Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast - Jason Schreier Makes an Enemy Out of Blizzard - Kinda Funny Gamescast

Episode Date: October 15, 2024

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What's up everybody? Welcome to the kind of funny games cast for Tuesday, October 15th, 2024. I'm one of your host, Greg Miller, alongside Forbes 30 under 30, aka the second best baby blues in San Francisco, aka the married one at Tim Getty's. It's my mom's birthday. Happy birthday, Mom. Happy birthday. Tim's mom. And, you know, congratulations to you. I haven't been on content with you or talked to you. you're one-on-one with Gia. Very heartfelt, very, you know, emotionally taxing, both for you guys and for me, obviously chronicling Gia's a cancer journey for the first time. And as a cancer survivor, a lot of things you guys hit on, it definitely had me tearing up in the car.

So I'm glad you guys did that. It was cathartic. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to it. And thank you all for listening to it and being so supportive as well. It means a lot to her.

She's definitely been texting me a lot today about how responsive everyone's been. and she's feeling, she's at work right now at crying a whole bunch. Yeah. You know, that's how it goes. Of course, next to you is Forbes 30 under 30, aka the New York Game Awards nominated, AKA soccer poppy.

Blessing Eddie O. Ye, Jr. Happy birthday, Tim's mom. Happy birthday, Tim's mom. And then rounding out our group is the number one video games journalist. The number one Bloomberg journalist, I'm saying it. I'm putting it out there.

And of course, the author of Plain Ice, the rise, fall, and future of Blizzard. and trier. The enemy of Blizzard. I gave you a chance to change the headline. I'm sure, like you said, if somebody's mad at you over there, it's a good head. I'll take them all on, is what you said. Somebody's always mad at me at pretty much every company, so I'm used to it. How does that feel? How does it feel to be the most hated man in video games? Why is that? Well, Bobby Kodick isn't in video games anymore, so you know what I mean? You're saying. You're saying the ranking was Bobby Kodick and then me. It's always fun to drop your name in a conversation and see how people react. And how do people react? I mean, I've seen the gamut. If they're on our side of it, they love you.

They're great, you know what I mean? But then when you get over to developer size, it's either like, oh, yeah, he does a lot of great work. Oh, my God. This one time he did X, Y, and Z. I'll take it. I'll take it. It is what it is.

At least they're talking, you know. Yeah, exactly. It is what it is. You're a personality. I like, my philosophy is always make the right enemies. So I think that if you're a reporter and you're not making a few enemies, you might not be reporting all that much. Whereas you shouldn't be pissing off every single person,

but you should be making the right enemies. That's my philosophy. For sure. I'm excited to see how many enemies this book made you. I'm excited to see how many enemies I make from this podcast. Who do you want to take on? Give them his one. Let's get, can we get like a wheel, like a spinning wheel?

Just to talk shit about specifically. Well, we'll see how many you come up with, of course, because this is the kind of funny games cast each and every weekday, four, sometimes five. best friends gather on this table coming to talk about the things they love, like, and sometimes hate in video games. It's the biggest topics addressing our industry, reviews, previews, amazing books. We're going to talk about all of it here and the biggest topics of the day. If you like that, of course, pick up the Kind of Funny membership over on patreon.com slash Kind of Funny games.

You can get all of our shows ad free, get good karma for supporting an 11-person small business. And of course, get all of our afternoon podcasts live as we record them and get me. a daily video slash vlog slash podcast where I tell you whatever's going on in my life and mostly answer questions. What's today is about? I haven't done it yet. What's going to be about? Well, it might be about you guys because I was, you know, when I'm listening to a good

podcast, I don't do the Greg way in the car and I was listening to you. I had the second half of your thing. And then I did the second half of a death sex and money I'd been sitting on a while. So I was listening to some good stuff. I was feasting out there with my ears. All right. Don't worry about it. So we'll see.

We're going to record it after this and after lunch. So it's breaking news for all of you as well. Remember, of course, no bucks tosser away. It's no big deal. You can get each and every episode of the Kind of Funny Games cast live as we record it on YouTube. On YouTube.com slash Kind of Funny Games, Twitch.tv. TV slash Kind of Funny Games and podcast services around the globe. No matter where you support, we hope you enjoy it and use the super chat function over on YouTube.

If you're live and super chatting, you can have your questions and comments read here. Just like David Short, who superchatted already and said, I don't read books often. And I housed this Play Nice in a night. amazing jobs. Listen, housed it. Just destroyed it. And then Raphael says, yes, blessing, rocked that shirt.

Oh, thank you. It's a good-looking shirt. Again, I already talked about it. Jason, you declined on games daily. Do you want to feel blessings biceps now in the games cast? They're right there. I'm not trying to make you uncomfortable. When I say making the right enemies,

blessing is not one of them. Oh, you wouldn't make an enemy out of me. Greg, Greg, I've been... Somebody needs to report on these guns. Okay, so I have to say I'm 37 years. I made it so far without being canceled. And part of that is by not groping people, sure, especially while live in front of an audience.

But when their boss says it's okay. Yeah. I think that adds another layer to it. Oh my. You're out of the bear! Go to the expulsion room! I can't deal with this right now. Anyway, I digress. You love it here.

You couldn't do without me. Let me feel these biceps too. You know what I mean? Anyways, like I said, support us wherever you can. We appreciate it because we're an 11-person small business all about cool live talk shows. Let's do some housekeeping. In space, no one can hear Nick scream, especially unless, I should say, he's streaming in alien isolation on Twitch.tv. TV slash Kind of Funny Games. Then everyone can hear Nick scream. Join Mike, Nick and Andy this Wednesday

for a special spooky stream as they attempt to survive alien isolation. Come out and support us and we'll go late Wednesday, October 16th at noon or whenever the games cast ends, which I appreciate. If that wasn't enough for you, the New York Game Awards nomination, personality. Blessing Adioia Jr. is going to New York Comic-Con this weekend in hosting the Secret Level panel with Tim Miller and Dave Wilson. The panel is Saturday at 6.30 p.m. Eastern. Come on, dude. That's so cool. Very exciting stuff. Oh, yeah. What can you tell us? What's the, what's the, what are you going to do? I can't say anything. It's exciting. It is exciting. It is also. Very proud of, yeah. Of course, after this, you can get a stream if you didn't know,

because this is all live talk shows all day long. We already did games daily. We talked about Bandai Damco's expulsion rooms. The stream today is going to be a sponsor segment for Run from Mummies. And then it's going to be some New World Eternal with me and Joey. Very excited to play that. If you're a kind of funny member, of course, you'll get Greg Way momentarily. And thank you to our Patreon

producers Delaney Twining and Carl Jacobs. They were brought to you by New World of Tournament, but we'll tell you about that later for now. Let's begin with what is and forever will be. Topic of the show. Topic of the show is Play Nice Jason Shriar's new

book. You did it. You wrote a book. Another one. I did. I have three times. Oh, my God. Can you believe it? Because I, like, I never, well, I wrote a kid's book. That's different, though. Like, a real book, you know what I mean? With real words and real work. You know what I mean? I should

write kids books. Every time, so I have two kids, five and two, and my wife and I take them to the bookstore all the time. We have a local indie bookstore that we love. And every time we look through, like, the kids' books, my wife is like, you should just do this. Like, it seems so much easier. Just make it up off top of your head. Yeah.

Get it done in a weekend. Yeah, man. No, it's cool. I mean, so my first two books were both kind of anthology styles. They were both compilations of different stories, whereas this one is one big story, so different sort of challenge. But, yeah, it was fun. It's satisfying.

I mean, look, people certainly do not write books for the money. So you have to get a lot of satisfaction out of doing it because you guys might know this, but books do not make any money. But I find it personally rewarding and enjoyable. and so I hope people enjoy it too. I hope people enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it because I do enjoy. I especially enjoy the reporting part,

which is when you get to just make phone calls and pick people's brains, like ask smarter people questions about things they know that you don't know. Like that, to me is the coolest thing. When we talked on Games Daily about your path to video game journalism, we talked about you always wanting to write.

When you started doing the video game journalism stuff, was this always something you thought about doing, not the Blizzard part, but writing books? about video games or was it that you were getting into so many themes and so many juicy stories that you knew you needed to get somewhere with a larger format? I always knew I wanted to write books. I didn't think they would be like I didn't think I would do anything about video games until until I started like more seriously embarking on this career and then what happened is by the way quick side note I said this before we started but those of you who were tuned in for the for the kind of funny daily saw me say like oh it just got some dues on my phone that was it just went public, which is riot laying people off.

So if you want to see a little bit out of the sausage is made, you can see me get a text on my phone and then it goes public. Anyway, I'm going to put it in games daily for tomorrow right now. So, uh, more sausage. I will not be here. So you'll have to do that. That's fine. You'll have to feel that one without me.

Um, so yeah, so in 2015, I published a story on Kotaku about the making of destiny and about the story of that game, the kind of behind the scene story of the story and why it was such a shit show. And, um, after that, uh, this guy emailed me who was now my, agent Charlie and he was like hey what if you do a book that like includes that like that is like a story like this and his initial pitch was like the kitchen confidential of video games which is not at all what my book turned out to be but I wound up being like oh okay what if I do like an anthology of game development stories and so he and I took that around and that's what turned into

blood sweat and pixels there's a little bit of resistance from game from book publishers because the idea of writing video game books video game nonfiction books is so just kind of out of their wheelhouse, which is strange because there are a lot of, like, good tech company books, like, I don't know, like books about Uber and Facebook and Twitter and stuff like that, and they all do really well. But for some reason, the idea of a video game industry book blew, like, baffled the minds of people.

But I eventually did get it landed at Harper Collins, and that kind of sent me on this career path of writing books. I mean, I've just done it ever since. Have your books found success outside of your, the normal audience of people that are interested in video that is a great question so can i okay so if you really want to like set me off okay so one enemy you know how we oh he's made his worst enemy one of my enemies is barns and noble and barns and noble is one of my enemies not because they're a bad store in fact i love them as a store and go to them all the time and i'm actually

quite supportive of he's walking around cursing the entire time you're turning books upside This is like my personal vendetta like bugbear. Like I can't stand it. Bruns and overristenable takes my books and buries them in the video game section next to the Minecraft strategy guys. Oh yeah. And like that happened for the first two. And ahead of this one, I like sent a billion emails to my editor or to my editor or my agent, my publisher. And I was just like, like this cannot happen.

Like this book, play nice. It is a business story. I wanted to be in the business section with other like nonfiction stories that would be appealing beyond people who go shopping for Final Fantasy art books. like, come on. And so, of course, Barnes and Noble sticks it in the video game section. Sounds of bitches. Just nobody understands. Like, games, still to the stay, the video game, like, industry and coverage of it is just, like, isolated from everything else. And it's just, like, people just don't get it. Um, so I think it would reach a lot more people if it was actually in the right section. Like, imagine if they stuck, like, you guys know bad blood, that book about

Theranos and like the crazy story, Elizabeth Holmes and her big scam. Imagine if they stuck that on like the healthcare section. It was like about how to like next to the books about how to like take care of your hygiene or something. Like it's it's ridiculous. It drives me crazy. Anyway, I could go on for like 45 minutes about Barnes & Noble.

Well outside of Barnes & Noble though, like on on have you found success on Amazon or like where are where's the success here? Yeah. Well, it's hard to. Well, yes. I mean the books are successes. They've all been best sellers. I think this one will be two.

We find out tomorrow. I found out tomorrow. Yeah. But I think that like it's hard to tell. what kind of audience you're reaching with books. There's no, like, demographic information or anything like that. I can barely find out, like, how many, what the sales numbers are. That said, this book was reviewed in the New York Times, which was nice.

That was cool to see. And has definitely gotten, like, I was on NPR, it's definitely gotten some coverage outside of the kind of the standard video game world. So hopefully that'll lead to it kind of breaking out a little bit. And it's also, it's actually very helpful to have this book, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow which I'm sure most people have heard of at this point because that was that really helped penetrate the market and be like oh look you can actually tell interesting stories about the video game world people read that and were like

video games what what have you are you guys actually familiar with tomorrow's yeah Gia read it and like that's the thing it's like she's a avid reader doesn't really care about video games at all but she really loved that and do you think that I could give this to her and that she would be able to I would like to hear her opinion you have to keep me updated if you do Because, yes, that is one of my goals is to reach readers who, like, don't necessarily care about games, but care about good stories. And, yeah, God, like tomorrow and tomorrow, imagine if they stuck that in the freaking video game section of parts of the level.

God, I'm so, so mad. A few date days ago, she grabbed that. And I actually, the one who picked it up and started, I'm halfway through it. I love it. It's so good. Yeah, it's really good. It's, like, I think it's, it's evidence that, like, it doesn't matter what the subject is. A good story is a good story.

and hopefully that helps convince the world that video game books shouldn't be in the Minecraft gulag. If you're unfamiliar, I just want to toss it out there. Do you know tomorrow and tomorrow tomorrow? So the Good Reads description is, in this exhilarating novel, two friends, often in love, but never lovers, come together as creative partners in the world of video game design,

where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and ultimately a kind of immortality. And the basic idea that I would pitch it as to game people is, It's like imagine these two kids out of college make the biggest indie game of all time. And so it's like chronicling the buildup to that, the success of that, what comes next, their friendship and relationships throughout. It's really good. Well done.

So I was going to ask about the process of writing for a book versus writing for a website. As far as like sourcing processes and, you know, we hear all about like, you know, working at Kotaka or working at Bloomberg. You want to have at least this many sources. You want to make sure they're concrete, you know, X, Y, Z thing. Does that differ when you're writing a full book? it's a little bit more intense i would say i certainly talked to more people so for this book i spoke to about 350 a little bit more people wow um over the course of three years uh and about 300 of them

are blizzard people are kind of like in the periphery in some way people who worked at activision or people who are like like uh blitzchung the guy who was suspended uh the hartston streamer are like um the people who made leroy jenkins for those of you remember that and so on and so It's a trip. Just a heads up. Reading all this and seeing you pull these people in and tie the threads up. That's awesome. It's a fun story.

Yeah. And so definitely more intense. There are things that are kind of, there are a lot of things that are very different from like writing for Bloomberg and a lot of things that are the same. One is that like in book publishing, you, I mean, a lot more people are reading it. I'm getting a lot more feedback. I have what's called like beta readers, which is kind of like beta testers, but they just are reading early drafts of your book. And giving you thoughts. Now, are these your friends or is there's like a service?

Somebody's friends. No, it's friends. It's like friends and colleagues. And sometimes I try to get a mix of people. So some of them aren't like super close friends because I want them to be able to be honest with me. And then my wife is like always always in there too. And she gives a good perspective because she's not a big gamer or anything.

So she gives the non-gamer's perspective. She'll just like highlight things and be like, ugh or like, I don't understand this. And that's very helpful. And in terms of the actual writing and the reporting process, yeah, it's a little bit more intense. You're trying to go into more detail than you would in a Bloomberg story. You're including more, maybe more physical details about like the space or what someone looks like. Or maybe you're going into more kind of beat by beat reporting in a nuance and in-depth way that you wouldn't be able to do for just like a random internet article that has more of a kind of a word count attached to it.

So it's definitely more intense. But in terms of the reporting, it's kind of like, or in terms of the fact checking and the corroboration, it's kind of a similar process because you always want at least a couple of people. It's actually harder because a lot of it is stuff that happened in the past. So like when I was fact checking 90s stuff, I actually had to cut a few anecdotes because like I would hear it from someone, hear something from someone, and then other people wouldn't remember it. And I was like, well, I'm not sure. Like unless I can get, it's one thing if I hear it from two people and then like a third person doesn't remember it because if two people are saying it and they both have kind of similar recollections of what happened, I might feel a little more comfortable with that.

but when only one person remember something, then I'm probably not going to include it. So, yeah, it's got a kind of similar corroboration process. Do you have any of those stories where you're like bummed out that you couldn't include them?

Oh yeah. They were so juicy. Yes, 100%. Yeah, there were a couple. There was one particular story about Starcraft Crunch that I had heard from this one guy and I certainly believe it.

Like, I still believe it. But I just, I'd asked a bunch of people who like were there at the time and none of them recommended it. Or none of them remembered it. So I was like, I don't feel comfortable including this thing.

So, you know, as we've said, you've done two other ones, blood, sweat, and pixels, obviously press reset. Where does the idea for Play Nice begin where you're like, that's a story I want to tell, or what tips you off

and set you down that path? Yeah, so the seeds of this were planted in like 2018. And in 2018 is when I first started reporting on and hearing about Activision's takeover of Blizzard and Activision playing a bigger role in operations of Blizzard.

And so I started reporting that on Katakou, Mike Moreheim, left. He was the CEO of Blizzard for a long time and the co-founder of Blizzard. And I had heard that he left because of Activision and because he was sick of fighting with Bobby Kodick. And that kind of planted the seeds. I'll tell you guys a funny story that you guys will appreciate. In 2018, as I was reporting this, like I was preparing to break this news, Blizzard was kind of pushing back a little bit. And I reached out to Blizzard's comms person, their PR person. And I was like, hey, do you want to do a statement? Do you want to do an interview? Whatever. And he responded

saying one thing. And then the next day I got an email from Activision's, Com's, people and they told me something completely different than what blizzard told me and i responded i sent them both a message and i was like look what i'm writing about is literally happening in front of me right now where you two are at odds with one another so any kind of pushback you want to give me on this story i think might not be correct here i'm seeing it play out i think is that a footnote in the book yeah yeah i really like that and i love the little notes in the book where you're like this and then down here you're like here's my personal story about this is a funny little thing yes um so but it didn't turn into a book idea. Like, I didn't think, like, I'm going to write a book about Blizzard until, as I was

finishing up, press reset, my last book. So, like, early 2021, like, March of 2021, I was like, I sent an email to my agent in my editor. I was like, hey, I want to do this corporate takeover story. And then it wound up evolving into so much more because, of course, one of the biggest things that happened is a few months after I signed my contract to write the book, the California government sued Activision Blizzard for sexual harassment and discrimination. And you must be like, yes. That wasn't my first reaction. I got to say that was not my first reaction. No, I was certainly like, wow, this book just changed a lot as a result of this. The first thing I did, my first reaction was, oh, my God, I have to report on this because I had to, after that hit, I then started immediately, like, dropping everything I was doing for Bloomberg and, like, reaching out to people to do a big story about everything that happened of Bloomberg.

And then, yeah, I knew that it was going to change the nature of this story. And then also, I had originally thought that the book was going to be about, like, modern Blizzard times. And then as I started reaching out to people who were there in the 90s, two things happened. One is that I heard so many interesting stories and anecdotes that I was like, this has to be about, like, I have to include a lot of Blizzard early history in here too. And the second thing is like, I realize that you can't tell the story of Blizzard without that context from the 90s too. And it's impossible to understand like, so there are two aspects of this story, the business story and the culture story. It's impossible to understand the business story, which kind of ends with this Activision takeover and then Microsoft take over. it's impossible to understand that without understanding Blizzard way back in the day. And it's impossible to understand the culture that led to this massive lawsuit and kind of reckoning internally at the company without going back to the 90s and understanding what Blizzard culture was like in the 90s.

So wound up turning like the entire first act of the book is like early days of Blizzard. And I think it makes for a better story than I had originally imagined. A lot of times what happens with these books is they go down paths that you're not even expecting. Well, that was one of the things that I thought was so, well, not even interesting. Like, for me, it was such crazy whiplash of, I started Plain Ice on the plane ride down to go preview vessel of hatred. So I was, like, through the first, like, you know,

it's Alan and Michael, and they're bootstrapping this company and doing all the stuff, and then it was to get there and be on campus. And, like, not have gotten to that in the book yet, but to see, like, where I only, I'm the reading about, you know, as this little seed, and here it is the giant. Did anyone see you holding the book? Well, I didn't bring it on campus. I kept talking about it, but I didn't want to get

confiscated. I didn't want to, I don't want anybody doing that. The Blizzard PR, were they probing you with questions like asking about it? No, I was, they were all super chill about it, but I thought you would really, I took a photo, I never sent it to you. When I got the tour of Blizzard, they took me to the Blizzard library. So the bookmark I was using the entire time was the Blizzard Library.

Amazing. Amazing. Amazing. I was pretty proud of that. I wonder if they're going to put my book in the Blizzard Library. I think, I would hope so, right? Like, I think, like, your book isn't like this cutting takedown of it's a real like this is a weird walk but stick with me uh yesterday there was yet another leak right or a hack right of this uh game freak information and stuff and so we're having this conversation about are we handling it the same way we handle insomniac and the same way we try to

handle all these illegal hacks and stuff and i of course i'm like i'm not that person anymore i'm not a journalist by any stretch of the imagination but you know the bedrock the foundation of who i am still is jay school and so i went to the society of professional journalist website and I was bringing in things of how I feel about it. And like there's this idea of, you know, do no harm, right, being a giant ethics for journalism or whatever. And I don't, the book doesn't do that. And in some ways, I think it's so great at not only contextualizing what's going on,

but then offering these really human looks at what's going on, right? I thought it was context that I didn't even know because it didn't get reported the way that your initial headlines did. But you do a great section there where you're talking about David Kosak, is that how I pronounce it? You know, he was this level designer and he's the one who, infamously got reported in all the stuff about the Cosby Suite having this quote of, I'm gathering the hot chicks for the cause. And that blew up and went so crazy and yada, yada, yada.

And you have this great section where you're talking about that and talking at him. And you give the context of like, people have to understand, like it was the pattern on the thing looked like a Cosby sweater. No one, for the most part, knew that Cosby was this horrible person until Hannibal Burris blew it up. And the hot chicks he's talking about are his close personal friend and his wife. But that all of them I spoke to you. the close personal friend is quoted in the book. And all of that, and like you talk to like, you know, David being like, I'm, my, my reputation is ruined. He was fired from his job unrelated to Blizzard.

Yeah, I mean, the Cosby Sweet thing, that's kind of a good example of the nuance that I tried to bring to the table here. I think that like that inevitably is going to, like, I think even some readers are going to be mad that I even went there because I think that we kind of like, I think culturally and kind of societally, like I think people have a tendency to just want. want to, what's the best way to frame this? I mean, you see something in a lawsuit. You see a complaint in a lawsuit and then you see people speaking out about it and you kind of feel like you want to, you want bad behavior to be exposed. You want the kind of like this sexual misconduct and harassment. You want that to be the focus. And there isn't really a ton of room for like the nuance of like, oh, is this thing that's floating around how much truth is there to this actual story? How much should that be? Like it doesn't matter if it's not true because we're

real women were hurt here. And that's always like a big question, especially when this stuff comes out and there's breaking news about it. And it can feel like going against the grain a little bit, even in a way that isn't kind of trivializing or dismissing the original complaints, but is putting more context or kind of pointing out some parts that are incorrect. That can be a little risky these days. And yeah, I mean, hopefully, hopefully that resonates with folks. Because, yeah, as I pointed out in the book, the lawsuit itself is actually super sloppy and misleading and full of inaccurate information. But it resonated with people and it resonated with a lot of women at Blizzard because

they did have like these real experiences and a lot of them shared it. A lot of them shared in the book. But on the flip side of that, you also did have this kind of like harm that occurred as a result of the misreporting and misinformation. And it's important to talk about that too, I think. And I think again, like, you know, what I respected so much about this section of the book particular is that then you, you know, I think it's Ethan, right? you reached out to Ethan who did the original reporting and you have a quote from him about it.

It's like there's a really great snapshot here of this complex situation, years removed of what do we think of it and how it went. Yeah, and the Cosby Suite, that to me feels pretty indicative of kind of like a culture that prefers splashy headlines to kind of nuanced reality. And I think you can kind of hopefully what the book does or certainly what I tried to do and readers can decide if it was successful. I think that like you can say this was a really awful place for women in a lot of ways. A lot of women had really bad experiences here. But at the same time, this kind of this idea of a Cosby suite as like a sex predator like Haven is nonsense. And then the added complication here is that the guy who's sweet it was, this guy Alex Neferciavi, was actually accused by a lot of women of being a problem. But as one woman, I quote one woman in the book, Michelle Marrow, who talks about how like,

when she was in that room in that Cosby Suite, the only nefarious thing there was Alex just being himself. And he was known as this guy who would get drunk and was accused of a lot of women of creeping on them in various ways. And so that's just an added wrinkle to this. It's like the idea of this being a Cosby suite where people are posing in front of this picture of Cosby

because they worship him as a sexual predator. Like that is complete fabrication. That is nonsense. But this guy who actually, who sweet it was, It was a creep, yeah. So allegedly. Yeah, I think, and again, like, you know, you talk about Blizzard PR, where they probe me or whatever. It wasn't that.

And I think, you know, I've had so many conversations with Blizzard PR since this about wanting to get into the games, right? I finished the book. And again, it wasn't for me a damning Blizzard's dead to me and it's burned or whatever. It was a man, I got to go, I got to go play wow. I got to, you know what I mean? Now that I understand a bit more context of that and what it meant to the development of company, what it led to, you know, to get to a game that I love like Diah And like, I had known David Breivik through Marvel Heroes.

And so then to hear he worked on a Justice League game. I think we were landing and I texted him and I'm like, dude, I just got to a part. I didn't know you did this Justice League game. That's fuck at all. You know what I mean? Like there's all that stuff. And that's them and Blizzard. That's how they met each other is that they were both working on different versions of

the same game. This was back in the 90s, like ports of different games used to be like slightly different, like a Genesis version and a Super Nintendo game version. And they were all at this conference. And they Brevick didn't realize that Blizzard down south was. also working on the same game. That's how they met. And wound up partnering and Blizzard wound up buying them.

It was pretty wild. Yeah. Wild. Okay. I have so much more to ask you about playing nice and so much more to talk about. But for now, I'll remind you, of course, if you want to play nice with us, we couldn't do this without you. And your support as a Kind of Funny member, if you love the 11 person small business we've

built in all the live talk shows, we bring you. It would mean a lot if you went to Patreon.com slash Kind of Funny or YouTube. dot com slash Kind of Funny games and picked up that kind of funny. membership. Ten bucks gets you good karma for supporting a small business, but you also get all of our shows ad-free, the ability to watch the afternoon podcast live as we record them, and of course a daily dose of me and a series we call Greg Way. For now, though, you're not using your benefits, so here's a word from our sponsor. This episode is brought to by New World Eternum. New World Eternum is a thrilling action-rpg experience for console and PC players with a vibrant world, vast and beautiful

setting, dynamic real-time action combat, and the freedom for players to choose how to forge their destiny. Combat is skill-based and dynamic, incorporating swords, guns, and sorcery so that you can build one character to rule them all as you explore Eternum and unravel the mysteries of the supernatural island that you can't leave. You love playing RPGs alone? You can in New World Eternom or play cooperatively with your friends as you complete quests, get better gear, and level up. Greg played this at Summer Game Fest on PlayStation 5 and was caught off guard by how much he enjoyed it and how many hours he said he could see himself sinking into the final product. There's boss fights, cool enemies, crossplay, resource gathering, and crafting. So yeah,

this sounds like a great game. New World Eternalium is available now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S and PC. And we're back. Jason, you've talked this book to death. You've been on a million podcasts. You've been out there. You're doing book signings. If you're watching live, you can come see him at the ferry building tonight in San Francisco. Very exciting. Can't wait. For you, what is the story that made it to the book where when you got it, you're like, oh my God, I can't believe I'm getting this or this is so good. I mean, there are few. Some kind of, some funny, some horrifying.

I mean, one thing that I'm really happy I was able to get in the book was kind of the nitty, gritty details behind why Blizzard, like, why Mike Moorheim left the company and the kind of battles, especially towards the end, about like between Mike Moorheim and Bobby Codick, I even have in there an email that Mike Moorheim, of course, CEO and co-founder of Blizzard, sent to Bobby Codick just before. leaving where he was like, this is me paraphrasing, but I have quotes in the book where he was essentially like, we need to have clarity on the boundaries between Blizzard and Activision Blizzard, which is really, really striking. And that really resonated with me because like the stories of like Activision coming in and being like, we need to get some adults in the room here. We need to crack down. I think are really fascinating. As far as the actual, as like, ridiculous anecdotes, I think the hotel band story is the one that like, that one was fun because whenever I would bring that up to people who were there at Blizzard at the time, they would be like,

oh, you heard about that. Can you summarize real quick? Yeah, real quick. I mean, I think it's more effective if you actually read it, but to give you guys the short version, it's like GDC, 2000, I believe, and Blizzard is kind of riding high at the time, and they're all staying at this big hotel, and so they're all out drinking at this, like, Sega party with an open bar, and they come back. And this was when alcohol was a huge part of Blizzard's culture.

And they come back and they're sharing rooms. And two guys who work for Blizzard is sharing a room together. And they stumble back drunk. And due to a wild sequence of events, wind up clogging the shower with vomit. And it winds up overflowing and flooding the entire floor of the hotel. And Mike Moreheim winds up getting like a call in the middle of the night. They wind up like getting banned from the hotel as a result of this. Amazing.

Amazing. I mean, but it's like, you know, it's like such a weird thing of to be a modern gamer. And I mean, obviously with the lawsuit and everything else, put that aside. But like to think of Blizzard, to think of a corporation, to think of Activision Blizzard, to think of Xbox buying them, to go back when it was just a bunch of hooligans who are, they're all, you know, dorks, they're all nerds, they want to sleep at their desk, they want to make cool games. They play it. They make the game and they play it. Like, it was interesting for me.

reading it to see so many similarities to the IGN that I entered but had also missed. Because I talk about it like I enter IGN right at the 10th anniversary and I'm always the IGN higher that was still the old guard but also the first hire under Fox Interactive Media. So I hear all these stories about like we, you know, StarCraft, we'd all just stay here and play and da da da and I see some of that in the way we play rock band and the way we party. But it's also moving into the corporate entity that IGN is now, where it is a professional place of business. Yeah. Yeah, it's a similar kind of evolution.

And I think it's worth noting. And I tried to point this out a couple times throughout the book that, like, the entire video game industry in the 1990s was a much different place than it is today. So a story like that, I mean, I don't know what people's reactions to that are today. Some people might find it funny. Some people might find it horrifying or disgusting or whatever. But like back then, it was kind of, that's just what it was like in the video game industry.

It was kind of a wild west. And I think they're positive and negative. aspects to kind of a culture that is like that. One of the most negative is that it was a boys club. And it was Blizzard at the time, just like many video game companies in the 90s, was almost entirely men. I'm sure IGN was the same way. I mean, back in the days of like the hot babe like collections and IG&B babes, yeah. Yeah, stuff that happened 20 years ago, we looked back on and are like, holy crap. How does that happen? How is this ever allowed? But I mean, it's the same thing. Culture really changes. And you kind of, you have to consider that whenever you're looking back.

at history because like 20 years ago, 25 years ago, like people were just kind of casually using the word gay as an insult. Like were dropping the R bomb as like a normal and that was considered a normal thing. So I think that like it's worth noting here that culture changes. But yes, I mean it's impossible to understand like where Blizzard is today and what led to the lawsuit without understanding that they started off as entirely men and because they started off as almost entirely men even when they grew and became more professionalized and brought in more women,

there were still majority men and the people who were in management roles and the people who had the most tenure were all men. So that led to some problems. Dude, the stories you have in there about what it was like to date inside of Blizzard and like these women who were being approached by everyone who worked there under the sun

and then the relationships they'd enter but then somebody cheats on that and it was just like some of the stuff you have in there is like mind-blowing. Wild stories. Yeah, I think that's something that was pretty unique to Blizzard, pretty unique. I mean, it was unique to Blizzard

I think because I think that at a lot of companies, there's kind of like Indra Office Dating. Indoor Office Dating is a common thing. That's not unusual. But I think the scale of it at Blizzard and also the fact that at Blizzard, unlike most other companies, pretty much every single person in the C-suite was either dating or married to someone below them, including the CEO of the company, that is unusual. And that creates a certain type of culture that, again, has positive and negative aspects. I mean, I spoke to people at Blizzard, women, men alike, who were like, I met some of my

closest friends at Blizzard. I met my significant other who's the love of my life at Blizzard. Like, Blizzard was such an amazing place. But at the same time, there's a lot of, like, negative aspects to it. I heard stories about like a QA, a female QA tester who might get hit on by their manager. And when they say what the hell, like the manager is like, oh, well, the CEO does it. Like the C-Suite does it. It's okay here. It's Blizzard. And if you're a tester, really, at any company. If your boss, your manager hits on you, like, you cannot keep working there. Like, that does not, that is

not a tenable environment anymore. Because no matter what you say, like, if you say no to them, like, you're screwed. Like, what do you do from that on? So that really is uncomfortable, yeah. Yeah, to your point, you know, I think you do a great job obviously talking about it right here. And in the book, contextualizing, obviously, that, not that this is

sweeping out of the rug or justifying, but it was a different place. And it reminds me so much of, I'm going to get some of this wrong. But I want to say it was a couple years ago, right? Probably five years ago now where Nolan Bushnell was about to get a GDC or an IGA award or whatever. And people brought up allegations against him. He was like, I'll step aside. I'm so sorry.

And so many women from his time were like, hey, he was great. But it was this thing of like, that's what it was. And they were trying to, it's so hard to contextualize 80s, 90s, whatever into a modern timeframe of what's actually happening. Yeah, and not just that, but also like I think women who were working at that time for various reasons, kind of like, built defense mechanisms or even were okay with it in some ways or convince themselves they were okay with it. I don't know exactly what's that kind of, it's all very complicated kind of like in terms of your mental state. But like if you're a

woman and you have to work in the 90s at a company that is almost entirely men, you kind of have to just, I have a great quote in this book from one woman who worked there in the 90s who was like, yes, it was a boys club, but like I love the boys club. I love being there. And that was a woman who was there in the 90s. And I was a little surprised to hear that because I expected a lot of the women who were there back then to have more horror stories and more just kind of like, oh my God, it was awful. And some of them did not. Some of them were like, actually, it was pretty cool even though it was this boys club and I to deal with everything that came with that. So again, it's very complicated. And I think it really depends. Like different people have very

different experiences. Different eras of Blizzard offered very different experiences. Like in some ways, being a blizzard in the 90s was a lot more sexist than being of the blizzard in the 2000s of the 2010s, but in some ways, the more modern years were worse for women because it was less the culture overall was less like that. And it was more like you're at this place where you can't get ahead because you feel like you're discriminated against. It's a little more subtle. It's not like you're walking down the hallway and you see like guys who have like big porn pinups on their offices. Like that doesn't happen anymore in 2010. But you get to a meeting and you're the only woman in there and you don't know if you're if you're not getting promoted. You don't know if that's

because you're a woman or because you're not like, whether it's because you're not going, not good at your job or because you're not like hanging out of the strip club with the boys on the weekend. And that in many ways is like it can be worse to work in than like the 90s kind of overt boys club culture. So yeah, I mean, it's really complicated and can be really bad for a lot of people in ways that I almost feel like the Cosby Sweet stuff kind of does a disservice to the real problems because this idea of like a Cosby Suite creates this demon of like, oh my God, look how awful these people are. These are like cartoon villains who like have a hotel suite dedicated to a sex pest when really the problems and a lot of the problems are a lot more systemic and kind of like

harder to tackle than just being like we're going to fire the dudes who are in the Cosby Suite or whatever. How much does your view of Blizzard change pre-working on the book and post-working on the book or does it change? I feel like for a lot of the audience, you know, a lot of people view, I'll say early 2000s Blizzard, like pre-activision Blizzard, let's say, with like, you know, a level of, oh, you guys were World Warcraft, oh, you guys were Starcraft, oh, you guys were this, this, this. And, you know, people, I think a lot of people, right, are still hold on to like this fandom of that era of Blizzard, whereas now it feels like that has fallen away as you see, it kind of be tainted by Activision or by Xbox acquisition or whatever it is,

right? It feels like business has gotten in the way for a lot of the fans. For you with somebody who, I'm sure you're aware before even working on this book, right? Because even doing stories about Blizzard forever, does working on this book and does reporting on Blizzard change how personally you view Blizzard as a company? Well, the products, no. I've always been able to kind of try to separate the products and the people in some way. And that like when I'm playing a game, I try not to think too much about like the stories behind that game's creation. I just try to kind of see it on its own terms. But yeah, I mean, there's always kind of like some level of like, oh, I suddenly have different contexts for things here.

Sometimes it's like in fun silly ways. Like there's a, in the old Blizzard games, they always have these cheat codes. Like you could type in a cheat code and like get some like God mode or whatever. It was kind of a fun thing in Blizzard games. And only the single player stuff, not like multiplayer. But in StarCraft 1, there was this cheat code that you would type in and it would make the buildings go faster.

And it was Operation CWAL. And I don't think I ever knew what that was. I knew the G-code for years and years and years. I had no idea what it meant. And as reporting for the book, I learned that it turns out in 1997, just in the months before StarCraft was coming out, a bunch of Blizzard fans,

or certainly hardcore gamers, started, like, internet forums where they would gather, and they would be like, why is this game taking so long to be made? And a few of them, even, like, this is pretty wild, but a few of them went to Blizzard's parking lot and would, like, scope it out and figure out how many cars were there

at like one in the morning to be like, oh, yep, they're still working. People are still working on it. They would write like these like lengthy pieces of fan fiction on the internet. They were like about going into Blizzard's offices and stealing the StarCraft code. So this group, they call themselves Operation Can't Wait Any Longer or CWAL, which got kind of immortalized as a cheat code in Starcraft. And of course it makes buildings go faster because like, of course. Lizzer needs to go faster.

The other wild part of that story today is that that level of extremity, like them actually going and scoping on the Blizzard parking lot. That was because the game was like a year later than it was supposed to be out. Damn. When it's Silk Song, the Silk Song was first announced in 2018 or something. Yeah, the timetables in the books for these updates

in these games is incredible. They hear them talk about and how fast they're flipping and what they're doing and how they're... Yeah, Warcraft 2 came out, I believe, like in 11 months after Warcraft 1 or something like that. Outrageous. Wild. one of the things I think that for me was the most like I know how good a story is by how fast I run to tell Jen

it and the Bobby Kodick stuff like not even I'm not even talking about the lawsuit side of it right I'm talking about like the email sure but mainly like do you you want to I don't know tell them tell them tell them this Steve win you know Steve win win casinos win hotels he's a he's a he's a gajillionaire whatever in Vegas he's got the wind tower

like he's that guy right you know what I mean the real estate hotel magnet golden nugget that was his casino yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah Bobby Codick in his pal on their little upstart pitch him and do all the stuff yet yet and like whatever he wait let me let me tell the story

because I just want to get to the jet where it's like he's I'll tell the story because how he meets him is okay so Bobby Codick he is like this born entrepreneur and he winds up at the University of Michigan where he winds up starting companies together with his roommate at the time this guy Howard Mark And the two of them, they start a couple of companies. One doesn't work out.

This next one seems like it's going to work out, but they need seed money. Basically, they wanted to do like a computer interface. It was actually a pretty smart idea. Kind of like Windows, like before Windows was a thing. And so Bobby, the ever-present schmoozer, because whatever you may think of Bobby Kodick, he is one of the most charismatic people, like one of the most charming people. And that's how he's found his success. He winds up going with a friend to this event in Dallas, Texas called the Cattle Barron's Ball.

And basically people wear their cowboy hats and cowboy boots and they like raise money for charity. And at the event, he is seated next to this guy, Steve Wynn, the casino magnate. And he winds up talking to him and Steve Wynn is impressed. And then Steve Wynn is like, hey, I'm going to New York tomorrow on my private jet. You want to come? And Bobby is like, hell yeah, I want to come on your private jet. And so Steve brings him on. And on this private jet, Bobby is like, hey, I have this company.

Like, would you like to invest in it? And Steve is like, you know what? I will invest in it. And the reason is because- This is where it becomes like a trailer and a movie. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Steve is like, the reason that I want to invest in it is because when I was a kid, this other like businessman, older businessman took me under his wing and like said, I will kind of shepherd you through business as long as you pay it for it and do the same thing to another young businessman one day. And so Bobby, you will be that young businessman. And from then on, Steve Wynn essentially opens every door for Bobby with like his access to massive capital and lawyers and everything else. And then a few years later, Bobby winds up spotting this opportunity in a company called Mediogenic

that was once known as Activision. And Bobby looks it over and he's like, hey, can we find a way to take this over? And thanks to Steve Wynn, he is able to do that, takes it over, files bankruptcy, moves it to Southern California from up here. And then turns it into one of the biggest video game publishers on the planet. Just this thing is, college kid with his dumb little business, like sits next to Steve. We want to get on the plane, yeah. And then on the plane thing. It will only get crazier if he like, here's this medallion.

You will pass to the next person. You will pass to the next person. I'm in this weird ancient money businessman thing. A secret treasure map. Yeah, right? Do you know who Bobby's passed it to? Do you know who he's helped out? I don't know, but I do know that I've talked to a lot of people who are close to Bobby.

And people who have worked with Bobby, their opinion of him is very different than the internet's opinion of him. A lot of them kind of acknowledge that he's ruthless and demanding and high energy and like we'll reprimand people if they make a typo in an email. He's one of those kind of like intense CEOs. But at the same time, they describe him as like incredibly personally generous and like, um, we'll give them one guy told me one guy I worked closely with him was like,

Bobby will do anything to kill you in a deal. Like he will cut your legs out. He will be the most ruthless negotiator. But at the same time, if I told him I had cancer, he would fly me to the world's best cancer doctor. Like he would drop everything he was doing to do that. That's how people would work with him describe him.

So I wouldn't be shocked if he had like, like a few people like that who he had mentored. And I've talked to some people who felt like he was their mentor. Have you ever interviewed him, Bobby? Not a question I can answer. Oh, okay. Well, because, okay, so at the top of the book, I say that of these 350 people, a lot of them spoke on the record, some of them spoke off the record.

Some of them, including multiple people named in the book, would only speak to me, like, for fact-checking purposes or on background, only under the condition that I not say that I spoke to them. And so I decided the best way to approach this is rather than saying who I didn't talk to because then you could kind of by process the elimination. Figure it out, I just won't say who I talk to unless they're quoted in the book. Totally fair. I understand that.

This is an interesting question from the superchats. Remember, of course, you can ask Jason questions on YouTube.com slash kind of funny games, just like cozy bear did. Knowing what you know now about Blizzard, would you have approached your Diablo 3 chapter in Blood Sweat and Pixels differently? And if so, how? That is a fantastic question. So you know, it's interesting.

So Bloodsend Pixel was published in 2017. I wrote it around 2016. It's about Diablo 3 is kind of like post-launch period after Era 37, going into like the Reaper of Souls development. And one thing I didn't know at the time was something that I reveal and play nice, which is that like Diablo 3 before Reaper even came out, Blizzard canceled the second expansion that they had planned. So like around 2013, Diablo 3, the plan was Reaper of Souls and then another expansion.

And Blizzard was like, instead of doing that, we're going to go straight to Diablo 4. and do like a quick Diablo 4 in the next couple of years. And there are all sorts of reasons behind that. You can read about them in the book. But short version is that like Blizzard believed that that game was unsalvageable, that the brand was kind of tainted by Diablo 3's original launch. And I didn't know any of that stuff when I wrote the chapter in Bloods, and Pixels because it was happening actively as I was reporting.

And so people like weren't telling me about it. If I had, I would have included that stuff in that particular story because it led to why Josh Mascara, who was the director of report. birth souls ultimately left blizzard and there was some drama there that um i was not able to get into in bloodsut and pixels but this is this is the chance to read more of that story i love that ability to follow up on it and also then see it through a different lens for you you know that's great yeah yeah and it's like sometimes you don't have all the context and you have to kind of do what you can with what you have which is unfortunate but that's the way of it especially when you're doing something like

bloodstone pixels which is like because it was 10 different stories i i did not have the time or bandwidth or opportunity to, like, go as intensely in depth on each of them as I would have if I was doing a whole book on one of those games. Another SuperShack comes from Calvin Perez. This is an interesting one that's he, I think Calvin's putting out here to be kind of be general, but there's obviously a direct tie to Blizzard. Calvin says the film industry recently has seen former indie studios go on to be competing with major studios with budget slash production due to independent success, i.e.A. 24. Do you think that's possible in gaming? Now, I think obviously we can sit and look at all sorts of different indies, but I love the fact that Mike Morheim, right,

just announced Dreamhaven in their new game and all this stuff. He's a co-founder of Blizzard now, again, starting on on his own. Yeah, I just played their game last week. I went down to Dreamhaven and Irvine and played their new game Sunderfalk that they just announced it's really cool. It feels like old school Blizzard in a lot of ways. Because it takes, the whole Blizzard approach was always like, we're going to take this genre or this idea

and like make the best possible, most approachable, most polished version of it. The donut. Exactly. Exactly. And so like World of Warcraft, their most famous game is them playing a lot of EverQuest and saying, hey, we love this game, but it's got some problems. Let's make our own version that fixes a lot of those problems. And that's what makes it a huge hit. Same with like Warcraft 1 and Dune 2 or like to some extent, Overwatch and Tea Fortress do. There are a lot of examples of this. And Sunderfolk, the new game from Dreamhaven, is them doing that same exact thing except with like gloom, uh, Gloomhaven or like other kind of really complicated tabletop games that take four hours to set up.

This game, Sunderfolk, is kind of the approachable version of that, and it is super fun. The one kind of barrier that I'm very curious to see if people are able to look past that is that you play it with your friends, couch co-op, using your phone as a screen. And it's interesting. I think when you hear that, you're like, oh, God, like, I don't want to play a mobile game, but it's not. The phone is really just, like, a controller. It's kind of like the promise of like the Wii U.

Like this would have been a perfect Wii game If that had in a world where that had been a hit And it actually works really well It's super fun. Like when I played for like an hour and a half And I was like I want to keep playing this Like I don't want to stop I can totally imagine playing this with my wife With like friends coming over

It's super cool and very a lot of good opportunities To like team up with your friends And like yell at them because they're doing something wrong Same like you would in Gloomhaven or whatever So I really enjoyed that So the question I think he's asking former indie studios go on to be competing with major studios with budget and production. Yeah, I mean, we're already seeing that.

I would think so too, right? Like, um, Powell World was the tiny team and that was one of the biggest selling games of the year. Helldivers 2, obviously Sony published that, but still smaller team than most of the other games this year. Bellatra was sold two million copies and that's one guy, one person. For me, I think I always think of the compounding success and growth of Super Giant, right? Uh-huh, yeah. Yeah, so. is a good example.

Oh, Katie's 2 is going to be huge. Yeah, there are a ton of examples. I think that's kind of been established that that's possible. And I think with Blizzard specifically, it's going to be interesting to see, especially now that Blizzard itself is in this world of service games and Forever games

where most of its resources are on World of Warcraft and Overwatch 2 and Diablo 4, I think a company like Dreamhaven can really step in and fill the innovative, like incubation part of that that Blizzard has struggled to do in recent years. Yeah. I think the final question I want to give you from the superchats comes from Alex J. Sandoval, who's superchats on YouTube.com slash kind of funny games and says, I don't think it applies to Jason's books,

but any insight for those who argue that journalists slash writers hold stories for books for self-enrichment? That's interesting. I think that, first of all, if you think books lead to self-enrichment, you really need to understand more about the book publishing industry. I mean, like, there's a reason that, like, I still have a full-time job, and it's a job. addition to writing books. Like, books are not turning me into a millionaire. But that is a good question because I think there's a lot of like, there's a lot of general skepticism and negativity towards journalists. Like journalists are not a particularly trusted profession these days. And it's a very easy story to believe that like, oh, this journalist is just sitting on something

so they can sell it to you, sitting on some information so they can sell it to you. which is kind of silly for a number of reasons. First of all, all news should be sold to you because news is not free. And this belief that we have that news is produced by people who don't deserve to be paid money for their product, that alone is pretty ridiculous. But also, like a lot of times when you're working on a book, and I can tell you this from first-hand experience with plain nice, like every single person you're talking to,

you were making it very clear to them that you were doing it for a buck. And they know that their interview with you is not like, in some cases, they might not want it coming out ahead of the book. They might not want it on Bloomberg. They're like, I am talking to you for the purpose of this book to tell the definitive story. I don't want you to take my story out of context and include it somewhere else. So that's another part of the equation. Another thing is that like oftentimes people, I mean, I've been accused of like sitting on the stories about Blizzard because I tweeted that I had heard stories about like sexual harassment or misconduct at Blizzard, which is really to me a fundamental lack of understanding of journalism. Because

hearing a story is not enough to report something. Everybody hears stories. Everybody hears rumors. In journalism, you cannot print something for ethical reasons, for legal reasons, until you were 100% sure. It's true. And in the Blizzard's case, it was a lot of me hearing things secondhand, sort of like this morning with the layoffs. You hear something secondhand for someone who like heard something or heard something. There's nothing you can do with that. And then oftentimes what happens to me, and this happens more like, if you, if people knew the number of times I've had to kill a story because I couldn't get the goods. It's like it's, it's really, it happens constantly. But with this specific case as an example, like I heard some stuff secondhand.

I reached out to some people who I had heard were personally involved, firsthand involved, and couldn't get them to talk to me for whatever reason, which happens all the time. And people have all sorts of legitimate reasons for not wanting to share their stories, especially when it comes to harassment issues. And so was not able to publish anything. Because like to publish something based on like secondhand rumors would just be so, wrong in so many different ways. I think despite the kind of the climate of mistrust of journalism, a lot of journalists understand that and are trying to do the best that they can to actually make sure everything they report is 100% accurate. So anyway, so I think sometimes, and this didn't

happen with this because it actually came out with a lawsuit and that's when I was able to do a big piece on Bloomberg that like dove into that stuff and I reached out to some people with the Bloomberg story where I actually got some people who weren't willing to talk to me before. to tell their stories now that it was all out there. Because a lot of times with sexual harassment and misconduct stories, women will want, nobody wants to be like out on an island. Nobody wants to be the first one and the only one to talk. You look at what happened with Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby,

which is like when the first domino starts to fall, then people feel a lot more comfortable coming out and sharing their stories. So that's what happened with the lawsuit. But anyway, I think that like even aside from that, but in the lawsuit part of it aside, sometimes if let's say you hypothetically you have some story that you've heard about second and you can't get people to talk to you for your web journalism outlet whatever maybe you can get them to talk to you for a book because it's a different medium some people might feel more

comfortable sharing their story in print in like the context of something way bigger as opposed to just like an internet headline so yeah all sorts of factors here um i think this has become more of a controversy with like uh trump stories like people like maggie haberman like doing a trump book that like people accused her of sitting on stories. And I think almost always that is kind of like a BS accusation because there's almost always more going on behind the scenes. And there's almost always good reasons why someone can't share something until it's in the right medium.

Although I'm sure Trump books make a lot more money than video game, nonfiction books. We'll see tomorrow. See if plain ice makes it the best seller list. Let's go. Even if it makes it the best seller list, I'm telling you the amount of money. I did, okay, I did the math on. Here's the week. you're making another enemy.

I did the math on me. No, I mean, everyone in book publishing. I did the math on like the amount that I made for my advance divided by the number of hours that I spent on this thing. You guys do not. Like, it is bleak. It is sub-minimum wage. So I'm just saying, like, it's, nobody gets into journalism because they want to get rich.

Like, I have friends who are in finance and private equity. Like, if I wanted to make money, that's the route I would have gone down. People said that the money accusation is particularly funny because, like, books, we do books for for the satisfaction and for the, like, grand purpose of journalism. A quick question I have for you is, have you now been at Bloomberg a couple of years? And how has that been? Like, I feel like you were such a, obviously,

we call you the number one video games journalist and all of that. But, like, coming from the games media space and then going to Bloomberg, which is, I don't even know the words to put on it, but it's more legit in my mind. It's a business public. Yeah. It's a finance publication. So how has that been for you?

Yeah. I mean, so I've been there for four and a hundred. half years now. It's crazy, right? Wow. So when I decided I was going to leave Kataku, I wound up preaching out to a bunch of people and like basically I had to decide between two job opportunities. One was at a more traditional gaming site and the other was at Bloomberg. And I, excuse me, I decided on Bloomberg because it felt like a totally new sort of challenge. And I was like, okay, well, if I go to this gaming site, I'll be kind of doing a lot of the same stuff I did at Katakou where it's like writing for a traditional gaming audience and all of that, all of that entails. Whereas if I go to

Bloomberg, it'll be totally different. I'll be learning from new people, learning new how to exercise new muscles and stuff like that. And I'm extremely happy that I went in that direction because it's been very rewarding and satisfying. And the amount of sheer talent in the newsroom with me is just still kind of blows my mind. I was out to dinner with like a bunch of colleagues a couple days ago and everyone was talking about like books they might want to write or books they've written. I was just like, holy crap, like I'm surrounded by so many talented like tech and entertainment reporters right now. So I love it. It's awesome. And they treat us really well. and it's a very healthy, stable organization,

as far as I can tell, which is a rarity in the media world. So that's nice. Is the way that you write about games dramatically different than it was at Kataku? Yeah, it is because you're writing for a mainstream audience. So it's, you are kind of,

everything's different. The style is different. The editing process is different. Everything is totally different, especially for big features, where we'll go through a lot of different rounds of edits and fact checking and standards and legal and very different sort of process

than Kataku, which was a little more not haphazard. We definitely had an editing process, but certainly not as rigorous as Bloomberg's was, which leads to some problems. It's interesting. I think some of the, like,

when you're at a blog-style website and you can just like, so at Bloomberg, I cannot publish things myself, but everything has to go through an editor and the editor can publish it. Whereas at Kotaku, anyone can just kind of like hit publish on a blog post, which can cause some problems.

If, say, you need to fill up a slot late at night and you're like, oh, there's this new trailer about this game, Dragon's Crown, I'll just write some pithy, snarky headline, and then call it a day. And then suddenly that becomes like an incident that like haunts you for the next 13 years. Because like nothing, nobody gets madder. Nobody, I mean, talking about picking enemies. There are no enemies bigger than the people who love anime tits. That can become a whole thing. so Bloomberg has higher standards so far we haven't offended the anime titty lovers at Bloomberg

we'll see if that happens Jason you're the absolute best thank you for spending your day with us Thank you guys it's such a pleasure to be here kind of funny is amazing studio Love here Of course, play nice available I'm gonna come back

Yeah anytime Probably it's in San Francisco I don't really love Are you doing GDC this year You're gonna be back on June? I don't know I might go to dice instead I kind of since having children I have to be a little judicious

about my travel Sure. And I'm definitely, I always do the Game Awards. And it's like Game Awards December and then Dice in February and GDC in March. And so I don't know if I can like subject. My wife is extremely tolerant and patient and she's the best. I love her. But like, I don't know if I want to.

Yeah. Yeah. Like risk being like, all right, I'm going to this book tour October, Game Awards in December, dice in February and GDC in March. So I'm not sure. And I also, I like being in Vegas a lot more than I like being in San Francisco. No offense to you guys. We're not offended.

Not my favorite city in the world. Sure. Okay. Interesting. Vegas I can only take for a couple days. That's funny. Well, I like, I like crops, so. Oh, that makes more sense, Jason. Of course, plain ice available right now. Everyone should pick it up. Everyone should support you on Bloomberg.

The best thing about Jice is like going to the craft tables and seeing. Who's there at 3 a.m? Video, like, like, like illuminaries. I'm trying to think I saw some funny people. I think I saw Todd Howard at a craft table last time I was there. It's just very entertaining to see like who's at how much people are throwing down. I love it. The one thing I didn't put over on Games Daily

that I really should because of course we're a podcast company. Jason, what podcast do you host and where can people keep up with it? The Triple Click Podcasts, of course. I'm sure a lot of people out there. I'm sure we have some crossover of our listeners, but yeah, every single week, triple click podcasts. We do some fun stuff if you enjoy

my bad jokes, you will also enjoy them there. Excellent. Jason, thank you for spending your time with us. And ladies gentlemen and NBs, thank you for spending your time with us. Of course, if you're watching live on Twitch or YouTube, guess what? You have a run from Mummy's stream up next before. Joey and I take over the stream after that. If you're watching later on YouTube, check it out on YouTube. If you're a podcast listener, just go to YouTube.com slash kind of funny games, like, subscribe, share, pick up a membership,

and know that until next time, it's been our pleasure to serve you.