Microsoft DOOMs ID with layoffs

In this episode of The Standup, we dig into the Microsoft and Xbox layoffs, what they could mean for id Software, and whether id Tech can survive after major cuts to its engine team.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Welcome to the stand-up. Today, we have a very special episode. You may notice that it looks lower quality video. That is because we have nobody here to record and I'm just raw dog recording the screen straight from Riverside.

• 0:16Speaker 00

  Uh, anyways, I'm sorry. With that, we're gonna be talking about Microsoft layoffs. Now, Microsoft has just recently released an entire kind of expose of exactly what happened. This is by Asha right here, the new CEO of Xbox. She has let everybody know that they are laying off a whole bunch of people, a bunch of reasons in here, things that they want to accomplish, including a bunch of crazy pieces of information I did not think we were gonna learn, along with also crazy management style of Xbox itself, and a bunch of studios and people have been hit today directly because 1,600 were laid off and 1,600 more throughout the fiscal year of 2027. Also, really weird way to measure time is the fiscal year. I'm just throwing that out there. I think that's just weird personally. Uh, but at the end of the day,

• 1:00Speaker 00

  that is what has happened and we're here to discuss it. And I figured one of the big burning topics that I see all over the internet is about id Studios. Id right now is kind of like the, uh, the star of the layoff, if you will. Approximately 10% of the total layoffs, 132 out of 1,600 of the layoffs, I believe it's 132 or 135, came from id Studios. Most of the engine team has been gutted, a bunch of designers, a bunch of people running it. Uh, effectively, the, the heart and soul of id has been ripped out and now what is left is just whoever's remaining there right now and it'd probably be impossible if, uh, or improbable if not impossible to be able to make anything. And so I first wanted to

• 1:42Speaker 00

  talk a little bit about that because I am not in the video games industry. I don't know what it takes to create, uh, an engine. I don't know what it takes to maintain an engine. I don't know what it takes to move forward an engine. And we do have with us a legendary game programmer, Casey Miratori, who does engine work in fact. And so I would just like to hear some of your thoughts, maybe from the engine perspective of like, how does it, is id just doomed to become yet another Unreal 5?

• 2:10Speaker 01

  Was that a pun? Was that a pun?

• 2:12Speaker 00

  It actually wasn't a pun. I didn't even realize it was a pun until you said it. But is it doomed to become another Unreal Engine game?

• 2:19Speaker 01

  Before we attempt to answer that question, I wanted to talk about something you mentioned in that lead up as well.

• 2:27Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Which was you were pointing out like fiscal year 2027. I don't know about you guys, but in my mind, I imagine like Sachin Della and Asha Sharma. And I don't, I mean, I guess I don't know who runs the other divisions there. Do they like get together for a fiscal New Year's party? Like whenever this year, like, do they all, do they like stay up till midnight? And then they pop the champagne and they're like, happy new year, happy fiscal new year.

• 2:53Speaker 00

  Together, like when it rolls over, they're like, new filings, SEC. And they press and everybody freaks out.

• 3:01Speaker 01

  And then they sing a song that's like old lang zang, but it's about, you know, accountability margins or something for some, you know, or whatever.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  Teach, production's down. I don't concern myself with such matters. What do you mean, production doesn't concern you? I've shipped 37, nay, 38 features today.

• 3:23Speaker 02

  Teach always makes the mess and I always clean it up. I'm better than that. I don't have to be a janitor. Someone has to be the adult around here. Oh, who, who is that?

• 3:32Speaker 03

  It's me, your Westlake Godfather.

• 3:35Speaker 02

  John, John Carmack?

• 3:37Speaker 03

  What? No, it's me, Trash.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  Oh, wait. Are you here to finally get management to understand software?

• 3:43Speaker 03

  What? I'm a Westlake Godfather, not a miracle worker.

• 3:46Speaker 02

  Oh, then why are you here?

• 3:48Speaker 03

  I'm here to tell you about Seer by Sentry, the world's first AI debugger that actually has access to all of your logs, stack traces, code, commit history and more. Code breaks, but you can get the fix faster with Seer.

• 4:00Speaker 02

  Who are you talking to?

• 4:02Speaker 03

  What?

• 4:02Speaker 00

  Build with AI, fix with Sentry.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  I think there's a couple of problems here with trying to answer it. We can talk about some abstract stuff, but the biggest problem, or the thing that I don't know is we have like no, like I don't know any inside stories or anything from the people there and what happened, right? So everything is on the table, like everything from.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  Uh, literally, they just got handed layoff notices. So like, you know, a substantial portion of the engine team just wakes up in the morning to like a thing where like, someone from HR told them that you don't have a job anymore. All the way to like, they were approached and said, "Look, we need people to do programming on stuff because we want to build out these other properties like Minecraft and Forza," or what, well, not Forza, that playground has their own engine team, but,

• 5:00Speaker 01

  you know, "These other properties we have, King, like, we want to put you on these other things and you'll be a centralized engine division." And they were like, "We don't want to do that. We would rather take voluntary layoff or something." Like, you know, I literally just have no idea. So I don't feel like I can really comment on anything specific to the id software layouts with layoffs with no, with no data, right? Because there's, there, it's not good. So it's not like there's any out, there's not, there really isn't probably anything where I would be like, "Yeah, great." Unless it was, they were approached with something and they all decided, "Screw this, we're gonna go form our own company," and took a voluntary, "And now we're gonna have like a new like id thing somewhere else."

• 5:42Speaker 01

  I suppose that would be good. But short of that, there's, there's no real like way to spin this as a good outcome, probably. But how bad this is depends a lot, and how,

• 5:55Speaker 01

  how like frowned upon, I would say, that the behavior by Microsoft was, is a sliding scale based on what really occurred, and I just don't know. Is that fair?

• 6:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's fair. I wasn't really trying to look for like the moral side of things. It was more of like, is it possible for id to continue being id? And being, you know, its own game engine, producing these kind of technical masterpieces, as I often see people claim the Doom series is. Uh, is it possible with the gutting? Or is it, I mean, just in your experience as a, as an engine creator, how hard is it to move forward when you have a significant portion of your team gone?

• 6:32Speaker 01

  I mean, it really depends on what you're going to be doing and like what that, what the moving forward requires, right? So the first thing I'll say is that in sort of modern, in modern engine development, usually the bottleneck, if you have good engine people, the bottleneck is not like that we had to sit down and write some code for this engine. In other words, the stuff that Fable does or whatever, right? Usually that is not going to be your super, the hard part of the problem, right? The harder part of the problem is usually on two other, on like two other, in two other domains.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  One is just figuring out what actually should be built at all, right? Yeah. And this is basically active research into like, what is our strategy going to be for like dynamic lighting? What's our strategy going to be for like level of detail? Like those sorts of things. Those technologies sort of, they change shape over time because the underlying capabilities of the hardware change. And so every so often, they're like, you have, they're discontinuous. So, you know, previously we were doing things without ray tracing and then we get enough hardware to make ray tracing make sense, or we make enough software progress to figure out ways to do ray tracing

• 8:00Speaker 01

  in ways we weren't doing it before that make it economic to do so. And now we have to like re-architect the way that our engine is working. And that, again, while sometimes, and certainly for novices, it can be the case. Sometimes, you know, you look at that and be like, oh, well, so it's all about writing this code. No, like that's not the hard part for experts. The hard part is knowing what you are supposed to do. What are the algorithms? What's all the math have to be? How does it all work out cleanly? How does it all move through the system at a, at a fast enough speed? All of that stuff requires a lot of experimentation, a lot of testing. And if you look at stories from people who have done like these sort of big technical pushes, there's Often, just a lot of that's like, well, we tried this, and we tried this, and we tried this.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  You know, you could go look at the presentation by the guy who made nanite, for example, and you'll hear that. You can go look back at John Carmack's stuff, or Michael Abrash's stuff that he put out when they were working on Quake. There's just a lot of like, we had to try this, we tried this, we tried this, we finally found that this was the right thing, right? And so that requires currently a lot of just people. Because for every one of those that you want to try to do experimentation on, somebody's got to be sitting there doing it. And even if you are buying into the new AI future or whatever, AIs still need a ton of guidance for that kind of work.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  They need somebody there to like, tell them what to do constructively and to build test cases and to say, I need you to try doing this, and then to look to see if they actually did that right, or if they screw something up, you know? And so-

• 9:39Speaker 00

  Let me jump in there for a second, too. Even if you could do all the looping and all the fancy words that they say, let me give you some AI speak. Even if they could do all that looping and all that, the actual getting the data out and all that could take some amount of time. And so that loop itself could, for each one of these experiments, could cost you $10,000, $20,000 worth of Fable time, plus two weeks of actually running, gathering, testing, running, gathering, testing, and test. So it's like, it's not a, it's not just like, oh, just put AI, it just makes it free. It's like, no, it could actually also cost a large chunk of money, plus the engineer's time.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  And I just, I haven't seen a lot of evidence that there's any kinds of significant speedups happening yet in that domain, where it's like, oh yeah, like, we can just now, you know, some studio got it to the point where like, one engine coder can just kick off tons of agents and run all the experiments, and it works out. Like, maybe that's a future that can exist, but like, no one has that at the moment. And so this, so just to answer your question, so-

• 10:35Speaker 01

  So depending on how much of that you envision doing, that changes pretty dramatically the kinds of budget that you're gonna need for the technical side, right? And that's like prong one. And if you're looking at a company like id, I guess I would say they... I am just kind of out of touch with what their engine team looks like these days. I know that when Carmack left, they brought in Thiago Souza, who is extremely good. And he kind of like ran the engine team, I think, on the graphics side anyway. That's my vague recollection of what happened. They were very efficient. They were very good at doing that kinds of experimentation.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  They were very good at, you know, even like six months, they would do a lot of graphical overhaul kinds of stuff. I don't know how many people he usually had with him, or whether those people are still there. So that part, I just, like I said, I just don't have the insight. I would love to know more. If someone presented me a little bit more information, I could have a much more informed comment. I simply have not seen anyone post that information, maybe because it's not really supposed to be talked about or whatever. So I don't know what's going on with that. The other prong is pipeline. So the pipeline of how assets are produced, how they are edited, how they are put into

• 12:02Speaker 01

  a game context, how they are sequenced, how they are marked up, how they are tested, all of that stuff, that is traditionally a massive part of engine development budget. And the reason for that is because for whatever historical or economic accidents, or I... We could spend all day trying to think about why this was the case, but unlike many industries, the game industry has been unable to find vendors who will sell them tools that actually make the things that they need for games. That simply just does not happen currently. And I'm not 100% sure why.

• 12:50Speaker 03

  What does that mean, the assets?

• 12:52Speaker 01

  So, for example...

• 12:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, because I'm thinking like of a PNG when you say the word assets.

• 12:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's what I'm thinking.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  Right, so literally nobody uses a PNG, you know, for putting...

• 13:02Speaker 03

  Well, that's kind of an example.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  Again, right?

• 13:04Speaker 00

  That's totally trash, that's what he was thinking.

• 13:06Speaker 03

  I didn't say that.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  To a AAA game, they might use it as a temporary export format that goes into some other thing, right? But basically, what has to happen is, for an engine, you need a thing that will package everything, all of the data and all of the information that you might need at all. All of that needs to be put into some kind of format that runs efficiently, that streams in, right? So it has to be incrementally loadable and these sorts of things, that has level of detail information baked in. So like, it's not just this PNG, it's all the other levels of detail. And just to give you a couple of simple examples, right?

• 13:45Speaker 01

  So, currently, if you want to make anything that is an actual final thing, you know, final game dataset, I don't care what you're using, using Godot, using Unity, using Unreal, using IDTech, they all have editors, they all have custom editors that you use to actually make those things. And when you talk about some external file format like PNG, it's always just something that you import in and then gets processed and worked with and placed and annotated, like you get more information merged with other ones because like, oh, we loaded this PNG for the color and this PNG for the bump map and like we put them, right?

• 14:27Speaker 01

  And so sometimes, sometimes parts of that process do have, like, a company does go out and make an actual tool and it's like, okay, finally, there's a tool that handles maybe this sub-chunk. An example of that would be like Substance, the tool that people use to make textures now. Another example back in the day would have been Mudbox or ZBrush, which allowed you to actually sculpt models and have really high-res data that was, you know, stored with model geometry. So sometimes chunks, there is like a company that goes off and does a chunk for you of that.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  But at the end of the day, a huge subset of that pipeline, often, or almost, I guess I would say always, almost always, there are cases where people have done it in Maya or 3DS Max on occasion, but nowadays, you know, if you're talking about any of your big stuff, Grand Theft Auto, Fortnite, anything serious, it's always-

• 15:29Speaker 00

  Towers of Mordoria.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  Towers of Mordoria. Well, okay, that's like quadruple A. That's more like Ubisoft Skull and Bones, but sure.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  So typically, you have this whole other team, or multiple teams, that are doing nothing other than making the level editor, and the asset packing pipeline, and the LOD generation, and the artist preview lighting tools, and the lighting baking tools, because now you need tools that like, compute things like light probes, or fallback stuff for when your hardware doesn't have ray tracing, and all this stuff. So, that is often as big, or bigger, usually like it's larger even, in-game cinematics, that's another one, blah blah blah, right?

• 16:16Speaker 03

  One question.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 16:17Speaker 03

  Sorry. The process that you just mentioned, like-

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:21Speaker 03

  Do these not happen often enough? Or are they always, their implementations are bespoke, to where there's just no industry standard tool to like, do these things?

• 16:30Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I think probably the right way to say it is that, for whatever reason, in terms of the institutional knowledge of how it had to happen, or something like that, there was really, I guess, never a circumstance where the money was right, and the people was right, to have it happen externally. So what kind of happened is Unreal now is the de facto standard. So you could say, "We did end up getting one, and it's just the whole Unreal," right? That is now-

• 17:03Speaker 00

  But even when you're producing something with Unreal, you still, even within Unreal, make a game that is like, the game editor for the things you're built, like you're always half, like, at least my very novice experience of game development is that-

• 17:15Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 17:15Speaker 00

  Every time I make something, I actually make a thing to make the thing.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is that kind of a thing. And so to the extent that there is a standardized tool set for the pipeline, it is pretty much just welded to the engine. And that may be one of the reasons that the external part never came about is because it's too tightly, like, it's, the design decisions are too tightly coupled to one engine that you couldn't really have like a generic one without a lot of extra engineering that there was never a team, there was never an external team good enough to figure out how to do that in a way that would be flexible. And I can speak from a little bit of experience there, actually, because for many years I did character animation library that included the pipeline part of the tool.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  So it included like the exporters for Max and Maya. And this is, this tool is still in use today, I found out. Like, it was used for Baldur's Gate 3. I didn't realize that. So it's even still in use today, I guess, even though it's been 20 years since I made it. It's pretty cool. Actually, more than 20, more than 25.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  The pipeline part, trying to make that tool so that every studio could use it, was a massive part of the engineering that went into that tool. Because it meant that we supported many art tools, like you could export for Max, you could export for Maya, you could export for Lightwave, you could export for your own, from your own tools. But also, the data formats had to be super flexible. So everything was configurable in there. You could say like, I want this to be compressed and I want it to have these data members and I want them in this order and in this structure and all that stuff. And all of that stuff had to be flexible and configured. And you couldn't do something like, we're gonna store it in JSON or anything like that, right? Like, that was all completely, you know, that would be a complete nonstarter.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  It all has to be super efficient, super byte-packed and all that sort of stuff, right? And compressed.

• 19:12Speaker 00

  Casey, do you, do you have any other things you want to finish up on that?

• 19:15Speaker 01

  No, that was just giving you kind of the two, the two, I was just trying to lay out the two prongs of like where a lot of the engineering effort goes when you're building engine stuff. And why you would need a lot of people, right, to do something like this. And so this is also why I say it's very hard to comment on what the likelihood is of them producing new stuff or other kinds of stuff. Without knowing what the prior makeup of their team was for doing that technology. And what it now and how many people they have now. So, you know, if it could be that they still have plans to move something forward. It could be that, no, they just got rid of everybody. It's like, nope, this is just going to be like, uh, maintenance mode until no one's using id tech anymore and then shut it down.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  You know, and we could, we could easily make a judgment call on that if we had those, if we could, could see like personnel list before and personnel list after. But we don't have that information.

• 20:06Speaker 03

  Right. I was reading somewhere that them laying off the id tech folks or individuals is because they're potentially going to pivot to Unreal Engine, which is more industrial standard and you can get cheaper support and more people know it. So that's what I read somewhere. I don't know if it's true, but it sounds like from everything you just kind of explained, it sounds like maybe that is a better idea. I don't know.

• 20:27Speaker 00

  Casey, can I ask you something?

• 20:29Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 20:29Speaker 00

  Is Unreal Engine the react of game development?

• 20:34Speaker 00

  Cause how, he just described it, which is like, oh, it's really easy to hire for. You got a lot of people that already know it.

• 20:40Speaker 03

  So I should never use Unreal.

• 20:41Speaker 00

  That is like.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Um, I think that is probably true in more ways than you are even thinking it is. So Unreal Engine, I, I don't have any experience with it, so these are not my opinions. I'm going to just try and give you a summary of like, I think what people generally would say. Uh, including even some of the people who work on it. Uh, the Unreal Engine. is designed with a very specific philosophy, which is basically like anything goes. The idea in it is that whatever you want to try and do, you should be able to do it.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  And this comes at like a sacrifice, basically, of, you know, efficiency and consistent performance and things like this. Because you have to be able to do things like, oh, if suddenly in the middle of this game, I want the user to just be able to pick some random thing from the internet that's going to be the new shader that they're using for their character's skin, that just has to work. Like, it can't be a requirement that it has to go through some kind of institutional baking process back at HQ or any of this sort of stuff. You have to be able to just throw things in without like a centralized decision-making kind of a thing. And that's even true of like augmenting it and putting so. So a lot of the decision-making on Unreal was just like, how do we get everything in

• 22:08Speaker 01

  there? Like, anytime someone wants to throw in a new thing, it goes, you know, it's like the, if you've ever seen, if any of you out there are Key and Peele fans like I am. Yep. If you've ever seen their sketch about the Gremlins 2, like, they're gonna write the screenplay for Gremlins 2. No. And there's this guy who's there who's like the... God, I missed this one. Yeah. It's, I highly, if you... This sounds great. Okay, so if, for those of you who don't know, Gremlins 2 is just a ridic, it has like, it has like nothing to do with Gremlins. Yeah. It's just completely ridiculous. And so what they did is they basically pretended the Gremlins 2 writer's room was like fairly normal, but then this guy who's like the Hollywood sequel doctor comes in and he like, is like, working with them to make it, you know, better.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  And it's absolutely hysterical. So please go watch that sketch. Anyway, that is the Unreal methodology. That is the Unreal idea. And it's been very successful for them because it's why they can do all these like fast-follow things. Like, it's why you can be like, oh, we had Fortnite, and now it's like, turns out it's a, it's a battle royale now. Because, because PUBG was big. So like, next month, we're just gonna throw it in the, right? It's like, and so they...

• 23:20Speaker 01

  The end result of that is it's an engine that lots of people can use. Like, it's very broad and allows you to do what you want to do. But it's kind of janky as a result, right? Because it's like, yeah, everything is just kind of going in there. And there's a bunch of really good devs who work on it, who are trying to, like, clean up certain parts or make certain parts more performant or more reliable all the time. So they're constantly, like, bailing water out of the boat. Like, then there are very good people who are doing that. I know several of them. Uh, some of the very best programmers, like, people I would point to be like, if you were picking a team of the very best programmers, I'm like, you'd want that guy, that guy, that guy. And a bunch of them are all at Epic, right?

• 24:04Speaker 01

  And, um, so it's not like it's being made by people who don't know what they're doing. It's actually the opposite of that. It's just that the philosophy there is, is full speed ahead. Everything goes in. That's the way we do things. It's about complete flexibility. It's not about trying to, like, get it down to, like, a hardcore, technical, like, uh, set of requirements and optimizing around them or anything like that. And so, uh, the end result is, like, it probably is a lot more like React than you would think in the way that you were talking. Like, it's like, this is just made so everyone can make their thing. And there were probably some good programmers on it. They could only have a limited effect on something that's moving this fast and that's used by this many people, you know? And that's kind of where Unreal is, right?

• 24:48Speaker 00

  With that, I'd like to introduce some coding guy. For those that don't know, this has now officially become the XFlix and Netflix Plus KC podcast. Guy also was at Netflix with me for, what, six, seven years? We overlapped, something like that. Yeah, yeah. Was he TV too? Yep. I was in TV. He was in TV. I'm inheriting both y'all's mess. Yeah, you, that's, that's, that's your bad. It wasn't my mess!

• 25:15Speaker 01

  Trash is like the last man standing. He's gonna have to fix, like, the last bug in Netflix, and it will be down to Trash, who has to find it.

• 25:22Speaker 00

  Trash, I want to be clear. I am the only developer from Netflix.

• 25:25Speaker 04

  Netflix that is net negative on lines of code. My last patch was I was like negative half a million. Okay, so believe me, it's not my mess. I am such a janitor.

• 25:36Speaker 00

  Deleting the package Jason lock file just like no stop it. All right. Um, yes, that's also JavaScript on the television that just happened. Okay, so with that being said, you are now joining us on the next portion. And so we might as well start off with you. Uh, if for those that don't know, uh, some coding guy has a very long, coding a past. He has a more decorated past than a many, many people out there legendary systems programmer. Uh, worked with Brendan Gregg on the performance team at Netflix, uh, found, uh, patched, what was it? Uh, stacked traces or the kernel to be able to show RXJS? Or RX groovy.

• 26:15Speaker 04

  The darkness. That was, those were the dark times, man. You, you, you're bringing up an old wound.

• 26:20Speaker 00

  I know.

• 26:20Speaker 04

  It, it hurts.

• 26:22Speaker 00

  The Falkor days. Okay, those are days that we all live, that we all lived through. Um, I applied the pain. You accepted the pain. Okay, so with that being said.

• 26:31Speaker 04

  It's true. That's true. That's a fact.

• 26:35Speaker 00

  Oh, my goodness.

• 26:35Speaker 04

  I pretty much moved from TV into performance. That's, that, that's when I was in Brendan Gregg's team and I was pretty much there. Because of this, like, like that, that, that is kind of like the trajectory that sent me off. I was like, I joined Netflix. I was like, yeah, I really want to learn a little bit about UI. You know, TV is pretty cool. They're like, yeah, if you know how to code, like this is like the most unforgiving platform. I'm like, oh, I'm fine with unforgiving platform. Let's go. And I joined there and then like I saw, I saw what was happening. I saw how the sausage was made and I said, oh my God, I have to move into performance. And I was like, I was like crying.

• 27:07Speaker 00

  Forgiveness.

• 27:08Speaker 04

  I was like, there's way too much forgiveness over here. This, this needs to be less forgiving. This and I, and I'm classically trained, by the way, so that, that I was, I was there doing that and you know, basically, had to fight. I was muffled like regularly. And so I, my only ability to speak was generally at Hack Day. So I had to like, encompass everything that I thought about everything we were doing into like a two minute hack presentation. And I was lucky that one day I did get to invite. The Primogen himself to join my hack team. He actually deigned to come join me and my hacker mates when we uh when we when we got Honey Badger. We went totally Honey Badger on the old system and we just that.

• 27:48Speaker 00

  And that was also the only hack day you won.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  Sullied himself by coming down to to to talk to you. Was he wearing that that king outfit that he wore at the at the uh at the tower stream with the little crown and the little robe?

• 28:00Speaker 03

  I will join your team.

• 28:03Speaker 04

  He did that whole walk on like, you know, in Hamilton, what he's.

• 28:08Speaker 03

  Well, Prime's desk had had him as like a your little doctor outfit. I remember seeing your little.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 28:13Speaker 03

  Cut out of a picture of you next to your name.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  Did he sing a song like in Hamilton too?

• 28:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, that I I don't know.

• 28:20Speaker 00

  To be fair, that was also the only hack day guy you won.

• 28:25Speaker 03

  What was it? What was it?

• 28:26Speaker 04

  I know I won again. I won. I won again for the uh the telegraph, the telegraph key like.

• 28:31Speaker 00

  My bad.

• 28:32Speaker 04

  I we we we had. We had a race back in time like this was one of those like they were saying at the time like Netflix is never going to run on this platform from Japan that I'm not allowed to mention. But it's from Japan and it's a console. And anyway, it was like it was it wasn't going to work on there. And I was like, it'll totally work on that platform. And then they were like, no, it's not going to work. And then I was like, I'll go back to the start of that platform and make that thing work. And I was like, I will show you Netflix on the original Nintendo, which did not win. Netflix on the original Nintendo did not win, but years later, like that started sort of like trouble with another team and and they basically were like, yeah, we're going to go back like further in time like to, you know, if you if you want to play the retro game, I'm I'm in.

• 29:12Speaker 04

  And so they went on to like a Philco TV like and they had like the the tuning knobs, like the channel knob, like that was and the volume that controlled where you were like in the Netflix app. And and then I just went, I went, I said, fine, we're going to go to the start of communications. We're going to have a telegraph key hooked up to Netflix. I had like I had a retail PlayStation. I built the USB adapter, like some Raspberry Pi and some bad stuff. And then, you know, I just Morse coded on stage, like just typing in that we needed to make Firefly season two, but that's um that was it. And I won for that. Okay. So then Honey Badger's after that.

• 29:45Speaker 00

  But to be fair, just so everybody understands, Hack Day also really secretly means Hack Month. Uh, it's not quite Hack Day.

• 29:54Speaker 04

  We did most of our stuff. We didn't prehack a lot, but there was some, yeah, the Nintendo hack definitely had prehack.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  There's some prehacking. Okay, so with all of that said, this is Guy Serino, known as Some Coding Guy, streams on Twitch every now and then.

• 30:08Speaker 04

  Sup, everybody.

• 30:09Speaker 00

  Making a game right now. Guy, what's the game you're making again?

• 30:12Speaker 04

  Gravity Matters. So this is the space part of space and body physics. You can fly in space and not go in a straight line and it drives me nuts in like older games. But anyway, that's a different topic.

• 30:23Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 30:24Speaker 04

  Coming out of early access later at the end of the summer. So that's probably a good time to go tune in on that. It'll be on Steam.

• 30:30Speaker 00

  So this part that I would like to talk about a little bit, I think is gonna be, Casey, you're probably gonna be less kind of invested in this one because you don't really have kind of the same, maybe the same corporate experience that Trash, that Trash Guy and I all have, which is I.e. Netflix. But we also don't have this level of corporate experience either, because this is a very beautiful phrase. So this is later down in the long message sent by Asha. She says the following, right down here. "We know that great technology gets better when it gets simpler, not bigger. Today, some parts of the company work passes through as many as 14 layers of management."

• 31:10Speaker 04

  It's like a gobstopper.

• 31:11Speaker 00

  And that's Xbox. Okay, 14 layers of management on Xbox, just to get something done. "Our platforms, our platform teams are 40% larger than they were at the start of this generation, even as our player base and player time has declined." And then what she says is that they're gonna reduce management down to five and where three, if possible. And so I just have a very simple question here, which is, how do you get to 14 layers of management? Like, how does that happen in a corporate structure to the point where that can happen? So here's my theory, which is that middle management is self-preserving and grows like bacteria. Meaning that middle management has to get more middle management underneath it to justify its existence.

• 31:54Speaker 00

  And middle management itself will never say, "Hey, I think we're too large." Because by saying that, they themselves mean that they have to destroy themselves. So it is... It is a self-propelling virus that happens at companies where people grow this middle layer more and more and more until at one point, someone looks back and goes, "How do we get to 14 layers?" Like, that's the only thing. But then I also have to realize that how did the C-suite go? You know what's really good? 13 layers. Like, where we're at right now, this is, this is cruising speed. Like, how did that ever happen?

• 32:25Speaker 01

  So I do want to interject one thing here, if I may.

• 32:28Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  Which is that one way, so I absolutely agree with all of that.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  And the fact that it does seem like, you know, your sort of status is about how many people are underneath you. So you keep like creating like these, you try to org chart your way into you being on top of the biggest org, right? And this is how I know for a fact that no talented computer scientist ever has become,

• 33:00Speaker 01

  you know, I guess I would say three levels of management high. Because as soon as they, as soon as they had three levels underneath them, you would make the, a CS person would make the ultimate power play and have one of the people at the leaf report to the person who's one, one down from you, creating an infinite cycle, where you could say that I have an infinite number of people underneath me.

• 33:24Speaker 00

  They're gonna do a quick AVL rotation to have the most balanced possible tree?

• 33:28Speaker 01

  No, no, no, not balanced, just, just cycle.

• 33:30Speaker 04

  No, he wants a graph.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  Right? So it's just a cycle. So you're gonna say, "Look, how many layers of management are underneath you?" And you're like, "An infinite number."

• 33:37Speaker 00

  It's actually a no.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Like, there's, there's an infinite number of layers of management. There's an infinite number beneath me. You can't get to the bottom of it.

• 33:43Speaker 04

  Don't try to walk the tree.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's impossible.

• 33:45Speaker 04

  If you walk the tree, bad things are gonna happen.

• 33:47Speaker 01

  So, like, I guess here's a question for you guys that I'm interested in. What is Netflix? What is the depth at Netflix?

• 33:56Speaker 00

  When I was last there.

• 33:57Speaker 03

  Can we even say that? Oh, you know, can we even say that?

• 34:00Speaker 01

  Oh, is that, is that like, is that, is that?

• 34:02Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 34:02Speaker 00

  It was relatively shallow compared to this.

• 34:05Speaker 04

  It is.

• 34:06Speaker 00

  That's as far as I can go. That's in the culture deck is to have a fairly flat thing. I think they've talked about like keeping management rather flat. As far as I can tell, it's rather flat comparatively to at least this. I don't know if I can say exact numbers or my experience, so I don't want to say anything, but.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 34:21Speaker 04

  I, I would say that like.

• 34:23Speaker 00

  You guys discuss.

• 34:23Speaker 04

  Okay. Yeah, I would say like to Casey's point, like it is the flattest company I've ever seen at that size. Like for, for the number of people that are there, it is very flat. Now, I don't, I don't know how much has changed. I mean, I've really been gone since like 2018. So like, you know, that trash would probably know better.

• 34:41Speaker 03

  You said 2018 was the last time you were there?

• 34:44Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, I contracted after that, but yeah, I mean, that was leveling, you know, when leveling came in, I was like, all right, you guys go do leveling. You know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go do leveling on Final Fantasy 14 and I got good at that, but you know, I didn't, I didn't do leveling at Netflix. So I was like, yeah, okay, bye.

• 35:01Speaker 03

  Netflix is relatively flat. It's not as flat as when you're there.

• 35:06Speaker 03

  I don't want to go too deep in what Netflix is. I can talk about like how like Disney Hulu was. I think they're generally like a little bit more.

• 35:13Speaker 04

  I heard they're way deeper.

• 35:14Speaker 03

  Middle management, but I've been a, I've been a part of many companies that have these lasagna layers where you basically, okay, here's one. I was at Capital One and that thing was just like middle management hell. And just to make one decision of like, can I ship some X product or change the color for a button or something would take like three weeks to make a decision. Because what happens is you talk to your supervisor, your manager, then they really like, they're like, okay, let me go bring it to my manager. And then they bring it to their next manager and it takes like two weeks just to reach the VP. God knows why we need the VP's answer on this. And then you're like, no, you cannot. And you're like, well.

• 35:54Speaker 04

  And then it's gotta come back through the chain.

• 35:56Speaker 03

  And that whole time you're just sitting there because you don't even know what to do or what you're allowed to do. Um, so funny story, when I was at Capital One, I was there for one year. I couldn't take it anymore. The thing I started on didn't even hit production by the time I left. That's just how long it takes. It's like a lot of red tape because you know it's

• 36:16Speaker 00

  How complicated. Let's let's color this a little bit because you know a year not to production right? How long were you at Capital One?

• 36:21Speaker 03

  One year.

• 36:22Speaker 00

  Okay, so a year not to production is not the most insane thing I've ever heard. There's plenty of things that don't do it, but how? In the grand scheme of how simple this was, if it was you with unilateral decision making, how fast do you think you could have got it from? No knowledge to production?

• 36:38Speaker 03

  I mean, it was probably like realistically probably a couple of months for sure. Like it was pretty complicated. I was like in the identity space. So we had to make sure like fraud. We had like systems that do like fraud license. Scanning, you know, like two factor auth or whatever we had to do. But it just took forever. And I was just like, I've never been in a place that moved that stuff. I was like, I gotta get out of here.

• 36:59Speaker 00

  No.

• 36:59Speaker 03

  Like brain rotting. It was insane.

• 37:02Speaker 04

  We had the exact opposite problem at Netflix. Like, like people who had just joined, the minute they had access, they could just take the whole thing down. I mean, like they get they buy out. I'm gonna push this and it's it was just live. I mean,

• 37:12Speaker 00

  I brought it down.

• 37:13Speaker 04

  I'm not gonna then mention names, you know, like.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  Well, pre Netflix, we know that Prime managed to take down the entire system using only a comment. Good luck doing that anywhere else. No one else has ever managed that.

• 37:26Speaker 04

  I saw nothing. Okay, like and and yeah, I I I saw nothing. I I mean, I I've seen it like go. I mean, at the time, like when I left, they were like, you know, maybe we should put some safeguards in place because like, you know, it's kind of like one click and just everything's just gone.

• 37:43Speaker 04

  So maybe we don't want to do that. And I was like, well, I mean, they shouldn't be clicking. I mean, why aren't they? You know, you gotta get like, you know, I mean, I was like, you know, you should be, you should be typing for this sort of thing. But anyway, like that, that was just, they they added a lot of safeties. They would, you know, again, like one of those like, you know, make make it so that people can do the right thing without trying to get in the way. But when I went back and contracted like a couple of years later, it was. A bit different, you know, I mean, it was kind of, there were guardrails on everything. So it was.

• 38:13Speaker 00

  So just to give you a little idea, we had these things that you could adjust like production values from a dashboard. And at some point that I think guy you were gone at this point is like 2020, maybe someone adjusted a staging value. So a value that should not be in production. That's in a different environment, adjusted that value and took down production for like, like some amount of time. And so they're like, that's it. We gotta figure this out. No one's adjusting properties now.

• 38:39Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. Those fast properties. That was a frigging nightmare. All right. Anyway, so enough inside baseball.

• 38:45Speaker 03

  I have a comment. So this is why I think like, um, by Microsoft or Xbox is in the state they're in. If they have 14 layers of middle management to, to Prime's point about everyone's about self preservation, those environments get so toxic because each person has their own agenda. So yeah, it's really rare for these teams to kind of align because everyone's like, I want the credit for that. Or I want to do this. So it makes me look better. So what happens is you just make no decisions. You kind of just standing still and everyone's just arguing about what to do. Um, and I think that's like a big part of like Xbox's downfall, like the fact that they have 14 layers. There was like a meme that vegan shared where it was like, this is what it's like to go through 14 levels of approved improvement. And you're just like saying random names like,

• 39:29Speaker 03

  yeah. And I've seen it like firsthand. I've seen like the politics around engineering managers wanting to take credit of everything and basically trying to poach engineers from other teams. So they have more people underneath them because it's, it's more about politics than actually delivering business value at that point. I'm not sure if you all have seen that firsthand, but it's pretty insane.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  That's a pretty well done thing at Microsoft too. Microsoft is in particular has this and everyone, everyone kind of knows that. Uh, so like it is not better there. If anything, it's probably worse than what, what, you know, people are thinking.

• 40:04Speaker 00

  That's such a like a positive white pill take, you know, whatever you're thinking, double it. It's probably that bad.

• 40:12Speaker 01

  It no, it really is. And I think that's especially true. Like, one of the things that happened as well, it on one thing that happens at Microsoft is there's definitely like a people moving towards the thing that has the momentum for the same reasons. So like, you know, if, if you look at the company, the gaming division, the operating systems division, these are not hot divisions anymore. Right? So you end up in this situation where the managers, the people who are trying to, you know, have the big, have, have the great resumes and all the sorts of kind of thing that Trash is talking about. They also like

• 40:55Speaker 01

  have a lot of incentive to go work in the AI part of things, in the cloud part of things, right? Whatever is the hotness, you want to be associated with that somehow. Right? You don't want to be associated with, hey, I like just kept like, you know, I did a really good job, like fostering like our indie game development studios that we have or some right? Like, that is not like going to make you a vice president at Microsoft. You know what I'm saying? Like, it's just, it doesn't really work that way. And so I think that's probably also another issue that you run into with something like this, where it's like, that's the reality of a large company. They're never going to prioritize the kinds of things that a gamer might look and say, this is what I'm hopeful about, or what I care about.

• 41:39Speaker 00

  Can I ask a real question?

• 41:40Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 41:42Speaker 00

  Is Halo one remake gonna be good?

• 41:46Speaker 01

  I have no idea.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  What does that have to do with anything?

• 41:53Speaker 00

  Microsoft phones in, they're releasing it soon, and I'm freaking out, okay?

• 41:58Speaker 03

  I'll be honest, I didn't think Halo was that great.

• 42:01Speaker 00

  Okay, which Halo did you start on?

• 42:04Speaker 03

  Uh, the first one, like the OG one. And then like, the last one I played was the firefight, or whatever you called it. And you have to like, survive the waves, the one that had that.

• 42:13Speaker 00

  Okay, yeah, that's like ODST, I think.

• 42:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was the last one I played. Okay. Modern Warfare 2, best game.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  I mean, so at, at the risk of making this on topic.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  I think like for people who are looking at this, I would imagine that the most of what's going on here is just like Game Pass imploding, right? We talked about this a little bit last time where we were talking about the games as a service, or gas, as it were. You know, the whole like, are you gonna owe nothing and be happy? Is all your stuff gonna get streamed to you? There was the Lori Wired tweet that we were like commenting on there, right? And all this stuff. So effectively, this is mostly, I think, just Game Pass was a bad idea and it completely failed. I think that's all that's really that we're seeing right now.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  And so I think it's probably hard to make sense of this as anything beyond that. Microsoft made a bunch of decisions that were all about Game Pass. Like, Game Pass is the business model. It didn't work, and now the question is, what do they do? Right? And so I think that's the easiest way to probably understand this. And I don't know that there's a lot more to say about it at this point, because until we actually see what they are going to try to do about that, I don't know. And the reason that I think that's the important part is, A, everything they've done over the past 10 years has been like about Game Pass.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  I mean, there's no rationale whatsoever for a company like Microsoft to acquire Double Fine Studios. It makes literally no sense at all, in any context, other than the one where you think what's going to be happening is, a bunch of people are going to be subscribing to you to get their gaming, and you want to show a diverse lineup of games across a wide spectrum, so that people who maybe aren't your typical console players or something like that, are still gonna subscribe to your service, right? Otherwise, there's no point in buying a lot of these studios that they bought. It makes no sense at all, other than, oh, we'll just get Double Fine, we'll make a

• 44:35Speaker 01

  bunch of games, they'll be sort of noteworthy with critics or whatever, they'll round out a part of our lineup that we're gonna need. They're not, everyone knows Double Fine is not going to move a console generation. That's just a given, right? Apologies to Double Fine, like not trying to diss them or anything, but like, that's not what they do. They don't make Grand Theft Auto, right? That's not their job. And it shouldn't be. But so, a lot of these moves that they're making over that, over that time period, don't make any sense unless you're thinking about Game Pass is this subscription service. We're Netflix, we're going to burn a lot of money in the short term to show that we have a wide catalog that's a lot of breadth and that every month you'll get a game and it's very varied. It's not just one kind of game.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  We'll have the tent poles, we'll have the quirky stuff, we'll have everything, right? And it didn't work, right? It, it did not have any growth potential apparently, and it just, that was it. So, the problem now is, what is the argument going forward? I think that's the position that they're in. Again, this is data free because I have, I have no inside knowledge whatsoever of this. So I'm literally just commenting completely from the outside. But, Game Pass cratered, I mean, it didn't crater in the sense that it, you know, went to zero or something, but just like, cratering in, for, in terms of what happens in a business. If you need something to be this exponential growth thing and it actually is logarithmic and just stops, that's what we're calling cratering, right?

• 46:01Speaker 00

  I'm going to hold you right there because if you look at what her tweet says, again, it says, "We have also learned that we are not the best home for every type of studio. In a typical year, we lost 64 cents for every dollar we invested."

• 46:10Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 46:11Speaker 00

  And this is talking about, uh, this is my assumption they're push into Game Pass. Like buying and purchasing all these studios to put underneath and all that, and then the outcome of it all, it was actually super bad.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. And just to try and like, uh, again, put on my, like imagining what the executives are thinking at various times, because it's just imagination, I can't know, right? You can see like what they say in like, you know, in like earnings calls and in press releases and stuff, and you just have to kind of back infer like what was the actual story. But-

• 46:43Speaker 01

  So if you think about it, it's like Microsoft is this massive company. Okay, like trillions of dollars company. So how do you make a ton of money in games? Like, how do you make money in the billions? Because if you're not making money in the billions, there is no, there is no seat for you at the vice president's table at Microsoft. That's not a thing that's going to happen. You're an also ran little tiny thing that no one's paying attention to and you won't get any funding and whatever. So the way you make an argument for you're going to be big business is that you're Netflix. And that was what they did, right? That's the easiest way to understand it is that we are Netflix for games. You're going to subscribe to our service. We're going to have Netflix like numbers.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  So we're going to have that kind of income and revenue. And that's why I'm a vice president now. Right? Does that, does that make sense? Like, I'm pretty sure this is effectively the way it is, right? Because we have to, we have to come up with a reason why this division is more than just like, I don't know, we sell some consoles every five years. And we make a little bit of money on the, on the vig of like digital downloads or whatever, right? That's not enough. They need just, they need to be, it needs to be huge and grand. And so when, sorry.

• 47:58Speaker 00

  I just have, I have a quick question. I just like, just from a practical standpoint. Why doesn't the Netflix of gaming work? Because obviously the Netflix of Netflix worked. They're making money, so just why?

• 48:11Speaker 04

  Everyone has been the Netflix of gaming, by the way. I mean, like every, I've heard that so many times. Like, I mean, Gamefly was the Netflix of gaming. Amazon was the Netflix of gaming. Microsoft, Microsoft's like, yeah, we don't even care about hardware anymore. We're just going to be like, it'll just be, we'll follow you. Xbox is like a concept and we're just going to be on every platform, wherever you are. And like, it just. None of them have like any of like the elements of like the Netflix part of like, you know, a seamless experience, not making it impossible to cancel. Like, I mean, finding out signal from your users, like, like what people really want and like doing that and doing it really well. And I haven't seen that at all. I mean, I've seen a lot of like expensive

• 48:53Speaker 04

  acquisitions. I mean, I was, I was a Activision shareholder when they picked that up. And I was like, I don't want to own this thing. I mean, like this is like, here was something with like a bunch of products that like, kind of made sense. Yeah, I have some misses and whatever. And then there was like, all of a sudden, this behemoth that's just burning money faster than ever on like, OpenAI. And then it was like, oh yeah, well, Xbox is like a, a virtual concept that follows you everywhere you go. And that's why we don't need to be worried about like the console and the hardware and all that, you know, and we're, we are too tied to that. And that's why we're going to be all subscription and the Netflix of gaming. And, you know, I was like, oh, God. And then their cloud platform version of it too, that they would, like, I mean, they admitted during the, the whole, like, acquisition trial that they were like, you know, when they were, when Justice Department was looking at it, that they were like, yeah,

• 49:37Speaker 04

  there's basically nothing there. Okay. It's like, nobody is actually subscribed and using that product. So it's just, I don't know. I don't see it.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  Well, um, I guess, Prime, it's a hard question to answer, but I'll try to answer it in two ways. The first way is that if you take a look at gamers who are, for lack of a better term, variety gamers, I think they're already very well served by Steam.

• 50:03Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 50:04Speaker 01

  What is your monthly subscription price? Like, let's ask that question. Your monthly subscription price to something like Netflix? Is it, you know, I don't know, maybe $20 in the US or something like that? $25? I'm not sure what it is. Um, for like, this kind of-

• 50:17Speaker 04

  We have an add tier.

• 50:18Speaker 00

  There's, there's various tiers, but yeah.

• 50:20Speaker 01

  Right. Um, so if you look at that and you ask, if I wanted to play games on Steam, and I gave myself a monthly budget of $25, what could I afford to play? The answer is a lot. So not only can you buy a lot of games on sale for $5, $9, so you could buy multiple games during Steam sales that you, you know, that build up in your, in your catalog, but also, you know, someone will buy a game like Bellatro for 10 bucks or 15 bucks. I don't know what it, what it cost even new, not on sale. And that's 50 hours they might sink into that thing.

• 50:57Speaker 00

  Fifty?

• 50:57Speaker 01

  They don't, 100, some people are, but I'm talking about the, on the, on average, even average people dumping 10 hours into Bellatro easily for people who didn't even, weren't even hardcore players of that game. And so you're talking about something more like Netflix. It's like Netflix is selling content that you subscribe to and just dabble in. It's like, I don't know, I just, I show up, I pick something randomly from this stream of things and I can watch it for two hours and shut it off, right? The equivalent of that would be I buy a $20 or $30 Blu-ray, I guess, and watch it for two hours and I'm done. Netflix starts to sound like a pretty good deal at that point, right?

• 51:42Speaker 01

  It's like, hey, this is sort of fulfilling the same thing. It costs less, I get more selection, right? So for variety people, it kind of seems like I can see the value proposition for Netflix. I don't see what you're offering over Steam if you offered a similar thing, right? For the hardcore gamer, which is the other prong of that, they are like, I play Fortnite 24 hours a day. I play Grand Theft Auto 24 hours a day. That's what I do. I don't care what is Netflix offering me. I can load up Fortnite for free. I play with all my friends. I play it for several hours a night. If I want to spend some money, I'm going to buy a skin.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  What possible thing can you offer me as part of this Netflix subscription that's better than free?

• 52:30Speaker 00

  So I will, I will most certainly say that there's a whole group of people you'll never be able to compete, compete with because they're single game andies, right? Like, they're like, I play Fortnite because Fortnite is my identity. That's all I know, that's all I am, that's all I'll ever be, right? So yes, I don't think that's-

• 52:43Speaker 01

  And that's most of the money, Prime. That's most of the money in gaming is those people. By far the lion's share.

• 52:49Speaker 00

  Okay, I see, I don't know where the money comes from and all that, because the only reason why I'm saying this, and this is coming from a genuine question, is if you look right here, Netflix cash content budget for 2026 is approximately 20 billion. I assume you could make a lot of games for 20 billion, that is your exclusive games that you own and is on your platform. And if you did it for 10 years, investing, starting off with 5 billion, and investing increasingly more for 10 years straight, I assume you would have an incredibly diverse, rich catalog of all these games with monthly games coming out constantly that are all unique and bespoke to your environment. I don't really understand how it's not possible to also create the Netflix of gaming. That's, I'm just, this is more from just like a purely, I don't, I, I must not get it.

• 53:32Speaker 01

  Just look at the tracker, I mean, I'm sorry, go ahead.

• 53:35Speaker 04

  No, no, no, go ahead, please.

• 53:36Speaker 01

  Just look at the tracker, Amazon, I mean, how many billions did they spend, literally trying to make those games?

• 53:41Speaker 00

  I'm not talking about Amazon, okay, they, they did Rings of Power and Wheel of Time, okay, they, they've just been known to flop, all right? I can't possibly try to say that they, they know what they're doing, okay?

• 53:50Speaker 04

  That thing was awful.

• 53:51Speaker 01

  All right, well, even Netflix themselves, have you seen how much money they've dumped into games? And they have not produced a single one of those titles, and they're not even close to it, right?

• 54:00Speaker 04

  Interesting, interesting, they actually, so they, they pivoted, because they, they realized that they're not really gonna be a triple A kind of player, you know, and, and their strength is really like around distribution, you know, they have the reach, I mean, there's, there's something like 500, 600 million people watching Netflix globally. And that, that, that's a window like we've never seen, and that's the kind of place where like, you know, the Steam model of sort of like, you know, not, not actually Steam, but they, they, they went more for like the casual gaming part, because putting big money against an unproven part of the business without, you know, leadership that has like, that's figured out what they're gonna do, and they don't really have a direction. It didn't make sense, they were just kind of throwing money away, and so they just cut that back, and they said, you know, it makes a lot more sense for us to like, do a deal and, you know,

• 54:44Speaker 04

  take Grand Theft Auto on the platform, and you know, here it is with like, a new version, whatever, you know, and, and that would be like, you know, we've just fixed a bunch of bugs, and that was just, you know, if part of that like unwind, like you're just, you want something to watch, you don't wanna, you know, you don't wanna be too involved, you probably don't wanna try a new, I don't know, maybe you do, I mean, and that's where they went after like the casual gaming segment, and that's been doing all right, I mean, from, you know, the most recent earnings calls, I, I don't work there anymore, so I, I, you know, I have just the outsider view on it now, but like strategically, that made sense.

• 55:16Speaker 03

  I was thinking I was conversing.

• 55:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, I mean Steam, um, I mean, I think to your point, Steam is way more in line with the kind of philosophy around, like, it doesn't, it's not painful, you know, like that, they've got the user experience kind of like, top of mind, like, you want to just like, run this client, you don't really care what you're on, and you just want it to work, you know, and, and if, if you've got all the fancy stuff, you want that to work too, you want the overlay, you want the standard controller, you want like, different things from the community, you want all of that integrated, and, and Steam just, it, it follows you, and it goes to different platforms, and Microsoft's strategy was always like, you've got to make this thing look like an Xbox, even if it's not an Xbox, make it look like an Xbox, and make it look like Windows, and, and there's a whole, like, you know, again, because that's their ecosystem, that's what they knew, that's their DNA, they wanted to be that, and then,

• 56:03Speaker 04

  not hardware, and, and then they had hardware, and then it was all just like, competing with themselves around like, okay, now we're like this virtual company with your catalog that you can't really get to, but you're gonna get to it and buy it all again, I mean, it was just, it was nonsensical strategy versus like, Steam's like, okay, you bought the licenses on this, and like, okay, you're on another computer, you're logged in, right? Great, grab, here's your game, like, and it was none of the experience of, like, dealing with like, AAA installers or anything else, like, it just, it just worked, as opposed to like, you know, the, the free play, you know, service, you know, like, the, the stuff, like, the Fortnights and things like that, where they're like, okay, well, the cost is zero, so we can actually worry about the customer experience here.

• 56:43Speaker 01

  But Prime was talking about AAA stuff, right? He was saying-

• 56:46Speaker 00

  No, no, I was just talking about gaming, right? Like, this is your Bellatros, all this, maybe you do have a couple tentpole titles, right? Like Netflix also has some tentpole titles, right? You look at the big name show, The Witcher, all these things where they spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make that one individual show, like, I assume this also, the exact same model would just map onto games, like, okay, here's our, here's our 1,000 million dollar games, here's our 110 million dollar games, here's our 10 100 million dollar games, right? Like, it's just like, here you go, go-

• 57:13Speaker 01

  Okay, so first of all, there's, I guess what I would say is, the, um- When you, uh, when you think about the budgets, think about more like 750 to 800 million dollars, maybe a billion dollars, maybe more. If you're talking about competing in the actual space for the high-end dollars. So when you're talking about going against GTA, Fortnite, Roblox, their expenditures are not a hundred million dollars. They're not even close. They're so far above that.

• 57:48Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 57:48Speaker 01

  So if you go into one of those things and you're like, we're going to compete with those guys for the high-end dollars, uh, you're talking about laying out, you know, I don't even want to know what it is, but it's going to be, it's going to be way more than a billion dollars total over several years, probably several billion dollars total over, you know, the five years it will take you to even get to someplace where you might start knowing if you're able to compete, right? So there's a much bigger gulf than what you're talking about. And down at the lower end of the gulf, Steam just has that entire market right now for PC side. And then on the other side of things, you have like locked up storefronts.

• 58:31Speaker 01

  It's like, if you're talking about competing with the Apple Store on iPhone, have fun with that. If you're talking about competing with the Play Store on Android, have fun with that. Now, maybe because Epic did a bunch of lawsuit work for you, you will be able to do that at some point. But like currently, if you've tried the Netflix experience for, like, like some coding guy was saying on the pivot there, uh, where they decided, okay, what we're actually going to do is sort of just let you download games that somebody already made, that you then just put in your Netflix login to the game and use it. It's a horrible experience. You have to go to the Netflix, uh, application. You have to look through their games tab to find something that you want.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  You have to click on that, which takes you to the store. If you're lucky that works, you download the game, you have to have your Netflix credentials entered into the game. It's like, it's terrible, right? It doesn't work, right?

• 59:26Speaker 04

  That part, I can, I can speak to that. So I haven't really used the game product, but they

• 59:30Speaker 01

  I have.

• 59:30Speaker 04

  They definitely had a problem with, you know, those storefronts being so locked down.

• 59:34Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 59:35Speaker 04

  Because they're, the major fear from the smartphone providers was basically like, you're not cutting us out. Okay. You don't just, don't just install stuff. Okay. Because like, we, we need to have all that, which means you have to go through us, which meant like all this deep linking crap that never really worked.

• 59:48Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 59:49Speaker 04

  Is the experience. And like, that's not a good.

• 59:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:52Speaker 04

  I can only imagine.

• 59:53Speaker 00

  In terms of service to be able to like have a Play Store as an application on Android or whatever it was.

• 59:59Speaker 01

  Exactly. And so, so, you know, again, that's like, maybe that can now be something that's pushed on because there's so many lawsuits and antitrust stuff. Maybe in a few years, there will be some kind of a like way that you could envision somebody deciding they're going to try to compete with Apple and Google there by having the sort of integrated experience that's actually good. That could happen. But again, like, that's all, you know, if you're asking why it hasn't happened, it's because it couldn't. It was like literally prevented from happening. There's no way Netflix really could have shipped something else as far as I know, because they were kind of prevented, right, from doing so.

• 1:00:37Speaker 04

  It was cloud gaming, you know, basically like, okay, we already have you on the TV. Like, you know, we already, you know, so pull out your controller and we could just make this work in the same app. And that, that is the one place where they could actually hit the experience. And Netflix's CDN is basically the largest in the world. I mean, it is a very short hop to just any Netflixer. I mean, you could test that all day on like fast.com. I mean, it is like, really, really comprehensive. So, like, they do have an answer to that. They'll never have an answer to the stores as long, until maybe more lawsuits or, you know.

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  Well, also, the streaming doesn't really answer the question, though, for mobile, which is sort of where we're talking about here, though, right?

• 1:01:13Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  Is my point, like, because on mobile, you're on unreliable internet. You are not going to be streaming like your game experience to there in a pleasant way, right? Already streaming movies already sucks in that way unless you can buffer them. So, it just doesn't really work.

• 1:01:28Speaker 04

  I can talk a lot about that, because I'm the one who got streaming to work in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, like, on a 3G connection. Like, I mean, I, this is a near and dear topic to my heart. But it will always be a, I do agree with you, it'll be a subpar experience. If that's going to be the only answer, is you can't run anything locally, then.

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  So, so that, but that may change. Because like, again, if the regime changes, and it becomes possible for people to actually supply store experiences, where you just download the Netflix app once, and now it allows that app to pull down game data and run it, which is against, which, which they do not, like, just to be clear, if anyone doesn't know, Apple and Google do not allow you to do that. That's the reason that you can't, that's the reason that the Netflix games, I mean, I don't know the reason internally that Netflix did that. But I mean, the reason that they could not, uh, it, that they are not allowed to do anything like that. Uh, is because you're just not, it's simply disallowed to execute any code at all, uh, that you download as part of the app. That's just simply not, uh, not, you know, permitted.

• 1:02:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, they want to make sure you're going through their store and, and that is locked up pretty hard.

• 1:02:33Speaker 00

  That 30% is delicious. All right.

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  It's not just the 30%, though, because even if you consent to the 30%, they still will not let you, unless they've changed this. They will not let you execute code that was not like signed by them as a separate package that's distributed as part of their store. So you can't, you know, have like these packages that you yourself are adding. They won't allow that for security reasons, I assume. So even if you give them the 30% cut, I mean, maybe if you, if, if you backroom business deal it, sure. Right? Like if it's like, hey, Apple, like maybe, but, but, you know.

• 1:03:08Speaker 04

  Why do you think that wasn't what happened?

• 1:03:13Speaker 04

  Let's not talk about that. Look, no one's paying 30%. All right. Anyway, moral of the story is that, yeah, I agree with you. Like if you're following the rules, like it's going to be a problem.

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:03:22Speaker 00

  All right. I just, I was just more curious about that because I, I, just to me, like if it's purely, it's so it's, you know, like, how wouldn't this work? But I guess if you're talking about mobile and that, then yeah, that makes sense. But, oh no, I'm still curious if it is actually possible to work. But it seems like it isn't because these companies are failing, but also I'd just expect Microsoft to fail. Right? Like if you just said, hey, Microsoft's going to solve this problem. I'm going to go, okay, it's going to be bad. Right? Like that's just my natural intuition of a situation.

• 1:03:47Speaker 04

  I mean, I, I think part of what made Netflix work was the fact that we had no hardware, you know? Like that was a, that was a hard stop from Steve Jobs, you know? He basically said, you're never getting on the iPhone if you, if you sell, but we, we had what was the Roku box, you know, like? And they said, if you, if you sell that thing, you're never getting on any of this, like, and, and that was very clear to us. And we basically said, okay, well, we want to be like. A software company, we want to be, we want to be on everything. So that means like, if the only way to do that is we don't sell hardware as well. And I think that's a part of the recipe. Like, you know, as long as Microsoft is selling hardware, which seems like they're doubling down to go back. And hardware makes a lot of sense in the console space. Then it's always going to be kind of a suboptimal.

• 1:04:29Speaker 04

  It's never going to be that like Netflix of blank experience because like it just, you, your, your goals are really in conflict. You know, you want the hardware sale, you want the install base, you want the exclusivity. You don't want an experience that just works seamlessly for people to be able to travel between platforms and have cloud saving that like just works. And you know, things like, you know, if you patch the game, then your patches just come in and everything like, that's not your focus at all. Because you want to make sure that it's a walled garden and that people are essentially trapped on whatever device. And if you go onto another device, you're going to pay for another license and you know, like, and that's that type of thinking, which is exactly not what made Netflix Netflix.

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  And again, just to really underscore the point about where the dollars come from, because I guess that was the thing.

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  There's literally nobody that I know of who's like, you know, doing sort of the executive advising sorts of stuff at these companies. Who won't tell you the exact same thing, which is that all of the money is in basically like the sort of the big attention games. That is where the vast majority of the revenue is generated on the sort of like anything outside of phones. Which as we've already talked about, is its own walled garden thing that you don't really have the option of poking at. So when you look at things, it's like, why doesn't Microsoft go after this market? Or why doesn't Netflix go after that market? It's like, well, they also look at those numbers.

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  They know that the money comes from Fortnite, Roblox, Grand Theft Auto, Overwatch, League of Legends, right? That is where it comes from. It doesn't come from anything else. It's just like, you can draw this circle of like, all the money comes from these and always on live service things that are very hard to assail. Because now everyone, there's like a social kind of capital built up there where you get together and you play those games with your friends regularly. It's hard to like move people over to something else. So that's where all the money comes from. And so it's really, really hard to go like, well, why don't you just, you know, why don't you just spend a few billion dollars and make one of those?

• 1:06:37Speaker 01

  Because what if it fails? No one wants to hear like, we're gonna put $5 billion into this thing and nothing's gonna happen, right? And like, you know, you've seen what happened to Concord. That was $400 million, right? You've seen what happened to Marathon from Bungie, right? Failed to really get uptake and that's, I don't know how many hundreds of millions, right?

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  And, and so it's, it's very, very hard to make the business case, I imagine internally for that kind of thing. Maybe this is how you return to Netflix Prime. Maybe you go like, look, here's what you're gonna do. You're gonna give me four billion, uh, four or five billion dollars. Over five years, we're gonna turn Towers of Mordoria, or sorry, what is it called?

• 1:07:21Speaker 00

  Towers of Mordoria.

• 1:07:21Speaker 03

  No, you said it right.

• 1:07:22Speaker 01

  Towers of Mordoria into a live service, uh, microtransaction game. And we are gonna own a significant fraction of those dollars. If you can make that sale to them, I mean, more power to you, man.

• 1:07:36Speaker 00

  I like where your head's at. I like, I just wanna say I like where your head's at. I'll think about it. If a quick a billion dollar exit, I could, I mean, I could maybe work that out.

• 1:07:43Speaker 04

  It'd be fun, yeah.

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  I mean, you, you, let's be honest, you might even settle for, for half a billion. You know, if you're, if you're on a bad day.

• 1:07:49Speaker 00

  As long as we still call it a billion, right? Like it's a half a billion. I don't wanna say the M word. I want, I want the B.

• 1:07:56Speaker 03

  Quick, quick question. What was like the last big blockbuster game title?

• 1:08:02Speaker 01

  Well, let's, let's just say, because it's almost November, Grand Theft Auto VI. Yeah.

• 1:08:06Speaker 03

  Okay. How about before that? What was it before that, man? I don't really count, I don't really count like the, like the sequels and stuff like, I'm talking about like.

• 1:08:15Speaker 04

  Well, no, but I mean, that's like everything, like, you know, of, of like the top games, like, you know, I, I saw some stat the other day and it was something like the top 10 games. Like, like nine of them were sequels from like previous years, from like the previous, I, I, like, I forgot the number, but like, everything is that these days. I mean, like, what was the last game that like, didn't come from like a sequel?

• 1:08:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, when you say big, do you mean like AAA, like hundreds of millions of dollars poured into it?

• 1:08:38Speaker 01

  Like, how much, how much money does that have to mean?

• 1:08:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Like, one of those games, like, when someone says Halo, I know what that is. And when someone says World of Warcraft, of course, I know what that is. Like, does that happen anymore? Like, is the, is the millennials, like, the last gaming?

• 1:08:48Speaker 04

  I mean, no, it's just, they're, they're starting off at like the smaller, I mean, you're seeing some of the, like Bellatro, you know, you're seeing like Subnautica, you know, you're seeing, you're seeing like, you know, the second installment is drastically bigger. I mean, is Subnautica 15 like the same size as like whatever the current Call of Duty is? Like, I, I don't know, you know, I mean, like-

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:09:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:07Speaker 01

  Very, very much is not.

• 1:09:09Speaker 04

  Let's just, let's just, let's just say that's a, that's a hard no, but-

• 1:09:12Speaker 00

  I think, I think the last really big one that I knew about was Clear Obscure Expedition 33, right? Like, that was the big one that, like, everybody kind of knew of.

• 1:09:21Speaker 04

  What?

• 1:09:21Speaker 01

  Which is not that big. Like, it doesn't, it doesn't register on the, on the scale of like Grand Theft Auto.

• 1:09:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that's still on like-

• 1:09:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was still like, it's considered like an indie game, right? Even though it was fairly big.

• 1:09:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, but it's like triple I. I mean, it's like, it's, it's like a Baldur's Gate, you know, like, I mean, whi- which was a big breakthrough game in terms of budget, but I mean, even that was a continuation, technically. I mean, you know, like-

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  Well, I, and again, I just want to draw a line there for, for, for folks. So, there is no comparison in terms of addressable revenue between Clear Obscure and Fortnite. It's not, they're not the same category of game, right? Fortnite is like orders of magnitude more revenue share than something like Clear Obscure. So, when you're talking about a hit game, that's a game that people just go and they buy for $50, and even if this thing, like, a good example of that, if, if you're looking for one, would be, let's say, um, maybe Tears of the Kingdom, right?

• 1:10:17Speaker 01

  Would be a good example of something that sold a lot of copies, right, at a premium price or something like that. The revenue that you generate from that is very small still, compared to the revenue you generate from something like Roblox, Fortnite, whatever. You couldn't start a company that would get IPO'd.

• 1:10:34Speaker 00

  Well, Roblox is just children gambling, okay? You're gonna make a lot of money from making children gambling.

• 1:10:39Speaker 03

  I've never used Roblox in my life.

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  You couldn't IPO on your company just being Legend of Zelda, right? Like, it wouldn't happen, not like it does for something like Roblox, right?

• 1:10:50Speaker 03

  So you've seen microtransactions, like in all your games?

• 1:10:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:10:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean Breath of the Wild did sell a lot, though.

• 1:10:57Speaker 01

  A tremendous number. Tears of the Kingdom was more recent, that's why.

• 1:11:00Speaker 00

  It was kind of like an event versus, you know, Fortnite is every single day. Kids are just like, "Ah!"

• 1:11:06Speaker 03

  Right, about Pokemon Go? Pokemon Go.

• 1:11:08Speaker 01

  And so again, that's why I'm trying to draw this distinction there, because when these businesses are looking at these things, they know that. They're like, "Look, if we spend, we're gonna spend a similar amount of money potentially to develop one of these AAA titles, we don't want to do that because the only thing it can possibly do is hit like a Tears of the Kingdom level amount of sales. What we want is to do this one that's going to be a similar investment to that, maybe more, but that we keep putting money into, but then we keep generating revenue from, right? So when we do get that one hit, it goes for a very long time. Not just that one sales cycle and then it's over, right? And we have to then make the next one.

• 1:11:51Speaker 01

  And it's just because the revenue difference is so large between those two when you look at their lifetime. And I ain't saying that any of this is good, right? Because I don't play any of these games. I don't load up Roblox, I don't play Fortnite, I don't care about Grand Theft Auto V Online, which is like, you know, was one of the first ones of these.

• 1:12:12Speaker 00

  I can tell you all about Roblox, my kids play them. And I'll tell you this much, it involves a lot of games where you like run on computer cap keys and you just run to earn running experience, to get faster, to run further down.

• 1:12:25Speaker 03

  Is Roblox like a Steam where you just buy different games?

• 1:12:28Speaker 00

  No, no, you just play all the games and then you buy microtransactions with it in it.

• 1:12:32Speaker 04

  It's like a virtual world and there's lots of...

• 1:12:34Speaker 01

  It's exactly like Fortnite. You can buy things inside this world.

• 1:12:38Speaker 04

  Roblox.

• 1:12:39Speaker 01

  This is what Mark Zuckerberg wanted to make the metaverse, right? And like Fortnite and Roblox actually made the metaverse.

• 1:12:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, they actually did.

• 1:12:46Speaker 01

  There's the easiest way to think about it.

• 1:12:47Speaker 04

  Casey, to your point earlier, I don't think anybody comes... out and says, we're going to spend Fortnite levels of money to go build something that's going to like do as well as that like I, I, I think that everybody who wants to get into like live service, because if you think about it like Fortnite isn't spending that money either like Fortnite spent a certain amount of money upfront and then grew and then started selling skins and then that grew and then watched the MRR and then that grew and then eventually they said, okay, we could throw more money at this because this is how much is coming back. So we can invest that, you know, and they could sort of play for like pre to optimal version of that to take whatever, you know, end day revenue they wanted and profits they wanted. I don't think anybody's going to go into that space saying, well, we're going to spend that much like they're, they're going to go in and they're going to say, okay, we're going to spend like

• 1:13:33Speaker 04

  a couple hundred million, see if we develop a thing because obviously you can't go anywhere without like a network effect and then, and then assuming that takes off and you have a bunch of users and then something's crowding around an event, then we can go launch some more stuff. Oh, hey, here's news. Here's new hats. Here's new like, you know, digital garb that you can go sell, which I'm not selling in my game, by the way. So I guess I'm doing it all wrong, but anyway, like, and that's like, so I think you inch your way there. I don't think you just like, you know, I don't think we are going to see new entrants like Fortnite, but nobody's going to spend Fortnite money to get there. Like, I think that's just

• 1:14:04Speaker 01

  Right, day one, you probably won't have to, but, but I mean, we do know it's in the hundreds of millions, right? It's 400, 500 million.

• 1:14:10Speaker 00

  Didn't even spend Fortnite money to get to where Fortnite was. Right? Like Fortnite started off and they're just like, ah, we made a game. It's like to show off things and they're like, what happened if we put a battle royale? That'll be fun. And then Twitch blew it up and then all of a sudden they're like, oh crap, we have 1000,000 people playing.

• 1:14:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, you need your servers falling over left and right. Yeah. I mean, that, when you get to that problem, it's kind of like, okay, crap.

• 1:14:31Speaker 01

  So yeah, I mean, it basically comes down to can you convince them to spend that money prime on Towers of Mordoria and then it'll be a thing. The reason that I think all of this is reasonable to say and not just complete BS, by the way, is take a look at, go back and look at that email that you're talking about here from Asha Sharma. What are the two studios who did not have layoffs and which were mentioned prominently as reporting now directly to her? And what do they have in common?

• 1:14:57Speaker 00

  Candy Crush.

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  That's right. The two things that are constant play that are just like you just keep playing and playing and playing them. And that are all about like, oh, we could, we can see ways in which these have Fortnite ish qualities, right? Uh, they have Roblox like qualities. Minecraft especially.

• 1:15:18Speaker 04

  Absolutely. I mean, they've moved to like seasons, you know, I mean, they very much pushed the like, we're moving this to kind of a, you know, we're not gonna call it a subscription, but it's a subscription.

• 1:15:28Speaker 01

  So, you know, it, that's how that works.

• 1:15:32Speaker 00

  Alright, alright, alright, alright, right, right. Well, this was a good stand-up. Thank you, everybody, for joining us for the stand-up. Um, thanks Trash, thanks Guy.

• 1:15:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:15:43Speaker 00

  Nice track.

• 1:15:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, thanks for having me, guys.

• 1:15:45Speaker 00

  By the way, Casey always denies when I say legendary game programmer Casey Murator, and then also casually drops, oh yeah, like Boulder Gates used one of my tools that I developed 20 years ago, not a big deal, eh, whatever, not that it was legendary, legendary! Game developer Casey Murator!

• 1:16:00Speaker 01

  But there's no legend, but what's the, what's the legend? Somebody used a private name?

• 1:16:03Speaker 04

  I would say there was a legend, because you, you worked on Granny, didn't you?

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  I did, yeah, well, I, I wrote the entire thing.

• 1:16:08Speaker 04

  Okay, so I remember getting like game developer magazine, like in print copy, okay, this is just a long time ago. And you guys always had a full page out, so you know, I would say there's a little bit of legend. I think I could go find one of those magazines and, you know.

• 1:16:22Speaker 00

  If you have a page in a printed magazine for game development, you are a legend of game development, alright?

• 1:16:29Speaker 01

  Oh, no, you know what I am? I'm notable, unlike Odin, because I have something in print, right? A print, like there was a print publication that has a mention of it, so all of a sudden, I can have a Wikipedia page. Not Odin, because it's not notable.

• 1:16:45Speaker 00

  That's because Bill Linear doesn't know what he's doing, okay?

• 1:16:48Speaker 01

  Bill Linear, yes, Bill Linear, thanks, thanks Grok for telling me all about Bill Linear.

• 1:16:54Speaker 00

  For those that don't know, Ginger Bill is in fact not named Bill Linear.

• 1:16:58Speaker 01

  No, he's not named Bill Linear.

• 1:16:59Speaker 00

  But for whatever reason, Grok's like, Bill Linear in the 1.0 release!

• 1:17:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, and of course, if you've, if you've watched the stand-up, then you know about Wikipedia claiming that Odin was not noteworthy, because it hadn't had anything in print.

• 1:17:11Speaker 00

  Yep, alright, well, I'm gonna leave you with this last chart by Microsoft. This is their co-pilot experience in, uh, Microsoft. So if you ever get confused which co-pilot you use, just reference this handy little chart right here, it's very useful, very understandable, very quick to kind of digest.

• 1:17:28Speaker 01

  I'm sorry, what is that, Prime? It looks like it's- It looks like an anus.

• 1:17:34Speaker 00

  No, well, like, if you look right here, this is the GitHub Copilot CLI. You also have GitHub Copilot Pro Plus. You also have GitHub Copilot Spaces. You also have GitHub Copilot Spaces, something else.

• 1:17:47Speaker 04

  Here is the strategy. Big surprise, they're laying people off, right? Okay, like, this, this is the, this reminds me of that, like, Army doc. Do you remember when they had that, like, when we invaded some country? I don't know. And then, you know, they were looking at that, and they were just like...

• 1:17:58Speaker 00

  That really didn't narrow it down, okay?

• 1:17:59Speaker 04

  No, that really didn't narrow it down. And I remember there was like, some, like, some military top brass were like, "I want to know how complicated..." It was, it was either Afghanistan or Iraq. And they were like, "I need a PowerPoint that explains to me how complicated this is." And they made the most ridiculous PowerPoint, like, slide you've ever seen, showing all of the different components and how everything fit together. This is that slide. They're like, "Okay, we need to reorg."

• 1:18:22Speaker 00

  Yes. Anyway, so I think I understand how 14 levels of management ends up happening at a place like Microsoft. Whenever I see the Copilot chart, I'm like, "Ah, this, this is what did it." All right. Well, thank you very much. Thank you, everybody, for joining us. Please go check out all the co-hosts. We have Trash Dev, some coding guy, and C. Miratori, known as Casey, computerenhance.com. Thank you, everybody, for joining us. All right, bye-bye!