This one comes from IO Interactive. I don't know if we talked about this on last week's show, Chris. I don't recall, but IO Interactive was long rumored to be working on a second party Xbox game, which they called Project Fantasy. And you heard bubblings about this over the years. IO Interactive, of course, is the Hitman studio. They just put out 007. So very well-respected European independent studio. The funding from that game got pulled as part of all of this. And we learned about that a couple of weeks ago. So whatever milestone they were at or whatever, the game transfers back under this deal at IOC.

3:37:09This is a pretty good deal when these things happen,

3:37:12Dustin Furman:if you're able to harness it, because it's like, yeah, we developed X percent of this game with their money. We might have to incur some layoffs or whatever, but this actually might work out great for us. So what ended up happening here is they released a statement saying that they had to close up their Istanbul remote studio as part of this to kind of tighten up the finances. And that they brought Project Fantasy in-house and that they're going to continue to work on it and ultimately publish it themselves. So that's kind of an interesting second-party fallout that should the game have not been coming to PlayStation originally, and I feel like it probably was anyway based on the way they were doing things, it almost certainly is coming to PlayStation now.

3:37:46Dustin Furman:So we have IO Interactive back in the fold, although they experienced some layoffs. as well and that's too bad i mean you're not even safe at the studio that just put out 007 which is yeah wild too bad the real problem that all this is going to result in is that like it's this industry is going to be so unenticing to anybody who's talented enough to work it you know what i mean it's it's why would you ever like if you were good at this why would you ever like why would you ever yeah i agree going to what's i mean it seems like nothing safe these days but yeah it's it's eating everyone alive it the it's sad when you know for a fact just based on the numbers that it's it's musical chairs and there are good amounts of people that get laid off that will never get another job in the industry there's just nowhere for them to go and it sucks the final piece of news here and then we'll be done with the news is uh june 20 26 is top download games on playstation network i thought this was interesting chris the top downloaded game on PlayStation Network is Escape the Backrooms for the month of June.

3:38:52Even more than 007 First Light. UFC 6 is number 3, EA Sports FC 26,

3:38:59Dustin Furman:number 4, NBA 2K 26, number 5. Other interesting games, NBA The Run number 7, which is a new arcade-y licensed NBA game. LEGO Batman Legacy of the Dark Knight is number 9. Yote holding on 2019, 18, 17, 16, 15, 14. At 14, nothing else really interesting going on here. Ready or not, number 19. Poppy Playtime Chapter 5. Oh, thank God. At number 20, Red Dead 2 dominates the PS4 list. I Am Cat, the top PSVR 2 game. And Fortnite, Roblox, Warzone, Rocket League, and Marvel Rivals are the top free-to-play games, so nothing has really changed there. All right, Chris, we're getting to the back end of our show here.

3:39:42Dustin Furman:Let's talk about what we're playing. You had mentioned earlier you had gotten your hands on an Xbox 360, So I see here you're playing. Well, you've been playing GTA San Andreas. Yeah, I have. First Series 2 and Pure as well. Feels like we're back in 2008. Yeah, 8-9-esque. That kind of territory. So what's going on? Yeah, well, I'll start with GTA San Andreas just because, dude, I'm so bad at this game. Insane. The third person shooting in GTA San Andreas is so hard. because it is so unwieldy and i'm just getting murked constantly my i don't know if cj can get stronger but like i'm so weak and uh i'm always locking onto the wrong guy it's a little rough don't know exactly where to find weapons yet too like it's kind of odd like because i'll die or i'll go to the hospital or something and i'll just be like weaponless yeah i hated that i hated that and i would just i've i've kind of been safe scumming in that regard where it's just like i'll just save after every single ever after every single successful mission and if i die i'm like well i'm not gonna go back and look for this weapon yeah that's smart um but i still like it i like these characters and i like this the san andreas is like a really good map like i i thought it's weird you it's it feels it feels bigger than i thought it would feel given how old it is like it's got a good scale it's got a good sense of scale to it and i i really do appreciate that The music's great, too, but still working my way through that.

3:41:15And yeah, over the course of the last week or two, not just because the physical games conversation has been kind of like the main topic of conversation, but also because I've just randomly kind of found myself in possession here in L.A. with of a bunch of 360 games that I thought would work in back and pat mode on Series X. that don't like things like uh marvel ultimate alliance and mercenaries 2 and all these like really weird like kind of things that i remember from when i was a kid that i really liked and so i was like well i have all these games i'm kind of annoyed that i can't play them they're just sitting there so i went out and bought a 360 cost me like 80 bucks it's a really nice really good condition too what i like about it too it's like it's the slim model but it's not the it's not the shiny one oh okay it's a matte black 360 i was like oh i'm so glad i was able to handle it because i probably wouldn't have bought i probably wouldn't have bought a 360 if it was anything other than that so like i'm pretty happy with that uh and so yeah i i started playing these two games mercenaries 2 and pure i'll talk about pure first just because i've mentioned it before as this really strange so this is like an atv racing game no multiplayer though just fascinating it's like a it's a single player focused atv really physics heavy racing game with a pretty solid soundtrack uh looks really good plays really really well it's really weighty and like the sense of speed that you get in this game is like actually really impressive to me like it like the drifts all feel good it feels kind of modern um and everything except literally just like little bits of like texture quality that you can kind of feel um but yeah pure is dope i don't know if there's much to say about it there's no story there is like a segment there's a there's a there's a mechanic there where you build your own atv and i got i just do not give a fuck i just not give a fuck about that i don't know anything but there's like a quick there's a quick build feature that kind of like approximates like the best kind of build uh for whatever it is you're going to do so i just mash that button until it's done and uh and i can get to the racing part which does feel good you so how it works is like you tilt forward and you tilt back and in order to jump like you basically have to like drive off these jumps and then you pull back and then pull forward on the stick and that'll give you like some jump and then you can do all these tricks and you unlock different tricks based on how long you last doing tricks without falling over and fucking yourself up and it's it's fun man i i really do think like i got i picked it up for like seven bucks uh and i think it's definitely worth it it's a it's a surprisingly good uh little quaint racing experience there's a lot to do in it there's like different like there's there's modes where it's more about like how many tricks you can pull off there's modes where it's more about like you know the speed and your position and so it's fun it's been fun to kind of delve into it again because it's been a very very long time since i played this game i think i really only even played the demo i think I played the demo over and over again back in those days when I couldn't afford anything.

3:44:29So it's been nice to play that. And I've been revisiting a little game called Mercenaries 2. This is a pandemic game who I'm quite fond of. They always made these weird offbeat double-A kind of janky, but very, very entertaining sandbox games, I would call them. And Mercenaries is no different. You can play as one of three characters, and they each have different stats. I think one's overall well-rounded. I think there's a woman who her speed is crazy. And then I think there's a black dude where he has an insane amount of ammo or something like that. I can't remember exactly what the main guy's is.

3:45:09I think he's just more health or something. And you pick these characters. And basically, you're in Venezuela, and you're just wreaking havoc. And you're putting together a team, and you're doing all this stuff. and it's fun man like it's it's it's weird it's it's like gta but you can call in a bunker buster on a random taco stand and watch and watch the physics kind of fall apart and uh you know it's it's got pretty janky gunplay although there is a fun thing in this game that like i don't think i've ever seen in anything and it's to be fair like i understand why it's not there because it is a little bit unwieldy and a little janky but i quite like it and it's if you're sprinting and you you aim your character will just stop and then he'll he'll keep the momentum of his sprint and he'll slide it's so weird but like i quite like it like it and i got into this habit of like doing these ridiculous slides it's like this looks so stupid i bet but yeah it's fun it's it's irreverent and it reminded me a lot of like how a lot of older games kind of leaned into comedy a little bit more than they do now like it's a lot more dramatic and serious now but like there's this there's this one mission early on where you have to retrieve this thing called the devastator and they frame it's an open world game where they kind of frame this linear section where like you run into this parking lot and you see this big tank and there's like an icon over it there's like an arrow pointing to it it's like oh this is the devastator and then you walk closer to it and you walk past it and you realize it's the icons behind the tank and it's really just this like really pink feminine scooter with like a flower basket on it and i'm like oh this is cute i like this uh i don't know mercenaries 2 is a very weird game it's i wouldn't i wouldn't call it like an amazing game by any stretch of the imagination it's definitely like a solid like seven if i were if i were to think about it in those terms but it's quite entertaining it's well paced uh i think it's it is fun to kind of you've rummaged through venezuela find like oh like here's a here's a fuel tank and i can use that to fuel my uh my offensive options and i'll like i'll market for theft and i'll send like a helicopter to come pick it up and i'll watch it come and pick it up and there's a lot of fun physics at play and some of the characters are quite fun although very dated uh i don't know it's it's fun like i like this era there's something spunky and like scrappy and you can tell it's just a bunch of people just making shit that they thought was kind of neat and i identify with that and i also quite miss it i miss when there was like a little bit less of a you know so much of an eye of sauron over everything um so it's a simpler time but uh yeah i've been delving into the past quite a bit i think i might it's kind of hard for me to get excited to play like new stuff or like stuff that's like in my recent backlog because like there's so much on the horizon right now like that we're that we're kind of chomping at the bit for july is obviously the beginning of it halo's at the end of the month which i will be definitely checking it out but then september rolls around it's gonna be a mess of just a glut of stuff so i'm gonna work on polishing these things off pure you can't you can finish I don't really care I'll probably I'll probably play it until I get bored of it mercenaries 2 I'll try to finish grant the thought I'll try to finish then I want to get to GTA 5 uh like you're you're like you're on now but yeah so that's what I've been that's what I've been

3:48:36Dustin Furman:messing around with lately cool yeah mercenaries 2 I think was it was uh pandemic's penultimate game right that was they made uh the saboteur next the saboteur was their final one yeah and yeah mercenaries 2 is just before right um yeah so I've been playing GTA 5 I play it like a few hours a night It's really great. It's a great game. It's, it's super fun. It's the, it's oozing with personality. It's silly. It's all the things that I think people understand about Grand Theft Auto. There's really nothing you can say about Grand Theft Auto. People haven't already said about it. A few things that I've, so one thing I've noticed is it sure does rain a lot.

3:49:11Dustin Furman:Like it's supposed to be Los Angeles and I'm like, it is raining a lot. It doesn't like, there's no universe where it rains like this in Los Angeles. Like it rains more in a few days in that game sometimes than it did the entire time I lived there. And I usually don't notice. And then at times I become like really self-aware and I'm like, what is going on? Like, why is it always raining? The fuck is? So there's like some weird quirks like that, but I'm really, I continue to be impressed by just the breadth of writing, the breadth of performance, like the different characters and characterizations.

3:49:40Dustin Furman:There are just so many random characters. I don't even know all their names or whatever it's like. And all the different tasks you're doing and the people you're working for, it's a very silly game. the the three protagonist thing i think is interesting i don't i don't know that i'm crazy about it i get it and i like it i i don't mind it but i don't think i need that i do love the it's not even the tech because i remember being very impressive when it was happening on ps3 but i do like how you just go from one to the next and it like zooms up and then like zooms down on the next part and that's loading like that next part of the map do you remember how long it used to take though on on ps3 and 3s yeah it was it was ridiculous it's a cool idea i don't think i don't know that i do wonder what they're going to do with this new game i wonder if they're because it's two people i wonder if it's going to be like kind of two of them or maybe you're not playing as one of them um but i feel like it could be a little more focused there is so much to do and there are like these it's so funny there are like these robust grand the thought of four really get got into this started getting into this in a serious way when you go bowling and shit like that but um there are like these robust mini games that are actually quite good like i I was playing tennis and I was wondering, I'm like, I don't think so.

3:50:52Dustin Furman:Well, it can't be because, well, it could be. Take-Two is the only company that makes tennis games, really. I'm like, I wonder, is there even shared tech? It's not a super great tennis game, but there are all these really interesting distractions and just stupid characters. Like there are these old people that are like obsessed with finding like relics of like things that like were used by by celebrities like they're used cups and all this kind of stuff. So like you you do shit for them. There's like this guy that's like. Wants you to steal all these valuable cars and you're working with like his like very upfront woman girl boss like secretary.

3:51:35Dustin Furman:And it's it's there's just like a lot of character in the game. Like there's just a lot of individual people. and I must say I'm not crazy about Trevor I think he's a little annoying but I do like generally like the protagonists their interplay with each other it's a little too natural and yet I kind of like people getting along and stuff like that so I don't mind it so much it doesn't there's not like a lot of tension between them but uh what else the flying mechanics are horrible the swimming mechanics are horrible I do like a lot of the uh I do like a lot of the races I do a lot of the races like the what like the ski the jet ski races and um the stock car races and stuff there's just like a shit ton of things to do the world is huge it's it's interesting and well populated there's so much dynamic shit going on and again that's why i'm so excited to see the next game because it'll be i think it'll be so much more impressive than this and it is impressive here and i have to continue to remind myself to your point this is not the way it looked this is not the way it ran and especially with grand theft auto six it's like damn we're really gonna have to play this thing at 30 frames i guess like it's it's just it's like i i am praying for even a 40 frame pro patch or mode or something would be awesome but yeah it's gonna be tough it's gonna be tough one can hope i just i would imagine that it's just gonna be such a cpu limited game that game you have to imagine the amount of ai that's gonna be roaming the streets of Miami.

3:53:04I, I, I, yeah, Grand Theft Auto 5 is an interesting one because I kind of feel the same way about you, that you do, about like the split protagonist where I was like, I would have rather just focused on a single person. Yeah, it's easier that way. I think it's just, it's better. I think you have a better relationship with the character. I think that's, that's why GTA 4 is so good because it's got all the, the trappings of like that modern kind of GTA of like the, the quality and like the, you know, the evolution of, you know, the technology, but you also have the focus. Trevor, I never liked. I like Franklin and Michael, though.

3:53:37Dustin Furman:Yeah, I do, too. Trevor kind of sucks. I mean, I just...

3:53:44Dustin Furman:He's flamboyant and interesting, I guess, in that you don't really know what he's going to do. I get why he's there. I think he serves the game well, but he's easily... I guess someone has to be the least favorite, right? Yeah, sure. If you have people to play as, it might as well be him because Franklin is great and uh michael is entertaining from what i remember but overall a really you know great i mean i think everyone out there has already played it but a really a really great game i'm enjoying my time with it and yeah i'll be spending i'm not gonna get anywhere close to platinum or anything but i want to do as much as i can in the game it does a really nice job of tracking what you've done what you haven't done so i think i'm like two-thirds of the way through the campaign i'm trying to just do everything as it pops up because i don't like doing you know when you leave things to the end or your post game stuff and it just feels unnatural if you don't do it all at once it feels more yeah satiating to do it um kind of randomly in happenstance as if you're taking things as they come so yeah i really i have enjoyed it a lot and it's it's fun to play so much hype for play uh for a grand theft auto 6 we'll see how it is when the time comes all right let's get into some of these questions comments concerns thoughts and ideas from the audience we end with six questions comments concerns thoughts and ideas from you guys each and every week and of course you've heard your inquiries throughout the show as well um you can submit your inquiries on patreon patreon.com slash last stand media where many of you support us many thousands of you support us and we appreciate you the threads for our show go live on wednesdays at 3 p.m eastern and are deleted noon on thursdays noon eastern so you have that time that 21 ish hours to get your inquiries in.

3:55:19We begin with MK, who says, hey, chaps, I've seen a lot of chatter

3:55:24Dustin Furman:about Microsoft being the good guys with letting four studios leave while Sony was evil for closing studios. I find the positioning odd for two reasons. One, the studios didn't leave for free. Microsoft were paid for the buyouts. And secondly, Microsoft basically drained the PL of the studios by forcing their games on Game Pass profit loss, which will make it trickier to attract funding. What say you guys? The World Cup is coming home to England. It might. It might. This has been a big conversation. Chris, I don't know if you've seen about like, well, what about Bluepoint? And what like why? I would assume that they would be allowed to.

3:56:00They would have been allowed to find a buyer. There just might not have been any interest in them, especially because they don't own any IP.

3:56:06Dustin Furman:They've never really made their own thing outside of Blast Factor, which was a PlayStation Network launch game back in 2006. And they had nothing going. So it's kind of like the worst of all situations. The reason that there might be interest in Ninja Theory, and like we talked about with Undead Labs earlier and stuff, is like these guys have games that are in development. You can kind of come in. The cost of doing business with them has been deeply prorated. Right. And that simply wouldn't have been the case with Bluepoint. So I find it a shame that Bluepoint couldn't find a buyer. I found Sony's treatment of Bluepoint to be preposterous and perplexing.

3:56:46Dustin Furman:it is incredibly weird to me that if you were going to cut any studio you would cut them I don't want anyone to lose your jobs but we've talked over and over again about studios that would make more sense to cut if you're going to cut and I think that their mismanagement at Bluepoint has been one of the worst things Sony has done in recent years having them work on God of War Ragnarok at all was weird and then having them make a God of War multiplayer game or a game as a service was fucking stupid they ran them into the ground so there probably just wasn't any interest in them and that's the sad reality unfortunately yeah yeah i don't know yeah i don't say about it really i think um i i do find the positioning odd uh but also it is how should i say this i think sony and microsoft just are in very very different places i think microsoft is definitely like they're in such a bad they're in such a bad way in so many different avenues that almost anything they do within a reason obviously gutting it is there's no way to positively spin that but like almost anything they do is kind of like well that's better than it's better than what they were doing before sony i think or playstation has because they're in a dominant position they have a further way to fall if that makes sense so like them closing blue point uh to me is more egregious than than microsoft letting uh double fine go you know what i mean like just on the basis of just like well you didn't have to do that microsoft's been a mess for a long time you you this is an unforced error this whole thing like you didn't have to like put them on a god of war live service game i don't know who the fuck anybody could have told you that was a bad idea and to give them no projects at all i do agree though that the profit loss thing is kind of a an interesting point to be made it's like here's all these studios that like uh didn't sell that well because we didn't let them yeah because yeah it destroyed their books yeah i i understand i understand the point about a point about blue point it would have been ideal i really suspect that there simply was no interest in them it's not a good or there would be interest, but not at the price or not at like you would have to spin them up.

3:59:04Dustin Furman:They would have to get their game going again. It would be expensive. I mean, I just don't. And you can't just walk into a situation like that and be like, yeah, let's get a project going or whatever. It's like it takes. It's just complicated. This is not if it's ironic to say this because this wouldn't have happened to Bluepoint at all in another era, but like in another era, there would have been interest in Bluepoint. It's just that the M &A cycle is over and that's again why i am so fascinated about what is actually going on with these studios like i wouldn't be that xbox let go like i wouldn't be surprised if some of them were just on their own and have figured it out with private equity or their own money and i'm i wouldn't be surprised if none of them were purchased and rather that like they were given a reprieve to get their next game out and then see what happens probably with some sort of cost cutting on their end including layoffs which is why i thought it was kind of you know dirty that Microsoft's like yeah we were laying off 1600 plus 1600 but not those guys and it's like well you're not we'll see what we'll see what happens I moved this question up actually because it kind of is related to this this one comes from Logan from memory card he says sacredists with all the news of studio closure oh am I putting this in the chat and not in the footnotes oh god damn it I just saw this yeah sorry um sacredists with all the news of studios closing and in the case of Xbox going independent and it had me wondering, is there anything generally stopping a team like Bluepoint from staying together as a team under a new name if Sony doesn't find a buyer?

4:00:29Dustin Furman:Obviously, they can't bring what they were working on with them, but couldn't they theoretically start Greenpoint games and continue working together as a team, even using their work as Bluepoint as a sort of resume material? Obviously, they'd be self-funded, so this might prevent some teams from doing this, but do you guys know if there's anything stopping this kind of idea? Closing teams is always horrible news, but it doesn't necessarily mean the talent of the team has to vanish, assuming they have the means to fund themselves, right? there might be like non-compete clauses internally for all we know especially with the leadership but there's probably nothing stopping that from happening and it happens occasionally i mean fair games is being made or whatever break-in is being made by a studio that is comprised of ex-ubisoft and google people that were lost during various layoffs that could yield around a new team a lot of those guys have been together forever which is what makes their game being so ill-received so troubling because they should know what they're doing a lot better than most teams so no to answer your question there is nothing stopping that from happening but you have to keep in mind the idea that yeah there could be some restrictive contracts with some or all of them they might not want to work together like And they...

4:01:46Dustin Furman:No company is as happy, like no company of size is as happy-go-lucky as they often seem from the outside. Things like this often allow schisms to develop where people go off and do their own things. You saw this happen with CD Projekt. I don't want to speak to who likes who and who doesn't. I don't know any of that, but there are lots of little teams. Some big, Rebel Wolves is one of them, but there are teams that have split off. And it's like three or four guys go here and five guys go there and two guys go here and then they poach ten more. and all of the rest. And so that might be what happens with Bluepoint.

4:02:18Dustin Furman:And all we have to do is see like, there will undoubtedly, I assume, be some sort of team that sprouts out of some of those people at some point. And if that's going to happen, it's still kind of early going. The best way to figure this out is to go spy on LinkedIn and do kind of shit like that. I don't have patience for that anymore. So I don't do that. That's the kind of shit I used to do. I used to spend entire days doing that kind of thing. But not anymore. so yeah there's nothing stopping them from doing it probably but there has to be a commercial reality and they certainly don't have the money to be funded you want to talk about a team that had their p &l drained yeah they launched a playstation 5 launch game and then nothing so they're not think about it yeah the thing about it too is just like what we have to start so look all this is happening all these layoffs are happening you look at if you look at the industry now and you think like you know we need another team you know what i mean like it's it's it's like it's such a bad i mean not to say that wouldn't be it like i'd be i would like for blue point to continue in some way but i bet it's probably a really scary thing to even suggest right now like more so than it's probably ever been to be like let's start a studio in america yeah yeah in america especially texas even there in texas it's still not great it's it's I would like to think so too.

4:03:39I would even like to hope that maybe they, they have managed to keep some of them together and they're just being quiet. But I was a little surprised, Chris, like they are really talented. It's true. Like I said, they had nothing going and no IP. So you like, you can't be super surprised on the ground level that people are like, eh, but they do have a very specific skillset that I thought might be interesting to someone. Yeah. To be like, Oh, these guys kind of have a,

4:04:06Dustin Furman:But as long as you disabuse them of this idea that they're going to make their own shit, which I think they were starting to get this idea of. And it's like, that's not what you do. Sorry. Again, it was like, it's like what the Nixis stuff, although the Nixis worked on Saros, but it's like, we really have you for a reason. And it would be interesting if they found a buyer that was like, yeah, why don't you join our family and start remaking our shit one game at a time or whatever. And I thought that that might have been a possibility, but it never came to fruition, unfortunately, for those guys.

4:04:31Dustin Furman:They are missed and the mismanagement of them is really unforgivable, in my opinion. they should have just let if this was what they were going to do to them they should have just never bought them it would have given them an opportunity to survive timothy kirk wrote in and said afternoon gentlemen there are reports of sony ceo selling 50 of his stock along with other sony executives now some of them are accusing them of a pump and dump scheme with executives knowing that no discs announcement is going to tank the brand what are your thoughts on this and the possible implications of when it comes to playstation or when it comes to playstation So this is true.

4:05:03Dustin Furman:I don't I'll give you a story because when I read this, I was like, really? Not the I read this on the news and I saw that the story I didn't think it was interesting enough to bring up in the news. But Yahoo Finance writes, Sony CEO sells over half of his stock after controversial PlayStation decision leaves fans furious. They write a quick read is Sony CEO Hiroki Tatoki Literature Club sold 56 percent of his Sony shares for four point seven million dollars just two days after announcing PlayStation goes digital only in twenty twenty eight. Despite a 100, and then they go to all this other stuff that we don't care about.

4:05:36Yeah.

4:05:36Dustin Furman:The timing raised eyebrows immediately. Sony president and CEO Hiroki Totoki sold 225 ,000 shares of Sony stock on July 3rd for approximately$4.729 million at$21.02 per share. Per an SEC filing surfaced by Quiver Quantitative, the sale represented approximately 56.5 % of his holdings in that class of stock, leaving him with 173 ,250 shares in Sony. On the same day, Chairman Kenichiro Yoshida sold 400 ,000 shares and additional unnamed Sony executives also sold shares. Market Beat pegged the combined insider sales at roughly$10.5 million.

4:06:15So it is bad timing. Like that's the thing that I'm like, what are you doing? You know, why are you doing this right now? As opposed to, wait, now I understand the stock went up.

4:06:29Dustin Furman:but it does conflict with what timothy was saying about what some people are saying he's like they're accusing them of a pump and dump scheme it's like well the market liked the announcement right so the only way that would work is if they thought that there would be deleterious effects later but their strategy seems to indicate that they just want to survive the moment and they think they'll be fine so i really think it's just kind of shitty ill timing probably pegged to a certain beginning of a quarter and start investing with hit their own stocks i really don't know but i the thing is this is what i would say for sure that if i was on the board i'd be like what the fuck are you guys doing yeah you can obviously do whatever you want with your with your stock and your options but like what do you you didn't think anyone was going to realize that you just dumped half of your stock and it looks really weird that you did that after a small bump we experienced on the market after we announced that we're killing the games like the physical games like why you guys need to think again about the shit the stupid shit you're doing i mean maybe maybe fucking totoki has a has a liquidity crisis i have no idea but but uh that needs to needs to sell now but i i just i i so it's not i don't think there's anything untoward about it i really don't i just think it's stupid just stupid timing yeah i this seems i mean i i don't know much i'm not gonna pretend like i i'm a I'm a scholar as far as like insider trading goes, but I don't know.

4:07:56Selling 50 % of your stock after something doesn't seem like a problem, does it? You know what I mean? Like I thought the whole thing was like, you know, you're going to publicly announce something. So let's, you know what I mean? So let's make a bunch of arrangements before we do that and then react accordingly. Once it's done, this just seems like reacting to what's happening. It's inappropriate. I would say probably, right? Yeah, I think. I don't know. Yeah. The problem I have with this idea is like, I would assume if I were them,

4:08:31Dustin Furman:maybe they just have a better understanding of things and like what the market really demands of them. In fact, I'm sure they do, but I would have thought that would have hurt their stock price. And so if they were waiting to get this news out and then watch the stock go up, I feel like that would have been pretty tenuous shit. and now you could make the argument that if they saw that they're like oh shit like actually we should just get out of this this position now there would be a degree of insiderist insiderishness to that if you assume that because but that would require them to not act in a fiduciary obligation like it would be illegal i'm not saying people don't do illegal things i just don't think they're that stupid i i think i think they just weren't thinking about the optics or that anyone was even going to report it and by the way 10.5 million dollars across executives is not that much money i would assume the ceo of sony makes more than that a year himself so it really it like really isn't that much money but yeah it's a lot of money to us but you know what i mean based on their volume on the tokyo exchange and all that it's not a lot of money and sony stock i actually haven't looked today sony stock kind of started adjusting back down actually um yeah like it's kind of almost back to where it was

4:09:54there yeah it's funny man when you look at their stock it's never really been worth very much

4:09:59Dustin Furman:yeah a lot of it has to do with volume i'm sure but like even if their their boom time like in the 80s and 90s their stock was worth like four or five dollars and right right around ps2 their stock went up to$29. That was like during the dot-com crash. And then it rode back down like during the PS2 era. It was at$6 or$7. And then during the PS3 era it was at like$3 or$4. To be fair, it's at like$28 now. Yeah. Actually, it's at$20. It was up to a high of$28 November. That was the all-time high. Anyway, I understand everyone's skepticism, but I wouldn't read too much into it. Orion Virchow wrote in and said, Hello, gentlemen.

4:10:39Dustin Furman:This one is for Chris. my son who is only seven has recently become obsessed with crash team racing and now whoops my ass in every race and last cart standing battle i need to know how to get better and maybe even beat him do you have any tips or tricks to accomplish this should i play balanced or speed or turn settings or anything else he also says he wants to marry coco bandicoot should i be worried if he is going to be a furry when he grows up should i give up gaming if i can no longer compete thanks for all the content interesting first of all that's awesome i love that like that's exactly how old I was I think when I was obsessing over Crash Team Racing.

4:11:12Maybe a little bit younger. But so here's what you're going to want to do alright, Orion? I want you to look up, there's a bunch of tutorials about this, but this is an important mechanic to learn if you're ever going to get good at Crash Team Racing. There's a mechanic called Ultimate Sacred Fire. It's a glitch. It's not supposed to be in the game, but they brought it forward anyway because it was so endemic to why that game was so good. And it basically allows you to have a boost forever. there's ways to do it i don't remember the little intro i bet i would probably remember if i like sat there and sat down and played crash team racing again but there's like a lot of little things about like how like when to when to drift when to boost over what over what there's there are different like boost pads that have different values of boost so you have to like boost over certain ones you have to make sure you're not you're you're on the ground as little as possible so you're always hopping as well so your boost lasts a long time there's a lot of strats there but look just ultimate sacred fire is the keyword that you're going to want to look up there's a bunch of videos about it i'm sure uh that'll help you grind your seven-year-old into dust hell yeah and just and destroy his confidence which i'm sure he doesn't need at that very pivotal young age yeah that that that important age that vital age but that makes me happy i'm glad that the kids that young are still enamored by that game i think it's an amazing game and i think for children especially i think it's just so tactile and so responsive and so rewarding of of your uh inputs that it it naturally kind of gravitates um naturally captures the imagination quite a lot yeah good stuff yeah be careful but he wants to marry her i don't think you're in danger yet but that's that's a definitely keep an eye on it you know what i mean like keep us appraised of this issue tell him there are many fish in the scene he

4:13:03Dustin Furman:He doesn't want to just go around saying he wants to marry these women. Yeah. Well, don't bring another animal into it. Don't mention fish. No, no, no, no. You're going to want to. Right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right. Yeah, yeah. Good point. I don't know. Play. I don't know, man. Give him. Let him play wet for the 360. Maybe course correct him a little bit. But that's the classic. Yeah. All right. Claytonimo Bay wrote in with something that is making the rounds in sports game circles, and it's quite a serious situation. Hi, Colin and Christopher. Have you two seen the uproar around EA Sports College Football 27 this past week?

4:13:42Dustin Furman:EA's microtransaction creep has now reached even the formerly sacred single player modes. In Dynasty, you can now pay to level up your coach instead of playing the game or spend a cool$100 to max them out entirely. The backlash has been bad enough that even EA partner creators such as YouTuber Bordeaux are posting scathing videos and creating the hashtag CFP, CFB, don't play, don't pay. I actually watched his video, believe it or not. And yet, despite the bugs and the shameless microtransactions, College Football 27 will almost certainly be one of the best-selling games of the year. I'm a huge college football fan, and I'm sitting this one out, but we all know the masses will be buying it sight unseen.

4:14:16Dustin Furman:Not to mention those single-player modes are hilariously broken. CPU-controlled teams will over-recruit punters and kickers to the point where a few years into Dynasty mode, much of the roster and many of the best players are all punters and kickers. Teams will also fail to recruit enough players at all and crater by 20 overall points within a few seasons. This has all been discovered in the early access period that cost$150 to gain access to. So my question is this. Is there any realistic way to break up the sports game monopolies that let companies like EA serve us the same reheated pile every year?

4:14:44Dustin Furman:And more importantly, will Colin ever give us a sports game sacred streaming episode? I'd love to watch him experience the state of sports games in 2026 while trying to rebuild his Jets or Islanders. Anyway, I'll hang up a picture of Chris above my bed and listen. so yeah this is a really big thing going on right now and i've been reading a lot about it in fact i was when i watched that bordeaux guys video about it it was a trend it was one of the top trending videos on youtube yesterday so i was like holy shit um and college football of course is a huge game huge huge one of the biggest games in the united states every year now that it's been released i guess this would be the third year um since it's come back there are multiple things to say about this first of all it's not surprising at all that ea is going to start doing this to their games after all chris their 20 billion dollar leverage buyout isn't going to pay for itself and you can expect many more shitty things like this in the game i told i mean i i just not that it needs a you have to be a genius i'm like you you think ea games are bad now dude and i don't mean bad from a quality perspective i mean and bad into how they're going to nickel and dime you you ain't seen fucking nothing that the leverage buyout to buy ea is the biggest leverage buyout ever so there's one way to make that money back and it's by nickel and diming the fuck out of you guys and they're going to and my assumption is is that i am think that most of you are going to go right into it now i was looking and i'm glad that some people are complaining about it but most people won't give a shit what they basically did chris is i understand okay is they took these single player there are these like in in dynasty mode your coach and your gm and all this have all these these modifiers and you can go in and modify them typically so like you gain experience points and there are these all these meters for like oh experience points for this and experience points for this person and how when this happens and you can have it like normal slow slowest but you'd be able to go faster fastest like all the way like max things out and go crazy with you do whatever you want because it's a single player game and it doesn't break anything for anyone right you cannot interact with others doing this stuff what they did was they removed everything beyond normal and put it behind a paywall so you can you can level yourself up normally or slowly but you cannot make it faster under any circumstances but you can pay for it.

4:17:09And then it will unlock these single player features too. And I'm like, yeah, that's ain't seen nothing yet.

4:17:19Dustin Furman:It's unfortunate. Now the bigger question he asked here, I think Chris is can, can people break this EA monopoly? And I have to remind people is it's not EA's monopoly. The monopoly is given to them by the individual leagues that they work with. and remember there used to be now nhl i think will let anyone do anything but nfl is the problem and you'll recall that the madden license is an exclusive license no one else can make a licensed triple a simulation style football game there are other football games that use the license that are more like nfl street and stuff like that you know style things and of course like your your simulate your you know uh spreadsheet simulators and all that those all exist this there used to be multiple football games there used to be multiple licensed football games there used to be multiple licensed hockey games there used to be multiple licensed baseball games yeah a lot of this comes from the exclusivity of it's not even access to the teams it's active access to the players and this is where nil came in with with um with football with uh the college football game but remember well you wouldn't remember even give a shit but like the first NHL game on Genesis was NHL PA hockey because they didn't even have the NHL license.

4:18:37Dustin Furman:They had the NHL Players Association license. So basically they had the right to use the players, but none of the teams they had. And there were games that even existed like that. They ultimately got them all together and everyone makes a lot of money, but it's all typically driven to one conduit and one studio and one game. And there really is no money to be made out, even if there were no licensing agreements, which there are, there's probably no money to be made outside of it because it's too competitive and these games are too dominant. E-football Konami competes with FIFA or football club, EA's football club, but it's free.

4:19:12There's no paid soccer game that will compete with FC.

4:19:16Dustin Furman:And by the way, EA let go of the FIFA license. They license all the individual leagues and stuff like that. That's different. They make the NHL games. There's just no interest in NHL outside of the NHL games. And the NHL series has been going for 33 or 34 years now. It really does come down to football. And you'll remember Sega used to make a really famous football game. And Madden got, EA got upset and they squashed it. 2005 is the year you want to read about if you're interested in this, because that's the year Sega released a$20 brand new licensed football game that was better than Madden. this freaked EA out EA went to the NFL and locked it you can see you can see the show is an example of a baseball game MLB went to Sony a very different Sony before COVID and was like you're putting these games on Xbox and Switch or we're pulling the license from you so you have to understand the power sits with the leagues and they should kind of be blamed for it in my opinion.

4:20:25Dustin Furman:But what EA is doing with football club is ridiculous or not with football with college football. And I wonder. It I was like, oh, this is an interesting thing. I clicked on it. I'm like, it's like the third trending video today. This is definitely a problem for EA. And I do wonder if they will fix it or not. But I don't know, man. It's going to be bad out there for EA games. It's just it just is like they are going to bring that thing dry man it's gonna be bad news i'm telling you give you bad news it's so bad man we're so cooked we're so cooked that deal sucks i'm i i was i'm still mad about ea doing that like obviously the shareholders approved it everyone made a lot of money but it could be the beginning of the end of ea as we know it if they really do need to monetize everything this way.

4:21:20Dustin Furman:And again, they're going to need to monetize things this way. All right, final inquiry. Some are related to the things we were talking about earlier. It just didn't feel appropriate to talk about it at the time. But Risen wrote in and said, hey, y 'all, did you see the memorial for laid off colleagues at Bethesda following recent restructuring? There was a display of portraits and flowers for those affected. While a well-meaning sentiment, why is it seemingly unique to game dev that we see these performative displays? They're champion too. Kind of funny shame, but does the HR for making them take it down?

4:21:50Dustin Furman:I've endured layoffs across industries and experienced the phenomenon of survivor's guilt, as it is called, but I never treated it like an event where somebody I worked with earned a purple heart for falling on a grenade. I don't think I am lacking in the empathy gene because I'm sorry for those dealing with jobless, but what is it in this culture that makes some act like they are akin to wounded warriors? I didn't want to bring this up earlier because I don't want to shit on people, want to bury it to where people can find it. But there is something to this. Like, definitely. it is extremely sad when people lose their jobs it has got to be incredibly scary I've I've never been laid off but I have survived layoffs many times and you do have a level of survivor's guilt you also have a level of relief you can't really share that with anyone because you sound like a dickhead but you you go through the whole gamut of emotion sure the thing that I think we have to remember Chris is that like and this is where I think I wish people would think about things a little more critically.

4:22:44You don't want, you don't need to like ruminate on it. And

4:22:46Dustin Furman:you certainly don't need to say anything about it, but it's like, you assume with some of the layoffs, some of the people laid off. It's like, yeah, these are like probably some of your lowest performers. These are probably some of your weakest links. It's not to say that people, everyone loses their job is like a throwaway. Nothing. It's like, no, that probably is mostly not the case. Actually. You have to probably make really difficult decisions about who you're going to keep. And you're going to lose some institutional knowledge or some skill that you're really going to need. But certainly some of these people sucked.

4:23:16Dustin Furman:And it just needs to be said at the same time. Like if you're making great games at great studios, these things typically don't happen. The unfortunate thing about Microsoft is that they kind of threw all these people away with their own, you know, slant towards a subscription service. And so I agree that it's it's both extremely sad and you leave it to me to verbalize it here on the show for you. You don't need to say it, but I think it's okay to think it. It's like, yeah, I've said it before about the layoffs I experienced. It's like, yeah, I hated losing some of these guys. Some of these guys kind of sucked.

4:23:49Kind of were like a net drain on us, actually. We're kind of going to be better without them. So I'm not saying that that happens.

4:23:54Dustin Furman:I'm just saying we got to look at the whole perspective of it. And I do agree there is like a very deep well of trauma in this industry around it but i think a lot of that happens because there's nowhere for anyone to go when like when you like imagine imagine you're an artist and you're like kind of coming up the rungs and you work kind of anonymously on a team and now you're going to competing you're competing with id's artists and obsidian's artists and like all it's like good luck yeah and so i i think from that perspective there is a dire nature around it where there there is no remember remember it's so crazy to think about this man 15 years ago maybe 10 years ago the idea of like jobs were so easy to get everywhere that people would quit their jobs intentionally have what they would call fun employment do you remember this and then they'd be like and they would they would go like it was a whole phenomenon of fun employment where it's like yeah i'm good i'm gonna go like do a thing and i'm gonna go live my life for six months and i'll just get another job right and they did it with confidence and they succeeded and those days are gone and now there really is like this draining like oh my god can i even get back in am i finished and that's scary so i let people i let people grieve but of course underneath the lines there's some there's some fucking melodrama to it of course well yeah i mean some generally i think that would be the rule but like i think like these xbox cuts specifically i mean i remember i know for a fact that there were people kind of talking behind the scenes or maybe uh these things got out where there were people outwardly saying in a way that i don't remember ever being said before by the way and we've had many many years of consistent layoffs at this point this is the first time i've seen in the cycle alongside it these cuts don't make sense right i mean it is the most obvious example you're telling me every you're telling me everybody but one person who worked on id tech was an idiot no ain't no shot i don't i don't believe i don't believe you and so like it did seem or it does seem like these cuts are being made like very broadly and without a lot of care and so like from that perspective like maybe maybe there is something to be said about like man like these cuts don't make sense and i think everybody kind kind of inherently knows who the people they would cut are you know they understand who the lowest performing people are and like maybe they did maybe they survived it like really really intensely hard-working talented people got the boot for no other reason than they just needed to get their books clean quickly because clearly like i don't know man there's nothing you can convince me there's nothing you can say that can convince me that ever that the it cuts make sense no no they don't really none of it and so like in that in this era where like now the cuts aren't really making sense i think everything's up i think the doubt is fair i think and i also think the empathy is fair i think it's i think it's fine i don't think i don't think they're necessarily i think this whole purple hard analogy is a little bit i think i i think there's a little bit of projection going on i don't think i don't think it's necessarily them doing that it's it's a little bit of a is it a little tacky maybe but like I mean there's far worse things going on in this space and uh I think it's fine but like there's just no job security anymore like it's all gone completely yeah I mean we we of course wish the best to everyone that was laid off but yeah I the tough thing to say is that like yeah I think an easier way to say it Chris is that like there seems to be no heartfelt anything for people that lose their jobs in a bunch of other places.

4:27:42Dustin Furman:But for here, we have to kind of like, you know, everyone gets the loudest possible outpouring of support. Maybe that's maybe that's a kind thing that lacks, but I have a hard time using that adjective in the games industry. Please. Yeah, fair. I mean, I I think that's more of a failure of other industries than it is a failure of the games industry, though, to be honest. I think it's a good thing that there's some level of support. Whether it's performative or not, it's nice that it's there. Other industries not having that is more of like... It says more about those industries, I think, in my opinion.

4:28:25But, I don't know. It's bad, man. It's bad out there. Very, very bad. Yeah, it sucks. So it really does. Yeah. We'll see how things shake up. I'm still fuming about it. I got to be honest. Yeah, me too. This whole episode, I've been like fuming about it, like silently. It sucks, dude.

4:28:46Dustin Furman:It's it's I mean, fuck them. It's inexcusable, but whatever. Well, it's not whatever. I mean, well, it is whatever it is, what it is, my dad would say. All right, my friends, that's it. So we have Chris for this episode. What's on your agenda for the rest of the day before we go? Uh, I'm going to go to the dentist today. I have an appointment in a couple hours. Oh, okay. That'll be fun. Nice, nice cleaning. Which I quite like now. I don't know what I used to hate going to the dentist when I was a kid. And to be fair, like going to the dentist as a kid is fairly traumatic. But it's kind of nice now.

4:29:26I don't know if they've got better technology or if they got better medicines or whatever, but it's not quite as. It's actually quite relaxing. so i'm looking forward to that yeah i i like getting a clean bill of health i like the idea of someone seeing like all right everything's all right get your x-rays get cleaning you know you do all this yeah the the the sense of calm that i get from that bill of health is going to be gone in a week because i'm going to be like oh i just missed it right like now is when the now is right now is when the heart disease starts right it's like two weeks after I get this bill of help but you know whatever I'm looking forward to it it's it's just it's nice to feel responsible getting these things done yeah you got to go twice a year man you got to do it important yeah um yeah I'm gonna just work out I think and uh jump in the pool it's been raining at night so I don't I don't know I'll be able to use the pool today but yeah

4:30:25Dustin Furman:just go swim and hang out and and live my life as it were but it was good to be here with you today Chris. I'm glad to see you and appreciate your time as always. Thank you for being here. Thank you all out there for your love, kindness and support. Appreciate you as well. Remember, you can get us three days early and ed free. A bunch of other perks, patreon.com slash last stand media and last day media 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 Collins last stand LLC and is proudly recorded in the USA.

4:30:59The show is conceived by, is written by, and is directed by me, Colin Moriarty. My co-hosts are Chris Raygun Maldonado and Dustin Furman. The show is produced by executive producer, Dustin Furman. All of Last Stand's theme music

4:31:12Dustin Furman:is by my best friend, Ramon Narvaez. As you know, all of Last Stand's shows, including Sacred Symbols, are fan-funded on Patreon at patreon.com slash laststandmedia. The following names are at the producer level on Patreon, our highest tier, and we're grateful for your thoughtful and kind contributions to our independent endeavor. Thank you.

4:32:08Dustin Furman:Thank you.

4:32:28the Late, Whiskey Sin, Relentless Rex, The Fandom Traveler, Jad Rita, Terry Tip, Double

4:32:34Dustin Furman:Duty Dirk, Zach Cohen, Peyton Stone, Michael Buffel, Dan Root, The Shady Mailman, Christopher Morgan, Steven Glasham, Josh Godfrey, Sketch McGetch, Betty Ann Moriarty, Electric MD, Tyler T, Norse Nuts, Omar, Jake C, Trey Woodward, Antonio C, Alan Einer, Jay Getter, Captain Verde, Bjorn Campbell, Jeff Mercado, Weary San, Trayland, Zainal Yuichi, Gregory Slavinsky, Gus, Remington James, John Zyle, Boots, Alex LaPere, Saul Balcazar, the brain worm starved and died, only the idiot remains. Who is Stephen Day? Mr. Finkler, Matt Flowers, Joseph Baker, Kendrick Kias, Jimmy Rodriguez, Dave Alvarez, Chris Galvin, Mason Bichard, Ollie Fritz, Robert Schultz, Sakib Alam, Colin Love, Daryl E.

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4:34:13Dustin Furman:Tom, Phil Crone, Throw7, Josh McKinney, Michael Gates, Alex Gates, Cam Wallace, Gio Corsi, Joey Gondaliger, Omar Rosa, Alex Monez, Justin Payne, Justin Wagaman, Austin Riley, Paul Joyce, Chad Lewis, Joshua Smallwood, Shane Rayum, Don Lee, John Cordero, Matthew Ash, Brad Cooley, Eric Pryor, Kyle Martin, and MadMockMedia.