Does Video-Game Marketing Really Work? [Mailbag]

Jason, Maddy, and Kirk open up the mailbag for some questions about video-game marketing, female protagonists, what's going on at Studio ZA/UM, and much more.

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

• 0:03Jason Schreier?

  It was 96 degrees in New York this week and I mean, I really think it should just not be.

• 0:12Jason Schreier?

  Welcome to Triple Click where we bring the games to you. This week, we are answering some listener questions about all sorts of things from marketing in video games to the new glut of female protagonists.

• 0:30Jason Schreier?

  I'm Jason Schreier.

• 0:31Kirk Hamilton?

  I'm Kirk Hamilton.

• 0:33Speaker 02

  And I'm Maddy Myers. Hello.

• 0:34Jason Schreier?

  Hello.

• 0:35Kirk Hamilton?

  Hello. Hi there.

• 0:37Jason Schreier?

  Do you guys want to hear a horrifying story?

• 0:40Kirk Hamilton?

  I always want to hear a story from Jason at the start of an episode, especially a horrifying story.

• 0:44Jason Schreier?

  So a few nights ago, I'm in bed, about to go to sleep, lights are off and I kind of turn over. I'm getting comfortable, I turn over and as my hand hits the bed, I feel like a sharp pain in my hand. And I'm like, what the fuck? Like, did one of my kids leave a toy? I'm like feeling around for it, can't find, like, I can't feel anything. And it's still, my, my hand still hurts. I'm like, am I imagining this? Half asleep? So I turn on the light and then I see it. A wasp in my bed that has just stung on the hand. Talk about having trouble falling asleep the rest of the night. Oh my God.

• 1:22Kirk Hamilton?

  Have you read The Shining, Jason? That literally happens in The Shining, in the book. It doesn't happen in the movie. But that is like a, one of the scariest and most memorable parts of that book is his dad like knocks down a wasp's nest outside of the hotel and then like kills it with bug spray and then gives it to his son, to Danny and is like, look, cool, you can keep this as a little trophy. And then Danny gets stung and like they put a glass bowl over the wasp nest just in case. And then they come in and it's like black with wasps, like it's just covered with wasps that have somehow started coming out of it.

• 1:57Jason Schreier?

  Well, meanwhile, in my real life, so.

• 2:00Kirk Hamilton?

  I'm just saying it could have been worse is the moral of that story.

• 2:02Jason Schreier?

  Could have been a fictional story. I, I hired an exterminator. I called an exterminator to look, like, see if there's a hive. Here and

• 2:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, is there a wasp nest?

• 2:11Jason Schreier?

  He could not find anything. He said that wasps were probably just getting in through tiny cracks in the in the house and getting stuck in there and can't escape.

• 2:19Kirk Hamilton?

  Alternate theory, you live in a haunted hotel with an eldritch spirit within it that is trying to kill you and your children.

• 2:25Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, but we but we already know that.

• 2:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, did the wasp manifest out of nothingness? That's always a possibility.

• 2:32Kirk Hamilton?

  You are a writer, you know, all work and no play makes Jason a dull boy. I don't know.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, have you only been writing that over and over?

• 2:39Jason Schreier?

  So I asked him if there's anything I can do and he said, no, just just keep an eye out.

• 2:43Kirk Hamilton?

  No, you I mean, I'm not an exorcist. I'm not rated for this kind of supernatural phenomenon. I'm sorry.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Just put up with it. That's all you can do.

• 2:52Jason Schreier?

  Hey, if you want to support Triple Click and make it so we can hire, I don't know, giant walls outside of our houses to prevent wasps coming in.

• 3:01Kirk Hamilton?

  We can pay gas for the snow cats so that the groundskeeper can come and save us in the middle of a blizzard.

• 3:06Jason Schreier?

  I was gonna say, I thought you were gonna say afford gas for a flamethrower to burn down your house so wasps can't come in anymore.

• 3:14Kirk Hamilton?

  Right, that is the only solution.

• 3:16Jason Schreier?

  Can't get wasps if you don't have a house. If you would like to support Triple Click, we are a listener supported podcast. You can become a member and sign up and make the show possible by going to maximumfun.org/join. Join Triple Click today. And not only do you support us by doing so, you also get bonus episodes every single month, including the one we just ran about The Sopranos, season two and season three. We ran that earlier this month. It was a mega episode, a lot of fun, us talking about those two seasons, very fun conversation. And we got one coming up soon, next week, by the end of May, about the show Players, highly underrated, underappreciated TV show that we're going to talk about a little

• 4:00Jason Schreier?

  bit. And since that show in particular is hard to find, we are also going to, we're gonna, we're gonna try to make that episode appealing, even if you haven't seen it or can't watch it. It's about games and esports and competitive League of Legends and there'll be a lot to dive into and I'm very excited to talk about it. One more quick thing before we jump into. In the episode, which is that last week as my one more thing, I kept saying London Calling as the name of the book that I was reading. It's actually the London Falling. And I just wanted to correct that because it's, I guess the name is a play on London Calling, because a guy falls out of a window. But I guess the title doesn't work so well, because I just kept saying London Calling. So I'm not sure it's, it's, it's

• 4:45Kirk Hamilton?

  So it's not a sequel. It's not London Calling 2.

• 4:47Jason Schreier?

  Right. It's, it's, The Clash wrote this book as a sequel to

• 4:53Kirk Hamilton?

  Their less known follow up.

• 4:55Jason Schreier?

  London Falling, yeah.

• 4:57Speaker 02

  Very less known in that it is a book. It's not an album at all.

• 5:02Kirk Hamilton?

  It's a, it's a real thinker. It's very ambitious in some ways.

• 5:05Jason Schreier?

  So yeah, if you want to, if you want to check out that book, it's called London Falling, not London Calling. Okay. I'm on the show. So this week we are doing some questions. We are opening up the mailbag and taking some listener questions. Once again, as always, you can reach us with your own questions at triple click at maximumfun.org. Send in your questions. Please keep them short if you want to maximize your chances of getting read on the show. And by the way, when I say keep them short, that doesn't mean write like a four paragraph preface and then be like, here's the short question. Please just keep the whole, the whole email short is my, my request for you all out there. All right, let's start off. Manny, when you read this first one?

• 5:46Speaker 02

  Sure. This one's from Andy who writes, hey, uh, gang. This week's episode with Nels Anderson was an amazing listen. I'd love to hear about what each slash any of you considers your most notable or most instructive failure. What mistakes or circumstances do you attribute as the root case? What lessons have you applied to your next endeavors? Is this a weird question? No weirder than asking about your finances, I'd like to believe. I agree, Andy. It is no weirder than asking about our finances.

• 6:19Jason Schreier?

  I, uh, many years ago was, uh,

• 6:25Kirk Hamilton?

  I created this pretty cool musical theater project with a friend of mine, who was an actor and a writer. She was really amazing and we kind of thought we'd pool our resources and make a San Francisco local stage production with skits and music, kind of a musical review. It was super cool. We had a great working relationship. We had a really good time and we, pretty quickly, like some of, I think they were her friends, there were some writers that she knew who wanted to get involved, who were like, I don't know, into writing comedy. And we had all these sketches we were going to be doing, so we brought them in. The whole thing was very sort of, it was the proto-Zoa. It was the very early phase of this creative project and neither of us had ever really done something like this before.

• 7:09Kirk Hamilton?

  So, we put it together and staged the first one and it went really well. Like, a bunch of people came out, we had a cool venue, it was super fun. We didn't really make very much money and we had no strong plan for like, how we were handling money, but it was, you know, we just, we knew it was like, equally the two of ours. And we had talked to the writers, basically being like, yeah, we want to like, pay everybody, we want this to be like, a whole thing, but we're just kind of doing it to see what it is right now. And we had no real plan beyond that. So, we kind of kept doing it and then, pretty quickly, some of the writers got pretty upset and were essentially saying, well, we want ownership in this, like, we want to be a part of this, like, we want a stake. Where my friend and I were like, whoa, that wasn't what we were thinking, you know?

• 7:53Kirk Hamilton?

  We started this together, we want to own this and we were just thinking we would hire you guys. And it just all blew up and fell apart, basically. The writers got really upset with us, we thought they were being unfair, they thought that we were, I don't know, being unreasonable or not communicating with them. It was kind of crazy, like, how quickly it just completely collapsed. And the whole project fell apart as a result, which really sucked, because I think it could have been really cool. So, the lesson that I took from that was, be very clear with people you're collaborating with, early on, about what their role is going to be, what, how ownership of something is going to work, even if it's like, a really kind of embryonic project and you're not sure what it's going to be. Be sure that you're communicating to everybody like who owns what,

• 8:38Kirk Hamilton?

  even if you think that it's clear, because we certainly thought it was clear, but it was not, apparently, and that led to the whole thing falling apart, which was a bummer.

• 8:46Jason Schreier?

  And that's why Chippiklik has an operating agreement.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  It does.

• 8:50Kirk Hamilton?

  If you're starting a business, definitely have an operating agreement. That's, that's a related lesson.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  That's, that's good advice. I have a pretty similar story, actually. I didn't know we had this in common, Kirk. I, back when I was writing for The Boston Phoenix, which I talk about all the time on this show. I usually talk about how I covered video games there. But I also covered a lot of theater there because I used to be really into theater productions. And I did a bunch of theater in college and when I was younger than that. And for a time period, I was like, this might be my thing that I'm really into is theater. And while I was at the Phoenix, I also started a small business with two really good friends from college who we had all done theater together. And we started this theater company and we did not have an operating agreement

• 9:39Speaker 02

  and we did not have an LLC. We didn't do any of that stuff. So in some ways, it's like, was it even a real company? There were no documents that needed to be broken up when this company did, spoilers, break up. And this was a kind of a different situation from yours, Kirk, in the sense that it wasn't a power struggle where everybody wanted ownership. It was a situation where I took ownership of a lot of tasks, kind of without asking the other people.

• 10:11Kirk Hamilton?

  That doesn't seem like you. I can't imagine that happening.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  And then I got very resentful that I was doing a lot and that other people weren't. And that became an issue over time. And eventually I... Very melodramatically, I would say. I do regret this. Quit the project and was like, "All of you have let me down. You weren't doing all the things I expected you to do." Now, did I communicate any of those things with the two of you? Or did any of the three of us really sit down and actually nail down what this project would be? And who would have responsibilities or ownership over each piece of it? No. So I also learned a lesson about, again, just having really clear expectations if you start a project.

• 10:58Speaker 02

  But I think another piece of that, that I'm not sure if this happened to you, Kirk, was just the concept of starting a business with people who are really close friends of yours can sometimes be really fraught as well, because sometimes you don't, you haven't worked with them before. But you might really love them or care about them and just want to believe that you're all simpatico as coworkers. But sometimes you're not. And that doesn't mean they're like a bad person or even bad at a job. It just mean that you're not actually a fit to work together. And that can be tricky, I would say. And that is something that sometimes even if you sign an operating agreement, you don't know until you try it.

• 11:39Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, for this, for my situation, it was my friend and I were actually great together and had been working together a lot on the project. It was more other people that we brought in who we didn't communicate with well. But yeah, I mean, that's certainly true. An operating agreement is great, even if like the three of us, we work really well together and, you know, just work things out and talk through all of our ideas and like resolve things pretty easily. But it's nice knowing that we have like a kind of a mechanism for that. If we ever need to be like, "Okay, well, the official rules of our, you know, of our business are, the voting works this way," or something like, it's just nice knowing that exists, just in case you need it.

• 12:14Jason Schreier?

  How does it work? Is it just majority?

• 12:15Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it's a two-third vote.

• 12:17Jason Schreier?

  We never had to address the agreement.

• 12:20Speaker 02

  How little this has ever come up, because we could just talk through conflicts?

• 12:23Kirk Hamilton?

  But it is on a legal document that all three of us signed, you know what I mean? Like, it's nice knowing that that is, that exists.

• 12:28Jason Schreier?

  66% of the LLC has to agree for, for a decision to go through. Interesting. Okay.

• 12:36Kirk Hamilton?

  You should read over our operating agreement, Jason.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  Jason, we could be voting you out.

• 12:41Kirk Hamilton?

  Also, it was expensive to get it written.

• 12:44Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, it hasn't been relevant in the six years of doing this.

• 12:47Kirk Hamilton?

  Nope, it's a good thing.

• 12:49Jason Schreier?

  I feel like a lot of people we know out there should listen to both of your stories.

• 12:54Speaker 02

  I do think it's a pretty common story for creative people, truly, to like start a project and be really excited about it. And even have it go really well. Like in our case, I think it did go really well for the first like six to eight months. We put on a couple of productions that I'm still really proud of. But the division of labor part, you really have to nail that down ahead of time. You cannot build that as you go.

• 13:19Kirk Hamilton?

  It's also a thing with freelance pay. This happens with musicians all the time where you get offered a gig and you take it. And you still don't know the night of the gig, whether you're getting paid or how much or who's paying you. That happens constantly because people just don't lay it out ahead of time. And you kind of assume, all right, they'll probably just divvy up the door after the gig and I'll get a hundred bucks or something. But I try to be like really clear with people, even with friends, like I am paying you this much for this. Or I have no budget for this. This is me asking you as a friend, you know, and just laying it out and trying to be very clear.

• 13:49Jason Schreier?

  But if it's a jazz show, it's all about how much you don't pay.

• 13:54Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I'll try that next time. I'm not paying the man. Look, guys, it's about the money I don't give you.

• 14:02Jason Schreier?

  I'll tell a story real quick. I've told this before, so it might sound familiar to you too, but I'll retell it anyway. About my most instructive failure, which is when I was in high school, I was obsessed with the newspaper and it's all I wanted to do.

• 14:14Speaker 02

  I love this story.

• 14:15Jason Schreier?

  My senior year, I like wound up becoming the editor in chief of the newspaper and I was so jazzed. And I do it for a couple of weeks when one day I get called into the principal's office and he has like printed out on pieces of paper, blog posts from a live journal that I had where I talked about like smoking weed and hanging out with friends and stuff. And he busted me, not because I talked about like drugs, but because as my avatar, my icon on the live journal, I used a picture of a teacher who looked funny. And his punishment for this, because he was like a vindictive, just kind of awful principle that it's funny, we talked about this at my high school reunion last year, like even with other teachers about how awful this guy was.

• 14:59Speaker 02

  That's so validating.

• 15:02Jason Schreier?

  His punishment was to kick me off the newspaper. He was like, I'm going to take away the one thing you love most. And since then, my career has just been driven by spite for this one.

• 15:13Kirk Hamilton?

  You joke, but I'm, I feel like maybe part of it is.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  I also feel like that's fine. Like, I don't know. A lot of my career is driven by spite, too.

• 15:21Jason Schreier?

  Kirk, I gave same high school reunion I just mentioned. I gave a speech at that reunion and I talked about how I told, I told two stories. I told that story and then I told a much more positive story about experiences in the high school journalism world. And I was like, so my career has been driven by love and spite, like equal parts love and spite, love for, passion for journalism and also spite for this one principle.

• 15:44Speaker 02

  I feel like that is a good lesson, though, is that sometimes an adult can't be reasoned with. I feel like as a kid, I learned that in a few different ways. And also that like sometimes authority figures aren't always, don't always have your best interests at heart and you have to be careful.

• 15:58Kirk Hamilton?

  They can be unfair and capricious and they can punish you in ways that.

• 16:01Jason Schreier?

  Fairness, that was my big takeaway. My big takeaway was that like, wow, like I thought that like rule, like if you follow the rules, if you do good work, like you, you will like, just kind of like, I was lucky enough to live like a comfortable like life, like I never had to worry about not being fed or whatever, like I lived in a house, like et cetera, et cetera. And I always was just kind of taught like you work hard, you can, you can make your way, you can succeed in life. And this was my first experience of like, oh, wow. Okay, sometimes you just do something and the consequences are completely unrelated. And I'm not saying I should have like done that blog post with teachers' pictures, but like the consequences were so.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  It's a good lesson, though, because the consequences were so outpacing. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 16:45Kirk Hamilton?

  It's a good lesson, though. It is one that can be over learned as well. I know some kids get betrayed by an authority figure like that when they're young and come to believe that you just can never trust that, you know. There will be reasonable outcomes from something that you do like it was actually a very irresponsible and harmful thing that your that your principal did even though you know it in part fueled your career like that is a really bad lesson to teach to a kid.

• 17:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I one hopes that those kids end up having like a really great teacher as well or teachers who show them that that can also be a really empowering and meaningful relationship and that mentorship can be great. Just as much as it can also be unfair and capricious and absurd because this is a person who has power over you.

• 17:29Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, Jason, was there? Did you have any other teachers who were like, I know, man, this is total bullshit. That shouldn't happen.

• 17:35Jason Schreier?

  No, they wouldn't say that to a kid, but there was one other guy who was the journalism advisor who I liked much more and I felt was much fairer and a better mentor to people in general. And twist twist ending, he's now the principal of my high school.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  Yay, it all worked out. It all worked out.

• 17:52Kirk Hamilton?

  I bet that your story that you told has has continued like I bet he will never make that mistake because of that because of your story.

• 17:59Jason Schreier?

  I sure hope not. I sure hope not because you know, even when a kid is like misbehaving, it's like, that was the one thing that kept me like, like despite like.

• 18:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, like.

• 18:08Kirk Hamilton?

  Like, not that I was. It's a total blunder.

• 18:10Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, it's like you want to encourage someone to like really get into what they're actually into because it prevents them from not that I was a troubled kid, but like in a situation where someone was like really troubled.

• 18:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, you could have become one like this could have been the beginning of your downfall.

• 18:23Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, right? Like then suddenly my life went off the rails after that.

• 18:26Kirk Hamilton?

  Well, and like how many kids who you know, have a really tough background and don't have a lot of positive things in their life, tell the story of like, it was the newspaper at school, it was banned, it was sports, it was something that was like, that was my passion and it got me through it and it got me out.

• 18:41Jason Schreier?

  A hundred percent. Yeah. Um, anyway, uh, let's keep going. Okay. So this next question, Kirk, you want to read this next one?

• 18:50Kirk Hamilton?

  Uh, yes. This comes from Abhimanyu, who writes, "Hey, triple-click. I was looking at a recent postmortem of 2XKO, a 2v2 fighting game that I tried out because of the terrific art style, despite no longer playing titles in this genre. One of the points made about its failure was that Riot simply didn't market it well, to the point that the reviewer hadn't heard of the game at launch. Do you agree with that sentiment? And what's your perception of the role of marketing and publishing in making games a success nowadays, regardless of how well they're made and reviewed by critics? Thanks for making the show. I always look forward to Thursdays when I get to tune into the latest episode. Big love from a fellow journalist in Bangalore, India."

• 19:32Jason Schreier?

  Cool.

• 19:32Kirk Hamilton?

  Cool.

• 19:33Jason Schreier?

  Yeah.

• 19:33Kirk Hamilton?

  All right. Well, yeah, what do we think of this? This is like, kind of relevant to last week's episode.

• 19:37Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, yeah, really fitting, because like, I think we were, we were kind of probing Nell's a little bit about marketing last week. And there is definitely a lingering question of like, even if that, even if Generation Exile was splashed on billboards in Times Square and on buses on the street, would it still, would, would it have been a hit? Like, would that have changed the course of it? And yeah, I don't know. More and more, I've actually felt, just talking to people, like, marketing is less relevant than ever, or at least that marketing has to be approached in a very different way. It was really interesting, actually, and I wanted to follow up on this. I don't think I got a chance, but like, Nell's talking about kind of following the beats of the traditional playbook. Actually, I did, I did talk about this, how that's kind of like, an old-fashioned way of doing things,

• 20:22Jason Schreier?

  where it's like, you got your, your PC Gamer show reveal, and then you, you have your coverage there, and then you come back in the show the next year, et cetera, et cetera. I think a more successful approach these days is a lot more community-driven, and just kind of trying to find your people and your audience, and like, like, drive word of mouth. Allow people, find a thousand people, or a hundred people, or whatever, and, and get them into your closed beta, and get feedback from them, and get word of mouth going among those people, and then try to get them telling their friends. And it just feels like it's a different world, because the market is so crazy, and there's so many games out there.

• 21:00Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, there's definitely a question of whether traditional advertising works anymore, or, I mean, to the extent that it ever did, because advertising is always a little bit hard to measure. And I guess I'll throw out there at least, the two of you are aware of the controversy around Geese and some other bands, like the sort of industry plants, marketing firm stuff. Maddie is nodding.

• 21:23Speaker 02

  I am, but feel free to summarize it.

• 21:25Jason Schreier?

  Just sum it up, yeah.

• 21:26Kirk Hamilton?

  Okay, yeah, I'll summarize it for listeners anyways. Well, I'll do my best. So Geese is a band, they've been around for a while, they're good, people like them, they've been a kind of a niche rock band for years. And then they really kind of blew up a little while back. And basically, there's way too much for me to get into, and it's not, like, there aren't that many clear answers, so it's not something I want to go too deep into. But it raised all these questions about modern marketing firms that claim that they can, like, organically build online engagement or viral fame, you know, by, like, seeding accounts and having accounts, you know, show clips from, you know, from a band or something. And then that, if you do that enough, it fools the algorithm into thinking that this

• 22:10Kirk Hamilton?

  is bigger than it is, which then actually causes it to become big. So you can basically game the algorithm in order to engineer viral success for your client. And just to be clear, like, it's not really demonstrated the extent to which Geese actually benefited from this. Like, they're actually a band that has a following that people know about, and they're good and everything. But they were kind of an inflection point in talking about this kind of stuff. It's come up in a lot of other stories recently in the news as well. It kind of ties in with the whole clipping economy thing, the stuff that ties in with, like, clavicular and these other kind of right wing or, like, manosphere influencers. It's kind of the question of, is modern marketing, is modern social media marketing just elaborate,

• 22:53Kirk Hamilton?

  advanced astroturfing? And is there really a difference between the two things? It's this whole world that seems very undefined and a little mysterious, but does seem like it's very relevant to current marketing. And I don't know how it works. I think a lot of people don't know how it works, and that's What makes it hard to talk about and maybe a reason that we shouldn't even get too deep into it. We could maybe link to a couple of things. A garbage day has done some great coverage of this, like summarizing what's going on, but it is something that's just like in the back of my mind whenever I think about marketing and trying to sell attention in 2026.

• 23:29Jason Schreier?

  I mean, that feels like that's what happened in Crimson Desert. That was everywhere on TikTok and Instagram before, uh, before launch. But again, who knows how much of that was organic.

• 23:37Kirk Hamilton?

  Right. And even saying it, right? It feels like conspiratorial.

• 23:40Jason Schreier?

  Well, we don't have any answers to that. To get this back to something that like, maybe we do, we can kind of tangibly talk about what's effective or isn't. Um, when I am marketing books and trying to sell those, um, there's kind of a, a strategy that I found quite successful or kind of like a, I don't know, maybe this is a truism, but I think, I mean, I actually, I think it's real. Truisms can be true. So yeah, it's a truism. Um, we're like,

• 24:04Kirk Hamilton?

  And that called falsism.

• 24:05Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, exactly. You hear about something once and, uh, you might be like, oh yeah, okay, that sounds kind of cool. Cool. I'll check it out one day. You start hearing about it two, three, four, five times in various ways. And you're like, you know, actually I kind of want that right now. Um, and especially if it's good, like there has to be a quality level for this to be effective and it has to be positive word of mouth for the most part. But, um, one of the reasons that like for Play Nice a couple of years ago, I went on every single gaming podcast I possibly could is just to make people feel like, oh, like everybody's talking about this book. This book is everywhere. Jason has all these stories. People really like it and it got really

• 24:46Jason Schreier?

  positive reviews, which is also very helpful. Um, but not to say that I was trying to connive or anything, but I wanted people to, um, hear enough about the book that if they were interested and wanted to read it, that like, it felt like, oh, okay. Like Jason's out there talking about it. Like I keep hearing it in my, uh, on all these different podcasts. Maybe I should go buy this. As opposed to like, if I just talked about it on triple click or something, maybe a bunch of our listeners would be like, oh, that sounds pretty cool. And then never think about it again. So you want to kind of like get something in someone's head as much as possible, which again, I mean, Sounds kind of manipulative when you say it out loud, but it's very effective. And I, I don't see it as manipulation because like, I wouldn't be doing it if it wasn't something I was

• 25:28Jason Schreier?

  super proud of and wanted people to read and would probably give away for free if I could.

• 25:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I also think people like Nell's kind of got into this. People who are making games underestimate the amount of time that all of that promotion might actually take them because he was describing, oh, I'll just do it myself. And then kind of realizing, wait, this is a job on its own. I don't have the capacity to do this. I mean, that may not have been Riot Games' excuse for not marketing this game. I don't know what their reasoning was for that. But for a smaller team where we have more of a sense of familiarity with how they might operate, because obviously we try to market TripleClick, Jason tries to market his book, et cetera. We know it's almost like an entire job to market something. Or like when I was launching Mothership Blog and I did, like I called it the podcast circuit.

• 26:17Speaker 02

  I was like, how many times can I tell people about this? Not because, like you say, Jason, I was trying to be manipulative, but because I actually was like, I just want the right people to find it. And I know if they find it, or if they find Play Nice or Press Reset or whatever, I know that they will like it. They just have to find it. And so in that sense, I'm like, it's almost like a system of reminders rather than advertising. I'm just like reminding people like, oh, this thing that I know you'll like is here. So I'm just reminding you to go check it out or buy it. Or, you know, we talk about our bonus episodes every week for a reason too. It's like, we're literally just reminding people like, hey, if you wanted this,

• 27:01Speaker 02

  just letting you know it's still there.

• 27:05Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, one other quick thought is like, something that I see sometimes that just makes me so mad is like, when a game will come out and I know that it's something I would have really liked if like, the people behind it had thought to reach out to me two weeks earlier. And just to give you an example of this, there was just, so this game I really enjoyed. I talked about it on our show like five years ago called Call of the Sea. Just got a sequel. That came out and I didn't find out that it was out until like the day it came out. And if you're a PR person working on this game and you don't look to see who had Call of the Sea on their game of the year list and like, reach out to those people, you are not doing your job effectively.

• 27:45Jason Schreier?

  Like you gotta reach out to every press person, every streamer who like was into that first game and be like, hey, there's a sequel coming out. Here's a code. And the fact that nobody did that to me is just, is bonkers.

• 27:55Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I would say all three of our tastes are established enough at this point. I mean, it's not like triple click is changing the world or the triple click bump is that big of a deal, but at the same time, I would have to think that most PR professionals who've been doing this for a while would at least know like, I should at least email Kirk about this jazz RPG or Maddie about this Metroid inspired game or you know, Jason about this old school JRPG. Like all the people who email you, Jason, about Blueprints likes or Oberdin likes. There are a lot of people who, who do know to do that.

• 28:26Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, well, so, I mean, in April of 2025, I'll link this in the show notes. This guy, Chris Zukowski, who does a bunch of game marketing blogging and stuff. He's like a game marketing expert dude. He did a post about the root trees are dead and cites me in it because I like talked about the game and it got them a bunch of attention. And I explained that the developer of this game just emailed me a few weeks in advance and was like, hey, I know you love Golden Idol. I think you would like this. And I was like, okay, you sold me. I'll check it out. And obviously like if the game wasn't great, I wouldn't have been into it, but the game was great. So it was like that one two punch of like, here's a great headline to the right person.

• 29:11Jason Schreier?

  And then I really liked it and I was able to use my platform to reach a whole bunch of people about this game. Which the developers have like contributed, like attributed as like a big part of how it was a success. So, yeah, I mean, I do think that that sort of thing is, is essential and a lot of people unfortunately neglect it. Just to get to Abimanyu's original question, I don't know if great marketing would have helped or hurt, or would have helped 2K, 2XKO. Really, it was the name that killed them.

• 29:44Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, and I mean, it's not not my genre.

• 29:47Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, who knows about that. Matty, was this a game on your radar?

• 29:51Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, but but partly because it's like, I mean, it was made by Patrick Miller, who's like really known in fighting game circles. And like when he started working for Riot, I followed that and was like, oh, wow, Riot's making a fighting game with this guy.

• 30:06Kirk Hamilton?

  He was like a journalist, right? Okay, I remember him from back in the day.

• 30:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, his partner Irene Coe.

• 30:13Kirk Hamilton?

  Oh, okay. Yeah, I remember both of them. Funny, I didn't know they were involved with this game.

• 30:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, she is now making, we covered it on mothership, she's making a fighting game comic book now.

• 30:23Kirk Hamilton?

  She's like a great, she's a great artist.

• 30:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, and and part of the comic and the spirit of it is about the fighting game events that they created together after the failure of this game because like Riot, I think, I mean, I'm sure Patrick could talk about this in more detail because I'm doing all of this secondhand, but I think I get the sense he did feel let down by them and like how they approached the project. And in that case, it's like, well, if you're going to do a different genre, I mean, we're kind of talking about something different here where we're like talking about Riot Games, which is a studio that's really famous for League of Legends, and they've occasionally tried to branch out and do other games, and it hasn't always worked. And this is one of the examples of that. And like, did they know how to market

• 31:08Speaker 02

  a fighting game? Could they get it out of the network of people like me who are like, okay, great, like, I know who this person is that's developing it. I'm familiar with this genre and I'm interested in it. But did it ever break containment out to other people? I don't think it did. And that, I think, is something for any company of any size to consider is like, if you're moving genres and you don't know how to market in this new genre, then you really should be considering what you're going to do differently. You can't just assume like, oh, this is going to sell itself because it's good. I mean, it's funny to say even Riot Games could make a mistake like that. But it does seem like that's what happened here because I did hear this game was.

• 31:49Jason Schreier?

  Do you have a sense of what they did or didn't do marketing wise?

• 31:53Speaker 02

  I don't, but I do know that I knew when it was coming out, but I feel like I saw no one talking about it, you know, but I'm like, well, I follow a bunch of fighting game people, but I don't blame you two for not knowing. Cause again, I think it didn't escape containment at all.

• 32:06Jason Schreier?

  I mean, that's not a game that Kirk or I would have paid attention to, even if it was.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  But you might have if you knew that it was specifically designed to cater to newcomers.

• 32:15Kirk Hamilton?

  No.

• 32:15Speaker 02

  This is the other issue with fighting games and like certainish genres is that marketing them outside of their niche is maybe always hard. So then you're like, okay, well, how can I make sure that everyone in that niche really knows about it? And did they even do that? That I'm not sure about. Cause like, I'm a journalist, so I'm going to follow game developers. I am not the norm. What about the regular players out there? Have they, have our listeners ever heard of this game? I have a bad feeling the answer is going to be no. So why is that? Especially the ones who actually like fighting games? Why did they not hear about it? They should have. Like that is, that is an example of them missing the mark, I would say.

• 32:56Jason Schreier?

  All right. Let's try to get to another question or two. We've been chatting a while about these two. Uh, this next one is from Griffin. Uh, Griffin writes, hello, Matty Jason Kirk, longtime fan. I have a somewhat urgent request to make of the three of you. After a decisive showdown between my dominant gaming thumb and a kitchen mandolin, I am sad to admit that I have approximately eight weeks of limited gaming on the horizon. I wonder if you three have any game recommendations for continuing to play games with certain bodily limitations? For example, I was able to play the ace of turning games by using a combination of my left hand and a stylus in my right hand despite my injury. Any recommendations would be appreciated.

• 33:38Kirk Hamilton?

  I mean, anything on an iPad. You could just play Ballotro for this entire time, just on your iPad with one finger.

• 33:43Speaker 02

  Oh my God, yes.

• 33:45Kirk Hamilton?

  Rock that.

• 33:46Speaker 02

  That's it. That's the only answer.

• 33:47Kirk Hamilton?

  No problem.

• 33:48Speaker 02

  Eight weeks.

• 33:48Kirk Hamilton?

  Fill up like, you won't even know how the time passed.

• 33:50Jason Schreier?

  Just, just Bellatro for eight weeks.

• 33:53Kirk Hamilton?

  Uh.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I feel like all the Ace attorneys probably qualify for this, right?

• 33:58Kirk Hamilton?

  Ace's attorney.

• 33:59Speaker 02

  They're pretty much one button games. Ace's attorney, that's right.

• 34:02Jason Schreier?

  There's a lot of games you can play on Switch with just the touchscreen using your left.

• 34:06Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, plenty of the ends, right? Like visual novels.

• 34:09Jason Schreier?

  Visual novels, yeah.

• 34:10Kirk Hamilton?

  So many games where you kind of just tap for most of the game. So yeah, any visual novel, really.

• 34:15Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I mean, you could go, you could fill eight weeks by just playing every Ace Attorney on the Switch or Steam Deck or something, uh, using the touchscreen and then move right into all three Danganronpa games. And you got, you know, man, that's a lot of hours.

• 34:28Kirk Hamilton?

  Zero Escape games, I mean, that's, that's like a thousand hours of video games.

• 34:31Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, Zero Escape 2, yeah, that's so much. Yeah. So there you go. There's your answer.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  Um, yeah.

• 34:37Jason Schreier?

  All right, let's get to this next one. Maddie.

• 34:39Speaker 02

  Sure. This is from Luke, who writes, "Good afternoon. I discovered TripleClick a few months ago after hearing Jason as a guest on another gaming podcast."

• 34:48Kirk Hamilton?

  Another reason that Jason should go on another podcast?

• 34:51Speaker 02

  Maybe we all should. Uh, "So I've been listening to the backlog of your 2025 episodes, and I noticed a pattern I'd like to hear your thoughts about. Multiple prominent games in 2025, Hades 2, Ghost of Yote, and Silk Song were the second installment in a successful franchise and featured a female protagonist. In the case of Hades and Ghost of Tsushima, the protagonist of the original installment was male. And while I haven't played Hollow Knight, my understanding is that the protagonist is possibly genderless, or at the very least, not explicitly female. That's right. Similarly, the upcoming Witcher 4 falls into this category, with Geralt in the original trilogy and Ciri in this later installment. Do you think this is a conscious strategy by game developers? Is the logic here that it's too risky to launch a franchise with a female protagonist,

• 35:36Speaker 02

  but once your player base has bought in, they'll accept a female protagonist in the second installment? Is there an idea that players who liked the first game will buy the second one regardless, but by adding a female protagonist to the second game, they might draw new female players or femme-presenting gamers of any gender who didn't play the first? Or is this just a..." Low effort cosmetic way to distinguish the sequel protagonist from the original protagonist? Or do you think this trend is just a coincidence?

• 36:02Kirk Hamilton?

  So I

• 36:03Speaker 02

  Definitely not a coincidence.

• 36:04Jason Schreier?

  I have another theory. I'm gonna, I'm gonna offer a not cynical, a kind of a generous, a generous theory.

• 36:11Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I have another theory as well, but I'm curious to hear if yours is the same as mine.

• 36:14Jason Schreier?

  My generous theory is that oftentimes these games, many games are helmed by dudes. And dudes kind of instinctively want to do something about a dude as art because it's reflecting them. But then after doing it once and maybe finding some success, they're like, you know, I mean, I did this already. I want to do something completely different for the next one. And then so they want to try doing a story, telling a story about a woman, animating a woman, character, doing things that just feel different. Because I think artists by nature just want to try new things and give new challenges to themselves. So maybe even, I'm not, not even thinking about the commercial aspect of it, just kind of the artistic aspect of it.

• 36:56Jason Schreier?

  Again, this is the generous theory. Maybe people just kind of like, if you're male, you're inclined to make something about a male character. And then afterwards, you want to try something different.

• 37:05Kirk Hamilton?

  Um, I would throw out a similar theory to that, I suppose. First, one game that comes to mind actually is Mina the Hollower, right? Because is the Shovel Knight canonically male? I actually realized that maybe the Shovel Knight's gender is not established.

• 37:17Speaker 02

  He is because there was actually a Kickstarter stretch goal that they took a very long time to implement where they were like, we're going to make a female character.

• 37:25Kirk Hamilton?

  Okay.

• 37:25Speaker 02

  Which I know because I waited a really long time for them to do it.

• 37:28Kirk Hamilton?

  So anyways, that just, that just came to mind. But um, my modified version of that theory, or at least something I've noticed with a few of these games is that I think that's true, Jason. And also a lot of times these games launch with a male protagonist. And then it just turns out that in that first game, there is a secondary character who is a woman, who then winds up being the most interesting character in the game. Like I'm thinking of The Last of Us where Ellie, who was playable in the first Last of Us, there were periods where you played as her. But she was the heart of the game. And over the course of the game, I mean, her character was so important and then playing as her was So cool that then they made an expansion where you played as Ellie. And then in the sequel, it's like just fully, you know, you're Ellie.

• 38:11Kirk Hamilton?

  Like, I think that trajectory is also a thing. I think that's also true in of Hollow Knight, where, you know, Hornet is by far the most striking character in Hollow Knight. You see Hornet move once and you're like, I want to play as her. And so I think they knew that and they had made that, you know, the goal for the first game. What for their Kickstarter, right? So they were kind of aware from the beginning, well, she's really cool and people are going to want to play as her. So it's like, I think that sometimes it's just a logical outgrowth of making one of your most interesting and coolest looking characters, a female character. And then you get to make a sequel. So it's like, well, yeah, let's make her the star.

• 38:46Kirk Hamilton?

  Bing, Kirk here as I'm editing the episode. And I wanted to just add a little bit to that, which isn't something I usually do. But I had this thought while I was listening back and editing, that the phenomenon that I'm talking about is also kind of an outgrowth of video game protagonist problems, where a lot of times the protagonist is the least interesting character in the game. Either like they're silent or they're just are kind of a blank slate because all this stuff is happening around them and they want the player to be able to project themselves onto them. They kind of need to just exist in the world to provide a viewpoint for the player. And then as a result, the supporting characters are like all way more interesting. And so then eventually it's just natural that you would want to tell a story about those characters because by the design of video games, the supporting cast tends to

• 39:27Kirk Hamilton?

  just be more interesting than the protagonist, at least the way that a lot of video games are made, or the kinds of games that we're talking about are made. So it's kind of an additional thought that I had that just seemed worth interjecting here because I thought it was interesting. Okay, anyways, back to the show. Bing.

• 39:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's definitely a thing. I also think totally non cynically that times did change and that game developers who maybe would have wanted to make a game with a female character previously, just didn't, either they didn't have the resources or confidence or whatever the situation was, backing by their publisher to do it and felt like the safer option was to have a male character, have seen many games succeed with a female protagonist and are like, I actually wanted to do this the first time around and now I can. And like, I guess that's sort of. Cynical, but I don't necessarily think it is. I think it's normal for times to change. And in this case, it's a good thing. So I'm excited about it. And I think it's a nice trend that this is the case and that now, I mean, when I was first covering games, it was like

• 40:28Speaker 02

  almost never that there were playable female characters in games. It would be so notable that that would be a huge talking point about the entire marketing of the game. Like the amount of time people spent talking about that Tomb Raider reboot trailer, like just the trailer and how was Laura presented in it and was it fair to her and on and on and on. That was like, just all of games journalism was that for like weeks of our lives. Like that's because it was like, okay, we really need to consider this very strongly. Whereas now it's like, it's just not, it's very different. The conversations are really different and way more nuanced and cool and interesting. And that's such a relief to me that we can talk about games in a different way that is more specific to who these characters are and what they represent in the story.

• 41:13Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah. I mean, in what in 2017, I guess Sony can launch a major successful franchise in Horizon Zero Dawn with a female protagonist that like has just gone on to star that female protagonist. And that's, you know, it's Aloy's series.

• 41:27Speaker 02

  That's a good point.

• 41:27Kirk Hamilton?

  And I know some people are very weird about Aloy, but at the same time, the games are successful. They're really good. And it was just a matter of fact thing, even by 2017 of like, yep, we're launching a major AAA open world series with a female protagonist. And that's, people are gonna like it because it's gonna be a great game and she's a great character. Mm hmm.

• 41:44Jason Schreier?

  By the way, one subversion of all this is Housemark releasing Returnal with a female protagonist in 2021 and then going to a male protagonist for the spiritual successor.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  And Control is doing it too. Control 2 has Jesse's brother in it. So it's actually trendy now to have a male protagonist.

• 42:01Kirk Hamilton?

  Right. We've come full circle.

• 42:02Speaker 02

  I was just so underrepresented.

• 42:05Kirk Hamilton?

  Well, that, I mean, I know you're kidding there, but it is an indication of how far we've come that now just a series will launch like Control. Control is actually a great example of a AAA, maybe double A game with a female lead. And then they're like, yeah, we're making another one. We're just gonna have it be a different character.

• 42:18Jason Schreier?

  It does. It does bolster my point that I think sometimes people just spend five years making one thing and they're like, we want to do something different. We need something new for this.

• 42:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think your point is.

• 42:27Jason Schreier?

  A female protagonist.

• 42:28Speaker 02

  Very true. And that after, much as I love Jesse, I can understand how they'd be like, we want to make a character who plays totally different. He's going to be really melee forward and look different and have a different personality.

• 42:38Jason Schreier?

  Okay, let's do a couple more. Kirk, why don't you read this next one?

• 42:41Kirk Hamilton?

  Okay, this one comes from Kate, who writes, hey, triple click. I wanted to write in with some great news, all caps, after listening to your previous mailbag episode in which you chatted about getting worse at gaming as you get older. I'm happy to report that I am in my mid 40s and I am most definitely getting better at gaming by the day. I've always struggled with games requiring a lot of hand eye coordination, particularly platformers. I was the kid who fell into the first hole in the ground in Super Mario every single time. I have avoided almost all platformers preferring RPGs and turn based strategy. However, a while back, I tried out Animal Well after hearing about it on your podcast. That game really rocked and I found that the environmental puzzles and general vibe were so

• 43:25Kirk Hamilton?

  cool that I was willing to really practice some of the movement techniques in the game to push through it. Jumping up and up on all those bubbles, it seemed impossible to me at first, but I figured it out. I was very proud of myself when I rolled credits on that game. Now I find myself playing Hollow Knight, something that I never would have expected. I've explored most of the map, I think, and I'm finding it incredibly difficult, but well worth the effort of repeating difficult platforming sections and bosses until I master them. It took me over 100 tries to beat Hornet, but it felt so freaking amazing when I did it. There is no way I could have progressed in either of those games in my 20s or 30s. What changed? I really doubt that my physical reaction times have improved, but I do think I'm just in a better place to appreciate and enjoy the process of learning

• 44:09Kirk Hamilton?

  these games. I'm more patient and I give fewer fucks. The excellent design of both titles is certainly helpful, too. Have any of you experienced something like this before? All this to say, keep gaming, you geezers. There is lots to enjoy and you may surprise yourselves.

• 44:24Jason Schreier?

  Love it.

• 44:25Kirk Hamilton?

  Love it.

• 44:26Speaker 02

  I love this story. I, I don't have a great example of this, except to say that obviously I didn't try Dark Souls until relatively late in life. And I think some of that was me assuming it would be too hard for me. And I think there's like a piece of that in Kate's message where maybe she wouldn't have actually found these games too hard in her 20s. I know she thinks that, but I don't know if that's really true or if that her personality and philosophy and patience changed over the years and that was the thing that made the difference. And I feel like that's been true of me and I have so much more patience now with certain kinds of games than I did when I was younger.

• 45:08Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I can definitely relate to this. I think coming from a higher point, as you get older, you do start to notice just the physical limitations of age do just cause some of your reaction times to lower. So that's kind of the downside of having already been pretty good at games in your twenties and thirties.

• 45:23Jason Schreier?

  You're just depressing everybody.

• 45:24Kirk Hamilton?

  As you feel the sadness. But to flip that around, the patience thing, the personality changes that Kate is talking about are absolutely real. It sounds like Kate is on an incredibly cool journey because it's just this upward trajectory, which is a nice thing to feel as you get older. It's something that I've actually felt with music in some ways, particularly with guitar, where like, I'm just so patient. I feel very expansive on the instrument and very relaxed and I'm not as obsessed with like playing super fast or getting my chops killer, but instead I just like to learn. And as a result, I like progressed so much and have made so much more progress over the last five years on that instrument than I did in 15 years from when I started playing. So like the mindset thing is huge. It makes a really big difference. And I also just love Kate's

• 46:06Kirk Hamilton?

  story and her enthusiasm because that rocks and I'm glad she's having that experience with games.

• 46:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's awesome.

• 46:12Jason Schreier?

  All right, let's do one more question from the mailbag. This is from Carl. Carl says, "Love the podcast, longtime listener. Could you explain what exactly happened with Zaum? I loved Disco Elysium and played it thanks to your review a while ago. However, I'm confused what the deal is with their new game and this is made by the same team or not. It's all very unclear." So their new game, Zero Parades, is out this week. So I thought this was fitting to kind of talk about this. Have either of you played it?

• 46:45Speaker 02

  I haven't.

• 46:46Jason Schreier?

  I haven't. No, okay.

• 46:47Kirk Hamilton?

  No, I will be playing it, though there's a lot of good games happening right now, but that's super at the top of my list.

• 46:52Jason Schreier?

  It's a real cluster. Well, maybe we'll talk about it once one of us or multiple of us have actually had a chance to play it. But what exactly happened with Zaum? This one is intractable.

• 47:02Kirk Hamilton?

  A question for the ages.

• 47:04Jason Schreier?

  I mean, I guess the short version is that a bunch of the studio's kind of core creative team left and have since founded like five different spiritual successors, all making different Disco Elysium style games. And there are lawsuits and legal battles between the core creative team and the studio. The core creative team has thrown all sorts of allegations of fraud and stealing theft at their, at the people who own Zalm. And at the same time, there have also been allegations from people who worked at Zalm of toxic leadership and kind of creating really negative environments from the core

• 47:47Jason Schreier?

  creative team that has left. I think that sums it up. It's obviously much more complicated than that. But I will say, just kind of looking towards the current game, I can share a few things that I do know. I actually interviewed the president of, the current president of Studio Zalm, not the, not the CEO, the guy who was like accused of anything, but this guy, Ed Tomaszewski, who came from Private Division and joined Zalm in 2022. And he's a really interesting guy. I spoke to him about a bunch of stuff that'll be in a story on Bloomberg on Friday, I believe. And a few things he told me. One is that there actually are a few people, I don't, I'm trying to get the exact number, but there are some people who worked on Disco Elysium who are working on this new game and just stuck around at

• 48:30Jason Schreier?

  Studio Zalm. So it's not totally new people, even though a lot of the core creative team and the people who like created the IP essentially, created the story. Robert Kerwitz, who is the writer, the main writer, he is no longer there. I think one of the reasons they chose to do a new IP is, is for that reason. And it's more of, it's a very different kind of game. I mean, it's, it's the same genre and style, but this is a spy game rather than a game about a kind of, an inept cop and his partner. A few other things he told me that I thought were really interesting, just a couple of fun little anecdotes. One is that Studio Zalm has unionized and he was telling me that like after reviewing their kind of their requests and having a bunch of conversations with them, he and management decided to voluntarily recognize the union,

• 49:13Jason Schreier?

  which is something that it's essentially what management does when they're like, you know what? We're cool with people. We don't want to drag this out and turn it into a fight. So instead, we want to work together to create a better environment for everybody. I thought that was an interesting, an interesting bit of context here. He told me that they work 35 hour work weeks and for this game, they had one month of crunch where they added 10 hours to that. So they worked, so their version of quote unquote crunch was 45 hours work week and it was all like paid over time.

• 49:45Kirk Hamilton?

  Beautiful.

• 49:47Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 49:48Jason Schreier?

  He told me, and this is the anecdote that you guys are going to crack up at. He told me that, um, he told me that during development, they went on what he called a good old fashioned clanker hunt, where he got a posse, this is Ed's words, of three other people. And they went out and put together a questionnaire and surveyed every single person on the dev team and made them sign, uh, sign this attestation saying, I did not use generative AI in this game under punishment of losing my job.

• 50:15Kirk Hamilton?

  Wow.

• 50:16Speaker 02

  Oh my gosh. Calling that a clanker hunt, kind of iconic, honestly.

• 50:20Jason Schreier?

  Clanker hunt is what Ed says. I was like, does that mean like they couldn't use Google? Like, he was like, of course, there's like nuance here, like, but the, the, the core idea is like nothing, no content, no generative AI content is in this game. I was like, wow, you're saying things that gamers will love to hear.

• 50:40Kirk Hamilton?

  Well, and I would imagine now, given how many developers now have had to eat crow after it turns out there's like gen AI art in the background of some scene that like probably half the people on the team didn't even know was there. Like, I can imagine now going around and be like, guys, please don't do this to me. Just promise me you didn't do this to me.

• 50:56Speaker 02

  Don't let me be the main character. I don't want to deal with that.

• 51:00Jason Schreier?

  It's so funny because it feels like, like that almost feels like, uh, just a, a gut response to. This idea that they're gonna be launching this game under the shadow of this controversy surrounding Disco Elysium and all. It's just like, we want to do anything possible that is the opposite of controversy that will make people realize we're like, that we're trying to do what's right here, despite what's all this legal drama and the people quitting and all of that stuff that happened in the past. And yeah, I mean, it seems like, obviously, this is a new team of people who worked really hard making this game. Obviously, a messy, intractable situation, so I'm not gonna be like, I'm not gonna tell

• 51:42Jason Schreier?

  people how to feel one way or another about what happened to those creatives. But this feels like it's kind of something new that is, that is out there in Zero Parades.

• 51:54Speaker 02

  That's a pretty good summary.

• 51:55Kirk Hamilton?

  I'll be very interested to see what it's, what it's like. A spy, a spy game in that style sounds pretty cool, and it was a lot of fun playing Esoteric Eb, so it, I'm apparently hungr- infinitely hungry for this type of game, so I'll play another one.

• 52:07Jason Schreier?

  It's funny you say that, cuz I was a little bit kind of fatigued on them after playing Esoteric Eb. I was like, I don't know if I have it in me for another one of these types of games.

• 52:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, let alone the like, six other Disco likes coming from all the other studios.

• 52:20Kirk Hamilton?

  There will probably come a point, and maybe this game will be that point where I feel that way. I kind of would've said that starting at Esoteric Eb, though, is like, one Disco Elysium was plenty, the game was pretty singular, I don't know if I can do this again. And even at the beginning of that game, especially when they're coming at you with all the proper nouns and it's so complicated, part of my brain, I think we talked about this in that, in that triple play, I was feeling a little like, uh, I don't know if I can do another one of these. And then, of course, five hours in, I couldn't stop and was so into it, so I guess it all depends.

• 52:48Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 52:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's good.

• 52:51Jason Schreier?

  It does a disservice when they all open the same way with the voices in your head just talking to you, and you can't see anything, and everything's black. It's gotten decent reviews, including a five out of five from Euro.

• 53:03Kirk Hamilton?

  Oh, nice, reviews are out. I hadn't seen that yet.

• 53:05Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, reviews are out. Yeah, the game is out, I believe, on the day this episode comes out, May 21st. Yeah. All right, thank you to everyone who mailed in. Once again, you can reach us at [email protected]. Let's take a break and then come back with one more thing.

• 53:25Speaker 03

  I'm Graham Clark, co-host of Maximum Fun's Stop Podcasting Yourself, and I'm here with Max Fund Member of the Month, Matthew. Hello, Matthew. How are you?

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• 53:44Speaker 04

  Plus, you're the kings of Boko.

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  I appreciate seeing those coming in.

• 53:49Speaker 03

  Now, do you know what your perks are for being the Member of the Month?

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  I do. I mean, I got to talk to you, which is kind of the big thing. Of course, the...

• 53:58Speaker 03

  The best.

• 54:01Speaker 04

  The parking space?

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  Yep.

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  And I think there's $25 in the Max Fund shopping.

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• 54:36Speaker 06

  Hi, everybody. It's Ellen Weatherford.

• 54:38Speaker 07

  And Christian Weatherford.

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  People say not to judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree.

• 54:43Speaker 07

  But we can judge a snake by its ability to fly, or a spider by its ability to dive.

• 54:48Speaker 06

  Or a dung beetle by its ability to navigate with the starlight of the Milky Way galaxy.

• 54:54Speaker 07

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• 55:01Speaker 06

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• 55:09Speaker 07

  Listen with the whole family on maximumfun.org, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 55:18Jason Schreier?

  And we are back. It is time for uno more thing.

• 55:22Kirk Hamilton?

  One of these days, you're gonna learn how to say one more thing.

• 55:26Kirk Hamilton?

  One of these years.

• 55:30Jason Schreier?

  Kirk, what's your one more thing?

• 55:31Kirk Hamilton?

  My one more thing is a video game called Mixtape that I played like a week and a half ago and was gonna be my one more thing last week. And then I realized that I wasn't sure what I thought of it. I started trying to write out my notes for my one more thing because I was like, I have kind of complicated feelings about this game. And then I just kind of kept writing and I was like, okay, I think I need to write about this game. And then I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote about the game. And then I like made a video, writing into a video essay about the game. And I've like now done so much work thinking and writing and talking about Mixtape over the last week that I feel like I have to make it my one more thing. But I guess it's partly just to say, if you would like to read extended thoughts from me or listen to extended thoughts from me in a video essay on YouTube, you can do so and we'll put links for that down in the show notes.

• 56:16Kirk Hamilton?

  But I'll also make this game my one more thing, just as a one more thing, only tangentially related to the writing that I've done about it. So Mixtape is a game from an Australian developer based out of Melbourne called, I should say Melbourne, Melbourne. I get crap about how I pronounce Melbourne. I think some Australians get weird about it. An Australian indie studio, they say Melbourne, but I'm not gonna do that because I don't have an Australian accent.

• 56:42Jason Schreier?

  Kirk, you can't, you can't piss off the Australians.

• 56:44Kirk Hamilton?

  No, I know. Very quirky. Super much of my creative output. So Beethoven and Dinosaur is based out of Melbourne. Their last game was called The Artful Escape, which is also like a music game that I actually did not play, even though it's kind of up my alley and I don't know why I didn't play it. I just didn't, it kind of missed me, it kind of passed me by. So this game came out and I started getting emails from people who'd played it saying, dude, you have to play this game. It's totally up your alley. It's like exactly your kind of thing. And I fired it up and played it. And I actually really liked it, even though I've gone and written all these long, complicated thoughts about it. Overall,

• 57:24Kirk Hamilton?

  I think it's just, it's really cool and fun and gentle and sweet and a nice video game. It's a kind of an interactive music video is sort of how I'd describe it. The premise of the game is, at some indeterminate point in the 1990s, reads to me as mostly 94, like pre-internet 90s, but there's, it's a purposefully timeless. Some of the slang doesn't quite fit and there's references that don't put you in a certain year and they never say what year it is. Three teens who live in similarly a kind of purposefully undefined California town called Blue Moon Lagoon that just looks like a California suburb with mountains and the, and the ocean and, you know, but it's not a real city. It

• 58:07Kirk Hamilton?

  doesn't map onto anywhere in the world. These three teens are at the end of their high school careers. And one of them, Stacy, the sort of ringleader and music lover, is about to leave the next day. She's going to New York to go enter the music industry and become a kind of, to pick music, music for movies, to be like a playlist master, professional mixtape maker. And so it's her and her two friends, a guy named Slater, who's kind of this stoner, who's actually pretty talented and cool, and Cass, who was previously kind of an overachieving softball jock, good girl, who then decided to become a burnout and hang out with them and rebel against her dad, who's a cop. He's like the local cop, basically, for their town. And so she wants to smoke pot with them and

• 58:49Kirk Hamilton?

  listen to music and like, break the law and, you know, get into trouble. So the three of them are enjoying their final day together, getting ready for a big party that night. And Stacy has made a mixtape for them all. That's the kind of mixtape for the final day together. And because Stacy is so big on mixtapes and she like places all this import on picking the perfect song for the perfect moment, everything in the game then is accompanied by some song. Like it starts out with Devo and then- And there's some Silverchair. There's like a Smashing Pumpkins sequence. And then there's some kind of more obscure stuff, like there's John Paul Young, this Australian rock singer who I wasn't even familiar with. And one of the best sequences in the game is this John Paul Young song, Yesterday's Hero. That's like an amazing song and I'd never even heard it.

• 59:34Kirk Hamilton?

  So it's a collection of sequences, you know, there's mini games and there's cutscenes and there's like Gone Home sequences where you walk around someone's room and look at stuff. And it's all kind of a mix of memory and current events, but it's kind of magical, like impossible things will happen, they'll fly into space. It's kind of hallucinogenic at times. It's like a trip down memory lane, a whole bunch of short sequences, each one accompanied by a new piece of music. So it's kind of an interesting mix of music that is in no way reflective of like an actual teen girl in the 90s, like it's not even close. It is very much the music liked by these guys who made this game, who are probably around my age and grew up in Australia.

• 1:00:18Kirk Hamilton?

  Like there's a lot of Australian bands. It's a lot of just like classic rock.

• 1:00:22Jason Schreier?

  There's no, no Britney Spears, no Backstreet Boys.

• 1:00:25Kirk Hamilton?

  No, there's no miseducation of Lauryn Hill, which I was like, well, the fact that that's not in here alone. But no, it's, it's very specific and then kind of odd. There's been a lot of criticism of this game, people playing it being like, I was a teen girl in the 90s and I'm sorry, but like, what? They're listening to Rainbow, like Dio's band and talking about how cool it is? Like this is not something my friends and I did. But like, to me, that was actually a kind of a cool thing or funny thing about the game. I didn't really mind. Like I, I don't know, like it felt very specific to the people who, who made it. The writer-director is a guy who goes by Johnny Galvatron. I'm still not totally sure about his name situation. He was the lead singer of an Australian band called The Galvatrons in the 2000s. I believe that's his stage name.

• 1:01:09Kirk Hamilton?

  The Galvatrons are named for like a Transformers character. So I think it's not his real name, but maybe he like adopted his stage name. Anyway, his name is Johnny Galvatron. There's kind of all these layers of artifice around this game. This is what I wrote about and how for a long time I was kind of just okay with that. I was like, well, this game is kind of weird. It's not set in a real place. It doesn't feel that believable. The music doesn't totally make sense. But also it's like kind of weirdly Australian. Like I actually like having Australians tell me about their favorite bands. It's like something that I spend a lot of time doing, so it's kind of a fun part of the game. And I guess the one thing I'll say that I should mention here in my one more thing

• 1:01:48Kirk Hamilton?

  is that what wound up being kind of the central realization in my writing about this game was that I figured out that some of the songs on Stacy's playlist actually aren't real songs. And I thought that was actually kind of weird. It was a creative decision that I don't love. There are just bands that I'm not sure what they are. I think it's likely, or at least possible, that they're library music made by the Sony label called Extreme Music that is credited in the credits, but it's not clear where they came from. There's like a band called Wooden Sword, and there's a musician called Curtis Dunn. And Stacy introduces them in-game. She's like, "This is Curtis Dunn doing Deep Space Scan, a song that we loved." And in the context of the game, like when I was playing it, and I know everyone I've talked to who's played it, they were just like, "Oh yeah,

• 1:02:33Kirk Hamilton?

  I assumed that was just some obscure synth artist from the 70s that I'd never heard of, because Stacy's so cool and she knows all these cool bands." But he's not real. Curtis Dunn does not exist. He's not an artist. And I think that's weird. Like, I think it's kind of counter to the ethos of the game. And so, you know, I wrote about this, and some people shared the theory, the likelihood, that, you know, they had a list of licensed songs they wanted to get, but licensed songs are very expensive, and they couldn't get them all, so they just had to use library music for some of them, just as a cost thing. And that seems possible. Galvatron has said, at least in a Vice interview, that they got every single song they asked for. Even so, just like, given the nature of the game,

• 1:03:14Kirk Hamilton?

  I think it's strange that they didn't explain where the music came from at any point, or even in the credits, like, you know, say who wrote it, beyond just crediting Extreme Music at the end of the credits, you know, given that they're attributing the songs to artists that don't actually exist in the game. And that kind of set me thinking about, like, art and artifice and music and performance and, like, the levels of the kind of truth and what the truth really is in this kind of artistic work. And so, that's what a lot of my thinking has been about the past few weeks. Yet another thing that I actually find valuable about this game, that it provoked in me all of these thoughts and feelings, and it really, I couldn't let go of it until I'd written about it. I had so many other

• 1:03:57Kirk Hamilton?

  things I needed to be doing. And I was like, "I guess I just have to write this essay", which I'm sure is a feeling you can both relate to, when you just, you've got an idea in your head, and you just have to keep working on it until you get it out.

• 1:04:08Jason Schreier?

  Well, your Australian fans would be disappointed if you

• 1:04:10Kirk Hamilton?

  I know, I know.

• 1:04:12Jason Schreier?

  About Mixtape.

• 1:04:13Kirk Hamilton?

  So, it's a cool game, and I really do, you know, for anyone just looking for a game recommendation, it's like three hours long. I think it's on Game Pass. Like, it's the kind of thing that if you just kind of want to cruise and listen to some cool music, like, it's really lovely. I found it really funny at times moving. I really thought, like, at its best, it's really, really cool. And, um, and I recommend, yeah, checking it out.

• 1:04:34Jason Schreier?

  Cool. Uh, all right, Maddie, let's hear one more thing.

• 1:04:37Speaker 02

  Um, mine is far less existential and, uh, is gonna take less time for me to describe. Uh, so I've been playing this Zach Gage game called Not Words, and it's really, really good. So, a while back, um, I was talking about playing word games on my phone, and I'm playing this game on my phone, by the way. It's a phone game. And, uh, I have a lot of really bad word games on my phone that, I don't know what happened this past week. I was playing one, and I just got really mad that I was watching an ad, and I was like, this game is fun, but it's not fun enough for me to be dealing with this shit anymore. I can't, like, there's gotta be something else I could be doing here. Um, I really like anagrams specifically. I think it's just a fun

• 1:05:17Speaker 02

  concept, and, like, the faster I can do an anagram, like, the better my brain feels. It just really gets me buzzing, and I, I think it's really entertaining and compelling as a game mechanic. So I was like, what are some cool anagram games out there that will not serve me? Terrible ads for games that may or may not even be real and will be trying to get me to pay microtransactions just so that I can solve another freaking anagram or whatever. Um, and Not Words is so far my answer to this question. Uh, it has a bunch of free puzzles, and I got through all the free ones

• 1:05:53Speaker 02

  and really liked them, and then paid for it because there is an option to subscribe to it or just pay a higher price, which I opted to do because I liked it that much, and I was like, I'd rather just pay for the whole thing and never have to pay for it again. So I'm gonna describe this quickly, although really, if you're somebody who likes anagram-type games, then I probably don't have to sell you any more than that, but I'll briefly try to explain it. So- So each level kind of looks like a crossword puzzle that is totally blank. But there's no clues for the crosswords and that's not how the game works at all. Instead, you, it's almost like Sudoku where you have to like find a series of words that will fit together

• 1:06:36Speaker 02

  within the permutation of the crossword, which you could have that just be the game. But there's a further limitation on how it works, which is that the crossword map is divided up into these random little chunks that are not contiguous. So like part of a word and part of another word will tell you, you can only use the letters S, S and T in these three squares, but those three squares won't all be part of one word. And that full word will also be broken up into several other chunks and those chunks will be part of other words. I, I realize this is kind of hard to describe.

• 1:07:15Jason Schreier?

  This is very Zach Gage.

• 1:07:17Speaker 02

  It is.

• 1:07:19Jason Schreier?

  That's a compliment.

• 1:07:20Speaker 02

  The first time I played it, I was like, this is so hard. I can never beat this. And then like something unlocked in me as I was playing that first puzzle where I was like, oh, like the trick is I fill out all of the two letter words first because there are only so many two letter words that exist. This is my tip for anybody who wants to try out not words. Like, okay, I, I fill out A and T, like at, that's a word. And then that alone gets you kind of kicked off. You're like, well, that connects me to this other remaining larger word. And I only have maybe one or two letters left that could go here and I'll just try putting one in and see what happens. And then as you go along, it ends up being kind of like this really brain expanding anagram.

• 1:08:05Speaker 02

  Because you're like looking at the letters that you have on your sort of virtual Scrabble board, if you will. And you're like, I can only use these letters and certain permutations. It's so fun. I've played a ton of this game this week and really, really enjoyed it. If you like word games, you will, you will enjoy it.

• 1:08:21Jason Schreier?

  How much, how much was it for the lifetime?

• 1:08:24Speaker 02

  I think it's 12 bucks. It's not a lot. So I'm saying it's called Not Words. I should specify it is a homonym. It is spelled K N O T W O R D S. But if you look for Not Words without the K, you'd probably still find it either way. And it's on, it's on Google Play and it's on iOS. So if you have a phone, you can play it.

• 1:08:46Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I'm gonna check that out.

• 1:08:47Kirk Hamilton?

  I'm gonna tell Emily about this.

• 1:08:48Jason Schreier?

  Um, okay. My one more thing is Planet Money, which is an NPR podcast, but it's also a brand new book that just came out that is really, really cool. Um, so the Planet Money book is kind of a collection of stories, some of which have been reported in the podcast, some of which are new for the book and all of which have been adapted into text form for the book. Many of which just kind of, or all of which just kind of are designed to inform people as to how money works and how the economy works through these kind of interesting narratives. And it's really cool. I'll give you guys an example, which is the opening story, which I found absolutely fascinating, which is about these food banks.

• 1:09:28Jason Schreier?

  And it's about how this, this food bank in Alaska had this issue, which is that they were, uh, someone donated to them five gallons of pickles. And they were like, look, we appreciate getting donations, but like, nobody wants this five gallon pickles. Like, we can't do anything with these. And so, um, this, this kind of food bank, Feeding America, they, they looked around and they realized that they had an issue and they brought in some economists to try to help them fix it. And their issue is that like, essentially they were running it kind of, I don't know, in almost like Soviet Russia, like a kind of communist style or socialist style commune where like, you have the centralized location and they just decide based on whatever information they have, how to distribute the food to different places

• 1:10:10Jason Schreier?

  based on what they think is fair. And they kind of, they, they do it in a way that they hope will be equitable for everybody. But it was very difficult for them to have enough information about all these different food banks to be able to actually distribute what they wanted. And so they brought in these economists and these economists put together a, um, like market system and they went through different iterations of it, but eventually landed on this idea that every single food bank would get fake money and be able to bid on different. Different food items and it would have to be like a blind bid. So they wouldn't be like outbidding each other. And what they did was they gave more money to the poorer food banks, the food banks that were in like a corner, more remote cities and less money to the ones

• 1:10:52Jason Schreier?

  that had a lot of donations and were like in richer cities, were better off cities in the first place. And they found that with this system, they learned so much about how to be more efficient because the prices that these like different items would land on taught them so much about how to collect and what to collect and what to encourage people to donate and what to buy with their money. That it wound up leading to like a way more efficient system, which I thought was really fascinating. It was like peanut butter turns out is way more valuable than they had any idea. And they like learned so much from like the the the prices of peanut butter getting driven up by this fake money eBay system. It was really fascinating. And then the the book's authors kind of extrapolate on this by being like prices are not just kind of like a

• 1:11:37Jason Schreier?

  thing that you look at and you're like, okay, this is not just a piece of information for you, but also almost like a newspaper, like you can learn so much from the price of something in that it signifies not just how much something cost for you at the store, but also the the way that the crops for peanuts worked that year in whatever country that peanuts are grown or like the amount of oil that it took to ship those peanuts across the sea and like how prices just kind of changing can just teach you all these things, all this stuff about the world and how much you can learn from them. Really fascinating book. And then even more fascinating is that Planet Money, the podcast did a, I believe, four-episode series about how the book

• 1:12:22Jason Schreier?

  was made. And so if you're interested in the nitty-gritty of book publishing, you listen to this series by this guy, Alexi Horwitz-Gazi, this reporter of theirs, who goes behind the scenes and like the first episode is about how a book is pitched and bid on by publishers. And the second, but the second one is about like how they decide where to print a book and they just dive deep into like the creation of this book.

• 1:12:45Kirk Hamilton?

  That's, that's very Planet Money of them. That's

• 1:12:47Jason Schreier?

  Very cool, very cool compliment to it. Turns out, they reveal in this podcast series, this book got an advance of more than $1 million, which is a lot of money for a book advance.

• 1:12:59Kirk Hamilton?

  An incredibly popular podcast, I bet it helps.

• 1:13:01Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's sold, I believe it's already sold more than 100,000 copies. So it's justified that advance and them some. But yeah, but I've been, I'm about halfway through the book and I really enjoying it. It jumps around, it's like a whole bunch of different kind of stories from all over the world. And many of them are very fascinating looks at money and the way the economy works and the way the planet works and a story about gig work and how that has impacted people and how like these companies, how it used to be this boon for gig workers to be able to like set their own hours and then how it just got squeezed as, as like a competition got squeezed out and, and the kind of effects that monopolies can have on the market.

• 1:13:44Jason Schreier?

  It's a very just kind of like factual look at markets and the way they work. It's a very just kind of, it's not, it's not, there's no agenda in the book, which I really appreciate. It's very much like, we are looking at this from a perspective of like, what is fair and what is accurate? And that is it. That is their entire kind of, they want to inform people about the way that the world works. There's a great chapter about remote work and the kind of the people that it's good and who it's bad for and the kind of the hybrid model just being a great balance for a lot of people. And yeah, fascinating book, I recommend it. And I really recommend the podcast, even if you don't want the book, you should go listen to the podcast series about how it was made in, if you're curious at all about

• 1:14:29Jason Schreier?

  how the process of book creation. The reporter who did that at the end of it was like, I will never look at a book in the store the same way again, after learning about all this. They talk about how a best seller, how like a book becomes a best seller. They talk about the printing process, the auction process. You guys would find it really fascinating. I think everybody would.

• 1:14:47Kirk Hamilton?

  Nice.

• 1:14:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, that sounds great.

• 1:14:49Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, Planet Money, really cool book. And of course, the podcast is, is very popular. All right, that is that for this week's episode. Thank you again to everybody who sent in questions and next week we'll be, we will be talking about a very good video game that I cannot wait to get into. So look forward to that. And Kirk, Matty, I'll see you both next time.

• 1:15:12Kirk Hamilton?

  Yep, see you both next time.

• 1:15:13Speaker 02

  Bye.

• 1:15:17Kirk 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.

• 1:16:15Speaker 05

  Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network. Of artist-owned shows. Supported. Directly. By you.