Xbox Layoffs and the PlayStation Disc Disaster

Maddy, Jason, and Kirk took a break and everything fell apart! This week, they're talking about two of the biggest news stories to hit the video-game industry this year: Xbox's restructuring and PlayStation ditching discs.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Kirk Hamilton?

  Things in the video game industry are not great. That's the short version. For the longer version, stick around for this episode. Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. This week, we are talking about bad news coming out of Xbox and PlayStation. But then after the break, we're talking about three games that we each really like. So some bad news, some good games. Let's get into it.

• 0:31Kirk Hamilton?

  I'm Kirk Hamilton.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  I'm Maddy Myers.

• 0:33Jason Schreier?

  And I'm Jason Schreier. Hello.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  Hello. We're back.

• 0:37Jason Schreier?

  We're back. It was summer break, but we're back and ready for school. Kirk Hamilton, how was Strong Songs Live on Saturday night? I've been waiting to ask you this offline, so we could ask it on the show, and I could hear all about it.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, how did it go?

• 0:55Kirk Hamilton?

  It was incredible. I'm still processing it. It was unbelievable. It was like the greatest night ever.

• 1:04Kirk Hamilton?

  It's just, I don't even know where to begin. The crowd was unreal. We packed the place. We had a ton of tickets on the livestream as well. The band was out of control. We rehearsed just so hard. That week before the show, we got a ton of stuff together. And then everyone just like brought it super hard. The guest singers were incredible. It was so much fun. It was a blur. I'm really like, we had a videographer named Kevin Jarden, shot the whole thing with his like insane camera and is super good at this kind of stuff. And I haven't seen his footage yet, but I've seen stills from it, and it looks unbelievable. So I haven't even dug into the recording, but we're gonna have some very cool recordings from the show.

• 1:48Kirk Hamilton?

  But it was just, I've never done anything like that before. It was the hardest thing I've ever done in terms of producing a show that complex and huge. And it just went off unbelievably. I mean, I want to do it again. I learned a ton. I'm ready to do it and do it even better. But also, I want to sleep for a month.

• 2:08Jason Schreier?

  So is there, like, are people, can people watch the pre-recorded, the recorded version online? Will it be online so people can check it out?

• 2:15Kirk Hamilton?

  It'll be, I'm not totally sure. I mean, if you bought a ticket for the stream, you can watch an archive of that for a while. Like, I'm gonna go and edit it and make it sound really good.

• 2:23Jason Schreier?

  Ooh.

• 2:24Kirk Hamilton?

  And then, there'll be something, somewhere. I'm not sure what Kevin and I are gonna put together, but I think we're gonna work together on something for it. Which is very exciting, because he's really good at this stuff. And also, like I said, he got some great footage, in addition to the multi cam for the stream. So we're gonna cut that all together.

• 2:40Jason Schreier?

  Very cool.

• 2:41Kirk Hamilton?

  I don't know if I'm gonna, like, release an entire, like, video of the entire thing to everybody, but I'll do something. You know, he was at rehearsal as well, we have interviews, so we could do, like, it'll be kind of a documentary-style, you know, accounting of the whole night, that people will definitely be able to watch.

• 2:56Jason Schreier?

  So cool.

• 2:57Kirk Hamilton?

  And I think I'll, I think I'll put an audio version of the show, or at least a lot of the show, in the Strong Songs feed, or at least for patrons of the show. So I'm kinda figuring that out. But yeah, people will be able to watch it. And if someone bought a ticket for the show, for the livestream, you can watch it, you know, for the next 30 days. You can't buy a ticket now and watch it, though, and watch the livestream. That was only before the event. So you'll just have to wait. If you missed out, you'll have to wait.

• 3:22Jason Schreier?

  One more question, and then we'll get to our show. But Kirk, what was the strongest song that you played?

• 3:29Kirk Hamilton?

  It's a hard one. There were a few that were really great. A singer named Naomi LaViolette sang "With or Without You" with just piano, and then I wrote a four-horn, horn arrangement. And she nailed it. It was like a real high-wire act, because that's a hard song.

• 3:45Jason Schreier?

  Sick.

• 3:46Kirk Hamilton?

  My friend Jared Flood sang "Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road."

• 3:49Jason Schreier?

  No, you're not allowed to do multiple answers. None of this stuff. Just one answer.

• 3:53Kirk Hamilton?

  No, there's gonna be three. I can't say one. I, no, because they might listen to this, and I can't say one. Jared did "Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road." He did the Sara Bareilles arrangement of that, solo piano. It was amazing. And finally, Luigi Botia, the wonderful opera singer, a good friend of mine, sang "Paranoid Android," the Radiohead song. That was our grand finale, and it was out of control. It was like, the whole, everyone was on stage, and we, like, blew the roof off the place, and he destroyed it. So that was also a highlight. But there were too many highlights to count.

• 4:22Jason Schreier?

  Very cool. Okay.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  That's awesome.

• 4:24Kirk Hamilton?

  It was very cool. Oh, and I should say thank you to everyone listening to this who came. Or if you bought a ticket or you got a ticket for the livestream, I really appreciate it. It was very, very cool that so many people came out.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's awesome. I'm so glad it went well. And I'm glad that you survived. You need more sleep to recover.

• 4:43Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I'm alive.

• 4:44Jason Schreier?

  Well, Kirk, if people want to help support us and contribute to your recovery, what can they do?

• 4:50Kirk Hamilton?

  They can become TripleClick supporters by joining Maximum Fun. And they can support the creation of this show, this very cool podcast that also does awesome live shows. And that is also a whole lot of fun. If you go to maximumfun.org/join, you can join up and get access to a ton of bonus episodes that we've done. We most recently recorded a bonus episode about 007: First Light, which was a lot of fun, just talking about that game with spoilers, because some of the particulars of that game are very fun to talk about. But we have been talking about video game documentaries. We've been talking about some TV shows, notably The Sopranos,

• 5:32Kirk Hamilton?

  which we just ran the season one conversation about The Sopranos in the main feed. You can hear seasons two and three. And coming up later this year, seasons four and five will also be in there. We're going to talk about The Odyssey this month. That's going to be our Beans Cast for this month. That'll be toward the end of the month, but we're all going to see the Christopher Nolan Odyssey movie. And we are going to talk about that. There's just a ton of stuff there. You should totally support our show. You'll get all kinds of extra material. And also, you'll just be supporting us making the show that we love to make. So yeah, go to maximumfun.org/join, sign up, become a member and get lots of extra stuff. All right, Jason, what are we talking about this week?

• 6:13Jason Schreier?

  This week, we're talking about some really grim news. Well, we were on summer break, some real crazy things happened. Two out of the three. Well, so there are three console makers for people out there who don't know. One of them is Xbox, which just had a mass layoff and is getting rid of a bunch of studios and canceling games and all that jazz. Another one is PlayStation, which announced that they are ending the production of physical discs. And then the third one is Nintendo, which released a game where you like jump over frogs to the beat or something like that.

• 6:52Jason Schreier?

  We'll talk about that one a little bit later.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  That one went okay, I think. I think that third one is doing alright.

• 6:58Jason Schreier?

  But we have to address the Xbox collapse and the PlayStation disc debacle, both of which have led to all sorts of ripple effects that we can get into. Why don't we start with Xbox? So we've been talking about this because we knew it was coming. I'd been reporting that a lot of this stuff was coming and then it was all executed, both literally and figuratively, last week when Xbox, under new CEO Asha Sharma, pushed the reset button, as she has called it, and they laid off 3,200 people. They announced they were divesting five studios, four now and then one to come. So the studios Compulsion Games and Double Fine are going to go independent.

• 7:43Jason Schreier?

  They're going through management buyouts. The studios Ninja Theory and Undead Labs have both been sold by Xbox to undisclosed buyers. And the fifth studio is Arcane, maker of Blade and Dishonored, which is entering the beginnings of the process to be potentially sold or spun off or shut down, most likely sold. But that process is long and elaborate thanks to French labor laws. They have to work with the union. They have to go through all of this kind of, this lengthy process rather than just kind of saying, see ya later, goodbye, we're done. In addition, those jobs, that 3,200 I mentioned earlier,

• 8:26Jason Schreier?

  is 1,600 people were, or 1,600 jobs were cut last Monday when all this went down, including a ton at like Zenimax, a bunch at Obsidian, a bunch all across the org, and then a bunch within the Xbox kind of publishing platforms division. And then another 1,600 will be laid off in the fiscal year to come. So even the people who survived this do not know who is going to be cut next, when it's going to happen, what that's going to look like. Could be in some of the studios that haven't been touched, like Blizzard, or it could be people in Europe, could be people all over, who knows? Nobody knows what's going to happen, so. Pretty brutal stuff that all happened Kirk while you were preparing for strong songs.

• 9:10Jason Schreier?

  I don't know if you saw the news.

• 9:12Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I was aware of it in the background.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, real sort of Damocles situation with that additional set of jobs that are coming. That's a pretty wild way to do that announcement. To just be like, hey, we're not done laying everyone off. So spend the next several months of your life being scared.

• 9:30Jason Schreier?

  Yep. That number, by the way, so that second number of 1600 also includes the studios they're divesting. So the real number is a little closer to 1200 or 1250, something like that. But then there's another number, which is that this kind of has gone unnoticed. So I will highlight it. I've mentioned it a couple of times in my reporting, but I'll highlight it again, which is that Xbox also announced that they're cutting 50% of their vendor spend of the amount of money they spend on vendors, which I think some, I think people, if you hear like vendors, you think of like, oh, does that mean like they're outsourcing partners or like their cafeteria staff or like other vendors they're bringing in, which I think it includes that. But at Microsoft, it also includes a lot of people who are like quote unquote,

• 10:12Jason Schreier?

  full-time staff at Xbox or at Microsoft, but they technically work for agencies that just kind of have them work there. So it's a lot of people who are losing their jobs on top of all those, that 3,200 number. In addition to everything else is all these, these kind of vendor jobs being lost.

• 10:30Kirk Hamilton?

  I think while we're adding to the tally, we should maybe also just include the fact that Xbox has had previous gigantic rounds of layoffs was over the other, is it 2024? There was a bunch of layoffs.

• 10:41Jason Schreier?

  There was one last year. This is, I believe this is the fifth in the last three years, the fifth mass.

• 10:47Kirk Hamilton?

  So yeah, this is in addition to so many more fairly recently. And it's easy to forget because it happens so often, but this is really just the latest and a really ongoing thing.

• 10:58Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I mean, what do you guys make of this? And what do you think happens next to Xbox at this point? I mean, I find it difficult to imagine that a lot of people are going to be doing their best work for this company that has just done this and, and who knows what's going to happen to them next. Maybe they'll be extra motivated now that they're fearing that another layoff could hit. That's, that's sarcasm. But yeah, what do you guys think happens? What do you guys make of this? And what do you think happens next? Matty, why don't you start?

• 11:27Speaker 01

  Sure. I mean, as someone who's been a manager at much smaller companies, I'll just respond directly to that and say if people know that a layoff is coming, they do their worst possible work and they are freaked out pretty much 24 hours a day. And it is horrible having to deal with that. So having this as just a management strategy from Asha Sharma is surprising to me. I don't know that it makes a lot of sense. I think fear as a motivator is something that people think is effective, but there's quite a lot of research demonstrating that it's not so.

• 12:04Kirk Hamilton?

  What do you think the rationale is? I mean, I assuming, not assuming that it's fear as a motivator, but just like, why would you not just, you know, rip the Band-Aid off?

• 12:14Jason Schreier?

  I think some of it is unions. Some of these studios are heavily unionized and have to have more conversations with Xbox. That said, I mean, Zenimax Online Studios has a union and they were hit pretty hard by this. So that can't be the only explanation. Some of it might be European complications there. For example, Machine Games in Sweden has not been touched yet? Question mark. And we don't know if that's going to be one. And maybe there's complications involving Scandinavian labor laws that are coming into play there. But yeah, I don't know. Other than that, I think they they've basically said like, yeah, this is, this is just how it's gonna be.

• 12:56Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I don't know. It's, it's hard to fathom. I don't understand it either. Cause like, yeah. And then again, if you're at Xbox, I mean, the last big layoff, Kirk, to your point earlier, happened the same exact time last year. So like, right after the end of Xbox's, of Microsoft's fiscal year. Last year, there was a huge layoff, first week of July, and now this is happening again. So like, even if we didn't know this was hanging over people, at this point, you just have to assume that it's an annual tradition that Xbox will have a bloodletting every, every July, just in time to celebrate. It's like, July 4th weekend, you got your, your hot dog eating contest and you got your Xbox bloodbath.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, your pink slip along with your hot dog, I suppose. Yeah, I I'm also curious what you two think is meant by the reset and the concept of focusing on the biggest IPs at Xbox. And and I think the kind of general assumption is, OK, Fallout, Skyrim, Halo, maybe Gears of War qualifies for this, but a lot of those are games that haven't had a major hit in a long time. Like, we, there's a reason we don't talk about Halo a lot anymore on this show. I mean, something like Call of Duty, yeah, it's still doing well. It's certainly declined in in recent years.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  But it's still doing well enough. Those other ones, just refocusing on those games, it doesn't seem like as safe of a proposition to me as one might think, especially somebody who might be more of an outsider to the games industry, which famously Asha Sharma is.

• 14:39Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, OK, so there's some interesting stuff here from a business perspective, putting aside the kind of the cruelty and the humanity of it. And just kind of looking at it from a pure business strategy. So there are a lot of hints at what their strategy is. If you go and look at the big annual slideshow presentation that Matthew Ball did every year. Matthew Ball was an analyst. He wrote a book about the metaverse and he was an analyst for a while and he would come out with these presentations every year that got circulated around the games industry. And Asha Sharma hired him as her kind of chief, whatever, strategist, some C suite role a couple of months ago.

• 15:19Jason Schreier?

  And so I think it's safe to say that he is a pretty significant part of this whole new strategy that they have. And a lot of what his thesis is, is that there is growth to be found in the games industry, but a lot of it is in Roblox, a lot of it is in China. He certainly points to kind of big franchises as having potential. And you can look at that and draw a pretty straight line from that into what Xbox is going to do next. To your question, Manny, I mean, I I also don't really think. That Halo has much of certainly isn't quite the brand strength that it used to have. Gear Zavor, I don't think ever really was quite a heavy hitter along the lines of what they're looking for.

• 16:02Jason Schreier?

  Then again, you could also just look at the mismanagement of all of these franchises and be like, why has there not been a new Halo game since 2021? Why has there not been a new Fallout game since 2018 or a new single player Fallout game since 2015? That's crazy, right? Especially when you have this big show. So for a newcomer coming in and looking at that sort of thing and just being like, what the fuck? Like, we have this massive show on Amazon, but we haven't had any game to kind of take advantage of that popularity and that success. I mean, I think most people, most objective observers would look at that and say, yeah, I mean, that's a massive screw up that they could be trying to fix.

• 16:42Kirk Hamilton?

  So it sounds like the move here is that Obsidian is now working on Fallout.

• 16:45Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, so that's one of the things I reported last week, which is that Obsidian, as part of this whole reorganization, they canceled a bunch of projects, including sadly, a sequel to Avowed that I was pretty excited about. I think all of us liked Devout. I liked it the most. I was pretty excited about the idea of a sequel. They still have a team working on the sequel, even though it's canceled, to like finish up the next milestone because the new project, aka the new Fallout game, is not going to be ready yet for them. Maybe they're hoping that they can get it uncanceled if it like gets far enough to completion, but.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  Talk about demoralizing, just continuing to work on a canceled game because you don't have a new project yet. Oof. Okay.

• 17:27Jason Schreier?

  Weird, right? At least you're getting paid. I mean, Obsidian also laid off a quarter of its staff, canceled some other projects too. It wasn't just the Avowed sequel. And then, yeah, they're going to be working on a new Fallout game. It's not really clear. It's so early. Like, it sounds like this decision was made within the last week or two. And decisions are still being made surrounding it, surrounding what it's going to look like. Seems like they're going to be teaming up with Bethesda Game Studios, which is Todd Howard's studio, the studio that has been Shepard. ...the Fallout franchise for the last two decades or so. So I don't know exactly what that is going to look like. But yeah, it's kind of like I've seen a lot of people talking about like the monkey's paw of like, I wish Obsidian would work on a new Fallout.

• 18:12Jason Schreier?

  Oh, it actually came with this horrible tragic event too.

• 18:17Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it's too bad. It makes a sort of business sense, I guess, because Obsidian has made a very good Fallout game in the past and they do need a Fallout game. That one seems like the most glaring omission. When I look at their games, it's, I totally agree about Halo. Halo, it just seems like everyone talks about Halo as being important to Xbox because it was so important to Xbox at the very beginning that that, there's still just a, I guess, a Halo effect from that.

• 18:48Jason Schreier?

  Oh, boy.

• 18:49Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, that wasn't even planned. It's just the actual term for what I'm talking about. But, you know, from that, from that success. And then, of course, you know, Bungie made some really great follow-ups, but that series has been kind of a mess for a long time and development on it, I gather, has been a real mess as well. And I don't, I mean, I don't really have a lot of faith in there being a great Halo game. It just seems like very, a real outside shot that there could be a big Halo game that becomes this major phenomenon. But Fallout, yeah, like, like you mentioned, there's this TV series. It's just a rich world that a lot of people love. People are, you know, Fallout 76 is successful. There's people who really like it, like the universe has a lot of fans.

• 19:33Kirk Hamilton?

  So it seems like they should make another one of those, but it is too bad that it had to come, I mean, not just during this terrible time, at a time when a bunch of people at Obsidian were laid off, but at the expense of Avowed 2. Because I think, I see people talk about Avowed as too, as though it's a sequel to Avowed, but Avowed is also in the Pillars of Eternity universe. And Pillars of Eternity is cool and it was something that Obsidian and their writers had built over a long period of time. It was kind of their own little fantasy universe, or big fantasy universe, I should say. There's something little about it. And it's very cool that they had that and that they could control their own destiny and to take a studio that clearly has a lot of creative writers and people who want to

• 20:14Kirk Hamilton?

  tell stories and to put them into a role that will, in some ways, be subservient to Bethesda and to Todd Howard, to the overseers of Fallout. It's cool. I get it from a business perspective.

• 20:25Jason Schreier?

  Another ridiculous pun, the overseers of Fallout. Very good.

• 20:27Kirk Hamilton?

  Oh, true. Yeah, you're right. Wow. It's all just, it's just the words mean things that also mean things in, in video games. Anyhow, I, I mean, it, it could turn out a great game, but it also is a shame because Obsidian kind of deserves to be doing their own thing as well.

• 20:41Jason Schreier?

  Yeah. And it's one of those things, we've talked about this, this trend in the past, how it used to be 20 years ago, 15 years ago, it used to be that you could have your kind of, your strong, but you're promising but flawed first game and then build off that to the sequel, you're Uncharted 2, you're Uncharted 2. And a vow to a sequel to a vow could have been just that. They have all this tech. They all have these production pipelines, this world they created, this amazing parkour system they created. You could really take that and make something really special with it, but they will just be, not get the chance. I also, Kirk, I want to talk about something you just mentioned because I think it's illustrative, which is that people still talk about Halo as this like frag flagship franchise for Microsoft despite the fact that there hasn't been a good one in a very long time and the studio

• 21:24Jason Schreier?

  behind it is, is no longer part of, hasn't worked with Microsoft in, in a decade and a half. They've got their own problems, but that's a conversation for another time.

• 21:33Kirk Hamilton?

  It's funny to very briefly interject. It is funny that we, I actually really liked Halo Infinite. I think we kind of all did when we were playing it.

• 21:40Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, and that grappling hook.

• 21:41Kirk Hamilton?

  I know what you mean. It had a lot of problems and as a multiplayer game.

• 21:45Jason Schreier?

  Hasn't been a great one. Hasn't been a great Halo in a long time. Let's say, say that.

• 21:49Kirk Hamilton?

  Right. It wasn't super successful, but there were actually things about Infinite that I liked.

• 21:52Jason Schreier?

  Um, I, I barely remember it.

• 21:55Kirk Hamilton?

  We were very positive on it in our episode.

• 21:57Jason Schreier?

  It had a grappling hook. Yeah, it did have a grappling hook.

• 22:00Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it was fun.

• 22:01Jason Schreier?

  Hasn't been a great Halo game in a long time. Let's say that. Regardless, or there hasn't been any Halo game in five years. We could say that too. And yet people still talk about it as this flagship franchise. And I think that's because there hasn't been anything else. And that really is one of the fundamental flaws with the Xbox organization. One of the reasons we're in this situation is because they have been unable to create a killer franchise that has been their version of like what PlayStation and Nintendo both seem to have quite a bit of. Nintendo in the last decade has created multiple billion dollar franchises like Splatoon, for example, PlayStation, same thing, The Last of Us, and God of War, technically not a

• 22:44Jason Schreier?

  new franchise, but it's been revitalized. Ghost of Tsushima, a new franchise that has turned into a very big success, right? So Xbox hasn't been able to do that, and that really has been a fatal flaw for them. And then instead, they've bought these other companies that were able to do that, like Bethesda and like Activision with Call of Duty, and that has helped them, I suppose, help their financials make sense with, in the case of Activision, not so much Bethesda, but still, they haven't laid out the killer case that made the killer franchise for the Xbox. And as a result, they've just been suffering for the last decade or so.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wonder if we'd be having a very different conversation if we all loved Starfield, like if Starfield had just been like this incredible new IP that just changed everything and was really exciting. And instead, we can all just be like, oh, well, what have they even been doing this whole time?

• 23:42Jason Schreier?

  Or if we had all loved Redfall.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  Right, or Redfall.

• 23:45Kirk Hamilton?

  There are probably a few games like that, where like each of these big games that an Xbox Studio releases has the potential to really change the narrative or make people feel differently. And then each time it doesn't work, it's just a really big blow. And that's particularly true because there aren't that many games coming out of these studios and they're all really big and take a really long time to make. So each one that doesn't work, it's like a huge gamble that then doesn't pay off.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:13Jason Schreier?

  So a lot of what they're doing here, in addition to doubling down on the big franchises, is culling the smaller games. And so the studios that they got rid of are studios, or and/or pivoted, are studios that have released like indie style games. I don't want to call them indie games since they're a part of Xbox, but indie style games or double A type games. Yeah, so Ninja Theory with Hellblade, Undead Labs: State of Decay, Double Fine with all their weird stuff. And compulsion with South of Midnight. Those are games that no longer fit into the portfolio that were brought into the portfolio because of Xbox Game Pass, their subscription service, which no longer seems to be a priority because that was never able to achieve the growth that

• 24:58Jason Schreier?

  it set out to because there was never a huge market for that service. It kind of peaked at 35 million users or so and just could never get past that hump. We could get into that if you guys want, but it's, it's interesting that there was never really enough of a market for that.

• 25:13Kirk Hamilton?

  It's interesting that we live in a world where 35 million people is not very many.

• 25:19Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I suppose in another, at another company, maybe you could just make a healthy business out of having that kind of number, but they had been projecting like 100 million and they had said like, if we don't hit those numbers, this is a failure. So that was what they, that's the reason they spent all this money, right? I guess you can't, you can't settle for 35 million if you're going to spend the kind of money that you spent to buy Activision Blizzard.

• 25:41Kirk Hamilton?

  No, for sure. Just the number is funny.

• 25:43Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, no, it is funny.

• 25:45Kirk Hamilton?

  Of it not meeting expectations and being a failure.

• 25:47Jason Schreier?

  A hundred percent.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  Right. Especially if it's like, okay, the games that are supposed to sell Game Pass are the double A games like your South of Midnight, your Keeper, et cetera, Asenua Saga, you name it. And those games are somehow supposed to make it to 100 million subscribers, even though, as we said when we were discussing Xbox before, they're games that are special because they're for specific niche audiences and they're exciting to those niche audiences. And like that tension between whether Xbox should be focusing on these massive blockbuster mainstream titles that are for the widest possible group of people ever, like your Call of Duties, your World of

• 26:31Speaker 01

  Warcrafts, et cetera, or something like South of Midnight. Like that is, that is the, the fracture in the ground that we are seeing right now. It's like the thing that we said something's got to give about for so many years. And it's upsetting to watch it, but it's also like. I don't know how else this could have worked out. Like, it made no sense.

• 26:53Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I mean, it's something we've seen at Netflix, for example, as well, where when Netflix first started adding original programming and also buying shows from other networks, the belief was, it was kind of that idea. Oh, well, we can make, you know, we can allow artistic creators to make something that's really particular for a set audience, and we'll just have so many particular things. We'll have this really diverse slate of entertainment. And you can look at Netflix's release, like at their releases over the years, and see how they have just moved toward now everything is just made for the maximum possible audience. And you get a lot of much more forgettable and, in my opinion, much less interesting programming. They still have some interesting programming. It makes its way through. They still get the occasional auteur in there.

• 27:39Kirk Hamilton?

  But you've got The Electric State or whatever, all these like, you know, Red Notice, all these crap movies, these things that basically don't exist, that they buy from other studios just to throw on there. It seems as though Xbox has kind of undergone a similar path. They're like, OK, Xbox Game Pass, it's going to have a whole bunch of diverse, interesting games. Then over time, it's like, oh, that doesn't work. Instead, we're actually just going to release major blockbusters, and we're going to go with, you know, the biggest possible surest bet.

• 28:03Jason Schreier?

  Maybe. I don't think, I don't think they go with Xbox Game Pass at all anymore, because unlike Netflix, the economics of Game Pass are really just putrid.

• 28:12Kirk Hamilton?

  That's a good question. What do you think, Jason, happens to Xbox Game Pass? I mean, like, is this actually, is it in jeopardy?

• 28:19Jason Schreier?

  I think they keep it going, but at some point, they're just going to remove day one sales, because that makes no sense anymore. So, Matty, to your point earlier, so you take a game like South of Midnight. That's a game that was not exactly like critically acclaimed or anything, but like, the people who really loved it, really loved it, it really spoke to them. And that's a game that costs $40 to buy, but on Game Pass, you can get it for, what was it, $15 a month, $20 a month, whatever it was at the point that that game was released. And so, not only is that kind of this, this, put this load on it that it can't really support as being part of the subscription service trying to grow. Oh, the subscription. It also is being completely devalued to the point where people

• 29:02Jason Schreier?

  might be like, why would I spend $40 on this when I could just get it on the Game Pass service for quote unquote free or for my monthly subscription charge. And that I think happened to a lot of games and there are a lot of people out there in studio leadership within Xbox who absolutely detest Game Pass and thinks it has, think it has destroyed the value of their games, think it has, has taken away from the value of all games in general, just as a service and just has contributed a lot of just, it's been a detriment to the games industry and those people's views because of how it devalues games. And so Netflix, I think is a little bit different, just because the stuff that is getting put in Netflix cannot be bought separately. You cannot go and buy Electric State or whatever. And then there's

• 29:47Jason Schreier?

  a bigger argument that we won't get into about how Netflix devalues the movie theater experience in general.

• 29:53Kirk Hamilton?

  It's too bad, man. I would have that Electric State steelbook.

• 29:56Jason Schreier?

  You really want that collector's edition?

• 29:59Kirk Hamilton?

  I'd have my The Gray Man steelbook, you know, up on the wall somewhere.

• 30:03Jason Schreier?

  But, but point being that like these Xbox studios are expected to sell their games and not just be part of Game Pass. So that, that adds a whole new set of wonky math that I don't think ever really made sense to the equation. But yeah, so now we're seeing this new Xbox that is putting aside all those games and is just going to focus on these, this bigger stuff. That's not to say they're not going to do new things. I think they're still cultivating new IPs, but they're, they're definitely making bigger, bigger projects. And the thing I would be worried about is what if you're one of these studios that has not been hit by this, this layoff, has a game expected to come out within the next few months or next year or so, and then has no idea what's going to happen after that. So like, if I was the Coalition and I had Gear

• 30:47Jason Schreier?

  Z Day coming up, I would be freaking out. Like, are we going to get shut down next after that game comes out? That game suddenly is going to miss out on millions of copies because Asha Sharma and her team also decided to make it exclusive to Xbox and not be on PlayStation. And so what does that mean for us? If I'm clock in exile and I'm making clockwork That game is not going to be selling millions of copies, especially since it was also made Xbox exclusive. What does that mean for the studio? If it isn't a huge hit, are we next? Or is NXL going to be on the list this time next year for that July culling? It's just miserable. It's just miserable to be a part of if you're not working on Call of Duty or Fallout or whatever.

• 31:33Jason Schreier?

  Then again, even Bethesda Game Studios, the flagship of Zenimax, they're the Todd Howard Studio, the studio that makes Elder Scrolls and Fallout. They got hit too. They lost a few dozen staff jobs as part of this culling. So yeah, it's, it's a lot and it's, it's very difficult to unpack. The one that I really don't understand is Arcane. A Blade game from Arcane seems like it's primed to do quite well. So that one really surprised me.

• 32:02Kirk Hamilton?

  Have you heard anything about the development of that? Like how it's going or anything like that?

• 32:06Jason Schreier?

  Um, nothing I can share at the moment.

• 32:11Kirk Hamilton?

  That would be my only question is maybe it's a disaster or something. There's something going on behind the scenes that has made management be a little less confident.

• 32:19Jason Schreier?

  That's true of every, like every Xbox game. Every video game. Every video game ever. Yeah, I mean, Fable, um, which is coming out in February of 2027, I believe, is, is what they announced. That game started development in 2017.

• 32:34Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, to be clear, I'm not saying like, oh, it's their fault because they're doing a bad job. I just mean like to try to understand the decision making behind something that seems to me as well, like as sure a thing as the team that made Dishonour making a Blade game. I mean, hell yeah, that sounds great. Just maybe they somehow talked themselves into it, you know? Sitting there being like, oh, we're hearing blah, blah, blah. Like, or this seems like it's the latest prototype wasn't quite working. So we're not going to do this anymore. I don't know, like something like that.

• 32:59Jason Schreier?

  I don't know. I mean, part of it could be also that when you work with the Disney license, you have to pay royalties on every game you sell to Disney. So maybe that's part of the equation there. I don't know. Another part of this is that has gone a little bit under discussed because it's not as sexy a headline is, I don't know if you guys saw this, but in Asha Sharma's note that she sent out as part of this layoff. She also said that Mojang, the maker of Minecraft and King, the makers of Candy Crush, will both now be reporting directly to her, which means they're bypassing Matt Booty, who was running all the studios before, and in King's case, bypassing Activision entirely. Both of those studios now reporting to her. Those two happen to be the studios behind the most lucrative games, or two of the most lucrative games in the Xbox portfolio, Minecraft and Candy Crush.

• 33:42Jason Schreier?

  Those are also games that could be seen as quote-unquote platforms, that could be turned into bigger things, maybe turned into the next Roblox, for example. And again, as I mentioned, Matthew Ball's strategy in his PowerPoint presentations have pointed to Roblox as one of the big growth vectors in the gaming industry. So I wouldn't be shocked to see these two studios start getting a lot more growth, a lot more resources, throwing a lot more money and people at trying to become the next big platform, the next Roblox.

• 34:14Kirk Hamilton?

  Can I ask a question that I don't know the answer to, that also might help some of our listeners out, which is, could I get like a comparison between Roblox and Minecraft in terms of size and scale? Just to understand how the two compare?

• 34:27Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I mean, we don't really have public numbers on Minecraft, but it's humongous. There's many millions of people playing it. Roblox, of course, is in the hundreds of millions in terms of like-

• 34:37Kirk Hamilton?

  So Roblox is far bigger than Minecraft?

• 34:39Jason Schreier?

  I believe so, yeah. I believe Roblox is bigger than Minecraft in terms of like active users. But I don't know, I don't believe, I can double check this, but- Yeah, it's all, everything out there is all estimates. I mean, it's definitely in the tens of millions of monthly active users on Minecraft, if not hundreds of millions. Roblox is humongous, though. I mean, Roblox, for comparison, we talked about, what was it, Grow a Garden and like Steal a Brain Rod, those games like were, in terms of daily concurrence, they were like, they had the same number as all of Steam, playing just those games. So different sort of scale. But I think the question here is, is like, can they turn into, turn these other platforms into games like that?

• 35:23Jason Schreier?

  Can they appeal to China more and get all the growth there that's kind of become the-

• 35:28Kirk Hamilton?

  And can they do that without screwing up what they've already got? Because my understanding is that Minecraft is and has been in a very good place and a lot of people really love it. And, you know, can they kind of, you know, kill the goose that laid the golden cubic egg?

• 35:45Jason Schreier?

  Well, I think what happens is when you come from the outside of the video game industry into the gaming industry, a few things happen. One is you look at something like Double Fine and you say, why would I keep this around? I believe I said that like the week after Asha Sharma took over on this podcast.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you did. I'm having deja vu right now. I think you did say that, almost those exact words.

• 36:06Jason Schreier?

  Which, by the way, you would think, like, can't you keep Double Fine around just to make documentaries? Because there's so much value to that. But anyway, I digress.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  I'm sure they do not want those documentaries being made, actually.

• 36:16Jason Schreier?

  Oh, no, absolutely.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  There's no way. They think that's good.

• 36:19Jason Schreier?

  So you come in from outside the games industry, and especially if you have a tech background like Asha Sharma does, I think one of the things that you might think is that you can scale up your business by throwing money and people at it. And that's not always necessarily true for games in a way that it might be in the startup world or in the kind of tech services world at Instacart, at some of these other kind of big platforms within Silicon Valley. And so with Minecraft, I mean, just throwing more investment at Minecraft, double the number of monthly active users? I don't know about that one. I guess we'll see. I guess we'll see how that grand experiment works out. But definitely expect them to be hiring

• 37:01Jason Schreier?

  a lot more people, throwing a lot more people at Minecraft and at Candy Crush.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  Ooh, a Candy Crush platform that is like in the style of Roblox is so upsetting to them.

• 37:13Jason Schreier?

  The amount of money Candy Crush makes, by the way,

• 37:15Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 37:16Jason Schreier?

  from what I've heard is pretty astronomical.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  Dark future, right there.

• 37:21Jason Schreier?

  So, yeah, that's the Xbox situation. There will be more fallout from this.

• 37:26Kirk Hamilton?

  Fallout?

• 37:27Jason Schreier?

  God, I did, I did what Kirk did. There will be more fallout.

• 37:31Speaker 01

  There will be more fallout. That's great news.

• 37:35Kirk Hamilton?

  There will be more, some of the fallout will be more fallout.

• 37:37Jason Schreier?

  That sentence has multiple meanings that we'll get to. But let's also talk about the PlayStation debacle, because for some reason PlayStation decided to announce that in a year and a half in January of 2028, they will be discontinuing Fizz. Physical disc production and the internet was just totally cool about this. Everyone seems chill.

• 38:01Speaker 01

  Everybody was fine with it. Nah.

• 38:04Jason Schreier?

  Have you seen, if you look on Twitter, which is a website I try not to go on, but still is necessary for news purposes. If you look at the PlayStation Twitter feed,

• 38:15Jason Schreier?

  every single thing they tweet has thousands of replies and they are all about this.

• 38:23Jason Schreier?

  Physical disc to the point where they tweeted something the other day and it was like about the blood of Dawnwalker, that new game that's coming out. That I think looks pretty cool by the X Witcher people. And every single response was just about how PlayStation is screwing over customers with this disc thing to the point where I wonder if the developers behind these games are like, you know that marketing beat we had planned? Let's, let's, let's give her the lout.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  Let's not talk about our game for a minute if it's coming out on PlayStation. Yeah, it's, hmm, I guess this was probably inevitable, but boy, do I wish I weren't saying that. I do not like that this was inevitable at all. I, I understand that many of these discs that we play, that we install are actually not containing any files on them and that that has been true for many years and that they are essentially download keys. But that is not a good thing and it, I wonder if PlayStation just saw all this bad news about Xbox and they were like, well, we've been meaning to do this disc thing. Can we just kind of sneak this in there really quick? And then people will just keep talking about Xbox for a while.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Didn't work out that way for them, but it did kind of feel that way.

• 39:33Jason Schreier?

  Man, I don't know. It really sucks because we were just talking about like how people afford games and all these things are like, like use games, libraries, all this stuff that like, like, like sharing games with your friends that is all just going to be killed by this decision.

• 39:47Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, this, and it also really drives home the fact that we don't own any of our digital games. And I think that has been true and it's been a bit of a frog in a pot of water situation, but. If there is no other option and you can just not own a game, it's, you know, it just feels a little bit different. And also, it's such a drag. I mean, when people put it in, I think, the proper context of saying, this would be like if you can't buy a DVD or a Blu-ray, or if you couldn't buy books anymore, if there were no more bookstores, and you can't own the books that you want to own. And suddenly, everything was just digital, and you just had a license to use it for as long as the person who sold you the license wants to let you use it. It's also, you know, this is also happening

• 40:31Kirk Hamilton?

  in the context of Sony removing a bunch of movies that people had bought from PlayStation. I can't remember the particulars of this, but there were a bunch of movies that people had paid for and had in their library that they now just can't access because Sony removed them. And that's something that can happen with any of these games that we quote-unquote "buy." And it really does just stink. It feels bad. It makes people mad for a very understandable reason. And I don't, I mean, I get it from a financial standpoint, but it's such a punk move. It just sucks. Yeah? I, yeah, it just, there should be physical copies of things. This digital future is not, what's the word? It's not consistent enough. If, you know, we don't have ownership. And also, Jason, you mentioned this somewhere,

• 41:16Kirk Hamilton?

  maybe in a YouTube video. They didn't pair this with any positives. This was a huge failure that they didn't say. They were just like, here's some bad news.

• 41:23Jason Schreier?

  Yeah.

• 41:24Kirk Hamilton?

  And we're gonna lower prices.

• 41:26Jason Schreier?

  It was paired with another negative, which was them saying, "We're shutting down the PlayStation 3 and Vita store."

• 41:32Kirk Hamilton?

  That's right. So, you know, saying, you know, "You can now buy, we're gonna make a way that you can buy your games and actually own them," or something, you know? "Or we're gonna lower prices," just something. It could have gone down easier, but even then, it still would have been a massive drag.

• 41:47Jason Schreier?

  I heard a really good, interesting theory from Matt Piscatella at Circa, a great analyst who handles a lot of, like, analysis of sales every month and stuff like that. And he thinks that this move was done to boost margins for Sony and PlayStation as much as possible in preparation for what is going to happen. To be console sales falling off a cliff for multiple reasons. One being the memory and storage crisis, leading to things getting more expensive. And thing also that crisis leading to supply going down. So there will be fewer consoles on store shelves and there will be harder to buy. And they will be more expensive when they buy them, leading up to a PlayStation six.

• 42:32Jason Schreier?

  Whenever that arrives, which again, as we said before, hilarious to imagine that coming out next year. But who knows, whenever that arrives, if that that could be an $1,000 machine, if not more than that. So again, Sony preparing for potentially not selling as many consoles anymore. And so maybe trying to boost margins elsewhere by doing this. Could also be just preparing for like a digital ecosystem on their next machine. So like a portable PlayStation six and then a console PlayStation six. And neither of them have discs anymore in any capacity. So it could be part of that. But yeah, those are some theories that I've heard.

• 43:12Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, the digital only feature is a real problem. Even as I'm, you know, thinking about it, there are, as I mentioned, Netflix movies. Like there are streaming movies that don't get a physical release and that do then just get delisted and just stop existing. And we wind up with, you know, cobbled together markets of people who maybe ripped it onto a DVD and have put it up on a torrent site to keep it alive. People who pirate games just as a way to hold on to them and own them. And it kind of falls to users to industriously preserve and maintain access to various works of art. It's just a sad state of affairs. I don't, I think that all of these art forums deserve better. Digital is great in so many ways. It allows for easier delivery.

• 43:55Kirk Hamilton?

  You know, it's, it's, you can spread your work all around the world. But I think that you owe it to your audience and to the artists who made the thing to maintain that art and maintain access to it. And this is no kind of way to do that. It's moving in the wrong direction.

• 44:10Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, and I think it's interesting. It's funny because all three of us are PC gamers and obviously PC has not been a physical platform for. Years, how many computers even have disk drives these days? But the digital future or the digital present has been coupled with all of these benefits that you get on PC. Preservation is way easier. It's all an open platform. So you can really, you can have emulators and ROMs.

• 44:36Jason Schreier?

  PC games don't, there's no worry about backwards compatibility. You can play your PC games as long as you like, as long as you have a PC that runs them. On Steam, you can share games, you can refund games. There are a lot of other kind of customer friendly tools that have been built to make that digital kind of library feel a little bit more real, even if you don't technically own it. And I suppose technically.

• 45:00Kirk Hamilton?

  Well, and also to add, GOG, Humble, there are a lot of platforms that sell DRM free games that you own. Like that also, I mean, there's a lot of PC games that you own. It's, I mean, mainly Steam that we're talking about where you don't technically own.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the Epic Games Store, but all those other platforms, you can actually download a DRM free version of a file that you own.

• 45:23Kirk Hamilton?

  Rip it to a DVD ROM and keep it forever.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  Which does feel great. Like I am very comforted by the fact that I own, own games from some of those platforms where I'm like, I have a file and no one can take it away.

• 45:36Kirk Hamilton?

  If I didn't get review codes for free for most of my games, I would absolutely seek out DRM free games and more so now, I think this would serve to kind of reinforce that for me.

• 45:46Jason Schreier?

  Yep. So it's not great.

• 45:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say it's not great.

• 45:51Jason Schreier?

  Not great, not ideal. Yeah, I'm saddest about the libraries. Everyone go support your local public library because this is going to hit them.

• 46:01Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah. And we, you know, we've talked about how libraries rent Kindle books and there is, there could hopefully be some possibility where you can check out a digital version of a game. Again, that's another thing that Sony could have talked about or that somebody, some publisher could talk about, hey, we're going to partner with libraries and make it so that this, you know, some number of digital copies will go to libraries.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  That'd be so cool. Such a goodwill announcement if they did that. Can you even imagine?

• 46:30Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, it's interesting. And then, of course, as part of this whole thing, Take-Two and Rockstar have announced that Grand Theft Auto VI will not come on a disc at all. It'll just be, you either buy it digitally, or you buy a game key inside of a, of the box, which I guess is just kind of ushering us into this future, starting with GTA VI.

• 46:50Kirk Hamilton?

  I was watching, Dunky, the YouTuber, made a pretty funny video about this, just sort of making a lot of jokes about a lot of physical games that he owns. And he was going through all of his old physical copies. He had, it's a very similar collection to the one I have. That would imagine the two of you have. There's a lot of PS3 games, a few PS4 ones. He pulled out his, I guess it's his Xbox, I guess it's an Xbox 360 copy of GTA V? I suppose it is. It's so crazy that game came out so long ago. And opened it, and it had that big map of San Andreas, which I have. I have that copy. And it was just, it was fun watching the video, just looking at these physical copies of games. And of course, the game that he published, Animal Well, he published it with a physical

• 47:32Kirk Hamilton?

  copy, and he included that in there as well. He likes to promote his own game in his videos.

• 47:36Jason Schreier?

  Billy Bassett, the creator of Animal Well, actually said on social media that this bums him out and makes him not want to make his next game on PlayStation, because like, physical is so important to him. I wouldn't be shocked if we saw other just kind of developers potentially following suit, especially if like, in the PS6 era, the console winds up becoming so expensive that they don't even have a library of users in the first place.

• 47:58Kirk Hamilton?

  Right.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:59Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, the wrong direction. It feels like they're moving in the wrong direction.

• 48:02Jason Schreier?

  Everything is moving in the wrong direction, both of these companies, to the point where like, it feels like the PlayStation 6, if it doesn't have a disk drive, if it costs $1,000 or more, if it really, if it like, if, if it comes out so soon that people just feel totally burned because the PS5 era just had such a weak lineup compared to previous generations, it really feels like the PS6 could be such a debacle that it just ends the console cycle forever.

• 48:30Kirk Hamilton?

  Certainly, given the broader economic trends and that affordability is not going to get any better. I mean, like, people are not going to be prioritizing a $1,000 console, you know? Even if, even if all that wasn't happening, they wouldn't be prioritizing paying that much. But now like that thousand dollars is a bigger chunk of most people's income and like, forget it.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know why. I no longer work at a place that's gonna send me one for free. So if that happens, I might be the triple click co-host that's like, I'm not buying this, guys.

• 48:57Kirk Hamilton?

  Yes, this is when we just go start talking about old PC games on the show. It'll be fine.

• 49:03Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I mean, there won't be any new PS6 exclusives that you need to get anyway, cuz like.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  I know, I won't even need it for ages, if ever. I mean, it's possible. Already right now, I'm projecting my future self being like, I'll just play that somewhere else. Like, what? Even the idea of it not having a disk drive is like, what the heck? I, that's so silly. So then it's implied that it won't be backwards compatibility, compatible to any of the PS5 discs that I do have because who cares about those anymore? I, I don't know. I, that's really wild. The, the disappearance of disk drives in general is already something that I feel weird about.

• 49:41Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I mean, to that point, Matty, and to the point you brought up earlier, Kirk, like, the fact that they didn't couple this with a, here's what we're gonna do for the future of your console, of your hard, of your software library is if you have a disk, you'll be able to convert it into a digital game that you're gonna be able to carry forward to future hardware generations. Like, the fact they didn't even say that, I think is, is really just such a failure in terms of messaging and how they could have smoothed this over. You would have think they would have learned from the past because it, they like, really started off the PS4 generation on such a strong note by defeating Xbox in terms of messaging and in terms of how they got to players and convince them

• 50:26Jason Schreier?

  the selling points of their console. And it's just, it feels like that generation has just been totally forgotten.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  Completely.

• 50:32Kirk Hamilton?

  It's like all these companies are actually just opportunistic and none of them were ever cool to begin with.

• 50:36Jason Schreier?

  It's not even about cool, no, but the opportunistic move would have been to couple this with something that made it go down easier. Like, you have to recognize that if you're completely profit motivated, you have to recognize that that, that appealing to customers is what's going to get you the highest profits. It's not, it's just boneheaded. I don't know what it is. Kind of arrogance. I don't know if it's arrogance. I don't know if it's just kind of misunderstanding. Maybe it's totally being in such an insular environment of your own people where you're just looking at spreadsheets and talking to other people that work at PlayStation and maybe you have poor market research or something and you don't realize how much of a mistake this is going to be. I don't know. I don't know the explanation. I just know it's a mistake.

• 51:19Speaker 01

  I mean, I think that's feasible because I'm sure that the people who buy digital vastly outnumber the people who buy a physical. I mean, we know that, but...

• 51:26Jason Schreier?

  Well, that's why this is happening in the first place.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  Right. And like, if you simply look at those numbers on a spreadsheet, then you're like, okay, well, barely anybody's even buying physical games anymore. So like, what does it really matter? But it's also symbolic. There's an emotional component to this and people are having emotional reactions to it that I think are understandable because it ties into the points Kirk was making at the beginning of this discussion about how we don't own anything anymore. It just becomes so literalized. You cannot even purchase a game in a store anymore.

• 51:59Jason Schreier?

  All right. Enough with all the bad news. Let's take a break and then we'll talk about some cool video games that all of us are playing.

• 52:12Speaker 03

  All right, we're over 70 episodes into our show, Let's Learn Everything. So let's do a quick progress check. Have we learned about quantum physics?

• 52:20Speaker 04

  Yes, episode 59.

• 52:21Speaker 03

  We haven't learned about the history of gossip yet, have we? Yes, we have. Same.

• 52:25Speaker 05

  Episode, actually.

• 52:26Speaker 03

  Have we talked to Tom Scott about his love of roller coasters?

• 52:29Speaker 04

  Episode sixty-four.

• 52:30Speaker 05

  So how close are we to learning everything?

• 52:33Speaker 03

  Bad news, we still haven't learned everything yet.

• 52:36Speaker 05

  Oh, we're ruined!

• 52:39Speaker 03

  No, no, no, it's good news as well. There is still a lot to learn. I'm Dr. Ella Hubber.

• 52:45Speaker 04

  I'm regular Tom Lum.

• 52:46Speaker 05

  I'm Caroline Roper and on Let's Learn Everything, we learn about science and a bit of everything else too.

• 52:51Speaker 03

  And although we haven't learned everything yet, I've got a pretty good feeling about this next episode.

• 52:56Speaker 04

  Join us every other Thursday on Maximum Fun.

• 52:59Speaker 06

  If you want to know what's going on in the world of movies, you should be listening to Maximum Film so we can tell you all about it.

• 53:05Speaker 07

  Okay, but what if you already know what's going on in the world of movies? What if you're kind of obsessed with movies, like maybe you have a problem? Well, then you should definitely be listening to Maximum Film because we too have that problem and it's important you know you're not alone.

• 53:18Speaker 06

  We're talking indies you'll want to seek out.

• 53:20Speaker 07

  Blockbusters and blockbuster wannabes. Classics we can't get enough of. I'm comedian and writer Kevin Avery. I'm film critic Alonso Duraldi.

• 53:28Speaker 06

  I'm festival programmer and producer Dreya Clark.

• 53:31Speaker 07

  Together, we're Maximum Film, smart about movies in Hollywood, so you don't have to be. But if you already are, that's also great. And hey, we see you.

• 53:39Speaker 06

  New episodes every week on MaximumFun.org.

• 53:43Jason Schreier?

  And we are back. Kirk, what's Nintendo up to?

• 53:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:49Jason Schreier?

  While Xbox and PlayStation are just shooting themselves in the ass.

• 53:54Kirk Hamilton?

  Nintendo.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  Not the foot, the ass.

• 53:56Kirk Hamilton?

  Has been making you move your ass by putting out a little game called Rhythm Heaven Groove that I've been playing. I played some on stream initially on the TripleClick YouTube channel a little while back and then have played much more. And actually, my nieces are staying with me this week and so the two, Emily and I and my nieces have been playing four-player co-op. Multiplayer in this game as well. And dude, this game is so good. It's probably not a surprise. Rhythm Heaven games tend to be pretty good. But this one is really, it's really great. There's a lot to it. And it's just the most fun thing in the world to play with a group of people. I think anyone listening to this, if you like to play Switch games with your kids,

• 54:41Kirk Hamilton?

  your nieces, any children that may be over and hanging out and wanting to play games with you. This is, man, I mean, this is a really great one to go with. Let me explain what it is. So Rhythm Heaven is a series that's been around for a while. I have, I reviewed at least one on the 3DS back when I was at Kotaku and hadn't been super familiar with the series, but it was, I think that was my first one. And since then, I've, you know, I've gone back and played a few of them. It's a little bit like WarioWare in the way that it's structured. It's a collection of mini-games, each of which takes a few minutes to play through, each of which is different, all of which are very funny and strange.

• 55:18Kirk Hamilton?

  And, you know, the art is really like, kind of like lo-fi, odd, but very specific and very charming. There's always something weird going on in the background of each little scene. So to give an example, I don't know, you'll be, in the multiplayer game, you'll be a group of tennis heroes who are fighting to save a kingdom. And so the four tennis players are like, in a, you know, looking down a kind of advancing column of enemies and their butts are like swinging in time to the music. And then they like throw up the ball and vah, pow, and you hit the ball. And you'll play this game with one button or two buttons. So you just have to time your hit perfectly. And then you kind of go in order.

• 56:01Kirk Hamilton?

  So the four tennis, they're the something lads, the lucky lads or something. And they're fighting against these monsters who are advancing. And then you'll play that for a few minutes and then move on. Then there's one where there's an onion that keeps growing like big, long hairs out of its, out of its chin. And then your tweezers, and so as your tweezers go around, so the hairs will go plink, plink, plink, plink, plink. And then you'll have to go cock, cock, cock, cock, cock to like clip them exactly in time. And If you get a little bit off, you won't, you know, pull all of the hairs correctly.

• 56:34Jason Schreier?

  So this is the same thing as WarioWare, right?

• 56:36Kirk Hamilton?

  I mean, it's the same idea where you just move through different games. But unlike WarioWare, it is purely musical. And actually, you could play this game without being able to see at all. They have built in a lot of accessibility features and including just like total speech to text or text to speech. So you could play this with your eyes closed and it would actually be a really cool experience. There are audio cues for everything and it's a very, very musical game. You kind of go through a training phase on each mini game. It shows you what you're supposed to do. And then the real song starts to play. Sometimes they're like songs with lyrics and they'll have a credit with the singer and you get to listen to this fun pop song. And you'll play through a bunch of these mini games. I think it's four or five.

• 57:18Kirk Hamilton?

  And then at the end you get a remix that combines them all. And it takes all of the games you just did and mixes them together. And then I think, I haven't gotten to the end, but toward the end you get a remix that's like a remix of a remix with every single game. And there are all the different little inputs and weird things that you're doing, kind of cut and mixed and overlaid on top of one another. But yeah, it's fun to play with a group because it never gets old. You never just, you never get stuck. You just do something and then you do something else. And there's a wonderful variety in this game. There's like an RPG, this kind of action RPG you can play through where you cast spells by doing different rhythmic inputs and you level up and get more abilities and you're like healing and doing different kinds of elemental spell attacks.

• 58:02Kirk Hamilton?

  I haven't gotten super far in it, but it's its own whole thing. Multiplayer is really fun. Like I said, there's a multiplayer game called Cake Wait that is like the most fun thing. My nieces were losing their minds. The way this game works is it's four guys and they're like sitting around a square table. And I can't even describe the art. They each have really funny hair and the hair is part of whatever. The way the game works is there's one piece of cake and they're about to be on break.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  I've seen gifs of this.

• 58:31Kirk Hamilton?

  I'm not surprised. This seems like one that would be mega, that would be very viral.

• 58:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 58:34Kirk Hamilton?

  There's, there's one piece of cake and they're at work and they're about to go on break in 10 seconds. So when the clock- Hits three, you press the button and grab the cake. So everyone's trying to grab the cake. And because the controller measures your input to the one, I think one hundredth of a second, it is very precise about who wins. And you can, you know, beat the other person by grabbing it at zero point one seconds late, where the other person was zero point one two seconds late and you were right near each other. And so it's this great buildup where you're all sitting there and you're waiting and it's counting down and waiting and then you're like, go! And everyone presses and like, you know, people fall out of their chairs on screen and one guy comes up with the cake. And then his hair gets a little bit longer. But then eventually it starts messing with you, like it'll zoom in on the cake and the music goes away.

• 59:18Kirk Hamilton?

  Or one of them, it gave us 20 seconds and then the music completely went away and we were all just counting in our heads, like nine seconds, which is very hard to do with any accuracy.

• 59:28Jason Schreier?

  That's amazing.

• 59:28Kirk Hamilton?

  And, you know, and then it's always just this explosion of laughter and, you know, recriminations at the end. And I haven't played all the games. I'm sure there's so many more like that. So it's just this like joyful, creative, hilarious, really great game. I recommend it wholeheartedly. If you've played one of these, you know what you're getting more or less, but also the joy of it is that you never know what you're getting. You just pick the next thing and see what it is. And even if you hate it, you just go to the next thing because each one is only a few

• 59:54Jason Schreier?

  minutes. Sounds delightful. I want to play this with my children.

• 59:57Kirk Hamilton?

  Oh, they would love it. You'll have so much fun. And it really would help improve your rhythm. It's got a lot of cool, you know, it's very musically designed. It has a lot of cool syncopations. It does a lot of good repetition. It's a good teaching tool. It gives you multiple chances at new rhythms. You know, there's always a twist, like it starts out, okay, quarter notes, but then it does a syncopated one and you're like, oh, what? But anytime it does that, it always gives it to you again because it knows maybe you got thrown off. So it gives you a chance to get it right and kind of internalize it, which is nice. So it also is a nice little rhythmic teacher.

• 1:00:28Jason Schreier?

  Sounds awesome. All right. Matty, what's your one more thing?

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  Buy One More Thing is also a game. It is another game that is played by tens of millions of people. It's called Love and Deep Space. Have you two heard of this game?

• 1:00:44Jason Schreier?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  Certainly you have heard of it. This is a mobile game that I would describe as a boyfriend simulator. It is, in theory, a dating sim, but I think boyfriend simulator is probably more accurate to the actual day-to-day experience of what the game is. So basically, you, okay, so this, how do I describe this? So you-

• 1:01:13Jason Schreier?

  You know, boyfriends.

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, boyfriends. So imagine they're nothing like that at all, and they're in this fantasy land where all they ever want to do is take care of you, and you don't ever really have to take care of them at all. This is a game that is very explicitly marketed towards women who are attracted to men, and there are so few games that have that specific demographic that aren't also trying to be inclusive of like queer men as well. There's none of that. This is just purely like, this game is for women who are attracted to men. That's it. Women and girls, I guess I should say. The men/boys in this game are sort of of dubious

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  ages. Like, they're, I think like a young girl could still kind of enjoy the fantasy of them, but I think they're all, they all have like young adult, young professional jobs.

• 1:02:05Jason Schreier?

  Maddie, can I just say real quick, I really enjoyed your mothership piece about how the Marvel, Tocon, Captain America thing, was that what it was?

• 1:02:14Speaker 01

  Marvel Rivals.

• 1:02:14Jason Schreier?

  Marvel Rivals, Captain America, ridiculous-looking dude with his dong just like flopping around, and how that was very much like not designed for the female gaze in a way that Love and Deep Space with its like safe twinks is.

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  Absolutely, female gaze. Safe twinks is a perfect way to describe these guys. So there are five different guys in this game. There is also a plot to this game, very elaborate narrative in this game, which I did not expect. I was going into this just being like, Probably just a dating sim like I just I walk around a school or something and I meet boys and I I date them. No, there's almost this like persona-esque supernatural world that you enter into like you are a young woman and you have almost no options for what you look like. You're basically this thin, beautiful Chinese woman, no matter what you want to do. And you are you have magical powers and the entire world is plagued by these supernatural

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  entities that you and a few other people have the ability to get rid of. And you are in training to help save the world from these bizarre supernatural entities. What's the deal with them? Some of them might actually be good, etc., etc., etc. And you meet these different men over the course of your supernatural adventures and training. And some of them also have these superpowers as well. But more importantly, they all have these like idealized romanticistic archetypal personalities. Like, one of them is like, like, one of them is like a mean doctor who like tells you, nags you into taking care of yourself. Like, again, all of these are kind

• 1:03:55Speaker 01

  of like caretaker fantasies. One of them is like your sort of long-lost childhood friend. One of them is like, I think he's going to turn out to be like an ancient eternal prince, like, think Edward Cullen, that kind of thing. So, anyway, I think what's interesting about this game is how wildly popular it is. And I know a lot of game developers listen to our show. And so, rather than recommending this to the wider audience, which you guys can check it out if you want, it's fine. It's sort of interesting cultural artifact, I would say. I think that it is an example of what Jason was describing, something I wrote about in the newsletter last week for mothership, which is this idea of the female gaze and like how to design for it. And I

• 1:04:39Speaker 01

  think this game is an excellent example of that. And I just so rarely see it in games that I feel like this might be a nice study for people who make games and are thinking about it and are like, what does it look like? For male characters specifically to be attractive to women. What is that writing like? And this game is really corny and silly, but I also think it gets a lot of things right when it comes to that. It's very forward on building up the narrative before you eventually, there is, there is some light sexual content in this game. Like there, it does eventually get quite horny. So like it's, there's Chinese censorship laws that it has to obey. So it's all implied, but

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  like you are working up to having sexual relationships with these men eventually. But so much of it is around having emotional closeness with them first and building that relationship with them. And if they're a bad boy, oh, they're going to change for you, that kind of thing. So like, I just think it's kind of valuable to understand those archetypes, because I think a lot of people don't. And they just kind of put things out and are like, is this an interesting romantic plotline in a game? And some of them are, and some of them aren't. I was also thinking about Garrus and Mass Effect a lot while I was playing this and being like, oh, like, remember how great Garrus was? What a, what a wonderful love interest. And like, we all remember the ones that are really well-written. And what is it about them

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  that makes that work? So from, from a cultural standpoint, I recommend Love and Deep Space. It's really silly. I, eventually it also like includes these gotcha mechanics, by the way. I think it becomes sort of insidious at a certain point that I haven't hit. And I believe, I believe it becomes like sort of exploitative of its female fanbase, which is kind of too bad. So I would love to see a game that doesn't have gotcha mechanics in it. But still kind of like caters to this audience. Cause I think, I mean, as evidenced by the fact that millions of people are interested in this game, I feel like it's definitely something that people want. So, I don't know. Anyway, it's called Love and Deep Space. And I'm glad I checked it out because I was really curious about it. And it's, it's fascinating.

• 1:06:50Jason Schreier?

  This is like the female equivalent of sports betting. Which is luring young men to gambling. This is luring young women to gambling.

• 1:06:58Speaker 01

  You're also like spending, you're betting, I mean, it's gotcha. So it's like, it's not literal gambling. You're like spending fake money to get like, you're spending real money on fake money in order to like, get increasingly archaic versions of fake money to bet on getting cards that then lead you to more sexy content with these boys. The cards kind of like tell you more details about them. Or like, sometimes you get like, voice notes from them and stuff like that. Audio plays, et cetera. You know, you can imagine.

• 1:07:29Kirk Hamilton?

  Hey, I'll throw out there for, related to mothership, that the newsletter that Maddie writes every week, you can just get it for free, right? If you're, you just have to sign up.

• 1:07:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's free.

• 1:07:38Kirk Hamilton?

  And it is great. The newsletter is wonderful. I love getting it every week.

• 1:07:42Jason Schreier?

  It's free, but then it lures you in with gotcha mechanics.

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. There are gotcha mechanics. Just kidding, not really. You can either pay for articles or not. Yeah. You, we, there's no trickery here. You don't have to.

• 1:07:55Kirk Hamilton?

  But it's nice. It's a nice way to get a little Maddy Myers in your inbox every week. So people should totally sign up.

• 1:07:59Speaker 01

  It's true. I do try to give our free readers something special as well. And our paid readers get even more than that. So yeah, it's, it's nice.

• 1:08:08Jason Schreier?

  My one more thing is a video game called The Incident at Galley House. And this is a game that is kind of a remade version of an itch game that was released for free last year called Type Help. And so if you guys remember, last year, one of all of our favorite games was The Root Trees Are Dead, which was also a remade version of an itch game helmed by this guy named Robin Ward. So Robin Ward happened to find root trees on itch and loved it and wound up working with a developer to turn it into like, a proper game that they then sold on Steam. Now, he has done the same thing with this game, Type Help, that was really well regarded last year when it came out. And so this new version, The Incident at Galley House, is really cool. I really enjoyed it.

• 1:08:53Jason Schreier?

  If you're into these kinds of like, deductive games, you will enjoy it too. I would say it wasn't quite as kind of like.

• 1:09:03Jason Schreier?

  Blissful an experience for me as Root Trees Are Dead was just because the nature of the game to me was a little bit less interesting. But I really enjoyed playing through it. And so the concept is, and by the way, I didn't play the original type help because I heard this remake was in the works. And so I just decided to wait for this. So the basic concept is you play as this investigator who gets to this, this house called where a bunch of people have died. And you are trying to figure out exactly what happened. And to do that, you have this kind of machine, this séance machine that lets you recreate scenes of the past. And so you are kind of recreating the story of what happened in this house as you use this machine.

• 1:09:49Jason Schreier?

  And in order to recreate scenes, you have to figure out where a scene, where something took place, when it took place and who was involved in it. And if you get those things right, all those variables right, then you will successfully recreate that scene and you will get to see what happened there. And then you can kind of use that to learn more information and piece together the entire tapestry of what happened as you go. So for example, I'm just gonna make things up. This isn't what happened in the game, but let's say you are exploring, you are looking at a scene in the dining room and two characters are talking to each other. And one of them is like, oh, have you seen Bob? I was just talking to him in the study.

• 1:10:27Jason Schreier?

  Then you might realize like, oh, okay. So that means that one tick of time earlier, I can go to the study and put in that character that was talking along with Bob. Then I'll be able to see that scene and you just kind of work your way out from there. And the game has some cool UI and some cool helpful mechanics, like it'll tell you, it'll be like in this scene that you're looking at. You have X number of potential leads left that could steer you to other scenes. You might have five clues left that'll steer you to other scenes. And some of them get a little tricky and you have to really use deduction to figure out and piece them together, use it based on multiple scenes as you go. And then eventually you learn why all these deaths have taken place and you kind of.

• 1:11:12Jason Schreier?

  Of go from there. So yeah, it's really cool. It's a really cool little mystery. And just like with Root Trees Are Dead, Robin Ward and crew, Robin Ward worked with the original developer as well as Jeremy Johnson, who was the creator of Root Trees Are Dead. The two of them are kind of paired together now, working on these types of deduction games. The three of them worked on this and it also has voice acting and art. It's like a good production values for this, for this game. They actually created a new scene or a new section as well, just like they did with Root Tree Mania in the trees are dead. So there's some cool new stuff too, even if you play the original type help. Yeah, I really enjoyed it. I recommend it. Pretty cool. Again, not as kind of like head over heels

• 1:11:57Jason Schreier?

  in love with it as I was with Root Trees Are Dead, but I still really enjoyed it and recommend it to anyone who likes this type of game. I think it's really great and you guys would both really enjoy it. So I think you should both play it if you haven't already. Once again, it's called the incident at Galley House, bit of a mouthful of a name.

• 1:12:14Kirk Hamilton?

  Nice.

• 1:12:14Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, it comes out, I believe it's out July 14th. So this week it is, is out and I recommend it. Really cool game.

• 1:12:21Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 1:12:22Jason Schreier?

  Took me about eight hours to finish in totality.

• 1:12:24Kirk Hamilton?

  I started it and it seems cool from what I played and then I just haven't had time, but now that I have more time, I will definitely be playing it.

• 1:12:32Speaker 01

  I love this trend. I'm just glad we have more games like this.

• 1:12:35Jason Schreier?

  Or deduction games.

• 1:12:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:38Jason Schreier?

  In the future, we will not have consoles, but we will have lots of deduction games.

• 1:12:42Speaker 01

  Seems fine.

• 1:12:43Jason Schreier?

  It's fine.

• 1:12:45Speaker 01

  Oh, well.

• 1:12:46Jason Schreier?

  No big deal. All right. That is that for this week's episode. We will be back next week to talk about Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resinked, which will be fun to discuss. And of course we will be doing our bonus episode about the Odyssey in the next couple of weeks. So go and check that out. Check out the movie if you want to hear us talk about it.

• 1:13:07Kirk Hamilton?

  Or the book.

• 1:13:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, check out that book. See if you can find a bard who will perform it for you.

• 1:13:13Jason Schreier?

  Yes, see if you can find your local bard. Go to the local bard store.

• 1:13:17Kirk Hamilton?

  The bardery.

• 1:13:18Jason Schreier?

  The bardery.

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

  It's a little long, but it's worth it.

• 1:13:21Jason Schreier?

  I read Cersei, that book I talked about a few months ago, which is also The Story of the Odyssey, just from a different perspective. So that's pretty cool, too. I'm sure that'll come up in our conversation. Let me see the movie.

• 1:13:31Kirk Hamilton?

  I still haven't read that, but I want to.

• 1:13:32Jason Schreier?

  It's cool. It's cool. It might be good companion literature to this upcoming movie chat. All right, Kirk, Manny, see you both next time.

• 1:13:42Kirk Hamilton?

  See you next time.

• 1:13:43Speaker 01

  Bye.

• 1:13:46Kirk Hamilton?

  Triple Click is produced by Jason Schreier, Maddy Myers, and me, Kirk Hamilton. I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music. Our show art is by Tom DJ. Some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration. You can find a link to our ethics policy in the show notes. Triple Click is a proud member of the Maximum Fun Podcast Network, and if you like our show, we hope you'll consider supporting us by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join. Email us at [email protected] and find links to our merch store and our Discord server in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

• 1:14:44Speaker 06

  Maximum Fun, a worker-owned network of artist-owned shows. Supported. Directly. By you.