Xbox’s Switch 2 Support, Oblivion’s Remaster & Marvel Rivals Swimsuit Edition | Games For Breakfast

I think it's important we get Janet in here. I think it's important we get Janet in here, too. Uh because it's not a breakfast stream without a Janet. So, yeah. I feel like if this was an episode of Seinfeld, uh Brad, us and Brad would be Jerry and Elaine talking in the apartment, right? And then all of a sudden, you'd hear, right? And then Janet Kramer would just come smashing through the door, right? And say something along the lines of like, "Tariff's, Jerry." And then like, and then we just go from there. I think that's kind of right. Did I Did I get the vibe of the show? No, I I feel like that's correct. I I feel like that is uh the best part of waking up is showing Janet your invisible cup. That's You know, that's correct. Uh oh dear. That's great. Who said that? Bob. Of course. Of course. Why do I even ask? All right, I gotta change. Good morning, everybody. I gota change some stuff. This is This is not a

This ain't Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Do we have a show to show you a show in Today's good. Today's a good smattering. I'm gonna I'm gonna need you to say the thing you said right before this show is good cuz you started saying it and I smell burned toast and then like I just checked out for a second. So I wonder what's going on with Newman. Is this a show about nothing? Oh boy. Oh boy. Oh boy. Uh okay. Let me let me Hey, nice. Welcome to Welcome to being on Janet. Yeah. Uh this time around. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Cool. Cool. Cool. Cool. Cool. Cool. That's good. Now, once I do all that, I need to click this and then hopefully Okay, that's

what's happening, Will. What's going on? Uh I am changing a thing pro. It's fine. Don't worry about it. I've changed a thing. Every time someone says don't worry about it, that instantly spikes a level of worry. Okay, so remember how I said that I was working on a new way to show chat to chat when I'm streaming? Unfortunately, on my end, that screwed up my view of the dashboard. I see. So that didn't it was more difficult to do the this thing than it needed to be. So, I was undoing the thing that I did so that now I can do this thing because I don't need this thing to look like the thing that it looks like when it's just me to look like the thing that it looks like now. Copy that. Understood. This makes all the sense. Is there a hype train going on? I didn't even look. Yeah, of course there is. Of course there is. I I like I like this that coffee clone got an ad for an ad

blocker. This is the tool of our enemy. We do not use it. You're going to put that in the actual show and it's going to make no sense for Rocky. I don't know what. No, cuz I'll do a fiveminute diet tribe about how we did it on the pre-show. That'll be how it go. That's fair. It's valid. That the pre the the the the talking about it is going to the going to the thing. So, uh, Snowy, I want to make this very clear. It's excellent that you're cross-pollinating here, watching on YouTube while chatting on Twitch. Look at this. All of the options. And and in fact, that is probably, I would argue, the best of the options, weirdly, is to like just pop out Twitch chat and then YouTube has a higher has a higher bit rate, right? Uh YouTube has Yes. to the viewer. Yes. Um but also they have better VOD controls, right? Um than Twitch does, uh which is, you know,

weird that don't need that. Yeah. Well, uh I think I think that the is Oh, it's 1 minute 47 seconds before I can have my coffee and we can start the show. Should no one else uh be generous on Twitch. I feel like that is the that is the the move. Matt, did you have a good Easter weekend? I did. I went to the park, hung out with some friends, played with llo. It's good. Nah, nah. Unfortunately, God, you spoke it into existence. You spoke it into existence. Look, we're always very torn, right? Because your generosity is what helps keep this show going and we very much appreciate it. And we set up this weird sisophician task of us both complaining about and yeah, no coffee for me. Thank you. Thank you very much. most also uh Lurker demonstrating one of the new emotes here on on Twitch. We have we have a series of new emotes here on on Twitch. We have

That's so fun. Cheer old high five left and right. Yeah, excellent new emotes uh by Nick Dit. Yeah, there we go. Yeah. No, no, I got them all. You just pull them up there. I have my coffee right here. It's weird though cuz here High-5 doesn't like look like they touch, but they do. They do touch. They do. They can also on the YouTube side of things. Uh we are working on trying to get more emotes over there. That b that's based on what memberships will. Is that the deal? That is number of members. I can let me see if I can pull that up real quick. The only Yeah. Like if memberships get high enough then we can add more emotes I guess is like one of the draws. And we have a bunch over on Twitch we can move over whenever that happens. Um yeah but then see here's the problem. Is there an equivalent on YouTube? Actually, this might be great for me. That is the equivalent of a hype train that would stop me in the morning on Mondays from drinking my coffee by people being kind and

generous. I don't know if there is. I don't I don't know that there is. Uh, okay. All right. So, we can get in four members. Four four more members. We can get more emoji. How many more emoji? I don't know how many we have right now. Oh, we have five. We get two more. No, sorry. I can count. We have six. We get one more when we get four more members. And interesting. So, it's really a 25% of the work. I need to pick two more uh emotes to upload on on um on YouTube already and I will take care of that probably tomorrow. Honestly, today is very is very busy. Yeah. Bob, why you do this? Why you make it work for me? Bob, Bob, why you doing

this? Thank you so much for joining the extra fans. Uh it's only three now. Can it be done in an hour and a half or two hours or however long this show is? For me as a viewer, if you have if you watch ads or if you have premium. Oh, question for Matt. Does the channel get more money? Oh, uh, premium. Weirdly enough, premium. Uh, if you're talking strictly YouTube, I don't know. Ooh, I need to ask our our partner manager about this. I don't know what the difference is for a live stream. Do you know what I mean? I know what like I know that it is more it is beneficial for a premium member to watch your show ad free on YouTube than through ads because it's it's showing it's showing what people who are spending money that way are watching and therefore it elevates it further. Um I don't know though for streaming that's a that's an for a live stuff. Yeah.

Um look thank you so much for becoming a member over on YouTube. appreciate you. Yes, this is true. Cause Tripurble on Purpose is uh actually the joint mods like right if you're wondering how someone got to be a mod here, it's very simple. I picked all the people who were causing the most problems on purpose and then I gave them all swords and said play with this mostly responsibly. Right. Right. Okay. All right. Don't say that. God, I was so close to you were Nova pushed it over and Nova was like just No, Nova did the the cat thing, right, where it was already at the edge of the table and Nova just went, "Yep, there it is." Oh, that's that's a very good point. That is a very good point. Uh Darkwolf says, "With premium, I can listen with my screen off. That's why they're there." That's the thing. Okay, so I also have signed up for fun fact, you don't get it for free when you make

YouTube stuff. Uh I personally out of my own pocket pay for premium and that is my legit selling point for it is you can listen to videos with the screen off. And it's so funny that that's the I want to experience less of what's going on on YouTube for more money, but it's actually like when you're walking or on the subway. I don't know. It just it actually is very very helpful especially for shows like this where listen this this and this is a bonus right um we think sometimes they keep wanting to turn us into VTubers so you know maybe they don't actually want to see that maybe they don't yeah I just I can smell it and it's really why do I make up these awful rules I No one's enforcing this but me. No. Oh, uh, quote also says screen models works better with smart TVs. Oh,

does it? Yeah. Huh, that makes sense. I can also imagine that having ads on a smart TV is like wretched. But that's also the entire business model of smart TVs. Yeah, that's why I want a dumb TV that I hook my computer up to because I don't want the TV to be smart. the pro. Yeah, that's the thing, right? Like you actually can't buy an affordable nonsmart television anymore. Yeah, you can buy cheap computer monitors, but everything else is we are the product, right? Like that's why you can get the Vizio whatever. Side note, that's not me poo pooing on Vizio as a company. I don't mind Visio. They've made some fine televisions for me in the past. Uh but they're also scraping every sense of data. I like how the brain cell has transcended platform lines. So momentary moments apart we have Sigman's comment,

I want my technology to be Himmos. And that's over here on Twitch. Uhhuh. And then on YouTube, moments later, like not fast enough they could have seen it and then reposted it. I have Nova. I hate smart TVs. I want my TV dumb as a rock. I want my TV to be a Hmbo. So, you know, it's good to know that the entire extra family has one brain cell. Keep it keep it going. One one singular brain cell. Lovely. Yeah. Lovely thing to see. Yeah. All right. All right. All right. Truly, here's the thing. I know this might seem like I'm busking. I'm legitimately not. I do not think we will in two minutes get to a level five hype train. I do think it's good that you use the word busking, right? Cuz when people ask like how Twitch and like live streaming works, I'm like, "Oh, I'm a digital street performer." Oh, yeah. If I could juggle. Side note, Jamie's learning to juggle. She's getting really good at it. Um Um But like this is essentially juggling right now. Yeah. Oh, but look. Hey, listen. It seems like

how close are we now to that extra emote sometime later? Um hold on. Uh hold on. holding. Oh, that's so bright. Why? Why you do this? Yeah. Oh, actually, no. But this is exactly what I was saying. If you want a giant TV for cheap and this is a smart TV, look for display monitors. The ones put in stores. It'd be a total of 10. I don't I don't know how many we have right now because it doesn't update in real time. Uh, okay. So, we'll find out soon. It's a total of 10. And if we wanted to reach par with YouTube, we would need more than we're gonna get right now. So, we're not going to talk about it. Um, oh, no, not just parody, just to get that one emote. That's what I'm talking about. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, I think I think we're almost there. I think we're almost there. Thank you all. Um, your YouTube memberships uh do help keep the lights on here and pay for

the gratuitous amount of internet that I drink through a Bendy straw. We will be thanking everybody who's given as soon as the hype train dies over on Twitch. Yeah, because we've found that a riveting pre-show tradition if we try and keep up with it. It's futile and we just do it all at the end. Um I do really want I I I would love them to just sell a television that doesn't connect to anything that you can connect whatever you want like physically to it, just not the internet. Yes. All right. Hype train over. The hype train is dead. Long live the hype train. Uh, second part, not so much. Uh, what? Hold on. We got to find out what emote we got. Oh, we got down bad. Look at the Look at the Hold on. Someone I got to use this. I got to Hold on. I'm going to use this and then I'm going to go over here and put it on screen so you all can see this stupid emote that Twitch did. Where is this? I got you. Look it. It's

doing this. It's It's down bad. It's like a little It's I don't know. I don't know. Anyway, all right. Uh let's thank everybody. Let's go over and thank YouTube first. We got to thank Arab Boros, Nerdy 234, Book Dragon 999, and Bobberation for joining the Extra Fans over on YouTube. Thank you so much for that support. We are uh approaching our next emote, and I will be figuring out what emotes are most crucial to be spammed on YouTube and putting them in uh probably tomorrow morning. Uh, and then over on the Twitch side of things, I've got to thank a great many people. And they go like this. Hippie, thank you so much for 33 months at tier three. Whimsy Weaver for uh 48 months, tier one. Nyio for 43 months with Prime. Book Dragon for 60 months with uh at tier one. Doride for 18 months at tier one. THC for 58 months. Zip for the gift sub. Mystic for the prime. Ramy for gifts sub toe

sparkle. Thank you to various incendentary people including copper chef for bits. Smaz for 61 months. Lurker for the prime and a gajillion emotes. Hippie for five community gift subs. Ruda for prime. Valindana for bits. A mentor for 50 months. Lil for giving my personal account that I never use anymore. A subscription to the channel. Why? Um Musty Line for 44 months. Uh Valandana for more bitties. Novafier for bitties and pushing us over into level three. Dad Panda for prime. Generic blues for prime. CSMO for 54 months. The hype train got to level four. Book for the community gift sub. Hippie for bitties and lurker for bitties. Thank you so much for that continued support. It means the world. Thank you. [Music] It's called a train, Jerry. But where is it going? Well, it's delivering hype. Um, anyway, I Oh, we can start the show now. Yeah, we can actually start the show now. All right, cool. Great. Awesome. Uh, if you're new here, we're going to

go to black for a quick second so we can begin the recording for Rocky over on Nebula. Worry not, this is on purpose. It is intentional. Everything is fine. Nothing is broken. Do not panic. [Applause] [Music] No. Did you think that was the start? It's not. We didn't load it into the RAM, but now it's loaded into the RAM. And now it won't hiccup for when we do the record. And now it's perfect. [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] Good morning, Matt. Ah, good morning, Will. 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 in the pre-show, we use this sound

effect too much. That's just what happened. Uh, but welcome on in. Hello. Uh, greetings to Rocky over on Nebula. Welcome to a phenomenal show. We uh man, we are well, dare I say, we are skinning the proverbial show in many different ways. Here we have a Wait, how many? Wait, hold on. I need to read that. Pre-show, Fox show, Fox show 2, Fox Electric Booaloo, and finally the show. I believe those are the official names of all of the different elements of this show. I mean, faux show. Faux Show. That was better. I like that a lot. Will, how are you, my friend? I'm well. I am well. I am uh energized by the gremliness uh that has surrounded us this morning here on on the stream. We have gremlins to the left of us, gremlins to the right of us, and here we are. Gremlins to the four of us. Anyway, stuck in the middle with

Brad, Janet, and Rocky. That's right. Anyway, I don't know why I went into the charge of the light brigade there, but I did. And we're, you know, we're here. We're having a good time. Why not? Why? Why not indeed? Uh I've been waiting. I've been waiting and now it is time. I will put it here and I will push this down just easier if I don't if I don't do this on this holding it up. Yeah, that makes sense. Uh well, happy uh happy Monday. Happy Yeah, happy Monday. Uh we've had um restful weekend in various and sunundry forms to all who celebrated one of the plurality of holidays this weekend. Whether you were celebrating Easter or celebrating Wrestlemania, whatever you did to relax this weekend, we hope you had a wonderful one. Um, we have an excellent show for you today, uh, with a plethora of stories from all over the web. Um, but first, we have to not really break a promise, but like bend a promise ever so slightly. Oo, which prom? That's my favorite kind of thing to do to a promise. What are we doing? What are we walking back? We

promised ever so slightly. We promised we wouldn't talk about the Switch 2. Except now we have a reason to talk about the Switch 2, which is very important, which is uh we do now have a US pre-order date for the Switch 2. Uh and that date is April the 24th. And with that, we also have some news about the prices. Um which is I think what most people are worried about. So the console itself, sure, is not changing in price at all. Console itself will remain $450 for the base model or $500 for the bundle with Mario Kart World, which I think is probably the better deal. I'm going to say if you're going to play Mario Kart, you should probably just get the bundle. Um and then unfortunately the accessories the mall of this this

new system have gone up in price um rather significantly. So uh here here here's the list. Uh this is what IGN has and I believe this is um these pre-order listings are uh up around the world. Um, so, uh, the Nintendo Switch 2 Pro controller, $85. A pair of Joy Con 2 will set you back a clean 95 US. The charging grip for the Joy-Con 2 is 40 US. A singular strap for your Joycon 2, should you snap it out of frustration, 14. the wheel that lets you hold it like my mom did. I I love my mom so much. My mom learned to play Mario Kart on the Wii. No, on the N64 and was originally trying to drive it like Oh, yeah. Everyone tries that in the beginning. Okay. Which meant that when

we got the Wii version and you actually drove like that, she kicked all our butts. Um, the camera is $55. The dock set is $120. The carrying case and screen protectors 40. The all-in-one carrying case, I have no idea what that means, is 85. And the AC adapter, an extra AC adapter for the Switch 2 is $35. Yikes. Okay, so let's back up here for a second. The all-in-one carrying case is literally to carry the entire thing, the dock, whatever. It's like in a cube. Uh, it's fine. Whatever. Um, I am of two minds of all of this stuff. There's there's there's something interesting here, too. 90% of the stuff here you could still use from the Switch One. They did announce that the old Pro Controller works. They did announce that any webcam will work. They did announce that the old Joy-Cons, while you can't slide them into the Switch 2, you can pair with the Switch 2. So, there's a lot of like you already have a lot of this stuff to

remember if you are a Switch One person. Um, also I think the prices are exorbitant. There's no question. I'm glad that they do have this peacemeal system. I wish it was cheaper, but for instance, over in Sony Town, uh, for all of us Sony ponies out there, for the PSVR 2, you still can't buy replacement controllers. Correct. You can only get the full package with the headset. So, look, I I'm not defending the prices here. I do like that even though it is exorbitant, if you are in need of one of these things, it is available for purchase. Should it be cheaper? Yes. Everything is going up and we will live through that uh for all of the reasons we won't talk about because there's no politics on this show. None. Definitely not later when we talk a little bit more about tariffs. Of of course, right? Tariffs totally apolitical. Um anyway, Will, do you have thoughts on

this? Brad, Janet, what what's going on here? What do we think about all the Is it just like, "Oh, great. Yep. Hit me again with the ruler." No, had a really good take on this uh earlier, which I think is right. Um keeping the price of the console the same and raising the price of peripherals is clever. People won't notice a price increase there as much. I think that's true. I I think for a great many people, the price of the Switch 2 didn't change. the total price, which is to say for a great many people, and again a reminder, we're not average or way more invested than the average gamer. Um, emotionally and monetarily usually, um, they're just going to buy the console. They're going to buy the console. Uh, does the console come with the dock? Yes. Then yeah, then they're going to buy the console and the dock and be good. and they might buy a Pro Controller if they don't already have one. But given that the target audience for the Switch 2 seems to be people who bought the Switch One, they're just going to use I might say that this might It's funny. I think

a larger portion of this audience is actually people maybe not larger, another large portion. I think this might be people's who are waiting on the Switch. this would be the thing because again with the ubiquity of like the the Steam Deck and other handhelds that are of this power now this thing has what people are considering a comparable or a a good enough amount of power behind it. The people that were holding out because of that I think now might also try especially with some of our stories we're going to be talking about later with other companies outside Nintendo kind of championing uh this console in ways. So, I think this this is also uh a move to get more people that aren't already in the ecosystem into the ecosystem. Yeah, I think that's that's very true. Um I like most of Ghost Cities. Um uh their OLED S1 works great. Still don't see the incentive upgrade yet. And I think that's I think that's pretty common. The again the main reason I think that Matt and I are both sort of raring to go is there's definitely a

world where we get a bunch of people together on launch day and we all play Mario Kart World together. Like the second the second that I can guarantee that Will and I have a a pre-order of this, I will start nailing down every contact I have in this industry to try to see if we can get a day one 24 player madness nonsense thing going. Absolutely. It'll be it'll be I I will have to find new ways to represent who on screen is talking. It will be absolute nonsense. We also have the additional that is to say we also have the additional incentive and consideration of this being content, right? So like while the average consumer might not need one, we kind of do or we're behind. So uh which is un which is an unfortunate truth, right? And it is it is somewhat uh Ricky Bobbyes-esque. If you're not first, you're last, right? Like and Damon has it here, too. Like it's right offable. Um and that's not for everybody. We

understand that. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Uh okay. Uh next up, speaking of things that have be that are old becoming new again. Yes, this was a late ad uh because I realized when we were putting the show together, I think 5 minutes beforehand that we weren't talking about this and this was a thing that came up in my feed quite a bit. Um so apparently an Oblivion remaster has been leaked. It it it I I'm having a hard time keeping up with all of the um actual factual bits of this leak, but apparently screenshots of this were were leaked and people are thinking it's coming out sometime in late April, like almost like a shadow launch. Most people believe it will either be today or tomorrow. Okay. Tuesday feels like the day for some reason. Why is that? Tuesday. Well, because Tuesday generally is the day. Is that traditional? Well, cuz DVDs come out on Tuesday. Um Oh, man. Remember

when that mattered? DVD Tuesday. Yeah, man. World um some stuff does come out on Thursday. For instance, uh Clare Obscure comes out on Thursday. Uh I know this because we're playing it on Friday. I I think this is a good window to get it in, right? Because they don't want to compete with Night Rain, I don't think. Um, although this is probably one of the very few things that could go toe-to-toe with Night Rain in terms of being like a fantasy RPG-esque thing. I think they're completely different spaces. Truly, I think I think that the I think that the the Night Rain is banking on being named Elden Ring and that's going to be what takes the oxygen out of the room. Not that they're directly competing, but like it's a thing that's like Elden Ring. Everybody go play it. Maybe. I don't know. I feel like a Bethesda RPG and even Elen Ringh like core Elder Ring. I don't know. I just feel like a re a remaster of this game which again I

enjoyed but did not finish Oblivion. Um this the the scaling is what got me I think we did an episode on this on uh on enemy scaling and how Oblivion uh just bodied you no matter how no matter how high of a level you got, it just raised the like so a mud crab was killing you at at crazy levels. Um, I don't know. I I would be interested in checking this out. I feel like this is sort of Bethesda's kind of like uh, you know, Elder Scrolls 6 is not going to be ready for a thousand years, so we made this. Enjoy. Uh, there's also rumors that a Fallout 3 remaster is going to be happening. Yep. Oh, and yeah, I there's a great point. I wanted to bring this up. Uh, Karma, thank you for reminding me. So, uh, they did talk to the modder who was doing the fan remake, and I believe I don't have the direct quote in front of me, but the the tone was, "No, this is great. Like,

I'm going to keep doing my thing. This is awesome that they're doing this thing, you know, great, great all around." Like, and that's the real modders sort of creed. And I liked that. the the the remaking question is called or the the modern question is called Sky Oblivion and it is a port of the entirety of Oblivion into the Skyrim engine. Yes. Which would make it highly compatible with the mod catalog for Skyrim. So you could replace Chiogarath with any number of things of Macho Man Randy Savages. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Cream of the crop. Yeah. Um anyway, well I by the time this uh stream is over and maybe by the time this is on Nebula, this could be out and maybe you're already enjoying uh going back and and fighting the the DRI princes. I believe it was Dri Princes. I don't remember who the enemies were. I remember they were demons. Um but yeah, I mean generally the DRI princes are probably somewhere

to something. Uh okay, excellent. Uh, next up, uh, a piece of news that is of interest to Matt and actually to me as like a theoretical, not not as a practical, but as a theoretical. 2X KO got some recent news. Uh, two pieces, one of which is near and dear to my heart, and the other, uh, I think everyone will be happy about. Number one, this is the Riot fighting game, by the way, based on League of Legends. Yes. Um, they need a better name. They do. They do, but Riot stinks at naming things. So um the big the the first big piece of news uh brought to us by V B VG247 is that there will be a version of 2X KO that has everything unlocked ahead of time that is exclusively for use in tournaments. So, um, this is, uh, this is a thing that people may not know as I've toed other stuff. So, like the struggle of to get everything together

to run an event is near and dear to my heart. Tournament organizers. Tournament organizers. Um, it turns out that if you don't have this, you need to have copies of the games with all the fighters unlocked, which is either expensive or timeconuming, or both. Think about a uh, think about a Smash tournament. How many switches with how many copies of the season pass and all the fighters unlocked do you need to have in order to run a a a local tournament a local first match? Yeah. Too many, right? Unless everyone brings their own, but then now you've got people like you're trying to track consoles and that's a hu no too much. So having an offline mode uh and a version of this that just comes with all the characters unlocked is going to support the tournament scene. There is a weird hitch which is they have not clarified and no one is sure how the offline mode will interact with Vanguard because Vanguard will also be on 2x KO

which is one of the reasons that a lot of people won't be playing it. Um, Megard is rides a colonel level antiche that activates on boot up and uh, at least to common understanding tries to call home. So, if it's an offline mode, but the antiche for it is trying to call home constantly. No one really knows what that's going to be. I imagine they've thought of this, but it is still a concern that they haven't addressed. This sounds like a different build that's not going to be available for everybody, but if you're a tournament organizer, you can download this build. Side note, how does that kernel level stuff work on I mean actually does Riot have console games? No. So, is this going to be a console game? Are they trying to get this on console? Know that they've confirmed that it will be on console. If they don't put a fighting game of this caliber on console, that seems kind of strange. It's one of the last places people will sit like and play like that can like play together in Wild Rift,

right, is out on console. Yeah, there's a version of League for console. So, sure this is going to be PS5 and Xbox One. Okay, cool. So, so I want So, yeah, I I think my guess truly is there'll either be a downloadable client that you can do on PC that is this version for tournament organizers or that only has local and doesn't even touch the internet. Uh or they'll do the versions of that on the PlayStation and Xbox, etc. and and it wouldn't be the first time companies have given special uh programs for tournament organizers. So, um most wargaming companies do this. Um not Games Workshop, but Privateier Press, Weird, um uh Infinity from Corvvis Belly, a couple others all have uh independent volunteer programs that you apply through and get like they they check you out and then you get access to special tools to help you run tournaments. It's conceivable that this works in the same way that you apply through Riot and they like vet your league account and make sure you haven't been banned for toxicity and then

they're like, "All right, you could be a to now. Here's your special TO0 stuff." So, that's definitely one way it could be done. I think uh I don't know. I think this is a a good move. I I I want more fighters in the scene. I know there's a bunch, but the the big three are obviously Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and Tekken. You could get Guilty Gear in there. um, Virtual Fighter back in the day, Soulcalibur, um, oh, I'm forgetting one, Dead or Alive, but like a lot the the Mortal Kombat, Tekken, and Street Fighter, the ones that keep releasing games on the regular. Um, although Guilty Gear might I I I got to be honest, I've fallen off the Guilty Gear train. Not for any reason, just uh I I I can only keep up with so much. Yeah. Um, I really do want this to do well. Another thing uh that uh kind of came up in the story is uh about their roster and apparently a lot of people are bummed with the character with the the what Riot has said the launch roster for this game will be will

be 10 characters. I think we've talked about this briefly before on this show. Um but they have now heard this and they're going to try to get more up before launch is what it sounds like. Um, but that is also gonna mean that a bunch of people in the character design team are crunching to Kingdom Come. Yeah, I don't love that. Like I It all depends on their pricing model. Like if this is going to be a free-to-play fighter, which do we know yet? I can't remember. It's It's all there so much. My my belief and understanding is that it will be free to play with cosmetics and unlocking additional characters in the same way that you do for League. Right. League. Yeah. Feels very much like the formula to do it with. I feel like that's why even they have been able to take the swing for as long as they have is cuz the monetization model does kind of fit. Um I don't think 10 fighters that are

polished incredibly well at launch is a bad roster. Like maybe I I I don't know. Like especially for a free-to-play game that's going to be built on like that. Like I wouldn't want a $60 Mortal Kombat to have 10 fighters at this point in the game. Like that makes zero sense to me. But like I don't know. I I I was a little bit worried when I heard that they're going to try to get out more of them before they launch it because a it might not be as smooth and as polished. B developers are going to crunch and this is still a relatively small team even though it is Riot. Um, I don't know. Uh, they were saying that 24 feels like the best option, but they're not like guaranteeing that. Basically, 14 more than No. Again, that's what they they said we they'd love, but they don't know if they can hit it. They said we're not close to that now, so we're going to work quickly to get to that point. They were going to keep going. Yeah. I was going to say like if you're not going to do 10 12. Yeah. And then you pointed original Smash. You say 12 and you pointed

original Smash and you're like it was good enough for Smash, it's good enough for us. We're launching more. OG Smash launched with 12 and you played with 12 forever. So, right. Tom Cannon continues said, uh, he goes, "There's a reason why I'm being a little cy about this stuff is because we're honestly still getting better at it. This is new, uh, new fighting game team. Even though we've been through this for a little while, we're not on like version five of the franchise, right? We're building this team as we're going and learning how to do things. You're seeing the game get better and better, look better visually, and the character kits keep getting more dialed in, frankly, as we are getting more familiar with the game and better at our jobs." like and that I love that. I love that mentality for what is essentially probably Riots's like real only like new IP. Well, I got that MMO thing. Yeah, this seems for I don't know. It it I don't know. I just like when someone's like, "Hey, we love this. We're not perfect. We're getting better. We're

trying." Yeah. Um, and it does. It's been looking good so far. So, I don't know. I hope they're not rushing too much. I think you could you could, again, I don't know the methodology or the the how much money they need to bring in to keep this thing going. Uh, however, or like player count or whatever. I can't imagine this flopping. No, no, not at all. I I think this is going to I have a theory where this game I think will actually help revitalize the fighting game scene in general. Not that the se like the deep scene is still there and embedded in the bedrock of gaming and not going anywhere, but I'm talking like the more casual player scene because what this is going to do is take everybody, not everybody, many people who play League who love these characters and want to try out this thing and it's going to catch some people. And when you have that bucket of however many millions of

people play League, even if you knock that down 10% and then another 5% of people that stick, that's a huge number of influx into the fighting game scene. Yep, agreed. Uh, also breaking newsop just put a post on social media teasing the Oblivion remake announcement tomorrow. Boom. This is what I wanted. I wanted us to at least say the words before. Did Did we get it in actually beforehand? That's what I need to know, Brad and Janet, right now. Is is that posted date before or after we said it? Yeah. I just want to know. Yeah. Uh, okay. Jimmy Jimmy thinks so by a few minutes. And I I think the um the 2x is not especially new user friendly. League isn't New user friendly either. Like they've almost on purpose, right? Jeeoff and I talked about this when I was trying to like understand League

better last year, right? It is a thing that you will have to become good at over a long period of time. And that feels like a thing that it shares with 2x KO, right? Like if you're already infranchised into the lore and the world and you want to try something different, then I feel like that hurdle is not insurmountable for the target audience. Also, there is okay halfbaked idea in my head right now. So, this very well could be wrong. I'm still getting better at my job. Um, a fighting games buyin, no matter how complex the the meta or the way that the fighting works, is still much much easier to get on board with for a new player than a MOA. Though they share a couple of things,

right? They do, but like I and the reason I say and and again I I'm happy to be proven wrong by many comments, but intrinsically the goal of a fighting game is pretty simple. Knock the other person down and get their life bar to zero. Y a MOA has a few more things involved than that. The methodology is more um execution complex I would say in a fighting game, right? And the goal is simpler. Well, technically in a mobile it's knock down that big building thing and reduce its life part to zero. So, but it's not as simple as one screen sort of like, you know, and I will say this, you can button mash your way to a victory in a fighting game. You can't do that in a mobile. You can't do that in a mobile. So, anyway, I I I've heard mixed things about the complexity and the new player experience. I have still not played this game and I'm dying to. Um I there there there was talk that

they're going to be trying and utilizing a sort of simpler system. Allah Street Fighter 6's um new fighting, new like button layout stuff to make it easier to do. Um I don't know how far along they are with that or what they're what they're doing. I'm waiting for the official 2X KO license tip boxes because there got to this got to be a thing, right? Anyway. Yeah. Um, cool. Speaking of freeto-play games and the ways they monetize, let's talk about Rivals real quick. What a strange what a strange circumstance we're in, Will. Yeah. So, Rivals is having a a weekend a week uh regarding skins. So, uh there's three parts to this and we will address them all independently and then sort of talk a little bit about it as a whole. Uh the thing the first below you see a skin for Doctor Strange. The skin retails for $25 based on the hit Marvel property Doctor

Strange in the Multiverse of Madness where spoiler alert Doctor Strange gets all undead and creepy. Correct. Also, we know you're all obviously familiar with The Multiverse of Madness because it's such a key part of the Anyway, um uh listen, I I I I don't love the movie. I liked it enough at the time and it did make a bunch of money. That's true. Like a lot of people did. It also feels like it was one of the ones that sort of like was a brief candle and then out, right? Versus like I don't know. We're going to talk about it later. I'm I'm sure Black Panther where I'm like I could watch Black Panther again. I've never once thought I could watch the Multiverse of Madness again. I've once thought I want to watch the Multiverse of Madness again and I started it and then I stopped it. Uh right now Multiverse of Madness is creeping up on a billion dollars. So Okay. Anyway, um so uh you you will see on the left here Doctor Strange in the promotional shots for this skin where he

is surrounded by hands of zombies. They form sort of like the the beginnings of the cloak of levitation, right? His his fancy thing. So he's got hands around the back of his head and like hands around like on his shoulders and he's got hands coming out from behind his hands and hands everywhere. A cool looking skin. A cool looking skin. And yet too expensive. A cool looking skin, right? Whether or not it's worth $25 to you is up to you. It's not to me and it's not to a lot of people at, you know, $25. Um because I could buy an entire game for that. So yeah, no. Also, Deistic, speaking of fighting games, you right. Although it was kind of fun. It was kind of um the problem the problem with this skin is that the way it looks in game is actually the one on the right. And you may note a distinct lack of hands. That is because in game those hands do not appear except during very specific moves. Um they don't they don't show up on the character model at all. And the additional problem is that

there's no way to know that unless you buy it or unless you look it up on YouTube ahead of time. Yeah. So, it's really deceptive advertising here. I don't really know that there's a way to like give them any leniency on that. The skin as represented is not the skin in game. And that's a problem, especially for what's supposed to be. It's on the landing. It's on their store landing page right now. It's one of the big promo items for this part of the season and it's not what it appears to be. So, that's a problem. Um, yeah. Also, there's a couple other different things, too. Uh, like the gash on, it's hard to see in this image, but if you look it up and it's in the show notes, the gash on Doctor Strange's like he looks like a zombie in the skin and he actually doesn't look like that from what I hear in the skin. It's almost is more like a goth. Yeah. Uh, thing. There's been a couple ideas as to why this is. Um, one of them is the hitbox or like

not the hitbox, but the like the the silhouette of the character changing too much. But then at the same time, uh, what was the other one? The the new Thor skin that they just released for season two or whatever, uh, as a giant puff of fur sticking way farther out than normal. So, like I don't think it's that, right? Um I was trying to think if there was and this doesn't I don't think strikes too hard into this, but like if it was the undead of it all. Do you know what I mean there? Um so important to note that the ways that the undead are portrayed culturally in China are very different than the ways that the undead specifically are portrayed in Western media. Um, yeah, the zombies and blood as they appear. It would not surprise me at all to learn that the skin is advertised as the skin on the right in

China and that the skin is only advertised as the skin on the left in Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah, I wonder if that might be the case. Blood and decaying bodies are both uh far more taboo in Chinese media than they are in um Western media. I'm not saying that that's 100% for sure. I'm just saying that that's my best guess. Um I think uh that that may be a cause here. That being said, it doesn't excuse them advertising it differently than it appears because I think if they if they had advertised it as the thing on the right, fewer people would have bought it, but more people who bought it would have been happier about it. We wouldn't be doing the story. Yeah. I mean, this is uh sorry uh skeleton model in China. I wanted to get Aram here too. Uh even if they had a decent reason for it to look the way it does, the advertising reflect that in the actual product. Absolutely. Uh there's also not a reason if you want and and listen if we know anything about any kind of company is they want all the money. You could I'm

just saying make it two different skins in two different regions. You don't have to do that. You could have the whole thing going one way and not have it in another. I'm sure there's some other issue in that regard, but like it's there's ways around this. Yep. Uh the simplest of which just putting a disclaimer somewhere on the store page being like, "Hey, this only happens during this move and this move or whatever and blah blah blah blah blah." Uh similarly uh there is an increasing amount of um consternation confusion over the introduction introduc introd I think introduction introduction of of unstable molecules a new currency to rivals unstable molecules Jerry they exchange one to one with units units which are the premium premium the pre the with the premium currency they exchange one to one um

credits units units I don't remember the gold one the little gold one you buy with real dollars anyway they exchange one to one yeah essentially money um you need 600 which is six bucks mercifully there's like a reasonable one one there so you need to exchange them one and unstable molecules are used to recolor costumes and that's it they introduced a whole new currency for that instead of having it be other things. My thinking is that it will likely be possible to earn some amount of unstable molecules through a different system in game that they don't want to end up giving directly premium currency for for whatever reason. And this is the soft launch introduction and it's being done poorly. Who knows? Um people are complaining about $6 skin recolors as they should. Okay, okay, okay, okay. I am of two very battling minds of

this subject. Marvel Rivals is another free-to-play game. They're not charging you at the start, and therefore, you are the product. Everyone should understand that. And you can vote with your dollars by if you don't want a $25 Doctor Strange skin, hopefully enough people don't buy that Doctor Strange skin. [Music] Um, I hate the idea of paying for a recoloring of a skin on principle, but if they are looking for different ways to get this game paid for to continue running as a free-to-play experiment, this feels like a lowhanging fruit to do. Like, I would I would be much more viciously attacking this decision if this was in a standardized, you know, $40 to $60 pricing package of

a game. Like this would be abhorrent and the idea of strip like stripping a game for parts as we're slowly buying less and less of our game because they're just making stuff like this. Is this a gateway to that in other places? Sure, because you could normalize it in this scenario and then a new game that does cost an actual amount of money could try to pull this stuff and blah blah blah blah blah. But um look, I think Marvel rivals still being free, uh to play is I keeping it that way is going to cause a lot of stuff like this to pop up. They're going to just keep thinking of things like this. Will, you bring up a great point. This is also probably a soft launch to de to increase the value of the game's real currency and start giving out more of this and less of that other currency for things because now yeah because now they can give this and this it has parody but I I imagine you

can't exchange actually someone who plays marbles or rivals right now let me know you probably can't exchange unstable molecules for the currency one way. Which means that I would not be shocked if season 3 replaced a good number of the premium currency nodes with unstable molecules. Right? That's my thought because this is another way to keep you from rolling the battle pass too hard, which is a thing that players want and companies don't. Right? Players want the battle pass to pay for itself in premium currency so that if you complete the battle pass, you can get the next one. And that's an understandable desire from the players because you're putting in time and effort and you feel like you don't want to spend money and time and effort to get rewards and that makes sense. Companies don't want that because it means that players don't spend money on their game right after the first infusion of cash. So I would imagine that this is going to this is ends up being battle pass bait but we'll see. something

interesting that turn brings up uh greatly gravely overpriced but it feels like it's only it's only crime created the other monetization out there trying to manipulate you into consuming that that's something else interesting too could you imagine I I I'm trying to think of how this works and credit charges credit cards take based on the amount that you pay can be different based on the the processing fees and things like that like every company's making money off your money right so imagine if re if recoloring a skin was 99. If I was a Marvel Rivals player, would more people engage with that to make up the difference? I'm sure they did the math to figure out what the $6 spot like was the sweet spot as to why they do have like a $4 intro pack that they did a little while ago. That is probably their test for how many people will buy the it's got orange

venom, so a skin recolor and a token in it for one skin. Um, and it feels like that's their like, hey, it won't hurt to put your information. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, here's the thing. Uh, n like this is just Richard's example, but like I'd recolor one skin per week. So, like it's almost like do they do they think that this is something that people would do consistently enough or like do they think this is like a one-time purchase or something like and also if they made it 99 cents and they were trying to change the currency like that it weirdly feels like it would make more monetary sense for me in parody because if they were cheaper to do you would do it more and you'd spend your earned unstable molecules more, but eventually you would run out of skins that you have to recolor cuz you'd find your favorite, so you'd have to buy more skins. Where at $6 a pop,

unless they're just doing completely high spenders, it doesn't feel like it's it's parody. Like, it's funny cuz like the Doctor Strange skin, like we're going to talk about sort of three I'll use the word sins. It's not that hard. uh are not that bad. Uh but that we're going to be talking about three different um types of monetization for games like this. One is the uh exorbitant super special skin, right? We've seen it even in like Hearthstone has like a $50 nonsense Ragnaros garbage thing. Uh and so like when you you have that uppriced skin that's just supposed to be the most premium of premium. two, you have these sort of mid-tier things that should be cheaper, even though they're treated like they're a little bit more. That is literally just a pallet swap. It is it's there is a design cost ever so slightly to make sure it doesn't look like hot garbage, but uh it is vastly cheaper

than designing a new skin. And uh not to go back to full Macho Man Randy Savage Bone Saw territory, but number three is 3 minutes of play time. uh is our next bit of the story which is just being sexy. Um that's the third uh skit skitting skdding sin of these types of games. So, um, I don't know if all y'all are as old as my dusty, dusty, dusty skeleton is, but Marvel, I think 25, 30 years ago, something like that, put out uh the Marvel swimsuit edition comic book, which you get it. Um, this time they're releasing another one this year and it's called Marvel Swimsuit uh edition. What do you got? Go on. I have I have a question. Friends, foes, and

rivals. Um, will you I'm curious what you I have questions. My first question, what does the thing wear to the beach? I desire to know mostly for curiosity reasons. Okay. Have you seen Borat? Oh, it's just that. Yeah. Okay. Sure. It's the man keiny. I mean, look, the thing tradition many times has worn different costumes that were full body and you can listen, will sometimes you just have to get your rocks off. Do you know what I mean? Um, my point is now this there's an article that we were we're linking to in the show notes here uh from Marvel Rivals.gg GG which talks about this in particular and its link to um to the game Marvel Rivals. However, in this article and actually uh Brad and Janet, if you find something else other than this that actually or if someone has said statist or like that this is

actually happening, yeah, then please let us know. But uh at least as far as as long when this was published uh on April 20th, uh they're saying Netis hasn't officially announced uh when these swimsuits will actually be released in the game. So, no one quite knows, but they're but they're feeling like um sometime this will also be a tiein. And I'm sure these will have a premium price tag. But I mean, everyone's done the Overwatch had its summer thing. I think League has done stuff like that. Like this is kind of part for the course in this. And weirdly, they've they've sort of done something for everyone. Uh the season two is a masquerade theme. It's a party theme. And so lots of the costumes are much more like elaborate highbrow like doneup costumes. So they they've they've done like the more like classy sparkly ones and then also you can have thing in a bikini. Um and that's like you know all your quadrants. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Like I I am doomed because I'm a cloak and dagger man and the the final skin unlock for the battle pass is a cloak and dagger like um Marty Gro masquerade style skin and it's gorgeous, right? And I'm like, "All right, fine. I guess I'm playing this season, whatever." Right. Um yeah, it's the Hellfire Dallas specifically. Yes. Yeah. And I guess the plot of the comic book is uh Janet Vanine, the Wasp, who is a fashion designer, I believe, sets up a fashion shoot after finding out that The Rocks on Comic uh put out an unauthorized swimsuit magazine. That is the plot. Um again, I don't know why Spider-Man doesn't have his mask on here, that we are past the the the Brand New Day timeline. Who knows? Yeah. Um, also the what was I gonna say? Like I'm curious. So like Hellfire Club did just happen in Rivals as well. Uh, with with Emma Frost

being here and that that whole um I feel like that look is the other side. It's the pendulum swing of the third edition. Yep. Uh, so we'll see. We'll see how it goes. We'll see. I'm curious what the pricing model is. and they're going to make a ton of money. Yeah. [Music] Uh, okay. Uh, the ads are coming up in 20ish seconds. So, we're gonna we're going to be here. Spider-Man, one more day on the beach. Amazing. Amazing. Just Yeah. Where's Mesto's uh like thong? Like that's really what we're what we need, I think. Yep. It's just it's the beaches of of hell. Yeah. Yeah. All right, it's ad time. We're gonna do ads here for things you can't buy while you see ads for things you can. If you're new here over on the YouTube side of things, we do ads uh for fake madeup things because we need to

run ads to keep pre-rolls off over on Twitch so the people coming in can just jump right in the conversation. So, we're going to sell you things. Matt, would you like to begin? Yeah. I'm going to turn this down a little bit. Hi, Matt from Extra Credits here. Who's actually not going to be the person selling you something right now because now he's back and he has you for 3 minutes. 3 minutes of play time that he's selling you. That's right. These ads will go for 3 minutes and then I'm going to keep talking like Macho Man Randy Savage Brother. And then we're going to find out that it's the cream of the crop and that I forget the other taglines that he used to say. But that's all right because he just sort of rambled into it talking about Hulk Hogan and then doing raps. Do you remember how Macho Man wrapped and made fun of Hulk Hogan back in the day? Look where Hulk Hogan is now. I think Macho Man was right. Yeah. Uh yeah, that's it. Uh I like I like I

like Matt getting possessed by the spirit of Macho Man all of a sudden. I have Macho Man glasses behind my green screen and I was like in my head I was racking my brain like how do I get them cleanly and I just couldn't. Yep. Man was right. All my homies hate Hulk Hogan. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was one of the I you know what I have to do? I have to get a sound clip of that for this show. I have to find I I'll hunt that down of a be a man Hogan. Like that was like the call and response uh bit of that song. Okay. All right. You ready? Yep. Here we go. Hi there, friends. With summer approaching, you're going to see a lot of games doing things like this, trying to sell you swimsuit editions to to get your eyeballs on the game. Well, let me convince you that you should buy Extra Breakfast Swimsuit Edition. Now, before you turn off the channel, this is how this is going to work. Matt and I are going to get those old school like

elbow to knee blue and white striped like you know uh 18 late 1800s style uh long sleeve shirt with suspenders, right? Yeah. Yeah. And they come with suspenders and the and the hats, right? We're going to straw hats and that's the costumes that we're going to wear in our swimsuit edition. So that's what you should be buying, right? That's that's what everyone wants this summer. Just just I I saw the panic. I saw I was like, "Go with me. Go with me on this. It's okay. It's fine." Um, yeah. Uh, I I think listen listen what I've always said is if we make it big enough that we're doing like a hot tub stream kind of thing, that's what we're going to do. We're going to get like the the, you know, up to your collar bone down to your elbows and your knees. And the straw hats are mandatory, obvious. We'll have to have we'll have to ship Toasty back and we'll get one a swimsuit for Toasty McBoat Face, our the the Wayward Toaster. I feel like having a swimsuit for a toaster might be a touch dark for

our audience. Yeah, it's not He's not plugged in. Okay. All right. Yeah. Uh Ye Olden Hot Tub. That's correct. Um can't wait for Armored Core Swimsuit Edition. Amazing. Yes, 100%. Yeah. Hey everybody in chat, what's the best swimsuit edition? Wrong answers only. Yeah, right. Love this. Love this a lot. Armored core swimsuit edition is pretty clutch. Yeah. Uh I liked I liked Goldie's comment from over on uh YouTube. A bathing suit emphasis on suit on suit. Ju just like a three-piece. Of course. It's just a three-piece that you wear into the pool. Um, Call of Cthulu swimsuit edition. I like I like Warhammer 40k swimsuit edition. These are good. These are good. These are good. Um, uh, uh, uh, Carrion. Yeah. Also, is it coming in too hot, too fast for me to catch? Portal. Only the

turrets. I like only turrets. Yeah. Um, this is great. Uh, okay. So, uh, we're going to keep moving because we are running a touch behind because chat decided they were going to hype for an extra long period of time this morning. So, we're gonna we're going to keep moving. Darkest Dungeon Swimsuit Edition. Amazing. The sun beats down onto your burnt skin. A you made me sad. All right. Sorry, buddy. Uh, okay. Uh, next up real quick. Um, we've talked a lot about Game Pass and the impact that Game Pass has had on the industry. Um, one of the one of the questions that's been asked is by giving the game away for free for a period of time at launch, are you hurting your sales? Um, and there's been a lot of speculation and a lot of people have like sort of armchair analysted a lot of this. Um, but we haven't had a real developer point of view that's been

particularly strong before until now. And the Atomfall devs uh are actually have actually uh taken the time to speak uh to um uh reporters about the way that launching on Game Pass has had uh an impact on their sales and on the profitability of Atom Fall. Adam Fall's been relatively popular. Um and so it's been kind of an interesting uh thing to see. Um it it's not it is pretty much as we had sort of expected. Ow. That's my Can I get dark mode on this page? Yeah, you you just lit up like the freaking sun. That hurt. Um the uh it it hasn't hurt as much as one might think. It also did they did confirm though not exact numbers that uh Microsoft does guarantee a rather substantial sum of money for being on Game Pass kind of like Epic does. Everyone's in this game of trying to get people onto their service. So, Microsoft

is willing to pay developers a guaranteed amount of money to get them on the service so that more people will get on the service, right? This is user acquisition cost. Um, and if the user acquisition cost is paying for 100,000 copies of Atomfall, then that is probably worth it to Microsoft, right? Yeah. I mean, the the thing that this this article uh over on GameSpot sort of talks about is like companies doing the math of like, well, do we want to guarantee a payday for the people who work here or roll the dice is kind of what it is. And there's there's other interesting things too, like if a game is on Game Pass and enough people like it on Game Pass, there are people that don't use Game Pass that will talk to people and friends that use Game Pass who like the game and hopefully if the game is good, they'll get good word of mouth and then people who aren't on Game Pass will buy the game not on Game Pass, right? Like there there's a weird trickle down scenario there that might actually work.

But no one really knows to like it's hard. How do you quantify this in a way that like you would be able to actually guarantee it, right? Because you need to AB test and that's impossible. I want to make it very clear that uh chat both Brad and Janet has not moved on from the swimsuit ask and it is just going continually right now on both sides. War Thunder swimsuit edition. Nothing in the game is just leaked designer swimsuit plans for the upcoming season. Y um I I also liked uh Five Nights at Freddy's swimsuit edition and 5D multiversal chess with time travel swimsuit edition. Like like these like like these a lot. Um oh uh Game Pass. Uh I think I' I I might hold the record now for the person who said the word Game Pass the most that doesn't use Game Pass. Yeah. Um, so this is just kind of an interesting perspective to have. I wanted to bring

it up because this has been a topic of conversation before and now we have devs speaking about their experience and that's good. Um, yeah, speaking is I like this story because there's no right or wrong or good or bad. It's like, hey, here's a business model. Everyone's trying to figure it out. We went with this because of this. Oh, it's just loot boxes. Unopened loot boxes. Pinups of loot boxes. I like it. I like it. Maybe one of them is slightly open suggestively. All right, next up, uh, Deolver has released a whole bunch of sales numbers, um, on their investor call, uh, for 2024, and it's, if you are into the business side of of gaming or wondering how stuff like how the sausage gets made, fantastically interesting um, piece over on PC Gamer about um, the about some analysis that's been done on Blue guide about what the

numbers mean. Basically, the uh if you thought that Devolver was making money off of other games besides Cult of the Lamb, you'd be correct. But cult of the lamb is so far in number one that it's it's sort of by a mile which is a very interesting thing because as much as we um talk about people wanting new games and people wanting uh novelty and you know more complete experiences. Uh, a bunch of that money was from DLC for Cult of the Lamb, right? And specifically the idea that DLC does more than just sell DLC. DLC keeps your game in the news cycle and therefore sells your game. Uh, game of the year editions, getting people involved because other people are talking about it again, can give your core game Second

Life, even if people aren't buying that DLC specifically. Um and they were just talking about how um called the lamb I believe it hit uh let's see 90 million earned um over the course of its lifetime and then 80 million is Astanineir uh with lifetime revenue. So, uh, the figures coming in Hotline Miami, uh, I think was a little under 30 mil and some serious Sam games altogether were like 45 mil. But the the the way that like it's it's interesting is like you can have even new IP start feeling like an institution if you support it continually out the gate like Cult of the Lamb did. It also helps that Cult of the Lamb, Cult of the Lamb is an excellent game. It also helps that Cult of the Lamb uh had such strong Twitch support, right? Even though there's a lot of things it had going for it. Um

but it's interesting to see sort of uh companies and Deolver is always on top of this stuff, but like sort of being like, yeah, like this is a this is a valid methodology for keeping your game in the news cycle and therefore continuing its sales. Yeah. like the DLC value goes beyond DLC. Absolutely. Uh I I think that's pretty that's pretty cool. Yeah. Um in other game biz news that's kind of interesting and kind of uh amusing to me at least, Tempest Rising launched early on accident and they just kind of went with it. So, in a world where launches are so carefully coordinated, where things are planned out down to the day and the everything, having this happen is kind of interesting. So, Tempest Rising's premium edition had early playtime as part of the deal. You would get to play early, uh, I think a week early, um, if you bought the, you know,

the premium edition and supported the game and all that jazz. And then they goofed because instead of enabling early access for the premium edition, they enabled early access for everyone who had pre-ordered. Oops. And they couldn't. They felt like it would be a bad move to take it back to say, "No, you're not supposed to have it yet." Right. Cuz remember it would. Yeah. I I believe another game attempted to do something like that and it ended poorly. Um, and so they just like ran with it. And now the really interesting thing is what started out as a goof is ending up to be very positive for them because it's ending up in the news cycle as a cool goof and then they followed through and did the right thing which was letting everyone keep the game early and further compensating premium DLC members with something down the line they're working on something because they don't have it planned obviously and that's good. I'm sure some it's interesting I the early different types of games and the early bird like buying

the deluxe edition to play it early has different value props for different kinds of games. This is what basically a base building RTS. Yeah, I would imagine the player base probably isn't terribly upsetty spaghetti about it because this means that they'll have more people to play with when the game launches. Like, yeah, I maybe I mean, someone uh if someone actually pre-ordered this and was like upset about the thing happening and not getting the thing, please let us know. But I I feel like this is overall a good thing, even though it is a mistake. Yeah, I I I like this. Uh this the launch equivalent of tripping, falling, and sliding into a break dance. Correct. Yeah, sure. Correct. It is taking full advantage of the mistake and then capitalizing on it in a good way. Yeah. Dark says they might not get to level up before the others though. Is this a level up kind of game? That that's what I don't know. Like I could understand like the value prop

even though I don't agree with it of like an MMO letting people get on early to do the things. Uh that has value I guess to to some people. Yeah. But I'm not sure about uh it is a classic style RTS set on Earth after a nuclear war developed by Slipgate Ironworks and published by 3D Realms at Nights Peak. I don't see I mean it's it's very much like I'm sure it has rankings like a like um the only thing that this is missing by the way is Tim Curry saying that he's going to the one place that hasn't been corrupted by capitalism like that's the level of RTS that we're talking about um space space right and like I I don't foresee this being in any way negative. Yeah. All right. Good little story. Yeah, good good little story. All right, next up, um a a brief update on a thing that a lot of people probably guessed, but we now know for sure. Turns out, um

Assassin's Creed sells games. Wow. After all of that complaining that people did about Assassin's Creed being whatever it was this time, still sold a bunch of games. It's now the number two selling game in the US after Monster Hunter Rise. Not Rise, Wilds. Wilds. World Wild Rise. Rising World Wilds. That's right. Yeah. Mr. 305, Mr. World Wilds. That's right. Exactly. Um I think this is good. I think uh everyone I've seen playing the new Assassin's Creed has enjoyed it. Um and I've I've tempted me to pick it up and I'm not I'll get it eventually. Yeah. I'm not an Assassin's Creed kind of person normally, but I think this is um it's a gorgeous gorgeous game. And they also included the photo mode, which is great because it's definitely like shiny bait, right? Where you're like, "This is a cool moment. Oh, I'm gonna take a picture. Oh, it's cool. I'm gonna take a picture." And I'm going post on social media and everyone's going to see how gorgeous the game is. Everyone's going to buy the game. And it worked.

Yeah. All of my Reddits that are talking about PS5 Pros and everything are like showing off all the nonsense and looks pretty. No, I'm glad. Glad it's doing well. Yep. Uh, absolutely. Okay, I believe we're almost back on track timewise, which means we have time for Matt to talk about Sinners. Yo. Okay, so we're gonna we're veering a little away from games and going into film here, but what we've been talking about even in this episode and kind of what's in the DNA of this show in general. Uh we've talked about in this episode, we've talked about freeto play and like if you don't own the game, then you're the product. We've talked about in the past uh physical ownership. We've talked about how like do you own your games, that sort of thing. Um and and and IP law and all that jazz. So, if you're not familiar, Sinners is a Ryan Cougler film um that released this weekend. First and foremost, let me just tell you, it is exquisite. If you are looking for a kick-ass, deep and uh film that is

actually saying something while also being an R-rated horror flick, you cannot do better right now. And I believe it was shot in IMAX. I did not have the privilege of seeing it in IMAX. I might go back again to do that. Um it is Yeah, actually Mindless just asked that and I didn't see I I believe it was shot in it, so I'm curious to see the aspect ratio change. Um, but the reason I want to bring up sinners is not just because it is excellent. Um, it's it's opened up a conversation over the weekend and today in a really interesting and weird way and that is based around the reporting of its success. Um, a couple different places, you can find it in the show notes. Um but basically um the I believe in Vulture uh and and Variety and a couple other places were posting about like man it made $61 million in its opening weekend but it still has a long way to go or it's not going to be profitable and d and it had

a real negative bend to what essentially is a really positive story about a new R-rated film in this climate pulling 61 million in its first weekend. Yeah. And um uh there's a lot to sort of unpack as to why the what the thing that uh that kind of knocked me onto this was Ben Stiller actually just uh retweeted this. He said, "In what universe does a $60 million opening for an original studio movie warrant this headline?" He's referencing a variety headline that basically lays out what I just said. And the reason behind this, I promise there's a point to this. I just need all this preamble is it's because of people are guessing a couple different reasons why this is being read as like why it's being portrayed as a negative. One, the first and easiest one is negativity and headline cells. If you can make it seem like there's something wrong or it still needs to do it thing, then maybe that's going to get more people to click on this thing. two, there's um obviously uh

the a possible racism throughout etched throughout the entire thing. While I think that is sort of the background um reasoning in this, I don't think that is actually the core here. Um though it, you know, it can permeate everything. Uh the the the interesting thing here that some people are positing is it's actually because of the of the unique deal that Ryan Cougler got for this film. Yeah, and you can read up in the show notes on the articles the very very specifics, but this movie was shopped around for a while. Also, Ryan Cougler is just a hitmaker. This is the man behind Black Panther and a bunch of other films. And uh so he has the cache to do this. And when I believe Warner Brothers um yeah uh finally uh won this movie, there were there were three three reasons. There's a lot of threes here. There were three things that uh Ryan Cougler got out of this deal. One, he gets final cut. Um two was

uh he makes money off the film be some percentage before the movie recoups its costs and three um he owns the film after a period of 25 years. the the rights of sinners goes back to Ryan Cougler or goes to Ryan Cougler because right now Warner Brothers owns I believe also the I mean the reason he can pull this off is he has incredible cache in the film making industry and I believe he put up a couple mill like 20 mil or something like that of his own money for this movie which I believe before marketing cost $90 million. Okay. And people in a lot of these articles are saying like, "Well, this will collapse the studio system because then people will start thinking about who owns the movies and how will studios make deals and and all of these things cuz everyone will want this deal and D and it's like I I don't get why we're trying to talk about this like it's a like it's a

bad thing that a a proven director, like beyond proven, can actually request a better deal than people normally get in the film industry and the film industry will pay it. Like the I get that like the the studio system relies on back catalog stuff. Most studios do, right? Um, but when you have something like like a sort of like hitmaker like this that that then they agree to do this and then it's being sort of marketed as like well man I just I don't know like it there's something odd about the reporting of it like this should be a triumph especially in a struggling film industry outside of like giant IP grabs and the fact that there are a lot of people talking negatively about this is odd and it really got me thinking about sort of ownership of honestly like ownership of the games

we own. Uh developers owning the games that they make, filmmakers owning the movies that they make. And it's interesting that studio systems uh some again all of the the quotes and things from people upsetti about this are also kind of uh nameless and were protected behind different things. But like it seems like a lot of like trying to poo poo on the success of this movie for a generalized fear that more people will ask for deals like this where in my opinion two poss two two things are true. One, yeah, people should ask for deals like this. They absolutely should. But the other thing is too, no studio system is in danger from this because you have to be a proven factor for a studio to agree to a deal like this. It also feels like a lot of pearl clutching a bit because it's a Ryan Cougler is relatively new even though he's grand slammed it repeatedly. Um, no question

that his track record is indisputably proven, right? Even Even if his track record was just and it's not just Even if his track record was just Black Panther and Wakanda forever, sure, fine. Let him do whatever he wants, right? Like that that feels like enough to let him do whatever. Um, but Quentyn Tarantino also has a deal like this. Well, Quent, it's interesting. Quent Tarantino had a deal that's grandfathered in due to his time at Miramax. Uh, and it rolled in. Um Mel Gibson uh for all of his nonsense had a deal like this for passion, but he paid for Passion. Um and I believe uh I think Quent Tarantino gets Once Upon a Time in Mexico. No, not Once Upon a Time. Wow. Uh Once Upon a Time in Hollywood um back in 30 years or something. Yeah. But like you're looking at you're looking at like um I don't know. This dude just makes hit after hit after hit. Everything is is I'm looking back through the stuff like uh Fruit Bell

Station uh Creed. This guy just makes winners, right? And he makes winners with Michael B. Jordan, by the way. With Michael B. Jordan, right? Yeah. And and and Michael B. Jordan plays twins in this movie. He does excellently. And here's something I don't want to spoil this movie because truly you should see it. Um, but the other thing that I don't see a lot of people talking about in the space that I promise we'll move back to games is the plot of this movie is deeply tied to um cultural origins and usages of art and how those things can be taken, misconstrued, uh, twisted around by different other groups. And it does it so smartly that to have this conversation be about this movie is just quadruply

both feeling like um inevitable but also extremely odd. It's just something weird that's going on in the space and it has to do with ownership of art. Yep. Um so thank you for letting me go off on my diet tribe. I will be doing a podcast episode about it uh next week. It'll be available by the time next breakfast comes. But the movie is excellent. Please go see it on the biggest screen you can. Yeah. Great. Excellent. Bringing us back to games. Matt, the wars are over. What? The console wars. Go home. The console wars are over. Everyone go home. Jamie. Jamie, I'm coming home. Um yeah, chat. Uh Phil Jamie told me the war is not over. No, that's a Yeah. Um Phil Spencer uh has gone on the record as part of a larger conversation um that he had with Variety

um a as a result of the Minecraft movie having a good weekend and a bunch of other stuff about a good weekend. The Minecraft movie. Oh, Britain money. Yeah. um [Music] the about supporting the switch too and about his sort of view on how that works. And I'm going to we we uh we've got the entire variety article linked and you can read the whole thing if you want. Um but we've also got the cut down from Kroaku that talks a little bit more about the um that specific thing. Uh Spencer said, "Nintendent has been a great partner. We think it's a unique way for us to reach players who aren't PC players, who aren't players on Xbox. It lets us continue to grow our community of people that care about the franchises that we have, and that's really important for us to make sure we continue to invest in our games." Spencer further explained he's a big believer in Nintendo's place in the game industry and in supporting the

company. It's about flipping time. It's all good. I I want to make it very clear, especially like this image that that I crafted is not a dig. This is a compliment. Yeah. Um this is supposed to be like Phil Spencer is good at seeing the writing on the wall. Yes. And he has proven he can adapt and move on to different things. I know I still do believe that Xbox will have its next thing be a portable. I know they're doing their like intermediate portable as well, but I think um getting uh Xbox properties on the Switch 2 is just a smart move at this point. Um you get to get a whole bunch of data about use cases and users that you didn't have before. And if you want to enter your toe into that, you can. Um I I don't know. I think that I could see very easily Halo popping up on this thing. I

could very quickly because uh Spencer goes on to say, I think um Variety asked if Spencer was antsy uh to reveal to announce an nextG Xbox after Nintendo's big switch to reveal earlier this month and he said no. I think all of us in this industry should focus on our communities and the player base that we're building. I get inspired by a lot of uh different creators, what different creators do and other platform holders, but I believe in the plans that we have. And I think that that like it goes exactly to what Matt's saying about like we should port Halo, port Game Pass, we should port well probably not Game Pass. Nintendo's probably not big on that because Nintendo Switch Plus expansion pass and Game Pass sound way too much alike and there'll be even further brand delution there. But um yeah, I don't know if we'll see Game Pass on the Switch, too. I could honestly if it's if it's all cloud-based. Yeah, you could do it. Yep. The I think that this

is a thing that we've wanted for a really long time to be more explicitly said, right? that like exclusivity is cool, but it's not working anymore. Well, I disagree with that. I think too many companies trying to be exclusive or have exclusives doesn't work anymore. I think money is tightening for various reasons that we wouldn't talk about ever on this show. And um I think that not to tie it back to movies, but there's a reason why I think that every other franchise tried to do the the the either multiverse or big uh big tie-in movies to make a cinematic universe and they all kind of failed outside of Marvel. I think there's only enough air in the zeitgeist's room for one of those

things at a time. I feel like there's only enough time, money, and interest in so many exclusives and so many companies before you start splintering uh the gaming space into too small of pies. And I think when we were in peak Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, and when and truly when PC, which never went away, but with the advent of the Steam Deck and sort of bringing it more into the console space, or when Xbox started leaning more closely to PC, I think the writing on the wall there was like, oh, exclusives are doing less and less for us with so many players in the ring, and there's other ways to win. Exclusives are not the only way to win and in a stretched environment they're winning less. I think we like truly whether I I like it or not and I don't like it all the time. Nintendo and Sony having like real hardcore exclusives are what kind of keep them

afloat. Um, but Xbox and with its sort of Microsoft pedigree, uh, does have the ability to pivot and try to find different ways to win than fighting that same war that they had been? Yeah. So, the the way I'm thinking about this is would Xbox rather have no money from people who can't afford or don't want to spend money on an Xbox or some money from the people who already have a Switch and are willing to buy an Xbox game on Switch? Yeah. Right. Because the just get an Xbox is becoming less and less and less of an option. That's really I think the big thing, right? Because if if if exclusivity sells consoles, and we have every reason to believe that it does, that still is contingent on people being willing to buy the console, and that's becoming less of a thing. I'm certainly not

buying a PlayStation right now, right? Because like and and it's worked fine for you. You have so many games and you play the exclusives like a year, a year and a half later, right? Yeah. I could get I could download um the last PlayStation exclusive that I really wanted to play. I could download on Steam right now and that's God of War um Ragnarok, right? I still haven't played it and I still want to but like that was the last big exclusive I was like yes yes exclusives were more fun when they were animated mascot characters. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, dark one day maybe. Um yeah, I I think this is a smart move. I think it is um it's trying to win the game differently. It's in in your civ game, it is trying to go for the religious win or some other version that's not just total domination. Like I don't know. I feel like there's a lot of ways that everyone kind of got stuck in

the exclusives uh battle that didn't really need to be. I think some companies do need to be. I think to be perfectly honest, part of Nintendo's brand is exclusivity. Um, I I do not see them being as successful if they were to pull what Xbox is pulling, but that doesn't mean that Xbox can't be successful doing what they're doing. Yeah. I I I do want to uh just address the point that I'm making. Uh, Coffee correctly brings up that I have a highspec PC. Yes, I have uh for those who are unaware my gaming PC is named Ozamandius aka look on my works ye mighty and despair. Um but but truly Steam Deck correct it would have the same exact thing. It is true that I can play a lot of games but my gaming rig is a standin for being infranchised in an existing platform. Right? I'm infranchised as a PC gamer. You might be infranchised as an Xbox gamer or a Steam Deck gamer or a Switch gamer or a mobile

gamer or whatever. You're less likely than ever to switch. I have the money. I could buy a PlayStation 5 if I wanted to, but I don't want to because the value proposition is not there. Yeah. Like if I were starting from the beginning, yes, it might be there, but because I'm infranchised already, it's not. Does that make sense? Yeah. So, I mean, I don't know. I I'm I I'm I'm more curious about Xbox's future than I weirdly am about Nintendos and Sony's. Like I feel like they're at least for the next few years kind of entrenched in what they are doing. I don't think there's going to be a big surprise um from any of them. And it feels like whatever Xbox does next will be the most interesting to talk about. even if I am not in that ecosystem. Yeah, I agree. So, anyway, it's a good article. Check

that out. Yep, absolutely. All right. And then we have a piece of dessert. Speaking of hardware, Matt, you love World of Warcraft Once Upon a Time. I did. I did. Once Upon a Time in Azeroth. Um Once Upon a Time in Azeroth. I get my rights back to my character in in 2036, right? Yeah. Exactly. Um, so you you know that like people form long-term emotional attachments to the games that they play in the worlds that they live in. Um, you've got this is this is Matt's character. I don't know what you're talking about. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Demetri is asleep in his Pandarian farmhouse. Right. Exactly. Um, so now the the folks over at Zenamax are are offering people who spent time in ESO the chance to get a piece of Elder Scrolls Online in that it's a piece of the servers that ran Elder Scrolls Online. This is we Okay. Is this an expensive silly

thing? Yes, absolutely. 100%. Is it a really cool expensive silly thing? Also, yes, 100%. I think this is one of the the really cool things because we've talked about this before in a lot of places. MMOs are spaces as much as they are games, right? An MMO is a place that you exist and play a game more than a game that you play that you happen to make friends during. Um, and uh I think it's really cool that they're that they're selling off uh parts of the old servers as sort of like momentos and ways that you can uh take home part of the world that you lived in. Um we've got the we've got the thing linked in the uh in the show notes should you want to go buy one. It is a RAM stick. It's $110. Um and it's it's a piece of the server architecture. It's it's it's it ran the game. WoW did this I think in 2019 as well. It's it's funny. I um we are doing an episode over on extra history uh about the history or the uh

hysterosity not not a word is a word I don't know um about the holy grail and we in it we talk about religious relics and meaning behind religious relics and where where in organizations or personal or whatever like what what their importance and purpose is and one read is it doesn't matter like if a relic is real or not. It's the spiritual connection you have to the relic. And I'm not I'm not connecting this with the deep sort of level as as something in someone's religion, but MMOs are an interesting space where you have real emotional tie. And even though it makes no sense that you might value a piece of the computer that helped maybe your information could have briefly glimpsed across, but that at least brought the world to life that you had actual experience in it. It takes on that sort of um Yeah. So, the real grail was inside us all along. The

real grail was actually on the uh Elder Scrolls Online server. Um but no, like do you get what I'm saying? Like like you can ascribe deep meaning to something like this if you were tied in that world and it would have meaning even though it is a dead piece of a server. Right? I'm stretching credul here a bit, right? This is like owning a prop, right? Or owning a film cell, right? And you can you can tie that like in this is even a little bit more or or again not more I can see the value prop in another way being this is a piece of the thing that I actually played. Yeah. Like that I was a part of a movie. You watch it and you can have deep emotional ties to it but you didn't you didn't you know interact with that movie. You watched that movie you know. Yeah. Um I don't know. I'm not saying like I wasn't into Elder Scrolls. Hell, I was into WoW and I wouldn't get this myself. But I can see the value, right, of something like this for people

who are deeply involved in it. Yeah. And I think that there's there's a dividing chat between people who are like, "Why would you get this?" and other people who are like, "Oh my god, I can't get this." And then there's like a third faction, people who are like, "Wait, ESO just turned 10. I'm dust." Um, and that third faction, I hear you 100%. Um, I I think this is specifically for the people who see it and are like, "Oh, yeah, that's really cool. Of course, I want that." Right? And if you don't see the value in it, that's okay because this is not a um intellectual value proposition. It's an emotional value proposition. Yeah. Right. This is this is just a momento, a keepsake, a thing that you keep on the wall and tell stories about because people are like, "Oh, you must be really into ESO." And then you get to tell them the story of like all of the cool things that you did with your friends, right? And I'm I'm kind of bummed because I love Elder Scrolls Online. It's the MMO I would play if I had more time, right? Because I kind of I I I have to pick one and I'm deeply infranchised in Final Fantasy 14 right now. And so if I had more time, I

would play it. But I don't I feel like I might be I might be making stuff up, Will, but if if Final Fantasy 14 ever went down and they did something like this with a tasteful plaque or something, I feel like you this would be in a heartbeat for you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 100%. Uh Ramstick swimsuit edition. That's right. Um anyway, anyway, we've got a couple of questions and comments from uh the last episode and one from an episode before last. What that we wanted to get to. So, um we'll we'll we'll dive into those real quick. Uh from Lazarus Complex official. Hey Will, what's your group tomb to Tom tom foolery to teamwork ratio in repo? Great question. Great timing. Um because I get to pitch a thing. Uh tonight over on front of the channel Zumi Zumi stream I will be playing Repo. So you get to see me and Alchemy and Zumi and a bunch of other people all playing repo together. Um we're doing it uh for Zumi's stream anniversary. So come join us for that. Um my I am always teamwork. Uh because

someone has to be teamwork and I am usually the dedicated support player in every game I play and repo is no different. I am the dedicated survivor. I am pushing the cart. I am grabbing people's heads and putting them in the cart and like all of that. That's that's my job. Um, so that's that's sort of my split. Uh, I know there are other people who like push people into pits and stuff and that's not me. It's not that's not my deal. There you go. All right. Next comes from Sir Stoke. I believe I'm pronouncing that right. And it uh they wrote, "Uh, after cooling down and listening to the rest of the section on the crew lawsuit, my fix would be as follows. First, at point of sale, the seller, the game company, guarantees to provide services to the game till a clearly defined date, not hidden in small print. Second, uh, put the final decision to keep the service running or not on the community in the community's hands. Kickstarters, etc., already do this all the time and would do this as follows. And then goes into like a breakdown of like how they believe that would function. They go on to say, "Gamers get a chance to keep their loved games going and are incentivized to get

their mates playing it again. And if it gets shut down a little money uh shuts down, then they get a little money back almost, but not quite like a refund. Then it's very in a real sense, it's when a game servers go down, we the gamers will only have ourselves to blame. So um we this is in in talking about the the episode last week and go listen to it with the crew. Um which is basically uh Ubisoft removing the ability to use a game that people purchase. You can go listen to that. I I like the um the optimism. Well, not the optimism, although yes, I do like the optimism. I like the optimism and I like I like where the heart of this comment is at. Yeah. Uh it is the way I I wish the world worked. Yeah. Um sadly, I think that there's a lot of reasons why companies don't do this and it's not only costs, but it's complications, etc. because you need to keep paying the people to keep those moving. I I think I

think sir sir's comment there's like pieces that I think companies should glean onto and kind of look at and and maybe try to take one or two things out of it that they could do. Namely, uh the clearly defined date like would be lovely. Uh especially for just online play. I know that's also hard, but like you have a projection like just make sure it's on there. Um, I don't know. I appreciate the the indepth the in-depth sort of uh thought going into this comment because I think there are elements of it where people could learn from. I do think that sadly people companies aren't going to take something like that whole cloth and just run with it because it's just too complicated and too expensive for them to do, right? Especially when uh again, one of the problems is that a large part of the community, a large part of the consumer base doesn't care, right? They will just toddle along and play the game until it stops and then they'll be sad, but they'll just kind of move on. Yeah.

Or they will have already moved on and be part of the reason that the game stops, right? Most of us don't get deeply emotionally attached to a game. Sometimes you do, and you know which game I'm talking about when I say deeply emotionally attached to a game, right? But that's not as usual, right? people just move on to the next Call of Duty, the next Madden, the next FIFA, the next whatever. Um, next up from Aiel Vado, um, yeah, Brad and Janet evolved. There was no Rocky Horror Picture Show comments. I fret for the future of our species. I saw I saw that, uh, Janet comments already got you. Yes, it is a Rocky Horror thing. Um, we started out with Brad over in Twitch chat and then Janet decided that their name was Janet. Uh and then uh after that we sort of named Nebula because they don't have comments as Rocky because they're the silent partner. So yes. Um does anyone remember uh and the rest of the comic goes does anyone remember back when all these games released digitally and uh we're going to make so things so much

cheaper for consumers because they didn't have all the infrastructure production costs. Now everything costs more. There are 11 tiers of pre-order, battle passes, optional cosmetics. The games are all a service that we don't own and can't play any longer than companies want. it's not even get started on the increasingly broken state they're released in. So, if you wait if you wait until released and don't have early access or a pre-order bonus, you're going to wait months before the game is even playable. I agree for a subset of games, but here's the thing that I think often gets lost in this conversation when we talk about games like The Crew and other stuff. These trends are true of AAA games. There is a unbelievably and I I I want to I want to draw people's attention back to this because I am in fact unabashed indie trash. The indie scene is thriving and suffers from almost none of these problems. Um the indie scene is 20 bucks, 30 bucks, 40 bucks for a game. Get a game. Do a thing. I've been playing South of Midnight, which isn't really indie, but is kind of double A. It's been great. I played it essentially

on release. Haven't had any problems. It's a complete game with no pre-order and no DLC and no battle. It's just a story, right? I'm finishing it later today. Those games do exist. I I just want to um I want to take this opportunity to say yes, you're right. Those things do happen, but we focus on them to the exclusion of the places that don't. Um and I think that that's that uh your comment sort of made me think about all the games that don't do those things that I've been playing and enjoying. And I think that while what you're saying is true, there's more to it than that, right? Um, okay. And then last, we wanted to go to dive back a week and engage with uh a comment about tariffs, time travel. Um, we talked a little bit about tariffs. The tariff situation continues to evolve, but uh we want aka the number just keeps going up, keeps going. So,

one of the key problems I think that some people are running into is what tariffs are for. So, we have a comment from uh Soldier from from uh two episodes back and um they have they're presenting their view of what the tariffs are for and I wanted to read that comment, engage with good fa in good faith with it and respond with like one of the problems that I think is going on um with this whole discussion and and maybe we can get into that for like Yeah. Yeah. Um okay. So, uh soldier says, "Well, the plan of the administration is to uh shrink the government to the point where we either pay little in taxes or subsist solely on tariff." Another part of the tariffs is to make the USA more competitive. For example, would you rather pay for toothpaste made in the USA? Made in the US for $16, buy from China at $20. And the final point is that frankly at the end of the day, you have to look after your community. And China is not their community. They're people that need jobs here. And if we can make it here, it will be made better and cleaner both for the consumer and the planet than anywhere else. If it's not, you actually

uh sue the company doing it. Okay. I understand where that comment is coming from. And I think this is a commonly held understanding of tariffs by people who are pro tariff because at one point that was true. Yes. And it's not anymore. And the problem is uh that we're running into specifically as pertains to the contents of this show is that Yeah. Let's we keep it. Yeah. Yeah. That's the only way we can cover in the last bit of this. And and this is this is why I think it's really important. You can't. It's not a switch made in Vietnam that costs $450 or a switch made in the US that costs 300. It's a switch made in Vietnam because that's the only place that makes them. It can't be bought anywhere else. It's not computer components that are made here or somewhere else. They're all made somewhere else. We are existing in a globalized economy, particularly when it comes to electronics and the goods

that we care about to do our jobs, computer parts, hard drives, semiconductors, all of that. That doesn't work anymore, right? And like I understand the point that people are coming from because it did used to work that way, but the time scale and the investment to set up shop in the US to avoid these tariffs is prohibitive. It's not going to happen. Uh there's Yeah. And it's also the imple imple Wow, I can't even talk anymore. the uh implementation of and I will use the term plan very loosely um it's concept of a plan where basically we just started putting incredible tariffs on things that as of so so sort of two different categories things that that cannot be made here which will go a little bit outside of uh the scope of the show but like coffee right like it's just we're not outside of Hawaii not really grown that much coffee in the United States. Something that we run on very very a lot as

illustrated. Um but also as far as even the components and materials to make the things, rare metals, other things. There's a reason why all other geopolitical things are going on that we're not going to get into. It's because we don't have all of the things here. we need to buy them from from other people. Now the and that's like to make the things where if we even had the long-term uh wherewithal or thought process of building factories to manufacture things like switches, you need years for that. You need to prepare for that. You need to make sure that the supply chain and the relationships of the countries that you're going to buy the things to build those fac to build those factories to then have those factories make those things that give Americans jobs. You need to make sure that those things are all in place or you have a plan to move them forward before kneecapping the

entirety of the system that's built. like I understand the want for uh more uh the changing job market sort of in the United States. Um but the truth is in my opinion the way that this is being done is so hamfisted that even if and I this is my personal bias. I want to make it very clear uh that even even if like the goal was to make tariffs replace uh taxes or something like that. I think we know, okay, let's put it this way. We've all said on this show a lot of times that a business all it wants to do is most businesses is not just make some of the money but all of the money. We now have uh an administration that really wants to run the government like a business. It shouldn't be, but that's what they're doing. I don't believe that even if

tariffs were breaking in tons of money that taxes will go down for the middle to lower class. I just don't see it happening based on precedent. But let's say that that is the goal. Let's say that that's what they're shooting for. The problem is when you do things in my opinion this hamfisted with no plan, no insight, no no grand scheme here truly when you move this fast, countries aren't like no one's going to pay the tariffs because people aren't going to be buying the things, right? So that money doesn't come in. It's the console problem, right? It's exactly the console problem. If you make a console cost more, it's not going to make me buy the console at that price. I'm just not going to and I'm going to use the one that I already have or I'm going to find a cheaper alternative that isn't a console, right? I'm going to do something else. Yeah. I want to make it

very clear, Will and I are not economists. Uh we are sitting in an animated kitchenet. Uh we are literally consumers of goods in this case. And uh I'm not saying that I understand the true ins and outs of a global economy, but I do know that 6 months ago there were problems in in trade and global economy and stuff like this, but the markets were not as crazy and and we would not like even the conversation alone on the Switch 2 is sort of like a tiny little nugget of literally everything. Also, I mean, tariffs are going to cause jobs in trucking and shipping. I mean, there are already ports and boats that are now just docked because there's no there's no order for these things. It's killing a bunch of jobs outside of the government. Uh people are getting I know many people that are either getting furoughed from jobs that deal with um things that they need to get things from other countries or having their pay slashed or a bunch

of stuff like and and again I see the sort of good faith argument I feel like Soldier is is trying to make here. And in a world in a world that was based more in in the past and before honestly before electronics were sort of a large part of this conversation and also in a world where there was a decent amount of planning and and discussion of what the American people like kind of actually want like there's every every time I see someone talking about this online it's like oh we're bringing manufacturing jobs back it's going to be human beings uh Americans screwing in those little screws on the iPhone. I mean, no, it's not there. It's going to be it's going to be literally automation and those jobs aren't going to go back to actual human beings because as Soldier correctly points out, there are more laws here like that would it makes it it's it's uh I'm getting way too complicated, but it would be less legally hard for a robot to do it. Yeah.

At least currently. That could change. Yep. Um, we veered off hard. However, I do really appreciate Soldier's comment and I appreciate sort of talking about it from uh and I think another angle and and this is I I I also want to hold this up as a great example of we can disagree in good faith about these things and like have a good conversation. And this is this is like one of the great examples of and all of these are um all the comments today uh were great examples of say more, right? And so, uh, I like this. I like this conversation. And again, we're continuing to have these over in the Discord. If you're a YouTube member, a subscriber here on Twitch, a patron, um, you can join the Discord and hop into those conversations, uh, whenever. Um, they frequently spring up at about 2 a.m. I don't know why. And that they want to get us before they wake up. That's right. And that, dear friends, brings us to the close of our show. Meaning that all that remains to us today is for Matt to do his signature sign off. The same one that he

does every time. Will, it's not my signature sign off. It's all of our signature signoffs. Will, you do it with me every time. That's true. Brad and Janet and Rocky, I hope you're all doing it with me at the same time because we all know it. We all know it and love it. It brings us together as a community and I feel like it's the kind of thing we need right now to launch us into our week after talking about a lovely two hours of gaming and and uh culture news. So without further ado, we're going to get it started right now. Three minutes, Jerry. Three minutes for tariffs. Oh, cream of the crop. Oh yeah. [Applause] [Music] I was going to be so disappointed if that wasn't the ending. I was like, it has to be it has to be the mashup. It can't be anything else. It has to be the mashup. God, we've been doing this show

so long that I'm like, I know what Matt's going to do for the ending. We we never talk about that. By the way, the ending is always based on what's happened during the stream. Um, we never have time to talk about it. And it's gotten to the point that I know what Matt's going to do. Okay, cool. Thanks everybody for for joining us. Yeah, thank you. Yeah. Uh the uh we've got stuff for the rest of the day. Matt's got to get to meetings. Yep. So, we're going to say uh goodbye to Janet. Janet, we will see you all Thursday for a design club. Not sure what the topic's going to be, but we'll let you know as soon as we know. So, uh, have a good day