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Full Business Brain
82 Plays1 year ago
- Mini-Topic: Judge Newman Being Suspended
- ‘Simply losing it’: Bitter fight brews over federal judge’s forced retirement effort | The Hill
- https://cafc.uscourts.gov/wp-content/uploads/JudicialMisconductOrders/September%2020,%202023%20Judicial%20Council%20Order.pdf
- Judge, 96, suspended over mental fitness concerns (axios.com)
- Main topic: Unity Engine Disaster
- EGDF calls for EU regulation on non-negotiable contracts in wake of Unity backlash | GamesIndustry.biz
- Unity reportedly told dev Planned Parenthood and children's hospital are "not valid charities" | GamesIndustry.biz
- Mobile game developers rebel over Unity charging, company will 'make changes'
- The video game industry is in uproar over a software pricing change. Here's why
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Transcript
Intro and Humor
00:00:00
Speaker
Intro music, cue the intro music. I forgot to play with a new generator other than to make Supreme Court barbecue, which was not as good this time. No, it wasn't as silly this time. Yeah, it was less distinctive. It didn't have that barbecue feel that I was going for. I don't think the first one had barbecue feel either.
00:00:25
Speaker
No, it was like clowns at a circus. I don't know. You don't associate Benny Hill with barbecues? No. People doing stupid things. Yeah, a little bit. It's possible. Yeah, I have a little Benny Hill. That original music was more akin to Yakety Sax.
00:00:45
Speaker
Yeah. I was like, yeah. What's the difference between Yakety Sax and Benny Hill? Isn't that the same song? I thought they were the, yeah, I thought Yakety Sax was a Benny Hill song. I think they're the same. I have no idea what the Benny Hill song is. So apparently. Oh, it's that. Okay. All right. So it's the same thing. Okay.
00:01:01
Speaker
We're all on the same page about our song.
Podcast and Hosts Introduction
00:01:05
Speaker
Well, in case people can't tell from what we're talking about, this is Squaring Minds, episode 25 for September 21st, 2023. Yeah. And we're three lawyer friends goofing around, talking about music, I guess now. That's what we do. On schedule this time. We did it intended. Yes, as expected. Yep. Every two weeks. Here we are. Do you remember?
00:01:27
Speaker
Do I remember the 21st day of September? Oh, that's the day. 21st night of September. Okay. Yes. Yes. Love that today. What is it? Do you remember? Earth, wind and fire in my body. If you don't remember the lyrics, there are a series of videos that I can direct you to. Have you guys seen the Demi? I don't remember how to pronounce his last name. Electro Lemon on Twitter, his September 21 videos, where he,
00:01:55
Speaker
He did this for years where he had increasingly elaborate ways to show the date of September 21, where at the end, he raised a million dollars last time for COVID relief or something.
00:02:12
Speaker
And like it involved like a giant like house production stuff where like a house was being tilted on its axis. Anyway, I'm going to have to show you a lot of sense to me, but I think I get the idea. Yeah. It was, he said like, this has to be the last one because this took me like four months to make.
00:02:31
Speaker
So I'm done. He's a writer on like the good place and, uh, like a bunch of, uh, other stuff. Okay. Gotcha. That was the detail. I wasn't, I wasn't getting. Yes. Electro lemon is Twitter handle where he posted this stuff. You mean X. We don't have an X story today. We don't, we don't have a Twitter story today. I don't think, I mean, we're talking about Twitter a little bit now, but no, let's, let's just go the entire episode. Let's just go one episode without saying that name. Let's just go. We'll just talk about X then.
00:02:59
Speaker
No, no, no, no. No X. We have actual bonafide topics to talk about tonight that are law topics that are not technology and hating on he who shall not be named. So let's just have a night. That's a night free of who shall not be named. Voldemort, we'll call him if we have to.
00:03:21
Speaker
Okay. Uh, and, uh, who, who are we? Yeah. We should do intros. I'm Andrew. I'm a tax and technology attorney and I'm from New Jersey. I'm also now an adjunct professor at Drexel Klein law school. It is safe to say you are my favorite law professor at Drexel. Oh, thank you. Appreciate it. All the others are offended, but I appreciate it. Well, I don't really care what they think.
00:03:44
Speaker
Gina's a law professor there too. She's a fence. She might listen. Oh, I take it back. Yeah, you left man. Gina's my favorite now. There you go. Okay. You thought
Jason's Litigation Insights
00:03:56
Speaker
you were safe, but you know, you made a, you made an actual statement. I'm Jacob Schumer, Florida construction land use attorney.
00:04:07
Speaker
I'm Jason Ramsland. I am a, the man for suing bad bosses in the state of Indiana. You can go to sue my bad boss.com. That'll take you to my website. I see people's bad bosses. Surprise, surprise. Are you totally done suing people in Georgia? No more suing people. Not totally done. I got a couple of lingering things there. I'm actually doing a deposition in one on Monday that I'm pretty excited about. It's a, it's an overtime case that I'm pretty pumped up for.
00:04:34
Speaker
Oh, so excited about depositions. That sounds like the most exciting thing. I actually think that depositions are maybe the best way that I have as a litigator of contributing to the team. I think that I am okay at my job most of the time, but at depositions, I actually think I'm pretty good. I have a lot of fun doing it too, so I'm looking forward to it. I enjoy it. If I could take depositions three days a week and that was the main part of my job, I would do it.
00:05:02
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I think that tracks. I wouldn't say you seem like conflict averse. Like I think you, you like kind of digging in a little bit. Thank you. This is Andrew's way of saying Jason, you seem like a real big jerk. No, no, no, no. Like I would want the, I would want you on my team with whatever cause I'm, I'm very much the opposite. I don't want it. I don't want it. I don't want any conflict. So I see the, uh, the skill there. I get it.
00:05:24
Speaker
Sometimes litigation, like sometimes it takes a while for me to allow it to soak in that by being a litigator, I'm just going to have horrible people come into my life every once in a while.
00:05:39
Speaker
You know, it's a lot of the time I have opposing counsel who are like nice or, you know, I would say 90% of my opposing counsel are nice, 95% for like, you know, at least respectful, considerate. But like, then the other 5% are just like the worst. And I'm just like, how do you get about
00:06:01
Speaker
How do you have friends? Do you have friends? I guess I shouldn't assume. How do people tolerate your existence on a day to day basis? How are you married? Who is it that hurt you to make you this way? Yeah.
00:06:16
Speaker
I could say that. I mean, it seems like the kind of thing, sort of like working at the DMV, you're kind of running into people when they are at their worst, but you're saying it's opposing counsel. That's the biggest, that really is the, like these bad people that are drifting into your life. You're saying it's other attorneys. Oh yeah.
00:06:33
Speaker
I mean, like clients, I, my own clients, I like my clients, my, I'm usually not fighting with my clients anymore. Now that I'm not a public defender, uh, my, uh, opposing clients, I never talked to. So because, you know, not allowed to, for the most part, you talk to him in a deposition. Yeah. That's what, that's why when you get excited about
00:06:57
Speaker
Now you get to talk. Well, I mean, maybe I like depositions because I tend to pick cases where my client is right. I don't know.
00:07:06
Speaker
No, I can see that. And I mean, your cases tend to have a sort of, um, moral, um, yeah. Yeah. This is satisfaction there. Yeah. I like to think so. I like to think so. So anyway, every once in a while I have a deposition where I'm like, I have a smoking gun and I have it in writing and I can't wait to see what you say about this.
00:07:30
Speaker
I would say a good 60 to 70% of the time I go around that smoking gun, the answer is so unsatisfying. Even if it's good for my client, even if it's good for my client, if they get super wishy-washy and don't really answer because that makes them look bad, it's not as fun as you really want it to be satisfying that answer to be like,
00:07:56
Speaker
uh either a straight up admission or getting super defensive uh in that admission but you know like screaming you can't handle the truth type moment is what you're looking for exactly what i was going for right like you want that moment you want that like ben mattlock in the courtroom yeah
00:08:14
Speaker
Stunning the jury with this amazing revelation moment. And it turns out that it's just going to be cited in a motion for summary judgments and it doesn't look as cool when it's on a deposition transcript. Uh, but you know, it's still fun to go out there and get it. I really like doing that.
00:08:31
Speaker
Was Matlock's first name really Ben? I'm pretty sure it was. I'm going to be really embarrassed. Boy, I'm going to be just filled with embarrassment if that's not it. Uh, you guys hold my beer while I Google. I knew he had a first name. You have no obligation to know anything about Matlock. No, I mean, that absolutely was Ben Matlock. Yes. Okay. Wow. I had no idea. That's a Southern name right there.
00:08:55
Speaker
Yeah. I had no idea he had a first name. That is classic 90s. I've lost the television remote TV show, right? Like I can't find the remote. I'm not getting up. It's on whatever. Yeah. It's one a.m. I don't have the energy to find anything. I'll just deal with this. Yeah. All right. What is he? Andy Griffith is doing what? Yeah.
00:09:16
Speaker
It's either one a.m. or you're sick and it's noon. Right. Yeah. You stay home from school. And it's that there's night. Night rider repeats. Yeah. There's you guys remember Renegade, that weird TV shows on like USA in the 90s. It was about a guy. I wrote a motorcycle.
00:09:32
Speaker
I know it's vaguely familiar. Yeah. 90s was big. Have a hero have a conveyance. That was interesting, right? The car talks to the motorcycle. He always rides. That was like 90% of writing a store, a TV show for the night. Sea quest. There you go. You guys remember sea quest? That's super cool. Submarine. Yeah. Okay. This is the animated show. No, no, nevermind.
00:09:56
Speaker
No, you're thinking of C-Lab. C-Lab. This is like Comedy Central Adult Swim. Hey guys, we've been recording for 10 minutes and we haven't talked about the law yet. Okay, I'm going to transition for you guys, right? We don't have to talk about the law all the time. We can talk about just being
Judge Newman's Suspension Debate
00:10:11
Speaker
friends. I guess we did talk about the law. We talked about depositions and smoking guns and litigation and stuff like that. I got the segue for you. Ready? Somehow we parlay that into C-Lab and then pass it west.
00:10:22
Speaker
Okay. Ben Matlock was played by Andy Griffith, right? He was born in 1926. So if he was alive today, he would be about 96 years old. Okay. And there's our segue. Are we ready? We're ready. Oh, that's very sad. Wow. So Andy Griffith would be about the age of Judge Newman. This is the story we've decided we're going to cover here, right? As our little mini topic, Judge Newman has been suspended. We talked about it, I think a couple of, a couple of
00:10:49
Speaker
episodes ago. It wasn't the last episode, was it? Oh, did we? I didn't remember that. Just in past, did we not?
00:10:55
Speaker
I don't know. Oh boy. I thought it might've been on a, it might've been on your better podcast. So the judicial council of the federal circuit issued an order on September 20th, 2023 concerning this judge, judge Pauline Newman. She's 96 years old. She served on the court for 39 years. Uh, the order delves into sort of the concerns about her fitness to perform her duties. And, uh, she's been suspended and it's like repeatable for future years for a year, which is a long time for a 96 year old judge, I think.
00:11:24
Speaker
Sure. I mean, this is tantamount to removal, like perception. They're basically, she's removed. Yeah. Renewable one year suspension. Yeah. She's suspended until she resigns or passes away. And so it wasn't just because she's 96 years old. There were a number of complaints about like cognitive issues, memory loss, confusion, focus, that kind of stuff. Some behavioral concerns, the stuff I read, they were talking about she had like some agitation, some paranoia, and then like also like physical issues. She had a heart attack and some other
00:11:53
Speaker
medical episodes and stuff and like half of her staff resigned or something. And then some people like, uh, they signed, uh, what like anonymous, uh, affidavit saying like, she's not fit. Yeah. And so one of her staff pled the fifth, didn't they? Yeah. Yeah. Which is concerning. I don't understand how they could possibly have criminal liability, but two of judge Newman staff members resigned and one invoked the fifth amendment when questioned about her mental fitness. I wonder if that staff member signed stuff.
00:12:22
Speaker
for or wrote stuff that the judge was supposed to do, um, that the judge was not mentally capable to do this. This whole story is just sad. Yeah. Um, you know, there's all kinds of like policy thing, you know, things that we might think about when it comes to, you know, these lifetime appointments, right? Florida, we have a mandatory retirement age of, I think 75. Um, that's just got updated.
00:12:48
Speaker
I think we have one in Indiana too. I don't know if it's 70 or 75, but I think we do. Especially for Supreme Court justices, I think at least in maybe appellate court judges.
00:12:59
Speaker
Yeah, but obviously there's no federal one, right? So I mean, I think that's the, the core kind of issue here is, and maybe that's something we can talk about. Like it's hard to talk about these sorts of, I find it difficult for to talk about these kinds of issues and not have it come off as ageism, right? Because it's difficult to, on one hand, you want to say something like it seems like 96 years old. Maybe that's too old to be a judge, right? But I have difficulty sort of unwinding that from our sort of defending that against just simply being an ageist statement.
00:13:30
Speaker
I think that it's interesting because I didn't even know this act existed, this judicial conduct act, which allows for removal for disability. Judge Newman. Sorry, technical difficulties. Yes. I was also unaware that there was any sort of act to remove her for competence issues. I didn't know that was a thing. I thought pretty much life appointment was life appointment.
00:13:48
Speaker
Yeah. What I was saying was or thinking was that like ageism at some point, you know, Alzheimer's or like degenerative, you know, this kind of issues that affects your mind is going to become becomes more and more common. And I think people just don't want to have to worry. It's hard to figure out exactly how long, how bad somebody is.
00:14:17
Speaker
And you don't want to have to go through this kind of painful investigation like having a judge Newman. And so even if it's not like, I'm sure there are plenty of very sharp 90 year old judges, but there is many, it's much more likely that you have Alzheimer's at 90 than you do at 45 or 50 or something like that.
00:14:40
Speaker
And even if it's not Alzheimer's, it can be just like garden variety dementia or garden variety cognitive decline. And we already engage in ageism as a policy matter because we don't let four year olds drive cars.
00:14:56
Speaker
And we don't let 13 year olds vote and we don't let 17 year olds drink alcohol or buy cigarettes because these, we recognize that there is a certain period of life where your cognitive capacity is growing and developing and your mind isn't fully formed yet. And your, I don't know, prefrontal cortex or
00:15:18
Speaker
whatever, your reptilian brainstem doesn't yet understand that, hey, maybe some restraint would be good here, or maybe you're exercising bad judgment, or maybe this is a risk you shouldn't be taking. So we already recognize that on the front end. But what we're talking about here is recognizing it on the back end. And there's a really delicate
00:15:39
Speaker
uh, balance to strike here because there, Jake, you're absolutely right. There are plenty of very mentally sharp, you know, 90 year olds, my great grandfather and great grandmother, one on each side were examples of that. But then you have examples like, you know, another member of my family who was not sharp at 72.
00:16:02
Speaker
Right. And it feels gross, I guess, to start subjecting folks once they reach a certain age to certain tests, but we kind of have to do it. And I think in some states you find
00:16:18
Speaker
that DMV or BMV, whatever your state calls it, the motor vehicle regulatory authorities start requiring that after a certain age, you have to retake your driving test. Whereas like now in your 30s, 40s, 50s, you just, you'd go back in and you're automatically renewed.
00:16:35
Speaker
And so there has to be some way for the law to recognize cognitive decline is a real thing once you pass a certain threshold age. And I don't really want us to get into the situation where we're having tests to vote in an election. But when you're occupying a position, a constitutionally appointed office that has this kind of importance, we really ought to
00:17:07
Speaker
We really ought to have a safety net for it. Yeah. And the importance is kind of like the big deal with, just like with the driver's license. Like if you screw up driving, you might kill somebody. Right. Judges, appellate judges. And trial judges are making law. Trial judges are deciding the fate of people's, all kinds of interests. Jail, going to jail.
00:17:32
Speaker
Right. And so, like, you know, it's you're going to throw out a few babies with the bathwater by having mandatory retirement, that kind of thing. But, you know, it's something where we care so much about, like, getting it right, because not getting it right is a disaster. Right. Yeah.
00:17:49
Speaker
And is there also not an argument, like not even on an individual basis, but just in terms of, I haven't really fully thought this through, but like generational turnover, like an idea that as a policy, we may want to try to push the average age down independent of this individual person.
00:18:10
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. There's a more sort of writ large type of policy rather than an individual like this. So this particular example, it seems like to your point, there's plenty of 90 year olds that are, uh, I'm sure are very with it and can, could still stand up to the rigors of being an appellate judge. No problem. It doesn't sound like judge Newman was, is one of them from what people are describing. I mean, they were saying that she needed a chair every 10 feet in the hallway to get to her office from the elevators. And it sounds like there's like physical limitations as well.
00:18:39
Speaker
to her being able to sort of exercise her duties as a judge. Her productivity was way down. This doesn't seem really like that much of an edge case as much as she just sort of didn't
00:18:52
Speaker
I don't want to say fold, but like just didn't say, all right, I understand and retire. She kind of pushed back. This is her life. We're seeing this a lot happening like in the political realm now where we just have people hanging on for way too
Age and Cognitive Decline in Politics
00:19:06
Speaker
long. And like you can look at the most
00:19:10
Speaker
Uh, in your face example of it right now, uh, you know, the next presidential election at the moment looks like it has stands a reasonable chance of being what a 78 year old Donald Trump at the time of the election. And an 80, what? 81, 82 year old Joe Biden or something like that. And like,
00:19:30
Speaker
At that point, they are already past the age where you would start being reasonably suspicious of cognitive decline, in addition to the fact that they're both showing evidence of cognitive decline. Look, she made it to 96 on the federal bench. That's an accomplishment. Making it to 80 on the federal bench is an accomplishment.
00:19:57
Speaker
Making it to 70 on the federal bench is an accomplishment. There's a judge who I practice in front of in the Northern District of Indiana who is incredibly sharp. And he was appointed to the federal bench the year I was born. He was appointed to the federal bench a month before I was born. Very sharp judge. He doesn't spend as much time in court as a lot of others might because he's taken senior judge status.
00:20:25
Speaker
And that's kind of what's supposed to happen in this situation is there is a very, very good shot that she is still, Judge Newman is still, when she is having good days, has an incredibly high level of legal acumen, good judgment, can do this job.
00:20:45
Speaker
and maybe a valuable asset as a senior judge, maybe closely monitored. I don't really know exactly what that looks like, but this is a serious problem and we're facing it with Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell. Nancy Pelosi is not showing a lot of signs of cognitive decline, but she is
00:21:07
Speaker
well-preserved, and you're singing with Mitch McConnell, you're singing with Feinstein, and so it's part of the big national conversation now. Frankly, I think it's ripe for action, but good luck with this House of Representatives and this Senate.
00:21:30
Speaker
Going, playing that into Andrew's point about passing the torch. There are a lot of people who, it's a trend of this generation, this older generation just not retiring. They've started to retire now. I don't know what it's like to be that age of like 60, 70 where you're supposed to be retiring. I can imagine all kinds of reasons why you wouldn't. It's like, just go ahead and do it. Just go ahead.
00:21:59
Speaker
So if you have the financial capability to resign, you can find some other outlet. That's my suggestion. I don't sit in your shoes, but pride is definitely keeping people in their jobs.
00:22:18
Speaker
longer than they should not everybody obviously but a whole lot of people seems to be happening yeah i don't know if it's necessarily pride i have very people that i care an awful lot about who continue to practice law well into their seventies and eighties and like
00:22:39
Speaker
It's not always about pride. And it's certainly, I mean, in these cases that I'm thinking of, it's not about money, but it is about like, this is what I do. I don't know how to do anything else. What the heck is going to happen if I sit at home all day? Like, what am I going to do? Start gardening? I live in Indiana. Like you can garden three months out of the year. That's an exaggeration. But like, you know, part of it is I think there's been a lot of, now we're getting into the psychology of baby boomers here, but
00:23:08
Speaker
in the baby boomer generation, like working and being a workaholic was a badge of honor in a way that three millennials like us can't understand. And so like this workaholic phenomenon, you know, part of that's got to be playing into it too, where this is what I've known. What else is my life, if not my work?
00:23:31
Speaker
Yeah. I've tried to explain it to my daughter too. I think part of it is that I don't know if you guys feel this way, but this, now this is really getting into some psychology stuff, but you don't change who you are to you as you age, particularly like you're the same you, you were when you were 13. You're just the, even if you're not totally not.
00:23:51
Speaker
Right. But to you, you have to be because otherwise, I think that would be a break that you can't really deal with. And so I imagine the getting older feels that way as well. And so if you're relatively able at 60, at 70, at 80, that just sort of reinforces, especially if you're physically able. If basically modern medicine can keep you kind of plodding along, then
00:24:12
Speaker
you are ripe to think that you are the same as you were 20, 30, 40 years ago. And as long as everything stays the way it was, then nothing has changed and you're still chugging on.
Psychological Reasons for Working Late into Life
00:24:23
Speaker
And that's how you get to 96. And so part of it is like to ask this person, this is how they got to 96 years old. Now you should stop doing the thing that has gotten you to here.
00:24:31
Speaker
It is to ask her to stop living basically. Yeah. There's a lot of stories about like college football coaches who retired and then just immediately died. It just happens like that. And that was like everybody who was born before like 1910 too. Don't you both have like grandparents or great-grandparents? That was roughly the story. Like they retired and then 18 months later they were gone.
00:24:55
Speaker
No, that's not my grand story. Not either. For various reasons. Oh, okay. I have several. I have enough to go around. Yeah. No, nobody, none of my four grandparents retired and then died. Yeah. But for what it's worth, the whole workaholic thing. One of these days when there was, or one of these times when there was a giant, giant lottery,
00:25:23
Speaker
And everybody was playing. I had a public defender lunch. We were talking about what we would do if we won the lottery. And everybody was talking about what they would do. But also every single person said they would keep being a public defender.
00:25:37
Speaker
Um, just like, it like, yeah, you would just do it less for love of the game. And then the rest of your time you would, you know, do whatever like, like, you know, maybe you love your job and you want to keep doing it. But in some cases, like where people's lives are in your hands, uh, maybe not the right call. Yeah. Yeah.
00:26:01
Speaker
Like public defender. Or like being an Article III judge on the federal bench. Yeah. Though in that case, we would just be super rich and not older. Yeah. Right. Right. And able to go do something else. You have answers to the, what am I going to do? But so apparently the other issue with Judge Newman was that she just didn't comply with any of the requirements for medical testing, which I
00:26:23
Speaker
And I think, again, is like why this is not really a gray area edge case as much as it's been sort of touted as that. This is just clearly someone who just didn't comply with apparently these are the rules, these are the requirements you need to comply. You didn't, you've been suspended. That's it. As I read through this story, it vaguely reminded me of a story arc from the West Wing where there was a judge on the Supreme Court who was issuing opinions that were in a meter
00:26:53
Speaker
uh, like iambic pentameter or something like that, like in a, in a poetic meter. And like, I wish the story had a little bit more of that flavor, but that's a little too Eren Sorkin. I thought you were going to say this, it went like flowers for Algernon where suddenly the meters started falling away. I was like, Oh, are they okay? No, no, no.
00:27:14
Speaker
This doesn't rhyme. Yeah. And I mean, it was a similar sort of cognitive decline kind of story. And like, how do we handle that? So this is not a new question that we are dealing with as it relates to the judiciary. It's a hard question and involves some competing policy concerns, but I think probably it's, it's fairly easy in this instance to take the side of, yeah, you know what, the line should be drawn before we get to this point and
00:27:43
Speaker
Where exactly you draw it is a much harder question, but it should have been drawn before this. So this is only partially relevant, but didn't President Buchanan's wife
00:27:56
Speaker
bit like give all the orders because Buchanan died like, or was like on his death bed. Think of Woodrow Wilson. Okay. He had a stroke and he was like in modern part, like with modern medicine, the understanding now I think is that he was catatonic. Like he was, yeah.
00:28:17
Speaker
beyond just like having a bad day. He was no longer there and she ran things for a while. And I think, uh, didn't, uh, Eleanor Roosevelt probably did quite a bit of FDR's sort of stuff, uh, in the last year or so. That's fine. That's, that's, that's what the conservatives would want you to think. Oh, that's true. Yeah. That's true. I'm sorry. I mean, um, okay. Let's, we have any other points of people who should retire already. Yeah. John Rigatello. Oh man. Don't get me started.
00:28:48
Speaker
Uh, the CEO of unity transitions tonight. Good job. Yes. I was, I was, I was not looking forward to trying to pronounce it. So it's Ricatello. Is that how you say it? Yes. Okay. Ricatello. Yes.
00:29:01
Speaker
that data I'd look in, it's the CEO of Unity, right? Right. And you'll, shall I cover this because I've been popping off on it. So this is like the, this is the main topic or, you know, mini topic, main topic, kind of just say whatever. Unity. So here's, here's the background for people who are not big nerds, which is most of you, let's be honest. The,
00:29:30
Speaker
In video games, to make a video game, you have to sit on top of an engine. And the engine is like the tool set and the skeleton that your game runs on. And some people make their own engines, but the vast majority of games are made on two engines, Unreal Engine, which is made by Epic, the Fortnite people, and Unity Engine, which used to be like a nonprofit almost, I think.
00:29:59
Speaker
Like a public, I think it used to be open source. I might be wrong about that. This is like years and years ago. But it was like based on the idea that you could purchase individual parts of the engine from different people. People can make their own engine parts and sell them to you. But it's really been considered good for smaller games.
00:30:21
Speaker
So this is unity. And one of the benefits that unity had for a very long time is that it had a flat fee. Like you would pay like $1,000 a year or $500 a year per person that used it. And that is your engine. You have your engine license.
00:30:38
Speaker
Right. And so people made, you know, spend five, six years making their game an engine in unity and then they publish it and they've paid like, you know, $60,000 for the use of that engine. And maybe they make $70,000. Maybe they make tens of millions of dollars on that on that game.
00:30:56
Speaker
That's as opposed to unreal, where they make 5% of what you make over a million dollars. So if you made a game in unreal and it made $300 million, they would take $15 million.
00:31:12
Speaker
So it was potentially more expensive to use yet Unreal, but also Unreal is better for like big 3D games like that. So that's the situation. Most games are actually made in Unity. But most of them, that includes indie games, that kind of thing. They would also like big games like Hearthstone and Marvel Snap.
00:31:32
Speaker
Assassin's Creed Pokemon go among us. Yeah. A lot of like big time. Yeah. Big time, like smaller scale games. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That make a whole lot of money, including like Genshin Impact, which makes an incredible amount of money. Right. And so that was the situation is the situation. Right. This week, Unity announced a new pricing
00:31:58
Speaker
a new pricing schedule. They are no longer doing flat pricing. This is their announcement. They are instead going to be charging 20 cents per install of Unity. That is 20 cents any time that somebody installs your game, they're going to charge you 20 cents, beginning with installs in 2024.
00:32:22
Speaker
Right. So this is not an install of Unity. This is an install of any game that is made using the Unity platform. By a user, by a gamer, right? Just by you or me downloading a game and installing it. Twenty cents needs to change hands from the producer to the... So let's say tomorrow, everybody... Not everybody.
00:32:40
Speaker
everybody who's getting a new iPhone this year gets a new iPhone and that gets put, installed onto a new device, extra 20 cents for unity for every single unity based game that gets transferred from your old phone that you're going to sell back to your cell carrier or whoever onto your new phone. So like they get enriched because you bought a new phone.
00:33:01
Speaker
Yeah. Subscription things, right? Like Xbox game pass, stuff like that. Right. Installation through there. Again, doesn't necessarily mean that this is like a sale per se. It's an install. I think there's an important distinction to make there. Not a sale. Right. OK. Yeah. There's like there's like 11 reasons why it's insane that the way that they decided to charge based on install. One is, of course, that so many of uni games are free to play and getting 20 cents per person per person
00:33:29
Speaker
out of free to play is not a guarantee. And a lot of free to play games are based on the idea that they will just have like hunt millions upon millions upon millions of installs and they'll get 40 cents per person, 50 cents per person. So that completely wrecks that business model.
00:33:49
Speaker
Second, it includes reinstalls by the same person. This is the initial announcement. It includes reinstalls by the same person on the same device. And they confirmed that that was true. Right. And so if somebody hated you, they could just keep deleting and reinstalling and deleting and reinstalling and just rack up your bill. Like it's a service attack on your bank account.
00:34:10
Speaker
Or say, for example, there's an iOS update on my phone for my phone. And in order to install this iOS update, I need to make some space on my phone to download the update so that I can install. So this literally happened. I deleted the Solitaire version off my phone so that I could install iOS 17. That's another $0.10, $0.20 for Unity right there. Good job, guys. You earned it.
00:34:37
Speaker
Think of people who sync app downloads across a certain... Say the entire Apple ecosystem. So if you sync it to your iPad... I will never play this game on my iPad, but I happened to download it on my phone. Now it's on my iPad. Now it's maybe on my Apple TV. Whatever else. One person who will play the game once or twice could easily be four or five installations. No problem.
00:34:58
Speaker
Yeah. Even if they're not doing anything wrong or even if they're not trying to mess with you. And just before you go any further with that, just really quickly. So Unity had ties to apparently was it was announced at a worldwide worldwide developers conference conference for Apple in 2005.
Unity's Controversial Pricing Model
00:35:15
Speaker
It was meant to democratize game development by making it accessible to more developers. So I don't know if it was open source in terms of its licensing, but the idea was that it was going to make it like it was obvious. This was in the era when they were trying to make gaming on the Mac happen.
00:35:28
Speaker
And so that's, I think, probably what this was intended to be, really. But in an attempt to get games on the Mac, what they were trying to say was like, look, indie developers, here's a fully built game engine that you can just jump on. Like, it'll be much cheaper. It'll be much easier. So to your point, not open source in terms of licensing, but open source in terms of sort of democratizing and making it more available for smaller production houses and stuff.
00:35:51
Speaker
Well, this was the engine for iOS games when the App Store was released in 2008. This was what you built your iPhone games on.
00:36:03
Speaker
Right. And a lot of terrible games have that unity like splash screen. Yeah. Because in like that's a sign that the game is usually going to be bad, but it's not because it's built in unity. It's because you're required to have that splash screen if you use the free version of unity that exists or the cheaper version. So because of that, everybody associates unity with bad. But actually, that's just because it's unprofessional productions using that.
00:36:32
Speaker
Um, but so let's say, okay, so that's the fee. So maybe you say, okay, well, I'm not going to make games in unity and you know, then that sucks, but whatever. Uh, well guess what? If you made a game in unity or spent years making it, and you're, it's about to come out, you still are bound by this because if you've updated any time in the last year,
00:36:54
Speaker
because they removed the portion of their TOS that said that if you don't like an update on the TOS, you can continue using the old version and still use the same TOS. And so what that means is that, for example, Hearthstone, which came out like
00:37:13
Speaker
what, like eight, 10 years ago, long time ago or something like that. Uh, 2014, I think, um, if you made heart released Hearthstone, uh, they are going, you can't even stop it. Uh, you can't sell any new copies. You can't a lot, uh, release any new copies after 2024 without, um, uh, without paying this fee. But even if you didn't, uh, even if you remove this from the store,
00:37:43
Speaker
People can still install things that they bought from steam. You can't take that away because they've bought it and under the same conditions, they get to reinstall it however much they want because that's what they purchase. You can't remove it like that. This is retroactive. They keep saying it's not retroactive because it's not going to count installs before 2024.
00:38:06
Speaker
But it's retroactive because it completely changes the business deal that they've been making with all these games from the beginning of time. Like large, meaningful businesses like Microsoft, who, for example, put games on Game Pass, which are also meant to get as many people to install as possible.
00:38:29
Speaker
like based their revenue projections on the unity business, you know, business, uh, the deal that they were selling. Sure. Uh, and they silently removed that, that provision of the TOS that allowed you to continue and also deleted the evidence of the old TOS, um, which used to be on, on, uh, yeah, which used to be, it used to be on GitHub. And now that got deleted. Thank you, Mac machine for saving that for us. Yeah.
00:38:59
Speaker
I looked at the TOS because I was just like, wow, is this legal? I don't think it is like in the EU or anywhere else, including in America for a number of reasons. But you'd have to go to court over that and that sucks because you're going to be waiting. You're trying to have a business.
00:39:20
Speaker
And you're going to be waiting for the results of that lawsuit for months and months while this business, you might not be able to sell the game that you're trying to make with the license because the people who have the license or you need the authority to sell the license from are saying you're going to have to pay us way, way more than you thought that you're going to have to.
00:39:45
Speaker
Um, yeah. And there is sort of a sinister undertone here. I think you mentioned it. I don't want to steal your idea. I think you said it in, in our Slack that like, this seems to suggest that there's going to be some mechanism by which they could track installations. And yes, that is right.
00:40:00
Speaker
They're sort of transmitting that, right? That if it's not already somehow built in, I mean, I guess it's probably not. I would imagine one of the... Like a developer would notice something like that. Though I don't exactly know how you... Like programming on top of a gaming engine, would you necessarily know that that engine phones home? Or is that so discreet? The code is so separate. You know what I mean? Like you wouldn't be aware.
00:40:22
Speaker
You could know. I think the only way that I can imagine you knowing is if you check, like, you know, web traffic or something on installs. Yeah. But I don't know if they were able to, you know, shield that or something. I have no idea. But they. So that's another part of it, which is the how much are they charging you? Like you developers don't have access to how many people, how many times people installed one of their games. They just have no idea. They know how many they sell.
00:40:49
Speaker
Yeah, but they know, but they don't know how many times it's installed. And so the developers like, so what are you basing this bill on? What are they basing you basing this on? And they're like, it's proprietary. Uh, so, you know, trust us, bro. We're going to charge you the right amount. Um, and what is an install? Is it install transferring it from? So if I had a backup drive that I had on one drive and I moved it to another, is that an install? Absolutely.
00:41:14
Speaker
I mean, there's all these questions that are like, they just have installed on a virtual machine. It's an install or a new machine. You run the executable to install it. You run the package file to install it. Like it's there's your 10 cents, 20 cents. What about updates to existing games? Right? I imagine same thing because it's still built
00:41:33
Speaker
I don't think, I'm not sure about updates. And so it's funny because they, so after this came out, there were, you know, 15 questions, burning questions about how this could work. Also, how dare you? And the entire develop, like I've never seen an entire industry of companies coming out and saying like, how dare you? What the heck? This is messed up. Like I've seen this.
00:42:00
Speaker
We had, there was a, the company that made slave aspire, put out an image saying like, we've never made a public statement before, but you screwed this up so bad. We're going to, we're going to have to, we're going to delay our game. If you don't take this back, what the hell is something like that. And it was in that kind of language. Um,
00:42:20
Speaker
And they put out like a fact, which, you know, the FAQ. Right. Like saying they aren't going to count charity bundles. They aren't going to count. They are no longer. They decided they're no longer going to count reinstalls by the same person on the same machine. Cool. It's like, how do you know? They also said things like Game Pass won't count because the publishers will pay for it. And there was this like, how was that? What does that mean? What's up? How?
00:42:48
Speaker
Do you agree with them on this? Don't worry. How do you know what's going to be in a charity bundle? How do you know what's a charity? And it's just like it didn't make it made it worse because it just showed they had no idea what was going on or they just had they weren't telling anybody what was going on. And this is this is like a the professionalism level of like in a message board moderator, except it's a
00:43:18
Speaker
a company with billions of dollars in revenue. This seems to me like this whole thing seems to me to really have very, very strong echoes of what happened with Reddit just a few months ago, uh, where Reddit decided, Hey, we're tired of these AI models getting trained on our dataset that's been publicly available because you can just have your
00:43:43
Speaker
AI model crawl through Reddit using the API. So we're going to start charging a ridiculous amount for that. And by the way, screw all you developers who were using this API to make actually good Reddit clients. And similarly, we've got like, oh, hey, we're going to publish this platform where
00:44:00
Speaker
game developers, even novice game developers can go out and develop these cool new games. And yeah, a bunch of them suck, but some of them are really good. You mentioned Slay the Spire. Like that's a really fun game that tons of people know and love. And like, uh, so we're going to take all of that goodwill and set it on fire because we think that by the time the hullabaloo dies down from people getting pissed about this, that we're going to end up way further ahead financially. And
00:44:30
Speaker
And boy, that whole Reddit fiasco caused me to delete the Reddit app off my phone. I essentially don't use it anymore. And you know what? This is a way to get me to be pretty pissed at Unity. I don't know if it's going to make me stop playing games that are built on Unity because I don't want to penalize the developers.
00:44:54
Speaker
But also like, I don't want the developers to be penalized by unity for me re-downloading Slay the Spire on my phone tomorrow when my new iPhone gets here. Just buy it and never download it. That's the thing, you know, right? That's penalizing me. I'm not penalizing that. And obviously like it's not in effect yet. So it's like my literal tomorrow install is not going to be a problem, but you know, next year it becomes a problem.
00:45:22
Speaker
Yeah. I think they shifted case. So go ahead, Andrew. Oh no, it's okay. I was just going to say, I think they, the, the five, my understanding is the final point now is that there's like a threshold thing for like $200,000 and that was also, yeah, that was also their selling point, which is you had to make at least $200,000.
00:45:42
Speaker
Oh, that was in the initial bad idea. That was, oh, okay. And so they're like, it's only going to affect 90% or like 10% of you. And of course, like, that's like, if you're successful, we're going to penalize you. Right. Um, and that, that points to the business case, which is like, really, they're like, we have this, these giant games, like I think Hong Kai, Star Wars might be on unity. Um, and, uh,
00:46:07
Speaker
Yeah, Genshin Impact, Hearthstone, Marvel Snap that are making a ton of money. We want to grab a piece of that. And so we don't really care about what happens to the indie gaming, the Slay of the Spires. We don't really care that much about that. We don't make very much money off of that. We make a lot of money off of ads because they have a whole other half of the business that just serves ads. And then we can make a lot of money off of the
00:46:36
Speaker
the Genshin impacts because that's really the way to make money. But to me, this is different from the Reddit thing because Reddit users really don't care about tech stuff and that kind of thing. Maybe they have a third-party app that they like.
00:46:54
Speaker
But I think we talked about it before. I think 70% go with the default or just use the web, something like that. Most people don't really care that much. And there's a clear business case of we're going to send you to the place where we get money for ads because that's our business model is serving ads. So there's a clear case there. Here, it doesn't make any sense to me at all because
00:47:18
Speaker
you're targeting the giant companies who can afford to build their own engine if they really want yeah yeah that's who has the money that and then you're killing the indy people who you know you don't care about those uh you're not
00:47:35
Speaker
the people that don't have the money to make the tech go to the new engines are those people. Uh, so it doesn't make any sense to me because really they're driving everybody who they could actually give them money to away from their products, which is, and they're,
00:47:52
Speaker
So to me, it doesn't make any sense, even as a money making employee. And I think they they have now fully retracted, kind of. They now said, OK, we're going to go back into the thought process machine and come back to you once we have a new plan.
00:48:12
Speaker
But they are not talking about what it is. In response to all this, a lot of free-to-play developers turned off their Unity ad service, like 500 or something. Pretty major developers with billions of downloads said that we were turning off our ad service until you reversed this decision.
00:48:31
Speaker
Yeah, Among Us announced that the developer of Among Us announced that they were switching off of Unity because of this. I'm like, why wouldn't you? I've got elementary and middle school aged kids who are like, Among Us is the thing right now. And so that's a big deal to lose Among Us if they were generating income for you before.
00:48:54
Speaker
Yeah. If they're changing, I mean, like the obvious answer why you wouldn't is because it's a huge pain and it's a ton of work to switch your game to a different engine. Right. But like it's everybody who has the money to change will do it. And also you are saying they, and they made this clear in their FAQ, they reserve the right to change the business deal on you whenever they want to.
00:49:19
Speaker
Right, so even if they reverted it back to exactly as it was, you should be planning to get off this ship. Right, because they can't be trusted. They removed their portion of the TOS, which gave you any kind of certainty about how much you were going to have to pay them.
00:49:34
Speaker
Yeah. Uh, so if you are, and it's not like Reddit because these are businesses that are making conscious business decisions who are making very intentional, like whether or not you go to Reddit, you can absent mindedly go to Reddit. I absolutely minded mindedly go to Reddit. Can't absent mindedly choose a game engine. And so, uh,
00:49:57
Speaker
I think this is already played out terribly for them. I think their game engine business is basically dead. It's a walking zombie until they get a totally new revamp of their TOS and their management because nobody's going to trust them. We have games that are in the hopper.
00:50:21
Speaker
Uh, but that will probably come out on unity, but starting a new game on unity is going to be a real hard proposition. The whole, the whole notion that's been happening for the past year. I think it's really ramped up in the past year where there's this whole phenomenon, especially it seems like in tech of we are going to intentionally do this really stupid thing that we probably, you have smart people at running these companies.
00:50:49
Speaker
I, I wonder the extent to which, yeah, yes, that's, that's fair. He who shall not be named is not included. Uh, but we have smart people running these companies. I wonder the extent to which they're just intentionally shifting the Overton window here of let's see how much we can
00:51:06
Speaker
piss people off and then walk it back so that we look like, oh, we listened to feedback and then we'll do something that's terrible, but less terrible than we wanted to do in the first place. And like, this is now a strategy that people are adopting and I'm not happy about it.
Corporate Strategy Speculations
00:51:22
Speaker
And frankly, I'm inclined to punish people who I suspect of doing that. So Unity just made my list of companies to punish in addition to Reddit and
00:51:34
Speaker
You know, the other place there's really no way to punish unity. That's the problem. Yeah. Don't do the game there. Unless you're a game dev and I'm not a game developer. So my bad boss, uh, the, you know, the ultimate reality game or whatever, don't launch it with unity. That's yeah.
00:51:51
Speaker
I mean, there's probably I think there's if I send a comment to the FTC about how these guys are apparently gathering data they're not supposed to have on people's devices and installs. I mean, I'm guessing like Apple's pretty good about that sort of stuff. I mean, I'm sure Apple is listening, but they're pretty good about sort of restricting other people from being able to. So I'm thinking this was something they were hoping to roll out.
00:52:15
Speaker
ahead of 04, like I'm wondering if they were going to be demand, like for the different platforms, would they be trying to get this information from the app store owner, right? So like Apple, maybe Google play store, that kind of stuff. Maybe they're going to try to get it at those points because it's hard for me to do that though. I don't think Apple or steam are playing ball on that.
00:52:36
Speaker
No, I don't think they would either. You guys were both talking a little bit about Twitter and Reddit. One thing that I'm finding interesting and I've been sort of working over in my head and I wonder if you guys have any thoughts on it is there seems to be... I get Jason's point, the like, he who shall not be named and then Reddit, sort of shifting the Overton window, sort of like...
00:52:59
Speaker
seeing how far they can go without losing all of their customer base and trying to basically cash in. There seems to be a sudden rush by a lot of companies, a lot of tech companies especially, to try to make a lot of money very quickly right now where it just didn't seem to be what was going on for a long time. There's a lot of gathering eyeballs and there's money here somewhere we know there is. And I'm wondering to what extent because Unity was started in 2005. Twitter is like 2006.
00:53:26
Speaker
Reddit is a little bit earlier than that, but like in that kind of era, there was that time where there was like just a lot of VC money flowing around and interest rates were pretty low. Money was pretty cheap. And so you saw a lot of these kinds of companies that didn't really have a plan for making a lot of money crop up and persist and stick around. Whereas maybe in any other era, they don't make it past month six. So you're wondering whether this is the venture capital chickens coming home to roost.
00:53:54
Speaker
a little bit. Yeah. If this is just sort of all of that, you're going to see all of those sorts of companies founded in, you know, the aughts in that like rough era, they're running out of money. Like it's getting tight now and it's time to start like, okay, how are we really going to do this? I don't, you know, maybe he who shall not be named has shown us the way and it's just do whatever you need to do, charge people money, make the money.
00:54:14
Speaker
Yeah, unity was I believe unity was a perfectly fine business when it was just a game engine business and they weren't trying to do a million different things, but then they tried to become they went got into AI and also film production and they bought like
00:54:35
Speaker
to three huge businesses spent a ton of money on it. So maybe they are running out of money now because, you know, they tried to they went, you know, full business brain and tried to shoot the moon, follow all the trends. And I'm sure they got it. I think they got into NFTs. Yeah.
00:54:53
Speaker
And they're publicly traded. If it's not exponential growth, you're basically contracting. Yeah. If you're not growing, you're dead and you're fired by whoever. Yeah, they've made a lot of purchases that they need money for.
00:55:10
Speaker
I think that as for the Overton window shifting, they could have gotten away with like they would, they would have been, it would have been a lot better move to do something that was much less like baffling than an install fee. Cause the install fee just doesn't make any sense at a functional level. It calls you, it causes you to cause like question the competence of the people that thought it was a good idea.
00:55:37
Speaker
because charging based on install, it doesn't cost unity anything to instant to get something installed. The developers have no control over it. It's question. There's no way to track it. It doesn't make any sense. It's not tied to any kind of actual outlay by unity is what you're saying. So it's like it doesn't. That's not the point where you'd go, well, how many hot dogs are leaving the hot dog stand? We need to get something for each one of those. This is like way downstream. Yeah, it's right. It's like if
00:56:07
Speaker
Unreal, this is a hot dog stand. Unreal charges developers based on how many hot dogs they sell. Or how much money they make selling hot dogs. Unity is charging based on how many hot dogs the people ate. And it's like, bro, they left my house. I don't know. Are you following them home? No? You're not following them home? How do you know?
00:56:32
Speaker
Oh, we have a proprietary method of determining how many hot dogs they ate. Oh, thanks, bro. We're hooked into the sewer system. Yeah, it just doesn't make any sense. If they had come out with, okay, we're charging you 5% income, your revenue, just like Unreal did. I think it would have been much less of a fight. It would have been a fight still.
00:56:55
Speaker
because you're still changing the deal from underneath the developers that have been making investments based on one deal. But it would have been a fight that made a lot more sense. But also, if they really had to go back and undercut this deal that they made, destroy trust, I don't think this business was going to survive. I don't think they had to.
00:57:20
Speaker
But if they did, yeah, they're done. Yeah, because nobody's going to trust you after you change the deal on them, after you don't give them an opt out for the new business arrangement. And by opt out, as in you don't update Unity, you can take away future support or something. But once you started working on Unity, you should be able to be baked in. It seems to me that it doesn't make sense.
00:57:43
Speaker
Yeah, the visionaries of the last year or so, I'm doing visionaries, I'm doing sarcastic air quotes, have been not like daring to ask what's possible, but like daring to ask how much they can get away with. You know what I mean? Because we've had these same discussions, right, about like X and stuff with, you know, bringing undesirables back on and how are you going to still sell to advertisers, right? It doesn't make any sense. Why would you do this? You need money now. Why wouldn't you try to make this the most appealing
00:58:10
Speaker
platform for advertisers to purchase ads on, but you do the opposite. It seems like the current thing is just questioning all traditional business dogma, but the weirdest ones, the strangest, just like you're saying, like, well, what if we just tie it to something completely arbitrary like installations? I don't know. Maybe we'll get away with it. Let's try it. Rather than trying to revamp the business in some way that makes sense, it's just
00:58:37
Speaker
I don't know, like whatever used to be the, this couldn't possibly work, this business plan. Now it is like de facto, the way to do it. It's so funny that this is all happening when like the stock market is doing perfectly fine.
00:58:53
Speaker
And they're a publicly traded company, right? So like, yeah, they're not. I mean, for what I was looking at, I mean, they're going down now and, you know, right. Sure. As you would expect when like most, when all the developers revolted. But like prior to that, it wasn't like they were in the toilet or anything. From what I could tell, I didn't look over their last 10 years or whatever. But basically,
00:59:08
Speaker
They started way higher. The stock price is about half of what it used to be, and it's like down three quarters from its peak. I think it peaked at like 120 or so, and now it's down around 30. As most did, probably, right? Like COVID era to now, basically.
00:59:24
Speaker
It was a tech company that was selling AI, selling that it was going to be like doing AI and Hollywood and military applications. And it was going to do everything. And so that's why they have like thousands of employees. When we have Godot, which is an open source game engine, which does a lot of what Unity does. Which is probably written by like a teenager in Helsinki. That's what I was going to say. It's like one 19 year old guy in Sweden. Yeah. It's three employees plus like
00:59:52
Speaker
A bunch of members of the community doing free work, but it's still not employees. It's the mastodon of the game platform industry. Right. Exactly. Yeah. I downloaded it just to play around with it and I discovered I am not a programmer. How about that? I made that discovery several times myself. Shocking. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's that on you, Unity.
01:00:15
Speaker
I don't think we have anything more to say other than, you know, shaking my, this is an audio format, but I'm shaking my, my finger at that unity. I don't know. We didn't even get into like the adhesion contract nonsense. There's too much to talk about with it. Yeah.
01:00:31
Speaker
There's, there's plenty of other ripples. Maybe we'll save that for equitable defenses the next fortnight or like, yeah, detrimental reliance and all kinds of stuff like that. So the, the, the analysis doesn't necessarily end with this, but the podcast does necessarily. Well, we can just pray for a lawsuit and then we'll have a chance to talk about it again. Yeah. There you go. Go forth and Sue.
01:00:58
Speaker
Yeah. All right. Recommendations fellas. What do you guys got? I put in star fields. I think we all played it and I think we all have the same opinion. Yeah. So far it's okay. It's okay. It's a, it's a, I wouldn't spend the gigabytes on it if you don't, if you're not huge into Bethesda. Yeah. I feel like I'm missing something. Like I don't get it or I don't, I don't know. It's just, it's not, it's not clicking for me.
01:01:27
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, like it's it's exactly what I expected a Bethesda game to do as Fallout 4. It's got some nice aspects of it. It's Fallout 4 in space. There's some other parts of it that make it like I like building the ship. That's that's the thing that I have enjoyed doing. But it's like, man, some of the writing is just painful.
01:01:50
Speaker
There's a so minor minor spoilers because honestly, none of these stories are that interesting. But there's a CEO character.
01:02:01
Speaker
in one of the stories where the CEO completely screws over a group of workers and then hires a group of mercenaries. So then again, then go and kill those workers. And the reason he did that is to protect his business, his business. And at the end of that, you get a choice to let him go or basically say, I'm taking you in, which results in you killing him because he won't go quietly. And it's presented as a moral choice between
01:02:29
Speaker
whether or not you want to let him go and thus save the company and save jobs or bring him to justice. And all the characters talk to you like this was a hard decision. And I'm just like, what are you talking about? This guy was a murderer.
01:02:45
Speaker
or assume I'm a bad boss.com guy. This must be like, you just keep playing that, do save there and then just move back and just do that over and over again. No. It's insane. That was a spoiler for me. I didn't get to that plot line. I changed a bunch of details so you might not. He was actually a very good boss. There are a lot of bosses in this game actually. Yeah.
01:03:09
Speaker
Yeah. I just, it's just, I don't know. It's not clicking for me. Like I said, it just seems that it's fine. Like, yeah, as you said, it's interesting. There's little aspects that are fun. I feel like I spend a lot of times in cut scenes. I spend a lot of times doing inventory management. Yeah. Yeah. It's like a game, like unpacking a backpack basically all the time.
01:03:28
Speaker
A lot of shifting between ships, the ship and yourself and partners. A lot of going to a map and clicking on a planet and seeing, oh, I can't fast travel for whatever reason. Yeah. So, you know, a lot of menus.
01:03:44
Speaker
Uh, but you know, it's good. There's a good game. Uh, lies of P, uh, which is just came out also in game pass. Uh, it's a souls. Like if you like souls, likes games like bloodborne and Elgin, right? Uh, it's the first souls like game not made by friend soft. That's like actually good. It's like Pinocchio game. You play as Pinocchio, uh, and Geppetto is there and Gemini is there. Gem, Gemini, Gemini.
01:04:13
Speaker
It's not Gemini. It is Gemini with a G. I don't know. I think that's like the original book.
01:04:20
Speaker
Maybe it is a book thing because it's based on the book or like the writing of that Pinocchio camera. I didn't even know there was a Pinocchio before the Disney cartoon or whatever. It's got to be a German thing, right? Isn't it every one of those? It's Italian. Oh, is it Italian? Oh, OK. Yeah. But it's like actually it's one of the best like kind of B games I've ever seen, ever played. But honestly, I'm probably going to get taken away from that because Cyberpunk
01:04:50
Speaker
the cyberpunk expansion is coming out and I'm stoked for that. So yeah. So is it Pinocchio, but like Pinocchio is dark. I'm looking at this and then is the, the, the, the gentleman. It's Timothy Chalamet Pinocchio. It's not actually Timothy Chalamet, but it just imagine you, it's the same. Okay. Interesting. All right. Yeah. Well, it's a dark world.
01:05:13
Speaker
Pinocchio is not dark, but it's a dark world where like puppets have gone mad and are like killing everybody in the town of crap. It sounds like me telling my daughter a bedtime story. Dark world puppets have gone mad. Everything's bad. You just don't want her to sleep ever. No. So my recommendation is not Starfield. Starfield? Fine.
01:05:36
Speaker
Whatever. It can hold my attention for 30 to 45 minutes at a time. I have a history of making food and beverage recommendations on here. Something that escaped my attention for a long time was something called a long drink. Do you guys know what a long drink is?
01:05:53
Speaker
No idea. It is a Finnish beverage, as in Finland. There is one that's like a popularized distribution of it. I understand it to be like a category of drinks, but there's one popular one in the United States. Basically, it tastes like a boozy Fresca. I love a Fresca, let me tell you.
01:06:17
Speaker
Looks good. It's just a great summer and still warm fall beverage. And just a delightful thing to enjoy. There's one in my refrigerator right now calling my name. A classic long drink is a Tom Collins. A simple style of long drink is the highball. I could see you being somebody who would order a highball somewhere. I don't know that I ever have. I can imagine it. Maybe now, based on this description, I'm going to try it. Yeah. Cool. I like grapefruit. Yeah. Awesome. Me too.
01:06:47
Speaker
All right, well, I think on that note, we're done our show. We are adjourned. Outro music. We're adjourned. We have that, yeah. I got one of these. Ha ha, gavel. Yeah, gavel, gavel, gavel. It's an audio medium, Jake, if you have to describe it with words. Yeah, I don't actually want to hit it, because that would be very loud. Yeah, I wouldn't do that. Good night, guys.