Asmongold TV - This goes much deeper than we thought.. | Asmongold TV
Episode Date: May 15, 2026This goes much deeper than we thought.. Asmongold podcast for all of his stream highlights, competitions, reactions & more. --- Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive.
The Price is Right Fortune Pick.
BetMDM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly.
19 plus to wager.
Ontario only.
Please play responsibly.
If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you,
please contact connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2,600 to speak to an advisor.
Free of charge.
BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario.
This goes much deeper than we thought.
This is that mixtape game.
Okay, let's see it.
The Western gaming industry is sick,
and nothing has made that clearer than mixtape.
A three-hour walking simulator that's barely interactive,
with mini-games designed to be impossible to fail,
rated M for mature,
with ESRB descriptors including boners sticking out,
and sexually deviant,
and kind of deep-throating it and gagging.
For characters who,
our high school teenagers.
A creative director whose proudest technical achievement is a saliva particle system for a tongue-kissing
scene between minors.
Getting the-
Wait, what is this here?
We spent ages getting like the ropes of saliva to work in a particle system and-
Oh my fucking, what the fuck is wrong with them?
A story that frames a father wanting his daughter to succeed as the villain.
Yeah.
A straight A athlete, abandoning achievement for parties.
as liberation, weakness and aimlessness, romantic self-hood.
True.
A same-sex relationship between teenagers as the emotional core.
This is the game that just received the only Perfect 10 IGN has given all year,
while sitting is the highest-rated game on Open Critic.
We've already covered just how absurd the institutional press bias
around this game's coverage has been in the last video,
so we won't go into that again here.
But since then, new information has surfaced that makes this whole thing much worse than we thought.
All right, let's see it.
It's been blowing up across social media, and I think every gamer needs to see it.
Because the company behind this game is Anna Perna Interactive, founded by Megan Ellison, the openly queer daughter of Larry Ellison,
co-founder of Oracle Corporation.
A man who, in September 2025, briefly, briefly became the richest person on earth.
With a net worth peaking near $400 billion.
That's a lot of money.
Who, even after market fluctuations, remains worth well over $200 billion.
A lot of money.
One of the wealthiest human beings who has ever existed.
With his children, reportedly receiving $200 million trusts on their 25th birthdays.
That's nice.
Which is relevant.
Yeah, didn't you guys get that?
Because Ellison founded Anna Perna in 2011, the same year she turned 25.
after dropping out of USC film school in under a year with no formal business education.
I can see that.
From which point, what followed is one of the most ridiculous runs of sustained failure in modern entertainment history.
Yeah, I didn't know about any of this.
Her first distribution effort was Catherine Bigelow's Detroit.
Detroit.
A film about white police officers killing black men during the 1967 riots.
So it's a... wait a minute.
So this is exactly what I said it was.
It was a failed art project.
You couldn't make it making actual film or media.
And so you had to try to make a video game instead.
I fucking knew it.
Which flopped immediately at 24 million on a $40 million budget.
It's bad.
From there, it only got worse.
Vice budgeted at 80 million when insiders said it couldn't cost more than 35 while losing at least 15 to 20.
Jesus.
If Beale Street could talk, losing 8 to 10.
Uh-huh.
Destroyer, losing seven.
The sisters' brothers costing 40 million while returning barely a million at the domestic box office.
Oh my God.
Revisionist Western critique, critiquing toxic masculinity, frontier capitalism, greed, and patriarchal violence while exploring emotional vulnerability.
They spent $38 to $40 million on it, and they made $3 million.
Where'd you go, Bernadette?
Wow.
in 2,400 theaters to $3.45 million.
What a fucking...
That's embarrassing.
According to deadline, being 200 million in costs.
Jesus.
While the entire slate combined for less than 40 million back.
Wow.
Which means for every dollar that came back from audiences,
they spent five.
Roughly five had been spent trying to reach them.
It's embarrassing.
Compounding this, the internal collapse matched the external one.
Her CFO, alongside her president,
leaving at the same time.
Her head of production let go.
Soderberg losing 23 million in funding
12 weeks before cameras were set to roll.
Alexander Payne left hanging
after she offered to partner on downsizing
then went silent.
While ducking Brad Gray's...
At a certain point you have to acknowledge
that maybe you're not meant to do this.
Like, how many failed films
and failed art projects are you going to have
until you realize that maybe I'm not very good at this.
I mean, really.
Her own advisor, Skip Brittonham,
one of the most respected in Hollywood,
walking away, reportedly because she wouldn't listen.
Insiders describing her to the Hollywood reporter as mercurial.
Exactly.
And by the way, this is exactly the kind of game
that somebody like that would make,
where they were right about everything,
all the older generation was wrong,
they were just cool and misunderstood
while everybody else was stupid
oh yeah this is so fucking perfect
until when things got bad enough
she retreated to one night
her father's private island in Hawaii
to regroup
which is the professional track record
of the person behind the top rated game
on Open Critic
Those films all have something in common though
because the losses weren't
random incompetence
They were ideologically consistent
That's right
Detroit about systemic racism in policing.
Vice, a political takedown of Republican power.
Sorry to bother you, an anti-capitalist satire by activist director Boots Riley.
With even that, Anna Perna's only profitable film...
It follows a black telemarketer who adopts a white voice to succeed at his job.
Holy shit.
From that era, returning reportedly minimal profit.
Nimona acquired after its studio shut down,
specifically because, in Ellison's own account, she liked its LGBT elements.
See?
A strange loop, a musical about a young black, queer artist, grappling with identity
that won with Tony for Best Musical.
How'd that they're?
While on the gaming side, the same playbook runs from Gone Home through the Artful Escape, through mixtape.
Every major title built around identity as the central axis.
And again, the reason why these people are so obsessed about identity,
is because they're narcissistic.
They're narcissistic and self-obsessed,
and they want everything to revolve
around thinking, discussing, and talking about them.
This episode is brought to you by L'Oreal Group.
Beauty is a powerful force that moves us.
That's why L'Oreal Group has built a business
that is inclusive at its heart
with 100% of its brands,
championing diversity.
With 25,000 professional opportunities
for people under 30 worldwide,
and 54% of leading positions
held by women.
Diversity is a strength that helps L'Oreal group
create the best beauty products for all people.
Visit Loreal.com to learn more.
The way that they feel or what they think
or what their sexuality is
or some other vision that they have.
That's the reason why.
It's not even about the sexuality.
The sexuality is just a manifestation of the
of basically just the narcissism.
Which, once you see the pattern across
films, games, theater makes the picture very clear.
Yeah.
This isn't a businesswoman who happened to lose money.
This is an ideologue with infinite capital.
Yeah.
Who uses that capital to fund identity politics projects.
Where losing money isn't a failure of the model, but irrelevant to the model.
That's right.
Because the money was never supposed to come from the market.
It was always going to come from daddy.
Well, it's more that.
And also people that get hired for these different studios, this is the way that they feel about it too, is that this is the reason why they don't care about having low sales.
It's because they don't really care about the media to begin with.
What they do care about instead of that is they care about being able to use that platform to push A from daddy.
Well, yeah, I mean, it's her dad that's paying for this.
I mean, obviously that's what's happening.
So, yeah, and so that's really the issue is that these people have no.
problem poisoning and killing a piece of media in order for it to reinforce the way that
their ideology is. That's it.
Exactly as variety confirmed, when an insider was asked why these losses had been tolerated,
with the answer on the record being, have you ever seen a parent with their kids?
Yeah. Which brings us to the financials, because by 2019, the whole thing had spiraled to the
point where Anna Perna defaulted on over 200 million in debt.
Burnt through most of a $350 million credit facility with Chapter 11 on the table.
Oh my God.
The banks involved, J.P. Morgan, alongside Wells Fargo, furious because according to deadline sources,
bankers felt betrayed on account of Larry Ellison's family office, having been portrayed as backing
the loans in the marketing documents, implying the family stood behind the venture.
Of course.
when the actual contracts were signed, there was no formal commitment from Larry Ellison,
meaning the banks had lent hundreds of millions, partly on the implied guarantee of a centi
billionaire who technically hadn't guaranteed anything. So when the debt went bad,
Ellison submitted what deadline called a last and final offer at 80 to 85 cents on the dollar,
forcing the banks to absorb a 20% loss, not because they wanted to,
but because Ellison holds billion-dollar personal credit lines with both institutions.
Yep.
As Deadline sources put it,
putting the daughter of one of the richest men on the planet into bankruptcy
would have been political suicide for the bankers involved.
I mean, I don't really see how this is like really that outrageous or crazy.
Like, yes, obviously this person's getting preferential treatment
and they're getting opportunities and money that they wouldn't naturally.
have because their dad's rich.
I mean, that's just what happens, right?
I mean, it's just the way it is.
It's literal corruption.
Well, it's not corruption.
It's just simply the way of doing business.
Like, this is just the way business is done.
Whether you like it or not,
this is the way people do business.
Because you don't alienate a man worth hundreds of billions
over his daughter's projects
if you want to keep doing business with Oracle.
So the banks swallowed it.
Banks swallowed it. Anapurna survived. A company that wouldn't exist without the gravitational
force of one family's wealth, bending the financial system around it, lived to see another
decade. And keep in mind that this is a great example of what I was saying about how a lot of
this like woke narrative and like all these people, this is completely a top-down ideology
that's being manufactured by people with a lot of money in order to sigh up the public and
to believing something that's not true.
Somehow.
Parallel to all of this,
Ellison had also launched a gaming publishing division in 2016 called Anna Perna Interactive.
Extending the same ideological playbook into a new medium.
Gone home, the artful escape,
mixtape, identity first narratives published alongside titles like Outer Wilds,
Stray, what remains of Edith Finch that gave the division enough critical credibility.
to mask the same identity politics obsession running underneath,
alongside the same.
And also, by the way, this is the reason why I will always do this for these games.
I will do my best to kill every single one of these woke ideology games.
I will.
I will kill them.
I will laugh.
Whenever the studios get shut down, I'll post memes about it.
Like, I will do everything that I possibly can to kill this entire ideology.
Because this is something that's being.
infected into society in a completely non-organic way.
This is not something that the public is simply beginning to shift perspectives on.
This is a manufactured changing of opinions that's being done by literal billionaires
trying to push a narrative that doesn't exist.
And the funny thing about it is that we do have the power to do that.
and we continuously exercise that power every single day.
Eventually her studio will fail.
Eventually her dad will get tired of paying for this.
I don't think her dad probably agrees with a lot of this.
He probably thinks it's pathetic.
Like, what do you think the probability is?
Like, how many times do you hear Larry Ellison talking about his daughter?
Basically never.
It's always about his son.
I wonder why.
Probably because the daughter's a fucking moron.
That's the reality.
So I bet like in his mind, like if you were to read Larry Ellison's mind, he's probably thinking, why can't she just get it right? Why can't she just do something normal? Like that's probably her brother too. Exactly. And so that's really probably what's happening here.
Financial dysfunction. He's not stupid. Except the team running it. He knows.
He watched the film side's dysfunction for years. The losses, the debt, the mercurial leadership, the retreat to Daddy's Island.
They'd seen what Ellison's management produced when left unchecked,
which is precisely why in 2024,
they tried to get out.
Nathan Gary, the president, alongside co-heads Deborah Mars with Nathan Vela,
spending months negotiating to spin off the gaming division as an independent entity called Versa.
Across Canada in a Volvo.
Destination, Vancouver, turn left to leave.
Travel west through.
Approaching.
Continue toward.
You've arrived.
Adventure and comfort with Volvo.
Whether you prefer gas,
plug-in hybrid, or fully electric,
there's a Volvo for everyone.
Learn more at VolvoCars.a.
Game as fast as they could.
It's been too long, cowboy.
From Disney and Pixar.
So that's Lily Pat.
Where are you?
Some sort of old man, toy?
What?
She thinks you're old because you're bald, Woody.
Toys are for play.
Tech is for everything.
Toy Story is back.
I want to talk to you, device.
The long toy.
Turn her off.
I'm responded.
I have plastic fingers.
Featuring Taylor Swift's All New Song.
I knew it I knew you.
Available now.
No way.
Oh yeah.
Disney and Pixar's Toy Story 5.
Now playing only in theaters.
Tickets available now.
This Father's Day start with a question.
Like where did Dad's story begin?
Ancestry DNA now has up to $75 off
and our father's day.
day sale. So Dad can explore
his roots across more than 3,600
regions and discover
the places and cultures that shaped
his story. Save now,
give Ancestry DNA from only
$69. Offer ends
June 21st. Visit
Ancestry.ca for details.
Terms apply.
I games journalists
resonated so much with this game.
It was about a person
that was, you know, the person that made
the game that was involved with this was,
a career failure that constantly was surviving off of other people's good and best intentions
that created nothing of value ever that was just a constant black hole of money and that never
experienced any degree of hardship trouble or any level of actual friction in their entire life so
this is the manifestation of that ideology and i think that it makes a lot of sense now it does that
a clean break from the centi billionaire's daughter.
His film operation had burned through 200 million,
while theirs had built something people actually respected.
Only for Ellison to enter the negotiations, then pull out,
triggering what can only be described as a mutiny.
Every single member of the team resigning within two weeks.
Their statement to Bloomberg reading,
All 25 members of the Anapurna Interactive Team collectively resigned.
How much of a fuck up do you have to be to let something like that happen?
This was one of the hardest decisions we have ever had to make.
Oh my God.
25 out of 25.
Development partners left scrambling.
Blade Runner 233 in limbo.
None of which mattered to Ellison, who simply replaced them.
Bringing back Hector Sanchez from Epic, hiring new staff, continuing operations.
Because that's what infinite capital allows.
It makes a full.
full-scale mutiny feel like a staffing hiccup.
From there, who she brought in to replace them tells you everything about where this publisher
is heading.
Because earlier, we mentioned that the gaming arm, despite everything wrong with the film side,
still managed to publish some genuinely good games under Gary's team.
Titles that weren't all ideological projects, which is partly why the division built
credibility the film arm never had.
But the person Ellison hired to run it after the mutiny,
is Leanne Loombie, who came over from Netflix in January 2025.
Uh-oh.
And Loomby sat on the board of Wings Interactive,
an investment fund for teams where women and gender marginal
Oh my god. How... What is this?
Another fucking ideologue, bro? I know.
...developers hold key positions,
with a selection committee composed only of women.
Wow, wow. This, by the way, this is the
reason why you have to be so aggressive against these people is that if you don't they have so much
institutional influence that they'll be able to push whatever narrative they want that's the reason
why you have to be so aggressive against them and if you don't do that they'll just keep doing this
more and more and i'm very proud of you guys i am and the gaming community at large for
being so aggressive and hostile towards this and i think that we've killed a lot of
lot of these games and ruin these studios. And I feel like, again, it's kind of like chemotherapy
for a cancer. And it's not over yet, but it's not in stage four anymore. I'd say it's still in
stage two. Things have gotten a lot better. We've improved traumatically. So it'll take more time,
but things are going in that direction. Ultimately, and I'll explain, like my mindset with this is
that you have to go after these people in a multifaceted way.
And so what that means is destroying not only their companies,
but also their personal reputations as well.
And if you do that and you take a multifaceted approach to them,
the way that, for example, people are doing with Anita Sarkeesian,
you make these people themselves radioactive.
And so it's not enough that, you know, for example,
they try to move past it.
Never let them move past it.
They can't move past it.
because them moving past it allows them to just simply control more capital to do more,
and then they'll go back to doing the same thing.
That's it.
And so non-binary, exactly.
And so how does one improve traumatically?
Well, I think that we've improved traumatically.
Well, we've done that too.
But I meant dramatically.
And this is great.
It's amazing.
I'm very happy.
Sitting on the board of WIGI, G.I.
in Games International.
Another one.
A nonprofit with a no woman, no panel policy that serves women, them identifying, and non-binary
professionals.
There you go.
Two separate DEI organizations.
Yep.
Someone whose entire professional identity is built around identity politics advocacy.
I want to say that this is something that probably might not sound good.
But my main motivation for doing stuff like this is my.
pure hate for these people.
I'm not motivated by making the world a better place.
I'm motivated by making the world the worst place for them.
That's my main goal.
That's what I, I wake up in the morning, I get up, I get motivated.
What gets me to go on every single day?
They said the strongest thing is not hate, it's love.
I would disagree.
I would disagree.
I never get tired of it.
Where do we sign up?
I mean, plenty of places, right?
And that's it.
May we clarify who you hate, so you avoid any shot?
Well, I think it would be hard for me to do that.
I mean, there's such a long list.
And it's not hard to see where this is going.
It's just the truth.
With Gary's team gone.
Yep.
And someone like Looney at the helm.
Anapurna Interactive is likely in the same direction as the film arm.
More ideological projects.
Yep.
More identity-first publishing.
The approach that burned through 200 million in costs for 40 million back.
It's probably more than that.
By the way, it's probably more.
...to gaming.
Funded by Daddy, accountable to nobody.
Which brings us back to mixtape itself.
Because this is where Anapurna's money meets the product.
This walking simulator is loaded with licensed music from the Smashing Pumpkins, Joy Division.
Iggy Pop, Devo,
Big artists.
Hey y'all, it's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair.
Ever order furniture online and wonder, what if?
Like, what if it doesn't hold up?
That sofa was four days old.
You should have ordered from Wayfair.
With Wayfair, there's no what if.
Just style you love and quality you can trust.
Visit Wayfair.com.
Wayfair, every style, every home.
...is a St. Mary Chain, lush.
Licensing tracks from artists like these doesn't come cheap.
And 28 of them, across a three-hour game,
is an enormous amount of money.
It probably isn't. They were probably able to leverage connections that they had through other like tangential relationships through Paramount. And that allowed them to get this at a much cheaper rate. And probably what I would assume they did. I mean, there's a chance they could have said that they were doing it at the base rate and then, you know, written it out that way for balance sheet purposes. I mean, there's a lot of ways that you could take advantage of this, right?
that Anna Perner shipped custom press kits to journalists with functioning retro CD players
and cost headphones inside.
I didn't get one.
All for a three-hour walking simulator made by 12 people in Melbourne.
And at some point, you just have to ask what you're looking at.
Because when a centi billionaires publishing operation pours that kind of money into a game
that peaks at 2,000 players on Steam, while walking away with the only perfect 10 of the
year. The instinct gamers had from day one that this is an industry plant starts looking less
like instinct and more like a reasonable conclusion when you trace the money. Which raises...
Most of the time, the thing that makes sense is true. It's the way it is. The obvious question,
what is the industry plant actually planting? And if everything we've covered...
How is it getting good Steam reviews? I think that these Steam reviews are not authentic.
The reason why is because the review, let me think of a way to say this, the ratio of reviews
to players is outside of the standard expectation.
And it's so far outside of that standard expectation that without some sort of third-party
explanation for it, something went wrong, something happened.
I don't know what it is, but I know something happened.
clear enough. The answer is
identity politics.
A billionaire's daughter who's never
experienced economic hardship in her life
using Oracle money
to publish entire lineups of products
where she's the oppressed.
The white male gamer buying
her product is the oppressor.
Because when you strip it all down
that's all wokeism is
isn't it? Collective
Gary Ellison is actually based. He invested
a billion to help Elon by Twitter. He just
can't say no to his woke daughter.
I think that you're right.
I do.
I think you're right.
I think every single time I've heard of Larry Ellison doing something with like any of his kids,
it's always that one son that does everything.
I mean, yeah, and I bet he knows what's a poor guy.
It is what it is.
It is what it is.
And if I was him, if I was Larry Ellison, would I keep funding my daughter's bullshit like this?
I can't promise that I wouldn't.
You know, when it's your kid, I get it.
I'm not blaming him.
I'm blaming her.
Guilt dressed up as social justice.
An oppressor versus oppressed framework.
It's just a truth.
Where your race, your gender,
your sexual orientation is all that defines you.
Being honest.
Where the white heterosexual male carries the guilt of the dominant group,
regardless of whether he's rich or poor, powerful or powerless.
Where oppression has nothing to.
to do with economics and everything to do with identity.
Meaning it doesn't matter how much money you have or how little.
What matters is what you are.
Which is why a billionaire's queer daughter paying off 200 million through Oracle
connections is the oppressed, while a gamer paying off a mortgage through 5am alarm
clocks is the oppressor.
5 a.m.
Why a millionaire Middle Eastern Twitch streamer out-earning his audience a hundredfold can
invoke racial persecution. Why a Hollywood superstar actress can claim gender discrimination from
inside a career most men couldn't dream of. It's actually insane how hypocritical these people are.
It is. Like, I don't know why. Like, I'm so glad that there is such a culture now of hating them.
There is. And like, we've created such an uncomfortable and bad environment for them.
it's something that like
whenever I see it
on the internet
and I realize that
I helped make this slightly worse
I feel so happy
I do
I think to myself
it's like you know
it's like you're seeing a house
that you built
well this is like seeing a house
that's on fire
with the fire that you started
feels good
I might not have started the fire
but you know
maybe I threw a couple of matches in there
that's the framework
it does
that's what Ellison's
entire catalog, from gone home to mixtape, functions as a syllabus for.
Cosplaying as marginalized, performing oppression as entertainment.
Yes.
Performed by daddy, crowned by the press, defended by the platforms.
While the audience that pays for all of it is told to shut up, stop questioning,
consume.
Game after game after game.
That is, without a shred of exaggeration,
the state of the Western gaming industry in 2026.
Not a good place to be in.
I'll leave it there.
If you got something out of this video,
I'd really appreciate a like,
a subscribe, drop a comment if you've got thoughts.
If you want to support the channel,
the membership and Discord are both linked in the description.
And thank you to everyone who's already joined.
How much credibility do you think IGN lost?
One last thing before I go.
I think IGN has, I've said this before, right?
is that, you know, they should really be getting interviewed by like CERN and like, you know, fucking MIT.
Like, you thought that it was impossible to divide by zero, but somehow they just keep cutting their credibility in half.
It's impressive.
To today's sponsor, Instant Gaming.
I'm sure most of you already know what a key reseller is at this point, so I won't bore you with the pitch.
Just know, if you want to grab games cheaper than Steam, there's a link in the description.
Thanks to Instant Gaming for supporting the channel.
Until the next one.
Take care.
It's a good video.
I like this.
I'll link you guys the video.
I've seen a couple of these.
I think that he made a video about what the fuck was it.
Crimson Desert.
Crimson Desert.
That's what it was.
Can't spell IGN without ignorance.
IGN makes good decisions sometimes, but not other times.
I would say most of the time they don't.
I would say that pretty much for sure.
And yeah, I'm much more.
likely to play a game. IG and gives a 5 to a 7 or anything.
This spring,
denim gets a softer, lighter update.
Introducing Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg,
a new fit that moves with you.
It's everything you want denim to feel like for summer.
Easy, breathable, and effortlessly cool.
With a fit that creates natural movement
and a wide leg that feels modern, not overwhelming.
Plus, that signature, wait, for this price, moment.
Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg.
I mean, I generally try to play new games that come out regardless of what they are.
But overall, I'm really happy to see the community pushing back against this and not allowing people to just keep pushing this like bullshit narrative.
And like bullshit narratives in general, things that are just like actively hostile towards players.
And just overall, I think that things have gotten a lot worse for these people.
And I think that again, it's not even, it has.
not even begun.
