The State of the Games Industry with Nathan Grayson

In this episode, Ed Zitron is joined by Nathan Grayson of worker-owned games site Aftermath to talk about building an independent media outlet and the state of the game industry writ large. Nathan Grayson: https://aftermath.site/author/nathan-grayson https://bsky.app/profile/nathangrayson.bsky.social Celebrate Aftermath’s anniversary by subscribing - just $1 for your first month! https://aftermath.site/11-06-2025-01-12-00-2ndbirthdayoffer https://aftermath.site/11-06-2025-01-12-00-2ndbirthdayoffer Buy Aftermath’s “Destroy AI” Hoodie: https://aftermath.site/destroy-ai-aftermath-kim-hu-hoodie-shirt/ YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at https://discord.com/invite/QUUQUP9szv Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron Email Me: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:07Speaker 02

  Call Zone Media.

• 1:10Ed Zitron?

  Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zitron.

• 1:22Speaker 04

  Better Offline.

• 1:25Ed Zitron?

  And today I'm joined by the esteemed Nathan Grayson, co-founder of the work-owned gaming website Aftermath. Nathan, thank you for joining me again.

• 1:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, thank you for having me.

• 1:35Ed Zitron?

  So you just did two years. What's it been like? What's, what have you learned in the last two years from doing this?

• 1:42Speaker 05

  Uh, yeah, just nothing. You know, we came in as experts. We were, you know, we didn't need to learn anything at all.

• 1:47Ed Zitron?

  We were perfect.

• 1:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, we have learned so, so, so, so, so much. You know, we entered it as five people who wrote for a living, who never really had much experience with the business side of things because that wasn't really our purview. And when you go from being at a major publisher of any sort, whether in our cases, that was Geo Media with Kotaku, with the Washington Post, or Vice, or whatever else, you know, a lot gets handled for you, whether that is payroll, or promotion, or in some cases, social media, things of that nature. We have to do all of that ourselves now, in addition to expanding the business, finding ways to grow, finding ways to support ourselves, and keep it sustainable, or even make it sustainable in the first place. So, part

• 2:30Speaker 05

  of the reason we decided to do a relaunch was to kind of plant our flag, and say like, "Yeah, you know, we're a real grown-up business now." Whereas, when we first started, we kind of just were cobbling things together, and learning as we went along.

• 2:46Ed Zitron?

  So, tell me about the relaunch. What you been doing? You moved to Ghost, right?

• 2:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, we moved over to Ghost. Yeah, so we relaunched the website. We think it looks better and nicer now, there are more design possibilities. And also, like, we can accept more kinds of payment, and have more ways to like, reach readers, and let them know, like, "Hey, your subscription's expiring," all this nitty-gritty stuff. But yeah, we just decided to move over there, because it offers more flexibility. Sites like 404 and Hellgate are on Ghost, and have nothing but good things to say. And like, you know, we appreciated Lead, which is what we were using before, that's what Defectors on. But yeah, there are just a few things that we felt like we were not going to be able to get from Lead, within a semi-reasonable timeframe, and Ghost already offered them. So, we're like, "Yeah, makes perfect sense."

• 3:34Ed Zitron?

  It's also grown into like, a vibrant website. At first, you were kind of testing things out, but now you've got a very developed stack of people. You've got freelancers now, right?

• 3:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, we use freelancers, or we accept freelance submissions. We also have two regular contributors, Nicole and Isaiah. They are in our Slack, they write for us, you know, every week. Yeah, you know, we're going places. We're still a core staff of five. But in the near future, you know, should we accrue enough subscriptions, we'd like to hire people on full-time, and grow our staff. Again, similar to what we've been seeing with, well, I think 404 now has like, regular contributors as well. I'm not sure if they have anyone new full-time yet. Hellgate, I know, has grown. So, yeah, you know, again, we are following in the footsteps of, at least relative to ourselves, giants, and we would like to keep doing that. But that requires growing more, making more money, all that

• 4:25Speaker 05

  stuff, you know. Typical challenges of a small business, but mapped on to independent media.

• 4:31Ed Zitron?

  So and coverage wise, you're fairly wired now like you cover games, but kind of in the dead spin before the bullshit happened style thing where it's like gaming can mean many different things.

• 4:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, and also like, I think from the get go, what we wanted to do was cover games in the way that defector covers sports, which is to say that, you know, we can cover a lot of things. A lot of things fall under that umbrella. And on top of that, like, you know, games are relevant to many different areas as well. Like, and so I think that compared to other video game websites, for example, we spent a lot of time covering politics. For a long time, there's this refrain that like, oh, you know, games are escapism and like, you should keep politics out of and blah, blah, blah, which has always been bullshit, of course. But I think that even relative to our coverage at other places, like before we made aftermath, you know, all of us have been fairly politically minded in our careers. But aftermath, like, we really go in on that. And I'm very proud of what

• 5:28Speaker 05

  we've accomplished on that front in terms of just covering that overlap, especially as it's become more and more relevant to the modern day, you know, like when Trump was running for president, again, he was meeting with gaming influencers. Like, you know, you have all of these things where now the people who used to be considered just like outcast nerds are in incredible places of prominence.

• 5:52Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, and it's weird. I don't like seeing games bleed into politics at all. I think we really, I think we were good in about 2011 with Home From, which was the, I think, the only necessary political game where what if North Korea radiated the Mississippi River? Classic game. I'm sure I'm going to get some great emails about the fact that there were political games before that. And you're wrong. But it is, it is interesting where you are, where aftermath is at in the current milieu of like, politics and digital culture. Because it does feel like streaming and gaming have just kind of meshed into everything now. Outside of politics, you've got a bunch of tons of like NBA players and NFL players who game and stream regularly. But you've also got these particularly vile

• 6:36Ed Zitron?

  and not vile streamers who do it too.

• 6:38Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, yeah, and I mean, we just recently, this week, in fact, we ran a story about kind of the aftermath of one person, the aftermath, haha, that's it. But anyway, about a, an employee at a company called Sucker Punch, they made a ghost of Yotay recently, getting fired as a result of a joke about Charlie Kirk. They're one of the people who got swept up on that. And so we ran a story about kind of what has happened to them since that occurred. And also just sort of like what that moment actually was versus what you might be able to misconstrue it as. So, you know, at the time, there was all of this furor over anybody saying anything negative about Charlie Kirk. And so this person got fired for a relatively innocuous joke that was probably in bad taste, but whatever. And so what she's contending

• 7:23Speaker 05

  now is like, you know, two months down the line, she's like, this wasn't actually about the joke. It was because there was a harassment mob that already existed that decided to weaponize this person's death to get some people fired and to, you know, basically instill silence in them and anybody else who witnessed that happening. And, you know, just generally taking the, the games industry to task for not defending its people better. Because when this occurred, you know, the company in question, at least she says, did not really like come to her or give her a warning or really do anything. They were just like, yeah, you're fired. And, you know, as long as the games industry continues to let that happen, which they've been basically doing since the original Gamer Gate back in 2014.

• 8:03Ed Zitron?

  As you would well know.

• 8:05Speaker 05

  Right. Then these kinds of things like that will just continue to let these mobs run rampant and kind of dictate the pace of conversation around games and even in some cases, how they get made.

• 8:17Ed Zitron?

  It's so strange. I, as a, as a child, I dreamed of the day that gaming would be a normal thing that everybody talked about. And now I feel like that was a monkey's paw situation. Maybe we should have less discussion of it. You know, no, I don't even mean in the mediated sense, in the sense that something happened as games came to prominence that dragged up a ton of stuff within gamers that wasn't anything to do with games at all.

• 8:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I think a few things happened. One of them is that, you know, for a while, games were considered this thing like for nerds and for like outcasts. And so there was always that bit of a chip on people's shoulder. And that like, once the mainstream started to care about games, they're like, hey, well, you know, these are ours. And if you do anything to them, if they get altered to fit your tastes and your needs, then we're going to like, do an uprising, like get really mad. But also that kind of energy, that kind of like, you know, faux victimhood is very easily easily weaponized by other forces. And I think that the the far right seized upon that quite early, again with Gamergate. They they noticed that there's this latent kind of resentment

• 9:27Speaker 05

  running through games seeking audiences, whatever you want to call them.

• 9:31Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 9:32Speaker 05

  Like, yeah, yeah, we we need to find a way to seize upon that. And Gamergate was the perfect flashpoint. And ever since then, you know, people much smarter than me have said this, but like Gamergate was the canary in the coalmine for a lot of the modern alt-right. And that's sort of just how it all started.

• 9:48Ed Zitron?

  And I wish that they would get angry at the real villains, which is electronic arts. And the like, because can you imagine if any, even a iota of this vile poison in their veins was a like, I, I know this is somewhat of a tangent, but I swear I'm going somewhere. Playing Madden last night, because I hate myself. And it's just, this game has been broken in the same way for 15 years. They're a little, you can play a game and without fail, we'll see a bug. I bet you that menus will hitch, menus won't load. And it's just, see, like, these harassment campaigns, I think, are so, as you've well put, so nakedly not about video games, but just aggression against women, aggression against any outliers,

• 10:33Ed Zitron?

  which is ironic considering gay, like gamers' historic outlier status.

• 10:38Speaker 05

  Mm hmm. Absolutely. When, yeah, you know, again, as with a great many things, obviously, the real villain, especially in the case you're describing, is capitalism.

• 10:49Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 10:50Speaker 05

  And like, you know, if you look at Madden, sports games in general, as you're saying, they've been broken in fundamental ways for like decades. But what's changed about them is that they're just more heavily monetized now. These companies have done more ways to extract money, yep, to extract tons of money from them. And like, there is anger at. Games changing in that way, but not to this degree where it's like we're going to, you know, harass people. I mean, there are in some cases harassment mobs that have gone

• 11:15Ed Zitron?

  Which they shouldn't do to anyone, just to be clear. No one should.

• 11:19Speaker 05

  But also a lot of the developers who end up in those crosshairs are also just marginalized. And that's the main reason people are going after them. Um, yeah, it's very odd because you would think that games would be this kind of could be this hotbed for like resistance to the ravages of capitalism in that, you know, so many games present effectively what are supposed to be fair structures, right? You get out what you put in. Um, like, you know, you gain experience for all of your work. You gain rewards, things like that. And so in a lot of ways gamers' brains are tailored to expect a certain degree of fairness and like egalitarianism. And so you would think the gamers would look at like all these structures and say, okay, well, there's a problem with this structure. It's not fair

• 12:03Speaker 05

  and we should do something about it. But, you know, again, uh, they've been misled by a bunch of various forces, including the powers that be, including the people who are like, are in charge of making the games, not the developers, the executives. Um, and so they just never quite get there. But it is kind of funny to think about like, you know, this could be the place where it all starts. Gamers could start the revolution.

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• 15:35Ed Zitron?

  But I think the Aftermath does a really good job of that, because you have the social stuff, you know, I had the term social justice, it's the correct one, but it's been bounced around too much now. But it's, it's a place where I think you have done, you have done some of the best labor work. I have, like, you have a labor section, and I think that people need to real, I think people need to see games developers as laborers far more, because I think there are plenty of people who are like, oh, these game, how much do game developers make? 700,000 a year, like, they, they have these, they see them as this ivory tower job versus a pretty brutal working stiff job at times. I suppose, and then even more so in things like QA, you know, as long as that still exists as an industry.

• 16:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, right. Till it gets replaced by AI in Square Enix's case.

• 16:24Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I could not remember the company, thank you for being smart.

• 16:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, they, they want to replace 70% of their QA, or have 70% of the QA done by AI. I'm sure that they have some, like, bullshit line about how that won't displace labor, but it's like, but you just explained.

• 16:41Ed Zitron?

  Thinking this out loud, that doesn't make any fucking sense. First of all, QA, from what I understand, is a lot of repetitive tasks, so I assume that that's why they think AI will work. But is it going to play the games? Because that's a big part.

• 16:54Speaker 05

  So another big problem with that whole line of reasoning is that QA is like a relationship, right?

• 16:58Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 16:59Speaker 05

  In that you don't just need QA people to do the job, you also need them to be effective communicators to the rest of the studio, in terms of what they should be looking for, in terms of how to reproduce various bugs and other issues. And another, like, big element of QA that is super underappreciated is that typically, because a game is made in bits and pieces, QA is the part of the studio that earliest and most often gets a full picture of what the game is like to play in its totality, as like a complete product, or is like, and so they can most often answer the question early on, like, is this good? Is it fun?

• 17:35Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 17:35Speaker 05

  Admittedly, they're playing it in a very specific way, so they're not necessarily playing it to enjoy themselves, but they do have that, like, broader overview of what is kind of turning out to be. And there all of those things that I just mentioned AI.

• 17:49Ed Zitron?

  QA is quality assurance. I probably should have led with that, but never. But no, you're right. And it's, I think seeing games as a labor thing is so it's genuinely one of my favorite things about aftermath. Is the, if you talk about, and now this is a little bit. Copium, hopium, whatever you call it, but it's if you do want to change things, you need to educate people about what's going wrong and why. I'm not saying that vile right people are finding aftermath and going, oh, I'm changed, but it's. I feel like you have to build a body of work to explain the overall problem. And it is a labor one. It is the fact that some paraphrasing my girlfriend here, but it's like with movies. It's like there are movies that are a hundred million dollars. There are movies that are one million dollars.

• 18:32Ed Zitron?

  And I feel like games is in this weird position too, where it's everything has to be triple A, everything biggest, most hugest game. And then there are indie games.

• 18:43Ed Zitron?

  And it's, I feel like that, like the capitalism problem you've been discussing is there too, where it's. The way games are made is broken. And I feel like aftermath does a good job of explaining how the breaking has happened, but also the consequences of that fracturing.

• 18:57Speaker 05

  Yeah. And then also like, I think people just don't understand the scale of game making in general either. Like, you know, certainly there's triple A and there's indie, but there's all sorts of stuff in between. A lot of indie games, you know, cause like, there's been this larger thing happening in video games where like, it's been hard for companies to secure investment. A lot of games have gotten canceled. A lot of studios have had to break up or go their separate ways. And so for a moment, there was this refrain of, okay, well, like, you know, as a result of all of that and all these layoffs happening in the triple A space. You know, pretty much every major triple A game company, be it Microsoft, Sony, EA, Ubisoft, Square Enix, whatever. Said major layoffs in the past couple of years. And so a lot of people saw that and said, well, you know, triple A is collapsing.

• 19:40Speaker 05

  It's going to go away in five or 10 years. Indies will save us though. But you know, indies are facing their own problems again in terms of securing investment. And also like a lot of indie games are not just, you know, one person in their garage or a few people making a game for, you know, pocket change. These are also full scale productions. These can have thirty, forty, even sometimes a hundred people working on them. And they all require paychecks. And so quickly the price for that on a per annual basis goes up to, you know, over a million dollars easily. And so it's like, you know, indies can't save us because they're facing a lot of the same headwinds as everybody else.

• 20:21Speaker 05

  And recognizing how games are made, I think, allows people to better get a grip on that and be like, okay, well then the games industry is actually facing very different challenges than it might seem on the surface.

• 20:34Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I even I, in my own ignorance, didn't even think of the kind of messy middle of what a hundred people working, a hundred people would be an indie game studio, I guess.

• 20:43Speaker 05

  It can be, it depends on the studio. I mean, some of them are, you know, owned by, again, Microsoft. Microsoft owns like half the games industry now, which is also bad. But others are, yeah, doing their own thing and either working with publishers or securing outside funding.

• 20:59Speaker 05

  And, you know, for every one Claire Obscure Expedition thirty-three you get, which that studio is allegedly around thirty people, but they had tons of other folks touch the game over the course of its development. You know, you don't get a lot of other games. They're like, others just get canceled. They, they die on the vine, they can't secure funding. And, you know, studios either lay people off or cancel games or both.

• 21:22Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I mean, even my favorite game of the year, Dead Zone Rogue by Prophecy Prophecy Games, which I love. Even that one, they did Tribes Three Rivals and just appeared to have stopped updating it. Which it's just, it. It almost feels like we're reaching a breaking point with this.

• 21:41Speaker 05

  And we also briefly talk about the number of times that people have tried to bring back tribes and it didn't work.

• 21:48Ed Zitron?

  It's insane. How many tribes get like 17, 25, 100 of them that I've been playing tribes games since I was like in my teens.

• 21:58Speaker 05

  Yeah. Why like in theory, tribe should be able to find an audience. Like we live in a time now where people are always looking for a new multiplayer game. Tribes is really interesting and different compared to pretty much every multiplayer game. You can ski around and like, you know, figure out your trajectories and launch blue discs at people. It rules. It's one of like the best multiplayer shooters ever, in my opinion. Um, yeah, like, you know, giant maps, huge landscapes. That's what like Battlefield is doing now. People love that shit. And so it's so odd that each and every revival, and they've been like relatively well spaced out. It's not like they're, you know, doing these in like staccato rhythm. But each and every revival has just, you know, been dead on arrival, basically. Like it's, it's really sad to see. Yeah.

• 22:42Ed Zitron?

  Six of six of them. It looks like my bad. I can't count. And it's with that one. Maybe it's the indie game thing, which is a giant map is probably not that easy to put together. And if you look up, I didn't play tribes through rivals, but if you look at Dead Zone Rogue, which is an FPS rogue like it's very, I don't want to say small, but it's condensed. It's like a very focused game, but I want to change it because I'll just talk about Dead Zone Rogue for now. Um, to the steam machine. How are you feeling? It's a steam machine. As you'll know from the episode before this one with Steve Burke, it's the new gaming console style steam PC thing. How are you feeling about it? I'm oddly hopeful.

• 23:21Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, so, um, Valve tried to release steam machines, um, a handful of years ago as well. I think in the mid 2000s. And they kind of crashed and burned or rather they just never took off. I think that Valve learned a lot of very important lessons from that. And I think that also just the timing is much better now in terms of what people are looking for, in terms of the prominence of PC gaming. Back in the mid 2010s, you know, consoles still kind of ruled the roost. Whereas now, like, if we're talking about higher end video game playing, pretty much everyone does it, or not everyone, but a lot of people do it on their PCs, because that also allows them to, you know, create content, you know, stream, things of that nature. And then Steam itself, which Valve owns and operates, has also become so much bigger than it was even back then. It was already huge.

• 24:05Speaker 05

  Now, basically, is the epicenter, the mecca of PC gaming. And so then you get to the Steam Machines themselves, and you know, there's long been this perception that the PC is for a lot of normal people kind of impenetrable from a gaming standpoint. You know, you gotta install the game and install these patches, and then like, you know, maybe it won't work with your particular hardware configuration, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so what Valve is basically saying is, okay, well, we will handle all of that for you, as you might expect with the video game console. And then, you know, you just click on a game and it'll work. And they have a couple of things working in their favor on that front. One is that they have since made SteamOS. SteamOS is a great little operating system for video games. That's the whole point. And it's on Linux, right?

• 24:50Speaker 05

  Again, it's super plug and play, it's really easy. And then also, the entire model they're going to deploy on Steam Machines, they've already successfully deployed with Steam Deck, which is their handheld. Steam Deck is an incredible piece of hardware. It is deceptively powerful. It feels really nice in your hands. And it's all entirely SteamOS-based. And so you can just install a game on it. SteamOS will let you know if it's going to run well or not. Valve has this entire system where like, they basically like, will play games to see if they're deck verified, or if they're like, you know, sort of edge cases where they'll work, but they're not optimized, or if they're just like, gonna be a mess. They let you know that upfront, so you can go in with a good idea of how it's all going to function.

• 25:34Speaker 05

  And then you just do it. Um, it's great. It's super smart. And then you have your saves across like Steam Deck and every other place that you can install Steam. So you could theoretically be playing on your Steam Deck in one room and decide you want to play on your TV or your monitor.

• 25:47Ed Zitron?

  Also you can flip between them.

• 25:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, you can do.

• 25:50Ed Zitron?

  Sick.

• 25:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's so, it's so nice. It's, it's, I mean, say a little about Valve, they are like a libertarian kind of nightmare company. Um, but they do still make cool stuff, unlike every other video game company that's not trying to like cut their way to profitability by laying everyone off.

• 26:08Ed Zitron?

  Hmm. I'm, I want it, I was talking to Steve, I want this to kill the, I don't know if it will, it's going to come down heavily to, if it's $600 versus $1,200 and if it's sold in retailers. But it's, I want it to smash Microsoft. I also think, and this is a somewhat, I know people aren't going to like this. Um, I don't think Game Pass is good for the games industry.

• 26:34Speaker 05

  No, no. I think, and I think a lot of people would agree with you, at least in the games industry.

• 26:39Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's, I don't think, I think it create, I, I don't know, I have a weird thing with streaming services in general. I think that they create a race to the bottom and actually make things way more unfair, but I like that Steam charges per game. I think it's good to do that. And I think a variety of games is good and a variety of prices as well. I don't know. I, I know they're a deeply imperfect company, but I genuinely think Microsoft might be walking away from the Xbox. Or at least they're not sure why they have it anymore.

• 27:13Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, I mean, they, they have their whole like campaign now where they're basically saying like, anything can be an Xbox. That's their marketing line. So the basic concept is like, you know, now Xbox is more of an ecosystem, an app-based ecosystem that lives on not just the gaming platform that you have, you know, in your living room, like it could be on your smart TV. Um, it could be on your phone. It could even like be in your car and like. It just seems in general that they don't really know what the brand is anymore. And that also goes back to like the game selection, like what is the last major first party Xbox game that came out or that like became the face of the platform?

• 27:50Ed Zitron?

  That's a good question.

• 27:50Speaker 05

  The fact that everyone still associates Microsoft with like Halo is on one hand, a testament to the enduring power or nature, I guess, of like the Master Chief. But on the other hand, like that game came out in the early 2000s. And still it is the main thing that people are like, oh yeah, that's Halo or that's Xbox.

• 28:09Ed Zitron?

  So I actually just had to look this up for the first party games. Doom, the Dark Ages?

• 28:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, because Microsoft bought in software in Bethesda a while ago. So they own those companies now. That's the other thing is in order to like have more recognizable IP, they just bought a bunch of studios. And then in recent years, because of the Activision Blizzard purchase and how expensive that was, and also just, you know, trends in gaming, Microsoft has been laying everyone the fuck off. They've laid off over 4,000 people in the past two years in games alone. And that's like a significant chunk of, you know, workers at those studios. It's like a really bad situation over there. I mean, on the upside, due to other stuff that takes a while to explain, they did let a lot of people unionize, but then also the most recent layoffs cut into the unions pretty badly, too.

• 29:10Speaker 00

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• 29:40Ed Zitron?

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• 30:24Ed Zitron?

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• 30:40Speaker 01

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• 31:12Speaker 06

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 31:27Speaker 07

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic. In a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 31:38Speaker 06

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• 31:42Speaker 08

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 31:49Speaker 06

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• 32:15Ed Zitron?

  I don't think Microsoft knows what the fuck they're doing, because you talk about they you're correct in saying, yeah, they want to build the ecosystem, but ecosystem fucking sucks. I remember it used to be a while ago that I you went like a couple of years ago, I'd say I'd use the Xbox to be like, oh, this is kind of clean and functional. It's got a few doodads to it. Now, every time I load it up, it feels like I'm on the fucking Las Vegas Strip. It's like an ad for a movie.

• 32:43Speaker 05

  Right.

• 32:43Ed Zitron?

  It's trying to make me download a kid's like it. It's fucking bizarre.

• 32:48Speaker 05

  Well, and it's about to get way worse because, you know, Microsoft, as you well know, Microsoft is now obsessed with adding AI to every potential product and feature they can possibly get their hands on. And so, yeah, they're going to load, you know, the Xbox ecosystem down with AI products as well. Yeah, it's just like, and then on top of that, I guess like the best example here is again, to go back to Valve and Steam. I think that if Microsoft had been building the kind of platform that Steam has been for the past, you know, well over a decade, then they'd be in a good position to do what they're hoping to do with the Xbox now, which is to put it to to ensure that it's basically everywhere.

• 33:30Speaker 05

  But, you know, so like the Microsoft recently put out their own version of the Asus Rogue Ally, which is a handheld.

• 33:37Ed Zitron?

  I like my Rogue Ally, but like, everything I've heard about the new one, I thought they were going to do something special with it.

• 33:43Speaker 05

  No, they just put like a fucking shitty version of Windows on it, where you still have to like, you know, because again, you want that to be like a plug and play product out the box. You're ready to go. And instead, I guess like when you first open it up, you've got to install all this stuff and do all these updates. And it's just like tedious and horrible and all for an interface that still pales in comparison to Steam in terms of just usability and versatility and like cleanliness.

• 34:09Ed Zitron?

  It is so weird, like compared to the Steam Deck as well. I'm talking about the Rogue Ally X, so before the Xbox one. It's it's just front ends on front ends. It's just a we've got an Asus layer, we've got we've got another fucking layer here. Oh, and now you can load up an Xbox thing, which is a different layer. And if you hit the wrong button, it will load a completely separate menu. And it really seems to be that no one sat down and went, what if this worked? Like what if this just because the the Steam Deck, I bought one of those early on. It is, it's chunky. It's too chunky. In fact, I think it's a little bit too big. However, it just fucking works. He just did the button that did load the game login by game play game.

• 34:53Ed Zitron?

  I don't have to fucking do algebra to make it, but it's not gonna, I'm not gonna brush a button with my hand and have it kick back to the Windows desktop. It's just, it feels almost loathing for the customer at this point.

• 35:08Speaker 05

  Right, right. I mean, it's a mix of loathing for the customer and then like, hey, if we're talking about Microsoft. And like, yeah, just maximal, you know, at least attempted profit extraction. But as you're saying, they didn't really think all the way down to the level of what will the end user experience be like? And how does it compare to this other thing? There's already out there and it's already setting the standard for what people expect. And like, if that's where you're coming from, then you will forever. And I think this is also part of Microsoft's problem in general. If that is the way that you are thinking and approaching the creation of your video game devices and services, you will always be at least in second place, if not third. And Microsoft has always been in third in the gaming space.

• 35:48Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, and they're like, I don't even know how the economics of buying these studios even works out for them because didn't they lose money when they bought Activision?

• 35:56Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 35:56Ed Zitron?

  People weren't buying like, who is Mr. Bean running Microsoft Gaming? It just feels insane to every time I see them do something.

• 36:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. And I mean, like, again, you know, the, the question now is what is the strategy? Because I think for a while, the strategy was very much all in on Game Pass. That's why they bought so many studios. That's why they bought Activision Blizzard and everything else because they're like, well, we have this service that is going to be the backbone of everything else we do. And we need to populate it with content. We need regular new games to be coming out. So if we buy a third of the fucking video game industry and have them pump out new content, then we'll be set. But the problem with Game Pass is that the economics of it just aren't great. Um, like, I mean, for one.

• 36:41Ed Zitron?

  How could they ever?

• 36:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, like Microsoft will repeatedly insist that Game Pass is profitable. But that's only if you like, don't pay attention to the upfront costs of the studios under Microsoft's umbrella, making the games. Or the cost of the studios themselves. Once you like, get past Microsoft's, you know, fake math. It's like, oh no, this thing is not profitable at all. And so Microsoft, I think.

• 37:04Ed Zitron?

  Billion.

• 37:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, for Activision Blizzard alone.

• 37:07Ed Zitron?

  Insane.

• 37:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, but no, once you realize that, and I think Microsoft did, then they're like, ah, okay, we gotta, you know, diversify this further. We gotta figure out something else to do. And so they started saying, okay, well, then we're gonna have our big, you know, first party games on other platforms. We're gonna sell them on PlayStation and other places as well. Because that'll help us recoup some costs. We gotta crank up the price of game pass because that might help absorb some of the costs. And so like, they just are slowly and shitifying everything, like, you know, as with every other company, to make up for the fact that they, this gamble is not paying off.

• 37:43Ed Zitron?

  Well, I, I'm hoping that Valve can overtake the entire X. I want them to take Xbox down because I, I also want, I'm weirdly getting on to like death to streaming, death to game pass and all this. I think it's bad for everyone, but also they make good user interfaces. It feels not, I don't feel like I'm being smacked in the face when I use the products. I mean, I like my Sony PlayStation. I sound 100 million years on my Sony PlayStation, but even then, my Switch two as well, partly because I love them and they work.

• 38:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 38:22Ed Zitron?

  They, they turn out like, it's.

• 38:24Speaker 05

  It's a very low bar to clear, but in this day and age, it is a necessary one to like, clarify, well, it's a product or like, it's a piece of hardware and it, it functions. It's just like you, you can, it does what it says on the 10.

• 38:39Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I.

• 38:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 38:41Ed Zitron?

  It's, I, I have hope for it. And I mean, I want, I want a Steam machine. I want a Steam frame.

• 38:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 38:47Ed Zitron?

  I'm a vision pro truther.

• 38:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, although I will say like, I don't know if these steam machines will necessarily compete directly with something like the Xbox. Valve has already said that they don't plan to subsidize the hardware in a way that would bring the price down so that it's comparable necessarily to a PlayStation or an Xbox. A lot of people are guessing where we'll be in the territory of like the PlayStation 5 Pro. Just a little bit price here. My personal guess, because they've said that it will be comparable to if you were to buy all of the components for a PC of similar power and assemble it yourself, which that does bring the price down in the world of PC gaming a lot, right? You know, you buy a mid-range PC pre-built, that's going to be $1,500 or more.

• 39:31Speaker 05

  If you assemble it yourself, you could be looking at, you know, $800, $1,000. My guess is that that's where it lands, probably somewhere in the 800 to 1,000 range.

• 39:41Ed Zitron?

  That would make sense. That's about the price of the Rogue X, Rogue X Ally and stuff.

• 39:45Speaker 05

  Yeah. And like, again, you know, we're still in a time of tariffs and things of that nature. So, you know, I don't think steam machines are necessarily going to be, at least price-wise, as accessible as an Xbox, at least out the gate. You know, maybe Valve will evolve their strategy over time. They've certainly done that with a lot of other products. But, you know, we'll see. They, Valve is something of a black box, so they only tell you as much as they want to at any given moment, and the rest you either divine through their actions, or they eventually come out and say, okay, well, that was kind of a miss. We're gonna change things up now.

• 40:21Ed Zitron?

  All right. So to wrap us up, let's go positive. What are you playing at the moment? What games are you enjoying? What have you enjoyed this year? Let's get to the good stuff.

• 40:29Speaker 05

  Okay, okay, let's see. What have I enjoyed this year?

• 40:33Speaker 05

  Let's see. I mean, Hades 2, although I feel like narratively, it's, narratively, I feel like it's a lot weaker than the first game. But gameplay-wise, it is so much better. It is one of those games where, you know, every time that you finish a run, you're like, well, I could do one more. And then suddenly 45 minutes or an hour or three hours have disappeared. You know, so obviously frontrunner for game of the year for me. Let's see. I was thinking about this game the other night, Eternal Strand. It's this game that I played earlier this year from a bunch of ex-bioWare people. It's kind of like an indie take on, I would say, a mixture of like Monster Hunter and Dragon's Dogma.

• 41:10Speaker 05

  It's on PC and I think it might be on other platforms too. I played it on PC. Um, yeah, it's just really cool. It's one of those games where you're taking down gigantic enemies all the time. And you're doing it by like climbing on them and having these like battles that span these huge maps where like

• 41:24Ed Zitron?

  That sounds so much fun.

• 41:26Speaker 05

  Lots of things are destructible. So like, you know, you're fighting a dragon. You're like leaping on its back. It's flying away with you on it and trying to shake you off. It's burning everything down.

• 41:32Ed Zitron?

  Is this like a 3D, 3D third person situation or?

• 41:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's really cool. Um, it's, I, it came out at the very beginning of the year. And so I was like, what, what games have I really liked that sort of, you know, maybe I have forgotten about. It's like, oh yeah, Eternal Strand. That game rocks.

• 41:48Ed Zitron?

  Um, that's, that's so cool. I'm so glad they're still making, cause I, and I'm not saying you're being negative. There's a lot of negativity out there. It's nice. They're still making funny, fun games like Hades 2 really. I played that all through early access and then in the full one, and you can just see the love. I like the ending. I'm not gonna say what it is. I, I like what they did. I think it was strange, but you know what? The amount of, the amount of game I got out of that game.

• 42:15Speaker 05

  Oh yeah. Oh, I mean, there's no doubt that there is tons of game crammed in that game.

• 42:20Ed Zitron?

  The best value.

• 42:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's kind of like Slap's Hood. There's so much game in this game. This game can fit so much game.

• 42:26Ed Zitron?

  But it's so, it's so weird to play a game like that and be like, wow, you really love making it. You really thought about this. Cause when I first played it, I got kind of pissed off because the systems were so difficult. But you can see that they've thought for hours about the intricacies of different meta or different combinations. It's just, I love Super.

• 42:46Speaker 05

  And also, um, you know, if we want a happy kind of like games industry labor story, at least as far as I understand it, like the last time I talked to them and it has been a minute. Like Super Giant is really well run on that front. Um, like I don't think they have had much employee attrition at all since they started. Everyone who ends up at Super Giant just stays at Super Giant. Um, and like. When I interviewed them about this years ago, they mentioned, you know, like they, they have things like mandatory vacation. Like if you don't take your vacation by the end of the year, you have to just take time off. Um, like, you know, people are, oh yeah, they also have policies around like emails. Like if it's Friday at 5pm, you're not allowed to email people anymore. Even because they're like, you might be really excited about something

• 43:30Speaker 05

  you're working on. If you want to keep working on something, that's fine. But like, don't drag other people into it. Like let people have their free time and their space to, you know, not be embroiled in this process.

• 43:42Ed Zitron?

  I love that as well, because the game is so tight and good and perfect. You don't have to hurt people to do this.

• 43:48Speaker 05

  Right. And also you can just, as you were saying, you can tell the people who made it care. And I think more than that, you can tell they were having fun when they were making it. They were enjoying the process of creating this thing they cared a lot about. And ultimately, when it comes to art, commercial art especially, that's what you want is, you know, on one hand, you want people to get paid. You want them to be compensated well for their labor. But on the other hand, like in an ideal world, you want them to be enjoying themselves. If we're going to be locked into jobs for our whole lives, then we may as well enjoy the process.

• 44:19Ed Zitron?

  Well, I couldn't agree more. And I must say Aftermath gets the better of flying thumbs up. And we will have a link to everything in the get in the episode notes.

• 44:30Speaker 05

  No, we are also having a, we're having a sale on subscriptions right now. $1 for your first month. It's a great deal if you want to come, you know, check out the site, see what we're about. Um, yeah, you should absolutely take advantage of that. That'll be going until the end of, well, middle of December, basically. Yeah.

• 44:47Ed Zitron?

  Cool. Which, and this will be out by then. Uh, and I have subscribed to Aftermath since the beginning and I will continue to do so. Please support independent media, myself included. But really give, give, give them a look. The new redesign is awesome. Nathan, thank you so much for joining us.

• 45:03Speaker 05

  Yeah. Again, thank you for having me. It's always wonderful to come on.

• 45:14Ed Zitron?

  Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com. M A T T O S O W S K I dot com. You can email me at [email protected] or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat dot where's your ed dot app to visit the Discord and go to r slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

• 45:46Speaker 02

  Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  Empower is all about helping you invest well, so you can go out and live a little. And their Free Empower Personal Dashboard shows you your full financial life in one place. You'll be able to see your net worth, monitor budgets, analyze your portfolio, set retirement goals, and more. Whether you're saving for something big, want to treat yourself, friends, or family, or meet long-term goals, Empower helps you see where you stand. You've worked hard for your money, and Empower can help you make the most of it. Download the Empower Personal Dashboard or visit empower.com, not an Empower client, paid, or sponsored.

• 46:50Speaker 04

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• 47:21Speaker 09

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• 48:18Speaker 10

  paid for by Genentech and Novartis.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.