GTA 6 ONLINE Clues (Strauss Zelnick Interview) + Gaming News Today
Publicado no GTA VI Online ·
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Video in English, published by the channel Reforge Gaming.
About this content: The summary, key points and topics below are generated automatically from the video transcript. They reflect the content, opinions, claims and predictions presented in the video and do not represent a position, validation or fact-check by Game ARX.
Video summary
Take 2 CEO Strauss Zelnick discussed the 13-year development gap of GTA 6 and insights from GTA Online. The video also covers first impressions of the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake and community member interactions on the stream.
Key points
- Take 2 CEO Strauss Zelnick spoke about the 13-year gap between GTA 5 and GTA 6 and how GTA Online shaped their ongoing business model.
- The speaker shared first impressions of the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake, praising its modern visuals, controls, and sound design.
- The community engaged in member milestones, unlocking a members choice stream on YouTube.
- Discussion covered the topic of game length, backlogs, and the current state of photorealism in video games.
- The stream included viewer interactions regarding games like Phantom Blade Zero, Wolverine, and various game releases.
Topics
GTA 6 OnlineZelda Ocarina of Time RemakeTake 2 CEO Strauss ZelnickGame BacklogPhotorealismInsomniac GamesLive Service Games
What you will learn
- Take 2's business model shifted significantly following the success of GTA Online in 2013, focusing on recurring engagement and ongoing content.
- The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake blends nostalgic memory with modern controls, visuals, and sound design.
- Insomniac Games generated substantial revenue with its PlayStation titles this generation, despite discussions around Wolverine's sales.
- Managing a large backlog of video games requires strategies such as playing short initial sessions or focusing on completionism.
Questions and answers
What did Take 2 CEO Strauss Zelnick discuss in his new interview?
He discussed how Rockstar's business model changed after the launch of GTA Online and provided clues into how they might approach GTA 6 online.
What were the speaker's impressions of the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake?
He found it incredible, praising its art direction, sound design, fluid movement, and how it successfully combines nostalgia with the feeling of playing a brand-new game.
How many games has the speaker completed this year?
He listed around 29 completed games, with more in his backlog.
Video transcript
Transcript from available captions; it may contain errors.
Today is all about the two biggest games of the year. First, a new interview with CEO of Take 2, Strauss Zelnik. Not the not the one that was funny and we laughed at yesterday. A new interview, a new interview, a good interview with Business Insider. Actually seems to reveal some clues about how they're thinking about GTA 6 online. And it has to do with what they did between GTA 5 and GTA 6. Also, I want to give you my first impressions of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake. I played it yesterday. Could not believe how amazing and great and awesome it is. Uh, I think the scores are definitely deserved. I'm sure we'll get into the 18th discussion about whether or not it should be in contention for game of the year. That's all fun and well and good. Now, if you're watching this later, don't forget to hit the like button. That really helps me out. It helps more people find the video. Also, make sure you're subscribed. Make sure the bell button is pressed and you can help us with our goal of getting to 600 paying members. Click join. It's five bucks a month. You get access to the Discord, the member board, and those streams where you can make me play any game you want on a Friday. All right, so let's get into the first thing because the GTA online situation is actually pretty interesting. So about 13 years is how long we've been waiting for GTA 6. And Take 2's CEO just explained something that I think could give us a picture into how they plan to treat GTA 6 online. It turns out that Rockstar spent the last 13 years not just sort of making the new game. They were actually doing something that made people stay inside of a game. And if GTA Online changed Rockstar's entire business model, I think GTA 6 Online could actually change what Grand Theft Auto becomes. All right. In a recent interview, Take 2 CEO Strauss Selnik explained how Rockstar used to operate. They used to release a game, they would move on to another project, and then they would come out with something new. Now, that's how we got games like Midnight Club, Max Pain, Red Dead Redemption, Grand Theft Auto. But Grand Theft Auto 5 changed everything because when they launched GTA Online in 2013, they discovered something incredibly valuable. Instead of constantly releasing new games to bring players back, they could keep people engaged in the same game for years and they could generate recurring revenue by continuously adding new content. Now, that model was so successful that GTA Online is still being supported more than a decade later. And I actually think this tells us something very important about GTA 6 online. Rockstar now has over a decade of experience operating one of the most successful online gaming ecosystems in the industry. They've learned what keeps players coming back, how to maintain engagement, how to build your business essentially around an ongoing game. So why wouldn't they take everything that they've learned from GTA 5, GTA Online, and then apply that to GTA 6 online? Now, I'm not saying they've confirmed anything specific, but I would not be surprised if GTA 6 Online was not built from the beginning to evolve around a 10 or even a 15-year plan. Because the difference is this time, they're not sort of reacting to the response or reacting to the popularity. They're fostering the popularity. They're planning for it. They have goals in mind for GTA 6's online player funnel. How many people are going to play? How much money are they going to spend? So, it doesn't mean that GTA Online is the reason that GTA 6 took 13 years. Game development is complicated. They shipped Red Dead Redemption 2 during that time. But the success of their online component fundamentally changes the economics of developing another sequel. And if Rockstar can repeat the success that they had with GTA 6 online, we could be looking at a much longer window before GTA 7. So, my takeaway is pretty simple. GTA 5 taught them how to keep a game alive for a decade. GTA 6 has likely been built to last for a decade. So instead of learning on the fly, they're going to be crafting the plane before it takes off. So interested what you guys think. Leave comments below. Make sure you're here for the live streams so you can be here for the lively discussions and the back and forth cuz I really do think a lot of people are going to start to look at this and be like, "Hey, when are we going to get GTA 7?" Because GTA 6 online, I've got my own theories and rumors about why it might be coming in the first quarter. It could be related to God of War's delay if in fact they did get inside information or not inside information but a timeline was shared between Rockstar and PlayStation. So that is kind of where I land on it. Wow, a completely different game. But the other major title this year, excuse me, is Zelda: The Ocarina of Time remake. And I want to give you guys my first impressions. So, I played it yesterday and I pushed out a short about this. You guys may have seen it. Uh, we have been doing a little bit more of those shorts. That's a great way to get our our feedback out there, our impressions out there. It's a great way for us to get the news out there. So, if you see those, leave a like, leave a comment, do all of the things. So, the Ocarina of Time remake looks absolutely nothing like the game that we all played all those years ago. And the thing is, it actually looks and feels how I remember it. And I actually think this is the greatest compliment that you can give to this game. So, I played yesterday. I had to resist the urge to play last night. My wife and I have been enjoying some games together. So, I didn't want to sit her have her have to sit and watch me play this game. and we went out for a birthday dinner for my birthday. Uh, and then when we came back, I was like, "Let's play, let's play something together." And we're also enjoying a show together right now. So, I had to resist the urge. But I played yesterday for you guys on stream. And here's the thing. I did not expect this to happen. It has actually been so long since I played the game. I'm 45, you know, I'll be 45 in a couple of days. And I was like, I thought I would remember more. I don't know what's around every corner. I I don't know what's about to happen next. There were genuine sections where I'm like trying to figure out the puzzles and remember what you're supposed to do. And I absolutely love that. That's the experience that I'm getting to have. Also, the crazy thing is I'm also getting to experience the nostalgia of memory. I'll go into a room, I'll hear a song, I'll go into a certain part of a town or something and I'm like, "Oh my gosh, I remember this. This is so great." So when I go into those areas and those familiar pieces of music hit or I I see something that I haven't thought about in years, it just all comes flooding back. It's this very weird combination of experiencing something for the first time, but also remembering it. It's like I'm remembering it while experiencing it. It's really, really unique. And I think the remake does an incredible job of bringing those two feelings together. the nostalgic memory of a wonderful game, but also the excitement of a brand new game to play and to figure out and a world to go and explore. The art direction is stunning. The environments are beautiful. There's this amazing sense of atmosphere. The attention to detail is incredible. Like, I saw somebody else just this morning taking notice of just the fog on the ground in the one section. Like, as you run through the fog or swing or jump, it reacts. It's really impressive that they pulled this off on the Nintendo Switch 2. The sound design is also fantastic. Just running in and out of water like really struck me as well. Designed. It makes the world feel alive. There's a lot of great ambient sounds as well. But then there's the music. I think the music is the centerpiece of the nostalgia. Like you hear those familiar melodies and it's surrounded and baked into a game with more modern visuals, controls. It just hits differently. Mechanically, the game feels fantastic. Like the movement's more fluid, the combat feels responsive. Everything feels the way that you would want an Ocarina of Time to play today. And the crazy thing is, I know the original game didn't look like this. I know that the original game didn't move like this. The combat didn't function like this, but in my head, this is how I remember the game. And I think that's what makes this remake special. It's not just sort of recreating a game from the past. It's recreating the memory. And then you get to experience it new like you haven't played it before. It's almost like a dream. It's like I it's like figments of my memory. It's like it's something that I dreamed about. I'm getting to experience it as if I've never played it. After spending some time with it, I think this is one of the best remakes and I think this is what remakes should aspire to be. Not just remind you or remake a game that you love, but to give you that feeling of falling in love with the game all over again. So, I hope you guys get to play it and enjoy it as much as I have. I really want to dive back in, but we got work to do. Okay, we got work to do. I can't play it right now. And so we're going to have a good discussion and a good day. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, guys. Thank you so so much for supporting the channel one more time with your with your viewership and your lurks and your likes. Make sure you guys are hitting that like button. Get us to 100 likes. And you guys got a bit of a climb today if you're going to unlock members choice, but we're already kicking the day off. Adam Lee Han shot first and so did you. taking that first shot and gifting a member to somebody. And the member board is up for grabs. Anybody who gifts a five bomb or more, you're in the raffle to make me play a game. The raffle has no monetary value, but when we pull your name, you can force me to play a game this afternoon. So, get your five bombs in if you want to enter that raffle. And the member board is completely clear. So, if you want to pin your comments or your questions, use the pin command or use the question command as 33rd degree gamer just did in chat. That will get you a guaranteed response from me. It goes to the member board and we feature that comment on the channel. So, you have access to the member board right from chat. You don't need to go anywhere to do that. Excuse me. Trying not to just sit here and clear my throat on the mic for you guys. And uh I appreciate you guys sending the jewels, but I don't shout those out because we don't uh I don't like them. It's a it's a bit of a nuisance, but we have to have them enabled. So curious what you guys think about the GTA 6 situation cuz GTA 6 online to me and Rick is going to jump up on that top gift board by 10 more. He wants to give himself a little bit more of a lead. Thank you so so much, Mr. Rissick. 33deree Gamer says, "Awesome feature, by the way." Oh, yeah, and let me pause the ads. We only have the ads run on the hour. So, welcome on in everybody. If you're not interested in the topics, you can use the pin command. You can ask questions about anything going on in gaming news. Usually, when we get to Friday, the news slows down like a teeny bit. So, it can be a bit more of a free-for-all this morning. And we are 10 likes away from 100 likes. We've only been streaming for about 10 minutes, so we're just getting started. So, it's a great time to get your questions or comments on the member board. You can kind of cut in line. But the interview with Strauss Zelnik to me was really informative because it's like he's basically saying that all this time that people have been waiting for GTA 6, they have been spending a bunch of that time with GTA Online. Do you I was thinking of doing the New Zealand trick for GTA 6. Will I get banned from Sony? You won't get banned. What is that? 13 gifted. Oh, all the live followers. Well, thank you, Mr. Wired Rope. He drops 13 gifts. I've never seen that color before. So, 10 and 1 2 3 for Twitch. Twitch now takes the lead away from YouTube. And that makes the top gifters a little bit more interesting. It's now 35-3 uh between Mr. Wired Rope and Rissick. Remember, the top two people get a guaranteed choice and then we raffle the third spots to anybody who's gifted five or more. So, I don't think you'll get in trouble, but I don't think it's worth doing to be quite honest with you. I know creators are going to do it. They're going to probably all do the New Zealand trick or whatever so that they can be streaming it, playing it ahead of time. I I think I did that once for something in Destiny. I think there was I I did something so like I could get into a DLC ahead of time and somebody got really mad at me and sent me a DM. They're like, "You shouldn't." Rick with the five bomb is going to keep the member train going and he wants to secure his spot and he gives YouTube the lead. Thank you, Mr. Rissick. New Zealand trick doesn't work on PS5. Well, yeah. So, that's what I was getting ready to say. You can't really get banned for doing it on PlayStation because you have to create a whole new account. You have to set the account up in New Zealand. You've got to get New Zealand money somehow as a currency for you to make the purchases or something. I don't know if you can just like attach your home address and your credit card to it. I don't think it's that simple. Thank you again, GS 170 stream on purple and then Snake Eyes with 15 stream. That's amazing. Thanks so much for being here every day, boys. Um, never was a fan. Excuse the data of sales by region. I mean, I don't think a handful of people doing that's really going to affect much, but I also, again, I don't think PlayStation cares. Now, if you get it installed and you do like the offline thing, I still think it would prevent you from playing with the United States account. I think it would see that you're region locked. It would be like, "No, you can't play this yet." I mean, I could be wrong. That could be a loophole. I did it a long, long time ago for Destiny, and I've just never messed with it since. I just don't think it's worth it. It's like, I'll play it when I play it. You know what I mean? We have a golden kappa train incoming. I think wired rope gifting helped with that. You have a limited time to earn the exclusive golden kappa emote for 24 hours. We haven't had one of those in a while. So, that's amazing. I wish it was a treasure train. I think the treasure trains are better than golden kappa. You guys can uh have a bit of an advantage in the weekly member contest when we get the when we get that. I waited 13 years. What's 18 more hours? That's what I'm saying. PlayStation share. Does PlayStation share get your region account around it? Thank you for 100 bit silver wolf bumping that cap a train just a little bit. Uh I did it on Xbox or Elden Ring. It was the best feeling ever. Uh I hear you can play with a US account if you game share. I mean it. Listen, I don't put out guides on how to do stuff like that. So I'm actually a little in the dark on if that would work or not. My assumption was that they would see the region of the account trying to play and put a stop to it. If that's a way that people are going to play early, more power to them, man. Go have fun. We're all going to have fun when it comes out. I'll I'll play it when it hits the time zone or time that I'm allowed, you know, to play in my region. I don't typically do those, you know, those sorts of things. Especially with the PlayStation, it's way harder because you have to make a separate account and go through all of the the currency setups and stuff. I just don't I just prefer not to do it. 18 hours is 1080 10 it's 1,080 more minutes. Um yeah I uh it's still the New Zealand account that plays it. Oh yeah. I mean I again I wouldn't want to boot up GTA 6 gameplay on some other account for 18 hours. I'll be at work until 5:00. Then my daughter had basketball until 8:00. By the time we eat and shower I send the kids to bed. It'll be midnight anyway. That's what I'm talking. That's dad right there. That's a dad right there. That's dad math. You're like, "Listen, I'm going to get home from work. We got to eat. We got sports ball. We got practice. We got showers. We got bedtime. By the time I'm sitting down, you know what I mean? By the time I'm resting my dogs, it's over. It's over. The day is over." And that's when you'll play. Barely able to stay awake. You know what I mean? Did it with Horizon 6. It works wonders on Xbox. Yeah. I mean, more power to you. I mean, I I don't I don't I don't think a lot of people are going to do it. I think a handful of people do it, especially content creators. Content creators especially want to do it. They want to get in there as soon as possible. Seeing all the consumers do a midnight release for Zelda Aarina time makes me so happy. I don't know why Sony will forego this with no physical releases because it almost never happens, brother. Like You you got to look at Zelda Ocarina of Time straight face, bro. Like the the average the the average midnight release of a game isn't going to get that response. It just isn't like you're you're pining for an era of time that is gone. Like I am not trying to be a Debbie Downer on a Friday. It's Friday, boys. Hit the like button. Let's have a good day. I'm not trying to be a downer. But here's the thing. That era of time is gone, man. We're going to do a midnight release for God of War Egypt. And there'd be like two dudes standing there. Everybody else would be like, "Huh? What? Why?" There's your leaderboard. Rick with 40, Wired Rope with 33, and 33, and Mike with 20. Uh, most of the people were there for the consoles and the controllers, not the actual game. Yeah. Something that's like limited supply. That makes sense. Seeing people play on their GameCube playing Super Smash while waiting for the Ocarina Time remake copies is why I love gaming. Listen, brother, I that I I think those types of things are great. I also think they happen less and less because I just don't think that people care that much anymore. You know what I mean? Phantom Blade Zero flop. Huh? Are you testing out a bot? Like, are you going to go and try and bait streamers by saying that? Do you're not Yeah, you're not serious. You're You're That's got to be a joke or that's just really weak bait. Phantom plays zero flop. Last I checked, Sony is a part of the rich. Huh? What's happening right now? I think we have bots in the chat. No dis, no buy killed it. It did. It did. Poor Phantom Blade Zero. It did so poorly. The rich corporations are the enemy. That's great, man. I tell you what, I'm not in the mood for people like you today because I don't think you're serious. I just think you're here to cause trouble. So, find somewhere else to hang out. Who remembers getting a game poster from GameStop at the midnight release? The last time I went to a midnight release, I believe it was MW3. I believe it was MW3 and it was like, I am never doing this again. Like, I'm never doing this again. Monday Bates uh on a Friday be better. Yeah, I don't know what's happening, guys. We got two pinned comments on the member board. We got Lone Wolf and 33 33rd Gamer. If you want a guaranteed response from me, you got a thoughtful comment or a question, use that pin command. Um, Halo 3 was your last midnight release, huge line. Yeah, like I don't even know if GTA 6 are they doing I don't think they're doing some kind of a midnight release, are they? Didn't they say you can go get your physical GTA 6 so that you can like take it home and put the code in or what have you? cuz preload GTA 6 preload is on the 10th and I think they even didn't they back up the date that you can go pick up your physical copy now. I feel like they did. I might I might be I might be wrong, but I thought I read that that like they backed that up. You can go in and get your code or whatever. You don't have to wait for the uh for the 19th or whatever because it's not a disc. It's a code. But it's just going to trigger a download, which is what everybody else is doing. Red Dead was my last midnight release. I think it was MW3 for me. And I was like, "Yeah, I'm never doing this again." It wasn't worth it. It wasn't worth it. I got back home and I was like, "I am not doing that again, dude." I was in line behind a guy who was of the huskier size. He had his camo jacket on, smelled like he hadn't bathed in two weeks, and I was like, "These are not my people, dude. I'm not doing this ever again. This homie, this homie is like, "Brother, you gotta come on, man." You know what I'm saying? You got to jump in that shower before you go out into the public. You don't got to do that if you're gaming all day. You want to be a gremlin, you go right ahead. But, brother, there are people in your proximity, man. My last midnight release wasn't even at midnight. It was like 900 p.m. for Borderlands 4. Really? Yeah. I think the MW3 one I don't think we got po I think I got a poster actually. I think I did get a poster. I got like a metal case or something for the for the game like you know like the the steel case that they do and I feel like I got a poster. Seeing YouTubers I don't know who that is. Lineup for the Switch 2 and Zelda Ocarina of Time is what it's all about. I don't know what it is but Nintendo has that hype. Makes you feel like a kiddo all over again. Well, Nintendo has the advantage of being like outside of what Atari, KCO Vision, you know, and some of the other, you know, at home consoles, Nintendo is the grandpa. I mean, it's the it's the grandfather of the gaming world at some level. And so, they have all that nostalgia that they can pull. And I listen, I get what you're saying. You're like, that's what it's all about. I with with as much respect as I can muster. I just don't think so. I don't think a lot of people I don't think that's what it's all about for them anymore. They're not about like going and standing in line at some store for a video game anymore. I just think that era of time has has largely come to an end. I don't think Nintendo would get away with this with every game. like a big big mainline Pokemon and a Zelda. Sure, maybe the next line Mario, but they wouldn't have done this for like Donkey Kong or Mario Kart because no, like very almost nobody would have gone. They'd have been like, "What?" And the midnight release for Mario Kart like what? Um the fact that uh Ocarina of Time remake is all in the cart is Chef's Kiss. Well, I mean, you have a distinct advantage when your games aren't that large. Like, you would How many discs would it have taken for GTA 6 to fit on? You know what I'm saying? Like, do you really I I don't know about you, dude. I'm not about to be like, "Dude, I got the physical edition here. I got three discs." Like, or however many it would be. Like, I'm good, bro. I don't know. I I can appreciate people that enjoy those things. I can appreciate people that remember how great those times were. But I'm here to tell you, most gamers have just moved on from all that. I'm telling you, Pokemon Wind and Waves will have lines a block long. That's what I said. Like a Pokemon and a Zelda and maybe a mainline Mario. Nobody else is going to get this kind of treatment. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Not even a Call of Duty. I You did a midnight release of Call of Duty. I Nobody's doing this. They're like, I'm not going to go to the store and stand in line for a call of for a call of duty mainline Pokemon. Sure. Maybe a mainline Mario and then a a massive what is considered to be one of the greatest video games ever made gets remade. Of course, people are lined up and having fun. But I would bet on average the stores that did this, you had less than 20 people standing around. I hope Metroid Ravenous gets a midnight release. You're going to see what I'm talking about. If Metroid Ravenous did a midnight release, again, I just I don't think you'd have this massive response of people, you know, standing around and wanting to do the the midnight releasing. I just I just don't think so. I just think again I think that most consumers have just thought yeah why would I bother you know doing that wasn't comparing it to anything just nice saying that it's uh you have a game on the cart you don't have to download it on the Switch and take up space huh what are you talking about I don't think that that's true I might be incorrect here But it's my understanding that when I put that cartridge in there, it installs the game and then takes up space. I thought for sure I did that with Breath of the Wild, unless the whole game wasn't there for Breath. Like, I'm pretty sure when that cartridge goes in, it's not playing it right off the cartridge. It still installs and takes up space. It's the install file. The whole game's there and able to be installed, but I don't think you can like play off of the cartridge. I don't do a lot with my Switch, so I could be wrong here. You have to install an update as soon as you put the cart in. Well, there you go. I mean, there the game is off the cart. It does not. So, it doesn't install. Did they switch that from Switch One to Switch two? I'm fairly certain that Breath of the Wild was installed on my Switch One even though I had the cartridge. Yo, what's good, GameStation? How are you? There was 200 standing outside for Zelda in my city. 200? All the pictures I saw were like small little groups of people. Where do you live? Oh, here he comes. AND A 50 BOMB COMES IN FROM Silent Spartan. He's like, I want to watch some more Persona. You He jumps to the top of the leaderboard. Hidden Siri. He goes, "There he is. This Oh no. Why is it glitching at the top? How many did he do? Did he just do the one? It looks like he's doing Oh, he just did the one. It's glitched at the top. It looks like he's just going. He's just like dropping 200 members. MTO says no silent no more. Oh no, he did do a second one. Oh my gosh. It looks like he did four. It looks like he's done like 18 at the top. That's not what he's doing. And another 50 bomb comes in from Silent Spartan. Well, you guys better hit the goal now because this homie this homie just made it pretty easy. You guys only need about a hundred members now. All right, let's let's get it. Anybody else that wants to make me play a game, you only need a fivebomb and you're entered into that raffle. Now, the raffle has no monetary value. You don't win anything of monetary value. You can make me play a game. I buy the game on my own. I install it. I play it. It doesn't do anything for you other than the sheer joy of making me play something. So, if you've been holding out on doing a five bomb, now's the time to do it because you guys only need about 100 more members. Silent just made it like super duper easy. And it's glitched out at the top of the screen. It looks like he gifted like 1050 bombs. He did two, which is amazing, but he didn't do like 10. That would be that would be insane. It would break chat. Not very silent of him. Don't I see three on my fan funding? I see that he's done two. It's Enjoy just did a 41-month renewal and a five bomb comes in from Jack Garland entering the Lono. Oh, I'm sorry. The members choice raffle. Silent really is that dude. He is. I think a lot of people are going to hold off on doing their five bombs for the raffle until they know we're going to hit the goal, which makes perfectly good sense. You're like, I'm not going to spend my 25 bucks if we're not going to hit the goal. I get it. Once we get close, I think that's when everybody will start throwing in to be like, oh, I'll enter the raffle for the 25. B41 is zero. Thank you so much for 44 months and renewing. I'm pretty sure it's glitched. Yesterday was so good. I was nine when Ocarina Time came out and I got to watch my youngest son who is nine experience it for the first time. Yeah, I don't know if I'm going to be able to get my kids to play it. I just don't know. I don't know if I'm going to be able to get them to play it. They're so deep in the throws of Fortnite and that stupid pirate token. They're going to want to play. What are you doing, Silent? Silent just dropped another 50. We'll have to we'll have to adjust here and just combine. He just did another 50 on Twitch. Gy Christmas before one is zero. Just gifted one. If you guys want to be in contention for the raffle to make me play something, you got to gift a five bomb or higher or you can do five singles. It's totally fine. However you want to do it. Okay. So, yeah, he just completely hijacked the leaderboard. He's up there twice. No, we'll combine him. Yeah, it's glitching out. It looks like B41 is zero is just renewing and gifting and renewing and gifting over and over again. B41 is zero. Dude, you got to chill out, bro. He's like, "Renew gift. Renew gift. Renew gift." Gman, he really wants that persona stream. Well, the beauty is now it'll it'll always be viewable on YouTube. I don't know if you guys haven't been here. We can no longer do um we can no longer do membersonly streams on YouTube. As soon as we stopped doing it this week, everything got fixed. Our shorts started doing what they were doing. Our uploads started performing better. We cannot do members only content on the channel because we had to delete it. So what we're doing is we're doing unlisted streams where we go membersonly chat. That means you guys can always go and watch it. Yes, that means people can go and watch if they're not a member, but I'm making the content for you guys that support. I don't care if people want a loophole. Five bomb from Silent Hill. I'm sorry. No, from Mile High. Silent Hill. I don't know why I said that. I'm I'm losing it. Thank you so so much, Mr. Mile High. Um, so I I I decided that I wanted to legislate to you guys. You guys support. You're the reason I'm able to do this full time. I mean, this wouldn't happen without you guys and the overwhelming amount of support that we get. Okay. So, and here come all the five bombs. Everybody's want to enter that raffle to make me play a game. There's a five bomb from Steam Deck. We got a five bomb from Mile High. Make sure you guys are in contention. I'll refresh it right now. I'll tell you how many. And then Alex comes in with the five bomb on Twitch. Thank you so much, sir. We have Rick is in content. Well, no, not Rick. Rissick's actually in second place. So, Wired Rope, Mike on the Mic, Neo Reaper, Cardock, Ren, Alex, Broken Earth, Lone Wolf, Pan Gamer, Hidden Sear, Lone Wolf, I already said your name. You're in here twice. Oh, cuz you get it on both. Ginger Prime and Bass Guru. and Bass Guru. You guys are all in contention for the raffle. If I pull your name, you can make me play a game. If you know the game that you want me to play, please put it in the Discord. There's a room for this so that if I pull your name and you're not here, I still play the game and you can go watch it later. You can go watch the past broadcast. You do not have to be present to win. All right? You don't have to be present to win. Um, so yeah, that that is uh that is how we do it. So, make sure you're in the Discord and put the game in there that you want me to play. If it's not in there and I run the raffle, if you're in chat, you can obviously tell me and that's fine. I'll give you like a minute or two. We'll we'll run the raffle like 10 minutes before we go to the round table. If I run the raffle and you're here, you can just tell me in chat. If you're not in chat, I'm not going to sit around. I can't sit around and wait all day, right? We got to go to the round table. So, we will uh we will go ahead and and pull those from the Discord. And a five bomb comes in from the Cisco and silent. I know what you want. He says he says with a $5 super chat. Persona 5, please. Thank you. Cisco gifts of five. And we count all $5 super chats as one as well. So, that rounds us out 140 to 68. Uh, and our two people that are guaranteed spots are Rissick and Silent Spartan. Hey, Williams in chat. Good to see you, William. And we got three comments pinned to the member board. If you guys use the pin command or the question command, you can pin your comments to this fancy member board and then your and your comment gets featured. So, we have three people in the queue right now. I usually go to the member board once we have five or more or so. So, make sure that you guys are doing that. Off topic says, "Noberto, did you ever get back to Alan Wake 2?" No, I did not. I don't have the time. I feel like I need long play sessions with that game. So, a Ratchet game cancelled. Yikes. It was that mobile like live service game. It was like a mobile arena battler or something. It they didn't cancel it. They're no longer supporting it. Like it wasn't. I think it came to the market, didn't it? Five bomb from Winged Wheel. And winged Wheel is now in the raffle. Guys, a five bomb puts you in the raffle. I'm going to always say this. I have to say this. The raffle has no monetary value. You just can make me play a game if your name gets pulled. Live service is dead. Rejoice. I mean, I don't care if you want to throw out a live service game on mobile. Ricky Bobby with a five bomb. There it is. Another one entering the ravel. Thank you, sir. I knew I told I was telling you guys I was like, I bet everybody's going to wait. They're going to wait. Nobody wants to do the five bomb if we're not going to hit the goal. They're like, let's wait and then once we're close to hitting the goal, then everybody's going to dogpile with their five bombs. I think that is a perfectly legitimate strategy. I don't expect you guys to be dropping a five bomb on a Monday and then we don't hit the goal and you're bummed. Like, I think it's completely legitimate. You know what I mean? That also means somebody can get an early lead during the week and uh and kind of navigate the top of the board a little bit easier. So, what were we talking about before we went on a little member train? We're talking about Oh, yeah. So, if you had the Switch One version of Zelda and you bought the upgrade for Switch 2, it might have installed it. But if you bought the physical version for Switch 2, it would have been on the cartridge. And a five bomb comes in from Rissick. Rissick's wanting to guarantee nobody bumps him from the second place spot. He's trying to stay above Mr. Wired Rope. Destroyer, thank you so much for 11 months on Twitch. Let me add it to the total. And then another single comes in for Mr. Rissick. Four to go. Four to go. Oh, on the member board. Where are we on the member board? We have four people with pinned comments to the member board. Is the Is YouTube acting up? The viewership is all over the place. We keep going up into the 400s and then back down. Like, are you guys having trouble? Thank you so much for five bomb from blind darkness entering the raffle gifts the five on Twitch. Oh. Oh, four more five bombs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, once we're at 500, anybody who hasn't five bombed yet, if you want to enter the raffle, just keep going. I don't the the what we do on stretch goal is I'll pull a second name. Does that make sense? First and second place are guaranteed. They're guaranteed. They get to pick what I play. We raffle the third spot. If we hit 750, if we hit stretch, I'll pull another name. So, you guys have a perfectly good reason to keep going. After we hit 500, you can go to enter cuz if you haven't entered yet, and you can go for stretch. So, what I'm trying to do is make it sensible. Like, you get more value if we hit a bigger goal instead of like trying to come up with weird modifiers like I got to play with a blindfold on her. Yeah, Twitch, YouTube, I'm sorry, must be having a serious problem. We are just hemorrhaging viewers. People must be having to refresh or something. I don't know what's going on. I'm not running ads or anything. Usually when the viewership drops that much, it's because I it's because it sent some ads. Um, let me just let me just do this. Let me pull the dashboard out so I can see when ads will run and just make sure they're not running. Um, and Ginger just does a fi bomb on YouTube. Thank you very very much, sir. Yeah, I don't know. It looks like people are having to refresh or something. What percentage do you get if I sub? You mean when you do a membership, like a $5 membership? I get 70. It's a 7030 split on YouTube. The video stream glitched for you earlier. Oh, it did. I'm not having any issues on my end. Yeah, my bit rate's solid. I I'm not sure what they're doing. They may They may be just having some issues. We had this happen yesterday. We lost like a 100 people out of nowhere. Um, and I did push out a short that could be bringing people in and maybe they're bouncing because we're not talking about GTA 6. Um, and Car Ren with a 10 bomb. enters the raffle as well. Thank you so much, Mr. Car Doc. Ren, there it is. We hit the goal. We hit the goal. You had to refresh. Okay. Yeah, YouTube Mobile's working fine. No issues. It looks like some people had to refresh. I was going to say we had like 420 people and all a sudden we had 350. I'm like, that's not how that happens. People are coming in to hear GTA 6 stuff and we're not hearing any GTA 6, so then they leave. Well, that's not how viewership typically works though. You don't like slowly climb to 420 and then they all leave at the same time. That usually means that the website's having an issue. Yeah, people come in and leave if you're not on topic. That 100% happens, but not that way. So, it made me have to reopen it, says Hex. YouTube mobile keeps doing the thing where the audio still works but a black screen. Yeah, they updated the mobile app and my mobile app keeps doing that. like the video freezes but the audio continues. I've I it's doing that to me on uploads. I'm like what the heck? It's gaming news, not GTA News. Well, I'm trying something with the title and the thumbnail. I feel like our titles and thumbnails were getting cluttered and I think it was confusing viewers as well as platforms. So, I'm going to go more simplistic maybe lead on the title and then just say and gaming news and my pictures on there so people should know that like they're coming into a live stream where we could talk about generally everything. But, you know, yeah, today's lead topic is GTA. I'll give you guys a little summary if you just got here. GTA 6 online. I think that we have clues about Wait, Blinds Darkness. Did I miss your five bomb? on YouTube. I feel like I didn't shout that out. Remind me. Help me out, Twitch. Did I Did I shout out Blinds Darkness? I can't remember if I did or not. Um, so basically I got it. Okay, thank you. I appreciate your honesty. You could have totally tricked me there. I would have been like, I'll let you add it. Um, so basically Strauss Zelnick did an interview with Business Insider. No, this is not the Wall Street Journal interview where the girl was like, "You don't have enough hits in your library." Uh um so this interview with Business Insider, he's he starts talking about, and I think a lot of people miss this. I don't think they caught this. He starts talking about the 13 years in between GTA 5 and GTA 6. And if you listen carefully, they changed their entire business around the way that GTA Online took off. And I took this to mean I took this to mean they are going to basically build GTA 6 online from the beginning to last 10 or more years. So with GTA 5, they kind of had to build the online in the air. It was like, well, we got to adapt. We got to adjust. It wasn't great. It got a lot of criticisms early on. It wasn't in a good place. People were really unhappy. It took a while to get where it is today. They have the distinct advantage now of the entire scaffolding of GTA 6 online has now been built to basically go the distance. That's what I think that that he was indicating in the interview. It was real It was real passing. Like if you didn't catch it, you're like, "Wait, this homie just said they changed their entire business like around the idea of of GTA 5 online. That means GTA 6 online has been built with all of that in mind." It's it's it's like it's kind of like what we've always said about Destiny, right? Like Destiny I I got this expression from Skill Up. I think it's a great expression. He's like they like to build the plane in the air. And to a certain degree, that is the definition of live service. You're building the plane in the air. There's so many adjustments and so many changes and so many things you have to do on the fly. Well, GTA 5 online isn't much different. They had to do a lot of things in the air on the fly. They had to do a lot of adapting and adjusting to players. And I think that GTA 6 online is a completely different ballgame now. from the beginning it's built. Now, I'm curious where you guys land on this. Do you think that means GTA 7 I mean I it might never happen. It might never happen. Whatever they do with GTA 6 online could be the next 10 or 15 years. They might be like, "Why would we build a seven? It's super expensive." I don't think that that's I don't think that they're going to do that. But I think it's a possibility. I think it's a low possibility. But like it's just so expensive to build a game like five. I'm sorry. Like six. It's so expensive. I can't imagine being like, "Yeah, let's do that again. It's billions of dollars. I don't know. Not for another 10 years." That's what I'm saying. A GTA 7, I think, would be even further out. Now, when I was talking about this with Creature, he made a good point. cuz he was like, "Well, what about Red Dead?" He's like, "They got to be doing a Red Dead 3." And I'm like, "You're probably right." He's like, "They got to be trying to fix Red Dead Online. They know they screwed that up. That's another great way they could make a bunch of money." And I'm like, "Yeah, you're probably right." He's like, "They opened up a studio to work on animations." And I'm like, "Yeah, you know, you're right. They could literally open a studio to make Red Dead 3. Like a Red Dead Redemption 3. They could literally just open up a new studio or just take one of those studios that are no longer needed. Like if you worked in that LA studio they built just for animations, they can just shift you over to well now you're building animations for Red Dead Redemption 3. GTA 6 took 13 years. Tech has peaked. GTA 7 isn't happening for 20 plus years, says Madden Mills. What do you guys think of that? 20 years for the next game. I'm worried that GTA 6 online is going to be 100% roleplay. I see the appeal, but when you just want to drive around and have fun and shoot randoms, I don't want to be punished for trying to have fun. I highly doubt they're going to make you go into roleplay environments, brother. I highly doubt that. I think that would be I think that would be self-destructive. I think that would force a lot of people to just not want to play you. I guarantee you there's going to be the, you know, different environments that you want to go into. 20 years, that's a bit much. If you're upset about AAA Studios with bloated budgets, maybe we shouldn't just automatically ask for sequels to games just because we want another in the franchise. Yeah, they'll have a free roam, right? They bought No Pixel because of the roleplay. Well, the question was, Ro, you might have missed what he said. His concern is, are they going to force him into role play anytime he goes in to play online? I'm like, no, I don't think so. If you just want to free roam, you just want to goof off, you just want to play with your buds, you don't got to I don't think you got to go into a roleplay environment. Tech has peaked. AI is just getting started. Yeah, I think both things can be true that tech has hit an apex where AI will speed things up. It will refine things, but I don't know how much it's going to do in the realm of like photo realism. And I mean, I guess we're seeing stuff with DLSS that's doing that. It's It's so uncanny valley right now. I' I'd love that to get a little bit better. It's super weird. Like, am I the only one that Maybe I'm off on this. I could be out in left field on this. I don't want my video games to stop looking like video games. Like I I just it just sort of came to me. I think that's why I look at some of those like hyperrealistic DLSS filters and I'm like, "No, that's not what I'm looking for. I want I want to play a video game. Like what I think was so enjoyable yesterday about Zelda is that it's a video. It looks like a video game. It's charming. It's beautiful. It has an amazing art direction. I love the reflections and the light and that the fog on the ground was so cool. But like hyper photo realism where like everything looks like real life. I'm like, "Yeah, I'm good." I like maybe once every 10 games I'm okay with something looking hyper realistic, but I'm like, brother, I don't want every game to look like that. I completely agree with you about DLSS. It looks absolutely horrible. It's really weird how people think it looks good just because it looks realistic. I feel like it's an overfixation on realism. I don't think realism is automatically a quality. It's a quality point if that's what the game is going for. Like let's take a game like if if they do a Last of Us part three. If that looks more photorealistic than The Last of Us Part Two, I think that serves the purposes of that game. Visceral, real. Oh gosh, that looked like a real That guy got shot. That was terrible. Oh, that guy's arm got broken or whatever. Oh, this is really scary. I think realism in that context is a great value point. Yeah. RE9. So when they make Resident Evil 10 and if the realism goes up, I'm like, "Yeah, I think that can serve the purposes of that game." But then the next seven games that I play don't need to look like that. Like Phantom Blade Zero. I think one of the I'm not kidding you. One of the reasons I want to keep going back to that game, the combat and I are having a bit of a disagreement. We're not really vibing, but the art style and the music, they call to me. I want to be in the world. Do you see what I'm saying? I I I can't really explain it. I had the same experience in Pragmata. Now, the gameplay in Pragmata I loved. I absolutely loved it. But I wanted to be in Pragmata. the feel, the vibe, the mu the just the music when you were like in your little safe space with with the um Oh gosh, old man brain. Dad gum it. What is her name? Oh my, that's terrible. When what does he call her? She high-fives him. I'm so mad. I told my friends last night we went out for my birthday dinner. Diane, thank No, Diana. It's Diana, not Diane. Yeah, Diana. Um, her name is Frozen. What? Uh, I told my friends this last night when we went out to dinner. I was like, I suddenly can't do that like I used to do. I used to be able to like quick on my feet like grab names of actors and stuff and all of a sudden I can't do it. It It's like it's I I get stun locked. It's your birthday. Monday is my birthday. I will be 45. And we went we like the my the my the group of people we've been in like a a a community group at our church for 15 years now. I've known some of these people for 20 years. For some reason now, two years in a row, we all get together for dinner for my birthday. My wife just sends the text and like everybody can make it. I love it. Like, and we literally said, "No gifts. I don't want any gifts. I just want to be around y'all. Like, these are like my ride or dies." You know what I'm saying? These are these are my people. And I was just telling my friend, I was like, "Brother, I just can't think of names as quickly as I used to. All of a sudden, a 45-year-old brain is like, I got nothing for you, man. I don't know who I I Anyway, the point that I was trying to make is I wanted to be in Pragmata. I wanted to be in the it's it was more than the gameplay and the the art direction. Oh, and the music. The music is really really stinking good in Phantom Blade Zero. I just want to be in Phantom Blade. I'm not super big on the combat. It's slowly winning me over. It's a little bit more palatable on easy because things just die a little bit quicker. It doesn't feel so drawn out. It's not exactly my vibe like Onimuja was, but I think that matters more. Like Zelda's calling to me, nostalgia, yes, but like being in the world was just great. And like so I don't need every game to be photorealistic. You're too saturated with video game knowledge to push everything else out. I will say this, I've been having weird ex like lately I feel like I experience everything episodically. I don't know how else to explain this. I feel like I experience everything episodically. Like I get home and I have to like replay what just happened. Like I have a like I don't know. Like even my short-term recall is not what it once was. Like I have to like recall like what were we doing? Oh yeah, we were doing this this this. I don't know. Maybe maybe I'm dying. Maybe it's early onset Alzheimer's or something, but like I definitely like feel episodic all of a sudden. And I wonder if it's because it's just a constant flurry of information every day. I take in a bunch of info, I make a bunch of content, I discuss it, and then I do it again the next day. And since nothing stays, I don't know. I feel like it's messing with me. Um it's like messing with my ability to keep everything straight. Like sometimes I don't know what day it is. I don't know. I'm getting I'm just maybe I'm just becoming old. Old old people just get confused and stuff. Um, in any case in any case, the the nature of this push for photo realism, I think it works in certain in in certain games. I think it works in certain genres, but I don't need every game to look like that. So, at one level, I'm like, yeah, tech is peaked. tech is peaked. Like you can make it look a little bit more realistic. You can make it look a little bit better, but at the same time like I don't think that matters. A lot of brain fog going around. Might be modern living. I think it's because that we I think it's because we consume too much information. I think it's too much. Do you remember those days where you would like cram and study, cram and study, and all of a sudden you just had that foggy sense of like, I don't even know what time it is. You know what I mean? I forgot to eat. And you'd like forget your phone number and weird stuff like that because like you would enter this like fog state. I wonder if we're doing that to ourselves every day now. Like we're taking in too much information. So the your brain is just like, "Yep, too much. I'm just losing I'm losing grip on basic stuff like Yeah. the name of the girl in the game that you played this year that you really really liked. Yeah, Diana. You know what I mean? Anyways, not trying to get hyper deep here, guys. Could we get 14 more likes on the video? Let's get to 200 likes. All right, let me give you the rundown of what happened over here in the corner. We have hit 500 members. It means we're doing Members Choice this afternoon. Okay, it will be on YouTube and it will not get deleted. It'll be in a membersonly playlist that you guys can watch. Okay. Silent Spartan is in first. Risk is in second. Silent Spartan is going to make me play Persona 5. I don't think anybody's going to unseat him. You would need to unseat him and Rick, which I highly doubt that's going to happen. Rick is going to have me play. I don't know what. He hasn't put it into the Discord just yet. Um, he has not put it into the Discord just yet. And anybody else that gifts a fivebomb, you will be entered into the raffle. There's no monetary value on the raffle. It just pulls a name and then you can make me play a game. So, right now is a great reason to drop your one and only five bomb of the week on the channel. It supports me and it throws you into the raffle. You're guaranteed a spot now because you guys have unlocked it. If you get this to stretch, if we go to 750, I'll draw two names. I extend the stream and I'll draw two names. I think that's fair. If you guys go that bonkers crazy and another 250 members comes piling in, that's 100 people doing no 25. That doesn't work. Never mind. I'm an idiot. That's a lot of members. If you guys do that, I'm happy to extend and I'm happy to pull another name. So that's yeah that's a lot of people doing five bombs. We probably won't hit stretch but you have two and a half hours to do it. We go till 1:00 on Fridays with the round table. So you do have time. You guys are pinning comments to the member board. Let's go to the member board. It's a good time of the day to do it. We're we're nearing the first hour of the broadcast and uh you guys will see ads in just a moment on YouTube for that first hour and then you won't see them again for another hour. So, let's pull up the first comment. This is a perk for members. It's a great reason to jump in. 33rd Degree Gamer says, "Lono, how do you go about jumping from game to game? Do you dabble a few at a time or are you more like me and you try to 100% a game before jumping to the next? It's hard when you have ADD." I've never felt like I have any of the ADD or ADHD or any of that stuff. I've had people tell me that they think I have that. I don't think I do. Um I think a lot of people self diagnose. I feel like I'm too proficient from about 3:00 in the afternoon until 6:00. Like I feel like I'm too proficient and efficient in my output of work for that to be true. So I don't think I have that. But I'll tell you how I approach games. I am more similar to you and this year has been especially difficult for that. I like to finish a game before I move on to the next. But then I also have to play a game on its launch because I really like showing off a brand new game to you guys. So I jumped into Wolverine, showed it to you guys, and then Control Resonant came out and I was like, "Yeah, I think I'd rather play Control Resonant because I was anticipating Control Resonant more than Wolverine." And then when I was done with Control Resonance, I went to go back to Wolverine and I got hooked on Star Wars Galactic Racer for 20some hours. And then I was with Star Wars Galactic Racer, Well Dweller came out somewhere in there. And I really want to go back to Well Dweller. Uh and then uh I finished Wolverine and then Phantom Blade Zero came out and then Zelda Ocarina of Time came out and that makes it really really difficult to play the games in the way that I play. So typically what I'll do is I will I will play the game launch date with you guys and then if I know I really like it, I know I really want to play it, it just gets rolled to the backlog. Like I definitely play games in order. The only thing that I'll tell you that is a little bit different that I quote unquote could be described as as dabbling would be that I play games with madam as well if if if that makes sense. Hang on. I like to be able to see the bit rate and I all of a sudden with the way we run this I can't see my bit rate. There we go. So I play games with Madam as well. So, we have been playing Neon Abyss 2. Last night was the first time we ever failed a run on easy. We must have just gotten really bad rolls. I was like, man, this feels like the difficulty spiked or something. It was the first time we ever had a failed run. And but we're really enjoying Neon Abyss 2. I wasn't even that salty. I wanted to watch the next episode of Carrie anyway. I was like, let's get out of here and let's go watch Carrie. Um, which we're thoroughly enjoying that. And so, that's really the only thing I kind of dabble. So, what I have right now in the backlog is I don't know what I I haven't made up my mind yet. I haven't made up my mind about what I need to do with Zelda and Phantom Blade. I just don't know. I think I need to play Phantom Blade first. I think from a content creator perspective, I need to prioritize Phantom Blade because y'all, this channel doesn't vibe with me and Zelda. Y'all don't vibe with Nintendo. Every time I've tried to touch a Nintendo topic or or a Nintendo game, we get pretty crappy results. Now, we got good results on the shorts, but the shorts are different. Like, that's that's quick consumable content that it's putting on people's homepages. Like, that's not a that's not a live stream. So, I'd like to finish Phantom Blade and potentially put out an opinion piece about it. Like, how did I where did I land? Was I wrong? Did I change my mind? Blah blah blah. Super super popular, super popular game that you guys all like have really vibed with. And all the Phantom Blade coverage that we did in the leadup to it did very very well. So, I feel like I should prioritize Phantom Blade, but then I really want to get to Zelda, and then I really want to get to Well Dweller, and then I haven't played almost any Deep Rock Galactic Survivor. Um, I just It's really tough right now. It's too many games. And then GTA 6 is out in 13 days. Um, it's Yeah, 13 days. It's like, it's too much. Have you played it since the most recent patch? I have not been able to. No. I we did my birthday dinner last night. We got back and it was late. I was like, "Let's play some Neon Abyss and then we'll watch an episode of Carrie and let's go to bed." And so I have not had a chance to uh I have not had a chance to jump back into um into Phantom Blade Zero since the patch. Final Fantasy Residence. Yes. Yep. I want to finish that one. I I want to play uh Star Wars Zero Company. Those are games completely outside of my wheelhouse, but I want to play them because they they they they kind of grabbed me. The the Star Wars Zero Company hasn't grabbed me because I haven't played it. But what everybody said about it, I was like, "I think I need to play that game." People are like, "You don't even have to like this kind of game and you'll enjoy it." And I'm like, "H." And I blame Cognito, you know what I mean? I blame I blame Cog because he was on the round table once he started talking about it and just wouldn't stop talking about it and I'm like dad gum it I as a Star Wars fan I have to play that sinking game. So yeah, that's where I am and I appreciate the question. I I think we're all we all approach games very differently, but that's how I've been doing it. If you guys want to pin a comment or a question to the member board, you just need to be a member on YouTube or a sub on Twitch and then use the pin command and you can pin it. I mean, right from chat. You don't have to go anywhere. Lo says, "Reminder, the New Zealand trick only works if it doesn't release at the same time everywhere. I'm pretty sure GTA does launch at the same time everywhere." What is that true? I thought it was rolling. Wyatt, I am rolling. I thought it was rolling. Um, if you guys are worried or trying to get into GTA 6 early, um, there were people talking about the the the the New Zealand trick. That's what he's referencing here. And so I I I again don't know um I I don't know how it works or how you do it. I I know with Xbox in the past, EPAD, thanks for renewing your membership. I know in the past you just like would like change your region or what have you, but I don't actually know if um if the release is rolling or not. It's rolling. Yeah, I thought it was rolling. There are so many games right now, it's actually insane. I remember playing six to 10 games a year. It's too many. It's too I'm I'm serious. It's too many. I don't even know how I'm going to because like so right now as far as games I've completed, Shape of Dreams, Galactic Racer, Control Resident, Onim, Musha Orbitals, Oniim, Musha Orbitals, Resonance, Plague Tale, AC Black Flag, Reync, Abyssus, Astral Ascent, Doom, the Dark Ages DLC, Adventures of Elliot, 007 First Light, Lego Batman, Sorrowos, Mouse PI for Hire, Dead Zone Rogue, Blaze Blueue, Entropy Effect, Pragmata, Swarm, born, Ghost of Yotay Legends, Grind Survivors, Resident Evil 9, Kairen, Crypt Custodian, Mio Memories in Orbit, Control Control 1, Mario Galaxy 1 and 2, and High on Life. That's 29 games. Once I finish Phantom Blade Zero, that's at 30. Zelda puts me at 31. Well Dweller will put me at 32. Then there's Grand Theft Auto 6, that's 33. I I don't know if I'll go back to Castlevania Belmont's Curse. I didn't like I didn't like how it felt. There's just so many. Yeah, that doesn't include um Deep Rock Galactic Survivor that finally came to PlayStation. That doesn't include um Final Fantasy Residence. That doesn't include Wolverine. Oh, did I not add Wolverine? I was like, I feel like there's one missing. Yeah, Wolverine's missing. Wolverine is number 30. Yeah, I hadn't typed it in my little list yet. Guys, you're about to get ads on YouTube. They run once an hour, okay? I only let them run once an hour. So, if you just got here, I don't want you being like, "Oh my gosh, I'm already getting ads." Once an hour. People on Xbox literally just have to change their time and restart. I'm amazed that they still let folks do that cuz I did that way back in the day. Way back in the day on Xbox for Destiny Eday. No, I haven't rolled credits on EDay yet. I think once Madam and I are done with Neon Abyss 2, I think we'll tackle Eay. Yeah, you beaten 30 games this year. Two of those in there. One's a DLC that was like a full game. The the Doom DLC was pretty big. And then Ghost of Yotay Legends was probably 12 hours. I think that counts. I mean, there's indie titles and single player games that count, you know, that take 12 to 15 hours. So, I'm including those cuz that's content that I that was relevant, new, download it, beat it. The only thing I didn't do in Legends was when the raid dropped. It dropped like two weeks after or whatever. I didn't do anything with it. So, I guess you could subtract that DLC and Legends and I'm still at 28. Like, I just like to include those because it's like that was new content. I the D the Doom DLC was like a was like literally like a new game. It was like 12 or 15 hours or something like that. It was good. Having all these games makes it easy to wait for the GTA 6 PC release. You ain't lying. All right, let me go to the member board and mark this one as answered. Let's throw Talica up on the board. She says, "Nintendo has always said that their games would be full on the cartridge. Ever since introducing the game key cards, Switch One games were always on the cartridge." This is where I was misunderstanding. I I could have just not understood how my Switch One worked. It was my understanding that I put the Nintendo I'm sorry, I put the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild cartridge in and then it installed the game cuz I'd go to play it and it would be like, "We need your cartridge." I felt like I uninstalled that game from my Switch to save space. I feel like I remember doing that. Oh, I still haven't played the Yote DLC. I still haven't played the otay DLC which I heard is quite good. It's too much. Too much boys. Yeah. Did RZ add his game to members choice yet? RZ, if you're here and you can hear me, make sure you throw your game that you want me to play into the Discord. All right. I don't know if we can. What is this? Okay. Sorry. Uh I don't know what that is, but All right. Oh, hang on. Let me go back to pausing. Imagine a little waking up out of a coma and being like, "Oh no, how much bigger has my gaming backlog gotten?" Uh, people are fools. It takes up storage. That's what I'm saying. Like I was like, am I am I backwards on this? PlayStation preload is midnight by region. Xbox is midnight GMT. Yeah, but if if if Gears is rolling, uh if Gears is rolling, then I would imagine you're going to be able to get in early if you do the Xbox trick. The Xbox trick totally works. I did it. I did it back in the day for uh for Destiny. So anyways, okay, let me get back to the member board. Oops, that's not what I wanted to click on. Let's get Talica's down. All right, we got seven comments still pinned here. One of them is just a a positive comment here. Calypso says, "I didn't realize how amazing Oni Musha is." It's okay. We We forgive you. It is, in my opinion, it's the best action game I've played. If if if we're talking melee based action where you have like a, you know, a sword or a sword and a shield or something, melee based action games. I think it's the best action game I've ever played. Um, it's just immaculately built. It has a few rough edges that I was critical of. The some of the retread, I didn't mind any of the retread until the one map. It was like one of those maps that was like really winding and like you had to go down ladders and up and down ladders and move things with chains and pulleys. retreading that for like the dogs and yeah, I think it was the dogs like the guys that you shoot with the bow and arrow. I don't think they sent you there for those guys, but you had to go there for the dogs. That was the one time where I was like, "This is really bad retread, boys. You shouldn't have brought me back here." And then I didn't like how the final boss fight kept getting interrupted with like miniature cutscenes. That was pretty much it. The archer missions didn't bother me because they were pretty quick, you know? I I I like the ones where you look for like the secret treasure with the picture. Um, you know, you know, there were people that didn't like the uh the enemy variety. They didn't like the enemy variety and they didn't like the fact that like bosses repeated. I actually kind of liked that the bosses repeated because when one showed up that you recognized and you had kind of memorized all their telegraphs, it was really fun to play against them. The tone shift from the original Onimusha game to this one is weird and off-putting. Yeah, I wouldn't know that anything about that. I didn't play any of the originals, so I jumped in with this one and just just loved it. The two repeating bosses were the worst. The dog and the demon. The dog. I didn't mind the dog at all. I didn't like the pair of dogs because you just had to dodge the whole time and when you got the dodge down it was like a stupid easy kind of almost brain dead fight but like I don't know the dog fight was weird where it was the two of them because break is on that one seemed really effective but it also seemed really inconsistent. I couldn't get consistency out of it so I just dodged and then it was literal easy mode. But if you try to do the break ising on the dogs that the the pair, it's super effective and really fun, but I couldn't get consistency out of it. It's such a it's such a a a small window that I just I couldn't find success with the um with the break isn't on the dogs, the the pair of them. So, you guys are using the Q command, the question command, the pin command. All of those commands work to pin your comments to the member board. All right. And we got one here from Terror says, "Silence Spartan the goat. I really enjoy members choice." Thanks. Well, I'm glad you guys enjoy Members Choice. I'm glad it's going to be able to stay on the channel. I hope people catch the vision for what we're trying to do. You know, we we really are trying to add as much value as possible. When you're here and you're a member, you get the member board. You can get members choice on Fridays. You can get me you get you get members lounge every day of the week. We have the members Discord. I've tried to be a little bit more active in the Discord. We do the town hall on Friday in the Discord for folks to kind of like share how they feel like things are going or share feedback. And so I really appreciate that. I know that doing members content on YouTube has become a bit of a hassle and a headache and we have to do it in kind of a convoluted way. Um, but I hope you guys catch the vision there that we're we are I am trying to give as much as I possibly can to people that support the channel. So, can't wait to hear some more awesome Persona music. I appreciate it. I am legislating to you guys. I am organizing the the the the channel and the flow and the content and everything around you guys. I want you guys to end the week and be like, I got a ridiculous amount of content and value. it was worth the five bucks a month. If somebody's like, "No, I don't think that's worth it." Or, "No, I can't afford it." That's respectable as well. But I'm worried about the people that actually do it. If you do that, that's what I want you to say by Friday. I want you to be like, "Wow, I I there's more content here than I can shake a stick at, you know?" So, overd delivery is is the is the goal here. What are these jewels? But here you go. So, what they're trying to do is is they're trying to mimic the thing that you do on other platforms where people stream vertical. The people that are like this, they're like, "What's up?" You know, "What's up, guys? Yeah, thanks for the gifts." D. They're trying to mimic that. It doesn't work in this format. And so, they're giving you guys free jewels to then use in the chat. I don't shout them out because I don't want them because they're disruptive. If you want to support me with money, jewels is not the way. I You can super chat. You can use the tip command and send the money direct. You can gift members or just do your own membership. Jewels is just Yeah, I got to get $300 together by the 15th so I can get my speakers in GTA in time to give them time to deliver them. Nice. So, all right, let's keep going to the member board. This is a great reason to be a member because once there's so many comments and questions in there, I kind of live there, right? I kind of live there. That that's a that's a really really great way for you guys to feel like, hey, it's not a membersonly chat, but man, it's it's worth it to be one because we we're just going to kind of spend our time here for a while. Have them use jewels to hype the stream videos. Can we talk about that for just a Can we talk about this for just a second? They they did that rather quietly. So, you can hype videos and that's supposed to help them. It doesn't seem to help. It seems to help big streamers and big content creators only, which is entirely against the purpose of the hype. The hype was supposed to help like smaller channels. Now, they've done it where you can hype with money. And I'm like, say what now? Like what? I I don't I don't think I like that. I can't really give a clear reason why. It ra it immediately raised my hackles. I'm like, everybody pump the brakes here. I don't want you spending your money to promote my content. No. You want a super chat? You want to send me a tip? You want to gift members? Great. You're saying, "Hey, man. Love the content. Here's here's here's a little tip. Here's a little extra lono. Thanks for all you do." But like you paying money so that my video might get more views. Number one, there's no value transmission there to you. It might not even do anything. It might not even work. If you throw 20 bucks on my video, it might not even do anything. Yeah. And it could turn into pay to win. Somebody could create an alt and throw a hundred bucks on their video. Like it's I'm like, "What the freak are we doing here?" YouTube Twitch tried that and the whole platform almost collapsed. They quietly released that because I went to hype somebody's video the other day and I'm like, "Hype with jewels?" I'm like, "What? No." So, hear me say this. Do not do that for my videos. I do not want you doing that. That to me is not a good value transmission to the consumer. Like, you guys are not getting anything out of that. like the joy of gifting to other people, knowing that the super chat goes to support me and then you get your little message in chat. Sending a tip direct with the tip command knowing you know that supports me. Paying to hype a video may literally do nothing. Now, yes, it's given it's supporting me. You're giving me money, but like again, it may do literally nothing. You could throw 20 bucks on somebody's video, hype it with jewels, and it doesn't even have an impact. So, I'm here to tell you, please don't do that. I don't want you guys spending a single dime on my channel for that. That is such a I man, that I don't like that at all. It really bothers me. It's like, let the algo do it. Do what it's going to do. You know what I mean? If the content's good, people are vibing and commenting, let it do its thing. Don't arbitrarily let some whale just boost some video. That's stupid. That's You're corrupting what makes this platform great. That's one of the best things about YouTube is that if you put in the work and you make good content and you do the research and you got it titled and tagged well and and you're delivering on the promise of the title and the thumbnail, you can find success on the platform. You can I didn't do this do this hype thing with jewels. Anyways, I don't want to blavorver that point, but I don't want you guys doing that. Um, Angry Pete says, "Your short gave us your thoughts on the Ocarina of Time remake, but have your kids tried it?" They have not. They have not. Here's one of my frustrations with Nintendo. I I would have to buy the game multiple times. Like I had to buy the Splatoon Raiders game twice so my wife and I could play it together. We ended up not liking that game that much. We liked it for about 10 hours and then it got super duper repetitive. Um and we put that thing down. I was like, "This is not fun, babe." I was like, "We're getting new weapons and we're getting to new areas and it looks and feels exactly the same." There was like no difference. I mean, we love a good looter shooter, you know what I mean? But the guns have really got to change things. Um, I'll hype your videos by shouting as loudly as I can in the warehouse. You got to watch this Reforge video. That's my man right there. Let the people know. You know what I mean? You let them know that there's a new Reforge video out. Is Madam going to try Zelda? Listen, I'm I'm I'm real close to trying something. I'm very close to trying something. I wonder if her and I could kill these last couple of bosses in Neon Abyss 2 and then like I buy the game a second time and we both just play the game, you know, on each of our own respective televisions like we did with Hogwarts Legacy. I feel like she might vibe with it. I just don't know. I don't know. I'm gonna have to have her kind of like watch me play for a little bit and then see what she thinks. So, we'll see. I'm glad you spoke to people paying to hype a video and you said don't do it. I can imagine supporters misguidedly dumping money to support you. Well, if I could turn it off, I would. I don't mind you guys hyping my videos. You get so many hypes a week or whatever. So many hypes. That's fine. If you want to use your hypes on me, it doesn't cost you anything. It's just you're just hitting a hype button or whatever. If you want to use your hypes on me, that's fine. If I could turn that off, I would. It's like I do not want people being able to hype my videos with jewels. I don't like the way that feels. If you want to support me with a super chat, a membership, or gifted members, that is great. That's in this that's in this environment. I can say thank you. I'm like, "Hey, thanks so much. It's how I'm able to do this." I'm like, "Hey guys, help us get to 600 paying members." Right? That's like community growing. You being like, "Here's money that might or might not help this video." Maybe like no like absolutely not. When she hears the music that should be the deal breaker that when you say dealbreaker you mean like that's that's what's going to get her to do it and Rissick drops a single gifted and gets us to 504. As a reminder guys, the two top giftters right now are Silent Spartan and Rissick. Okay, that obviously could change if Sony passes up Rick. uh in the uh in the top gifter spot. You would need to pass him. He currently has 46. Okay. The next in line is Wired Rope with 33 and Cardock around with 25. Anybody who has gifted five or more members this week, you also have a shot at making me play a game. So, if you haven't done your weekly five bomb, now's a great time to do it. It'll enter you into that raffle. That raffle has no monetary value. It is purely to make me play a game. If you guys get to this uh if you get this to 750 before I go to the round table with Ginger and the boys, then I'll pull two names so you can increase the number of games I play. Uh let's go here. Let's go gaming round table. Let's use this fancy timer. Um, when do I Hang on. I think I need to go here. Open the tool timer label gaming roundt roundt time duration. Uh it's going to be today at I'm gonna call it at 1250p. set duration and then I don't know how to make it show up. I don't remember how to do this. Wait, I can't figure out how to get it to show. Um Oh, wait. Here it is. Here it is. Got it. What happened to my camera? That was weird. I don't know why my I don't know why the camera does that every once in a while. I thought it was that I had too many things plugged into the USB, so I unplugged the one thing, but it's happening again. I'm broke as a joke in Zelda right now. I've forgotten my money making ways. Yeah, I don't know why that happens. I that's been happening at random. Um the camera's working fine. It's just literally that like OBS just needs to be like smacked. I can't watch your stream. It's not 60 fps. That's completely understandable. I I respect it, DTO. You know what I mean? Wait, why is it not running? There we go. There we go. An hour and 45. Yeah, that works. Okay, I refreshed and it was still stuck. It was just the camera. Like my voice was working. I was just messing with you guys. You know what I'm saying? I was just I was just holding unbelievably still. Just holding unbelievably still. Um, okay. Let's go back to the member board. And we've got a comment here from Draus Pander. He says, "I am an admitted photo realalistic snob, but fully actualized reality in gaming would be off-putting in my opinion. Just short of real life is my sweet spot." So, the reason he's saying this is I went on like a teeny tangent. It wasn't like a like I wasn't like ranting or angry or anything. Thank you, Krono, for the raid, guys. Krono will be on the round table with me today. I went on a little bit of a tangent, and what I said was, I kind of want my video games to keep looking like video games. I think it's fine in certain times, in certain games and contexts, to say, "Yeah, this game should be as photorealistic as possible." Right? I think that's great. I think that's fitting. I think there are places where it makes really really good sense to do that. I also think that it's becoming something that we're doing too much of it. Like I love a video game to still look like a video game if that makes sense. Zelda when I played it recently and then I referenced Phantom Blade Zero. One of the reasons that Phantom Blade Zero is still calling to me, it's not because of the combat. Me and the combat are having a little bit of a disagreement. We I may be able to get into a flow state with it. I may be able to feel like, yeah, this is okay. I'm starting to get it. I'm starting to get into, you know, flow state or what have you. It's because of the art direction. It's also because of just the vibe of being in the world. The music especially in Phantom Blade is exceptional. DK Baker, did I thank you for the single gifted or did I get I think I might have gotten tripped out and missed it. I think DK Baker was trying to do a 20 bomb setup. Um, let me add it to the total. There we go. We're at 505. Um um so the the thing that's trying to pull me back into Phantom Blade Zero is literally the vibes. It's literally the feel. It's it's literally like, yes, I want to be in this world. I want to be in this game. And some of it's the fact that it's, you know, it's the art direction. It's the feel. I don't necessarily need Phantom Blade Zero to be hyper photorealistic if that if that makes sense. So the photo realism thing I just think has to be properly contained and dealt with and used in the best ways. It shouldn't just be put everywhere like Johnny Apple Seed. I'm with Lucas on this one. I don't need my video games to look like I'm actually touching grass. I do that in real life. Yeah, but in the in the in the right context and in the right games, I definitely think it makes sense. Like I said, like The Last of Us Part 3. Well, yeah, The Last of Us Part Three is going to be served by having a hyper realistic, you know, art direction. You want it to be visceral and realistic and and grounded. You want it to feel that way. The city map is where it's at with Phantom Blade Zero. Yeah, I haven't even made it very far. And I just like the vibes. I just like the feel. I do. I'm like, this is just a dope game to be in. Even if the, you know, even even the combat's not my favorite. There's nothing like a captivating world and good gameplay. Photo realism has a place in gaming, but it isn't always necessary. I wonder if it's almost like I wonder if it's tantamount to why we enjoy a good fantasy story. Like you wouldn't if you really like reading fiction. If every fiction book that you picked up and read was based in the world we live in right now, you might enjoy it, but not necessarily like, well, that's all I ever want to read. Like you might be like, "Yeah, I want to read fiction that's based in our time sometimes, but not all of the time. You want a good fantasy. You want good sci-fi. You're go you want to go to other places." I do think art direction in a video game can essentially deliver that idea in a subversive way. You're going to another place. You're going to another time. If it's all photorealistic, it can literally start to feel like, well, we're not I don't know. It can start to blend with everything else that's out there. And then you're like, well, I don't really know if this feels like I'm going to another place in another time. It feels like I'm just in another photorealistic environment. Also, it's really hard to have identity. I want to see you play Ace Combat 8. Okay, Rissick, is that your game? Okay, I'll I'll have to That's fine. I'll have to buy that. Which I probably should buy that anyway. Everybody has screamed about how good it is. And they're like, you don't even have to like these kinds of games and you'll like it. So, Rick is in second place, so that's his choice. He'll only get bumped if the person in third bumps him. He could still be in the raffle. So, the advantage of being a top gifter is if you get bumped out of the top gifting spot, you're still in the running for the raffle and you still might get to make me play a game. That's a good parallel. Fantasy and sci-fi are my favorite fiction game. So, that makes sense. I gang, thanks so much for jumping back in and bumping the line. Yeah, good choice, Rissick. So, yeah. Yeah. and we'll pull the raffle at 10 minutes to the hour. That's what this countdown's for. That's when we'll do the raffle. Um, I'll show you the leaderboard, Batch. So, the raffle will do in an hour and 40. So, Silent Spartans in first and second. That doesn't count. He's got 150. So, he's in first place. Rick is in second with 47. So, you you need to beat Rissick if you want to get a guaranteed spot. Rick says, "I dare you to." And he drops another 10 bomb to secure his spot a little bit more. So So Rick now uh a little bit higher with a with a uh with a 57 with a 57. So it's 150 to 57 and then Wired Rope has 33. So if you don't want to go for one of the top spots, just do a five bomb and be done with it. You'll be in the raffle. If you're trying to maybe consider do I go for a top gifting spot, it's cheaper for you to just do the five bomb than to try to beat Rick right now because to beat Rick right now you would need 58 gifteds to beat him. So yeah, the photo realism discussion to me I think it's harder also for a game to have identity within photo realism. I think it's a little bit more difficult. You've really got to carve out like iconic characters and you really got to carve out like vibes and feels. Like you can't just be like here's realistic trees and realistic world. Like how do you have identity when the trees and the rivers look like trees and rivers? Like I think that can be very difficult. You're going to have to bake things into that world that create the identity. Like what we saw like in the Witcher 4 tech demo. It was very photorealistic and yet it had it had a vibe. It had a feel. Does that make sense? I think that that is a significant challenge that you will always be facing whenever you're dealing with a whenever you're dealing with an art direction that is trying to find and and and establish its identity and carve out its identity within a photorealistic environment. I think that can be significantly challenging. So, the mobile app keeps doing the black screen. I can tell that people have been having a bunch of problems today. We we can't hold viewers right now. I keep getting the 400 410 and then we lose 30 or 40 or 50 people like like that. One thing that does help is when you guys hit the like button, that communicates to YouTube that people are enjoying the content. So, if you haven't hit like today, go ahead and do that. Give it a thumbs up. I am sorry that YouTube's been having a bit of a conipion. I have tried to remove every barrier between you and the content. I run normal latency because that doesn't give as much buffering and the ads only run once an hour. I I can't do anything else to smooth out the process. The app is having some issues. So maybe check and see if there's a new version. You can always uninstall and reinstall the app. Sometimes that fixes it. Let's go back to the member board. And I got a new one from uh Retaxis says, "Hey Lono, do you think Phantom Blade Zero is better than Wolverine?" I mean, I really wouldn't compare these games. They're completely different. It would all that's kind of like asking me which is better, Horizon or God of War. Like there's there's obviously some adjacency, but not enough similarities to compare. Like I would say that there are things that might make you lean in one direction versus another. Like I think your moment to mo moment choices in Wolverine are clearer, but I think the depth of combat and variety in Phantom Blade Zero is far more vast. So you have to kind of ask the question like what are you looking for? Um, there's kind of a sweet spot in Wolverine. Um, your short took off from last night. The new members lounge looks like it helped. I put out a short yesterday. It's also doing well. Switching to the new format for members lounge has had an it had an immediate effect. Everything started to look better. We were definitely heading towards a bad a bad situation again. And I'm glad we caught it when we did. And I hope you guys are are are happy to continue to get the members content on the channel. Honestly, it benefits you guys. It benefits you guys because we don't have to delete them anymore. I just hope people catch the vision and decide to become members. And don't look at it as like, well, I don't need to become a member now. Like, I really hope that's not people's conclusions. If that's people's conclusions, then, you know, that makes me a little sad. But the benefit to you is we don't have to delete the content anymore, and it doesn't hurt the channel. And that's really primarily why we had to make the change. So, um, but yeah, it's hard to say which one's better. I mean, commercially, Phantom Blade Zero is is kicking the dog crap out of Wolverine. I mean, Phantom Blade Zero has a massive audience on PC and in China that Wolverine obviously can't have. And I admitted this yesterday. I don't know how you can't admit this. I think Wolverine had soft, you know, a soft sales tale. It had a really strong start and then it and then it tapered. Now, on this subject, I'm seeing a lot of the pro PlayStation guys, they're running to Lin Tao's comments about the game. And if I were you, I would pump the brakes on that because Lind Tao also had a lot of things that were pretty positive to say about Marathon that I thought were bull. I don't have another word. The stuff she said about Marathon the one time, it was BS. It was corporate spin. Like, so I wouldn't take Lint Ta's comments about Wolverine and really run with it. I think the best thing you can say is 2.4 million sales is not a flop. The concern is the budget. 2.4 million sales on a single platform is respectable. That's not the question. The question is 2.4 4 million plus lifetime sales in the first year minus budget. That's the question. Now, I don't think people keep saying, "Oh, Insomniac's in danger of layoffs." I don't think so because Insomniac generates way too much stinking money. They are a cash cow for PlayStation. The the Spider-Man property alone just continues to print money for them. They've more than made back the budget on all those Spider-Man games and those games just keep selling. The question with Wolverine, I think, comes down to year one sales minus budget. Do they stay in the license? PlayStation can back out of the license. Marvel can back out of the license. Either party could determine this isn't worth continuing. My personal prediction is that the X-Men game will still happen because the movies are setting the groundwork for that. The movies and some sales could also lead to Wolverine having a better quarter, but then GTA 6 is going to come in and make that really difficult. Now, some people will run into the comments to also say Wolverine's already on sale. That's a bad sign. Wolverine is not already on sale. The Ultimate Edition is part of the Black Friday sale. The Mortal Shell 2 is part of that as well. Nobody would say that Mortal Shell 2 is doing terribly because it's part of a Black Friday sale. Like the Ultimate Edition of Sorrowos, the Ultimate Edition of Wolverine are a part of the Black Friday sale. So, they're giving you a discount on the Ultimate. They're not doing it on the base game. So, that was a little bit of a misrepresentation that people were running yesterday. Oh, it's already on sale. Oh my gosh. It's like it's a Black Friday thing and it's the ultimate edition. I personally think that Marvel and PlayStation will come to the conclusion that an X-Men game is worth doing, but another Wolverine game is not worth doing. Which I told you guys that when I rolled credits, I said, I don't think you do another Wolverine game. I don't think you could carry another game. I don't think the game was that great. I think the game was fine. It had a 5 hour sweet spot where it felt really good. I don't think you want to do another 15 to 20 hour Wolverine game. Wolverine can be part of an um what did I call it? Not a single player game, but a not entourage ensemble. He can be part of an ensemble game. He can be part of an ensemble game. So, that's just my prediction, though. Marvel or PlayStation could determine, no, property didn't do well enough. Let's not do that again. It's too expensive. But I think the I think the the X-Men game is in a different category. They're establishing that the X-Men are going to be, you know, back into the movies and stuff. You know, the the the Doomsday movie is going to change the calculus here a little bit. I also think that PlayStation's not showing signs of like, yeah, this thing underperformed, you know, what the freak's going on over there. It's just if it had soft sales, it had soft sales. I don't think that means they like pull the rip cord and demolish one of their best studios. You don't take your your killer studio and and do layoffs because they had one game that might have had softer sales. Also, I spoke with somebody in the know who has given me reliable information about Sony and PlayStation in the past and this individual said they expected this level of performance out of Wolverine. I don't think they thought that Wolverine was going to be up there like Spider-Man. They are internally in town halls and stuff. They are speaking about Wolverine as if this was expected. So, I don't think anybody's internally like, "Oh my gosh, we're in trouble and Insomniac needs to go through layoffs." Now, Melissa saying, "I'm sure they're not happy with 2.5 million." No, of course not. I think that that's soft. I think they probably were hoping for over three. I think they're probably hoping for over three and closer to three and a half. But again, both things can be true. It can be a softer sales result and they could be like that wasn't ideal. But they were also expecting it to be lower. They had to know that the deluge of games was going to play a part. There were so many games coming out in and around Wolverine and GTA 6 played a part. They knew every time the marketing for that game went out that you've got people committing funds and pre-ordering the collector's edition and all that. It's like we're going to have a hard time selling this game. I think it's part of the reason that LAF got delayed. I think they looked at Laaf and they're like, La is going to go through the same thing. It's surrounded by a bunch of other games now. And it's very possible that the first quarter next year is when GTA comes to PC as well as GTA 6 online. I think that Rockstar and PlayStation, I think their partnership, they would know that timeline. So, seems like they're happy with it. You have to read earnings reports carefully. So, here are the facts. It sold 2.5 million. they seem happy or satisfied with it is subjective because they are never going to project weakness to their shareholders. Now, they'll take impairment losses like they did with Bungie. Taking an impairment loss is this assets now worth less money. So, they're not like, "Oh, we lost a bunch of cash." It was we bought Bungie. Bungie's no longer worth what we paid for it. So that impairment loss is certainly quote unquote negative, but like you're never going to see them show weakness to the shareholders. So again, I'm just telling people you might want to pump the brakes. Like I don't think using a couple of positive Linda quotes, I'm not compelled by that because I'm like Linda is the one that talked about marathon as if it was doing well and we all know that was bull crap. It's like what are you doing? They don't want to. They do not want to display any weakness to the shareholders. The Wolverine leaks changing the game from open world to leaner. That's not what happened, though. The leaks did not cause them to change the game. That's simply untrue. They internally changed their own combat system because it wasn't going over very well. And I think around that time, they were also making the decision to not go open world. We have no no concrete evidence to convince me that they were like, "Oops, got leaked. Better not go open world." Like, I don't think that's how companies like this operate. You don't make that level of a seismic design shift because of a leak. Like, yep, got leaked. Better not do open world. No, I don't think so. If a game goes over budget, you should be ready for the game to underperform long before the sales reports go up. The version of Wolverine is scaled down and cheaper, so I don't think it's a loss. Huh? What? Scaled down and cheaper. The projected budget that leaked, if it's even close to being true, brother. No. Uh-uh. I don't think so, dude. I think it costs a lot of money. I think that's one of the biggest problems, dude. The number of people that are emailing now and they're like, "Do you want us to make GTA 6 clips for you? Do you want us to make GTA 6 clips for you? No. 2.4 million sold multiplied by 70 equals 168 million. Isn't the budget supposed to be 300 million? Well, and a lot of people bought the the the better edition. That was at the top of the charts. That one was out selling the standard. So, they're probably closer. I don't know. They're probably closer to 200 mil. So, I don't know why people are freaking out. If your budget's 300 million and within 50 days you've made 200, I again I don't think they're panicking. I think people are overstating it. I think I'm again both things can be true. This is really hard for people that live in just false dichotoies and clip culture. Both things can be true. The sales can be soft and they can also be okay. Like it's like they're not panicking if they're close to 200 million after 50 days and it was a 300 million budget. This is the studio that has made buckets of cash for PlayStation with Spidey 1, 2, Spidey Remastered, and Miles. Like I again I think people are doing that thing like they're absolutely there what they're I think what people This is where it gets really really messy. There are people that just want to bait and they want to troll and you can't take these people seriously. There are also content creators who literally can't do anything else. That's their content. They have to be the court jester. They have to play the role of look at the pony coping. Look at these ponies on Twitter. They're a court jester. They have no other pivot. That's what they have to do with their content. Then you have people that are trying to run counternarrative because of the Gears of War stuff. There's so many people in the mix that are not coming from a place of good faith. They're not. They're all doing they're all playing a part in a giant circus. And what they try to do is they try to contort everybody else into that narrative. Dollars to donuts. You You bet all the money in your wallet right now. I'll be in a bunch of videos this weekend with people claiming I'm a coping pony defending Wolverine's weak sales. Why? That's all they can do. That's their content. That's it. It's super predictable. It's like bad traffic in LA. It's like, yeah, that's what you're going to do. You don't have anything else you can do. You You can't put out an opinion piece. You can't run a live stream and just interact with the community and have a great conversation. No, you got to play your role in this circus show of well, let's make fun of people and contort things to to push a narrative. It's like, okay, I have at it. I guess you're not I don't think that's productive. I don't think it's honest. And I'm like, that's why these conversations often times they either get flat tired or you end up getting, you know, super hyperdistracted by people that are literally not interested in having a conversation. They're just trolling. That's what their mission is. Let's see if we can't get so and so upset. Let's see if we can't bait people in the chat to be upset. They're not trying to have a conversation with you bro. So, multiple things can be true. The sales can be soft. They can be lower than they than they were hoping they could be. It could lead to no more Wolverine. It could lead to no more X-Men game. But it's not this dire horrible situation where like Insomniac's in trouble and they're going to have to do layoffs and the game is a flop. If you're close to 200 million after 50 days on a $300 million budget and the game's going to continue to sell and then there's sales and then there's Marvel movies coming out that'll boost the sales. Again, I do not think they're I don't think they're internally panicked at all. I don't. And I'll go as far as to say this. If they do layoffs at Insomniac, I think that's incredibly stupid because that company again has been printing money for PlayStation this gen. If there's a studio that you give a little bit of a pass because of a little speed bump of like, yeah, you know, that project might barely break even. If there's a studio that you give a little bit of a pass, it's Insomniac. They did close Bluepoint. Do you know the entirety of what happened with Bluepoint? Because you need that in your mind if you're going to use Bluepoint as an equivalency to Insomniac. Number one, they're not even equal. It's insulting to Insomniac to even put Blueoint into the conversation. They ain't equal. Insomniac is at a degree of talent and has a pedigree and a backlog that shouldn't be compared to a remake studio. Second, Bluepoint and Sony. Sony worked with Bluepoint for almost two years to find something for Bluepoint to work on. Bluepoint did not want to be a support studio. They didn't want to do remakes anymore. They were they were given opportunities to work on other things and they declined. So that is that that has nothing to do number one has nothing to do with Insomniac. The amount of money that Insomniac has generated for PlayStation. Bluepoint shouldn't even be mentioned. Shouldn't even be mentioned. They're not in the same universe of of revenue generation or profit generation. Insomniac is in a league of their own. their proprietary tech, their in-house engine, their institutional knowledge. They there's almost nobody that touches these guys. I mean, we need to put a little bit of respect on Insomniac here. They had a ground roll double. Okay? Wolverine didn't put a lot of points on the board, but come on now. We got to remember who this team is and what they're capable of and what they've done this gen. Ratchet, Miles, Spidey 2, Spider 1 Remastered, like they have been doing killer work and making a ton of money for PlayStation. If PlayStation touches this studio with layoffs, I would be severely critical of that. If it's 10 people, I I might be like, "Okay, you got to trim. Things are getting more expensive." But if they do like significant layoffs, I would be immensely critical. I'd be like, I that doesn't make an ounce of sense. they have made you such a stupid amount of money. And I'm still critical of the Bluepoint decision. Now, if Bluepoint sat there and said no six times in a row to projects that they didn't want to do since they got told no for Bloodborne, they wanted to do the Bloodborne remake, they got told no by FromSoft. Okay. If Bluepoint says no six or seven times in a row, PlayStation doesn't exactly have a choice. I still think you should have kept Bluepoint around because there's so many remakes they could have been tasked with. But if they kept saying no, what are you supposed to do? What do you What are you supposed to do with them? If you go to Bluepoint, like what about remaking this game? No. This game? No. What about supporting this studio? No. Cuz Bluepoint helped Ragnarok get out the door. They were a support studio for Ragnarok. Similar to how Nexus was a support studio for Housemark to get Sorrowos out the door. And now Nixus is working on some pretty top secret stuff right now. So they're kind of out of the frame. But Bluepoint, what are you supposed to do with a studio that's just going to keep saying no? It's like, well, what are you going to do? What are we g Why are we paying you money then? We're going to pay to keep you open so you can twiddle your thumbs and and collect the check. You got to make a game, bro. You gota you got to make a game. So, I I I don't think it's a I don't think it's a comparison that that we should be making. Games getting cancelled is the number one reason why a studio closes. I don't know if that's the number one reason. It's probably one of the top reasons that a studio gets closed. Commonly, studios close because the game comes out and doesn't make enough money. Just this year alone, we've seen studios close and lay people off within the month of the game releasing. The game comes out and it just flops. It doesn't go anywhere and they're like, "We're in trouble. We're we're in trouble." It It happened with the Bolt Gun Team. Uh there was at least two other smaller studios that did that. Like the games came out and just didn't make any money. Now, I've seen people talk about the situation with like Double Fine and Ninja Theory and all this and what they like to do is they like to do like selective examples. So, they'll you they'll use Kilm as an example as to why Double Fine got divested. Well, does that explain Ninja Theory? Ninja Theory had an impressive tech demo. Sure, Hellblade 2 wasn't massively commercially successful, but in this in this ethos that we're in, having a team with that ability to put on such a great technical showcase, I I feel like that team is worth keeping around. What about ID Software? Like, I know people want to throw out the Kilm game and be like, "Oh, they made a g they made a silly goofy game with teapotss in it." Okay, you that's a very selective example. You're also ignoring the fact that Double Fine made Psychonauts 2, which was a game of the year nominated game. Let's just ignore that and focus on one game, and act like it's totally justified that all these studios got gutted. These people will never talk about ID Software with that level of disrespect. They wouldn't they wouldn't dream of it. Like, do it. Do it. Go on Twitter, boot up your stream, make a video right now and act like it's totally fine that ID Software got gutted cuz like Doom: The Dark Ages wasn't as commercially successful and use Kiln as your way to smuggle in all these other examples that I guess don't count. You basically just get to ignore the fact that like they gutted ID. They're basically shutting down Ninja Theory and oh, and the guys working on Sand K3, they're gone. They're It sounds like Arcane Leone is going to get sold, too. So wait, all these studios are equal to this one bad game by Double Fine? That seems awfully convenient. I don't know. It seems I don't know. It seems dishonest. It seems a little misrepresentative to be like thousands of layoffs are excused because of Kiln. Okay, sure. That seems nuanced. That seems measured and logical. That seems reasonable. That seems based on business. No, that seems like you're intentionally stacking the deck. You're going to ignore Psychonauts 2. You're going to ignore the the technical prowess and the history of ID software. You're going to ignore the very impressive tech demo that Hellblade 2 was. You're going to ignore all that and act like kiln is justification for thousands of layoffs, divested studios, and getting rid of long-standing pedigree and legacy. Okay, if that's how you want to argue it, no reason to take anybody like that serious. None whatsoever. You would never ever catch me defending like Insomniac getting gutted. I'd be like, "Are you insane? Why would you gut Insomniac?" "Well, Wolverine didn't sell that well. Wolverine got a bad Metacritic score." I would be like, "PlayStation, you have lost a plot if you got Insomniac over a ground roll double of a game. Also, it's not a comparison because studios were making games like Kiln because that's what they were told to do. So, the unhealthiness of that gaming division is not on the studios, it's on the leadership. That's the other weird thing here. Never blame the brand. Never blame the brand. God forbid you have some accountability for the multi-billion dollar corporation that's in the driver's seat. No, no, no, no, no. Blame the devs. That's more convenient. That also is a great tribal drum that gets you cheers and seal claps from the audience. Don't blame the brand. This has nothing to do it has nothing to do with the leadership and how unhealthy that gaming division has been. No, no, no, no, no. It's on the studios. This is their fault. Yeah, that's why 3,000 people are going to be laid off after it's all said and done because I guess every studio sucks over there. They'll fixate on games like Kilm and Keeper. That's a convenient red herring to distract everybody. Oh yeah, you're right. Double Fine made some made some weird smaller creative games that justifies 3,000 people getting laid off and all sorts of studios being divested or gutted to the studs. What a compelling logical well-reasoned argument. Thank you, sorcerer. Let me add you to the total. This guy was clowning on compulsion for accepting Xbox's blank check to make a seven-year game, ignoring the fact that Phil gave them a mandate to make Game Pass games. What's funny about that is people are acting like they wouldn't have done the same thing. I love the lack of self-awareness to be like so you go for for years. Let's let's rewind the clock a little bit. Let's just rewind the clock a little bit. We had to hear for years about how Microsoft was on top because they had deep pockets. I seem to remember somebody literally that individual Jack watching my content and literally mocking my content because this was the argument they're spending $70 billion. That was the level of intellectualism we got like talking close to the microphone. So deep pockets, lots of money spending equals Xboxes fighting, right? But then you want to turn around and act like you wouldn't have done the same thing. Xbox has deep pockets. Microsoft has deep pockets. They're going to studios and they're saying, "Here's money. Go make stuff that you want to make." And you're acting like these studios are in the wrong for doing that. That's a total lack of self-awareness. Anybody in creative work would have been like "Sweet. We think about what we've been saying for years that publishers only want the same types of games. Cookie cutter, live service, big blockbusters, like all the cliche IPs. We belly ache and we moan for years as gamers because publishers are always meddling. Publishers are always making creative work get funneled through market analysis and broad reach and we have to have mass appeal. And Microsoft does the opposite. Phil Spencer's like, here's a bunch of money. Make what you want. And people are like, I can't believe these studios did the thing that we've all said they should do for years, which is make the game you want to make. a a as opposed to just making some like conveyor belt production line big AAA broad appeal game. People aren't consistent. They're not consistent. People have bellyd and moaned about this for years that publishers are always meddling, demanding type, you know, bad timelines and making the studios make these games that they don't really want to make. And Microsoft walks in the room, Phil walks in the room and says, "Blank check. Make whatever you want." And these studios go, "That's amazing. We've never been given this level of freedom before." And you want to turn around, and this is what is hilarious to me. You want to turn around and blame the studios and not say, "That was probably not the best business strategy from Xbox." Xbox does all these things. They end up with an unhealthy gaming division. And you're like, "It's the studio's fault." Wait what? What are you talking about? Like when I was coaching soccer, if I was telling my team, just go out and do whatever you want. Yeah, you don't need to pass it. Don't worry about offsides. That rule's stupid. You just play however you want. Do you think we would have won nine games in a row? No. We would have lost a bunch. And would you have blamed the players or would you have blamed the coach? Who would you have blamed? coach told us we could play however we wanted. He never really taught us. He never ran rondos with us. He never taught us about, you know, pass and goes. He never taught us about centering. He didn't teach us things. He just told us to play however we wanted. So, like when you have leadership writing blank checks and saying make whatever you want and then it ends up being unhealthy for the game division because you have all these games that don't have broad appeal because they're trying to feed Game Pass and you want to turn around and blame the devs. I think that nobody should take you serious. You're not doing analysis of what happened. You're doing tribal drum banging so that people seal clap for you because they don't want the brand to be criticized. That's all you're doing. That's all you're doing. You're just getting people to seal clap for brand defense. Like, just make sure and defend the brand. We can't criticize the brand. The reason that Asha's doing what she's doing is because the brand was literally mismanaged for a very long time. So, the same people that would do what that gentleman did to my content pulled it up, mocked me, made fun of me when I said, "I think Xbox is out of the console war, they've lost. They've lost. And I don't even think they're fighting anymore." And the and the defense was, "Oh, but they're spending all this money. They've got all this money." Yeah. How did that work out for them? They spent that $70 billion. What did it do for them? Where did it put them? It put them where they are right now. So, I don't know. Maybe do better analysis. M maybe do better like logical like deduction as opposed to tribal drum banging for a brand so you get seal claps from the audience. Like I I just I've never been interested in stroking the ego of the public to be like, "Well, I'm going to tell you what you want to think." No. This was terrible. It was mismanaged. The division was mismanaged. These studios were mismanaged. And blaming the devs for taking money to make games and projects that they've always wanted to make is so backwards, especially after we as gamers have complained about publishers not allowing studios to do that for years. You meddle, you want the same games. You always make production line games. Everything's about live service. Everything's about big safe IP. And then they do a bunch of things that aren't safe and a bunch of things that are risky. And everybody's like, "Yeah, you suck. Get them out and it's like, okay, they'll just funnel everybody over to ABK. They'll just funnel everybody into the edifice of Call of Duty or mobile games. And then what are you going to have? Constant live service games and microtransactions is what converted me to a tourist gamer instead of the guy who used to spend 10 plus hours a day playing games. I mean, I don't know why you'd be a tourist this year. There's so many games to play. There's so many games to play, right? It was a gamble and it did not work, right? Yeah, it was. It was a gamble and it didn't work. But to turn around and act like it wasn't the gaming division's fault or the leadership's fault, it's ridiculous. It was a mismanaged division for years. Well, no. So, I'm getting you right. Saying your boss says, "Go do a good job and do what you want, then you go and do a crap job and you make no money." No. See, you're refraraming it. Nope. No. He's They were given money to make whatever they wanted. So, South of Midnight, the the creative director was literally like, "I wouldn't have funded this game." Why? because he knew if you were judging South of Midnight by broad appeal and potential return of investment, he's like, I wouldn't have funded this. But there was a money tap. They were just getting money handover fist from Microsoft to make games for Game Pass. Because again, that was the strategy. Fund games, get games on Game Pass. Do you remember the email that Phil Spencer sent and then they came back with projections of what it would take to put third party games on Game Pass? It was a lot of money. They were willing to spend that. Phil Spencer got on the phone with some studio. I forget the I forget the interview. I forget the studio. And the studio guy was like the studio head was like Phil basically said, "You don't understand. What What would it take?" Almost like you don't understand, bro. I'll put extra zeros on this. What do you need for us to make this happen? That's the way Papa Phil was running around. And so, South of Midnight comes out and I actually think it's a good game. It's got cool art direction. I thought it was graphically strong, amazing soundtrack. The weakest point was the combat. I thought the combat could have been better, but it didn't have broad appeal. So, it doesn't make a ton of money. That doesn't mean that they went and were like, "Uh, they did a bad job. They made a bad game. That's not what they did. Yeah, it won awards. It It literally won awards. Like again, everybody misses the forest for the trees here. When the dad of the studios is like saying when Phil is saying, "Here's money. Make whatever you want. Be creative. Let's get creative stuff on Game Pass." He is not telling them make something with broad appeal. We need high sales volume. That's not what he's saying. He's saying, "Make something creative. Make something cool. We'll throw it on Game Pass." And then when those games don't sell a lot of copies, you cannot turn around and then go to the studios and be like, "Your fault. Your fault. You made South of Midnight." They're like, "We literally did what we were told to do." He said to make games like this. We really loved this game. We didn't intentionally make a crappy game. That's such a misfrraming of what happened. That That feels willfully dishonest to act like these teams intentionally went out and like sabotaged the plan or something or like we're going to make a bad game like what? Like, you know, Doom the Dark Ages is an example. I actually think Doom: The Dark Ages is an example of a studio saying, "Let's do something completely out of left field and completely different than what a lot of people are expecting." And it probably hurt it. They really, really did a pretty big departure from Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal. And it and I think it hurt it. It also was attached to a marketing edifice that's constantly telling people, "You don't have to buy Doom." Yeah, you don't have to buy it. You got 20some million people. your core audience that gets all those marketing beats, your core audience that sees the tweets and sees the trailers and sees the stuff because it's an Xbox owned title. That core audience, a huge portion of them don't have to buy Doom. So, you want to turn around and you want to go to ID Software and act like I want to see somebody argue that like Doom: The Dark Ages is a bad game. You might not have liked it. It went in a very different direction than Doom Eternal and Doom 2016, but tell me that Doom: The Dark Ages is a bad game. Are you freaking serious? It was touted and bragged about. People were showing the great graphics. People were showing the really cool moments. And then they made an incredible DLC. But you want to sit here and tell me straight face that it's the studio's fault. It's all their fault. And then you want to use games like Kiln as the scapegoat to so that that makes perfectly good sense of like Ninja Theory, ID Software, Double Fine, the team behind um State of the K. Like that all gets excused because of Kilm. You truly have a dizzying intellect if that's what you think. South of Midnight is fine. I always point at the studio that makes a game about Pottery War, though. Yeah, but the Okay, you guys are getting hit with ads. It's been about two hours. Do you guys honestly think that Kilm was super expensive? This is the other thing that gets lost in this. You think they burned a bunch of capital and cash on Kil? Really? You think they burned a bunch of cash and capital on Keeper? No. Now, if they would have been operating around the idea of we need games to sell, we need to make a ton of money, they likely would have tasked them with building Psychonauts 3. Now, Psychonauts 2 lifetime sales are estimated in 2022, they were around 1.7 million copies. Okay, that's not that great. But the game was critically acclaimed. It was a game of the year nominated game. But I think if you look, that right there is a perfect example of why it probably didn't matter what they made. And I think people are using K and Keeper as scapegoats. It probably wouldn't have mattered what they made. If they would have made Psychonauts 3, the same thing would have happened. It would have been a longer dev cycle, pretty pretty decent size budget, and then it wouldn't have sold a lot of copies. It w it would it wouldn't have. If Psychonauts 2 sold, I don't know, probably two to two and a half million by now. It's a Game Pass game, so it's not going to be a It's not going to be chart topper. It It isn't. You're cutting its legs off day one. 20 million people don't have to buy it. The same thing would have happened. The operational cost of Double Fine wouldn't have changed Keeper K or Psychonauts 3. Psychonauts 3 would have been in development. It would have come out. It probably would have gotten a lot of praise, probably more award nominations. And then just like Hi-Fi Rush, it wouldn't have mattered. it have been like, "Yeah, all those award nominations are great. You're not moving copies out." So, I find the whole thing to be bewildering that people are still continuing to run with this notion that like this one particular title, Kiln, is the catch-all sort of scapegoat to act like everything happening to these Xbox studios is excusable because Double Fine made a weird game. And it's like that has nothing to do with Ninja Theory. That has nothing to do with ID Software. That has nothing to do with the team working on State of the K3. These these are these are not related at all. That has nothing to do with Arcane Leon. Do you see why it doesn't work? It's like every studio is different. Every studio had different property, different games, different approaches. But we want to act like Double Fine is the perfect scapegoat to act like thousands of layoffs are excusable because Double Fine made a weird game that didn't sell a lot of copies. Okay, it's not just the studio's fault, but they take a huge part of the blame. Just as much as the freedom that they had was a bad management decision, they took advantage of it. I believe accountability matters. I think that we view accountability very differently. I do because if Phil Spencer comes into your studio and he's like, "I want you to make the most creative thing you can come up with. Just make whatever you want. I don't care. Make it. We want games for Game Pass." And you do what he says to do. Accountability at that point would be on him because for them to do the opposite, this is what everybody misses. If double fine and compulsion would have done the opposite, they would have been going against their their leader, they' have been like, "No, Phil. No, we're not doing that. We're going to make a mass appeal, broad appeal game." Do you want to know what would have happened? Number one, they probably would have gotten a pretty severe talking to like, "Hey, I told you to make what you wanted to make. What are you guys doing? Why'd you spend all this money on market research? Why'd you spend all this money trying to build a broad appeal game? Why'd you do that? What in the world? And then it wouldn't have sold commercial copies at a level that would have mattered anyway because of how the division was set up. Like the division was set up, these guys were set up to fail. They were literally set up to fail. It doesn't matter what they made. It doesn't matter what they would have developed. That's the that's the red herring of the discussion. It's like everyone fixates on Kil cuz it's an easy target, but it's like you guys are missing the bigger picture. It wouldn't have mattered what they made. They're all getting hit. Hellblade 2, Doom: The Dark Ages, South of Midnight, Kilman Keeper, those are all very different games and they were all I think every studio essentially was set up to fail. They were either given direction that was basically counterintuitive to like having, you know, market success or they were basically set up to fail because whatever they made was going to get chopped up anyway and not sell a lot of copies. This guy says, "Proves me wrong. Who decided to cancel Tu multiplayer? Was it Naughty Dog themselves or was it canceled by PlayStation leadership? Please answer this question only. What are you guys debating? Naughty Dog canceled it. I don't usually say this about Lono's chat because everybody here is great. But you are by far one of the dumbest people I've met in a long time. Your brain is cooked. Oof. Why you being so harsh, this guy? PlayStation 2 were offered a lot of money if they could pitch a live service game to leadership. It was a choice. Some developers didn't take it. They ended up making single player games. Naughty Dog had been adding multiplayer to their single player IP since Uncharted 2. They decided to separate multiplayer for Tulu 2 and they turned it into its own thing. I don't see how this adds to your point. If anything, it just proves that they had autonomy to choose themselves. Yeah, Ultron is correct. If Ultron's position is that Naughty Dog cancelled uh factions themselves, Oldron is correct. That was their choice. That was their decision. And Ben Studio, this is a this is a giant misconception about the PlayStation live service effort. You will hear YouTubers and podcasters commonly inadvertently bake in false head cannon for people. They'll say this sentence. They'll say, "Playstation was making these studios make live service games." That's false and untrue. That is not true. Navic says, "Not a dog cancelling has no bearing on my argument. It's a logical fallacy to say because they canceled it was their choice. That doesn't conclude that they weren't pushed towards live service. Well, you would need to outline which logical fallacy he's guilty of. You're just claiming it's a logical fallacy. Which one? And second, they were not pushed toward live service. Okay, you've really got this one wrong. First and foremost, Naughty Dog was not pushed to live service. Jim Ryan's live service plan and initiative came out well after Naughty Dog had announced their decision to pull TOU 2 uh factions out of Too 2. They announced that well before the live service initiative from Jim Ryan. The live service initiative for Jim Ryan and that budget where they increase spending within live service that came years later. Naughty Dog wasn't a part of that. Naughty Dog made the decision while they were building Too 2 and I think the catalyst was Fortnite. They looked at Fortnite and they thought factions was un like s it was surprisingly popular in Tulu 1. We should separate factions. It's becoming big anyway. We could do it its own thing. We could have success like they're having with Fortnite. That had nothing to do with Jim Ryan's live service efforts. So that is a complete and utter falsehood that you're pushing. That's not true. The second thing that's wrong with what you're saying, it's factually incorrect to say that PlayStation was pushing studios to live service. This is once again untrue. They budgeted money and they accepted pitches and then they green lit certain pitches. So Ben's studio was not pushed to live service. They said, "We got money. What do you got? What kind of a live service game do you think you could make?" and Ben made a pitch and Bluepoint was working on their God of War live service game where you like go to Hades or something. That was not something they were pushed toward. That is completely made up. It's unsubstantiated. It's been falsified by multiple people in the industry that are like, "That's not how that works. That is not how PlayStation operates." PlayStation doesn't kick the door in and say, "You're making this now." They don't do that. They say, "You have autonomy. We have money. What do you want to make? Pitch us your projects." And then they green lit a Bluepoint and a Bend live service game. And then this stupid thing that Guerilla is going to end up probably canning Jim Ryan, Herman Hulse Live Service, Concord, Fair Games, Horizon Hunters Gathering. Yeah, those are other Yeah, that those are other other uh efforts from them as well. Other disasters that were that were green lit by those guys. So, you disagree with Jason Shrier? You would have to outline what he has stated that I'm disagreeing with. I don't know what you're referencing. I don't think there's ever been any reporting from Shrier that he that they were forced to do these things. You know, he reported on this, right? Sure. Tell me where he reported on this where he go he went against anything that I just said. I don't think Shrier has ever put pen to paper and published something that dict that that stated PlayStation pushed these studios to live service and made them do it. That that's nowhere that is written nowhere in his body of work. I've read basically everything that the guy's ever published. Anytime he's blown the door open on a story, I've gone and read his work. He's never ever indicated what you're saying. that like, oh yeah, the studios were pushed towards this. No, PlayStation did a forecast in that one earnings report and they had that spreadsheet. They had that like bar graph and like they were making half of their increase of spend on live service and half of the bar was on single player tentpole titles. It was the biggest spend on single player tentpole titles that they had ever spent. It was a big big increase in spend there and it was the biggest amount they had ever invested in live service. In the wake of them doing that, teams made pitches. They would pitch live service games and they would get green lit. Jim Ryan did not walk into their offices or studios metaphorically or literally and say, "You're making a live service game now." That never happened. That is not why Naughty Dog did what they did with factions. It's not. They did that on their own. If you check the timeline, Naughty Dog's decision to separate factions from part two of The Last of Us predates the live service push from Jim Ryan by at least 2 years. They are not connected. I would like the concepts that Bluepoint came up with that were constantly getting a no. They had their own thing they were trying to work on and it it basically was like a no-go. I don't know who said it was a no-go. It might have been executives at Bluepoint. It might have been PlayStation. I don't know. For the longest time, everybody thought that PlayStation shot down Days Gone 2. And it's not true. Guys from Bend came out and clarified this. I think it was in an interview or a podcast or something. And they said, "No, we internally, the executives here internally like rejected the Days Gone to pitch." Oh, you would like to know? Oh, I would too. I would really like to know what in the world Bluepoint was working on. I just their pedigree up to that point was clearly remakes. That was clearly their skill set and and what they were good at. And you know, it probably was difficult for them to come up with something that was going to be able to, you know, stand on its own. You know, it would be like going to Nixus and be like, "Hey, Nixus, can you guys make a brand new game?" They'd be like "Uh what? Like, we're a support studio. We can assist. We can help. Quality assurance, porting, whatever." But like, they're probably not set up to build a game from scratch. They rejected the days gone pitch with the cliffhanger like that. I don't know if they've ever spoken to why the executive shot it down. They just said that they shot it down. It could have been because the initial reception of the game was tepid. It launched and it had a lot of problems. It didn't review that well. There's a there's a lot that went into that. So guys, in 45 minutes, we're going to pull the raffle. So currently, members choice will happen after the round table. And right now, our two people that get to pick are Silent Spartan and Rissick. If you want to beat Rissik, he's got 57. Silent Spartans got 150, so don't try to beat him. If you want to enter the raffle, it's not a monetary raffle. It is a raffle where your name gets pulled and you can make me play a game. You just have to have gifted five members before I do it. So, you've still got time to do a five bomb to enter that. You can make me play any game within reason. I'll play it this afternoon. I don't think we're going to hit stretch, but if we get to 750, I'll draw two names and do an even longer members choice stream. Stretch is probably out of reach unless people start going bonkers with 20 and 50 bombs, which we've only been really getting those from Silent Spartan lately. So, if you want to enter the raffle, five bombs are the way to do it. S3 plan says, "Am I understanding your thesis correctly? Microsoft gives money to studios, says go have fun. Studios make their game, whether good or bad, didn't matter. The business model of Game Pass is the true culprit." I think it is the primary culprit. There were two things that were problematic there S3 plan game pass is the primary culprit because even if you make a game like Doom the Dark Ages you're likely going to have fewer commercial sales because of Game Pass. You conditioned 20 million people to not buy games anymore. That's the primary problem. Super expensive budget. Throw the game on Game Pass. Where where's the return coming from? Well, Game Pass makes this much money a month. Okay. Well, these budgets are getting crazy. That was something that we had to hear about for the last couple of years, and it's coming home to roost. Like, it's it's threatening a contract and a license with Insomniac right now. No reason to make a caricature out of an argument. Nobody said he busted in the doors and demanded it. But as the president, he specifically spoke about a strategy shift towards game as a service over 10 years. You have not falsified or refuted anything that I said. You are merely adding to what I've already communicated that they said we're budgeting an increase in spend for game as a service. Pitch us games. That is not pushing studios to live service. That is not forcing studios to do live service. The minute you say that, you're saying something that is false. And you can't demonstrate. You can't demonstrate that. Anybody I have spoken to in the no, any article I've read, any interview I've read, PlayStation does not operate that way. They do not say, they do not mandate you make a live service game. Jason Sher had an entire video about this, by the way. Yeah. You have not substantiated your position. You just went quiet and then said, "I did a caricature of the argument." You have not substantiated your argument. What did Jason Shrier say that you think falsifies anything that I've said? Yeah, they also increased their budget for single player games. So, you could have come to the table and been like, here's a single player game. They they increased the budget for both. So, there was no mandate. There wasn't. It's it's a complete fabrication. It's made up. It's false head cannon. There was no mandate. There was no you will make a live service game. There wasn't. A lot of the budget that they increased and they spent all that extra money, you know, to budget money. A lot of that money went to Fair Games, went to Concord, likely went to Hell Divers 2. Like, do you see what I'm saying? Like this idea that like, well, they budgeted the money, therefore they pushed people to it. It's like, no. They had the game in development for years before the push. Yeah, the factions thing was in development for a super long time before the live service push. That was another falsehood that you were pushing. You were trying to say that like Naughty Dog got pushed into doing that by PlayStation, which is untrue. It's demonstrably untrue. You can look at the timeline of when they did it. You can look at them talking about it. Naughty Dog denies that. They refute that. They're like, "No, it was our call. It was our choice." They did it. They sent out a post on Twitter when they decided to do that. Wide Rope says, "Here's an AI. I didn't find a Shri report saying Sony explicitly ordered specific studios to make live service against their will. The reporting is about the companywide strategy and the unease that it caused. If you want the exact wording and sourcing, his Bloomberg articles from September 2023 and January 2025 are the ones to read. It causing unease is understandable. It was a big departure from what they were known for. They weren't known for multiplayer games. They weren't known for live service. PlayStation was known for tentpole cinematic storydriven single player games. That's what they were known for. And that unease is not surprising. But who's uneasy when you're pitching a game? You didn't have to pitch a live service game. You could have pitched anything. Nobody forced Ben Studio to pitch a live service game. That was their choice. And I think a lot of what they built for that live service game is probably getting baked into the co-op game that's coming from them. Assuming Microsoft is okay with Game Pass resulting in lower sales, that doesn't mean that they don't have any performance expectations for their studios. Uh they would still expect engagement for those games. What's remarkable, Tommy, is you should go back and read what Phil Spencer said in his email that we saw during the FTC trial because he literally said, "We don't know." He said it's some combination of engagement. Like, he's he literally admits to some guy in an email, they don't have a spreadsheet to calculate the return of big big huge budget games in their own personal games going to Game Pass. He literally didn't have a way to figure it out. We're splitting hairs here. You're getting hung up on the term force, but the initial push was towards live service. That is untrue. What's the probability of every studio was working on a live service game? Yeah. See, your issue is that we're splitting hairs on you using terminology. That's false. That's not splitting hairs. Force or push them to do it is untrue. You haven't demonstrated that it is true. I got somebody I trust inside Sony. I've got interviews. We've got articles. That's not how PlayStation operates. You made the claim burden of proof is on you. You made the claim that they had pushed Naughty Dog to live service. That's been falsified. You were wrong about that. You had the timeline wrong. You're also now trying to push the idea of like forcing or pushing them to do live service is just semantics because they budgeted the money. No, that's not how that works. There's an enormous difference between me saying, "Guys, I've got this money budgeted for projects about trinkets. Pitch me your best trinket idea." That's not the same as, "Guys, I've got this money that I budgeted. You need to make trinkets right now." Those are completely different things. You got caught pushing something that's false. And now you want to backpedal and act like I'm playing semantics. There is an enormous difference between budgeting money and saying, "Pitch us what you got." and saying, "We budgeted this money, you will now be making a live service game." Those are completely different modes of operation and managing your business, and that is not how PlayStation does it. They do not operate that way, and they never have. So, I'm going to go back to the member board. If you can't demonstrate your claim with evidence, you have failed to meet burden of proof. And we're and we're this is an exercise in running in a circle because you're not making any new points. So, I'm going to go to the member board. Let's pull this one down and put the next one up. Evidence says, "How do you hop back into games in your backlog that you haven't played in a while? I find I have to start new saves to get back in." This is one of the reasons, Evidence. This is actually a really good question. This is one of the reasons that I usually on the launch date of a game only play for about an hour. only about an hour because if I if I play more than that, I'll get too deep into the mechanics. I'll get too deep into the mechanics. What's the probability that everybody pitched a live service game after Jim Ryan deliberately spoke about it? Yeah, that that question doesn't demonstrate anything that will prove your position to be true. We don't know how many and we don't know how long they had. We don't know. We don't know those details. What we know is the money was budgeted and then people made pitches. I posted Jason Shrier's article, but you conveniently ignored it. Don't run now. You didn't post anything in my chat. You can't post links. Listen, if you think I'm running from an argument or a debate, this is either your first day here or you're just being bad faith. I don't run from arguments. I love them. You can't post links in a YouTube chat, brother. You can't. Why can't you pull out the statements that he said? Make your own dadgum argument, man. You're going to make me go and do your work for you. I got to go read a whole article. Why don't you do the diligence of supplying evidence to your claim? What did Shrier say that supports your claim? What did he say? You want to post an article and make me go do your work for you? What is that? No. Put it in chat. What did he say? What did he say? It's not hard. Just type it. Jason Shrier said this. And then we can fact check you. We can go find the article and see if you're telling the truth. I don't run from arguments, man. I live for arguments. I love them. They're fun. They're they're enjoyable for me. Reposting. Last of Us Two Factions was canceled by Naughty Dog themselves. They didn't want to solely focus on live service. If they were forced, it wouldn't be possible, would it? Number one, he has the timeline wrong. Number one, he has the timeline wrong because Naughty Dog made the decision to separate factions prior to the Jim Ryan budget. It's like years apart. They made their choice with faction years before any budgetary changes happen with live service. So number one, he had the timeline wrong. The second thing that that about them canceling it themselves, that was corroborated by Shuhei Yosha that they chose on their own to not do factions. So that that entire argument has been completely falsified. The correlation between Jim Ryan's words and nearly every studio pushing a live service game around the same time is not very probable for single player studios. You haven't demonstrated that nearly every studio push a live service game. That's also not true. That's also not true. Nearly every studio did not pitch a live service studio a live service game. They have a lot they have a pretty good number of studios and like Naughty Dog didn't pitch one. They were already working on something that they cancelled themselves, so they don't count. We don't I I don't know if the Insomniac Spider-Man thing was a pitch or not. That might have been something just baked into the Marvel plan of like we'll probably want to have some kind of an online component. We don't know if that was a pitch. We know Bluepoint pitched something. We know Bend pitched something and we know maybe Guerilla and then Haven. I believe Haven was already brought in to work on the live service game. So that wasn't a pitch and they were not an existing studio. And then you got Fair Games. I'm sorry that is Fair Games. I'm I'm Concord Firewalk. Again, not a studio that they suddenly tasked with Live Service. They partner with them and bought them to build Concord, which failed and flopped. And Arrowhead, that's not a studio that they own. They own the Hell Divers IP. Naughty Dog, false. Didn't pitch a live service game. Insomniac, we don't know. Guerilla, yes. Bend, Bluepoint, that's three. That's not That's not what you said. You said nearly every studio. You see, homie, I'm telling you, if you're going to get into this discussion, you got to come with locked in concrete facts because it's not going to work. Naughty Dog didn't pitch one. We have falsified your claim about Naughty Dog 10 times over. Insomniac, we don't know if they pitched one. That internal road map that they had was old and they had that live service Spider-Man game. We do not know if that was a pitch for Jim Ryan. That could have been an old thing. So, that could be one. That could be on your side or not. Gorilla, yes. Bend, yes. Bluepoint, yes. That's three. That's not nearly all of their studios. Do you see the problem? Like, are you going to tell me I'm splitting hairs now because you said nearly all and it's actually only three? Like, come on, bro. Like, there's no reason to propagate this kind of stuff. Sean Leaden said he wanted to go on a path of live service. Oh, he Shawn Leaden did. A lot of this is superfluous because they've clearly learned their lesson. They've clearly learned their lesson. Bend is working on a co-op game and I don't I think fair Games is cooked. Guerilla is almost assuredly no longer doing Horizon Hunters Gathering. They're on they're on H they're on Horizon 3 now. I think they've learned their lesson. Why are we having these studios do do live service games? It's not working. They're going to start doing partnerships. The Arrowhead partnership makes more sense. The Ark Systems partnership with Tokone Fighting Souls makes more sense. Partnerships make more sense. I don't understand why we would belver this point anyway. They've clearly learned the lesson that they made a terrible choice in handing money to single player studios to build live service games. But you create this falsehood where you're like, "Oh, they were forced and everybody was pitching all of a sudden because they were forced." What? Why was Bungie brought in to fix Naughty Dog's own game? They decided to work on then they decided, "Whoops, we don't want to work on it long term." Here's the dilemma. You either don't know enough to have this conversation or you're posturing like you don't know anything now. So Bungie was purchased. One of the primary reasons for the purchase was the center for live service excellence. They literally bought them in and they're like Bungie we want you to assess live service viability of projects that we're building. You've been doing live service for a really really long time. You've got over a decade of data player trends etc. You know the bandwidth required. You know how often cadence of content has to come out etc. after Bungie was onboarded. One of the first things they were tasked with was looking at the viability of the Last of Us factions. They humbled Naughty Dog and they basically told Naughty Dog, "You don't seem to understand the bandwidth required to ship and then support a live service game." Naughty Dog comes out and basically says, "We would have to become a live service game to support this. We would have to become a live service game to support this. We don't want to do it." Shuhei Yosha did an interview couple of months ago and he corroborated that claim that that was a decision that Naughty Dog made. We do not want to become a live service studio. We want to make games like Intergalactic. Everything I just said is a verifiable fact based on all available data. None of that paints the picture that they were forced cuz it doesn't line up with the timeline with when they pulled factions out. And number two, Bungie was literally brought in to save studios from these train wrecks because they would have shipped factions and they would have been like, "We don't have the bandwidth to support this." and it would have died and then it would have moved on to Intergalactic and then you would have had this weird corpse of a game attached to the Last of Us IP which is one of their best IPs as evidenced by their willingness to do a TV show. It's a strong IP. Now, season 2 sucked but Last of Us is a strong IP. So, they saved them from doing that. Everything we just walked through is information that you either completely lacked or you ignore it because it's not convenient for your narrative. Like you either completely lack all this information that's verifiable. This is all public because you want to run with some narrative that studios were forced to make live service. It's like so I like to have arguments and debates. You got enough one guy out of me. I'm going back to the member board because to be quite honest, these people matter more to me at this point. Like these folks matter more than belaboring this point. We've demonstrated that your claims are false. I'm moving on. So evidence back to your question. So sorry, got mega mega sidetracked there. I whenever I launch into a game, day one on stream, I play it for an hour and that's why I'm able to pick it up later. If I get five hours into a game, it's gonna be a lot more difficult. It's gonna be a lot more difficult to pick it back up. That's probably why I'm gonna finish Phantom Blade Zero first before going into Zelda. So, Concord wasn't even that bad. They should have just changed the characters. Shutting it down was a mistake. Sony wasted so much money. Sony didn't waste that much money. That's another false narrative that gets spread. A lot of that money was uh independent funding that happened before they were even purchased. Fair Games got like 250 in private funding before they were even purchased by Sony. They did another round of like 200 million in funding that had nothing to do with Sony. Sony and did waste money, but a lot of those numbers you see like, oh, Sony wasted 400 million or whatever. That's completely false and made up and untrue. And second, that game was dead on arrival. They could have put half naked characters in it. It wouldn't have mattered. It was not a game with broad appeal. They had like they didn't have like a thousand concurrent players or something. It was DOA. Thank you, Calvin. Let me add you to the total. All right, here's a good question from Zenthos. Do you recommend playing Onimusha before Phantom Blade or the other way around? I would play Phantom Blade first. Like if you Concord not fair games. I probably misspoke. Sorry. I keep saying fair games because I'm thinking I'm thinking of Firewalk. I think of Firewalk and I say I say Fair Games, I confuse myself. Fair Games is being made by Haven. Concord was made by Firewalk. Sorry, I probably misspoke. Um, anyways, let's um let's answer this question. So, Phantom Blade, I would play Phantom Blade first. If you were looking forward uh to both of these games, I would make I would tackle Phantom Blade first because I feel like Oni Musha is I just think it's a tough game to follow. I think it's a very very tough game to follow because it's so tight, it's so crisp, it's so excellent. I just I think it's a tough game to follow. I think the vibe shift and the combat shift in Phantom Blade would make you probably enjoy Phantom Blade less. So, my recommendation would be you play Phantom Blade first, have a great time with it. You're going to go into Oni Musha and you're going to be like, "Oh my gosh, this is so pristine and precise and tight." Phantom Blade is a little bit more all over the place and flurrybased. So let us go to the next question. Hang on one second. Yeah, not taking the bait. E-ad says, "Was Madam into video games when you guys first met or did you slowly convert her into being a believer?" could slowly convert her into being a gamer. Okay. Um, it depends on preferred play style. Even preferred play style though, Trill, I just don't know. I just think Oni Musha is a really, really hard game to follow. That's just my own personal opinion. Um, can you read the captions on the video I posted in Discord? I don't understand the relevancy of a caption that says what it says. after I left, which is not a path I wanted to take myself. I don't know what Sean Leaden speaking to. Anyways, Madam was not into games. No, the way that I got her into games was you got to start simple, right? You got to start simple. So, we started with things like castle crashers and he conveniently ignored the article. No, I didn't. You're not going to do false summary. You're out of here. You're out of here. I entertained you for 45 minutes and you wouldn't substantiate your claims with quotes from the article. And now, when you know I want to move on, you want to take a cheap shot and falsely summarize the argument. You're not allowed to hang out here when you do that. That's dishonest. take a freaking hike. I don't tolerate that. I just indulged you for 45 minutes and you would not substantiate your claims. You just kept wanting me to go read an article, read an article, read an article, and I kept going with you and now you're like, "Oh, he conveniently ignored the article." No, you're a liar. Take a freaking hike. I did not ignore the article. I gave you ample opportunity to substantiate your claims. Dishonest people don't get to hang out here. They all g run turn tucktail into discords and other YouTube channels because they can't hang with basic logical argumentation. It's too hard for them. So you can go join that crew of people. Bro, I gave you ample time. Ample time to substantiate your claims. You don't get to do false summary after you lose. So I started basic. I started very very basic. I went with Castle Crashers. There were a couple of Mario games you could play co-op and then, you know, maybe a little bit of Mario Kart here and there. And then Borderlands 2 was getting ready to come out. Borderlands 2 was getting ready to come out and I said, "Babe, I would really love to play Borderlands with you. Split screen. It's a looter shooter. It's really fun. And I know you don't really play looter shooters. She doesn't really play shooters at that point in time." She hadn't really played one, right? So, I said, "Let's play Borderlands 1 together. It's one of my favorite games." I said, "You can play as a character where if it gets too intense, you can hit these buttons and you'll disappear." Okay. So, we got into Borderlands 1 and she would hang back and she would use a scoped weapon and slowly but surely she got good at the controls. She got good at the aiming. I played as uh Roland, I would push up, throw down the turret etc. We played the entirety of Borderlands 1 and all the DLC and then we played the entirety of Borderlands 2 and all the DLC and we had a blast ever since then. She's been a gamer. We game like she she's so much of a gamer now. When we originally played Mario Galaxy together, that was another one we played together. really good choice of game to play together co-op because she was just a companion and could like grab stars and grab enemies, right? She was just gonna, you know what I mean? Pragmata sold 2.7 million copies. Oni Musha sold 1.7. They've exceeded expectations. Great. Good. I can't wait for another Oni Musha and a Pragmata sequel. I think they're some of the best games that have come out this year. Capcom is crushing it this year. Uh, my man second love with 40 months comes in. Thank you very, very much. Now that he's gone, here's my monthversary. Thank you. I appreciate that. I tell you what, I tell you what. How many people have done How many people are in the running for the raffle? There are 23 eligible people to be in the raffle for members choice. So, we're doing Members Choice no matter what. It's happening. And Broken Earth is coming in as well and adding to the total. Let's Let's do a little run here. Let's make I feel like we could make stretch I feel like we could make it a little bit easier. When we hit 500 on a Friday, it's a little bit unfair to be like, "Hey, let's get to 750. All right, let's get 750." Why don't we do this? Why don't we do this? Let me go for 650 instead. How about that? There you got 20 minutes. Now that means you need how many people to do five bombs? 25 people need to do five bombs. Every single one of those people will be entered into the raffle. The raffle has no monetary value. So I just lowered stretch goal to 650. Since we just got to the goal on a Friday, I'll make it a little bit easier. Now what that does is if we hit stretch, it opens it up. I'll do one more game. So, we'll have first and second get to pick. That's Rissick and that's Silent Spartan. And then I'll draw two names from the raffle instead of just one. All right. I'll make it a little bit easier. So, you got 18 minutes. If you're going to hustle and you're going to go crazy as a community, I'm going to go to the member board and try and clear through these comments. Uh, Muku Muku won the raffle last week. He gifted at the last minute and won the raffle. Muku says, "What are your thoughts on the graphical prowess that the Nintendo Skillful with a 20 bomb says, "Let's get it." Holy mackerel. That's generous. Sam Wrl renews their membership. All right. Okay. Skillful Jeepers. And Hustle Zone enters the raffle with the five bomb as well. Thank you very much, Hustle Zone. I appreciate it. Uh, the graphical prowess Nintendo Switch has been displaying with games such as Pragmata, Resident Evil 9, and the Ocarina of Time remake. Sam Wr upgraded the member Plus. I'm counting that as a double. And a five bomb comes in from Rissick. Rissick doesn't even need to do that, by the way. He's just helping out. You guys are 100 away from stretch. Here's the thing. You got to be careful with the RE engine. The RE engine's really impressive. very very optimizable and agile. It doesn't do well with openw world games, but like on Musha, Pragmod, and RE9 and a five bomb from Sam Wr. he enters the raffle. Okay, here's the deal. Here's the deal. If you guys Jen Christrist enters the raffle with a five bomb, you need to be here when I run the raffle so you can tell me what game you want me to play. If you're not going to be here in the next 20 minutes, you can throw your game in the Discord room. We have a Discord room for this. So, if you guys are going to hustle and do this, make sure and stick around so if you win, you can actually be here or you can actually have your game picked. Xcal is going to enter the raffle with a five bomb. Thank you very much. Um, okay. So, you got to be careful with the RE games because they might be misrepresenting what everybody else can do with the Switch 2. Okay. Pragmatada, Onimusha, RE9. Okay. And then Ocarina, I agree with you. These games demonstrate that you can get a lot out of the Switch 2, but you're going to have to do the leg work. You're going to have to do the leg work. What Ocarina of Time remake really assures me is we're going to get some amazing looking mainline Mario and Zelda in the future cuz they cooked. They cooked with that freaking remake. It is gorgeous. It's amazing. So, if they can if they can keep harnessing that level of art, direction, lighting, reflections, and like look at the size of some of those environments. I mean, it's it's big game. I I can't wait. I can't wait for more. Okay. And how much time do you guys have? You got 15 minutes. 15 minutes. I'm going to go back to the member board. I want to get through all your I want to get through all your comments. Uh, Bumble Pan says, "Did you ever try Vampire Crawlers? I got it on the current sale and I'm addicted. Deck building vampire survivors." Basically, probably wouldn't appeal to me. Maybe it would. It's probably a perfect like portal game, but I already have a bunch of Portal games that I'm trying to get to like Mugenics or Minioot Adventures or Deep Rock Galactic Survivor or uh Moonlighter 2. There's so many games to play on the Portal if and when I have time for Portal games. So, I probably wouldn't want to add vampire crawlers to the stack. Jay Chris says, "If I win, I want feed to pick." I don't want you guys to start doing like honorary giveaways of your of your raffle. Dwayne says, "Lono, pretend it's a Saturday afternoon and the kids and the wife aren't home for a while. What game would you binge playing?" Right now, I would probably work on Phantom Blade Zero and then work my way towards Zelda and then work my way towards Well Dweller. it probably in that order. Yeah, I can't hop around. I gotta I gotta finish a game before moving on to the next. I would call Ocarine of Time breathtaking in places. Almost a perfect balance of realism and fantasy look or vibes, if that makes sense. No, we're going back to Persona. Yeah, true SSJ. That's what he That's what he picked. Um Dwayne with another one. Do you see yourself doing any Diablo 5 coverage? I started playing Diablo I for the first time a few months ago and I'm addicted. And a five bomb comes in from Benevolent Icon. Guys, you have a shrinking window before the raffle happens. Um, you have 14 minutes to get 75 members. If you get it to 70, if you get this to 650, I'm going to pull two names instead of just one. Two people then have a chance. You're in the raffle for a five bomb. So, if a bunch of you do five bombs right now, you'll hit the goal and then two people will get a chance to make me play a game. So, I probably by the time it comes out will be more interested in Diablo. Right now, dungeon crawlers don't call to me that much unless it's a dungeon crawler rogue. Madam and I love Sworn. It's like a Hades clone dungeon crawler rogue. We had a good enough time in Shape of Dreams. We kept getting to the final boss and then I don't think you're supposed to beat his second phase very easily. So, we got 20 hours out of it and had a good time with it. We like those kinds of games. So maybe by then a Diablo could do well. Jack Garwin says, "Do you want me to make GTA 6 clips for you?" No. Banshee, I can't understand why a game being on sale is a bad thing in a world where the price of the games has been so heavily criticized. It seems hypocritical. Uh how do you satisfy these people? Well, people were trying to draw attention to the Wolverine being on sale thing as like an indictment of like it must have done really terrible, but what they were missing was it was the uh ultimate edition. Uh the Ultimate Edition is what was on sale. It was not the base game. They were doing the same thing with um Sorrowos. So, uh really quickly, these last two and then I'm going to help maybe you guys can steamroll this. Hunter's Gathering is not cancelled. It's a multiplayer game. No live service elements. Oh, no. I think it's going to get cancelled. I don't even think it's going to come to the market. I think it's going to be too damaging to the brand. And a single gifted comes in from the Cisco. Cisco, I don't know if you're in the top. I don't know if you're in the raffle or not. You're in the raffle as long as you've gifted five or more. We have 29 eligible people in the raffle. And True SSJ, this is going to be the final member board. No more. Uh, are we going back to Persona 5? Yes. Silent is having me go back to Persona 5 because he is the winner. You guys have 12 minutes. You have 12 minutes to either enter the raffle with a five bomb or help extend the amount of people that get pulled in the raffle. 29 eligible people. Right now, we're only going to pull one name. We'll pull two if we get this to 650. I lowered stretch because I thought that was I thought that was a fair thing to do. When we finally get to the goal on Friday, it's a little rough to be like, "All right, guys. Now we got to go more." Like, I'm in the raffle. I put my request in the Discord. Thank you, Cisco. Let's see what we might be playing this afternoon, shall we? We have WWE 2K26 from Mile High. Cisco has an Alex O' Conor video. Oh no. It's 11 minutes long. Uh Cardock Ren says, "Dealer's choice. Play something that will make you happy." Rogue comes in with the VIP renewal and bumps the line a little bit more. Alex says, "Continue playing Ocarina." Edward says, "People of note." Is that a video game? Deep Rock Galactic Survivor is Silver Subaru's vote. Lone Wolf says Wow Forever and then Bass Guru says Outer Wilds. Where can I play WoW Forever? Like Lone Wolf, if you win, how would I where am I even going to play that? Is that that's on PC? Is that in Steam or the Blizzard launcher? I don't know. I know nothing about WoW. Lo's going to last one match in WWE 2K. I never would have thought that Lono and Persona love it. I'm actually enjoying my time in Persona. It's on PC. Battleet only. Oh frick. You got to sub. Lone Wolf. I don't think you can pick something like that. If I got to I don't want to sign up for to sub to something. I'm okay to like buy games, but to sub. Yeah. Is it Wait, is it a onetime fee? Do I not have to buy the game? Do I have to buy the game and sub or is the game free and then just the $14 sub? Only PC Blizz launcher only. It needs a monthly fee. I'd have to have it sitting here downloading. I guess if he wins. If you're not too familiar, Lona, the reversals can be annoying in the wrestling games. It's sub only. Okay. You only have to sub. The game is free. Here's my question. I don't know if Lom Wolf is here. You only I only play the game for about an hour or a little bit more. Like is that even a good idea? Like an hour of WoW forever. Is Is that even a good idea? Like he if that's what he wants, that's what he wants. But I don't want somebody to win a raffle and be super bummed cuz like I don't get anything accomplished. Like I don't know. You You got to be a little careful. Like a wrestling game could certainly be funny. A fighting game could certainly be funny. You guys have 9 minutes to when we pull the raffle. 9 minutes. >> You can cancel your sub as soon as you start it. Okay. >> It plays fun on the controller. We'll get to watch you make your character. >> That's about it. >> You won't get much done in an hour. An hour out of forever isn't a lot of time. >> Honestly, no. I love the game, but an hour of WoW forever would not be entertaining at all. I I don't want to tell somebody that they can't choose something, but that doesn't seem like a good choice. Like I've said within reason, I won't play like adult only games on Steam. I don't know if that's a good choice. I would just feel bad. I'm like, you entered the raffle and supported and then I played a game that you didn't really get to see me do anything. If you guys are going to hit stretch, we need what is that? What is it? 70 more. You would need 14 people to do a five bomb. 14 people. >> If 14 people do a five bomb, I'll pull two names. So, we'll do four games this afternoon instead of just three. But the clock's ticking. I'm pulling the raffle in eight minutes. 14 people would add to the raffle as well. Currently, the number of people in the raffle is 29. As a reminder, the raffle has no monetary value. You don't win anything. You don't get anything. You make me play a game. I spend my own money in order to do that. You don't you get nothing of monetary value. We have to be very clear on that. Is that a nat or a fuzz? Um, there's a free trial of regular WoW. Not sure about WoW forever. An hour would be fun to see if you and Madam already have decently leveled in gear characters and you did like a dungeon or something, but starting out in a leveling zone is not super engaging. One more hour of Neo3 and he's hooked chat says Jamal. Guys, could we get 300 likes on his video? That would be amazing. We're super close to 300 likes. I didn't really I wasn't really focusing on likes today. I try to mention them every, you know, 30 minutes or so. I'm glad it has no monetary value. I hate to pay taxes on you playing a video game. You guys are recommending good games. Does no one want to see any rage bait games or just notoriously bad ones? I think right now people are wanting me to play a game that they like to see how I react to it. Krono, we will probably get to the point where people start picking rage bait games. We just haven't really gotten there yet. I think people are like, "Oo, I love this game. I want to see what Lono thinks about it." So, 6 minutes left. You got 6 minutes left. If you guys get it to 650, two people get entered into the raffle. Rissick and some others were trying to help and they didn't even have to help. They didn't even have to help and they were gifting to try to get us there. And currently we have 522 people paying for their own members. So, thank you everybody who has picked up a membership. I appreciate it very much. 5 minutes final countdown to raffle time. I'm not lowering it anymore. I lowered it to 650 to pull a second name. That means I stream longer. That means I'm I'm pushing up against dinner. I think that's fair. I don't want to lower it anymore. Oh, no. Uh, playing Getting Over It would be priceless. I played that once a long time ago for for you guys. I forget when that was. That might have been on Twitch before 2020. I thought about Switch Sports Resort, but I decided against it. I'm saving my pick, says DTOM for when Arc goes back to PvE. That's a good choice. That's a good choice. Troll ready to summon Zo to Rage. Yeah, Troll Games will definitely summon some salt. One day we need to coordinate and make it three hours of something bad like first, second, and the thing. And Dr. Naz is trying to help at the buzzer here. Thank you so much, Mr. Mr. Doctor. Excuse me, Mr. Doctor. I don't know if you guys can pull it off in four minutes. You would need a savior. And Dr. Naz is trying to bait somebody. He's like, "We're 20 away from 600 boys. Two big bombs would do it or a lot of fives. Right now it's going to be Silent Spartan Rissick and one person in the raffle. We will do two people in the raffle if you guys get to stretch. I try to pick games that someone in chat might not have played or have heard before. Listen, if you guys win the raffle, you pick whatever you want within reason. Again, within reason. The only reason I was pushing back on WoW forever is I would just feel bad. I'm like, I'm not going to get anything done. you know, a wrestling game, a sports game, a fighting game, or if you're like Silent Spartan and every week you're gonna make me play Persona. Like, I think that that's fine. I just don't want somebody to pick something like WoW forever and then an hour in I'm like, brother, I didn't get anything done. I feel really bad, but I have to move on to the next game. Like, I can't just stay in in one for forever. Top three people pick Superman on the Nintendo 64. That's just hateful, man. We don't Come on bro. Can't be out here just being mean. Can't just be out here being mean. We got three minutes left. Three minutes left. I'm going to pull the raffle. It actually shows the winner like right here on the stream. It's really cool. Not going to lie, the Persona 5 streams are a banger. I am kind of surprised by how much I'm enjoying it. Behemoth says, "Hi, Lo in chat." charging my car and watching Lo. Can my day be any better? It's about to get better. We're about to go to the gaming round table and then after the gaming round table, we're going to come back here for members choice. Okay, I'll provide a link in the I'll provide a link if you guys can't find members choice. We are doing it a little bit differently now. It's an unlisted stream in a membersonly playlist. So, you have to come to the channel, go to the playlist, and you'll find it. Okay. I may do a members post just so we might have to do members posts on Fridays to link to it because if not you guys will have no idea where it is. I might do that. So the members you might get a post only on Fridays. When we go to members lounge it's really easy because we redirect but for members choice we're coming from the the gaming round table. So you have two minutes to get it to Oh Chris wants to enter the raffle. You don't have to hit 650. You can just enter the raffle at the buzzer right now with a five bomb and you might be one lucky winner that makes me play something. The raffle has no monetary value. It is purely you getting to make me play a game. Mike on a mic renewing his prime on Twitch. If you guys get this to 650 in the next minute and a half, I'll pull two names, but I don't think you're going to do it. You can enter the raffle at the last second though. We've come a long way from your JRPGs in a nutshell. Nutshell short. That's true. That's true. They still do it though. LIKE LIKE ALWAYS. OH, AND TWILIGHT'S GOING TO ENTER THE raffle with a five bomb at the buzzer here. One minute left. One minute left. Who's in second place? Risk's in second place with uh 62. Silent Spartans in the lead with 150. Rissick's got 62. And the next person after 62 is only 33. So if somebody wants to beat Rissick, they're going to need to really go crazy. They're gonna need to absolutely go crazy. You guys have 40 seconds to hit stretch. If you hit stretch, I draw two names. You also have 40 seconds to enter the raffle. We don't have to hit stretch. You can just enter. And then I'm And then I'm pulling it. Lone Wolf, we were just saying I think it's you. I don't know if Wow Forever is a good choice, brother. I'm not going to be able to get anything done if you win. Do you want to switch to something else? We just we're just questioning the wisdom of that. Like you supported and and really and really helped this week and then I'm going to I'm not going to get anything done, brother. Like I would I don't know if that's a good choice. I think within reason sometimes I need to be able to push back a teeny bit on choices to be like, I don't know if that's the right call, man. An hour is fine. All right. Okay. All right, there we go. Timer is done. Last call. Last call. I'm gonna run the raffle. I'm going to run the raffle. Uh, actually, I need a I need a break. I need a break. I need a break. If anybody wants to enter last minute, do it while I'm gone. I'll be right back. I'm not going to make it. I got 10 minutes to round table, but I I absolutely need a restroom break. Give me a second. Okay. Wait, what happened? Mythic train just started on my channel. What the freak is a mythic train? What does a mythic train do? Unlock one of three exclusive emotes for 24 hours. What? Anyway, uh I just gifted one and wired rope just gifted one. I don't even know what it does. Wait, Malice one just did another five. Uh hang on. I'm going to add it to the total. What the freak does a mythic train do? You get like gold emotes. I've never seen this before. We've gotten like golden kappa and we've gotten treasure trains. I've never gotten a mythic. An emote for 24 hours doesn't sound very mythic. 100 bits from silver. All right, let's do the let's do the raffle. Hang on. I've never seen it. Yeah, I've never seen it. I mean, it'd be it'd be cool if you get the emote like for a week, 24 hours. Like, okay. Like, I don't know. I think they've got some good ideas over there at Twitch, but like taking part in the mythic train and then for a whole week having the emote, sure, but a day like what if you take part in the mythic train like right before the end of your day where you're going to bed and then you're not going to be able to watch next. Okay, let me get the raffle up. Uh, how do I do this? top gifters. Um, uh, select and feature on primary. Yeah, here we go. Select pick one for round two from 32 eligible entries. Yes. 32 eligible people. Oh, there it goes. All right. out of everybody that gifted five or more this week. I KNEW IT. I KNEW IT. I WAS LIKE, it's going to be Lone Wolf, dude. The freaking got to get dad gum it. I got to download Battleet and get freaking stupid World of Warcraft installed. You son of a gun. I knew it. I knew it. I knew as soon as I looked at the Discord and I saw that game, I was like, he's going to freaking win. Dad gum it. All right, so Persona 5 and then you want a pit pop. Oh, yeah. We need to make the pit pop emote. Rristik, what was your Rick's pick was uh uh uh the the the the flying game, right? I need to get you guys over to Gingers and I'll have to do all this like during the the round table. I'll be sitting here slightly distracted for a few minutes. Um you idiot. All right, hang on a second. Uh subscriptions. No, I go to my ch. There it is. The round table round table. No, click on that. Click on that. Uh, ignore the link on Twitch. I'm just doing that so I can get it over to my my streaming rig. Just ignore that. Um, customization redirect. All right, YouTube. I'm going to send you guys over to the round table. Uh, Lone Wolf won. So, I've got to freaking figure out how to get dad gum blizz blizz battle net whatever. We're literally gonna raid in the middle of a mythic train. We're not even gonna take advantage of it. So yeah, we're going to be doing Persona 5, Ace Combat 8, and World of Warcraft Forever. What a freaking afternoon that's going to be. Thank you guys so much for an amazing week. We're going to head over to the gaming round table. So on Twitch, you guys are going to raid. And on YouTube, I'm going to redirect. If you don't want to ride the redirect, then use the um use the use the use the link in chat. I'll look at what Creature saying in a second. I'll see you guys over there for the round table. Please go over and have fun with us. It's a It's a great show. >> Oh yeah. >> Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah.