#421 | As They Gas, All I See Are Hieroglyphic Patterns

25:21Chris G.:Yeah.

25:22Dustin Furman:wow like this is incredible you know um i felt that way kind of about inception as well i know micah really likes um the magician one the prestige the prestige is my personal like i love that one that is a good one and i think that's his first non like major non-batman one i think like because he did a bunch of other things like well memento and stuff but like people didn't care too deeply i don't think until that movie um and then inception i think really is where I kind of really all took off for him.

25:51Chris G.:Yeah. That's my outsider perspective. Yeah, no, but even the Batman stuff, like I'm kind of like, yeah, I think it's fine, really. Like I like the Dark Knight, but like I kind of don't know if I, I don't know if I like it because the performances are really good. Like I think Heath Ledger's performance is amazing. Oh, it's amazing, yeah. And at the time, I remember that being like, I remember seeing in the theater being like, this is crazy because up until that point, there had only been one Joker really. it was always it was just mark hamill or like caesar romero so it's like mega transformative but when i think about like oh do i want to watch the dark knight the answer is almost always no like i never really want to sit down and like i think i'm going to watch the dark night today not once yeah i i thought that i didn't i like the first movie finding batman

26:39Dustin Furman:begins dark and then i love dark knight rise is the best everyone knows i love Bane I think Bane is the is the best he's the best yes brother like he's just an outrageous and again I brought this up a million times but I just love I love this about Christopher Nolan like the avant-garde kind of nature of it is that originally you weren't really supposed to understand him which is like what I think is awesome like if you listen to the original dub like you didn't really know what he was saying and then when when people were watching it like what the fuck is he like and it bothered people and they went and dubbed it that's why he sounds like that but i'm like that's kind of cool like that you because i think he said in an interview it's not important you know and i'm like that's so interesting yeah it kind of isn't really like

27:23Chris G.:i don't remember the dark they have to find one of us in the records brother

27:29Chris G.:it's like all right i guess bro it's so funny though because you have a that's the i the idea is interesting i'm like oh you can't understand him but then you also have batman going right So it's just, it's a nightmare. It's like a sensory nightmare. Everyone's leaning forward. Yeah. Well, to be fair, he also, this is a thing also with Christopher Nolan that bugs me. I don't mean to, this is going to be a Christopher Nolan guest. But like, I feel, and maybe it's just me, but like, I really feel like his sound mixing is awful. I feel like I can barely hear the people that I need to hear. Oppenheimer was like this a little bit where like the music was always drowning people out.

28:13Chris G.:And I'm like, brother, I want it. These are scientists. I want to hear what they're saying. What is this fucking violin doing? I don't know. I feel I feel deaf. I feel deaf when I watch Christopher Nolan's right. That's why we're we're in the generation where millennials of

28:34Dustin Furman:we got to have the the closed captioning on man I mean that's me anyway it's like I yeah I always

28:38Chris G.:have that on like I wasn't always like that though I swear to god it got that way because I was just having a harder time hearing what people were saying because people got worse at mixing audio I swear to god I swear like because I that would have never been a thing that I wanted in my media like oh I want the subtitles on always I remember a time when that would annoy the shit out of me but then it got to the point where I was like then it got to what what did he say why do and then and then and then the character whisper the character's whispering and you're like what and then you raise the volume and then the and then it goes back to normal and then it blows your fucking speakers out i don't know yeah it's you're absolutely right you know the first

29:14Dustin Furman:the i i think it's probably been about 10 years where i just keep the closed captioning on on like tv and yeah and not on like network tv but like but i think it began with that eggers movie the witch where i'm like i think i watched it for like 20 minutes and i was like i don't know what the fuck anyone has said the entire film like i'm you're like waiting to get it and i'm like what

29:36Chris G.:i don't think i saw that one was that was that like a lot of accents and like whispering yeah

29:40Dustin Furman:it was like and it was all naturally shot like with no artificial lighting it's it's totally even i know that as a delay man i'm like this is fucking beautiful like this is incredible there's candlelight firelight scary shit yeah eggers eggers is good it's the chick um i think I'm the chick that's in Queen's Gambit I think is in it which is not really a very timely reference but I know her from that I think um I think Anya Taylor-Joy yeah right right yeah she plays one of the characters in that but it was that was a really a really good one do you know what bothers me about closed captioning though Chris Mike and I were talking about this recently when we were watching maybe it was Handmaid's Tale or something where the closed captioning is showing you things people are saying that you would never hear yeah I hate that like there's like a conversation going on in the background and i'm like dude i don't know how you're even getting this out of what they're saying it's probably in the script i assume but that kind of shit annoys me a little bit i'm like let's just keep let's just keep it focused on what like the what's that shit bothers the hell out of me i'm like this whole conversation's happening i would have never even known

30:39Chris G.:this dude that drove me insane in um in uh i think it was one of the final fantasy 7 remake games where like you'd be walking through a town and then everybody would have a text box popping up everyone would have their conversations like coming up but it would like the audio would be like the game would like treat their conversations as equally important as like the main characters conversation i'm like shut up i don't care what the fucking the cobbler is talking about it's insane

31:14Chris G.:metro exodus had that problem too i remember right uh not with the closed captioning but like the audio being like yeah the it's like proximity audio yeah it was just like everybody's conversations everybody everyone's audio is at the top of the of the mix i forgot about how you and i were laughing about that i think with that when that game came out yeah oh that's funny well

31:33Dustin Furman:let's get into a few inquiries here then we'll get into the news as we always do we'll get to what we're playing and we'll wrap up with more inquiries because i guess we aren't tired of hearing about you there is some news this week but not a huge amount so i i went a little heavy with the inquiries here from the audience we'll get through them brent leo wrote in and said first time writing in i'm currently in the hospital waiting to have open heart surgery this friday i'm 39 and a single father of three young kids whom i've been raising all by myself i just wanted to say thanks for helping me get through the long work days and my current situation with the upcoming surgery you guys have been a great distraction from all the rough patches i've had to go through take care brent we're wishing you the best uh yeah open heart surgery serious but obviously very manageable and we're wishing you the very best uh on the other side Let us know when you're let us know when you wake up.

32:15The first thing I want you to do when you wake up is I want you to get on your phone and DM us.

32:20Chris G.:Yeah. Very person before before any family. Right. You notify us.

32:29Dustin Furman:We're wishing you the very best, of course. Some dude in Florida wrote in and said greetings and salutations on the topic of your podcast being played in strange places. I manage a summer camp for kids ages six to twelve. Oh, on one of my very few breaks, I popped in my Bluetooth earbud and hit continue on the latest episode of Moriarty Cross Jaffe. Oh, when it didn't start playing, I fumbled around on my phone and found that it wasn't actually connected to my ear. But instead, I see that my phone is connected to a classroom speaker downstairs. The video has been on and the video has been on for about a minute.

33:02Dustin Furman:I immediately stopped the episode and ran downstairs, imagining all the terrible things that could have been said in that minute. Turns out it was pretty much the worst case scenario. The kids had been quietly painting when the speaker abruptly started playing the stream audio with Jaffe speaking. And of course, it timed out perfectly so that the first thing the kids heard was Jaffe Flaude proclaiming, your sister is a whore. The instructor in the room was apparently so confused and was getting the class to stop repeating your sister is a whore as I arrived. Needless to say, I received a few angry calls from parents the next day.

33:30Dustin Furman:Yikes, I lied and said a random passerby I connected to the Bluetooth speaker and it was a fluke. I think it's better that the parents don't know the manager of the department was responsible for teaching their kids some new colorful vocabulary. Anyway, three weeks of summer left and that couldn't in the end couldn't come sooner. Thanks for getting me through the long days of screaming children, especially when my phone is connected to the correct Bluetooth device. Rough.

33:50Chris G.:I love the I love the just like, yeah, I just lied. Yeah, whatever. Yeah, whatever. Who cares? It's some fucking guy. you invented a person and saddled him with this with this crime i love it how old is like what's

34:06Dustin Furman:the okay six through 12 yeah that's a that's a kind of a wide rate age range because by the time you're 10 11 12 you're a little more privy and a little more you know sly and that would probably be a funny thing confusing and and cry worthy perhaps for a six or seven year old to hear Jaffe talk about anything um yeah did you ever go to camp I have like vague memory like I went to

34:31Chris G.:I did Cub Scouts I think and I did I don't know if that's necessarily camp but like and I did go to uh I did go to a science camp where we built robots because of I have glasses so my parents threw me into a robot camp it was cool to be honest it was uh yeah man I used to be so smart and then i just stopped yeah but i went yeah that that science robot camp i think was like i think 2005 so it was it's been a while but not like traditional like oh bring your sleeping bag you know get a tent ready yeah i i've never related to any of that like the the campground kind of right right right you know i've never had that experience i always feel bad for well i don't

35:20Dustin Furman:feel bad i mean some kids like it but it's like there are parents i even knew kids like this where it's like you're going to camp this summer like you're not sitting around the house doing nothing you know and i'm like why not like like my parents never we were all pretty all the four of us the kids were really active with sports and all these things digging not so much but digging worked a job and was skating and doing his thing art and stuff like that so we all had our own interest. We were never like, I was never really bored as a kid, but I always felt for those kids where it's like, no, we're sending you away for like 10 weeks to like this camp.

35:51Dustin Furman:Bye. And I'm like, you just got out of school and now you got to go to fucking camp. Now I was, I went to camp for one summer, but it was like a day camp. It was the summer of 1993. And my mom and dad had just gotten divorced. And I, that was the first year I moved for the school year with off of Long Island I went with my mom I lived in Maine at the time my mom was working at Business Express which was a Delta connecting airline that would do like regional stuff and she was like the head of flight attendants there they don't exist anymore yeah and Express sounds completely fictional by the way yeah yeah yeah it's Express yeah Business Success BX was like the logo and they were based out of New Hampshire so I lived in like southern Maine and my mom would have to go to work so she would send me to this like day camp and what all i honestly all i remember about it was that like i got picked on a lot it was like the one i've talked about this in the past about how i was not i have to be honest and say that like most of my life i wasn't really picked on i was kind of just anonymous no one really busted my balls i think a lot of it had to do with that fact that i had older siblings and the old my older siblings friends little siblings like one of them matt spanky his name was he definitely like protected me in high school and like all those so there was probably like subtle things around me that were happening that I knew wasn't quite privy to because I was a nerd I was in the 90s I was prime for the picking I mean I'm just letting you know I was reading Toy Fair and like playing fucking Legend of Dragoon and shit like you know things that like would get you fucking stuffed in a locker yeah but like that that experience at that camp was the only time I remember really truly being picked on like right like really

37:29Chris G.:like majorly and you don't remember anything else about the about that camp not really no i just

37:35Dustin Furman:remember i remember like with the one kid that did it he was like a like a fat blonde kid and i think about i don't remember his name but i think about him sometime like wonder what you're doing now i bet i'm doing better than you yeah and i'm gonna come and remind you he he's like he's like a biotech fucking executive he makes like 18 million dollars a year plus plus benefits he got bitcoin

37:57Chris G.:immediately the yeah i that's so funny because that that kind of implies that there's a level of like you you've repressed the positive memories probably of that camp experience it only you're only left with like i was picked on yeah i remember like i remember dreading it yeah what

38:16Dustin Furman:i remember too about that summer this might i think this lines up perfectly is i think that that summer was when mighty morph and power rangers like first kind of emerged in the united States. And I remember watching it before camp and I would eat like a pop tart. And then my mom would like go drop me off at this place. And then I'd be there for eight hours and it was awful. Yeah, I hate it. And my mom always says like, oh, you know, I love my mom. My mom's like my favorite person in the world. But she'll always say like she'll always like paint the rosiest picture of like the way things were where she's like, yeah, we were alone, but we had fun.

38:48Right. And I'm like, I guess like it kind of sucked a lot of it. You know, like I was I joke about this all the time, but I was like a latchkey kid.

38:58Dustin Furman:By the time I was like in fifth, like actually really fourth grade, but certainly in fifth grade, like I was alone. And I think I think that's a major reason why I am so such a loner to this day. And like Micah, Micah reflects on all the time. She's like, you really are like. A loner. It's not like antisocial. you don't know how to socialize you don't want to talk you don't like see it's like no you're just used to being by yourself and i would tell the like my mom would work until eight at night or whatever like i would be up and then when i was in high school and i my sisters don't want me to ever say these things in front of their kids because they're like where i'm like my dad used to date this girl or this woman upstate you know long island people don't know long islands in the southern part of new york and upstate is like everything above new york city basically and uh He used to just leave for like three or four days at a time when I was in like 10th or 11th grade and be like, here's some money.

39:48You know, he like. Go to school. Yeah. And I and it's like, yeah, I was by myself all the time. And so it's really no no surprise that I am the way I am now.

40:03Dustin Furman:I didn't I didn't do bad things either. Like I didn't like my sister used to have parties and shit like that. Like I never did anything like that. i would just like my sister used to have my sister used to have parties and then our house got robbed like cased and robbed because of one of them my dad flipped out i'll never forget it like crazy yeah like all of his like all my dad is like a big audiophile and he has like he had this amazing stereo stack and like all the shit like everything got jacked and he was gonna fucking kill my sister you know um anyway all right so uh camp

40:40good by the way how's uh how's uh speaking of camp speaking of madness how's uh snark tank

40:45Chris G.:how are the boys oh they're doing well everything's fine i think um are you gonna are you in kind of a rhythm no yeah we're yeah we're in kind of a i mean it's it's always it's very everything about it is improvised the schedule the recording time uh what we're gonna do so it's like it's very kind of we've been hitting a good stride though lately like there's a lot of good uh clips that we've been managing to get out there and now we have people doing um these animate like not animations i guess like animatic kind of like motion comics of like cool some of their favorite stuff there's one recently where we had like a a bit go i don't want to say viral because it's not really viral but like got a lot of hits of like this we did a bit of uh joe rogan interviewing a caveman and the caveman is smarter and it was fun so like i don't know it's it's it's nonsense but it's fun which is good i still find it weird that i did that show twice what do you mean rogan oh i was right now you're now you're sure yeah yeah i was i was like what i didn't know the uh like it's that is kind of interesting yeah that you did that that was forever ago now at this

42:02Dustin Furman:point right yeah it was it was like 10 years ago almost i think at this point um because i was on it twice in like six months he liked me but then i think when i stopped talking about politics so much he wasn't he doesn't like he doesn't care about games he has no no he really doesn't like he did a couple i think he had carmack on once but i think a lot of it had to do with other things you know um because i'm surprised like uh lex friedman's much more into it i think

42:25Chris G.:he had todd howard on at one point um yeah he just didn't he just or maybe i just saw that he had um was it the gta was it dan hauser yeah yeah he did so i think it was was it sam hauser i i don't or maybe both of them i i can't remember who it was it was one of the hauser people and i don't i don't remember i don't know if it was recent or not um but i saw

42:46Dustin Furman:it recently and it was interesting it's surprising like i'm sure a lot of the pr people have tried to penetrate that rogan shield because it's really unusual how you i don't know how he does it now but like when i was on the show it was literally all set up through twitter dm i didn't speak to anyone and then when i got there jamie young jamie had a document i had assigned and that was it um that was crazy yeah so like it wasn't like you know you would think he would have a person or people and it wasn't it's like oh you want to come do the show well sure when do it now okay cool do you have like a hotel recommendation yeah go here and then i just show up and that was yeah

43:18Chris G.:you're one of the you're you're one of the rare people where like that actually materialized because he followed me and derrick and i think derrick and him were corresponding about something and then he just and it was just like you know never again which is fine because it's just like i don't know i'm sure he's oh yeah yeah like i haven't heard imagine they talk to everybody you

43:36Dustin Furman:know yeah like i we've dm back and forth but like the last time i dm'd him he didn't even answer me which like I'm I'm I'm not like boys with him I'm sure he remembers who I am or whatever but that was a that was a surreal surreal thing but he it's funny how much of a cultural impact that show has had and like how prescient it is um I don't think I even really appreciated it when I was doing it to the to be honest like right because that's not a show I really listen to often i listened to probably one in at this point almost nothing but like even that like when i was more into it it's like one in five one in ten if it's something interesting yeah and you

44:15Chris G.:were on it when it was like actually a a real interesting show instead of a an arm of the state department yeah well i think when he moved to texas i think the i never i did the show

44:27Dustin Furman:that then and i think it kind of changed a little bit the complexion of it yeah even when he moved

44:34Chris G.:comedians and celebrities and it's like here's Mark Andreessen. Yeah, right. Right. Okay. All right, but fascinating.

44:43Dustin Furman:Moshe Sweet wrote in and said, hey, guys, I have a request for Colin. Please keep sprinkling in the fun sports stories, news and random facts on the podcast. My wife and I have started hanging out with another couple and we're really hitting it off. I'm trying to connect more with the husband, but he's a big sports fan and I'm definitely not. He plays Cod, but not much else. And I'm trying to open his eyes to the real shit. never neverness to everness the funny thing is the last time we hung out i found myself remembering things you guys had talked about like aaron rogers tearing his achilles in the first game with the jets or how baseball doesn't have a salary cap like other major sports those little nuggets have actually turned into great conversation starters and have really helped bridge the gap so thanks for unknowingly helping me out and keep up the great work you're very welcome i have a few for you right now uh just say like uh so the nfl is about to go into training camp next week the teams are starting to report so you can say something like uh yeah so the uh the teams are starting to report the training camp we're almost here to the football season you know something like that something like that i think will make you sound sound good you can bring up something about the world cup perhaps that's timely what i'm more curious about though is what kind of games are you trying to open you know the real shit be careful you know because you don't want this guy to understand who you really are

45:58Chris G.:oh no no no no i couldn't i couldn't even it's so funny to imagine that people because like i just it's so alien to me not not the sports thing it's just like it's so difficult for me to pretend to care about a conversation like i went to a world cup thing kind of recently it was and they held it at like it was at noon or something and it was like from noon to three or whatever and i went there and i i just i think i left like 30 minutes in and i I just didn't say bye to him. I was like, I can't. Oh, Irish goodbye. I love that. I'm getting more and more in favor of the Irish goodbye as I get older.

46:33Chris G.:I like it. And now when I notice it happens, I like it. Like when I notice that it happens to me, I'm like, okay, good. You know, I don't mind it. Yeah, I don't really either. Yeah, remove yourself. That's fine. I'm done here. I had a conversation about like, oh, so do you watch a lot of soccer? I was like, no, not at all. I don't know why I'm here. I was invited. I don't know why I'm here. It was an obligation. There's food. Yeah, food's good.

47:06Dustin Furman:Food and sports always go well together. We're in the real doldrums of sport right now where nothing interesting is happening. And I'm watching... What was I watching yesterday? There was Little League softball World Series on at one point on ESPN2. The WNBA, which I just think is... borderline unwatchable sometimes. Just like a lot of random shit. I'm like, God almighty, please just real sports begin. Please, please come back. Please. I'm begging you. We're almost there. We're almost there, but I'm glad that we were able to help you and I'm wishing you the very best. I'm so curious. What does a person who only plays Call of Duty in like those kinds of games, the ball shooter, you know, the ball shooter, ball and gun gamer, ball gun gamer, that's what it is.

47:55what do they think about when you're like you play genshin impact like if you just showed them any of this shit yeah show them fan grand blue fantasy relink show them zenless zone zero see how they take to it we just take these things for granted but i think they would be shocking

48:14Chris G.:yeah i mean it would be probably completely debasing do you think because the thing the thing about call duty there was like call duty is no stranger to that shit though like they have like Nicki Minaj and like thrown into like playable characters and like they they just had fucking Beavis and Butthead that's true you know like in the last like couple years so like I mean it's not they must be somewhat aware of like the insanity of this industry on a broader level yeah it's you're you're you're right in that like it's just about like how avant-garde and weird do you want to get you know yeah um anyway dexter wallingsford wrote in and said

48:53Dustin Furman:hello cc and the phantom d i just wanted to write in about a situation i was placed in recently i was a groomsman in a wedding for one of my friends and my pastor's daughter was rather large 400 to 500 people including our entire church i just wanted to stop here i couldn't even name 400 people that i've ever met like i would i i would be like i would have to sit here and like getting beyond like a hundred like like just name people that you know and I'm like I don't know man like 400 I think that's like really pushing it I've met people I guess I can start naming names out of a yearbook or something I don't know yeah I know I've met hundreds of people I know that for sure and getting to like a hundred people

49:40Chris G.:like getting to 100 people to list is like that's a that alone is a feat like a feat

49:47Dustin Furman:you know when i when we were getting married and mike and i and we were putting our stuff together i was like i don't even think like i don't even like i'm already done like when by the time we got to like combine 70 or 80 people it was like every i'm like i don't know anyone else like this is literally like everybody i know i i so i just it's like 500 people fucking christ nice outrageous you probably got a nice little uh or they got a nice little bundle of money for that though which is cool probably that's why i mean that's why you would do that i suppose why would you want to have 500 people at your wedding unless you unless you're like the fucking king queen or something it's like yeah like i don't know that seems miserable to be honest but anyway back to the letter dexter says i was instructed after the ceremony when everyone was going back down the aisle that we would all dance.

50:36Dustin Furman:I don't dance. You can tell from my username that I am indeed white, generationally white. Again, I don't dance. I was pressured for a week or so by the other nine members of the bridal party to just let loose or don't worry about it. My bridesmaid wanted to coordinate and yada yada. However, in the end, I just walked down the aisle as quickly as possible while the others danced. It ended up being fine since the entire crowd heartily laughed at my curmudgeonliness, but I still resented, as Colin would say, being put in a situation. I don't know, man. I feel like you got away with it, which is good.

51:06I think sometimes you just got to do what other people want you to do for them. You know, I don't like dancing either. The first dance was awesome, but it was like very awkward.

51:17Dustin Furman:I don't do this stuff and like, you know, like that kind of thing. Like, but sometimes you just got to do what the expectations are. One of the things I say, Dexter, in these situations is you just not worry what no one's going to care what happened. Like no one's going to talk about it. no one's gonna say like remember like in five years like remember that fucking retard dexter and the way he was dancing down the aisle at these people's wedding when there were 500 of

51:37Chris G.:us in the audience for some reason you remember how you said you're how he danced at that wedding in a way that uh indicated that he should be killed yeah like it's like no one's no one's thinking in extreme terms you know when it comes to this so i get it though like i think it's awkward too i specifically learned i specifically learned music from like an instrument perspective because i thought it would give me a pass to never dance like i thought it's like okay well this is where the music went like i can play instruments i don't dance right right but then you just have to in certain places and then eventually you just kind of get over you just don't care yeah i do think a lot of it is is being in your own head about it i guarantee you you it's more you're just embarrassed to do it and it's like it kind of becomes at a certain point at a certain you know what it is when you're drunk at like a bar or something or like like a club or something and it's like that's when it kind of like oh i guess this isn't really that big of a deal right like that kind of shattered the window for it for for me or just like oh who

52:39Dustin Furman:cares well you're the center of your own world and when you and then you realize like you're not the center of anyone else's like so like so like people are not are not paying as close of attention to you as you think but i understand i totally agree where it's like it is awkward i hate doing awkward things but sometimes you just got to do it there are so many situations in my life over time where i'm like i just got to do this you know here's the thing dexter we're saying this

53:01Chris G.:and no one's paying attention to your awkward dancers nobody's doing that i am though we know we know now there's always gonna be one person you know who's like look at me that's me that's like at least like I see you you don't know how to you don't know how to step for shit and I notice you don't know what's where that in mind doing you're shuffling your feet out there like a moron finally Benjamin Sharp wrote in said Colin last week you offhandedly mentioned and

53:27Dustin Furman:displayed the gizmo that Micah had purchased for you for mosquito bites here in Alberta Canada we are having the worst mosquito outbreak that we've had in decades it actually feels unlivable and like you can't even go outside some days so this felt like divine intervention and I immediately went to Amazon and ordered this thing without really looking into it, desperate for any reprieve from the itch. Now, what is this sorcery? Not only does this thing work immediately, but it lasts. I know it's just something to do with extreme heat and pain displacement, but it still feels like magic. I find myself excited to use it as if I'm somehow getting some sweet revenge on these little proboscis having bastards.

53:59Dustin Furman:Nice word. They can take my blood, but they can't take my freedom to burn myself. Also, it hurts so good to use it, and I think it's giving me a weird pain kink, and I'm here for it, but I digress. The thing is a lifesaver. Anyway, I just wanted to show appreciation for the out-of-pocket but wildly serendipitous recommendation. Thanks for all you do. Stay golden, Pony Boys. We will. I brought this up because Benjamin, I'm in a similar place. I had brought this up the other night when I was using it where I'm like, I kind of like this. Yeah. You know, like I have a mosquito bite and I'm like, oh.

54:29You're kind of excited to get a mosquito bite. Right.

54:31Dustin Furman:And because there is something so interesting, it feels like it's so weird. I wonder if anyone else has used it can understand. It's like you have this itch, this very specific mosquito bite itch, and then you burn yourself with this thing. And it seems like it captures it. It almost like you could feel the pain or the itch dissipate out of it. It's so strange and it's it is addictive, like when they're like, wow, because it works. It's not like some bullshit that you got sold on TV for$9.99 or whatever.

55:00Chris G.:Yeah, it's a sensory thing. I get it. It's like it's like messing around with the Ooblick. you ever mess around with like you know you know what ooblake is no what is that that's like that weird like it's i think it's like cornstarch and something else but like you mix it it's like that it's it's liquid but that gets hard when you hit it or like when you like uh what is it how do you apply force to it o o b l e e k i think oh i got it yeah ooblake okay it's like this weird like it's like a thing that they would teach you with like science class they would like okay let's make this and it's to teach you it's a non-newtonian i think non-newtonian fluid i think yeah that's what it says like it just so it's like it's it's in one state like it's perfectly liquid when it's like softly moved and then when you strike it it becomes hard and it's like it's all weird the sensory it's i i remember fucking around with it and this is like i was obsessed with it just from a sensory perspective because it's so weird to experience and i would imagine it's very very weird to get a mosquito we've had mosquito bites our entire lives the entire time we've been alive on this planet we've been we've been plagued by these things and to suddenly just be like oh here's a machine that like makes me kind of want to get one right because you want it is a fascinating that's probably it like because under no circumstances would you have ever assumed that that would happen right because i i just hate mesquite i just hate those

56:18Dustin Furman:motherfuckers man yeah we spray we get we get sprayed every month every month like in um we hire someone like come in and it apparently just kills the eggs so they don't but still a few get by and then people had written in chris about like the whole x thing that you would you know you put the x with your nail over it and i've done that too in the past and that does work but this is even better this is even better i'm telling you if you're out there like he is in alberta uh i don't have it uh let me um it's what does it call like what would you even call it like i don't know mosquito bite mosquito bite burner burner yeah mosquito bite relief device that's what it's Yeah, it's the one I have is B-E-U-R-E-R-B-E-R, insect bite healer.

57:03Chris G.:That's so crazy. Yeah, what a weird. What a weird fucking item. It is weird.

57:09Dustin Furman:It's like it hurts like for a second and you're like, oh, I really should take this off my arm. But you just keep going with it. And then it's oh, my God. Anyway, Benjamin, I'm glad you understand. Chris, we've had enough of this chicanery. It's time to get into the news. Now, we're going to go into things a little bit differently than we usually do, because there are new sales numbers to share this week from Surkana. However, we usually do this at the end of the news. But because of what's going on recently, I thought we would do them instead at the beginning.

57:37Chris G.:Okay.

57:39Dustin Furman:Because there's some interesting indications here of what is happening. And there was a specific thing that Matt Piscitella from Serkana put out on Blue Sky that has a lot of people talking as well about, frankly, how poorly physical games are doing on PlayStation this year in the United States. So we'll just take it all at once. Um, June, 2026 was not great for the video game industry in the United States, the biggest gaming market in the world. Video game spending fell 21 % in June. Um, that's year over year. And he was saying that a lot of this has to do with switch to, of course, being in its launch window last year.

58:19Dustin Furman:So that's to be expected. U S video game, total market projecting projected spending reached$4.5 billion during June, 2026 and we said that that was a decrease first half spending finished one percent behind 2025's pace so not anything to really talk about there he notes june 2025 featured the launch of the nintendo switch 2 as we know which set an all-time u.s video game hardware launch month sales record at 1.6 million units nintendo switch 2's june 2025 debut also drove the highest hardware and accessory spending totals for a june month in u.s track history that's not a huge surprise considering almost nothing comes out in June.

58:53The nitty gritty of it is video game sales, of course. Now, this is the shitty thing I think that Serkan is doing, although I understand this, is that I feel like Serkan's numbers are more nebulous now than they used to be. And we've gone into this in the past

59:11Dustin Furman:because they are now projecting sales figures for publishers who do not share, rather, digital sales figures with them. So people might remember that Nintendo games would really under chart on Serkana because a lot of those games are bought physically, but there was no digital footprint. So we didn't really know how games did outside of that, which was what made them so impressive. So they're trying to fix that. But I feel like the numbers are now a little more amorphous. The best selling game in June. So this is May 31st through July 4th. This is the reporting period. UFC 6. Oh, wow. Interesting.

59:48number two mecha chameleon yeah number three 007 first light number four starfox so now nintendo games are starting to appear better because of these projections and it's it's good

1:00:04Dustin Furman:because they were always underrepresented five lego batman still holding on number six tamadachi life still holding on yeah number seven forza horizon six not available on playstation so that's all based on PC sales and certainly some Xbox sales as well. MLB The Show 26 is at number eight. Minecraft at number nine. It's interesting. Again, because this is dollar sales. And 10 NBA 2K26, which is also interesting just because the basketball season's over by this point and NBA 2K27 is right around the corner. And again, this is dollar sales. So very, very interesting stuff. year to date Requiem remains the best-selling game of the year followed by Crimson Desert and then 007 First Light pops in at number three another I mean a big surprise here for Sony MLB The Show 26 the fourth best-selling game in the United States and again this goes to show you the for the year this just goes to show you the incredible power of sports games I think we all intuitively understand that and yet we just don't have many sports game players listening to the show so it seems very alien what about this forza horizon 6 number five and again no playstation release yet that i think will come a playstation this fall and i think um it's gonna spike majorly i mean forza horizon 5 sold millions of copies on playstation which is incredible i think the projection was like five or six million copies that's incredible that is a five-year-old game it's crazy it's insane

1:01:35Chris G.:Well, we talk about the sports games. I mean, like these racing games are another. I mean, it's a whole nother thing, too. We're just like this is like we we don't have much to say about them. You know, we don't. I feel bad about that. I feel bad about that. Yeah. And I've tried them, to be fair. Like I put a good I think I put like 15 hours or something into the last Forza Horizon game before this. And it's just like. It was really cool, but like I just don't know enough about like what makes these things tick or like why people like them or like what about it?

1:02:04Dustin Furman:I just can't get like so Forza Horizon 5 success was surprising on PlayStation. I guess Forza Horizon 6's success is less surprising because people like in the main have been waiting for so long for it. It does look very high quality. I just don't I can't get in. I feel very disingenuous playing these car games because I don't drive. You know, I know that's ridiculous. It's like I don't I don't shoot guns all the time either, you know, but I'm playing on the shooter. So it's really nonsensical. but they Microsoft really all the games that matter that they make are acquired with the exception of this game and that's that's something and maybe you can say Sea of Thieves as well so congratulations to them that they're going to stick around when the PlayStation version comes out for sure Lego Batman is the sixth best-selling game in the United States for the year Tamodachi Life number seven Pokemon Pocopia number eight and then rounding things out number 9 and 10 are WWE 2K26 and NBA 2K26.

1:02:59Let's see here. Nintendo Switch 2 was again the best-selling hardware platform.

1:03:06Dustin Furman:PlayStation 5 ranked second. Not a huge surprise. This is good news for them considering Xbox I think had an 86 % month-over-month increase in their own sales and they're still in third place. So I think that just goes to show you how low that number was and that things seem to still be pretty steady for the other two, but we'll see. Now, the reason that I wanted to bring this up was for a couple of things. Number one was there's some new data that were released that I think show the direction things are going in. And I would say people aren't handling it very well. Although I understand it's a very heated thing and I didn't really want to get back involved.

1:03:45Dustin Furman:I didn't think there was going to be much more to say about this, to be honest. But considering that I can't ignore this news, since we have to talk about it. But before we get into that, I wanted to talk a little bit about Surkana itself. And Herman's March wrote in and said, how reliable is this news from Piscitello? We'll get into the news, but how reliable is what he's saying? The stat, which we'll get into, seems pretty convenient for Sony, but what's more convenient is the timing of this news and just how coordinated this reporting seems. Multiple accounts parroting the same statements have been appearing within hours of one another, leading people to believe Sony is trying to manipulate the press for positive spin.

1:04:17Dustin Furman:Between allegations of paying off journalists silencing their own PR wing and even paying up for bots to counter criticism online via Moore's Law is dead. The current media blitz seems to be evolving. What was a war of attrition is now a race to influence the most number of people into one side or the other. Does this mean the backlash is working? What do you think? Well, I want to talk about a few of the things here. First of all, Serkana data is incredibly reliable. I've tried to say this to people that don't believe it is that if they were wrong, they would lose. The reason people pay serious amounts of money for their data in the industry is because they can also imagine this.

1:04:54Dustin Furman:You have to use a little bit of logic. I don't want to, I don't want, from our audience, it should be fine. For some people, the other audiences, they probably won't be able to figure this out. If you have, let's say, 10 publishers and they all continue to buy your data, right, over the years, the thing that lets you know that the data is right is that the people who are buying the data are in the data and can verify that what they know is true and lines up with what's in the data does that make sense so if you're at sega and you're like oh sonic whatever sold this many copies according to serkana it's like yeah it did we know that that's why we so we we assume because our numbers are true everyone else's numbers are true and everyone's playing by that same game so people that are trying to like shoot and i also saw this recently and i wonder if people know serkana is npd and i feel like back in the day people didn't question npd's numbers i feel like the change in name made it made it feel like it's like oh this is not real anymore and i'm like no this is basically as good as like the billboard top 200 like as i was saying earlier they're starting to integrate projections, which I think makes the numbers more unsteady.

1:06:07But there must be some method to the madness if they still exist. This is the thing that I think people don't understand. It's like they would have no purpose in our space if they were wrong. Everyone would know. Everyone who applies would know that their games are wrong. No one seems to be talking about that aspect of it. So I think the numbers are incredibly positive. The other thing I want to say is there's this idea that Sony is trying to manipulate people overtly.

1:06:38Dustin Furman:There are marching orders going out, and I'm like, I don't think so. It's insane. Not because I don't think companies sometimes don't do this, but because I'm like, I know Sony PR. I know how they operate and what their strategies are, and they're not talking to anyone about this. They're just not they're not like there's i think a lot of peers had said recently like uh as she understands like there have been instructions from sony you know from hq for all the employees to not say anything and i'm like yeah if you talk to anyone at sony those instructions come down fairly regularly and they'll fucking boot you out if you that's that's why no one is saying it like what do people want it's like oh um sucker punch uh go rogue and start talking about how much you want discs it's like what do you think is gonna happen like what are you crazy like of course they're they're buttoned up that's like the least surprising thing but i i think people are are getting a little bit too conspiratorial about some of this stuff i know more as well i had some interesting thing about like paying for bots and stuff and i'm like i don't think so dude like maybe there's some of that going on with something it doesn't have to even be sony doing it can be some other influence campaign or whatever but it my my honest take is like i don't think sony is really reacting to anything.

1:07:57I think they just understand that they're going to have to ride this out. And so believe what you want. That's up to you. But I'm telling you from my own position. Dude, if I knew that these companies were doing that, I would tell you. I mean, come on. You don't think you don't think if I if I got wind that it's like, oh, my God, these guys are really like doing this. They're like buying bots and they're sending out marching orders and there's like secret discords and so i'm like there's not i hate to say it i run the biggest playstation podcast in the world i i have some connection to what you would what i speak to people i know like it's it is what it is sometimes you can disagree with it i think

1:08:42Dustin Furman:that's the thing that's happening recently chris is that people are getting mad at the messengers and it's like you should be mad at sony don't be mad at me i didn't do anything you i'm just telling you like what is happening and why so that sets the predicate for what we're going to talk about and the thing is is that matt piscatella now this would have been useful information weeks ago but he he put on blue sky just a couple days ago and people got this is the other thing is that

1:09:11Chris G.:people can't fucking read dude i don't know if you noticed that yeah no yeah it's it's it's amazing

1:09:16Dustin Furman:actually so he tweets out the following two playstation video games sold more than 10 000 physical units in the u.s during the week ending july 11th 2026 a lot of people stopped reading there so when i when i talked about this if you read a lot of the responses are like well maybe pick a better week and i'm like read the next sentence oh my god he continues seven seven have sold more than a hundred thousand physical units year to date so to reiterate two PlayStation video games sold more than 10 ,000 physical units in the U.S. during week ending July 11, 2026. There's really nothing there. He continues, seven have sold more than 100 ,000 physical units year to date.

1:09:58Horrible. Now, people that are trying to, I understand there's all sorts of different ways to look at this data, but then Matt released more data today. And I don't know if you saw this, but I was like, oh, it's bad. and what he says is, and I think he's doing this in response to people kind of busting his balls about that data.

1:10:25So in 2008, he reports, there were 100 PlayStation games by the middle of 2026, or the middle of that year, rather, that sold more than 100 ,000 units. That's fucking crazy. Now, almost everything in that era was physical. There were some digital games at that point, but not really. I mean, there were some notable ones. But that number had fallen from 100 to 7. And that's pretty extreme.

1:10:57Dustin Furman:But the bigger thing that he shares, and this is because I understand people being like, saying something goes over 100 ,000 doesn't tell you anything. It's like, what? It could be a million. And it's like, no, he says, while he can't disclose title specific units, none of the seven that did exceed 100 ,000 physical units in the U.S. reached 275 ,000. Again, this is pretty dire because you have some games in there that you can imagine like Requiem and a few others, 007, where it's like, yeah, you would assume maybe those games sold pretty heavily physically, but we know that that's not what happened, at least not in the United States.

1:11:35so it's just data it's nothing to be mad about if it's just reflecting reality and i understand people's angst about this but just wanted to share that data and that's why we were

1:11:49Dustin Furman:covering this in the front as opposed to the back because there is something more notable here than us just going through some of these numbers what did you make about that data when it was circulated it was it caused quite a stir people are really were upset to see that it is just a piece of the puzzle Chris but it is a substantial piece of the puzzle this is the biggest gaming market and is our buying behavior a little differently different here yeah are there other mitigating factors sure but you can't deny that no game this year surpassing 275 ,000 printed copies in the United States is good it's not it's bad yeah I used to see the MPD numbers back in the day during the PS3 and PS4 era and they weren't like this so it is what it is what do you think

1:12:31Chris G.:I don't know I think it's a lot of I mean look it's useful information and I think it's uh it's interesting and it gives us a little bit of illumination into the overall like what's going on but I think a lot of this is like it's I wonder what it is that people are looking for in in digging deeper into this that isn't already explained by the fact that the the situation that is a currently that is currently happening is happening in the first place you know like sony we talked about how like they're part of the blu-ray consortium and that they own like you know they make money on every blu-ray disc sold the fact that they don't want to do it is kind of indicative enough really that it doesn't sell well or that it's not worth the juice isn't worth the squeeze again i'm not saying that like personally like i like physical games you know i appreciate them and i always i would have always i would have preferred to have that option for as long as possible um but they don't care you know and they don't care for a reason it's because there's not enough there's not there's people aren't voting with their wallets on this to to the degree that it would be enough for them to you know consider are continuing so yeah i mean is is are those numbers pretty dire yeah um but again it's like of course of course they're dire if they weren't dire they would still be making physical games right you know so like it's i don't know i know i know that there are different markets that uh are a little bit more physical i know i know japan is a little bit more um as far as i understand it anyway it definitely is more physical oriented um but i mean again if if japan isn't enough to convince them to just reverse this whole thing then i there's really i think we just got a certain i think at a certain point we just kind of have to accept reality even if it's not preferable or um i mean now you can just quit like that's a valid thing too like i wouldn't even begrudge anybody for doing that it's like if you like physical games at only physical games well then there's really not much of a there's really not much of a choice you're being given really um and i respect that but i mean this is the reality of the situation now and i just don't know what people are looking for like they're looking for like a kernel of like oh no um there's a way forward here and there's like oh look this game sold like is there just a game a secret game that sold a billion physical copies like i i don't know what we're looking for um so yeah yeah it's it's the more data that comes out the more my expectations are bent downward where i i continue

1:15:35Dustin Furman:to be surprised where i'm like what like i i always thought it was bad i always thought that what i was trying to express people got mad at me on social media like they do because they're killing the messenger of course but it's like when you see that only seven games in the u.s sold a hundred thousand copies or more physically on ps5 and it's actually ps4 as well um not that that matters so much because it's just played year to date right right exactly i thought that there was going to be a higher baseline of core gamers that would have bought many of those or if not all of those games if that makes any sense or you know let's say like four of seven or something or six of 10.

1:16:12Dustin Furman:In other words, 100 ,000 baseline is bad. That to me is van. That is the definition of vanishing. I thought it was in the hundreds of thousands per game. And to me that and so I could see. I just I just saw those numbers again, incomplete data. But I saw that I was like, damn, like the more that you learn, the more you're like, yeah it's hard to kind of argue against the reasoning again i'm like you where and i've said this from the beginning and you you have as well it's like i want people to have the i don't mind if people buy physical games doesn't matter to me and as i said before i am shocked that sony didn't try to ring these people dry but i think even that shows you that it's just not worth it because if you believe them and you do i mean i know the numbers like how much you make versus on digital versus physical, the reality is, is that if they shed half of those people, right?

1:17:08So half of the physical people that are upset just leave and they only maintain the buying habits of the other half digitally, the money is net zero. That's the whole, that's the whole ballgame. They don't care. And, and I thought, I guess what I'm saying is I thought they were playing with bigger, more dangerous numbers, but they're not. And these numbers show you that so it just kind of is what it is i'm not saying it's right i'm not saying i don't

1:17:34Dustin Furman:feel bad for you it's just the more i learn about it the more i understand i i yeah that's just me being honest the more i am the more not understand the move as much as i understand the strategy of like all right i guess you guys really aren't messing around if these numbers are accurate then yeah you're right now there's a lot of people chris saying like there are things happening they underprint the copies on purpose they make it difficult to find physical games like i don't know man i think you can probably go on amazon and buy a physical version of whatever you want i don't know if i don't know if it's that maybe like if you don't go to gamestop they don't have enough copies whatever go online i mean at some point it's up to you that you didn't get it it's

1:18:08Chris G.:not like there's a real finite amount of them yeah yeah i don't really know what to make of that i i just i'm i'm in agreement with you where i thought the numbers were higher i thought the numbers were still dire but like i thought they were like like you said like multiple hundreds of thousands per game i didn't realize it was it was to this degree um so i mean and look i'm still personally i'm i'm still of the mind that that's still a subsect of your audience that's important uh it's a subsect of the culture that i think is important too and i think there's some level of inherent responsibility that it's not written anywhere but there's kind of like an inherent responsibility of like the leading platform to maybe steward the culture in a way that is you know responsible and and pays respect um and so i would even say like and i've said this before uh even if you just sold discs directly from playstation direct and you charged it a little bit more for them and you uh you made it kind of a bespoke uh kind of pseudo collector's edition the type of things that we used to get like manuals and you know maybe accoutrements or whatever along with the physical game you could only get it from playstation direct um i even think that would be nice and would be you know just i'm still of the mind that like it's we should we should have an option here um but uh i understand why this is all happening you know and and it's two different like i don't know people people have a hard time i feel like people just don't have a theory of mind to be honest yes i mean i think that's fairly obvious yeah i feel like it's a lot of people yeah unfortunately so none of this is you know justification or whatever or uh personal but like i see what they're doing and it makes sense data wise yeah it is um right i'm in the same position where it's like i want i want people to have choice and optionality i don't want people to feel alienated at the same time i think the numbers somewhat speak for themselves and sony is acting accordingly and i'm i'm with you where i don't know it's like even it's just you assume the 275 000 copy game is resident evil and i would i would think that would be what it was yeah and it's like wow man that's it

1:20:37Dustin Furman:for a game that has sold an extraordinary amount of copies like it's like one of the best-selling Resident Evil games I think already and it's like damn and I think Capcom had said that 93 % of their sales are digital at this point I think the canary in the coal mine as I've said before is there are basically no friendly publishers to this not one publisher has come out and said they had a problem with it like of any size I'm boutique guys have a problem with it sure but like you don't see take two being like this is a big problem for us like they're amped that's the other thing that i think you just have to accept unfortunately now i think there is a question to be asked too about like because i think the solution like you said chris was more direct sales at a higher price point because i think the one thing digital players have to ask themselves is like well to be fair why do we have to subsidize this and they don't like like if we if sony's making way more money on on digital players it's like we're subsidizing the physical players at some point and i think sony i honestly think that that could have been an interesting argument should you have been able to massage that in your communications you don't have to be such a dick about it but you can say like you know we we were few we we are uncomfortable with the majority of our audience subsidizing this this market something you know something like that but again they just didn't communicate it well maybe i don't know if that

1:21:57Chris G.:would have landed that's it that's a rough that's a rough line like i get what you're saying but But like that's a that's going to be a difficult thing to spin.

1:22:07Dustin Furman:I think for most people, it might be that their strategy of just saying almost nothing is probably the best of all strategies. Ironically.

1:22:16Chris G.:Yeah, probably. Yeah. There's really nothing you could say that would make anybody happy now because you're not going to go back on it. It's very clear. The stock, the stock went up. I know people say that doesn't matter. And it's like, I mean, I guess it doesn't in a broad sense. Like, but like it matters to the people that make decisions. right and it matters to the people that make decisions and it certainly matters as far as like and and look a lot of the people let's be real like a lot of the people the overwhelming majority of people who are being loud about this um and i'm not saying that like uh people aren't putting their money where their mouth is but like i care i care to some degree about this like i i've talked about like oh yeah i i don't like that we're going into this digital digital only space i say that out loud and i'm a primarily digital customer so even as many people are talking about it there's an even there's an even fewer subsect of the people who are talking about it that actually like you know i'm strict physical you know you're actually seeing in some ways an over-representation of the core philosophy of the core foundation of like a lot of these arguments and i'm part of that to be honest but um it's because i philosophically feel that we should have that you know we should have the uh the option but I don't care personally like interpersonally I could give a shit you know Jamie wrote into us Chris and says hi Colin and Chris

1:23:40Dustin Furman:just wanted to say a big massive fuck you to PlayStation right now we physical buyers have been incredibly loyal we buy a ton of digital games too we buy day one consoles and we keep the physical market alive but I made up my mind that the PS5 is my last PlayStation console They're reporting that, quote, only seven games sold more than 100 ,000 copies in the U.S. for games released this year, end quote, is seriously misleading. How many games were even released on disc in total this year? Feels like barely a handful. That's not true, unfortunately. We need a better context on digital versus physical splits and actual total sales, not just the arbitrary 100 ,000 threshold.

1:24:12Dustin Furman:Sony themselves shipped nearly 70 million PlayStation game discs last year in fiscal 25. That proves physical demand is still strong when publishers actually support it. Games like Resident Evil Requiem had physical copies selling out in many countries for weeks. that's the kind of support we want to see not abandonment physical collectors are in some irrelevant niche we show up on day one we buy premium premium editions and we help drive the ecosystem pushing everything towards digital only and subscriptions while slowly killing physical support is a great way to lose dedicated fans like me for good sony needs to do better love the show as always it's interesting because well first of all like we can i think we can even just identify what the games are because people have been asking like what are the seven games and i think i'll tell you what i think they are in that let's see i gotta bring up the right link yeah there it is so it's resident evil requiem crimson desert first light mlb the show lego batman and probably something like call of duty last year's call of duty and a sports game it people are acting like it's impossible to get to that number i'm like no it's not it's actually quite possible like games like saros don't even appear anywhere in the in the realm of like the 100 000 copies sold which is again is another that's a bad sign for that game and also a kind of an ominous sign for play the playstation ecosystem not even 100 000 people would come out and buy saros on disc first party i think that that's so people are acting like it's like well like what could it be and i'm like guys there's like a bunch of different permutations of the games it could be um i don't know i i hear what you're saying and i i the reason i i think jamie's angry is so interesting is because at least he's putting his mouth he's made a decision and that was what you were saying about and i wrote this in my notes because i wanted to make sure to get back to it is you you talked about accepting reality it's a tough pill to swallow for people that are involved in it right i see no evidence at least right now maybe anything can change at any moment i see no evidence that sony's gonna do anything like i think i think at this point why would you not have said something by now remember we were talking about how it took 28 days or 29 days i think for xbox during the xbox one reveal to come back and say we're reversing the drm stuff and whatever.

1:26:37And so that was like four weeks and change. And we had noted, and I've always felt

1:26:43Dustin Furman:this way is that it took them so long because they didn't know if it was possible. So like you had to like figure it out. And then they said it as soon as they could. There's nothing to really figure out here. You're making discs. And as Moore's law has said, and I agree with them, is that like, it's almost certain that at some point the PS6 had a disc drive. So even if you settled on something that you weren't going to do, you can go back to like the frozen in Ember kind of thing and be like, and Ember and be like, we want to revive this thing and get it going. Like it shouldn't take this long in other words, because otherwise all you're doing is reaping bad PR for no reason to like announce it at some future point when everyone's gonna be excited.

1:27:19Dustin Furman:It's like you've done so much damage to yourself. So that's to me, Occam's razor simply suggests the simplest explanation is they're not, they have no intention of moving. And so I, I, I do wonder like when this go like I don't from a from a like when does the conversation stop like when does do we have to reach a level of acceptance I you know I always think in terms of memes and there's that meme of like the people the cartoon of people gathering around they're talking and then someone says something and then they like give them a thumbs up and then they keep talking yeah and I'm like I wonder when it kind of turns into that situation for everyone where it's like we get it it sucks it's unfortunate are we really going to do this for years yeah and maybe people are like yeah but I'm like I feel like at that point you kind of come off as like if you're so embittered by it you've been broken up with basically and there is a level of it sucks I've said this like If I didn't get my PSN account back, I would never be a PlayStation person again.

1:28:31Dustin Furman:I don't blame people for being like, yeah, you have abandoned the way I interact with your console. If you don't want me, then I don't want you. I get it. And I also get people's I also get and I think they're right that like all things being equal in a digital ecosystem. Steam is probably the place you want to be. None of that's wrong, in my opinion. So but I do wonder, have you thought about that, Chris? Like, what's the end game? are we really gonna like it's demonstrable people don't like it but it's like the the furor around it is getting less and less just look at the responses look at the thumbs up look at the the ratios all the rest they're getting less and less and less this is probably what sony wanted and i just wonder like are we always gonna have this guerrilla war yeah i i mean it'll it'll probably always be there as like some kind of undercurrent um but i i think it'll

1:29:22Chris G.:it'll probably slow down at some point like i would imagine once the ps6 is out it's it'll it'll or like once the ps6 is announced is what it's going to be and it's not going to have discs or whatever that'll be its own thing and that'll be like a reigniting of it and there will be periods where it just kind of like ebbs and flows back into relevance based on you know whatever the hell happens but i i i don't know man i i i get it we're at an inflection point in the industry in in a lot of different ways so like this is kind of the point where a lot of people are either going to stick around or call it quits and i i i kind of don't blame people for doing it like it makes sense to me like i have a line that like i think is probably fast approaching with this ai stuff where like there will be a point where like pretty much every game every game already is touched by ai in some point in in some way uh but there will be a point where it's just ai full gen i gen ai stuff and at that point it's just like well this might not be the industry for me then at this point and so that's physical games for some people and i you know it's hard it's hard to say that you shouldn't feel that way um because i get it because we all have our own lines in the sand so i respect it if you're actually going to do it i respect it right i agree and I think Sony is relying on

1:30:40Dustin Furman:most of you not most people won't and I think most people won't like a lot of you see a lot of the responses where people are like people will respond to snarkily and be like all right see you in November for Grand Theft Auto you know that kind of thing and I'm like or see you in September for Wolverine or whatever it's like I hope people can remain strong and and treat the situation with the seriousness that it deserves in your own from your own perspective but I do wonder how long we're going to have to talk about this not because it's bad news for sony i don't i think it's kind of neutral news for sony i don't i honestly don't think it's going to hurt them in the long run i i just i think that that's i think sony's in trouble for other reasons

1:31:22Chris G.:i really don't think i really don't think it has anything to do with this i think people put too much stock on like uh ratios you know on social media or whatever or it's just like look at how many people are angry it's like yeah shit chris odyssey's a great example of that isn't it like oh odyssey's a fantastic example like it wasn't it didn't it like it was getting obliterated like it was getting obliterated to the point where you thought like oh this thing really isn't gonna do well and then it didn't matter at all yeah and i don't know yeah it's in some ways a similar thing where you have this kind of very massive you know i guess it's not that similar but like i the way that i feel about it really is with the christopher nolan thing is just like you have this very well-respected director making a film based on like one of the most renowned stories of all time like you you really thought that this was going to be anything less than good like what like what are we talking about it seemed like a weird one to

1:32:18Dustin Furman:stake your reputation on not that any of these people have reputations but it's like right or they have reputations that they they certainly don't want necessarily but i to me it's like i understood um it's a weird it's an old example like ghostbusters the women ghostbusters from 10 years ago it's like yeah that's probably not going to shape up great that's a good one to kind of make fun of if you want to be safe you'll look good on the other side going after christopher nolan it was a little weird i thought i thought that the whole it's so funny you said it because i thought i'm like really like again i don't know film very well so i'm like wow maybe this is like really going to be a fucking disaster you know um yeah but it didn't really compute with what you know about of course yes just like people have an intuitive sense of just like well that's

1:32:57Chris G.:probably insane to think that's going to i mean it's always possible i suppose but to be so fervent about it is i don't know that's kind of how i feel about what with the playstation doing the and the disc business because it's just um you know i mean it's bad yeah and it's less choice or whatever and it looks bad from the outside and um it is bad from the inside in many different ways but this is the dominant console platform and most people who are on that platform play digitally and i get and look there is an argument to be made like there's a lot of game like there's a lot of stuff that's released only digitally like i get it a lot of the free-to-play stuff you know which is a big domineering which is a big cultural force is a lot of these free-to-play games that do not really come out on disc and i get that but this is reality is it not so right that's why i don't know dude call of duty what is it that was it the digital what is it call of duty black ops yeah like exploded it did dude we actually have data on that sam h wrote

1:34:07Dustin Furman:into us and said how all as well i've been a listener for over 10 years but i haven't touched a playstation since the ps2 era i'm always i i love it but i'm always i always find that so fascinating. It's like, what are you listening to this for? This past week, I went to GameStop and bought two PS4s, one for me and one for my brother, specifically so we could play the Black Ops ports. In just my immediate friend group, that's two PS4s and three PS5 Pros purchased in the last week alone, adding a total of five new PlayStation Plus subscribers, all just to play games from over a decade ago. You mentioned on a recent episode that the impact of the physical game boycott and PS Plus cancellation push seems pretty negligible because of situations like this.

1:34:39Dustin Furman:I just wanted to add a real world data point from someone who was completely out of the ecosystem until now. It really highlights how strong the pull from those older titles still is. keep up the great work and you're right Chris because um Serkana also released information so this is the week ending July 11th so that week that those games came out on PlayStation Call of Duty Black Ops 2 was the sixth most played game and Call of Duty Black Ops 1 was nine so it goes Fortnite NBA 2k26 Roblox Call of Duty which is like the the holistic app GTA 5 Call of Duty Black Ops 2 Marvel Rivals Minecraft Call of Duty Black Ops Madden and crazy this is this is what i was talking about with it sucks like this is the this is the the hopelessness embedded in a lot of boycotts is that you can't control anyone outside of your circle right and i think that the the black ops black ops one and two from 2010 and 2012 ancient games ps3 games by you know modern standards breaking the seal like that around this um this growing movement to try to kind of boycott sony it's like oh that's just the beginning unfortunately because there are there there are going to be there's gonna be so much chip damage kinks in the armor as each game releases right and there'll be big ones like Wolverine and but like even something like Tokan Tokan is going to peel people off right beast of reincarnation is going to people people off blood of the dawn of the blood walker or the fuck that game's called is going to that's going to peel people off Animusha is going to peel people off Wolverine's gonna and then and then you and it sucks it's so this is the thing that I feel for the boycotters because it's just what it is it's it's the way it always goes I remember when people were boycotting Bud Light I didn't have to boycott Bud Light because I don't drink Bud Light but like people were even trying to get into like well these are the other brands they own and then what ended up happening is that modello ended up taking over number one owned by the same company

1:36:46Chris G.:right so it didn't even matter you know this is ultimately the problem is it's like boycotts i've i've long felt that boycotts are just kind of like um i i get like from a personal perspective i get it like this is like i there's plenty of things that i boycott personally like and that's fine um but as as a point of like protest or as a point of movement to like initiate change the world's just too small now you know the world's the world is both too big and too small at the same time now it used to be that oh there's a store in town and you know the nearest town is like miles and miles away and we need a horse to get there a boycott's a big deal because that's the town that's all you got but now it's just like oh you're if you're controversial in georgia you're probably popular in new york or like or if you're you know if you're unpopular in this country you're popular in that country this is we're not this isn't like local anymore um and i think that's just the boycotts in general i just like that's a tool from a more simpler from a far simpler time um when that kind of thing could really be used to affect change not to say that it couldn't still there's some things that are potentially incredibly egregious that you you could maybe through sheer force of insane will um mandate uh or a force a mandate to change but it's vanishingly rare that that happens in in the modern hyper-connected age like it's just i don't know these these companies are too national and like multi like global you know there's entire markets popping up that have never even heard of any of this where playstation is going to be their first for the only console that they know you know so it's it's just i don't know it's a it's a rough uh team to be on if you're focused on winning yeah that's why i'm saying your own if you're if you're focused on your own personal proclivities it's fine but like it's got to be a rough team to be yeah and i hope that you act in a way that is that signals even if it's lost in the noise for the most part like i i believe that you should

1:39:11Dustin Furman:it's what i was saying about it's why when my my account got boosted the last thing i ever asked anyone to do is to do anything about it it's like i don't want you know what i mean it's like i don't want you to change your behavior i'm not asking you to do anything but for me if it didn't work out the way it did it's like I would make a decision I wouldn't want to make it it would be painful I'll cry about it for a little while but eventually you got to make your move or you didn't even really believe what youth were saying to begin with but I think people kind of lost and are still kind of lost sight of the fact that like this isn't really a movement to bend anything anymore because there's not enough of you I don't think I think if there were enough enthusiasts really engaged in this, maybe something would change.

1:39:55Dustin Furman:But as I said earlier, I don't know why Sony wouldn't have made a change by now if they were going to because they have nothing to gain and there's really nothing to figure out. And again, I don't again, I want to be clear. I don't think the change will ever affect PS6. But again, I don't know what you really lose by saying, yeah, we'll just keep PS5 certification open indefinitely, whatever. Yeah, like that to me seems like an easy win. But that they that they haven't even done that seems like they just don't want to do it. That there's no publisher of size coming out and saying that they hate it means that they love it i hate this i hate to be the guy that says that they they're probably amped i i said this right away and people got mad about it i'm like if you think ea and take two and all these guys aren't fucking being like yes yeah they're thrilled for so many reasons that was the thing i was trying to explain to them it's like it's not just like the loss of the money in the physical games that they don't want to sell you it's like they don't have to get a gold master ready like early they don't have to deal with any of the physical certification the extra esrb ratings and that whole pipeline like they're probably like yes we get more time to make the game we don't have to worry about any of this anymore dude i'm

1:40:55Chris G.:even of the mind of like i'm even curious as to whether or not even stores give a shit well they don't gamestop ceo said that it's irrelevant i don't know if you saw that he's like when he was asked about like that he's like it doesn't matter because they don't make any money on them either yeah it's that really pisses people off too because like you think they would be a big champion

1:41:14Dustin Furman:in this i'm like they don't care i'm pretty sure gamestop wanted to buy ebay they don't give a fuck about about physical games anymore. They're on. They understand that if they were focused, if they're like whole business revolves around, they're done. They've that's been true for fucking years. This doesn't really change anything for them. It just forces them to accelerate probably a little bit. But yeah, that was a that was a canary in the coal mine, too. Yeah. Jeans, nut stained Xbox Helix shirt wrote in. Said hello, Colin and Chris. Am I wrong for thinking that boycotting PlayStation over the disc thing won't matter due to the PS6 setting up to be a massive failure.

1:41:49Dustin Furman:As a console-only person who has the funds to buy a PS6 but refuses to spend the same amount as a PC on it, I personally believe, boycott or not, Sony will feel the hurt when the PS6 comes out. I have no doubt in my mind that most PlayStation players are going to just stick to their PS5 or PS5 Pros until the price possibly comes down to a reasonable amount. I also believe no PC gamer will pay$1 ,000 plus for exclusives, and most Xbox players will just stick with their series console or go to PC. This thing is projected to sell in the low single millions in its first two years, and I feel that will hurt Sony more than any boycott right now could ever.

1:42:17Dustin Furman:If you guys feel otherwise, I would love to hear why you think this boycott ultimately matters as we know Sony will just ignore us in spite of their failure. Well, I think there's something really important here, Chris, and we touched on it earlier, is that I do think Sony's in some trouble. Yeah. And the ironic thing is that when the PS6 comes out and it doesn't sell well, which it probably won't, the physical game people are going to be like, see? And I'm going to be like, it has nothing, sadly has nothing to do with you. But I understand people will make those connections. I think regardless like even if it had a disk drive like straight up was like we're putting disks on PS6 not even like a backwards compatible thing I don't think it would help um yeah I think that they're just in they have they're gonna have problems with this thing I think now I agree with the synopsis or the the analysis rather and you and I have discussed this in past weeks where I was turned on to this idea of there being no reason to wait for that for so from Sony's perspective it's like you're gonna sell millions of these things to people at maximum price you might as just do it you're not going to like permeate the market until the price goes down but you might as well just release it get people excited tantalize you build up a little back catalog perhaps people stay on ps5 and ps5 pro by the tens of millions so i think they're in decent shape from a backwards ps5 perspective and i don't know how much that makes them happy it's probably a little bit of a pleasing cushion for them but i do think ps6 is in some sort of trouble i mean the projections we went over last week show sub ps3 numbers it's not gonna be good yeah but i don't know how intertwined these things are i think sony just has bigger problems than this yeah i don't think

1:43:56Chris G.:it has anything to do i like like you said i don't think even if they reverted the decision and had a disc drive on ps6 i still think that machine would sell pretty softly because the hunger is not really there for a new machine it's not it has nothing to do with discs or even business practices really it's just um i guess you could may argue that it's like maybe a little bit business practice in the sense that it takes so long for a game to be made now that the generation still doesn't really feel complete um or even close to complete really uh but it's just yeah this this machine's got it's got an allure problem which is to say that it doesn't really have much even with the stuff that we know about it look the enthusiasts are going to jump on it right like everybody who's like into shiny new hardware is gonna buy it um i'm probably one of those people i like new hardware yeah i'm gonna buy both the handheld and the console for sure yeah i'm very curious about it um and maybe when we again i've said this before but like maybe when we do see it in person maybe maybe it'll start because right now it's nebulous it's real in like a in in like in like in a vague sense but it's not we don't know what it looks like we can't really envision it in our in our uh living rooms we can't really envision like we don't know what the ui is we don't know what the experience is going to be like maybe they could somehow make a case that like hey you actually need this thing uh because what you're getting right now with the playstation is like it's good but it's like it's not good enough i would have a hard time believing that right now i'm perfectly satiated whereas by this point in many previous generations i was like very eager to get on you know even with the 360 which i loved i loved that machine uh there came a point around 20 2011 2012 where i was like all right let's let's go like what's what's going on and i remember that being the broad sentiment at the time as well people were stoked about it and they were curious as to why it was taking so long and then when it finally happened you know people were like stoked about it and disappointed obviously with the xbox one and all that stuff but there was a hunger for a for for a continuing there was a hunger to see what was next I don't know if that hunger even really exists in any real meaningful capacity to the same way that it did before and it could be that we're just in the space where we're in a bubble but you'd imagine that the enthusiast space would be the bubble that would be excited that's the thing that i can't shake is that like we are in the space that cares most about this like your average civilian doesn't give a fuck you know they're not looking forward to the next machine because they don't even know about the current machine really or not to the extent that we do so they've got way bigger problems in my opinion than than discs um you know they've got studios taking forever to build things they've got exploding budgets um they've got kind of an untenable economy to deal with that really kind of only seems to be getting worse and like it sometimes it comes back and then it gets worse again it's not a good situation to release a machine but like you said if you've already if you've already got the components if you've already like basically set this stuff in stone you kind of might as well go like i think it'll be awkward as fuck i think it'll be awkward when that machine comes out when nobody really is hungry for it uh it'll be weird and it'll be probably a big thing to make fun of online and it'll probably be bad optics in that sense but if you're gonna go you might as well go um i think yeah i think chris the the one thing that can save it, well, there's a few things that can save it.

1:47:48And we're making, like you said, we have all these assumptions about it. Yeah, we don't know what this thing is going to be yet. We don't know how appealing it's going to be. But I think the price is an interesting thing. Like, there's such,

1:48:01Dustin Furman:I don't think they're outrageous expectations, but I think they're really high-end expectations about like what this thing will cost. And I think it's like, this thing's going to cost$1 ,000. This thing's going to cost$900. And it's like, if Sony just is like, something's still egregious, but like, it's like$749. Everyone's like, oh, you know, like, like, like even something like that could be like, oh my God, I can't believe it's not, you know, like, because everyone's expectations were so out of whack, perhaps. I also think like what you said is true in that. Sony is typically a master has mastered hype.

1:48:33Dustin Furman:Really clean trailers and presentations, people that know what they're talking about, high end tech. there'll be some sort of sophisticated rollout when this thing is announced that I think will get some people. Sure. But I think Sonya, and you saw this with the CFO talking during a recent fiscal quarter presentation, they're getting comfortable and acclimating to the idea that people aren't moving on. And we're going to talk about a game later on in NBA 2K27 that is now finally going to skip PS4. And so I think a lot of casual people will be forced to buy these new machines because of that too and by new machines i mean the ps5 and so i think i think it's just got i think the the view into the 2030s is going to be some sort of multi-generational thing i think it can't be any other way i love this idea of them being like and i i think it would be fucking hysterical if they did shit like this where it's like we're doing bloodborne 2 or like bloodborne remastered uh only on ps6 or you know pull some bullshit ps3 emulation only on PS6.

1:49:38I just don't know that they even can do

1:49:40Dustin Furman:that kind of thing anymore. Like, in other words, I think that like the draw is going to be the power and not the games because I think the games are going to have to come to PS5. We're going to talk a little bit about Bethesda soon. And people are wondering what they're going to do with their games. And I'm like, I'm the meme with the guy hand on the shoulder. I'm like, I'll tell you what they're going to do with their games. But we'll get there. The Who fan one wrote in and said, Colin, you've got to come back with me back to the future. Bring Chris along. This concerns him too. Something's got to be done about your games.

1:50:11Dustin Furman:There seems to be a civil war online right now between those upset at Sony killing physical games and those who think the conversation about physical games is blocking the conversation about digital rights from happening. I don't think the conversations are mutually exclusive. And if the digital only crowd is as huge as the numbers say, they would not only be drowned, they would not, they would not be drowned out by the physical crowd. They just haven't begun to speak up in numbers because they don't see a reason to yet. The people asking for digital ownership probably also don't even have a clear picture of what that means.

1:50:36Dustin Furman:If that fight is to be started, it probably needs to be started with the drafting of some sort of digital consumer bill of rights. Some people are calling for the abolition of DRM. No corporation is willingly going to abandon DRM for new AAA games. I don't see how any of the world governing bodies having the stomach to enforce it either. Honestly, in that case, be careful what you wish for, because if they can't control their copyrighted material with DRM, publishers other than Sony and Nintendo may be looking to fast track game streaming as the future. This is, I have to be honest and say that I actually think that a lot of the justification I see from the physical games people in relation to the digital game stuff is this is what protects you.

1:51:12And to me, I'm like, no. It doesn't. And it's completely insufficient. Halo is a great recent example. Halo is a coaster on disc. On PS5. It doesn't protect you from shit. And I appreciate that people want that in some games or on disc and whether you can patch them, whatever. But I. I really do feel like people are missing the forest for the trees with this.

1:51:40Dustin Furman:We don't have to say because you say something in here, the who fan, where you're like, if the numbers are as what they are, like if the digital crowd only crowd is as huge as the numbers say, they are as huge as the numbers say. They don't see anything to say right now because they don't care about buying licenses. That's the sticky little thing. They're used to it. Yeah, it's like they don't even really understand that they can't discern the difference. And really, if nothing changes behind the scenes, it is a distinction without a difference. Because it gets you the same thing at the end of the day.

1:52:13Dustin Furman:And I think most people do see it that way. However, I really do feel like this does need to change, that it is the far more important and future looking component of it, obviously, and that it really is worth going to the mat over it. and I am of the mind that it is going to require governmental interference. I don't think it's going to require and people are like, why would the government get involved with PlayStation? It's not about PlayStation. It's about all of them, all of the companies and all of your digital items, not games only, but everything. And I think only the threat of it will fix it.

1:52:51ESRB style. I don't think the government actually needs to pass legislation.

1:52:55Dustin Furman:I think the government needs to start bringing these people before Congress and scaring them. or the European Commission, or whatever, in the UK before Parliament. These big markets. And I believe that there's a lot of defeatism around it. I believe also, Chris, that it might be hard to retroactively do anything. And that the biggest victory that we might be able to get is from date X, there is no more licensing. And then maybe they can negotiate going backwards. But really, that's the thing that needs to be fixed. and also your access to your account. Like what happened to me was ridiculous. What's happened to a lot of thousands of people in PlayStation is ridiculous, especially because they have no recourse.

1:53:37Dustin Furman:The reality is, is that we need to have rules where that just can't happen.

1:53:41Chris G.:Right.

1:53:42Dustin Furman:And you and I remember Chris were talking about this about the idea of like Chris goes on PSN and goes on a racial fucking tirade on Call of Duty and he gets banned, right?

1:53:49Chris G.:Yeah.

1:53:50Dustin Furman:And they're like, you're, but it's like, even then, okay, you broke the TOS, but like, should you really be able to preclude him from having access to the things he already bought? like to me these are the things that need to change and other you would get you and i agreed it's like sony doesn't have to serve you moving forward if you do something wrong but they can't say like we're not serving you the things you already bought you already bought that you already paid for these things we're not serving you those either and it's like no i don't think so yeah i i'm sorry i don't think so like and i think it's just going to require what we need enough it's enough it is enough it's it's enough already it's enough yeah right yeah no i agree like i think i

1:54:27Chris G.:I think this is the more forward thinking. This is the more important thing because things are going to be, we are headed towards a digital future. And that is, it's important to accept that because once we accept it, we can start actually like focusing on the reality of the situation and coming to constructive and, you know, salient, you know, paths forward with, with which to, you know, navigate it and establish, Because that is a big, dude, it is, it really is kind of crazy that it's, it's written in TOS is that it's just like, okay, well, we could just revoke this at any point it's like well i don't know about i don't know about this

1:55:01Dustin Furman:this is kind of crazy yeah just because it says it doesn't mean it should be actionable like contracts can say things that are not legal and just because you signed it doesn't mean that it's okay you know oh you well you signed it it's fucking nonsense but uh that's just it's just it's got to change i think people are being really defeatist about this being like well what are you going to do what you're going to do is you're going to fucking change it what you're going to do is you're going to allow these things to be digital generational accounts that could perceivably exist for 50 or 100 years between fucking people that maybe you can't buy or sell them, but maybe you can.

1:55:34Why not? But well, like to me, it's. I don't know where it starts. That's why I'm trying to meet with a congressman about it. It's like, what do we do?

1:55:45Dustin Furman:Like, I don't expect this guy to help me, especially in central Virginia. There's no tech industry here. You probably give a fuck less, but it's like, what do we do? How do we do it and i think these companies are only responsive to one thing and it's force it it over and over and over and over and over and over again you see that i always bring it up but like apple having just it's like yeah we just use our own power we just see and and then some and the european commission was like what do you like why

1:56:20why yeah and it's and then they're like all right fine like you just need they didn't have to like

1:56:28Dustin Furman:find them they didn't have to put them in fucking a gulag somewhere they were just they were like we're gonna fuck you up if you don't do this and all right we'll do it it's actually um it can kind of backfire sometimes too i think michael was telling me about about this about europe has a rule now about electronics having to have replaceable batteries have you seen this i did see this and that so so nintendo will just not sell the switch there anymore like one switch one because they would otherwise have to redesign it and so like sometimes things backfire and this is what i was saying about people's anger about closed ecosystems generally like i am vehemently against people suing sony over the monopoly on the playstation network like you're gonna ruin playstation you're gonna ruin it if you break this monopoly like some of these things are actually at the center of how it works and by the way it wouldn't just ruin sony nintendo would be done too um they would both become publishers and i don't think anyone wants that so you have to be careful what you ask for you have to be deliberate in the way you approach things but i personally and i don't not support the double negative the pursuit of physical games i just feel like it a lot of people do justify it based on like well they're not going to they're not going to fix your digital stuff and i'm like oh yes they are yeah and this idea that i want to interact with this company and the only way that they'll respect me is if i have physical items that i put into my console disconnected from the internet it's like are you out of your mind i'm sorry like especially

1:57:58Chris G.:especially because the disc has so few like that's kind of thing i think we talked about it last time we talked about this but presuming that the ps6 does come out and it does have discs what the hell could possibly be on that disc knowing that there hasn't been knowing that it's a full generational leap ahead presumably and there's been no generational leap ahead for the format like there is no new type of blu-ray you're gonna get the fucking start menu on that disc if that right maybe the splash screens you get on the disc and that's it's just it's a yeah it's the reality of the situation dude it sucks yeah i was thinking about this even with crimson desert because crimson desert has some sort of time key built into it that won't let the game work until a certain you know like like so they can get the discs out early i didn't realize this about this and i'm like so what if your ps5 is offline or like what yeah or like set to the

1:58:55Dustin Furman:it's like set into the future yeah and he was talking a little bit here about drm it's like i think going after drm is a mistake too like companies have the right to protect their goods We're losing sight of what we're even talking about. This is the whole problem with this. It's like we've got to focus. What is the big thing that affects everyone? Digital ownership, period. Sure. So I've chosen my lane, but I support people to do their own, and I wish you the very best of luck. But that's what we have to speak about with on that, Chris. I am curious what you think about this next piece of news, though.

1:59:31it has turned out that the creative director of marathon has quit and has left the game in the hands of someone else ziegler writes what's his first name joe ziegler joe ziegler he was the

1:59:46Dustin Furman:former game director of valorant as well he says quote hey everyone i've got a bit of an announcement to make today friday 7 17 so this was last week when we were published will be my last day at Bungie and I'll be passing the torch of game director to the very capable and amazing hands of Del Chafe III, who will, or maybe it's Del Chafe Ill, who will guide the game forward alongside the creative director, Julia Narden. Both of them have been operating in a strong leadership capacity for the team and are ready to guide Marathon into the next chapter with an even better and brighter future. I'm proud of them and I'm excited to see them helm the future for this crazy little world we've created together.

2:00:21Dustin Furman:As for me, I'll be heading to something new somewhere else and we'll update you on where and what soon i just want to say a deeply heartfelt thank you to all the support all for supporting me and marathon and our windy mission to bring a dark or windy mission to bring a that's funny man i never see really windy would it be w-i-n-d-e-u i don't know i think it's the same word yeah i think you're right mission to bring a dark and terrifying space survival frontier to your screen the mission will continue in new and surprising ways so stay tuned for what the team has in store for you it's been a pleasure seeing all the stories you've created all the clever ways you found ways to murder robots in one another hopefully as i move on to new things you'll join me for those adventures as well much love to the marathon community and to all my friends and colleagues at bungie may we cross paths again keep it weird keep it real what are your thoughts here on this uh the game i mean he's bailed it seems like quite a few people have been maybe bailing out of bungie i don't know how to read it i i'm curious to hear what your thoughts are yeah i mean well they just had that monumental

2:01:19Chris G.:round of layoffs so i mean at this point as of this day and as of like i would probably argue like early july like bungie is now like that is a ship of theseus like there's literally nobody like lars bakken is gone um jason jones is gone um now joe ziegler was a more recent addition to be fair but like he's gone too so it's just like it is really just like it is bungie in name only at this point um so i don't i don't really know what to make of it uh it's it's a shame but i don't know i mean it kind of is what it is you know really i think marathon's an exceptional video game but it's also it just didn't hit the way it needed to so it's like and these things happen a lot and they're going to continue to happen by the way so i don't know i hope that they can somehow keep it going for a little bit at least because i would like it the biggest strategy would be for it to to go offline i don't even necessarily need it to be like supported for like years and years i don't even think that was necessarily even um something that people were looking forward to in any real meaningful way but to i hope it stays playable in the way that destiny 1 and destiny 2 stay playable my read on budgie though it's just like i don't know man at this point It's designed.

2:02:45Chris G.:I don't know. I'd be surprised if they make it through. If they make it to next year. I'll be kind of surprised to see that. That would be nice, but like I would be surprised to see that. Yeah, I really wonder what's going to happen here. I for them to turn things around, Sony is going to have to accept that they're going to have to invest. Right.

2:03:09Dustin Furman:And this was the problem for the very beginning. I actually went back to listen to some of the things I was saying when they bought them. And I was saying at the time, I'm like, it seems preposterous to assume that this will ever work. Because even if at the time Marathon's big and Destiny continues and they have something else going, they paid billions of dollars. So like you have to have this thing that breaks even and then makes billions of dollars, which will then erode away the cost of buying the studio. Then you start making money on it.

2:03:40Chris G.:And it's like this seems preposterous. the death knell is the overpay. Right. Like if they had just sold for like a reasonable valuation, it'd probably be in a much healthier space. But...

2:03:52Dustin Furman:And I just, I think too, I don't know what the literal time would have to be, but in terms of them having to file, but it's like, Sony seems to have been got so bad on this that like, I can't believe it actually happened. And I wonder if they're looking and being like, these guys lied to us. And you and I have talked about this before, about how it's almost certain that they misrepresented them. Like, it seems, you know, I don't want to, you don't want to accuse people of like things. It seems like they misrepresented the company in a major way. I'll do it. Yeah.

2:04:22Chris G.:I'll do it. I think for certain they did. I almost have no doubt about it. Like the Bungie management has been terrible the entire time that I've been following the studio. And you would think they would, the entire time.

2:04:33Dustin Furman:You would think they would try to claw this back. I think it would look really bad. Like, I don't know how it would do. would probably be in the courts for years and also you own them and they're making games it's it's like it's a tough one it's it's the it is the worst situation sony's ever been in with with playstation in terms of just it's just it they they spent so much money man like they wasted all this time and money and that we said it ad nauseum but it's the thing that really sucks about this generation for playstation is because i'm quite satisfied actually with playstation 5 but it has nothing to do with them it really doesn't for every like a ratchet or death stranding or something that we really liked it's like i'm playing 20 games that they don't make 25 30 games so it really has nothing to do with them but i look at it i'm like damn like you really fucked up bad i i reflect on it all the time is that i can't get over that these people that had anything to do with this are there anymore.

2:05:35Dustin Furman:Like if I were there, if I were in Ashina or something, I'd be like, I want to know every person who had something to do with this. Like who signed off on this, who supported it. I want to know everyone because you guys have no business making decisions for us. And it's, that's the thing that bothers me. I mean, we see a little bit of it behind the scenes, but no one seems to have paid a price for anything. And that shit pisses me off. And when you talk to Jaffe and you hear about the people that were the people that were what's clear now especially when you hear shuhe talk about it is that like the people that were removed like the connie booths and all these people they didn't want to play ball they didn't they looked at this and they're like we don't want to do this what are you doing and shuhe has basically said that like that they were like we're going to do this games as a service thing we're going to do this transmedia movies thing he's like i don't to do that and they should be groveling over shuhei to get him back and i'm not saying it's like a 10-year project i'm saying like come back for two years and let's get this thing going again you know come in make decisions from a studio standpoint set them in motion find yourself a good steward and leave again who has who has the taste who has the capability who has the boldness it sucks I hate it and I think a lot of the Bungie marathon thing man I'll never get over it I really won't I think marathon's cool I think Bungie was once a great studio I think for a fraction of that they should have bought them maybe even a billion it's like okay no I don't think they should have bought them really at all but you can understand at that point all right you took a little rider on them didn't work out but it's not the end of the world but it's literally assuming let's assume i don't know but let's assume intergalactic is 400 million dollars let's let's let's call it three or 350 like they literally could have made like 10 or 12 of those for the cost that they paid for the studio not to mention all the money they've since dumped into it probably in the hundreds of millions of dollars and that that gets me back to originally what i was saying chris is Sony has a decision to make.

2:07:51Do you want to like pair this team back to two or 300 people? Give them a few hundred million dollars and leave them alone for five years? Or do you want to just shut them down? Yeah. And I think they have to figure that out. And I think it's a coin flip.

2:08:11Chris G.:Yeah, I think so too. I think a lot of it is contingent on what they're probably figuring out

2:08:15Dustin Furman:about what would be the next game. and how would it be like what would it what would do and the thing they should probably do i don't again man it takes too long because because really destiny 3 should be like much closer at this point if they were smart but yeah they could just like be like all right like they could release a press release they could release a logo and say like we're making destiny 3 we've decided based on the outrageous support you guys have shown destiny 2 in recent months marathon's not really working for us gummy bears has been spun off we're going away for a while now. That might be the best, the best, we'll see you in 2030 or something.

2:08:53Dustin Furman:Like that might be the best course of action, but I just don't know, you know? And by that point, no one might even give a fuck. There's going to be a whole nother palette of games.

2:09:02Chris G.:There'll be another palette of games. And again, this is a completely different, this is this, again, this Bungie is a very different, this is just, the entire Destiny team is gone. The marathon team remains in some way shape or form i'm not super familiar with anybody at that studio now you know like a lot of the people that i knew that i was familiar with that i was keeping tabs on they're not at that studio anymore so even if destiny 3 somehow does show up it's gonna be it it's gonna be as if id made it or like not not id necessarily but like you know what i mean like it'd be as if not bungee made it because it really is just the name of the studio now and i think i think bungee's been a great development studio or like a great outputter this entire time the issue has always been just like they're terrible with management and their c-suite just fucked them over for no reason well i guess not for no reason they made a pretty penny you know fucking the studio over right and sony over but yeah it's just a bummer man because marathon's really good and it deserves it deserves better and everybody i don't know it's it's it's just such a crazy in a different in a more just i think it's a coin

2:10:26Dustin Furman:flip well chris don't you think in a more just world though that marathon could have been one of those ephemeral multiplayer games we talk about that you release it does well then you move on but because everyone stakes their claim on these singular games existing for perpetuity nothing even has a chance of being something at all if it doesn't last forever which wasn't the expectation of multiplayer games until the last 10 years and um that i think is another i'm not saying you want to make these games and they die in a year or whatever i'm not saying that but like that was an acceptable kind of thing back in the day you you couldn't make that work even you know people

2:11:05Chris G.:played people played many many games for years with no updates minimal balance changes you know they would be just like patch notes of like hey we found a bug with the grenade in this area it's it's three months into it's three months into launch we fixed it and then in four months you'd get another patch we're just like we changed the this thing was causing a bit of a hiccup we fixed that and then that was it and then the game that you had was the game that you'll have for the rest of the time that you have it and people played it and they enjoyed it and like i miss that era man i do i do miss and i get we're in a we're in a different space where like we're iterating and we're changing and to be fair marathon has done a pretty good job of switching things up this we'll talk about it later but like you know now that joe ziegler's gone they're kind of pivoting away from this very very hardcore pvp thing which i think is still going to be there but they're trying to get some more casual people in with more pve oriented stuff which i think you know that's good but like i just i really am with you i'm just like it really is a coin flip as to whether or not bungie lasts through the year really in my opinion um i think you'll get season three of marathon i think that'll happen i think they'll put that pvp pve experiment out but dude again it's just the worst timing of all of it because like okay this is potentially the biggest thing that's it's going to be because you'll have people who aren't hardcore pvp players diving into checkout marathon for what it is which is you know a really solid first person shooter that feels good, sounds good, is good.

2:12:46Chris G.:Without the stress. And it's going to be happening at a time where this glut of single-player games, these massive games are coming out. I think the whole game is ill-timed, really. I think even if it came out a year, two years earlier, it would have been a different story. But, I mean, it couldn't have. Right.

2:13:12Dustin Furman:And this is the problem, I think, Chris, incumbent in doing a Destiny 3 is you just don't know what you're releasing it into. I mean, obviously, this is true for everything. But if you're relying on something that is permanent. I don't know. I don't know what they're going to do. They've already taken. They can continue to write down the assets or whatever, and they've already written down a lot of it. I really. I don't want them. I don't want Bungie to close down. I don't want anyone to close down. And I think Sony made this investment. So I want it to work. I just really have a hard time even squinting and understanding how it's going to work at this point.

2:13:45Dustin Furman:And I think riding it on marathon was foolish to begin with. I think I think they just put too much pressure on the game. Really, it would have been wise to just keep Destiny 2 going to just take the pressure off of the game.

2:14:00Chris G.:I yeah, I agree. I also don't necessarily I'm not I'm not convinced that marathon was ever intended to be like. so the way that i feel about it is this you had gummy bears kind of happening right and so that was the thing that was presumably by the way working well enough for for sony to be like we're gonna actually take this and bring it in house right so presumably there's something there right that spawned out of bungee and then they were like actually we're gonna take this and then sony goes like well now what do you got it was just like well what do you mean yeah kind of took the thing that we you kind of took the thing that was going to potentially be the thing and now we're stuck with destiny 2 which isn't working and it's dying then marathon which was always kind of supposed to be an interim kind of like what are we supposed to do yeah so i think there's and again it's all i want to be clear i think most of this is bungee's fault i think the overwhelming majority of it is um both in the management and how they oversold it and how they they had all these like incubation projects that were undoubtedly there presumed just to inflate the value like i i almost i believe that that's true yeah um but i also think it's kind of fucked up for so to be like this is actually good we're taking this and now now what are you guys gonna do and it's like well what why yeah i wonder what that was all about even why they did that yeah i'm curious about it because like what difference does it make like you own the studio either way like what difference does it make to bring them in house like what is it what does that do exactly i i don't know yeah like it inoculated that team from having to worry i guess but i don't

2:15:40Dustin Furman:i don't i agree with you it's like who knows what the the staffing even was necessary for that game as it ramped up but yeah that is a that is a it is a little bit of subterfuge it seems like or it's not really i mean that's not really a proper way of looking at it really it's it's sony has just it's hedging its bets where it's like well we don't want this thing to get fucked up this at least is okay because i think it says that they understood what marathon was going to be early and again you just have to read like in between the lines because they don't speak you have to kind of take them take their actions as words in a way and we'll keep a close eye on this i'm rooting for marathon because i think as i as i've described it in the past it's a cool little beach head in this war they're on the beach they're on the sand i just don't know if they're gonna get push back in the ocean at some point and it seems like that might be in the cards when you're it reminds me a lot i mean it's it's weird reminds me a lot of lawbreakers and um radical heights i guess that's that's on my mind in uh because uh cliffy b has been in the news recently about i don't know if you saw about his alcoholism and stuff which is interesting um and i'm glad that he's in recovery but when when they when lawbreakers when nexon spun out and started doing Radical Heights you knew the game was fucked because they're like oh they're trying to do what they can to survive and yeah I think that Marathon's in that loop now where like it's already broken open what it was supposed to be because it's not sufficient unfortunately yeah we'll see yeah all right Chris Bethesda released an interesting letter that I wanted to go into this was released when we published last week so we didn't get to go into it it's a little bit of old news now but i wanted to add it to our record they this is from bethesda game studios specifically so the flagship of bethesda because when we say bethesda like bethesda softworks is like the publisher but there's the game studio is the you know is the actual studio that makes elder scrolls for instance so you could tell that this was written with asha holding a gun to someone's head probably but here here's what here's what it said quote today we want to share what's next for Bethesda Game Studios and what you can expect from us in the years ahead.

2:17:49Dustin Furman:For 40 years, it's crazy that's been that long. We've built games that have entertained almost half a billion players. More than just games, these are worlds. Worlds for you to explore, shape, and make your own. Worlds we return to together. That's what's driving us forward. So they get into each of the individual games. Starfield. With over 17 million players, a totally irrelevant number, logging almost a billion hours to date starfield remains an important part of our future as we enter year three we'll continue expanding the settled systems with new stories targeted gameplay improvements and additional updates while preparing for the launch of the new starborn content next year more than excuse me more than 40 of players already customize their experience through creations that's pretty high and we'll continue investing in creators and giving them new ways to make starfield their own so that's starfield um in terms of the creator so i don't want to get I don't care about any of that stuff about people making.

2:18:40Dustin Furman:They do say that they've paid creators$10 million and stuff that they've made so far, which actually seems kind of low. The future of Fallout. Here's the meat and potatoes, Chris. Fallout is one of our biggest priorities today. Fallout 5 remains our long range destination. We have multiple Fallout projects in active development right now. Fallout 76 continues to be home to millions of players exploring Appalachia together. With nearly 70 free updates released to date, the journey is far from over. In fact, we have a major fallout 76 expansion plan for next year raven rock a prequel story to fallout 3 i can't believe millions of people are still playing that game fallout because i gotta be honest with you that game always looked like shit to me i was like i i i was like this is fucking i don't know man but good good for them fallout oh god sorry i was gonna say they somehow turned that game around

2:19:25Chris G.:i played it on launch day and i i hated it they did turn it around they definitely did

2:19:30Dustin Furman:fallout 4 the most award-winning game in the franchise which i'm surprised by just celebrated its 10-year anniversary and recently passed over 35 million copies sold, continuing to attract a new audience every year. It's booming because of the Fallout show, no doubt. We also know many players want to revisit previous Fallout experiences. While we're not announcing any dates today, we've been working on remasters for both Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas. And then they talk about Fallout Shelter, they talk about the show, and Fallout Day, which will be in Washington, D.C. for the 30th anniversary of Fallout.

2:20:00Dustin Furman:They also say studio collaboration. the wasteland continues to expand as we team up once again with our longtime friends at obsidian we're happy to confirm they're working with us on a new fallout project we'll have more to share in the future this game apparently is being directed by josh sawyer um who's the director and he also directed um he also directed pentamon right it is it is interesting chris i i every once in a while you see this thing of him going around talking about how much he loves the creation engine and that gets it and that gets into the uh the stuff here and they're talking about the foundation expand extends beyond our teams to technology tools and systems that will power the next generation of bethesda rpgs our teams are now developing the eldritch roll 6 and fallout 5 on creation engine 3 a shared technology platform we've been building since starfield's launch it allows our teams to support multiple projects simultaneously with new tools rendering and systems that define our games.

2:20:52Dustin Furman:This is important. Fallout 5 is currently in pre-production. The Elder Scrolls 6 is our primary development focus today, with the majority of our team currently working on the next chapter of the franchise. With over 65 million copies sold, players are still exploring Skyrim 15 years later, but we know it's been a very long wait for the sequel. The next chapter is on the way. We're where we plan to be. I highly doubt that. Loving how it looks and playing it every day i just want to say this real if you're where you plan to be with elder scrolls 6 you guys are fucking out of your minds yeah wild plan uh you were you plan to be 15 years out from the elder scrolls 5 with no game that's interesting it's an interesting place to plan to be all right so we have a letter here from ham slammer says first time long time a new vegas fluff up is one of the very few games that would make me even consider buying an xbox console so So my question is this, will there be, will any of the numerous Bethesda related announcements find their way across the aisle or will they be held captive for Asha's endless string of PR wins?

2:21:54Dustin Furman:Will any precedent be followed with former multi-platform games or will Xbox change course again in the years to come before we have any solid release dates? I gotta be honest, dude. I don't, I, some people are not gonna wanna hear this, but I find it impossible to believe that they wouldn't put these games on PlayStation. Like it, I know that they wanna do this new exclusive thing first of all like fallout 3 and fallout new vegas remastered are coming to playstation i think that that's a given i could be wrong about that i think that's obvious i think it'd be a safe bet yeah the one that's most uncertain is elder scrolls 6 because it's the most immediate but are they really good are they really like really you're gonna skip playstation with it and it's also gonna be on pc so it's not gonna sell any xboxes so you're really cutting off your nose to spite your face in that in my opinion fallout 5 i said this online people didn't like this there might not even be an xbox ecosystem by the time fallout 5 comes out like they're not going to commit to these right because people have i don't know if you've seen recently like again matt booty and matt ball and all these guys are just saying all this different shit they won't shut the fuck up and they were saying recently about like we're not really we don't want people to fixate on single-player games and there's going to be exceptions and all the rest and i'm like the exception is like you can't blame them you can't commit to a like an ecosystem is Fallout 5 is in the 2030s.

2:23:14Dustin Furman:You can't, you can't commit to being like, yeah, we're going to bring it to Xbox. It's like, we don't have any fucking idea what you're bringing it to. You have no clue. It's being built on PC and you'll spec it later. But my personal opinion is that Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas are coming to PlayStation. I think Elder Scrolls 6 may not. But I, because it's so, it's more immediate. But I, I, I still have a hard time believing that.

2:23:42Chris G.:like i i just it's so expensive dude you know well well they they they had no problem taking 400 million dollars and putting into gears and then taking it off yeah that's true that's true you know so like that's true so it could i mean this is the ultimate problem right is that like okay you're gonna get an exclusive technically in the sense that it's not on playstation but then it's gonna be on pc anyway so there's no real reason there's still no reason there's still no reason i don't know i think it'd be insane i think i i per i think you put gears on playstation as well like what are you doing make your money bro yeah i think they've kind of made it's hard to go back and change the choice at this point especially because they've they've done it so many times right um yeah it's frustrating i don't know i i the i think the remasters are coming like

2:24:34Dustin Furman:i i and i think their justification to their own audience will be like these games are on playstation it would be yeah you can make the argument that elder scroll 6 should be exclusive but it's like you're saying really instead of saying xbox exclusive what the terminology should be is not on playstation right like they should make a brand you know how it's like it used to say on the top of xbox is only on xbox and those yellow and that yellow text during the original like it should say on any other text not on playstation because that's that's like what that's what it means with a little trademark logo after because that's what it means and uh do i do I think they do I think right now they're thinking that yes I do but I think they're delusional like I I think the the idea that Xbox hardware is going to turn around is delusional I it's it's this I mean this this generation's done we're talking about next generation it's delusional I don't know I don't know what else to say dude I say the most normal shit about Xbox

2:25:29Chris G.:people still get upset I'm not even nearly remotely as hostile as as you appear to be no i i definitely you're definitely not as hostile as me it's like what are you it's like what do you talk well oh you fucking hate xbox or whatever it's like brother i i just genuinely i'm telling you i i don't have a reason to buy the next xbox i would like one i would and to be honest i would like one because i'm probably gonna buy it anyway because i like machines but i would like to know that at least like my stupid impulse of wanting a new machine is going to be rewarded in some way by having something that I could at least point to and say, hey, I got that for this.

2:26:08Chris G.:That's the problem that I'm having right now with that ecosystem. But I don't know. As far as, you know, Josh Sawyer being on this new video, I mean, good, excellent. Arguably, this all should have been done a long time ago. Right, that's the question, right, Chris? What the fuck were you guys doing? like what were you doing even if you were under the impression of like okay well look we're we're we want game pass to be a thing we need to feed game pass you'd even though it would suffice to just have random passion projects on there you would assume that i mean the big things that people do want would also bring people to game pass so like why not prioritize that as well um it's kind of it's it's a little crazy to me that it took this long to get a sequel to new vegas or or fall or obsidian working on a fallout game in any real meaningful capacity like that it took this long it's crazy but i mean it's all good news the thing that makes me laugh about all this though is that like there's all fall fives in pre-production so it's like god damn it you did it again you did it again because you like the when starfield was or not when starfield was being but i guess when fallout 76 was out they were like don't worry we're working on single player things elder scrolls 6 and it's like it wasn't even a phantom of an idea yet and now you did it again elder scrolls 6 is still years away and you're talking about fallout 5 now people are going to be asking that right like when elder scrolls 6 is being shown off they're going to be like well what can you tell us about fallout 5 even though the answer is obviously nothing

2:27:53Dustin Furman:right i don't know i i agree i mean it's a good point in that yeah they're they're following the same primrose path of announcing these things too early out of necessity but i think i will give them a little credit in saying like they've been so badly run that it is nice for asha to go in there and be like you guys have to say like i think everyone's confused what the fuck you're doing i think that's reasonable enough and so you got to say something at this point like

2:28:17Chris G.:well right it i will say it makes more sense for them to talk now than it did for them to talk when 76 was out and they were just like no no we're working on elder scroll 6 it's like do you really think that people didn't know that was going to like that's what kind of blows my mind about that period in time is that there was any oxygen in the room for the idea that oh they're doing fall 76 so they're just not going to make single-player games anymore that's that was obviously not gonna happen right so like they in my opinion they didn't need to say that they didn't need to be like oh elder scroll 6 is coming in a decade because uh duh duh right oh skyrim's not gonna get a sequel yeah it's i i am i gotta know i want to know more about i hope people start writing more

2:29:08Dustin Furman:about Phil Spencer's time over this. And of course, Matt Booty has a lot to do with this too, but just it's like, although Matt Booty's more, especially for much of his tenure, was more Xbox Studios focused, but it's like, why did you let them do whatever they wanted? Like, why didn't you try to line things up so you had Fallout? Like, Fallout should be going. Elder Scrolls Shicks should be out. Like, 15 years between games is fucking nuts. And especially with Starfield, listen I'm just gonna fucking I'm just gonna tell it to you straight if I were if I was Microsoft after Starfield like this game sucks you wasted a lot of comparable to your other stuff you've wasted an enormous amount of time with this wrap it up like whatever you're doing here wrap it up and get back to like what we want you to like the things that actually you do well um that they're still dealing with Starfield is hysterical like I can't even believe it it's like come on man but um and 17 million players like i don't give a shit i don't care about your player counts don't care this is the same publisher or the same entity in xbox that was bragging about dark ages being the the biggest doom release ever and then they laid off a lot of the team so i don't care about your numbers i don't care about your player numbers i care about sales numbers much more interesting um the other thing is just the the technology i was i i it was silly because I don't really think it's going to work to, I was hoping they were going to go on some other engine.

2:30:42Dustin Furman:I think it would probably be too late for elder scroll six, obviously, but God, man, those, I hope things changed a lot. Like I remember playing, it was over 10 years ago now, but when I played fallout four, I was like, man, what the fuck? You know, especially because it came out the year, which are three came out and some other things like dying light. And I'm like, come on, this is a fucking joke. And that's why I, that's why, And that's why going back and playing Starfield, which I did earlier this year when it came to PlayStation, as people know, it's like, God, what the fuck? You know, what are we doing?

2:31:14Dustin Furman:It would be like Telltale still making Telltale games on that old shitty engine. It's like, do something about it, please. So maybe this next one will be better. I don't know.

2:31:23Chris G.:Yeah, I don't know. I don't. I like I like creation engine a lot. I like I miss and I've talked about this at length before, but it's just like that. I lament the loss of these proprietary engines because I think a lot of the proprietary engines that we grew accustomed to give us the unique feel of what we associate the soul of certain games to be. The idea that everything's going to be on Unreal or Unity is kind of like... It's a bummer because I think in a lot of cases you can feel that. And I think the way in which creation engine is broken and the way in which it doesn't function... isn't as detrimental to the game as Telltale's engine because Telltale's engine is just straight up.

2:32:11Chris G.:like not only would it not function, but it wouldn't, it wouldn't, it would break in ways that aren't even entertaining. Like the thing about the creation engine was that the ways that would break actually gave you more flexibility in what you could do with the game. Like they broke open the game in a lot of ways. And so I think that's, that's fun. Like I want creation engine to be better, but I don't want it to feel, I don't want a fallout game to come out and it's just like it's on Unreal Engine it's like okay well I don't really want this that doesn't really do anything for me yeah I understand

2:32:42Dustin Furman:we'll see I think big days are ahead for Bethesda and I think the Elder Scrolls 6 is going to be huge it's just crazy everything's just so mismanaged and botched the lack of efficiency in all these institutions shocks me

2:32:59Chris G.:it's shocking yeah for how much money there is like this entire generation is defined by just like terrible management like this is the this is the generation of where like nobody knew what the fuck to do or how to do it you're right it's interesting crazy yeah you're absolutely right you're absolutely right all right chris a few more news items i wanted to get through before

2:33:18Dustin Furman:we get into what we're playing i thought this was interesting from euro gamer they figured out that save game carryovers and time leaping seek and time leaping will be available in blood of the dawn walker for future games so we went into um what was it the summer games fest and we saw that that trailer for dawn walker and i was a little disenchanted with it because it's it's more of a modern day almost like mercury steam castlevania thing going on but in an interview that euro gamer conducted with conrad tomaskowitz who is the director of blood of dawn walker from Rebel Wolves. He said the following to them, quote, from the beginning, when we talked about the blood of Dawn Walker, we talked about the whole cycle because we planned a few games and we wanted to tell the particular story we thought about.

2:34:07Dustin Furman:When you know what you want to say in the next games and where they lead, it's easier to plan the story for the first game and put some events and story elements in which will be the hooks for the next thing that will happen. If you are not thinking about it, then later you have a problem because you start the next game, you have some ideas for the story and you start to think, okay, I will move the saves for the player and what kind of decisions I should predict and how should it be connected and how to make it smooth and organic and so on. We prefer to do it this way, end quote. So it seems like he said something that he really shouldn't have, which is that like they were thinking the entire time, not only multiple games, which is fine, but of bringing the saves between and that's a major motivating factor for them.

2:34:41Dustin Furman:So as you guys might know, the game is being published by Bandai Namco and they actually released a statement and they said this, quote, there will be an option to carry the save from the first game, end quote. As you and I have discussed, Chris, in the past, this is exceedingly rare to the point where it seems like it's actually quite difficult. And we took Bioware doing it in the Mass Effect trilogy for granted. There are only a few other games I can even think that do it in a very robust way. The Banner Saga is one of them. So I there's not much to say about this, but it's very exciting that they've thought about it to such a degree that they're already promising that the save will carry over because I don't know if you remember that was Mass Effect.

2:35:20Dustin Furman:That was like a big piece of news for Mass Effect 2. yeah was that actually actually the choices you made will carry into the next one so i'm very very excited about this where are you on this game chris because it's it is soon um yeah comes

2:35:34Chris G.:out in early september and i'm really i'm really looking forward to this what about you it is in that glut of games and this is one that i'm like kind of like i'm curious about it but it is also one of these things where it's just like i know myself well enough to know that like these games either grab me or they don't and like sometimes they don't and sometimes it takes like years uh like Witcher 3 is a great example right where like I played that I think like four times before I actually got into it the fifth try and this strikes me as kind of one of those games where it's like I might just not be in the mood for something like this but I might I don't know when does this come out this is early September so this is around September 5 yeah I'll verify for you where i'm trying to remember like what other games come around it oh it's like onimusha yeah um control that's

2:36:31Chris G.:yeah i i i'm i mean those are later to be fair that's like at the end of september

2:36:37Dustin Furman:oh yeah this is by the way september 3rd pardon me september 3rd for dawn walker Onimusha I think got pushed up to the fifth oh right right right it's gonna be tough it's gonna be a it's gonna be a little

2:36:49Chris G.:it's gonna be a little gauntlet good gauntlet I'm I'm probably gonna hold off and just wait for Onimusha to be honest yeah I'm a lot more interested in seeing like what they're gonna do with that and like how that's going to like like what they're going to do with Onimusha in like a modern context I'm I'm a lot more fascinated by and a lot more interested in than this game that looks really cool but also feels like it's going to be a long one like i know that there's a time i know i understand there's like a time element to it but like this is a deep looking game i don't know if i have the appetite

2:37:21Dustin Furman:yeah i'm excited about it dude i was turned off by the modern day stuff and i'm just trying to go in with an open mind and go into and and hope for the best i mean these guys have chops right they know what they're doing i i hope for the best but i will say like this is a new ip i'm very, very looking, much looking forward to, but I like my vampires. I like my Eastern Europe. I like all that. Like my Transylvania, my Carpathian mountains, my Laurel and garlic, love all that kind of, and they're leaning in all that. Again, that first trailer they show to the guy in the church with the kid is like fucking goosebump worthy.

2:37:56Dustin Furman:I think that, that, that trailer is amazing. Or like, this is fucking awesome. Of course it's not in game, but whatever. All right, Chris, a few more things to get through. NBA 2K27's cover athletes have been revealed, including Derrick Rose and Caelan Clark. But what's interesting about this, as I said earlier, is that this will be the first NBA 2K game to skip PS4 since 2013. So they are moving on. It'll be available on PS5, Xbox Series X, NS, of course, Steam and Switch 2. So no Switch version either. Early access, August 28th. Game comes out, as we know, already September 4th. So we won't linger too long here, but it's just another example of a major game.

2:38:37Dustin Furman:I mean, this is a top 10 selling game in the United States every year. It has some global appeal, too. It's not like the show where the show is very American, Canadian, Mexican. This is a global entity, and they're skipping PS4. Now, I don't know if you remember this. I wonder how people take, I don't know anyone who works on this game, but I do know people who work on Call of Duty, and you might recall that when they, I said earlier this year, when they announced that they were skipping PS4, there were people at the studios that were not happy about that. and I wonder if they're feeling the same way here as well, because it's just fewer copies sold, and you just make less money, and then your ship bonuses and your milestone bonuses are lower.

2:39:14Chris G.:Probably a lot of people too, right? Because you figure like PS4... I would imagine that a lot of people who are still on those machines, those are probably sports people. Yeah, and I wonder... At some point, the old versions hold the game back, right? Because it used to be...

2:39:33Dustin Furman:the PS1 to PS2 generation or the NES to SNES generation, there were different games made, like totally different products, but now they want these games to be seamless. You even can play with each other across platforms. So getting rid of these old versions, I think it was the argument that the guys that make, MiHoYo, that make Genshin Impact, they were saying that about it. It's like, we can't do this anymore. Like this is hurting the whole game by having to do this. And I wonder if they're going to have a similar justification. It is one of those games though, Chris, along with the show was a big one when they skipped ps4 a couple years ago it's one of those games that's going to push people naturally to the next console or they're just going to stop playing or they'll play the old one and i do think that that is a big thing too is playing the old one as i brought up it's just an anecdote but my i brought up my nephew's college roommate still plays mlb the show 20 on ps4 like every day crazy so so i think some people are just happy with what they have especially because on in the the online ecosystem the rosters are updated so like you always have like the newest whatever going back i remember i think i told you this chris when i used to play the nhl and madden games on snes they didn't i used to i used to read the newspaper and they would have you don't know this because you don't like sports but there's always a thing where it says transactions and it says like oh this guy got traded from this team and this guy went here and i used to go into my games i would have the paper open there was a battery in them so like it would save your settings and i would literally manually move players around just because it's like you got like it's got to be accurate because you had this i always thought about that too back in the day it's like it's like nhl would come out in like september so ea back in the day had to like seal it in like august maybe even in july the rosters are not even set in the nhl remotely by that point so you'd get this game and you'd be like what the fuck is this guy doing on this in on this team and there was like nothing you can do about it for a whole year and that used to all used to infuriate me so then so then they started putting the batteries in the cartridges and you'd have to do it manually which i was autistic enough to do so nba 2k 27 please look forward to it i know you will cool to see caitlin clark on the cover yeah cover i did read something recently which is so interesting with the physical games thing though which is like physical like covers don't even matter at all anymore they used to matter like it used to be a huge deal to be a cover athlete and it still is you get paid a nice amount of money but back in like the 90s and 2000s it was a lot bigger than it is now because that was that was everyone would interface with you that way now you're on the splash screen i guess or whatever especially

2:42:03Chris G.:since a lot of these games are live service now and then their cover art changes with the season which bugs the shit out of me by the way yes i hate that yeah i hate it i wish you could at least choose you know what i mean give me give me like if i could cycle between like like whatever my favorite one of the updates that they had and just like have that be the icon on my screen bothers me that i can't do that yeah a little customization would go a long way i think all right christopher just a couple more things i wanted to throw this out here jonathan blows

2:42:35Dustin Furman:new games coming to playstation order of the sinking star there's a video i was watching they do what they call an extended overview i will be honest and say that i am not going to smart enough for this game, I don't think, which is very similar to The Witness. This is his first game since The Witness. New game. They re-released Limbo. It didn't seem like anyone really cared. Space Oddity wrote in and said, hey guys, Jonathan Blow just announced Order of the Sinking Stars coming to PS5 later this year. After the long PC demo, it's easily one of my most anticipated games of 2026. Mainstream coverage has focused more on disliking John's opinions than on the game itself.

2:43:10Dustin Furman:Still, it's closing in on 200 ,000 Steam wishlists. Anyone else planning to try it? PS is Sacred Symbols plus interview is how I discovered Braid and The Witness. Would love to see him back on the show. I think I've said this, and I don't think he'll mind me saying it because I really appreciated the candor, and he's not saying anything wrong, is that I talked to him a few months ago, and I was like, do you want to come back on the show? And I think I said this to you, right, Chris? He was like, he said, I mean, it's not verbatim, but the basic gist was, me going on these shows just turns into headlines about something I said.

2:43:41Dustin Furman:As opposed to being a holistic conversation people listen to, like a lot of people do, but a lot of people also just click on the headline and it just creates a lot of drama for no reason. So I understand he kind of wants to stay away from that. I will reach out to him again and ask him the problem for this is that I'm not going to play this game. And so having him on and it's not because I'm disrespecting it. I just don't. It's too. It's not my kind of game. It looks fucking cool as hell. I just know. I remember the witness and how everyone got caught up in that to the paper, paper and pencil shit.

2:44:10Dustin Furman:Everyone I was like, it's I'm not smart enough for this. Like it's not it's it doesn't compute with me right right so i don't think i'd be the best person to even interview him at present anyway are you going to check this game out probably not i'm kind of in the same mode as

2:44:23Chris G.:you or it's just like i didn't i didn't i mess around with the witness a little bit but i just kind of i don't know it just wasn't my kind of game and even honestly even be braid i i thought was fine like i braid wasn't really my cup of tea either like i think they're good games but they're just clearly not for me really and that's fine um it looks really well made like it looks like a quality video game i believe i'm sure it'll do well i chris i could be speaking out of school

2:44:51Dustin Furman:here but i'm pretty sure that it's built on completely proprietary technology too like that's like their own engine which i think is like so cool that he does that so you have any idea how unnecessary for you know but like people out there do you have any idea how unnecessary that is

2:45:08Chris G.:that would that's like building a camera to film something it really is crazy it's like totally

2:45:15Dustin Furman:ridiculous i love it um yeah i appreciate the fuck out of that i mean you're not licensing anything that's cool it's just and he's really into like the he loves like tech and and engineering and like the problems that those things present very obsessive very carmack like we brought him up earlier as well um i don't know if you saw this diddy kong's little dong wrote in and said hello chris colin and quitter how do we feel about the god of war show recasting kratos because the actor got injured should they have waited for him to heal don't stunt doubles exist for reasons like this most importantly who will they replace him with so it has been reported by deadline and again this happened right after we recorded last week so we weren't able to include it that um ryan holst or Hearst I'm sorry who uh was or was Kratos haunted by Halst Halst yeah exactly Jesus Christ I know right they went with him or that actually in Japanese it would be Halst right

2:46:12that was quick thank you good um so he was apparently injured in late June on the set so weeks ago and he apparently tore his bicep but the Nate apparently will take him four to

2:46:27Dustin Furman:six months to get back and they just can't wait which I think is pretty interesting so I guess they're going to refilm he wasn't going to be able to he wasn't going to be able to even really get back on the set until 2027 so it's going to fuck the whole thing up so yeah they've recast him that's brutal dude I mean that is pretty I'm sure he got paid out and it's fine but I would be so crestfallen now chris conspiracy are they kind of being like maybe this is an opportunity for us to do this again because everyone hated the shots we released of it and maybe well you know we can figure this out a little bit better and do it better next time what do you think i think it's

2:47:05Chris G.:one of those things where it's just like well that's probably a silver lining yeah yeah it's just like all right well we we've done this we've done it a little bit of this now so we kind of know the pain points it's kind of like whenever you're fighting your way through a game and then like you you lose a save and it's like it's frustrating to lose all that progress but like when you go back through it again it's like way trivial um true enough i'm sure they i'm sure they probably are just like well this is a bummer but at least we can they could probably catch up i think relatively quickly now that they know what they have to do and what what works and what doesn't what the pain points were it's just so crazy like what a high profile example of something like this happening like i can't remember the last time i can't remember the last time i heard

2:47:46Dustin Furman:about like a recast for an injury yeah i don't i mean i always famously it wasn't for an injury but i always think of back to the future which i guess is the most famous example of that of just right eric yes yeah and i always love watching those shots of like the same shots they like went back months later and did the same exact shots and so interesting to look at those yeah one thing i was thinking about too chris is the kid because he's probably growing fairly quickly and their weight and they've kind of, I don't know, I don't know if that's a contingency as well. But anyway, this will be on Amazon Prime and I assume we'll get it in the first season in 2027.

2:48:21Dustin Furman:I'm skeptical of this show, to be honest. But yeah, me too. Not because I don't think they can do God of War well. Again, I think a lot of this stuff would be better in cartoon form, but I just think Kratos' imposing physique, especially next to a child, it should be incredible. And who should replace him? I have no idea. The guy who played the mountain. I remember saying that that was the guy who I was saying, I mean, he is genuinely fucking huge. You know, he's enormous.

2:48:47Chris G.:I have no idea. I have no idea who would even be in the running. I'm trying to see Gregor Clegane. Paul, look up tall freaks.

2:48:58Dustin Furman:Yeah, hard hard for Julius Bjormson. He's like, I guess, obviously, he's like Norwegian or something. He's a big dude. I love that fight, but ironically, between. Him and Joel in Game of Thrones. That's a great, great scene where he's like, he's like boasting and he gets fucking fucked up. That show is so violent. I loved how it was so violent that sometimes I was like, oh my God, what the fuck is going on here? But what a great show. So maybe he's a good option. I should, we should do a very avant-garde God of War and I'll be Kratos. That would be avant-garde. Yeah, that's one word for it. That's one term for it.

2:49:43All right. Finally, Call of Duty film. They released just a little something about it. It's going into theaters June 30th, 2028. And apparently it will be based on Modern Warfare,

2:49:57Dustin Furman:or at least in the Modern Warfare universe. I think people were curious about what, if any of the little, you know, would it be? Could it be ghosts? uh but yeah but i think i think modern warfare and black ops were the only two and i think that or doing something else they should do advanced warfare and get kevin spacey back yeah he mean pork i don't know if i should say poor kevin spacey because i'm not really sure what happened like it seems like was he innocent so i don't i'm kind of in the same mind too it's

2:50:28Chris G.:like i don't know enough but the thing that makes me mega uncomfortable was i think that he had like there were like witnesses that just mysteriously died or vanished right that's right and so there was no one to testify that's right i remember that yeah and like that was like i don't know what that means but like little frank underwood energy perhaps a little weird you do an impression of him don't you like a frank underwood i don't oh yeah because i've only seen like i only see the first episode of the show how does he sound again he's like southern he's got like he's he's like that southern drawl like that yeah yeah he's like uh you did you did it once and it was really perfect but i don't know how to i can't uh is that a playstation vita yeah right it's exactly right that's exactly right yeah yeah yeah because we were talking about how he's like he actually how he interacted with the playstation network yeah yeah right because he played kill zone um that was the best part about him was that he was a playstation player

2:51:28Dustin Furman:and he would play legit like i loved that that was like so it was so it was like the subtle bullshit and then the vita if anyone out there has not seen the house of cards vita scene just look up house of cards vita because there is a literal scene about the playstation vita in the game or in the in the show but if he was innocent what a shame dude because he's one of the great actors like he was awesome he was awesome yeah and they fucking botched house of cards because of that and it would be and it was such a and it's like man we that was such an up um that was a real that was when i was like damn netflix is cooking with gas dude with that with this with the show um and then i watched the first episode with robin wright like only of the last season i'm like i'm not doing this and that was the end of that oh god all right uh that's it that's all we have for the news all right chris it's time for us to talk about what we're playing i've been playing uh onimusha and so i'll begin i uh randomly on saturday maybe sunday i was like i'm gonna down i had onimusha warlords ps4 port from 2019 i had it at that time and i beat it at that time but i'm like i'm gonna go back and replay this i we're in the preparatory period as i was saying last week i gotta get through some of this onimusha stuff i gotta get through some control stuff and Alan Wake stuff.

2:52:46Dustin Furman:So it's time. And I'm a little bored with GTA 5. I really should just bang it out because I'm like right at the end. I'm just like, come on. I don't want to play right now. So I started playing this game and I beat it. I ended up beating it four times. The thing about Onimusha is it's so small and short. And I said earlier that I had an idea for Sacred Plus and it was just to play through the whole game on stream, which would be fairly trivial. You can beat the game in like an hour and a half. But no problem. And it's just funny to look at some of these earlier 3D games and not see the seams in them, but really see how self-contained and overly ambitious they seemed.

2:53:22Dustin Furman:And yet, and they were at the time, and yet they are so manageable. And it's funny because, so I beat Onimusha Warlords and I platinumed it, that's number 214. And then I went and started last night playing Onimusha 2, which I have not played in years. I remember very clearly when it came out, because if I remember, and I do remember correctly, it came out the same day Super Mario Sunshine came out. And I remember getting them both the same day and then it really took a backseat because i was so into super mario sunshine but it's a much more dynamic and interesting game with a lot more backtracking and there's like different playable characters and optional things that you find and gifts you can give but for people that are not familiar with these games they're basically i would say fairly obviously heavily resident evil influenced action games with pre-rendered backgrounds and like constant moving camera like you know the i was saying to mike i'm like look how complicated this is you're walking down a walking down like even a corridor and it's like camera angle here two seconds forward camera angle here two seconds forward camera angle here yeah all this different stuff but i and it's it's some of the trappings just don't hold up like the voice acting in only which warlords is horrible like some of it is so comical um the bad guys are ridiculous the delivery is ridiculous it's like we would make fun of megaman 8 back on ps1 where it's like did you get that in like one take like we have 10 minutes say all of the lines we got to get out of here it's very it's very strange also speaking of megaman only wish the games were produced by keiji and afune which is kind of cool so yeah played only wish of warlords one for people that aren't familiar with it again a sword-based japanese historical action game with some light role-playing elements the the key to the game is and i'm sure it'll be in the new one too in all the games is you hold the circle button down.

2:55:09Dustin Furman:When you kill enemies, you use your gauntlet to suck these souls in, and the souls are of different colors. Red souls are used to upgrade. Yellow souls heal. Blue give you mana or mana. And that continues into Onimusha 2, which is, again, a much more robust game. So, yeah, I've really enjoyed playing both of them, and I'll work through Onimusha 2 over the next few days and see what happens there. but it's been fun to go back and and the first one warlords especially is an extremely nostalgic game for me because for people that remember it was one of the first playstation 2 games that really mattered it came out in march i want to say of 2001 and so it's around the time eco came out and the bouncer and some other things that started to emerge and then later on in 2001 you end up getting gta and silent hill and all this and metal gear solid and it's like it gets crazy at that point ps2 like takes off really quick but i remember i i vividly remember getting it and being so excited to play it and it really it really is a good game you know you get s it's very capcom you get s ranks there's like optional mini games that you do you can unlock these amazing weapons that make the game trivial there's ultimate modes of harder difficulties there's a lot to do but it really is a small game and it runs a lot like resident evil where it's like go and find the key and then go open the door and then kill this guy and grab this thing and put the thing on this pedestal and it's very similar to that yeah so and uh i don't know about the first one i assume it is but onimusha 2 right now is 50 off on psn so i was happy to buy it and then uh power wash simulator 2's star wars dlc i bought it for stream on monday so people can watch me play a little bit of it on sacred streaming i have done you do like mose isley cantina the skywalker like um what would you call home homestead there's an x-wing the death star bridge and now i'm on the millennium falcon which is the last one and i do appreciate i mean there's more for that more for them to explore here if they wanted to but all old stuff so like there's no like oh now we're on naboo or or with some bullshit with ray it's like none of that it's all original trilogy stuff which i do appreciate because that speaks much more to me but i just love power wash simulator too there's it's not reinventing the wheel it's power watch simulator and similar it actually reminds me most of i don't know if you remember me talking about this chris it's very obscure but when they did the warhammer 40k expansion for the original power watch simulator i bought as famously i bought all these expansions even though i have no familiarity with any of the ip and that one was especially fucking annoying because of the machines and all the little crevices and gizmos and gadgets and star wars has a little bit of a a similar feel um Hashim Barakat wrote in about Onimusha though and he says good day super sacred sons Colin did Onimusha Warlord setting remind you of the intimate single location of the classic RE games I got Onimusha's platinum last month and they keep reminding me of the mansion of RE1 though it was not as expansive as the mansion do you want future Onimusha games to be set in multiple locations or in a single large location thank you for the amazing content and I wish you all wonderful week I don't remember Onimusha 4 well enough but the first three Onimusha games Onimusha three is a little weird but they do take place within these self-contained areas which is kind of cool and they connect to each other it is very much a mansion setup and onimusha one you're playing in like a castle basically and like the in the surroundings of like a japanese you know those wooden japanese castles with like really cool roofs that slant and all the rest so yeah really enjoying all of that i don't know what i'll be moving on to after onimusha two and uh i kind of wanted there's there's adventure time power watch simulator 2 dlc that i also didn't get i also have no familiarity with adventure time so but i gotta get to that as well but that's what i'm playing chris it says here you're playing vault breakers which we know on marathon and then

2:58:59Chris G.:halo campaign evolved so you got got well yeah so here's the thing a friend of mine who we we connect a lot with with the through halo stuff he was like hey do you want to do you want to stream uh campaign evolved with me when it comes out and i was like okay yeah sure i could do that and he he was getting he was getting the early access i was like all right like whatever fine it's it's free game time with a friend of mine like fine it's i was gonna buy the game anyway it's a set of fine so i'll be streaming that later like after i record this people who listen i think i i streamed yesterday and talked about that i was gonna be doing it um so if you're hearing this i've already done it probably but yeah so i'll talk about that in a second i do want to start with this vault breakers thing because it is interesting i talked about it a little bit earlier because it is it is pve marathon but it's it's a separate thing in that they've turned it into a bit of a roguelike which is kind of interesting so it's like you go in with a free kit to this end game map with like the hardest uh the hardest ai the hardest puzzles and in In typical extraction shooters, you go into the map and you find like guns and equipment and currency and you extract either by killing other people to get their stuff off of them or doing puzzle rooms to get stuff off of them and leave to use that stuff in future runs.

3:00:24Chris G.:In this version, in this PvE, you don't leave with anything other than a very specific type of currency that you can only find in special vaults. these vaults in the normal game have like high-end gear you know high-end weapons and stuff like that in this mode it's all it's pretty much exclusively this currency and your goal is to get through as many of these vaults as possible and when you extract with this currency it allows you to upgrade your free kit so instead of having no shield you have like a normal shield or like a purple shield eventually or like a better weapon or more inventory space so you can load up on more of those things to get more stuff for the next run and it's it's cool because you can either it's a good way to get because you can also trade that currency for just equipment for the main game as well like if you want to get like a gun or if you want to get like a shield or if you want to get something to go into the real pvp you can do that but it'll set you back on the currency that'll upgrade your kit which is useful because the better the kit the more you can carry the more capable you're going to be able to deal with the threats that you're going to encounter it's an interesting it's more interesting than i thought it would be um it's still you know definitely a tacked on kind of pve thing um it doesn't feel as thought out as the rest of the game does but i've had a pretty good time with it because as i said earlier like i like marathon a lot but i'm i'm not always in the mood to be sweating or to be upset with like teammates who just can't follow simple direct you know sometimes i am sometimes i'm thrilled to be angry right or or or get out by the skin of my teeth and knowing that i could have lost it like it's a good feeling but uh yeah so it's cool if anybody has marathon and they're curious curious about that or like what pve looks like in that game i do i do recommend giving it a shot because it is weirdly it does kind of have a weirdly satisfying hook to it that i think that i think works pretty well um but aside from that i am playing halo campaign evolved i've played through the first i'm at the end of truth and reconciliation so i'm at the very end of the third mission it came out at 8 a.m today my time so i was playing basically from then until we recorded about three hours um two hours really and it's good it's quite good it looks very nice I think they've done a pretty good job at capturing the feeling of the original game in a way that is new and looks very pretty like unreal looks good for the most part you can definitely see certain like there's this weird thing and I wonder if if by the time you play it you'll notice it like I did there's like a weird like sometimes when you're changing lighting conditions when you're going from indoors to outdoors there's like almost like a static kind of thing that happens and i don't know what that's about i've heard that i've heard that that's an issue with unreal um and i was a little bummed to see it but i was happy to see that unreal is just the visual components in this game because the underlying engine here is the halo reach engine i think or like some kit bashed um modified version of the reach engine from back in the day and i know that because i can see i can see the animations and i can see the way the ai reacts and i'm like that's a reach elite because in reach the elites will like melee you and they'll do like a one inch punch it's insane like like there's almost no there's almost no reaction time it's just like no no animation they go up to you and they punch you and you're dead and i was like oh that's reached that's interesting um and you can kind of feel it but it feels nice it like it's i don't know it's it's no less than good you know it's what i it's kind of exactly what i expected in in a lot of ways um there's some minor pain points in my opinion i think uh I..

3:04:24Chris G.:There's too many waypoints. Like I actually did a setting.. I've altered it in my settings where like I turn the.. You can't turn waypoints off but you can turn the opacity of them way down. So I've done that because like a lot of the original Halo is kind of getting lost in these environments and you're exploring your way through and I'm like I don't know if I want to know exactly where I have to go. Like this is kind of the charm of these games and what's cool about it. So like I turned all that off. I would recommend doing that too but like if you want a more streamlined experience you can do that too.

3:04:50Chris G.:it's good so far i think uh they've captured the look better than i thought they would it just also is this very like yeah okay we're doing this again kind of i don't know it feels very unnecessary and knowing that they also don't have anything in the pipeline is great right it is interesting if this was something that they had and they were like oh we're working on the next thing i'd be like oh yeah okay this is a fun little tie it's a fun thing to tide us over but knowing that this is it and it's like they've just got nothing it's just like oh my god what the fuck is going on what are we doing i don't know it's it's a very it's good i recommend it for people who have not played halo before i think it's it's and i'm playing it on playstation by the way which is surreal as fuck i have my i have trophies in combat evolved right now which is very cool yeah it's very surreal um yeah but it's it's good i like it i like it uh it's just not exciting or reinventing the wheel for me but i've also played through halo combat evolved so many times and that's like my least favorite original bungee game too so it's like i've still played through this one so many times um so it's nothing new for me i'm also like very attached to the original in in certain ways like there's certain line deliveries that are different that i noticed that like bother me but like most people aren't going to notice that shit you know uh so that's true yeah i give it a go it's i think it's a really solid it's a solid remake that i think does a good job and and you know what i i do want to say too it's way it makes up for in my opinion the disastrously ugly uh combat evolved anniversary from 2011 which i thought was just so so hideous in ways that are just uh that defy reason so shout out to them for making a nice looking remake of halo campaign involved it's good i'm looking forward to playing it yeah yeah i'm looking forward to it i'm not going to pay another 20 dollars for it but uh yeah i wouldn't yeah yeah so i think the 28th is when it comes out

3:06:57Dustin Furman:for everyone else and i will uh so maybe i'll even have something to say about it by the time we record again but yeah i'm looking forward to it and yeah the surreal the surreality of it is

3:07:04Chris G.:my favorite part so yeah it's cool to get trophies in it like it's i saw i saw the pillar of autumn pop up in the playstation like trophy thing i was like that is crazy it is weird it probably means nothing to people who are way younger who don't give a shit but like it's it's a surreal

3:07:20Dustin Furman:thing to see and it's cool so yeah i will um i will be very curious how it does because i feel like there's going to be a very um there's going to be a gravity around this game i think for playstation people especially the summer as things are a little slow slower like you're just your average player signing on and being like what like i think there's going to be a lot of people that are just not very familiar with things and i'm being like what is halo doing here it almost feels like it's not supposed to be there you know like it's a mistake or like some sort of shovel wear it's halo with like a zero yeah it looks out of place it's like what is that um war gods Zeus of child right right oh man good shit what was it what was what's the new one on PSN that I saw that they actually changed what oh it was Gran Charisma oh yeah insane cool very cool good lord all right Chris let's get into six questions comments concerns thoughts on ideas and finish this episode up with inquiries from the audience remember if you support us on Patreon you get early ad free access to the show and a bunch of other perks including submitting your inquiries to our show via the news feed the threads go live on patreon each week for the various shows so keep an eye out our threads go live on wednesdays and are deleted thursdays zw begins and says c sticks with fire sprite being the developer of untold on 2 do you think that it can live up to the expectations set by its predecessor if it's successful do you think that playstation continues the franchise and if so does fire sprite become the untold dawn studio going forward thanks to answer your last question first is that yeah if the game is successful i think they'll probably continue to put them on there.

3:08:59Here's the thing, Chris, is that a new Until Dawn game every five

3:09:04Dustin Furman:years or something seems kind of nice. And because they're all, they could be connected, but, and they are kind of, I don't want to spoil it. They are kind of connected, but they're disconnected teen horror stories. And horror is kind of killing right now. I feel like this is a place Sony should be. I know that in the film world, people are quite impressed with a lot of these lower budget horror films that have come out or are being announced that are trouncing a lot of things and of course that's the place you want to be these games uh remember we looked up annabelle and it cost like three million dollars to make or something and then it made like 500 million dollars and it's like this is the space you want to be in if you can if you can figure it out so now what what are the expectations of its predecessor which predecessor are you talking about because because the ballistic moon until dawn game is questionable at best.

3:09:53Dustin Furman:But if you're talking about the supermassive 2015 PS4 release, that is a high, that is a great game and a high mark to reach. But I got to say the Until Dawn 2 trailer kind of got me going. I thought it was kind of cool. I really, I really liked it. I was really interested in, in it. I like, I like consequential narrative driven games that aren't super gameplay heavy. I don't always want to play them, but I think there's a place for them. And I think this can be an ongoing thing so i don't know how until dawn 2 is gonna do i don't think they didn't them any favors with until dawn remake at all it'll ironically chris it would almost be better if they just never did that oh and then and then they were just like what happened 100 oh yeah i'm sorry i misunderstood and yeah and until dawn 2 just being like yeah it's an until like imagine how exciting that actually would have been if they were just like here's until dawn 2 and it's like

3:10:45Chris G.:what yeah it would have been like uh yeah it would have been a nice surprise um yeah i don't know these uh these games they're not really for me like i i like some of them like i i actually didn't hate the quarry really nearly as much as colin and uh dustin did yeah i wasn't into it i'm into these at varying degrees i think by the time until dawn 2 comes out i'll be into it but yeah man that that that remake was the shit that i would i i want all i did was watch videos of it and i was like oh man it's weird because we were talking earlier about like set camera angles and how they're they are a little it they're it's old it's an old way to show a game and people want people generally want to control the camera in a 3d environment i think it's one of those examples of be careful what you ask for because until dawn with the with the tight camera angles and

3:11:45Dustin Furman:everything it showed you a cinematic view of the world that you wanted to see and what i specifically remember about until dawn remake is and i'm going to go back and play it replay it again before the game comes out to just refresh myself on the story because they are somehow interconnected like i think hayden's characters in it and stuff like that um and obviously like the psychiatrist dude whoever the psychologist dude whoever the fuck that is so what i remember about the remake though is like it because you can have the camera wherever you are you're just missing shit like there's a lot of there's a lot of um there's a specific scene that in the original showed from like the rafters of a built like a basement and there's like a mount like a rat or something that runs across it or something happens and i remember and i had just played it and then i remember playing the remake and being like oh like i just missed that and then i went back to the cut scene and looked again and i'm like there it is but like because my camera was pitched it's like it just doesn't even happen and it's one of the now i'm not saying that until dawn 2 should have a fixed camera angle i don't think it will but i think until dawn 1 was designed around it and i think disassembling that was a mistake and the bigger mistake is that a lot of the dudes that were at ballistic moon worked on the game so they knew it better and i i was a little confused of like why no one during this was like this is a i mean you're not going to do that to your own project for sony but it's like this is a bad idea we really what we really should have done is remastered the original game yeah and maybe even hired supermassive to do it although i don't know if they're really really around anymore so i think fire fire sprites whole existence depends on this game and i am curious to see how it does i'm excited about it though i'm looking forward to it i think we'll be more excited about it when it's closer and we know more about it yeah joseph jerry Jerry wrote into us, Chris, and said, it seems the current state of upheaval in the games industry started shortly after the industry-wide movement to eliminate crunch culture.

3:13:37Dustin Furman:While I realize that correlation does not imply causation and the underlying cause of all this will always be corporate greed, is there something to this? Was the elimination of crunch culture and the improvement of work conditions for devs the cause of ballooning budgets and decreased profit margins? Did this lead to an industry filled with people doing a job rather than people filled with passion doing whatever it takes to create their dreams? Was the games industry actually healthier and in an overall better place when crunch culture was the norm? I think this is a very bold and interesting question and not an easy question to answer.

3:14:07It's not an easy question to ask. I think that there probably is something to do with this, but I think what you have to ask yourself is,

3:14:15Dustin Furman:like, what is most important? From a fiduciary commercial standpoint, like, the quality of the game is most important, so you, like, enslave these people, right, to, like, get the game out. But really like the happiness and work life balance of your workforce, I think does pay dividends in the mid to long term. In other words, if you if you go in and say like for the next six weeks, we're crunching. You're going to work weekends. It's gonna be 60 or 70 hours. That's a short term thing. But if people in the mid to long term expect that that's always going to happen, then I think it becomes a drag.

3:14:49Dustin Furman:And it makes people question where the production is going, where like why you can't figure this out three or four years ahead of time. and now we have to match this up chris of course with the idea that i and you and i definitely agree with this because you and i are both very fastidious workers in the creative field it's like if you care about something and want to do it right and you're not pushing papers you're not doing some bullshit you don't work at you're not doing something you would hate like flipping burgers at a restaurant where you're like i'm waiting for the clock to be up so i'm not gonna i'm not gonna i'm not gonna give another hour you're right right but when you're in a creative field, when your name is attached to it, when you put four or five years into something, I don't think that most developers have a problem with not crunching necessarily, but working late.

3:15:39Dustin Furman:And actually, Del and I, I think, talked about this in our Sacred Symbols Plus episode is that people don't want to be the person on the team that gets up first. Like, it's six o 'clock, it's seven o 'clock, it's eight o 'clock, you're looking around, everyone in the pit is still at their desk you don't want to be the guy that gets up and i think that that level of peer pressure i know that peer pressure exists because i've talked to people about it but i also think that that is a major driver of it too so i i don't know that there's necessarily causation here but certainly if you're letting your workers live a more normal life which is good it's going to cost you more to make the games it's going to take longer and that's the way it goes but that that's a price worth paying i think at the same time in other words i don't think there should be a culture chris of like overwork at a studio until it's necessary and then i think everyone has to understand what time it is and i i i think that that's kind of the way it goes right we have a deadline where we're we're strapped everyone's gonna crunch right we need overtime mandatory overtime for everyone you just can't live in a world of permanent mandatory

3:16:43Chris G.:over time yeah yeah i i just don't think it's i don't think it's correlated at all i i really do feel like it's a lot of this is literally just the the ballooning of covid and and everybody just assuming that like oh this this industry is going to balloon forever and then it just didn't and then like what you're seeing is rising and then in addition to the fact that the economy is fucked i i don't think there's really any correlation between like oh the the upheaval of the game industry and uh a wide movement to eliminate crunch culture because crunch culture isn't eliminated no not at all it's just not it's not it's there was never like and and to be to be clear there's people talk about being you know made to stay late but like i mean like you just said it's just like people who care will stay late it's not and people who don't

3:17:34Dustin Furman:they'll leave and that's fine that's fine yeah it's not ideal it's not if you're a family man care about your marriage you have kids it's going to be difficult it's a young man or young woman's game in my opinion yeah easily but I think it's what I've been telling my nephew is like I think 20 your 20s are for work that's my opinion like I think people are like I want I want I want the perfect job and I want life work balance and all this and it's like you just got out of college shut up go like work for a while and prove like make your bones and don't worry about anything else live to work in your 20s so that when you're in your 30s, you can work to live and so on and so forth.

3:18:15At some point, you're going to have to dedicate yourself to something deeply and it's going to ask something of you.

3:18:23Dustin Furman:And I think the thing that keeps game developers honest in a way, or at least in the trenches and engaged, is knowing that they will be easily replaced if they can't do it. It's not that rare what you do, especially in an industry where everyone's getting laid off i saw that the uh that studio that made that game chrysal or whatever that people liked you know i'm talking about c-r-i-s-o-l it was like supposed to be some sort of um i think it was some sort of like bloodborne style or you know souls like game but anyway they just laid everyone off today so you're swimming in a sea of desperate fish and you might as well just stay attached to whatever you're working on as long as possible and i understand that because I've operated in that in my own capacity and games media that way where I'm like, I'm not going to be the last person to get up.

3:19:12Dustin Furman:Or the first person, rather, I'm not going to be the first person to leave the E3 war room. I'm not going to be the first person to go back to my hotel room. I'm not going to be the first person to go to lunch. I'm not like no way. Someone else can do it. And everyone will notice. And the managers will notice. You know, it's like there's a game, there's a political game to be played as well. Anyway, thank you for the writing. in. BMJ614 wrote in and said, Hello, Original 2. I want to talk about video game sequels and the phasing out of the trilogy in the video game landscape. I feel like video game designers are leaning towards only doing two projects and moving on in an IP's lifespan if The Last of Us telltale signs indicate hopefully this is not the case.

3:19:52Dustin Furman:With Overwatch pulling back, literally turning Overwatch 2 back into its former self shows that sequels aren't truly needed. And what the trend in video games will be going forward are expansions and DLC. I myself hope that this will not be the case so what do you say wielders of the sacred symbols is the sequel and trilogy and video games going the way of the dodo bird or will it change ever so slightly i mean this is really canny a canny observation in the fact that in the sense that to get two games out requires now the time that it used to take three games to get out right so i really think that a lot of it has to do with that don't you think chris that they probably want to do more they just can't

3:20:23Chris G.:yeah i mean i think i think there's a there comes a point where you just naturally i think it's more about the time spent and less about the projects delivered because you you see god of war 2018 you figure what that was in development from you would imagine it's like 13 i think yeah 13 onward so that's when the when the other game got canceled yeah that's like that's over 10 years or that's about 10 years working on god of war you know and you've only put out two games like that in a in previous generations that would have been long enough to make three maybe even four games so i think it really is just a matter of the time and then just the amount of time the people the people that are spending that time by the by at the end of 10 years working on god of war you're like oh my god i want to do something else dude you know i want to do i i want to go elsewhere let's let's do a sci-fi thing fuck it um you know trilogies i i think are that's more gone i think i'm sure we'll still get trilogies but they'll just take a lot longer they'll take a lot longer or they'll be like indie or something like that you know what i mean like you'd be like i feel like um it'd be fairly trivial to make uh like a smaller game like three smaller games you know i mean then it would be to build three full-on triple a games that is that are going to take 17 years to finish i it's it's tricky i don't think the expansion thing is is more likely though like i think overwatch going back to from overwatch 2 to overwatch is like that's a rare thing where like overwatch 2 should have never been a sequel in the first place like multiplayer games and live service games don't really need these to the same degree that like single players games do they don't really benefit it from it in the same way that single player games do so like i think it's just a different ball ballpark altogether my curiosity is what they're going to do for like the larger than life game like like i we know they're making a hogwarts legacy too right oh yeah definitely presumably i would imagine oh most certainly at avalanche so that's interesting but also like so gta 6 is out obviously that's going to be the next big thing what do they do after that is my curiosity like because my curiosity with gta is like well don't you wouldn't you just should you just add Liberty City in its own campaign like should you make GTA 7 but like really fold it into 6 right and like build like almost like a GTA like globe where you can fly from Liberty City to Vice City to San Andreas that would be awesome that would be dope as hell I think you're right I mean I it is like yeah these platform level things instead of creating new products expand constantly yeah realistically Rockstar has they could do whatever they want they want I'm just curious about like what happens to games that are just so big you know that do you make a do you like are they going to are you going to risk putting a billion dollars into another game right you know right I don't know I'm not so sure yeah I don't I I am curious to see how

3:23:42Dustin Furman:this all goes to I mean he brought the last of us I'm pretty confident the last of us will get a third game I just don't know when that's going to happen horizon will get wrapped up in a third game I assume so I think trilogy I love trilogies it just we're far we're far away from the Arkham trilogy or something where it's like that was 10 years and not even and in development and you can move on and yeah I get disappointed when if developers want to linger too much on these things to get more of these games out which makes sense you definitely want to do a sequel like 007 is getting a sequel. There's almost no...

3:24:15Dustin Furman:I would hope Amazon is not stupid enough.

3:24:18Chris G.:Right.

3:24:19Dustin Furman:They might be. But it's not stupid enough to be like, yeah, we want to do more, but we don't need you. It's like, no, you definitely do. And I hope that... I can't wait to see a 007 sequel because the first one is so good. Like, imagine what they can figure out in a new one. Because that game really is extraordinary. BMJ, thank you for writing in. chiral network administrator wrote in and said greetings to the father and the son and blessings to the holy ghost who chose the busiest time in gaming news to have a child how dare he chris i know you were on the same pilgrimages pilgrimages me to one day replay the greatest rpg of all time marvel ultimate alliance i have had no luck in the endeavor i hear rumor of a ps4 version that exists but cannot be purchased due to defunct licensing have you had any luck please raygun show me the path to that end is now the time for me to buy a ps2 given the uncertain future of physical and digital media should i start collecting the things i want to have for the coming years well the lack of new physical games mean that prices of retro gaming hardware will skyrocket keep on keeping on so i actually looked this up about marvel ultimate alliance because i'm like was it released on ps4 and it was i didn't remember that back in 2016 because that game's from 2006 so at some point and that was on everything it was on like we and i think there was like a gba version of it and like all sorts of weird shit so and it's funny that they put a gba version of it out in 2006 um that is crazy but i didn't realize that it was delisted as far as um collecting is concerned i am of the mind that these things are not going to get any cheaper right i don't really know how they would or why i think the only thing that would make them cheaper is a literal lack of demand.

3:26:02Dustin Furman:Because these things are finite and becoming more and more finite every day. There's never going to be another PS2 made. There's never going to be another PS2 game made. So you have this kind of rarefied thing. And I don't, I just, I don't want to give, listen, do whatever you want. Don't take this as financial advice. But like, if you want something now and you feel like you're going to want it later, you have to really seriously consider whether you should just get it now and save yourself the trouble of having to deal with all that shit later because it's but maybe I'm wrong I mean maybe the shit just falls out I don't know but I think if it was going to fall out in a meaningful way because of emulation especially Chris I think it would have happened already I think people like to have these that's why I was saying it's a bit of a fetish with some people that like have the like they want the physical good like it doesn't matter what other options are there which is fine that's great I think you have to pay attention to that though so if you want to get in I think

3:26:55Chris G.:you should probably get in soon yeah they're they're just becoming more and more scarce you know so like get if you're if you've been thinking about getting a machine for a long time just do it for that reason but yeah as far as marvel ultimate alliance yeah i found it i picked it up at a retro game store i got i had the 360 version because i picked up a 360 recently and that's how i played it initially as well um it's so funny a lot of these early 360 games have such weird they're so they're so different because I was I think I was talking to you about how Call of Duty 2 has like 13 achievements right yeah because they didn't know what to do yeah because they just weren't quite sure they didn't know what the magic number was they didn't know like how much the gamers course would be so it's like it's interesting to peer back and like look at like what they thought about but I played a little bit of Marvel Ultimate Alliance and I I like it it's still it's a very nostalgic game for me it was like one of the first 360 games that I had gotten I think I got it from Gamefly I think if I remember correctly which is crazy um but so I have I have these weird achievements in Marvel Ultimate Alliance where I'm like I don't know how I got because I'm playing so here's the thing I'm playing through Marvel Ultimate Alliance again on my same 360 account my same exact account and I have and I got I just got an achievement where I'm like how could I have not gotten this the first time you know what I mean it was just like beat this person but it's like it's a linear story so it's like how didn't I how did I get one later than this but I don't know it's it's interesting it's cute it that game is so corny though it's it's awesome like I'm smiling ear to ear because it's just like the most over-the-top ham-fisted dialogue you've ever heard it's it's like the masters of evil have taken the helicarrier and it's just like this is exactly it's it's like a window into when comic books were lame And that's kind of awesome.

3:28:50Chris G.:Like it was before the MCU is before Iron Man. And it's interesting to play 2006. Yeah. Yeah. So it's interesting to play a Marvel video game with absolutely no cinematic influence on its depiction of its characters. Like none whatsoever. it wasn't like the gardens of the galaxy game where it was that where it came out and it was clearly like oh well this is star lord from the movie or this is groot from the movie it's like this is all just comic books and saturday morning cartoons and all the influences that that was and it's it's corny and it's it's cheesy and it is fun it's a little it's a little wonky it doesn't feel like the most um thought out game it does seem kind of like it does feel like throw it like bashing your action figures together a lot of the time but it's uh it's cool it's it's been nice to revisit yeah i recommend it if you can yeah ravens ravens dope and they of course did

3:29:51Dustin Furman:us proud with that wolverine game a few years later it's interesting looking at all the platforms it came to because it came to Xbox, Xbox 360, PC, PS2, PSP, Wii, PS3, and then Game Boy Advance, but no DS version. And now you could put the Game Boy Advance version in the DS. Right. And you can play it on one of the screens. Right. I just find that so interesting. And then, yeah, July of 2016, it was re-released on PS4 and Xbox One. I do not remember that. Marvel, I haven't, I always thought Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 being a Switch exclusive was weird.

3:30:26Chris G.:yeah yeah didn't seem to move the needle really either like no one really seemed to care no no one gave a shit it was way too late at that point like what are you doing that's crazy but yeah chris dark side of the moon wrote into us said hey guys i've been a police

3:30:42Dustin Furman:officer for 17 years and a violent gun crimes detective for 10 of those i've interviewed hundreds of suspects and obtained confessions from many of them these are the people who make the news for armed robberies, shootings, and murders. They come from all demographics and walks of life. I've also been an avid gamer my entire life. As a way of building rapport during interviews, I usually ask suspects whether they play video games and if so, what they play. Among those who do, the answer is almost always GTA V. Rarely do they mention any other games. I've played every GTA title myself, though I may skip the newest one.

3:31:12Dustin Furman:When I watched the trailer for GTA VI and saw Lucia and Jason walking into the convenience store with guns, I couldn't help but think of the real innocent story clerks in the bloody crime scenes I've investigated. I also thought about the suspects who will spend the rest of their lives in prison wishing they could play the next GTA. What do you make of this? I know correlation isn't causation. I'm two people saying that. And I don't believe violent video games should make violent people. Still, it's difficult for me to ignore this much firsthand experience. Should GTA and Rockstar bear some responsibility for this behavior?

3:31:40Dustin Furman:Or should we instead be looking at family, culture, socioeconomic factors, or society more broadly? Am I reading too much into this? What do you think? It's an interesting and thoughtful question, I think.

3:31:51Chris G.:i think yeah well good good well i was gonna say i i'm of the mind where if you are a violent person you're just going to be drawn to violent media anyway like that's just kind of the thing it's like yeah like of course you know i don't think it means anything like gta 5 sold a shit ton like an inconceivable how many units did grand theft auto 5 sell it's like 100 isn't it like 130 million or something it's like some absurd i feel like it's there's no way it's 200 right oh uh best-selling games wikipedia let me see if i can find it for you uh gta5 yeah 230 million 225 million yeah 230 million so it's just like nice that is just for context how many people are in the united states about 300 something million it's 330 i think yeah 330 so the likelihood's fucking high you're gonna run into somebody who has played GTA 5 in some way shape or form and I just think like yeah if you're I think normal people are into violent media as well but I think also like if you are violent you're all why wouldn't you fit in with the median like why wouldn't you also be a part of that and just maybe more so right um I really think it's that simple, honestly.

3:33:11Yeah, I am. I think things can convince almost anyone of anything.

3:33:17Dustin Furman:And I think when you like you're saying, like when you saturate a product in a society like GTA has been, it will find crazy people. Yeah, it will invoke into them something. It is up to the individual to be responsible. I look at it the other way, Dark Side of the Moon, where I'm like 230 million people. Right. Like you're saying. How many of them were convinced by GTA to do anything? exactly and it to me it says more like that actually the games are gta 5 in a way is a is actually proof that they're not or at least it suggests that they're not really affecting anyone because if they were then we would have like a murder spree on our hands every day of the fucking week everywhere that you can possibly look because look at all these people are playing gta so but i think your heart's in the right place in that it's almost like you're asking something different in my opinion which is why are we okay replicating this level of violence and i think that is a deeper and more interesting question like the video games reducing to combat which is what they do almost always in some way mario is a combat game right like all of it it is interesting yeah that's that's why i do really respect the games that tried and that try to do something different although they often resort or reduce down to the same things like a walking simulator or a puzzle game or something but at least at least it's not about murder and it's not because i'm i'm like oh i'm dying on my cross over here it's just because it's like yeah we are doing a lot of killing in in video games and i think that that is worth investigating why did we default to this as like the idea of elimination basically yeah it's interesting yeah when you think about the early games they didn't they weren't like that like pong was not or space war these kinds of games like it was it wasn't until and and it very quickly got there but what's the first what's the first one in your memory the galaga maybe yeah like i was thinking space invaders even something like yeah like something eliminatory for lack of a better term and and then we were like yeah we're just gonna do this and there are other ways to play the games like uh like score chasing obviously a racing game uh there's a million different like chips challenge and shit like that like there's all sorts of different things but it's like yeah that's that's the more interesting

3:35:41Chris G.:question i think it's engaging to i think competition is engaging and there is no more cut and dry form of competition than i killed you that's true you know there's no it's not like even the play pretend shit where it's just like bam i shot you it's like no you didn't and it's like no no you can't argue because you're dead you can't argue because you're literally i i the the computer told me that you're right yeah you're like i think it's it's the least it's the least you have to convey i like yeah i it is an interesting question i recently in the last episode i talked about that game that i was playing about like tidying up a library no combat in it at all right and it was uh interesting so i appreciate games that don't do it um or that don't default to combat mixtape was another one actually if people want if you want to get specific um mixtape had no combat in it as far as i remember so i like it when i like that we're able to kind of play with what a game is now and explore different avenues of like okay what is what does this really mean does it need to be combat does it need to be murdered does it need to be competition and uh it doesn't have to be i happen to like that version of what games are quite a lot i don't know why but it just yeah i mean i love shooting shit and killing shit and

3:37:03Dustin Furman:game like it it's i think it's important to stop once in a while and ask yourself why but i i wonder i wonder too if it gets to i wonder if there's something to it chris where there's a certain visceral brainstem style thing in us of like we grew up in a violent in violent environment and like games are this way to for us to get it out of us yeah in other words i want yeah i wonder if i like it actually creates like less crime

3:37:35Chris G.:i really think it's you know what's interesting about this is like i had this discussion a long long time ago and i even did a video about it if i if i recall correctly i can't remember what i called it but i was thinking about violence in in video games and like gears of war in particular i remember playing gears of war and trying to imagine what it looks like from the perspective of somebody just watching it right and gears of war when you're just watching it it's just violence it is literally it's just shooting people in the head their heads exploding uh chainsawing people uh you know it's it's all this incessant violence but then from the player perspective that's not really part of it at all like it's part of the accoutrements or whatever but like what the game really is about is it's about positioning and it's about outsmarting and it's about you know you yeah you use the chainsaw attack because it locks an animation in and you know that they can't do anything they can't they can't retaliate and so it's it i feel like a lot of these things really boil down to like how satisfying it is to strategize and and it really is less about violence it's just violence is the easiest way to convey victory or to convey defeat or you know like it's it just it reads immediately in our brains because we just know what violence is implicitly and so like i think that is really part of it because i'm whenever i play first-person shooters I'm literally genuinely never thinking about oh I just I'm not thinking about the violent aspect of it it's not because I'm desensitized to it or I'm not like or I'm putting a screen over it it's literally that that's not the satisfying part of it for me you know the satisfying part of like playing a Halo 3 multiplayer isn't shooting other people it's oh I bounced that grenade off the ground and did damage to your health in such a way that I could just i could hit you once with my gun and not waste any ammo and get you before you could even do any damage to me like i i i outsmarted you right and feeling smart is a really addictive feeling i think it's why social media does what it does by the way yes yeah everyone's trying to be clever feeds you the dumbest shit because it makes you feel smart and so you feel good in the way that you feel bad it's very it's nefarious but i don't know it's an interesting conversation i've i've thought a lot about this yeah what you're saying too chris it's what we

3:40:00Dustin Furman:it's a different angle because it's more about sexuality than violence but it's what we say about stellar blade sure like if you're watching that game from the outside it's about this like buxom hot korean chick but actually like it's not even really relevant to the game at all and you're not even really looking at her because it's third person so you're looking at all your surroundings so like yeah your your own interpretation of it will be different

3:40:20Chris G.:yeah there is no medium there's no medium that is more drastically different from uh well i guess you could argue sports too sports is one of those things like playing a sport and watching a sport is so different um obviously but from the perspective of like passive from the perspective of like two people relatively in the same environment participating in the same event like watching a video game and playing a video game are so monumentally far away from each other

3:40:45Dustin Furman:that it's actually crazy i think but final inquiry for us comes from john black says hey guys little big planet helped sell me a ps3 uncharted was the big game i wanted but little big planet was the one that felt made for me at that age it was weird creative approachable and easy to play with friends it even helped me convince my parents that a ps3 was worth buying that ps3 became a ps4 then a ps5 playstation became my default because sony reached me early with games i couldn't get anywhere else I understand why Sony is hesitant to fund smaller single-player or co-op games that may not sell millions of copies.

3:41:18Dustin Furman:They do not generate Fortnite money, move subscriptions overnight, or look especially impressive on an earnings report, but judging them only by immediate sales ignores their long-term value. Kids now grow up playing Fortnite, Roblox, and other free-to-play games available on nearly every device. If everything they love is already on phones, tablets, computers, and competing consoles, why would PlayStation ever become their default? Many smaller, kid-friendly, second-party exclusives might not be massive sellers, but it can help put a PlayStation in the house. More importantly, it can make a kid associate PlayStation with creativity, couch, co-op, and experiences they cannot get elsewhere.

3:41:50Dustin Furman:Those kids eventually become adults who buy consoles, subscribe to PS Plus, and build permanent digital libraries. What do you guys think? It's funny, man. Someone else wrote in this week. They used something I never heard before. I think that was called the doorman fallacy or something. Doorman, yeah. And I had never heard of this, but it's like, The doorman fallacy describes the mistake of defining a human role or process solely by its most basic visible function and replacing it with an automaton. And the guy basically was saying like the doorman opens the door. And so they look at this and they're saying, all right, we can just have automatic doors.

3:42:31Dustin Furman:But it's like, well, what about the guy that hails the cab for you? What about the guy that keeps the riffraff out? What about the guy that just makes you feel like you're seen and says hello to you? What about the guy that acts as a concierge and all that, you know, and directs you to the nice restaurant? There's all the shit you don't think of because you're so focused on the doorman and is like and that he opens the door. And it's a very similar thing here where. PlayStation might be losing the forest for the trees in a way with this, but I think the problem is, is that I don't. I think they've identified what I would agree with this is if it is what they've identified, which is I just don't think things operate like this anymore.

3:43:07like I don't think there's any investment really worth being going to think of Astro Bot Astro Bot is essentially for children it sold maybe 3 million copies it's

3:43:17Dustin Furman:Sony's most blatant approach to kids games since LittleBigPlanet and it didn't really mean anything and in fact I think it's a game of the year but that's adults that are gaming and are engaged the reality I think Chris is that I don't know that Sony can ever really win with these people and it's what I think makes them unusually susceptible on the market in the mid to long term because everyone uses their plays all these other games but there's just nowhere for them to be like it's part of the reason why I thought it was smart of Sony to invest so much money in games as a service like can you can you breach this but double A games like little games like LittleBigPlanet and I love that you called it a second party game very very good because Media Molecule wasn't owned by Sony during LittleBigPlanet 1 but um could they figure out a way to get this market back maybe but i don't think this market really matters i think that's just kind of the unfortunate reality people this is a major thing that i think people are struggling with with playstation is they just don't feel seen like they used to everything used to make someone like parap of the rap i made someone feel seen you know tokyo jungle made someone feel seen and i don't mean like oh this is like it makes me feel like it's me it's like no this is for you you you want to play tokyo jungle you want to play africa you want to play you know folklore and all that but it doesn't listen man like i'm sad about it it just kind of is what it is though so i like where your head's at but i don't think that's what that's what's going to make or break playstation anymore i think what's going to make or break playstation is can they can they remain the default so that when the kid the kid that plays fortnight the kid that plays rocket league and all these things he's just like yeah i play them on playstation that's about the most i think they can ask for at this point yeah it's just a

3:45:11Chris G.:different it's a different environment i think we so let me pull back i i think younger generations now have a lot more competing for their attention uh than we did and i'm younger i'm like you know i'm 32 but like you know um i i had like a little bit of social media and it's like infancy competing for my time and it really wasn't on my phone like it was college is when it was on my phone you know so like i didn't really get that um now it's different like you get like entire games accessible on your phone you get entire like you got an ipad from the second that you're born you have all these things like it's it's harder to get a playstation in a baby's lap than it is an ipad right you know so like i think that's really the problem is that like we we formed connections with these machines from a young age because there was it was simple it was the earliest technology that we could really interface with that was built for us in any real meaningful way that felt real like we had like fisher price bullshit or whatever, like, you know, like, Tamagotchis or whatever, but, like, the PlayStation was, like, that was, like, a real thing.

3:46:28Chris G.:That was, like, from... I remember when I got my game consoles, it felt like I was getting, like, a laptop. You know what I mean? Not necessarily specifically, but, like, the feeling of when I got my laptop was the same feeling that I got when I got, like, my first console. Like, this is an adult machine. Like, this is not a joke. And I just don't think younger generations have that because they've just always had that. and i just it's hard to compete you know if you're not first then you have to make a case to butt in um and i'm not even saying this is like oh young old man yells at clouds i just think it's like a genuine thing it's like playstation isn't the default for a lot of people because the the default is the internet the default is apps the default is scrolling now um and so that's that's the competition i don't think it matters about i i don't think having like games for kids necessarily matters.

3:47:23Chris G.:I think having good games matters and having a putting them out at a reasonable clip. I think that matters as well. But I think the I think the war that they're fighting is very very different than the one that we're envisioning because I think we're strategizing for an old battlefield. Indeed. Indeed. And I think

3:47:43Dustin Furman:yeah I don't know man. That's why I was saying earlier is like I think Sony has big problems. Yeah I really do. I just don't think there right now, but they're big and they're coming. They're on the horizon. And we'll I'll be very eager to see how they deal with them. I'll be here one way or the other. Maybe not. Maybe I'll die by then. I have no idea. All right, Chris. That's all we have for this episode of Sacred Symbols of PlayStation podcast. It was good to be here with you today. Any closing comments before we go?

3:48:11Chris G.:No, I mean, it's it's it's 153. I've got I'm going to be streaming Halo in about an hour with a friend of mine, Lyle. so lyle you know what's awesome about lyle's best friend is kyle i'm not even joking oh cool lyle and kyle so it's hysterical to me i was like you didn't do this on purpose i can't i don't believe you but yeah so that's gonna be probably the immediate probably gonna get some food haven't eaten yet but yeah because i woke up stupid early to play halo and not eat

3:48:43Dustin Furman:yeah well you're hungry you're a hungry boy you're a growing boy i'm 32 i did this yeah

3:48:48Chris G.:it's exciting i woke up at 8 a.m to play a video game that i've played a million times more that i wasn't even particularly excited for it and didn't eat what a life we live huh

3:48:59Dustin Furman:what a life um it's funny the name thing's funny but when i was growing up uh my my group my friend's group was mike cory cody and colin so that's a lot of c's yeah a lot of co's yeah what about you what do you got going on um i don't know it's in the 70s so i think i might like take advantage of that and go for a walk or something because it's nice and then i got to work out um and then i want to get back to gaming tonight and uh i'm trying to like maximize my gaming time because we're only like like i was saying earlier in reference to a letter is the nfl training camp begins next week so we're like getting we're like less than 50 days from the season beginning now and so i just know like my my life's going to be dominated by sports again soon because then hockey kicks back in and so I have a lot of free time right now and I want to try to really maximize it so that's what I think I'm going to do and yeah nothing too exciting otherwise alright my friend well it was good to be here with you today and always good to see you and your bright smiling face I hope you have a good rest of your day and enjoy Halo with Lyle and Kyle hope you all out there enjoyed our show as well it's always good to be here with you we appreciate your support on Sacred Symbols patreon.com slash lastdaymedia to support us if you'd like early ad free access and all the rest and lastdaymedia.store for merch.

3:50:10Dustin Furman:We'll see you next time. Until then, goodbye. Take care, guys. Sacred Symbols, a PlayStation podcast, is a product and trademark of Last Stand Media and Colin's Last Stand LLC and is proudly recorded in the USA. The show is conceived by, is written by, and is directed by me, Colin Moriarty. My co-hosts are Chris Raygun Maldonado and Dustin Furman. The show is produced by executive producer Dustin Furman. All of Last Stand's theme music is by my best friend, Ramon Narvaez. As you know, all of Last Stand's shows, including Sacred Symbols, are fan-funded on Patreon at patreon.com slash laststandmedia.

3:50:48Dustin Furman:The following names are at the producer level on Patreon, our highest tier, and we're grateful for your thoughtful and kind contributions to our independent endeavor. Thank you. Neil Amon, Ross Marenka, Morgan Ashley, Michael Vecchio, Daniel D 'Amour, Patrick Leslie, Donald John Vaders, Steve Innerfield, Smokeless Joe, Neo Sapien, El Sarutobi, Colin Davenport, Stephen Bonnell, Cuddy Black Sow, Sad Clam Man, Caffeine Addict, iMike0, Zman8601, Trench Goat, Brad Lohman, Kevin Young, J.P. Lynch, Sweet Gray Mane Jones, Orchard, Zen Red, Keith Richards, Anthony Acura, Eddie Smith, Denny Would Never, Uncharted Shinobi, WTF, Logan Little George, Emmanuel Perez, Brandon Runger, Zachary Wood, Brian Williamson, Vance Cody, Rallo, Gabe's New Gabe Cube, Dustin Spruill, Will Williams, Shane Brekke, Michael Mash Potato, Aaron Temple, Sweaty Magic, Lizard King, Nate Izod, Ellis, Albion, My Name is Mayo, Jason R.

3:51:52Dustin Furman:Zahn, Grayson Maxwell, Vega the Late, Whiskey Sin Relentless Rex The Fandom Traveler Jad Rita Terry Tip Double Duty Dirk Zach Cohen Peyton Stone Michael Buffel Dan Root The Shady Mailman Christopher Morgan Steven Glashen Josh Godfrey Sketch McGetch Betty Ann Moriarty Electric MD Tyler T Norse Nuts Omar Jake C Trey Woodward Antonio C Allen Einer Jay Getter Captain Verde Bjorn Campbell Jeff Mercado Weary San, Trayland, Zainal Yuichi, Gregory Slavinsky, Gus, Remington James, John Zyle, Boots, Alex LaPare, Saul Balcazar, The Brain Worm Starved and Died Only the Idiot Remains, Who is Stephen Day, Mr.

3:52:39Dustin Furman:Finkler, Matt Flowers, Joseph Baker, Kendrick Caius, Jimmy Rodriguez, Dave Alvarez, Chris Galvin, Mason Bichard, Ollie Fritz, Robert Schultz, Saqib Alam, Colin Love, Daryl E. Naaman, Toby Ryland, Stewie 108, W. Patrick Montgomery, Christopher Devayo, Chris Morton, Aaron Betke, Mark Liberto, Roto24, Jonathan Coates, Sean Mason, Josh Gravelick, Joseph Lopez, Kyle Johansson, Carlos Algorit, Sonny Sides Up, Joosh, Martin Beck, Gavin, Jerome Ferreira, Nathan R., Joe McPartland, Gary Cavallo, Christopher Moore, Dennis Uzel, quality of freak, Jonathan Cortez, John Schultz, Robert Byers, Anton K., Alan Tremblay, Ryan T.

3:53:26Dustin Furman:Mandel, Jean-Francois Forzy, Tony Zuniga, Shane Miller, Chris Ritchie, Alex Cabrera, Alexander Suarez, Simon Conception Jr., Anthony Vasquez, Jorge Pal, Cannonball Jones, Mr. Tom, Phil Crone, Throw7, Josh McKinney, Michael Gates, Alex Gates, Cam Wallace, Gio Corsi, Joey Gondaliger, Omar Rosa, Alex Monez, Justin Payne, Justin Wagaman, Austin Riley, Paul Joyce, Chad Lewis, Joshua Smallwood, Shane Rayum, Don Lee, John Cordero, Matthew Ash, Brad Cooley, Eric Pryor, Kyle Martin, and MadMocMedia.