Maybe Every Game Is 'Early Access'?

What's the deal with Early Access? What are the pros and cons? Kirk, Jason, and Maddy sit down for a wide-ranging conversation about all the ins and outs of what it means to sell an early, unfinished game, from Baldur's Gate 3 to Star Citizen and so much more.

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

• 0:03Speaker 00

  So with early access, you might notice bugs like buckets keep spawning into various areas. We know, but we haven't figured out how to patch it. Welcome to TripleClick, where we bring the games to you. This week, we talk about games that launch in early access, what it means, and whether all games are secretly in early access. Or maybe they all should be? What does it even mean to be in early access?

• 0:30Speaker 00

  I'm Maddy Myers.

• 0:31Jason Schreier?

  I'm Jason Dreyer.

• 0:33Kirk Hamilton?

  And I'm Kirk Hamilton, and hello, my friend.

• 0:35Speaker 00

  Hello.

• 0:35Jason Schreier?

  Hello. It's good to see you both.

• 0:37Speaker 00

  Hello.

• 0:38Jason Schreier?

  Do you guys remember how my daughter is obsessed with Animal Crossing?

• 0:42Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 0:42Jason Schreier?

  Yes. So she's been obsessed with it for the last two months, still remains obsessed with it. And the other day, she was like, Daddy, I wish there was a way I could just take Animal Crossing and like play it somewhere else. And I was like, sweetie, I got some news for you. I realized that she's never actually seen the Switch taken out of the dock, because she only plays it on the TV, and it blew her little mind.

• 1:07Speaker 00

  That's amazing.

• 1:07Kirk Hamilton?

  I'm just imagining your daughter saying this to you, and you look up, and there's a camera crew, and the Nintendo ad department is all standing there.

• 1:15Speaker 00

  The entire Nintendo advertising department.

• 1:17Jason Schreier?

  And then suddenly, a cutscene is playing on a rooftop together.

• 1:20Kirk Hamilton?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:20Speaker 00

  There's some red solo cups with apple juice. It's all kid-friendly.

• 1:25Kirk Hamilton?

  Some ukulele music is coming in from somewhere.

• 1:29Speaker 00

  A Benetton ad of diverse friends suddenly gathers around you, singing and being like, let's play some Splatoon 3?

• 1:38Kirk Hamilton?

  Wonderful.

• 1:39Jason Schreier?

  I think I told you guys last year, like, right before the Switch 2 reveal, I saw that play out at a coffee shop where like a group of like, there actually were a group of diverse-looking friends, like, sitting around the Switch, playing Mario Kart in New York City. It was very funny.

• 1:55Speaker 00

  It does happen sometimes. Speaking of thrown-together groups of people having a wonderful time, you're listening to TripleClick, and you could join.

• 2:07Speaker 00

  Maximum Fun and be a subscriber to Triple Click. Be a member and get bonus episodes along with everybody else on the cool rooftop. That is the exclusive party only available at maximumfun.org/join. And once a month, you'd get a bonus episode from us. Our most recent one is us spilling the beans about everything in Resident Evil Requiem. Really fun counterpart to our main feed episode about that game. And the next episode that we're going to put out is going to be about The Sopranos again. We talked about season one a few months back in a bonus episode.

• 2:49Speaker 00

  This time around, we're actually going to do a big double stuffed Oreo of an episode. We're going to do seasons two and three in one mega.

• 3:00Jason Schreier?

  A little context here is that we, we wanted to talk about The Sopranos forever. And we asked listeners, and a lot of people were like really into the idea of us doing a ton of bonus episodes about The Sopranos. We decided to do a little bit of a compromise and do a couple of smashed seasons together. So we'll do, we did one, we'll do two and three together, four and five together. Maybe we'll just do one big one for six down the road. So rather than doing a new bonus episode for every season of The Sopranos, we're going to condense a little bit. But it'll be fun and that'll be our project over the next year or two.

• 3:32Speaker 00

  It will be, and it will definitely be, like I said, a double stuffed Oreo. It'll be a big app, but that'll be really fun. So you're definitely getting something good if you're subscribed to that bonus feed. So once again, it's maximumfun.org/join if you want to join.

• 3:50Jason Schreier?

  It's as if you're getting two bonus episodes for the price of one.

• 3:53Speaker 00

  Kinda. I mean, it's about two episodes of The Sopranos, but also you're getting many, many dozens.

• 3:58Jason Schreier?

  You're getting like 70 bonus episodes.

• 4:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're getting like a heck of a lot of episodes for the price of one. I, I don't know, for the monthly price, don't worry about it. You're getting a lot of bonus.

• 4:08Jason Schreier?

  The value of a triple subscription just goes up with every passing month as we add more to it. It's kind of like Xbox Game Pass. Unlike Xbox Game Pass, we do not remove things.

• 4:19Speaker 00

  I don't know if we want to compare it to that.

• 4:21Kirk Hamilton?

  Could you imagine if we did? We're actually removing the Last of Us 2 Beans cast. We're taking out some of the older ones. The Mario movie episodes.

• 4:29Speaker 00

  But then we put it back in later and we like announce it and we're like, "The Mario movie episode's coming back, people." We're not doing any of that. All of those episodes are available all the time. It's an incredible deal. You can slap any device in your house and say, "This is a triple click," and it'll be completely accurate. Okay, Kirk, what are we talking about today?

• 4:50Kirk Hamilton?

  Today, we are talking about a topic that comes to us via the digital version of the rooftop, where everybody gets together to listen to Triple Click. That is the Triple Click Discord server, where user Nick a little while ago, who suggested this idea that we talk about early access just as a hot topic. And that seemed actually like a great idea. Sometimes we get great ideas from our listeners, and that is one. If you have a good idea for the show, or a bad idea, really, if you have an idea, we prefer good ones, though. Send it to [email protected]. That's the most reliable way to get something to us. You can post in the Discord, but we don't always check that. So email is the best, the best way to go.

• 5:35Kirk Hamilton?

  So anyways, thanks, Nick, for this episode suggestion. We're going to talk about early access, that being the practice of selling games that are still in development and allowing people to start playing them early. Something that became a practice known as early access anyways in around 2013. But early access to games has been around a little bit longer than that. And we can, of course, talk about that as well. This is a really kind of a broad topic and something that we are just gonna kind of throw out there. I'm gonna throw some chum into the water for the two of you, and then I'll sort of study it and eventually dive in and see what I want to chew on myself. But yeah, early access. Let's just start some... What are your thoughts on early access, the two of you? What is your history with it?

• 6:19Kirk Hamilton?

  What are your current impressions of it? Maddie, how about you kick us off?

• 6:24Speaker 00

  I would say we all probably have a similarly long history of it. The first time I think I played an early access game was Day Z, although I could be wrong, could be misremembering. But I remember thinking that was kind of an interesting way to play that game. It was in early access for several years and it was already felt pretty complete when I was playing it way back then. And my biggest early access memory, which I'm sure we're going to talk about today is Hades, where I remember a friend of mine playing it in early access a ton and streaming it on Discord and watching it. I didn't play it myself at the time, but I saw him playing it and was like, okay, this game looks kind of cool. Doesn't seem like it has a lot of story going on, because at the time it didn't.

• 7:07Speaker 00

  But it's got some cool fighting mechanics and Greek gods, I like those. And then when it actually launched in full, it was a super different game because it had way more going on. But that core combat that I'd seen my friend playing was there, except also evolved. And so those are kind of two examples that I would propose, which is a game like Day Z, which was already pretty similar at its core concept in early access. It just would get refined over time. And then something like Hades, which I saw as being pretty different in early access, much more minimal, and then became really different when it launched in 1.0 and was kind of more prominent in 1.0.

• 7:48Speaker 00

  And I think people kind of think of the Hades 1.0 release as a big cultural moment for that game. And there's a lot of examples in the middle of those two. But the fact that early access encompasses those two games and everything in between is pretty fascinating. You really don't know what you're going to get at all as a player when you hear the words "early access."

• 8:12Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, that's true. It can mean a lot of different things. Jason, how about you? Your history and some opening thoughts on early access as a concept?

• 8:20Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I think my first early access game, I guess if you want to describe it as early access, even though that term wasn't around back then, is Minecraft, because that was in its kind of alpha state before it was formally released to the world in 2011.

• 8:37Jason Schreier?

  And yeah, it's interesting. I think there are two kind of big buckets of type of video game. And one is the kind of the gameplay centric, kind of systems based game, sort of like, oh Kirk is pantomiming, holding a bucket and stirring around in it. The gameplay bucket. That's the gameplay bucket. The kind of the Minecraft, the Day Z, where really a demo of the game can tell you everything you need to know about it. And from there, it's just about expanding and adding new things. And okay, that's actually really distracting. Okay.

• 9:13Jason Schreier?

  And, and so those, those are also like the perfect games to pitch to publishers because you can very easily make a vertical, not easily, but you could make a vertical slice that demonstrates what the entire game will be about. And then there's the more narrative centric games, which I guess Hades would be a little closer to that. Maybe that would be in that bucket, where it's a lot harder to see what the entire story is going to be like, what the entire game is going to be like, but you can still play around with early access. Baldur's Gate 3 might be a good example of a game that has its feet in both buckets. It's kind of like, imagine a person standing in front of the buckets and instead of picking one, just sticking a foot in both of them. There's a foot in each bucket, which is quite the mixed metaphor. Is this the developer?

• 9:56Jason Schreier?

  Why? These are buckets that people are hanging out in. That's the, that's the metaphor that we're describing. Well, okay. So Baldur's Gate, well, what are, what in this metaphor, what is inside of the buckets that we're describing? Are the games themselves inside the buckets? Baldur's Gate 3, we split it in half and put one in each bucket? I mean, the buckets that I have here on my desk, yes, the games themselves are in there. Got it. Kind of a, it's a little bit of a slurry, just sort of. It is. A bunch of different narrative games in that second. And Baldur's Gate 3 might be a good example where like, if you had told me in advance that a story of a game like that would be in early access, I would be like, that's so weird. Why would you do that? But because it's so system heavy, you can have all of act one, or a good chunk of act one be in early access and just have players test out and flesh out the systems. And they spent years iterating because of early access.

• 10:42Jason Schreier?

  Broad thoughts are that I used to be very skeptical of early access. I think. My initial reaction back when it first started becoming a prominent thing in 2013 was, I can't believe people are just trying to take money from players to just like pay for these buggy, buggy games that are just unfinished and might never be finished. And that that part is still the case and there are still examples of games that were in early access, but just never actually launched and people just wasted their money. Same as kind of unresolved Kickstarter campaigns, that sort of thing. Maybe that's the third bucket, the unfinished bucket, the bucket that was never finished. But as time has gone on, I've grown to appreciate early access as a

• 11:27Jason Schreier?

  unique part of the video game industry, something that only games can do that we can't really see in other forms of media. And also something that I think can do a little bit more than just sell a game early and help that developer finish it financially. It can also build a community and allow for the kind of back and forth, playtesting and development and iteration that I don't think would be possible if you kept a game to yourself. And it's gotten to the point now where I think some games not choosing to go early access or have kind of an open process, where that was actually a death blow for those games, such as High Guard, might be the most prominent example of that, where if that game had gone into some form of early access

• 12:10Jason Schreier?

  or open beta or something, would have been a very different story for that launch, I think. So I, my thoughts on that have evolved quite a bit over the years and I've grown to appreciate the value in early access and seen a lot of the charm. And I also think I've been surprised to see that for players, a lot of the times, I, at the beginning, I, years and years ago, I assumed the players like wouldn't be that interested and a lot of them would just want to wait for 1.0. But what we've seen over and over again is that sometimes with early access, a game can have this big spike of players and sales when it launches in early access and then another big spike of players and sales when it goes into 1.0. So it can really work out nicely for a lot of games. So I guess my opinions have kind of leaned positively in recent years.

• 12:57Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I, um, that, that was a lot of interesting ideas. I'm gonna come back to one of those, I think, but I'll just say that my-

• 13:03Jason Schreier?

  Are you saying it was a bucket full?

• 13:05Kirk Hamilton?

  It was, it was a whole, a whole third bucket. So Jason's interesting ideas.

• 13:09Jason Schreier?

  The fourth bucket now. We've added a lot of buckets to it.

• 13:11Kirk Hamilton?

  Okay, I lost track of them. Oh, you're right. They're here on my desk.

• 13:14Jason Schreier?

  Oh, Kirk, oh, you got some buckets there, okay.

• 13:16Kirk Hamilton?

  Mm-hmm. Um, so I'll come back to one of those, I think, and we can go from there. But yeah, just to say my, my history with this. Like you, Jason, I played Minecraft very early on. It was right when I was kind of first getting into writing about video games. I remember actually Penny Arcade talking about it, and I think they were instrumental in spreading the word about that game. And they had talked about it on their blog or something, or I don't know, and they were pretty visible around 2009. And that kind of got a lot of people talking about it, and I saw it around and started playing it.

• 13:50Jason Schreier?

  God, that's so funny to remember a day when people like read web comics.

• 13:54Speaker 00

  I, I know, and read Tycho's blog and where that could really move the needle for Minecraft.

• 13:59Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it really did. It really did. And it, it made me check out that game, or at least led to the sort of popularity of the game that made me want to check it out, because at the time, it wasn't like anything I had ever seen before. And yeah, I actually played more of that game in early access than I did when it came out. Uh, it was actually pretty great, like, when it first launched, and the roughness of it was interesting and is kind of elemental to what it's like to play it. Even now, it still kind of feels like a game that's constantly in development, even though it's owned by Microsoft and is, in some ways, you know, far more corporate. When you log in, when you look at that first screen, I mean, it still is just like all these weird updates and, you know, servers

• 14:41Kirk Hamilton?

  and all this really open-ended stuff that looks very early access, even though it's been-

• 14:45Jason Schreier?

  I think, I mean, it's to Microsoft's credit that they've kind of allowed it to be its own thing, very independent from the rest of Xbox.

• 14:51Kirk Hamilton?

  It really is. Honestly, that is such a surprise and so cool. It's like something that Microsoft never gets credit for. And it's not to say like, oh, Microsoft, whatever, I don't know. Microsoft has screwed up so many things, but it is crazy because they're, it's so easy to imagine them screwing Minecraft up and they didn't. At least they haven't yet, and that's remarkable. Anyways, so the other game that I think of when I think of early access is actually Divinity Original Sin 2. I was a little earlier on Larian than a lot of people that I knew. I can't even remember why I wound up playing that game. Actually, Divinity Original Sin 1, I should say. That was the first time that I played a game in early access and it was Larian. They have done early access, I think, for all of their games or for that one and for the sequel and then for Baldur's Gate 3.

• 15:36Kirk Hamilton?

  And I remember playing it and thinking, this is remarkably feature complete. This is really cool. It really plays well. I think it was the whole first act of the game, the kind of same approach that they've subsequently taken. And then when the final game came out, I found it overwhelming because it was so much bigger and I'd already spent so many hours playing the early access build that I didn't wind up ever finishing it.

• 16:01Kirk Hamilton?

  So I think that's kind of a recurring theme where if I put a lot of time into a game in early access, I then don't finish the game when it finally comes out. Or now more commonly, when a game comes out in early access, Hades 2 is a good example. I'll just kind of say, I'm gonna wait, you know, Fields of Mysteria, there's another one where I really want to check that game out, but I'm just gonna wait until it's in 1.0, even if the early access version is incredibly feature-rich and, and complete.

• 16:28Jason Schreier?

  For Divinity Original Sin 1, was that like Baldur's Gate 3? Where it was like the first act of the game was in early access? And so that's what you played a bunch of?

• 16:37Kirk Hamilton?

  Yes, that I think is right. I don't know how much of it it was. I played a lot. And that game is like structured pretty differently even than Divinity Original Sin 2. It's been a while, but it's a game where there are like two protagonists and it's designed to be played in co-op. And there's a whole like rock, paper, scissors system for making decisions and you can play online with people. It's very cool, but kind of a different thing than the sequel. Equal and it's been a long time since that happened. But yeah, I'm pretty sure it was something like that. It was a big chunk of the map or it was kind of a whole complete map with a bunch of quests and all kinds of stuff to do. And because those games are so involved, it was like a lot of time to just screw around. And it's so systemic that you can sort of just play with it forever.

• 17:18Kirk Hamilton?

  And of course they're watching everyone do that and they're learning and, you know, changing stuff and fixing things and, you know, squashing bugs and, and so on. They make a ton of changes over the course of that early access period. It seems to be kind of one of their secrets to their success.

• 17:32Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, yeah. And it's like getting players in there. I mean, a lot of developers during the course of game development, you constantly have people come in and play your game. You have play testers giving you feedback all the time. But like early access is just that at a bigger scale. And I guess the risk is that you burn people out. You reveal kind of too much of your game in advance. People get sick of your game, et cetera, et cetera. But I don't know, in today's world, it feels like more of an advantage than not, especially for a certain type of game. And those Larian games, I think it works really well for, for a variety of reasons. Also bug testing and a lot of bugs got squashed. I remember playing early access for Baldur's Gate 3 in act one and it was a lot bugger than it was in the final product.

• 18:17Jason Schreier?

  And you could see that because act one is so much more polished than the rest of the game. You could see that act one was in early access for three years.

• 18:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, I remember having mixed feelings about early access early on, like you, Jason, for that reason. Because I saw it as a way to take advantage of player goodwill. And I still feel this way on some level. I just feel a little differently about it now, given the financial struggles of the industry and my increased knowledge of them. And just the fact that it's almost impossible to make any game in the first place, especially for indie devs. And so the idea of crowdsourcing bug testing for people who are willing to do it, which is essentially what you're signing up for. A lot of times when you're playing an early access game is the understanding that.

• 19:04Speaker 00

  You will be playing an incomplete product and you can choose to engage with that product as a bug tester. And sometimes there will be specific avenues to do so that you'll be openly invited to do by the developer on the store page. They'll have an email where you can submit requests or problems. Like that entire culture of early access is something that I would say I still have some mixed feelings about, even though now I think I have a more understanding and compassion towards the fact that that is the way that early access works for a lot of developers.

• 19:39Jason Schreier?

  For what it's worth, it's kind of a larger scale version of something that's always been around. I mean, friends and family betas have been a thing for a long time. Back in the day, I'm not sure if this still happens, but it certainly did happen that companies like EA would, would, would go to and like find people off the street and bring them in as testers in exchange for like a pizza or something like that. So it's not always like a paid gig, this kind of bug testing aspect of it. So yeah, I mean, I can see why you might feel conflicted about the labor issues there. But it's definitely been around for a while. And then, yeah, I don't know. It's, it's an interesting

• 20:19Jason Schreier?

  one. It's like when I have a book manuscript and I ask people to read it and give me feedback, like I'm not paying them for their work there. Granted, most of the people I'm asking are like friends or family members. So it's not like I'm asking the public to just like give me free labor. But I don't know, if I were to do that and be like, you know what, I want to kind of crowdsource this and get like a thousand people to read my book and give me thoughts on it if they want. I don't know. Is that taking advantage of labor? I don't know. I don't know the answer to that question.

• 20:49Speaker 00

  That'd be really weird and kind of cool.

• 20:51Kirk Hamilton?

  I think that the if they want part of that question is the most important part. If people want to do that, they can. I mean, I do early access for Strong Songs on Patreon now, where I release episodes a week early on Patreon as a little bonus for people. And most of the time, it's just a nice little thing. People can check out the episode early. Most, no one, almost no one cares. Just want to support the show and they get this nice little extra thing. But occasionally, someone will notice, especially like if there's a noticeable just editing screw up or something, they'll catch it and say, hey, there's a weird thing where the guitar like plays when I don't think it was supposed to. And I'll be like, oh, man, like, thank you so much. And I think that's fine. I mean, like, they want to do that. Like, people like the show.

• 21:35Kirk Hamilton?

  They want to support it. And of course, it is just me, you know, I'm not Electronic Arts. I'm not Rockstar Games.

• 21:41Speaker 00

  You're an indie creator.

• 21:43Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, feels like people are maybe a little more like allow for more early access with indie games than with games from big publishers, even though, as we're talking about and as you've both sort of alluded to, big publishers have a really hard time now. And, you know, not even big publishers, but like larger studios, like the studio that released High Guard, can release a game that's a sort of mid-budget but significant undertaking that crashes hard enough on a release that they, a lot of people lose their jobs, this really awful outcome. And you do look at, I look at something like that and I think, man, they totally could have done early access and this could have been a very different narrative. I always think about No Man's Sky when I think about this topic because No Man's Sky,

• 22:28Kirk Hamilton?

  released by Hello Games in 2016, so a few years after early access had become a thing. And was this kind of, it was this very weird situation where the game did very well, but was kind of reviled by a whole lot of people because it fell so short of the promises they had made. And then they spent years making those promises come true and rebuilding goodwill. And it almost felt like the game was an early access game, it just wasn't called that. And now No Man's Sky has this completely transformed, unbelievably different and really impressive experience. And it's like, it's, I don't know when 1.0 would have even been. I'm not sure what anyone at Hello Games would even tell you about, you know,

• 23:10Kirk Hamilton?

  when they consider the full version of it to be. But it's a game that has just continued to change forever. And that brings me to the question I want to throw to the two of you. Is early access?

• 23:21Kirk Hamilton?

  A meaningful, is it just a descriptor? Or does it actually mean something? And to put that another way, are all games released in early access?

• 23:31Jason Schreier?

  Okay, so I have some food for thought. All right, this is, maybe this is a hot take. I don't know. Let's declare that this is a hot take to go into the fifth bucket or something like that.

• 23:41Kirk Hamilton?

  I'm running out of space for buckets on my desk.

• 23:43Jason Schreier?

  I feel like early access is the same thing as a live service game, except generally without the monetization part of it. So kind of a live service game is by nature an early access. Fortnite, when it came out, is a drastically different game than Fortnite is today. And you could describe it as like, oh, when it came out before it even had Battle Royale, it was an early access. Just like No Man's Sky, when that came out, it was very different than it is today. Just like Minecraft or whatever, actual early access games. Hades 2 was very different when it first came out than it is today. But the biggest difference is that with an early access game, generally you are asked to pay at the beginning, sometimes for a discount than the full price, which is part of the appeal. And you are not expected to pay again as you play.

• 24:28Jason Schreier?

  Like the game, there are no in-game microtransactions generally. I'm sure there are cases where there are, but generally speaking, especially since some of these are single parent games. And No Man's Sky, I mean, I think one of the reasons they built up such goodwill over the years is that they were just continuously updating that game for free and adding new stuff to it without charging people for a single DLC, a single expansion, anything like that. People could just buy it and download it for free. Granted, that game, that whole, the whole decade of No Man's Sky only worked because that game had high enough sales at the beginning to be able to justify them spending the money to keep updating it over time. But I think that's how you build up goodwill. Whereas a Fortnite or something else that sells in-game stuff, it feels a lot grosser because it feels like it is just continually generating revenue

• 25:12Jason Schreier?

  off of these new updates and expecting people to keep paying to keep up with the FOMO or keep up with their friends or whatever. So I think it's kind of, we're talking, these are kind of two sides of the same coin. And a lot of games are in this space. But the early access and the games where you just pay once and that's the end of it just feels a lot more, I don't know, genuine and less exploitative, that's for sure.

• 25:36Speaker 00

  I think you have something there, but I think what's different about early access is very psychological because the term itself has, I think, an inherent goodwill built into it because we all now understand the term to mean this game is not complete, you're here behind the velvet rope to watch as we're still putting together the party. Your forgiveness is implicit there and that helps every early access game, I would say inherently. That and if there's a discount, like you mentioned, Jason, that helps too because it's like, okay, I'm also kind of investing in this and maybe I'll be glad I got it at a discount

• 26:19Speaker 00

  because it's going to be so great later on. Whereas a live service game, I think, almost has the opposite effect where people will kind of be leaning back with their arms crossed and being like, all right, you're going to really have to impress me with this because the live service landscape is so competitive. And I'm not even saying that the landscape for a regular, regular early access game isn't also competitive. It's still trying to get eyes. It's still trying to get people to stop playing Fortnite and play their game. But there's just something really different psychologically about those two terms. I think people feel skeptical about live service games because they're like, okay, you're

• 26:59Speaker 00

  expecting me to keep logging into this forever. And that idea that it's going to keep changing and improving is not necessarily a promise that has the same intention behind it as early access. I don't know why, but it just, it just doesn't.

• 27:17Kirk Hamilton?

  I think you're on to something. I mean, I think there's a really profound difference that is psychological on the part of the player, even though what we're talking about, if you just look at what's happening, you know, with the game's release and with how things are functioning, you know, yes, with a live service game, they're charging for updates or something like an Assassin's Creed, which isn't a multiplayer game, but Ubisoft does charge for You know, expansions, even though they release a lot of stuff for free post-release as well. Like, if you look at what's happening, there's, it's harder to tell everything apart. But man, the psychological thing is real. You could, I don't know how, like, early access works with games that will eventually be service games. So if we imagine a world where High Guard, for example, had been released in early access,

• 28:02Kirk Hamilton?

  like, how would that have gone differently? How might players have thought of it differently if it was an early access game and it was described as such, instead of being a free-to-play, ongoing game? I don't know, but I, it feels to me anyways, Matty, like you're on to something there. That when someone shows you a new service game and says, "Here it is. The new hot service game, it's a multiplayer shooter. Here's all what makes it so cool about it." Players just look at that and think, "Man, this better be good if this is gonna earn my time." And, like, we're launching this thing in early access. We're gonna see what it is, we're gonna find out together. That is just a kind of a different process as a player. Even if functionally, it's like, actually very similar. The two things are very similar.

• 28:41Speaker 00

  It's implied to be collaborative, I think, is part of it. Is that it's like, you, the player, even if that's only an illusion, the implication is that the player will actually have some input on the final product and help it in some way.

• 28:53Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I think that's right. And I think something that happens with service games a lot is that, you know, we've kind of described it as this upward trajectory with a service game. Okay, we're gonna just keep expanding it and making it better. But that's not the case, right? I mean, anyone who's bought into a service game knows that a lot of times, the game gets worse, or it changes in ways that you personally don't like. It embraces some other type of player who they've decided is their core audience. They nerf some ability that was really fun, but that didn't serve their purposes. And that kind of thing also happens in early access games. It happens just in single-player games. FromSoft will do this, you know? They'll nerf some weapon that everybody really likes in Elden Ring. It happens across the board. But in an early access game, there is that sense of dialogue.

• 29:36Kirk Hamilton?

  And you will see players in the early access forums or on the developer Discord saying, "No, like, don't nerf this thing, it was super good." And there are a lot of success stories where developers will say, "We made this change and players were super clear." That they didn't like it and we realized they were right and we went back and we figured out how to make the game work without the change that we had made and it made the game better. And those are the kinds of changes that lead to an eventual 1.0 where people are like really psyched and your hardest core players who gave you that feedback in the first place feel really good because you listened to them and that you changed the game to make it more fun for them.

• 30:11Jason Schreier?

  I want to get at the question you asked earlier Kirk, which is are all games really in early access? Cause I think that's another-

• 30:18Kirk Hamilton?

  I'm very glad that we didn't dodge this.

• 30:20Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I don't want to dodge that because that's another interesting just kind of take, interesting food for thought. I was thinking, I mean, you could, you could ask this question about a lot of games. I guess the answer to that question is that like you can kind of feel if a game feels like it's complete or not, or you just have to kind of use your subjective judgment. Like, I don't know. Edmund McMillan was on the show a couple of months ago talking about Mugenics, a game I loved and I played to near completion, almost the final final landing. And he told us that he's going to be working on this game for years to come and adding more stuff to it and DLC and all this other jazz, which to me seems like that, isn't that the definition of an early access game? But if you play this game, it's polished as hell. It's humongous. Like you wouldn't think of it as early access.

• 31:05Jason Schreier?

  So I don't know. Is it a live service game? I don't know. I don't know how you would describe it. I think the borders are all just kind of blurred.

• 31:11Speaker 00

  I think we asked him and he was like, I don't know.

• 31:12Jason Schreier?

  He was like, yeah, I don't know. I mean, the definitions were, at the end, we're just kind of like trying to categorize the chaos that is video games and that's never really possible. But it is, I mean, I'm also thinking about Crimson Desert, which is one of the biggest games of the year, has sold like 5 million copies. It's a game out of Korea, came out a couple of weeks ago. I dabbled with it, played the first like three or four hours and really did not like it, but a lot of people seem like they're really into it. And I was just talking to my friend who's, this game has like penetrated the mainstream. It's like my high school group chat is talking about Crimson Desert. So I was talking to a friend of mine who's really into it and he was talking about how every week it seems like the developers are adding these patches based on what people are saying in Reddit.

• 31:56Jason Schreier?

  So like the controls were a complete disaster when it launched. But since then, they've been patching and playing around with them. All this other stuff, they've just been going through player feedback and addressing it, which is the type of thing that you can only do when a game is out in the world and played by millions of people. And therefore, you're just getting this barrage of feedback. But it does add credence to that point that all games are really in early access. And the flip side of that is like, if you don't want your game to be thought of as if it's in early access after you release it, then you what, don't add updates and address player feedback? And that's also a problem. So I don't know, in a way, I think playing any game is a conversation between the player and the developers. And so why not carry that forward?

• 32:38Jason Schreier?

  Man, I remember talking about this when Mass Effect 3 came out and everybody hated the ending. And they patched it and did a new ending. And that was very controversial. And some people were like, man, they shouldn't have listened to those whiny players. And I remember we were talking about this at Kotaku and Steven Tattilo, our boss at the time, and I also was on his side, was arguing that like, this is something that only games can do, where they're in this conversation with the player, the developer, and they can be reactive and change things based on how they feel like people are reacting. I think games are closer to like, I don't know, theater than they are to movies or books, because they are a conversation between the player and the creators.

• 33:19Jason Schreier?

  And so therefore, you have to be willing to like, play around with the form in a way that maybe you wouldn't in a more quote unquote auteur-driven medium that's more like, this is my art, here it is. You can interpret it however you want. I think games are a different beast and early access is just a big part of that. And so, yes, all games are early access in some way.

• 33:39Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, this is an old, I mean, it's an old artistic process, right? Think of a stand-up comedian who takes their routine to kind of closed room and works on their material and looks at what gets the best laughs and kind of develops it and hones it. And then eventually they do their comedy special and that's kind of documented, or a band.

• 33:58Jason Schreier?

  Which is also like theater, like, and like video games. I would put that all in, let's take out some new buckets and let's put all those in the same bucket.

• 34:06Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I mean, I guess it's performing. Well, it goes beyond even performing, though. So of course, like a band that breaks out their new material and works on it and hones it on stage, then finally takes it into the studio after the tour because they've really worked out how it works and what the crowd responds to and what feels right when they're performing. And then they record it and you get the final version. But then, of course, it probably keeps changing after that. And you, but then there's also like people who write episodic fiction, people who, some people who write like fanfic and stuff on fanfic boards and they release new chapters. And then they have these rabid fandoms that read along and give tons of feedback. And so they write for those people and they, they change the story according to what people want. But, you know, I mean, Charles Dickens

• 34:48Kirk Hamilton?

  did this with David Copperfield, too. Like, he released his stories episodically and he would hear back from people about what was happening. So you have to imagine he was at least somewhat affected.

• 34:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. I always think of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for this and how angry people were when he killed off Sherlock Holmes. It's like one of the first examples of rabid fans forcing the author to bring a character back to life.

• 35:09Kirk Hamilton?

  And that was him being like, I'm sick of Sherlock Holmes and I want to do something else, right? They're like, no, no, no, no, no.

• 35:14Speaker 00

  And the fans, the angry, the angry fans, as we know them today, were like, you can't do that. We're, we're doing the equivalent of a Twitter dogpile to you.

• 35:24Kirk Hamilton?

  It's funny. Yeah. It's like what people did with the end of that Sherlock show where they became convinced that it was all a huge, like, whatever, a fake out and there was gonna be a better finale.

• 35:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then people did that with Stranger Things also.

• 35:36Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, the Stranger Things thing.

• 35:37Speaker 00

  Everything old is new again.

• 35:39Jason Schreier?

  I was just talking about How I Met Your Mother. People did that with the ending of How I Met Your Mother and they did an alternate ending for the DVD that is like, actually, this thing doesn't happen.

• 35:46Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah. So I think there is still something to be said for Stephen's observation, which I agree with, that video games offer this kind of unique way that the actual finished product can just be changed or expanded or updated. And that games have always been expanded after release. And it's something that we just sort of expect as part of the medium in a way that we wouldn't expect in a movie or a book. We wouldn't expect someone to be like, oh, uh, reworked the last chapter and now in the new additions, uh, your favorite character doesn't die anymore because that bums too many people out. Like, that would not happen in a book. And you actually could imagine that happening in a game.

• 36:21Jason Schreier?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah, that's what makes games cool in a lot of ways is that kind of that. Conversation that you're having. I always think about this when I'm playing something. It's like, what was the designer thinking here? Like, what's this kind of like, whatever? What are they doing to try to trick me or delight me or surprise me? And yeah, early access to extrapolate it. But yeah, I mean, any game that gets patches is like technically launched in some sort of early access. Maybe some, maybe there's a spectrum of early access. And some games are earlier than others, but all of them are on it.

• 36:51Kirk Hamilton?

  And it's true. Some of this is that it is like a category on Steam that your game can be called early access and that simplifies things in a way because once it's labeled early access on Steam, it has to fulfill a certain number of, you know, qualities. Like it has to have a couple of things be true of it in order for it to be early access. Even though there are games like Star Citizen, for example, which is in early access and has been forever and possibly will be forevermore. We don't know, but has been in early access for a long time. Even though it's not on Steam early access, the game is not finished. People have been paying them scads of money for more than a decade. And they do keep releasing stuff and letting people in. I think some people get a kick out of that. They like just being part of it and seeing this

• 37:36Kirk Hamilton?

  super ambitious thing, even if it never does come out.

• 37:39Jason Schreier?

  Isn't it up to a billion dollars in revenue at this point?

• 37:42Kirk Hamilton?

  I have no idea. It wouldn't surprise me, but I don't know.

• 37:45Speaker 00

  It's a huge number.

• 37:46Kirk Hamilton?

  I stopped following that story a little while ago. And then whenever I look into it, I'm like, wow, this is just what a saga Star Citizen is.

• 37:53Jason Schreier?

  Yeah. PC Gamer headline, December 25th, 2025. So just three months ago, four months ago. Star Citizen is on course to reach $1 billion in player funding in 2026. And we still might not get to play its single player campaign.

• 38:07Kirk Hamilton?

  Man, it's so it's looking at that kind of process that like where you're buying in to be a part of the development for this long period of time, whether it's Star Citizen or a Steam early access game. I think that that that process actually plays a cool role that will become more important over the years to come. This is something that's come up a few times when we've been talking about AI and its role in game development or just creative work in general. But something that I've noticed more and more is this trend toward disclosing and showing how your work was made. Like, you know, not just the sort of this was made by humans disclaimer at the end of the episode, but also the documentary about the show, you know, the behind the scenes, look at how things work.

• 38:50Kirk Hamilton?

  The Patreon or the other, you know, sort of crowdfunding site where when people join it, they get to see you making the thing. You show them all your work. And it's partly, it used to be you would do this to justify the fact that people are paying you. You'd say, look how hard this is. Like, I'm spending so many hours making this thing. It's your money is going to to feed me while I do this, you know? But now it's also become, look how I make this thing. I'm I'm really making it and I'm not just like, you know, having a computer crap it out for me and then taking your money. And with more and more games, like with games, AI becoming more and more of a part of video games, having people in there during early access, seeing how it's made, getting to know all the different developers, seeing the teams, you know, hell, something like Double

• 39:34Kirk Hamilton?

  Fine Documentary, like getting to really look inside the studio. That's very good for communicating the human work that goes into the game. And it strikes me as something that'll probably continue being being fairly common.

• 39:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's funny you bring up Psychotacy because I was going to bring it up in a different context of related to this topic, which is something I always think about in relation to the idea of games being updated is the very beginning of that documentary where they they have that footage of the developers making Psychonauts 1. And it's like this really old grainy VHS footage. It's delightful to watch, but of course, we recommend the whole thing. But just that one pocket of the documentary is really fascinating because when they get to the end of developing it, they talk about. Pressing the game to a disk and still having bugs in the game and like that tension just being part of putting a game on a disk and that just used to be the way that games

• 40:30Speaker 00

  were made. I mean, this is like a extremely obvious statement, I guess, but heading into this discussion, it was something I was thinking about a lot is that games didn't used to feel as much like theater or comedy sets as they get to now because of internet updates, which feel completely normal to us as part of this conversation, but-

• 40:49Jason Schreier?

  Console games specifically, because PC games, PC games always had that, or some PC games always had that.

• 40:55Speaker 00

  To a degree, to a degree. But there would also potentially be something that you would buy and then if you didn't have great internet access, maybe it couldn't be updated. And there's still people now who don't have great internet access and are playing games in this form and maybe don't relate to some of this conversation and that's fine. And that idea of games, I think, has really changed from something where the game had to be finished in time to be pressed to a disk and be good enough back then to be something that couldn't be updated and could at least be playable. And that, I think, is just an interesting piece to this. Like Psychonauts 1, I think, is maybe an example of a game that wasn't in early access. If we're going to say all games are in early access, maybe we say that one wasn't and all the other games of its

• 41:40Speaker 00

  ilk couldn't have been, although maybe-

• 41:43Jason Schreier?

  Right, it would be all current games.

• 41:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 41:46Jason Schreier?

  Any console game before 2013 or so, like, was just static by nature. Yeah, for the most part.

• 41:53Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I think about a game like Subnautica, which was a game that I discovered after its 1.0 release. That game is amazing, man. That game is so good. I was just watching videos when I was sort of doing research for this episode and thinking about early access. It was launched in early access and people will make videos now, you can find them on YouTube, where they'll release videos where they go back and they play different builds of Subnautica to see how the game changed because it has, that game has a very, like, a pretty substantial fandom and I think people are very interested in that whole process. And it did change a lot over the course of early access and it got a lot better. Like, the version that I played was this exceptional game, really, really cool and well-made.

• 42:36Kirk Hamilton?

  The earlier versions just have a lot of different stuff in them and it's so cool to go back and look to see what was there and what wasn't. And especially neat that it is possible to get those early builds still and to still play them. Like, that kind of transparency, you know, it's sickos only, right? It's not gonna be for most people. But then again, if you're doing early access and the builds exist, why not put them out there and let people see that process? I think that's a really cool part of early access, if people are up for maintaining the archive.

• 43:06Speaker 00

  Totally agree. And I still think it's really fascinating, because I didn't play Baldur's Gate 3 in its original early access form, to hear about how the characters changed over time and were completely rewritten in some cases. I think the character Will is the one who got the biggest rewrite, as I recall, but like, they've all been rewritten in some form or other. And that, I just think, is really fascinating, that like, there's people out there arguing, like, "Oh, this other version of the character was better." Like, I just, I think that's really cool. I think that's something about this kind of art that is really, really neat. And without early access and without, like, the transparency of including those builds as something that everyone can play, you don't have those experiences and those debates

• 43:49Speaker 00

  among fans of like, "Well, what's the real version?" quote-unquote of this story.

• 43:55Jason Schreier?

  Yeah.

• 43:55Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, that's incredibly interesting. Almost like different peop- like, different Dungeon Masters campaigns that you're just hearing about, but they use the same kind of module to do the campaign. So they just have a different take on these characters that are kind of sketched out for them, but they, they come up with their own version. And that is really cool.

• 44:12Jason Schreier?

  It is. The Larian games are unusual in that, like, most, like I mentioned before, most story games are not, like, good fits for early access, but somehow it works for those games. One other thing I wanted to mention that I kind of alluded to before, but just want to dive a little bit deeper into, is the community aspect of it all, because I think that's a big part of what makes early access successful. And it's actually, it's a really good model from a developer point of view for a lot of reasons. I guess the big- Downside is that you kind of ruin some of your surprises and you lose your opportunity to make a big splash and get all word of mouth on launch and stuff. But the upsides are really myriad. I mean, you got, first of all, you get the revenue coming in earlier than expected. So you could potentially be, spend more time in development because you have more people

• 44:56Jason Schreier?

  buying your game and therefore giving you more padding to your schedule and therefore can make a better game. You get all that feedback that we talked about earlier. But then this is, this might be the most important one is you start building a community and you start getting all these people who will be advocates for your game and start building word of mouth for your game, which is super important in a market like today's where there are so many releases. I mean, there were 20,000 releases on Steam last year. Even if like a quarter of those were like real games, that's still so many, right? So being able to build a community early, I think is really important from a marketing point of view. I remember a few years ago when Yacht Club Games announced Mina the Hollower, which is a game that's coming out real soon and I'm really excited about.

• 45:41Jason Schreier?

  They did a Kickstarter and I was interviewing them for the announcement and I asked their studio head and director Sean Velasco why they were doing Kickstarter and he was like, "Well, we don't need the money. It's not about the money. It's about starting to build this community of people on Kickstarter who are like invested in the game and supporting it and can't wait to play it and are talking about it and just like building this ongoing conversation." And that's the one thing Highgarde never had until the Game Awards announcement and then it was all just a negative conversation. But if you release your game in early access, you can start building a conversation and people are talking about your game. And if there's cool parts of it, people will be more willing to kind of ignore or at least

• 46:22Jason Schreier?

  put aside the bad parts or be willing to like let the developers have room to fix the bad parts and just be talking about it and talking about it. And it can really be beneficial, I think, in a lot of ways.

• 46:34Kirk Hamilton?

  I think maybe the swaggiest current early access release, the one with the most swagger is Deadlock, the Valve multiplayer shooter, which I sometimes, I very often actually forget about.

• 46:45Jason Schreier?

  You mean the unannounced, unannounced Valve game?

• 46:47Speaker 00

  You mean the game we're not allowed to acknowledge exists?

• 46:49Kirk Hamilton?

  It's like, there's early access and then there's secret early access, where it's been out for years and so many people have played it. It is apparently exceptional. And I've seen footage of it and I've seen people on YouTube talking about it and yet it also doesn't exist and hasn't even been released yet.

• 47:05Jason Schreier?

  Hasn't even been announced yet.

• 47:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, hasn't been announced.

• 47:09Kirk Hamilton?

  But, and yet, it is, it is out there, which is a pretty, I mean, a unique, a unique circumstance for a number of reasons, partly because Valve is the one behind it, but still just a funny game that's worth mentioning in this conversation. And we're, we're running out of time, but I want to say, I guess, at the end here, that I think this is an interesting topic. I'd love to hear from some developers about this. I think if you're listening to this and you're a game developer and you have any experience with early access or there's maybe some angle to the topic that we didn't talk about or that you think we should be considering, none of us make video games, we'd love to hear from you. So shoot us an email at [email protected] and, you know, let us know your thoughts on early access. If you've ever, you know, worked with it or put out a game in early access

• 47:52Kirk Hamilton?

  or talked to people about it and have some thoughts or some knowledge, we would love to hear from you.

• 47:57Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I would also, I would love to hear if there are any downsides aside from, like I mentioned before, just kind of like ruining the potential impact of a 1.0 launch or like getting reviews on the internet too early or something like that. That was always the downside I heard a few years ago, but I wonder if that's changed and if there are any other kind of potential downsides nowadays, because generally it seems like a pretty good thing for games that it fits.

• 48:19Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, yeah, for sure. So yeah, shoot us an email and let us know your experience with it. And we look forward to hearing from you about that. All right, let's take a break and then we will come back for one more thing.

• 48:36Speaker 03

  This is John Hodgman and Jan Navarney coming to you from the flight deck. Please be comfortable. We have now reached our cruising altitude.

• 48:42Speaker 04

  Oh, that's correct. You are now free to listen to the latest season of E Pluribus Motto. As always this season, we'll discuss the official modos of US states and territories for your enjoyment.

• 48:52Speaker 03

  Look out the window. You'll see local iconography and creatures of all sorts. It'll be discussed this season, including California quails.

• 48:57Speaker 04

  Puerto Rican frogs.

• 48:59Speaker 03

  North Dakota horses.

• 49:00Speaker 04

  Spiders of New Hampshire.

• 49:01Speaker 03

  And all manner of official and unofficial state creatures. I've now turned on the enjoyment sign, so please start enjoying new episodes of E Pluribus Motto every other week on Maximum Fun and wherever you get your podcasts.

• 49:13Speaker 04

  Sit back, relax, and enjoy your listen.

• 49:20Speaker 05

  Saginaw, Michigan, Galveston, Texas, Albany, New York, the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, and Muncie, Indiana. We've just added these cities to the growing list of meetups on April 23rd for Max Fun Meetup Day. Didn't hear your city or don't know where your local meetup is? Head to MaximumFun.org/meetup and we've got all the details there. And if you still don't see your city listed, host your own. Find somewhere, a park, library, cafe, bar, any public space a small group can hang. Then fill out the form at MaximumFun.org/meetup and we'll add you to the page so other folks in your area can find you. That's MaximumFun.org/meetup. Hope to see you on April 23rd.

• 50:02Kirk Hamilton?

  And we are back for one more thing. Jason, what's your one more thing?

• 50:05Jason Schreier?

  My one more thing is a TV show called Wonder Man. This is the latest from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, came out a couple of months ago, and I just, just watched it. By the way, if you Google, I was Googling Triple Click Wonder Man to see if we had ever talked about it. I didn't think we had, but just like double check. And it says on the top of Google AI, the Google AI box, it says, "On a discussion on the podcast Triple Click, journalist Jason Schreier reported that a source working at the Marvel Studios Wonder Man described early production troubles, allegedly stating that it, quote, 'sucked.'" Which is just entirely- You've really been developing your Marvel sources pretty good, man.

• 50:46Jason Schreier?

  Entirely made up. And then, so I click, there's like a little Reddit link and I clicked it and it leads to a Reddit post that is like, Jason Trier said on TripleClick that he spoke to one of his sources who was working on the Wonder Woman game. And they are aiming for such and such release and that seems unrealistic, so. Look, that is an understandable mistake. Wonder Man, Wonder Woman, a TV show, a game. I mean, it's easy to get mixed up with this kind of thing. I mean, the takeaway here is that Google doesn't, Google says that gender is not real and therefore it's all the same. Wonder Man, Wonder Woman. Typical woke AI.

• 51:23Jason Schreier?

  Anyway, so I was, I just watched Wonder Man. It's eight episodes. Each one is like half an hour, so it's a very easy watch. And it is quite good. I really enjoyed it. It's like the, the, the least superhero-y a Marvel show has ever been. It's kind of like the, it actually reminded me, Kirk, of the way you described Night of the Seven Kingdoms is, in that it's a grounded story set in, within this world of larger things. I mean, there is some, like, the main character is a superhero, so there is that and that's part of his story, but still, it's like a, it's, it's a, it's the type of show that I think we wanted to see more of from Marvel. I think there was maybe one action sequence in the entire show, which made me very happy.

• 52:04Jason Schreier?

  So it stars Yahya Abdul-Mateen as this guy named Simon Williams and Ben Kingsley as Trevor Slattery, who you might remember from Iron Man 3, where he plays the Mandarin and that's part of his role. So he's this actor who had played the, and that was a big twist of Iron Man 3, that it wasn't actually the Mandarin, it was this guy playing him. And so the two of them are these kind of actors at different points in their career in Hollywood. And Simon Williams is hoping to get cast in the role of Wonder Man in this big, high-profile, kind of Marvel-esque production that is a remake of a film that he grew up watching in the 1970s or 80s.

• 52:45Jason Schreier?

  And the show is mostly about their relationship. There's also Joe Pantoliano, AKA Ralph Siffaretto in The Sopranos, has a fantastic role in this show that I won't, I won't say anything about it. AKA Cypher. Yes, AKA Cypher, AKA Joey Pants. He's fantastic in it. But really, it's a show about Simon and Trevor and their relationship and the way they they kind of interact and just build this budding friendship, despite being very different people, unlikely friends, I would say. And yeah, it's really cool. It's a very human story. A lot of it is about Simon and his powers. He has some superhero powers. You will you will be shocked to hear that a Marvel character has superhero powers. But a lot of it is about that. I won't get into the specifics, but a lot of it is about that.

• 53:29Jason Schreier?

  A lot of it is about his kind of back and forth with Trevor Sodary about all sorts of things and their adventures and their discussions about what acting actually means, which leads to some really good stuff. There's a whole scene where it's just like Trevor is really just trying to convince Simon that he doesn't need to over prepare and he just needs to just kind of like act. And they talk about different methods of acting. It's really interesting. And in there is an entire episode that is just a standalone story, kind of in the vein of that Mythic Quest episode, A Dark Quiet Death, or that Last of Us episode about that couple. That episode is super cool, the standalone episode. And yeah, it's just a really solid show,

• 54:14Jason Schreier?

  which is not something you can say about a lot of Marvel shows. I've enjoyed a lot of the Marvel shows I've watched, but more from a perspective of like, oh, it's just having something on while I play video games. This is a show where I put my Steam Deck down for most of it because I actually wanted to watch it. And it like, looks like a good show and is a fun show to watch. And there's no, I don't know, like acrobatic flips and superpower, like CGI effects for me to like tune out of. It's all just people interacting. It's, like I said, it's a very human story instead of a superhuman story. And I appreciated that. I highly recommend it.

• 54:48Speaker 00

  So no big like PS2 graphics fight scene in the climactic episode where Wonder Man fights an evil version of Wonder Man? You're telling me that's not how it ends?

• 54:56Jason Schreier?

  Nope, nothing like that.

• 54:58Speaker 00

  Interesting choice on their part.

• 54:59Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, yeah. There is, there is a little CGI here and there, but it's

• 55:02Speaker 00

  They gotta, they gotta.

• 55:04Jason Schreier?

  In a way that I did not have many complaints about.

• 55:09Jason Schreier?

  And yeah, I just, I really enjoyed it.

• 55:12Speaker 00

  That's great to hear. I wanted to watch this. I saw it was getting good reviews, but I feel like it really came and went and like very few people watched it and I just kept meaning to get around to it. So I'm glad to hear.

• 55:22Jason Schreier?

  No, I actually, it got renewed for a second season.

• 55:25Speaker 00

  Oh, good.

• 55:26Jason Schreier?

  It must have done well.

• 55:27Kirk Hamilton?

  I saw that. I think that was when it first got on my radar is when it got renewed and people were saying, yeah, it's pretty good.

• 55:32Jason Schreier?

  Yeah.

• 55:33Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah. Yeah, I'm glad to hear it's good. It tracks that it's kind of following this trend towards smaller stories. I feel like even like when I was watching Night of the Seven Kingdoms, it just felt like this is a pretty natural evolution for all of these big franchises. They've just exhausted the possibilities of going bigger and bigger and it's time to go smaller. It kind of makes that upcoming Avengers movie where they're bringing everybody back feel a little like they're that's moving in the old wrong direction, but I guess we'll see. That's cool. That makes me want to watch it. We don't have a Disney subscription right now, but when we get it again, I'll.

• 56:04Jason Schreier?

  When you get it, it's also very funny, I should mention. And like the showrunner, Andrew Gass was a writer for shows like Community and 30 Rock and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. So he's got a big comedy background and you could see that, see that in this show as well.

• 56:18Kirk Hamilton?

  The 30 minute thing is also a big point in its favor.

• 56:21Jason Schreier?

  30 minutes, just like Night of the Seven Kingdom. Remember I said that about that? And yeah, it's a big appeal. And yeah, it's just, it's really just a fun bromance between these two guys. And there's some other cool stuff that happens along the way. But yeah, I mean, if there's one criticism that I can make of it, and Matty, I'd be curious to hear your take on it, is that like there are literally no female characters that have any like, like development or story whatsoever, like.

• 56:46Kirk Hamilton?

  They can, they get Wonder Woman. Okay. This is Wonder Man. It's.

• 56:49Jason Schreier?

  Exactly. This is Wonder Man.

• 56:50Speaker 00

  Actually, they don't anymore. That game isn't ever coming out.

• 56:53Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, that's true. Based on, well, according to Google, gender is, is a construct.

• 56:59Speaker 00

  Wonder Man and Wonder Woman are kind of the same. So like.

• 57:01Kirk Hamilton?

  Much the same thing.

• 57:02Speaker 00

  It's actually all, all of a piece. Yeah, I'll check it out. I. I don't know. I mean, I, to give like a slight counterpoint to that, I did also really enjoy how grounded the Ms. Marvel TV show was. And so that at least it's not to say that Disney isn't still doing stories like that. And I'm also glad they're finally making anything about characters of color, because for many, many years, it was all white characters and male characters. So, hey, at least there's that, right? That's something. They're getting around to it.

• 57:32Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, Yahya Abdul Mateen, for people who aren't familiar, he actually played Dr. Manhattan in that fantastic Watchmen HBO show. And he was so good.

• 57:41Kirk Hamilton?

  Remember how good that was? That was so fucking good.

• 57:44Jason Schreier?

  Yeah.

• 57:45Speaker 00

  And he was, he was really good in that.

• 57:47Kirk Hamilton?

  He was incredible.

• 57:48Jason Schreier?

  He is fantastic in this. He is, he is incredibly, and obviously Ben Keisley is Ben Keisley. So.

• 57:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I, I mean, that Mandarin character that he played was so funny to me. So just the fact that he's back is great.

• 58:01Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, ridiculous. And yeah, the two of them, I think one of the reasons the show works is because the two of them have great chemistry and are both great actors.

• 58:09Kirk Hamilton?

  Nice.

• 58:10Speaker 00

  That's good to hear.

• 58:10Kirk Hamilton?

  Well, speaking of great female characters, Maddie, what is your one more thing?

• 58:15Speaker 00

  My one more thing is a 2003 video game that I had never played before. It's called Beyond Good and Evil. Have you two ever played this game? Or did you play it way, way back in the day?

• 58:27Kirk Hamilton?

  No. I didn't play it back in the day, but I have played it.

• 58:29Speaker 00

  Okay, yeah. I think I bought it on super discount on Steam many years ago, and it was just in my library. And I was kind of between games and was looking through my entire Steam library, just scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, hundreds of games. And I saw it there. And I was like, huh, I wonder, I wonder what this game is like. So I installed it, and I played it. It is not very long, and I was pleasantly surprised by a lot of things about it. So I used to be kind of resentful of this game, because in the 2000s, this was kind of held up pretty often. If you had any type of. Critique of video games for not having many female characters in them. There'd always be some comment or several from people being like,

• 59:09Kirk Hamilton?

  Your argument is invalid.

• 59:11Speaker 00

  Well, Jade, there's Jade in Beyond Good and Evil. And she's not like a quote unquote, sexualized character. She's a journalist. She takes care of these orphans in this super futuristic version of the world where animals, anthropomorphic animals and humans live alongside each other under this like oppressive militaristic regime. And like, that's all kind of like a fun, cool world for a female character to be centered in and to have this fun aspect to her where a lot of the mechanics are around taking pictures because she's a photojournalist. And so all of that, you know, always sounded cool to me despite my resentment over it constantly being flouted in game arguments. So I always meant to play it.

• 59:55Speaker 00

  And also, as we all know, there's a Beyond Good and Evil game that has been in development hell for many years at Ubisoft and will probably never be released. And that is interesting to me.

• 1:00:06Jason Schreier?

  Hey, for what it's worth, I heard that things were getting back on track in recent years.

• 1:00:10Speaker 00

  Really?

• 1:00:11Jason Schreier?

  Only, only took 14 years since it was announced.

• 1:00:13Kirk Hamilton?

  What's the, is Michelle Ansell still technically working on that?

• 1:00:16Speaker 00

  No, he left, right?

• 1:00:18Kirk Hamilton?

  I know he left Ubisoft, but is he consulting or something on that game?

• 1:00:20Jason Schreier?

  I feel like I saw somewhere that, I don't know.

• 1:00:23Kirk Hamilton?

  Maybe. Anyway, sorry, not to sidetrack.

• 1:00:25Speaker 00

  Anyway.

• 1:00:26Kirk Hamilton?

  I don't know what the latest is.

• 1:00:27Speaker 00

  Maybe it'll come out and people need to get caught up on Beyond Good and Evil. So going back to a 2003 game, I have really low standards. I'm just like, this game's going to be so clunky. It's going to be hard to play. I'm probably going to have to look up a walkthrough because it's going to be totally opaque. Didn't feel that way at all about Beyond Good and Evil.

• 1:00:42Kirk Hamilton?

  Nice.

• 1:00:43Speaker 00

  I actually think it holds up pretty well. It, it was criticized at the time for being very simple. The combat is very simple. You like hit things and you have a charge up attack and like, that's about it. A lot of the game is environmental puzzles that are also really simple. At no point did I have to look up a walkthrough, which again, for a 2003 game, I feel like that's really saying something. But I actually think all of that is part of what made this game a cult favorite, even though it wasn't super well reviewed at the time or like a smash financial success at the time. It kind of over, over the years became a cult hit because it does some key things really well. Jade is just a cool character for starters, but also the vision of the world is really

• 1:01:28Speaker 00

  original and it's just, it just feels good to play, which again, I don't think I can say that about many games from this time period. As simple as the mechanics are, it feels like the people that designed those mechanics were like, let's just not complicate them at all and have them feel really good. And that's surprisingly effective. Um, I will say, if you want to go back and play this, I would recommend getting, there's an HD version of the game that apparently is way better on Steam Deck in particular, if that's how you also want to play. I have the original, original version of the game and I tried to play it on Steam Deck and it's just a nightmare. Some kind soul has developed-

• 1:02:08Kirk Hamilton?

  That's funny, because there's like, there was a 20th anniversary edition of this game. I was looking at this because I was remembering-

• 1:02:14Speaker 00

  Yes, which I think might also be better. I would say get any newer version of the game than the original version of the game.

• 1:02:20Kirk Hamilton?

  Well, just to, to clarify, because I was remembering this. So in 2024, they released like an updated version of the game that has like new mechanics and stuff and they like, they kind of polished it up and cleaned it up. That's, I just had had a, it was like announced and then delayed or something, but it is out. So that, yeah, that's, was that, and that wasn't the one that you played?

• 1:02:41Speaker 00

  That's not the one I'm playing. I'm playing like the original version of the game, which I think still holds up pretty well, but I, I think those other versions are probably way better. Some kind soul has developed a controller set on Steam Deck. You know how there's those like fan made controller setups that you can download for this game that works pretty well considering, and I've been using that, uh, or used that rather to, to play the game on Steam Deck and that was pretty good. So shout out to that person. But overall, I would say maybe you don't have to play games from 2003 unless you're me and you're just curious how they hold up. Beyond Good and Evil, really interesting game. Did some cool stuff at the time and I get now why people really loved it and remembered it all these years later, especially that Pokemon Snap kind of mechanic where

• 1:03:24Speaker 00

  you're going around taking pictures. I think that's really fun and really satisfying in the game and any game where you take a picture of something and it like goes in your logbook and you see the- Numbers go up, like, come on, that's just, that's just fun. That's great stuff.

• 1:03:38Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I think I played some of that, that 20th anniversary edition and was struck, as I usually am at the beginning of this game, by just that feeling of loading into a whole new video game world that is so well-defined and feels completely original and is just full of cool, weird ideas. And they really drop you into the thick of it and it's just all happening around Jade and you have to figure it out as you go.

• 1:04:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, I loved that.

• 1:04:01Kirk Hamilton?

  And you just don't get that feeling that often.

• 1:04:03Speaker 00

  There's no, like, oh, a big exposition dump is gonna happen, like, a guy is gonna tell you what's going on. No one ever does that. You're just plopped in and you just have to figure it out. And I think that's really bold as well and cool to see in a game that was from so many years ago. And I think it still influenced how people drop you into a video game now.

• 1:04:21Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it might be like the French Connection or whatever, but it makes me think of The Fifth Element. The Fifth Element has that same feeling of a kind of slightly bent, zany sci-fi world that you just get thrown into and has so much going on in the background and you're kind of just like, you kind of just gotta go along for the ride and enjoy yourself. That's cool. Maybe I'll play through that, that 20th anniversary.

• 1:04:42Speaker 00

  It's pretty short. It's like 10 to 12 hours, which is also nice. Like, it's nice to just play a game and have it be over in a reasonable amount of time.

• 1:04:51Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it is. Nice. All right, well, I will go last. My one more thing is a YouTube video from the wonderful ContraPoints Natalie Nguyen, who doesn't put out as many videos these days, but I think is probably good for her overall. And when she does put one out, everybody pays attention, or at least everyone who likes her videos. And I got a notification for this, and the video is just called Saw. And the thumbnail is a picture of Natalie. She always has very, you know, beautiful sets in these very, you know, theatrical, wonderful-looking videos. And it's her in a room full of, like, barbed wire and kind of blades and stuff. And I thought, well, what's this gonna be? And I clicked it, and it was a lengthy analysis, a critical analysis of the entire Saw film franchise. So I don't

• 1:05:36Kirk Hamilton?

  know what I was expecting. But that's what it was. I have never really watched a Saw movie. Not really that interested, or I find them pretty stressful. And so I'm not the target audience, you would think, for this video. And yet I watched the entire thing. And I found that by the end, actually, as a person who doesn't like the Saw movies, but is aware of them and has been curious about them, maybe I was the exact target audience for this video. Because now I know a lot about them, in a way, after watching this interesting, smart person talk about them for an hour and a half. And I don't ever have to watch them because they seem really intense and gory and scary. I suppose not really scary, just like gross and stressful. Gory.

• 1:06:19Kirk Hamilton?

  So the Saw movies are a long-running, very successful franchise of films that's been around since like the early 2000s, I think. I'm not sure the exact date of the first one, but there have been so many at this point, just, man, with all kinds of different directors and different actors in different styles of different quality. And they've really strayed very far from where they started, just because so many different creative people have taken them over. But the fundamental idea is, in a Saw movie, say the first one, a group of people each wake up in some kind of horrible death trap. So like, a woman wakes up and she has this crazy bear trap attached to her head. Or a guy wakes up, a woman is in like a barbed wire like net, kind of.

• 1:07:04Kirk Hamilton?

  And there's like barbed wire all around her and she can't move without getting cut. Or someone's like hanging from a arm, like I think is holding their arm and they're hanging over some horrible death device. And so then the killer, or the kind of bad guy of the Saw franchise, who is called Jigsaw, and is actually a guy, he gets identified eventually. He kind of comes on the radio. He has a little like Monokuma style, Monokuma from Danganronpa style, like toy. It's this little like kind of clown on a bike, I guess, who sort of, the voice comes out of him sometimes. And he basically says, there's some, is it, do you want to play a game? I can't remember. There's like catchphrases and stuff. And he basically says, oh, well, you know, you always took your life for granted. And so now I'm going to show you that you really need to.

• 1:07:49Kirk Hamilton?

  Suffer and sacrifice something in order to prove you really want to live, or whatever. He has this kind of ethos and he's trying to prove something. And so then the people have to do some horrible thing to get out of the trap. You know, I don't know, to get out, you have to like, cut off your hand or something with a saw, and it's horrible. And so they're all kind of like that. Or maybe you're in a trap with one other person. A lot of times, he makes these kind of moral, like, traps where it's you or the other person, and you have to sacrifice someone else's life for your own. It's like a kind of a torturous situation, though, as I think Natalie very effectively argues, these are not exactly torture porn, which was, I think, the term that was used to describe them.

• 1:08:31Kirk Hamilton?

  And she really gets into the kind of visceral reactions that we have to horror movies, and why we watch horror movies, and how we're supposed to be disgusted by and disturbed by what's happening in Saw, and that that's like fundamental to what we get out of the movie, like, how they derive meaning, and how a lot of critics dismiss them, especially early on, by saying, "Oh, these movies like glory in all of this horrible violence. You know, they exalt in doing horrible things to people." But she says, "No, they don't at all. Like, they depict it as horrible, and you're supposed to feel horrible about what you're seeing, but that's like what they're actually going for, and what they're trying to tell you, and what they're trying to make you think about." So it's a really great video that really kind of elevates the whole discussion.

• 1:09:16Kirk Hamilton?

  I think she would roll her eyes at that, because she jokes a lot about elevated horror, and how Saw is like very not elevated most of the time. And she's not even really trying to elevate it by talking about it in her typically intelligent and thoughtful way. But it is just a really fun video. So I wanted to throw it out there for anyone who is, you know, a lover of the Saw movies, or who has never seen a Saw movie, but thinks that still sounds kind of interesting. It's a really funny and just a really insightful and fun video that I was very glad to watch, and I wanted to recommend it. So that's ContraPoints on YouTube, and her latest video, which is about the Saw franchise, and it's just called Saw.

• 1:09:55Jason Schreier?

  The guy who plays Jigsaw, Tobin Bell, has a very distinct voice, and makes an appearance at the end of The Sopranos, season three. That is very memorable.

• 1:10:06Speaker 00

  I hope he's playing Jigsaw. Tony is trapped in a room.

• 1:10:11Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, Tony suddenly wakes up and he has a vice on his head and yeah.

• 1:10:16Kirk Hamilton?

  Anyhow, a good, a good YouTube video for everyone. And that'll do it for this, for this edition, for this episode of Triple Click. This was, this was a fun one and yeah, sign up to become a member to get some of these bonus episodes we're putting out. That Resident Evil one is a lot of fun. That was a really fun conversation about a really cool game. And that's in the feed now, so you can listen to that. And you sign up to become a member.

• 1:10:40Jason Schreier?

  Next week for people who pay attention to numbers. Next week is number 300, episode 300 of Triple Click.

• 1:10:46Kirk Hamilton?

  That's right. Episode 300 coming up. We'll, we'll have to do, we'll have to recognize that in somewhere.

• 1:10:51Jason Schreier?

  We'll do something special, yeah. Also, happy Passover.

• 1:10:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, happy Passover.

• 1:10:54Kirk Hamilton?

  Yes, happy Passover, everyone. All right, well, I will see the two of you next week for episode 300.

• 1:11:02Jason Schreier?

  See you next week.

• 1:11:03Speaker 00

  Bye.

• 1:11:06Kirk Hamilton?

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