Rade: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Player Two Podcast. I'm your co host, Rade Stojsavljevic

Dave Leary: And I'm your co-host Dave Leary. Rade it's good to see you. I I know you're freshly back from some indie conferences and I think we're gonna talk about that in the discussion today.

Rade: Yeah, there was right before PAX there's a conference up in Seattle called Slice. It's it's focused on independent creators. it's all like kind of local stuff. so that was pretty neat. so it was a one day conference and I I popped over there and checked that out. All right, we got news first.

Dave Leary: But we got news first, right? News to get into.

Rade: Yeah, so man, this first one is infuriating. So BitReactor builds Star Wars game, best reviewed Star Wars game in the past twenty two years. Eighty percent of the staff is laid off i like right at launch. Like God, furlought, yeah, sure.

Dave Leary: Yeah, or or furloughed at least, right? unclear if they were laid off, but furloughed makes it a hard to come back when you bring things to a grinding halt.

Rade: It's man, like that is just galling. It just sucks.

Dave Leary: It's galling though. you know, there are rumors, and and one does not know how much credence to put behind this stuff, but there are rumors that the studio had some internal troubles as well. There are some lawsuits flying around related to to founders maybe going after each other a little bit. So there might be more to this story than the press really has got a handle on yet. But that said, I mean, it it what a terrible signal and what a common trend that we are seeing these days to have studios just release a game, whether popular or acclaimed or not, and then immediately lay off a bunch of staff. Terrible stuff.

Rade: Yeah, so you know, a couple things on this one. I think your point about like we don't have all the info on this. We given that there's lawsuits involved. Like this will come to light. It always does. And over the the coming weeks, we'll we'll learn more about what's going on on this. like first reaction is this just sucks for all of the devs involved. You know, you put something out, it's really well reviewed, seems to be performing well, and your reward, you're laid off. So is that just shitty business practices or just the fact that we have the wrong model on how we're building games and like it maybe a little bit of both, but man, it sure doesn't look good, doesn't feel good.

Dave Leary: Yeah, may maybe a little bit of both and and we have talked about the model for building games a bunch on this podcast, where we're gonna talk about it some more in the weeks ahead, I'm sure. But you know, on paper at least Star Wars crossed with XCOM feels like a fantastic idea at its core. And certainly they were staffed with some veteran developers who understood how to build that kind of game and and as you say, the game has been fairly well reviewed, though there were a few technical issues at launch. I I don't understand it, but again I don't think we know all the details, so I I'm willing to kinda wait this one out before I pass too much judgment on on anyone involved.

Rade: Yeah, fair enough. other big news. We're just coming back from Gamescom, the big show in in Europe. I didn't go this year. I've been multiple times in the past. It's really interesting. This is for those of you that have never been, this is a show that that blends some industry stuff at the beginning and then is just opened up to all the fans later in the week. And it's just it it is huge. It reminds me in terms of scale of what E3 used to be at its peak, just in terms of number of people. never forget one time I'm standing there with a developer of mine, a friend of mine, and we're about to walk in, and I see a bunch of these people in black military-looking uniforms, and I'm like, shit, like like I thought they were like SS troopers or something from Nazi Germany for a second, and then I did a double take. No, it's the guys cosplaying in black imperial officer uniforms, which were stylized. after SS and Nazi uniforms and so you're like this weird combination of stuff it like freaked me out for a second and then like I saw they were just really cosplaying so

Dave Leary: Yeah, I've I've not actually been to Gamescom. It's an awful long trip, but the the scuttle butt has always been that that is the place to be now. It it is, as you say, what E3 used to be back in the day. What what have you heard out of this year's Gamescom that that got you excited? I I think for me the the Warhammer Total War Warhammer 40K is is still kind of on everyone's radar and I'm super excited about that. I feel like that's gonna be pretty big.

Rade: So honestly, not much out of this one for me that's that's news or new and exciting. And that like that's not a good thing. Like you usually want something to pop or at least a couple things to pop out of the show. I mean, nothing particularly bad. you know, not much with GTA six, but like, did they really need to be there? No. Like they're not gonna do hands on at the show, so why why show up? They had their big reveal already. Anyone who wants that's gonna buy it. I don't I don't think that was worth them going. Didn't see a presence from many of the big players there. would have been nice to see some surprise announcements, at least one or two. And I just I didn't see that. And like I don't think that's a good thing.

Dave Leary: Yeah, and I think I think maybe one thing for us to talk about sometime is whether that that old model of surprise announcement even makes a whole lot of sense anymore. stuff gets leaked, early access is a thing now. I I I don't know that that's a valid marketing strategy for games anymore. And maybe that's what the the big publishers are thinking nowadays, they'd rather spend their money elsewhere.

Rade: Yeah, and it it it didn't necessarily have to be a surprise announcement. It just has to be some piece of news that I wasn't expecting. so I don't I don't think that's good. What was encouraging was the folks that I I know that went said there's a lot of focus on indie titles there and tools and business to business kind of collaboration things to help kind of a la carte publish. get support for your game if you're putting it out there, which I think is a net good thing for all the reasons we've talked about about how the publishing model is evolving and the industry is moving forward. And there was it's nice to see that there. And a lot of people are dipping their toes into that. it's just we're not going to see the fruits from that for at least another year.

Dave Leary: Yeah, though as you say, that is great to hear, you know, the the indies that become the runaway hits in the next couple of years are going to be the things that will be the tent pole big franchises ten years from now. So I'm I'm glad the seeds are being laid for hopefully a more fertile crop of games down the line.

Rade: Yeah, the but the only I think the takeaway story for the industry folks that were there were some laptops from devs were stolen.

Dave Leary: I did hear about that. That that's that's kind of not ideal and certainly scary if

Rade: No, it's not.

Dave Leary: you're a dev.

Rade: Well, I mean, there was some victim blaming going on, a little bit. Like this has happened at shows before. Like I remember back when CES was a thing, ages ago, when they we used to do it in Las Vegas and Chicago, there was one of the big scandals there was somebody stole something from an SGI computer that they were demoing Donkey Kong Country on, like like back when that came out on N sixty four. So like it sucks. I don't know, man, like with with hardware prices what it is, like the you know, computers are gold now. So you gotta be careful.

Dave Leary: Yeah, sucks that it also may be a concern if you have a a recent build of a product that is still under wraps on your laptop. you know, not just the hardware getting stolen, but potentially data that you brought to the show getting stolen as well would be a concern of

Rade: Yeah.

Dave Leary: I would have.

Rade: Yeah. So, you know, we'll we'll see what that does going forward, but that that's just unfortunate. all right, couple more bits of news, but I think those those get right into our our our topic of the week. so I think I'll save them for that unless you have anything else.

Dave Leary: Nope, I'm good. Roll on. Let's

Rade: All right.

Dave Leary: get into it.

Rade: So if you haven't heard of this term before, there's there's one that's an actual term called n enshittification. And what enshittification is, is a systematic decline in quality of platforms or services over time driven by profit motives and resulting in a degraded user experience. I'm I'm reading that from a definition here. And

Dave Leary: And that is an excellent, excellent definition, I will just say.

Rade: And it's it's a fun word, right? between Sony and Microsoft right now, they seem to be trying to compete with one another at who is best at end shittification. And I'll give you two examples of this. So Microsoft announced new Game Pass cloud gaming service pricing, and it's limiting by hour. Right. So you're top tier of that. You've got 15 hours of cloud service play with with Game Pass. And man, if that doesn't suck, like I don't know what does. But not to be outdone, Sony still reeling in the news from ending physical disc production, which we've talked about before. And I understand the reasons why they're doing that. And I actually I get it. I don't I don't buy physical media. Decided to define in a lawsuit. That no reasonable person has an expectation of ownership when they buy a digital game. And the memes are floating. I shared one with you, with the the guy, Michael Douglas from Falling Down. And he's basically saying, No, I I I I want to own the game. The one I don't want to rent it. I want to buy it when I pressed the buy button to get the game. But they're they're countering that with the the licensing. And I get where they're coming from too. So I understand both of the business reasons why these things were happening, but they both to me demonstrate a clear and just unbelievable misunderstanding of their customer and what's going to set them off.

Dave Leary: I I could not agree more. It and shittification is an excellent term for what is happening here. I will I will cut Microsoft a small break on this because I'm not sure how many people are actually using cloud-based gaming. I'm sure I'm sure there's some numbers out there on that. But, you know, if they're going to figure out a way to save money on Game Pass, maybe that's a way that is fairly low impact in terms of how the customers actually engage with Game Pass. But that said. It's just taking value out of an existing product and and it certainly doesn't look good from a PR perspective. I, as I'm sure you do, read a lot of LinkedIn opinion pieces about how awesome Asha Sharma is doing and what a fantastic job as CEO is being done now. I'm not sure I can agree with that. I I don't understand this direction. And the Sony thing is just not reading the room at all. You don't release something like the death of physical media out into the the discussion sphere and then immediately double down on it week after week with this kind of well no no consumers really don't want what they say they want. The customer outrage is not really there. I'm going to cover my ears and cover my eyes and pretend I never heard or saw anything about this. And that that's what I think is going on.

Rade: Yeah, and and meanwhile, Nintendo's just sitting there doing their own thing and and I, you know, maybe they're looking at this and just feeling and just let like letting them self-destruct. But like here's kind of getting behind the decisions on on why these things would happen and then why I think it's a remarkably stupid thing. So let's start with Microsoft, right? So the fundamental problem with the business model of cloud services at a fixed monthly price is that the more somebody uses your service because they love your service. The more they cost you and the less money you make on that. And that's generally the opposite of what you want for most business models. Like this, you know, you see the all you could eat buffets, where they, you know, they they they're like kicking people out for eating too much food and everything, and you're like, great, you saved a dollar and now you've got a bad story going out, you know, with your whole thing that you're cheap or you're reducing quality or whatever. If you look at if you're a gamer, You know that when you really, really get into a game, you lose track of time. And it's sort of a magical thing that happens with a very good game. And you're like, wow, I spent three hours playing that. It felt like 10 minutes because you're you're in a flow state. You really, really engage that. The last thing you want to start thinking about is, man, how much is this costing me? It just ruins the whole experience. And we've seen this back when. Text messages used to not be unlimited. We're both old enough to remember that. And parents, the you know, their teen would get hooked in it. And then they're like, I have a $2,000 phone bill. What the hell is this? Or, you know, just imagining in your head what would happen if Netflix said, Hey, you get to watch 15 hours of shows or movies a month with your subscription. And after that, you got to buy more hours. Like people would just cancel services left and right. And I get that it's maybe costing them a little bit more than they were hoping for in their business model for these premium consumers. But then just up the unlimited tier price a few bucks, maybe take a loss on that one, two percent of players that are super engaged and make it up elsewhere. It is like is just not worth the bad PR for this.

Dave Leary: Yeah, agreed. And I I would like to subscribe to your newsletter and think perhaps you should be in charge of of Microsoft strategy. I I'll make one more comment about the cloud gaming side of it, and and that's that you and I have speculated a couple times that maybe one of these consoles in a world of increasingly ridiculous hardware prices is going to move more to that model rather than away from it. And one could read this Microsoft kind of test. testing out of what prices the market will bear for cloud gaming as either a signal that they're not thinking about that and and are just gonna try to price those people out of the market, or they are actually seeing what the market will bear and that may be the future for them as a pay by the minute gaming model.

Rade: Yeah, and and I think that like you could look at it and be your clever tech PM or or whatever, but if you go down that path, you have no idea what your customer wants and how badly that is going to fail. It will be an absolute disaster. There's no pricing model where that is going to work and be accepted and and and have you win the console wars. Like you could give away the console for free and charge like that and it is gonna die. it is a terrible, terrible idea, and it just demonstrates

Dave Leary: And why do you feel that way? Is it mostly I mean, you've talked about this before, but just to refresh people, I think it's mostly because you think that that somewhere along the line of the internet tubes between you and the cloud, some something's gonna fail on the regular and the service is just really not gonna be as reliable as it needs to be, right?

Rade: Well, I mean, the general problem with cloud gaming services is you have a l you still have a last mile problem, right? So if you're too far away from the data center, your latency increases and there's no real way to fix that. That's a physics problem. So you know, if you're if you're rural, you're kind of screwed because like it's just not cost effective to put a a a server rack, you know, with within a proximity of somebody, you know, that that's out in the middle of nowhere. So you lose anywhere. depending on how many data centers you have from twenty to forty percent of your customer base. some games are more latency tolerant than others. So like that number is is fungible, but that's generally the ballpark. So right there you're now you have a smaller audience. Then you have the problem of connection reliability. and you know while broadband is is much better now than it was five or 10 years ago, you still have an issue with with data caps, peak usage. so you imagine you know just a hypothetical situation. We're in cloud gaming only GTA territory. GTA six comes out, people are taking days off of work to play it, like we're seeing going around all over on social media. And you know, you've got a bandwidth connection that says you got a gigabit. You don't really have a gigabit. You have a gigabit if not everyone is using theirs at the same time. Now, if their usage goes up, couple that with work from home, streaming television and everything. You've oversubscribed your data service. You're gonna get a degraded service. Your latency potentially could go up. Your bandwidth may be enough to stream it, may not. You're gonna have a shit gameplay experience. Like you're pretty unhappy.

Dave Leary: Certainly lines up to a lot of potential points of failure and I I I think that's fundamentally your point.

Rade: Yeah.

Dave Leary: Yeah.

Rade: And then you know, the more you use it, the more you pay. On the Sony side of things, so there's been this debate about do you own the game that you've got or not? And Sony's argument is well, nobody would expect that they actually own God of War when they buy it. They didn't pay to develop it. They they didn't do all that. And like, yeah, okay. Technically that's true. I don't think any reasonable person expects that. What they expect is I bought the game from you because it said buy. You sold it to me. You didn't rent it. I want to play it whenever I want, and you can't take it away from me because I paid you. You gave me the game and now I could play it. Doesn't mean I own the art and I could start selling gotta war t-shirts or whatever. Like I don't expect that I've got ownership for that. And I don't think any reasonable person does. But I do expect that you're never going to take it away from me. And I could play it whenever I want. You're already restricting me from selling it. Or lending it to somebody else. I have no way to do that. And for the most part, I think people are okay with that. Like you you do see some complaints about that, and I get that, but that's a pretty small minority. But the fundamental concern is that when I buy the digital good, if your argument is, well, you don't actually own it, we could take it away at any time, which is what they're saying in this case that they're making. I'm not buying it then. Like I'm effectively renting it. And people are not okay with that. And Unless there's some malicious intent to revoke licenses at some point, you could have avoided all of this problem with the transition from physical to digital to just say, you know what, we're giving you a lifetime license to play this game. Make that really clear in whatever legal ease you want. And I think that that mollifies your most vocal and angry customers. But they didn't, they chose not to do that. And I cannot understand why.

Dave Leary: Yeah, and I I think what is weird to me about it is this is just a pure case of them stepping in it, right? I I I mean, I think about their situation and what they're what they're really presenting, and it's not fundamentally any different from what Steam and Valve are doing. When you have Steam and you have a bunch of games on Steam, you if essentially don't don't really own the games. If Valve won under tomorrow, you would lose access to those titles. But people trust Valve. They also trust that Valve's gonna be around. They trust that Steam's gonna be around. They don't think about it because when a game gets delisted for one reason or another on Steam, if you've already bought it, you still own it. You can still download it. You just can't new new players just can't buy it. So I I think there's some faith and trust in Valve and Steam there that that maybe Sony doesn't have. And if they did have it, they certainly just squandered a lot of it by saying, Well, you know, let me remind you guys that you don't really own any of this stuff. And We don't expect that you really care about owning this stuff at all. Like, why rub ru why rub the faces of the consumers in it? Makes no sense to me at all.

Rade: Well, just to to to double click into that a little bit more, if my internet service goes down, which happens here when I have a power outage, and I'm on backup power because we have a a generator here, I could still play my Steam games. I can't do that.

Dave Leary: Sure can and and they've gotten more friendly about that lately, right? Their offline mode used to require a login, but now now you can pretty much just do it all the time. So

Rade: I can't do that with online DRM that Sony

Dave Leary: That's right.

Rade: is doing with a lot of these titles. so that's not great.

Dave Leary: So it so it is even more fundamentally different than I was suggesting. I was kind of drawing an equivalence there and saying that the difference was really in the messaging, but Sony's actually pushing for something a little more extreme here, aren't they?

Rade: Yeah, and it it just seems it's tone deaf and it's not reading the room. And it kind of ties into the next part of this that I experienced at this conference. There were a bunch of talks, and I went to some of them, and in in generally, like, you know, I I try to approach these like look, you know, this is a topic I'm I consider myself an expert in, but I I kind of want to see what someone else's opinion is on that because there's always something to learn. So I sat in a couple from These folks that were either at platforms like Microsoft or major publishers. And I was listening to the advice that I gave that they were giving. And it wasn't bad advice per se, but it was advice for a a gaming industry that doesn't exist anymore. It's just completely not understanding the state of the industry and the state of the market. And when you couple that with some other discussions I've had with execs at some major companies over the past couple of months. I don't think at a lot of these places they understand the state of the the the industry. Like they sure they could they're reading the news and they're seeing what's going on. And maybe some of them are feeling it. But when your back catalog is, I mean, we we know like people are by making most of their or their purchases or most of the money is coming from existing or legacy titles. Something like two thirds or three quarters is right in that area. And so if you have this back catalog and you're making your money at all of this. And you're not launching a lot of new titles. Do you really understand how messed up everything is and why new games aren't working and and where customers are going? And like, are are you is your data obscured because over the years you've offshored production to to lower your cost, but you've reached the point where you can't do that anymore? You've relied on on government subsidies like the Canadian Media Fund or some of these other places to help. Lower your development costs, but those are starting to dry up. Like, do you just not fully grok what's going on in the in the world? And I think that's absolutely happening.

Dave Leary: Yeah, I I mean, I believe you are correct based on what I am seeing and and just on my interactions with with various studios in the the business now, you know, a lot of people are still in that headspace of what worked in my playbook before is gonna work in twenty twenty six. And, you know, if you have a successful stable of legacy titles, that's an understandable trap that you might fall into. but E even in the case where you have a great set of legacy titles, there's all kinds of headwinds against you right now. not the least of which may be that it's entirely possible that in the various series of layoffs you've done over the years, you've lost some institutional knowledge. So even if your old playbook did work, which it probably doesn't, you may not have the people around anymore who know how to execute that playbook. And you're just kind of walking through a rote series of very straightforward things that are are are really kind of obvious prerequisites now rather than you know, things that are more proactive and will help you stand out. I I think I don't know if you want to talk about it, but I think you had an excellent example on a slide from one from the conference of something that is really just kind of a prerequisite, basic prerequisite, not a real recipe for success.

Rade: Yeah, I don't I don't want to call this person out because I could tell that that they were a little bit inexperienced in their speaking and they weren't a senior person, but they were basically talking about like, you know, merchandising your app in a digital front and like the advice was like, Yeah, okay. Like some of the stuff is obvious. Maybe it's not obvious to everyone, but like even if you did all that, you you're still likely to fail. And I that was completely glossed over. so I think that's part of the problem. But I don't know. I think if you generally look at it, you look at all these publishers, the the bigger ones, for the most part, like let's take Microsoft, for example. Their marquee franchises are all 20 plus years old. Like when was the last new franchise that that was launched over there? I mean, Warcraft, Diablo, old, Fallout, old, still relevant though. You know, they got a TV show and everything. Halo, old. like There's nothing new going on in there. And to your point, are any of the original people that worked on those still there? For the most part, no. I mean, they just gutted all of the core engine people and the the anyone from original id. There's nobody there for that. And like I've personally seen this with franchises that I worked on and seen other people take them up. They've gone in directions and crossed over red lines that is that we define that we would never cross over. So I'll mention one particular RTS franchise that I worked on where we had a very hard delineation between land and and water units. And we wanted them separated. We didn't want them crossing over with very, very, very rare exceptions. and that was an intentional design choice to kind of force you on how you would segment the map. And all new team comes in, and next thing you know, there's fucking battleships with. tank treads on them driving around on the ground. You're like, what the hell is this? Why would you ever do this? You've completely broken like core rules of the game. This isn't even the same thing anymore. And you see this kind of stuff with these long franchises that churn out all the subject matter experts that were there.

Dave Leary: Yeah, you lose it's it's what I have always talked about as institutional knowledge, right? I I think that's where these layoffs have often been short sighted. I I I'm really kind of interested though. I mean, I I think you're right. I think the old concepts aren't working, the old techniques aren't working, but I don't think anyone really knows yet what does work. And and I you may have a recipe that you'd like to float here of what you think does work, but I think that's a really much longer conversation because I I am hopeful there are multiple things that will work. It's just the old systems maybe don't don't work as well anymore.

Rade: I'm not going to sit here and say that there is a recipe that works. there are multiple recipes that that that can work. What I will say is what we did before, even just a few years ago, does not work anymore. And I I think part of the problem with GTA six coming out is it is going to be running effectively that old playbook, and it will work. It will work well. It will mask a lot of this learning. And I think it will probably be the last game that could possibly work that well using that playbook.

Dave Leary: I guess I'll I guess I'll present this argument to you and see what you think about it. I I maybe don't think this situation is quite as dire as as you do just because I feel like that's always been the case for the game industry. If I think back to in our youth, our misspent youth, Rade, of the dawn of the game industry in the nineteen eighties, I mean the way you'd market a game, a big game, might be a T V commercial or getting on the cover of computer gaming world or some one of the print magazines that existed at those that time. Those paths to success all went away somewhere along the way and they were replaced with different stuff. You know, we saw the rise of sites like IGN and then we saw, you know, heavy community involvement in games where we're getting social media influencers to pump your game up and getting a YouTuber on your game was was the way to go. getting presents and wish lists on Steam was the way to go. We've constantly seen a cycle of ways to get your game surfaced in in front of people that's changed over the years. And maybe we're just going through another change like that and people haven't quite figured out what the new model is.

Rade: I don't think so. I I think those were all incremental learnings that were built off of one another, you know, as as you know, we moved from traditional marketing to performance marketing to influencer-based marketing, like all those were kind of evolutions of the same type of thing. And I think the fundamental difference now is like that is still shifting on on what works effective. And it there is no one. thing that works for every game there. It really does depend on your individual game and and your ability. But what's true is you have to solve for that. You have to solve for how much game you could build and expect a reasonable return on your investment. So like we've been building too big of games in general for a long time. And I think you know where there might have been room for twenty or thirty triple A games a year that can make a return on investment, that number is shrunk. I don't know what the right number is now, but it kind of feels like two or three at best. So you got that problem. And then you have this what I would call when we were talking about in the earlier segment is this sort of distancing between not just executive leadership, but a lot of leadership and I think where their consumers are at, and they're not meeting and they're not showing that that gap is closing. And the people that are closing that gap are the folks that are coming in. and building smaller indie titles that are are literally the customer of the game is building the game for the customers that are like them. And maybe the audience isn't as big, but man, they sure know that player pretty darn well.

Dave Leary: Yeah. And and that's why I think we have seen indie games rise and be successful is because they're they're willing and able with the budgets they work with to niche down and find find the few hundred other people or a few thousand other people that are just like them that want to play exactly the game they built. And and that that's always been the superpower of indie studios. And and I I don't think that's changing anytime soon.

Rade: No, and and I think there was always this thing that existed in the games industry. And I've been on Triple A and I've been on on the indie side, but I've seen sort of this arrogance happen in AAA, even from to down to double A, but certainly to indie about how like we're professionals, you're not, we know this, you don't, you should learn from us, kind of crap. That I I I is just really, really unhealthy. Like, you know, you gotta be humble. going into this because at the end of the day, we're here to entertain people. And if we're not connecting with our customers and entertaining them, we're going to fail. And we should fail if we don't do that.

Dave Leary: Well well said, as always. And you know, it's kind of another bleak week for the discussion, but hopefully the takeaway that if anyone's listening to this who actually works on games, I I think the takeaway is probably, Hey, really look at what you're doing and think about whether what you're doing is is antique antiquated and now in the current world that we live in.

Rade: Yeah, and in and just to give another insider analogy to this, so back when E3 was this thing, there was the the the main hall up top where you would kind of have all like your big, big stuff. You know, EA was there, Westwood, Blizzard, Sony, Microsoft, all of them were up there. But then down below in this kind of basement area was this area called Kentia Hall. And that's where all the if you were an indie or a smaller publisher or developer or you had this wacky accessory or something, you would go in there. And it basically we were putting these people in the dungeon at at at E3. And it was it was not the best space, but it was looked down upon by a bunch of the triple A people who had like these really flashy loud booths, and and the ones down below were like. You know, literally some pipes with some canvas and somebody with a folding table, you know, showing their wares down there. I know myself and several of the other folks from Westwood would always go down there and walk it and check it out because you would see some really cool, interesting things, it in that space. And you would get something, you'd always come up with some sort of takeaway. You're like, wow, like that surprised me. I hadn't thought about that. That was really novel. And you would take some lessons from something like that. And I think it's we need the equivalent of that at the leadership level of of AAA and and and and some of these publishers to really kind of look down and realize I think the way forward is gonna be from folks that are not coming from that space. Doesn't mean that the the the big guys are gonna lose out, but like they if they want to do anything new and learn, like they're not gonna. figure it out without looking at everyone else.

Dave Leary: Absolutely. I I knew as soon as you started that story, I knew you were gonna reference Kentia Hall. And I'm pretty

Rade: Ha ha.

Dave Leary: sure you and I have been to the same some of the same E threes and walked through the same Kentia Hall exhibits and and I can definitely say that I have seen some of the most interesting things I ever saw at E three in that hall. So your point is well taken.

Rade: Yeah, it's look, just to be fair, it's not all roses. there were some things in there like, well, that is like one of the worst ideas I've ever seen. I don't know how you went that far, why you did that. But like, look, that's what happens when you take risks, and that's fine.

Dave Leary: Well, you know, Rade, Kentia Hall was like a box of chocolates. You never knew what you were gonna get.

Rade: All right, Forrest. Speaking of which, what's the box of chocolate that you're gonna pull out one game of the week from this week?

Dave Leary: boy, do you do I have a treat for you this week? Because we were just talking about niching down. And you know, last week I feared that you might have gone a little too mainstream with your pick. So I I've dug all the way deep, deep down into the the the real hardcore indie space now. and I'm gonna talk really quickly about a a game that started life as a traditional roguelike in 1992 and has been in continual development since then, making it Possibly the record holder for the game that's been the longest in development of any game I'm aware of. it had a Steam release in 2016, and the name of the game is Unreal World. the updates are fairly infrequent. I say continuous development, but they don't update all the time. over the years, what started out life as a traditional roguelike transformed itself into a very hardcore and extremely realistic. survival game based loosely on Finnish folklore. there are various different starts that the player can have in the game, but typically you'll begin your adventures somewhere in the wilderness in spring with the ice and snow melting around you. You'll spend the first twenty or so real-time hours in the game slowly chopping down trees to build a cabin for the next winter, setting snares for rabbits, maybe fishing before. dying horribly to a passing reindeer or bear or or freezing to death when winter comes. this game has been built by a couple of guys in Finland who spend part of their their year working on the game and and the rest of the year basically living the experience of the game in real life. They do their coding in a house in in rural Finland and there's a lot of fun social media videos of them hunting and chopping wood and and hanging out in their sauna and gener generally just survivaling it up. it's a unique experience. It's got a tiny footprint. It's it's very hardcore and it's not for everyone. has a very confusing UI. but it is a game that for me never gets uninstalled. It's got a a very tiny footprint on the hard drive. you know, in in part that's why I don't uninstall it, but in part sometimes it's nice to just go and live the life of a hunter-gatherer in ancient Finland.

Rade: So I'm looking at the Steam page for this. So first off, right now it is two dollars and ninety cents in the in the US on sale, eighty percent off.

Dave Leary: Ooh. Excellent. On sale. On sale until when? Do we have a did people have a little time? Okay,

Rade: September seventh, so

Dave Leary: so our podcast will launch right when this perhaps goes off sale, but it does go on sale periodically.

Rade: Yeah, it does. this looks like a DOS game. it

Dave Leary: It it definitely started probably as a DOS game. I don't remember what where it started, but yes.

Rade: Yeah. So like if if you're too young to remember DOS games, think this is not 3D. This is definitely 2D, top-down perspective, chunky movement, straight text interface in a lot of areas with this this takes me back. But what's odd is the photos of a lot of the survival characters and everything are way higher than we ever got back then. So they actually have like

Dave Leary: Yes, and I'm I'm pretty sure those are just the developer's friends hanging out at his house.

Rade: Yeah, I I you know what? I like I love that this exists. I I am

Dave Leary: It is fantastic. I promise you I will bring you a game next week that is a little less obscure. I I have an idea for the next one that I think you will actually enjoy. I don't know that you would actually enjoy this, but maybe at two bucks you want to pick it up.

Rade: Un wow, five twelve megs of RAM required, eight hundred by six hundred resolution, one gigahertz processor. you know what?

Dave Leary: But no note there has been a fairly recent update or two to this game.

Rade: I recently got my mother in law's old PC to set up for my daughter to do Minecraft modding. And she was complaining that it was laggy and terrible. And then I looked at it and saw it was a Celeron third gen

Dave Leary: Mm.

Rade: CPU with with four gigs of RAM. And my wife had installed Windows eleven on it. And I'm like, You want maybe maybe now I've got I'll take her a copy of Unreal World and say you could run that on that old machine, but you're not running anything faster. Cool.

Dave Leary: There you go. There you go. Excellent.

Rade: Well, if you like the podcast, as always, hit the like and subscribe button. and yeah, we'll see you next week.

Dave Leary: Later.

Rade: Bye.