Triple Click - Xbox Leaks And Unity Explodes

Episode Date: September 21, 2023

It's time for a news roundup! Maddy, Kirk, and Jason break down a whole bunch of recent headlines, from the Unity price hike debacle to the massive Xbox document leak. They also talk layoffs, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, and much more.One More Thing:Kirk: Killers of the Flower Moon (David Grann)Maddy: The Other Black Girl (Zakiya Dalila Harris)Jason: The Wager (David Grann)LINKS:Support Triple Click: http://maximumfun.org/joinBuy Triple Click Merch: https://maxfunstore.com/search?q=triple+click&options%5Bprefix%5D=lastJoin the Triple Click Discord: http://discord.gg/tripleclickpodTriple Click Ethics Policy: https://maximumfun.org/triple-click-ethics-policy/ Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/jointripleclick 🚀  SUPPORT TRIPLE CLICK:Join Maximum Fun | Buy TC Merch💬 JOIN THE TRIPLE CLICK DISCORD🎮 Triple Click Ethics Policy📱 SOCIALS | @tripleclickpodInstagram | YouTube | TikTok | Twitch

When Phil Spencer said he wanted Microsoft to acquire Nintendo, what he meant was he needs a plumber. To take care of these leaks, am I right? Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. This week we talk about the news from Unity's bizarre price change for developers to the leaks of Microsoft's plans for the future Xbox. Oh, and a Nintendo direct? I'm Maddie Myers. I'm Jason Schreier. And I'm Kirk Hamilton and hello.

Hello. Hello, hello everybody. It's us again. Back for another week of video games. And boy, I just have to say, thank God our emails didn't leak the way Microsoft was great. Well, thank God we didn't accidentally upload them anywhere. Thank God we didn't upload our secret planning documents.

Every day I wake up and I make sure not to press the big red button that says leak all triple-click archives and messages. Maddie, why would you even code a button? like that. I just for fun mostly. Seems really risky. Yeah, I had some questions when you were doing that. Just because I really want I want people to know how many

times in the past, Kirk and I have tried to convince Jason to watch various movies and he just ignores the messages over and over again. We have to read it into the public record. Yeah, people need to know about that. But speaking of which, why would I be talking about forcing Jason to watch various movies? Well,

I have something important to get to right off the top, which is that we, as a podcast that's part of the Maximum Fun Network, we participate in the tradition, the tradition of your, of releasing bonus episodes to anyone who deans to go. Tradition passed along from our ancestors. That's right. To anyone who deigns to go to Maximumfund.org slash join and become a member.

If you partake in that grand tradition and you become one of us, then you get to listen to monthly bonus episodes from us and also bonus episodes from other podcasts on the network. And the one that we're going to release this month is about two of my favorite movies that are also both about the topic of AI. And they are the movie Her and the movie X Machina, which are both, well, her is like a romantic drama. And then X Machina is like a romantic drama that is actually a horror movie is maybe how I would describe it. They're kind of opposite it movies in a lot of ways. I think we'll be two good polls for our conversation to orbit around. And yet, I would say that they ultimately have very similar ideas about AI in the end.

Well, we're going to get into that. Or do they? Or do they? But yeah, it'll be a great conversation. I love those movies. And Jason's never seen them before, much like, say, die hard, which we also watched for one of our bonus episodes and the Mario live action movie, which we watch. watched. Just just a little taste. No, that I had seen. That you had seen. Of course. Yes, I didn't mean to lump it in in that way. I was just listing other movies at that point, but it's true. Just listening some movies.

Yeah, just listing movies. Let's remember some guys. Let's remember some movies we've watched for triple clip bonus episodes. But yeah, Maximum Fun.org slash join. You can listen to those episodes. We do talk about video games on there too. We do. It's not just movies. More often than not. And that's what we're going to talk about today, at least from the news perspective, Jason, I'll kick it over to you to lead the app.

Yeah, well, so there has been a lot of news over the past week. So we're going to do a news roundup today, a good old-fashioned news roundup. Y-hawn. Yeah, can you insert a cowboy? A cowboy. Sure, I'll come up with something. Yeah, we're walking in through the swinging double doors and there's a tumbley going by. You want like a record scratch, the piano player stops, everybody turns and looks at us.

I thought we wanted like a whip crack. No, yeah, I was thinking the whip crack. You were thinking a roundup. I see. I see. We're rounding up some news. Way more fun than what I was picturing. But Maddie, but I do like the saloon idea too.

We'll save that for another. As we're doing Wild West cliches, I'll do them both and we'll save the second one for something else. All right, all right. So yeah, there's a lot to talk about. Let's start with the big controversy that started last week, which involves the video game technology company, Unity. Unity was caught in a firestorm last week. So let me give the kind of short version of the headlines and then we can get it into it from there. So short version is that Unity put out a new policy that is essentially a price hike that says, hey, if you have a game that is made with the Unity engine starting in January, if you hit a certain number of installs, if users of your game install it a certain number of times past a certain threshold, we will charge. you per install. It was 20 cents per install for the lowest level. It kind of changes. There's a lot of complicated aspects of the policy, but that was the gist of it. Charge the developer of the game.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You user of a unity engine. And so, yeah, people freaked the hell out for a number of reasons, first and foremost, because this was just kind of like surprise dropped on everybody, and it would affect all Unity games no matter what. And it was just kind of, it felt like a punch in the face. It felt like a violation of their terms of service. There were a bunch of things left unclear that Unity then had to clarify it in subsequent days. It was a communications disaster, like potential Harvard Business School Study, and how to not communicate a new policy. And where we're at now is yesterday. So Monday, I reported that Unity had an all-hands meeting where they were talking about potential changes, which they haven't yet officially announced,

but one of them was like a cap on the number of, on the amount of money that you could, that you, that you have to pay due to the new policy. Another one was that like the policy wouldn't apply retroactively. So like installs would only start counting in January. But it's all just become one big mess. We've seen a lot of people get mad about it.

A lot of people switch over to different engines or threaten to leave the unity engine, which is a complicated thing, especially if you have a game that's like years in development on Unity at this point. And it's just been one big disaster. And the long and short of it is, this means that Hollow Night Silk Song will once again be delayed another 40 years. Maddie, why don't you kick us up? Did you see this controversy? What was your take on this whole series of events? I find this to be a shocking policy to implement from Unity's perspective. And I completely understand

why game developers would be upset by it. Even though from a financial perspective, I understand the logic, it's the kind of decision that were I, for some reason, put in charge of unity I wouldn't make. Obviously, it's expensive to, from an energy standpoint, to install video games.

Like that is the logic here, the cold calculating logic is, yes, the more people install a video game, the more energy is used in that transaction. And that is how, Unity is thinking of it. But the result is that you're making game developers feel like the more successful their game is, the more they'll be punished for that, which is a pretty dicey proposition for kind of indie devs and also kind of double A developers who are dealing with like

a pretty risky financial situation in terms of how much they can actually put into their game and in continuing to develop it. We've talked about that quite a bit on the show in the past, like how close to the line some of those AA and single A developers are in terms of financing. So I just, like for example, Cult of the Lamb, which is an indie game that we talked about on this show, they did a joke post about how they were going to delete their game. And people immediately believed it because the situation was so fraught, like that reactions were so high that people were like, oh my God, am I not going to be able to play Cult of the Lamb anymore? And they had to like put out like a long TikTok where they were like, we were kidding. We aren't actually deleting the game. That's a good way to juice sales.

I mean, I don't know if that works. That'd be interesting to ask them, but they did have to be like, listen, we wrote a joke post on the internet. We aren't deleting our game. However, like, the unity decision is going to really impact developers like us and developers of our size and also switching to a different engine is extraordinarily expensive. So, yeah, I just, I don't know what's going to happen next. This is like the most I've had to talk about Unity at work in a while, though.

I feel like we don't often think about reporting on game engines, and like a lot of them don't have name recognition in the headline. But Unity sure does now. So there's that, I guess. Yeah, worth learning Unity went public in 2020. And since then has been just stepping on one rake after another under CEO. John Rickatello, who was formerly the CEO of EA, where he oversaw, where he oversaw, company under its whole worst company in America award-winning years and really oversaw the era of like microtransactions and I think he once said in a investor call or something like that some

video has him on tape saying that they should charge players or they could charge players per number of bullet they use in the shooting game another great idea yeah it's all around Kirk you are not as in touch as with the gaming news world as Maddie and I are these days but have you seen the unity controversy? What have you kind of made of it? Yeah, I didn't hear about it when it happened and then

was talking to some friends who mentioned the discourse and I said, oh, what's going on? And it's always a wonderful sort of blessed feeling for me when someone mentions the discourse and I have no idea what they're talking about. Yeah. So then I got the short version of it and was

yeah, a little bit in disbelief. that this was really happening, I think maybe it would be helpful for our listeners for me to ask the two of you for some clarification on how this works. Because I think, like I think I understand it, but also the specifics of it are worth really understanding. So my understanding is that you pay a license, you used to pay for a license to use the Unity Engine to make your game. And then you release the game and you sell it.

Is that correct? Well, okay, so it's a little convoluted because Unity, like everything these days, has different tiers of membership. like personal pro whatever and so it really depends on like what scale of game that you're you're making where and what what sort of category let's say say pro like your cult of the lamb or something how does that work exactly like how do you pay unity or when do you pay unity under the old model so yeah i mean essentially if you are you are making a game under unity you are paying a yearly or a monthly fee to unity. And I believe that Unreal, which is Unity's biggest competitor, is a similar thing,

but Unreal also has a form of revenue share, and this is kind of Unity's way of doing its own form of revenue share, except in a way more convoluted, way more potentially exploitable way. And I think that, like, one of the reasons that the cap on potential money that Unity can take from this thing is going to be the solution that mollifies people or to the best that Unity can, at this point is because it doesn't, in theory, like it makes sense to do some sort of revenue share agreement because that's what the precedent that Unreal has set is. It's just that the way that Unity announced this and rolled it out

was just so ham-fisted. It was just like, like people immediately have the question, what happens if you're part of Xbox GamePass and people download it millions of times? Like you're charged for those downloads. Like the idea of installs, sorry, install it millions of times. The idea of installs, like translating to revenue, doesn't make sense because it doesn't, especially in the free-to-play world, where a lot of people can just download games and install them and never pay a time. So immediately, it just didn't really fit.

And a lot of people were like, why didn't you just announce a revenue share instead of this whole cockamamie scheme? But does that answer your question, Greg? Well, that, yes, more than more even than I needed. Because the second part of the question that I think is just something that people should keep in mind of the important distinction is the one you're talking about, which is per install. So they're changing it to say the number of times the game is installed, you then pay us some amount per install rather than revenue sharing like Unreal does where you just pay us some percentage of your income. And that does strike me as just I don't really understand why they're doing it that way because that would freak me out. I'm thinking like the closest thing I can think of from the world of music where I'm a little more familiar with publishing would be right now you pay a licensing fee to use Pro Tools if you want to record with it. You don't have to pay a licensing fee ongoing if you recorded your album with Pro Tools for it to remain up for sale.

So that's a little different already. But this would be like them saying, okay, now instead of paying, you know, I don't know, some percentage of your revenue for us allowing you to use these tools, you have to pay per play. and if there's just like bots auto playing or something or you get onto some Spotify playlist, you would immediately be scared because you'd be like, oh, God, I'm about to get millions of plays and that means I'm going to be on the hook for a lot more money. Yeah, it's not exactly the comparison because it's not per play of the game. It's like most games, you just install it once. Like that's not a direct.

The bigger issue I think is that there was so many questions, like so many holes in this. Like what happens if I am part of a. Reddit Brigade and I want to like go after you and so I have everybody like install a game and re-install it deliberately to harass you like well and right what I'm getting at is not that the two things are directly comparable but that the approach of saying you're responsible for something other than just a percentage of your revenue which is how basically how revenue sharing has but worked since time immemorial it's very easy because you can just look at the amount of money you made and say okay well we're on the hook for this percentage for licensing this software like that's

really straightforward. The minute it's something that's like plays or installs in the case of these games, it's something that's out of your control in a way that just seems to me as a developer or as a musician or as whatever, as a person creating things, like that is a really scary and really stressful proposition and seems to me to be the fundamental problem of this whole thing. Just from the outside, when I first heard about it, I was like, that seems like the problem. If they want to make more money off of their engine, cool. They can come up with some way to do it that doesn't have this fundamental unknown factor that just seems like it introduces a lot of chaos. Yeah, 100%. No, I think you're spot on.

Again, punishes success. Like, there's even a different way to message it that is fundamentally the same thing that makes it clear to people that when you are making enough money from your game, at that point, we're going to take a bigger cut. And, like, maybe the way that they would calculate that would be functionally very similar. But by describing it in the way that they did, they've made it. seem terrifying for anyone to install your unity game, which is like the opposite of what you want. Right. Well, I mean, installs don't equal revenue. Like they're not the same thing. Yeah, specifically punishing for success in the free to play mobile space, which is where it's going to hit the hardest. I mean, also the lamb, like a game like that, you're not really, maybe

you install it on multiple machines, but that's so rare. Like, realistically, this policy isn't going to hurt them that much. But I think the bigger problem here, and then we'll get on to the news story, but at least in my opinion, and you guys can offer your takes. But the bigger problem is that they've just torched their brand because they essentially said, like, we care about you so little. We're just going to throw this policy out. It's going to be half-ass. It's going to change everything you know.

It's going to affect already existing users that are, like, trusting us to go with the Unity Engine here. And it just, like, immediately they lost all trust with so many people that I'm not sure they can ever get it back. And then, like, in practically, I don't actually think. think that this policy is going to financially hurt that many people if it hurts anybody, really. It's more that they just completely like bungled the rollout and the messaging. And the entire execution of this so badly that it just feels like from now on, unity will just be associated with chaos and John Rickettello like trying to steal people's wallets.

Yeah, I will say that my reaction when I heard this was that is never going to happen. That was the first thing I said. I was like, when are they going to undo this? Well, it is going to happen just with extreme. like caveats and like a cast. The thing people are describing, though, is not going to, just seems very unlikely to me that this like apocalypse is going to happen to every indie game. Or if it did, then every single developer would stop using Unity, which is like pretty much

what the reaction was to the news, which would cause it to cease to exist. Like those are kind of the two outcomes. It's like either Unity goes out of business for making the work decision ever, or they come up with some other more logical way to approach this and implement some changes that actually make sense to people. Which will probably happen. Speaking of big corporations stepping on rakes, let's talk about what happened to Microsoft this week. So early on Tuesday morning, late Monday night, people discovered that Microsoft had accidentally uploaded a treasure trove of documents to the FDC court record website and that they were all public and could be downloaded by anybody. And suddenly on Tuesday, it became Xbox leak day and so many different emails. and PowerPoint presentations and slides and all sorts of delicious corporate shenanigans leaked on the internet. It was fascinating.

I mean, some of the highlights were hardware plans for the next few years, which included an all-digital version of the Xbox series X coming next year and like some next gen console in 2028 that is like hybrid with cloud stuff. And who knows, we're talking years away now. so unlikely that it'll actually be what's on paper right now, but still. Also a more advanced Xbox controller with updated haptics. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Trying to compete with the DILS sense. Well, the haptics are pretty cool.

That's why the dual of the new PSI controller is cool. And I thought the most interesting part, other than some Phil Spencer emails and seeing how he talks to his team in private and exchanges with other executives, I thought that was interesting. But the other interesting part was the Bethesda lineup. like the entire lineup for Xenemex games over the next few years, which was a little out of date. I think this was from like 2020,

and so a lot of the years were totally wrong. I think that Starfield coming out in 2021 or something like that, fiscal year of 2021. But still, it had some gems on there, Dishonored 3, an oblivion remaster, a Fallout 3 remaster.

It's like they listened to our episode from a few weeks ago and we're like, hey, we should remaster those games. I guess they didn't hear the part. where we said oblivion was boring in Murwin. Yeah. No, they were probably, they were probably reading the triple-click Discord in which there are many oblivion likers. Regardless, clearly they're very up to date on triple-click, just everything.

Yeah. We can fairly assume that. And also, it was, they time travel back to 2020 to create this presentation. So split screen, they've been listening to Splitsman. You know Pete Hines is out there listening to Split Screen. He definitely is. And then like a bunch of co-names, some of these, I believe, were canceled games. Some of them are not going to happen.

and some of them are going to happen. Like there's a game in there called Project Kestrel that I believe is the Zenimax online studios, The Makers of Elder Scrolls online. Kestrel is their new game. I believe that it might actually be called Kestrel. I guess we'll see about that, but the code name is definitely Kestrel.

And yeah, a bunch of other stuff. I mean, Project Hebeki is on there. I believe that is Hi-Fi Rush, which already came out. Yeah, so what did you guys make of all these leaks? Did you read through any interesting Phil Spencer emails? Did you see anything that appealed to you guys? Yeah, you wanted to find Nintendo. Wasn't that an old Jason Trier prediction of years gone by that Xbox would

would buy Nintendo or attempt to have Nintendo in its corner? I feel like they're remember. Sounds like one of the when we did the bonus wild predictions. Crazy wild predictions. Yeah, it was. I think it was like you're right. You're super outlandish one. Mm-hmm.

I was interested to see that one. But yeah, mostly I just, I mean, what do you guys think about the all digital Xbox? Like, talk about the Xbox thing that will never die. It really has me going back in time 10 years and thinking about all those arguments that we all got to have about digital only consoles. Like, it's coming, apparently. Every conversation I've had with, like, someone, people who know things at game companies are like, you would not believe how few people are buying physical these days. It's like, like, the industry hasn't already change it.

Yeah, okay, you guys would believe it. But they're like, well. The numbers are like, it's even, it's like the digital transformation has come much quicker than a lot of people anticipated. So it doesn't shock me that they would be going all digital. Like, I think that's, I think maybe it's, it's probably less than 10% or less than 20% of people are buying physical these days. I know. I just also think that that's happening at the same time as everyone realizing that we've all made a horrible mistake because our digital library. are deteriorating and often not as comprehensive as they might have been if we'd been collecting

Blu-ray discs all this time. And I'm really sensing that pain, like seeing games either get delisted or like, I mean, obviously we're not, we're not talking about Netflix here. We don't need to get into that. But goodness knows a lot of things that used to be available to me easily 10 years ago in the golden age of streaming where everything was cheap and easily available. it's not so these days and I just I'm feeling that anxiety already of like if everything goes digital then what's going to happen to video game preservation and the actual ability to play the games that come out in that digital only era but like 20 years after that you know assuming we aren't you know busy with the water wars and everything at that point well we'll need a distraction right

right exactly and if only we had them on disc because at that point all we'll have left is like our deteriorating PS5s. Yeah, well, the internet infrastructure will be totally dismantled. Exactly, right. Exactly what I'm saying. We need the disc for the post-apocalyptic wasteland that we're going to be entering into. I do wonder if,

if video game collection is going to become kind of like vinyl collecting? I think it is. I feel like I can already sense that because a couple days before this leak happened, I guess it's not a couple days. It was only on Monday. This has been such a long week already. On Monday, one of my co-workers was talking about how he doesn't have a Blu-ray player because he had bought the PS5 that doesn't have a disc drive

because he was like, at the time, I just figured, you know, get whatever PS5 you can get. And now he doesn't have a Blu-ray player. And he's like, I don't know how to watch Blu-Rays. And I was thinking of him when I was reading about the digital and the Xbox. And I'm like, well, what about people who want to watch movies and they actually look really good? Or people who want to play games that aren't off of, subscription services and the games actually look as good as they can look. I mean, I'm not even

just thinking of the preservation angle, but also just the fact that sometimes you want something to actually look good. And that's where the vinyl record of it all comes in, Kirk, where I'm like, yeah, I think that collector sensibility does matter when it comes to things actually operating as intended and installing and running off the disc, you know? So my question is, are the future, like the physical game collections of future people like Jason of your kids when they are you know when it's the hip thing to have a physical collection the way that we have vinyl collections now is it going to be the same as vinyl collections these days where everyone has the same like 16 Joni Mitchell records and the same kind of earth one and fire like because everything is

from the 60s and the 70s when records were mass produced so basically everyone will have like the 2008 Prince of Persia for the Xbox 360 on a physical copy but like no one is going to to have, I don't know, Bloodborn or cyberpunk, like there will be no physical copies of cyberpunk. It's interesting. I will say that one thing to Xbox's credit, they put all their games on PC, and if you want to preserve things,

PC is the way to go, because, like, ultimately other than online-only games or games with, like, heavy DRM, you can ultimately play anything forever on PC. Like, you could get emulated ROMs for pretty much anything from 30 years ago. And while I'm not pro-pirating new games, I am very much pro preserving games that can't be bought anywhere else.

And so I think that two Xbox's credit, unlike PlayStation and Nintendo, which release games only on their consoles, I think releasing everything on PC helps in the great preservation wars. But yeah, so when the internet goes offline and we're all lost forever, then that'll change things. We're just carrying hard drives around. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You just got to make it to Chris Grant's bunker where he's got like a huge trove of every copy of PlayStation an all stars.

Right. So after the water wars, it'll be like, just got to make it all the way to the Eastern Seaboard and you'll find the guy who has the hard drives. You can finally play

Battletons again. You can play ration and play. I have a couple other thoughts on this Xbox League. One is just that I'm excited that Disanor 3 is going to happen. I hope that Arcane is allowed to get back to making those kinds of games

because that's what they're really good at. And I'll play the hell out of that when it comes out. Yeah, I wonder if that is, I wonder how real that is. I guess we'll see, but I wonder. Yeah, it was just exciting to hear the one's Desonner 3.

I know. So I do know Oblivion remaster is definitely is 100% real. That's a little sooner than later. Just on her three. I don't know that. You guys heard it here. Jason Trier says it's 100% real. That's a really high-stakes sentence, Jason.

Are you sure you want to say I'm fine? Well, that 100% real doesn't mean like it won't be canceled. It just means it's really happened. All right. Last thing is just there have been some headlines about internal descriptions of Baldersgate 3 by. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think that this was something, this was like an interesting news story that I've been a little bit aware of over the last couple of weeks is just these small indicators that Microsoft misunderstood how big Baldur's Gate 3 was going to be. So there's this second story that's unrelated to this leak, but that's that Baldersgate 3 did not come out on Xbox when it came out on PlayStation, not for any exclusivity deal, but because Larian could not get the split screen working on the. Xbox Series S, which is the less powerful Xbox. And as a result, because Microsoft has a requirement that there would be parity between the series S and the series X, Larian wasn't going to be able to release the game because the series S is less powerful. It couldn't do split-screen co-ops. So what are you going to do?

So the game came out on PS5, this massive game, one of the best games of the year, when the greatest RPGs I've ever played, just finished it last night, by the way. Amazing ending. Really great game. And it's not on Xbox. and that really is it went up being almost compounded by the fact that Starfield is an Xbox exclusive and also Starfield got let's say much more mixed reviews than Baldur's Gate 3 and so it's turned into a weird proxy like not a proxy console war but like a false console war

where like people because so many times like critics who just played Baldur's Gate 3 will say something about Starfield oh man the writing and this is nowhere near as good and then people get mad who are feeling that kind of console loyalty about a game that's not on their console even though the reason it's not on their console is because Microsoft was being inflexible and then Microsoft changed their policy for Larian to allow the game to come to Xbox so they can get this massive hit out

anyways, all of that is to say there is some language in here that could be interpreted as Microsoft basically predicting that Baldersgate 3 is some niche bullshit that no one cares about. So specifically so the context here is that there is a chart essentially that is

like how much Microsoft it would expect to pay a publisher, how much a publisher would be expected to ask for for game pass day and date. And it's like Star Wars Jedi Survivor, $300 million, something crazy like that. Assassin's Creed Mirage, $100 million. Ballard's Gate 3, $5 million. $5. And then the description of it is like second run, stadia PC game.

Yeah, I can't. Second run, Stadia, PC, RPC. I read that and there were not on a fire emojis to add to it, truly. I can't believe. I mean, poor went out for the stadium employees who had to read that news today. Like,

they're out there being like, you know what? Well, what's funny is that, so when we were at Kataku, things have changed, but when we were at Kataku, back when traffic stats were public, you could really,

you could get a lot of info out of like how many people were looking at articles about specific games. You could get an indication of how well those games would do. And I remember lots of Balders Gave Three stuff doing extraordinarily well.

That was the closest thing we had to Nielsen ratings was the big board. Yeah. Yeah. It really was. It helped. Oh, this game's got heat.

People care about this game. It was a good way of knowing. Yeah, I mean, it's not public, but even at Polygon internally, we knew. We planned for that, and we were like, oh, Ballard's Gate 3. We're going to have to gird our loins. Yeah, Zelda came out this year, but whatever. Rest up, kiddos. We all got to get in on Baldish Gate.

So, like, I don't know what Phil. I don't know what he was doing. You also have to gird your loins because it's a really horny game. I know. And you've got to decide what you're going to gird your loins with. Especially pre-patch. You heard. they patched the horniness out, right?

They dehornified all of your party members. One more quick thing. One more quick thing before you move on. Phil Spencer put out a statement on Twitter. Sorry, on X, the website formerly on Twitter. Yeah, what are you saying? On what? That's for you, Kirk.

We've seen the conversation around old emails and documents. It is hard to see our team's work shared in this way because so much has changed and there's so much to be excited right now and in the future. We will share the real plans when we are ready. The real plans. We've seen the conversation around old emails and documents. What a sentence. Anyway, let's keep moving on.

There's some other headlines to get to. First, real quick, Final Fantasy 7, Rebirth gets a trailer. Man, that looks so sick. Oh, it's such a good trailer. Remember when Vincent was there? That was cool. An official trailer for fan service. There were like nine fan service moments in that trailer that made me yell.

Well, there were so many snapshots. Remember when Tifa and ERIS and Ufi were on the train together, That was great. And then Cloud was on a segue. Well, there were so many little shots that are like, oh, my God, that's Cosmo Canyon. Oh, that's Costa del Sol, like just little moments. Oh, there's Jocobo racing. Oh, my God, the boxing mini game.

Vincent Valentine in his crypt was the moment for me where I was like, wow, this is just going to have it all. Just phenomenal stuff. One quick note, the developers say that the game will end at the forgotten city, which is, I believe, the end of disc one in the original PlayStation release. and so it remains to be seen how they handle the finale, but I'm very excited to see what they do. It's so funny, like, after playing remake and the twist ending of that game and the revelations of that game, this really feel like I'm so excited for this.

Me too. More than I ever thought I would be. I'm even more amazed by the people who have only played remake and don't know the plot of the original game. And to each and every one of those people, I just have to hold both their hands in mind and be like, at least look it up because you're just going to get more in what confused. I think you honestly should.

No, I think you should because this is essentially a sequel to Final Fantasy 7. Yeah, exactly. Like, it's not, despite the name, quite a remake. That's why it's called, it's rebirth. That's right. It's not even called remake. So you got to know the original story and whatever happens.

I may have immediately, I may or not have immediately downloaded Final Fantasy 7 remake on my PC to replay it in preparation for re-bursed. Understandable. It was a cool trailer. There was also Nintendo direct. Some cool stuff got announced. Princess Peach Showtime. It looks great.

I just watched the trailer for that. I missed the direct. It looks so fun. Yeah, this is a game. So this is a game for anyone who didn't see it, starring Princess Peach. Yes. Where Princess Peach is putting on a show at a theater. The whole thing that takes place on stage.

That's right. In classic Mario format, it's on stage. Yes, yes. Like Mario 3. Yep. And, and a bad-y show. shows up and takes over and she has to save the show. So the whole thing is like costume changes for new abilities. And it's all staged with like set design and lighting and props and everything

is moving around and shifting. So it's got this kind of really incredibly cool look. I was amazed by that trailer. That game looks really, really fun. Super cool. I'm really excited to play it. Paper Mario 1000 Year Door is getting a remake. That is pretty cool. That's a great game that I think you guys will enjoy when the movie comes up. Yeah, that just topped some poll I saw online of the best Mario's story by a mile, like some reader poll, and that made me excited because I've definitely never played it. I would love to. There's some good stuff in there.

A lot of cool side characters. There's this hilarious kind of like series of, I don't know if they're like, they're like intermissions with where you control Bowser or you control Peach. No, Bowser. You control Bowser trying to go after Peach. And then the funniest thing is that you run into Luigi at every city, and he just talks about his adventures, and they're just like increasingly like wild and more far as much. You never see anything. Yeah.

It's all off screen. It's fantastic. I love that. And then there was a video game called Unicorn Overlord. I watched the trailer from that. So this is from Vanillaware, and it's another sort of classic, classic RPG. It's a strategy game. Yeah.

Well, it's a strategy. It is funny that it's called Unicorn Overlord. Yeah. What a name. I would have thought that'd be like a devolver, like a semi-ironic. Yeah, doesn't it sound like that? Indy game where you have an unicorn army that you have like a farm and you're breeding them for combat and the unicorn overlord. This is 100% serious.

Like robot unicorn attack, I suppose. Unicorns are a kind of ironic instrument in that like Loll-Cats sort of 2008 era way. So watching it live, they didn't see the title until the end. So the entire trailer is like two minutes of them talking about this like high fantasy. stuff dead serious dead ban and then at the end unicorn overlord and i just cracked up when i heard that it was ridiculous you expected to be called like fields of the magisterium or something yeah something like yeah but like magisterium is in all caps and then there's a colon and it's like remember the titan beginning and then there's like another colon and then it's like prologue mattie you know your jrpg yeah prolog

prologue 5.6 prolet reasons one thing i'll say is that like uh vanilla wears last game third Sentinels. I wasn't super hot on that game, but there were some good parts. The one part that wasn't good was the strategy, like, game play. I had the same thought. Yeah. Yeah. I was like, I was into the story, but not into the game part. That was the worst part of it. And so for them to make a strategy game, but who knows? I mean, it looked cool. It looked gorgeous. And it could be totally, like, different people designing it. But what about the title 13 Sentinels? That's what I thought you were going to say, wasn't good, because the full title is also really weird. Agis Rim, is that right? H's rim.

Anyway, it's fine. I don't know. Unicorn Overn. 13 Seninels on its own is a fine name. Unicorn Overnor is not. I mean, there's so many things wrong with it. First of all, it's hard to say. It's like so many, a name shouldn't have so many syllables.

Unicorn Overlord. I think that it's memorable, though. I'm going to say that it is a memorable name. Unicorn Overlord, I'll remember that. It's fair. It's got that going for it. Some games are just not memorable. That's their problem.

I think it's fun to say. unicorn overlord. There's something about like the O at the end of unicorn going leading into the O and overlord. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, the rural juror. Nice. Couple more headlines. These two are kind of connected. Layoffs everywhere, despite this being

such a humongous year for games and game sales. And Embracer falling apart just a couple of years after it bought up the entire AA games industry. It is laying people off, shutting down studio, shut down Volition, the makers of Saints Row. It's trying to sell or spin off gearbox, the makers of borderlands, just a disaster, like trash fire of a company. And layoffs, I mean, Immortals of Avium, that game, speaking of titles, that game came out, like, three weeks ago under EA.

And I guess it sold so poorly, they laid off half the studio, like, within less than a month later, which is just pathetic. Imagine, like, working your ass off to ship this game, and then you get laid off before you can even, like, see how it does in the long term. Or have a chance to potentially updated or like make any change to it in response to what happened or anything. Yeah. God, what a disaster. But yeah, it's just a lot of bad industry news alongside all the exciting stuff. Unfortunately, it's just one of those years. And I know this is kind of a worldwide problem or at least countrywide problem with the economic, I don't know. Is it a downturn? Who knows these days? But a lot of problems, a lot of turbulence. And games industry has no. No exception. It's a bummer. What have you guys been making of all this? Yeah. I mean, it is confusing in light of just how many incredible video games have been coming out this year. Like, just from the coverage side, I feel like it's been hard for us to keep up in a good way.

Like, it's a nice when there's a ton of really great stuff to cover. And that's always exciting at work. And then to have that be also juxtaposed with like, oh, there's an economic downturn. supposedly and then also to see all these layoffs, it's confusing. Because I'm like, really? Because I feel like everyone I know is buying video games and playing video games and talking about how great they are. So I don't understand. It always just feels like a mismatch to me.

But I'm not an economist and I don't know what money even is. So that might be part of it. What is economy? Yeah, I don't know what I mean. Well, and I get that feeling too, that feeling that there's a disconnect between the reality on the ground. Yeah. And it's just, it's that disconnect between the logic of the real world and even the logic

of the market that we engage with as consumers, where it's like, you want to buy good things and you buy them, and the market of investment and Wall Street in the stock market, which is just a totally different logic that works on a different, just a whole, it's this weird alien thing

that just doesn't really make sense. So then you see stuff that doesn't feel like it should be happening. And we're seeing more and more and more of it because, you know, the acquisitions are getting bigger and bigger. The people holding, you know, people buying companies are motivated by increasingly abstract. It's perplexing to me as a civilian. Yeah, motivated by watching the line on the graph go up into the right,

just the eternal chase for growth. Right, and just the things that require that to happen are increasingly arcane. It seems to me. It's not as simple anymore as just, I don't know, make a cool thing and like sell it to people. It's like so far beyond that that it can be really hard to get your head around. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's nutty. And like even the companies that seem to be fine are like laying people off.

I heard last week that, you know, you guys know the company probably monsters. They have a lot of big investments. They're like a game company. They were started by Harold Ryan, who was the CEO of Bungy for a while. Oh, okay. They're kind of, they're like a semi-publisher. They operate a few different game studios. They led off a ton of people a few days ago.

All the big publishers, 2K, EA, EA laid off a bunch of people at Biore a few weeks ago, I mean, Biware, like, one of the most recognizable studios. And especially, like, that was especially tragic because BioWare, of course, made Baldersgate 1 and 2. And here's Balders Gate 3, the smash success. And, like, the company also known for making great RPGs, lost 50 people, including some of the people,

some people who have been there for two decades. Like, it's just, it's really, it's really just. I saw some of those notes from the narrative folks at Biwere who got let go, and that sucks. Like, that just seems like a terrible people. to lose at a game studio that's known for these great stories. And that has been sort of suffering in the story department lately. Who knows why they did that?

Yeah. Ridiculous. And you know what happens when you like the layoffs, not only do you lose people, the people who are remaining have survivors' guilt. They're not going to work as hard. They're not going to be able to function at full capacity. And they're expected to do the jobs of the people who got laid off in addition to their own jobs. It's just like, it's so

short-sighted and I mean, anytime a big company that can afford to not do layoffs, does layoffs is almost, it's like always just shooting themselves in the foot and like hurting their reputation, hurting morale, hurting people, it's just, it never makes

sense. Like layoffs in general just don't make sense unless you're really like an independent studio that is funded by like your owner's pockets and you literally cannot afford to keep paying salaries, but still it's Or to introduce that twisted Wall Street logic. It makes sense in a way if you can demonstrate that by cutting that cost,

you're going to increase your projected revenue, and then that allows you to get to some kind of goal that you're trying to reach. In that investor logic, the sort of thing, those considerations, those longer-term considerations don't always apply. And that's kind of how we wind up watching these things where we're like smacking our foreheads and being like, I don't get why you would ever do this. Yeah, it makes sense in a world where all that matters is the next fiscal year instead of the next five fiscal years.

That's the fundamental, like, long and short of this. It's just, like, the most short-sighted. Because executives are incentivized to only think about the short term. Like, you can't. It's like being a GM of a sports team or something like that. Like, you're on the hot seat if you can't make winning moves in the next two years. So why would you think about five or ten years from now? It's all just like this perverse system that we all got to live in, I suppose.

that's late-stage capitalism. I don't know. I mean, we kind of talked about this with Tears of the Kingdom a few times where like having a game where a lot of people who worked on it have been there for a while can actually still be pretty financially successful.

So like it would just be nice if like maybe a couple of these executives would just give that a little ponder at night. Think about it. Yeah, just think about it. Just think about it. All of you out there listening. Give it a thought.

Well, we know these executives are listening. They're all listening. They're all big triple-quick listening. I do assume, yeah, I'm guessing that at least one C-suite executive at a major gaming company is secretly listening to triple-click. Right in, triple-clay. The one who plays games, like the one C-suite executive who actually plays video games, listen to Starz show. Bobby Todic, really? Okay.

Yeah, Bobby, good old Bobby. Why don't we take a break and then we'll come back for one more thing. If you need a laugh and you're on the go, try STO-P-P-O-D. D-C-A-S-T-I. Hmm. Are you trying to put the name of the podcast there? Yeah, I'm trying to spell it, but it's tricky. Let me give it a try.

Okay. If you need a laugh and you're on the go, call S-O-P-P-B-A-D-I, it will never fit. No, it will. Let me try. If you need a laugh and you're on the go, try S-T-O-P-P-P-D-C-O-O. Oh, we are so close. Stop podcasting yourself. A podcast from Maximum Fun.

If you need a laugh, and you're on the go. I'm Miffie Wadiway, the host of Maximum Film. I'm Alonzo Duraldi, also the host of Maximum Film. And I'm Drea Clark, yet another host of Maximum Film. Every week, we host, Huddled Up. Usually with an illustrious guest, and we talk about films. We have film news. We have film quizzes.

We answer your film questions. It's like the maximum amount of film talk. That's why we call it maximum film. Boom. Maximum Film, the movie podcast that's not just a bunch of straight white guys. New episodes weekly on Maximumfund.org. And we are back. Kirk, Maddie, it's time for one more thing.

Kirk, Kirk, why don't, I won't mention mine. Kirk, you can go first. Okay, I'll go first with a book that I am reaching the very end of that is a fantastic book that a lot of people probably know by an author who will never be mentioned again on this podcast. No. No, just kidding. Maybe he will be. This is Killers of the Flower Moon by David Gran, also known as the author of The Lost City of Z,

a previous one more thing from Jason Schreier. And I had heard of Grant. I haven't read Lost City of Z, but I knew this was a good book. My sister actually just gave me her copy and was like, dude, you have to read this book. It's incredible. And also, as it happens,

Martin Scorsese is adapting it into a film that's coming out next month. Yeah, as it happens. With Leo DiCaprio. Yeah, oh yeah, a stacked cast in that. Of course, because this is a great book that I'm sure a lot of listeners are familiar with. It came out in 2017 was a real sensation. And yet I had not read it.

And I would imagine I'm also not alone in that. I didn't start reading it because the movie is coming out. But I would guess there's a lot of people reading it for that reason too. So I really do wholeheartedly recommend this book. And it would probably be a good one to read before seeing the movie, because I'm definitely going to watch the movie. Because I think it'll probably be really good. So this is the story. The full title is, oh, now I'm forgetting the full title, but it's basically Killers of the Flower Moon, the Osage murders, and the founding of the FBI, something like that. And it's the story of the Osage people, a Native American tribe in Oklahoma, who were forcibly relocated, just like so many tribes over the course of the 19th century, and had their land kind of whittled away and taken away, but who managed to advocate for themselves in this one very specific way, where they,

They established that their reservation, the land couldn't be divided up into parcels the way that a lot of other reservations were. So they owned the land and, crucially, they owned the mineral rights and basically everything under the land. The government didn't really care at the time. They were like, whatever, fine. Like, they basically had moved, of course, moved them onto like the rockiest, crappiest land in Oklahoma.

And we're like, all right, whatever, fine. So then, of course, they strike oil. And it turns out to be the richest land in the whole country. and for a period of time, the Osage people are the richest people per capita in the world, I think. I think that's the statistic. Then, of course, the story from there is this story of just injustice after injustice after injustice. It's just infuriating story of the government finding all of these ways to come between people and money that was legally theirs, according to an agreement that the government entered with them, the United States government.

But of course, when lawyers start getting involved and you start finding ways to trick people, you can kind of start just, you know, essentially imposing your will just like people did taking their land from them by force. It was the same kind of thing. That is the backdrop for this story. But we get to the 1920s and that's kind of where this story starts with a rash of murders that becomes a kind of a true crime mystery story. And that's the hook of this story is you're watching as people are being murdered, Osage tribe members who have had what are called head rights, which means they, because they were born into the tribe, they like own a certain percentage of the money, of the oil money coming in every year, which is a lot of money. So they're

like very, very wealthy people, and they're being killed or they're dying under mysterious circumstances. And it starts to appear to be some sort of a vast conspiracy. So as a result, the Bureau of Investigation, before they were the FBI, this is under Jay Edgar Hoover in the early 1920s, they send in an investigator because they have jurisdiction over Native American land. They don't have jurisdiction over very much because there's no like federal, like the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the way that you can be charged with a federal crime that kind of didn't work that way. But this is kind of the beginning of that and it's Hoover sort of organizing the FBI into this new law enforcement apparatus. He sends this guy

named White, I forget his first name, but who's basically this old cowboy who's become an FBI out to run an investigation. So the middle part of the book is just the story of this investigation. And It's a real page turner. Like, it's a really interesting mystery. But it never loses that edge, just the edge of the sort of horrible injustice that this whole thing is built on. Of course, that our whole country is built on. And then it winds up really taking some surprising turns toward the end as Grant himself goes and researches the full scope of what was happening. And the kind of, like, it really winds up just indicting all of America, like in this thing that, of course, America should be indicted for.

like this original sin or one of the original sins of America's founding. So it's a great book. It's like, it's a book that I think all high school students should read. This is the kind of thing that I just wish I'd known about when I was in high school and was learning American history. It's similar to the Tulsa Race Massacre that we've talked about at least, you know, talking about Watchmen or, you know, its depiction on TV shows. When Watchmen showed that, it was a similar thing where a lot of people didn't know that this had happened. And it's kind of a similar story where a minority group accumulates a lot of money and then just a bunch of white people basically decide that's not okay and just start killing folks and like that's what happened here too

Oklahoma man got some got some history yeah but I mean and it's Oklahoma but of course it's it is America but yeah a lot of bad stuff happened in Oklahoma and so it is a great book really just like an essential historical read and a really just well put together well written well-researched, just an absorbing historical tale. So I really recommend it, and I'm looking forward to the movie. So that's Killers of the Flower and Moon by David Grant. Very easy book to find, and a worthy one to read. Well, as it turns out, David Gran.

He's got some chops because my warmer thing is The Wager by David Gran, which I finished a couple weeks ago. Welcome to the Grandcast, folks. Welcome back to the Grandcast. Yeah, David Gran, he's quite a writer. So this book, this is his latest book. It actually came out earlier this year. And it is another just riveting nonfiction story that has written like a novel because he just so heavily researched it and kind of pinpointed and recreated scenes from history in a really astonishingly interesting way. He's amazing at that. It's really incredible. Yeah. And something he does, which I really appreciate. A lot of nonfiction writers will recreate scenes with like fake dialogue and like put thoughts. in their character's heads.

And I hate that. It's like, none of that happened. People did not say it this way. This is not what happened. And the way David Grant does it is not like that. Like his quotes, when he quotes things, they are from primary sources, documents, and logbooks and whatever. And they are things that are actually,

that actually should be quoted, like people's thoughts that they wrote down. And he's very artful. Like, he's very artful in the way that he evokes a scene or describes someone like returning home and driving across the land and the sun. is setting a certain way where he's not saying what happened, but he's kind of saying this is what it was what it was like there. And so he isn't going so far as to paint a, you know, actually narrativeize in a way that doesn't add up. It's really clever. He's a very, very thoughtful writer. Yes. And that's agree. I thought about that a lot because I know that was a thing

that bugs you. And now when I read nonfiction, I pay attention for it. Yeah, it's something to pay attention to you. There's some books, I won't name names, there's some books that are just egregious about like totally, like, they shouldn't even. be allowed to call nonfiction. I mean, like, I guess I will name names. There's like Ben Mesricks, right, like, book. Like, I only think of this because that movie, dumb money just came out based on the Wall Street story and Ben Mesrick. It's based on a Ben Mezric book that was totally fictionalized. Anyway, the wager. So the wager is the story. The wager. The wager opens up with setting the scene by saying that like this little town in Chile, these people,

they see this like little like flotsam like come by. And a bunch of people come off it and they save their survivors of a shipwreck that landed like miles and miles away. And they all are returned to their home in Britain and kind of are return to their families. And then six months later, another piece of wreckage comes by. And so more people get off and they're like, hey, those guys who came six months ago were mutineers. And they rebelled against their captain. And that's setting the scene for this book. And so the book is about a ship called The Wager that is part of this.

questionable name for a ship, I got to say. It is. It's called part of this fleet of ships that is a British expedition. British is fighting this war against Spain in the 1700s. I believe it's 1730s or something like that. And they send this ship to go and steal treasure from a Spanish

galleon in a mission of like stealth and subterfuge. They want it to be totally they want Spain to be caught unawares. And along the way, they run into all sorts of problems, catastrophe, and the wager, the ship, winds up shipwrecked on an island where they have to spend months like in true hell, like this island that has no food and total awful weather conditions, and they like have to build a life out of it. And so the book is kind of set in these scenes of like, first you see the ship and you learn about ships and then you learn about the voyage they took and

then you learn about what happens on the island and all the drama that goes in there. And then the third part of the book is what happens when they return and the kind of the court hearings they had to face as a result of their actions. They had to deal with the consequences of their actions on the island and on the ship. And the reason it's so riveting is because David Grant found these log books from a handful of characters, three main ones, including this one guy, John Byron, who would be the grandfather, a great-grandfather of the poet of the name Byron, Lord Byron. Wow. And so these log books managed to tell each cast each of these crew members' version of the story and also create them as characters. Because by reading these log books, David Grant could figure out what they were thinking and what made them tick. This is some real over-a-din shit.

It's very over-d-d-in. Do you think that David Grant has played Return of the Over-O-O-Rat-D? I don't know. It's a great question. But yeah, it's fascinating. It is a fantastic, fantastic book. And it's nice and short. It doesn't overstay its welcome.

It just zips through stuff. really, really interesting book. And to your point, Kirk, and kind of similarly to Killers of the Flower Moon, it does what the best nonfiction stories do, which is it tells a story that's about, that's greater than the events that just happen here. And there are some themes, not heavy-handed, but he does talk about this a couple of times about the colonialism of the English and the problems that that caused and the reasons that they, like how this all played into that and the imperialism and this belief that all of the sailors had that they were like on this crusade

and this grand mission that was greater than them and even on the island they like ran into some natives from nearby who like knew how to survive the harshness of that land and could have potentially helped them but I won't spoil exactly what happens

but yeah I mean British colonialism no good but this story extremely good the wager David Gran I recommend both books I have also read Killers of the Flower when both books are fantastic, so go read them both. Maddie, what's your one more thing? What's your one more grand?

So, Lost City of Z, Maddie of Gras. It's not Lost City of Z. Imagine if it happened, that would have been great. I didn't know we were doing this. It could have happened, honestly. I wouldn't put it past us to accidentally all pick books by the same guy. Sadly, no. Sadly, I read a book by Zika Delisela Harris, which is called The Other Black Girl.

The reason I read this, similar to you, Kirk, in that there's a movie coming out about the book you read. I don't know if that was part of what motivated you. No, I didn't even know. A Hulu show that is already completed because I think they just put up all the episodes in one go called The Other Black Girl. And I saw the trailer for it. Great trailer. Haven't watched the show. I just watched the trailer and saw that it was based on a book.

And I was like, I think I'd really like this book, actually. So I'm going to go ahead and get this book and see if I like that before I watched this show. And I devoured the book in like two days because it's a thriller. It's a good sign. And so I don't. I don't want to spoil the book, but it's pretty simple in that it's kind of similar to the Stepford Wives, and that it's like a science fiction premise where you like kind of have these marginalized, this marginalized class of people. In this case, it's specifically black women

who are working in a white dominated publishing house in New York City. This is a very New York City kind of a book. And much like the Stepford Wives, one of them becomes very suspicious of the other one and like a science fiction type of a way and is like, what is really? going on with this person. And the book is like, so it just sort of unfolds from there. And that's the kind of sci-fi premise that I really love. I talked about they clone Tyrone on this show and how much I enjoyed that movie. And I think the step for wives, like the original stories is wonderful. Any kind of science fiction where there's clones or people are getting replaced or like brainwash or something I'm always fascinated by. Because it's always sort of evocative of like real life social parallels and like

why we do and don't trust other people. And so this book's very fun in that regard. I will say probably it's only flaw that I would say is still something that makes it extremely fun to read is just that it's very focused on New York media personalities, be they bloggers, writers, publishing house workers, that whole world. So the most interesting people. Yeah, the people that everybody thinks are so interesting. The people who maybe you might create a sci-fi conspiracy about in order to rule the world, for example, like there is a piece of where I'm like, would, would anyone actually care to do that? I'm not sure. Would they maybe instead do something like this in Washington, D.C.? I don't know. The book doesn't quite get into that

territory because it's like a little too lighthearted for that. I think to its benefit, because it's just kind of like, look, it sucks to work in these kinds of knowledge jobs that are like really high stress, tons and tons of hours, super hypercompetitive, especially the few marginalized people who get these roles end up being intercompetitive in ways that are really toxic. and that's very much what the book is about. That's the title, right? Of course. Yeah, exactly.

It's like, oh, this is the one other person at the job who everyone's going to mix me up with, et cetera. And that's like really what the point of the book is. But yeah, I think maybe you enjoy it a little more if you're a writer who lives in a major city in the United States. But maybe you enjoy it if you're not one of those people. But yeah, it went down really easy. And I thought the ending was really fascinating. And I'd like more people to read it so I could talk to them about it, especially since I've already read, because I'm the kind of person who does this, the Hulu show changes the ending.

So I'm like, great. Everyone needs to read the book and then watch the show, and then we can all discuss it. My wife love the book. You can text her. Yeah. Okay, great. I'll contact her. No surprise.

I feel like in her case, she'd be like, well, why wasn't this book written about competitive law firms? Which was the thought I also had reading it. I was like, surely. Similar. Yeah, very, very similar. But yeah, the other black girl, really cool book. Except for the pay.

I know. In every way, except the one that matters. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I guess. But yeah, that's my one more thing. Cool, awesome. Well, that is it for this week's episode. Thank you all for listening.

Kirk, Mani. I will see you both next week. Yeah, see you both next week. Bye. Triple Click is produced by Jason Schreier, Maddie Myers, and me, Kirk Hamilton. I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music. Our show art is by Tom DJ.

Some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration. You can find a link to our ethics policy in the show notes. Triple Click is a proud member of the Maximum Fun Podcast Network, and if you like our show, we hope you'll consider supporting us by becoming a member at Maximumfund.org slash join. Find us on Twitter at triple clickpods. Send email the triple click at Maximumfund.org

and find a link to our Discord in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network of artists-owned shows. Supported directly by you.