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February in Capitalism
20 Plays3 months ago
Join Dave and Jake as they talk about Nvidia GPUs, DeepSeek, Bioware's layoffs, hotdogs, and even more in this week's episode!
Intro:
- Super Mario Galaxy - Bowser's Star Reactor
Outro:
- Super Mario Galaxy - King Kaliente
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Transcript
Introduction and Morning Routines
00:00:29
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Serbstone. My name is Jake, and I am joined by my co-host as always, Dave. How's it going today, Dave? It's going. I am fully awake and ready for the day. And I do not have various opened bags of snacks slash half-finished drinks. And so I didn't just shower. I'm just wearing a towel for the past hour. I can i can visually confirm that Dave's not currently wearing the towels. He's completely taken those.
00:01:05
Speaker
ah No, I can't judge you on the multiple drinks thing. There have been times where I think my ice was probably three. I'll be like on a meeting for work and I've got like a coffee in front of me, ice water and maybe like an energy drink or something like that. I'm just like throughout the meeting, just taking sips of various things. I haven't been called out on it yet, but I think it's very funny.
00:01:29
Speaker
um I mean, I like having the multibub strat. It's like, oh, well this is like my hot caffeine. This is like my cold beverage, no caffeine. This is my cold caffeine. Exactly. Exactly. It's all about ah homeostasis. It's about equilibrium in all things. Imagine going right to left, left to right.
New Podcast Format: News & Video Games
00:01:46
Speaker
yeah yeah um yeah well uh hopefully i don't know where i'm going with that i was gonna say hopefully you put on some pants yeah any minute i'll think about it um Well, this is what episode two of the new format, we're kind of mixing things up a little bit for people who may not have noticed at this point. um And so we're kind of consolidating our episodes a little bit, focused more on video games for the off episodes. And then all like the episodes such as this, we'll talk about news, talk about what we've been playing, things like that. um And so.
00:02:27
Speaker
You know, or we're playing around with it. Maybe it's not set in stone.
Nvidia's Graphics Cards: Impact and Cost Debate
00:02:30
Speaker
We'll see where it ends up. So still, I imagine one person just mouths it in the background. He said set in stone. They're like, so, so it was right there. It was right there.
00:02:41
Speaker
um But you know kick things off, start start the tempo going. There was some news over the last month ah that we haven't covered. And there was some stuff here that was kind of interesting um from my perspective at the very least. ah Did you notice, I guess it all opened with the first question, did you notice that Nvidia launched a new series of graphics cards in January?
00:03:05
Speaker
I had heard that there was something about a 5090, but I had not followed it too closely. I just know that because there's a bigger number, everyone's like, I want this new thing. But actually, how good is that new thing compared to the previous thing? And then people have YouTubes on spec videos. Yeah. <unk> i've I've been watching some videos here because it's good it's good tech drama ah for like hardware nerds.
00:03:28
Speaker
um You did not need to track that they released these new graphics cards for the most part because ah two of them were announced, two models basically, um and were launched, I should say. ah The 5090, which you mentioned, which is the, it's supposed to be the successor or inheritor of the mantle of the 4090, as one would suspect.
00:03:51
Speaker
which was like the peak tech bro, I'm using this for AI, i generation, learning, all of that jazz type card. um Also very, very good for games. um It takes like a mountain of power and it's very expensive, right? These are the ones that were just priced, you know, out the wazoo.
00:04:12
Speaker
um So this is the successor to that. And it's like $2,000, I think, MSRP, which means you're never going to see one for $2,000, which means, for my purpose at least, where my budget comes in as a system builder.
00:04:29
Speaker
It doesn't exist.
Do GPU Features Enhance Gaming Experiences?
00:04:30
Speaker
It might as well not exist. The only thing that does is it drags some interest away from the crazies in the enthusiast market so that my card is slightly more accessible underneath it.
00:04:45
Speaker
um But they're doing you a favor, basically, you're saying. They kind of are. Yeah, it's it's like agro. It's holding agro for the insane people that would spend that much money on a graphics card. And I'm only insulting you a little bit if you're one of the insane people that would spend that much money on a graphics card.
00:05:05
Speaker
I think you'd have to be a hobbyist, though, because that's like a very expensive buy-in point. Just be like, oh, I want to keep up to date. Yes. And somebody feel like, oh, I'm going to hop into VR from fresh. um Like when I started making computers and stuff like that back in the day, I didn't have the money. But you know I would request from my parents a graphics card in the range of, if I could get like a bit over $200,
00:05:29
Speaker
That's pretty good. you that's not That's not bad. That's a lot of money. right um and Once I had got a job and things like that, I was like, OK, maybe I could afford a little bit more than that. I think the last graphics card that I bought, the the the mainline graphics card, um was still well over um MSRP, if I recall correctly. It was around $700.
00:05:51
Speaker
um I technically bought two 4060s for the LAN machines, but the main graphics card I got for like my main gaming computer was around $700. And spending more than that seems like insane when people release graphics cards every two years. right That's the trick with the hobbyists you were describing. like Do you want to buy a $2,000 plus dollars graphics card every two years? like that's I mean, I don't, but that's i'm kind of not a hobby. Yes, there's nothing I have like. And so I mean, who does to these people for having a passion and are just wanting to have the newest thing and then continuing to stay with it? Because I might try it once and be like, I didn't notice any marketable differences between this and the one I was using last week. So, OK, my interest is just kind of jumped off.
00:06:45
Speaker
Yeah. And I think like in the past, there was some sort of there is some sort of advantage to gamers for keeping up on graphics cards to a certain extent. But right now, the question is, like do these actually help people who are playing games?
00:07:02
Speaker
And for the most part, the answer is no. ah For like, for for for two reasons. One, I don't know what resolution you game at. But big. Big. Yeah. But if you're thinking of bigger. Dave's gaming at 16K. That's a lot of Ks. That's a lot of Ks. A lot of Ks. But 4K is pretty much the space where previous graphics cards were like,
00:07:31
Speaker
You could play games at 4K, maybe like 30, 60 FPS, something like that. um But if you're really maxing out graphics and you're playing at 4K, like a lot of graphics cards cannot handle that at all. um And now they're starting to make some grounds where that's kind of doable.
00:07:52
Speaker
but I don't care because I game at 1440p and ah everything works fine at 1440p. There's something you said multiple times previously on and off the podcast about the visual fidelity of games not surpassing so much of the graphics where they're at currently to where you're like, oh, we need to have a more updated, detailed look. We need to have ray tracing on blades of grass, even though it's not a game where you're focusing on the grass um because it usually doesn't.
00:08:32
Speaker
add too much. A lot of stuff is just background environmental. Like PoE2 is a good example of, it has a lot of extra details and things and it's nice, but as I'm going through active gameplay and my ability is going off, Nanami's ability is going off,
00:08:48
Speaker
It is rare that I'm going to be appreciating all of the nuance behind the scenes while the act of chaos is going on in my face. Right. like I think a recent thing that we discussed was the um Ghost of Tsushima, how like absolutely beautiful different parts of that game are.
00:09:05
Speaker
And the reason is because you're pretty much moving slowly or at a fixed pace, ah like on a horse, right? It's not because there's a ton of stuff going on. You don't have... This isn't a battle royale game well where you're like paying and attention to comms and there's gunfire around you and stuff like that. like This is a game where they put you in a moment where you can appreciate the soundscape, the visual scape, all of that um and the aesthetics of it. So then them they matter, right? Because then you can appreciate lotus blossoms and all that jazz.
00:09:38
Speaker
um But also, we already kind of could accomplish that. And that looked really awesome. like Will I feel more wowed if I see that at 4K instead of like whatever it was running on a PlayStation at the time? right Probably not.
Frame Generation and Competitive Gaming Concerns
00:09:57
Speaker
I don't think it's going to like increase the happy feelings in my brain to have that just at a higher resolution compared to just being an awesome work of art made by an artist. Right. You know. Yeah. And it can.
00:10:12
Speaker
Right now, I have two different monitors. um The one that you see me in front of is my main one, and I have an off one for like, here's what I'll put Spotify or like a YouTube video or something. Right. um It has different settings. And a lot of times any video that happens over there ah will have a lot of kind of like a washed out red thing and some other effects. And it's an old monitor, right?
00:10:40
Speaker
But I can watch a YouTube video on it and still make out the things I need to. I'm not confused by something that's going on. It's just it's not ideal for visuals. OK, so I'll use that one for audio and.
00:10:57
Speaker
It's like going back to YouTube videos from even like 10 or 15 years ago, even close to the start of your YouTube, they had some pretty shitty 30, 60p quality videos. But you could still make it out. Yeah. But like when it gets like, I made those. 7.20, you're like 10.80. People are like, that's kind of just where things are. like It looks really great when you switch um Marcus Brownlee's video to like 4K or something. But I don't need to see the guys pause. You know what I mean? Mm-hmm. Yeah.
00:11:29
Speaker
Yeah, that's that's where I'm personally at. I get that there are people chasing resolution. But I guess the point I'm trying to make is, outside of that, what I consider relatively niche market, and awesome, if you can't appreciate that, and you have the hardware and the money for it, outside of that, there's not much of a reason to update to the newest series of NVIDIA GPUs.
00:11:51
Speaker
um And in particular, there's there's a calculation that lots of sites will do for you, which is um what is like the per frame performance that you're getting out of these cards like per dollar spent. right Because at the end of the day, that's kind of what matters when you get like a GPU. You're like, OK, can it play Crysis? OK, awesome. How many frames does it get for Crysis or whatever? For whatever games you're interested in playing, right you just want a GPU that can
00:12:21
Speaker
um make the games that you play look good and run at a ah good frame rate. Hopefully like 144 hertz, right? You want like high high enough refresh rate or higher if you if you care about higher. But that's like the biggest actual improvement in games for me was just getting off of the 60 hertz refresh rate monitor, getting 144 frames per second. And if you can land that, perfect. You're in Nirvana, right? It doesn't doesn't have to be better.
00:12:49
Speaker
um And these new cards are more expensive than the previous. They have less of an uplift percentage-wise compared to some of the previous ones, um like the 4080 series, the 4090 series. When you're saying uplift, are you saying this comparison between that current card and the previous card? like It's better than the previous ones still, right? It is strictly strictly better.
00:13:14
Speaker
but Um, what you look at as the percentage of performance increase for one version versus the previous. So if the comparison between the two of your price per money. of the Exactly. Right. If you went from a 30 80 up to a 40 80, was it worth it? Right. Like how much of a performance gain did you get? Because usually what they try to do is they price each of these cards, um, in that bracket.
00:13:46
Speaker
similarly to the previous entry. So like the 4080 should be priced similarly to the 3080, which should be priced similarly to the 2080, whatever. That's the idea. The price has been going up a lot, especially since AI, but like um it gets harder and harder and harder to justify actually upgrading your graphics card.
00:14:07
Speaker
And the last, the last point I would kind of like mention here is that there, Nvidia is really focusing on frame generation, uh, DLSS for this, which is basically like in the past, say you were running starfield or something else that wasn't optimized very well.
00:14:27
Speaker
it would take like, you would have two frames of actual rendered um content from the game. And then the graphics card would make up a third frame. It would use its AI, whatever it is. I don't know the exact technology to basically extrapolate a second a third frame and send it to your screen.
00:14:48
Speaker
to your screen which is cool. That is a cool technology. The idea is like we actually don't have enough bandwidth to make this game run faster faster just on its own, but we can make it appear with a higher frame rate because we can guess at what that third frame would actually be, um which sounds like magic, right? um And a lot of games support this. But they're going overboard on it with this series, where you're looking at potentially generating three frames for every one frame um that your GPU is actually capable of rendering.
00:15:30
Speaker
And what people have found is on certain titles, this actually just really, really increases your input latency. Because your computer, still, the game is running at the lower frame rate as far as the engine is concerned. But you see more frames on your monitor.
00:15:49
Speaker
um And so if the game's running at like 30 frames per second, you can only have inputs at 30 frames per second. And you see 60 frames per second, and everything just gets weird. right But they're selling this. They're like, look at this massive frame difference. you know All you got to do is use frame generation, and you can have 220 frames in this demanding game or whatever.
00:16:12
Speaker
ah And it's a little bit sus.
00:16:19
Speaker
ah I hadn't thought about it, but i I've been doing research recently into the idea of it. And some of the downsides are like pretty severe. You would not want to do this in a shooter, um because the game will just feel sluggish compared to what you see on the screen. And you you can't have that.
Advanced Graphics in Gaming: Necessary or Not?
00:16:40
Speaker
No, absolutely not. There are as many people who I've been around who are just constantly talking about counter-strike. um like They have specific strats and angles that they take so that they can have literally their center of dot pixel on where somebody's head's going to be at a specific time, theoretically based on where they saw a smoke grenade before or where they're hearing footsteps because it needs to be that precise because it's It's a one-click dead situation a lot of times. yeah If they hit you in the head, you're dead. um So you can't be fucking around with that. Otherwise, it's going to feel like shit every time you play. And then you're constantly saying, oh, I lost because like the game engine's not doing things correctly versus, oh, they just kicked our ass.
00:17:22
Speaker
Exactly, yeah. And it's important to remember, frame generation can never give you new information, right? It's just taking a guess between the frames that are already coming through your GPU. So you're never going to like see someone pop around a corner faster because you generated frames expecting that the person was going to pop around the corner faster? No, right? like That's not information they...
00:17:47
Speaker
were what already existed, so there's no way you could see it. It just makes things look smoother. So in this case, I think it would actually kind of be great for Ghost of Tsushima, right? You're like, oh, maybe we can actually just make things look smoother. As long as the lighting's right and it's not dark and you're not using a torch or something like that, because that'll cause all the visual artifacting you would see in like a YouTube video.
00:18:11
Speaker
um And I'm sure they'll work through some of those issues with the technology or whatever but outside of like a Cutscene or a movie like experience. It's really important that games feel good when you play them and That they feel responsive like you mentioned this for Hollow Knight If Hollow Knight had crappy controls would be a terrible game right if there was
AI in Gaming: Opportunities and Challenges
00:18:35
Speaker
a little bit more delay it'd be terrible um so
00:18:41
Speaker
I'm not sold. I'm the latest generation of GPUs from Nvidia. And it is unfortunate that the AMD is not competing on the high end anymore, but we'll see what happens.
00:18:54
Speaker
i
00:18:56
Speaker
I understand that, like, the technology is going to keep advancing. You're going to keep trying to push stuff because, I mean, as a business, they want to sell new things. Therefore, they need to make better things to be like that old shit. You don't want that. You want our new shit. Please buy the new shit.
00:19:11
Speaker
um But if games cannot keep up with it at that same pace, like it's going to be a lot easier for a game studio to make an indie game with like a good story, maybe unique art style, because it's cheaper than having to deal with a constant frame rate where it matters that much.
00:19:29
Speaker
um
00:19:32
Speaker
And then what what do you do at that point? Right. Yeah, and most games don't need this, right? You don't need the latest graphics card. There's a lot of games that could just run on integrated graphics, like on your motherboard. If you don't know what that is, God bless you. You're doing fine. Then you're doing fine.
00:19:49
Speaker
but I was going to say um something to its credit. Game of the Year of 2024, Astrobot. I was about to say a Hollow Knight. Second about it. Won it again. Maybe. Astrobot was touted for being very well-designed, yeah um very kind of in its own element at a given point. But I had some people over yesterday, and I was having them try it as well.
00:20:18
Speaker
um But there's like a lot of stuff that's going on in the screen. They added a lot of extra detail to stuff if they don't need to. Now granted, this is running on the PS5, whatever hardware it has. But at no point did it feel sluggish. It felt like you had a lot of control of what was going on.
00:20:37
Speaker
But also, you could go down a slide with 100 other balls that you collided into. So you have all of these objects being calculated going through the water slide. And it felt smooth the entire time. yeah um I think part of that is them making it a little more focused in and more of a tight experience. But I also think that helps polish things too. You don't need to deal with all the extra graphics on this chaff that isn't really necessary. Let's fucking skybox it and call it a day. Yeah, no, like in optimizations like that are very common in video games where you need to make games for consoles, right?
00:21:16
Speaker
um Yeah, honestly, the fact that the latest graphics card costs like two thousand dollars every two years, compare that to just the price. Like, what could you get for a PS5 if you spent two thousand dollars on it every year? Because there's a massive difference, right? If you're actually just interested in playing games.
00:21:38
Speaker
these graphics cards don't make any sense. like And for a long time, to be completely honest, you know PC mastery is all that stuff. But like to be completely honest, consoles have had the much better value like proposition for a very, very long time. Yeah, because it's it's all baked in.
00:21:58
Speaker
Yeah. And like, there's you can't come out with a game that just doesn't run on the hardware. Someone tries cyber for the hardware. Right. Whereas computers, you could I could be like somebody who's out of college um and I could have like an overheating integrated graphics laptop. Right. Versus I'm somebody now in their 30s who I very much want to focus on games when I have something very high end.
00:22:27
Speaker
The games are still both made for the platform or the computer, but they're going to have different spec requirements. Exactly. Right. And you can pull arguments like Todd Howard did for Starfield and be like, oh, people are going to need to upgrade their hardware for this. We're making a next gen game or whatever.
00:22:42
Speaker
Sure. But I mean, you released it on consoles, right? Like you can't upgrade the GPU of a console ah without buying a new console. And they release those once every like 10 years or so now. So like maybe close to eight, but like.
00:22:59
Speaker
Yeah. I don't know why we would put up with this on the PC front, I guess. Um, like the value proposition is just, it's very poor right now to try to keep up with and the enthusiast here, or even something like on the Nvidia side, like an 80 series card, a 70 series card. Like it's a lot of money and it should last you a long time. Now, to be fair.
00:23:28
Speaker
You don't need graphics cards this good anymore for anything, really, i unless you're really pushing 4K, like we said. So that's probably enough. I don't recommend them. um i we'll We'll see if they come out with some more budget offerings or
AI Development Costs and Societal Impact
00:23:44
Speaker
something like that. But right now, they're really focusing more on AI. I was still thinking to be like another two to three years.
00:23:51
Speaker
yeah um Remember when it was just like, hey, we wanted to take all these new latest GPUs and use it to farm like doge coins? Yeah. I mean, that's kind of what people do with them now. So it's that in training AI. Nvidia's crazy stock valuation.
00:24:10
Speaker
has largely just been because people are super stupid about AI. But are you excited for it to fix everything in your life? Uh-huh, uh-huh. That was the other thing. That was a good, that's excellent segue. We finished talking about GPUs at some point here, but did you hear anything about DeepSeek? That came out since our our previous news episode as well.
00:24:34
Speaker
I'm going to give you like the five seconds I heard about it. Sure. It is another AI competitor sure that was trained using the AI competitor. And it was apparently made for a lot cheaper. Yeah, they probably do to that. Because that's how AI usually has been working, where it steals something else. It's like, here's my base template I'm going to work off of. like If you've already done 600 calculations over here, I want to redo those. I'm going to take the ones you already have.
00:25:04
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. it's There's a term for it, I don't recall the exact term, but basically trying to pull as much information from an existing AI model as you can for your your your model that you're uplifting. DeepSeek was made in China. They said that it took $6 million dollars to train That wouldn't include anything for the hardware or anything else like that. But $6 million dollars is a lot of money, but it's also literally nothing when we talk about how much AI costs in the US. The tech sector is insane for the amounts of money they drop on it. But basically, we had this little guy show up from China using restricted cards that like could not
00:25:46
Speaker
run operations as good as the latest graphics cards can because they're literally impeded by um sanctions in the US. like They can't get the best graphics cards over there um as far as Nvidia is concerned.
00:26:00
Speaker
And so they're like, yeah, well, we just worked within those constraints and we just made this and here's a model and you can download the app for it. And it's like one of the most popular, um, like rising downloads on like the Apple store or whatever. Um, and it passed like chat GPT, which is like its direct competitor.
00:26:19
Speaker
Um, and he's really good, apparently, it like can solve logic problems and things that some others would have struggled with. And it's competitive to like open AI's latest version, which is like four, like Oh, four or whatever it's called. I don't care, but their latest thing that costs a lot more money is, uh, it's around that tier and open AI.
00:26:44
Speaker
is closed source. and DeepSeek from China is actually open source, which is incredibly funny to me. What's the idea of like imagine Mr. Scrooge? Dr. Scrooge?
00:27:01
Speaker
master speech Just like hoarding as much wealth as possible just to like build this this this ah this huge system, this massive business. And then there's just like a kid in the lemonade stand and just completely destroys them. It just makes like way better lemonade or at least competitive lemonade sells it for way less, just makes it available.
00:27:26
Speaker
And it's just, it's glorious. Not because I want China to succeed, but just because I want AI to fail. Yeah, you want something to disrupt it. Exactly, right?
00:27:38
Speaker
And even if you're an AI purist, i think like and you think that this is going in a good direction for some reason, um like the idea of having an open version of this compared to just a monopoly from a really big US company that like meets with the president Uh, yeah, the open version sounds better, right? Like it seems like maybe we shouldn't have one person with Skynet and it's just going to make all our decisions for us. Um, yeah, it's.
00:28:16
Speaker
Like I understand that people can separate between fantasy and reality, like when you're watching a science fiction thing or something like to what you're saying with Skynet Terminator, where we see the advancement of technologies far surpass what humanity can really control and deal with. And one, if you're not just like a little bit like, yeah, that kind of wouldn't be great.
00:28:40
Speaker
um I feel like you you haven't read any science fiction because a lot of it is like, hey, the same problems that we have today are just in the future with different technology. Oh, look, a system somebody can abuse sits very acutely. Sure hope nobody abuses the system of intergalactic travel or AI or cloning or anything else. Uh-huh.
00:29:04
Speaker
I also, this is part of the standard AI rant, but there's this contradiction baked into it where they talk about how close to artificial general intelligence we are. It's like we're on the precipice, right? We're so close. and We don't know. It could be next year even. It's impossible to say all of this just to like raise the price of their stock.
00:29:24
Speaker
um And at the same time, they're like, general intelligence would be so dangerous and it'd be so powerful and it could destroy the world. And like all of a sudden, it's overt governments and it would subvert all these industries. And what would people even do if we had machines that could think like people could? And it's like.
00:29:44
Speaker
then why are you guys still working on it? like it's it's just I know it's just to make money. All of this, that's the spoiler. yeah it's It's just to make money and to like drive absolutely absurd amounts of investment in this industry.
00:30:02
Speaker
um it's just like I know there has been enough examples to say like this is a promising yeah technological field to explore into. We've definitely seen the changes over like even the course of a couple years of the pandemic between here's like some AI generated images versus stuff we have now. It's like, oh, holy shit. That has advanced kind of scarily fast, but. I still don't think it's going to be anywhere in our lifetime where we're seeing actual tangible benefits from it.
00:30:39
Speaker
And I mean, that's my thought anyway, because it still feels very much like
00:30:44
Speaker
the AI is just kind of copy and pasting a lot of things all over the internet. That's my two cents on what i what I see. Yeah. And I mean, I get that it's going to be disruptive, right? Like it already has been and will continue to be. And part of me is like.
00:31:02
Speaker
You know, maybe the programmer of tomorrow is pretty much always paired with an AI agent and they're going to be asking questions on how, how this could be written, how this could be written, and then making adjustments, right? Like that's possible. That's actually not, that's not crazy. That's not insane.
00:31:18
Speaker
um And maybe there will be fewer jobs in a lot of industries because of that, right? um That's the part that is more concerning to me is as a society when we don't necessarily take care of people who um don't have jobs or they're underemployed, they're not being paid as much or whatever, are you ready to just take a huge portion of people out of the workforce by saying that, you know, A.I. can take care of their jobs. um Oh, the answer is no. Right. I mean, you can just blame it on a some ethnic groups that you're not a part of. But once it's white people, Dave. Oh, yeah. people are going to do Yeah. Yeah. Oh, shit. Yeah. Even white, even white people. What are you saying?
00:32:06
Speaker
um But yeah, it's. it's It's a combination of a tremendous waste of money compared to like what that money could do if applied meaningfully to help people. Even if you just bought people Taco Bell like around the entire world.
00:32:25
Speaker
That's what I have. It would still be more beneficial, I think. Even if it's like one talk of a meal for a day would be more beneficial. Exactly. But yeah, that's not how capitalism really works in our country. So the the that was the good thing from DeepSeek, though, is they were like, hey, we made this. It's competitive. And it cost us like less than a tenth.
00:32:47
Speaker
of what you spent on your models because we just couldn't we couldn't throw all of the money at it. So we just did it without the money. And then Nvidia's founder, or and yeah not founder but CEO, lost $20 billion dollars off of his net worth.
00:33:08
Speaker
after DeepSuit came out. Some of it's probably made back up because a lot of it's in stock and Nvidia rebounded a little bit, but it really just shows how insane this all is. How can one person, right? $20 billion. dollars Like it goes to show you that all money is fake. It's all made up. It's all fake.
00:33:29
Speaker
I feel like sometimes when we have these discussions, like you're making a point about something in the actual news. I'm like, yeah, it's kind of all experience. Does that add to your discussion? I mean, it it it it does, though. i mean that is The important thing is to be able to take a step back and be like, does this help people? Does this make any sense? There are, as with all things, there is room for beneficial applications.
00:33:53
Speaker
yeah Because how cool would it be to have automation for stuff like dangerous surgeries? So I mean, credit to surgeons, they have obviously a lot of experience ah doing what they do. But in the same way, like there's always going to be a degree of human error, even when it comes to programming and designing this stuff.
00:34:15
Speaker
But let's say in a future perfect world, ah machines can make no mistakes. And they're in charge of a surgery. It doesn't matter your weight is. It doesn't matter um your diet for how your organs are being moved around. It's always going to be able to do this one surgery perfectly. That would be so fucking awesome to then extend something like that to other cases of more things in the medical field, teaching. um Teaching would be huge. Food preparation. Yeah.
00:34:45
Speaker
But there's like so many theoretical applications for it. I'm like, let's do that. And they're like, ah.
Bioware's Financial Struggles and Industry Challenges
00:34:52
Speaker
Yeah, i think that's I think you touched on what I think the most likely good sort of utopic outcome for AI could be, which is it's basically the world's library. It's it's a knowledge repository. um It's capable of taking close to the sum total of remaining human knowledge And making it available to everybody, right? This is like super Wikipedia, basically, is essentially what we're describing. um And yeah, maybe if you could integrate that into some automated systems, there's a lot that could be done there. You absolutely have to minimize hallucinations and other issues. You don't want the AI that's operating on you to hallucinate and be like, and the brain is down here, draws the scalpel down your chest.
00:35:41
Speaker
um lets big elephant big um But I mean that there's there's plenty of ways that you could you could introduce safeties and things like that to prevent situations like that from happening, but Is it worth the money, though? It's definitely not for the the way they're going into it. Because I still think the theory is, oh, once we do this, we can save so much money because we won't need to employ these 100 people who are working doing these functions because, oh, we can replace them. Yes. but Right.
00:36:19
Speaker
As with all technology, at what point does it work all of the time? name Name me one technology that does that. Go into any doctor's office and be like, hey, is that system working quickly for you? And see how the nurse glares at you. I don't know.
00:36:38
Speaker
We don't know, but definitely the direction the market's going is insane. yeah And that's what China showed with DeepSeek. infinite you don't Stargate is what the US government program is called. It's supposed to be used to like invest tons of money into AI.
00:36:58
Speaker
And it's just people making lots of money. It's always just rich people getting richer. and that's That's the kids's conspiracy theory taking the hint here. Someone with a laptop in their basement is going to break through and make instead artificial general intelligence. It's not going to be the company you gave $4 trillion dollars to.
00:37:18
Speaker
No, because innovation will always come from limitations and restrictions because you have to find another way to do something. Yeah. You can't just throw money at it. But man, we try. I try real hard. My door dash still isn't showing up.
00:37:38
Speaker
I'll have a funny DoorDash story, I'll tell you later. um Outside of that though, ah not in the best news, in continue rough time for BioWare, apparently Dragon Age the Valeguard missed their revenue target by 50%, which is insane, and that shows me that leadership did not understand what kind of money they should expect for these types of games. um But then they they fired a bunch of people on the tail end of that, um including somebody who was with the company for 18 years, one of the one of the lead writers, um I guess, a director, he was a director by the time ah the veil guard came out. um And that's unfortunate as someone who liked the old Bioware games, but
00:38:27
Speaker
That's kind of just the way Bioware has been going. They're rotating out anybody who we liked, I guess, from a nostalgia perspective and pushing the company in new directions. So I don't know if there's going to be any other Dragon Age games. Maybe maybe itll maybe we'll get a mobile game developed by a third party. That's kind of where I expect this IP to go now.
00:38:48
Speaker
I can see that, but unfortunate I will say if you wait enough time with a lot of ah game franchises, um while you don't see any flowering petals, there could be roots growing underneath. There could be, yeah. In that like there are revivalizations of things like Turok, which is a franchise that nobody talked about for the past 20 years. Somebody's like, hey, what if?
00:39:13
Speaker
Or you'll find another game studio is very inspired by a certain type of games from software. And they might make something in a similar space because they want to pay homage to it. They want to do their own version of it. And that's where you'll see these things kind of come back in cycles. That explains why there's so many dragons in Dark Souls, actually. They just they want to take over a drag team. I never thought about that, but maybe maybe that's it.
00:39:43
Speaker
We'll have to ask Miyazaki the next time we have him on. He's not been emailing me back. I'm not sure if he's sending you the emails directly or? Gotcha. Maybe they didn't filter. I'll have to check. We get so many. It's only Hideo Kojima that gets the bolded, incoming emails header. Everybody else has to deal with the filter.
00:40:07
Speaker
ah Yeah, we'll see we'll see you how they do um but rough times for for Bioware What's the last Dragon Age game that you did play? For me personally. Yeah, Inquisition. I played Dragon Age Inquisition. I enjoyed it But there was a there's a quote that stands out for me. I think I might have mentioned it right previously where a developer was like very uncomfortable with how much crunch there was or they opposed how much crunch happened with the game and They wanted the game to come out and they wanted it to kind of like flounder Part of them wanted it to flounder because they wanted to show leadership that crunch didn't work and then Inquisition actually sold pretty well And they're like Yeah,
00:40:59
Speaker
yeah I I would love for that to stop being a thing. Yeah. Cause it seems like other media industries don't seem to have those same issues. I mean, I'm sure some do, you know, like animation artists and things like that are heavily exploited, but if we're talking about different exploited, like areas of various industries, there's going to be a lot. Oh, that's true. Video games is one of them though. Like I wouldn't recommend anyone work in the AAA space in video games. Your, your efforts will be subs, your, your efforts will be subsidized basically by your passion, right? The fact that you have so much passion will be taken advantage of, um, in video games. So.
00:41:49
Speaker
This is why I always mention a blank expression. No one's going to take advantage of me ever. Exactly. Exactly. um Conversely, if you're really interested in making games and you do it in the indie space or you do it in a smaller studio where the decision makers aren't so many steps removed from you, then you get Hades. So.
00:42:09
Speaker
Hades 2. Oh, doesn't say no. But yeah, it is always very reassuring, heartwarming to see in these studios essentially go toe to toe with AAA just because you're essentially looking at a passion project with a smaller team compared to a very big budget game. Not to say that there can't be overlap,
00:42:35
Speaker
in that it seems like the latest Doom entry has a lot of care and thought put into how they designed everything, which kudos to them because I did not get that vibe as much previously where I wasn't paying attention as much. um But a lot of times AAA stuff that we kind of meme on is still very much that vapid.
00:42:53
Speaker
to go to, Oh, have you checked out the latest call of duty or other thing? Yeah. or Hey, do you get a new triple eight game? Oh, it's having issues in like the first two months. Oh, they didn't think there'd be so many people playing. That's crazy. Um, or you find crunches, something like red fall and.
00:43:11
Speaker
There's so many talented people out there who make stuff, um but they don't always control all of the strings. Exactly. Right. Yeah. And that that is the trick. That's the reason I advocate for these these more compressed, um more focused development teams, because if anyone above you up the come up the company just wants to extract revenue, they basically just want to mine users um and players basically of as much money as they can get, then there's no way that's not going to impact your game.
00:43:49
Speaker
Like this is literally just what Larry and said at the game awards, right? It's like, what's the next game of the year look like? Well, it's somebody who cares. There's the TLDR. He said it much more eloquently. Um, but yes, that's, that's the thing that matters. And if you're in a studio that can't fulfill the requirements that were laid out in that eloquent speech, then yeah, you're going to struggle when it comes to things like this. So stuff.
00:44:19
Speaker
yeah But, on the other hand, Andes are hot right now. so That's good. That's good.
Game Updates: Sons of the Forest and Path of Exile 2
00:44:29
Speaker
Rapid Fire, some other news here. Sons of the Forest had a patch after we did our episode. well I thought they were done. We've got to go back and play it some more.
00:44:41
Speaker
um No, the things that they added. So they added rafts. It looks like you can build on. And then they made it so you can plan out walls, basically. And Kelvin will build the section. We called him Kevin, I think, for the entirety of our episode. His name always has been Kelvin, but Kevin is funny. No shit. I thought he had a typo in the notes here. I was like, I'll let it slide. I'll see where it goes. I was like, if I only ever refer to him as,
00:45:11
Speaker
Kevin, I think we can make it stick. It's a better name than Kelvin, obviously. um
00:45:19
Speaker
But yeah, ah some quality of life stuff and a bunch of bug fixes. I mean, good on them, I guess, for continuing to see those improvements after the game launched. On the other hand, I'm a little bit vindictive because I'm like, it's a 1.0 game. yeah Why are you still working on features for a 1.0 game?
00:45:41
Speaker
Couldn't you have just waited to push this to 1.0? Because I'm not saying don't make the game better. Yeah, just a lot a lot of people are going to have a similar experience with like, oh, hey, we want to check out this game. We played through it at, let's say, December 5th. Yeah. Oh, cool. There's a patch of February 2nd. Oh, do we have to go back and play through the whole thing to like check those out? Or do we hop off for five minutes to be like, oh, there is ref now. Because you've kind of already had that experience. Right. But now you're not going to be having the whole experience.
00:46:11
Speaker
Yeah, I mean I guess to their credit they're not it doesn't look like they're expanding the story or anything like that It's mostly like some quality of life changes, but and some future improvements bug fixes and stuff like that but I Mean, maybe the people who play now will have a better experience than we did so it's almost against their own interest to have released the game when there was a hundred bugs left to fix. Um, and some of these other changes that were coming down the pipe that they they hadn't completed, you know, but it's, I don't know. It's a measure toys, cut ones type of deal. Cause you can only have that first impression. So if you didn't shave and cut your nails,
00:47:03
Speaker
Probably should do that. Yeah, should do that. um Make sure your teeth are brushed. Make sure everything's good ah before you go out into public. Exactly, right. um I don't know if there might have been financials behind this. Maybe they needed the burst from actually hitting 1.0. But that's not how we want to see games reach 1.0, right? Yeah, it's like, oh, once we reach 1.0, we'll kind of backpedal on some stuff and use some of that money to finish the game. Eh? Yeah, it feels a little bit discordant to go with that approach. But again, don't want to dissuade people from actually making their games better. ah No Man's Sky has been doing that for 30 years at this point now. And I don't even have them in the news. I mean i can just assume that they're probably about to release a major patch that adds content to the game.
00:47:55
Speaker
ah But that's about it for what I wanted to cover in the news. What have you been playing, Dave? It's been a lot more of Path of Exile 2.
00:48:06
Speaker
so to I'm slowly starting to learn one or two things, try experimenting a little bit more to, quote unquote, further my build in the end game. Started to get some currency I can use to actually use on the trade site to get better gear, because be fucked if I'll find it.
00:48:24
Speaker
and I don't know, if you like ARPGs, this has definitely still been very fun. And again, because it's not completely out, still considered early access, we know that there'd be more stuff coming down the line. Right. It does. um Did you hear, though, there was um some drama around Path of Exile? I don't think so. We'll have to actively Google this while I say it. ah But essentially, what I had heard was a Path of Exile 2, people were going to
00:48:56
Speaker
I think, no, Path of Exile 1 is going to have some type of disruption while Path of Exile 2 was updated, which I think they had initially promised, hey, this won't be the case. There's such going to be going on active development side by side. But I think some factors cause that to not be the case. Interesting. I actually ah had never put a thought to the fact that this is a completely separate game.
00:49:22
Speaker
like it I mean, it makes sense, obviously. It seems obvious now, but I'm kind of curious, because like Path of Exile 1 has a lot of live service integration, and I'm sure it's in their best interest that most of their player base moves to 2, or is like, refreshed interest in 2, and then they'll make money off of that.
00:49:49
Speaker
Yes, I will say as somebody who's played both, the cosmetics that I had gotten in Path of Exile 1 did not carry over it to 2. Right. Which I'm fine with. That's pretty industry standard. But that was my kind of like, hey, different thing. I was like, OK, Path of Exile 2 will be the train that I will be attached to.
Game Competition and Platform Rivalries
00:50:11
Speaker
It's one of the places I'll actually give Overwatch credit is they did have cosmetics carryover. They just put all of the, it's like everything unlocked. Now, after that, they just flooded the market every season with bunches of cosmetics. And a lot of them weren't that great. um As some of our friends could attest, but like,
00:50:32
Speaker
It is nice to get like a little bit of, oh, you're a landed Gentry. You already are a game owner. Okay. Oh, you've been with us for a while. Okay. As a premium.
00:50:47
Speaker
right this way. Here's your here's your special seating arrangement. ah Maybe not all of that, but like some recognition for um having already played the game, having some loyalty and stuff like that. and Yeah, because the people who are like die hard on ladder stuff and grinding, um and they've been putting all this time and effort into it,
00:51:08
Speaker
For them, it's still like an active game. Yeah. And so to them be like, oh, we're not having these next patch for the next season. It's going to be held off because of this other game that these new casual people are playing. They're like, what the fuck? Uh-huh.
00:51:22
Speaker
Yeah. Although at the same time, like from the game development standpoint, I kind of think that putting the older game onto life support or long-term support um when the new game is created makes more sense to me. Yeah. Like you want to divert people to your your new platform and you don't want to split effort or leave the community in type of a situation where they're like, well, I don't really know which one I should be playing. Yeah, are you making this update on both games? You're like, what's where's this set of changes going to be? Exactly, right. If you make a change in POE2, are you going to also add that back in POE1? Because this was a nice quality of life thing we'd really like to have.
00:52:05
Speaker
That was kind of the one of the issues anticipated with Overwatch, right? When they made like the forced, well, honestly, I honestly think that the biggest issue with the transition for Overwatch was they had terrible communication the entire way through and they lied to people, which is wrong.
00:52:25
Speaker
um Lying is also a terrible form of communication. That's the thing, so. Because if they would have just told people upfront, hey, all of this is going to be rolled together. Here are all the changes we anticipate making. um We're going free you to play all of that. Then like they would have been in a much better place, but it seemed like some of those decisions were made late. And so people had more opportunity to be disappointed um and to
00:52:59
Speaker
reasonably be upset when stated expectations weren't met. um But it sounds like Grindy Gear Games is doing a better job of kind of communicating their intentions for supporting both games. Yeah, I think they've been pretty good about communicating with their community. I think It's one of those game studios where it like it really cares about the gameplay and the game itself. It's not like, oh, let's just add a new thing next season. They're like, how does this intertwine into the other mechanics? Would this be broken for certain builds? um
00:53:35
Speaker
Right. And I'm sure that Jews will still find a way to make something broken and make a YouTube video about it, which I'll check out every six months. Who who did you say? Jews. It's J.O.U.S.I.T.Z. OK, gotcha. They did a lot because a lot of it sounded like you said Jews will optimize this. so I mean, maybe they will. I don't know who's working on it.
00:54:01
Speaker
But he's he's known for doing a lot of like automated builds. It's like, oh, if your minion dies um with this specific ring, it'll take you'll take a certain amount of damage. OK, with another effect, it's like, whenever you take damage, this will proc. And so you can essentially make engines in the game for triggers, at least in Path of Exile 1. I don't know if 2 has been as common with that. Right. Yeah, it's definitely one of the things. that the game is known for. And I want to see Path of Exile succeed.
Hot Dog Preferences and Episode Conclusion
00:54:32
Speaker
Because at some point, I want to play Diablo 4 more as well. i want you um Well, I mean, so a lot of the things that have been added have been pretty well received. um But it's not anywhere near the top of my list to go back and play. But in the same way, we're still talking about video cards, in the same way I want Nvidia to be competitive,
00:54:55
Speaker
for gamers, I want like AMD to be competitive because they're going to have a better synthesis, right? Like more options for the consumer or the player is better. And it's always better when like you can compare features between games and be like, this is the type of thing I want to see. Right. Like here's some improvement. Here's reason for innovation and Path of Exile forces Blizzard through that gauntlet sometimes where they're like,
00:55:25
Speaker
I mean, cool, but like do you have this build diversity? Do you have this weapon diversity? like um Obviously, they're different types of games and they're going for different markets as far as like the type of people who want to play them. but like um Variants is good. That's in TLDR. Yeah. If you only have one hot dog standing in your channel, you're going to be like, these are the best hot dogs I've ever had. They have hot dogs. They have hot dogs, and I like hot dogs. Versus if you go to a grocery store and you have these six options, you could be like, oh.
00:55:59
Speaker
ah This one brand kind of a store brand actually pretty decent and you know, like not crazily expensive tastes kind of like the other ones I'm gonna keep doing that cool. You've used information of options to select something that's best for you the consumer exactly And now that you mentioned hot dogs, that brings me to my last topic. I've had the XL2 hot dogs. This is inverted because we usually talk about food at the beginning. But from Scams Club, I get their like large hot dogs. like I don't know if you're familiar. People probably know they're not a Frank-sized hot dog. They're closer to like
00:56:38
Speaker
how do you compare it like a full bratwurst basically in size um because they're delicious and you air fry them you like cut it air fry it it's so good um but the issue that I had was I kept buying hot dog buns just like potato rolls, basically, which are usually pretty good for a hot dog. I prefer them for hot dogs. They literally poisoned my spouse, but like they're good for me. And so they're tiny. They're so small that like this bratwurst size hot dog will just destroy the potato. There's zero percent chance of structural integrity.
00:57:17
Speaker
um And recently, Mango was like, you know, you could try hoagie rolls.
00:57:25
Speaker
And it's been a game changer. So much better. Now, it might be a little bit too much fun, but it's not that much over and it's way better than falling to pieces.
00:57:38
Speaker
Hear me out, it's not too much button. OK. Because you're obviously talking about laying the thing vertically or, you know, along with the button. Yeah, parallel to the button. But if you actually cut it up, like at least cut it lengthwise, you can see the flat sides. Yeah. And then it kind of like chunked that up and then put it in the row with like some sauce.
00:58:00
Speaker
what do peppers nu You basically have like a sausage, pepper, nu and onion sandwich. And those are so great in hoagie rolls because it can absorb all of that extra sauce or juice from the sausage or hot dog. What have you. The kind of hot dog feels like you're underselling it because they're definitely way better than just like you bought a hot dog.
00:58:23
Speaker
Yeah, like the a lot of the rolls you're talking about, like as soon as moisture hits them, they will just kind of be like, oh, I'm done working. Exactly. there's like it's such The structural integrity is nothing. yeah um Especially if you want to like crack it open, basically, to like sear it. Because air fryer, awesome. Recommend air fryers. But like in the last minute or two of the air frying time, while you're cooking like hot dogs, you can like throw the bun down to like sear it.
00:58:52
Speaker
um Standard hot dog potato rolls, they will fold. They are not ready for that kind of pressure. They are not prepared, um as Illidan would say. And hoagie rolls, there's a chance they have the power. That's because a lot of those are like closer to actual bread than your hot dog rolls will be. True. That doesn't seem to be the case. yeah You can almost toast them, too, without being like, oh, I've now burnt in on the crisp. It's just too thin.
00:59:24
Speaker
I recommend it though. And I'll have to take your advice. Cause I do think like some sauces or some toppings on that could be pretty awesome. You said like a bratwurst. It's pretty close to a bratwurst. Yeah. Like in size. Like it, does it taste like sausage-y? It's less sausage-y. It tastes like a higher quality, all beef hot dog. Okay. Yeah. But it's like.
00:59:48
Speaker
usually the ones from Sam's are like, maybe it's a function of air frying them, which just also makes them taste better because it's comparable, like pan fry, but you're not like in the juices as much. Definitely better than microwave. That's basically what we're comparing against. I still feel like you could get away with some type of maybe a little bit of a barbecue sauce, maybe more so than a tomato sauce and still like have a little bit of a pepper onion in there for some substance.
01:00:14
Speaker
recently I've been using ah we had a Grey Poupon for a mix of a sauce for another another dish so I've been I've been eating them with Grey Poupon um but ah which is just Dijon mustard I guess in name brand form um But yeah other sauces or maybe like we have a ah ah Burrito mix mango made yesterday that kind of its end result and she would attest to this as well I'm not slandering her ah Came closer to like a chili Yeah, that's what she said to me as well. I got to see the pictures <unk> um And putting chili
01:00:57
Speaker
on a hot dog and a hot dog bun. That's where the money's at. I feel like maybe we could use some sort of like video game IP to promote this new idea of yours. Yeah. What is the video game IP? Because we're at the end of the episode. My brain don't work so well. Oh, I was thinking of Sonic and chili dogs. Ah, gotcha. Gotcha. Um, that is entirely fair. But what else is entirely fair?
01:01:28
Speaker
is our listeners. So thank you for listening to the end of this episode. um As always, if you want to reach out, our information is down there in the description. I cannot remember exactly what our blue sky is by memory by memory right now ah because their links are a little bit weird weird, but soapstone podcast is in there. That's the key operative part.
01:01:52
Speaker
um We are also on Gmail so open up soapstone podcast gmail dot.com and we're always happy to hear from you guys um if you have thoughts feedback for future episodes feel free to send them in and as always We'll see in the next one my towel