#423 | I Swear To God, All I Do Is Cash Out

11:49Dustin Furman:Yeah. Well, that's why when I had Maddie on to talk about things last week at the audience's request, and I tweeted out actually likable physical games advocate. Mr. Maddie plays appears on secrets. Yeah, it's like some of the most unlikable people you've ever seen in your entire life. It's like, holy shit. unfortunate it's actually almost like sony is doing it you know like it's a total like it's it's totally fake they're on payroll yeah yeah it's like all right you guys we're gonna pay each of you each we're gonna identify 10 of you and we want you to be as annoying as possible

12:28Colin Moriarty:like brilliant metagame yeah sony's part and it's not even like i i honestly right now some of the like marketing foiling with the comments is fun and i kind of i kind of like that sticking it to the man to some degree guerrilla war like i like i described it but uh there's a lot of physical game advocates on physical game advocate violence going on a lot of some pocket watching even i

12:57Dustin Furman:would say oh yeah oh yeah that's that's common you're can you imagine when the ps6 comes out the amount of pocket watching that's going to be happening boy oh boy i'm gonna tell you real bad real bad it's gonna get extreme the because the ps6 will probably be so expensive too it's gonna be extreme levels of now of pocket watching some pocket watching i think is approved

13:19Colin Moriarty:because like there's examples of youtubers are like the switch to is so expensive i refuse to buy it and then they buy it and then they buy it then that's a good kind of pocket watching i say

13:27Dustin Furman:but sure well that's that's keeping people honest that's i i think chris and i had discussed this a couple weeks ago, or I'm like, I wish I have all these ideas that I'm way too lazy to do. Now we've been over this many times. I have, I'm a font of ideas, but am I going to do any of them? Absolutely not. And one of the, one of the ideas that I had was to just try to chronicle the most outspoken people about this in various outlets, and then just try to link up their PSN name to who they are and then just watch it, you know, and just, and just see. um but really i mean i understand people we'll talk about it more later but i understand people's consternation i totally get it but like yeah the unfortunately some of the worst advocates for the movement so that was that was very clear very early yeah to me but that's the way it goes sometimes um people busting your balls about it though what were they busting balls about with

14:23Colin Moriarty:with you not oh they weren't busting well they were busting my balls because people were busting

14:28Dustin Furman:radix balls oh right because he said something and then went and bought something but but he never really said yeah like people are putting words in his mouth as i recall i understand what

14:42Colin Moriarty:you mean yeah people are pointing to the fact that at one point he said like yeah let's keep the heat up or something yeah and then they lumped him in a like no physical no buy boycotter and it's like he never said that ever and yeah that's the type of pocket watching where i'm like you can i know i guess it may be hollow to some degree but you can you can be for the cause and not be like 110 you know but it wasn't enough and so i thought what happened not that it was like a crazy incident but the way people were treating radic was insane and that really kind of soured me on it. So it soured me on being outspoken at that moment where I was like, yeah, fuck this.

15:28Dustin Furman:Well, that's what I had said to the audiences. And it's not I'm not mad at the audience. Our audience are good people, but just a general ecosystem where I had said, like, the way people were talking to me, I had all these I had a huge plan to do this show. I was trying to line up where I was going to get a bunch of different people on and do like little mini interstitial interviews and stitch them together about the physical games, what we should do and all the rest of them. Like after the way people were talking to me and treating me, I'm like no no sorry not next so um we'll see what happens i'm sympathetic with you but not your tactics perhaps but i'm going yeah it sucks it's a tough one that to be gone i understood how you must have felt being gone but we probably got over it pretty quick yeah i was all right i mean

16:12Colin Moriarty:you must have been pretty personally sad about it oh yeah i still am yeah um and i know there's questions later so i don't want to get into it too much but like yeah it's definitely changed my perspective on certain things in the future of my gaming life the idea i've been talking about

16:29Dustin Furman:recently of settling yeah you know and where you might be yeah i understand that completely all right well it's sacred symbols like i said episode 423 each and every week we go live you can get us three days early and add free patreon.com slash last stand media like many thousands of you do We appreciate you. Five dollars a month is the sweet spot where most people are. And that gets you early ad free access to the show. The ability to submit your inquiries to the show and all the other shows in our network as well. Use the threads in the news feed each week. You can access to our discord. You can use RSS feeds and Spotify feeds so you don't have to even be in the app.

17:03Dustin Furman:We'll just send you your early audio if you'd like. And of course, Sacred Symbols Plus. We're going to do Halo, Campaign Evolved, Review Discussion and Spoiler Cast tomorrow from when we're recording. And that will go live this weekend. So please look forward to that. like I said earlier I had Mr. Matty plays on a good friend of ours obviously the co-host of our show Defining Duke the Xbox show on our network to talk about the physical game stuff because he is a physical games advocate and he's a sad man right now just like Dustin is did an episode with Lockmore that people really loved we're going to put that free for everyone I think soon but that's on Patreon right now had Tom from Wars Laws on to talk about PlayStation 6 Chris did a really great episode with COG about the future of Bungie and the death of Destiny.

17:47Dustin Furman:So check all of those things out as well. Sumo Joe 118 wrote in and said, Greetings, boys. With the upcoming PS3 and Vita store closures, I think it would be cool if we got a shopping list episode of Sacred Symbols Plus. Perhaps Colin and another PS3 expert in the LSM community could go through the store and find all the best and most obscure stuff that is worth checking out. I have some games in mind I want to get, but I'm sure there is tons of random shit on these stores I've never even heard of that deserve one last spotlight before they get wiped off the PSN forever. we'll do that next year i promise you we'll get there but that will that will have to wait the store is not closed it closes it closes in in a well they announced that i think it was a year and a half ahead what was it now maybe i'm getting now maybe i'm conflating it um let's see ps3 vita store playstation blog closure yeah i found it oh okay yeah july 27 on where you are right so unless you're in like certain latin american or middle eastern countries you still you have until july of next year so about a year from now so i will definitely do stuff for ps3 and psn on ps3 next year and i'm sure i'll do some let's plays and or like you know whatever sacred streaming stuff about it as well so fear not but it's not time yet for that who has time to worry about ps3 right now with all the games about to come out We're on the precipice of a deluge of games coming.

19:14Dustin Furman:So don't even worry about it. Sacred Streaming continues on Mondays, 1 p.m. Eastern time on our YouTube channel. I just did office hours last week, just talking to the audience, having a good time. Did the Power Wash Simulator one with the Star Wars Power Wash Simulator, which was fun. Just a job. That one I went off the fucking reservation on as well. I don't know if you... I added so much lore to the Power Washer. and some people thought I was like writing it and I'm like no you have to understand that I'm psychotic enough that this is just all coming up in my head and really I felt like I was I told Mike this I'm like I was kind of imbibing um fellow Long Islander Tim Dillon I think if you I don't know if you guys are into him or and but like he goes on these crazy stories and these rants that he does or whatever then I went back and watched him this and I'm like oh I think that like I was kind of subconsciously doing it so right that was fun it happens yeah that was a fun were you gonna say something Dustin I thought I might interrupt I saw a clip from the power

20:13Colin Moriarty:washer uh stream that was just like you talking but the hiss oh yeah yeah yeah that was well

20:20Dustin Furman:what was funny is that that I was like it's not that bad

20:27Dustin Furman:um let's see we already read that inquiry Joey Garcia wrote in and said hi gentlemen Colin this one's for you sacred streaming is great don't get me wrong can you please stop going silent for moments at a time it honestly feels like the stream froze or you dropped dead please ease my worry by gaining some weight and breathing uncontrollably into the microphone love you mean it now so now i just can't stop talking apparently i just have to keep talking i can't take any breaks that is part of it that's wonderful feedback thank you joey don't ever stop just talk for four hours i'll tell you those four hours go I'll buy pretty quick though for me anyway.

21:05Dustin Furman:Like it doesn't feel like I'm on for that long. Right. It's madness. Because you're silent for 10 minutes. And people say those are long streams and they are long streams, but it's like it doesn't feel like it's that big of a deal. Is it because you're silent for 10 minutes at a time? Right. I'm really collecting my thoughts. That's right. Yeah. That's a good point. Merch. Lastdaymedia.store. T-shirts, sweatshirts, hats, whatever. You know, the drill. If you're interested. All right. some topics of discussion, Dustin, we will get back into your parenthood in a moment, but we have a couple of inquiries to get out of the way.

21:38Dustin Furman:First, demons rage wrote in and said, what's up, sacred slitties? Colin, you said the phrase Boku bucks twice recently. I always thought it was Boku bucks. Can anyone settle this one? I can't can't speak to what the nomenclature is, but Boku is French for a lot. Yeah. And so I always thought and it's Boku. So I always thought it B-E-A-U-C-O-U-P is Boku. And so I always thought when someone said Boku bucks, that's what they meant. See, I grew up hearing Buko bucks. So am I just wrong that like I just assumed it was the French word for a lot? I would imagine it's a phrase that a lot of people have just butchered and different versions of it have become the default for various places.

22:27Would be my assumption.

22:28Dustin Furman:yeah because he's nothing really right he spells it in his letter b-o-k-u and b-o-o-k-u and i'm like that's not how i've ever seen it in my mind's eye i've seen it as the french word boku so i don't know what the etymology is i could look it up very easily yeah we won't but i won't i'm not going to know my favorite thing is having the opportunity to correct yourself and just that yeah it's like it's like a little nostalgic you know like it brings you back to like 2005 or whatever where you couldn't just google the answer to any question that you had by pulling your phone out the best i like it you live it live in the mystery you know there was so much mystery back then wasn't there there really was yeah it's all gone now all the joy and mysticism is gone like you know what's reality now someone brings up like an actor and it's like what's that guy's name and then someone figures it out they look up a movie and then they go to the filmography and then they find them in there.

23:24Dustin Furman:It's like if you ask that in 1988, no one would know. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know who you're talking about. There's no way for me to find out. You won't remember. So we're kind of at an impasse. Everything. We're all at an impasse at all moments of every single interaction that we're having. It's a great time. Get your tickets now for the Dog Stars. Let me go home.

23:51Colin Moriarty:It's no surprise how fast civilization can disappear. Go! Out there. Just kill or be killed.

23:57Dustin Furman:Jacob Alordi. There are people out there. They need our help. Josh Brolin.

24:01Colin Moriarty:Shoot first and inquire afterwards.

24:04Dustin Furman:Margaret Qualley.

24:05Colin Moriarty:Ow! Okay, tough guy.

24:06Dustin Furman:And Guy Pearce. Arm up! The Dog Stars. Directed by Ridley Scott. In theaters August 28th. Get tickets now. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parents. Sacred Symbols is sponsored by Shopify, a company that helped transform my very own Last Stand Media's thriving merch operation and which could help you get your e-commerce initiative off the ground too or strengthen what you're already doing. Learn more for yourself right now at shopify.com slash sacred. So as you probably already know, Sacred Symbols is the flagship of Last Stand Media, my delightful podcasting empire. And since the very beginning, we've had merch.

24:40Dustin Furman:But a few years ago now, we decided to take our merch up entirely in-house, a daunting and challenging task that had no guarantee of success. Quite the opposite, it actually seemed kind of crazy, at least at the time. But among all the stuff we had to figure out internally, sourcing, pricing, funding, storage, and all the rest, we had a companion that made things so much easier, more fluid, and more effective for us. And that partner is Shopify. Shopify Storefront is a major reason we found success, because it takes care of so much for us, allowing us to streamline our operation, meet our customers where they are, and worry about a whole lot less than we thought we'd have to consider, as we went down this merch-laden road.

25:16Dustin Furman:Fast forward a few years, and our merch represents the fastest-growing segment of our larger business, contributing a substantial amount to the bottom line. One thing I especially love about Shopify is that it makes it comically easy for our customers to check out what the items they want, something you kind of take for granted after like 30 years on the internet of filling in endless fields over and over again. In a novel approach, Shopify actually centers the customer, can you believe it? It's basically one-tap shopping, the likes of which you'd see at major retailers, but scaled to your own operation.

25:47Dustin Furman:It's awesome. And since Shopify handles so much for us, it allows me to actually focus on continuing to grow my business as opposed to being perpetually stuck in the weeds, which any fellow business owner can completely understand. There's a reason millions of businesses around the world rely on Shopify, because it's rad. Are you next in line to see what they can do for your enterprise? With Shopify, nothing stands between your idea and a real business, so go make it one. If you're ready to stop putting off your business and start hearing, then you're ready for Shopify. Start your free trial at Shopify.com slash sacred today.

26:20Dustin Furman:That's S-H-O-P-I-F-Y.com slash S-A-C-R-E-D. You heard that right. Start your free trial today at Shopify.com slash sacred. That's Shopify.com slash sacred. Big dumb stupid idiot wrote in and said, hey, CDC, Colin, have you gone woke? Meeting with your congressman's team to discuss regulating how companies treat our digital goods. What's next? dyeing your hair blue and joining the neighborhood watch the snitch to the hoa i don't look at the hoa as a liberal organization where has our libertarian father gone you used to give ran paul the gawk gawk soul sucker you've gone full bernie sanders the audience deserves answers um all right so two things about this first of all is that i am meeting with my congressman's team uh in a couple weeks in their office uh and i'm looking forward to it actually i don't know if this is a good idea, but I was thinking about doing a stream where we try to put the, like, the deck together or like, what, like, what should I say?

27:16Dustin Furman:Like, what, what are the things that we should, and we should like crowdsource it and see like, how do I use this time? If they give me 20 minutes or 30 minutes or whatever they give me, I don't know. What's the most effective way to communicate this? Are they just placating me? Probably, but maybe not. I messaged them in mid-July and I never reached back out again. And then it took them three weeks, but they did get back to me. So my assumption is that they get all these things, they collect, they collect them, and then they figure out how they should use their time.

27:47Dustin Furman:I don't know that my visit will be very useful, but it is my hope that... So I researched... The congressman in my district is a Republican, and he's been the congressman for, I think, seven or eight terms or something like that. He's on... Congress, for me, well, Congress for me, Congress for all congressmen is like kind of compartmentalized where like you're on different committees, right? He's on like the armed services committee, which is like a mega powerful committee and like a few other things, but he's not on like the tech committee or the engineering committees or anything like that. It is my hope that I can kind of deliver this message and be like, listen, there, there are a few things.

28:22A, I think it's going to require congressmen

28:27Dustin Furman:from outside of the districts where these companies are. I was saying how like logically you'd want to talk to someone like Ro Khanna or someone from Silicon Valley or someone like that. But it's like, no, those guys are like kind of in the pockets of these companies. You need like outside congressmen that have really no skin in the game so that no company in their district is going to be affected. So that's that's the first thing I was going to say to him. The second thing, though, that I think is even more pertinent is. who's your who are your friends in Congress you know who are the can you give this to someone or bring this to someone's attention that would be able to do something with it and the third thing I think is that what I'm saying is just manifestly true and obvious and it would be pretty smart to be on the on the front end of this I think like I am confident that this will happen I don't think it's going to be me that does it but I'm going to try to make something happen but I do think that like the era of like the the the ownerless digital ecosystem it's on its last legs there's no way so and whether it happens here or in europe it's going to happen in one of those places and it will force them to and frankly it's probably going to be europe as we've said and then it'll force them to change everywhere so all right so that's that so i'm looking forward to doing that and i'll report back as far as libertarianism is concerned i do not understand when people say this I have always and still and remain a very socially and personally libertarian person I believe you should be able to dress how you want act you know within reason you don't want to be like hurt anyone with the way you act or anything like that but like do whatever you want I don't give a fuck what you do I don't I don't know how much more I can wear that on my sleeve I also don't know how I can wear on my sleeve how much I hate businesses how much I actually hate free market capitalism, how I think free market capitalism has hollowed the United States out, hollowed its working class out, made us seemingly richer because we can buy cheap things on Timu, but made it so that we make nothing, that these companies are beholden to no one and that they need to be brought to heel.

30:32Dustin Furman:I've been saying this for years, years on this show and everywhere else. I'm the one who believes in tariffs. Does that sound very libertarian? It's the antithesis of libertarian. It's literally government control of the economy, which I believe in. Like I am not a free marketeer. I don't know how many more times I can say it. I believe in capitalism. I believe capitalism has been bastardized and needs to be reined in. And if the companies need to be brought to heel by government interference, then so be it. I don't give a fuck. You know, I have no I love the I love the products that these companies do.

31:18Dustin Furman:I have I don't have any love for the companies who care. So I don't I'm I'm confused by that feedback. You guys probably see that feedback about me, too, where it's like what Colin says is liberal. I'm like, I've never you have never heard me make an argument for a libertarian economic policy ever you've never heard me say it never because i don't believe it i've never i don't right that is the simplest explanation it's like free markets look around one day at the fucking burnt out industrial towns around the united states and tell me how much i really like free market capitalism and what it's done most i think it's cool free markets that's how we should start saying it now just totally yes you like the free market oh you like the you like the free market oh my god that takes the job out of your out of your out of your hometown and then and then gives it to someone in a third world country for fucking 10 cents an hour that's been good for you hasn't it yeah so um but at least i can go on timu and buy cottons for ten

32:36Dustin Furman:we're gonna be breaking out the free market voice i think in the future the free market

32:44that's a great shorthand oh you do the free market voice that's good stuff i am yeah i don't think people understand that like you could be any you can be a there's a gradient of capitalism and i believe that a business that doesn't a

33:03Colin Moriarty:spectrum right and i know all about a spectrum yeah there's a few spectrums i know about and

33:09Dustin Furman:i am of the mind and chris and i have talked about this no doubt we've we've all talked about this is like a business that doesn't exist for the benefit of the people is a business i don't give a fuck about like make your money be as gratuitous as you want whatever but the second that you start like the second that the customers and what they think doesn't matter the question it's like no i don't think so you can be thrown out you can be thrown into the garbage with the rest of them as far as i'm concerned i don't i haven't i have no i don't look at there's like the sanctity around like you know american commerce and business and i'm like no i mean they're great firms and we have an amazing economy and we invent great things here um but these companies are do whatever they want who who brings them to heal if not us they just do whatever they want that's it because it's the flea market yeah big dumb big dumb stupid idiot name checks out thanks for writing in it's crazy all right cody frost wrote in and said hey c and c and possibly d i was going to write in saying we should all bet on when dustin would return from his paternity leave, but I saw another comment saying Dustin was back this week.

34:23Dustin Furman:If that's true, then welcome back to the grind, Dustin. As a paying customer, I greatly appreciate what you do in your role as producer. As a layman, I'm not sure what that even means exactly, but I can tell it's important based on what was missing in your absence. If Dustin isn't back, then I think we should all bet on when he'll return. I'll take the episode airing September 4th to all have a great one. Yeah, good bet, Cody. He's back right now. And the thing is, is that I wouldn't have read this, I don't think if he was back. So it's a little a little bit of a weird end to your inquiry. But nonetheless, Dustin.

34:55Dustin Furman:What was missing in your absence? I mean, maybe I should even be asking Chris this.

34:59Colin Moriarty:Yeah, what was missing?

35:00Dustin Furman:I thought we did a pretty good job. Yeah, I don't know. It's where the shows as long. I don't know. They were like within. They were like three, 45, 40, 30. Probably. I feel like I remember people complaining about like, this isn't as long. but i feel like but people meme about that too so like i don't know how genuine that is because that's a bit of a that's a bit of a joke right exactly they'll just they'll meme both sides of it so that i don't know what anyone wants and i just eventually put a gun barrel to my fucking head you know what i mean yeah it's a very smart way to be as a consumer just confuse the fucking fuse the fuck out of the people delivering you the product uh yeah i don't know I mean Dustin it was was gone so he would have and presumably well I actually don't know like were you listening at all were you like jumping in I would listen to like out of curiosity

35:53Colin Moriarty:yeah like a few segments here and there but something missing I mean I I don't know I'm curious about the episode length though like we need someone to do the stats on this because I was looking at and I was like I really don't think these are any shorter or longer when I'm not here on average now yeah we did right before i left come off of a six hour episode from summer game fest right right so yeah of course that was longer but that was circumstantial so someone can crunch numbers put that in your fucking clod code to figure out uh you know spend a couple gallons of water on that they'll be um but yeah missing in my absence as in terms of production stuff i feel like I mean you guys would know better than me but I feel like Locke and Jimmy just did

36:42Dustin Furman:fantastic oh yeah they did a great job like yeah they did no no there were no hiccups that broke through that I became aware of them when I was gone I don't know of anything that really maybe something went wrong but I if it was it was hidden from me but uh which is good I don't really want to know better than me then yeah I don't want to know anyway just figure it out um yeah everyone lock and jimmy did a great job and actually it is it is worth noting that and and i'll wait to i haven't really i haven't talked to dustin about this at all it's like i do i think want to incorporate lock into this show as a produce like an active producer um i don't know and we won't do anything about it anytime soon until dustin's back full time with like everything we wrap our minds around some other things we need to do but i feel like dustin was supposed to be the producer of the show, but he's kind of an active participant.

37:36Dustin Furman:I want everyone focused on the show, but it'll be nice to have someone like, I don't even know how it would look Dustin or how we would do it, but like, even like live switching, you know, trying to like do certain things to kind of up the production value of the show. And I had mentioned this the last week and a lot of people wrote in saying like, I want to be that producer. I want to be that producer. I appreciate people reaching out. I've gotten back to all of you. the reality is that I have the idea of who I would want in that role like I said and I'll just be honest with you I wouldn't just put some random person on sacred symbols that I didn't know it's too risky but that's kind of like where my mind is on it I want to try to you know keep things moving a little bit you're doing the old school Sony approach of like you know we've worked with these guys for a while right let's bring them on right that's very yeah well higher outward well well put i don't know i don't know any you cretins you fucking fucking weirdos cretin is such a funny word it is a good one he's fucking cretins um but yeah i appreciate everyone everyone reaching out i like your go-getterness that's what you gotta do it's not always gonna work it's often not gonna work but that's the shit that that does work but um not this time loom doom ronin said dustin it's great to have you back as you said on summon sign your son is becoming more active and it is getting harder to game like you were in the first few weeks of his life are there any games you're envisioning that may be able to fit your schedule as becomes more and more active god bless dude i'm very happy for you and holly and oh i hope colin and chris are doing well too i guess thank you for that that's very nice of you yeah so gaming behaviors i guess are already changing you were saying yeah um for the time being yeah it's like i said it

39:32Colin Moriarty:changes from week to week the first three weeks were i don't want to say like oh it was easy but it was certainly easier than the weeks that followed in terms of like that's when i was able to fully complete Dragon Quest in the matter of two and a half weeks, which for how long that game is, is, you know, pretty good.

39:52Dustin Furman:Yeah, that's like some that's like summer vacation shit. I love that.

39:54Colin Moriarty:Yeah. Yeah. Because it was just a lot of times Holly, because she has to get up to feed him, was mostly getting up in the night to feed him. So my job was to like, OK, try to sleep as much as you can, because once 5 a.m. or so or 6 a.m hits you're on until like noon so that's when and for the most part leon was pretty sleepy at that point so it's like i'm just chilling with him in the living room all he's asleep what else am i gonna do play games which is why i went to some of those backlog games it's like it's not easy to just slip in a game like dragon quest in this environment so uh but now more recently um he he's a little more awake a little more fussy like around this time which is i guess it's like six seven weeks they have like different growth spurt periods where like he's just like hungry constantly all the time which is mostly not my thing because holly's breastfeeding him but i still need like holly is basically captive to this baby for sometimes three or four hours at a time because it'll just be like on off on off for a very long time so i was joking on summon sign about there's those people that for from software games like not having a pause is a disability feature because i need to be able to pause the game for my kid right i'm like i'm like i kind of i get it i don't support it because i'm just like well i can't play a from software game right now because I need the ability to pause the game it's if you look at my steam uh like games like Yakuza the first one the amount of hours on it are astronomical because you just start playing and then it's like okay I gotta pause to help him out and then it just cascades into a million things I'm like oh my game has been on for six hours on pause just without me realizing so yeah

41:55Dustin Furman:it's funny like the last person who cares about your kid is Miyazaki oh yeah no easily yeah yeah like no there's probably no one that cares less about your child than him so keep that

42:07Colin Moriarty:in mind keep that in mind so yeah as of right now uh i'm still probably able to game more than normal but it just it'll change eventually he's going to be awake for much longer periods and she's going to be crawling around and then you got to like really watch him because he can't go or do anything i know he's just he's he's stuck wherever he is in this moment it's so interesting

42:34Dustin Furman:i'm i'm fascinated by like anthropologically this comes up every once in a while it's just like the way like pre-modern like you know cavemen lived we'll never know like it's unknown it's totally unknowable you can kind of garner some hints or whatever in the record but i i'm fascinated by them with children because like humans are uniquely helpless like uniquely helpless a deer comes out of the bait like out of the mom and like can walk you know i mean like it's it's kind of crazy when you think about it whales gestate for a year and a half and and the baby is like quite sophisticated when it comes out but like puppies are smarter than humans when they're you know of equivalent weeks it's hysterical and then suddenly like the dog just stays still like two years old and then the the kid keeps progressing but i'm so fascinated by these primitive peoples taking care of such a delicate thing and understanding and knowing how to do it and all the rest i mean obviously they figured it out but yeah it's interesting that that and like

43:42Colin Moriarty:you know there's been a few times where holly like we've been at my parents house and they don't have air conditioning she's like really concerned about him being too hot or something like dude there's people that have babies in deserts right and i'm not saying that's a good thing or like you know it's probably not good in a long-term situation but i'm like he's going to be fine to be a little a little warmer for a few hours your parents don't have ac so they have their house doesn't have probably yeah central air right so they have to have wall units and so their living room doesn't really have it's it's toastiest in their living room yeah i i i know

44:18Dustin Furman:many houses like that because yeah in many houses like that it's like you're most worried about your

44:21Colin Moriarty:bedroom and like some other places the bedrooms have it and the kitchen so uh but yeah it's babies are it's funny you bring up the dog thing because we brought that up with with frisk a lot that i'm like frisk enjoy this while it lasts yeah you you interact with me and understand me and can see me but like a baby he can't even really see you yet he's kind of trying now like i you get a little guidebook with your baby which i thought was kind of funny i'm like i don't get a

44:53Dustin Furman:guidebook with a video game but i do for a baby on the way home um and it's like if your baby's

44:58Colin Moriarty:going cross-eyed it's nothing to be concerned about like occasionally cross-eyed it's because he's trying to focus because his eyes aren't developed yet interesting so he's starting to do a little more cross-eyed now like when you get close to him he's like you can tell he's like really focusing try to figure things out but it's too stupid not for a little boy little boy you will grow strong little boy um and holly's uh obviously like you've already brought her up several times but doing well hanging in there yeah she has done exceptionally well because we did have a planned c-section um which dude a c-section is crazy um like a planned c-section it's so fast i remember you i got like scrubbed up and they took holly back to do like the the drugs like the anesthesia or stuff she did wasn't under for it but she couldn't feel anything basically from like her shoulders down and so they took her back and they're like then we'll we'll bring you back once she's ready to start the surgery um and so when they they went to bring me back and i texted my parents i'm like okay i'm going into the surgery room at 10 42 he was born at 10 52 so like it was like super fast baby's out um kind of freaky thankfully one of the main things people told me before the plan c-section was like don't do whatever you do don't look on the other side of the curtain like don't do it thankfully i didn't because i was just not interested in in seeing holly's guts completely uh on the table fucking distressing yeah but uh she she did so well she like immediately after the surgery was like eating that night she was getting up to go to the bathroom like the nurses were like wow you're doing really really well um holly's never been a person that's been very good at low sleep but like the mom mode has kicked in uh and she's just working super hard i'm super proud of her she's doing great yeah the

47:07Dustin Furman:women's body woman's body just gets fucking abused in this process it's yeah it's and that's true with you know all you know animals basically but it's it's it's crazy how much it like the woman is so much relies on the woman not only to obviously carry the baby and then how you get the baby out and then breastfeeding and the fucking sleeping and the and that crazy and the diet and oh yeah oh yeah it's it's a lot man yeah well yeah that's a lot it's really really there's really no better way to put it man it is so what c-sections like they make me so like i'm angry thinking about it because it's just like it's so distressing the idea like when i learned what it was and like how they do it i'm like this is fucking barbaric yeah i mean there's no better way to do this really we put a man on the moon there's no better way to do this um i don't know it's just upsetting i get it obviously it's science but like holy shit

48:04Colin Moriarty:i was pretty nervous when we were leading up because you have to get to the hospital super early they're like doing all these checks and stuff i was like kind of like you know like standing there pacing around a little bit like okay let's i just let's do this right and holly's talking in there says like oh i'm here for the ride i'm excited and i don't know if she was just like in denial in that moment but then during the surgery of course holly was really freaked out because it's like i from i was on the other side with her and it was like you could see like her body like it was like her of the lower half of her body was in a washing machine because they're moving around they're trying to do things as quick as possible um and it's crazy too because the nursing staff like at one point when they were getting holly ready they were like one of them was like talking about doing an escape room over the weekend which is like another monday yeah

48:52Dustin Furman:nurses or nurses are psychopaths with that shit i i i you know i dated a nurse back in the day and they are they like it is they are very she was an er nurse so it's like they were very they have to be you know like almost desensitized to the to the nth degree i was always it's funny you say that i was always fascinated by that too i'm like you don't want them freaking out the way that you would though you know like so it's it's it's it's good that they're not but it is disturbing that they are not also like that's a level of familiarity with uh with uh that type of activity where it's just like oh this has got to be something wrong maybe not that maybe nothing that would manifest in anything outwardly negative or anything but like there's definitely something wrong with you you know like on some level have you ever seen the video it's like a video of like a like a like a lecture hall in a college classroom and i think it's for people that are pre-med or something like that and it's just shots of them like the first day of some class they just show the most graphic shit to them and it's shots of them like some of them being like walking out and be like basically the whole idea is like if you can't deal with this like you got to go like it's like almost the first thing we need to know about you is like you can't be here unfortunately that they do that at on at what school is it like it was like pre-med for like like it was like a symposium of like you know people that were like you know beginning their journeys on this on this path and so okay but it was just shots of instead of seeing the fronts of the classroom it was just them so like you could see all the responses and like and like some people are like like leaning forward like eyes wide open some people are just like normal some people are like hands in the faces some people are literally getting their

50:38Colin Moriarty:stuff and leaving somewhere like don draper with the cigarette yeah exactly like oh yeah and i was

50:44Dustin Furman:like that is pretty that is a pretty good thing to do at the very beginning just to be like let's just get this out of the way it is good this is the inevitable conclusion of where you're going so i couldn't i couldn't do that i don't consider myself a squeamish person necessarily but like i'm good i'm good on that yeah i don't i i'm i'm gore and violence and viscera doesn't bother me at all because it's fake like we've talked about this in the past where i'm like it's fake like if you're watching like halloween or you're playing dead space something like it's fucking fake but the shit but when you see like when i was younger and i saw you see like iraq like i've said like i the one of the things that was like most startling to me was seeing a beheading video when I was younger and I was like fuck you know and like and when you know it's real that to me is a totally different thing and I don't want to see that you see like the results of every once in a while like some horrible mass shooting and you see like the results and it's just pools of blood everywhere and I'm like it's fucking horrible like I don't want it's different than playing Gears of War you know like I don't see them as the same and some people do so I appreciate that respect that what if when we died we went back into the womb oh i don't like that

52:02Colin Moriarty:like a restart or you're going back into your mother's womb i don't even know like a reincarnation

52:09Dustin Furman:yeah maybe you're going back in your mother's womb i think that's more disturbing if i have to do this again i'm someone's gonna hear about it yeah like yeah you gotta be fucking kidding that would piss me off but i think we i had a conversation with somebody a long time ago I was like, what if I can't remember what the premise was, but the idea that like you have like you're born with all the knowledge of your previous life, but that it like slowly fades away over like hours. Yeah, that's that's interesting. Yeah. Oh, that would be that's an interesting idea. And you can't communicate any of it because your muscles, your muscles are still, you know what I mean?

52:45There's nothing's developed. Horrifying.

52:49Dustin Furman:Reincarnation is an interesting one. I hope that a lot of things are true that I don't necessarily believe. Like, I hope we all go to heaven and we see the people we love. I would love that. I hope we don't get reincarnated. I don't want to be reincarnated.

53:03Colin Moriarty:It's a really bad lottery. Yeah. Like, what have you won this time? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You could be like, I don't know, the food for parasitic wasps or something like that. Yeah. Like, the thing is, though, the heaven thing, though, is like, are you seeing all the people that you love or are you seeing all the people that love you? That's a good. because there's people that love me that i i believe i could do without you in my heaven to

53:28Dustin Furman:be quite i personally believe chris we've talked about this before on the show in some context maybe it's on constellation back in the day i believe that if heaven exists it is astral projection in other words like you are you are not with the people like you build your own kind of right like because it was what i was saying like we all have to agree like i don't want to be in your heaven right like you like some person you're like i don't want to be in your so but i have to be present because you want me there it's like you can have me there but it's some sort of projection of me like if your biggest fan was like a bjork stalker kind of guy and their heaven was you right like i don't want to be tied to this you know i didn't i didn't sign up for this at all what would be funny is if that was hell right yeah i mean that would be like hell oh hell is you being subservient to someone else's heaven right that's a that's an awesome concept yeah I like that a lot.

54:20Yes.

54:21Dustin Furman:Yes. We write that down. Yeah. Write that down. That'll be another thing. I don't do anything with it. Yeah, exactly.

54:30Dustin Furman:Just another idea. I won't do anything with. All right. Get your tickets now for the dog stars.

54:39Colin Moriarty:It's no surprise how fast civilization can disappear. Out there. Kill or be killed.

54:46Dustin Furman:Jacob and Lurdy. There are people out there. They need our help. Josh Brolin.

54:50Colin Moriarty:Shoot first and inquire afterwards.

54:52Dustin Furman:Margaret Qualley.

54:53Colin Moriarty:Ow. Okay, tough guy.

54:55Dustin Furman:And Guy Pearce.

54:56Colin Moriarty:Arm up.

54:57Dustin Furman:The Dog Stars, directed by Ridley Scott. In theaters August 28th. Get tickets now. Rated R. Under 17, not a minute without parents. Let's see. Anything else? Yes, one more. Trevor Cannon wrote in said, hey, fellas, wanted to circle back to a topic that comes up from time to time on the show, especially now that Dustin is back. Maybe he'd want to chime in. How do Sacred Symbols listeners balance gaming with life, work, and kids? The conversation always seems to come back to not having enough time. I'd like to offer a different perspective. For me, it isn't really about time. It's about having enough energy.

55:24Dustin Furman:By the time I get home from work, play with the kids, make dinner, and get everyone ready for bed, I'm completely exhausted. The last thing I'm thinking is, yeah, let me go get my ass kicked by a boss for an hour before I go to bed. It's something I've really been struggling with because I genuinely want to game. I just don't have anything left in the tank by the end of the day. To all my fellow gaming parents out there, I feel you. I wouldn't trade being a dad for anything, but I wanted to bring this up because this conversation usually centers around not having enough time. I don't think that's always the real issue.

55:46Dustin Furman:Dustin you're gonna have things to figure out I think if Trevor's comment there's any indication yeah months and years to come certainly and I'm definitely in a

55:57Colin Moriarty:a privileged position with this in that I work from home and I can dedicate parts of my workday to playing games as needed for the show but I can relate to at my previous job and even sometimes on this job when we're during our crunch period like before we go on holiday where we're recording I'm editing and doing all this stuff where it's like at the end of the day you're like I my brain is so fried that I can't even play a game I just need to watch this like something dumb on YouTube so I totally get that and uh yeah I'm assuming with kids it is infinitely worse uh because kids require a lot of energy so i i don't have any advice or solutions i'm not quite there yet to go to speak on that but i can i can imagine not wanting to fight the tree sentinel after uh after working nine to five and then uh playing with your kids yeah yeah yeah we'll be checking in do you do you guys want to keep going have you you're kind of early in it now i mean but We're kind of early.

57:12Colin Moriarty:Holly's already thrown it out there. So probably we have a lot. You're supposed to wait like a year and a half in between. I want you guys to.

57:21Dustin Furman:Let's see here. If you. I want you to have Irish babies because I think that would be funny as fuck. But it's kind of tough at this point to do. If you have sex, let's get you on this calendar for sex. Let me pull up my calendar. Let's get you on the calendar for sex. Let's call it April of 2027. Right. So April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December. Yeah, maybe. So maybe May. Let's say mid-May you have sex. June, July, August, September, October, November, December, January, February. You could do it, I think. And then you have another and then you immediately conceive again.

58:06Dustin Furman:And then that kid comes out in like December. We're cooking. You don't want that. Now we're cooking.

58:12Colin Moriarty:you don't want that no no no no yeah you don't want a december birthday no no dagan has one too

58:20Dustin Furman:yeah then yeah yeah let me tell you like you were yeah it's too close it sucks but again we're not worried about that what we're worried about is that can we get these two kids in the same calendar year and that's all we can that's all we can that's all you give a shit about yeah you just don't care about how it'll affect him at all yeah merry christmas here's a ripoff i'm sorry please no no go ahead i was just gonna say my my parents you know especially like irish families like irish american families were known to be like you know have lots of kids like my dad's one of six for instance or whatever and my parents would tell stories about people they knew that had like multiple sets of irish twins right like where they did it more than once and it's like holy shit that's that's so fucking crazy like people with literally 11 12 13 kids it's like damn you don't work on a farm it's not futile fucking europe yeah but nonetheless slow down yeah dude i've been thinking about people that have like

59:20Colin Moriarty:not only twins but triplets and and beyond i don't know how you do it like god bless yeah anyone who has multiple kids at the exact same time yeah the triplets thing imagine mike

59:33Dustin Furman:and i talk about how if we were to have kids like i wouldn't mind having twins right away i think it would be really difficult obviously yeah but like you just kind of do it all at once efficient right like i said the exact same thing i'm all about the efficiency actually i just went to the dentist last week and they were like oh this filling is getting a little old we should replace this filling they're like since you're doing this filling i guess you could just do this other filling too we'll probably have to replace it in a couple years i'm like yeah let's just fucking yeah whatever you gotta do like yeah just let's just do it you know and so but then we were saying like so what if you have a kid and then you have a second kid and then they're the twins and it's like oh man then you get owned

1:00:13Dustin Furman:it could happen and triplets that's scary shit yeah that's truly i never knew what i never knew in-person triplets i knew plenty of twins my my answer twins my mom's sisters but um yeah i've so it's in that's the thing is that it's i guess it's in my blood like i there is some chance like material chance that it'll happen

1:00:35Colin Moriarty:but yeah yeah i don't know what was crazy the the right around the week he was born in the same hospital there were four sets of triplets born in the same week wow that's because uh and we noticed they're not obviously not allowed to talk about other patients but we noticed that we the care we got was incredible 10 out of 10 shout out west pen hospital shout out and shout out to the west pen uh hospital but we noticed at points they were a little frazzled being that there were uh 12 babies that is kind of crazy yeah the fuck is in the water over there yeah i'm getting three feeling it it's crazy it's that lake it's that lake erie

1:01:21Dustin Furman:water yeah benongahela is that the river that's one of them yeah so they make iron city beer out of iron city have you ever had iron city i don't think so it's horrible it's bad oh is it like is

1:01:35Colin Moriarty:it like piss water yeah there's there's iron city and iron city light but they make a mangover variety of iron city that's fantastic oh cool little mango light beer sounds really fucking gay yeah it sounds good but it's very good that's all right though it's 2026 yeah it's for the boys you're allowed to be gay we're gonna allow it all right my boys let's be gay with the news together

1:02:08Dustin Furman:oh there are a few things to uh talk about a few big news items one thing that happened this morning though that i wanted to uh to start with is this psa that grand theft auto 6 everyone's crying about grand theft auto 6 when are we going to see grand theft auto 6 i really don't understand people's anxiousness on seeing it i'll be perfectly honest with you i think i personally i'll just reiterate i think it's actually exciting something about just refusing to show it but But anyway, they are going to show it. An extended look premieres on Netflix Thursday, August 27th at 3 p.m. Eastern time. So there'll be a extended premiere of Grand Theft Auto 6.

1:02:48Dustin Furman:I'm sure they'll get into all of it. Now, for people that are freaking out, and a lot of people are in the inquiries, there is more information, but we'll get to the inquiry first. Ren Quinn wrote in, like many of you did, and said, Sup, guys? Just saw GTA 6 will have an extended look on Netflix. Thoughts? I find it pretty stingy that they are hiding the reveal gameplay behind a paywall. Why does Rockstar feel the need to do this? Honestly, I feel I couldn't be any less interested in this game just based on how it's currently being treated. Well, I'm sure the game will be great and obviously do well.

1:03:13Dustin Furman:I almost feel the game deserves to fail. I only feel this way just based on how marketing is going. Crunch somehow prevalent despite years of development. And I've seen apparently Rockstar will be willing to delay the game another six months if even one mission is not ready. Just seems like a complete disorganized mess. I had never seen that last part of it. They're not delaying the game. but I want to I understand your fear hearing this news but it will be up I think six hours later on YouTube something like that right yes because they say Grand Theft Auto 6 extended look will also launch on the official Rockstar Games YouTube channel and the Grand Theft Auto 6 site at 9 p.m.

1:03:47Dustin Furman:Eastern on August 27th so just wait six hours and by the way they really had no choice but to do this should they go with Netflix or something because people would just record it and put it online so there was really there's really no there's no getting around that um i think it's weird for the consumer i don't think it's weird for them they want money and they just got more of it i wonder i wonder how much netflix paid for that like yeah that is an interesting question for a six hour exclusive i wonder it's a strange one but anyway what do you guys think of uh this dustin let's get your thoughts on the first news

1:04:25Colin Moriarty:items since you've been back yeah i it feels weird like oh my my paid subscription service is premiering um a new advertisement for me to watch yeah like there's something about it that has that in certification quality to it if you take it on a surface level like that but it is i mean the biggest media launch of all time coming up so it is that big of an event so it feels a little bit grody but as you were saying colin it's not a permanent exclusive they're putting it up on free youtube and stuff six hours later uh so that's fine it just feels like come on man how much money are you already gonna make on this game it's like yeah let's get a little netflix deal for the for the fucking ad for the commercial i mean it's amazing on their hat on their sure that they managed to do that like who the like why would why netflix would pay for that is insane well here's my thing is i want i i really want to see this next thing like this debut that'll have gameplay and after that i'll probably go on blackout yeah same um i really don't want to see everyone's tiny clips on twitter during that six hours like i just want to be able to watch it I'm not signing up for Netflix.

1:05:48Colin Moriarty:I'm not. I'm not. There's no way I'm doing that. No, maybe it'll come out. Maybe September there will be a different show that comes out that I want to watch on Netflix, but probably not. So I'm trying to figure out, like, does anyone I know have Netflix? Because like there's like a principle that's like I'm not I'm not paying for your parents. My parents don't have it.

1:06:07Dustin Furman:No, I don't have it. I would lend you mine because I don't care that much. But yeah, I. It's funny because I have to get Netflix back like Micah and I were talking about this because there's going to be certain NFL games on Netflix, but they're later in the year. So it's too bad that there I can't line up a month or whatever, but I'm not doing it. I'm not paying for Netflix for this. There's just no universe, especially if they really did the ballsy thing. And it's like it's only on Netflix where I'm like, oh, my God, that would be there's just no universe where they would have done that.

1:06:32Colin Moriarty:All right. Yeah, I'm getting so cheap with it now that like there is a show like in a few movies that I wanted to watch on the Hulu Disney Plus. Combo, and then I went, I was like, OK, maybe I'll sign up because I have stuff I want to watch and it was$20 for the ad free version it's like insane I don't think I want to watch it that bad yeah like I 20 bucks it's a lot these these subscription services were

1:06:58Dustin Furman:so I came up on the show like I had Netflix continuously from like 2003 or four to two years ago right and eventually I'm like I never even used it really and I was and I was like well I just have this because it's like a habit because I have this old account I don't want to like cancel but who cares i'm not and i think there's a big difference between 8.99 a month and 25 a month and i'm just not i'm not like yes but like you look at the prices of some of these things you're like damn even amazon with amazon prime and then there's all these different tiers now amazon prime and i'm like fuck this shit yeah annoying i hate i hate that there are tiers that you pay for that still give you ads yeah it's totally unacceptable is egregious yeah i agreed 100 %

1:07:42Colin Moriarty:yeah that's like the show I wanted to watch is Nirvana the band the show is on Hulu now because I've seen the movie and it's awesome and I've seen a little bit of the show and there's part I'm like why can't I just buy it like I would buy the show even if it was$20 which is the same price of the subscription it's like I only really want to watch that and if I can watch that and then I'll just have nothing after a month so i'm probably just being cheap is the reality the reality of it but i don't think it's being cheap i think it's being crude because this stuff adds up yeah oh yeah it's also just a ridiculous thing that we've grown to accept over a period over like it's it's it's the kind of the definition of like the what is it the frog and boiling water yeah like you look around and suddenly like there's ads on my paid subscription service i remember when i saw that happen i i think amazon prime has that and it's like a default and i can't remember what show i was watching but it was a show that i was interested in watching and i was like oh let me put it on and then the ad came on i was like no and i just haven't i just haven't i haven't watched i still have amazon prime by the way because for packages yeah right like why the fuck wouldn't you but like on principle i'm like i can't i don't even want anything to do with this streaming service really dude this is going to

1:09:01Dustin Furman:drive you up a wall because i know you guys don't watch sports so you don't you would never experience It's like when you watch a Netflix, a game on Netflix or a game on Amazon or Peacock or whatever, like an NFL game, they're presented like their TV shows. So you're basically paying for entry and then there's just commercials every 10 minutes, like as if you're watching CBS. So they get like two bites at the Apple, basically, which there's something truly ingenious about it. And by the way, cable is not dissimilar to that because everyone gets a fraction of your cable bill. That's how it works.

1:09:30Dustin Furman:And that's why channels disappear from from things sometimes because they're like, you're not paying us enough per subscriber. were leaving but it's not 20 dollars a subscriber it's like pennies or yeah you know tens of cents per subscriber and then and then you move on from there unless you're like an espn like it was i remember it's a big deal like espn gets three dollars per subscriber or something like that like when you get on your cable bill and so on and so on and so on so it's funny like people just want cable back and the things they describe it's like that's cable but but i was i was all into this too.

1:10:04Dustin Furman:I got got. I was like, this is exactly what I want. This is exactly what I want. And, and I think sometimes you got to be afraid. Well, it's great for, if you know what you want to watch or you're a consumer of the TV and movie culture or whatever, which I'm not, because then I can see you circulating through all of them. But by the way, I've said this before, this is why I think it's really important that we keep subscription prices on the last stand down, even though we, I think we are giving credible value is like, I want it to be in the amount of money at the average five or 10 bucks or whatever, like where you're not even worried about it.

1:10:32Dustin Furman:that's just the better part to do a way to do business as opposed to you looking at your bill every year or every month and be like ah what do i need to cut five dollars it's like that's not really gonna do anything for you but twenty dollars yeah it's a massive it's a massive expense yeah and then yeah multiply that by seven or whatever right now i have i guess i have more subscriptions than i think because i have spotify yeah i have youtube i i guess maybe that maybe is that that might be it i gotta cut some for sure and youtube is the i mean that's all you need yeah that's it that's all you need youtube i have youtube apple music i had i have crunchy

1:11:14Colin Moriarty:roll right now but i don't think holly's even watching i probably don't need it hi

1:11:32Colin Moriarty:oh boy yeah oh you have playstation plus oh ps plus sure okay there you go right that's what now we're cooking cause you don't care colin i care i care you know you don't fucking care

1:11:43Dustin Furman:okay i'm gonna tell you right now no disc no buy let's let's look at that's fine with me let's look at let's look at uh what everyone's doing and trying to do in their own little causes i feel like i've gotten the ball a lot further down the field so far like we'll see what happens but i care and by the way the physical game thing is going to be a big part of my presentation. Oh, because I'm going to present that as the last straw where there's really no, there's no there now is nowhere to go. So now you have to do something. Right, like it is what it is. But I'm sorry, you did cancel PS Plus, though.

1:12:25Dustin Furman:I did. I did. Oh, Lin Tao must have pissed you off, huh? When she was speaking. I'll tell you what. We'll get into that a little bit later, though. Well, not too much later. Chris, do you have Netflix right now? uh no not right now so we'll all be watching this on youtube i guess or some bootleg oh no pardon me dustin's gonna watch it on uh well wait you said you didn't i don't but then you don't have it right so we've we right so we left it as you couldn't access a password from someone there's got to be someone that can help you out the full thing will be on twitter yeah someone will rip it at 4k the full thing will be out do you understand like i i last night i watched spider-man on twitter the new spider-man movie it was all all of it was on twitter now by the way i should say i did go to the theater and see it right right i like spider-man i'll go see it but i saw it again because this was like somebody said fuck it spider-man brand i always love that it's always fuck it here's it's i love that i love that but i was like okay yeah i'll Watch it again.

1:13:32To chewed on it a little bit more, you know? So if that's going to be on Twitter, like this advertisement for GTA has no shot of not being on Twitter. So like, I'm not really that worried about it. I'm sure we'll see it immediately. Someone will have a good rip. Now,

1:13:49Dustin Furman:let me get into something else, guys, that Ren had said. He'd said that he's not feeling it based on like the game is currently being treated. And I don't understand. I really, I, I, I really don't get it. I got to be honest with you. It's hard for me to agree. I think it's, listen, take two is going to do exactly what it needs to do to sell maximum amount of copies of the game. And I don't think there's any universe where they wouldn't show it to you. So I think that, and let me be clear, by the way, and back off of that, even say like, I wish that universe did exist. I think that would be fucking dope.

1:14:27Dustin Furman:If they were like, listen, we're not showing it. Like you'll go and buy it and everyone's going to be surprised and delighted like at the same time. And I think there's major risks to doing that, but not really. Yeah. And actually you save on all the marketing costs, but they would never do that. Like they would laugh you out of the room if you suggested that. Of course. So I say that because people are worried about this thing as if they were not going to show it to you. And I'm like, just be patient if it's that important for you to see it. Just be patient, but also understand that a world where take two and Rockstar were like, yeah we're just never going to show it to you until it comes out i think is a fucking amazing timeline that i wish we were on so it's hard for me to it's hard for me to not like i don't know i i just i guess i i'm like i'm curious like why people think it needs to be shown so badly

1:15:15Colin Moriarty:maybe maybe he means by the way it's treated maybe he didn't say this but like the fact that it's there's the 80 cheapo version right the the version and then it's a it's there's no physical version you know right well there's no disc version i should say maybe that's what he means

1:15:35Dustin Furman:but he didn't say that yeah i don't know i i yeah you could be right because i read it as him being like they're just refused to show it like why are they treating it like this why are they why are they ignoring it or whatever and i'm like i don't know i think there's i don't think that i honestly don't know that they really benefit from showing it too much i actually think it starts to become i guess i'm just fixated on that that whole image they released of the vista like the the bay or whatever of the ocean side of of the map and there was no reflections for something like the ferris wheel in the water do you guys know what i'm talking about yeah people like fucking freaked out about it yeah yeah and i'm like you really shouldn't you know like if unless it really is going to be totally perfect which it might be maybe it will be and i'll just reiterate what i've said a million times your expectation should be through the roof for this game and hold it to those expectations as well i hope i'm excited man yeah i'm excited it's it's becoming more and more real and it's funny because like the expectations for this are so high as they should be that like i actually think the possibility that this is going to be disappointing is actually quite possible yeah just because everybody is like i'm going to be looking at this thing with like a microscope you know i don't i'm not going to nitpick the shit like oh this traffic light is floating or whatever but like i'm going to i'm going to notice it more than I would if if it was like Lego Batman or something.

1:16:57So exciting times. Yeah, you live by the sword,

1:17:01Dustin Furman:you die by the sword, man. You know, like if it's what I always say about Naughty Dog games, it's like if you you set a precedent that people are just going to expect now, that's that's a good problem and a bad problem. Yeah, we'll see. I think that I think the game is going to be really impressive. Like I do believe that I think that it'll be easy to find issues with it because it's a video game and it's an open world video game but it is my hope that it is substantially more refined than previous grand theft auto games at launch and i think it will be like i think they they just took an extraordinary amount of time with it it just it seems hard to believe that it won't be or then you have to like then you you have to ask like what did you do all certainly you burned a shit ton of money and all this time or whatever but was it even worth it should we have just made this game in four years or five years does it even did it is it truly the difference maker and i think that now it's going to be that's going to be in the edges of the game so when this reveal or whatever it is comes out we're we're watching it because i know i know you have this thing about like oh it would be cool they didn't show it so like there's like a media blackout kind of thing going on potentially i will yeah i i kind of i kind of have the feeling that like this is kind of going to be unavoidable i don't know how you would realistically avoid anything about this game.

1:18:17And Rockstar is pretty good about not spoiling. So like, I think I'm kind of, I think I'm one of these people where I was like, I think I'm just going to watch what they put out for it because I just don't know how I'm going to avoid it, really. I will watch this.

1:18:29Dustin Furman:Yeah. Because I am curious. Like, I want to see like a mission or like some, I don't, I think it would be exciting not to see it. But like you said, yeah, I think it'll be there. I'm curious about it. But I think, like Dustin said, I think I'll probably avoid if I can everything else about it. I think the because people have been asked, like, where's the marketing? I'm like, oh, my God. Like, I don't know how you don't understand how saturated NFL games and games like you. You are in another universe if you don't think they're going to have like not have like Monday night football one minute commercials.

1:19:07Dustin Furman:And like, yeah, you'll see. It's going to be insane. The marketing. It's not time yet. No. and it would be a foolish waste of money to do it. No one's even watching TV right now. There are no, the only shared American cultural moments anymore are sports. And that's where you want to be when you're premiering these things. Everything's lining up perfectly for them. So yeah, I say that because I don't know how avoidable some other content will be, but I think, and there's rumors of a state of play in September, and you wonder if it'll be in there too. because I assume Sony seems to have the market like a serious marketing deal and that might be part of it.

1:19:47Dustin Furman:I mean, they don't seem to. They do have a marketing deal. So, yeah, I imagine that will be in there as well. And we might not be able to avoid that when we watch that, but we'll see what happens. An extended look on Netflix. Grand Theft Auto 5. That was supposed to be a PSA, but we spent, we marinated. We marinated on that just a little bit. Just a little bit.

1:20:09Colin Moriarty:Get your tickets now for the Dog Stars. It's no surprise how fast civilization can disappear. Out there. Kill or be killed.

1:20:20Dustin Furman:Jacob Elordi. There are people out there. They need our help. Josh Brolin.

1:20:24Colin Moriarty:Shoot first and inquire afterwards.

1:20:27Dustin Furman:Margaret Qualley.

1:20:28Colin Moriarty:Okay, tough guy.

1:20:29Dustin Furman:And Guy Pearce.

1:20:31Colin Moriarty:Arm up!

1:20:32Dustin Furman:The Dog Stars. Directed by Ridley Scott. In theaters August 28th. Get tickets now. All right. This actually came out the day, the next story, the day that we published last week, but we should add it to the record. And I think moving forward, I will maybe even delay episodes that come out around stories like this to make sure we capture them, knowing that they were going to happen. But Sony's Q126 financials were released. And I brought out some notes about what I think are interesting. and I went through all the numbers and stuff just to kind of reduce things for the audience. But there's more to it than that as well because some stuff happened in the earnings call that really illuminated an already fiery situation in the space.

1:21:23Dustin Furman:And so here are the numbers, if you guys are curious. Q1 runs from April 1st to June 30th. So it's important to remember, as we've talked about since the disc announcement, that the disc announcement happened literally July 1st intentionally to put it at the very beginning of quarter two and give them as much runway as possible of the full 90 days to like let this wash out if it if it doesn't as they said in their financial call they're not seeing any deleterious effects of the disc situation and any boycotts going on right now but they only have a month to work with so we will have a better picture of that so it's important again to remember this this this is before this is before right before that time.

1:22:02Dustin Furman:1.6 million PS5s were sold in that period, down year over year from 2.5 million. Quarter four is typically weakest. So the numbers could theoretically get worse than this if the prices continue to go up. So something to keep in mind, because 1.6 million PS5s is very soft. The total is 93.7 million. overall. So they'll get to 100 million easily by the end of the year with Grand Theft Auto and Wolverine helping to push machines. Games sold 66.1 million, up year over year from 65.9 million. Quarter one is typically the weakest for game sales. So these are probably the lowest the numbers will really get.

1:22:47Dustin Furman:As you can see, the numbers are flat. Digital ratio, this one's for you, Dustin. 82 % down year over year, 1 % from 83%. So actually the physical games sold at 1 % better this quarter than the previous quarter. Monthly active users, 125 million up year over year from 123 million. It is an all-time high for the quarter. The all-time high for the brand is Q325 at 133 million. Here's an interesting little wrinkle though. Playtime down 4%. So a couple million more users playing cumulatively 4 % less playtime. I don't know what it means. Might not mean anything. Sony has revised its financial results upward because of foreign exchange rates, because the yen continues to struggle.

1:23:38Dustin Furman:And I actually don't know if you saw the American government and Trump talked a little bit about it. we kind of stepped in and helped stabilize the yen because it's getting bad and did you see his little thing about Pearl Harbor

1:23:53Colin Moriarty:he's like Japan's been very good to us with the exception of Pearl Harbor

1:23:59Dustin Furman:yeah that's amazing fair enough operating income booms 37 % up because and this is this pisses me off is tariff refunds yeah

1:24:16Dustin Furman:so sony all corporations that charge tariffs on their imports kept the money basically yeah and this is what i was saying chris it reminds me because i again i support protectionism it's why this needed to go through congress you know right and why i i always felt like it was a stupid idea to try to unilaterally do it because these things happen and it would be kind of impossible to have to reimburse the money on the at the point of sale you know what i mean which makes me feel like i not that like robbing peter to pay paul whatever the saying is but it's like maybe you should have had no refunds at all if it's not going to go back to the people it's like you're just so in other words sony made money twice right they charged you more for the tariffs and then they got the tariff money back anyway it's kind of like and it's not their fault if i were that might be like fucking awesome well yeah you know this is this is ultimately how tariffs work it kind of confused me that this was such a point of confusion while the tariff conversation was happening because like yet the people end up paying for this duh this is how this generally works i was always kind of befuddled that that like i said because i saw people shocked by this and i was like what do you mean this is like quite typical yeah like why wouldn't and why wouldn't you take that like if you're a company like oh you're oh okay i would take it yeah it's it's a it's an enormous amount of money i think i think it's like wasn't it like 580 million dollars or something it's like for sony um yeah because you and i obviously you're right like people like tariffs are a tax and i'm like well yeah but it's towards an end just like any tax right and And the only way it works is if it sticks.

1:26:08Dustin Furman:In other words, you can't do it and then take it back. You know, exactly. So that's like that's why I remember even saying at the time, and I know you and I agreed about this. I'm like, this really should this has to go through Congress because otherwise it becomes it becomes too tenuous. And so you need to elect the Congress as it's constituted now would never vote for that. And you need to elect the Congress that would if that's what you want. I mean, that's just the way it goes. You know, because I believe in that. I believe in what they were trying to do, but this is just makes it look so fucking stupid.

1:26:34Dustin Furman:I mean, like this in a way has been almost underreported. Yeah. And I'm like, that's there's almost no room for something. Because this is stupid in a way that like things used to be stupid. Like this is like actually like really mundane in comparison to a lot of the stuff that we're, you know, that's crossing our like Perez Hilton cutting himself up. You know, like it's not really as crazy. So like this, this is the kind of thing that kind of flows under the radar. it's like oh the tariffs went the way they would normally go like duh and then it kind of gets forgotten and then the next thing goes up but like yeah it's i agree like i didn't see much i saw one thing about this yeah for people that don't understand like in a basic way you know the company pays the company passes the tariff cost on it's like the cost of any good right So they owe a bill to the government.

1:27:29Dustin Furman:And then the government just gave them the money back. So they charged more on the assumption they would have to pay a tax that they no longer have to pay. And yes, yes. So anyway, like fucking insane. But OK, anything else here in my notes? Oh, OK. An important thing. they note quote we have secured the quantity of memory necessary to meet our projected sales volume for fiscal year 26 fiscal year 26 runs from april 1st through march 31st of 2027 so march 31st 2027 it's over and this basically says to me although i don't know that because they say they secured it they didn't say the price but you would assume that the price of ps5 will probably be static through the fiscal year?

1:28:16Dustin Furman:I mean, that seems to be what they were saying. I don't know for sure. And by the way, I don't know if you guys saw that all memory is already sold, I guess, for next year. Like there is none. So like if you didn't get in, someone wrote in about it actually too, but I don't think I included it is like if you didn't like get your orders in for these mass purchases, you're not going to get anything. So we'll see how this all goes with the PSX as well. I'm really struggling.

1:28:47Dustin Furman:I understand how complicated these facilities are that make all these components. That's not nothing to invest in them. It costs an enormous amount of money, billions of dollars to make them. But you would just think that there would be an impetus to get this going. Like who's going to get there to get to start winning? You know what I mean? Like, why is it taking so? I guess I guess we're probably still a year or two out from even really being able to increase manufacturing i'm like damn it must be really that complex even running three shifts 365 like i don't know i i'm just so surprised that the free market hasn't uh stepped in yet like it just hasn't and i wonder it almost seems collusive in a way where it's like you guys don't want it to be fixed oh no why would you want to spend more to increase production when you can can lower production and increase prices right well there's

1:29:37Colin Moriarty:And I think that there's a risk that if you spend all this money in investing in a new facility, which is billions of dollars, and then suddenly, I don't know, the AI bubble bursts or something, and there isn't as much demand, then that investment was a total waste. So it's like, why risk on the possibility of increasing production when you're already making hand over fist money? Yeah. It makes no sense to invest in a new plant. yeah exactly so get used to it buy your electronics now colin doesn't care at all he's texting he's texting he's texting his draft kings partners or whatever sorry michael is that

1:30:24Dustin Furman:the super work and she said she had a question and she's had to answer within the next five minutes she gave you a time limit yeah or like you know or you have no input so i'm sorry about that that's funny um so there's all right so we got into all of that we got about we we've gotten into oh there was one other thing i'm sorry operating income increased as well offset by and this is really nothing to not a surprise but an acknowledgement of playstation 6 they were saying increase quote quote unquote increased investments for the next generation end quote so it's coming and uh also quote unquote restructuring costs which i think is a in relation to bungee and the impairments they're taking on bungee over time all right so there's all of that the other thing that happened in here as i said was during the earnings call now there i want to let everyone know i'm not by any stretch of imagination of financial expert, obviously.

1:31:24Dustin Furman:But there's this idea that earnings calls that accompany quarterly results and fiscal results from publicly traded companies only speak on the quarter that they're reporting on. And this is important because people have interpreted some of the comments that I'm about to go into about what is going on with disc production as being like, well, they can't possibly have spoken to that. The disc production thing is in the quarterly results that will happen in mid to late October. And I'm like, no, that's not how it works at all. That's never how it worked. Remember, it was only a few quarters ago that they brought up ghost of Yote.

1:32:00Dustin Furman:Someone asked about Yote, I believe. And maybe they even brought it up outside of the quarter that it would actually be counted in. They have a fiduciary and legal obligation to tell you the truth in these calls. Now, by the way, they're human and people are human. I'm not saying that they do tell the truth. I don't know. All these people could be lying. What I'm telling you is that it's illegal for them to do that. And that if you were an American company, for instance, or an American traded company in Europe, you go to the SEC and you get fined and can even be jailed for doing shit like that.

1:32:30Dustin Furman:And Japan has its own version of the SEC that monitors these things as well. So I just say that because I feel like people just think these guys can just say whatever they want. Now they can couch things in certain language and make things really vague and give themselves wiggle room yeah but to act like they just kind of like like you know just come out and say whatever they want is is incorrect um which is important now they're asked about they're asked really multiple questions about discs and i'll get into this uh a reporter from nikai which is one of japan's major newspapers um asked the following um and some of the questions are about by the way many of the questions that they're asking are about the recent earthquake and a lot of the shit that happened to sony's infrastructure in japan so that's like the discs actually weren't the first things being asked about it was about more about that stuff but the discs were definitely the second thing the report from nike says about the game business quote you're going to end the disc products i think that you made a comprehensive decision on that and there was some movement against that and some of the consumer organizations have criticized you some have sued you how did you come to that decision and how do you respond to that criticism was this a decision that was necessary for the next generation game device or was it intended for enhancing the margin was that a sales decision so great question and gets into a lot of different things but obviously they're very well prepared to answer this.

1:34:09As far as the...

1:34:13Dustin Furman:So she answers most of the question. Remember, these are two questions put together, one about the earthquake, one about the disc. So she answers a bunch of stuff about the earthquake. And then she gets into the stuff about the disc later. She says, quote, PS5 ending disc production, the second question. On this point, we announced that January 2028 onwards, we will no longer be manufacturing game discs. One and a half years ahead, we made this announcement at this time. There are various reasons we made this decision. The biggest being that the digitization of content overall has been progressing.

1:34:44Dustin Furman:That's the big factor. It's not just for PlayStation, but for all kinds of content. Digitization is progressing. When we think about the future, we put a lot of thought and time. We cautiously consider this. We came to this conclusion. We're going to cautiously move this forward. To this decision, we have received various opinions. People have strong views. We understand that the community has put forth those views to us. Games are loved by many people. It's a form of entertainment that's loved by people. It's connected to people's fond memories in many cases. We understand those emotions. We want to consider that.

1:35:10Dustin Furman:In the future digital ecosystem, how do we engage the gamers is something that we would like to continue to explore. Thank you very much. Satisfying, Dustin? No, no, no, no. By the way, it should be noted that it's stilted and awkward because it is Japanese translated into English on the fly. I'm always surprised. Sometimes companies do go back, but sometimes they don't. they'll actually retranslate everything but i have not found a retranslated version of this

1:35:38Colin Moriarty:so go ahead yeah yeah so i i'm i agree that oh i i guess i'm agreeing with the fact that they're not lying you know or at least they're not supposed to be but in this case i feel like you can present what you like you can kind of fudge it as you were saying where uh the the digitization progressing of our media landscape. Is that a factor? Yes. Is that the number one factor? Is that the most important reason for them? No, I don't buy it for a second. All you have to do is look at the money. It's easy. Look, they're looking at how much money they can make on digital only. And yeah, that's, that's it.

1:36:25Colin Moriarty:The complete control of their own marketplace, cutting out the middleman for a lot of you know people and I guess this comes back to something to touch real quick it's just that some people say it's like oh well they'll still be doing codes in boxes to me as a personal opinion I don't think that's going to last very long I think that's an appeasement thing that you do in the beginning but I could see a lot of third parties being like hmm nah we're going to choose not to do that yeah I think

1:36:56Dustin Furman:people are underestimating to why they're doing that. I honestly think they're only doing it because they think they're going to get sued and they do need. It's a matter of how you interpret things and like what you really want as far as the idea that they should have options to buy games for PlayStation off of PlayStation's own ecosystem or whatever. It's like I don't necessarily think that that's a compelling argument. I think closed ecosystems should be allowed to exist and you should be allowed to play with them. But I think that they're afraid that they're going to get bodied in certain municipalities, you know, like, and they can simply say like, well, we are selling games in person and they, and they can cut the price of those games.

1:37:33Dustin Furman:And, and what means more to you, the disc or the idea that you can buy it. If you're making the argument that you want multiple storefronts, well, here you go. And I think that I literally think that their lawyers or their strategists were like, this is something we have to do because it actually makes no sense when you think about it, not even from the retailer perspective, but if you're trying to truly cut costs you're the the major cost of it is still the split with the store more than the manufacturer the disc more than any of that the shipping of the disc it's the split with the store and they are still absorbing that by doing this because they have to or they feel like they need that in my opinion they feel like they need to so how many of them are they going to make

1:38:10Colin Moriarty:for stores as well like i i don't know there's too many questions up near them like i don't we'll have to wait and see how how much they even follow through on that yeah they indicate

1:38:24Dustin Furman:i'm fascinated by this too that there's like some indication if you listen to what they're saying that they did tell their their major retail partners ahead of time which i was a little surprised about well i'm not surprised because it's a big thing to do and you want to tell them but i'm surprised that they did it because i was surprised it didn't leak yeah um in other words it's almost like the kind of thing you would imagine they like send to everyone at the same time like they send the email and like the corporate correspondence out at the same time that they publish the blog post because they realize it's why xbox publishes all their emails on on xbox wire because they just know someone's going to leak at the fucking tom warren so why not just do it ourselves um the they are asked elsewhere though about the disc production as well.

1:39:08Dustin Furman:And this is the one that really annoyed people, I think.

1:39:13Dustin Furman:I love this. It says, quote, Nishita speaking. Can you hear? Yes. I also have two questions. I wish people would just go through this and retranslate first. Well, as we asked about the termination of this production at present, for example, are you seeing users and sales going down? Do you have any forecast? Are you saying that you're not in a position to make such forecasts yet? I want to know what you think the impact will be up until 2028? And at this point, a different executive answers, quote, as a result of, well, I'm sorry, let's see. Thank you very much. Quote, about your first question about PlayStation discs.

1:39:49Dustin Furman:Well, up until 2028, well, at this point in time, we are not seeing any impact on our business as of now. Going forward about the content sales, I think a large part is already digitized. Therefore, as a result of the discontinuation of discs, we don't see that there will be any negative impact on our business. However, as I already said, the users, the players have attachments and we have to think about how to respond to those feedbacks. This is the one that, yeah, kind of set people off a little bit. But I feel like this is where you have to kind of take them at their word. Or they're just straight up lying to you because people are like, well, how would they know yet?

1:40:22Dustin Furman:And I'm like, you don't think they have like up to the minute data about how everything's going? They would know if people were unsubscribing or PS Plus, if people were

1:40:27Colin Moriarty:they would definitely know right well i think it does feel condescending uh the i guess the way that they're they're like oh well they have attachments they're nostalgic for discs and i think any honest person in this debate will be like well yeah of course there's an attachment and a nostalgia to buying physical games but to simply pin it on just that is categorically false for the people that are really invested in this movement or cause or whatever you want to call it is that it's like, no, it's way more than just like the ceremony of getting a disc and driving it home and putting it in. It's about the marketplace.

1:41:12Colin Moriarty:It's about Sony's control. It's about the control over the media that you purchase. So I can see that being annoying. The facts about it being like, oh, well, we're not seeing the effects. I totally believe that. I can totally believe that the very everyone being very loud about this, myself included, represents so small of a minority that it's not making an impact. I totally believe that it's unfortunate, but it's probably it feels like it's probably the truth.

1:41:44Dustin Furman:Yeah, I think I was saying that the unfortunate reality is that there probably was this blip of like, oh, people conspicuously canceling PS Plus, maybe disengaging a little bit, you know, a small number of people. but then I was saying there's something, I don't think they necessarily line this up intentionally, but it's like something like black ops coming out. Then you get all of these kinds of more casual people. We'll talk about the sales figures later, like massive amount of people playing these games and re you know, getting sick. They need PS plus to play it, you know, and they need, and I'm like, it's like the number is probably higher right now than it was before the announcement, which is so it's hard to fight against things when it, when it's, uh, When it feels like it's doing no damage and it probably isn't.

1:42:28Dustin Furman:And I agree with you that it does sound condescending, but I really wonder if it's because of the language barrier stuff.

1:42:33Colin Moriarty:Yeah, that's that's certainly an aspect.

1:42:36Dustin Furman:I mean, the Japanese do communicate in a much more straightforward way, especially in professional settings. No doubt. There is something stilted and weird about the way they talk about everything. So it wouldn't be surprising if they. If they sounded a little off kilter there, too. But let's see. Ed H wrote in and said, hey, CCD. Well, those comments from Sony's quarterly statement from Lin Tao suggest that the advocates for physical games have done a shit job of communicating. Sony seems to think the issue is about a nostalgic desire to have a circle of plastic to put in a sleeve on a shelf rather than anything to do with ownership rights.

1:43:11Dustin Furman:This could have been a moment that forced walled garden stores to come up with a way to make digital games as good to buy as physical games. Instead, it seems from Lin's comments that Sony is just going to try to figure out ways of upselling us more digital crap to capitalize on a perceived emotional reaction. slow clap to all involved. I mean, I don't necessarily blame people for this interpretation. I'm not entirely sure that yet I am not entirely sure that the environment of people that are kind of advocating for this stuff right now are doing a very good job of talking about what is what the future is, which is about digital ownership, of course, and ownership rights.

1:43:46But I think there's

1:43:48Dustin Furman:a conflict there, too, in that like solving the ownership rights situation digitally will make discs useless. And I think that that's, that's what people like truly, there would be no argument for them at that point, in my opinion. And at that point, then the disc does become a preference. And, and so I think solving for one actually kind of hurts the other. And I think people are maybe more aware of that than you think. And that's just, and it doesn't, it doesn't go both ways. The removal of physical games helps digital advocates. You know what I mean? If that makes any sense anyway yeah yeah i i don't know this it kind of this is ultimately you know this reminds me of it reminds me a little bit of like the what is it the um like the gamer gate thing where it's like you could maybe make an argument that like a fraction of the people really were like yeah what are you doing covering giving promotional coverage to game games by from people that you know and not recusing yourself or whatever like there was there was an ethics argument but the loud majority of people probably like the loud majority of people in this instance probably are just nostalgic like to the degree that like it splashes outward like i think there's a core fundamental like um nucleus of people who who are aware of like the digital ownership thing and like who do care about it from that perspective but i do think the splash damage not damage necessarily but like the the outer layer of that nucleus i think it is a lot of people kind of because a lot of the content that I see surrounding this argument is unfortunately kind of caked in nostalgia as a primary kind of focal point as like oh this this made me feel like this when I was a kid I was like well that's not really what the conversation is about like I agree but like it is it's it's just unfortunate things kind of grow beyond the scope of like the original kind of core idea and then they become kind of not flanderized necessarily but um a little bit simplified and that's probably what they're seeing it's funny because i agree you bring up an interesting point chris too in that the nostalgia around the product it does seem to be more fixated around the acquisition of the product the reception of the product and i'm like to me i have those memories i remember that a lot of that stuff and it is great memories yeah i agree with it but a lot of it is about the what about the game you know like was it about you opening it on christmas morning in 1990 or was it about that you liked the game and and for and for some people i guess it's a little bit of both but i wonder if one is driving the other at this point i think the serious people are talking about like this is about ownership and like i i like having this game because i can play it today and there's no bullshit drm or whatever like those are the serious people but they're i don't want to say they're few and far between but like i mean this argument is huge you know so it's it's incorporating a lot of people who are casual who are maybe not in the weeds and they're kind of getting loud online as well and and their arguments are just not as sophisticated and uh i don't know it's unfortunate reality of these types of things online and on the internet everything just gets flanderized the fuck what is this i don't know if i know this word let me see flander flanderization blander so it's it's an old term it's like uh it's um regarding like ned flanders from the simpsons how like he originally was like a kind of like a well thought out kind of fleshed out character and then over time he kind of becomes simplified to his most base got it got it traits like he's he's the christian guy who goes howdly doodly and that's like his entire character right

1:47:31Colin Moriarty:right right um how do they do it's like every character in the late seasons of the office right yeah many shows actually many comedy shows just that's kind of what happened it happens

1:47:40Dustin Furman:yeah larry that happened with even with larry david and the curb revival stuff yeah you become a self-aware version of you it's natural i think it just it just happens but like online with like movements and stuff i think it also happens to like things like there is an element of nostalgia baked into the physical games conversation obviously because it's so it's such a strong emotional core of it but the real thing is ownership and like having access to these things long after a drm server goes offline dude like there's so many games that i have right now on pc that i load up and like oh you play is not around anymore and it's like what the hell is this it's insane i can't play splinter cell blacklist because there's no you play server and i gotta download some crazy file it's it is annoying um but like the emotional core is usually what resonates um more than the the real arguments so let's see yeah and i i think there is something well i'll get into this argument in a minute actually i'll say i'll say what i was about to say because i think it actually goes better with what i was going to save in a moment but there is one more piece of this which is that images have leaked now online that i think are fairly clearly real although you know it could be debated that they're they're not i think they are though which is that these notice stickers have been are being stuck on the playstation boxes now and they and they say in a bunch of different languages from january 2028 newly released games on playstation will be available for purchase on playstation store and at retailers in digital format only this for games released before january 2028 can continue to be played on this console so it seems like yeah they're going around sticking these on now and um so just another acknowledgement that this is the direction they're moving in and it's kind of an intractable decision, I think.

1:49:22Dustin Furman:Although I still think it's within the realm of possibility that they turn things around for PS5 specifically. I think PS6 is not going to have physical media. And I've got to be honest with you, I'm okay with that. And by the way, I think that I still am of the mind, and Dustin I think we talked about that even when you were on the show, like I think they said this now so that they don't have to say it for the PS6. so you already just intuitively know it they didn't want to say they like the worst thing that could have happened was them saying it when they announced the console right yeah it would have dominated the conversation around it and i think they understood that and they got it out of the way and so i think they just have to eat shit now yeah they're gonna yeah i my biggest question

1:50:06Colin Moriarty:still i don't even know what's possible it's just like are they going to be able to do a disc to digital program like xbox is it possible i don't know are there is there a unique code on every ps5 game i know that pork was looking into this for a bit but i don't know what his conclusions were but that's the the really frustrating thing for me is just that there is no indication of like our current libraries am i basically starting fresh on like is all my total investment in disc games on ps5 like oh well you can just play those on ps5 and you'll never be able to play them

1:50:49Dustin Furman:on your ps6 i just think there's a catch-22 for sony and they put themselves in this pincer of course but if they put a disc drive on the ps6 to play your ps5 games then people are gonna be like why can't we just have ps6 discs like that's literally like they're just begging for people to do that so i think they are just kind of in a tough spot you know like if you really if you that's their problem but if you want to make this transition i think they're just eating a lot of shit right now because i feel like they think it'll make it easier later and i think they're right but yeah i don't know if it'll make it better different thing entirely but i think it'll make it easier to communicate and i think that's like that's behind this entire thing i don't know the one thing that i wanted to say though and i've been trying to articulate this and i talked a little bit about this i think on the stream but if i had more time and inclination i would even make a video about this because i think this i think this is there's something here i think this is the outcry right about not only the discs but about playstation generally over the last few years because i've been on record as saying that i believe that there is something really weird going on.

1:51:59Dustin Furman:Like there's something weird in the ether. Something doesn't feel right. Right? Like it doesn't. There's something weird about PlayStation right now. And whether it matters or not, whether it tracks for the market or not is a totally different story or a different series of stories. But what I think I've come to realize is we are seeing the outburst, reasonably so of a group of people on a console and in the console space that are starting to realize that it's no longer about them and i was saying recently that i i said it on social i think actually that i kind of already realized this intuitively in the early to mid ps4 generation when you started to see like what was doing well and how things were going and how things were selling and how people were spending their time.

1:52:52Dustin Furman:And I remember being blown away over and over and over again during that era. And then even in the early sacred symbols era where we would discover like, how much are they selling these things on Fortnite for? What? Like, you know, Madden ultimate team cards make what? And you start kind of internalizing this idea. It's like, this can't possibly be true and it be about me anymore. And I think that people have gone along reasonably so under the idea that oh no no matter what kind of casual play goes on on this console it really runs through us and we kind of determine the direction of things and i'm like i don't think so and i i think they're telling you that and that's a tough fucking pill to swallow because i understand that a lot of us were there since the beginning and people like us are the ones that constructed this place, but they don't really care.

1:53:48Dustin Furman:And so we, we either, we either, and you can't, this is why when people were, people were upset when I tweeted this last week, but it's true. It's like when they're talking about exclusive games and how important they are, I'm like, don't you see the inverse relationship between exclusivity and money made there? It It might not be causal, but it exists. In other words, like our behavior doesn't move the fucking needle. All of this shit does. They're making more and more and more and more and more money, releasing fewer and fewer and fewer first party games, many of which don't even sell like Saros, which was played by a virtually irrelevant number of people.

1:54:28Dustin Furman:When you consider they have 125 or 130 million monthly active users and half a million people played it. and then what you walk away from that is that your behavior matters. Like, right. Yeah. And I, I describe it as a level of myopia. It's not an attack. It's not an insult. It sucks for me too. If PlayStation was what I wanted it to be, it wouldn't look like this. But I also admit that my purchasing behavior would mean that PlayStation was making much less money in my in my universe. I just does this make any sense to you guys to you guys? I really think that there's something here about the PlayStation audience coming to a realization about itself that, by the way, the Nintendo audience had to come to they had their come to Jesus moment in the Wii U era.

1:55:21Dustin Furman:It's like, actually, this is all that exists of you right now. You know, you're not as big as you think there needs to be way more of you. and I think Sony looks at it that way and certainly Xbox with their ambitions to reach a billion players and shit like that. Like they, it's not a, I hate to say it. It's just an observation. It's not an endorsement. It's, it's not a pleasurable thing to acknowledge or to, or to showcase or to point out. Yeah.

1:55:51Colin Moriarty:Yeah. I think it's true. The question is, and you brought this up earlier, Colin, is that if, if the hardcore fan base is starting to make this realization that like, Like, Sony, obviously they want this to be your home, but they're not catering to you anywhere near as much anymore. Do you decide to nest yourself somewhere else because of that? Which, what I wonder, and, you know, people say a million things on this, like, oh, I'm moving to PC now. And certainly there probably are many people that are, or at least saying they are. but obviously steam steam machine is not that device uh because i missed all of that as well while i was gone is the steam machine pricing and stuff like that but i do wonder that valve when they when they've released products like the steam deck and now the steam machine their version of it isn't always the most desirable version of it but they are launching a platform In fact, I think Valve doesn't even really care about Steam Machine doing well.

1:57:01Colin Moriarty:Clearly, I mean, they know that they can't. I mean, they want it to do well. But really, it's like a proof like, hey, look, we've created an OS that is controller friendly and can run on living room PCs. And we're making that open to any third party manufacturer. Anyone can build a Steam Machine and ship it with Steam OS. and maybe that's not happening right now because steam machine just came out but as the years goes on e and there's third parties making steam machines that maybe are more way more compelling than the original steam machine itself when people are feeling this neglected from playstation then maybe will they jump over i don't know it's hard to say but i can understand the feeling of like PlayStation isn't really doing anything for me right now or much less, I'm going to move to somewhere where I can kind of find my own people again.

1:58:01Dustin Furman:Yeah, I think that this is where a lot of compelling conversation will happen in the years to come. And I can only be so clear with the audience that I personally feel that Sony has major problems in the mid and long term with PlayStation if they don't figure out a certain number of things. And also they've been victimized by like every electronics firm, by what is going on with AI and the component crunch. It's important to remember that when we first started talking about PS6 with leakers like Moore's Law, people that had access to a lot of things, the machine was being described as being shockingly cheap.

1:58:42Dustin Furman:And that was like the entire idea was it was supposed to be a mass market consumer machine i just can't do that now nothing about the the machine i don't think has changed i think that the material reality of expectations of where pricing would be has changed it's flipped the entire table over for sony which why i think is why i think it would be so interesting to be there and understand what they were really thinking about and talking about because i think they're going to re-emphasize ps5 i think ps5 is going to be be around for a really long time. I think, um, I think that, I think when they release the machine is even up in the air, but I think they will release the machine.

1:59:19Dustin Furman:I think it either has to be, you know, next fall or spring 28. I don't know, man. I don't know. They, they, but I will say like, I just feel like something's off. I've, I feel that I've been doing this for a long time. And, but, but again, And that's my the ironic thing is that's my feeling as a hardcore player. And maybe like my feeling on things just doesn't really matter that much. Because they see these numbers and they're like, yeah, none of this really matters. Like when you think about eight eight million copies of Black Ops 2 on PS5 in in July, it's like, who are those people? You know, like.

1:59:58It's a lot of people that are not us.

2:00:01Dustin Furman:Some of them are some of them are shot. Vegas wrote in and said, hey, guys, the YouTube channel. dammit jeff put out a bounty for someone to jailbreak the ps5's current firmware in response to the physical game situation it reached 35 000 last i saw what are your thoughts on this as some sort of retaliation tactic against sony thanks for years of great shows for my long commute it makes the drive much more reasonable i don't know anything about this scene at all i just would say that in my opinion this stuff this stuff exists regardless of what happens and will be going on behind the scenes where people will justify it however they want, but they're going to do it anyway.

2:00:36Dustin Furman:It's what I always say about piracy. Like you don't have to justify your piracy to me. Like you're stealing regardless of how you want to justify it. Do it or don't. And it's the similar thing here. I think people look at this sort of thing as a challenge too. And I think Sony likewise looks at it as a challenge, not one they necessarily want, but that they have to make their machines more secure. So it might make them more vulnerable, but I feel like they have to be dealing with this stuff all the time. So I don't think anything really changes for them. All right. Next piece of news is just a confirmation that the deal between the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund and Electronic Arts is closed.

2:01:14Dustin Furman:And Electronic Arts is now a private company delisted from the stock market and under the majority control of the Saudis. They write in a press release. EA does. Electronic Arts, a global leader in interactive entertainment Today announced that its acquisition by PIF, which is the private investment fund or the public investment fund of Saudi Arabia, Silver Lake, which is an American investment firm and Affinity Partners, collectively the consortium Affinity is also an American firm, has successfully closed. The consortium's agreement to acquire EA was previously announced on September 9, 2025 and was approved by EA stockholders at the special meeting of stockholders held on December 22, 2025.

2:01:54Dustin Furman:So this is a done deal. People get$210 a share in cash. So some people are going to become very, very wealthy indeed. Now that this is closed, including many people at the company that either had options or held stock and for other reasons. So a lot of money is going to be changing hands here. But NASDAQ listing is gone. So this is an official thing now. So Jason Schreier reported this on Blue Sky. Jason Schreier, the journalist, of course. He says EA officially goes private tonight, meaning EA will no longer trade on the Nasdaq for the first time in 36 years. All stockholders of EA, including many employees, as he says, will receive$210 a share.

2:02:38Dustin Furman:EA will take on$18 billion in debt, putting it on the hook to pay$1.8 billion a year in interest. I don't know where he gets his$18 billion a year number because they said that it was $20 billion plus EA has$2.2 billion in debt outstanding. So their debt is higher than 18 billion. He says EA's annual EBITDA is around$1.5 billion, which should be enough to service the interest payments. So this is a big, this is a, it's a, they're making enough money after EBITDA is, is an acronym EBITDA for like, well, let me, let me get the exact nomenclature. Thank you. So, yeah, earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, a metric used by a company's overall financial performance and core operating profitability by removing the impact of financial decisions, accounting choices, and tax environments.

2:03:34Dustin Furman:So what he's basically describing is that they're profitable enough to cover the interest payments on the debt, to keep the debt static. but the publisher has told debt investors that it will cut according to jason 700 million dollars in annual costs including 170 million dollars in organizational efficiencies so um layoffs as jason says here i don't think it took a genius to figure that out i tweeted that out the day before when the deal was just closing where i was like oh the first thing that's gonna happen is people are gonna get laid off i mean that's that's what happens when these situations occur um

2:04:18Dustin Furman:um, EA is going to monetize its games like you've never seen before. And remember, remember Chris, the, um, I was saying this with the college football, you weren't here for this, Dustin, I don't think, but there was a drama with college football 27 and it's monetization and the, and people freaked out enough where EA actually fixed it. But remember, Chris, I pointed out in the letter, something interesting where they're like, in the future, when we make change, like in so many words in the future when these things happen we will communicate better right in other words like we won't just drop them in your lap like we did this time because there's just no universe where they can service that debt the consortium's debt while remaining remaining maintaining the status quo and the layoffs will bring fixed costs down but they're still going to have a big nut to to fill, unfortunately.

2:05:06Dustin Furman:So, um, I'm, I have a lot to say about this deal and I know we've already said a lot about it. I think from my perspective, and I'm curious what you guys think is we kind of put this in the rear view mirror because it is what it is. Um, I am surprised things like this are illegal for multiple reasons. I'm talking about the free market before. And this is the, this is just to reiterate for people that don't understand, this is the biggest leveraged buyout in the history of mankind. It's not the biggest leveraged buyout in the history of the gaming industry or in the history of the electronics or space or whatever.

2:05:44Dustin Furman:It's the biggest ever. And what a leveraged buyout, in a basic way, it basically, you're borrowing money. Instead of acquiring a company for assets, part of what you're acquiring the company for is borrowed money. And you take that money and strap it to the company. So it's a very dangerous thing. If you read about leverage buyouts that are even much smaller, leverage buyouts have a one in five chance of just outright failing in bankruptcy within the first decade. It's a very high failure rate considering how much money is being spent. And a lot of people look at deals like this as ways to kind of take all the meat off the bones and destroy the company.

2:06:29Dustin Furman:And that happens. And I don't know that they bought EA to do that. In fact, I really doubt they do. And I did. And I feel like they have a plan. But it's such an enormous thing to take a company to take an entity and 10x its debt. Someone had pointed out, which I thought was fascinating. Apple has four times EA's current debt and 50 times its revenue. Like, let that wash over you. Apple has four times EA's debt, but 50 times its revenue. So this is a strapped company. And will they figure it out? Maybe. What will happen? I don't know. I think in the short term, the layoffs are obvious, and I think they're going to, you're going to see a very efficiently run EA that focuses on big things.

2:07:25Dustin Furman:Like I personally wouldn't, maybe I'm just speaking out of my ass, but I personally wouldn't be surprised if they went to Bioware and they're like, you guys are dumb.

2:07:34Dustin Furman:Or they sell Bioware or they sell Mass Effect, they sell Dragon Age. Because that's the other thing that happens in leverage BIOS and situations like this is like you start paying down the debt by figuring out what you can use and draw, you know, driving revenue by figuring out what you, what this company has that you can use and what you can sell and get rid of not only to lower your own fixed costs but to maybe make some money back on the back end and the thing is ea does sit on a lot of shit and if they're not going to use it they might as well get rid of it so yeah but moreover

2:08:06Dustin Furman:i and this i think you guys might recall that i expressed this pretty vehemently when it was going on we simply it should it simply shouldn't be legal for foreign entities to come in and take over American firms like this. And it's not just that the Saudis are doing it and we have, you know, some sort of problem with them, although in a lot of ways we do. And we'll talk about that in a minute. But it's it's that. America is a unique place that creates a lot of amazing stuff. A lot of creative people are here. The biggest tech firms in the world are here. Some of the biggest game companies are here.

2:08:44Dustin Furman:Hollywood and all the rest in our music industry and all the all of it. It's all part of the American texture. And we shouldn't spend decades building up these amazing firms to allow foreign entities to come in and poach them and all of the benefits from them and or run them into the ground. Whatever the outcome is, it's not really beneficial to us. And I'm surprised that in situations like this, talking about more regulation of the market, it's like when a deal like this is on the table, really there should be some sort of play to be like, is there any domestic investors that would be interested in this?

2:09:16Dustin Furman:if this is like what you want to do how can we make it so that we're not sacrificing our companies to these outside entities and i have a big problem with it i don't like it so because i feel like it's just you can't blame the stockholders for voting overwhelmingly to do this it's a lot of money it's an enormous amount of money but what does it mean for ea like what does it mean for the people that work there and their structure and the games that they play and stuff like that or games that they make and all the rest I don't know man I know I've talked a lot about this in the past but it's just weird to me that you're even allowed to really do something like this and it's and it's people have a problem with the big leverage which I have a problem with too but it's more just like where's the pride in the things that we build maybe that's just a naive stance though

2:10:14Colin Moriarty:yeah i was gonna say that man it's crazy that somebody that an entity can just take on 80 billion dollars of debt but then i thought about our our government yeah all right yeah the uh no

2:10:27Dustin Furman:biggie yeah exactly it's i mean it's it's the american government is in so much debt that it's just fake like it can't even it can't even be quantified as being real at this point it's like okay yeah 35 trillion or whatever it's like all right whatever like what do you do with that what do you what do you want me to do all right insane um jason polite wrote in and said hey cdc with ea's acquisition by the saudi pif being finalized this week do you think we will see any pushback or boycotts by gamers similar to when snk was purchased ea is a bigger name in the u.s so this may garner more attention also what are your thoughts on madden being the only nfl licensed simulation game being owned by a foreign entity thanks for all that you guys do and welcome back Dustin I hope fatherhood is treating you well I don't believe that they'll it is interesting Chris you and I talked about this I think right that that there were like SNK fighting games that were going to be a games done quick that were thrown out of it I think or something like that because of its connection to SNK so like there are people that are doing stuff and EA for a lot of core gamers will be much easier to avoid.

2:11:35Dustin Furman:Like Micah and I were discussing it where I'm like, I don't even I'm not really even an EA customer. I buy I bought Plants vs. Zombies. We both did. But I'm like before that, I guess it was Immortals of Avium. Was the last EA game I bought. So I can do without EA. I don't I almost don't even really give a shit from that perspective. But I don't think there'll be any serious boycotting of the company, especially because and you could say the same thing for SNK. And we've said this is that the Saudis aren't interested in leveraging their control control over these. And they're not interested in leveraging social control, which almost makes it worse because they don't really believe in what they, what they say.

2:12:17Dustin Furman:They just want the money. It actually somehow makes it worse than buying. Like if they bought EA and they're like, yeah, we're putting all the players in burkas, you know, it's like, it's like that would be insane, but at least you had like principles here. here it's like no we're gonna buy your shit we're not gonna do anything to it and we're not gonna and yeah we just want the money it's just money it's all money it'll be money until everything's hollowed out and then there's no money left it's it's i don't know i what do you even say about a situation like this i i'm with you in the sense that like ea doesn't really the last ea thing that i was involved with i guess was battlefield and that was bought for me so like before that I don't even I don't even remember you know the last time maybe Mass Effect Collection yeah Mass Effect yeah something you know but yeah I don't think you're going to see anything serious about it especially because like you would imagine that the clientele of like most EA games which are like I would imagine at this point for volume these Madden titles or these sports titles just like well those are people who probably don't even know what the hell is going on in the industry anyway so they'll be fine in the realm of like boycotts they won't be fine in the in the broader spectrum of the fact that like oh they're they're a deeply strapped company at this point especially so like but from the perspective of like will there be any like big consumer led boycotts of Madden games like I don't think so no I don't either and S &K hasn't really experienced any pushback either so no it's literally it's just that it's just that games done quick thing and me.

2:14:03She's like not really a lot. Yeah, right, right. You could take or leave me. I'm about as important as SNK is every single Saros player is to Sony. Yeah. You have anything

2:14:16Dustin Furman:you want to add, Dustin, before we move on? Are you good?

2:14:19Colin Moriarty:No, I'm good. It's just annoying.

2:14:22Dustin Furman:Yeah, it's too bad. But the stockholders have voted and it is over. It's done. and it's not even really worth worrying about at this point. I will be very interested to see how they employ their strategy and what happens. And I'm rooting for EA because I feel like a lot of people work there and a lot of people care about the product, but it's unclear how it's going to go for them, I think, because I just think that's so much money to owe. Everything's so tumultuous out there. You can't lay off too many people because you still have to make your games. So you can't cut too deeply into the workforce.

2:14:55Dustin Furman:I don't know. we'll find out but yeah it begins with layoffs i i suspect it'll they'll start maybe even spinning things off and whatever and then yeah the monetization stuff i just i can't wait to see what what they're gonna what kind of bullshit they're gonna try to do and by the way a lot of the their audiences receptive not if not receptive neutral on it like they make they don't do these things because they don't make money they make an enormous amount of money on right bullshit and they would argue i think if we make a lot of money on it the market must be able to tolerate it like in other words we haven't pushed it too far because the bottom hasn't we haven't bottomed out and there might be a compelling argument to that as well we'll see what happens do you think they'll do a thing where it would be like you know ea sports and but then it's the muslim call to prayer that'd be awesome that'd be the coolest thing they'd ever done that would be ridiculous did you guys uh i don't know if you want to talk about this at all i did want to bring it up that did you guys see this kind of this fiasco around the ai stellar blade blood rain music video yeah what do you guys think what do you guys think about this for people that don't know they really stellar blade um or shift up the developer in late july released a music video of called wannabe in love and it features evie the protagonist from stellar blade blood rain but it is ai generated or at least assisted i don't know if it's fully ai generated i assume it is and people are freaking out about it there's this idea that south korean firms are simply much more top and society just tolerate ai a lot more than us and i'm like that's fine but this is what happens when cultures mix up and i wonder how you feel about this this was one of the first times i had seen something where i was like i don't know guys you know i don't know why you would do this yeah you have so much goodwill and you don't need to do this well dude there was ai stuff in in the first trailer for uh this new stellar blade as well or at the very least like examples of ai assisted texture work in the game i don't know how much of the trailer was fake or whatever but um i remember there was a sign with like completely fake korean on it it was like an approximation of it was like an approximation of like how i would draw kanji or something right i mean like yeah you ever do that when you're a kid you try to draw like a japanese cat like a fake japanese character but it never looks right yeah it never looks right but like there was there was some bits of that in the original so i was like i was already kind of put off by this game and like this one was like all right i'm i'm good this is so weird like i don't i just

2:17:42Colin Moriarty:don't care anymore yeah the video is horrible i what i think is funny about this is that there they had a response from the head of shift up that was like the uh evie the character at the heart of this video was created from head to toe by our talented artists and modelers through more than a year of dedicated work the ai is not crafting her from scratch it is rendering presenting the character based on the data designs and craftsmanship our team created we would truly appreciate if you could view the work with that understanding in mind it's like okay they're like oh no no we created her but you know the artistry of animation and you know the the layout of the no that that's ai you know it's like don't worry oh we just let the computer do all the animation i've been thinking about this a lot while i've been gone like because holly and i have a game now when we're in the car where we see how many ai generated signs we can see as we're driving around they're everywhere and i had a conversation with my dad where he's like you know one way to look at it which he's no like big ai defender or anything but he's like you know before people would use word art or clip art and stuff and they let the computer make the you know the the flyer more beautiful or more appealing but it was it wasn't really their artistry in it and so this is just kind of the new version of that and i was like i can see that uh i would still prefer someone trying to shittily put together a menu with that than use AI.

2:19:28Colin Moriarty:But I get it. I get that from a small business perspective that it's like we can't afford to hire an artist to do something like this. And we want it to look nicer than something. Well, in their mind, nicer than what we would do. And to a lot of people, it does look nicer. That's kind of the thing that I've been contemplating is like a lot of people see an AI generated an image or a sign or something and they don't think anything of it are we the minority maybe but anyway my point about this is that i was thinking about it that's like okay well if a farmer wants to sell their corn and they have a stand and they have an ai sign i can see it right but the problem comes in is that when creative companies use ai and it's like well what are you saying about who you are as a team and your work that you're offloading what you do and i know this has been a big point for you colin so i don't want to belabor it too much but when i see a company like shift up that clearly has such insane levels of artistic talent that we saw in stellar blade uh then be like okay we want to make a music video we're just going to offload half the work more than half the work to an ai it's like what does that say about you guys then so anyway that's that's that's the only thing that i thought about this just like why what was the point yeah i don't understand other than making you look bad to your western audience which yeah i don't know man it's it's it's really weird i think people don't i i get i get the argument about like you know small businesses or whatever and for the same reason that you said it's like they're not creative businesses whatever it still bothers me and i'm just like as gross uh and dude a lot of time that ai generated food looks gnarly and disgusting i don't even know how you could possibly think that looks better like i would much prefer you just took an unflattering photo of the food you do sell but yeah i i don't think people and again this is a side effect of people just caring more about bottom line and money than they do about the i don't know what you how you would even describe it the the culture or the community that you're fostering because it's like even just like in you know film or whatever it's like oh we're not filming on location anymore because we're just we film on you you just do green screen and in a in an apartment or or um ai generate you know whatever who cares then you know that has an effect on okay well there needs there's usually craft services you know and that's a catering you know catering for for a local restaurant that like gets a ton of business that kind of relies on that economy in the local space and now that's gone and so like it there's a big little domino kind of thing happening now just broadly it's not even just in games or ai or just kind of uniformly i don't think people are taking notice of and it's not good it's not good no yeah i'm sorry go ahead no i was saying i was just agreeing like yeah not good i just think that there's i

2:22:40Dustin Furman:don't like people's excuse making for shift up in sense that it's like well they're a south korean firm and like i said that they're just more tolerant in that society of that stuff and i'm like that's cool but you're an international you have an international product and an international audience and you have to decide how you want to position your product i actually think we're probably not very important to seller blade success i think i think seller blade success has a lot to do with south korea japan and especially china and yeah for sure um they just might have a different outlook on that and i understand that but i'm just put off by this sort of thing because you just i think you articulated it well too dustin you both did where it was like you don't need to do this no one's asking for this no one wants this and you guys are obviously incredibly talented aesthetic artists you shouldn't want to do this you you literally should want to have some level of modicum of control beyond prompting claude to make your bullshit for you it'll all come down to people's tolerance for this it's i mean it is it is that simple and i just i'm i'm becoming more and more of a believer as we've said and I think your dad articulated it well too is is people don't care yeah because I see a lot of that stuff too like that the fucking shitty you know you see like a van for like an AC company an HVAC company and it's got some AI bullshit you see some menu at a restaurant's got some AI bullshit you see it's like and it all looks the same it all AI is starting to kind of look the same it even has a certain aesthetic to it very similar to how it's all reducing to a similar style of writing which is strange and maybe one of the um the unforeseen circumstances of doing ai of finding like the what it what it thinks is the best most efficient most universal whatever and it's like yeah here's this the thing too is that it's like there's so many more ai generated images than there are real images now that a lot of new ai images is being trained on previously created ai images so it's not even being trained on real shit anymore so now you're just getting like a a complete facsimile of you know i i think i saw like some like a rendering of like a chicken nugget that was like bit in half or like it was like cut in half and it looked like ramen noodles yeah and i was like what the hell is this dude like you're you don't even understand what chicken is anymore yeah it does yeah it's it's it's depressing um but i don't know it is what it is I'm not that interested in I'm no longer really interested in this game at all I liked the first Stellar Blade well enough but like I don't need another one if this is kind of where they're headed yeah I want to see but that's where I was going with it too is that we all like Stellar Blade and I think it's a great game but I want to wait and see how are you going to react to this maybe this is a maybe they'll just stick to what they've been doing but maybe they'll be like yeah maybe we're wrong or maybe this is not the right thing for our product and we need to be more careful about what we're doing.

2:25:45Dustin Furman:The video on their own YouTube channel has 11 ,000 thumbs up and 22 ,000 thumbs down. So some people say these numbers are fake, but I don't know if that's true or not. I don't know why or how they would be fake. Maybe they're like approximations or something. Okay. Just a couple more things. we know that the original actor that was playing Kratos on Amazon's God of War show was Ryan Hurst was injured he fucked up his bicep while recording or doing the show and he had to get surgery and all the rest so they had to figure out what they were going to do and they decided that they were going to recast you know pause production and recast and they have Dave Bautista he was a wrestler right yeah and then kind of made the transition over is going to play kratos i thought there was interesting stuff here in this deadline article that announces it where he apparently was already apparently like things just kind of lined up where this works because they write here quote bautista's extensive background as a decorated professional wrestler would allow him to step into a physically demanding role such as kratos with limited preparation given the tight schedule what's more he's coming off shooting a similarly physical fantasy project the new highlander movie which required him to bulk up and quote.

2:27:02Dustin Furman:So it seems like they can kind of just use him and he can kind of just keep the status quo with his own body right now and go ahead. They're also they also announced and this is not really a big deal, but just something to note MP first discovered this that they are looking to recast both the trace and through it in the second season, but that's because they're getting older and in the second season. So I guess the kid that plays that plays a trace in the first one will still be the same one that was with Ryan Hurst. Something weird about this show at this point. I don't know. I wonder if they didn't we say this a week or two ago Chris that I'm like I wonder if Sony or the production people at Amazon look at this as a way of like we release these production stills.

2:27:45Dustin Furman:People weren't really into it. It's kind of a blessing in disguise that we can try again in a way you don't want Ryan Hurst to fucking get hurt or all the rest but at least we're not committed to this thing that people had problems with. Yeah I'm sure there's probably some element of that. I'm sure it's more negative than positive because they've you know it's a lot of money kind of in the drain a little bit uh but yeah i mean take advantage of it i guess i don't know how well that well i like david batista generally i think he's actually a pretty good actor but um i don't know i can't imagine i can't imagine anybody as kratos yeah is the is the big problem here really yeah um because i think he was like wasn't the big thing with david batista that like he was uh And people really wanted him for Marcus Phoenix for all right for Gears.

2:28:32Dustin Furman:Oh, yeah. The Gears movie. I think there's even a I think there's even a character model of Dave Bautista that you can equip as Marcus in one of the games. I can't remember which one of them. Maybe maybe maybe the Reloaded the first the first time they did the Ultimate Edition, maybe or something like that. But I remember that from a long time ago. We'll see. Yeah. See how it goes. Yeah. I'm not I'm not looking forward to this one. Yeah. Me neither.

2:28:55Colin Moriarty:i feel like he fits the role and the look probably better than the last guy but they're okay i hate to make this comparison but colin i think you were right that maybe sony has a a sonic movie situation on their hand that first sonic that looked horrifying and now it's like okay well i it seemed like they were going to go through with it but then they had this little opportunity where they're like well now we can do it and so i i saw a lot of people saying like this project is is doomed now and i'm like no i kind of went when things run into production issues like this and they really take the time to like if it seems like that there's problems it's like no that means they're probably fixing things that aren't weren't working yeah which doesn't necessarily mean that the end result will be good but it's showing that they're they're trying to make it work instead of just they saw this opportunity it's like okay well this wasn't working let's do it so i not that i even really care that much about a god of war live action but i would say i'm more hopeful with the idea of a date batista in the room i think what's for sure is that the

2:30:13Dustin Furman:run of kind of good feelings about playstation productions has kind of tripped up a little bit because things started really well. I mean, and things were good. I mean, you had the Uncharted movie, you had The Last of Us, HBO season one was very well received. Twisted Metal has been very well received and so on. But then you start getting things like Until Dawn, which was a little softer. Then you get the second season of The Last of Us on HBO, which people weren't crazy about, although I'm sure it did very well. The Horizon stuff at Netflix, you know, that series got canceled because of the showrunner or whatever.

2:30:48Dustin Furman:and now that's like they don't really know what they're doing with that and then the god of war thing with the recasting of ryan hearst and as you know it's kratos and also like where's the second uncharted movie and like it seems like things are you know after like after some good hits seems like things are kind of falling back to earth and i'm i'm to earth two more quick pieces of news i wanted to share with you guys one is that uh and i did a little bit of research on this this is a reliable apparently a reliable source of lego news brick tap they announced that astrobot will be included with the lego ps1 um that will be apparently be released october 1st it is going to cost 160 and it will be 1 911 pieces so there's that i like i like astrobot actually someone sent me a little astrobot toy you won't be able to see him but he's back there I put on my shelf.

2:31:47Dustin Furman:And then the other thing that we already talked about this is that Reese Elliott over at Alinea released some data about the sales of Call of Duty. And I'm actually going to delete this inquiry because we really don't need to talk about it any further. But that Call of Duty Black Ops 2 on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, both for the month of July, sold 8.2 million copies. Call of Duty Black Ops 1 sold 3 million copies. And Black Flag re-synced that 1.6 million copies, a nice little hit for Ubisoft. And then a bunch of other EA stuff. Look at Grand Theft Auto. 846 ,000 new copies of GTA 5 sold on PS5 last month.

2:32:25Dustin Furman:And Halo, a lot of people were fixated. Halo apparently, according to him, only sold 350 ,000 copies. Pal World. They released the 1.0 version of it, I guess. I didn't know people, it sold 479 ,000 copies apparently on PlayStation. I thought that, I guess I was just wrong. I thought it kind of came and went. but I guess people were waiting patiently for it. It's 1.0. Right. That's all we have for the news. We're into what we're playing now. I'm still playing Halo Campaign Evolved. And by the way, you put that in the chat and on the footnotes.

2:32:58Colin Moriarty:Yeah.

2:33:00Dustin Furman:Rusty. No,

2:33:02Colin Moriarty:yeah, you got to get back on. Get on back. I got to save Lockmore. And I've been hearing about some of your timestamps.

2:33:07Dustin Furman:Yeah, that's bad. It's been bad. So, yeah, I've been playing Campaign Evolved. still i am playing through on hard whatever that's called heroic heroic and uh it's hard man you know insane yeah so i am um enjoying that i'm almost done with it i'm trying to collect the skulls as i go and do the so i'm like using a guide to try to find the skulls in the terminals of which i found almost none in my normal playthrough so what's a little annoying is that there are a few of them where you're trying to play through linearly and you really need to go back even again with a certain skull in order to get another skull which i'm like that's a little fucking funny but we're about to do the spoiler cast interview discussion i'm prepared for that so i'll just save my conjecture about the game but i i will say i i don't have an affinity for halo like chris does or a lot of other people do but i like halo and i really like this game and i think there's so much hate about it and i'm like i think it's great i don't i don't see what's like why everyone's so upset about it but again i i'm not a purist and i am not like it i'm an old fan I had the game in 2003 but it's um so a little late later than it came out but I understand people some people are upset about it so that's what I am playing but I know you guys are also playing it as well so I guess we'll stick with that Chris uh and Dustin if you guys want to talk about it at any length please do otherwise we'll we'll save it for the show uh yeah I don't know if I have much like I platinumed it already so like we'll be getting into the meat of it I do want to say like I think ultimately like most normal people will play this and like it like i don't think it's flawed in any real deep way to like to the point where your average person is going to be like this isn't quite right like it really is like the people who have been paying attention who are going to have the most nitpicks i have plenty uh but i think it's like serviceable and fine i do think the the issue really comes in with the fact that it's just like this should be better than serviceable and fine you know like there is an entire component of the game missing and the fact that like the multiplayer is not there and you know the bonus missions in my opinion are very like I don't know about this but the core game the core remake I think is pretty solid I like the changes that they made overall I don't really have that many issues with it but it is kind of weird to see I guess the way that I feel about it is you'd think that this ip would be more important to them enough for them to not throw it out early to avoid gta you know which is clearly the case there's like some like minor polishing issues that they definitely have to they should have cleared up and um i don't know i i do think it's good but I do think there's like there's a distinct difference between a game like this or a remake like this and like Resident Evil 2 you know what I mean and or Resident Evil 4 remake you know what I mean like there's like a I don't know if you want to call it a difference in care necessarily but it's I feel like Halo should be more important to Xbox than it feels like it is with this game it's not to say that there's anything like massively wrong with it but like it's a little odd But I like it.

2:36:29I think it's perfectly adequate.

2:36:33Dustin Furman:Dustin, you want to speak on it? We'll get back to you about the other ones you're playing.

2:36:36Colin Moriarty:So I've played not a lot of it. I'm on the silent cartographer mission, which I think is mission 3 or 4. Yeah. It's 4. Yeah, it's 4. I don't really like it. I don't think it's bad. It's funny, as I was playing it, Because I wasn't extremely excited for it, but I really like that first Halo. I have a ton of nostalgia for it. Yeah. And I think I was just hoping to feel something from it. But I feel like I learned something about myself playing this game that I was like, man, I just don't care that the graphics are nicer. At all. In fact, as I'm playing it, I'm constantly. And this is a me problem.

2:37:23Colin Moriarty:So that's why I'm trying to. I'm not saying anything definitively wrong with the game. but as I'm playing it, I'm thinking about the original. I'm thinking about how I like the original better. Is that nostalgia? Probably a good part of it. Maybe not all of it. I think there are some cool changes in it. I think that the fact that they added a new, like some of the later weapons games into it, like the SMG. Yeah. I think that's pretty neat, but there's like a couple of things. I'm like, why? like tell me if i'm wrong i feel like there's points where kurtana is talking where she didn't used to talk yeah for sure and like explaining things and i like almost like uh aloy not that bad there's points where i'm like no no you don't need to say anything right now uh so i i haven't played it in probably a week now and i'm just not really feeling it and there's really nothing wrong with it really yeah that's the weird part this is the thing it's like see for me like i love the original trilogy and i love the original bungee games quite a bit but halo combat evolved is my least favorite of those games so like i and but i've still played it a million times and i think ultimately i still kind of do prefer the original just because like there is a charm there's like a readability to it um and there is something about it that is just good but the way that i approached it was just like all right i've played this game a million times if this is a remix and this is going to give me kind of the same experience but like tweaked and kind of different in weird ways like i'm okay with that and i came away kind of like i came away liking it generally but it is one of those things where it's just like if you have a real affinity for halo like i'll put it this way if they did this exact thing with halo 2 and halo 3 i would probably be up the wall with all sorts of complaints because those are the ones that i really know like the back of my hand and that i really loved deeply and i can't imagine i can't imagine them doing a better job than those original games especially with halo 2 because they already re kind of they did the anniversary of that too so we'll get into the deeper stuff in the spoiler cast but i think if you've never played halo comet evolved before i think you'll like it like it's it's still ultimately the bones of a really really good shooter um yeah and it's it's paced relatively well and the the difference in line delivery or the differences in like what cortana says and what she doesn't say isn't going to bother you because you won't have a point of reference it was a comparison is the thief of joy i think that is like there's no game where it's more true than this game i think where like if i'm looking at it as a direct mirror of the original comic of all of them like i don't know man but it's its own thing i think i think most people would probably like it yeah i am also playing on heroic and unreasonably hard to see what people were saying about it because i saw some people saying that how easy it was it's too hard on heroic i was feeling like it was really fucking hard particularly i was on the the beginning the first few levels i was like oh this is fine a little challenging but nothing crazy it's truth and reconciliation it's when you get on the ship and then like there's like 16 elites and you're like this is not what are we yeah like this is there's no way it was like this in the original heroic this is this is absurd um i don't know if that's on purpose or what but like they heroic is too hard in my opinion i think when i go back to it i could muscle through it and do it on heroic but i don't want to so i'm probably just gonna do it on normal just so and play it to see the rest of it but I don't I'm just not really feeling it heroic is the way that you should play most halo games I think in this in this game it's like you go normal yeah the best experience is normal or legendary because you're kind of prepared for that difficult experience but heroic is not I was getting my shit pushed in and heroic and I was like how is this possible with respect yeah what I find in my own

2:41:34Dustin Furman:playthrough because I played through on normal all the way just like you know blind and then I started using the guide for the skulls and all the rest and playing on heroic and i find that i cruise for a little while and then i and then i come to a place where i'm like damn and then and i literally die 10 times before i before i get through this one thing and because the checkpoints are dynamic i've started to try to trick the checkpoints throughout the game which i i've successfully done a few times because there's this one part where you have to where am i i'm like you you i I don't even know.

2:42:04Dustin Furman:I don't even know what the stage is, but you're flying the Covenant ship to these various little perches and going in and like fucking up these servers or whatever you're doing. And there's this one part where there's a hidden skull, but you have to like beat all these enemies in this area first. It's like a totally optional area. I've never encountered anything like that in Halo 1 except for this area. You have to like open a door and then go in the opposite direction. And then you're there for like a long time fighting these enemies. And then if you kill them all, a skull appears. And I literally died probably 25 times doing it.

2:42:33Dustin Furman:it's hard so yeah so it's like i'm not the greatest gamer in the world but i'm not that bad i'm telling you it's it's as a veteran of this stuff it's uh heroic is not in my opinion not well tuned but so i'm gonna i'm gonna stick with it i want to do more with it but i'm really interested and none of us are playing it yet but uh i think beast and reincarnation a beast of reincarnation looks really good and i want to play that game it's gotten kind of mixed reviews i mean people seem to like it but it seems like it's a little maybe a little boring or something but i think it looks pretty good so that's kind of on my mind but i want to stick with halo for a little while longer get a little more out of it but i don't know how long i'll i'll be playing it beyond that all right chris let's just go over to you you're playing gta san andreas as well do you want to uh speak on that there's really not much more to say like i just um i put it on the back burner a little bit with uh halo and just also just i've been getting back in the marathon a little bit because they that pve mode has been out uh for a minute and i've been quite liking that uh but i realized like oh yeah fuck i was i was i was working on san andreas i gotta get back to that so i'm kind of getting back in the fold again uh with that i still like it there's not really much more to say about it i don't know how i don't know how deep into the game i am uh i didn't look up like how many missions there were or like the you know i mean like i kind of like going into these games blind um but i'm i'm at the point like i've been to san francisco like the in-game san francisco like diegetically through missions and stuff so i would imagine i'm kind of i'm healthily deep into it but i like it i like it a lot i've come around on it quite a bit like i've gotten used to the weird controls like it which is crazy because like i do think early on like the first like five hours i was like yo even the first 10 hours i was like this is uh this is quite archaic and it is it's not not archaic but like you do kind of get a muscle memory for it and you kind of learn how to you learn how to trick the camera into doing what you want which is its own kind of weird metagame of enjoyment that i'm i'm quite liking so yeah i i still think it's really fun and and uh i love the characters in it i'm excited it's getting me more excited for gta 6 honestly yeah that's great getting me in that mode although i honestly don't know if i'm going to go to gta 5 to be honest yeah i kind of it kind of got a little long in the tooth for me i still have to go and like just beat it because i'm like right at the end i do that with games sometimes i'm like i just don't even care anymore about this but it's not the game either like you have to appreciate a game so dense sure with shit to do and and it's quite impressive actually but at the same time i'm like i don't know man um i just think the main reason why i like these rockstar games is that they're so focused on a character and i remember that being my main problem with gta 5 was that like we're kind of swapping constantly and i'm like this is cool like technologically speaking and it's interesting and it's kind of innovative but like i don't this doesn't work for me really in the way that san andreas is working or the way that certainly in the way that gta 4 works sure um or even three and and vice city you know like i just think they're stick with the protagonist three is a very interesting game very it's like liminal almost at this point it is very san andreas is liminal as well like those everything before g and even gta4 is kind of like it's it's out of that space a little bit but those early gta games are quite liminal yeah it's cool it's cool yeah i like them all right dusty boy you're back like you said earlier in the show you're on um summon sign talking about some some of the deeper things you were playing over time So this is more what you're playing now.

2:46:13Dustin Furman:So people should go listen to that for the full breadth of what you might have been playing over the last couple of months. But here it says you're playing Big Walk, which just came out on PS Plus, actually, although you don't have it anymore. So you couldn't get it. And then Splatoon Raiders, which Mike has been playing and really enjoying as well. So I'm interested to hear what you have to say.

2:46:29Colin Moriarty:Yeah, let's start with Splatoon. So I just finished, well, sort of finished it last night. I got to the final boss and did the credits, but there's more afterwards. But this was a really surprising game for me because I played Splatoon two and three and I like those a good deal, but I wasn't in love with them. I like the PvP. It's very unique, really well designed games, but I was never very good at them in a PvP stance. So I always played them a little bit, but moved on, didn't finish the campaign of either one of those games. so i picked up splatoon raiders because i like saw the reviews are really good and i was like i like splatoon games and the fact that it's pve is interesting and so this is a splatoon looter shooter game uh at its core where uh you go on these different raids and most of them take anywhere between like 7 to 15 minutes depending on what type of raid that it is and you The main, I guess, core mechanic of the combat in this is that you have three different types of backpacks that give you different special abilities that reload really quickly.

2:47:50Colin Moriarty:So there's one that's built on speed. There's one that's more tactical focused and then one that's just kind of like raw power. and uh as you play you'll unlock more of these special abilities whether it's like a uh like a window around you that spreads ink or you can get like a little drone that sets up to shoot things and what surprised me about this game was you really can't just settle on like one build there are certain levels that are clearly designed for you like you need to switch up your build and you need to use something that's like okay i need a longer range weapon and i need to use the special abilities that can have a better distance or i need just raw up close power output something like that and there's just a surprising amount of depth in that the amount of which uh you can customize your different builds uh i'm trying to think what else about so you can do a co-op in this game which is really convenient because there are certain levels that were actually i'm playing on normal and there were some levels like man i cannot do this and so you just press this button it's like ask for help and it will match make you with two other random people you can't talk to them which is actually nice and you can go in and it does the scaling for three people instead of just you and it was kind of fun just be able to like hop in it felt very old school and just hopping into a match two other players we're doing we're have a shared goal we're not competing and then just when that match is over they're gone and you say goodbye uh so now i'm at the end of the game i've completed all of the primary raids apparently there's like a really extensive end game that i'm getting into now which is pretty cool but yeah i was really surprised by Splatoon Raiders.

2:49:45Colin Moriarty:One thing that I really appreciate too is that the game looks almost exactly the same as Splatoon 3 on a graphical level, other than, of course, it's at a higher resolution. But Nintendo really used the horsepower of the Switch 2 to increase the enemy count. And there are points in this game where it's like absolute fucking chaos, where there are, well, not hundreds, but it feels like you are completely surrounded by enemies. There's explosions happening everywhere. and I always appreciate Nintendo sometimes for that because they get dragged a lot for you know I famously always call it stinky switch and it's often deserved but I think it's they do do a good job sometimes being smart where it's like we don't need this game to look any more beautiful how can we use this power to actually do new things with gameplay so they did a good job with that on Splatoon Raiders so uh for a spin-off game that is not even full price

2:50:39Dustin Furman:this is one of the best games on switch too and some and some new new novel slurs coming out of

2:50:44Colin Moriarty:it i hear as well i saw that yeah what was it i'm trying to remember i feel even weird saying it was it i think it was squiggers but i squiggers which is fucking crazy that is insane the hard everything people gotta relax yeah man yeah slow down jesus christ they couldn't even give you the

2:51:07Dustin Furman:a that's what it was micah was saying that was just like oh my god they went hard r on it and they didn't even like do the a like the more casual a yeah you guys are out of your minds out there man sometimes i think i'm fucking crazy and i listen to you fucking bozos geez louise

2:51:24Colin Moriarty:anyway i'm sorry big walk big walk uh so you're right colin this is on playstation plus which technically i i still have playstation plus because i had my subscriptions not run out for a few more months but i played this on pc i believe it's cross play as well this is from house house the developers of untitled goose game not to be confused with house mark not to be confused with house mark true it's house house and what's interesting about this game is that they i believe were making it for six years uh so it was born during the covid era and it's coming out now in a very interesting time where friend slop games are huge and dominate steam whether it's something like more recently the mecha chameleon game or gamble with your friends or something uh but this was the idea for this game was born way way way before that and they've described it as a co-op puzzle walking sim game uh i guess the walking sim maybe but basically with this game is that you and up to I think it's like 10 or 12 other players are on this island that's very reminiscent of like Myst or The Witness or something where there you're on the island and there are just puzzles everywhere for you to solve with your friends and the game doesn't tell you anything it'll give you a little bit of a brief tutorial area the beginning of like how to pick things up how to jump how to sit how to use hand motions or something like that but after that the game doesn't give you any direction at all so this game is about discovery with your friends and it is certainly very slow paced where you're walking from one point to another you really don't have any inventory system so you have to like each person has to carry one thing and maybe you get a backpack later uh that then the backpack can only be used by someone else putting it on you and putting the items in the backpack so i there are clear goals for you to discover like the main goal which i almost don't even want to get into because it's fun for people to go and discover like why you're doing all these puzzles what rewards you get from doing the puzzles but what i will go into is the puzzles themselves are really like surprisingly sophisticated co-op puzzles uh for example uh there are ones where like you and another player will be separated and you need to describe different objects for them to rearrange the tiles on something to be the correct arrangement.

2:54:26Colin Moriarty:Oh, the other really important thing about this game, you have to use proximity voice chat. You can get around it. You could use Discord or PlayStation Party or whatever. But there's actually like a note when you start the game that's like you really, really, really think you should use proximity voice chat. The game is designed around that. The puzzles are designed around that so if you use something else then you're getting rid of that whole element of the game you're making you're putting on like insane easy mode um it is pretty cute and fun with some of its uh different items for example we found walkie talkies that we could use so we were able to like split up into groups and do different abilities uh do different puzzles there's also interesting mechanics for if people get lost there's like flare systems because it's like if you wander away uh like i'm trying to remember who did it might have been brad someone just wandered away and we couldn't find them for a while and they had no way to communicate with us so it's like okay well go to this tower and set off the flare so hopefully they can find the right direction to find us uh but it really is like a very chill and i understand the walking simulator aspect where it's like you are going to be walking quite a bit with other people and i kind of think that that's it's like a very chill game where a lot of the fun that we're having like obviously we're doing the puzzles and that's cool and some of these puzzles are really fucking hard to the point where like last night we did a puzzle where I just kind of like step back I was like you guys have to figure this out because I'm too stupid to do this but um when you're walking around it's like okay we know we're going to this point let's figure it out and you're just walking and so it's like naturally you're just going to talk to each other uh and chill out so it's fun from that perspective if you have a good group of friends to play this if you were playing with someone you didn't really know would be weird i think it would be kind of awkward like or unless you're a great conversationalist uh maybe that would work but my only big complaint with the game right now is that the voices are too quiet uh and it's hard to hear people even when you're directly beside each other the voices are really quiet there's no uh game audio and voices like sliders in the menus to kind of control that house house has already said that that's the first thing they're going to fix is to make the voices louder i am shocked that nobody when playtesting this game said like hey we kind of can't hear each other very well it's a huge detriment to the game it's always surprising when what gets through yeah and these things including in my own games

2:57:10Dustin Furman:so like you look later and you're like oh our bad i this morning because i i i've played enough the

2:57:19Colin Moriarty:game that some of the mystery around like the basics is gone so i was able to i watched a game spot review it was a good review uh so i'm not knocking this reviewer but he didn't mention it at all and it's the one thing that all of us playing like me ben brad uh lockmort our friend justin we all are like man this voice chat is too fucking quiet we can't hear each other and the whole point of the game is to like hang out and it's all these puzzles and it's like what how did

2:57:45Dustin Furman:this slip through the goalie so hanging out and solving puzzles sounds like the last thing i want to do so oh no you would you would absolutely yeah it might make for a good sacred stream yeah

2:57:54Colin Moriarty:maybe yeah yeah though i know it would be tough because i would have to like i'd have to let you try to solve it you know because i the the mystery is gone on me on how to play this game so oh right it's like a play once game i think not that i've i we've played it maybe we played it two nights so probably like four hours total uh but i'm really enjoying it i don't know if it's a game of the year contender like some of the reviewers are saying yet but i don't know but i'm having a great time playing it and the fact that it's free for playstation plus users if you have a friend group that's like an easy sell if most likely they have playstation plus so uh give it a shot you can play it with as little as two players and the game actually dynamically adapts based on how many players you have the puzzles which is nice cool it sounds cool it looks cool and uh yeah it

2:58:50Dustin Furman:is nice uh because when we were talking about it last week um for the ps plus stuff chris had brought up i was like yeah that's that's new and then i was like yeah i forgot about that then i went back and looked and i'm like yes they announced this at a state of play but yeah not my kind of game but certainly one of those games that will be the talk of the town for a minute and like you said it's it's nothing is part of what i think is disintegrating about gaming culture is just the nature of nothing being permanent. Nothing was ever permanent, but nothing sticks around very long. Crimson Desert is my major example of that this year.

2:59:22Dustin Furman:A game that demonstrably sold millions of copies and that people love and that you never hear a fucking word about. You never hear a word about it. There are millions of people playing the new Assassin's Creed re-release. You saw videos for 36 hours. And then that's that. Now that's in the fucking dustbin of history. All right. Well, that's what we're playing. Good to hear back your thoughts again, Dustin, on the games that you are enjoying. And we'll, of course, be back next week with more, as we always are. We'll get into six questions, comments, concerns, thoughts, and ideas now from the audience over on Patreon.com slash Last Day Media and wrap this episode up as we always do with your thoughts.

3:00:00Dustin Furman:This first one is long. But it is crazy. And I am very curious. In fact, I feel like this is if this is true and I suspect it is, although I can't verify it myself. I think this is huge news and something that people should be aware of. But I didn't want to put it in the news or whatever. And it's like we'll talk about it here. Game over. Dad wrote in. So hello, CC and hopefully big succulent D first time writing. But I've been a listener for over 10 years since the beyond days. Last week, I made a post on the marathon subreddit that became the top post for about two days. it also sparked enough controversy that multiple multiple follow-up threads were created just to mock or rehash it i thought it would make for an interesting discussion about ai moderation and where gaming is headed here's what happened i was playing the new solo vault breaker mode and was having the run of my life after clearing several vaults i got cornered by two commanders and two ghosts uesc in a moment of frustration and panic i called one of my ai enemies a slur an alternative word for cigarette i somehow survived with literally one hit point about a minute later a large red banner appeared saying I had violated the voice chat terms of service and should check my inbox.

3:01:09Dustin Furman:The message from Bungie said I had used hate speech and warned that repeated offenses could result in my Bungie or PlayStation accounts being banned or deleted. Here's the important part. I was completely alone. I was in the new solo queue. There wasn't another player in my lobby, on my team, or anywhere else that could have heard me. I was simply playing marathon on PS5 with my Pulse Elite headset. Since the microphone is hot by default, Bungie and Sony's AI heard everything. I'm not the only person this has happened to. More players have shared similar stories ranging from much more severe language to far less.

3:01:39Dustin Furman:As far as I can tell, neither Bungie nor Sony has clearly explained what crosses the line into account ending territory. Personally, I think this is a massive overreach. Regardless of where someone stands on hate speech, AI actively monitoring players in private solo sessions and issuing warnings that threaten their accounts is a conversation worth having. Predictably, Reddit focused almost entirely on the slur instead of the AI monitoring. That's shocking. Still, the upvote ratio suggested that many more people agreed with the broader issue that the comments would lead you to believe. Sorry for not sorry for the long email, but I figured this was a spicy topic for the show.

3:02:11Dustin Furman:The Reddit post is titled PSA do not use marathons internal chat prox or otherwise. End quote. Do you want to check it out for yourself? That's nuts. And remember, do you guys remember that I and actually someone sent me a controller and did it as like a joke and a nice little gesture where I was like I want to disable the microphones in my controllers yeah I don't like that there's a live mic on my controller and I've had a problem with it since the ps5 launched and I always make sure that little orange button is on because I just believe of do you remember many years ago like where it was like amazon people from amazon were like oh yeah we can just listen to like any alexa and we do by the way you know um and i'm like that's fucking crazy of course you can and i think it's kind of silly to act like someone couldn't listen to you or get things you're saying otherwise that you wouldn't want to i don't like this whole mic'd up microphone thing and uh or mic'd up controller thing and i don't like this is outrageous It's outrageous.

3:03:18Dustin Furman:And not appropriate at all for them to do. Have you heard anything about this, Chris? No, I mean, not from my experience. I don't know. I just assume this is happening everywhere. So like this is. Like, yeah, this is bad, I guess. But like, I mean, like, are we not have we not been here already for like a while? Yeah, but why is you know, why is Matt? why is bungee monitoring your microphone on a solo queue in a solo play mode i don't like that it's weird yeah i don't like if they can do that with ai then certainly i'm not saying that maybe the tools or maybe normal people wouldn't know how to do it over there at bungee but it's like if it's listening to you then certainly they could listen to you right sure probably yeah i have there is a setting that you can activate on your ps5 by the way that because i have that i made sure to do that where like my mic is default off uh on the controller um because sometimes i remember early on i was forgetting you know and it was like annoying uh but like yeah i would imagine that it's probably an ai that's like listening for keywords and then it like files a thing whenever it hears a keyword and it activates it's weird to me that it would to me the thing so it's it's it's tricky because on one hand let's say you let's say you don't say anything right and then somebody reports you for having said something right and then you get knocked or you get dinged even though you didn't say anything theoretically it would be good like theoretically it would be good to have like at least proof that that didn't happen right he's like literally go back and check the ai didn't say anything like that the hell are we doing um and you could maybe have some recourse that's a very good point but it's but like the the real thing for that so i've i'm already aware that we're just being listened to forever like it's this is just the surveillance like we got flock cameras everywhere like this is just whatever the camera like this this is evil and it sucks but like what am i gonna do you know this is just what we've chosen i i'm sorry i'm sorry go ahead no no well the thing for me is that like if you're going to monitor things for the sake of having like I don't know maybe like a a record that maybe gets uh maybe you have like a record like every day it gets like erased or something like that just just so you can have like if there is a dispute you can go back and verify I don't necessarily mind that I don't necessarily mind people being able to report people and then having proof of that but to me it's just like there was nobody there to report like it's one thing if somebody else reports somebody else it's another thing if like the system just tells on you even though no one was around to report you that i think is confusing and weird and shouldn't happen like i don't understand the impetus behind that because like what if you're like listening what if your mic is on you're watching tv or something you're watching the sopranos and then tony soprano gets your fucking account banned you know what i It just seems it seems a little bit.

3:06:24I think it's a bit overreaching. I think if I were to guess, I would imagine that's more of a Sony thing than a Bungie thing, to be real. But because that was originally the reason why they didn't want proc chat in the game at all was because they just didn't want to deal with like the Sony legal stuff. And then they ended up kind of pursuing that anyway, because it was good. It was better for the game. But it is. Yeah, I think it's lame. I think it's dumb. I don't know. I feel like it's also weird that you're just shouting slurs at robots. Yeah, you should be allowed to do it, I guess. Yeah, why not?

3:06:55It's better you.

3:06:56Dustin Furman:It's better you shouting slurs of robots than real people. That is true. But yeah, I think it's odd. And yeah, like I said, I think it's it's it's fine to have like a record for people who actually have issues with each other to actually like come to a resolution that is fair and accurate. But like to have a robot tell on you is kind of crazy. Two things. one was I was going to say, and I'm sorry to have interrupted you, is that I just read a story recently about just in the last couple of days about a guy who I think it was Wisconsin and Minnesota were the two states. But let's just say that that's what it was, where the dude drove from Wisconsin to Minnesota to buy weed at a dispensary where it's legal and then drove back into Wisconsin where it's illegal.

3:07:41Dustin Furman:And again, these are just the two examples. I think those were the two states, but whatever. And the cops used flat cameras to track him and use that as evidence to pull him over and arrest him for possession yeah it's ridiculous and i'm like these are simply crimes you would have never even known existed and i am other the other thing is that like i am like my mom has an alexa in her living room and i'm always like i like almost i'm like i'm not saying anything here like i don't i don't know man i just don't i don't like having these like open mics it's you you always see videos all the time of people have something funny happening in their house or in bedroom or whatever and they just have cameras pointing at themselves in their house it's like what are you doing yeah the fuck are you doing like look at me tossing and turning when i'm sleeping i'm like why do you have a camera pointed at your bed the fuck are you doing and it's not one of those things where they're like oh i'm a i'm a tick tocker it's like no that is like an installed corner security camera looking at your bed you're recording yourself sleeping it's you know what it is man it's to prove that you weren't somewhere else doing evil shit right like that literally is it's like the only way to it it sucks but like i think i think it happened there was a story man i wish you could remember the specifics but like somebody like their car was caught on a flock camera or whatever and then they they were assumed to be guilty of a crime or whatever and they had to use other people's porch like ring cameras to prove that like no i was actually on this porch at that time um and so it's it's really annoying it's like it's like you have to use other people's you know privacy invading surveillance to protect yourself from other people's private privacy invasive uh surveillance it's it's fucking it really is crazy it's like everybody it's like everybody's using chemical warfare against each other you know what what I mean?

3:09:33It's insane. But this is the world that we've created, you know?

3:09:38Dustin Furman:It's funny because when Mike and I go for our, we go for walks at night a lot and, you know, we're walking just on the sidewalk in a suburban neighborhood in front of all these houses. And I really do watch what I say because like, if it's like a piece of gossip or like something really inappropriate, like one of our inappropriate jokes or something like that, it's like, cause I'm like, we're walking by, you know, house. And then a few seconds later, it's like another house. And I'm like, it's just ring doorbell, ring doorbell, ring doorbell. and i'm like i gotta be careful oh that's fun i see i i activate when i'm around those i have fun i have i have fun knowing because then i get to say like outrageous shit and i get to give people stories but uh i don't yeah i it's annoying that that we're in this constant surveillance state and that people are okay with it by the way and that like i i can't endorse anything but like i i do like those videos of people beating the shit out of flat cameras i you know they're right i mean it gives me satisfaction to see it i uh it's funny like on we have this big main road you know it's just a straight road for many many miles and lights and there's like these big cameras on top of each of them and we were driving to five guys the other day and i was looking at them and like one looks down and then like looks forward so like each is looking at the next you know what i mean yeah and i'm like and i was looking around being like if you had like a rifle like where could you be to just shoot these things and not be you know and like they wouldn't really know you know not that i would do that of course but no of course i really wouldn't could you imagine me trying to do what am i what am i a fucking army ranger you know like yeah it's um crawling through like doing a military crawl through like the woods with a rifle to shoot the flat camera.

3:11:25It's all very dystopian and it happened very quickly with express permission. It's upsetting. But I'm also desensitized to it. You know what I mean?

3:11:36Dustin Furman:Well, that's the thing is that I always just assume I'm being recorded. So I just... And you are always being recorded. And I guess there is an upside. There are societal upsides to it. Presumably things are safer now. people don't get away with shit you know like i am fat we bring it up every once in a while i'm fascinated by old crime or i'm like like it's like oh this guy killed someone in 1810 and he got caught it's like how you gotta really be bad at killing people to be caught yeah pre-forensics it's insane who caught you the fuck are you talking about you ever have this you ever have this thought and i understand this is an insane thought but it's this is purely uh what do you call intrusive but you just think like this was 1800 i could kill this person oh definitely like i could like this this person if we're like they're on the escalator it's like i could kick this person down the stairs right now and then just flee and then like it would be a mystery for forever like before forensics or before like people gave a shit to take down what and people i'm always like mesmerized by the people who like in in um even in like the 60s who like or like the 50s or something like that like not even that distant in the past where they're like yeah i have a completely different family and they live like two towns away right and they live their whole lives just like they didn't get caught at all what do you mean yeah it's i'm fascinated now by how much um like ancestry and all those things has fucked shit up for people that have gotten away with crimes like long ago because like basically the the like you could put in a dna sample and it could be like this person is this person's second cousin this person is this person's uncle this and then like you're like if you committed some heinous crime in like the 60s or 70s and like you're still kind of going on or the 80s and you got away with it like you have to be like counting your time until they get you because it's over like once they once they once they get like just some of your familial connections they'll make it and i watch videos like that of how they often have people getting caught like that it's like damn that's that's wild it's crazy man it's it yeah like presumably we are better off maybe you could maybe make the argument um i certainly feel freer because i'm just like i don't know i'll just say whatever insane shit publicly then if you know what do i care i guess at this point yeah at the very least you could say that there's no mystery as to what happened but but sure but i mean i'm against it but then some of them are wrong like that lady uh who proved that she was on the porch uh right different times but like it's not even really as foolproof as people would like to assume it is so there's probably people getting you know arrested and you know i i really think it's just because we need labor just like uh we gotta arrest these people so we can get some free labor out of them make license plates i really do think that's like that's like my tinfoil hat is like they're just looking for reasons to lock people up so they can just make them work for free we don't if anything the prisoners are not doing enough fucking license plates we should have them yeah prison studios that'd be awesome san quentin studios presents sony san quentin sony let's do it let's see what they make oh they do they do their vidocs and they're all in the yeah they're all in their jump shoots yeah it's like we built this for everybody and it's like some dude rules blood still on his face um dustin do you have anything you want to add

3:15:19Colin Moriarty:about this before we move on it's definitely concerning my theory on why it happened to him was in a single player quote-unquote single player match is that you can't play marathon offline even if you're playing a single player match it's just online regardless and so yeah his he was on their server and they probably don't have it to like not listen because this mode is relatively new and so it's just that's just how that server runs so uh that's probably why it happened obviously it's concerning just because like who determines what words are okay and what isn't okay like there's words that we can universally agree that's like okay i get that's part of your moderation system right um the other thing is about like mistakes i mean you you brought up chris like if the tv is on or something certainly but it's like in this case like what if someone said maggot instead and it's like oh i heard you say that i'll you know like or what or what if somebody like sitting next to you says it they shout it into your controller and get you know what i mean like people look man i can't play games with a hot mic around around my star tank co-hosts that's not it's impossible like i'd get immediately immediately killed so it yeah the the moderations what what is okay i guess they're a private company they can set that however they want and maybe you could argue that maybe you should probably be trained to not say these things in a on a microphone to strangers anyway but like i still think it's ultimately like just let people i don't know right it just strikes me as a little overreachy it is a bit i'm thinking about like there's been with the re-release of black ops too there's been a lot of the the lobby chat videos coming up it's like the the culture shift is uh extreme which like i would assume those black ops chats are still like that on the new version i've seen some the emblems and holy shit the emblems are crazy the emblems are still crazy so it is weird that's like though i would though that game's fine but i guess it's like a company by company basis like it's it's not surprising that bungie is very sensitive to anyone saying a slur in their game as opposed to activision right but i don't know it's uh it's weird it's weird that it's an ai listening all the time transcribing all the things you say yeah it's

3:18:03Dustin Furman:just so ironic that like the only way to protect yourself from it is to have the recording the paradox right yeah exactly yeah enraged seahawk wrote in and said hello secret i wanted to ask what the mlb lockout looking likely to happen in 2027 can we see sony san diego take a year off and maybe do something bigger i understand they're probably losing out on easy sales while people are hungry for baseball but perhaps letting people miss it wouldn't be so bad ps seahawks hard knock episode one was fantastic i don't have hbo right now so i have not been watching hard knocks um and we've talked back to the subscription stuff it's like i just don't want hbo right now i'll get it for uh the gilded age when that comes back but um you guys are not sports fans but there is a very big story going on with baseball right now which is that there almost certainly will not be a season next year and the basically the mlb and the mlbpa have to kind of come up the mlb really the teams and the players and the player association and their representatives under a new CBA have to come to a deal.

3:19:00Dustin Furman:And the basic thing here that's going on is there's no salary cap in baseball. So players have the opportunity to make an enormous amount of money on these various teams that are willing to spend. But it, you know, based on the argument about what's going on, it unbalances the competitive advantages that teams have and so on and so forth. And there's a bunch of arguments about it. I'm not here to have any of those arguments, but it's clear that the baseball owners and the owners of the teams and the players are on different sides of this argument. and they're going to be in an impasse soon enough and there simply won't be a season they'll be like a lockout.

3:19:35Dustin Furman:At least for a time. I feel like, and I'd be very interested to see what happens with this. I feel like MLB the show will be bigger than usual if that happens. Because it will really be the only official baseball product that you can even acquire as opposed to being able to watch games and follow the season along with your team because there probably will not be a season. unless something revolutionary and dramatic happens. These two sides are just completely on opposite sides of the spectrum of what they want. So it's an interesting question in Rage Seahawk. And I like the question, but of course, they shouldn't take a year off.

3:20:13Dustin Furman:They won't take a year off. And as you said, I think people are actually going to be unusually hungry for it because it might be their only option.

3:20:19Colin Moriarty:I have an idea.

3:20:21Dustin Furman:Yeah.

3:20:21Colin Moriarty:Okay. Instead of a regular baseball game, let's do PlayStation All-Stars baseball. that'd be sick uh since they since they have an off year like imagine a team they can just they have to load they have to get the models from their specific games i don't want like mlb the show version of joel or slay cooper or something i want those assets in a hyper realistic

3:20:45Dustin Furman:world playing baseball there you go it's very nintendo very nintendo yeah exactly take advantage

3:20:53Colin Moriarty:of the opportunity when you don't have anything to do.

3:20:58Dustin Furman:MLB, the show is so important to Sony that I don't think they're going to do anything to it. I know we're not being serious, of course, but yeah. I don't know. I would be curious to know how they feel about it. Of course, real baseball helps sell MLB, the show. Your excitement about the game. You just watched a great game. You went to a great game, whatever. And then you're like, yeah, I want to play the fucking show. But I just feel like there's something about Like, what are you going to do? You can watch minor league baseball. You can watch local baseball, college baseball. But you're not going to watch major league baseball.

3:21:30Dustin Furman:And that might be your only way in. So Japanese baseball, of course. They did release an English version of the Japanese version of MLB, the show this year, like whatever it's called, Pro Baseball Spirits or something. Have you seen that on the store? That's like a big game in Japan. I think Konami does it. You know, because the Japanese baseball league, like their domestic baseball league is huge. It's like a big sport. And so they have their own. Their own game. But it's obviously never been localized until recently. OK. Portuguese wrote in and said, hey, guys, first of all, welcome back, Dustin.

3:22:07Dustin Furman:I was listening to Punching Up and Gene decided to rant about trophies that we try to optimize games too much. I'm not going to lie. I felt that trophies for me are something that adds to the game. However, I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't say that I already passed on the game because I despise the trophy list. So, Colin, big boss, be honest. are the gents like you and I poisoned. I find myself adding movies to letterbox shows to refract RIP TV time and hoping for trophies and achievements on my games. I'm going to enjoy my last week of parental leave and listen to you guys talking about how Gene completely exposed us and deserves to be fired.

3:22:35So I went back and listened to this and and it's an interesting conversation, but it's

3:22:39Dustin Furman:one that I've been subjected to for many years at this point.

3:22:44Dustin Furman:I think people should play video games like for and whatever whatever reason they want towards whatever ends they want to play them for, like whatever they get enjoyment out of them. I just want to reiterate that. What he's basically what Portuguese is talking about here for people that don't understand is like the idea of optimizing your runs through games to earn trophies for that for that to be a and Gene goes into the persona thing and how much that really bothered him that I play persona games like or play those kinds, you know, even. We retard as you. I played the same way.

3:23:17Colin Moriarty:Yeah.

3:23:19Dustin Furman:But to me, it's like I have a very paralyzing. I've always had this very paralyzing need to do everything in a game. It I think people can't comprehend that it's it predates trophies. And the proof is in the facts that I used to write. Right, like I don't I don't know. People think it's like this new phenomenon that I was brain broken by this certain thing, which I was. But it it is so much older and deeper than that. It's kind of just always how I've played. And I kind of feel annoyed that I have to constantly defend it. I'm not telling anyone else how to play their games. I give you recommendations sometimes and try to tell you what I think would work best for you.

3:23:59Dustin Furman:But ultimately, if you like if you get enjoyment out of just running through games as quickly as possible, if you get enjoyment out of beating the game on the hardest difficulty level, if you get enjoyment out of buying games and not even taking them out of the cellophane and leaving them on your shelf, I just feel like that's kind of up to you. And it reminds me of my old journalist days of just always around people at IGN always He was having to defend the games I was playing and whatnot. And I'm like, just let me live my life, man. Can I live?

3:24:29Dustin Furman:Can I just be?

3:24:31Colin Moriarty:I think a big difference, though, Colin, between you and Portuguese here is that he says that he passed on a game because he despised the trophy list. Because there's many times there's been times, Colin, where you were like, I'm excited about this game. The trophies suck.

3:24:46Dustin Furman:okay that's fine yeah i i don't do i don't do that i mean you can basically see if i have if i play with rare with there are exceptions because sometimes i just bail out of a game but if i have a game if i played a game with no platinum trophy it just means that i didn't care like yeah i'm not trying to i love trophies i love getting platinum trophies i like i like trying i find the metagame fun of optimizing your runs of but there are things like uh where i care about a game too and i'll platinum it but i'll worry about that later and i think that i think that that's the way a lot of trophy people do approach things and that that people don't quite understand that philosophy so a good example recently was um well halo was a example of that but before that first light was an example of that where uh and i was actually kind of annoyed that i did it this way after the fact because i was like god i don't want to you know but i was like no i want to kind of just play it and experience it doesn't matter like i'll figure it out later and that happens often um like when intergalactic comes out or the big thing for me and i it doesn't even require that much optimization because often all you have to do is go look at a trophy roadmap and just say like are there missable trophies the answer is usually no and then it's like okay i'll worry about this later so too much micromanagement out there of other people's gaming behaviors in my opinion i and i'll also say this that i play games very completely and like i said i've always played them like that i've always been obsessed like can i get all of the i remember zelda one what and actually you guys can read my walkthrough on game facts about this i like optimized the fuck out of that game when i was in high school like sat down and really was like all right i can get these heart pieces this armor this sword this candle this this this and this before i even go to the first dungeon like that's the kind of shit i always loved doing just beating the ever-loving shit out of it and doing every little angle and every little thing and fighting every enemy and getting every item and leveling up to 99 and do it like it's not trophies that did that to me it's some other malady that did that to me undefined yeah you were predisposed to being a trophy trophy minded right and what's funny is that it required even a certain kind of like i was never really an xbox guy so achievements were not going to capture me per se but when achievement points came out i was like this is fucking stupid like you just have this this you just have like these digits going up and i'm like i didn't give a shit at all i used to get yelled at at ign all the time for my guides because i would never do achievement guides on my guides i would have to do them later where they're like can you fucking do an achievement guide and i'm like who cares you know i remember i remember that specifically with medal of honor airborne like where they were like you got can you please do the achievement guide already and i'm like but i'm doing like the walkthrough like it doesn't matter you know and yeah it just didn't it just didn't resonate with me until i saw i was like oh this kind of works a little bit better for me and it was really resistance too and fallout three to a degree where I was like, oh, this I like this.

3:27:55Interesting.

3:27:55Dustin Furman:You know, and but but like you said, I was predisposed to it because I've always been a completionist. Every guide I wrote, I wrote 94 strategy guides was about how to do everything. So it's just what I do, you know? Yeah. And I think I think that's a. I don't want to say it should be lauded. It's like. I play games pretty thoroughly and people got a little taste of it with some of the things that i've done like what what was i playing where i was pragmata before i got my account boosted when dustin and i were playing it where i was like i was like just look i'm like this is literally how i'm going to subject you to how i literally play games and i was just like literally looking at like corners and like looking at textures and just staring at things and i'm like i like i just love dicking around man you know yeah it's just fun it's fun for me so portuguese worry about yourself thanks for writing in Chase Carter wrote in and said, gentlemen, of everything that is sacred, I don't think I've ever heard anyone properly mention why Sony or Microsoft doesn't have a digital storefront where gamers can buy and sell game licenses for one another.

3:28:57Dustin Furman:I don't know how the money or credits would be split maybe 50-50 to make it profitable, but Sony or Microsoft can take a percentage of each sale while the seller receives cash in their digital wallet or PlayStation Store credit. It would also benefit Sony and Microsoft because it could address the used games issue, potentially help them avoid some EULA or other antitrust concerns and encourage customers to stay even more invested in their digital ecosystems. I'd like to hear if you gentlemen can think of any obvious flaws in this idea. I think there are obvious flaws in it, but I wonder, Dustin, I'm very interested in what you have to say about this because I don't think this used to sound unthinkable to me.

3:29:34Dustin Furman:I often recall during the PS3 era, and you guys might remember that Like there was a time where GameStop was trying to like actively explore how they might get into used digital games. And the news cycle lasted like five hours because everyone's like, that's what? And then and then like the story went away and it really doesn't make any sense. What you're saying doesn't even make any sense. Right. But I wonder in the era of these new licenses and owning them, if. it logically it's logical to think that if you if the licensing situation change into an actual ownership of digital item situation that you should therefore actually be able to do whatever you want with it i mean i wonder if that's too much to ask and we shouldn't probably start there but that might be where things go and i don't know that i necessarily mind it though i think there are a million reasons why it could go haywire and get all fucked up over time, including that there's really no there's no scarcity argument.

3:30:36Right.

3:30:36Dustin Furman:So it's not if it's hard to sell things on a secondhand market that's digital. I can't think of any example of that. Right. Like, what is this? What is a secondhand digital item? I can't even think of it. And now I know there's going to be NFT bros out there. This is what they were trying to do with that. There's going to be crypto people that are being like, well, it could be blockchain level stuff. And I'm like, that's cool. We'll stop trying to justify yourself. That's not what we need. But yeah, like the idea of saying like, I own this license. I want to sell it. I want to sell my license to Mega Man Legacy Collection at Dustin for$10.

3:31:07Dustin Furman:I guess what would stop me from doing that? I don't know. What do you think?

3:31:11Colin Moriarty:Yeah, it it sounds like a nice idea, but it just sounds too exploitable, right? Like, could there be a world where my license is as good as a physical copy where like I could send it to my friend and it temporarily leaves my account, but it's on my friend's account for like, I don't know, two weeks or something. Actually, I feel like that's sounds like it actually could be pretty cool. But you're right that there's no scarcity element. There's no. It's not used. there's nothing different about it because it's just data so i just he brings up um the idea of like sony being able to take a percentage of sales which is kind of interesting where at least then when someone's buying and selling instead of like a used physical game they can at least make some money off of it but eventually for a game like let's take a game like final fantasy 16 why would anyone buy a new copy a new digital copy right because there would just be a flood of people with licenses that don't want them anymore so then the market kind of breaks down for them and then it becomes exactly what they wanted to avoid I just would never see them doing

3:32:35Dustin Furman:this yeah that well that's what I was thinking too is that I think I do think that it's possible that these companies or a consortium of these companies understand that they need to be better about digital ownership and they might be able to do that on their own without government interference but like something like he is describing would only happen at the barrel of the gun right like yeah they would never agree to it for any number of reasons and i think you really articulated a great point which is that there would just be basically a never-ending supply of used versions of the digital games um which is not the case with any physical product because people want to keep them right i wonder i guess the only thing that would stop you from doing that is like the risk of wanting that license later and having to buy it again.

3:33:17Dustin Furman:But then you just would probably be able to buy it for even cheaper. It would almost stop you nothing from you making money on it. Like when you think about it for just a few minutes, it doesn't make sense. I don't know how it would work, but it doesn't make sense. It sounds like a nice idea. You're right though. And that level of ownership and that level of like dominion over everything would be pretty cool. But I don't think so. Is that something you want to see, Chris? no i mean i i just don't have i don't have a used games issue you know interpersonally i also just kind of feel like they they wouldn't the amount of time and resource it would take to kind of flesh something like this out is not something that i think they would perceive as in their best interest in pursuing the money that it would take to like figure all this out and figure out like how are we gonna get this to work and you know how do we how do we piece this together I think from their perspective, their resources are better spent elsewhere.

3:34:18Like, because you're asking them to spend money to try to figure out how to make less of it. You know, like, it's just like, that's a hard sell for anybody, really, let alone a business. That's a hard sell to ask a person.

3:34:33Dustin Furman:You know, we have to almost deconstruct. physical ownership and like resale ability happens because not because the item is intrinsically resellable, but because the physical item is physically resellable. And thus, if we go into this data laden world, it is something we're going to have to let go of. That's easy. People have already made this concession implied that they're at least implied that they're comfortable with it by their digital buying habits, knowing like they're comfortable. A lot of people don't think don't realize that they don't really own the game, but nonetheless, they're comfortable having this like this immovable item.

3:35:08Dustin Furman:And so. I think people are aimed. I'm sorry. I'm saying it needs to be reframed. Like digital ownership is going to have to mean like you own it forever and no one can take it away from you. But that means you can't take it away from yourself. Right. Yes. Yes. Or at least like it's like your account transferable. Right. Everything. Everything. Or you can maybe splinter. I don't know how the fuck you would do it. But. Yeah. I do think this are this this obsession with selling used games. I do think that there's a real this is where Colin's going to tell you things you don't want to hear. Right.

3:35:43Dustin Furman:But like so shoot the messenger if you want. If you're like a used games guy and you're like, yeah, this is kind of how I get through and I buy used games and all this. It's like, I don't think Sony cares about you. I hate to tell you that you're a drain on them. Like they don't they don't want to lose. This is why I think there's I've said before they are slowly they've signaled. I mean, overtly signal that they're deemphasizing monthly active users and that level of engagement, I think because they understand they will lose some people. But I think they realize it's what we say, right? I mean, it's a little bit different, but our subscription numbers or whatever X, we lose five subscribers that each subscribe at a dollar, but we get one new subscriber at$5.

3:36:23Dustin Furman:It's the same. It's negative four net subscribers, but the same amount of money. And the reality is that Sony makes no money off of you if you're buying, if like you're obsessed with buying used games and selling your games and doing all that kind of stuff you're they're not making money on you and i think they've kind of realized we don't it's not they don't want you they want your playstation plus prescription they want the digital shit you might buy occasionally they want your your mau and dau and all the rest but they i think they realize like you're not that valuable and i'm not saying that that's that i'm observing it so please don't get mad be mad at me they so i think that's kind of the intractable situation that the used games market finds itself in is like, yeah, you have this thing going.

3:37:03Dustin Furman:That's great. Good for you. The comp, the powers that be don't like it. And that's who you're going to have to fight against. And I'll just reiterate, it's not a coincidence that not a single third party publisher of any size has had anything negative to say about the disc situation because they don't want to make them. And that was one. Is it possible that Sony is jumping on a grenade? They are the first party. They are the hardware manufacturer. They are the storefront. So they do have to set the cadence. But I think they understand what everyone wants. And internally. And I think they're like, yeah, all right, we'll do it.

3:37:44Dustin Furman:Because I just think that they know they're not going to at least get any industry pushback. And that might be allowing them to put their guard down in one way. And then worry about these other things. Again, I still think, I wouldn't be surprised, although I don't think they're going to do it. but I wouldn't be surprised if in the future, maybe even after PS6 is announced, where they're like, by the way, we'll just keep making discs for PS5. Like that wouldn't surprise me, but I don't know why you would wait so long. You know, and like do all this destruction to your brand in the meantime. All right, nice idea, Chase.

3:38:19Dustin Furman:I mean, these are the kinds of intellectual exercises we're going to have to go through, try to figure out how this all looks. Joseph Jerry wrote in and said, is gaming truly in such a dire state? Or is it the lack of true games media skewing the perspective around the industry? I think back to when Sega discontinued the Dreamcast and left the hardware market. The primary voices of video games coverage at that time were magazines and nascent websites that sprung up from the magazine template. These voices were curated to some extent by editors and at least a modicum of journalistic integrity that simply does not exist in today's climate outside of maybe Game Informer and some sites like GamesIndustry.biz and the Jason Schriers of the world.

3:38:52Dustin Furman:When Sega made this decision, magazines such as Next Generation, EGM, and GamePro ran for retrospectives on Sega and their impact on gaming, as well as commenting on what may come next for the company as they transition to a third party software publisher. Now compare that to today, where if Microsoft were to make that same decision, you would have 10 ,000 rage bait inducing chuds on YouTube, screaming how the industry is over and crash is coming. Is gaming really in such a bad place or are we merely letting the wrong voices influence our enthusiast perspective? Yes. The answer is yes. Yeah,

3:39:20Colin Moriarty:both for sure. Both, both is true.

3:39:23Dustin Furman:Right, right. Gaming is in a gaming financially is not a bad place. You're looking at a roughly$200 billion industry. I don't know if you remember, Chris, a few weeks ago, I pulled out the numbers of like what the numbers look like after the video game crash. They're unadjusted. But the crash, 83, 84 and 80 and 85 console gaming was down to$100 million a year. Can you imagine that? $100 million a year. As I said at the time, that's basically what mouse PI for hire made. that was like the whole games right on the on the hardware side and it wasn't until the mid to late 90s that it ever even recovered we have a different problem now and that's why i i know people are talking about there are different kinds of crashes and when people say the games gaming industry is going to crash or it's going to crash again they might not necessarily be talking about the same reasons why it crashed in the early 80s because those as i've said and i've illustrated before those problems aren't even possible anymore gaming is a you have to remember Remember, gaming was thought of.

3:40:27Dustin Furman:There were really people that thought. And I think I don't think it's an unreasonable thing, but there are people that thought they're like, this is a fad. Yeah, this is a toy. Like NFTs or something. Right. Like where they're like, this is just a thing. And and when it started to go away, everyone's like, all right, on to the next thing. But there were people with vision. Nintendo that were like, no, but even with Nintendo selling the NES like it was, they were making way less money than Atari was earlier in the 80s. gaming is a permanent thing now. It's huge. It's way bigger than all the parallel entertainment industries.

3:41:03Dustin Furman:So the money is going to be there. As I keep trying to reiterate to people, there will be different winners and losers and many more losers than you can possibly imagine. And so the Joseph's inquiry, is gaming really in a bad place? Depending on how you look at it, yeah. I mean, it is in a bad place. When you have 20, 25 ,000 games a year happening, when layoffs are well mapped of maybe 15 ,000 for the cumulative calendar year, when all is said and done, it's not in a good place but our voices influencing enthusiast perspective yes now i do push back on one thing guys i think he's looking at that era through rose-tinted glasses a little bit which are the era of like he was talking about the dreamcast went out in spring 2001 so i assume he's talking about 2001 and it's like yeah the websites were nascent at that time and the magazines were kind of doing their thing but like it wasn't as professional as you're making it seem I read a lot of that stuff.

3:41:55Dustin Furman:It was cool and they were a little bit more serious, but it was just different. There's no doubt now that people just take advantage of your rage and it's not exclusive to video games. And people will make, look at the whole saga with Ghost of Yote about how like still to this day, people pretend that game didn't sell well. To this day, it's like that game made Sony an enormous amount of money. Like what do you, but like people will swear on it. it's just an alternate reality and it's up to us to choose or not to choose to be part of those conversations even though i've lamented that it's it's in it's encroaching on our space it's yeah it's ingrained in everything the issue it depends on what you value i guess right like um if because there's because gaming is going to continue to be what it is and it's going to continue to change and there's there's probably like millions upon maybe even hundreds of millions of people who are going to continue on and not really notice that anything's changed but like we will notice you know the the people who pay attention like is like as far as like triple a gaming in america or like triple a homegrown game like that's that's i think gone borrowed time and that's gonna go away i think to some degree like way way less than we used to have it and a lot of it's going to fluctuate towards markets uh either new markets or older markets or even just like completely new upstart markets that are kind of beginning to beginning to join the fold like it's going to go over there um and so that's bad in my opinion because i like generally when american companies do triple a stuff it's cool um but most people may might not care or notice or maybe they'll they'll be like okay we're still getting triple a games they're just not from america and they don't they don't know the difference you know so there's a myriad of things i don't think it's uniquely the gaming industry that's having this problem i think it's it's a broad global kind of economic technological issue i think it's it's a bunch of shit but like we're not gonna have like a video game crash like that's not really how it'll manifest no no because it's not the early 80s anymore and i really do encourage people to read and study more about the games industry the games crash in in 83 particularly because it's fascinating it's it's like there are a lot of lessons learned in the way people reacted and responded especially nintendo like the nintendo seal quality is a total response to that era um yeah nintendo's five five games per publisher thing is like a response to that era uh it's just different now anyway dustin do you have anything you want to add before we move on to the final question

3:44:37Colin Moriarty:um yeah i he brings up like letting the wrong voices in and i don't know i think that sometimes that we can inflate like someone like a smash jt it's like yes they get a lot of views but they're not really um influential people or something like that like we have to i bring this up so often but It's like, we got to remember our bubble. And I think Chris was touching on this, too. That's like there's certain things that just don't really escape that. So. Yeah, that's it.

3:45:15Dustin Furman:Fair enough. And you're right. You're both right. And I'm bad at remembering that, too, sometimes. Anyway, Shuhei Yoshida's constant clicking wrote in the final inquiry says, greetings, Colin, Chris and not Dustin. Well, he's here. We all know how ridiculous hardware prices are getting, and they're projected to get even more comical in the very immediate future. My question is whether you think it's feasible for Sony to offset this problem by selling PS6 in the same way that mobile phones, that cell phones to you in the colonies are sold, i.e. signing you up for a two-year contract that the cost of the phone is split across those monthly payments.

3:45:46Dustin Furman:Could Sony give you a PS6 and two years of PS Plus for a princely sum of, say,$60 or whatever a month to get more people in the door? This would come with the added benefit of getting these people on PS plus, which is where Sony wants them. What do you think? Is this workable or should I just go back to playing lost judgment and shut my fucking hole? Jesus. Oh, Jesus. I saw Microsoft had talked about doing this. I think with Xbox recently, right? Have you guys seen this about like some payment plans and people freaked out about it or some people freaked out about it, but I'm like, well, I don't really get what the problem is personally.

3:46:17Dustin Furman:It's just an option. And it's, it's them exploring ways to like get it out there knowing that people can't afford the price basically acting as your credit card you know um yeah i don't hate it i gotta be honest i mean it might be the it might be the best you can fucking hope for if if everything's going the way it's gonna go uh you know i think this question kind of made me like i feel kind of insane because i feel like xbox did this already with like series x i i remember them doing like a kind of payment plan or maybe not x or maybe it was xbox one x or something like it was around between 2018 and 2021 yeah i know what you're talking about you're right um yeah they had like a payment plan kind of option for xbox and maybe even it might have been series x and s um so this is something that has been explored i don't know to what degree it made a difference obviously because xbox has been selling incredibly softly anyway but um dude if you're gonna have consoles for you know a thousand plus dollars like there's really no comfortable way to do that without doing something like this, to be honest, like you're going to have to get used to maybe this kind of thing.

3:47:30And quite frankly, I don't know why it would bother anybody.

3:47:32Dustin Furman:Yeah, like I think it would bother me. Let me be clear. If they were charging you interest, it would bother me. But if they're simply saying like the price is X and we're going to split it up over 18 months or whatever, I'm like, whatever. Like that's that's it's actually kind of preferable to you putting it, buying it because you can't say no to it and putting it on your credit card. Yeah, it's better. yeah i also think there's something compelling about it saying like we don't know what's going to happen to prices so when you like we'll lock you in at a certain price right and if pricing goes and you can only what would be fat what would be fascinating is if they were like when this would really hurt them because they're obviously paying for the components that you're buying at the time and the cost that it is to make but they could say like your we will your repayments will be based on like what the current cost of the console is and based on like you know the component pricing because i assume there are some i what it's not looking good but like you would assume that they want to push out as far as they possibly can to sell it for the most expensive price it will be you know does that make sense and then yeah you have nowhere else to go but down as opposed to releasing it high going up and then going down so if you got people locked in at the at the at that rate with that kind of that promise or that intention and said like hey man the price might adjust in a year And you'll pay a little less on your payment.

3:48:50Dustin Furman:I don't hate it. It's not ideal. The point people are making, I think, with a lot of this is that console shouldn't be this expensive. But I just encourage you to remember they don't want them to be. Yeah, they are not making thousand, a thousand dollars in profit on your cause. They're probably going to sell these things for eight or nine hundred dollars and maybe even lose money on it. So you got to just remember, I'm not asking people to apologize. I'm not apologizing for the corporation. it's just it's not an example of greed not their greed the ai company's greed did this

3:49:23Colin Moriarty:yep to follow up just to make sure chris the xbox series x launched with the xbox all access which was uh 35 a month for 24 months with the xbox series x and they low-key did this in the 360 generation too and i remember because yeah my roommate he worked at walmart in the electronic section he came home and he's like dude i got an xbox 360 for a hundred bucks uh but the manager had to do something weird he didn't understand it but i got it for a hundred bucks i'm like dude that was the the finance xbox that you just got yeah for a hundred bucks like that you weren't supposed to and he was like oh okay and then he just like didn't care at all uh which i mean good

3:50:10Dustin Furman:for him but by the way that price is 840 over two years but that include game pass i think

3:50:16Colin Moriarty:yes so that's a pretty good deal yeah yeah uh i could totally see them doing this with the playstation 6 and as you were saying colin it's just an option um the main thing that i was wondering this is kind of a side note but this relates to the digital game stuff is that sony they they have profited off consoles at launch since well i guess ps4 and ps5 not ps3 uh wait did they did they make a profit on ps3 at launch uh no they were selling ps3 i think the

3:50:49Dustin Furman:ps3 was being sold like ironically as the even though they were selling it for 600 they were losing like 200 a unit or something i wonder if playstation 6 if they're they would be willing to take a loss yeah i think i well they did say again you have to kind of read between the lines because who knows but like i didn't they say in a i think the last financial statement saying that we we don't intend on taking significant losses on our subsidies on our hardware but that doesn't mean they can't take a 50 rip or even sell at cost the idea of doing this in other words i i think it's six of one half dozen of the other because a lot of people will just put this on credit and then you are going to pay interest and again i'll be clear like sony i don't want sony pulling any bullshit with that where it's like yeah it's five percent interest but we'll do that's like no it's this is like and i don't think they will i don't think that's that that's even what they

3:51:40Colin Moriarty:want to do so part of me wonders and i'm trying to remember what tom said in one of his videos because i think he speculated that it's possible that playstation 6 did have a disk drive at certain points in development early on and i wonder if they were looking at the situation being like okay we're gonna have to charge a shit ton of money for this and our options are either to make it really expensive or take a loss uh so how can we fix our profit margins

3:52:10Dustin Furman:force everybody to go digital yes i mean there is no it's not even a conspiracy theory to me that they are doing it for the money well yeah yeah right i do i do think that like some people are like yeah there's all there are a lot of reasons like i even think that like the security reason is a good reason. I just think everything starts with the money and then flows off from there as reinforcing agents towards being why it makes sense. But I am not befuddled by looking at the breakdowns of physical versus digital and them being like, we can't do this anymore. This is already becoming quite a marginal company.

3:52:45Dustin Furman:And they'll figure it out. But maybe they won't. I don't know. I don't know. All right. I'm trying to think of it like a PS6 with PS Plus maybe for$50 a month for 24 months, something like that, would be over$1 ,000. But that would be a decent deal. Plus, you'd get the MAU and the PS Plus user. They're going to need PS Plus to play online. I don't know. I think the PS6 never had a disk drive in it. I think that they were probably originally going to make one for it and that's where I get a little confused of why you just wouldn't pass the cost on to the consumer that's my whole question about the whole physical games thing is like why are you so they have no confidence in being able to do that for some reason

3:53:42Dustin Furman:and people get mad at me when I say that like digital gaming is subsidizing physical gaming but it is it's all fungible so it's not like a literal subsidy sure it's just to say something had to give and they could have probably just extracted more money out of you guys and i'm surprised they didn't use that option first right that to me doesn't that tell you that there's something more to it and that it almost certainly has to do with ps6 messaging i mean that's my logical conclusion in other words they don't want they simply feel like they must say this and make it make it as now even though there are obvious routes to not do it it's it's interesting it's it's deeper 4d than i think people think in a way and i think it's kind of it's bold and i i think from a i'm not defending it i'm saying from their pr perspective i think it's actually pretty good where they're probably like yeah it's not a bad not a bad idea and again i'll just reiterate for the millionth time too the ps3 and vita stuff no one even talks about that was the that was the brilliant part of it them realizing they have these multiple bad pieces of news that is also in fairness the obvious minority right you know like that that is the obvious example of like a vocal minority is these like who the fuck is still on ps3 yeah paying attention to place it you know what i mean like it's got to be no more than a couple million worldwide a month i would assume at this point right yeah because i think they announced a few years ago it was like two 2.5 million monthly active users on ps3 still so it's got to be smaller than that yeah but i think it would have been a very unpopular thing with some of the core that they just were like we don't have to worry about this like that that to me dumping having your bad news dump all at once smart i don't hate it i don't hate it all right that's all we have for this episode my friends it was good to be here with you guys and good to have dustin back in the fold of course back to normal for our show moving forward.

3:55:44Dustin Furman:Well, as normal as it can be. Let's go around the horn and say goodbye to everyone. Chris, goodbye to you, my friend. Be well. It's good to see you today. Any plans for the rest of your day? Today is Gears Day. The Gears E-Day beta is out. Oh, cool. As of, I think, an hour ago, two hours ago or something like that. So I'm going to get some food and then jump on that. See how that. Cue it up on PS5. Oh, wait. Nope. Nope. I'll be on PC. Yeah, really. But yeah, no, I'm really stoked about it. I totally did. This completely snuck up on me. I completely forgot that this was happening and that it was this soon.

3:56:21So I'm pretty pumped. It's a nice little surprise. Cool. But enjoy it and report back next week. Yeah.

3:56:29Dustin Furman:Less germane to our show than it used to be, although maybe we'll get in the future. Who knows? They're saying no. Dustin, goodbye to you. Good to have you back. Welcome back. Thank you. Go be with that little boy.

3:56:39Colin Moriarty:That little boy. Yeah. Uh, let's see tonight. I know Holly's parents are coming by for a little bit to see Leon. So they'll be here, probably play some big walk later and then no plans at all. You have a baby. I mean, we've been out with him quite a bit, but just kind of chilling, chilling at home. So cool.

3:57:04Dustin Furman:It is a hot as fuck outside right now, but I have to, but I have to mow the lawn. so I'll go do that and my dad's coming in tonight and tomorrow we're having everyone over for for dinner like a barbecue or whatever so I have to like I have to like get the shit straightened up you know so I gotta go do I gotta just bite the bullet and do that so that's what I'll be doing for the rest of the day nice and then yeah we'll be recording Halo tomorrow so if you guys are listening to this you know the day we publish on Patreon look forward to that on Patreon we will have that published imminently but otherwise good to have the family back together we're no longer separated right Right.

3:57:41Dustin Furman:Much more. I mean, guys, it's starting to starting to kind of pick up. I mean, well, obviously, Beast of Reincarnation is out now. There's a few other odds and ends, but really we're less than a month away from a deluge of games where selections will have to be made. Concessions will have to be made. Very excited. I'm excited, man. I'm excited. I'm excited about Dawn Walker. Yeah. Onimusha. Control 2. There's also there's also and I forgot about this. There's Metal Gear Solid 4 at the end of the month, right? Right. Yeah. This collection volume two. Mm hmm. That's a big deal. It is finally liberated from PlayStation 3.

3:58:14Yeah.

3:58:14Dustin Furman:So yeah, there's like a lot of there's a lot of stuff coming. Then there's like a little bit of a lull in October. There's some stuff, but like that's like when a lot of. You know, like the shooters will come out and all the rest, but then November, obviously Grand Theft Auto and. Yeah, it's a good it's going to be it's going to be a very productive fall. Plus, we have Gamescom coming up right at some point, Tokyo Game Show. Right. And then the Game Awards at the end of the year. so and then dude next year's PS6 I don't know if it's going to come out next year but they will certainly start talking about it next year and Good big times for sacred symbols.

3:58:51Dustin Furman:Our second console launch. Yeah, which is exciting. So, so long ago with the PS5, but I still love it. I still have a soft place in my heart for it. Anyway, guys, good to see you and good to see all of you out there. Thank you for being here with us. Appreciate you. As always, patreon.com slash last day media for early ad free access and last day media dot store for merch. We'll see you next time. Until then. Goodbye. See ya. Take care, guys. sacred symbols a playstation podcast is a product and trademark of last stand media and colin's last stand llc and is proudly recorded in the usa the show is conceived by is written by and is directed by me colin moriarty my co-hosts are chris raygun maldonado and dustin firman the show is produced by executive producer dustin firman all of last stands the music is by my best friend Ramon Narvaez.

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