Ragnarok Breaks the Internet, Kojima Addresses Rumors, & PS+ is Struggling? (TWIG 11)

[00:00:00]
And welcome back to the Lambency show. I am Lambency, joined here by our host, Vex Electronica for this Week in Gaming, as well as Sharper FPS Sharper, how are you doing today?

[00:00:18]
Always great commentary, top tier. How about you, Vex? How's your weekend? I mean, since I can't put the camera on, you can't tell, but I am doing the queen's wave as always. The royal wave.

[00:00:35]
Yes, my Internet is so there's a windstorm here in southern Ontario last night, and what ended up happening is it basically blew a transformer in Toronto. So my Internet was down to almost 04:00 and it still hasn't really fully bounced back because, yeah, I can't run the camera on Discord. So it is what it is.

[00:01:01]
She might have cut out a little bit right there. While we are getting her back, we have recently posted a new article for gaming deals for the holidays. You will see that we have a bunch of different things, like a great webcam that's on sale, as well as an entire streaming kit, mouse, keyboard and mousepad set, a monitor and a headset. All things that are significantly discounted right now. You can feel free to check that out over at the Limburseychoe.com.

[00:01:37]
Vex, have you reconnected? I have. Sorry, I didn't realize that. So every time my phone goes to sleep, like, the screen turns off, like discord turns off. So I didn't cut out.

[00:01:48]
I changed my settings now on my phone, so it's not going to turn off. No worries and stuff. Vet, you had a chance to glance at this article. What did you think of the article? I thought the stuff that you listed there are great, especially for people that they don't because a lot of stuff you see advertised for like PC gaming or just gaming setups, it's all high end stuff and that's not really budget friendly.

[00:02:11]
So a lot of the stuff you've listed there, I really liked the headset, too, because I personally think Logitech does a great job with headsets, but it's a good introduction to, like, gaming set up equipment. It's good replacements if you've got high end stuff that isn't working in general. Like, everything there. If I had the extra income right now to spend on that, I would pick up definitely the keyboard and probably the headset. Well, that's the thing, is I was trying to look at things that were reasonable.

[00:02:43]
And the funny thing is, some of the stuff I actually have, so, for example, this monitor, it's the most expensive thing here, but it was a $280 monitor that's now on sale for $160. All right, I have one of these. About to have a second of them to have my triple monitor set up because I think I'm going to use my 27 inch. These are 24 inch monitors, but I think I'm going to use the 27 inches, the middle monitor, and the two odyssey's as like the two side monitors. But that keyboard mouse, mouse pad set, I have two of them.

[00:03:17]
I have one for my setup right here, and I have one for my setup at work so I could personally bounce and tell you how great this is. Nice. The HRI streaming kit for PC with the Led light, the microphone, and the webcam. You remember when I had that webcam that was like crystal clear looking video? Oh, yeah, I do remember that's.

[00:03:39]
That webcam right there and stuff. So if you're looking for it all in one, the microphone you hear me from now that you really like, that's that microphone.

[00:03:51]
So in this set, you get those two and a light that's brighter than those ring lights that you see. It's normally $63 on sale for 32. But if you care for the name brand logic tech, obviously everyone knows logitech C 920. Less people know about the C 922, which is their pro version, and that's usually $80 on sale for 40 right now. And these are all in US.

[00:04:18]
Dollar pricing. These are us. Dollars. I mean, it might be different for your areas, but we were trying to figure out gaming deals that are good for the holiday season, that are budget friendly, that you can use for yourself, your loved ones, and anyone else you may know that are into these electronics.

[00:04:40]
I'm going to mute my mic. I will occasionally come in every now and then if I need to. You guys will be able to hear me and stuff through the discord chat, but they won't be able to hear me through that. And it is on to Vex and Sharper to take us away from here. All right, this past week was kind of weird, and I'm sure even you guys saw because I share all the stuff that we discussed in the Google Doc with the Cohost so they can get an idea of what we'll be discussing.

[00:05:14]
Everything was just all over the place. There were a weird, like, combination of things that got announced and revealed this week. So I literally just have a section here called Weirdness because I didn't know what else to really label it.

[00:05:30]
I mean, to start off on a little bit of a political note, but we're not going to stay there very long. So, as you guys know, back, I guess it was over a week ago now, someone supposedly broke into Nancy Pelosi's house and attacked her husband. And there's been quite a bit of debate about how that went down and there's been some suspicions and whatnot, but apparently the attacker that they arrested, who was a Canadian, coincidentally, he was in a blog back in August, he supposedly posted that, quote, gamergate is the reason that he is a radicalized individual. I just thought that was interesting because there seems to be a lot of hate directed towards just gamers in general the last couple of months, just trying to find ways to demonize us in any way possible. And even before that, it's been a longstanding thing where there's been claims that violent video games make violent people.

[00:06:27]
And I mean if that were the case, literally half of the western world would just be running around shooting and stabbing people, which is not the case. Right. So I just thought that might be a funny thing to start off tonight's show with. But there was like aside from that one little sentence that he posted that blog, there was nothing else but things like the Wall Street Journal were running and Kotaku were running full articles on this. So take away what you will from that.

[00:07:00]
In other weird dues though, you guys are aware of what Ikea is, right? Yes.

[00:07:09]
Ikea, the Swedish furniture brand, which is basically global right now, apparently sent a cease and desist letter to developer, the developer of an indie game called The Store is Closed, which is basically an indie survival game where you spend the night in a furniture store.

[00:07:28]
But it's not like expressively like Ikea though, right? It's not, no. When you look at the pictures that are posted online and some of them it looks like Ikea. Yes, there is a likeness instead. The store is called Steer, like Styr, and it's a Scandinavian store which Sweden is still part of Scandinavia.

[00:07:51]
But apparently lawyers representing Ikea accused the sole. This is one guy who developed this game, by the way. His name is Jacob Shaw. They sent him a letter basically saying that he's committing trademark infringement and gave him ten days to change parts of the game that allegedly represent Ikea's branding. And specifically what it includes is like the blue and yellow signage which is iconic to the outside of Ikea buildings.

[00:08:18]
Yellow vertical striped shirts, the gray paths on the floors, and even some of the furniture designs. If you change it all to red, it'll be fine. In the lawyers letter it said your mic for that because all people heard was just a weird silence.

[00:08:50]
Okay, now Lamency just said in the background that they should probably do the same to Blockbuster because of the whole blue and yellow coloring there. But other like, aside from just those slight kind of similarities, it's like there's no direct reference to Ikea. So quite a few people were speculating about this and it just seemed kind of odd because in a lot of respects, just based off the photos that they have posted, there doesn't seem to be much of a likeness to Ikea at all. So I haven't actually seen a follow up from that one creator about what they're going to do about it. I imagine it's probably very troubling for him to hear that.

[00:09:30]
But like Sharper said, just make everything red and you should turn all the yellow to red. Tell them to kick rock. There you go. Right. As we reported last week, remember that there was news that broke that henry Cavill was leaving his role as the witcher once season three wraps filming and Liam Hemsworth will be taking over the role.

[00:09:53]
So since we announced that, there's a couple of things and one of these things is about a I don't want to say fair, so I'm going to say a sarcastically. A fair lady that we've also discussed quite a bit on this show came into this discussion as well. So Frost decided to come back to social media to try and prove her relevance once again by saying that the witcher star is problematic. Basically, she took to Twitter and said, quote, Henry Cavell said some very questionable things around me too, and dated a 19 year old as a 30 plus. Seeing people throw themselves at his feet for the witcher is weird.

[00:10:32]
The show is whatever at best. Now, she's right on that last part. The show is whatever at best because personally, to me, Henry Cavill was the only thing carrying that show simply because of the dedication he had put into that role. And he's a gamer, so he understood the source material was the great part. However, the rest of it, I'm just like, why do you need to come back to Twitter just to poke that?

[00:11:00]
So the questionable thing she's referring to with the MeToo part of that statement is basically he did an interview with GQ Australia back in 2018 and when he was asked by the publication about his thoughts on the MeToo movement, he said, quote, stuff has to change, obviously, but there's something wonderful about a man chasing a woman. I think a woman should be wooed and chased, but maybe I'm oldfashioned for thinking that it's very difficult to do that if there are certain rules in place. Because then it's like, well, I don't want to go up and talk to her because I'm going to be called a rapist or something. I don't think that is a questionable statement at all. Maybe I'm a little bit biased in that, but I do kind of agree, right?

[00:11:43]
Because I think about even just the times I've gone out with Girlfriends Clubbing and stuff, and I've even had conversations with other guys. And it's like they don't want to approach girls anymore for that reason, especially when you're going out into more liberal areas, which tend to be the cities, it's women take it very like they take it immediately a negative way when they're approached by men, and they take it the worst way. And as a result, it's just like I know a fair amount of guys that just don't want to date anymore. I muted myself for this bit. I told you I might interject.

[00:12:18]
I'm not going to say much on this matter. What I will say though, as someone who's introverted outside of my work life, living in a liberal city, it's already bad enough that I don't like talking to people, but I definitely don't like talking to women now just because literally all it takes is a fake accusation for my entire life and my career to be ruined. And I don't see how what he said is controversial at all. Because if we're going to talk about hashtag, me too, we need to talk about equal rights for everybody, not just for one side.

[00:12:59]
I agree with you. I just also like to clarify that these are our views. I mean, this isn't representative of everyone on the show. And I understand, too, that people that lean more onto the liberal side of things don't necessarily share the same view to we're just simply pointing out a pattern that we as individuals have noticed from our own experiences. Right?

[00:13:21]
So I personally don't see anything wrong with that. Honestly. I've raised a bit of an eyebrow, though, at Henry Cavill dating women half his age. That is a little bit weird, little bit sus. But again, if it's two consenting adults, who am I to say anything?

[00:13:36]
As long as they're happy and nothing bad is happening, I wish them the best. Right? To be fair, this is my personal opinion. My personal opinion does not reflect the show. When you're that rich, that famous, all right?

[00:13:50]
People throw themselves at you all the time, all right? And if a woman that age who is an adult is interested and he himself is interested and knows that person's value, then who are we to judge that relationship? The fact of the matter is, it wasn't like he gworded her, all right? He met her at that age and they went out at that age. It wasn't like anything was done beforehand, all right?

[00:14:19]
So in my mind, it's two consenting adults and nobody has any right to say anything about that. It'll be a completely different story if they met when she was like, say, a minor. That was not the case. It's the same thing as Leonardo. Leonardo has a pattern, though.

[00:14:38]
And if they turn like, 25 or 26, they're gone.

[00:14:44]
But he's almost 50, right? But again, it's two consenting adults, so what do we have to say about it? We honestly have no place in what goes on in other people's lives, right? But that's the price of being a celebrity, right? So another unsurprising person that did unsurprising things as well, which I'll just briefly mention.

[00:15:08]
So as you guys are also probably aware, because we did extensively cover this in some previous episodes, there was a whole Amaranth drama that went down a couple of weeks ago for those of you that don't recall or maybe didn't listen to those episodes. Amaranth is a female streamer most popular for basically just dressing up and doing hot tub. Stream. Basically just being attractive on a camera is what she's famous for. She has only fans as well, outside of Twitch, but she revealed on a stream a couple of weeks ago that her husband had been quite abusive to her emotionally primarily, I don't recall even if there were any physical abuse allegations, but definitely emotionally abusive.

[00:15:50]
And there was a whole breakdown that was on camera and a lot of people, a fair amount of people, including Lambeth, CNN, speculated that this was all for clout, given her previous history of doing pretty terrible things for the same reasons. It turns out that she has now set an alltime new record of followers on her Twitch channel. So following the five day break, she did take on Twitch. After those events, her follower count grew exponentially. She gained almost 1400 followers just in the last month alone, bringing her total to just over 6 million.

[00:16:26]
So this is a new milestone, not just for her, but now. This pushes her up to number 22 on the list of all time highest Twitch followers and now places her number two in the female category, just behind Pokemon, who has 9.25 million. So it worked in her favor and she decided not to do much else.

[00:16:52]
To be fair, she'll pop up on the recommended and stuff and it's usually since that happened, it hasn't been like hot tub streams, she's been playing games, I haven't been following the stream. That's good news then. That's good news if she's not doing all that stuff. But again, that might also be to keep up appearances, right? Because if you go to her social media, she's still posting half naked pictures of herself.

[00:17:24]
So just a wee bit questionable, that's all. And there's still a lot of holes in the story that haven't been addressed by anyone as well, which also makes us be a little more suspicious of all this. We don't even know what her if she's on in terms of subs of what her earnings have been since then too. We already know she makes 1.2 million off the only fans every month, just on average. I guarantee she's not doing hot tub stream.

[00:17:49]
She's losing subs. Even if she's gaining followers. People will give money for sympathy though, time and time again we've seen that in other instances, right? So I don't know, maybe we'll get a trickling of information on our earnings after this because I'm curious about that. If it jumped as much as her follower counted, let me look it up right now.

[00:18:08]
And we all know I've immune to myself for this. I've gone on record and said that I feel that she is the epitome of the person who cried wolf, especially because I brought up her Twitch stats before about how every time her numbers drop, a scandal arises that increases her viewership and she never gets punished for anything. If anything, she gets rewarded for poor behavior. And her hitting this personal milestone is no shock to me because as usual, controversy arises and this happens. Now, another thing that still hasn't been addressed, and I have made abundantly clear, is that she specifically stated that her husband, her so called husband had two factor authentication on all her financials and she couldn't actually access her own money.

[00:19:04]
Yet somehow, within 24 hours, she had gained access to all of these accounts. She also made the claim that she only did only fans because her boyfriend, her husband made her to do this. However, from what we have seen, she is still very active on only fans. All right? She said she was only being sexualized because of that, because of her husband, yet she still continues to do that.

[00:19:33]
Now, here's the thing. I get the difference between someone who's being forced to do it and someone who's doing it of their own free will. But for those who are a victim of emotional abuse and being sexually exploited, they do not immediately go back to doing the same things that they are being exploited to do. That is not something that someone who is a victim is going to do, all right? And if they do do it, it takes time before eventually they go back to that form of work.

[00:20:09]
All right? The signs are there that this was all a set up for sympathy. I've also pointed out the fact, and you reported on this as well, bex about how when people looked at the phone and zoomed in, it was a female's number, it was a female's name that was calling you under this whole thing. It wasn't even a boy's name or anything else like that. So there are so many plot holes in her story and as usual, she gets rewarded for it.

[00:20:37]
Now, could we be wrong? And by we I mean me. Could I be wrong and could this all actually be true? Yes. But with her past and her poor behavior that she's shown time and time again and the fact that every time she has different numbers of controversy arises, is it plausible that she made all this up also?

[00:21:02]
Yes. So while I cannot say one way or another whether or not she made this up, I will say that the plausibility is 100% there. People who will deny this, on the other hand, are people who do not look at her past, do not look at her history or anything. One of the biggest things I've always said is history tends to repeat itself. So if you do not learn from your mistakes, history is bound to repeat itself.

[00:21:30]
That goes doubly for people. When it comes to character assessments, there's a reason why in the courtroom, whenever someone wants to be a witness, especially for the prosecuting team, the defense team will do a character assessment value on said witness to make sure that they are a viable source for the case. And when it comes to a character witness, her character is in extreme jeopardy.

[00:22:06]
So since the day that that happened, she has done looks like one hot tub stream. And that was for on the 31st, which would be Halloween, which makes sense over like all her stats and stuff. It looks like she's down 50% since all this happened, like compared to on her trajectory, where she was at before. Maybe let's check back at the end of the month and see if there's any changes there. It's only been a couple of weeks, right?

[00:22:50]
So I don't know if maybe it won't be fully reflected in our numbers yet, but that's interesting. If I go back 30 days, it's up and you can see the majority of our streams within the past 30 days with hot tub streams, but in the last 14 days, majority of them are all it's just chatting overwatch couple lot of warfare.

[00:23:17]
All all right. Right. We're keeping an eye on you, Amaranth. Let's just leave it at that. Let's just leave it at that.

[00:23:22]
Right? So moving along, there is some other weirdness that happened this week. So as you guys know, EA already has a deal with Lucas Films for its Star Wars games, right? And I think anyone who is a Star Wars fan or played Battlefront can agree that those Battlefront games are not very good, especially the direction that they decide to take battlefront too, with the hyper monetization and microtransactions there. But that didn't seem to stop Marvel at all from signing a three video game deal with Electronic Arts.

[00:23:56]
Earlier this week, there was a rumor that spread earlier this year that there was an Iron Man game on the books. There's even an article by I can't remember which studio it was, but it was like back in 2010 or 2012 around there where they had actually started putting together an Iron Man game. And then it got scrapped because of the rights ownership. But now the first of these three games from EA will be an Iron Man game. It will be developed by Redwood City, which is a California based developer, and it's going to be a single player action adventure game for both PC and console with an original story based on Iron Man's history.

[00:24:35]
Aside from that, we don't have any other details in terms of what engine it will be built on, even a general release window. I think we can already expect this to be a next gen exclusive given the timing of it all as well. A lot of people are pretty critical about why would Marvel do this given Star Wars. And to that I say Marvel is being dumb. Smart about it.

[00:25:01]
Dumb because why would you put your faith in EA? Because the critical response to their Star Wars games has been poor, but smart because of all the money they made, all of those those off Star Wars games. And if there's anything that we've noticed over the trend of Disney Marvel releases over the last just three, four years in general, it's that they will put out whatever for a quick buck at this point. So let's see what happens here. Marvel also does have another deal with EA with FIFA 23, because, recall, they're putting in a bunch of Marvel superheroes into a DLC where you can play as, like, the Hulk and stuff on the soccer field.

[00:25:44]
We still can't get a good Fantastic Four movie. I know. That's Fox or Sony Fox novel now own because they bought out Fox a couple of years ago, right? So now Marvel Disney owns the Fantastic Four, and there is a Fantastic Four movie in the works. Who knows if maybe one of these three games or the two remaining games will be a Fantastic Four one, but that would be ideal, in all honesty.

[00:26:09]
Did you guys ever play, like, the old PS Two Fantastic Four game? No, I didn't even know there was one. That was a good game. That was before it all went downhill. Peak gaming.

[00:26:26]
That was the era of peak gaming, almost.

[00:26:30]
It was kind of like the old Spider Man game. Oh, was it developed by the same studio, or are you not sure? I'm not sure, but it looked like it interesting gameplay wise. Interesting. So in other interesting game announcements, possibly it hit the net a couple of days ago that apparently a John Wick game might be in the works, and Lionsgate, who is currently the company that owns human rights hello.

[00:27:06]
Sorry. I don't know what he said. Just ignore him. Okay, I'm just going to ignore him.

[00:27:16]
That's very distracting, though. This man is yelling about peanut butter.

[00:27:24]
So Liesgate, who owns the rights to the John Wick franchise and has been making those stellar action movies, has been meeting with potential studios to create a John Wick game. During an earnings call with investors, John felt heyer, forgive me if I mispronounce that noted that Lionsgate executives have been fielding proposals for a big video game based off of the Keanu Reeves hit franchise. Despite his excitement at the idea, though, john was hesitant to say much more about the early stages of the project. I don't want to get ahead of myself here, but we believe there is a big triple A game to be made out of John Wick. We've been fielding proposals.

[00:28:02]
We are certainly interested in moving that forward, but I don't want to say anything more about that at this time. I think a John Wick game would be great. I think he works fantastically as an action movie. I think he will translate even better into an action game. If we're talking about something like Max Pain esque, that would be awesome.

[00:28:21]
I'm looking for I hope that goes through, and I hope that they find the right studio for it, because the last thing we need is EA dipping their toes into anything. I want people to look up, all right? For anyone who thinks their life is hard or that someone's keeping them down as opposed to their own personal issues, I want everybody to go look up Keanu Reeves past and then actually take a good long hard look about things going on, all right? Because at the end of the day, if you know anything about Keanu Reeves and Keanu Reeves history and know what he's become regardless of his circumstances, only then will you truly know pain and sorrow. All right?

[00:29:06]
Keanu Reeves past is just insane. Have you looked up the issues that he went through? Oh, no, I have. I'm very well aware of what you're talking about. I would argue that not on this, like, if you think you're sad no, but it's more growing from the pain in your life.

[00:29:24]
I think a lot of people have an issue where they let a lot of their pain and trauma consume them in a bad way. And Keanu Reeves instead is a great example of doing the opposite, growing from it in a positive way instead. And that's more what I meant. Not like I'm saying that, you know, people are weak or anything else like that. I'm saying that people, if they learn how to channel their pain and their sorrow the right way, can make anything happen if they choose to.

[00:29:54]
But I feel they get into this hive mindset where they put themselves in a cage that they don't have a key for to get out. And if they can look at someone else who has gotten through that cage, it might help them 100%. It doesn't help that we kind of live in a society that thrives off the negativity of people's lives as well. Right. I feel we've moved farther and farther away from a society that praises people for developing good habits and good traits and more just fostering all this negativity.

[00:30:30]
Keanu Reeves has a very troubling past. It's a bit of a downer, but if you guys are interested, he's even spoke about it in a couple of interviews. I know, but I feel like that's part of the person yeah, he's just a good guy in general, part Canadian as well. So one good thing to come from Kim, this guy one of my favorite things about him is an article came out when someone realized he never said anything, but someone spotted him in a soup kitchen serving food to the homeless. And when he was asked about why he never talks about it, he basically I don't know the exact words he said, but basically, to summarize what he said, he's like, if I did good things only to get publicity and stuff, am I really a good person?

[00:31:16]
In other words, what he was really saying is, all right, I know I'm a good person. I don't need the world to know I'm a good person and stuff, because I'm not looking for charity or anything else like that. Instead, I'm just teaching by example and actually doing I don't need the publicity to do what's right. Which is another thing, too, is a lot of people do good things for cloud. Right.

[00:31:41]
But it's yeah, that's exactly the thing. Though, too, is like, you do things and you want to be like, hey, I did this cool thing. And then you think to yourself, why the fuck do I have to do that? And then you put it away. What do you mean, why the fuck do I have to do that?

[00:32:00]
No, why the fuck do I need to tell people that I did such and such, you know what I mean? It's being humble. That's it. People lack the ability to be humble about things. Which that's not to say it's not a bad thing to share your successes or good things, but it's when that's one of the driving factors.

[00:32:19]
That's where the problem lies, right? One of those things. It's like, you know, I'm not going to say exactly what I do and stuff, but I will say that I participate in charities and all that other stuff. I never really speak about it unless it's a fundraiser and then I'll speak about it, you know what I mean? But as far as donations helping out, I do it all the time.

[00:32:42]
Do I tell my friends and family that I'm doing it? No. I'm only bringing it up here to talk about humility and stuff. And I know it sounds kind of oxymoronic, me talking about some of the stuff I do in my spare time and talking about being humble. But the thing is, I've been doing this for longer than I've been streaming, and anyone who knows me knows that this is not my first channel.

[00:33:07]
I've been around since, like, 2012, and nobody knew that I did this stuff. And that's why I appreciate seeing celebrities who get all this attention, all this paparazzi and stuff. And even the paparazzi didn't know he did this.

[00:33:25]
Just imagine he had to pull a John Wick on the paparazzi just to get away from them so he could do that stuff.

[00:33:37]
And that's the kind of thing take the keyboard away, Sharper. Take the bells away. I must have hit something. Oh, God, I'm afraid to look. Sharper.

[00:33:46]
Just formatted our whole Google Doc. Oh, it shows up for you guys, too. Yes, that's the whole point of a shared Google Doc. I didn't reformat it. I just slid the thing so I could see more of it on my page.

[00:34:04]
Fuck you. There's a zooming function for that. But okay, I didn't realize that, like, listen, I don't work in the corporate world, so I don't ever use a Google Doc.

[00:34:20]
It's okay.

[00:34:23]
I mean, I have more weird news, but that was all the news that I couldn't really categorize into anything else. We did have a fair bit of Xbox news, though, thankfully not related all to the activision deal that's ongoing. Also, since we're in the midst of it, shout out to Gamers little playground on YouTube. This man is basically the source of all the videos are playing on the stream right now. I was laughing when I saw your comment about who else?

[00:34:51]
Of course it's them again, which by the way, was the one that I couldn't use. And then I figured out a workaround and I did find another video from them to get them to use for that particular section. All right, awesome. But yes, if you do want to watch cutscenes from a lot of popular games, he has a lot of 4K resolution uploads from a lot of popular games across all platforms, so you can check his channel out. So Playground Games and Xbox have been pretty busy working on the fable reboot, which, if you guys recall, we heard about it a couple of years ago, and then there was basically no news about it until the Xbox.

[00:35:26]
Bethesda show this past summer where Xbox revealed their roadmap of games for 2022, 2023 and into 2024 and Fable was listed there in the 2024 and upcoming section. So in lieu of also getting some recent creative directors and other writers on board, it turns out that they recently hired Andrew Walsh earlier this week, who is best known for his work as senior writer on Horizon Forbidden West. He's also been involved in Watchdog Legions, the division two need for Speed Most Wanted, and had also previously worked on Fable Legends back in the Xbox 360 era. So I mean, that's good news for them. Horizon Forbidden West, which is a pretty recent release by all means out of all of those did pretty good.

[00:36:12]
But I don't know about the division of Watchdog that has me a little bit.

[00:36:19]
But he has previous Fable experience and it seems like Playground Games is scooping up a lot of big people in the industry to work on this. So I'm hoping based on that, that this game is going to be a bit of a banger as a result. Now, there's also an interview that came out earlier this week from Mike Fridley, who's a studio director at Swanch Games for the upcoming game called High on Life. For those of you who aren't aware, Squash Games was founded by Dan Harmon and Justin Rowland, who are the two creative minds behind the Rick and Morty franchise. So this will be their first game ever under this studio and it's going to be an Xbox exclusive for the time being when it launches on December 13 of this year.

[00:37:06]
So when speaking to Mike, he actually had some really nice things to say about working at Xbox. He said that they've basically been the perfect partner to work with. He said, quote, Xbox has been an absolute dream to work with. They have been very supportive in their efforts to help us market High on Life and have completely stayed out of any development of the game. This is what we like to call the perfect partner around here as a game pass subscriber.

[00:37:29]
I know how great of a service it is firsthand, and we all know how much of a reach the service has both on console and PC. We're pumped to get as many people playing our game as possible. So game pass is a perfect fit for us. So, yeah, if I didn't mention it before, that is going to be day one on Xbox's game Pass for both PC and console. I'm pretty excited to play that because it's a fun outer space shooter with Rick and Morty style humor.

[00:37:52]
So to me, it can't really go wrong right away.

[00:37:59]
Repaid for my Xbox. Xbox gold or what? Xbox Live membership. I'm sorry, you what? The game pass.

[00:38:09]
I forgot what the name was, but it was for a split second, I was having a brain part. I had expired, so I repaid for it. Okay. Honestly, if there's any time to resubscribe to game pass, it's like the next two months. No, here's the thing.

[00:38:24]
I was also thinking another thing we can do and stuff, because as I said, we're trying to find new cohosts for you and Mikey, but if we could find some games that we could play together and stuff, multiple co hosts, get it onto the actual channel, I think it would be a fun thing to do. And I know you got game Pass, so we'll keep in touch. Nice. Exactly. Nice.

[00:38:46]
Very nice. I'm playing Plague Tale Requiem right now. Off of game pass. I'm only like, six chapters in order to come out. Exactly.

[00:38:56]
I started the review there on our website because A Plague Tale Innocence was an unexpected hit for me and turned into one of my top ten games. So the sequel was very highly anticipated for me, and so far it's living up to my expectations for it. And even then, I try to keep my expectations low. How do at least gave the fifth speaking. You would say you got a golden shower out of it, wouldn't you?

[00:39:24]
I would give a Plague Tale Innocence the first game, a definitive golden shower rating. I think that is a must play game. It is a gorgeous game. Just visually speaking of golden showers, one golden shower. I don't know if we're doing multiple showers or not.

[00:39:43]
We got multiple showers. Speaking of golden showers, we got our second review of the podcast today, didn't we? Oh, yes. Somebody reviewed our podcast today, actually on the website, and they titled a golden Shower. So I appreciate that people are not taking that in a weird way.

[00:40:06]
Do you want to read off what they said? I actually don't have it pulled up on my screen, and I'm afraid I'm afraid what it will do to my internet right now. I can pull it up right now. Just give me a second. All right, stand by, everyone.

[00:40:22]
All right, let's go back to the main page and scroll down here. See all reviews. Five stars. Golden shower is the title. It says, this weekend gaming is something I listen to on my way to work.

[00:40:37]
Whenever a new episode is released, it keeps me up to date on everything that is going on in the gaming world. Vex's reporting style is a breath of fresh air, and I give them five stars to the golden shower they bestowed upon us all, which I think was hilarious. Whoever came up with this is amazing. This is, like a great review.

[00:41:00]
Vex messaged me about it and stuff. Did you see this? And stuff. And I'm like, I know, right? I approved the comments so fast, mind you, because I was already on our back end of the site working on it.

[00:41:13]
For those who haven't noticed, I have put a lot I have basically revamped the entire site today to enhance the viewer experience and make it look all smooth and clean. Like, look how those sponsors look. You can't tell me that doesn't look clean. So much better. So much better.

[00:41:31]
And then our favorite bit of it all is this little header no longer says blogs, it says articles, which is what we wanted in the first place. So I happen to be on the back end and I have to approve those comments. Like, the rating is still there, but I still have to approve it to go on the site. And I saw that and, like, soon after I got a message from Vex about it. I'm like I know, right?

[00:42:00]
Well, yeah. Thank you. We got our second review. Thank you, whoever you are that left that review. You've truly touched my soul, and I tinkled a little bit because of it.

[00:42:12]
So I give your review a golden shower as a result. Oh, God. She says, I'm going to give the yellow nut all over you.

[00:42:22]
No, but it's very appreciated to see that people recognize what we're doing here and they enjoy it, right? And we like the feedback as well to help improve what we're doing. But yes, back to what we were discussing. If you haven't played a plague tale Innocence, which is the first game, I highly recommend it. Visually stunning narratively, stunning character development is amazing.

[00:42:45]
It's also a great example of building a strong female protagonist without having to, you know, revert to the typical I look like this or I act like that kind of thing. It's actual solid character development that so far they're carrying through in the sequel. So another Xbox related news, though, phil Spencer did do another interview on something called the Same Brain podcast, which is just two lovely ladies. I watched it, actually, when I was summarizing this. I actually highly recommend checking them out on YouTube if you guys want to.

[00:43:16]
I think they're on Spotify as well, but they were definitely a little they were what's a nicer way of saying sucking up.

[00:43:26]
I felt like they were sucking up to fill a little bit with some of the questions and some of the responses they have, I can say because I'd be saying kissing ass. Right. But I do appreciate that they didn't kind of stick to a lot of the popular talking points when it comes to Xbox. They got a little bit more personal with him and got to know him a lot better and didn't just see him as a face of Xbox, it was about a 45 minutes interview. So if you guys want to check it out, it is on YouTube.

[00:43:54]
But there were a couple of notable things to come out of that. So as you guys recall a couple of weeks ago they did release some of their numbers in terms of sales figures and how Game Pass is doing overall. It has been growing exponentially on console but they have hit a bit of a lull. So now they are focusing more on the PC side because the libraries are different across both platforms just based on what games are where. Right.

[00:44:20]
So as a result, Phil did point out that they are focusing more on the PC side of that subscription service for now. And if you guys look at what's coming up throughout November and December you'll definitely see there are a lot of big titles coming to PC as well as console. In lieu of this though, there is a great promotion that is running I guess from now until November 11. So for anyone who is on the Twitch platform, if you choose to gift Subs or purchase Subs to any channel of any tier, you just have to purchase two and what will happen is Twitch will DM you a code for three months worth of Xbox's PC Game Pass which you can then redeem on the Xbox website. So, I mean, if there's now ever a better time to try it out, it's definitely now just given what's coming out over the next couple of months.

[00:45:10]
And that is honestly a fantastic deal because Subs are only 599 each and PC Game Pass is 999 a month outside of that one dollars a month promo that they have sometimes.

[00:45:24]
We will not reject any of your Twitch subscriptions if you choose to just subscribe link. So that's a great opportunity to try it out if you are a PC gamer and have some PC games on your or some Game Pass games that might be on your backlist. Right. So there were a couple of collaborations he announced. I know we've covered a couple of them like that weird.

[00:45:50]
IHOP one that Xbox had running in October but Halo is collaborating with chair maker Hayworth for Halo inspired gaming. Chair, it actually looks pretty nice. It's an olive green and black design. Looks very nice. Did you see the halo, Adidas?

[00:46:09]
I haven't, no. Did that come out though closer to the Infinite launch last year? No, they're new. I have not seen those. What do they look like?

[00:46:17]
Sharper. I'm pulling it up. Just describe it to us. No, I'll show you a picture. That's why for those listening what does it look like?

[00:46:32]
Well, they're like, white with a sky blue bottom and kind of like that halo. Like, they're like cortana colors. Okay. And I don't know what logo that is on the tongue. It's like a brown almondshaped thing with eyes cut out in it.

[00:46:57]
I don't know what that is.

[00:47:03]
Speaking of people on the inside, like, the inner side of the shoe, it says UNSC that I'll have to take a peep of those. So, yeah, I guess if you want some halo themed Adidas, those are out, too. What's the price point on those sharper? They're 180. Those are some expensive shoes.

[00:47:30]
My goodness. I'm more curious about wasn't there something about, like, minecraft and, like, Burberry or Calvin Klein or something like that? Yes. Fortnite in ralph Lauren.

[00:47:46]
I wouldn't put it past them, though. There is a Minecraft Burberry partnership ongoing as well. Burberry is a high end fashion brand, for those of you who are unaware. But it's basically Burberry's print, which usually is like, that plaid like style. And then there's, like, minecraft characters imprinted on top of that.

[00:48:08]
It doesn't look good at all. I'm going to be honest, I'm not surprised, because here's the thing. I hear Burberry, I think cologne, perfume. I didn't even know they had a clothing line. Shepherd, did you know Burberry had, like, products besides cologne perfume?

[00:48:22]
Yes. Shocking. You've cultured, that's why so apparently I'm just in an unfollow swine. See, this is why they banished me to the nether, which is the background. All right, I'm going back to the background where at least I know I'm appreciated.

[00:48:39]
If you go to any airport, usually, like, I know DC International and Atlanta International have them, but there are Burberry stores at both of those airports. Listen, Burberry me personally, I think it's fucking ugly. The patterns that they use. It's kind of like plaid. It is plaid.

[00:49:03]
Yeah, it's plaid. But the colors that they use for it, it's ugly. I'm actually totally I don't mind it just I don't like it for the scarfs. Like for their coats. I think Burberry coats look good.

[00:49:15]
That's the only thing I like is scarfs the rest of them. There you go. Right? But yeah, aside from that, I just think scars and handbags. Right?

[00:49:23]
But yes, there is now a Minecraft Burberry collaboration that you can purchase. Honestly, I don't have a price point on it, but given that it's Burberry, you're looking at well over $100 for a smaller item right now in terms of the activision deal as it's ongoing. Phil Spencer did state again that he's okay with the criticism, and I know that we had covered this in another interview he did last week in last week's podcast episode, but he also asserted again for about the fifth time, that Call Duty will not be leaving PlayStation ever. Now, I do understand that a lot of people are suspect about it, given what he's done with some bethesda IPS, right? Specifically Elder Scrolls.

[00:50:03]
And this is the point I was making quite a bit too, in defense of Phil Spencer is he actually did cite the whole Minecraft acquisition. So when Microsoft acquired Mojang Studios, they didn't take Minecraft away from all the other consoles because they saw the value in keeping them there. And he did bring Minecraft up as an example of why would we take Call of Duty away from PlayStation at all, he said, quote, as long as there is a PlayStation console out there, we will continue shipping to them. So, I mean, again, Phil has kind of backtracked on his words without saying, it sounds like we lost her. Sharper.

[00:50:43]
What are we going to do? Listen, I'm here. Oh, God, we were so worried. Don't do this to us. Don't do that to us.

[00:50:51]
You may me who's supposed to be in the background have to reappear to COVID All right, listen, I prefer being in the background, all right? I like being in the shadows and the dark depths of the Lambda Sea show's background website. Okay, I see that.

[00:51:10]
I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm here. I'm here. Sony won't give us fucking bloodborne on all consoles.

[00:51:18]
Fuck it. Take Call of Duty away from him. Those are hard. Those are hard choice. Well, that's the thing is, we've also spoken in depth about the difference between PlayStation owning studios and creating games versus Xbox buying studios and then making exclusives for those games specifically for them.

[00:51:41]
And for those who want to bring up the fact that let's say they do stay too true to their word about keeping it on PlayStation, all right, let me tell you exactly what's going to happen, all right? PlayStation used to pay activision for the exclusives they got. I get that they got a lot of exclusives. However, they paid forthset exclusives. Now, hold on, let me finish.

[00:52:07]
Xbox is now going to have the exclusives. And why would PlayStation want to pay for exclusives to their direct competitor? All right? That's like, for example, I want to give you another industry in retail, in the food industry, all right? There used to be it was a 50 50 chance.

[00:52:27]
Not really. It was like an 80 20 chance that you'd get a Coke machine 80% chance you get a Coke machine versus 20% Pepsi machine in the fast food industry. So what a Pepsi decided they wanted to do? They said, all right, so what we're going to do is we're going to buy a whole bunch of these franchises. So they went out, they bought Taco Bell, they bought KFC, they bought a bunch of and they put their machines in.

[00:52:49]
Well, what ended up happening? Every other company is like, why am I going to pay a direct competitor? So if they had a Pepsi machine before they went out and got a Coke machine, because in their mind, and rightfully so, why would they want to support a competitor.

[00:53:09]
So Mikey is saying, I still don't believe Impurities told us numerous times about Elder Scrolls. Six of that would remain on PlayStation. So in lieu of that, Phil did state that current stuff would remain on PlayStation, but any new things in those franchises would be Xbox exclusive. Right? I will admit I was kind of surprised that that still was going to be an exclusive because I don't think that was a smart business move at all.

[00:53:32]
But I can understand why they did it. But again, in the same respect, minecraft is still available on PlayStation and therefore PlayStation is giving money to Microsoft as a result. Right? So to me, it's not worth it. Because when it boils down to it and I'm going to come back to this a little bit later because I know Laymancy and I were having this conversation over Twitter, but to me.

[00:53:58]
It says more that Sony is somewhat admitting, and even Xbox is somewhat admitting, that at the end of the day, it's not necessarily the specs or exclusives that sell a console. It's just, what can I get that has the most positive feedback about it that I can purchase right now? Because, let's face it, at the end of the day, most people that buy an Xbox or a PlayStation, they are buying it just, oh, I can play Halo or I can play Final Fantasy or whatever. They're buying it because they can play those cross console games like Minecraft or Call of Duty or Destiny with their other friends who have those same consoles. So we're going to come back to this because PlayStation also revealed some sales numbers earlier this week, which we're going to COVID there.

[00:54:50]
But I really don't think that Phil, now that he said it so many times, I really don't. It wouldn't be a smart move to do it. And now there's so many instances of him saying that he won't take it away. It would be dumb of him to do that. And it would reflect really poorly on the Xbox brand if he did it.

[00:55:08]
Microsoft was smart. They would dangle it over Sony's head. You're just an agitator. You like, just the shit. Well, no, listen, if they were smart, they would do that.

[00:55:21]
Then they could get all the older PlayStation stuff that they're holding on to.

[00:55:30]
Bloodborne was made for Sony, I get that. But that was, what, ten years ago almost.

[00:55:39]
It's getting there. It's getting there. Yeah. Be like, hey, you give us your legacy games that you've been holding on to.

[00:55:55]
Bingo, bango, bongo. It's a win win for everybody. But then it eliminates the need for competition. And not only that not only that competition how so? It's games that are ten years old.

[00:56:09]
Nobody's going out and buying a console just for a ten year old game. For a ten year old game? What are you talking about? You're an exception. Then on top of that, like, I have previously stated, they have paid for these games to be exclusively made for them and it helped build the brand.

[00:56:28]
That the arts thing. All right. I was already upset that Final Fantasy started appearing on Xbox. Why? Because Final Fantasy grew in popularity with the PlayStation.

[00:56:39]
They worked hand in hand. However, I was laughing my ass off when I realized that Xbox had to pay $60 for Final Fantasy Ten when I'm over here. Just like I bought it for like $10 and that was just a weird choice on it. I understand that they wanted to bridge that market, but it was just so weird.

[00:57:02]
I get between Sony and Microsoft thing, but why not release it on Steam? The people that own computers are not going to go out by a console regardless. Well, that's what now the PlayStation Plus has their PC launch, which happened back in September. PlayStation has already had a bunch of their hit games on PC. They've just never appeared on Xbox.

[00:57:28]
For your whole argument, if you want to go down that road. Do you believe that all Halo games should be playable on PlayStation? I mean, I'll give a fuck. I don't like Halo. See?

[00:57:40]
He's a PC master racer. So for him, he's just like, why are you guys fighting? I don't make it. All of it doesn't make sense to me because with PC I can play whatever the fuck I want with the exception of like, well, even older games I can play if I want to download like an emulator. But you also got to keep in mind there wasn't a rise in PC gaming to the extent that it is until about the last decade.

[00:58:09]
So before PlayStation used to always just throw games on to Steam anyways because mind you, they get a portion of the sales. Not as much as they would like, but they didn't mind. They're not going to go directly. You got to keep in mind the console market grew faster than the PC market up until the last decade. So in their mind, they didn't see the PC as a direct competitor at the time.

[00:58:35]
Which is why if you look at the PC, they have the luxury of having games from both consoles and games obviously exclusively made for PCs. But that's an argument for another time. But they've had games from both the consoles basically this entire time because they weren't viewed as a direct competitor, whereas Microsoft and Xbox were, because at the time that they were growing and that a lot of their hits came out, they were direct competitors. They came out around the same time, they had hits around the same time. And they were obviously two very different companies from two very different regions who hit different markets.

[00:59:15]
So while Xbox went more of the say FPS style with like Halo and everything else, Square, PlayStation had like Square, Enix and Final Fantasy titles and they went like a single player route. So over time I get it. So over time, PlayStation got known for these kind of games and Xbox got known for other kinds of games. And that's what created their identity. And it wasn't until I don't know the exact year, so I'm just like guesstimating.

[00:59:48]
But I say around it wasn't really until like 20 11, 20 12, where PC gaming really started taking off and they were starting to catch up specs wise and everything else to what consoles were already doing. And now PC gaming has gotten to the point where, I mean, we reported on it, what was it last week about the guy who like there was no reason to do it, but he somehow got CS Go to do like 40,000 frames per second.

[01:00:23]
You got to keep in mind when the Xbox and the PlayStation had their hey days, and we're talking about, like, the early 2000s PC gaming, the most popular game at the time. Unless you go to mini Clip, which, rest in peace, still can't believe they're gone. Or a site like it basically the only game you would play would be RuneScape, which was, like, the original online MMORPG. So PC was never considered a competitor until recently. But I get what you're saying, but at the same time, I think that's why they don't look at PC the same way.

[01:01:03]
You know what I mean? So when it comes to PlayStation fanboys, xbox fanboys, well, see, that's my thing with PC. Why do I need to have a Game Pass subscription and now a PlayStation Plus subscription?

[01:01:21]
Steam is where everybody gets their game.

[01:01:26]
40% to Lord Gavin. It's not 40%, it's my bad. 30%? No, it's only like 15. He received enough backlash.

[01:01:37]
He lowered it. It's never been that high. Oh, it was because there's a whole schedule a couple of years back about it and stuff about how people didn't like it. Which is why Epic Game Store started coming out because they were talking about the actual percentage Steam was making and Lord Gavin was making like 30% on every transaction. Alright?

[01:02:00]
So that's why Epic Games came out and they're like, hey, we're going to take like 10%. You can have your games on here, all right? And it started this whole drama between PC, Xbox, PlayStation, all that. They drag everybody into it, all right? They dragged Apple into it, they dragged Android into it.

[01:02:20]
They dragged all that. Lord Gavin was getting 30%. So unless he decided to lower it, he's probably still getting 30% of all transactions. And even I know who Lord Gavin is because it's a meme. There was a whole lawsuit though with that one.

[01:02:36]
And that's why the Epic Game store came into being. Because of that whole scandal. Exactly. So if you're asking why they don't just throw everything on Steam, it's because again, direct competitor, all right? They're going to literally throw it onto a platform where they don't have.

[01:02:52]
A say over what's going on. All right? PlayStation. All right, here's the thing. If you look at PlayStation, you look at Xbox, you look at Steam, and I'm even going to go mobile here.

[01:03:02]
You look at Android and you look at Apple, all right? And you look at their terms of services for gaming, not for the gamers itself, but for the creators of games. And all of them, anywhere between 20% to 30% of your transaction goes to that company. So if you're on Apple, 20% to 30% of all transactions goes to Apple. Android, same story.

[01:03:32]
PlayStation, Xbox, PC. So to throw all things onto one platform, I get why we would want that, but because of the way everything set up, it's never going to happen. Because then you're going to have to give up a portion of your money every single time when you already have your own working platform on whatever system, PC or phone you currently have. And that's the real issue. Now, if you want to talk about the exorbitant rates and if they work together, yes, it would be great.

[01:04:01]
Is it feasibly possible at this point? No, just like it's not feasibly possible for them to put the entire game on the disk and not have to download it after purchasing it. But in terms of the whole putting it on one, I understand where both of you are coming from. I would love if all of it wrong, but again, it eliminates the need for competition, right? This goes back to my argument of, like, PC players aren't going to buy a console, like 90% of them.

[01:04:38]
So I don't understand why we can't just all just put it on Steam. It doesn't make sense to me. Because 30% makes their million dollars a year, that's why. Exactly. That's what we're saying.

[01:04:51]
What I'm saying is I get what you're saying. What I'm saying is the reason they're not doing that is because then they'd have to give 20% to 30% of all their profits to Lord Gavin when they already have their own operating software. Here's a funny thing. I like how you say 90% of PC users don't want to go to console. However, I would argue that just about the same amount of console users don't want to go to PC, all right?

[01:05:16]
Now, there are people who will play both and there are people who only play one or the other. It's as simple as that. And the thing is, as long as they have fun, I don't really care what platform they play on. What I do care for is the fact that this is switching up just a little bit. I'm getting so tired of PC players whining and complaining about Aim Assistant console when you have your entire arm to Aim, whereas we have a little thumb and it's already proven that the Aim assist only really kicks in to the extent that they're complaining, where it's basically a hack when they put their controller into the PC, not on the console.

[01:05:59]
When you play controller PC on most games, no, because it's 100% already been proven console. The problem is players don't want to admit that they play like news console. I play with a controller. So what the fuck you trying to say?

[01:06:23]
Thank you, appreciate it. But here's the thing, is Aim assist on Console, they have to up it because the frames are so shit to compensate for it. You're saying the frames on wait, say that again. The frames on Console are so shit that they have to up the Aim assist to compensate for it. But it doesn't fully Aim assist.

[01:06:53]
That's the thing. They lead you in the general direction. You still have to put the effort into making sure it's still there. Whereas on PC, on the other hand, all right, you guys don't need the Aim assist, but when you put in the controller, you get significantly better Aim assist. And it's been proven by pro players that this is what happens.

[01:07:17]
All right? So the fact of the matter is that you have an entire arm to play with, and then you have the cheat that is, the controller that you could plug into the PC and get a better Aim assist than what we are given, all right? Which we need, by the way, because we're going with thumbs versus an entire arm. You do understand when you plug a controller into PC, the Aims is not as high as on console, is what I'm trying to say. Right, I understand what you're trying to say, but I'm also telling you that it's already been proven.

[01:07:49]
What you said is wrong. You just don't want to hear.

[01:07:55]
I don't want to hear because it's not true. You don't want to hear it because it is. Moving along, though. Yes, moving along. The final point I wanted to make on that, though, is in terms of the whole, like, having multiple subscriptions thing, it was inevitable as we become more digitalized everything.

[01:08:15]
And now Netflix started off this whole trend, and now you buy eight different subscription services and you get the same price you pay for cable, when originally it was supposed to be the opposite. Right. So it's just another way to monetize at the end of the day. But another Xbox related news, there was an interesting investment that Microsoft made earlier this week. So we Made, which is a Chinese company, announced that they saw a new investment of $46 million was from Microsoft alone.

[01:08:51]
But we remarkably succeeded to attract new capital from several foreign strategic investors under favorable conditions. We made CEO Henry Chang also added, quote, this is a meaningful investment by reputable financial and strategic advice. Investors with proven track records. We made and we mix, will continue to exert efforts to attract more capital and actively invest to build the global digital economy platform. So for those of you unaware, we made was founded back in 2000 and developed PC and mobile games specifically.

[01:09:25]
It's the most notable franchise is Legend of Mir which is a series of PC and mobile MMORPGs. And according to the company, its recent title Mir Four has actually become the world's first wellmade blockbuster blockchain game since the company entered the blockchain industry back in 2018. They also launched their own blockchain main net called We Mix 30, which is described as a platform driven and service oriented mega ecosystem. And it's fully developed and deployed by a blockchain network in which cryptocurrency transactions can be broadcasted, verified and recorded on the blockchain. I don't like this whole direction of whole NFT's the blockchain gaming in all honesty.

[01:10:09]
It's just another money grab in my opinion. And it just takes away the authenticity of gaming in general. Shout out to Square Enix for not getting their Feds and continuing to give us NFTs. I'm confused as to what that even means. NFT's are nonfungible tokens.

[01:10:29]
They weren't ever meant to be used in the way that they are. No, I get that. I'm saying like everything she just said I'm lost is the what?

[01:10:40]
Okay, are they making NFTs is what they're saying. They're making basically an online platform for games that is all service oriented and is basically a mixture of NFPs and gaming that's funded through cryptocurrency.

[01:11:00]
So it's like that it's like that fucking monkey game they tried to make? Pretty much, yes, pretty much. Welcome in Adam. It's good to see you.

[01:11:13]
Welcome in, Adam. So basically, long story short, it's one Fed funding another Fed that has been in declining interest is what you're saying. Pretty much. Yet people still seem to be jumping onto this train and we're going to come back to this. Ironic because I recently saw a chart of searches for NFCs over time and it peaked and then just dropped significantly and it hasn't been that interesting for the past like six months.

[01:11:45]
People aren't searching for NFCs anymore. Just like a console company be late to the party.

[01:11:54]
I mean, Microsoft isn't just consoles, right? They have computer investments and military contracts and all that stuff.

[01:12:07]
Contracts? Because I said to you before, if there is ever a company that can work directly with our government and stuff to do what I fear most and stuff after my DHS article I wrote about them already have a military contract would be it. You didn't know? You didn't know. Oh I knew they had military contracts and stuff.

[01:12:32]
But like I said, I have reported on our website in an article about how the Department of Homeland Security has given out grants to certain companies to combat the spread of terrorism and violence in video games, so on and so forth. And they go on to state about how they believe that terrorists and violent people are being swayed on the video games, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Even though they link no source they don't have any tangible evidence to back it up and as a matter of fact, they have evidence that goes against them from the past 30 years because it's a beaten drum that's been beaten over and over again. Video games cause violence, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There's never been a study that has proven that.

[01:13:27]
All right, now I can't say that there hasn't been someone who's taken a video game as an influence for a murder or something like that. I mean, there probably is. I mean, there's a lot of crazy people in the world, but as far as a tangible link between violence and video games, that horse has been beaten so many times and prove it wrong. That the fact that the US government wants to step in and monitor our interactions and multiplayer lobbies says more about their lack of trust in their willing to persuade us in any way possible than it does about supposed violent behaviors in video games.

[01:14:05]
We're going to come back to this because there is another company that unfortunately announced some investment in NFT gaming later on. But I mean, this is directly Microsoft related, but I will tie this in. So Embracer Group, which is another kind of multibillion dollar company along the lines of ten Cent. They had about 100 employees worldwide and as you guys recall, earlier this year they bought out basically the Montreal arm, the North American arm of Square Enix Studios, which was based in Montreal and produced a lot of the big hits in the Deus, Ex and Tomb Raider franchises, right, eds Montreal. So even though they just first of all acquired it back in May and then rebranded it to Onma just a few weeks ago, it seems that now they've basically shut down the entire company in an effort to cut back costs and scale back the scope of Unannounced title and canceling other games outright.

[01:15:08]
Now, in light of this, there was a report that revealed that a lot of the people from EOS Montreal are actually working with Playground Games on the upcoming Fable game. And on top of that, there was an unverified rumor floating around from a couple of notable journalists that allegedly Microsoft had paid Embracer Group $300 million to acquire it. Just so in the OK, hold on, I wrote it down here properly. Microsoft made paid 300 million to Embrace your group to acquire Square Enix Europe, and when the Activision deal will get approved by a regulator, they will buy Square Enix Europe Studios from Embracer. A bit of interesting news, especially since Square Enix does a lot of the more Asian popular titles, the Japanese RPGs and all that stuff.

[01:15:57]
And Microsoft has been very clear in trying to break into the Asian market, especially this year. They've made significant moves to do that. So just an interesting token to keep in your back mind, in the back of your mind, should something happen next year with this activision deal. I'm not interested in any tokens unless it's nonfungible.

[01:16:22]
For those of you who are in the street, I've got scenes from the first years of War playing in the background. And that was intentional because earlier this week there was an interview with Cliff Blazeinsky. Again, forgive me if I butchered that on IGN's Unfiltered podcast. And he was talking about how he felt when Epic Games announced that they would sell the franchise to Microsoft back in 2014. So Gears of War, it was sold off that year and then it was merged into the Coalition, which has been the primary studio producing Gears for Five, and Tactics, which is going to be coming out shortly as well.

[01:17:01]
So Blazinsky actually left Epic Games prior to the sale back in 2012. He said, quote, I honestly think once Lee Perry, who was the gameplay designer on Gears of War Two, myself and Ron Ferguson, the producer on Gears of War, left, I believe that Epic didn't really know what to do with the franchise. He also further believes that the sale helped Epic fund its future ventures and growth. In another quote, he said, they hadn't shipped a game in a while, the Unreal engine was doing rather well, but they were growing and they probably needed the income, even though they really didn't know what to do with the future of the franchise. He also said that following the sale, the only person to actually call him about it was Phil Spencer.

[01:17:38]
And he had good things to say about Phil. Actually, quote, as much as I loved Tim and Mark, who were the VPs of Epic Games and were still in touch, but when the IP was sold to Microsoft, the only phone call I got was from Phil Spencer, right? And that's Phil. Phil is, as they say, a gentleman and a scholar. It's just very nice to hear people talking positively about others in the industry.

[01:18:00]
But in light of this this article, it came out like seven days ago and a lot of gaming sources seem to just be reposting it every day. And I was pretty vocal about this online, but we could fucking tell you didn't know what to do with the franchise. I know a lot of people have good things to say about Gears Four and Gears Five. I don't know if you two have played either of them or watched the footage from them.

[01:18:31]
I'm going to take that silence as a note. But it was very clear because we had the original Gears trilogy, which had a very clear storyline, very clear characters and character development, and there was a set kind of finality that they had to it. Now, even with that, the third game definitely did leave it open for the franchise to continue. And I was very excited when Gears Four was announced and came out, but upon playing it, I was like, bro, what is this? Beautiful games.

[01:19:03]
Gears four and five. Visually stunning. The gameplay is seamless, the controls are great. I think they did a lot of things right, but to me it hits the same note that Halo Five did in which everything is perfect except for what's driving the game forward, which is the narrative and its characters. They were garbage.

[01:19:24]
They were absolute garbage. So I hope that should they choose to release another Gears game, they recognize the failure that they had in the last two. And in all honesty, that's probably why the last two didn't perform as well, even though they marketed those very strongly. But yes, I hope they find their footing and they figure out what to do with it because it's very clear to a lot of us that they didn't know what they were doing when they were handed that franchise over. The coalition listeners and Halo, they both died when they decided they changed their multiplayer.

[01:20:00]
It wasn't even just the multiplayer, it's just when the campaigns and stuff weren't good, but where their actual player base died is when the multiplayer changed on both games. And the weird thing is, these are two franchises that, yes, they had very strong multiplayer components back in two console generations ago, but a lot of people I know that have played all the games in those franchises, they go back to replay the campaigns more than anything. So it's very odd to see two franchises that have strong campaign player bases to start focusing on multiplayer and just abandon what made them so popular in the first place. I feel both of those franchises would do much better if they just added DLC instead of trying to clone all these other multiplayers that are already out there. Like Halo especially really shot themselves in the foot in that respect.

[01:21:04]
They doubled down on their changes and made more changes instead of trying to bring back what it was. Exactly. And now that Halo is undergoing some reformatting and all that stuff too, with the changes in CEO and what's her face leading Bob, halo is dead.

[01:21:25]
I don't want to say it out loud, I still have an inkling of hope, but like, coming back, I understand why you're saying from like everything with Infinite. For any people out there that know any Halo devs or if there's a Halo dev, former or current out there, send us a message on our website because I would love to talk with you in not an attacking fashion because I know a lot of Halo fans out there just attacking them online. But I just want to have a frank conversation about what went wrong and where it went wrong because it seemed like Halo was doing extremely well and then it was just a sudden and steep decline into basically chaos.

[01:22:11]
Vex will keep it unbiased with you or else. Her name. Her real full name isn't Beck's Frost. Electronic.

[01:22:24]
But you want to hear a startling statistic about Halo sure in the last, I think it's like three months, the PC player base for Halo has been under 3000 players. Oh, I've been well aware of that, yes. There was a slight boost in those numbers. I think when the it was either this past week or the week before. There was some content that dropped as part of the winter release schedule.

[01:22:58]
But even then it's nowhere near what it should be for a franchise like that.

[01:23:09]
But I really do hope that Halo at some point bounces back. And I really hope with the new direction, three, four, three is going now, now that they've gotten rid of that woman who I think is was instrumental in the fall of the Halo franchise personally, hopefully things will get better. Right, so in talking about though Xbox IPS and whatever, kojima actually came up in the news quite a bit in the last week. I think this is Death Stranding footage I have in the background for this one also courtesy of gamers little playground shout out if you want again. Go check out his stuff if you want to see more cutscenes from famous games.

[01:23:50]
So earlier this year, it was reported via Try Hard Games that Kojimo is working on a new horror game called Overdose. I mean that's since been confirmed that he's working on it, but originally when they reported this, basically Kojima's Productions had reached out and said, please get rid of this article because he is notorious for keeping his projects under wraps. So back in June 2022, of course, that's when we got the announcement that Xbox and Kojima Productions were partnering for several games actually. Now unfortunately, Overdose was leaked online. Several images for the game were circulating throughout Discord servers.

[01:24:26]
And on top of that, there were actually two and a half minutes of gameplay footage that was leaked as well. Pajamas simply noted that it's pretty disappointing, but they've made a pretty vigorous effort to scratch it offline altogether. Now in the same kind of now this was all through his, oh my God, what was it called? Brain trust, I think. Or brain scan.

[01:24:49]
So I was just more offended. Out of all of his games, you decided to pick Death Stranding for it. I don't know much about Kojima, I'm so sorry. I know a lot of people are like speculating about Death Stranding too, being announced really soon too, because he keeps hinting that he's working on these other projects. I cannot imagine they would green light another one of those.

[01:25:17]
The first one was so bad. I haven't seen any footage from this game. All I know is the Norman Reedus holding a baby trailer. That's it. And that's literally the whole game.

[01:25:28]
You're just walking around with the baby. Ironic, because the only thing I know from Death Stranding is they had this whole article about if you look at Norman Reeds'crotch area for too long, he eventually beat you up. And I just thought that was funny. I heard about that. Mike, you said a badge of doughy much about Kojima?

[01:25:49]
Okay, to be fair, I know about Kojima before he left Konami, but it didn't feel right playing Kojima Konami games in the background now that he's left. His legacy is like Metal Gear and Silent Hill. Yes, I understand that, but it didn't feel right playing that now that he's no longer a part of Konami. And they basically destroyed any hopes of having a Kojima produced Silent Hill game a few years ago as well. Right, but anyways, in the same episode of his podcast he did reveal that given his close working ship with Sony, there was speculation at one point that Kojima Productions was going to be absorbed into the company as a PlayStation studio.

[01:26:36]
He did say that he would like to stay an independent studio and he said this a couple of times. And he also did hint that he's had several big companies approach him for acquisition offers. Quote Let me reiterate that we are indies, we have no affiliations whatsoever and we are not backed by anyone. And every day I'm approached by offers all over the world to buy our studio. Some of those offers are ridiculously high prices.

[01:27:01]
But it's not that I want money, I want to make what I want to make. That's why I created the studio. So as long as I'm alive, I don't think I will ever accept those offers. Now he is also kind of noting the whole sad split that happened with Konami where basically they destroyed that Silent Hill sequel that was I think looked amazing and it's a shame we'll never get to see that. And also any sort of his name and relation being removed from Metal Gear Solid Five upon release as well.

[01:27:30]
He also did address some rumors and fan theories as well in this podcast, specifically about a game called Abandoned from Blue Box Game Studios. It was a little indie game basically that was supposedly like a love letter to the Silent Hill franchise. Essentially. Kojima did officially confirm that he had no involvement for this and he was not indeed the mastermind behind it. He said, quote, well, this one I really didn't understand it first.

[01:27:56]
Users kept sending me pictures of this Hassan, which is a character in the game. They still send me collages and deep fake images like 20 a day. It's really quite a nuisance. This has been going on for almost two years now. And Jeff Keely, who he's talking to on the podcast, you remember when we did that Moby Dick thing?

[01:28:14]
You were in on the whole thing and that was pretty fun. But people should know I wouldn't do the same thing twice. Meaning kind of ghost writer supervise on a game. So in responses, Blue Box just tweeted out that we want to thank Kojima or hideo Kojima for addressing the conspiracies openly. It's been a burden and not cool for both fans and developers.

[01:28:34]
We hope that we can close this for good. There you go. So, aside from him, Sega and Square Enix actually made headlines this week as well. We had quite a few news from Japanese developers. So Sega, which honestly, I can't remember the last time I've really heard big Sega news that isn't Sonic related.

[01:28:54]
So this was an interesting story to me. So there was a game back in 1997 called The Sacred Pools, which was canceled because of the negative reception it got back at E 319 96, which is hard to believe. That was that 26 years ago? Going on 27 yeah, going on 27 years. However, there was a copy that was found from a website called Gaming Alexandria that acquired prototypes for the PC Sega Saturn, which was one of Sega's consoles and one of the early PlayStation versions of the game.

[01:29:33]
The latter was actually the most interesting because it was the first instance of Sega developing a game specifically for the PlayStation, which, back in the late ninety s and early 2000s, was Sega's big rival, PlayStation. So Sacred Pools was developed by Sega Soft, a studio which formed back in 1995 to replace Sega America's development group with the aim to release games for all platforms. It will ultimately end up only releasing games for the Sega Saturn NPC. The game apparently had a budget of $3 million, which was quite big for the time, and made use of what Segasoft called VNRs technology, which is virtual navigation in real space, which is super outdated. Now, is that like red?

[01:30:21]
It's like VR, but everything is read? Pretty much, yes. That thing made me so sick. Super outdated. So it joined together like FMB clips to make it look like the player was moving through 3D worlds without pausing to load the next clip.

[01:30:38]
There were also rumors at the time that prototypes still existed, but this guy, Gaming Alexandria, actually got in contact with one of the associate producers from this game, David Gray, and he was able to actually copy the discs and share a lot of the footage online. So if you guys are interested in a weird sort of sex game, virtual sex game from Sega, you can actually find clips of it now online through Gaming Alexandria. And you can even get an indepth analysis of the story too, from that same producer. I have a question. Yes.

[01:31:14]
Does Sega exist, like, within the past five years outside of Sonic, or is that like all they do now? I think that's pretty much all they do right now. Sega has taken a pretty significant dip in the 2000s because I haven't seen a Sega game in the past 20 years that's not sonic. Well, now they've branched out into movies now, right? Because I think no, wait, Sega doesn't own Pokemon.

[01:31:40]
There's another video game movie that we had recently that was from Sega. I can't remember, maybe I'm mistaken, they've also kind of gone into, like, behind the scenes. They've actually been going into a bunch of different industries making products. And I say this because a lot of people don't realize, but like, the anime figure lines, one of the lines that I actually rather enjoy, believe it or not, sega has a whole line of anime figures. Yeah, but are they Sega or they no, it's Sega or are they licensed?

[01:32:18]
It's got the actual Sega logo, like it's actually from Sega.

[01:32:25]
I don't know what other industries they've gotten into, but I think they know that except for their initial IPS, like Sonic and stuff, nothing else really makes them money in the video game genre. So I think they kind of went the way of the dotal bird in the video games aspect, if that makes sense. However, have made up for it in other forms of retail.

[01:32:49]
Okay. They're less in the limelight, we'll say now, basically.

[01:32:55]
Yeah, that sounds about right. Okay. But they are getting a little more exposure again now that Sonic is gaining a lot more popularity with a newer generation. So Sega also had another big article come out this week, too. So back in April 2022.

[01:33:12]
So earlier this year, if you guys don't remember, sega had basically announced that they were developing a super game, which would essentially be, quote, a development of AAA titles that cross over Sega's comprehensive range of technologies. And the company said it still intends to realize that vision within five years and explain that several titles are being developed with the framework of the super game. This just sounds like a giant OpenWorld game from my understanding. It's very I don't know, it sounds weird to me. But essentially they're back in the news with this again, saying that the project will be a major title that fails globally and believes that Super Game will be capable of delivering lifetime sales of at least 1 billion, or, sorry, ¥100 billion, which is equivalent to 672,000,000 USD.

[01:34:02]
Now, writing in the company's integrated report for the 2022 fiscal year, which was released alongside its late latest results, sega's Sammy CEO and Group president Haruki Satomi outlined plans to create a hit titles that represent Japan, and said that developing a super game will help it achieve that goal on a global sale. Oh, my God, I'm stuttering a lot. Suddenly he said, quote, the ultimate goal in the Super Game strategy is to create a game so revolutionary that it attracts far more active users than any of the groups games to date. One key to achieving this goal is whether we can draw together a large community involving not only players, but also streamers who stream the game and viewers who watch their videos. So, in terms of how well the company is performing right now, its fiscal results for the last six months ending September 30 of this year consolidated total net sales.

[01:34:58]
Consolidated. That their total net. Sales had increased by eleven 3% year over year to ¥150,000,000,000 and profit declined by 19.9% to ¥9.6 billion. Within Sega Entertainment's contents business, though, which houses its video game operations, net sales totaled 116 ¥6 billion, which is actually an increase of over 107.4. So in terms of the game side of Sega, they're actually doing pretty well.

[01:35:27]
So I can understand now why they're overachieving with this super game target. I still don't understand. I still don't understand what this is like the metaverse of the Sega gaming universe. That's what it sounds like to me.

[01:35:49]
So you guys have talked about NF T's earlier and I said we were going to come back to this because Square Enix was also in the headlines this week for a couple of reasons. So Square Enix did announce before you get into this, you remember how I said, yeah, fu Square Enix for giving a set of fees. This is what you're reporting on, I'm pretty sure is exactly what I was referring to. I think it is. So they announced a new franchise called Symbiogenesis, which is described by the company as its first digital collectible art project.

[01:36:24]
Designed from the ground up for web three fans. According to Square Enix, Symbiogenesis is set in a selfcontained world where a wide cast of characters symbiosis, all of which can be collected as digital art. It promises to offer an interactive story and dedicated community. And the collectible art can also be used as social media profile pictures, and also can be used as a character in the story that takes place in an alternate world where the player can untangle a mystery by completing missions that revolve around questions of the monopolization and distribution of resources. Square Nix says that sales of this game's NSTS will begin in Spring 2023 as a quote free browser service.

[01:37:10]
And during the company's 2022 shareholders meeting back in June, Square Enix did share its plan to create story focused NFPs. As revealed in the report, the company's medium term goals include the development of blockchain gains and entertainment products. However, in discussing how blockchain would impact the company's biggest franchises, square Enix president Yosuke Matsuda said it's still too early to consider making Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy blockchain games. Which is specifically why I chose the Final Fantasy clip in the background here. So just to give you an idea, the ¥150,000,000,000 is roughly 1.1 billion and to the 9.6 billion is down to 65 million.

[01:38:03]
Oh, wow. That's a $50 million loss. No, that's like a oh, hold on. No, I'm wrong. Sorry.

[01:38:14]
Oh, no, that's a few hundred million. That's a lot. Yeah. From 1.1 billion billion. Yes.

[01:38:22]
You're talking about like $850,000,000 in loss. Oh my goodness. Sorry. It took me a moment to comprehend there. Forgive me.

[01:38:34]
So Final Fantasy made news in other respects as well. Thanks to the great minds over at Kotoku, there's one instance where I will show my bias on this podcast as when because they are just garbage reporting, they should be tossed out with yesterday's trash. That's all. So Final Fantasy X-V-I don't know what roman numeral that is lamency. Please tell us what number that is.

[01:39:06]
That's the one that's coming up. Final Fantasy 16. Okay, thank you. So Final Fantasy 16 producer Naoki Yoshida was recently asked about the upcoming games diversity, where he asked if there would be I'm not going to say this term because I think this term is racist, but where he was asked about if there would be nonwhite people in his game, yoshida noticed that this wouldn't be the case. Despite the theme thinking about the possibility.

[01:39:33]
Ultimately, the Final Fantasy Xi team decided against the diversity because of the underlying geographical, technological and geopolitical constraints of the setting. He said that most people are likely aware of this at this point. Final Fantasy 16 is based around medieval Europe, which, according to Yoshida, would realistically never be diverse compared to that of modernday Earth or even their own game. In Final Fantasy XVI, he also notes that he understands as my disappointment for some fans, but says that their diversity goes beyond appearance, noting that characters are diverse in their natures, backgrounds, beliefs, personalities and motivations. Ultimately, though, those chose to keep away from creating ethnic diversity due to setting as even though the game and the world is fantasy, it is also rooted in reality.

[01:40:25]
What's funny about that is they're asking a country that's like historically Xenophobic to include other races in their day. It doesn't make sense to me. Majority of their stuff, it's not expressively like white. They're just vaguely Japanese like character wise. Well, even if you take that out, it's based on medieval Eastern Europe.

[01:40:59]
And the fact of the matter is, the only reason that they're making this scene is because everybody wants to talk about inclusivity and this and that and so on and so forth. All right. Now here's the thing. There was a time when people can relate to characters regardless of the color of their skin, just based on their personalities. For example, I myself am white, and I related so much with Barrett in the original Final Fantasy Seven.

[01:41:26]
Not the remake, but the original Final Fantasy VII. The take no nonsense from anyone. Tell people how it is, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But now, according to today's generation, I have to find a way. Equivalent is basically what you're saying.

[01:41:40]
But here's the thing. If I flip those words, it becomes racist. So the fact of matter is we're basing it on a period in time where diversity would not be a thing. Whether or not you agree with that is irrelevant because the time frame would not allow for that certain thing. Yes, you could technically add it, but if you're trying to make a realistic medieval experience, I hate to break it to you.

[01:42:05]
There is not that much diversity in the Medieval Ages, all right?

[01:42:13]
This is the diversity you'll get. If you want to go medieval, so on and so forth. You might get different countries, but they're all white. They want the Call of Duty thing, right? Where they're putting, like, black and Asian characters on the German side.

[01:42:40]
What the fuck? So does that make exactly. And then on top of that, when you look at the diversity that happened at that medieval time, if you were a diverse person, it wouldn't be called diversity back then and stuff. You would be punished in one way or another, whether it be some medieval torture or you become a word that rhymes would save or something along those lines, because that's how they viewed people who didn't look like them. Now, is that culturally appropriate?

[01:43:19]
No, but at the same time, this was their time frame. Things were different back then. And it's not like they're overtly saying that, hey, we're making this game to be racist. We're not putting black people or any other race in here because we're racist. That's not what they're saying at all.

[01:43:37]
What they're saying is they just want to make it as realistic as possible for that time frame, which I think is there's nothing wrong with that, all right? And if you're complaining about that, that would be like me saying that next time, if they ever do a reboot of the Proud Family and stuff, they need to put white characters in the family or else it's not diverse enough. All right, well, if you can make everybody happy, easy in between with that would be do. It historically accurate. You have Irish slaves or something.

[01:44:19]
Well, that's the thing. Here's the other thing, all right? If they want a quick fix, I'll give you a quick fix. Don't change nothing about the game, but add a character creator, you know what I mean? If you want to create your own character, you want to be a different nationality on this Soviet, so on and so forth.

[01:44:37]
All right? But the fact of the matter is, if you're trying to make it as realistic as possible, I'm sorry, it's not going to be diverse.

[01:44:52]
Not everything has to be diverse, especially when it comes to history, as I said earlier this podcast.

[01:45:02]
But we also have to learn from history. Like, I get where they're coming from, where it's already a fantasy game, so why the fuck doesn't matter. But also I don't know. It's all just stupid. I just want to point out, first of all, because a lot of people online seem to be upset about, oh, there's no people with different skin colors, but they totally just skate over the best thing that he said in this article, which is hold on, where is it?

[01:45:34]
Characters are diverse in their natures, backgrounds, beliefs, personalities, and motivations. Exactly.

[01:45:44]
People seem to be skating over the most beautiful thing, literally in this entire article that this producer recognizes how unique characters are and that is what makes them so interesting and memorable. But all people can think about is how nobody has a different skin tone. Exactly. But that's because when it's getting shoved in your face twenty four seven. That the whole reason that certain things happen to certain people is not because of the consequences of their own actions, but because of the color of their skin, which is the complete opposite, by the way, of what MLK wanted.

[01:46:22]
Yes. They're just going to constantly keep doing this and it's going to happen over and over. And eventually what's going to have to happen if we want this nonsense to stop? Eventually you just have to say no. Enough people say no and what are they going to do?

[01:46:42]
If enough people say no, then there is nothing they can do. Because if we continue to allow the smallest minority of people who scream the loudest to dictate everything else, it's only going to continue to ruin everything else. We've seen it happen in every industry. There's a reason now I'm not even trying to get political when I say this, but there is a legitimate reason to why people started saying if you go woke, you go broke. Because if you look at what they're doing every single time they take a stance and you actually look at the facts of whatever stance they took, it is simply not true.

[01:47:23]
They're just looking and grasping at straws or they're making martyrs of people who are not martyrs or whatever the case may be. All right, if you are a company or anything else, first of all, you should be staying out of it. But the problem is these companies now just bend to the will of the small minority that make the most noise. But the silent majority, if they were to step up, start speaking as loud as them and say, no, we can end this within a week because nobody wants to look bad. Well, this is what they're starting to notice, right?

[01:48:08]
I think it was either today or yesterday there was an article circulating about Amazon's Rings of Power, which notoriously employed this diversity ideology, we'll say. And a lot of people pointed out, like, hey, this is not accurate to what Token described. I don't understand why this is here, but okay, whatever, we'll give it a chance. And it turns out that that was kind of one of many reasons why that show fell off is because a lot of these diversity choices they made didn't make any sense. And it's the same reason why a lot of people get up in arms about, say, the Little Mermaid live action that's coming out from Disney.

[01:48:47]
It's not that anybody has a problem with a non white person being a lead character. That's not the issue at all. The issue is more that you are Tokenizing, a character for the sake of Tokenizing, them.

[01:49:04]
Let me finish. Hold on. You no longer are valuing the character for what they stand for and what they represent. You're simply valuing them for what they look like. And that in itself is racist, and a lot of normal, level headed people recognize that.

[01:49:18]
And here's the thing. I'm glad you said this. I know this term you hate, but coming from someone who, in their terms is a POC, a person of color, I know you hate that term because it is inherently racist. But coming from your perspective and saying that, I'm glad you said that, because here's the thing. We've been saying this for a while now.

[01:49:42]
And the funny thing is, if you were to reverse it, all right, say we were to take whoever they want, like, say we were to take all right, we'll use a proud family. Again, let's say we were to take the proud family and we racewap their characters to white people, all right? They would call that racist, all right? They would try to cancel it. They would try to do this, they would try to do that and stuff.

[01:50:07]
But it is okay when they do it, all right? And I bring this up because did we not see the nonsense that recently happened with the whole mila something or whatever, with the whole Scooby Doo without Scooby Doo, where they race slopped every single character, all right? And then didn't include Scooby Doo. And then didn't include Scooby Doo. It's funny because it's not only the fact that if you were to do it the opposite way, you guys would be crying foul, but it's perfectly fine for you to do it.

[01:50:37]
It's not just that. It's the fact that when you do it, not only do you inherently try to mock fans afterwards when you inevitably get backlash because the hypocrisy is real, but you insult them and then give a really shitty version of something they love. And a lot of people have been turned off, but a lot of people are starting to literally just stop consuming any of the products of whatever their favorite thing is as soon as they start doing this shit. There's a reason why a lot of people stopped watching Disney or stopped doing this or stopped doing that is because they're doing this shit. But if you were to do it the opposite way around, if you want to tell something's racist, whatever you are doing, switch them, all right?

[01:51:33]
Switch your sayings to a different race. And if it sounds racist, it's racist, all right? Yes. Because here's the thing. People have been very racist towards white people for the past couple of years.

[01:51:46]
But the thing is, is no one calls them out on it, because when they do, they say, oh, you can't be racist to white people. But the funny thing is, if you take out the term white and put black, Spanish or any other nationality, it's very racist, all right? So if you switch the races, and it becomes racist. And I hate to break it to you, you're racist. There's like, also another side of that.

[01:52:12]
Most white people don't care if you're racist towards them because they're like, Whatever, go ahead. Sorry. Go ahead. No, you're good.

[01:52:25]
What about all the racism that Irish people were subjected to or Italian people were subjected to? And I told you about this, too. I have told you about this, too, as someone who Irish is crazy how intentionally ignorant people are about this issue. It's also funny because you mentioned MLK earlier, and everybody always thinks of the I Have a Dream speech. But there's another speech he gave about the three types of black people.

[01:52:54]
He called them the other word in the speech, right? Because at that time and I know the speech you're talking about and I know where you're going and yes, exactly. Please pay attention to what she's about to say. Go ahead and explain it. I know what you're saying, but I agree.

[01:53:09]
So the speech was essentially saying how there were three types of black people in this time. The civil rights movement. Right. There was a black person that wanted to stand up for equal rights and didn't really want anything. They weren't for violence.

[01:53:24]
They just wanted to find equality by whatever peaceful means, which is what Martin Luther King stood for. Then there was a second kind that were willing to do it through, basically, violence that they thought they thought was the best way. And then there was the third kind that was just complacent and things staying the way they were because it was better knowing what you know now than putting all of your faith in something you don't know. Which at the time, they didn't know how this was going to turn out. Because keep in mind, as much as Martin Luther King was peaceful, there were a lot of people in that civil rights movement that were incredibly violent as well in trying to know who else is in that list.

[01:54:01]
And it's considered an icon. Is Malcolm X. Yes. Which is jarring in itself.

[01:54:11]
Those are the same people that think Che Guilvara is a hero.

[01:54:18]
Honestly, it blows my mind how willingly ignorant people are. And they're also unwilling to just even for a moment, open up their mind to the possibility of something different. It's really horrifying. But, yes, a lot of industries are popping on this trend and it's producing disastrous results. And you can see it in the box office numbers, you can see it in the stock value that all these companies are losing.

[01:54:47]
You know what I think it is, in all honesty, and I've said this already when I was going to school, we were taught how to critically think and to do our own research. However, over the past, I'd say 1015 years, that philosophy has completely changed. People are no longer being taught how to critically think for themselves. And instead are being fed the exact thing that they say that they hate, which is misinformation and disinformation. So they're only given half truths about certain things, but they're not given the concept of what actually happened, what led to this particular situation, what led to the resolution and ways that things could have gone.

[01:55:37]
They're not being told how to think for themselves at all. Instead, they are being trained how to think, not how to think for themselves, regurgitate how to think the way they want you to think. All right? And then what happens is now you have all these people who don't know how to critically think, who don't know how to do research, who hear someone say something and just immediately assume it's the truth.

[01:56:05]
For example, to go into the political landscape, so on and so forth. Everyone wants to talk about how Joe Biden was a better choice, blah, blah, blah. I don't care what you do or do not think about Trump, but for people to vote strictly for Biden because they don't like Trump without actually doing the research on Biden in his past. If you look at Biden's past, he's done a lot of things to jail the same people that he wanted votes from, and in his campaign specifically said, if you don't vote for me, you're not black, which is inherently racist. But people don't want to think about that because orange man bad.

[01:56:43]
All right, so now we're looking at a midterm election where they're sitting here spewing about all this is the greatest threat to our democracy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They want to take away your rights, they want to take away your freedoms, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They want to take away your Social Security. But when you do the research, none of what the left is viewing is true at all. As a matter of fact, the same things they're spewing is exactly what the left has been trying to do.

[01:57:12]
But people don't want to do the research and actually look into things. Now, I lean neither left nor right. I'm neutral. I side on the side of truth. And that's because there are many times where the left is more correct.

[01:57:26]
There's going to be times when the right is more correct, there's going to be times when neither are correct, and I'm going to be forced to vote for the lesser of two evils, which never fun. But the fact of matter is, is political landscape, personal landscapes, whatever the case may be, when people don't know how to critically think, they just become part of the masses. That gets easily manipulated by those around them who know that they can be easily manipulated. And that is the issue we're facing now. You see it all over.

[01:58:00]
You see these people doing violent protests everywhere that then people are saying, oh, no, it's a peaceful protest. Yeah, you're right. It's peaceful. As they destroy millions of dollars of damages and buildings, cars, everything else like that. And they left X amount of people dead.

[01:58:18]
Yes, that's peaceful, you know what I mean? I think that's what it really boils down to is critical thinking is now gone. People don't think for themselves anymore. They're told how to think and they don't want to be enlightened to any other idea or the possibility that they are wrong. No, you're spot on as someone who works in education, you are actually spot on.

[01:58:41]
Children are raised to regurgitate, not to think now. And it shows as they get older because even simple things like watching a movie and understanding what is going on in the plot and why it's happening, even like a Marvel movie, they can't fully comprehend it. And it's really sad because that's like the simplest form of modern media to understand because the plot is so singular. But like listening, you talk to your students and stuff and they were trying to explain something, I was like, sorry, I don't understand what you meant there. I think what he's saying is that when he's listening to your students try to come up with solutions and stuff and then listening to the responses and their inability to critically think, he's just and they're like their explanation, like a story or something.

[01:59:37]
In other words, they didn't comprehend. Yes, okay, I can't pick up I know what face you're making, but I know our listeners don't see that face, so they don't know what you mean. It's a face.

[01:59:54]
So yeah, we'll get back on track though. But that was like really silly news. I'm glad you said that. People are diverse in their beliefs and personalities. I'm really glad you put that out there because that is a great point to Hammer home.

[02:00:09]
But yes, as I mentioned earlier, sony had put out some interesting analytics earlier this week. So it looks like the PlayStation Plus is syncing just a little bit, but still doing fairly well, it looks like. So the number of people subscribing to Sony's PlayStation Plus fell from 47 3 million to 45 4 million in the last quarter, the company announced in its latest earning release. The subscription service is now in its third quarterly decline in a row though. And that's despite Sony relaunching and revamping the service between May and June earlier this year.

[02:00:46]
With the whole tiers thing, which honestly, with that whole tiers thing, I could understand why it lost subscribers because it was a more paid to get attention poison than anything. Now, while the subscriber numbers were down revenue from network services, which includes earnings from PlayStation Plus, the network advertising revenue and the discounted, PlayStation now has increased from ¥100 billion to ¥117,000,000,000, which is the equivalent of $794,000,000 year over year. And these figures suggest that Sony has less subscribers spending more money on its network services. Actually, that's weirdly worded. So it has less subscribers, but more people spending money on its individual network services.

[02:01:31]
Now, in terms of its PlayStation Five consoles, sony has now sold 25 million PlayStation Five consoles this past quarter. It sold 3.3 million between July and September, which is the same number sold in the same quarter of the previous year, which is no surprise when you think of the console shortage and parks prices. It also sold 62.5 million physical copies of games, which is actually a reduction of almost 20% compared to the previous year. But if, like, the network Services is up, that probably means maybe more people are buying digital. And I do notice that there is a bit of a price difference between digital and hard copies, so it might be a money saving issue there.

[02:02:13]
On top of that, PlayStation did announce the new VR Two is coming out February 23, 2023. For just take a wild guess at what the price is, please. Someone. $8550? I was going to say around like 800, to be honest.

[02:02:35]
Never mind. Yeah, let's not forget they also said that their games coming out are not going to be compatible with their last VR set, which people just like, God, this is actually just slightly less expensive than the actual PlayStation Five console. It's like a $50 difference and you still need the PlayStation Five console in order to use it. So if you do plan on getting one, plan on spending $500 on a PlayStation, it's probably going to have high amounts of storage for the games you need to play, plus the software to play it with. Which means you're also going to have to drop a couple of $100 on an SD card.

[02:03:17]
Yes, and it also is not wireless, so it needs to plug into the console.

[02:03:25]
We talk a shit about PC prices. Well, here's the thing. So you remember last week we discussed how Microsoft is apparently losing 100 $200 per console because realistically, these companies don't make money off of consoles. And then PlayStation had their price increase, which again, could be a combination of market prices and part prices, plus the fact that they need to start making money to maybe make up for some losses somewhere else. So I'm wondering now, with the information that we have, perhaps it is marketed at such a price for all those three reasons.

[02:04:04]
Oh, no, I think they're just trying to milk that shit.

[02:04:09]
Well, that's what I mean. They're trying to make money somewhere, right? So we'll see how it performs when it comes out. How much is oculus, $250? I was going to say I want to say they're like $230.

[02:04:23]
Yeah, and those are wireless and they work on their own. You don't need a console for that. Yeah, I don't know, 550 for VR. That's probably not much different from something we've had around for, listen, six to seven years. Unless I'm getting the nerve gear and being full sun to full dive into Sword Art Online, I'm not really interested in virtual reality.

[02:04:50]
You want that mirror link? I do want that neuralink, that nerve gear.

[02:04:57]
I don't care if it becomes a death trap. And if you die in the game, you die in real life. Because take me away from this, because this world is screwed. That's the way you want to go. If I have to die, let me die doing something I love.

[02:05:10]
Damn it. I can't do all that VR shit. It makes me sick to my stomach. It makes me dizzy, too. It's the same with 3D movies.

[02:05:19]
They make me feel a little nauseous. I can't do it. It's something with the frame rate, like it's not smooth enough for what they're trying to do or something. I don't know. Who knows, right?

[02:05:29]
But now, in lieu of these numbers coming out, it did also reveal that in terms of, like, comparison to Xbox X and S sales in the USA alone, right now, Xbox is only about 75 million consoles behind the PlayStation Five, which a lot of people were like, oh, there's a lot of availability for Xbox, of course. But to be first, there are two things. First of all, it's pretty impressive considering that Xbox basically botched their last console generation, like the Xbox One did very poorly compared to its competitors. And that's not something I'm afraid to admit. Like, it is what it is, right?

[02:06:08]
And I was an Xbox One owner. But considering all of the factors that have been at play, and even with a shortage, that they've managed to kind of bridge the gap so significantly, this generation is impressive. And it also tells me that people don't really care about exclusives. Well, like I said, I think a lot of it boils down to not just availability. Because at no point did I ever in my area was I not able to get either an Xbox Series X or S.

[02:06:40]
Like, there are both owners in stock in my area where it's a PS Five, not so much. I actually had to order online to get my PS Five. So it's not just an availability thing, but it's also a price point thing. And I know what you're talking about. Exclusives.

[02:06:52]
People do care about exclusives. I think you're reading into it wrong. And what I mean by that is the gamers who don't care about exclusives do not care what system they get, which would make a lot more sense. Those who do care about exclusives will stay with their older gen console until they're ready to get they will wait. But if you are the type of gamer who's just trying to play a game that you can get on Xbox or PlayStation, and even if you are PlayStation user before, if the Xbox is available and you're oh, God.

[02:07:31]
Oh, God. This is terrible. No, God. Nobody saw that. I'm just going to keep it on a pause screen here.

[02:07:38]
All right, nice. Did I show boobies again on the stream?

[02:07:49]
Xbox and. PlayStation. If they don't care about exclusives and the Xbox is available, and especially with the Xbox series espion price the way it is, they're just going to go out if they want the next generation, they're just going to go out and go get what's available. And it would be the same way Xbox would lose some people if it was the opposite way around. If PlayStation had a cheaper version of the PlayStation Five and was available and Xbox wasn't, then yet the people who don't care about exclusives are going to go over to PlayStation.

[02:08:25]
It's a matter of availability and what they have. You know what I mean? But this is what I but again, you kind of reaffirmed the point I made, which is like, if people are loyal to a brand and they're loyal to the exclusives, they will wait. Right? So I'm just saying that people wanted to play NextGen games, and it wasn't necessarily next gen games that were console exclusive, they just wanted to get a next gen.

[02:08:51]
Right. So you kind of unintentionally reaffirmed my point. A lot of people have this argument of one is better than the other, and they always point to exclusives. But even in my history of working at an Eevee games, which is now Game Stop here in Canada, people didn't care what they like when I would sell a PlayStation for, they didn't ask for it. Can I get bloodborne or whatever with it.

[02:09:15]
They bought FIFA or Call of Duty or minecraft with it. They played a game that you could get on either or whatever. Parents come in wanting to buy a console for their kid. It's like, oh, all of my son's friends have this console. Do you have it?

[02:09:30]
Right, so for me, it's like when it boils down to it is, yes, they are a selling point and a selling feature, but it is not necessarily the only thing driving console sales in this generation so far, it looks like. And again, this also could partially be because of availability. Up until now, it was very hard to find a PlayStation Five. So I think that gap is probably going to grow quite a bit now that the holiday season is here. I think PlayStation Five is going to do extremely well in the holiday season.

[02:10:02]
And I got five bundles going on right now, too, which is going to help even more. Here I am sitting with a Series S and a PlayStation Five, and apart from watching anime, I barely turn them on. And the only reason I turned it on to watch anime is because I have to do the weekly anime recap, but I have to make sure I've done my research.

[02:10:24]
Yeah, mikey 100%. Especially now that stock is I like my Xbox. I enjoy Xbox games. Yes, they're PlayStation exclusives, I'd like to play. But it also helped that there were certain companies, Walmart, who had a huge stuck, that they were literally holding on to for certain times of years and slowly releasing.

[02:10:49]
So they'd say they only had X amount of stock, but if you actually go to the warehouse, like, there were images coming out from their actual warehouses of, like, them having, like, 20,000 PlayStation Five available at the time. But they would sit there and tell people that they had none in stock because they're waiting for a better time to sell it, or they only want to slowly release them, if that makes sense. And I'm just looking at them like, really? You know, people want this and you're telling them you don't have it, but you have an entire warehouse full of them. Yeah, that's real nice.

[02:11:24]
So, you know, not helpful when companies do things like that either. It's also not helpful when you got skelpers causing the prices to skyrocket. A PC like an adult tired of the PC people and stuff with this whole PC Master race, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You guys only became relevant within the last decade. Sit down.

[02:11:52]
I'm sorry, were PCs not a thing in, like, the they were, but as far as for gaming yeah, no, sit down. You guys weren't relevant for gaming until the past. I'm sorry, World of Warcraft wasn't the biggest game for how long? I'm sorry, world of Warcraft didn't gain the widespread notoriety that I had until recently. Even though it was popular before, it was mainly known as just a nerd central, and it wasn't socially acceptable until the past decade.

[02:12:26]
So again, I rephrase it. Sit down. You guys haven't been relevant until the last ten years. So if you're going to sit here and talk about PCB better than this people like what? People like shepherd.

[02:12:38]
All right, listen, at the end of the day, I play all day, every day. At the end of the day, I play on all three. And I'm going to tell you right now, I don't care if someone plays on PC, I don't care if someone plays on console, but I will not tolerate you sitting here disrespecting console users just because you only like PC. I'm going to disrespect them every step of the way. All right, gentlemen, please.

[02:13:07]
Let's put the fists down. All right? We all like what we like. I'll just end it on the sharper. If you want to have a big dick competition, I need to tell you something.

[02:13:19]
Mine is hanging in my sock. Yeah, mine's resting on my balls. What do you want to do about it? Doesn't sound that big.

[02:13:30]
Yeah, yeah. Okay. So there was a Twitter user by the name of Clobbery who actually noted that there was an article showcasing Bethesda's London office on their website. And in the area there's actually on the wall an image from an upcoming game called Ghostwire Tokyo, which also stated that it was going to be released for the Xbox. Now, at this time, it's actually a PlayStation exclusive with no known version for Xbox coming out or even PC.

[02:14:09]
Bethesda signed a deal basically with Sony prior to Microsoft's acquisition of the studio, in which Bethesda was kind of agreed to produce two PlayStation exclusive titles. Now one of those is Death Loop, which is going to be coming to Xbox within the next couple weeks, if I recall correctly. So I think this is just more likely the same scenario. This game is going to come out on PlayStation. It'll probably be exclusive for about a year or so before it comes to Xbox.

[02:14:36]
Now, the biggest Sony news, which is probably God of War Ragnarok, which is breaking the internet before it even comes out officially on November 9. So a developer who worked on God of War Ragnarok actually confirmed that the game is not able to fully utilize the capabilities of the PlayStation Five hardware. So during an exclusive interview, an animation director for God of War Ragnarok bruno. I'm going to butcher this velasquez. I'm just calling Bruno.

[02:15:07]
We don't talk about Bruno.

[02:15:10]
Why? We just don't talk about Bruno. Okay. Bruno. We don't talk about Bruno.

[02:15:23]
Stated that the development team at Santa Monica Studio, which is the studio behind the God of War franchise, wanted to make the best PlayStation Four game possible and in doing so was unable to fully utilize the capabilities of the PlayStation Five hardware. He said the studio wanted to take what it did with the original 2018 God of War and expand on it. And in that previous games fans were teased about the nine realms but weren't able to visit all of them. The changes in the sequel as one of the main aspects of God of War Ragnarok is that you'll be able to explore all nine. Now, according to Bruno, all of the design goals that the studio had in mind were achieved on the PlayStation Four.

[02:15:59]
So the PlayStation Five version is essentially an enhancement of what's already possible on the PlayStation Four. So he mentioned that some of the PlayStation Five exclusive features like the 3D audio and Haptic feedback, as well as higher frame rate, but he also states that the PS Four version is also an individual improvement over the 2018 original. The studio's goal was ultimately just to make a great PlayStation Four game and then have it enhanced on the PlayStation Five. That's a bit of a shame, but that's also kind of expected, I guess. You're making sorry, which game is this?

[02:16:38]
God of war. Ragnarok. The upcoming one. So they only plan on making it for PS Four? No.

[02:16:44]
So it's coming out for PlayStation Four and PlayStation Five, but it's built as basically the best PlayStation Four game ever and will just look enhanced on the PlayStation Five. It doesn't fully utilize the PlayStation Five capabilities, so you're basically getting a last gen game, unfortunately. Now that's not to say there probably won't be patches in the upcoming months or years to make it a more PlayStation Five like enhanced version. But unfortunately for those that care about specs and all that stuff, you're essentially getting a PlayStation Four game on your next gen console. Now, even with that news, which I don't think that's a bad thing or anything, in all honesty, there are reviews out from notable websites like IGN and Game Informer regarding the game, and it's actually doing incredibly well on Metacritic with an average of 95 out of 100 right now, which is great.

[02:17:39]
Now, despite this, there was one review from IGN Korea from a writer named Bei Sang Hyun, who actually gave the game a six out of ten. And I mean, this isn't a surprise to me because I've made a very strong note of how PlayStation fanboys act online, but since he released that review because it was so low, he has been bombarded with nonstop online harassment for his decision. It got so bad that he decided to put a statement out on someone's YouTube channel to try and defend himself. Now, in this statement, he kind of dug himself into a corner because he did state that he is more of an indie gamer as opposed to AAAA title gamer. But in my opinion, that's a good thing if anything, and reveals something that's really telling about the game review aspect of the industry in general, which is that they give these review codes to people that they know will enjoy their games and thus rate it a certain way.

[02:18:41]
Big industry insider last week who actually had his review unapproved for a Sony game in the past because it didn't meet the standard that Sony was hoping for. I don't know, this is a good thing to me because if you're giving a game out to review, you should be trying to appeal to a wide range of gamers, not just people you know will enjoy your product like that, just invokes a certain level of bias. So I'm okay with this. I mean, I'm okay with a non triple A gamer reviewing it. I'm not okay with the fact that people felt the need to harass this guy over his singular opinion over a game.

[02:19:19]
That's all.

[02:19:23]
But speaking of highly rated games, so since God of War Ragnarok is rating so high, it actually puts it on the same level as another big game that came out earlier this year, Eldon Ring. Eldon Ring also currently has a 95 score on Metacritic. That's actually what people are speculating to be probably the winner of this year's Game of the Year at the Game Awards, but From Software actually released its financials for the second quarter of 2022. Oh my God. This actually was really positive news.

[02:19:54]
I was blown away by this. They raked in a revenue to the tune of an operating profit increase of 1116.8% increase. That's over a ten fold increase in revenue during the same period last year after the release of Elder Ring, which has been their only release this year so far. By the way, I have a pull up that's running for a minute for you guys. What manage prediction going on right now?

[02:20:30]
Who will have better graphics? God of war. Ragnarok. PS four version. Or got them nice for the PS five, probably.

[02:20:40]
You know what? Hold on. When we talk about graphics, are we including, like, frame rates and all that stuff? We're just including a better experience? What do you think?

[02:20:49]
Graphics going to look better? I have to pull up right now. If you look at the chatting stuff, you just got to click it and then vote for which you think is going to be better. It's got to be God of war. Put it in the prediction.

[02:21:05]
It can be worse.

[02:21:10]
I can't vote because I created the poll, but I'm definitely going to say it's going to be God of War. Because here's the thing. Yeah. I've already seen some of that Gotham Night footage that they've been putting out, and it doesn't even hold up to Batman, arkham island and Batman. Batman arkham island?

[02:21:28]
Is Arkham Island or Batman? Batman arkham knight or something like that. I can't remember the exact title. It's Batman. Arkham batman game.

[02:21:38]
Yeah. Arkham Night. Arkham Night. Batman arkham night. And it's not like it's a new game either.

[02:21:46]
You know what I mean? And the fact of the matter is they put, like, the graphics, like, the animation side by side, and just everything looks better on Arkham Knight.

[02:21:58]
It was ridiculous. It's no surprise that the two guys that headed Rocksteady, as we reported last week, left the company after Gotham Nights release and all. It's no surprise there. They don't say that the graphics for telltale games Batman is better. Bruh all right, you need to chill.

[02:22:19]
You need to chill. Go back to the dark depths of the background. Look at it, mikey, listen. They're trying to silence me, but they can't silence the truth. So just to wrap up this last story so, yes.

[02:22:36]
So From Software is looking at an increase of over ten times in terms of revenue. So that means that this year alone, they've managed to rank in seven point ¥52 billion. And that's actually 600 compared to the same period last year, which only earned ¥623,000,000. So From Software is doing really well this year. Congrats to them.

[02:23:02]
So, yeah, on that note, I have nothing else to report this week, unless during this podcast, there was some breaking news that happened over Twitter, which has been the case the last couple of weeks. I can't remember. All right, Mikey, maybe you saw it and stuff. I can't remember the name of the lady, but there's a very high profile woman in gaming, like a very creative person. I can't remember her name right now.

[02:23:29]
Who recently passed away in the game industry. There's been a couple. I think she was a Japanese. Yes, her. And there were two other people that passed away recently as well.

[02:23:44]
They were also from Japanese studios. They're relatively young though. She was only like 50 something. Yeah, the other two were like in their forty s too. They're all very young.

[02:24:01]
Either way, we'll have to add next week if we could find the articles. I thought you had them, so I never sent them. I guess I'll just send them if I see them again. But they were influential. I believe even Kojima said something about it.

[02:24:20]
He did say something about one of them, yes. Yeah. In other news, there's been a whole other platform that's trying to compete with Twitch that's had some drama going on lately.

[02:24:36]
Here's the thing, I could go either way with what side I'm on.

[02:24:44]
You know what? Okay. This is a statement that I make on behalf of myself and no one else. I would just like to make this clear. Twitch streamers are softer than baby shit.

[02:24:57]
That's fair. I'll throw that.

[02:25:04]
Twitch has been quite a bit of a problematic platform, but unfortunately it is the main platform for a lot of people that want to get into the streaming game. And it has a lot of high profile names. So there have been some other platforms that have come up in competition, but they have never performed as well and basically all just kind of drifted off into the background. Trovo is one of those websites that I can think of even YouTube gaming, it's been steadily growing, but it's still not quite to the level of where Twitch is, just because Twitch has been kind of the mainstay for so many years. So there is a company coming out of, I think it's either Wales or Britain, called Gamer Network Co.

[02:25:49]
And I followed them randomly a few months ago because I was like, let's see where this goes. Because again, seeing so many of these platforms come up, but then they disappear. So there was a bit of drama in which whoever was running the social media for that profile was, I guess, trolling people, essentially. And a lot of people were just posing questions of, oh, what are you going to do about hate raids and inclusivity and all this stuff. Things that Twitch has neither really directly addressed nor taken care of.

[02:26:24]
The hate raids being one of the bigger things. So a lot of people have been lashing out at this guy. A lot of people have been lashing out at the founder as well, who has a separate Twitter tag of his own, who allegedly is operating the Gamer Network code Twitter as well. Like he's doing both. I don't know if there's any truth to that.

[02:26:44]
Today there was a statement saying that he has taken note of what's been going on and he's fired the social media manager for that account and he's deleted a lot of those tweets. But then they also said, yeah, so Mikey thing, when I asked for receipts and transparency. They ghosted me and just argued with me on another post. So, yeah, apparently that's the toxic person who had been running the social media before. They released a statement apologizing for what happened a couple of days ago, they released another statement that they in like the new year before they launched.

[02:27:16]
They will be releasing all the information in regards to policies and funding and all of that stuff. Honestly, I just think Twitch Streamers are some of the most entitled people you will find on the internet and you can never do anything right to buy them as a result. So even with a network popping up, yes, I will admit that it probably wasn't the best way to address the drama by trolling people, but at the same time it was very obviously trolling and people were taking it seriously. But then on top of that, the hypocrisy for me, it was a hypocrisy for me because before all this went down where it got like really vile as far as them saying certain things to certain communities before that happened, it was just light hearted trolling that they were calling unprofessional and everything. And all I'm sitting myself is these are probably the same people who would who praise the Wendy's account, patrolling other people, but because it's a different account, you know what I mean?

[02:28:16]
And I look at it, it's not just that. Like you said, all these issues were already on Twitch and Twitch has done nothing about it. But they have no problem streaming on Twitch.

[02:28:30]
Now, whether or not it was the founder who was running that particular Twitter or not, allegedly he was, but then for some people, allegedly he wasn't, I don't know because I'm not the one behind the curtain for that company. What I will say though, is there's a line you just can't cross and I believe he did eventually get to that point. But I was kind of laughing because there's a couple of people that I'm well aware of who I used to think more highly of until I realized that a lot of the things kind of went to their head and they are hypocritical to the way they used to be and their chances they used to take, if that makes any sense. So they think they're still being the same person, but they're really not and they've been swayed, so to speak. So now every time I see these particular people enter the chat, I just cringe every single time.

[02:29:40]
I'm not going to say any names because I'm not giving any additional clout, nor am I out here looking for unnecessary drama or anything else like that. But I will sit here and say, I put out a tweet earlier today, let's see if I can find this real quick. I put out a tweet. Where is it?

[02:30:03]
Before that hot take. If you produce a lot of content but are primarily known for drama, you will inevitably get a poor image, just like the people you cover. Now, this wasn't named at anyone in particular. There are a few people that this covers, but I will say there was a lot of negative things going around, not just between Gamers Network or whatever they call themselves, but also between some of the people in there and stuff who let's just say all they do is escalate situations. They do nothing to actually help the situation, if that makes any sense.

[02:30:46]
The Keemstars of the world. Yeah, pretty much. Sorry, I'm addressing Mikey's thing here.

[02:30:54]
Listen, I don't agree with how the guy went about it, right? Whether it is the one guy who was making those tweets or it was a separate person. Allegedly, the separate person who was managing the social media has been fired. And the guy issued a statement. There was no apology in that statement.

[02:31:09]
I think he should have put one in there because I would have made people a lot more happy. But at the same time, even if an apology were in there, people will find some reason to target you either way in terms of, like, turning in receipts. If I were him, I would just step away from the whole thing. Because even when you provide receipts, especially when it comes to streamers on Twitch, they take advantage of that every opportunity they can to basically shed the worst light on you, whether you're trying to do good or bad. And the thing is, I will say first hand, I'm the first to admit I was laughing at a lot of things they were doing until they hit a certain level.

[02:31:49]
Once they hit that threshold, it was like, okay, this is no longer funny. Again, nothing was handled correctly. I agree with you on that. But I was laughing at certain things until I hit that threshold where it's no longer laughable. I was only laughing when it was just trolling.

[02:32:08]
Once you got into sexism and all that other stuff that they got into, then I'm no longer laughing at the situation, you know what I mean? But as far as the trolling goes, it goes right back to what you were saying. Twitch streamers are stopped as shit. So that's why I was laughing when they were just doing general trolling due to the fact that we knew what would happen. But once they took that additional step was where I was like, yeah, no, I'm not laughing at all at this.

[02:32:37]
This is not cool. This is not acceptable in any way, shape or form. And I think you were similar, vex, if I'm not mistaken. What do you mean similar? Like I'm a man?

[02:32:50]
No. God, I mean, I hope not. Are you? I hope not either.

[02:32:57]
You're a manly man, aren't you? No, I was talking about you were somewhere in the fact that under the general trolling, you thought it was funny watching how people reacted until they crossed that threshold. Once they crossed that threshold, then it was no longer funny. Exactly. That's why I don't agree with how all of this went down.

[02:33:18]
There was a better way to handle it. I don't think we'll ever know the truth. In all honesty, you don't have to give an explanation for all of your actions. Sometimes it's okay to just step away and reevaluate it on your own, especially when you're in the hot seat, because you don't know what you're going to do in such a situation. Right.

[02:33:36]
In terms of, like, I don't know where the money is coming from. This. And this is why I'm just waiting and seeing what's going to happen with this. Because he said that he's going to release a full statement and policy and all that stuff in the new year. So when we see that, I'm just keeping my eye on this.

[02:33:52]
Other than that, right, I have no positivity or negativity about it. I'm just waiting and seeing. Because, like I said, this may just be another one of those platforms that have a boost in the first couple of months, then disappear. Because ultimately, nothing compares to Twitch. People hate it.

[02:34:11]
They still stream on it. Have you seen Fox's streaming platform? I didn't know Fox had a streaming platform. I didn't either until, like, a month ago. Interesting.

[02:34:22]
Is it any good? No, it's fucking terrible. I just have it's called Caffeine. Caffeine. All right.

[02:34:31]
Yeah, it's fucking terrible. Yeah, Mikey, it is a little sad. But again, I'm waiting to see what comes out in the new year closer to launch. Let's see what happens. Let's see what happens.

[02:34:46]
What were the comments to the LGBTQ s? I only saw one of them. Some of them were pretty bad enough that I see them later. Bad enough that we shouldn't repeat them on stream. Okay, noted.

[02:35:06]
It's one of those things, like I said, once they hit a certain threshold here's the thing. I followed them when they were trolling. I immediately unfold them. When they hit a certain threshold, I just muted them for a while. That's all.

[02:35:18]
I just muted him. I was sick of seeing it show up on my timeline. Yeah. But as soon as I saw that threshold had been breached, I was like, yes. No.

[02:35:26]
Can't follow them. No, don't want to be associated.

[02:35:31]
It was nasty. It was vile. Regardless of what you personally believe in, it was still a line that should never be crossed. Let's just put it like that.

[02:35:47]
When you start calling names, at the same time, I understand that there are certain lines you should not cross, but if you're getting upset by a random guy calling you names over the Internet yes.

[02:36:06]
That's why I said there's a certain threshold. Once you hit that threshold, I can understand a certain bit, like I can understand some minor drawing. I won't say that I haven't done it myself. I mean, it's been a while since I have. Because personally, I'm too busy to even get into shit like that right now, even if I wanted to, which I don't.

[02:36:24]
But even if I want, I'm too busy. But I can understand, like trolling, so on and so forth. But once you hit that certain threshold, there's a line you don't cross. And they definitely cross it whether or not it was the actual person in charge of the whole company or so called. And I'm using air quotes, social media manager, whoever it was crossed the line.

[02:36:50]
And I was just like, yeah, no, this ain't cool. I just don't remember because they were popping up on my feet a lot yesterday. And I was like, oh, those are kind of funny. And then I don't know what was the trigger for it, but suddenly it just went straight downhill after that. And that's when I had to mute them.

[02:37:07]
I was even laughing because mind you and maybe something happened where they crossed the line before they did this, I don't know. But I did see one where I was just like, oh, no. Whoa. Well, I was laughing at some of them where they were saying things like, this particular group is banned for this. And I'm not talking about like it was like no place station users allowed.

[02:37:27]
Yeah, PlayStation users are banned from using this. So on and so forth. And mind you, I'm just laughing. I'm like, oh, that shit is funny. And I'm a PlayStation guy.

[02:37:39]
But I thought it was funny and stuff. But then they started going after groups and individuals and all that other stuff. And then I was like, no, I'm going to be honest. There was one pronoun joke that I thought was pretty funny. I don't know if it crossed the line, but it was a Michael Jackson one.

[02:37:59]
I was like, that's kind of funny. Michael Jackson joined social media and announced his pronouns are I laughed at that too. I don't think you're crossed I think it's funny.

[02:38:19]
But the thing is, here's the thing. Humor nowadays, like I said, they did cross the line. There is no doubt about it. But I will say that humor nowadays is almost dead. Because humor is supposed to be about the ability to poke fun at yourself or people like you.

[02:38:38]
So some lighthearted poking at any group I think is fun. It's when you cross that line that it's a different story. And unfortunately, I feel like some people just can't even be poked at all without crying. But make no mistake, Gamers Network or whatever they call themselves and stuff, definitely smash through that line that they shouldn't cross. Yeah, so we'll keep an eye on, see what happens with them in the future.

[02:39:13]
Because it looks like the founder is trying to remedy the situation. Also, one of our ads is a Rockstar Xbox giveaway. That was kind of funny. But yes, on that note, I don't have. Anything else to discuss this week?

[02:39:32]
The website has been revamped, so go check that out. If you can leave us a review, I'm okay. If it's a super negative review, give me feedback. I'm okay with it. If you just want to tell me that I chuckle like a hyena, I'll take it too.

[02:39:46]
I really don't care. That's your opinion. Other than that, any news for upcoming podcasts? There lambeth sea. Well, we have the weekly anime recap coming tomorrow and as you see, we have increased the amount of sponsors we have as well.

[02:40:03]
I do want to do a plug for Genki if you do not have Genki yet. Genki is a browser extension where if you use our link and install it and then pin it to your taskbar, you can just completely forget about it. And whenever you purchase things in your personal life, some of your purchase will go towards the Lamb and see Show as commission, which what better way to support the Lamb and see Show and the Lambdency Show.com than just by doing your normal day to day tasks? So I will plug that one in particular because I think that is amazing. It really is.

[02:40:42]
And as far as the other ones, I have other plans for. I'm always going to be browsing for deals, so on and so forth. And I'm probably get a couple of other people browsing for deals to always come up with some articles giving you good deals. Like the article that we posted earlier, which one of the things I forgot to mention about that article about the fantastic holiday discounts on PC and gaming equipment is, I believe, if I'm not mistaken, this particular webcam comes with, I want to say, like a three month premium to export it or something. Hold on, what is it?

[02:41:24]
One of these I can't remember which one it is. Something comes here with like a three month free something. I just can't remember what it is right now off the top of my head. But yes, we're always going to be looking for deals for you and ways to enhance the show and provide you value. So keep an eye out for articles like that as we try to give you some good deals.

[02:41:46]
So that being said, that is going to be the end of this podcast. We hope you guys enjoy this podcast and until next time, you guys enjoy yourself.