Video Gamers Podcast - CallisNO Protocol, Starship Troopers and Free Steam Decks - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: December 8, 2022

Gaming hosts Josh, Paul and Michael are back with This Week in Gaming. All the gaming news you need to know, delivered straight to your ears every week. Callisto Protocol launches to disaster for PC players and Josh loses it. Starship Troopers 12 person co-op looks great and Steam is giving away a LOT of Steam Decks. Gaming news has never been this entertaining! Thanks to our LEGENDARY supporters: Dave G, Remi, MarbleMadness, Dr. Catatonic, Blackstar (DQ), Glapsuidir, Phelps, Michele B, Redletter, Nevo, Waynerman, TFolls, AceofShame, Jake, RangerMiller, and Ad Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/multiplayerpodcast Join our Gaming Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: instagram.com/multiplayerpod/ Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/MultiplayerPod Subscribe to us on YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q Visit us on the web: multiplayerpodcast.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. Hello, fellow gamers, and welcome to the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast. We are so excited to have you here with us today. We are a group of three dads who are lifelong gamers, and on Thursdays like today, we break down the recent gaming news that we found most interesting. If you have not already done so, please take a second to rate our show five stars, leave a written review, follow us on socials everywhere at MultiplayerPod, and come check out some ways that you can support our show on Patreon. Support starts at five bucks a month,

and you'll get some amazing perks like two bonus episodes every month and a shout out on the show. You can sign up at MultiplayerSquad.com. All right. I am your host, Paul. And joining me, he's just joined the United Citizen Federation, and he's doing his part by taking on the arachnids head on to help protect humanity it's michael the only good bug is a dead bug there we go yeah we got some starship troopers talk i did not see this on the radar it's gonna be

fun and then joining me and michael he's just crashed his ship on a moon of jupiter called callisto he's been thrown in a jail and he's fighting against prisoners infected with an unknown disease it's josh hey i'm really glad to be on the show oh dear i see the stuttering has spread from calisto to uh to our podcast recording oh my goodness guys what a what a week for news how dare you also paul how dare you introduce me using any kind of calisto protocol reference he's got calisto madness all right so anyone out there who's not aware, the Callisto Protocol, which was one of our most anticipated games of the entire year. We've been talking about it these last few months. Josh and I absolutely loved Dead Space.

We could not wait for this release. It came out on December 2nd. And guys, this is like probably the worst PC port of like a AAA title in a very long time. Maybe ever. Like, where do we even start with this? I mean, supposedly the game runs completely fine on PS5. It does not run great on Xbox. But we're PC gamers.

And this game was basically unplayable from second one. Yeah. It's like Gotham Knights did it right. Oh, man. Ouch. Ouch. So let me just tell you guys a little story. Let's set the stage for people a little bit here. So we're all super hyped for Callisto Protocol. I had told my wife, my family, I was like, oh, man, this new game that we're super excited about for Callisto Protocol. I had told my wife, my family, I was like, Oh man,

this new game that we're super excited about comes out on Friday. I can't wait to play it. My kid was having a sleepover with one of her friends. So I was like, okay, well, you know, they're going to be busy. Like I'm not going to need to be dad,

you know, for most of the night, stuff like that. So I was super excited, man, get home. I preloaded Callisto Protocol. I get home,

I'm pulling it up. The, the joy is just welling upisto Protocol. I get home, I'm pulling it up. The joy is just welling up within me. I'm like, yes, it's Callisto Protocol, man, yeah. And I'm like, oh, look, they've got a benchmark. Like, that's cool. Let me see how my system runs. I run the benchmark. And anytime the camera starts to pan on the benchmark,

it stutters and drops frames like you could not imagine. And then I went, it's just a benchmark tool. Maybe it's not really optimized, whatever. I get into the game, I start loading the game, and it is absolute garbage, man. I mean, garbage. Dude, the cut scene was stuttering i finally got to control my character if i pan the camera at all it would chop chop chop chop stutter stutter stutter and then whip around and it's like all of a sudden i'm facing another direction and i just went like what the heck is this so i start looking i'm like is something running in the background is something updating like what's happening and then it just kept going and it kept going.

And slowly inside of me, this like rage meter was slowly filling up and slowly filling up. And so I went, something has to be wrong. So I go to, I do what any reasonable person would do. I go to the internet and I google like callisto protocol stuttering and what do i see is just thousands upon thousands of pc gamers saying this game is unplayable in its current form and i went no this can't be this this can't be man it can't be this bad like i have had i we've all seen the game reviews we've all seen the people that are like oh i'm trashing this game because it runs like poo on my my computer from 2001 right yeah and i'm like dude that's your computer from 2001 that's your problem

right you know what i mean like you can't fault the game because you're playing it on a potato at that point but like we have beefy pcs man i mean my computer is not absolute top of line but it's it's in the upper like 80 there is absolutely no reason for this so then i'm just i'm peeved man because this is such a widespread thing and it's like people are going this isn't like where you just edit your ini file or you fix it it's an easy fix oh just turn off windows defender and it'll all be better kind of thing this is like this is an obvious known issue people gamers are smart man they figured out this is because it's

running on unreal engine 4 they do not compile shaders uh you know when you launch the game or any of that stuff so basically what happened is we come to find out that the developers of calisto protocol craft crofton crofton studios crafton studios something like that whatever whoever is the publisher yeah they basically just went forget you guys we're gonna release this game and we'll let you deal with the issues on this game and i lost it man right i went i i was so mad at that point that i was legitimately going off we have a we have a friends group discord and i i mean i was i was so livid at the fact that they would release this game in this state, knowing the fact that they knew that this would be an issue and did nothing about it. Absolutely sent me over the edge. Paul,

I'm pretty sure that at one point you actually put, this is the most mad I think I've ever seen Josh. I did. I posted that. I said, Josh has never been this mad as long as I've known him. Dude, all caps. Well, Josh is tweeting at Striking Distance Studios. Josh left a Steam review, which I've never seen. I've left like three Steam reviews in my 40 years of life, man. I just don't do this stuff. But the review bomb was justified. I was, dude, I was so mad.

And here is why, right? I get that games are difficult pieces of technology. I understand that. We've all been gamers for a long time. I am willing to overlook a lot of garbage in a game. Cyberpunk burned me once, Callisto Protocol burned me twice, and I am at the point now where i will never forgive you right well and it's i'm just done it's interesting too when you look at like back uh you know that so-and-so's computer from 2001 so the system requirements for this game i'll read them off real fast yeah core i uh intel core i5 8400 oryzen 5 2600 a geforce gtx 1060 or an amd radion 580 to run this game that's the minimum people requirements that's not the recommended right

but we're seeing for which are those aren't those aren't big requirements those are 1060 is an old card and it's a base model there wasn't even a 1050 they didn't have the 50 series until i threw the 22 000 series right but people are running this game on 40 plus like the four the four the 4000 series and it's unplayable like completely like completely trash which is funny because like i was like okay no problem they'll put out a patch or something like that josh tomorrow you'll be able to play i was getting ready to pull the trigger on my playstation 5 because i'm like okay if i can't play it on the pc i have a ps5 i'm gonna buy it on that looks like it's good to go and then it's so bad that the three of us here are like we probably can't deep dive this game right now because it's unplayable like literally unplayable if you

try to play it it's not just annoying josh was talking about the camera swinging all the way around you can't face and your objective or do what you're trying to do if you literally cannot control your character because it's so bad. What a disappointment. What a bunch of trash. And of course, they've already put out a patch yesterday, right? They're putting out a patch today. But even most articles... I read something even from Forbes, a business magazine, who's like, oh, this and that, not looking good, blah, blah. But everybody's

saying like, oh, this looks like it's going to be like, yeah, the patch yesterday helped a little bit, but it's going to be multiple patches they're going to have to do to get this game even to run. It's sickening. Sickening. There's a few things here that just don't make any sense to me. And this was where

Josh and I both tried playing at basically the same time i think josh had like a 20 minute head start on me and josh was already saying like this is unplayable this is awful and i'm launching mine thinking well my goodness josh has a 3080 i only have a 2080 there's no way this is gonna run for me right and and what's weird is that the game will run at 60 frames a second as long as you aren't moving, or you just barely move. But yeah, as soon as you start panning, the game goes completely haywire. So supposedly the issue when you're not pre-compiling shaders, and none of us here

are programmers or developers, this is just from what I've read, basically it means every time that you see a new asset for the first time, it has to compile. And so when you turn your head to look at that picture on the wall that you've never seen, the game has to compile it. So it causes a stutter. Well, guess what? It's going to constantly have to compile new assets all the time. And so a lot of people were saying, even with the patch, they thought it improved things but i guess they didn't reinstall the game and so there were already assets that they've looked at and compiled and so a lot of people thought that it initially helped but then the longer they played

it even got worse and worse i mean things got so bad that this game was rocking a 20 approval score on steam that is now up to 54 i think a lot of people are trying to now swing the pendulum the other way for people who are able to run it i guess some people can run this half decently um the three of the three people in our friend group me josh and our buddy steve we all had exactly the same problem and so we just told michael don't even buy it don't buy it on ps5 or anywhere because we're not gonna deep dive it right now it's just not playable and it's completely inexcusable because here yes you do have striking distance studios which is new but it's run by glenn scofield who i've talked about before he's one of my gaming heroes. He's

a titan of the industry. I don't know if this was just them trusting the wrong people for the PC port or just not overseeing it enough. I don't understand how a lot of reviewers got copies of this game. They're able to write a review and it was playable there's a lot of positive reviews from critics out there on callisto so what the heck happened why why is it not running for 95 percent of us but the reviewers seemed clueless striking distant studios seemed clueless what on earth happened i still i still have no clue how it's this bad yeah it's it's something changed clearly because it's not like every single person doing a review was given a playstation 5 and a copy on the ps5 to run it because apparently that's the only thing that runs it right which is weird because obviously pc we

know the issues there but xbox the xbox and the playstation are notwise, very different. So why? Technically, the Xbox, the Series X, is more powerful than the PS5. Right. So I may have gone down this very dark rabbit hole of rage and loathing at the time, because I was super, super ticked by this. Because number one, there's no excuse. There is absolutely zero excuse. This is not an issue that affects like 3% of hardware users, right? Like, again, I'm a patient guy. We have been in gaming for

decades and I get it. You know what I mean? As far as that goes. So it's like, there is just a certain amount of built-in patience that you have to have, especially on launch day, man. Like, I get that, you know, but this is inexcusable. This is widespread. A hundred percent of PC users were experiencing this stutter issue because it was inherent into the engine of the game itself. And the developers basically said, we do not care. We'll wait until there is an outcry and then we'll patch it, right? Here's the issue.

So they came out on day one and said, we have heard reports that a few users may be experiencing stuttering issues. We'll have a patch for you later today. Number one, not a few. 100%. That's a lie. Number two, if you have a patch that you can release six hours later, you freaking knew about this issue ahead of time. There's no programmer in the world that can patch a game within six hours of release and go, oops, sorry about that. We didn't know, but here you go.

Well, I think what happened was, and whether or not this is true or whatever, you can make up in your own mind. that one of the programmers in the rush to get the game uploaded to steam that they accidentally patched the wrong file and uploaded all of callisto then essentially what they had to do was reverse what they did to that one file and re-upload the whole game to steam now you would think that that would then fix the game and make it fully playable but it's still not like some people can say that they can now play it, but there's still a lot of people that are saying, it's just as bad. It didn't help me at all. Some people say it just helped marginally. So that's what I don't get. So for them to do a quick fix like that makes sense to me where they say, well, we looked at the logs. Someone accidentally goofed on this one file, so let's fix that. That could be a very fast fix, but they haven't fixed it. So that's the thing. Like, they either were completely ignorant of how bad it ran, in which case it's a little bit

of incompetence, or they just didn't care. I mean, maybe they were so focused on the consoles, and maybe they just trusted this other corner to port it. And that's where the problem was. That's why I said maybe they just trusted the wrong people. But I mean, the buck stops with them. They're in charge of this game. And we got a product that's unplayable. We all refunded it.

Dude, I was mad. And I don't generally show my madness as far as that goes. But in this case, it was so obvious that they knew about this issue that they put this game out and let people give them $60 for a broken product that they knew was broken. This is true. They had Sony developers come into their studio and help them optimize Callisto Protocol so that it would run well on the PS5. And it paid off. And it paid off in spades.

I get that. You know what I mean? Like, you want to do that, that's fine. But then how, at the same vein, do you not go to Microsoft and say, Microsoft, we need your help. We have this AAA title that we are touting. It's got a Times Square billboard that they tweeted about. You know what I mean? This is not some indie developer

that's a two-man operation working on a game. So why did they not go to Xbox and say, hey, help us optimize this game? Why did they not go to a company that handles PC ports and go, help us optimize this game. Why did they not go to a company that handles PC ports and go, help us optimize this game? You know why? Because they would have had to delay the game. And they're trying to get this game out before Christmas, and they absolutely must get Callisto Protocol out before the Dead Space remake. And so what do they do? They say, push it, push the game. We'll deal with the backlash. We'll fix it. Everybody will go away.

It's the same crap that happened with everybody will go away it's the same crap that happened with battlefield 2042 it's the same crap that happened with cyberpunk 2077 we saw it with no man's sky six years ago you know what i mean you cannot continue to abuse and take advantage of gamers and push broken products and think that that's okay now i have heard because i have been obsessed with this over the last few days, because I'm still ticked, is that this patch did help a lot of people. A lot of people said, hey, so now when you play the Callisto Protocol after the patch, the main menu of the game will stutter and stagger and lag like you wouldn't believe,

because what they did is they pushed the pre-compiling of the shaders to up front in the game. Now, anybody that's ever played Call of Duty Warzone knows pushed the pre-compiling of the shaders to up front in the game. Now, anybody that's ever played Call of Duty Warzone knows exactly what pre-compiling shaders is. Because it takes 10 minutes. When you want to play Warzone for the first time or after a big patch, it takes 10 minutes for Warzone to pre-compile those shaders before you can play. And if you try to play, what does it say? It says, hey, you can't play because we're still compiling shaders. So basically that's what Callisto Protocol did, right? Why didn't you do that in the first place?

You knew. You knew this was an issue. They knew and they let it happen. And you put it out there anyway. And I'm so sick of it that basically what I did is I started whining like a little kid. And I said, forget you, Callisto Protocol. You're not getting my getting my money i'm refunding this game you do not get a second chance for me forget you guys you know what i mean and you can say hey it was a mistake no it wasn't you did it on purpose i'm not playing your game the weird thing to me right that's all i can do i mean

as a person i can just say i'm voting with my wallet. I'm voting with my behavior towards the game at this point. And I know that it might sound whiny to some people, but I'm so sick of this trend in gaming of releasing broken video games, taking people's money with the promise that you'll fix it. And do they fix it? Yes, most game companies do fix it. But I'm at the point now where I don't care.

It's like, I'm not going to pay you to do that to me at this point. Okay. So in a second here, we're going to have to take our break. But there are a couple of lessons to learn from this. First of all, you got to stop pre-ordering games. Because when you buy a game, you're not an investor. You are buying a product. And that product should be finished.

It's not fair to buy a game and then wait three years for them to fix it. Like this is the thing that makes no sense to me from the ground up is that they have said that they want this to basically be like a live service game for the next four years that they're going to keep pumping out new content that you can buy. You can get the season pass and buy it all up front. And then they release this game and it's not playable and you're gonna have to wait forever so just don't pre-order games wait and find out how the game is performing i don't know if all the journalists were like in on this

like did everyone feel like there must be something wrong with my pc and this game must run well for everyone so i'm just gonna write this review as if it ran well or are they all in on it did they all get a different build when the game ran right i just i feel like we still have no idea what happened here it's just it's crazy but i never know yeah we may know i know they pushed a broken product because they were under a deadline and they can't come out the day before release and say, Hey guys, we know we said Callisto protocol supposed to release on this day, but we have to push it back a day because what happens, right? Everybody goes, right. And everybody gets really mad because we don't like

delays. If they had, and here's the change in mindset and we'll move on after this. Cause I know I'm, I'm ranting at this point, but if they had come out and said, PC users, we're really sorry, but we just identified an issue that is causing our game to have major performance issues. We are going to patch it. It will release tomorrow. Please forgive us, but we want you to have a good product. Fine. Fine. Yeah, we'll go, oh, that sucks. And I was hoping to play this on a Friday night and blah, blah, blah, but we'll be over it. But instead, what you did is you pushed it. Now look at your game. You've got a, I don't know, would you say it was 50% mixed review rating on Steam? People like me that have just had enough. This was the straw that broke the camel's back. I'm not going to buy Callisto Protocol. Maybe in a year when it's 20 bucks on sale or something like that maybe i'll buy it then because

i'll have forgiven them at that point and i want to see what the game's about but it just this is a trend that's got to stop yeah and even seeing clips like on xbox where there's no faces in the mirrors and stuff like that is just oh yeah i don't i don't know what happened with this game all right well we're going to take a short break and we'll be right back with some more multiplayer gaming podcast. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from real Canadian superstore with PC express shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC optimum points. Visit superstore.ca to get started.

Okay. We are now back. we're still running hot i still feel the energy in the air uh but let's go on to our next news story here maybe this will be a little bit more fun to talk about starship troopers all right i don't know if you guys are fans of the movie i love it it's one of my favorite movies one of my favorite writers and directors of that movie um but they are coming out with a co-op first-person shooter. It's going to have 12-person squads where you hop in for a match. And I feel like there's such a focus on PvP in the first-person shooter world that this is kind of fun. It's kind of nostalgic to get this co-op FPS game.

I mean, we can talk separately about whether or not this game looks good, but in general, I love the idea of coming out with more co-op first-person shooter content. I love this idea. There was another game, Aliens Fireteam, that came out. We had talked about it a little bit. It looked really good. Reviews were kind of mediocre. It's repetitive. But that's another game that caught my interest instantly instantly because what's more fun than shooting aliens? Shooting aliens with friends, right? The co-op nature of games really is fun to me.

And I think the thing that set this off for me is the 12-player co-op. Yes. Yeah. Developers do not do this anymore. And I'll tell you what i will buy this game simply for the fact that you are going to let me play this game with as many friends as i want to play it with and i think that is going to lead to some phenomenal fun and that's all we're really looking for anyway right yeah i i think that it's it's the same reason that i really

latched on to deep rock galactica so fast i almost it sounded like galactica but it's it's the same reason that i really latched on to deep rock galactica so fast i almost it sounds like galactica but it's deep rock galactic um fun with words um no but it's one of the reasons i latched on to that so fast is i'm like hold on a minute i get to play a shooter which i'm not good at fps we've talked about on the show mostly just because i'm just slow to aim and people are just better than me they're smarter than. They eat their Wheaties in the morning. They do a good job. But play against AI and stuff like that. I have a great time still playing shoes with friends, but I prefer to do it in a co-op

like that. This looks great. It looks so much fun. You know, like as far as just running around with my friends, 12 people, like 11 other friends. It's a big group. Like we don't have to live it. That's one of the pros of Deeper Galactic is it seems like there's always five people

that want to play. And I'm like, I'll sit this one out, guys. I'll just kind of come in or whatever. Twelve? No. I didn't see. Is it up to twelve? Can you play with four? It's up to twelve. You don't have to have twelve people. That would actually be a problem. Great that you can have twelve people, but if you had to have

twelve people, that would be an issue. If you had to have twelve, they'd just matchmake you and play with random people that weren't your friends. know what i mean which is cool because it's like if the three of us want to play let's do it um we can talk about the gameplay a little bit if we want to i don't know if we're going to or not but i got super excited by the trailer super excited by the trailer love the trailer because i'm like oh this is this is this is very verhoeven ask starship troopers they look like they came right out of the movie you know like it's definitely the same character design everything like that when i watched the gameplay trailer i was a little

bit like okay but what happens because it seems like the entire gameplay trailer they're just shooting from range far away and the bugs don't seem to be doing anything these bugs will be scary hopefully and they will be like goring out on your friends and stuff but the gameplay i was like hopefully it's more than just you shooting from far away at the yeah to be fair everything is labeled that it's alpha footage so it's not the final product yet I don't know about you guys I

kind of got like Star Wars Battlefront vibes like especially the really old Battlefront games from the mid 2000s it's it's almost a little tower defense like tower defense is exactly what i was gonna say if if one of you guys didn't mention it i was gonna bring that up yeah there's like them putting down traps they're intentionally funneling all the bugs into these choke points

and i thought that that all sounds like a lot of fun i will say i had the same reaction as michael the ai at least as of yet, didn't look fantastic. The graphics looked okay. I have it on like a let's wait and see, but I got really excited. The whole idea of a co-op first-person shooter, sign me up. As long as it doesn't look completely awful,

I'm planning on picking this one up. I'm with you. It did look unfinished, I is the the polite way to say and they kind of said hey this is all alpha footage so it is unfinished so take that with a grain of salt there um beyond the 12 player aspect it was it did look like this is a horde defense type shooter um i got very strong tower defense vibes but i love tower defense games especially like in a co-op nature, which I thought was really cool. And they did.

They showed people plopping down turrets. At one point, you could see a little electrical gate that they were funneling the bugs through, and it would slow down the bugs and stuff like that. So I'm with you, Paul. This has my interest peaked a lot. The big selling point for me is the 12 player aspect of it because at that point if it's just fun it's just fun you know you don't need super good graphics i think you have to have a fun gameplay so if it's just holding down left click until you have to reload and then holding down left click that's not that great but they did say that they're going

to have classes um which i think adds a lot to it they're going to have classes of bugs right yes that's exactly yep so then you're going to have bugs that lob plasma and then you're going to have the melee bugs and stuff like that and then one of the things that they saw that they did mention that they're working on because the game is coming out in early access next year and then they said they expect it to be in early access for a year before it fully releases so we're probably looking at early 2024 for the release of this game but they were saying that some of the things they're working on is you know a wider range of classes a wider range of bugs that's all stuff that you want to see because that's what adds to the longevity and replayability of a game like this

also means that their game might be fundamentally in really good shape to where they're already thinking ahead on like hey here's what we can do next let's add these bugs let's add some kind of great big brain bug or something like that i'll tell you two things i want two things i want from this game for me to call it a success uh from our inevitable probably early access deep dive one at some point there has to be an audio clip of Sky Marshall to Hot Maru saying, to defeat the bug, we must understand the bug. And also, I want a Neil Patrick Harris cameo. Give me some MPH. Oh, go watch Starship Troopers if you've never seen it.

It's so funny. It's a great satire on fascism and everything. It's a great watch. Fun fact, my wife and I, when we met, I asked her out on a date the next day. And our very first date was to go see Starship Troopers. No! Yeah, it sure was. That's great.

Epic, dude. Well, this is one of the very few games where we're excited to see bugs. We get to shoot them. And I think what would make this game really great is if it ends up being really frenetic toward the end of these matches. I don't know if you have to hold off a certain number of bugs or a certain number of minutes but if things start getting stressful where you and your buddies are all yelling and you're running around and get the west gate run to the west gate like that's what's gonna make the game special and i hope it's not

just like too easy i hope that you're able to play it where it's actually challenging and that's where i think the fun is gonna be had yeah yeah and hopefully you and your friends don't go the way of port joe smith exactly come on there's i i have to keep throwing in starship trooper references i haven't seen it in a couple years you're like you're shaking the dust off as you're mentioning the mormon fort that gets massacred at the very beginning of the movie like port joe smith like oh mormon settlers and it's like what the fuck you pick on the mormons like that's just really mean just watch the first five minutes of this movie on youtube i'm sure there's clips it's it's so funny you'll understand if you like it or not in the first five minutes anyways it definitely sets what the movie is going to be like all right

so we are are very quickly running out of time here but i did want to mention one other story here that way everyone can be aware of it this might sound a little bit like an ad, but it's not. We don't have any sponsors here for this episode, but Valve announced that they are going to be giving away a Steam Deck every single minute during the Game Awards. And so basically, you just have to opt into this. You have to then have the game awards open through steam and have that up and running and let's just say that last year it was more than three hours so this is a lot of steam decks that they're giving away for free and we just want to make sure all of you guys are aware of that so you can enter and maybe get a free

steam deck the game awards are going to air on December 9th, which is tomorrow if you're listening on the day of release. So you can very quickly opt in for that. But what a cool little thing that you can win. Yeah, and this is you're not selling your information kind of opt-in thing. This is literally just in your Steam account. All you have to do is say, I want in. And then you have to watch.

I think that's the big draw is they want people watching the Game Awards, so maybe that's why they're doing this giveaway. But, I mean, last year the Game Awards went for over three hours, and so a little bit of simple math, that's over 180 Steam Decks that they're likely to give away for free. And what's the going rate on a Steam Deck? $400, $500? Depends on which one they're giving away.

Because these are the 512 gigabyte models. Oh, that's the 580 it's 580 dollars yeah so this is no slouch of a thing they're giving away here either so on the off chance that you're listening to this and you remember to sign up man we'd love for some of our listeners to win a free steam deck so that's kind of why we're bringing it up is just uh hey don't forget to go click that register button and get in on this yeah easily i can say that if you don't know that you want a steam deck you want a steam deck i've got one i love it it runs almost every game very very well um if you're using like a third party um dock to put on your tv that's the only time i

ever noticed performance issues when i was trying to load like a triple a game but overall as a handheld version you can play anything on it um also like from a business, this is pretty smart because I can kind of see what happens here. The Video Game Awards are like, hey, listen, you know what? We'll cover your cost, Steam, on Steam Dex or whatever if you give them away or give you a little bit above just to filter all these people in. Because what's the math on that? 500 times 180? I don't know. That's hard math, right?

1,800 divided by 2 is... Shoot. I shouldn't have asked such a hard question now we got this weird pause going on here while paul figures it out this is why i want michael to do all this math manually we'll wait we'll wait it's 900 it's 900 000 90 000 90 000 worth Steam Decks are given away, right? So if you think about that, like $90,000, to potentially get another million people watching the Game Awards,

that's really good advertising money spent. Yeah, it makes sense. And I had no plans to buy a Steam Deck. I'll play the heck out of a free one, though. I'll tell you that much. I would love to get a Steam Deck. That's so great. I was going to say, you guys know I don't do much mobile gaming, but if I won me a free Steam Deck,

you'd know I'd be sitting on a couch playing or laying in bed playing. I'd be also like, I'm a mobile gamer, guys. I mean, one of the things I love the most, and not to keep touting it, is that I can start a game on my computer, and if I don't feel like playing on my computer anymore, I can go lay down on the couch and play it handheld because Steam has the cloud saves. You can just go back and forth seamlessly, is it's just such a nice thing to

be able to do because i can't do that from pc to like my switch yeah and also look at it from valve's perspective they're getting free press like this where now people are finding out more about the steam deck and finding out more about how you can watch the game awards through steam so it really just seems to be like a win-win all around so just hey you don't even have to watch the game awards just have it up and running on your pc maybe you'll luck out and be one of those 180 lucky winners or however many there are this year maybe we can find some ways to like sabotage and make the game awards last a little longer squeeze out a few extra steam decks yeah right it's what was it super bowl 40 something when the lights went out maybe trip a couple breakers yeah we'll see how it goes uh all right well i

think we are all done covering news for this week a couple other minor things that are on the cutting room floor if you want to look into it yourself uh sifu is getting a live action movie that'll be written by the person who wrote John wick. Also amnesia, which is a series that Josh and I love. They're releasing their next game titled the bunker. There's an announcement trailer online. You can go check out if you would like.

And then just as a reminder to everyone out there, you can sign up on Patreon. If you want to get bonus episodes, you can do that at multiplayer squad.com. You can follow us on socials everywhere at multiplayer pod and we hope that you'll come back for a quick take episode on saturday and then we will have our deep dive of evil west on monday so evil so evil so west so west so sorry it's been a day so evil and so west all right well we'll catch you guys next time

and until then, happy gaming. Cheers, all. All right. See you, everybody. See you, everybody.