Switch 2 Gets Political, Games Industry Shook and Minecraft Movie Makes Moolah | Games For Breakfast

We then after going live like a few seconds before on Twitch, we went live on YouTube. I think that's a really good plan. That is indeed the plan that I have executed. That's correct. Is it already executed? Yeah, that's correct. Well, good morning for a second time, Janet. Yeah. How's it going? Welcome to this Oh, boy. I'm still I'm making I'm making links. I'm doing things. This is the pre-show goodness you come here for. Let's see here. Uh, Pavara, thank you so much for gifting a channel membership to Annie. Annie, welcome on into the channel membership family. We don't have alerts for that yet. We're working on that. There's a minor technical hiccup that we have to overcome first. Uh, that we're working on there. Actually, Matt, we could work on that later this week. I think I think I figured out a way to do it. Question. Are you seeing YouTube chat in your chat right now? I am not looking at that chat.

I want to make sure. I see a lot of Twitch love because it is the first of the month. Thank you so much everybody over on Brad. Uh, no I'm not, but let me see if I can fix that. Um, I'm just fixing a thing over here. I forgot to hit activate selected, but I think it's good. Uh, membership does also give you Discord access. That's correct. Channel membership over on YouTube does give Discord access. Also, wait, what happened? I turned away and now there's so much hype. It's a level three hype train. And how is it already level three? Well, it's working on level three. It is level deceptive marketing on the part of Twitch. It won't actually God. I wish I you know what I wish I wish they would let us like they would give us the mechanism and then let us customize it more cuz right now we

have no ability to customize it. I want to customize it with like different names, different emotes, diff all that. I want to all the things and the highest level of hype train should be plaid obviously, right? But like I don't know. I don't know. Who knows? Yeah, I'm still not seeing anything on the YouTube side of things. I don't know if I have to reactivate something. Yeah, I uh I don't know either. Um already added someone on Janet type something so we know what's going on and then we'll move from There we go. There we go. Thank you, Tam. I appreciate you. Yeah. All right. Great. Now it's working. So, you're being loud. She will not be Is it now not working for Brad? No, now it is. It is working for Brad. All right. Great. Awesome. Excellent. Love it when a technology works

together. Man, I'm like halfway to references this morning. I'm not awake. Uh Chad, we're both on the East Coast and all of a sudden the East Coast decided that instead of spring, it wanted to be like fall in Boston like for no reason like for the entire East Coast. Thanks, climate change. We love that. Um, but I woke up this morning and it was like I went to sleep with the window open because it was nice out and I woke up this morning and I was cold and I was like, "Why is it cold?" I looked at my phone and it was like it's 45. It feels like 37 and I'm like that is not a number of degrees that I wanted to be in freedom units. Thank you. So, yeah. All right. I'm back. All socials posted. Good morning, pre-show, folks. Hell hath indeed frozen over. I I I'm willing to bet that some people wish that um the market would freeze. Hey, that's the first of many jokes about the stock

market that will probably be happening today. What are you talking about? I haven't I haven't read the news since a week and a half ago. What's going on? Oh, you know, we continue to live in times that are most unfortunately unprecedented. That's fair. Well, we do have uh a really good show today. We're going to be talking a lot about uh the Switch to I do we're going to break it up into a couple different sections, I think, because there's a lot to go over. I'm very glad that we waited uh that the Nintendo Direct was two days I guess after the last breakfast because I it's good to let this stuff sit because I found my opinion has sort of changed across a lot of different things. Um and yes, we will be talking about prices and tariffs and nonsense and stuff like that, but uh there's a lot to sort of unpack around that that's sort of like we need to get through the base of it first. And we have a bunch of other fun stories that Will has found uh to start us off throughout this this wonderful week because listen, as

darkest of timelines go, uh there is always something else going on and we want to make sure that we're actually like talking about other things as well. Um yeah, Zoe agrees. I don't know if you can hear her due to the noise gate, but she is agreeing loudly and um prolifically. Oh, these are good words. Yeah, I need to I need to bribe Whisper into like coming in here more often, but he is largely immune to bribes. Um, and is generally grumpy and also sassy, but I love him because he is grumpy and also sassy. So, yeah. Well, I'm feeling both fat and sassy, so I think uh no reference. Is your spoon too big? Never mind. Will Zoe, come here. You understand me. I I was digging for one of those that was like vaguely PG-13. And the first reference that comes after my spoon is too big is not

an appropriate reference for this channel. Cat. It's got old man energy. Exactly. Immune to bribes. Put that man in office. Unfortunately, that man is a cat. Oh, that's right. I am a banana. My spoon is too big. It was an adventure. I can't hear anyone yet. Hi, bud. Good morning. Yeah, I got to put my headphones on so I can hear what Will's saying. He could be saying anything right now. Literally anything. Nope. Well, he said nope right there. Okay. Okay, pal. As you should be, Ice. It's It's a work day, so she has to put her collar back on. All right. I am happy to report that I am a banana. There we go. Good. See, yo, Matt, you you know what the reference was going to be after my spoon is too big. And I was like, that's not the right reference. Can't use that one. So, that's fine.

Zoe's platform is more for all. That is correct. Yes. Oh, hi, buddy. Okay, we got the tail. We got the thing. We got your collar. We've got lights. We've got cameras. Pitching technology. Yeah. Okay. Hey, is the hype train over? Will, for everyone who doesn't know, the the pre-show goes until the hype train on Twitch is over. They have 45 generosity to get to level five, but I don't think they're going to do it. So, it's probably over. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. I'm gonna put I'm gonna say that they're not going to do it. So, we can start wrapping up and I'll start thanking people and because I can't have my coffee until until I trade is over. That's That's correct. Um, yeah, there are new emotes available, by the way, if you want to throw your prime sub in or whatever and do all of those things and stuff. Zoe, you've been you've been called by the people.

We'll sign the executive order that the hype is over. That's not how executive orders or hype work. Yeah. Sadly, well, it's funny. At first, I was like, "Oh, no. Zoe has too many scandals going on to be mayor of New York City." But then I was like, it doesn't matter. All those treats. Uh, we got Oh, I got a I got a new we got a new emote. That's very nice. Thank you. Thank you. Shoot. All right. Uh, I'm going to start thanking people. Bob, thank you so much for 57 months at tier or sorry, 71 months at tier 2. Hippie, thank you so much for 55 months at tier three. Midlife cranky for 15 months. Mindless indulgence for 36 months. That's like three years. Thunder for 60 months at tier 2. carrying for biddy's copper chef for 18 months. That's like a year and a half. That's a really long time. Rayan for 24 months. That's two years. Why do we all have all these anniversaries? Gladius for 61 months. Book Dragon for 59 months. Hippie for gifting us up to Nocape. Ras for 56 months. Ice Beer for 47 months with Prime that's almost four years. Thank you for remembering to hit

the Prime button and give us Jeff Bezos's money. Uh Hippie for gifting a sub to Phil Sean for 41 months. Teamwork for 32 months. Hippie for gifting a sub to the chatbot. Thank you. Uh, now it can use emotes again. It was kind of awkward. I didn't want to ask, but it couldn't use the emotes. Um, Alcar for 18 months, CIF for 50 months, THC for 57. How have you been here 57 months? I remember when THC joined, and I was like, is that actually that's actually their use. All right. You know what's cool. Um, a mentor for 49 months, Nova for the giant Zoey emote, Sal for 65 months at tier 2. And that's a hype train. Thank you so much. Boom. Nailed it. We have a great question from YouTube. Uh, there are custom emotes for channel members. Those are gated by the total number of members we have. And since by and large, most Extra Credits fans are members over on the history side. The credits channel only has slots for the current number of emotes. We want to put more in. We have all of the

emotes from Twitch that I can port in as soon as we have enough members that YouTube will give us access to those slots. Um so that's that is a thing that is very much in the works but we need to meet thresholds uh first so uh that's that's the plan. Um, is there are there any other uh matters of business or state that we must handle uh before we jump into the show proper or any other questions from Brad or Janet at this time that we can answer before we begin in today's games for breakfast? I forget did the original EC channel transform extra history? Yes. Yes. So, so we rebranded the OG channel because the split on the OG channel was that most people were there for history and so we spun up the gaming channel and this is the the lives are actually an experiment. We couldn't have done this because um when when it was all one

channel because then we would get no gaming news done because we would spend the entire time answering questions about history. We might do lives on the history channel um at some point. I've thought of a bunch of use cases where we could use this to go live on the History Channel, but that's not a thing that we're there's no plans for that currently. Uh the the one exception may be if and and spoiler alert for anything that could be coming down the pipeline. Um if a thing we did last year we decide to do again, uh that might be one of the only use cases currently for that. But yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, uh, hey, you know, I I I hope I I hope that is true. Oh, boy. Uh-huh. Oh, boy. Like it. I didn't have to say anything. We're keeping it as light today until we're

not. Uh um we're keeping it as light as possible so that we can float above the conflict until we just hammer drop right through it. Just um yeah. Uh okay. Cool cool cool cool cool cool cool cool cool. Uh this is a great question. Um much like all stocks it's imaginary. True. Uh so I'm imagining right now uh listen if if if current if current trends are anything to go by so the you have definitely go by the gameplay of flexel sticks right it it unlike traditional stocks flex sticks um offerings tend to be priced out around different methodologies that the player base is actually uh you know using. Um, so right now they're in uh blue indigo. Yeah. Don't Yeah. Yeah. You got to write

out that. But here's the thing. The thing with a flex stick is when it when one side of this this is not a flex stick. This is a pencil. But the thing about a flex stick is if one end dips, what happens to the other end? Will it goes up? It goes up. Unless it's doing that really weird optical illusion thing where you wave the pencil really fast and it it turns Yeah. See, it bends. And then who knows? There's still there's still a there's still an up and down, right? So like my point is much like the point of this pencil that is not a flexible stick. If one end of flexel stick go down, other end go up, boom, to the moon. Uh I think I just solved finance. Yes. I don't even look I don't need I don't even need to look for a man in finance with 65 blue eyes with trust funds. Uh I now we just put all of that those hopes and dreams into uh the Flixelsticks account. For those of you who don't know, Flixelsticks I was going to say a lot of Janet's confused right now. By the way, you know what? I don't I don't I don't know what

tier of reality I should explain flex on. Flexel sticks is one of the longest running stupid bit jokes that keeps coming back and we have to explain it every time because it's inconveniently long between the times it comes back. Flexible Sticks is a is a a game in our minds. Yeah, that is also apparently a Fortune 500 company. Anyway, we probably should start the show. Cool. Does that mean that they can um witness us? Witness. Yeah. Yay. All right. Uh I need to go get silver spray paint while we're in the blackout. All right. A reminder. We're going to go to black for a quick second and then we're going to come back and then we're going to do a show. Please do not panic as we go to black. That is so that we can begin a clean recording for uh the folks over in uh Nebula. So uh please look forward to it. Um you are allowed to panic if you would like as a treat. Yay.

[Applause] [Music] Good morning, Matt. Matt. Oh, good morning, Will. And good morning to all of you. Welcome to Games for Breakfast, the only internet talk show we talk about this week's gaming and tech news, but that also sadly due to uh stock prices. I've had to maneuver some things around. Uh I had to basically do the Teu version of my hat now. Um it's everything's go we're fine. We're going to ride it out, but right now uh this this is this is this is where we got to be. Uh but you know, I I hear that, you know, temporary pain for some sort of solution or something would be cool if someone had one. I don't know. I black out every time I watch the news. Um this is dear audience, right after Matt in the pre-show said we were going to keep

it really light before we got really heavy, but I see that we're just sinking to the bottom of the very honest trench right at the beginning. I want to be very clear. This hat is very very flimsy and light. Like like it the materials this hat is made. No, this is this is a I could breathe on this wrong if I like like I'm surprised the brim doesn't go flying up and just break backwards. Yeah. So I don't like the reality that we're living in right now. I'm gonna What are you talking about? Listen, we we all have to make terrible terrible Yeah. My eyeballs are apparently making making the sacrifices. Um Oh, okay. Yeah, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. [Music] Um, welcome to Games for Breakfast, everybody. We've got a a very fun, I promise so much fun show for you until it stops being fun. We have to talk about the cold, dark reality of the world. But before then, listen. Yeah. Uh, we're going to be talking about the Switch 2. Uh, that's going to be sort of our main story. Also, what's going on with the prices and stuff like that. Uh

we're going to keep the the the the polytox uh basically put straight into the video game space uh because that's where we live today. That's right. Um we're keeping it very restrained to that space. How this affects gaming and not only just video games. I think there's a lot to be said about the tabletop stuff. That's going to be later on in the episode. Will has actually prepared a uh a a a wonderful smorgish board of other uh wonderful gaming topics to talk about before we dive into all of that. Uh but as I was saying in the pre-show, I was very happy that we did we had a week between last show and the Switch 2 announcement and everything because uh my opinions have changed and it will be really fun to sort of dive in with all of you. So please when we hit something that you are interested in start chatting in in whatever if you're on Twitch, if you're on YouTube uh or if you're on uh Nebula, there is a place you can talk to us and that is on Blue Sky. If there if you basically have anything in the show that you wanted to comment on or question or say you're

wrong and silly or you're awesome and still silly, then that is also where you can do that there. Um yeah. Yeah. Uh, real quick before we begin, I have a correction um that I I thought we could we could talk about ever so briefly. So, last week we were talking about Ubisoft and Assassin's Creed, right? Oh, yeah. And we were talking about how um there was a story that went around for a really long time that uh Assassin's Creed, the Assassin's Creed team at Ubisoft contributed information of some kind to the restoration of Notredam. That part's not true. They didn't give a bunch of money, not information. kind of interesting. We don't actually know where that came up. Um I found it really Polygon has a good video in the show notes. Yeah. And big big um thanks to Siegebug for passing that video along and setting us on the right path. Um yeah. Okay. I hope this is on the right screen when I take this thing away. It might be. You never know. We're going to talk about our favorite April Fool's jokes

cuz today's April 7th and we didn't get to talk about April Fool's Day cuz it was on a Tuesday. It was so silly. The last breakfast was um at the end of the month and so it feels odd that this is the 7th today. Correct. And it's the first breakfast of April. That's correct. Um so Oh no, not that. Oh, I'm in the wrong spot in my in my slideshow. Matt Matt saved me. Matt saved me. Oh boy. You just you went I was I looked away for one second to pour my coffee. It it reset. So, I'm just going to do this. There we go. There we go. All right. Great. We're going to talk about that other thing later, but everyone's already seen that because it's a thumbnail on YouTube. Um, all right. First up, uh, some some some fantastic uh, April Fool's Day jokes. My two favorites were both games that you can play. That is my favorite kind of April Fool's Day joke is things that are real um, and not just like fake product

announcements. The fake product announcements are funny and good, right? Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying like you shouldn't have those, but I love I love me a good hey, we made a thing and here it is. It's for you. Um, so my two favorite were Discord's The Last Meadow, which will be playing after stream today before it goes away because it goes away today at noon Eastern or Can you explain what that is? No, I don't know. I just know that the community on Discord told me I needed to play it and then I needed to know nothing about it. So, I've done as much as is necessary to set up the capture and I have no idea what it is. That's great. So, it is a game type experience. Yes. That uh Discord has put together for April Fool's Day, but you have no idea what that game type experience is. That is correct. All right. Uh and the other one um is uh that Minecraft continues to just point at the fence, point at the fence, and then knock it out of the park. On April Fool's Day, um they have

introduced a new uh April Fool's Day snapshot called Craft Mine where they turn the entire Minecraft experience into a rogike. So, we're playing that tomorrow on the Rogue Review because they combined Minecraft and rogue likes and they made them. Okay, great. Awesome. That's everything I wanted. So, yeah. Uh the thing the only thing I learned about the Discord one, honestly, uh was what Grass says here. The bad thing about Discord is the one that looked exactly like an ad, which means I clicked ignore as fast as I could. Same. I saw it pop up. Even though it did, I think pop up on the other side of the Discord window. I instantly was like, "Yeah, and I made it go away." Yeah, I think a lot of people did that, too. Um, uh, are Minecraft snapshots permanent? It is permanently available. Yes, it will be available for as long as snapshots are available under craft mine. Um, which is cool cuz people have done really weird things with the old snapshots. There was one where, excuse me, um, if you wrote a word on a book and then through that

book into a portal, the portal would lead you to a new randomized dimension kind of like Mist. Um, Sure. like with linking books and um, you would do that uh, and that's still around and people still play that because it's it's a wild experience. Yeah. Um, yeah. Uh, nice. Yeah, there was I didn't I didn't get a chance to check out Chocolate Dropa. Uh, that wasn't on the list, but when uh I had heard about it, uh, true. Uh, which, uh, at some point at some point I will I will dive in. Um, what was I going to say? Oh, my favorites were uh this thing that we're seeing right here, which is the uh which is a fake product. It's the thing that Will doesn't like. Uh, I don't like it as much. I like it just fine. I just prefer real products. Uh, I love this so much. This is the ste uh the stream desk. Uh, so most streamers,

as you probably know, have little things like this that control various buttons and and things we need to do. Uh, this would be a whole desk of them because everyone just needs more buttons. My favorite thing is on the Elgato website there's I I think they're real streamers that they just asked to write some fake things, but like there's the scroll of like like product reviews and they're all equally as unhinged. Like there's like, oh man, now I'm really looking for the the the Stream Desk XL cuz I still need more buttons. It's like just things like that are very fun when it goes two or three levels deep. Y um but my my absolute true favorite was um was this which uh can anyone tell me well actually I guess it says it on the thing. Um this is a pillow that you can actually buy I think until tomorrow from the Konami website. It's too expensive. I won't be doing it. That has this line from Silent Hill 2 in glow-in-the-dark

ink on the case. So, it is this is my favorite kind of April Fool's thing because unlike the steam the sorry I keep saying Steam the stream desk this is a product you could actually buy in a limited number were you so inclined. Mhm. Uh yeah I I I really really loved that this was uh a reality a terrifying waking dream reality. Yep. Yeah. I uh I I I I I worry about sleeping with my head that close to anything directly related to Silent Hill. I feel like that's my fear. I feel like if I do that No, I I don't I I do not wish to have those dreams. Thank you. I mean, or what if that's the most immersive Silent Hill experience you could have? No. No. I'm good. I'm good. I already have enough trouble sleeping.

You can tell from the bags under my eyes perpetually. Whoa. I made this coffee strong as hell this morning. I feel like it's it's a it's a a precursor of things to come. Okay. All right. Uh well then were there any real quick? Were there any uh in in Brad or Janet? Were there any April Fools uh game related stuff that you really really dug that we sort of missed on here? We'll leave a list u of a bunch of them in the show notes. I know Hell Divers made their guns really big. Yeah. There's always like some number of silly things um that that happen in like in small amounts. Um yeah, I will say here's something else. Larky. True. Same. I actually had to hunt them. Yeah, I did. Um and it feels like uh this year, this particular time and whatever was not a place where people were looking for a lot of levity. people were looking for maybe some some assurances or or or um you know something a little more solid and it

feels like a lot of the April Fool's stories did get sort of undercut and didn't really have much time at all in any and any news cycle, you know. Uh oh, that's right. Um Marvel Rivals had a Venom twerk emote, right? Um at the same time, however, is my least favorite April Fool's Day joke. Not because anything about the Venom twerk emote is bad, but because they also broke rivals for a non-trivial number of people with the one of the updates that put the Venom twerk emote in so hard that I literally when I tried to launch rivals, it force rebooted my computer so hard I had to go into BIOS and restore defaults. Like is bad right now. Thanks, Nies. Love that. So, waiting for a fix on that. Um, yeah. Uh, anyway, I do really I actually very much like April Fools. This year did feel a little different and harder to parse and or find things, but that's to be

expected, I think. Yep. Um, oh, I love this Star Trek Online April Fool's thing where for the day you can replace all the sound effects with the devs making the sounds. Zoom. That's fun. That's good. I like that. Those those kinds of things are great. Um, okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Cool. Cool. Cool. Um, let's move on to some stuff that happened this week. Some of which is is good, I think. Some of which is good. So, chat chat, in these trying times, and boy are they trying, uh, many people turn to their comfort games. And I know of two games uh that are particularly comforting to a large number of people in our audience. One of them is Stardew Valley and the other one is Balders's Gate 3. And in both of them, you're trying to kiss people who probably need to go to therapy. Um and

so one daring visionary asked and answered the question, why not both? So, there's a mod for Stardew Valley called Balders's Village that adds a village for all the people from Balders's Gate. So, you can marry and start you can marry Asterion and Stardew. Like, it's just that's how it is. Um, and it had kind of a tumultuous launch. Um, because uh Sven, the CEO of Larian, saw it and was like, "Yo, this is dope. Great job." Uh, and the Larian team all loved it and it got released and then Wizards was like, "Hey, you can't do that." And the Larian team was like, "That really the attack you want to take with this buddy?" And then Wizards backed down and retracted their copyright complaint and Balders's Village is once again up for download and you can add it to Stardew Valley if you want to. So this is this is uh you

can get it on Nexus Mods but it was by user BV and uh the story comes to us from Kotaku as well and basically uh it's kind of you never know because I I have yet to find a statement from Wizards about this um they are I think through Hasbro's uh puppeteering um so overly latigious and like will slap things down so quickly. Like they definitely have out I'm sure have outside companies looking for copyright infringement and just like be like no like just to sort of keep things clamped. Mhm. Um it's great that they realize that this was a mistake for whatever reason, but I don't the reasons of why they consider this a mistake is is not clear, right? Like is it because they're like, "Oh, wait, no, that's cool. Crap. Ah, and then they fix it because they're they're overly latgious on that. Or is it a you know,

oh we we got caught, people are mad, the creators of Baldersgate say this is cool. We're going to look like dummies. Okay, never mind. Right. There there is some there is a balance between So like we should also be clear. They totally have the legal grounds to be like don't do this. Oh, because it contains characters and likenesses that they own the copyrights for for a whole bunch of reasons. Like, so we're not saying they don't have legal ground. We're just saying like you could, maybe don't. There is there is I'll even I'll even go a little further on the benefit of the doubt. I'm feeling generous in this very light hat. Um, copyright is a hard and interesting and dangerous thing to maintain. And every time you let something like this go through um without comment or or or something or or engaging with it in some way, you could essentially in various courts be weakening your copyright

claim. So they have to do something. But I think even Sven over at um Larian uh mentioned that there was basically like ways around this like you this all comes back to a corporate beast being too big to react quickly to something small and wonderful like this if that makes sense. I truly don't if if I was to give my hypothetical what I think happened I don't think the people at Wizards saw this and were like absolutely not slap. I bet you one of the firms that they hire to to take care of these things did a nice quick like nope whatever. Turned out this was not only a beloved thing but crafted with a lot of care and no one's making any money off it. Like there's a lot of different things but still to help wizards with their copyrights etc. like it's this whole process has to like play this dumb game and then all the things pick it up being like Wizards hates this thing and well maybe they do I don't know but it seems pretty silly like this

is this is and I I think I think people would realize that. Um anyway that's a long way of saying I'm very happy this exists. I'm very happy it's back up. I have yet to uh play it yet because I haven't Stardew tends to just suck away my brain and so I don't play it much. Um, but I was interested in trying this out and just seeing just seeing how uh how well the crossover went. Yep. Uh, absolutely. Uh, okay. Speaking of things that are in sort of a legal limbo, uh, we're not going to talk too much about it now. We're just going to let all of you know that it's happening. So, a reminder that Tik Tok is still very much in legal limbo. Uh, this came up again this week as the original deadline imposed by the US administration on Tik Tok getting sold to a company or to an entity that wasn't the Chinese government got extended again. We don't know if it's

ever actually going to hit the deadline or not, but it is a good reminder that Tik Tok might just stop working in the US in the next little bit. um whatever your feelings on Tik Tok are that it is a source of um job for a lot of uh creators and it is a place that a lot of creators have turned to um particularly um in the past couple of years. So it is going to be an interesting phenomena if and when it goes away or when it gets sold. Um it's sort of a a thing that I forget about cuz I don't Tik Tok. Um Right. And and then it comes up across the news feed as like, "Oh yeah, that's right. They need to sell themselves to So Okay, great." Yeah. Yeah. Uh what an interesting moment for um social media companies in general. Yeah. Um, again, not to get uh into things

that a this show isn't about and b uh I am undereducated on, but this seems as though there is a social media platform, Tik Tok, that is was basically um for for better or ill. uh many part bipartisan groups in the in the US government thought that there was a problem. Uh but then when it seemed like Tik Tok might actually help the side coming into power, it was then saved for a little bit and now the can has been kicked again. Um this just feels like That's right, Zoe. It feels like just sort of um a tactic to keep stringing the story along. Yeah. Um also, I don't believe Bite Dance is at all interested in

selling any of it. That's the big one. I I I I don't this is and given the the state of the global economy, which we'll dip ever so briefly our toe into in a little bit, um getting it sold now might be even harder, right? So, like there there's a bunch of problems with this. Uh, suffice it to say, uh, our our regular reminder every time this story comes up, the reason I bring this up is not because I particularly have a dog in the race of whether or not Tik Tok goes away. Um, it is to remind you that if there are creators whose work you enjoy who you only follow on Tik Tok, it is a good time to find them elsewhere. Because remember the last time the deadline expired, they just sort of turned off the app entirely ahead of time and people couldn't find creators

that they wanted until they made deals to get it back online. Right? So like the the regardless of the um quality, efficacy, legality of any of this, the inevitability is that if Tik Tok goes away, people will lose access to creators whose work they enjoy. And those creators will be desperately in need of finding their fans again on other platforms if they're going to keep being content creators as a primary like um uh job. So do that. Find find all your favorite content creators in other places. Just do that as like a matter of habit, right? Yeah. I uh I I popped up X Dragon's thing again. I'll pop it one more time just real quick if it'll actually uh play or not. Maybe it won't actually allow me. There we go. Uh yeah, when Vine went under uh they did migrate to another platform, but there were growing pains. Lots of people couldn't find the other people. And this is sort of in in what Will is saying now is you have another 75 days to like look if

there's people that you and creators that you really really have basically made a part of your internet life at this point on TikTok. Take the 10 minutes, go through your feed, see who you see every day. maybe make sure you're following them other places because if this does go away, they will just be gone to you, right? And yeah, like you can I'm of course Google their name and find those things too, but the less time you're away from their content on whatever other platform that they're trying to make a living on, the easier it will be for them to stay afloat amidst this sort of nightmare of their main ship sinking. Correct. You know. Exactly. So, um Yep. Yeah. Also, side note, I am seeing a lot of um I love this comment honestly from Male. Um the the very ironic thing when D and D is the most modded game ever. Um yeah, and I will say I'm seeing a lot of the D and D stuff from the from the

previous um uh story. We have people were bringing up like they want to become TSR again and I was like we have a great breakdown um written by a friend of the show Eddie Webb uh animated thing. It's like 20 something minutes long called Dungeons and Disasters and it talks about the different uh it's on this channel. You could go watch it right after this. Um where basically uh we go over all editions of Dungeons and Dragons as it's happened. And for some reason how the even number editions are very, no pun intended, draconian and locked down and the odd number editions are like proliferated and can be modded freely and things like that. and the successes uh uh and financial gains how that tracks along those things. So um coffee says with regards to Tik Tok maybe you shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket. I don't think most creators aren't. The creators aren't. The the problem is that Tik Tok some do, but but the the the thing to keep in mind is

that Tik Tok's algorithm is hyper effective at delivering content to people in a way that other algorithms and formats are not. Shorts aren't as good, but they're pretty good. And Insta, from what I understand, not being a person who uses Insta at all, um, is kind of in the same boat, right? And it's not that anyone's putting their eggs all in one basket. It's that creators aren't in everyone's basket or people can't find creators new baskets to put themselves into, right? That's the problem. It's it's making the baskets talk. Social media, I will only speak to my individual use case, but it feels like this is also true. It feels like often times you only engage with a creator on one platform that you found them on. I that's what I do. Uh not not on purpose, just because I'm like, "Oh, well, there's the people that I follow on Instagram and these are real funny cuz I get my Tik Toks a day and a half later."

Um and so that's fun. And then on YouTube, it's more to be honest, the majority of my YouTube watching now has moved over to Nebula because all the creators I would watch on YouTube, a lot of them are on Nebula already. So, I just watch over there. But that's for like longer form stuff and then I'll use Blue Sky to engage with them uh if I wanted to chat or bring up something like that. Like it's it's interesting that at least I find whatever platform I'm on that I found that person on, I tend to stick around on that platform to engage with them. It's not because I don't want to, but it's just now if like if I found out that say uh Instagram, we could only be so lucky goes away. Um I would then have to do the same thing that we're asking for Tik Tok people to do, just find people in other places. Yep. But okay, speaking of interesting things that happened this weekend, not my best. Oh, actually, uh, sorry, one last thing. This is an interesting This is exactly sort of what

I'm saying from Oopsy. Obsy, sorry. When y'all cancelled Janet last time, tried to follow me on Twitch, but fell off after two weeks. So, glad you're back. Well, thank you very much. Thank you for coming back. And uh, yeah, and it's that's that's sort of the thing, too. as people who make stuff on the internet. I would like to just say like no one can be blamed like no like it's never ill will or anything like that if if there's something that moves to another platform and people fall off like that's expected. That's just that's the that's how humans engage with these things. Um and it's really nice that uh it's really nice that uh we can come back here and that uh you're back here even though you fell off of Twitch. That's just I don't know. I think it's cool and it kind of speaks to what I was saying. Yep. Uh okay. Um uh Oh, what? Yeah, you're right. It's true. Everyone watch the same things for every Thanks. What up, buddy? That's right. Oh. All right. Uh let's go on to

something that's relevant, I guess, to both of us and also maybe to all of you. This thing. This. So, I haven't seen it yet. I'm going tonight to see the Minecraft movie. Uh, also Will will be a guest on the podcast on the only podcast about movies which will be out next Saturday on Nebula next Sunday um everywhere else on wherever fine podcasts are not sold because they don't make money. Um, or mine doesn't mine doesn't make money. But um I am very excited to see this. I'm also seeing this tonight. This is not going to be about the quality of the movie or or whether or not people enjoyed it or not. This is more a thing I wanted to throw in because all I've been seeing in the headlines of stories about the Minecraft movie is every major news outlet seems like their minds have been blown that the Minecraft movie had the strongest opening weekend of a film this year. It

already made back Sonic 1's like full US budget like or like uh it beat it beat it in its weekend. It ran its whole theatrical run. Quick reminder, quick reminder. Minecraft has sold over because the last time we checked it was this number, 300 million copies. This is my point. The a lot of business places like the one um the one we pulled from I think here was CNN Business like says the Minecraft movie uh smashes box office expectations with 157 million. I think they were planning it for to be 60 million. And when I saw that number, I was like, what what type of block are you smoking? Like it makes no like if you are if you either are in the gaming space or have a child, it feels like you would know how large, no matter if this movie is great

or not, this movie was going to make bank regardless. Uh early reviews seem to be pretty positive. That's great. But I just couldn't believe how many like actual news organizations like I can't wow I can't believe this and it's it feels very odd and out of touch. Um I don't know is everyone else's experiences with sort of what they've been seeing sort of similar to that like it just the tone of headline is really what I'm getting at and how weird it is. Yeah. I uh I actually haven't heard anything, but I also don't have as much like movie business news in my feeds as you do. Um but I could have told you that it didn't it it could have been terrible. It could have had no one who was a known actor at all, let alone Jason Mamoa and Jack Black in the same movie. Um, and it would have done great cuz it

had the word Minecraft on it like but also like you take you take that right and then you make it truly a four quadrant film. I think it's rated PG, right? I believe it is rated PG. So PG-rated film, well-known actors that parents will like to see. Well-known game franchise that that children will want to see. Uh, also a bunch of money dumped into it. Like I feel like if those are your four quadrants, then you've hit every one of them. Yeah. Uh, I'm I'm gonna be very interested to talk about the how well they dodge the or lean into the uncanny valley thing that they've got going on. It's very strange. They made hyper realistic villagers. It's the one that's like Yeah. But yeah. Oh, no. Yep. Hey, Luis. Hello. Welcome. Um, oh, and then also, uh, Red Lightning says

something interesting here, too. To be honest, I think, uh, well, actually, movie entry to be popular, Alex Pika. Oh my god, that is very true as well. Chat was moving too fast. Um, I don't think most news realize how big Minecraft is. It's It's funny because they maybe it's just like the the degrees of separation because like they know how big Microsoft is and they know that they bought Minecraft for a large sum of money. Like I I it's it's so strange how it's like how they never uh understand how big Fortnite is. Also, AMP worked on it. Hey, hell yeah. uh AGori. Well, congrats on the good opening weekend. Yeah, right. Is a is a visual effects artist and uh has worked on many of the fine things that we have enjoyed over the years. Uh so that's cool. Well, I'm very much looking forward to seeing it. Will, I'm looking forward to you seeing it in our conversation. We're recording it midweek and then that'll be available. I I I got to ask I was wondering um is the

reason that you all want me on because I know stuff about Minecraft? We like to have people on the show that know about the subject matter, but that also can talk articulately about the subject matter. I have Will I have plenty of friends that know a lot about Minecraft. That's fair. Um I I I would say that you are my friend that could talk the most articulately about all of those things known about Minecraft. That's fair. That's valid. to be honest, Minecraft quickly gets into like the and then Herobrine territory very quickly. And and what's fun is I know you and I talk about movies on here on occasion, but you and I have never actually gotten to do I' I've been trying to find like the right one to bring you in on, and this felt Oh, yeah. This felt like one that you would already be making the trek over to the theater to see and that you would be a perfect fit for. I I am indeed very excited. I uh I'm I'm looking forward to it. My roommates and I are going tonight after the stream.

Nice. So, um, let's keep moving. Okay. All right. This now comes the time where I need to tell everybody, brace yourselves. If if you just wanted like the light gaming news and like the the fun April Fool's Day stuff, that's that's that bit. We're gonna talk about tariffs in general here for a second and then we're going to talk about the Switch 2. But we wanted to talk about tariffs in general first because they are impacting a lot more than just the Switch 2, though that is the headline piece of news that's really grabbing people's attention. Um because and also Oh, sorry. Uh there's our boy. There's our boy points if you're old enough to understand this reference. Um, real talk, we will be talking about this situation that is a real beyond gaming issue that is happening in the United States and and also therefore the

world. Um, I do think even if it is not a fun topic, a we'll try to keep it as fun and silly as we possibly can, but B, um, it's something that because in my lifetime, let me back up. In my lifetime, I have had the um how do I put it? The the distinct privilege of unless I was interested in a global economic thing, uh my privilege allowed me to sort of just sort of coast by and ignore if I wanted to. Um, and I think because things were so stable for a lot of people and places for so long, that kind of became a norm for a lot of folks. And now with everything sort of changing as fast as it is, it really wasn't an option before. And now you can start seeing how much it really isn't. So I guess my whole point behind that is even if this

doesn't sound like a fun topic, it's not. Um, but it's important. is worth engaging with and talking about because the the more the can gets kicked uh the worse it can probably get if that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. So, with all that super fun preamble on this lovely happy morning talk show, this is Ben Stein. This is Ben Stein from um uh Ferris Buer. Ferris Buer's day off giving a speech about tariffs. Uh and yeah. Um okay. So uh the brief the brief recap which I will try to keep as factual and screamless as possible. Last week on April uh 2nd we had the Nintendo Direct for the April uh for the Switch 2. And after that, that evening, the uh president of the United States, one

Donald Trump, signed uh an executive order mandating a raft of tariffs unprecedented in American history. Um, which is currently causing the global financial panic. That's probably the most factual and succinct way I can put that. These tariffs uh are by country, not by good or service imported. there don't appear to be wide swats of exceptions. The reason that this is particularly relevant to our our show and to the topic that we're the topics that we're going to be discussing is that many of the countries in Asia which produce many of the goods which are relevant to the gaming industry, China, Vietnam um several others uh but those two in particular um are being hit with north of 50% worth of tariffs um which is uh an existential crisis for the gaming industry in some cases um companies are not able to absorb that.

So uh we'll do a we'll do a very we'll do a very brief and succinct uh what's a tariff because that Google search continues to trend. Um a tariff in this case is a additional tax placed at the port of entry on a good from another country into in this case the United States. So um based on the on the value of the good on the declared um like MSRP of the good. This cost is in every case where it matters passed directly or almost directly on to the consumer which leads to a um a cost of goods increase roughly equivalent to that of the tariff placed on the good. These are not ways to actually make money. there ways to sculpt um uh consumer behavior towards in theory domestically produced goods. The problem is of course that that's not how that works anymore because those things don't can't be produced

domestically um for a whole bunch of reasons. That's sort of my my short like what happened? What are tariffs? Did I miss anything there? It's no I think I think you're actually a really solid solid description. Here's something I will say. I was while Will was sort of giving that uh the the 101 entry into what's sort of going on. I was just looking through a couple different sites and a couple chats I'm in and a couple things where uh I was trying to see like what the up totheminute stock thing was right now. I don't normally follow stocks this closely or the stock market. So, uh I don't know exactly where to look. Um it is there are some things that are dipping up at this very moment and other things that are dipping down. It is what what would be coined as incredibly volatile. There are rumors at this moment, even though the White House says the rumors are not true, that there will be a 90-day pause on these tariffs. There's like it's it's I I have no this this is the problem. The the the the markets, from what I understand, like stability and and this sort of whiplash will cause uh

irreparable damage. Now, going back to what Will was saying, oh, sorry. I was just the the reason I bring up that is by the time you even watch this on AvaD the this information obviously will be very different but but like I think what I wanted to talk about in in the generalities of this for first and foremost is tariffs will in no way as Will sort of said help the average consumer anywhere. it will just be an additional tax and sometimes in in small doses and things and again I'm not a economist so I don't know this spec specifically tariffs have been issued across countries for a long time based on various different things but the way that this was implemented seems incredibly hefisted and possibly generated by Chad GPT um the equation is very rudimentary uh and I believe Chad GPT spat out like and said hey if you wanted to figure out a global type of thing how would you do this and it spat out some the equation that is essentially what the White House used.

I'm not saying they used it. I'm saying whatever they used was the simplest and most ineffective and incorrect version of what could possibly be used. Um there is a world and and before we get into this whole switch too of it all like just talking about manufacturing because the line that seems to be happening and I'm going to tie this back to games. The line that seems to be happening is like, oh, this is being done to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States. Um, and it doesn't work like that. Like, look, I I won't even say that is a good thing or a bad thing. Um, but you need years of leadup to get even remotely the possibility. Yeah, that's a great point as well. um to get capacity up where you could sustain a tariff like this and you could actually push people to manufacture and you you can push people and tell people

to manufacture in the US all you want if there aren't facilities that can do it. I saw then then you are just killing businesses. Now the the thing that um I believe we'll be putting into the um this is from PC Gamer even though it is about board games. They have an article called board game publishers lament the devastating impacts the new tariffs on the industry. Um the headline continues there's no silver lining. It's just a lose-lose lose for everyone involved. Smaller to mid-tier companies are going to be the ones that can't weather this. This is going to be um oh god I'm going to butcher history here. Oh my god I have so much of it in my brain. But there was something and I'm trying to remember this back in the day in our history of beer series. There was something about the beer barons and was it during a financial collapse? Maybe someone in Brad or Janet can correct me when I'm wrong, but like a lot of small brewers got destroyed during specific hard times financially

and that's why the larger corp the larger ones were able to stay because they were able to weather the sto Oh, I'm sorry. No, no, no. It was it was prohibition. Yeah. Wow. Me. Um, so pro prohibition caused there to be a consolidation of power in those industries and that happened. Sorry, took my brain. It's the hat. If I was wearing my regular hat, I would have gotten that correct. The hat is actually an external locus of Matt's memory. Yeah. So, um, it's it's it's my it's the equivalent of my N64 RAM booster pack um that I have to unplug right now. Um, so, so with that in mind, like small to mid-tier tabletop people with physical physical, let's just talk about like physical gaming products, that's a lot of paper products, that's a lot of plastic, that's a lot of wood and laser cut wood and stuff like that. Um, they're going to be the ones that can't handle this volatility and the short term. And that means that the board game and and tabletop game boom that we've kind of experienced over the last 10 to 15 years does really feel like it it is

coming to an end. Yes. Um and you you add on to that that people will now have less disposable income to throw at those hobbies and now in order for those hobbies to even remotely try to turn a profit, they will have to raise their prices. Um it's it's the death of a lot of sort of small industries with no with with two main problems. One, there's no solution to do the thing that the US government is pushing for, i.e. manufacture in the United States. Nothing is being offered there. And two, let's even say this somehow did help like the American people. Like no one that I have seen has been able to tell me, okay, great. We're bringing in all this money uh from tariffs. How is that money going to be spent and distributed to make the United States better? It's going to make what better? It's not my point. Let's say this is this is the

whole thing cuz they're the current administration is positing that it will make America a bunch of money. Let's pretend that that's true. It's not. Let's pretend that that's true. What are we doing with the money? Whose money is that? What's h we doing a big old infrastructure push? Like what's the plan, bro? Like that's that's what also gets me too. So, um yeah, it's a it's a sad time especially for hobbies and things that I absolutely love. Um so I I here's what I'll say before we move on to the Switch too because there are Oh, sorry. I I wanted to give a concrete example by the way. So of a thing that you were talking about because I think this is really salient. Okay. So, um, when we're talking about tariff increases, right, one of the problems is, um, is that, uh, if you increase the price at the point of sale to compensate for the tariffs, because tariffs don't take that into account, it's actually

more complicated than just multiply the base price of the product by the tariff percentage. You have to take into account the tariff also has to pay for the tariff on itself, right? So, it's slightly higher actually than the tariff rate. Um, but as an example of a kind of thing that's not going to be happening, I looked it up. Frost Haven, the sequel to Gloom Haven, award-winning, muchbeloved big box game that many people legacy game. Many people enjoy it. Is that game kept me sane during the pandemic with my little pod? Yeah. Uh, Frost, the original. Yeah. Yeah. Frost Haven is about $190 right now, give or take, which is already expensive. And if you take if I assume it's manufactured in China because most board games are manufactured in China. And if I'm wrong, that's okay. We're going to use this as an example. Let's pretend for the moment that it is. Uh China's getting the it's about 1.64. It's about for the cost conversion if consumers ate 100% of it. Would you pay $310 for Frost Haven? No. Can you

afford $310 to pay for Frost Haven with the with the amount of money with groceries going up, everything like that is the my grocery bill is a little higher because I have siliac and I have I have to shop around very carefully and there are some whole like places I can't eat and I don't have access to a lot of cheap food staples because of that. Okay. Um and that's more than a month of groceries for me. That is Yeah, right. I could eat for a month or I could buy Frost Haven. Yeah, Diaby brings it up. Uh it was a long one. Uh basically hobbies are one thing but there's a lot more at stake here. There's enough things we produce high examples of. Coffee for example is going to be much higher. Manufacturing one thing but then goods and services is another. And then we also have to look at sorry I've been waiting all week to kind of rant about this. So thank you for for for sticking with um let's say that there are places to manufacture.

All of a sudden these facilities are are here and now like Apple can make iPhones in the United States. Um, all of the materials and things that we need for tech things are also kind of not from here. So, we have to import them anyway. So, that will be tariffed, right? Correct. Um, yeah. Anyway, um, so in general, there is there is no upside to these tariffs for the for the gaming industry in the US. Not for the electronic side, definitely not for the board game side, not for the TTRPG side, right? Especially because most printers get stuff printed elsewhere, right? Mo like most um books, right? So, a lot of indie um TGRPGs are going to be experiencing problems, right? Uh it's it's not there's no good upside on

this for the gaming industry, I would say. I think this is just bad across the board. Oh, interesting. Uh, Kool-Aid, the tariff income will help make up the potential trillions lost in income tax due to the Doge cuts according to the IRS. So, they're are they then saying that because they fired a lot of people to collect taxes, this is how they're going to try to make up for all the money the government didn't get. Okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna Ber real quick. Real quick. Real quick. For a while, we were doing a show called Action Politics every week that I hosted with a bunch of friendos of mine. We took some time. We're taking some time off because the mental strain of doing that during this particular administration is higher than we were willing to upfront, especially with two of my co-hosts working in the board game industry and needing to deal with this and one of them working in politics and me doing all of this. Um, but I I would love to ping their brains on this

because that thing that you just said, I Kool-Aid, I believe is an accurate representation of a statement that was made and it's wrong. That's not how this works. Tariffs don't make up income, right? Because the net purchasing power of the consumer goes down, right? So if things cost more, you will buy fewer things and and therefore less money will come in and you're hoping to even it out, not make more money, but you still probably won't do that anyway. I have been so tempted so many times to just scream the most horrendous, profane things about this because it's so much of it is wrong. That's not the way the economy works. That's not the way tariffs work. That's not the way consumer purchasing works. None of this works that way. And it's and this is this is something and and

and I I'll sort of say this last thing and we'll move on to the switch to it all cuz I want to I want to swing into something happy for a moment before we bring it down again. Um I am an animated loud cartoon man on the internet. I try to uh be as educated about things as I possibly can, but uh running the helping to run the studio and making all the shows and doing all of these things I and just my general level of education. I don't have a doctorate in anything. I have a BA in communications. Uh, I tend to stay out of conversations when it comes to economic policy because I feel I don't know enough to act actively bring anything of value to the conversation. That has been a general feeling that I've had cuz I don't want to cloud people that know what they're talking about with any misinformation that I might not understand.

But we're here now. And when I, an undereducated person in this space, can look at this and very clearly see that what is being done makes no financial sense. That is when I throw my very cheap hat into the ring to basically scream from the rooftops, what the hell is happening here? Because if I can understand that this doesn't work, how can people in control of it, not understand that these things don't work like that. It's a really great question, Matt. Anyway, uh hearts do go out to everyone in the board game industry and god, every industry. Um because and and truly if you know if there is a team or a group um that you really love their work and you can still afford to get in on

that last Kickstarter or do something like that. Uh now would be a really good time to show that support. God, I needed that. Thanks. Oh my god. I'll be I'll be uh uh chief of the cabinet of the interior of What Up, fam. Um Yeah. No, I could Oh, man. All right. Uh Okay. Okay. Celebrating mediocrity. Uh hold on, hold on, hold on. All right. Uh we're actually gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna push them forward three minutes. We've got ads coming up, so we're going to schedule the ad break now. Um, so Janet, we're gonna do fake ads for things you can't buy while um Twitch gets real ads for things that they can buy so we can keep pre-rolls off over on Twitch. So, we're going to do that real quick. We're going to take about three minutes to do that and then we'll start talking about the Switch, too. Okay, cool. Great. Awesome. Brad, go enjoy your enjoy your ads. Uh, that that Bob post is lying.

Ads will start now. Also, Janet Janet and subscribers of Brad, we're alone now. We can sell you any fake thing we want. Will, would you like to sell a fake thing? I'm struggling to come up with something that isn't just like a Why don't I do something? Why don't I do something? Because right now, I want to sell people eggs. I mean, they are delicious, but I'm going to sell them something a little bit different. Hey, friends. Matt from Extra Credits here. You love buying stuff, right? Well, have you tried not? That's right. Well, it's going to be, I have to tell you, so much more easy to now not buy things than it has ever been before. Did you enjoy having disposable income or even a little bit of it outside of your normal needs uh for for sustainability in your life? Well, boy oh boy. If things are going the way you're going right now, then you're

going to hit not buying things as hard as I'm about to. Because when you don't buy things, you basically Ooh, am I just am I just doing an advertisement for like certain religions? I just got lost in like the esoteric thought of like, Matt, how many Scoville am I allowed to go? How many Scoville can I go? Oh. Um, do number seven. Never go full the bomb. Okay. The the bomb. We're talking about hot ones. Skullville is the heat rating on on the hot sauces. Uh, the bomb is an interesting hot sauce because it's always at number eight. And I've done the hot ones challenge before. And basically, it burns out your tongue so much that you don't really experience nine and 10. And I think that's for for a hot sauce for your ability to taste and and whatever. I think that's almost like a a kindness, but for this will, I feel like we should go with a seven out of 10 on that rating so that the message doesn't get lost. Does that make sense?

That seems correct to me. I I have one. Here we go. Hey kids, Will from Extra Credits here. Here to sell you the concept of collaborative action. That's right. If you want to do things with your friends, maybe do them without spending a whole bunch of money on new fingle products. Do things like play board games that you purchase from an independent developer. Do things do things together, right? Just things together. Maybe maybe take trips with a bunch of your friends. Maybe, you know, art projects, make creative signs with a bunch of your friends that express the way that you're feeling in a way that's healthy and communal, like 2% of Americans did. I don't know. If you're if you're feeling some kind of way, maybe talk with your friends about it. That is very true, Will. is a better thing to to sell to people uh than the concept of buying nothing is the concept of doing something. Hey friends, Matt from Extra Credits here. Piggybacking on what Will said, did you know that the hands-off protests across the country

were a insane success? And if I could sell you a moment of your time, going and supporting those type of things over the course of the next couple months are going to be crucial in trying to claw back any of the things that we've actually enjoyed over the majority of our lifetimes. Collective action is a thing that you can do. And there's many places that you can go to find out more and join up with groups that believe in the things that you do and peacefully let people know exactly what you feel about their dumb nonsense that they're trying to do to the United States government. A lot of people marched all over the country this two days ago and you can too. There we go. Did we do it? Did we fix it? Believe it or not, Matt, that was still one level down from the level I was originally aiming at before I asked. Yeah, I know. I've got to pull the bomb. This hat would melt. Yeah, exactly. Um, okay, cool. Apparently, people are now getting ads for silver supplements. What? Right. Thank we supplement for

what? It's silver that you eat, Matt. What? Why? [Music] Why? Why? [Music] Why you ingest the powerful minerals to obtain their power at you could obtain the power of wealth by eating minerals? Obviously, they also make you blue. If you consume too much colloidal silver, you turn blue. Oh, we got a great short coming out about um uh that green dye in Victorian times. I

think it might have even dropped this week. Yep. On the XP side of things. Anyway, okay, great. Take a deep breath, everybody. So, we're going to take a detour away from tariffs. We're going to talk about So, we're going to do this chronologically, okay? We're going to talk about the Switch 2 as it um released and then we're gonna uh and then we're going to go from there. Okay. Um, well, kind of. Um, so here's we're Did we Oh, is that the wrong one? No, that's the right one. That's You said that that was the main image for the Switch story, and we'll move off of it when we're into the sub stories, but you made this, so now you have to deal with it. All right, great. Awesome. Um, so, uh, all right, so last Tuesday, we finally got our first peek at all the information about Switch 2. Um there's a whole bunch of it. Um it's uh the next generation of the Switch. Uh it is in fact named the Switch 2. Those things were not actually

in question. Well, we weren't 100%. We were reasonably confident on all of them and then we were became more confident before the press release. The world is too cruel to have it be called the Super Nintendo Switch. Right. Yeah. Uh, and Jeff actually had some really good thoughts on that, which is that because the Switch 2 is backwards compatible and the Super Nintendo wasn't, they didn't want to link the idea of the Super Nintendo to the Nintendo Entertainment System with the Switch to the Switch 2. Um, and if you want a more in-depth breakdown of how they announced this information, Jeff and I actually did a like a look through of the Direct last week on Design Club. The VODs on YouTube. You can go check it out. Excuse me. Okay. So, um uh the first thing is the console itself. It's more powerful. Um it's significantly more powerful actually. It will do 120 frames per second at 1080p for some games when it's docked. No, no, it'll do 4K uh 60 too as well. It'll do 4K 60 or

it'll do 120 1080. And again, games will vary here. I I always find it interesting when like the spec of a system like the PlayStation tech five can technically send out 8K. Not that you're going to do it, but like it's it's the same thing as like television manufacturers and screens. Like they put the absolute top tier thing that could possibly be done but would never be done. This is not a dig. This is more of a marketing dig than a hardware dig. Yeah. Um Yeah. Uh so that's kind of cool. It's It's the same thickness. They're very big on that that it's the same thickness, but it's bigger dimensionally. It's heavier. It's heavier. Um the battery life is worse uh ever so slightly, but for the most part, I don't think that's going to be a huge deal. uh LED screen, but apparently it's a newer version of an LED and therefore like people put it next to the OLED and it looks just as bright if not brighter than the OLED, which is interesting because I know a lot of

people like myself who to be perfectly honest have fallen back on fallen behind on screen technology. Yep. Innovations. Um I was like, "Oh man, it's really disappointing that it's not an OLED." Then I was like, "Wait, that could also just be a real buzzword depending on what's going on." Um the uh the screen also supports HDR which is cool. Um and uh that's uh someone in chat mentioned correctly that Larky made uh yeah I said LED it is LCD correct. See uh the hat will I blame every mistake I make on this hat. That's right. Um it's uh Nvidia has confirmed that it has ray tracing and tensor um cores in it as well. Uh we knew that it was being powered by Nvidia because that's all Nintendo told us. We don't know uh exact speed or RAM or any of that. We do know storage is bigger. It's got about four times the storage of the original Switch, but that makes sense because games are getting bigger. That's

interesting. It also supports a new form factor for uh SD cards, Micro SD Express. Uh, so your old SD card won't work, which is stupid. Um, I think that's like most of my thoughts in general on the console itself, on the hardware. Um, uh, the the JoyCons seem like a lot of good uh, innovation there as well. Obviously, the mouse controls are neat, though. People are saying it does uh lend to hand cramps based on the shape of what the the mouse is, but also it's not a Yeah, the fact that the I'm really curious about the magnets because something on my OLED switch uh the the slide down um JoyCons always feel like they're shift up a little bit like when you pick it up. And the fact that this is like coming in from the side and locked in with magnets, I'm very excited to have sort of have that feel. Um yep. Uh, in handheld mode it does copper say it does lower processing power. Um, also yeah, lurker magnets. How do they work? Um, I'm very excited about

that. I also really like Okay, this might be a Matt thing. I love Nintendo busted out hardware innovations that everyone has used for a long time, but doing the This isn't even a dig. I I I'm actually a fan of this. Doing the cheaper and lower res version of the thing that we've all been doing for 5 years. And by that I mean they have the microphone on the Switch that you can apparently with all the noise cancelling can hear you from across the room. Uh, it's like putting people's faces in games based on a camera. Um, side note, can we go to the camera shot or is that two away? Yeah. Okay. So, let's let's talk about this for a second. So, a hardware thing. There's actually two USBC ports on it, which is great. Means you can charge it from the top and the bottom, do all things. This is the Nintendo Switch 2

camera. I want to say something right out the gate. The Switch 2 looks like a like a beautiful, elegant machine that I I feel like I would love to have in my living room and hold in my hand. Okay. Why is this like like nothing looks good when you have a like the plug bent up like plugged into the top? Like you're you're telling me that you couldn't have added a continuation port on the dock or something for when the C like not to say you couldn't do this if you were in like if you were in regular standing mode, but the fact that this is like Yeah, you just bend the cord and then it just sticks up and like it so much care feels like it's been given to the shape and the ergonomics and we didn't make it any thicker. And like then you get this image for literally a 2000's webcam sticking out. Like it's so crazy. And it

shows you, I think, how much Nintendo doesn't care about this particular element of it cuz everything else feels so planned and and pristine. There are ways, by the way, that you can make a USBC cable that like plugs in and then goes 90°, right? So it could like have the plug and then like like the plug's down here and then it just bends at 90 degrees. Why wouldn't you if you're making the proprietary camera, why wouldn't you do that? But here, okay, but okay, I'm going to back up. I'm going to back up a little bit of the sauce here. I also have heard that other webcams will just work with it. Correct. You don't need the Nintendo webcam. Good, good, Nintendo. Thank you. USBC webcam. Yeah. Um anyway, I think that covers most of the hardware stuff. Um um we get into games now. Will is that you want to sort of talk about I was also just going to bring up was there anything about the OS like at the same time the virtual game

cards make a lot more sense now? Um and we'll talk a little bit because we talked about that last week some uh we've got a couple of comments from YouTube uh comments that we wanted to talk to about that. Um, but uh overall I think the operating system is it does the same thing. It does the same it does the same thing only faster. Only faster. If if we can make the the store run faster than a sales pace that would be lovely. Um uh Okay, cool. Um so now let's talk about uh launch titles real quick. Um I don't know if we have a specific picture for that. We can just stay on this if we need to. No, we can. Oh, not me resetting everything by looking at them. It's good. Great. Awesome. Love that. Okay, let's talk about this. Um, so, uh, there are gajillion launch titles. I want to give credit to Kotaku for this image. This, this was so good. And the shadow on the box is perfect and I love it so much. Uh, uh, so um, there

are a bunch of games coming out at launch. Um though though only if I'm correct really like two or three original games. Correct. Which for a Nintendo console to be perfectly honest is pretty are for the course at this point. Well, and that's if you don't include the Gamecube Classics launch. I don't. They're not. They're That's great that they're they're coming out. I love that. I love that those games are going to exist. Wind Waker, F-Zero, GX, and Soulcalibur 2. Three phenomenal GameCube games, but you also have to pay for the online service with expansion pass. And again, my hat doesn't have the port for that. Um, it's just I'm not going to do that. Yep. Um, the the the I'm very much looking forward to Mario Kart World. In theory, in practice, I'll probably play it for 10 minutes and then never again. Oh, come No, we're gonna we're gonna go hard, Will. We got to we got to we got

to I'll play with you. Get you up. I I've been talking about this. We we talked about this a bunch last Thursday. I am slowly coming to the realization that I'm probably only going to play the Switch 2 when I play with people or play on stream. It's not my preferred method of gaming. I'll have I mean, you are you are I would say a proud uh mainline PC gamer. Correct. And you get consoles for exclusives. To be perfectly honest, you're you're you're not you're not uh by design on the go enough where like a Steam Deck or a Switch or Switch 2 makes the most sense for your console. Correct. Use it. Yeah. Um, so, uh, the other big one is the new Donkey Kong game, which isn't out on launch, which won't be out on launch, but does look very good. Um, and then here's a game that is out on launch. Uh, the, uh, the Welcome Tour, which

actually Larky just says three hours ago they confirmed would be $10. Cool boy. Okay, so I am not the first to say this, but the little tour that they give that basically like talks about the system, like what makes the system special in like a gamified way is a real opportunity for a home run. And it's funny that Sony showed us how this was done with the PS5 and Astrobots um Playroom or whatever it was called uh before the full game because that was a full-fledged platformer that wasn't terribly deep, but made with incredible love that showed all of the different things that the console could do in fun and innovative ways and it came with the system for free. The fact that Nintendo is selling this thing for even $10 is in my opinion out of all of the things we'll talk about the most insulting thing about this launch beyond price, beyond everything. It this

because this comes down to principle. And I get that they're trying to make up costs for other things that we may have mentioned before, but this is a piece of software that's supposed to sell people on your system. and make them feel good about their purchase and you're selling it to them. This should be either pre-installed or free download day one and I will actually be shocked if by the time it drops it is not. Yeah, I agree. Uh I cannot believe they're trying to sell that. It could be the most fun thing. That's not the point of the software. Mhm. I'm all about also selling smaller mini games from Nintendo, maybe for $10. That seems like a really good thing in the price hike world we're living in, but not the one that is marketed purely to sell your systems like capacities and

and qualities, right? Um, oh yeah, Nintendo Crimson says this too. Did it for Wii Sports. Wii Sports arguably one of the most successful things that sold the Switch to millions or not the Switch, the Wii to millions of people. Y Anyway, um what this image is referring to, however, is sort of even though the Switch and the Switch 2 now, uh is a the reason I was excited for it was physical media still having cartridges. Um they're doing uh they've done their virtual cartridge or what was it? there. I I'm having trouble keeping track of the naming conventions. So, there are there are physical cards. Yep. Virtual cartridges, which is how they're going to be handling digital games. And then there's this other third thing which is called a game key cartridge. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. Same. Right. So, a

game key cartridge is their new innovation. It's a It's a cartridge same size as any other cartridge. Comes in a box that you buy at a store and it's just an authorization to download the game. It's essentially a f a version of physical DRM in a way. Correct. Um and that seems okay. Let's let's talk about a minor positive before all the negatives about that. In a world where sadly everything is going digital in my opinion people can there are benefits to digital. Of course I do think preservation and having a physical thing is really important in the day and age especially with a company with a track record like Nintendo of just shutting down services. Um there is a a cool thing here though I don't know how the market will sustain this for uh resales. So in theory, you can buy this card with say Elden Ring on

it. That is the DRM equivalent of allowing you to download it and then you can download it and then when you're done with it, you can sell that card to someone else who can then download it with a with a digital game full digital digital like the with the virtual cards you download from the Nintendo store. You can't do that, right? So this is a small olive branch to those to that ability to resell a software's license. However, it is not the same as a physical game because as stated uh it's not on the card. So therefore, if the system ever goes down and let's be very clear in 10 to 15 years minimum or I don't max of something I don't know like the Switch 2 store will go away like it that's just time marching on. I'm going to I'm going to take the counterpoint not necessarily because I fully believe this but because there is a counterpoint to this to that line of thinking which is Jordan No,

please. We passed that thermal client a really long time ago when games started shipping with mandatory day one updates. We're already at the point where games simply don't function without patches on day one. Right? When we stopped shipping games with gold masters that were designed to work out of the box without any major game-breaking bugs wi without a day one patch, we sort of passed that point because even physical copies of games, which I agree is a good thing, right? require those day one updates, right? And that's been true for generations of consoles now and every PC game ever since they, you know, they came out on Steam, but like that's a whole different thing. But I do think that this is not really that substantially different because of the presence of day one updates. So I think you are uh uh 100% correct. Um I will yes and off of that. I think also in the world of games that either are multiplayer or have multiplayer elements that need to be

have servers up to play anyway, buying a physical copy of that game doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Like it just doesn't because there's another key latch point of that experience that could go away anyway. But the things that got me are there's there's two different things here. So Elden Ring is coming later this year onto the Switch 2. Mhm. And Cyberpunk is, I think, launching. That sounds right to me. Cyberpunk, at least at this point, correct me when I am wrong, has gone on record saying that the whole game is on the cartridge. It is going to be a 64 gigabyte cartridge. Impressive. And the whole game, including Phantom Liberty, will be on the cartridge. You're right about patches and things like that, but chances are it Cyberpunk as a game will still function on that. Like if it if it's broken, that's a whole another thing.

And give me my money back, right? Like that's fine. Um, but there's an interesting that specific thing is a real interesting itch for me to scratch from a philosophical perspective. I agree. Um, like if if you if companies do that, we should reward them, right? That is a cool good thing to do. I am going to scrimp up a bit and even though I do own Cyberpunk on PC and I don't even know if I'll actively play it on the Switch too, I will want to own one of those cartridges. And again, it is not I if that proves to be true, whereas I will not even if I wanted to and probably would play Elder Ring more on the go be picking up the license key version because the as a secondary system to play a game on for my use case, it also loses part of the the specialtity of why

I would even remotely engage with it on that system. Like I don't know there there's I hope that is true and I would like to whenever I financially can reward larger companies for putting their whole game on a cartridge. Yeah. Um but again that it's a personal thing and there's a million reasons why digital is great too. Um yeah I I think your your line of thinking makes perfect sense to me. I am just already so far past the point of like If I lose access to my digital game collection, it means that there is a bigger problem than me losing access to my digital game collection. A thousand%. Right. So like, so that's sort of my personal philosophy on it and why it probably doesn't bother me quite as much. And I also don't have a problem. This is a weird thing and this is all uh this is all how things are sold to us and how we've engaged with them throughout the our course of our lives while we game. I have no problem with

the fact that I don't buy CDROMs anymore to install games with. Yeah. Oh god. Awful. But because like Steam has taken like it's funny and oh actually you know why I think it is even though Will again I want to say you are correct. Day one patches and all that jazz tend to have to happen, right? But there is a mentality even if it is incorrect where a PC game when you bought it, no matter what it came on, you had to install it. That is and then it was installed and that is that is on your computer now. Whereas consoles with me coming up because I am a h a thousand years old. You put the thing in the thing and it plays even even though there are day one updates and whatever and and we've been I've been old man yelling at cloud about when you pop in a game into the PlayStation 5 and it's like updating and I was like are you kidding me? Like there's there's something about a console that's supposed to, at least in in my uh institutional memory, feel like

you just play the game you put into it. Even if that's not true, that is an experience that I am wanting to buy. Yeah. Yeah. Um Yep. Uh and I think I think lots of people are going to be divided. I think some people will will care and I think a lot of people won't. reminder that while you all right Brad, Janet, Rocky, uh the there is probably a larger percentage of you that care about this than the general public. Yeah, the general public probably won't care. The general public will probably go, "Oh, sweet. I can play Elden Ring on my Switch. Great. I'mma play it again with a different build. Let's go." Right. So, I think that um I think the the the angle that we're taking with this of it being a largely philosophical one is probably the best angle for us because I think um this is not a thing that they're going to back down from. Oh, no, no, no, no. Here's

like so truly they're not dropping this price and we'll talk about the prices in a second. And they're not changing this plan. This is the plan. Uh, the thing that I will go back and I I I will try to hang my very cheap hat on is I think that they will inevitably start giving away if not before launch quickly after launch that tech demo thing. I agree. Um, or they might, you know what's funny? And I don't know if they just announced the price of $10 a couple days ago. This feels like any other company would just be like, "Oh, yeah. Who cares? Yep. Yep. This is bad press. Yeah, this is free now." Like, but Nintendo is Nintendo, so who knows? But let's should we get into cost now? Uh well, I wanted to do one more real quick. One of the big things about uh Nintendo Switch 2 that everyone has been very interested in and happy about is that it's largely backwards compatible. Um there are currently working on a list. There are some games that will never be compatible and those are generally ones that rely on Switch One hardware. Unfortunately, Wee Fit is on that list or um Ringfitit is on that

list because of the IR sensor which was removed from the um uh Wii remote because not Wii remote. God Joy Con. I'm on the Wii right now. Um uh on the Joy-Con because it did was underutilized and was an additional part that was costing them money that they didn't need to put in. Um there are other titles that are currently we're currently working on. There is a complete list on um the the media on the on the Nintendo um website. We'll have those links in the description uh or the show notes um so that you can check it out for yourself. But I do want to give Nintendo and Adabo for putting forward backwards compatibility as a thing that you can do, right? Because this does feel like it's an upgrade rather than a replacement, right, for the vast majority of games. And I do like that and I do want to call that out as a good thing, right? When we start upgrading instead of replacing games. So, uh, also side note, I want to bring up something that, uh, Neo just said. I like this I

like this comment a lot. I listen to many Matt rants about physical media, but I have a hard time caring. I know it's uh, it's just the me uh, me thing, but I tend not to rewatch or replay most shows, games, etc. I think there's a lot of people like you, and there's nothing there's zero wrong with that. We all engage with media in different ways. And like um it's funny because like there's thousands of movies not maybe not thousands but maybe thousands I have no idea. I've seen a lot of films uh that I have enjoyed watching and I never want to watch again. Right. I there are many games I have played that I have played and never want to play again. But then there's some that like um it's it's it's it comes down to I think for me personally the ability for me to continually engage with a piece of art that I have purchased. Yeah. That I that that I specifically know that I will want to engage with again. And I understand that that use case is

different for everybody. Um I think it's the it's the it's the loss of that option that gets me ranty. But I a thousand% Neo agree that there are probably more people like you than there are me that like enjoy the thing. They're happy to pay for the thing. Let's move on to another thing. And there's nothing wrong with that. Yeah. Um Yeah. Uh okay. So, let's talk let's talk price. Um so, uh the treehouse went well. Okay. A reminder, this is being filmed at noonish Eastern time, April 7th. This is relevant because all of this information may be wrong in the future. You're going off the latest information because I'm actually going to skip the last one and then come back because I think that makes sense. Um, Nintendo originally announced that pre-orders would open April 9th, that's Wednesday, and then said, "Just kidding,

we have to evaluate those tariffs that are coming in on all of our products into the US. The US will not be able to pre-order on April 9th." So, that there's two there's two things real quick about this with the Switch, too. one is the initial price everyone lost their mind about for many different good and bad reasons about both the conso's price and the the games prices themselves. Um and then there's the tariff stuff and removing the pre-order day from the United States. Um if we're jumping onto that second thing first, I think kudos to Nintendo for calling out the tariffs as why this is happening. Don't don't beat around the bush. If companies have to make hard decisions because uh the US government is making it difficult to conduct business, call out that the US government is making it difficult to conduct business. Like, and it's interesting because with something like the Switch

2, it it's a this is so weird how our society values news and information, but the Switch 2 hits a lot of those quadrants that you need to hit to have it bust out and be the story. Nintendo is a huge name. Everyone knows what the Switch is beyond like I would argue that the Switch and the Wii in this sort of generational time are the things that Nintendo is just like it's ubiquitous. So when the new Switch comes out, that's a big story. Oh, they just announced it. Oh, wait. Now you can't pre-order it in the United States. Why? tariffs and and and uh you know volatility that amount of of news like I've seen more news and maybe this is just my circles everyone in Brad Janet Rocky please let us know like I've seen more news about people being mad at Trump for these switch two than all of the other far more damaging things like on major news cycles. Mhm.

And it's interesting that this is the story that's breaking through because it it's playing to something that like look, I love video games. Video games are an art form that I hope I never have to live without. If push came to shove and I had to, as we all could, we could live without video games. There's a lot of things that are happening right now that are affecting things that people need to live. And it feels like those aren't even getting the same amount of breath in the news cycle as the Switch 2 being interrupted. And I find that interesting and kind of scary. Yep. Um, so yeah, all all that to say, the prices that we're talking about right now are the pre- reannouncement prices in the US only. We're not going to talk about the global prices for the most part because that would take too long and we're a US focused show, so we're going to focus on

the US prices. Okay, cool. Great. Awesome. Um, the console itself is going for $450. It is available in a bundle with Mario Kart World as a digital download. There's not a cartridge in that box. It's a digital download code to the best of my knowledge for $500. Um, and those seem to be people seem generally to be fine with that. I think they priced that the way that it is and all of the prices truly to make up for impending doom of tariff type things. And here's the here's the other thing about Oh, you you disagree? I I disagree. I think that I think that um they may have priced in some amount of tariff into it because it was known Oh, yeah. Not the amount not the amount. Right. Right. Right. Right. So, like there's no way anyone could have predicted these. Absolutely. We're trying like the fourth time to do

this without swearing. Level seven. These unprecedented, ill- advised, economically unound, grocken, AI hallucination looking excuses for an economic policy. Um because no one dreamed that anyone could be this stupid and still be able to walk, talk, and sign a piece of paper. And yet somehow I am proven wrong. Um so uh the so th those prices are are reasonable, I think, as long as they stay roughly around there. I can see it going up 50 and people still being like, "Okay, that's the tariff tax." All right. The problem is that that doesn't even begin to close to cover the tariff, right? Because a reminder coming out of uh China and I think these are actually coming out of Vietnam, which is where the Switch 2 is theoretically being made. I don't I'm not exactly sure. The

number that I've seen bandied about is north of $600 for the console after tariffs are taken into account. Yeah, that'll be a deal breakaker, right? That'll be a deal breaker. Um people won't buy that. Uh, so Nintendo's gonna have to take some amount of It'll be very interesting to see what they land on for that adjusted price. Yeah, I Yeah, who who who knows on that sort of front. Um, jumping back a little bit to sort of the price of the individual games. Yeah, I was gonna do that next. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so it is a complicated topic. Um, at the end of the day, so what is it? Is it now? And I'm trying to remember because the news about this was so flaked around before

the tariff stuff even hit. Yes, it was going to be $80 for a new Nintendo Switch 2 game roughly. It is somewhere, depending on which game and how you buy it, between $60 and $80. $80 is a physical copy of some, but not all Nintendo titles. Mario Kart World will be $80 when sold separately, right? DK Bonanza is $70 when sold separately and there is uh pretty credible going around that there will be a $10 discount in some but not all cases for buying a digital version rather than buying a physical version. Which would be interesting because there has been digital physical price parody for a very long time and breaking that would be a big shakeup in my opinion. just doesn't matter by how much. Breaking that parody and acknowledging that it's cheaper for the

producer to get a digital game to a consumer and that therefore that consumer need not pay as much for that game is a big deal. No, agreed. Um, it's interesting like we've done a bunch of stuff on on game prices on this channel over the course of years and the I think where I stand personally is I would love it and and on the on the PC side of things, this has already become very normalized. I would love it if game prices were not static like or if we weren't expecting like, oh, it's the $50 game, it's the $60 game, it's the $70 game, it's the $80 game. Like that that that I think that way sort of leads to a bit of ruin in the current way we engage with purchasing video games. Um, it feels like archaic in a way.

Um, and sure Nintendo as a company has track record of uh sticking by their guns on what on on the value proposition that they believe their games hold. Yep. Sometimes I agree with those and sometimes I do not. Um, but that that is what they do. And if we're going to engage with them, if we're going to engage with them in their ecosystem, by this point, we know what type of company we are dealing with. Um, for better or worse. I think there's there's pro and con to what they're doing. I think one of the bigger cons is less people will play their games. Like that's just what's going to happen. If you look at the entirety of the current economic status of the world uh in that direction like everything else, please see our fake things you could have bought before for not buying things. Um

that's going to be affected here. Like that's what's going to happen. I and and and luckily at the very least and I'm not saying this is a solution by any means but like there are other avenues to get games cheaper than Nintendo that doesn't mean you need different hardware infrastructure that that sort of thing obviously internet connections etc. Um but like I could I could not blame a soul for being like seeing these prices and being like nah. Yeah. like yeah what what I do think is hilarious to me is is our is our image for this topic which is um the petulence of gamers true I think um so if you I attempted to as research for this and for our design club last week watch the tree houses um for the new launch titles or for the new games that are coming to Switch 2. Metroid 4, DK Bonanza, Mario

Kart World were the big ones. um and uh watching um watching them the chat completely unusable because chat was spamming drop the price in all caps. That's not how this works, right? So if you believe that you're going to influence Nintendo to drop the price, don't buy the game. But don't like I I understand people wanting to like go in and express their displeasure, but like that it doesn't do anything and is just annoying, right? Like Well, I think we've also kind of seen online I won't even call like on live online action like spamming drop the price in a Nintendo chat is essentially trolling. Mhm. You can you can do it and let them know you displeasure or whatever, but like it's

also not going to do anything. And I think we've seen this. Look, we've seen this since horse armor. People say one thing, right? And then go and and mass do the opposite. Correct. And then people at these companies are like, "Oh, well, there's a vocal group of people that say they absolutely hate this, but profits have never been higher." Right. Yeah. I I would be willing to bet that more than half of the people who were spamming drop the price in chat will be buying uh Switch twos at pre-order at whatever price Nintendo sets and buying games to go with it. Right. Yeah. Um that's sort of my uh Yeah, that's sort of that's sort of my take on it. Um and then so this last thing that we'll get back to is the delay. The console is still expected to release June 9th. June 9th, June 2nd, early June worldwide.

Yeah, I'm going to go out on a limb and I'm going to put my prediction down now that it won't launch in the US on that day. That's my bet. My bet is that things will be so volatile and the pricing structure will be so unstable that it will not launch the same day in the US that it launches worldwide. I have a conference that I have a theory on that. I think if nothing changes between now and then or whatever, absolutely. But if there's one thing that this administration has proven is um is This is a loud thing that many people across the board are angry at that has a very simple solution that can make them look like they're winning. Mhm.

They could very easily because chaos say the switch to nah no tariffs on that. Like that's what we're going to start seeing here I think is individual deals on loud things that would look like an economic win in three weeks time because we have myself included the attention span of a goldfish that that looks like a big win for this administration like oh look we saved it you get your video games at a normal price look we saved it we made it the price again when in fact they caused the problem to then sell you the idea of the solution right Um, that's what I think is going to happen. There's already talks of individual uh the individual countries coming and like trying to work things out through it. There's no way that Japan and Nintendo is not in on that, right? Uh, but Will, I do agree with you that if everything stayed as is, they wouldn't launch it here. And it would be a really sad yet interesting global economic experiment

for a large piece of hardware that used to be global to not launch at the same time in the United States. Yeah. Yep. I I agree. Also, also, um I I wanted to give uh just a second to this this very good comment by that guy Jimmy. Um I'm going to read it rather than post it because it's a giant comment. Um, I'm trying to be brief, but there's a lot of nuance here and more so with the tariffs. I think Nintendo gets away with some scummy stuff because they do exclusivity so well. But video games have been around $60 since 2006ish. It's surprising to me that some people seem unwilling for prices to raise after all this time when you consider inflation and wanting devs to be paid and treated well. However, a wealth inequality problem has only gotten worse and people's disposable income has not grown. Yes, that's a great summation of it. Right. There there it is a complex multifaceted problem, right? And I understand people not wanting to pay more because they don't have more money to spend, right? But at the same time, I do think it's really important that we acknowledge that the real price of video games has

gone down and down and down because of inflation. The problem is not the price of video games. The problem is our lack of disposable income and that wages have not kept pace. Right? There is a there's also and there's and there's also compounded onto that where the money made from video games goes. Correct. Uh yeah, it does not often times go to the developer unless we're talking about some real indie stuff like it's Yeah. Correct. And so the big problem the really big problem is that this applies to lots of luxury goods, not just games. games you're just anchored to because they're a individual physical item which is disposable in that you purchase many games, right? Um that has had a very anchored price that many of you have been anchored to since childhood. I'll even go back to what I was saying before about the anchoring around consoles and having a game that just works outside the box. That is a feeling that is anchored in me because that's how I grew

up. game prices are a and it's funny. You know why I don't So, I think I just put it up there. Um, someone mentioned the SNES prices. Daft mentioned the SNES game prices. You know why I don't remember those is because I my parents got me one or two of those. I didn't buy them, but I have the anchored price of $50 to really in my brain of what a video game costs because that's when I as a consumer started engaging in the hobby. Yeah. And so there's there's a real and and it's so complex and and honestly an interesting conversation because you talk about, you know, how much disposable income people have for luxury goods versus how much those goods should cost based on inflation versus where the money that is actually going for to support the people that make those things. Then who is actually making them? The dev is making the game, but the publishers getting it out there. And who's keeping that end of the money and why aren't devs being taken care of? And there's a lot of like interconnectivity around all of this stuff that is hard to summize easily and quickly, which makes

a solution hard to find. Yes, this is one of the most complicated topics in the gaming space because of all of the internal to the gaming industry and external to the gaming industry factors that go into this, right? And again, people spamming Drop the Price isn't going to do it, but I would welcome um we're running a little short on time today. I would welcome No, no, I already pushed my meetings. I can go longer because I knew this would be going right. Yeah. Um I would also welcome wellconsidered responses in in in the comments on blue sky, right? Please do and like I want to sort of um the comments have been really good about this and I want to sort of put forward this idea. Say more. I know it's weird in in a YouTube space to like to like have a longer comment. take your time and say more because one of the things that we've been fostering here on Twitch is taking the time to say more when it's worth to say more, right? We're a little antish that way. Um in uh and I perhaps

the tariffs should not be implemented in the way that they currently are being at their you literally hit the bottom end of the call and dropped out. um uh the um but I do think that this is a complex multifaceted issue, right? I'm not happy about them going up, but I also understand that that's an economic inevitability and the the way that people feel about it is going to be different depending on their level of disposable income, their relationship to their disposable income, right? What their priorities are, whether or not they have a family to take care of, how much their job will be impacted by tariffs, right? If you work in the tabletop RPG industry, you're probably not buying a Switch 2. You're probably not buying a Switch 2. You're probably saving all of your money because you have no idea what's going to happen when the bottom drops out from your industry momentarily. Yeah. Right. So, there's there's a lot of there's a ton of stuff going on here and I think that um I'm

really glad that we're having this bigger larger conversation. I want to thank Brad and Janet for having more time for saying more. Right. takes time to write the text wall because it is important that we have the multi like I see so little nuance about this because everyone's limited to 300 characters on on blue sky, right? Or whatever, right? But um and if you're a member or a patron uh or a subscriber here on Twitch, drop in the Discord, right? There is a space to have a longer conversation there. I may set up a like what should games cost thread in the industry news channel. we can have a bigger conversation there because I think that would actually be really interesting to have it be because like again what we want to foster here is like a space that is comfortable to have complex difficult conversations in the gaming space because that doesn't seem like there's a lot of places for that. Yeah. Um also I think I found my end filter. Anything worth saying is worth saying slow.

There we go. It's pretty good. Yeah. Um, okay. Is there anything else on the Switch 2 that we wanted to tackle? Uh, la. Um, there's lists of the games that might not work at launch. We have them in the show notes. Check those out if you're going to be affected. If you are still interested after all of this stuff or think you can get your hands on a Switch 2. Um, let's close out the Switch 2 stuff on what I consider Oh, what do you got? I'm I'm gonna interject this one. This This This is a big one. For those of you who missed Kirby Airide Songs and I have already agreed that we're going to have a 1v one Kirby Airide uh City Trial because I swear to God if the new Kirby Air Ride does include City Trial, it's not worth buying. Let's Let's Let's do this. We We just talked a lot of of of of dark dark stuff, right? Yeah. I want to talk about the games that I am legit sort of excited for. Please. Um, obviously the new Mario Kart is right up my alley. I think that it is this will be a game

that I'll be able to play with friends for a very long time. And I think I the value prop for that for me is so huge. I love the idea of an open world Mario Kart. I I I trust Nintendo to make an open world, especially after the last two that they made that feels both lived in and and interesting enough to move around. Um, I think that that opens up a lot of interesting sort of like one of the things that I miss in Mario Kart 8 and that that game has so much content. I miss sort of the experimentations and things of the battle modes and whatnot. Like there's some battle modes, there's a lot of them, but it never felt like actually like it nailed something. What an open world Mario Kart at least allows, it seems like, is you can kind of invent your own games with your friends. What I'm hoping will, and who knows if this could be pulled off, this is not a feature that is announced, but there's something that there's a very little used feature, at least in my

friend group, um, with I I want to say it's in GTA online where you can basically using your waypoint on the map, make an impromptu race. Yeah. So, you set your waypoint wherever you want and you say, I'm inviting whoever wants to race to do this race. It would be awesome if in that Mario Kart in Mario Kart World, you could do things that simply and cool. Like you could do it without a a feature like, oh, we're going to race to the top of the the ski slope or whatever, right? But like it it makes it seem like there's a lot of um option there. So, I'm excited about that. Donkey Kong Donkey Kong Bonanza looks like it's the first Donkey Kong game that I've been really excited about in in a while to be perfectly honest. It it has a level of chaos and joy to it that I I really like. And I like that it feels like there's some new mechanics for Donkey Kong, specifically the the earth the earth melding or ripping or throwing or breaking or punching

mechanic. Um and Will, I can't believe we've gone two hours and you have not mentioned that uh Silk Song confirmed. Yep. Silkong confirmed for 2025 has 8 seconds of footage. By the way, those are eight new seconds of footage. I will not bore you with the frame by frame. Suffice it to say, Soong. Now, by the way, I won't be playing it on the Switch 2. I'll be playing it on PC. Sure, because achievements, but like uh very excited about that. Also, Enter the Dungeon 2. I don't know how much of the charm of the original is going to maintain in 3D. Spoilers, the original Dungeon was also 3D. It was just billboarded. Um, and and also spoilers, I think Will and I's friendship uh was formulated around Enter the Dungeon. Uh, we were both super deep into that game. It e is easily in my top five games of all time list. And I I think there's a much like I I uh you probably feel this

way about Gungeon as well, but I maybe my Silk my Hollow Knight is Gungeon if that makes sense. So with a sequel, even if it's exquisite, it's going to be very hard to beat the emotional resonance and and importance and just like drive the first experience. That's just how it goes. Absolutely. Um I don't mind if it's going to be 3D. I I couldn't quite tell how the camera was like I want to make I I want it still to be like that locked like asymmetric locked kind of thing. I do think the Pixel Maybe pixel art is a I don't know. I have no idea. There's some There's some level of like ephemeral joy to the ridiculousness that pixel art brings me that I have yet to see in the style of 3D that seems to be used. I've also seen what 8 seconds of it. So like who knows? Yeah. Um yeah. Um, oh, and the the elephant in the room,

uh, is the Dusk Bloods trailer. Yeah, definitely legally for reasons of copyright and deals with Sony, not Bloodborne 2. Yeah. Yeah. Look, no, it's not Bloodborne 2. It absolutely isn't. It are there gothic buildings? Yep. like it's it's also a PVPVE game which I was very worried about until uh Miyazaki did an interview recently uh since the launch and he's like hey look this is an experiment we wanted to try uh I think Vidya does a great sort of breakdown of like why he's psyched and trepidacious about it but basically um this is the kind of game that Fromoft can only try as a console exclusive that Nintendo is helping to back or that that a game hardware publisher is helping to back. Um it's and I like personally that it is not a

story focused thing specifically because of that. Yeah. Because if it was Bloodborne 2 essentially Yeah. with the with the name serial number filed off because it's exclusive to Switch 2. It would be like Bloodborne one on the PS4 and less people would be able to play it. Yeah, I agree. This this is an experiment that hopefully goes well. I I I I'm very curious about it as development happens. Um it it feels Yeah. And um and uh Akuma in the chat says, "Yeah, two multiplayer focused FromSoft's games and lined up is kind of worrying for fans of the original formula." And that's why Miyazaki basically went on and was like, "Hey, this isn't the studio's direction. This is what we're wanting to try now. We are still very committed to doing storydriven uh singleplayer mainly experiences." Yep. Um which is a great thing to say. I I want FromSoft and

other companies that I love or creators, developers that I love to be able to experiment and not be lambasted right away for doing that. And and you could without that message from him very much be like, "What the hell?" But the fact that they he came on, he's like, "These are just fun things we wanted to try. This feels like the right time in space." Cool. I that was enough for me, at least for now. That obviously can change. Yeah. Uh, and my last one I think is uh Metroid Prime 4. Mhm. Congratulations Nintendo. You have done something for the first time in the FPS market. You have introduced a console FPS with native mouse support. Yeah, I will I will buy it and play it. I will try it. I'm very interested. Right. To be fair, this isn't the first time they've done unique control schemes. Uh, Resident Evil 4 on the Wii has manual Wii remote aiming. Yep. Um, so there's they've done unique control

schemes for shooters before. I'm very interested to see what this is. I'm also very interested to see what the hand cramp issues are with the using a Joy-Con as a mouse for a prolonged period of time. Sure. Um, but we'll see. I'm I'm I'm very excited to to check it out. Yeah. I think I think the overall even though many of these things are not on release, they did a really great job of h like I felt before reality smacked me in the face and this is a good tell I think of video game announcements in general. I was over the moon like with with the with the announcement as a whole. I felt great uh and I I was excited. I was more excited about this console release than than any in previous memory. Um, and when you sort of step back from it and look at all of the specifics and all of the myriad of topics that we've talked about for the last hour about these things, yes, that that excitement has been chipped away, but there is an ephemeral joy to what

Nintendo tends to do that I thought they actually really brought to this. And for a brief beautiful hour and a half or whatever it was, I was I was feeling pretty good. Yep. Uh let's end us off with our dessert story. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um Oh, that was the that was the tariffs uh one that we had. Oh, whatever. Now we talked about it. All right. So, uh a story from GDC that has come out that I think is probably my favorite GDC story. Um so, Local Thunk went to GDC and that was cool and he got to see people playing in the wild. and no one knows what local funk looks like. So he went up and played Bellatro at the Bellatro booth and no one knew it was him. Yeah. And he was playing really well and someone went, "Hey, you're really good at this game. How'd you get so good?" And the other the other very interesting thing is he's finally getting to appreciate the game himself because he didn't play the game. He was building the game. I think a lot of people assume

that developers are always good at their own games. That's not always true, right? Uh, in fact, I'm pretty sure the crew at Meggrit isn't nearly as good at Slay the Spire as a lot of the Spire pros are as an example. Um, and so, uh, he got to experience that and and get got to play through and be recognized as someone who's good at Bellatro, not just someone who made Bellatro. And I I just love this story as like a heartwarming little like look from someone who's managed to maintain anonymity and not let it all go to his head as an aur in this space that there are like these cool fun moments with a game that is better than anyone could have possibly expected it to be and brought more joy at a lower price point and an easier install than any other game of the year. Um, and and I just love I love the cultural phenomena around Bolatro probably more than I love Bilatro. And I think that's great. Yeah. Yeah. It's very fun. Uh, I like that that happened. And I like uh I don't

know. I I it's it's a because of the way that the industry is, you don't get a lot of these devs in these stories and things and it's nice when they when they come across. So, all right. Real quick, we did have a couple of comments from the tubes of you that we wanted Oh, yeah. to uh to address from last week's show. From last week's show, right? And if you're still here after watching, you know, a bit of this week's show. Thanks. Um uh RMS Grey said, "When it came to the virtual game cards, my media thought is that it removes one of the major roadblocks to Switch to adoption. Now people know for sure that they can bring their virtual library across to the new console or as much as they want to transfer without having to research the question." Yes, we talked about this. Um, and I picked this question in part to throw to last week's design club. Jeff and I actually talked about this as a marketing move to announce virtual game cards before the console because lots of people when they announced virtual game cards were like, "Oh, I don't have a use case for this. How why why do I care about this?" And they didn't realize that they're about to own

two Switch consoles, right? A Switch and a Switch 2. And that that will be the use case that applies to them. So I think that if you don't transfer your entire account to your Switch too. Correct. If you still intend to use both or intend to have both in the household, right? Yeah. So I think um that's exactly right and I I think that that's um a very good move on their part. Um yeah. No, agreed. Uh next one comes from uh Roi 13 and says that they're excited about virtual game cartridges. Uh my mom and I live in different countries and love to play Just Dance, especially when we're together. And it seems like uh the video game cartridges will allow us to play games separately without needing two copies of the game. Uh yeah, I mean that is essentially what they're trying to do. Um and it is interesting to think about. I kind of like this. It's interesting to think about once you're on the same like family account or whatever. Like again back cuz I'm a thousand years old, you'd go to someone's house and give them a cartridge to borrow. Yeah. here. If even if you live far away, you

can just let them borrow your game and that's pretty neat. Yeah, I'm a big fan. And the last one is aimed directly at you, Matt. It's from Aie Cycler or AIE Siler, excuse me. Rifts was the first system I underestimated as a DM. I started with TMNT and other stranges. I was not prepared for what Rifts was doing. For those who don't know, Matt has a deep and abiding love of tabletop games. Um, he loves Lancer, he loves Dn D, but God, if you start talking about rifts, Matt will go to a happy place of nostalgia and then you've lost several hours of Matt trying to pitch you a Rift campaign. Oh, I'm sorry. This is the original edition. Would you like the Ultimate Gold edition instead? Uh it's it's I listen again, beautiful, wonderful world, absolutely terrible system that I uh that I cannot get enough of and love and have rewritten a bunch of different times. Um yeah, uh thank you. Thank you for that uh Cycler. Uh I too was not prepared for

what Rifts was doing. And literally, it's funny. I don't actively have a Rifts campaign going. My last one was I think four years ago. Um I have all of the world books like cuz the expansions for riffs came in world books. So you had rifts um Africa, riff South America, riffs this and they broke off eventually. But like so you basically because it takes place on Earth, you have all the different locations uh as your expansion books and uh I still have them on my shelf because I just like looking at the spines. That's fair. Uh uh yeah and and Mort more if you are interested in riffs look it up. There's there's some bad. It's a lot of good. The system again is broken. Uh but the world is very interesting and it it's it's one of the few versions of like throw everything and the kitchen sink into your RPG that has actually worked with me on a narrative conceit basis. Um it is great.

Anyway, yeah. Friends, thank you so much for joining us today. Uh if you have thoughts, comments, concerns, responses, please take time to say more in the comments below or message us on Blue Sky if that is the case. Especially for folks watching on Nebula. Thank you for doing that by the way. You can you can hit us up. Um seriously, let us know what you are liking about the show, what you'd like to see more of. Um constructive criticism is always welcome. I know that's a daring thing to say on the internet. Um, but if there's stuff you wish we'd cover more of or you think perhaps our um our pre-shows are too pre, I don't know, uh, let us know and we'll we always love hearing from y'all and and seeing what you like and how we can how we can make this little breakfast adventure a little bit better. Yep. Uh, I think then all that remains to us for today is for Matt to do the same sign off we always do uh as sort of

a community, you know, reentering exercise as we as as we say goodbye today. That's right. Um, I think and and we do it the same every time to ensure that we can all come together as one breakfast family, whether you're a Brad, Janet, or Rocky. Um, and so I think I'd like you all to join me in the following very somber and and um I guess um ritualistic I might even say thing that we do every time. So hold on just one second. If I could just also with [Applause] [Music] [Laughter] you. It's a good one. I like it. I like it. Uh yeah, I know we ran long, friends. Um that was a topic that

demanded running long. Like I could we could have cut some of the pre stories, but god if that main story wasn't going to hit like a freight train loaded with hammers if we didn't do leadup to it like no no no we have to we have to we have to do that thing. So um Matt's got meetings to get to. I'm uh we're going to say goodbye to Janet here. Janet, thank you so much for joining us YouTube. Um we will be back on Thursday uh on YouTube. Jeff and I are doing a design club on the Unity store and why um why a dev might use it. We're going to talk about that because there's um a bunch of conversation about the difference between asset flips and using a store and what that's all about. And Jeff wants to go deep diving in Unity source. We're going to do that on Thursday. Um so please join us for that then. Uh, everybody say bye Janet.