Triforce! - Triforce! #162: The Gamestop Hackers

Episode Date: February 3, 2021

Triforce! Episode 162! We try to explain the wild world of Wall Street Bets recent GME heist, Lewis and Sips have been playing the new Factorio-like Dyson Sphere Program and Pyrion wonders what happened to the British Film Industry! Support your favourite podcast on Patreon: https://bit.ly/2SMnzk6 Music courtesy of Epidemic Sound. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hello, everybody, and welcome. Good morning. Welcome back to the Triforce podcast. Welcome back, Sips. Welcome back. Welcome back, Perion. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here with all of you. It's wonderful to be here. I hope that you guys are all well, keeping well, keeping fresh, keeping tight. Keep it tight, above all.

Keep it tight and fresh. And I hope that that's how you guys are keeping it. Absolutely. If I taught you anything, keep it tight and fresh. In fact, when we met, those were the first things. We had a handshake and Sips grabbed my hand and leaned in. He said, keep it tight and fresh. And I thought, I'm going to remember those words.

Words to live by. And I've kept them with me that's the wisdom if there were a little book of of um wise words to live by you don't need anything other than keep it tight and fresh honestly it's a two-page just be blank it's like one of those it's a very it looks like a thick book but it's actually just two very thick pages and on one page it says tight on the other page it says fresh so you need to know. Yeah. Keep it. And the cover says keep it. Keep it tight and keep it fresh. It's like a 90s rap.

That's what it sounds like. Like tight and fresh sound like terrible rappers from the 90s. Tight and fresh. I like that. Can we talk about this story that has been really interesting over the last couple of days, the Wall Street Bets thing with GameStop? Oh, yeah. I could talk about it, but I don't really understand it.

What don't you understand? You're going to have to explain to me from, like, as if I was a complete idiot, what's going on. Explain it to me like I'm five. So do you guys know what a short position is? No. So I know what GameStop is. It's a failing retailer.

I know what Wall Street is. Okay. All failing retailer. I know what Wall Street is. Okay. All right. Good. We're way ahead of where I thought we'd be. Well, no, let's define this as well. Let's define what Wall Street is, if you know what it is. All right.

Wall Street is... It's a road in New York City. And it's got the New York Stock Exchange building on it. And the building has a statue of a giant bull outside of it. That's all I know. This is true. Right. Now, that's not really what Wall Street is.

I mean, that obviously is what Wall Street is. You weren't specific in your question. Well, I wasn't. But I think what Wall Street is is actually represents the older generation of investment But I think what Wall Street is, is actually represents the older generation of investment and massive investment firms who have existed for a very long time. I'm sure the stock exchanges are on Wall Street and there I'm sure some firms work there. But it's really, it represents more of a... It's the home of the big banks, isn't it? Of the biggest banks in America and therefore probably by extension, certainly most of the biggest ones in the, and therefore probably by extension,

certainly most of the biggest ones in the world are right there on Wall Street. And yeah, they deal in stocks and shares and all the other shit that goes along with that. That's Wall Street. And then you've got GameStop, which was a company with a value of $3. Its stock, that is, was $3 a share.

As you said, a failing business. Well, I think a lot of people compared it to Blockbuster video yeah it's exactly the same they don't have an online presence you know they don't have plans to break away from brick and mortar stores which yeah which i've always heard of gamestop described as the very lucrative used game market which i don't deny is possibly very lucrative but certainly the model of it is i mean you can't take a digital download there and sell it again because obviously that's impossible so there goes their model really but me for me personally uh having oh i've only a couple of times bought or traded in used games and then they were when i was younger.

Right. Because you needed the Lula to buy something new, right? Because I didn't have much pocket money or stuff. And if I wanted to buy a game, it was a big expensive thing. And I honestly felt like even buying used games back then was probably more expensive than it should have been. Well, yeah, they kind of ripped you off. Because they were never worth the amount that they charged

for those used games. You know what I mean? And they were never worth the amount that they charged for those used games you know what i mean and they were always sticky i don't know if you guys remember this but like anytime you buy a used game like the cartridge itself was sticky it's it's true just like other people's weird like hand gunk on it or something i don't know it was i'm and i just i honestly am surprised that they still are a thing. And I think a lot of people were surprised. It would be like finding a blockbuster. And that's why the stock price went down to $3. I mean, apparently there is like one blockbuster store left

in some remote place somewhere, I think, in either Canada or America, apparently. I don't know if that's true. I saw an article or a video or something on the internet. Anyway. I think that those things exist because weirdos exist, P-Flex. I think there's some weirdo still running a blockbuster. There might well be.

He's like, my family have been running blockbuster radio for generations. My grandpappy ran a blockbuster and his grandpappy ran a blockbuster and I'm going to run a blockbuster despite the fact that Netflix exists. I think there's one left. That's all we can handle. The last remaining store is in Morley, West Australia. Closed its doors. So there's one left. That's all we can handle. The last remaining store is in Morley, West Australia. Closed its doors. So there is one left.

Yeah, it's like in Ohio or something. It is in Bend, Oregon. Oh, Oregon. Sorry. Do you reckon it's in one of these? Do you reckon there's going to be like modern Amish people? No, it's not even. It'll be like Twin Peaks. It'll be like the town amish people who no it's not even it'll be like it'll be like

the town of twin peaks right okay that's where the blockbuster is yeah yeah just a bunch of old people who have always just like been car mechanics or whatever um that like to rent vhs tapes that's very wholesome what if it only did porn what if you went there and it was it was only porn that was it. At Blockbuster. Well, I'm just guessing that's the way you could stay alive would be- With porn. With porn. It's not that kind of busting.

Yes. Nut buster. A different bust entirely. So anyway, GameStop. So the subreddit WallStreetBets, which I've dipped in and out of it over the last few years because they often post what they call loss porn, which is where people post pictures of their horrific losses. And sometimes it's mind boggling and also their gains. And sometimes that's mind boggling too. And there's all kinds of memes there and stuff. It's kind of a crazy place. I've never invested and I probably wouldn't

because I think it is a little risky, but even I might get a little app and chuck 100 bucks on there. And if they're going after a stock, why not? I mean, they've driven the price of GameStop up over, I think, 3,800% or something like that. It's just going up and up and up as they're all buying. And because the share price is going up, this is where it gets difficult for the short sellers. So you've got these hedge funds, which are basically gambling institutes for wealthy people, and they've got billions of dollars. Now, a short position is when I say... One of the things you can do with short and long positions is I buy some shares from you. Let's say Sips has some shares. Let's say Sips has a thousand shares in GameStop. I borrow those shares from you. And I say, I'm going to give them back to you in three months time. You'll get your thousand shares back. And for letting me

borrow them, I'm going to give you a little bit of money. So you say, well, they weren't doing anything anyway, and I'm going to get them back. So no problem. So you give me your shares. I give you a little bit of money. I've now got those shares valued at $3. So I sell them immediately because I think the price of the shares is going to go down so i sell the shares at three dollars the price drops to one dollar a share i buy back the thousand shares and i keep the the difference and i give you back your thousand shares it's not my fault they're now worth one dollar i just have to return you one thousand shares of gamestop or whatever so the short position is that they're saying we we we owe a whole bunch of people shares in gamestop when these short positions come due.

The short positions are saying, we bet that the price will go down. Right, because then I know that I sold it at the price I got it from you at, and I think it's going to go down, so I can then buy them back at a lower price and give you back your 1,000 shares, and I keep the difference in profit. The problem is, if those shares go up, I still owe you a thousand shares

and I now need to buy a thousand shares for you and return them to you. And that might end up costing me money. Now, normally the spread wouldn't be that big, but because of what's happened with Wall Street bets, all these hedge funds that had short positions on GameStop, when they bought these shares at fuck all, they got them and sold them at fuck all. Now they're worth like hundreds of dollars per share so they're going to lose billions and a lot of them have had to close out their positions and and buy the shares absolutely and because they have to buy these shares to then give back to people that's more shares being bought so the price goes up even more and and the thing about it is is that it's not even that it's it's almost like derivatives

so the way they work is, instead of doing this with Sips and buying the share off him, you kind of buy fake shares. You go to a bank and you say, I would like to make a bet on these shares. And even though you're paying a small amount, like a very small premium, a little fraction of the money to buy 10 or 100 or 1,000 shares worth so you can play that position. So it was as if you were buying the shares and selling them back. You're actually saying to a bank, I'm just going to play that game. Yeah, silly, isn't it?

And I'm going to pay money to let you play that game for me kind of thing i mean these these things these things are called options and and basically they're they're a derivative and and and that means that that you're like often not always but often liable to these potentially massive losses if the trade goes the wrong way and i think most people expect game stop it's like a house of cards right everyone looks at that and says this is not going to be the next tesla this is next not going to be the next apple you know this is a business that you know even if somehow they turn around or they have an e-store selling games that brings them into the 20th century um do you know what

i mean like like even even if they even if they like start i don't even know what they could do what could they do what are they going to start a platform that competes with steam and epic exactly i mean you know blizzard and and ubisoft have been trying to do this for the last 10 years and you know just about survive it. Epic is, I assume, doing okay. But what's GameStop going to do? Whereas the point is that with someone like Tesla, you think, well, maybe the US government is going to say, let's put money into all of our post vans and make them all Tesla's or let's make all of our

things. We need batteries now for everyone's house. We need solar panels for everyone's house. I don't know. They might do some big innovation, right? And suddenly Tesla have got all this technology. Maybe Toyota are like, well, we're going to make this electric car that's by Tesla's batteries. You know, you can see like this potential with all of the knowledge base and like stuff that Teslala has but with games it's just nothing but what's happening here is that the price well the gamestop price at the moment of is 350 dollars from three dollars right which is crazy and so it's causing this kind of distortion i guess in the the markets that have always been abused and manipulated so heavily by conventional right

money i think and i think that's where the biggest problem for people comes in is that now wall street and a lot of their defenders and buddies are complaining because it's like well yeah but manipulate the market is wrong when other people do it because a lot of these short positions that these hedge funds have they'll then go and get their media buddies to say wow gamestop is fucked the share price tanks even more and their short positions come good like that's that's a thing that happens and i think it's interesting to me that this subreddit wall street bets is not they're not manipulating the media they're just basically saying to each other this is what we're going to do and committing to holding on to these shares to and watching the price go up that's not the same as going to your buddies at cnbc or whatever

and saying uh hey uh we're we're short on gamestop we think it's really going to go bad and they just go oh really and they go on there oh they're short because it's our game so game stop's gonna go bad and then magically it does it's like why are you allowed to manipulate it these guys are just doing it's almost like a democratic thing. I have way more respect for the Wall Street Bets guys than motherfuckers on Wall Street. But the whole system is completely fucked up. Yeah, it's ridiculous. Again, I'm not an expert,

and I don't really understand what's going on with all this GameStop stuff. And I don't also know what's going to happen by the time this podcast goes out in a week because it's crazy. But at the moment, it's really interesting to see. I mean, it's a classic thing that can happen in the market. And I assume it's legal to say, I'm going to invest in this thing. Let's pump it up. Let's pump this stock up. And then everyone

jumps on the bandwagon. They pump it all up together. And then at a certain point, though, at a certain point on this stuff, usually the big banks and the big money gets out first before the little guy because the big bank has access to things like being able to trade after hours or being able to you know or doing some bullshit where they get their money out first i don't know i think the important point here is the debita-da-deba-da. Deba-deba-deba-deba. I don't know. But I always get the impression that, you know, someone's going to lose money in this, right? Like, the money has to come from somewhere.

If people are making money, other people are losing money. And at the moment, it feels like the big banks are losing money and the individual chumps on Reddit are making money. But, like, if anything anything if 100 years of financial finagling you know it's like yeah surely the banks who has the gigantic mega buildings but this hasn't happened before that's the thing i don't think this is this is this is a new thing that banks have had to deal with people People outside of financial institutions organising something like this. It's never happened before to my knowledge. It does feel like a protest.

Yeah, of course it is. Of course it is. It's a generation of people. That's what they're all saying. Is that these were the kids of 2008. You know, they watched all this shit happen. To some extent, this is a good thing in a sense because I think GameStop probably was fundamentally undervalued

when it was really, really cheap. I think the pandemic has caused everything to be... I think a lot of the times, I imagine, I don't know, I imagine this is how it works. Someone in a big company, like a big bank, will identify a company that they think is undervalued. They will flag that up and use their massive corporate power to buy up a bunch of those shares or options of those shares. So when the price doubles of that thing that they've pumped, they actually make 100 times because they've bought all these options.

And so then they sell and then they've made 100 times the money. That's kind of Lewis's idiotic idea of how the financial system works, right? But I assume this kind of stuff isn't illegal, right? If you just tell all your friends, you tell all the other banks, you tell the CNBC, you tell that weird financial guy, you know, it's a stock tip. I assume all that is totally illegal to do. Yeah, it's one of those things it isn't illegal until it is sort of thing right like if some some big boy gets burned or or whatever then it's likely that it'll be become illegal or be seen as illegal or there'll be some reparations

there whatever you know what i mean like there's i think there's like fail fail safes for a lot of this stuff but then in in a lot of cases, there's not, I guess. You see people get fucked over by this kind of stuff fairly regularly, I guess. It's not like... I don't really know about much of this stuff, but you hear about it. I don't get anywhere near any of this stuff because it terrifies me. It's like like even bitcoin which feels like actually bitcoin feels to me like a cool good idea right it feels like it's a kind of limited thing where you've only got certain amount of them and so therefore you know

if you want some you know you there's no bank that can just print extra or no government worth like 40k or something. It's insane. Well, but that's the thing. Maybe, Sips, they'll go to 100k. Maybe they go to 200k. We don't know. And so we're scared to get in or you're always going to miss out.

But then again, it might go to nothing because Bitcoin is... Volatility manifest, really. I think if you're into it and you understand it and you're interested in it, it's fair enough. To me, it's just complication in my life that I do not need. Like, I don't need to think about that. And I don't want to think about that. And therefore, I avoid it. Well, it's playing a game with money often.

That's the thing. And I always think of Wall Street as the professional poker players, the old guards, those men at the table. You see these poker games with these men who've been playing poker for hundreds of years, it feels like. But imagine if those guys are gambling with other people's money, and if they go bust, the government... It fucks over a lot of people, yeah. Yeah, so their money is tied up in people's pensions and if they go bust the government fucks over a lot of people yeah yeah so their their money is like tied up in people's pensions and houses and jobs so if they lose they

just go to the bank aka the the government and say we lost our money and we're important poker players they say we'll have some money back that's that's the kind of poker game it is and i think that is that is it that pisses off a lot of people. I think that we don't want that to be the case, but I think that is the case. Yeah, if the banks went bust, we'd be fucked. That's the problem. The 2008 crisis was horrible for a lot of people. And I think every time, as part of our financial system,

recessions are a thing. I don't know. I was watching The Crown. Oh, yeah. And a lot of The Crown seems to be about prime ministers in the sort of 70s and 80s having to worry about oh the inflation is out of control we have to devalue the pound oh i don't know there's like and that's that's enough to get a prime minister out of power you know oh well you know a financial system was falling apart i don't know i feel like i feel

like now it's just like not a big deal anymore. No one complains about that sort of economy and stuff and thinks about it these sort of ways. Back then, it was like, oh, let's just sell some more fighter jets to Iran. It was kind of weird where they treated countries more like they were companies. And so, you know, when a country had to make some money, like back in America with the Contras, you know, in order to fund some of these projects, illegal wars and things, they had to do some drug deals and stuff. Right, right. And you read about this stuff and you're like, you know,

obviously there was a some sort of like there was some sort of ceiling on how much money you could print and send out and i i just i just see these these news articles where it's like you know biden's new rescue package and i'm like where does this i don't understand where this money comes from and what it really means and why it's not a problem to do it. And so it's kind of this bizarre world we live in. And it worries me, really, in a sense, that the pandemic has caused these... And I don't want there to be another recession in the same way as 2008, because that was very harmful to a lot of people.

A lot of people had a lot of hardship yeah and we don't we don't need any more hardship we need we need less hardship in this world oh so anyway i'm a bit frustrated but yeah confused confused and frustrated i don't like i don't again i don't really follow much of this stuff or any of it really like i've heard like people talking about this but but like, it's, it's so beyond like what I'm interested in or what I'd ever look into or whatever. Like, I guess like the, like what I, from what I understand, uh, there, you know, like a lot of people are saying, well done Reddit for like, you know, making a lot of money or something. Like, like, I guess there was like some sort of effort for people to do this and help out or something. I don't know.

But I still don't really get what's happened or why or anything. So you weren't listening for the last 20 minutes? No. I'm so ambivalent towards it that I just sort of zoned out while you guys were even talking about so that's okay so what so this week pretty much all i've been doing is playing dyson sphere program on yeah i picked that up i tried it out briefly and it seems pretty cool like yeah it's factorio so you know factorio um but they've it's it's the sort of the idea of it is that it's colourful. You're building around a planet, and the first time I realised that it was quicker for me to send a production line

round the entire other side of the planet and circumnavigate the little planet I was on rather than go straight forwards was really interesting. You can launch yourself into space, go to other planets, build stuff um build like a little space elevator there a little space elevator and and build these sort of transport ships you can lob solar sails at the sun and sort of slowly surround the sun by this cloud of things and sometimes there's moments in it which look really great but at its core it is the same gameplay as Factorio. See, now, as much as you guys, like Sips was saying here,

doesn't get it and has no interest and far from what he'd be concerned with when it comes to this Wall Street Bet stuff with GameStop, when I look at Factorio, to me, it looks like someone has just spent all their free time tidying their house to a ridiculous degree like it's that level of just ludicrous getting every hair out from between every floorboard uh you know shake and vacuum the carpet uh not just scrubbing the sink but taking all the pipes out from underneath the

sink and cleaning those as well lifting the tiles up in the bathroom to clean the wall behind the tiles and carefully replace them and re-grouting them cleaning every speck of glass making sure there's no piece of dust that wouldn't be that wouldn't be factorio factorio would be making sure that the pipes were taking the most efficient route to their destination right but i'm trying to put it in terms of something i know i hate doing which is cleaning so it's just like it's just mind-boggling to me when i see i'll see i saw i think maybe it might have even been a trailer for factorio where it's zoomed in a little part of a factory and then it slowly zooms out and you see this vast unbelievable network of of lines and and conveyor belts everything i just thought my god that must have taken so long and it all just

looks like the same thing to me and it's just madness yeah you're i think it's it's one of those you either love it or or you hate it sort of thing i like but i think it speaks to who you are like if you enjoy that order and i know that i mean i know i think i think people who enjoy programming like it because there's a lot of sort of like efficiencies and stuff like that you know like sometimes when you're doing it you you kind of feel like you are programming in a way so i think it probably appeals to people like that for example i i think that most games are a simple mechanic sheathed or or hidden in pretty colors often right like you're doing something over and over again and that's something that gameplay loop

they call it needs to be satisfying you know like digging a block in minecraft is is something you do again and again yeah and i always go back to that one because it's very satisfying but but in in factorio and a lot of games like ano and even even simple games you are just trying to get one resource and provide it to a place and so it's like even it's even if it's like a sim city where it's like a town and you need to give it food you know it's it's simple right yeah i think factorio is the next evolution of that it's bringing together multiple things from multiple locations and putting them in to combine to make something else and then taking that thing and making it something else and taking that thing and making it something else.

And before you know it, you have a very complicated production line. And Factorio is the furthest along, I guess, of the most... It's the most spreadsheet-like, I guess, of all of them. Satisfactory is the more 3d fps version and it's it's much simpler as much as i like satisfactory i found satisfactory kind of clunky at parts and i think it's just because some of the buildings are just way too big and it's kind of

hard to get like a good setup or it doesn't feel it doesn't feel as satisfying as maybe the title leads you to think because you just end up playing this stupid you know trying to line things up properly sort of game and it's just like i don't know i wish i wish there was less of that i wish maybe that the buildings were a bit more compact or that you could you had more control over how the buildings looked or how big they could be or whatever. You know what I mean? Yeah, you're totally right. I mean, the Factorio is the simplest, most easy version of the game, whereas Satisfactory, I think, is...

Imagine the thing that you built in Factorio in half an hour. That's what you've built in 24 hours of Satisfactory. That's the same level of complexity, but complexity but satisfactory is much more satisfying to see yeah when you've got this landscape laid out in front of you on a planet of all of the stuff that you've built and you're like wow look at my thing that that makes you know orbs of of copper or whatever you know um what were you saying p flex because this is this is something which you know you must experience in gaming, right? So what I like in gaming is the chaos and trying to make it through the chaos, the random events, trying to respond to changes and things.

So, for example, the reason I think I dislike Factorio is because it's about creating this order and it's all very perfect and everything. That's not me at all i'm a very chaotic badly organized very list like it's like in factorio it's like i need to do this then i need to do line then i need to do power then i need to do this thing then i need to do this yeah i think that's the ideal way to play it though right but i don't see how you could play it any other some people do get enjoyment out of the chaos as well it's kind of like playing city

skylines you know like and and managing the traffic some people are which i'm very bad at having these these really gross you know bowl of spaghetti systems for traffic and stuff and then when they're done and it's kind of working they're they're like great like this is this is great i really like enjoyed that or whatever and i didn't feel like i had to be overly efficient or have 20 wikis open um to do it sort of thing and i think factorial can be like that too there's like enjoyment to be to be had but if you're approaching it like wanting to be the most efficient and and like a perfectionist then i feel like it'll be a frustrating experience because i think it takes a while to get there. Like I do the road thing in whenever I've streamed City Skylines.

I like the chaos of that and the madness of having like I've had the entire town is like, wow, we're doing really well in Trafficker, guys. There seem to be hardly any cars. And then we pan around the city and there's one roundabout that for some some reason every single car that enters the city is using and nothing's moving and it's like why is everybody dying yeah why aren't these dead bodies being picked up and you see like a line of a hundred ambulances yeah it's like it's like a plague victim it's like it's like a it's like there's snow did but the the traffic generation in that game isn't scaled properly like like one industrial um tile will produce like 10 trucks or something and it's like it's ridiculous like

there's no way that it should even work like that and there's mods to sort of alleviate some of it or make it a bit better or whatever but i think i mean i think it's funny the traffic generation isn't great i would say but like like whenever i'm streaming it that's one of the favorite things for chat is the awful traffic yes well i mean the whole game becomes about managing traffic again like it's i i think that's that's a symptom of the bad in a sense something that i don't think that was intended i don't think that when city skylines developers sat down around a table and were making the game they were like okay guys so the core gameplay loop here is going to be traffic management

so i know dave you particularly like traffic management because you're a fucking massive nerd uh it feels like they intended it to be this that was just a side effect and that you have to wrestle with and it's a frustration i guess the most recent sim city was the same they had this um they had this engine running sort of like it was like kind of like an ai layer to the engine that handled uh traffic and and like spawning entities and stuff and but they had a like a rush hour right so like at certain times a day um the game would decide that everybody needed to get to to work or whatever so like for the most part your traffic would be fine but then at rush hour it would just be a disaster but so much of a disaster that like you know ambulances and fire trucks would get stuck in the traffic and couldn't make it to the places that they needed to go to.

Oh my God. I always have this paranoia in games that hell, that the devil is sat there, right? And he's coding and he's like, I'm going to make it. So however you play this game, you come up with a brilliant idea, but I'm always going to fuck you like i'm always going to find a way to make it so the traffic doesn't fucking work and i feel like so many times in games i get to these these sort of situations where i've spent far too long trying to fix something which i hate i hated i hate the whole experience of trying to fix it yeah um yet that hours go by and i'm like fuck this but it's like i can't stop it's very and i think that's part of it with the same thing with factorio right it's like it's like it's a chore it's a tedious chore okay to to build this stuff and do this stuff over and over again and honestly like factorio does have blueprints and things like this to make it

simpler you know once you've built something once you can just copy paste it yeah um as long as you've built the tech to support you doing that it's it but but but certainly like like there are just these very tedious things and what you said pflex is that you know you like to the chaos you like the randomness you like decisions you like to make choices like in rimworld my favorite part is very different we we get some weird thing happening that's unpredictable and i love that like i i my favorite kind of gameplay is like the kind that emerges from a fairly simple setup like rimworld yeah and then the layers of stuff that you add on top add complexity but there's still this very lifelike random event coming out that sort of you know changes things i like that rather than predictable methodical almost like chore like

like you said tidying up as a game to me the equivalent to doing your chores would be factoria where you can plan it out and be maximum efficiency some people love that factor it does have um aliens that attack you which is i guess kind of random and the way that they work is they get um bigger and they attack more the more you pollute right so like there's there's that to it i mean it's not like yeah there's a lot of tidying up there's's no denying it. But there is elements of having to have turrets filled with ammo and some defenses and stuff, too. But do you ever get a boomer lope becoming self-tamed and then exploding in your Nintendo Chrome?

No, but it's not remodeled. You're comparing two things. No, I'm not comparing them. This game just doesn't have those mechanics whatsoever. I'm saying that's what I prefer over the other. No, I totally get it. And I think that they are very different games with very different gameplay experiences.

And I think that in some ways, you are just going through the motions. If you like logistics and engineering and stuff like that, you probably like Factorio. You know what I mean? If you like moving lots of things from one place to another i mean you don't really do anything like that in rim world like the like get getting efficient in rim world i think uh i think like the the sort of scope of it's probably just having like a good kill box or whatever you know what

i mean like otherwise somehow having colonists that putting your medicine next to your med bay you know like like scientists get your colonists just getting fucked off and being like you know what it's too dark in here i'm gonna start attacking people like that's the bonkers stuff oh rimworld's great i played it recently i haven't played it for a long time rimworld funnily enough is one of my most streamed games like i was looking at you used to play i was looking at like my top five of games that i've streamed like in the past i don't know how ever long i've been streaming and rimworld's like number three i think how do you find that what really um you just go there's websites like twitch metrics or twitch track or something like that usually it usually tells you i'm gonna have

a look carry on um that's interesting yeah so, I apparently just have played hundreds of hours of RimWorld without even realizing it. But, I mean, it's a great game. Oh, tell me about it. No, I mean, I've spent hundreds of hours in RimWorld. I think the thing that always frustrates me with RimWorld, sadly, is that the random events are, once you've seen them all, and there's not that many. Yeah. Yeah, sure. A rabbit has gone crazy. Yeah, but I mean. Pods with radioactive dust have come down. Yeah, and there's not that many. Yeah. Yeah, sure. A rabbit has gone crazy.

Oh, pods with radioactive dust have come down. Yeah, I don't mind that. It's a cold snap. Everyone is dead. Sometimes the game feels a bit oppressive when it layers these things on top of each other. And it's almost like, yeah, okay. You know, like, you think like, okay, I have a talk like a nuclear winter. All right.

Well, the worst case scenario would be X happening and then X happens. And you're like, all right. Well, you know, like it's it feels like a bit bullshitty, like even with Randy Random or whatever. Right. You know, it's almost like parts of that are just scripted to just really try to fuck you or poke at your defenses. And I get it. And it's and i get it and it's and and overall i think it's fine but i still get frustrated by it sometimes because it just doesn't feel authentic i guess like it it just does feel sort of like um you know it's like a predetermined

thing that like once one thing happens it's likely that the other thing will, you know, X, Y, or Z that would be like worst case scenarios will come coupled with it. And then you're just like kind of stuck with it. Yeah. I think this is something about like how long a game should be as well. Like I think sometimes games don't, like the roguelike genre has come along and it's really kind of put a put a put a tight kind of and also fortnite and games like this in battle royale games where they've kind of put this tight

time limit on how long the gameplay experience is right it's like you're gonna start at the beginning you're gonna build up you're gonna do stuff you're gonna get the guys that's always the best bit it's the same in civ and it's the same in everything it's you know you want it to be a certain game length before you can start again and try something new and try some new stuff and and not get too complicated you know you don't want to um spend too long on one thing right and so yeah i think with rim world it feels like sometimes you put a lot of time in and then suddenly something will go wrong and you'll just lose your sort of 60 hour playthrough or whatever yeah it's a bit more of a robo like i think so by the way looking at the list of games streamed

Yeah, it's a bit more of a roguelike, I think. So, by the way, looking at the list of games streamed, since November 2016, I've streamed 3,630 hours of Dota. Jesus Christ. And then the next is CSGO with 750 hours, then Tarkov with 630, then Rust, and then, unbelievably, Blood Bowl. But I've realized why that is. Well, yeah, I mean, those are kind of like your games, though.

I mean, that's pretty good. I haven't played Blood Bowl in ages, and I regularly on no no football manager on there though which you know oddly enough yeah oddly enough but um i think it's over the last uh four years or whatever i didn't i haven't streamed much football manager yeah i think my top game is minecraft with like four or five hundred hours streamed but you you play a lot more games like i do yeah my my my i think my variety is wider another one for me is overwatch which i streamed a lot of um so that's in my top so so i've got minecraft overwatch rim world fallout 4 which i've streamed a ton of yeah god and um what was the other one i can't remember the oh among us

now because i've streamed a lot of among us more recently sort of thing i'm surprised that's that's high yeah it's uh yeah so yeah but like of all the games i think oxygen not included was was up there but i think like among us has overtaken it now but yeah wow it's like quite quite a quite a wide variety tarkov's coming up the list on my list it was on my list but it's quite a wide variety. Tarkov's coming up on the list as well. Oh, Tarkov's on my list. It was on my list, but it's not. Sixth on your list, Tarkov. Yeah, I mean, I streamed not this wipe. I haven't streamed it much at all.

But when we used to play it a lot, Flax, what was it, two wipes ago? Yeah. I played it and streamed it a ton. I think it might have been two wipes ago. Yeah, wipes ago. Because I know that, yeah, so they wipe the server. Completely.

So you have to restart, basically. Like everything. You lose everything. You're back to level one. All your skills are cast. This is what people want. People really want wipes. It's a weird thing to say, but like...

Yeah, no, you're right. I mean, if you look at the banks of the Thames River, like, man, there's wipes everywhere there, too. People love wipes. It's 2021. No one wipes with paper. You use wipes now. There's no achievement if you've just got a billion rubles and you're a full hideout and there's no quest to do and nothing.

What's the point? There's no scoreboard or anything, so it just becomes pointless. Usually, the wipe comes with some new revised mechanics and stuff right so it's it makes it more interesting it's a bit like i guess in some ways maybe it's a bit like poe but it's instead of like a full expansion to refresh everything and a wipe to play on it's just a couple of you know patches yeah well this does feel like that yeah that does feel like the middle ground now you don't tend to get new games designed that are static and a standing still unless who still do things like they did 25 years ago it's it's interesting like they're the two choices really in terms of you you have your your your in terms of you have your regular wipes

or you have the game wipe itself. Scented wipes. Lightly fragranced wipes. Auto wiper. Oh, man. Holy crap. Lots of wiping. They keep talking about stuff they're going to add to Tarkov.

You know, the weird relationship between people that are playing a game and the devs is that you kind of trust them to get why everybody likes this game yeah you you read about some of the plans that games like i assume we're going to add so and so and everybody's like oh my god please don't do that so one of the things they're talking about is is adding traps to the game that you can plant like i don't know what those traps would be like but presumably things that explode and wound you. And I think that would be disastrous for the game. I think it would be really, really unfun to people just planting mines and tripwires and stuff around the place. And some people like, oh no, that would sound, that sounds like quite fun. It's a bit like, it's a bit like techies in Doja 2. Some people think this changes the game so much this one hero that it's actually not fun

even if it's not that effective it ruins the game for everybody else in it and i feel the same way about traps in in uh in tarkov i'm sure i would have fun watching i mean i can imagine them putting it in though because i think that as for all the sort of complaints about gameplay and, or, or, you know, praise about gameplay and stuff, I think they are trying to make something kind of realistic or whatever. Oh yeah.

So I think, I think on that basis alone, possibly they would put them in, but I think that it would slow down the game like crazy. That's what, that was what I was saying was it's already people don't move around that much. Not much.

No. And it's definitely gotten slower. I noticed like even people still like hatchet run or like, you know, rat and stuff like that. But like the mechanics around that has changed a lot now too. But, um,

you know, if they were to put traps and stuff in men, it would take you forever to get through one building, right? You wouldn't be able to just charge in or else you would just get your legs blown off. Right. But worse than that, if you do see someone and they've run away from you you can't chase them yeah yeah

because you don't know what what traps they've left behind but and imagine entering a door now you what are you going to have to check for traps on the door yeah carefully open the door you got to check for tripwires i mean i think we're basing this on like call of duty where you just press the button and then instantly the trap is up if i think if tarkov were to do it it would be like it would take 20 seconds of holding a button to like you know set it up or something like that you know what i mean all i'm saying is the extract points are already risky enough now imagine if people are just putting fucking bombs everywhere what do you think of the new one on reserve but where you turn the power on and then you can get the one in the one down in d2 with the really big i use it all the time i love

the big sliding door yeah it's great isn't my favorite before that getting out of reserve was fucking awful so yeah well you had bunker right but then or train but like i mean train meant you had to hang around for fucking 30 minutes no bunker you had to go through the most dangerous part of the map and then fight potentially raiders all the time so obviously now there's actually a way out what happens is that you as the players take control of the game and you find certain things and certain things become fun i'm sure that tarkov didn't intend to develop this kind of chad slash rat kind of duality right yeah in their game no they weren't expecting it to be like that at all but i think that's what's developed and

and in the sense some people what you get is you get these two different communities in the game who'd like to play in a certain way or like to or prefer to play in a certain way and when you start getting a big community of when you when you want to reach out to new players and bring them in you know everyone's going to have a different opinion and i think when you you're very paralyzed when you're a developer because you can't satisfy everyone with your stuff that you put in and almost like you're gonna you know injure certain groups of people i think i think the what you have to do is you just have to have your finger on the pulse, right? You have to be down there in your game, playing actively every day, passionate about it. Those are the people who know, the community really know what the game needs, you know,

most of all to make it good. And sometimes that's not adding fucking traps or whatever. It's sometimes fixing a massive problem with the game. There is a big problem that they need to fix. The desync and... Oh my God, the desync is insane sometimes. And there's also issues like, they call it peeker's advantage.

And you can watch clips of this all over the place. A lot of the time, the person who's running at you and being super aggressive, you just can't hit them. No. Like you're shooting and they're just, if they're moving, the hit detection is so bad.

You'll clearly see bullets land and they just won't register at the end of the game. Yeah, and it's like, no, you didn't get him. He got you. It's like, okay, you didn't get him. He got you. It's like, okay. And you see people get very frustrated. The thing is, that's not going to bring in money, is it, right? If you advertise your game and you're like, okay, this month we got Peaker's Advantage being fixed.

It's not going to bring in new people, right? Whereas if you say, we got traps and zeppelins and the president dropping it by helicopter you don't mean it's like we got fort knox you know that sells that sells new players i will say this however there are a lot of big streamers that stream tarkov and i think if they quit the game and got sick of it and moved on to something else and complained a lot i think that would drive the player base down and i think you're right a lot of those people like i saw shroud losing his shit the other day because he got he got uh desynced and and um not decent but the peak is advantage and the rushes advantage was ridiculous and he had this guy cold he's like and the guy just like one bangs it's like what the fuck is happening like what's happening on screen

is not what's happening behind the scenes and that's frustrating is that you expect and also like in cs go you expect and also like in cs go you expect that holding an angle is going to have some advantage because i'm you know you don't know exactly where i am i've got you i've lined up where you would be and it doesn't make a difference in talk of you can just fucking blap people and it's just kind of silly but i think you just have to change the way you play but that kind of frustration does uh i think it seeps into the community from these and it's funny how like it's a similar thing with sacrile right because i saw he posted like um that he

had this whole like two hours of hell where he went in with a full two million gear just got hacked hacked to death by shot through the floor right at spawn and then you know killed by some other bullshit and then killed by some other bullshit and then desyncing for another hour and it just like like kind of grinded him down but obviously he's still playing it actively every day and you know it doesn't even care there's nothing like that's the thing there's no game but if you have enough of those bad experiences they are gonna grind you down and you're gonna find a game yeah it doesn't have that that i mean that this is why people are playing tarkov i guess because it gives them an experience that the other games didn't right yeah yeah like pub g and and whatever came before that world war z god knows it's just it's got it's got it all like it's got the

combination of really genuinely very tense firefights and action it's a very pretty game the sound design is incredible like there's so many sound effects it's incredible um the weather effects and everything i mean there'll be bits where as a sniper i'm watching an area and the cloud cover changes and that means i can't see or then suddenly the sun comes out and you can suddenly see a lad and it's like oh shit the sun came out and now i can see him and now i shoot him and you know little details like that that are really really immersive um but then i think nikita is the head game designer and that's sort of the guy he keeps saying things like we want to add gun jamming into the game yeah yeah can you imagine how frustrating it would be for you to come around the corner and just go

and your gun is jammed then you have to drop back clear i mean it's just more chaos yeah it would drive people crazy that's what you want you want chaos but that's what you said earlier yeah that you want to go but that's what you said earlier. Yeah, yeah. That you wanted chaos. But that's the thing. I don't mind that because I run cheap shit and go in with like a crappy SMG. So if I die and it's a funny death, that's fine. But if you're Chad,

God, this is bullshit. And they're going to lose their shit. They want it to be this perfect competitive shooter. I looked at this thing and it was like, I was watching this this talk by this game dev guy some time ago and he basically was describing how there are these like pillars of game design and one of them is to have a a stable game economy if you like and a hacking free economy and actually building that in as one of your five things it's like it's as

important as the gameplay yeah to have like no hackers you know it feels like battle state games like like tarkov is like some company where you it's not on steam you know you have to actually buy it on their website it's not cheap people put lots of money in if you if there's a hacker you you would assume that they have a couple of people just bam let's just ban this guy and then he has to pay 50 quid to buy the game again like they do but that's the thing like they don't it it doesn't it it's not a massive deterrent like there's they exist like apex legends i used to play it was had tons of hackers like it just it it's just uh it's just one of those things like i don't think they're ever ahead of the game with people creating hacks it feels like it should be such a priority some people just seek them out. They want them,

you know, like some cultures sort of promote, you know, winning at any cost or whatever. It's almost like having a bug in your game that you need to fix. You know, you need to build these facilities in any way. Maybe I'm just ranting about it,

but I, yeah, I think a lot of people are just, it's just guys in an office who don't really, I don't have anyone even thinking about banning the hackers. You know, there's, there's no, there's no process at all. at all actually interestingly they've just brought in i think

it was yesterday or the day before a new overwatch system in dota they call it overwatch which is what they called it in csgo and essentially the community reports people and then i think okay community uh decides whether someone's cheating or not, which it doesn't work. It didn't work in CSGO. No. You can have people reporting people for bad usernames, abusive language and stuff like that because there's a log and presumably someone somewhere reads it and goes, yeah, this person's banned.

But on occasion you get a message that pops up that says action was taken against a player you reported, but a lot of the time it doesn't yeah i mean i i message people that i know at valve directly if i feel like there's something really bad that they need to see i'm like look this guy look at this guy and they're just like okay i'll pass it on to the band team it's like that's all you can do like that's the best i can do is email someone but most people don't have access to that kind of stuff and i don't know if it even ever leads to anything you think it would be quite a simple process right like someone files report a copy of that game is like filed away as a replay the dev that you know whoever's going through the report just looks at the first one this is clearly hacking some just a

guy assigned one guy you just assign a guy to do this valve they don't have anyone like yeah but they yeah but they ban these guys and then they just come back they just create new accounts they whatever they just buy the game again like but that's great that's monetizing it you know i know but that's that way that guy is describing is is what is in place now that's how it works right i see it's you know they they ban people as best they can and then those people just come back with new accounts i don't know how many times i would come back and pay 50 quid if i was banned every day though no but you you when was the last time you got a hack for a game and you know what i mean like you you can't get into the it's a different mentality like their mindset because it's just

completely like i i've never downloaded a hack for a game i've never felt like i wanted to even you know what i mean like i i can't imagine how these people just operate generally like can we cut to a picture of spiff sweating and looking left and right no but i mean like especially like uh like online competitive games against other people you know where there's a ladder and stuff like that what's the point i mean i don't i don't see what satisfaction you get from it you know what i mean like i would have thought that you're if you're playing that in the first place you're legitimately trying to get better at the game so that you can climb on the ladder and that is where the satisfaction comes from like no you

you must just feel yourself cheated all the time if you're having to cheat and knowing that any progress you've made is based off having a massive advantage. I wonder how people who cheat on exams – but I think if you're one of these – if you've cheated on an exam, right, do you go through your whole life feeling like a kind of – or do you think, well, I've got one over on those fuckers? No, I don't think so, really. It's a means to an end, isn't it? Like, yeah, at least there's some definitive goal. Yeah, I need to get these exams to get this job and then I'll figure it out from there. And then sure, who knows? Maybe you fucked up in the exam and you cheated and got through it.

And then maybe you have a successful career. That's the hope. But cheating in a video game? But even cheating an exam to get somewhere, like if you don't know what you're doing you're gonna have to get found out pretty quickly right like it's oh yeah you think so but but at least they have a goal in mind yeah sure like the the cheating is literally they just get pleasure from cheating it's it's that's all it is like they love it i mean you see videos of uh i know that there was a guy on the talk of subreddit posted he got into this cheaters discord which sounds like hell yeah

and he was in there and played with them and he filmed it and recorded all their audio and everything like that and they just went on to labs and killed everybody with their cheats and everything and then yeah the guy was like bragging about it what i'm gonna watch me clear this map like it's a skill thing killed everything and of course of course he did it i mean he did it because he can one tap everybody perfectly well and he can see where everybody is like most of them can see you know outlines of players through walls and stuff like a lot of these hacks are like fairly advanced right like and they can toggle them and stuff as well. Yeah, but they were so happy. Talking about this stuff, this week as I was playing Escape from Tarkov, not Tarkov, as I was playing Dice of Sphere Pro,

because I wouldn't be able to pay attention. So I was watching, because we watched Night Stalker, all of us watched it last week, and I moved on to the Netflix show I Am a Killer or whatever. Oh, I was watching the trailer for that. So there's two series of it, and basically it feels like a lockdown show in a sense. Yeah, don't they interview people who are on death row and stuff

and they talk about what they've done? Yeah, so they go into these prisons and they basically just talk to death row inmates. Oh, yeah, that, that, that death row inmates yeah yeah yeah so is it any good first of all it's it's bizarrely formulaic and repetitive and the stories that you get out of these people are almost almost the same every time that i've written it down but it falls into like sort of a couple of categories right so most criminals that they seem to have on the show are death row inmates who tended to have done their crimes when they were young. So either 16, 17, 18 or 19.

And usually they're still on death row because their sentence was commuted. or at least they've come off of death row relatively, not recently, in the last 20 years, because there was a law passed that said, actually, if someone did a capital murder when they were 16, they can't be on death row, right? Right. And so these people often did their crime when they were young.

And in a sense, there is an element of they were just young and stupid, right? There's this great episode where there's a DA who actually did a lot of stuff, really stupid criminal stuff when he was young, but he's now the DA. And he's deciding whether someone who was, you know, so he's sat there in his plush leather chair saying, you know, well, it doesn't matter. These guys done the crime and in texas we kill them kind of thing you know and they're like but you know you did a very you could have very easily done something almost the same and you in fact did do i did go to prison

you know for something can you seek how you would be in the similar i'm not trying to defend anyway it's really interesting because you've got on one hand you've got these criminals who obviously did these terrible things um and a lot of the time when you're interviewing them, they go one of two ways. They either are completely admitting what they did. They're really embarrassed about it. They're like, I was young and stupid. I didn't know what I was doing. It was a terrible thing. I shouldn't have done it. I was an idiot. The other thing is they have this story that they've been telling or maybe telling themselves but telling ever since and it's it's obviously not true um or at least

but but they're convinced that it is they've almost told themselves the story so many times that when they're then confronted in the interview with like well you've just told us this story we've gone back and checked it this is what everyone else has to say they're almost shocked they're like well i don't remember it that way have i been it's what's going on like they're very confused and then you've got the victims who again sometimes are completely forgiving and like look i realized that he killed my dad i i can't believe it but i've forgiven him i hope he gets out one day you You know, he seems like a changed man. And the other people who are completely the other way, completely the other side, and are like, I hope he dies.

I want him to die. That's the only, you know, my dad's not here, so why is he here kind of thing. And it's really amazing to see the differences between people's feelings about these activities. Is it worth watching? I think it kind of is, just because sometimes it's quite surprising. And in a sense, the way it's sort of set up is,

you get this guy who's killed all these people, and he tells his story, or her story. Right. The female ones are actually more interesting. They're in the second season. And so her story is this thing, and then you go to the um victims and they tell what they think and then you finally go to the police and the the lawyers who were involved and they tell their thing right and you realize that actually you know the the criminal telling

their story left out a lot of stuff well of course i mean they will do very convenient stuff which really kind of changes the narrative quite dramatically. And I don't know whether, you know, they just don't remember or who's lying and who's not telling the truth. Of course it is. I really think it is. Yeah, I really think it is. Yeah. It's a process of justifying it to yourself so that you're not like constantly just feeling like shit about it.

Driven mad with guilt. The way it sets up is you meet this criminal. They obviously look like a scary criminal. Some of them look like they've had chemotherapy, you know, because they're pale. They're wearing this like they're not very well nourished. They've got terrible teeth. They've often not got much hair. They look awful.

You know, these people are in prison like me and they they come out and they tell you this terrible fucking tale of how they were you know i was just sat in a car and my friend went and killed someone and i got done for capital murder i never even pulled the trigger i never even done anything you know and i'm now here and i've spent 50 years of my life in prison for capital murder and then you know that's like god you're like holy shit this guy this is a complete injustice what's going on and then it goes to the victims and they're like well this is sort of and you're sort of learning more and you're like oh okay well so maybe he was more involved than he said and then the next guy's like well you gotta remember this guy also shot a guy

in the stomach the week before and it's like okay so this guy actually is kind of you're looking at a lot of stuff in isolation too like if there's not too much i mean they'll talk about like the crime they committed but like it it's important to know like their their sort of like past and stuff as well right like usually it's not just uh a case of like oh yeah this guy murdered one person or two people there's there's definitely like things that lead up to that too right like oh yeah this guy murdered one person or two people there's there's definitely like things that lead up to that too right like this guy this guy wasn't like uh baking brownies for the local church and then one day decided hang on i am going to um just abandon my normal average life and now murder two people kill three people with a baseball bat yeah i mean there's definitely other things that sort of um lead up to it and there's probably other um you know like assaults

or maybe murders that you don't know about there's loads of really interesting everyone's story is slightly different right one guy is like like felt like he was hearing voices from the devil that were telling him to do stuff and sort of did things that that indicated that and one guy was like you know really upset about a relationship and sort of just got really lost his mind one guy was drunk one guy was on drugs you know and so it was all like they they you you do feel sympathy for some of these these folks but some of the folks you you don't feel any sympathy for god i'm glad this guy's locked away but sometimes them being locked away is this torture in itself and that leads them to do even worse things you know sometimes they they're like well you know i wanted to they took me off death row and so in order to get back on death row i killed my cellmate you know i strangled him

i was like jesus you know because apparently death row is quite cushy apparently compared to like i guess you're not in general population are you you're not in general population you get like regular meals you're like i don't know it's weird like in a sense like apparently being on death row is almost like to this one guy that i was like in one of the episodes so he's he's keen to be on death row um because he wants to die he and some of them were like you know i'm guilty i did it you know the law is to kill me why aren't they killing me kind of thing he's like frustrated and but but then again like i'm sure there's ways that if you really wanted to go out you could go out in jail right i guess um just uh make the big boss angry in a blaze of glory just demand a jugging just do something that demands continual day day by day jugging

i've been watching a completely different show yeah i'm not i'm not happy cheerful it's it's not cheerful it's i'm not gleeful about it either it was it really made me think but i i did i did enjoy the experience so anyway call call my agent watch call my agent it's a french comedy drama about um ital talent agency for actors. And it's very good. Right out of the box. First episode is really good. And yeah, it's just, it's a really good, funny show.

It is in French with subtitles. So the problem is I watch a couple of episodes before I go to bed. And when I'm trying to get to sleep, all I can hear is... Like I'm just hearing French words in my head. It's really good though. I recommend it. Yeah. I watched... I probably mentioned it, but if you guys still haven't seen it, you should watch Gamora.

It's the Italian, it's Italian with English subtitles. It's like four seasons. It's like about the Gamora in Naples. It's based on the movie, right? Yeah. in Naples. It's based on the movie, right? Yeah, it's Robert Saviano, who was kind of like a whistleblower for the mafia in Italy, who wrote it.

Thank you. It's a really good one. Thank you very much. Oh, and Dark as well. Did you watch Dark Flags? Yeah, we've spoken about it. Oh, yeah. Really thought that was all right.

Foreign TV series with subtitles. Gotta love them, eh? So here's my question, right? Some really good stuff. There's loads of famous French actors Really thought that was all right. Foreign TV series with subtitles. Gotta love them, eh? So here's my question, right? Yeah, well, some really good stuff. There's loads of famous French actors in the show who are big in France. And I thought they were actors playing actors, but they're the actual actors.

Right. And if you look them up, they are actual actors. So their talent that they get in and that they are representing are actual professional French actors that are known, that are famous. They're like famous, which is quite funny. So it'd be like, you know, the agent suddenly incomes, I don't know, Tom Hiddleston or someone like that, you know, or whatever. Um, so that's quite funny, but you miss out on that. Cause I don't know who any of these actors are. So I'm some of the jokes might

be about the fact that, Oh, look, can you imagine if, uhasion francais said this you know so that element of it is lost to me but it's clear that there is a french film industry making films just for the french well i mean i think most countries do have where's ours well english yeah name films that we make that are released in for in england just for english people and don't really get get sold overseas oh there's been a couple like it's not i would i wouldn't say that it's like shows there's there's there's definitely been a couple though name three in the last few years that you would say were in the last three years i don't know but like historically i'd say like waking ned divine um i don't i can't imagine that that translates well outside of the uk this is a tv

series for a start p flex not not a film right but my point is that these actors in it the ones that they're representing are they like tv actors no these are film actors and there is a big french film industry that makes films for france yeah that are we don't see them we don't you know we're not aware they have a a massive music industry as well in france and that music you'll unlikely hear anywhere outside of france so where is the british film industry what happened to it we got fucked though there's loads i think there's i think there is still like uh like a fair amount of of british i disagree i can't of, I don't have examples for you, but if you look into it, you'll,

you'll probably be surprised. I don't think it's anywhere near as big as you think. I think it used to be a lot bigger. Maybe it's not as big as France's, but France have a very sort of, um, their approach to, um,

uh, maintaining their culture is different to anywhere else as well. Yeah, they give a shit about it. Well, you're just pissed off. Why aren't we doing, we produce so many great actors and watch a hollywood film and the half the fucking actors in it are either british or the aussies or the kiwis or something yeah but

that's the it's why aren't we making movies with these we all we we all speak english so there's always going to be that crossover for sure right like like an english actor is just going to be at some point in their career is going to aspire to go to america and and break america right i understand that i understand that but where do english film industry at that's all i'm saying let's make some more movies people i know there's someone out there listening to this who's got their finger on the button tweet at pflex all the great british movies that have been made in the last five years that were released in britain yeah think of more examples than just waking ned divine which is the only one i can think of that and lesbian vampire killers with i think that was james corden or

someone like that like i'm talking about i'm asking people to just give me examples of films that were made in britain didn't go outside britain much the way the french did and obviously in france there's a difference is it's in French. So a lot of the movies that are in French, it's not going to, you know, people don't want to watch subtitles. I get it. So our film industry, because it's in English, could appeal to a lot of the world.

What I'm saying is a lot of the time you do get some films made like, well, film for funding and all this kind of stuff, but not at the same volume that the French do. Why not? What happened? Give me some examples. If you think the british film industry is alive and well and cranking out movies give me some examples because

i i am struggling there are definitely some like trains but train spotting for example and i think they made the other one but i don't know if hollywood money was waking ned devine for example yeah fucking this this fucking waking ned devine that's 20 years that's 1998 i just remember seeing trailers for it like when i was working at blockbuster funnily enough at the time and uh it did just come out and there were commercials for it and i remember thinking at the time fuck me like this movie will never leave the uk like there's no way any other country in the world understands that's you know this fucking Irish guy it was like the father Ted of movies like it was just such a weird I don't know it was all right I'm interested to see him as well I'm not saying like I don't know if someone comes at me and says like Oh Harry Potter or something like that I'm talking about films that

were made for Britain like this would would not translate. Like Sips is saying, this would not translate outside Britain. People just won't get it. We may try and sell it over there, but where are the films just that are like so UK-centric that they would never sell internationally? I think that French Film Industry makes films for France. Do we make, how, give me some examples of films we've clearly just made for a British audience. Films is a tougher one because of the amount of crossover.

But, I mean, TV shows, like Lewis was saying, there's... Oh, TV is a dozen count. But the thing is, they all cross over, right? People love watching the British... The things that you would think would be ours, like Great British Bake Off. You know, people in America can't get enough of that shit. TV's out. I don't want to talk about TV.

TV is different. I'm talking films. I'm talking films, okay? All right, films. don't want to talk about TV. TV is different. I'm talking films. I'm talking films. Okay. All right. Films. Films is a different ball game. It is.

Well, it's not a ball game. It's like a racket game. It's just going to be like really weird shit like educating Rita and stuff like that, you know? Again, that was made

in the 80s. I know. We've established. I don't have any modern examples. Maybe that's establishing that there aren't any more but I'm just saying it'll be shit like that

where it's just like it'll be so British that it'll just be impossible for any anyone else who's like you know not remotely interested to watch or understand you know what I mean I mean are you talking about things like Paddington and Kingsman

no no no those things clearly hollywoodish movies or what you know there's usually english studios that line into hollywood though right like there's i mean to to film in england with like mostly an english cast and everything is i i would say that like a lot of the production would have been british for sure right but maybe money coming from america right and also it's clearly made with them in mind sort of right but so like the in-betweeners movie for example my friend i was playing taco with my mate bob last night and we

were talking about this based on a tv show though right but they love the in-betweeners in the states right it was a big hit i don't know why because it feels very british to me but it does it was apparently quite successful over there weird isn't it yeah it is the other one maybe there's like an american version most of like the strictly come dancing dancing on ice all that shit like um you know like pop idol all that crap that made it over to america and right when one shape or form or whatever. There's definitely like a big export industry in Britain for formats and stuff, right? The BBC, for example, have made fucking millions

off of exporting formats to other countries, not just America, like Australia, Canada, everywhere else as well. But the big one at the moment, The Masked Singer, it's South Korean. Oh, is it? Oh, so what? That's on ITV, right? Yes.

I think The Voice is another one that went over to America eventually. It was a BBC show that then ITV bought the rights to because they were going to ditch it. But now that's made it over to other countries and stuff as well. Yeah. I don't know. The funniest thing about watching Masked singer is that my kids don't know who any of the celebrities are none not one but the other way around though it's it doesn't seem to hold true really like what what shows do we have that are sort of like popular in britain that are based on formats from like say america for example like i can't me like maybe in more

general sense like the kind of like uh like the genre like the sitcom genre or whatever maybe that's changed a bit more but like i'm trying to think of like you know like in america they'll have like say survivor or i guess maybe the apprentice the apprentice did the apprentice start as a an american show i'm not sure i'm not sure was that the other way around like i can't think of i can't really think off the top of my head of any shows that we would have imported as formats. I think generally speaking, if a format is successful in America, they can just export it here. I know, but that's what I'm saying. Right, but what I'm saying is they'll just give us the American show.

We don't feel a need to remake it. The Americans feel a big need to remake it. So by way dragon's den was based on a japanese show right and what about um big brother where did that originate i think that was i think that was was it first in holland yeah bloody holland bloody dutch coming up with creative ideas always creating my tulips so the apprentice was an american show. All right. So that started and that format was imported then. I'd be surprised

how even like a lot of, we don't even know a lot of American reality TV that's going on. No, I mean. It's cultural stuff.

Especially sports. You know, we don't know anything about American sports going on. We don't hear anything about it. It's really interesting.

I mean, occasionally the Super Bowl. It's really interesting what stays within countries when news kind of comes out, right? It interesting uh anyway we're gonna we're gonna go yeah thank you everyone thank you so much we got stuff to do have a good one fuck you got stuff to do interesting week we'll see we'll see if um we'll see what happens with blockbuster video next week yeah apparently uh amc amc cinemas that's the one that they're going for we're

tracking that story and uh we'll have updates for you next week, hopefully. Hopefully there's some more movement. Anyway, this is Sip signing off. Bye, everybody. Love you. Love you, bye.