NZXT PODCAST - #103 - Versus Evil

Episode Date: September 3, 2021

This week we are joined by Lance and Dave from indie games publisher Versus Evil! We talk about indie games, corny rap, and Marvel! Check out more Versus Evil at twitter.com/vs_evil Tune in live every Thursday at 10AM PT on twitch.tv/NZXT and send your questions to: podcast[@]nzxt.com

everyone to episode 103 of the NXT podcast, the official podcast of the NXT community. This podcast is recorded live every Thursday at 10 a 10-N Pacific Center time. The official NXT Twitch is available to stream on-demand on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and SoundCloud, and also Twitch pods, I guess. If there's those are sold up, I don't know how they work. My name is Dennis. So with me, as always, is Ivan. Ivan.

How do you do, baby boo? Good. Happy certified lover boy day. How you, how you feeling? Pretty good. I actually listened to it twice last night, back to back. Back to back. Definitely, definitely enjoyed it more than Donda, that's for sure. I even, I liked it so much that I named all my fantasy football team certified lover boys. We'll, we'll discuss that in a second because I feel like,

if our guests are going to want to chime in on this. Today's special guests, are Lance and Dave from Indie Games publisher versus Evil who are known for titles such as the Banner Saga franchise Guild of Engineering and First Class Trouble. Am I right on that one on the first, okay, call? Because I was typing it out and I'm like, am I wrong on this? And then he just never asked for clarifications.

They also do Battletoads. How are you guys doing today? That would be awesome. Doing good. Yeah, it's Friday. It's good to be here. Yeah, thanks for having us. No worries.

Thanks for joining us during our N60 summer party extravaganza. be doing so much on social on a discord on actually that's pretty much shit right it's just in social on discord everywhere man yeah everywhere it's it's definitely been a really busy i guess couple of weeks leading or not even longer than a couple weeks leading up to summer party and then now that it's here it's like all week long it's just basically like posting on social media like every hour but uh we made it to the end and we saved the best giveaway for last you know it's a free nzia starter PC. You guys can type

exclamation giveaway in the Twitch chat here to get the link. And apart from the PC, we're also giving away a bunch of game codes

that versus evil gave us and... Oh, yeah, he hasn't know actually right there in the office. He hasn't done. Oh, perfect.

Yeah, I was there yesterday. We were doing... We're working a secret project. Yeah, those are awesome. Banner Saga, like hard rock. hired shirts. They were super cool. Got those shirts. Got a bunch of these shirts.

Heck yeah. Yep. Yeah, this was really cool. I should have taken one when they stopped by it. I don't know. What were you thinking? I don't know. I was too focused on work and just trying to remember to keep my mask on. Because I haven't been in the office in like a year or something. And I kept getting yelled at by our HR because I had my mask off. He's like, where's your mask? I'm like, oh my God, I'm so sorry.

It's just kept forgetting. because I'm here all day and I never wear it. And it's when I'm at home is walking around. We also got some of these. So I'm going to be randomly dropping Banner Saga trilogy switch partages into these giveaway bundles here. Thank you guys for all the cool prizes. Yeah, absolutely. And for joining us on the podcast, too.

Probably that one more, I would say. least for me. It's not all the free stuff. Yeah. I mean, free stuff was cool, but myself personally, I value conversations over material possessions. It's just the kind of guy that I am, you know. My third eye is open.

So, yeah, how are you guys doing today? How are you feeling? Are you excited? Like, what's up? What's good? What's going on? Yeah. I haven't been on a podcast in a long time, so my etiquette is all off the mark.

I'm just like I'm trying to remember how to speak to people. You know, it's been a weird couple of years now. So, you know, my social skills still need some work. But very excited to be here and chat with you all. So yeah, thanks again for having us. Yeah, for sure. We're glad to have you guys on. Yeah, so, so I just want to talk about you guys for a second.

So Dave and Lance, what do you guys do at versus evil? Go ahead, Dave. What do you do, Lance? I'm just kidding. I always joke because Lance is like employee number two. He's been with versus evil forever. So he's got all the secrets. And I'm still looking forward to finding out more about that.

I've joined versus evil in December of last year. I've known the founder, Steve Escalante, forever. So it was a really cool opportunity. The community team at that time was kind of shifting and building and had new priorities. So it brought me in to kind of help out and assist with that. So I am currently a community manager lead for our team of awesome people. Hey, Sydney and Chris, hope you're listening. And then I also do influencer relations.

Yep, very cool. Thank you for sharing your screen, Dennis. What's you doing? I don't know what's you doing. I don't know what he's doing. Now he's muted. My bad, sorry. I believe this is a photo of Steve on the podcast.

I may be wrong. I don't know. I haven't even want to verify. Well, I actually know you guys can't really verify, but I can drop it into our Twitch chat. I want to believe this is Steve. I just did a Google. And if I'm wrong, I'm probably wrong on this.

Steve, what Steve? Steve Escalante. That's him. Hey, look at that. He looks like an uncle I have. Like, no lie. I'm sure he's not. You never know.

You never know, right? It's such a great glamour shot pose. I know. It's great. The power lean. Like the stairs. He's really going in on it. That's from.

So at Versus Evil, you guys, you guys publish indie games, right? What does that, like, what does that mean for people who just don't know, like, what a publisher does? Yeah. So there's a lot that kind of goes into that. And people kind of have perceptions of what a publisher does and what they should do. But at its core, we kind of work with indie developers when they're making the, their titles, and we help them through the process of publishing, which includes, you know, going to Steam or going to Xbox or going to PlayStation or going to Apple or whatever, right,

going to any of those platforms where people buy games and enjoy games. On top of that, we help with a bunch of marketing costs and marketing awareness and marketing plans and strategy. Then I guess what takes up a lot of time from a couple guys of our team is kind of the sales strategy and kind of lifelong product cycle. When a game goes on sale, it's not just a, you know, you know, split decision type thing. Those are planned out generally months ahead of time. We have dates planned out. We have events planned out. We have, you know, things happening. It's just a, you know, we try to operate a six to 12 month calendar of when we're doing things with our games

with our developers, just so we have, you know, we're trying to get them the best opportunities possible, right? So, you know, we try to think as far ahead and play as far as as we can. That way we enable our developers to get those opportunities whenever they present themselves. I think at its core publishing for us is helping any developers be successful. So, and that means different things, whether that is making money or gaining notoriety or going to a talk or, you know, speaking at a trade show or whatever it may be. we just try to step in and help them as much as we can in whatever ways we can.

Right. So I know like in today's kind of climate, it's, I wouldn't say it's easy, but it's, it's a relatively, like, I would say, and if I'm wrong, someone, you can definitely let me know, like a relatively straightforward process for, say, someone who just lay indie one two-man person team, they want to get a game on Steam, but they just sort of the game on Steam, they're good to go, right?

But I feel like that's not like all the, risk to it, right? There's the, just like you were saying, there's like a lot more. So let's say, you know, I have a little game. Maybe it took me, you know, a year to two years to develop and I just want to throw it out to the world, right? And I don't really feel like, you know, I needed to have someone like versus evil behind me. Let's say you were trying to kind of like shift that needle over and get me to kind of join your guys' team. Why would you do that? Or I guess why, why would I do that? Well, I would say, there's a couple things there

I guess the first one is we try to look for developers who are a good fit right and it's one of those things where we don't want to come in and disturb them so if we're coming in it's more so like a it's a collaborative effort in terms of us working with a developer

but if we're trying to a developer wants to launch a game and I think they can do it themselves and we want to you know help them or expand their possibilities we look at things like what's your PR plan what are you talking to to get press awareness or getting any previews are you getting any reviews are you getting any influencer to play your game right now what your marketing budget look like and how much are you

spending on you know influencer marketing or ads or targeted marketing or things of that nature do you have a launch trailer i have zero of that i just want to make a cool game and put it out there and you certainly can but you and 500 other games certainly do that on the same day and what games are launching on the same day as you um and it sounds like one of those guys that always has like a brilliant app idea, but no idea how to make it. That's pretty much. That's the tricky part. There's a lot to goes into it, right?

What games are launching are the day you're launching it? If you talk to anybody at Val, is Valve talking to you? Or if you're launching on Epic or if you're launching on GOG, or you're working with those guys directly to, like, get their input on when you should launch and how you should launch. There's just a lot that kind of goes into it. And a lot of it is just planning things out and, you know, giving yourself enough time to.

to think about all these things and have someone to do it, right? Because often what happens is you're going to finish your game and want to launch it immediately, which rightfully so. You just finish your game. You want to launch it. But you also need to have a marketing plan, marketing assets, PR assets, PR plan, influencer assets, influencer plan. All of these things kind of impact how your game will get found and get seen and get picked up by people to, you know, people to play it.

certainly you can do you can launch your game without all that stuff and it may do okay or no one may ever see it just because there are so many games launching these days that's easily our biggest challenge is getting your game awareness and getting people to notice it and making sure people can find it um just because there are you know hundreds of games launching almost every day so it's it's it's a difficult uh sphere to be in if you're not doing any of those other things so in that in that publisher developer relationship like who's actually responsible for coming up with you know like the marketing plans and creative assets and all that stuff but certainly every publisher is different and they handle

out things in a different way from how we operate we'll generally come up with a few different ideas and maybe a plan or maybe a plan a plan A and a plan B type of thing then basically we kind of internally pitch that to our development teams and get their input on it and being very blunt you know we have ideas and we're human and it doesn't mean our ideas are the best or you know we we expect and we want feedback from our developers and even internally from our other team members right like i routinely say dave's plans are terrible so and he just expects that sort of feedback um i don't really he's generally pretty good um but it's one of those things where it's a group effort in a lot of ways right

like we'll come up and we'll do the bulk of the work and kind of idea generation um but then in terms of executing those plans, we'll typically do that ourselves, either internally or a third-party vendors or what have you. But the ideas and kind of agreeing to that plan is still very much a group effort on, do we like this plan? Does this trailer idea make sense? Do you like the way this screenshot looks, whatever it may be, right? It's very much a group effort in terms of us and developer. Yeah, I mean, just to kind of piggyback on that a little bit, like my background is actually working for, you know, like bigger publishers with AAA games. And now working in indie, it's so much more collaborative.

Like, I remember my first month on the job, I was just like, whoa, there's so much communication happening. And there's so much room for everyone to have input and a seat at the table where, you know, working in AAA games, it is, it's not like that. So I felt much more at home so quickly working with Indies. It's so cool getting a chance to actually work with people, and there is a collaborative effort to bring a game to launch. It's not just, here's your milestone dates, hit the morels. Yeah, when I was working my last job, I was at a publisher, and we, I would say we did a lot for them in a sense of like they were just solely focused on here's the game, right? It was a live service game, so it was just like a continual process, right? So they would just do the game patches, right, game notes, and that was pretty much it.

And we handled literally everything else. Server back end, community management, social media, marketing, sales, Steam, right? Whenever we had to like, you know, update servers, we handled all that stuff. So it was actually kind of cool to see like the process from that side, right? We're saying, all right, you know, they're going to deploy this patch. We need to get ready to do this thing and that thing and that thing. And it was actually kind of cool. I don't know if it was like that collaborative as like the way that you guys are making it sound

but it's it's definitely um there's like definitely a lot of stuff that that the publishers do that a lot of people don't see in the back in right that kind of help get that game out there and help get the game kind of like get notice and seen by people you know um that's really really cool do you guys mention that you guys look for games that are kind of like good fits what would be a good fit for versus evil for a couple different things. I would say we're all generally fans of something that like stands out art-wise. So Banner Saga, fantastic art, guild of engineering, a very unique art style, kind of hand-drawn, kind of old-school looking. You got Armacrog, which is kind of a, it's not claimation, I forgot what's called. Stop motion. Stop motion.

There you go. Stop motion. Well done. You're smart. I was guessed. You guys guessed. That's it. But we look for things like that, right?

It was visually something that stands out and sets it out. Then I guess the other thing is we look for a development team that, you know, we think we could work with and, you know, work through a game with. It's kind of both of those things, right, where we've passed. on games where we don't think a developer is someone that someone work well with us or us with them and we've passed on games that you know that have a good design maybe or a good idea in there somewhere but it's also missing that kind of got you thing right like it factor right right right yep certainly but yeah aside from that any kind of genre or what have you it's just we look for kind of those those things right it's it we kind of go from there speaking of genres has anyone ever told you guys that

First-class trouble is like among us. Yeah. Yeah. Social deduction games. Yeah. And social deduction has really become its own genre. And there's a lot of games that are getting into that space. It's a fun one, lying to your friends and murdering them and all that good stuff.

Yeah. It's one of my favorite things. I'm like always lying to my friends. So it's just like natural to me, you know, just to kind of hop in these games and just lie to them more. I'm determined by playing first-class trouble that I'm a terrible liar. Like, I just, I'm not, I'm not good at convincing people that what I'm saying is true. We do, we did some team play sessions and I mean, these are people I work with every day.

And I'm like, he's personally, he's got the key card. Like, prove it. Like, okay, I'm done. I don't know. Okay, well, that's it. I quit. I'm going back to Almighty. You guys play first class trouble.

It's actually funny because you do notice things about people that you like never would have noticed before. Once you start playing these kind of games, where you have to kind of try to trick each other and lie, but be, like, really convincing of it, too. Oh, yeah. So we've got our team who, within game, whenever he starts to be, like, lying or doing something kind of negative

or what have you, right? He'll start, let's like laughing a little bit. It's a laugh he doesn't normally have. So it's Francis, if you're listening, this is you. It's very easy to tell when you're up to no good. A secret laugh. Yeah. I love that. You can hear him a little bit, just like,

It's like giggling to himself. It's like, what are you doing? You're trying to do something you shouldn't be doing. It's not good. That's great. So, yeah, it is fun to see stuff like that. I love that. That's really funny.

I think you've only played among us once or twice. I haven't played players slash trouble yet with the team. But we've played similar games before, and I don't know. I'm trying to think like what tells like Ivan might have. I don't have any because I'm always lying. There you go. I'm going to say he has got a poker face. Wait, I stay lying.

Does that mean you're lying now? Yes. About lying? Yeah. I don't know how that works. I don't either. What's that I mean? Confusing.

That's actually, it's like a famous, a famous philosopher. I forget who, like, they have this quote that's like something like, I cannot tell a lie I am lying right now or something like that it's like a paradox that messes with your

with your mind a little bit yeah yeah I'm lying right now Dennis I'm always lying I think I think it's what you use to like break robots right supposedly like like oh I think that is actually that's in uh I think that's in a movie I think you're gonna go Star Trek with that

like a Captain Kirk reference it's like a loss in space or something is that I'm I just Googled it. Maybe that's what it is. Finding does not compute the things that it is. Right. It's a paradoxing that breaks

logic or whatever. Yeah. The phrase was often present in stories which carried the theme of superiority of human emotion over limitations within logic utilized by machines. So that's a lot of big words. But TLDR, you can break robots by saying,

what was it, Ivan? I cannot tell a lie. I am lying right now. There you go, yeah. I think that's a quote. something like that. We should feed that to Elon Musk and see what happens to him. Because I'm like 100% convinced the guy is not real.

He's got to be a robot or Android or something. There's no way. It could be an Android. Yeah. That makes sense. All right. So you guys have a lot of games on versus evil. We're going to ask you a very difficult question.

And you're going to hit us for this. What is your personal favorite game that you guys have published so far? I knew that was coming. I know. You got to do it. Got to hit him with it. I mean, Lance, you've been here the longest, so you've got so much frame of reference to work with.

Yeah, there's a lot of games I've played a lot of. So I'm going to cheat here a bit and say there's two. There's one game that I like a lot that's single player, a very different experience. That's Pillars of Eternity 2. Great game. Okay, okay. By the team of Obsidian, great game.

Single player, RPG, old school, that sort of stuff. The other one that's really fun is a game called Anti-Euro, and that's a multiplayer. It's got single-player, too, but it's multiplayer's fun. It's a turn-based kind of board game, digital board game. I spent many nights playing with Steve, our GM, and another guy, Francis. So much so that Francis developed his own strategy, the developer had to go in and change and rebalance the game because he figured out how to destroy Steve and I. It'd be very annoying with it.

But a very good game. very similar to risk in terms of a friendship ending digital board game experience. Pretty sure that people have gotten divorced over that game risk. It surprised me one bit. I thought that game a couple times, and every time I play it, it's just like I get mad at someone. Yeah, it's very literally the backstabbing, right? It's like, why would you do that? Yeah, yeah.

How did, uh, by the, the way, Lance, were you around when you guys came up with the name versus evil? I wasn't. The name was already there. I can tell you what it kind of means and stuff if you want. Yeah, I like that name. What does it mean? So Steve, basically, has been around the industry for a long time. He doesn't quite look as young as that picture as he does now. He's a little older these days. He's still fine.

He's not gray hair or anything. No beard, no that. stuff. He's also still walking on his own, no wheelchair and all that stuff. So he's still doing good. Glad to hear it. But he's been around the industry for a long time. He's he's been a part of several publishing deals and things of that nature. And it, you know, up until maybe 10 years ago, publishers really were kind of a negative thing. I'm not saying all of them, bainty means, because there's certainly plenty of publishers out there who do it a good job and treated developers fairly and what have you, but publishers kind of had this reputation of taking advantage of developers and doing things in bad ways or taking over IPs or taking over games or things of that

nature. So Steve basically thought it didn't have to be that way. We can do things differently. You know, we can treat developers like they should be treated and we can still operate as a publisher without being a bad guy. So that's kind of how the whole versus evil thing started was, you know, a publisher doesn't have to be this big evil entity. You know, we try to act as a partner and as a,

you know, as a true partner on publishing a game. And we go above our publishing tasks often to help our developers and whatever way we can. And it just goes back to the mentality of, we're here to help developers. We're not here to be a big versus, you know,

a big evil entity or anything. That reminds me of, Google, like Google, when they first started, they used to have this sign in their entrance that said, don't be evil. But they got rid of that sign a long time ago. He actually took it down. But yeah, that was like their whole thing in the beginning was like, don't be evil. That's cool.

It's a good mentality. Don't be an asshole. That's the key. Yeah. Don't take down your sign, please. I don't think Google's done anything evil. yet. I feel like they're like so big that people are going to consider them to be evil. But to be honest, I kind of seems like almost like kind of incompetent.

Like to be honest, like Stadia, you know, like Google Fy. It's like a lot of these like these like products and services that like are like almost there and like people know that they're good but they kind of like don't. You're telling you to someone who's on Google FI has a Google Stadia and a purpleish pixel phone. It all works fine, Dennis. I don't want to be talking about. I just think Google is to a point now where they're so big, right? Like they are just all over the place, right?

They got their hands in so many different things that, you know, they're doing a lot, which is a good thing. I don't think they're evil, but they're definitely doing. They're controlling your life. They're doing things that like in order for you as a consumer to use them, you have to accept certain things. And one of those things you have to accept is the fact that they're going to track your every movement. you know and they might listen to what you're saying they might sell your information to advertisers but at the end of the day it's very convenient you know like i love going inside my car and plugging in my phone and saying okay google uh how long is it going to take to get get home or whatever

and it'll tell me you know you'll be home in 10 minutes so it's kind of the price you pay right just convenience i guess but um convenience fee yeah i just assume i'm so boring that They wouldn't want to pay attention to me anyway. So start sending me life advice or something. Dave, get out more. Dark, a couple people are saying that I trigger their Google meaning, so I'm going to say it again. Okay, Google. Play the Muppet Babies.

Will it do it? Maybe. Let's see. Let's find out. I mean, we might as just trigger everyone else's. I mean, we should do Alexa, let's do Siri. Oh, that's true. go for it, you know.

For the one random person, Hey, Cortana, right? Like, that one person who still uses it on. What's weird? So, we have a Google, a Google Ness Mini in my house. Yeah. And, like, every time me and my wife will start talking about stuff,

like within days, if not that same day, we'll start getting the served ads for that thing. So I know they're definitely listening, man. Like, they're listening. And I don't know they're listening to, like, every word, but maybe they have, like, keywords. because I know, like, just recently, we were talking about some kitchen a place. I think like an air fryer or something.

And then the next day, I opened up my Google. Like, I'm just seeing, like, frigate air friar ads everywhere. I didn't, I didn't search for an air friar. Like, I don't know why. That happens to me daily. Yep. But if you don't, you really should get an air friar. They're amazing.

Oh, they are. Yeah, they're awesome. Yeah, they're awesome. Literally changed my life. I have a combination toaster oven and air fryer. We have too. It's the best thing ever.

I mean, oh my God. I can make my attendees in there and it can heat up my waffles. Like, what else do you want, right? Like, come on. Yeah, I love it. Great combo.

Yep. Yeah. I heard it's also great for thermal paste, too. Just put it on there and you're good to go 100%. You know, another another great combo for me. is video games and music. And I do see a Smith shirt on the screen here

and some musical equipment here. So I'm assuming you're a big music fan. Is that correct? That is correct, yeah. I kind of reached musical maturity at a young age. So I'm a 90s kid. I grew up right in the height of like the whole grunge alternative thing in the early 90s.

And it's still my favorite music to this day. So I put on my Smith shirt just for you. Thank you. Well, and because, you know, I love it. He's wearing a shirt. My favorite fan. What year were you born? Everyone.

What year were you born, Dave? Oh, you don't want to know that. Well, I do, because I was born in 81. Yeah, I'm a little older than you. I was born in 76. All right. Right around the same window. But, yeah, like, I'm like you, man.

Like, for me, like, music basically stopped after the year 2000 to be. be honest. I do listen to new music. Like I said, I've listened to the new Drake last night, but like every day, it's basically, you know, 80s and 90s and 70s, I guess, sometimes too. But yeah, something about that era, man. Like, I don't, 90s rock will, will always have a special place in my heart. Yeah, I'm with you. Dennis doesn't know what he's missing out on. What are you talking about? Born in the year 2000. What? No, no, no, no, no, he's messing with you. I was born in 98. I was born in 98. So, so I was, like, growing up right when, like, all that stuff was happening in the 90s.

I literally known, I've known nothing but tragedy in my entire life, right? We had Kirk Cobain, right? We had 9-11. We had the first financial crisis or the second financial crisis. We have whatever's happening right now where the world's exploding, right? But I said, it's all your fault. Yeah, pretty much. As soon as I was brought into this world, there was like we we just got to end this like we can't do this anymore he's too powerful we got to knock him down but could be could be i do want to say i am also wearing a a a well not a bancher but a music shirt actually have my i'm my ice cream shirt on today so nice a huge fan of ice cube yeah it's a good day it's a good day it's a very good day today because it's friday i'm gonna watch friday i get it i get it i like it got you with it

It's kind of a meta joke, too. Like, I'm digging that. It's got some layers to it. It's got some layers. You know, we're trying to be a big brain here in the podcast, right? For those who can stand it, you know. And it was like a lot of eyelorness. No, exactly.

I can't. I can't do it. What am I doing here? I was going to say, like, we would have shuffled the deck and given you better people. You guys are great. How about you, Lance, are you a music fan, too? I am, but it's vastly different than everybody else here. I think.

So I do like, I grew up with chili peppers and things about nature, so I do like that quite a bit. But I grew up in Texas during the early 90s in late 80s, so you can probably assume

everything there's accurate. Yeah, exactly. Pretty much all that. DJ Khalid, you know, all that stuff. Yep. But a lot of country music,

which, you know, whatever, it's fine. I did venture out and do quite a bit of rap and old school gangster rap and things of that nature. so a lot of Ice Cube, L.L. Cool J. Things of that nature, I do like quite a bit as well, which is very weird on my Spotify,

whenever it kind of mixes the two together. It's funny. Technically, L.A. Cool J. was the first certified lover boy, if you think about it. Who? Yeah, he is. L.L. Cool, Jay. He was, like, one of the first rappers

would really be, like, about, like, the ladies and making songs for the, you know, for the ladies. Was that like, I need love, right? I sit alone in my room. Yeah. I need love. He was the OG.

He was a template. He came up, though, at a time when everyone rapped the same, though. He did. He all rap like this. Yeah, very literally. It's like, okay. There's this really good Hannibal Burris

bit where he was on T. Payne's podcast as a Napi Boy radio, and he's like playing with this drum machine and like doing like 2000s era's like Curtis blow type of rap you know it's like we all rap like this go to the park do do and we break dance it's pretty much like yeah the song sounded like yep yep that's awesome now I'm throwing some critus blow now to be honest right yeah did you guys listen to to Donda I don't know what that is so no oh no no Kanye no yeah no and uh I I recommend you you you don't listen to

it done. It's the awkward like, no, never, never, haven't done it at all. It was weird, man, because I love Kanye. Like, he's definitely one of my favorite musicians ever, to be honest. Like, I love all his albums. And this one,

there's just so much hype around it. You know, like, you, it was all over the news, all over social media. Like, oh, Kanye's locked himself in a football stadium, and he's living, like, in a prison cell, recording his album. All this crazy stuff, and he's like flying through the sky. He's wearing like a, you know, like a bag over his head.

It's like all these weird things leading up to the album and he does all these crazy listening parties. And it's like so weird and out there. And then the album drops. And it's just like, it's not that it's bad. It's not bad, but it's not. Lots of hype. Yeah, it's nowhere near what I was expecting.

And then the, um, the, the Drake. Drake's new album, I wasn't expecting much from it, but I really enjoyed it for some reason. Maybe because I'm a certified lover boy myself. I don't know. Right, Dennis? I, um, so I, I don't just like Donna. Are you certified, though?

Yes, sure. Let me check my, let me check my card. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Fantastic. So I don't, I don't just like Donda. I think it's a good album, honestly. I do think it's a good album.

I think that it's like similar. it's like a similar vein of almost like 808s and heartbreaks or maybe like Jesus or something right where people don't get it yet but like if you talk to people now right they're like oh yeah I love eight oh wait oh waitates you know I love this album love that album and that seems like something he's been doing for a while now right where like he's take some time type yeah yeah yeah we're like you're like you don't see the effects of like what he's doing until like years later and like if you if you listen to like a lot of rappers now who are coming up they're like yeah you know like this this album eight of hates and heartbreaks was like my favorite album I was growing up and that's why I'm rapping now. Like, that's why I do the type of, like, music that I'm doing now because of that album. And I feel like he has it effect. I don't think Drake has it effect. Drake has the effect of what is hot right now. I'm going to put out bangers.

I'm going to sell a million records. I'm going to a giant tour. I'm going to shave a heart into my head. And all that? Yeah. And I think that's what the difference is. So that's why I can't compare them. But I would say if I were to listen to it right now and just want to enjoy myself,

for sure, I should if I love her boy. Hands down. Everyone glows in the album. It's really good. I enjoy it. People are asking in chat, what is versus evil? Versus Evil is the indie games publisher. Welcome to the podcast, by the way. You're a little late, but it's totally cool. Don't forget to hit up an exclamation point giveaway in the chat.

Make sure get everything out there. Exclamation point giveaway in the chat for a dope giveaway. We're giving away a computer. We're giving away T-shirts. We're giving away games. We're giving away one of Dave's Smith's shirt. I heard he has a ton of them, so he's going to, yeah. That's true.

Oh, actually, Dave, I want to ask you as a musician, have you checked out Ubisoft's Rocksmith at all? Yes. Okay. What do you think? What are your thoughts on it? So, I mean, like, I think a lot of people, you know, I started with Guitar Hero because it was just this completely innovative product at the time.

And I remember the first time playing that little, you know, plastic controller and could not put it down. And it's really cool the way it like it kind of teaches you if you're an aspiring guitarist or a musician. It teaches you timing, which is really cool. It just kind of teaches you the basic fundamentals like so that you you couldn't necessarily go from guitar hero or rock band to a real guitar, but you would you would learn how to keep time, how to, you know, stay or learn about beats per minute, tempo, that kind of stuff. Rocksmith kind of takes that to the next level and I don't work for you. be soft, so I don't mean to put it over so clean.

But just to say that it really does kind of take it to the next level. So if you are interested in learning real instruments, it's a really good way to build technique. It doesn't have things like tension per se, so they're still getting used to when you switch to a real guitar. But it's a really good foundation. Yeah, the reason I ask is, because I have my real tone cable right here and I can't really see the logo on it says Ubisoft on it.

Yeah, and I've been playing Rocksmith for like a minute now. I really enjoy. I moved out on my folks' place, like earlier this year for like the second time. And I left my guitar at home because I was like, you know, I'm not really going to play anything like that. But the minute that I heard that they're coming out with another Rocksmith, and it's supposed to be like way better. And for me personally, I actually enjoy the fact that it's subscription base

because I hate paying piecemeal for DLC. it bothers the heck out of me. Like, I want to have all the songs, but I don't have $100 right now, right? Like, I'd rather just pay over the course of a year and just get everything. So I'm super excited to kind of get started up again because I've been in the process of like learning guitar for like, I think 10 years now. We're like I'll pick it up for a month and I'll learn like a little something new and then I get boarding and I go play like video games or something. Then I forget. All right, let's have a guitar battle.

You, Dennis versus Dave. Let's go. All right, I'm one of you one. You guys later. Great podcast. Bye. I'll say, like, you know my musical influences, so there's a good chance you know I don't shred. So speaking of your musical influences here, so I do want to test your knowledge of 80s rock and roll. So how about we do the ultimate 80s rock and roll trivia quiz? Oh, no.

What are the stakes here? If he has to get at least six out of ten questions correct or else We kill him Or else Dennis has to shave his head or something I don't know I don't know I like this All right First question here

This rock group was inducted into the rock and roll Hall of Fame in 2017 However, with 10 top 20 hit singles and 14 studio albums, they had only one album reach number one in the charts. Was it dire straits, R.E.M. Journey, or the Talking Heads? Dennis, I need some Jeopardy music, please.

Yeah, I'm pulling something up right now. Actually, I think Jeopardy music might be DMCA, to be honest, but I don't know. I guess we'll find out, right? And then I need some we shot music, please. There you go. And they only had one album that... Yeah, so let me see it again. So this rock group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2017.

However, with 10 top 20 hit singles and 14 studio albums, they had only one album reached number one in the charts. Was it, Dyer Straits? REM, Journey, or the talking heads? Geez. This is not easy. No, that's not easy. This is the ultimate 80s rock and roll trivia quiz.

The 80s were not so much my jam, but... Should I do 90s then? I definitely know more about the 90s than the 80s, but I'm still... I'm going to throw a guess out. I'm going to say REM. Let's see. I'll say Journey.

The correct answer was Journey. Ah, nice. I can't believe they only had one record that made it to the top ten. I mean, Journey's so iconic. Everybody knows a Journey song. Or 20. Let's do one more 80s one, and then I'll do a 90s one. All right.

What legendary 80s rock music group were paid just $5 for their first public gig by a teacher inside a dining hall in the Westfield School. Was it Death Leopard, Van Halen, Motley Crew, or Guns and Roses? Wow. So $5 for their first gig at a school. Motley Crew, you said?

That's my guess. I'd wait for Dave, though. He's the expert. No, definitely not when it comes to that. I mean, Motley Crew seems the most likely. I would agree with that. You guys are both wrong. He was deaf leopard.

Def Leopard. I would gladly pay $5 to see Jeff Leopard. Agreed. Agreed. 100%. Buy the teacher thing. That's interesting. Okay.

Last question. This one's 90s. 90s rock trivia. Who is the greatest rock band of the 90s? Is it? The hell? Is this like subjective or? No, I'm just curious.

That's a serious question. I'm just curious who your favorite band is from the 90s. I mean, it's tough for me because I think the very clear answer is Nirvana, if you want to talk about influence and just what they meant to an entire generation and decade. But also, if I'm being completely honest, musically, I would say smashing pumpkins probably had the biggest impact on me personally, especially related to wanting to learn to play guitar and get into music myself. Did you guys see that

The kid Or Green Day I was also up there I would say Yeah The kid that was in the cover of Nevermind recently Yeah Oh yeah

Like last week He did Yeah For what? Yeah Because he said that They posted his picture Without his consent

And he's He's naked In that picture He's a little baby You know Hanging Like swimming in a pool Like

Trying to catch a dollar Yeah But what's interesting, though, is, like, this guy, he's, I feel like he's kind of capitalized on being on this cover for a long time. Like, I've read, like, interviews. I know, I think he has, like, a huge tattoo on his chest that says, never mind. Yep.

Like, he's definitely, like, not been shy about letting people know about it. Yeah, just recently, he decided that he's on a foul suit for not getting whatever, right? Or not getting revenue based on that. But he's been taking advantage of it for a long time. Yeah, he's just. so many photo shoots and like recreating the photo with swimming trunks. I agree with mech. He's trying to catch a bag.

That's pretty much trying to get paid. It's kind of what it seems like. Like you can't have it both ways, right? Like if he was only mad, he should have been mad years ago, not just all of a sudden. I decided today that I'm angry about this. Right. Pretty much. Yep.

It's funny. I mean, in a way, it is kind of weird, right? It's like he didn't have a. choice to be on that album cover. And his parents, I think, got paid $200 or something like that to get his picture. At that point then, like, it's not really, he should be shooting his parents, right? Because his parents are the ones who put him on the cover. His parents probably gave consent.

Or maybe they didn't. Maybe they just took money. He never actually gave, like, consent. Oh, maybe. But also a different time periods, right? So I don't know what the laws were like back then either. Yeah, there was probably no, like, upside guarantee because nobody knew Nirvana was going to blow up. you know they they had modest success on the you know in the indies before that but i mean how could

you have known maybe geffen knew i i always loved that when people had all these weird conspiracy theories about that kid on that cover like you know that kid grew up to be maryland manson or something like that it was always like weird yeah there was always a maryland manson story like oh the kid from the wonder years grew up to be maryland manson yeah the kid from the wonder Here's the kid from Mr. Belvedere. Yep. The kid on the Nirvana cover, they all grew up to be Marilyn Manson.

There's a bunch of memes out there with like the, a bunch of memes out there with like the kid, that, you know, that photo of the kid in the swing pool. It's like, remember him? This is him now. There's tons of memes are like that out there now. It's great. What about you, Dennis?

Who's your favorite 90s band? Favorite 90s band? Instinct. I mean, boy band, I would say Insync definitely over Backstreet Boys, but I think the Backstreet Boys had better singing, and I think they were better performers in the sense of, like, vocal,

but I think Insync was just, they just put out bigger hits, you know? I saw this TikTok other day. I think Backstreet Boys and NSYNC have teamed up to form, like, this super boy group. Have you guys seen that? It's called, like, Backsink or something like that. It's like, serious.

I'm not making this up. I saw this TikTok video. I Google this and it comes up with something terrible. It's your fault. But I think I'll say like my favorite band from the 90s. This is hard because there's like so many for different reasons. But I was like my favorite band probably would be like AFI because they started up in 90s.

But I didn't really start listening to like the mid-2000s when they were like kind of they kind of dropped the punk thing and we're more like emo slash whatever they are now. Just because I've never been the biggest. been a punk, to be honest. Sorry, folks. I just, I always thought punk was boring. Like, boring in the sense of, like, it's just like,

like, like, I, I feel like a lot of punk bands sounded the same, right? Because punk was never really, I know, I know, you get, I see the head shaking. Yeah, but I've just, I've just never been to punk person. I was never been a punk person. Like, for, for, for a genre, those, like, super supposedly about, like, individuality,

everyone looked and sounded the same in my opinion, you know? Like, the dudes who had the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, with all the stuff on them, right, and all the studs. I'm like, I can't tell you guys apart. Like, I don't know what you guys are listening to. But I would say the same thing for like black and death metal as well. It's like every genre. Not every genre.

Every genre has stereotypes. Go on, Ivan? I think every genre is like. Even if you're every music metal, you know, you imagine like a guy with a black t-shirt with a logo you can't read and long, long black, greasy hair

and, you know, a spiked bracelet or something, you know, but it's, yeah, I don't know,

I'm trying to think of other 90s bands. I mean, you know, like, I also grew up listening to like Blink 182 and like the offspring

and stuff like that. Just like a lot of SoCal bands. I would say probably, you know what? Actually, I think it'd give you to, to Nirvana.

And then, sorry, not Nirvana. I'm blanking so hard, sublime. I'm a SoCal kid. Yeah. I'm a SoCal kid.

I grew up here forever and I can never not listen to Sublime. They're just like, they're just always, they're always somewhere on one of my playlists. It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter what it is. So there we go. Solid. That's my.

Yeah. All right. What about favorite 90s video game? That sounds hard. Yeah. What come on the 90s? Well, I've got mine, but it's a bit of a cheater.

It's Age of Empires 2. I actually play that professionally at the tail end of the 90s. Oh, really? Yeah. That was me. How was that scene back then? Not anything like it is today. I remember going to hotel and playing on a card table with no one in attendance.

No one's there. It was set up just so we could play against each other. And literally it's like a little somebody ran out. I think it was ensemble studios at the time. We rented out a studio, a hotel room. Literally set up four computers. We played one v ones against each other. And that was the tournament.

It was like, hmm. Nowadays, obviously, e-sports are completely different. But, yeah. Yeah. If the internet would have existed back then, Lance would have been, like, the first ninja. Maybe. I had a Mohawk at time, so maybe. I think Fatality was the first ninja, no?

He was, like, the first big, like, gamer. Who was? Fatality. Oh, yeah. He was a, yeah. Yeah, he had a. This dude had soundblasters named after him, really. Like, he had soundblasters.

He had, like, a weird partnership with, I think, like Toyota or something. It was a car company that was sponsored me even. It wouldn't surprise me. Everyone tried to get a piece of what he was doing. I remember his product line. I remember seeing the ads in the magazines at the time. Oh, sorry, magazines were things that were printed in

Booker form. Boomer cast time. Let's go. Let's do it. They start talking to the kids. See, I used to have the CD player. A CD is a physical media that you would put music on, and then I had a special player that would prevent it from skipping when you walked. Get the shit protection on that.

Walkmans are awesome. Yeah, I'm looking at, let's see, Fatality went pro in 99 at 18 playing Quake 3 Arena. Yeah, it sounds about right. Yeah. And this was before, like, big, big e-sports was the thing. But it's actually funny because, like, at that point, competitive gaming, esports, whatever you want to call it,

was, like, in such a weird spot that, like, everyone just wanted to see, like, what was up. So, yeah, so we had things like, you know, the uh the uh the all kinds of weird games we had the world cyber games for like the olympics of yeah esports or video games nintendo used to hold like those speed run uh tournaments i remember that it was a weird time fighting fighting games are really popular at the time obviously and they still are um yep different time different time it was also like kind of a golden age for RPGs because when I think about my favorite games from the 90s, it's like Chrono Trigger, like,

hands down. But Final Fantasy 7 was a made a huge impact on me as a player as well. Like those were the kind of games like just that back of the days when it was still Squarespace and everybody was kind of starting to bring in like Eastern RPGs to the Western market, which had just not really been a thing. Yeah. It's really cool to see RPGs rise to, you know, where we are today, where it's not, you know, people don't look at you. funny if you say that you like RPGs but back then it was like that you were just branded a nerd and you know people kind of avoided you were any games considered quote unquote indie back in the 90s I mean there were definitely like very very small publishers like I always think of coi even though I don't know if coi would be considered indie but like they were so niche back then

like romance of the Three Kingdoms and stuff like that like just you had to really really really dig to find those games. Yeah, I would say probably not. The only indie developers were the guys making the games for themselves, and they would keep it at home, right? These are like DOS games, essentially, right? Yeah. But really not.

Because to get on any of the platforms, right, it was a physical product, which required a ton of money, a ton of effort. So all the games that you played on any platform, really, they were with a publisher who could do all that stuff. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking, too, because there really isn't a way you could really get games out there. Like, you know, if you had to throw them in, like, a Toys Ress,

or, like, A, B, games or whatever they had back then. I would say, like, the only thing that would, like, be considered maybe Indy were, like, all the dudes or people who were making, like, Flash games, right? Like, on New Grounds and, like, Abino Black Sheep, stuff like that. And, like, they went out to do, you know, bigger games, too. Like, I forget the name of the dude, but he did an alien hominid and then Castle Crashers and whatever else. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, it didn't really... There's a bunch of... Newgrounds was actually a breeding ground for a lot of game ideas and a lot of game design and things of that nature, right? Like, I'm not sure if it was intentional,

but the cyanide and happiness guys. Yeah, yeah. They went on to do a lot of really good stuff, and I think they started there, if I'm not mistaken. Maybe they didn't, but... Hey, Lance, you mentioned DOS games. Were you a PC gamer back in the 90s?

I was. Yep, I was one of these super nerds. What was your PC like back then? It was, by today's standards, it was awful. But by those standards, it was great. I had this, I think it was a 15-inch monitor that took up the desk because it was one of the big flat, I say flat, one of the big gray boxes, essentially. I think it was, I think I was on Windows 98 then. I've been on 95 still, which was awesome.

But yeah, it was literally. really, everything was shades of gray and white, so it was awesome. It was good in that regard. I had floppy disks. I don't know if you guys remember those, but had floppy disks. Four or five of them, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It was terrible, but it did stuff. Did you build your computer, or did you spend like $10,000 on it like my dad did back in day? I think my grandparents actually bought it. I think they ordered it from, it had shipped actually because I was

hounding them essentially for it. Crazy how expensive they were back then, man. Yeah, especially for what you got, right? I got a compact PC setup thing which I don't think Comback exists anymore but it was this whole all in one right? You got the tower, you got the monitor, you got the keyboard mouse, all that and it was like

I don't know specifics but you know it was obviously like 10 megabytes of RAM or whatever right and like things of that nature right it was how fast it was and i was on dial-up which is also awesome i was on like 33.6 dial-up or whatever it was so it was like no modems modems were a thing too i don't if you guys ever remember the most annoying noise in the world oh yeah yeah and then somebody tries to call somebody on the phone and like here's that noise like get off the phone i'm on the internet oh yeah you pick up the phone and it's like hey hurry yeah i remember i remember remember those days.

Yeah, sounds about right. I remember that sound. That one. Yep. That's it. And then you hear, welcome, you got mail. Yeah, I had a rip aim. A. Well, as a messenger.

It was awesome. I would use that now if it was still around. It was great. And how about now? Like, what computers do you guys use right now, like on the regular day-to-day to do your jobs? Yeah, mine's a bit stupid. Yeah, it's pretty crazy, right?

I've got three 19-inch monitors. I've got fancy peripherals from Razor and Corsair. They're all lighting up and doing their things. I've got a fancy AMD video card. I've got, I don't know, 64 gigs of RAM. I've got an I-7. Jeez. Yeah, I've got a setup.

It's pretty crazy. Yeah. yeah Sydney does too Sydney just upgraded her home gear it's man just I'm jealous like I just got a boring old Dell I mean it's powerful enough to run

games but I'm not you know Sydney has one of those similar to what you guys make she has a really one that performs really well but also looks really cool like she has lights and colors yeah I don't have enough stuff I've always

wondered that like um what kind of what kind of setups, you know, publishers and developers have? Because I know for sure, like, developers, you know, they're going to need, like, some beefy computers to, you know, work on video games and whatnot. But for publishers, I was always curious, like, do they actually have, like, powerful computers, or can they just do their jobs with the laptop?

And I guess it's probably both, right? Certainly both. So I work in the production side of stuff. So I get lots of builds and lots of games that aren't optimized and things of that nature. so I've got lots of hardware. I guess I can't really show you because I have Deb kits and stuff. Show us, show us.

Yeah, I've got lots of hardware here to run various builds and games in various states. But yeah, I've got a beefy PC for that very reason, because I'll get games that are unoptimized, and it's like, you know, they're unoptimized. I don't know how else to say that. They're not running great, so the better off my hardware is the better in that regard. I thought for a hot second you referred to like AAA games. I'm like, yeah, I know.

That happens a lot. No, like, no lie. Like, I mean, like, there's certain games that are like, I like load in and had to like optimize shaders for whatever reason every single time because I had, because I don't play maristical day. I'm sure everyone knows what I'm talking about, but it's like, like, why, like, why, for what?

Why is it doing this? Yes, exactly. Yep. Yep. Yeah. It's sad, actually, because I feel like that's happened a lot in recent years with some pretty expensive video games. I can tell you what it is. It's that the technology has gotten so advanced that it's almost become like cumbersome, right?

Where they like throw in a lot of really cool things and they don't think about the impact it has on the systems that it's running on, right? And it's it's kind of it's kind of dumb, you know? Yeah, it's one of those things, right, where and this simplifies it a lot. And I don't mean to simplify the problem because I'm sure you guys know. But for anyone listening, it's one of those things where people always want. 60 frames a second. The human eye can really only see like 30 frames a second. So once you get to a point of like,

you're increasing your frame rate so high, so it looks better. It's like, can you really tell a difference? No. But on a hardware side, that is doing a ton of extra work and eating up resources and what have you. But when you go from like 60 to 80 or whatever, right,

it's like you're not going to be able to see anything. Or if you go 30 to 60, some games, you'll be able to see a difference. depending on what you're doing and what have you. But overall, you're not going to see anything differently. I would say I would rebut that with, if you ever swap from 60 frames a second to 144 hertz or 144 frames on like Overwatch with the monitor,

they can run that frame rate, it's like buttery, smooth, 100% noticeable difference. I feel like it really depends on the games too, right? Because games you don't have really good fluid animations. Yeah, yeah. If you don't have really good fluid animation, animations that increased in like Hertz isn't really going to do much other than just you know. Correct.

Yeah. It definitely goes back. Yeah. That's 100% the animation and the rigging and all that stuff that goes into it, which doubles back to are they not, is that developer, which, and obviously that case, it's Blizzard, right? I mean, they can take the time and money to do that. But most developers can't. And you look at your consumer base on who can spend that much money on getting those, those video cards, those monitors to enable all of those fancy features. It's not the biggest market share either. So what does an average developer do?

Do they take the time to do that or do they just, you know, do what most people are doing? It's a hard one. And you said something earlier that's also right, right? There's so many different hardware setups out there on PC where it's like all these video cards now have so many different settings and optimizations and over-blocking and all these things. It's like, uh, What do I, where do I set my men spec at? Or do I set my recommended at? It's like, it's hard. It really is.

And that is why I like Google Stadia, to be honest, because at home, believe it or not, I don't have the world's beefiest PC. Like, my PC is really old. And, like, the one game that I play on Stadia can't run on my computer. That's Red Dead Red Dead Redemption, too. But on Stadia, it runs perfectly. Like there's no issues, no lag, nothing like that. All you need is a really fast internet connection. And, you know, people like, including Dennis, they clown on me all the time because I play on Stadia when I work at a computer company.

But it's not, to me, it's not so much that, like, I think it's better than a PC. It's just, it's definitely convenient when you don't have the hardware needed for a game, you know. Yeah. I hope game is cool. Yeah, I love it. I hope it keeps getting better and better as time goes on. I think it's great. Yeah, I do too, right? Because you also think, right, like you work for a, you know,

and you work for a computer company, right? So it's like, and lots of people don't, or they don't have the money to buy, you know, a $5,000 video card or $2,000 monitor or whatever, right? Cloud Gaming opens up gaming for people like that. And it's super awesome, right? It's, I think it still needs to get better. I said the thing that needs to improve here and there.

But overall, I'm pretty excited about it. It's a cool opportunity for more people to get involved in gaming who couldn't for various reasons, right? It's removing another barrier of entry for people, which I'm all for. Let people play games and chill out, relax, and do that sort of stuff. That's also another reason I like this whole Valve Steam deck

because even though, yeah, it's a portable gaming device, but I also think it's like a low barrier of entry into PC gaming because you can get a gaming PC for a couple hundred bucks that could play any game on Steam. That's awesome, you know? Like, there's not many devices you can buy that can do that. Yeah, same for a thing. Yeah.

Are you guys, did you guys pre-order your Steam decks? I have developer things, so. Oh. Yeah, and I'm a dirty console gamer, so. Yeah, it's funny. I know a dog and Ivan a lot, but I will be the first person to talk up and down about how great the, like, Steam link is. Like, I love the Steam Link. I love it in theory.

I love using it to, like, like, like, Resident Evil and stuff, like, on the couch because I just don't always want to be, like, on the computer. But, like, I want to play a game, right? Because I'm sitting in front of this thing, like, you know, eight, ten hours a day or something. And, like, the last thing I want to do is, like, you know, sometimes, sometimes, right? You got to play on PC, right? It's just, like, no way to do it. But sometimes they be, like, you know, I just want to sit on the couch. that's comfy that I paid for in this apartment that I'm spending money on, right?

Got two bedrooms for a reason, right? Might as well use the other ones. You know, and like I'll just sit there on the couch with my Steam control and I'll play like Resident Evil or something like that. I think I played pretty much all of Resident Evil to remake on my Steam Link. It was almost perfect, almost perfect, you know? A couple of, you know, lost Wi-Fi signal connections here and there, but for the most part, like, almost no problem whatsoever.

So, you know, I'm all about, you know opening up gaming to anybody wherever they're at right i think that's the fantastic thing about that right where it's a lot of people don't want to sit at a desk and play games and i totally understand that yeah but you know with steam link or switch another great example right it's enabled that gaming on the go and easy to pick up and play type of thing right where it's like i can play a high quality game almost anywhere these days which is great yeah cloud gaming is another example of that right like i can get a decent laptop and if i have internet i can play whatever generally speaking like this is great like i think removing those barriers to entry for gaming

will get people more people gaming and especially into pc games which there are lots of great pc games in there people just don't know about um a bunch of them are older at this point they're still great games yeah i mean like i'm i'm i was telling i'm the day i've i've been playing uh and i think it's hard that was in the past like couple episodes i've been playing uh natural selection two on my PC and that game came out in 2012 and it's still bumping there's still people on it you know and I'm like you know what this is a good game I enjoy it you know it's about almost 10 years old now you know but there's still people on it and I enjoyed and you can't really play in and it around so you know it's just it is right um I was going to say something uh about

what you were saying but I totally I totally skipped it oh yeah I think the next big gaming platform and you guys can quote me on this clip this is going to be now Netflix. Netflix mobile gaming baby. It's coming. It's almost here, everyone. You joke about that, but I think you're right, man. It makes sense.

You know, we have YouTube gaming. We have Facebook gaming, Google gaming. Like, everyone's trying to get into gaming because gaming is dope. It's a place to be. It's the best form of entertainment now. You know, it used to be movies, it used to be music. At one point, it was the newspaper. But now it's literally like video games.

And everyone's trying to. Highest grossing form of entertainment. Yeah. Yeah. And that's why companies like Amazon are buying companies like Twitch and making, making their own games and things like that. So there's no doubt in my mind. There's going to be some sort of not just Netflix gaming,

but like some some sort of like subscription service for gaming that's just going to like be the the de facto like streaming platform for gaming like kind of like how Netflix is for for movies and TV shows you know we have Hulu we have Amazon Prime whatever but everyone has Netflix you know so you get everyone has like one of the others but they also have a Netflix account so I wouldn't I wouldn't surprise me if they actually did that one day to be fair though I only have Amazon Prime because I I have Amazon Prime for shipping, and then Hulu, I get free through my Spotify subscription, and then I think the only one I actually pay for, like, off is Crunchyroll and Disney Plus, which already has a lot of money to spend on streaming services, but you can't really get into me anywhere else, you know, so, and, you know, basically the Hulu's free. And Disney's Disney, right? I mean, they're going to be released as Marvel movies on there. You know, I'm literally going through again and rewatching all the Marvel movies,

for no reason. I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm having on the back. Watching what if? Yes, yes. What if I'm enjoying the hell out of that? That's really cool. I'm not seeing the latest episode yet,

but it's super, super good. The animation is amazing and it's just like it's... Yep. The second of the last episode, and I feel like if you haven't seen it yet, you know, too bad, you know, like, I'm super good. Yeah, I'm gonna spoil it.

You got really, really dark. I don't know if you guys... The last episode gets real dark. Oh, does it? What is it on? because I haven't even had a chance to look at it. It should watch it yesterday. Dr. Strange.

Okay. I'm in this early. I got to watch it right now. It gets pretty dark. It gets pretty dark. It actually surprised me how bad they took it or bad. How deep they took it. Yeah.

What I mean like the episode prior, they had like the Hulk exploding, right? It's like, okay, well, like there we go. I guess they don't care. Because like that first episode was like, okay, this is a cool little, you know, side thing, the second episode. Okay, cool. get this, you know, this is kind of fun. That episode was like, okay, I guess it's just blowing people up now.

That's great. What do you do? If you remember, I don't know, Dennis, if you, you might be too young, but back in the, in the 90s, they actually had like this what-of series of comic books. And they were all dark. They were always messed up. And not just Marvel, but even DC. I remember.

I remember there was a DC comic I bought, a what-if comic. It was like, what if Batman killed Robin or something like that? Something really like messed up like that, but I remember them all being kind of dark. So I haven't seen this show, but it sounds interesting. Second one was my favorite. Super good with the Black Panther. Super good. That was actually Chadwick Boseman, right?

Who was talking in that? Yeah, yeah. That made me sad when I heard his voice. I was like, wait, is that actually him? And I was like, oh, man. Yep. Yeah. They're all really good.

I've been super impressed, I guess, is that what I would say? everything from the because it's got some of the original cast right the original at Marvel movies it's got super I think the animation blows me away it's really well done

yeah and this storytelling is really good from the point of view of the watcher it's um it's really good I've enjoyed it tremendously more I used to tell people that my favorite

animated show was King of the Hill um love to be so good so good it's my favorite anime yeah that was gonna say it's the best anime but I think it might be what if now

it's really well done wow it's really good so I have something I gotta pull up for you uh please be king of the hill yeah it has is king of the hill

do I look like I know what a JPEG is I just want a picture of a god dang hot dog hot dog so the best thing about King of the Hill is that when I was watching it as a kid I thought it was funny watching as an adult now

you don't realize how smart that show actually was at depicting just like America in like a nutshell it's so good

it's very well done and I will fully admit growing up in Texas there's so many things in there that just like that's like my neighbor it's just like so many things just fit so well

it's very well done yeah um Yeah, what if it's really good? Everybody should watch it. If you don't have Disney Plus, steal it from her friend. If you want to know how to steal it, steal it, DM me, then I'll report you to, what's the CEO of Disney,

the Eisner, whatever his name is, and something like that. And then we'll throw you in jail for trying to steal content. But, yeah, I've been really enjoying, like, all the Marvel post-movie content that they've done, like, the shows have been super, super good. I was a little iffy on like one division at start because I was like what is this and then once like once it clicked I'm like okay I see what they're doing here. Yeah it took a minute for it to click but once it did it's like whoa this is awesome. Yeah.

Yeah. And then they had a was that they had the that a Falcon Winter Soldier was like really really good. I again like it started as like this like super action thing and I'm like okay like they're really going in on like some of these topics like okay like you know. Then Loki. Loki was awesome. I really enjoyed Loki as well. Loki made me legit cry. I was sad.

I was sad because, like, I was, I was expecting Loki did not do Loki things, but the entire show is about Loki doing Loki things, so Loki gonna Loki and Loki, Loki, I'm like, okay, well, there we go. Yep. If you get it, you get it, right? If you know, you know. Exactly what it is. I guess I have to watch the Marvel shows,

because I am so bored of the Marvel movies. Shows are good. There we go. Yeah, the shows are really good. you're driving. Like, if I have to watch another Avengers movie, I'm just going to, like, I don't know. I don't know what I'm going to do. But they're all the same.

That's why. He's going to have a gamer moment. All the same movie over and over again, getting tired of it. If anyone has questions for versus evil or even Dennis or myself, please ask him in the chat. We'll get to them. I see we do have a recent question here for versus evil. It is from... Where is the name?

I can't find the name. But the question was, what was the hardest game for you guys to publish? Hardest in what way, I guess, is my question. Maybe one with the most challenges? Yeah, let's go with that. The one with the most challenges. I would say it's actually probably a recent one with first class trouble.

It is on Steam right now. It's an online title. So every 100% of the game happens online. I can see that. From a consumer perspective, that might not sound like a lot, but on a back-in perspective, there are servers,

a dedicated server manager, there's rules, there's rule sets, there's logic. There's a ton of stuff happening on the back end to enable players to play together and have a good time. And because it's all happening online, that stuff has to be maintained 24-7.

Is that your guys this first online game? Yes, yes it is. I believe so. Yeah, it edged out Almighty by a month. Okay. Yeah, we watched two online titles in the same month. Yeah. A lot.

That must have been fun. It was a lot. But luckily we have some great partners who work with, like, Excelbytes. And our developers are working on things as well. So it's a lot, right? Online title is a constant 24-7 monitoring thing. Wow. Next question here from Assetrex.

I'm not sure what this means, but they're asking how you've ever been stuck in dev hell. I'm not sure what they're referring to. Yeah, there's a few things I can reference to. It's generally there's things in development cycle, right? when somebody's making a game where it's like you might have a finished idea in mind or might have a product or an end product in mind

but you're stuck right like we know where we want to get to but we can't solve X, Y, and Z without breaking our design or without scrapping the whole idea and starting over. Yeah, that certainly does happen and we do our best to help our developers through those scenarios when it does happen. And that's everything from

it could be any number of things right? It could be an artist decides to quit or it could be, oh, the game engine requires an update and so I'll break all my assets or it could be any number of issues that has caused development to come to a halt, right? COVID, another one, right? Like it caused some of our developers to relocate from offices to homes and, you know, we lost weeks, months of development time. There's a lot that goes into it. So it's dealing with all of that and just kind of helping our developers through it when we're, we can and how we can. Pre-pandemic, were you guys all in the same office? So versus evil, it's all remote all the time. So we actually were mostly okay with the pandemic.

I feel like that's kind of a common thing with publishers because I was, I was just looking at other publishers that we've worked with. And versus evil, not versus evil, freedom games the same way too. They're like 100% purely remote. Which is interesting. Like, is there like a challenge to like being remote when, you have to publish games or I mean I'm zone

yeah I mean besides that's always a challenge no matter what we have offices here and like in Germany in the places and like you know it's always like you know we gotta get up like 830 in the morning flecking meeting or something but is there something that like

you would need to be in like a physical location to get a game published I mean if it's like an online game on Steam unless maybe ship boxes but you guys probably don't do them yourselves right um so some Sometimes we do. It just kind of depends. We, I would say this day and age, not really. There's no real need for a brick and mortar location for a publisher. Certainly, I'll fully admit, there's a lot of nice things about everyone working in the same building, right? Like you get a lot of, you can make decisions quick and easy. You can all be on this exact same page, whatever, right? Lots of benefits. But in terms of publishing a game, as long as you're working with the right partners and your developers. and all the first party pokes have you set up with the right hardware and the right,

you know, like you might have to get your IPs whitelisted. You might have to get the right internet, you might have to get whatever, right? Certain technical things sorted. It's certainly all doable. It's not too much of a problem. Yeah, I experienced it more when I was at BioWare just because Edmonton is locked down. Like that studio is completely isolated. They don't let anything out of that studio.

So, like, working on games like Dragon Age and Mass Effect, required me to go to Edmonton for big stretches of time. I remember right before the launch of Dragon Age Inquisition, I was actually in Edmonton. Back then, their studio was in the same building as a hotel. It's since moved, but it was kind of convenient because I was all holed up in this hotel for three weeks, and then I could get up at any point, at any point.

And there were times where it's like midnight and they're like, hey, we've got to get you in here, start talking about, you know, live service potential issues, things like that. Nowadays, you know, it's just, it's, the security is still there, but like with the games we work in, everything is so, like, well protected. So that it's just, it makes working from home so much easier or remote working easier. That's good. That's great.

I hate working from home myself. Frozen cons, certainly. Yeah. Well, for me, it's not necessarily a con, but. kid back there at home and it's just like it's pretty much impossible to like do anything when you have a toddler running around the house so next question here from panda writer is have you ever wanted to make the banner saga but in an Asian culture background So those are things we've certainly explored before.

And I will fully mention a good shout out here to Stoic. It's up in Seattle area where you guys, I believe you're up in that way, or at least Dave is. I am. Yeah. But yeah, the Stoic guys, we looked at all sorts of things of that nature, both with ourselves and with some of our partners in terms of an Eastern-inspired art and story and that sort of thing. as well as we've looked at some other territories like Russia and things of that nature. Certainly looked at it and explored it, and I won't say it'll never happen, because who knows, we couldn't find anything that made sense for us to do at the time. Sadly, it's a big game in terms of texts and art, and that game is all rotoscoped as well, which is a somewhat of a time-consuming process.

So there's a lot going on there. The game is also made in Adobe Air, or at least most of it is. Really? That's cool. One of the cool things of like just they were able to do that. I'm sure it's like difficult for a lot of other reasons. Yeah, taking that and getting it onto like an Xbox's. It was an experience.

But we looked at all sorts of stuff and we just couldn't find anything that made sense at the time. The way technology is going though, who knows? It could happen sometime in the future. I wouldn't surprise me. What It's quick kind of follow up to that Like what How much

Like input would you guys have to say Into like the development of a game So let's say like someone's coming to you To have a really good idea for a game Maybe you decide to kind of like You know work with them like really early on Do you guys like Like

I guess help them make the game Or do you like kind of I don't say dictate Because that's like the wrong word right But like Do you like Offer feedback support Into the actual development

Or like the ideation of games of like the game mechanics, setting stuff like that, or is it mostly just whatever the publisher wants to do? So I would say, Dave, feel free to hop in anywhere here. We give feedback, right?

We give advice. Yeah. And we give our opinion. And we'll also try to get a kind of third-party opinion as well, not just ours, to look at a game and it's, you know, it's progress just to get feedback.

And we supply that to developers. Rarely we ever say, like, you have to change this. It's more so like if you change this, it might be better. Right, right. There's been a few scenarios where maybe something was insensitive or maybe it was offensive. In those scenarios, we will lean more on the dictate type of thing. Our goal is to not offend anyone with the game.

You probably should change this, right, because it's going to make people mad, right? Correct. Yep. But generally speaking, yeah, go ahead, Dave. I was just going to say, like, just to touch on that, is it our role is not, not to play developer, right? Like we are here to help indie developers create the game they want to make.

It's their art, it's their project, it's their baby. But we have a lot of experience and we can certainly help guide where necessary and offer feedback where necessary. You know, like Lance said, we're very aware of, you know, things that, you know, maybe just don't age well, just aren't really appropriate. And we want to make sure that, you know, players aren't exposed to these kind of things.

And it doesn't happen often, but it's just something that we're always on the lookout for just in case. We want to make sure everything gets gone through with like a fine tooth comb to make it, you know, hopefully the best experience that we can. All right. Awesome. That's cool. Yeah, that's that's what I figured, you know, but asking, you know, for the audience, right? Because I know that, you know, like, for a developer or for like any kind of artist, right, right, I guess you could say probably has like, you know, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they. have a vision of what their game should be or what it wants to be. And like, you know, I know that's one of the things that like people think about when I think about a publisher is like, oh, they're going to come in, they're going to change everything. They're going to ruin the game. They're going to make it, you know, like the most common game ever because that's what sells, right?

They're going to turn my banner saga into Call of Duty somehow, right? Which I feel like, you know, from like the indie smaller side, right, you want to help these developers be the best that they can, right, whether it's, you know, through support or advice, like, hey, you know, we've had experience doing this. We've seen, you know, we've seen a lot of games through launch. If you do this, you might have more success. But, right? I'm assuming it's like, up to you, right?

It's your game, you know? We'll just hear to help you out. And I can't stress this enough. The loudest voice and the most valuable voice is the player. And then that's the one thing that I love so much about working versus evil is that the community, the players, they have so much control, you know, as it comes to, like, or having a voice in what happens, like helping shape things. You know, like we've gone through, you know, a couple of launches this year where player

feedback from playtests or from early access has really shaped development and really helped us kind of, you know, hone in on where we need to be focusing. Yeah, I saw a, I saw GDC talk a couple days ago from the community manager or community camp counselor from Red Hook Studios with Darkest Engine. talking about their community feedback. And then also I saw, again, because I love watching it, it's Sean Michael Murray's from Hello Games. And it's like the way that they take their feedback,

I think is really interesting how this guy from MedaHug basically made like this giant spreadsheet and kind of like, it's really hard to explain because like I'm not good at it. But like he basically did some really cool math to kind of show people that your opinion is right, but the way that we stack it amongst other people, you're kind of wrong, but also right at the same time. which that was really, really brilliant because, you know, especially with a game like that, right, or even, like, you know, fighting games or, like, any competitive game,

people feel like, this is broken. You should fix this. Like, right, but if you look at this, it's broken too. That's why I kind of love the, like, Marvel II style development where everything is broken, so everything's balanced, right? Like, nothing is balanced, so it's just all good. Yeah. Because it's all just insane.

I'll go up in here and say something just so give Dave some kudos. He does a great job of telling us. and our developers what the community is saying. I think our hardest challenge that I strive to get out to fans and gamers essentially is that fixing a bug that you think is critical is critical to us as well, but sometimes the fix for that bug might take weeks and you think it should be instant. And that's not always the case. So Dave sends us a ton of feedback that we send to our developers

and we put everything into a project system called Jira. and we track all this stuff, right? No, Nigeria. Yeah, sadly. But we track all these comments and bugs and suggestions, and it's like how does this slot in with what work or what developers or what engineers or what artists we have available in? Is this a five-second fix or is this a three-month fix

or what other systems is this fixed touch? But it's one of those things where we do take in all this feedback. It's just some of it will do right away and some of it just takes time, sadly. Yeah. Dennis and I go through that as well on the regular basis with our products. You know, people with both our hardware and our software and even our services, you know, people just giving us, you know, good feedback, bad feedback, positive suggestions, negative sentiment, all these like just different things coming at us. And we always, you know, do our best to let our team know, like, you know, here's what people are saying, here's what people want, et cetera. but they always tell us too like well you know thank you we're going to put it in our in our jira queue as well

but that same thing like a video game is you got to prioritize it and figure out you know what what's the most important thing what's the most feasible and all that so definitely relate i i generally look at it as feedback any kind right even bad sentiment right like great send it over that's the only way we get better so the only way our games get better and you know i'd rather have people just tell us bluntly the way things are, then try to sugarcoat it or try to make us feel better. Like, okay, just tell us. Like, we're here. All of our developers want their games to be as good as it can be.

So they want that feedback, whether you think it's, they want to hear it or not. So I always encourage people. Just be honest, let us know. All right. You got to that, be respectful and constructive. Yeah, I was going to say that too. Yeah.

It's so much easier for us to work. with. If you guys like being blunt and not sugar-coding things, I have a great question for you. Great. Awesome. All right. This is from Ben Midna wants to know. What's a video game that y'all think hasn't aged well? Hasn't aged well. Any shooter from the N64 era does not age as well. They don't feel good anymore. Oldenai still feels good. I don't know. I've tried playing that.

tried playing perfect dark it doesn't it's just like the way you like I'm so like a clunky feeling nowadays it's um it's it's it's the lack of having that second analog stick to look up and down like like like makes sense yeah it's like I got so used to like that's how just games are now if you're playing a shooter on a on a controller that like going to like that little whatever target style thing with the uh with the yellow yeah with the with the C buttons right yeah yeah yeah a game hasn't aged well. I don't even know.

I didn't have a hard question because it really depends. It is a hard one. Yeah, I mean, of course it's subjective, but I mean, I, there's games where I've tried to, like that I used to enjoy and I try to pick them up and play them again. And I discover, like, wow, I don't like this as much as I used to. I'm trying to think, yes. I'm just going through my list.

The correct answer is GTA6. Wow. If and when we'll ever get that game, right? They're just going to re-release the new PlayStation and Xbox. Cheezy wants to know. Has there been any games that you started publishing but never published? Yes. That does happen.

So we, as a publisher, will get involved with a game developer at various stages of their development, right? sometimes we'll get a game that's nearly finished and we'll hop in and help them finish it up plus launch sometimes we'll get in like when they're in early stage development or pre-production so that's really early other times we'll get into a game where we just have a pitch there's no actual development maybe there's not even a team formed and we've literally bought into an idea of the game they want to make and we'll kind of go to that process anywhere in there things could happen that might make us step away, whether that is a, maybe one of the key people got hired in their studio and we can't replace him, or maybe somebody else is coming in to buy the IP, the rights of the game, or maybe the development team got to a blocker and there's no fix, so we just kind of have to stop. Or maybe during development, another game comes out with the very same exact style and design. And it's like, well,

what do we do now? Because this looks like your game and feels like your game. So those things do happen, sadly. It's part of the process. So there's been like several. It does happen. Yeah. Does that last one happen often?

Like a lot of games come out? Because like I feel like right now, I think like Gamescom and E3 or whatever, there's like 20 games that were all announced. There were all like four player co-op shooter type games. and I'm like, does someone just like just like put out like a APB? Hey, let's all do like a similar style of game or something. I'm super down for it because I'm like ready for Dark Tide to come out.

I want it. 2022. It's going to be the year. I got to wait. But like I feel there's so many games that have been that have been announced recently that are similar. So like how do you, how do you decide this is too similar? We need to stop or we need to like pivot or something. Like how do you do that?

So I feel like. This comes in waves, right? So some new game will come out that goes gangbusters, right? PubG, right? Or whatever, right? Some Battle Royale comes out. So then for the next two or three years, you're going to see a bunch of Battle Royale games. Yeah.

And that's the same thing, right? So I'm seeing that game two or three years before it gets published. So we might be in development of a Battle Royale game that looks like H-1Z-1 or PubG or Warzone or whatever. those games just beat us to market and then we have to decide well now what? Because that was the popular genre at the time. That's what people want to play.

That just goes in cycles, right? Before that, it was like five on five with like League of Legends and you know, maybe there's a racing game that comes out that makes everyone interested in racing. Maybe there's a flying game that comes out. So now everyone's flying helicopters. For the longest time, it was zombies.

Everybody was making zombie games. Yeah. It actually reminds me one time I had, I literally had a million-dollar idea And I didn't do it fast enough, and I probably would have just been like the richest person. I would have been like the next Jeff Bezos with this idea. So when the iPad first came out, right? I thought, the first thing I thought was like, you know, it would be cool.

If someone made a case for this, that was actually like a keyboard. So you just like carry the case and you open it. And it's like you have a keyboard and you type in it and it becomes a laptop. And I kept thinking about that for, I think like a year. Like when the iPad first came out, like that did not exist. And then one day I was watching Oprah, of all things, and MC Hammer was the guest. And then she asked him, like, you know, yeah, and she asked him, like, you know, what did you do with all your money that you made in the 80s with your, you know, can't touch this and all that? And he said, he invested pretty much all of it into tech startups because he's from the Bay Area, right?

So as Silicon Valley was blowing up. So was he and he had money. So he started investing all these different tech companies. and then he said, and let me tell you about this company I recently invested in. We're the first company to make a keyboard for the iPad

and he showed it and I was like, no, that's my idea. So, Dennis, that could have been me. I could have been MC Hammer. Who's that company? I'm curious. I don't know. This was like 20 years ago.

Wait, wait, wait. Did you just say you could have been MC Hammer? I could have been the next MC Hammer, yeah. Airship pants and all. I was going to say he already has the pants, so I have a pair of those pants somewhere. The next question is actually not a question,

but it's a really nice comment here from Jack Life AR saying, as a developer working with Versus Evil, I can speak that many different publishers do different things. Versus Evil specifically does a great job of molding to a developer's needs and provide support when needed in the parts that a developer is able to handle themselves, and their advice has been invaluable in our journey to launch. That's very nice.

That's awesome. Yeah, really enjoyed working with Jack on Unmetal. And I'm sorry to go into plug mode, but seriously, if you haven't had a chance to play the Steam demo yet for Unmetal, the game is so much fun. I grew up, obviously, in the 80s, 90s, so 8-bit, 16-bit arrow is kind of my jam. And I love how Un-Metel really.

taps into that but feels very current it's still a very modern game with that kind of retro wrapper it's you know straight up 2d action stealth gameplay it's hilarious it's everything you want in a game check out the demo on steam on metal it looks it looks awesome well the way you said that unmetal coming soon yeah this is this is totally my type of game right here this looks awesome forgive me i work in marketing, I try my best not to sound like it. It's going to hard not to you, right? It looks like a really

old school metal gear solid game. There you go. Yeah, absolutely. You're not allowed to say that, Ivan, because then Konami will come for them with all their Pacino money. I was telling somebody, it's like a love letter to Hideo Kajima.

It's fantastic. I seriously, like, I know it's like every time you put out a new game, it's automatically your most favorite game. But genuinely, like out of all the games that I've been working on, like I've really been having so much fun with this one. That's awesome. Developer on Epic Fran has an amazing sense of humor. And so it really comes through in the game.

And there's, I play a lot of games. I truly enjoy most of them that I play. But rarely do I have laugh out loud moments. where I laugh. And there's been several in this game that are literally, like, they're funny. It's just, it's really well done. Yeah, Fran's knowledge of like 80s and 90s pop culture is fantastic. The movie references that he knows is unbelievable.

Where he puts that stuff in his brain, I have no idea. But when you play it, you'll completely understand. Yeah, I'm definitely, I'm actually downloading it right now. Excellent. You will not be disappointed. I would too, but I think it might break to stream, so I'm not going to touch it. Follow-up item. Yeah.

I really get to Internet, but for some reason, if I download something and I'm streaming the same time, and it, like, it just takes a giant dump, so I'm not going to touch it. Should limit that download speed. That's, like, a great name for this game, too, unmetal. Like, hilarious. Main character of Jesse Fox. I was actually just talking to someone who told me that they had this idea. to make a metal gear solid cookbook and I told them well I have a perfect name for a dish solid steak

oh my god think about that I thought you were going to say silver burger that too all right later I'm done solid steak you're definitely a dad that's uh wow revolver omelette that's a good oh i don't know yeah I'm just spitball in here. Yeah, I shouldn't think of... Do you want a solid stake with that? No, that's just... Hey, there you go.

They go together. I think that might be it for the versus evil questions, but we do have one piece of gaming news to report on today. We do? I mean... Well, you added it to the Trello card. I mean, you're just as a topic if you want to throw in there. We don't have to, you know, we're already on time.

I want to know. What is it? Yeah. So, of course, as a topic. According to reports, Game Boy and Game Boy Color Games could be coming to Nintendo's online service in the near future. This means classic games from the Mario, Metroid, and Pokemon series will be available on a Nintendo system for the first time since the DS. I know Lance is a huge Pokemon fan, so I want to get his take first on this. He loves Pokemon. He's telling us before the show how much he loves it.

Yeah. All of them. I'd say off camera. We had a long Pokemon conversation. Yeah, yeah. He really loves it. He has a Pokemon tattoo. I know everything about them.

Yeah, right on my ass cheek. That's cool. I mean, that's a really good idea for Nintendo to do, frankly. Yeah. I'm surprised they actually haven't done it sooner. Sorry, what surprises me is that Nintendo has been going after all these people with, like, emulators and ROMs forever. and then that's literally what they're doing now with the switch.

They're just like, let's just make the switch it emulator and put our ROMs on here. Now you know why they've been going after everybody. It's like, it's like, it's like if you don't give people access to your stuff if they, you know, where they want to play it, then they're going to find it somewhere else, right? So it's like, you're kind of asking for piracy at that point if you don't, like, provide it to people. Like, I've been wanting to replay some of these, like, old games for like ever on like any kind of modern system. Like, give me, you know, give me, you know, give me. golden sun again. I want to ever play golden sun. I still keep an old DS

like SP boy with a you know messed up cartridge I had since I was like 12 because I'm like the option to want to play that game again but like you know I don't want to play that thing in. I got to find the charger and everything. It's a pain of the butt. I got a friend David Martinez who

who is a, he plays tons of retro games. Yeah. That's what he does. He'll go out and find all these old consoles and all the old actual, you know, physical games to play them because he'll use an emulator when he has to Detroit has really hard to find the real deal. But stuff, this is like perfect for him, right?

So he can play on his new hardware, all these old games that he wants to play. And, you know, it just makes sense. I'm actually really surprised they didn't do it sooner. That's kind of my thought, but yeah. Yeah, Nintendo's in like this weird spot where they have like all these great IPs and they just like don't make use of them.

Or they do some weird stuff but like the Super Mario collection with like, hey, it's here for like a month and it's gone now. It's like for what? Like, why? Yeah. I do something like that,

which I'm sure there's a plan, but to me it's very weird. I think the plan is no plan. Or maybe the plan is just like mass confusion, right? Let's just do whatever we can to confuse people. So when we do something cool, it's like, oh my God, they did it. Oh, Nintendo's, you know, they're the goats.

I told Dennis that the first thing I do with my, my steam deck is going to be to install an emulator so I can play Nintendo Switch games on there. because I can. I think it'd be funny. I don't I don't think of emulated anything

in a long time the last console I emulated was a PS1 because I wanted to play some of those old games like, like Legend of Dragoon like medieval

Spiro Legacy of Cain is that the name of it Legacy of Cain yeah because you can't find copies of these games anymore and if you do

they're on these discs and discs I don't think lasts very well as I'll say those original PlayStationist didn't hold up very well. Yeah, with that black bottom of it or whatever that was, yeah, I don't know what that was.

Correct. Yep. Those things scratched so easy. Yeah, so easy to scratch. Yeah. All right, we got 15 minutes until the giveaway ends. Dave Lance, I know you guys are already overtime, but if you can

hang out until then, you're more than welcome to and you can be here to congratulate the winners as well. But if not, I know we told you guys that we'd be done at 1130, so I don't know if you guys have other obligations. They got games to publish, dude, come on.

That's true. The next bangers right around the corner. There is. I can hang out for a little bit longer. I don't know what Dave's schedule. Yeah, if I got 15 minutes, no problem. Yeah. Awesome.

So for all those who haven't answered, please answer the giveaway, exclamation giveaway, and the link will pop up in the chat. Yeah, it's been there. And we'll announce the winners at 12. It'll be exciting. someone's going to get

a brand new PC with a bunch of versus evil goodies and then a bunch of other people are going to get a bunch of versus evil goodies so fun times for everyone

we don't want to show up empty-handed yeah I'm out of content so I have a fun question for all you guys kind of a hypothetical kind of not

would you quit your $100,000 a year job. I don't know how much you guys make. So I'm going to assume that's like a good amount of money for everybody. Would you quit your $100,000 your job to ask Jake Paul for a job? Do you guys hear about that? Yeah. So this is a guy who like quit his job and he snuck into like an event to ask Jake Paul for like a job. Or it was Logan Paul? Whatever one's the famous box or not the famous boss? I don't know. All these guys are the same thing. They look like they looked at same to me. I don't care. But anyway, so he asked one of the polls.

Stranger did this? Supposedly, yeah. He literally just like walks to him. There's like a video and he's talking to him. He's like, hey man, like, I want to talk business at this random event. Like no real pitch is like, give me a job. And he says no. And then the guy's like in the video the following day.

He's like bawling his eyes out and he's like, you know, work really hard. You know, I make $100,000 a year. I don't know what that has to do with anything. But I just thought he was the most hilarious thing. This guy thought he's going to get a job just like off the bat like that. And just like asking this dude, it was so good. so good. Well, that person, it sounds like a stunt to me, to be fair. I don't know. Right. Yeah. That sounds so... You ended up getting like a million dollar job now from someone because it is.

Yeah. No of that sounds, to me that all sounds like a stunt. But if that's real, uh, wow. Yeah. That's really betting on yourself. You mean, maybe he... I wish I had the confidence, right? But why even quit your job? Go ask for. first, and then if you get the job, then quit. Yeah, like someone said, if he has $100,000 a year job, he probably has PTO, so why didn't he just request a day off? Yeah, right?

Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. That makes no sense to me. This is real? It's a real thing? It's a joke. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a real thing that actually happened, yeah. No cap.

Wow. Yeah, really, really weird, I know. That's funny. Yeah. I don't think I would do that. I don't think I would do that. Oh, wow. He's actually crying a video.

I found it. Let's see here. Someone asked a question here that I think you guys have answered in the chat, but I do want to ask it on the stream because I myself am interested in this. How difficult is it to publish games on different platforms or to move it from one platform to another. Lance's life.

Yeah, let me figure out how to answer that. So there's lots of variables that go into play there, right? So every game starts out being made in a game engine, and that game engine will determine how easy it is to be ported. And porting is essentially the process of making that game available on other platforms. To further complicate that, the game itself will dictate how easy it is to port to our platform based on its UI, its controls, offline versus online, multiplayer versus single player, all that comes into play because it uses different services and has different inputs and

different factors. I would say these days, in general, taking a game to consoles is pretty good, pretty doable for most games. When you start talking to online games, you start talking to online games that couldn't be tricky based on how they're set up then we start looking at things like a mobile or touch controls for switch or for mobile that's a bit more challenging for certain games and certain games just not doable but you know we're getting to a point now where the technology is pretty good if a developer thinks about it ahead of time and kind of plans properly you know it's pretty doable to get a game on to other platforms so I

You say it's doable and the reason why this question is so interesting to me is because I know it's doable, but I guess the follow-up question would be like, just because it's doable, should it be done? Because there's some games that they have like on PC and switch and they're literally like, they're not unplayable, but they're nowhere near as good as they are on the PC. I always think like, why did they even do this? Because it's like almost like a different game to a certain extent. Yeah. So that's what, whenever we're porting a game, we look at two kind of major areas to decide if it's something we want to do. The first one is cost and technology of porting. Will that outweigh what we're going to gain by having the game on that platform?

So for example, if we had a game that took 2 million to take from PC to mobile, is that worth doing? probably not. If it's, you know, 50,000 or 100,000, then yeah, well, something we'll probably look at. We'll kind of do a P&L, profit and loss, and see if it makes sense. The other aspects that we look at in terms of porting a game is, is the game still fun and still kind of true to its design, right? Like, there's certain games you're just made for a mouse and keyboard, right? RTS games, strategy games come to mind, right? Really best played with mouse and keyboard. Some games do it well with a control. controller, but it's still really challenging. Some games are really designed for mobile, right, and for touchscreens, and they're not made for a keyboard and mouse.

Some visuals are made for a computer, and they're not made for a console, right? You know, things of this nature, right? We start looking at those things. It's like, are we doing the game a disservice by putting it on another platform? So we don't want everyone to, everyone that plays on this other platform to leave a bad review. or to hate their experience, right? Because that's ultimately going to impact the game as a whole. And that's just something we try to avoid as much as we can.

So there's a third thing that comes in there that's also a bit tricky, right, where that platform may approach us or the developer and say, hey, we really want your game. How can we make this happen? And something like that does come into play too, where maybe they're doing something to give us a good opportunity or offer to encourage us to come to their platform. but you know generally speaking it's those first two things that we look at the most that makes sense

and i guess it also feels like there's a big difference with publishing like triple a titles on multiple platforms and indie titles because i feel like this is just as a you know as an outsider looking in because i have no idea how that stuff works but i always feel like indie games for the most part are good everywhere no matter where I play them. Like I'm sure unmetall, if I played it on my switch, would be awesome, just as good as it is on the PC, just because I can tell just by looking at it, you know, like it's not like a demanding game.

And then I look at a game like, let's say, I don't know, Overwatch, for example. And just by looking at it, I already know, like, playing this on the switch is going to be brutal. Like, I already know without even seeing it. And I feel like that's like the case with a lot of AAA. games. Do you think that's true? Well, it goes back to some of those things where the game is originally designed for a PC

in certain hardware specs, right? Consoles and mobile phones and all that stuff, they're locked into what hardware they have, right? So you can only get so much out of those other platforms. So if that game is originally designed for a high-end or a nice PC, of course, there's only limitations and other things on other platforms that either you as a consumer, have to be aware of or the developer has to be aware of and make sure it's, you know, highlighted, right? Like, you still might be able to play, some way but have fun, but visually it might not be the same. It might be better in some cases, depending on how things are set up.

It could be worse in some cases. Performance could be different. It's just, it's one of those things where messaging and communication have to be good and you've got to look at it, right? But that goes back to the original, like, planning of the game, right? If this is AAA or indie or whoever, if it's thought about ahead of time, far enough ahead of time, you can kind of make those considerations based on your art style. How many assets are loading, where you're loading your assets, what kind of performance tool you're taking, when you're loading certain sounds or how you're handling certain things that make

the game run, what calls you're making win and all that stuff. But that's, you know, you don't always have that luxury of planning that far ahead of what platforms you're going to. Yeah. Wow. It seems like a lot of work. Yeah. I have a question you guys might not be able to answer because you might not want to be mean, but have you ever gotten a pitch from a game and you've been like, this is not, like, this sucks. Like, sorry, we can't. Like, hopefully you wouldn't say it like that,

right? But like, like, I don't, I want to ask for examples, but I'm pretty sure you can't. but like has there been a situation where maybe like you've had someone come up to you and say hey we want to pitch this game to you and like you're like we can't do it this game we don't think it's gonna be it's gonna be a good game and like I don't they ever like argue with you

or they get like angry or anything like that like I'm really curious like I'm sure I'm sure it's happened right yeah so it's definitely all of those things have happened certainly and I think I'm trying to be sensitive you know

well it's one of those things where we also don't want like we see a bunch of games right we get tons of game pitches we see lots of developers and hear lots of ideas and just frankly some of them just aren't fully fleshed out or they don't have a good loop or whatever

right something about it just doesn't cut the mustard so to speak or doesn't you know it isn't on to work well cut the mustard I don't know that's the right phrase or not I think it is yeah basically it's one of those things where we just have you know I always tell our developers

and everyone I work with, I'm the same talking to you right now as I am the developers. Like, I'm always, I'm not going to hold anything back. I'm pretty blunt, pretty open, pretty honest.

And if I don't tell you how I feel about the game, then I'm doing you a disservice by saying, we don't like it, but keep going, right? Like, that's not what I want to tell a developer.

It's like, it's not for us, but we think your game idea is good. Like, I don't want to say that because that's terrible. I'd rather tell the developer, hey, we're not past because, you know,

your art style is not great. Or, hey, we're not past because you're not past because your design is boring or whatever, right? Like, we generally pass on a title, and we'll try to give a developer some feedback why we're passing. That way they know, you know,

it needs improvements or it needs whatever. And we just tell them, like, this is our opinion, right? Like, this is what we think and this is why. There's been a few cases of developers get mad, and that's fine to some regard. Like, you know, it's their idea. It's their baby, right? And if we disagree with it, you know,

who are we just saying? that we know everything either like yeah we're human we make mistakes for all i know your game could be awesome and a year from now you could be you know a billionaire but i'm just going off of what i know and i'm what what we see and how we operate and the games that are out there now and just try to give you our best and honest opinion of things um yeah we've had developers come back right like uh like later with another pitch saying hey you know we've we've updated the mechanics or we've taken your feedback on board, check out our new version. Yep, that does happen.

And that's awesome to see, especially if it's one of those things where, or what I think is even better is if we give feedback to some developer and they go, it's either self-publish or another publisher, and they act upon that feedback, and they may even give us kudos somewhere. It's like, you know, we didn't work with them, but thanks to them for saying this, or thanks for giving us this idea or whatever. It's like, oh, that's awesome. That's good.

We're in a space where I don't want to see anybody fail if that makes sense. I'd rather see everyone. There's enough games out there to play that just go be successful. But I don't want to do you a disservice by lying to you or leading you on. I just want to give you honest feedback and let you kind of go from there, whether you come back to us or go somewhere else or whatever. Yeah. Yeah.

So I ask for two reasons. One because I'm curious, but also because I saw TikTok the other day where this guy submitted this game to publisher. It was like a board card game or something. And supposedly the litter he got was like, your game is not good. We strongly advise you to like not work on this anymore. Like the idea is in original, you know, we've seen it before or so on and so forth. So he's like, all right, TikTok, make you an game famous. And then people in the comments are like, no, dude, seriously, I saw your game. It's not good. Like, please don't. Like, please talk. And it felt bad for the dude. But at the same time, it's like, they're like telling you like, hey, like, this game is not

good. Like, you know, we have some experience. And then people in the comments are, you know, I guess I'm expecting people to like kind of like you know lift them up like oh man no this game is great like no actually it's not good like just no no like me and me and my group of board board game friends played it it's not great we just were rather play mafia or something like that I was like oh shoot yeah that's so bad for the dude I do you know I feel bad saying that stuff right yeah yeah I put their time and effort and this is their thing they want to do but I don't feel good telling them that their idea sucks by any means I you know I don't phrase it like that. But it's one of those things where I would feel worse if I told them it's not for us, but they keep working on it. Or if I don't give them feedback that's constructive, they can make it better, right? Like I don't want that developer to keep working on that project as is for the next two years in the hopes that he's going to do something with it.

When I know or have a good idea, it won't do well because that's almost setting him up for failure if I'm not being honest. And, you know, it's one of those things where. in that scenario with a TikTok, that's kind of the ultimate thing, right? Like he had it in his head that his idea was the best thing ever, and he was expecting people to agree with them. So then one source told him it wasn't good, and they passed on it. And then he's got confirmation from a bunch of other people on TikTok that it wasn't good,

and it was already out there. The real test is, does he listen to any of that? And what does he, what does that person he or she do with all that feedback now? they could still go ahead, which is that's their choice, certainly. They've gotten a lot of feedback and what they do with it's up to them at this point. That's a, that totally makes sense. And I think the part that really sucked to me was like, we want to see it succeed and we want to succeed together, right? And if it's something that's not going to be beneficial for both of us and why would we do it, right?

It's the same thing that I tell people whenever they like, they like, ask us on social, like, oh, why don't you sponsor me? You know, I'm really dedicated. You know, I got like 10 beers. And I'm like, well, that's the reason why, right? It's like, it has to be beneficial to both of us. We'd love to give every single person in the world of computer, but at the end of the day, we literally can't, right? Like a computer costs resources, time, money, you know, shipping it out, you know,

costs something, right? And if there's not going to be like a, I'm going to say paybacks to wrong word, but there's not going to be like a mutual benefit from both of us, then can't do it, right? Stay on that grind gamer, right? And then, you know, we'll see what happens. All right, Ivan. Yes.

You got some exciting news, I think. It's time to announce all the losers of the giveaway. So hold up. Let me throw up. Can you some music here? Yeah. What do you want? Give me some.

Play me some of that certified lover boy. I think it might be, I think I might get in trouble if I did that. All right. I got a good one, though. Hopefully the boomers might know what this song is. Is this the right one? I'm listening. Trying to pull it up.

Give me a minute here. I'll make sure it's the right one. Is that it? All right. I like it. I can invite with this. All right. So the grand pies winner of the NZXT starter PC is...

Oh, this is this word's here. Sorry, go on. BTC Midna. Oh, hey. They asked the question too, didn't they? I believe so. Hey, let's go. Congratulations.

Keep an eye on your email. I know... Congratulations. Most people do. don't check their email, but you might want to check your email today. And then also congratulations to Jeffrey, Kenyon, Paul, John, Zycin, Dario, Vivin, Leonard, Tom, David, Chase, Justin, Carlos, Paul, and Meese. You all won a bunch of cool stuff from versus Evil, so you're going to get some game codes, some switch cartridges, some T-shirts, and probably some other little Z-Extee goodies thrown in there just for fun. So congrats everyone.

Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. Thank you all for listening and for entering the giveaway. And also thank you versus Evil for hanging out with us and for donating all the cool prizes. Please follow at versus underscore evil on social media. Check them out where you buy your video games, all that good stuff. They make some good ones. Yeah.

And thanks to everyone who participated throughout the week for N60 Summer Party, Um, fun fact actually. And I think we're pretty much done with almost all the giveaways, uh, at least on the social side. We have some, no, we have a, we have a bunch of versus evil pop up giveaways on Twitter today. We have some more coming up, right?

But there was one person in particular who I was going to call out because I think it's hilarious. They won twice Steam gift cards on Facebook specifically because y'all slack it on the Facebook. We have a Facebook guys. I know it's for your mom and dad, right? I know that's where they get all like the terrible information, right? But there's free stuff on there too.

And also free stuff. on the Instagram. So check out NZT on our Instagram and on our Facebook as well. And our Discord server too. We got the bump in Discord server. There's free stuff on there. Go get your free shit. Like seriously,

there's like, like, don't let this man win twice. He might win three times. And I will, and I will gladly give it to him three times in a row because he's the only dude commenting on the Facebook when it's not a bus feed question.

What does it matter with you? It's free stuff on there. Check it out. We want to give you guys free stuff. We never do it. So when we do, you got to get out there and do the things, which is just click the button pretty much. Like most of the time we just click a button or something.

Even I can do that. That's great. What's funny too is like, you know, I think I counted something crazy, like over 100 prizes this week that we're shipping out. And I already know like next week when the summer party is over, we're going to start getting comments like, do you guys do giveaways? Like, yeah.

Anything away is going on? All right, other than that, though, Lance and Dave, do you guys have any parting questions for parting comments or anything for the community or for us before we go ahead and say goodbye? The main thing is thank you. You know, we obviously wouldn't be here without such great support from the community and the people that play our games. we're just so happy to have everybody, you know, engaging with us, playing our games, telling us about their experience with our games. So really just wholeheartedly, thank you. We really appreciate it.

Yeah, certainly. Thank you guys. It was fun and enjoy the prizes and hope everyone likes them and whoever that was enjoys our new PC. That's super cool. Yeah, congratulations. GGs. You did it.

You did it, Gamer. You finally won the computer. All right. And with that, thank you for joining us. But I always said Jeff for some reason, Lance and Dave, I got Jeff on the brain today. Lance and Dave, thank you so much for joining. Really appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having us.

Anytime. Anytime. Yeah. If you guys ever want to hop back on, let us know. Awesome. And thank you to everybody who tuned in. Remember to tune in next week at 10-A and Pacific Center time of the official NXT Twitch. And follow at NZXC on all relevant and irrelevant social media.

And if you want to, send an email to podcast. At nziccc.com, if you want to ask a question off the air, Yeah, if you're just, you know, listening offline. Sorry if you're listening offline and listening on FODs or whatever, in terms of time for a second. We should probably do something for you guys. We'll think about it. Let us know.

Send us an email about what you want and we'll do something. They forget to listen to previous episodes on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and SoundCloud, and it gets Twitchfods too. Also, leave us a positive review, like, subscribe, hit that bell, smash the watch later button, open it in 50 windows, share with the friend, all that fun stuff. All right, thanks guys, and we'll see you next time.

Bye. Bye-bye.