Why The Video Game Industry Is Struggling

What's with the video game industry? Over the last three years, tens of thousands of jobs have been cut, dozens of studios were shut down and countless projects got canceled. Kirk, Jason, and Maddy break down why and how this is all happening, from flattened console growth to the rise of Fortnite and other Black Hole games like it.

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

• 0:04Speaker 00

  Dr. Mario, we've got a code black. The rest of the game industry is about to blow up. You're probably fine, though. Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. This week, we talk about what is going on with the video game industry's financials? Why are so many studios closing? Is it cooldown after the pandemic boom or something else? And why does Nintendo seem to be uniquely immune? I'm Maddy Myers.

• 0:32Jason Schreier?

  I'm Jason Schreier. And I'm Kirk Hamilton, and hello, friends.

• 0:35Speaker 00

  Hello.

• 0:36Jason Schreier?

  Hello. How are you guys? Doing well.

• 0:40Speaker 00

  Good, you know? I'm in a different place right now.

• 0:43Jason Schreier?

  You are. Where are you, Maddie? Can you tell everybody that you're recording from a closet?

• 0:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, if I sound different, if I sound way better, don't get used to it, because this isn't where I'm gonna be recording ever again.

• 0:55Jason Schreier?

  I mean, you have closets at home, don't you?

• 0:57Speaker 00

  I do have closets at home.

• 0:58Jason Schreier?

  Maddie, I thought you've been out of the closet for a while.

• 1:01Speaker 00

  You know what? I decided to go back in. I could be. I can't believe I didn't think of that. Yeah, I went back into the closet just for this episode and also for another episode we're gonna record after this, which is a bonus episode. What am I talking about? Well...

• 1:18Jason Schreier?

  What are you talking about?

• 1:19Speaker 00

  The way you could find out what I'm talking about would be to go to maximumfun.org/join. And if you were to do that, if you were to become a supporter, a member of Maximum Fun, our wonderful podcast network, you would get access to our monthly bonus episodes. That's right, we do one every single month. The one that we have just done this previous month would be the Metaphory Fantasia one, right? But then, the one we're about to record, we're gonna do a breakdown of the last three generations of console launches. We're gonna go chapter by chapter of the most recent three, each pretty different, especially this most recent one, very strange one. And I think that might be a nice sister show to what we're gonna talk about today, but

• 2:04Speaker 00

  we'll get to that in a second.

• 2:06Jason Schreier?

  Well, also an appetizer for the Switch 2 launch lineup.

• 2:09Speaker 00

  Right. It's an appetizer and then today's episode is an aperitif and then the switch to is the delicious meal that we all get to share and that will probably make up multiple Triple Click episodes. But before we get to today's topic, I also wanted to mention that we teased this already, that all three of us are going to GDC in San Francisco this year. And we wanted to have a meetup for anybody San Francisco based or adjacent, willing to make the trek in. So on March 20th at 2:00 PM, the three of us are going to be at Yerba Buena Gardens and we're gonna want to come see you. So if you're a fan of Triple Click and

• 2:48Speaker 00

  you want to come say hi to us, ideally no haters allowed. I specified fan. I mean, I guess if you're a polite hater.

• 2:56Kirk Hamilton?

  We'll have a sign, no haters.

• 2:58Speaker 00

  If you're very polite about it and you just want to explain, I don't know. I don't know why I even got into this. Fans only, March 20th, 2:00 PM.

• 3:06Jason Schreier?

  Everyone is welcome. Yeah, so the Yerba Buena Gardens are pretty big. We'll probably camp out somewhere. Not sure. We'll decide on the fly. So really just walk around until you see three people who look like Kurt and I and Jason.

• 3:18Speaker 00

  If you see two short people and one really tall person who looks like they play the saxophone, you're there. You know what I mean?

• 3:26Kirk Hamilton?

  You're probably in the right place.

• 3:27Speaker 00

  You're probably found the three of us.

• 3:29Jason Schreier?

  Or you found Bizarro Triple Click.

• 3:32Speaker 00

  Or you found.

• 3:33Kirk Hamilton?

  Kipple Trick, you know.

• 3:35Speaker 00

  Trio Clock, a different show about watches and just Swiss machinations. All right, Jason, what are we talking about today?

• 3:45Jason Schreier?

  All right, we're talking about the video game biz and how it's all fucked up.

• 3:50Speaker 00

  Finally. Let's explain it.

• 3:53Kirk Hamilton?

  The biz is bad.

• 3:55Jason Schreier?

  I just came back from the Dice Convention in Las Vegas, Nevada, which is a hobnobbing industry kind of get together where a bunch of executives and game developers schmooze and network and talk about the state of things. And the vibes were real bad, guys. The vibes were real bad. Last year's Dice, the vibes were also bad. This is maybe slightly better, but still pretty bad. It's, times are bleak. And in fact, as we are recording this, about an hour before we started this, we broke the news at Bloomberg that Warner Brothers is shutting down three studios, including Monolith, the storied studio.

• 4:35Jason Schreier?

  Behind the Middle Earth shadow of Mortar Games and also the canceling, Warner Brothers canceled the new Wonder Woman game that they were working on. And so, yeah, things are bleak. It seems like every week we're getting a new headline about studios shutting down, about layoffs, about reductions. And then at Dice, there's a lot of invisible stuff that you hear about, like indie developers who just can't find funding. And when they do find funding, it's kind of shitty contracts, contracts with terms that screw them over and that sort of thing. And so I wanted to talk about how we got here. So this is going to be a bit of a business analysis episode because like it's important, I think, to, if you're trying to understand why the vibes are so bad, to actually look at the, the kind of,

• 5:20Jason Schreier?

  the factors that have gone into this. So I wanted to start out by talking by about a slide presentation, a 200 page slide presentation that was also like the talk of the town at Dice. Some six or seven people came up to me and like brought this up unprompted. And it is, it is kind of the state of the video game industry. It's called by a, an analyst named Matthew Ball. And it's really interesting. We're going to link it in the show notes so people can kind of browse through it. But it's really interesting in that it breaks down some of the factors behind the current kind of slowdown in growth that we've seen across the entire video game industry. And it gets into a lot of different subjects.

• 6:00Jason Schreier?

  It gets into mobile gaming and China and all these other factors, console growth or lack thereof. And it's really worth reading. The three of us all kind of read it ahead of this show. I will say caveat here is that the numbers in it, a lot of those are bunk. Some of them are from like VG charts and other websites that just totally make shit up. So, so don't put too much stock into the numbers themselves, but the analysis of the takeaways, I think, are still worthwhile. So here we are. Let me set the scene for you guys, right? So there for many, many years, the video game industry was seeing exponential growth.

• 6:38Jason Schreier?

  It grew quite a bit, especially in the PS4 era from, let's say, 2013 till 2020 or so. And then it really grew during COVID because everyone was stuck at home and nothing to do but play video games. But then in 2022, at the end of 2022, it hit a, it stopped growing. It really, it fell a few percentage points and then it just has plateaued since then. And we're talking about, when I talk about the industry, I'm talking about overall revenues. So that includes console, PC, mobile. It's kind of a, it's a broad group and we'll get into some specifics over the course of this show because kind of broadly generalizing is a little bit difficult. But overall, we're in a state where the video game industry has not grown

• 7:21Jason Schreier?

  or certainly has not grown at the rate that it had in the past. And there are a lot of reasons why that is. Matthew Wall breaks down a few of them. First and foremost, you guys both read the slides or at least skimmed through them. What kind of, what were your takeaways? Maddie, why don't you start? What were your, some of your takeaways from reading that thing? Did anything really stand out to you?

• 7:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, a few things, but first up, I just thought it was fascinating how well the Switch did and still is doing. There were a few slides about this, especially in kind of the precipitous decline of consoles generally in terms of sales and also just the games people are buying when they are owners of consoles. But the Switch has been immune to a lot of that seemingly, or at least that's what these numbers, which are a little fudged, suggest. I think we've seen that ourselves in terms of other more reliable sales numbers. But it's very interesting to see them side by side and to kind of think about why that is.

• 8:20Jason Schreier?

  Switch numbers are actually almost always accurate because they're provided by Nintendo. So Nintendo provides their hardware and software sales, unlike a lot of other companies.

• 8:29Speaker 00

  Exactly, and we know they're massive and very brag worthy and have been released over and over again. And so that was interesting to me to see because it also matched with just anecdotally what I've seen, just the kind of normies of our lives, the people who might not even use the word gamer to refer to themselves, but still have a Switch and are still actively playing it. And to contrast that with how poorly some of the most recent console generations were doing in terms of sales and also just engagement, like people continuing to play really old games, like the slide about Counter-Strike just still drawing in so many people. I mean, I'm sure we all look at the Steam charts now and then. It's always up there and that is just fascinating to me.

• 9:13Speaker 00

  Like Counter-Strike, I know they've remade it, there's been multiple Counter-Strikes, but to me, I'm like, that's the game I played when I was 19 years old. And the 19-year-old of today is still simply playing Counter-Strike. And trying to get them to deviate from that is almost impossible, except they probably also do own a Nintendo Switch and they're playing all the first-party Nintendo games as well. I thought those trends were really fascinating.

• 9:38Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, those two stuck out to me as well, the Nintendo part of it and the older games. They seem like two topics that we could just chew on for a little bit. Maybe we can pick one or the other and go after it.

• 9:49Jason Schreier?

  Let's talk about old games first and then we'll get into Nintendo, because that to me is really the leading factor here and the leading conversation topic. We've talked a lot in, over the last couple of years about the trend chasing of games as a service. And that trend chasing exists because everybody is trying to make their own version of Counter-Strike or Fortnite or GTA Online or Minecraft or Roblox, or these other kind of what Matthew Ball refers to as black hole games.

• 10:14Speaker 00

  I loved that.

• 10:15Jason Schreier?

  Because they really suck people in and those people-

• 10:18Speaker 00

  And then you never escape.

• 10:19Jason Schreier?

  Don't buy other games. Yeah, it's really wild and it's really changed the habit. I think the percentage that I saw, and take these numbers with a grain of salt, because like I said, some of the numbers in this are pretty bunk, but- The number that he said was that 30% of playtime on Steam goes to like five games, the top five games, which actually which matches something that Matt Piscatella at Circana, another well-known industry analyst, has also said, which is that like most of the play, like a large chunk of the play share is going towards just these black hole games. And every time a new single player games comes out, a new Assassin's Creed or Avowed, or whatever else is coming out this year, Monster Hunter, they are competing over like

• 10:59Jason Schreier?

  a very small chunk of the market because there's so much of it is already occupied by those black hole games. And then another big chunk of the market, by the way, is people who buy Madden and/or Call of Duty every single year. So we're talking about maybe a big overall market, but the portion of that market that is actually buying new games on a regular basis is pretty small. In fact, I want to quote Matt Piscatella on something. Let me find this. So Matt Piscatella, again, a Circana analyst, Circana used to be called NPD, which might be a more familiar name to people. Piscatella went on Kind of Funny with Greg Miller a few days ago, and he said that,

• 11:41Jason Schreier?

  listen to some of these stats, "The top 10 live service games take up 40% of total playtime on consoles." He said 30% of people who play games will not buy a game this year. 18% of people who play games buy games every six months or even less frequently than that. And only 12% of people buy games once per month, buy a game once per month, and 4% buy a game more often than once per month. 4% of the people who play games are buying more than one game a month. So if you're listening to Triple Click, you're probably part of a very small minority. Yeah, man.

• 12:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's, that's so wild. And yet, it also makes a weird kind of sense in that it reflects what I see when I look at Steam charts. But it doesn't make sense if I'm, say, a Sony executive trying to get somebody out of those black hole games, because now that I hear those numbers, I'm like, that is an almost impossible task to fathom. Because that could be somebody who's been playing Counter-Strike for five years, 10 years, 15 years. Like they, why would they ever play anything else? Or Call of Duty? I mean, insert your franchise here that just keeps getting updated and updated. Why would you ever leave that?

• 13:01Speaker 00

  Even if you hate it, like the chances of you disconnecting from that just seems so slim to me. And also, as I'm talking, I'm realizing that that might be a new form of what once was a console allegiance or a platform allegiance, is that now the platform is something like Fortnite, where you're like, that's what I'm, I have. That's the game I have. That's the system that I'm locked into. And why would I buy another one, as it were, even though I realize Fortnite is free? But there's that emotional bid of investing in a whole other experience that like-

• 13:34Jason Schreier?

  The time investment.

• 13:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, and also the emotional startup cost of why would I learn something new? I already have my thing that I've been doing for years.

• 13:43Kirk Hamilton?

  I think you also see that reflected in the culture around gaming. You know, streamers and other gaming celebrities and just video game culture seems to me to have embraced the idea of these ongoing black hole games, where, you know, if you're a streamer, you can just play Fortnite and, you know, your whole kind of video game existence takes place within Fortnite. And there's so much going on in Fortnite that you can, you know, reliably just stream it and talk about it and react to the newest updates or the newest events. And also do your other streamer stuff where you just talk while the game is going in the background and it works for you. I don't watch a ton of streamers, so I don't have a super strong sense of the breadth of streaming options.

• 14:28Kirk Hamilton?

  But I don't get the sense that there are too many people or that there are maybe as many people as there used to be, whose whole deal is, I stream the newest thing. And, you know, maybe a famous streamer will stream a new game, you know, whatever hot new game just came out for a little while. But typically, people tend to go back to something else just because it makes sense when I think about it anyways. I'm not a streamer, but I do- You know, create other types of media and it makes sense that you would want to have something consistent that you can use as just kind of a, you know, a starting point to build whatever today's dream or this week's series is on top of. And so because of that, you know, all of the culture sort of feels a little bit more connected to these ongoing

• 15:12Kirk Hamilton?

  experiences and a lot less connected to the new game of the week or the month.

• 15:17Jason Schreier?

  So I think that, Matty, you mentioned this is kind of a sidebar, that these games are free. A lot of them are. Yeah. But I think that's an important part of this for several reasons. One is that, so service games have always existed. When we were growing up, there were online games. People were playing EverQuest, like, kind of religiously. It's just a lot fewer people were playing them because the barrier for entry was much higher. And so it was much harder to be like, hey, playground friends, let's go home and play EverQuest because they would all have to pay $10 a month to play it. But nowadays with Fortnite, with Roblox, it is much easier to grow up in a world where like, those are your hangout spots and anyone who you know at school can just download them for free, no matter

• 15:59Jason Schreier?

  what their financial situation is like. And so that has really changed habits in a big way, I think, and made those numbers of people much bigger. And what I think I would be freaking out about if I were a video game industry executive, and maybe we should be freaking out about as people who professionally cover the video game industry, is that these games have trained a generation of young players that they aren't not to buy games, like, not to go and buy new games, but to go and play Roblox and Fortnite with their friends and not think of games as things that you go to a store and pay for and get new experiences as a result out of. These black hole games have really not just become black holes for people's like, kind of at a micro level, their day to day, hour time,

• 16:43Jason Schreier?

  and the amount of time they spend playing on a given month or year. They've also become black holes in that they've taught people Not to buy games anymore. And that to me is really wild.

• 16:54Speaker 00

  That's true, but these games make a lot of money in a completely different way than the games we're aware of, that I also think is interesting.

• 17:01Jason Schreier?

  They're definitely, people are definitely spending money on the games. That's not the point. The point is that they're-

• 17:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, but you're right, that it's completely changed, the way people are spending money.

• 17:09Jason Schreier?

  Right, so my point is that like, if I'm coming into this, I am, as Pixkattella said, you're competing for that 4% of players or whatever. And that is really scary if you're a video game company, because that wasn't the case 10, 15, 20 years ago, when kids who were growing up at that generation didn't have the same options. And then the more time, like the more years pass, and the more those younger generations that grew up playing Fortnite and Roblox become the kind of, the coveted 18 to 35 demo of people who have spending money and can afford to buy new games every month, are those people actually gonna buy games? Or are they just gonna stick to those old habits? That's, that's what I would be, again, freaking out about if I were a video game executive.

• 17:52Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, we're at least adjusting your expectations for how much money you can spend making a new game and how much you can expect to make, which I could totally see happening. I mean, this is a kind of a forced evolution of creativity, which we've seen happen in media, you know? We went from huge ad revenue and massive budgets, hiring tons of people, to three people making a podcast, and much more inexpensively-

• 18:16Speaker 00

  And that's great. It's all gone well.

• 18:18Kirk Hamilton?

  I mean, I like it, but I think it's worked, but it's because it was kind of, you know, we are not, whatever, we're a specific example, but I think that media broadly has had to adapt to a total collapse in its revenue model. And as a result, we've seen new ways of making money, and we've seen a lot of people who make media, who do reporting, who write criticism, who make podcasts, YouTube, whatever, finding ways to do what they're good at sustainably, because they've just adjusted how much they can spend and, you know, invest in the work that they're doing, and also just had to find new revenue models. So it seems to me that it is possible that people who like making, you know, I don't know, really clever-

• 19:00Kirk Hamilton?

  Single player puzzle games can possibly still find a way to do that. It's just some of the, you know, we're kind of watching some of these projects that tried to follow the model that worked 15 years ago crash and burn in this new industry because so much has changed, especially when it comes to these huge budgets.

• 19:22Jason Schreier?

  Well, so that's the biggest thing. That's another factor we should talk about here, right? When you're talking about industry woes. So let's say that the growth, let's say that the industry isn't going to continue on that crazy growth trajectory. And let's say we're actually going to flatten and we're going to see consoles flatten, which they have, other than Switch, which I'm still putting a pin on the Switch topic. Yeah. We'll get to that.

• 19:41Speaker 00

  It's its own beast.

• 19:42Jason Schreier?

  But PlayStation has plateaued pretty much. It might be like slightly ahead of the PS4 now, but not by a significant amount. Xbox has declined significantly. So consoles, consoles are, that market is not growing in a, in a really big way. So let's say that audience isn't growing. You can still sell a million copies of a game. The problem is when a million copies isn't enough for that game.

• 20:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:04Jason Schreier?

  That, that is, that comes about of these budgets going crazy. Here's a fun stat. In 2009, Uncharted 2 was released. Uncharted 2 from Naughty Dog, of course, beloved game. That cost about $20 million to make. The Last of Us 2 in 2020, 11 years later, also made by Naughty Dog, cost about $200 million to make, according to leaked Sony documents. That is a 10 fold increase. And that means that no matter how many, I mean, unless The Last of Us 2 is selling 10 times as many copies as Uncharted 2, which it is not, profit margins are getting much, much lower. And that, that's a big problem.

• 20:38Kirk Hamilton?

  No, no, it is helpful that The Last of Us 2 is 10 times better.

• 20:41Jason Schreier?

  Right. Well, it's Metacritic is actually 10 times as much. So it has a 900 on Metacritic.

• 20:49Speaker 00

  That's 800? Yeah, they mentioned a new score for it.

• 20:53Jason Schreier?

  So, so, yeah, so, so a lot of the conversation now is like, how do you get that budget down? Some companies think it's gen AI, a little skeptical of that. At Dice, one of the big conversation topics was co dev and a lot of studios. This has been kind of, we've been trending in this direction for a long time now. Companies spending less and less money on people in expensive cities and instead kind of having a core team in Los Angeles or Seattle or whatever, and then working with teams elsewhere to kind of help co develop the game. Avowed, which just came out, did that.

• 21:29Kirk Hamilton?

  Elsewhere, exploiting cheap labor in other countries. You can say what it is.

• 21:33Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I mean, I don't want to start like rapid firing China, India. I'm not sure exactly where Malaysia, like they're, they're all over the place. A lot of countries where labor is cheaper than it is in Seattle and Los Angeles. Avowed, which just came out last week, they, they did a lot of that. A lot of co dev work as well. There are also co dev studios, I should say, in some of the bigger cities too. So somehow they're able to make the economics work on that. But that, that is one solution that people have proposed. But really, I feel like it's, it's kind of, the video game industry, this is my personal opinion. The video game industry has kind of been due for a reckoning and how it approaches game development for decades now.

• 22:13Jason Schreier?

  Because, and this isn't just on a management perspective, this is like on an individual person, like level. There's just so much time that is wasted and kind of innovate, or games. I've heard so many of the same stories where a game is just kind of like a team flounders for three years and then like works their asses off to make the game in the last 18 months of development. And obviously you can't blame an individual artist or individual contributor for that. But like from middle man, management on up, there are a lot of kind of flaws in the process that lead you to that point. And that I think is a large part of what causes these big budgets. Also, it's important for the game companies to look at like, did the Last of Us 2 really need to be 30 hours long? Do the scopes need to be as big as they are?

• 22:57Jason Schreier?

  Cause that also contributes, contributes a lot to the, to the, the budgets.

• 23:03Jason Schreier?

  Fidelity needs to no longer be as much of a concern because when you have all these people who are willing to play Fortnite and Minecraft anyway, like, what do they give a crap if like, the pores are ultra realistic in the new PS5 game? That raises other problems because how can Sony justify selling you a PS5 if you're not getting that graphical fidelity, but that's for Sony to solve. So those are a couple of the solutions to the budget problem, but that to me seems like something that almost, it's like, fire alarms are going off and nobody's leaving the building. Like, that seems like a pretty critical problem at this point.

• 23:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, regarding the reckoning that you referred to, that was how I felt about it too, especially after the pandemic boom and the idea that, oh, maybe this could continue forever, which Matthew Ball's presentation really gets into. But what I thought was interesting about that, because prior to reading this, I'd kind of been like, oh, these layoffs are a reflection of the fact that growth has stagnated and maybe there was some over hiring, which is sad to think about, and a lot of promise and ideas that just never got to happen, but that growth just didn't match up to it. And so now it's kind of course correcting back to where it was pre pandemic. But those numbers in Matthew Ball's presentation suggest that it's actually now below what it

• 24:20Speaker 00

  was pre pandemic, which almost is like, I don't know, I'm picturing the proverbial pandemic gamer, like, getting really into video games and then going so hard that they're like, I now don't want to play them at all, you know?

• 24:35Jason Schreier?

  They crashed on Animal Crossing.

• 24:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, like, they got, they just like, had, you know, 16 bags of potato chips and they're like, I could never look at a chip again, but with video games, like, I don't know if that's actually how it's happened, but the numbers going even lower to what they were before is sort of a, it's not like they're wildly lower and I don't know how exact we could really take this, but I did think that was an interesting piece of the reckoning that you're describing, Jason, where it's like, not only are we back to where we were before, people are actually kind of like, I don't know, I really need to take a step back from this hobby.

• 25:09Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:11Kirk Hamilton?

  Right. It's never a good sign when a bunch of people come into contact with something new, in this case, video games, and then some significant percentage of them move further away from it.

• 25:21Speaker 00

  They're like, I don't know. This is for me. I tried it and now I'm associating it with this.

• 25:25Kirk Hamilton?

  I don't know if that's really the case or not, but it's a little chilling to think about.

• 25:29Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I don't know. I wonder. I wonder how many of those people just bought a Switch and Animal Crossing and maybe are still playing Animal Crossing on their Switch. They just haven't.

• 25:38Speaker 00

  Or played plenty and they're done, you know?

• 25:40Jason Schreier?

  Well, that's the thing. Okay, so if people bought a Switch and Zelda and Animal Crossing, they might not be. If you're looking at numbers, numbers can be funny, right? Like, you can, numbers can tell a lot of different stories. If you're looking at percentages and numbers, like, those people who bought games in 2020 might not have bought games since then, but they're still playing games, like, or they still could be playing games. Like, we don't know, because if we're looking at just the revenue and just the playing habits, like, it's hard to tell. Or just, or not the playing habits, then it's hard to tell. And it's hard to get a measure of, like, the amount of time people are playing Switch. That is not something that we have easy access to, as opposed to, like, Steam, where you can see concurrence and whatnot. Yeah, let's talk about Nintendo.

• 26:26Speaker 00

  It's so special. It's so different from everyone else.

• 26:30Jason Schreier?

  It really is. I mean, they have somehow been able to achieve this remarkable growth. Matthew Ball posits that that one reason for that is that there was a separate handheld market that existed up until the release of the Switch in the form of the DS and 3DS and Game Boy before that. And that all converged with the console market for Nintendo, and that helps explain some of that crazy growth, which I'm very curious to see what happens with the Switch 2, if that follows the same trajectory. We'll have to put a pin in that one and wait and see. But yeah, what do you guys think of Nintendo as an anomaly? Do you think it's just because they make such great games?

• 27:13Jason Schreier?

  Do you think it's because the Switch has some sort of, like, universal appeal that other consoles don't?

• 27:19Speaker 00

  I mean, I think it does. I think it does have an appeal. Other consoles don't. I think the Switch is such a fascinating and well-designed device that it truly is different from every other single thing on the market. It did have the advantage of coming out in an off-cycle time because the Wii U had done so poorly that Nintendo kind of rallied quickly to put together a different console launch, so it wasn't kind of directly compared with other consoles. But I think even if it had been, it wouldn't matter because it's so remarkably different from even just like having a laptop. Like, I can't even really compare it to PC gaming and say like, oh yeah, that's a comparable type of gaming. It is its own entire thing.

• 28:04Speaker 00

  And that's part of why I often use the example of like the person who owns the Switch and nothing else, because that's reflective of such a huge percentage of people. And that in and of itself is like, this is like a cultural object. It's like a cool fashion item almost, where, like having a cool phone. Like, it doesn't, it doesn't even feel like it has the same trappings as a PS4 or an Xbox of any kind, like even if you leave aside all the other console generations. I just think it's, it's become something completely different that transcends the idea of gamer and gaming, to me.

• 28:41Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, this is something related to what I was talking about when we talked about the Switch 2, the idea of families that just have a Switch where the kids just play Switch and it's just, that's what video games are. And when the Switch 2 comes out, they'll just get that one because it's another one and it's new and it plays all the same games we already have. And yeah, I think it's, that's related to what you're saying, Maddie, and I think that's very true. There's a, I mean, there's an almost aesthetic or, I don't know, some, something beyond just, is this game fun and is this device cool? It gets, there's a link between the software and the hardware and the experience of using both and the way they fit into your life with the Switch that elevates it and sets

• 29:25Kirk Hamilton?

  it in a separate category from all of these other things we're talking about. Talking about PC gaming, console gaming, mobile gaming. It's just its own thing. I mean, playing Animal Crossing on a Switch, playing Zelda on a Switch. I've watched my nieces do this. I've seen the way that they react to this device and the way that it fits into their lives. And it's just not like anything else. And I think that that's true for a lot of different people. And it's been true for Nintendo for some time. I mean, I think that was true for people with the DS as well. There were certainly people who just had a DS and they played a bunch of stuff on that. And they didn't really play other things. Because Nintendo has just found this way of offering more than just fun games, more than just a device that's cool to use.

• 30:07Kirk Hamilton?

  There's something, there's some higher order quality to the overall Nintendo experience. And I think that's reflected in these numbers in this presentation.

• 30:17Jason Schreier?

  Something that I thought was interesting in Ball's slides was that he said that, I don't remember the exact number, but he said that a large percentage of Switch buyers are just buying Nintendo games. There are a large percentage of the software that is sold on Switch is just Nintendo stuff. And you can see it in the numbers. I mean, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe on the Switch has sold 67 million copies, which is like, Unfathomable. The Switch itself, yeah, I mean, the Switch itself is up to 150 million. So that's almost half, that's like a solid 40, 45% of, of Switch owners have Mario Kart 8. That's pretty nuts. Animal Crossing is at 47 million, Zelda Breath of the Wild, 32 million. So we're talking about astounding numbers.

• 31:00Jason Schreier?

  Like, those are numbers that even Square Enix would be happy with. So this is, they're really an anomaly in a lot of ways.

• 31:07Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, astounding numbers as a console exclusive, also as an exclusive. I mean, it's only, you know, it's not being sold on other, on other platforms. And still, they're doing those numbers.

• 31:16Jason Schreier?

  Well, that's, yeah, that's, it's really, yeah, it's, it's.

• 31:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:21Jason Schreier?

  It's mild.

• 31:22Speaker 00

  You know what it kind of reminds me of? Maybe this is a stretch, but it kind of reminds me of how people used to feel about iPods and how that just like completely changed everyone's relationship to music. And it was like, you just get this object, even if you're not like a quote unquote "music" person who was walking around high school with your Discman, AKA me, you'd still be like, well, I gotta have an iPod. And I feel like that did culturally change everyone's relationship to music because now it's like, well, we all have all of our music on our phones at all times. And that was just like a tech company inventing something that completely changed how everyone saw music. And I don't know that Nintendo's achieved that with the Switch, but it reminds me of that in a way because I do feel like it changed the way people saw the idea of having

• 32:05Speaker 00

  video games be part of their life in a more intense way than maybe they do by just having them on their phone, where it's like, well, this is going to be the console that I invest in because it's cool and it's cute and it's got all this aesthetic aspects, like you can get different joycons and stuff. Like, there's just something additional, additionally fashion about it that just changes it.

• 32:26Jason Schreier?

  I think that was true in the pandemic when everyone was buying them.

• 32:30Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 32:30Kirk Hamilton?

  I think some of that is also related to the cultural point that I was raising earlier, that the Switch makes it much easier to capture footage and stream. And people play, you know, the Switch on Twitch. They play Zelda, they play Splatoon. That console has a presence on social media in a way that the DS, as a portable that fits into your life in much the same way, just never really achieved. Of course, also the DS existed or was popular during a time before all of that, but the fact that the Switch can be plugged into something that then can be captured on OBS and broadcasted, you know, over the internet is also a part of what's helped it achieve more of a cultural ubiquity.

• 33:11Speaker 00

  Especially during the pandemic, yeah.

• 33:13Jason Schreier?

  So before we close this out, let's kind of, let's talk about the big picture and what the future looks like. Cause I'm sure a lot of people out there are like, what the heck does this mean for the future of video games? If I'm part of the 4% who likes to buy like new games a couple of times a month or something, what does this mean for me?

• 33:29Speaker 00

  What is there?

• 33:29Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, if you like about and you're not like a constant Fortnite player, you want like new single player games and stories and like interesting experiences. Um, well, for starters, here's another crazy stat that it's kind of, it's almost like hard to reconcile this with all the doom and gloom, but um, according to Ball, and this number I believe because it's um, pretty easy to find publicly. Um, in 2024, Steam released nearly as many games per month as it did in all of 2014. Let me, let me repeat that. 2024, on a monthly basis, Steam was releasing almost as many games as it did in all of 2014. So we're talking about a market that is completely oversaturated with games. There are constant,

• 34:14Jason Schreier?

  you, the three of us are constantly facing a barrage of, barrage of new games to play every single week. Um, and so it's hard to look at this as like an industry in crisis because it feels like we're getting so many cool experiences all the time. We don't know how many of these game makers are actually able to make a profit off of what they're releasing. But in terms of output, I mean, it's kind of, we're almost in a situation where the games are better than, they're, they're more good games than they're ever have been in the past, which is hard to reconcile with this idea that like so many people in the games industry are losing their jobs and so many studios are shutting down and so many games appear to be underperforming. So I guess my question is like, what does

• 34:57Jason Schreier?

  the future look like? Is this, are we talking about a permanent shift? Are we talking about a correction from like, that is still kind of lingering from COVID? What do you guys think the next five to 10 years look like, both for game output and for the games industry and the health of people who work in it?

• 35:13Kirk Hamilton?

  Well, I think that this is, you can really think of this not as a video game question, but as an attention question. I've been listening to Chris Hayes talk about his new book, which, first off, that dude is really smart. I'd never really heard him talk, but he like, really, smart guy. He was just on Know Your Enemy, talking about his new book about attention. His book is called The Siren's Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. And Jason, as you talk about the incredible, overwhelming glut of video games that are out, I just think of, I mean, the same is true of streaming shows, the same is true of music, the same is true of books, for that matter. So many things are being published that the most, the scariest resource isn't any of those things. It's our attention.

• 35:58Kirk Hamilton?

  Especially when you consider something that Hayes points out, which is that our attention is worth almost nothing individually to any of these companies that are trying to get it. You know, TikTok or Facebook with Instagram or, you know, Steam, any, any game company that's publishing games. Any individual hour of my time that I spend, you know, on their game or on their social media platform, it's not actually worth very much to them, but to me, it's everything. It's my mind. It's, it's, you know, it's my attention. That's all I really have. And that, I think, is actually the thing that a lot, this is a much bigger topic than just video games, but I think this is absolutely a part of

• 36:40Kirk Hamilton?

  that. And that's what the world of, you know, media, I suppose, if you want to consider video games as media as well, is running up against, is there's an overwhelming amount of it. And our attention has never been more diluted, we've never been more separated from our attention. There have been so many technological innovations that have mastered the art of capturing our attention and pulling our attention, tricking us into infinite scrolls and constant distraction. And as a result, we are the, like, we're not the problem, but we have been almost short circuited by this. And as a result, we can't, we can't handle it. We can't process all of these different options. And that becomes a kind of a sustainability thing for the industry.

• 37:23Kirk Hamilton?

  We can't support the existence of all of this stuff because the limitation is our precious attention. And that also, of course, has all of these negative effects on us and our lives and how we feel just existing in the world with our attention so torn asunder. I don't know. That's the way that I'm thinking of this, just in this moment in time. And when you talk about the number of video games there are, and when I think about my own life, I've been thinking about my attention a lot lately. And this really just underlines that for me.

• 37:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's very wise. It's reminding me of the slide in Matthew Ball's presentation about how much time people spend on TikTok and YouTube and just other services where he was basically like, these haven't declined. And if anything, some of them have increased slightly. So clearly, people are still spending time engaging with media on the internet. So it's not like they couldn't, in theory, be playing games. And I do think that quality of infinite scroll that TikTok especially has just is very alluring and is its own black hole game of a kind. And I think that unless that changes, which I don't know why on earth it would, because clearly, it's very effective. I don't know how people would

• 38:39Speaker 00

  ever or why they would leave the black holes that they're very comfortable in unless there is some other significant shakeup in how games work that is new and different from the status quo that we have now with black hole games and how they function and how they keep our attention.

• 38:56Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it's a good question, because I think that if you ask your average person how they feel about what's being done to their attention right now, they will tell you they hate it.

• 39:04Speaker 00

  I know, that's true.

• 39:05Kirk Hamilton?

  Because I think that most of us do, right? We hate this feeling of being torn in a thousand directions, of constantly being distracted and unsatisfied.

• 39:13Speaker 00

  And wasting time, like sometimes feeling like I wasted time on something I was, in theory, choosing to do.

• 39:19Kirk Hamilton?

  Right. You go and unplug for a day and sit under a tree and you feel great and you realize how good that feels. Like, I do think that there's, there's something there. And I don't know if it's actually a culture-wide backlash or what, but the fact that people, you know, feel so much better and that we are so much healthier when we're directing our attention differently, does tell me that there's room for something like a book, an album, a video game, something that requires you to focus your attention on it, the way that I think a lot of the games that we like do. And that If people can kind of move en masse toward that, I could actually see that making a difference. You know, it would require a lot of changes on the development side,

• 40:03Kirk Hamilton?

  just in terms of what we were talking about earlier, budgets and sustainability, the amount of people you need to buy your game or play it. But I could see, you know, a certain number of people choosing to dedicate their attention to games and moving away from some of these, especially social apps, that in this presentation, you know, clearly are cutting into gaming time because people are spending so much time just on TikTok, just watching video after video after video. That won't last forever. This, this status quo of everyone staring at their phones as just people dance and it's all empty and meaningless. I'm sure it feels very ubiquitous right now, but it will not last forever because nothing lasts forever. And I could see maybe some cultural movement away from that. And

• 40:46Kirk Hamilton?

  if it does happen, then it may move toward things that require a little bit more dedicated attention. Bing. Kirk here. As I'm editing the show, and I just wanted to underline that earlier mention of the episode of Know Your Enemy, featuring Chris Hayes, talking about his book. It's really wonderful, really thought provoking and smart conversation about attention. And a lot of what I'm talking about here, that was like me just going off the dome with some thoughts. The thoughts that I am having are much better articulated on that episode. And I really recommend listening to it if any of this is sparking something for you. So we'll put a link for it down in the show notes.

• 41:22Jason Schreier?

  Bing. So the flip side of all of this is that I think people are putting their attention on games that seem, for whatever reason, to justify it. Games that do hit and do resonate with a lot of people. Last year, we saw a few, Pal World, Helldivers 2, Baldur's Gate 3, a couple of years ago, Bellatro last year. There have been a lot of games that have been hits and reached, I mean, Bellatro sold 5 million copies and that is a game, I guess it's a game you can play while doing other stuff. Yeah, I was gonna say, I don't know if that's- So maybe your attention can be caught between things. But I think that what we're seeing, just to kind of- Spitball a little bit here. I think what we're seeing in addition to just kind of like,

• 42:07Jason Schreier?

  or maybe as a result of the oversaturated market and a result of the fact that there are more options for your attention, whether it's games or TikTok or Netflix or whatever else. I think we've kind of gotten past the days where you can release a game that is just kind of solid and okay and still sell well and like have it do good numbers. It's like we're long past the days where you could like release a game tied to the latest Spider-Man movie and sell half a million copies because it's a Spider-Man licensed game, even if it's pretty terrible. I think people are just more discerning with what they choose to spend their time on because

• 42:48Jason Schreier?

  there are so many options fighting for your attention. And so games like, I don't know, maybe Veil Guard is a good example. That game reached 1.5 million players, EA said. We don't know how many of that is sales because some of that is EA's streaming or subscription service. So 1.5 million players, however many sales. But that is like a good, seems like a good number, but it missed their expectations by 50%. They expected 3 million players. So let's say maybe their expectations were unreasonable. Well, let's say for a second that they, those were reasonable expectations. If Veil Guard hadn't been kind of like a polarizing game, I know you two liked it and I didn't, which maybe speaks to how polarizing it was because

• 43:32Jason Schreier?

  we're all Dragon Age fans. If that game had been more unanimously loved the way Baldur's Gate 3 was, it's very easy to imagine it having sold 3 million copies. So I don't know, maybe we live in a world where people are willing to spend money and keep buying new games. It's just they're buying fewer of them and the ones that aren't really just kind of like breaking the mold and really standing out are kind of doomed to fail. And we're going to see more of a contraction of the video game industry to the point where like only the elite of the elite can survive. So maybe that's what the future looks like more is more just kind of of that like we're going to have indies and then we're going to have the AAA game companies that are able to make those kind of 90 plus Metacritic games and not much else. I don't know.

• 44:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, the Baldur's Gate example is interesting because it is kind of what Kirk's describing of like a singular attention style game and people are still playing it years later. It's still on Steam charts, but it's also like, okay, great. You just need your AAA game to be exceptional, like Baldur's Gate 3. Like, okay, easier said than done.

• 44:39Jason Schreier?

  Well, in a world, in a world where people are buying fewer games.

• 44:43Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 44:44Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, of course it's easier said than done, but I'm saying that like, looking towards the future, this isn't kind of me prescribing solutions. This is me trying to figure out what the next five to 10 years are going to look like. And I wonder if we're going to see more and more. We've already seen just kind of the evisceration of like the AA games and that kind of squishy middle of games that are kind of like, okay, experiences or that people enjoy or that are kind of flawed for some reason or whatever. I wonder if we're just going to see more of this, the top heavy games. But even then, I mean, I think ultimately, and maybe my biggest takeaway from all of this and all the conversations

• 45:24Jason Schreier?

  I've been having is ultimately, game budgets need to get smaller. Like, the industry at large needs to reckon with how much money they're spending on games. I reported a couple of weeks ago when I did a big feature about Warner Brothers games. I was kind of hinting that at the fact that Wonder Woman would be canceled. I think I mentioned in there that it was in trouble. I mentioned that Wonder Woman had already cost $100 million. It had been in development since 2021 and in its current state at the time seemed years away from ever coming out. So the amount of money involved here, I mean, that first and foremost needs to stop because maybe if Dragon Age: The Veil Guard hadn't been in development for 10 years and cost who knows how many millions of dollars, definitely

• 46:08Jason Schreier?

  in the nine figures, if that hadn't been the case, maybe 1.5 players, 1.5 million players would have been fantastic and maybe it would have been seen as a big success for them.

• 46:17Speaker 00

  Totally, yeah.

• 46:19Jason Schreier?

  Mm-hmm. So, get your budgets in order. Come on.

• 46:23Speaker 00

  Stop spending so much money, video games.

• 46:25Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, man.

• 46:26Speaker 00

  There, we solved it for you.

• 46:27Jason Schreier?

  But I do wonder, the other lingering question I have is just about younger generations and what they're gonna do and if they're just gonna stick to Roblox and Fortnite or if they're ever gonna be convinced to buy new games.

• 46:38Speaker 00

  Yeah. I wonder how many of them are playing Avowed. That'd be a fun statistic to know, you know?

• 46:43Jason Schreier?

  Probably not many. Probably like 0.3%. Yeah, Avowed seems like a game that is like-

• 46:49Speaker 00

  But there's only 4% of us out there even playing it, okay?

• 46:52Jason Schreier?

  That's true. It is true.

• 46:54Speaker 00

  We gotta factor that in.

• 46:56Jason Schreier?

  Triple-click. We are the 4%. Isn't that, oh no, it's the 3%ers. Isn't that a militia? Oh, God. Oh, no. Let's take a break and we'll be back with a little more thing.

• 47:11Speaker 03

  Walking About is the podcast about walking. It's a walkumentary series where I, Alan MacLeod, and a fun, friendly guest go for a walkabout. You'll learn about interesting people and places and have the kind of conversations you can only have on foot. We've got guests like Lauren Lapkus.

• 47:34Speaker 00

  I figured something out about this map, like how to read it.

• 47:37Speaker 03

  Betsy Sidaro. I had no clue. That's awesome and nuts. John Gabris.

• 47:43Speaker 04

  This is like great first date for like broke 20-something, you know?

• 47:47Speaker 03

  And more. Check out Walking About with Alan MacLeod on Maximum Fun.

• 47:56Speaker 05

  Hello, Podcast Recommendation Service.

• 47:58Speaker 06

  Hello, dear young man. I'm looking for a new podcast to listen to. Something amusing, perhaps?

• 48:03Speaker 05

  Oh, what about Beef and Dairy Network?

• 48:05Speaker 06

  Something surreal and satirical.

• 48:07Speaker 05

  Well, I would suggest Beef and Dairy Network.

• 48:09Speaker 06

  Ideally, it would be a spoof industry podcast for the beef and dairy industries.

• 48:14Speaker 05

  Yes, Beef and Dairy Network.

• 48:16Speaker 06

  Maybe it would have brilliant guests such as Josie Long, Heather Ann Campbell, Nick Offerman, and the actor Ted Danson.

• 48:22Speaker 05

  Beef and Dairy Network.

• 48:24Speaker 06

  I don't know. I think I'm going to stick to Joe Rogan.

• 48:28Speaker 05

  The Beef and Dairy Network podcast is a multi-award-winning comedy podcast, and you can find it at maximumfun.org or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 48:37Jason Schreier?

  And we are back. Kirk, Matty, it is time for One More Thing. Kirk, start us off.

• 48:44Kirk Hamilton?

  My One More Thing is a show that Emily and I have been watching that has just reached its halfway point, and I am ready to fully endorse it because it's really good. It's a show called The Pit on Max that I'm guessing some of our listeners have heard about. Have the two of you heard of this show?

• 48:59Speaker 00

  I have. It's on my list of things I think I'd enjoy.

• 49:03Jason Schreier?

  Yeah.

• 49:03Speaker 00

  Do go on.

• 49:04Jason Schreier?

  I've seen it in the screens when you open up Max.

• 49:08Speaker 00

  It's been marketed to me.

• 49:10Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it's really good. It is ironic that we've really gotten into it because we just canceled our Max subscription and our Netflix subscription. Speaking of attention and overwhelm, I recently just went through and cleared out so many things because, give me a break, who needs to pay $25 for Netflix to watch old episodes of The Great British Bake Off? It's not worth it. Anyways, The Pit is very, very good. We'll probably resubscribe when it ends just to watch the remaining episodes. This is a show about an emergency room in Pittsburgh. It is showrun by a longtime staffer on ER and is, I think, seen in some ways as a spiritual successor in ER to ER, not least because it stars Noah Wiley, who

• 49:54Kirk Hamilton?

  was a character or an actor who was on ER, though he is quite different on this show. It is structured really interestingly. So there are 15 episodes. Each episode is one hour long and reflects one hour of a shift of a single day in this emergency room. So it begins in the morning with hour one, and then it is told in real time, more or less. I'm sure they're plunging somewhat, but it's basically an hour each episode. And it's 15 episodes, which is pretty cool. It's longer than TV seasons tend to run these days, and so far, that has been very much to the show's benefit. It's a pretty gritty show, though it feels like classic TV in some ways as well. It's a really interesting mix of modern

• 50:38Kirk Hamilton?

  and old fashioned. It feels a little bit like an old fashioned TV show, and I like that about it. Sometimes, I don't know, especially at the beginning, you can just... See the characters walking on, you know, a nurse or a doctor or a patient and they kind of give you their spiel and you get a sense of what they're about and it all feels a little bit constructed at first. And I think that's on purpose because they're giving you a lot of good starting points. This is a very broad and diverse cast, a whole bunch of different characters from, like I said, nurses to, you know, supervisors to surgeons to residents to med students to Noah Wiley, who is the doctor who's kind of in charge of everything. He and the supervising nurse are kind of the two who are just constantly

• 51:22Kirk Hamilton?

  going from place to place. And, you know, and then everybody just all around them. A hospital is a very structured and complex environment. And then, of course, you have the patients who are coming into this overwhelmed emergency room because this is an emergency room in 2024, 2025. So there's a massive waiting room. Everyone is trying to get in. There are never enough beds. They're just constantly cycling. And as a result, you get these characters who come in with an injury or a mysterious sickness or, you know, some domestic issue going on with the person who's coming with them. And you get to know them and then they come and they go over the course of different episodes. You know, their problems reach different crescendos and then have closure. There's, you know,

• 52:04Kirk Hamilton?

  a lot. It's a very sad show at times. There are some really heartbreaking deaths. There's also really heartwarming, beautiful stuff. So it's kind of this whole mix of different emotions. And because they start it so strong and establish the characters so strongly, it really works as you watch them knit everything together. And I've been just, I've been really impressed by the scripting on this show. This cannot have been easy to break the story on this thing. 15 hours of writing across a massive cast with a ton of, you know, bit characters who are coming and going. I mean, goodness, it's really impressive. There's a kind of an overarching, there are a few overarching plots, you know, for the doctors. One of the big ones that's very interesting and very modern is that Noah Wiley's character,

• 52:49Kirk Hamilton?

  Dr. Robbie, is, he's basically dealing with PTSD from COVID because COVID hit the emergency

• 52:57Kirk Hamilton?

  Really hard, as it did hit emergency rooms very hard. And I think it's something that a lot of us don't really think about if we don't work at hospitals, just how unbelievably intense and brutal and traumatic that was for people working there. And it's not something they lay on all the time, but it comes up regularly and you can see that he's really struggling with this. And I think that's just an interesting wrinkle on top of the usual, you know, house-style, ER-style medical procedural. Really, though, it's just a very well-written show. It's well-performed. All of the actors are doing a fantastic job. Among the cast, actually, is Fiona Durif. Do the two of you know who Fiona Durif is?

• 53:34Speaker 00

  No.

• 53:35Kirk Hamilton?

  So do you know Brad Durif? He played Wormtongue in The Lord of the Rings. He was the voice of Chucky. And Fiona Durif has also become a cast member on recent Chucky movies and TV shows alongside her dad and is a really cool lady. She sort of has Natasha Lyonne energy. She's really, really great. Really, though, the cast is great. It's just a great show. You know, we're halfway through. I'm dying to know what happens next, but also each episode is just a very satisfying and rich combination of large and small stories. So, yeah, it's great, and I recommend it. It's called The Pit, and it is on Max, and they're about halfway done with their first season.

• 54:17Jason Schreier?

  Cool.

• 54:18Speaker 00

  So it's not over yet? You're halfway done, because so are they. All right. Good to know.

• 54:22Jason Schreier?

  Maddie, what's your one more thing?

• 54:24Speaker 00

  Okay, so I'm out of town right now.

• 54:27Jason Schreier?

  In a closet.

• 54:28Speaker 00

  Something I wondered before I left was, would there be a way for me to stream games from my computer onto my Steam Deck while I'm out of town? And, folks, there is, and it's called Moonlight Internet Hosting Tool. Is it extremely irritating to set up? Kinda, because I had gotten into this, I don't know what happened or why, but Moonlight, which is the tool by which I stream games from my PC to my Steam Deck normally, there's Moonlight and Sunshine, and I don't know why I have to install both to get Moonlight to work, but I do. Anyway, they had broken and I needed to repair them. So I was already

• 55:09Speaker 00

  on my PC anyway repairing them, and I was like, while I'm doing this, while I'm reinstalling all of these programs and getting this fiddly thing to work again, so that I can play Monster Hunter while I'm sitting on my couch, because sometimes I just want to play Monster Hunter while I'm sitting on my couch, and I don't always want to look at my beautiful, beautiful monitor. You get it. Kirk is probably horrified by this reveal. It's fine. Our friendship is gonna get over it.

• 55:33Kirk Hamilton?

  I've talked about Moonlight so many times on the show, and I love Moonlight. I use it constantly. I'm not horrified in any way.

• 55:38Speaker 00

  I know, I'm just not trying to disrespect Monster Hunter. I'm not trying to disrespect Monster Hunter. Anyway.

• 55:42Kirk Hamilton?

  Monster Hunter is best as a mobile game. The Switch version was amazing. Nothing you're saying is horrifying me. I am nodding my head.

• 55:48Speaker 00

  Good. That's great, because that's how I'm playing it. So there is this tool, if you just Google the phrase I said, which is "Moonlight Internet Hosting Tool," you'll find it. Or you can also Google the phrase, "Can I use Moonlight when I'm out of town?" And you'll find a bunch of Reddit threads of people linking to this very handy tool. It's relatively easy to implement, assuming you already have Moonlight set up. And it's great, because Monster Hunter, the new one, which I can say this now, we're all playing it because review embargoes are up, it doesn't work on my Switch. I did install it natively just to see, and it crashes.

• 56:25Kirk Hamilton?

  You mean on your Steam Deck?

• 56:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, it doesn't work on my Steam Deck. It crashes every three seconds. Don't even try. I mean, I did try, just for fun, but it super didn't work. And this does work, and it's kind of magical, and it feels like I'm opening up a portal to another world or something.

• 56:40Kirk Hamilton?

  That's so cool.

• 56:40Speaker 00

  It's amazing. So yeah, I recommend it.

• 56:43Jason Schreier?

  We're gonna talk more about Monster Hunter next week, by the way, in case people are wondering.

• 56:47Speaker 00

  Yep, we will.

• 56:48Kirk Hamilton?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, that'll be our episode. You know, I think to add a little context to why you have to use Sunshine, I believe the reason for this, or I'm fairly certain the reason for this, is that Moonlight used to work with Nvidia Game Stream.

• 57:00Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 57:01Kirk Hamilton?

  And it just kind of piggybacked on Nvidia Game Stream from your PC. So if you had an Nvidia card, you could just stream to Moonlight, and it was far superior to Steam.

• 57:09Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 57:09Kirk Hamilton?

  And now, I'm not sure if it, it may still work in some ways, but Nvidia has said that they may remove Game Stream from their driver, and then people basically went and made their own freestanding kind of Game Stream-esque server for your PC. That then I also think works with non-Nvidia cards, which is also nice.

• 57:27Speaker 00

  Oh, cool.

• 57:28Kirk Hamilton?

  So you can use Moonlight with anything. And if I'm wrong about any of that, I will bing it. But that's kind of the backstory there, and why you have to use Sunlight now in order to have Moonlight stream on your Steam.

• 57:36Speaker 00

  I think you're correct about that. Because previously, I only had Moonlight, and it stopped working at a certain point. And I think that was because Nvidia had decided maybe it was going to turn that faucet off for people like me.

• 57:47Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it could be. It's a very fragile system.

• 57:49Speaker 00

  It is.

• 57:50Kirk Hamilton?

  If you leave it unattended for a little while, it stops working. And you have to go and reinstall everything. But when it works, it is like magic.

• 57:55Speaker 00

  The Steam Deck, it's a great device that's easy to use.

• 57:59Kirk Hamilton?

  It is, it is. When it works.

• 58:01Jason Schreier?

  Well, I mean, it's worth noting, if you use a Steam Deck without any kind of jerry-rigging, and you're just playing games on it, it's great.

• 58:08Speaker 00

  It does work great.

• 58:09Kirk Hamilton?

  And to be fair, streaming via Steam, just straight from your Steam library, is fine. It's not quite as good as Moonlight, but it's, it's pretty good.

• 58:18Speaker 00

  It's fine. It's just not as good as Moonlight, though. And so that's part of what motivated me to finally update my Moonlight and Sunshine and get it all working again. And it's really working great. So I recommend this to anybody else out there who has the game on PC and is considering getting over the hump. Go for it. It's really worth it.

• 58:36Jason Schreier?

  And now you can play Monster Hunter in the closet that you're recording in.

• 58:40Speaker 00

  I've been doing it this whole show. I've just been playing monster hunter.

• 58:43Kirk Hamilton?

  It's a monster closet.

• 58:44Speaker 00

  Just out of frame.

• 58:44Jason Schreier?

  My one more thing is a movie that I watched on a whim last night called This Is the Tom Green Documentary, which is about the life of the comedian and star Tom Green. It is a fascinating documentary. It is absolutely wild to watch. It is on Amazon Prime. Tom Green directed the movie and it's mostly him chatting and like his friends and archival footage. So, okay, so let me, let me back up a second. Let me zoom out as one does. So for those of you who do not know, because you're younger than us, or maybe you don't remember, Tom Green was kind of like a force of nature back in the 1990s.

• 59:27Jason Schreier?

  He was this comedian who just kind of popped up out of nowhere with this show on MTV called The Tom Green Show. And it really became a cultural phenomenon for a long time. It was everywhere. He had this song called My Bum and he would like put his butt on things and it was called My Bum Is On The Whatever. And then he was in all these movies. Road Trip was this humongous comedy that he starred in. He released a movie called Freddy Got Fingered that was not quite as beloved as.

• 59:51Speaker 00

  Teenage me watched it multiple times anyway.

• 59:55Jason Schreier?

  Oh, yeah. Well, well, part of he gets into how like people didn't understand it. He was really ahead of his time on a lot of things. Like The Tom Green Show, because it was kind of, it was a mix of like footage of him sitting behind a desk, talking to his friends or interviewing people and also him on the street, just doing ridiculous things and filming people's reactions to it. It was very much a precursor to Jackass and to Eric Andre and to Impractical Jokers and a lot of like these humongous hit shows today. Tom Green really.

• 1:00:26Kirk Hamilton?

  Maybe in the line with Andy Kaufman and also Sacha Baron Cohen as a before and after as well. Two people that I would maybe compare to Tom.

• 1:00:34Jason Schreier?

  Sure. Sacha Baron Cohen being after, you're saying.

• 1:00:36Kirk Hamilton?

  There's a before and after. Yeah. Andy Kaufman before Sacha Baron Cohen after.

• 1:00:39Jason Schreier?

  Yeah. Andy Kaufman, yeah, although Andy Kaufman, I don't think he did like on the street footage in the same way.

• 1:00:45Kirk Hamilton?

  No, no, no. But I mean, in terms, just in terms of aesthetic sensibility.

• 1:00:48Jason Schreier?

  But yes, surrealist kind of, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he was really, the film, like the documentary reveals a lot of stuff I didn't realize, which is that like. A few years after the Tom Green Show, he started like streaming and making YouTube videos in his house and did this show, this kind of like live streaming talk show that was years before its time. He actually shows he has Joe Rogan on it and Joe Rogan looks around and he's like, you could just do this? And it's kind of like the beginning of Joe Rogan's podcast. What have you wrought? Yeah, man. And so nowadays, he has moved to a farm in Ottawa, Canada, and is like a cowboy, basically, like, living on a farm with dogs and horses and stuff. But this

• 1:01:32Jason Schreier?

  movie just shows his whole journey and it's really fascinating. I had forgotten that he was married to Drew Barrymore. I had forgotten that he was like, really, for a while, he was like on the cover of magazines. He was really a superstar. And I guess I hadn't really thought about it. Or I guess I hadn't thought about him in a long time and like his, the effect he had on people. It's really interesting to see and it's really interesting to follow his journey. He talks about getting cancer and what that did to him and his kind of mental state. I didn't know he got cancer then. He went and hosted Saturday Night Live like five days after getting surgery to like have his lymph nodes removed or cancer removed from, from his body. It's really crazy. And it's a fascinating documentary. I recommend it. It's really interesting and just fun to watch. It's really just well done. And it's also really cool to see all

• 1:02:17Jason Schreier?

  this archival footage, like compared to how he is now, which is a lot more just kind of low key and chill as a cowboy on a farm. But he's still doing stuff. He's still making, like, I saw right after this, I didn't watch it, but after this, next in the queue was like a new show of him on the farm that is like Tom Green in nature or something like that. So he's still making things. But yeah, it's really interesting and I really enjoyed it. Once again, it's called, This is the Tom Green Documentary on Amazon Prime. And if you want kind of either a nostalgia blast, if you're a millennial, an elder millennial, or if you want to kind of understand the early internet slash early pop culture world

• 1:02:58Jason Schreier?

  of like, the period from 1995 to 2000, which is like, if you were 12 years old or 13 years old during that period, you probably had MTV on like every day for hours after school. If you want to understand that, this is a really fun documentary to watch and just kind of like, it captures that time period well.

• 1:03:17Kirk Hamilton?

  Man, it's so interesting. I just watched the extended cut of this documentary, Dig, which is about the dandy Warhols and the Bryan Jonestown massacre in that same time period, from 95 to 2000. It was such an interesting time because it was pre-internet, or at least pre-ubiquitous internet, but a lot of people had camcorders and were recording a lot of footage. So there are, I'm seeing more and more documentaries, and music documentaries in particular, from that time period because there's so much footage. And it's really cool. It really was such a distinct period in time. I totally want to watch this. That sounds really good, Jason. It's, it sounds fascinating.

• 1:03:52Jason Schreier?

  It's cool. You'll like it. Yeah, I think you'll, I think both of you will like it. I think people, especially people our age, you like, might have grown up.

• 1:03:59Speaker 00

  I liked him.

• 1:03:59Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I always enjoyed the time we had. I thought it was the silliest thing. It's especially if you're a teenager.

• 1:04:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, but that was the humor of the time, was like that kind of absurd, like, space ghost, like, just like silly things happening. I, I don't know. It still really formed a lot of what my sense of humor is now, is growing up from that.

• 1:04:16Jason Schreier?

  Extremely silly. And watching how far he would go, like, with his physical comedy was also just fantastic. I mean, also, it really captures like the drive of a creative person and a passionate person who like, really worked his ass off to make it.

• 1:04:30Speaker 00

  And didn't care about being liked, seemingly, because he just was extremely strange the entire way.

• 1:04:35Jason Schreier?

  I think he cared about being liked. He just like, was willing to take creative risks.

• 1:04:39Speaker 00

  Well, maybe I couldn't help it then, and was just like, this is the art I make. I don't, I don't know.

• 1:04:45Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, well, he, he just wanted to, he wanted to make people laugh, and that's what he tried to do with everything. Anyway, it's cool. All right, that is it for this week's episode. If you are a member of Maximum Fun, we will see you soon with the bonus app. Otherwise, we'll see you next week to Talk Monster Hunter.

• 1:05:01Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, see you next week.

• 1:05:03Speaker 00

  Bye.

• 1:05:06Kirk 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. TripleClick 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. Find us on Twitter at TripleClickPod, send email to [email protected], and find a link to our Discord in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

• 1:06:04Jason Schreier?

  Maximum Fun, a worker-owned network of artist-owned shows supported directly by you.