You are listening to Video Games to the Max. Hello, and welcome to
another edition of Video Games to the Max. I am your host, Sean
Garmer. Here with me today is Steve Esposito, a senior editor of Season
Gaming. How are you doing, man, I'm doing well. Thank you
for having me, man, it's I'm very grateful for you to be on
here. And I mean we both just had a holiday here Father's Day.
How did it go? It went very well. We got I had some
good food. My kid got me a Lego set Star Wars Lego set,
so I can't really ask for anything more. So yeah, mine was pretty
great, pretty chill. Because Sunday's is my off day for the weekend,
so I was like I would have exhausted from on Saturdays, I work at
seven in the morning, so I'm like going to bed at like one am,
getting up at six something. It was my last day in the office.
We started work from home today and permanent thankfully. So now if I
want to move around, go somewhere outside of my ami, because it's super
expensive to live here. You would know that being in New York too,
but um, yeah, it's it's crazy and and so it was nice to
just be able to chill. She loves horror movies and I'd never seen The
Shining or Doctor Sleep, so we watched those and she gave me a Star
Wars thing too, like a cool she made it herself. She's very creative
and so she just you know, maybe that's like really simple like card that
she made herself. So I was like, that's that's awesome. I was
very happy trying not to cry, so, uh, you know how that
goes. Um, But yeah, man, one of the best things in
life to get to be a dad. You know. It's you know,
at first, my my wife and I were very like, oh, we're
not gonna have kids, and then um, things happened and it's been a
really rewarding experience. Like a lot of people are like not really into kids,
and I get it. But one day, you know, it is
it's it's an I don't know, it's a trade. It's like it's like
any Dark It's like any Souls Born game. There's a lot of risks,
but the reward is so good. That's the way. Yeah, my daughter
says that now she's like, I don't want to have kids. I don't
I don't want that and I'm just like, Okay, you're twelve, let
me know when you get older, you know how that how that goes.
You always say that. And then for one, you can't always decide that
for yourself, and like what happened to be? And then number two,
it's something it's a huge, a huge blessing that you don't appreciate until it's
actually there, So you know, don't that. Yeah, And like my
mine's three, so she's uh, she's a little young, talks very well
for three year old, I feel, um, especially when she's trying to
make a point in certain things, you know, right, Um, but
yeah, it's like, um, no matter how prepared you are for like
parenthood, you're all you're never You're never prepared for the wild thing. Definitely
not. It doesn't matter how many books you read, how much you're you
know, you're significant gather they've had kids before, tell you until you have
that experience yourself, it's not it's it's a whole different deal. Yeah.
But um, you know, I'm sure that many of you are fathers out
there and mothers. You know, y'all just went through Mother's Day last month,
as well. Um, thank you for listening and or watching and we'll
get into the housekeeping in just a second. But let's talk about we're gonna
be talking about on this show more of that Pom Fantasy sixteen demo. I've
actually finished it. Did you finish it, Steve? I did finish the
story. I didn't realize that there's a second part to the demo, and
I've been I've been meaning to get to it, but like I just I
just couldn't right. Um, and I thought it was very good, Like,
um, it was a game I was gonna put on my backlog and
be like, Okay, I'll wait till it hits because I'm a big PC
guy. Yeah, but I'm kind of like, you know what, maybe
maybe I don't know. I don't know. We gotta see how it works
out. But after that demo, I've never played a finn fasty game like
that. Every Game of Thrones stylist like they went kind of it's almost like
they took George R. Martin was revealed to be like a writer for this.
I would not be surprised. I'd be like, oh, yeah,
that makes sense. Yeah, well it's some secret credit that we don't know
about. But yeah, we'll get into the sphivics on that. We'll talk
about some fallout from the summer game Fest, maybe you get Steve gets some
thoughts on the showcases there and some other things that we'll we'll get into all
right, Well again, yeah, I'm actually it's weird because I'm not a
like big Zelda person, but it's the respect, right, It's the like
that being around from even before, like right around when I was born,
when my brother was playing games or introducing me. I remember watching him and
I'm like, you know, the music is awesome, doesn't matter if I'm
not like the biggest fan of the games that can't hate the music. So
I was like when I found that, I was like, I gotta use
this. Yeah. Yeah, as as a previous as a musician in my
past life and like being involved with music and stuff listened to, like the
chip tune bands and whatnot, it's huge respect for her any musician out there
who can do it, oh man, for sure. Like sometimes I look
at that and you go back to those, uh you know, speaking of
fantasy watching, you know, stuff of like the old fantasies and things like
that. Oh yeah, I was like, how Umatsu was able to get
those freaking soundtracks on on that on between one through three. It is ridiculous
to me still, he you know that that's the one thing with Fine Fantasy
is I feel like that, uh, the music is one of the key
components, even for Legends Elda. I think like those two games, like
Legends of the Fine Fantasy are best known for like their wide breath of music
and how it colectic each song kids sound, and like how the tones still
kind of carry over through each and every game. It's just it's fair they're
both music wise. No one could beat those two games. Yeah, absolutely,
Finn Fantasy have even gone to one of the concerts in the past,
you know, when I was younger, because I love that music so much.
It's just like, like you said, not only do they carry the
themes forward, how each game sounds different and amazing at the same time,
you know, yeah, like did they hit like the right notes, like
the victory music. Yeah that Oh, it's it's perfect, the like melody
thing that they have almost at the beginning of all of them. It's just
like, you know, it's Fine Fantasy time, Like let's let's yeah.
Yeah. My wife brought me to the Legends of the Symphony a couple of
times in Madison Square Garden. We went twice, I believe, and it
was a great show. Great show both times. Oh man. And then
being at the garden too, that's gonna be a really cool experience. Yeah.
Yeah. It wasn't like the huge garden room, but it was like
they have like a smaller room. Okay, even the small room is still
like gigantic, and it was. It was a great time. We thought
were like, this room is small. And I ended up being at a
different concert at that same room and I was on the floor, I was
in the pit area, and I looked around. I'm like, no,
this place is gigantic. This is a big place. So it's uh,
it was. It was. That show was great, both great show.
That's awesome. I love hearing about you know. I think they said they're
gonna take Sonic on the road with their music, and they have some fantastic
music too, and it's like I love seeing that more video games having their
music out there for more people to listen to in that kind of setting.
That was great, you know. And and it's being integrated into like like
pop bands like Churches is very big on video games and you can hear that
like inspiration and I just I can talk about this for days because of the
music kids, I mean video games are they got a Grammy now, So
it's like, yeah, I'll be interested to see when they actually have the
time to go through this entire year, not like the first one where it
was kind of like, let's just take like five games that kind of have
a name and slap them on there. I mean, not that Valhalla didn't
deserve him, just saying, you know, this year, it feels like,
okay, you actually have to go through the releases and decide something like
how could you not have Zelda At the end of the year when they're doing
these Grammys, they better have Pop Fantasy and Zelda on that list because that's
gonna be crazy. Oh yeah, absolutely, especially with like I'm not big
in the classical scene, but like like classical not really hitting the mainstream,
but video game music is like you you can't turn a blind eye, right,
Yeah for sure. But I mean, since we're already talking about Final
Fantasy, I guess, let's let's start there with what you've been playing.
You did say you played. I guess the prologue, the part that actually
goes on to the next to the game that comes out in a couple of
days. It's crazy to say, because I feel like I've been waiting the
whole year for June twenty second to come. It's it's finally there. And
now like after you played the demo, you said you haven't played a Pop
Fantasy game like that. What's the hype level now after you play? So
my, I have this thing that I go through, you know, being
being a senior editor and like I'm if I'm a reviewing game, you get
really hyped for it. You know, I built I built it up.
I did not do that for Final Fantasy sixteen at all. I wasn't I
wasn't even gonna play the demo originally. I just gonna be like, Okay,
let's just wait from the game come out and I'll just put the whole
thing one shot. And I'm glad that I went against that, um,
because man, like the story beats are real good, Like, yeah,
the demo is mostly like a movie, I feel, but perfect introduction,
like you you get this tasty at this little flavor of it, and it's
just like it's so good. It was. It was so good. Um.
I think the acting is fantastic that the fact that they have real actors
coming in to do it, some really great voice actors coming in as well.
Um, it just it flowed really well and in the combat at first
the comebat I thought it was kind often that I realized, like there's rings
that are automatically equipped, so you have to unequip them to actually get a
full feel of how the combat works. And that's when I was like,
Okay, I see what you're doing and I like it. And yeah,
like fifteen came close. Like every every Final Fantasy game I play, it
feels like it was a build up to this moment where you had I'm even
gonna say, yeah, Kingdom Hearts three, which was good, but it
wasn't it was too handhold the fl and then we had seven remake, which
was good, and then this kind of adds on to what seven does,
like it just it's a stronger feel and I just I really enjoyed my experience
with it, and I can't wait for the full game. I really can't.
It's uh, like I said, I just got to figure out when
to start it, because when I started, I'm probably not gonna stop,
so and I know it's a mature rated game, which is the first,
which the first for Final Fancies. So I'm very excited to see where this
goes. And I hope my kid will let me play it, so I
hope. So for YouTube, man, that's always rough. When you got
the young kids and you're gonna play something mature, you know that you don't
expose into something you don't want to, especially because it's not just mature in
the violent way, it's mature in other ways as well. So yeah,
which is different for I mean, it definitely goes into the Game of Thrones
thing right of it. Yeah, He's like, I can't believe he's uh.
He said he made everybody watch the entire series before while they were working
on it. There's something about that studio, especially because I think Yoship is
also the producer or director of this one, and he's very big on like
making sure his team is up the snuff on whatever it is they're working on.
With Fantasy fourteen, he made his team play World of Warcraft like they
played World of Warcraft and he was just like, I don't want to do
this exactly, but I want to make it like this, and that made
his team better, especially with the whole the Rebirth situation where like the game
came out and it failed, like awfully I played it. It was bad,
and then when he did a realm Reborn, it was so much better
and more streamlined. And it's because he made sure his team did the work
that was necessary to make it work. And it shows. And I'm because
of him, I have full faith in sixteen. So I'm like, yeah,
you can't. You kind of deserve my seventy bucks at this point.
He did a great job with everything else. Yeah, man, I mean
thinking about it, like how much, like you said, they were able
to change what people thought at Fine Fantasy fourteen just because they took what was
great about Wow and and other MMOs and said, Okay, let's let's build
that into this. And then now it's like the leading MMO out there,
like yeah, and take that one team and and have them work on this.
It's like incredible, you know. And you were talking about the voice
after. I don't know if you've seen the guy the voices Clive he's been
everywhere this week, and Ben Starr he's been He's been like on every podcast
or one of the you know, the big big guys, like kind of
funny or game spot and all that. Um, it's cool to see like
that he and and I and by essentially you know, Clive. Kind Of
a lot of people were upset that that's his name, Clive, and then
it's like, all of a sudden, no, I don't care about the
fact that his name is Clive. This this dude's too cool. That's that's
the least my complaints, you know, like, actually, let me take
that back. If I complain that the guy's name is Clive, that's pretty
good. Like I could complain about other things, but now we're gonna stick
to Clive. But that's that that just kind of comes to the territory,
you know that that's kind of what they're going for. A lot of the
names are you know, related to Like I believe Clive is a British name.
Um, so I think they're kind of tying it in with that whole
universe because once again the Game of Thrones situations. Yeah, I'm trying to
center myself and I really can't. You know, You're good there, You're
good there. You know. I try to do the same thing, but
it's hard sometimes because you're like looking at the camera from one way and it's
like, wait, the camera is actually looking at me the other way.
Yeah, I also have this ultra wide monitor, so it's like, oh
yeah, it's crazy. So I mean like, did you I mean obviously
we knew going in it was going to be more like I guess Double Way
Cry or and all that, you know, more like I guess the God
of Wars that have come out. Does it Does it still feel like a
final fancy game to you? Or are you in that realm of like,
oh man, this is just totally different. Um. Well, the thing
is, I feel like this kind of combat has been frontloaded way of advance,
Like Square was pretty straightforward to being like hey not everything's gonna be turn
based. I think ten it was like the last one they're kind of like,
yeah, they're like this is this is it for turn based? You
know that' Like we're done. And then I eleven was eleven Yeah the m
Yes, twelve was that Gambit system, Yeah, which was also with the
MMO type where they're kind of just attacking and you're watching them. Yeah.
Yeah. Fourteen was the one, the last one where they had that sort
of like oh, here's where we're gonna be going. This is so fast.
It doesn't feel like turn based, but it is. And then all
of a sudden, we went full Okay, we're trying to really go action.
Yeah, because they even experimented on their non final Fantasy games with Kingdom
Hardstakes, they expanded on that combat system a little bit. They did a
lot of work until like building up to sixteen. So I'm not surprised in
the slightest that they went to this direction. And it makes sense because that's
what's kind of I don't want to say that's what's in, but that's that's
what's in. You know, a lot of people, a lot of purists
want the turn based, but there's a lot of people who are just really
night into that. And yeah, they're just like, Okay, well,
you know, let's try it out. Let's see what it goes. And
it works, that's the thing. If it didn't work, who knows.
But it does, so I can't really say anything. Yeah, And I
felt like I'm one that, like, I love action games, but I'm
gonna say the first off, I'm not like the one that gets the highest
scores or whatever. I work with what works, you know. And and
the fact that I didn't need the rings like the Dodge is actually done well
enough on normal that you can get a feel for when you should and when
you shouldn't. I almost, I'm not gonna lie, almost died playing the
boss that you play in the in the combat demo. She got me really
close, but I was able to, you know, do one of those
like last hitch things and and kill her at the end. But I like
the fact that it's like challenging but not dark Souls like, oh my god,
I feel like I'm bashing my head against the wall kind of thing.
Yeah, because I also kind of notice that the Soul's board games are kind
of like now they're slowly becoming the default. I feel right like across it's
it's implemented of the games like Star Wars, Jedi Survivor has that now where
they are, you know, they're they're bringing in that kind of combat style,
and I feel like Final Fantasy doesn't want to go that route, so
they're they're kind of like, hey, let's do something different. Let's do
something a little bit old school, because Devil mccry is that kind of old
school combat and it works. You know, they pulled it up, they
made it more modernized, and uh, I want to see how this works
in the full game and we actually have like all these abilities that we can
add on to it, because that's that's what really excites me about this.
Yeah, I do want to see where the story goes as well, because
the Icon Battle thing looked awesome. I mean, yeah, some of that's
probably gonna get kind of old because uh, you know, it is a
little bit like trying to just kind of get you through it. But I
actually didn't. I didn't understand a certain part and I didn't know you could
actually like fail and I failed the first time. Oh yeah, yeah,
where where I didn't hit if for it and a certain spot or whatever,
and he actually blew the Phoenix's face off with his fire or whatever. Then
it's like, oh, game over. I was like, what okay,
oh yeah at the beginning, right because I had the same situation, I
was like, oh I'm playing now, yeah, still seamless into that,
and I was like, oh wait wait, I'm actually controlling the phoenix now,
Okay. Yeah, yeah, I had the same feeling. I was
like, oh, oh we're starting okay. Yeah. I mean that's what's
so good is like the Senate normally, you know when you have that many
cut scenes out the wall, it kind of goes like, oh, all
right, whatever, yeah, but these are so good that, like you
you kind of get stuck watching it then go oh, crap, I'm supposed
to move now. So yeah, and usually there's like there's an indication,
and then this game was just kind of like, oh, it just assumed
you held the control or not, like popcorn or something. But it's uh.
With the demo, the graphics Titan, like just the Titan. Yeah.
I can't remember the name of him or what they are, but they're
that model. That was like I was taking pictures with the PlayStation screenshot out
in like every two seconds. I was like, right, yeah, this
is that was me too. I'm like, okay, I know, my
my thing's gonna tell me that it can't upload the picture because it's full or
whatever, but I'm gonna keep doing it. This is so good. Oh
man, Yeah, it was really good. Um you know. So,
I mean, look, we're we're both getting ready for this game to come
out in a few days. I'm sure all of you guys are as well.
I keep seeing this one guy on Twitter who's just constantly freaking hyping up
this game. I can't remember his name right now, but he's like a
content creator for Fantasy I think, and he's he's constantly talking about how how
much he can't wait for this game. So I know a lot of people
are doing that only a few days away and it's gonna be great. But
I mean, you've been playing another game that recently came out that people have
been hyped about as well. Afore, yes, yes, I've been playing
that a bunch um. Interestingly enough, I'm playing on a PC and also
playing on my steam deck because just like that on the steam Deck, it
works so good. Like I'm kind of upset that Lizard is not really embracing
the handheld as as much as I could, Like I know the rog ally
it will just work because it's a Windows machine. But using some like Linux
backdooring and using like the the desktop mode allowed me to put it on my
steamback and it's like it's like the perfect little device to like not a little
huge, but it's a perfect device for me, Like set in the couch
and kind of play while the kid watches TV or something, and like I'm
just killing zombies and skeletons while while she's doing her thing. So it's it's
perfect for that and even like medium settings, the game runs really well.
So we had Yeah before I'm really liking it, I played the barbarian I
kind of board, so I jumped over to the Rogue, who I'm really
enjoying with my my range build currently and uh, I'm I'm level like almost
thirty on two characters, so I haven't gotten to the end yet, but
I'm I'm building towards it. So you're liking, like I Act three or
four, So funny enough, I just started to act took only because like
I, I'm the kind of guy who's like, you give me this kind
of world and there's a huge, sprawling map and there's things to explore,
and if I'm like, hey, that's right there, I'm just gonna go
look at that, and it's like, oh, okay, hold on,
there's a live events over here, let me go to that. So I
totally get sidetracked, like completely, Like I'm not reviewing the game, so
there's no rush for me to get anywhere, so I'm just kind of like,
oh, there's that thing, let me go check that. Oh there's
that thing, and then lo and behold. Before I even get to like
the crescendo of the act, I'm like, ten levels above like what it
wants me to be, and I'm like, oh, okay, my mistake,
my bad. Think I should have just streamlined it and just ran.
I didn't know that, but I was just having fun. It's like,
it's it's a very immersive game for a for an AARPG, and it's it's
kind of up there for like a game that you're contender. I'd say,
I'm interested to see how seasons work out. But besides that, great story
so far, great cinematics, great gameplay, and besides some maybe internet rubber
banding, I haven't experienced too many issues. You've been playing with people or
just by yourself, by myself mostly other people i've seen jumping in out.
I haven't really played with friends because they're all still playing like World Warcraft or
something. They haven't jumped out yet. So yeah, well, I mean
that's good that you another game that you know to add to the list of
twenty thirty three games. At this point, it's been an incredible year and
there's more coming. Oh, the Game Awards are gonna be a blood bath.
I've been saying it's gonna be. Yeah, legend is all that you
got. You have Fantasy, we have Diablo Starfield coming out. It's gonna
be rough. It's gonna be the most indecisive year. I gotta say,
yeah, it's it's gonna be one where you know, it's Spider Man still
because Spider Man stuffer again, where it doesn't win anything because there's so much
around it. You know, yeah, it's gonna be one of those crazy
years for sure. But you know, just for me really quick, you
know, I've only kind of played the Fantasy thing because I've been This was
the last week for us at the office, so we've been focusing on getting
everybody out the door and all that stuff. So I did get to play
a little bit today. The Steam Next Best started, which I'm hoping this
week I'll get to play a lot of these demos of games that I was
really excited about throughout watching all those showcases and everything for the indies. So
if you you know, if you're somebody that's curious and you like to put,
you know, try out games. I don't know if Xbox is gonna
have they usually have one around this time as well where they put some of
those demos on Xbox as well, So I'm not sure if if they will
eventually have those if you're a console owner, but if you have a PC,
definitely go on Steam. There's like hundreds of games right now they have
demos, hum, so check it out. I played a little bit of
Enter Nights, which is the at indie like action RPG that kind of looks
like Persona that's also a dating sim so it was on the one of the
PlayStation's State of Plays. Oh yeah, so it's uh, it's definitely unique
for sure. So like you you're so your friend puts you, well,
you're you're playing a character, but they allow you to kind of name it
whatever you want, so you kind of you can either do too to one
or two things. I have it act like yourself or have it be someone
else. You know. So your friend gets you on a dating app,
uh, and then you're supposed to start going on this date and then craziness
happens and all of a sudden you get put into this where you're essentially fighting
like zombies sort of, and then you know, you go through the action
RG part and I don't know how far the demo goes, like if you
actually get through to some of the dating stuff, but it's fun. Um
the Combats actually, uh it was. It wasn't too hard to get into.
But I can see some people that maybe aren't big action game fans a
bit struggling and they want to actually do more of the story part. But
they do have difficulty modes, so if you're there more for the story,
they do have like a story mode option where they make the combat easier and
you can kind of just go through, um, the story, which is
they have some really good like animated like cut scenes, and then they have
like the end game stuff as well. So it's one that I'm definitely the
problem is just coming out in September in the week where what are Combats coming
out? Lisa pe Uh, there's some other big game coming out like that
same week and then that, and I'm like, oh my god, that
dude, that developer is gonna it's gonna suffer for sure on that. Oh
yeah, and it's it's it's hard because they don't deserve it. They don't
deserve Yeah, August is gonna be gigantic. September it's gonna be gigantic.
I was doing the content calendar for for Season Gaming and getting Ducks in a
row over there, and uh, I was looking at those months. I'm
like, what are we gonna do? There's so much, there's so much,
and I'm like, I had myself down for two reviews. I'm like,
oh, I can only do one. This is gonna be a little
rough here because yeah, two of them are right next to each other.
I'm like, all right, October's gonna be pretty big. And then like
November nothing. Yeah, like everybody decided to skip November this year for some
reason. Yeah, then Avatar in December seventh. It's like, what's going
on here? I don't know. It's just it's really weird. It's like,
instead of taking advantage of the Black Friday and all that time, I
guess they said, up, well, it won't get nominated for Game of
the Year if we don't put it in October. So I guess. I
guess. I guess that's all got to do it before then. Yeah.
It's it's crazy, man, Like, it's crazy. Just I guess kind
of go into any thoughts you had on the summer game fest that just just
happened. How much like it feels like we're getting into Jeff Keely is assuming
his dream here slowly but surely, like people are molding their game releases around
the Game Award. Summer game fests actually felt like E three this year,
like we're we're starting to get there. I feel like, yeah, I
feel like it's funny because I kind of I personally like to kind of joke
around on Jeff Keeley because it's you know, he's popular. It's funny,
right, But in all seriousness, I give him so much respect for like
he's single handedly pretty much saved this entire concept of a conference, especially when
you have all these people pulling out and the ESA is doing absolutely nothing to
try to try to keep some sort of legitimacy in the video game world.
They're they're just kind of abandoning the medium. And then you got Jeff Keely
who's like breaking his back to give back to the community in a way that
that one of the biggest organizations in the world can't. So I give us
so much respect for being able to be like, Okay, well, let's
go Kajima on stage, which she does all the time. Yeah, or
like let's let me get Elddn't Ring. I'm gonna show off the first trailer
for Eldden't Ring that's a huge deal. Final Fantasy seven rebirth. I think
it is, like that's a big deal, and like he's got stuff on
from from Summer Game infest that Sony should have had their in their conference,
right, that's a big deal. Yeah. The fact that Sony didn't Sonny
actually wanted to work with him. They didn't just shove it all in their
showcase and go like, oh, I'm sorry, Jeff, we gotta do
us first. Yeah yeah yeah, Which like if if I was Sonny,
that would probably been a move that I would have pulled. Is like no,
sorry, we want to show a Final Fantasy like not you. So
the fact that he's respected enough to get that is is a huge deal U
and for the entire world to kind of just like look at him and be
like, Okay, we see what you're doing and we respect it. And
I respect him for where he does. I used to put on I used
to work on an expo, a local thing by here, so I know
what it's like to run like a segment, and it's it's so hard.
It's so it puts so much work and you really need a good team to
do it. So I respect him for like putting in all that hard work
and getting it together, because I really don't think anyone else could have done
it. I really don't. It's it's that's what I mean for sure.
And for him not to just uh, he actually really did try to bring
gaming together instead of the ESA where it's like, hey, everybody to the
highest bidder, you do your thing and will just be your host and all
that stuff, and you pay money to have a booth on the floor,
and he's, yeah, he's trying to prove that, like you don't have
to waste money and all that stuff. Just do your showcase digitally, bring
your games to the like play days and all that stuff. Let people have
that experience of having the demos and everything, but you don't have to have
this extravagant thing that nobody really needs to. I mean, yes, do
I miss that? Like do I do? I love the fact when I
went to E three and like you get to see all that stuff on the
floor and it feels like, oh my god, you're like a video game
heaven or whatever. But I don't miss the whole go into like five different
halls and go in a million places for interviews and all that stuff. Either.
I don't so like the fact that it's all in that one place.
That's such a cool thing for a journalist. And then for the like gamers,
you know, for us Washington at home, it's also a cool thing
because there's so much packed in this one week and it and he's gotten it
better every week every year and number. At first it was like this whole
month long thing and it was like, oh my god, this is way
too much information constantly. And now he's kind of brought it back to like
what E three was, where it's like, Okay, it's one week,
you get a lot of stuff and then you get to chew on that for
the rest of the year. Yeah. Yeah, he did a really good
job with that. And uh, all the companies as well, like they're
reps and whatnot. Um, you know, when when E three was efficially
canceled, my heart went out to the guys over at Red Pop because I
had a handful of them and they tried very hard to bring E three back.
And it's just like when you're working with a company, like I said,
at the ESA, and they're not lighting a single hand, they're just
like, ye're sure whatever, like make us money. And then and then
you know, my heart like I said, my heart goes out not to
them hearing about that, but I'm what was that? That was actually my
my usual co host Mark He's he's watching there and he's, uh, he
always has some joke about Tommy Tollerrigo. Oh my god, so saying you
know, I mean, yeah, I don't know if you mind if I
got a brief tangent, no, go ahead, go I Tommy tellar Rico
is one of the most interesting man in men in gaming. I gotta say,
like Jeff Keilley is there too, of course, but there's something about
that guy like I just I want to be in a room with him and
just ask him everythingle like, no MIC's, no phones. I just want
to be like, what's going on, dude? What like H Bomber I
don't know if you felt like h Bomber guy on YouTube? Yeah at all?
But he did a video on the Minecraft sound or I think it was
Minecraft. It was at the oh Sound. Yeah, it brought him down
this wild rabbit hole that ended with Tommy Tellarrico, and I'm just like it
could blew my mind. And like every time I at least expect this guy
to show up, he does it's like he's just yeah, it's amazing that
we talked about music before he did Video Games Live. Yes, And I'm
like that was him, Like I saw that a couple of times. He
has some like cool credits in industries, and sometimes he tries to take credit
for things that like really weren't him. And it's it's the same thing with
like the him trying to ring back the in television am ego thing, and
it's that thing bombs so hard, like they couldn't even make it to where
like the Atari thing where okay that sort of exists, uh in where no
one talks about it but it exists. Yeah, Like he couldn't even get
to that where it actually launched and somebody actually reviewed it and talked about it,
like it just bombed. His point was, I don't. That's one
of the reasons why I want to ask it, because that that had to
be my kneelandering scheme. I can't, Yeah, I can't. That guy,
Like it's just like he's like a nightmare creature to me. I'm afraid
that I'm gonna I'm gonna like turn a corner and it's like boom. Tommy
Tellarrico is gonna be right there and I'm like, oh what, and he's
just gonna yell at me or something. I don't know. That's uh,
he's so interesting and it just like he really shouldn't be, but he is.
That drives me nuts, drudgs me absolutely crazy. Um, even the
guys from even though it's like Maga sixty four, like he's just an anomaly
of a person. Yeah, that's It's so true though, And you know
Mark's making a joke, but he loves retro stuff, so he actually probably
pre ordered the thing. And then of course you know it doesn't go anyway.
I know, I know plenty of people who did and they were really
upset. And I was like, once I knew, Tommy Tillery goes avolbum
like it's not happening to guys, I'm sorry, like that to be.
He even had the commercial and everything and then yeah, nothing like there's this
one YouTube preview of it. I forgot who did it. They're like,
oh, this is the most immersive game ever, Like it is not.
Yeah, it's not a good game. Like I'm sorry. I mean the
CDI did similar stuff. I mean it's not like you know CDI who that
throws her back. Yeah, there was actually some decent stuff on that thing.
I mean, everybody loves to hate on the Zelda games or whatever,
but like that was one of the systems. My dad is not a gamer
at all, but aside from the Wii, that is the one system because
there was this like wacky golf game for it, I can't remember with the
name. Yeah, and he had the controller where you actually it had the
roller and he had to actually like roll the thing like making seekers swinging the
golf club and it was actually really cool and like he would play that thing
with me for hours, and like it goes back to that whole thing of
when you actually try to make something that is immersive, right, it works,
but not to tell it man that should have stood in the grave.
Oh and you know Mark makes a point that he's like he knew it was
gonna be a scan from day one. Oh yeah. Yeah, it's the
way you looked at this thing and thought like it was gonna be something serious.
It's like, uh, like I think his nextployees could be like to
bring the engage back. Yeah, I mean, like, and the thing
is like he's one of those people that can sell eyes to an Eskimo,
so like the fact that he got Earthworm Jim forward to be exclusive to that
thing, like it's like wow, and then sadly it never came out.
Yeah, once again, he's like like Jeff Keilly is like the more lawful,
good person and he's chaotic just straight, and I'm just like I need
to understand him, Like I need to understand why. Yeah, instead of
having a Jack and Stranger Paradise, they should have put Tommy Telarco in there.
You know, him yelling chaos all the time. I can imagine it's
you know, it's on PC it you know. So I mean that brings
before we keep going just because you know, even though you are a senior
at a season gaming and season gamings, man, y'all have gotten huge.
Man. I feel like between that podcast with Ains and Everybody and and Hogan
Um and then you know, the site is such a big deal. I
love reading stuff on there. You'all do some great work. It's always cool
to like know where everybody's like gaming origins come, like, you know,
because not everybody, like Keith is not actually a games journalist. He's not
you know, from Outer Haven. He's not like this, Oh my god,
I always he started and decided he wanted to make the website, and
then he's kind of taken this turn. So like, I know there's other
people like that. It's cool to learn where where everything started for you.
Have you where you always a gamer from? From? Like the moment you
remember did somebody gets you into or did you get you kind of somebody gave
you a system and you started there. Uh. Well, I remember we
had Nintendo in the house I lived in, uh you know, back in
the eighties it was like everyone lived in the same house. Still kind of
like that depending on where you are, but it's uh, it was this
huge family of mine and we all had this Nintendo. I remember everyone going
back and forth, like playing games back, like swapping controllers and all this
stuff. But it really started that was like their system. I just had
to play Mariot want it. But it really started with the Sake of Genesis
with me like uh playing Sonic the Hedgehog um and like I loved the Sake
of Genesis so much. My grandparents bought one for their house, so we
would play games over there too with with them too. It wasn't like a
system where they just like put it in front of us and said do whatever.
While we do this, my grandmother sat down with me. We would
actually go back and forth and sonic and like trade the controller like if I
died, okay, now it's her turn, and she died back to me.
So, um it was My family embraced it, and uh it was
that that's kind of like where I was born from. And then uh,
down the road, I just started writing once I got jobs at a game
crazy, which is a yeah, the one inside a Blockbuster they right,
it was highywad video, Blockbuster video, right, yeah, but Blockbuster I
like their own they were trying to do with it just never took off.
Um, but yeah it was. It was part of Hollywood Video and I
worked there for a while. Then I jumped over the game stop and um,
I call it from GameStop on I called the evolution of the games writer
where it's like, okay, you started the GameStop employee that you like work
for like a PR firm, where you work for like a writing for a
video game company. It's like it's like a Pokemon evolution kind of a thing.
Um, and that's I started, uh working with Season Gaming about three
years ago, like right, kind of when the pandemic was starting and I
was like, okay, let me get a let me get a little bit
more writing experience. And I worked with these guys because I followed ains for
a very long time. You know. We met on Reddit and uh,
him and I hit it off, and then we got some of the great
dudes on on there. I met Keith at packs two years ago and he's
he's a great guy, and uh yeah it was. Uh that's kind of
where my origins and how I got to this point right now. And I
even even my day job. I m a a computer hardware web content writer
for a pretty big retailer. I'm not going to say who, right,
Okay, I'm just only because like this company is actually big enough where someone
found me to come and be like, oh that's weird. Yeah. Plus
you know, with Aarona, you never know. People are so terrible sometimes.
Yeah, so I'm like, you know what, I'm not going to
tellity one exactly who, but it's a big company and I do a lot
of their computer work. So it's video games. Since I was a child
of being seven seven years old playing Sonic that got me to where I am.
Now, Hey, I mean that's cool. You know you're not You're
one of those people that can say, look, video games did something for
me. Look what I'm doing with that now, you know. That's that's
always a cool thing. Is I remember growing up and my mom's kind of
always sort of supported it. You know. My dad was was exactly that.
He was not a gamer. He just put the thing in front of
me, and I don't think he expected me to grab it like I did,
and it became like the thing that I like to do aside from sports.
So he but he was never a oh, let me play with you,
let me figure out why you like it, you know kind of he
was just like, all right, I'm a doctor. I got too much
stuff to do. You know, you play, Yes, I gotta say
live. So it's it's one of those things where like, thankfully it's good
to hear those stories of like, hey, this does still still happen for
people, you know, and and the fact that gaming has grown to where
I look at all of the stuff. My brother, who's also a tech
person, is also like a streamer as well on the side, so it's
always cool to me to see how people go from that to another thing in
gaming. Yeah, that I met my wife through game stop like we're both
a system managers. Those different stories. We hit it off and uh like
it's it's so crazy how gaming has affected my life beyond beyond a reason.
It shouldn't be like this and it turned out perfect. So so like you
mentioned Sonic right, but what of your I guess favorite genres some some other
favorite games for you? Um favorite genres definitely rpg um MMOs are I'm big
into MMOs Like I love these times sink. I love any game where I
get to phillip a bar and then I can make numbers gill bigger. Like
if any game has that number go up, number numbers go up, you
got me? Um, Like I'm big World Orcraft fan. I'm big.
I'm really kind of diving more into Final Fantasy fourteen because I got burned out
on on wow. Um, But like I love those games. I love
my RPGs. I one of my favorite I remember playing. I remember telling
my parents I was too sick to go to school so I can play a
Final Fantasy seven that that that series means so much to me. Um and
then like I'm surprisingly enough out of left field of racing games. Wow.
I don't know why. I'm not a big car guy. I love the
way cars look, but I can't I can tell you how like parts of
an engine. Otherwise, like games four Is the Horizon and whatnot and Motorsport,
they're just RPGs for cars that oh yeah for sure likes think about it,
like you're literally putting better parts in your car so you can upgrade your
car. Yeah. Sometimes they do have numbers that go up with that too,
So exactly you put money into it, numbers go up. That's my
thing. It gets more expensive, so you got to send more money.
Exactly, you gotta do more races. You're grinding out for resources, which
I mean the first thing that makes you have to grand eff for gas.
You know, then I'm done right. Yeah, Like the games like four
Z, where's a little arcadie, it's not too serious, yeah, because
sometimes Grand Turismo, I can't play Grand Turismo in the regular Fourza because they
get too simulation. And I'm like, look, I love driving my car.
I've learned to actually like cars and like to know what's in them and
how to fix things or whatever. But um, I'm not a Oh my
god, I gotta have this and i gotta drive at like thirty miles an
hour to go the past this tur and I got, Yeah, I'm just
Grand tros a movie looks cool, but I don't want to drive. But
it does, it does. Yeah. Yeah, I'm the same way where
it's just like I like the Horizon series because it's a playground. It's go
around, do whatever you want, and they're just like for it's a Horizon.
I think they're on five is the more recent one where they're just like,
here's a supercar. You turn the game on. Here's a supercar,
go three hundred miles an hour, hit a ramp, go fly into the
ocean. I don't care. And I'm like, yes, that's how that's
how this scapes should be. But I do respect like the the the simulation
games and stuff, and uh, I think that's also partial, dude to
like my history with like Grand theft Oto and like those, you know those
kinds of games where they were very car centric, like Twisted Metal, like
even though it was like a car combat game, is still car centric.
So it was. There's another one I had tough headback forgot what it was
MMOs, RPGs and racing games. Well that's uh you know, that's cool
to have that one that that's a bit different, you know for me.
You know, like I said, I always like sports, and then people
are are you know, they go, oh, why do you like these
RPG things? And and and whatever. They're just a bunch of you know,
you know, before a Game of Thrones, it wasn't cool necessarily always
to like that stuff. So now and now Dungeon and dragons becoming like more
in vogue or whatever. It's not like oh, old eighties thing that people
used to play, and you're like a super nerd. So I'm like,
you know, I go, yo, you guys that are so crazy.
And a fantasy football you don't understand. That's basically an RBG for football,
right, We're just y'all are just drafting a team and then putting them out
there to see who gets you the most one. It's the same. It's
it's a yearly roguelike, you know exactly. It's it's not anything um crazy,
Like people just don't see it because it's like, oh, football school.
So it's like, no, it's the same thing, guys. It's
the same thing. It's you wear the jerseys, you know, you have
the numbers your favorite go to the bar and buy food and sit there and
watch games you don't give a crap about because one player is on it and
you're looking at your phone going, ah, my guys out, like yeah,
exactly. The medics had to come out to the concussion guys to come
out and save him, like throw my health potion, I give you some
HP. Oh man, I think I think Final Fantasy tends. Um,
what was it? Blitz Ball really kind of yes, kind of revealed that
like, hey, everything is an RPG. Everything thing in life is an
RPG, and if anything gaming now is everything is trying to if it's if
it's not already it's everything is, let's be an RPG. So Assassin's Creed,
let's make it an RPG. I'm like, oh, okay, not
bad, but I mean I like, let's make it an RPG. Let's
you know, like everything's got to have a grind, everything's got to be
like that. It's like, can we just leave the RPG mechanics to the
RPG guys please? Yeah? Like awards, but don't you know, do
something like these every game having like a percentage like oh, this increases your
defense by two percent? Like can we stop it. Yeah, Like not
every game needs to do that, like, because then it's gonna be all
homogeneous and won't have the awesome mc cleckiness the gaming Speaking of that really quick,
Um, before we get totally off the topic, did you have any
games that, like you were excited to see from Summer Game Fest or any
of the other showcases. Uh, the biggest one for me is gonna be
Starfield. Like how could you not? But I'm big I'm a big sci
fi guy. Like I said, I don't try to get hyped over things
because, like I feel like hype is I don't want to say it's genuinely
a bad thing, but how you deal with hype could end up being bad,
like if you hype it up so much and it ends up not living
up to your expectations, which over the last couple of years we've had a
huge experience with. So Starfield is one of those games where, like,
it looks so good, I'm super happy they showed off that Starfield Xbox controller
and the headset. I was like, oh my god, that controller looks
so awesome. Do I need those? I do not know, I do
not, but do I want them? Yes? Yes. I had a
friend who was gonna guest on the show and he couldn't. Um and it
was actually his birthday on Sunday. Uh you know, shout out said card
Dome Man. He got controller, and I was like, oh my god,
that looks so pretty. I'm sitting there going nope, must not press
button on Amazon, must not press I already have. I have two controllers
right next to me. I got this one, the thirtieth and the twentieth
anniversary one, which, like the control style just looks so good. This
is one of my favorites. And uh, you had the tight and fall
controller and then that broke on me, which was upsetting. And then for
Christmas, my brothers got me one of the Elite controllers with the design lab
blue. Yeah. I like this one. And I'm kind of like,
if I get another controller, I'm not going to use these, So yeah,
another controller you'll have to like purposely make yourself like go, okay,
well I'm gonna play with this controller today. Yeah yeah. And like the
Starfield control, um, it's just so good. And then uh, what
was it like? And that's and then I realized that that's kind of how
Microsoft is making their money because they're not they have game Pass, so they're
not making money off of games like Starfield really, but they'll make money off
the peripherals. So that's like their their give and take. And I'm like,
Okay, I don't need fine lab things such like a neat idea.
Man, it's so good. The design lab stuff is so fantastic. But
that's where their money is. It's it's in this kind of hardware. Um.
I used to actually work for Microsoft, so I know firsthand what they're
making money off of it. This is this is one of those things where
like they struck old with it. They really did, and it's good quality
stuff, I will say for the most part. I know some people had
issues with the Elite version one, but this one, Elite two, has
been holding a pretty well through my Diablo campaigns. So that's that's good here.
I mean, since we're on the Xbox Shop. You know, they
had, by all accounts, in a tremendous showcase after having like so many
years of people just downing them. But a lot of stuff came out after
the showcase. They had this big interview where they talked about a bunch of
different thing I kind of gave you like little highlights of things that they talk
about. Was there something that stood out to you that that you feel like,
Okay, we kind of need to talk about that. Yeah, okay,
So I'm a big heart of our guy. I'm a big PC guy.
I wrote a couple of articles comparing the PlayStation architecture with the Xbox architecture,
with like the Steam deck and like how the PC markets now changing because
it's in a weird spot right now. I don't know if anyone's really privy
to what's going on with like Vidya and am D and all these how that
affects consoles, which is a big deal. So you have it right here
about Starfield being at the thirty fps the Xbox Series X, but it's it's
four K resolution and this is like this is this hits home for me because
I love this game. I love how it looks, and everyone who's played
like the hour long demo of it has said they loved everything they interact you
with, And don't think black people are understanding in the full scope of what
this game is. Like, Yeah, they talk. There's a reason why
that directed was forty five minutes. I watched it a lot of information.
I watched this thing three times because there was that much info on it,
and if you really paid attention to it, they did drop hints on why
it has to be thirty frames per second on the console. On PC,
I'm expecting sixty, and I got no problem running it because the specs are
out and specs are pretty decent. But people will get like, there's no
such thing when it comes to like PC or just game development in any case,
there's no such thing as a decision. There's compromises. That's what all
these companies do. They don't go out and say, well, we're gonna
make this thirty. That's what we have to do. No, they tried
sixty, and sixty wasn't working no matter what they did, no matter what
horses, horsepower they threw at it, all the horses where what they threw
at it, it just wasn't going to work. So they said, okay,
well we're gonna have to compromise this in one way do we want,
because here's how it works. It's either And it kind of stinks to say
this, but when you look at a game like the scope and the scale,
with the regenerative concepts and everything being like thrown in your face quickly without
hesitation you need to consider, Okay, well we have four K resolution,
that's a need. Okay, well if we do four K resolution, that
we're gonna have to cut the frames from sixty to thirty? Like, can
we deal with that? I can deal with that. I don't know whether
the hardcore gamers who are complaining they can't deal with that, but they'll deal
with it, because if there's one thing that is weaker, the weakest thing
the world is in gaming, your boycott like we know this, yes every
time. Not to mention the fact that people always tend to forget the loud
voices on social media are such a small section of gaming. There is such
a wider bride of the game are out there that has no idea this is
happening, and they'll go and buy it because they don't care. Ye.
So, so there's something called the diffusion of innovation, the law of diffusion
of innovation, and it's if it was popularized by this speaker named Simon Senec,
and it's it's a marketing concept where you have a whole different you have
a couple of groups of people, and you want to market yourself to hit
these specific groups of people and starts out with the early adopters. You know,
that's gonna be the people buying the Starfield Controller day one or day like
negative zero, the games I've been out yet. People are buying shit up
part of my language. Then you have like the people who are like,
Okay, now I'm going to buy this stuff because they're buying this stuff and
they're saying it's good, so I'm going to dive into it. And then
you have more of those people. Then starts going down to the last resort,
the people who only change because they have to. And Microsoft is smart
enough to understand their market. They understand and who they're going for. They're
going a little bit for the early adopters because they're going to bring other people
in and they're reaching a market penetration of like fifteen percent, and that's what
they called the threshold. If you can get past like fifteen to twenty percent,
you're golden. And that's what Microsoft is doing with these games, is
that they know who they're going for. They know what's going on. And
the loudest people on the Internet are not the crowd they're going for. They're
not because there's many of people that that look at that and they go,
oh, man, I can do all this stuff and in space, and
they're going to just get grabbed on that. And then you go, oh
wait, I can just subscribe to game Pass and play these for fifteen bucks,
like oh right there, and then you got a new game Pass subscriber.
And they're not really what you would call a hardcore gamer, but they
got it based on what they saw on that thing. Yeah. They're the
way that Microsoft is. It's funny because all these companies are, like,
they have the smartest people on their staff. They they write checks for the
right people. And the guy on Twitter with an anime profile I pick it
was gonna tell me that they don't know what they're doing. Okay, yeah
right, like you know better? Sure. Um So the fact that like,
yeah, Red Fall was a big mistake and they owned up to that.
Um, it wasn't great. I didn't even play it. I just
I just know I don't have time. Yeah, I know it wasn't good.
Um, But with all the positive feedback I've heard in Starfield, like
and the fact that they pushed it off that far, they know they have
something really good on their hands and I'm just very excited to play. That's
that's my pick for for for that showcase. Um, because as of right
now, I can't remember a single thing other than that, uh he had
what a vow. They showed a little bit of Fable, which you know,
Fable were still a while off from from my understanding and the information that
I know, we're still a while off. Um, they just filled up
their last writing spot. So the narrative design team is a great team of
people, and as we know, Fables all about the narrative, So we
got to wait for them. People can that, people can fly, um
playground. They have to do that. They would like redeveloped their entire engine
to work for Fable because they don't want to make it a racing game,
so I wouldn't mind as an RPG, but um, they had to do
a lot of work to like just get to the point that they were had
so to see them. Actually, honestly, I was really surprised to see
them open with Fable because I was not expecting to have that kind of a
full trailer at that time because apparently that's also showing off like what the game
is supposed to be like. So I'm expecting maybe maybe two years, maybe
twenty That's what it fell back to me. The fact that they didn't even
put anything close because everything else there was pretty much like twenty twenty four,
that kind of thing that they didn't put a day on. It probably feel
makes them feel like we don't feel like this is going to be anything close
to right. Yeah, And the fact that we know that Microsoft has no
problem pushing games off that they need to be pushed off. But I like,
I know a lot of people at the point they read Fall and be
like, well what about that one? But there was a lot of stuff
behind this and they did delay that game, Yeah, it did. And
the fact that also it's like they didn't come in with that game. That
game was brought to them, they delayed it, and then, like Phil
said, it was at the point where it's like it didn't really matter how
much more time we gave it. The way that the game was made,
it would have had to take an entire overhaul. They could have taken even
longer, and how many resources are you going to waste on that when you
just put the game out and then hey, hopefully it pulls one of these
Ubisoft things where they can get it into a state where people might enjoy it
at some point. Yeah, Like I don't like seeing a game fail,
and I don't like it when people like say, like they praised a game
for failing or something like that. But Dreadful, it's like it's it's a
learning opportunity and plus it there's a lot of stuff going on at Arcane that
Microsoft didn't even know what was happening, Like a lot of people quitting,
you know, that huge team lost almost a lot of that pre team and
everything. You know, so like when when you're experiencing that sort of attrition,
like how do you how do you collect yourself and still release a product?
Like I think releasing a game at all is a miracle. I don't
think people understand like how much work it takes to get to that point,
especially when like you're considering pipeline, the scope and everything. Like I'm surprised,
I'm surprised to Halo. I'm not surprised, but you know, having
Halo get pushed off, like it's not in great spot right now because of
the after effects of the store. Imagine that came out when it was supposed
to, like that would have that would have been terrible, and then started
getting the push like, we know Starfield needed that push, so it's yeah
and uh, I mean, and you compare that to something like Legend of
Zelda two's The Kingdom was supposed to come out last year, but they spent
a year on just fixing bugs. Imagine if Nintendo released that when it was
supposed like a last year when they said it was supposed to supposed to come
out, that would have been a train wreck. But yeah, same thing
with Fall Fanacy sixteen, right, Yoshi, He basically said, oh,
we spent the last year basically year polishing it. I mean, yeah,
they're still gonna have to have a Day one patch, but imagine if it
would have they would have tried to have it come out last year. Yeah,
and that's kind of like where we are. What we're looking at the
industry is on end mass Triple A games need just a year of polished to
come out without any issues. I don't think the yearly schedule, like even
what was it Call of Duty. They went from just two teams, just
two two teams going, you get year one, we get year two,
then we get year three, then you get year four. Now they have
three separate teams who were working on three year cycle because they need one just
one year to just like figure out other stuff. That's where we're at in
Triple A game and not as to mention all those support studios that basically helped
them as well. So yeah, and then you got like what was the
core Barague I can't ever say his name. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
he was saying like, hey, listen, we made we made Gotta War
Ragnarok like two games into one because it would have taken ten years. We
had, you know, we had Todd Howard saying that Elder Scrolls six might
be his last game. Like, people don't understand how long it takes to
make a game like you you have right here that I mean, I just
uh yeah, Matt Booty mentions says that right, He's like, people need
to kind of understand that deb cycles were like five to six years minimum.
Now like a game. Yeah, uh that makes I mean, that was
gonna be my point of There was a lot of discourse, which sometimes this
course is bad, but this was actually good discourse. Yes of are we
getting too much into a divide of we have indies and then everything else is
triple it and we don't have that middle ground anymore, and you're absolutely right,
Like do we need to start getting back to that because there was there
were people bringing up which I you know a lot of times we get so
sucked into this and we don't think about the humans on the other side.
And it's like, can you think about that's five it's been eight years working
on the same thing every single day to get one game out of your life.
Five to eight years one game and you're yeah, and you're talking like
you have so many lives behind that, like you said, like I think
to put it into perspective the when Cyberpunk twenty seventy seven was announced, when
it launched, Okay, I met someone, I got married, I had
a kid, I went through two cars, I got like five different jobs.
You know, life happened in that lifespan, Like you really think about,
like and that their production was, that was a long production. That
was a seven year production. And you have that booty saying like, oh
it's average, it's gonna take five and if one thing goes wrong one you
need one, you get one key person to leave your company, and it's
that set you back months. You know, like someone loses the keys the
USB drive, you know, that's that's a project just getting that back.
We don't and we don't know exactly what's going on, and we don't deserve
to know what's going on, Like you know, we're not entitled to information.
And the problem is with the white people react. They make you not
want to give out that information exactly. I don't want to tell people where
my day job is because I'm afraid, so right, yeah, yeah,
like I you know, I don't want to. I don't want people.
I mean the fact that, like, oh my god, the game.
I feel like people are starting to be a little bit more understanding. But
like even even now, people will announce some kind of delay, and if
it's some huge franchise, you're gonna get people with death threats, like it's
like the world ended because now, oh my god, I asked off from
work that day and and like now I can't have that in I'm like,
yo, dude, I get it. Some people you really have to put
in PTO and all that stuff, and that's a big deal, but you're
not thinking about those are humans on the other side, and the catastrophe that
they will deal with even bigger if that game comes out and it is in
terrible shape than if they waited another year to release that, But you don't
get to know when you should because people act like that, Yeah, it's
a it's a big, it's a double a sword. And like, as
someone who's been trying to get into like the narrative design aspect of gaming,
it's I keep that in mind of like, yeah, like it's it's it's
a rough job. It's it's not the roughest out there, but I know
there's plenty of jobs that aren't really hard. But like when you have when
you have people who are leaving social media because they get hate like that,
that I should tell you something like that that should really awaken something in your
mind, you know as a person, not even as a gamer, but
just as a human being, to be like, you know what, maybe
we're taking it too far. Maybe gaming has gone too far, and you
know it's a far cry from what it used to be. Where a lot
of the retro guys will will understand where a game came out and it came
out, that was it. You didn't get no updates. You spend your
money on that game, your allowance, and that's what you got, So
be happy. Play through the whole damn thing. Exactly. Like if there
was something in there that makes it to where you can't progress, will I
don't know, figure it out, like, man, the phone number in
the back exactly call them spends I don't know how much money on collect calls
or whatever to get that get that resolved, or or buy the strategy guide
or whatever it is. Yeah, Um, you know, it's just like
that's the thing. Is there used to be that middle ground of right,
the thhqs and and all that, like having your double A games, and
now you don't really have that anymore, or if you do, people lambastad
for being a double A game, and it's so don't we I think we're
gonna have to get to the point where we need to accept that there are
going to be that that needs to come back, because if not, we're
gonna get more and more time between these huge games. Yeah, and like
that's the thing, um, A mutual of mine. Tony Planco. I
remember what he said to he said out last year, and I didn't agree
with him when he said this. He said that the Xbox series and the
PlayStation five feel like a lost generation. And at first I was kind of
like, we are you talking about? And then like after a full year,
I thought about it. I looked at these games. I'm like,
Okay, we have three or four Triple A games from first party studios releasing
the year three or four. That's not a lot. That's not a lot
of games. The fact that wee, yeah, yeah, there's we don't
know. We don't know anything about PlayStation going into twenty twenty four. We
don't know, we have no idea, and that's six months away. You
know, February. February will be busy with stuff like we always are,
but we don't know what's happening. You know, we can't. And you
start asking yourself, well, why did I buy this console in the first
place? You know, when we have these indie games, these indie darlings
out there that are so stylish and fantastic running on potatoes like that's that's kind
of why I really like the Steam Deck. And I think that also goes
back to Nintendo, the one brand that no one likes talking about. You
know, they love Nintendo, they do, but you look at what Nintendo
is doing with the Switch, and here's the kingdom is for what it is,
the fantastic game. It should not exist on that platform. It should
not exist on that using that tagware than the video tager chip. That's an
arm processor that that's an old it's almost ten years old at this point,
and a video hasn't pulled the plug on that, which I'm surprised, but
you you have all these games that can run on that hardware. Why would
Nintendo put the money to release a more powerful system when all it's gonna do
is blow up the budget it's going to make companies have to put more work
into a five year project and they're already granted, they're already taken like what
ten years to make a Legends all there or something. But it's you know,
having weak or hardware right now is not that big of a deal.
We don't we really don't need a switch pro. We don't like they've they've
shown us that. It makes me think of, well, why did we
buy a PlayStation, Like remember all the games that came out, Okay,
it's coming out for a PlayStation four NPS five. Well, we only bought
a place because we needed it for some reason. Well, yeah, because
you thought, right role You're like, oh man, we're gonna get that
step up, right, and then all in the pandemic. I think that
the pandemic hadn't happened, I think we would have bounced into the PS five
and series a lot faster. Yeah, they had to regress to putting God
of Ore and Horizon Forbidden West on PS four because they're like, we can't
even get people to buy this system because scalpers are freaking eating it alive.
And then there's distribution problems because of the pandemic, and we're only selling it
on our website, like and every time we put on our website it crashes.
Like at some point, you know, Microsoft might have been the smartest
person out there of having the series s because they could actually put that in
the store it was around. People didn't buy it for the most part because
you know, it's seen as the lesser of the two. But people are
buying that thing, right. You tie that with gamepath us and it's it's
a it's a big money saver for people that were going through issues in the
pandemic and even now, you know, the parents just buy a game system
for their kids. I almost thought about it when when my daughter was,
yeah, really getting into games. She she's kind of more of like the
i'll play roadblocks with my friends or do a lot, you know, to
get that age. They just want to do stuff with their friends, and
then my thing is as a reviewer or as somebody that's a journalists. Gaming
has kind of always been the oh, it's my other job. So I'm
always stuck having to do something with the system. So there's been a few
times where I got to play things with her, and and a lot of
times I can't because I'm I'm having to use it for something. But it
does the series US does work for what it was intended, But it's not
the next end console, right, It's not the thing that it's supposed to
push us forward, and I do. I did see Tony's point back then.
It's funny because he just posted like an artic that yesterday about how oh
now they are starting the next sin so ny there after everything that was shown
off on Summer Game Vest and I agree, right, it just took time
to get out of the pandemic stuff. He used the remote work thing and
and get in a better quality of life situation for a lot of people.
It sucks that all these people are like being demanded to go back to the
office. Yeah, I think sucks as well, because it's like their life
is already tied to this game for all this time for them to make a
living, and then you're going to force them to be in an even worst
situation, like when when now they have to do a commute that they didn't
have to, or they have to you know, be even more away from
their family than they than they maybe already are. Like it's just that's that's
the thing we don't think about, that human size. So perhaps embracing the
double a's or the indies are already expanding. We're seeing the Indians rotating towards
PS one, PS two look kind of games like I think people also need
to understand that because of how long quadruple as and triple as take to make,
we're gonna have to start embrace another thing that Tony was always up.
I'm not buying I'm not buying these consoles to play indie games, you know,
And then that's fair, that's what. But I do think we need
to embrace that because it's like indies is where you see the innovation. Indies
is where you see a lot of things that will eventually go into year Triple
A. Yeah, I um, when I went to Packs is a couple
of years ago. Um, it was an eye opening experience as a as
a journalist to cover the indie games because I remember it was twenty twenty two
at the Boston Convention Center. It wasn't it wasn't a big year. It
was not a big year. There was not a lot of Triple A games
there, if any real with there was any, Um, it was all
indie games. It was all you know, Double A and indie titles and
studio. But I remember they had this one little booth or kind of section
on the floor and it was just these little stations that one or two people
could play games at. And I was talking to the developers of these games,
and these are people who put their lives into these games. The game
to Werve from Half Human Games, the creator there, I can't remember his
name without of my head, but he was He was just fantastic to talk
to. He was a great person. And it was a two guys studio,
two guy project. It was done on Kickstarter, so you know it's
backed by people who believe in this project, and it was just kind of
phenomenal to talk to him and understand what it's like working as as just the
two person team, like the marketing behind it, the getting it officiated and
put through, like the Xbox service and then the PlayStation service and Steam and
all these places. And it's an indie game. It's a fantastic little game.
It's like a mix of those, like a tower defense game meets like,
yeah, it's a tower defense where you're ground and you're putting down traps
and you're trying to organize things to kill all your enemies before they get to
the end kill you. And it's it's a neat little game. I love
stuff like that, But we need to, like we need to embrace these
games. We need to because they're inspired by some of the biggest stuff,
like Tunic was inspired by Dark Souls and Legend of Zelda. Like people like,
oh, I want to play a game like this, and I'm like
telling them, like, yes, there's an indie game that's like that.
There's there's this game that's inspired by Metroid. You should try this. Ori
was an indie game. You should try Ori. I don't want to,
Okay, well, then you should try Bloodstained. If you're like Castlevania,
I don't. I don't want to. I want to play Castlevania, and
then you realize it's all about the name. It's all about yeah, and
it's kind of like, you know, Castlevania has a licensing fee, so
you know, Castlevania onto the title card of any game, that price just
went up thirty bucks. Yeah, I mean the Dead Cells d'alc right,
they had they put Castlevania in there and they got to charge you. Oh
yeah, but that that didn't you know that that was a awesome add on,
but that was negotiated like crazy and Dead Cells. If that was like
the first Cassimnia would have never done it, or like Economy would never send
the licensing fee for that. If it was like the first year Dead Cells
came out when it was still like early access, it had never happened.
And the fact that so many people picked up and now that game's everywhere that
came runs on my phone. But that's what's incredible. It's like it's not
this like hog of a game where you need to have this great setup for
whatever. You could play it on anything and it's a great game and if
and and you can just enjoy it as like learning that genre, because then
what happens Hades comes out and it's like, oh my god, Oh I
didn't know why I liked the roguelikes before. And I'm one of those people
right that I just didn't lack the fact of Okay, I'm just doing this
game over and over and trying it. And then when I played Hades,
I got it right cool and and now I kind of appreciate ate that genre.
But that's the thing, is like sometimes just blocking yourself out to the
fact that it's not this this huge, humongous game. It's like, this
is why I feel like both Sony Sony does this as well, that I
give them both credit wealth position and Xbox and Bryce indies in their own way.
But this is why Xbox has that ideat Xbox thing because they know that
when we're talking about years down the line, what's gonna keep game Pass going
aside from these these games that they eventually hopefully you're going to get in some
kind of dominant order, is these indie titles that are going to keep growing.
So just just start learning because that's what's gonna be coming. And that's
to mention that, like, the more you support the indie game market them
you get more games. Yeah, Like that's the thing that that really makes
the most sense out of this. You support the indie studio, right,
let's say, well, your spirit farther. I don't remember the company that
made it, but they made that one game was on game Pass the Great
and now they're making what thirty three immorals. Yeah, oh my god,
that looks awesome. Like I had, I had no interest in it until
I saw like Phil playing it with the team. I was like, Okay,
no, if this is actually really cool, but like that's an indie
game, like no one would have might let that game would never have happened
if Spirit Father didn't come out and people didn't like pick up on that game
and learn of it through game Pass, an Idea, Xbox and all that
stuff. It's you need to kind of support the indie market because the other
thing, too, is that we need to realize is that the Triple A
gaming market people are leaving it like in droves. Yeah, it's also hard
for you to get from. You gotta start somewhere, right, You got
to start exactly, so for you to get to that Triple A studio is
already so difficult. M You know, you gotta support the indies because they're
the ones that are going to keep the thing going. And then also when
those people leave and they start, they spent off their own studio. Most
of them, they have to start making an any game right to make money.
Yeah, I was. And it's funny because so I mentioned before,
I want to get the narrative design, and I've talked to a lot of
major developers and like how to get into that whole market area, and they
say that one of the biggest things you can do is go to GitHub and
they have like game jams and they say, like, find a game jam
that needs a writer and do it, because that's how you start. You
need to understand the process. You need to understand the concept of writing and
putting something out there and putting the work in because when I was when I
was younger, I always thought the world like the world owed me something,
and I was like a pos teenager, like, oh I deserve this,
So no, you don't. I don't deserve anything. You get to work
for what you want, and you want to be a game dev. If
you want to work anything you want, you have to really work for it.
And no company is willing to put their money on something where someone doesn't
know what they're doing or they've ever worked on it before, So you know
it sucks, but you have to pay your dues. You know, I
did freelance writing for a long time. I wrote a lot about games,
and I put my work into it and I got the job I have now
because of it. And you know, you're gonna have people at Todd Howard
leave. He said it. They can't, even though he looks like he
hasn't aged, and they put him like a cryotube nine months out of the
year like he's he Eventually he's gonna leave. These great minds that we have
behind the most the most awesome modern games we have, they're gonna leave,
and they're good. We need people to fulfill their shoes. And you know
that that starts from the bottom. That starts from the bottom completely. And
if we support these indie games, these smaller studios, who knows the guy
who made some of the best smaller the guy's super giant. I don't think
I've played a bad game from them. Who knows. If you give these
guys makind of starting as a game journalist, right, look at Gregor So
what he's been able to do over there? Um Gary Woodah, Yeah,
huge writer. He was, he was he was a game journalist. He
he was writing a bad video games now Star Wars, writing Rogue one.
I mean, for god's sakes, like you look at where a lot of
these people started, and like, if that doesn't motivate you, I don't
know what does right? Like and I think everyone should. Uh when when
I not even just support indie games, but support yourself. You know,
dude, you would do something right if it's not by by yourself at least,
Like just pick up a game pass is full of indie games. Just
pick one exactly. You're paying your ten or fifteen dollars a month, pick
something. Yeah, like even if you play for ten minutes, that's ten
minutes longer than someone else like gave it attention. Look, I'm not gonna
lie. There's a lot of there's a lot of stuff on Steam that is
not great. Okay. They they have a like minimum level one hundred dollars
fee or whatever that you gotta pay to get, Like that's all you gotta
do. You gotta pay that, and then you can put your game on
there like it's like and then even you go on to itch or whatever,
you don't have to pay anything so it's if we're gonna go down to that
level, then yeah, sure you're gonna find stuff that's not great, but
that does not that doesn't Maybe that's the base level of what indie gaming is
right now. There's a lot of people by man all this indie gaming stuff.
It's not really indie games anymore. You got all these people supporting it
and whatever. But it's like, if that's the base level, the stuff
that you see on game Pass, stuff you see on PS plus, the
stuff you see that's like usually the top part of Steam or whatever that's supposed
to being curated. That stuff's been fled through with reviews and everything like that.
You know you're going to get something good. You just give it,
give it that time. You never know. It could absolutely surprise. You
give a game ten minutes. Give it ten minutes. That's all the devs
want. If you don't like it, then you know you don't like it.
That that's not a big deal. That's the beauty of those services.
You don't have to keep playing it. You can you can let it go
and play something else. Uh, since we're on that topic, you know
they there's there's a feeling in or well Phil was asked, you know,
there was a lot of questions as I put in that list of stuff,
but Phil was asked a question that I felt was very interesting because we see
how Sony and an Xbox differ on what they do with game Pass. What
did you do with PS plus? What did you with PC gaming? Right?
And Phil was asked what is your take on PC gaming? He said,
well, PC gaming is on a window for us, it's a market
that we want to bring our games to day one. And then you listen
to Jim Ryan and Herman Holst and they're saying, well number one for us
as Poystation Pointation five, that's what we care about those PC games. They'll
come out a year or two whatever later, and you guys can buy them
on PC if you want, but we're going to make sure our PS five
gamers get fed or whatever first, which that's fair as well, right,
And then psbus does not when to put their big games day one as XBOS
does. So do you when you see that? Like I guess obviously both
of them prove that both of them work in a way, But do you
have a preference? Do you think one is better than the other, Like
going long term, looking at things. Well, I'm primarily a PC guy
these days, so if a game's come to the PC, that's better for
me. That's better for me. Um. I think Sony can do whatever
they want. They're in the hardware game in a different way. I remember
an interview with Major Nelson ten years ago when PC market, when the PC
gaming space was like on the rise, like it was still an its infancy,
but was getting bigger. And Microsoft saw like, hey, listen,
we need to need to capture that because no one else is UM and they
don't want Apple to beat them to it. So UM when they in an
interview with Major Nelson, someone asked him, oh, so what about the
PC market? And Major Nelson said, oh, you mean our other console?
Like that that said to me, like, okay, they're serious.
They're serious about delivering on the PC market. And the fact is that,
like the PC market has grown exponentially, it is gigantic now. It's it's
too hard to you can't ignore it. Um, what's Sony. It's really
interesting because consoles don't make a lot of money. They don't They make about
maybe forty dollars of problem, and they have to sell it at a loss
because if not. It's a ridiculous Yeah, the expense for everybody, so
they have to they have to sell it on to sell it the software and
that that's kind of the big difference here is that Sony is selling you the
console. They're also selling you the software. They're also selling you the controllers,
they're selling you the other parts of the peripherals, the selling you the
PlayStation VR, the selling of the games of the VR. And they're saying
no to the PC market because who gets a cut of that someone else?
Right, Valve gets a cut of the money, or Epic gets a cut
of money, although that as much, or Microsoft gets a cut of the
money. So they don't want to do that. They they're Sonys. As
much as I do like all these companies a lot, Sony is probably the
most nefarious of them all because they don't they don't want people to go outside
there their walled garden. They don't want people to see, you know,
these games running super high fidelity on a PC because they're like, oh,
that means they don't want you to know the grass greener on the other side,
Yeah, yeah, that's not always the case, you know, with
Last of Us on PC. You want to talk about that one, but
but it's it's very like I played Spider Man on PC. It was like
night and day difference. I'm telling you night and day difference from from the
PlayStation five to PC. But not everyone has my PC building. That's kind
of like the big downfall. I don't think it hurts Sony if they put
their games on day one on PC as well, you know, because I'm
not pushing a physical media. You know, they can they could have a
separate contract with team or whatever. I don't know the semantic spind and I
can pretend I do, but it's as a gamer who plays most PC,
is kind of upsetting to see them go that route because the PlayStation five,
so much as I like it, is weaker hardware to me, so I'm
not getting the best experience. And that's kind of like why I had Final
Fantasy sixteen on the back, because I was kind of like, Okay,
I want to play it on the best hardware, and the best hardware that
I own is not the PlayStation five. It's not as much as we'd love
to say it is. It's not my PC is way both PCs are way
better than it, and you know, I Microsoft understands that, and they're
like, you know, we want to give people choice because that's what their
thing is. They they had their walled garden with the Xbox One, and
I was I was a beta and alpha tester for that console. It was
it was very walled off until Phil Spencer came in and he was like,
no, let's open the gates. Let's let's do the total opposite is currently
what we're doing is not working, and Sony really want big with the PlayStation
before, and now we're seeing Sony kind of backstep and they're acting like they
did when the PlayStation three came out, where oh the price tags not so
bad. Oh you know, this isn't so bad, this is good to
getting a little cocky. So yeah, I think Microsoft is playing their cards
right, and I think Nintendo is just in the background, like just counting
money and be like, oh, what's up now? All right, and
I don't worry now, you guys find it out though. I mean,
look, Nintendo is the reason the Steam Deck and the rage ally and all
of that stuff exists, right, the reason why Sony has that project que
thing where you can remote play it or whatever. Like I don't I mean
not to much exact thing looks really stupid. It looks like basically, you
st if that's really what it's going to look like, you already have that.
You're selling people backbone controller with your your PS five thing. They're like,
what are you doing? I hope that's seriously a concept because holy crap,
I meaning Sony. It's not that, but that's the thing. It's
like, um, it's like one step forward, two steps back with Sony.
Right. They feel like they can get away with it because where they
are right and then exactly and like the whole their whole version of PlayStation Plus
with the three tiers or the Essentials or whatever they call it. Yeah,
I'm just like this is listen, I'm in this space. I'm I am
terminally online. I get it. Yeah, like we get it. We
understand how this works. But you look at like the average person and all
this is done is like this is done to confuse the average camera, like
the average person who is an online who doesn't know the ins and out,
so you need to talk to someone to turn the brightness up on their phone
because they don't know how to do it. Like it's they're kind of like
it's it's very nefarious. And meanwhile, you have Microsoft. It's just like,
give us fifteen dollars, just play everywhere. We don't care. You
know, we want you to play everywhere. We will talk about how much
you want you to play every where. Sony's kind of like, yeah,
you can stream. Oh now we're gonna make a big deal about streaming all
of a sudden, because it's it's possibly causing this deal that we don't want
to happen to be a problem. And and like, oh well, Microsoft's
pushing it, so we want to do our own cloud thing because right now
we're having to pay Microsoft to do our cloud for us. Yeah, like
I get it, I get it. But it's like, you know,
you guys had cloud first, right, If you guys would have actually gone
after that, you could have been sitting pretty where Microsoft is once again behind
you. But that's the thing is I think most of the time, Microsoft,
I feel like has been behind right because if you think about what they
want to do with Xbox One, always online, a lot of stuff,
well we're kind of always online right now. A lot of games have to
be always online. Now they're trying to push into like play everywhere thing,
and now it's funny. He's like, oh, you know what, I
think we kind of need to do that too, Like it's yeah, it's
it's a it's two mentalities fighting each other. Um, there's a there's this
thing called this is constant of do you know the game you're playing? And
that's what these these businesses are playing. They're playing two different games themselves.
There's the finite game and the infinite game. And the finite game is when
you have two teams who are competing aust each other that they know the rules,
they know that there's a definite winner and there's a definite loser. There's
the the finite game. That's finite game. Then you have the infinite game,
which is the goal for that is just to stay in business. Uh.
Microsoft has learned that they've learned that the goal isn't to beat the other
person. The goal is to stay in business. And Sony is playing it
where it's like, Okay, we know we have the same business, but
we really want to beat them, Like that's not really what we want to
do, but we want to. So they're trying all these different things to
try to beat the competition and it's not working out that well. You know.
I mean it's working out now, but we're starting to see that.
Yeah. And that's the thing. It's kind of like Death of a Thousand
cuts with them right now. It's just like they got a lot of people
on board with the hardware and the promises like Ratchet and Clank and Spider Man
and all those games that look really good. I'm going to play them.
I'm going to. But when I'm done with those games, am I gonna
keep the PlayStation from collecting dust? That's the big thing. Microsoft is able
to keep people going, you know, because of their third party support and
game Pass, which is super easy to use and a super easy concept to
understand. They know that, like they know that there's no finish line.
That's what it is. There's none there's no finish line. But and here's
the genius by the whole thing is that Microsoft knows that they understood that years
ago, and that was it was a big thing when Windows eight came out
and it didn't do too hot. So they're like, okay, we gotta
jumped the Windows ten. That the jump instantly because they knew it just wasn't
going to work and didn't. And Bomber left and all these people left,
a big, big exit of a lot of major names, and meanwhile,
Sonny was kind of like sitting on their laurels and going like, oh,
we don't you know, we don't have to worry about anything because they're in
this array. And then they collected themselves and realized, Okay, here's our
new approach. Instead of being the world garden, we're gonna give open access
to everyone. We're gonna have games everywhere. It's going to hit us,
but it's not about the short games, about the long game. You know
where we're going to be in ten years, and Sony it has been and
it's very obvious. Sony has been playing the immediate short term game and now
it come in and Marcrosot was making it easy for them as well to play
the immediate short pining. It was like, oh, we can just keep
doing gotcha's because you keep screwing yourself. And then oh, well, while
y'all are developing this thing over here, we're kicking your butt. And they
didn't really see to be fairer to PlayStation. They probably didn't think that this
was going to work right. Yea, even though Microsoft has what you call
infinite resources, they probably felt like, Okay, eventually the game Pass subs
are going to hit a wall. We're going to start making it to where
they can't get the big game. So people are not gonna keep subscribing to
this thing. Microsoft is going to stop putting money into it, and eventually
they're gonna have to cave the service. Right, And then all of a
sudden, oh wait, this is actually taking off. Maybe we need to
do something about it. And here comes PS plus right, And then the
thing is that Microsoft turned it on his head again with the Idea Xbox thing
because they're like, we can't fight Sony, but they could, but what's
a point of wasting money to outbid Sony on getting a third party onto a
system that the third party really doesn't want to do because they're not gonna buy
the game, They're just gonna play it on game Pass and then they're done
with it. Right. So they have this like pipeline that keeps giving them
games to put on game Pass, Like it's like it's this ingenious thing that
I actually didn't really think about it until last year of like, wow,
if you really think about how many games they have in that program and how
many they keep putting in. They can literally just keep putting games like,
look, they're not the ones that catch your eye if you're a casual gamer
or whatever, but they fill up the thing. You can say, oh
man, we have four hundred games or whatever, and it's not four hundred
old ass games from the PS two PS three ear which that really does have
a finite cap on it because talking about old graphics, you're talking about,
you know, things that people are like, oh man, I don't want
to go back and play, right, Well, why are they remaking all
these games? People don't want to go as much as how awesome Final Fantasy
seven is, don't want to go back to the PS one and play.
Why are they putting it on on a mobile version of that that looks cooler?
Because people want to play the thing that looks cool. So yes,
they got push their hardware. That's what it is. They got to push
their hardware, and it's that that's kind of the beauty of hole that.
So this back and forth is like you have Microsoft of the hands and multiple
pots, and Sonny wants you to believe that they do too, but it's
really one track for them, and it's the place they're starting to get into
the whole Oh well, now we got into the live service thing. Which
that's the thing that I think could be a real big turner of dude,
if those live service games go the way of some other live service games have
been going, if they could really go the other way quickly. And the
thing is that, um, the live service game style is a matured it's
a mature genre. That's it. You have to the amount of breaking in
you have to do. Once again, it's a diffusion of innovation. Who
you got to get to hit that market penetration of fifteen to thirty percent?
Who are you getting? You're not gonna get the early adopters because they already
invested all that time into other games of Fortnite. How are you going to
get the Fortnite gamers off? You're not pulling them from their game, they
already have sunken cost How you get the World Warclve gamers, the Final Fantasy
fourteen gamers, the Destiny players. Yeah, you got Bungee And are you
going to get Bungee to people to get off Destiny to start playing Marathon?
Yeah? And from what I understand, Destiny too is kind of in a
rough place content wise, because Bungee's A team was taken off and this has
coming to me through very legitimate sources. Bungee's A team has been pulled off
of Destiny and they've been put on to Marathon. So you're competing with yourself
now, like what, you're going to release ten live service games between now
and I think it's like now in like two years from now or something like
that. I don't remember three ye two to three years ten to twelve live
service games, and you expect you're competing with yourself. You're giving people way
too much choice. And this choice is a good thing, but when you
give too much choice, you get choice paralysis. And you have one company
that's supposedly looking over everything, and it's like, do you really want just
one company looking over eGain because they have a certain style of live service game
that may not work for everybody. If you try to start every live service
game you have into that, it's not going to do right either. And
the things that people are so limited on time and your audience that has lifted
you up so far, they're older now. This is the one thing Blizard
understood with World to Warcraft. Their user base is older now that people who
played it back in two thousand and four when it first launch. I'm gonna
be thirty seven. Like, I don't. I don't have the time I
used to have when I was, you know, nineteen playing that game.
I don't. If I play it, I'm playing maybe a couple of hours
a week if that. But besides that, like oh Diabo four came out,
seasons haven't started, but there's a lot of controversy behind it already about
how they're going to implement how this system works. And I can't. I
can't put time into filling out a battle pass for all these games. I
have to pick one. Like not so much. You're paying for all of
them as well, Yeah yeah, like yeah, sure, oh ten dollars
year, ten dollars. There. It doesn't seem like a big deal because
I'm older and I have money now. But you have these people who are
becoming they're younger, and they're getting into modern gaming. They might have time,
but they don't have money, so what do you know. That's the
problem we're getting with the streaming services as well. It's starting to get to
the point where it's like, uh, yeah, people don't want to keep
paying more and more prices for the amount of content that you're giving, and
then when you try to overproduce the content, guess what you have to do
start having to pull it off. So that's the thing with gaming is then
what ends up happening. They end up killing the live service game because they
can't afford to keep it running with the amount of the small amount of people
that are playing it. And that's the thing is also I think it makes
the point of why Microsoft is doing their thing of saying, look, we
can make we could take forever trying to make our own games, or we
can come and buy Activision Blizzard and get an easier ticket into places where we
aren't strong. And and you know right now the FCC's trying to block the
deal with that injunction or whatever. Like where do you sit on that deal?
Do you think? Are you? Are you in that state of like
I'm worried? Oh my god, man. I know people who work for
Blizzard like personally, and I worked for Microsoft. So the thing is with
me is that Microsoft is very serious about their work ethic when it comes to
having a positive work environment. As we all know, Activision did have some
trouble, you know with Activision Blizzard had some trouble with sexual assault and allegations
and those terrible stories that came out about two years ago. I want to
say it's been and when I read those stories and like my heart sank.
It was very hard to root for this company, a company that I loved
and spent most of my life with. And what I know, what I
know about Microsoft, and I know like if they were absorbed, the humanity
aspect would go up so much more because I was when I worked for Microsoft,
there was a sexual allegation case that happened while I worked there with a
manager that I had, and they take that super seriously. I Am talking
secret meetings, talking to lawyers, the whole nine. They take it super
seriously. They do not mess around with that. So I don't care that
I really when it comes to major corporations. The only thing I'm scared about
is that if they do get absorbed, that a lot of people will lose
their job because the jobs that they have would be they wouldn't be relevant anymore
because the business has absorbed the other, which is a thing that does happen.
That's my only worry. I want people to have a positive work environment,
and I know Microsoft can give it to them. On the other hand,
I don't want people to get fired if their job is no longer needed.
But I think that assign I think just on the humanity aspect I want
to go through. I don't. I don't care about Diablo and game Bess.
I don't care about what the warcraft on Xbox I don't. I don't
care about any of that stuff. I just I want I think. I
don't like Bobby Cootic. I don't like him at all. I think he's
a terrible human being. I want to know who does I don't. I
don't think the variety apparently or somebody, yeah, whoever wrote that article two
weeks ago. Um, I think it's a terrible human being. If there's
one thing we'd all agree on, it's that, um And I don't want
to see him employed. I don't want to see him in charge of people
anymore. And that's the only way that is, that's the only way to
do it, because that guy's not leaving him less someone hires someone. But
like it's that's that's my take from the whole case, because I otherwise I
don't care. Like I got no skim in that game yeah, I mean
I think it would be I personally don't like the games that I like from
Activision. I don't know if they're gonna like Crash will probably keep going and
so will Spiral because we know Phil Spencer's mentioned that. Um, I'm one
of those people it likes. I love guitar hero and rock band Like.
I don't know that Philli Spencer's gonna bring that back because I really don't know
what you could do with that at this point. Um, that's gonna make
it relevant for people, you know, of of my daughter's age and forward.
But I just want to see those studios separate and not only work on
call of duty and get to do stuff that they want to do exactly have
the freedom that that you're gonna you see, But that's the and all these
other studios like an Exile getting to work on that Clock Revolution game, it
looks amazing, Like you can you imagine Toyster Bob getting to work on maybe
something that's not Crash or Spiral like their own thing like that would be amazing,
you know. So Yeah, Microsoft has the bones of a company that
wants to produce good games and not to us workers and not create just Cold
Duty twenty twenty three. Yeah, exactly, And I mean just just because
we're on that stuffing just really quick, any thoughts on the embracere thing like
that. That just made me so sad for everybody that works there. Yeah.
Yeah, it's never a good thing when the media outlets in the media
companies start consolidating their reporters um and the coverage, especially when you see a
really big situation happen and you need readers, you need solid writers to talk
about it. Um. And that's as a as a freelancer myself. It
you know, it's really rough to see um see people like oh because now
they're they're starving, you know, right, they just they just have a
solid job. They're let go. Now they have to fight with other freelancers
to to get paid and the it's just it's just a terrible situation. It's
a really terrible and uh, the media world has seen fair amountal losses within
the last two years. And yeah, no matter how you look at it,
it does it really makes me sad, um that that's the route that
things have gone. And then you bring an AI into this and it's like,
oh god, that could really travel wedge. Yeah, so the only
thing you really do is not see it sucks because it's a catch twenty two.
Do you not read the content coming from these crump companies anymore knowing that
the people who are still there are also going to lose their job, or
do you you know, do you continue to read what they have? And
the only answer I have is like, find these people on social media and
if they have like a co fi or something like, throw five bucks at
them. That's all I can say. All I can That's the only thing
that I can think of, because there's so many people out there who have
been like who've tweeted like, hey, listen, if I don't have a
job in three months i have, I'm getting kicked out of the country,
Like that's the worst ones too, like that. I've seen people just like,
oh I lose my visa, I have to go back and I have
nothing over there, Like yeah, this is this is the terrible reality of
letting good people go, and then like I feel guilty for like trying to
to pitch something when I know there's some good right, I already have a
job. I don't need to be pitching other articles knowing there's people who who
are also pitching who don't have a job. They don't right, they lost
everything. I feel I feel guilty doing that, and I can't, so
I've laid off of that for a while and trying to make other other work.
Happened over at Season Gaming for that exact reason, and that and that's
why we got to, you know, promote and continue to help with remote
work because all these people that have to come over here because you're forcing them
the good one office where they could work from home and do the same thing,
especially with writing. You don't get something. Twice I've been back to
my office. I do not like it, I bet right. So just
to end things here, even though we know what everybody's buying this week,
it's Fa Fanacy sixteen for sure, But there is some other stuff. Speaking
of towards the Bob Crash team rumble, that online party game comes out actually
like right now. You can go buy it right now, pretty much as
you're listening to this Alien's Dark Descent game, which I thought looked cool when
they off Game Awards comes out. Also it's an RTS in the Aliens universe,
um, and then you get some indie stuff super Meat Boys coming back.
But in Puyo Puyo form with Doctor Fetis the Mean Meat Machine. There's
a first person airship based survival game Forever Skies. It's also coming into PC
and seven Xbox um. And then that fire Boom which is technically Fireblom seven
is hitting the antenna switch online. Yeah. So gearybuddy, everybuddy, if
you're not hyped already, Final Fantasy sixteen week in a few days. Um,
thank you so much. See this was such a like awesome conversation to
have. Thank you, this is great. Thank you for having me.
Uh you know, hopefully we can have you on again. I don't know
if you want to promote yourself or sure. Uh well, you can find
my work along with other talented writers over at season gaming dot com. You
can check out the live podcast that's played every Sunday, I believe at eleven
o'clock Eastern Standard time called the Bitcast, where we have ans Dan good Old,
Richard Hogan Travis from ign Tyguy Travis you might know him as they're always
streaming every Sunday with their bit Cast. You can find me online on Twitter
at Steve Esposito SG. If you can find me on I'm also on TikTok
where I talk about computer stuff that is on I believe agitated. Still I
should have prepared that one. And yeah, that's about all my little my
little bits. All right. Well, I mean, if you enjoy what
you heard here with Steve, Mark will be back soon, I think about.
We're still going to be having guests hopefully every you know, every week
or two. And you know, if you like what you heard, you
can always subscribe Video against the Max on the YouTube channel. You can if
you hit follow subscribe there you get not just what we do here Video against
the Max, you get the routs of broadcasting folks, which I'm sure they
have the Transformers review already in the can there on Dammy Hollywood, or taught
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also listen with your ears on podcasts search Video against the Max and we'll be
there. So yeah, thank you so much, Steve, and we'll see
you next week everybody. We'll definitely be top play sixteen later