I'm so out of the competitive fighting
game that when I went
over here to this tab,
I thought this was
Wolverine for a second.
What?
What? I was like, what is it?
Am I on the wrong tab?
And then I thought
this was a Van Halen logo.
Good morning, everybody. Welcome to
another episode of Off the Console.
My name is Gardner. I'm
joined by my friends High Tech,
Low Life and James, aka
The Brink. What's up, guys?
Off the Console is the hottest new thing
in tech and gaming and everything nerdy.
And we're going to be talking about some
awesome, like, and some
kind of scary topics today.
The big one is EA being bought by Saudi
Arabia and Jared Kushner,
which we'll get into shortly.
We're also talking about Xbox Game Pass,
the price being
increased, which, you know,
completes Microsoft's euthanasia arc of
Xbox. Then we've got the
RGLIX, whatever the heck,
shipping early to people in France.
That's fun and a whole lot more.
So make sure you get subscribed to the
channel so you don't miss
new episodes as they come out.
We're also on the Fetaverse at Off the
Console show at what is it?
I get this wrong all the time. At Off the
Console show at podcast.subscribe2.me.
And you can follow our RSS feed anywhere
you listen to podcasts.
Without further ado, let's get into the
show, guys. The big topic this morning.
Oh, wait, actually, no, we do. It's been
two weeks since I've been here. Sorry.
We like to start to show off by talking
about the things we've
done in the prior week. So,
hi, Tech, what have you been playing, AKA
or slash doing on the
on in your free time?
So the document sheet still says
Silksong, but I've been
getting back into Diablo 4.
And I've also, but also the press portal
for the next fest demos has come out.
So there are some next fest demos
available, which means I've been looking
into playing some of those.
And I think one of the ones I've played
right now that's super
interesting is a game called
Alabaster Dawn, which is made by the same
guys that made CrossCode.
And my God, it's like the
most gorgeous looking pixel art like in
motion that I've ever seen.
You have to you have to see
it to believe it. So it's like a top down
sort of action game. Like
you guys have played CrossCode,
right? Oh, yeah, CrossCode is awesome.
Yeah, it's very I think the
gameplay is very similar to
CrossCode, of course, same developers.
Now, the question is CrossCode was
released. It was like
written in HTML and JavaScript. Right.
This is also released. This is also
OK. HTML5 as well. Yeah,
that's so sick. I love that.
Yeah. As a web
developer, that tickled me.
Wow, dude, this looks amazing. I'm really
excited to check it out.
Dude, I still can't believe this is made
in like a web browser, like
made to run in a web browser,
basically. Yeah. So for the audio
listeners, it's kind of
like a two point five D
like world inhabited by pixel art
characters. And it just looks and it's
running in a web browser,
which is wild. But you wouldn't know, you
know, it's like I think
it's a Firefox kiosk mode.
Right. Like it's pretty neat. Oh,
interesting. I don't know. I haven't I
haven't evaluated the
actual file, the actual executables.
Yeah, it is two point five
D. But like, you know how like
most two point five games have like 3D
models for like the terrain
and whatnot. Yeah. This has like
pixel art for the terrain. And yeah, I
was going to say it like it
has that that feel where like
it's not it doesn't feel like it's like
exclusively like 3D geometry.
Like the I don't know if the
textures are fully pixel art or if it's
like doing some kind of
like, like perspective
manipulation on on on sprites to make
them appear 3D. But it looks really cool.
Yeah, that that's probably one of my
favorite demos I've tried out
right now. That said, not all
demos have been released yet, of course.
So it's only a matter of
time before I try them all out.
Or try out as many as I can potentially.
But yeah, that's what
I've been doing this week.
I guess I could talk
about what I've been doing.
I and then we'll get to like what
gardeners because gardeners have been
gone for a little bit.
And yeah, you have a lot of good stuff. I
have been messing around
with lossless and FSR four
on the steam deck. And I am both really
impressed and also a little disappointed
because the input lag is a little bit
high on some of the
games. Some games actually
isn't too bad, but the loss. Yeah,
there's some input lag.
And if it's an action game,
that really matters. And so have you guys
played around with the
lossless stuff or FSR
four for the steam deck yet? No, no. It's
impressive. And
honestly, if they baked it
into the steam deck, which they could,
because right now you have
to do it through like the
decky loader. And then you also have to
get like a pre-release of
the lossless or like a certain
plugin to end yet the by lossless on
steam and all that. It's impressive,
especially if you only
have a steam deck, like it definitely
will extend the life of it,
but it also has a little bit of
that input lag, depending on how, because
you can adjust the lossless
to be like two times and then
you can increase your frame rate. And it
very much does so, but a
little bit at the cost of input,
like controller input. So it's definitely
worth it. And I was, if it
was going to work perfect,
then I would potentially have switched
over to like, maybe wouldn't
have gotten the Xbox handheld,
but I'm thinking about still getting
that. But it's pretty interesting. It
doesn't work for everyone.
A thousand dollar handheld? Yeah, but I
can write it off on taxes if I do a
couple of videos on it.
So I have some taxes coming up next year.
And I'm going to, but
yeah, it doesn't, it works for
DirectX 11 and 12, just as a note too for
anyone that's so if the
game supports DirectX 11 or 12,
it uses like DLSS and then tricks it into
using FSR. It's a whole
thing. But yeah, between that and
playing the dwarf game, Deep Rock
Galactic, survivor,
survivor. That's what I've been doing
this week. It's really fun. Nice. Nice. I
know some guys that
like Deep Rock Galactic,
like the actual game though. I like both
a lot. I just, I don't play,
I don't have anyone to play
with. So I play by myself with the
survivor. That's fair enough.
And I think Gardner had some
interesting stories to tell us. He was a
summer special last week.
Yeah, I was in Berlin, Germany
last week. That's why I wasn't on the
podcast. And that was quite
fun. Damn. Tell us about it,
man. What were you doing there? I was
doing a tour of Europe, checking out fast
food restaurants and
how they differ from the United States.
Just kidding. I was actually
at the next cloud conference.
No, dude, the next cloud conference was
sick, man. Here, I'll show a little
slideshow presentation.
So this was my press badge. I was a
member of the press. Yeah.
Really, really fun. Yeah,
which is weird to me because I don't
think of myself as a press guy. But-
I mean, I think we all qualify as quote
unquote press, even if we're not like
with a press outlet.
Gardner Bryant counts as a press outlet,
I guess. But this was me after my
interview with Frank,
the CEO of Next Cloud, which was really
cool. And that's Tech Lord.
You guys know Tech Lord, Henry?
Tech Lord or Tech Lord? Lore, L-O-R-E.
Oh, that would have not something
feels named Tech Lord. Tech Lord. But no,
I don't know who he is.
Yeah. So I met Tech Lord.
He does privacy stuff on YouTube and on
PeerTube, and we actually
have our instances peered,
which is nice. And then also I met
Brandon Hopkins from Tech
Hut, which was he's a really
cool dude. I bet we could get them on the
podcast at some point. Oh, I
thought that guy on the side
was Linux Torvalds. Kind of looked like,
yeah, he kind of looks like
Linus a little bit. That's
Chris. That was Chris Duff. He's my
contact there at Next Cloud. Yeah, it was
great. I made a video,
like a vlog about it on my channel. It's
on PeerTube as well. I did
an interview. It was like
like an eight minute video with Frank
from Next Cloud. And I had a lot of fun.
It was very, very rewarding. I got to
meet cool people. That
is very nice. Do they make
any major announcements or? They dropped
Next Cloud 25, Autumn
Edition. They do like three,
I think they do three major releases a
year. Or maybe they do
three releases a year and one of
them's major. I think this was the major
update. It had some cool new features.
Like if I understand
correctly, I believe they have some AI
optimization stuff. So Next Cloud
actually supports local and
remote AI stuff that you can integrate
like a deep seek or some
kind of image categorization
thing. And you can actually get a similar
experience to Google Photos where it will
scan all your photos and label people,
like familiar faces or
objects or whatever. You can
do that with Next Cloud now, which is
really sick. Next Cloud Talk is also like
this Microsoft Teams
Mattermost situation. And it's like a
drop in replacement in a
lot of ways for Slack and that
kind of shit. And that got some big
updates. And there were like, they had
400 people sign up for
the event to go to the event. And they
had numbers differed, but
they had about 330 people
actually show up. And then a bunch of
people just were passing by
the venue, saw Next Cloud and
were like, "Hey, that's cool. I'm going
to go check that out." So
there were people coming in
off the streets to like hang out with the
Next Cloud group. It's
pretty sad. That's cool.
That is pretty cool. Now, aside from Next
Cloud, did you go
anywhere else in Germany?
Did you have some local German food? Did
you go to Octoberfest?
I had a beer. Okay. I'm a type one
diabetic. So I had a beer and that was a
huge mistake because
like it made my blood sugar go very low,
very quickly. And it was
unpredictable for the next
two days. So that was cool. But I had a
beer and it was delicious.
Like I love beer and I wish I
could drink it more often. And then so
not too much Oktoberfest
thing, but I did have two
authentic German dishes. One was called
Rinner-Roulada or something like that.
All that.
Imagine a cinnamon roll, but replace the
cinnamon with mushrooms and
then replace the roll with
beef. Oh yeah. Wait, what?
That's a weird way to put it.
Well, I mean, I don't know how to
pronounce it. Like, I
mean, literally it's like,
it was like shaved steak kind of. And it
was like mushrooms in
it and it was rolled up.
It's like, oh, yeah. And it was I mean,
dude, it was like this big around
and then it had like it came with like
potato truffles and red
cabbage, like gravy. It was so
delicious. And then I don't remember what
the other one was, but
it was another beef dish.
Oh, it was beef. Yeah, it was good. I
didn't have schnitzel
because there's a lot of carbs
and schnitzel. So did you have any donor
kabobs? Dude, OK, I was
recommended to go to like one of
the Turkish kabob places that was right
there. And I didn't have a
chance to because I actually
moved my flight back. I was going to be
there for an extra three
days after the conference.
And I had a client emergency that I had
to come home for, which.
Oh, damn. Yeah, that was annoying. But I
hate when I hate when
that happens to me. And I was
you know, I was in Japan, I was trying to
go to that famous Omurice place. Kichiki,
the one that's on the one with the guy
that's on YouTube. I'm sure you've I
think you've seen it,
right? Sounds familiar. But like he's the
guy that's super excited.
He makes like the perfect
Omurice. And I never got to go when I was
in Kyoto. I was only
in Kyoto for a few days.
Yeah. I still haven't told you everything
about the Japan trip.
Yeah, because like it's like it feels
like almost like a haze
now, but I have to like
I have to recollect a lot of things to.
Yeah, the worst thing about
the client thing is like if
there had been any one technical like on
their team, I could have
like described how to do it
over the phone. But like, well, nobody on
their team would have
been able to to follow my
instructions. So I was like, I have to go
back for this man. If
I was on their team,
I probably could have followed it maybe.
Oh, yeah, dude, it was
really simple. It was just like,
unplug this thing and then like run
another cable and plug this
in. I well, when I was there,
when I was in Germany and I was talking
to them, they were like,
yeah, we can't access the internet
on the point of sale machines. And so I
had no idea what was wrong
and some like long story short,
I didn't know what the hell the problem
was. And I thought it
was something like way more
problematic. And then I got there and I
had to just move some
cables around. I was like,
are you kidding me, dude? I hate when
clients do that shit.
Yeah, it sounds like a lot
of fun. I wish. Yeah, maybe.
Yeah, no, Germany was fun. I had a blast,
met a lot of really great
people. And hopefully I can
go back next year for next conference 26,
which would be sick. Sick. Yeah.
Germany or France? I mean, it sounds like
if you live in France,
you get your stuff early.
I know. Right.
About that later. And you're only like,
then you're next door to Germany. So you
can just take a train.
Yeah. Go pick up your
early package and head back.
Exactly. Got to move off the console,
man. Right. Well, so guys, we got some
major stories we got
to jump into. The first one here is
Electronic Arts is being
acquired by the Saudi government
and by some private investors in the US,
which is in no way problematic, right?
EA Sports is in the
private investment firm.
Yeah, it's normally I wouldn't be against
like, I, it's annoying to
have companies be on the
stock market because then they're that
need to adhere to like
making short term gains. And it
really is like ruins a lot of companies
like Blizzard and stuff.
But also having it privately
owned by these major firms is just as
problematic because they'll squeeze it
for whatever reason.
They'll try to influence how things are
made. They'll yeah. And
Saudi Arabia has a goal
in mind for a lot of this stuff. And then
on top of that, Jared
Kushner being a part of this is.
Another issue on. Yeah.
Man, there's going to be another
political episode, isn't it?
Right out the gate, too.
The biggest news. Yeah, it's the biggest.
It is political. Yeah.
When you have a country that has a
private firm like Saudi
Arabia, because they have multiple
private firms and they acquire a lot
because they have a lot
of oil money and they're
diversing, which is actually not a bad
play. It's just Saudi
Arabia. It's not to say anything
bad about people that live there. It's
just, you know, yeah, I
say crap about the US.
I say crap about other
countries. It's just problematic.
Yeah. Yeah.
I would want the US to own EA.
So. No. So there is a game. There is a
game company that Saudi
Arabia basically owns now
that used to be a pretty big arcade
developer in Japan called S
and K. They made Fatal Fury,
King of Fighters, Metal Slug. Yeah. And
it seems like they're
doing pretty well now.
I don't think there's any so far. I
haven't seen any effects of the games
that would make it seem
like their Saudi influence
perhaps, but. Give it time. Yeah.
What they're doing is they're acquiring
things to help diversify
their portfolio and then they're
trying to bring it to them. So they have
a lot of events coming to
Saudi Arabia. So there's a lot of
trying to wash things in so they can be a
part of it and just give it
time. It will eventually show
it's ugly head, I think. But the the
problem with going there is that they
don't have very good
rights for human for certain humans. And
so. Yeah. Yeah. Like the
thing is with with the Saudis,
like the effect of them owning the these
media conglomerates is
silent. Right. Like that's the
effect. Like you they command and conquer
has always been a bit
tongue in cheek, but it's also
been a little politically incorrect.
Right. If there's ever a
new command and conquer game,
you can bet that like there won't be
anything critical at all
about, you know, and I mean,
command and conquer is like a joke.
Right. Like the story is
foolish. But you take my meaning.
You know, you have like comedians going
over to the reality comedy
festival. And and these are
like and some of these comedians are like
comedians I respected, but they're not
allowed to criticize
the Saudi government or any religion or
anything like that. And it's like, dude,
put a muzzle on your favorite comedian
and what are they? They're nothing.
It's the same thing here with with these
games. It's very much
they they will see it come to
fruition, I think sooner or later, I will
have to say. And this is bad
on me, but there is one thing
that they could do that make me like
sanctify this relationship
or what others this purchase.
And that's really dead space to remake.
Yeah. But that's just me
being human, I guess. But at the
end of the day, I still don't approve of
it. But if you're going to
do something bad like this,
might as well I'll ask something. Give us
dead space to maybe the
Saudi prince really wants dead
space to and three. That's why he did it.
Yes. So we do know about
Mr. Saudi Prince, of course.
We do know about the private medicine
firm. And oh, yes, there he is. Mr.
Saudi Prince. He used to be known as
Sweetheart Yukie Yukio,
which was kind of a dumb name.
No offense. Don't don't detect me. No,
you can't go to Saudi Arabia now.
No, I mean, you can't go to Saudi Arabia
if you like look at
this profile and be like,
oh, my God, how embarrassing. Like you're
never allowed there anymore.
There is. Yeah. Is that an AI generated
photo? It looks like he could have
afforded a real artist.
He could have afforded like an actual
like manga artist from Japan, like paid
him like handsomely.
Yeah, but it's this way. Yeah, whatever.
But dude, he just bought the A.
Yeah, yeah. Click on click on that era
that like shows all
the previous nicknames.
Yeah, I bought. Oh, my God. Oh, dude.
This right here. Valve.
Valve.
V-A-L-V-E. Valve next.
That is a way valve sounds.
Yeah, that is kind of funny. No, no, I
think he like just put in asterisks.
Oh, that's what I think. Yeah. To make
people guess. It's not
going to be valve, obviously,
until, you know, Gabe Newell, hopefully
you live long and
prosperous, even if it's on those mega
yachts, I'd prefer you to own valve slash
steam as opposed to the
Saudis. But or Jared Kushner.
You know, you know, the one thing that
really yeah, I didn't make
the connection until they said
until everyone started making a deal
about it being Jared Kushner's company.
That's the one that's more interesting or
more has potentially more
negative. What's the word
I'm looking for implications, so to
speak? Because of those for
those who don't know, Jared
Kushner is the son-in-law of El
Presidente, current sitting El
Presidente. So there is no question
about it that I'm sure he's going to try
to make. The big question is
what is he going to do? Is he
I wonder if he's going to make
Battlefield 7 like US propaganda is going
to make he's going to make
it a less shitty version of America's
army. Well, he's not in the
administration this time, is he?
Do not. Yeah, I don't. I don't think he
is. But he gets a lot of deals
like what they say about said
about Hunter Biden, which some of them,
you know, probably true. Not going to
defend the dude. But
Jared Kushner is just that's what he's
doing. He just uses names
and all that to get his deals
through. I mean, at this point, we can
tell that Trump doesn't
care. He has a lot of investments
that are just out in the open. Right. So
the big question is whether or not
affinity partners is going to just
squeeze EA or if they're going
to turn EA to something else,
so to speak. That's my big concern. This
only just happened a few
days ago. So of course,
we don't know for certain. I think this
would have serious red flags even if
the other political
party ODA. Agreed. Yeah.
I don't like you using your political
influence to both like buy and affect
the media like this. Like it needs to be
a little bit less tied to
politics, in my opinion.
Yeah. I mean, I have the same problem
with this that I have with
Oracle taking over TikTok. Like
I have the exact same issue. The only
difference is Larry Ellison's like
private interests and
Oracle has private interests where the
Saudis and even Jared Kushner have like
possibly more nefarious ambitions. So
that's really the only difference.
It's not like EA is doing well. So I'm
really like there's not
like they're buying it because
it's a great investment. So. Yeah. I
mean, the big thing for
me is like, I don't care if
I don't care if like EA starts making
great games. If they come
out with like Mirror's Edge 3,
I'm not going to play it. Like if they
come out with Command and
Conquer Red Alert 4, I'm not
going to play it. I'm not going to buy
it. I'm not going to support
EA anymore. And that's been my
policy for a while. And I did make an
exception to buy the Command
and Conquer games that launched
on Steam recently. But like, that's it.
Like I'm not going to support this. I
don't believe in it.
I have a very moral issue if it's Dead
Space. But you know what? I'm lucky
enough to where they
won't release Dead Space 2 or 3. So.
Yeah. So here's another
thing too about this deal.
It's a leveraged buyout, which means EA
owns $20 billion to the
banks. So I mean, that's like a
third of the, that's a little over a
third of the amount that, you know, the
Saudis and Jared Kushner
paid for it. The big question now is what
will they do now to pay
that off? Word has it, they
might be trying to leverage AI more and
laying off more people. But the big
question is, does it
spell the end of EA? Are we witnessing
the death of EA as we speak? Quite
possible. No. The average
person's not going to care. They're not
going to realize what's going on. They
just don't have time
to. Well, dude, I mean, EA's not doing
well right now anyway. No, they're not.
But there is still a
chance, like going private to like this
and all that, like there is
actually a better chance of
this, of them succeeding now than doing
short term gains like they
were doing with being owned on
the stock market or by, you know, being
on stock market. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we
don't know if they're
still going to try to go for short term
gains. I mean, going private doesn't
necessarily guarantee
that they'll just turn things around. No,
but Saudi Arabia owns
this stuff for a long term,
in my opinion, they diversify because
they know that oil will dry up
eventually. I've read a couple
of articles on this already that they
really are trying to diversify because
they know oil is not
going to be around. So this is just one
of those things. And I have
a feeling because they don't
need for money, they don't want for money
right now. They're fine
with long term, like getting it
back into a better state. I could see
that Jared Kushner on the
other end. I don't know, like
anything him or the Trump family touches
is almost always kind of a
scam run. And so it will be
interesting because like right now, the
like upcoming games that EA
is coming out with is like
battle filled six, which is actually
looking okay. Plants versus zombies
replanted, which is interesting.
And then Star Wars Zero Company. Those
are the three that I see on
Steam that they're coming out
with. And so are they still doing like
football, soccer games?
Yes, they still do, Matt. And I
think they lost. They lost the FIFA
license. They lost the FIFA one. Yeah,
that's probably one of
the biggest blows to EA because like,
yeah, people buy FIFA games. They don't
buy fucking FC games.
Yeah. Yeah. Look, it would be awesome if
you people buy it because it
said FIFA on it. Now it doesn't
say FIFA. Yeah, no one's buying it. This
is a hard one. Split
Fiction is published by EA and
Hayes Light Studios. I actually really
think they deserve to be supported
because they do good work.
That's hard. Yeah. Well, I mean, if they
wanted, if they want to be supported,
they should go with an ethical publisher.
Well, yeah, they I don't
know if they can do that now.
That's a really hard. I don't know if
they could do that now.
They'd have to break off.
I think I think it would have to be for
future games. I don't
know. I don't think they can do
it for all. I don't think Joseph Fares
can do it for all of his currently
released games under EA,
but we shall see. No. Well, the problem
is, is that the studio is
most likely like heavily
controlled by the publisher. When you get
into these kind of deals
with EA, you pretty much are
owned by the publisher. So they'd have to
break off, create a new
company and start new IPs,
which they it's not like they don't they
usually do new IPs so they
could easily do it. But yeah,
I mean, dude, the thing is like, you
know, in the Sims, you know, the next
version of the Sims,
will the will the Saudis like allow gay
representation, lesbian representation?
Like, that's really like what this is
coming down to. For me,
it's like, there's going to be
quiet controls and things are just going
to disappear. Things
that we take for granted.
And and it won't be like overt political
messaging either. It will be like
just little things that just start
disappearing. And you don't
notice. Yeah, they'll they'll be
about. And I agree. I think the least
sneaky thing is I bet you
there's going to be a Trump
DLC for Sims Lord of Mercy. I'm not going
to lie. It's going to be
probably like not supposed to be
tongue in cheek, but I don't know, man. I
mean, that doesn't matter
as long as Trump gets paid,
right? But here's the thing. True. Here's
the other thing, too.
EA, I don't know. I mean, I don't know
what to make of this whole
situation. EA is being bought
by Saudi raid. That's something that I
thought I would have ever
seen. But it's clear that
the Saudi government, like first and
foremost, I'm surprised
Saudi even the Saudis even let
Jared Kushner buy a portion of EA because
it's not like they own 100 percent of it.
I don't even know what percent of it they
actually. I don't
know if it's split evenly
or like it's like they are more of it or
Jared Kushner owns more
of EA. So that's that.
Jared Kushner is tight with a lot of
these different. His firm that he manages
is tight with a lot of these different
countries, including Saudi Arabia. So
this is not actually a
surprise. And oftentimes these firms will
split it with others
because for various reasons, but
there might as well just I don't know.
We'd have to get really
deep into this type of stuff,
I think, to understand it. But I'm not
shocked. And I'm not
shocked that EA was like, or that
this is starting to happen. And to be
fair, I think every major company that
you that we know of,
every major publisher is struggling
because they do short
term gains and they're just
fucking themselves over hard. And so EA
being sold to now private
expect this to happen to
more and more companies that are
struggling right now. Like a part of me
is kind of glad Microsoft
picked up Blizzard because I would much
rather have Microsoft even
though I'm not, you know,
the biggest Microsoft fan at times, I'd
rather have them owning
it than than Saudi Arabia.
Yeah. Also, like that
brings us to our next story.
Game pass.
Game pass. I think there's a through line
between this story and the previous one.
What you were saying,
James, where it's like,
triple A games just are not don't seem to
be profitable anymore.
Like they require so much
money and so much investment and so much
time that like, you know,
EA is going private and now
Xbox is raising the price of game pass to
the point where game
pass ultimate is going to be
basically unaffordable for all but the
biggest whales. Right. Yeah.
Yes and no. I this Xbox game pass
increases a little bit of people miss
some of the nuance in it.
But I'm just saying like, I'm not saying
you are or anything like
that, but there's a couple of
things that people don't realize with
this. And that's one of
them is they are increasing the
amount of games that are accessible
through this. So you're getting more
value. But I don't know if
it's a 50 percent increase kind of value
and them doing it so
close to also increasing the
price of the Xbox systems and all that
kind of tell me a little
bit of like they probably had
a lot more wiggle room for those consoles
with tariffs than they
let on because this is like,
OK, if you did that and then increase
this to is kind of making me
think you're just trying to do
a whole run the gamut on increasing
prices across the board.
This is not a tariff as much,
but I still think it is partially a
tariff thing because
other other companies are like
Nintendo and PlayStation are raising
their prices, but like it
doesn't look good for them.
Everything rises. I do agree. It's not
purely like price. Of
course. Yeah. So you offer you
more things. There are a lot of benefits
that game pass does
offer you for games that you
probably wouldn't expect it to like for
like, for example, League of
Legends, you have in Valor,
you have access to all the characters.
But like, I don't know if
anyone I don't know if everyone
would want that, though, because like I
don't see the same type of
person that has game pass
being the same type of person that also
plays League every day.
You know, well, yeah. So and
also a fortnight to eat. They also just
included a fortnight crew.
I don't exactly know what
fortnight crew gives you, but this is for
Gen Z. It's Gen. The
fortnight crew is generally
twelve dollars a month by itself. And of
course, Ubisoft Plus is
included now as well. Sixteen a
month. And I think EA included included
as well. It's just a matter
of whether or not you want all
of this. And personally speaking, if I
were the average consumer, I
would cut up every single one
of those anticipated benefits and just
have a lower Xbox game pass
price. Well, they have that.
So you can see right here, they have
still the essential and the
premium. But the if day one,
because they were losing a lot of money
on Call of Duty's releases
in the past few years, and I
don't think I think Microsoft kind of had
to do this because their
shareholders were not happy
with they were they lost the potential.
And this is stupid to say because
potential means nothing.
They think they lost 300 million because
last year's Call of Duty
release didn't make as much because it
was tied to day one of the game pass.
I will say this right now, though, too,
with the game pass, this
is a really good deal if you
are able to beat these games pretty
quickly. Like I have a couple of people
in my community, they
beat their games within a week in a
month. And so this makes
sense. They're getting really good
value, even at 30 dollars, really good
value. But for the average person, even
for me, that this is
starting to become I don't beat my games
in a month. It's well, I
was going to say, like,
the fact is that they're adding all this
value, quote, I'm doing
heavy air quotes right now
so that they can justify the price
increase. And what they're really doing
here is trying to push
as many people off of Game Pass Ultimate
so that they have to
then go buy the games again,
because games are not you. This is I have
been saying since 2020, I
made a video in 2020 saying
Xbox game pass is a scam. And I predicted
almost exactly this
scenario. But they have hit this
time. They they have accelerated the
timetable from what I thought
would take 10 years to five.
This this they got people addicted to the
idea of a Netflix
Netflix style subscription to
all you can eat games. And and then now
they're increasing the price. I'm a
cynic. This is this is
like clearly what Game Pass was designed
to be. This is exactly the
play that I expected Microsoft
to take. And I am shocked that it only
took them five years and
not 10. Sorry. Go ahead.
Go ahead, James. So I don't think it's a
scam quite yet, but I think
James, once they lock it behind the like
the like, let's say a new
game comes out and you can only
get it when it's on the membership. I
think it becomes more of a
scam at that point, because I'm
don't want I don't like that. I like to
own my games, right? And I
have a feeling they're trying
to gear up to to do two things. One, they
want to start locking some
games behind membership so they
don't they can be guaranteed monthly
income because if you start playing that
game, you're not like
for me, like I have doomed the dark ages.
I'm playing on Game Pass.
I'm like, well, I'm gonna
have to like, but I'm not on the
ultimate. I think I could still access
off the double check
because I'm on the like they're getting
rid of the PC one, but I
think it's going to be next month.
So I need to beat doomed dark ages, but
that's a whole other thing.
But my my thing is once you
start getting locked into this, they're
going to continue increasing
this price every year or two.
Yes, this is my problem with
subscriptions and they've proven it and a
lot of these companies
right now it used to be a lot cheaper to
cord cut from cable. Now it
is just as expensive to get
all the different services. I'm worried.
Yeah, it's more expensive. And I'm
starting to actually buy
my media again. I bought Superman on on
4k Blu-ray. Yeah, I haven't
done that yet, but I need to.
The hard part is it's already out on
something and I can just
watch it and I just need to watch
it one more time and then I'll buy it
later on when it's on sale.
But they've got me like these
subscription services have kind of got
me, especially since
having kids. But this is my
like my warning to people that are that
with the Xbox game pass, it
will continue to increase the
price. Just expect it every year or two.
They probably won't try
to do it every year because
it will be too often, but they will be
increasing the price and
then they're going to try to
hostage you into the situation because
that's just what their
shareholders are going to want.
Yeah. So now to the, you know, to go back
to the Netflix example,
how much longer until we get a Netflix
style situation with
Xbox game pass where, if you
recall, Netflix back in the day used to
have basically every
major networks like shows and
whatnot. It used to be the one place to
get everything. Right.
And then now all of a sudden
like NBC, ABC, Disney all broke off into
their own their own
streaming services. Right.
How much longer until that happens? A
game pass where game pass
goes up in price, but Ubisoft
doesn't want to be a part anymore.
Neither does EA. So they break off, but
then the price, you know,
still remains the same as if they were
still on there. So right now it is
already a really good
deal if you play a lot of games a month.
If you beat these games in
a month, this is an amazing
deal. The problem is, are you going to be
able to stop the deal once
it goes up to $60 a month?
The deal has altered.
Yeah, I don't.
This is this is why this is why I don't
think that that's
going to happen. High tech.
Microsoft is the only company in the
gaming industry that can
subsidize this level of scam
for this long. OK. And I, you know, like
James, I was going to ask
you, like, if this isn't a scam,
then how come Microsoft continues to put
so much money into it? It
to me, it seems like it is
designed from Adam to not be a loss
leader, but to like get
people addicted to the idea.
I don't think Electronic Arts could do
this. I don't think
Ubisoft could afford to do this.
I don't think Sony could afford to do
this. Like it is such an
astronomical loss for them
when, you know, it's like they lost how
much $300 million they
supposedly on the on the last call
of duty. It's like that's cannibalizing
their own real gains.
That's that's right. Always what
they're going to say. They're always
going to put it up much higher than they
probably do some type
of write off and stuff on it. So right.
But like you could make you
make more money. You stand to
make more money by selling a copy of a
game, especially an
annualized like series like Call
of Duty or whatever. You stand to make
more money that way. Just
point blank. Unless you also
continue to increase the price of Game
Pass. I think Call of Duty
is also drying up more than
they realize. Oh, yeah. Let on. That
could be another thing.
They're they're hiding a lot of
this stuff. They're like, oh, I could
have made $300 million. Well,
probably not because I don't
think Call of Duty like they've I don't
think is dying off per se
like some of these other
like MMOs and stuff. But it is definitely
not the cash cow it used to be.
And they aren't interested in Call of
Duty anymore. They're
playing like they're playing
Fortnite and Roblox. They're not even
playing the most
graphic intense games anymore.
No, they're playing Fart Night. I know.
That's what I thought you said. Yeah.
Yeah. No, but like seriously, they're not
even playing the most
graphic demanding games,
which makes me wonder why do they even
why do developers even bother making
super graphically demanding games if like
the next generation of
gamers don't give a fuck?
It depends themselves into a corner with
marketing or it's like
it's the best looking
game this you know of ever created or you
know, they should do they should market.
Oh, it's the most destructive game ever.
Yeah. Like, honestly, when
I saw like red faction two
in like red faction, the one on Mars, I
think which one that
was called red faction.
Both red factions are on my well, I the
the one the one that always like
put them in a tunnel. Basically, I think
red faction two, I could like dig.
All right. But you get what I'm saying,
right? Like I saw red faction. I thought,
wow, this is a feature of games. You can
destroy shit. And it was
so awesome. And I mean,
crackdowns kind of like that, too. But
like, and then 30 years later, you get
Doc O'Connor Bonanza. Yeah, that's the
feature of gaming. That's it.
Oh, man, I really want to play
that, but I'm not going to because
Nintendo sucks. Not yet. Is it gorilla or
is it like Armageddon?
Well, the first red faction I think
wasn't what I'm thinking of.
The first red faction had destructible
environments, too. I
think I think they all do.
It's one of the biggest selling points is
that you can destroy things
and they make it easy because
it's on Mars. And so they don't have to
worry about high
environmental details like foliage
and stuff like that. So yeah, but imagine
like red factions put on
Earth with a bunch of like
foliage and all that cool shit. Now,
they're often our games kind of like
that. I'm trying to,
is it just cause? I don't know. There's a
couple of games that do
have a lot of environmental
destruction. Oh, dude, have you guys
played? Have you guys played teardown?
No. So teardown is like
an indie game where your goal is to like,
there's a bunch of different
objectives. But like the main
selling point is destruction, like voxel,
destruction, physics.
There's a mantra called
structural integrity, which tries to like
mimic like real life
structural destruction.
So like if you blow open like a few
walls, eventually like
the building will like
like the remaining like foundation will
start to like crack and
then eventually collapse
under pressure. And it's thinking of
collapsing under pressure
after Microsoft announced the
game pass changes their website to
cancel. These subscriptions
crash. Yeah. That's crazy.
That's going to happen a lot, though.
Like people are very
reactionary. And if we haven't noticed
before in the past, a lot of people end
up coming back. But I
think the amount that they
were going to make up, they're probably
going to lose from
cancellations. I don't think at the end
of the day, they're going to increase
much maybe over the few
years, maybe, but like even I'm
thinking about canceling mine. And while
I'm almost done with Doom Dark Ages,
which is it gets better,
by the way, Gardner, but it does. But
it's definitely not
nearly still it's not as good
as doing eternal. And so I'm going to be
wrapping that up and then
anything else I'm playing,
I'm just going to buy it because I I just
prefer to own the games.
Do people still play cod? This is crazy.
I see a clip. I saw a
clip of someone with like the
sniper in the new Call of Duty beta. And
apparently it looks like it's just a
sniper with built in
wall hacks and built in sheets through
walls to kill enemies to.
I don't know. I'm sure they
still like there's still plenty of people
that play Call of Duty. It's just they're
heavily invested. And that's what they've
been playing for
years. It's kind of like,
it's like Stock syndrome. It's like a
sports thing. So it's a
sports thing. People see it
as a sports thing. Some people like
football. Other people like
playing Call of Duty. And that's
what they do after they get done with
work. They just want to relax and play
something. They play
Call of Duty. I'm not going to like even
if people choose to do
Fortnite, like I'll say this,
we are all like gamers are a variety.
There's like a variety of different
gamers. Me, I actually
do like pushing the graphical envelope
quite a bit. I just don't
think these game developers
or publishers are doing it the right way,
in my opinion, but I like
doing that. I like a little
bit of artistic flair to it. And they
oftentimes don't do that. They try to
make it too realistic.
And so, which is bullshitting. I kind of
brought it back into that.
It's just there are a lot of
different people, which is bullshit too,
because like movies aren't
even that realistic. Like
there are a lot of like, no, like
obviously movies have like real actors.
It's probably way more
realistic than a game will be. But at the
same time, though, like
the like directors play with
the lighting, they make they make it so
it gets a good shot at the
cost of sometimes realism.
Set design to it. And the fact that these
game developers haven't
really caught on to the fact
that that's why movies look so good is
insane. It's like the
different way in a YouTube video and
in like a movie movie, right? I think
there's just a lot of
different games. I don't know if
that's fair because there's a lot of
movies that try to be as realistic as
possible. They do it
with lighting and stuff like that.
There's games that do well by saying,
hey, this is realistic.
They're not going to be doing the best,
but we have a variety of
different games. I don't think
it's a bad thing. It's just the trends
right now for a lot of
the triple A are not great.
Because I don't think going the Fortnite
route is going to be the
right way for all of them.
And they'd like to chase that. So these
triple A just try to chase
whatever they think is trendy.
I don't know. It's. I don't want really
like some realism to go away. I don't
want it just to play
Fortnite games, I'll be honest. I mean,
that's totally valid,
too. If they keep it at like
Dead Space remake level of like detail,
I'm down for that. Oh,
yeah, dude. The thing about like
that era, I think that that was like peak
gaming because there
wasn't huge demand on hardware.
Like they were pushing the 360 and stuff
at that time. But like,
you know, today's hardware, especially
like the Steam Deck, can play
these remakes of old games like Gears of
War, right? Anything from
that era works really well
on the Steam Deck. And that I think we've
been kind of talking about
the future of gaming a little
bit like Red Faction. No, no, no, the
future of gaming is this like
handheld market. Like that's
what I think the future is. And so if we
can like kind of reset
our expectations to like,
it looks good enough. You can tell what's
going on and you have fun.
That's the critical aspect
of game. Yeah. So and that's my
curmudgeon take. Well, speaking of the
future of gaming, right?
Like as handheld and they everyone knows
it. That's why the cost is going to be
a thousand dollars to enter that future.
Well, the future is
actually today for some people
in France, in France. True. Hi, tech.
Tell me what's going on
with this. I hadn't heard this
story. So a Redditor posted on Reddit
that they received it a
little early or the next day.
The Xbox, the RG Xbox, the X, the X.
Yeah. The post has since
been deleted by the author.
But I mean, from what I remember of the
article, it looked like
he was doing pretty well.
You know, decent battery life. It seems
like it has a lot better gains.
Like the upper gains aren't too many FPS
increases, like at a higher wattages,
like compared to the original ally. But
the efficiency gains
for like lower wattages is
a lot better. Which is good, which is
good. No, that's that's true. Like
there's supposed to be some
updates coming out for the
Z1, or Z2 extreme to make it
a little bit better at higher
TDPs. But like mid range TDPs do really
well. And it does have a
pretty sizable increase.
Is it a sizable increase to say, like,
hey, if you have an Xbox
or let's say an ROG Ally X,
and you want to get the Xbox Ally X or,
you know, all the
naming convention shit. But
I hate it. It catches me up every time. I
would definitely say no. Like if you have
just a regular Ally X, don't get the Xbox
Ally X because you're just
not going to get enough gains
to warrant paying $300 more for a device
that's not that much different.
I also don't think this is a good deal. I
have a reservation for
this. I don't know if you know
that gardener, but I've talked about it
in the past. I think
episodes, but I do have
reservation for the Xbox Ally X. I don't
know if I'll keep it or
not. I'm trying to convince
myself to keep it because I like every
aspect of it besides the
screen. And I want something
that can be just a little bit better and
have a USB for interface.
Well, you know what device has that both
of those things, the Lenovo device?
Yeah, but I can't get one right now. Are
you talking about the Legion go to?
Yeah.
Yeah, it's not. They pulled it and it's
for pre-order again.
They had a bumper issue.
Oh.
And so if I go and look to see if I can
get it, I don't know what's
going to come out. I don't even
know if they have a date. I'd have to,
maybe I could find it, but
they released it. They had
a bumper issue, which
seems stupid to, I don't know.
A bumper issue?
Yeah, the bumper, like the right bumper
gets stuck really bad
for a lot of people.
I can see that being a
huge issue, to be honest.
Yeah. And so they did a recall from
understanding. And so, and at the end of
the day, it's nice that
it has an 8.8 inch screen and OLED, but I
really did not like the
Legion go 1s. And I don't think
they changed the controller itself enough
because the Legion go 1
controllers were too mushy for
me. I didn't like it. And the allies are
a little mushy, but
they're not quite as bad. Like,
it just felt very cheap
holding those controllers.
Fair enough.
I hate to say this, but they probably
should have thrown a
little bit more weight into the
controller, which is not a good thing for
a handheld, but I don't
want to lift something
that feels so plasticky and fake.
There is a way to enable the new Xbox
interface on your existing handhelds,
if you're running Windows on them. And I
tried that on my Ally X,
and it seems to work pretty okay. The
problem is that the Xbox interface itself
kind of bare bones, to be honest.
Unless you're playing games like on the
actual Xbox itself, like
the Xbox service itself,
it's kind of bare bones. Apparently, in
the future, you should be
able to replace that launcher
that you launch with by default with a
different program. So it
seems like maybe in the future,
you can just launch to Steam Big Picture
mode, but it's
running Windows underneath.
I don't know how well that's going to go
over, to be honest, but I mean,
it's nice that they're improving Windows.
I just wish it wasn't super late.
My stance has been that Microsoft, in the
history of their
company, has never been able to
sustain a product to be good for three
years. It takes them three
years to take a good product
and ruin it. That's what Microsoft does.
That's their entire track
record over the entire history
of their company. And so they might be
able to make the Xbox UI for Windows
good, but very quickly,
it will become corrupted by outside
departments, outside the Xbox
and Windows teams that want to
shove extra crap into it, or you won't
only be able to access it
if you have game pass, or
it's going to happen. Microsoft is going
to ruin it. And that
gives me hope for the future.
Very pessimistic take on that. I don't
think you're wrong about that.
We're talking about Microsoft.
Yeah, I don't think
you're necessarily wrong.
That is true.
I... They're going to inject the AI stuff
somehow into it. And I
will say, if they brought back
Cortana, cool, do it. Actually have a
game character be it. Cool.
They're not going to do that.
And I'm really frustrated because that's
the only thing they had
going with the AI stuff,
then they got rid of it. But just because
I'm not the biggest Halo
fan, but I think it's really
cool to actually have the AI in Halo to
actually be at least a little bit of a
cover for the AI to have the voice that
sounds like Cortana. I don't know.
The veneer of Halo. And when you pay
extra for Cortana, DLC for Co-Pilot?
Well, per month, no. One time, yeah.
Well, would you be...
It takes money to make that stuff. I'm
saying, guys, like...
Yeah, fair enough.
It's not cheap, I'm sure, to do some of
that, but they already
have it made, I guess.
Would you pay for a
pay-per-view eSport event, though?
No.
Well, Capcom says,
"Yes, you are, in fact."
Oh, this is fun.
So, for those who don't know, Capcom has
their own tournament
series called the Capcom Cup.
And usually, the streams are free.
Obviously, if you want to go
into the venue and actually
watch them play in person, that's going
to cost money. That's to
be expected, though, right?
Yeah.
But now, to even watch it, you're going
at the pay, and the fighting
in community does not like that.
It's very reminiscent of something like,
I don't know, the UFC
unboxing, which I believe the UFC is
actually moving away
from pay-per-view events.
Oh, really? Because I know anything
that's a sports-related event, they
usually do pay-per-view,
unless it's football, soccer, stuff like
that, and you just
have to buy into the...
Like the NFL redline or
what, red zone or whatever?
Yeah, stuff like that.
Do the only people that buy NFL redzones
are fucking sports bettors, to be honest?
I've never heard of it.
Sports makes so much fucking money. I
don't know if you
realize how profitable a lot of
this stuff is. That's why Capcom wants to
get in on it. It is crazy how profitable
pay-per-view can be. I don't know how
good it is nowadays, but
a decade ago, it was super
profitable.
Dude, imagine pirating a Capcom stream on
one of those sports streaming websites.
That'd be hilarious.
So I'm going to say sports betting. All
right, I can do sports betting on it.
I'm so out of the competitive fighting
game that when I went
over here to this tab,
I thought this was
Wolverine for a second.
What?
I was like, "What the... What
is it? Am I on the wrong tab?"
And then I thought
this was a Van Halen logo.
Dude, but I mean, basically, that's the
gist of it. The Capcom Cup,
the finals, only the finals,
like the final, like 16 top 16 brackets.
That's pay-per-view. The
rest of the tournament was free
to watch. But the really...
Do you think people are
going to pay for this?
I don't know.
We... I don't know.
I think they will.
I wouldn't be surprised
if this is successful.
Yeah.
So for those who want to compete,
there is a pretty decent price pool of a
million dollars. Now, obviously,
any other e-sports that is in a fighting
game would probably pay a lot more.
Like if you were to get the competitive
gaming E8, like click on the image. That
shows you the prices.
So all the prices are yen, of course, but
you could buy like 6,000
yen's worth and you get both
the Street Fighter League, World Cup
bundle, and the Capcom Cup 12 finals.
And obviously...
6,000 yen. That's like what? 40 bucks?
I think so. Something like that.
Something along those
lines. Of course, buying tickets
to the actual event itself would be
closer to like 160
yen, I think. $160 USD.
No, actually not... Yeah.
6,000 yen is 40 bucks.
Yeah.
Well, it's gone down. It used to be a
couple of years ago. It's like...
It'd be like more even, but...
You just removed two zeros, typically.
Yeah. I mean, the yen's...
The yen has really gone down on price and
it kind of sucks for the economy,
but it also benefited
me greatly in Japan too.
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
40 bucks though. That's still crazy.
That's like the price of a game. That's
like the price of a
character or two characters in
Street Fighter 6. What do I want to play?
Do I want to watch
people fight or do I want to
pay for more characters so
I can play the game myself?
I just don't think we're
the target audience for this.
Yeah, we're not the target audience.
I don't watch football. I don't watch
sports, but there's millions, tens of
hundreds of millions
of people in the world that do. So...
I just don't know if there's a Venn
diagram or how much overlap there is
between people who watch
professional sports and people who watch
professional video games.
I don't think it exists.
Yeah. I don't...
That's interesting.
Because like, dude, here's the thing. I
understand loving to watch people play
games at a high level,
but there's tons of free content
available for Smash Bros
tournaments. You can watch
hours and hours and hours of high level
Smash Bros play. And I
do. I love watching that.
But it's free. The thing is, if this is
successful, it will surprise
me. If it is not successful,
it will surprise me. Because either way,
this is completely up in
the air for me. I just don't
understand how this will perform. I don't
think we've ever seen
anything quite like this.
Right?
Yeah. I think this is the first that
we've seen. Like Dota, let's
look at some of the other ones,
like League and Dota. Those are two big
ones. Those are free to
watch, right? I don't think
they've ever done any pay to watch.
This is Japanese-based too
that we're talking about.
This is Japanese-based.
I could see it being successful in Japan.
I mean, the international.
Because it's like their sports stuff.
When was the last time
they did one of these?
I don't think they're
doing it as much now, are they?
2024.
September 12th. Wow, shoot. I guess
they're getting up for
Dota 3 then now, right?
Imagine if Dota 3 was
Valve's first three.
That would piss everybody up.
That would be so bad.
That would be a headliner topic.
I can see it happening though. Game New
World is like deep in the Dota.
I know. Dota is such a weird game that
Valve made. It's like, I get
it. It's a mod and all that.
But maybe we should make like a
critically sustained mod so
that Valve will just buy us
out and make that into
like a two game deal.
Maybe.
That'd be sick.
Well, we could sell dudelings.
There you go.
Yeah, you'd have to remake it in Source.
Dear god.
And it'd have to be like
a first person shooter.
No, it's not.
Oh, that's true. That
isn't. That's right.
They have a lot of
stuff that's not. But yeah.
I don't know about a lot of stuff that's
not a first person shooter.
Please.
How many people came to this? They had a
2.8 million dollar
prize pool. That's why.
I mean, there is there is so much like
money in it because
people are like invested in it.
But like if Valve made the the finals for
the international pay-per-view,
I feel like that would kind of kill the
momentum of the community.
I think it would. It would probably kill
the momentum of like
the League League Legends
International Cup 2 or whatever it's
called. I don't
remember what it's called, but.
But maybe Capcom knows
what they're doing. Who knows?
Yeah, I'll be interested to see how this
turns out. Like that's
all I can say, you know.
Yeah. I mean, we do have some dates for
it. So it is going to
happen sometime next March. So
I guess I'll follow. We'll follow up with
this once it happens and
see how successful it was.
Yeah, for sure.
But I will say the FGC is not a huge fan
of it, at least the western
part of the FGC community.
They don't like it. I don't like it
either, to be honest.
I'm not I'm not a pro fighting game
player, though I do double in
quite a bit of fighting games.
One of these days I'll make it to Evo.
Dude, imagine imagine the kind of hell
that Evo or any other one,
any other like competition that
like does Smash Bros.
Competitively, the kind of hell they
would unleash if they did
pay per view. But for a Smash Bros
tournament like
Nintendo would go ape shit.
I don't. Yeah, I don't think Nintendo
would allow it. I mean, Nintendo
barely even allows the game to be
streamed at all, to be honest.
Yeah, it's insane. So crazy.
So there was an update to the security
incident on Discord.
What's going on here? I think I missed
this story completely.
Yeah, I did, too, actually, when this
happened. But essentially,
on September 20th, Discord was
hacked, but not necessarily Discord
itself, but one of their third party
providers that they use
for like, or like a customer support and
whatnot. And as you can see,
there are a couple of things
that have been compromised. For example,
names, government IDs,
Discord IDs, emails, other
contact info provided the last four of
your credit card or
purchase history, your IP address,
messages with customer support and some
like internal corporate data.
Damn. And this is a lot of this happened.
A lot of like, what could
have been avoided were the
government IDs. But a lot of these
appeals were about age
verification. And as you know,
I think they started they started doing
that like in the UK, if I'm not mistaken.
Hmm. Yeah. So this is just like more
proof positive that like,
that that UK law is probably a bad idea,
right? I would say so. Yes.
So they were handling it themselves.
That's crazy. Well, it
looks like it was a third party.
Oh, it was a third party. I just must
have missed that. Oh,
yeah, yeah. Third party. I was
going to say like, damn. If you have a
proper third party, I don't
know. It's we have so many
different verification processes like AYC
and stuff like that. That
this is inevitably going to
happen. But this is definitely not a good
track record that they
just started doing this and it
leaked. Yeah, it's been a few weeks. Like
you can measure it in weeks.
They're definitely going to
have to secure that shit. I'm still of
the opinion, like they have
opt in kind of stuff like I'd
rather have opt in with like online
gaming and a lot of other
stuff to where I'm like, yeah,
if I can opt in, that's who I play with
is people that are verified. Sure.
But to force it on everyone.
I'm not a fan of that. Yeah.
It's you know, it this just goes to show
that like it's not enough
for like a government to
just say, oh, you guys need to like
implement age controls.
Like if they want age controls,
they have to provide a secure system that
is ubiquitous, that
that provides a baseline,
you know, and then there could be, you
know, private entities that do
something on top of that. But
like just this just proves that like
these companies cannot be
trusted with your private
information, you know, I it's so
difficult to like use the Internet now
because I don't want
my shit to get leaked. All my stuff has
been leaked almost. It's why
I have to have credit report
watches and stuff. But yeah, that's also
another thing I think on
users is that you probably
should be always being diligent on your
stuff being leaked because
it will eventually happen.
I mean, heck, if you touched PlayStation
at all, your stuff's gone.
How many leaks they've had. It's crazy.
No, I think like the UK, Europe. I mean,
here in the States we have I don't know
if it's really like it's
a third party. It's ID.me.
I don't know how good it is, but like a
lot of services integrate
ID.me. And maybe we just need
better government level integrations for
the stuff if they're going to require it.
I agree. Yeah, I mean, honestly, man,
they the government like
foisting all of this on
private companies is kind of insane,
especially since it looks like Discord
was doing it themselves
or at least they were doing it with
another. I'm not sure.
Third party. Yeah, I mean,
in the fact that they got hacked and like
actual information got out
to you, it's not like they
got hacked and but they didn't get
anything of value. No, no, no,
like names and government IDs
get hacked. So like. They should be
storing that stuff anyways.
They should what they should be
doing is grabbing it, verifying that it's
real and then deleting
that data right away. And then
they mark that account as verified. Yeah.
So even if it's a third
party, unless that's what they're
even if it's that's what they're. Because
sometimes the third party ones like I
would assume like ID.me
would hold on to some of the stuff so
they can make sure when it's cross
application verified,
that they can like, okay, yeah, this is
the same person. We have a verification,
but at least hash it or do something.
Don't store it directly. Yeah, it seems
crazy to me that like
it would get stored. Like why would you
ever need to like it once
you've verified someone's ID,
like there's literally no reason for you
to hold on to a copy of it.
You know, dude, that's wild.
Verify it with the government and maybe
the government just doesn't
offer good enough resources,
some of these governments to verify
because you should be
hitting some type of service to be
able to say, Hey, is this a valid person?
Here's all the stuff. I
don't know. It's I think it's
little speed bumps on the way to
improving some of the systems. And this
is just one of those.
You shouldn't do it this way. And we need
better verification process,
especially if you want that
internet library card gardener. Yeah, I
mean, like the idea that
I've had, I love this idea.
Honestly, you would go to your library or
you would go to get
like your city hall or town
hall or whatever. And they would just
cryptograph, they would
provide you with a cryptographic
signature. And then it's and then you can
like sign anything you want.
And you're on the internet.
And it's all done with a signature that's
like, you know, you have
your public private key,
and then you're on the internet. And
that's how we verify everything.
I like that on a level of that if you
want to opt into like a
more secure internet and
dealing with a lot of these companies
that want to opt into this, I like that.
It will leave a little bit of a wild west
and that's fine. But I,
for one, don't care about
that side of things. And it can still be
anonymous in a lot of ways,
but you're still verified.
Yeah, it's a weird world we live in. And
I don't know if there's one
great way that everyone would
be happy about it. Yeah, no, there's no
way to make everyone happy.
I've also thought about just
doing a building our own IPV10 or
whatever. And at the IP level, having
individual signatures.
I think that would be cool. But I'm not
like technically, I'm not
cryptographically minded enough to
actually implement something like that.
Personally, this might sound weird, but
this is one of the
blockchain actually would be a
little helpful on this and NFTs is doing
some of this based on
that and having a mobile app.
If you want to talk about future, I'm
tired of having to get my
mail and vote put in through
the mail. I'd rather just have an app
that is heavily secured
through some of these, I think,
good security practices to then just
check to see. Because then
with that, you could vote,
but you could also check with the
government to see if your vote ever
changed. That would be nice.
I don't know. There's a lot of ways to do
it. And people might
not like that, but...
I lean towards paper ballots all the way
forever and no electronic voting ever.
Yeah, I think both can be heavily
corrupted. It's just a
lot harder to do with paper.
In the sense of like, the paper might not
get counted at all.
You don't know if your
vote's getting counted. There's been
ballots that have been left out.
Actually, in this last election, a lot of
that happened and people don't realize
that that's why I'd prefer electronic and
in a system that is
heavily maintained by a third
part... Not a third party, but like a
non-political entity of
the government that's...
Which I don't know if that exists
anymore, but we're getting really deep
into this type of stuff
where I would just like better
verification processes and
then I'd want to play with those
people online. I don't want to deal with
assholes. That have
to hide behind their...
Being anonymous. I don't like that.
Speaking of assholes...
Hi-Tech, what's going on with this, man?
You just called Hi-Tech an asshole?
No. He knows what he did.
Yeah, I included this topic. Basically,
they say it's a teenager,
but he's legally an adult.
First of all, do you guys
consider 19 still a teenager?
I consider anything under 27 to be a
teenager. I was going to say, your
brain's still developing
like up to 25, isn't it? Or is it 27?
I think it's 27.
Yeah, your brain's
still developing up to 27.
But basically, yes. This 19-year-old guy
made a legal threat against Epic.
Not Epic, but some specific employees.
I mean, he says he's going to kill
employees of the company.
Now, I don't think I've read further into
it. I don't know why he
decided he wanted to threaten
Epic Games. It sounds like maybe there
was some dumb bullshit
with Fortnite. Honestly,
it's probably Fortnite. That's the only
game they developed,
but like it's the else.
Yeah, what other online games do they
have? That makes sense. I
mean, any of these online games
have death threats. So I'm shocked that
this is not new news.
There are death threats against
everyone every day that are public, in
the public. It's crazy.
So according to this article, he was
indicted by a grand jury in South
Dakota's Western Division
for sending threats between October and
November of 2024. And he
admitted to sending messages
threatening to kill employees of the
company. Damn, dude.
This is not an uncommon thing. People
send death threats all
the time. Are people getting
prosecuted like this? Because I don't
hear this side of things.
They should be. I agree. They
should be. I just don't hear it.
Honestly, man, I mean, I
think Bungie sued once.
Bungie is surprisingly litigious when it
comes to stuff like this,
but I mean, that's good.
The more people get sued for saying
bullshit as developers,
the better the game will be.
I agree with that. You should not
threaten to kill anyone. Goddamn it.
Like, how hard is this
to understand to not threaten to kill
someone? I mean, but this is
going back to our discussion
at the risk of sinking back into that.
Like if you had to sign every
interaction you did with your
public key, then one of the end of your
public key was yours, you
know, and you either couldn't
change it or or future public keys were
also tainted with your
criminal record. Guess what?
If you did this once or twice, you got
caught doing it.
Consequences are you can't fucking send
messages anymore. You know what I'm
saying? Yeah. Like that's I don't know,
dude, like I feel like
this, you know, having, you know, five
years in prison, two hundred fifty
thousand dollars fine,
that'll follow you for a while. But like
if everybody knows that,
hey, this guy sent death
threats and he got like banned from using
the Internet completely,
that would I think that would
have a bigger. It's the anonymous nature
of things. Yeah. So now,
as per game developer in
a twenty twenty three twenty twenty three
GDC survey, they found
that ninety one percent of
survey developers thought that harassment
and toxicity towards
game developers was an issue
with forty two percent of it calling it a
very serious issue. And
forty percent of those
developers responded that they personally
witnessed or experienced
that kind of harassment,
which gamers come on and we can do better
than this. We should be better than this.
This is like some Hollywood shit. The
problem is there's a
billion plus gamers in the world.
So you're going to get bad actors no
matter what. And the problem is most of
us are not doing it.
It's a small fact, a small portion of
them that grew up chronically online
playing these games.
It's their whole identity oftentimes or
they just like the troll. And I don't
think I don't know of
throwing something in jail because
everyone else kind of like on this level
does it. But taking it
away is I think a great idea. Gartner,
you should be like ordered.
You can't get on the Internet
anymore for like 10 years. Yeah. Or like
you're banned from
playing competitive online games
because clearly it affects you too
severely. You know, like I
would be very shocked if this guy
was a if this teenager was a single
player gamer who has who
never plays online. I would be
absolutely floored if this kid wasn't an
online gamer. I mean, how
could he be? How could he be
a single player game? He plays Fortnite.
Oh, does it say Fortnite?
Well, no, but like he this
was directed at Epic Games. There's no
way it wasn't. Okay. It
could have been because Alan
Wake 2 was Epic exclusive. Let's give him
slack now that he could
have been 38 years old.
No, it wasn't me. Yeah, he's 19. I'm
playing off. It was it
was me, but it's not me.
Well, no, but I mean, like seriously,
seriously, there are some
people who play online games who
like I'm not saying that everyone who
plays online games is like
a psychopath or whatever,
but there are clearly I've witnessed it
personally. There are some
people who play online games
and they cannot cope with like the amount
of like competitiveness
and it just drives them into
just horrific behavior in the real world.
Oh, it's a very small
percentage of people,
but it is a real thing. It is a real
thing and it happens a lot.
Like I have League of Legends,
a lot of other games I've played where
people have done have
had death threats. Now,
in that type of heated situation, like
obviously they're not going to fall
through because they're
just like freaking have never moved a day
in their life. So them being
able to get out the door is
crazy, but they go make it feel like a
buff animal. But they
crack a mountain, do them,
break a sweat. Yeah, that's the best way
to put it. It only takes
like one person and then fall
through and then you're going to have
instead of school shooters,
you're going to have just like
online shooters because it's going to be
the new hot thing to do, which is crazy.
And we should bring back
dueling. Should bring back what?
Do you dishonor my, you dishonor my, you
dishonor my, uh, me,
a pox on the house. Do you bite your
thumb at me, mister?
I'm not dueling. Like if someone's like,
Hey, let's do on peace out. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. It would have been a lot cooler if
we were still using
fucking swords and shit,
but like everyone's putting iron. Yeah.
Until you're bleeding out, even though
you won because you got stabbed once.
This sounds cool on paper.
That's funny. Yeah.
We've had founding fathers die from
dueling. That's the crazy part.
Hamilton. Yeah.
Yeah. Oh, they were the original
trollers. They're like, ah,
it kind of was, they're going to do a
death threat and then
like going to duel it out.
Oh, speaking of another epic story, uh,
rock band four to be delisted.
I had forgotten that,
uh, epic bot harmonics.
And now I'm sad again because I was
reminded that epic bot harmonics.
Yeah. This is this is sad. I can't
believe it was good.
Yeah. I can't believe that the rock
expands is now entirely
in Fortnite and not like an
actual like game itself
that you can just buy. Yeah.
There isn't a PC version, right? Like
this is for PlayStation and Xbox.
There is not a PC version. I mean, there
are guitar here, simulators on PC,
but it's full of like fucking insane
lunatics. Uh, that's
generally how it is with like beat.
That's how it is with like custom, like
games with custom like
music and like tracks is that
eventually only appeals to like the
hardcore mass, the
what percenters basically.
I was literally playing, uh, beat saber
this morning and I had a
few custom tracks and like
most of the ones that I had are like
expert plus only have
you ever played beat saber?
Uh, yes. I don't know if I've ever played
expert plus beat saber.
I can play like games on, I can play
songs on expert most of the time.
Expert plus is like you hit every single
note and you have to do like this.
It's wild. I can't do it. Um, anyway,
different story, but no, I
agree with you. Like, um,
you know, rock band for I didn't, I never
played rock band for
for cause I haven't never
owned like an Xbox one or a yes.
Yes. Well, I do have a PS4 actually, but
I never, I never played rock band for.
All right. Well, uh, so by the time this
episode releases, I mean,
it's already going to be
delisted, but gardener, if you want to
get it on your PS4 now, and now is your
only time to buy it.
I, uh, I can't get it on my PS4 because
my PS4, uh, has old firmware
on it so I can like hack it.
So I'm not going to update it.
Well, I guess you could, uh, well, shit,
man, if you can't buy
rock band for, uh, damn.
Well, you know what I do have. I have
rock band three deluxe on
my Xbox 360 that's hacked
rock band three. So have you
played rock band three deluxe?
Not deluxe now.
No. Deluxe dude is a community mod of
rock band three and you can like load
custom songs into it.
And most of the songs that are on the,
uh, rock band four are
on rock band three deluxe.
Oh, that's cool.
That is pretty cool.
Yeah.
I miss, I miss rock band. I really,
really wish it'd come back. I'm shocked.
I'm shocked that we
have not gotten a new one.
Hey everyone. On Sunday, October 5th,
2025, rock band four turns
10. What a ride it's been.
This is on their 10th anniversary. I
could not have thought of
a bigger slap in the face.
I mean, I get it though. Music licenses
are never perpetual.
And you know, since rock bands, like
entire gameplay is the music.
Yeah.
Oh, God.
The thing is, like, if you own it, you
still have all the
game, all of those stuff.
And they've been releasing new songs for
these games pretty much every week.
Right. Like at least one or two new songs
every week for 10 years.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
You know, speaking of epic games.
So the new, so Fortnite's getting the
K-pop demon slayer song.
K-pop demon slayer skins.
But they're not, but they're not
including any of the songs in the movie.
In the music like game.
Really bizarre.
It's crazy because when they did Hatsune
Miku, they brought over a
bunch of Hatsune Miku songs
that you can play, but they didn't do the
same for K-pop demon hunters, which is
kind of insane to me.
How is Fort, how does Fortnite even is it
like rock band, but in Fortnite?
Fortnite Festival.
Let me look at some.
Yeah, it's rock band or guitar hero.
But in Fortnite, how do you play it?
Yeah, I was going to
ask, like the controller or.
Well, I mean, they have a Fortnite
Festival guitar controller.
Really?
Oh, yeah, it looks like it.
I mean, so they have like a.
They had so there are a
couple of different controls.
They have one that actually
looks like a guitar, of course.
But then another company made like one
that attaches like the bottom of a
standard controller.
And that has five frets.
Is this a Gorilla's?
Yeah, they have the Gorilla's too.
Oh my God, dude, I love the Gorilla.
I don't like that
they tied it to Fortnite.
I don't like that either.
That's the only thing that like if they
didn't do that, if they
made it a separate game.
But I called it Fortnite Festival.
Like you didn't have to download the
entirety of Fortnite
Battle Royale to play it.
Did that be a little better?
If they made a separate standalone rock
band style game, if if Epic did with the
harmonics team, I would actually buy that
game and play it because I love that.
And that's one of like that's rock band
is like my Dead Space.
James, you don't bring it up very often.
So I don't know if I can believe you.
Oh, sorry.
Yeah, you don't annoy every listener
every time with Dead Space talk.
No, I agree.
I love rock band.
I still I think I still have one of the rock bands. I don't remember which one
somewhere, but Fortnite Festival.
This is actually standalone.
So is it just the guitar?
Or is there other like is
there other instruments?
I think it's one.
Let me see.
drums.
Drum set for festival. C.E. Drum set for festival.
C.E.
That's a good question.
I'd actually be
interested in this, maybe.
Yeah, I also am kind of interested.
I mean, I'm kind of
vaguely interested, too.
Next week, Gardner's gonna be like, I'm
playing Fortnite now.
It was the drug.
He got me into Fortnite.
Start to do the dance.
Yeah, you have to like
you have to build like.
Oh, man, I had a joke.
I lost it.
Yeah, so I know a lot of guys that got
into Fortnite Festival or Fortnite
in general because of the Hatsune Miku
skins they released, too.
So wow.
Yeah, it just shows that if you bring the
right APs, I'll probably they'll
probably get you to play Fortnite, too.
I'm still of the opinion
that Fortnite's not that bad.
It's just not a game for me.
Oh, no, I'm not saying
Fortnite is bad at all.
Fortnite's not bad.
It's just not fun.
I know, but everyone really.
Well, it is fun for a generation.
It's fun to hate.
It's fun to hate on it.
But so many people hate it.
And I'm just like, you're just driving.
Like, I think sometimes you're driving a
certain generation away.
But yeah, I think well, I just for my own
sanity, I don't find like
playing games with your friends is fun.
If the game itself isn't fun, but you're
playing with your friends, then you're
still probably having fun, but that's not
the right kind of fun because I'm a
certain budget.
All right.
I played OG Fortnite
and I had fun with it.
Okay.
I got my victory royale a few times.
I'm saying I also funny enough, I bought
the the OG Fortnite
before it was a battle royale.
Oh, actually like tower defense game.
I don't know if it's tower.
It was a defense game, though.
Well, I mean, they split it off and then
they canceled it essentially.
Are they are they?
Yeah, I remember they were saying they
were going to release Save the World like
many, many times over.
But like, I guess.
Yeah.
So I could see myself playing Fortnite
again with my son once
he gets a little older
because it's better than Roblox, right?
I would agree.
Probably.
Speaking of playing games.
Trump's now renewing its threat to impose
100% tariffs on non-US made movies.
James, you want to give
us the highlights here?
I mean, I don't know if
there's much the highlight.
There's just it's fucking it's so stupid.
So it is this has happened twice.
Once when there was a
movie from China named Nezha 2.
It's based on Chinese
mythology, essentially.
Or I think it's actually based on during
the Western mentality.
I'm not read it.
But it made gang bust.
It made it made insane amounts of money
the first time a couple
of months ago when they
when Trump said that he
would do 100% tariffs on movies.
But then, coincidentally, when Demon
Slayer Infinity Castle 2
makes a shitload of money,
Trump says it again.
Which tells me.
He's paying attention to how well
international movies do here.
I this rings completely hollow.
He said California with its weak governor
has been particularly hard hit.
Like.
Does he actually care about California?
Does he actually know that not all movies
that are super popular
are from are from Hollywood?
Like let's look at some like popular
foreign like movies
from like other countries.
Like, for example, The Dark
Knight is part British, too.
If you can believe that.
Yeah, I mean, there's
movies made in Georgia.
A lot of movies are made in Georgia, and
I think they're moving that film.
Some of that filming over to Europe,
Georgia, Georgia, the
country or Georgia, the state,
the state, because we talked about this,
I think a week or two ago, right?
I know The Walking Dead
is filming Georgia TV show.
Yeah, and the Breaking Bad
was filmed in New Mexico.
Yeah.
And whatever new series Lance Vance
Gilligan or whatever.
I forget.
I think Vince Gilligan.
I forget his name.
Apparently, that looks like it's also
filmed in the same area.
The whole point of globalization a little
bit or well, the for me,
I don't I like globalization when it
comes to equality of
like people being able to
if a country wants to make their own
movie, let them make it
and don't put a tariff on it.
Let us just enjoy it.
And so it's weird.
It's like, hey, I don't like that these
movies are doing well.
And so I'm going to slap a tariff on it.
It's I mean, that's
isn't that capitalism?
I you have competition.
I do think it's crazy that demon slayer.
The demon slayer movie
did as well as it did.
I'm not shocked, but yeah,
it's still at the same time.
That is weird that it was brought up.
Well, I mean, Trump
didn't bring it up directly.
It just happened like coincidentally as
news was breaking that it
made a shitload of money.
Right.
Okay.
Yeah, the other thing is like here, the
Canadian Chamber of
Commerce said that it was deeply
concerned by the levy because American
production houses relied
on Canadian facilities,
crews and talent to
deliver Hollywood movies.
Right.
So it's dude, we use Canada so much for
filming, especially TV series.
And I think Superman was filmed in in
Canada or some of it was anyway.
And I know that like Battlestar
Galactica, like the 2003 show,
was filmed almost exclusively
in Canada and they had many Canadian
actors, but it was also
an American production.
Mythbusters was an Australian show.
Yeah.
But it was a fully Australian show, but
with American hosts
filmed in San Francisco.
So like, I think it's kind of arbitrary
to just declare, hey,
this is an American film,
this is not like it to your point, James.
You know, let's just continue making good
movies, not get freaking
caught up in the money.
And that's part of the problem too, is
like everyone's caught up in the money,
caught everyone in Hollywood.
It's like, well, if it's not going to
make them, it's like with our freaking
games like EA and all that, like they're
going to put that bet.
They're going to bet, which they're all
losing their bets, by the way.
They're like, we're going to bet on these
billion dollar things
instead of just making
a lot of small good movies again.
And they overpay actors and actresses.
And I'll be honest, there's almost no
actor actress now that I'm
like, yeah, I don't care.
If you're going to spend this much money
on them, then fuck them
because like they're not,
I don't know, I don't consider anyone
worth a hundred
million dollars for a movie.
Sorry, that's just asinine.
But what about the AI
actress Tilly Norwood?
She's worth a hundred million.
She's worth two hundred million.
She's worth she's probably worth more
than the GDP of some countries.
They put they heavily invested in her.
So OK, calling it an quote unquote
actress is ludicrous to me.
Yeah.
And naming it quote unquote Tilly Norward
is is ridiculous to me.
What's the what is that even mean?
Tilly Norwood.
It's it's obvious your name.
I know.
But like, is it supposed to mean
something or is it just the name that
they don't fucking know
what it means to be
like a Hollywood name?
It sounds it sounds
fancy like Timothy Chamelay.
My ex-girlfriend's
poodle was named Tilly.
So I don't I have a hard time taking the
name Tilly seriously.
Dude, but you should take this.
But, dude, we should get
Timothy Chamelay on this show.
We can introduce them as Modicontrol 360
or as I like to call them, Lisa Naga'im.
Yeah, dude, let's do it.
Let's get a while the show.
I'll reach out on Twitter or whatever.
The OK.
But back to the topic at hand.
Talent agencies are
scouting this A.I. actress.
What the fuck are we doing here?
I will not recognize A.I.
actresses and actors
until they are actually A.I.
Like like not this fake A.I.
Yeah. If they're sentient.
OK, I'm going to accept it.
Yeah, even if it's like Commander Data
decided to go into
theater, I would I would support.
Yeah.
Or if like Bender came in
and it told me to tell me.
My shiny metal.
No, you have to buy his
shiny metal as oh, buy it.
Yeah.
But my shiny.
I can't do it.
Oh, man, I wish I could do Bender.
Bender is such a great voice.
Rapping.
Now we're going to.
You guys auditioning
for voice acting now.
Now that you know an A.I. can do it.
What auditioning, man.
Oh, strong man.
Yeah.
It's anyway.
So so how does this work?
It's just like a digital A.I. actress
gets injected into like movies.
Well, all I know is that
A.I. talent studio Sequoia.
That's how you pronounce it, by the way.
I think Sequoia owns this
character, not even a character.
They own a quote unquote actress.
And I would imagine they're using A.I. to
like, I don't know if
they're going to like
put her against it.
Fuck.
Now I have no idea how this even works.
Okay.
So my understanding is that this is
basically Hatsune
Miku, but like for acting.
Yeah, dude.
But this is yeah.
Here's the thing that Hatsune Miku was
like ancient technology at this point.
It's like 20 years old.
Yeah, I know.
But this is it's basically the same thing.
But like it's an A.I. puppet rather than
a, you know, whatever Hatsune Miku uses.
So I could see them using the epic engine
because there's a lot of new TV shows and
movies that use it now and use a lot of
green screening and they
could probably pretty easily
inject her in.
Yeah.
But we use her likeness
since she's not a real person.
No, she's a copyrighted thing.
Yeah.
Oh, but like, can we like make slight
adjustments to it and then say we can
call her Nilly Torward.
Yeah, you could.
Should I look at one of the A.I. services
and I can probably make something.
We'll have her on as a guest.
Oh, God.
We are not generating our guests.
Dude, that would be so awesome.
I'm not going to lie.
I'd do it.
I couldn't do it very often.
But and all we would do
is like insult the A.I.
guest.
I know we'd probably I probably get death
threats online from her.
So I don't know.
But I mean, former quote unquote, A.I.
quote unquote artist,
whom says that all of the big studios are
working on the assistant projects.
But of course, she can't
specify which ones are generated.
The question is, can you even tell at
this point if Hollywood's behind it?
Yes.
Stop paying these actors hundreds of
millions of dollars.
Just find someone that's
decently priced as a decent actor.
There's plenty of them and just pay them.
And there's plenty of older movies, too.
I mean, honestly, if all new movies suck,
why even bother, right?
That's the thing with movies, too.
People are more willing to accept
watching older movies,
but they're not willing to
accept playing a fucking NES game.
That's like ludicrous to me.
I guess that's proof that game that
gamers can't see games as art.
Right.
But no, there's tons of people.
Art is not the older like not everyone's
going to see art the same way.
Not everyone's going to go
back and watch old movies.
I do somewhat, but like I go back to the
90s and some of those
movies are pretty bad, though.
Yeah.
I mean, it's I can't say it's like a one
size fits all thing.
Like, yeah, when I was
growing up, my grandparents
had a museum of antique music machines,
which was really, really, really awesome.
So like, do you know
what a Nickelodeon is?
Not the TV channel.
I did not know that was
a thing that wasn't yet.
So Nickelodeon, the TV channel gets its
name from antique
jukeboxes before they had records.
And so these jukeboxes basically had
computers in them that
were powered by vacuum tubes.
And they had like little punch cards on
rolls that would like go
over these little holes
that were then there were like
instruments inside the Nickelodeon.
And the based on the the punch card
program, it would play the instruments.
OK, so like almost like
almost like a MIDI, almost like.
Yeah.
But the name piano role in
like a DAW comes from that.
Like those are called piano rolls.
Have you ever seen like
a player piano before?
It's like that.
And so anyway, I had a
reason for bringing this up.
Oh, but like so for me, like the
experience of going back
and playing like any games
or even Atari games is kind of the same
experience as me going back and listening
to like Nickelodeon music versus like
listening to like a recording, you know,
or like a studio produced song.
So I don't have a problem with going back
and playing these old games, but like
the the issue is going to be when this,
you know, when Tilly
Norwood becomes like, you
know, movies starring Tilly Norwood is
going to they're going to go.
They're going to become like unwatchable
because it's just going to
be like painfully obvious
how she's not like a real person.
It's going to fall into
uncanny valley, I think.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's going to be interesting.
I'll be honest.
I will watch a movie with this because
I'm just I'm a future
facing kind of person,
but I don't if they start putting this
person like in every move
this AI into every movie
or overdo it, then it's just going to
turn me off completely.
The novelty I'm
interested in beyond that, though.
So I'm going to save
him as head ass tape.
If you're going to seriously call
yourself a gamer, like unironically,
then you should be OK with going back and
playing older games.
There are many ways to play older games,
too, in case you can't
actually get access like old
hardware.
I would say learn how to watch it.
That's my head ass
tape, but it's gatekeeping.
But yeah, yeah, OK, well,
then that's what you were.
But it's OK to have your own
definition of what a gamer is.
Yeah, like I get I get it with like
someone's and starting
gaming for the first time,
and they start with like an Xbox series
X, even though it's $800 nowadays.
But like, I mean, by the time someone
listens to this, like in six
months, if they listen past,
they're like, wait,
what are you talking about?
It's like a thousand.
God, that would be horrible.
For four years, you
know, they're like game pass.
What are you talking like?
Thirty dollars.
That was a good deal.
It's like two hundred dollars now.
But not as horrible as what's about to
happen to video editing.
Sora, Sora, too.
So also, Gardner, I attached a bunch of
examples to the topic at hand.
I don't know if you can.
Yeah.
So if you know, I see.
So there's a lot of videos.
This is this doesn't even
cover the tip of the iceberg.
So let's look at this one for example.
You can't hear the audio, right?
I don't know if it records it.
Yeah.
Imagine a store where the graphics cards
would be in front of a fucking glass door
and not secured tightly.
Is this real?
No.
It's generated.
Yeah.
I'm watching on a very small screen.
It's Sam Altman stealing a
GPU from Target from Target.
It's a generated.
I can't believe you do that.
Someone's got to feed
someone's got to feed the A.I.
Some cards and Jensen
Huang's ripping us off, obviously.
Next up are a couple of
different examples of anime.
And they all look like
dog shit, to be honest.
It might look like garbage now, but guys,
it's iterating pretty fast.
This is already much more impressive than
like what we years ago.
Yeah.
I wouldn't watch it, but.
It looks a lot of it
looks very off model still.
Like, yeah, some
frames don't look half bad.
But a lot of it is pretty off model.
Yes.
We don't talk about the whole finger
issue anymore with a lot of A.I.
generated videos where that was a or even
images where fingers were
not being generated properly.
Right.
That's not as much of a deal now.
An issue that is.
Yeah.
So I'm not super big on to this.
It's so incoherent.
It still feels like slop, man.
It is a lot.
Yeah, it's it's quite slop.
We have.
But we have to keep going, man.
This is there's a few.
This is like waterboarding for creatives.
I could just imagine if
you make like fan art.
That this is just like a finger.
You see the fingers.
That's still better.
It's better than what it used to be.
Yeah.
Visual visual novel.
Well, this bullshit.
Yuck, dude.
What do you don't need the visual novel
are fucking mostly still images.
I know, but like.
That like how there's like
it's a subtle 3D anime effect.
Like it just I don't know.
Oh, this is awesome.
I'm going to be
watching this all day to now.
Thanks.
The hand holding looks
better than that one, though.
Yeah, it does the like four frames of it.
So very recently, though, very recently,
though, they disabled Nintendo characters
from being generated.
This is before they disabled it.
And as you can imagine, so apparently in
order for your IPs not be usable,
you as an IP holder have to contact them,
which I'm pretty sure that's not.
I don't think that's how
that's supposed to work.
No, but Nintendo did anyways.
So obviously, you'll never
see anything like this again.
In Seoul, you'll see it again.
Just not from like your it's going to be.
I'm I'm I'm here for this
type of stupid stuff, though.
This one's the better of them, but it
also feels like a slap
in the face of Nintendo.
So oh, I think it was
intentional that way.
I could not watch this close up, though.
This is the Twitch chat.
Yeah, I generated two looks like it.
What?
Oh, my God.
You guys hear it?
No, I can't hear it, but I've also heard
all of these before.
Yeah, it sounds like I think it's like a
police like body cam
like footage and like news.
You can see it's kind of fucked up like
me about to watch Mario get deported.
Yeah, he might.
He might be deported.
The real question is, are they going to
deport up to Italy or Japan?
That's actually a question.
The next is.
Yeah, you do that.
All right.
Rick and Morty can Morty.
God damn it.
Oh, no.
The show's already
gotten cringe over the years.
That's fan base is already cringe.
Yeah, I think it's already been cringe as
soon as the Szechuan
sauce fiasco happened.
I got some of the Szechuan sauce.
It was not that good.
So Rick just said Morty.
Oh, wait, he says.
Morty interdimensional.
Interdimensional.
TikTok just dropped with sort of
releasing version 2.0.
But like, that's kind
of what this is, right?
Like if you've ever watched
interdimensional cable,
it basically just a I slop.
Yeah, that's that was
actually pretty good.
Rick and Morty impression.
I don't think I know
that was pretty good.
But yeah, I'm curious.
Like do these.
Can you like feed Sora a prompt like that
where it's like open AI
just dropped interdimensional
TikTok and it will come up with and I'm
like, just do it for you.
I think it's going to be a long ass one
where you have to like
write paragraphs and paragraphs.
Maybe I think you'd be shocked at how
well open AI is in filling in the gaps.
So they probably utilize a different AI
model to generate like
the script and then they use
one for generating the video and
and here's and here's an
ad for Epstein Epstein.
I always the toy line.
You find their secret massage room.
Oh my God.
Jesus Christ.
Look, it even it even like
recreates like the fuzziness
like older like toy ads to.
Yeah.
I'm crazy.
You know that I think about though.
So you guys can't hear it.
But like James, like I'm listening to
this and it's it sounds
like a Nickelodeon ad like
and it's like impressively like, hey,
kids, get your Epstein Island toys.
It's like crazy.
Wow.
That's this is going to start.
This is the type of stuff we need to be
making fun of anyways,
because it's ridiculous that.
Hey.
Oh, that's going to get us
at a labor camp or something.
The orange man.
Oh, wow.
Wait, wait, look at this.
Yeah, I don't know.
They made him buff.
He's going to like it probably.
Well, no, he's on Epstein Island.
Yeah, well, if they just released the
files, we already know that.
On those like crazy, the crazy movement.
I miss the days of Will Smith eating
spaghetti looking totally crazy.
Oh, no.
I hated the uncanniness.
It was so unnerving.
It was like.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Imagine if they made a horror movie based
on like how bad AI used to look.
Is this cyberpunk?
Yeah, so it's fully recreated.
It's recreated gameplay from AI.
You can see the HUD like
changes multiple times.
Yeah, I don't know if that background is
generated by AI, though.
What do you mean?
Meaning the gameplay itself, except for a
few things, seems like it
was probably heavily copied.
I mean, yeah, I mean, yeah, but you can
like recreate fake gameplay with AI,
which has saved me.
Yeah, the water just continues to fill up
slightly by itself after he stops.
Yeah.
The bottom air gets cut off like
entirely, which I'm pretty sure that's
not supposed to happen.
No, dude.
Yeah.
I mean, just imagine how many trees in
the rainforest have to get
killed to create produce this AI slot.
We still have trees in the rainforest.
Not anymore, we don't.
Definitely not enough.
Not enough to not enough to fulfill Sam
Altman's dream of being
immune to criminal activity
because he can say, oh, but it's AI.
It's all AI.
Imagine if he actually walked into a
store and pickpocketed something.
People could just say, oh, it's AI.
That's why we,
there's going to need more.
Oh my gosh, we do not have an
administration that's going to,
we need a whole arm on like detecting AI
fakes and certifying stuff.
Okay.
Listen to your audience.
This is probably one portion of the video
that you should watch on YouTube because
while we just watch a bunch of videos and
it's kind of hard to really grasp of what
we're seeing unless you watch it as well.
Yeah.
I mean, what we just watched was pretty
convincing if you
weren't paying close attention.
For an ad, I will say for that ad,
Epstein won, even though it was a parody,
I will say anyone that is an actor or
voice actor is going to
be royally screwed in the
near future.
I think for ads, it's just going to make
sense for these companies just to do this
because they'll be much cheaper and no
one really pays
attention to most ads nowadays.
Well, here's the crazy part though.
People go on strike
and actors have success.
I think they should go
back on strike to be honest.
Yeah.
They probably will.
If I were an actor, I'd
probably go on strike too.
Yeah.
It's just why we need unions all around.
Yeah.
We're not going to have jobs soon, so
there won't be anyone to unionize.
It's crazy how close we
are to having zero jobs.
These are not going to create jobs.
It's like we...
Oh, that reminds me.
If you go back to...
Oh, sorry.
Go ahead.
No, it's okay.
No, I'm just more.
It's more with the AI.
I use AI, but I use it to help free up a
little bit of my time.
Does it make it right?
I don't know, but I
try not to overuse it.
Yeah.
If you go to a...
Yeah, if you go back to the Sora 2 anime
part, the part after the
stupid death note fight...
There's a gibley ripoff
right after that part.
So skip to like...
Let me see where it was.
Go to like 50.
Yeah.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
Full ripoff.
Status.
Notice how they don't
show them holding hands.
Yeah.
It's Saudi Arabia owned.
Yeah, I was going to say.
Okay, that hand
holding didn't look half bad.
I know how we're critiquing how anime
characters are all cat,
but that's not a terrible way to critique
how far AI has gone.
This is the only way we're going to get
more Hunter, Hunter.
Is to have an AI generated.
Matt, okay.
That's also another crazy thing too,
because Togashi, he's the
main author behind Hunter.
Yeah.
He's like, he is like suffering hard
because of his craft.
Like if AI replays that, it's crazy.
The guy can't even
wipe his own ass anymore.
That's how bad it's gotten.
Like his back pain is insane.
It's kind of crazy to think about artists
getting physical pain
when you have people in construction that
risk their lives every day.
But it's happened.
It does happen.
Like there's a lot of
cases where this happens.
And if AI just...
I don't know what to tell you.
I don't know.
He lives in a place that
has universal healthcare.
So at least that does help.
Yeah.
I don't know.
It's just...
Sorry.
I'm getting really political on this
whole thing because a lot
of this stuff is very like,
I'm sorry, but the future is
very bleak in a lot of ways.
Yeah.
You've heard of the grim dark universe.
We live in the grim shit universe.
Is it worse?
I don't know.
It definitely...
I just remembered when AI used to...
The whole idea behind AI used to be that
they were like sentient life forms.
They were basically
like people, but like...
Robots.
And like...
That's technically why AI is supposed to
be artificial intelligence.
Yeah.
Well, I guess people are
just naturally stupid, right?
I guess.
I mean, fucking...
We affixed the term AI to list what
really it should be machine learning.
A lot of it is machine learning.
There's a couple aspects.
There's a lot...
AI is a very complex issue and there's...
In order to actually have artificial
intelligence, there's a lot of different
modular pieces that go into making like
us, who we are intelligent.
And so, yeah.
Yeah.
They haven't changed the term because
people had to
essentially monetize AI as a term.
And that's where we're at now.
I just can't wait till this era of AI
ends where they have to fix the term
AI to every single product.
Fucking...
Rise in AI plus Max.
395 plus.
Who knows if it will...
Did you get it right?
Yeah, did I get it right?
I don't know.
It's too long to remember anymore.
Like that's the models and naming
conventions should be easy
for the buyer or anyone using it
to remember.
This is...
We have gone off the
deep end on naming stuff.
Like if us PC gamers and PC builders and
tech guys sometimes get this shit wrong,
then what about the regular consumer?
How the hell do they
don't stand a chance?
That's the problem.
So they'll just go buy a pre-made...
At the end of the day,
it doesn't even matter.
I don't know why they named this stuff.
It doesn't matter
because the normal person,
like the average person's gonna go and
buy a pre-made and not really understand
what they're getting.
Like sometimes that's
kind of the point though.
Yeah, like sometimes Apple gets it wrong
with like the pros and the
pluses and the pro maxes.
But sometimes they get it right.
They sometimes...
Like the M1.
It's still simple.
It's still drastically more simple.
And their GPUs and their CPUs are based
off of core accounts typically.
They're like, it's the M4 and then you
can have up to 40 cores,
let's say in the MacBook Pro.
I think that's much easier to understand
than what AMD is doing.
And I'm sure it's not the investors
saying to these guys,
"Oh, you need to make these names have
the word AI and like
the fucking throw off
the naming product schemes of products."
Definitely investors
like AI being injected.
It will...
Putting AI into anything will make your
stock go up a little bit.
That's like proven.
Here's the thing.
I'm probably part of the
problem because I don't mind AI.
I like AI.
But I don't like it.
I like a demo...
I want it to be democratized more and not
have it be in the hands of
just like a select few people
because this is going to end poorly.
Yes.
Yeah.
AI is cool in a few ways.
The new version of Audacity is going to
have open model weights from Intel in it.
And you'll be able to
generate music, generate audio,
and do noise reduction with
it, which is freaking awesome.
And it's all run locally on your machine.
The same goes with DaVinci Resolve.
All of the models are run
locally on your machine.
If you could run...
I have a machine, a GPU in my server that
is doing image
categorization in my next cloud.
That's all great.
But as soon as it's being gate kept by
these huge corporations
that cannot be trusted,
that's when it
becomes dangerous, I think.
I agree with you, James.
I think democratization is key.
Well, thankfully
DeepSeek is open source, right?
Not really.
No.
I mean, it has some open weights, but
they're kind of truncated compared to...
What's the term?
Not truncated.
The open weights are a reduced precision.
I don't remember what the term is.
Interesting.
Oh, I thought that was
the whole selling point.
It was a lighter model that was also kind
of open source almost.
Well, it's hard to make an AI
open source because not only...
You have to make all of the training data
not available, but
ethical in order for it to be
open source.
And so I don't think DeepSeek was trained
ethically, and I don't
think that their full
weights have been published.
That makes sense.
Yeah.
Oh, well.
AI is still one category.
I'm still not fully into.
Like, I just don't fully...
I guess I just don't
fully get it just yet.
I think eventually I will
be, but only time will tell.
Truthfully, if AI can be used to help
save creatives time,
that's when it's useful and
that's when it's
interesting, and that's when it's good.
But everything else about AI is garbage.
If it's just posting...
If it's just flooding
the internet with shit.
If it's being used to manipulate people.
If it's...
Yeah.
There's just so much wrong
with the way AI is being used.
It's...
Here's the problem too.
For me, I use it and it saves me a lot of
time that I can spend with my kids.
I spend a little bit
more time with my kids now.
That for me is invaluable because then I
can get some of the
stuff I need to done on a
creative level, and then I
can spend more time with them.
But it's not...
It also does bother me that
it's still not very ethical.
Have you guys seen...
Did I show you my Kezeta video?
Can you hear this?
Guys, I just finished...
I think you told us about this.
Yeah, you told us about this a while ago.
I did.
So basically, I'll tell
the story again real quick.
I was holding my phone like this, right?
And to do that intro part.
And I was covering the microphone.
Oh no.
So it was like this really muffled thing.
You could still hear what I was saying,
but it sounded like shit.
I didn't have time to rerecord it.
I had already trained DaVinci's AI model
on one of my old videos.
So I had a model of my own voice that I
had trained previously.
I just right clicked on the audio clip
for this handheld portion right here.
I generated my own voice over top of it.
And if you listen to this...
There's a number of reasons.
But the first is because it's
basically indistinguishable.
Nobody knew in the comments,
even though I said it here,
that's the cool shit
that you can do with AI.
And I really love that.
It does sound interesting.
Yeah, I blew my mind when I first started
because you had us preview it before.
And I was like...
That's right.
Oh yeah, I sent it to
you guys in Discord.
That's right.
Yeah, like an earlier
version of that video.
Yeah.
I've had to regenerate some audio too.
But I didn't do it with DaVinci Resolve.
But now that I have a copy that I can, I
will try to do that more.
But I've done it with
Descript and it was very convenient
because I didn't have
to rerecord something.
Yeah, but people are using AI for their
own nefarious purposes.
For example, there was someone that was
using AI to generate
cosplay photos of themselves
and selling those photosets because
that's what cosplayers do online.
And one of my cosplayer
friends, she got really mad.
She got really pissed off because she
does actual cosplay
yourself and it's kind of crazy.
Damn.
Yeah.
So I guess at the end
of the day, AI is a tool.
It's just a matter of who is using it.
And obviously the people trying to use it
to scam other people.
Like AI artists online trying to pretend
like they're making actual art.
Obviously, it's just a
matter of greed, to be honest.
Yeah.
That's definitely one
thing that we need to fix.
And there's a lot of different ways to do
that, but I don't know
if it's going to happen.
Yeah.
I'd love to know what everyone in the
audience thinks about AI.
Because I've seen lots of
different varying opinions.
And I'm curious, you
guys, leave us a comment.
You can interact with
the show on the Fetaverse.
You can follow us on the Fetaverse.
You can also leave a comment on YouTube.
Guys, I think that's
probably the show right there.
What do you think?
Let's wrap it up.
Awesome.
Cool.
Well, thank you, everybody, for watching.
And I'm glad to be back
joining my friends here.
And we'll see you
guys in the next episode.
Later, guys.
Later.
See you.