#420 | Taste the Thinnest of Oxygen

1:09:38Well, that's what I would say. Like, I don't know. Like, yeah, you're right. Calendar year would be a year defined. I'm talking about 12 months. Sure. You know what I mean? So that's a third definition of year, which is funny. So, yeah, I don't know. it's it's just interesting because i i feel like it all is contingent on what these things are and what their price are and i do understand xbox fans especially being a little upset about people talking about how how bad the xbox helix is going to do when it's like yeah it probably will do bad but it's you can't we don't really understand it yet in fact the way that they talk about it during their interviews makes it sound like they're changing it i mean that's the way i read it is that like there was something about because I think my prediction is that I think Asha came in and realized the multiple storefront thing and I think she realized it's like I understand what you're doing here you're going to kill the hardware though and we might want to do that in the mid to long term but you can't I don't know I think she realized like what's the point if we're if we're going to do this like what is the point but I think if these numbers are true especially for xbox series decline it's like man putting gears on it to die and and more sadly to me clockwork revolution or whatever where it's going to be on pc it'll be they'll be fine they'll do well on pc but it's like i don't think you made the right choice if these if these numbers are indicative of anything i think you made a pretty bad choice i 100 agree and the thing that the thing that bothers me about it it's like okay let's let's so with the gears thing in particular it really bothers me because it's like okay you're going to send this game out to die on a platform that has no meaningful install base.

1:11:16I guess it'll be on PC as well, in fairness. But you actively took it off of another platform. It was going to be for PS5. Now it's not. If Gears doesn't sell well, is the coalition then going to suffer the consequences of that? That's what I'm afraid of. You know, because that's not their decision. This is what I'm saying. This is what I talk about often. I know people get annoyed about it, where it's just like the people often responsible for the for the fuck ups are not the people who end up receiving the brunt of the consequences for for it oh no and that's what pisses me off because it's just like what are we doing here you really because i know that's gonna happen it's like oh we're gonna we're gonna get rid of uh some of the coalition and it's like well they it's not their fault that you took their game off of the most popular console platform to make a weird play like what like what did i don't know this is what i was saying about id and i i don't think people people like i don't i still people on ps5 and pc could have bought the game too and i'm like yes but your your community didn't buy it at all right and that's what i was saying earlier about like when you're bragging about i actually saw someone recently say i haven't gone and double checked it but that they were they were bragging that doom to dark ages was the biggest doom launch ever but they're looking at player numbers right my whole point is I'm like if a quarter of you bought it they would have made more money than none of you buying it

1:12:43Dustin Furman:and so these studios being sacrificed to this this author it's a shame dude and you either see it or you don't like it's it's almost impossible to even explain it anymore it's like well I don't know man I don't know what you want me to tell you like at some point it's just complete ignorance and and willful ignorance at that like when your own executives are saying it's not working I think yeah i think it's gonna be all right all right so the other analyst thing that i wanted to bring up um if i might chris is yeah and this this just came out today this is from new zoo a fairly well-respected analyst firm that releases a lot of interesting insights and numbers reports and so on and so forth this one's about grand theft auto six and they write new zoo's data shows that GTA 6 generated roughly$180 million in digital pre-order sales across the U.S.

1:13:34Dustin Furman:and the five largest European markets in its first week. These markets are the U.K., France, Italy, Germany, and Spain. Based on pre-order sales curve, GTA 6 is most likely to follow. This puts the game on pace for$3.3 to$5.2 billion in cumulative global sales by the end of launch week. That marks the strongest opening to a pre-order campaign ever recorded in our data set. So here's what they say. What does the$260 million in week one of pre-orders mean for GTA 6? The answer depends on which pre-order curve GTA 6 follows. Broadly, there are three curves to hit for titles. The brand new IP, Cyberpunk 2077 Hogwarts Legacy are examples.

1:14:17Dustin Furman:Nobody knows what they're buying until early reviews, so pre-order bookings trickle in before climbing exponentially, a hockey stick. The second option is sequel with performance uncertainty. They talk about Spider-Man 2 and Battlefield 6 as examples of this. The franchise and gameplay are well known, but execution on the specific installment isn't. And then the third is the proven sequel, a known quantity. And they talk about EA Football Club here. Massively anticipated each release with a tried and tested formula and an aggregated loyal audience. So a higher share of total revenue is booked early in the pre-order window.

1:14:46Dustin Furman:So what they're basically saying is that there are simply three curves that you would mark based on how you would identify this game. And I think the proven sequel, a known quantity, is likely what it's going to be. So they say, of the three, GTA 6 will most closely resemble the proven sequel curve. On that curve, the opening week counts for 5.8 % of total revenue booked by the end of launch week. At a$260 million opening week, that implies GTA 6 is on pace for a$4.5 billion sales by launch week. Roughly 51 million units at an assumed$88 average selling price. Now, I brought this up because, Chris, if it launches in a launch week at 51 million units, it immediately becomes the 11th best-selling game of all time.

1:15:30Dustin Furman:Yeah. That's ahead of Wii Fit and Pokemon Red and Blue, a bunch of Call of Duty games, the original Sonic. Pretty interesting. So, just wanted to throw that out there. And by the way, this isn't for for the times we're in it's an all digital game so that's right i don't know man i don't know possible 51 million units that seems like a that's a lot dude like that feels like too much like i know that gta 5 i know that that game is gonna do crazy but that feels insane because it wasn't like elven room is available everywhere right and that was like i think like 11 or something it was like 11 i think in the first day or the first week or something yeah i think i think what this these numbers sound very high to me too well not very high but high it will certainly reach that number certainly um this suggests that one in three console owners will buy the game launch week yeah globally i mean that's a fairly ambitious thing um it'll be in the low i mean it'll be in the tens of millions for sure undoubtedly yes it could be chris i mean we're we're kind of i mean i don't want to say we i want to speak for you but i'm somewhat disconnected from the reality of the of like the normal gamer i don't talk to many normal gamers like this could be one of those games that just reignites a lot of people and brings them in and and we're going to talk a little bit later it's a much smaller example but black ops one and two coming to psn it's like people are coming out of the fucking woodwork so imagine imagine a game right imagine a game like this like people are people are going to be coming out of the woodwork for this game people that probably might not even never played a game since gta 5 so there's something about this game but i would love to know i would love to know what their numbers look like at take two right now like how do they feel are they feeling good yeah are they feeling nervous i don't know i don't know i mean even half of even half of that is amazing you know what i mean like even so do you imagine that that's it's going to be that much in such a short time it wouldn't it both would and wouldn't surprise me because this is the i've said this before where this is kind of the last really big traditional game with this amount of hype behind it there's really not anything on the horizon that matches this this is very likely the last we'll get of something like this um at least until the next gta which like who knows if that's even gonna be a thing if they if they just like dedicate to making this a platform of some kind which i think would be also cool um but i mean you figure like elder troll 6 is maybe the other thing but like even that's like compared to gta i feel like it's not on the same that's not on the same level so i'm sure a lot of people are going to come out of the woodwork for this but that number is what is a 50 50 million 50 something they say at 260 million dollar opening week that implies gta 6 is on pace for 4.5 billion in sales by launch week which is 51 million units at an assumed 88 selling price so they assume some people will buy the or many people will buy the hundred dollar version that would be no short that would be nothing short of amazing i mean it'd be crazy and and if if those projections are true and by the way rock star and take two can hide these numbers from everyone except for two entities sony and microsoft so you can read we'll use sony as an example sony's PlayStation is always going to be the de facto home of this game.

1:19:20Dustin Furman:They might be looking at this and be like, oh my God, man, we're going to make so much fucking money. Whatever we were losing from all the drama and trauma we're dealing with right now, it's just going to be completely offset. And God, I would love to know. I would love to know. They're staying so tight-lipped about this game. I think it's frustrating, people, but I'm kind of digging it, if I'm being honest. Yeah, me too. I like the mystery of it. I saw some big GTA Twitter account, those accounts that have millions of followers and they just news aggregates of all these things. And they were saying, GTA 6's marketing has been a failure so far.

1:19:59Dustin Furman:And I wanted to respond and be like, GTA 6's marketing hasn't even fucking begun, dude. Yeah. You're going to see GTA 6's marketing. I guarantee you that. It's too early to market it. What they're frustrated about is... no trailers no no working the the enthusiast market for things and i'm like yeah that's marketing too but a different kind of marketing you have not they are going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars like they're going to spend the higher than a budget of like a naughty dog game on just marketing this game so right just wait until football season um i assume you're going to see plenty of grand theft auto during football season start september wow yeah that sounds about right and wait until like you know you're going to see placards at premier league games and you're going to see 60 second spots which are really expensive during you know sunday night football like that that's the kind of shit you're going to see i think patience there's no reason and again i've said it a million times right chris in my opinion i don't think they gain anything by showing anything i i would think it would be dope if they barely showed anything in the game there's like you'll see yeah i'm kind of in the mode where like even if they i think i might just completely avoid all the marketing for this game like as best i can i know it's going to be really impossible but uh i like how little i know about it and how little i know about what it's going to be and i know we know a little bit about what it's about kind of but not really also right so i kind of want to keep it that way because again like i don't know when the next time this is going to happen like something like this let's see here chris next up wanted to close the loop on this yeah last week we talked about college football 27 the very popular ea game especially here in the united states and how they uh to catch everyone up the basic drama was that in an attempt to sell single player microtransactions in dynasty mode specifically ea disabled modifiers modifying sliders that would usually be available in the game so you have like a coach and the coach levels up and you can actually just make it so your coach levels up really quickly if you want it's kind of like cheating it's kind of defeats the purpose of playing dynasty mode but like you can do those kinds of things and so you can set the experience typically to like go slowly like very slow slow normal fast very fast and they had disabled all of the fast moving experience bonuses and locked them behind these paywalls and people in the community free so ea kept this to themselves until the early access period for college football 27 because they sold you know i think you get three or five days early if you pre-order it like the special edition and so enthusiasts um including this college football creator on YouTube of some repute named Bordeaux made a big stink about this.

1:22:57And they, so basically

1:23:01Dustin Furman:like people are upset that you have to kind of micro microtransact to get things that you used to get for free, even if it breaks the game. And EA released a statement basically reversing course on this decision. However, I will say that I think this is going to be a short term victory, and I'll get into why I think that is. And as I understand, I haven't caught up with it completely since then because this just happened last night and tonight, or today rather, is that I think Bordeaux is like that creator and other creators are still mad about stuff. So I have to get further into it. But here's what they say.

1:23:33Dustin Furman:Quote, thank you for your continued passion and for the incredible response to College Football 27. We love the game and the sport. College Football is and always will be about the sights, sounds, pageantry, traditions, and atmosphere of Saturday in College Football 27. We aspire to deliver the deepest experience to date with all new Dynasty Blueprint, new positions in Road to Glory and the best college football gameplay yet. However, your feedback on Road to Glory and Dynasty is that we've missed the mark with the introduction of paid progression options. This was added independent of deeper mode progression with the aim to give players more choice, but what you'd said is that they're not adding the value we intended.

1:24:04Dustin Furman:Tomorrow morning, so this has already happened, we will remove all paid progression options from Road to Glory and Online Dynasty. An unfortunate side effect of removing paid progression is that players that have college point balances in their wallets will not be able to apply the balances in Road to Glory or Dynasty. So jump in between now and then to apply your points. Hopefully you've already done that. Now here's where it gets a little dicey. Our goal for live service plans in College Football 28 and beyond, so next year, will be to deliver valuable features and content with greater transparency and communication.

1:24:35Dustin Furman:We're moving fast to respond to your feedback in-game, so stay tuned for follow-up communication next week where we'll take you through more design details and share our goals for College Football 27. So. Listen, well, let me get into this letter first. Tim C wrote in and said, hey, guys, with EA putting out the statement about College Football 27, how much of the blame can be put on content creators with the progression of microtransactions in the first place? I understand that they were the most vocal about their outrage about the additional microtransactions in this game. However, they are the ones buying the games year after year, regardless of quality, and they only have outrage because it's starting to move into single player modes.

1:25:12Dustin Furman:They are the ones spending more than the average player in the online game modes to have videos about every new card and player that becomes available. Even though they do have no money spent videos to show how you can do it without spending money, they will still have a second account where they will pay to have the best team to create content. I understand it's their job, but regardless of how good the game is, they will spend the money in this online game modes year after year, which can entice their viewers to do the same. I think some sports fans feel their games go ignored because there is no longer competition in this space, and no matter what they make, their money is online microtransactions.

1:25:41Dustin Furman:would love to know your thoughts so i'm much more familiar with this than chris's and i'll say because he doesn't really interact with sports games at all and i don't anymore either but i did and i read something really interesting chris about 2k so nba 2k another huge game is that so there was a comment on like one of these videos i was reading where a guy was like listen i know people are really upset about this shit i basically only play 2k and a couple other games a year and I have a normal job I spend probably a thousand dollars a year in 2k making my team better because I can afford it and it got thumbed up a bunch and people were commenting under it or whatever it's and I'm like like the reality the the reality of this and this is the this is the kind of conundrum is like most people that play these kinds of games not everyone but play them deeply this is their shit and spending 500 or a thousand dollars in the game is actually worth it to them and might even be less money per hour spent in playing games than i spend because i'm always buying new things so they don't even not only do they know what i'm trying to say is they don't look at it as a ripoff and there are and there are people that are interacting with the game in deep ways like that so for the most people that don't buy any microtransactions that's fine but you are being well outpaced by the simple amount of money that we used to call them whales but they're not whales.

1:27:03Dustin Furman:I guess the point I'm making is they're more common than you think. And that's why these things appear there. I'm of the mind that like these options, especially in single player, I don't mind them existing. It's that it's removing what used to be free that bothers me a little bit. But here's the other side of what I wanted to say, Chris, is and I made this point, I think, last week when we reported on the first time is. You ain't seen nothing yet with electronic arts. I'm just telling you. okay i went i went and i went to research this just to make sure they strapped 22 billion dollars in debt to ea when they bought it 22 billion that that's not a static number that has to be serviced there's interest payments on that it's it's a number that has to be whittled down constantly or it's going to get out of control and it's going to consume ea this is the largest leverage buyout in history and they're going to do shit like this in their games and that's why i thought the and i think this is why people are upset still but i appreciated the candor in the statement to a degree where it's like we'll be back with this like we're gonna massage this and communicate this better and and make sure that the roadmap is known or whatever but like they are probably under a crunch unlike you have never experienced at ea with this game and with madden and with football club and even with nhl and these other things like nhl is a smaller game at ea but like they're bringing back shit like online dynasty modes and stuff like that they're doing all this for a reason right so yeah it's just and and and tim is right chris like there is no competition in the space but that is the fault of the of the leagues people don't want to play fake football games they don't want to play hockey games with fake players in it they don't the only even in the uh the show konami has long done uh it's called pro pro baseball spirits or something it's like it's like the the the japanese version of the show for the japanese baseball league and that's getting a western release now but even then it's because the the players associations and the licenses don't cross over there can be no other triple a baseball games there can be no other triple a nfl football games i don't know if nba is bound because EA used to make basketball games.

1:29:18Dustin Furman:But the point is, is that these leagues like it the way it is. And actually the best way to bend this is to not go after EA, but to go after the leagues and say like, we want competition in this space. But then the leagues go and say like, well, we get these very handsome, you know, royalty payments and licensing payments by giving them exclusive access. And if we don't do that, then the game sells worse. And then we have this other version of the game and we've been there before and it didn't really work for us. I think this is a shitty situation but it it it just is what it is people don't want to play there have been great sports games in the past that simply don't have the license and therefore that they don't matter and that's that's that's all there is to it and it's too bad yeah so expect a lot more of this like you in ea games you have not seen anything yet i am telling you it's gonna to get fucking hairy out there man with ea games oh man they gotta get that money somewhere it's like they knew what they were doing when when the people bought it they knew that they had these yearly annualized expected funnels so in other words it's not like oh you're you're wedging assassin's creed in every year we don't want assassin's creed every year like the tradition of these games is getting them every year everyone is always expecting them every year the they are named after the years and i think that that was part of ea feeling or the people you know the pif and these others um silver lake and others getting involved with this and saying yeah we'll we'll take out all this money because there are these forced conduits that have to exist in nine month development cycles and people will never stop buying them and and you should and if anything people should be thankful that ea doesn't have baseball or basketball they they did have them both and they maybe could one day have them both but at least those are with others because if they had a total sports monopoly then yeah it'd be really bad which is i'm sure what they want i'm sure they love that but and did did they do rbi or rbi baseball no that was uh who's rbi rbi was tension originally wasn't it let me see i don't know that's the only baseball game that i played that wasn't the the recent show games rbi baseball 2005 is the last oh namco is rbi baseball the original rbi baseball and then it went yeah oh no it was tension as well and then mlb took it in-house i guess it's something because it because like you said like they've they've released more rbi baseball games i guess there was ones in 17 through 21 and so on and so forth i remember rbi baseball on the nes is as the tension game though the black cartridge game um i i i've i've recommended this to people many times but the game if you want to play an amazing old baseball game that is on on license but really really deep baseball stars on nes is a fucking game dude that game was so ahead of its time i can't even believe how good that game was that's an snk game so you might have some uh some drama with that if you don't want to support the saudis but did you see by the way um games done quick or whatever was supposed to do the sponsored stream with snk i guess for i don't know if it was king of fighters or whatever and um and they pulled out which i and a lot of people were mad at them but i respect that like yeah that's a very very left-wing organization and i think they're doing it for because there's a lot of trans people and a lot of gay people in their community and it just doesn't quite compute but i've never actually seen anyone take a stand yet and i was like yeah all right cool yeah it's good i mean i i would argue it's not even political really like i do you're not not not in part in a partisan way it's just like bro this is like they they kill journalists you know like it's not it's not unreasonable to be like yeah maybe not maybe we won't do this uh maybe won't work directly with uh this entity it's funny it's funny chris because i i'm sure you didn't watch any world or haven't watched any world cup soccer but the um no yeah they have the ads like i was saying earlier along the border of the the field all the time you know at soccer games and um savvy games group had pretty prominent advertising during all the world cup and i don't and savvy games group is like the the is the games washing like organization that like is the saudi games entity oh and and i was like oh i bet you almost no one knows that that's that's what that is it's very similar to uh level infinite and all that stuff with uh with china right and i was like oh very interesting they are advertising very expensively and very heavily and they're making games i don't i don't know what's going to come of it i mean we made fun of it at the time when they had like these you know these like traditional western game developers you know with their purple hair and their their complicated sexualities and they're working out of like Riyadh and it's like okay yeah you guys are definitely not sellouts but cool have fun all right so college football 27 saved for now but I think things are gonna get I think things are gonna get pretty dicey for you guys but man that game is huge dude but you know what else was huge Chris on PlayStation Network that came out recently black ops one and two and i thought this was interesting so i was talking earlier about those twitter accounts those famous twitter accounts that cover certain games i think everyone on twitter knows the twitter account charlie intel it's a call of duty account they cover other things too oh yeah yeah but they have a um they have a deep well of connections to activision and that's been demonstrated many times in the past they tweeted this out the call of duty black Black Ops and Black Ops 2 ports on PlayStation have more players online than Black Ops 7 does combined on all platforms, sources say.

1:35:13This is brutal. If you are this, this is to me the sign of. You can't boycott things if you have.

1:35:26Dustin Furman:If you have the counterbalance of this. in other words like it's very it's got to be very frustrating for people that are trying to like trying to be disciplined and do things and then it's like yeah i i like i was mentioning earlier that it's entirely possible that even people leaving ps plus like dustin got rid of his ps plus many people got rid of their ps plus and protests of the physical games thing it's entirely possible that there are more people now on ps plus than there were before the disc announcement simply because of black ops yeah and it's like damn dude if that's that's the ecosystem you're dealing with there's almost no way to really hurt them and so i wanted to note that but uh are you interested in going back to these games obviously black ops 1 ps3 2010 the sequel 2012 on ps3 so these are old games and they're not as i understand chris they're not remasters right yeah like as far as i as far as i understand they're just straight ports or they're so the thing for me is just like these old Call of Duty since it's a port these old Call of Duty games as far as I'm aware have a bit of a hacker problem and as far as I've seen it's still a thing there's more people playing now because it's been officially re-released so like the the likelihood of you running into like somebody who's just been on Black Ops 2 the whole time fucking around with it is a lot lower than it used to be when it was just like this you know this dead game but I don't know if they've done much to really fix or fortify um so i don't know i'm curious about it because black ops is one of those is like the series where i would always hear that it was good but i just kind of never i never really played call of duty for the campaigns honestly like i just never they never i never gravitated to it but that was the one where people started saying it's like oh this is actually like this is where it gets serious or where it gets like this is art is how I remember people describing to me it's like okay like maybe so I've been thinking about it but I don't know man there's a lot to play and I also just know I'm not that much of a Call of Duty guy I like it well enough I know it's doing well I don't know but I am pulled towards it constantly what I will say it's like this this old stuff being more successful than the new stuff is not necessarily surprising to me there's just such a deep well of nostalgia for these things that people have especially if you're i mean even if you're you know my age but especially your age and younger because you that's a more seminal time for people you would have been in in high school or middle school or wherever you were at at the time like i'm not saying chris i'm saying people out there listening yeah and so i think it's it's why there's like a i always feel like games like fortnite and roblox and all these things probably will never go away just because there's always going to be this this cycle yeah the young people are there you know yeah that's where the young people are the young young young people are there and so if you want to placate to if you want to not placate but if you want to um play to the strength of strengths of this market you have to kind of play for the people for who were who were around for a while and it seems to be working i mean it's not it's it's not anything new it's like dude like i'm looking at just out of curiosity because i i was curious uh halo the massive collection has 6 000 like a 24 hour peak of like 6 153 and halo infinite is 2 700 you know what i mean so it's like yeah the older stuff is there's a case to be made that it is nostalgia and that is absolutely true but there is also a case to be made that it's just like it is also just better yeah it's good yeah people like it You know, it is just objectively like I don't think anybody's sitting there being like, oh, yeah, the new Black Ops, the new Black Ops games are way better than the first the first two.

1:39:12You're seven entries in on a franchise. That's what, like 30 entries in. Like, of course, of course, the earlier entries are more. You know, what's lovingly crafted. Duh. What I remember about those games, too, Chris, is that it's just when people dispute this and I don't know why, because it was obviously true at the time. is like it was when Treyarch kind of started to get taken seriously. And they weren't. They weren't taken seriously at first. They were kind of they were they were like Infinity Awards bitch. They would do like all the off cycle games and then and then suddenly it switched.

1:39:48And that was what I remember about these games. Yeah, because World at War, I remember people really liking World at War. That was where zombies first came in. But it was still kind of like that was the second. That was the second. That was the B team. you know they were doing cool stuff but they were they were the b team infinity ward was that was the way and then it swapped and then i think it swapped again at some point i don't know now

1:40:11Dustin Furman:they're all just working on everything now it's like when you go look at these guys do the single player and raven's doing this and fucking binox did this and high moon did this and it's like all right yeah high moon's making sure there's no swastikas in the emblem editor that's their entire job dude i'm seeing some in the m in the uh the uh you know the r is that the emblems of the things that people make on yeah i'm like do some of the shit i'm like oh my god it's outrageous it was crazy that they allowed you to do it back then uh it's even crazier now i just can't believe people's balls in attaching that to your presence in other words you're not playing the game it's not like the ps2 like modem where you're like going into socom and you're like all right i'm this guy on socom and i count it's like that's your playstation network account and you have like a fucking ss logo in your like i'm pretty sure you should be more careful than that but i don't know people don't give it yeah yeah i don't know they are uh 40 each the games but i was told they're 20 each if you have ps plus that's not so bad that's not so bad it's i don't know if i had more time i'd go and play them but i don't have them the thing is they're backwards compatible on xbox already and if they're just straight ports i would probably have to see like I might own them on Xbox already if that's the case.

1:41:30So like, let me. Black Ops. Digital.

1:41:38Yeah, I don't know. Maybe, maybe I'll get around to it.

1:41:41Dustin Furman:Like I have this fantasy because remember I was making fun of myself for it because I just you just get used to saying the same things over and over again. So you feel like time doesn't pass and therefore things don't become untrue. So there was a time where I played Call of Duty every year. Right. And then I including both of those games and these games and it stopped like a long time ago. And I still and even after years, I was like, I still play. I play Call of Duty. And then it's like you look back and I'm like, dude, I haven't played like nine of these at this point. It would be it would be fun to.

1:42:11Dustin Furman:Have the time to be able to play all the campaigns from the first Call of Duty, which I love the original Call of Duty. I think the original Call of Duty is dope. And they did. Remember, they re-released Call of Duty, Call of Duty Classic. Big Red One. what was big red one was later that was like an expansion yeah yeah um that's right cold classic i forgot about that they like i brought it back i just picked up uh for 360 i picked up call duty 2 nice it's so funny dude it has 13 achievements oh they're all like 100 points or whatever it's so quaint it's like because it was like that was like day one right yeah that was the launch game i want to say yeah so yeah i mean i have some history with call duty like the thing for me was just like I know the Black Ops the first two Black Ops games are mysterious to me though those are the ones that I would want to if there were any Call of Duty games that I would want to play it is these two and I would probably not go any further really um but I'm gonna wait there's just there's a lot that I'm playing right now and there's a lot to play on the horizon so I'll just I don't really care about multiplayer either World at War has always been my like it's always stalked me from the corners because i can never beat it on veteran and a hard game dude that game was insane it was it's comical like i if people are not familiar with world of war on on a veteran go look it up yeah go go yeah you'll have a good look i i really hated that game dude i hated it like it made me so mad well that's why i stopped playing like i was i used to be a really much more angry gamer i actually had to tone that down when i became a like and when i worked at ign like because i used to get i'd like slam like my controller and i like you know dagan was like dagan was crazy i remember it was like when cords still connect you still had corded controllers and you would throw the controller like smash but then it would reset the console because it like jerked it or whatever yeah i remember so but i remember world of war was one of those games where i'm like i am getting so mad at this game that i like i can't i can't i can't and i just i i just put it down after a while you can do it it's a degree of tilted that's very rare to that's rarefied air the degree the degree of anger that i that i felt that world the world at war it was world at war and when i was and it was trying to and when i was trying to play them crash team racing oh yeah in that brief window of time where we had that wager i had a dead i had i had a controller on like so i had my normal controller and then i had a second controller that was dead already that i used to just slam on the ground and beat up when I needed to take anger out of something.

1:44:47Because I was going to throw it out anyway. I still have this memory of Kingston walking in while I was curb stomping my like literally stomping on my controller out of fury. It's a fond memory. It's good. It's good stuff. Yeah, that's a man's platinum. For sure. Man's man's platinum. That fucking sucked. Chris, a game that might also suck. I don't know. Ratchet and Clank Ranger Rumble. They wrote about this on PlayStation Black. Now, people will remember that we first talked about this game last November. Right. This is a mobile game on both iOS and Android being made by a French studio called OBB.

1:45:26Dustin Furman:They do what they got to put a little respect on their name. I don't play mobile games. None of us do. I don't think here, but they do a game called Frag Shooter Pro, which is apparently pretty famous. It has 150 million downloads. So that's crazy. So not bad. so they're a studio of some some good reputation the chief executive officer officer stanislas the war the waverin wrote on playstation blog suit up rangers pre-registration for ratchet and clank ranger rumble is now open worldwide on the app store and google play to celebrate we're launching a community reward campaign headlined by a reward we think ratchet and clank fans will especially love the exclusive clank suit skin for widget since the games reveal a few months ago we've been testing and refining the experience the regional soft launches in Canada, the Nordics, France, and Asia.

1:46:11Dustin Furman:After a successful testing phase shaped by player feedback, Ratchet & Clank Ranger Rumble is now gearing up for global launch, and pre-registration is the first step on that journey. We can't wait for what's coming next. They describe the game as this. Ratchet & Clank Ranger Rumble is a free-to-play multiplayer hero shooter that brings the iconic franchise to mobile, developed by OBB in collaboration with PlayStation Studios and Insomniac Games. Captain Quark has created a revolutionary combat simulation to find the next generation of Galactic Rangers, but well, it's Quark. So once you step into the arena, anything can happen.

1:46:41Dustin Furman:Players choose from legendary heroes, master unique abilities, and unleash an arsenal of explosive weapons in real-time PvP arena battles, enhanced by dynamic PvE elements that add depth and variety to every match. The hero lineup is something we're especially proud of. With 12 heroes available at launch and more to come, each character brings a new, fresh perspective to the Ratchet and Clank universe. So, I don't know. You can register, by the way, rangerrumble.com. r-a-n-g-e-r-r-u-m-b-l-e.com and you can play it on both ios and android like i said earlier i don't i think the game looks cool it's not it's not a game for me my biggest confusion chris continues to be like it's what we were saying about the horizon mmo you got to put it on playstation right what like it's cool like put the game on mobile i think that's awesome yeah just also have why wouldn't you also want to bolster the audience of uh like why not have this like this strikes me it's like a perfect xbla type you know what i mean like back when uh the summer of arcade was doing these types of things it's just like why not have like a multiplayer ratchet and clank game that's also available on playstation it's kind of i don't understand that i don't understand that strategy right like i don't i don't know i just don't understand what i i again everyone knows i'm aggressive about them going off platform with their games like i think it's a good idea and i want them to try different things but everything everything you make has to be on playstation it's what it's it's the little things like what we were making fun of anaplex when they were publishing the fucking dang and rampa guys new game and it's on switch it's like sony owns anaplex why are you putting it on switch but not playstation like it's like one hand doesn't know what the other is doing yeah and i don't it's very weird it's weird to me it's very silly it's um it's also just unwise all of all of it all of it is confusing i will say like in the middle of scrolling through this i gotta say i think i had like a i think i had a minor breakdown because i was like i was looking at the screenshots and i was like i feel like i've seen this exact screenshot so many goddamn times you know what i mean like i don't know if like maybe like i mean you're older than me maybe maybe you've uh experienced this exactly that i'm going through right now and you've just you've either gotten used to it or you've gotten over it but like dude every single one of these screenshots looks like 50 other games that i've seen and i'm starting to i'm starting to lose my mind yeah i mean everything is starting to look exactly well it's not that they everything looks the same it's that there's these different verticals of things that look like something right so right it's exactly it's it's not that this game looks like fortnite or anything it's just like this first screenshot or uh this first screenshot of the cutesy character in the in the in the middle selection screen and it's clearly like oh this is the menu and like your character loads in in the center it's just like fortnight it's just like marvel rivals or whatever and then there's a screen with all the lasers and all the colors going on it's like oh look at all the chaos i'm like how many how much more of this can i take yeah it's it's a lot i will say i will say when you click on the screens i'm looking at them it is a clean art style it's just a very generic art style it's cell shaded it looks like and it looks good like i don't i'm not sitting here saying like it looks like shit but like no but everything looks it's it's all everything's reducing right like to to it's like how they say in a thousand years like like if we keep in all these races around the world keep interbreeding in this globalized world we'll all just be like kind of this shade of whatever yeah it's it's like i remember playing mass effect i remember when i would play mass effect and like in mass effect all the stores have the same exact signage and like everything's like the same and it's obviously because it's assets and it's just like easier to do that but i remember being like this this isn't what the future would look like and now like i'm slowly starting to believe that's very possible like i'm like it's slowly becoming like it's settling it this is a sinking feeling where it's just like yeah okay we're gonna have the same signage for everything the same font for everything it's funny man oh god i'm losing my mind i'd be curious to see if how this does i just feel like buttressing these games with the presence on PlayStation is so obvious that I understand it's it's complicated but it's not that complicated there are games that play between console PC and mobile like the biggest games yeah like it's it's like you got to figure that out man like it I don't know what they're trying to prove with not doing that it's like you're not giving these games really a chance by not doing that I I don't know if they're like yeah we we don't like go you didn't play pokemon go on your switch and i'm like come on guys like maybe it's they don't do they want um do they perceive mobile to be a vector into the psn i guess maybe yeah i mean yeah that's yeah that's especially because it's on google yeah i mean that's that's possible sure i i just feel like still silly you should you should really at this point your playstation you're the de facto console manufacturer if you're too afraid if that is the if that really is the reason which like i just made that up who knows it could be but like if that is the reason and you you're so unsure or you're so uncertain of the of your own ecosystem that you're like you can't put something on mobile and have it cross-integrate because you're worried about it being like a massive vector then like that's kind of a problem in the first place that you should be solving yeah i agree and um it and i also say chris it's not it is not as egregious as the horizon mmo thing like to me it's like you almost want to be like hey dumb fucks you have to put the game on playstation you have to put the mmo the horizon mmo has to go on play does you are you crazy are you fucking crazy are you crazy it is my sincere hope they understand that like it's actually exclusive to the psx yeah it's exclusive to purple that's great what are you doing that put the purple launcher insane i know that they're going to come back and say like we want this is for east asian the east asian audience i understand but like it should be for it should be for the global audience and and anyway i think mobile's a good place for sony to be i i will say the one inorganic acquisition sony ever made that i liked was Neon Koi.

1:53:05Dustin Furman:And obviously that blew up in their face. Yeah, didn't they? Savage game groups that were originally called. And that obviously melted down completely. So it didn't work. But it's like, God, this is what this all this years, all this money. And you come up with a pretty cute looking ratchet game that's pretty neat, but no one's there saying to you guys, it should all circulate around our platform. And then we spread out from there. It would be like, it would have been like releasing Lego Horizon and only on Switch. It was cool that you put it on Switch. You got to put it on your own console. Dummies.

1:53:42It is crazy. So I think this thing is going to come and go, unfortunately for that. But I don't think it would have come and gone if it was both good,

1:53:50Dustin Furman:which it looks good and generic, but good. And it was on PlayStation and available. And you know what? If you're not going to put it on PlayStation or you don't care about selling it on PlayStation, put it on PS Plus. Right, right. What's the harm? Yeah. I don't know. It's just crazy to me. I don't know. I don't know, man. All right. A couple other things to get through here. Oh, man. The FlexStrike wireless fight stick has been delayed. I don't know what's going on with this. Yeah, weird. Unfortunately, so it was supposed to launch August 6th, and it was supposed to be to coincide with Tocan.

1:54:32Dustin Furman:I think they got a little, they just wrote it too close with the manufacturing because they have an update on the post about this saying, quote, update, we wanted to share an, we wanted to, I'm saying update a million times, but they're writing it this many times. We wanted to share an update on the launch timing for FlexStrike Wireless Fight Stick. Due to unexpected production delays, FlexStrike Wireless Fight Stick will launch at a later date. We will share an update soon. We're working to ensure we deliver the best possible experience to our players with FlexStrike, so we're taking extra time to put the finishing touches on the product.

1:55:01Dustin Furman:We apologize for this delay and look forward to bringing the FlexStrike experience to the community when it launches. Players who have pre-ordered FlexStrike Wireless Fight Sticks from direct.playstation.com can check their order status through the website and will receive communications regarding their orders. Players who pre-ordered through another retailer should look for updates directly from that retailer or contact them with any questions. This is a weird one just because this date was announced in June. so something has gone wrong very late and i wonder man what it what it was yeah there's something wrong with it they say again in the second paragraph quote we're working to ensure we deliver the best possible experiences to our flares with flex so we're taking extra time to put the finishing touches on the product it's almost as if it came off the line with fucked up or something yeah that's my read too is like there's something catastrophically there's like a red ring situation going on with this like maybe like a button doesn't like a really key button just doesn't press or something although how do you fix that the thing with like putting the finishes finishing touches on something is is one thing if it's software right but like how do you put the finishing touches on hardware that isn't like it how should i put this if if something has to be held back for you to put the finishing touches on it and and it's hardware surely that's not a it kind of necessitates that that's a trivial thing, right?

1:56:27Because like you can't, they're not rebuilding these. Yeah, that's true.

1:56:31Dustin Furman:I mean, it could be like all of these controllers these days require firmware and so it could be something preparing to launch with that. I don't know. It's true. It's also the FlexStrike also works on PC and it could be that there's a problem with that. But I will say it's, I'm looking at pictures of it. I haven't seen it in a while. I was kind of, I kind of forgot about it. It's very clean. It is a very clean looking thing and I love the little bag it comes with. Because it's expensive. It's 200 bucks. It's a nice. It's a nice bit of kit. The issue, though, is that like it's it's so nice and it's and it's a type of controller that is beat to shit.

1:57:06Right. You know what I mean? Like this is like if you it'd be like making like an apple punching bag or something. We're just like this is kind of this is going to be this is going to be scuffed and fucked like by the by week two. Yeah.

1:57:20Dustin Furman:The white the white accent thing all over where the face buttons are is interesting. just in that but if you had to choose one or the other i think you would want it on that side as opposed to where the stick is you'd have this like circle of goo of fucking dust of cheeto dust yeah helping around it but uh it does look really nice but yeah 200 bucks is not not cheap so no i don't know my friends we'll keep an eye on this i know some of you were looking forward to it it's too bad that it's not going to meet for token because um that will be a nice question to ask at the token thing if you're going to that thing at san diego comic-con about about the fight stick because I know that they were trying to match that all up.

1:57:53Dustin Furman:And I am curious to see how Tokan does. It's not far away, dude. It's 20 days out, I think. No. Yeah. Yeah. It's close. Yeah, about 20 days. It's close as hell. Yeah. My suspicion, though, is that it's not going to matter necessarily. I think people, with respect, like I think if you're the type of person to be interested in a fight stick, you probably already have one. Right. I would assume so. So you probably have a fight stick for Tokan. You just probably wanted a new one and you're not going to get it. And that sucks. but like it's probably not going to be the biggest deal i've heard that playing on controllers i don't want to say in vogue but like kind of more people do it now because when i when i was younger and i played fighting games that was almost nothing i played on controller that was something almost no one did um like that was serious that in my circles but now you see it and i think some of even the greatest players in the world play on controller now if i if i all which is so and because to me i i always held it why i'm a ps5 controller here i would always hold it almost with like a claw because you want to use all four of the triggers in street fighter like the these are like the fierce attacks um so yeah i don't i don't know i don't know what uh i don't know i don't know what people that's interesting yeah yeah it's it's funny to me because it always it's always struck me as like controllers are like i mean this is way better right like to me to me i'm by casual like i don't play fighting games like but the flat panel with buttons seems so like not ergonomic for for video games to me where it's just like I just don't understand how this is better for you yeah I think I think some of it has to do almost with like a piano like when we play with the face buttons we use our thumb so there's only so much you can do right but I think the idea of like sequencing buttons together by pressing them yeah um yeah that's valid I mean like I mean I used to to be fair like I can't remember what games oh there was like a def jam game or something that i used to play like and i would i would hold the controller like upside down and it was like i was pretty good at it i don't i don't know how i would do it now and it was more suited to playstation controllers yeah people people hold i've i've said i've um we've talked about some of those interesting ways people hold their controllers like the backwards thing there were people i think i i saw i read about it a long time ago so i really i'm really uh not up on it and i doubt it's very common at all but like there was a dude that like held his nes controller upside down basically played like totally inverted um yeah that was like in the speed running community it's just it's just a matter of i guess what you're into and what you're what you're interested in but i'm not i'm not uh i'm not skilled enough in any game to really have to worry about the finer parts of like control you know gta 5 is kind of exhausting my thumb because you have to hold the stick down to run so and then press forward there seems to be I might be missing it because there's a million options in that game, but click to run, you know what I mean?

2:00:41Dustin Furman:That's usually an option. And that's not an option here, so my fucking thing. They should really do that. I don't mind a lot of the core Rockstar conceits, like the weighty characters and the slow animations. I'll take all that, but give me click to run. Just do it. It's okay, I promise. Well, that's what you think. All right. I just thought I would talk about this real quick, Chris. It's nothing really here to go on, but V Scooper tweeted out, and I'll get into who this is in a minute, says, exclusive Sony Animation explored in a Horizon, I like how they said N, Horizon Zero Dawn animated series.

2:01:20Dustin Furman:The project remained in development even after the theatrical film plans emerged, though its current status and any connection to the previously announced live action series remains unclear. So I was looking at, I think we've actually brought this person up in the past, but I was looking this person up, V Scooper, and they're uh they do have these like weird scoops about the entertainment industry and they have a a thread on their twitter account of all the things that they've said that have come true so i was like okay it's interesting it's a nice idea i should do something like that i wish i wasn't so lazy um i thought this was interesting chris just because my notes are somewhere that i had forgotten about this the we there was going to be the horizon netflix series which we had talked about extensively and then the dude got in trouble right that was like running it he was like the umbrella chronicles guy yeah so they just pulled the plug on that entirely then there was going to be the live action horizon film that apparently is in going i guess so that's what he's saying this is unclear like how this might interact with it if at all but we have or if it even exists anymore but we have said that unless you're going to do a very expensive movie like live action movie like really expensive jurassic park style shit like original jurassic park style You can do it with CG now, obviously, very well.

2:02:34Dustin Furman:But I think you got to go with a cartoon on this because it's too much. Like, it's a lot, dude. It's all predicated on this really extraordinary shit. And it would be dope for you to do a live action. But you got to do it right or it's going to look like shit. And so, I don't know. Cartoons are kind of an easier, simpler way of doing things. What do you think? It's a better way. I think animation has always suited video games and a lot of this heightened fantasy a lot more. um it's just so funny it's just like uh horizon animated is there anything that isn't horizon that's being made like is is is horizon is like a real like horizon the restaurant right like what are we doing what are we doing this is crazy dude order a barrel of aloys ale aloys that's pretty good actually that's like that reminds me of like when they used to have like i remember like spencer's gifts they would have like those like gaming energy drinks did you ever see those where it was like the gears of war had one it was like emulsion or something oh yeah come in these like really blank they were these really blank cans with like just one logo on it and like the nutrition facts that were undoubtedly hard but I don't know.

2:03:46The favoritism is just funny. It's very funny. I think Horizon would work better, though, as animated. Like, I don't know how you do. Like, Jurassic Park is like the budget that you would need to do this in live action of any in any way that has any hope of hitting. And that's probably way too much. Rest in peace, Sam Neill, by the way.

2:04:06Dustin Furman:yeah it was that was very sad he's awesome you know he was i love i love jurassic park i think that that movie is so i haven't even seen anything past the third one i guess you don't need you don't need to dress world or whatever they call it or whatever but um i remember seeing the third one with my my girlfriend in high school and i because i remember really loving the logo which was like the the raptor claw three oh yeah it is good and i remember it's a good logo yeah is that the one is that the one where the where sam kneels on the plane and and the the dinosaur says alan i i don't know i don't know he's having that dream in the plane and he's like and he's like shaking himself awake and he turns to his right there's a there's a fucking rafter on the plane and he goes alan yeah wait i thought alan's bad dream yeah he wakes it's the most yeah it is it It is from Jurassic Park 3, yeah.

2:05:01That is a classic. That is one of my favorite things ever put to screen. But Sam Neill, I know from, obviously, Jurassic Park, but also Event Horizon. Oh, dude, I love Event Horizon. It's amazing. You know that missing shot? You know there's always the rumors that director's cut or whatever that all the footage has been destroyed or it's been ruined or something. No, I don't even really know any of the lore around Event Horizon. It was so gory and so bloody that like the audience was like we we no i think somebody like fainted or something and so they were like all right we got to cut a lot of this out but there's this there's this one shot that survived and it's so cool it's like it's like sam neill like crawling down a like face down on a ladder and he's like all red he looks like a liquor from like resident evil and i'm like i can't believe that got cut because it look it's so striking it's insane i saw that theater in uh

2:05:50Dustin Furman:or i saw that that movie in the theaters i remember and i can't remember there was a quote that I used to save from it but I don't even remember what it is anymore the uh it's funny man I when I got a we've talked we talked about them at the time I got a custom couple custom suits made over the past few years and they so they have these things where it's like oh we stitch um yeah like a little you put your initials here and that little thing here and and when and in a little zipper you can write a little message whatever it is and I had them write event horizon on the on the message oh that's funny um as the message on both of those things because um my junk is so large that not even light can escape it right it's also a portal to hell

2:06:34Dustin Furman:touche

2:06:38chris i thought this next story was interesting and i wanted to go into this a little bit with you yeah uh this comes from automaton media which we cite often on this show because they translate

2:06:49Dustin Furman:Japanese stuff pretty well that we would otherwise miss from Famitsu or 4Gamer and other places that print good stuff over there. And they write, Koei Tecmo has expanded its workforce from 2 ,500 to over 3 ,000 in two years, remains committed to target a 5 ,000. I thought this was fascinating. They write, Koei Tecmo president and CEO Hasashi Konuma, who took over from founder Yoichi Erekawo last year, recently spoke to Famitsu about the company's significant upsizing in its past few years. Aiming to increase its number of development lines and broaden its release lineup, Koei Tecmo expanded its workforce from 2 ,500 to 2 ,850 people between 2024 and 2025.

2:07:30Dustin Furman:This year, it has welcomed another 193 new hires, domestically reaching over 3 ,000 employees. Back in 2024, Koei Tecmo announced the target of growing to a workforce of 5 ,000 as part of its midterm strategy. And according to Coinuma, the company remains committed to this even now, with hiring planned to continue at a steady pace, alongside internal training meant to cultivate talent. Currently, game development at Koei Tecmo operates through six distinct brands, most notably Team Ninja, Omega Force, and Gust, plus one studio, the recently launched AAA studio, that they haven't really talked about yet.

2:08:01Dustin Furman:The company is looking to establish an infrastructure where each of these divisions can produce a steady stream of new releases. Additionally, Konuma says he is invested in launching new brands that would allow the company to try different things with its games, given that existing brands already have loyal fan bases who expect specific IP and genres from them. While Konuma says the direction of potential future brands is still a secret, he asks fans to look forward to future developments. Another noteworthy point is Koei Tecmo's move to handle global publishing of its games in-house as much as possible.

2:08:32Dustin Furman:According to Konuma, this is what led the company to self-publish Neo 3, whose predecessors were both being published through partnerships with Sony. This brought clear advantages like the possibility to release simultaneously on PC, with the game becoming the fastest-selling entry in the series. while there are bound to be some expectations and situations where partnerships are more beneficial kanuma thinks that in principle koei tecmo needs to build a structure where it can handle everything on its own in quotes now the big thing i wanted to ask you about you know neither of us interact super a huge amount with koei tecmo they don't have these brands that speak to me specifically um with rare exception but they speak to a lot of people and i was wondering what do you think a koei tecmo does with 5 000 people here are the uh the major ip they own this is according to wikipedia so i might be missing some atelier so that's gust series dead or alive the fighting series which is team ninja dynasty warriors which is omega force then they own fatal frame they write kesin as one of them which i think is so funny because kesin is like not a like they're they're a sequel there are three kessins i think i don't think uh i've never heard of kessin kessin was a ps2 launch game here i can put it in the chat for you yeah i'm looking at it now um monster rancher which i think has been dormant for a while um ninja gaiden which is another team ninja thing neo which is team ninja nobunaga's ambition which is kind of a nerdy series of turn-based like grand strategy games they have one piece the one piece license but that's a license so I wouldn't really count that romance of the three kingdoms and then samurai warriors which is adjacent to dynasty warriors and tokaiden which is like a monster hunter clone so it's the thing I'm looking at it's like I'm curious what they're going to do with all these people because none of these series like the unfortunately the new ninja guy game kind of seemed like it bombed I think people liked it But you don't hear anything about how it sold or how it did.

2:10:35Yeah, it's was that a Game Pass game also?

2:10:37Dustin Furman:Yeah, it was. So we'll never really know exactly what what would have happened with that. Yeah. Neo does really well. And he's right. Like Neo three, it was pretty huge for them. And they did publish it themselves. And I do like them taking control of their publishing pipeline. The one thing that I'm confused about, though, especially with Omega Force is they license so many things. and you can't really self-publish that. Like for instance, if they're going to make like another Zelda Musou game, Nintendo is going to publish that. So you're going to have to have like some sort of, I guess, understanding internally that you're not going to be able to do everything yourself.

2:11:14Dustin Furman:Now, the big thing, and I did forget about this, is that, and they remind us in this automaton story, Chris, is that they did launch a new team. And like, what could they do? like i i want because through the kowei connect tecmo and kowei used to be separate companies as i think everyone understands kowei used to do this like very historical nerdy shit that's where dynasty warriors nobunaga's ambition samurai warriors all that shit comes from and then tecmo was a much more traditional video game company that's where ninja gaiden dead or alive and so on comes from right i wonder like wouldn't it be cool if they did a shooter or something that's exactly what i was thinking yeah where i'm just like you gotta branch out a little bit right i i don't know what else there is for them to do outside of something like that um but i also don't know dude it's so weird to see like oh we're gonna increase our workforce it seems so alien when we look at it compared to you know the the industry as it stands here um the japanese these publishers are doing great dude yeah i mean it makes sense they're selling on global markets in and their their market you know it's so cheap to be there yeah they can do well because they're inherently international so i think that yeah i'm happy for them like all of them bandai namco square everyone will square a little less but yeah yeah i i don't know though like i i would imagine though like if they're trying to increase their the if they're trying to grow that much then they have to branch out of what what they've been doing and i think shooters are probably that uh but at the same time it's just like i don't i don't know like again like just like you i just don't interact with a lot of these ip so like i know that they're building new stuff or they're trying to build some new stuff off the ground that could be a start you know one thing i really respect chris about this approach they note this is that the reason that they want to expand too is to not make ask their teams to do things that their fans don't want them to do and that's pretty powerful and i went back and read here um there's a story in automaton i'll put it in the chat so you can see it um there we go uh it says koei tecmo's new triple a studio this is from june of last year so about a year ago koei tecmo's new triple a studio is a way for it to try new things without disappointing team ninja and omega force fans and they basically write about how like we don't want they write here uh and this is from a famitsu interview with an executive there as well quote i believe that's because each team simply kept creating the kind of games they naturally excel at their consistent output built that brand identity over time so this is something that I think others can learn from a little bit although it's easy for Koei Tecumoto maybe do that and a little harder for hardware manufacturers but probably I'll be very excited to see what they do I want them to keep their Japanese flavor but yeah or their Asian flavor because not all their games are Japanese they are Japanese but you know a lot of the stuff that they're doing Nobunaga's Ambition and all that stuff is is I think Chinese anyway alright so we'll keep an eye on what's going on with them but it's cool to see them expand and it's cool also i don't report on it too much anymore but um it's cool to see all these brands these these much more japanese companies are much more structured in their pay structures and how people make money there and their constant announcements of everyone getting these across the board raises is oh this reminds me chris nintendo released a report the other day and i was reading it just for fun as i as i sometimes do Miyamoto makes 1.5 million dollars every year they are ripping him off to such a fucking degree I can you imagine he has been there since before I was born yeah and he's at 1.5 million dollars that's how much he's making and I look at that and I'm like oh my god oh my god like their their president i think makes two million or something i'm like i don't know about that i don't care about your executives really you're create you're you're he's i just can't believe i can't believe that like i think some people are being what's the big deal like someone like that would be making 10 million dollars or more at this point i would assume even at a japanese company i just feel like they're ripping them off i guess is what i'm saying and they've ripped them off his entire life maybe i don't know that's that's i don't know it's hard for me to it's hard it's hard for me to look at a guy making a million dollars a year and be like oh no think about that though i mean i understand i understand that he's that he's him it's just like i mean what value it's like the value derived it's like that's the most capitalistic shit i ever heard in my life i mean i guess is what i'm saying like you billions billions billions of dollars he has created for them and he's and he's according to this he's made less than a hundred million dollars from them and i think that that's fucking crazy i'm sorry i think that's just absolutely insane but but he remember chris we talked about this some time ago he did say people have asked him about this before about like you don't get paid shit basically like you like you could have gone and worked for activision they would probably pay you 20 million dollars a year or something you know sure yeah and he had said something like um not every company lets you go see movies during the day and like just be a child and like dick around i'm like i think a lot of companies will let you do anything you want miyamoto but nonetheless i understand your point and that they were kind there's kind of a symbiosis it's just kind of sad to see one man worth so much get so little we were talking earlier about like athletes like there are pro athletes like there are nfl quarterbacks this year that will play one season and make more money than miyamoto's ever made yeah that's that's insane that is crazy if he doesn't care what do i care yeah they are a very fiscally responsible company we'll give them that i mean because a lot of these things are symbolic i remember when iwata took like a pay cut i think he took a 50 pay cut and i'm like it's completely irrelevant but it's it's the way they it's the way they roll it's it builds goodwill right and it builds good morale to do these things, which is like we've we've long not cared about morale in this country.

2:17:43No, no, we have no more. We just don't give a shit about the common the common good of just like a good gesture. It's all over.

2:17:49Dustin Furman:The beatings will continue until morale improves. Right. We had we had a sign or something like I don't know if it was in my kitchen or my I don't remember like when I was a kid. I just I remember seeing that that statement like that's an old thing people would say. I don't know if it's Twain or something that said that Mark Twain. something like that but i'm like i never under i'm like what the fuck does that mean i didn't like understand the sarcasm you know behind it right i was like what does that mean what do you say what do you mean by that very mysterious okay chris this one's for you halo campaign evolved which comes out very soon has gone gold and in fact uh people are already playing it i mean many people have really screenshotted them playing on playstation i the surreality of it for a lot of people is uh is is finally hitting so the game's gold early access begins july 23rd as i recall early access is 30 bucks if it was if it was 20 dollars i would do it i'm not paying 30 dollars for that though but i will buy it when it comes out for sure uh are you in on halo are you looking forward to are you excited there's a lot of trepidation around this game it feels like but i i think it looks fun but i'm not a halo like guy like you so i don't have the eye for it yeah i mean i think it looks reasonably good i i don't think there's anything in it that i think is particularly upset like it's it's clearly their way to do a halo game on unreal and get a feel for the tech and um you know flex a bit but that's exactly what the last combat evolved anniversary was for them too is it's like oh we're a new studio we've been handed this ip let's let's tinker around with combat evolved so it's it's not as exciting to me just because i've seen i've been through this exact cycle before this is more of a top to bottom remake than combat evolved anniversary was obviously so there's they're doing some stuff that's interesting um i think it looks reasonably good i think they've added a reasonable number of features the four player co-op is nice I think it looks good I just it's a game I've played already like a million times and it's also of those original games probably my least favorite of them so there's like a ceiling to my excitement now reasonably speaking this could be because this is my least favorite of those original run of games there's a potential that this ends up improving the original game for me which is also exciting and interesting but I just know so much about the original combat evolved and i know what was cut and i know like what they wanted in and couldn't get in and what you know freelance modders have over the years ended up basically cobbling together in an original director's cut of combat evolved with like wildlife and shit and all the stuff that couldn't make it in and i just know that that's not what this is which is It's a bummer because I actually feel like there could have been as much of a, let's be real cash grab as this is.

2:20:52It's cool to have it on PlayStation. But this is, this is reinvesting in something that works to avoid risk and to play it a little bit safe. It bums me out because there's just so much ambition that could be attached to this in, in bringing a lot of that cut material in that. I don't know if it's there or not. You know what I mean? like it could be that i play the game and it ends up being like oh my god they added in the the blind wolves that they cut from like the original comment about that's awesome or like oh they added this section that they cut from this level that would be awesome i just don't know if i i believe that 343 has the ambition to even do that i know they're not 343 anymore halo studios whatever right um so i'm just kind of cautiously optimistic i will play it i do want to get a platinum a halo platinum that is like appealing to me yeah we went over the trophy list remember it was it's gonna be pretty tough i think but i think you can do it'll be tough it'll be tough like lasso is gonna be the the bitch but yeah so from that perspective i'm looking forward to it i'm not gonna pay an extra amount of money for early access to it but i'll i'll play it and i'll judge it for what it is it could surprise me you know but right now i'm just kind of like i've played this before i'll probably like it i i don't think i i don't think it's going to be anything less than pretty good you know yeah yeah i think you're right and i um i wanted to check

2:22:18Dustin Furman:myself by the way i went and looked it's actually 50 for the standard edition and 70 so 20 increase not 30 i was wrong about that for five days early access and you get some like digital story and art collection stuff or whatever i still don't think i'm gonna get it so 20 july 23rd early access july 28th for normal access i think i'll probably just wait i'll see where i am at that time and calibrate from there. I'm definitely going to buy it, though. And Chris, I'll say this. We only have so much power as consumers. We've learned that in different painful ways recently. I will say if you want more Halo on PlayStation, this was a given, and I don't think it is anymore.

2:22:58Dustin Furman:And so you're going to want to show up for this one, I think. Not only for the novelty of it, but maybe to send them a signal that you might not want to pull the future ones from here. Because they did say all future Halo games are coming to PlayStation. This was supposed to be the beginning. That was obviously true for Gears as well. They've changed with Gears. Halo might be a little more painful for them to do because it's going to sell much better than Gears. But I just, even if this is all we get, fucking weird. So I'm definitely going to, I'm definitely going to be playing it. I can't wait to see the PlayStation button prompts and it's going to be very strange.

2:23:29Yes, it's going to be, it'll be interesting. The novelty alone, I think is worth checking out. And it's an old, it's a$50 game for, it's a$50 version of a very classic game that is that is it is my least favorite of those games but it is very good Halo Combat Evolved is a stunning game in a lot of ways so I'm looking

2:23:49Dustin Furman:forward to it all right let's see another game has gone gold recently Christopher much earlier this time so Halo went gold right before it comes out but Dawnwalker Blood of Dawnwalker is gold this game doesn't come out until early september uh september 3rd i want to say is it september 3rd let me see yeah september 3rd so they're going live about seven eight weeks early something like that which is a great sign i'm a little less excited about this game mike mike and i were talking about this where on our on our nightly walk we saw it at the game awards it's like right modern kind of thing oh i yeah but i'm just trying to stay in the mode of like whatever i just i i i want to i this game looks cool and i'm really really looking forward to playing it and uh so going gold this early gives them a lot of time to massage it and for disc players you're gonna get probably a pretty good version of it on the disc i assume because they don't really have to rush and um yeah so i'm ready to go man i'm ready to go i was very happy to see this i think that's a great sign for the game when is this out um this is out in early september yeah i i'm looking a lot more forward to i saw some the impressions were fairly good and i skimmed a video i didn't really i don't know i didn't have any sound on i just kind of skimmed through it and just to get a feel for it it does look really cool um i might check this out if early September ends up being a reasonable time it's a late September is going to be rough see here so oh my god it's gonna be horrible I mean it's gonna be great but it's gonna be horrible especially with Animusha moving up makes that early part of the month more complicated very bold I'm sure if I was blood of Dawnwalker I would be a little annoyed by that but and again I find it so funny Capcom moves their game up twice in a year they're feeling themselves right now they really are all right new ps plus games for the game catalog have been announced so if you're at the playstation plus if you haven't canceled your subscription and you're at the can at the extra tier or the premium tier you get access to the game catalog which is a game pass style thing fewer new releases no new releases for playstation but nice third-party collection of games for you to check out if you're interested i don't have it i have playstation plus um essential but you have you have extra right and i know dustin did i think he canceled it i think i i don't even know anymore what the fuck i have i because i usually get the years because i just i don't like thinking about it i don't oh yeah i do that too and it's more affordable yeah it's just more it just ends up being a little bit better for me so i think i might have i might have extra i know i have one of the high i don't have the basic one but let's see here all right so these are the games that are coming in to the PlayStation Plus extra catalog.

2:26:44Dustin Furman:On July 21st, Avatar Frontiers of Pandora joins. This is I bought this game and played it very briefly. This is a massive developed game, which is interesting. I think it kind of quietly did OK. And it's supposed to be pretty good, but I just wasn't. I was like, I don't really want to play this. It's the same thing that happened when I bought the. The Guardians of the Galaxy. Oh, and I was like, I don't want to play this, but I heard it's good. And I'm sure it is. I just wasn't into it. So that's coming July 21st. Rise of the Ronin is available now already. This is a second party game, speaking of Koei Tecmo.

2:27:23Dustin Furman:And this is a Team Ninja game, of course. I bought this game and was interested in it. I couldn't even get past the first boss, as you might recall. I do remember that. And I was like, yeah, I don't think this game's for me. Firefighter Simulator Ignite is available July 21st. 21st this looks like you know your classic uh simulation game you're and it's so funny because you were talking about power wash simulator how much i love that game earlier it's not even the highest quality game it's just really good some of these games are like really high quality and some of them are garbage and it's i don't know like you you can't tell by the description or the art you have to just go and look like some people have recommended like a few crime cleaning like crime scene cleaning games that are supposed to be pretty good and whatever so anyway firefighting simulator ignites out there if you want that mighty morph and power rangers rita's rewind is available this is a brawler people might recall and that's available on the 28th of july the original dying light will be available i highly highly highly highly recommend this game if you have not played this game it's excellent the original dying light is fucking awesome and um shout out to that game what a wonderful game it was that's available july 28th citizen sleeper 2 starward vector is available july 28th as well this is a role-playing game snow bros wonderland it's so funny man i had you know like when you're a kid i don't know if you did this i did this i would like going to nintendo power whatever and just take out random like things that i thought were cool and put them on my wall and i had oh yeah i did the same yeah and i had a snow brothers ad like from capcom for like the nes on my wall for some reason but i like did Did you just did you just tape it to your wall?

2:29:03Dustin Furman:Yeah, I just like taped it to my wall. I thought it was cool. I used to do this. I would cut shit out of magazines. I would tape it. And it was so it looked terrible because magazine pages are really like shiny. They're really reflective. And so like it just looks like a massive just white shit all over your wall, especially with the tape, too. That's so funny. Yeah, like I just and then my dad would get mad at me for using tape to pull the paint off the wall. i was such a like i was even being an asshole it's just like you just didn't care it's like you know you're not supposed to i'm like yeah whatever like i don't what do i care about the fucking paint on the wall and now as an adult i would like fucking cry if that happened to my wall it's like it's like the magic racer and i'd be like you know yeah exactly it's it's like using um it's like just using any pair of scissors to cut something right it's like whatever whatever this cuts and your parents would be like no this is the meat scissor Yeah, they'd get, oh my God, they'd be so upset.

2:30:01Dustin Furman:But you understand them more as you get older. Yeah, sometimes. A little bit, sometimes. There's still some things where I was like, ah, you made a big stink out of this. All right, let's see. All right, finally, excuse me, for PlayStation Plus Premium. So this is only the premium tier. These games will be available a la carte as well, but you can get these as part of your game catalog if you're at the premium tier, part of your subscription costs. We already knew this was coming. PsyOps, the MindGate Conspiracy. the old midway game from 2004 um the shooter is uh third person shooter is coming and that's coming july 21st and then this is a surprise this is a game no one knew was coming and i thought this was an interesting one indigo prophecy or what is known in europe as fahrenheit the original this is the original aquatic dream game um and this is coming to ps4 only interestingly and here in the notes it says that it originally stated was coming to ps5 as well it doesn't really matter but there's no native ps5 version of it so i don't know quantic dreams in some financial trouble and i wonder if they're i mean i don't want to say that outright they obviously are they're laying people off their their newest game just failed the spellcaster game whatever the hell it was called and there's all this hullabaloo around how they like that that their star wars games in trouble although they say it's not i wonder if they're just trying to get some sort of income going in some way i mean i can't imagine indigo prophecy joining the the fucking premium catalog is big Boku box, but I've never played it.

2:31:31Dustin Furman:So I would, I would like to play it. I love, I think Quantic Dream is dope. I, or they were, I don't know if they are anymore. Heavy Rain and Detroit specifically are really good games. Like really, really good games. Yeah. Indigo Prophecy is, is one that I've been curious about for a very, very long time. So that's definitely a pickup. Psyops, the Mind Game Conspiracy is another one where people talk about it. It's so funny. like this name is so crazy this this name has uh intergalactic the heretic prophet kind of energy yeah it definitely does it's just it's so many words it's it's a lot of it's a lot of words but that looks cool uh dying lights are pretty obvious i didn't love the original dying light but i also it probably was one of those things where it's just like i probably just wasn't into it at the time i'm sure i'd probably like it it felt it really felt revolutionary to me in a way in a way almost like fallout 3 did where it was like the first time you were in an open world where you really could like really move through it and yeah the parkour i remember just feeling like oh this is like mirror's edge of zombies this is cool but like for whatever reason it just didn't i think i was playing other things at the time or something something like that and avatar i am kind of curious about because i've been in the mood lately for a far cry game but i don't really want to play far cry like i don't know how to explain it like i want like a sandboxy kind of thing i just don't care about avatar is the problem yeah that's what kind of turn me off from it too is that i i started playing it and i love massive because i love the division and i'm just like i'm not compelled by this at all the blue fucking characters and the fucking weird flora and i'm like i'm not i don't want to play this but yeah but teach their own i mean i'm not you know what do i what do i care do what you want it is supposed to be good i mean so you should go play if you do play it and you probably can get it for pretty cheap i would assume actually there is a logo here too it's on ubisoft plus i mean you could just get Ubisoft Plus and play it if you wanted.

2:33:24You know, it's probably like 10 bucks or something. Yeah. If you want another subscription. Yeah, Lord knows we all need another one. Yeah, please.

2:33:33Dustin Furman:Please help me out with that. I want the Indigo Prophecy trophies will be interesting, too. I might. I might. That would be an interesting stream game to play, especially because you know it's going to be janky as fuck. You know, you know, you know that that Indigo Prophecy is going to control like absolute ass. I'm telling you, there's no way it doesn't. There's no shot it doesn't. That's awesome. Oh, yeah. You know what? It isn't there. I was looking this up. They did do a game before that, Nomad Soul. So it isn't really their original game. Oh, isn't that the one with David Bowie? Yeah. Yeah.

2:34:06Dustin Furman:But I think it's a little, it is an adventure game, but I think it's a little different. I think Indigo Prophecy is where David Cage started becoming David Cage. and I think it's the game that caught the attention of Sony which is kind of right and that's how they began their relationship in a different world that would have worked out differently man I think beyond kind of hurt them a little bit and then I think by the time Detroit came out I just think everyone was kind of over it although I think Detroit yeah I've always been curious about this game though Indigo Prophecy has always been in like the peripheral for me I'm just like yeah yeah maybe I'll get around to it now it's now that now it'll be easy this game and and what is the other one deadly premonition is the other one deadly premonitions I never beat it but I did play it when it came to ps3 that game is fucking weird I mean it's like Twin Peaks it's like a weird kind of thing yeah I I got into Twin Peaks sort of like well recently was in the last couple years and so like that game's been more on my mind lately for some reason i'll get around to it so much to play god damn and then i just wanted to acknowledge a couple of um oops i forgot to put this in the uh so in the uh time stamps sorry about that lock mort um i just wanted to acknowledge two sales milestones that i thought were fun one is that mouse pi for hire wonderful game has surpassed a million copies sold and i want to congratulate them for that that's awesome if you have not played mouse man it is really good it really really is a special game even if you're not in the boomer shooters particularly but you like shooters if you're not in the shooters you shouldn't play it but if you look at most boomer shooters and like i don't you know if you look like proteus and shit like that and like ion fury and like you weren't in any of that cool i love those games i understand if you're not into those games this game is a is a special boomer shooter and it's really it is a boomer shooter but it's it's more than that you'll see no it's so good it's so good dude so congratulations to those guys really well earned and i thought this was interesting too assassin's creed black flag resync sold two million copies in one day what do you think of that i could i believe it because i was thinking about it i'm not an assassin's creed guy really like i i stopped with like brotherhood you know what i mean like i was i was early like i liked assassin's creed when i remember playing and i remember that it's so funny when you look back at assassin's creed because i remember thinking like wow what is this this is amazing it was also boring and i kind of knew that but i was also like this is amazing there was something about it and then assassin's creed 2 was great i loved brotherhood quite a bit and then revelations came out and i was like i don't know if i care to get revelations and then 3 came out and i was like oh american colonial west oh this was kind of disappointing like the execution of it uh and then for four i was just kind of like i guess i just i'm not into this and so i just never really got into i think i played like the first couple minutes of four black flag and i was like eh i think i'm out and that was really it until shadows i think literally in the last couple years so like i've been gone i mean i've dabbled here and there like whenever it would come into like ps plus or something like i would dabble with origins and i was just like but i was looking at like this this game was all over my feed in a way that like assassin's creed never is like in a positive way like people were like playing it like there's some negative stuff too obviously people that i saw one video some guy throwing a guy like throwing somebody in a pool of water and it didn't make a splash and it's like all right yeah it's okay but yeah i was i was very i was vaguely compelled to pick this up like there's a point where I was almost going to do it and then I I couldn't find my wallet because my card isn't in the PS isn't at the PlayStation right now because because I'm a little worried but and then I was like I'm too lazy to find my wallet so I'm not gonna get it but that was the only reason I didn't Ubisoft needs a hit dude I mean that you do you know here I mean Assassin's Creed Shadow did well but and it does seem like Assassin's Creed will be fine but this there's a well of nostalgia for this game too this is what we're talking about like it this is of the same era black yeah like well yeah it's right after black ops 2 so it's a similar it's the tail end of that right similar era well of nostalgia for people where you can imagine that that game is probably like i mean how long is that game probably not insanely long assassin's creed black flag i know assassin's creed even back then we're kind of long yeah what is like 25 hours or something maybe i mean they're not like they are now no but it's like a reasonable amount of time so it's just like yeah i mean i looked at it and i was like yeah maybe i'm kind of in the mood for this but like i also don't know uh that's good if i fly game life i'm curious yeah what does it say yeah 20 to 25 hours yeah that sounds about right i mean that's or like way longer for completion but right right right yeah god forbid they make games like that anymore god damn i mean that's what i was i didn't put it in the news but that's what i i um glenn schofield uh retiring and i was just i was lamenting recently i know you and i feel the same way about it but it's like the the stuff with dead space it's so perfect and it's crazy to me that he kind of went out trying to get access to it and it's like what especially with this new ea like we were talking about earlier it's like what are you doing what are you doing and i really am i am disappointed more people didn't come out for dead space remake because it was fucking awesome i mean straight up it was fucking awesome and we blew it dude we blew it everyone blew it like we we could have had remakes of two and three and going into a new game or and and again i don't want to spoil too much but they were kind of changing dead space a little bit with like yeah it was almost like it wasn't quite final fantasy 7 or anywhere close to but it was a little bit of that no no it was a little bit of that and i was like god damn dead space is still my favorite survival horror game ever it's i agree i i think i think for sure like dude it is crazy it's criminal how good how good how good how good dead space remake is it's it's so easily my favorite of those of that genre of it like because i know that it came out alongside or maybe not alongside but uh you know in the general vicinity of uh re4 right if i'm not mistaken yes yes that's right i think i think the winter before or something like that yeah yeah they were relatively close they weren't like on top of each other or anything but like you know i get it and then the calisto protocol was there too but like i mean i don't know man i get resident before i love resident before i think it's great i think the remake is fantastic too i quite liked it but dead space remake is something else dude it is a it is so so good if you haven't played it i really like i think we both highly highly recommend it especially for like whatever you can get it for now it's probably an absurd value for what you can get it for now it actually it's like one of the few remakes i think like genuinely like makes the first game kind of redundant like i don't think there's really much reason to play the original dead space now like with that remake yeah it literally is just the first one but like everything is better i agree in in my opinion i guess that is subjective i last replayed the original dead space in 2020 and it's still held up but there's nothing there's no comparison and and it just bothers me that the lack of vision for ea i understand dead space probably was a little softer than they wanted it to do it's a remake of a game people have already played.

2:42:03Dustin Furman:I just think if you can't make survival horror work in this era, that's a you problem. I think you need to open your fucking eyeballs, you know, not only to what Capcom is doing. I mean, that that speaks for itself, but there's survival horror shit everywhere. Like people love it. Like if you can't figure that out and then you have the original producer of the game and like the creative force behind the game coming to you and saying like, let us make another one like let us do it again and you're like nah we don't want it we don't think we can make any money on i'm like you guys are so fucking stupid like i i just if if anyone can make it work it would have been him and it sucks to see him go out on that note but i think he's just kind of tired he has a lot of money i mean he he has a call i mean people forget he has called he was on call of duty before any of the dead space stuff so he made a lot of money you know or actually it was afterwards but he made all at sledgehammer because but he made a lot of a lot of money like he's good yeah he's good so i i understand it from that perspective but um it's just a disappointment and i thought the crystal protocol was cool but it just wasn't it wasn't what it needed to be yeah it was it was entirely fine yeah it was it was too expensive yeah way all way too that's that's the issue it's just like there's no reason that game should cost that much but not in price but in like you know development all right chris it's time to get into what we're playing.

2:43:24Dustin Furman:Chowderhead Cough Talking wrote in and said, good morning and afternoon, Colin. Please tell us about the games you play and how you feel about them in depth. There is never a need to just quickly get through them and get to Chris or Dustin faster. It always confuses me why you do that. I promise you the majority of the Sacred audience is interested in your thoughts regarding the video games you play. I hope you aren't just saving it for some insight. Far more people listen to Sacred. If you are concerned about the podcast going long, just mention working out or going in the pool 20 % less or stop asking Chris if he is going to eat or buy food.

2:43:52Dustin Furman:Thank you for your time. Thank you for writing in. I don't often, I don't skip it for any, I'm not really super time sensitive, obviously, but it's more that I just feel like sometimes I play games and I don't really have anything to say about them. I'm not saving anything for Summon Sign. I prepare much more deeply to talk about the games I play for Summon Sign. So I'm ready to go. That's like, this show is not really about that for me. And it's one of the, I don't want to say it's one of the least enjoyable parts of like covering games for me but because I like talking about the games I play but it's like it's not what I really do this show for so I don't want to find like a million different things of minutiae to say for a half an hour about the games I'm playing all the time sometimes I have a lot I just I want to be natural about it if I have something to say about it I want to say it if I don't if I'm just playing a game I want to tell you about it a little bit give me the space to do that yeah by the way I've been meaning to say this some people have thought And I think reasonably so that I've become a little more aggro recently.

2:44:50Right? That I'm getting a little rougher. I have to say that like, I take that on board.

2:45:01Dustin Furman:I think I've always lived on this thin line of like, I like being a little bit of the heel. Not really, but also just like being very sarcastic, very biting and whatever. um but i think that if it's coming off as me being genuinely upset too often which i'm really not then there's something obviously off about that and i don't want to i i i wouldn't use this as an excuse because it is a it's a total cop-out i'm responsible for my own behavior and my own actions me like i'm nothing else no one else is responsible for it but me but i think as i unwind from my medication i am starting to interface with the real like the real world more than i had in years and i'm not saying that like i was like delusional and out of my mind i was very anyone in my life would tell you that like i calmed down a lot and a lot of that was medication i am a more talkative confrontational like those kinds of things not in a bad way but like about like you know having a good argument having like saying your piece doing those kinds of things and so I ask for everyone's continued patience as I try to find my new continue to find my new calibration uh because I think some of it probably has something to do with that like I don't I will say and Mike is very worried about this but like I don't sleep very well anymore at all oh like um i just find it really important for me to unwind and it's not like i was like on a crazy amount of things but i was on a lot of you know i took ativan for a long time i was i was on really high doses of lexapro and all the rest and so i just want to you know in the case of just to be honest with everyone and candid with everyone i'm feeling different and i'm trying to find my new calibration and i never want to come off as like too heated or too anything it's not my intention you know it really isn't it's not who i am but i am more of a talkative new yorker in a way you know that i think is kind of compartmentalized by the need to find more sanity in years past so anyway i wanted to i wanted to acknowledge that out there that i'm not trying to ever do anything to agitate and i appreciate everyone's patience and really I would like to be able to sleep more more but I uh I just have a hard time sleeping and I just that's the thing is that like everyone's got to be on the things they want to be on and do what they got to do and take care of themselves I think it's really important for you to take care of yourself um therapy and self-care and all that I think is really important uh for me I I find it really important to to I want to know what natural is again and that's what I'm trying to get to but it's been it's been it's been difficult at times I will say this from a physical point of view I don't think I've ever been healthier I watch I'm gonna die tomorrow probably I'm gonna like I've I don't know like what it is like I just I've lost weight and like I'm I mean I always I've worked out for many years but I feel good like I feel like there's part of it is like I feel better i feel like i'm i'm in it and i'm enjoying myself more and i'm getting away from the screens and i'm getting outside and i'm doing things and enjoying myself and getting sun you got to let that have more influence yeah you know what i mean yeah you gotta like succumb to the influence of that feeling so that kind of like overtakes everything else yeah yeah so i don't know how i got into that but oh it was shattered cough cough talking about uh busting my balls here a little bit and and uh yeah just yeah so i wanted to just say that wanted to put that out there all right As far as the games that I'm playing, Grand Theft Auto 5 still and then GTA Online.

2:48:58Dustin Furman:So I actually went online. And went through the process of making my character and like doing that. And I've played it for probably several hours, but I'm not really entirely sure what's special about it yet, because I don't think that I. Mike has been watching me play it. She played it back on Xbox 360 and Xbox One. And she's like, it's totally different now. She's like, I don't even know what this is. I was like dude like I picked you pick like a profession now which apparently was is not even really a thing that existed at that time so like I'm a nightclub owner and because I chose nightclub owner gay Tony's in the game oh interesting I had which he's like one of the main characters in the game which is kind of cool tons of dialogue and like and uh you could pick out you could be like a business magnate you'd be like a gun runner and shit like that it's like there's all these cool things but i just and i've played for several hours it's the one of the frustrating things about it to me is that it and i think this is reasonable if you look at the trophies it's like kind of like call of duty some people just don't play the game or many people just go right into the online mode never play so they they treat you like you've never played grand theft auto before and i'm like no you don't understand i've played grand theft i don't need it's like drive here uh pick this person up here's how you do and i'm like oh my god like it go it does go on and on and on yeah so i i wasted a lot of time with that but i want to mess around with it more and one of the cool things i realized is one of i don't know how long this has been a thing again i'm playing on ps5 but once you you know how you have that command where you can go to any of the characters like the three characters once you have your online character there's a fourth character that appears and you could just go to that character and just go online and then back offline and then online and offline like pretty seamlessly it's pretty cool oh wow that's interesting yeah i didn't know that was a thing at all so it's like it's funny man like they just released a new heist package it's just funny how this really antiquated ps3 game is still played and how it kind of playing it online it's funny like they've cleaned it up like there's the single player version of the game that you can't really fuck with probably from a design perspective because all the path findings done and like everything is exactly what and you don't want to QA at all again but like there's a version of of Los Santos that's like kind of different it seems like and I'm like this is neat so I don't want to I don't chowderhead cough talking doesn't I don't want to get mad at me but I have nothing really to say about it I will I don't want to spoil GTA 5 for anyone I'm 60 missions into the main campaign and I'm like enough already dude like let's wrap this thing i do feel like that i'm like let's i don't mind there being all the minutiae in the world and all the things optional things i think that's super cool just endless amounts of it but like with the story it's like all right guys you know let's wrap it up so hopefully i'll be done because i'm pretty over it at this point it's a great game but i'm like enough gta is like that yeah like in my experience like gta 4 was i love gta 4 but gta 4 was like that as well where you i think that game has around it's 60 to 70 missions i think or something like something 68 or something it might be around that actually and by by that point you're kind of like all right i've driven i've done the same thing over and over again at this point it's just like let's let's get to a narrative conclusion it's all very good but grand theft auto online is so weird because like i remember like when i first played it yeah it had none of that it was just like here's a multiplayer mode i think they had like some light sim elements where like i think i remember the the thing that the thing that i talk about all the time is like i remember i tried to steal somebody's car and i couldn't because they had car insurance right or something and i remember being like well what is i don't know what i can't steal cars and grab the photo what is this and i just kind of like i never stepped back into it and i think the the only time i did step back into it i i ran into what you're experiencing now with or with the uh the endless tutorialization of just like no no i know how to do all of this and now i've got to sit through this again but then get disconnected sometimes because that was happening to me at that at that time then i would have to redo it i'm like ah i'm good but it sounds interesting i mean it's it's do you see online has always has long been this weird kind of thing in the periphery too for me where i'm just like i am curious about whatever the hell is going on over there but one thing i want to say chris is i couldn't help it i don't know if this is a thing an online in the online well i we know that they're all the role-playing servers for grand theft auto but right as i play the game the campaign i'm like what about a realism mode like something like a like a fallout mode you know like when fall where you have to sleep you have to drink and and i'm like what about a mode where you where you have to drive this speed well you don't have to do anything but like when you're driving like a maniac you immediately attract crazy police attention like you have to like you have to stay within the lines you have to drive normal speeds you have to do act in a certain way i'm like would people be into that and like could you even play the game like that because i it would be it would be cool and how much it would break open the actual missions where things get nuts but like while you're doing things it also attracts an enormous amount of attention from everyone else so like you're never left alone kind of yeah i don't know i was thinking about like how i am curious and it's what i assume they're keeping under their under their hat for now is like all the ways they've enhanced the game from that perspective from a similar perspectives about living in it and treating it the right way i've talked before about how my brother-in-law used to make me laugh because he would sometimes play gta3 with me and he would play like where he would stop at the lights and like play and like normal thing and i'm like you don't yeah you didn't really know if you should play like that or not i'm like yeah like you don't have to play like you can't really play like that but what if you what if you did kind of have to play like that i mean i can't i can't get away from that i used to do that myself like with gta 4 like i would drive i would stay in the i would wait for the lights to go just for it was always for like maybe like five minute increments right or whatever and then you'd like break out of it but it was i don't know it's like a grounding or like an immersive immersion tool and they're really good for that man they're fun to play that way for at least a little bit.

2:55:16We'll see what happens.

2:55:17Dustin Furman:I want to get into Onimusha 1 at some point soon and start doing those in preparation. And then I got to get through the remedy shit at some point. Those are the two major things that I need to do now for the rest of the summer. yeah the only complicating factors is that that that game free comes out game well halo right that game free game comes out next month and then and then we're in september it's gonna be a balancing act i gotta wrap this up soon i i must admit to i must admit i've been dicking around a lot and not really dicking around but like what like one does it's like oh i'm gonna do all the parachuting shit now for no reason oh i'm gonna do all the stock car races i'm gonna go rob a store for no reason or go i'm just gonna go see how how many stars i can get for how long like it's just the grand theft auto style shit so it's it's not that i am playing through the campaign and it's taking that long but it's a it it's like all right yeah let's wrap anyway all right chris it says here oh i'm sorry go ahead please no well i'm playing well on that note since just to stick with gta i'm playing san andreas still um i'm so bad at this man i am getting murked consistently to the point where this is probably taking me so much longer than it should because these the controls are a little unwieldy i'm i i i should note i am playing the original version i'm not playing like the uh the remake remastered like whatever that that definitive edition trilogy thing i'm not playing that version of san james i'm playing the original well i guess the ps4 skew of the original ps2 game so it's there's not a lot of bells and whistles there's not a lot of like quality of life changes so it's it's a bit rough but i am still playing it i am still um being pulled through it the story is fun i like how and this is technically objectively tedious and i i think on some level maybe i don't like it but i like the effect that it's having where in this game in particular and i can't really remember if it was like this in four or because it's been a minute since i played four but in san adreas you can't really save unless you go back to cj's house like you have to go to and not only do you have to go to cj's have to go all the way back to the kitchen you got to go to like the furthest point in the house to save to save your game to save your progress and i've been doing that after every mission because i'm afraid that i'm gonna die and lose all of my weapons and stuff and i just don't want I don't want to go recollect all that shit.

2:57:53So I've been going back to the house every single, like every 20 minutes or so. And it's funny because it is annoying and it is tedious. But this neighborhood has become so familiar to me. And I kind of like it. Like there's like these NPCs outside. There's specifically like there's like NPCs outside on Grove Street. where they're all in green and they're your guys right they're basically like your neighborhood guys and i feel like distinctly attached to them because i always see them as i'm pulling into my garage or as i'm running into the street or as i'm running into the house or and coming out they're there in the morning they're there at night and i accidentally like ran over some of them and i felt like really bad about it in a way that i don't feel about like any of the mvcs so it's like there's there's an interesting it's definitely a product of the time it's definitely you know more tedious it's more annoying to save that way but if i didn't save that way i would have no real relationship with grove street and that house and i think that's this is this is one of the interesting things about video games to me it's just like the way that like a little design decisions influence like emotional connections to like the things that you're experiencing i love that shit so like clocking that and like processing that is like it's like a fun little thing but yeah I'm still enjoying my time with it uh I like the vibe of San Andreas quite a lot and I guess this is obvious but it wasn't it wasn't that obvious to me like back in the day because I only had like really brief interactions with it I didn't realize that San Andreas was basically the entire southwest of the united states yeah it's like a majorly compacted thing yeah i did not realize that like i thought it was los angeles like i i really did assume that it was just like oh it's it's you know it's it i i just i don't know what i assumed i just kind of assumed that that was it because that's what you know i guess grand theft auto 4 tries to do this a little bit like there's a place that's like theoretically connecticut theoretically and then and there's a place that's theoretically new jersey but like connecticut new jersey feel like new york anyway like there's really not that much of a distinct difference the southwest is a lot more distinct i think you know like uh even san diego and los angeles are distinct from one another uh los angeles and san francisco are distinct from one another nevada is like and um you know las vegas is distinct from um from los angeles in a way that connecticut and new jersey and new york aren't really like new york is distinct but like connecticut and new jersey feel like they feel like they belong attached in some way and so when i was kind of exploring and i hit this point where i'm like oh this isn't los angeles anymore it kind of blew my mind a little bit.

3:00:59It reminded me of how I felt when I played Red Dead or Red Dead 2 and I realized how big that map was supposed to be relative to the continental United States and I was like, this is kind of this is actually really impressive that they did this on the PS2. This is kind of amazing. I'm kind of blown away by just the sheer amount. I didn't realize the Golden Gate Bridge was in this game. I didn't realize Las Vegas was in this game. I had no idea. And I didn't realize how much of like just how how diverse it is i guess yeah because san andreas is the is the state of

3:01:34Dustin Furman:california in the grand death auto world right and los santos is los angeles yeah yeah yeah so like i just i don't know it didn't it's obvious i guess to most people but i again i just i never really interacted with san andreas deeply in an integral way i didn't own it i played it at friends houses and every time we would play we would start out at cj's house so we would just fuck around in grove street or like in that area and then i would like hand the controller off and we do something else right so yeah i'm i'm surprised by just how uh broad this game is and how vast it is despite it being still ultimately a ps2 game and it is still very truncated obviously it's mega truncated hilariously so if you look at it objectively but it does a good job of like feeling like it's supposed to feel like it these places do feel although they are like minutes apart from one another they they do feel like the san francisco portion of the game feels distinctly not like los sanchos or like or like where you start off and it feels distinctly not like the the nevada desert and these like weird places it's it's really cool um yeah that is neat it's certain games were able to do like death stranding i think does a really nice job of that too of of scope within like ridiculous scope within the confines of a game that's playable um yeah i agree i agree yeah it's it's so i've been enjoying my time with it it's it's really just like the unwieldy controls that are kind of fucking with me like it's really aiming and like targeting is so janky because like the you hold r1 to aim but your aim locks in depending on like what direction cj's facing so if you're looking at somebody if you're looking at like a target over there but you're running this way and you hit aim then he he goes like he locks that way and it's like oh my god it's quite tricky you could tell that they hadn't quite figured out third person shooting quite yet uh and arguably some people would argue that rockstar never quite has no they still haven't really figured it out i would say maybe they have now we'll we'll find out soon we'll find out but i'm still liking san andreas it's just i'm moving through it so much slower than i thought i would because i'm just so shit at it but outside of that i've been playing a lot of things honestly like i've been dicking around with my 360 quite a bit i was playing i was noodling around with the original toge mcguire spider-man game i was i've been noodling around with mercenaries 2 still it's a fun sandbox but the main thing that i wanted to talk about this this week i'm fucking around with this game and i think dustin mentioned this on a on a on an episode a while back was is the steam game this librarian tidy up the arcane library and i this is uh this is a game where there are you're in like a mage's library basically it's like it's like a wizard's library whatever and it's completely fucking ransacked all the books on the ground and your goal is to just put everything in the right place and stock the shelves correctly and there's like i think like something like 3 000 books or something it's like 400 rows and i played it just it was like five bucks and i was like this seems like a dumb game like whatever i'll play this while i'm on discord with some people and i ended up finishing it i played i played the entire thing it's quite there is something about it that is kind of cute and interesting and that i kind of like uh you get these abilities over time that kind of make it a little bit easier so like you can you can feel your progress exponentially speeding up as you're going through it the the first row is is the most tedious and the most hardest because you're looking for like oh i want to fill up the philosophy section so you're looking for like the philosophy and ethics of transforming you know people or whatever the fuck and you're stocking those shelves one by one and then like for every row you complete you get an upgrade point or at least early on then it becomes like five rows gets you an upgrade point then like 15 and so you do this and then like you get different abilities where like if you're holding a book you can press like three and then it'll highlight all the books in that area for a short time so you know generally where they are but you still have to dig through and then there's one that you get later that like automatically sucks up books of the same type and then you can upgrade that from like one to two to three to four and to the point where you get an entire row and so there's this weird strategy of like you you end up like build crafting where you're like okay i'm gonna to pick one book and i'm gonna spam five i'm gonna spec into five and then i'll hit five and then i'll suck all those up and then i'll spam two so i can see where i gotta go and then and then there's like different magic items that you find that give you access to like sprint and like all these different things it's like oh my god i can sprint now it's weird it's a weird game i didn't expect i'm looking at gameplay of it it looks it looks really cool i did not expect to vibe with it as much as i did um but i ended up finishing it by accident because i just got so sucked into it while i was on a call with some friends and uh it's a good time it's a steam game obviously uh can't really play it on playstation as far as i'm aware it feels yeah i just looked it's not on console it um it looks like it's very mouse dependent maybe maybe it's maybe i there's a way you could do it it doesn't it's not precise you're not like shooting although there is like an a there is like an aim down sights in it which is like what the fuck is why like what are you like what do we what am i zooming into with this yeah yeah it does look very fun is it the description on steam makes it sound like speed is the is the game is that the way it is like you're trying to do it quickly um yeah i mean that you there's time i i i gotta be real i don't know there's a time that they keep track of so like i played for like four and a half hours and I finished it.

3:07:13But like there's presumably, but once I finished it, I was like, I bet I could speed run this. You know what I mean? Because like, oh, I know you get, you become intimately familiar with like, oh, this is, oh, this is the law section. Or like, oh, this is philosophy. Right. Or like, oh, this is ethics. And like, oh, this is medicine. And so as you're moving, you kind of like, you finish the game and you're like, I could probably do this way quicker. And then I would imagine that there's part of it that's like that. And I think the reward is different every time um like so for me i found one key there's there's there's four chests kind of like ominously or maybe not ominously but they're just kind of like sitting in the lobby and i only found one key to one chest and that gave me access to sprint so that i could now run through the library which is like made things a lot quicker i would imagine that there's another one for like jump that i didn't find i don't know if that's true but like there's four other abilities so like i assume that there's something to that maybe a maybe a time stop maybe i don't i really don't know i'm hypothesizing but yeah so there's you could theoretically like figure out a way or it's just like all right i know where everything goes i know where the keys are i'm gonna hunt down the keys unlock these abilities then like kind of hunt down the sections that i know and then like i can imagine that there's like a time crunch thing to it or i think there's like maybe a mode where like you have a certain amount of time i didn't play that way i was just like just i want to vibe out i don't i don't really want to yeah it's cool too much well i was wondering also if like are the books ran they're not randomly generated are they randomly placed

3:08:49Dustin Furman:so that it's different every time that is a good question i don't quite i only ran through once so like i only had one seed as it were right so like i don't know yeah right right yeah i don't know like i'm curious to maybe jump back in and see if like maybe the organization changes like maybe if philosophy is now on the bottom floor or something like that or maybe the map changes or maybe like maybe the density of books in in the piles that they are stay the same but like where they are changes like i i actually i i genuinely know where the keys are maybe that changes i really don't know um but it was it was weirdly engaging i don't i don't know i won so i finish it in four hours i and there's a door that you uh that unlocks when you get every book and it opens up into a room and i assume you get different rewards based on completion rates or like timing or or um or like how many magical abilities you unlocked i got a a nice margarita pizza that looked delicious i have to say for like an indie game like this that where everything looks like stylized i was like that looks bomb as fuck i'm hungry now yeah me too but it's a good game it's like it's it's weirdly solid um not for everybody for sure like i was definitely in a weird mood when I picked this up because I was like I just don't want to play anything that's I kind of just want to relax I don't want to play anything that's like I don't want to kill anything I don't want to fight anything I just kind of want to vibe and it's pretty good um it takes a special kind of probably mental disorder to really get into this it's probably why it works for me but check it out if if you're curious about it I think uh I think this would click with a lot more people than more people would expect because it is so weird but cool yeah it looks right up my alley actually we'll see if it comes to playstation that would be pretty cool yeah well that's it then for what we're playing yeah and that leaves us with our six questions comments concerns thoughts and ideas to end the show Chris as we always do with inquiries from the audience remember you can submit your inquiries on patreon patreon.com slash last day media where you get early ad free access and a bunch of other great perks for supporting us there we could not do without you and we appreciate your support we begin with electric md who says gentlemen i'm watching reading and listening to the discourse surrounding the console games industry these days and it feels incredibly apocalyptic as someone who's been gaming since the atari 2600 i've seen a thing or two maybe i'm just old and hopelessly behind but my ps3 through ps5 backlog is so large that i don't even have time to panic i can't help wondering if the current doom and gloom is being overstated every price increase service charge uh service change i'm sorry and rumor seems to be met with declarations that Sony is finished.

3:11:23Dustin Furman:PS Plus is doomed or people are canceling subscriptions and swearing off GTA 6. So Colin, is the industry really at an inflection point or is this just another cycle of online outrage that will be forgotten six months from now? Are gamers actually reaching a breaking point or are the loudest voices on social media making things seem worse than they are? Is the sky really falling or have we simply become a condition to expect the worst? I think it's everything. I think the answer is yes. Yeah. Um, it feel we talk about this sometimes and it feels dire sometimes and i think it is magnified by social media and and the loud voices i had this idea actually um i had expressed this to micah i'm not really a i use chat gbt and i've said before i like it helps me with gardening and a few other things where i just ask basic questions and it answers them for me like a search engine i'm not really sophisticated enough and i really have to learn how to use ai much more deeply where i was like what would be an interesting exercise chris would be to have claude or some sophisticated model be like take these all of these tweets from patreon or from a playstation rather take all these instagram posts from playstation even take all of these youtube videos from playstation analyze the usernames of the different people and see how many duplicates there are and try to like net out who's saying what and how this measures towards playstation's overall user base and stuff like that and the numbers probably won't be very kind this is why i was saying the jaffy on sacred streaming was that's why i believe and i think you're in agreement with me that the best way to affect change is actually this guerrilla war this guerrilla style war that people are playing on social media where like you almost have to make it impossible for them to market anything because the numbers themselves won't really change anything and that creates a loud and boisterous environment where people realize i think that that's the only way you can affect meaningful change because like we brought up the example with black ops black ops could have very well attracted more ps plus new like laps ps plus subscribers to go back then people left over the game thing right it's like it's the numbers game is rough and i was thinking recently too about wouldn't you be curious to know chris like what what were their expectations at this point in the fight at sony and like how are they doing because they really don't seem like they're they seem non non-plussed in a way and i don't know if that's really true or not or if that's just kind of their demeanor publicly so i guess electric md to your point it's like do i feel like we're at an inflection point in some way i feel like we're always at a different inflection point the gaming industry has always been a path a series of paths and and forks in the road yeah the one thing i want to say is that i feel like people are losing sight of i just think that people think that things are so calamitous generally speaking with the gaming and and and i want to reiterate to people it's not like if you just judge it based on financial health of an overall sector gaming is a permanent thing now it's never going away and the idea that it can crash like it did in the early 80s and all the rest it's like no it's different now you have to understand more about 1983 when it felt it felt like this was a fad I actually brought up some numbers, which I thought was interesting.

3:14:59In 1980, the gaming industry, the global gaming industry,

3:15:03Dustin Furman:these are unadjusted numbers, by the way. The global gaming industry in 1980 made$12.2 billion. Most of that's from arcade, right? And this is true, 81, 38 billion. So it goes from 12 to 38. And then 82, 42. 83, 37. 84, 30. 85, 24. 86, 22. 87, 20. In other words, it was more than halved by the time it was done. And that was when Nintendo was around. In fact, this is interesting. Console gaming in 1983, so Atari mostly, but also Intellivision and a few others,$3.2 billion of the$37 billion was from console gaming, which is amazing when you think about that, right? That means 90 % of the gaming revenue was from arcades.

3:15:49Dustin Furman:Obviously, things started to flip. 1985 console space,$100 million. Dude,$100 million. Mouse PI for hire has made almost$100 million at retail, just to put that into perspective. Gaming doesn't recover from a fiscal point of view until 1993 during the SNES and Genesis era. And the reason it took so long was because arcade gaming started declining heavily and so there was no offset and then everything became console gaming. Chris, if you look at those numbers now,

3:16:26Dustin Furman:190 billion, 183 billion. This is a situation that will become$200 billion and go beyond very quickly. And we have to keep in mind that we simply, unfortunately, just don't have that much centralized power anymore because there are so many people. It's what we were saying about college football and the guy spending$1 ,000 a year in NBA 2K. and it's there's just too many of us doing too many things for us to garner too much information about it but the one thing that is for sure is that gaming is never going to be in danger again yeah there will be different winners and different losers conduits by which games are played and the style in which they're played will change but that's it so are things bad for we're in the late stage of consoles you have to understand that and accept it we're in obviously the end stage of physical media it seems like we're in the early stage of the digital ecosystem we're probably in the middle stage of monetization so i think all these things line up differently and they certainly seem calamitous some of the best advice you can probably give a person out there is to just not pay attention to all of it but like i unfortunately don't have that luxury otherwise we wouldn't have a show so what do you think yeah no i i think i think you said it pretty eloquently i think um i think we are at an inflection point but like i also i mean dude it's i don't know it's it's it really is tricky to parse through a lot of this because it's such an unpredictable the state that we are in right now doesn't help right you know It would be this way anyway in some ways.

3:18:13We were always tracking towards digital and tracking away from the things that we kind of understood or took for granted. But yeah, I mean, the interest in the next generation is mega low in a way that I don't think is particularly precedented, or at least in my lifetime. like usually like for my entire lifetime the next generation has been generally always pretty excited you know it's always been like a big thing that people were looking forward to i think the closest that ever got to not being that way was ps5 but even that was like not really true you know i mean people were still excited because the ps4 had so long so much more to go you know like the the the the hard disk drive and like all this stuff like there was there was obvious there were obvious improvements to be made so i think now we find ourselves in a situation where digital media is kind of becoming the the framework budgets are exploding you know people's wallets are the people's purchasing power is really low like i mean it's it's a it's a lot of different things but the idea that it's like it's over is is kind of crazy like i don't think that's it's gonna change it's gonna transform and it's gonna change it's gonna change shape and like you said there's gonna be different winners and losers the thing to me that gives me comfort is that i already know like if gaming were to stop today i would still have no hope of playing everything that i want to play right you know like i i really am not wanting for much more than i already have i'm always happy to exceed to accept more there's a lot of games that i'm looking forward to that i i you know like you know judas is presumably going to exist at some point gta gta 6 is right there blood of dawn walker control like there's like all these things that I'm excited for but if those things stopped existing tomorrow I would still be completely hopeless in catching up with all the stuff that I not only that I want to play and want to catch up on but stuff that I don't even know that I want to play yet that I just missed that I'm just not aware of it's there's such a glut of content like every day that goes by is the best day to play games because more and more is available we're getting a bug's life on the PS from the ps1 on ps5 like it's that's insane like it's a ridiculous amount of backwards compatibility that like i had no reason to expect even and we're getting it and so i don't know i get the doom and gloom but i'm also well fed so it's kind of hard to parse it's kind of hard to

3:20:47Dustin Furman:parse for me yeah this gets into our next inquiry actually you set it up perfectly isaiah summers wrote in and said howdy with the ps6 on the horizon and the type of seemingly relatively muted. I'm curious, is anyone planning to skip the launch and wait for a larger game library or a price drop before picking one up? The PS4 is only now starting to lose support about six years into the PS5 generation. If history repeats itself, the PS5 could continue receiving support for another five to six years after the PS6 launches. At this point, I also have a hard time imagining what a PS6 exclusive game would look like that the PS5 couldn't handle.

3:21:18Dustin Furman:Are you planning to buy the PS6 at launch or wait a few years? I'll be browsing my digital library and listen. I mean, the straight up reality is I'm buying both the console and the handheld. at launch but i will we have to see how it all plays out pricing game the the exclusives like what are the perks what can the things do i mean i don't we maybe we maybe there are just things about it we don't understand i think it's going to be a pretty traditional kit though and so i'll be there day one i have to be i mean on nature of what we do but also i think i'll just be real as a place as a consumer with you know with disposable income i think i just would have been there day one maybe i would have bought just one or the other at that point but i don't blame people for wanting to sit out from this and i don't think you're really going to be missing out on very much i i that's that's just my feel i think it's going to be really cool i think the handheld is going to be mega exciting and i'm so i'm so amped for the handheld but yeah i agree with what you're saying isaiah i think crush gen will be a thing into the mid 2030s i would assume at this rate and especially with ps5 pro unless the costs adjusts such that they really just discontinue the ps5 at some point and start selling the ps6 because of comparable pricing but that remains to be seen i do think christian we were bringing this up earlier is that i think a lot of people will wait and i think that that's wise but if nuzu is right and they can really get it between six and eight hundred dollars which seems so ambitious maybe maybe you stick it out and do it i don't i don't really know um yeah what do you think you think well you're not going to wait obviously but are you do you think yeah what about like more casual people in your life are they talking about getting it or are they going to wait no way they're definitely going to wait like i i if i were to get it it would it would be the primary reason would be because of the show because it would be just beneficial for all of us to be in the ecosystem and understand we have kind of a somewhat of a responsibility to relay that information to the audience but also So I am just a hardware nerd.

3:23:19I like new hardware. Realistically, I'm probably going to get the Xbox as well, even though I know I probably won't even need it. But I like the feeling. You know what? Honestly, I think the big part of it for me is just like, I don't know how many more of these we're going to get. So I'm kind of savoring like anytime I can open up a new box and get that feeling of just like the fresh machine. because I feel like at some point, I wouldn't even be surprised if this happens in my lifetime. It's just going to be kind of, I don't know if it'll be cloud or what, or if it'll just be like more software and it'll be in your TV or something.

3:24:00I do feel like that's going to happen at some point because the cost of building these machines is insane. So yeah, I don't know. I think from my read on the situation is that enthusiasts are always going to be interested. early adopters are always going to be interested but like most of the people that I know who are just like and they're gamers like they play a lot they're not stoked about a new machine you know like they're they're more than happy with the machines that they have they're more than happy on PC or with their existing PlayStations the the thing that really is going to separate this generation I or this next generation I would imagine isn't really even going to be exclusives it's probably not even going to be anything particularly serious on that regard I do think it's going to be the handheld element of it i do think that is we're not selling you a machine that does all these things that the ps5 can't do we're selling you something that can take what the ps5 does and and make it incredibly sleek incredibly portable and a little bit stronger maybe maybe resolve the cpu bottleneck ideally because that's really the only thing that's left to improve in my opinion is like frame rates are good but you got to get that ai kind of you got to get the ai stuff a little bit better but it's going to be a novelty or not like not a novelty maybe that's the wrong way to phrase it but it's going to be more in the use case of the machine rather than a boost in power or like oh it's 8k like i don't know anybody who gives a shit about 8k you know what i mean yeah didn't they print that on the ps5 boxes too like yeah then they stopped okay and then they stopped yeah because no one cares because i know i also think there was like two

3:25:39Dustin Furman:games that were ever 8k and one of them was like some random indie game so yeah yeah you're right yeah you're absolutely right i i i'm very curious to see how this all goes that's why that's why the new zoo report that we talked about earlier was so interesting to me because that's like yeah we're starting to really kind of try to conceptualize this in a real way and unfortunately we have all the modifiers that matter we like don't know any of the values you know like we don't know like what the machine is we don't know what it costs we don't know what it can do we don't know if it has games we don't know anything about the portable the interoperability between them there's so much we don't know we assume and the thing too is like we assume we assume it's going to have exclusives but like i don't know if we necessarily should you know in the broad sense like i'm sure we'll get like maybe an astrobot or like an obligatory you know demon souls remake or something like that but like i am kind of of the mind where it's just like well ps4 is still active not that you're gonna make a new ps4 game but like we know that these generations stick around quite a bit why would like why would they really like why would they like especially with budgets being the way they are like what is the incentive to making a an absurdly expensive game for a new machine when the install base is so low you already have like i don't know like the economics of it is starting to be it's starting to be a little dubious i agree i've talked about in the past about like it almost feels like you're sacrificing games or studios to for the necessity of having to do it um getting back to what i was saying earlier about resogun even with housemark like i wonder if they would even do like some sort of limited exclusive that then would be ported backwards oh backported yeah um i don't know i don't know i think they're probably figuring that out because I think I think there's probably there's got to be a method to the madness like if you if you're going to release a console you probably should have a few things on it that only are on it but I think that when you look at PS5 there weren't that many things that were like that and even things that I think would have really helped PS5 weren't necessary like Miles Morales was on PS4 at launch it I remember us being kind of like put off by that being like why are you doing this but like in the reality it didn't really matter and then you had games like what the pathless and demon souls and a few others that were there that were well demon souls was ps5 i think pathless was on both consoles if i recall i don't maybe it was a ps5 only game i don't know we'll see it's gonna be dude it's gonna be dangerous out there yeah all right next up is herman holst tanking reputation who wrote in and said hey fellas should playstation invest in a face a man a woman or perhaps a small team with a relatively simple function of talking to their audience with most of playstation's communication coming through faceless blog posts and the odd scripted chat on popular websites, breaking up absurdly long silences.

3:28:35Dustin Furman:It's clear they have a communications problem, a PlayStation Studios head in Holston, which nobody trusts when it comes to relaying information. But perhaps a small group of friendly, relatable faces to smooth over some difficult conversations may be a worthy investment. What say you? I think the answer to this is generally yes, but I do think it doesn't come without its own dangers. And I think because Sony is so risk averse that they are probably very aware of what this does if you if you create if you have like a major nelson right that kind of started blowing up in their face um because it was working when things were good right like it was good to have a guy out there like that and when things were bad it was really bad to have a guy like they're out there because you he couldn't do anything or say anything or get anything done or post anything or whatever without people bothering him because of the expectation that he was kind of the conduit by which we learn things so it's a double-edged sword i i think the best move is to just make some of these executives more accessible which is what sony has always done they never really had like kevin butler was a fake person really everyone that they they used were real people that worked there but also had charisma and took to media training and knew how to present things and that's always been true that was true for xbox that's true for nintendo and so they just need to do that more but because they do everything live to tape at best and a lot of it is obviously just stitched together we we only see people like sid schumann and that lady that does third-party stuff and the other lady that kind of looks like the lady that does the third-party stuff and like but we never ever ever see or hear from these people ever outside of that context and so they don't come off as anything but hosts right there i know with the official i don't even know if they do the official playstation broadcast still i assume they do that was a fairly well liked show even though we everyone knew it was nintendo power-esque and they wouldn't talk shit um you at least got to know these people and that's cool but that's why i was i was laughing so much about sid schumann having his byline on both of those letters it's like so funny man like just from the perspective of sending someone out to get fucking murdered but because these guys don't speak they're really not exposed anyway and the reality is is that so it let's let's be clear this doesn't matter to the quality of the content necessarily but sony doesn't have executives that are of the ilk of the old style guys that actually knew how to talk so Herman Hulse doesn't really have a lot of charisma we don't know too much about Nishino but like like you know we've talked that before Shuei and Gio and Andrew House and Jack Trenton and on and on and on and on and on even Cerny I mean Cerny might be the only one of them they have that can communicate and I was talking about this with Tom from Moore's Law is Dead where I'm like you kind of have to keep him in ball wrap because he's like the only one anyone respects anymore and so like when you're when you're ready to like say something and we want people to pay attention you send him out to his fucking podium and he does his thing with about ps6 or whatever but he's not the guy that should be fielding questions about your brand in fact i don't think he even works for sony like i'm fairly sure he is like a contractor so it's you they need to figure this communications thing out and people think there's a contradiction in what i say where i'm like where they're like colin you think it's you say it's smart for them to not say anything and I'm like it is I didn't say it was smart for them not to say anything when they do things they just don't have to say things most of the time this is the time where you got to say a lot right that doesn't mean you just never speak it's a time and place thing right it's like it's like you just don't say so much like like your competitor for instance it is a bummer because like I remember like even when I was like a 360 guy in that in that generation and watching e3 i liked seeing jack trenton like they were likable guys they are like they're on stage and so like it is it is just a bummer that we just don't have that and and the capacity that we do have that is very it's very it's very tightly wrapped it's very synthetic feeling like even when we do see these people who we know are real people obviously like the the degree to which they're able to be people is very limited you know they're there to deliver a talking point or like a pr blip or like you know a buzzword or something wolverine is visceral you know okay yeah but like you know there's no there's not that opportunity as much and i think that's something that we lost a lot with e3 and just the uh because there was a necessity there was a necessity to invest in somebody like that because you needed people out there on the stage to be like as as charismatic as possible because like in a live environment that shit reads you can't go up there with like a mr caffeine i was gonna say that yeah you yeah otherwise you fall into that or you have like the konami press conference where like all your people just don't know what to do yeah um one i was like this is like 100 000 troops yeah dude i remember these i remember it's so funny how like ingrained these e3 conferences are in my brain like there's parts of it that i i know verbatim dude the delivery like i can replay them in my head in 4k if i wanted higher resolution than i even saw them in i i can do it the wii music one is still one of my favorites um the wii music is iconic my favorite one my favorite one forever is going to be the uh the connect demo where they're like do you ever you want you ever wonder what the bottom of an avatar shoe looks like well bam there it is and it's this ungodly contortion and just clearly fucks up it's so good what a joy it was it goes all the things that went wrong at all these conferences too it goes to show you why none of these companies want to do shit like that anymore like that's that's the dirty little secret we say that about discs but it's really true about everything it's like none of these guys want to do this shit i get like they want to do as little as possible but but i don't want them to forget that that endemic in in gaming is joy and like celebrating the and culture and figureheads right and like this is the thing it's like we we don't have that to the same degree anymore we don't have that super bowl like event where personalities like address like they track trenton and these people they used to be like the coaches you know what i mean there's something that we had and i was like we kind of don't have that anymore yeah that's a huge bummer it's well put jeff buss wrote in and said hello gentlemen with all the talk of physical games lately did either of you ever lend a game to a friend while you were growing up only to never see that game again on the flip side did you ever borrow a game from a friend knowing that you were going to steal it i went over to my neighbor's house one day to see if i could borrow donkey kong country 2 knowing i was never going to give it give it back again i'm the asshole thank you guys for continuing to plow on for over eight years you shouldn't have stopped there at the plow um have you ever have you ever had a game stolen from you or or it's not really I don't know if it's always stealing what you did Jeff is stealing but like people that borrow things from you and then never give them back or have you done that to someone else in the gaming space Chris um I don't recall that I've ever done that I did I lost I lost a number of Game Boy Advance games from lending them out I know that for sure because I think there was a point where we moved or something and I just wasn't I don't know I just didn't care that much about the games that I lent out I was like uh I moved but like I didn't move that far away like I'll get them next time I see you and I just never yeah so like I'm sure it's happened to me not anything that I remember as like a visceral kind of like ooh that stings I can't believe any game that I lent out was something that that I was kind of in some ways I was like accepting that it was maybe never going to come back to me weirdly the most recent thing that I can think of actually is a real thing where it's like, so I, I lent Sweeney Skyrim on switch and he is still not giving it back.

3:37:01And there's no shot that he plays it, but also like, I also don't care enough about it to ask for it back. Cause I'm not going to play Skyrim on. I know.

3:37:10Dustin Furman:Can you imagine? So like, it is kind of one of those things where it's just like, eh, it happens. But, uh, i think i was also so protective of the games that i loved that like i would never lend out like i would have never lent out my copy of like halo 2 or like spider-man 2 or like or um splinter like i would have never done that it was only stuff like seek and destroy for the ps2 or like my street oh man like or like these weird games that i had that i didn't understand why i even had music maker or music magics or some shit like all these bizarre things i toy play he's like yeah you can have it take it you can take it you can take it but yeah nothing nothing that i would remember i'm sure it's happened though i it's funny man like i had a very tight group of friends growing up that all lent games to each other and i don't think anyone ever really took each other's shit there were those kids occasionally i was always surprised by this that would like write their names on the on the cartridges or like their family yeah yeah oh my god that's kind of i don't know i was never really worried about it the two things came to mind for me though well one is i borrowed tetris 2 on game boy from some kid in maine and i never gave it back to him um i i think i think part of it is because i moved yeah we moved to new hampshire and then and uh for the school year and i just never saw him again so i'm sorry about that that was a great game though uh on the other the shoe on the other foot in high school i lent my n64 expansion pack to a friend of mine john he had majora's mask and didn't realize it might he might even had something else too that and he didn't realize that you needed at the expansion pack for it so i i lent it to him and i never got it back i ended up getting a different one in the future and like replacing it wasn't the end of the world in fact the sad thing and no one realized it at the time or some of us would be really rich off of it is and if some people are really rich off of it no doubt is um they couldn't give the shit away so replacing the uh replacing the expansion pack in like 2001 wasn't the end of the world but now it's a lot more valuable i think of that but i have a buddy in jay in la so he was one of the kids he was one of the guys i've told the story about how i went to 311 day in 2004 and i met these two random guys that were like the mirror versions of me and ramon and uh we ended up becoming really fast friends with them and so So I'm still friends with them to this day, but I lent when I lived in L.A.

3:39:30Dustin Furman:Jay was like kind of getting in the PlayStation a little bit. And I had a ton of PS4 physical games that I got when I was still in the industry. I rarely I'd never even played them, but I probably had like I probably ended up my PS3 collections, hundreds of physical games, but my PS4 collection is probably about 100, let's say. And I let him go through it and pick out whatever he wanted. I'm like, you borrow these things. I was like Resident Evil, The Last of Us, Infamous Second Son, like whatever it was. and those games like I never even I don't really give a shit to be honest but I never even asked for them back so that those were the two that come to mind for me but you would hear every once in a while in school like people getting games stolen I was saying that on um on I think was it on a Q &A or something the way people used to you know the CD cases like the CD books that were big in the 90s that people used to leave their games in those sometimes and I never I can never believe that because I was like dude like you know how easy that would be to steal from you it's your entire i i mean i do that to this day to be honest with you oh it's so scary to me that scares the shit out of me even with my music i wouldn't really do that because i was scared of it in the games no way no way so funny i was but i always felt like really protective over those things though like i knew exact i know exactly where all of my dis sleeves are right now because they're like they're too integral not to know it's like your entire that's all of everything yeah that's that's that scares the shit out of me man yeah i never did that but yeah so those are the only things that really come to mind i wasn't really i didn't really i lent games to friends when they needed them but i must say i was playing some offbeat shit all the time compared to my friends were like no one want like no one was asking to borrow fucking beyond the beyond um or whatever bullshit i was playing at the time could i borrow azure dreams it's like no one was asking for those games all right beer jen wrote in said hey cnc and our missing boy d in light of our discless future i wanted your opinion on another boneheaded move by a sony by a sony company crunchyroll earlier this week they announced that they are moving their store that sells their physical media behind their membership paywall and it is only available for those who subscribe at higher tiers do you think playstation could be entering similar moves in the few entertaining i'm sorry similar moves in the future while being a playstation plus subscriber gives you discounts and access to certain games, what would stop them from in the future giving early access or exclusive access to only paying subscribers?

3:41:50Dustin Furman:I would have thought this unthinkable two weeks ago, but given their commitment to the bit at this point, their greed and bullishness of committing to a digital only future, I can't be certain they wouldn't try to pull something like this. I know you, Colin, how pontificated at length about the move Sony could make to win back some goodwill, but on the other hand, could this just be a way for them to turn things around and offer exclusive physical releases via paid subscription? You must be a PS Plus member and then you are able to buy physical directly from them we'd love to hear your opinion on this praying for you boys against your will and hope you have a great day i'll take your prayers you don't have to pray against my will i appreciate yeah um i read about this and this is a big thing with country rule right now and a lot of consternation what this suggests to me is that and i think that i'm not the first person to really observe this general you know in a more macro way, but there are certain customers that are way more valuable than other customers.

3:42:41Dustin Furman:And you could argue that some customers aren't very valuable at all. This is a tough way of looking at business. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, right? It's just like you have this array of customers that all spend a certain amount of money and a certain amount of access. They cost a certain amount of money to have. You have to serve them, right? And you look at it and you try to get to this point in line where you maybe cut it off and you say like everyone to the left of this line we don't really need if we do this to everyone on the right side of the line and i hate to say it but i think that that's kind of what's happening remember i don't know if it was a coincidence they're very deliberate as all companies are chris sony said a couple quarters ago we're no longer really that interested in monthly active users yeah they did say that and it's like huh you're you only say that if you think they're number will plateau or go down if that happens but you have a certain expectation of financial expectation the only other thing you can do is to get more out of those who remain and i think the crunchyroll move is just a small example of that i guess that's a long way of putting it is like they don't give a shit about a certain level of customer right i i just think that and it's not this is crunchyroll playstation or sony companies but it's it's not just them it's everyone.

3:43:59Dustin Furman:And there's something to it. We run a business at Last Stand that's based on micro community. And there are definitely customers that are more valuable than other customers, but we don't draw a line, right? Like we want all comers because we can serve all comers on YouTube, on podcast services, wherever. And then if people want to pay, they enter this more rarefied situation with ad free and all the rest. So we like to have that spectrum because we attract people in across the line. But I wonder if these guys just kind of look at it a different way. And it seems to me fairly obvious that they do and it's it's a shitty thing because it gives you very limited power as an individual you know person that that you know purchaser of these goods so i don't i don't know what they're going to do with playstation plus i don't by the way to your kind of question at the end about will they bring back physical releases and do this there's that would be fucking crazy if they did that but i did say that should the physical release thing should they have just stuck with it they could have just said like you have to buy them on playstation direct and i think people wouldn't have liked it but i think it would have been a lot better than this i agree yeah what do you think you have anything you want to say about this have you seen this thing about crunchy roll no i mean well i've seen it because of this question i did a little bit of research into it but i crunchy i know i might be surprising crunchy roll news does not come across my feed diegetically the the so i don't know man i think what you said is valid i think it's i think it's true but i you know this is another example of just in shitification like it is it is worse like it's just it's just not as good you know like to to pay to have access to a storefront so that you can then pay for things is that's on the face of it it's absurd i understand the reasoning for it but part of me is like okay so you're doing this you're doing this because, and maybe this, maybe this, uh, analogy or this thought experiment is going to make sense or maybe it won't, but you're doing this presumably because it's, you know, it yields, it yields higher or, you know, it's easier to do.

3:46:07Like if, if, if you have a customer that you know is paying a subscription service to be there, it's more worth your time to serve that customer, right it is uh it is more it is easier on you my feeling honestly is kind of like i don't know we don't have easy difficulties in from soft games like maybe you're just not cut out for this like like maybe you're just not cut out for this if you can't handle the the stress of serving a customer that is that is not paying for a subscription service to walk into your store. Like, I don't know. It just seems kind of, it seems weird to me that this is kind of happening and we're just kind of like, all right.

3:46:51I get the impetus, but the impetus is also insane. So I don't know.

3:46:58Dustin Furman:Everything's so marginal. Like you can tell that like, and I mean that literally, like Sony is making moves to extract pennies out of things because like they don't, They're not an incredibly healthy company. I don't think. They're good. They're in good shape. They make money. But they're not, they're not, they should be doing a lot better. And I think they feel that way. And I think that they're now trying to maybe take some shortcuts. I still feel like the best way to win, it's easier said than done, of course, but the best way to win is to just make a superior product. And you would think with Crunchyroll, Under Your Control, PlayStation, and a few other things, you would put them together.

3:47:37instead of instead of keeping them separate and then extracting all these individual fonts of value out of them like start putting your shit together and give your player god forbid i mean

3:47:49Dustin Furman:more value but again the the the monthly active that's why that won't happen though right right i know i know it's it's a shame that people it's like you i mean it's suggested in what you're saying like we all know the companies will never or don't want to do what's right for their customer but i'm always kind of like why not and everyone's like it's like because it's money and i'm like yeah but the company that treats it's i think it might not work at scale it works with the smaller companies all the small companies i deal with right or even a small company like stan we treat our customers well and give them value and they come back you make money i guess i don't quite understand why that why that wouldn't scale to a motion multinational corporation in fact do you think it would be the safest way to do business would be to be so reliable it's why uh well oh good well i was well the only thing that i have to say about that is it's just like the issue with like a multinational corporation and the scale of money that they're dealing with is just like they're they want to get what they can while they can get it you know what i mean like it is more of like they already had like the degree of of wealth that accumulates is so vast that it's it's even even a fraction of it is like is good enough to set you up for life in in an absurd comfortable position so your goal really is to kind of like get in and get out really like i want as much as possible for as for as short term as i can do it and if the brand is fucked after me like what the fuck do i care you know like i i don't rely on this really i could quit today and be set right i would like more but i would also like a lot more for like way less time I don't want to have to put 20 years into this.

3:49:30I want it now. I want it within the next. I want it within the next fiscal year. I want it within the next like within five years and then I'm out. I don't know. And your conversations that I hear. Yeah. You're well said.

3:49:43Dustin Furman:And it creates a domino effect of bullshit because everyone is doing that. Right. Then they think they'll interact with companies that will treat them better, but they don't. No. And so on and so forth. And yeah, I guess it goes. it's about market capitalism in that it's about ownership because family-run businesses don't really run like that small businesses don't they can't really run right the deli around the corner like your fucking dry cleaner or whatever like i don't know man maybe it's a little i don't want to say it's naive i've owned three businesses three successful businesses i am a businessman i understand business i'm a businessman doing business but there is still a certain naivete and thinking like, well, it should be better because it can be.

3:50:26Dustin Furman:And I'm like, I understand that. That's fucking crazy. It's just that I could. And that's why I just wouldn't be cut out to be one of these people. Right. Because I just don't know that I could run a business like that. Like fiduciarily to the nth degree where nothing else even matters. And I think a lot of things matter. So anyway. Yeah. Final inquiry, Chris, comes from Angelo Color. Who says, hey, boys. First time, long time. Is it time for Sony to give the PlayStation TV another shot? Let me explain. With component pricing continuing to rise and showing no signs of slowing down, maybe a low-cost streaming-only PlayStation device could be a way to bring more people into the PS5 ecosystem at a much lower entry price.

3:51:09Dustin Furman:The portal proved there's demand for a dedicated streaming device, so why not take it a step further and make it a streaming box for the TV? I feel like a PSTV2 bundled with a DualSense for$199 would absolutely murder. Thank you for your donation. I like the idea, but I do caution you that I'm not entirely sure why Portal did well. It's awesome. I love it. The cloud gaming thing wasn't even an option until more recently, and I don't think it owes almost anything to it. In other words, I don't know what the demand would be for Sony's standalone cloud service. I think people liked PlayStation Portal because it connected to your ps5 yeah and so that other option that they opened up and remember you have to have playstation plus uh premium i think for that as well so yeah so i like where your head's at angelo and there is like some way to finagle this but i don't the cloud experience is still not very good for a lot of people some people it's really good jaffe swears by it but i also I'm not entirely convinced.

3:52:19Dustin Furman:I'm not entirely convinced of two things. I'm not entirely convinced players really want to play on cloud mostly. And I'm not entirely convinced companies really want you to either. And I know I've made that point in the past. I'm like, I don't know that they really want you to do this. There's this idea that like they want to basically make hardware so onerously expensive that you have to kind of subscribe to them. And I'm like, I don't know about that. I don't know why if you're Sony, you would want to not offload the hardware and all that comes along with it. So you never have to worry about it again.

3:52:43Dustin Furman:You want to serve the power and the water and all the rest for your playstation 5 farm or do you want to just sell the playstation 5 at cost right and then let the fucking schmuck out there like me or you power it ourselves that's the kind of thing i don't think people really think and i'm not saying angelo is doing this i'm just saying i don't think people really think all of it through or i'm like i don't know about this like i don't know if cloud is necessarily the future you think because it puts so much of the cost the onus of cost on the manufacturers and i don't think they want that part of part of console gaming is putting that on everyone else you know yeah but if you buy a game from them that's awesome but then they're streaming it every time you play it yeah you theoretically well i guess the subscription the fact that it is a subscription service is meant to yeah offset that of course you're right you're right yeah but still like i i'm i'm in broad agreement i don't here's the thing So in this pitch, the PSTV2 is its own little bespoke kind of dongle or something?

3:53:44Dustin Furman:Yeah, like a deck of cards like the original PS Plus or the PSTV was, I assume, that you would then use as a conduit. Maybe you plug an Ethernet cable into it. And then I think you can plug Ethernet in the PlayStation TV. And then you go from there. It seems like an unnecessary step, really, because you don't need that at this point. It seems unnecessary. it seems like a lot of like unnecessary r &d to build this thing i mean it wouldn't be complicated necessarily but it would be it would be more time than it would be worth and more manufacturing than it would be worth certainly um i just think they really like everything's in in a very precarious place that they i don't think anybody can really afford to manufacture shit that isn't like really ironclad or um if not ironclad at least a little bit more you know not niche you know than like a a cloud streaming dongle.

3:54:34I think it is more likely that you could just do this through the, through a PlayStation app. You know what I mean? On a, on a, on a TV storefront or something like that. Like that would be more likely to me than just investing in building a little dongle. Um, I mean, that makes sense to me. Like if you could just like have, if you download the PlayStation app or, or download PS plus on a TV, because I think they do that with Xbox, I think. Um, but I also think Sony probably looks at Xbox, and be like whatever they're doing we should do the opposite yeah you know like they're kind of a great they're kind of a great example of like we're just like whatever they're doing is not working so like if they do something let's like just go ahead and not for a for a broad array of uh different things you know optionality is necessarily how they feel but well i was gonna

3:55:24Dustin Furman:say chris i think having the options cool but like it playstation tv was actually a really interesting device i remember being intrigued by it i i had one i never really messed too deeply with it but i was like it's an interesting idea yeah it's just i think i had one too it's like it was it was they didn't really promote it it was a for people that don't know playstation tv was basically a vita that you plugged into your tv um and it gave you all sorts of interesting functionality but and it was this really cheap thing and it was super small um but they almost treated it like it never existed and i'm not really entirely sure what they were even trying to do with it because they didn't market it as a vita but it was that was that was was weird so would it be time again for that no i i i'm i'm still on the fence of cloud gaming not so much for the fidelity anymore but just whether it makes any economic sense and i'll be interested to see how it plays out over time i think people want dedicated hardware personally not even nice hardware just local hardware all right chris let's get the hell out of here it's time to go let's go good to be here with you today what's uh what's on your agenda for the rest of the day uh i don't quite know i didn't plan out anything today i think today's gonna be a nothing day which is nice i can relax i'll probably just play video games honestly today's like today's like nothing i'm free cool that sounds awesome that sounds perfect thank god it's uh it's 94 degrees out it's fucking oh have you been affected by the wildfire canada wildfire stuff where like the sky's all fucked up Not here.

3:57:03Dustin Furman:Yeah, here it's like really do the sun is like it's like orange like a perfect circle orange circle. That's really interesting. It's really creepy. That's so funny. Like an omen. There's so many crazy fires in Canada. It's actually like the last time I went to Canada. I went to like I think Edmonton and it was like there was so ash is everywhere and it was like you could feel it. And when you breathe in you get that like almost like smoking feeling and you're like God damn. This is Canada. It's very odd. Yeah, they have a lot of woods up there. so things are always burning I think but no I mean everything's clear blue here and absurdly hot it's 91 yeah it's gross it's better 91 there though yeah so yeah I'm gonna I don't know I have some things to do and then I'm gonna work out and go in the pool probably but tomorrow from when we're recording so the day this publishes is Micah's birthday so we're gonna go do our yearly tradition of staying at the nice hotel and getting dinner and suiting up and doing all that so we'll be gone And then, yeah, just a weekend of hanging out and and vegging out, I guess.

3:58:05Dustin Furman:And then I'll be back for secret streaming on Monday. So, yeah, it was good to see you, Chris. And thank you for taking the time to be here with me today. I don't know when Dustin will be back for everyone that's been asking, but whenever he wants, it doesn't really matter. Yeah. Yes, that's kind of it. Yeah. We'll see you next time for more. Thank you for being here. Patreon.com slash last day media for early ad free access and last day media store for merch. Till next time. Goodbye. Take care, guys. sacred symbols a playstation podcast is a product and trademark of last stand media and colin's last stand llc and is proudly recorded in the usa the show is conceived by is written by and is directed by me colin moriarty my co-hosts are chris raygun maldonado and dustin firman the show is produced by executive producer dustin firman all of last stands the music is by my best friend Ramon Narvaez.

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