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00:00:01
Kazuya + 149 bystanders at the Waffle House
51 Plays2 years ago
Join Dave and Jake as they talk about adding Waffle House to Tekken, capitalism in the gaming industry, sex jokes, and the dangers of having more than 150 people in this week's episode!
Intro:
- Hollow Knight - Queen's Gardens
Outro:
- Hollow Knight - Enter Hallownest
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
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Introduction and Humor
00:00:39
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Serpstone. My name is Jake. I'm joined by my co-host as always, Dave. How's it going tonight, Dave? I was gonna say, uh, hey, it's your boy, Thick Bit This. Hmm.
00:00:53
Speaker
But your question was, how am I doing? Right. Not how large is your penis today. Today. Well, it's like I assume, you know, it's similar to measuring your weight or your height or something like that can vary throughout the day.
00:01:12
Speaker
Do you weigh your penis? All right, get on the scale. I won't say as a while we're on the penis conversation. Sure. Yeah. There was a phrase was coined in another discord. Shout out to Steve. If he ever listens to the podcast. Friend of the show. Yeah, I'd say so.
00:01:37
Speaker
But he's like, oh, do you boys have like a big dick and a good attitude? Yeah. Like that was just like the phrase like, oh, like, yeah. To get people like stoked for stuff. Right. Like, how's your day going? You're just like, oh, well, I got a big dick and a good attitude. Yeah, that's kind of funny.
00:01:57
Speaker
It is funny. I think like that's definitely a good response between friends because it's also definitely one that immediately leads into a discussion of your response rather than, you know, potentially anything else. Well, that's, that's fair. Cool. Well, you know, glad you're doing well.
00:02:22
Speaker
That's it. That's all we got. That's it. Pack it
Jake's Ethernet Adventure
00:02:25
Speaker
in. How about you? How are you doing this day of the week? I'm doing pretty good, pretty well today. I was telling Dave moments ago, but you guys don't know this, but I've been punching holes in my wall to run Ethernet.
00:02:41
Speaker
Now I'm going to buy the tools that I need to punch holes in the wall around the internet. And it's fun. It's gratifying. I do find, I will say, I'm not going to go into a bunch of detail or turn it into a full topic. But climbing around in the attic or contorting my body, I want to be painted by one of his French girls or something like that while I'm working on something for the wall.
00:03:09
Speaker
I am not resilient to those types of motions anymore. So when I was up in the attic, like I have to, I have to bend down a little bit. Like I was around six feet, maybe a little six feet in chains, chain six feet in chains. Wow. I'm very tall.
00:03:27
Speaker
Yeah, once he's unfettered, oh my god, he's like a fucking monolith. Phase two boss fight, yeah. Six feet and change. So up in the attic, I have to like crouch over constantly because it's just like a triangle, you know? Yeah. A V-shaped thing. And even in the middle, I have to crouch over.
00:03:46
Speaker
But I was up there messing around and then I came back down and I was like, I feel like really, really stiff and not all that great. I'm going to lay down and it straight up was just like out of commission. Like I could walk to my computer slowly to do remote work the following day.
00:04:07
Speaker
But man, if that was not a wake up call that I am an aged and wizened old man, nothing. Right. Can I stop having things aged and what kind of things are wizened? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Wizened beverages. That'd be good. Wisenberry.
00:04:29
Speaker
I'm not even going to respond with audio. I'm just going to look out in the distance and be like, that's a good idea.
Gaming Industry Trends
00:04:33
Speaker
Yeah, that would be good. I'd buy it. Um, but speaking of random things in the news, which is something we sometimes cover, uh, some stuff happened last month. One of the things that stood out for me is I knew this, uh, the showed up on Twitter, but, um, the tech and director apparently had a bunch of people.
00:04:55
Speaker
send him messages asking for a waffle house, be a valid stage for Tekken. And this confused him a lot because he didn't know what a waffle house was, naturally. I'm glad that our memes are fairly localized and widespread. I think it culminated in someone sending him a message that was like an offer, basically, like for you to understand this.
00:05:25
Speaker
Like, come with me, I'll take you to a Waffle House at 3 a.m. And you'll see why it belongs as a Tekken stage. And it's just, it's great. I love it. I've been to one exactly once. Food was good. How was the fight? I'll admit. A little sketchy of a place. I could see some shit going down there in the middle of the night.
00:05:50
Speaker
Um, but I think I just went for dinner with somebody that is not super populated. I've actually never been to a waffle house. I don't know if they're local here, really. The one I went out to is, uh, down near Baltimore, but I'm sure they are around. Maybe not just immediately Jason to us. Gotcha. Yeah. I don't really want to, I'm not up to travel to a different state to figure out if it's low quality enough to be a tech and stage.
00:06:21
Speaker
Not to say tagging stages are usually low quality, but the presumption being that people are fighting, right? So, although that could add to the experience, if you were sure that you wouldn't get caught up in the fight, right? Like, you know how in the old fighting stages, you would have people, I guess it's still a thing for new fighting stages, but you have people doing stuff in the background, like sometimes cheering if it's like a actual combat arena, but a lot of times they're just like shopping at a street stall or something like that.
00:06:50
Speaker
Just minding their own business is like two people with god powers are beating the shit out of you. Uh-huh, exactly. There's this actual murder happening in front and they're just like, I don't know, like, should an avocado really cost four bucks?
00:07:04
Speaker
But I would love to be that background person in the Tekken fight, right? You're just sitting here, you're like, waffles are great, aren't they? Like, waffles are pretty good. Just people beating the piss out of each other in the foreground. I mean, if the food was good, I could obviously go into something like that, but I would want to be in a specific, like, designated spectator section.
00:07:27
Speaker
I want to be going for like a sip of my beverage and then somebody gets flung into me. Yeah, Kazuya's like, you are now collateral. Like I would never bring food and drink into a mosh pit, you know what I mean? So like, it's not a good idea. You can bring potatoes in and then get mashed potatoes.
00:07:52
Speaker
Good night, everybody. We made it through exactly one news item. I didn't see it coming, I'll be honest. One news item.
00:08:00
Speaker
But yeah, we'll see what happens there. I hope it happens. I don't even own Tekken. They would have to get the rights and all of that. But I mean, Waffle House doesn't have any money, so they would sell the rights in a heartbeat. So can we throw in the franchise, please? It's just like a freebie. You just have to assume the debt. I don't know. I don't know what their financial situation is. I assume it's not good. It's a chain business. It's multiple places. It's still in business. I guess it's fair. They're probably doing OK.
00:08:29
Speaker
that still uses a metric for like how fucked a city is and like a disaster relief. They're like, well, the wildfire is still open, so it can't be that bad. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking, though, of measure of business segue into another piece of news here.
00:08:50
Speaker
I actually heard this from like multiple places before seeing it in the article we were researching for this, for this news piece. You know, we're just journalists on the beat, figuring out whatever we can. But Phil Spencer, as many people know, head of Xbox, very high up in Microsoft and, you know, going to be or is the head now of Blizzard, Activision Blizzard Entertainment as well with Emerger.
00:09:18
Speaker
had a quote where he was talking about how people, how many people are being let go and like how they're downsizing all these departments and stuff. And he mentioned that he didn't have the luxury of not running a profitable business and like they have to chase this growth model. And like growth is absolutely essential and growth and growth and growth and growth. And you might even have seen some like clips online of this meme of basically because so many people in the industry just keep talking about it. Um,
00:09:48
Speaker
But if they're not literally having investors throw money at them, they're like, we're failing. What are we going to do? And the crazy thing to me is I'll ask for your take as well, Dave, but like Microsoft is a mega corporation. Right. What? Like they talk about the conditions of publishers and like, you know, it's important for publishers to make money and all this stuff. They are the publisher. Microsoft is a publisher. It's like.
00:10:19
Speaker
Anytime that they talk about the unfortunate circumstances in the industry, it's like, you are the industry, right? No one has more this way than you in the industry. I hate hand wavy talk like that. They're like, yeah, there are definitely some issues that like we need to, what are they do it? You know? Yeah. Cause it's like, that was just gonna say,
00:10:52
Speaker
Go ahead enemy team has also picked punch. Oh, no It's one of the things we're like
00:11:01
Speaker
The trajectory of gaming as a whole and like the gaming industry has had lots of issues and it's been across multiple instances, multiple different publishers or companies. It's like we should address some of those things and not have like the churn and burn of developers and other stuff that you don't need to hire a new team and rush things out. Yeah.
00:11:26
Speaker
I don't know. Like if you look at, again, I have to throw Larry in a bone because it's fucking Larry and look at what they did without all the extra bullshit. And then you have like a quadruple a company being like, well, you know, things are hard. Really? No, that hard. You can't get your your ship together.
00:11:49
Speaker
Yeah. I don't know if, I don't know if Microsoft is like full quadruple a like Ubisoft is, but they're definitely approaching it someday. They can make a terrible pirate game as well. But for now they're just stuck with a sea of thieves. I just meant to say like they are main a mainstream thing. Yes. I know. I know. I mean, I'm just any opportunity to poke more fun at Ubisoft is correct. Um,
00:12:12
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. I think part of it is like this sole financial focus on growth is just kind of miserable. It's like we're approaching going even. All right, that's an evil thing. We either have to find out how to make more money or we're going to just cut people so that the numbers will start going up again.
00:12:37
Speaker
And from a certain perspective, from a business perspective, I kind of understand it. The problem is there are a lot of things in life that if you run them like a business, then you're going to hurt whatever thing it is. This is the late stage capitalism argument a little bit.
00:12:58
Speaker
Obviously, even intuitively, infinite growth forever is not attainable, right? You cannot just keep making more and more and more money like exponentially every year. And that's just going to be how it works. Like you're going to have a tapped market for games where more people aren't buying games. You're going to have a situation where people aren't willing to spend more money on their games, right? Like something is going to happen.
00:13:28
Speaker
And it just seems so garbage that the response to that is just like, all right, well, let's cut developers. We're going to dial everything back so that we'll have next quarter less salary burn or whatever.
00:13:45
Speaker
Yeah, it's again one of the major problems with capitalism as a whole is just The greed aspect and always that quote-unquote need to keep pushing. Yeah, I Know we talked about this like a decade ago around like some work stuff where it's like, oh we always need to be the best possible like, okay, so like where's
00:14:09
Speaker
Where's good? If above and beyond is the standard, when does that become just, oh, that's good now. And oh, we need to have a bigger and better above and beyonds. And you keep basically having this moving goal line that people are going to burn out as far as your employees. Or like you were saying, the customers should be like,
00:14:32
Speaker
Like you keep raising prices and not necessarily making great products. So that's not really tenable for me as purchasing option.
00:14:41
Speaker
And also for like, if you're going to start a business, you're not targeting growth. You're targeting sustainability, right? You have to first make sure that you can pay back your initial investment for, I'm imagining like I have a bakery, right? I can't bake for shit if anybody knows me. I like to dick around in the kitchen and I call it cooking.
00:15:05
Speaker
But you'd have to like, oh, this is my question. I disagree, but go on. I have a mandatory disagreement, but go on. Thank you. That's the whole reason I'm making this segment first. All right. Any minute now, Jake. Feel free to jump in. I'm messaging you on Discord. Say something. But you have to establish your customer base. And oh, people seem to like these prices. Here's some promotions that we can do to have more.
00:15:30
Speaker
People stop by on the weekend or whatever the fuck it is, right? And at a point, it'll become like a comfortable thing. We're like, oh, you know what's going on day to day, week to week, month to month. You know what you're going to make and where you have room to say, oh, we could technically bring on an extra person or something else. And then you do that over time slowly. That's how businesses grow. I mean, I'm going to I'm going to hard disagree.
00:15:58
Speaker
because that's how traditional businesses grow. But we live in the modern tech industry where it's like so many of these giant companies are used to operating with massive debt or even being non-profitable for a lot of time.
00:16:15
Speaker
And then it's only when the economy starts to go south that people actually come due and they're like, oh, okay, we actually got to get like red ink on the books. So it's not a red ink, black ink on the books. So it's not all negative. Right. But until that point, it's just like expand as rapidly as possible. Right. Like Epic game store, taking it back to gaming for a second. They just throw money away.
00:16:37
Speaker
all over the time. It's almost the entire thing that they do. They're not even worried about going even because they're subsidized by other parts of the business, but they just want to grow. They want to be competitive with Steam.
00:16:50
Speaker
Amazon, all of those guys did that. That mall is theoretically possible if you have that deep of funds or coffers. You need a fuck ton of venture capital to be able to do something like that. Yes. In general, a lot of businesses that are not major corporations can't do that because it doesn't fucking make sense.
00:17:11
Speaker
Whereas I'm sure you could operate at a negative with something like Microsoft for a while. And then worst case scenario, you're like, oh, that didn't pan out. That didn't even dent our pile of money. Yeah.
00:17:23
Speaker
Google is a perfect example of that. They keep making products that clearly cost like millions of dollars of investment, and then they just drop them randomly for no reason. Like the person who's responsible for products just has like ADHD or something, and then they're just like, Google Glass, I don't remember that. Let's just stop that. I remember I met somebody in person who had it once.
00:17:49
Speaker
Never saw them again. I'm not, I'm not saying it's related. Um, uh, the 0% survival rate. It's hard to believe, but it's not that the product died. It's that the users. AR stands for. Uh, but yeah, it's, it is, it is crappy. I mean, this is the reason that you do not want to be in.
00:18:15
Speaker
a major publisher. You don't want to have a major publisher. You don't want to have someone else holding the reins. You don't want to have your company be owned by one of these massive companies. We are beyond if we were ever in the era of I have a game dev team and we work under Microsoft or we work under Ubisoft or Activision Blizzard or Sierra, whatever the crap, right?
00:18:43
Speaker
None of these stories end well, right? Maybe you're good for a couple of years. Maybe they help you ship a title that otherwise you'd have trouble finding funding for. But as soon as the numbers come up bad, they're just like, kill them. And they're asleep. Lock the doors, burn their house down. I was like, okay. That's why all of the news is so poor. And like you said, Larry is just like, hey,
00:19:11
Speaker
Maybe don't, right? Like maybe, maybe work at a place where they respect you and that the point isn't just infinite growth forever. Yeah. Also that kind of applies to a job in general, even if you're not in gaming, you should be working in a place that gives a fuck and.
00:19:34
Speaker
You can also just have like a separation of work and not working. Working state, yeah. As the founding fathers intended. I kind of wonder why somebody like somebody, some corporation like Microsoft or Sony hasn't done smaller stuff.
Indie Game Potential
00:19:56
Speaker
Right. It's like, yeah, they're going to have like, Oh, technically we published some small indie company thing that's going to go on the Xbox game store. Yeah. But like they could just make smaller things. They don't need to make a 70 or $80 game. That's like, this is the new cutting edge FPS. That's exactly like the others, but we added a double jump mechanic and you're like, okay.
00:20:20
Speaker
I honestly, I think you're on the pulse of what's going to happen is there's going to be more of a focus on less expensive games. And yeah, part of it is a bunch of people got fired. So there's literally just not going to have the scope for massive games, but.
00:20:39
Speaker
I mean, you can see the success of games like Hi-Fi Rush, which is not like, like it's well-developed, well-polished, everyone loved it, et cetera, et cetera, but it's not like open world, $500 million budget nonsense, right? Whereas like Call of Duty, Red Dead Redemption, Grand Theft Auto, these games are like, they're seen as like the mantle piece type games.
00:21:05
Speaker
Um, of their respective franchises and the companies that own them and they make a lot of money, but they cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make. Right. And I don't know. I think we talked about it before, but the, um, there's going to be, I feel like there's going to be a little bit of backlash towards the over monetization and live service inclusion in like every game.
00:21:34
Speaker
It started a bit ago. I would like to see it come to more of a head where people were like, hey, fuck off. But again, it's always people voting with their dollar. So if enough people are buying it, it's not really going to change much. You really need to say, hey, fuck off, Metal Gear Rising.
00:21:57
Speaker
Metal Gear Rising didn't have microtransactions or any of that stuff. I'm sorry. Sorry survive I survived it. Yeah. Yeah, I think we get in the free day I know I was like I thought that that was just just hate for Metal Gear Rising, but just all revenge
00:22:13
Speaker
I think that's fair. I think we're going to see it a little bit more, um, with some high profile misses recently. Like there've been a lot of life service games that launched into retirement almost recently, right? Like suicides, God killed the justice league, miserable, terrible. I just, I don't understand who's
00:22:33
Speaker
Behind some of this stuff cuz like if you look at gaming and just what's popular Just as like a complete outsider if you're like, hey, what are the top 20 games? For gamers you might see like a hauling in Minecraft to Halo 2 whatever the fuck it is, right?
00:22:49
Speaker
But you could look at those titles and be like, Oh, here's why people like this. Nine times out of 10. Um, actually nine out of 100. I'm going up the scale. A lot of it has to do with it's well made. It makes sense. And it's well themed. Like I didn't care anything about the halo universe. And then I was playing halo. I'm like, Oh, I like kind of the background ambient music. I like when things pump up. It was a good game.
00:23:15
Speaker
Yeah, like they just they made a good game. It was made well. And then it showed by how popular it was for so fucking long. I think I think what it is, though, is as a consumer in the gaming industry, that's your perspective on it is you see here's a successful game. It's because the game was really good. And then someone in a boardroom with a cigar.
00:23:39
Speaker
is that is a successful game because it made a lot of money. That's what happened with WoW. World of Warcraft came out and people were like, how much are people willing to spend each month on an MMO? And then the entire industry was just MMOs for a period of time, even though MMOs are the most expensive thing you can make. They actually put modern game prices to shame at times for most games.
00:24:07
Speaker
I'm sure GTA costs more than most MMOs ever did, but like the same thing happens with live service games. It's like, oh, some people are willing to spend more money on the same game. They keep playing like Diablo was had the ambitions of that with Diablo four and their seasonal system. Any, anybody who has a season pass does that. But the issue is like, I actually do not want to pay seasonal passes for multiple games.
00:24:37
Speaker
Right. So they immediately just opened with like a presupposition that's false because it's for me, at least where it's like, I'll buy your game, I'll play it. And then I'll stop playing it as God intended. Right. Um, and so you can't keep me around for forever, even with games that I love. So.
00:24:59
Speaker
I think a majority of gamers are probably of a similar mindset to where a lot of times gaming is an experience. You might have a forever game that you play with people like with Dota 2. I know people buy chess and cosmetics. I still do it occasionally because I have such a long term investment with it. But that would be like for that one title, right? If I'm starting to pick up other games, I'm not also be like, well, they have like a season.
00:25:29
Speaker
No, I've done the one thing and I refuse to do anymore because I have other subscriptions, right? I have, let's say, Amazon Prime. Maybe you have a streaming thing like Hulu. Maybe you have like a Patreon and you subscribe to your Twitch. There's so many recurring bills that like the average person has. It's where they're like, oh, and also this game thing that you play occasionally.
00:25:51
Speaker
No, it's it doesn't make sense. Yeah. It just can't go up forever, right? I'm not getting more time in my day to play games and I have plenty of games to play. So yeah. Until they start selling you extra time per day. That's exactly what I need. I need the what was that had Justin Timberlake in it. Was it in time? Just in time. No, that would be too much of a pun. I think it was in time.
00:26:19
Speaker
He had a whole thing where like the premise was, it was based off like a sci-fi book, but the premise was like you had your time left in your life and when you were paid for whatever shifts you worked at for a day or whatever, it would just be more time. And then if you wanted to buy a coffee, that would cost time. If you want to have some transaction with somebody, give them time. And it was just literally this kind of like holographic display on your arm.
00:26:46
Speaker
It was kind of cool. It was a stupid movie, like really stupid, but it was, it was a cool sci-fi idea. It was a cool world building idea. Um, stupid movie that like really dumb. Uh, yeah. Anyways, I guess we probably talked about this enough. It's gonna, it's gonna continue to be a topic. I think until publishers start to be a little bit less like
00:27:12
Speaker
evil maker corporations and a little bit more like Larian. Well, to use the term zeitgeist, which seems to be some manner of ghost based on my research. What are your thoughts around big mode? Big mode. That is an up and coming publisher. Yeah.
00:27:34
Speaker
And a lot of Dunkey's videos, half the time, it's like, hey, these games are sure fun. I'm like, all right, Dunkey. It is. It is funny, though, because he does. He knows he knows how to do it. It's sort of like a tongue in cheek thing where he's just like, hey, by the way, player game. Also, here's the rest of the topic. It's not just an advertisement, right? True.
00:27:56
Speaker
Which is funny because like he hasn't, at least that I remember really done baked in ads for his, for his stuff before. He's like, okay, this is manscaped or, you know, uh, hello fresh or whatever the crap. Like he never has done a long, long time ago, like some small thing, but yeah, it's not been a part of his standard content. He probably reformed away from it when he quit league, but like, it is kind of funny to just see like, here's an immediate, uh,
00:28:26
Speaker
brief ad for animal well or something like that. I think that's entirely fair. It's literally his company. So to your question though, I think that's basically the future, right? Like the issue is when anything gets big enough, it starts to become evil.
00:28:44
Speaker
Right. Like, Oh, is this going back to the penis thing? All right, dude. Right. I'm just saying there was a lawful good penis when it started and we're not there anymore. But like. Yeah, like big mode enables small indies to get out there and be published, but.
00:29:09
Speaker
You just have to be really careful when you're being published by anyone because you're often you're giving up revenue to get whatever benefits they provide you. Right. So stuff, but it's definitely better than Microsoft. Give Facebook some money to run some ads for whatever you're trying to promote. Yeah, that's fair.
00:29:32
Speaker
Yeah, or I don't know exactly how it works if you self publish on Steam, but it seems like people generally kind of get a window there as well. Um, I'm sure there's a lot of factors that play into it, but I'd be nice if they had something like that. Because otherwise it would just be kind of like a ghost release and you're like, Oh, let's use social media or.
00:29:53
Speaker
Yeah, it's hard to get the attention of that many people, as you can see by your listener count. I wasn't gonna say, because I didn't want to surprise or shock you, but our average listens were significantly higher recently than they have been in the past. I do not know what that means. And maybe Dave's just refreshing the page. I don't know.
00:30:18
Speaker
You want to see us at the meet-and-greet we will be at the panel between three and six I'm gonna be doing the greeting and Dave was gonna be doing the meeting But yeah, there was a
00:30:40
Speaker
This is just a brief aside, but it does kind of relate to this small publisher, big publisher discussion, uh, audio book I've been listening to from Malcolm Gladwell. And he talks about like a bunch of different things, but one of them that was interesting to me is like, apparently organizations of people get significantly less efficient and cohesive if it goes above 150 people.
00:31:06
Speaker
and specifically 150 people. There are cults where they don't, or maybe not cults, but subgroups of people where they don't allow a commune or whatever to have more than 150 people because it'll start to subdivide into factions. So instead they're like, oh, if we're about to hit that, you have to go off and found another branch. But there's a company that does this.
00:31:32
Speaker
And they literally, they're like manufacturing or something. And anytime they get more employees, if they would need to put them into a building where they already have 150 people, they make a new building and they'll split off and literally just have like a different department. And they apparently make a lot of money and it works really well for them. And I'm just like, as you were talking about like these big publishers and stuff, I'm like, I can think of nothing further away from
00:32:02
Speaker
150 people limit, then here's this massive corporation and it's all going to crap because no one can communicate or they just don't care about you as a person and all of that.
Game Development Challenges
00:32:13
Speaker
Yeah. It's part of the mentality of like, Oh, we have enough money or venture capital. We can just throw that. It'll eventually go through the pipe and be fine. Right. Yeah. Um, or you can't oversee it, right? You're less invested, right? Yes.
00:32:28
Speaker
like games were bad and no one realized it was going to be bad until like it launched. And you're like, how did that happen? Right. Like that doesn't seem possible for a 500. By the way, ROK City came out a couple like I think a week ago at this point. Yeah. And if you're like, what's that? Exactly. Yeah.
00:32:47
Speaker
Yeah, I'm not so 100 percent. They're like, we need to make a game. We need famous people in it. And then they just threw money at it. And I'm sure it's a piece of shit like. Yeah. Cool. There was this actually is related to another piece of news. I don't remember where it is on the on the list, but it was a level designer for Starfield that left the company was talking about like what it was like approaching the end of Starfield.
00:33:17
Speaker
And they were pretty much out of time and they had to throw together a final mission. And they knew it had to be this climax with combat and all this stuff, but they were like at the end of development and pretty much had to enter emergency mode to like pull people together to like get it done because they did not have an ending for their game, which is like, it's depressing in its own right. But the thing that was interesting to me is he talks about how like, because the team was so massive, it was 500 people.
00:33:47
Speaker
The team was so massive that it was impossible for them to actually work together. Even though the goal was we have so many people, so so many people can work on different things at different times and we can get more stuff done.
00:34:00
Speaker
The number was so much higher than 150. They couldn't coordinate anymore. Well, it's the pipeline of things. So the company I work at has more than 150 people. Right. Microsoft. I think it's run like shit, personally. By the way, the name of the company is Davesoft. Sorry, sorry. Dave's hard. There you go. We have to continue that, too.
00:34:31
Speaker
But yeah, a lot of the issues that I see are like from departments not necessarily communicating or being on the same page. There's not necessarily like a single entity controlling like, hey, here are our initiatives. So-and-so is working on this. Yeah. But you need to kind of plan that structure ahead of time. Otherwise,
00:34:51
Speaker
You have one person doing a thing, somebody else doing a thing, and then they might kind of communicate and then like, oh, here's the next thing we can do. And there's a lot of overhead and back and forth versus if it was planned out ahead of time of who's going to do what and when. Oh, my God. Then it kind of actually comes together.
00:35:08
Speaker
Again, going back to Larian, um, because they had so many fucking voice signs, they had to record. Um, they're like, Oh, Hey, what's the best way to do this? And they actually worked out a pipeline that's going to work for them to make making their games easier. Yeah. Yeah. They, they, they focused on efficiency and they didn't let it all get caught in like approval pipelines and all this nonsense. And that's apparently what happened with starfield is like,
00:35:37
Speaker
They were like, Oh, should we add a chair to this area? Well, does that need sound? We need to go to like the sound department for that. Does it need an animation? We need to go to this department. Those seem departments are working on different things. It's getting prioritized differently. That's different. Again, it's going back to my job, but
00:35:56
Speaker
If you have people on like different priorities, like if I'm doing thing A and someone else is doing thing B, and I need help with thing A from the other team, but team two is focusing on item B, I just have to kind of spin my wheels and wait to then get them to help out and connect on that thing. And that's just a waste of time. Yeah. Yeah.
00:36:22
Speaker
It's tough. And that's, I mean, like, if you're going to have a big company, then this is where efficiency becomes like the most important thing. Cause things that were just so lightweight before magically overnight are no longer lightweight. And it can be difficult to find out why if you're at the top view, but, but Dave knows if he's dealing with the problem, then Dave's going to be aware of what it is. Ask Dave. There you go. Business advice. I.
00:36:50
Speaker
Obviously, I speak to a lot of my friends from time to time. I talk about anything else, jobs going, and everybody's going to complain about their job, at least to some degree. But a lot of times, I'll hear about somebody's job, and I'm like, that sounds really fucking stupid. Why do they do that? I was even talking to my uncle.
00:37:13
Speaker
over the summer about his job. And he was talking about some of the practices that they do and how they don't make sense. I'm like, that sounds insane to me how they're doing that thing. I want to go in and audit people and be like, hey, you're fucking stupid. Let's change this to this. How much time would you say you spend making TPS reporting? Another thing.
00:37:42
Speaker
Reports are one of those things where, yes, it can be valuable to see like a high level view of the data. Um, but so many of the times people just want to see a fucking number and that's it. And it's such a waste to be like, Oh, things happen this month. Okay. My report came in. I'm happy. Why are we generating that Susan?
00:38:07
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's probably a human thing where there it's for, for, for some people, depending on where they're at in the chain, something being measurable is more important than the thing being measured, having a good result, right? Someone's responsibility is to make sure something is measurable. And if that, if that is true, they're doing their job. That's what I would assume, but.
00:38:32
Speaker
I don't know. Um, man, before I go off on the whole rant about how the whole system is fucked, I do want to talk about some of the other news items.
Industry Pettiness and Criticism
00:38:42
Speaker
Yeah. Any of them stand out. I know all of them by heart. So that's not true. The one specifically that caught my eye was a Konami releasing, uh, like a David Hader, which love David. I don't love David haters. Yes. Pause funny joke clap. Um, uh-huh.
00:39:02
Speaker
But yeah, kind of talking about like Metal Gear and his involvement in it and the legacy of Metal Gear, because like, whether or not you like it, a pretty prolific series. Oh, yeah. And again, because it's fucking Konami, they they have nothing to do with Kojima and they don't even credit him at all, even though he's the guy he is, he is the guy.
00:39:27
Speaker
It's very... I'm not even saying Kojima's my favorite person by any means, but like, holy shit, Konami's so fucking petty. They're very much striding and defecting this, I think, right? Like, because Metal Gear Solid, it is Kojima's.
00:39:47
Speaker
like, and it has been for like forever. And the only way they can change that is just continuing to make garbage games, which they will do, but, um, they could, they could tarnish the legacy. I fully believe, I fully believe in them. Um, but it is like just funny to be like, we're not even going to mention this guy in the historical sense because it's very possible. And I know people are capable of this, of being like,
00:40:14
Speaker
We disagree with this person. We're not happy with them. We do not have a good working business relationship with them. Here is something they contributed to in the past. That was nice. There you go, right? It's like, you don't have to pretend that the past didn't happen in order to shape whatever narrative you've got going on. You can be like, he was a big part of this. Cool. You like had a team working with him and all this stuff. Cool.
00:40:40
Speaker
We're not doing that anymore, right? But it kind of just exposes the weakness in their mentality in a way, because it's like they're not confident to just obviously state that the producer for this game produced these games, right?
00:41:03
Speaker
Even if it's like a footnote, it's like, it doesn't have to be the focus of what you're talking about. If it's like credits, very David Hader focus, because he's the voice of snake for most of it. And just be like, oh, and it was made by this person. OK.
00:41:19
Speaker
don't need to stick on that point, but you just say a team led by Hideo Kojima, you know, like if somebody was historically, let's say 35 years from now, let's say, Oh, do you guys remember soapstone podcast? Eric? Yeah, it was a Jake. Yeah. He had a really good podcast. And they just don't name the other person in it. That would be weird. It would be weird. It's like,
00:41:42
Speaker
Was it a monologue? Like, what was the format of this podcast? He had like one recurring guest mostly, but he'd bring in another one from time to time. He made up this alter ego named Dave. Uh-huh. That's too real though. We can't let them know. Um, just for dirty jokes, basically. Yeah. That's, that's my Dave persona. How can, how can I get away with saying fuck? Ah, Dave, Dave didn't say it.
00:42:13
Speaker
Yeah, it's dumb, but I mean, that's what's expected from Konami now. They just do not like saying Hideo Kojima. So Jeff Keighley will keep saying it more on my thing. Every game show, just in case you guys forgot, leans in the mic. Hideo Kojima, now onto best soundtrack, right?
00:42:43
Speaker
funny, funny, funny meme. I'm now remembering that, um, Kojima and Jordan Peele are going to be doing a thing. Yeah. Uh-huh. That, that game, the other game they showed a little bit of that made no sense to learn from the preview. There's very much a teaser. So, you know, it's a Kojima game. If you can actually derive any meaning from the, uh,
00:43:07
Speaker
from the visuals or the teaser or anything like that. You're like, I think he's he's letting someone else creatively run this game at this point. That would be that would be the fear. Yeah, anyways, for other news stuff that's going on, Dragon's Dogma 2 came out. I was really excited for it. I think I mentioned I was excited for it. I have not bought it. There are reasons for that.
00:43:34
Speaker
I am playing a lot of other games, but also just like Capcom had a bunch of pointless microtransactions in it. It plays really crapily on PC.
00:43:44
Speaker
The people who are having a good time, however, are having a great time. And then Moist Critical specifically had a video where it just never stopped crashing. And there's just so many reasons not to buy at full price. Because it's like a $70 game plus microtransactions. I don't swear. That's the closest thing that makes me want to swear. All right, I shouldn't. I very infrequently swear.
00:44:10
Speaker
It's so dumb. It's so dumb. Seventy dollars plus microtransactions where the microtransactions are just stuff you'll find in the game anyways, like. Yeah, I understand if you want to have like optional cosmetics because you're like, oh, I like playing as whoever I am in this game. I want to like have like a little bonus thing. It's just for me to maybe style on or just be like, oh, the characters looks cool. And I like that. Yeah, sure.
00:44:38
Speaker
But if it's like, hey, we're going to get you to level 10 to start off. And, uh, here's a couple of extra potions, some Apple. Uh-huh. What is this? If you don't want to play the game, then play a different game. Yeah. Because Dragon's Dogma 2, as far as I'm aware, and correct me if I'm wrong, uh, is a very slow burn game. That's like a long RPG. Yeah. Like if you want to go to the other town, you got to walk there.
00:45:07
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of the thing. The like design, the creative design, at least for the first game was a very explicit decision to not have fast travel until you get like this ability to drop very few, very limited number of stones that you can like travel back to. So if you want something to be your fast travel point, then you could, but you have to get there first, drop the stone and then use it. So like very limited.
00:45:35
Speaker
intentionally. Um, and apparently like the, the funny thing here is like, from what I've heard that all of the microtransactions, they're for like meaningless things or almost meaningless things. They're like, don't even impact the game that much. So they just chose to burn all of that goodwill by introducing these microtransactions to make like a quick buck at the beginning. Um,
00:45:59
Speaker
which combined with the technical performance problems has just, the game was mostly negative, I think, for a period of time on Steam. I don't think it is anymore because it's kind of like gone past that. But yeah, I don't really feel the need to play it until it's like half off or something. And it'll be fine.
00:46:19
Speaker
It's also moddable. So I literally saw an article where one of the things was like a character, uh, change their customization, their, their character appearance. You can like pay. That was one of the microtransactions. Um, and then one of the mods is just give you 99 of that item. Right. It's just like, I mean, good that the game can be modded. I'm not saying don't do that. It just highlights how stupid the microtransaction is. Right. Yeah. So anyways.
00:46:50
Speaker
Now, I also am kind of curious about it. At least from watching the gameplay so far and knowing it's a long RPG, I don't think I'm going to jump into it. Yeah, but I am curious to learn more about it, maybe through somebody else's eyes. I know I'll give it a try at some point because the parts that look good look really good, but I just I want it to work on PC. I don't want to buy a game that crashes. I don't want to buy a game at $70 full stop.
00:47:19
Speaker
I would if it's something I absolutely know I would love, but I can just wait. That's the card that I hold is not buying the thing right now. But what if I said no? Right. Let's see what else we had here. Gearbox was sold off. That was owned by Embracer, which is the, I think they're Swedish.
00:47:48
Speaker
They owed a bunch of people for a while. Well, they didn't own people. They owned the companies that had people. I made an assumption. Gearbox got sold off to take two, which you may know from such indie titles as Grand Theft Auto. A little bit mad that they didn't make it takes two. Right. It feels like they should have.
00:48:14
Speaker
$460 million, if I remember correctly, Gearbox was bought by Embracer for like a couple years back for over a billion, if I remember correctly. So massive deficit in that trade, but that's just because the games industry is going crazy right now. And Embracer is like, we're just going to focus on making good games, they say, as they just
00:48:37
Speaker
guillotine their entire development department in the background. Um, good luck to them, I guess. But Twitch streams can't stream your butt anymore. Um, as a green screen. So rest in peace. I will say that that was one of the funnier variations. So like, Hey, you can't do this. They're like, but what if it was game concept and just screen it?
00:49:06
Speaker
It's it's very. I don't know, it's entertaining to read about the back and forth for the whole like sex cells paradigm that Twitch does and does not have going on. Well, they they refuse to like condemn anything too hard, flat out because like this is, you know, generating us a lot of revenue because of course it would. Yes. But they're like, oh, but we need to have certain things in place.
00:49:37
Speaker
And there's just, they keep changing what the line is. And I think also the streamers are like, I can worst case scenario, I get like a one week band, but like I can try and push the meta. Yeah. Yeah. If they're a little bit more extreme than other people, they'll get more eyes, right? So it's. That's why I stream naked. Check me out at Twitch TV.
00:50:02
Speaker
It's, you just rely on like the, the couple hours of not being banned to generate all the revenue to make up for next time that you're banned. Although I do think that if you get banned on Twitch, I could be wrong about this, but I thought I heard somewhere that if you are banned, that your subscriptions automatically will not renew if they would have renewed in the time that you're banned. So it can be dangerous.
00:50:28
Speaker
Because people who just left things on auto-renew, those will actually just fall off if you were a band. Just if the auto-renew would have occurred during that period of your band, but still.
00:50:40
Speaker
Also, the term banned on Twitch like was not like it's so dumb. Any time that I because I kept seeing like, oh, persons banned off Twitch for like a day or a week or something. I'm like, what does this word mean? What do you think this means? We're reporting on people being in time out as adults. Yeah. Yeah. Because like what else can we can stop you from actively generating revenue? But we're not going to kick you from the platform. We can't actually legally just cut into your funds unless they had some
00:51:10
Speaker
policy in place or something that was in a contract there. Yeah.
00:51:17
Speaker
But I mean, they could use a word other than banned is the argument I'm trying to make like pro prohibition. That's wrong. No probation or something like that. Right. There is there are terms other than banned that I feel like is more accurate because if someone is banned for an hour, I'm like, that doesn't usually say I'm banned from a game. Yes. And I cannot play that game. I'll be back tomorrow. Yeah. Yeah. Doesn't work anywhere else. But
00:51:48
Speaker
Let's see, a couple rapid fire things. V Rising is going to have a Castlevania crossover, which is kind of cool. Kind of cool, maybe, but cool at the very least. I still haven't really gone back and played it. Hopefully it's good, but. I assume they've made it better from when it launched initially. Yeah. I also have not played it, but I assume it has been patched. Maybe Simon Belmont will make it even better. Who's to say?
00:52:17
Speaker
Um, there's a bunch of information. This is kind of just a stub that like, do your own research is the followup for this, I guess. But there's a lot more information out about Judas. Judas recently, Ken Levine's latest project. So this is kind of his, his thing after Bioshock. And I've seen some stills. I don't know if there's, there's full footage or not, but like,
00:52:38
Speaker
It looks really, really bio shock. Oh, it's when we watched the trailer at one of Jeff Keeley's things. Yeah. It sounds like bio shock in space. He's like, I do not have the IP for bio shock. Judas. But hopefully we'll have to figure out what they're called because it's not going to be vigorous or plasmids.
00:53:07
Speaker
Interesting. Betrayal's too long a word, but it could be like commandments or tenants or something like that. Something difficult sounding. Anytime you want a new superpower, you have to swear a new oath. You're just like a super multi-class paladin or something. I'm going to use my shekel attack. Oh, no.
00:53:30
Speaker
But yeah, hopefully we get some more information on that game and we can come back and cover it because I do want that to be good, right? It feels like Bioshock Infinite being the last Bioshock is...
00:53:42
Speaker
Sad. But then you see how many Lighthouses there were? There were so many Lighthouses. They could have had an MMO. It could have been a roguelike. Oh my god please though. Where you just play as a different man in a different lighthouse and then after you die you come back but this guy's blind. He's color blind or he's fat or something like that.
00:54:06
Speaker
Or both. This booker is a wizard. That one's a fighter. This one starts with a little bit more money. But your lighthouse meta progression between runs is really what it's about.
00:54:28
Speaker
so dumb. I would like it to do decently well, because I've missed playing something like Bioshock. Yeah, I like having like a single player FPS from like, Oh, I'm actually following the story and giving a shit about it. And it's, it has fun powers. And I don't know, I just that's something that when I was getting into gaming, Bioshock one really hit me like a
00:54:54
Speaker
Yo, this is hitting different than some of the other games I played. Yeah, right. And it stuck with me. So I would like more of that feeling. Yeah. Bioshock was one of our very early episodes because it was like, obviously, we're going to have an episode on Bioshock. You can hear us still talking between two paper cups in a string. Yeah. Yeah. No, it was pretty rough back. I'm not saying go back and listen to those episodes. Those are too far ago. Too far gone.
00:55:24
Speaker
We'll remaster them, that's what we'll start to do. We'll just go back and rerecord the Payday one and stuff. For anybody who subscribed to the Patreon, you'll be getting that for free, obviously. Uh-huh, naturally, yeah. At a certain tier, right. Oh yeah, not for the first two tiers. I'm trying to think of what the tier name for the highest tier would be for fans of the podcast.
00:55:51
Speaker
There's this show. The friend of the show is perfect, actually. Yeah. Or special guest or something like that. Yeah. It would be funny if someone, if you pay $1,000, we'll let you on the episode. Yeah. Uh-huh. That's our new business model. That would be pretty good.
Impact of Rooster Teeth's Closure
00:56:08
Speaker
I did want to ask, um, cause I don't think we even talked about this off podcast, but how do you feel about the Rooster Chief closure? Yeah. I mean, I was never super massive.
00:56:21
Speaker
or super giant games, but like I was never super huge fan of Rooster Chief stuff. I didn't like follow it a lot, but like they were really known for I think achievement hunters and obviously red versus blue. Ruby. Ruby. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. Actually. Yeah. I forgot about Ruby somehow. Fun house. They had a lot of sub things. Yeah. Right. Like they were, they were, they were big. They were diversified. They were almost like,
00:56:50
Speaker
I will say almost like machinima. Machinima has so much negative connotation associated with it. Maybe Rooster Teeth 2 did too at the end of it. In the beginning, Red versus Blue and Machinima were paired up together. Uh-huh. Initially. But Machinima was very much this like, hey, we're going to give you a really bad deal, but we're going to give you some money. You want to make videos, right? And then they just grabbed everything. Um,
00:57:18
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, it's kind of sad, I guess, to think of all of that closing, but I don't know. It's, I don't have a huge attachment to him. What about yourself? Um, I definitely had more of an attachment. I mean, obviously I don't.
00:57:37
Speaker
follow one of these people. I don't know them personally, but like I did grow up with Red versus Blue. I even bought a t-shirt of it. I once messaged the voice of Caboose on Able Instant Messenger because somehow that information was public. I think he said hi, and that was it. Yeah. Hi, and then blocked it. Probably, yeah. He's like, who the fuck is this?
00:58:03
Speaker
But by the way, that guy's apparently a piece of shit. Yeah. Joel Heyman, if you ever want to look him up. Apparently he has some very interesting opinions about things.
00:58:13
Speaker
But yeah, like I've definitely watched some stuff over the years like Ruby. I've seen maybe some shorts from some other things like Funhaus on YouTube here and there. But I think mainly it just sucks because if that's been your passion project or even if you joined later because you grew up with Rooster Teeth, you're like, oh, I really want to make stuff with them. That would be so cool. It's like my dream job.
00:58:36
Speaker
And then it's just now not a thing. Yes. Right. Obviously, I do see a lot of these people who are talented and can do things and make content are going to go on to other things in a different avenue, whether it's with a new company, whether it's solo. But of course, just having that taken from you and shaken up sucks. Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully they can find their footing.
00:59:04
Speaker
Um, they can be guests on our podcast. That's, that's, um, they can get their information out there. If, if you're a friend of the show and you pay a thousand dollars, yeah, send it in. Um, there's a couple of things I wanted to mention here because they're, they are important. We talked about Larian. Um, we did get official confirmation.
00:59:25
Speaker
that they both had started working on some content to follow up on Baldur's Gate 3 and then just basically realized that they didn't want to.
00:59:35
Speaker
And so they stopped and they're just like, let's just make a different game. Let's just make something that like is ours and has a system that we designed. And that just sounds more fun. Let's do that. And they could do that because they're not beholden to, you know, any, you know, publisher above them. So many copyright stuff from. Yeah. I know that Wizards of the coast would absolutely love for them to continue to churn out like Baldur's Gate stuff, but like they don't own them.
01:00:05
Speaker
And I saw, I saw the comments somewhere and I agree with it wholeheartedly, but like.
01:00:11
Speaker
preemptive, I'm so sorry to whoever else carries on the Baldur's Gate franchise. Yeah, those are big shoes to fill. Yes. Right. Well, I do not think it's possible for any other company or team to do what Larian does. Can't think of it. I think you definitely have to take it in a different avenue. But even if you did make, let's say,
01:00:40
Speaker
a first person spell casting game in the world of D&D following some of these same iconic characters from the Sword Coast that you know. Is it the Sword Coast? Yeah, you got it. I'm glad my research has been up. But you're going to basically be comparing what you now know of these characters from what Larian did compared to however they represented in this new game.
01:01:11
Speaker
and stuff going forward. It's really tough. It's really tough, right? Larian has not delivered a mess that would, you know, encourage people to start doubting them.
01:01:23
Speaker
Ah, divinity original 7-1. Didn't even play it. I played it for like two minutes. It wasn't as good as two. It wasn't as good as two. That's fair. That's fair. But for the dedicated listener, I remember I think in our Baldur's Gate episode, I was talking about some of the D&D stuff that Larian just completely changed. They're just like, hey,
01:01:45
Speaker
We're just not going to follow the rules for this mechanic. Like haste is so much better and we let you rest so much more. And there's all this stuff that just makes it a more fun game as like a video game. Um, and in some ways I honestly think it would improve the tabletop too, but, um, they just focus on having fun first. And at the end of the day, I was like,
01:02:09
Speaker
Yeah. I'm sure that if they may came up with their own ideas for like a video game based one, just like they did for divinity too. It's just going to be better. Right. So continuing to work in Baldur's gate is just, they have all of these restrictions and all of these restraints within the system. And they're like, we could go back to like electric blood. Why aren't we doing that? You know, electric bloodness.
01:02:36
Speaker
Yeah, it's, I think in a similar way to FromSoft, they don't want to be stifled by doing the exact same thing all the time. Yeah. I mean, obviously, Elder Ring shares a lot of Dark Souls DNA, as do all their games, because they found some stuff that works and certain design principles will carry over. Yeah. But they're not like, oh, we're going to do Dark Souls 10 now. Yeah.
01:03:04
Speaker
They did Armored Core to vary it up a little bit. Although apparently this isn't one of the news things, but I think it was the guy that made the co-op mod for Elden Ring is also making the co-op mod for Armored Core. Team was co-op? Yeah, it was up to six players, which is insane. We can get you past that mod.
01:03:31
Speaker
Yeah, I guess if we double team a boss, you can probably get through them in an armored core if that would do it. Um, might have to take you up on that offer, but yeah, I heard the nerf that the two weapons I was abusing, so I don't know if that'd be possible. The mid range shotguns and something else. Um,
01:03:51
Speaker
Yeah. Uh, best of luck to Larian. I think, I actually think it's a great move. Um, Baldur's gate three is a very complete game. It does not need DLC. Um, so yeah. Pop off, I think is what they would say. Uh, yeah, we are pretty much at time. If you want to pop up in our Facebook comments section.
01:04:20
Speaker
There were a couple I wanted to mention just very briefly. I'll say these ones briefly. So lots of good reasons to continue to distrust Blizzard. Continue to do so if you want. Overwatch 2 starts, they're starting a different policy for releasing new heroes where they're not going to be attached to the battle pass. You just get them. So that's really nice. They're going to do that for the existing heroes as well.
01:04:46
Speaker
I think that this is probably an act of desperation, but we will see. And it's way better than not being able to access a hero in their overpowered form until you're halfway through the battle pass. That's absurd. I don't know how they ever thought that was a good idea. So we'll see what happens.
01:05:08
Speaker
That's the mandatory Overwatch update. And yeah, hopefully Tribes 3 is good. That's my other thing. That's a personal hope.
01:05:19
Speaker
I downloaded it. I hit the, did you actually check it out? I went, I hit the apply for like alpha access button, um, which immediately caused a pop-up of, uh, you have been like, you have been admitted into the alpha and I was like, okay, this doesn't seem like much of a gate, but
01:05:42
Speaker
I guess I'm just the barrier entry. You have to express interest. That was literally. I think I think that was literally it. But unfortunately, when I went to play it, it was down. I think they only bring it up to like do certain tests and stuff like that. And I'm not subscribed to any sort of notification of when those tests are. So the game has just been installed. I haven't done anything with it, but tribes is a freaking love tribes. So I hope it's good, but we'll see.
01:06:13
Speaker
And yeah, Destiny 2 skimmers are fun. There you go. That is the news. You caught up. That's the entirety of March. Yeah, that's every single thing from March. That's all of it. But if you would like to be
01:06:31
Speaker
part of our show, and you want to come in, be a guest, one time donation, $1,000, reach out, soapstonepodcastgml.com, or join the discussion on Facebook, where we will spend the $1,000 on advertising, facebook.com slash soapstonepodcast. And as always, we'll see you in the next one. Have a good mood.
01:07:22
Speaker
you