Better Offline - How Growth Is Killing Video Games

Episode Date: March 5, 2025

In this episode, Ed Zitron is joined by Gita Jackson and Nathan Grayson of worker-owned games site Aftermath to talk about how the growth-at-all-costs mindset is destroying games, how fandom culture naturally feeds extremism, how Aftermath does games journalism differently, and how despite everything, great games are still being made. Gita Jackson:https://bsky.app/profile/xoxogossipgita.bsky.social https://aftermath.site/author/gita-jackson  Nathan Grayson: https://aftermath.site/author/nathan-graysonhttps://bsky.app/profile/nathangrayson.bsky.social Stream Big: The Triumphs and Turmoils of Twitch and the Stars Behind the Screenhttps://www.amazon.com/Stream-Big-Triumphs-Turmoils-Twitch/dp/1982156767 Article on Skin Deep from Aftermath: https://aftermath.site/skin-deep-steam-next-fest-demo-impressions-pc  The New York Times: Video Games Can’t Afford to Look This Goodhttps://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/26/arts/video-games-graphics-budgets.html Aftermath - Fuck WBhttps://aftermath.site/warner-bros-discovery-games-wonder-woman-monolith-shut-down Pyre - https://www.supergiantgames.com/games/pyre/Supergiant Games - https://www.supergiantgames.comAvowed - https://store.steampowered.com/app/2457220/Avowed/ --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/  Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitronSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zittron. Today I'm joined by the esteemed Gita Jackson and Nathan Grayson of Independent Gaming Site Aftermath, and Nathan, of course, has a new book out called Stream Big, The Triumphs and Turmoils for Twitch and the stars behind the screen. Both of you thank you for being here. Thank you for having us. Yeah, no problem. It's super fun. Hell yeah. So today we're talking about the games industry, which I think we can all agree is going well. Yeah, it's going super good, bigger than Hollywood, as we all know. So to that point, Nathan, what is actually going on right now? Because it feels like over the last few years, I used to be a games journalist, but I've kind of dropped out of the industry stuff. What's going on?

Well, right now, a bunch of games companies are realizing that they, well, they've decided that what they need to do is make fewer, bigger games. And so they're laying a lot of people off in pursuit of that because games are in their minds a hits-driven business. Right. And so in order to achieve that, they're just like, okay, let's put all of our big. all of our eggs in these increasingly smaller baskets. And if one of these lands, then great, we have the next, like, leave legends or the next, like, Fortnite or whatever. And if they fail, then it's a catastrophe, and we're going to lay a bunch of people off.

And the only people who will not suffer from this are the executives who are making these bad decisions. And that keeps happening over and over and over. So what is a hit, though? Like, how do they define a hit? They define it by Hollywood terms, right? Which are? Which are, you want to be a good.

have a level of cultural impact, one that is inescapable. Fortnite is a very good example because literally every child plays Fortnite. And you can play it on every device. Everyone suddenly understands the terms through which that game is sort of is made and played. At birth, every child is given an iPad with Fortnite on it. It's that old Minecraft. Yeah, one of those two.

And then also, there is a saying that a lot of, of executives love to tout when they talk about the financial success of their industry, which is that video games are a bigger industry. There's more money in video games than Hollywood. And I don't really think that that's true. Is there any proof behind me? I mean, they might, games that are very, very, very successful, like Elder Ring is another great example of just a smash hit where millions of millions of games were sold.

But the thing is, that money that you make often goes immediately back into recruits. all the cost of development because games take a lot longer to make than a movie and require a lot more people to make them. And a lot more things can go wrong. Yes, very much so. A lot of projects in this day and age are rebooted repeatedly over the course of their development. Like that happened recently with a Dragon Age to Vail Guard, a game that was originally

meant to be like a live service multiplayer game, which is a weird point for that series to pick. And for the listeners, we're not like avid gay, but so a life service game is... It's a game that sort of exists in perpetuity. Right. The idea is that it has seasons of narrative and gameplay. Not even necessarily narrative. Just like new stuff

coming out. Like can you pay a monthly fee? Again, Fortnite is a very good example of this. Fortnite refreshes the maps that you use to play the game on. They refresh that every occasionally. They call it seasons like seasons of television. And they

there's always just new skins, new items, new things to spend your money on. New collaborations with major brands. I just, on the way over here, there was an ad for, like, Cowboy B-Bob skins in the game now. Which is sick. But Destiny, so Destiny 2 is the one I remember with that way. Destiny 2 is a lab service game.

And that's owned by Sony PlayStation now. Well, Sony Interactive Entertainment technically, but it's, and so this is kind of, from my experience, at least, gaming a shit ton when I was younger by, which I mean like two years ago. But the fact is that games now aren't just allowed to be good once. They have to be good forever. Yes. You have to be the biggest game ever in order to be considered a success. Forever. Forever. For ever. Like not just when the game comes out, but also every single month after that for the next year.

Well, which also, like, I think works very much in conjunction with kind of like the line go up mentality of business in general. Like your game also has to be a line that's always going on. Yes. And it can't simply be successful. In a linear sense, it can't just be like a game. you sell. It is a game you are constantly rebooting. Like, even with Marvel rivals, I heard, a very successful game, owned by Netzee, even. And they just laid off a bunch of people.

They laid off all of their American. It was like under... What actually happened? Oh, so it wasn't a huge layoff? Yeah. So this was also like, it was part of a larger NetE's plan to kind of divest from outside of China. Oh, okay.

Yeah. And so like, I think they were planning to do this even before Marvel rivals took off. No, but I could... No, I wish you were getting at, though, because my favorite example of this phenomenon is Bioshock Infinite, a game that was incredibly successful, hugely acclaimed. Right.

After the game came out, the studio shuttered. Like, it was over. Immediately. Immediately. They couldn't recoup the costs, essentially. Like, there was no amount of money they could make on that game that was financially successful and was critically acclaimed to give back to the studio in order to make it, like, financially, probably, like a financially stable institution.

Right. And then all those developers scattered to the winds. that was kind of the end of major game development in Boston for a long time. Yeah, until like literally now with CD Project, getting rude over there. Are they starting up a Boston arm? Yeah, it's where they're making the next cyberpunk. And what's weird a CD project is like,

they were a very, that cyberpunk 27, 27, right? 27. I did play it. I don't know why I'm acting like I don't have a gaming PC. I have like a gaming PC with like two motherboards inside. It's beautiful. Anyway. Yeah, you also sitting right behind it.

is one of the widest monitors I've seen in my whole life. It's beautiful. It's beautiful. It's beautiful. It's amazing. But that one was really tortured because the game was rushed out. And I don't think I've seen in a while like a game that rushed and it ended up being dog shit. I mean, if we're talking about the broader state of video games, another characteristic, I think,

is that most big games these days get rushed out in some capacity. It's just less glaring than it was for cyberpunk. Cyberpunk was a lot of functional issues. Right. Now what you get is a lot of games that are rushed out but polished. So they have all of these like mechanical problems and like other more deep-seated issues that were they could have solved it just by like, you know, giving the developers more time to cook. But they know that people will be off put by a game that doesn't work. So they make sure it works.

But it's not good. Exactly. Can you give me an example? Dragon Age. Dragon Age the Vail Guard is amazing. Was it bad? Okay. So I'm like huge.

Super Dipper Mid. I'm a huge. I was really looking forward to this game because I'm like invested in the narrative in the characters and Dragon Age Inquisition. I think like a lot of people who if you've played are listening to this and have played Dragon Age Inquisition, you know the experience of you're incredibly fucking depressed. You completely just mainline a game and the writing and the characters are so good. It becomes your entire world and you can just live inside that fandom. And that was me for a little bit. So I waited like 10 years for this game to come out.

And the longer a game stays in development, the generally speaking, the worse it will be when you actually get your hands on it. And when the game came out, it worked and it functioned, but it was not finally tuned. You could tell and feel when you played it, there were things that should have been there

that were not there. And it felt empty and like it was missing things. And with role playing games, it's extremely important to get the mechanics, right? Yeah. And like this was a byproduct of just like how the game was made. So again, it started many years ago. It was like it began development like nearly a decade ago as one kind of game, as a multiplayer

live service game. And then over time, EA and BioWere were like, this isn't working. Let's reboot it mid development and try something else. That didn't work. They had key personnel leave. They're like, let's reboot it again into something else. And that's what became the game that came out, which is like this mishmash of all these mechanics and assets they came up with over time.

And so internally the way this played out is they were like, well, again, it needs to reach a certain, like, quality and review bar from the cell. So let's just make sure that it feels polished. Like, let's pop all this stuff together, but make sure it looks nice. It has the smell and the taste of a AAA game without actually being fun. So, Nathan, what is it that makes them so expensive, though? Like, what is the cost center? Is it people?

Is it something we don't know? So this is the thing. There's been a lot of discourse around, like, the increasing, you know, level of fidelity that you need for a AAA game and like all of these various concerns about the number of people that you need to create all these assets and maintain that. But I think that Jason Schreier in particular has done really good reporting on the real problem, which is mismanagement at almost every level. Executive is making poor decisions while siphoning away millions and millions of dollars

from a project. Siphoning it from to where, though? Themselves. Yeah. Often themselves. How does that work? I mean, go check out like the kind of money that's Throb Zelnick. Oh, okay. So it's like the CEOs are making obscene amounts of money.

Uh-huh. In a lot of cases, yeah. Fucking hell. So often in, uh, at E3, rest in peace and other video game sort of industry conferences, they will make comparisons to Hollywood between themselves and Hollywood. Right. They want to be a part of the entertainment industry. Well, they want to be paid like David Zaslow.

Exactly. Exactly. But there's a huge differences between what, how Hollywood operates and how the video game industry operates. And the main difference is, They're, these are not, the people who work on games are not unionized craft people. Right. With a culture of unionization in their workplaces. So they really can, like, you are a contract worker, you sign on for a gig. And if you aren't there when the game is completed, you don't get your name in the credits.

And you just have to move in a herd from studio to studio to studio. And all those credits important, I'm guessing. They're very important in order to get better paying jobs. You can't just put it on your link. tense. No, I mean, especially if you're working on a project, like at Monolith, the studio that's shuttered this week, they were two years into development on a Wonder Woman game. And Wonder Woman, and I think you're a DC comics person. I'm more of a Marvel person, but I'm familiar with Wonder Woman. Yes, I hope so. Well, it's interesting that you say that because like, Wonder Woman in comparison

to the other two big heroes at DC, I'm a big DC comics person. Superman and Batman, they've both had cartoons, movies, the gamut, like video games, everything. Even Superman had an extremely bad series of video games. Superman 64. Oh, yes. A classic. Oh, God. But there's, with Wonder Woman, there's been no cartoons. There are a couple of flagship comics, but they've had a lot of a harder time finding really good writers write really good Wonder Woman books. And there have been zero games. This would have been like the first game there. They worked on it for two years. And there's a lot of people now who cannot even talk about what they did on these games. They can't show the art that they made these games.

Oh, well, they don't have the assets. They can't. Yeah, the assets don't belong to them. They haven't been publicized. And these are also contract workers, so they don't have the rights to anything that they have worked on. And I just want to say none of these are actionable legal threats. But Monolith Studios made one of my, two of my most favorite games, Gita,

we were talking about this when we came in. Lord of the Rings, Shadow of Mortal and then Shadow of War, two of the best games ever made. I have not returned. Only Hades is a game. I think I will be playing until I'm an old man. Yes. Absolutely. But Shadow of War,

especially, like, these are amazing games. And these are games that the systems are perfect and they're beautiful. And they give you that feeling that I think these major studios are trying to chase in these enormous games like cyberpunk 2077. This game, this world is a living world.

This world, things are happening inside of it, even when you are not there. is the feeling you get when you play that. All the orcs are talking shit about you behind your back. And that's the thing. So to explain this game to people who've not, who even don't play games,

I really recommend it. So what it is is it's kind of a open world game where you run around, you're some Lord of the Rings fellow. I do not remember the story. Not going to try and remember. But the big thing about it is something called the nemesis system. And there are these orcs and various troll creatures.

And they're all generated procedurally, even flawlessly said that word. And where they come up and they're like, someone of bile. and they'll come up and they'll be covered in postures and they'll be like, oh, man filth, you piss me off.

And then you're able to, it kind of mirrors my real life and that some horrible creature comes up to me and goes, you don't you piss me off, Citron? And then I convert them to my side. So you can convert these orcs and they follow you around. And they have these org charts. Yes.

Of like, and if you die to an ork in a combat encounter, that orc will then go back to his little orc friends and be like, I fucking fucked up Ed Zichron. And they'll talk about it. And they'll talk about it. to you later and they'll recount specifically like how they killed you and stuff.

Like they keep that in mind. And it's quite literally what I love about video games writ large. It's just like a weird freak system full of weird goblin creatures. You can send them to kill each other. Have you played dwarf fortress ever? I've tried. It never really stuck. I'm gonna, I'm gonna teach you how to figure.

It's because it's this thing, right? There are characters with memory, right? And they learn things and they have personalities that change. Like this is a game that's made by two guys, two brothers, until very recently it was literally just the two of them. It is so fascinating how you can have

that same sort of magical black box experience of there's magic inside of this, there's a personality inside of this. One of them comes from two brothers that have worked on this thing on and off for like 20 fucking years of their life. And the other is an enormous studio using the IP Lord of the Rings. And I just want to be clear about a few things. One, this is one of the few games I've heard, like, unilaterally loved by games journalists.

Like, sure, there are people who don't like the genre, but anyone who has even a smell of RPGs loves this year. Yeah. I also want to add the WB Games CEO, J.B. Games, former CEO, David Haddad, you are enemies of better offline. You are enemies of this show. Your growth at all cost, rock economy bullshit will. You will be hated by all the people who listen to this show. So the reason that this, I'm literally looking at Nathan's story about this, the reason that, monolith got shut down is just that Warner Brothers

cannot run a fucking studio. They're stupid and bad in any industry. Yes. Yeah. Like, I mean, they've also been tanking tons of like television and movie properties too. Yeah.

The Warner Brothers. It's just been their M.O. ever since Azlov took over. Warner Brothers Discovery is on my shit list and has been for a long time. It's an incredible, it's an incredible Hollywood studio. It's so much incredible history. Right.

The whole story of Coyote versus Acme has been, I just want to jump off a bridge when I fucking hear about it. Can you run me through that for the listeners? There is, there was a movie in production, Coyote versus Acme, an adaptation of the Looney Tunes cartoon, you know, the coyote, roadrunner and the coyote. And it had John Cena in it, and it, by all accounts, everyone who worked on it said it was incredible. It used the, um, it's a James Gunn movie. Yeah, James Gunn movie. He, it was also, um, what's the movie? And James Gunn, by the way, for the listeners, Guardians of the Galaxy, Suicide Squad.

upcoming Superman movie. Upcoming Superman. Which I'm freaking psyched about. I'm so good. Anyway, I'm probably watching a trailer. Yeah, but,

you know, it was going to be a Roger Rabbit type thing, a mixed media animation and and real life stuff. Like a lot of the stuff that moviegoers

actually really, really love seeing real stunts and real effects, not CGI, not VFX, that kind of thing. And the Chippendale's movie did really well

on Disney Plus. Yes. Very similar thing. Anyway, continue. Yeah, yeah. And they, um,

the movies wrapped. It's totally fully completed. Shelded it. Sheld it? Literally for tax reasons, right? Literally for tax reasons, no one will ever see it. And David Zaslav, if you go back to the shareholder's supremacy, two-parter, you will learn all about him. Jack Welch, the CEO of G who created the modern culture of layoffs, literally the guy who didn't invent layoffs. But if you go back to those episodes, there's a story of Jack Welch, CEO of the, well, upcoming CEO, one of the candidates for it, was running several divisions and came out with this idea, what if we just laid people off to increase profits? the time layoffs were considered something you only did as a last resort, but Jack Welch,

Jack Welch thought, what if we did this? He did it and everyone else went, that's a great fucking idea. Number go up. The reason I'm bringing this up is that David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery once referred to Jack Welch as like a big brother to him. Oh, my, my fucking. I think, I just want you to know, everything I've been doing for the last few years has driven me insane. I'm turning into the Joker in real time. The makeup is appearing on our faces. But Coyote versus. Acme, was like Will Forte was going to be in it. It was like going to be a very, like it very clearly would have done really well. And they just sheled it for tax reasons. This is the same

company that owns WB Games, which owns monolith, which shut down monolith. This is the like, it is like the tech industryification of the entire entertainment industry, which is just disastrous for art in general. You can see it very visually in film, in cinema, just sort of I used to be a person that just fucking loved block like blockbuster action movies. I love them. There's nothing wrong with that. In the summer, when it's hot out, nothing better you can do than go to a theater for two hours with air conditioning and just enjoy mindless action. Except they all started to suck when Disney realized that you can feed people like not like the suggestion of a plot but not actually a story.

Right. You just sort of allude to things that will happen in the future and you can make billions of dollars off of that. And you don't actually have to shoot on sets. You can just put people in front of a green screen and then ununized VFX workers can fill in everything else for you. Right. And this is also something that fed into the creation of one of the worst things, fandoms. Yes. I mean, I love the experience of being in a fandom, but there is this tribalistic thing that is disturbing to me. Let me be a little more specific, because I'm a huge fan of many things.

Like, I've seen Queens of the Star Age 16 times. I'm like a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a non-executive. Fricke when it comes to that person of interest. Like, I really love my share. I consider a fandom, or at least perhaps I'm just describing the worst elements of it, as something separate, where it's not really about liking it something. It's about memorizing facts. It is about being a defender of the thing you like.

Yeah, it's about being in a tribe. And like this comes up a lot in my book is like, you know, the ways that fandoms can behave. One of the things that I found especially interesting in the course of reporting it is that there are also fandums around just like pure hatred. one of my chapters is about Keffels, who is a streamer. Oh, yeah. That's pretty controversial, you know, did some dumb bullshit. But also, like, managed to attract this hate mob from Kiwi Farms.

Right. And when I interviewed her while she was still, like, on the run from this mob. What was Kiwi Farms? Sorry. They are an online forum dedicated to, like, doxing people. So finding their personal information and, you know, outing it and then coming out. And, like, of course, they particularly target marginalized people. Because they, the goal and the goal of most.

hate fandoms is to get a reaction out of the person that you hate time. And it's like to cause them pain and then to use that pain as your personal source of entertainment. But what I was going to say is careful is, yeah, is that in her particular case, you know, she was like showing me some of the things that these people were doing in their free time in addition to directly harassing her. And these involved like making what were effectively like fan art and even fan songs about her just from the perspective of someone who despises her instead of somebody who. likes her, but the mechanics were all really similar. And so, like, fandom can be this thing

that coalesces using the exact same, again, like sets of tools and behaviors, but around despising someone as opposed to liking them. So this is the thing that really gets me, because I have to wonder if, the reason I brought up fandoms other than just despising them is, I have to wonder if they're not part of, not saying that it's their fault, but I feel like the entertainment industry and by extension, the games industry is really trying to sell to them. When Marvel, I love the first run of Marvel movies. I'm a little pig. Show me if it's the charming. The first Iron Man movie is fucking amazing. It is a really great film and it's because they let Favreau be Favro. But that's the thing. You had the

charming people doing the things and they were talking and it was enjoying enjoyable to watch them. But it feels like it really got into the hog slop era where it's just, you like this guy. Look at this guy. Look, we've got Jack Black and we've got Lizzo in the Mandalorian. Yeah. You remember that thing from that thing? look, it's the dark troopers from the Star Wars game. You remember dark forces? We were making dark sources suck it. It's the freaking knights of run.

They fly now. Blah, blah, blah. You know, it's like. But it's, the reason I bring that up is that's a commodity at this point. It's, if it stops being about telling a story when it's more symbolic, when it's more about just people being factions against or for something, it's just, can I sell you a fucking product? And when it comes to, I actually wanted to ask with Twitch, the cultures around streamers,

are those different to like forums culture or social media culture, like more asynchronous culture? Is there something about the live experience that changes things? Oh yeah, completely. Because I mean, for one, there's just the basic fact that if you are in a Twitch chat, you can say something that the person who's on screen might immediately react to. Right. And the people in that chat might immediately react to.

And that immediacy changes everything about it. Because I mean, just think about like how we have conversations. If somebody is able to immediately react, they are not going to consider what they're saying very much. They're just going to go for it, especially if it's like a fast-moving Twitch chat. Everyone's just trying to say the most incendiary thing possible because that's all that gets noticed. Yeah, I mean. Something measured or interesting. The perfect example of this is Hassan Piker is saying, off the cuff, America deserve 9-11.

Which is not what he meant to say. Well. But he meant to say America created the conditions that created. the people that delivered 9-11 to us. Even that, right? Like, he explained that during that same stream. But it already happened. Well, and also what happened is that people then clipped that out of context.

Yes. And then, you know, surfaced it on all these other platforms. And now this clip will haunt him forever. Every time someone is mad at him, he has a similarly size like hate fandom that is constantly, constantly trying to get a rise out of him. Multiple ringleaders. And it, it. Really?

Yeah. Ethan Klein, Destiny. Oh, God. Different kind of destiny to the game. Yeah. Destiny that sucks. It's a destiny that infuriates me for other reasons. I'm going to get him and Norman Finkelstein on.

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Totally unreasonable with different parts of life, right? Like, oh, we'll have all three meals and make sure you're mindful during all of them? Absolutely not. During one meal, I'm standing. I'm standing and handing my children food. Because healing, empowerment, and resilience aren't just ideas, their practices, and this mental health awareness month, there's no better time to pour back into yourself. Listen to cultivating her space on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

It's funny as well because as a just a gentleman podcaster with a decent-sized fandom, I don't get as many insane people. I don't get people threatening or hating me other than everyone because they wish I was dead. But it feels like there's something altogether different, specific. about games because I left games journalism in like 2008. Oh man, you, I know, like,

and even then someone fucking doxed me. I got docks because there was someone, I reviewed a game, I'm not even going to name just because it also leads to the funniest YouTube in the world, but there was a MMRP review that fucking sucked. And they claimed I didn't play it. Of course. And then someone,

like, posted my parents addressed and I'd moved to New York and I really had to stop myself being like, missed me, bitch. But then, No, I emailed the developer person. I was like, fucking take this shit down now. But now it's constant. I reviewed the most recent Final Fantasy game, Final Fantasy 16,

which is a game that I said has some of the, in the review, this is what I said, that the combat was thrilling and incredible. You fucking go to space and punch a dragon in the head. Like, it is so fucking cool. But the story is dog shit and I hated it. I hated every second of it. I'm going to say that most stories that involve going to space and punching a dragon, like don't really cohere otherwise.

It's hard to make that into a compelling narrative. Yeah, and I, especially, like, it was a game where there was a subplot with slavery and it was handled really, really, really poorly. I personally thought the whole game was bad, but that's why I don't review games anymore. No, I just, like, when you give me a combo meter, I would just go into Sikomo. It's something that just happens to me. But, no, I said those things, and I tried to be fair and complimentary toward it. The first thing that happened was someone found my email address and told me to

on myself. Jesus. Yeah. I similarly gave the Harry Potter game a pretty dismal review. And there is an entire culture devoted to trying to cede reactionary politics into young minds through the fandom of video games. Games are like the easiest mark for that because I think that, I mean, for one, a lot of people have based their identity on games.

That's the starting point. Right. And then the other element of that is that a lot of that identity comes out of this perceived persecution complex. Right. There was. The games were once for nerds who were bullied constantly. And not only that, though, but there was a real reactionary movement against video games post-Columbine, right? Right.

With Jack Thompson, there are congressional hearings about whether or not games were evil and were destroying the minds of youth, which is obviously not true. When I recently went to the UN. Look at all of us. Yeah. You know, we're normal people. I mean, my mind has been destroyed. My mind was, my mind's perfect. No.

Anyway, so you went to the UN. I went to the UN and I was on this panel to talk about terrorism and extremism and gaming spaces. And the one thing that many of the panelists made sure to say was that this idea that it's violent, video games that cause violence is not true. And in fact, often games are pro-social spaces. They encourage isolated people to interact with other people and, and, form friendships. It's just that those people are so vulnerable and extremists know

how vulnerable these people are. It's very easy to say join a discord server and then start spreading dog whistles about like extremist white supremacist thought. And then you normalize these things, these expressions and these

phrases and these images. And then you can take those people out of that bigger discord server and funnel them into more and more extremist basis. insane as it seems to get back to a point I was getting it as well, is that they're trying to monetize this. They're trying to monetize it by making the games less about being good games, but symbolic of stuff. And then the right wing types seem to see games that are not doing that, like, like, dragon age the veil garden, being like, awoke. Wokeness has begun. It's purple,

which means black, I guess. Like, like, it's just, well, no, there's a, there's a new one every week, too. Like, there's a new DEI in video games controversy every week. And, like, it wasn't always this way. But after like there, there was a conspiracy movement last year around a consulting firm called Sweet Baby Inc. Right. That is when this sort of became a well-oiled machine. That's when all of these content creators started latching onto this constantly.

Their biggest crime essentially was that the head of the company, Kim Bel Air is a black woman. And like that's it. That's literally just it. Something she controlled. Yes, absolutely. She chose at first to be a black woman. Yeah. The character creator.

So what were you saying about as well? But yeah, and so, like, now you just have these people, you have content creators who've made this their entire identity and, like, their entire brand. And so, like Gita was saying, you know, games can be really pro-social, but you'll have these people come in and sort of say, okay, well, these games that you like are being taken away by this evil DEI woke mob. Right. And so your purpose, the underlying purpose that maybe you as a person have been looking for is now to fight a battle against these people who are taking your toys away. And like that works really well on a lot of people who, you know, feel purposeless, directionless, all the ways that we all commonly feel under capitalism. And I feel like, and I feel like as well, games are an incredible vector for that, not just because there's things to rely around, but also there's a satisfaction to them. The reason I play Hades all the time. I have Hades on my, I'm not playing it right now, I promise. I would, though.

The reason I play Hades is it feels good. It feels like you have industry over something. You have, you can get good at something. I'll take this a step further. I think that the core fantasy of a lot of video games, no matter what their setting is, whether they are sci-fi or fantasy or set in the present day, is what if capitalism was fair? What if every input gave you a fair output? A consistent one. Yeah. Oh, I like that. You get better and better over time.

Look at like a Sim City, right? Yes. In Sim City, you are essentially the mayor of a city, you are the developer of the city, you're the engineer of the city, you design the entire city. And you also have control over its taxes. and it is like just A equals A shit, basically, when you look at how the tax system works in SimCity, it assumes that taxes are always fair. Right, and consistent.

And consistent. And they don't, you won't get a huge lobby from the people in the highest tax bracket asking for their taxes to be lowered. I wonder if they would add that. There should be just the SimCity, which is real. I mean, I'm sure the modders have gone into the tax system and just like torn out of the wires.

What was that city skylines? city skylines. I love watching the Cities by Diana, one of the endorsed better or fine best Instagram accounts. I do love Cities by Diana so much. I wanted to interview her for a long time, but just like, she's amazing. Diana, you're always welcome on the show. A beautiful and unique mind. I love her. So let's change, change topics to something that actually really, a positive thing. Aftermath. So how long have you been going? A little bit more than a year. So how is the company structured exactly. Well, we, okay, so

it's called aftermath because we all used to work at Kitaku, right? Right. And none of us really had much editorial control at Kitaku. Even Riley, who was a managing editor there, like, the story of his life is having strong opinions and wanting to enact the plans based on his opinions and then being told no that he can't do it, essentially. So we are the aftermath of all of that,

the slow dissolution of geo-media and our own, just losing our brains working there with the conditions there. Geomedia was the former holding company of Gizmodo, Cicado, I-O-9, and somebody came out of Gawker being sued into oblivion. Right. Yes. And we own the company and we try to structure it in such a way where we all have a relative amount of control over the work we do and what we want to do.

We are not technically a co-op, but we try to behave as if we're co-op. A fun fact is that a lot of like co-ops are not co-ops because it's weird on taxes and everyone's just like, yeah, morphing into one. One of our guys. And it's better to just be an LLC or something else. Yeah. But it's worker owned. It's a worker-owned. It's a 100% worker-owned.

No outside investment. No outside capital. We literally just rely on subscriptions and nothing else. For now, we might incorporate a small amount of ad-based stuff in the future, but that'll just be on like a podcast. And there's nothing wrong with ads. I mean, I definitely can't. Because someone listening to this is probably going to email me and be like, Ed, did you hear there's an AI ad? There's an AI ad that ran. Did you hear the AI ad? It ran after the AI ad. If you are emailing me or messaging me about the AI ad, I have heard you over 150 times. And every single person, I'm not bitter. I'm just like, at this point, if you think it's novel to mention this to me, it isn't. And every time I kind of roll my eyes. And if you're trying to hurt me, which you would love, then keep going. But please don't. But please don't.

Nevertheless, it's good that this exists, though, because my experience of games journalism was future publishing and Dennis publishing. Oh, no. Oh, no. A little bit of Zitron Law for all of you. So I was a games journalist from the age of 16. I interned at Computer and Video Games Magazine, is steamed out there, owned by Dennis Publishing, sold to future publishing, really like out of the toilet into the toilet situation. The worst shittier toilet, yeah. And I worked at PC Zone as well, and it was definitely, and there's British libel laws, which will stop me being fully honest here, it was a challenging corporate environment

with many incentive structures that affected the output and structure of the work regularly. And it's funny because games journalism feels like something that could be bigger and better than it is, but it just won't be. Okay, so like the example that I think is really useful is the Kitaku, essentially,

we all worked there in a certain era where we had an editor-in-chief who was like an old school magazine guy, like went to the Columbia School of Journalism, really wanted us to get scoops, and we had for at least a short while, uh, management that understood the value of actually reporting news

and not caring about the reaction from quote unquote gamers. Right. Um, however, that did not make us very advertiser friendly. So now where we are at with Kataku after everyone that we worked with has left, essentially. Yeah. They're in an environment where they're like, what advertisers want is not news on how badly the industry is doing.

What they would prefer is guides and hype and what are gamers want, what are gamers talking about, you know. I like reporting on fandom because I do think that the cultural impact of gaming is really fascinating. And frankly, I did not realize when we started aftermath that we'd be doing journalism. that is actually quite important in understanding the slow dissolution of democracy in America. But it certainly seems like it has been. Right. You know, I think that it's worth contextualizing that gaming has often been a canary in the coal mine for the slow dissolution of democracy and of, you know, these cultural movements that... Can you elaborate?

Well, Elon Musk. Gamergate. Yeah. Literally Gamergate. And actually, Nathan, and both of you split this question, I think, would be good. Can you describe GamerGate for people that were outside of it? GamerGate was kind of the first, like, real reactionary movement in video games. Basically, I mean, I had a lot of personal experience.

Yeah, you had a little bit of a part of it. Yeah, so the short version is there was a, you know, prominent indie game developer named Zoe Quinn, and she and I ended up dating for a minute. And gamers took this to me, or well, not gamers, basically, she had a jilted X. who published a manifesto about her. Right. And which he claimed, among other things, that she had, you know,

effectively slept with me for positive coverage of her game. When that never actually happened, there was no such coverage, it was all bullshit. But a lot of people, a lot of gamers who were already after her, there had been this whole,

like, heat movement against her, even before this. But they latched onto this, and it became their plausible deniability. And so they started saying, oh, it's about ethics and games journalism. We got to fix this. And then all of these other people from outside of video games latched onto that.

That's where you got people like Milo Yiannopoulos. That's where you've got a lot of like Breitbart's notability in that era. Yeah. And I think that's when a lot of these people in the conservative movement realized, oh, like this is a perfect seedbed for the future of conservatism. And the future of harassment. We can grab people right here. No, you can literally brute force a reality is what they learned.

The things that they claim and you will still see people claim these things on the internet, none of these things are true. None of them are approvable. None of them are anywhere near provable. There is no review of Zoe's game that Nathan wrote. It does not exist. And they will never show it to you. And what's insane as well is there are actual issues in games children with me.

I mean, like I'm not saying what magazine I'm talking about or indeed who this was said to, but I know multiple different games covers of games magazines for certain PC games magazines that were bartered with drugs. and where scores were raised to please publishers and raised to please advertisers. These are the actual fucking issues. Or even just sort of the like parasitic relationship. Game devs, especially the higher up in management you go,

they consider the games press to just be a PR wing of their same industry. So the idea that we are journalists and we do not have the same goals as they do, which is to please developers and help make sure that their games sell, that is considered like really, really hostile. And it is something that you have to explain and re-explain over and over again. I don't care if your game sells well. Like, I'm sorry, I want games to do well, but I'm not doing PR for you. That is not what I want to do.

Also, there's already, like a lot of these games already have these massive marketing budgets anyway. Yeah. The press is not a big needle mover there. But what a lot of people want the press to be, whether they are executives or whether they're gamers, is this like mouthpiece for the industry. Like going back to, you know, those like law or those court cases against games as a whole and things like that. They want industry advocates. They're still stuck in this mindset from like 30 years ago of like the industry needs defending.

It's just a little guy. And it's like, no, it's not. No, you can't simultaneously be quote bigger than Hollywood and just be a little guy that needs me. You know, I love video games. I love the culture of video games in a lot of ways. I love, I think play is a fundamental part of human life. that we all need more of, especially the more bleak it. If you have imagination, then you can imagine a better world.

It also feels like we fundamentally got away from the thing that games is, which is escape. Yeah. Like, I don't, it's not that I'm ashamed of being a gamer. I have plenty of other things I'm ashamed of. But it's the sense that, like, I do this to try and not, like, not think about it. I will say, however, like, Bellatro, if anyone knows the Bellartro developer, Balatro developer, welcome on Better Offline. Official endorsement.

Belartre is incredible. Such a fucking good game. Belatro, I also got me through like mental health things. Just I was able to, there's an EMDR effect, I think. But nevertheless, these games are meant to be, if not a distraction, something you escape into. Even if you're not escaping life. But it's like people want them to mean something else. Fiction is transformative.

I was thinking there's a big indie game hit that is really depressing and sort of about the experience of living under lay capitalism. It's an indie game. It's a visual novel. It's not mechanics heavy. It's very story heavy. But it became an enormous indie hit with a very big sort of unexpected fandom. Because it describes an experience that people have. And they love feeling like the misery and stress and pain that they are being told by so many different forces doesn't exist and doesn't matter. They love being told, yes, it does matter. Your personhood does matter. The things you experience in the world. do matter and have significance. Being able to experience that is something that brings us closer together as a society and allows us to, again, just start to imagine, what if the world didn't have to be like this? Right. You know, that's what all media, all forms of entertainment can give you. And I do feel like by becoming an industry that is chasing a bigger and bigger, number more than anything else, you do lose side of that. That, like, art can't just be measured in dollars.

Art is something that touches you and changes you. Yeah. I mean, I think that the, yeah, the big issue is that games aren't supposed to be anything, especially not at this point. Yeah, it's a form. And also, like, there are so many of them. So, last year, almost 20,000 games came out on Steam. Jesus.

Right? 20,000. And with that in mind, like, the fact that there's a reactionary movement going around saying, oh, you know, this game can't be this. It can't have like a black person. It can't portray trans issues. It's like, well, why does that matter to you? Also, why there are 19,999 more games over there that aren't doing that.

So we have like 30 years of games which were not bad. On top of that, you were talking about this idea of games is escapism. And it's so funny because this reactionary movement essentially posits that, yes, game should only be escapism and nothing else. Right. They shouldn't have quote unquote political top. topics in them. For example, trans people or black people. But these people have dedicated their lives to fighting a political battle about games. In effect,

shoving their politics into games. That's all they do anymore. And so they're like, games should be escapism, no politics, except for all the time on my terms. You know, for me, a great level of escapeism would be imagining a world where I don't have an annoying conversation with a white person. You know, like that would be. That is completely imaginary, right? You know, that would be a wonderful escape for me. But you would be a wonderful escape for me. do, when you get down to, when you see one of these viral posts that comes across your dash about, or, you know, whatever social media figure you're on, and they are so upset about a promo image for a game because the example character they've shown is a black person. You realize that

the escapism that these people want to experience is an escape from black people. And it's just, they don't want to have to see a black person. And that is like an inherently political things to say. That is an endorsement of white supremacy. Yeah. It's an endorsement of an ethno state. Yeah. It's very fucking frustrating as well because I don't know, maybe they could learn to be in a situation with a black person, but they're like, no, no, no, I couldn't possibly.

Wait, wait, wait, there's an option buried in these menus that allows me to have trans-like features, and fuck no. I can't even consider a world where that's an option. Given the choice of a they-them pronoun pronoun, is something that just terrifies them. Oh, yeah. No, like, there are YouTube videos where these people, yeah, are reduced to, like, actual,

tears because of how upset they are. I love how masculine that is as well. Yeah. Oh, it's crazy. I mean, I could like go off on it. So, so back to aftermath, though, on a more positive note, what are you trying to create with it? You don't need to have like a big vision, but what are you trying to do differently to like Kataku, for example? Um, not destroy our brains and bodies. Number one. Sure. Yeah. Um, I also think we want to acknowledge, like, and embrace the, both editorial and hard scoops and reporting. That was not something I think we did very well embracing the duality of that.

You need news and then also you need to help people interpret and understand the cultural impact of this news. Nathan has been doing an incredible job reporting, just really fucking killing it. I currently have two full-time jobs, so I've been writing less than I'd love to. But really my interest is understanding industry trends and looking at them as sort of long-term research projects

and understanding the way that the world moves as we understand how money flows and moves. And I think that both of these things are equally important. Essentially just even though video games as an industry, people just lie about how much money they make and how culturally important they are, they are now a massive and indelible part of the American entertainment industry and our economy.

They are mainstream. Especially for like, you know, Gen Z, Millennials. Like, we all grew up playing them. They are as much a part of the cultural fabric as any film, as any TV shows, anything else. Yeah. And they need to be covered that way.

And it's so weird to look at, like, major publications, major papers, having almost nobody dedicated to them. Which is Washington Post has one person. Jane Pog. Yep. And even then, Gene doesn't really do hard report. He just does, like, criticism, which is important, but it's not the whole thing. Like, I need a team for that.

Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy, not, Quite unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group. The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation.

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And we'll talk with leading experts like Judd Brewer about anxiety, and John Hirschfield about obsessive-compulsive disorder, and the science of how the brain can change. This is a month of deeply personal and honest conversations about what happens when the brain goes off course and what we can do about it. Listen to Inner Cosmos on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Agency, the ability to know that we're the experts in our own body. On the podcast cultivating her space, Dr. Dom and Terry Lomax create a space where black women can show up fully and be heard. I wholeheartedly think, you know, you hit 30.

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Well, something I like about, like you did this one about Steam, the Steam users and AI. And it was specifically the story is about how, actually, you know, walk it through the next Fest Games part. Why would I read your story to you? Yeah. So basically, right now, Steam is running this promotional event called Next Fest, where there are a ton of demos. Everybody is getting prominent placement for the demos, which will in turn cause people to go check out their games and maybe buy them.

That's really important. And so this time around, people have been scrolling through and seeing a lot of AI art. And they're like, oh, that's not good because that means that a bunch of AI slop is potentially crowding out deserving good games that have been development for a long time and that, you know, have a chance of it attaining real success. And so the thing about that is that, yes, it looks bad, but then at the same time, Steam has this hyper-complicated algorithm that they've been tuning over the years. And so they basically tuned it to change the way that games are seen in the first few days of something like Next Fest.

Right. So that you end up seeing like a random kind of scattering of them in the first few days. Then it becomes personalized. And so basically that sorts out the AI garbage. Right. Because those games, people don't really interact with much. They see them. move on. And so like they've built a system that sort of anticipates AI slop, which is good,

but they still have this larger problem that I think that you see in a lot of industries now in this era of peak content, which is that there's tons of good stuff coming out on Steam all the time. Too much of that for most people to like find what they're really looking for. And then on top of that, you're also competing with all of the old good stuff, which is still on Steam, constantly goes on sale, has bigger name recognition than you. do. And so, like, that's the real battle that people need to be fighting, whereas I think looking at AI on Steam is like this major issue is tempting. And it is to an extent, but it's not kind of the core problem that a lot of developers face. So the reason I brought up this story was to compliment

you is because this is exactly why Aftermath rocks and why I actually think the future of journalism is more, yeah, it's like better offline. Of course it is. But it's things like Aftermath as well, because this isn't just a story about Games culture, which is. the anxiety over AI stop, also the anxiety over indie games not getting the attention they need. It's also an industrial analysis because you've got fucking numbers here and actual view counts. Because to cover the games industry, it seems like much like tech, you need true domain expertise. But you also need industrial Jason Shrier style. And Jason Shriar, by the way, over at Bloomberg legend, got to get him on the show.

It's my fault, Jason. Do you want to know something amazing about Jason? Yes. This is one great Jason's story that he told me right before we left Katakou. I used to sit next to him every day. And he told me, when he first started there, he asked if there was a dress code. And his boss told him no. Right.

So to that effect, he wore basketball shorts, literally every single day. And at his yearly review, his boss came up to him and said, Jason, I did not know that I had a line for dress code. But I realized that my line is, please don't wear basketball shorts literally every day. If anyone from... Didn't he counter this one online at some point? I feel like he added some particulars that Modi of the Lerner. waters of that story a tiny bit. Oh, I see. I see. Every time you see Jason tweet something that pisses you off, I just love imagining him in basketball shorts. That's all. Yeah, but also, I'm remembering

if any of the British Games press are listening to this, we don't, we never dressed that. I dressed like, I was in like a dirty jeans. I'm actually in dirty jeans now. I realized this. We just like, people dressed like, I guess we didn't see their legs because it's England. It was cold. But I feel like that would, that's the difference of the British gaming press. They would just look like creatures. No, what Kieran Gillen said is about, I love Gillen. He's such a sweetie pie. He said in what, when his little manifesto he wrote, like, I don't know, it's like 20 years ago.

New games journalism. He said, I love Kieran, but I fucking hated that. He said something about, there were two models of games journalism when he was working there. And it was the U.S. model, which was a lot of like car journalism, which is also pretty fraught. And there was the UK model, which is a lot more like music journalism, which now does not really exist in America anymore. Right. And the US model, which was all about stats and statistics and numbers and products. And products, uh, that model won out eventually. And you can see how much it has went out because now it's, it's only about toys. Like we talk about games as if they are toys

and you evaluate them and you make guides about them and that's pretty much it. I, um, I remember why pissed me off because he fucking worked a PC gamer, which was exactly what you just described. That's why he left and made Rockbacker shot. And now he, and now he fucking writes amazing comedy. The power fantasy is so fucking good. It's really good. It's great. But no, I was going to say in line with a lot of that and the way that I think games journalism

kind of, you know, continued to mature along those lines and mostly considering games to be these disposable products and like, you know, a lot of sites consider like posting about a trailer to be news. The thing that I think Aftermath does that we really focus on doing is contextualizing a lot of the news, especially the harder news, something like the WB layoffs. And contextualizing it, I think, with the kind of feeling it deserves, something that I think you also do really well with all of your different projects. You know, well, people find it very cathartic to have people confirm what they feel about the world, which is things are stuck in our back. But with facts. But also, sometimes they don't, yeah, with facts. But also sometimes they don't recognize how bad things are.

they need to be told. That was my point in that WB piece, which the headline for those who don't know is just fuck WB. And fuck WB by the way. Yeah, literally just fuck WB. And it goes into all the reasons why they deserve to be fucked. Because they've been mismanaging their business horribly and treating people and their various properties is disposable

and like doing it in these ways that are very avoidable. They are an expression of the way that the tech industry as a whole has changed how employment works and changed how companies understand value. you and it is disgusting to watch it happen in something that's very important to me, which is the world of art. Like, I was a cinema studies major in college. I had these whole highfalutin dreams of being a gallery, a curator, etc., etc.

These things really matter to me. Like, human expression really, really matters to me. And the wonderful history of American cinema is just being flushed down the fucking toilet. And it feels like they're doing the same thing in games and in tech and everything. because not to tie it back to my own bullshit, but it's the Google search thing, it's the Facebook thing, it's the thing that we fell in love

with the idea of games. I guess it's more what, it's more death by a thousand cuts with games. Yeah. Except sometimes the cuts are larger, but it's like watching, like Monolith, for example. Monolith also, I swear

Monolith had something to do with like free space as well. It was like, pollution entertainment. Like we've watched it. It's been this slow burn where you'd see these amazing games come out and then the studio would just disappear.

or they've got dog shit. And it seems like it's just this problem of CEOs. It's these executives who have nothing to do with games. They don't play games. They wouldn't dare touch these games. They've got important things to do, like go to lunch and write emails. Or, I mean, okay, so actually, this is a good example.

There are CEOs who at least, like, pretend to or do, but they still make the same decisions. Somebody like Phil Spencer is a great example of this. He's like the gamer CEO. He's at Microsoft. But is he actually like a gamer, though? Yes. I mean, he like, his Xbox Live stats were, like, public for a long time.

You can see how many hundreds of hours he's putting into games. That makes it worse. But yeah, exactly. It makes it way worse. Because what that suggests is that, like, the problem is that these people is not that these people are not gamers. Right. The problem is these structural incentives that a company being an executive that you will

still, even appreciating the art form, cut thousands of people loose from their jobs. Right. And, like, make decisions that actively harm games and their quality. Isn't the problem also that games are just insanely expensive to build, though? The AAA gaming is, are we? not running towards this unsustainable point? Putting aside a word of it has it. It's already understandable.

There was that New York Times article about graphics and games that I read a few weeks ago, maybe last month. That was about like there is so much money being pumped into, these the Spider-Man games, for it as an example, realistic one-to-one fidelity of the world we see outside of our window, including physics systems that replicate real-life physics. Right. And there, we are at a point where that last 10, it's like, self-driving cars that last 10% may never be solved because our human brain interprets and

processes things so much faster than a computer program and a computer can just in general. And these studios put so much money into creating that thing and players don't notice or care. Players literally don't care whether or not this happens. There's documentation about this for Spider-Man too in particular. Which is a really good game. It's a good game. But Insomniac, the developer of that game, suffered a leak a little while ago. And in some of their own conversations about the game, they were like, yeah, our budget for this sequel was $300 million or somewhere thereabouts, almost double what the original game cost.

But we don't think that players actually notice just how much better the graphics are. We actually think that they take either version and be fine with it. And so at that point, why are we spending all of this money on increasing the fidelity? what is the end that we're trying to achieve here. And then meanwhile, the other wild part of it, all of this to me is that the current like video game juggernauts for Gen Z

are like Minecraft and Roblox. These games do not have high fidelity graphics at all. No, Roblox, in fact, it is a kind of disgusting exploitative model where they rely on community developers to make games for them. Oh yeah, they get child labor. And children.

And children mostly. And the split. Yeah, and the split is one of the most predatory in the industry in terms of how much money Roblox will make off of your game versus how much money you make off your game. What's insane is Roblox only loses money as well. They're horribly unprofitable. It's just ridiculous. I feel like we need to like have a referendum on the CEOs on a very basic level of put aside all the moral stuff that's very obvious. Let's just be like, you fucking suck at this. Right. No, when we started our own company, what we marveled at for a long time was like, no, we don't have MBAs and yes, the money stuff is kind of. kind of difficult, but actually getting people to visit our website and trust our reporting was extremely easy. Like the actual day-to-day put blocks on the site, run a business, promote ourselves.

That's so, so, so easy. And there were so many people at Geo Media that made so much money that couldn't do things like there was an HR lead that couldn't attach. She couldn't put an attachment on an email. She made a quarter million of a dollar, a quarter million of dollars a year. That's insane. I hated her so much. That is insane. Yeah. It seems like... I'm not being a published author and not even making close to that.

It's so cool. What's fucking insane as well is it's like, this is the larger problem. This is... I know that someone's going to email me like, the problem's capitalism. Wow. By the way,

if you're one of the... I don't know. I'm acting like I have derision from... I love my listeners. Like, for the most part, it's just I get one person... I'm going to start emailing you like this all the time. Like, actually...

It's a silly capitalism. I fucking know. But it's just... This is actually something that really frustrated me at a former game. publication I may have been up, where it was just like the people writing were fucking amazing. They loved games. I mean, I can talk about log, for example, disappointment on Blue Sky or

Steve Hogarty, a PC zone. Yeah. Will Porter as well, like, loved games. It was so, like, it was a real joyous energy to it. And then there was just this mandate from above where it was just, yeah, well, we got to make sure we sell more issues. So you got to put this on the cover. It was never something fucking interesting. You get an occasional one, like I did my one cover about the third. World of Warcraft expansion. That was fun. But it's like the things, the people driving the incentives are not people that I even understand the customer so much. They're just like, I need to resemble the thing that my boss wants me to. And then I will be the best at my job, even if I'm not good at it at all. Like, David Zaslav, I have a lot of thoughts about what could

happen to him that I won't be sharing. Have I introduced you to my concept of the well-based system of justice? You got a deep, deep well. And, like, you just throw him down there. I mean, like Samara from the ring. Like, she lived down there. She didn't die right away, right? She had a nice time down there. You know, we'll feed him sandwiches,

a little picky basket every once in a while. And he can try to get out. Maybe he'll succeed. But he'll just have to just repent. This is all happening in Minecraft and or robots. Yeah, this is all parody. This is parody. Yes.

This is parody. But it's just fucking frustrating as well because, despite all this frustration and annoyance, we've had some incredible fucking games the last year. like Hades and Hades and Super Giant is just an incredible incredible studio. They're having like a weird dust up about voice acting and not working with like SAG for reasons that they weren't. I actually super giant.

A bit of quick insight. I like, because they put out this statement. Basically a voice actor came out and said that super giant was considering not renewing with them over like their insistence on having a SAG contract. And so then Super Giant put out a statement saying like actually we have some of the best protections against AI and things like that in the industry. And like, we're just not working with SAG for reasons. And they did not state those reasons, which is insane to me.

And SAG currently is on strike specifically in the video game industry over AI protections and voice acting. And just reading this statement, yeah, we have respected and will continue to respect any actor needing to pause work during the ongoing SAG AFRA after video game strike, while none of our games have ever been subject to the SAGAFTA contracts for a variety of reasons. There we go, which, what does that mean? We wish that after the best. What does that mean?

And so I reached out to Greg Casavin, who's the like creative director over at Super Giant and who I've known for a lot of years and asked that. I was like, can you provide any of the reasons? And he was basically like, no. And I was like, oh, thank you, man. I appreciate the comment. And it's just like, it's frustrating because Super Giant, I assume, makes a shit ton of money. Oh, I mean, Hades was a massive, massive hit for that. They're also a very small studio relative to, I mean, they have a 30 people.

not a lot of overhead essentially. I'm not receiving the money there. Where's that going? It's not even like the CEO makes more money if they do that. It's confusing. And also it's like it's a real bummer because otherwise they've been amazing in terms of like making games the right way. Like they are a very people focused studio.

I interviewed them years ago about like all the ways that they like for example, they have mandatory vacation. So if you reach the end of the year and you haven't taken your vacation time, you have to just like take a month off. And they do that kind of a thing. to describe for the listeners who haven't played Hades or Hades 2, which is coming out next year probably. Yeah, it's an early access right now. You can play it. This game is both mechanically perfect. Hades 2, I would argue, isn't. I think Hades 2 tried. I actually really like Hades 2.

I love it. No, I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it in that there are some bits that. Also, it's earlier. Hades 2 isn't finished yet. Yeah, yeah. Nevertheless, the point is, these games are mechanically perfect. They sound incredible. Voice acting is amazing. They look, they feel amazing. There are tiny little systems. And on top of that, they're incredibly diverse. They prove that you can do diversity in this way that's very, like, sincere. And it doesn't feel... And it fits the setting. And it fits the setting is like Greek mythology.

And it's really cool. Yeah. Yeah. The whole plot of Achilles and Patroclus in Hades just melts my heart. It really is affecting. Nathan and I are both big fans of the game Pire, which is the game that came out right before, which is like... Still the best supergeny.

An NBA jam, essentially. With wizards. With wizards. And then also it's a story of... of sincere revolution that asks you the player what it would mean to overcome oppression and why you would fight for it. And it is a really affecting and meaningful storyline. One of the most amazing things about Super Giant is they have this bespoke relationship with Darren Corp, a singer-songwriter. Oh my God. And the music he makes where these games drive me to tears. I love them. I actually really

want to talk about Darren Corp real quick. So Hades 2 has a boss. against this band of sirens. And there are two different metals, like metal adjacent songs. One that's about how much they hate you for killing. And how bad your hair looks and what they're going to do to you? And these songs are fucking bangers.

They're great. They have blast beats in one. It's fucking sick. Bear in mind, too, that they had to write these songs with the expectation that because of the game's run-based structure, that you do the same thing over and over and over. Yeah. They will hear these songs like a hundred times.

So they got to write something that they know you're not going to be irritated by hearing this many times. No, and they're catchy. Which onto itself is this like level of craft that's so different than just writing a song. There's like a little bit of a crossover with like musical theater with Duren Corp where the songs are people sing in these games when they are called to such a high level of emotion. And then they anticipate that a level of emotion also from you, the player. So that by the time you get to Scylla and the Sirens in your run again, you will be, your blood will be pumping. so hot that you just want to hear them burst into song. And it's fucking great. And also, I'm ranting about this. I don't care. You little pixel slop this up. But what's also great

about this boss fight is it's three different things you're fighting. And as you, one is the drama, one is the guitarist and one is the singer. And if you kill off the drummer, you no longer hear the drum baby. And it's like, it's beautiful. And the reason I bring this up as well is, it's proof of what you can do in games and with technology when you just fucking think about what the medium is. And it's so expertly done and it shows so much love. And it frustrates me because I know we've been quite negative today, but there are so many signs that games can be so much better and that there are these incredible, like, Hades 2 is, even in early access, has so many bits to what you're just like, wow, not only do you love games, but you want this to be cool. You have genuine creative

expression that cannot be done anywhere else. Yes, in no other form. Like, I mean, this is why I talk about Dwar Fortress, like, near constantly. It's like, this is a game made by people that are clearly just obsessed with Lord of the Rings. But they also are obsessed with fantasy and building a world and just native narrative experiences. Look, the way that you as a human being create a story inside of your mind. Yeah. And, like, you have this little group of dwarves, and they all have distinct personalities that are

all procedurally generated. They all have memories. They have all lived in a world that has built itself up over, you know, in-game, like 250 in-game years. So there is history. When you ask your dwarves to engrave carvings into the fortress you build inside of a mountain, they will build carvings of things that they remember from life. Like when your mayor got elected, et cetera, et cetera. So as... That's what I'm going to do before I die. I'm going to carve Eric Adams into something. Oh, God, yes. Just carve... My main memory. Your number one memory is Eric Adams. But no, I remember I played a game once and there was a dwarf child that was just mad all the time.

And I was like, dwarf child, you can't keep hitting people with an axe. Like, what's going on with you? Oh, God. Wokeness gone wild. Well, it was because after a big orc attack at my fortress, a goblin attack, his father had been in the military and his father died. And there weren't enough dwarfs after this attack to clean up all the. corpses, so this dwarf child had to watch his father rot away at the floor. And that permanently changed his personality. So now he's angry all the time. And this is all within this game,

Dwarf fortress. Yes. And I think that this is the thing. I refuse to be fully nihilistic about this stuff because even with the Slop Kings in power, it seems like cool shit is still being built. And so as we wrap up, Gator first, is there anything you're really looking forward to? Is there like a game coming out or something very recent you've played? You've kind of hint. I mean, It's avowed. I'm playing a vowed nonstop. What is the vowed? Avout is the new game from Obsidian, the most recent game that people remember from them. And what did it say? They've made tons of incredible RPG. Follow New Vegas is, I mean, Follow New Vegas is just a precious jewel. I love that game. It is, it is worth, the three

hours I spent modding the game so it would not crash when I tried to play it on my PC. So it wasn't an Obsidian game anymore. Sorry. But it avowed, is it takes a lot of the systems that they developed for the outer worlds and refines them. And then also you get really, really excellent character writing all of the time. There's a character you meet right away in a vow named Kai, who is like a fish person. And he's always got a little sarcastic quip to say about something. But he's also like a deeply empathetic. Like he has like a real tangible personality traits that make me excited to talk to him and hear him react to the things that I do.

And another wonderful thing about this is the combat stuff is really, really fun. But the choices in the quest that you're forced to make, they do not present a path to you that will not piss someone off. So you have to sit there. Looks like my life. Yeah. Sorry. This is the fate of the smiling man.

You just have to think to yourself, what are my convictions? And that is something that games can really make you confront within yourself. What do I believe about something? And you play as an envoy of an empire. And I found that what I have been doing in this game is just, you know, I met up with the rebels. I had the option to kill someone who attempted to assassinate me or not. And when I heard that he realized that assassinating me wasn't the right choice to then write the right way to defeat the empire that is trying to take over the living lands, I decided to forgive him because I don't actually have any beep with them.

And I don't think the things that the empire are doing in this land, me, the person, me, Gita, I don't think the things that they're doing, the attempt at colonizing this beautiful lush landscape that is fighting against them, I don't think that that is right. And so other characters have judged me for this, but I decided, you know what, I side with the rebels. I want the empire to dissolve. And that is how I'm going to play this game. That's the way this character is going to play this game. And this is on PC and Xbox. Yes. It's fantastic. Yeah, it's really good. So Nathan, what about you? What game? Um, so I recently played a demo for a game called Skin Deep.

Skin Deep is, I would describe it as a like slapstick stealth immersive sim game. The idea being that like you are somebody who works in a very wacky form of insurance where basically you get frozen and stored aboard ships that have important cargo on them. And if somebody breaks into that ship, then they unfreeze you and you run around and take care of whoever's on there. Okay. And it's really, it's just really clever. It's one of those games that again, it could only be a game.

So like it thinks about all these. things that other games of this sort don't. So, like, your character is barefoot for whatever reason. And so, like, if there's glass around, you can step on the glass. And then you can, like, pry it out of your foot and use it as a weapon if you want to. But also, like, the combat is so different from what you expect in these games. And that, like, instead of you being this master of, like, martial arts, you have to, like, briefly incapacitate somebody with any number of comedy items.

Like, you can throw a banana peel and they'll slip and fall on it. And then you, like, go jump on their back. And, like, you're trying to wrestle them into something and they're, like, trying to push you off. You're not, like, physically stronger than them. And so it descends into just, like, lunacy and madness almost every time that you are trying to bring somebody down. And just to be clear, what platform is this on? It's PC. So it's not VR or anything.

You're just doing this with, yeah. That's fucking bonkers. And it's from this one studio that actually, they're called Blendo. They've been around for a while. Oh, I love Blendo games. Yeah, they're amazing. Blendo is amazing. And they, they've always been really smart about, like, integrating cinematic techniques that other video games don't.

They made this one game forever ago called 30 Flats of Loving that relies a lot on like jump cuts. Yeah. In a first person setting, which feels, I think, unnatural to gamers who are used to continuity in a first person game. 30 Flights of Loving is an experience worth having. It's a very short narrative game. And I, if you want to understand just like how games work, how the moving image creates narrative creates associations, it is very instructive and it's also really affecting. Yeah, cool. And so these developers are also really good.

surprisingly good at not making just like on rail cinematic experiences, but also like these really intricate systems. And that's what Skin Deep is. It's this game where so many funny, weird things can happen. Like, you know, and you can replay levels and figure out all this stuff. Like the first time that I played the demo level, I nearly like lost and, you know, I sucked at it. And the second time I realized, oh man, I can break the glass on this spaceship and open it to the vacuum of space. and so I can go around like wreaking havoc on these guards by just like subjecting them to like a James Bond like a moonraker situation.

Yeah. Yeah. That's so beautiful. So, and that's the thing. I really want to leave the listeners here with the sense that there's still cool shit happening. Oh, yeah. Everywhere. And there is hope to be had.

Gita, where can people find you? Oh, you can find me on Aftermath. That site, mainly. I'm ExoXOXO Gossip Gita on social media, Instagram and Blue Sky basically is where I post at this point. But yeah, everything I write will be on Aftermath, so look after me there. Yeah, Aftermath.com.com. And then I'm at Nathan Grayson on Blue Sky. I'm glorious curly mop on Instagram.

And then I also have a book called StreamBig, The Triumph and Terminals of Twitch and the stars behind the screen. And you can get that wherever books are sold. Now, I'm going to kind of force you all to do this. I need you to go to Aftermath.com. I need you to pay them. I need you to buy Nathan's book. Ideally, I need you to go and make your friends by it as well, and you also subscribe to Aftermath.

I say this from the bottom of my heart to leave this episode. Games Journal, me... Jesus Christ. I'm not cutting it. Games journalism genuinely made me who I am, and people like Will Porter, Steve Hogan, and Log, of course, John Blythe, really changed. And even Kieran Gillen, who's become more of a friend since I left anyway. And it's lovely to have you two here, because games journalism is very meaningful.

and I still don't think it's where it needs to be, but I think the aftermath's bringing it there. You all love me, though, so you know where to find my shit. Please keep downloading this show. Please tell people to download it, too. I need the downloads. If I don't get them, I'll die. I love you all.

She keeps wasting away in front of my eyes. I'm literally dying, but I do love you all. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Mattersowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Mattersowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-K-I-com. You can email me at E-Z at Better Offline.com or visit Better Offline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter.

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