Only XBOX Can Kill Xbox, Unreal 6's AI Update & Pokémon Training Drones | Games For Breakfast

[music]
Good Friday morning, MATT.
OH, GOOD FRIDAY MORNING, WILL.
A GOOD FRIDAY MORNING TO ALL OF YOU.
Welcome to GAMES FOR BREAKFAST, THE ONLY INTERNET TALK SHOW WHERE WE TALK ABOUT THIS week's gaming and tech news, BUT THEN ALSO IT'S FRIDAY. IT'S FRIDAY, got to get down on Friday. Everybody's working for the weekend, weekend. You listen, I don't remember the rest of the words to that song. But it's important that we know and note that this is the first of many Games for Breakfast now on Friday mornings.
That's correct.
Yesterday was Thursday, Thursday.
That's right.
Today is Friday, Friday. And we we we so excited. We're so excited.
That's true.
We're going to have a ball today. That's it. I'm not going to keep doing it. It's fine. Uh how is everybody? Welcome Will, welcome back to to Fridays.

Yes, yes, yeah. I I have not experienced a Friday. Uh actually, it's kind of weird. Exactly 1 week ago right now, I was in the airport.
That's right.
So yeah. Uh you know
Fireball, we are nothing if not uh consummate professionals. And we wait until each and every one of our viewers is back to their PC before we start the show.
Uh yeah, in fact, thank you for letting us know that does help the show move forward.
Yeah, right.
Um I'm very excited for this new this new chapter in Games for Breakfast. It opens up a lot of a lot of different opportunities. A lot of the stories we're talking about today actually didn't break till later on Monday or a little later, which is really nice because otherwise we would have been talking about like Flexseal Sicks, then all of a sudden boom, Xbox is shooting itself in the knee again. So like [clears throat] uh I'm very happy about that. Also, uh first and foremost, this should have been the first thing I said. Happy Juneteenth, everybody. This is uh I hopefully everybody is uh not working and and and hanging out and having a

little bit of time off to celebrate June 10th. When we planned this we didn't we we didn't we didn't get our our ducks in a row enough to realize it but it all kind of it all kind of worked out and we're we're very happy to be here.
Yeah.
Oh Will.
Yes.
We have a show. Do what else was in there? Was there more stuff in the notes? Let's see.
Uh we were
were going to talk you you had new schedule and then you wrote why?
Yeah so just just real brief cuz cuz some people are like but why are you moving this to Friday? Couple reasons. Couple reasons. One we are now talking about this week's news instead of last week's news. That doesn't seem like a big thing I promise you it is.
Yes.
Um second this now lives this is current for the weekend which we think will help the algorithm all hail the algorithm get us to more eyeballs and help us find more Janet's who will who will watch this later and if you are a Janet seeing

this for the first time over the weekend say hi in the comments.
Janet's are the names of people who are on YouTube watching this. Brad's are the names of people who are in the chat in Twitch watching this and Rocky's are the people over on Nebula who watch this then then that's just how it goes that's how it's been since time immemorial.
That's true. And then the the the last one is we're we're goofing the whole schedule up. We just we just sort of went and then the whole schedule is just changed. So not next Tuesday but the Tuesday after cuz Jeff is traveling design clubs will be moving to Tuesdays. And we're doing this for a bunch of reasons some of which are data driven and some of which are just the vibe. The data is that Thursday is the worst day of the week on Twitch.
What?
It's the worst day so
But you've been doing a show and we've been playing games on Thursday.
That's right. So, we have abandoned Thursday like rats from a sinking ship.

Um Thursday will be the day where I get all of my um stuff done. So, if you are are someone who wants to send me stories, which we always appreciate, for Games With Breakfast, do that on Thursdays. That's when I'm prepping the show. Um but Matt and I are going to play some games together after this. In fact, uh what we'll be doing today is we'll be beginning Destiny 2.
That's right. From the from the from the end's beginning.
Right. That's right. Now that it's a complete whole, we can finally begin it and not worry about falling behind. Um so, we're going to we're going to play some Destiny 2 uh and then uh next Tuesday, instead of Design Club cuz Jeff won't be here, we're going to be pondering an orb. Um orb. Ponder, everyone. Together.
Got to do it. Got to do it.
So, yeah. So, that's that's why that's the short version uh just to get ahead of the But, I look forward to this upload day. We did, too. But, the we're we're trying an experiment. We got to we got to we got to mess with things and see what the data tells us.
I also think our work-life balance might

be a little bit better that way. Will, you don't have to prep a show on a Sunday. Um and
Yeah. And I'm not prepping the schedule for next week on a Sunday anymore. I'm prepping it on Thursday. And so, those things are a little a little easier. Um Yeah.
And we have a couple little surprises throughout this episode. Um as the as they come up, we've been doing some some re some re some retooling of things, which you'll be seeing as as the show progresses.
That's right.
Um I think the first story, though, truly is one that is the largest in gaming. And that is Guys, I got married. I'm now I'm now married. You can see There I am. There we are. Well, I got married. There There's me and the Goblin Queen, Jamie, and a duck. Do you see the duck that photo bombed the wonderful picture on the dock? I love that. I love that.
you are more excited about that duck than you should be, but that's a
No, no, no. Listen, the wedding was

great, the ceremony was lovely, we wrote our own vows, we all cried, there was a lot of stuff going on. Will was in attendance, it was lovely to see Will in person. Um actually, funny story about that. So, my mother is not a very social person, and she watches this show. And she Yeah, see, hi. And although I I did hear, due to the Friday thing this week, she can't watch it, but she will watch the VOD. I taught her what a VOD was. Um but the essentially, the um the way that this happened was my mom was like sitting around with me and my small family over on one side, she goes, "Hey, hey, I think I saw Will over there." And I was like, "Oh, yeah, from the from the Twitch thing?" She goes, "Can you introduce me? It'll be like meeting a celebrity." I WAS LIKE, "YEAH." SO, Will got to meet my mom. Uh and it was so cute, but and she's Will, I I I'd hate to blow up my mother's spot, but she she loved you, she thought you was you were awesome, and she keeps using the she keeps using the celebrity line.

Like, you might be my mother's favorite celebrity at this point. Um
Okay.
So,
I I'm about this. It was It was It was really great. Um we we got to talk about about watching the show and about how how much she she loves listening to us talk about things that aren't part of her life.
No.
My favorite part though was that sometimes she like has has us on speakers. And so, it sounds like it sounds like we're just hanging out in your old room, which makes me feel like that one friend who's always at your house who never really knows when to go home and just always stays for dinner, which I'm fine with, but it's kind of like a a funny thing that like I haven't thought about since I was, you know, in my teens, which was forever ago. Dust, wind, us. Like
Exactly.
You know.
Actually, Will and Will and I did we did we can prove that we were in the same space. Will, if you'll go to the next

slide real quick.
Yeah.
There was a tag. I did not plan for this. Uh but our our photo booth person had a
[laughter]
It said "YouTube famous."
Which extra ironic because
Because one, not really, but two, also that's our job.
Yeah. It was also really funny because um there were people in attendance who had no idea what we do.
Oh, yeah. Most of Jamie's family has no I I had to explain it a lot.
Yeah. And so like some of the bridesmaids came over to like cuz the the whole EC crew. So, um me, uh Al was there with me, which was great. Getting to Getting to be there with Al was just fantastic. Um Allie was there, Red was there, uh Red's wife was there, Jeff was there, James was there. So, we were all like sitting at a table and like the number of people who were like, "So, can you explain
What this job is?
What this is?" And we're like, "Yeah,

sure, totally."
[laughter]
Yeah. And I listen, I don't want to I don't want to spend too much time at the wedding. I did just want to share cuz it's a big moment in my life and I spend a lot of my life with both Will here and with all of you on the internet. So, I wanted to say that. I want to leave you with two sort of fun anecdotes here. Uh one, also after the reception ceremony and the reception and uh a wonderful after party that had started, the Knicks started playing. Go Knicks. Uh I'm not a basketball person, but I have bandwagoned thanks to Adam Chase of Jetlag fame. Uh and now uh basically the the party broke up in the after party hours into three distinct groups. There was people chilling and hanging out and and drinking and hanging out on this nice porch overlooking the bay. There was a group in an open-air game room where like you could still see the water, but there's a giant TV and they were all watching the Knicks. And then there was a secret game that I had planned out over the entire weekend where if you completed the wedding bingo card that had runes along the edges, you brought it to a groomsman and you got a ticket. And then that ticket got you a special drink in a tiki glass called the My Tie

the Knot at the bar. And then when you looked at the coaster, there was a poem on that coaster that talked about coming together in new and interesting ways and maybe you're holding this coaster the wrong way. And if you push the runes of that coaster that you can only get by completing the bingo card against said bingo card's instructions, it gave you cut in half horizontally cursive words that told you the name of a cabin, a time bring the coaster in the final game. And then the third of the party went up to this cabin where there was line out the door of about 40 people. And I had up by one of my friends running the door as like the doorman to let two people in at a time to play a final game that basically was like a little mini escape room where there were four different games where you chose something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. And then you were had 2 minutes to complete a game. And if you won, you got a medal that said you won Jamie and Matt's secret wedding game and you got a little bottle of champagne. And if you lost, uh from the shadows someone would kick out a box that I just called the trash box. And it just had little bits of nips and candy in it. You could take one and get out. So that was I I Jamie and I The reason why I'm really comfortable talking about

on the show is we gamified our wedding. Uh fun fact about the Knicks. So all of a sudden we're running this this this cabin is far away from where the TV is. But we start seeing lights from outside. And we see like cops coming up this drive. And we're like, "Oh no, we're being too loud. We're screaming in this game and it's you know, da da da. It's like midnight or something in coastal Maine. We're we're in so much trouble." And then my groomsman is looking out the window and he's like, "Wait. Wait, they're stopping. Oh god, they're not here for us. They're here for the people watching the Knicks. Because when the Knicks won, that whole group of New Yorkers just exploded so loud. So, they worked as a buffer even if we were too loud. The cop all the all the sports people got talked to by the police and we kept getting to run our fun little haunted house game at the end of a wedding. Um so, that was so go Knicks. Oh, also inadvertently, wedding was on International Pigeon Day, which if you know Jamie, that's very important to her. We didn't realize that and we didn't mean to have our wedding colors

which were orange and blue also be Knicks colors. It all worked out. Um it was crazy. So, that's a little bit of sharing. I'm sorry to start the gaming show off with that, but that I we built a game and we ran a game and out of a guest list of Oh, yeah, we did. We did. We absolutely did. Uh it's Coastal Maine after all. Um but no, uh I I the fun thing about designing a game like that is it had to be uh available for the folks that wanted it, but completely inobtrusive for folks that just wanted a normal wedding. So, like you could go and complete the wedding bingo list and get your free drink and be like done with it or like whatever, right? Um or you could dig and find secrets and like it had to be that balance and that was very hard to do and I actually learned a lot about experience design and uh how to and and I and the percentages my math checked out. We had about 130 people at the wedding and about 40 five roughly completed the game like all the way through and I was like I thought that would be the number and I was happy

that like my my social math checked out.
Yeah.
Um
It was very good. Yeah, it was
That's all. We We can talk about the actual news now. Thank you for indulging me.
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Uh
And we'll thank you for coming. It was lovely to see you.
Would not have missed it for the world. Okay, so that means that it is time for us to do something new.
Something new?
Yeah, that's right. It's time for us to talk about today's main course.
[music]
Oh, we have stingers now. That's up to that was thanks to Mr. Nick Do it. Thank you so much for that lovely lovely art. Um yeah, we got stingers. WE GOT SECTIONS OF THE SHOW. We can chapter it out. It'll be great.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay, chat chat approves and that is that is all that matters. Uh okay. Friends, we got it now well well

the section is cool and and the stinger is great. Man, does this news suck?
Yeah, we have a spoiler alert. We have a stinger for bad news you might see later. This technically would fall into that, but it's still our main story. So it's our main course. We can't we can't do it right then.
Yeah, so one of the things that's happened over the past week and a half um is Xbox has decided that they don't like studios anymore. And it's sort of that joke about it sounds like you're feeding game studios to the wood chipper.
But Will, they don't like game studios. However, every studio making games for them needs to make them faster and better and and and with less people, and but we have to close them.
Right, yeah. So we have to close them, but we need more of them, but they need to be better and faster and also all of the game studios that got closed

were doing exactly what they'd been told to do by Xbox.
Yeah, this story is huge and I'm trying to think of how to break it down. It when you when you go into the show notes if you're watching this on the VOD, um there's like nine links or seven links or something of all the different angles of this. How do you want to attack this story first, Will, because there's the general email that uh that the next 100 days of Xbox is reset that kind of kicked all this off, but then there's the layoffs and a couple other things. Where should we begin?
I I kind of think we could start Let's start with that email. Let's Let's start with that email from from direct from Xbox themselves. Um
I kind of if if it wouldn't be too boring. It's not terribly long. I kind of want to read it.
Yeah.
Um and the reason is it's just it and like actually maybe we could use this I have an idea. You think we could use this email as a framework for the other bits of the story?
Yeah, sure.

Okay. So So essentially there's a post and you can look at this on news.xbox.com. They have a whole thing. It'll be in the show notes as well. And this was a message that was just sent to team Xbox employees globally. I don't know when that was actually sent, but this was actually published on June 10th. Team, over the first 100 days together, we have started to revive Xbox. Our platform teams have already shipped more updates in the last 100 days than during the prior year combined. Let's pause there. I don't know what specifically those updates are. Maybe they're quality of life things. Maybe there's other things around other stuff, but cool cool cool starting off with good news. Back to it. We now have more active partners on Xbox than ever before. Our Game Pass team is set to work on fixing our offerings and after 8 plus months of decline, our service has started to grow again. And through player voice, we have 24/7 channels to hear directly from players, creators, and developers. Okay. Seems

Seems so far so good. With the Xbox Game Showcase and return of FanFest, we brought together hundreds of millions of fans globally. We reintroduced exclusives like Gears of War E-Day in 2026 and clockwork revolutions in 2027. Players can continue to expect signature exclusives from us every year. In parallel, playground games reminds us that established franchises can achieve incredibly new hot incredible new highs. These results are early, but they demonstrate what is possible when we move faster, stay closer to our community, and align behind a shared vision. We have made mistakes and will continue to make them, but what matters is that we listen and adjust and course correct where needed. Remember, our fans are rooting for us. Now, let's pause here for a second
I also I also I have to highlight this. We changed the URL from xbox.com TO XBOX.COM.

YEAH, that's the a really big update. Okay, so this is sort of the the fluff sort of around it and mentioning the mistakes. Let's talk about the transition. Something that we really didn't talk about much when we talked about the the leadership shakeup at Xbox and and all that jazz is a ship the size of Microsoft is very very hard to turn.
Yep.
And back in the day, there's a great video by Jason Schreier out there sort of breaking down the behind-the-scenes corporate history. It that kind of is almost like I I would put it as like it's the sister thing to the video that this thumbnail is from here that this cannot continue or Xbox like history of the actual physical consoles. Um but they essentially back in 2021 when they were trying to get Xbox Game Pass off the ground, there was essentially a mandate saying all of these studios that they bought up that they could basically make what they wanted. It would be okay if it wasn't a runaway breakout blockbuster success like a Call of Duty or something else

because they needed constant influx of games for Xbox Game Pass. So, as long as your game broke even and it would it could kind of fit into any sort of mold at that point to make it valuable to the company. Uh turns out, and I think probably the numbers bear this out, the idea that Xbox Game Pass at whatever eventual exorbitant amount that they charge for it was going to cover uh the development and personnel and infrastructure costs of all these studios that they gobbled up, uh I don't think it was. And that's when we started hearing a lot of the things about Xbox being like, "Well, we need a 30% profit margin on everything." Or whatever it was. It was like, remember that well a while ago they had like the edict of like it needs to hit this number or it's dead.
Right. Yeah, and it was completely untenable and unreasonable to suggest that anything that they were doing could ever hit that number. Yeah.
And And not only that, but it's not like game development of sizes and and of companies like this can pivot on a dime.

If you have an edict for a year and a half of like, "Take your time. Do whatever. This is going to work out. It's going to be great." then all of A SUDDEN IT'S, "OH, NO! YOU CAN'T DO THIS. DO THE THING." You can't You can't just snap to attention and change what you're doing instantly. So, of course everything floundered, right? Like that's that's kind of So, so while this the beginning of this email is kind of flowery, uh it also I think it's trying to like we've made mistakes and we'll continue to make them. I think one of the major mistakes was maybe the original choice, but then also trying to snap back to a different choice incredibly quickly. Yeah. Um that seems like it was a bad idea.
I agree.
Um shall I continue the email?
Indeed.
All right, here we go. Now we start the next 100 days. It's important to have both optimism and realism as we look to reset the business. Here's the realities that we need to navigate. Number one, over 1 billion players choose to play

Xbox and our games each year for a total of 72 billion hours across console, PC, mobile, and streaming, including much of China and a few other properties. Wait, including much of China and a few other properties.
Excluding.
Excluding. Thank you. I don't know why I read that as including. Thank you. I knew there was something wrong there. Moving on. Our franchises are also among the largest and most beloved globally and are now breaking records in TV and film. Going forward, our competition is our competition is a tension. There are more great games, TV series, franchises, creators, content formats, apps, etc. than ever before. Okay, so Number one. That's all true. That's something that every media landscape That's something every movie exec and television showrunner and actor and YouTuber and Instagram content creator and and TikToker Everyone knows that it's it's essentially a war of eyeballs. The pool, when it used to be traditional media, was very small. And

now anyone with a camera and who is in the right place right at the time and has a good amount of skill and or charisma can kind of make a thing and rival a lot of other stuff.
Yep.
Uh we're seeing that even with Hollywood and wonderful things like Obsession and Backrooms, which have been lovely and yeah. So, number two.
used lovely to describe those.
Uh the films are lovely. They're horrific imagery, but the movies are wonderful.
Yeah.
Number two. We will end this fiscal year at about a 3% accountability margin, down year-over-year. Excluding Activision Blizzard King, over the past 5 years, we have spent over 20 billion on ongoing investments in our content platform and hardware subsidy, but our annual revenue has declined nearly half a billion during that time. Going forward, this can't continue. Now, a lot of a lot of stuff has been getting said about that this can't continue line. A lot of the headlines are taking it. We took it. Um I liked it

specifically because it's a line from near but that's neither here nor there. The
Neither near nor far.
That's neither near nor far. Um I don't think that that is actually the problem. I think that they're right. Their decisions have led to losses and if Microsoft wants to continue this can't continue. Now, how they managed to pull that off, that's a different story. I think the thing that sadly will continue is the damaging of this brand and trying to make cuts to save things but probably cutting too much is probably my opinion here.
Yeah.
Um number three, there's only five of these everybody but that was that was the one that caught the headlines. Number three. We are in a hardware component crisis. When I joined as CEO in February, the price we paid for console storage components was over two times higher than we paid last fall. The cost of since doubled again and as

we plan for the 2027 holiday season, we expect another significant increase taking us over five times the price we paid only two years earlier. Memory costs have followed a broadly similar trajectory. While the entire industry is facing a component crisis, we believe we have been impacted more greatly than many of our peers due to the choices we made over the last half decade. We are currently unable to make as many consoles as players want to buy and we need a new business model and partnerships from for hardware as we remain committed to Helix. Let's talk about hardware. Um there has been a lot of talk from Microsoft about trying to get back into the console game and making an Xbox an Xbox again and trying to make it have a value proposition for you to buy a 500 piece of a $500 piece of plastic and silicon to put in your living room. Um
I like this one. What's causing that price spike? Well, anyways, moving on.
Yeah, if you'll just so kindly look to the thumbnail on your screen right now

floating above uh both Bill and Clippy's head is the Copilot symbol, which is Microsoft's AI project. It's not just Microsoft, it's everyone's AI project. Um this is doing a lot of like oh man, invisible forces, we can't control it. What's going on?
Who what's the deal with that?
Yeah, yeah. Uh it's a real Seinfeld moment. But to Okay, so your plan is getting back into consoles, Helix is going to be the thing, but also you and your billionaire buddies have jacked up the cost of anyone wanting to manufacture any hardware worth a damn to do a next generation console.
That's correct.
And you're going to do exclusives on that console.
Yes. How?
You can't. [laughter]
Right.
Where where is the They don't Nothing connects. Those things are all antithetical to one another.

And they're all things you decided in the in the new 100 days, not the not the 5 years before that was all messed up and the granted you have to clean up. HOW? HOW IS THAT How are the promises you made now going to actually come to fruition? I know what this email is saying is like we need to find solutions. Sure. But no one getting this email it's I'd say 95% of people getting this email, it's not their jobs to find those solutions. It's the people writing the email's job.
This is This is so that people have some amount of empathy for when the leadership team does what the leadership team did. Uh it's it's not because these people are going to make the decisions, it's because they want cover for when the leadership team dude starts mercilessly feeding studios

to the wood chipper and they're like, "See, we told you we had to do something." And well, this is the only thing we can do as they feed another studio into a giant wood chipper labeled parts for AI, right? And just like This is right? Like I don't
I'm going to I'm going to continue on with number four. We expand our studio system when we need a pipeline for content to meet multiple strategies across subscription, streaming, and devices. Subscription and streaming. Okay, cool. In the process, we found ourselves overextended as we've executed on on changing strategies in a landscape of more readily available content. We are the fortunate stewards of industry-defining franchises that have enormous potential and player demand, but we have not adequately funded them to compete and win. At the same time, as we saw this past weekend at showcase, a reliable pipeline of first- and third-party exclusives and new IP are critical to our success. We need to

reassess the balance between these and our investment priorities over the next 5 years.
That the whole paragraph feels like it's at odds with everything that followed.
Let's pause the email now, even though there's one more, and talk a little bit about all the closures.
Yeah.
Will, do you want to take Do you want to take this as my my voice is parched now?
Yeah, absolutely. So, um Following this email, um many many studios uh were shut down. The big ones
Or they're in the process Like the the thing is, I don't know Nothing is officially, from what I understand, axed completely, but the leaks are that these are coming and or going to be closed or given the option to have the company somehow buy their company back.
Correct, but that would be prohibitively expensive for most of these. The three big ones that are hitting the news consistently and

the the the top lines are three that don't make a lick of gore ram sense. Compulsion games most recently famous for absolutely gorgeous breathtaking game South of Midnight which I loved. I absolutely loved Alpha Midnight and it was only because of the strength of the the release schedule last year that I think it didn't get more wins.
Sure.
Um Double fine Double fine, right? Like the they're cited in like IGN articles as like the people that made Killman Keeper, but I think especially among our audience you would be hard-pressed to find someone who can't name a Double Fine title that they found to be weird and interesting and lovely, right? Like Double Fine has been known for doing weird stuff for a very long time and has been on Xbox since like at least

the 360 if not before. Psychonauts was Xbox One, right?
I believe so. Psychonauts might have been Ooh, when did chat when did what system was Psychonauts out? Was that Xbox 360 or the first Xbox?
Big big ones Brutal Legend, Psychonauts, Grim Fandango, right? Yeah, Brutal Legend is in my opinion one of the most like underrated games because the marketing sucked, but it's a gorgeous game. I love I love Brutal Legend. Anyway, and Ninja Theory who held up Hellblade. That one's catching a lot of people off guard because you see they just announced the new Hellblade game.
They're trying to make like God of War now even though that's not what Hellblade
Right. Yeah. I feel like Hellblade is squarely in the category of games that shouldn't have ever gotten sequels. At because so for those who are unfamiliar, Hellblade

Senua's Sacrifice, the original game is a game about mental health struggles, about defeating inner demons, about journeys of personal transformation. And they care so much about that that the psychologist on staff who was deeply embedded in the entire development process so that the the game was faithful to that experience is the lead credit in the opening credits, right? And it's it is very much a psychological game about hearing voices, about not perceiving reality as it may or may not be. It is about a journey of healing and transformation and reconciliation and grief and loss and a bunch of things. And then the second one was like, "Hey, what if instead, hear us out, she had a sword and killed everyone." And we're like, "That

little incongruous, but okay." But they just announced the third one like days before they began this studio closure.
Well, before the rumor broke that they would. Again, this is this is the thing here. Like I I if I was a betting man, and I am, I would bet that these are closures or things they're going to either try to cycle out or whatever. Because again, like something that I very rarely think about when it comes to acquiring a company. We talk about all these mergers and all this stuff. And and eventually layoffs always happen. But one of the main reasons is once you pay the 11th e billion dollars for whatever flicks or flexel sticks company that you buy Yeah, you got it now and now you need to pay the rent for your offices the overhead for the every person that works for you there you know the matching their 401 K's like all of these different things cost of living around the area where these things are like it's still going

to truly bleed you money. You have to really really think that you have I mean you should let me rephrase you should really really think that you have a plan on how to utilize all of the assets that you now own and have to pay for before gobbledy goop them up.
Yep.
And it seems like perhaps because the ship is so big Microsoft and Xbox didn't really think that far ahead. They wanted to disrupt. They wanted to do what Netflix did and stumble into a business model that just keeps on giving until they were big enough to basically do their own thing again. Um that does not happen or has not yet happened with games Xbox Game Pass has not been able to figure that out and I think it has to do with the costs of what everything is to to produce. Will you're you're grinning. What are you
Every time someone says they want to be a disruptor in the industry now all I can think of is Glass Onion.

Yeah.
And how none of those people are actually disruptors. They're just corporate stooges sort of fumbling around hoping that they make it big off the back of someone else's genius.
Here's here's the thing about disruption. You know I I love team chaos right? Uh although I believe I'm team order when we do it for some reason.
Yeah.
Um
Well it's cuz between the two of us you're more orderly and I'm way more chaos.
Okay okay okay the the truth is disruption is great in pontification. It's great in brainstorming. It's great in coming up with ideas that are outside the Xbox. What it's not great for is giant mega corps who who moves so slow that any decision they make today won't trickle down till

3 years later when market forces will be completely different due to a pandemic or a financial bubble that I pray will pop soon. Like all of this is connected and they you can't disrupt in that space. Or let me rephrase. You very you can disrupt, but it's not going to go the way you think and it's not going to be good for you, the company, the consumer, anybody. And so that's why I get I get a little bit pissy about the when someone says that they were a disruptor because that just means you don't care enough to learn how the the consequences of an action and you do it anyway and you hope. Sometimes that might work out. More often than not it won't. Yeah. And that's what we're seeing here with a lot of the gobble ups of um of all these of all these companies. The Activision Blizzard King purchase that we've talked to death about took 18 months.

Uh 69 nice billion, I think it was at the end of the day.
Or million I know it's billion I think it was billion. I God, it just the amount of Sorry, I'm going to go a little extra politics for a second here. The amount of numbers of billion that are thrown around on a daily basis now has me convinced truly that my joke of like money's not real is more and more true every day. Like everything's like, "Oh, we did this for like 19 billion." You're like, oh, did did you? Kids can't get lunches at schools. So, what the what? Like I I I just make it makes me feel crazy and like numbers like the numbers that we talk about are less real than even we think they aren't. Sorry. I'll back up. Um
I think it's a necessary reminder when we start talking about this.
With the Activision Blizzard King acquisition was kind of not the first domino, but like the largest domino of of the of the utter disruption of the industry.

Because then everyone else tried to gobble up stuff and no one can actually gobble and maintain. Like no one really has. So, now we're in a situation here where Microsoft has very much bitten off more than they can chew and they have a new CEO and they have a new team doing stuff and they can't and and they they're saying all these words and making announcements, but they're pivoting from their pivots when they already know that a pivot from them takes years, not a 100 days.
Yep.
Um and it's maddening. It's I I cannot believe the like the wastefulness in this. And coming from a company look I don't have Microsoft's internal financials. But if I had to guess Microsoft as a company might have more runway if they spent a little less on executives and a little more on their company. Have a little more runway to slow roll a

change and do research and figure out these things rather than like try to hurry up and break stuff. Like there are companies that the last ditch effort because they're small enough is well, we got to try this Hail Mary pass sports reference I know to make sure that or else the entire company is going to implode and it's either has a 3% chance of winning or it's going to implode anyway. Like, I can see that. Microsoft's not that. Microsoft has runway. Microsoft could do this cleaner. But the leadership possibly even the new the leadership doesn't have a strong enough vision or believe in their vision enough or their foresight enough to take the time to do so. And it's nowhere is it clearer than the contradiction between the Xbox showcase, this email, and the leaks of the studios closing.
Yep.
Uh I want to finish the email if that's okay. We're almost done. We're on number

five. Our current platform infrastructure is not built for the battle ahead. Our systems are overly complex, spanning hundreds of dependencies, which hinders our ability to move fast. We've become too reliant on vendors to operate our systems and must become more self-reliant as engineering culture to build for the future. Side note, they just said above We are currently unable to make as many consoles as players want to buy and need a new business model and partnerships for a hardware at to remain tame committed to healing. So, they want to outsource more, but really like pull it in more. I know there's different sections. It's just a silly contradiction. We must increase the value we ship to players while decreasing the time it takes to do so. Going forward, we'll evolve and rebuild our stack and look at capabilities across all of Xbox and potential M&A to help us win hardware, PC, mobile, and streaming. For some of

you, these realities will be surprising and even frustrating to discover. We won't succeed by hiding hard truths, nor will we succeed by doing the same thing and expecting different results. Like the everyday wins mentality from the first 100 days, we will sprint to make progress against hard again to make progress against hardware content experience and service together. Xbox is one of the few places where people can not just play games but connect with others to create memories. I think there's a lot of there's a lot of places for that but we'll just keep going.
Sure, one of them is the digital breakfast table.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. With consoles at the center of how our showcase experiences are defined, Windows as one of the largest gaming platforms in the world and incredible games under our roof as one of the largest publishers in the world, we have the foundation in place. Let's reset for a stronger Xbox and build the number one gaming and entertainment company. Asha and Matt.
Now, here is of course the other truly hilarious thing about all of this.

Um, which is uh IGN's got it and a couple other places have talked about it. Um There This is all incredibly interesting in the lens that there's it's not off the table that Xbox gets spun out from Microsoft entirely at this point. Um, as like a whole new company sold something but they get yeeted out of Microsoft. Which would be very interesting to see that they're just like, "Screw it. We don't We're done. The whole thing gone. Get rid of the whole thing." And I I don't know. Yeah, like We've talked about Xbox so much on this show and it's funny because after the 360 I didn't really engage with Xbox much at all. Will, I don't even know if you did. Did you ever engage with Xbox?
I I had a 360 and that was it.

Okay. So the uh Sorry, I got distracted. I think someone new uh noticed Aha, it it's actually is green. You can get it at the store right below if you like it. It's very delicious, but I love chroma key nonsense.
Yeah. It's Matt's favorite bit. It drives me a poor
It's my favorite thing. Um Oh, I love this. Maybe Nintendo can buy them. That'd be so funny. Um but that no one will happen. Uh Xbox The thing that this email gets right is that the Xbox brand is so well known. And I think still well respected outside of people that like pay attention to studio layoffs. They can turn this around. And like and look, I think there's two ways they can do it. They can do it the way that they're doing, which I think is throwing a bunch of stuff at a wall and hoping and seeing what sticks. Again, I don't think that

that like the plan to get faster and move quicker Well, that is is antithetical to the entirety of how Microsoft functions. And you're not going to like change that. Like that's just not going to happen. Uh there's also a uh apocryphal idea that like AI will speed up everything. No, it won't. People still got to check it. Like it's just not it's not going to happen. And you're going to take you're going to remove jobs, which will slow things down anyway. And and at best case scenario, you'll still be crawling along at the same speed that you were before. Um but I do think and hope and wish. And if if Asha and Matt ever happen to watch this episode and get to this point, hi guys. You walked into a [ __ ] show. I don't think what you're dealing with from what was before your uh your tenure is clean or easy.

But I think the way that you have to maneuver around it and wade yourself out of this muck is not going to be done sadly through speed. It's going to be done through smarts. It's going to be done through like you have the opportunity and the financial backing if you can uh with your job titles convince the people that need convincing to kind of become a beacon of empathy and like actually giving a [ __ ] about games in a space that's increasingly seeming at companies of your size just just you don't. Like you could turn this around and meet the moral obligations to some of the things that were said in that email, but you have to ditch the things that are in direct competition with those things in your email. There's no reason

why making video games and selling video games cannot be a sustainable business model. People love making them. People love buying them. People love playing them. People love sitting around animated kitchenettes and talking about them. Yeah. My my last ditch effort out here to the two of you now in control grab it by the reins. Try to be a beacon of good in a increasing hellscape. And if you can't do it get out of the way of someone that actually can. Yep. Agreed. That was a lot on Xbox.
It was, which means that it's time for us to take a brain break uh and do some fake ads for things that people can't buy while Twitch chat gets ads for things they can buy for 3

minutes to keep our pre-rolls off over on Twitch. So, Twitch, if you're getting ads, we'll see you in 3 minutes. Uh Matt, do you have something that you'd like to convince everyone to buy?
Sure. Hey everyone, Matt from Extra Credits here. Say, do you ever want to take all your money and then roll it up in a ball and just never see it again? Well, then let me introduce you to the concept of throwing a wedding. Throwing a wedding will take all that money and actually make it go away. If you're like, "EW, MONEY, GROSS. NO, get away from me, giant piles of cash." All you have to do is to have a wedding. Granted, you will be turning it in for lovely family and friends and experiences that you'll remember for the rest of your life and emotional resonance moments that you can actually feel and taste and touch and have an actual cathartic experience about the human condition, but your money's gone.

[clears throat]
That's my ad.
Okay. Okay, excellent. Uh okay, I got one.
Ready?
I got one. Hi there. Will from Extra Credits, next to Matt from Extra Credits, but I'm Will from Extra Credits, here to talk to you about uh chopping your show up into sections. Have you realized that you need to uh find new ways to make it easy to talk about large groups of things? Consider getting a a really cool artist to make a whole bunch of like little finger segments and then reorganize the show. Just do the same stuff in a different order so that all of it could be preceded with like funny little bits, and then you rescrable it so that everyone can pay attention to the things that they want to pay attention to. It's the same, but different. Also,
I think that's the way we should sell everything. It's the same, but different.
That's that's right. Uh also, I'm going to call it out J star. Thank you so much for the 10 gifted memberships over ON YOUTUBE.

J STAR!
THANK YOU SO MUCH for
Thank you.
for for the support. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, right. And then you two can save 40 gigabytes of RAM. That's that's true.
There we go.
[laughter]
What were you going to
to get rid of my money. Thank you for getting rid of your money. I feel like
very sweet. Thank you.
This is Yeah, this is a good place to get rid of your money. Also, Matt and I are sharing the brain cell. We did that like we did it at the same time. Uh yeah. Uh Some setting was clipping the audio sadly. Uh it shouldn't be amp. We tested like three times beforehand.
was clipping the audio? Uh some setting was clipping the audio sadly. Oh, was it was it hold on. I wonder if it's You know what it is, Will? I got it. Cuz Okay, I'm going to play the the ad music again. Actually, I'll just do an ad and it will clip again and I think this is why. Hey everyone, Matt from Extra Credits is here with Wolf from Extra Credits here after we did the ads from Matt and Wolf from Extra Credits over on Extra Credits to make sure that the Twitch people

don't get to see ads when they already have to see the ads. Listen, I think you're probably hearing a little bit of clipping because we had to adjust our volume this time to match up with the audio of our stingers because it's all new to us. Now, what you're probably experiencing is the music when it hits a low hitting a noise gate because we had to adjust our gain and noise gate to make ourselves match the bumpers that you're about to see. If you're experiencing this right now, please let us know in the comments both on Twitch and on YouTube and next week when we come back, we promise that for the low low cost of absolutely nothing but your attention, we will make sure that it's actually lovely and ready for your ear holes the next time round.
Yeah. Yeah, it's a big squi I like I like Amy's analysis. It's a big squigy.
We'll we'll get it working. We'll get it working.
All right, cool. Also, thoughts on this chat? Did the stingers need to be higher?
Oh, so we thought they need to be lower. Actually, as we transition to our next section, you'll be able to tell us. So, get ready. The audio, it's all over the place. We tried leveling it as best we could.

Yeah. Uh so,
Seems like lower. Yeah, that's what we were thinking.
Here Here Here's your Here's your fun fact about OBS. I can do hot and cold running filters and changes to anything that is an audio source. Stingers are not audio sources.
Nope.
And you can't adjust them at all.
And when I kicked them out, I kicked them out with these with the levels that we do YouTube videos in, and that's not the levels that we do here. So, it is my fault this time, but we had 10 minutes before the show before we discovered it. So, if everyone would get ready for our next bumper, you can turn your volume down a little bit if you want. It's not going to blow your ears out. It's just going to be louder than us.
Yeah, that's right. Uh because I believe it's time for some good news, everyone.
[music]
We are not going to snooze on good news, because there are I would say 1.5 tiny but good little story One Well, one is a a big story, which is this one

right here, which I'm very excited about. But, I think that the the thing that I think is good news about it is the scope in which this game's footprint and like attention span across media is going to have. So, about 23 hours ago at this point, the a new video got launched on Rockstar's channel for GTA 6. That wasn't a new trailer or some gameplay footage, perhaps. It has over 6.8 million views. No, no, no. It was the reveal of the game's cover.
Yeah.
And the reason why I think this is good news, you might be saying, "Matt, you're reaching." And you know what? You may be right. But, I think that there's so few times in gaming when a thing comes out that literally will be, no matter who you are or where you are

in media or what you what your vibe is, what you're into, that will transcend the conversation and have everyone talking about it, whether it's good or bad or whatever. And I like the idea that I like it when my favorite hobby gets talked about in ways around other hobbies. And I not that this is a surprise, but I it's funny. I kind of forgot it was coming out this year, which is neat. And then this happened and I was like, "Oh, cool." Like and and I just I got a little bit hyped for it and I like the fact that there's enough people out there, 6.8 or whatever million people, that just looked at box art air quotes box and got hyped enough to do it.
Yeah.
Um Yeah, that that's it, new guy. It doesn't have many monoculture moments. And for better or worse, GTA is a monoculture moment. Um and

I'm really looking forward to when it for a beautiful week, maybe two, like this is going to be the news cycle. Do you know what I mean? Like, whether you like GTA or not, at least we're talking about video games.
Yeah. And not and not the things surrounding video uh video games.
The union got a victory? We talked about that last time, did we not, Jimmy?
Uh the the new one was brief. Uh and it's the the thing that I saw that uh when I was doing setup for the show was that the union busting case in the UK got given the green light to go and it's not like it's a step
Yeah, but it's not a huge it is not a massive step forward I will I will say.
Yeah. So we'll keep reporting on that. The other piece of good news

which is just a nice quality of life thing that I wasn't aware of until Will put it in the show notes.
Yeah. Nintendo eShop has been terrible for a very long time.
It's so bad. It's so bad on the switch one.
Yeah, it was it was real bad. But they finally updated it. They're finally fixing the eShop which I'm I'm very excited about.
They've fixed it from what I understand.
and it's getting dark mode which as someone who is a big devotee of dark mode, yes, good, great.
If anyone has a switch one at their dis actually, hold on.
This is not a bit by the way. We just realized Matt has a switch one. Uh yeah, I think a lot of people How many people are still playing on switch ones that don't have a switch two yet that they've moved to? Just by by show of hands or high five me.
to pry the switch away from Laszlo. Just Okay, hold on. Okay.
I I [laughter] feel I feel

like puppy tax. Um
Puppy tax, okay. Let's see. Like this. Oh, there's a software update.
That's probably the software update that we're talking about right now.
All right, we're going to come back to this and we're going to see how fast it is.
Okay, great, excellent. Um I think it's really good to see that Nintendo is still doing stuff for the switch one. I think that's that's a big deal because I think a lot of people felt like the switch one was going to get abandoned. Um but that's really good and showing that they're finally addressing some core infrastructure problems with their system is also really good. Just like that has been one of the big hang-ups for the Switch um for a really long time. And so, I'm really glad to see them uh addressing it.
Yeah, agreed.
Yeah, I think Laszlo is
Sorry, Laszlo. I know you were playing uh Tears of the Kingdom. I'll put you under the desk now, so you can go back to
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.

Unfortunately, that's the end of our good news.
[laughter]
We promise that we'll try to find more.
We're We're trying to find good news every week, but it's it's a little tough sometimes. It's a little tough sometimes. So, with every piece of good news, I think it's time for some breaking bad news.
So, y'all y'all heard of Unreal 6?
Oh god, must must we hear of this? Must Must we hear of this? So,
So, the good news about this is it's not out until like 2027, like in beta, I think.
Yeah, the the the the problem is that they've decided that the way to do uh

Unreal 6 is they're going to depreciate a bunch of stuff that some developers really liked and replace all of it with integrating with every AI model they can get their hands on to reduce tedious work. And they they did some demos of how they're using AI in the Fortnite engine to like tweak skins and assets and other things before they go into Fortnite to help save time in their flagship money-making product. Which may not have worked as well as they thought it was going to because the developers of Vampire Survivors Poncle announced hours before this Unreal 6 announcement that they were going to do a Fortnite collab. And immediately upon this announcement coming out said, "Uh oh, hey, we're going to maybe take a

rain check on on that. May- Maybe no. Maybe Maybe no. No." And all of their And all of Poncle's fans clapped because they don't want Vampire Survivors stuff thrown through an AI filter to make it into Fortnite.
Yeah.
I Yeah.
Like And that Like is that going to move a monetary needle? No, but it's really good to see, you know, companies sort of standing up and being like, "Oh, you just That sounds awful. No, thank you. Bye." Um There's another element and I wish I had time before the show to sort of dive into this more. I saw a few uh posts across the internet, which is a series of tubes, about how, depending on how this is implemented in Unreal 6, it brings up This is from a couple lawyers that I follow across Blue Sky and a few places. It brings up some interesting legal quandaries about like what actually can be uh trademarked and

copywritten. And like obviously AI stuff can't be. And game mechanics can't be. So, when you integrate AI doing a thing into a space that is already nebulous with this,
Yeah.
how does one protect all of the time and money they're saving when making something with this new and unique tool. Um Like I'll be really curious how that goes. And again, like I Unreal is also we're we're doing an episode that's coming out in a little bit on um Jeff Jeff had a pontification, I believe, on a design club uh a bit ago about uh a certain House of the Mouse being interested in buying um
Epic.
Epic. Um

And Unreal 6 Unreal is not just for games anymore. It's for all media production at this point. And there's reasons you can go back and watch that episode or wait for the uh for the episode to drop on the EC like uh animated stuff in a couple weeks. Um But Epic at this point with Unreal 6 needs this to be a hit. Like it's already in everyone's thing. And the reason why it got so popular was it was because it it was so easy to use and get ubiquitously in like the the uh the the various um Like there were ways you could use it for free, if I remember correctly, Unreal 5 and a couple of other things. Um This Who who who [snorts] can even own what it makes?
Yep.
Af- after it scraped stuff off of other people's work to then I think I think I saw

I didn't I didn't dive into this because there's too many like nonsense accounts when I see the headline about this. But I think I think there was something about Bernie Sanders um mentioning how any company that uses AI should essentially pay a um society tax or something. Like it you know, something that goes back to a greater good thing because it's using everyone else's stuff that came before. I mean, that's not going to ever happen, but neat idea. Um
Yeah.
Yeah, don't love this.
Nope.
Don't love this.
Okay. Uh enough about this crap. Let's talk about a different problem of a different and more mundane nature. Uh Matt, how's the how's the how's the
I'm loading it up right now. We're going to see.

Oh. Okay. Yeah, snappy.
Oh, that was good. That was a little little good little good news little good news break before we talk about the loss of what some people are calling the RPG Maker Library of Alexandria. Um so, thanks to DevTech [clears throat] Dow on Discord for bringing this one in. Um Huh. RPG Maker is closing their forums. RPG Maker has had up until this point for the past 14 years had old-school forums where people could get together and talk about RPG Maker stuff and publish things like add-ons and customizations and tools and assets and all that stuff. And it was one centralized place for everyone to do all the things they wanted to do to make games in RPG Maker. And they're closing it. And they're not hosting any of the resources there anywhere else. And there's no plan to replace it with anything. They're just closing it.

Now, question cuz I don't know the answer to this. Are the people that make RPG Maker the people that are in charge of these forums or is this just a group of people?
That is my understanding.
And they're giving 6 months before it goes away and they're asking people to take down whatever they want to keep and whatever, right? Like, but like Actually, there's definitely people that are far more tech-savvy and/or understand what like the cost of operating a forum like this would be. Hm? Does anyone have a like and I I I'm not This is not a wrong answers only thing. This is like a legitimate question I have. If we had to give a guess of it if anyone who knows web hosting and design, a a a forum that is about 14 years old of content, like is there a ballpark we could figure out of how much it costs to run that annually? Yeah, I don't know if there is. That might be too complex a question with too many variables. Um
As an example, the there's a um

there's a support topic on the forums for the legacy engine. Just one So, that's one topic has 45,600 threads and about 280,000 unique messages. So, yeah. And I I believe that. I believe that it's it's skyrocketing because of AI content crawling through and and munching on their content, right? But like, surely there must be a better solution than knee-capping future development in your game engine, right? Cuz like, that's that's like the truly horrifying part here, right? Is that RPG Maker's been around for forever and is what a lot of people get started with because it's it has this community support and it's straightforward and like it's a thing that you can learn and to like learn principles and get started and now it's just gone, right? And like you could stick it in read-only, you

could make it available as an archive. There are lots of things you could do and you've done none of them.
Well,
did did did you just get gifted a baked good from Ready? Ready? Your wife?
FROM MY WIFE? OOH, it's a blondie. It's a blondie for breakfast. Thank you. Thank you, lovely wife. I'm the goblin consort, by the way. They've named me that.
[laughter]
I think she has her headphones on. She doesn't know. Uh um So, yeah, no, this there was like no upside to this. There's like no good thing about this. This just stinks. Uh and I'm I'm I'm I'm real bummed about it. Uh for everyone who who likes RPG Maker stuff. Um Matt the goblin taste tester, yeah. He may is in fact the best. I was telling people at the wedding that um

one of one of my favorite uh transitioner periods in in doing this show was when Jamie moved in with Matt because then we got more Jamie interruptions. And Jamie's interruptions have historically been beautiful. Things like blondies, but also things like just coming in the middle of the show to steal Matt's coffee. Beautiful. Excellent. Add some Add some verisimilitude to the idea that we're actually in a digital kitchen instead of in front of both of our PCs.
That's right. That's right. And I've closed the door and turned on the air conditioner so that us yelling, especially when we play Destiny later, won't bother her.
Yeah, right. Exactly. All right. Um Next up in acquisition news that makes sense, I guess of a kind, but boy, does it suck. Um Fox is buying Roku or merging with Roku.
No, buying. Buying. Buying.
Right, but they're giving So, the way it's going to work is that they're giving people

with Roku stock Fox stock as part of the buyout. And so that's that's my confusion. But yes, the the total valuation of the transaction is $22 billion and this is another way that things are going to get worse because plenty of people I know use Roku's for things. Which are now going to be Foxified, which means that they're likely going to be right-wing propaganda. Thank you so much for coming to our burn your Roku talk.
Yeah. Um So interesting thing kind of happened um I think it was the uh last Sunday. Was that when the 200 the the the the birthday party UFC fight thing happened? Was that last Sunday?
Sure, maybe. I paid zero attention to it.
Well, I did too until I opened up Paramount Plus. Uh and it was a big thing of like being

able to watch it on Paramount Plus. Like Paramount Plus was the place to own it. And it got me really mad and actually I'm going to be well on my way of canceling Paramount Plus cuz I just finished watching Deep Space Nine for the first time. And I'm like, well, I don't really need this anymore and if you're going to be doing that, then deuces. Um I don't use Roku. But like Will said, tons of people do. Roku is a is a a gateway into a lot of different In fact, I think outside of built into televisions and Fire Sticks. Um I don't know if Google TV's What are they What's Google's plug-in called?
I don't remember.
It's either Roku or Google's thing is the is the second biggest.
And the other one's the third.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Um Oh yeah, Dark. I lost my my Chromecast. Thank you. Yeah, I lost my mind. I love I love I loved Deep Space Nine. I we could do a whole episode on Deep

Space Nine at some point.
Yeah, the the finale in particular is
It's great. They I could not believe how quickly and effectively they tied up like a thousand loose ends.
Yep.
Um But uh yeah, this is going to change the media landscape a lot and um It's that It's not going to get better. Like
Yeah. This doesn't prove anything for anyone besides Fox.
Yeah.
Right? And that's that's why it's bad news. Um Okay, I'm going to keep us moving cuz we got we got two more of these to do and then we got some interesting stuff.
Yeah, but these next two things not interesting at all.
Uh they're mostly screaming. All right, so you remember you remember Pokémon Go?
Oh, I remember that game where you and your family and friends get to go outside and experience nature and go

around and catch Pokémon on your phone. You see the little Pokémon as you scan your surroundings. You see where they are.
Right.
And you can catch them and battle them and take control of gyms and have a really wholesome experience that um in no way has any dark undertones whatsoever.
So, about that last part.
Mhm. What if
instead of having no dark undertones whatsoever, we found out that surprising very few people have been paying attention and lots of people who haven't been paying attention uh that all of that visual data combined with all of the GPS data from Pokémon Go was being used to train military drones to work when the GPS is out.
Known as VPS. Uh visual positioning systems. Essentially, Niantic or one of the many companies it's owns or buys or sells or whatever It's somewhere around it. Um took all that data since 2021 that

you could opt out of if you could ever find the way. In fact, I think when they actually we talked about this like 2 years ago or something like that and we'd mentioned how you could opt out of it.
Mhm.
Um but that is all proprietary data that that company owns and it is selling to uh military companies for drones for what cuz GPS truly you can jam a GPS signal.
Yep.
But if a drone has built-in visual maps of a place,
Yep.
it can do whatever. Now, um What a What an awful existential thought.
Yep. It's terrible. Now, I will say let me soften the existential thought ever so slightly. It is important to note that this data was not included in the package of

companies that was sold to Saudi Arabia when Pokémon Go and Niantic was sold to Saudi Arabia. Just before anyone gets on that track cuz I saw a bunch of it and that's specifically not a thing that you like that's not the thing to worry about.
No, no. Just Just Just our own government now has all this data for its own drones. And we As we As we know, they never they would never go after any actual citizens of their own country. I mean, that would be That would be crazy.
Right. Yeah, absolutely. Listen. Listen. I'm not saying that we should be concerned. I'm saying we should be accurately concerned.
I know, no. I Thank you for the distinction. I was just continuing the thought. Um God, like Okay. I I because I can't be all doom and gloom and this is an entirely doom and gloom story. I will say let's pretend for a moment that this wasn't for military drones. Let's pretend for a moment that this was for

Jetsons cars. I don't know.
Delivery robots.
Or delivery or something. Like and I know there's there's negatives to all of those examples, too. But like I like from a technological inquisitive mind kind of way the idea of like, oh, we have this one piece of data that can really make other people's lives better if you use it in this way. Like I think the technical leap of what was done here is neat. I think the implementation and the actualization of what is done is abhorrent and evil and um incongruous to the way in which the data was captured. Um Yeah, I I There's no like thing here. There's no like continuation of what this story is. This is just like what's happened.
Yeah.
Um and maybe the only thing if it's not terribly too late is to know that like

anything you're doing on your phone chances are you are still the product and look for ways to opt out and not be able to do things like this if it's important to you. Um
Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Mhm. Yeah.
Yeah. And that's the other thing. Thank you Thank you for bringing Great Great Great point. If I wrote something like this that is too big story, people would call me a hack. There's a lot of that going around. There's a lot of reality being very hackish. Again, I go back to the UFC fights on the White House lawn. Brando, it's got what plants crave.
Yeah. All right. Speaking of you being the product, hey. You know when you play video games? Have you ever thought "I played a
game. I played a video game." Yeah, you know video games. Have you ever thought, "Wow, this isn't enough like real life. I would like real life advertisements in my video game?"
Wait, did I say that?
I I I I think EA heard you say that

because EA has now uh has a press release um where they are going to be announcing that they are putting real actual advertisements that plants crave in your in your video games. Um such as
Yeah, they made a company called EA Advertising. Cracker Jack name, everybody. Um and essentially it's doing the thing that people have been trying to do for the longest and succeeding in doing, but now it's just on a on a global brand scale. So, any EA Sports game now, I believe in the future, you'll be able to as a as a brand buy ad space to show up in the same way that ad space shows up on uh like actual sporting events.
Yep, and they've already they've already got partners. Partners include Visa,

Lowe's, Red Bull, Xfinity and Peacock, and Mountain Dew.
Well, I thought Mountain Dew already had that lucrative branding deal with the reflecting pool. Did that not No? Am I getting that wrong? Ah, it's crazy. So much going on. How can you keep track?
I got nothing for this story after that. That was We live IN A JOKE.
[laughter]
OH, THAT WAS YOU KNOW WHAT? I got nothing for that. Okay, uh time for a different segment. Uh let's talk about a weird case where gaming is interacting with the law?
[music]
That's right. It's Conklin and cruel gaming the law for you.

That might be one of my favorite ones.
That's my favorite one I think. Well, no, there's one other one that's really really good that we won't see this episode.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. So, um in Japan there is a system whereby you can choose to have some of your taxes go to a specific town or prefecture. Um you can have things go to to like specific parts of the country and this is designed to help rural areas that people maybe have moved away from uh get tax revenue. And one of the ways that uh different parts of Japan encourage people to participate in this program and to direct their tax dollars to specific places is by sending goods to those people. That it's essentially like a hey, we'll we'll send you like a nice little gift basket sort of if you say that that you know, a chunk of your taxes is going to our to our town to help with our needs. Um and it's usually locally done stuff. Well, um Final Fantasy XIV is getting in on on

this uh because if you send that those if if a Japanese citizen sends those tax dollars to Shibuya Ward where Square Enix is located uh you get you were going to get a package of uh digital goods from Shibuya Ward uh which includes but is not limited to the mega shiba which is based on the uh
I don't know. We have a graphic for this. Not the shiba though cuz I although you can see it in the Polygon article.
Yeah. I'm I'm trying to I'm trying to I got to I got to press is. I got to press I got to press too many buttons.
Taxes.
I got to I got to work on that. Um So, it's it's kind of an interesting it's just an interesting way that people are getting to have a role in where their taxes go in Japan. And it's interesting to see that gaming companies are like, "Hey." Cuz to be clear, Square Enix doesn't get anything out of this. Right? Squ- Square Enix doesn't doesn't

like other than positive press.
I mean so I I this is not accusatory. They might and I think a lot of game companies as we move into sort of like continual digital spaces that more and more people are involved in, like there is Okay, so if they send it to the province where the company is based, right? They get the things. Well, that would eventually, if it was successful, make that province more prosper- prosperous and therefore maybe more people would want to move there and then maybe they could grow better because the quality of life is better there. And it's one of those things that in a way and I'm sure there's detriments to everything is a push and pull. But in a way it's another slow roll of making something better for the group of people that are doing the thing in both real life and in the game. And um I don't know. I think I would have to examine it to find like the bad, but um I think we've had enough bad today and I think that overall I like this as a concept and I also like

that literally the Japanese government, going back to my GTA story, like is treating something in a game that is sort of a essentially what's more monoculture than taxes.
Yeah.
Like like it's it's elevating this hobby or this pastime or your digital life and and in a weird way validating it through a government required thing you have to do. And I'm not saying taxes are great. I'm saying this thing in Japan is a neat way to deal with the concept of taxes and yeah, I think it can benefit companies and people and players and I think it's pretty neat.
All right, are you ready for the weirdest story of the week?
Yes.
I don't think you are.
Okay.
I don't think Chad is either.
I think I am because I made the graphic.
Well, yeah.
Yeah.
Chad.

You know, it's a real shame that some of our favorite video game mascots aren't real. What if
That's true.
What if What if they were real or at least their DNA was real and you could buy it in statue form? That's right.
He's on the run. He's number one. He's coming next. Watch out for Sonic X.
So
Who Who in Chad right now show of digital hands in in Brad and Janet on Twitch and YouTube knows what the hell this is? I just need to know before we tell you. I need to see if this is broken containment at all.
Okay, great. I like this. I like this. Sonic's 5th year of the 30th anniversary. I like that one.

Yeah.
Yeah.
Heard about it, not a clue, unfortunately, yeah. I wish I didn't.
Right. Okay, this is how you get Sonic DNA into chickens. Okay, great. I love this. Good. Good. Good. Good.
So actually Amy made a good point here. I saw the headline but did not look into it because I'm already barely holding on. Amy, before this show that was me. Um because I was like, I'm used to reading ridiculous headlines all the time now. And I was like, you know what? This seems like a ridiculous one that I don't have to deal with. And then Will put it in the show notes, and now we all have to do.
Yeah, we sure do because God do I need a like Okay, I deal with the crushing horror of everyday life and existentialism by absurdity. And you know what? I can't think of anything more absurd than this that we've talked about this week. So, let's point and laugh together. The 35th anniversary of Sonic the

Hedgehog was 3 days ago on the 16th. Sega has a life-sized statue. This is life-sized statue of of Sonic that contains Sonic DNA in a Chaos Emerald. Now, this is another one of the tran seeds projects. Um and though it is uh though it is probably not that kind of trans. Um The Mhm.
No, keep going.
The Their claim is that the Sonic DNA contains Sonic bios, emerald vision, boost system, velocity cells, and some Sonic adjacent buzzwords. Um this is the same company, by the way, that created a recreation of the T-virus

Resident Evil. But this time it's in a life-sized Sonic statue that Sega is promoting the 35th anniversary of Sonic. Now, chat, I'm normally not one to encourage this, but Brad, I'm not saying you should, but if this did disappear in some kind of immaculately planned caper heist thing
A grift perhaps?
That would be hilarious beyond belief. Uh and for that reason alone, I think it should happen. Um maybe we could simply tell the British Museum where this is.
Hey, well, let's pause for one quick second because we're going to get back to Sonic. We have a first-time chatter tiplo's. Uh hello, welcome from Melbourne. Wow, hello, howdy. Uh what's our excitement for Silent Hill Townfall? I'm actually very excited. I

still need to play F. I have not played F yet, but um I am very much looking forward to it and I hope it lives up to my expectations.
And I am going to miss it because I'm not a horror person. So, it's it's it's very much not for me, but I'm I'm glad it
to the Wait, wait, Will, you're not a horror person and you put this Sonic thing in front of us for all of us to scream into the void app?
This is hilarious. I think I think we're watching stupid companies spending stupid money.
I think Will might be more into horror than he admits because this is insane. Uh this feels like it could be a uh a Dead by Daylight villain. Like this feels like it could be uh Okay. Are we I don't want to I Is this a harbinger for like the fake real product? Right? Like it says like the advertising for this is it has Sonic's DNA and it lists a bunch of

bull. Are we just like Will, did we release fake advertisements into the world of real advertisements? Like did we do this?
No.
Did Are we responsible for the DNA being inside the
No. Chaos Emerald of the life-size Sonic statue?
No, of course not. We don't have nearly enough money to be responsible for that. This is They came up with this stupid idea all on their own.
I have no problem if they're like, "Look at this sick statue we made for the 35th anniversary. There's 100 of them and you can buy them. It's dope." And I'd be like, "Yeah." Then they're like, "No, but for real though, it has Sonic the Hedgehog's DNA inside of an actual Chaos Emerald in its belly." And you're like, "What does But like hahaha." [laughter] And they're like, "No." You're like,
That makes it so much funnier. Don't you get it? Like, the the absurdity of it

all is like palpable to me. This is great. This is the stupidest thing I've seen all day, and it makes me feel so much smarter and wiser by by knowing that I have never once thought of something as mind-numbingly idiotic as this. By comparison, every person in here is a genius, okay? You can do anything with your life. You can make great and beautiful things because this got through multiple people at multiple companies and made it into a press release that Sega was proud of for the 35th anniversary of their beloved mascot. You can do anything. This is stupid.
I want to make sure I want to make sure that we include in the

get the link from YouTube specifically. Uh Stop it. Stop it. Uh there we go. Sorry, I was playing like nine different Sega things in my thing. In the show notes later, if you if you're not searching for it yourself, I will put the link for the YouTube clip of the announcement of this. It's like So, everything it says is ridiculous, but it's also like not good. Like Like there's a way to say all this stupid-ish well, but this version Like I get where they're coming from. Like in the beginning it like starts with like, you know, 16-bit Sonic, and then it keeps moving through the ages. I thought it was actually going to take it to the movies, like the the cinema Sonic.
Uh-huh.
Uh and there's a really actually an opportunity they missed to have it be like ugly Sonic first and then a rewind and have it be regular Sonic. Uh they don't do that. Um but like it treats it so like it's real.

And I I It has all the style and grace of like one of those videos for like a folding chair on Amazon.
Also, I'm going to make everyone read this. Chaos Emerald juice is also weird cuz it's not like you choose the emeralds, and even then having it in a stump dump clearly means Sonic ate it. And then Sonic turned into glass? They're trying to offload Sonic's corpse after a terrible experiment.
Yeah, this is called getting rid of the evidence and trying to make a profit.
Yeah, right. 100%. I love this. This is great. I think this is just absolutely the worst thing.
Little nerd Annie brings up a good point. Sega does know how unhinged Sonic fans are. Now I I'm I truly I need to ask this is our last question of the day, okay? Is there anyone in chat right now that's like I don't know, it's pretty cool. Like like that like is actually like psyched

for this statue, and I will not shame you. I promise you. I just need to know if we have that level of Sonic fan in this audience.
I I don't think we do. I Yeah.
[laughter]
No.
Someone might be brave enough. Someone might be brave enough. We're going to let it roll in. No, no, no. Sega really does what Nintendo did. I like this. After the shaming we just gave them, no one will say they are. I I Listen. Let the record show my hand is not raised. Not me. I know a guy who was in high school. I could ask him. All right, fine. No one's No one's brave enough.
Yeah. No, I think this is great. Um Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's
Right. And this is good. Fly Hyping has it right. I'm psyched to hear about the

crazy people who buy it. I'm not that crazy, though.
Yeah.
Uh Dark will do it. Dark will do it. Good. Report back.
Salutes to you, Dark. Well done.
Report back. Let us know Let us know Can you take the DNA out? What would you do with it? Can you
What?
This too many questions.
There's no real DNA.
You don't know. Oh, I'm sorry. Is that the problem?
It's like they took a hedgehog. And they like took some hedgehog blood and they're like, "There's a hedgehog in there."
Remember the computer that was cooled with blood? I forget it was Diablo or something like that.
idea. Literally any any one any one who has ever built a computer is perfectly qualified to tell you that that was the stupidest way to build a computer. Because so blood is red because of hemoglobin,

which has iron in it. And there are moving electric parts near the coolant.
I don't know what you're talking about.
Which means that you're going to magnetically remove all the hemoglobin from the blood and clog up your coolant system. Like this is not rocket science.
Everything I learned about blood and DNA I learned from Jurassic Park and Mr. DNA and dinosaurs. So, I don't really know DNA. Oh, Dark's Dark's giving us his master plan. They're giving him That's it.
[laughter]
All you guys are going to laugh up until I have my own clone Sonic army. I will become the Eggman this world needs. You know what?
Kukulcan
I feel like Eggman would do a better job running this planet than anyone else

right now. So, at least anyone who's currently trying. So, you know what?
Dark and his army of of and [laughter] his army of parasite Eve Sonic clones.
Yeah, right. Yeah, it'll be awesome. Okay.
All right, that's it. That's it. We're done.
See, look look look. But but isn't it better now? Isn't it better now? Haven't we had a good laugh?
No, because we know it exists somewhere. That's horror, Will. You like horror.
No, I like how stupid people are. It's great. Look, I'm I'm very used to people being stupid in a way that means that Mountain Dew now sponsors the reflecting pool, right? I'm very used to that. I would like people to be stupid in ways where they believe that Sonic the Hedgehog is going to come to life if they buy the statue and grant all of their wishes with a Chaos Emerald, because that's funny stupid. It isn't hurting anyone.
Listen, we're stuck in a new location without any explanation. No time for

relaxation. That's all from the Sonic song. I don't know. I
Okay. Great.
Hey everyone. Thank you for WATCHING THIS FIRST FRIDAY EDITION of Games for Breakfast. Uh
I hope this has been unhinged enough for a Friday edition. I feel like I feel like there are fewer hinges.
There were fewer hinges. There was more bad news than good news. We didn't get through all our stingers. We have stuff for other segments. And we're going to come back and re-level them. Thank you for dealing with us as we kind of tested these out with all y'all. We're learning a lot. But I do really enjoy having like sections of the show to kind of be able to fill and talk through it. Again, shout out to Nick DeWitt who did phenomenal work on all of these animations that we designed. They they came out excellent. I can't wait for you to see every single one of them.
Yep.
Um Will, something different is happening now on twitch.tv/extracredits at the end of the show.
That's right. Because we've reshuffled the schedule. One of the other things that gets moved is that Matt is now going to hang out and play some games

with me over on Twitch. So go nowhere if you're ever on Twitch YouTube if you want to come over. We're going to be diving into Destiny 2. We're rolling brand new characters and starting Destiny 2 from the beginning.
At the end.
At the end. Because now that it's over, we can't possibly fall behind. Um
It's and I have to say like this is a weird this is a weird thing and I'm wondering if other people are feeling it. I am so much more pumped to play Destiny and go through it now that I know I can't fall behind. Like there's a mental like latch that was released and now I'm like oh I'll deal with this. Like I'll want to do this again.
Yeah.
Like even during the setup Will and I were talking back and forth. We're like we're oddly excited to play this old ass game like because we know that our progress will matter for our own journeys. That makes sense?
Yeah.
Um yeah. So
so Matt's [clears throat] going to Matt's a Titan.
Yeah. Yep. I built one that looks like my my wife.
And I'm I'm playing a Warlock because if you're new here, I guess, I play

supports in every video game.
Everything. Yeah. Also, Fireball, we do know that some of it is is still gone, but the most they did release essentially at the end of it as much of a complete thing as they could or would. And Will's going to go to the very beginning and I'm just going to be along for the ride for that. I did the beginning cuz I didn't know if I'd be able to join right away with him. I really like what they've done in the beginning. So, we'll see if it holds up. Anyway, thank you so much for joining us for Games for Breakfast on Fridays. Come back every Friday 11:15 on YouTube, 11:00 a.m. if you want the pre-show over on Twitch. Also, Nebula, thank you so much. Rocky's over there. We love that you guys watch when you can and we hope you enjoy the Nebula ad-free experience other than our ads, which you can't skip, which we make, which but you can't buy things and then
So, they're not really ads. They're more of like
And then we get Sonic DNA statues. But that's neither here nor there. Will, there's only one thing left to do.
That's correct.

And that is to do the same ending we've done from the beginning of Games for Breakfast even when it was back on Mondays so long ago. And if you're new here, the reason we do the same ending every time is to foster a sense of community and togetherness. And it used to be leading into the week, but now we're leading into the weekend, baby. So, that vibe is going to be intense even more.
Yep.
So, you all know it if you're here, if you've been here before, you know this ending. And if you're this is your first time, just pay attention. It's going to be the same every time. If you don't get it this time, you'll get it the exact same way next time. So, thank you for watching Games for Breakfast. I am Matt.
I'm Will.
And I would like to officially pronounce you Brad and Janet. You may kiss the Rocky.
I