Microsoft Ends "This is an Xbox" Campaign

<v Speaker 1>Hey, everybody, Welcome to Game Best Mornings with Me Jeff Greb,
<v Speaker 1>your host from giant bomb dot com.
<v Speaker 2>Thank you for tuning in.
<v Speaker 1>In this episode, we're gonna be talking about what you
<v Speaker 1>can actually expect from Crimson Desert's performance on a certain
<v Speaker 1>console and more. It's gonna be a good one because
<v Speaker 1>we have Lex Ladi on the show. LEXI, how are
<v Speaker 1>you doing?
<v Speaker 3>I'm not doing too bad, Grub. I'm hanging in there.
<v Speaker 3>I'm reviewing games to one of which I can't talk Yeah,
<v Speaker 3>one of which is Marathon, which I can talk about,
<v Speaker 3>and my review should be going live. We were going
<v Speaker 3>to set it live early this week, and then we
<v Speaker 3>decided to wait until that Cryo Archives thing comes out,
<v Speaker 3>which seems like it's going to be any day now
<v Speaker 3>by the sounds of.
<v Speaker 2>It, Like where you sort of settling in?
<v Speaker 1>I mean, obviously it's not finalized yet this review, but like,
<v Speaker 1>how are you settling in on that game?
<v Speaker 3>I so like I've written the bulk of the review
<v Speaker 3>and I just have a section I feel for the
<v Speaker 3>Clio Archives and the endgame stuff. I like it a
<v Speaker 3>lot more the more I play a.
<v Speaker 1>Sh and that's interesting. The sentiment I'm hearing as well.
<v Speaker 1>People enjoy it the more they play it.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, I think that the the problem with that game
<v Speaker 3>is that the best elements are kind of undermined by
<v Speaker 3>the genre that it's in, which is kind of stuff
<v Speaker 3>like the story and the music and the tone and
<v Speaker 3>the art design, which you don't really get much time
<v Speaker 3>to interact with because it's an extraction shooter. And it's
<v Speaker 3>reductive to say, because honestly, the game wouldn't exist if
<v Speaker 3>it wasn't an extraction shooter, if it wasn't this multiplayer thing,
<v Speaker 3>right of course, is there's a constant lying part of
<v Speaker 3>you of like these elements feel like they were built
<v Speaker 3>through a different kind of game, and.
<v Speaker 1>I mean even like more basic that It's like, I
<v Speaker 1>would enjoy this stuff if it was more if it
<v Speaker 1>was a different kind of game, right like where it's like, hey,
<v Speaker 1>this was a single player world where that I got
<v Speaker 1>to explore a campaign, I would enjoy all of these
<v Speaker 1>very cool aspects to the art and the aesthetic even more.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, And I think it leaves me in a place
<v Speaker 3>where I think it is a really really good game
<v Speaker 3>that I can't stop thinking about the great game that
<v Speaker 3>it could have been if we lived in a different universe,
<v Speaker 3>but also that game would never exist in this universe.
<v Speaker 3>It would never get greenlit, you know, and so it's
<v Speaker 3>ultimately kind of pointless to review it on that metric.
<v Speaker 3>So it's kind of a tough one to actually review
<v Speaker 3>the other game I'm reviewing. Let's just say we're talking
<v Speaker 3>about in the news, so I might, you know, I
<v Speaker 3>might dance around a bit, but we'll see.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, well we'll figure some stuff out there.
<v Speaker 1>Well, I'm feeling a little bit better after getting some rest,
<v Speaker 1>and I was like yesterday, I'm like, am I getting sick?
<v Speaker 1>I think I might be getting sick, but I definitely
<v Speaker 1>didn't get enough sleep, so maybe it's just I'm tired,
<v Speaker 1>and I'm like last time, I'm like, you know what,
<v Speaker 1>I'm just tired. I need to finally, like really go
<v Speaker 1>to bed, go to sleep, catch up on sleep.
<v Speaker 2>And I did.
<v Speaker 1>I got a lot of sleep last night, and then
<v Speaker 1>I woke up and I feel pretty similar. I'm sick,
<v Speaker 1>but it's like it's just like a tiny little cold
<v Speaker 1>that I'm playing off. So it's like, all right, we'll
<v Speaker 1>finish up the week. I feel good enough to do
<v Speaker 1>this show. I'm missdoing it, but you know, a GDC
<v Speaker 1>worth it even if I got sick. There were so
<v Speaker 1>many nice people that came by and said hi, people
<v Speaker 1>that said they like it when we do the show together, Lexi.
<v Speaker 1>People call that out, So thanks for coming on the
<v Speaker 1>show again and making me look good as always.
<v Speaker 3>Wait and people like this, Well, I'm glad myself.
<v Speaker 2>I want to chime in off show. A lot of
<v Speaker 2>people are saying very nice words about Lexi and she
<v Speaker 2>should hear it. Yeah, it was that's nice to hear.
<v Speaker 1>And then it was people were talking about like listening
<v Speaker 1>to the show on the in the morning on their
<v Speaker 1>drive and stuff like that when they're going into their
<v Speaker 1>game development jobs, and it's like, hey, we'll do our
<v Speaker 1>best to kind of give you good news when we can. Sorry,
<v Speaker 1>it's been so much bad news.
<v Speaker 3>I met someone at an event in Leeds the other
<v Speaker 3>week when I was in Leeds and they were like,
<v Speaker 3>I mentioned I work with you guys sometimes, and they
<v Speaker 3>were like, I listened to the Voicemail Dump Truck with
<v Speaker 3>my husband every single week. And then the very next
<v Speaker 3>question was, Hey, is Dan.
<v Speaker 2>Really like that? Right?
<v Speaker 1>Listen it's a riddle for the ages. Yes, absolutely, All right,
<v Speaker 1>let's get into it. Let's wrap the week up starting
<v Speaker 1>with our intro. Here, let's explain ourselves. Hey, we're Giant Bomb,
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<v Speaker 1>There's grub Snacks Premium, but you're not gonnaant to miss
<v Speaker 1>this week's scrub Snacks Premium. I was in the throes
<v Speaker 1>of my most desperate needing to go to sleep, and
<v Speaker 1>most English words became mysteries to me.
<v Speaker 2>That was yeah, you're not going on one of my
<v Speaker 2>stats to.
<v Speaker 3>Watch that last night, and it was just this thing
<v Speaker 3>like have you ever seen like a child who should
<v Speaker 3>really just go to bed also hasn't, like it doesn't
<v Speaker 3>want to go to sleep for whatever reason. So they're
<v Speaker 3>just kind of talking out their ass and they're just
<v Speaker 3>like and then and then and what's this? And I
<v Speaker 3>can't speak anymore. And then you're like, ah, I'm done.
<v Speaker 1>That is my Uh, that's my butter zone. That's where
<v Speaker 1>I love everybody and the tired little kid that should
<v Speaker 1>go to bed.
<v Speaker 3>Uh.
<v Speaker 1>As far as this show goes most weekdays, I Jeff
<v Speaker 1>Grub will help peace her gaming life back together. That
<v Speaker 1>includes breaking news and maybe even some of our own
<v Speaker 1>original reporting.
<v Speaker 2>For all these topics, I'll.
<v Speaker 1>Get the input of a bona fide expert who will
<v Speaker 1>make me look smart. If you were watching live on
<v Speaker 1>twitch welcome. You can always listen to the show later
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<v Speaker 1>can also catch the show later with chapters and timestamps
<v Speaker 1>on YouTube.
<v Speaker 2>Hello YouTube.
<v Speaker 1>All right, we have a lot to get into, so
<v Speaker 1>let's start the Morning Mess with Crimson Desert console gameplay
<v Speaker 1>finally released, but only of the PS five pro version.
<v Speaker 1>This is from Zach Swisen at Kotaku. Crimson Desert launches
<v Speaker 1>next week on March nineteenth. It's March thirteenth right now, everybody,
<v Speaker 1>so very very soon. It has lots of hype levels
<v Speaker 1>reaching critical mass for the RPG. We had it yet
<v Speaker 1>seeing console gameplay of it, though, that changed yesterday thanks
<v Speaker 1>to a new video from Digital Foundry showing off the
<v Speaker 1>PS five pro port of Crimson Desert. Basically, this video
<v Speaker 1>goes into the details and says, hey, it runs pretty good,
<v Speaker 1>sixty frames per second most of the time. It has
<v Speaker 1>a lot of actually impressive graphical techniques. Digital Foundry found
<v Speaker 1>it pretty impressive. Now they only did see the PS
<v Speaker 1>five pro version, which is not like standard here. I
<v Speaker 1>don't think that this is not me trying to once
<v Speaker 1>it goin, be like the sky is falling for this game.
<v Speaker 1>We all have been having this conversation for a conversation
<v Speaker 1>for a long time.
<v Speaker 2>Now.
<v Speaker 1>They came out or got kind of snippy and we're like,
<v Speaker 1>we're gonna put out console gameplay, and it's like, is
<v Speaker 1>this what you meant? Like We're like, look, kudos for
<v Speaker 1>taking it to Digital Foundry. That often does show show
<v Speaker 1>a sign of confidence in your product, but not showing
<v Speaker 1>the base models, the models that most people have and
<v Speaker 1>where most people.
<v Speaker 2>Are going to play this game.
<v Speaker 1>For the most part, I could break out on PC,
<v Speaker 1>but at least on console sides, most people are gonna
<v Speaker 1>play it on a base PS five.
<v Speaker 2>We kind of need to see that as well.
<v Speaker 3>Right, Yeah, I'm very curious about this because the recommended
<v Speaker 3>Steam specs on this are like a twenty eighty, which
<v Speaker 3>is about PS five level, And as someone who has
<v Speaker 3>a fifty seventy TI and has maybe interacted with that game,
<v Speaker 3>I have thought about what underclocking a fifty seventy and
<v Speaker 3>trying to run it then would look like.
<v Speaker 2>But I can't.
<v Speaker 3>I don't have a twenty eighty to just plug into
<v Speaker 3>my PC and check something out. So I'm very curious
<v Speaker 3>to see what this game looks like. We've seen two
<v Speaker 3>very select views of this game. We saw the high
<v Speaker 3>end or pretty high end AMD card that and that
<v Speaker 3>a Digital Foundry got footage of for their PC preview,
<v Speaker 3>and they got the PS five Pro look so two
<v Speaker 3>kind of distinctly high end things. And I know a
<v Speaker 3>lot of the folks over Digital Foundry, and they're great
<v Speaker 3>and I really respect them and their work. I do
<v Speaker 3>think that this game is the kind of game where
<v Speaker 3>people are going to get really hung up on how
<v Speaker 3>it looks and how it runs, and.
<v Speaker 1>That's what they're a bit. That's a big part how
<v Speaker 1>they're selling it, right. A lot of the the trailers
<v Speaker 1>so far have been like, look at the stunning world,
<v Speaker 1>where yeah, you can keep going, and then the next
<v Speaker 1>thing you go to is as beautiful and detailed as
<v Speaker 1>the last, and it's like, yeah, okay, well then it
<v Speaker 1>better run.
<v Speaker 3>Well yeah, And I think that you know, that's going
<v Speaker 3>to be really interesting when the Robber meets the road
<v Speaker 3>of interacting with more people, of how they find things
<v Speaker 3>like gameplay, and how they find things like art design
<v Speaker 3>and things that people don't get as much of a
<v Speaker 3>sense for in a trailer or in previews. I remember
<v Speaker 3>when I previewed this games Calm last year, they had
<v Speaker 3>a pure person behind every press person to answer questions
<v Speaker 3>about the controls because the controls are so complicated and
<v Speaker 3>they are like the controls that they had at that
<v Speaker 3>preview event were out of this world bizarre, and.
<v Speaker 1>It felt like I remember people saying at the time
<v Speaker 1>that it definitely felt like an MMO developer was making
<v Speaker 1>a console game a controller game, and it's like, okay, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>what do you mean by that? And then kind of
<v Speaker 1>having some people explain it some of the button presses
<v Speaker 1>and the hot buttons you'd have to hit to get
<v Speaker 1>stuff to work, it was, oh, okay, that does sound
<v Speaker 1>overly complicated that we've it feels like we've had more
<v Speaker 1>streamlined solutions to this before. Obviously they've had a lot
<v Speaker 1>of time now since then, so maybe things have changed.
<v Speaker 1>Maybe maybe I think that we are going to have
<v Speaker 1>a lot of conversations about this game as it launches
<v Speaker 1>on shows like this, as people finally get it in
<v Speaker 1>their hands and we're like, okay, there was a ton
<v Speaker 1>of hype and the first concern will be how does
<v Speaker 1>it perform? But then there is this entire game here
<v Speaker 1>still of like, you know it really, I guess we
<v Speaker 1>should remind people what it is if we haven't done
<v Speaker 1>that yet. It is from that MMO company, but it
<v Speaker 1>is a single player action adventure game kind of RPG stuff.
<v Speaker 1>A lot of people comparing it to some Witcher three,
<v Speaker 1>The Dragon's Dogma two. There's a lot of that stuff
<v Speaker 1>in there, but it's a big, open world RPG basically,
<v Speaker 1>and it looks very promising in the in the trailers,
<v Speaker 1>it does look like, Hey, if this game is what
<v Speaker 1>they're claiming it's going to be, it could be a
<v Speaker 1>very exciting, new fresh thing, and then a lot of
<v Speaker 1>people like it's too good to be true, So we're
<v Speaker 1>gonna be having those conversations going in there. I think
<v Speaker 1>we'll get on the other side and it will just
<v Speaker 1>come down to it like how fun is this? And
<v Speaker 1>for some people, I think it's probably it's probably gonna be. Hey,
<v Speaker 1>if it's as big and sprawling and detailed as it
<v Speaker 1>looks like, I'll be happy. And then I think there's
<v Speaker 1>gonna be some people like, hey, I think there's there
<v Speaker 1>needs to be a little bit more here, But we'll
<v Speaker 1>just have to wait and see.
<v Speaker 2>I don't know. I'll get my hands on it and
<v Speaker 2>judge for myself.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, Like it's it's one of those things when games
<v Speaker 3>are always trying to sell to scale, They always trying
<v Speaker 3>to sell that this is this is the biggest thing
<v Speaker 3>that you have ever seen, this is the biggest world,
<v Speaker 3>this is the biggest whatever. And I think that games
<v Speaker 3>that do find a lot of long term success rather
<v Speaker 3>than just like straight out the gate sales, are games
<v Speaker 3>that kind of wind up being quite deep, you know,
<v Speaker 3>something like a Bald Skate three or stuff that do
<v Speaker 3>does have a lot of you know, replayability and mechanical
<v Speaker 3>depth and interesting choices, whereas there can be games where
<v Speaker 3>they're full of a million different things. I think like
<v Speaker 3>this comes up a lot with Ubisoft games of like,
<v Speaker 3>oh their map slap like it's it's a million different
<v Speaker 3>things to do, but none of them are particularly interesting,
<v Speaker 3>and none of them are particularly bespoke or like engaging.
<v Speaker 3>So I'm very curious to see how how this game
<v Speaker 3>winds up playing out.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, and in chances they specifically said it's not an RPG,
<v Speaker 1>I meant like in the way every game is an
<v Speaker 1>RPG now where you'll take on quests and think and
<v Speaker 1>and like explore a world, but there's not some deep
<v Speaker 1>RPG system at least they have not shown that off
<v Speaker 1>so far.
<v Speaker 3>That's a wild thing to say. That's a wild thing
<v Speaker 3>to see.
<v Speaker 1>I exactly like genre Dix live on and we can
<v Speaker 1>have those conversations once this game is actually.
<v Speaker 3>Get I get that you don't create your character. But
<v Speaker 3>like with the way that the phrase ORPG has been
<v Speaker 3>deflocated over the years, right, this is APG in the
<v Speaker 3>same way that the Witcher three is an LPG. You know.
<v Speaker 1>That's yes, exactly, I agree. All right, Well, hey, that's
<v Speaker 1>that's out March nineteenth. We'll see what people say. I'll
<v Speaker 1>be very curious to see it, Like if it explodes
<v Speaker 1>out of the gate with all this hype, at least
<v Speaker 1>on PC. I think it might, especially if it runs
<v Speaker 1>decently on most rigs. But we're gonna have to wait
<v Speaker 1>and see, all right. Next story, Microsoft quietly retires This
<v Speaker 1>is an Xbox marketing campaign, something that definitely seemed like
<v Speaker 1>was going to happen. But you know, basically some confirmation here,
<v Speaker 1>Chris KURRK game developer rites.
<v Speaker 2>Remember this is an Xbox.
<v Speaker 1>Microsoft made four words the cornerstone of a marketing campaign
<v Speaker 1>it believed would hammer home one key point Xbox is
<v Speaker 1>a platform, not just a console.
<v Speaker 2>Now.
<v Speaker 1>However, just weeks after the company appointed a new leader
<v Speaker 1>in former AI exect Asha Sharma, a bid farewell to
<v Speaker 1>outgoing overseers Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond, it appears the
<v Speaker 1>company has quietly retired the campaign. When searching for the
<v Speaker 1>blog post that kicked off the marketing beat earlier earlier today,
<v Speaker 1>I noticed it had been removed from the Xbox Wire,
<v Speaker 1>which is a Microsoft's Xbox focused news blog. In fact,
<v Speaker 1>the only post currently available on the This is an
<v Speaker 1>Xbox results page on Xbox Wire is the September twenty
<v Speaker 1>twenty five update featuring news about the rog Xbox Ally, so,
<v Speaker 1>they have scrubbed their history of this is an Xbox
<v Speaker 1>almost to the point of, Oh, they clearly are embarrassed
<v Speaker 1>by what this thing did, and to me, this says
<v Speaker 1>they believe it did damage to what they are trying
<v Speaker 1>to do in the future. A part of me also
<v Speaker 1>thinks that this is Asha Sharma coming in and putting
<v Speaker 1>her stamp on things, being like, let's throw out the
<v Speaker 1>new It's not we're not just gonna move on.
<v Speaker 2>Let's throw it out. Let let's make a clean break.
<v Speaker 1>And to do that, let's establish that we are firmly
<v Speaker 1>moving away from that. And how do we sort of
<v Speaker 1>convey that message to people without coming out there and
<v Speaker 1>throwing previous executives under the bus. Well, this is a
<v Speaker 1>pretty effective way of doing that of Oh, they are
<v Speaker 1>definitely trying something different as they go forward. My question,
<v Speaker 1>LEXI is like, you know, effectively, all the things that
<v Speaker 1>were true under this is an Xbox are are still
<v Speaker 1>going to be true under whatever new marketing campaign they have, right, Like,
<v Speaker 1>it's nothing's really changed to functionality, Like to the functionality.
<v Speaker 3>Well, gob you know what they say, you either die
<v Speaker 3>an Xbox or you live long enough to see yourself
<v Speaker 3>become an.
<v Speaker 2>Xbox's that's what two face said that.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is weird. It's right now out
<v Speaker 3>of xboxes coming to very strong, distinct mixed signals of
<v Speaker 3>Xbox is still a platform and the next Xbox is
<v Speaker 3>a PC and it's open, and they I still have
<v Speaker 3>so many questions about how that will work and how
<v Speaker 3>they will even monetize that, because like I feel like
<v Speaker 3>the thing that keeps on being forgotten is like Microsoft
<v Speaker 3>is a services company, Like they make money off of
<v Speaker 3>acurring revenue. If you can just load up Steam and
<v Speaker 3>Windows on or hell, if you can sideload Linux on
<v Speaker 3>this Xbox because it's just a PC, then Microsoft never
<v Speaker 3>see a dime after your first purchase of their box,
<v Speaker 3>which is then act opposite of what they want.
<v Speaker 1>And then alternatively, if it is like I was talking
<v Speaker 1>to Sean on the Sides last night and we were
<v Speaker 1>like kind of laid out the two possible scenarios of
<v Speaker 1>what this thing is. It is a PC first, or
<v Speaker 1>it's an Xbox first. And if it's an Xbox first,
<v Speaker 1>and then it kind of like just they open up
<v Speaker 1>the Windows side of things. Because Xbox was always running
<v Speaker 1>in a hypervisor a virtual machine on the uh, you know,
<v Speaker 1>using a Windows kernel. It's like maybe they just have
<v Speaker 1>an Xbox and they open it, open it up, or
<v Speaker 1>is it a PC and they bring in Xbox functionality
<v Speaker 1>and backward compatibility.
<v Speaker 3>Which seems more like what they're doing at the moment
<v Speaker 3>because they have announced that that Xbox Profile thing is
<v Speaker 3>coming to PCs that is on the log candles.
<v Speaker 2>Right now, right exactly so.
<v Speaker 1>And also it's just I don't know, if you're making
<v Speaker 1>an Xbox first, how do you convince developers to support it?
<v Speaker 1>But then there's a bunch of other questions about like
<v Speaker 1>Xbox Live Gold, although if they were, you know, the
<v Speaker 1>thing is still something you could boot into Windows on
<v Speaker 1>and then you make people pay for online multiplayer on
<v Speaker 1>that device, that's also going to feel weird. Yeah, they
<v Speaker 1>they have a lot of messaging that they're gonna have
<v Speaker 1>to do. Is is the focus of that message Lexy
<v Speaker 1>going to be you need an Xbox because that's the
<v Speaker 1>alternative to everything as an Xbox.
<v Speaker 3>I think the thing that is kind of telling is
<v Speaker 3>that already it's confusing and muddy. Like you think about
<v Speaker 3>the main problem with the Xbox One when it was
<v Speaker 3>announced was the whole thing of like journalists were getting
<v Speaker 3>different answers from different people when they ask questions, and
<v Speaker 3>that was like the first death knell of Xbox was
<v Speaker 3>the confusion caused by some people giving certain answers about
<v Speaker 3>online connectivity and some people giving other answers about online connectivity.
<v Speaker 3>And that kind of murkiness is what we've become pretty
<v Speaker 3>used to with the Xbox brand ever since. And even
<v Speaker 3>if they just have one or two figureheads now saying
<v Speaker 3>those things, somehow, they're still saying things that feel like
<v Speaker 3>they could be conflicting in some way and were left
<v Speaker 3>with all these questions and it's not like a stable
<v Speaker 3>foothold to build a platform off of because devs don't
<v Speaker 3>know how they're going to interact with it, yesh, and
<v Speaker 3>like players don't know how they're going to interact with it, yesh,
<v Speaker 3>And it makes it very hard to just be like,
<v Speaker 3>if I buy a PlayStation, I'm buying PlayStation games on
<v Speaker 3>that PlayStation machine, and I'm buying my PlayStation so I
<v Speaker 3>can play PlayStation games on that PlayStation machine. And they've
<v Speaker 3>made that even more clear now by pulling back from
<v Speaker 3>PC releases, Whereas, if you're buying an Xbox, are you
<v Speaker 3>commission to the PC ecosystem? Are you you know, are
<v Speaker 3>you still paying for online multiplayer? Are you opting out
<v Speaker 3>of you know, game Pass and all of this, Like
<v Speaker 3>it's I already it feels confusing, which isn't where you
<v Speaker 3>want to start, even before you have you know, alpha
<v Speaker 3>kits out there to devs.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, because like what are the doubts that people have?
<v Speaker 1>Like, what are the barriers to spending another But let's
<v Speaker 1>be real, eight hundred to twelve hundred dollars some what
<v Speaker 1>this next Xbox is going to be? The barriers are like,
<v Speaker 1>and I'm talking about people already in the ecosystem. I
<v Speaker 1>have a ton of Xbox games I purchased. Are they
<v Speaker 1>going to continue working? And the answer right now is yes,
<v Speaker 1>They've come out and said yes, they're going to continue working.
<v Speaker 1>They're going to no matter what, no matter how this
<v Speaker 1>actually functions, they're going to have backward compatibility, or it'll
<v Speaker 1>just straight up you an Xbox and it'll run your
<v Speaker 1>Xbox in Xbox three, sixty and Xbox one and Xbox
<v Speaker 1>series games. They haven't come out and said they're gonna
<v Speaker 1>have a disk drive. I imagined at the very least,
<v Speaker 1>they're gonna have an external dis drive you can plug
<v Speaker 1>in so you can play those games. Okay, But really
<v Speaker 1>the question is it's like, do I continue investing in
<v Speaker 1>that ecosystem and are you positioning this as yes, it
<v Speaker 1>has backward compatibility and your games will continue to function,
<v Speaker 1>but like, you know, we're not really investing in that
<v Speaker 1>for the future. We're investing on the PC side of things.
<v Speaker 1>And it's like, okay, so those people are gonna have
<v Speaker 1>to shift no matter what. And at that point, like
<v Speaker 1>don't they ask themselves, do I need this Xbox or
<v Speaker 1>should I just get a PC? Especially if there's backward
<v Speaker 1>compatibility brought to the wider PC. You know, you know
<v Speaker 1>Windows at Large, which they have not said is going
<v Speaker 1>to happen, although I can't imagine won't happen eventually. How
<v Speaker 1>that works though, is definitely a question mark either way.
<v Speaker 1>It's like, yeah, there are a lot of specifics and
<v Speaker 1>a lot of questions about Okay, so if I do
<v Speaker 1>have that library and I'm convinced, are developers convinced to
<v Speaker 1>continue putting games into that Xbox side of things? And
<v Speaker 1>that I just you know they went to GDC, and
<v Speaker 1>I don't know that they went into GDC trying to
<v Speaker 1>tell developers, hey, here, you know that Xbox Development Kit,
<v Speaker 1>so you can make new Xbox games for this new system.
<v Speaker 2>You should definitely be doing that.
<v Speaker 1>Or hey, if you're already making a PC game, guess
<v Speaker 1>what it already works on here. Said to me, that's
<v Speaker 1>the pitch I think Microsoft wants to be making because
<v Speaker 1>it's a lot there's a lot less friction there, and
<v Speaker 1>so it's just fundamentally this thing has to change and
<v Speaker 1>they're going to have to come in with a different
<v Speaker 1>message because this is not just a console anymore and
<v Speaker 1>the old sort of bullet points you would hit of
<v Speaker 1>it's simple to use. I'm sure they'll try to make
<v Speaker 1>this simple. We'll see it if they're actually able to
<v Speaker 1>succeed at that. It is less costly than these other platforms.
<v Speaker 1>Is that going to be true. That's a huge question mark.
<v Speaker 1>It is relatively powerful, you know, despite its lower price
<v Speaker 1>compared to equivalent PCs. We'll see like maybe you're gonna
<v Speaker 1>be able to get a PC that is more powerful
<v Speaker 1>for less money. Because there's so much competition in that space.
<v Speaker 1>How does Xbox position it's messaging against all of that.
<v Speaker 2>If this thing's just.
<v Speaker 1>A PC, it's a big, big thing that they're going
<v Speaker 1>to have to figure out.
<v Speaker 3>And you mentioned one particular point there that we were
<v Speaker 3>already talking about with the Steam Machine of if they
<v Speaker 3>subsidize the price of this too much and it is
<v Speaker 3>very powerful for what it is, people are just going
<v Speaker 3>to buy it as a PC and never engage with
<v Speaker 3>the gaming side of it. And that's the exact opposite
<v Speaker 3>of what they want because they're not getting their thirty
<v Speaker 3>percent calcol game sales. If people just buy this as
<v Speaker 3>a PC and use it as a PC because it's
<v Speaker 3>a cheap PC, then that's like, that's the exact opposite.
<v Speaker 3>That's the high Guard situation where they get two million
<v Speaker 3>players and none of them buy any of the micro transactions,
<v Speaker 3>and you know that's you know, more people pinging your
<v Speaker 3>server lode and stressing all of your online infrastructure and
<v Speaker 3>charging you money, but no one's actually giving you money
<v Speaker 3>back in return. So yeah, it's it's a weird situation.
<v Speaker 3>And I don't know, like a healthy Xbox would be
<v Speaker 3>good for the industry, which is a weird thing to
<v Speaker 3>say under this circumstances of yes, there's still a BDS
<v Speaker 3>boycott going on against them. I haven't played anything on
<v Speaker 3>my Xbox in about two years that isn't a backwards
<v Speaker 3>compatible game that I part secondhand.
<v Speaker 2>But like.
<v Speaker 3>A healthy second option would be really good for keeping
<v Speaker 3>this industry competitive and alive. And like in that in
<v Speaker 3>that section, you know, the switches off doing its own thing,
<v Speaker 3>and PC is its own market as well, but having
<v Speaker 3>two healthy competitive consoles would be really good for that market.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, and it's you know, we've heard these companies say
<v Speaker 1>a bunch of times our real competition is blank, it's
<v Speaker 1>x and it's a lot of times that's TikTok or whatever,
<v Speaker 1>short form video and all these things that are distraction.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, we get that.
<v Speaker 1>We would like you to though, consider the competition of
<v Speaker 1>the company trying to create similar products to you, so
<v Speaker 1>you feel like you have to make those products better
<v Speaker 1>that's better for us, That's what you're getting at, and
<v Speaker 1>it's I do think that these companies are, you know,
<v Speaker 1>between Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are much happier to find
<v Speaker 1>their niche and live in there because they can treat
<v Speaker 1>a little bit like their playground, and that enables them
<v Speaker 1>to start treating us a little bit like their ATM machines,
<v Speaker 1>where they can just just extract as much cash out
<v Speaker 1>of us as possible. And you know, Sony and Nintendo
<v Speaker 1>both kind of found out that that's worked pretty well
<v Speaker 1>for them so far.
<v Speaker 2>All right, let's let's keep moving here.
<v Speaker 1>Actually, we're gonna take break before we do, though, Alexi,
<v Speaker 1>I saw an ad for a new n C Soft shooter.
<v Speaker 1>It might be out in other territories, but it's called
<v Speaker 1>Time Takers.
<v Speaker 2>Have you seen this?
<v Speaker 3>Feel like I heard of this. I've probably gone some
<v Speaker 3>emails for it.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it's uh.
<v Speaker 1>It showed up and I'm just like, are they purposefully
<v Speaker 1>trying to make me think of Lawbreakers?
<v Speaker 2>Because the names, it's.
<v Speaker 1>Like, yeah, the visual style, the character designs, uh, and
<v Speaker 1>then the gameplay, I'm like, I'm not sure it's third person.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I'm a little bit thrown out. It's three. It's
<v Speaker 2>a three v three survival shooter.
<v Speaker 1>So it doesn't play like Lawbreakers, but it's just, man,
<v Speaker 1>how are we getting so many generic shooters still? And
<v Speaker 1>I know that the way I feel like some things
<v Speaker 1>are generic, they do really well in a lot of
<v Speaker 1>like with a lot of other audiences that people are
<v Speaker 1>just like, oh, this actually is super for me. It
<v Speaker 1>looks cool, and to me it's like it looks so
<v Speaker 1>vanilla and bland. I'm like, how do you not expect
<v Speaker 1>this to just crash and burn?
<v Speaker 2>But who knows? Maybe I'm way off base. All Right,
<v Speaker 2>we're gonna take that break.
<v Speaker 1>We'll come back. There's plenty of more headlines to get into.
<v Speaker 1>If you want to skip out on these ad messages,
<v Speaker 1>we got a way for you.
<v Speaker 2>To do that.
<v Speaker 1>You go to giant bomb dot com slash join, become
<v Speaker 1>a premium member on the website there. Once you do that,
<v Speaker 1>you can find ad reversions of this show in both
<v Speaker 1>video and audio formats.
<v Speaker 2>In the meantime, we will be right back. All right,
<v Speaker 2>we are.
<v Speaker 1>Back, everybody. It's Game Mess Mornings. That's Lex Luddy. I'm
<v Speaker 1>Jeff grub LEXI. Let's keep going here. So we were
<v Speaker 1>talking about Xbox's marketing campaign coming to an end and
<v Speaker 1>then them starting up something new, and the question mark
<v Speaker 1>is like, Okay, what is their focus?
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, before you get going, I'm just really glad that
<v Speaker 3>this big shift and change in Xbox management has led
<v Speaker 3>to them reusuationing that there will not be AI slop
<v Speaker 3>in the games and in the products. So continue as
<v Speaker 3>you wik for.
<v Speaker 1>Xbox is marching forward with AI features, but says it
<v Speaker 1>wants to protect content creators. This is from Ethan Gotch
<v Speaker 1>at Kotaku. The backlash against AI is real, and you
<v Speaker 1>can feel it in the way Microsoft talks about its
<v Speaker 1>game help feature Gaming Copilot at GDC twenty twenty six.
<v Speaker 1>The company is moving forward with integrating AI tech directly
<v Speaker 1>into Xbox at the platform and hardware levels, but also
<v Speaker 1>quick to promise that it's keeping game makers and content
<v Speaker 1>creators front of mind as it rolls out new features.
<v Speaker 2>Here's the quote.
<v Speaker 1>We really believe that creative control should always stay with
<v Speaker 1>the game creators, the game development teams, and with the
<v Speaker 1>A and with the AI features that we are experimenting, exploring, experimenting.
<v Speaker 1>This is really to support the visions of the teams,
<v Speaker 1>and that's from gaming ai general manager Hian Jiang, who
<v Speaker 1>said that during a presentation at GDC, Ultimately, we want
<v Speaker 1>to bring AI that helps broaden the game's reach, deep
<v Speaker 1>in engagement, and keep players coming back to your games
<v Speaker 1>to many many.
<v Speaker 2>More games across our catalog. Okay, so.
<v Speaker 1>They go into exactly what this looks like, and one
<v Speaker 1>of the big things here is gaming Copilot. That's where
<v Speaker 1>they spent most of their time. According to GOTCH, data
<v Speaker 1>from early testing revealed a couple of interesting results. While
<v Speaker 1>the feature can be used to help players find games
<v Speaker 1>they might want to play from the store or game pass,
<v Speaker 1>that was a quarter of the usage. More popular was
<v Speaker 1>game assistance at thirty percent of usage, and most surprising
<v Speaker 1>was in nineteen percent of people who just talked to
<v Speaker 1>gaming copilot for the hell of it, which, Okay, I'm
<v Speaker 1>wondering if that is actually a sign of health for
<v Speaker 1>AI here or if that's a sign of people don't
<v Speaker 1>know how to use it and they are just they're
<v Speaker 1>just talking to it because they got into these tests
<v Speaker 1>early and they want to see what it does and
<v Speaker 1>see if they stumble across anything, and instead it's like,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know, I'm just going to talk to this thing.
<v Speaker 2>About the the weather, or.
<v Speaker 3>Hey can you do a black Obama personation? Hey can
<v Speaker 3>you order me McDonald's?
<v Speaker 2>Oh you can't, Okay, right?
<v Speaker 1>Can you be the most base level internet? A meme
<v Speaker 1>humor for me? So I can feel something. Yeah, this
<v Speaker 1>is the presentation they brought to this conference. These are
<v Speaker 1>the things that they want to talk about, still gaming
<v Speaker 1>co Pilot for Xbox, you know, Copilot getting stuffed into everything.
<v Speaker 1>It was inevitably coming to Xbox. The fact that this
<v Speaker 1>is still the thing that they're coming out and talking
<v Speaker 1>about shouldn't be surprising to anyone. It's not surprising to me.
<v Speaker 1>This is their entire business right now. But it doesn't
<v Speaker 1>like look any better because of the like the way
<v Speaker 1>that they sort of couched it as, oh, you can
<v Speaker 1>use it to find games on the store.
<v Speaker 2>It's like, so it's just a search.
<v Speaker 1>Engine, and then when I am stuck in a game,
<v Speaker 1>it's going to then search for the guide I would
<v Speaker 1>look for and get me back to the game. Okay, convenient,
<v Speaker 1>But is that really the entirety of your business model?
<v Speaker 2>Going for forward? Do you think this is going to
<v Speaker 2>make you more money?
<v Speaker 3>How Xbox? Do you want to know what would really
<v Speaker 3>help me search for games that I might also like
<v Speaker 3>on your store publisher pages, developer pages. I've for fucking
<v Speaker 3>years Nintendo have figured this out, and Xbox and PlayStations
<v Speaker 3>still don't have publisher and developer pages on their storefronts.
<v Speaker 3>I do really like that, Like or Gaming AI general
<v Speaker 3>manager is raising a lot of questions answered by your
<v Speaker 3>Gaming AI general manager. You know, like, we're not going
<v Speaker 3>to shoehorn this into games. We just employ a guy
<v Speaker 3>whose hold job it is to figure out ways to
<v Speaker 3>shoehorn this into games, so you know, don't worry. And
<v Speaker 3>from the bits and pieces I hear coming out of
<v Speaker 3>Microsoft Studios at the moment, it's not just on the
<v Speaker 3>player side that co pilot is being hoisted upon people.
<v Speaker 3>And sure, yeah, and that sounds like a real fucking
<v Speaker 3>delight is being like, actually, no, Narasha, Clippy, I don't
<v Speaker 3>need your help placing these I know where I want
<v Speaker 3>to put them myself, and so yeah, good luck with them.
<v Speaker 3>Remember when Google out there being like, oh, you'll be
<v Speaker 3>able to like stop your game anytime and pull up
<v Speaker 3>a YouTube video instantly a guide.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I mean even the console manufacturers are are are
<v Speaker 1>especially guilty of this, Like Sony is it when it
<v Speaker 1>launched PS five and had the oh, you're gonna be
<v Speaker 1>able to press the home button and on every game
<v Speaker 1>there's gonna be all this help there that is that
<v Speaker 1>we brought into UH to assist you, and there's gonna
<v Speaker 1>be videos for the part you're in that we'll explain
<v Speaker 1>exactly how to do it. It's like, yeah, I bet
<v Speaker 1>like a couple of games at launch use that and
<v Speaker 1>it never gets used again. And maybe it's actually still
<v Speaker 1>getting used, but no one ever actually engages with it
<v Speaker 1>as far as I can tell. It's like this is
<v Speaker 1>this is just extra fluff that doesn't matter to the
<v Speaker 1>people spending a lot of money on these consoles, and
<v Speaker 1>so like like honing in and shoving AI into that space.
<v Speaker 1>To me, it's like, oh, you don't know what to
<v Speaker 1>do with this, and you are just trying to make
<v Speaker 1>it feel like it's an important part of this product
<v Speaker 1>because everything that you've added AI to so far has
<v Speaker 1>seen it like get a little bit of shine from
<v Speaker 1>the investor side of thing and gets them excited.
<v Speaker 2>And you think that you might get the same thing here.
<v Speaker 3>Forcing use cases by trying to remove the actual useful option.
<v Speaker 3>You know, it's like, oh, this is a great way
<v Speaker 3>to go about guides, and it's like, yeah, it is.
<v Speaker 3>If you know you've managed if Google have managed to
<v Speaker 3>kill off the SEO of all normal guide rising websites
<v Speaker 3>that like actually intelligible guides to follow, so you know.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, the question is, and gotcha gets to this. Excuse me,
<v Speaker 1>where does the data come from? It's got to come
<v Speaker 1>from somewhere.
<v Speaker 2>It doesn't.
<v Speaker 1>There was a time when we were talking early machine
<v Speaker 1>learning where it's like, hey, we're gonna build tools that
<v Speaker 1>will just like throw their head against the wall inside
<v Speaker 1>a video game until they figure out like the optimal
<v Speaker 1>way to beat it. And it's like, oh, that's interesting,
<v Speaker 1>like building spoke tool to play a game, sort of
<v Speaker 1>like the early machine learning models that we're able to
<v Speaker 1>play Go and chess.
<v Speaker 2>Say okay, we can start applying that to all these
<v Speaker 2>video games.
<v Speaker 1>They're like, now, now we have these sort of generalized
<v Speaker 1>AI models that we're just gonna sit in there and
<v Speaker 1>they're gonna go read the guides on the internet and
<v Speaker 1>then come regurgitate that stuff to you and say, okay, well,
<v Speaker 1>I can see how that's convenient to someone, because when
<v Speaker 1>someone's playing a game, they spent seventy dollars to play
<v Speaker 1>this game. When they get stuck, they don't want to
<v Speaker 1>go into a guide and see, they're not going to
<v Speaker 1>the guy to see the ads and all the stuff
<v Speaker 1>that actually pays for the entire business. They just want
<v Speaker 1>to get the answer to their questions so they can
<v Speaker 1>get back to the game. So inherently there's this motivation
<v Speaker 1>of people don't want to be doing this thing they're
<v Speaker 1>already doing that pays for the whole business. And so
<v Speaker 1>if you can cut that out and just take the
<v Speaker 1>pertinent information and serve it to these people yourselves, you
<v Speaker 1>can cut out all of the work that the person
<v Speaker 1>did to actually get the answer in the first place.
<v Speaker 2>And then where does this data come from?
<v Speaker 1>You know, obviously some people will still putting guides on
<v Speaker 1>the internet, but there will be few and fewer, so
<v Speaker 1>that data could be worse and worse going forward, because yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know if people know guides pay for a
<v Speaker 1>lot of websites to actually function. That's where a lot
<v Speaker 1>of the search once came from. And I bet that
<v Speaker 1>SEO has created recently, if not completely gone gone, could
<v Speaker 1>put for a lot of websites.
<v Speaker 3>Yes, and no guides have gone down a lot, but
<v Speaker 3>maps a big interactive maps.
<v Speaker 2>Right, that's expensive to produce. Yeah, it is.
<v Speaker 3>It is that game of guides. The folks who I'm
<v Speaker 3>helping out with a lot, they focus a lot on
<v Speaker 3>interactive maps, and that stuff is time intensive and it
<v Speaker 3>requires prior showy tools to pull things out of games
<v Speaker 3>and to actually build them into your website. I will
<v Speaker 3>say upcoming releases never been a better time for guide writers.
<v Speaker 2>Yep.
<v Speaker 1>Anyway, there's there's a lot in some big video games
<v Speaker 1>coming up. All right, let's keep going here. Elden Ring
<v Speaker 1>on Switch To shows big improvements after months of performance adjustment.
<v Speaker 1>This is from Darren Bonthus at GameSpot, and I think
<v Speaker 1>this is pretty good news. Eldering was initially positioned as
<v Speaker 1>one of several big third party games headed to the
<v Speaker 1>Switch Too, but following a games Com twenty twenty five
<v Speaker 1>demo that showcased several technical issues in From Software's open
<v Speaker 1>world action RPG, particularly in handheld mode, publisher Bandy Namco
<v Speaker 1>delayed its release. After several months of performance adjustment, the
<v Speaker 1>game has re emerged at GDC twenty twenty six, and
<v Speaker 1>so far it looks to be in much better shape.
<v Speaker 1>One telling sign here is that Bandai Namco was confident
<v Speaker 1>enough to allow switch To handheld gameplay.
<v Speaker 2>To be recorded.
<v Speaker 1>I think over at game Spot they have a pretty
<v Speaker 1>good video of the camera right over Jake's shoulder and
<v Speaker 1>he's playing the game, and it looks like it's running
<v Speaker 1>pretty solid at least thirty frames per second, maybe forty
<v Speaker 1>frames per second. I hope that they have a mode
<v Speaker 1>that sort of just locks in forty frames per second,
<v Speaker 1>similar to what happened with Cyberpunk. That's great for the
<v Speaker 1>switch To, which has what is at one hundred and
<v Speaker 1>twenty hurts screen, So forty frames per second would it's
<v Speaker 1>perfectly divisible into that so you don't get the weird
<v Speaker 1>tearing and other artifacts that happen when you don't have
<v Speaker 1>a perfect match between frame rate and refresh rate. So
<v Speaker 1>it's like, yeah, that worked really well for Cyberpunk Elder Ring.
<v Speaker 1>You should be able to do the same thing, you
<v Speaker 1>would hope. I think this also, LEXI sets us up
<v Speaker 1>to be a little bit more optimistic that Dusk Bloods
<v Speaker 1>could come out this year if from Software has learned
<v Speaker 1>some hard won lessons.
<v Speaker 2>What do you think?
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, I totally shot in the dock, but I'm willing
<v Speaker 3>to bet that Nintendo sent some programmers and some people
<v Speaker 3>over there and were like, Hey, this is this is
<v Speaker 3>how DLSS works.
<v Speaker 2>You can turn it on. You can turn it on.
<v Speaker 3>Did you know that you can turn it on a hardway,
<v Speaker 3>Just like how Nintendo had to do the exact same
<v Speaker 3>thing with FSR for Elder Wing on Steam dex of like, hey,
<v Speaker 3>we actually built a thing that you should be using.
<v Speaker 3>Please use it. Please use it, guys, please use it please.
<v Speaker 1>The more yeah, they like, wait, They're like, we're going
<v Speaker 1>to make it so the shaters get pre built for
<v Speaker 1>your game when people boot it up, So it just
<v Speaker 1>like it's going to be performing great everywhere. People don't
<v Speaker 1>have to go to the place first in the game
<v Speaker 1>to get the shaters to start cashing. It's just going
<v Speaker 1>to happen from the beginning. And that's different from every
<v Speaker 1>other release. So the micro stuttering that happened on every
<v Speaker 1>platform with Elder Ring when it launched didn't happen on
<v Speaker 1>the Steam Deck. So wildly, Steam Deck was one of
<v Speaker 1>the better places to play that game for a very
<v Speaker 1>short while.
<v Speaker 2>That's what is required.
<v Speaker 1>When working with from though from Software is very, very talented,
<v Speaker 1>very good at making games. They're technical, I won't even
<v Speaker 1>say prowess, they're sort of emphasis on the technical side
<v Speaker 1>of things just seems diminished compared to everything else they do.
<v Speaker 1>And so their games come out and often have a
<v Speaker 1>lot of problems. And I was expecting Eldering to kind
<v Speaker 1>of just be a shit show on switch To because
<v Speaker 1>I didn't think Nintendo would give it the attention it
<v Speaker 1>was going to need. And we still don't know that
<v Speaker 1>they did, but I agree with your assessment that that's
<v Speaker 1>probably what happened here. Is Nintendo at the very least
<v Speaker 1>sense some emails and pointed them in the right direction,
<v Speaker 1>if not just sending people over to the studio to
<v Speaker 1>help figure it out.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, Farm is extremely a studio where the best way
<v Speaker 3>to play their games is like seven years later with
<v Speaker 3>newer GPUs of like, you know, if you're gonna play
<v Speaker 3>if you're gonna play Securo, the best way to play
<v Speaker 3>that game is like with your fifty eighty or something
<v Speaker 3>at four K with you know, it doesn't need any
<v Speaker 3>it can just run at one hundred and twenty frames
<v Speaker 3>per second and as barely any latency on like but
<v Speaker 3>when it came out, I know you were using high
<v Speaker 3>end cards. It's like, oh, there's a couple of even here,
<v Speaker 3>there's a couple of things that I'm kind of having
<v Speaker 3>to deal with.
<v Speaker 2>Ye have the vision and they stick to it.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, that's a shame when it comes to them releasing
<v Speaker 3>console only games or console exclusive games, is unless a
<v Speaker 3>Switch three comes out or Switch two Pro comes out,
<v Speaker 3>you're not gonna get like an enhanced version of the
<v Speaker 3>Dust Bloods, which is a shame.
<v Speaker 2>Yep.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, this is their first console exclusive, like exclusive to
<v Speaker 1>one console since Bloodborne.
<v Speaker 3>Since yeah, since Bloodborne and then Demon Souls and Demon Souls.
<v Speaker 2>Right right, you did before that and the remake.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, yeah, second Demon Souls is a different thing because
<v Speaker 3>it's almost the inverse where Blue Point were like a
<v Speaker 3>tech studio under our studio first rather than a gameplay
<v Speaker 3>and a like, you know, game design studio.
<v Speaker 1>And so yeah, I'm going to, like I said, get
<v Speaker 1>optimists optimistically or yeah, cautiously optimistic, I should say about
<v Speaker 1>Dust Bloods.
<v Speaker 2>Coming out this year. I did. I did a draft
<v Speaker 2>it in Fantasy, so that's part of it.
<v Speaker 1>But I think that is a game that if it
<v Speaker 1>can come out this year and deliver the way a
<v Speaker 1>front game can, uh, then Nintendo's got a very strong
<v Speaker 1>year in their pocket and they would like to sort
<v Speaker 1>of deliver on that, uh Pacopia and Dust Bloods, and
<v Speaker 1>then you know they have like one other big thing.
<v Speaker 1>It's like, oh that that switched to narrative around it's
<v Speaker 1>expensive and what games can I really get for?
<v Speaker 2>It changes pretty.
<v Speaker 1>Quickly, but you know, Dusk Bloods will have to deliver
<v Speaker 1>both in terms of actually coming out and then being
<v Speaker 1>the game that the from audience wants. I still think
<v Speaker 1>there's gonna be a lot of people who are like,
<v Speaker 1>I'm not getting a switch to to play this game.
<v Speaker 1>I'm just gonna be mad on the internet about it.
<v Speaker 1>And I get it. It's a lot of money, why,
<v Speaker 1>you know, And if you never wanted to switch to
<v Speaker 1>you just want to play from games, I can imagine
<v Speaker 1>that being pretty annoying.
<v Speaker 3>I I'm very angry that we forgot about the ps
<v Speaker 3>of your exclusive game that they made.
<v Speaker 2>What was that.
<v Speaker 1>Decreascene deso Right, that's okay, all right, Well we'll have
<v Speaker 1>des Serene week here on Giant Bomb everybody to make
<v Speaker 1>up for that mistake. Sorry and apologize, all right, Next
<v Speaker 1>story here, PC game projected to overtake console revenue by
<v Speaker 1>twenty twenty eight. This is from Alex Hopley at Game Reactor.
<v Speaker 1>Basically the story is that is the headline, but up. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>PC modern monetization is mainly micro transactions, led by or
<v Speaker 1>it was led by micro transactions, I should say, with
<v Speaker 1>forty eight percent of the platform's revenue being accounted for
<v Speaker 1>by micro transactions, Premium game sales represented twenty nine percent
<v Speaker 1>of the money it makes. Yeah, they expect that sort
<v Speaker 1>of just to keep ballooning, and the money that these
<v Speaker 1>games produce, whether it is from just selling games or
<v Speaker 1>micro transactions, to keep getting bigger and bigger and be
<v Speaker 1>bigger than consoles by twenty twenty eight.
<v Speaker 2>That's pretty quick.
<v Speaker 1>But it also just feels like, yeah, PC sort of
<v Speaker 1>hasn't missed a beat. You know, There's been a lot
<v Speaker 1>of times in its history where PC gaming was dead
<v Speaker 1>and then it's it just kind of continued chugging along
<v Speaker 1>on its very steady trajectory, and now it feels very
<v Speaker 1>stable and reliable compared to the piece or to the
<v Speaker 1>console side of things, and I think it has it
<v Speaker 1>just kind of won by default here, LEXI, Is that
<v Speaker 1>the best way.
<v Speaker 2>To view it? Yeah?
<v Speaker 3>I think the other thing that you need to keep
<v Speaker 3>in mind, and it's going to come up in the
<v Speaker 3>next story that we do, is you know, PC gaming
<v Speaker 3>includes roadblocks and Minecraft, which are also included in mobile
<v Speaker 3>gaming to a certain extent. I'm not sure how you
<v Speaker 3>split up games that are like that, that are so
<v Speaker 3>inter operagable between mobile and PC, but yeah, I think that.
<v Speaker 2>You're right.
<v Speaker 3>PC gaming has weirdly become it's easier to play certain
<v Speaker 3>old games on a PC than it is to play
<v Speaker 3>them on a console in some places, and it's easier
<v Speaker 3>to play new games at the highest possible settings on
<v Speaker 3>a PC than it is on consoles. And so you
<v Speaker 3>have it at both ends, where people who want the
<v Speaker 3>most premium experience are going for super expensive PCs, and
<v Speaker 3>people who want the most budget experience where whether it
<v Speaker 3>be that they are piushing games straight up, or whether
<v Speaker 3>it be that they are searching for deals and going
<v Speaker 3>on like G TWOA or whatever, or running like ten
<v Speaker 3>twenty graphics cards still and they're playing in net cafes.
<v Speaker 3>You know, the PC gaming is weirdly the highest high
<v Speaker 3>end and the lowest low end of the games industry,
<v Speaker 3>and you it's like it's a weird thing, but like
<v Speaker 3>it's the vanishing middle class. It's you know that just
<v Speaker 3>doesn't it doesn't exist anymore, and it's you know, slowly
<v Speaker 3>ev operating, and consoles were kind of the way to
<v Speaker 3>get into games if you were you know, middle class
<v Speaker 3>in a lot of ways.
<v Speaker 1>And so yeah, and it's it's and it's almost strange
<v Speaker 1>that there was a time where it's like I like
<v Speaker 1>to own my games and that means I like to
<v Speaker 1>play on console, and now it's like, oh, it feels
<v Speaker 1>like both the you know, the manufacturers that might make
<v Speaker 1>that kind of console next generation where it's like you
<v Speaker 1>would buy a lot of Blu rag disc games, they
<v Speaker 1>might not include disk drives with their next systems, and
<v Speaker 1>if they do, they'll be external, they'll be deeply emphasized.
<v Speaker 1>And while that is, you know, on PC that's long
<v Speaker 1>been dead, people have definitely adopted mentally this concept. And
<v Speaker 1>I know people are gonna chat shout, you don't own
<v Speaker 1>your games on Steam, You're like you're buying a license. Mentally,
<v Speaker 1>most people are like, like, I own a huge library
<v Speaker 1>games on Steam and it feels good to like have that,
<v Speaker 1>and they feel like a sense of security and control
<v Speaker 1>over their library and that is a sort of of
<v Speaker 1>an emotion that a lot of people in gaming deeply
<v Speaker 1>treasure of. I want to have control over my library
<v Speaker 1>of games. I've hoarded all this stuff and I want
<v Speaker 1>to protect my hoard. I want to sit on it
<v Speaker 1>like a dragon. And Steam has like just become the
<v Speaker 1>default answer there of like, yeah, you could build a healthy,
<v Speaker 1>secure library there and there's no risk of it going anywhere,
<v Speaker 1>and of course there always is, but that's not how
<v Speaker 1>anyone views it. So I think just sort of by
<v Speaker 1>being this stable, well known thing, they have presented themselves
<v Speaker 1>as a strong alternative to doing things on the console side,
<v Speaker 1>and I think it's slowly evinced people that if I
<v Speaker 1>want to have that feeling of I have my library
<v Speaker 1>and I can always access it, Steam's probably the answer.
<v Speaker 2>And PC gaming more broadly.
<v Speaker 3>Weird thing that I managed to do with my PC recently,
<v Speaker 3>because I got it pretty recently and I'm still kind
<v Speaker 3>of exploring things. One of my favorite games of all
<v Speaker 3>time is Dirt three. I adore Dirt three. It's such
<v Speaker 3>a fucking good rally game, like modern Valley game. It's
<v Speaker 3>so good. It's the closest you're going to get to
<v Speaker 3>the Sega Valley Games in a lot of ways.
<v Speaker 2>I'll pick it up, and I don't think I ever
<v Speaker 2>touched it.
<v Speaker 3>So that's the thing. It got delisted from Steam.
<v Speaker 2>Oh fine, Yeah.
<v Speaker 3>Dirt one and two, one, two, and three all got
<v Speaker 3>delisted from Steam, and the only one that is still
<v Speaker 3>on there is Dirt four on five And there is
<v Speaker 3>still ways to get Steam codes for that game. Yeah,
<v Speaker 3>And I managed to find a way to get a
<v Speaker 3>Steam code fort pretty cheap, and now I'm playing that
<v Speaker 3>game at like one hundred and twenty f P or
<v Speaker 3>two hundred and forty FP with like four K resolution,
<v Speaker 3>and I'm like, oh my god, this is the greatest
<v Speaker 3>thing ever. And yeah, that that's a real fun way
<v Speaker 3>to play that old game. And I would recommend people
<v Speaker 3>maybe seek out how to how to find those those keys.
<v Speaker 2>Yep, it's uh.
<v Speaker 1>And and there's a lot of downsides to digital, like
<v Speaker 1>the control that the publishers and developers have the ability
<v Speaker 1>to dealist games now of course, like a disc could
<v Speaker 1>just go out of print like that.
<v Speaker 2>That had similar issues in the past, But.
<v Speaker 1>The market and the way we can buy our games
<v Speaker 1>has changed sort of without our input, or if the
<v Speaker 1>input is we are willing to buy digital, and so
<v Speaker 1>they're going to de emphasize the other version because the
<v Speaker 1>other version, the physical side of things, cost them more money,
<v Speaker 1>so they would prefer we buy digital. So they sort
<v Speaker 1>of like not just in that direction, but yeah, the
<v Speaker 1>basically things have changed without us being, hey, we really
<v Speaker 1>like to buy games. Can we keep doing that? We
<v Speaker 1>don't care, we don't want to do it. We are
<v Speaker 1>going to de emphasize that. So you kind of have
<v Speaker 1>to find someplace that feels stable. And that is the
<v Speaker 1>PC side of the equation.
<v Speaker 2>All right.
<v Speaker 1>Roadblocks and Minecraft players are less likely to play traditional
<v Speaker 1>Triple A video games. This is from Lewis Packwood. This
<v Speaker 1>is another sort of thing that came out of GDC.
<v Speaker 1>New Zoo did a panel and then had a report
<v Speaker 1>on this and they said Roadblocks in particular has been
<v Speaker 1>at the forefront of this trend. We saw that its
<v Speaker 1>playtime grew around fifty percent a year over year, which
<v Speaker 1>is huge. A lot of that was driven by experiences
<v Speaker 1>like Steal a Brain, rot and Grow a Garden, which
<v Speaker 1>are very viral things. The question is what else are
<v Speaker 1>those people playing, What is the implication for the rest
<v Speaker 1>of the games industry, and when we look at that,
<v Speaker 1>we see that Roadblocks and Minecraft players are playing a
<v Speaker 1>lot of the other really big top ten live service games.
<v Speaker 1>Those games include Fortnite and GTA five and Call of Duty.
<v Speaker 1>But to Roadblocks and Minecraft players also play other titles
<v Speaker 1>apart from the above. There's a theory that these folks
<v Speaker 1>then drop out and play single player experiences and they
<v Speaker 1>go back to their live service experiences, and to some
<v Speaker 1>extent that is true. But what we find is that
<v Speaker 1>Roadblocks players under index and what a lot of the
<v Speaker 1>industry would consider very traditional good games. The idea here
<v Speaker 1>being like they play fewer than your your standard uh
<v Speaker 1>you know, citizen of gaming. And to me that makes
<v Speaker 1>sense because of the way like they view Roadblocks and
<v Speaker 1>Minecraft the new experience, Like they've already built up all
<v Speaker 1>of these sort of investments in their time and their
<v Speaker 1>understanding understanding of how Roadblocks and Minecraft work, and so
<v Speaker 1>if they want a new experience, it is often just
<v Speaker 1>easier and more rewarding for them to just go to
<v Speaker 1>the new experience. In Roadblocks, it's a platform with infinite
<v Speaker 1>new experiences as far as they're concerned, and even if
<v Speaker 1>it's all shitty, it's you know, it They've sunk the
<v Speaker 1>cost into it, so why not just keep going with it?
<v Speaker 1>And that is the appeal to publishers. It's the reason
<v Speaker 1>all these big companies want to have their own roadblocks.
<v Speaker 1>It's why I expect Grand Theft Auto six to present
<v Speaker 1>a little bit Grand Theft Auto five already does present
<v Speaker 1>a lot like roadblocks. I don't know if people like
<v Speaker 1>have looked at the way that the user generated games look.
<v Speaker 1>They have the same sort of Oh, here's the game
<v Speaker 1>or the you know, the little mode someone made, and
<v Speaker 1>here's how many people are playing it with a big
<v Speaker 1>red light next to it, similar to like a YouTube.
<v Speaker 1>That's how ro Roadblocks looks, and Grand Top thout of
<v Speaker 1>six is going to go in the same direction, because
<v Speaker 1>once you have an audience growing up in your ecosystem,
<v Speaker 1>it is a lot easier to keep them there, and
<v Speaker 1>they're much more likely to spend their next dollar with
<v Speaker 1>you than on some other video game out there on
<v Speaker 1>a random marketplace that they are a little bit less
<v Speaker 1>engaged with it.
<v Speaker 2>It's makes a lot of sense to me. What do
<v Speaker 2>you think it?
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, I was explaining this to my dad the other day.
<v Speaker 3>I can't remember what we were talking about, but it
<v Speaker 3>kind of came up the idea of people have their
<v Speaker 3>digital lockers, and if they have a bunch of skins
<v Speaker 3>in roadblocks, it is virtually impossible to get them to
<v Speaker 3>start a new game where they don't have that history
<v Speaker 3>of skins and items and achievements and whatever and tied
<v Speaker 3>to their account. It's the stelff that Microsoft kind of
<v Speaker 3>said about losing the PS four generation of what else
<v Speaker 3>the generation where people build their libraries, except in this
<v Speaker 3>case the generation the example is more like people have
<v Speaker 3>built up the muscle memory of skimming roadblocks, whereas they
<v Speaker 3>might not have the muscle memory of skimming GGA five.
<v Speaker 3>And so they're like, well, these roadblocks and mini games
<v Speaker 3>are just as good in my head, So I'm just
<v Speaker 3>going to keep on playing the new ones of those.
<v Speaker 3>And then when you compare those two traditional video games,
<v Speaker 3>which are a single experience and don't have multiple you know,
<v Speaker 3>countless modes and user generated content and whatever, those games
<v Speaker 3>seem so much smaller and seem so much worse value
<v Speaker 3>in a lot of ways. And yeah, I think it's
<v Speaker 3>it's a real existential crisis that the traditional games market
<v Speaker 3>needs to find a way to position itself and of
<v Speaker 3>making its game seem valuable in a way that they
<v Speaker 3>currently don't. And clearly the answer isn't raising the price,
<v Speaker 3>because that hasn't made games more valuable, and that has
<v Speaker 3>made people more like resisent to even buy the games.
<v Speaker 1>You're coming from roadblocks where you view things as mostly free.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, And it's how do you create the value in
<v Speaker 3>your game and how do you make it feel like
<v Speaker 3>people are getting a deal by playing your game, because
<v Speaker 3>that's so much of what this generation of players look
<v Speaker 3>for is they play Rollblocks because it's a deal, because
<v Speaker 3>it's a free game and they can start for free.
<v Speaker 3>You like it's been said on this website a million
<v Speaker 3>times before, but you are competing with free and it
<v Speaker 3>used to be piracy, now it's roadblocks, And how do
<v Speaker 3>you present yourself as more valuable than free? And so yeah,
<v Speaker 3>it's it's a real challenge.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, and it's like there's some things that can do that,
<v Speaker 1>but it are the things that already have a lot
<v Speaker 1>of emotional investment from people like Pacopia, Right, that's something
<v Speaker 1>that is going to be able to have that competition
<v Speaker 1>and often went out because people know they like Pokemon
<v Speaker 1>and that goes a very long way and then once
<v Speaker 1>a bunch of people are playing, then it has that
<v Speaker 1>social capital and the roadblocks has all that stuff as well,
<v Speaker 1>and in spades with younger audiences. Basically, it's like, okay,
<v Speaker 1>so this is going to be more difficult. It's going
<v Speaker 1>to continue to be more difficult because this audience has
<v Speaker 1>been trained to not buy video games to sell video games.
<v Speaker 1>Last couple of stories here, Marvel Maximum Collection is coming
<v Speaker 1>out this month. Last time they talked about it, they
<v Speaker 1>said it was coming soon. Now they've given a date.
<v Speaker 1>It is arriving digitally on the twenty seventh of March.
<v Speaker 1>That's that one with like Maximum Carnage, the Red cartridge game,
<v Speaker 1>and a bunch of other similar era X Men and
<v Speaker 1>it'sder Man games, and then Super Mario Galaxy Movie is
<v Speaker 1>set for a massive first weekend at the box office.
<v Speaker 1>They it looks like it's tracking to earn one hundred
<v Speaker 1>and sixty million dollars in the US alone on its
<v Speaker 1>first weekend. That would be bananas. That is a big,
<v Speaker 1>big number. That though does include the five day period
<v Speaker 1>of Easter weekends, so that's kind of how they are.
<v Speaker 1>That's one of the reasons they moved it up. It
<v Speaker 1>was originally going to come out April third, they moved
<v Speaker 1>it up to April first because I think they saw
<v Speaker 1>an opportunity to really dominate, and it's gonna seems like
<v Speaker 1>it's going to.
<v Speaker 3>You know, kids, Do you want to know who else
<v Speaker 3>had one more life?
<v Speaker 2>I came back from the dead, Not Luigi. It's not
<v Speaker 2>Louisian's time.
<v Speaker 3>Everybody, it's not like, yeah, anyway, I love it.
<v Speaker 2>That does it for the headlines.
<v Speaker 1>Let's start wrapping things up with the poll question from yesterday,
<v Speaker 1>and then we're gonna do the bump twelve here in
<v Speaker 1>a second, let's see here, I'm gonna refresh get the
<v Speaker 1>most recent results for this poll question from a day ago.
<v Speaker 2>Are you getting a switch to for Pacopia? Yes?
<v Speaker 3>No?
<v Speaker 1>Or or I already had a switch to? Fifty seven
<v Speaker 1>percent of our respondents already have a switch to. We
<v Speaker 1>kind of saw that in some polls recently, where it's like,
<v Speaker 1>oh yeah, there's like maybe a quarter of people who
<v Speaker 1>are still looking to get a switch to, but a
<v Speaker 1>lot of our audience has already purchased one. For the
<v Speaker 1>people in that remainder, thirty eight percent said no, they're
<v Speaker 1>not getting a switch to for Procopia and then five
<v Speaker 1>percent said yes, I would say that that is.
<v Speaker 2>Actually probably still a pretty big number.
<v Speaker 1>Anything that can convince someone to spend four hundred and
<v Speaker 1>fifty dollars is at like five percent of a group
<v Speaker 1>that's moving the needle, Like it takes a lot to
<v Speaker 1>get people to get over the hump there, and if
<v Speaker 1>this is the game that does it for five percent,
<v Speaker 1>this is probably going to show up in the numbers
<v Speaker 1>here for Nintendo and the next time they talk about
<v Speaker 1>how their console is sold, right.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, definitely, that's that's not insignific numbers. Even if it
<v Speaker 3>is a minority of a minority, that's still like shifting units,
<v Speaker 3>which is the hardest thing to do. It's is shifting
<v Speaker 3>the hardware. So anything that increases that number is like
<v Speaker 3>and like, it's not like this game is a lost leader.
<v Speaker 3>It's not like the Last of Us where they spent
<v Speaker 3>three hundred million dollars to make ash and this.
<v Speaker 2>Was by Coe Techmo.
<v Speaker 3>Like come on, yeah, this game was contracted out and
<v Speaker 3>they kind of you know, they Coy Techmo's made their
<v Speaker 3>money from it, and now it's all just Nintendo making
<v Speaker 3>it like all.
<v Speaker 1>Each other and like them in a g Omega Force,
<v Speaker 1>got I always want to say Force, Omega Force and
<v Speaker 1>Nintendo and they're like, all right, let's let's rent it
<v Speaker 1>back and we're gonna make even more money next time,
<v Speaker 1>and and they're right, this will keep happening in the future.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, this is probably the one for uh, the system.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know, Maybe they have another one in five years,
<v Speaker 1>we'll see.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, okay, So that does it for the pole question.
<v Speaker 1>No new pole question, because it's Friday, and we do
<v Speaker 1>in the week with the Bomb twelve.
<v Speaker 2>We'll get to that here in a second.
<v Speaker 1>Before we do that, we should probably ask Lexi, where
<v Speaker 1>can we find you on the internet? What do you
<v Speaker 1>have going on and all that good stuff.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, you can find me on Blue Sky at Lexloody
<v Speaker 3>dot xyz. And I'm currently reviewing a few things, like
<v Speaker 3>I said, Marathon and another game that I'll be able
<v Speaker 3>to talk about soon also at the moment. Oh yeah,
<v Speaker 3>check out Statmanu dot co dot uk. It's the website
<v Speaker 3>I won for people trying to break into games media.
<v Speaker 3>Were an independent outlett and we could always do with
<v Speaker 3>more support, And we have a Patreon as well. Go
<v Speaker 3>support that because we could really do with that currently
<v Speaker 3>starting later today. I think it is March thirteenth to
<v Speaker 3>March nineteenth on Steam. There is an Irish Video Games
<v Speaker 3>Festival going on or seam event and sale on a
<v Speaker 3>bunch of Irish video games. I'm trying with a bunch
<v Speaker 3>of the people who work on those games, and I've
<v Speaker 3>talked to a bunch of them, and so a bunch
<v Speaker 3>of those are going on sale. There's some really cool
<v Speaker 3>things like the say Once of Blake manor the Enigma
<v Speaker 3>Studios trilogy, which are already cool. TLT has a demo
<v Speaker 3>which is a game about a horse. Gub, Have I
<v Speaker 3>told you about Tult?
<v Speaker 2>I think you might have told me about Tult. I
<v Speaker 2>wasn't sure.
<v Speaker 1>I don't think I played it though, So you told
<v Speaker 1>me about it or I think you just sent me
<v Speaker 1>a link about it.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah.
<v Speaker 3>Tult is a game where you play as a horse,
<v Speaker 3>and also there's another horse called Tony Maloney. It's a
<v Speaker 3>real good time. Yeah, you get to meet Tony Maloney,
<v Speaker 3>which is a real good time. There is a upcoming
<v Speaker 3>pinball Philosophy game which I think would be very interesting
<v Speaker 3>for Baccalau to play. I would love to see him
<v Speaker 3>play Bash. And there's a game based off of Cooler World.
<v Speaker 3>If you remember that, the PS one puzzle game where
<v Speaker 3>you roll a ball through three D environments and so yeah,
<v Speaker 3>check that out. It's the image game sale on Steam.
<v Speaker 3>Lots of lovely folks involved with that. I don't think
<v Speaker 3>the link is live yet or it's not up yet,
<v Speaker 3>but it will be up Lasia today and at once
<v Speaker 3>until the nineteenth.
<v Speaker 2>Excellent.
<v Speaker 1>I'm looking forward to spend some time with those games.
<v Speaker 1>All right, with that out of the way, let's see,
<v Speaker 1>we should probably talk about what we have going on
<v Speaker 1>at Giant Bomb. We are going to be doing upf
<v Speaker 1>here in a little while. It's going to be a
<v Speaker 1>grab bag at least, that was the last thing we said.
<v Speaker 1>So we'll probably I'll just bring a game or two
<v Speaker 1>and see what we got, hang out, shoot the ship,
<v Speaker 1>I'll hang out with my friends for the first time
<v Speaker 1>in a while.
<v Speaker 2>That'll be good.
<v Speaker 3>And then it goes live in literally an hour. I
<v Speaker 3>just checked the email. Okay, goes in literally an hour.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>It's like, is there something that people should just like
<v Speaker 1>search easily to find it?
<v Speaker 2>Like you like, what would you say it is? Let me?
<v Speaker 3>It is Steam Store sale games from Ireland. You'll see
<v Speaker 3>it when you log into the Steam you know, main
<v Speaker 3>page on the cawsel. Yeah, it will be on me. Yeah,
<v Speaker 3>it'll be on the main page. And yeah check out.
<v Speaker 3>Told to specishly because that game's fucking ridiculous, excellent.
<v Speaker 1>I'm going to do so. I need to meet Tony Baloney. Everybody,
<v Speaker 1>everyone knows.
<v Speaker 3>Me Maloney, Maloney, a fine Irish name.
<v Speaker 2>Tony.
<v Speaker 1>I could have sworn the second time you said Beloney,
<v Speaker 1>I was like, I thought it was Tony Maloney. Then
<v Speaker 1>I thought you said Tony Boloney. I'm all right, correction, Okay,
<v Speaker 1>got it. We're gonna get in there and we're gonna
<v Speaker 1>learn all about Tony Maloney, Anthony Maloney as I call him.
<v Speaker 1>Let's wrap up the week, though, everybody, it's time to
<v Speaker 1>do the bomb twelve. These are the twelve games that
<v Speaker 1>really matter to people who are really playing video games.
<v Speaker 1>I have the fiding right here where I can have
<v Speaker 1>the full twelve game list, starting with number twelve.
<v Speaker 2>Who did this? Was it you?
<v Speaker 1>Jesse Vittelli Quest sixty four at number twelve. Number eleven
<v Speaker 1>is Neo three, Number ten is Overwatch.
<v Speaker 2>Number nine is blue Prints.
<v Speaker 1>Now that that game is out on switch, that seems
<v Speaker 1>to be boosting its popularity, which is a trend. I
<v Speaker 1>noticed if a game launches on Switch, there's a chance
<v Speaker 1>it's going to show back up on this list. Number
<v Speaker 1>eight is Mugenics, Number seven is Esoteric EBB. Number six
<v Speaker 1>minis Shoot Adventures, another one that just launched on Switch,
<v Speaker 1>I think at other consoles, and that's helping it raise
<v Speaker 1>its profile. Finally, number five World of Warcraft Midnight. Number
<v Speaker 1>four is Slay the Spire two. Number three Resident Evil Requiem.
<v Speaker 1>Number two is Marathon, and yes that means number one
<v Speaker 1>is Pokemon Pacopia. No surprise that game is taking over
<v Speaker 1>the world. I suppose maybe the one surprise here is
<v Speaker 1>that Slay the Spire two is you know, that is
<v Speaker 1>also taking over the world. That had like five hundred
<v Speaker 1>thousand concurrence and it didn't correct the top three. But
<v Speaker 1>I bet there's a lot of people who are like, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I played it in early access, but I'm still my
<v Speaker 1>viral game right.
<v Speaker 2>Now is Pocopia or Marathon or whatever.
<v Speaker 1>So Slay the Spy or two with a really respectable
<v Speaker 1>showing there at number four, What have you been playing?
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, I've really been liking Marathon. It's what I want
<v Speaker 3>to be playing at the moment and I'm not playing
<v Speaker 3>it and it's annoying me. And yeah, I I I
<v Speaker 3>squatted up with Alissa mccante the other day. I'm kind
<v Speaker 3>of showing through through the first couple of quests, and
<v Speaker 3>once you start to like understand the language of that
<v Speaker 3>game and kind of get into the swing of things,
<v Speaker 3>it's it's a lot of fun. It is extremely hostile,
<v Speaker 3>which I'm still kind of torn on because so much
<v Speaker 3>of that genre is meant to be about maybe working
<v Speaker 3>together with people who you'd normally be rivaled against. But
<v Speaker 3>also the shooting in that game is really fun, and
<v Speaker 3>so shooting those fuckers feels pretty good.
<v Speaker 1>Good amount of stuf to shoot, Like, that's the thing.
<v Speaker 1>Even between meeting other humans, there's plenty to shoot and
<v Speaker 1>it's okay, So you're doing the fun thing quite frequently
<v Speaker 1>in this game.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, I'm at the point now where I'm kind of
<v Speaker 3>doing a lot of objectives that aren't part of contracts
<v Speaker 3>of like, hey, there's this you know, world event that
<v Speaker 3>appears on this map. Let's go do that and see
<v Speaker 3>if we can extract in time. And like when me
<v Speaker 3>and Alyssa played, we had a really cool moment where
<v Speaker 3>we did one of these side contracts and it was like, Okay,
<v Speaker 3>get a thing in South Relay, download that code, kill
<v Speaker 3>a boss and get the code off of him. Go
<v Speaker 3>to North Relay upload the code, call in a bunch
<v Speaker 3>of even more tough enemies and they'll drop in with
<v Speaker 3>some really good loose and if you can kill those,
<v Speaker 3>you can then extract with that. And we extracted with
<v Speaker 3>like thirty seconds left, and it was a lot of fun,
<v Speaker 3>and like stuff like that is really really fun.
<v Speaker 2>Yep, exactly. I just urber a merchant storytelling like that
<v Speaker 2>is always going to get me, all right.
<v Speaker 1>So that was the Bomb twelve. We're gonna do another
<v Speaker 1>one next week. I will get a new form uh
<v Speaker 1>post posted on that little link on giant bomb dot com.
<v Speaker 1>If you scroll down you can see the current Bomb
<v Speaker 1>twelve and then there's a vote here button you cook
<v Speaker 1>on that. I'll take you to this form get that
<v Speaker 1>all updated here very soon today. In the meantime, I
<v Speaker 1>think that's gonna wrap us all up. Lex Luddie, thank
<v Speaker 1>you so much for hanging out with me today and
<v Speaker 1>talking about video games.
<v Speaker 2>I really appreciate it.
<v Speaker 3>Anytime, glob anytime.
<v Speaker 1>Thank you Jan for producing Thank you everybody for watching.
<v Speaker 1>You're the best audience in gaming. Until next time, have
<v Speaker 1>a good one, take care of yourself and goodbye.