Pod Insights Pablo Torre Finds Out The "Pay-to-Play" Scheme That (Almost) Ruined Video Games, with Dan Soder About this episode Virtual currency is a new cheat code. But when EA Sports tried to squeeze extra cash out of sports fans with so-called "microtransactions" inside its latest-college football title, gamers revolted... and won? Comedian Dan Soder, who's been playing video games with a future NFL coach since childhood, takes Pablo on a journey to the seventh circle of nerddom: What does this phenomenon say about private equity turning fun into an asset? How do we stop sacrificing community for convenience? And is shame still possible?
• Subscribe to "Soder" https://pod.link/1716617572
Previously on PTFO:
• Share & Madden & Tell with Katie Nolan and Dan Soder https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/OTUyZDY0ODQtODRkZC0xMWYwLWFjNDUtNGI3MzhkNTQwNjU4
• We Smoked All the Athlete-Branded Weed We Could Find https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/OTUyZDE0M2UtODRkZC0xMWYwLWFjNDUtNDdkNjM5YWEwNGI2
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Pablo Torre? Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today, we're gonna find out what this sound is.
0:06 Speaker 01 Why are we isolating ourselves and hating ourselves so that Jeff Bezos can have another boat for his weird sex lizard wife to crawl around on?
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0:59 Pablo Torre? It's used by sales teams of all sizes, from small businesses to larger organizations, and it's built for teams who want less manual busywork and more time with buyers. If your marketing and sales teams are trying to work from the same view of the customer, it's worth a look. Sign up for free at apollo.io. That's apollo.io. Thanks for doing this.
1:26 Speaker 01 Yeah, dude. I did something that I do in my off time, so of course I want to talk about it. I love video games.
1:34 Pablo Torre? You are our video game correspondent, I realize.
1:37 Speaker 01 Yes. I'm not a big video game guy, I'm just a consistent video game guy.
1:41 Pablo Torre? What does that mean?
1:42 Speaker 01 I'm not Barry Bonds, I'm Ted Williams. I've played video games since I was like, six. When did I get a Nintendo? It was, yeah, Christmas of 89, so I was like, six. And I've just always consistently had a system, and I've just played my whole life. I've been a devout fan of college football since its inception by EA Sports. Because Madden was first, NFL games were first, but when they did the first college football, it was NCAA Game Breaker with Eddie George on the cover.
2:13 Pablo Torre? Mm-hmm.
2:13 Speaker 01 And it was like you would go to a Blockbuster or something and find out they go, they have college football. And I, you know, I remember exactly where it was. I was sleeping at my cousin Luke's house. We rented Game Breaker on a Friday night when college football was the next day. So you're like, you know, it was like a tease. You're like, ooh, we'll play these games. We would like play games that were gonna be the next day. Like if Florida was playing Tennessee, you'd be like, I'll be Florida, you be Tennessee, we'll play, or we'll flip for it. It was great. But then EA came out with NCAA, which is now called college football.
2:45 Pablo Torre? Right. And so this thing that's happened in college football, I want to be clear to everybody who does not give a about video games.
2:50 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:50 Pablo Torre? This is a story that I think is fascinating even and perhaps especially for people who don't know what's happening in video games. And I am kind of, I would say I'm like a median, I'm a median voter when it comes to video games. I used to really be into it, but what I have now realized is I hear and attempt to understand what's going on right now is that I have been alienated by what this is now.
3:16 Speaker 01 What's interesting about video games to me is that they are a thumbprint of our societal evolution. And I think they show a lot of parts of our society, good and bad. I think it's, you know, there's people that are adamantly against it and think if you play it, you're wasting your life. But there's people whose brains run hot and it's just a nice thing to turn on and completely shut off all your thoughts about the outside world.
3:44 Pablo Torre? Yes.
3:44 Speaker 01 It's great for escapism.
3:46 Pablo Torre? Oh, I, I, my favorite thing. And so when I, when I say that I think of you when I see the headlines about the revolution happening.
3:54 Speaker 01 I'm, I'm gonna tell you right now, I'm not a big Reddit guy, but I go to Reddit. It's the, it's a place I go if I need to look up stuff specifically for video games. It's like an excellent source for video games. And I just want to say how proud I am of the college football video game community on Reddit.
4:16 Speaker 01 Partly on Reddit, I know it was in other places. But what they did is, there's these streamers that do very popular streams of college football.
4:24 Pablo Torre? And typically, they are the foremost and most effective marketers for the game.
4:30 Speaker 01 It's, it, it behooves these companies to be nice to these streamers. You should treat the streamers right, because they are, they are basically your representation via human form, which we don't have anything anymore.
4:44 Pablo Torre? And on their channels, in ways that are, I think, derived from a genuine passion, it seems by and large, they're broadcasting your product to people who might also wanna buy and spend time on it.
4:57 Speaker 01 It's an evolution of both capitalism and the unboxing.
5:00 Pablo Torre? Yes.
5:01 Speaker 01 The unboxing craze that happened when YouTube first came out was because people were watching people be happy opening, they were wa, they were watching capitalism porn.
5:11 Pablo Torre? Dude.
5:12 Speaker 01 They were watching someone open, the way that a pizza boy would have sex with the lonely housewife, was the way that the kid would unbox the video game and go like, "I wanted this result!" We all feel, it makes us feel something.
5:42 Pablo Torre? For those who are steeped in the lore of this show, this is kind of the thesis behind why we have people like Katie Nolan open.
5:50 Speaker 01 Shout out, one of the best, one of the all-time greats.
5:52 Pablo Torre? Just a friend of the show.
5:54 Speaker 01 Friend, I, I'm obsessed, desperately in love with, just make it sound unhealthy. I would follow her to the end of the world, you go, alright, turns out that was her future husband.
6:05 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
6:05 Speaker 01 Um, but.
6:06 Pablo Torre? But we put, we put journalism in folders because we're unboxing it.
6:10 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:10 Pablo Torre? And you see the surprise and the horror, and you vicariously enjoy what feels like the eternal Groundhog's Day Christmas morning of what's in there.
6:21 Speaker 01 I used to go to GameStop, dude.
6:23 Pablo Torre? Oh my god, me too.
6:24 Speaker 01 I used to go to GameStop at midnight. And like, I can remember, I can tell you which Assassin's Creed I went and bought. I'll tell you, like, in Queens, I used to walk to Steinway, which was like 12 blocks away from my apartment. And I would like, really look forward, you would have conversations with guys in line.
6:40 Pablo Torre? Yes.
6:40 Speaker 01 About like, getting the game. And then, the, the, the moment of leaving with your copy.
6:46 Pablo Torre? The physical copy.
6:47 Speaker 01 In your hand, to someone that you were talking to in line at GameStop and being like, "Dude, have fun." And they're like, "You have fun." And that was, and obviously, things evolve and we're all online now. So now you preorder it. But you, you still get the feeling of the preorder when it pops up on your screen and you go, "Oh, I get..." And it gives you a countdown, like, six days.
7:08 Pablo Torre? But, but now what we're getting to is the way in which, what I grew up doing, which I think a lot of people may assume is still happening, is eroding or mutating or being corrupted into something else. And I want to establish that when I look through your appearances on the show, video games have come up consistently.
7:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, probably.
7:28 Pablo Torre? You played...
7:29 Speaker 01 An old pothead that loves video games.
7:31 Pablo Torre? When you were playing...
7:32 Speaker 01 And crunchy rock music. I'm a, I'm a hack.
7:35 Pablo Torre? Playing Madden against Mike McDaniel, who you grew up with.
7:38 Speaker 01 We played, that was Techno Super Bowl, technically.
7:40 Pablo Torre? Techno Super Bowl, excuse me.
7:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
7:42 Pablo Torre? Um, with the now offensive coordinator of Los Angeles Chargers.
7:45 Speaker 01 Yeah.
7:45 Pablo Torre? Uh, playing as Deion Sanders, he would.
7:48 Speaker 01 Yeah. Uh, he would play as the Atlanta Falcons and he would switch to Deion and pick it almost every time. Anybody that played Techno Super Bowl, you remember down B with the 49ers was one of the most dangerous plays on earth. Rice would do like a 10 and in, John Taylor would run a streak. Uh, Roger Craig would run a streak out of the backfield. And then Brent Jones would sit, just kind of squat in the flats. So usually Rice is your first option, but you're looking Taylor downfield. And he knew I was going Taylor every time. So he would drop Deion back, go one on one with John Taylor and just pick it. And it just made me, it's still... makes me mad.
8:22 Pablo Torre? I do like the idea of, as always, future NFL coach taunting you.
8:26 Speaker 01 Yeah, Mike's a great talker. And then what happened is he stopped playing video games and video games evolved. So by the time it got to like, you know, I remember like Madden 01 was a big one. When the PS2, when I got a PS2, my senior year in high school, Madden 01 was like, everyone's coming over. We're putting names in a hat. You're drawing the team you get. I got the Vikings with Cole Pepper.
8:50 Pablo Torre? The number of just like sleepover, playdate, like multiplayer.
8:56 Speaker 01 Afternoon before you have to go to work in high school.
8:58 Pablo Torre? Bloodsport tournaments of video games.
9:00 Speaker 01 I mean, you know what? One of my all time favorite moments with my friend, my buddy Mark, who I went to college with, was we would sit there and play All-Star Baseball on PlayStation 2, but we'd just play Home Run Derby. Because all you had to do was pull the right joystick back and fling it forward to hit home runs. But our fun part was calling the home runs. So we would be like, Miguel Tejada is fluent in three languages. He's fluent in English, Spanish, and home run when you like hit it. So we would just do like dumb calls. Uh, and that was like so fun. And we'd just do that after class at the University of Arizona. You'd be like, you want to go play Home Run Derby? And you'd be like, yeah, absolutely.
9:40 Pablo Torre? Of course. And then, uh, the episode we did with you where we invaded your home with Katie.
9:46 Speaker 01 Yeah, that was awesome. Trying all the athlete weed strains, which you have to play video games.
9:50 Pablo Torre? I mean, of course, and we did, but that was the same moment at which the 2024 return of what is now known as College Football 25 became the all time best selling American sports game in terms of dollar sales ever.
10:05 Speaker 01 Over like 500 million, correct?
10:07 Pablo Torre? It was, and you contributed to that.
10:10 Speaker 01 Oh, brother, I, it was, uh, it was a full circle moment for me. Shane Gillis used to open, uh, on the road with me back in like 2018, 2017 and 2018. And I would bring an Xbox 360 and we would play the defunct NCAA 2014. But we'd run a dynasty together. So we would be like, you'd be like, I'd be OC and he'd be DC. And then we would recruit. It was just a fun thing to do on the road.
10:36 Speaker 02 Hey, the boys. Hit it in the game? I mean, if it's in the game.
10:40 Speaker 01 It is. All right.
10:41 Speaker 02 We praise Jesus in the game.
10:44 Speaker 01 Long way from Happy Valley. Because you would like have it at the hotel and then you bring it to the green room and you'd be like, well, we're recruiting between shows. And then, um, you know, he became like the, the most famous comic in the world.
10:57 Pablo Torre? Playing literal arenas.
10:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, and this video game came back and they were like, hey, we want you to stream it. So he called me and he was like, do you want to stream the new college football? And I changed the passing options and that's where I screwed up and he beat the hell out of me the second game.
11:15 Speaker 01 No, that was stupid. I fucked up, I fucked up, I fucked up.
11:24 Speaker 01 Damn.
11:24 Speaker 02 You must feel like an idiot. Because you were up, you were doing so good at the beginning.
11:29 Pablo Torre? You changed the passing options?
11:30 Speaker 01 I screwed up. But anyways, that game came back and it was like a full circle moment that Shane was like, hey, I'm gonna. In fact, even this year, he was like, you want to download? I pre-ordered it and he's like, you want to download code? And I was like, for a week early and I was like, yeah. So I've just been building my Kansas State dynasty. Shout out Wildcats.
11:48 Pablo Torre? Why, why Kansas State?
11:49 Speaker 01 Uh, my little cousin plays there now.
11:51 Pablo Torre? Oh!
11:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, my little cousin's on the team.
11:53 Pablo Torre? What position does he play?
11:53 Speaker 01 Plays tackle. He's a true freshman, Oliver Miller. Shout out big number 73.
11:57 Pablo Torre? Oh my god. Oh, there he is!
11:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
12:00 Pablo Torre? Hey!
12:01 Speaker 01 This is my cousin, dude. I love him to death. And shout out his older brother Graham, who never gets shine, but Graham rules. He's the older brother of a, of a starting tackle in football. He's like, no one gives a about me. And you're like, your brother is a fucking house.
12:14 Pablo Torre? Your brother is 6'6", 290.
12:16 Speaker 01 Woo! He's only getting bigger, baby!
12:19 Pablo Torre? Number 73.
12:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, big 73, Colorado.
12:22 Pablo Torre? Damn. Yeah, Inglewood, Colorado.
12:24 Speaker 01 Yeah, he went to Creek. I forgive him for that, but whatever. Yeah, but it's so.
12:29 Pablo Torre? But you, you were, in other words-
12:30 Speaker 01 This year is special to me. This year is even more special.
12:31 Pablo Torre? You were anticipating in ways that are like, beyond even what I expected when you walked in here.
12:39 Speaker 01 So you were talking about playing, um, Tegmo Super Bowl against Mike McDaniel.
12:45 Speaker 01 NCAA used to have all the things in this thing that I used to do in college. For those of you who are old enough and played PlayStation 2, you had memory cards.
12:53 Pablo Torre? Yes.
12:53 Speaker 01 That was how you saved everything were these just like tiny memory cards. When I was at the University of Arizona, NCAA was out and I was in summer school. Cause I'm not a good student and I was at summer school and one of the guys in my class, we were talking about NCAA coming out and he was like, oh, give me your memory card. Uh, I'll put all the names on it. And I was like, what do you mean? Cause at the time you weren't allowed to have likeness or names or anything. Cause the athletes weren't getting paid. So you, I brought him my PlayStation 2 thing and he came back with all the names. One of the names on the roster, Yale, I think at like
13:29 Pablo Torre? Yes.
13:29 Speaker 01 62 overall, he was like a 58 overall. He was dog shit, Mike McDaniel at Yale.
13:35 Pablo Torre? Wide receiver.
13:36 Speaker 01 Yeah. And like, I think that was like NCAA 03 or, or, uh, 04.
13:41 Pablo Torre? So 5'9, 175.
13:43 Speaker 01 Yeah.
13:44 Pablo Torre? Smokey, Smokey Hill?
13:46 Speaker 01 Yeah, Smokey Hill High School. Go Buffs. That's why I'm disappointed Oliver went to Creek. Um, but this year is the first year where someone's in the game. But now there's NIL, so Oliver's name is in the game. I took a picture of it and sent it to him on Instagram. The second I got the download code and he was like, I haven't even seen it. And I was like, yeah, here you go. They made you look like [BLEEP] ass. Like they made you look horrible.
14:10 Pablo Torre? But, but the point being that all of this is what you bring to the Christmas morning.
14:15 Speaker 01 Yeah.
14:16 Pablo Torre? Of getting to play this.
14:17 Speaker 01 I love this game.
14:18 Pablo Torre? And, and the thing that happens when everybody who loves this game turns it on. And this is including the people who had been playing like the beta pre-release versions.
14:27 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
14:27 Pablo Torre? These influencers that you're describing who are the marketers slash publicists of, of this empire.
14:34 Pablo Torre? There's a big difference.
14:37 Speaker 01 Yeah, for the first time um in this game's history, it was loaded with microtransactions. If the first one that you saw was when you do the preorder, they were like, hey, you know, you can spend fifty, sixty on the game. You can spend ninety on the deluxe or you can do the MVP package.
14:56 Pablo Torre? So sixty-nine ninety-nine for standard.
14:58 Speaker 01 Standard.
14:58 Pablo Torre? Ninety-nine ninety-nine deluxe.
15:00 Speaker 01 And then the MVP bundle.
15:02 Pablo Torre? One forty-nine ninety-nine.
15:03 Speaker 01 Crazy, but that is for Madden and college football. Cause what happened when college football came out was Madden took a beating. Cause you realized how many people were playing Madden to scratch the itch that college football had left.
15:16 Pablo Torre? Hmm.
15:16 Speaker 01 Cause college football is a different game. You're not doing contracts, you're not dealing with free agents. You're like recruiting kids, they're leaving, there's the transfer portal. It's just a different vibe completely. So all the people that missed college football, cause I was buying Madden. I bought Madden to see Mike McDaniel as the head coach of the Dolphins. That was the last time I bought Madden was his first year, I think his first or second year as the coach. I was like, I wanna see what they make Mike look like. But college football comes out and you're like, fuck Madden. I don't care about Madden, I just wanna play college football.
15:44 Pablo Torre? Yeah, a half billion dollars worth of people agreed in the first year.
15:48 Speaker 01 Five hundred million dollars went to college football. You could see EA immediately go, shit. Cause then there started being things on the home screen of college football of like, hey, Madden's forty percent off. Like, hey, you can just buy Madden, we'll just give you Madden. They just like started to be like, please take Madden, we made Madden, please use it. But this year, they said, hey, we're gonna do the MVP, we're gonna do, it's a hundred and fifty bucks. The thing that was fucked up and the thing that everyone noticed, myself included, was they went, uh, when you do a dynasty in college football, there's a skill tree that you unlock. Where you unlock these things that like help you get recruits or they help you start a rivalry game in a, like on fire.
16:29 Speaker 01 This one was like, hey, there's gonna be two new skill trees that you cannot touch unless you do the MVP bundle. And everyone was like, so there's just a thing in the game you can't access unless you wanna play? Which is also, the MVP bundle, I believe is a subscription. So then people were going, well, if the subscription's up. Am I gonna be able to access it?
16:52 Pablo Torre? Right.
16:52 Speaker 01 And this is where we're running into a [bleep] massive problem.
16:55 Pablo Torre? Well, okay, so hold on. I want to establish that when you even say the, because you're, you're getting to, when we say that this is a thumbprint for the way we live now, effectively.
17:06 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:06 Pablo Torre? You, you're mentioning words that we've heard in other contexts in the effective degradation and, and fracking of media.
17:15 Speaker 01 Of owning media.
17:16 Pablo Torre? Of what it even means to own something in media.
17:19 Speaker 01 You don't own anything anymore.
17:21 Pablo Torre? But the term microtransaction.
17:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:24 Pablo Torre? For those who have never played a video game, could you please explain what a microtransaction is?
17:29 Speaker 01 Basically, what a microtransaction does is, is if you have a, a player or something in the game, a character, and you wanna make it better, you wanna make it somehow better, they do this thing where they go, you know, for $10.99 V bucks, or whatever they wanna call it, it's money.
17:46 Pablo Torre? A virtual currency.
17:48 Speaker 01 A virtual currency, which is just an in-between, because I'll tell you what, when you say yes, they sure as hell take you right to that screen where your credit card's on there. That's American money that I'm spending when it is. But you buy like XP, um, and then you, you progress faster.
18:05 Pablo Torre? College football points is what the euphemism is for these virtual currency things.
18:10 Speaker 01 So, NC, or college football, you grind it out. You play a game, you get XP for touchdown scores, how many good things you do.
18:19 Pablo Torre? You earn it.
18:20 Speaker 01 You earn it. And then, when you, and then the next week after you go, they give you these points that you go spend to make your coach better, which makes your team better. There, and so basically what EA Sports is doing now is going, hey, [bleep] play in the game. You wanna just give me money and we'll just like progress you?
18:39 Pablo Torre? What if you could pay?
18:41 Speaker 01 Yes.
18:41 Pablo Torre? For the things you used to have to earn?
18:44 Speaker 01 Yes, well now that's also a big difference this year more than anything is because there are people that are fine if you just want to progress fast. You know, you might have four kids and you have a job and you just like can sit down and you have the fifty dollars that you want to pay so that you're got, you know, you can play in peace. So you can turn off your brain. Fine. What they're doing is they're making some stuff only accessible via microtransaction. And they're going like, no, you can play all you want. You'll never be able to access this unless you give us money. And that is where it goes, oh, it's just, that's the ugly face of capitalism.
19:27 Speaker 01 I know this is probably not an adult only show, but it reminds me of the time I got a lap dance and I saw the woman check her time. It really takes you out of it. When they look at the, she looked at her clock on her phone. Yeah, it was a Saturday night in Montreal. I was at a comedy festival and these like agents took me out to a strip. This is like fifteen years ago, I was drinking. And we go out and this beautiful woman gives me a lap dance, but it was just like the most capitalistic lap dance I've ever had. Where she like, it was on her iPhone with the timer, the way I timed my set on stage. And I saw her check her time and I went, I'm out. You know, I just got up, I was like, we're good. And she's like, no, no, no, no, I was, and you're like, nah, please let me leave. Please let me leave.
20:12 Pablo Torre? Part of me, part of me is glad that she did that if only to spare you from the sound of the alarm going off.
20:18 Speaker 01 Beep beep beep, beep beep beep, beep beep beep. It's at the end of a Nickelback song. Beep beep beep. Look at my photograph. I go, oh man, sorry, we gotta go. Yeah, it, it just feels like when you see stuff like that, you go like, oh, you just want my money, this isn't a community, this isn't a game. That's why I'm so proud of the Reddit community for college football and I'm proud of the streamers. There was a couple major streamers.
20:45 Pablo Torre? So, so what the streamers did, and they point out a couple of changes by the way that I also just want to detail is, because one of the other things they did, which had not happened before apparently, is that they introduced the XP slash virtual currency slash college football points thing into single player modes?
21:03 Speaker 01 So that's what, that's. If you were to say like, what is the felony? Like, what is the absolute crime they did? Is that they brought it to single player, which felt weird because you're like, I'm alone. I'm just like in my office playing this at 1:30 in the morning. Like, I don't... Why do I gotta pay to progress faster? I'm gonna play all the plays. I like the progression. The work is the fun. It's a game.
21:30 Pablo Torre? Right now, what I want to establish for people who are just listening, who don't know anything about this topic at all, is that on the internet, the influencers, the streamers that you're referencing, particularly a guy named Bordeaux.
21:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, Bordeaux's a huge college football streamer. He does like, um, you know, he does like a program build. And people love it.
21:48 Pablo Torre? With Kentucky, that's his team.
21:50 Speaker 01 Okay, yeah, there's a couple people. One guy does Hawaii, one guy does Kentucky, and it's fun. You pick a school that traditionally isn't good at college football.
21:58 Pablo Torre? And they get to do the thing that real life doesn't give them, which is dissatisfaction of winning a national championship.
22:03 Speaker 01 By the way, I'm not joking when I say it's my favorite football game of all time. I lost in the playoffs to Tennessee. I'm sorry, Oliver, you were starting at right tackle. And it was fun. I got home from the airport yesterday. Katie and I hung out and watched some golf. And then I was like, I'm gonna, oh, I got the playoffs. And I went in and I lost. And she like, we laugh about it. We make jokes where she's like, that's a, she'll act like a college football wife. That's all right, honey.
22:32 Pablo Torre? I like Katie O'Sander Bullock in the Blind Side version of your video game.
22:36 Speaker 01 See them? You block them. They're trying to tackle, yeah, that's what she really does. But it's, um, it was, it grossed me out. It grossed me out. And then you, and then so to see streamers who usually fall in the line.
22:50 Pablo Torre? Who are there because if you give us the product we love, we are typically, you'd assume, very compliant. We're gonna help sell the thing you want us to sell.
23:00 Speaker 01 Companies have forgotten that we wanna buy stuff. You don't have to shove it down our throats. You don't have to trick us. You don't have to trap us. Make good stuff and we'll buy it.
23:16 Speaker 01 All these venture capitalist groups come in and buy it. And I'm not surprised this move is happening with EA Sports. Cause now that Jared Kushner and the Saudi collective.
23:24 Pablo Torre? Are you mentioning perhaps the fact that there's a headline on front office sports? That reads literally Saudis, Silver Lake, Jared Kushner. Take EA private in a $55 billion deal from September of 25.
23:37 Speaker 01 This is my advice to anyone that is kind of like me and kind of stupid. Walking through this world and, and right now going to themselves. Why is everything starting to suck a lot more? Private equity, venture capitalism. No one owns the product they sell anymore. No one owns the product they buy anymore. No one is selling you anything. You're not going, Mr. Duncan isn't selling me this.
24:03 Pablo Torre? No, you walked out of GameStop with a physical disc.
24:07 Speaker 01 Yeah.
24:07 Pablo Torre? And now, I mean, we'll get to.
24:09 Speaker 01 Cause there's a lot to bring up because Sony is moving away from the physical disc.
24:13 Pablo Torre? Which is basically saying, everything you thought you were buying and holding as a customer. You actually are just.
24:22 Speaker 01 Licensing.
24:22 Pablo Torre? Subscribing.
24:23 Speaker 01 It can't just be CEOs and the guys at the top of the companies getting bigger and bigger bonuses. And, and stuff running the way it's supposed to.
24:32 Pablo Torre? Well, the question for EA Sports was, it turns out, we just made in that, in that aforementioned headline. Over $500 million on the most successful video game of all time in America. How can we make more?
24:46 Speaker 01 That's where it's broken.
24:48 Pablo Torre? But the thing that has happened on this online community, on the subreddits on YouTube. Is that there was effectively an organized revolution.
24:59 Speaker 01 There was, and this hasn't, hasn't happened in quite some time. There was a hashtag.
25:04 Pablo Torre? Hashtag CFB play, don't pay.
25:07 Speaker 01 Basically, what it was, was like, even if you pre-ordered the game, even if you have the game, do not do the microtransactions. Do not give them that extra money. Which, by the way, I wasn't going to anyways.
25:18 Pablo Torre? So, what are the things we did, by the way? Because I was trying to understand this, like, what do people who work in video games think? We contacted a guy named Michael Brook, who was an EA game designer from 1987 to 2001.
25:29 Speaker 01 Okay.
25:29 Pablo Torre? So that is a fertile period, but in the before era.
25:32 Speaker 01 It was, honestly, it was like, um, he put them, he set them up to become the dynasty that they became in the 21st century.
25:41 Pablo Torre? And when Michael Brook told us, among several things, he said he's very passionate about this question about in-game microtransactions. He said, quote, "I believe that in-game microtransactions can be a wonderful way of adding features to the base game. Only gamers interested in those features need pay for them. When these additional features entail added development, testing, licensing costs, as they often do, they're a way of extending gameplay value, and have been a standard part of sports games for at least 60 years. However, if these microtransactions are improperly implemented, for instance, by removing or disabling features that were previously free, or obviously have no relation to additional costs, gamers will see through the marketing gimmick and will express their wrath. In general, it is important for those implementing and setting pricing for microtransactions features
26:25 Pablo Torre? to work with gamers and developers to tune the gameplay elements. You wouldn't have your marketing guys be the sole determinant on how fast players run in a game, or how accurate they throw, and you shouldn't have them be the primary determinant on how quickly a dynasty player progresses." End quote. And so, the idea here that he's expressing with clarity is, "The marketing guys..."
26:48 Speaker 01 Yeah.
26:49 Pablo Torre? "How do you get the money up, guys?"
26:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, they're controlling everything. I think they're controlling everything and every asset, uh, every aspect of society right now.
26:56 Pablo Torre? And turning them into assets.
26:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, they're literally trying to turn everything into an asset. How do we, how do we charge with it? I'm in my 40s. I don't have a kid. All I do is work. I still play video games. If you were to tell me for $3.99 that I could download every uniform from 1982 for the teams and they'd be available, hell yeah, I'd give you that $3.99. I'd give you that $5.99. I'd go, that's so cool. I would definitely want to see that. And, you know, or if it's just the Big 12 uniforms. Or something like that. Something that's like a add-on, like he said, that is clearly an add-on of value to the game.
27:35 Pablo Torre? That you can choose if you'd like.
27:36 Speaker 01 If you want or not, but it will not affect the basic game. I completely agree with that. I'm always down, like I said, for DLC packs.
27:44 Pablo Torre? Right, downloadable.
27:45 Speaker 01 Downloadable content, which is usually extras that come with games that you play, where you get more of a game if you want it.
27:54 Pablo Torre? Right, so you pay again.
27:55 Speaker 01 It's just, it's in a lot of ways, it's like a second serving of food if you want it. It's the, it's the supersize of fries. You're gonna get fries, fine. $0.99 more, you get more fries and you go, great. You don't have to. It's not, you know what I mean? But you can if you want. That's what they should keep it at.
28:14 Pablo Torre? Now, the thing that began happening, and I want to take us to 2K here for a second. Because this became sort of like the ghost of Christmas future for all of these, I think, streamers. They saw the way in which NBA 2K, which was a competitor once upon a time to NBA Live and then became.
28:32 Speaker 01 I think it beat NBA Live.
28:34 Pablo Torre? Herb stomped it.
28:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, which is crazy because I was an NBA Live guy.
28:38 Pablo Torre? Me too. EA Sports, that was EA.
28:40 Speaker 01 And then you played 2K the first time and you went, well, do you remember NBA, do you remember NFL 2K?
28:45 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
28:45 Speaker 01 Because NFL 2K was a legit threat to Madden.
28:50 Pablo Torre? So when we say there used to be competitors and now there are fewer of them, this is what we mean. Like, there used to be direct head-to-head competitors doing the same thing.
28:59 Speaker 01 And Madden got nervous and EA got nervous and they went and bought all the NFL rights. So, so 2K couldn't make an NFL game. You can't make the NFL game if you don't have the NFL. And so that's what 2K did against EA, where they went, well, we're the best basketball game. We're gonna go get the licensing.
29:18 Pablo Torre? And at a certain point, 2K asked themselves the question that every corporation in America asks itself these days, which is,
29:27 Pablo Torre? How can we make it so for effectively very little margin? We can extract a lot more profit?
29:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, and I think what they saw was the boom of online competition, of players reaching out, playing each other, the birth of streaming, the birth of like, you know, PewDiePie and doing all that stuff really led way to these people going.
29:55 Pablo Torre? Twitch.
29:56 Speaker 01 Twitch, yeah, Twitch was.
29:57 Pablo Torre? Entire platforms.
29:58 Speaker 01 Entire platform going, I wanna watch these people play 2K, I wanna watch them talk [BLEEP]. I wanna see them get good and it's fun to watch. Guys go to 2K and they're talking [BLEEP] and you watch a guy get mad, it's so fun. They saw that and they went, what if we just make that in it like almost the heart of the game?
30:18 Pablo Torre? The city?
30:19 Speaker 01 The city, it's called the city, that's what it is. And you basically walk around with a created character, bump into other people.
30:26 Pablo Torre? My, my player is the mode.
30:28 Speaker 01 The my player mode and you can go online and play as your character against other characters online or with them, you can run, you know, 3v3 for, you know.
30:38 Pablo Torre? But this is, what it became is effectively like everyone who plays a sports video game gets to build their own like role playing game avatar.
30:48 Speaker 01 And when you make your avatar, what they found out was they could put shoes and shorts and shirts and hairstyles and tattoos and watches and as these things that you used to unlock if you played the game.
31:06 Pablo Torre? Yeah, like bonuses, little prizes.
31:09 Speaker 01 I would say at the heart of it, for anyone that plays video games, you saw this, they took quote unquote unlockables and just made them.
31:17 Speaker 01 Microtransactions.
31:18 Pablo Torre? Right.
31:18 Speaker 01 So they just went, oh, you can unlock this if you play this game long enough. Fuck that, give me 10 bucks.
31:24 Pablo Torre? You have to spend, it turns out, according to the user Jimmy4Real, this is on a Reddit post four years ago, you have to spend more to purchase a 2K virtual durag, $5, than you would on a real-life durag.
31:40 Speaker 01 That's very funny. That's very funny that if you just want to go get a wave cap at a bodega, it's like $2.99.
31:45 Pablo Torre? 15,000 VC is what that costs.
31:48 Speaker 01 Exactly. What you're like, I don't know what that is. What is that? I'm not an economist. I'm not an online economist.
31:53 Pablo Torre? But that's, but that's, the question of like, wait a minute, we could build an entire marketplace in which people are enthusiastically gonna pay more than they would for the real physical objects, and we don't have to manufacture any of it?
32:04 Speaker 01 Yeah.
32:05 Pablo Torre? What a deal!
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32:46 Pablo Torre? One thing you learn quickly as a journalist is that you should go directly to the experts when you want the best info, the ones who live it every day. And when it comes to jackets, what could possibly make you a better expert than being a Jackson Hole local? Steo is designed and tested in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, right at the base of the Tetons, by the locals who ski, bike, climb, and fish every day there. Steo has been at it since 2011, and 15 years in, it's the real gear that the locals live in. These folks live through Wyoming winters, so they know warm. The Hometown Down jacket, for instance, is 800 fill down, but somehow feels more like your favorite hoodie than some puff. I just ordered my own jacket after hearing about the brand from my producer,
33:30 Pablo Torre? who practically lives in his. And he promised me that with a Stio jacket, it'll feel like the warmest New York winter I have ever had. And looking through their website, it is not your typical outdoor gear. The stuff does look good anywhere. You don't have to sacrifice looks for warmth. It'll become the jacket you grab every time you leave your house. And with ski season almost here, make sure to gear up now the way the locals do. Go to stio.com/ptfo for 20% off your order. That's S-T-I-O dot com slash P-T-F-O. Stio dot com slash P-T-F-O. Stio, designed and tested in Jackson Hole.
34:12 Speaker 01 By the way, 2K, whoever's working there is just like hungrier and hungrier for more microtransactions because they completely ruined the WWE franchise.
34:24 Pablo Torre? Okay, so.
34:24 Speaker 01 Through microtransactions.
34:25 Pablo Torre? So what happened to your favorite?
34:28 Speaker 01 Now, real.
34:29 Pablo Torre? Not in your childhood, Dan.
34:30 Speaker 01 Now, come with me to a lower level of nerd, to the seventh circle of nerd-dom.
34:37 Speaker 01 I'm a huge wrestling fan. I love WWE 2K. It's just a fun thing to do it. The thing that made WWE 2K the best wrestling game, and honestly, there were others that tried to compete. It wasn't the gameplay. The gameplay is fine. It's fun. It's very fun. It was the creator wrestler suite. So basically, you could create any wrestler that's ever existed to put them in the game. But the thing was is they made the creation suite so good that these guys online were making better models than in the game. Where you go, whoa, that looks more like Roddy Piper than Roddy Piper. And you go, that's great.
35:19 Speaker 01 And there was this community center where you could just type in a wrestler's name and then you'd see all the ones that were created. And you could go through them. From that, you could follow the creator of that guy to see who else they created. And it created this community. But what it was, was, and it was for a long time, cross-platform. So Xbox users were bumping into PlayStation users, who are bumping into PC users, who are bumping into Switch users. And they're all making creator wrestlers and trading them. And it's this community where basically you're like, hey, this guy, there are guys who make. Who you know, every year they're famous and like I follow a couple online. And they go like, hey, the new WWE is out. Here's who I've made so far.
36:02 Speaker 01 And you look at him and you go, that rendering is awesome. This guy, this guy's so good. 2K went, whoa, whoa, whoa. You guys are having too much free fun. So they created this thing, which was called the island, based off Roman Reigns' character in the island of relevancy. And so two years ago, they put in the island, which was an online marketplace. So you want the stone cold Steve Austin shirt with the skull on it? Go to the island and spend your VC points and then you can unlock it. You want Cody Rhodes' boots from WrestleMania? Go to the island and wrestle. But then what it did was it stopped cross-platform sharing. So it basically cratered the creator wrestler movement.
36:47 Speaker 01 So now no one can, now if you're PlayStation, you can only see the ones the guys on PlayStation make. So now these creators, these guys who were doing really good, and honestly, some of them are starting to turn careers out of it. Streaming, making it, you know, look good. These guys go, listen, I gotta make this on Xbox and I gotta go make it on PlayStation. I gotta make it on PC. And it just [__] everything up and you saw it was for that. And where it got worse was this year, they were taking unlockable things that you would just unlock in the game and putting them on the island for money.
37:19 Pablo Torre? When has making an exclusive island ever backfired?
37:23 Speaker 01 Never. I don't even think inviting the wealthy to an island for a, for a thing that most decent humans would find disgusting. It's never backfired. And in fact, they've never covered that up. What's, what's crazy is 2K is like drunk with power. And this year, they, I didn't buy, this is the first year I didn't buy WWE 2K. I'm done with it. I don't need it. I don't want it. I don't want it. Because what happened is they put it out again and now, so it used to be a thing and, and WWE 2K fans will tell you. If you're an older guy and you don't want to grind out the game and play like the thing where you do it. They would do a microtransaction where they go, we have a thing called the season pass.
38:06 Speaker 01 Pay 20 bucks and you get every DLC we drop. It'll automatically download and you get it. But 20 bucks, you get all of them. Or five bucks per one and they usually drop like five or six. So it would make sense. I go, give me 20 bucks. You also unlock all the venues, all the belts, all the secret things that you have to unlock.
38:27 Speaker 01 Now 2K goes, give us money for a DLC. And you pay him and they go, great, now you gotta grind it out in the game. So now it's the worst of both worlds. I'm paying you money and I have to, I have to go do this, this match that I don't wanna do or I have to do a thing that literally has me angry at the game. I don't wanna do that.
38:46 Pablo Torre? I like to, I like to imagine you as the guy who is like master of frankly, uh, the voices, the...
38:54 Speaker 01 Two voices, really, for being honest. I'm working on Roddy Piper.
38:58 Pablo Torre? Well, so what are the, what are the two?
39:00 Speaker 01 Macho Man and Andre the Giant. Those are probably the two, those are the only two wrestling voices I can really do.
39:05 Pablo Torre? What, what is, what is, what does sad Andre the Giant think about?
39:09 Speaker 01 I don't want this. This is Tomas Marley. But it is, it's, it, listen, man, it's what I was telling you. We want to buy it. Don't [bleep] us over. And that's all they're doing. They're like...
39:27 Pablo Torre? It's, it's, it's, it feels, I'll use that word, uh, it feels predatory.
39:33 Speaker 01 I would tell you right now, we are at a stage in society where most capitalism is predatory.
39:40 Pablo Torre? Where we are in, in, in, in the, in the US economy has made all of these companies seem particularly unworried and frankly, desensitized to what it is when customers might gather and organize and cause something.
39:54 Speaker 01 Well, then, the thing that really outrages me and probably a lot of people, the thing that really pisses me off is the faux concern, which is what we talked about with EA, what they released, the statement.
40:07 Pablo Torre? After the revolution, on the internet, there was a statement.
40:12 Speaker 01 They put out a statement on Sunday. That was kind of like... Yeah, you guys are pissed. That was the energy like they came out and they went, whoa, like the storekeeper came out to the front.
40:25 Pablo Torre? I love it when they post, I love it when any statement is a JPEG and all the text, because there needs to be a lot of it, is so tiny.
40:35 Pablo Torre? So.
40:36 Speaker 01 Because that isn't the first draft.
40:38 Pablo Torre? No, no, no, no.
40:38 Speaker 01 If you think that was the first draft that they cooked up.
40:40 Pablo Torre? I'd love it.
40:40 Speaker 01 That went through seven layers at EA.
40:43 Pablo Torre? Happy College Football 27 launch week, big text, red font, and then it goes.
40:49 Speaker 01 And then it turns to a whisper. Happy College Football. Hey, we really [bleep] up back there. I'm really sorry about that.
40:54 Pablo Torre? My text, thank you for your continued passion.
40:56 Speaker 01 You guys are like really super pissed? Are you guys really that pissed? I talked to a couple of streamers and they're really [bleep] mad.
41:04 Pablo Torre? And effectively, they're saying, we're gonna undo this, dot, dot, dot, for now. Tomorrow morning, we will remove all paid progression options from Road to Glory and Online Dynasty. An unfortunate side effect of removing paid progression is that players have college point balances in their wallets. They will not be able to apply the balance for Road to Glory or Dynasty. So jump in between now and then apply your points, exclamation point. And then it gets to the, like, and this is like the post-credits scene.
41:30 Speaker 01 You gotta watch the post-credit. If Marvel's taught us everything, it's don't leave until after the credits.
41:34 Pablo Torre? Our goal for live service plans in CFB 28 and beyond will be to deliver valuable features and content with greater transparency and communication.
41:44 Speaker 01 Basically, I'm gonna go wash my junk in the sink and then next year I'm throwing it right back in you. That's what they're doing. They are, this is not gonna improve.
41:55 Pablo Torre? It's not over.
41:56 Speaker 01 This is not gonna regress. This isn't going to change. They are literally gonna wait for us to get so lost in our 24-hour news cycle that next July, they launch College Football 28. And to start the game, you need to pay $10 every time. You know what it feels like?
42:16 Pablo Torre? To stick the key in the ignition.
42:17 Speaker 01 It feels like, I don't know if you've ever had friends with horrible drinking problems that have received multiple DUIs, but this feels like when those people have to blow in the breathalyzer to start their car, that's what they want out of video games. They just go like, yeah, here you go. You wanna play the game? Give me 20 bucks right now.
42:34 Pablo Torre? So this is where we are, though, is that I used to grow up. Subscribing to a GamePro?
42:42 Speaker 01 Shout out GamePro.
42:43 Pablo Torre? Dude, I bought a GameShark.
42:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, I had a GameShark on my, um, 64.
42:48 Pablo Torre? Yep, yep.
42:49 Speaker 01 Dual wielding, uh, Goldeneye.
42:51 Pablo Torre? Oh my god.
42:52 Speaker 01 How did you not, with two AKs? Good luck. Good luck not getting through the dam on that one. Just untouched.
42:58 Pablo Torre? The, just, just sitting in a bathroom as Oddjob.
43:01 Speaker 01 Yeah.
43:01 Pablo Torre? Double barrel.
43:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, dude. Just looking up, because you always had to look up.
43:05 Pablo Torre? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
43:06 Speaker 01 They made him so short. Yeah, dude, that.
43:08 Pablo Torre? But, but, but, but the point being that, like, I am not some sort of paragon of video game morality. I loved cheat codes.
43:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
43:17 Pablo Torre? There are no cheat codes anymore.
43:18 Speaker 01 No, there aren't, and that really sucks.
43:20 Pablo Torre? Because they became this.
43:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, it became, oh, you don't have to type in a code. Like, I remember learning the ammo code on Grand Theft Auto IV.
43:31 Pablo Torre? Yes.
43:32 Speaker 01 And then you play it for a while, and then you go, this kind of makes the game unfun. I'm gonna go back to when I was saved and I, and I had to go find ammo. But it's fun to learn that, and that's like a life lesson you learn.
43:42 Pablo Torre? And, and the idea is that they saw what people sort of hungered for, and they wanted, okay, well, if we could charge you for that, cool. But the thing that is happening next, because you mentioned Grand Theft Auto, is that GTA 6, the most anticipated video game in the history of Earth.
44:01 Speaker 01 Easily. I mean, this thing has been built up for over, I mean, for years. And it's, and they've announced it's coming out in 2026.
44:08 Pablo Torre? It's been 13 years, launching November 19th, 2026. And yes, I guarantee we will do an episode when that comes out, because I love committing terrorist acts in the virtual world.
44:19 Speaker 01 It's, it's gonna be crazy.
44:21 Pablo Torre? But, but there, it will not exist as a physical disc.
44:26 Speaker 01 Which is a sign that they go, we're not selling you this, you're borrowing this. That's all you're doing. And I don't know if you ever borrowed video games back in the day.
44:37 Pablo Torre? Oh, Blockbuster, yeah, all the time.
44:39 Speaker 01 But there was this feeling of insecurity when you did it, where you go, but I gotta, I gotta play it so much because I gotta return it, or my friend needs it back. And then you'd go like, and then when you owned it, you go, I own this. I can like sink into this game.
44:52 Pablo Torre? And I can even resell it later if I want to. I can make my money back.
44:57 Speaker 01 So during COVID. People were reselling NCAA 2014 for like 260 bucks a disc.
45:06 Pablo Torre? Oh, man.
45:07 Speaker 01 Because people wanted to play the game so bad, and this was before college football came back.
45:11 Pablo Torre? Right.
45:12 Speaker 01 That people were like, online, you could find people selling it for a crazy amount of money.
45:16 Pablo Torre? So now, where we are, the state of the video game union is, you don't actually buy video games.
45:22 Speaker 01 Nope.
45:23 Pablo Torre? You rent them, you pay for them via subscription services, as everywhere in media wants to sell you subscriptions because that's how they get more money from you.
45:30 Speaker 01 Sure.
45:30 Pablo Torre? Sometimes you'll forget, am I still subscribed to that, to Hulu?
45:34 Speaker 01 Oh, man, I just got one that made me so mad that came up where I was like, how am I still subscribed to that? It was like, which one was it?
45:41 Pablo Torre? Exactly.
45:42 Speaker 01 It was one of the streamers where I went, I just have to shut off my whole credit card.
45:45 Pablo Torre? But we don't even know, we lose track, and so you'll be subscribing individually to dozens upon dozens, potentially, of video games.
45:52 Speaker 01 Has this, has this podcast episode been an elaborate Rocket Mortgage ad? Here we go. On Rocket Mortgage, I'll show you all the subscriptions I have. I go, Paul, you got me. I thought we were talking about microtransactions.
46:17 Pablo Torre? The fact that the multiplayer mode, which is where the VC economy first sort of metastasized into the thing that took over everything else. The fact that when you show up online as your avatar, dressed however you have been able to afford.
46:32 Speaker 01 Sure.
46:33 Pablo Torre? You end up meeting people for whom the distinguishing characteristic is, you spent all of this money.
46:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
46:42 Pablo Torre? That's what this is all signaling. You can't afford this.
46:46 Speaker 01 Yeah.
46:46 Pablo Torre? But you can go broke trying.
46:48 Speaker 01 But you can, and, and it is, that is, um, you know, when we did the episode with Katie at our apartment, we were playing Rocket League. You can do quick chat when you're playing people on Rocket League. And one of the things they used to say when someone was flying around with the cars, they'd be like, they would write in the chat, "You buy credits." It was like a diss.
47:06 Pablo Torre? Yes.
47:06 Speaker 01 It was like, "You buy credits. You didn't work your way up. You bought that." And by the way, is someone that buys credits? Yeah. And you go, "Yeah, I did. I barely, I mean, I don't play Rocket League anymore, but when I did play it, I'd be like, 'Oh yeah, I want that Wolverine skin.' I'll spend VC, 5,000 VCs or whatever." But it wasn't, I wasn't beholden to it. I wasn't like, "Oh, if I want to play the game, I have to do this." Or "If I want to play the game better, I have to do this."
47:30 Pablo Torre? But the thing that seems to be returning as comments like that occur and revolutions on the internet like this happen is something like, and again, it's the rarest commodity now, but this statement in its tiny font sort of implies it.
47:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
47:46 Pablo Torre? Maybe shame is possible.
47:48 Speaker 01 I think it's a really big part of society that is like a flavoring, that you just can't overdo it. And I also think you can't shame people for being themselves. But what you sure as hell can do is shame people for greed.
48:04 Pablo Torre? Yes.
48:05 Speaker 01 And that is something that we don't do. As an alcoholic, I've been shamed for it. As someone with an addictive personality, wealth is an addiction. There are people running our country right now that are addicted to wealth. They're, they want all the wealth. And what that does is, it sucks up all the resources for people at the other end that don't have any resources, that don't have any wealth. I'm not talking about communism. I'm just talking about loosening the chokehold that five nerds have on our entire civilization. It's like-
48:37 Pablo Torre? It really is.
48:38 Speaker 01 It's just five dorks that couldn't get [BLEEP] in high school and they're just taking down the whole [BLEEP] planet. And it's like, I, it's like, dude, I want to act, I want to be an active member of a capitalist society. If I have a good weekend and I want to put new boots on Roddy Roddy Piper, let me put new boots on my baby if I want to go buy it. But have them where I can, it's a DLC. It's something that's not, that you're not, you don't have a gun to my head. And I also collectively would say, we need to wrestle with the idea of sacrificing convenience for community.
49:19 Speaker 01 It's just a thing that I think we need to do. It sucks that you're out of socks. I know you don't want to get in the car and go to Target, or Walmart, or whatever shoe store is by you, and buy the new socks.
49:33 Pablo Torre? I feel like you're now giving a coaching pep talk to...
49:36 Speaker 01 Kansas State?
49:37 Pablo Torre? To Oliver.
49:38 Speaker 01 Well, I don't tell Oliver anything. That guy's diet's right. I've been looking at his preseason workout. We're talking IRL, Oliver's doing great.
49:46 Speaker 01 But yeah, man, I feel like, um... Man, humans rule. It's so fun being friends with humans and hanging out with them. And why are we isolating ourselves and hating ourselves? So that Jeff Bezos can have another boat for his weird sex lizard wife to crawl around on. You know what I mean? How about just pay the people that work in the fulfillment centers a good wage? Walmart, pay your employees well. And then they shop at Walmart. And then the money comes back to you. It's almost like if you treated people well, it would come back to you. Let's just do that idea. Stop... And EA, I promise you that if next year there's microtransactions, we're good. We're good. I can play this game,
50:31 Speaker 01 or until you tell me I can't, I will lease this game from you. And I'll play college football 26 until the wheels fall off.
50:40 Pablo Torre? The word I think of, the word that I think is the through line in the motivational speech that I think America needs to hear, and also the thing that EA and all these other companies need to worry about, is in the end, competition. The value of having to compete and earn what it is that you think you deserve.
51:00 Speaker 01 And I will argue to a capitalist, someone that might disagree with a lot of points that I'm making, isn't it the best part is a free market? Isn't the whole point that this is a free market? And that if someone isn't doing something right, someone can respond and do it better? And then the customers go there? So... There might be a computer, you know, a video game developer that has an idea for a wrestling game. That's the gameplay is more fun and the create a character suite is big and you can make all these characters. And we don't worry about it. It's all free. It's all fun. And then all of a sudden they make that and it gets a push online. Well, now 2K is going to be like, there's another wrestling game. How do we squash them?
51:40 Pablo Torre? Right.
51:41 Speaker 01 Instead of going like, how do we make ours better? How do we compete? How do we? The competition is how America got great. It's what makes America great is competition, is true competition. And also, part of that is losing. Part of losing is like, to me personally, when you lose, it's so motivating. There's not a more motivating thing than getting beat at something and going like, I want to get better at that. I want to get better at it so I can win at it. What isn't American is getting beat at something and then going, well, then I don't want to. Well, then I don't want to. It's like, well, that's loser. That's how you're a loser, is if you lose and you give up.
52:24 Speaker 01 If you lose, go win. Just go compete. But I hope to God someone starts competing with these companies.
52:29 Pablo Torre? Dan Soder, thank you for taking me on a journey through, frankly, your childhood and-
52:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, I'm sorry. I really just dumped on you there a lot, but it sucks because I think it's such a fun thing. It's such, video games are supposed to be like a dessert. And you're like, making it feel like homework, or you're making it feel grimy and gross. It's just like, just come on, man. Let's just have fun. I just, I just traveled all day. I just want to play with Kansas State. I just want to beat Tennessee, which I will. I'll get my revenge on Tennessee in the playoffs and go Wildcats. I'm all about, I'm all about the cats.
53:18 Pablo Torre? This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Metalark Media production.
53:24 Pablo Torre? And I'll talk to you next time.
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