GrubbSnax Ep. 02: OLED Nintendo Switch, Assassin's Creed, and DICE LA

Yeah, it's the Internet. You're busy, and it's chow time. Welcome
to another episode of grub Snacks. This is the episode, episode two.
This is the show where we we we feed ourselves, we feast on news.
That's right. Let's uh, let's bring those bowls sitting around on top
of the tommies and let's show down. So, uh, there's a lot
happening this week. You know, I'm actually a little bit more nervous about
this episode than I was last time, because specifically because last episode I had
like some news ready to bring some stuff to break, and not every episode's
gonna be like that. Not every episode's gonna be like me, like,
oh, let's just break the news and make the rest of the day about
what Jeff Grebb talked about on Greb's Necks. Uh, that's just not how
reality works. It's not I'm not always going to be able to like ring
stuff out of sources like that. For these shows. I'll try to.
I will always try to, but a lot of times we're going to talk
about what's happening in the news and try to talk try to give a little
bit more insight and maybe speak to those with some like sourced information, and
then that's what we're gonna do today to start, you know, let me
say first, if you have questions, you can always send them in by
hitting that staff or ask a Question button up there. It sends it to
the staff and I could see it and it's actually all they're all coming in
right now. So if you have questions, send them in there. I'll
try to get to them. We'll get to them after this first section.
But it also feel free, like if you feel like your got lost,
send it in again, no problem. So thank you all for tuning it
in. I think last episode went really well. I was really happy with
it. This episode, we're going to talk about a few things that have
been breaking this week, including the switch O led model and Assassin's Creed Infinity.
Now let's start with a switch thing. I think that this is the
This was kind of a mess, right, the switch old thing. Everyone
thought we were gonna get the four K one. I thought we were gonna
get some sort of four K upgrade. I always thought that the a switch
O led like update was also possible. I just wasn't sure if Nintendo would
also upgrade the hardware inside of like the switch Old and then have some switch
pro as well, and then try to get like the advantages of better battery
life on a new chip or something like that. That's not what they're doing,
and I think that, well, let's talk about what they are doing
first, the switch old. Most people, I'm sure no by now.
The switch old is basically a standard switch. It is the switch V two
with the same processor, the same internals. It's got a little bit of
extra stuff. Mostly though, it's about the bigger screen. And when you
look at this thing, it makes a whole lot of sense, right,
just based based on Nintendo's history. Nintendo, like you look at the three
DS. There was the three DS, and then they did a three DS
XL and then they did a two DS. So they had these three models
that were all like on the base hardware, and but they like they serve
different audiences. And I think Nintendo thinks they could do the same thing here
where they have switch they have a switch light, and now they have the
switch the switch O led with a bigger screen, and really that's going to
be where the marketing is. Like Ninteno knows how well just saying a bigger
screen sells. That's a really big part of their marketing for the for the
three DSXL it worked really well. That was a very big success for them.
I imagine that when they start advertising this a lot, you're going to
see that that, like that small shot they did of the screen getting bigger,
They're going to focus on that a lot. And I think I think
this is also going to work for them. You know, why this though,
instead of a switch pro? You know, that's that's the question.
And I think that to me, I think this was always supposed to happen
kind of like this. I think we were always supposed to get the seven
inch o O LED model, and some sources got conflated at places like Bloomberg
and some other other places, and uh, I think, but I think
that they always intended to have this XCEL model first, and then they will
move on to a new chip set in the future that does make the thing
more powerful. Now, when does that happen and what does that actually look
like, and like, how does that actually come out? Well, we'll
have to wait and see. I mean, honestly, they could call it
a switch too and wait like two years and just release it then. But
it's most most it's still kind of like an upgrade and maybe they're just going
to move into a more iterative model. I don't know, but I would
suspect that we're probably still going to get something like a Switch Pro next year.
That's that's a guest, though. Uh. This sort of the reason.
One of the reasons I guess that, though, is that that lines
up with what I've heard in the past. And one of the reasons I
was always unsure and this this stuff felt weird because we were getting all these
really good sourced reporting, source reports from Bloomberg or whatever saying hey, it's
coming this year, and I never heard anything like that. I always heard
twenty twenty two for the Switch Pro model. And and you know, I
think when we get the Switch oh lad, that doesn't that doesn't sort of
derail anything. For what I've heard before. It still seems like Nintendo always
intended to do a Pro model in twenty twenty two, and people again just
got conflated. But you know why twenty twenty two, Like what is like
what like what's happening there? What am I hearing? It's mostly developers and
publishers saying like, hey, they're getting stuff ready for four K. It's
it's that It's that old report of like Nintendo going to some publishers and some
partners and saying, hey, you should get your stuff four K ready.
It's in the It's along those same lines. But whether or not, like
that's something that they're seeing through or maybe they did get their plans derailed because
of the chip shortage, something that like I think a lot of people point
to saying that's what's happening here. That's why we're getting the oletted model instead
of the switch pro that that seems possible. It's definitely going to affect their
plans to some extent. But you know, Nintendo's a Nintendo's a big company
that buys a lot of chips, and if they want to get in line
to buy processors, but you know, through Nvidia and you know, go
to Samsung r TSMC, who the people who actually manufacture the chips. Uh,
they have the power and the buying power to like make that stuff happen
and to get in line. And while while there is a chip shortage,
the chip shortage is worse for things that aren't like gaming chips. Gaming chips
have a high profit margin. So TSMC and Samsung did not like cut back
on those too much. In fact, they like wish they right now,
They wish they could just keep making more and more of them. Uh,
the chip shortage really is with other chips, chips that have smaller margins of
profits, and that's the kind of stuff that goes in cars. But that
stuff is so vitally important to the global economy that these companies sort of can't
be like, well, we're going to put those at the back of the
line and focus on these high profit margin gaming chips, and and and so
it is still affecting things, but there's still a lot of capacity for gaming
chips. And Nintendo wanted to get in line, they'd be able to make
it happen, but it still seems like that's not something that's going to happen
until twenty twenty two at the earliest. You know, these things also could
get pushed out and elongated. I'm gonna be happy to like to ask,
like answer questions. I'm sure a lot of people. A lot of people
are talking about the switch old still talking about the Switch pro. If you
have thoughts, questions, send those in. I'll try to get to those
after this other stuff that I have to talk about. Assassin's Creed Infinity.
So this is like one of those things that, oh, of course they're
doing this. So Assassin's Creed Infinity was it's They announced it yesterday in a
blog post, clearly because it seemed like Jason Tryver's gonna do our report about
it, so they responded to that first with the blog post. Basically,
it's going to be a living platform for Assassin's Creed. And when you look
at it, the reason you say, of course is because we live in
a world with Grand Theft Auto Online that just makes money for ages and it's
the reason that rock Star doesn't have to release another new game, you know,
every year, poor GTA online. If you look at the release schedule
for rock Star games, excuse me. Rock Star had a game every year,
sometimes two a year, from like twenty five Twitter two thousand and five
up to like twenty eleven, twenty twelve, twenty thirteen. And after that,
after Grand Theft Auto Line like became their focus because it was such a
lucrative thing, they stopped releasing a bunch of games. And Ubisoft has said
they want to make fewer games, fewer and bigger games, and the reason
for that is because of the risk there's a lot of risk involved in releasing
an annual game or even every other year. Like basically they're on an average
release cycle for Assesss Creative like a year and a half right now. They
there's just a lot of risk involved with that. There's so much risk that
it's you saw Ubisoft freak out recently when one of their games got him what
was it that? Not Ghost Recon, but what was it? Ghost Recon?
The one in the shooter series that when it got really bad reviews,
it didn't sell very well, and then you's like, we're going to delay
everything. We're delaying everything by like at least a year. And so they
they did that, and it's like they're so worried about things going side,
like they every single one of their games kind of has to hit and when
you live that life, that's a lot of pressure on every single game,
and if something goes sideways, they they're going to be a situation where their
profits are going to take a huge hit. It would be much better off
if they could establish something like a grand theft auto online with you with Assassin's
Creed that just exists as this thing that constantly has people coming in and they
can make content for that. But there's so many benefits to that when you
are looking at it from business model, because once it's established, the upfront
investment, the upfront cost is it's like it's already done, it's behind you.
Now you could just have a team steadily working on updates, steadily working
on content, and that stuff is much more affordable, and it's much more
reliable. It's much more predictable, so they can they could predict like how
much how many people they need to keep on this game to ensure profitability,
to ensure that they can make enough content based on like understanding how players are
spending money and expecting players to continue spend money in a certain way, as
opposed to saying, well, this brand new game needs to hit a certain
level of sales, so just afford just for it to make sense, and
once it's out there, if it doesn't reach that, well what do we
do now? We could try to like do what we did with with Rainbow
six Siege and slowly turn it into a huge success over time. But not
every game that we release is actually a live service. Some of it's like
we have some live service elements, like a lot of the assistants Creed games
absolutely do. But if even even in those cases it's still a really tough
challenge, it would be better off. We would be better off if we
just focused on trying to create our own grand theft auto online it. You
know, it makes a ton of sense. And this is stuff that we've
reported from, you know, on some podcasts a while ago. I think
someone special Nick said that it's going to be kind of like an online live
service thing has you know, raids and stuff. That's the kind of stuff
I'm not sure about, Like Assassin's Creed with raids kind of sounds like they're
it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, but I imagine that
they would. It wouldn't be just raids, it wouldn't be just stuff that's
like Destiny or Avengers or whatever. It would still it's still gonna be an
Assassin's Creed game. But I think they've looked around what they've done with the
updates to some of these games, and how people do come back to these
games, and they're like, what if we just you know, set out
to do that from the beginning so that when we do release, like,
oh, here's the tour version, of Greece or whatever, where you could
just just go like on a virtual tour in this place that could be treated
as an update for this platform, and every update is then additive instead of
like, Okay, well, we're just going to kind of drag this game
along while we wait for the next game to come and then start this whole
process over. I mean, this stuff just it just makes sense, right,
whether or not this is good for the series, whether or not this
is good for you. As an Assassin's Creed fan boy who knows who knows,
I'm sort of excited to see what it looks like. But I'm also
not a Grand Theft Auto Online person. That's I'm not one of them.
I'm not. I don't enjoy that. I just kind of do want the
next Grand Theft Auto. I think there's a lot of people out there who
are like that, but these companies are just they're balancing it and saying,
hey, who is out there? Or are we going to try to keep
making these investments over and over and over and hoping for the best and it's
working out, okay, or are we going? And you know it's also
not just working outkay. Our fans seem to really respond to it. They
seem to really like this, but we still mostly just care about ensuring that
we have a reliable source of revenue and reliable source of growth, and boy,
we would love to have our own grand Theft Auto online. And they're
weighing that against like maybe upsetting some fans and thinking it's gonna be worth it
in the end. I think that's I think it's a legitimate conversation that they're
probably having at Ubisoft. I did one of my notes here is basically everything
turns in the Fantasy Star Online. Eventually. My Fantasy Star Online did this
forever go, and it's like we just didn't know then that eventually everything would
be Fantasy Star Online. Every like every game would be about getting like a
group of like four players together to play through content together. We just didn't
know at the time, And who could have I want to talk about dice
La becoming ripple effects so years ago now, I was like, I just
tweeted I didn't even do a story about I should have done a story about
it, but basically saying that Vince Sampella, like EA was so infatuated with
Vince sam Hella that they basically were like, hey, you are, can
you come like oversee some of these other studios, Like you're going to be
moving up the hierarchy. This is a story that got reported a while ago
now, but like even before that was like two, hey, they love
this guy. They love the way that Respond makes games, and they want
to spread that around throughout other EA studios, starting with Dice La Dice Las
that they announced yesterday or the day before, I can I'm losing track of
time, that they are now Ripple Effect a new studio and it is still
right now primarily helping with Battlefield twenty forty two and you know, hyping helping
the core Dice team get that done. But it's also got a new project
in the works. And this new project is going to be something that they're
you know, taking on themselves, but it is under the oversight of Zampella.
And like what does that mean when it's like, okay, you know,
Vince Dampella from Respond kind of moving up the hierarchy, like having multiple
studios underneath them, Like what's the point of that? What does that mean?
It is about spreading the way Respond makes games and Respawn, uh,
you know when they you know, Titan Fall two I think you could see
it in titan Fall two. But they also did this with Apex Legends,
and the respond way of making games is lots and lots of prototyping, long
periods of prototyping. This is not something that respond invented. I think honestly,
Mark Turney gets credited with this concept of making games like the method I
think it's called, but basically, you spend at least like half of your
time of the development cycle prototyping ideas and just banking ideas to say, this
works, this works, this works, this is fun, this is fun,
this is fun. And uh you know, this is what helped them
come up with Apex Legends, a huge success, and so EA's like,
man, maybe we should just do this as well. But if you look
at titan Fall two, that's a game that looks like it was made by
a bunch of really creative people banking good idea after good idea after good idea,
because that's what that game is. It's just the campaign is just one
good idea after another after another to make one of the you know, the
best shooter campaigns of all time. I think that uh EA has recognized that
this method really does work and it's it's helped it makes It's not just that
it's like it creates good games. What it does is it gets it gets
investment, like emotional investment from the people actually creating the games. They take
ownership over these ideas and then they want to see them succeed. They want
to make sure they are implemented it correctly into the games. And it's not
all coming down from on high and saying this game needs to be this.
EA has done a lot of that in recent years, and it hasn't It
just hasn't worked very well. There's been a lot of like, you know,
this is not exactly the same thing, but like working with the Frostbite
engines frostby engine that you know, I know that I can't remember his name
now, the former CEOO or whatever. He said that They didn't necessarily say,
hey, you have to work with the Frostbite engine. I don't really
believe that. I think that they were they were asked that most of those
teams were asked to work with the Frostbite engine because it was best for EA.
I think that if a lot of the developers within EA got a chance
to decide for themselves, they probably would not have chosen for us BYPE,
and I think that's kind of one one of the points here is that EA
is going to step back a little bit and say, hey, studios,
if you want to like we want you to create what you want to create.
We want you to take ownership over these things. We've seen this work
with Respawn. We we love Apax Legends, we love Jedi Fallen Order.
We've gotten great reviews and great sales from these games. We want to see
other teams be able to replicate this, and we're going to start this with
dice La, which is now Ripple Effect. I think that like the name
change signifies this as well, like taking ownership over their own creations. And
I think this is going to be something that could uh it's gonna be like
a point where maybe this is where e A sort of turns around a lot
of things around. You know, I think is a fine publisher in a
lot of cases. I know they you know, people still Harvard grudges against
them, but the recent track record has been pretty good since like Apex Legend,
say, you know, Jedi Folle Order was very good. They did
kind of bury Titan Fall two before that, but you know, and they
do work with they do. They helped unlock some indie studios, like Joseph
Ferris to the point where hey, let's try this a way out idea.
Let's see if it works. And it was okay. I think a lot
of people, most people don't like it, found it boring. But then
they let him try the same idea again after learning lessons and he came up
with a way out or it takes two and a lot of people seem to
really love that game. I haven't played it yet, but it seems like
that process is working for them. I don't know. It just seems like
there is like maybe a little bit of a change at EA, and it
does seem like it starts with Vin Sampella, although it's not Vin Sampella.
I think would say, it's not about me. It is about, you
know, it empowering the creators within these studios, and that's the whole idea.
So yeah, not even necessarily about Viziampella, but it's kind of starts
with him, all right, A couple other tid bits and then we're gonna
get this some questions in the past, I've said Xbox Live Gold is gonna
go away, and when I started saying that it was when Xbox Live Gold
was still required for free to play games, and I knew for a fact
that they were going to make a change before Halo, and I thought at
least they would go it would be dropped for free to play games because they
weren't going to charge people to play Halo on Xbox when they weren't charging you
to play it on PC or whatever. Then they decided to raise the price,
and it looked weird, right, well, why would they do that
if they're gonna get rid of Xbox Live Golden. I just wanted to reiterate
Xbox Live Gold is still on a board somewhere of saying this is going to
go away at some point. Microstoft's still that's like whether or not they like
they're actively talking about it right now, I don't know, but they still
have it on a roadmap for saying Xbox Live Gold will be dropped at some
point in the future. That might take years, because the focus right now
still very much is getting game Pass into a very healthy position. It's okay
right now, but game Pass adoption has it's slowed down before E three,
Like before you three, things were starting to kind of slow down, and
I think there was maybe some people at Microsoft getting a little bit ansty about
it because they're like, we do need this thing to grow. You know.
The problem is is that they were waiting for big games to come to
the service, and I think a three, it seems like a three helped
game Pass really kind of hit hit that hit its stride, where now people
can kind of look into the future and say, oh, if I get
it now, I'm gonna have all these games. But then there's gonna be
this and this and this right and the immediate future and then these big things
on the horizon. And so Microsoft very much just kind of heads down on
getting user acquisition, and that means like, yeah, well we'll Xbox Live
Gold will go away, but we need to get to a certain threshold with
game Pass before we can make that choice and like unplug that revenue resource because
we have enough coming from something else. You know, In terms of numbers,
like what the actual numbers is, I don't know what they expect or
what they need. I think it's gonna be some It's gonna be somewhere between
thirty and fifty million, which they're not. They're not close to that yet
not that's super close. Then they're getting they're nearing it, but I know,
like the last publicly reported number was eighteen million. Jazz cored in from
Window Central said twenty three million active users for for game Pass. I think
that I'm not sure exactly if that number was exactly accurate. I've heard between
nineteen million twenty three million before E three, but you know they are app
they're at least approaching twenty three million, and as we get close to Halo,
I bet they will easily hit twenty three to twenty five million by the
end of this year, and then like once they're at thirty million, they'll
probably reassess, like what they're doing with Xbox Live Gold probably still won't go
away until it's probably closer to something like forty or fifty million in terms of
active active users for game Pass. But all that stuff seems within grasp,
within their grasp right now. As long as they kind of keep up the
marketing side and the promotional side along with all of these games that are now
are getting announced, I think we'll see how it goes with Halo. If
Halo is a big lightning rod for adoption for game Pass, then they'll know
like, oh, and then when Starfield comes, that's going to be our
next major lightning rod, and everything in between is going to sort of be
connective tissue. But as we get these big games coming out on a faster
cadence, which you know, by twenty twenty three, we're gonna talk about
that in a second. By twenty twenty three, they should be hitting a
pretty fast cadence in terms of releasing games. Game pass adoptions should hit it
really at that point, really actually hit its stride, and they should be
well on their way to being able to get rid of Xbox Live Gold.
But the point is, for now Xbox Live Gold still sticking around, but
it's still on the roadmap to go away for good. All right. So
the final point I wanted to mention before we get to the questions and I
see people sending in the questions thank you very much, is this is something
I talked about in a story, but I feel like people didn't quite understand.
So I'm gonna repeat myself here. And you know this is this is
grub Snacks. We can we can do that. And I feel like,
you know, we're establishing the grub Snacks cannon of this is stuff that we
have talked about on the show, and we haven't talked about this on the
show exactly, or maybe I did. I'm forgetting already, but I wanted
to like just reiterate and make sure people fully understand. So, Uh,
Microsoft has an internal tracker for its Xbox Game Studios releases and and it's looking
at when when you look at on that tracker for twenty twenty two, my
understanding is it's still fort some Motorsport eight, Redfall, and Starfield as like
the big Xbox Game Studios releases, and these are like the big Xbox series
X games. Twenty twenty three, however, is packed. And again this
is not me for making a prediction. This is not the release dates for
sure. It is what Microsoft expects at the moment, or how at least
where they like put it under tracker in terms of this is when we kind
of expect to maybe get this game out, And for twenty twenty three,
it's a lot. It is perfect Dark. It is a contraband which was
announced to the Three that was previously that Project Typhoon, a game that was
being teased, a new smaller game from Coalition, which they talked about in
that blog post a little bit ago saying, hey, we're messing around with
Unreal Engine five, and before we do in the Gears of War, we're
gonna keep experimenting, and the experimentation is going to turn into a smaller side
project from the coalition. What a smaller mean in that case, I don't
know. I bet it's still gonna be a pretty hefty game. Everweld also
expected for twenty twenty three, but we'll talk about that avowed Fable and n
Exile's new title. Those are That's what Microsoft is, That's what it has
on its tracker for twenty twenty three. Right now, that's a lot,
right. I think it's very easy to see many of these games getting delayed
into like twenty twenty four. So that would start with ever Wild. Ever
Wild did get the reboot. It did get kind of the this is not
you know, this is not hit in this public knowledge that the creative director
left and they were going to reboot that. So yeah, they or the
creative director left, and then that they did, they left in a situation
where it's like no one necessarily knew what was happening in terms of like,
oh, you know, what is this game. When you talk to the
public, like when you talk to gamers fans of Rare, no one really
knew. And the reality is that Rare doesn't necessarily know anymore either, because
the creative director left, and so they are rebooting that project and hoping to
get it out by twenty twenty three. What that ends up looking like,
we'll see. I think they have a they do have a new team in
place to see that game through now, but we're gonna have to wait and
see if they're able to put something together in time to release it by twenty
twenty three. I just saying that just seems unrealistic. But you know,
any of these games, like an Exile's new title doesn't have a name yet,
at least not on a tracker at least the last time I heard,
And so like, yeah, that could go to twenty twenty four as well.
And even if like a three or four games falls out, like you're
still gonna you could still have like Contraband and Perfect Dark and that would be
pretty good. But if you have like Perfect Dark, Contraband and Avowed and
then maybe Fable, that's like a huge year. It's like the biggest year
Xbox maybe has ever had and definitely the biggest the biggest year it would have
since the beginning of the Xbox One. Right, So when we go back
to talk about like where game passes at and in terms of adoption, if
we get to E three twenty twenty two, and Microsoft says, hey,
Starfields still coming, look forward to that, like, here's the big blowout
on Starfield. You're starting to play Red Fall right now. Turns out that
game is really good. Isn't that nice? Okay, so we're in a
good place, right, Okay, Well, now here is our E three
twenty twenty twenty two that looks forward to massive games coming out in twenty twenty
three, and it's sort of NonStop. They're going to be in a really
good place to say, hey, game pass is still the best deal.
I guess one last thing, and then we'll get to the questions. I
think it's the place where people are like, well, the price is going
to go up by then they're gonna charge its more. There's no way they're
not going to charge its more. And listen, the price on game Pass
is one day going to go up. Everything goes up in price eventually,
right, but they are still in heavy user acquisition mode, and I don't
see that changing by twenty twenty three. And while and use your acquisition mode,
that means, you know, you set the price at a point where,
even if it's not making as much money as you need it to make,
that's not the point. You need to charge to the price that users
find attractive and are willing to pay. And once you have them in there
and they are like hooked on the games, maybe you can raise the price
at that point. But it's just it's not going to go up anytime in
the next twelve months that that would be wild if it did that. I
don't know what's going on, but see, Okay, how's everybody doing.
Let's get to some questions. I'm gonna I'm gonna scroll down here to the
bottom. I saw a bunch in here, but I'm gonna start with this
very first one that I saw before we even started started doing the recording.
This one's from Silene Kawar with switch internal storage. Why is Nintendo still dealing
with double digit numbers compared to the Series A S, which is fifty dollars
cheaper yet has a five hundred gigab by SD. Why can't Nintendo do something
similar and eliminate the need for SD card expansion. Let listen, I think
the big thing here is that they don't They just want to save money,
and they want to save money wherever they can. You know, a five
hundred gigabyte SSD still pretty expensive. The switch uses e MMC flash memory,
which is like a slower version of SSD, and it's not very good and
it probably doesn't cost very much at all, and they're going to double that
and it's just a marketing point at this point, Like it's just oh,
it has more memory. Like you're sitting at the store, You're like trying
to decide if you're gonna spend fifty dollars more, and it's like, oh,
it's only fifty dollars more, and I get more storage, I get
a bigger screen. And it's that it's the medium popcorn thing I think we
talked about last week, where you don't look at three hundred fifty dollars price.
You just look at it's only fifty dollars more, and I get this
and this and this, and Nintendo just doesn't feel the need to be the
ones fronting that cost. I mean, first of all, they would have
to sort of reorganize. I think they'd have to do a lot on the
development side and a lot on the back end side to make sure that a
switch was like taking advantage of an SSD. So it's not like they were
going to put an SSD in this one. I think there's a chance an
SSD ends up in the switch pro I guess that's more wishful thinking than anything
else. That's wishful thinking. But you know, if if if they do
something like that, they have to change the way the games like load into
memory to take advantage of the SSD to a certain extent. It obviously it
would be fast, it would just be faster because it's SSD, but it
would they to really get the full advantage of it, they'd have to change
some things in the back end. I think. So they were always going
to kind of stick with this slower memory and at that point it's like,
you know, we'll make it a little bit bigger. But it's why not
just let people pay for these SD cards people have already, they're already used
to that, they're already doing it, and uh, it's not gonna like
look bad compared to the other models, which is the comparison they're worried about.
They understand that people can compare it to the Xbox, but Nintendo could
be like, okay, then go buy an Xbox and and most people aren't
going to do that. If they're considering a switch, if they want to
switch, they want Nintendo games. They're going to pay the money for it.
It's it's crappy. I mean, I get I get that, But
Nintendo can get away with it. That's the kind of that's the story of
the switch. Oh lad is Nintendo can get away with it. So it's
going to do it. Uh And I feel like we can all make the
decision not to support that. But the reality is the reason that it gets
away with it and why it's gonna do it is because most of us are
going to in the end decide I'm still gonna I'm still gonna buy Natindo games.
I'm still gonna maybe upgrade, if not to this one, to the
next system. Yeah, so they will get away with it. From Zoltal
or Zolatl. Any news on what the new, what the internal effect at
Respawn was following the Apex hack this week, as well as if it created
any any discussion regarding Titan faull one. I can't imagine any of it was
very positive. Internally, it wasn't. When I talked to some people kind
of familiar with what's going on, respawn and the like, we already know
about all this stuff. We are fully aware of the issues. All this
is doing is making us have to work on July fourth. Uh, it's
just making us angry. It makes us less likely to want to help you.
It takes resources away from stuff like that because we have to spend more
time on this. And then when we look at like budgets, because like
you know, people are working overtime and stuff like that, it just makes
them less likely to want to address those issues because they take it personally.
It wasn't good. Everyone everyone at respond was feeling pretty rough about that,
and they're like, you know, are these supposed to be fans that are
doing this to us? So, yeah, and I see you put hack.
It wasn't really hack, but like a DdO US attack, right,
It was the kind of the big issue there. Yeah, from zugs Wang,
how do you ask a question on iPhone? I think they ask a
question? Button should still be at the top of the page. If not,
go like get download Chrome go to giant bomb dot com las chat and
hit the button that says show desktop version. That'll help you from fatal Man.
Lots of lots of constanants in names today, mister Snacks. You ever
hear anything about new about Last of Us two multiplayers? So I haven't heard
anything specific, but I think if we all look at this logically right,
we could probably put two and two together. With what's gonna happen here.
Last of Us two Multiplayer is probably going to come at the same time as
Last of Us two Director's Cut, which will somehow they'll find a way to
make sure they get seventy dollars out of you to get. Now. Last
of Us two Multiplayer will probably be free, but it will be packaged alongside
I think a director's cut. This is guessing, but I mean I'm not
the only one who's guessed this, right, You package it alongside that.
Some of them people are at the store like, oh, well, if
I buy the Drektor's Cut, I get all this stuff, this bonus stuff
for the multiplayer version, and I get all the upgrades, and I want
to play that game again on my PS five. There's there's stuff coming out,
but there's not a ton of stuff coming out. I just finished Ghost
as Himan director's cut. I'm just gonna buy this version as well. It
maybe maybe you upgrade or maybe you buy it out right, but they're gonna
try to make it part of that package so that they can have the so
the value seems right for when people want to go or when people have to
decide whether or not they're gonna go spend money again. Uh Don asked,
what the hecking heck excuse me, it's going on with Vampire mass Grade boadlines
too. Have you heard of any of a publisher dropping a studio that late
into development? What happened. I'm not super familiar with what happened with this
one. I do not know. Looking at it from the outside, it
just seems like a deal fell apart. You know, developers don't meet like
the developers the publishers developers when they have a deal. And this is true
for internal publishers. This is true for like we were talking about that Contraband
earlier, the Contraband game earlier, which Avalanche is developing. Avalanche has missed
a lot of It's like the publisher set goal lines, like you know,
milestones along development there. That happens all the time. It's so normal for
that stuff to happen. So my guests would be this is not like a
normal case of the studio not quite meeting. It's it's milestones. I think
that it's got to be something more intense than that, like it's just something
completely fell apart. But that's just speculation. Uh, you know, te
do I'm gonna here's what I'm gonna do. I said last time, I'm
like, oh, that's that's like a bunch of times like, oh,
I'll look into that. And I did not keep a list of the things
I was going to look into, so I forgot. So here's what we're
gonna do. We're gonna start the the grub Snacks follow up list on keep
dot Google dot com. I'm gonna set up check checkboxes, yes, show
those checkboxes. Okay, so I'm adding look into vampire bloodlines too. Let's
go around all right, I'll see what I can find out from Kane High
Wind zero nine. Any idea what's going on with Bayonetta three. I think
that Platinum is just very busy and has a little bit more leeway on bayonet
A three than it has on some of its other projects, which is weird.
You think because Bayonet of three they're we're working with Nintendo, you would
imagine Nintendo would be a pretty tough taskmaster and say, hey, no,
you got it, and you have to get this done for us. We're
a Nintendo. But this is hearsay. This is something I've I've heard,
and it's that the way the deal structured is Platinum does have more leeway with
Bayonet of three and can kind of deliver it on its own timeline. And
Platinum is very interested in establishing itself as an independent studio that self publishes its
games and is able to sort of take care of itself and not have to
rely on the goodwill of someone like Nintendo. And so I think it's like
very busy trying to set up that reality for itself, and it's taking that
leeway that it has, it's that slack that it might have with Bando three,
it's using that up. Does that mean it's still years off? I
honestly have no idea. I will continue to expect to see at every Nintendo
Direct going forward into the future. That's where I'm at with that. Like
I was surprised it wasn't any three, I guess I wasn't. I was
a little surprised it wasn't any three, But also it was like, oh,
of course not excuse me, all right, let's let's get some other
questions. Do you ever think there will be a Chrono Trigger remake, maybe
similar to the recent three D remakes of the Man of Games. I think
that there's a chance. I almost wish that they would do it like the
I wish they would give it the two D three D treatment, what is
it, the HD two D whatever they call it. I think that could
be really cool for Chrono Trigger. But maybe they might go a little bit
bigger than that, do it like the Man of Games. I don't.
I don't think anything else is gonna get the Final Fantasy seven remake treatment.
That was a special case. I guess we'll see years from now, maybe
there will be some Maybe Final Fantasy six is the other one that might get
that some day. But even that, right, you don't. Who knows.
I think Chrono Trigger gets some sort of remake at some point, yes,
uh, but you know, I have no idea what the timeline looks
like. They're but it just it's it's a huge franchise that could come back,
and if it comes back to me, there's like this, I think
the Mother franchise now, it's like Nintendo we're to fully do If they released
Mother three with the English version and then they said, now we're going to
do Mother four. I think that game would be huge for Nintendo. I
really do. And I think a new Chrono trigger would be massive for Square
Enix. And they're gonna get to that point eventually where they recognize that and
they want to take advantage of it, but they're just not there yet.
Thoughts about the slow stream of BioWare departures and how it will affect the New
Dragon Age. So I'm on record about this saying that I think that while
there have been some important key people leaving BioWare, I think the people who
have stepped in to take over that studio in many cases are the people that
you maybe want taking over that studio. It's a lot of people who are
very good at putting out fires, the people that kind of rescued the Older
Republic, people that were the process of trying to rescue Anthem. These are
people who really care and are very good at making games and very good at
like fixing problems and recognize what causes problems and maybe being might be able to
be able to prevent them from happening in the future. So these games come
out and are in a good state right from launch. That's my take based
on like looking at the studio and understanding a little bit about who's in charge
and why these decisions are being made. You know, But does that mean
do they have the creative chops that made Dragged Age the thing you love in
the first place. I don't know about that. I'm just like, when
I look at the leadership in charge of Byoware right now, I'm like,
oh, I actually admire many of these people. They do the kind of
thing that I respect, which is they solve problem. They ran toward it
and fixed it, and I think that they should get credit for that and
they should get rewarded for that. And it seems like that's what happened what's
happening at by Aware right now. But all of it's going to depend on
the end product and who knows how that gets messed up because of EA who
knows? All right, how are we doing? Wow? Forty minutes in
already, I feel like I just started answering questions. That first section took
way longer than I was expecting, but that's how it goes sometimes, you
know, I want to make sure that people are still pure and tuned in.
I'm going if you just sent a question, this means like thirty seconds
ago, because there's a delay, I'm gonna hit the clear button and I
want you to send in your question again. Okay, like Leonader just did.
I don't think they sent it in again. They obviously just got this,
but I was just wanna make sure that we're kind of up to date.
So send in your question again if I didn't answer it, which I
almost certainly didn't because there was like dozens of them and I answered like three,
all right from Leonader, similar to the buyowere question. Any thoughts on
how the departures at Blizzard will affect the major franchise to like Warcraft and Diablo,
etc. I'm division Blizzard is a different beast. I think I made
a joke on Twitter a little bit ago saying, well, at least Bobby
Cottock is still there. That's like Bobby Contocks ever made a video game,
at least as far as I'm maybe something. Maybe you grew up coding or
something. I don't know, but he hasn't made any of the video games
that matter to Activision Blizzard right now. But he's still there. And yet
all these key people who made many of the game game like Overwatched and Diablo
and all these people they've they've left. To me, that stuff is it's
a lot harder to replace. It's not like there is a lot of talent
out there to go and and and soak up a lot of these companies so
or a lot of these people that made these games, and a lot of
people that could come in and act as like a senior producer or a senior
like a senior coder, senior programmer, senior artists, all these senior roles.
They are just making their own studios because they would rather be in charge
of their own business than work at one of these major publishers, especially Activision
Blizzard right now. And you know, I think we're seeing that's what happened
with all of the talent at Activision Blizzard. They all left to go start
their own thing. And uh and yeah, and see, your talent it's
just so hard to come by. So I think the difference is it's like
at EA with BioWare. BioWare had like was like basically they were working on
the next generation of talent and they're putting them in charge now. At least
that's what it seems like from the outside, and Blizzard doesn't necessarily have that.
They had a lot of people in charge of in positions for a very
long time now. I think with Overwatch maybe might be an exception Overwatch.
The guy that's in charge of Overwatch now was he has been a Blizzard for
a very long time, so maybe this is the next generation of happening.
But I just feel like the culture hasn't changed, and the business models haven't
changed, and the demands haven't changed, and Bobby Cottock hasn't changed. So
if like do we expect I don't expect this talent to stay around for much
longer either. I mean, maybe they ship one game and maybe it's good,
but then they probably would leave pretty soon after that it too. I
mean, I'm trying to see into the future less faith in what's happened at
that Blizzard. Personally, I guess I think that a game like Overwatched two
and many of the existing projects they all probably be okay. The bigger problem
for Blizzard is trying new stuff. I think I think that the you're putting
this next generation of talent on these things, and you know, but you
also still expect Blizzard to be able to like do new stuff like they've done
some news they came up with overwatching. It was like this really big deal
and it was like it was more polished than any other shooter at the time.
Could they do that again? I feel less Again, I am less
confident than they'll be able to pull that off because just because of the talent
that has left. All Right, thank you everybody for sending in your questions.
Let's see from Axelmanana, has there been anything about Ubisoft using the South
Park ip for a fractured but whole sequel or has has that series hit a
dead end? I think a series has hit a dead end. I think
that those two games did pretty well. I think that one of the big
part, one of the big problems is that the creators of South Park,
Matt and Trey, who can't remember their last names, Matt Stone and Trey
Parker, they had a lot of involvement with those games, and they're used
to making a show in six days. If you've ever seen that documentary six
days to air. They make a show, they come up, they come
in on Monday or whatever whatever it is, and they sit around for a
long time and come up with an idea and then they animate that show in
a day two days or something like that. And while they're doing voiceover at
the same time. They're used to that workflow. A game is very different
than that. A game takes years, and it takes it also seems like
it was taking a lot of out of Matt and Trey when they talked about
working on those games. And I don't think they would be like, oh,
we want to just let ubi stuff go and do it without us or
do it with us like kind of like maybe just emailing ends some ideas.
And so I think that's a big one of the big hurdles here. And
uh and yeah, so I think it would be unlikely that we're gonna get
another one, but maybe I'm wrong. Fox dies zero zero eight nine says
any more Studio buys. So yeah, So nothing's changed in terms of like
the you know, I talked about this on the BombCast when I was on
two weeks ago. Nothing's changed in terms of the environment that makes people makes
these companies want to acquire studios, and nothing's changed on the developer side of
wanting to be acquired Because you start a business. One of the big things
that you wally think about when you start a business is maybe another business will
come among and buy me. And that's true for most development studios. You
know, this is a chance for the people that started those studios to retire
because studios are worth more now than they've ever been. This again sometime,
I'm gonna repeat a lot. I think we're gonna probably talk about this every
week for a quite some time. But studios are worth a lot right now
because the pandemic and increasing sales and a bunch of other reasons, and a
lot of competition. I think we saw that. I don't know if we
talked about that with was it Nixy's or the other company or the other with
the returnal studio house Mark. I think it was house Mark saying, hey,
we went with Sony, but we had interest from China and from America
and from all these these companies all over the world. These companies are getting
bit up right now as well. So these companies are worth a lot,
and people that and companies that have money in the bank. They want to
spend it. They want to spend it because it's gonna be worth less because
of inflation, or at least they think it's gonna be worth worth less because
of inflation and a bunch of other reasons, and they don't have a good
place to put the money to actually good good interest rates. So studios.
There's a lot of studios out there that are probably for sale, and there's
a lot of interest in buying those studios, So expect more studio buys.
Absolutely. As for any specifics, I still think that most of what we
heard before E three probably isn't going to turn into anything real. But I
don't know. I bet those conversations, conversations are still happening across the board.
I wonder if one of the reasons we haven't heard about nether Realm's game
is because nether Realm is like up for discussion and at least situations, I
guess, I don't know. Would that helped raise I guess that could help
increase their price, though, so why would they hold it back? But
maybe they're not the ones that they don't own themselves, right, So maybe
that's the difference there. And then maybe someone thinks it's better for negotiations that
they hold it back. I don't know, you know, I don't have
good insight into all of this stuff, but I know there was a lot
of talk about a lot of Microsoft acquisitions before E three. All that stuff
is evaporated, and I think it's because most of that stuff is was just
sort of smoke and there actually wasn't a fire in many of those cases.
From sign or Slaine macawsome video games or video games. So if you if
you're listening to this on the podcast audio, he suppells video games one word
or video games two word. I know that this is somebat of somewhat of
a holy war among people. I we spell at video games two words at
games beat. That's our style. But if someone were to write video games
one or one word, I would be like whatever, I don't I don't
care. Maybe that makes me a bad editor, but oh well, I
think it's you know, now, after writing video games two words for so
long, I do think it's kind of ugly to look at the one word
version. But I do remember at a time in my life where I was
like, no, one word that that almost makes more sense. It's like
video games TM like we should just embrace it. I don't know what I
was thinking, but yeah, two words. Thank you for the questions.
Slain all right, Dan cmcuh is it actually acquisition season? Yes? It
still is, like it still is. Uh. I do think Microsoft will
probably make an acquisition or two before too long, and I think, you
know, Sony will probably has maybe lit a little bit more of that fire
under. But because Sony's made some acquisitions and all of the stuff we talked
about before, the biggest thing here is content, right, Oh, content
is king that that old saying that I don't I don't like saying it for
some reason, but I mean the reality is that's still the biggest driving factor
here. You don't want to get into a situation like I mean, we
could see it happening with this generation. Look at the beginning of this generation,
everyone's talk about how Microsoft doesn't have any first party games for a very
long time. If Microsoft would have bought but thats the before Sony made the
deal to get Death Loop and Ghost by Tokyo exclusive this year. This would
be completely flipped, this narrative, because we'd be talking about the next two
big games coming from anybody from a first party publisher are both coming from Microsoft
exclusively to the Xbox, but Sony made those deals to get that stuff exclusive,
and both of these companies recognize the value of exclusives, and so Sony's
gonna keep trying to make those deals, but they're gonna start buying studios if
they have to do ensure that can happen. Microsoft is going to keep making
those deals, but it's definitely in a buy studios to ensure that can keep
making that happen. So yeah, it just it all just kind of fits
where more acquisitions are inevitable, all right? From Aldozen Aldolphson. Do you
think Bloomberg heard about a DLSS device from developers but from manufacturing context they heard
about an an OLED skew, which then led to the confusion as I assume
said devs would have never heard of an old switch. I think that there's
something to this. I don't know for sure. The thing is that there's
a million ways that this stuff can get mixed up. I mean, honestly,
the one you lay out there is pretty convincing, and it's like the
simplest solution to the problem of like what happened with Bloomberg, But it could
be there, could it could? I mean, human beings are pretty messy,
and when you're reporting, you're talking to a lot of human beings,
and that creates a lot of situation where things can get confusing. I know
that, Like I said on a podcast a few months ago, now a
few weeks ago, that oh, yeah, Scarlett next is going to be
on Game Past day one. And what happened there is I talked to someone
and they said that because they were they saw a code word and they thought
that code word meant that, and then when we looked at the code word,
we're like, well, it could be something else, And it turns
out that that wasn't the case. It was just a mistake on their side
and then my side for not checking it. But that's the kind of thing
that can happen where where when you're talking to people and you're trying to figure
this stuff out and you're trying to talk about stuff before things are publicly acknowledged,
those human mistakes can can get in the way. But I do think
to me, the conflation idea is the simplest one here that Bloomberg definitely heard
about the seven inch oh led screens, and I think They've also heard that
in Video is working on a new processor and all this stuff board Nintendo with
the LSS and all that stuff. That stuff, there's so much smoke there,
and it makes a lot of sense. It makes video really would want
that stuff to happen, especially as super resolution is picking out. I'm TOI
I'm testing super resolution myself right now from AMD, which is a competing concept
against DLSS. But one of these is probably going to become a standard.
It's probably gonna be super resolution. So an video needs to make sure that
it gets u LSS really going before that happens, because DLSS will be proprietary,
and they need to make sure that developers still want to support that.
One of the best ways to do that it's the release of Switch that has
it, so the developers anyone making a Switch game that's just gonna want to
support the LSS, so they'll have that on PC. It fits. It
makes sense. But in terms of like what happened with Bloomberg, I think
yeah, I think they probably just complated pieces of information that weren't related from
lex Predator. Any word on who is making the new Quake in Internal or
another studio, and it is it I've heard a lot of people say I
d recently. It's driving me crazy. It's it like like I like Ego,
super Ego and it Any word on who is making the new quake,
I don't know. I think that I know there's been like some recent rumblings
about like a new like a new quake coming back and stuff like that.
I think that might take a little bit longer than we were expecting. I'll
have to look into this one. I kind of didn't pay too close attention
when this stuff was coming out, But my understanding is like it's gonna be
pretty pretty busy. But I think if anyone's gonna make quake, I would
stole themagine it would be it internal let's see from Hurricane Jazz. So I'm
gonna say that any indication the switch Olette has fixed the joy Coon drift isssue.
Nintendo surely has to know that this is a big complaint. This kind
of goes back to what we're talking about with the with the hard drive or
the you know, the storage and does Nintendo have to do this this one?
You think Nintendo does half to fix right, and yet yet they're using
the same exact joy Coons. My understanding. My understanding of what causes drift
at this point is cheap components. They use cheap analog sticks and analog actuators
and stuff like that. And they could fix it pretty easily by spending a
few more pennies per joycon to get the more expensive analog sticks and actuators.
Why they could have done this a long time ago. I feel like,
so if they haven't done enough to now and they're not doing it now,
they must just be looking at a spreadsheet that tells them it's not worth it
that we're not going to sell more joycons because people are just will probably sell
fewer joycons. It's that's see, this is where it like, it is
maybe scummy, and it's just like you can't just look at the numbers at
a certain point. You have to do what's right for the customer, right.
But I think there's no indication that Nintendo is going to fix it now.
Yeah, And I hope that's not. I hope that's wrong. I
hope you know, we go and we look inside there and they're like they're
using much more expensive analog sticks and actuators that fix the problem and ensure these
things last for years. But yeah, it just doesn't seem like that's the
case. All right, So some people were asking about this last week,
so I'm glad Gandato brought back up. I'm going to add it to the
list because I didn't mean to look into it. Any thoughts on the Steam
Pal, especially with Valve allegedly adding a hardware queue to Steam, So I'm
gonna look more into steam Pal. But let's I mean the Steam So the
steam poll is the alleged Valve handheld handheld gaming PC. And I'll say,
you know, we talk a lot about like the environment for things, like
the environment for acquisitions is ripe, the environment for a handheld gaming PC is
also very ripe. AMD and Intel CPUs are getting more power efficient, especially
AMD, but Intel's most recent CPUs are also pretty power efficient, not nearly
as power efficient as am D. So if you want to do like a
you know, a Win thirty two, if you want to just do like
you know X eighty six based PC that you hold in your hand, you're
gonna be off to a very fast and good start with one of these new
supus, especially a rising one. And then at the same time and videos
made a lot of bit like huge leaps in terms of making its mobile GPUs
more power efficient than ever. Things are just in a good place for that
stuff, and that's why we're seeing a lot of Chinese companies make these handheld
gaming PCs. Right now, you could find a few of them, like
not not gonna be able to think of any of the brands off the top
of my head, except for GPD, which makes like the you know,
the little clamshell ones, and then there's one they had that like sliding slide
out keyboard. I think I'm gonna buy one, Actually, I think I'm
gonna get one of those those GPD. I think it's Win three or I
can't remember exactly what the name is. If anyone has one, chat,
feel free to put put the name in there. But we're going to see
a lot more of these from Chinese companies, and I think what Valve is
thinking here is the next generation of the way people are going to play a
lot of Steam games is going to be on a handhndheld device. And what
we need to do is we need to get ahead of this in terms of
presenting the Steam experience on handheld and the best way to do that is to
make our own handheld. We'll just make our own, and we don't really
care if our if ours becomes the industry standard, or if someone else undercuts
us and sells a ton. We just want to make sure that when we
put together our experience of playing a handheld gaming PC with Steam, that it
feels right, it looks right, and people want to buy games on Steam
Stell. We don't. What we don't want is for one of these companies
come in and create their own store and then undercut us. That's the thing.
We don't want to undercut us. If it's the hardware, that's one
thing. But if someone it makes a handheld and the handheld is somehow a
gaming PC that has its own proprietary store, uh, that's that's right.
And also we just think we could do it better because we're valved, like
that's honestly, how Foul thinks. It's like, we could do this better.
Let's just do it ourselves. And so I think the Steam pal is
about establishing a handheld version of Steam and making sure that experience is all good
to go, and that even if you do get even if you do go
to a Chinese company and say, hey, I'm going to buy one of
these cheap, awesome handhelds that you guys are making, which many of them
are very good. They're getting very good at this stuff, especially like the
like the handheld emulator, things like the Retroid Pocket. I've talked about it
before. They're getting very good at that stuff in China. So they'll like,
Yeah, even if you get one of those, like a handheld gaming
PC, you personally are still gonna the first thing you're gonna want to do
is make sure that Steam is installed, and if it's not, you'll do
it yourself because you don't want to miss out. You already have all your
Steam games. They just want to make sure all that stuff just works.
And so yeah, I think that's what the big focus here is for it
makes a ton of sense. I'll actually reach out to Valve and see if
I can like talk to them about any of this stuff. But and then
I'll look into it on the side as well. All right, how are
we doing? How are we doing in terms of time? We're about to
hit the hour mark, so now we're in bonus time, I like to
think, because I want to go at least an hour. But then we'll
see what We'll definitely answer a few more questions after that, I'm gonna kind
of start scanning a little bit. Uh feature Creep. Any chance of Armored
cor coming back? I don't know. I try not to talk about from
too much anymore, so there's a chance, but both wow Issarry Buck also
asking about Armored Core. That is the from series, right, I'm sorry,
I'm not exactly up on my Armored Core, but I don't know.
I'll add it to the list, probably not. What is the likely reason
that PERSONA five is not on PC? That's from a bron commander and I
think I think the likely reason that PERSONA five is not on PC is that
Sega is bad at business. That was bad. They're just not good at
this stuff, I think, honestly, I think we talked about this in
the past, management just not just making bonehead and mistakes. I mean,
I hope that I'm wrong there. I hope The reality is that Sagan Antlas
have a really good deal where Sony paid them a ton of money to keep
the games exclusive to the PlayStation platform That's probably not it. I think I
think they're exclusive to PlayStation platforms because Sagan Anatlas don't realize the demand outside of
PlayStation platforms. They were surprised about how well Persona four Golden did on Steam.
They were shocked. Were you shocked? I wasn't shocked, not even
a little bit. Like the hint tie games sell super well on Steam,
of course, Persona was gonna sell well. Not that it's a hintie.
I just mean, like, if that, if those kinds of games are
find an audience like these big mainstream games of course are going to find huge
audience. It's sold millions. It sold better on Steam, I think than
it ever did on Vita, Right, I think that's the case. I
don't know for sure, don't quote me on that, but yeah, I
just think it comes down to them making bad making poor choices, and not
having the wherewithal or the bandwidth to sort of reverse those bad decisions. I
hope I'm actually speaking out of turn. I hope I'm speaking ill of them,
and later I would be corrected by them or by at the evidence before
my eyes, and I'll say, oh wow, I was actually wrong.
There was good reasons for all this stuff. I just don't think that's the
case. From Guigi, Guigi, Guji, any idea what Bluepoint are working
on next with Sony. I don't know. If I had to put money
on it, I would personally put money on but I'm afraid to say,
but I would put money on metal Gear Solid one. I feel like there's
a chance that I think that there's been a lot of talk about Konami making
deals fry P. I think there's either there's either what's gonna happen is either
that is real or one of these companies is gonna come along and just license
all of Konami's IP. So something's gonna happen with that stuff eventually. And
maybe there's a chance that that stuff's already happened here with with Blue Point and
Sony. I mean, it's the one that I think would be the biggest
make the biggest splash, But I don't know. From Fantastical Milk was the
league screenshot up the street Fighter six prototype reel adding it to the list because
I don't know street Fighter fix? You know what? Could you also?
So I didn't see it? Send that to me on on Twitter if you
get a chance, or if anyone wants to just at me or my dms
are open sending that to me. I'll take a look at it and I'll
see if I can get some answers about it. Street Fighter six prototype is
on the list. Did I turn out? I almost? I thought my
my effects, my voice effects might still been on. Okay, all right?
Uh? From Black Heart Vinyl, Phil Spincer said, Halo Infinite is
not make or break for the Halo series. Do you believe him? I
think what he means there is that he's not going to throw the baby out
with the bathwater. I think it's make or break for the way three or
four three makes Halo games. But that's not what he was asked, and
that's not what he answered. Is it make or break for Halo? It's
not make or break for Halo? Really, Halo? Could you could always
bring back? I mean, you always will get another chance for a major
franchise, for any major franchise. That last Transformers movie was was garbage,
right, But I watched Bumblebee and gave it another chance because that apparently that
it was very good. I liked it a lot, you give it another
chance. I was gonna watch another Transformers movie unless they did something different.
But they did something different, and I tried it. A major franchise,
major IP wan't always have enough Cachet for it to make sense in some way.
It's just if they have to change things up, it's just a matter
of figuring out that stuff. And I think what Phil Spencer saying is if
this doesn't work, we will try something else with Halo. We're not going
to give up on Halo. And I believe that. I think some people
have taken this to mean that, sorry, hang on, I wanted to
check something. Okay, Yeah, I think I think some people have taken
this to mean that Phil Spencer is saying that, oh, you know,
we're not treating this like the fourth quarter of a close game where we have
to make the shot or something like that. We're not treating this like this
matters. That's not what he's saying. He's just saying we're not gonna put
the pressure of a lie on this team, of saying like, if you
don't make the if you don't make this work, Halo's gonna die, because
that's not what's gonna happen. And I think if you when you say make
or break, I think that's what I think. It's how Phil Spencer took
it. I don't think he took it to mean like, oh, this
is make or break for Halo to be one of the top franchises in a
Game of the Year contender and all these other caveats, That's probably not what
he was considering. From Hammond of Texas, mister Snacks, will there ever
be a new Splinter Cell? I think yes. I think they'll figure it
out eventually. Isn't that a game that would make sense? As like they
could make that a live service platform now hear me out, Make it like
Middle Gear Solid five that sort of gameplay and you change the map over time,
but then you also have like multiplayer modes like the chaos theory stuff that
people like the Spies Versus Marks put like, make a big deal out of
that. Like, honestly, the fact that the Ubisoft hasn't found a way
to make Spies Versus Mark's work in a modern world is weird. They probably
should have figured that out a long time ago. So if you stuff only
wants to do it with live service stuff, I bet they could make it
work, just like they're doing with the Assassin's Creed. I just imagine that
they're pretty busy with Assassin's Creed. Any idea on what Valve is working on.
We need a team Fortress three. Valve is still very much Valve in
terms of people deciding what they're working on. I think we got to hear
about, like what's happening with that the Firewatch team, Like what it like
is there in their next game? Like when Valve acquired them, they were
working on that and a lot of them want to go help work on the
Half Life Alex and then they went back to work on that game. Is
that game still coming? I think we have to hear about that first before
we hear about anything else. Any idea on when Ghostware Tokyo was scheduled for
a bar at two four nine. Now does this have a release date?
I thought this had a release date for October? But was that just a
placeholder ghost Wire? I'm gonna bring it. Listen, I just have edge
open. Don't you just you be quiet. I'm gonna bring it. I've
safe search on. Don't worry. Ghostwire Tokyo release date. It says October
twenty twenty one here, but that's bing So can I even trust this?
I don't know why I even did this Sony and asked the Ghostwar Tokyo.
This is from Laptop mag dot Com would be expected to launch of the time
in October. I think it's still coming this year. I think it's weird
that we're not hearing about it at They didn't explicitly say that we'd hear more
about it at the State of Play that's happening later today, So maybe that's
I don't know, to me, they want they're want to focus on DEFU
because Deafoop is definitely coming out first, and so they're focused on that.
Oh god, being being is killing my Oh my god. Okay, I
might crash everybody. I'm sorry, hang on, all right. No,
I think we're good. I think we're good. Hopefully I'm still here.
Hopefully I'm still here. I'm gonna all right. I think I'm still alive.
All Right, We're doing good. We'll probably wrap this up pretty soon,
though. Let's do a few more questions. I'm gonna scroll back up
to the top and again no, no, Salu says, oh you like
league and stuff, name every unannounced game, then it's pretty good. I'll
take a look at these as I'm scrolling up. Do you happen to know
the state of UFO fifty two? No, man, that's a very good
question, though. UFO fifty two that's the one from Derek Lou Derek you
who made who made Spilunky? Right, And he's got a bunch of developers
working together on a compilation game. That's what you're talking about, man,
I know. I think they said a few months ago that's still progressing and
we'd hear about it soon. So maybe, hey, maybe where did we
hear about it first? Was it a state of play? Maybe we hear
about it today, I hope. So. Do you think it's in it?
Would ever adopt the Ultimate Brandy for their other franchises? Would love to
see a Mario Kart Ultimate complying all the old courses? Good question. I
don't think so. I think the big thing is Super Smash Brothers is a
weird one where I think the people who work on that game eventually kind of
want to get away from it, and so like, no, this is
ultimate, and we mean that word literally as it means, like as you
read it in the dictionary where it says this is the last thing. I
think they I think it was more like a message to the fans than anything
else. But I guess you know, it did work really well for that,
So yeah, we might see it somewhere else my guests would be a
note. Instead, we'd see some other word be adopted to say, oh,
this is bringing everything together, but don't worry, it's not the last
one. It's not ultimate, and another like a Mario Kart af this would
make total sense, So don't worry about that, because they would always want
to do another Mario Kart. Right. Of course they want to do another
Smash Brothers. That's not what I'm saying. I just like, right now
we're in a place where another Smash Brothers does seem difficult, right, and
they don't want to put Mario Kart ever in that situation. Did you ever
hear about that anything about that canceled Lord of the Rings. Mmo, that's
the one from Amazon, right, I'll just I just know the Amazon is
a mess and doesn't understand it. Doesn't they don't have the stomach for games.
How I always I always put it, they just making games. Like
Ubisoft has almost as many employees as Amazon does, but Ubisoft just makes video
games. And if you were to tell Amazon you need to increase your staff
by like twenty percent just to make a video game, they'd be like,
what is this? How Like we make software constantly. That's our business.
We make all kinds of software. Why does this require a small city to
make one game, the one big game? Because they made some smaller stuff
and they're making they are working out some stuff, but like to make one
big game that like competes at the top of the of the echelon or whatever.
They don't have the stomach for that, I don't think. I think
they look at their their books. Now, we make so much money on
these products to have a fraction of the manpower on it, you know,
workpower on it. Why why are we going to invest in games? I
think that's what happened with Google. That's absolutely why Google got out Google.
It's like, wait, wait, wait, we need how many thousands of
people to make games? First party games? What are you talking about?
Like we have like, you know, thousands of employees worldwide working on stuff,
but we're working on thousands of projects. You want us to have that
many for one project? These companies just they don't think that way, and
so it's kind of very hard for them to shift into making that stuff.
My guess is the Lord of the Rings MMMO probably hit something similar. I'm
not I'm not speaking in correctly if that's even correct, I think that was.
I think the Lord of the Rings MMO was Amazon right. Any word
on the Dragon Quest MMO, dragon Quest ten coming overseas with offline one of
the announced SAPAN a couple of months back. No no word yet. I
think if anything happens there, maybe maybe Microsoft helps to make that happen.
And the same way they did look like PSO two because I know that Square
Nix just feeling pretty good about Game Pass right now. But we'd have to
wait and see these video games a sandwich. No video games is a taco.
Daniel Mud seemed to indicate each of the big three have stuff to announce
this week. With Nintendo and Sony announcement's done. What do you think Xbox
could one could be? Was it not that awesome all for one commercial?
I don't know. I'm not sure. I'll keep my eyes peeled. But
what day is it? It's you know, it's the kind of thing where
if it didn't happen on Tuesday, because like everyone had a bunch of news
on Tuesday, right because it was the first day after the big holiday,
Like let's just go at it. I don't know, I feel like that
if it didn't happen then. I'm not sure if it will still happen this
week, but I'll keep my eyes spilled. I'll ask around. Do you
think we'll get a final Fantasy seven remake ports sooner rather than later? A
port to PC? Yeah, support to anything else. I'm unsure. I
think a PC port is imminent. Yeah. From Slee Mac awesome bat or
knife? Thank you for this question? Uh? Bat, it's bat.
I mean, listen, a knife does a lot of damage, but I
think you're just keeping someone at a distances is more important. I just got
you can't overswing. There's no good answer here, and that's why it's such
a good question. How come Soul's board games don't have difficulty skills like Rescueable
four from Star Price sixty four. It's not a question for me, answer
question for from But I think uh, I think it's part of the mystique
and part of the narrative of let that players tell themselves. So if I
be at a hard, hard game, even though many of those games you
can like grind and level up and stuff and and get better and get better
gear and stuff and make it make it not so hard anymore. Except for
Secora, which the one I beat. So I'm a real gamer. See,
I'm not doing it myself. It's part of the story we tell,
and they think they's of the marketing, and it's part of making sure those
games still appeal to the right people. I don't agree with it. I
think that I think I don't think they need have difficulty sliders. I think
they need to just do the Celeste thing where they put the stuff in the
options of you know, and just call it accessibility settings and give people double
jump if they want one or whatever. Uh. Christian asks, what's going
on over at nether Realm? I don't know. I think they are still
just trying to figure out what's going on with their new world of like,
are we still part of w B? Are we part of this discovery thing?
Are you selling us what's going on? Should we still be working on
these games that we've been working on? Do we like, are you gonna
sell us? Then we have to worry about do we even have the rights
of these characters anymore? I bet it's a pretty confusing time at all those
studios, and you know that is all that has been on my list to
find out what's going on with all those studios for a while, but I
continue to hear it is just a mess. Let's see, I'm gonna scroll
back to the top. We'll do We'll do a couple more questions. These
ub sauce pirate games still a thing, yes, I think so, you
know Skull and Bones. Does that thing ever actually come out? I think
it does still come out. I don't think it's gonna get beyond good and
evil tude. Yeah, yes, the lock. I think this is the
thing that we talked about last week that I always trying to remember. Can
you please add the Marvel Francis game to your follow up list? That's exactly
the one that I was trying to remember and I forgot. So yes,
I'll look into that. I'll ask around. But yeah, I'm you know,
last we heard it was like the reason I didn't look into that.
This is why I said last week, it's because I thought it was gonna
be at E three and then it wasn't. So hopefully hear about it soon.
I mean, it's the kind of thing that could just pop up at
like a state of play today, right, But I'll look into it.
I don't know a new plague tail coming. They confirmed that, right,
they already said the new playutail is coming. They did confirm that, right,
because there is a new one coming. I just can't remember if they
said that. I thought they announced it. It's some free thing. Okay,
all right, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna wrap up.
Let's do one more question and then we'll get out of here. Thank you
everybody for tuning into the second episode. This was a lot of fun.
Again, let's see, have you heard anything about the Game Boy Classic or
are the plastic mini console emulators done for a while? I haven't heard.
I think that Nintendo is obviously doing those game and watch ones right now,
whether or not that is to me. You do the game and watch things,
and then you get like, those things probably sell pretty good. You
can manufacture quite a lot of them, but that drives down the price of
LCD screens. And then when you're ready to go do a Game Boy Classic
that is going to sell way way more than that. You got a really
good price on those screens because you've already driven down the price, and now
you're gonna buy a time more and and it helps make the whole thing make
a lot of sense. And I think a game Boy Mini is inevitable.
I don't know when they would do it, but it seems inevitable. Yeah,
what's the outline? You can it must be some special thing for you
because it was your car last time too. Would you come with me parade
with signs outside say get to help them get help them get their ship together.
I don't think they would even they'd be like, oh, look at
these people supporting us, Look at them. They just they're just here to
They must love Sonic, they must the Sonic fans are back. All this
makes us feel good. Who wants to go to lunch? Yeah, let's
go to lunch. I'm sorry, I'm like creating this narrative of like a
super incompetent Sega. But that's like the fiction I have in my head because
I just don't get a lot of their decisions. I think their PC stuff
is pretty well put together. They know what they're doing on PC. It's
just baffling that persona seems mismanaged. It's just they should be making so much
more money from those games than they are. Okay, so Calm, So
Calm is the other one I wanted to add to my list. Everyone always
asks about so calm. I'll ask no guarantees on any of this stuff.
It's just on the list. So when I have people around, I'm like,
oh yeah, I have this list, like can like refer to.
All right, everybody, let's get out of here. Let's uh see I
do the face game. Let's test this camera that can't talk about yet,
could say I could look into it. Hello, let's get out of here.
Let's wrap this stuff up. Everybody. Oh man, I forgot it's
gonna do that every time. I should only go to that shot. I
need to set up a separate shot that doesn't have that intro video in it,
and that way I can Okay, I got it. I need to
set up an intro scene and then the one shot scene notes for next time.
All right, everybody, let's uh, let's get out of here.
Thank you so much for watching. This was grub Snacks. It is a
show I very much enjoy doing on here on Giant Bomb. If you're watching
right now, you were, you were part of, you're already a member.
Thank you so much for you know, being a member, for going
to giant bob dot com slash upgrade. But you know what you could always
do. It's it's still on sale, So tell your friends to go hang
out. If they're interested in news, they don't want to miss out on
the stuff. If they have questions, don't be like, no, I'm
not going to go ask that question for you. I don't. I don't
care about that. You do it yourself. I'll answer it. They just
got to come and do it themselves. Giant Bomb dot Com, Slash Upgrade.
I believe the sale was going on till Friday. Other things, I'm
Jeff Grub on Twitter sometimes sometimes let's stream on Twitch, Twitch, dot tv,
slash Jeff Grub. I had my own Discord, Discord dot GG slash
game mess but you can find the link on my Twitter bio. Yeah,
I'm feel good, pretty good about this one. I'll try to bring some
big news here coming soon. I think, you know, I don't think
anything happened with that EA thing that was happening at the same time, whether
we're doing the Future of Shooters. I asked about that because I'm like,
hey, it's happening at the same time. Should I be worried about news
happening? And it seems like it was just gonna be sort of them talking
about their games and not having any big news reveals. But maybe I'm wrong.
We'll go check that and see if there's anything happening. But yeah,
I really like interacting with everybody. I really like this. This is a
ton of fun. I think the giant Bottom audience is perfect for this.
I really do think you all pay a lot of attention. You guys keep
me on my toes and I think you're gonna help me build out this list
and we're gonna come back and trying to answer some of these questions in the
future. But yeah, until next week, I want everybody to take care
of themselves. Have a good one and goodbye. And now I'm remembering which
one of these is going to have the outro, one which is a different
than the other, and the intro. I'm just gonna hit this button.
Hi, everybody,