Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast - Xbox Activision Blizzard Predictions - Kinda Funny Gamescast

Episode Date: January 19, 2022

We breakdown one of the biggest news story in video game history and what it means for the future of Xbox, Call of Duty, Crash Bandicoot, and the games industry as a whole. Time Stamps - 00:00:00 - Start 00:03:18 - Housekeeping 00:06:00 - How Do We Feel About Xbox and Activision? 01:03:20 - What Does This Mean For Everyone Else? 01:12:55 - The Remaining 3rd Parties Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's up and welcome back to the kind of funny games cast. As always, I'm Tim Getty's joined by one of the coolest dudes in video games, Greg Miller. Hello, Tim. How are you? I'm doing very well and I can't wait to talk to you about everything that's been going on today. And not just you. We also have the new face of video games. My 30 under 30 brothers in arms.

Blessing Eddie Oye Jr. Tim, I have opened my Blessing Super Fun game release calendar 2022. And Tim, do you know what season it is? No. It's about to be review season. And I'm very excited for it. I remember a few weeks away for a lab. Yeah, I thought it was even more clever than that.

I thought it was a season or something. God or war season. Season of the witch. The season of the band of coot or something. Season of the coot. No, but it is about to be. Amy knows something about coot season, don't you? Oh, God.

And joining us. So sorry that you have to be here with us today. But it is the one and only nitro rifle, Andy Cortez. Hello, everybody. Great afternoon. I played a lot of God of War on PC today. It's so good. Oh, my God.

I popped into that stream, like as much as I could today. And it is such a gorgeous game. And it's one of those things where I know it's running on PC, so I know it has the newfangled this and that's or whatever. This is one of those rare times where it's not looking at a game being like, oh, man, this is how I remembered it looking from, you know, the 90s. We're talking about a game from 2018 and not I'm not looking at it like this is how I remember it looking. I'm looking at like, did it really look at this fucking.

Yeah. Yeah. Holy shit. And like not only that, I watched the stranger fight in the beginning that you did. God, that game is incredible. And I know, oh, someone's saying God of war, 2018 is incredible. The least hot take possibly have, right? But I was shocked at how just impressive it all was.

Like the score, everything fit together with the one take camera. like, damn. I didn't remember. Have I thought to replay this shit? Tim, I didn't remember the music being as consistently good. Like, I guess I was just so enraptured by the visuals and the dialogue and the acting and everything that when you're kind of getting the full experience, oh, my goodness, dude, this game just keeps on hitting.

And it is just, I've got goosebumps the whole freaking time I'm playing this game. It's got such an awesome intro. Yeah. Oh, truly incredible, man. You can go check that out on YouTube.com. slash kind of funny plays Andy playing through the first, how long did you play? The whole first couple hours? Well, I started late because Greg put me on a special assignment.

So I was like, this is going to take a bit longer than I needed. So I played about an hour and a half, I'd say. Bear, show the assignment. Show the people and these amazing work here. Look at this. The uncanny, uncanny Xbox. You nailed it. Crushed it.

I'm so proud of you, Andy. It's perfect. Thank you. It really is. It really damn is. If you're an audio listener, get your ass over to the video version because there's some special shit going on. And this is a very special episode, actually, of the Kind of Funny Games cast, which of course is the show that we do every single week here on YouTube.com slash Kind of Funny Games. When we get together to talk about video games and all the things that we love about them, you can get it on YouTube or roosterteeth.com.

You can also get it as a podcast. Just search your favorite podcast service for Kind of Funny Gamescast. It would be right there for you. If you wanted to get the show ad free. If you wanted to get it live as we record it. And if you want the exclusive post show, you've got to go to patreon.com slash kind of funny games, just like James Davis at James Davis makes.

Praise Portillo, Greg Miller's back and better than ever. Pranksy, Delaney Twining, Tyler Ross, first responder, ND, Julian the gluten-free gamer, James Hastings, and Casey, Andrews have all, Andrews have all done. We appreciate you also very much. If you do not have bucks to toss our way, that's totally cool when you're buying games over on the Epic Game Store, use our epic creator code kind of funny on all epic store and epic in game purchases like rocket

league and fortnight to help support us we appreciate that all so very very much a little bit of housekeeping for you there is currently a podcast survey going on right now to help roost your teeth kind of understand the the user base the kind of funny has and all that stuff to get better ads and all that stuff uh so you can go to kind of funny dot com slash podcast survey to help fill that out if you would so like we'd appreciate that today we're brought to you by hello fresh but i'll get to all of that later. Greg, this is one of those times where I'm in just pure go mode when it comes to the intro and I'm just like saying all the words. Sure. I feel like I fucked up the first URL I said. I think I said YouTube.com slash kind of funny instead of kind of funny games.

Guys, don't go to YouTube.com slash kind of funny. You just give Nick Scarpino of views and subs and then he lads us over. The fact that the games channel, and I get it, I fucking get it. All right. I'm Greg. I'm celebrating 15 years doing this professionally. And I understand you all got introduced to me as an audio podcast. We see the audio numbers. The audio numbers are insane. The fact that it's year seven of Kind of Funny and Kind of Funny game still hasn't taken over

Kind of Funny is outrageous. Have you seen the conversations Andy Tim, Nick and I have on YouTube.com slash Kind of Funny? It's a hot dog sandwich. We're going to ruin Tim's birthday. That shit's outperforming Xbox? What are you talking about? I just love it.

But the point I was making is I thought I messed up the URL and I couldn't stop thinking about the fact that I met, I missed the URL, but I was still half, I was going. I was halfway through all the rigmarole. And I don't know what it says about me that I've done this so long that, like, I can simultaneously be thinking about that and worrying about it and just keep talking and just like, do the rest of it. But here we are.

Here we are. That's one way to put it. Pros, pro, professionals, professional right there. And you know what professionals, professionals do, Andy Cortez? What do they do? They're able to pivot at a moment's notice. And that's exactly what we're doing today. We've been looking forward to this episode for a long time.

the 2022 video game predictions here are kind of funny we're punting that shit because this is a once in a lifetime news story that dropped today Xbox to require Activision blizzard there was an amazing episode of kind of funny games daily i recommend all of you go check that one out even if it's a little bit outdated by the time you're listening to it that it was gregg and gary whitt up but we had dynamite poppins for blessing and from paris whole bunch of cool people wow what an amazing episode so much news to talk about so much going on. Here we are, I want to talk about it with you guys, too. And I want to get Andy's thoughts.

I want to get more blessing thoughts. And of course, I want to delve even deeper with one Greg Miller. You guys wrote a lot of questions in over on the Games Daily reader mail stuff. So we're going to get to some of that. But really, this is going to be an unstructured games cast. More unstructured than normal even, where it is just kind of a deep dive into all this stuff. I'm kind of looking at it as a predictions episode of what is this going to mean? But not a predictions episode in the way of like, let's try to beat each other and come up with numbers and predict what's actually going to happen.

It's more about predicting potential futures. We're going to be the doctor strange in this situation. And we're going to like discuss the 14 million different options that might go on. Uh, because of this news. Yeah. Greg, if somebody somehow missed the news because they were too busy rewatching the cup head Netflix trailer for the 17th time today. God, that's yeah. looks good though. Barrett, you see that?

No, I have not. Check the trailer out. Let's watch it together after this because I'm not seen it either. Yo, we'll do that in the post show. It is awesome. But moving on from that. Greg Miller, can you give us the top level update? Thank you. Thank you for this. Top level update. What happened this morning? This morning, Phil Spencer and Xbox announced that for $68.7 billion, they are buying Activision Blizzard. And I guess more importantly, for now, they have the intention to buy Activision Blizzard. Obviously, there's a bunch of legal hurdles to clear still.

And, you know, some people are already crying out for Monopoly. So we'll see how that goes. But the short version is for nearly $70 billion. Microsoft has bought Activision Blizzard. So Call of Duty, Diablo, World of Warcraft, the Candy Crush and King and all those games. The list goes on. it is an outrageous statement to make it is a statement that if you would have said and predicted it yesterday you would have been called crazy and here we are you know in battled activation blizzard on you know hot on the heels of a lawsuit from the state of california for a frat boy culture you know bobby c o'tic as CEO more demonized rightfully so than ever uh you know we've had so many comments from phil spencer recently is what last week i feel or maybe it was even Monday.

Time is now lost all meaning for sure, but having questions asked of him about how they're going to handle Activation Blizzard and what do they do with the information? And of course, Phil had made a couple comments early on, the Activation Blizzard stuff saying basically like, we're evaluating how we do business with them. And I can't talk about it publicly,

but privately that is happening. We all did not know what that meant. And then you get to today and it finds out the way they are evaluating and changing is that they are buying the company and they will be able to do whatever they want with it. And that's the thing right now, of course, is that, you know, for the behind-the-scenes business side of it, it's business as usual. They are operating independently.

Bobby Codick is still CEO of Activision Blizzard. But when the deal is finalized, Activision Blizzard will fold under the Xbox Game Studios. And Phil will be at the top of that and all the executives involved with Activision Blizzard will answer to him. And, you know, officially there has not been a dynamite confirmation of I'm Bobby Codick and I will not be with the company. once this happens, but all reports are pointing that direction where, you know, it is this whole thing of trying to pin down Microsoft spokespersons and then stuff the Wall Street Journal is getting off the record and back and forth and people talking that, you know, don't have the clearance to actually talk about it. That's where you're at on that side of it, on the business side of it.

On the game side of it, there's a bunch of other stuff happening, right? Where today, this news drops, today is also the day where NPD drops both for December and for the year at large for 2021. And at the top of those lists, both times around, right? Call of Duty showing what a property this is, why you'd want to buy this, why you'd want this company. You know, Phil has gone on the record in his post as saying, like, you know, they're going to be bringing these games to GamePass. Right. Upon close, we will offer as many Activision Blizzard games as we can within Xbox GamePass and PC Game Pass, both new titles and games from Activision Blizzard's incredible catalog. We also announced today that GamePass has more than 25 million subscribers.

As always, we look forward to continue to add more value in great games. games to Game Pass. Let me stop you right there real quick. Just because I think this is important context for everybody, 25 million Xbox Game Pass subscribers as of this year. The last time we got an update was last year and it was at 18 million. So not only have we seen a 7 million, that's a ridiculous percent increase over the last year.

We are now about to get an even bigger increase from all this stuff. These are just important numbers to keep in mind when we're talking about what this is going to mean, where this isn't a, oh, man, things were stalling out, so they're doing this to like skyrocket. It is, they're going up. And now this is just going to continue to speed that up and snowball. Yep.

The other thing to toss in while we're on this conversation, of course, is that, you know, great, they're coming Xbox game pass. Will they be exclusive? Is that, are we going to Bethesda route with these games, stuff like Starfield? So far, the best we have on that from Phil is from Bloomberg's Dina Bass, who tweeted out this statement and added it to our article, of course, but it's Phil Spencer.

I'll just say to players out there who are playing Activision Blizzard games on Sony's platform. It's not our intent to pull communities away from that platform, and we remain committed to that, he said in the interview. Of course, we talked about this at length on Games Daily. We had Paris Lilly on there, of course, from the kind of funny Xcast, and somebody who was obviously following so much of the Pithezza stuff when there was a debate of what is going to go on there. And at the time, Paris had infamously said, you don't spend $7 billion to keep things the way they were when he's talking about Bethesda. today he reiterated that you don't spend $70 billion to keep things the way they are. I read into this quote of,

it's not our intent to pull communities away from the platform. He's talking about people who are playing Call of Duty now. He's talking about Warzone players right now. He's talking about very specific games. I think you'd be going forward. Your new Call of Duties will be, once this deal is finalized, maybe even down the road a little bit, will be exclusive to Xbox. What does that mean for an ongoing platform like Warzone?

I think they wouldn't just end it. I don't think they would just rip it away. I think it would be a Minecraft kind of situation. But that's what we'll be talking about, obviously, throughout this show. so I shouldn't even be doing that. Those are the facts, Jack. I think I got you through the big ones there, Tim. Yeah, that was great.

Now, with that, like before we get into even the broader conversation itself, I just want to have the conversation of, is this the biggest news in video game history? Because we're talking not just about, oh, a major acquisition, like even something like a Bethesda, we are talking about Activision, the creators of Call of Duty that are the highest selling game for a decade, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. Like I think back and I saw Roger Wurter, worked on a great TikTok video you can get on kind of funny games TikTok this morning that was clipping out Greg and Gary talking about it about is this the biggest day in kind of funny games

daily history and it got me kind of thinking back and it's crazy because you know we've been doing the show since 2017 and and thinking back into all the different times there's been new stories of episodes I've been on or not on I would argue that the biggest new story I've ever been on was Xbox announcing Game Pass and announcing that first party games were going to be coming to game pass day one and that felt unreal back a couple years ago but here we are years in they they've proven it works and that that that is the plan and yes that means that crackdown three is going to come day one but that also mean well watch that but back then that's what that meant right it was that it was see if thieves like uh expansion or

whatever but like it was like okay cool but now we're years into that and we see that does mean forts of horizon that does mean Halo Infinite, that does mean XYZ going forward, right? So that was crazy. And then we get the Xbox Acquires Bethesda News, and we got to see the last year how that shook out and what that meant in terms of, okay, they're announcing the acquisition

and a thing to keep in mind there, Bethesda was a privately traded company as opposed to Activision, which is publicly. So whole different set of issues that they're going to have to deal with with all this. I don't know the thing I wanted to say was in terms of when this plan is now or when the acquisition is supposed to be done,

and it's by fiscal year, 2023, which would be June 30th, 2020. So it would start as early as this July, but as late as next end of June, that all this could actually like shake out before they're allowed to act as separate entities, Activision and Microsoft. So we shouldn't expect to see anything coming up too soon. But anyways, I'm already getting too far into this.

like the one, two, three punch of game pass announcing day one, first party things, acquiring Bethesda and then now acquiring Activision, I easily think this is the biggest piece of video game news I have been ever around to cover. Andy Quentin. That we've been alive or you mean professionally? I mean, I think both. Okay. Just make sure we have the right guidelines for what we're talking about.

I'd easily say both, Tim. Yeah, I think you're right about that because not, I think it's one thing to just mention Bethesda and Blizzard, Activision Blizzard, but you immediately think of all of the gigantic properties underneath those umbrellas. This isn't just Call of Duty and a handful of other games or IP. This is Call of Duty and this is Starcraft and World of Warcraft and Overwatch and everything Blizzard that, you know, all of the heart, I mean, there's a, BlizzCon is a thing for a reason. There is a hardcore fan base there. Yeah, this has got to be it.

This has got to be the biggest news in video game history. I immediately, I mean, first off, Phil Spencer, you took my prediction for, that was going to be my prediction, Tim. I was going to say, I was going to say Xbox is going to buy Activism Blizzard, everybody. So I guess I get a point for that anyway. If we were going to stick with it, if we were going to stick with this being our yearly predictions, I was going to open with.

Well, you know, Tim, we're recording this on Monday. That's just be like, I think, I think, I think, I'm like, I was going to buy just Blizzard, not activism. No, I'll be 100% honest with you. My prediction, one of my predictions is going to be that Bobby Kodick is going to be out this year. And that will, obviously, we've heard the rumors that that's going to be taking place whenever the deal is done in 2023. It might be this year. It could be this year.

You're right. You're right. It could be this year. And I just want to, I want to comment on that first and kind of get that out of the way because we talked about it a bit. before, I guess, before Games Daily when we were reacting to the Moon Night trailer earlier. And I know a lot of people's immediate thoughts are, well, fuck him, he's getting paid. There really is no justice. And I, while I agree that a rich guy is going to get even richer, I'd think it'd be a lot more of a gut punch if Bobby Kodook was making

300,000 a year and was a terrible dirtbag, awful human being, and now he's going to make multi-millions a year because of this deal. Like, I think that would be an even bigger gut punch. But to me, it's like, look, whatever they have to do to get him out of there and ensure that these employees are going to have a place to work at where they don't hate their workplace and they don't hate who their bosses are and they don't dread going to work and wondering, what's the next thing I have to deal with today.

I just want to make art. I just want to make a game and have fun. Whatever they had to do, like, I'm with it. And to me, it's like, an ultra-rich guy got even richer. Like, okay, I can't even comprehend the numbers of, like, well, he's worth $8 billion now,

and now he's going to have $20 billion. It's like, okay, well, he's still fucking filthy rich. Like, he's still an awful human being, you know. I think this story, is filled with so many pros and cons of it. And I think Greg made a good statement during KHD that like, you know, like there are, there are so many different like takes and opinions and reactions out there, right? And so many people are like, this is bad or so many people are like this is good.

And as people who are reporting on this as news, right? Like, you can't help but to look at this and go, this is crazy. Like, this is wild. I can't believe this is happening. And I think when you start to pick things apart, I can understand any which way people take it in terms of the Bobby Cotech thing, right? I totally understand why people would be upset that he's going to leave with this huge pay out and get hundreds of millions of dollars. But I also understand, like when I tweeted

out this morning, right, I quote tweeted the, I think Nival took a screenshot of the Wall Street Journal article where they had the off the record stuff saying that, yeah, Bobby Kotech is going to leave when this deal finalizes. And I took that as good news for me because I was like, okay, cool, that does mean exactly what you're talking about, Andy, that people that are currently working at Activision Blizzard don't have to worry about this guy being at the top of the company at a certain point. He's going to leave. And that is, I think, good news for the, uh, employees. Is it good news for Bobby Kotick in his pockets as well? Yeah, and that is the unfortunate side of it. But yeah, there's so, I think there's also way more we can look at in

terms of like corporate consolidation and how shitty and scary that can be. But then you look at how it frees up studios creatively to kind of do what they want to do as opposed to every single Activision studio working on call duty. And again, there are so many different things we can pick apart in terms of this being good news and this being bad news. Yeah, right. You said it was the worst good news than the best bad news or something like that is how it was going through and it's it's accurate yeah but it's also one of those things that and i you know hate to be a naysayer about it or you know a dose of reality but this is how it was always going to end for bobby kodick right even if he was removed by the shareholders he stills a golden parachute that's corporate america

right like unless it was they found him like trafficking drugs or straight up murdering people and there was going to be like a legal legal thing which there wasn't going to be right he's just a shitty person, not a murderer. Like, this is how it was going to shake out. And so I think you have to, as you already said, like, poignantly, right, is like, focus on, all right, cool, we're getting what we want. And we're getting what we want for the people who work at Activision Blizzard.

So hopefully that a new regime comes in and straightens things out and makes it so you're not ashamed to work there. So you're not launching games and feeling terrible because there's an audience that is like, well, shit, should I even buy this? Should I even play this? I don't want to do this. Or you talk about it and there's just before you can even critically now talk about a game, you see it,

and down by the fact that, you know, the parent company is so awful. And this is the thing we talk about all the time of bad bad bad, not badass, bad parent companies equaling ass decisions that then, you know, roll back down on the very workers that are the ones being abused. Can you imagine if Phil Spencer not only did all this acquisition stuff and said, hey, devs, I promise a bright future for everybody involved. And also, I know why Bobby Codick was on Jeffrey Epstein's black book like oh my gosh he would just be the god of all gods Phil Spencer I'm blowing it wide open was he in the blackbook was he got he code on this guy's black yeah yeah oh Jesus dressed so maybe he was just a horrible fucking

maybe they're going on I don't know jump jumping off of what kind of what you're just saying there Andy about like bringing Phil into this I think it's a extremely important like aspect of all this that despite Activision blizzard's whole situation in the last year being in the same way that I just started the show saying like is today the biggest news in video game history. Like I think that what happened last year was not one news story, but kind of just the worst year in video game history in terms of news stories. And like that all is, you know, it's everywhere in the industry in different ways.

But there is no bigger example of it at its worst than Activision Blizzard and Bobby Kodick and everything that we've been talking about. And for Xbox and Microsoft to, you know, there's two ways to look at it. Of course, there's always the, it's about the money. And at the end of the day, yes, it is about the money. But the money comes from the creation of these things and the understanding of these things. And who was creating and understanding these things, I think is very important. And I think when you look at the team at Microsoft over the last decade, the last five years specifically, we've seen them take the right steps.

We've seen them, like, look at what their leadership looks like, what their teams look like. Like they're and sound like and where they come from and their focus on accessibility and all this stuff that you can easily look at and be like, oh, they're just doing that because that's like the hot topic of the moment to get the brownie points. But like I think deeper than that, there is an actual real desire to change the direction of the ships and to make sure that the gaming industry is vibrant and going to be building a new foundation, I guess is kind of what I'm saying. And I just think it's a bold move to make this acquisition at this time with Kodick being where he is and with Phil Spencer being where he is. It is putting a target on Phil Spencer. And I see them promoting Phil Spencer to CEO of Microsoft gaming. Like think about that title. Think about the power that that has.

This shows that they have a level of trust in him across the board that he can take this. And he is the guy. And of course, he's not doing it alone. But he is the face. He is the one on the blog post. He is the one that, you know, reading between the lines on this is being like, yeah, I'm taking this problem on. And we're going to try our best to fix it.

And I think that that is so incredibly powerful for where the industry is at as a whole that, yeah, sure, take the IP, take all the games and take all that stuff. That's all important. And we're going to talk a lot about that. But I think that this does signify Microsoft believing that not only is game past the future and all that stuff, that a safe culture at workplace. in games industry positions is the future and needs to be the present. And I think that they've done a very good job building.

It could be better. Of course, could be better. Blah, blah, blah. I really think that it's in the right hands. And this is a very, very, very significant step forward. Andy, you had your hand wrist. Yeah, totally agree with everything you're saying. I don't, I don't want this to come off as if, you know, we are worshiping the giant corporation.

We're just worshiping Phil Spencer. Just worshiping Phil Spencer. No, I think in the same way that what EA did with their EA originals and how they made it really easy for indie devs to kind of make games and get them published and make money and not feel like they're getting screwed out by the publisher, I think Microsoft has made a lot of comparable moves that, sure, all of this is still about money at the end of the day.

But some of these moves are choices. that are likely making them a bit less money than they could have made had they gone the other way with it. Had they chosen to go with the way that was maybe the more exploitative loot box angle? Like, you know, there's a lot of stuff that Microsoft has done in the past that, sure, it's still made them money, but it isn't like the thing that they are banking on or whatever. It's more of a service like the accessibility stuff that they've been doing. Those are all little additive things that I think just earned the part. public's trust more for you know hey we are giant corporation we're not a hundred percent evil

right we're we believe in gaming as as something that's meant to be fun and something that a lot of people should be able to do and here's what we're trying to do with it and I can't think of any better group than to be taking over something this negative and I've I haven't really felt excited for a culture change I can't imagine working there right Like I think we still need to hear from a lot of Blizzard employees about this, but it seems like a pretty, from my perspective, a pretty exciting day to say, hey, this is kind of like, hopefully the dawn of a new day. Yeah. And I think to bounce off of that, too, like, I think a lot of times we were talking about Microsoft as a corporation or these big companies as corporations, we a lot of times forget that these are corporations filled with people at the ground level who are putting in the work in order to make sure that the product. that they're putting out are good and do support a positive outcome in something like the

correct me for wrong is it called the adaptive controller the the Xbox controller that is really good for accessibility right like that was a project that a person or a team of people took on that Microsoft took and propped up as oh man this is really good oh man this is actually something that we should promote you know and it could be for the brownie points why the corporation promotes it in that way But it is a team of people that actually works on that and actually puts it out. When you look at Forsa and the accessibility stuff there and the sign language stuff that they implemented, it wasn't like, you know, Microsoft from the top. It wasn't like the CEO, right, look down and was like, all right, put this thing in Forsa. It's like, no, the Forsa team was like, hey, how do we make games better?

How do we make our games better? And the people that actually work on the games, on the creative and the development level are way different from the people up top who may or may not be in it just for the money or who may or may or may not. care as much as the people on that ground level. But I think that's something that's worth pointing out. We're talking about culture change and culture shift. And yeah, that was one of the first things that I know I, and I'm sure many people thought about when it came to the acquisition of, oh, is this going to fix things at Activision Blizzard? And I think to some extent, with Bobby Kotick going away when this finalizes, and with them

being under a company that as far as we understand, as far as we can perceive, seems like it's going to have a better culture than Activision Blizzard. It's hard to confirm any of this because none of us work in Microsoft. And of course, I'm sure every single big corporation has their problems and is going to, like, as much as they're probably going to shed a lot of the core Activision Blizzard issues, they're going to go into Microsoft and probably adopt some of those issues as well, whatever exists there that we may or may not be aware of. I do think it's still a thing worth celebrating and looking at as a, hey, okay, well,

at the very least, right, we could see the accessibility features that we've seen bleed into Microsoft stuff, bleed into the Activision Blizzard stuff as well. To shift it back to Tim's original question of, is this the biggest video game news ever? We recently did an episode of KFGD, and it was the last episode actually of 2021. It was me and Janet, and the headline was, what was the biggest news story of the year? And everybody was pretty much in agreement that the biggest news story of last year were the Activision Blizzard happenings, right? the ongoing story of it, the updates of it, the Bobby Kotech stuff, the other, the other lead developer and higher up stuff that was going down at Activision Blizzard and the protests and that whole story packaged up.

In 2020, when I first, you know, started doing, when I first joined County and was on KHG and stuff, toward the end of the year, I had the thought of, oh, what was the biggest news story of 2020? and I think it's split between E3 getting canceled that year and then also Microsoft acquiring Bethesda. And you go further back and it is to him bringing up, hey, first party games coming to the Xbox Game Pass, how big of a deal that was. And in a way, I feel like this new story is such a convergence of pretty much all of the biggest news stories

that we've gotten over maybe the last decade of gaming and the journey that Microsoft and Xbox specifically has gone through since launching the Xbox one. I jokingly put in a tweet, or not even a tweet, I jokingly linked a video in the PSLW Slack of the, it was Shuhay Yoshita and Adam Boys doing the How You Share Your Games on PlayStation thing. And the joke I put in the PSW Slack was like, oh man, like, actually I forget exactly what the joke was, but it was something along the lines of like, oh man, like this probably pissed off Microsoft essentially. Like, Microsoft sees this.

Convinced this video is the cause of all of this. Yeah, I'm convinced this video is the cause of all of this being that like, you know, So 2013, Microsoft and Xbox got their asses handed to them. And they had to turn around and really look at themselves and go, how do we evolve as a company and how do we make ourselves better? And I think with that, with Phil Spencer attaining his role, and with them having to make the big money move, like the literal big money moves to get where they're at now, this feels like such a, like, I don't know, like I guess a victory lap. Even beyond that, right? It feels almost like a checkmate. or at least a gigantic check in a chess game

where it is like down to the wire at this point. What I find fascinating about this acquisition and this move again, and it is, I agree with you that context is everything. And I think in general on paper, you say, Xbox buys Activision.

You're like, holy shit, that's a huge news story. But it is this wrapped up the fact that they're coming in off of this move to try to get rid of Bobby Kodak, this move from the state of California suing them and outing all their dirty lines.

laundry, this move of what game pass has become on the heels, you know, a year later of the Bethesda stuff for more than that. Like, you have a story that continues to build here. What I find interesting about this acquisition versus Bethesda is that when they acquired Bethesda and we had the whole debate at the time of, is this stuff going to be exclusive? What's it mean? Yada, yada, yada, yada. It was still, all right, cool. They're getting more bullets and putting them in the clip. They're getting ready to start when it was up, but it was still, when is the hammer going to drop? When are we going to start to see results from it? And so for them to get Activision now to start talking us to start talking about

2023, to talk about Call of Duty, suddenly it's more real. When you look at the fact that Forza is a game of year contender, Halo, Infinite went above people's expectations and became a game everybody loved, right? The fact that Psychonauts 2 is a game of the year contender, granted, multi-platform, I know. The fact that you look at what game pass is, for this month in general, where I already had this conversation of how insane game pass is this month, before they announced Death's Door, right, being part of it, before the release of, I want to say guacamayle, the new game from Drinkbox, nobody saves the world. And then to look down the pipe and be like, cool, in November, you're getting Starfield

and you can't get that anywhere else. Like, the acquisitions and moves Phil and team have made since they became Xbox and since they, you know, started dusting themselves off and took power after Xbox one, the launch of it, you're starting to see that tree bear fruit. And that is changing the conversation in a way that's very interesting. It is no longer hypothetical of what we're going to get from GamePass and Xbox. Now we're seeing it. And dude, with that, like you bring it up the context.

I think it's incredibly important. Rare was acquired by Microsoft in 2002. And, and shout to blessings Jet Force Gemini hoodie. But that's crazy to think about because to me, that was my first time as a fan back in 2002, obviously. I was in middle school. I was shocked by this news. And I remember hearing this, but it was one of the first ever,

like gaming acquisition things were like, whoa, this changes everything because all of a sudden, this company that for years, and especially leading into that, had created some of the best games of all time at that time on the Super Nintendo and N64 in the form of the Donkey Kong country games,

then moving on to Golden Eye, Perfect Dark, and all that on the N64, to then be acquired by Microsoft when Xbox was, brand new fresh out the gate they were the halo guys that was pretty much all they did and then to see them squander rare yeah in there for generations right like to to not have a good perfect dark to have cameo come out to have uh whatever banjo kazooey game nuts and bolts like and then just blah blah blah but then you know we're getting eventually whatever

the most it's called ever wild if we do whatever but where's been like okay there it's not what it used to be but got a good scoop on that one by the oh no she can't wait can't wait can't wait That's your prediction for a couple of weeks where we do the prediction topic. But going from that Xbox, and obviously it's a very different time and we're multi-generations in, Xbox means something totally different. And what it means now is Game Pass. And that means 25 million active subscribers on this system that is working that we've questioned and we've talked about. We went from questioning, questioning, how is this working? How is this working?

To being like, this is the best deal. I guess it must be working for them because they're pushing it hard to now seeing it. It's like, okay, there's been enough interviews. There's been enough data out there to back up the fact that not only is it working, but they truly believe that it is the way of the future of this industry. And they're like, get in, we're going. And they've proven with Bethes. They've proven with their first parties.

Like with Greg, bringing up forza being a game of the year. That's a very different Xbox that we're dealing with. And they're prepared for this. And what excites me about this is the idea that for years, Activision, the last three years, it's just been. punch after punch after punch to things I love seeing what happened to vicarious vision, seeing what happened to Toys for Bob, seeing what happened to Benox, all of these super talented teams putting out some of the best work in their careers, in their franchises in the form

of Tony Harts Pro Skater remake and Cresc bandicoot remakes. But in addition to that, a brand new crash game. And then what's the reward for that? Oh, you get to work on call of duty. This represents a second chance. And it's going to take a long time to even see what that. up turning into. But I love that with everything we just said, the context of where we're at now is Microsoft understands the power of autonomy for these studios. And when they show, when they talk

about this today, it's Phil Spencer, now CEO of Microsoft Gaming, he is talking about these different teams and he isn't just talking about Activision Blizzard. Like he's talking about Trajark and Raven and Hi Moon and Beanox and Infinity Ward and blah, blah, blah. Now alongside all the different companies from Bethesda alongside what we know as Xbox Game Studios to eventually just be all Xbox game studios teams. I'm so incredibly interested two years from now what that means for these specific teams and what they're working on, what it means for the IP that they own. Because of course, we're still going to need multiple teams working on College Duty because

of how big that beast is. There's so much money there. Is that multi-plat? Is blah, blah, blah. So many questions. So many things we'll have to find out and see. But I am so interested in the idea that we're now in a world. that two years through now,

toys for Bob could be working on a banjo-kazooie remake. That's fucking cool. Here's the question I have, though, is that, you know, we were talking about, and I think Blessing was the one who was talking about, you know, celebrating the fact that Activision, as from a worker perspective, is underneath Xbox, right? Like, they can celebrate it, we can celebrate it.

It seems like at least a good move compared to a bad situation they were already in. Overall, do you guys celebrate this thing? Because this has been the conversation going around, right? of like there's the hot take knee jerk reactions that started at 6 a.m. and have it stopped of cool. Is this cool? They are taking away games from PlayStation players, right? It's more, what is this?

And not even getting into what does it mean for PlayStation? What does it mean for the person who already invested in this? Is exclusivity ever good? So on and so forth and stuff like that. Jeff Keely, you know, six hours ago put up a poll. Is the Activision Blizzard deal with Xbox good for gaming in your eyes? It's got 17 hours left, but right now the poll looks like this. Yes, at 40.4%.

Behind that is not sure yet, 33.4%. And then no, at 26.2%. Andy, is this word? Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. But before Andy answers that, let me tell you about our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by HelloFresh. Sticking to your New Year's resolutions can't be hard, but if you're focusing on saving money by ordering less takeout,

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I'll go with that. I don't love the future of having just of everybody buying up exclusives. I've never liked that. I did kind of feel good when Xbox bought Bethesda because it felt like a fighting punch back at what Sony had been doing with a lot of, you know, with Avengers getting Spider-Man only. And also just Sony having the Spider-Man. game and it being a really damn good game. Right.

So when Xbox ended up acquiring Bethes, I was like, hey, you know what? Good for Xbox. You know, they're, I feel like this is maybe taking it a little too far. Right. That's how you felt with the Bethesda part. Especially when we're talking about a game as ubiquitous as Call of Duty and this and the amount of units that that sells, right? We're not talking about like people aren't going to freak out that they can't play.

ukulele on or what i don't know i'm just trying to think like some weird exclusive that you would only get on uh that you would have gotten multi-platform and now you're only going to be able to get it on xbox now this is call of duty this is something that is a juggernaut and sells millions and millions of units every year i think if they could find a way and figure out a way like we've mentioned already with keeping war zone this multi-platform game and maybe only putting this offering out on on Xbox or whatever like you know whatever the yearly call duty game is that year I think if they could figure out a way to make it feel not shitty I'll be okay with it but until then I'm kind of I am kind of worried about

the PlayStation fan base and them losing out on you know not being able to play the next overwatch not being able to play the next well I guess when I think of Starcraft to Warcraft those are definitely PC games but It's yeah, it's definitely something to work as I talked to Gary about today, like I definitely think that'll be something they push forward with of all right, cool. Now that, you know, we own you guys. And obviously game pass is there's PC game pass. I do think you'll see them really push on getting you those games on Xbox and try to open it up that way. Sure, you could pay 60 bucks to get it on PlayStation or you just get it with Xbox or whatever.

You get it with Game Pass. I just want to getting PCs like stuff like StarCraft onto Xbox. I don't mean that I think Xbox. I think PlayStation's out in the cold. I don't think they'll do that for sure. Got it. Oh, really, really. Yeah.

I don't know. It does, it does feel not great at the beginning. And now selfishly, I go save Overwatch 2. Here we go, baby. Like, we're back. Hire back, Jeff Kaplan, and let's save Overwatch 2, make Overwatch great again. And I'm selfishly, that's immediately the first thing I thought of. But, yeah, of course, you start to worry about and wonder about what this ultimately changes for the industry.

Yeah, it's really interesting. to me because like I I don't think this is going to be a surprise to most people that know me, but I know this isn't going to garner a lot of respect from people, but that's okay, because my opinion is this is great. Like if this were someone else, I think it'd be a lot more problematic. But again, everything I've said, like Microsoft approved, they give a shit and they care. And this reminds me a lot of the Disney buying Fox stuff. And what that actually means were, is there a lot of problematic elements with this?

Absolutely. Anything you look at, there's cons and there's going to be pros. But to go with that example, what Kevin Feige has done. done and proven to do with the MCU is that with people that care and that put things to the right hands, we're not getting what we get on the DC side with Warner Brothers with all of the horrible workplace stuff and whatever and also the product quality kind of being all over the place that we get there. We get a cohesive vision of people that care in a pipeline for people that care and love

these products that they're making because at the end of the day, whether it's video games or movies, these are products we're talking about with people that make them. So if people are being supported to make the products that they want to make for people that want to consume them, I think that that's only a good thing. And if this allows more of those products to be made and make more people, more money while getting more people the ability to play them, I think that that's great, especially because we're not talking about there being this gobbled up every single person's in one boat.

This is still Microsoft, like a very interesting thing that Daniel Amad was tweeting about is the top five gaming companies right now in terms of money where tennson is at a little under 30 billion uh sony at 22 billion nintendo at 15 and microsoft at 13 and the net ease at eight those numbers are really interesting to me because i wouldn't necessarily have pegged sony at number two despite it being PlayStation just because of all the mobile game stuff and all the blah blah when you're talking about tenson and all that an interesting thing there though is microsoft and Activision deal putting together, they would come in at number three at 21.9 billion, but still behind Sony, despite all of this with Activision.

Like, that's kind of surprising would you really start looking at the realities of what this means? And the other side of that is the realities are Xbox acquiring Activision is going to allow so many more people to be able to play these games because of Game Pass, whether it's on a Series X, a Series S, which is another. option they have or I've been saying this for years the inevitable dongle they're going to sell for $50 to make any smart TV be able to play these games for dollars a month like there's so much good here that of course there's cons but I think that that all combined with the fact that this is going

to give franchises an IP that are owned by Activision that aren't call of duty a chance to exist is a great thing and to Andy's point war zone still going to be everywhere the inevitable snarky comment that I had when Phil Spencer is on his earnings or on this call and saying I'm really excited about today's news everybody with this acquisition we are now the third behind Tencent and Sony and I was like damn still that's all I had to say I did immediately I thought like oh damn all right yeah it's not third place huh man that's like that's like when you get like four or three and your 30 you tell your parents they're like oh cool so like you a doctor yet yeah it didn't happen to me but

Still 29 above us. It's like, damn, 30 and 30. But yeah, for me, I see this is a bad thing. And it's tough because when you ask the question of, is this overall good or bad? We're talking about so many things happening at once with this acquisition, right? We're talking about what's happening in Bobby Cote. We're talking about the games.

We're talking about the studios. We're talking about so much. And I don't think it's 100% good or bad, right? I think there are so many good things that do come with this acquisition. But I still come out on the other side of it going corporate consolidation, overall as a whole, I think is scary, and I do think it's bad for the industry. Because we talk about right now,

right now Xbox being led by Phil Spencer is a thing that I think generally we like and generally a thing that we believe in and we appreciate their approach right now, but we don't know that that's always going to be the case. We don't know what Xbox looks like 10 years from now. And at any point, things could change and Xbox can turn into a company

that does things in a way where we're like, oh, that's shitty. Oh, the culture there now sucks. Oh, Phil Spencer leaves, somebody else takes over and oh now now the whole strategy changes and i think that's the thing that's that's very possible i think that's i think that that's the thing that exists uh i love the clip that barrett just pulled up of the clip from parks and rec of the what was that uh barrett verizon exon chipotle yeah i think it's to be versatile yeah it's a it's a thing that i think it is

very scary uh on the business side of it and you know it now it just now means that there is more IP and more companies and more, I guess, like, big organizations and brands under this one corporation that has control over how those operate. And like, remove from the context, remove from like the idea of it being Microsoft and it being Activision Blizzard and Activision Blizzard, already being a company that was shaking and having having issues. I do think it leads to less creativity and less freedom in terms of the different kinds of games we can get, the different ways we can see, see games appear on different platforms, what you can do with certain things. When you look at the context of it being Activision Blizzard and Microsoft, you get less fearful

about it, but I do still with my gut just don't like corporate consolidation in this way. That said, I do look at the IP and I do look at the studios. And I get excited for the idea of call of duty, maybe not having to be yearly or not every single Activision studio having to work on call of duty. Being a support team, yeah. Yeah, like being a support team. Or what Andy said of like Overwatch 2 possibly being sage, right? Like these are all things that are reality. And I have a page up that is like a VGC article that went up this morning because like they're thinking in three dimensions, right?

Like they have an article that is a list of every single Activision Blizzard IP that that they own, then now Xbox owns, right? And they just have, it's bullet points. And I'm looking through and there's a lot of IP here, most of which that like, I'm sure most of us don't really care about too deeply. Like how many of us are out here being like, oh, Microsoft put out prototype or put out singularity or, you know, soldier of fortune or whatever. But they might.

That is the thing, though. They might, and Activision wouldn't have. That is the thing is that Activision wouldn't have. And also now we are looking back at things like Tony Hawk. We're looking back at things like Sparrow the Dragon. Securo baby. And Guitar Hero, right? And all these other IP that can now be worked on by the Activision Studios that get freed up

or even by Microsoft studios that are already there, Bethesda Studios. Right? You have that freedom to switch and mix things around in the way where, but that's the first got bought by Microsoft. off the question on our minds was, oh, is obsidian going to make New Vegas too? Even though they're not, like, that was a possibility, right? If they wanted to do that, they could do that. Now, like, you have all these other studios.

And if Rare isn't able to get ever wild off the ground, could Rare make a crash game or a spiral game? Like, these are things that are fucking possible now. And I think that's pretty insane. A negative thing about it that I immediately think of is, damn, it sucks that this is what it took for us to feel better about these employees. Like this drastic of a thing is what it took to feel better about people working in and working comfortably and not feeling like they're constantly under threat and worried about their futures in the industry because they have terrible people working above them. And we go, oh, yeah, hell yeah.

Like now they're going to hopefully this changes the work culture. But it sucks that this is what it took for to just kind of buy people out and hopefully we say, all right, go away. situation please yeah it's like it's such a drastic ass thing um but i i i on the plus side like what blessing and tim her already mentioned i do hope that they were able to look at all these studios that are essentially called duty studios and say well maybe we can definitely scale that back like we call duty is still going to be a juggernaut it's not only a juggernaut because we have five support studios working on it or whatever it is it will still sell millions and millions and how about we chase that passion project for that one franchise that some people showed

enthusiasm for that we're hoping we can bring back in some way. Like there's the possibilities are kind of endless with this, not just of Activision IP that aren't being used anymore, but just, I mean, really kind of any Xbox IP as well. So I think that's what gets me the most excited that we can pull off these teams that we don't need this team only making maps for Call of Duty. There's other purposes you can serve. And it's still going to sell millions anyway, so who cares? The call of duty portion of it is one of the things I'm most curious about,

because I think you're absolutely right that it frees them up to go, hey, we don't have to, we don't have to just churn out call duty, the way that call duty has been churned out for the last decade and a half at this point. But there's also the other thing that I brought this up during KFD that you don't spend $68 billion to buy Activision Blizzard and go, cool now let's not make all that call of duty money right call of duty is such a big moneymaker and call of duty is a big reason why they're actually worth that much right and of course there's also fucking like world warcraft and blizzard and all the other things that they have going on but call

duty is a core component of that and it makes me wonder what the shift is going to be with call of duty because we've seen in past years call of duty has been kind of shaky right call of duty not just from the activision blizzard standpoint of it from the call duty black ops for not having a campaign because they weren't able to get together a campaign in time, so they just shipped it without a campaign portion of it, right? That was a thing that happened, and it was a big signifier of, oh, shit. Like, they don't always have their shit together, right?

Black Ops, what was the last? Cold War. What was the last Cold War? Two years ago, I think it was Black Off's Cold War. When that came out, I think that was, like, out of order, right? Because there's typically three studios that may Call of Duty. Yeah, they jumped one. They jumped one.

And I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, I believe that was just because of the difficulties they were having, having developing the game and getting the game out the door so they had to switch things up. Call of Duty, I think, was already kind of in a weird, unstable place with what this yearly structure has been. And if I had to guess a move, the move I would guess would be to, cool, let's go back to Call of Duty being the two biggest brands of Call of Duty, right? Let it be just Call of Duty Black Ops and Call of Duty modern warfare and rotate between the two and have it be similar to the Assassin's Creed cadence of,

you're on, you're on, you're off. You're on, you're off. And have it be a thing of, cool. There's two call dutys. You have Call of Warzone, which is always ongoing. And then free up some of the other studios to work on more stuff for Microsoft. That way, people aren't getting over Call of Duty, but people are also getting the call of duty stuff that they want the most,

which I would say is probably modern warfare and Black Ops. I think that that's really interesting. And I also think that because of Game Pass, because of what that allows, you're on your, you're on your off. could just be year and a half on, year and a half off, year and a half. Like, it could just be a different cycle because games don't need to come out in November, necessarily anymore, especially when you have Game Pass, especially now when we're starting to get to a point where, like, cool, we have to wait for this to actually go through and all this

to happen and whatever, but two years from now, we'll be at a place that these are all just Xbox game studios. What is the monthly release schedule going to look like for Xbox? Because they're going to be looking at that while giving the different developers autonomy to create what they want. but there is going to still be the ringleader kind of looking at it all. Like, how does it all shake out? And what's crazy to me is like looking at what just happened in the last couple of weeks,

I would have never, ever, ever believed that they were going to launch Forza and Halo as close to each other as they did. But they did. And they're just like, yeah, and we're not done. We're just going to keep doing stuff and keep having third party shit and whatever. Like, it's crazy. The world's changed. I think what gets me so excited about this is the development for these sort of annualizing

games or for a year and a half annualized games, whatever we want to call them, to see the love and care and to see the amount that they listened to feedback for Halo Infinite. And I know it's still not in a perfect spot, but with how communicative they are and with a lot of the executives at Xbox seeing how important that community is to Halo Infinite and how it has continued to succeed in the game space as a multiplayer game. It didn't just come out and die on the vine after a couple of weeks, and it's still being played by a lot of people. I really hope to see that love and care being put into Vanguard,

or any call of duty franchise for that matter, because we know that Vanguard is not in a great spot, and even though it sells a whole lot, I wouldn't have ever seen Activision really necessarily carrying a whole lot that there is a negative viewpoint of it. Of course, the numbers are, to me or kind of all that mattered to Activision. And they see that bottom line and they go, well, sure, we can fix it and we can try to, you know,

oh, the QA team for Raven is still, well, whatever, you know, the game is still selling. We'll let the QA team still continue to strike or whatever. But I see, like, I don't see that happening under an Xbox leadership. I don't see Phil Spencer seeing that happen and being cool with that. I feel like that is something, the culture that they've kind of shown what HALA and 343 can do, I really see those changes being implemented and hopefully kind of taken over a lot of the other bigger studios. So that's what gets me really excited. Go ahead, Greg. Yeah, if I can, like the one thing, so I haven't gone, we went around as it good, is it bad? Is it, you know, wait

to be C? Obviously, the answer is it's a wait and see. We don't know. We're all hypothesizing going with this. I would, if you eliminate wait and see, you have to put your chips on the table. you have to back one, is it good or is it bad? I would say it's pretty much all upside, that it's a good thing. Good bad. Good bad. It's good.

It's bad. No, it's all upside. It's all good because I think on the immediate thing we've already covered it that, so I won't do it. It's the fact that, all right, cool, the toxic leadership looks like they're going to be gone. And you'll have Phil Spencer and an Xbox team that's trying to be better in the industry.

That's great for the workers. However, I would take it then to what you're getting from games in where the games industry is at, specifically Activision, right? Where we can sit there and talk about the fact that Activision pretty much just makes call of duty. Gary called this out and we looked at the graphic earlier today on Games Daily, right? That it's a bunch of Blizzard games up there and then Activision, right? Activision just makes Call of Duty. So even if just Toys for Bob gets to go do something else,

even if just a small team from Raven gets to go do something else that they want to do, that a project they've been doing on blah, you're getting more out of them than just another call of duty. And to Tim's point, like, no one is going to hold them theoretically to an annualized schedule there, that they can make these call of duties. They can make them when they want and they can make it all work together go that way. The other thing I think that gets lost is, yes, consolidation is scary, especially when we talk about something as big, a player that is as big as Activision Blizzard, right? However, what, and I'm not trying to throw shade because I know there are so many dinners, but like, what were the innovations and games coming out of Activision Blizzard that we were. holding on to. There's a legacy for Blizzard. Obviously, there's legacy for Activision. I'm not even trying to take

shots at. But when you look at the list that went up there of Starcraft and Diablo and Overwatch and Call of Duty and Candy Crush and stuff like that, these are great games, some regard, varying levels, right? But they're also ones that you look at and you go, okay, well, how many of them were just on PC or how many of them have just been Call of Duty? How many of them are just mobile? I think them going to Xbox means they're going to go to more places. I think you're going to see those PC games come to Xbox and go there. I think you're going to see

Call of Duty get more time. It'll be on less platforms, but it'll get more time. It may be a better product than that way. I think it's a nuanced conversation, but to sit here and talk about consolidation makes it sound like Activision was putting out hundreds of games that are all different, that are all these

different scopes and slides and scales and stuff like that when I really don't think that's what the company was doing. And I think it's in a different place as an industry and a bit blinders on not to stop and look and go, well, let's look at, you know, what we've defined as quote unquote indie for so long. And indie, of course, when it originally started was it's going to be an eight-bit platformer made by some guys in a garage to where an independent studio is a different thing these days. It can be hundreds of people. It can be a big thing. It can be a tiny too. It can be

somewhere in between. It can be all these different things. But we are inundated every day with games that are multi-platform that are everywhere or sign the exclusivity deal and do game past exclusive or do PlayStation Plus exclusive for a set amount of time before they go everywhere else. Like it's scary to think of consolidation. It's scary to think of something as big as an Activision Blizzard going. But I think when you actually sit there and talk about what games are under the Activision Blizzard banner, I'm not saying who cares about them. I'm saying there's tons, hundreds, thousands more out there that are games like Chickory, that are games like nobody saves the world, that are these games that maybe they have an exclusivity window for a while

are still out there. Tim, I'm sorry. I saw your hand go up. I just to talk about the games and the catalog that they have, like looking at Activision's Wikipedia, the list of games they've released. Like, it is ridiculous to see the start contrast between the games released from 2010 to 2019 and then from 2020 to 2021, looking at that tail end of like just starting at like 2017 and going down to see the varied games that they would release and just get more trickled down to just call it. That's pretty much it. Like in 2020, it's a little cheap to say that because 2020 wasn't that long ago.

I mean, I guess it was at this point. But like they did Tony Hawk. They did crash bandicoot. They did Spiro. But then since then it's just call of duty, call of duty, call of duty. And it's like, that's not a bad thing. And I do want it to defend college duty, like you were talking about innovation and all this stuff. And innovation might not necessarily be the right word.

But they definitely, I mean, Col of duty. It pushed out. Col of duty innovated video games and a bazillion different ways I don't even need to talk about. we all understand that. But they've continued to kind of iterate and kind of create something that is like AAA on a whole of a different level. And to see what Warzone has done in a post-Fortnight world is absolutely incredible. And if that were to just be kind of refined, I mean, just the fact that like our guys

love playing it as much as they do, I think is a testament to the quality of the game where it's almost belittling to just be like, oh, it's just call a duty. It's just one of the best gaming experiences out there, you know, and like maybe not for me, But the numbers don't lie at some point. Like the quality is there. And even something like Vanguard, it's like I feel like it comes out and granted Vanguard's in a very different situation because so many people wouldn't even give it the time of day

because of the trash motherfuckers that are surrounding it, right? Like everything is just so bad there that the idea of a call of duty campaign that can be made without that layer of filth on top of it and with better leadership. And just kind of like, what story do you want to tell? I think that that is incredibly exciting and likely with this plan. And to bring it back, right, in terms of what I'm talking about with corporate consolidation, I think when you look at the actual context of it being Activision Blizzard and Activision Xbox, it is exactly what you're talking about, Greg, in terms of it's upside in this particular situation.

When I talk about corporate consolidation, I'm talking about it generally as an idea I don't like. And I also don't like the fact that this is what it took to make Activision Blizzard better, right? This is the solution that is happening in order to grant them the freedom to be able to have that time, to be able to have that freedom to make the games they want in order to have the better working environment. I would have preferred it be something else. I would prefer it being not a gigantic Microsoft, maybe another, either another company or like, I would prefer the love to get spread in a way where it's not. Okay, now this $68 billion corporation gets put into this even more expensive corporation.

to make this happen. I think it's just a sad solution to it. Going off of that, I mean, it's interesting to think about the other guys now, right? Where we have like that that list that I was saying from Daniel Amad like Tencent at number one, right? Like I feel like if this news was Tencent acquired Activision,

this conversation would be a little different than we're having right now, right? Like I don't think that we're celebrating acquisition. I think that for those of us that are, we're celebrating Microsoft acquiring. And what that actually means. And again, we're talking about context and all stuff earlier but going down from Sony being number two at 22 and the Nintendo at 15 both of those

surprised me and like to different extent like we know that the switch is like selling ridiculously well the PlayStation 5 literally can't stay on shelves it's this 500 dollar thing that people are buying and buying the games and the numbers come with that and the proof is there with the sales numbers for all of the core first party titles from Sony like when horizon forbidden west comes out next month it's going to cross 10. That's crazy. You know, like that's, those are insane unheard of numbers. Like, we're getting to the point that Sony is creating first party titles that can rival sales of something like a call of duty.

And that, that is insane. It's what is keeping them in the race. What's up, Les? I feel like we're about to shift into the PlayStation side of things in the conversation. And that's actually the other half of why I think it's a bad thing that I left out that I didn't get to is that I think the exclusive sides of it get pretty weird and pretty like, oh man, this kind of sucks for the PlayStation audience of people who, you know, show up. You buy a PS5 because you love Call-Duty. You buy PS5 because you love Overwatch and looking forward to Overwatch to and then have

these things ripped away from you. And I know part of that, the big part of it is that is the industry and there's always been exclusives and this is anything new and the same thing happened with Bethesda. I think when it comes to, with the Bethesda thing, I think I felt a similar way and I think I feel even more so with call duty that I don't know like I look back at me in high school and college only having only getting to have a PlayStation right or only having the money to afford a PlayStation and having certain games I look forward to you or having like I guess this is a little bit later in the college for me but having rise to the Tomb Raider get announced as exclusive to Xbox for that period of time and me as somebody who couldn't afford an Xbox going

ah shit I love the first Tomb Raider I guess I'm not going to play rise to the Tomb Raider well I'm just I'm just not going to play it. right there are so many people who i imagine are in that bucket of people who are big fans of call dignity who are big fans of these games that now just don't get to play these games uh on the only platform that they own granted the upside of it being Xbox is there is game pass and there is PC and there is streaming but like i i don't know for i don't know for overall all the way there yet where people have a gaming pc right or everybody has a way to interact with it i think we're going to get there soon with streaming but i do you think there's still we're still in that great area where

the Xbox dream hasn't become the Xbox dream yet of what they what they envision. I understand that argument. Don't get it. But like you said, exclusive have existed forever. I'm not going to toss it out. For me, I don't totally vibe with that argument holding water in the fact that this isn't

happening tomorrow. It's the fact that like this is going to be a glacial process right before this happens. It's the same thing where I think Starfield is really that first like, oh shit, how much do you care about Bethesda? You know what I mean? And like, obviously you want to sit there and be like, well, I want to play her eyes and I want to do this, I want to do that. So I want my PlayStation for those reasons.

It becomes that push and pull. But it's the same push and pull I feel like we had when I was a Sega kid and my friends were Nintendo kids. And granted, not exactly the same. We're talking about acquisitions that have come after the fact. And yada, yada,

yada. This isn't like, it isn't Mario Sonic where it's like, you know, homegrown IP from it. But I think that they're giving you enough time to see the train coming down the tracks that if you need to switch over, if you need to,

how much do either of them matter to you? You know, we have an expensive hobby. We've all known that. And so it, don't even wrong. It, yes, bottom line, it sucks if you are a PlayStation gamer and you're like, fuck, I only ever want to own a PlayStation. But I feel like you're saying there are avenues outside of it. You wouldn't have, you won't be able to buy a PS5 in 2023 either.

So like, who cares? No, no, no. I am, I do side a bit more of blessing here because I, I don't think this is like the perfect comparison, but this is like if Xbox said, hey, Sony users, uh, Addin's only going to be on Xbox from here on now. Or 2K is only going to be on Xbox from here on now. Like, Call of Duty is that type of game where it reaches beyond the people that are going for the Last of Us gamers or the people that are playing, are going to play a vowed from Obsidian in the future. Or even Bethesda games, you know?

Yeah, exactly. Like Call of Duty is the type of game that my cousin will buy a console for, play the game. and that's the only game that he'll ever play on that thing. Will he buy an Xbox now? I don't know. Like, at this point, like maybe he bought PS-5.

I would venture to guess that he will in the future. I would venture to guess that he will in the future, especially right now if you're sitting here and I'm projecting on your cousin, what I assume he knows that it doesn't have a PlayStation 5, then he's rocking a PlayStation 4 in this, in this scenario. I don't know if they play on PlayStation in general.

But I would think that's what this is and why it's a smart move for Microsoft of like, all right, cool, let's put more weight on the scale that when you sit there and you go, what's the next gen console I want to get? Well, I have the S, which is, you know, cheaper than all of them. I can go to the Xbox Series X. I can get a PlayStation, but what are the pros, cons? What's on the back of the box?

Remember you used to buy the console and had all the games laid out on it. Like, don't be wrong. I'm not saying why it's okay or like, well, I'm just like capitalism. If it feels a bit dirtier when it is, we're going to take this from you to do that as opposed to like, and I'll go in again, I think, I feel like what I'm saying is speculating a lot. We're talking about stuff that isn't even fully cemented or whatever, but I would feel a lot more okay with this if we were in between console cycles. If maybe the series consoles and the PS5s had not come out yet, I feel like I would be a lot better about that because some people will buy one console for the next six, seven, eight years and not think about getting an extra console.

And if those people just bought a PS5, if they were able to get one, you may not have call of duty in next year or the year after that, you know. The one thing I've seen a lot of people going around being like, and this is a fun, I think a funny take. It's not wholly wrong or anything like that. It's just funny of like, man,

it just sucks that PlayStation built this armada of studios and great games and great IP and Xbox's answers to buy things away to try to build their own, right? And I think in the chat right now, the live one, have been saying we have no reason for having an Xbox platform. Xbox's goal here is to make you enter the Xbox ecosystem. We've been asking for years what would make us do just that. And here we are.

And again, like, yeah, they didn't create call a duty. They didn't do a thing, what they fucking threw some money at it and got it and are trying to give you a reason to go buy that system or get on Xbox game pass at least. But my thing is like, and of course, we're making a lot of assumptions here. But I assume that they're going to make these properties better. And they're going to be better because they're quote unquote exclusive and tied to thing because somebody cares about making them better on this specific platform this reminds me a lot of the argument of the the streaming wars that are happening uh between disney plus

and hb o max and netflix and all this stuff and the conversation i see constantly about cable coming up about well back in my day like we had to pay a hundred fifty dollars a month or whatever and we're back to doing that i thought we cut the cord but here we are it's like well the difference is you're getting more high quality content than you ever work before on cable because all these people are competing and it's not just HBO quality shows now. They're everywhere. They're on Disney Plus. They're on Netflix.

Like the game has changed in terms of content. There are more good shows coming out every single month and movies coming to streaming platforms than entire years that we used to have. The same is happening on the gaming side of things. And I think that the idea of, well, you might need to buy another console. It's like, well, yeah, but you're going to be getting a way more exclusive high quality content than we've ever gotten before in gaming history. if you were to do that and investing in PlayStation will get you the litany of first party titles

that we can expect quality from because they've built us up to expect that and they've earned our trust in the so many that Xbox has earned my trust over the last five years to be able to create extremely quality content at a very quick clip using GamePass, which is the lowest barrier to entry we've ever had with inflation and all this stuff when it comes to consoles. When the N64 was out, it was $150. that sounds like nothing compared to the 500 people are paying for consoles now, right? But like that's what it would cost to just get the new console. And then you add PlayStation, you add all this other stuff.

There was exclusives and there was no other way to play it. It was a cartridge or a CD. Things have changed now. And with Xbox, they're clearly trying to be able to make as many people able to play games as possible. And when it comes to GamePass being as cheap as it possibly can be for people, and if you can't afford that, that's unfortunate. Like that is a problem, but even then they try their best to have free trials. They have so many deals.

They have so many different things you can get on. And they're going to continue to do that. Like we can't just look at it and be like, oh man, if you bought a PS5, you made a bad call. No, if you're about a PS5, you're about to have an amazing amount of games coming out the next couple of years. They're going to make that worth it. But also, if you're jealous and you want the Xbox experience, which you probably should, there are five different ways to get into that ecosystem if you don't already have a gaming PC or whatever. Like, I think the argument that like, oh, not everyone has a gaming PC.

It's a little like short-sighted because the reality is Xbox knows that. And Xbox wants everyone on GamePass. They want GamePass everywhere. And I guarantee in the same way that this news took the world by storm today. Like, how did all of us not know this? How do we not know anyone that knew this news? You know what I mean? I guarantee those conversations going on with every major TV provider, every manufacturer for smart devices and stuff.

to get Xbox game pass literally everywhere, including PlayStation, including Nintendo. Those conversations might not turn into something, but they're happening. I guarantee it. On the, yeah. I've been waiting.

The reason is absolutely, you know? Put it a little play date, you know what I mean? I can't wait for that thing. Maybe you mean you're going to play the play day. It was going to be a fun time. We're going to have a play day.

We're going to crank it together. Let's crank it together. Uh-huh. Jesus. So taking this conversation a slightly different way, so we're talking a little bit just about the PlayStation thing and I'm sure on PS I love you and many other shows are going to be talking about like what can PlayStation do to compete all that different stuff I don't want to do that here I want to talk about things like Ubisoft and EA I hope nobody is the first thing I thought I hope as we as we as we've as we've been talking about Betheson and Activision Blizzard a thing that popped into my head was the third party library of games and how I guess for me as somebody who plays a lot on PlayStation right like I'm playing a lot of play I'm play I love PlayStation for the first thing I'm play I love PlayStation for the first thing I'm play I'm play I love PlayStation for the first first party, obviously. But for me, I do think I gravitate, I don't gravitate to first party, like, as, I think as much as compared to, like, other PlayStation gamers where I, my, historically

for the last generation, I spent a lot of my times, a lot of my time with, like, Bethesda games, right? Or even with, like, some Ubisoft games, some EA games. But, um, I feel like, if, if one or the other, right, if Microsoft or PlayStation were to acquire a Ubisoft or Bethesda, I would be kind of bummed out by it. Even me as a PlayStation person, if PlayStation acquired Ubisoft or, or EA, I'd be, I don't know. I don't think that's the right move. I think that is, I think it's, it's a business move for sure. And I think it's a thing that'll work out for them having more studios to work with. But I think it still falls into my thing of like corporate consolidation and how I think that's what we start to get into. Okay, so no games are third party anymore. No games

are coming out on, on all these platforms anymore when everything gets bought up. like that's a you know people like oh man it's it's scary i've seen that go around today of microsoft you know having bethesta and now having uh activation blizzard and what's scarier i feel is then the arms race you're in now of like okay cool but what does that do to an EA to a ubysoft what kind of you know target does it put on their back that way what do you have from PlayStation now feeling they have to respond to that, they have to go out and do that. Was that ever, you know, does this at all shake up their strategy over there for Jim Ryan and Herman, right? Where they, it was this always, if they were and they were to buy one of those companies,

or even Konami, which I see you get thrown around a lot, right? If you were to go out and acquire something like that, was that always the plan? Are you doing it now because we're suddenly in a game of monopoly where it's like, well, fuck, I got to buy whatever I land on on the board. I need property. I need things here. And so even if PlayStation didn't do that, Is that still Microsoft's plan?

Is Microsoft plan still to keep acquiring huge third parties and get stuff into the chamber that nobody else can? I don't know. You know, and you look at Ubisoft and how they fought off of Vendie. I remember when I was like, that's a done deal, but Vendee's got them. And they were able to change perception, you know, change the way they made games and get out from under that.

But then there's been more scuttlebone recently. Was that the best move for the, like, I know that time we celebrated that. But like at the end of the day, it's like, was that maybe what if Marvel universe that's I love I love the assassins creative late so I would say yes but who knows I just meant for culture I meant like oh for culture I apologize I understand you're saying yeah well who knows there yeah yeah I don't know I don't know what that means for them I think that there's ongoing conversations not all these places and I think it you know it goes up to such a different thing I've

seen today already with this Activision stuff the comments from Bobby Kodick saying like this is nothing to do with what's happened recently. These were conversations that started a long time ago. And then like unnamed sources, being like, well, Phil was pretty sure because of everything happened. They'd be able to get this.

And of course, there was pressure then of the stockholders right when they went there. And we have a quote pulled up here. Which one's this? I can't, let me open it up. This is the screenshot from Jason Schreyer. Oh, Jason Schreier from the Bloomberg reporting, right?

Yeah. In an interview with Kodick, I'm sorry. In an interview, Kodick said the deal has nothing to do with the controversy surrounding activation or calls for him to step down and that Spencer reached out to him last year.

Person familiar with the discussions, who was not authorized to be publicly, said Microsoft looked at Activision's situation. I like the situation, given all the negative attention and pressure on Kodak. And wondered if the beleaguered CEO would be willing to do a deal. Kodick initially didn't want to sell, according to another person familiar with the talks,

and also put the word out to see if any other company would outbid Microsoft. But at that point, Kodak had little leverage with his board. I mean, the ongoing public scrutiny at his company. And so if that's to be believed, which I think it is, you then take it into consideration when you think of a Ubisoft or an EA or, you know, I guess there's not many other big third parties to toss out there and be like, this is almost a very specific situation, right? This is a not once in a lifetime thing, but like there was extenuating circumstances here that made this more than just Microsoft. Be like, let's buy Activision. And it was very much like bloods in the water, right? Codex weak right now.

The stockholders would like to just get this done with and make their profit and get on. why not go for it? And so what that means for Ubisoft and EA, I think it's harder to say right now, where I don't think EA is in that turmoil. Ubisoft is in and out of it, and you figure maybe with, you know, Activision, if they can get rid of all the toxic leadership there

and then get that fixed, maybe then eyes are back on to Ubisoft, but we'll have to wait and see. Last of us factions, it's your time to stand up, baby. This is the multiplayer that PlayStation owners are going to be going for. Can you imagine though being EA and being like, hey, guess what?

Call the player is Battlefield is better than back and better than ever and it's just not and that it is not. Go ahead Tim. Yeah. No, I mean Greg saying that EA and Ubisoft are kind of like the big ones. It's like when you really look at the industry of where it's at now, it's like yes, Ubisoft and EA

and formerly Activision, or I guess currently for now, are kind of in a league of their own there. Like I would put Nintendo above them and PlayStation obviously and then below that Capcom and Square there's take two as well. Take two is like I would even put as like a different category altogether like that almost feels like a vertical to its to its own more similar to a Tencent or something like that

But because the thing about take two is it doesn't feel like there's like a Cohesion between their brands and their IP and their developers and all that stuff like it seems messier than Ubisoft where it's like there's Ubisoft Right you know or there's that whatever and then you go down to things like like Sega Konami whatever all of them have different kind of pros cons and value to them. And at this point, I think that as gamers, we can all kind of unanimously say, someone should buy Konami because Konami is not doing shit. Yeah.

So it's like Konami, like wherever that goes, at least there'd be people working on all these IP that we love so much. But then you start like looking up the rest of the list. Like it does get really kind of messy and complicated because even looking like a Ubisoft right now, of course, if Microsoft could get them, I'm sure they'd want to, right?

So many talented people there. so many so much IP, so much quality titles on an annual basis, all of that. But they do have their deal with GamePass and, uh, GubePlay or whatever it is, right? On the EA side, they do have their deal with EA origin and all this. Like it's already, the benefits are already kind of there in a roundabout way, which is interesting to see that we don't necessarily need acquisitions for Xbox to be gaining a foothold in that's all of this. And that's why it's interesting to see it go this way.

Again, Activation, I think, is a very specific case as we just went through. But it did seem like partnerships were going to be the thing going forward. As you've seen, yeah, Ubisoft do this lately and then EA before them. But even Ubisoft, right, has partnered up and has the Amazon Luna channel. Like, they're out there pushing that thing. They're getting their brand there. They're going by the old adage, right, that we try to, which is, of course, you know, you can't direct someone to a dot com anymore.

You need to push be where their eyes are. And so you see Ubisoft chasing that. You see EA chasing that. And that's the way to actually grow the business and keep it healthy and hopefully keep yourself out of an acquisition state. And so, yeah, like, you look at them, but I don't know if they're, and obviously, nobody's, clearly, nobody's too big

to be purchased anymore. But it's like, if you would have listed off all these companies, yeah, you would have been like, oh, who's going to get bought by either Microsoft or Sony? It'd be like, oh, Konami, for sure, isn't there, Sega, for sure? Like, there's a whole bunch of people in there. I can see. Well, who? Square. Camcom.

I was like, who's ram? Yeah, square, right? Yeah, there's a bunch. I mean, inevitably, Square and Capcom are going to get bought, and Konami. I think all three will be by somebody and I think another interesting thing to bring up is those are Japanese companies whereas like all these big ones are talking about our Western companies so far like even like Bethesda there's just like a different kind of culture when it comes to these things and how games are made and all of that and I I'm very interested in the fact that it seems like right now

the Western companies are all kind of being acquired in together with Microsoft meanwhile Nintendo Sony Capcom Square all the Japanese Japanese companies are doing their own thing. Does that remain? Does that last? I think it does for a while. But I just think it's an interesting thing to kind of point out. That's the question that I've been wondering if like if they continue in the

steps that they've been making of continuing to purchase Western publishers or developers because there's the big question today. Does this, you know, raise any red flags for antitrust and all that stuff? when does it get to that point? You know? Because like the conversation for the last five minutes has been made me so depressed

of just like just seeing all of these companies just be whittled away and just thinking about how it's just gonna it's gonna come down to two or three companies in the next 10 years. And that just first, it's a very depressing thought to have.

So I'm just wondering if it ever stops. But again, and I know it sounds like stupid probably and it's too rosy to some degree. Remember that it, if these like what are what are we talking about right like let's let's let's we've just gone through ea ubisoft uh square uh you know Sega like what are we talking about we're talking about dinosaurs from a bygone era and i'm not trying to be like burn the whole industry let's start over kind of shit but it is that thing of like there's for there's people like me that're like

oh a ubi soft game cool an open world checklist that's dope and i i'm interested to play that it's not going to be game of the year, but I'm interested to play it for 30 hours, never finish it and move on and, you know, talk about it here and there's other people like, I never fucking play that kind of shit, but I'm over it. Like, there's this whole thing of, I feel like we get so caught up in these names that have been around our entire lives that, yes, they have cachet and they mean something and they're, their pillars of the industry, but like, I'd be more, like, there's still so many other things happening, so many other ideas, so many creative ideas coming from the independent space that, I mean, yeah, we can sit here and it's like almost like

when Warner Brothers games, you know, almost got sold a while back and all these different things. It's like, oh man, that'd be terrified. But wouldn't it be cool? It's kind of like Marvel games, right? Where it's like, yeah. But isn't it cool that they're like going to people and giving, you know, all these different partners room to play? I guess just insomiac for the most part.

But room to play with these things. Like there's good. There's pros. There's cons. There's everything else. I don't think it's worth being depressed about it. Yes. I don't think it's worth being depressed about it as much as it is just like the industry's

drastically changed then from where I started in 2007 covering it professionally, let alone playing it. And I don't, in a world where all you need is. a license you can go from PlayStation or Xbox or you know 99 what I don't even know if it's still it's $99 to get in app store developer kit right like people are making awesome shit and they don't need these giant third party publishers anymore the reason third party publishers are falling away being purchased are not being looked at to be like the pillars of where your game of the year is coming from is because it's exactly what we're talking about with all this bobby kodick

and activision shit where it's like cool we just need to make fucking money that's what we're in this to do make fucking money and this isn't new news right i tweeted this out as a joke earlier but it's a real story from 2008 why activation dump sierra games activation blizzard boss bobby kodick has explained the various sierra parentheses vivendi games were dumped for not exhibiting quote potential to be exploited every year across every platform end quote potential to be exploited every year across every platform This is not a man or a company who gave a flying fuck about the art of video games. He wants to make a buck for his shareholders and everything else. And that isn't at all unique to him.

And Xbox are doing amazing things right now. They want to see a return. Microsoft wants to see a return, yada, yada, yada. And don't get me wrong. The other end of the spectrum, when you have an independent developer, and I will say them again because we keep using them today. Drinkbox. Nobody saves the world. They want to make money on their game.

but they also want to do something cool. And so there's that ebb and flow where clearly with an Activision you can go too far one direction and clearly with a failed company that is just putting something out that never gets purchased to go another direction.

I just don't think it's the end-all that these big dinosaurs are falling. Yeah, I understand Barrett, why you might feel like, because I get the same way, I can kind of immediately go to like... And I'm not talking about like, end of the day.

Oh, it's so sad that these old companies are going on a bit. Like, I'm... It's more of just like the implications of like, what late stage capitalism is doing to a lot of things and now how it's breaching and affecting our industry as a whole right now. And that's just more of the ether that I am in and that I've been in all day. Well, I mean, at the end of the day, Barrett, you know, the fucking ocean tides

are going to rise in 60 years. We're all going to be dead, Barrett. Think about that. So that's crazy. I think I'd be a lot more sad if the acquisitions that we were hearing about were similar to like what EA did with origin back in the day or or EA shutting down visceral like i think hearing about smaller studios getting shut down by bigger corporations is what kind of is what i think would be more of a sad thing like if xbox was acquiring Activision blizzard and they said hey by the way all your other studios gone getting rid of you all like if that were the story i think there'd be a lot more reason uh to feel that sort of doom and gloom scenario but i'm kind of more with Greg on this one where

I just I just think about these old studios and I don't really necessarily think that like what are we necessarily losing aside from you know the will to live Barrett you know I mean it's but again it's less about what we're losing

and more about the continued power that we're giving very very very little few companies yeah and I think that's where I agree, Barrett, is that I think once we start sweeping away third parties under three big corporations, that's where things feel, that's where I feel like things are kind of dying in terms of like the vibrancy of the video games industry. I understand what you're talking about, Greg, in terms of like things aren't vibrant as they are. When you look at like the issues that we have at Ubisoft in Activision and when you look at like Konami, not even putting out games anymore with them holding on to the Meliger IP and all this other shit that's going on,

I think we're, you know, not to be depressing, right? I think we're kind of in a lose-lose in terms of each and any other way. And so like the way that the exciting thing, I think that makes Xbox acquiring Activision acquiring companies the exciting thing because at least right now, at the very least, we trust Microsoft with these companies. But like when we talk about EA and Square Inix in these companies, right, like the thought of, because I know we're going to have this conversation is probably going to be the next PSLW of how does PlayStation respond?

because I don't think PlayStation sits here, watches Microsoft acquire Bethesda last year, watches Microsoft acquire Activision Blizzard, and go, all right, cool, let's announce another partnership with Jade Red. It's like, no, you guys are going to fucking buy people. And when PlayStation inevitably buys a, when they buy a Square Inex or they buy a Ubisoft, I do think that PlayStation operates different from Microsoft, where PlayStation, I think, will be hands-on, and PlayStation will convert those publishers and companies, studios into PlayStation Studios type studios, which could be a good thing, could be a bad thing,

depending on do you like those studios already? Is it? Maybe. Yes, it is. Do we like playing quality video games? Yes, we do. I think there's a deeper conversation there. But I do understand where Tim comes from in terms of we see PlayStation Studios as being the pinnacle

of putting out quadruple-A video games. And so like, do you want every video game to be that? Sure, why not? But I do think that there is a, it's a, it's a slipper. slope of okay cool now everything is under the vision of like PlayStation Xbox or Nintendo and now you do come you do everything falls under these three creative visions or three I guess corporate visions of how these studios operate and that's about it and again that is very like it is me pushing things to the greatest degree indies do exist other studios will always exist

right there's plenty of studios still making video games but I think uh the the business conversation gets me more anxious than like the pure creative conversation i think the creative conversation is fun the business conversation and talking about the monopolization of the of the industry and like turning these studios into these uh corporations into pure chess pieces so they can fucking like sell and buy each other is the thing that makes me go is this okay is this right because something about this feels wrong and again i'm not a business person i can't narrow down exactly why it feels that way it just feels that way to me i just want to say the companies are the the third priorities are now are already the held in two, the other guys, to PlayStation and Xbox.

So it's not a Nintendo. It's not like they're not already in control of that shit. We got to wrap up the show pretty soon, but Andy, what's up? I just want to say something really quick that I don't think it's unnatural to feel that way, blessing. And I think a lot of us felt that way when Disney bought Fox after, you know, Disney had just bought Star Wars about, you know, eight years prior to that or whatever it was. And since Disney purchased Fox, I was still like, you know, I'm kind of worried about this. And then I saw new mutants and I was like, this is the right choice. We deserve to live under this.

We deserve to live under this society. That's all I had to say. That's all I got to say. And with that, I'm sure we're going to be talking about this for many, many years to come. Because this is just beginning now. And honestly, I don't expect to see much or hear much about anything official of this happening. for at least six months, if not longer. But let's know in the comments below what you think about all of this.

Stay tuned to PS, I Love You, and especially Xcast later this week, where Mike, Gary, and Paris, I'm sure we're going to get all into their thoughts on this entire thing. I recommend you go listen to Games Daily. I still do. It was a fantastic episode. So much to talk about. Until next time, I love you all. Goodbye.