#426 | It's Interesting When People Die

17:50Colin Moriarty:Yes. Well, we didn't go into details because I didn't honestly really know very many of them. We just said, you know, it's production.

17:58Dustin Furman:Vince couldn't make it like Zencaster work. Occasionally, someone just doesn't, Zencaster doesn't agree with a person's setup. I don't know why. So I told him in the coming weeks, like when Dustin's back, we'll get him in touch with him and then we'll figure out the technical stuff. So we'll get back to Marvel Tocan. But Dustin, Brad, and who else? Ben? It was Ben, Locke, and first time debut,

18:21Colin Moriarty:our friend justin guns justin guns because he was part of uh it was our big walk crew

18:28Dustin Furman:that played together cool so you guys did that and that's cool so thank you for doing that because you really jumped on a grenade because i didn't really know exactly what we're going to do so token will be coming soon my conversation with kiwi talks is still up there our halo campaign evolved conversation is there recent conversation i had with maddie is there um i'm going to be talking tomorrow so around the time this goes live on patreon i'm going to be talking to the guys from the stop killing games movement about that and we will make that podcast free for everybody because it is an important conversation in my opinion sacred streaming continues as well we did game com onl so you can go check that out that was fun that was like a four-hour stream recently did a kingdom hearts four stream kind of not really um stuff about talking to my congressman no updates there really office hours which is me just answering questions um zach volp tell volpicelli wrote in good italian boy says greetings sacred crew colin the nfl season is nearly upon us any chance we can get some colin football content A season preview on Sacred Streaming.

19:22Dustin Furman:Predictions for the Jets Super Bowl winner. Maybe even your boomers fastest three minutes in football impression. How about the Raiders? They won't. Chris and Dustin aren't going to get that. How about a little food for the ball and gun gamers? Sans Gun. I'll hang up my Justin Tucker jersey after a trip to the masseuse and listen. That's a sexual joke.

19:43Dustin Furman:Good news. I'm going to buy Madden NFL 27, and we're going to do an entire season playthrough with the Jets. uh on sacred streaming i'll do four games at a time all coaching mode and i'm gonna and i'm gonna role play the coach so like i'm gonna be in the role of the coach and we'll begin that on monday so we'll bang out the first four games are you gonna dress like a coach yeah i mean they don't they i gotta just put a sweatshirt on or something i wish i did have like the little thing with the mouthpiece you know and i gotta yeah i gotta get a board as well so i can be like exactly all right so please look forward to it last day media.store for merch if you're interested t-shirts sweatshirts etc stickers all right let's get into a few topics of discussion then we'll get into the news which is mostly grand theft auto related and gamescom related so we will get into that and then we'll talk about what we're playing and then we'll end as we always do with six questions comments concerns thoughts and ideas from the audience A couple of things that we need to talk about at the top, though.

20:46Dustin Furman:Diamaro wrote in. And said, hello, CCD, can you guys talk to Patreon about their player? When I continue the pod, it never remembers where it left off anymore. I started taking screenshots to know where I truly left off. Yeah, I can bring this up because some people have complained about this. The bigger thing that people have been complaining about, though, Dustin, is that the RSS functionality seems to be somewhat broken depending on the podcast service you use. And I don't it's unknown why that is. so i wanted to i wanted to know like there's nothing we can really do about it it's not like we individually like upload these things to different rss it's like an rss feed that is then taken it's supposed to be taken automatically and like that's a technical thing that's well beyond us so i can reach out to patreon if that continues as well but it's just rest assured like

21:27Colin Moriarty:i can't we can't do anything about it on our end right same thing with um i think this was a couple weeks ago spotify just was not appearing and it's another thing where like we're we're sorry that happens but we literally we have no control we have a little module in patreon that like to put in some of the podcast data and it's supposed to handle everything for us it doesn't always work right so eventually though it works usually yeah so just wanted to acknowledge

21:56Dustin Furman:that you know um because i see the feedback and i don't i can't help you unfortunately i'm sorry no all right jose mauricio has the other thing that i wanted to touch on he says hey colin i I know historically you've had a strict policy against accepting free review codes for major publishers. With games like Tokan and Wolverine, it seems like your stance on early access or review case may have shifted. Never cared if your company gets free codes or not, but I was curious about why you were okay accepting these codes now.

22:24Dustin Furman:The easiest way to say this, and it's not meant to be a dickhead of thing, it's just true, is it's kind of Dustin's fault. Because when Dustin started accepting codes, the show for his own stuff, I feel like it kind of was ridiculous for us. it's like okay i told everyone they can do what they want everyone else in the company accepts codes for their game for games so it's not a company policy i've never made a company policy about that it was supposed to be a show policy but when dustin started accepting codes it's like well this kind of fractured that idea but i believe what i've said where i'm like well people want access for things either through sacred or for their own stuff i i don't i don't want to really control things to that level it's too granular and weird to me now if the question is being asked like well why am I leveraging my own connections it's like well I'm really not I'm just not ignoring these people's emails anymore there's this idea that like I stopped getting code offers or something and I'm like you're delusional right um that really didn't happen so and certainly not in recent years we've been turning down everything so with that in mind I felt like well maybe the guys I don't want the codes but maybe the guys would so that's kind of the answer to the question i'm going to continue not to accept anything i don't want these things early i like buying the games i like experiencing them with everyone else and as i've said ad nauseum i don't really like the pressure of um you know i don't like the pressure of having to deal with that it just sucks it's lame and i it's it's it was fun a long time ago it's not fun for me anymore so

23:55Colin Moriarty:i hope that explains it but i have one comment yeah about this just to be clear is that i never accepted a code without colin's permission yeah of course right but i don't but i don't want but that's the whole point is like i just don't want it to sound like i went rogue and was like i'm taking i'm doing this now it's like we had a conversation about it i would my preference is

24:14Dustin Furman:that none of us accept codes not only on this show but in the entire company but i can and i could control it of course i could but it's i want people to think about it through the lens outside of sacred symbols it's like well brad does his own streaming maddie and cog all do their own content i can't it's too venn diagram ish i can't um right i just don't want that level of control

24:35Colin Moriarty:because then you're putting barriers in front of people outside of outside of what they do with you

24:40Dustin Furman:right rather right exactly right right instead i'd rather just adapt around what people's preferences are so i never this idea that there was like a company-wide policy that's never been true um in fact a lot of xbox content we do is early access stuff and like review stuff like they've always done that so but it's just for sacred symbols that's kind of the way i prefer it was uh it's nice because it's like I feel I kind of I don't really ignore people I always email them back and tell them like we're not really interested you can take us off your lists and all the rest and usually you just never take it off the list and you just continue to get emails indefinitely um but yeah like that it was kind of like things have been fractured open so like I guess I should just leverage my own connections to help other people in my company but it does nothing for me um to be honest I ignored the Wolverine email for so long that I emailed them back and still haven't heard back because they might just be over like done now because the game is in in people's hands but we'll see if we get it but I think we got we got token codes because I passed them along um yeah I think I've like so I have a good relationship with Bandai Namco and and a few others so like but I've I've kind of made it clear to some of these people who I have more personal relationships with just not to email me anymore about this sort of thing.

25:56So I could easily get blood

25:58Dustin Furman:of the Dawn Walker or if we wanted to go to Remedy with Control 2 and stuff. So I'm not, the point I'm making is I'm not reaching out to anyone. But if they reach out to me, I'll pass them along. I think that's probably a fair little way, but I hope that that makes sense. Right.

26:11Colin Moriarty:And I think the audience, if they feel that me or Brad or anyone else in the company, you feel like we're being disingenuous some way, then to call it out. But yeah, I don't think I mean, this is my opinion. It's not saying much because it's me and us. But I don't feel like we have made any comments, opinions or statements that have been compromised in any way. But you may feel differently. And I'm I'm open to that. If you feel that way to let us know.

26:44Colin Moriarty:Late night bites with friends already hard to beat. That first too hot bite of fries you couldn't wait for, followed by ice cold Pepsi. Now that hits different. Suddenly, the energy kicks back in. The night goes longer. And the laughs don't stop. Because Pepsi brings out more flavor, more fun, and more of the moment. Food deserves Pepsi. Grab a Pepsi Zero Sugar today.

27:11Dustin Furman:Birdo85 wrote in. Said, hey guys, I just wanted to take a moment to tell you guys how much Sacred Symbols meant to me this past weekend. I got the news that my grandmother passed away at 89. She had been dealing with kidney failure and dementia, so advanced that towards the end. She could barely remember who any of us were. I can relate to that much about my grandma. At 41, she was my last living grandparent. I had a five-hour drive to my parents' house, and honestly, I was pretty devastated, but I had the boys with me for the drive. For a few hours, sacred symbols gave me something I desperately needed.

27:37Dustin Furman:A little levity. I laughed. I listened to you guys argue about ridiculous PlayStation nonsense, and for a while, I wasn't sitting alone in a car thinking about losing my grandmother. I was just a guy listening to his favorite podcast and enjoying himself. You probably don't realize what something like that can mean to someone on the other side of the microphone, but it meant a lot to me this weekend. I'm eternally grateful that Sacred Symbols exists and even more grateful that you three have built a show that can be there for people in moments like that without ever knowing they're needed. Thank you, Colin, Chris, and Dustin.

28:01Dustin Furman:I'm sorry for your loss. Wanted to acknowledge it. Awful. Definitely touched me because I was in college when it happened, but my grandma went the same way. Where no clue who you were. It was awkward and weird. And you always wonder, like it would, probably be really scary, but like what, what's going on in that person's mind? What are they seeing and thinking? Yeah. I remember she, my grandma used to just sit like in her living room and chain smoke cigarettes and watch TV. We had like a, she had like a caretaker and just would stare straight ahead. And it's like, it's like so sad and scary. Yeah.

28:41Dustin Furman:So I'm sorry for your loss. Glad we can be there for you. That's all of us listening to these podcasts, I think, and just other shows, like just being there with distractions and whatnot. I think it's much appreciated. Matt Splatt wrote in and said, hey, fellas, I had to write in to let you know that you have officially conned me and my marital home. I've been calling my one-and-a-half-year-old daughter Little Raisin for a month now. She was formerly called Little Bryn, but now that has all been ruined and replaced, just so you guys and Raisin would get a little kick out of that. I love the pods.

29:13Thank you, Little Raisin.

29:15Dustin Furman:Perfect. love that love love infecting your life

29:23and finally Chris this one's for you oh Trevor Cannon wrote in and said hey fellas I've got

29:28Dustin Furman:breaking news and I'm not talking about gaming Chris you're going to want to tune into this one I've got the details from a very trusted source so drumroll please glass snapple bottles are coming back baby I work in marketing and I was meeting with a vendor the other day when they confirmed to me that glass bottles are in fact making a comeback they ran the limited glass bottle test in New York, which was previously mentioned on the show. And after the test, they made the decision to roll them out nationwide. So I'm not sure how your day is going thus far, but hopefully the news just made it that much better.

29:53Colin Moriarty:Listen, man, if that's true. Hell yeah, that's dope as hell, dude. Snapple right now, for the last several years, dude, it's such a terrible, such a terrible drink. I don't know what it is. I think I might have said this on the show before, but like I've never tasted anything that's gone that's i've never drank anything whose taste was so drastically affected by the material that it's delivered and served in it's insane how it goes from like it drops like several tiers as a drink because coke to me is like shifts maybe one tier right it's better it is better in

30:30Dustin Furman:the glass bottle yeah you and i you're now you're crazy because it's not real coke it's it's mexican coke that's never real coke in it well that's not true either like they do have normal coke in the glass bottles really i've never seen that before that's interesting yeah there's like because

30:45Colin Moriarty:there's some because there's some that's sugar cane and then there's some that's like just normal yes normal coke that's served in the in the in the glass bottles that i can do that i can do but i didn't know that but regardless they're both in my opinion just like dude it's so much better in glass although coke is less effective because like tin and metal is also way better than plastic i I don't know if you've had a plastic Coke in a long time. Dude. Disgusting. The plastic bottle diet Coke. It's it's it's bad compared to the can. It's it's terrible. It's obnoxiously bad. But like the Stabble doesn't have that.

31:17Colin Moriarty:It's like it's either glass, which they got rid of or plastic. There's no can. They used to have cans. Not anymore. So this is this is if this is true and this is not you yanking my chain. That's a great. That's a great boon to my mood. I got to tell you. dangerous for my health because that shit's really not good for you but whatever what the fuck am I trying to stick around for what the hell's all this what is

31:38Dustin Furman:yeah like what is what is this who gives a shit I know it's pretty much where I'm at at this point

31:46Colin Moriarty:this show man it's just stupid you're catching you're catching me in a weird mood today too because like this is kind of the end of my day because I've been I've been working really late just like filming and editing so i actually woke up at like 1 a.m oh interesting so you're fucking wired so this is like this is at the end of my day basically i've got all my i've got all my energy the different me you're getting sorry it's not gonna be a part of something to apologize about my friend

32:20Dustin Furman:all right that's all we have for the uh the things the topics of discussion now it's time for us to get into the news yeah there's a lot of it there is a lot of it um so i want to talk about grand theft auto first we're going to do a thing i guess we'll cut it in at some point we're recording this the in an hour and a half on you or i'm sorry on netflix the grand theft auto stuff will happen and then that will be uploaded at nine o 'clock p.m eastern to youtube and we'll watch it then we're going to get together and just record a quick pickup if there's anything we want to say yeah we can do it at that time um so that will happen at some point in here But there's other Grand Theft Auto news to get to as well.

33:00Dustin Furman:And I wanted to get into some of that as well, including the fact that Rockstar has finally released a statement as well. So we'll talk about that first. Rockstar released a statement on social media feeds that says, Dear all, we know that many of you have been waiting to hear from us regarding the events of the past week. This is in regards to the leaking of the game. It would be an understatement to say that having videos of Grand Theft Auto 6 gameplay leak in this way has been heartbreaking for our team, and this is obviously not how we intended for you to see the game after all this time. We are very sorry that everything has taken as long as it has, from getting the game finished nearly there, to sharing more details on official gameplay and providing the community with everything you want to know.

33:43Dustin Furman:We are very excited for everyone to see the extended look tomorrow. That's today. It has taken longer than we wanted to get it ready, but as with everything we do, we know we need to exceed your expectations, and we are determined to deliver at the level you expect and deserve. While it is unfortunate that the intended game experience may now be impacted by some spoilers, we hope that everyone will wait a bit longer to experience the game for themselves on November 19. We want to thank everyone in the community who has reached out with a message of support this past week. Your words have meant more to the team than you can imagine.

34:08Dustin Furman:Ultimately, we are making this game for you, and without you, we would not have the privilege of making games. We look forward to sharing more with you soon. Dustin, what do you make of that? I mean, and what do you make of just a situation over the last week or so? Watching things kind of trickle out, and uh i've kind of i don't even really know what's going on anymore because i've kind of tuned out to it not because i like i don't i i gotta be honest with you if i'm putting all my cards on the table i don't really give a shit about spoiling grand theft auto i'm worried more about the meanness of doing it to people that really do care because i was you know we always talk about the last was part two i did really care and that was ruined for me so obviously the shoe's gonna be on the other foot most of the time and i think it's really so like you could come into my my like you email me and just be like this happens and i'll be like all right i mean like whatever um but i know that that's really going to suck for many millions of people and i feel for them and i think we've been pretty lucky to dodge things so far i don't know that anything i i haven't seen everything but i i don't know that everything anything that's been released has been like truly spoilers but maybe um so do you have any thoughts you'd like to share it's been interesting watching

35:13Colin Moriarty:such like this is such a the biggest game really uh well beyond outside of the bubble that we normally talk about and seeing some of the reactions has been interesting first minor note i liked people saying that uh this was an ai written response because it has m dashes in it like like ai invented the m yeah people do this to me because i use m dashes so we've talked about before it's like the worst thing that ever happened to me so i think rockstar i'm i'm i'm pretty sure

35:40Dustin Furman:we're good on that the only the only thing by the way about that is that like i have such a huge work like a library of work that uses m dashes that it's clear that that's what i do but yeah thank god for that thank god i didn't like pick that up later you know you can go back to my work in high school i'm using them it learned it from watching you well i did say jokingly that like i guess my writing style is the default great writing style i'll take it there you go i'll take it thank you

36:08Colin Moriarty:thank you computer the second funny thing that i've noticed in some of the response to these leaks are people that are uh first of all surprised that the game's not done yet you know like yes games are down to the very wire and sometimes some of the biggest moments of polish happen in the last month and so yeah the game's not done yet it's not surprising it shouldn't be surprising to anybody but i've seen people they're like oh they're still not even fucking done with

36:39Dustin Furman:this game do you see all these some as chris would say larp larping yeah larping is the new poser

36:45Colin Moriarty:yeah like people don't call someone a poser they call them a larper so i i do like that

36:50Dustin Furman:they're working on the game 85 days before it comes out what it also should be noted that

36:58Colin Moriarty:arguably you really could make an argument that even when a game is out it's it's not truly done because this is ultimately yeah it is a piece of software but it is also like a work of art and art is never truly done people are just pried away from it um unless you're just lucas unless you're yeah that's right that's a great example actually like you just say well actually we gotta actually java should be a weird fucking slug have you ever seen that original cut of like star wars where java is just a guy yeah it's it's upsetting what if we made him a big a big slug man what if he was a big pile of sluggy what if he was a big wet slug dude it's so funny because the

37:37Dustin Furman:this in the special edition they you know they they incorporated that footage and then replaced that guy with like a java slug character but they had a he walks behind him right and he has to like go over his like it looks so bad when you look at it it looks really bad how do you how so how does

37:53Colin Moriarty:that guy feel imagine being that guy that got edited out of star wars and replaced with like a like it's 70s CGI monstrosity damn the Pete Best of Star Wars bad luck dude I think about that with

38:07Dustin Furman:Biggs Darklighter to the the pilot he's in the movie but like there's a whole scenes with him that are like removed like he was supposed to be a more like that's his friend and supposed to be like more of a character and I'm always wondering that it's like damn you just missed yeah like a

38:18Colin Moriarty:more iconic role in a movie but yeah crazy stuff as far as the leaks as a whole I'm with you Colin in that the first few were interesting because you're finally getting a little look at the game. But as they just kept rolling in, I'm good. I'm happy to just wait and see it presented the way that Rockstar wants it to be presented.

38:40Dustin Furman:Oh, you don't want to see it at 480p with like text all over the screen asking you to buy cryptocurrency? That's not good. Yeah.

38:46Colin Moriarty:And then judging it through the lens of that? Yeah.

38:49Dustin Furman:Comical.

38:52Colin Moriarty:So you're right though that I... I think I was saying this to Brad on Summon Sign that, and this comes back to something that you were saying, Colin, last week, is that if you're, if you are like, man, these leaks are bad, you get called a corporate bootlicker immediately, you know, because Rockstar is a bad company. They're making their game digital.

39:12Dustin Furman:And then you get to see a barrage of the gay porn that the person has on their phone. Nothing to think about with that.

39:18Colin Moriarty:yeah but what i was saying to brad was just that regard like all i shouldn't say all but a lot of the games we love are made by giant corporations that i don't have any love for necessarily some of them i don't have disdain for but a lot of them i do and regardless of that there are people uh and artists in the trenches that have been working on this thing for the better part of a decade at this point uh that have put so much of themselves into it so whether it's an indie game like silksong or it's grand theft auto 6 there's artists that are putting themselves into this game and it sucks and i feel bad for them so um especially now that it seems like there are some more story things starting to come out for it well um we don't have a letter we don't have

40:08Dustin Furman:a letter here i'm sorry okay good i was gonna say dion d lesia wrote in and said spoiler free spoiler warning guys i think the ending of gta 6 was just cyber leaked two major story points were posted on x i wasn't searching for it but it was in an x thread about how gta characters can gain and lose weight and i saw a simple three sentence post revealing the end of the game from a cyber leak related account looks really believable if it's true i'm so fucking pissed fuck leakers don't be like me avoid any gta discussion on social media for your own sake i don't know if they i feel like it would be more well known if they really did leak the ending but to the point that he is saying like this is why i was trying to impress upon people like it's so fucking like people are so fucking stupid when they're like when they are like just don't watch the videos and i'm like all that's gonna happen is something's gonna be shown and then it will be five words in something that you posted and you will not be able to unread it are you stupid this is why you don't want any of this stuff out there you don't have to go it's not an opt-in situation that's not how the last of us part two was spoiled for people right yeah it's people people that got it spoiled weren't like oh i watched a two minute video and now it's spoiled it's like no they went online and someone was an asshole to them based on the leaks that they watched that's all it takes that was what i was trying to impress upon people and it's lucky if

41:17Colin Moriarty:that hasn't happened yet very lucky i i saw what uh this write-in is talking about i have not seen it confirmed anywhere that the story especially the end to that degree has leaked it could be true but take those things with a grain of salt like don't be worried too much we we were told by the leakers that abby was trans uh for last of us right and there is a trans character they they

41:41Dustin Furman:were confused so you could tell that they had like some sort of information lev is the trans character they just assumed it was abby because of her masculine well colin spoilers for the last of us part two oh yes yeah that's yeah that's true that's true yeah yeah yeah we gotta we gotta Should we should we are you being serious? Should we blur that? No, no. At this point, I mean, because Lev Lev's sexual or like, you know, identity is kind of important, but not really. I mean, not really.

42:11Colin Moriarty:If you wanted to play The Last of Us Part two by now, like, I don't know what the hell is wrong with you. And if you haven't done that, you know, like, what are you what are you waiting for? There are bigger spoilers than that.

42:21Dustin Furman:Believe me.

42:22Colin Moriarty:Yeah, that is.

42:23Dustin Furman:Yeah, that is true. If you somehow avoided them, like when I think it was. that we were talking about with Dagan my brother for people that don't know it played it like he didn't know and I'm like I don't know especially someone like Dagan who like seeks out shit like the guy who would spoil everything for me I was like oh I found in like 1997 be like oh I found like a rumor early script of episode one want to hear about it like oh cool yeah I I don't

42:47Colin Moriarty:know this whole thing has been so fascinating to me because I've seen I've seen a lot of this game now but I also feel like I've seen none of it I don't know if you guys feel the same way but but that's how I feel about a lot of what I've seen from GTA. It's like, I don't know if it's real. I don't know if it is real. It's so low quality that I feel like I haven't really seen anything. It's littered with all these watermarks and all this crap. I'm like, I don't really know what I'm seeing right now. And even to the point where I had an experience like this, I can't remember what game it was, but I had it spoiled for me in the sense that somebody said that this was like, oh, the ending of this game is this.

43:24Colin Moriarty:And they mentioned some character meeting this fate or whatever. And I remember I read it and I was like, I don't know what that means. And then like, and then I played the game and I beat it and I had to, and I didn't even realize that it had happened because I had forgotten and had so little attachment to any of the proper nouns that were in the spoiler that I read at the point that I had read it, but it essentially kind of evaporated in my head anyway. So like, maybe I've seen the ending of GTA six already. Like I really don't know if I have, I already forgot it because I don't know what any of this means.

43:57Colin Moriarty:and so like i i it's gonna be it's gonna be difficult you know if the ending really is out there like you can't really control what you read i would say flood the zone with misinformation leaks right yes so that it's it's you know it's almost it's like that thing that we talk about sometimes colin where like if everybody gets their information stolen then it's like it's as if nobody did right exactly yeah there's such a cluster every every blue moon i bring up that

44:23Dustin Furman:anime or it was a manga or something about how everyone, it's a Japanese story about how everyone gets their shit stolen so everyone lives with masks on now because everyone's exposed so they have to live fake lives. So fascinating. Yeah, I feel bad for people. That's all I'm saying. I don't give a fuck. I really love GTA 4's story and I guess that there are probably substantial spoilers in that, but it's like GTA 5's story it's like whatever and then for me but GTA I know people care about it a lot more people care about it than care about almost anything else and so it's sad to see it ruined for them especially because apparently this dude the leaks might be over now especially because we're about to see the game but more properly but he apparently or this group of people apparently did it and made maybe$250 ,000 which in my opinion is fucking pathetic it's like you did all of this like all of this damage and all of this destruction for$250 ,000 in in some crypto scheme yeah that's pretty sad you know what i mean um and i'm just letting you know like and by the way i've been reading about like wallet transactions and shit and apparently it's split four ways so there might be four of them so you each did this for like nothing comparable to the destruction that you caused to the game and to and to the scene and the fact that you have a target on your back and they're going to go after you if you're in if you're in a place where you can get got they're gonna get you so and i don't know if you guys have been read there's like some interesting reporting where like people are feel like they're getting close and like there are some ideas of who it might be and where they might be and all the rest it's it's quite fascinating a lot of this stuff happens on the gta forums i don't know if you guys read that website that old website but they do they have like a lot of like information on there about who they think it is and people do it's not unlike what happened to me on psn where like people in our audience were like oh i can help you and give you information i've got a lot of information from people like pork poncho you know or opsec and all the rest it's the same thing in the gta world i mean you're attracting curious bystanders that can help find you that might even be more effective in finding

46:29Colin Moriarty:you than the cops if they found if if if the internet managed to find shia labeouf's flag multiple times with like no hints at all like i don't and that was like years ago that was before flock and palantir and all this crap like i really i really don't know i don't know if it's it's uh bravado or just you got balls on you or if it's just sheer ignorance but like i just don't know how you think you get away with anything of this magnitude now like we talked recently about like how trivial it would have been like in the you know the 1800s to get away with even even something incredibly severe and like viscerally evil yeah you get away with how wouldn't you have gotten away with it that's that's like the yeah and so like now it's like i just don't understand how you think you're gonna get it like you're always gonna be looking over your shoulder and to me

47:21Dustin Furman:like nothing's really worth that yeah for like 75 grand of your cut it's like okay what are you

47:27Colin Moriarty:gonna pay off pay off a credit card like like i don't i don't know what you're gonna do with that money i mean if you're smart you could maybe do something with it but like it's not really it's not nearly what you it's not really that's not nearly the amount of money like it's not the amount of money that i would that i would assume the risk for to do exactly the point it's like

47:47Dustin Furman:it's total loser shit for nothing like right like people don't rob banks and walk out with a hundred thousand dollars you know because they understand like it's that now or never it's all or nothing

47:58Colin Moriarty:probably so it's like jesus how pathetic it's probably what a good streamer makes in like three months you know like it's it's crazy oh my god it's fun so um but yeah i'm feeling for

48:11Dustin Furman:everyone out there that's getting it spoiled and getting it ruined and um i feel for people too and just the caught in the endless dialogue around this game around just the incredible level of

48:26Dustin Furman:babyness babyishness i guess you would call it just babies you know acting like someone's putting a gun to your head to pre-order the game you haven't seen yet get grow the fuck up are you out of your fucking mind what are you owed you know an 80 game that's probably going to be endlessly playable and you're complaining about its price you're complaining about how it's being made how long it's taken that they don't want to show you very much but like shut up who are who do you like what are you talking about you get to control everything like it's all it's like it's it's a it's a it's a lot you know should we go should we go into dylan's little thing oh yes dylan ty winky reminds me we got to talk about twinkle girl later megaman oh man colin why does everyone on the internet hate you dylan everyone on the internet hates me because i tell you the truth unflinchingly

49:27Dustin Furman:yesterday I did a little bit of research because I am so tired of this conversation around not only Grand Theft Auto's price but a fact that it is so an it is such an unreachable price and such an unfair and egregious price and so deeply unaffordable and of course the and I'll just underline this because I can say this with certitude now because I've done all the research the lie that people's salaries have not kept up with the price of these things. In fact, they've more than kept up with the price of the video games. And what everyone seems to be mad about, as I will explain to you with all the numbers I have, is that other things on the market, if you consider everything you buy as a pie, the slices of things that you need are getting bigger.

50:14Dustin Furman:And what you're doing is blaming the slice that is getting smaller for not being even smaller. it is baby behavior economically illiterate and shows that if you have if they're and i'm just being real with you if you if this is like really ruining your life it's what i said on sacred streaming if like this is like i i can't afford you shouldn't be buying video games yeah period end of story it's not a it's not an elitist thing to say no it's not any of those things, you're making your entire identities. The fact that the game is$80. It's pathetic. And divorced from all economic reality on the ground.

51:03Dustin Furman:So what Dylan is talking about specifically is a tweet that I made. Now, I tweeted about my whole thought about how I feel bad for people. I don't really, I honestly, I feel bad for Rockstar. I mean, like the people in the trenches, they've been working on this. They've kept the secret, right? Yeah, I mean, people making the game. Right. Imagine the temptation of leaking this stuff. I mean, I'm sure people get offered a lot of money to leak things. In fact, I know they do. And they've withstood all that and didn't do anything wrong. And then this thing from I don't know if they've really still talked about it, but it seems like someone got fished.

51:37Dustin Furman:I think people think it's someone at Rockstar India. Right. I don't know if any that's true. I mean, I don't know if they'll ever say. And it might require like some sort of external report because I don't think Rockstar wants to expose how they were broken. So I tweeted that out and then someone responded being like, when are people going to say that$80 is too much money for this? And they haven't shown us anything. And I responded to the dude being like, if you can't afford an$80 video game, you should get another hobby. Specifically, if you can't afford Grand Theft Auto. Now, people tuned into that and just started retweeting that and talking about that.

52:08Dustin Furman:But I'm like, I was talking to that person. So if people are expecting me to be like, you should apologize. Like, you're the one who's making it about you. Right. You know, I don't know what you want me to tell you about that. And by the way, no one cares about any of the context of it because I looked it up today. I muted it back on Monday, so I haven't really been seeing anything. In fact, the only thing I've really seen is when people go into other things I've tweeted and talk shit about that. I want to be clear. I've talked about this in the past, and I think you're the same, Chris. Maybe, maybe not.

52:33Dustin Furman:I think you're even a little more laissez-faire. Talk your shit about me on Twitter and things that I talk about if you don't like it. If you bring that shit into other threads, I consider you a reply guy and I block you. You know? So if you want to talk shit, do it. But do it where don't talk shit about that on my dog post. Don't talk shit. It's like, I'm going to ban you. You know, I'm going to block you. Otherwise, talk your shit.

52:53Colin Moriarty:Yeah. Yeah. If you're making it a thing where like this is like who you are, like, yeah, I have no interest in letting people like that stick around.

53:06Dustin Furman:Yeah. If you have something to say underneath what was said, that's okay. I'm not going to get it to you for that. Or retweeting it or whatever. I don't care about that.

53:13Colin Moriarty:I don't know. I think. Look, I agree. with with most of what you've said there and like the economic thing that you were talking about earlier about like how like the everything everything that we need is getting more expensive is true and i do i do want to point out like this isn't necessarily devil's advocate because it is ultimately an agreement i understand when people when you bring up when people bring up the inflation argument like that is an accurate thing to say it is also accurate to say that purchasing power is fucked in comparison to how it used to be so that is that is specifically because the things that we need are more expensive things like tvs are trivially expensive now and so like there's less flexibility in the stuff that we choose right than there used to be and so like i think that that's valid and i don't even think it's necessarily invalid that people are like upset at the economic situation that i think arguably we've put ourselves in for no real reason i think it's valid to be upset about that my issue is that you're not really directing your anger towards the people responsible or even towards the industries that are responsible because like you said, and like many people have pointed out and like is obvious by just observing the space.

54:18Colin Moriarty:Everything that is more or less, I don't want to say luxury necessarily, but things that are entertainment oriented, things that are luxury oriented, like these things comparatively are so much cheaper than they used to be. I remember paying, dude, I remember, I remember paying$2 ,500 for a TV. I did that like probably like 10, maybe. Maybe 12 years ago, right?

54:50Dustin Furman:So the amount of money you couldn't even really spend on the TV anymore unless you were buying like 100 inch 8K screen or something.

54:55Colin Moriarty:Right. And that was and that was that was the most egregious thing that I had ever spent money with. I guess with the exception of a PC, PCs, I guess, like and that stuff is getting more expensive now, too. like I get it um but I just I yeah like an$80 video game like that's just not that's not where your ire should be should be driven if you're an if you're a literate person if you're an economically literate person that's not where your anger should be directed I think you can disagree

55:24Dustin Furman:you'd be wrong but you could disagree right well that that's my whole point is like so so to speak about the tweet and put that away because I think people want to hear about that a little bit is like Now, when I went back and looked at it, I did realize something today for the first time, which is that I thought I was talking to the same person the entire time, but I was actually talking to two different people. But this goes, as I said, ad nauseum on this show, I am name and blind and icon blind. I've always been in forum posting and stuff like that. But the whole interaction was to be like, was talking to this person or these two people about like, save your money.

56:03Dustin Furman:like yeah this is not the hobby for you if if this is going to be like your whole thing and you feel like the game that's about to be shown needs to justify its 80 price point based on some sort of faux economic reality that you think exists then you're delusional like people can people can take it however they want i don't i like but taking that response tweet making that so that's what i was saying earlier is like the response tweet has like a million or whatever like or one point whatever million but like the other posts have like you know a hundred thousand it's like no one's even seeing the context of it you know so it's like i don't know like do we make that you can you can make that now your whole personality that tweet instead of the 20 price difference between uh gta 5 and gta 6 that no longer has to be your personality but you said something interesting and this is where the work comes in or do you have anything you want to add dustin before i go into this because it's gonna be a minute uh i think just the only thing to add

56:56Colin Moriarty:I generally agree with you. I've gotten lots of shit before from making inflation-related arguments. I can understand why your tweet in a vacuum that says, if you can't afford GTA 6 at$80, you should find a new hobby. That in a vacuum, I disagree with. And we talked about that a little bit on Monday that I don't think... Tuesday. Anyone is... What? Tuesday. Tuesday. Yeah, Tuesday. day uh i don't think growing up i never was able to get new games i bought used games i that's how i was able to engage in this medium my parents didn't have a lot of money and so we got used games i can remember vividly the first time i got a new game um and so i think that some people could read your tweet that's like if you are poor you're not you shouldn't be a gamer and to some extent that is true you cannot have the latest of everything in the newest games all the time not everybody can financially do that i've been at that point in my life um but i understand what you're saying in the context of talking to that guy uh that you know if this is if this is the hang-up that 20 that it's like you know i mean if the hang-up that's what i said on tuesday i'm like

58:13Dustin Furman:if it's even worse if if the problem is not the 80 price point in a vacuum but the difference between 60 and 80 i'm like that's really bad like i'm not i'm not people have to understand i'm not money shaming you what i'm saying is is that you shouldn't be spending this much like there's no universe where you should be spending money on video games if this is a problem that's the point and i think that people need to like it's very easy to take like the populist every no one has money and everything's bad. See, and everything's, it's like, I can do that too. I can get the plaudits and the applause.

58:46Dustin Furman:Yay. Like Colin is, is speaking truth to power. But the reality is, and this is something that why I want to talk. It's like, we're going to talk about the inflation thing. I know people are tired of hearing about that. That's not even what I'm really going to get into. It's exactly what Chris said, which is your purchasing power. Your relative uninflated purchasing power is higher right now in video games than it was. And that's what I'm going to get into. So even if you want to remove inflation entirely from the equation, okay, we won't talk about inflation anymore. We're going to, but we won't talk about inflation anymore.

59:14Dustin Furman:Instead, we're going to talk about unadjusted money, how much money a person in the United States makes today compared to the way they did unadjusted and that the games even relative to that are substantially cheaper. In fact, they're about half as much as they were unadjusted. So we live in a total economic fantasy world where your electric bill, which is onerous, your food bill, which is going up, et cetera, and so on is being blamed as being you're blaming the fraction of the pie, which is, by the way, discretionary and is getting smaller, but has to exist in the world where they have to buy that electricity and their people have to eat that food and all of this stuff.

59:50Dustin Furman:And then it was like, no, but it's too much. It's got to be cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. It's delusional.

59:56Colin Moriarty:That's what that's what I'm saying. It's fucking delusional. yeah it's not false that so i think there's i can already tell like where the miscommunication is going to be because you said that your purchasing power is higher in the realm of video game that that is literally true your overall purchasing power i think based on like a number of fact is less and so you're not wrong to feel that at the at at the store or like on playstation network right it's like gilded age level bad right now like it really it's probably going to get worse so like i don't begrudge people for feeling angry i don't i don't even i don't even begrudge people for saying like for sticking it to rockstar in the sense it's like you know what i'm not gonna you know i'm not gonna buy gta sick or there's really arguably no good reason that you should at least get in the getting in on the ground floor of a new video game it's like the the most unwise thing you could really do in this space because you're going to get a less polished version of the game at the highest price possible we've been over this and there's no real reason to be in the conversation especially because the majority of you are just going to go into GTA online and or just fuck around in the story and not really finish it anyway as most people don't finish their games anyway so like there's really I would suggest to most people if this is something that you care about like yeah just don't I would never begrudge people for like being like you know what I'm not going to support this company because they're you know this it's too expensive or whatever and if you feel that do it I also think that the anger is misdirected I just completely disarmament.

1:01:23Dustin Furman:In fact, like we should. We should be grateful, especially when I get into some of these numbers about what's going on in other mediums where it's like gaming has been so resistant to a comical degree. Games really shouldn't cost$80. They should cost a lot more than that. The reason like and I'm not saying all games and I'm not saying I'm not saying like pay like whatever you want. what I'm saying is if they were really keeping up with the increase in quality, the increase in playtime, the increase in value, and the fact that the people that make the games have to live on this market where the non-discretionary items are going up to price, gaming has been super stubborn.

1:02:00Dustin Furman:And it's a reason why some of these studios and publishers go out of business, because they simply can't even charge a market rate for these games. I'm not saying that that's good or bad. We've talked about this about how it goes both directions too, about how I was surprised by how cheap Silksong was, but a real developer that had no backing, like Team Cherry has a huge fan base and all the rest is it's same thing with amina being somewhat affordable not so not quite as affordable i think it's actually even more money than that but it's like these guys have fan bases you can play into that and do a volume play and people might argue that um rockstar could do the same thing but as i go into the budget numbers again i have so many numbers for you you're gonna you're gonna see that this is is

1:02:37Colin Moriarty:Let me just go into it. Yeah, what's a AAA game supposed to cost now? Like$140,$150 or something like that? Some insane...

1:02:44Dustin Furman:Yeah, so it would be like$150. If you were paying equivalent pricing over time, it would be like$130 to$150, depending. If you're talking about the cartridge error, so like the same four$20 bills, unadjusted, so just the same four$20 bills, I use those same four$20 bills to buy Final Fantasy III on SNES 6, but we knew it as 3 in 1994. You can walk into the store today uninflated with those same four bills and buy GTA 6. Yeah. That's, and then people will say, well, they're running it up and they're going to make all this money. And I'm like, actually, the margins are way higher for Final Fantasy than they are for Grand Theft Auto.

1:03:31Dustin Furman:The highest marginal wins Grand Theft Auto has ever received is GTA three because they basically like 100 X their money, which is not going to happen with GTA six can't like, it's impossible. So even like the amount of money they're making per what they're spending is less right at these onerous numbers. This is what I was saying. This is why when Dylan was like, why does everyone hate you? It's because I tell you the truth. And I'm like, it's a funny thing, but I'm, I'm being honest. Like I'm telling you the truth. It would be a very easy thing to be like, to again, lean into the populist messaging.

1:04:03Dustin Furman:And I am a populist in a lot of ways. We're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about tariffs in a little while because there's a new story about that. But like, so let me get into what I've discovered, okay? And then I'll tell you exactly my argument. Inflation will play a part of this, but you'll see that there are arguments from multiple angles. At the top, the numbers that I got, so you guys can research and double check my work if you'd like, all the employment numbers and money numbers I'm going to use come from the Social Security Administration. Some of it has been double checked with the US Bureau of Labor and Statistics, but the Social Security administration's numbers are what they base.

1:04:34Dustin Furman:These numbers are known because in the United States, we all pay into social security. They judge how much you owe and then how much you get later based on all these numbers. So these are the numbers that the government has. And if you look, by the way, at the different numbers, so like the Bureau of Labor and Statistics has some different numbers and some of the other bureaus have their own numbers. These are the lowest numbers. So this actually makes my case the least. And I did that on purpose because it still makes my case plenty well, but these are the lowest numbers the government is working with.

1:05:01Dustin Furman:So inflation numbers also come from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics and game length, which is going to come up, comes from how long to beat. Game budgets come from different research I've done. You can read about these numbers pretty easily. And by the way, you might want to make a note for Lockmort here. We're going to have some light editing at this point. And he can just listen and figure it out as we go. I outlined there's a bunch of Grand Theft Auto games. I have five Grand Theft Auto games over time. Okay. So Grand Theft Auto 1 comes out late 1997. It costs$50 when it came out. By the way, I should have said this even earlier.

1:05:39Dustin Furman:I'm talking about America. Our audience is two thirds American. We have a third foreign audience, Canadian, European, Australian, whatever, wherever you are, can't speak to your countries, not pretending to do that. You'll have to figure out the numbers for yourself. But this is from an American perspective for our primarily American audience. So GTA 1 comes out November 97. It costs$50. That would be$103 today. if you want to talk about inflation. The budget for the game is about$2 million. The average annual pay in 1997 was$26 ,309 per person, per worker. Okay, so$26 ,309. Therefore, GTA was 0.19 % of your annual pay.

1:06:19Dustin Furman:Gross. GTA looked like this. Lockmore, show them what it looked like. It took about 17 hours to complete everything in the game and 13.5 hours to do the main story. Okay? That's GTA 1. So 0.19 % of annual pay. Unadjusted. GTA 3, 2001. $50. That would be$94 today. A budget of$5 million. They 2.5x'd the budget. Game over game. The average annual pay in 2001 was$31 ,581 in the United States. GTA 3, therefore, was 0.16 % of your annual pay, unadjusted, purchasing power in the moment. So down from 0.19 % to 0.16 % of the average worker's annual pay. GTA 3 was 36.5 hours long. It looked like this. And to beat the main game, it was 14 hours.

1:07:24Dustin Furman:GTA 4 2008$60 game that would cost$93 today it also had a special edition it was$90 which would cost$140 today a lot of that was physical stuff at that time the budget of the game is 20x GTA 3s and 50x GTA 1s 100 million dollars you guys might remember it was the most expensive game of all time at that time. Yeah. The average annual pay in the United States in 2008 was$39 ,652, meaning that unadjusted GTA 4 was 0.15 % of annual pay, down again. So 0.19 % unadjusted, 0.16 % unadjusted, 0.15 % unadjusted. And by the way, it's worth noting in 2001 and 2008, the economies weren't good. So as we're talking about the economic situation, the economy was really bad in 2001 and the economy was really bad in 2008.

1:08:22Dustin Furman:Of course, we're talking about the dot-com crash and the Great Recession, respectively. GTA 4 was a 73 and a half hour game. It looked like this. And it took 23 hours to beat the main game. GTA 5, 2013,$60. It's$86 today, so more expensive than GTA's base product. It also had two special editions, which everyone likes to ignore. both with a bunch of digital products in them which everyone likes to ignore there was a 80 version which would cost 114 dollars that was mostly a steelbook and a map plus you got because remember there are the in-game bonus stuff and all the in-game stuff that you can only get for these pre-orders it's bad special ability boosts stunt plane trials that otherwise didn't exist for anyone else bonus outfits and tattoos and additional weapons there was also 150 version that would cost$214 today.

1:09:18Dustin Furman:And that came with all of that plus special GTA Online characters that don't exist anymore for anyone. Garage vehicles that don't exist for anyone unless you bought that special edition. Exactly what's happening today that everyone's complaining about, just so you know. Also, they had physical goods. Worth noting. It's 2013. So I think you got a backpack and shit like that. The budget of GTA 3 was 2.5x GTA 4s. $265 million.

1:09:45Colin Moriarty:GTA 5, you mean?

1:09:46Dustin Furman:Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, GTA. Yes, I'm sorry. GTA 5's budget was$265 million, 2.5 X's, 4's. And more than 100 times more than GTA 1's. Yet, the median annual, or the average annual pay in the United States was$43 ,000 in 2013. And GTA 5, therefore, was 0.14 % of your annual unadjusted pay. So again, 0.19%, 0.16%, 0.15%, 0.14%. unadjusted, no inflation. Oh, by the way, GTA 5, 89 and a half hours to complete looked like this. And 32 hours to beat the main story. GTA 6,$80. There's a$100 version. Budget of predicted at least a billion dollars. We don't really know. If we go to the lowest end of just the development budget, it would be 4X's GTA 5's budget, unadjusted.

1:10:42Dustin Furman:In 2026, the Bureau of Labor and statistics says the average annual pay is$66 ,622 in the United States, meaning that GTA 6 is 0.12 % of your annual pay. And by the way, if you want to say the$100 version is the real version, and I just indicated to you, it's really unlike what it's exactly like rather what's happening with GTA 5, everyone just ignores that, then it would go up to 0.15 % of your annual pay exactly what it was for GTA 4. The game will probably be somewhere, I put a prediction on mine, 150 hours, something like that. I assume. And you would have to assume it's going to take at least 40 hours to do the main story, probably more.

1:11:22Dustin Furman:Anyone who's telling you earnestly and honestly that your purchasing power in gaming has not adjusted with time is lying to you. It's in the numbers. They're lying to you. Or they just don't know. And then the next thing to blame, so to put it in Starker, GTA 1 to GTA 6, unadjusted monies based on the realities on the ground economically in the United States means that GTA 1 was twice as onerous to buy for the average consumer as GTA 6 will be. Does that all make sense to you guys?

1:11:58Colin Moriarty:Mm-hmm.

1:11:59Dustin Furman:Yeah. I mean...

1:12:00Colin Moriarty:I agree.

1:12:03Dustin Furman:So everyone's always like... It goes a certain way. It's like a chess game. But I might be in my own wheelhouse. you make your opening moves everyone has these predictable things they do right and so it's like inflation means that games have been cheaper and people say like yes but that doesn't take into account people's standard of living and all these other things and I'm like but it does actually taking that into account you're blaming the products that didn't decrease more in value because the products that increased in value are making it harder to live. These are two different things. Are they intertwined?

1:12:43Dustin Furman:Yes, they definitely are. But the situation has been so vastly misrepresented. It's wild to me. And that's why I went into all these numbers. Now, the average hourly wage in the United States today is$32.40. The average weekly wage in the United States is$1 ,290. Now, people have a lot of things that they need to pay for. They have their car bills and their rent, and they have kids and all the rest. But we're really getting all bent out of shape over what is equivalent to three hours worth of equivalent average work in the United States to buy a game that will probably be playable for many years.

1:13:25again it's detached from reality and delusional now gta's price increase over time

1:13:35Dustin Furman:is 60 from gta 1 to gta 6 and unadjusted money but if you if you adjust it for value it's actually down 25 relative to the economic realities on the ground for each individual game as they were released and the reason that i didn't use vice city and san andreas like we don't need to get get the idea. Now, here are some other things. While gaming has increased 60 % in unadjusted money, movie tickets have increased 183%. In 1997, when GTA 1 came out, a movie ticket was$4.59. Now it's$13 for an average movie ticket. Concert tickets have gone up 328%. $28 in 1997 to$120 in 2026. The U.S. Bureau in Labor Statistics had a really interesting study about sporting tickets that are up 155 % since 1997.

1:14:37Dustin Furman:And CPI data suggests that restaurant spending is up 142%.

1:14:45Colin Moriarty:Late night bites with friends? Already hard to beat. That first too hot bite of fries you couldn't wait for, followed by ice cold Pepsi. Now that hits different. Suddenly, the energy kicks back in. The night goes longer. And the laughs don't stop. Because Pepsi brings out more flavor, more fun, and more of the moment. Food deserves Pepsi. Grab a Pepsi Zero Sugar today.

1:15:11Dustin Furman:And that a$20 meal in 1997 would now cost you$48.50. Mm-hmm. Do you guys know what the only entertainment medium that actually shares gaming's high value over time? It's books. And in fact... That makes sense. A$20 book in 1997 would be$20 today. So it's actually even more valuable than the gaming space.

1:15:40Colin Moriarty:Yeah.

1:15:42Dustin Furman:I mean, I've made my case definitively. In my opinion. like it now do i want to insult people do i am i sad that people got insulted by my exchange with that person yeah i don't want to i'm not out to hurt anyone i also think it's like a i think these my theory of the case honestly on this and i'd be very curious to know what you guys think of this and as i think that it's largely driven from younger people and people from other countries that don't have a high standard of living or an American or European or whatever standard of living where$80 is really onerous because of course these things are not adjusted by geography typically.

1:16:29Dustin Furman:In other words, if like you don't sell a game for$5 in an African country because that's what they could only afford. Because it seems so either that or people are just totally ignorant on the facts on the ground. And yeah, were you going to say something, Chris?

1:16:45Colin Moriarty:Well, no, no, I don't know. It doesn't really, it doesn't do anything to diminish the overall point, which I ultimately agree with. I do think it's worth kind of looking at the idea of like averaging out income in a world where like there's more of a gig economy now and the quality of people's security in those jobs is less secure. And like, what is it, what is an average earning? like when there are people making a trillion dollars what is an average earning for you know

1:17:11Dustin Furman:what i mean yeah well that's why you like and you could use median so like yeah yeah the but so when just to put a fine point on that the median pay in the united states is only right this year is only 1 500 less than the average pay so yeah yeah and by the way what i mean by that for people that don't know chris knows this but like the median would be the person directly in the middle if you were counting like every worker you would take from the from the bottom of the top and go all the way into the middle that's different than the average because the average is weighted by people

1:17:38Colin Moriarty:that make a lot of money yeah i just i i think how should i put this this is like a weird kind of i think now because again like we are in a we are in a time now where it's if you wanted to get involved in video games and video games were your thing back when rent was comparably low and everything else was comparably low it was inherently more open to you than it would be now especially with the with the rapid shift right so there's probably a lot of people who are into video games or who like grew up with with the medium who are probably now a lot less secure than they used to be despite all of these like you know the median you know average wage or whatever i i think it's it's the drastic shift over a brief period of time that's really kind of the source of this because it's not like again it's not like games weren't very expensive before they clearly were i remember most of my games were used games like dustin you know like i i think i i also can remember like the first new game that i got like i remember it very vividly um and i think with that no longer existing you could argue that there's subscriptions now which is like kind of takes that place i guess um or it takes the place of like at least renting there's a lot of varying factors i i don't think people who are financially insecure now are lying though you know what i mean like i think there is a truth that things are very very bad again though it's not rockstar's fault that things are bad and it's just very it comes across as like somewhat illiterate and somewhat novice to pretend as if that's the case well i i want to be i agree with

1:19:25Dustin Furman:you but i want i want to be clear chris i'm not saying that people's economic insecurity is a game what i'm saying is that people that are making this topic their personality it can't be really i agree it can't be it cannot i refuse to believe it's real people with real jobs and like an actual like sure like yeah it's got to be young people and it's got to be people with just not a lot of disposable income from places where you know it's like they make ten thousand dollars a year they make twelve thousand dollars a year like that's different that's why i said at the top i'm like i can't speak to your guys experiences you know i can only speak to yeah so i want to

1:19:57Colin Moriarty:be but we we know the internet though that's the only reason i say this is because like it none of what we said none of what we said over the last 40 minutes matters to these people we've got it we've got to be aware of that you know right but i you're you are right but i wanted

1:20:12Dustin Furman:to speak i don't like blowing smoke up the audience's ass i do that once in a while but like are it's why like no what i noticed when i was like reading some people's feedback a few days ago and like looking around is like no one in our audience is mad about it so it's like like or very like very it's like i've said shit like this forever um here's the thing too is that

1:20:32Colin Moriarty:people who people who do have legitimate reason to be mad about it probably don't even have the time to be mad about it you know what i mean like the people who are really financially insecure who are like really like i'm sure they're probably very bummed but they're also not paying attention to this like they got a lot more important shit to be doing than paying attention

1:20:52Dustin Furman:to how much gta is going to be and at launch and people saying talking like it's also like you don't you're really getting the real version at a hundred dollars it's like if that's the case and you only got the real version of gta out of 105 at 150 dollars right just throw just throwing that out there just it's just a complete equivalent um the one thing i wanted i did promise that I would do this on on. So I that's like those are my points. I think I've made my I want because I want to segue into another part of this. But does that all make sense? Like I've definitively made the case for uninflated affordability.

1:21:27Dustin Furman:So if you don't like the inflation argument, which is a valid argument and a reasonable argument, then you can't avoid the uninflated argument about purchasing power based on the average wage in the United States, which makes GTA six virtually twice as affordable as GTA five. GTA six at$80 uninflated is twice is affordable nearly to the average person in the united states as a 50 game was in 1997 period yeah so so it's it's in the united states own economic data right so that's

1:21:58Colin Moriarty:it's just your electric bill is like 1200 because there's a data center in your fucking village

1:22:01Dustin Furman:right we're gonna talk about data centers later so but right and that sucks yeah but as you said i don't know what you want rockstar to do about it they're already making they're already made they haven't kept their piece of the pie the same size they've basically made it twice as or half as big and then people still complain they're like because it doesn't quite wedge in with this new reality and i'm like maybe blame the fucking utility company then yeah i don't know what you

1:22:26Colin Moriarty:got a lot of you got a lot of good anger directed accordingly you're you should be people should be upset i agree that's but it's this is not it man no it's not it and i think

1:22:43Dustin Furman:people are like it's corporate defense and all that i'm like no it's not it's just reality dude and again i'm telling you the truth unflinchingly it's the truth

1:22:55Dustin Furman:so what i wanted what i promised i would do and dustin was there for this was i wanted to talk a little bit about personal finance and i don't want to get too deep into the weeds on on people's individual situations but i want to speak from the heart and i i am speaking to each of you individually, I want you to hear what I'm saying to you and I don't want you to take it as a judgment. I want you to take it as me being worried about the reality of people on the ground. You have to save your money and put yourselves in positions where incidental one-time purchases will not ruin your life or upend your economic reality or stop you from putting food on the table or whatever you're going to do.

1:23:34Dustin Furman:You have to say no to those things. You have to. And I will reiterate, if you were okay buying it at$60 or$70 and you're not okay buying it at$80, it is more urgent that you don't buy it. It is not a judgment call. It is not saying you have it easy. I am an extremely lucky person. I've said that a million times. Anyone who listens to this show knows that. I am extremely fortunate. But there were times in my life, a lot of it, where I had dick. and I had to pull myself up by my bootstraps and I did. And you have to make tough choices. You must say no. I want people out there to really internalize this.

1:24:17Dustin Furman:There are easier and affordable. It's why we don't raise prices. I've talked about this openly. I want our shit to be so cheap that it's irrelevant. Right. And it is. $5 a month is an irrelevant amount of money. The reason it becomes relevant for us is because it is compounded by many, many thousands of people. It's a volume game. Right. because I know that if we raise prices, like if I kept up with inflation, since like what's funny is we've never raised prices. We've only added more to it. So like value richness, I mean, there's almost nothing more value rich than this, than like what we do in terms of the things you absorb.

1:24:47Dustin Furman:You have to find things like this that you can eat around the edges and have predictable purchases, which is why consider if you have the hardware, consider Game Pass, consider PlayStation Plus Extra, consider Nintendo Online, consider going to your local library and renting things or narrowing down your big expensive subscriptions. Like if you have Hulu and Netflix and all these things, maybe choose one and have a real game plan of how you're going to approach it. You know, a lot of the, I truly believe that no matter, and again, I'm talking to primarily Western audience, no matter what financial situation you're in, generally speaking, I believe you can make choices to make yourself more stable.

1:25:28Dustin Furman:And worrying about an$80 purchase indicates an instability that must be confronted. And it's not an$80 like tank of gas or something like that. It's an$80 one-time discretionary purchase that will ultimately probably give you hundreds of hours if you are willing to spend the time with it. I am really worried about the financial insanity of what people expect and how, and I've already illustrated obviously with my statistics about the incredible rise in budget, the decrease in relative uninflated and inflated cost, the price going down relative to the average annual pay. To me, I just want to encourage people to be smart.

1:26:21Dustin Furman:Please save your money and make it work for you. And what I would do, this is what I used to do. And I'll tell everyone, like, I had nothing when I graduated college. I owed a shit ton of money for my student loans. I could barely, I had no money. I went and bought a bag of rice and like vegetable, you know, frozen vegetables and tried to eat and do all these things. But what I would do is I would slowly make these goals where I'm like, what if I saved two weeks worth of pay and didn't touch it? And then I'd be like, okay, I did it. Go to the bar. All right, now I want to save a month's worth of pay.

1:26:59Dustin Furman:and then you reward yourself at the end of it. So you're doing something positive for yourself while rewarding yourself for being disciplined by saying no to many things so you can say yes to something at the end of the line. And then if you do this enough to where you have three months, four months, whatever, then an$80 purchase, you don't have to make it your whole personality because it's like you can just make it because you've made you. So what I wanted to say, and I did the math, it almost works out exactly is the day that this goes live, if you want to afford Grand Theft Auto and you feel like you don't have the amount of money to do it, what I want you to do is I want you to put away$1 a day.

1:27:41Dustin Furman:If you can just find in your life, in your paycheck, in your world, whether it's real cash that you put in a jar, whether it's something you do in a bank account every week where you try to kind of account for it, put$1 away a day. And by the time that the game comes out, you can afford it.

1:27:57Dustin Furman:That's all it takes. you gotta, you gotta reduce things to it's, I'm not a huge Dave Ramsey fan. I appreciate what he does, but that's something that he really is really right about is that like when you're paying off credit, they call it the snowball. I think where it's like, you go after the easy things first to give yourself momentum to make me. So you have like five outstanding credit cards and one of them you owe, some of them are really crazy, but you owe this one. That's like$500 and you can just pay off. So it's just paid off. You know, then that you get a little momentum, you're, you're feeling good.

1:28:24Dustin Furman:You got a little, and then you do the next hardest thing. And then the next hardest thing. The one thing that I've come to realize is that like there's a real deep financial literacy in society. And I get it because I also went to school and no one taught me any of this either. I've said before, the reason randomly that I got into finance was from watching CNBC in college. And I love Susie Orman, who's like a pop finance person. And it gave me all these different things to talk and these different ways to talk about it. So like everything is within your grasp if you're willing to make some level of sacrifice and plan and understand that you can't have everything that's true for everybody it's true for all of us yeah but it doesn't mean that the product that you can't afford for a certain reason is too expensive those are different things and the the big tell on this by the way and mike and i were discussing this and i think we'll have to be patient on this is like the reason you know there's no real price sensitivity for grand theft auto 6 and that this is all performative for most people is that it's going to be the best selling game when it comes out it'll sell 10 tens of millions of copies at this price it as Strauss-Delnick said on CNBC the hundred dollar version is out selling the 80 dollar version there is no price sensitivity and that I think is the big thing is that it's like this is a performance it's not real that's why I was saying earlier it's like people are mad at me online but my audience isn't we're not seeing any like nothing's happening in our company because everyone knows it's a performance art.

1:29:49Dustin Furman:That's it. If you want to be mad about, and you should be, I go to the supermarket and I'm like, this costs what? But it's not Rockstar's fault that it costs that. Because when I go look at Rockstar's games, I'm like, oh, my food is up 250 % since 1997, but the games are only up 60%. Interesting. And by the way, that's for an$80 game. the$70 game it's not it's not it's not 60 percent it's more like 45 percent like it's comically cheap and I'm talking about gaming software not hardware and by the way we'll get into the hardware story later but I don't know I'll just leave it there does all that make sense

1:30:31Colin Moriarty:I think it does it makes sense to me I even think about it just from my own experience like back then like granted I was I was I didn't have a lot of money when I was a kid or when I was like working because i worked minimum wage but i even remember like comparably um buying a game in like 2011 felt worse you know than uh buying a game now like even intrinsically even though it was like necessary even though it was lesser of a price tag i think there is also a psychological math that is that is a cornerstone of a lot of this to be honest with you because i think 80 feels closer to 100 and 60 feels closer to 50 now these are true objectively but like you know you know what i mean like there was a there was an indie developer that said something that was like really succinct that was like really good and i can't remember i think it was like the the people who made peak they were talking about how like a one dollar game is free uh a four dollar game is five dollars a seven dollar game is five dollars a ten dollar game is fifteen dollars and like these these there's like there is like an associative like psychological math that takes hold i think at eighty dollars that probably like that rubs you inherently the wrong way even if it's not necessarily that crazy um and i think that that's generally true it's yeah no i think you're

1:32:00Dustin Furman:right and i'm sorry i didn't know i didn't know if you were done i um yeah i think listen i'm just telling i'm just telling you the truth you can be mad you can be mad at me if you want but i don't think my audience i don't think our audience is mad about anything so well they're mad about a lot of things but i don't think they're mad about this um let's see do we have other so does that dustin i haven't heard from you in a while is that everything i'm saying do

1:32:24Colin Moriarty:you agree with what i'm saying or i'm curious yeah no i completely agree i've i've obviously not to this degree i've made arguments like this before i've gotten lots of shit for it uh but i it's one of those things where it's like sorry that you're mad about the reality because i get it you know it's just you're not as we've been saying a million times pointing it in the right direction i was having a conversation with my dad like a few days ago that i was like i really thought the amount of money i'm making if i told myself this when i was a kid i would have been like holy shit yeah and now and i to be clear just like you were saying colin i'm very blessed i know people have it way worse than me and that's actually what makes it crazier that in this economy i'm like what the fuck has happened so i get it you know but um yeah i don't think it should be rockstar or any other game company to be like you know what we're going to be the charitable ones and some of them do we just well we're going to talk about witcher and their free update and the yeah ability to do that i think that's great uh

1:33:34Dustin Furman:but not a brand new game that cost maybe one or 1.5 billion dollars to make either right yeah um yeah it's cool it would be awesome if they were like yeah we're gonna sell it for 30 dollars it's like that's just and that's why i thought it was so interesting when i was reading about gta 3 specifically like they made so much money comparable to their budget that it is literally impossible for them to make that much money comparable to the budget ever again we're talking about like something like 250 million dollars in like a year or something which is that would be the equivalent that is well let's be fair because that's single sale

1:34:08Colin Moriarty:that has no microtransactions right right of course in comparison that's true gta won't have

1:34:12Dustin Furman:any microtransactions either for a while. But yes, but it is true. I think this is the other thing I wanted to say, and I think this is important, is I don't believe that we should look at AAA console gaming as poverty gaming. In other words, what is the lowest possible price we can reduce all this shit to? I think it's bad for the product. I think it's bad for the space. It's not what I want. I don't want cheap games, like cheap, shitty, free games. I want the artists and the programmers and these companies to get paid a fair wage for the games that they make. And I want high quality stuff and it's going to cost something to do that.

1:34:52Dustin Furman:So I think that like there is affordable gaming. I don't think core console gaming is for you if you're price constrained. It's never been for you if you're price constrained, by the way. And at this point, I'm not even sure how you could afford the hardware and then worry about the software price. So it's only going to get more. Yeah. It's going to get only more, I think, focused in a lens of this is nonsensical in a way. Yeah. By the way, I also want to make.

1:35:22Colin Moriarty:I also want to point out, too, that there are more options available for people who are price sensitive now than there were when I was a kid. Like comparable, like there were no options really when we were kids. That's the one where there was used. There was used games and then there was extremely old games. right but like now it's like there's a lot of stuff coming out on pc specifically that's like nine dollars or whatever which by the way is like even if you only play it once that is like the equivalent of like going out to a bar for a night and and having one drink maybe you know what i mean so it's like it's at that level of price where it's like even if i play this once it's probably going to be worth it for the amount of fun that i'm going to have with the people that i'm going to play with like things like peak things like um how to fish and all these other these are when i was a kid we didn't have like we didn't have that i guess like towards the xbox live generation like what or i guess like the xbox 360 generation we started to get that stuff with like uh with um summer of arcade and things like that like and i remember that was a big deal it was why i was such a big fan of it because it's like oh my god i get we get to be we get to get in on the ground floor of these brand new games for like and i think even at that time they were like maybe like 15 i can't remember the price i can't remember the exact price because they had that stupid fucking microsoft point system on xbox live so i don't i don't really remember what the exact price of these things were but they were affordable comparison compared to like games on the ps2 that i wanted but couldn't get so yeah i would have shit my pants at the thought of game pass or playstation plus like that oh yeah it was like it was like dude okay okay my dad has a friend that has a playstation he has this game maybe my dad can ask him to borrow it dude i was at this i can get it from uh the giant eagle video rental for five or six dollars for seven days that's like the best i can do you know i used i used my allowance to pay for game fly where i i only i could only rent one disc at a time and i had to play it per month and then i had to and then i had to play that the entirety of that game and then send it back as fast as possible just to get my money's worth for the month so i could get like another game in the same month to play and like try game pass where you just have like a hundred plus like and all this back catalog stuff to this backwards compatible every generation available to you in some facet like it's it's an amazing time to be involved in this hobby really now granted it's not a great time to build stuff for it in triple a no and it's not a great time to exist

1:38:07Dustin Furman:around it to play but i right but you're right it's like it's one of it's like we should be a we should be so we're lucky i guess that's what i'm saying like we're lucky like it's been it's been so resistant they really could have browbeaten they really could have browbeaten us

1:38:23Colin Moriarty:they really could have just been like you know it's a hundred dollars in like the in the 360 generation they could have done it and they would have gotten backlash for it for sure but like it would it would have just happened and then it just would have been like oh this is what it is i guess but they didn't do it so like i don't know dude et the extraterrestrial the game that like sank the entire industry that is 130 people paid 130 in their value of money for fucking et the worst

1:38:49Dustin Furman:game ever created yep like you live in a i don't know we live in a goal we live in a true golden era we live in a golden era with price we live in a golden era with accessibility you can play games on almost any device you have you don't need to even have these specialized machines you can like we said get game pass or ps plus and have these subscription services there's a million different ways to interact so making your entire personality about this 80 game that will i am i'm i'm positive it's going to justify this 80 price point like i'm positive yeah i'm not really

1:39:19Colin Moriarty:literally no doubt about that like i would it would be it would be a big story it would be the biggest story that's ever happened in games if it was fucking mind's eye or something that's what's

1:39:31Dustin Furman:so funny about it too is that everyone lauds reasonably so like what is in my opinion the most lauded game ever is red dead 2 people it's been almost it's eight years people won't shut the fuck up about how good it is and about how amazing is you know who's making this game right yeah yeah you know like so like what like what like what are we what do you think is gonna happen it's just so it's just so strange and it's it's performance

1:40:04Colin Moriarty:it's fucking performance it's it people gotta be a little bit more literate they've got to be a little bit more aware like it this it's not bootlicking to just understand the reality of the situation you know it's not there's plenty of bootlegging but like it ain't this isn't one

1:40:24Dustin Furman:of those this is not one of those things it's not and i'm not i'm never gonna tell people what they want to hear i'm a i'm a little brash could i say things better yeah if i knew people were gonna read that tweet the way that they've read it as out of context and not talking to someone then yeah maybe i would have said something different but i gotta be honest it's probably not also like in the top 25 worst things i've ever tweeted so i'm not incredibly worried about it um who amongst us has not let out a little tweet every now and every now and again now what you're referencing of course is the charlie kirk thing like it's important to get away from that what's important is like getting away from the visceral reaction like my reaction to that was wrong i've said that i've talked to chris privately and publicly about it sure you gotta distance yourself even from the emotion of the moment to really see things as they are.

1:41:14And this is this is what I was saying

1:41:17Dustin Furman:again to Dylan's question. I am telling you the unflinching truth. That's why people don't like me. I could just blow smoke up your ass and tell you everything you wanted to hear. Yes, yes. Things are so difficult. The game should be cheaper. Yes, yes. We should be making them as cheap as possible and selling them for as cheap as possible. And yes, whatever you want to hear, whatever makes you happy whatever makes it so you say nice things about me or give me the up dutes or i can make like cool little videos about it's like i could just tell you the truth with the numbers and i just did now here's a yeah no no never mind never mind yeah really never mind i'm gonna hold yeah yeah

1:41:55Colin Moriarty:i'm gonna hold my tongue

1:42:00Colin Moriarty:i'm on i'm on a i'm on a different wave of energy you're a little bit you're a little

1:42:05Dustin Furman:like you said at the end of the day you're a little tired probably yeah yeah no i'm just like i'm energized yeah i feel a little silly yeah i feel silly this week too like i uh i want everyone to just be careful out there and be smart with your money and be and plan and be cognizant and try to make intentional good choices and enjoy grand theft auto yeah because you're going to i mean of course you're going to by the way all these people complaining about it they're gonna buy it how funny like how funny is this gonna be if it sucks do you have it like i'm willing to i'm willing to take that risk because that would be the most

1:42:47Colin Moriarty:insane thing that's ever happened right yeah no it would be i'm just saying it's like it would

1:42:51Dustin Furman:would be mega funny i mean seeing the videos like that were leaked it's like i'm like this looks awesome like that was that was i think once you get past the compression and the impossible

1:43:02Colin Moriarty:impossibly dark right presentation of it yeah dustin and i talked about that on the stream

1:43:06Dustin Furman:the other day where i was like yeah like you can see it like you know what it's supposed to look like and i was like this is fucking like it's what i thought it was gonna be it's like a really impressive graphically visual dense rich grand theft auto what did you think it was going to be

1:43:23Colin Moriarty:yeah yeah um so and reminder there has been a game that cost 80 dollars yeah which most people bought in a bundle let me tell you mario kart world is not worth 80 dollars i've played it um it's all just fine that's my opinion maybe some people feel that way that's the other thing i think that's really important about this conversation colin is let's say you can afford it but you're mad about it being 80 why not just wait and wait for it to come out and see if people

1:43:52Dustin Furman:believe that it is worth the price yeah like why why are why is everyone acting like they have a gun to their head it's strange it's not your electric bill you know i mean like yeah it's

1:44:03Colin Moriarty:well that's kind of the issue is for some of these people it is right but again i mean like i do know what you mean but that's always been true no well what i'm saying is like um for some of these people it's like oh well i gotta have an opinion on this and it's got to be strong because i have to have a nice i have to have a nice thumbnail and i've got to uh you know i've got to whip up the whip up the bots into a frenzy if i want to make my patreon bucks yeah it's it's a strange i think i said it

1:44:34Dustin Furman:on streaming is like it feels childlike just in that it's the way i talked about and spent money when I was a kid. Like, yeah, I would buy like, I would just let money burn a hold in my pocket. I had no regard for like what the realities of the situation where I would just not budget or plan for anything. I've made fun of myself a million times saying like, I never even had $1 ,000 until I got out of college. Yeah, it's like$1 ,000. I'm gonna go buy this and this and this and this and this. I'm gonna go out to eat and I'm gonna go buy this game and I'm gonna go buy pot and I'm gonna go buy beer and I'm gonna go, you know, and it's like, you can't really you got to like budget and live within your means and like have a like or you're gonna ruin your life that's that's really that simple yeah the the best advice that i would have to people is if

1:45:19Colin Moriarty:there's any um if there are any people out there uh who are like mentally handicapped ai artists who are uh who are making videos about something maybe maybe just uh instinctively just veer in the opposite direction of whatever it is they say i would i would maybe make that case for people

1:45:37Dustin Furman:so we'll leave that there um you're welcome for doing all that research for you now you know that when someone tells you that the purchasing power of money is not keeping up with the cost of games you know that they're lying directly to your face are there any other inquiries that we want to get through oh john kos koscusko koscusko i don't know hey gents not a question as much as a comment all this conjecture of who cyber league might really be isn't it obvious leslie benzie's told us all from the start it's obviously the work of the ritual network i'll be collecting my bounty from Rockstar now for solving it.

1:46:07Dustin Furman:It would be hysterical if Leslie Benzies was Cyber League himself. Like Leslie Benzies himself was Cyber League.

1:46:14Colin Moriarty:Yeah. That was my favorite genre of tweet that I saw over the last couple weeks. It's like, it was me. I leaked GTA. My name is... Yeah, like whatever person you hate. Whatever person you hate.

1:46:29Dustin Furman:Hashim Barakat says, Good day, sacred gentleman. Do you believe that GTA 6 being$80 could be a deterrent against other AAA games increasing their prices? I think any publisher that attempts to do that would be under serious scrutiny as their games would be compared to the quality content and polish offered in a Rockstar game. Thank you for the amazing content. And I wish you all a great week. Yes. In fact, I think in a way, in a weird way, they're not doing it for this purpose, but it is it acts as a weird favor. Because. If anything, it's constraining price, but imagine a quarter where seven different games tried to charge you$80, right?

1:47:00Dustin Furman:So, yeah, now that might happen, actually, and they might get by the goalie because they're all kind of intercomparable. they're pretty good whatever but then a game that no one really does it the one game that tried to do it like outer worlds got scared out of doing it so they've already it's already shown that bullet you can bully these companies and then rockstar does it and yeah everything will be held to this quality of 80 so it might actually hold the market down ironically and that's i think one of the most interesting things and i don't know if that's good for the gaming market by the way but the core console gaming market but yes you're right like as crit dust or as dustin says over and over again like you got to be that guy if you want to do this yeah and yeah they're going

1:47:34Colin Moriarty:to compare and even nintendo by the way when they did um mario kart for 80 like that was more of a play i think for them to get people to just buy the bundle yeah yeah right i think that was less about them thinking like this is 80 this is an 80 game and more about just like we'll give them an expensive option then we'll just give them something that's a little bit more compelling that they can that makes a little bit more sense for us as well um i'm sure some people bought it for 80 i don't know why you would have at that point but i would still expect though that uh when PlayStation 6 launches that games will all games will be$80 at that point yeah that will be the flip maybe at that point yeah probably you might be right I don't that I don't know how they can withstand it by that point like that it's gonna be like what would it what are we thinking like 2027 like next year fall if everything holds for the for the hardware yeah yeah I mean at the

1:48:27Dustin Furman:soon at the yeah I think it only can be fall 27 or spring 28 I don't know like what how it could possibly be anything but those two things it's funny though dustin you're right but i think

1:48:38Dustin Furman:i think the hardware situation so we said this earlier it's like the and it sucks for gaming it's like gaming hardware has gotten more expensive and it's onerous to the actual companies like they're the few companies that don't want this shit to happen the the price of the hardware the access point is going up and that's different but software is obviously far more accessible and i wonder if the original plan under the old economic rules of this is what we think things are going to cost i was actually i just did a guest appearance on someone's podcast it's going up next week i think and i was saying like we really should they probably thought ps5 was going to be 300 bucks by now something like that yeah and so i wonder um if the plan was to make the games more expensive with kind of more affordable hardware and if now that's not really gonna be possible because you're asking people to probably spend people are saying a thousand dollars i i i still feel like that's such a psychological barrier that i just don't think that's going to be that much but maybe it will and then you're going to be like and we're increasing the cost of the games it's like i don't know that's like that's a tough one yeah but that might have been the plan the whole time and even at 80 dollars the games would be incredibly affordable comparable to you know we've gone right we've

1:49:47Colin Moriarty:gone under this i have i have a question for you colin do you think uh do you think they're going to be any ps6 exclusive like big games i think that has to be probably something right but i assume but like you know what i mean like the these budgets are getting i don't know i i just don't know how you justify it i guess you just kind of have to assume it's like a kind of a bit of a loss i don't know if i don't know if a loss leader is necessarily the right term for that but you just have to assume like yeah this isn't gonna like return but we need to push people over

1:50:16Dustin Furman:to the hardware and this is going to be our way to do it yeah like that's the these budgets are

1:50:21Colin Moriarty:going to be fucking ridiculous by the time that the ps6 is out for anything that's like big and that could draw your attention they're not going to put out like a i guess they could have like an astrobot kind of thing but that's not going to be like you know this big thing yeah i think

1:50:36Dustin Furman:we we had we had discussed this um at some point in the past where i was like you probably have to sacrifice something basically like it's not the studio you would think a studio would want to make a ps6 game but probably not because if your ship and and and monetary quarterly bonuses are based on the performance of the game you're kind of being throttled i think what will end up happening ultimately is that there's gonna be a lot of cross-gen stuff that that to me i wouldn't be surprised like there's just gonna be ps6 versions of all this stuff and there'll be ps5 versions and i think shit dude there were ps4 games announced at gamescom right yeah so yeah you're gonna have all these things circulating at the same time unfortunately and i i i'm your the question you're asking is one of the things i'm most fascinated to see because you just intellectually have to assume there's got to be something that can only be played on the machine otherwise you're really not tempting anyone and if they're really dickheads it should be something like Bloodborne or something like that.

1:51:35Dustin Furman:Yeah, maybe.

1:51:36Colin Moriarty:I think the play is going to be like, you can take this on the go, the portable aspect of it is going to be like, well, that'll be maybe the core thing that gets people, or that they assume are going to get people to jump over because if they can take their entire library on the go and it is as functional as a PS5 is, that's fairly compelling, I would assume, but that also depends on the price.

1:51:58Dustin Furman:Tom Miller wrote in, this is the final inquiry about this. I just thought this was a really interesting question and I never really thought about it. He says, hey, CDC, GTA 6 and its impressive pre-order campaign have got me thinking. What are the mechanics of how funds are held in between the game going live on the storefront and the game releasing? Does Sony have billions of dollars in its accounts at the moment, acting as a custodian for Rockstar until November? While small change at a company level, this must still be a nice income stream for Sony. Excuse me, being presumably able to earn interest on 100 % of GTA 6 pre-order revenue until they need to relinquish 70 % to Rockstar.

1:52:28Dustin Furman:Or is all the money off limits for either company until the digital good is in consumer hands. I'll leave my niche question with you and listen. Great work on all the LSM's output as always. I don't know exactly how this works. And, um, you know, in the games that I've made, I've never done pre-orders or anything like that. My assumption is, is that take two has some sort of open, they probably have some sort of open multi-game account that has money constantly going in and out of it. And I would assume that the sales of the, the, uh, pre-order sales are not final because I think you can probably request a refund, but that the money is fungible in such a way where the money comes in and out of this one place.

1:53:02Dustin Furman:And so if someone, if they've already taken the money from it and then they get a refund, then that's just dinged on that account. So I don't think that anyone's holding anything. I think that the money is flowing fairly freely. But I don't know. That's a really great question. And I really, I don't know if they like hold it, have to hold it in escrow or something. I don't really know. It's, we'll actually have a decent idea in their financials because it should show up. If they're allowed to count this money this quarter which i assume they would be then we'll see it yeah okay at this point we're going to cut in for gta 6 netflix stuff and talk about our thoughts on that we'll see you on the other side okay we're back here to talk about gta 6's reveal 27 ish minutes uh on youtube we waited for the youtube version chris maybe didn't you have netflix right now chris so maybe you watched it but we but we dustin and i waited for the youtube version right um kind of wish i could have watched the netflix version i wonder if it would have been a little bit higher quality like there was still a little bit of compression it looked like in the for me on the youtube version but um nonetheless it was it was i thought it was excellent i'm curious what you guys think and if we have anything we want to say we don't have to force it there's nothing to really say but we've seen the game pretty extensively i will say that i don't need to see anymore and i will be i'm sure i'm sure they will show more but i'm gonna be on on blackout for it uh chris let's go to you first what do you uh what did you have to make of the trailer yeah or so i uh whatever that was that's not really a trailer whatever yeah it was kind of it was but what yeah it's very

1:54:31Colin Moriarty:interesting what they did here um i thought it was really interesting it's i can't quite tell how to feel about it only because all first of all of it looks impressive like it's it's it's an insane looking game one of the first things i noticed almost immediately that i didn't think i would notice but just but just seeing the way is gonna sound so insane because i i don't normally give a shit about this and i really ultimately don't but at the very beginning it shows both of them walking into like a building and you can see like the shirt changing based on like the shape of the shirt changing based on like how it like falls on his body and i was like that's crazy like that's a weird amount of detail to see in a video game and it was like jarring uh to notice and the the whole the whole trailer the whole video is kind of um filled with little things like that like um incredible detail um but yeah it looks it looks great there's a lot of red dead in this, which I was kind of excited to see.

1:55:45Colin Moriarty:I don't know. My... My thousand foot kind of like bird's eye view of it is just like this looks really impressive and I'm really excited about it. I would like to know more. I don't know if I'd want to see more necessarily because there is stuff I'm still curious about. Like what's like what's going to what is this going to be? How is this going to function? what's the what are the systems what are the underlying systems here that like we're not kind of getting a good look at quite yet those I'm curious about but as far as like seeing it in action like I think I think I'm good we don't have to wait much longer but I thought it was a great showcase

1:56:29Dustin Furman:about I think it's like nine weeks or something like that from now Dustin what are your thoughts top level thoughts anything you'd like to point out well it certainly looks like a billion dollar game yeah immediately i was like yeah it's um

1:56:45Colin Moriarty:he spent a lot of money making this and it fucking shows because it looks crazy um i was particularly i think the main takeaway which is something we already knew about but i'm so deeply interested in the relationship dynamic of this game and i've already been seeing some tweets from people who went to um rockstar to see it that like that's not necessarily a guarantee uh that their relationship which is very interesting for that being the two main characters but curious about that but i was like noticing little things like there's the hand there's a hand-holding mechanic in this game and i was like okay that's kind of cool but more than just some of those novelties is that it really seemed to emphasize like the quick the switching between players during gameplay so there's the scene where lucy is driving the car and jason is shooting in the back and then there's like a small cut scene that plays and then i think you probably start as jason and then switch to driving and i'm like hmm that's pretty pretty cool pretty interesting um yeah i i mean there's so many different little things of course the shot that everyone's talking about which for good fucking reason is her uh parachuting off the building like that's like clearly like the flex shot of the trailer and it's like yeah it looks it's insane really good really really good uh the all if i have to be it have to be nitpicky a little bit is a couple times during the driving section there was a little bit of like upscale blur and it wasn't just youtube compression it looks like other ps5 base ps5 games when they have compression on them and there's some quick movement but you know basically every game on base ps5 has that but it wasn't like necessarily like a flawless technical presentation is i guess the only that i could really say uh i did ask holly what she thought she had three comments during the trailer the first thing she said at all while we were watching was wow that sweat looks incredible there's a scene that shows uh lucia in a nightclub and she's like real brief and she's real sweaty and holly was like whoa that looks crazy second comment when i asked her if she had any thoughts afterwards was uh the cellulite on the girl's butt during the drug scene i noticed that too she was like that's crazy that's crazy detail right there i was like i also noticed that as well um and the last thing she just said was like she said that a lot of times she feels like in video games characters are just like not talking like a muppet but just like very basic mouth movement and i mean she's seen games like last of us that have mocap and stuff but she's she felt the facial animation and the models just looked unparalleled which i totally agree with so i feel like this trailer is one that or whatever extended look is one that i'm gonna need to watch it again and maybe even watch one of those YouTube breakdowns because I think there's so much more information packed into it, like showing off like some of the robbery situations that you can get yourself into.

2:00:17Colin Moriarty:The shot that's them on the swamp in the, it's not like a hover car, you know what I mean? The car that has the fan on the back.

2:00:25Dustin Furman:Yeah, the hover boat or what do you call that?

2:00:28Colin Moriarty:Something like that, a hover boat. Yeah, that looks so cool. Hover craft. hovercraft yeah uh that looked really cool i like that they made sure to include that they're they're the trailers have been very serious up until this point this trailer is pretty serious but they made sure to include like the scene where he's watching the tv and it has like the fake ads and stuff that are ridiculous i like that it was like hey this game's still fun and is willing to not take itself too seriously as well of course gta game but it's nice to see that in there um but i i think i'm with chris too where i'm like this was a i mean a fantastic appetizer but there's so many things i'm still curious about like all the different we saw some of the different activities in the game there was like a like a legit racing part of the trailer uh that looked cool then there's like a street racing part um there's the jet skis of course that were in there that all looked crazy good but the first trailer had a little bit of the tease of like the social media platform in the game like the tick the in-game tick tock and i'm still curious about what that's going to look like if that's going to be like a thing that people can upload their own clips to um i guess i don't know not all of them but particularly gta5 had like the online like the fake internet browser and stuff i'm curious like what your phone does like how many different features are in the phone she mentions she mentions there's like a site called snap something which is clearly supposed to be supposed to be snapchat or something yeah but there's like they mention it specifically i think once or twice in this uh in this thing so i imagine it's going to be it's going to play some some part one thing i love that like the is that that rooftop bar is called effluvia which is like okay we're we're still doing the the jokes as far as like naming places like gross things i like one thing i noticed almost immediately almost immediately was the third person shooting is that it doesn't seem to be functioning in the way that like previous rock star games have functioned which is to say somewhat poorly it looks more like a traditional it looks more modern i guess it looks less like it's snapping from person to person it looks more like there's just there is auto aim but it looks more like it functions like a normal third person shooter it actually reminded me a little bit of um 007 uh the way he the way the character was like moving and shooting and the way it looked the way it looked like it felt to aim obviously we don't know how it feels to aim ourselves but it looks like they've made some strides there um it looks like certain foods have stats i noticed that because like when you go to the fridge or when the character goes to the fridge there's a bunch of different options to eat and they have like different icons next to them kind of implied and if you if you pause and look at it there's kind of like an implication that like maybe one's like focus or and one's like maybe like a boost in stats or a boost in speed or something so that's interesting that's a bit of red dead uh kind of brought into this and i'm not sure if gta 5 has that i don't remember that no i mean i don't i don't recall i mean i just played it yeah there's um there's working out mini games which like maybe I wonder if there's I wonder if they're going to be doing some San Andreas type stuff some of the stuff but might might by the by the way already be answered but yeah man it just looks so impressive I the level of detail and the way it looks and the fidelity of it captured on base PS5 and and it or that's what I'm assuming because they said captured on PS5 I don't see why they wouldn't say capture on PS5 Pro.

2:04:27Dustin Furman:Yeah, I agree. I mean, that's what I'm ready to.

2:04:30Colin Moriarty:And just to see this level of detail and this level of AI density at the scale that they're doing is so... Like, it looks incredibly expensive. It looks like how much we assume it costs, which is exciting. It's crazy. I can't wait to see this on a running on a bit on a machine because that's the other thing too it's like these these showcases look pretty good generally but like there's always going to be some kind of compression there like I noticed this even when I watch trailers in 4k on youtube versus play the game myself it's just like it always looks more impressive on the machine and to imagine that translating to this it's just like I can't even I'm really stoked I'm not a graphics guy don't normally care but like this is so mind-boggling um i really can't wait to see it yeah you guys

2:05:27Dustin Furman:have a lot i've been writing down a lot of things you guys have been talking i would argue that the game appears to to represent a certainly a visual quality but also just a richness of world quality production per square inch maybe i want to say something like that for an open world that is virtually unobtainable actually outside of spending as much as they've spent with as many people as they've spent spent it with over as much time as they've been spending that time this game has been in development for a very long time many thousands of people are working on it it's it's especially if you're not super into games and don't really think about the size of teams, it's an unfathomable size of people working on it.

2:06:16Dustin Furman:I think we talk, I don't know if it's later in the show or before we've already said it. I think it's later in the show. We bring up MiHoYo and how they have almost 7 ,000 employees. And that's probably as many people as working on Grand Theft Auto and across all these different companies and all these different units. Something of that nature, everyone that touches it from the marketers and just everyone that you can imagine, all the contractors that have touched it over the years and whatever. and that's like a mihoyo has like eight different games going and by the way they're all huge so you can imagine you can just imagine like i'm actually from a semantic standpoint i'm mostly fascinated with the production as far as being a producer like they must have a million producers i would actually be very curious to know how many producers work on this game because there are so many cats to wrangle and so many things you have to do and you have to constantly be releasing new builds, I assume, that are integrating everyone's work.

2:07:13Dustin Furman:Like, I'm not even really sure I understand the workflow of how it all functions with so many people. A team of two, three, 400 people have a really hard time doing stuff like that and iterating. And so I can only imagine, and these guys are like all over the world. I thought I saw KiwiTalk say something like the Indian Rockstar unit, which apparently is the highest headcount unit working on the game, is currently working 12-hour rotating shifts. like ping-ponging back and forth. So just from a, I mean, I'm obviously very into game development and the kind of the behind the scenes things of game development.

2:07:49Dustin Furman:And I'm just really fascinated about how even a game like this can be wrangled and how you can produce it. How do you keep everyone on task? I wonder like what the time sink is in just logistics as opposed to anything productive for the game. So that was one thing that stuck out to me. Like I said, an unobtainable level. you shouldn't even bother trying to make a game like this. It's really the only game that's ever been made that comes anywhere close to the expense of this is Star Citizen. You know, like... Yeah.

2:08:22Colin Moriarty:No one cares. Right. Like, didn't... Hold on a second. Wasn't there, like, a whole thing about that recently where, like, it... Yeah, they had a billion dollars in funding for that game, which is crazy. Now, I can't blame them. It seems to be working. I feel like I heard something about them doing a stream to prove that the game functioned properly. And then it was a complete disaster. I don't know if that's true or not. I remember hearing it from pretty reliable people.

2:08:49Dustin Furman:It's like one of those games to me that's so out of my wheelhouse and outside of my purview. At this point, I have no idea what's even going on with it whatsoever. But it seems like a fairly serious product. Anyway, I only bring that up because it's just like, this game is really multiples of times expensive. Of course, it's very big. And it's being made with a lot of external, non-Western development resource that makes the cost even cheaper. If it was being made by all people in Scotland and New York and San Diego and all these different, Australia and all these different places, they might be.

2:09:24Dustin Furman:A billion dollars wouldn't even scratch the surface, I don't think. So they deserve a lot of credit for that. And I think it's really interesting from that perspective. the other non-game thing that i think is interesting is just the sony stuff clearly the marketing is subtle in a way but important captured on ps5 like we said and if you read the uh the description on the youtube chat video it's uh plays best on playstation five uh there's just there and you know obviously all the button prompts for ps5 button prompts i think things like that matter and will drive people towards the console although i think that people are already being driven towards the console i think new zoo released a study suggesting that 78 of the pre-orders are on ps5 already so that's almost four out of five which is pretty crazy um so they're already doing well and i think that that's for our podcast useful information all right so some of the things i noticed um lucia has a huge ass amazing ass yeah pauline i agreed on that what i was saying to michael is i was like it's interesting and she agreed where i I was like, she's kind of, and I'm not, it's not, she's kind of like, they made her, gave her a huge ass and somewhat of a flatter chest.

2:10:34And I'm like, that's an interesting choice and cool.

2:10:38Dustin Furman:I mean, I don't mind it. Where's my water? But she, her ass is humongous. And they're definitely leaning into that. And it's, it's cool. Can't deny, can't deny the, she's going to be a big hit. Yeah. Let's just put it that way.

2:10:54Colin Moriarty:Yeah. God bless her.

2:10:55Dustin Furman:Especially when it comes to PC. oh man so there's there's that at the very top what i'll say is it's grand theft auto and i think people that were expecting a revolution were not really reading the situation correctly and i think most people understood it's not going to turn into like a hack and slash renaissance themed role-playing game it's obviously going to be a game in an open world city where you're doing a lot of driving and criminality and you're stealing cars and you're killing people and you're fighting the cops and you're running away from things and you're doing all these crazy tasks and you're meeting zany people it's grand theft auto it's what grand theft auto has always been and yeah um i don't think there's anything wrong with that because i think that everything seems to be somewhat reinvented although subtly you had brought up the combat which i agree looks different and there's just a lot to the game that i think makes it stand out as its own individual grand theft auto game and maybe that's just because i really just spent so much time with GTA 5 recently where I'm very familiar with what the most recent core game did and this game just does seem to be a huge jump remembering of course that that's a PS3 game and they've obviously made it better as time has gone for PS4 and then later to PS5 but it is fundamentally a PS3 game and even with GTA Online stuff they I think they've abandoned the PS3 I don't know for sure but I think they have but it definitely have not abandoned the PS4 and so everything's going to be held back by the standard of a 2014 ps4 release the 12 years in in gta 5 or gta 6 rather since that point of time at that port it shows and i think it looks uh really really nice the frame rate is a bit of a problem i think but and you i noticed it pretty quickly and i think that they were true you can't you can't there's gonna be car chases and all sorts of crazy open world shit so they can't really maintain these slow corridor driven not well populated not crazy lighting effects kind of scenes that keep the frame rate steady i will be very curious we'll play it on pro if like you said chris it seems like they would say if they captured it on pro so what we're seeing is not the version of the game we'll even be playing the three of us which is yeah we'll play maybe it'll be a 40 frame i doubt it though it'll probably just be a more stable 30 frames with decent resolution or whatever i noticed that immediately though

2:13:20Colin Moriarty:that's what i'm assuming yeah i uh again just the the level of detail and just the amount of ai on screen the physics at play undoubtedly throughout every frame of this game it's just like it's it's a bottleneck that consoles are just not designed to overcome it's it's the reason why bethesda games which have to keep track of a lot of things kind of function poorly in even when they're like remastered very old games um i i knew this was going to be a 30 frame game from the jump it's just it's also what rockstar has typically done like red dead was a very similar situation uh but man this game in this game in a couple years dude like when this when technology catches up and you can run this at 60 frames uh that's that's gonna be wild i will uh be interested

2:14:15Dustin Furman:yeah ps6 will probably be the one that unleashes that you would assume hopefully i would hope so playstation fans and then obviously pc will have an open more open frame rate as well but yeah I know I think it's just it's it stands out to me more because I really don't play anything at 30 frames anymore I don't even know what the last game I was I played at 30 frames but it just stands out a lot to me it just I just can't I cannot see that it was already brought up by both of you I think I think Dustin you spent a little bit of time on it as well but just the models the level of like fine animation is actually insane and it's really I was really I almost stopped paying attention to it after a few minutes because I was fascinated with just looking at the little tweaks and and little movements of each person like people moving their fingers and like like looking at their hands or like adjusting things and it's like it's not that some of these things in in isolation have been done before it's just really natural there are like these crazy animation cycles with all these characters that are very very realistic and again i just played gta 5 like it is a it is a fucking light year away from gta 5 in terms of the models the the world of gta 5 looks actually pretty good i think that the characters look dated and that's not going to be a problem anymore with gta 6 so i wanted to point that out as well driving looks good gunplay looks good a lot of weird funny strange shit it's Obviously, like we already knew this, that they're kind of like a Bonnie and Clyde style, like.

2:15:50Dustin Furman:Pair of robbers. And so you're going to be doing, I think, a lot of robbing, which is funny to say for a GTA game. But again, if you really think about GTA games and sequence and like the things you do in them, you're that the trailer seemed very focused on one kind of task. And I don't know if that was just them hiding a lot of the game or if this is literally just going to be like a kind of you're going around Miami or whatever by city just. Dicking around like that. So it was pretty interesting from that perspective. And then one thing I will, I will say that I thought was strange was there were just certain scenes.

2:16:23Dustin Furman:This is just a marketing and production thing for me, but there were just certain scenes where I'm like, why wouldn't you record that again? They're like, they were just like, I saw them do things and I'm like, wait, why would anyone be like, there was one scene where like they were merging onto a road and like the car, like the AI in front of them were kind of like trying to merge over and run into them. but there was like nowhere for the car to even merge it was should have just been going straight the entire time like there i was like why wouldn't anyone catch that and just be like just go back and do this again it'll be a whole different cycle of ai and the cars will all be different and we can get a better shot and i noticed a few of those things where i was like there was another one where he like does a flip into the pool and the animation's like really stilted and slow and i'm like why why because you have all these like amazing looking things and then this thing that doesn't quite obviously quite look right and you're just throwing it in there and i i wondered like where the fine eye for detail was in that doesn't matter to me but to them i'd be like just cut the shit out like we don't need the shot of him jumping in it looks like it's like running at like 10 frames a second and then he suspends himself in the air for a second weird so it's just these are nitpicks but i am uh i don't know if you guys noticed any of that stuff too but i noticed a lot of those where i'm always fascinated by that like we say the e3 pants and and stuff like that i just i don't know i look at these materials especially when they're pre there's no pressure like you just got to capture it and and tie it all together so yeah no i did notice the flip looked a little odd but i don't know if i noticed the merging thing that you were talking

2:17:45Colin Moriarty:about um yeah i don't know i yeah i it people are going to be looking at this game very closely you know as they should as they should yeah yeah absolutely but it looks cool man i love specifically like this has been an issue with with me with with gta games for a while and they finally fixed it I think for the first time and at least that I've noticed is that the shooting tires affects the cars in the way that they they should finally I feel like I remember especially because I just replayed I'm playing a lot of San Andreas I just replayed for like a year or two ago and I dabbled a little bit in five and something that always bothered me in those games is like man yeah you can shoot the tires but it doesn't doesn't quite feel right And this looks like they really explode, and there's like some force that pushes the car, and it flips and twirls, and it does all the things that you would want it to do, and it's like, yes, dude.

2:18:45Colin Moriarty:That's exactly what I was hoping for. These minor things in addition to just how the fidelity has been handled, and it's just like it's something, man. This is going to be so big. Yeah, I mean, it's going to be huge.

2:19:03Dustin Furman:it's gonna be huge i wonder how big the file size is gonna be yeah that's a good question i i what would you think like 200 gigs or something like that at least something i would imagine over a terabyte right you think i don't think even i think it would have to fit on any of the

2:19:19Colin Moriarty:core machine well no you're right huge a terabyte would be crazy i do think it would it would have

2:19:26Dustin Furman:to be hundreds hundreds of gigabytes but we'll uh we'll see i'm gonna go on blackout for this I think for the rest of the time we'll play it in November. So I don't think there's going to be any more real coverage on sacred symbols until the game. Watch it's not that we've been invited to anything or anything. I'm not saying that. It's just they're going to show more of it. And I don't really think that. I think they've shown so much of it that already in that 27 minutes that you could have split this 27 minutes over the next few months and that could have been everything. So they really are getting ready to really showcase the game.

2:19:56Dustin Furman:And I don't know if this is going before or after the conversation we already had about GTA. I don't remember. but the people that were complaining about this game,

2:20:08Dustin Furman:it's really like objectively one of the highest quality things that you'll ever lay your eyes on in AAA gaming. Obviously, demonstrably so.

2:20:18Colin Moriarty:Whether or not, maybe it sucks, I don't know,

2:20:20Dustin Furman:but I doubt it less than ever now.

2:20:23Colin Moriarty:Even the commercials on the TV, because I remember the commercials on the TV, at least in GTA 4, and how like... comparably like i just i just remember them being very much like like you and i could have done those you know what i mean like it was it was and gta4 especially it was like i remember it was just like machinima tools basically of like a bunch of or some some of them were just like very minorly animated 2d things and like even that shit looks great and the interior of this fridge looks so crazy too like i'm obsessed with this fridge because it's just like they've got like the little frost on the glass I'm just fascinated by it but yeah I'm I'm done I don't need to see more I'm probably gonna read more about it I'm definitely gonna like read what people have to say about I'm sure there's like interviews out there already uh that kind of pick up on some details there's gonna be things I'm going to be curious about like I wonder how I want to know how the social media thing is going to work I want to know what systems are going to be in place like what's I'm really just curious about how this functions at all to be honest um and once it's out in the wild i'll be a massive nerd about it probably rockstar said that the

2:21:32Dustin Furman:campaign is 80 hours long by the way i don't know if you guys saw that which if that dollar an hour that's right a dollar an hour horrible horrible value um and if they uh if they're accurate and it's not dev math then that is approaching three times longer than gta5 story which is crazy and um let's just assume it's dev math and it's twice as long that's really fucking long because i'm because i remember i said i told you guys i got to i'm at the end of gta 5 i got there like a few weeks ago and i'm like this is so fucking long i don't even want to play this anymore it's almost hard for me to imagine it being so much longer but the density is just there it's like it's definitely a game they should be giving away for free it's like holy christ man this is gonna be this is gonna be an amazing it's gonna be the most valued dense grand theft auto game ever and potentially based on its high production value maybe one of the most value driven games ever which is fascinating we have to wait and see we got to hold you know hold our fellatio until we actually play the game but I think I'm excited we have 10 times more of an insight into what it is and how it plays and what it looks like and everything and I have no idea what you would be skeptical about really at this point so yeah it is uh it is very very exciting by the way if you're not in a grand theft auto that's different gta 6 is not going to change your opinion on grand theft auto uh i'm talking about if you like these kinds of games that's there's no there's no reservations i wonder do by the way that same i think the the new zoo thing i brought up earlier about the 78 of ps5 they were they had suggested that it was something like eight out of so four out of five of the pre-orders are hundred dollars it's like whoa i thought i I thought it was gonna be like 53 % or something.

2:23:17Dustin Furman:It's like what they're, you know, it's like 85 or something. It's like, what? There's, it's just so funny. There's no price intolerance. I think the price intolerance is going to be even less. I'll be very interested to see if this drives pre-orders. We won't really know, but some of these study groups will probably figure it out. So, yeah. All right. Well, that's Grand Theft Auto 6. You guys can go to the YouTube channel, Rockstar Games' YouTube channel or on Netflix. I'm sure it's going to be there too. if you haven't already seen it you can go check it out for yourself and then see what we're talking about but otherwise uh is that it do you guys have anything else you want to say i don't think so all right yeah yeah i think shout out to the twitch streamer guy

2:23:55Colin Moriarty:and i liked it it put the chat on the side of the screen oh yeah detail yeah that was cool that's

2:23:59Dustin Furman:cool all right back to the show all right grand theft auto 6 delayed indefinitely looks awful a few other news stories or there's one other news story i want to get to before we get into the Gamescom news and we can talk about whatever we want from there. This broke on Politico today. Another potential headache for U.S. data centers, Trump tariffs, they write. And they write in part, quote, the Trump administration is weighing a new round of sweeping tariffs on semiconductors. Eight people from eight people familiar with the discussions told Politico, despite warnings from tech companies that the move could doom U.S.

2:24:29Dustin Furman:hopes of dominating artificial intelligence. One tariff approach under consideration would dramatically expand the number of tech products subject to the duties, hitting not just chips, but potentially many of the goods made with them, such as laptops, gaming consoles, or the servers that fill data centers the people said commerce secretary howard lutnik favors a structure that would tie foreign companies relief from the tariffs to investment in u.s ship manufacturing to juice more domestic production said four of the people the administration is also mulling a phase-in period for the new tariffs the four people said the people stressed that the framework could still be substantially revised in the coming weeks or months um there's really they haven't said anything about this yet but it's worth putting on the record i have to be honest like i don't mind the intent i just don't again And I just don't think that it works that way, really, for certain products.

2:25:15Dustin Furman:Like the idea of saying, like, we'll relieve your tariffs on a business by business basis if you start manufacturing shit in the United States. I love that. But it's a dangerous thing for the video game industry and for computing, generally speaking. Not so worried about the AI race. I think we'll be fine there. So there's nothing really to say about this yet. You guys might have something you want to say, but this news just broke this morning. But it's something that we should keep an eye on as we move forward. i also don't exactly know how this all works because the the unilateral tariff stuff was struck down right so it's just going to be some sort of proposal to congress that's what i've always said is like this has to go through congress it should have always gone through congress um just to make it permanent so that's predictable you have to have a predictable economic model so people know how to do things yeah imagine i mean it's yeah i mean i just well remember we said this when the tariffs were put in on other things i'm like tariffs are supposed to hurt like that's the whole point and if you're gonna do it you have to have balls you can't be like wishy-washy you know what i mean just don't do it then just don't do it yeah so i think you have to if you want to do it you have to do it in a very because i again i am a protectionist you have to do it in a very predictable way that spells it all out and i do like the idea you guys might like it too of saying like okay um toshiba or whatever or it's ubicia whatever companies that you're dealing with it's like you invest in chip manufacturing in the united states and we will lift your tariffs like that's cool yeah i don't

2:26:43Colin Moriarty:mind that on on principle i don't really necessarily but again it's it's literally all in execution i just think there's just like a there's just such an obvious almost objectively apparent degree of incompetence that it's just like a i just don't understand how

2:27:03Dustin Furman:how any of this has come to pass. I agree 100%. Yeah, I really do. I think it's a...

2:27:14Dustin Furman:We have to do something to protect our markets, but again, you have to be selective in what you think you could really make here, and chip manufacturing is really important, and we should be doing that stuff here, and we are. We're trying.

2:27:25Colin Moriarty:Let's import a bunch of rotting beef from Argentina instead.

2:27:29Dustin Furman:Yeah. it's like you gotta i really just think if you want to have a protectionist model you have to have balls and if you don't have balls which i don't think trump really does then you well

2:27:43Colin Moriarty:you can't do it you have to be an ist in the first place to do anything that is an ism and i just don't i just don't think he is an ist of anything i think he just he wants money and there you go and he's got it so well it's the same thing with uh like what's going on in iran

2:28:01Dustin Furman:it's like if you're gonna do it do it you know i mean like do it but understand what it takes and have some balls otherwise don't do it you know what i mean like don't just do it and then be like yeah and then like it's like god then you weren't that committed to begin with

2:28:19Colin Moriarty:yeah the idea and so you shouldn't have done it yeah i think you shouldn't have done in the first place but if you were going to do it you certainly shouldn't have pretended to do it and then undid it and then pretended to do it again and then undid it again i agree with you i also think it

2:28:31Dustin Furman:shouldn't i also think it shouldn't have been done but i also think that i would have been pre i would have respected it a lot more if you just did it and i'm like all right at least you just did it at least this at least this person believes something oh well so something to keep an eye on the political article is if people want to read it again is called because it's their their scoop another potential headache for u.s data centers trump tariffs oh no the data centers we're going to talk about the data centers lady you want to talk about it right now

2:29:00Colin Moriarty:if you want data set we're looking for the guy who did this

2:29:09Dustin Furman:yeah let me see here i have we have an inquiry from the data center the data center stuff yeah where's where is it let me oh i had it open oh cameron there it is i found it i found it Cameron James. So this is from the six questions, comments, concerns, often ideas later in the show. So we'll go down to five because this makes sense now. Why not just talk about it? Cameron says the anti-data center craze in America is crazy. The tech industry is basically begging to invest billions of dollars and create tens of thousands of highly skilled manufacturing jobs, specifically in rural areas, which will ensure the county remains the tech leader of the entire world.

2:29:41Dustin Furman:Data centers print money, create jobs, and essentially don't pollute the environment at all. And for people still skeptical and want the holding to stop, how are you going to feel 20 years from now when every time you want to use the internet, you need to pay China just to use their computing and storage space. I wanted to bring this up because I thought it was an interesting inquiry. I must admit that I've been trying to read and I haven't really watched anything, but been more open-minded because I've been very viscerally against it. For people that don't know, I live in Virginia. Virginia is getting carpet bombed with data centers.

2:30:12Dustin Furman:I think it is the most data centers in the United States in Virginia. So it's a, it's, it's a problem very close to home and watching people's, you know, it doesn't really affect me because I have solar panels, but it's like watching people's electricity bills go up and all the rest. But I've been trying to approach it more. So I have, so again, I have this very visceral, like get the fuck out of the fuck. You know, I'm kind of a Luddite in a way, you know, where I'm like, I'm like, get the fuck out of here. And, but I've been trying to be more open-minded about trying to learn more about like, okay, so what is it really doing?

2:30:43Dustin Furman:And like, what, how does it really function? And what I've learned, Chris, and I don't know if you feel the same way, is that environmentally there is some impact and that is the problem. For the local community, it is actually good. And that's one of the things that I've been trying to keep an open mind about for like, so I was reading a story, I think it was a place in Ohio. And it was not like this company sponsoring this piece. It was people, a journalist going and speaking to people on the ground and them saying like yeah like our roads got paved again and like our schools are better funded and our property there was one place i was reading about where their property taxes got cut in half and i'm like okay i mean i think you can have it both ways and i think what you and i had said was like if if we had nuclear power which we should have been having for the last 70 years in the united states 100 100 % yeah power would be free basically and uh then it wouldn't matter well by the way that's why we don't have it yes it's true yes it's true that is that is why we don't have it because people will blame like obviously three mile island and stuff like that but like even chernobyl and it's like we're not the soviets i think we'll i think we'll be okay you know the soviets couldn't build fucking dick and i don't think chernobyl melting down in 1986 really has much to do with

2:31:55Colin Moriarty:what it's it's a bad association it's it's it's negative press i get it but like the reality is like you're you're if if you could if you could see through your walls and see your electrical layout how it exists in your walls how it's sitting and the way it works it's like you realize that you're never you're never more than five feet away from something that could potentially electrocute the fucking shit out of you and you're fine with it because you understand how stupid you would have to be to let that happen oh i tripped with forks taped to my hands into my electrical socket whoops gonna happen to anybody like you know so like i think that it's a similar thing with nuclear it's just the the scale of of you know i i get it i understand the uneasiness but like dude the the upsides are so good of nuclear like it it's it's such a frustrating thing that we never pursued that in any real meaningful way but the data center the thing with data centers is like i understand that ai is a genie that's kind of out of the bottle you can't really put it back so you have to figure out a way to ethically figure it out and like what you're going to do i'm not necessarily opposed to the existence of these things but like and and on a community per community basis like these things are probably varying i'm sure there's communities where it works out great for them where they get like all these um all these benefits and they get they get roads paved and they get like the property taxes cut in half largely because i would imagine the big fucking black obelisk in the middle of their town is fucking tightly as hell humming humming yeah humming at a low level driving people fucking insane um and there's other places where like they build them like really really far away and um cool like that's like i i don't i don't necessarily mind that it's just a matter of like who's in charge of this like who has access to what these data centers like siphon and like like there's a lot to figure out here i think and unfortunately the reality is it's like ai as it exists now the way that i see it being used it doesn't strike me as like and maybe it will at some point right maybe at some point it'll get so good and it'll become something that i can't figure out how i would have ever lived without at the very at this moment though and we're pretty deep into this ai is in its infancy i guess but like not relative to other things like we've seen ai make massive strides over the last like couple of years i remember when will smith eating spaghetti was like groundbreaking compared to like the the dolly i think the d-a-l-l-e back when they were doing like um the seinfeld dolly and it was just like ink blotches that you could kind of tell were seinfeld and like now it's like full-on you know animation and all this stuff and like i get it i i would argue that like what i'm seeing as a result of these data centers at the moment is not it doesn't strike me as worth the squeeze actually you know what's funny i i'm i'm glad this kind of came up because i wanted i want to read you guys something so i got so on on instagram and i guess like meta platforms they have this uh integrated ai that will kind of summarize various things and i posted some video on on uh instagram about like yeah i've been gone from youtube for a while i'll come back when i when people want me or whatever and underneath it it said it had like the little magnifying glass that said like you know ai summary and it said and i clicked it and said chris wrigg on youtube hiatus this is what it says chris wrigg had recently addressed his absence from youtube in a video titled summer sun and why i've been away for a while he explained the break shared updates on upcoming projects no including a planned shoot in Lofoten next February with the TU crew what the fuck is any of that I had to look up what Lofoten is it's like some place at like doorway or something or in one of those countries and that was under a video that it you know what I mean like yeah it just made all this shit like literally hallucinating and this is where like the humming is going that humming that's keeping you up like at like 6 a.m is going to like misinform people that tell people that i'm going to fucking sweden or something to shoot with the tu crew i don't even know what that is yeah the tu crew i don't know i'm afraid to even ask so i don't know the way that i'm not even interacting with ai but having ai forced upon me and just being curious about what it is doing does not inspire much confidence.

2:36:37Colin Moriarty:So I don't know. We'll see where all this goes. I'm generally... Whatever the community wants, I would assume know better about how this affects them. And so if there's a community that's totally fine with it, have at it, Hoss. Do what you want. But I'm generally skeptical in general of a lot of this stuff. that's i'm sorry i heard something recently there's a youtuber or something that apparently ai and this is no comment on political sides here but there was a youtuber that like people looked at this has like to do with hasan or something like they looked up and the ai said

2:37:19Dustin Furman:that he like showed support for israel and people started freaking out hasan the streamer oh it's

2:37:26Colin Moriarty:on uh yeah yeah it wasn't hasan but it was like on his stream they were like talking about some youtuber and it was like oh this youtuber showed support for israel and everyone freaked the fuck out and the guy's like uh i don't know where the ai got that um but the point is just like it's funny when when the ai makes up some stupid shit about chris but then it's like when ai is dictating a position that you've never made you know yeah that's where it's like what the fuck and when it's defaulting people's google searches to these inaccurate queries like then it becomes like well what the fuck is even the point of this i i don't know it's it's i was curious about chat gpd for a little bit i just kind of got over it i had an interaction i think i don't remember if i told you guys about my interaction where i was trying to figure out something about spider-man 2 that i did i talk to you guys about that in the last episode i was trying to figure out i was playing spider-man 2 and i was trying to figure out how many pizza missions i had left because i was i was so deep into it i was like how many fucking pizza missions are in this game i remember it being so few and it just kept getting it wrong to the point where I had to be like, no, idiot.

2:38:31Colin Moriarty:I'm talking about these pizza missions in this game. And it would say something like I'm 15 missions in and it would be like, oh, there are five pizza missions. And I'm like, that can't be true, sir. And so like I was at I just I give up.

2:38:44Dustin Furman:Did it give you one of those? I'm sorry. You're right. Because I was like that. It's like, you're right.

2:38:48Colin Moriarty:Yeah, you're right. After I berated it and insulted it.

2:38:52Dustin Furman:Yeah. Yeah. I it's funny in getting the the numbers together that I was using. i started just asking google gemini at the very beginning i'm like all right so what is the way average wage in 1997 like got a number wrote it down and then like and i'm like wait a minute these are not these don't make any sense like next to each other and then i start and then i and then that's why i was like i'm just going to go to the websites and get it myself like because i'm like i can't rely that you're these numbers are even proper which is annoying

2:39:19Colin Moriarty:yeah because search engines were good for a long time and then they weren't and then chat tpt was a good replacement for them for a little bit and now they're bad now they're just like the search engines they're fucking completely useless so like we had a brief moment there where like it was actually kind of good and it was like maybe like three months yeah now it's like everything's accelerating in like the worst ways it sucks it does yeah as far as the the data center stuff data center data center data i may be i may be speaking out of my ass here so i'm saying something i don't know but i'm making the assumption i know people uh i know someone that works at a data center and i've heard this before that this idea that a data center creates tens of thousands of highly skilled manufacturing jobs i don't think is always the case sure it may take a lot of people to build a data data center but that's kind of where it ends but right it does not take that many people to maintain one it's not recurring i don't know someone could tell me i'm wrong i think that's true that that sounds true i mean that sounds definitely i mean that's

2:40:25Dustin Furman:definitely true i think i think what people are trying to rely upon is like and i think why data centers make places and it makes sense in places like virginia is there's a job markets here this is a way to like kind of accent the community and perhaps quid pro quo it and like i was saying earlier being like yeah well you guys will build it for us we don't really need you to run it we're gonna make a lot of money off this thing perhaps we can distribute that money to you guys and some other way right which i think is kind of what we're saying earlier six of one half dozen to the other i don't really mind that like if a data center moved into my town they're like we're cutting all your power all your property taxes in half i'll be like okay so yeah so like all you have to do is rub my back a little bit and uh it'll be good fuck the fuck the environment who cares i'm kidding by the way before anyone gets mad at me yeah about the environment i'm not kidding about taking the deal for the data center i like the environment though right i appreciate it we all have a death wish part of that is maybe hoping that something happens to the environment but it's not it's not saying that i i necessarily wish that on it right all right time to catch up on gamescom here let's do it um i am using a uh article from our friends over at push square to help us frame things although we can talk about whatever we'd like and i also have a bunch of press releases jason polite wrote in and said hey cdc a few episodes ago Colin mentioned that he's not the target audience for playstation and by the way no one listening to this podcast is the target audience of playstation i'm just letting you know and after opening night live i found myself realizing i'm in the same boat 90 of the games are some form of gotcha games souls likes or combination of the two i'm not making an argument that there are no games but it's pretty disappointing that the game i'm looking forward to most from the show is a free upgrade and an expansion of an 11 year old game i think that this show was relatively soft comparable to other things it's not a huge surprise it's gamescom I think Tokyo Game Show will probably be more interesting from some perspective.

2:42:21Dustin Furman:And of course, what Jeff does in December will be way more interesting. But I actually thought there were probably a dozen or so games that I saw that I would be interested in playing. And I think that that in a I'm not trying to put a rosier picture on it for you guys. I just think that in an environment where we are, we have such a there is no more absence and emptiness in the release schedule. We're going to just you have to remove the myopia. and realize like there are just going to be a lot of shit that's that's not for you and that's okay um yeah i've long accepted this but yeah there was a lot of gotcha shit a lot of chinese shit generally speaking chris what were your you weren't with us to watch it but what were your overall thoughts before we get into kind of some of the individual things yeah i was uh i did catch

2:43:13Colin Moriarty:up on the stream i was at a weird shooting schedule this week but yeah i thought it was it was fine there were like things i definitely kind of skipped through just because like i just knew i just wasn't going to be interested um the gotcha games the the anime stuff that's just clearly not not make up a tea but i've there was a enough there that i thought was interesting and that got me curious i wouldn't say it was i would say it's like fairly middling i would say leaning towards positive because of the stuff that i was into i i did care a lot about like i thought metro looked great and like we'll get into you know some of the stuff but the stuff that i didn't care about i equally didn't care about but the stuff that i was into i i i did i was like okay that looks that looks pretty cool so it evens out i think um i didn't have like a miserable time watching it dustin what are your thoughts yeah the i think it's a game of expectations always you know the big announcements are usually uh in december or summer game fest time frame right whether it's from summer game fest itself or the different parties that do their own event so gamescom i kind of appreciate in a way that it has a stage for these games that that wouldn't necessarily get on that big cycle and it's a big update show i would i'm looking through this list now a lot of these are just like new trailers for games we already knew about you know crazy taxi we got a new look at the mega man game which was pretty exciting games like silent old townfall we knew about metro already so there's like it's a it's a big update show yeah with some new stuff and so it's not going to be for everybody but uh there was were still some surprises in here that i thought were pretty cool uh i think you have a list of layer like the uh the lego city builder builder game was one of the big ones for me that i thought looked really cool and exciting um stage tour which we knew was coming but we got to see what it looks like and get a taste of the soundtrack and stuff like that that looks cool so yeah there was still some some good stuff and uh as we mentioned on the stream jeff does a good job showcasing these things um so there were points of course that i was bored yeah but not everything is for me it's swinging it's swinging too widely for nobody to be bored yeah you know like it's i just don't know what people are expecting to be like enthralled the entire time it's well i just think that there are a lot like

2:45:48Dustin Furman:i'm sorry but there's just a lot of people that don't i can't acknowledge that shit's just not for them anymore and yeah they just hold on well beyond reason where like i i don't know what what you want and i just think that i think i think we might have a letter later i don't know if we're using it or not but like that like you can argue that like every year basically is like a a 2007 style 1997 style year like it's constant it's just it's unbelievable to have this richness in releases and not have something to be passionate about at all times i can't i can't relate at all so um okay well let's go through some of these games i i pulled out the press releases for the games and projects that i thought were notable but we can talk about whatever you guys want and you guys can use the push square article that i put in the um in the document in case you want to pull anything out that we're not going to talk about here more specifically the big thing for a lot of people is the witcher 3 wild hunt remastered which was announced along with a the expansion that we already knew existed that was coming next year, Songs of the Past.

2:46:51Dustin Furman:So they write, quote, during Gamescom opening night live, an announcement trailer for The Witcher 3 remastered revealed a slew of upgrades and enhancements to visuals, performance, gameplay, and more. And they're all coming to the acclaimed role-playing game. Players can experience the entire epic adventure with updated visuals, enhanced combat, improved traversal and movement, new Witcher sign effects, revamped mount handling, enhanced monster behaviors, a skill tree revamp, transmogrification, expanded photo mode, new finishers, and much more. remastered will be available on all platforms so ps5 included um no ps4 version plus for the first time a native version of the game will be released on nintendo switch 2 so very exciting uh for micah specifically you can pre-order it now and that launches september 29th so very very soon the expansion uh comes out next year songs of the past and the one thing that i did acknowledge because this is free which is pretty crazy in my opinion and i also think that they're giving away the expansions the old expansions for free right yeah so now this is a very pro consumer move and i appreciate it however i will say they've extracted everything they're going to out of the witcher at this point and um the best move you can make now is to give it away to the tens of millions of people that you have already bought it from you at least once and you'll attract probably several million new people in as well so like you can make your money on the back end so it is very pro consumer but i wouldn't read too much into it the game is 11 years old they've made a lot of money on the game um and they're polish so they're really swimming in it over there right uh songs of the past looks pretty cool nice little um i mean there hasn't been an expansion since 2016 so it will have been 11 years in between expansions for the witcher 3 and it's really cool that they're doing that um i think that's all i have for the witcher do you guys have anything you want to say but i'm gonna i don't think i'm gonna get to it immediately but i'm excited about this actually because i had wanted to i played the witcher 3 for 40 or 50 hours and I just I couldn't really do it anymore so I've always intended on getting back to it and

2:48:41Colin Moriarty:I think that I'll be able to do that um yeah yeah yeah I have a similar feeling about it where I uh I was I was excited to see this because I've been thinking about the Witcher 3 actually like this year um I think I installed it on my Steam deck and I tried to run it because I figured oh it's 2015 it just did not run that well I was like okay um but this is a game that I want to get to but the biggest thing for me that was keeping me from it really was just the combat just kind of just didn't really do it for me and it looked like they're it looks like they're addressing a lot of this stuff and they're kind of fleshing a lot of that out it looks like a pretty hefty retooling of uh the witcher 3 from like a ground up kind of i guess not like rebuilt necessarily but like there's a lot there's a lot of under the hood things that they they seem to have done that that seems to me less like i if i were to restart the witcher 3 now after this update it would feel less like i'm playing the witcher 3 again and more like i'm kind of playing a new thing with like a new kind of a new fresh start it's like okay this is like a different foundation kind of so i'm stoked about it i think this is awesome the fact that it's coming so soon is one of those things where i'm like i'm sure that's really exciting news for some people this is next year maybe i'll get to this but i'm excited about it and i think i have i think i saw during the uh when they did that scroll with all the updates that it's uh

2:50:11Dustin Furman:xbox play anywhere which is kind of cool i did see that yeah that is cool i saw that too yeah because i think i have it on i think i have it on series x i think i mean i have it everywhere but I just thought that was interesting I have the ps4 version so hopefully I'll be able to upgrade to the ps5 version and then I don't know I'll pay for it again I don't really care but um yeah maybe a holiday game I was thinking but I just don't know like what my schedule will look like at that point because that would be a nice kind of it's not cozy like in the literal gaming sense but it is a nice role-playing game for that time of year to get through yeah so we'll see uh Dustin you

2:50:46Colin Moriarty:have anything you want to say yeah I think this looks pretty cool I I'm like Chris I'm mostly interested in the overhaul combat because that was kind of the stickler for me that i was never really a fan of witcher 3's combat so i'm much more curious about it doing an expansion you know this long after i think is kind of a neat idea to get people re-excited about the witcher before witcher 4 but i think that the fact that they're giving this away for free for owners of the game is awesome and so cool and i i if i understand you correctly colin i i totally disagree i think they could have made a lot of money on even just like if they were like we're being generous and this is a 20 upgrade oh i agree with you i agree with you that they could have i think it's really

2:51:34Dustin Furman:generous that they didn't right i absolutely agree with you i i'm surprised by that as well

2:51:39Colin Moriarty:i would have definitely charged something yeah like ink in contrast right now where we're at the square annex in particular when it comes to switch 2 they are releasing games with no upgrade path between switch 1 or switch 2 uh and certain games it's like oh whether you have the switch version you simply need to just rebuy it on switch 2 uh so something in the middle would be great i mean i would love it if every game gave a free remastered update i don't expect that but um so So I think that's a very cool move and I highly respect it. And the fact they're giving the old DLCs away is pretty sick.

2:52:19Colin Moriarty:Yeah. So shout out. It's smart. I, I think it's also a smart business play too from them in the sense that I think they, I think every studio is aware of the cynicism of the industry. I think, I think everybody's kind of well aware of like how fickle the industry can be. And I think CD project red is one of those studios where it's like, they've, they've done a lot to get the goodwill back from the launch of cyberpunk 2077 but i think they could stand some more you know like it would it wouldn't hurt them to be like okay we fixed cyberpunk and everybody loved it we did the the phantom liberty everybody loved that let's get a cadence of this good news going leading into the witcher 4 so that way there's like there's a little bit more of like a track record of it's not so like cyberpunk bad cyberpunk good which are four you know what i mean like i think it's i think it's a smart play for them to uh gain some good grace leading into the next big triple a thing that is undoubtedly going to be fucking

2:53:24Dustin Furman:controversial somehow yeah which are they i think they verified which are 427 is in 2027 right or

2:53:30Colin Moriarty:am i crazy about that that sounds right that sounds correct that would be kind of crazy so

2:53:35Dustin Furman:I mean, it's another reason why they don't have to play a really fierce monetary game. Because there is there is a. I do acknowledge and I think it's true that. You want to make maximum amount of money, but but, you know, handling your audience as carefully as possible and making things seem like good deals and stuff is actually sometimes worth more than the money.

2:53:59Colin Moriarty:Especially I would argue, especially now.

2:54:01Dustin Furman:Yeah. Yeah. So just super accessible. and yeah, I'm excited to, I'm excited to play Witcher. I was, you know, Mike is obviously excited because it's like one of her favorites, but in the Switch 2 announcement, I know pleased her as well. Dustin, we'll stay with you for the next one I wanted to talk about, which is Final Fantasy VII Revelation. They confirmed, I think they already kind of talked about this earlier in the summer, but aiming for spring 2027 on PS5. It'll be the first Final Fantasy VII remake project. It's the last one, but it'll be the final one and it'll be the first one to come to all platforms at the same time as well.

2:54:35Dustin Furman:for those that are not on PlayStation, that listen to the show for whatever reason. The trailer was cool. I mean, they showed a lot of the weapons and kind of, I don't want to see anymore, so I'm good. And I am extremely optimistic about this game. Just completely optimistic about it. I just don't think they're going to fuck it up. I said it on the stream, but to reiterate, and I think the audience already knows about how I feel, but I am so blown away by this franchise. Like, I just don't know what business they had making something so good. And it's so surprising. It's surprising who it came from, from a publisher perspective in a way, and it's surprising who it came from, from a personnel perspective.

2:55:14Dustin Furman:In a way, and we were saying about Nomura, like I have a whole new look at him now. Yeah, like I've always respected him. He just didn't make shit that I really liked generally.

2:55:23Colin Moriarty:Right. So, yeah, I don't know.

2:55:25Dustin Furman:Do you have anything you want to say about this? I'm on a total blackout with this game now.

2:55:28Colin Moriarty:yeah i thought this trailer was good it's i feel slightly weird in that the trailer wasn't it's exciting i can't wait to play this game the trailer i was already excited from the first trailer and in some ways it's like a known quantity so i know what i'm getting which is great but it is in some ways less exciting uh because i feel like rebirth was such an expansion of the remake project and i'm just assuming that we're getting more of that and that's great and the in the conclusion of the story which i'm very curious about but i think i'm with you colin in that i i don't need to see anything else yeah i'm good at this point i'm i'm good hold on to your

2:56:20Dustin Furman:saves for Rebirth and Remake because you will unlock things including exclusive Summon Materia in the third game if you have those saves so make sure not to lose those when the time comes so spring soon April or May I would imagine something like that very exciting indeed Chris I'll leave you alone on this I know you don't care

2:56:42Colin Moriarty:I like these games I just don't love I'm not in love with them as much as a lot of people are it looks cool

2:56:49Dustin Furman:I wanted to bring this game up I mean I don't have too much to say about it but Wizards of the Coast showed Warlock their D &D game this game was announced a while ago so it's not a new game but it is the first time we've seen gameplay and I didn't realize that Trisha Helfer is the main character which is awesome she's 6 in Battlestar I thought this game just looked pretty good it's by a studio named Invoke they're a Canadian team in Quebec and they're owned by Wizards of the Coast and one of the interesting things about Wizards is that they were you guys might remember wizards is a cap as a as a um hasbro brand and they were investing i think they invested more than a billion dollars as you guys might recall in games and they've canceled a bunch of them so this is one of them that's coming out remember i was they showed two back-to-back wizards games during the show remember i was saying dustin this is where the gi joe game would have been if they probably if they they didn't cancel it so that's a little the storm or the snake eyes game so anyway this game is scheduled to come to playstation 5 in 2027 i don't have too much to say about it but i just i wanted to bring it up i thought it looked pretty good actually surprisingly good like not too crisp or triple a but playable and fun i wonder people will be into it i don't know what did you say that it's like uh it kind of looked like a sony game with it's like a like sony game yeah with like no budget yeah yeah it's like it's like be careful what you wish for when you see games like this because uh sony games go like this too but they never do all right um let's see where are we here Oh, yes.

2:58:18Dustin Furman:I know you're excited about this, Dustin. So I want to bring this up Stage Tour. We've known about this game for a while. This is from Red Octane. This is the revival of Guitar Hero and Rock Band style games with a bunch of different... They even have licenses like Gibson and so on and so forth. And then they have, I think... I was looking at some of the songs they have, but I think they are going to have 90 total songs and they've revealed 45 of them so far. There are some pretty interesting ones in here. I was looking at the list. Let's see. I mean it's Just Like Heaven by The Cure It's kind of cool To be in there Photograph That's my favorite Def Leppard song So that's cool that it's in there Rio by Duran Duran It's another good one What else do we have out in here Land of Confusion by Genesis That's fun Grace by Jeff Buckley R.I.P.

2:59:00Dustin Furman:of course It's so sad how he died Like do you ever Do you know anything about Jeff Buckley Like he died just drowning randomly Yeah Like he was like just drowning Or he was just swimming in a lake And he just drowned Like Jesus Christ man That's crazy let's see anything else here that's interesting to me not really oh danny california by red hot chili peppers that's good psycho social by slip now that should be fun all star by smashmail r.i.p as well yeah um island in the sun by weezer that's kind of a weak choice teenage dirtbag by long island's own weedus that'll be fun good that's good sharp dressed man by zz top another r.i.p they're all dead now i think right so then the drummer just so i don't know yeah

2:59:41Colin Moriarty:Yeah, everybody's dying right now. I don't know what the hell's going on. So talk to me a little bit. They even have Static X in here, an old Colin classic. They got a Rise Against song in here, but it's Broken Dreams Inc. That's kind of that's a weak choice in my opinion.

2:59:52Dustin Furman:Well, that's what I'm seeing. Like a lot of these choices. I'm like, why would you choose these songs? But I guess maybe they're just trying to be different. Maybe a lot of these guys had their songs on old ones and you want to have a little something different. I don't know. But anyway, Dustin, I know you're excited about this and I want to hear Chris's opinion on this too. But where are you at?

3:00:04Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I think this looks awesome. Some of the audience may remember I was getting into some of the PC Rock Band clone space with Yarg around Christmas time. And I got a couple of guitars from Cracked and they're making some guitars for this game as well. And I think this is cool. There's, of course, arguments going around, like with the PC nerds. They're like, oh, why didn't you just play Clone Hero? And it's like, not everyone wants to fucking play Clone Hero. People just want to buy the game, have the track list. they don't want to deal with custom songs and stuff and i think having both is great what i'm most interested in is they have a new drum kit and looking at it this thing looks i mean it looks we'll see it looks really sick it is designed in a way that the each drum head is removable which is awesome because one of these things breaks you can just replace that one drum head uh and the other thing too that i saw people again to get into the not to talk about money again and inflation uh people are saying that the the bundle if you pre-order it from the stage tour website you get the guitar you get the game the drums the microphone the regular version of the drums not the pro it is$2.99 for that bundle i believe there's a crossed out price of$3.69 maybe after pre-orders but let's just say it's$2.99 right now how expensive that is I'm like dude the rock band band in a box bundle I want to say was$200$250 when I got it yeah you got to use the d word delusional delusional delusional so and these drums look way way way better so I will I will checking this out for sure the track list is it's kind of interesting in that i think i've been spoiled by some of these clone games because you can just pick exactly what you want yeah but there's something interesting about when i was in seventh grade and playing rock band and having this set set list that introduced me to a lot of bands a lot of music that's what got me it gave me like a musical education to some degree of rock music um not that i didn't already know a lot but it was like oh i've never heard this song before and you hear that band and maybe you start liking them so it's kind of an interesting perspective to go into this being like i don't know a lot of these songs and so i can go in and i can learn about them play them and have fun so i think this is pretty sick uh and i'm i'm just curious about the quality they look really cool though the drums in particular we have a million there's a million well not a million there are a multitude of options of guitar controllers out now drums are the forefront now that i'm very curious of yeah i i

3:03:00Dustin Furman:am i got a bad feeling about this game i don't know like i just because like i just because of the revive they already tried it i mean it was 10 years ago when they tried to revive guitar hero and rock band and that obviously destroyed mad cats um it's just so dangerous to be in this game because it requires heavy peripheral manufacturer that destroyed certain companies in the past including THQ so right so like you have to you have to spend an enormous amount of money to make these things and hope for the best and I just wonder now there is controller functionality which is cool and i think that that's like what you have to do in this day and age if you want to just map the colors to your um face buttons or whatever and your triggers i think that that's which i think would be fun i mean i think it would be a little confusing you have to kind of really

3:03:49Colin Moriarty:wrap your mind around it but i i used to play the 360 demo of guitar hero 3 because i only had guitar hero 2 for the ps2 but i didn't i i was like i already got the guitar for the ps2 and they weren't like forwards compatible obviously so i was just like whatever i'll just play i'll to see if the demo works and it did it was like i think it was the the triggers and then one of the face buttons was like the last one so like it would go kind of like up and around and then down to the a or the x or whatever it was playable it's just a different kind of rhythm game you know what i mean you're not getting the sensation of it but it is it is still ultimately a rhythm game and it was it was fun um but yeah i'm kind of with you in the sense of like i'm excited about this i think i might pick it up just sheerly out of just because i think it's interesting that they're doing this but i am curious about like the sustainability of this like i i don't necessarily think that the revival of guitar hero and rock band 10 years ago was ill-timed i just think it's kind of over and i i wonder if i don't know i'm not that convinced it's going to be this is going to explode yeah this will prove whether it's like a zeitgeist move or like

3:05:01Dustin Furman:in other words can you revive the zeitgeist because i i was pretty bullish when they did it 10 years ago i remember that i was like kind of funny i'm like yeah this is awesome like it feels like it's time and then it came and went like a fart so yeah i really don't know and i've always been kind of i mean it still goes on ubisoft has a small success story with rocksmith which is a much more serious music game but i'm even surprised by kind of the lack of pickup with that because it's a good idea i just think some of this stuff is too intense you can requires people

3:05:30Colin Moriarty:to play with as well you could maybe make the argument that like 10 years ago rock wasn't because rock's actually kind of a bit a little bit on the upswing right now uh there's a lot like turnstiles kind of like getting big and there is there's energy around rock right now in a way that there kind of wasn't when the last time they tried this so maybe maybe there's something here that wasn't there before i i don't think it's anywhere near the way it's going this is not going to be guitar hero in its prime again you know but um maybe there is something you know i don't know i'm not that deep in the music but i do know that rock is kind of bubbling up right now um so it would be good timing for if there was any timing recently like now would probably be the best time to try it so we'll see we will i'm very curious to see how it does oh what is this go square hammer by ghost hell yeah dude oh yeah yeah there's some there's some there's some good stuff here some questionable choices but i think it's just to flush out the variety i think probably

3:06:35Dustin Furman:definitely and uh you as dustin noted you can go to stagetour.com right now and check it out for yourself and like you said there there are deals on bundles should you want to order and pre-order now i mean but this is gonna be a pretty expensive purchase for people so um gird your loins if that's what you're interested in all right so that's stage tour uh i don't know if you guys are interested in this it's new so i wanted to bring up rainbow six tactics was shown up by ubisoft yeah um this is coming to playstation 5 and it is a turn-based tactical game set in the rainbow six universe it kind of looks like x-com yeah any interest in this i i don't think i'll play this if it was grid based i probably would play it but yeah i i love that this exists because i think more ip

3:07:20Colin Moriarty:should be doing this kind of thing like expanding into different genres especially tactics i think more games i think more ip and more um franchises would work in a tactics format than most people would assume i think it's a very malleable i mean the fact that like wasn't there like a am i insane or wasn't there like a like a like a mario rabbits x-com game or something like that like on over on nintendo i i never played any of them so i don't that's a real mario plus rabbits kingdom battle yeah like people it's just interesting that this is a genre that seems to work obviously rainbow six attack being a tactical shooter kind of like a natural fit um I think this is cool I don't know enough about Rainbow Six or care to get that involved with it but I like to see this kind of thing I like IP experimenting with smaller types of games like this I want more tactics games from like different IP like I've been I would love a Halo tactics I would love a Destiny tactics Gears tactics was great in my opinion um so like I want more of that but rainbow six doesn't speak to me as a i really only fucked around with rainbow six vegas i think for a little bit all right rainbow six tactics no date i don't think so we'll see

3:08:47Dustin Furman:oh exodus i want to bring up exodus i think this game looks fucking awesome um this launches april 7th uh chris on the our stream we were saying how they they used a american dating rubric which so is like is it july 4th and then he came out he's like it's coming out in april I'm like, that's interesting. Very confusing. Everyone in the chat was confused as well. But it's actually coming out April 7th, which is exciting for PlayStation 5. This is, of course, from Archetype Entertainment. And it looks exceptional. This is for people that are not familiar, a Mass Effect-style game. And I'm into it, man.

3:09:20Dustin Furman:And yeah, they showed the octopus character, which I thought was kind of fun. Yeah, very awesome. How he drives a little. He's like, I got a mech with a cockpit of water that he rides in. It's like, pretty neat idea. I'm again I'm blackout with this game and I will play it day one I wish they would make it available maybe they will in pre I don't think they well maybe they would have said it by now three or

3:09:39Colin Moriarty:five days early I'd get got no doubt oh yeah but yeah this looks great this looks this is a game what I love about this game is that like this is obviously it's obviously Mass Effect again with some some tweaks it's it's like I get it but like people want this I want this this looks fantastic this game looks better every time i see it which is a nice sign i feel like that's i feel like there's a good um there's a sixth sense that you get watching these trailers from certain games over and over again where you start to notice like oh i noticed they've cut down on the shadows here like or there's a bit of a compromise as things get closer and closer to launch and who knows we might see that even still but like this game has consistently looked better every time i've seen it the first trailer i remember being iffy on it and being like i don't know it looks a little jank this looks great i love this character this octopus character is awesome can you fuck the octopus now yeah i'd like to fuck the octopus if possible is that gonna be is that gonna be a thing i don't know man this looks awesome it looks like it plays great i love the style of it even just like the small glimpses of the hud that you see it's just like yeah i'm into it i don't know i don't even know necessarily why but just like all of it looks right you know like there's um it just looks fun to play which is mega important and so yeah i'm i'm in on day one with this i i kind of started off skeptical when i first saw it but like i'm i'm sold on exodus dustin will you fuck the octopus it depends do i like it depends on the personality octopus yeah yeah oh man i'm excited are you gonna play it doesn't yeah i'll play it i can't say the trailers I think look really good I can't say I'm amped for it but I feel like it's one of those games that when it comes out I'll be like obsessed with potentially so we'll see I'm interested yeah

3:11:34Dustin Furman:um let's see one more I wanted to bring up because I know you were interested in this Dustin was Lego Skylines coming from Ice Flake Studios with Paradox coming to PlayStation 5 at an undisclosed time in the future anything you want to say about this

3:11:50Colin Moriarty:yeah i was obsessed with the original cities skylines what when i when it came out i got it

3:11:57Dustin Furman:some bundle at some point the sequel's all fucked up right so well i was just looking at that yeah

3:12:02Colin Moriarty:as on steam right now it has a mostly positive review so it seems like they're turning it around some of the steam reviews say this is good if you have a nasa level pc so uh it seems like your mileage still may vary uh i haven't played city skylines too because of the state it was in but maybe it's worth checking out now but i love city builder games i love this kind of over-the-top building game obviously people know i love roller coaster tycoon and this was kind of in that realm i grew up playing sim city 3000 a lot so a lego version of this the trailer looked really cool and i'm intrigued because with these city builders there's it always there gets to a point where I don't understand them or there's things going on.

3:12:50Colin Moriarty:They're like, you got this crazy traffic problem. Like I, I can't help you. I don't know how to fix this. And so having a city, a city builder that maybe is a little bit less complicated, but still has that kind of depth is very intriguing to me. So I'm very curious about this. And it is, of course, we're talking about here and launching on PlayStation 5 consoles, switch to steam i won't be playing on a playstation 5 just because i want well i think they do mouse and keyboard support so you got that that's probably the ideal way to do it but just a very intriguing little game initially i was like is this lego island for any of the ogs out there oh yeah they played that on pc a long time ago so looks pretty cool though yeah i'm not gonna play it but teach them lego getting their money yeah as they should good for them anything else in

3:13:46Dustin Furman:the uh push square article that strikes you that you wanted to bring up before we move on from

3:13:50Colin Moriarty:gamescom uh yeah i i wanted to give a shout out to uh i mean dude crazy taxi i mean i'm just i'm i'm just excited about it they used the 10 in 2010 by bad religion in the trailer which i was amped about love bad religion uh seeing megaman there and seeing that the megaman uh what is it pragmata yeah yeah and it was quite funny so uncanny and strange yeah it is it is quite upsetting but it's funny given what we were talking about with that game being like a megaman game like early on but i guess the only other thing is like i thought metro looked excellent

3:14:31Dustin Furman:metro does look good we were hoping lock and i are both fans i'm not a fan of exodus but i loved the first two and i platinum the both and i hope they go back to that linear dark claustrophobic style that Metro is supposed to be all about and we'll see um and uh it's a good direction obviously they're making the game under incredible duress too so we um give them a shout out for that there's that yeah Silent Hill Townfall looks cool but I'm I'm just on black I mean that game is so close I don't need to see it it's basically a commercial at this point Mega Man Duel Override obviously I'm hugely into but there are things I'm learning about the game that do not please me and one of them is that they're getting rid of lives which is a very very weird on Mega Man thing so in other words you'll have checkpoints one of the fun things about Mega Man and you guys know this is like you get to the boss you have like half your health you have one life left maybe you try to like do as much as you can to learn about the boss a little bit knowing you're gonna die then you're gonna get bounced all the way back to the beginning of the stage and you just have to get better and I feel like making it too easy is not the answer Mega Man is not supposed to be easy and it's easy for me because i know how to play it i'm always surprised we've talked about this a million times i'm always surprised when people are like it's so hard it's not fucking hard um you sound like a souls fan well right like souls is so much harder like anything in 3d is harder than almost anything in 2d unless you're playing like something like truly bullet hell or whatever but nonetheless it seems like they're making it easier and i don't like that um do you think i mean surely they're going to have a classic mode right with like it would be insane for them

3:16:10Colin Moriarty:to not give that option at least for like the platinum and stuff like that you know what i mean like i i get the impulse to make things kind of like because people don't people don't finish their games and i'm sure like if you if you make games you cut you want people to finish them you want people to see all the stuff that you do so like i get the impulse to have like checkpoints and make certain difficult games easier but definitely not at the expense of the difficulty you know what I mean like that should that shouldn't go away um but we'll see yeah we'll

3:16:38Dustin Furman:see I'm trying to kind of tune out I there people have played it now and there is gameplay of it and I really don't want to see it um there were a couple of things I thought were weird in the trailer though like one of them is that they show Astro Man who is from Mega Man 8 and I was like what is this um what is this indicating what is this saying and then the uh they showed up for the first robot master which is a woman a girl sparkle girl woke woke um i'm not crazy about the use of the term girl because i don't want them to start calling the characters some of them boy on the other end it's like it should just be man and woman that's the convention i know it's a very traditional thing i have no problem i loved splash woman in megaman 9 i thought that was awesome so i wanted them and i didn't we just say a few weeks ago i'm like i wonder if they'll have even more than one female character in this one they're clearly going to have a female character in this one and they showed it right showed her right away but so i sparkle woman would have been cool i'm not crazy about the name but that's me being a traditionalist i don't know how other people

3:17:36Colin Moriarty:feel about that yeah it makes sense i feel like there was something else uh well while you look i have just wanted to shout out yes this game show a american story oh yeah that looks cool i am like the trailer looks out of control silly very japanese uh you know colin you pointed out the the girl fighting with the american flag saluting it at the end yeah this could be a 10 out of 10 7 out of 10 game that's kind of the impression i'm getting from it is that it's maybe going to be rough around the edges but the silliness is going to take it to a new level so i have my eye on this i don't know if it will be great but it will be interesting and honestly that's more important to me now than anything yeah uh i remembered what i was gonna say it wasn't anything new necessarily and i i i kind of promised myself i would go on blackout for this but i kind of couldn't look away once it started that dude i'm so stoked about whatever the fuck control 2 is gonna be man like that was such a good trailer and i don't feel like it spoiled anything either it was just more like of what we already saw in the same location but like dude like it just looks excellent i'm so i'm so pumped that's easily like the the thing that i think with the exception of gta 6 out of sheer curiosity and just magnetism that that game has like it's easily the the thing that i'm most excited about and most amped it like that's the one i'm going to be counting the days down towards it i've i've tuned out i'm excited i'm

3:19:09Dustin Furman:i think i'm going to be ready to go i thought i thought i wasn't going to be because i wanted to replay control on Alan Wake too, but I think I'm going to be good to go. Anything else here I'm trying to look at? You brought up Crazy Taxi, which I think looks phenomenal. That game Zoopunk is a fist game, Dustin. We were wondering about that.

3:19:26Colin Moriarty:Oh, yeah.

3:19:27Dustin Furman:It's just a much, you know, that game that for people that don't know fist, Forged and Iron, what was it called? Forged and Shadow Torch was a 2.5D Metroidvania that PlayStation funded as a China hero game. And it did really, really well. it's one of the shiny hero like success stories and so they have made a sequel to it basically actually it's a prequel i think yeah um oh no law dude that game looks fucking sick straight up like i think it looks it's cyberpunk it's like cyberpunk i get that i'll take it it does but there's like an uncanniness about that game i don't know what it is necessarily but

3:20:08Colin Moriarty:there's something about it that you know what i get the i get the feeling uh when i look at that game the same the feeling that i get when i when i look at ill which is like i'm really looking forward to ill i think it looks great but i'm also not necessarily convinced that it's real and if it is real i have a suspicion that it's probably not going to be as good as it looks i have no reason necessarily outside of just like intuition for thinking that and i could be completely wrong but there's something about it where i'm like this looks really good but like what's the catch? Like I'm looking for the catch, but it does look really cool.

3:20:46Colin Moriarty:At least what we've seen. I am keeping my eye on it.

3:20:52Dustin Furman:Let's say Chris cautiously, knowing that I've had my mind's eye situation. I don't think it'll be as bad as mine's eye. No, I don't think so. All right. So yeah, if you want to go check out the Gamescom stream that we did, you can go check that out on our YouTube channel. It's in VOD. or you can go watch it yourself if you don't want to hear me talk over the entire thing all right a couple more items we can move through these somewhat quickly but i thought they were notable to add to the list sony quietly released a press release that no one really noticed as we know hell divers 2 is being was released for playstation plus game catalog for the extra and premium tiers of ps plus and uh that's a big deal because it's the first time that this game will be available in any sort of subscription service but they buried in the press release announcing it that the game has had 22.9 million players and i don't know how to not interpret that as 20 plus million copies sold i don't know why they're not just saying copies there's it's not on any subscription service but presumably like i could buy hell divers and then micah could log into it on my console and play and she would be a separate player she didn't buy it so we don't really know the exact number but that is a a wild success story for playstation and something that I think is kind of understated in a way they really killed it with held out like it is exactly what the doctor ordered and so I wanted to point that out so you can play it right now if you're on ps plus extra although I think most of the audience here has already played it two years ago yeah um I'm gonna skip this one actually I don't really feel like talking about this uh bloodstained this is a Colin thing of course but um people might remember the 2019 Metroidvania Bloodstained Ritual of the Night, which is a EGA game.

3:22:33Dustin Furman:Koji Igarashi produced it. Of course, the producer of the old Castlevania Metroidvania game is beginning with Symphony of the Night 1997, in which he was the associate producer. Bloodstained, of course, was the spiritual successor to it. And it's taken a while to get it off the ground, but it finally came out in 2019. And of course, there are two other spinoffs from Innie Creates, the developer's art play that makes those games. But Innie Creates made these old school Castlevania 3 style games. That's all we've gotten out of Bloodstained. In 2021, it was revealed that Bloodstained sequel was in development.

3:22:59Dustin Furman:And we found out years later that the game is called The Scarlet Engagement. And people have kind of been wondering what the story is with this. It was originally revealed properly in 2025, supposed to come out this year. It's been delayed to 2027. There's a video of Iga talking about it with his cowboy hat on, of course, if you'd like to check it out. They also released some new images from the game to kind of tease you. It is important to remember that Shatoru Iyata... is the original director of both games and he died earlier this year so they are probably um trying to figure it out it's not a good time i mean i'm sure the game was fairly well completed but and for people that don't know he was a long time konami programmer that worked on a bunch of the castlevania games and um he worked on metal gear solid 5 as well so an r.i.p to him we talked about it at the time so there's that i'll also have an update that we were talking about terranigma the Lost Square Enix game, or it's really an Enix game from the 90s, from 1995 specifically, that was localized but never released in the United States because Enix closed its U.S.

3:24:04Dustin Furman:office when the Dragon Quest games started doing poorly here. The Dragon Warrior games weren't really doing it for them. And so this was a part of the trilogy of games along with The Secret of Evermore where it was like incomplete in the West. It was kind of always this mystery game. You could play it on emulator for the last 30 years or so, but with fan translations or the original Super Famicom or Super NES versions with their native languages, including English, but now it'll be released in early 2027 natively on PlayStation 5. It's a huge deal. Very, very excited about this. Wanted to point that out as well, but we talked about that game extensively last week, so I won't linger on that for too long.

3:24:39Dustin Furman:Also wanted to confirm a story from Variety that writes Dave Bautista is officially set as Kratos. So we had reported earlier, I think Deadline reported that they were in conversations with him and he was kind of going to be the guy. This story confirms it. He's taking over for Ryan Hurst, of course, who got injured and can no longer film until next year sony fairly reasonably so didn't really want to wait around for that so they hired someone else and they're going to refilm it so that is going um and it'll be let's see released i guess sometime in 2027 on amazon prime this feels like an upgrade to me i know some people

3:25:10Colin Moriarty:don't like it but when i'm seeing like you have the variety article linked yeah and you see the side by side i'm like yeah it gives me more wouldn't say i'm confident in this show yet not necessarily saying it's going to be bad but i think he's a much better fit um and then finally

3:25:30Dustin Furman:boys playstation plus games for september this is for playstation plus essential so that means everyone on playstation plus even if you're at the extra premium tiers will also get this game these games as part of your subscription service these games will be available on september 1st so right around the corner and they order them in a different way here i think the big one here is MLB The Show 26. That's the newest MLB The Show game and they are just giving it to you, which is pretty cool. And by the way, it's perfect timing. Baseball season's not over in September, not at all. So there's that.

3:26:03Dustin Furman:That will be available on PlayStation 5. And then of course, Sniper Elite Resistance will be available on both PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4. I did play one of the Sniper Elite games a long time ago. They are very, I wanted to like it. I did like it. It's just a little too much for me, personally.

3:26:19Colin Moriarty:can't you like explode hitler's nuts yeah you like you explode like yeah like it

3:26:22Dustin Furman:but you have to like it's all about i appreciate the realism of saying like you know a real sniper would aim like way above a person left right or whatever it's like i just want to aim the scope of where i'm shooting and that's where it's gonna hit i don't want to do this you know like it's a video game so yeah yeah yeah it's just not fun for me to do that i don't care about that but people like it and it'll be available so you're gonna say something chris no no i i i kind of

3:26:48Colin Moriarty:agree like this i love sniping in video games and i love stealth i i hear that these i hear that these games are kind of like underrated stealth games i'm not i i've heard that before i don't know how true that is um but i've just never been compelled to dive into one maybe they are still

3:27:04Dustin Furman:they are stealth games like basically what i remember is like you're put on these maps with things you're supposed to do. Like, go fuck up the tanks, go kill the commander, and you just do it however you want to do it.

3:27:15Colin Moriarty:See, I've only ever seen footage of people's balls exploding. It's like the only thing I know about this game is that balls explode.

3:27:25Dustin Furman:It is cool in that you are slinking through this environment and you can be in it basically for hours and you're kind of secretly there and they don't know, and so you're kind of secretly killing soldiers and dragging their bodies in places. I do like that. reward stuff you know like where you're building up that's the thing that frustrates me about these games is you do it's what bothered me about metal gear solid 5 frankly you do all this shit to like prepare the perfect it's like you went around the environment everything's good and then you fuck it up at the last minute and it's like god almighty i don't want to do this again you know i love i love that game i love metal gear solid 5 so much do you guys are you guys familiar with this game wobbly life no i was just looking it up ps5 and ps4 says play solo or with up to three players online or a local split screen co-op as you explore an open world sandbox where almost everything is interactive and is filled with mini games toys and secrets embark on story missions each offering unique rewards through fun puzzles and challenges unveil the mysteries of the tropical island uncover the mountain secrets delve into the hidden caves and more want to take a break from wobbly island try out arcade mode discover new modes blah blah blah i don't know what it is

3:28:25Colin Moriarty:yeah I'm not uh the game is reviewed overwhelmingly positive on steam cool so might be good yeah and

3:28:36Dustin Furman:then finally there's a fourth game this month I don't know why they're doing it but we appreciate it the ps4 game chained echoes which is a game I've actually played came out late 2022 on ps4 and ps5 the ps4 version it says will be the one that's specifically available I don't know if the ps5 version will also be available but it doesn't say that here it is a 16-bit style role-playing game and it's good so might want to check that out pretty good month boys yeah not bad pretty good all right that's all the news let's get into what we're playing we can probably move fairly quickly through this unless we want to stick around for long i platinum to be some reincarnation that's platinum number 215 i think the more i played the game the more it's um especially replaying you can beat it in a few hours if you know what you're doing if you just run through it um the first time through it took me almost 30 hours and then i was at like 36 hours or something when I beat it again.

3:29:23Dustin Furman:But of course, I am very powerful at that point and all the rest. There is a, the thing that I think sticks out in a bad way in the game is that there's a systems imbalance in this game that I'm a little confused about. And it only comes in when you're getting deep into the game and you're really doing things where, what I mean by this is, it's like level up your character to 100. It's like you could do this by spoofing the game very easily. I choose not to do that stuff. When I was talking about it with Mike, I was referencing Final Fantasy Tactics and the easy JP or job point thing you can do in that game where you can basically just put a chocobo in your party.

3:29:57Dustin Furman:Everyone attacks it. Everyone gets healed and you just get job points endlessly. Like you can... So I was at level 60 when I beat the game again and I'm like, all right, I want to get to a level 100. And I got to level 100 in about an hour and a half because there was a thing online where it's like, just do this. And I'm like, damn, like I wouldn't do this in the game to keep the sanctity of the game, but it's crazy that you can break it open this much. And then there's just all these inconsistencies with like skill points. and and uh amber which is like the currency in the game and everything like you either have way too much of something or not enough of something it seems like there's no economic balance with all the systems so for instance you find these skulls that make your craft that you travel around in stronger like it's electronic stronger it's like your ability to cook stronger you only have to have seven levels of them though and i i leveled them all up by just being thorough about halfway through my first playthrough and i'm like why is it so easy and then you and then you look at something like the skill tree and you're like i would have to play this game if i was doing it naturally forever to be able to fill in the skill tree instead like there's a way you can kind of spoof it where you can fight these enemies near a campsite and then just constantly re like restart the campsite and then you get like 10 skill points at a time when you do it but again i wouldn't do that in the natural course of the game so i think there's a systems problem but i will say this the game is very emotional and sad and i think very similar to the way i felt about 007 earlier this year thematically and about what it's about is very timely unusually so and it's really about the hubris of man and their willingness to want to try to circumvent the bad things that happen in life by offsetting like they're basically offloading that's not a spoiler it's what the games about it's like humans are offloading themselves to these machines but then everything kind of gets fucked up and they were doing it to avoid the calamities that they encounter in life whether emotional or literal or anything like that so it's really about like how a man tries to engineer himself out of unhappiness and and ends up fucking it all up it's really really interesting and you have to see the game through to really understand that but it's very cool and i i i do recommend it i think it will probably be discounted imminently i would assume so check it out if you and then I'm back to Alan Wake too and now I still haven't gotten past where I was when I played it in 23 uh without spoiling everything I'm now switching between the characters so that's where I'm at in the game oh right yeah and now I'm back in the police station and I remembered this because I was like the shimmering is so bad like it it's exactly the way it was like when I walked away from it so like all right I guess I just have to grin and bear it I thought it was going to be fixed because when I when the same thing happened with Silent Hill 2 it actually did get fixed and they did fix it and it was a lot better but here i'm like this is the i don't know if it's north light or what's going on here with this but it's like it's all fucked up and it's specific it's not the lighting and where it hits it's you seeing the lighting and then seeing where it hits so if your back is to the lighting everything looks fine it's like really weird there's no way this is only happening to me by the way so people like have gaslit me about this for years alan wake 2 is so fucking good that it's absurd how good it is And it is so thoughtful and so intriguing.

3:33:09Dustin Furman:I saw a recent interview with Sam Lake where he was saying he had to take six months off after making it, like after the game came out, because he was just so exhausted. There's so much style and panache in a Remedy game. And this was true with the original Alan Wake, of course. I've never played Quantum Break, and I know a lot of the Quantum Break, the stuff I like about Control is in Quantum Break. What I mean by that specifically is the back and forth between real things and fake things yeah there's there was a lot of that in quantum break there's so much of that does that in a way that alan wake one really doesn't um yeah to the extent yeah it's so good you're gonna say something you're playing it again

3:33:45Colin Moriarty:no i was gonna say like al uh quantum break 2 had it had its house so it had so much of that that i remember a big problem with quantum break was that like my controller on xbox would like go to sleep and then it would like make the screen go dim in the middle of like a cutscene and I'd be like no but it's it's yeah I'm glad you're playing I'll wait to again because uh I I love that game it it is um exceptional in my opinion it is it is except like it I haven't

3:34:17Dustin Furman:seen nearly a third of it yet probably but it is just so good like good for the sake of being good I was looking like they only sold three million copies of this game I'm like what fucking universe do we live in where these games sell this few like how is this not huge now i know you'd have to go play the original alan wick which is a little janky and it wasn't really accessible to a lot of people back in the day because it was only on 360 but that's not the case anymore and i don't know man i just look at it and i'm like i'm it's one of those things where i'm like i'm so jealous of this this is like such an elite form of storytelling the scenes with mr door like when he's doing the show like he's doing the talk show over and over again and he keeps going through the tv and so like goes back from real is like real shot stuff to like i'm like this is so good like why is this so thoughtful why is this so well executed how is this not a 20 million seller it's so infuriating that's why i keep saying this shit's just not for us anymore man like we don't drive anything anymore because this is just just yeah the way they play with like

3:35:20Colin Moriarty:mixed media is just so entertaining and so fun like i really do think it's one of those things where it's like on paper this is not a me game really at all like i mean outside of the fact that i like remedy games and i just generally like twin peaks and that kind of like the like david lynch kind of vibe like this is very much like a cinematic kind of narrative driven adventure game it's it's very it borrows a lot from tv and film but like to not play it is to lose so much i feel like there's a lot of games that borrow a lot from movies where like if you were to watch the game like you wouldn't really lose much but i feel like this is one of those things where it's just like it borrows so much and so in so many different ways where like you do lose a lot by not interacting with alan wick 2 despite how seemingly like movie like it is it's so cool it's and the dlc is fantastic too yeah so so i never played obviously the

3:36:14Dustin Furman:expansions and i i guess i bought the special edition when i bought the game because i was assuming that i would play that because i downloaded it again and it just had the expansions and i'm like all right i guess i own this and so i don't know about one of them but the night springs expansion is like interspersed throughout the campaign i guess you could play it without doing that but like you basically go up to a tv and like and then alan wick gets sucked into it and then you're playing as like a different character as if he's watching this show of the twilight zone spinoff and it's like i like petty and weird shit it's just so and it really makes me excited for control because i remember when control came out how much you and i loved it chris back in 19 or whatever it was and it what the one thing about that game is it's just insanely dense with shit i'm like i can't wait and and dude they they uh they reference in alan wade too like they show robert darling or whatever that guy's name is the scientist there's like a picture of him and stuff and i'm like i and you have to play it all to understand it like the the bureau of control is in the game yeah their main their main faction right so it's and i like when you go to like the guy's like fixing the machine and he's like, he's like, who are you guys?

3:37:17Dustin Furman:And he's like, I can't tell you that, but you know, we're just monitoring the volcanic activity here kind of thing. And I'm like, it's so good. It's so good. How is, and I think that, you know, we talked a month or so ago about how that, you know, they have a new CEO now and he's from EA. And I think he was exactly right where he's like the, his basic premise was like, we should be doing so much better. There's like something wrong with people understanding what this is and I wonder if they can flip the script with control but I must be honest and say that I I feel a little nervous about control actually we can go let's go back into the six questions comments concerns lots and ideas real quick at the end of the show we already read one we'll read another one Kai wrote in and said hey boys I just finished replaying platinum of control and anticipation for resonant can we get a quick hype check I'm a little worried for our friends in Finland I fear I might be the biggest victim of this congested September schedule any chances of a remedy verse spoiler cast thanks and have a great day not a remedy verse one because I don't think I'm prepared for that and I've also not played quantum although I don't know if quantum break even plays into the any of this shit that's happening I think it does though um that's loosely but um we will do something for control resident after comes out there's no doubt about that of course yeah I am worried about this game like I I don't know how much they spent on it I think fire break was a really big mistake for them and they lost a lot of money on it and I just don't know how much they can withstand I don't want to like be a catastrophist and say that they're going to go out I don't think anything like that's going to happen but I especially because they're making other shit for other publishers but it's like uh like Max Payne right so it's like they're fine but like with this specific game I'm like I it does feel like it's not going to do well but maybe I'm totally delusional like I just feel like it's none of their games seem to really bubble up and it's too bad yeah I don't know I don't know I don't know I do think this is more in the style of this is more control 2 seems more in vogue

3:39:10Colin Moriarty:in the sense that third person action kind of you know i don't want to say souls like because it's not a souls like but you know the spiritually like the third person action game where you're you're parrying and you're dodging like it it's that seems to be more of a thing that the general audience seems to be into relative to some of the stuff that remedies made in the past or at least the recent past i i don't know what to make of it it's a crowded September economically things are hard I don't know like I don't know if I want to say like if it's going to do well or not I do think of the games that Remedy has released up until this point at least in in recent years I do think it has the highest potential to do the best honestly just because I think it looks I think your average person would look at gameplay of Control Resident and be like that looks cool I want to play it as opposed to Alan Wake which is like a little bit more like eclectic i think you have to kind of not that you have to know what twin peaks is but like it definitely helps and like i just think it's a little bit less heady or at least it comes across as less heady i i imagine that it is going to be quite heady anyway but i don't know it looks more approachable to me um than most of their stuff so i i'm hopeful for it i also think it's a crowded september but none of the stuff seems to like i don't know if necessarily people who are looking forward to Oni Musha are going to be looking forward to Control and like Vice for like I do think it's crowded but I think it's distinct enough like we'll see I'm rooting for it I hope I'm I hope I'm right and I hope it it finds success because I think Remedy deserves it I think they're doing such great stuff always so um Firebreak notwithstanding everybody gets one

3:40:54Dustin Furman:yeah and the thing about Firebreak was it wasn't supposed to be bad it's just like a game that didn't need to exist and that yeah no one cared about you know yeah I played it I don't want to

3:41:02Colin Moriarty:say extensively because that's not necessarily true but i played quite a bit of it and it was pretty good for a first person shooter by a studio that never made one before like i was actually i remember being kind of impressed at how good of an fps it was given that remedy didn't have a history of doing that but it also was just like i'm not into this universe for this reason like i'm not really like feeling it generally it played quite well but you know it's not what i was looking for it from remedy anyway so we'll see i'm rooting i'm rooting so hard for it though

3:41:34Dustin Furman:rooting tooting yeah by the way total non sequitur did you guys see the story recently that's going

3:41:41Colin Moriarty:around about the fart room what is this yeah dude it's so funny hold on i gotta find this for you guys i have no concept of yeah what made you think of this i'm intrigued i don't know i don't know

3:41:53Dustin Furman:what made me i'm putting it in here the fart corner it's the fart corner gives it's an mbc seven san diego story the fart corner gives students a place to pass gas without ever leaving class and helps normalize a very normally bodily function so apparently there's the second grade the second grade class in california that like when people have to fart in their class they just go into a corner and fart and it's and people are taught it's so funny the things people are saying about it it's i don't know i didn't know if you saw it come across your uh i did not see I was like, Sacred Symbols is kind of like the far corner.

3:42:22Dustin Furman:All right, Dustin, let's go on to you. You're playing Mortal Shell 2 still as well as How to Fish.

3:42:28Colin Moriarty:Yes, still playing Mortal Shell 2. I am too... The game is divided into different sections of a much larger world. I have beat the second main boss. And I'm still... I'm enjoying it more and more as I play and understand it. I'm starting to build up my character. um still having a couple crashing issues with the game which is a little bit annoying especially in type of game where uh you have your i can't remember what they're called in this game your souls and then the game crashes and then they disappear so love that hopefully they can get that ironed out but i wouldn't say it's like i wouldn't let that deter you from buying and playing it i think it's uh pretty good and continues to surprise me but i talked about that a lot last week the other game i've been playing uh consistently every night has been how to fish and it's this uh this this current week's and last week's friend slop game which uh basically the way it works is you're on a deserted island with your friends and you have to fish in order to make money uh so you catch a fish but you have to kill it so you start first by like just punching the fish to kill it and then you sell it by feeding it to this guy like it just

3:43:50Dustin Furman:like i don't want to punch the shit out of a fish that sounds so satisfying to me yeah uh the game

3:43:55Colin Moriarty:is super physics-based which made me think of you chris that like yeah you so eventually you get like brass knuckles and knives so you're like slicing up these fish and stuff but just continues to escalate you're getting pistols shotguns the fish are getting crazier at the end of each island there's like a boss encounter honestly kind of reminded me of destiny where it's like everyone's trying to kill this one boss that's just a giant bullet sponge um but where it gets really silly is that once you start to get um like pistols and and different guns involved is that you can do like trick shots shooting the fish that adds a multiplier for how much of their worth and so the physics comes in where like you'll you'll catch the fish you'll fling it up in the air and you'll pull out a sniper rifle and try to like no scope it so it's very good it's only five dollars but it i feel like the problem with a lot of friend slap games as a connoisseur is the end state or like the fail state i guess of these games where we've been playing a little bit of gamble with your friends and this also is the case with like peak or um lethal company a lot of these the problem is that they get so increasingly hard that inevitably you're just going to die that's the point then you play again and again and again and it frustrates me that some of these games particularly uh lethal company was this way where i'm like there's stuff later in this game i haven't seen but i can't get there and it's too annoying repo this way as well where this game is just kind of like a standard linear adventure that you play with your friends and if you die then you can just reset and i really appreciate that about it so we played we beat it last night and let me see how many hours do we have seven hours almost eight hours to play how to fish for five dollars and that's a hell of a deal pc only for now sometimes these friend slop games migrate over

3:46:03Dustin Furman:to playstation there'll be a how to fish in two seconds on psn it'll be called um how to fish with an e and how it'd be how to h-o-w-e to fish p-h-i-s-h right yeah asset flip yeah thank god

3:46:15Colin Moriarty:so yeah how to fish if you're have a pc i recommend it and have friends to play it with i know that some people's are they're jokingly like oh dustin's really bragging talking about the friends he has to play games with yeah i'm sorry we get it we get it well my friends are into these things like a lot of a lot most of my friends are like hyper competitive so they play like really really intense shit all the time but it looks how to fish looks fun it's good i like the physics angle of it like i've seen scenes i've seen some stuff that audibly made me laugh and i was like i'll pick it up at some point that's good yeah uh did you talk about mortal shell yeah yeah you did

3:46:57Dustin Furman:all right i'm like i think you blacked out yeah i can't with that i can't with that game i tried after you talked about it uh not the last week's episode but you talked about it i think on the stream i went and looked it up because i was like well because a few people i've talked to have said exactly what you've said about it which is that it's really the best or amongst the best of the non-from games yeah and i'm like i just don't personally see i'm not a souls guy but i was like maybe this is something for me you know i felt a little bit about that with like lies of p but it just doesn't it doesn't really uh it doesn't really compute lies of p i actually

3:47:32Colin Moriarty:argue is kind of lies of p i i feel is actually kind of harder than a lot of souls games that i've just because like the parry is so weird yeah they added a normal mode to it right i think i might

3:47:42Dustin Furman:i don't know if that oh i don't know maybe that'd be kind of a move to play that i think like that though i don't know whatever because there's things it's okay for things supposed to that are supposed to be hard it's okay for god of war ragnarok to have all these settings but like i i also appreciate that it's what i was saying about megaman earlier it's like it's okay for things to just be inaccessible you know like yeah if i just because i can't play something doesn't mean it

3:48:02Colin Moriarty:shouldn't be hard you know i yeah i mean i agree i also think it's up to the ultimately like if a dev if the dev themselves is like whatever here's an easy mode like i think it's like well that's confirmation from the dev themselves that this is fine and whatever um as far as me i haven't really been playing a lot just because i've been i've been doing a lot of uh i've been doing a lot of filming doing a lot of editing and also just the timing like there's a lot that's about to come out so i was like i don't want to get too deep into anything serious but a friend of mine recommended me this very weird indie game uh endocopia i don't believe it's on playstation right now i think it's only on steam but it's this very weird point and click kind of it's it's made as like an homage to old school like edutainment yeah i'm looking at games it's cool and it's very odd like everything is interactable like you can click on like everything that is an object is like has some kind of animation associated with it you can use your eyes to to observe something you can use your mouth to talk to something you can use your hands to interact with something and everything on screen has something to do and some of them have secrets that completely up the tone like it's it's a very fascinating game i've quite enjoyed it i went through the demo uh extensively and really had a great time with it and i i bought it at the end of it just because the the tone is so interesting and it's it's not quite horror but it's it's unsettling and it's eerie and it's so far like it revolves around like you are the main you're you're this character who kind of wakes up in a house and you don't really know what's going on and you fall through this hatch and you have to you have to recollect your eyes your mouth and your hands so like it's that's i'm pretty early into the game i'm 30 minutes into the main game after like a long time with the demo um so i'm only like now kind of seeing stuff that wasn't in the demo i'm still pretty early on but endocopia is a game that i did not think i would be into at all that i'm quite um enamored by there's there's something about the style here and the soundscape and the visual identity and I guess the types of games that it harkens back to, which I don't have a lot of history with, but I have enough to kind of recognize.

3:50:30Colin Moriarty:Like, oh, you click on the, there's a scene where you're going, where you're kind of climbing through a hole in the wall and then you kind of go down. And it's a 2D perspective. So like, as you're going down, you can see like fossils of like dinosaurs and stuff in the ground. and you can click on them and then like one of them will eat the other one and then the animation will reset so you can do it again it's like oh my god i remember these i remember this exact kind of design and it's it's um it's interesting only because like this type of design doesn't is not associated in my mind with like something that could potentially be adult or scary so seeing that kind of implemented is kind of surreal and it's really cool i think it's it's a really charming interesting game again i'm very early on i don't know i can't speak to the to the rest of it but a lot of people that i know who have played it um are also quite enamored with it so i thought i'd put that on people's radar in case case anybody's into something or curious about playing something that's a little bit more oddball it's also very cheap i don't remember what i paid for it but i feel like it was pretty pretty low i i it's fairly affordable i wish i can remember exactly what i paid for it let me uh i wish i wish i wish i wish it said how much a game was on steam even if you bought it already it's uh 1650 it says for me 50 oh yeah so it's like it's a it's a lower there's a lot of content in it though like there's a lot of animation there's a lot of work put into it so it's it's quite good i i like it um but yeah endocopia that's all I've been tonight though is is kind of big because tonight is um tonight is both Metal Gear Solid and uh or I guess today already it's probably out already uh Plague Tale uh yeah yeah yeah Resonance getting pretty good reviews I saw yeah I saw IGN it's got a six oh a six yeah I saw Push Square gave a seven which is good yeah I mean I'm I'm looking forward to it.

3:52:30Colin Moriarty:I think I like Plague Tale quite a bit. So I'm going to decide which one I want to play. I think probably I'm leaning towards Plague Tale. I feel like I need to separate. I feel like I need time for Metal Gear Solid. Because I do want to go through Peace Walker as well.

3:52:45Dustin Furman:Yeah, it's such a big deal. I was talking about that on the show I appeared on that will go live soon. A guest appearance where. Quietly Metal Gear Solid 4 migrating is such a. small thing seemingly, but actually a pretty big deal. It's like one of the most, it's like one of the most notoriously isolated big games and no longer will be the case.

3:53:07Colin Moriarty:It's huge for our age bracket. You know, who was there and like kind of remembers how big of a deal that was and how weird it is. It's almost weird. In some ways, it's almost, it's weirder to see Metal Gear Solid 4 on a modern PlayStation than it was to see Halo Combat Evolved on a PlayStation to me. like there's like there's something about it that is interesting and and cool so all right well

3:53:34Dustin Furman:that's what we're playing it's time to move on yeah we'll i'll have more we'll see what where i get next week it might still be alan wake 2 world for me yeah all right these are great and they're small so we have yeah i'll definitely do all the expansion stuff too and i already i did i did uh the one i don't it's not really a spoiler it's like one of the episodes is like you're the waitress

3:53:53Colin Moriarty:in the diner oh i yeah i love i love the waitress film um which was pretty cool just blowing the shit out of people um okay yeah it's time to get into the listener inquiries typically six questions

3:54:06Dustin Furman:comments concerns often ideas from the audience but we're going to only do four now because we've already read two of them and actually i was reading through them briefly i'm like we could have even done another one of these earlier but we'll do it here and we would have only had three left by the way i forgot to tell you guys this earlier i thought that you guys would find this funny we have an exit you know i read the exit surveys like why people are leaving canceling usually it's anodyne understandable stuff i don't really have the money don't really have the time it's not really into the content anymore all that sort of stuff someone left the exit survey that they're leaving because i refuse to drive

3:54:35Dustin Furman:interesting so you would appreciate this is always funny i'm like all right teach their own teach their own nvdl wrote into us boys says good day sacred blokes there's a concept in ai modeling called mode collapse when ai models begin training on ai generated content causing degradation of the training data over time. My question is, do you think this is also happening to game developers as the medium matures? Original game developers came from software engineering backgrounds. Game writers were an offshoot from other written mediums where extensive knowledge backgrounds were advantageous. Our auteurs have been movie enthusiasts, fantasy novel enjoyers, and D &D nerds.

3:55:09Dustin Furman:Fast forward to the next generation, young game developers have been herded through the same few game development college courses where they study pre-existing games. They're taught to use pre-made drag and drop automated tools and a very homogenous worldview is incestuously recycled through the medium couple this with the fact that driven software engineers and other creatives are enticed to more lucrative fields i can't help but see as a complete game development mode collapse in the near future thanks lads i'll go spend the last of my savings on frivolous nonsense and listen this is a really interesting question and i appreciate you writing it in i don't see it quite the way you see it i think i see it slightly differently although i think we're probably going in the same direction which is how do I put this in a way that's sports analogies one of the reasons that the NFL doesn't expand to more teams even though it easily could because there's demand for more teams and there's demand for more games is that there's a fear that there's simply not enough talent to fill out all the rosters you could find enough people you can find bodies that are willing to do it and that did it in college and you know did it at a high level but are they really good enough and if you expand and expand and expand optionality in terms of employment in a place like the games industry like in football then every team gets diluted of talent by nature of the fact that there simply isn't enough talent to fill these up with a and s rank tiered developers that's why studios that stay together like generally like naughty dog are so valuable because those people have worked together for a while while money and other things have enticed people away remember the dude that was originally directing Wolverine left to go direct Perfect Dark sometimes you don't make the best decisions right although that might have been a good decision based on his based on the delays in the game and his decision making going to Perfect Dark might have been a good thing for the game so I don't know if that makes sense to you guys I don't think that there's a degradation thing I don't think it's the educational stuff people have always studied the games that came before and specializing in tool sets isn't really a bad thing either if you're an Unreal Engine specialist or something like that that's a that's both a niche that will limit you but also very valuable because many people use those engines and that's not unlike programming which is what he's referring to people are if you're a programmer you don't program in every language you program in certain languages you're an expert in certain things you're not certainly going to be this polyglot of of computer language it's not really the way it works so i think the bigger risk to the games developers is just the dilution um but he does bring another interesting topic in which has been well known and this has been true always in games which is why we should want to for games to make as much money as they can so we can retain this talent is that the highest talent people do get poached and it's not only like you can work for people that complain that your game is 80 and you work like 70 hours a week for fucking eight years on a game and all the rest and then some financial firm needs you as an engineer at them and they offer you like twice as much money you're like okay bye that shit happens all the time and that also is dragging people away and it's not exclusive to computer skills and programming and all that it's also art i mean you can go make movies you can go make commercials you can go write other things you can go there are these people have this multidisciplinary and art form that we're into is is definitely every one of those disciplines can be exercised elsewhere shit even programming specialties within engines like a lot of rendering happens in unreal engine now a lot of things are like go like that are not games that was always the idea that's what they wanted to do forever and they're finally getting to the graphical fidelity and obviously unreal 6 which we saw recently will only bring that to the next level so i don't know if you guys agree with that or anything you want to say about it but i don't think that them studying each other and them studying at the same schools and all that i don't really buy that i just think intrinsically there's not enough talent like you either kind of got it or you don't it can be coaxed and coerced out of you but we've said this all the time right like the unreal the unfortunate reality of layoffs and i only know this from my own experience in the corporate world but i think everyone knows this is it's always sad and there's always people that get victimized by these things that don't deserve it but there definitely are people that get victimized by that definitely didn't belong there and that's probably true for every game studio there has to be weak links at every one of these places and those weak links will become more prominent go ahead i think that my take on

3:59:19Colin Moriarty:this issue is very different not that what he's saying couldn't be possible but if we're looking at like okay well games aren't as creative or ambitious anymore it's like well it doesn't take hard to look at indie developers or smaller games like the one chris mentioned that's like that is totally unique there are people making those off the wall ideas out there but they're doing it by themselves or at a very low price and i think the reason why we're seeing so many games that feel like something you've seen before is because uh video game video games at the triple a level are such high risk high reward that there is no room to make ambitious games anymore or maybe not ambitious isn't there creative games right where you don't see the most expensive games doing very many new things because companies are risking millions and millions and millions of dollars that they're like it's safer if we don't do something new and untested instead we should stick to the formulas that and the gameplay systems and mechanics that we know people like because we've got a hundred million or more dollars on the line we can't be risking your new idea for this gameplay system unless we are really damn sure that it's going to work.

4:00:46Colin Moriarty:So that's how I see it. What about you, Chris? I don't know. I think I see it mostly the way Dustin sees it. I don't think I would have anything new to spin on that. I do think it is true that not enough people in or maybe not enough people maybe that's not the right way to phrase it i i do think there is danger in people being too uh enveloped by one medium in the sense that they're they're the broad scope of their inspirations is muted in such a way that leads to things being a little bit more redundant but i also feel like i've seen too many examples of game i mean the game i was just talking about endocopias like i mean that's a game undoubtedly inspired by other video games um old video game in in such a way that is so unique and interesting that like i don't know if it would have benefited them at all to really be like a dnd fan or like or a fan of scorsese movies i think it's cool for people to be multi multi-faceted in the mediums that they engage in i personally feel like people don't read enough you know like i think people don't read enough books um in in like fields like this um that would be my concern honestly but i think it's largely just there will be a collapse in the sense that i think triple a is going to look a lot different in 10 years uh i think you're going to start seeing a lot more from overseas markets emerging markets um japan and you're going to see start seeing probably like more indie titles from the americas that are going to be a lot more interesting and inspiring mainly because so much can be done by one person now compared to like in the 90s you know you're actually i think i think there's an empowerment in who can be an auteur now compared to back then where you needed like an auteur to not only be an auteur but you needed an auteur to be able to lead a team which is not always necessarily the same skill set there are probably like a lot of brilliant people who have no social skills at all who are just like savants who can just run into c sharp and fuck around with an unreal or unity and make something that's genre defining and groundbreaking and i think that that's um i think that's exciting also so i don't think it's all doom and gloom

4:03:21Dustin Furman:Thank you for writing in, NVDL. Jodo Mac wrote in and said, Hey CDC, I know none of you play their games, but what the hell is going on at Hoyoverse? They currently have three of the biggest gacha games in the world running simultaneously. Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail, Honky Star Rail, is that what it's called? And Zenla Zone Zero, plus two more mobile-only titles, Tears of Themis and Honkai Impact 3rd. On top of that, they already have two more games in the pipeline, Petite Planet, which we just saw, and Honkai Nexus Anima. and they have just revealed another one notice fall i can't speak for the pure mobile games but the rest of us are all extreme the rest are all extremely high production titles that receive constant major updates new characters weapons regions story content the works i get that development costs are lower in china but the sheer volume and quality of what they're putting out is still kind of insane not really a question just an observation yeah we talked a little bit about this on the stream that what i actually dug about the new game that they showed which is the um petite planet which is like the animal crossing style game is that they're trying to do other things.

4:04:18Dustin Furman:And a major reason why it works is because of China. I know that you said like you understand that, but that is what it is. China allows for high end development that is both affordable and high quality. And they have an endemic audience of more than a billion engaged people that can buy their stuff and get it going. So imagine a studio like Naughty Dog in the English speaking world or the Western world has about as many people at their beck and call as, you know, miHoYo does just in their home market. And that they're leveraging that. I also looked at, you know, in preparation for this, I looked up a few things.

4:04:56Dustin Furman:They employ almost 7000 people. But the cost of doing business in China is comically cheap. Remember, like China, I'm pretty sure it was only I should look this up. I'll look it up when I pass it off to you guys. I'm pretty sure it was only somewhat recently that China's cumulative economy outran the United States, but they have four times more people. So like that goes to show you like per capita incomes in the gutter for a lot of people in that place. And so relative to income and expectations, but selling on global markets, like we always say, you can get the best of both worlds. They're drawing money in an USD and euro and pounds and all these different things.

4:05:34Dustin Furman:And then they're trans, you know, and they're, they're bringing it all in through all these different channels and that makes the opposite is what's difficult it's not difficult to do that the opposite is making games in america for american money and then selling them in china not because they don't like american games but because of the there's a difference in cost and expectation so i'm fascinated by them and i must say this too i think their games look awesome i just don't want to play them really like it's like yeah i think they look great i think they probably i think they're probably a ton of fun out of all the shit that i've not played in that in the in the game as a service free to play realm whether it's fortnight or um i played a bunch of rocket league but like back in the day but like roblox i've never played any of this stuff like the genshin stuff is the most attractive to me as like the thing like the big stuff that i would actually maybe do but i'm not going to and i'd be much more attracted to them actually if they were just games that they sold and that's what they're kind of trying to do and you can have it both ways actually now and so they'll do that are you either of you guys uh neither of you really play these games i don't think but either of you interested in in the

4:06:36Colin Moriarty:world of the miho yovers i tried a little bit of genshin impact when it came out but quickly fell off of it did not really like it um i've tried some of these other like very samey looking anime gacha games and none of them have ever stuck with me the interesting this this uh notice fall game which is wearing its Elden Ring inspiration on its sleeve maybe I'm starting to see people that are like taking screenshots from that trailer and then putting them side by side with Elden Ring and I'm like oh no it's actually it's much worse than I thought so it it's just one of those things I personally don't really understand even and I know the joke is when we're streaming that people are like it's a Dustin game and I'm like I get haha I like anime stuff but it's like no I I really don't understand the appeal but clearly millions of people excuse me

4:07:37Dustin Furman:um more power to him I think I like I like getting Chinese goods I just wish it was easier to do things in the other direction and that's the nature of free of if we block it that's right Fwee market Fwee twade Fwee twade Why didn't we think of that Supply and demand Supply and demand

4:08:06Dustin Furman:Inflation Inflation

4:08:15Colin Moriarty:Oh my god The bubble is going to pop The bubble's going to burst.

4:08:25Colin Moriarty:God, kill me, man.

4:08:28Dustin Furman:Dane Goldberg wrote in and said, Sirs, let's imagine a world where corporations made consumer-friendly decisions. In said world, could Sony reverse all the current vitriol with a single gesture, announcing the brand new legacy PlayStation that natively plays all physical media from all generations? It won't happen. Probably dumb to even discuss, but it could be an olive branch that you need at this moment. It's a little dumb unless... And this is where I was like, it's not a bad idea. What's really stopping them from making a PS1 slash PS2 slash PS3 that just plays the discs? It doesn't go online, doesn't download patches, can't play any digital stuff.

4:08:58Dustin Furman:And you just make this cheap machine and just be like, here you go. It's kind of not a bad idea. I don't know like what would go into that, but probably not. Well, two things. Now is not the time because of the crunch on, you know, asset on components. But it doesn't seem like it would be that big of a deal. ps2 was able to play ps1 games by a lot by putting a small component in the ps2 and ps3 played ps2 games by putting the emotion engine in the ps3 originally you would imagine this at this time you could probably just do that very simply is it am i crazy dustin like that's so i think things like ps4 ps5 like no but like this idea of the static state maybe not even blu-rays maybe just ps1 and dvds or something i don't know it's not it's not actually not that crazy they won't do it

4:09:41Colin Moriarty:but it's not that crazy i think that the ps3 is a huge wrench in things as we've talked about many times that it's harder to emulate and i think recreating a lot of that hardware at this point would be getting like all of those chips which probably aren't even created like the off-the-shelf parts wouldn't work but in terms of a playstation 1 and maybe a playstation 2 they could certainly do this uh right now like there's a battle between clone and 64 consoles with the analog 64 and the um the mod retro one and that's all done through fpga which is a hardware level emulation so sony could eat at the very least they could make a new ps1 that plays ps1 games analog is probably already going to do that along with other companies within the next five years so it would be smart for them to just well i don't know would it be smart for them to do it themselves like it's like oh we're gonna make this console to run discs that we don't even make anymore no i i don't that's my

4:10:49Dustin Furman:whole point is that like i think i i do think it would be smart in an era where things kept getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and you can make this machine just as a collectible item you know because we we've described i mean we're not going to do this either but we were giving i was noting that video games plus the canadian retailer was just getting a new ps3 games and like it seemed like no one knew like and i'm like these things were manufactured somewhat recently probably based on old contracts or whatever i don't really know the same thing is going to be in place with the blu-rays that you get in earlier so if like you print if you publish a blu-ray before january 2028 for playstation 5 you can reorder it in the future um and that's what they've been saying so i guess what i'm moving backwards it would be interesting for them i've i've kind of wondered this from a i'll just i'll just come out and say without having a flowery language it's like just reprint a bunch of old shit how how difficult can that really be but it's not they would make money on it too but it's not high enough margin but it would be wild if they just started publishing ps1 games and ps2 games on disc again of course this would be totally it's a it's a totally ridiculous conversation to have now simply through the lens of they're not even gonna put ps5 discs after 2020 like whether they're obviously not gonna do so this is a different alternate universe where it's not even about caring for your customers because who gives a shit about people that want to play ps2 games at this point i mean it's like i don't like the ps3 came out 2006 it's time to move on but like it but rather if i were them i'd be like let's just we can just kind of make some chip damage money on a lot of this stuff it would be fun and it would make us look good but yeah it's not now is not the time you don't want to release new electronics right now of any kind yeah i agree but then i liked what you were why i like where your heads at nonetheless

4:12:38Dustin Furman:cameron james i think this is no that we already read that one cody frost therefore is the last one and this is the one i was bringing up earlier that i'm like we could have actually talked about this earlier too is these sheer shaping up to be one of the best years in gaming i'm talking 2007 level good i'm not going to waste characters listing every game that's already released or still coming this year the sheer volume of gate great games is already up there with any legendary year in gaming and we still have the biggest game of all time yet the release now i'll get back to mowing my lawn and listen this is i'll just reiterate what i said earlier and it is going to be a little bit redundant is that like i don't even know that these kinds of conversations make sense anymore because it seems like every year is kind of like this yeah i was gonna say that

4:13:15Colin Moriarty:exact thing where it's just like i really feel like the last several years have been this um i would actually say that this year is actually for me personally like this year is actually one of the slower years um and it's still like granted i say that at the at the end of august you know i'm sure like this month is going to be crazy but like up until this point like i'm kind of like yeah this is kind of actually like slower over the last several years and we still have like you know gta 6 on the horizon which is no doubt going to be like a massive deal um but yeah like i mean elden ring even games that like i wouldn't have expected like tamadachi life like all of these massive fantastic expedition 33 like balder's gate 3 alan wake 2 for in my opinion not a not a big seller but just like stellar fantastic like it's been a fantastic run for a while um i just think it's hard to feel that way because if you're aware of the industry you know how bad it really is in in ways that didn't used to be bad like 2007 was great for a number of reasons like there was a lot of great stuff that came out but also things were kind of good you know and even when the economy was bad like that benefited the games industry at that time you know like that was like a big deal it was huge i think ign boomed during that era yeah and honestly same thing with uh early covid was like a very similar thing way more you're just you're just getting this boom in in a situation where you really kind of shouldn't be but like the the facts and and the reality and the texture of the culture and the tapestry of everything that's going on just kind of bends in your favor and and so we weren't really thinking about that so those years kind of stick out still to this day because they were not only good for for games that were coming out but they were also good relative for developers and publishers as well and so that's the distinguishing factor that separates the modern years from like years that we kind of laud in in previous generations but i would say from an output perspective and from like a quality from a quality standpoint of like the software that we're getting not only in triple a but from from the indie scene as well with like a lot of the a lot of the friend slop stuff which you could argue is like you i say slop lovingly in in in uh reference to friend slop but like there's just so much there's such a rich tapestry of texture to engage with and so much of it is of a high quality where i'm just like i i struggle to think of a year since the pandemic where we've had like a a truly bad year like because even the pandemic was like doom eternal and like you know animal crossing and and then maybe maybe 2022 the year where it takes two one maybe was like a like a weaker year but even i thought it takes two was phenomenal so yeah we've just this conversation no longer really makes sense in fact i'm curious as to when it will start making sense again you know like what's gonna be the year that's gonna like drop the ball in such a way where it's just like damn bro we had a good run and it's over because i actually kind of feel like it might happen at some point based on you know the trends of all these all the layoffs and you know the restructuring and ea being a saudi company all all the all these things um i think have the potential to kind of set us up for a year like like 2014 again but I don't know it's we're eating good in my opinion I know I soapboxed there for a minute no it's all

4:16:56Dustin Furman:good man take your time uh yeah I I generally concur I think there's obviously gonna be vacillations in the year 2020 was a really good year uh last of us in my memory part two and Ghost of Tsushima are in there too um and the launch like Spider-Man Miles Morales and you know and that was PS5 so exciting an exciting year too not so exciting from the COVID perspective Dustin um what do you think I was gonna make a COVID China joke didn't happen in time it seemed too late so I feel like we kind of have to wait until after the year

4:17:34Colin Moriarty:not only is over but we've had time to like look and see what the legacy of certain games are well and to be clear I totally agree with both of you that it's like we are constantly eating good all the time um and i this is obvious but it's a lot of personal taste as well like for me looking back 2017 is probably my favorite year of games ever with like persona 5 near persona mario odyssey like stuff like that where it's like yeah that for a dustin list like it probably won't ever be topped um but it's hard to say like with some of these games like control renaissance renaissance could come out and be an amazing game but doesn't isn't isn't a game that remains in the con like i don't want to say in the conversation but a game that we look back on like wow that was an amazing game that year it could still be a great game but we'll have to wait

4:18:32Dustin Furman:and look back and reflect yeah it's on point it is too early yeah it is too early and and by the just shout out to 2007 shout out to super mario galaxy no okay if you want me to just say it i'll

4:18:46Colin Moriarty:just say i'll just come right out and say what did you say was that halo 3 2007 yes that was halo 3 that was call of duty 4 that was um the orange box that was the orange box so like portal um yeah just a lot of i mean it's a great that year is really truly insane um uncharted i believe

4:19:06Dustin Furman:yeah uncharted 1's in there too yeah i am um i uh the reason i remember that year so well and just galaxy specifically is because that was the first year at ig and i was allowed to vote in game bioshock yeah bioshock one was in there um mass effect one the first assassin's creed

4:19:22Colin Moriarty:just a massive i remember i remember that year very vividly and very fondly because that was my freshman year of high school and it that the worst possible time to have such a great year

4:19:30Dustin Furman:was it modern warfare as well or was that called call of duty 4 modern warfare yeah right the first

4:19:35Colin Moriarty:yeah so like i remember that year so fondly because it was so fun but also like it i i was

4:19:42Dustin Furman:so irresponsible that's a crazy 360 year too dude because bioshock and mass effect were 360 exclusives at that time so yeah um it was embarrassing to have a ps3 at that time no it was it was at that time you don't have to tell me i remember and then they eventually came over

4:20:00Colin Moriarty:but like dude like from from a sheer like these games are important to me angle like that's a massive year i think there's other better years but like that's a seminal that's a seminal year

4:20:12Dustin Furman:for sure um definitely and uh yeah i'll just say it's a we're in a perpetual golden age it's not it's not going to stop i don't think and if you are a lover of video games like we are and like the people that listen to the show are then it's a it's what a time to be alive the world is truly your oyster i've never truly encountered in any particular generation until maybe last generation and certainly this generation where i really had to say to myself i can't play even much of what i would play if i was if i if if we lived on a slowly rotating planet and we and our days were 65 hours long and shit like that you know um then maybe i would get to some of the stuff but you just have that there's so much good stuff even without the lens of myopia that you you just have to say no to just as many things as you say yes to i guess in some ways it's too bad or at least defer a lot of the stuff and it's funny man with i was saying with dawn walker i was at when i heard it was not gonna be relaunch at 40 frames i'm like nope and then i was gonna go back and uh put and play on musha at that point instead but then they very they freaked out i think and they're like no no no we'll have the 60 frames ready for launching i fucking thought so so now i'll be back to dawn walk it's next week dude yeah very exciting times very exciting all right let's get the hell out of here it's good to see you guys uh as always chris be well it's time for you to go to bed

4:21:34Colin Moriarty:uh maybe i don't i'm feeling i don't know i feel so good like i kind of i think i'm just gonna wait until we record and then like just there's some still there's still some stuff i gotta to do as well um but yeah it was good it's good being here it's so weird being here in this in the frame of this being how late i am into my day right because i feel so much more awake like usually like when we do this it's 10 a.m my time and so like i have to get up at like nine i'm always like a little groggy um still waiting for my brain to turn on i feel like this is a very different me you're getting um well i want you to rest up i want you to take good care of yourself i want you to eat a good meal i do have to yeah that would be a wise thing to do i'll eat my cashews oh yeah good cat my office cashews i've stayed away from i haven't had cashews in a couple months because they're just it's was i talking about on the stream dustin i'm down chris i'm

4:22:33Dustin Furman:down like 15 pounds just organically by just not snacking everything else is exactly the same i just don't like that's and i'm not a prodigious snacker but like in midnight i'd go into like my pantry i'm gonna have like a bunch of cashews i'm gonna have some peanut butter i'm gonna have like crackers like just and it's like just i just popped that was the only change i did and i'm in the one i'm in the 170s now so it's like okay yeah i mean i'm just eating cashews because i just i don't know what the fuck is safe to eat anymore yeah you can't eat the greens that's for sure

4:23:00Colin Moriarty:all the beef is toxic there's a diarrhea ghost haunting everybody there's i don't know what the I don't know. I don't know. Everything has gotten so much worse in like,

4:23:13Dustin Furman:like necessities. We've talked about this a million times. Yeah. It's just so bad. That's why it's like games. Games are better than ever. And they're cheaper than ever. Stop. You're ruining it. Everything else sucks.

4:23:25Colin Moriarty:Stop. Like, is it? I'm very self-aware of the fact that like, when you get older, things feel this way. But like, at the same time, I feel like this isn't just getting older, right? Like things are worse. Yes. It's not just like a mental thing of just like, oh, I'm not young anymore. So things seem worse. It's like, I'm sure that's some things, but like, I think you could make a pretty good scientific argument. No, things are worse. They're definitely worse. I really think everything peaked in the 90s.

4:23:56Dustin Furman:And then now it's all kind of over. I've made the case that 9-11 had nothing to do with it. It's just the perfect period on that, on that whole era and everything since then has been downhill it's just like fucking sucks yeah anyway i don't know good to see you as always you don't suck chris and i love you very much good to see you as always dustin thank you goodbye to you my friend be well bye

4:24:19Colin Moriarty:anything to say before we go my wife and child returned to me so i don't have to worry that you know he didn't leon didn't go out and get some cigarettes yeah only to never return which I appreciate so I'm looking forward I mean it's already happened and for the listeners but

4:24:35Dustin Furman:seems like this GTA reveal is pretty sick yeah yeah we'll uh we'll get into that yeah we'll talk is that out like yeah is that out like proper it's on Netflix yeah oh interesting yeah can't get me Netflix um you can't but you can't so excited to see it but I'm gonna need some leftovers

4:24:54Colin Moriarty:I got those wings leftovers from last night. So I love leftover wings. I feel 100 % better now at this point. So you know what that means? More wings. More wings. Bad. Just no lessons learned at all. No. You're going to come back and we're going to record the pickup and you're going to be exactly the same place that you started the episode at. Yep. Yep.

4:25:17Dustin Furman:Good, good, good, good. Well, my best to the family, of course.

4:25:21Colin Moriarty:Thank you.

4:25:22Dustin Furman:Yeah, I got to get out. I'll get out of here. feel a little something rumbling inside you know take a shit poop that's right yeah maybe hop in the pool I don't know I got things to do so alright time to go we appreciate you guys hope you had a good show with us we had a good show I thought this was a fun one 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 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.

4:26:01Dustin Furman:The show is conceived by, is written by, and is directed by me, Colin Moriarty. My co-hosts are Chris Raygun Maldonado and Dustin Furman. The show is produced by executive producer Dustin Furman. All of Last Stand's theme music is by my best friend, Ramon Narvaez. As you know, all of Last Stand's shows, including Sacred Symbols, are fan-funded on Patreon at patreon.com slash lastnamemedia. The following names are at the producer level on Patreon, our highest tier, and we're grateful for your thoughtful and kind contributions to our independent endeavor. Thank you.

4:26:50Dustin Furman:Addict, iMike0, Zman8601, TrenchGoat, Brad Lohman, Kevin Young, J.P. Lynch, Sweet Grey Maine Jones, Orchard, ZenRed, Keith Richards, Anthony Acura, Eddie Smith, Denny Would Never, Uncharted Shinobi, WTF, Logan Little George, Emmanuel Perez, Brandon Runger, Zachary Wood, Brian Williamson, Vance Cody, Rallo, Gabe's New Gabe Cube, Dustin Spruill, Will Williams, Shane Brekke, Michael Mash Potato, Aaron Temple, Sweaty Magic, Lizard King, Nate Izod, Ellis, Albion, My Name is Mayo, Jason R. Zahn, Grayson Maxwell, Vega the Late, Whiskey Sin, Relentless Rex, The Fandom Traveler, Jad Rita, Terry Tip, Double Duty Dirk, Zach Cohen, Peyton Stone, Michael Buffel, Dan Root, The Shady Mailman, Christopher Morgan, Stephen Glashen, Josh Godfrey, Sketch McGetch, Betty Ann Moriarty, Electric MD, Tyler T, Norse Nuts, Omar, Jake C, Trey Woodward, Antonio C, Alan Einer, Jay Getter, Captain Verde, Bjorn Campbell, Jeff Mercado, Weary San, Trayland, Zainal Yuichi, Gregory Slavinsky, Gus, Remington James, John Zile, Boots, Alex LaPere, Saul Balcazar, The Brain Worm Starved and Died Only the Idiot Remains,

4:28:42Dustin Furman:Who is Stephen Day?

4:28:51Dustin Furman:Thank you.

4:29:19Dustin Furman:Thank you.