GTA VI, Giant Bomb And Polygon Gutted, Deep Rock Galactic Survivor

Hello, everybody, and welcome to a new episode of the MinMag Show, a place about games, friends, and getting better. I'm Ben Hanson, joined by Leo Vader. Wow, yes, nice. The hero from last week, holding down the fort, along with Kyle Bossman and everybody else. Thank you for stepping up, man. My pleasure. Very fun. We got Kelsey Lewin here. Second is the best. That's right. We have the dirty third, Jeff Marchiafava. What a terrible nickname! We have Hayley McClain!

Hi, gamers. And that's a full show, everybody. We couldn't possibly stack any more people in this episode, but what if we kept going? We have Jacob Geller joining us. Jacob Geller! Me and Ben are best friends now. That's right. Toot-o-boom, Jacob. We're also joined by the one and only Ana Diaz, everybody. Hello. Thanks for having me. Returning champion, former MinMax cohorts,

left years ago to join Polygon, and obviously there's a lot to unpack with the state of Polygon and games media, and we're going to do that on this very episode. But Ana, how you doing? Not as bad as maybe like... I'm just grateful for all the support right now. Obviously, things are really stressful, but all things considered, I think I'm doing okay. Thanks to the

Thanks to other people who have been scooping me and lifting me up. Oh, that's nice. That's nice. Yeah, we'll unpack it because last week was probably the worst week ever in terms of games and media with Giant Bomb and Polygon getting... how would you call it a deadly blow to the side of the head for both sites here so there's a lot to unpack just talking about the state of games media all that wild stuff but you know if you're watching this on youtube thank you for being here

You can always shout out in the comments with sites that you think deserve some love, games outlets you think are kind of unsung. Like, I think about... I don't want to tip too much into this journey that we're going to unpack later in the episode, but you think about all the sites that are just quietly appreciated that could probably use a boost

Just like, oh, like a gameindustry.biz or a game developer. Unwinnable. Unwinnable. There we go. Unwinnable. I mean, just give a shout out in the comments, everybody, for a site that you think could use some more love before we unpack the state of the games industry here. Speaking of state of the games industry, we are a MinMax, we are a Patreon-supported outlet there at Patreon.com. We are a MinMax, baby! We are a MinMax, baby! Yeah, baby! Oh, baby, yeah!

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even if you just want to unlock the pissy zones, which is after our game of the year debates, once we wrap up our game of the year debates, we let her loose for about an hour of... Content that should not be shared publicly. It's the meanest we ever are all here. It is outrageous. This last year in particular was very fun, but it gets raw in a good, fun, feisty way. And so that is all available in that same playlist, which you get access to if you support us.

through the whole YouTube membership there. So jump in. You can help support us. And a couple things. Since MinMac started, we have been collecting clips. If you see me often, Maybe you hear me frantically typing on my keyboard. I'm running down time codes of like... That zinger from Sarah was so good. I gotta get this. Or that was such a smart comment from Kelsey. I gotta get this. Or Jeff, I'm farted on Mike. I gotta write down that time code. These types of killer moments

So we've been... Thanks, Haley. We've been taking clips. For years and years and years, we've been gathering clips. And what if I told you that it's all gathering for this one event, the MinMaxathon, which is going to be happening this Friday at 7.30 p.m. Central on YouTube. We're going to be randomizing... clips from the full history of min-max. I just put them all in a VLC playlist and it was over 24 hours worth.

of min-max clips that are like, you know, 10 seconds to a minute long and we're just going to be randomizing all of those. and we're going to be reacting to them along the way, along with chat, and this is all as a drive to promote the MinMax membership on YouTube. So you can jump in and support that if you feel like seeing that randomized roulette wheel of a bunch of Minvax moments from our five and a half year history is worth supporting. So we appreciate that. A couple of things.

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That's it, everybody. Tune in for the MidMaxathon. We have links below that will be happening this Friday on YouTube, the evening of Friday. It won't be 24 hours long, right? No, no. I'll need to sleep at some point, but I'm looking forward to cracking a beer with whoever wants to swing by for a bit and just going through that. roulette history of the last five and a half years of my life. I'll crack a frickin' beer, that sounds...

That sounds like a nice Friday. It's going to be lovely. But, wild times in the game industry. Lots of ups and downs. Last week, obviously, was tumultuous, and they also announced that GTA 6 was getting delayed. And everybody said, boo, I can't believe you do it to us.

And then this week they released a new trailer for GTA 6 and everybody said, yay, this looks amazing. We're excited for this. Good order of those things. Expert PR. Yeah, they seem to know exactly. We have a reaction stream up on our YouTube channel if you want to see a raw reaction to the new trailer for GTA 6. Jacob, how are you sitting with GTA 6's second trailer after a day or two of living with it here?

I really like it. I, like, I think it's, you know, some of the conversation has been they did not show any gameplay as we would typically define it of, like, third person behind the character, you know, doing stuff. But, like, I... i have not been a fan historically of the gta franchise because i just think that rockstar has a real like piece of attitude in a way that i don't enjoy with grand theft auto you know that that it's just kind of like

You go to a website and it's like, instead of Facebook, it's like pissbook.com. That's hilarious. That's not funny.

um and so i really i really liked that this trailer was kind of about like the world vibes which still seem nice and wacky but like two characters who both already seem interesting and complicated and seem like they're going to have like a relationship that i'm really invested in it was just like okay this is what You know, in terms of like what I want from one of these sorts of games and kind of, you know, like what I got from Red Dead Redemption 2, which makes it one of the best stories ever.

This is the kind of thing I want them to put their $1 billion budget towards. Yes. I mean, there's like the bigger picture of, God, I can't wait to see what the most expensive video game of all time looks like. But then on top of that, actually being like, you know... having like a romance as the core story presumably that's running throughout GTA 6 like that is making me so much more compelled than I thought and just not to get crass but just like Having...

sexiness as like a core pillar of this trailer. I watched you the last time. You guys reacted live in bed at one point. You yelled. It's so rare. I looked up Wikipedia. It's that kind of insight you have to come to MinMax. You gotta be careful, man. They're gonna put that in a sizzle reel at the Game Awards. You gotta be careful having moments like that. In memoriam, Ben Hansen. Yeah, did you like the trailer, Hayley? As a huge rock star nut?

i'm yeah i'm a rock star net i yeah i very much agree with jacob i love the gta is a fun thing to play and like the story is whatever you know that's how it always has kind of felt for me GTA 5 is an okay story but yeah I'm very tired of like you know my wife won't stop and shut up or like that's like all the characterization we have for like a woman in the game so i'm like okay cool but she cheated too

Don't forget that. She's also a cheater. Oh, I guess you guys don't know satire. Okay. We're commenting on whores. Whatever. So I'm very excited that they're taking a lot of the lessons they clearly learned and the characterizations of characters within Red Dead, which are so solidly good. I just adore those characters still to this day. I can name every single person in that freaking group.

up on that hill in Chapter 2 of my family. So I'm very excited for them to bring that over to this, which is so far, historically, for me personally, has been more about, I'm just excited to... drive a car around and like follow the rules of the road when i'm bored or whatever like i just use it as like a playground it's fun that it'll have like a good story i'm very excited for that at least it looks like it's going to I'm just so curious to see if they fully replicate the...

um ridiculousness of like the miami highway system because yes oh my god true miami and like I have never experienced fear like I've experienced when driving in that city. I'm like, This story's great, but I'm really worried about how we're going to get from place to place. Yeah, how chaotic in Western America. My Miami thought I haven't considered right now is, do you think we'll have drivable cruise ships? Oh my god.

You can drive a car onto a cruise ship. I'll bet you that that will be something that... That'll be a... Like a park.

yeah an entire like mini story on the cruise ship i could see yeah i bet i bet that's going to be the case like on their site which by the time have you checked out the gta 6 site it's like one of the most beautiful sites i've seen in a long time it's just like a beautiful scroll and it's working through like all the different areas in the game which you think like okay it's vice city

But then you go to the site and you start to realize, oh no, it's like the entire state, which is called Leonida instead of Florida, right? But it's like, okay, we're doing... There's a whole national park in there, like a mountain national park. We're doing all of the keys. Like it just keeps expanding more and more until you realize the scope of what they're building here. And it just seems incredible.

Oh, my God. The site's awesome. It's so fun to scroll. I know, right? Yay! Yeah, I love it. The director's room. That's the anime town. I'm excited that there will definitely be like a farm or something somewhere because you're telling me they're going to put all that energy into making horses amazing and Red Dead and then you can't ride a horse in GTA 6.

There's got to be some mission where you're riding horses and I'm just going to spend all my time over at the farm riding horses around. Or that scared them off of it because it was such a huge undertaking. But they already did it all. They got the horses all mo-capped and stuff. They don't want to do that again.

Chuck it up there. Why not? These are Florida horses are completely different. I guess that's racehorses. They'll have a racehorse level. Guaranteed. Guaranteed. Yes. I guess this is kind of like the magic of DJ six, why it's the biggest thing in the world. Everyone can get so hype about it because. when these games cover so much territory, it's like how Leo feels about Streets of Rogue 2 and the infinite potential of it. Like, all of us can assign our hopes and dreams

onto this canvas that's just Florida. It's stupid not to. It's so weird looking at the trailer and it's like, okay, the most expensive game ever made. And somehow you need to have the most expensive game ever made to like highlight these little small slice of life moments, which is really what popped for me in the trailer. Like the more I rewatch at that first minute.

of just like Jason going around his life and everybody subtly hitting on him from the distance and stuff like that. But just those quiet little moments or my favorite scene in the trailer now.

is when Lucia, like, comes home, and she just, like, collapses on Jason on the couch, and she's wearing kind of, like, blaze orange, like, some probation or something after she got out of prison, and she, like, throws her keys on the table and collapses on them exhausted, and it's like, It's so weird that the most expensive game ever made...

That's what you need to have just like that accurate of like okay, there's reality I'm seeing life in a video game, which is a little too rare I feel like animation budget must go crazy on this game i guess so yeah i can't even begin to thank every single person walking around like even you pointed out in the thing like the party boat people oh my god how long until their animations loop

yes 15 seconds 10 minutes like who knows I am again that's again just the huge scope of what you can be hyped about like I'm more excited to watch those party boats and to watch those animations than to do any mission in gta 6 i just want to camp out and enjoy that yeah i mean it's good for people watching Sometimes I just like don't do anything in these games and I just kind of like watch what the NPCs are doing, because it's interesting.

absolutely going on walks places i used to do that all the time when gta 5 dropped and gta 4 too like just for the time it's it still is hitting that level of a new new high for for realisticness and it's fun to hopefully again all fingers crossed See them lean into like, we can make a grounded story that is attempting to make you care more versus like,

Let's make the most realistic world ever, and then you're driving your poop car around. I mean, yeah, so the way they pitched the story in the description for the YouTube video, which already has 79 million views. It says, Jason and Lucia have always known that the deck is stacked against them, but when an easy score goes wrong, they find themselves on the darkest side of the sunniest place in America, in the middle of a conspiracy stretching across the state of Leonida.

forced to rely on each other more than ever if they want to make it out alive. Uh, I would... I think it's probably a crime against drama. But wouldn't it be nice if they just stuck together the whole game? If they were just a tight couple that loved each other? If they were just that, yeah. super cool and emotionally intelligent and just like work through it all together. Great stories.

exterior to them that'd be kind of lovely in a way is that like they're so rock solid but everything else around them is like the worst yeah which would make me really interesting to be honest if anywhere that could happen that would that would be a fake florida

Right. They're just too busy making out throughout the entire game to worry about any conflict potentially popping up between them. Ben, did you catch that? The guy in the beginning, I think the only official cast member announced is Steven Root. who's like Fuchs from Barry one of my guys I mean you mean Jimmy James from News Radio give him his credit please so okay but did they actually announce that or is everyone just

guessing based on the voice, because it clearly is him, but I don't know if he's announced it anywhere. 100% is him, yeah. Okay. I don't know if they announced that, but if you go on IMDB, GTA 6 has one person listed, and it's Steven Root as that guy. That's amazing. If it's not him, they're using AI, and they're going to get sued by him for putting his voice in it.

It's undeniable. Yeah, it's super exciting. Yeah, Steven Rett belongs in GTA 6, of course. Just think of how many other... famous voice actors they're gonna have like they had Samuel L. Jackson like 20 years ago in san andreas it's like they can get anyone they want now um and i'm sure it's just going to be a who's who of Famous people. Yeah, Bobby Moynihan's in there. Obviously, the gloves are off. Was Red Dead 2's voice actor list star-studded?

No. Like, obviously, they're all very good, but is that just, like, a GTA-Redmen separation? That's a GTA kind of, yeah. I mean, Ray Liotta, you know, was, like, first voiced character, and I'm sure they're going to be... I would think at least.

On that note, though, it is fun to just have, like, a little bit more of these two main characters, the actors playing the two main characters, who are going to be launched into known names from this, same as the Red Dead crew and the GTA V main cast. Like, you're just going to...

These are the people we're going to be seeing clips of talking about the process of making this for a decade after. There's going to be so many cameos for them. They're getting their cameo page ready to go for hair when she wants to drop big bucks on these things. Yeah, I like, it wasn't until I cruised into Reddit a little bit where it's like, oh, okay, that's probably exactly what they're going for, like the opening line. is jason up on the roof and he's like i'm just fixing some leaks here

It's like, oh, that's probably a reference to the gigantic GTA 6 lake. I didn't piece that together until too late, probably, but of course. See, Jacob, the writing is pitch perfect at this point. Flawless. I liked it better when I didn't know that that was... I'm going to choose to believe that's not intentional. Yeah, I mean, other tidbits in the trailer that pop for anybody? Things you want to highlight? Sack! Sex. There was certainly sex. There's no doubt about it.

Sex is going crazy in that. The beer bottles that you pointed out in that too, but I look... like just the way they're jingling around and the thing he's holding yeah like individual assets within other assets that they have their own physics within the asset thing that's realistic oh my god yeah and they say all captured on ps5 they didn't even say ps5 pro

in there, but it's funny that in the trailer there is like a parody of a PS5 that's like next to the tv it's like oh is this game been in development for so long that they had to replace their ps4 parody with a ps5 parody just to make sure it's fully up to date. Digital Foundry can sometimes do, I think if they get the uncompressed trailer they can do like a resolution count of just being like what res is this actually going at and I feel like from that you could maybe get a guess of like

Is it actually PS5 or PS5 Pro? Because it just seems Like, if they were running it on a base PS5, I feel like they would have made a bigger deal of saying this is a base PS5. You know, for it to be like a tiny little flex that like 1% of people would notice that it's like, it's not on a pro. And for it to presumably look worse, it doesn't really make sense.

to me, is like a marketing strategy. Well, then you'd have to make two versions because Xbox has downloaded on their YouTube channel. I'm like, would that be weird if they're leaning too much into that? Why would you have to make two versions? If you're having a big flash screen that says, this looks great on a base PS5. I'm just like, why would they do it on a base PS5? What would be the reasoning? Maybe they just forgot the PS5 Pro exists like me. Right, I think that's entirely possible, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, there's like stuff that you can really lean into here. Like, okay, Lucia has... She has, like, AirPods. Big muscles? Oh, her back is out of control muscular. And apparently she's been, like, trained to be a fighter her entire life and stuff. But she has AirPods.

a couple times throughout the trailer. And so, like, okay, is that meaning that you can listen to music now even if you're not in a car just as you're roaming around? That's got to be the case, right? If they're already showing that in trailers and screenshots and stuff. Yeah. And then there's stuff like, okay...

Jason's lifting weights in the beginning as the girls are ogling them and stuff. Like, is that coming back from San Andreas in a big way? Can you change your body type like in Red Dead 2 in a big way again here? Like, there's a lot of reading into it that the super fans have done, which is fun.

I want to make a real quick prediction on the AirPods. I think they will go so far. Rockstar level of detail. You can do the noise canceling thing. You can on AirPods. I think that's a great call. That's a great call. I think that's right. No one take that bet because he's 100% right.

But yeah, so May 26th. You know, a little more than a year from now. Presumably. Is when this thing's coming out. And now it's like, it's probably going to be... what eight months nine months and then we'll get one of those like overview trailers you know it's like in the world of gta 6 these are the things you can do and that's when we'll see gameplay that's probably going to be the next

pillar of marketing here they'll probably leave with uh airpods yeah i think you're right yeah that's smart they they dropped the first trailer like a week before the game awards right yeah do you think i mean they could do that again just a stunt on keely i mean i feel like i kind of already did i mean just like a month before the game awards got that that's true yeah um but i mean this thing is gonna be 80 bucks right does anyone want to

Gamble anything else? 80, 90? At least. Yeah. Especially when they're coming out so late now. Like, I mean, unless things... Start reversing quick. Just supply chain alone is going to be insane. Maybe they won't do physical copies. This could be weird.

Never know. Weird world now, which is what we're going to unpack on this episode. But before we get to that, we do have a special message from a Patreon supporter who wrote in for community questions, but I had to jump ahead here. Clayton Carroll says, Hey, I was watching a min-max show from 2022. and Jeffem was on the episode, and he assuredly said that he would finish Red Dead 2. You gave a good cutoff, challenging him to finish it before Rockstar released their next game.

And Jeff Magritte with the challenge thinking he had all the time in the world, which he did. Since that time seems to be finally approaching one year from now, I wanted to know if Jeff was going to honor the challenge and finish Red Dead 2 before GTA 6 releases. Jeff has been delaying GTA 6 this whole time. I sent him a message and was like, hey guys,

I still haven't finished Red Dead 2. Please, can you push it back? And they were like, of course we will. When do you want it? And I said, probably a year. Maybe a little more than a year. What chapter are you in? I have no idea. I'm going to have to start over. No! So long. Just the first chapter is the worst, walking through the snow and stuff. That loses everybody. i'll get through that at least no you won't um

No, I got to the part where you're at the camp, and then I just never wanted to do anything other than go fishing. That's the best chapter. Yeah. that's the chapter I live in don't worry he'll get right to it right before this game launches it's absolutely happening I thought he was this whole time which we've been talking about this for years I thought he was like

kind of close to finishing it. The part with the camp, like, four hours in. One of the first things you do. I play it like I play, you know, all the Bethesda games. where it's just like I get far enough for the open world to open and then I just do that forever and then never finish any games. And then just live with it and hear about it for the rest of my life. How will you learn about Dutchess Downfall?

Come on, Jeff. Spoilers. Or maybe Red Dead 1. Maybe Red Dead 1. It's not spoilers. Yeah, it's the plot of Red Dead 1. I come out and play it down. so we can all debate whether or not this game is going to run well on our PS5 or Leo you know what we could be doing instead Huh. We could be jacking in with a beautiful MSI motherboard, baby, and play games that you want on your PC. Because MSI, they're on a mission to make custom PC building easy, affordable, and accessible for everybody.

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Look at that bad boy. There you go. What do you want, everybody? You can save 5% on those motherboards at the MSI US store with the promo code MSIPOD. If you're looking to upgrade or build a new custom PC, this is your option to 5% use the promo code MSIPOD there's a link in the description and also they're here to help you if you're intimidated they have some

Some ways to guide you through the process of building your own PC. And you can get up to $120 in Steam codes on top of the motherboard discount. So check it out, everybody. MSI Pod. Link below. Já falo... Why do I feel like you would have the strongest opinions about Xbox increasing their prices on absolutely everything in a time where... I guess everyone's increasing their prices, but of all the people, Microsoft right now, like when you're in last place by a mile. Probably because they're...

A trillion dollar company that spends billions of dollars acquiring all these studios only to shut most of them down. And they don't need any more money than they already have, but they're just going to do it because they can.

And also they're giving no incentive for like why you should now buy an xbox that's like a hundred dollars more like like they're just raising it out of nowhere and being like actually this is going to cost more you can play all our games everywhere else anyway but If you did want to buy it, it's more expensive now?

And with the boycott, it's like, there's multiple sides to it, but this, it's like, everybody can hate this. And it's wild. They're on BDS's side. It's wild to not be doing any amount of, like, there's no trying here like they could at least be like but you get six months of game pass or like something something that wouldn't even like cost them any more money you know server space or whatever but like they would not

cost them any real money to at least give some sort of incentive but they're just like It's more expensive now. And I get it. It probably is more expensive for them to be making everything right now. That's just the reality. But that's not how consumers operate. To just be like, it's all more expensive.

shrug is very strange i i genuinely don't know the answer to this question but like are we going to spend the next uh let's hope three years like getting mad at every company for raising prices yes like it does it does feel like this is going to happen with every other consumer product that we buy and i don't

Like, I don't know what to do about that, you know, that, like, my electric toothbrush next month is going to cost twice as much as it does now. Like, and it's not, I don't want to, like, let the companies off the hook, and I think... Jeff was right that Microsoft has a bazillion dollars and they can do kind of whatever they want, but like everything is going to go up in price. Just like everything that we buy is going to increase. Yeah, because of tariffs. And so...

I guess you just rarely see something, I don't know, are you passionate about your electric toothbrush in a way that people are passionate about playing games on their Xbox? He buys a new one every month. Yeah. Game Pass subscription. 360 or whatever they would call it.

But yeah, so Price is here for the Xbox, right? No, it's great. We got the Xbox Series. No, Hayley, it was really good. You've supported me with enough of my 3 out of 10 jokes. I'm here for yours. Thanks. But that was like a 4, honestly. uh but it was an xbox series s yeah so the cheapest model it went from 300 to 380 and then like the xbox series x that's up 100 bucks from 500 to 600 bucks and that's yeah like jacob talked about it's just the weirdest when clearly they're struggling.

to get xboxes in homes Their messaging is everything is an Xbox. They're putting their games... I mean, Gears of War is coming out on PS5 in August, is the state of Microsoft gaming, and just, you know, Forza Horizon 5 is out on PS5 now. Everything is spread out, and so... The idea of raising this prices now is just completely brutal. It feels like they're trying to kill off, like, they just don't want to make consoles anymore. And so it's like...

Let's do this in the worst way possible so that we have a reason to not have to do it anymore. And we'll just be game pass going on. It does feel so stupid so as to feel a little conspiratorial about it. When you are in last place, and you know, Jacob's point, everyone is going to raise their prices at some point. They're going to have to.

So if you're the last place company right now, why would you jump out and be the first one to do this and offer no incentive, you know, or like anything? It's just, it's weird. It's so bad that it feels a little like, are they doing this on purpose? They can't possibly be this dumb. Well, I mean, there is the case that PS5 got out there and raised prices in a lot of territories other than America.

I would not be surprised by the end of the year if PlayStation didn't raise the price of PS5 as well. I am so curious to learn how much of it was Mario Kart. that dastardly mario kart breaking the seal on the 80 game because also this holiday uh they say that some of their first party games are going to be 80 bucks which is you know you can read that as code for we want to charge 80 bucks for call of duty please don't stop us mario kart can do it call of duty can do it um but

I'm curious to see what other holiday game from Microsoft. Which is super transparent. Like, everyone knows that's exactly what happened. And, you know...

Absolutely, tariffs are going to raise the prices on everything. I blame the person who made the tariffs as much as anybody else, but it's like, there's an element of corporate greed to this that's coming from the biggest company that is that is very much like saw nintendo do it and said okay we can do it now too and like didn't bother to look at the Fallout from Nintendo doing it, and...

Or they just don't care. And it's like... I don't think, like, the fallout will... I think people will just, like, slowly begrudgingly accept it, though. And it'll just be, like, kind of back to Jacob's point, like... I think it'll be like people complaining on the internet for a while and then them eventually realizing, well, I kind of want this. So I guess they'll rationalize it and be like, okay, $80 more, then I'll buy one less game or something. I can see that for some games.

For Xbox, it's weird because most people just powerfully pay for Game Pass instead. And also, like, there's just not an incentive for the consoles in the first place. Yeah. It's the best place to play, but then they released the PS5 version of Indiana Jones, and it's like, yeah, but that has a bunch of... yeah it has some extra features in there and stuff so it's kind of like i kind of want the dual sense and when i play indiana jones

But, so, I mean, I was talking to Jacob about this because we talked for like a week straight in Brazil, but it's looking at like the console sales. Like, remember how I was always just dunking on the Xbox One and what a complete failure their Xbox One was in comparison to PS4 and all that stuff, yada, yada, yada. I mean, at this point, if you just go from the clock of starting the console line of when it launched, the Xbox One had sold 40 million units.

And at this point, with the Xbox Series X and S combined, they've sold 32 million units. So it's like the last generation was just seen as like a disaster for Microsoft. Like we're, we're significantly behind even that line. And now we're making things more expensive and putting our games in every other system.

But if there's enough faith in Game Pass, that's the long play ultimately, even though that has plateaued in a way that's, I'm sure, frustrating for all those folks. Yeah, I feel like the real question is when is Game Pass going to start doing the Netflix price structure and just... increasing three times a year. Just being like, hey, you're bought into this. You don't own any games for your Xbox. So if you want to keep using this as a console, Now it's 25 bucks a month. Yeah.

My kind of conspiratorial take is that, like, the tariffs I mean, it's not that conspiratorial, like the terrorists are going to hit physical media. It's going to really benefit companies that like want to, that, you know, sell their media in this way, because it's going to be so much harder to get physical media. And that actually like, you know.

people are going to be like, well, I'm not going to buy like comic books because like, you know, the tariffs hurt this. I'm just going to do like a subscription app, yada, yada, yada. And eventually it's just like,

going to lead to this like sad place where it's like okay then people won't own things yes and then they'll just push push the prices up once people are kind of dropped yeah exactly yeah i mean already like just speaking as someone who stocks new games in the stores i now order maybe one per store of any xbox release physically and people simply do not buy one physical xbox games one one per store and sometimes that doesn't sell like It is about a Bliffian remastered like

I don't think there's anyone, but there's not even a physical. There may be later, but anything that they shadow drop, the physical can't come out at the same time, or I would know about it early, which would not be a shadow drop anymore. um but yeah i mean like already i don't think people own games for xbox and it's gonna be it's gonna be weird in the future xbox like xbox one and series s might be like the rarest most collectible stuff in the future because

They are not selling whatsoever. A wonder swan of the 2020s. Gather every Xbox. Hey, people bought that in Japan. People bought that. That's really interesting. Thump. Yeah. Do you remember Leo back in 2012 when there was a web series that was sponsored by Microsoft's Internet Explorer, The Peak?

other than Opera GX, like the peak browser for gamers and explorer. Yeah, for non-gamers, it was a pretty good browser, yeah. Yeah, yeah. There was a whole series released back in 2012, and it was about the creation of a certain website called Polygon. which has grown to become one of the biggest gaming sites in the world. And last week, it was sold to Valnet.

which is a company that also owns OpenCritic, GameRant, ScreenRant, The Gamer, DualShockers, HowToGeek, MovieWeb, Collider, ComicBookResource, a bunch of stuff like that. But with that,

company being sold then to Valnet. It was a slaughter not to not to put too fine of a point on it of the entire staff like yeah leo we We're still bummed out, and Jeff and I guess everybody, but we're still bummed out about the Game Informer layoffs from 2019, where we lost like 40% of the editorial staff, and it felt like... good night like see ya um and anna i mean what percentage of folks were let go from polygon last week

I mean, I don't know the percentage off the top of my head, but only five people were kept on and we were like a staff of like, like over 20 people were laid off. Yeah. Yeah. Just brutal. Yeah. um yeah i mean do you want to walk through your experience with that was there an inkling of anything happening or what was it like for you yeah so this is what's kind of um surprising and really sad and devastating about it is that like it it took everyone completely by surprise I think like

you know we're not naive we're in games media and journalism so you kind of always at least for me personally I always do this work with this idea of like I'll do this until I can't do this anymore of like this idea of like transience and like um subtle instability always like in the background um but as far as like game websites go um like

There was never the impression that we were like under like that we were like threatened in any reason. I think there are like certainly challenges that we saw like. internally as far as like okay like we launched uh redesign and that kind of like impacted the way that people like access our stories or something like that but like even then you know to the very end like we were posting a lot producing a lot having like

our monster monster hunter wilds guides did like very well um yeah you know like we continued to have like editorial hits right and so and to have a readership and so we did not expect this and for me personally like I just I woke up on Thursday. sent some news to our slack and was like getting ready to kind of like do some refreshes of some stories and

saw our union Slack talking, saying that our company had been sold. And like within a minute, I had an email saying that my position had been eliminated. And then it was just like, it was like a Twitch chat, like a chaotic Twitch chat with just like messages rolling around. Like I was laid off. I was laid off. I was laid off. I was laid off. I was laid off. Like it was like the saddest thing ever. And just like, so.

Yeah, I mean, it was shocking. It was surprising. Yeah. I mean, I had it on good authority, the idea that, like, within Vox, that Polygon was profitable, which is pretty rare, I guess, for a site that big. There's kind of a looming threat, I have to imagine, that all sites are reckoning with, and IGN's Ziff Davis is fighting for at this point of

It's profitable. A lot of that traffic's coming from guides. I don't know the exact percentage of how much of Polygon's traffic was coming from guides, and with AI kind of absorbing more and more of that traffic there is I mean there was you know an axe hanging over the head of is hanging over the head of almost every gaming site you know with AI kind of

taking the summaries of the guides which is a huge component of traffic for those sites that are still out there it's just like that axe is in full swing at this point and last week yeah it got polygon and kind of sort of giant bomb in a different sort of way but yeah Yeah, well, and that's the thing. Vox did describe us as publicly being profitable, right? And within Vox, we were a very lean team. We were large as far as games media goes these days, right?

But, like, as far as, you know, compared to the resources that, like, other Vox Media properties get, like you say, like The Verge, New York Magazine, even Vox.com, these kinds of places, like, we were so much smaller. And we knew, like, we... you know put numbers on the board and so It's definitely sad. Like there's definitely this feeling of like. We did everything right and you still can't, you know. be helped because you're that's right that's the sadness of this is like

You don't own this site. You don't own this content. Yeah. enter an employment contract you send us and your CEO can be approached by someone and just like decide to sell you. Yeah, way above everybody else that's had, like what I saw, Chris Grant.

who was the founder of this whole thing where he said quote talking about Valnet he said their press release proudly calls Polygon a premium gaming publication but Valnet literally refused to meet with me or answer a single question of mine throughout this process They were wildly incurious about how a gaming publication even becomes premium, which is something Polygon's been trying to push since the beginning. What was their wording again, Jacob? They called it

Oh, they're going to hire triple-A writers. Double-A writers. So I was not kept. I'm so sorry. Name a AAA writer in the gaming industry that hasn't been laid off from Polygon.com. Yeah. No, it is true. They've just been an amazing source of talent since their founding.

i was going back and watching that press reset documentary that they made in 2012 sponsored by internet explorer if you don't recall um and it's i love that documentary for just it's a specific time and a specific place but if you want to watch a documentary about making a site in 2012 and a lot of big all hands-on meetings where they debate whether or not to

allow the Oxford comma to be used on polygon.com it's like god this just this just wouldn't exist these days just to have this level of funding and this much of an effort and I don't know does anybody else have fond memories of the early days of Polygon because within Game Inform or Jeff, I don't know if you remember this, but it was like

We got our first whispers because Phil Kohler, controversy noted, who was at Game Informer at the time, and he was like, hey, I'm leaving because they're going to be building up a new site and I'm going to be the deputy reviews editor over there. So it's kind of like this.

inside track to be like okay let's see how this other site does and then it ends up becoming what second behind ign for like the biggest gaming site like it's just had an incredible journey since it launched but yeah anybody else have Thoughts on the launch of Polygon, kind of the arc of Polygon here?

I mean, obviously, like, they paved the way their video specifically has always been my niche, my wheelhouse for the Polygon stuff I pay most attention to. They paved the way for... being a bit outside of the typical way you would play the game on YouTube as an outlet like that, of doing the guides and the previews and the reviews, focusing on that or just straight up gameplay or whatever, they brought so much creativity to it and so much

just an undeniable headline that you had to click on and find out. They had so much great talent for that. And I think that... You know, not in a way where I was like, look at Polygon, they can do it, why don't we do it? But at Game Informer, I think being allowed to fly freer, it's like they showed the template for why that's worthwhile, why that's not just just as worthwhile of a way to do it but a way that to be even more successful to be more

Be more creative and get more rewarded because people respond to that. Just the freedom to do that. I applied to Polygon before I applied to Game Informer. Oh, nice. I remember making a reel for that. I loved Polygon. Yeah, I had a vague memory of like, wait, I applied for Polygon. And I was digging through and it was like in 2016, I applied to be like their executive producer.

video over there which I did not get the job and that's correct but I was like oh yeah I went and re-read my cover letter for Polygon so everyone was scrambling to get in there and Ana was looking to have to get there as an intern and then full time there for years and years

Yeah. And Leo, I think what you were saying about the video is true for the articles there too, because I was, I mean, I liked their videos too, but I was definitely more of a reader and, um, Even back in those early days, I mean, I don't think I was like a super savvy consumer yet in like 2012, 2013, but.

You know, there was like... I remember one of the early ones was just like an article from Chris Plant about like the founder of Fangamer and how Reed Young and how he like had an earthbound fan site and how that just created this whole career and his marriage and all these things and it's like it was just these very like

human stories that I didn't see from a lot of outlets at the time again wasn't the savviest consumer possible other places were doing it but it was the first place where I was like They're doing some more interesting game reporting that's not just talking about the games, but talking about the culture around it and what it builds.

No, it's the kind of stuff that I would kill to have in the game. You can name two YouTube channels who kind of do it, but like... you know, our friend, my podcast co-host, Blake Hester, if you just go back and, like, look at Blake Hester's author page on Polygon.com, it was, like, the kind of journalism that, like...

And I say this with no disrespect of any other games writers, but like what we think of as like real journalists did, which was like, flying to columbia to talk to the rockstar co-founder or like yeah going on a road trip and meeting with like 13 different indie developers or you know like

doing all the stuff where it's like you would go and do things and it was about the people and the focus of the article wasn't and this game will be available in three months and you can buy it on xbox and playstation you know it was like this is telling the story of people making games and like you know i think blake will say that was a lot working with like matt leone who's also really focused on telling those kind of like human stories and it's just kind of like

The idea of games being like a grown-up industry wrote about by serious people is something that I feel like games writers have been trying to do for decades and still feels kind of impossible and then there were like Six years where Polygon was doing that sort of thing. And it's so... It was like so amazing to see it and so sad to... seemingly get the definitive answer of like, nope.

We're not going to fund that kind of thing anymore. Yeah, Jacob. And to that point too, like I think something I really, really appreciated about working there and something that really formed me, especially as like an earlier career journalist. And I think part of the reason why I ended up there.

was because like I really appreciated this attitude from the staff is like okay like we are journalists first like we're not part of the games industry we're journalists we cover games like rather than being like we are games journalists or like we are games writer you know like this distinction of being like we are

you know, like part of a larger media that's like aligned with, you know, the verge box.com, um, you know, list any other kind of reputable like news site, right? Like, um, that wikipedia would like rank as like a fact-checked credible source right and so i feel like i'm so appreciative like

Even just like having people show me that and teach me that was like, I don't know, so formative to me. And I think really helped shape that the work that we did. Yeah. I mean, talking about just kind of the angles that were taken, I remember. Before the launch of the Xbox One

Like a handful of us were invited to Microsoft's campus, and this was part of Game Informer's cover story on Titanfall that we all kind of wrapped together, like the big Xbox One kind of unveiling thing. And it was just like a select group that got to see the Xbox One before it was announced.

um and like jeff keely was there on three phones at once texting all his cool friends and and matt leone was there I remember talking about Leon because I'm a big fan of 1UP and stuff, so I was talking about all that.

and meanwhile they're like talking about the xbox and i'm like sketching it because it's like they unveiled it on the stage on this platform like i need to write down like the hdmi ports in the back and how it's all laid out because we're not gonna have reference for it and all this stuff and he was just so chill And I remember him being like, yeah, I might mention this, but I'm just writing a big feature for Polygon that's about the development of Rise, Son of Rome.

So the unveiling of the new Xbox, it might get like a couple sentences within my feature about Rise, son of Rome. Like, what world is Polygon working in? And the answer was a classier one, I suppose. Not frantic. But like to that end too, I think something that I hope doesn't get lost is like there was like, you know, I feel like people did have very different experiences, right? Like I think that

You know, I have pretty much been like on news and like pumping out a lot of content like every single week. Right. And so it's like definitely not as bad as other sites. And I'm so grateful to be there. But it's kind of interesting to hear like these different eras of this website. Right. Because like. By the time that I had gotten there, the ability to do work like that was so much more limited.

wasn't necessarily something that was like accessible to me right um but i am still like obviously so glad i was able to happen but it's kind of like interesting to kind of like compare experiences because for me it's been like so much you know trend tracing and like doing it in a really responsible and smart way that like I'm so lucky my editors always supported me and like.

covering those things and figuring out a way that like made sense to me you know and that's the kind of thing that like other sites won't offer writers but it's so interesting right like now even as someone who worked there to kind of like see these different sides of it and like reflect on it yeah it's a full spectrum yeah um Jeff, what does the world look like without traditional games media? Because clearly that's where we're nosediving into. Ya, um...

When I was reading about all this, I read some Reddit forum. discussions and stuff and that was that was more depressing than than like the than the actual news of the closures because there there were people in there who were just like We don't need it anyway, because we can just get the information straight from the publishers, and so we can just cut out the middleman. Great press releases! Woohoo! Yes, yes. We can just get that directly, and it's like...

Games journalism has already been so decimated that there's like generations of people growing up that don't realize what they're missing in the first place. That it's not just you're just copying a press release or something. It's like putting in actual thought and criticism and holding people accountable and all of these things that you're not going to get anymore. Like, that's just going to disappear. And yeah, it's going to be Nintendo Directs.

where they don't tell you the fucking price in the first place. And it's like, and there's not going to be the follow-up until, until like someone finds it and it like spills out into social media and like, If you think a tweet about it is as good as a thoughtful interview or an opinion piece, that's what's going to be missing. And I'm afraid that people already don't realize they're not even going to know enough to miss it. They're not going to know how good it was

that they don't have that anymore. And obviously there's great reporting on YouTube. It's not that clear dividing line of like, everyone with games media is good and the YouTubers are bad. Like Jacob, you in particular, you're kind of straddling several continents. And I'm curious your perspective on all this. I like being on YouTube, but I am the first to say... Nothing that I do is a replacement for what Polygon was doing. And even the more, like, news-focused YouTubers are...

There are some good ones out there, but, like, it's not, you know, for all of the, like, million ethical, you know, slings that were thrown at games media. It's like YouTubers don't know what being a journalist means. they don't they don't have like a code of ethics from my perspective the vast majority of youtube news channels are basically reading the press release to you you know that that it is just kind of like yeah it's another arm of the publisher and publishers view

YouTubers and streamers and influencers as much easier to control than people in traditional press which is why they have like turned to them so much you know and then it's like why would we talk to a journalist who will ask questions about what we're doing when we could just

give it to like a 20 year old sitting in his office who will regurgitate it because he's so happy to be getting a story yeah and to that end like i think that you know like games journalism like you want someone who is contextualizing

that press release is following up on questions who's been like doing this for a while like i felt like i learned so much like mike mcguerter who's been like doing this for forever yeah like really like when i was like earlier on in the career telling me like okay like just because they say something like doesn't mean that that's like

what it is and so like it's really important to make that distinguish you know to distinguish that in this article because we know from x y and z this company has a tendency to do this you know and like i just think about like losing that kind of work and it just makes me so sad like

What do you do when the audience isn't there? Like we said, Polygon was profitable. There were still people clicking on those stories, right? But so clearly people are going to YouTube, going to... tiktok going to instagram and not checking out these sites as much as they were and so No doubt, especially when we get to Giant Bomb, no doubt there are an infinite amount of middlemen executive heads that don't know anything.

However, to take their side for a second, what do you do at the same time to keep these sites around when there's no profitable path to make it happen? I've been thinking about this a lot. How do I reach new audiences? I, you know, have been a games journalist for a while now and like, the two young people in my life like little cousin my little brother like they're you know 21 and 19 they've never read polygon right they don't know what games journalism is right and so i think for me like maybe

the way that I think about it, a step of this is thinking through like, and this is an issue for media at large. Like Polygon was really, we were really cool because we weren't just interesting because we covered games as journalists. We also were like, a relevant news site to like younger audiences like the new york times like they don't have the same age audience as polygon right like

Our age audience, from what I understood, was like very, very rare in media and very cool because of what the, you know, of what we covered. And so, but even then, right, like we still had trouble reaching people. And I think for me, that's something that I think about a lot is like, okay.

Like, maybe we do. There definitely needs to be some changes, right, in how we talk to people, and I don't know. I try to be optimistic and be like, people don't want to read, but I don't think it's that simple. Yeah, but it is. It is, it is like Well, how do book publishers adjust to generations that are functionally illiterate? like i don't know man we should we should address that problem yeah that's the thing is you really can follow this down like a toilet bowl doom spiral of like

You simply have to do all your hard-hitting reporting on TikTok now in 10-second pieces. That's all people have an appetite for. The upsetting part to me isn't that... Like, it's not the business model failing that's upsetting. It's... It's the audience isn't there or doesn't understand the value of it in the first place. And I don't know that there's a solution to that other than like...

sent out a virus to everyone's phones so that they explode and they have to go back to reading newspapers. But we can still be upset that that's the way that it's going, and it's... Like, I remember when When Game Informer got shut down, one of the news videos that... that like made the rounds was

Someone reacting to like a video of someone reacting to another video of someone reading an article from like one of the last remaining. It was probably Polygon or something like explaining it. And it's like. And it's fine for an audience to say like, oh, well, I can get it from video, but they don't like... Like, there's a disconnect of like...

The source of what they're sourcing is an actual person who did the work in the first place, and it's like, you're not going to realize these things until it's gone in the first place, or you're not going to realize or appreciate it at all. Yeah. The other thing on the Reddit that got me all triggered and had me up all night is that like people were like, well, yeah, I'm glad they're gone because, you know, because of like their politics and let's.

I don't need a person with blue hair in San Francisco telling me what to think and it's And it's like, The articles that they point to like, I don't agree with every article that I read, but at some point it's like, don't you want other information entering... your like landscape of the things that you read and the things and it's okay to disagree with it but at least it's broadening your perspective and it's like if you're like

Have social media algorithms warped us all to the point where we view other opinions as invasive and a threat to us? And it's just like,

that's the kind of thing that we're going to lose. Like you don't have to agree with everything that Polygon posted, but like you can appreciate it as just another opinion. And like, there have been plenty of people throughout our industry that like, Like, if you go back and look at what journalism was 30 years ago, there are plenty of people who didn't agree with all of the, hey, here are all these hot booth babes, and like,

And it didn't mean that we had to burn everything down and close every site. We can have a broader, or we used to be able to have a broader, more diverse perspective of opinions and and like you could see something that you didn't agree with and just disagree with it and appreciate that they're still like offering you different opinions, and that... No. That's bias.

I want a nice unbiased press release. That's being objective about how epic this game is. I saw that part as well, Japhim. And I think, honestly, the issue there is the media illiteracy has gotten so bad that those people don't know what it is. an op-ed is They genuinely have never heard of that and they just think this is news.

and this news has an opinion in it and it's like no there's different classifications for things that get posted on sites like this and you're confusing op-eds with news that's on you bud and that they just don't even know that that's a thing that they're confusing and they're happy to not know that on the profitability thing it's i mean it's with when polygon was profitable i think that should be remembered for sure because i think

tons of tons of distractions as we talk about tons of things that actually matter at this and I think something that of course does really matter is treating the talent well and Not only not pissing them off and not straight up ejecting them from the company that you want to do well.

But like, I can't speak for anyone's experience besides ours and Game Informer's previous iteration, but it's like, we had tons of ideas that we were not supported in doing in any way. We had tons of ways we wanted to modernize, tons of ways we wanted to keep up with what was going on in a different way. that simply were not allowed to happen because

Someone at some chain in the command did not want to sign off on it. And I would be very surprised if we're the only people struggling with that. No, I mean, I don't know if you listened to the last episode of Jeff Grossman's podcast.

But the first 40 minutes or so is him just kind of unpacking the quote-unquote death of Giant Bomb, the deadly blow to Giant Bomb here that's been dealt. And it's just I love hearing his perspective on several fronts, but one of them is just, he's just, you can feel the weight of an entire career of just,

arguing with stupid executives. And you can feel how much sleep that he's lost with this. Like, no, I was pushing for this and they didn't understand what a podcast was and how to monetize it this way. And I posted on Blue Sky, but I mean, that was, tastes of that at Game Informer. I do think we had it very, very good. We were so insulated from

most of the nonsense at GameStop, you know, but just for sure. But in a way that kept us stagnant rather than like supported and growing in a way that, you know, to keep up. Right, right. You know, like I posted on Blue Sky, but just like that moment where I was talking to our, uh, associate publisher there he was like the head of sales and he's like oh no we can't monetize the game informer show until it hits 500,000 downloads per episode

I was like, that's not how podcasts work. He's like, yeah, it is. Yeah, it is. I'm like, all right, your career is sales, so I can't argue with you, but I listen to other podcasts that don't have downloads of 500,000. He's like, that's what it is. Those are the numbers we need to hit before we can have those discussions. I guess when he's used to working with a magazine with a circulation of 8 million, I guess that's his frame of reference, but like...

This is your job, is to stay on top of this shit and you're not doing it. So often I see...

other people who have a lot of experience in different forms of media coming into games and trying to shove the industry standards of those types of media into games. And I have to come in and be like, that doesn't work like we'll get an agreement from somebody and it's like here's our publishing agreement it's meant for a movie and it's just it's trash it's perfect for a movie right right but then I look at it I'm like you realize that none of this

It makes sense because games aren't movies and they have a whole different way that they get made and they're a whole different type of media. So then we have to throw away the whole thing and then the person gets all offended and goes, i've used that template i had this person i've used that template for 10 years i've never had anyone come back and say it wasn't good

And I was like, was it only for movies that he used the template? No answer. Because, yeah, you're trying to use it in games, idiot. Of course it's not going to work. It's the story again and again of people who make decisions about companies

are bad at their jobs and they don't pay the people who pay are like the writers who were doing exactly what was asked of them well right you know that it's like there was nothing there was nothing about polygons like output with its staff that was like lacking what it should have been

It was like, I mean, in this case, it didn't even seem like it was like boneheaded corporate maneuvers. It was just someone rolled up with a big wheelbarrow of cash, and they were like, yeah, I guess we don't need any of these people. That's it. Bye. And when we talk about like... the profitability and like how is how are we going to make it profitable we're also dealing with

a landscape where media keeps getting bought up more and more by corporations. And so the profitability that we have to hit isn't break even or make a small profit. It's like, how do we maximize this? It's not going to matter to Anna's point of like,

polygon being profitable well yeah that's nice but like can you can you still be more profitable with a quarter of the staff or and like doing just the guides that is what everybody hits and it's it's like there's just Like, the industry just doesn't value the work in the first place.

And so, like, the numbers that they want to see are always just going to go up and up and up anyway, just with, like, video game sales in general and, like, so many other things. Like, you can't fix a problem when... It always has to be making more money in the first place anyway.

I want a little peek into corporate law to why it feels that way and how it works that way is because the shareholders appoint the directors so every financial quarter when the shareholders need to be very happy so that the directors get to keep their job that's when they're firing people that's when they're you know doing all these crazy things so that number go up really fast so then when the shareholders have their meeting

They go, oh, John is great. Let's keep him on the board. And then John doesn't give a crap about next, you know, he's got another four months to try to make number go up again really fast at the very end of the quarter again. Truly, it's just like a centric thing where. Directors are just trying to make it to the next shareholders meeting so they get appointed again. And God, who cares about the company? It's a completely individualistic approach to running a corporation.

There was a really good article on Defector yesterday called The Money is in All the Wrong Places. It was basically about just like artists today don't have the avenues of artists before and talking about how like You can tell in Hollywood who's a Nepo baby and who's not. And, like, Sydney Sweeney is, like, one of the most, you know, castable actors in the world right now and says that she can't take six months off because, like, her family wasn't rich before that.

But there's this part in it where they say that in 1936, Ernest Hemingway was paid $1 a word for his writing. 1930s, like, not adjusted for inflation. I heard you hear that. Don't say that. It's like, that is more than writers are paid in raw dollars now. If it was adjusted for inflation, he would have been making $21 a word. And it's like... Sure, maybe no one working today is as good as Ernest Hemingway, but like...

Maybe we could be paid 1 20th of the amount that he was paid for. Or maybe we would get more Ernest Hemingway's if we paid people fairly. Right, if they were allowed to have a career in this. Although why is his signature thing being so concise then?

Like, he should have had less punchy sentences. Because he didn't have to artificially stretch it out then. I get it now. Yeah, I mean, there is kind of the bigger picture thing of thinking about, like, God, with so many different... uh sites going down people branching off obviously potential patreon uh you know platforms launching and stuff like that i was thinking like god dude is the move kind of like the way that

All these streaming services are out there, and if they could just be bundled all together and call it cable, you could just pay for it again cleanly. It's like, is there the equivalent of that with kind of games press? of like bundling a bunch of folks together and everyone's like oh that's kind of what min max already is i guess we're kind of like a ranked group of like scattered people already kind of bundled that way but like i don't know i know you all

don't need to think about as much as I do, but like, does the collapse of these other sites, do you think, change what MinMech should be doing? Does it change what we need to be doing as an outlet to keep something alive other than hopefully always making it worth it for the folks who support us and pushing to do things that

the average YouTube channel can't do, trying to lean into our connections a little bit through interviews, studio visits, all that type of thing. Well, that's another thing where, like, there was a resetter. thread about a comment that you made i think it was a tweet that you did about one of one of your interviews that got picked up everywhere yeah and you had said like hey you know like We made basically nothing from the YouTube video. So if you want this kind of content,

you should subscribe. And people, I think in the thread, they were like, uh-oh, is MinMax in trouble? Do they need money? And then they started analyzing our model and was like, well, it's like an hour and a half interview video like nobody's gonna want to watch that i feel like we're already like we already have a mix of

The best thing that we can do is do the kind of content that we want to do that we consider to be good content while still remaining sustainable. But it's another example of like... That slippery slide of like, And then everyone in the comments is saying like, well, you know, like they should they should clip it out and just have like two minute videos that they can put on TikTok.

and then like and then other people won't take that and it's like You're just telling us to make sh**ty content in order to make more, like... Also, that would throw me nuts. Because I was like, I technically did that. I have clips on TikTok. You made the clips. And I made excerpts that were shorter on YouTube of the highlights and still. But that's fine. That's fine. I'm not bitter about it. Well, and this is like the unique woe of like being in games media, right? Is there's a bunch of people.

Some of you think they know what your job is and how to do your job. and like the best way to do your job and with like zero understanding of what this line of work is like right like the challenges that come with it the real work that goes into it it's just like Why didn't you think of doing it like this? And you're just like, actually, if you go here, we've been doing it like this. We've been trying. Yeah, we've been trying to make numbers work.

This will probably be saved for the extended travelogs and sign up for MinMax at a $10 tier. But Ben and I had a conversation in Brazil with someone who is not from Brazil, who was, like, maybe the most corporately evil man I've ever spoken to 100% who was who was just like The problem with YouTube channels is they have personalities. And he was like, we own over a hundred YouTube channels and they have a hundred billion views. And like, here's the thing.

no, there's not allowed to be anyone on them. And it was just kind of like if you tie your YouTube channel to a person then that person might get too big and leave. so what we do is we don't have any people or personality in our video and he was those were like the tips he was giving us on how to make mid-max he was yes he was amazing where somehow we just got into a circle at a mixer talking to him

down in some Heinekens and like Jacob tapped out after like 10 minutes of talking to Satan himself and I was like how far does this rabbit hole go? I will talk to this guy all night because he was just like flat Austrian Satan. Like, literally, he's like, well, the secret, what you have to do.

is you recycle content. So what we do is we look at content that's popular on other channels and then we say, hey, give us your entire YouTube channel. We're going to put it on our YouTube channel and we'll give you 50% of the revenue.

And he's like, and everyone takes the deal. Of course you would take that deal. And then you post it on Facebook and you just recycle all this content back and forth from seven years ago and no one can tell. I'm like, doesn't that dilute your channel's brand? He's like,

you don't want a brand for your channel. That implies a personality which you cannot have. You just need to crunch the numbers and eventually you will make money. It was insane. There was an amazing thing where we had met a different... super friendly like very nice guy earlier in the convention and he entered into the circle at some point and then we all kind of separated and then we saw him individually later and he was like

Was that guy a friend of yours? And we were like, no, no, no. No, we were interviewing Satan. Yeah, but everybody check out the Crayola Creates YouTube channel. This guy's really proud of it. It's the offshoot of the main Crayola YouTube channel. It's turning out. i literally was scrubbing through it to be like isn't this a personality there's a person's face on there he's like no

There's no personality with that person's face. They're incidental to the video. It's like, oh, okay. I do the same thing, Ben. When I meet somebody like that, I'm like, oh, you're just the worst. I like, I like go behind enemy lines and try to learn more about that. It's like kind of fun. You're like, so tell me more about that. Wow, cool. And in my head, I'm like, oh, I hate that.

I went to a free NFT party at GDC one year for that same reason. I was like, I just want to talk to these freaks and get free drinks. Like, they were weird. They all just, I mean, it's the same talking points. They're like, and then the gun from this game, you can put it in any game. Yes. It's fun talking to the freaks. I don't know. What's cool about it is the money that is generated. Those aren't even the fun freaks. Like, show me the real freaks. We're real, you're real freaks.

Speaking of real freaks, fandom, everybody. There's a company that owned Giant Bomb and GameSpot. That's just a bizarre situation. Several people have been let go from Giant Bomb. It's very much in a chaotic state, and I understand the... huge community for giant bomb isn't a tizzy of like can you tell us anything what's happening are these shows ever coming back was that the last episode of the bomb cast that was taken down by fandom because it was a little bit cheeky. There were

There was a jab or two at fandom in that video. Were they taking inspiration from the guy you talked to in Brazil? Yeah, start recycling GameSpot's content from six years ago and put it on Giant Bomb's current YouTube channel. That's the future, baby. But yeah, Leo, I don't know. You're way back with Giant Bomb. I don't know how you're processing where they're at right now. I am still, I was hoping to be further informed by this conversation of what's exactly going on. Yeah, that's so valid.

It's, you know, it not being formally done, but feeling like it's hard to picture it being around. Right. I mean, Gerstmann in the podcast, he's like, it's 100%. It'll never work. It can't work with middle managers and these executives in there who don't understand.

what it is at any level and they're just getting a huge paycheck to try and keep this thing rolling but then they look at well we have GameSpot who also could use a boost and shout out to those folks at GameSpot still there holding down the fort good lord they need some support and love

But from the executive level, trying to balance those two brands, is very challenging and you know it's it's been interesting to see like oh death of giant bomb and everyone kind of posting their favorite clips and stuff uh from giant bombs history which

It's lovely to see. I'm a huge fan going way back, obviously. But, you know, seeing all these clips of like, oh, you know, here's Brad and Gershman and Patrick Klapbeck and all this stuff. And it's like, it almost feels... antithetical to what giant bomb is where it's like no it's about the people and the personalities not the brand and when all those people have already left it just feels like a weird time to celebrate them or it's like

we should celebrate the good work that the team has been doing over there over the last couple of years, you know, kind of like the last crew holding down the fort there at Giant Bomb. But yeah, the brand's kind of, moot at this point like the point is the people and so many of those people have moved on that it's I don't know everyone's kind of celebrating it and mourning it in a different kind of way but

We'll see. We'll see what happens. I don't know if you've heard this one before, but never count Dan Reichert out when it comes to... I heard he's stepping back from the limelight. We did that interview years ago at MidMax where that was his... pitch where when he's going to work at WWE like I don't want to be the center of attention anymore

And then it lasted a year and was like, it's me! Not how much he did want it. That's right. But no, shout out to the team, obviously, and curious to see where they go from here. It'll be a fascinating watch. I promise you that. um but yes in terms of min max you know we're happy with her level of support we can't thank everybody enough for creating a little pocket a little island of sustainability and yeah we're

We're doing our best to build it in a healthy, sustainable way. We don't want to take too big of a swing and have this whole thing crumble down. So I greatly appreciate everybody. Do you find it kind of odd that in all the conversations around all this stuff and happening, it kind of feels like...

All these things keep happening and bad stuff happens and more and more eyes start shifting towards MinMax as like one of the only survivors in a weird way. Like I keep seeing the word MinMax show up in all these Reddit threads as people talking about it and stuff like that. And it's just kind of weird that that.

It makes me feel weird. Yes, I have complicated emotions about it. It's flattering on one hand. On the other hand, I want to make it really clear of what our model is, right? Where it's like, I'm the only person full-time, and then we contract out with eight other people. And, you know, we could have the strategy of having, you know, two people full time, two and a half people full time. Like, you know, that's a different approach. But with our current model, it's like.

I get annoyed, I guess, by the people who are like, oh there's go to patreon it's a piece of cake look min max is a big crew that's totally funded done and done it's like no if you look into it it's like we have a very specific structure for how to make this work and again feel free to reach out to me uh if you're listening this or watching this if you want to talk about the structure and see if that's a good

fit for you if you want to go independent as well if you're on a big site but it is like it's such a specific case that I want more people to follow that model but I don't want people to think that like You know, if you go on Patreon, it's a piece of cake to support nine people full time because that's not what's happening here. Yeah, I don't live on the min-max salary. That's my fond money. Right, going right up the nose.

Um, let's see. That's why our content's so bad. It's amazing. And it's the vibes of Pew Pew Bang, I guess. Oh, boy. I'm very curious for you all to go to SGF this year. I forget if it was in Bonus Pod or in the main show, but with Summer Game Fest, it freaked me out when I went And I'm sure we talked about it somewhere, but it feels like It's a great event. They do a great job putting it on every year.

At the same time, there's something that freaks me out about attending because it feels like this is an old folks home, like a little sanctuary old folks home where just everyone is slowly fading out of existence and no one's acknowledging that there's no money underpinning this entire.

industry anymore. It's just a weird feeling. I want to grab everybody by the shoulders and be like, how long does your site have? Are you financially stable? What is happening here? What is a model to keep this around anyway? And I just... I don't see it and it's scary, but that's just, that's my piccadillo. Yeah, it's weird. It's like, I'm sure it's a lot of people's also side things that it's like, oh great, I get to go to an event for my blog. And yeah.

The gigification of this industry. It's a lot of people paying for their own travel to go to these events and stuff, preview events. You talk to more and more people who are like, well, I get freelance rates and they suck, but I pay for the travel because it's a cool opportunity. And it's like, no, that's a cool opportunity.

There's a lot of smoke and mirrors for sustainability, I think, in the game industry space. Shout out to the folks hanging on. Things become those people's vacation for that year, which is really sad because you're still working. Right, right. Haley, as a video game IP lawyer, can you shed some light on the actual state of the games in the game industry? There's too much going on that's diabolical. But in the big scheme of things, EA just had a ton of layoffs.

Respawn had a ton of layoffs. Dear friend Cyril Vasquez, former cohort, was just laid off of writing job. Feel free to reach out to him if you have writing opportunities or opportunities for, what's it called? You know, consulting, that's what I'm looking for. Narrative design. Narrative design and consulting, all that fun stuff. But Haley, yeah, you write a ton of publisher agreements. Would you agree that that's kind of your main bag?

baby that's my bag baby yeah okay cool so i write like two or three a week at this point it's like almost all i do now geez and so you had like a big summary that you prepared with your law firm and like can you shed any light just on how things are shifting for the agreements in the game industry that developers are actually making here

Yeah, so we did a huge data report. And feel free to interrupt me at any time because I don't want to ramble. I'm just like talking about data for 10 minutes. But the question that kept popping up that my boss, Kellen, who runs the for my work at Voila. we kept getting was we can draft the agreement, we can make sure that it says what we need to say.

But the question always was, is this a good deal or not? And like indie devs are unfortunately really not having access to information because all these agreements are confidential, which is normal for agreements. you know that's not unique to the industry but all these things are confidential so unless you just have like a tight knit

Slack or something with a bunch of devs sharing all their intimate details about their agreements and technically breaching their agreements. But, you know, they don't really know, like, what percentage of rev shares fare, how big in advance they should be owed, and all that kind of stuff. And then Kel and I were like, well, we have, like...

100 plus agreements sitting here with all the data in them. So we essentially, it took forever, but we anonymized all the data, took all the data out of the publishing agreement templates. And these, we only use agreements that have been signed, executed, and like... The intention was to make the game thereafter. You know, sometimes it fizzles or whatever, but these are not just templates that got thrown around. These were signed agreements between all the parties.

stripped all the data out of that, put it in an Excel spreadsheet, and then just outputted like the most important stuff. And so now whenever we get a developer who's like, is this a good deal? We can just point them towards this data set now and say, here's the industry average based on all the agreements that we have access to, which our firm, we're realizing when we talk to other video game lawyers, it's like we have a lot of data.

A lot of other firms aren't really focusing on the publishing agreement review side, so we're in a very lucky position where we can just kind of say, this is what we see. We don't know how completely accurate it is, right? Because it's still a data subset that, you know, could be different depending on jurisdiction, whatever. But it's been extremely helpful.

Devs that we talked to, and even ones that we've gotten so much work out of it, people were talking about it at GDC at a time, which was really nice. I was bringing it up to devs and they were like talking to me and they're like, oh, I saw one game lawyer do something with data or whatever. I was like, that was me. And they're like, oh my God. It's like very fun that it's like seeping around and stuff.

It's at IndieGamePublishing.com. And if you just type that into Google, it's just like a nice little easy to read. thing that's we try to make it as simple as possible but what we're finding if you want like oh you know spend your time looking at the data if you'd like you know average devrem share for grams within advance is 58.2 percent

I'm sure you don't want to just hear me read those percentages out loud. I'm kind of curious about all this stuff, yeah. Yeah, but overarching, if you take a step back from the data and think about it,

We have information dating back to about 2017. Deals are remaining substantially the same in terms of the rates, like the amount of advances people are getting, the rare shortcuts they're getting, if they own the IP or not at the end of the day, which we always push for that they should own the IP. All those kind of things. They're staying the same. There's just way less of them.

which is really interesting to me, honestly, personally. So it's not that, you know, devs are getting worse deals. It's just that it's harder to get them. which I think is useful information for a dev going into a publishing situation. It's not that the market's so crappy right now, so I'll take that really bad rev share deal. It's no, if you have it locked down,

and you're moving forward with negotiations, and now you're signing it, keep fighting for that, because that's the industry standard. It's just that you're the lucky few who have the project that the publishers actually want to work with, essentially. That's probably the biggest thing.

we could take from the data we took out there. Yeah. You said you were talking about in the Monday meeting how more and more developers are working together and cutting out publishers and publisher deals entirely. Is this your new obsession? Yeah, I love it. And the devs are coming to me with these ideas, and I go, yippee, I'll draft that. That sounds great. It's just I can't really talk about it because these are all projects that are getting worked on right now.

But it's kind of a scale of, you know, I saw some instances of one dev spent five years making this really unique game engine that does something really specific in a genre. And this other dev wants to make this game and they have a really cool idea. So dev A licenses their game engine to dev B, and then they get a percentage of revenue for the game at the end. Dev B gets to save, what, three, four something years on development, so then they don't need an advance from a publisher.

they can just work on it for one to two years no publisher have way more revenue even with the rev share split with dev a And then Deve gets that money coming in to fund their next game. And then the two indies are like kissing and then love and they make their games and nobody gets abused. And it's like really nice.

yeah and you know and the other thing is as well um seeing more and more companies that have success and i'm going to point to outer sloth because i think what they're doing is super interesting and this Don't go sign an agreement without a lawyer signing it. Just take this with a grain of salt. But I really like, I've seen Aderslau's agreement quite a few times now, and I like what they're doing. And this is developers of Among Us who are publishing games now. They got the Among Us money.

And now they're coming out here and they're like, you know. I see. Sorry, it's not so much actually. That's what you're saying. But yeah, I like that kind of trend where it's developers who found success that are now turning and they're offering unique deals to other game developers.

It's just exciting to see that. Please get your agreement reviewed. Don't just, if you get a deal, sign it. Anyways, legal information only, not advice. Okay, so to see all the stats for this big breakdown, it's IndieGamePublishing.com. And it'll be in the description there. It took so long. So many people. Yeah. Yeah. It's just behind the scenes stuff that people wouldn't get access to. Like they can just quickly look at this and be like, am I getting a bum deal or not? Let's see.

Right. Yeah. So average advance is $674,000. The median advance, now Leo obviously knows the difference between average and median. This is elementary, but that is $300,000 apparently. Do you want me to explain that? No, I don't want to be embarrassed on the podcast. I'm a sociology major, let me do it. But, okay, so Dev owns the IP. Yeah. Wait, is 96% of the time? Yep.

They should own the IP. They should maintain full ownership of the IP at every step of the process. But there are certain instances where the publisher says, assign the IP to us, we own it. You only get it back if we breach the agreement. sometimes what I see. And I always go, no. Stop that. That's an encouragingly high number. Yeah, that's shockingly high.

Without an advance, it's 100%, which makes sense, because what's the point of taking a deal if you're not? Right, right. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, is it just that maybe we're used to AAA games, and we're so used to that? Obviously... Publishers always own IP, what are you going to do? But this is just in the indie world? These are only indie agreements. We've seen a couple, like double A, barely, right? This is almost entirely indie.

game publishing agreements here. Wow. Meaning solo devs or what size teams? A lot of solo devs. A lot of two people teams. Probably the most I see in a team is like Like where they're actually involved with a company, like they're a director, shareholder of the corporation working, is probably like five. But sometimes they'll have really big teams, but there's like one solo dev with a bunch of contractors who all get like...

They'll do internal rev share splits or something like that. That can be an internal incentive model to try to keep people around and working long term, even if they are just a contractor. but most like a lot of solo and almost never are, is there people investing money for equity and game indie game companies where they're trying to buy shares in the indie game company.

It's just the rev share split. I've seen a safe, which is, anyways, I've seen a safe one time for a game company. And other than that, it's just rev share. People just care about rev share splits. Gotcha. Yeah. Check out that link if you want to learn more about it. God, Jeff, you know what I'm craving?

A new pair of underwear from MeUndies. How dare you? Don't even mention underwear. Of course I'm craving human fuel, otherwise known as Huel, everybody. Gosh, I would give anything for this can of bubbly to become a big... tub of huell um well there is like a tub for like a big bunch of chocolate if you want that but huell you can pour it in your tub yeah drink it huell drink it out of your tub

It'll taste better. So Huel, it's ready to drink. Meal in a bottle is the way they describe it. They've got a ton of great flavors. I don't know, you guys ever heard of something called strawberry banana? Yeah, two and one. They got chocolate. At the same time. That's right. They got coffee flavored. Huel, it is, it is, it's designed for like, if you're in a rush, busy lifestyle. Think of like Jacob Geller in a Mentos commercial, running around the streets, right?

Just need something quick to chug instead of grabbing a full lunch here. Just a quick meal in a bottle that has a ton of vitamins, a lot of protein for you, convenient, everything you want. That's where Huel comes into play. It slides right in there. And you drink at and you say, With a name like Yule, I don't know what I was expecting it to taste like, but hand to God, I love the taste of Yule. I was down in this stuff.

left and right when I got my big batch before this promotion to the point that I don't have any left to promote on this podcast. But every time we ate something in Brazil... Ben was just whispering, God, I wish this were Huel. Yeah. This is sub-Huel gruel, is how I described all Brazilian food. No, no. I take it back. I love the food. But new customers can visit Huel.com slash MinMax today and use the code MinMax to get 15% off your first

first order plus a free gift. What's the gift? Is it more fuel? You tell us. That's Huel.com slash MinMax today. Use the code MinMax to get 50% off your first order plus that free gift. Check it out. Huel, everybody. It tastes good and it feels good and it's easy. Did MSI mind that I said amen at the end of their ad read last week? We got a lot of emails about it, actually. Yeah. Mother of Mary board. Hey, Haley McLean. In 2020, let me tell you a tale.

In the year 2020, this developer went on Twitter. You know it as... And they said, streamers worried about getting their content pulled because they used music they didn't pay for should be more worried by the fact that they're streaming games they didn't pay for as well. It's all gone as soon as publishers decide to enforce it.

The real truth is the streamers should be paying the developers and publishers of the games they stream. They should be buying a license like any real business and paying for the content they use. What do you think about that text? Can you put like a big like fart noise over? I remember the discourse for this one so strong. It was. it exploded where this was a developer who was working for Stadia at the time and so one Alex Navarro then a giant bomb

He responded saying, hey, how's Stadia going? Perfect, perfect. That's all we need to respond. And now in retrospect, this is dark. But then the developer responded by saying, better than Giant Bomb, from what I can tell. Oh my god. And then Stadia and Dom Hill lived Stadia by like five years. That's fair. And it has a little bit more public approval. I think that might be the case, yeah.

But the long saga then is the developer who was working on a game for Stadia then was, the studio was let go. from stadia and they were able to retain the game that they were working on which was the follow-up to a game called journey to the savage planet and then this game was called revenge of the savage planet which just launched we've been playing this thing and alex hutchinson was the developer

The craziest way to introduce a game, as far as I can tell, we don't have a grudge again. No, but I was just thinking, like, oh, Alex Hutchinson, the creative director for this game. Oh, that's right, Giant Bomb. This is all interconnected. The legalese of Haley. There are yarn threads here.

No, I like Alex Hutchinson, even if he's a very outspoken guy at times, but he was the creative director for Assassin's Creed 3, which was the first reason I love him, but also he was a lead designer for Spore. which is awesome.

And then he was the creative director for Far Cry 4, which in O'Haley in particular is the best. That was so awesome. And that was so awesome. And now the follow-up, Revenge of the Savage Planet. Jeff, do you remember talking about Journey to the Savage Planet years and years ago at Midmax? Do we have to...

pay to talk about this game now? Yeah, I think that's the case. I bought the license, don't worry. I think you should just stop talking right now or you're gonna get... yeah you're probably right this was enough but Jeff you played Journey to the Savage Planet I remember I went back and watched our old episode of the podcast where we talked about it back in 2020 and i was like oh this is good for like a comedic no man's sky i'm digging it

Is that what I said? Yeah. Okay. Okay. Is that not how you remember Journey to the Savage Planet? I don't remember. almost anything at all except when the game started. There was a lot of live action humor. Yes. And you said that I said the humor was good? I think you liked it overall. I don't know if you were like, it's knee-slappingly good. But the point is, Jeff, what do you think and everybody else about Revenge of the Savage Planet? No, I want to know what Jeff thought he said.

What did you think you said back then? I would have assumed that I said the game is fun and I can't stand these videos. That could be. And they freak me out. That could be. Very Tim and Eric humor. Gross out style stuff. Yuck. I've enjoyed what I've played so far of it. We all...

Leo, you've been playing much more, right? And you've been playing it co-op, so I feel, I don't know why Hanson's kicking to me to start this thing off. Because you played the last one! We had this very weird info about it. You played it! Jeff, we're trying to assert the need for coverage like ours to exist. Get me the first piece of games!

When in doubt, just yell sex. That's true. This game, I didn't play that much in the first one. This one is third person now. Goofy sense of humor. Pretty in your face with it. I, I, you know, people work really hard on this game and I never want to just, just throw it aside real quick, but it's like part of the experience is the first enemy, they call it a herp derp.

and then you see in the settings you can change the amount of talking from always to some, and you change it to some, and it doesn't seem to change it at all, so then you turn the voice off, and that's just kind of how the experience goes. But the main gameplay is, same as the first one exploring the strange planet multiple strange planets in this one

Learning about the flora and fauna, how they interact. You'll blow up the first critters and they make a green goo and you walk in the green goo and it makes you slide around. Things will have explosive goo and you hit other guys into that and it has a chain reaction, like learning about the rules of these biomes.

And it's fun in co-op. It's kind of just a collect-a-thon, really, but a little more interesting tool. You get a hose quickly that you can wash things with or fill up plants that need to be filled with water. It's kind of an unconventional tool set, but a lot of...

Pretty simple 3D platforming, you might expect. Yeah, some Metroidvania elements of like, well, in order to get this, I'm going to need this previous tool. Now that I have this, I can open up these different areas. I can shoot these crystals or whatever. um i i have been enjoying that once i finally got into Like, it starts

very contained. You can send out a survey and like maybe one or two little resources will ping as you go. And then after you kind of find your home base and you establish that and you go out and you ping it and there's just stuff everywhere.

and it's all like satisfying to get because it has that kind of survival aspect of crafting new things that that are going to be useful for you but instead of like banging on a tree to get five pieces of wood or whatever you're kind of going into these different areas that seem very well crafted and have different enemy types and

you're using different elements and things like that to get these new kind of resources and you're kind of searching for them. And it's like, okay, there's an egg up there that will, you know, like level me up, but how am I actually going to get up there? You know, I'll use my host to like. rehydrate this mushroom and that will create a new platform that i can jump on and those kind of i'm enjoying those those aspects of it yeah i'm sure yeah

The videos and voices are just part of the humor. I do overall like, with skipping a lot of the videos and stuff, I do like that it is a goofy world and that these creatures do look so strange and you'll discover a new one and they'll be remarkably actually cute or really stupid looking.

the design is fun too to see new examples of yeah and I was a sucker for even just like the run animation like it is so hoppy it's like and then like when you're in any sort of liquid like your legs jump up as well it's like it is

It is the poppiest running animation I think I've ever seen in a game. It's like, okay, this is the tone. It's setting the tone immediately for... the world you're going to be inhabiting here but yeah I was just playing single player and I had a fine time with it but I am curious to see I think playing the split screen or online multiplayer would be the way to go and I'm wondering if there is

Kind of in the wake of Hazelight's success with stuff like split fiction. Maybe there's just enough of an interest in split-screen multiplayer where this would be a gem to play sitting on a couch together. Maybe the on-rails-ness of Split Fiction and It Takes Two, I think, do it a lot of favors for.

the type of second person you can bring along uh play it with my partner who's who has played a lot of games but isn't a diehard everyday gamer and something like this you're required to do a lot more like map investigating and following the compass and things that are really open world and specific to somebody who has like a big

encyclopedia of video games in their head versus something that it takes to kind of guide you through. Are you thinking you're going to stick with it, Leo? Where's your enthusiasm at for Revenge of the Savage Planet?

I'll definitely play more. I'm excited to play more. Disappointing to get to the second biome and have a lot of the same creatures there. It's not like it's really its own world. You go to a whole different planet and then it's still kind of... the same grunts and new ones but stuff like that makes me wonder how much it'll uh assert its its need to be kept playing versus just

A cute few hours with my sweetie. Oh, that's so sweet. Yeah. Raccoon Logic is the name of this developer now. They were Typhoon Studios, but it's been through a whole journey. um yeah i was playing on ps5 and chugged a little bit uh here and there um on my end just playing full screen but i'm curious to see how it outruns for most people but uh it's uh it's also on game pass if you want to get on xbox there

But, cool. Alright, there you go, Jeff. That's Revenge of the Savage Planet. Good. Slap it on a plastic box. You can skip the fake commercials. But... I don't know I'm not as turned off by you guys I On the slider of where to put the voice, I'm like, I want some of the comedic voice. I've left a little robot voice on. That's fine. It's just every time you walk in and it's like blasting you with a fake 80s commercial, you know the humor. Yep.

We don't even have to describe it. You know exactly what it is. It's sci-fi. It's, yeah, the live action from WALL-E, if that was just kind of, or the opening of Metal Gear Solid 4, if that kind of live action was just sprinkled throughout the experience here, yeah.

It's cool. Yeah, it has the flavors of Subnautica as well, which is kind of a more kind of structured, designed version of Subnautica for navigating these spaces. A lot of upgrades, and, like, you can collect the animals to have in your little garden and stuff. Some of those progression hooks, too, seem solid. Yeah. Speaking of progression hook,

There's a game that came out, I think, last year in early access called Deep Rock Galactic Survivor. And it was one that I was meaning to get to for a very long time. And then we're doing some reaction stream. And Leo, I remember you said like, you know, I bet that Vampire Survivors, but with mining in it, would be a really killer combo. And that was like the final push for finally checking out Deep Rock Galactic Survivor, which is the Vampire Survivors. Offshoot!

from deep rock galactic um and so i started playing it and it was just like immediately like oh this is This is the best. This is so damn good. And then Jacob was watching. We played on a plane. And then you scurried home. You asked the pilot to fly back from South America faster just so you could get back home and download Deep Rock Galactic Survivor. Yeah, now I've been playing in every min-max meeting. Yeah, smart. I mean, your Vampire Survivor is not sicko. What's the term you prefer?

perfect yeah degenerate degenerate how are you liking this compared to vampire survivors because i'm not as head over heels as that game uh with that game as you are but i mean it's an interesting question because it's like could i i don't think if i played vampire survivors again now i would be half as head over heels for it as i was like on first blush you know that it's like you can kind of experience the novelty of that genre only once So with that in mind, I think that this is like

almost comprehensively kind of a better game than vampire like just in and it depends what your vampire survivors is the ultimate brainless game this has added depth while maintaining the feeling of, like, man, there's just so much chaos going on. I love seeing all these monsters get killed. But, like... It is. It's the same...

You walk around, your weapons auto-target and auto-shoot. You never have to hit a jump button or a run button or whatever. But because it is underground and because you're able to dig through the walls...

There's just a surprising amount of strategy in kind of like vampire survivors and this are games of kiting where you just get big groups of monsters to follow you around a screen but when you can decide like, how narrow of a path those monsters are going to follow you through, suddenly that strategy is, like, a lot more interesting, even though you...

still have like very little control over what your weapons are doing at any given time absolutely yeah or like bouncing projectiles creating a little zone for yourself where it's like surrounded by walls so I can keep just feeding on these same enemies over and over. Being the engineer and you get little lightning rods and mining a path through here and then just lining that entire thing with lightning rods.

electrifying everything is so damn satisfying. But Leo, I think, secretly, have you been playing the most of this thing? What do you think about Deep Rock Galactic Survivor? I'm 30 hours. I looked at Leo's hour count, and I was like, oh my god. It's one of those games that's just so easy to put more hours in than I would in another game I like in the same period of time, because it is such a podcast visualizer. Oh my god. It's like, I partially love it, and I...

really love the podcast that I want an excuse to listen to. You never miss a second of what you're listening to. You don't have to read anything if you want to run around and collect gems and stuff. I don't know. Yeah, I want more. Vampire Survivor is nuts to check this out.

compare the experience because to me like it just yeah i think the art looks good it's clear upgrade paths are satisfying at all times there's little quirks of like okay there's reloading with the guns technically so you can unlock like boost for your reloading speed but trying to manage like

all the different weapons that are reloading at different rates at the bottom of the screen. There's enough going on here that's interesting enough while still having the basic vampire survivors kiting enemies around getting... you know, the super magnet and having all of the little XP fly into you and you feel like a god as you get three levels up at once. Like that same core level of satisfaction that Vampire Survivors has. There's also, there's a lot more like...

And this is, you know, this could be a positive or a negative, depending on what you like about Vampire Survivors, but, like, There is a lot more like here is a mission for you to do. You know, it's like. beat this map as this guy on hard and you will unlock something or like each weapon has like little individual challenges and then that weapon permanently gets like a damage boost for the rest of the time and so it is kind of like

You know, it's like, you know what makes my brain feel good? A bunch of bullets bouncing around and also checklists. And so now there are checklists in the bullet bounce around game. Yeah, that was my one kind of stumbling point with Vampire Survivors. i like streamed it at one point and they were like oh well now you have to get the garlic and then like three levels from now you get the cross and that will unlock some new and it's like just just tell me what i have to do and

And then I'll do that thing and not like try and figure out secrets or have to go to a guide. And this seems very straightforward. In terms of telling you. Yeah, there's a little messiness about like what is the best thing to do because you have so many options to level up so many things. But there is a general sense of whatever I do is generally. pushing me forward and i will say for whoever it's relevant to out there i bounced off vampire survivors pretty hard

And I was into this faster than I bounced off of Vampire Survivors. Yep. That's definitely not for me. Yep. I'm in that exact same camp. Like, this is going to be a staple. I feel like I'm Steam Deck.

Maybe forever. I can't imagine ever uninstalling this. This is the perfect Steam Deck game if it ever comes out on Switch 2. that's going to be such a slam dunk but it's it's kind of a battery hawk though if we want to get into it oh the 3d faster than anything else yeah um but yeah deep rock galactic survivor it's going 1.0 in september if you want to wait for that but I mean it feels

incredibly fully featured at this point like i haven't noticed anything at this point that would make it even seem like it wasn't 1.0 but more stuff coming in september technically but it rules i'm going to keep playing it for a very long time All right. Hey, Jacob Geller and Jeff, do you guys know who we should be thanking?

Wait, Ben, before you do that, can I say one thing? Yeah. To the person who commented one and a half hours ago that Rockstar confirmed that GTA 6 was running on the base PS5. I'm sorry. I just saw that. Apparently, they said that's just a PS5. So, I was wrong, and that's impressive. Very clear. Sweet. Now, I don't know, Patreon?

Yeah, good call, man. New Patreon supporters. People drop out all the time, so we appreciate new folks jumping in on Patreon, jumping in at any tier that works for them, like Micah N here. Not Micah from Red Dead 2, Haley. I won't get you started. But this is Micah here. He's at the $2 tier, so he unlocks access to the Discord, and he submits questions for the podcast or comments for The Deepest Dive, which we're doing now on Clubs Gear.

Renzo jumped in at the $5 tier. GR jumped in at the $5 tier. They unlocked that bonus podcast feed and access to the Discord and a ton more stuff. Bonus pod each and every week. Jump on in, folks. We greatly appreciate new supporters. It's a great time to jump in. We appreciate it. And shout out to some of our biggest supporters. But before we do that.

We've got to say goodbye to two dear friends who are going to go off and live their lives and let us really focus and hone down for the best of the best for community questions. So Jacob and Jeff, you're selling us to Valnet. That's right. Sorry. I hope you like browsers. All right. You guys want to clap out together? Thank you. Hey, I am Apen, everybody.

other huge supporters of ours uh shout out to imapet they want everybody to know about the messenger The double vinyl is being reissued for the wonderful game and wonderful soundtrack, The Messenger, everybody from Sabotage Studios, the developers who went on to do CSRs, of course.

But this is the great vinyl soundtrack to The Messenger. You can get it in iMateBit's wonderful online store. And you can check out everything else in that wonderful online store to get 10% off. You can use the promo code It'sGonnaBeMay. It's gonna be May, everybody. Say it right. What's that? Say it right. Is there a way to say it? It's gonna be me. Oh, is that what they're going for?

Yeah. I didn't get that at all. So that's right. 10% off with everybody. It's going to be me. And check out their online store. Help support IMAPIT because they're wonderful folks. and you should help support IMAPIT because they ship out a prize each and every week. Whoever has the best question as we deem it, submit it on Patreon. You support us at any tier on Patreon. Even that trailer tier, you can submit questions, which is our favorite, number one favorite. That person wins this prize.

The prize this week, of course, is Ori and the Blind Forest. The double vinyl soundtrack to Ori and the Blind Forest, one of the best. Ana, iMapet was a supporter of ours even back when you were on, right? I was literally going to be like, so many things changed, but it genuinely makes me so happy that iMapet's still out here supporting Midmax. I know.

That's awesome. I know. I agree. So keep them around. Use that promo code, please. I ran into the founders at GDC and I was walking on the sidewalk, but I was like, how quickly can I kiss their ass while still walking on the sidewalk? Thank you guys for supporting us for so long. We really appreciate it. You guys are all...

um hey michael lane writes in and they said hey min maxers um with the awful sad deaths of giant bomb and polygon i would love if everyone could share their favorite videos or write-ups or any other content from those sites from over the years i feel like jeff and dan Playing the 3DS on a roller coaster is the exact vibe of Midmax's charge shot videos, by the way, for New Show Plus. If you've never seen that Giant Bomb video, that was fantastic.

for one of the first big swings that Dan took when we were impacted. I guess when he started that giant bomb was playing Mario three on a three DS on a roller coaster to see who can get the farthest. It's a super good idea. And shout out to like Jason. And I guess it was before Jan's time. Right. But for like figuring out the tech of that, I guess it was drew. Right. Of like how to.

how to actually record that like oh my god what a mess i have so many from polygon um yeah it's tough to It's tough to pick out like just one specific one because I like so many of the people who have worked there throughout the years so much. um anna one of my favorites that you did was the um barnes and noble manga section article thank you i'm still so proud of that story that's the kind of stuff that i love polygon for um

Jenna Steber had a video that made it into my book, which was about the language of animal crossing. Oh, yeah. That was a fantastic video. um any of Matt Leone's oral history is all fantastic I mean there's just I know it's really stupid to say like oh I can't do it down it's all good but like seriously just Just go like click on an author's name if you're ever like, yeah, I liked this one thing and just like read a couple other pieces because you will find something else delightful.

I'm just nodding aggressively quietly. One of my favorite things that we ever did was, we did it twice actually. It was like an edit, like we used to do these, used to, I don't know, past tense, do like editorial packages with themes. And my favorite one that we ever did was Fashion Week theme. um and we did it twice and we just like all wrote about video game fashion and like the art and the graphics were incredible the stories were awesome um it was like um

One of our freelancers, Kazuma, like wrote a really great essay on like video game fashion and like reflecting like on his own fashion as it's changed throughout the years. So I really like that. And another piece of work that comes to mind is Nicole. Carpenter has like obviously like done so much in reporting throughout the years like her breaking the story on the Gone Home studio and everything like for me as like a younger reporter it was like

So I was just like in awe of her and her work, like leading up to that point. And also like her, um, union magazine she wrote like she literally wrote like basically an entire book like a miniature book for polygon called the polygon like union magazine and it had really great art it was like structured to look like a Like a, you know, like a really cool zine that you would make in college. Oh, cool.

I'll nepo shout out Blake Hester's connect piece for Polygon, which also has art by Kobisop Joe. So it's an incredible thing for me. Oh, right, right. All the money in the world couldn't make Connect happen, it's called. I also was going to call on Blake as well. We all just love Blake. But...

His road trip story is still one of my favorite things written about games of all time. But I also really liked his Crash Bandicoot in World History one. I remember having a really great afternoon reading that one as well. Yeah. I just, I love how Polygon is everything. It's like you're sitting down to read a magazine, but it's on a website. That's what Polygon always felt like to me is like elevated games.

reading. It always just felt way more comfy. Like you need a cup of coffee before you read something on Polygon. Yeah, I mean, Giant Bomb is just, it's huge. I mean, it's up there for like the pantheon of, for me personally, just influential sites. I mean, it's Giant Bomb and one up. It's kind of the two sides of the coin for, okay, this.

this type of content is more inspired by one-up like the game clubs or this is more inspired by giant bomb um but i mean it's just weird to think about the idea that i mean over the last I mean, at least 15 years? I've maybe missed like five episodes of the bomb cast. Like it's just, it's weird to have listened to that much of that site and the evolution. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, so of course the best episode, the Game of the Year debates is probably the highlight still. I know it's very influential for Leo as well. And like a while ago, it was for Dragon Ball's anniversary. Dan Reichert reached out. He's okay. Do you want to like record?

video of you talking about your favorite giant bomb moment where like I can gather a bunch of clips for social and I sent him one and it never never which is like I thought like oh everyone's gonna talk about the funniest moments we're gonna choose something a little bit different which was

just a little moment of during the game of the air debate, they're talking about Florence, that mobile game about like relationships and stuff. And Vinny Caravello is talking about how much she loved it and how much it meant to him. And he got choked up and started crying, talking about it. and my favorite thing was that he

There was not the reflex of, oh, I'm sorry, I'm crying. He never apologized in any way. Just to have somebody crying during a Game of the Year debate be like, no, it's emotional, and I'm just going to own it, and we're going to have a conversation about these are human emotions, obviously. made me want to reach to the screen and kiss Vinny um totally yeah and and you know as far as

Specific moments like that that inspired how we go about them. Like, of course, Austin Walker's speech for Invisible Ang. is often referenced and i feel like is the blueprint for like why it is cool to do game of the year debates that way where you have to really fight for something right that's your that's your mode you try and snap into every time you have to fight for some weird immersive janky thing

Shoot for the moon, land amongst the stars. That's right. I'll shout out Mario Party Party 5, the live one they did. Oh, yeah. Which is one of the most exciting pieces of content to come out of.

playing a video game online truly i have remembered that thing for a decade that's sweet uh max bz writes and says awesome alternate reality where billionaires realize the value of journalism arts and culture So you get paid handsomely to build MinMax into an organization as vibrant and powerful as the major newspapers of the 70s. I'm just thinking like, yeah, Washington Post, all the president's men, busy.

You know, office, bullpen, everyone's smoking. You each get two weeks of paid vacation every year. Thank you, Max. Are you pitching this? So how do you use it? Wow, Miss Canada over there. How do y'all use it? If you had a billionaire fully funding MinMax into a 1970s level news organization, what does it look like? Well, I would know to just spend it all immediately because you never know when it could suddenly end. So I would buy a lot of sports cars and stuff. Yeah, yeah. Generational wealth.

I think we would kill... a bullpen styled vibe because i think we all have such good chemistry and we'd like to hang out with each other i think that would we would kill it like like a smoshification of mid-max where we're all just hanging out together all the time That would be insane. Now, I think we might lose our magic if we switch models so drastically.

suddenly that's what I worry so we get the influx of cash we all come full time we all move to be near each other and start doing in person what if we lose the magic and then everyone makes fun of us that's the big fear Yeah, what if we all start hating each other? I think that's a secret. And then drama. And then people have to make drama explainers of us. People will raid into little, like,

you know, I'll glance at somebody in a weird way and they'll be like, Haley hates Jeff. Um, look, they'll have like a clip show of me like looking at him weird or something. Yeah. Another clip of you talking about Jeff, um, maybe deleting your, um, Yeah, exactly. As it is now, people know that I'm staring angrily at someone the entire record, but they can't tell who. It's all to them to figure out, though, and they can figure it out if they talk about it enough.

Right. I do wonder, like, with an infinite amount of money, I think we would benefit from there being a couple people whose whole job it is to, like, just do all the organizing. Because I feel like, Ben, you do all of that and... And have to still turn this thing on and entertain at the end of the day. And I just wonder how much further we could all... I think even just having someone who reads all the emails, buckets everything, does all of that...

One person. Hire one person to do that. We don't need a billion dollars. We need a salary for one person to do all that. My day producing and editing the podcast last week was the longest workday I've had in years. You baby boy. I saw you make a sweet comment on the Patreon post about like, this is so hard to post this podcast, which is very sweet to see. It's just the ad rates. There's bullet points. It's a complicated thing.

I'm curious though, Ben, of your take as someone who worked in a bullpen environment at Game of Thrones for years, like what if we just took that format and it was just mid-max people in the bullpen?

Obviously, we're not writing. We're not sitting there writing articles. I don't know what we'd do all day while you're working on everything else. What would people do all day? I think the sweetest thing you can do is, like, push harder for the min-max spotlight formula, and maybe this is just a cop-out because that's why I did so much at Game of Warmovers visiting studios, but if we just had, like, At all times,

somebody, one or two people were like visiting studios and we could just keep out churning. That would be awesome. Just churning out videos of like, hopefully as insightful and raw and honest as we can get for game development all around the world at all times. like that would be like sarah and kelsey are on a trip to for infinity nikki one week and then like me and jacob to remedy the next week and then we're just cycling through yep yep and then in between we have pizza parties Oh my god.

And with a billion dollars, you could get the best pizza ever. Right. Gold flake crunch. The cupped pepperonis, wow. It'd be tough to incorporate the Patreon supporters in a big way if we're constantly talking about the fact that we're milking this billionaire for all he's worth, but... We would just thank them. Daddy Billionaire. Right. You know how this whole thing is operating? It's our big daddy billionaire. John Stevens. We love you, John Stevens.

It is fun to think about, but also weird. I'm like, I don't know. I kind of like the structure of Min Max right now. We've talked about it a lot in BonusPod, but I do think if everyone was full-time, I think we'd all drive each other insane. Or more importantly, I would drive other people insane. i think i think i i personally i can only talk about personally i would personally love it that is like

I can't picture a more fun job, but I need everyone to feel that way, otherwise the vibes wouldn't be it. You could meet everyone full-time, and then they can just go nurture other parts of the community. It's like, imagine like... You pay people full time and then like Haley can do pro bono, lawyer work, and then Kelsey can write. Like everyone could just have the time to do what they already.

Yeah. We can have a law firm portion of Midmax where all that is is indie devs get free legal advice. Okay. Are you listening? And then when they're really successful, they gave us, they gave us the first sneak peek of their games. Hot excursion. Perfect. That's it. This is extremely ethical. Yeah, now we're coming back around into being non-independent. Yeah, that's really working. Money crops everything.

But it is, I don't know. I mean, I don't want to drag us back too much into that Games Press discussion, but it is such a weird idea. I'm just like, okay. What other millionaire can we convince that games coverage is the way of the future for a couple years before it eventually all melts down and crashes down? And so if there are models outside of that, if it's just a lab at crowdfunding...

Maybe slightly grosser sponsorships, but in the name of clarity, it all has to be communicated very clearly that this is just so this outlet can exist. I mean, kind of funny is almost that, right? To have an 11 person team and just leaning more into the sponsored content and they're making it work presumably pretty well over there. So anything other than that idea of like, all right, rich guy.

give us two years and then fire us. It just seems like it's been that again and again and again. It just sucks. Yeah, I think being beholden to any person who is holding the purse strings. Patreon is a good model because you're beholden to thousands of purse strings as opposed to one giant one. you know no one's voice is really drowning out all the others no one's voice is saying like you have to do this because you can just be like well there's

999 more of you, so I'm just not going to listen to this one. What if Daddy Billionaire dies and leaves us all his money in the will, and we don't even know who he is, he just lets us refer. We have to find us a secret room to get it. oh daddy billionaires play blueprints i think that's fair i heard this story about a daddy billionaire once um and i forget the details so i hope you like a vague barely remembered story but i think i heard it on the radio

But the idea of like there was this crazy rich guy, like literally a billionaire. Daddy billionaire. Daddy billionaire. And he had in his will that he wanted all of his money to go to the government. when he died he just wanted to like give it to the department of agriculture and the government's family's like what you know it's like i don't know i just appreciated uh the services of the government here you go can you imagine that in your will just be like here you go government

How silly. How did I get that to them? To the government? Yeah. And they walk into the lobby and say, here's a check from Daddy Billionaire. Have you heard of Daddy Billionaire? Well, here you go, Mrs. Government. Will Davidson writes in and says, hello. Obviously, the GTA VI launch is going to be absolutely massive.

Sales are going to be destroying records. That's true. I don't know why, but whenever I think about the sheer size of this launch for GTA 6, I get the strong urge of a terror in the pit of my stomach. Does anyone else have this strange sensation? What's happening to me? I have this feeling. It's so funny, though, what's happening to me at the end? I have this feeling of, this feels like such a big, momentous occasion. And I remember how big GTA V felt.

And my brain immediately goes to how many more of these do I get? Which is very morbid. Like, do I get three more of these big things and then I die of old age four? And that makes me sad. Yep, that's it. I mean, honestly, we're going to get... Probably two and a half GTAs, if we're lucky. That's so few! We're not going to live to GTA 10? No, I'm sorry, Kelsey. Of course we won't. I know you have high hopes.

But, gotta let go? Gotta let go? Maybe, maybe ten. Although, maybe ten. You got, like, twelve. Well, yeah, start eating your carrots. What are we talking about? What parents keep you young? I don't know. Think about it. I think it's going to take even more and more time for each next GTA. How many years will it take more than this? 20 years.

It is bananas to think of how long it's been, 12 years since the last GTA. I was in a college dorm when GTA 5 came out. I am a 30-year-old business owner like this. I had to choose between going to the doctor versus buying PTA that week. That's genuinely what happened. I remember I didn't have money for both. Oh god. I get that idea of just I don't know. The terror in the pit of your stomach, well, is an interesting sensation, but just knowing that, like,

A black hole of people's time and attention is about to be launched towards the world. I love when the world gets like that. Websites to take advantage of it. Not enough. Not none. Sure, sure. I like when the world is all focused on one thing at the same time and it's not something horrible happening. It's fun. It's kind of rare, right? Yeah.

large Pokemon Go oh that was it I'm trying to think of like what the obvious example is but I guess it says Pokemon Go yeah We have... precious few cultural touchstones for everybody compared to when there were three radio channels that everybody listened to and anything like that like marvel movies which i don't like or watch it's like i like that i can start a conversation with pretty much anybody i've run into in my day-to-day life

about that. This is my pitch for sports, by the way, when people are like, I don't like sports. I'm like, but it is such a good easy small talk thing like you can talk to anybody if you know a tiny bit about sports by the way i see somebody at the min max meetup in brazil by the way shout out to everybody who came out to the min max meetup in brazil good lord there were like 40 people that came out in sao paulo

It was absolutely incredible. So thank you so much. But one person there in particular, Kelsey, they're like, let Kelsey know that I'm a huge Mets fan, that there are Mets fans in Sao Paulo. So there you go. Awesome. Yeah, I used to host at a restaurant. I'm walking people back to the table. You have to make small talk, and it's usually about the weather because, again, what touchstones do we all have? But they would go like, oh, are the wolves playing tonight? And I would be like, I don't know.

or what was the score i don't know you gotta have like it would have been a lot better if i was in the one yeah i feel like a rebuttal of like i don't know but Hey, what color is this dress? Let me show you this picture. Is it blue or is it gold? Just think of some color touchstone. How dare us say that we didn't have A unifying cultural moment. So if we had black and brown dress or gold dress or blue dress.

And I love that we had that. You can't erase that history. Yeah. And I remember when a woman ran up to the host stand to show me her phone to ask my opinion on that. Wait, really? Yes. What an odd, do you have a memory about that stupid dress at that restaurant? What did you guys see? Black and blue? No one remembers and no one's gonna check. I saw white and gold first. Yeah. Blue? Wow, white and gold?

All I know is I want to be buried in that dress because it was such a beautiful moment for society. You look great in it. Hey, thanks so much, everybody. Vets Mildly Raven writes in and they say, I finally listened to Ben. Thank you. Finally listened to me on one thing. I love how you talk to them. Before you're like, they were like, hi everybody. And you went.

I, like, nervously. I can't not. I can't not. Oh, let me shake your hand. I finally listened to Ben and I checked out Into the Aether, the video game podcast. And I got to say, I think it's my new favorite podcast. It is so good. It is my favorite video game podcast at this point. They say, so what? Currently running, to be clear. So what are everybody else's under-the-radar podcast recommendations?

I was going to say Into the Aether, so I'm about now. You wrote a story about them on Polygon, and you listed them for, like, podcasts to watch or something, or somehow you were...

You wrote something about that. I'm trying to remember what it was. Yeah, oh, maybe I interviewed. I'm trying to remember. I'm... I... so many posts so many posts i understand um uh no i um i had an off-air conversation with brendan over there recently which was very nice just to talk about you know his youtube channel and the podcast and stuff and i got to kiss his ass a bunch and

We'd love to cross the streams in some way, but that podcast is so pure with the two of them. I can't go on there. I'd throw off the rhythm. And it's like, I'm going to find a way to bring them on here. So anyways, we'll figure out something in the future. But in that, I talked about like, oh yeah, there's an article about your own polygon and Ana wrote it and Ana used to be with MinMax. And so it was nice to force that connection there. Anybody got an Under the Radar podcast recommendation?

I mean, Jacob's not here for him to plug himself, but I love Something Rotten. I listen to every episode of Something Rotten, which is Jacob and Blake talking about... rotten games it's always so unhinged and nice and the tone of their conversation is different from other any other gaming podcasts i've listened to yeah I'm a fan. I still love Hollywood Handbook. It's still like 80% of my listening is getting caught up on the 10 years of Hollywood Handbook that I missed. Oh, wow.

Basically, the show is an improv game where the job is to have the worst conversation possible. is like the whole conceit of the show and it's it's broken my brain so much where i listen to i'm like why would i listen to a podcast where people just like have a conversation this is like so much more fun at the risk of you know waking up all of our Patreon supporters and bringing us to zero dollars. That's how I feel sometimes.

yeah i have a couple dead podcasts that i recommend um the archive from idle thumbs for the important if true podcast is still up and i still have a bunch downloaded for like long car trips with my wife because i'm like well They're from the game industry. It's kind of the Campo Santo folks who now are at Valve, I suppose. But it's them just like,

focusing on scientific what-ifs and talking about scientific research papers and then just spinning it out into the most comedic possible podcast. But I love Important If True. And one that... God help me. I hope I'm not the only person on earth who loves this podcast, but one of my favorite podcasts ever was so short-lived, and it was called Out of the Game. Help me out, everybody. I can't find archives of it anywhere, but if you have the archives, send me a link.

But it was like when 1UP collapsed and GFW collapsed and all that stuff. It's kind of like the old GFW radio crew. They started this podcast where they were all from the game industry, but they talked about stuff outside of the game industry. So it was like Jeff Green and Sean Elliott. And Guy Kroll, who used to be at Newsweek and stuff, now he's a big consultant and all that stuff. But yeah, they started the podcast where it was just them talking about like,

the history of shipwrecks and stuff. It was excellent, and I can't find it anymore. It's killing me. I... literally just googled it and the first result was an archive of it well i've never googled it yeah i can't find it anywhere on my phone in the year 2025 what gives you and your historical research Gotta start somewhere. Put your team on it. Somebody else got one they want to throw out there? I actually do. Okay, now I can do another because I was

Just remember this as we were talking. I really like, I like range touch and I like game studies. study buddies, but my favorite thing from them was a homestuck podcast called homestuck made this world and like if you want to understand like the internet and you want to understand like homestuck culture like even if you don't know homestuck it's like very very good it's very very thorough and it's like a really great listen. Yeah, one of my favorite podcasts.

There's a dead internet podcast that I also liked called Garbage Day, which now it was hosted by Ryan Broderick, and now he has another podcast called Panic World, which is... good but not garbage day was very much just like this is a weird phenomenon on the internet like let's figure out where this came from and why this is happening um and his new podcast does a little bit of that too but um but i really liked garbage day

And then also, for a podcast that's still running, if you are really nerdy about game history and want to learn more about that, the They Create Worlds podcast, you might find it a tiny bit dry if you're not... into that, but it is such incredible information.

I kind of just throw on old episodes when I'm cleaning the house sometimes. Two more. I swear we're done. Side story with Austin Walker. New podcast. It's kind of killing it in the charts, but he's kind of returning to... to gaming podcasts and it's it makes us all look like amateur doofuses i guess just it makes me look like an amateur doofus just to be really clear

Yeah, it's so good. It's called Side Story. But Haley especially. Yeah, very much so. Bonus pods taking hits. And then people make games. They have a podcast called The Games Press, which is very relevant for this. this episode. Jacob Keller was on an episode as well. Lolworthy wrote in, they say, what's the objectively correct amount of pizza toppings? Not the toppings themselves, the number.

They say, growing up, my dad used to order a combination pizza that was basically every topping. Work event pizzas usually have one. So what is the correct number? And Lolworthy says three, because they go with pepperoni, sun-dried tomatoes, and spinach. Three's good. Three's great. Listen, I think, here's what I thought. I thought everyone's going to say three.

But I think that we only think that because that's what the pizzerias offer. They say, it's a deal with three toppings. But you're saying if the same deal had five, you wouldn't go, this is way better. You wouldn't be able to, like, at a certain point you're not tasting all of the different toppings as much, though.

It depends on the kind of pizza, too. Like, and the toppings themselves, right? Like, the variety of the flavors. How many different variations of sausage do you really need, you know? Most of all.

Yeah, there's like five different... meats that are the same that you can put on your pizza but when you go to a sit-down restaurant it's always like they don't just say mozzarella and pepperoni and you go yum it's like they go oh all these different things and they list them all and then some of them have crazy

crap on them like walnuts and stuff and then that's always when you're like what the hell the pizza is crazy it can have like good mouth texture and stuff but i just have never had enough room on here because i'm always limited to three sure i mean one is obviously a joke No, I like one. I like one. I think one is solid. Okay. And it's just pepperoni? Yeah. Yeah. It's a good meal. Well, I mean, one is for work parties, as the writer said. Two makes it an event.

And that's frankly all I need too. I've never had to. Enough for me to enjoy. Can I finish? I've never had two. One or three. I've never had two things on a pizza in my life. Name one time. What? Pepperoni and a mushroom? What are you talking about? Do you like the pineapple pizza? Canadian bacon and pineapple? That's two. That Canadian bacon. Wait, what? I've never had pineapple pizza, but I've had pineapple on pizza when there's more than just two.

What else is in there? When you order a Hawaiian pizza, it's just Canadian bacon and pineapple. Yeah. I've had it on, again, a fancy sit-down restaurant where it's all these crazy things. Barbecue sauce. Okay, so you've never had a boring pineapple pizza. No. You've only had, like, extra fancy pineapple pizza. I only ever eat extra fancy pineapple pizza, yeah. More walnuts, please. I think two is fine.

She was like... is is good i'm happy with that but the question wasn't what are you happy with the question is what's ideal and it's three point i think you're pissing people off i really think pizzeria is is taking over your mind kelsey i think you can have more than three I don't say you can only have three toppings. No, but the deal is that. It's always been the best deal. That's not always true. If you do too many, you know?

But poor Christ, it can't hold. It's going to fall. It's falling. It's falling. Hey, above the running pizza. Probably the pizza I've had the most the last few years is the Domino's $5.99 each. And those are two toppings. So it could be the company dictating the amount of toppings that I'm comfortable with. But I go usually like Italian sausage and diced tomato or like banana peppers and diced tomato or something. And then like

I don't know, the toppings I do like to get, having more than two of them, it feels like overkill. I don't know. I got into a big fight with my mom because we were ordering pizza, and I wanted to order the pizza that had clams on it. And I said, that's fascinating. What the hell? I bet that would be good. And she said, no.

Yeah. And I was like, no, no, no. And she made me feel like such an idiot. And I was like, I can't believe this. But I was also being devil's advocate, like egging her on. And I get it's fun when I make my mom mad over dumb stuff like clam pizza. But then you know what she did when the pizza arrived? She had gotten me a small clam pizza because that's my mommy and she loves me. And it was just okay. It was just okay. Kaylee, I'm so glad that you're...

You're bringing up the weird pizzas, though, because I'm also a weird pizza enjoyer. I'm way more likely to order the least pizza-looking pizza on the menu. Not from a delivery place, but at a sit-down restaurant. If they've got a weird one that's got like corn on it and stuff, I'm like... Sounds interesting. Everyone always gives me crap for it. No one has ever just been like,

Okay. Like, no one has ever not commented on that choice. They always are like, that's a weird pizza. That's annoying, because it's the one place you can get a weird pizza, because the to-go places aren't like... Walnuts. They're like, oh, God, I don't have the money to put walnuts on such a pepperoni. I wouldn't want that from a delivery place, either. No. It's a different vibe. Walnuts will go everywhere.

We have a lot of pizza luches around here and punch pizzas. Those are a lot of pizza options that my sweetie and I go to. And it's... pizza luce is like only weird options so you're not going to get made fun of there but it is such a different thing it's like i could have regular pizza hut or whatever the next meal it feels like such a different thing to me yeah i always had a bias against pizza luce too so maybe this is

I just thought a lot of their pizzas were doing way too much, and so maybe this is that. Yeah, I think that's nice, I guess. If you're a piece of cheese. There's a couple good ones. I have no idea what this is. i don't know anything i don't know this this minnesota thing that is clearly very minnesota but um the important question is is this like they were being weird before instagram took off or was this like okay

And I respect it. I think there's definitely some places now that are like, we're weird so that you take photos of us and put it on social media. Clickbait pizza. Yeah, or it's like, that's just ice cream shops, I feel like. I'm like, order our ice cream store. It's got like six.

flaming marshmallows on top and a bunch of weird sculptures like what do you just want to take a picture of coffee places like that all over the place now where it's like you're not ordering a coffee you're ordering like a stack of candy arranged in a bouquet I have a question for the panel. If you order a pizza that has five different types of cheese, So like feta and ghost cheese and mozzarella, whatever. Does that pizza have zero toppings?

does that pizza have that's what i was wondering yeah i think it does that's a classic pizza for Cheese pizza is kind of... Yeah, that's zero toppings. It has four toppings. Yep, that's zero toppings. They charge you! One cheese is standard. Yeah, so it would be three. You'd have to deduct one. Otherwise, then pepperoni would be two every time. I think it's only a topping. Cheese can only be a topping if it's weird cheese.

Comfort complicates this. You know, a white pizza. Like a blue cheese or something. You know, something that's not normally on. But if it's just like we've got Cheddar and Colby Jack or whatever, it's like, yeah, those are both pizza cheeses. Cheddar on a pizza would be... a topping, I feel, because I feel like... If it's like a block of cheddar, then that counts as a topping. I think the first

Of course, cheese is not a topping no matter what, and anything additional are. I mean, you get charged for adding garbage on Reggiano. That's stupid. That's stupid. That's stupid. That's stupid. That's stupid. That's stupid. That's stupid. That's stupid. But then if it's mozzarella and then Parmesan, I don't feel like, I feel like those aren't toppings even though there's two cheeses.

Hey, did you guys hear the rumor that Tom Blackburn wrote in? Don't. I'm on. Tom Blackburn wrote in. And they say, it's not clean, but we have no choice. We have no choice. Like the fancy mozzarella. I think that's a topic. Leo, your cat is attacking that microphone. So Tom Blackburn writes in and says, the GTA 6 trailer, it showed off sexy body part physics that looks subtle and realistic. is the discourse on body physics

And I've seen them myself, I swear. That's right. That's what all of our bodies look like. So, yeah, we understand. So, is the discourse on body physics at a turning point now that they're making more accurate anatomy rather than clowny gooner junk? Absolutely not. Have you seen any Ho-Yoverse game? The Gooners are alive and well. They're just finding their games. They just have their games now. I 100% agree with that. But if it's like realistic, realistic, perfect body.

That's like a new level of discourse. That's never going to be enough. Even if it's completely high-def, perfect, accurate, a million trillion polygons, they're going to want to goon to the things they can't see in real life, even if it is perfect.

It will never replace it for sure, but this question was brought up in the Slack without the GTA 6 attachment, and that is what I thought of. Because as I saw that shot in the trailer, I said like, Well, this is a different type of jiggle physics because this is honoring what someone like this really looks like. We finally have feminist jiggle physics which requires more power that's going to knock down the entire amazon rainforest so what are we doing

It's all worth it. Is it really feminist if we sacrifice the Amazon rainforest? Women would say no, but we need this representation.

Amazonians like Wonder Woman. Right, Leo? If we don't get representation for people who have perfect bodies from planetary, then... when you know that's a great one right uh gigglesby more like jigglesby how they say hailey mcclain for goodness sakes please give us your opinion on the state of overwatch It made an appearance in the community's top play games recently, voted on the Discord every single week, and the online discourse around the game is the most positive I've seen in years.

What's happening to Overwatch? Is it good now? I called this. Didn't I say months ago I said it's good again. Everyone just wants to complain and be a contrarian little baby face. It's fun to make fun of this thing. It's good again. It's fun. They have perk system in the main game.

And it's like, that's been really fun. I really like love, like I've fallen in love with on all over again. Cause now she has the double nade, which just makes her even more fun. And then yeah, they have the stadium mode, which God, I want to turn off the annoying voice that talks over top of it. But other than that. it's been great it's like you you pick me you go in and you pick skills and each round you sell your skills to buy new ones and you build these kits so now like

Juno has a kit where she can just be launching her rockets every literally five seconds by round five, and she's just insane. So you need to focus Juno more than anybody else in the whole map right away, which has never been the case before. The only thing I don't love, which is a me problem, is because I've played this game for almost a decade and I need to do something else, is I feel like I'm so used to knowing how everything works.

And like how long a cool down is, what everyone's kid is bought to the point. It's like second nature. But then when you're in stadium, things get changed up so much that I have no natural instincts anymore for how things work. I was playing my first stadium game. Meg went in a big f***ing ice ball and started rolling at me, and she hasn't done that in 10 years. I said, what the hell is going on here? Apparently she got a whole new ability or something.

But, you know, they don't care about me, the long-term fan. They're trying to bring in new peeps who are all over at Marvel Rivals. Gooning at the new Emma Frost skin. Don't bring that up. Gooning's big! Gooning's still so healthy. Also, modding is so healthy. Gooners are alive and well. They are being catered to. They are being absolutely catered to. Huge demo. On the voice thing, I also turn the voices off in Deep Rock Galactic Survivor.

Sorry to these developers for the third of four games we're talking about having the voices turned on, but you're a little understated with the voice actor. Whoever's doing well, they have this auto AI kind of voice. It's just like...

Anna with the big moves. And like, all I did was like throw a nade into a team fight, which is like what you're supposed to do as Anna. And it's like, it's kind of fun that the game's calling that out. I also am not entirely clear if only I heard that or if everyone, I guess I hear other people's how I think about it.

But, you know, Soldier will alt and get, like, a three kill, and it'll be like, Soldier slopping up the seconds, or, like, whatever the hell. What? Slopping up. Slopping up. They didn't say that, but it's something like that. And I just, So, I mean, this has pulled you away from Marvel Rivals to get you back into Overwatch? Like, it's working? Marvel Rivals is too good. Deadass. It's like, I feel like I opened that. What are these words?

I'm getting gooned at and I'm just trying to play a game and have fun and I literally have to stare at Emma Frost's entire body. If I don't have Emma Frost there, like, what will Valnet publish writing on? We won't get, like, eight gifs to goon to Emma Frost. Top ten Emma Frost gifs to goon to. Number three will...

Cream your jeans. I don't know. My friend who has constantly never played Marvel Rivals with my other friends who always jokes about downloading it because it's so obvious he's not going to play it. Suddenly they drop Emma Frost and suddenly he's playing it. Wow, huge, wild coincidence. I jump between the two games, to be honest. It kind of is whatever. If my friends are online playing Overwatch, I play it. If my partner's playing Marvel Rivals, I'll play it.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My schooner. Sorry. Sorry. I did just Google what is Gooner and I had to go to no stupid questions for the subreddit. You brought up a question with the word Gooner. They wrote it! I didn't construct that. What did you think of that? Jordan wrote in and said, howdy, MinMax. What is something you've changed your mind about recently?

Doesn't have to be a big thing, though it can be. It's just always refreshing, reassuring to see proof that people aren't destined to be stuck in one way of seeing things. That's a wonderful question that Jordan has entered several times And every time he's entered it, I've been stumped and I understand that's a terrible spot to be in in your life of like, in the last year, something that I really changed my mind about. I am struggling, which is not good.

I only have one that's like not, you know, super consequential in the grand scheme of things, but it's made a difference in my life, I guess, which is I'm biking to work like every day now. Yeah. And.

that used to be a thing that it's not like I was like oh those idiots on bikes it was just a thing where I was like that seems difficult and like I'd have to gear up for it and that's going to be annoying and like this whole process is just going to kind of suck and I'd rather drive to the station and then take the train in or whatever um and it's been wonderful and obviously it'll be different when the weather's like

freezing and raining or whatever but like i i really thought this even on a nice day would be kind of an ordeal that still sucked a little bit and it's way better than driving like it has been it's even better than like driving to the train and taking the train when the weather's nice. I'm like,

I just get to like see some nature and wave at neighbors on my, this is great. I don't know if I've talked about having a sweetie, but I have a sweetie and she's been biking to work as well. And just going past all the traffic on the like single lane street that gets there.

really euphoric it's the best amazing but those seattle hills kelsey i mean oh i have an electric bike oh all right great yeah i probably should have led with that it's an electric bike it's pedal assistant so that sounds amazing So biking is good. That's the revelation we've had recently. Politically, we're all locked into the grave. I didn't, I said it wasn't. I know, I know, I know. I know, it's tough. It's tough. Um, I'm.

starting to regret who I voted for, but that's still a work in progress. The big thing that I feel like I've really successfully worked through, and I'm sorry for a not short answer when we're running long, but I... have naturally Just the way my brain works, the way that I go through experiences, I really noticed I was like... collecting anecdotes in a big way for like for Letterboxd or for this podcast so many things where it's just like there's an avenue to put this

And if there isn't, I'll at least write it down in some general place where it can become something someday. It can go in a video as a one-off. joke or thought or can be built on later and it's like if i don't do that if i don't at least write it down if i don't share it with somebody who i am thinking of when i think it and like oh they get something out of this or whatever conversation it's like if i don't do that then this was

pointless right then then having this thought or change of mind or any little thing any little opinion it's like there's no value to this unless i can take it to that next level where it becomes something and i've After thinking about that a lot, I've noticed just recently, like, oh, I've really successfully come around and, like,

Having a beautiful thought is inherently rewarding, is inherently a nice way to spend a few seconds, whether or not anything ever comes of it. I don't need to scramble up to go write it down. I can just like...

sit with it and take a moment. And that has been a real, that exact thing was very hard to do a year ago when I first started kind of thinking about it. Now it's like my brain has actually kind of gotten there. I've gotten obsessed recently with just How movies specifically, I guess you could say storytelling in general, but let's say movies specifically of just like corrupted humanity for...

giving everybody the assumption that there will be like a beautiful way to tie all these threads together in your life and everything will be impactful. And specifically, I think about a lot with, um, uh, a kid of just like, There's no one event, there's no one conversation I can have with this kid that'll change their life. But in a movie, that's just one scene and everything hinges on that and pivots. But it's like, how many times would you have to bring a kid...

to a beautiful location and have the same conversation before you can maybe turn that cruise liner just two degrees from whatever their trajectory naturally is. And so I wonder if that's related to your thing, Leo, just the idea of like,

Oh, if you just have the perfect thought and you can string it together in this way, then like a huge pivot will happen in your life or just this thing will be radically different. I think that's also just a corruption of movies and the assumption that, oh no, it's just a whirlwind of chaos. That's life. any semblance of structure is a curse from storytelling. Maybe. I certainly only remember random stuff my dad said.

In the middle of a day we had a million days, you can't predict what they're going to remember forever for no reason. Exactly. So just be a perfect father every single day, make no mistakes. Exactly. Done and done. If you do make mistakes, obsess over them. Like as a backup plan. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That sounds good. Chris Pally writes in, says, no question. Then we're moving on. Easy. No, they say, games and games media just feels rough on all ends.

Like everything else in the world, so I just wanted to say thank you. I'm midway through my first actual deepest dive, play along, and it's made everything more compelling in an environment where it's a struggle to let myself be compelled. I assume that's for Claire Obscure, but thank you for that, Chris. Appreciate it. Thanks, everybody, for playing along.

Claire Obscura with Jacob and Kelsey and Haley and I. Swan Song has a very appropriate question saying, if you could be blasted into the past and do a deepest dive on any game that is now considered retro while the game was still contemporary, when it was just released, What game would you choose? What do you think of the most interesting game to unpack as it was releasing?

Like, Ana, if we did the Mario 64 deepest dive right when that game launched, that would be a fascinating archive to have all of us. I just think every little bit of it would be so much more amazing. Yeah. You know? Um. For me, my answer, I feel like...

This isn't, like, that far back, but I think it would be really fun to dive on Undertale and maybe, like, play through it and realize that there's, like, different endings and you have to play through it multiple ways. I don't know. Maybe that would be dumb because you wouldn't know.

play it how to play it that's the whole point right right um but i don't know just like i feel like that game was really impactful and like kind of now people only see it through the lens of the internet so it'd be cool have a conversation on it and a deep dive on it like that wasn't influenced by all the conversations on it totally after the fact imagine the conversation where everybody figures out they got a different ending exactly yeah that'd be so cool

I think Shenmue would be one of the most interesting ones. Not even necessarily as like, it's a good game, but just as like a I think there would be so many weird little things that could be explored in that that would have been just...

brand new weird at the time like have you ever been able to just you know open up all the drawers like this like this is great gaming has changed forever and like did you see this on the wall inside this one random building like it was it's just it has so many little things in it in a time before

that was really happening a lot and so I think just the first time that a game was packed with a bunch of little pointless things would be It would be a really interesting thing to be talking about in a contemporary sense. Yeah, the idea of games will never be the same. I think Metal Gear Solid 2, maybe it seems cliche and obvious, but I think that'd be a fascinating one to unpack. Just to have, like,

a recording of people speculating where they would think that story was going when they were only like a third of the way through it or something. Because I remember playing that game. And being convinced, like, okay, we're playing as Raiden for a bit, gotta, gotta, gotta, but like...

We're gonna play a snake for the finale like obviously snakes coming back for the grand finale he's back but you don't get to play him ever again in that game so i think just having yeah a recording of where you think that game is going to go before it goes off the rails harder than any other game has ever gone off the rails would be fascinating to have a document of it's The Last of Us Part 1 aging poorly in the backstage chat said the same thing speaking of opening a bunch of drawers

Oh, yeah. As far as games I'd want to unpack moments of, that's what I think of. I played it again a couple years ago, and it still holds up so hard for me. I was thinking about that one. It really felt like... games had a had a shift when that game came out i don't know is that a me thing but it really was like wow

No, that wow was, everybody said that wow. Developers are still saying wow. I feel like it's, I don't know, I've had that experience so many times within the last couple of years of talking to developers about like, oh, what are your big inspirations for your game? They're like, oh, we want to make a game like Last of Us. Yeah, I guess. All right. Have you still got to look back to 2013? All right, got it. WeGoGiant writes in and says, I have a game for you.

I check the Wikipedia pages for these pairs of things. You have to guess which page has more total words. So, Leo, which page on Wikipedia has more words on it? The page for Blueprints? The 2025 video game? Or Blueprint? As long as it's not a trick of, like, it's just a list of the different places you could go with the word blueprint on Wikipedia, I have to think blueprint. Concept. Incorrect. It is blueprints.

has 100 more words on it. And that's embarrassing that you didn't know that. Only 100. That's close. I was close. Real close. How many ways can you talk about the concept of a blueprint? Yeah. The history. Sometimes the red. Iconic ones. Kelsey, Paper Mario or Paper? Which has more written about it? Now this is Paper Mario, parenthesis, game series.

I still think it's paper. Incorrect. Paper Mario has about 4,000 more words written about it. Paper could include everything from the blueprint page. Yeah, exactly. Let's see. Oh, Anna? Crazy Taxi? Or Taxi, the 1978 hit TV series. I don't know that show. I'm going to go with the Taxi series. uh correct the taxi tv series has more written about it than crazy taxi um let's see of course uh hayley oh that's a good one too the legend of zelda echoes of wisdom

Oh my god. Probably one of the least discussed Zelda games if we're being honest. Or Zelda William. Robin Williams is his daughter that he named after Zelda, which has a longer Wikipedia page. That's great, because everyone always just talks about her because her name is Zelda. They don't stop. So what else has she done? I don't know. She's directed. She's acted. Neppo baby. She's got a childhood section on there. Great job, it's actually. It's a great read. But Echoes of Wisdom was barely...

We did the deepest dive on it and we barely talked about it. I know! That's why I'm thinking like this. This is really hard. I'm going to say... Zelda Williams. Foolish. No, of course, it's Echoes of Wisdom. Has about a thousand more words than Zelda Williams. Oh, frig. Okay, but I'll give you a redemption round. Okay. Death Stranding?

Oh, my God. Or death. Oh, interesting. Or FedEx, the package delivery company. Death Stranding. Correct. Death Stranding has got it in the bag. Okay. All right. What do you all like for question of the week here? I liked the mid-max. Bullpen one. Or the pizza one. Yeah, I liked pizza. I think pizza was probably the biggest. We always choose the food one. It's sad. It's sad. Sometimes we don't, but Anna, you're a guest of honor.

I think we've been on like a kick of saying we always choose the food ones and then not choosing the food ones. That could be. That could be. And pizza it is. Pizza. Pizza it shall be. Congratulations, Lawworthy. You just won the prize from I Made Bit, of course, which is Ori and the Blind Forest. And now it's time for something that we like to call Get a Load of This. Hey, I'll go first. Get a load of this. Kelsey, you're probably hip because you're a hip cat, but...

There's an artist named Robert Tinney who created a bunch of art for an old computer magazine called Byte. Do you know Byte, Kelsey? Okay. I do. I went on this rabbit hole recently and like, if you like just surreal art, of old floppy disks and stuff. Apple II disks flying through the sky.

It's so good. Look up the cover art for Byte Magazine. That's B-Y-T-E. And Robert Tinney is the name of the artist. But it's just a good nostalgic blast. And now I'm like, I need to find a way to get... huge prints of these because it's like god i didn't realize i was so nostalgic for the floppy disk for the apple too but like i want just a wall covered in these old things I kind of hadn't thought about that, that, like, These covers are really interesting and cool. Yeah!

Yeah, there's this, like, you know, the future of computing and someone, like, slipping a tiny floppy disk into their tiny little watch and stuff. It's just, like, the level of future predictions is way off, but kind of charming for how off it is. That's a sweet spot, I think. Get a load of this. Here's a juicy nugget or whatever we're calling this thing. Infinity Nikki Update 1.5 came out, and it is...

It is a mess. There is a huge boycott going on right now. Girlcott, excuse me. The word boycott is banned in the official Infinity Nikki subreddit. but it is it's wild basically they released not only like you know they did some kind of standard predatory gotcha stuff um when they hadn't really been doing that in the past but like You know, instead of the outfits being eight or nine pieces, there are 11 pieces. And also the, like...

Your roll rate is worse and all of that stuff. They introduced a dyeing mechanic, like dyeing clothes, not like dyeing in real life. And it's just... Basically, every single thing you want to unlock takes an enormous amount of resources. It's not per outfit, it's per item. But the worst part... No, there's two worst parts Worst part number one.

is that they retconned the entire story. I have 100 hours in Infinity Nikki, and this update is just kind of like, yeah, so that was all alternate dimension, kind of, and, you know, not literally alternate dimension, but, well, kind of, yeah. It really just kind of said everything you did up to this point doesn't really matter that much. And... That was really disappointing, but also, most importantly, it's just a buggy mess. People are randomly losing some of their

currencies. I've seen screenshots of people posting like, I have negative 11 crystals for some reason. I don't know how that happened. Oh my god. I was having all kinds of like, I've logged in several times where I just can't move. I can only jump. I just can't move forward at all. The menus are a mess. Like, it's just, it's a buggy mess, and it's been like a week now, and there's still...

Not a lot of real good communication or messaging from Infold, so it's bad. I'm hoping that this can turn around because I was really enjoying that game. Certainly not going to spend another dime while this is all going on. Oh my gosh. Okay, Nikki. Get a load of this, Nikki. I'm glad that we... Stinky Nikki. I'm glad that we talked about how handsome Jason is, because this is going to be a compliment. I'm sorry, but Jason, I'm putting a pic in here. He looks like Ben Hanson.

What are you talking about? Show the picture. Can you bring that picture? I just put in Coro text chat. That's your face! Are you out of your mind? people i think i just am so boring looking that everybody thinks i look like other people but no let me see this like there's differences there's differences don't get me wrong but i think the overall like setup of this dude's face Where his nose is, where his mouth is, eyes and stuff, is your face. My eyes are above my nose.

Yeah, it's in the same order. It's in the same order, top to bottom. Well, thank you. And sometimes it looks more like you than other times, but I was feeling like no one's said this yet, and I was feeling, I was almost gaslighting myself into thinking about it. I think what we have to do is you just need to get incredibly jacked. And then we can make...

Then we can settle this. Okay. I mean, yeah, you guys haven't seen my back. Maybe my back does look like that. No one knows. Can you put this specific screenshot on the screen? Where did you send this? I didn't see it anywhere you sent it. It's cohorts text chat. Cohorts only. Cohorts only chat. oh in this thing this is the most it's looked like you is this screenshot of all the images i've seen this is a terrible way to bring okay no one's gonna be able to see this at all

I want to show. This is the most evidence I have. I'll put it in post, yeah. I mean, it looks like a picture of Sasquatch. It's just a blurry background picture, but I appreciate it. Haley, you've gone over backwards to compliment me, so I'll take it. Thank you. I just saw that and I said, I need to talk about this. Thank you. There you go. Breaking news. Got it. Thank you. You're welcome. I get a lot of this.

Did you know that when you're driving somewhere and listening to music, when you've arrived at your destination, be it home or at work, you can sit and listen to the rest of the song, and it's a nice way to steal a minute's peace in your day and create a sense of flow between your activities?

Give it a try. That's interesting. That's interesting. Just to set and soak it in? Yeah. Just till the song's over. Yeah, right on, man. Time it with leaving. Make your life feel a little more cinematic. I started doing it lately. It's time. I'm too antsy and I always have to pee. I don't know if I can do that. Just let it flow. Yeah. I'm not pissing in my car. Be at peace. Anna, can you have us? Can you save us, please?

um get a load of this this my my first get a load of this brought to you by um my my uncle um wisconsin man turns port-a-potty into cuss Perfect. It's called the crappie shack. That's such a good idea. Why not? Because you can probably get one of those for pretty cheap. Why not? Because they're really heavy. Oh, really? Is there ever an instance where the ice melts and the shack falls in the water? All the time. Yeah. It's the leading cause of death wonder, actually. Yeah.

Get a load of this from the Discord channel. The community shares links all day, every day. It's the greatest news feed on the internet. We got a post from Pixel Breakdown. on Blue Sky where they shoot a picture and they say, I will never forgive myself for bringing this monstrosity into existence. It's the fabled man skeleton used to animate the horses in the first Assassin's Creed game. and they actually show a picture

of what it's like for the skeleton of the horses in Assassin's Creed where they've stretched out a human skeleton to make it fit for the rig of the horse in Assassin's Creed 1. And it's disgusting. How dare they. It's gross, but there's links below for all this fun stuff if you want to check it out. Except for Leo's, which I don't know how to share a link to, but you get the idea. Well, heyopetter.com.

that's it smart thank you so much everybody for joining us on this grand adventure thank you for watching listening sharing this episode of the min max show um kelsey lewin you have something you wanted to plug Yeah, I just opened a store. We just opened a store, I should say, in Las Vegas. So there's a pink gorilla in Las Vegas, one mile from the strip now. So if you are visiting or a local, it is a... Literally $10 Uber ride, and it's to Chinatown, which has other cool stuff in it.

Hope you come check it out. We're very proud of it. Good game stores. Is it your favorite store? Could you rank all the stores internally? Internally in your own brand? So I'm... I'm going to actually go to the store to work it a few days. like tomorrow uh but i mean i'm staying here in seattle this is really my business partner's uh thing he's got a place in vegas and uh enjoys vegas more than i do to be honest i'm not a fan of

Not a fan of dry. My skin is not a fan of dry. But yeah, I mean, it's very cool building a new store just after having done it a couple of times to really... like you learn so much every time and so every time it's like this is the most organized perfectly put together thing i've ever seen and if we open another one i'm sure i'll say the same thing about that one That's awesome. Ana Diaz, thank you for joining us on this big adventure.

What would you like to plug? I have a couple things I would like to plug. I would first like to plug the union fundraiser on GoFundMe. started to help raise funds for colleagues who have been laid off and need the financial And the second thing I would like to plug is an incoming thing from one of my coworkers, Pete. uh volk who is going to be doing like a little interview series on everyone at polygon i'm everyone

So do it at Polygon, like talking to them about them and their work and reflecting on their time there. And that's going to be called. There's no link for it yet because people are just kind of figuring stuff as we go. But it'll be called PV Guide. And so I'll drop a link whenever it's ready. But I just wanted to proactively plug that because my colleagues are awesome and they all deserve the work.

Yeah, there's links for all the stuff, including that union drive. What would you like to be doing at this phase, Anna? I mean, I know you want to kind of relax and think for a bit about your future career, but... I'm not exactly sure yet. I, you know, obviously like needing to pay bills and whatnot can sometimes trump like what I exactly want to do. But, you know, at this point, I'm interested in like... you

I'm not at a stage where I know exactly what I want to do, but I'd love to talk to people. If you have any role in any side of the games industry where you could use someone who knows social media well, trends really well. um games like traditional games journalism hit me up um i I have accepted some freelance work, but basically I'm open to any and all things to be fit for. Here we go. And where should people reach out to? Oh, okay. You can reach out to me at my email. It's just Ana Diaz.

At Gmail. Okay. Awesome. It's in the description. And her blue sky is in the description if you're going to reach out there as well. Sweet, that is it for this episode. Bonus pod this week. It was one of those business blasts where I jumped on with Haley to answer a bunch of questions from the community about where Mimax is at, where we want to be moving in the future.

the status of a bunch of different things. If you've wondered, like, hey, whatever happened to this? We basically give an update in that episode. So if you're at the $5 tier on Patreon, you unlock the bonus podcast feed. Bonus Pod is in there. Deepest Dive is in there. A ton of stuff. is in there. Next week, I believe next week, the plan is we're going to be launching the travelogue for Brazil for the big trip to Sao Paulo.

Which, by the way, it wasn't until I got home that I realized, oh, Sao Paulo, that's St. Paul. That's the same name as the Minnesota city. I just never connected it that it's the same name as the city. Oh, my God. We'll talk all about it. Does it have a twin? It does not. Well, no, not that I was aware of. It's so big that it doesn't have a trend. Like, did you know that Sao Paulo is the biggest city in all of the Americas, like north and south?

I did not. It's ridiculous. So we'll talk all about that full trip. And shout out again to everybody in Brazil who is so sweet. Everybody came out to the community meetup. We are very appreciative for everyone being so kind. We love the country, love the city, and so we'll talk all about it in the Travelog, but then also on BonusPod next week if you want to hear an hour of fun Brazil and Gamescom, LATAM, Breakdown, all that fun stuff. New Show Plus this week. Leo, how would you describe it?

The title was Skin Deep and Skin Care, and I played Skin Deep, the immersive sim that I'm glad we have gameplay of on the channel, and Sarah gave skin care tips, and we talked about skin care. And it all worked. It feels like a parody of a New Show Plus option, but it's like, well, if people vote for the parodies, then I guess that's just a real New Show Plus show. And hopefully the people who want more gameplay, you know, hopefully satisfy everybody. Hell yeah.

Let's see. Deepest Dive on Clarab's Gear is going on. If you're enjoying that RPG, you can check out our first discussion, which is up in that bonus podcast feed and up on YouTube, where we cover everything in the game up until you get the fourth character. It's a fun chat. It's a three-hour chat. If you want some people to give that game the discussion it deserves, unlock that in the bonus podcast feed for a convenient way of dealing with it yourself. And part two, we're collecting...

Your comments on everything in the game on May 16th. This is everything in the game up until you've dealt with both accents. axons is that's the next stopping point so once you've dealt with both axons that's the stopping point for part two of the deepest dive And we're going to be picking up the conversation from there. Reminder, Doc Lightning is happening right now.

Short documentary film festival with the community. If you feel like pushing yourself, being a little creative, you don't need to spend money to get a bunch of fancy equipment. Literally use your phone, use free editing software, shoot a documentary that's under three minutes. highlight a loved one, highlight a family member, get some grandma's stories recorded. Anything you want to document, we're all for it. And there's a discord channel where people can offer tips.

suggestions it's a really sweet community channel and then at the end of the month we're going to have a big screening the film festival for the third annual docked lightning so you can check that out there and again Um, You can help support this thing directly by going to Patreon, or you can now go to youtube.com slash minmax slash join if you want to directly support Independent Games Media.

youtube.com slash minmax slash join unlock over 140 hours of bonus content extended versions of our videos um the pissy zones all that fun stuff and it's kind of in a um it's we're launching it And we're going to be improving that tier as we move forward, connected to the Discord, all that fun stuff. But for now, it's just a great place to check out all those extended versions. And for $10, check it out for one month. You can cancel after that if you like.

But if you've been looking for a way to support us outside of Patreon, there's your option. Yeah, if YouTube's your main place, then you can get notifications when we make those posts about the extended versions, and yeah, it'll appear on your homepage. that kind of convenient stuff you bet awesome all right that is it everybody thank you so much we'll be back next week oh Don't forget, pewpew bang!

Of course. What is happening with PP Bang in the future? Do you want to give a calendar? Because there's going to be a little bit of a gap, potentially. I actually don't think there's going to be a... Yeah. All right. I think we're good. Oh, awesome. So when are the next episodes rolling out here? Next Monday, which is... The 12th. The 12th. Okay. Awesome. And what's the theme?

We haven't revealed that yet. What a team! It's kind of a surprise. It actually is a surprise. It actually kind of is a surprise. We tried really hard for this. Sweet. So subscribe to PPBang in its standalone podcast feed. Leave a review. Help spread a word. Help spread the good word about PPBang. We'd appreciate that. But that is it for this episode of the Midmax Show. All right. Thanks so much, everybody. Be good. Have fun. Let's go.