Inside Blitzball w/ Jeff Gerstmann

Oh, yeah, baby. It's VGB's episode 48 with the three most employed people you know. That's right. I'm one of your hosts, Sean Warren. with me is my forever co-host nikki grayson i think i can sell this xbox series s for like fifteen thousand dollars i think if i'm reading the news correctly it's worth the more than it was when i woke up

It's worth more now. You're correct. So that's good. Joining us today is a very special guest that I swear to God we did not plan it this way. I can't stress enough. That this was on the books a calendar month ago. I was like, I gotta get on a podcast. These motherfuckers. I gotta tell someone about it. You know, Jeff Gerstman? Hello. How could you not know Jeff Gerstman? Hi, Jeff. Hi. They can't get rid of me. The internet keeps trying. Like one of those good weeds.

Like one of those good weeds. Yeah. Thanks for coming on today. I can't. What to even say about today? One of the strangest days I think I've ever had. There's no news. Genuinely on Monday, I started to make our notes document and I was like. I guess we'll talk about skin deep. That's a cool video game. And you know what? And eventually, eventually today we will talk about that. Yes. But then a whole lot of other shit happened.

Like a lot of big shit happened before today even happened. And so we have to get to all of it. But today's stuff was truly wild. I don't know who you are that I'm breaking this news to you, but. Polygon is dead. It was sold to Valnet For scrap and everybody's gone. Chris Plant, Pat Gill, Matty Myers, fucking everybody. Nicole Carpenter. Nicole Carpenter. Everybody gone. Gone. The entity that our guest today founded, giantbomb.com.

has undergone what can only be described. Please read the language, Sean. Okay, I'll read the official language. Sure, sure, sure, sure, sure, sure. We're actively exploring creative directions for the future of Giant Bomb. Look forward to sharing more with you soon. So that's what we are up to. And I say we... Because they haven't said anything to me. Reichert bounced. Grubb bounced. Okay. There you are.

Was bounced. Was bounced. Got bounced. I guess what I'm saying is I have not heard anything about Dan Reichert's employment status officially. at this time. He is declining to appear again until conditions improve. He's actively exploring creative directions for the future of GB. He's actively exploring. That's what he's up to. And so, yes, we have the implosion, explosion. of two genuine institutions in games media that are happening roughly on the same...

day. Nikki literally does not know their status as we sit here today. They haven't told me anything. If we talk about brand safety for 15 minutes, maybe you'll get fired. That's a good way to go, I think. I don't have the soundboard set up. Who's left to do the firing, though? Who's left? Great question. James, James, James, James, John Q. Wiki ruiner. What a dream, right?

Someone back in, I don't know, 2010, whenever the fuck fandom was invented, was like, we're going to make a website that's going to make your phone so hot it'll burn a hole in your pocket. And what a cool dream to have. Listen, again, John, as employees of another company that was in the get your phone hot business, there was something there. We were there. There was something there for a little bit.

Yeah, we were in it. We were like, okay, another video unit? Sure. Two of them? Two of them. On the same. Do it. Fine. Get them both on mobile. Get them both autoplaying. Yes. One at the top, one at the bottom. No words visible. Yeah. Do you, Nikki, do you remember when like we started having a problem where the audio started auto playing and it was just, it was, it was.

so not important to literally anyone we talked to. Yeah, what's the problem there? You call it a problem, but like that just sounds like a problem making too much money. Is that the problem? What are we? It was. fucking crazy fucking crazy but it's just because no one's ever been on these people don't go on the internet No, they don't. So that's why. Nikki, what do you want to say? What do you want to do? What do you want? It's just like the things I'm obviously trying to keep.

like, keep my head on a little bit about it. But I think the thing that is the most... Because they might still hand it to you, you know? Yeah, no, that's so true. You haven't heard anything. You haven't heard anything yet. On Monday, they could hand you the keys. They took, they actively, they made, they figured out where the password to the Blue Sky account was this morning, but they on Monday could. Could say, come on back.

Come on back. We need you. Yeah. No, this one's wild because no one's told me anything. So like when when fanbite happened, it was like it would because of ineptitude. It happened in waves, but they got all almost all of us. Right.

So, like, they were calling us one by one, but removing Slack access kind of before they had made the call to tell you that you were gone. So then we were in our own Discord kind of being like, well, I guess it's happening. But then people were like, well, am I going to get got? And it was so I don't have any of that because I'm still in the slack. But I also didn't have full access to the Slack. I only have access to like three channels.

But those have been quiet, if you can believe it, for a couple of weeks now. Always a good sign. So it's hard to say what's going on. Nah, dude, it's a fucking bummer. I think there's no, there's no bones, no bones about it, really. It just sucks. There's no... No bounds to the stupidity. of a person who works in a C-suite. You simply cannot underestimate how stupid you can be professionally.

because they'll just they'll let you do it because there's no stupid you can be so stupid you can make you can be given a golden goose Yesterday I watched, y'all remember that Key and Peele sketch where they're sitting on the couch in one of their rooms and they're talking about stuff that's not real. One of them goes, we should make an app.

And then the other one goes, no, why would we make an app? They're smoking. And then they're like, creating an app is like having lightning in a bottle. And then Jordan Peele leans down and he grabs lightning in a bottle. And he's like, oh, you mean like this? And he is like, where the fuck did you get that? And he's like, I don't know. Some guy gave it to me. That's the whole fucking business here. It's like they've been given magic and they're like.

Who could possibly say? Who's to say what we can do with it? Where it came from or what I'm supposed to do with it. Just looking gift horse. in the mouth, any of these metaphors, analogies that you could possibly want. It sucks. I think even as a I'm younger than y'all by 20 to 45 years. Yeah. But I think that there is like from the perspective of. I watched this website when I was in my early teenage years and I said, wow, it would be sick as hell to do this for a living.

And then I got a taste of it when I was at FanBite and I did it for a living. And I said, well, that was fun. And I guess it was good enough for me to do it again. But at no point in the grand arc of time did I think I would get laid off from giantbomb.com. So if I told myself that in 2014. Maybe I'd be amped because I worked at JiveBob.com. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, tough, dude. Tough, tough day. Tough week. Tough, tough time to be in the business that increasingly doesn't, doesn't exist.

Jeff, I have so little expectations for whatever your response to this is. So just take it at whatever level you want to. But I have to imagine. Even with the distance you have and the history you have, it must feel weird to have this thing kind of be dismantled. Yeah, and it's really, my feelings are all over the place with it. Better, more grounded and normal founders than I are able to move on from their thing and go like, it's cool that that thing's still around.

Not me, man. It's, you know, because of the circumstances around it, like it was. It was just awkward. You know, it was time to leave and I was ready to go. And then it actually was awesome that they decided to fire me before I could quit because it meant a very different severance package. Yeah, that's money, baby. That was awesome. It was like...

fan fucking tastic. Um, but like at the end of the day, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm kidding mostly, but the The day we signed the contracts to sell Giant Bomb to CBS. Dave Snyder, who was one of the engineers, and he appeared on camera a lot. He and I went for a walk. He said, walk with me. And we got outside, and he said, listen, man.

The thing you need to know, because he had sold his website to this company when it was still CNET before it was CBS. Yeah. He said, the thing you need to remember, this is not yours anymore. We are selling it to them. They own it. It is theirs. You need to be like emotionally like, you know, like like the implication being like you need to detach from this a little bit because it's not the ragtag group of, you know, whatever that it always was.

And it was really good advice that I failed to take completely. And I stayed completely emotionally attached to it for years and years. And I got in arguments and I came close to walking. A couple of times, you know, we had a contract thing that like I've suddenly I was out of contract or like a year early and I was like, awesome. I'm going to get the fuck out of here. And, you know, that was like two years after we sold it.

that was the roller coaster was always like, are we getting out of here? Are we not getting out of here? Are we, you know, are we, are we moving to Detroit and buying a city block and setting up a new website and, you know, like what, you know, for $9 or, you know, It was a lot of stuff like that over the years. But ultimately, like, you know, I. I was never really able to fully... Take that advice and fully detach from it. It's the thing that I always tell myself whenever I still.

you know, occasionally get worked up about a dumb conversation I had, you know, nine years ago or three years ago or, you know, or whatever. It's like, dude, whatever. This all worked out. This could not have worked out better for what it was. Ultimately, I think that that website failed a few different times. Yeah. When you think about the nature under which it was founded, and I don't mean like, you know, people are going to say.

You know, I talked to Dan Reichert all the time. Like we're tight, you know, like Jeff Grubb is great. It was my idea to like, Hey, we should bring Jeff Grubb on. And then suddenly I was like,

Hey, does Grubb know that it's a shit show over here? Or I mean, does he still want to come? Cause it got, you know, cause it got, it got real bad there. It was like, we're not bringing him cause like, you know, he had a job at the time. I was like, I hope we're not bringing him in to fuck his whole thing up. Cause Jesus. And I was gone before he was brought in for, you know, full time stuff anyway, but.

But as a website that was founded to be the exact opposite of GameSpot. Uh-huh. To be like, yo, man, fuck those guys. Like, not the people doing the editorial work, but everyone above them. It was very much like, fuck those guys. There's a better way to do this. We're going to, you know, the very idea that we had to then sell it to them. Yeah. It's a failure of the original concept. Yeah, I would say that, like, you know, that was for the kind of whole concept. And then I might say.

When we thought, think of thought about, it wasn't fandom at the time. There were other, like, it was like eHow or, you know, whatever the wiki garbage sites were of the, you know, 10 years prior. It was like, man, we're doing cool Wiki stuff. At least it's not that garbage. So you can imagine how I may have felt when the company got dealt to fandom. Good.

Great. I was like, finally, it's in some loving hands. This wiki is going to see a lot of support. I spent nights and weekends updating that wiki for years. You know, and so many other, you know, people that use the site did too. And that's the thing I, in some ways, feel the worst about is like, you know, whatever ends up happening to that thing. It's not going to see.

it's probably not going to see any meaningful development to kind of fix the issues that it has always had. And, and so I just, it's, it's a series of missed opportunities. It's, but in some ways. Game spot. Being in the same company as GameSpot is bad because even when we were doing great and we were turning a profit as a unit and all this other stuff. GameSpot was perpetually underperforming. They were on fire in some variety of way.

And so anytime we'd be like, it's great that we're doing great. We should hire up and capitalize on this. It was like, yeah, that's a cool idea. Unfortunately, GameSpot's on fire and the money was better spent on trying to fix that. And so anything that we would have gotten any resources we've gotten, the vast majority of those went to this like idea of like fixing GameSpot. And.

You know, and not long after we were acquired, the people that like made that happen left the company. And so it became this like rotating door of, you know, executive types, general managers and such. who got further and further away from the idea of like, why do we have two websites?

Yes. And for a while, the internal pitch at CBS was more of like, well, this is the premium brand, like an HBO or something. And then, you know, this other thing is GameSpot's going to be ESPN or, you know, whatever metaphor thing. But at some point, like the premium thing was not being supported in a way that was enabling it to make truly premium content. And fast forward to, you know, kind of under.

red ventures and then fandom you know like it just it was never given an opportunity to succeed it's cool that people were able to make cool stuff i think under cbs we did actually some of our best work Just in terms of editorial output or just like fun videos or whatever, I think some of the coolest stuff we made was in the first handful of years.

there when when we could still just say like hey we're gonna go do this and people were too afraid to say no um And, uh, and so I, I don't, I don't mean to say that like people making content where maybe, you know, like, like we were, we were fighting against, you know, an organization that was not incentivized, like none of the incentives ever aligned to make Giant Bomb work the way that I think it really could have.

And like that was always frustrating for me, a person who was paid on the idea of how successful Giant Bomb was to say like, oh, I came up with like nine different ideas about how we could make money. And the rest of the company is like, that's not enough money for me to get out of bed. Like, I'm not going to, I don't care about writing these contracts. I'm in legal. We're negotiating golf masters tournaments over here. We don't have time for your.

YouTube contract or, you know, whatever. And so it was just, you know, that's kind of the order of the day. So I look at what's happening right now and go like, this was always how it was going to go. There was never a moment over the last, I'll say at least five years. But I think you could walk it back a number of years before that. There was never a way where it was going to go any way other than this. Yeah. And...

It's a bummer, but like, I don't know, there's a weird, disgusting relief to it that I feel then guilty about. Yeah, it's all very new. I'm still working my way through it. It's a very strange, real fresh. It's a very strange thing. It's a very fresh. I 100% understand. Like these last three or four days have been a real roller coaster for me, like laying awake at night, like just like reliving.

like a decade of conversations going like there was a GM who he was he came out of Yahoo and he rode a razor scooter around the office from meeting to meeting this was like 2014 or something like that and it's just like Dude, he sucked so much. It was mind-blowing how much that dude sucked. It's so just like, you know, reliving all of these dumb moments where we had to fight for scraps against executives who increasingly had no idea why we were even there.

Yeah. It was like at some point it's like, and now that I'm on the other side of it, there's an aspect to it of just like, man. We should have gotten the hell out of there way sooner. But I think everyone, everything worked out. My hope for things always, you know, at some point was like, I hope that when people leave this, they're better than they were coming in. And I don't know that that's true for everybody. That's, you know, everyone would have their own.

their own feelings on that, you know, but that was always my hope. It was never about like the brand. It was never about like, who cares? It's a name that, you know, that Dave just came up with one day and we went, sure.

it's better than it's better than thwomp.com which was the other you know I was like better than the five other names like CBS had already registered gamevine.com so we couldn't do because comic vine existed prior so we couldn't be game vine and I didn't want to be game vine anyway. And yeah, you know, we picked the name and it was almost out of a hat. It was like, yeah, cool. I did the...

Like the, what the, the Howard Stern private parts, like the, the WNBC, like I just like, I said, giantbomb.com, like into a mirror for like a week and a half and said, yeah, no, this is good. Well, let's go with this. Sure. And so it's never about the brand. It's about the people. And I hope that...

I know that the people who are there now and are no longer there, I think that those people will be fine. I think there's good people that, you know, have ideas about what they might want to do in the future. And, you know, I think a guy like Jeff Grubb will get in anywhere, you know? Yeah. For sure. Yeah. I mean, it feels like the legacy of the site is. a community that travels unbelievably well, um, in terms of just like, just, I think is just.

So much of my timeline this morning is just filled with people. And this afternoon is just filled with people like, I started watching this when I was 15. I wanted to do stuff like this when I was 20. And a lot of people followed it from when you started it till all the way to the bitter fucking end. And, I mean, that's, I think, incredibly cool, despite the fact that it's changed a lot, obviously. Yeah.

The other part of this is the polygon part, which was also really shocking to me, especially the timing of it. I remember where I was when they did that big like. you know, kind of up their own ass like introduction to the website when it was. introduced and we all had a big laugh about it. Hey, when I was a child, I thought that it was so cool. I didn't know any of those fuckers. I was like, yeah! Yeah, it's like the fucking right stuff. Astronauts walking to the shuttle, you know?

You know, maybe a little bit of an ominous beginning, but I think it settled into... depending on who you ask and when the second biggest games media website in the world and a place that was producing unique content as well as really good video content from Some people who I really admire. And it's a place a lot of freelancers cut teeth on, which is like very cool and something that's dying. And now it's fucking dead.

just sold the parts for Valnet, which is... If you can't figure it out with that kind of audience, like... No. I just, like, I don't know. Like, I just don't... I don't know. Yeah, it's really... You call it short-sighted, I guess, especially dealing it to something like Valnet, which is such a gross organization. It's just going to be like AI articles now, right? Yeah.

Like, it'll be a gross disaster. Yeah, Polygon was always very rock solid. You know, that was, I think, their reputation. And, you know, Chris Grant. Chris Grant was always a guy who, you know, when, when they found that it was like someone who took like the, the mantle of like gang journalism, like he took that stuff very seriously. Yes. And I always really appreciated that about him. And the way that, you know, when, when.

you know he was kind of a more of a face of the site instead of like a little more behind the scenes you know the the early days of that site i think were really interesting watching them Build what they were building. There was talk. I didn't hear about this until after they had launched, but I guess they.

at one point had approached us about buying giant bomb. They were, they were in like a, should we build something new or should we buy something else that's out there? And so I guess at some point.

their a conversation was had and they decided to go and build their own thing but like you know when joystick shut down it was a bummer and so seeing kind of like some of the joystick folks you know justin and just some of the other people kind of find a new home in polygon when it launched like that was enough for me to be like oh great okay good like at least you know these people have something new going on that's that's awesome and yeah um

and mcwhirter and you know it's like yeah there's just a lot of long time people that that are getting cut in as a part of this it's yeah It stinks. It stinks. Nikki, did you have any? I think you might have. No. Yeah. It just, it feels it. this one I it does it makes no sense to me obviously in a way that like again a little bit to your to your point Jeff like

The fandom giant bomb divorce is not a surprise to me. That was a very slow-moving train that I have been watching move ever closer to myself as I am strapped to the track. since I've been there for the last two years, right? Like at no point did I have any... Like, surprise about it. You've been texting me privately for quite a long time. I've known, right? Like, hey, you know. Yeah. Polygon was like. That's crazy.

That's great. Like, that's crazy. It feels the only thing I can kind of liken it to. It would be like if tomorrow. Like. If the Denver Nuggets tomorrow were like... We're packing it all in. We're packing it. We're selling the team. Listen, I know we just won it all. 29 teams now in the NBA. We're good. That's it. We're out. We're just kind of done. And it's like, no, gang. Do you know that Grand Theft Auto 6 comes out this year? You know that, right? The Switch 2 comes out in a month.

And it's like, I understand. You'll own it. You'll own the SEO for Tears of the Kingdom guides again in the next five years. That's incredible. That guide's already done, right? That guide's already done. No, for sure. but it just doesn't make any sense. I, who God knows how much they sold it for, but it doesn't feel like Valnet stupid run by stupid people.

Could have sold it for more if you waited until January of next year, gang. When the traffic was crazy high post GTA, I'd feel like you could just sell it. So in January, probably worth more money. Oh, if you don't think I asked about.

about what we could do to cash out of Fanbyte when that fucking Animal Crossing article hit. Remember that one article that Dylan made? It was one tier list for Animal Crossing. And our traffic went from, eh, to what the... fuck like overnight and I was just like well how do we

Can we spin this in some way? Like, I don't understand this. In an industry that is constantly confused as to why it's not the pandemic anymore and as to why every game isn't Animal Crossing and why every game isn't Elden Ring. to then look at the calendar and say, well, it seems like we might have another Animal Crossing and another Elden Ring in the same calendar year.

We're good on this one. Like, what do you mean? Again, it's just it's people who fundamentally don't understand the business that they're in. and are so fundamentally disconnected from it that they're like, well, who loses here? Nobody loses if we sell the website. Everybody around me that I can see, everyone wins. I don't know. Jim Bancroft might be as much of an herb as Mansour Spanfeller. I was literally going to read a quote from Jim Bancroft. More like Jim Jackoff. Hell yeah, brother. Yeah.

that's why they call this the bad bad Bad days of podcasting. That's it. We're proud to have built Polygon into the gaming authority for both experts and casual fans alike. Jim's hard work. Jim did it. He's writing press releases. He's in the press room all night. I wrote a stub for Grand Theft Auto 7. Is that okay? Informed and delighted. Tens of millions of gaming enthusiasts. Jesus fuck. If I see the word enthusiast one more time, I'm going to...

Okay, I told myself I was going to quit saying violent things about myself, but I'm going to walk into the sea. Since its founding at Vox Media more than a decade ago, this transaction... will enable us to focus our energies and investment resources and other priority areas of growth across our portfolio of iconic digital publications and audio video programming while enabling Valnet to grow their leadership and authority in the gaming information category.

It's just a transaction. It's just numbers going from one account to another account with no... No consideration for the human cost because it's not them. So. easy easy to kill it if it's not you yeah it makes me think of like i want to say it was maybe like the first five years of polygon but maybe it was a little bit longer than that but

It felt like they were constantly being dogged by rumors of just like, oh, any day now they're rolling Polygon into The Verge. The Verge. Polygon's going to go away and all it's going to appear on The Verge because The Verge is already doing some gaming stuff. Yeah, and it always felt so crazy because I remember my exodus, my first exodus was I followed the Engadget crew from Engadget to VAR.

when they started The Verge. And then when the game stuff happened, I was amped. But I kind of, even then at the time, I was like, well, why are they going to do a whole nother website? They've already kind of had them start writing stuff on The Verge.

Just put the game, just have more people. I didn't know anything at the time was a child, but just have those people just write for that. So then whenever that stuff did come out, I was like, oh yeah, like it kind of makes sense to me from their perspective. But yeah, I don't know. Again, had a golden goose and they said, well, there's nothing to be done with this. We can't, we simply cannot make money on. You want us to sell video online?

What? Let's throw the goose into a jet. Ads on what kind of content? I don't know. So you're saying that you want an advertisement before the podcast and my job as a salesperson is to find someone to... pay pay us to put an ad before that i don't think it's gonna work an audio ad what is what are audio is it the 50s like it's the internet what what is this a phone call what do you want to like an ad before a phone call that's no one's gonna buy that how does that even work

The scooter riding, the Razor Scooter Man was in charge when we were trying to get our podcast sponsored for the first time and trying to make a deal with an external ad network. The sales team was very much against it because they didn't get commissions if we went to an external sales network. However, the internal sales team had no idea how to sell a podcast and no interest in selling a podcast because they only like to sell what they knew.

Yeah. And so they already were making fucking commissions anyway. Exactly. The end result was zero dollars for anyone. And me sitting there going like, boy, I bet the balance sheet of my part of this business would look a lot better if the most popular thing. Instead, we have people going like. The bandwidth on the podcast is a real drain. You should consider cutting it or making it shorter.

Really? This thing is so popular that you're telling me that it's draining resources. This popular. My job. What is my job again? Is it to make things that people want to check out? Is that what? How did we fuck it? Yeah. My point is, it's been this forever. There's a never-ending cavalcade of dumb fucks in middle management, GM, and C-suite positions. That just like have zero vision and zero flexibility for like new business models or any kind of new anything.

a sales team has tried to do to you on your watch, do you think? Change the Kane and Lynch review. That's a big one. That's a pretty big one. That's probably the biggest one. That's probably it. Yeah, that's pretty big. What was the one? I used to get to work early, so early, in fact, that my boss before my boss was John. Are you talking about the day that Lindsay was yelling at him? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I used to get to work before my boss was John.

And then I had been doing that for about three calendar months. And then one day I got pulled into a room that was like, it doesn't seem like you're working the whole time that you're here because you leave early. And I said, I get here before you do. and then he said what are you talking about and I said I get here like an hour and a half to two hours before you show up to work so i'm gonna i'm not gonna wait for you to leave to leave and then he said

And also, very clearly, we had an office that had this rolling start. Yes. So yeah, you can get in at eight, you can get in at 10. So it was not, it was not like a, it was not any kind of issue. But one of those days I got to work again before Tuan did and John was sitting. In this conversation with the sales team, the way that our office was set up was that you opened the door. And the first section of the office was sales. And then there was the agency block. And then in the back.

in the depressa zone was editorial. Yeah. So like on my and for a long time, I was sat between sales and agency, which was just the most I was so proud of myself when I had the courage to get up and say, can I sit back here? Yeah. but I walked in and John was being yelled at by sales yelled for what? I mean, I mean, I mean when I, I'm not like, that's a real literally yelled at. I was being yelled at like a child in, in the middle of an office. Yeah. Um,

Okay, so who gives a shit? I'll use names. So Lindsay was the head of sales. Hired a man named William. No, actually, that's not what happened. William was hired and then they decided that William was so inept he needed a boss. Yes. So they hired. Always a good outcome. Always a good sign. Yeah. Hired his boss, Lindsey. And Evan was kind of my God. Everyone needs an Evan. Evan, if you're out there. Evan.

Oh, man, Evan. Fucking legend. Evan is my Wario. He is my, like, legitimately, like, yin-de-mei-yang serious. Absolutely, like totally locked in all the time. Everything I'm not, except he's not persuasive and charismatic. And so he would give me all the data and I would take all of that data and make a persuasive argument. best working relationship I've ever had with anyone. Loved it. He and I tag teamed on this project, which was William had agreed to sell...

Going deep into the well of fucking programmatic advertising here. But to sell a single pixel advertisement. which is essentially a pixel you install onto your webpage. And when the user gets to that pixel, which is invisible, it expands into an ad that pops up in the middle of the screen. Okay? Common thing, but we had not... sold any of those yet. We had very established units that we designed and put up there, all that stuff.

So he had sold this unit without talking to anyone about it, without talking to the web team, the design team, the editorial team, anybody just said, I'm going to go out and sell. So Evan and I were already pissed that this had been sold because it meant that our engineering team would have to figure it out and install it and all this stuff. We were already mad about it. But then what we did is we started looking at the contract and we figured out.

that after Williams' commission, we would not be making any money on the unit. Great. So we emailed... him his boss and our and our boss like everyone's boss this rundown of like this is a bad idea like you should stop doing this and not sign this contract and we should just get out of it and that's when

That's when Lindsay pulled Evan and I pulled just we like literally Evan and I met at the elevator. We went up the elevator. We're hanging out. We open the door. We open the door. Lindsay is there and she is yelling at us already. Already could see us get in the door. and yelled at us for 30 minutes. Who the fuck do you think you are? All this stuff. And I'm like... I don't know who you think you are. We're the same age. I don't know what you're doing.

And that was the craziest thing. That was probably the craziest thing. There was a lot. There was a lot, but that was probably the craziest thing. Yeah. I hate being yelled at. That's not fun. Well, you don't like being yelled at at work? Not at work. There are some, if I, you know what, if I pay for it, I'd love getting yelled at. Who doesn't? But if I'm not, if I'm not, then I'm, no, I'm not. I'm not so much into it. No. Yeah. But that was the craziest. I mean, you know, when, when.

When a child kicks me in the testicles, it's uncool. But when I pay someone to do it, it's a treat. That's why we're here. It's a total treat. Yeah, so obviously, it goes without saying, thoughts and vibes are with everyone who lost their job today at Polygon, as well as folks at Giant Bomb that are in this kind of weird flux. Some people are very much in control of their destiny. We'll be back. Some people are. Yeah.

Giant Bob will be back for sure. And we'll all be there on Monday. Giant Bob will be back. It says here, we understand your frustration and appreciate your patience. That's exactly right. Yes. We're actively exploring creative directions for the future of GB and look forward to sharing more with you soon. Yeah. So, I mean, you gotta, I mean, you gotta, you gotta trust. I wrote the post.

So maybe they're going to bring back the guy that found, I mean, you know, like maybe they're going to call on the whole thing on this. By God, that's. Yeah, there are, as of this moment, 777 quote tweets of that bad boy. Is that good? Do you want that? Is that a good ratio? And they're all positive, too. They're all positive. Yeah, every single one of them. Every single one of them is positive. Crazy. Absolutely crazy.

Let's move on. Let's get out of this space. Fine. We spent a lot of time here. I was having a great time here. You're having a good time in this space. I totally get it. Uh, but let's talk about, uh, Jeff, you would, uh, you would, you would brought to our attention. uh, a question about a video game that we saw a bit more about yesterday. You want to ask us, uh, yeah, ask us what you thought. Does any of this Borderlands four stuff do anything for y'all?

Not even one little bit. Yeah. Short answer is no. Short answer is no. Yeah. I definitely wouldn't. So like. I live in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. Randy Pitchford works in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. You're in it. You're drenched. Where the fuck does Randy get his shirts? I'm like, where? Are the shirts coming from Randy from the Shein boat?

They come to his house. Oh man, what's going to happen? I'd pay a premium now. It's going to be dire. Depleted. I think he'll survive. The Fashion Nova David Copperfield section. That's where he gets most of his shit. I mean, he owns the Magic Castle now, right? I'm sure that they just have a bunch of those in the back. Oh, my God. Leftover from dead guys, yeah. Um, does it do any, so I, I will say the last borderlands that I, I have dabbled.

And every single one of them, including Tiny Tina's dungeons. diners and drive-ins, whatever that was. I like that because she's like, what up, yo? And I'm like, yeah, that's how I talk. I would play that game. Tiny Tina's Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives is a good video game idea. It's a good idea, yeah. what's up goblins uh um word son

It's time to smoke these fools. It's time to smoke these fools. That's so true. It's time to smoke them. I've dabbled in all of them. The most I ever really spent with one was two. I did some like co-op stuff. I beat that game. i picked up three i bounced on that one like really fast because just you know what if you've played one you have played them all And although it maybe looks like the game has a little more heft to it than it did before, nothing.

I saw in that 20-minute presentation made me go, Okay, well, that's speaking my language. We've talked about Mario Kart three weeks in a row. Mario Kart did a great job of saying, hey, have you bounced off of Mario Kart pretty hard? We've got some stuff that you might actually like in the new one. This Borderlands 4 thing, I'm like, okay, you made another one of these. It's totally cool if you would just...

checked into a fucking social media post and said like, Hey, we made another one. You're going to, you're going to love this slot fuckers. Like it's like, and that, and that would have worked for that audience, but it's not going to pull me in. Yeah, I think I agree. It looks better. I'll say that. It does look better. There was a... I think they kind of got a little too cartoon with it.

Like, with each subsequent one, it kind of got too cartoon to the point where it was like, this is no longer a distinctive art style. It kind of just feels like a bad art style. Like, it doesn't resonate. but they've really paired it back now. And I actually do think it, it looks really nice. There's, it does seem like I watched, I watched the state of play.

Seems like the same game, though. Yeah. The guns have different gun parts. You can make the guns have multiple gun parts. That's cool. What are they going to do for the next one? Like the guns are in this, they're going to have more. And then there's, well, you see. Okay. All right. The different manufacturers have different special. This is something that's been in the franchise forever.

So for them to devote time in this video to, you know, well, this corporation has higher crit damage and this does, it's just like, why, why are you spending a bunch of time on this thing that like, Anyone who's watching this video and cares. That's something that they did. Also, it has mattered so little in the games unless you're a twisted freak.

Yeah, I need all the Jacobs guns. Yeah, the idea that people are in a discord call and say, please give me all your Jacobs guns is crazy. That's not a person that exists. They look at the big number. And sometimes when you reload it, the gun goes away from you and comes back. And then other times it doesn't. And that's functionally the only thing that... is different to me between these things.

And then like, they've really, they didn't talk about how many guns there were. Cause the hallmark of three. was they were like, there's a billion or whatever guns in the game. And I'm like, that's the opposite of a selling point. You understand that, right? Like, all that tells me is that there will be guns that are better than mine. Right. So this time they stepped away from that. But then they were really like, now you get to make the gun that's better than the gun that your friend has.

Which is funny because that's like if you had a Borderlands save editor for the past couple of games, that's what you could do. Just do that. It's kind of like that's the thing that I look at and go, oh, that's cool that they're doing that because that's the thing they should have done.

you know 15 years ago or whatever at this point is Like, hey, you know, this gun system behind the scenes has always been like it's barrel seven and it's this that and then the numbers are kind of derived from those stats in a really weird and kind of interesting way when you dig into it with a save editor. And so exposing that system, I think, is kind of long overdue.

And then when, you know, when you got the writers out there saying like, hey, we're trying to step away from the dumb shit. Like, yeah, we know. We know it was bad. Like they're at least like saying some things that I go like, okay, yeah. Like maybe like it can't be worse than three. Like I feel like that's low. And, you know, the way the combat looks and stuff, you go like, okay, like, yeah, sure. But, like, I...

I feel like the ship sailed. I really liked Borderlands 1 and felt it just needed to be better and then the ways they iterated on it. were wrong in my view. I don't normally take that tack of just because I'm not a game designer. What the fuck do I know? But like Borderlands 2, I just look at it and be like, wow, you really expanded on this in all the worst possible ways. The wrong directions. It is a game.

It's a game that people love, but nobody talks about. The number of regular people I have in my life who play video games has really dramatically increased since I graduated from college. And I remember when I was in high school, I didn't have a job or anything to worry about. Like, yeah, at school, we were talking about Borderlands because we were 15 years old.

people are going to play this game and then never, never speak about it again, which is, I feel like what really, what the problem was with three and tiny Tina's, which was people were like, Oh, there's a new borderlands. And then you would be like, what? You play Borderlands? That's wild. I think this one will sell an unbelievable number of copies. This game will make them so much money. I agree that no one talks about this shit, but like...

Find me a town that doesn't have a barista without a Borderlands logo tattoo. They're out there. I mean, it is. Every month, I feel like I see someone in the wild with a Borderlands or... or a bumper sticker on the back of their car. Are you sure that's not just because you're in Texas and they're all like, it's just Randy's relatives? It might be, but I also had this, I also had that phenomenon in...

LA, where I commuted from Sherman Oaks to Santa Monica every day for like two years. And there was a small... pink Prius that I saw, I would say like three days a week that had an Overwatch and a Borderlands sticker on the back of the car. And I'm like, God. I would say every time I'd see her, I'd be like, bless your heart. I don't. I couldn't understand you if I tried. It's cool that gaming got big enough that, like, that can happen, that you see that and you're, like, disgusted by your...

It's like, that's awesome that a bunch of people are playing video games. I find these games repulsive, but awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Cool, man. It's the same like if I see a kid on a plane playing a game, I'm obsessed with finding out what game it is. Obsessed with it. How often is it Roblox? It's not really plain, but it's like, it's often just something very, it's Minecraft on Switch, where it's like, it's something very, but it's like...

I love that. I went to the fucking museum here in Frisco, the video game museum, which like... I was like, I'm going to hate being here. Actually, what I saw was like kids playing old shit and like having fun. And I was like. I almost got emotional, actually, watching these parents and their kids, these little kids playing.

a fucking frogger and like all this stuff. And I was just like, well, this is really neat in a way. So I do have this like emotional connection to like, oh, it's cool that like people in the wild play game. But, yeah, I see an Overwatch sticker on the back or a Borderlands sticker on the back of the car. I'm like, I don't think you should be allowed to vote, actually. I think you should be. I think we should. Society needs to step in. Fewer rights.

I feel like fewer rights for those people. No, but it's just really interesting. That series is so big in ways that feel... very strange to me because I agree like I don't think there's any sort of we're in a bubble but it's like I don't think there's any sort of like lasting conversation about those games

I feel like I had those lasting conversations around the first and second game and nothing changed, right? It was fun to interview Randy Pitchford before Borderlands 1 was out because he kept referring to it as a game that was a lot like a game he called Diablo. And I was like, Diablo. Okay. All right. Texas. All right. Okay. Yeah. There is. I just do think that there is a guy who has had his PlayStation 5 for a really long time.

And then has been like, wow, there are no games for this thing. And I do think that this year is going to be the year where he is like... Wow, all my favorite shit's here. Borderlands here. Grand Theft Auto is here. I'll buy Madden this year. I think there is a saturation point. that a game like a Borderlands 4 indicates. like is an indicator of the same way. Like Kesha dropped music last month. That's a bad sign for us.

as a society. It had T-Pain as a feature on it, right? That's not a good sign for our Twitch streamer, T-Pain? Popular Twitch streamer, T-Pain. Fantastic. So that's not a good sign. But Borderlands, I think, is a similar canary. as to the health of the business. Recession Pop is back and now Recession Gaming is back with it. Yes, exactly. That is exactly correct. Bungie should make a video game where you kind of like...

You're a guy and you've got a team, right? It's like three people and you're in space. And like you do little missions and you run around, there's like an open world aspect, but you're doing missions and you're trying to like collect loot and collect guns. And then you can have these like six person, like big missions. Oh, sure. Yeah. Kind of go through a dunk, like a big dungeon with puzzles and stuff in it.

And then you can get that cool stuff and show that cool stuff off in a social space or something. Yeah. There might be something there, but I'll. There might be something there. I'll keep thinking. I'll keep thinking. There might be something there. Maybe. Who's to say? Indie, indie, indie, indie, indie company. I think it would be cooler if they made a game where you just, uh,

Opened a bunch of boxes looking for garbage and then maybe fought some other players and maybe didn't. And I took your garbage away or you didn't. I do want to revisit that. Nikki and I, we played about two and a half, three hours of that last week, marathon. And we had wondered aloud. We didn't know this for whatever reason. We didn't look it up. We were lazy. We're bad at our jobs. No matter what, it doesn't matter. Just pick one. Dealer's choice.

But we wondered aloud, how many teams are there at any given time? And it's apparently 18 players. Yeah, I saw someone say that. Nikki. Wait, there were six teams of three? No, no, no. What I'm saying is like, that was not true for us. I refuse to believe it. There's no way there were 18 different people on this map. There's no way there were 18 people on this map. I might be full of shit. I thought it was 18 teams of three.

No! Is it 18 people total? No, no, no. There's no way it's 18 people. It would be crazy. No, it was 18, so six full teams on one of these maps. That also feels too big. That sounds wrong, but it might have been. It felt like we were one of three. We died pretty early a lot. it's called down so we didn't really get to see the kill i mean looks like it's a two-player game if you lose the first encounter Where are we dropping and dying? Where are we doing those things right away?

Yeah, no, Borderlands, I don't know. There were two moments in that state of play that I was like, okay, who gives a shit? And it was when they were like, hey, guess what? Claptrap's back. And I'm like... Actually, I think you should, like, I think you should put this guy in the wood chipper, actually. I kind of respect it. The idea that, like, they put out a major motion picture.

What had Kevin Hart in it? And everyone was like, wow, that fucking sucked. And they were like, you know what? We're doubling down. It's the same guys as the last time that you didn't like. Honestly? Yep. I respect it. I respect it. I have a little bit of respect for Randall in this specific.

scenario no other situations he knows his audience i think i'm mostly just bummed that you know the borderlands movie tanked because it means we probably won't get the duke nukem movie now everything i heard was that john cena was literally attached like actually actually so you know like we're we're missing out on what a bummer Nice advancing culture. Something's really going to push us forward. And then the other part was like,

There's some flower alien thing busted out of a thing and its name was Tim. And it goes, Tim. And I was like, Someone's favorite guy though. Like fuck off. Like, are you sure this wasn't the Rick and Morty guys game? It kind of sounds like something that was in that winter. It kind of sounded like that. I feel like people played Fallout 3 and they got to the Gary vault and they're like, let's put this in every game. Yeah.

And I'm like, it was good then. You don't have to, we don't have to redo it. No, the thing about jokes is that you can do them one time because the joke still exists. What if the joke was on the internet for a lot of years and then you're writing a video game and you're like, well, what if we put the best of all the jokes of the last five years in here? Hey, but there was a this is fine joke in Claire Obscure that people were sharing last week. And I'm like.

Brother, brother, we don't have to be doing this. It's good. We're fine. Moving on. Borderlands 4. I can't help but be like, I'm disgusted. I can't help but look at it and go like, I will try this game. I'll play it. Yeah, I'll get it. I'll play it, but I'm with you. And, but also I know, I know that I finished borderlands three eventually because I was like, I had a character that was in deep enough. I turned the, I turned all the, I turned all the voices down.

And play the rest of Borderlands 3. Verbosity slider all the way down. And he said, I've been shooting feels good. Yeah. And I was like, well, you know, I need to play something on this PlayStation 5. And they ported it. They ported it up. And, uh, well, I want to get the rest of these stupid trophies because I'm a moron. Let's go. And I finished that turd, uh, and had a real bad time with it, but, but learning nothing. I'm now like, well.

you know, eventually they're going to get one of these right. And you know, the, the gun thing is at least enough for me to like, go like, see, I was right. That's the thing they should have done 15 years. But so, so that's annoying for me, a person who. has too many games to play already that I know I'm going to spend time on that thing that I'm like. It doesn't look great, but the shooting will be good enough. But it'll be enough. It'll be enough. It'll be enough.

I'll find a gun that does something moderately interesting. One of them had legs. You got me for another two hours. That's kind of the promise. That's the loop. All right, let's get into some industry news, shall we? Xbox is raising prices across the board. God, we love it. $80 games, $80 to $120 price hikes for hardware. Games already getting expensive. Can't help it. Doesn't matter. I'm sucked in. I have to pay all this shit anyway. I have to be plugged in. Doesn't matter. Doesn't bother me.

Normal people absolutely bothers. Totally understandable. This was kind of a surprise. Not a surprise in the sense that they would do it, but kind of a surprise in the... the the rollout and the announcement kind of very sudden i feel like you know but i guess it's probably the you gotta shock them about it because then it goes away faster because then if you if you say

on May 15th. We're thinking about it. Yeah. Or yeah, if there's any sort of delay, then that gives you time to delay or warning that gives you time to get the fucking. It's just everyone's going to be concerned about it for a long time. There's enough. There's enough time between now and the holiday season to fucking forget about it. For sure. But a lot of people. Yeah. Who the fuck?

is going into Target and saying, I gotta get me an Xbox Series X. Like, that person doesn't exist. Like, they don't sell these things. And, like, I guess, like... There are people for whom they had, I guess, an Xbox One or an Xbox One X. And it's just now time in anticipation for Grand Theft Auto that they're going to just buy a PlayStation. They're not going to buy. Yeah, I mean, if that ecosystem stuff mattered, then, you know, the Xbox One would have done better than it did. Yeah.

So, yeah, I think, yeah, people will go where their friends are and, you know, like everything's cross play now anyway. So, you know, that kind of softens some of the sting of that. Yeah, man. You know, like, remember, this is the company that has now spent the last several months telling you that every single device from your fridge to every vibrator you own is an Xbox. I gotta fucking go. Yeah.

And, you know, like, why would you buy an Xbox Series X in this situation? I think the reaction I've seen out of people is like... And of course, it's day one reactions from people who are going to be a little dramatic about it, I suppose. But it's been like, oh, well, I guess I'm done with video games.

I guess that's it for me with video games because you know Sony's going to do it too and that's too much money for me, which it's a very real fear. But then there's been a lot of people who are just like, well, this is now underscored why I need to build a PC. because the games are cheaper there because this and that and you know they're finding more and more reasons to

to go and try to find how that works, which, you know, with the tariffs and everything, it's not like that's like a great way to go. But I did see someone saying that demand for NVIDIA 50 series cards is like way down in Germany. So like the cards are, what do they know? Find them in Germany now or something. We've got to get these German 50 nineties. Trust me. We're hopping a plane to Munich tonight. Let's go. Just strap this video card to your body. We're bringing it through.

Yeah, I'm, yes, not surprised that this thing would become more expensive. And also, they're pricing themselves out of people who already weren't going to buy these. But I'll ask this question to someone with well over 30 years of institutional knowledge in this. Is this the first generation you've seen where everything has consistently gotten more expensive in this way? I mean, is this... Is this because I've seen a lot of people say that, oh, this is.

It's the only generation where... No, never. The industry used to be much more willing to lose money on a console out of the gate. And, you know, like that's and people still think it's that way and it hasn't been for a while now. But like people are like, oh, it's like razors and blades. They lose money on the. the the handle but they make it up by selling you razors for five years or whatever and if you go to harrys.com slash

You can get a trial kit right now. Are they still alive? Can I go to Harry's? If you go to harrys.com slash Jeff right now, you can get a trial kit. Normally $13 for $3. That's a deal. Is this you on the website? Is it? I don't know. Whoa, that is you. No, no, no, it is. We'll put this in the show notes, folks. Put this in the show notes, folks. This is Jeff Gerstmann now. But no, people always thought that was the model.

You know, but like the everything always went down because they would they would launch it at their highest price to get the most money out of early adopters. When they had milked all of them dry, they would go, OK, I guess we need a price cut in time for the holidays. And then they would attract the next tier of consumers.

They would exhaust that and lower it again and eventually hit this mainstream price point where people are just like, well, you know, I don't know. I went and got a loaf of bread, half a tank of gas and a PlayStation. I don't know. Yeah. Why not? And that would help game sales later on, you know, it would grow the install base to the point where the games were selling more money and they were making their money on software and.

As time went on, as R&D costs increased and all this other stuff, a lot of factors. All of these companies became unwilling to lose money on day one on the hardware. And so everything's more expensive now. But then on top of that, now instead of. the traditional price cutting process or like

Hey, we figured out how to make an Xbox with fewer parts because we spent a lot of years staring at it and going like, I guess we could make the diet drink something. But because the supply chain has been so jacked for so long post pandemic. and a variety of other factors, it's gone the other way. And now here we are asking people to pay $600 for an Xbox Series X. When a PlayStation 5 Pro is 7. Wouldn't you just do that? Right, right. But even that's crazy. No, for sure.

Because at that point, just say, and that's the other part of it, right? Because it's like, it is, it assumes that people, and I mean, I don't know, it works. So I guess maybe this is, this is why they do it. But it assumes that a person is not smart enough to just go, well, I'll just wait. some more time until I have the money to buy the thing I want to buy instead of settling. on this thing that is worse right now because it's closer to the amount of money that I have.

yeah but it's like yeah but if you're gonna spend seven hundred dollars on a playstation 5 pro okay then just wait two more fucking months dude and then buy a pc like i don't know what the what the problem is Yeah. Some people just don't understand how a PC works. They don't do that. Yeah, that's true. That's me. And so, yeah, I mean, for those people, they'll still want a console of some stripe, but like...

I think Xbox obviously is in like a extra bad position here because, you know, like it just feels like that they've entered into this position where people just aren't really buying the Xbox to begin with. Right. And so it's this price raise on a thing that like they've already. been moving away from to an extent and putting their games on other consoles and and everything so it's just like you look at it and go like yeah okay now people extra won't want one of those and uh

Well, I guess, you know, as long as they buy a copy of Indiana Jones on the PS5, like Microsoft don't care. Cool, man. Yeah, they get the money either way. Their whole deal is very confusing. I mean, we have said often here that like... They want you to believe that their entire philosophy is actually very simple. And I would argue that they have done nothing but kind of muddy their life.

value prop over the past five years. I get the idea of, yeah, well, just hook yourself into this Xbox Game Pass ecosystem and whatever. It's fine. It's like, well... I don't know many people playing Xbox games on their fucking browser. I don't know anyone who's doing this stuff. They're all playing the stuff that they play, either on the consoles or just natively on the machines that they have.

And the $80 games would make a pretty clear case for, well, now the value prop for Xbox Game Pass is pretty good, right? Because you could just like pay a flat amount and you get all that stuff. Now the consoles are really expensive. Okay, well, where am I playing Xbox Game Pass? I don't, like, there's so many, like, it's just, it's overload. It's like fucking make, like, Nintendo's like, we have the system, and here's the shit you play on it.

Yeah. We're going to do really great. And it's like, yeah, that seems really simple, huh? Seems smart. And again, you don't have to hand it to Nintendo, but they've figured it out. It's pretty simple. And for Xbox, I'm... If I'm not plugged into the industry the way I am and have to do these things or feel like I have to.

I don't know that I'm doing any of this shit for Xbox. Yeah, and I think PlayStation's going to end up in a similar boat. I'm not just on the pricing stuff, but I think in terms of like, you know, obviously they're porting more and more of their stuff to PC and, you know, they're going to accelerate that as they go. And because the games are so expensive to make and they have to squeeze every dollar out of it and try to find more users wherever they can.

And so, yeah, the traditional value of a console in terms of like that old, like, well, you can only play these games here. Nintendo was the only one sticking to that. I think that that works to their benefit up until it doesn't, you know, but also as long as they keep their development costs down, they don't have to care. Like, yeah.

You know, if Spider-Man 2, Spider-Man 3 is $8 trillion to develop because New York needs to be shiny or whatever, then yeah, they're going to have to put it on toasters and everything, you know, whatever can run it. It will have to run it.

Yeah. Nintendo is on the same timeline. They're just earlier in it is what it kind of feels like. And yeah, I just think that like... anecdotally people don't people fundamentally just don't care about any of the games that that Microsoft and Sony are making, so they're not going to buy the thing, but they will buy a Mario's cart. It was Mario's cart. Yeah. Mario's to play with the cow.

the cool cow. Let's talk about another tech thing. Uh, Apple got slapped down. Remember that whole thing where they, uh, so fucking crazy. This is so super crazy. Tim Sweeney out of the kindness of his heart was like, uh, we, We think the people should be able to compete with Apple on their own ecosystem. Starting with us, Epic. And they brought that big lawsuit. The people, you know? We got our own store. If you want to get a blockchain game, we're down.

Yeah, just think of it, folks. The people, you're being double-taxed. For your V-Bucks. So, yeah, ruling came down that Apple has failed to comply with the prior injunction to essentially, you know, now essentially opens it up to other. payment platforms to other sales platforms within the Apple Store ecosystem. They have to allow others to compete with them on their ecosystem. They're obviously going to appeal this judgment, but for right now, it opens things up. This is such an unforced law.

Because they won the case at the federal level. Yes, they did. But then did not win it at the state level in California because Epic appealed. And in the injunction period, the state was like, you got to do this stuff while we figure it out. And Apple said, we're good. Yeah, we're good. And then the judge got so mad that they were like, actually, go fuck yourself. Yeah, you lose the whole thing.

If you control F any of these articles and look for the word rebuke and it appears, you fucked up really bad. Like I've read the word rebuke. in like eight of these articles. I'm like, oh man, it's not good. Don't put that in the newspaper that we were rebuked. Please don't do that. It is a sea change for the way that Apple's...

coffers work. Part of Apple's thing is that they don't really do anything anymore. Very critical to the amount of money that they continue to have and continue to make is that they do nothing. And they make money. And now the faucet that has to this point has been pouring out unlimited amounts of money has been turned straight up turned off. Right. Because of the ways that they treat buttons and links.

Yep. And we'll see how many, you know, because this got opened up in the EU a while back, right? And there are a lot of apps and stuff offering alternate payment, but it's not all of them. So I wonder what sort of uptake we'll see. This is something that in the Patreon community became kind of a big deal because Patreon just kind of flipped a switch where they're like...

Hey, you know, your your patron subs are going to cost more if people do it through the app because we have to pass the non savings on to them. Or you can take it on on your side if you want. Like, you know, as a Patreon person, you could say, no, I'll make less money. instead. Yeah, that's smart. Everyone I know has checked their Patreons to be like, how many people do I even have that are using Apple's payment system? And it's like zero. So people are usually pretty smart.

but you wonder like oh is patreon now going to reverse course on this and implement their own payment tools and you know like like what does it mean for uh, for things like that. Um, obviously this is the sort of thing that continues to open up the idea of game pass and Xbox cloud streaming on iPhone, which they had pretty much gotten there.

Yeah, it mostly works. Yeah. This probably removes the last few hurdles that prevent them from launching because they were out there saying, we're launching our own app store. And then they said, actually, we're not because this Apple stuff didn't get. resolved in time. So we're kind of in a holding pattern. So I wonder if they deploy something because they said that they were working on something exactly like this.

And I wonder if this gets to the point where, you know, because I like the EU lets you install alternative app stores and like things that are not subject to Apple's approval. And, you know, it's. I'm not going to jailbreak my phone anymore, you know, because I can, all I've ever wanted to do was have my own ringtones.

And so I had to jailbreak my iPhone 15 years ago, 20 years ago. It was so cool, though, because sometimes you would plug it in and it would fail in the middle of it. And then you would be like, well, I guess I don't have a phone anymore. Yeah. I got pretty good at unbricking phones. All right. Firmware umbrella here and do this. We're going to, okay, don't worry you Alpine. And then we're going to, I love this board.

Yeah. But like, I wonder if we'll eventually see it get to that extent here in the U S I mean, you know, right. Will we be able to just like freely install stuff because there's emulators. Like Apple opened up in preparation for some of this or in an effort to like look good to the courts.

They started allowing emulators and things on the app store in the US. But there's still certain types of compilers like just-in-time compilation that you can't do. So a lot of higher-end... emulators like Dolphin, which emulates the GameCube and the Wii and stuff. will never run well under those rules. But if you had an alternative app store, you can enable all of those things and get full access to the phone and all of that. So I wonder if we'll see any change there.

without having to go pretend to live in the EU or whatever you have to do to open that stuff up now. That'd be kind of cool. Yeah. Well, you had also made the point that iPhones are now going to cost like $15,000 between tariffs and this ruling, right? Exactly. You know, like Apple's going to go like, oh, we're making less money on phones. I guess we have to make more money on phones now.

They already raised prices last time. Yeah, they did. And iPhones now are going to cost as much as a Vision Pro and that's going to be a problem. I see those everywhere. Yeah, the Vision Bros, I do too. Yeah, on the bus. Everyone's got them. You're like, wow, that looks just like your eyes. Really? No, it does. It's so realistic. Yeah, it's like I'm looking at your face.

it's totally it's great um i i just am i legitimately am i was shocked when this came across the timeline yesterday because i it this was this did not i a i guess didn't realize it was still a going concern Because of the initial federal ruling. And then B, if it came up again, I was really expecting the news to be an epic lost again. And what we have now is what we've got. So like to read the article, I looked at the Verge article and I said, huh?

I clicked it and read it and was like, God bless you, John. John muted himself to sneeze and really didn't want anybody to mention or talk about it. No, it's fine. I kind of threw a wrench in the work. Honestly, Nikki, I'm proud. I'm happy that you did that because I was so proud of me being able to do that in time. So you pointed it out. I'm like, okay, everyone will be really impressed anyway. Wow.

See, even Jeff Gerstmann is impressed. Thanks, everyone. Appreciate it. Now I'm subconsciously moving my hand over towards my cough button now just in case. Exactly. I hope I can be this slick. I'm going to mess up and actually hit. Oh, no. Now I'm going to hit the other buttons on it. Ah, jeez. And I'm just brand safety. Ah, crap. Now Ice-T's talking. That's not good. That's not good.

That's not good. At least it's not sucking on chili dogs down at the Tasty Freeze. Oh, Mickey's going to do it. Mickey's going to do it. I don't have it. No, I don't have it. It's fine. Let's talk about a video game that I have been enjoying very much. It's called Skin Deep. I played this demo back at Steam Next Fest. and it is out now. Editorial disclaimer, why not? Laura Mache, one of the writers and co-creators of this,

was the reason I got a job at Zam slash VanBite. I worked with her for a while. So you hate the game now? It's a grain of salt. I hate the game now as a result. The only thing I'll say is I knew this game would be really fucking funny and interesting because she worked on it. which is not to say anything about Brendan Chung, who also made Quadrilateral Cowboy and Gravity Bone and 30 Flights of Loving, some really, really good games.

This is an immersive sim. It's really fucking funny and weird. I know we've all played it here. Jeff, I'd love to hear your thoughts. I know you had some... up for your Patreon, but yeah, I think it's just, it's, it's the right level of immersive sim in terms of like, you have a lot of options, but not a zillion, you know, it's, it still feels very contained and confined and like the tools, the verbs it gives you to kind of work with as you, as you play.

I think it's very reasonable. And so the level design really shines because it shows you. all the different ways you can take advantage of like, oh, if I pump this hand cleaner, it makes a flammable cloud or, oh, there's going to be soap suds on the floor over here so I can make this guard trip and then do this and grab them. And it's just the writing is great. The emails you get from the cats that you're saving are really fantastic.

And so it's just, it's really funny. I really like the look of it. And it's just, it's a fun set of tools to engage with. And they're very good at letting you know what you can do. There's like almost like a Metroid style scanner. that you can use to scan objects in the world. And the up close thing that you see when you scan items in your inventory is how they are used and what they do.

So it's like this interesting little way to tutorialize every single item. They're like, okay, you inherently know that like, if I find black pepper, like, oh, I can make a guy sneeze and do this. But like, it'll tell you straight up, like, it does this, it does this. You can use it this way. And it's a really cool way to kind of ease you into what the game is going to expect from you later on and help you just get better with the tools it gives you.

I also think that the tutorial is so... good like there is there is the way that it jumps around so frequently. They're like, listen, in a regular video game, we're having you walk through the entirety of this spaceship. but you know, you don't need to do that. We're just going to put you in the scenarios where we're like, okay, sometimes you're going to have to walk above guys and then watch them do their thing. And then you're going to have to do your thing.

And then we're going to just jump to the next thing, which is here are the cats that you have to free. And there's a guy in here and you have to put the head in the toilet. That's the thing that you can do. Okay. We're jumping again. We're jumping again. We're jumping again. And then like, okay, now you're good. You can go play the game. And I think. The physical act of playing the tutorial in some games is like such a fucking slog that by the time you're done with it, you're like, oh.

weird another game was recently remastered that had one of the worst tutorials of all time in uh elder scrolls oblivion yes yes and then you're like oh fuck i don't even know if i want to play the video game anymore or like i played the tutorial and that was it like i it It took me two hours until the video game started. Because I'm an adult. I've played a video game before. This game really...

It's good at doing the things that you said, Jeff, where it is very explicit about the ways that it is teaching you how to use items, and then also it feels like it respects my time and understands that this ain't my first one. And even if it was... It still gives you all of the things that you need to be successful when you're playing it. Yeah. So, yeah.

Yeah. I think it's great. The main character is Nina Pasadena. Great. All-time video game character name. Not introduced in this game, technically introduced in Flotilla 2, but brought over into this game. I think it's really neat. It's an immersive sim that leans heavily into, I think, the slapstick nature of how an immersive sim could be. Like Deus Ex could be a really funny game. Like if you go back and play that.

It totally doesn't feel like it should be. Maybe this is a game that says like, nah, like this is pretty much where we are with this game. And I think it. It works really well. I'm obsessed with games that let you do something that is novel. slipping on something slippery is just like something you don't do very often in a game no in a video like when i when i discovered that i was like that's really funny like i don't know why that's not in

Yeah. More things like it's just really good. You can go completely prone in this game and roll around like a child around. Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Call of Duty Black Ops 6. Exactly. They should have marketed skin deep and stuff like Omni movement. They really should have done that. I don't know why they didn't. I got to get in touch with Laura.

Like there's, there's also like quality of life stuff. That's like, you could, you could see the conversations of when something was going to be too annoying. You could blast out the airlock, but you're never going to die in space. Like that's one of those things that's like. I just was like, well, okay. But I was like, well, fuck it yeah like who cares it would be annoying as hell if like this is annoying like whatever like you don't you don't have to add the ingredient

just because it presents itself. And one line of dialogue explains it away as to why you don't die in space. And you can use that as a tool to suck the enemies out into space. And it's a great time. It's really good. So I highly recommend it. It's out on Steam now. And yeah, this is a good one. Maybe the best game that uses the Doom 3N.

So this is something I've known about Brendan Chung for a long time because we used to be part of the same dev kind of incubator in LA for a little while. So I actually got to spend time with Brendan who was like... Just like an unfathomably smart designer. He's obsessed with Doom 3. Obsessed with it. So when I, I'm terrified. So when I, when I found, I was just like, this is perfect. Like this is like, like he's literally like chasing his dream by making.

a really silly immersive sim in the Doom 3 engine. It's very funny. And it has workshop support, so theoretically people could make maps and that could be a lot of fun too. Is that what they're called? Wads? By Doom 3, they might not have been. Well, they were wads in Doom, and then they became something else in Quake. I'll call them wads still. Yeah. They'll call them wads. I'm sure they would call them wads. Have a good wad.

Summer Games Done Quick is coming up. Skin Deep was going to be a really... Yeah, in early July. Skin Deep is going to be a really fucking fun one of these speedrun kind of games. I love... shit like that. It's really good. So yeah, go check it out. I'm still playing a game called Claire Obscure Expedition 33, a game that is taking My timeline, at least, by fucking storm. It's got a bunch of people I know by the throat. I am not grabbed by the throat yet by this game. I think it is.

interesting that they have made such a punishing kind of parry system in a turn-based game. I think this game doesn't look very good. I think this game is hard to look at. My eyes can't focus on this Unreal 5 pack-in demo. aesthetic that they've decided to go in and do. This game is still French in ways that I actually don't think is very good. This is the thing that kept me from playing it so far is I saw you talking about how French it was. It's fucking French.

It's so French. And I was like, you know, I need to see this at some point, but I got other things I'm working on. Maybe I'll just hold off. This sounds like I just, oh, I'm going to need some time. It's really French. And for. And for folks out there that might have played a game called Final Fantasy X 24 calendar years ago. This is that game. These are the exact same games. Same basic premise, same turn-based combat. And you know what?

I love that fucking game. I know a lot of people don't. I love it. I even fucking love Blitzball. That's right. My wife loves that game. And then after we... got together, she started playing it again and she made me do all the Blitzball parts and... Fuck that game. I played... I've played a lot of Blitzball. It's really weird. I am one of those weird sickos, but like...

Everyone seems to be grabbed by the emotional beats of this game, and I am not sold on any of it. There is no... emotional heft that has been presented to me that makes any sense. And so this has been a struggle for me as I watch people kind of freak out. I hear it gets better in terms of its narrative beat. Again, I go back to like, if it takes you 10 hours to get hooked into something, I'm kind of like.

oh, I could be doing a lot of other stuff besides this. So, yeah, that's kind of where I am in Clear Obscure. You should pick it up at some point, Jeff. I've got it installed. It's a button click away. But, you know, maybe I'll wait another week on that one. France will be there. I am really tickled by the fact that like Ben Starr.

Who, by the way, I can't wait to talk to Ben Star because we just have to look at his calendar. We've said that before, but I'd love to see what that guy's calendar looks like. He plays a character in this game that I won't say who it is, but it's not the main guy from the beginning. The main guy is Charlie Cox, aka Daredevil.

who did not do a single bit of promo for this game, which is really, really funny when you see all this stuff. It's like, this guy doesn't even know that this game is out, I swear to God, which is really funny to me. I don't know, just a footnote from my time with it. Yeah, I don't know. I hope it grabs me a little bit more than it has. I'm having fun playing other things. So I haven't really taken the time to dive all the way in. Nikki, I know you haven't played it, right?

No, I downloaded it and then I said, I don't know why I did that. Yeah, it's fine. These ain't for me. It's on Game Pass, which is, Nikki, say it. Say what it is. It's extant, John. What kind of deal is it? Is it the best deal in gaming? John said the words. It's the best deal in gaming. Jeff, have you been playing anything else that you want to chat about? Oh, gosh. You know, I have been messing around with some little stuff. I kind of fell back into Tower Unite a little bit.

Hell yeah. That got out of early access and it had been like three years since I played it. So I loaded back in and I was, I still looked like violent J. from the ICP because that was the workshop skin I had put on and they've added so much crazy stuff to that. You can run libretro-based emulator cores inside of it now. What? So you can play video games inside of this video game. That's awesome. And that's ridiculous. It's like Game Room for the Xbox 360. Pretty much. Yeah, they made it real.

And they made it illicit because you can just kind of bring your own stuff. Yeah. We talked a little bit about Marathon again. I've been messing around with that a little bit. I've been playing Azra the Striker. which came out about a week ago now. It is a really credible space Harrier clone, the arcade classic from Sega. except now it's an anime boob lady, and she can punch, and she has slow motion abilities. But other than that, they realized that they needed...

We need a Gundam looking robot in this thing. We need dragons that are spitting big fireballs that look a very specific way. Like they really went out of their way to copy. Space Harrier, which Yu Suzuki put out a game called Air Twister. I was going to ask you about Air Twister. It was originally on Apple Arcade and then Air Twister came to PC and it's not a great game. The music is very...

Funny, I forget the artist's name, but he has like a very Freddie Mercury-like sound to his voice and then all the songs. If you stream that game, you will. Valencia. Yes, Valencia. That's all right. If you stream that game, you will hear from the copyright cops if you leave the music on. Let me tell you. They'll get you.

They're coming for you. Uh, and that game's not so great. Air twister is like the soul of it. The feel of it is all wrong. Right. And it has like daily missions and all this other stuff because it was originally a phone game that you're like, I, okay, no. Um, Ozra the Striker, it's not perfect. Like there's stuff about the, cause you can, you can punch that dragon in the face now when it gets in close, which is, you couldn't do that in space area.

And it's really satisfying, but like the, like figuring out the range of, is it close enough for me to hit or not? Or what? Like, like that stuff's really tricky. Yeah. weird yeah yeah and I'm like you can you can hit attacks back at enemies in some cases but just the feedback on that stuff isn't always as clear as it seems like it could be

But that's like a fun, you know, it's like 15 bucks. It's like, it's, it's relatively simple. Like my first playthrough, I made it to the, what would be the final level of a play of a playthrough. It has branching paths. So there's more to see, but like. You could get to an ending of this game in an hour or something. It's very much an arcade game in that sense, but it's pretty neat. That's exciting. The most I've ever played of Space Harrier is just within Shinmu in your living room there.

Which I played a lot. I did play... That's not sad to play the best game ever. It's definitely high on my list. It's cool that they put something good in that shit factory. Listen, history will vindicate that game and that. series. The BAFTA just said it was the most influential game ever made. I know, I saw that. Unbelievable. Most influential. I was like, okay. According to user voting. Yeah. Yeah. No, it doesn't fit in a headline, I guess. They're putting, have you ever heard of Star Wars?

Yeah. They're putting Star Wars in Fortnite. You ever heard it? You seen it? Yeah, again. Was pretty fucking dry. No, no, no, no, no. Listen, listen, listen. They got Mace Windu this time. Mace Windu. Mace Windu's here. And you know what? They also got Darth Jar Jar. No way. They got the dark, like the evil Jar Jar thing. Evil Jar Jar Bink. That's pretty good. Everyone can't wait. This season of Fortnite was bad. Awful. Truly terrible. Kind of a stinker. They're on a every other one is good.

This one, the loot cycle was kind of based on you doing these little heists. but the amount of time, and it feels really like they could, and I'm sure they did do some tweaking, but it's just like the amount of time where you're sitting and doing nothing. is so high that by the time you get outside, you're not really incentivized to do the heist part because really it's a better use of your time to go.

get stuff and then third party a team that is looting the safe so it just doesn't really it didn't the flow kind of fell off they added Sub-Zero and Scorpion gloves, so you could do Mortal Kombat stuff. but it feels like all of the other melee combat in the video game where you punch and kick sometimes. The best thing is that Sub-Zero's slot, like the left trigger lets you do a cool ice slide. That part is fun. That's cool.

But otherwise it just kind of felt like a stinker. The Star Wars seasons always bang because the lightsaber stuff is really silly. Like just the idea that you can give anybody in that video game a lightsaber. That's good. I think they're putting Ariana Grande running around. Yeah, running around, like fighting a stormtrooper. Like that part is funny. But I think that game is in a weird spot where they kind of feels like they don't have, they've tried a bunch of stuff outside of battle Royale.

And none of it is sticking. Like none of it is sticking. You can look. One of, I think, maybe the worst things that they ever did was show you have a player count. for each game mode on the screen. And now when you open it up, there isn't even really a way to just give me the actual official game type. They really don't want you to know who's making who. They're like, you want to play Battle Royale. We know that for sure. But if you want to play Lego Fortnite.

You really got to fucking dig. And it's because there's 13,000 people playing it. And there are. Like 50,000 people playing whatever the fuck Bed Wars 1v1 is. And then you're like, well, damn, gang, like you've got you've got real folks working on Lego Fortnite. And nobody, I can see that nobody is playing it. When the nine-year-old who made Bed Wars 1v1 has 50,000 people playing the game mode, like it just kind of feels like it feels unsustainable.

They released their little Counter-Strike mode called Ballistic. I tried that when it first rolled out. Nobody like that. It is. It takes a long time to find a match in that. Why would you want to play? Just why? Hey man, check out our bad counter strike. It's like, I could go play like, okay. official Counter-Strike if I wanted to do that. I'll go play Valorant. There's other stuff for me to do, so it kind of feels...

It feels like they received an edict to make a bunch of different kinds of games inside of Fortnite. And then they did, but didn't bother to ask. God, who? I guess that's how the Battle Royale took off, right? Is there just like, what if we stole all this? Yeah, it is. But I will say. I have no insider knowledge of this. Okay, I really don't.

I will say that feels more like Tinson asking him to try some shit than it does. Like them going, them going organically, let's do a lot and see what sticks. I kind of feel like they had a kind of a handle on what actually sticks. What the video game was? Yeah. And then like the sharp turn to like, it's Roblox, basically. It's been kind of like... There's already a Roblox, I guess. And like, I don't know if we needed this kind of, you know, thing. It's selling.

It would, I think, and I've been on this horse for a long time. I actually think if they tried to do Save the Worlds today. It would work. They might be able to get something going with it. Sure. But instead they split that budget up across five game modes that nobody plays. Yep. But Darth Jar Jar is cool and all. But, you know, why would you play that when Call of Duty is debuting Seth Rogen today? God, I didn't fucking see that. There's no way.

real. You can play as Seth Rogen. Not Seth Rogen as a character. It's like they're starting an event that is like a battle pass. The battle pass. It's like a limited time event. And on the premium track is... Seth Rogen. And it's like a weed thing. They already did Jay and Silent Bob as a weed thing. Jay and Silent Bob. And it's like this season of weed that they're doing that is like just the most desperate looking thing ever.

Like who's going like, Oh, I love this Seth Rogen guy. Everything about him. The way he looks, the way he talks, just like, I can't get enough of him. I want to hear him saying throw under grenade off. What? That's nuts. So I'm going to buy it as soon as we're done here. No, absolutely. Yeah, it's only $10. Yeah. That's a deal. You're losing money if you don't buy it. They changed the... Okay, God. Okay, sorry. This image on... Gamespot.com also doing really well.

They changed Nuketown to Blazetown. That's funny. Have you seen, have you heard of, you know about drugs? Wait, I've heard of them. I don't know much about here in California. You can just get them. You can just walk out on the street and there's like, you know, it's like ice cream, but drugs. They painted the sides of the buses to be all like psychedelic. They should paint it like the corporate weed industry. It should be like the past blue ribbon plus THC seltzer logo. This should look like

Nukedown should look like the inside of a dispensary in Santa Monica than what this looks like. The med men. Peace and love, bro. I'm like, no, no. Oh, God. Seth. Oh, my God. Seth Rogen operator skin. It's just him in a bucket hat with these sunglasses. Folks, you're going to have to go to the website, bgbees.com, to see these images on the stub for this.

Wow. Hey, thanks for telling me about this, Jeff. I would have never fucking know. I just remembered. I saw it yesterday. Wow. Wow. Wow. I went into a fugue state and forgot all about it, but it just came to me in a flash. Oh, man. This is crazy. Yeah, did you know that Seth Rogen likes weed? Did y'all know that? I didn't know that. This is the first I'm hearing of it. It's really interesting. God. Nicky, what else are you playing? Anything? No, I had some other stuff going on this week.

I mean, what excuse is that? You know what I mean? I'll be really interested. We were talking about very briefly. A couple of us at lunch were talking about college football coming back. I almost wonder if there's a good amount of people that somehow missed that it was back last year and we may be getting like an even huger thing this year. It'll be really interesting. I bring it up, I guess, because EA fired 300 people this week, including other people from...

So Titanfall 3 has been, I guess, canceled for like the eighth time, it feels like. But this time the Bloomberg reports were that it was an extraction shooter. It's an extraction shooter. I don't understand this. Why are we trying to get extraction shooters over right now? I think everyone is convinced that...

People cracked Battle Royale in a way that's like, we made a ton of money off of this. Yes. I think they feel like no one has cracked extraction shooters in the same way. And so there's a chase. There's a chase to just like see if we could do it. I kind of get it. There is something like unique and interesting about something kind of as self-directed as an extraction shooter of kind of like you can kind of make your own.

fun make your own goals all that stuff it's a little like less it is goal oriented but it's like a little less punishing in that regard but it is punishing in other ways that make it interesting um it may not be my cup of tea but i kind of understand the appeal I think people are chasing it to see if they can make that kind of...

financial thing happen, but I don't know if it's going to. Yeah, I mean, they see Escape from Tarkov and they go like, that game seems really big, but also it's for total sickos. Yeah, real big sickos. Could we make one of these that's for... normal people. And then they see Hunt Showdown and go like, can we make one of those that's for more people than just Post Malone? And so they're trying to find a way to make a mainstream one of these.

And I, for a while, I really understood it. And it was, it was playing the marathon alpha that kind of set me into a mode of just like, I don't know that anyone can crack this. I don't know that it's a crackable thing. And I think that like there's.

And part of it is like just, you know, them forcing you into a three player thing, you know, whether you're playing with friends or not, and really making a game that has like that kind of higher barrier to entry, because I don't think people are going to have fun playing with strangers. Generally speaking, you know, some people will, as always, some people will, but...

But I think by and large, it's for people that play games with friends. And it is this kind of social thing that like, I don't, I don't play shooters that way. Yeah. Um, I know, I know people do, you know, obviously like people get together in Fortnite with, with crews and go, but I look at this and go like, it just feels like the risk and reward is not.

fun enough like it feels a little bit like and i wonder you know is it a little too much like gambling in some ways like there's just like some weirdness around the edges of the concept that i just go like i don't know man the chase and it's it's kind of it's all it's A little bit also the Borderlands problem, right? Because it's like the thing that I am getting can only be marginally better than the thing I have. Right. Right. Yeah. And that's the, and the whole game is.

And the thing I say about marathon in particular is like, I think the starting weapons actually feel kind of bad. Like the AES time on them feels miserable. Yes. And so like, cause obviously you have to go somewhere, but like. it's the old problem that driving games used to have of like You have to have a fun car out in the first five minutes or else why are we, you know, what's the point? Yeah. We're giving you a Pinto. It's like, all right, well.

When you crash it twice, it pulls to the left. That's fun for lunatics, but no, no one wants to do that. I think it's a really hard thing, and I came away from the Marathon Alpha really... like actually like bummed out because I was hoping like, oh, maybe this will be the game that helps make it make sense to me. And I played it and was just like, oh, this is the Call of Duty DMZ mode that they abandoned and left as a beta.

A couple of years ago, like in fairly major ways, it feels like that game. Uh, I just don't know. Like, you know, if call of duty couldn't figure it out and, and they have some pretty similar concepts here that that game had, I don't know, man. It just, it just feels strange. It feels strange to me as well. Yeah, yeah, really weird. I'm trying to think of other games I've played. Some stuff is on my radar, but...

Oh, yeah, I do want to play Despolote. While we were talking, I put in a code request because I thought I did it and I didn't do it in the past. Yeah, it's a short one. It's a small one. It's about football. But it's also about other things as well. Go read Moises' piece on digital trends that he put up this morning. It's a good one. Hey, let's do some Hive questions, huh? Question time. Every single week, you can go to bgbz.com slash join. You can join the Hive. I suggest you do so.

We have yearly tiers that are discounted probably too much. Probably didn't do that math well enough. It's fine. But you know what? It's a real treat for you until I decide to change it. Make it up in volume. I agree. But you can go and join the Hive. And then once you do that, you can go to our Discord and ask us questions every single week. Boy, can you believe it? Having Jeff Gerstmann on the show, popular. A lot of people asking a lot of questions.

I'm going to cherry pick them because they're not all winners. What a week for it. We have a question first from MC Benji. Did Jeff get to keep the bad man poster from the old GB office? Poster, huh? I have a lot of, I mean, I have a bad man shirt, like a Vegeta, the Vegeta bad man shirt. Someone sent one of those. Actually, MC Benji corrected himself and said, actually, maybe it was a shirt pinned to the wall, actually.

So I do I do have a bad man shirt. Yeah, there's a lot of boxes in my garage because they when the pandemic started. They boxed up the office for us and said, come get your stuff. And most of my stuff was in boxes. And there was a few things that I just, you know, now that I'm going through them all these years later, I'm like, there's some things that I feel like I'm missing. And it turns out it's because Danny O'Dwyer has my hentai hat.

He just revealed that this morning, that he's been the one that has had it all along. I saw people wondering aloud on Blue Sky yesterday if you still had that hat. So that's okay. I was going to buy a new one, but they were sold out. But someone sent that in. That was something that showed up in a mailbag. But yes, I do still have a bad man shirt. It is no longer in this room. It was in this room until relatively recently. But yes.

Uh, by your zero asks, what do you think we lose as games become more and more flashes in the pan question inspired by the speed of zeitgeist move from a vow to blueprints to clear obscure, uh, intending maybe more philosophical answers, but feel free to interpret every light. I think this is, you are asking My Hero Zero, I think this is a good question, but you are also asking it from the perspective of someone who is like,

you are plugged right into the fucking cadence of what we do, which is. Yeah. I'm going to be like, I don't mean this in a hostile way. That's a mistake that you were making. You don't have to be plugged into this shit the way we are. You don't have to do that. I'm broken. I reviewed games for 15 years, you know, whatever. And it was it was assignment to assignment to assignment. Sometimes, you know, in busy times, I'd be playing two games at once.

Right. And, and, and you had to move on to the next thing because the reviews were had to run. And, and, and so, and the, the reason I was good at that is because that's how I played games already anyway, is I chewed through them and moved on to the next game. And I think that's a very good skill set for a job that doesn't exist anymore. But it's it's served me well for a very long time. And I still kind of behave that way because, you know, I'm just I'm broken. You don't have to.

Yeah. You don't have it. You control the buttons you press. So if you only want to think about one video game... you can just think about the one video game. Read my long article, kill the game reviewer in your head. Yes. I mean, I think to answer the question kind of more at face value, I think what you're also seeing...

is the experience of a bunch of people. You're talking about, what do we lose critically that we do that? Probably a lot. One of my best friend's patients, I talked to her the other day. She's not in games media. I had a blast talking to her for an hour about Baldur's Gate 3 because now she's playing through that right now. And is experiencing it in this way. This is like, I played this on my own time years after released it.

I'm in no danger of interacting with anyone that's having a discourse about this game, and I'm untethered from this. And that's something really beautiful. I do think we lose that. by trying to do it at this cadence. It would be nice to really take our time with things. I think there are some critics.

in some spaces that are known for taking their time with things and don't do things super timely. And I think those are really interesting critics. I would like to be more like that. There is actually no reason that... I am not like that, really. I'm beholden to no one but myself. John, you control the buttons. I could do it. I control them, right? So I do think we lose something critically by doing that, but I also think like...

The industry moves at a certain speed that people are used to. And I don't know if there's a whole lot we can do about it, but like you don't have to. Someone wrote in to me yesterday. I didn't take the question, but I'll take it here now. Someone wrote in and said like, hey, what happened to South of Midnight? It really feels like that game was just like there and gone. And I was like, yeah, I guess it kind of did. Everything gets eaten by something else. It's still out.

It's still out. It's not gone. That's the other part. So it's like, yeah, are people talking about it? It's not conquered. It's not like they pulled it from the servers. They didn't kill it. Yeah, like it's still out. I will say though, well, I mean, I guess it's the same. I think of things. Holistically, I look at how Sinners, the movie, has been talked about for the past three weeks. By the way, great movie. I've seen it twice. They're putting it back in theaters in Gimax. I get to go see it.

Yeah, they've decided that Thunderbolts doesn't need to own every IMAX screen, even though I've heard decent things about that movie as well. Whatever. things do control the zeitgeist a bit like blueprints i think is the game that i think really kind of controlled the past like you know month And I do feel like that happens more in games than it does in film. But I also think we're looking at a film industry that's been kind of decimated by things where we're actually seeing many more games.

of a certain quality that are impressive or worth talking about than we are movies. There's just more of them all the time. It's relentless. It's relentless for us. It's relentless for you. But again, it kind of doesn't have to, like South of Midnight is still out, but it is, it does feel crazy that it dropped off. Like, yeah, yeah, it does. It's weird, but it does. My Hero Zero also asked this question. Which would you rather play, MC Kids or Sneak King? Oh, you know.

I'd probably say MC Kids at this point because I've played less of it. sneak king i think i've rung everything out of that you know yeah it's still something you can learn from mc kids yeah exactly uh I am going to expose my children to MC kids at some point here, and it's going to blow their mind. My son thinks that there should be TV shows and toys and video games for everything he sees. And there should be an infinite amount of it because of how.

Everything works now where I can just push a button and be like, I don't know, here's every episode of Paw Patrol. Go nuts. He thinks that that's how everything works now. And he's like, I want to see more new Magic School Bus. I'm like, yeah, there's no more.

That doesn't, they don't, there's a Genesis game. It's not great. He's played it a couple of times and he's been like, I don't know year you play it for me. And I'm like, I don't want to play this. He's three, by the way, I should say that. But it. But yes, it gets some taste. Kids have taste. There's so many click them.

Adventure Magic School Bus games on the personal computer that I played. That I loved. I'm going to get my hands on some of those. There's a bunch of Blues Clues games. There is a Blues Clues game. where Blue gets stuck in this weird jungle, and then you have to cut out pieces of paper to save her from the jungle. So kind of like Congo for the Saturn. It's exactly like Congo for the Saturn.

Sega. I remember Congo for the Saturn. I remember the Lost City of Zin. Sorry, the video game is called Congo the Movie, colon, the Lost City of Zin. That's the one. It's in a jungle. I deleted Zing. I wasn't matching with anybody good. I got a few Zin Jin right now. Yeah. What flavors you got? Blueberry and cream soda. Yummy. That's a good mix. Hey, this kid looks like shit. Yes, it is. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

Yes, it does. I'm not here name dropping good old video games. What's the point? He's got a brand to protect everyone. Symbiosis asks, hey, what have you learned about yourself from the NES ranking so far? In case you didn't know. Jeff is going through playing every single NES game and ranking them as he goes. That is quite a feed. I check in on that every once in a while. It is always fun. Over 500 games now. Unbelievable. How many are there?

700 and change. You're almost done. Yeah. Yeah. It's only like another year left. Yeah. It's been two years. Yeah. I learned that there's a lot of NES games that I didn't play. You tend to think like, oh, like everything. And it's the reason why I didn't want to do it at first. I had the idea. I was like, oh, whatever, man.

YouTube has seen every NES game to death. No one's going to care. And people have really gravitated towards it. And really, it seems like they've been enjoying it. And I've really been enjoying it. But for me, a big part of it is trying to approach these games without like the... There's so much of the coverage of these bad games has been... framed in the like, I'm the bad game man on YouTube and we're going to talk about bad games now. And I don't.

ever want to be that. And so trying to look at these games and try to bring a fresh set of eyes to them to some extent. has been really fun. And also it reminded me that like I bailed on the NES in like 89, like as soon as the Genesis came out. I was like, cool, man. I I'm a edgy teen with an edgy 16 bit video game system. I don't need this kid's shit anymore. And playing these games that came out in like 1990 onward.

It's just mind blowing because some of it is so fucking miserable. Yeah. Once the NES became such a popular platform and the install base go like, like. Really, Nintendo started looking the other way on the seal of quality. And a lot of stuff got shoveled out there that is absolutely abysmal. Yeah. And it's been really interesting just kind of.

seeing that stuff, but you find games that are like weirdly ambitious for their time. And it's been, and, and, and very British. Like there's a lot of games that I'm playing that I'm like, Oh, this is like you, you clearly spent the last 15 years making Commodore 64 games.

Yeah. And now here you are making NES games and, and, and that's, I didn't remember it being like that when I was a kid either. So it's, that's been really, those have been, I think the big learnings so far. Uh, and, and it's been, it's been fun doing that for sure. Yeah. What's number one on the list right now? Mega Man 2 currently. Okay.

Rygar was number one for a long time, and I thought maybe that was going to make it through, and then Bionic Commando, and I was like, well, Bionic Commando is pretty much unbeatable, and then... Playing Mega Man 2 and applying actual science to it. It's not just my opinion. A lot of people are fooled into thinking it's just like me just arbitrarily doing this, but this is hard science. Yeah, absolutely. It's objective. Yeah, exactly.

Jeff Gerstmann's objective review. Yes. As someone who wrote for GameSpot for 11 years, let me tell you about objective reviews. Lobek, I'm going to go ahead and just give this a disclaimer. Lobek asked this question yesterday morning, okay? Okay. And I need to just preface that. Oh, no, you've been put in games industry jail and can't work in the games industry anymore. What job are you trying to get right away?

Um, you know, my mom's got a tire business and she's not going to work there forever. So maybe I take over the family business and get into auto repair. I don't know. That's, that's been going well for her lately. people need tires yeah people need tires people still have cars um that would probably that would be my first like oh shit like maybe there's something like this but like i don't you know

It's fun to joke and be like, oh, all I know how to do is smile at a camera and be an idiot. And that is the vast majority of it. But, you know, I've managed editorial teams. I've done this and that, like in theory. I could write about how dumb phones are. I could do tech coverage or something. I mean, you know, something games adjacent or something would probably make a lot of sense. get my rap career going again i think that's

There's never been a better time. Because the market's soft right now. Yeah. No one in it. No one doing it. Yeah. Nikki, what about you? What would you do? I probably would pivot to sport. Right. Yeah. That seems like the thing that would make the most sense for me is pivot to some kind of like sports, like branding or like sports marketing research.

applied to a job at the Nike corporation a couple of weeks ago. That is this for, that is that exact thing for women's soccer in Los Angeles. Right. So it's like the, the, the skills I also. Jeff feel the same where I'm like, wow, I've got nothing. But then I look at a JD sometimes and I'm like, I can do all this shit. Yeah, it's easy to forget sometimes. You're like, oh, actually, I did a lot. It's tempting to go like, well, the only person I know who has actual marketable skills is Jan.

how cameras work. He actually knows how gear works, and that guy will be fine wherever he goes. The rest of us are fucked, but you're like, oh, actually, you know, that's something. Well, I have an MBA, so I can really do it. Oh, wow. Go fuck yourself. Go ruin some industries with that thing. I go to Goldman Sachs. I go to the fandom corporation. I go to... fandom I get my real my real answer is I would probably try and fail to open a restaurant

I want to open a bar so fucking bad. Yeah, that seems fun. There's so many shitty little wine and beer bars around me in my neighborhood where I'm like... You could do better. The bar would be so much better than this. You could do better. Yeah. No, it's true. I fully believe that. Have burgers on Fridays. Yeah, I'd probably try to do that. I think that'd be really fun. I think pivot to sport also possible, whether it's like...

some sort of management or... You've got a commentary streak, brother. I do have a... I do have a comment. I'm actually commentating a football game tonight, actually. So, yeah, that would be fun. Yeah. I don't know. Shit like that. It's all entertainment, baby. You know? That's showbiz. I commentated a women's arm wrestling tournament at a bar once. So I think I know a thing or two about that. You've got all that you need. That's kind of great. We found out today that that Silksaw.

The next Hollow Knight game will be playable. at a museum in Melbourne, Australia in September 2025. They're just going to put Hollow Knight 1 on a switch and then run back and put the fucking banner on the top. I understand that. This is a two-part question. Jeff Gerstmann, do you believe Silk Song is ever going to come out? Sure, why wouldn't it? Indie games especially, they just disappeared. Fez 2 is going to come out someday, right? No, maybe not. Fez 2?

I mean, World of Goo 2 just came out after a zillion years. World of Goo 2 just did. That's true. The second part of this question is if the news of the museum exhibit changes John's opinion. Okay. Which my opinion is that. Let me get real close one more time. It's never coming out. It's fucking Fugazi Fugazi. It's not coming out. It's not. It's not going to get shadow dropped. It's not going to get announced on time. That thing is going to get canceled.

It's going to be canceled and everyone is going to be really fucking upset about it. And I was going to be right the entire fucking time. It being in a museum where Indiana Jones puts things makes it more extant? I don't think so. Like, oh, does it make it more of a consumer product that's going to show up in a museum? What the fuck are you talking about? No.

That's just never coming out. That's my stance. I don't think the first game was very good. So for me, it's very low stakes. I know. I like that game, but the... The froth around it has confused me greatly. So, yeah, that's my answer. Sure. We got maybe one or two more. Let's see. Let's see. Let's see. Let's see. Would you rather the next big Mario game be a 2D or 3D? Also, what if Mario but big?

I don't know what that means. That's a really good question. They've done Big Mario quite a few times. So if you haven't heard of Super Paper Mario or New Super Mario Brothers. For the Nintendo DS. You got to go check those things out. They've done big Mario. Mario is pretty big in those. It should be 3D. We just got a 2D one. It was great. The 2D1 was so good, it did make me go, what if we did another one of those pretty quick? Kind of, but yeah, it's been...

It will be eight years in October, I think, that we've had a, well, you know what? I keep skipping Bowser's Fury. I was going to say, I think Bowser's Fury to me sets the table for like a really interesting, like weird open world thing, you know, different from Odyssey. I would take a sequel to Odyssey, honestly. I would love that. Yeah. Because of how old I am, Mario games are 3D. I know. No one's perfect. I've been angry about it since day one.

that that's kind of how your vibe is yeah my memory my first memory being of my first memory of disappointment was the power going out during playing super mario 2 with my mom and i was like well can we get it back where it was she was like nah i was like what um and so that was my first like foray disappointment um Yeah, so it's crazy that you, in your mind, it's like, oh, Mario is a 3D. But that's okay. No one's perfect.

Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, 3D. Sequel to Odyssey would be awesome. That would hit. And if it's like pseudo open world, that'd be great. I'm really interested to see how... obviously like the new 3d mario is like well into fucking development by now so it's not like anything would be like drastically different but i am interested to see how donkey kong bonanza informs some of that design language of the new Mario.

because I guess I'm just really excited to play that game. It seems like a really interesting swing. Cool tech. He's the king of swing, so it makes sense. He is the king of swing. And now he's such a cartoony, funny guy instead of the serious, hot Donkey Kong that people have been upset about. Bring hot Donkey Kong back, everyone. I'm like, all right.

I didn't even know we were doing that until recently. Until pretty much just now. I think that's it. Did I miss one? Did I miss one? Did I miss one? Did I miss one? Or a couple more I'll probably hit in a bonus that are kind of general. But yeah, we'll leave it there, folks. Once again, go to vgb.com slash join.

And you can ask us hype questions every single week. This has been a blast and a half. Before we get out of here, I have said I would read our five-star reviews on the show. We have one new one from Northrop. Grumman, F-14. Okay? Okay. Okay. Five stars. What I listen to when I'm penetrating foreign countries.

great conversations that take a deeper dive into the culture surrounding video games culture thank you thank you it's a great sentence great great rolodex of guests on the latest stint as well yes i agree we Yes, we're very lucky in that regard. Thank you, Northrop Grumman F-14. I really appreciate it. See, now I do think he just got got.

Right. Because you did just say thank you. And then the username, because they're not going to get me. I'm too smart. So now you've just kind of you just thank them for what, John? I really appreciate it. If you leave us a review that's not on the US Apple podcast store, you have to tell me because I ain't checking all the other shit. I'm not checking France. I'm not checking England. I'm not checking Canada.

I did check them today and we didn't have a, I think we actually did have a new review, but no, we had a new rating, but no review. So, yeah, that's just that's just where we are. French iTunes is still mad about your clear obscure takes. So, yeah, yeah, they're really, really upset about it. They're mad that I pointed out that the literal first person you meet, once again, can't stress this enough, wearing a horizontal black striped shirt with suspender. Your girlfriend has a bob and a beret.

Perfect. You fight a mime within 10 minutes of starting the game. Now you're selling me on it. It's like, yeah, let me go punch a mime. Fuck that guy. If you beat the mime first go around, you get a baguette for a sword. Ooh. Well, okay. Now I'm kind of in, John. Do you want me to play it or not? A lot of people online seem to love this shit. They're like, oh, look at this stuff. I'm like...

You've never been, have you, to France? This is not worth celebrating, everyone. That's my hot take. Hey, Jeff, my God, thank you so much for hanging out with us. Yeah, thanks for having me. This has been like, again, I said it before we started recording. You're a real trooper for still sticking in there on one of the worst days. We could have, I don't know, like done this, I guess, but it's all right. I'm still, I'm fine. I know. No, no, no.

No, but it's... I just mean it's a harrowing thing to... It's a harrowing thing for me. And you got my first half thoughts about it so I'm sure someone will be mad somewhere but it's like I'm still working through this how I feel about it I don't really know yet but it's definitely a weird thing It was funny as this was happening, knowing this was coming up, because I think you asked me about a month ago. Yeah, it was a month.

And so as I was coming up, I was like, oh, this is going to be interesting. And then today happened. I was like, oh, this is going to be okay. All right. I don't know. So what did you know? You know? No, what did John know? Did you do this? Here's the only additional information. Did John Warren destroy Giant Bomb?

It's been suggested by someone in this room right now. That's what happened. No, I'll just also point out that Dan Reichert's supposed to be on on May 22nd. Interesting. All right. What does that mean? Which is... An interesting date, like close to an interesting date. And that was also not planned. Who knows what Alyssa Mercante, Jenna Steber, and Gina Jackson also have planned for, like, whatever, because that's the rest of our guests for this month.

But yeah, no, we really appreciate it. What do you want to plug? Where can people find you? Hey, I'm on Twitch and YouTube doing stuff, and I'm on Blue Sky doing stuff. But you go to... patreon.com slash Jeff Gerstmann. Or if you're not into spelling my name, because no one is, you can go to dopeassvideogames.com and that will somehow get you there. I don't own that domain.

is eventually going to redirect it to hardcore pornography. And that's fine too. That's also fine. Also, I did a recent video about the 1983 pornographic classic for the Commodore 64 called Stroker. I could not post that anywhere other than archive.org. So... Ask a guy. It's out there somewhere. Find it. No way you put anything on archive.org. Exactly.

What did you learn about a big part of my brand is just kind of being out there, you know, playing pornographic games and cursing. It's just sort of, that's just, what did you learn about? What did you learn about the penis? It turns blue when it goes off. That's true. Yeah, it's true. It's like a weird gun.

It's so cool that a video game taught us that. And I just had no idea. That was the first time I knew about it. I was like, whoa, it does blue. All right, cool. Can't wait to do that in real life. Nikki, where can people find you? It's just one less URL to tell people, you know? I know. Go to makeyouthink.club. That's my newsletter. Comes every week.

It's free. And if you want to give me money about it, you can. You're an adult. You can figure it out. But makeyouthink.club. Michael Hyam just texted me. He did sex with me. Fan duel, fandom, fan bite, Lakers in five. Thank you, Michael. It's so true. Yeah, Nick, you got to get away from fan anything. No, dude. Curse for me. You got to fucking get away. Curse for me. Or maybe the third time is the charm. I should go somewhere where I can use FanDuel, put all of my money in.

Yeah. No, that's good. Because the third one, the third one's the winner. They got you on like whatever the fucking like we give you your money back if you bet all your money right away. Same day bet. Same day. Yeah. Guaranteed. Literally can't lose. I only saw the first 98 minutes of Uncut Gems. It seemed to work out for him. It seems like it was pretty good.

So I think you should try it. But yeah, go to MakeYouThink.club, subscribe to Nikki's newsletter. If you give them money, you will get to see a cat on a roof. sometime. So that's awesome. As for me, listen, you go to floppyadult.com over on Blue Sky. That's where all my stuff is listed. I decided not to just plug everything I do because I did it one time on someone else's podcast and I was so embarrassed by the end of it.

I just I can't I can't do it. So it's all there in that profile. But I will say. an impassioned argument uh if you do want this thing to keep going and i just mean like generally games media like people entertaining you around this thing um yeah you're gonna need to give money to someone like i don't know who who it is it might be jeff it might be us

It might be both of us. It might be the folks over at Aftermath or Remap or some tiny blog that I don't know about that's run by someone who's cool. You're going to have to do it. And if you can't afford it, that's okay. Just make sure you're always sharing that stuff because... Whatever model that we've tricked ourselves into thinking that this is going to exist by without having to pay for it, it's just not going to fucking happen.

Just do that. Go to bgbz.com slash join. Join the hive. Why not? It's only 10 bucks. What are you going to do with 10 bucks? Yeah. Buy a... Buy half of an Amiibo? No. I got a remote good for you. That's going to turn your $10 into $20 of bonus bets. Okay. So then if you're going to just, you're going to pick. Well, how many rebounds do you think he's going to get tonight? Oh, man.

27. That's good. That's a good number. Put $10 down and I think you'll be, again, $20 bonus bets guaranteed. Same game parlay. If you or anyone who know have a gambling, please call 1-800-GAMBLER. Hey. That's a great phone number. It's so fucked that 1-800-GAMBLER will never be available for anybody else to have. Because 1-800-GAMBLER is a good phone number. It's a really good phone number.

and use it if you're having an issue. All right, folks, let's get out of here. Thanks so much for joining us once again. You can catch us every single week. And this is also available on YouTube. If you've not checked out our YouTube channel, we do post videos there. every single week okay folks it's time to get out of here go enjoy yourself go enjoy it go outside touch a touch of go touch a bee with your bare hands why not don't do that yep keep on buzzing everyone bye