How the f*ck does this keep happening..

So apparently, dude, this game Slay the Spire 2. Oh my god, it's like super popular. I I didn't even know this. Okay. Okay. How does this keep happening? Here we are yet again with another indie game releasing in the same week on the same day as a highly anticipated AAA release, though the type of anticipation widely depends from person to person. And it comes out and it just absolutely crushes them. Yes. Slay the Spire 2 has had seven times the amount of players as Marathon. Seven times. That's sad. Now, I'm not going to sit here and try to tell you guys that I think that Marathon is some failure. I think that the game did within expectations of most games. It was all right. Yeah, it's all right. It's not It was not a It was not Concord 3. Now, it might end up at Concord 3, but it's not there yet. Problem is is that Marathon isn't most games. It's one of Sony's biggest bets. It's coming from a studio that's behind some of the most prolific firstperson shooters in the entire industry. It's got a ton of money and a ton of marketing behind it. All a lot of marketing. And the real question is going to come down to whether or not this is enough for Sony. Whether or not this is the number that Sony was looking for. Yeah. These two games have had a lot of people talking. A lot of people are using it as an opportunity to slam marathon showing that this is the way. Oh, this game has totally failed. On the other end of that, you have people that are deflecting, trying to say that the two games are not comparable because, well, they're just not the same. And I've also seen a lot of people try to ride off Slay the Spire 2 success as just another rogike. What I think then they should have made just another rogike. That's all you have to do. So, you just make a rogike video game and it gets 500,000 players. Wow, that's crazy. I guess every single rogike gets 500,000 players. Jesus. Who thinks of this? All this discussion does is ignore some really incredibly important questions. Who is playing these two games? Why are they choosing one over the other? And what are they chasing? That's what we're going to find out today. Yeah, about right. The last couple of weeks, honestly, the last couple of months have been kind of insane for games. There's been plenty of Can you believe they nerfed my build in this game? That's how good I was. Drama that we'll be getting into. But man, gamers have been genuinely eating so good recently. We need to take the time to appreciate that. February had Neo3 which ate up a lot of my personal time. Eugenics as well. I don't see why, bro. If you can't even dodge that attack, that mob's been in Team Ninja games for seven years. It's been in Team Ninja games for seven years. You get hit by the same overhead slam. Jeez. From the creator of Binding of Isaac. Then we got Resident Evil Reququum, which man, that game has just been so good. I just finished my second playthrough of that. We also got a steady stream of information coming out around Crimson Desert. And honestly, it looks like that game's actually going to be delivering on its promises. And man, if it does, oh boy, it's going to be the best game ever. Pokemon Poptopia launches. Here, let me give you guys some advice. If you want a lowmaintenance girlfriend, you should date a girl that plays Pokemon and likes to play and get into Pokemon games. The reason why is that they are already conditioned into accepting the absolute bare minimum, the lowest quality, and the worst possible outcome that they could ever have. And then they continually stick with it for 20 years. So, if you want a girlfriend, it's low maintenance, that's not going to cause you any problems, go to the Pokemon section and find one of those, which is genuinely a good Pokemon game. PlayStation launches Marathon, which seems to have found an audience that genuinely enjoys it, but the player numbers definitely leave a lot of questions on the table. Questions that get a lot louder when on the exact same day, it is entirely eclipsed by Slay the Spire 2. Yeah, the comparison of these two games flooded social media almost immediately. Marathon peaked at about 88,000 concurrent players. It lost momentum over the weekend, something that we normally don't see, and it never broke over 80K again. Slay the Spire 2, however, launched to over 175,000 players and it kept climbing day after day, eventually hitting a peak of 570,000 concurrent players. It is now the 20th most played game in Steam history. These are absolutely absurd numbers. Now, I have seen a lot of people trying to estimate how many copies Marathon has sold. That's the game that most people are the most curious about right now. And well, most of the math that I've seen once you extra well, let me has been pretty flawed with people overco complicating it more than they need to. The simplest way for you guys to be able to gauge how a game is done is just look for a game with similar launch performance and see what that studio reported. Marathon peaked at around 88,000 concurrent players and the closest comparable across all platforms is actually Dragon Age: The Veilg Guard, which actually had more players about a thousand players higher than them. EA reported that game had engaged 1.5 million players at launch, whatever that means. But I find that to be an overestimation because uh Dragon Age: The Veilg Guard was free, I think, with like some sort of like Game Pass or some other variation of that. And also players is not sales. So whenever you hear the word players, there's a reason why they're saying players and not sales. I think that if you compare it um like I would say how many copies is Marathon sold? Probably like 600,000 700,000 like maybe a little bit more than that. Like I that that would be my guess. Marathon is likely sitting right around there. Likely just below that or maybe just at a million copies sold. How many refunds? Now a critical difference between these two releases that I think is really important to take notice of is that games industry.biz Biz ran a piece noting that Slay the Spire 2 was not multiplatform. This game was only on Steam and it has already sold over 2.8 million units based on available data and that 43% of those sales are coming from China alone, which is a massive market. Now, I love this because this is a 10person studio team that is making a $25 deck builder that's cracking into markets that AAA publish. Think about that. 3 million 25. So that's $75 million. Obviously, you know, you cut all that up, like each of those guys is walking away with seven figures 100%. That is crazy. Are spending hundreds of millions of dollars and they can't even reach. I think this is a bit poetic that the games industry has been spending years chasing larger and larger audiences and in that pursuit, they've managed to shrink the audience that they do have while also somehow ignoring one of the biggest ones in the entire world. I think that another big issue and the reason why this happens is that a lot of video games aren't video games anymore. They're like interactive stories or some other form of, you know, a vignette simulator where you go from, you know, some encounter to another encounter like a walking simulator. Like there are very few actual video games being made nowadays. And like it's very weird for me to say this, but like whenever I played Resident Evil, for example, like I mean cutcenes are great. We love cutscenes, but like the problem is that some games are just all dialogue and there's like no real gameplay loop. Like there's nothing you really do in the game. And I think that's just it's it's Last of Us ruined everything. It did. It ruined everything. Uh every video game before that was good. Every video game after that very clearly was bad. Exhibition 33 was perfect. Yeah, it was. And like now I feel like there are so many games like I I was playing like through weathering waves for example and like I was doing the story and like the story was very good. It was a very nice story but at the same time like I want to fight the dragon. I want to fight the guy. I want to fight the the robot, you know? And like where is that? And it's like it's just like I I want to like I always feel like in a lot of cases the story for a lot of games is almost like an inhibitor for gameplay. I don't know if you guys have ever had that vibe before, but it's just like a huge inhibitor for gameplay. Even Mega Crit, the developers of the game, couldn't help themselves. They jumped onto Twitter posting, "Congratulations to Marathon team on their launch. Don't let a small indie passion project pass you by just because Slay the Spire 2 is out." Absolutely brutal. guys. Me is a 10person studio that dropped a single trailer announcing their early access launch. Bungie is an 800 developer studio backed by PlayStation throwing everything at the wall and this wasn't even close. I mean, I don't I don't think that they might be able to to recover from this too because like keep in mind there's another factor for this with Bungie is that Marathon is probably also um cannibalizing players from Destiny 2. And like I've seen Destiny 2's player numbers go down drastically. So like even the success of Marathon is not completely uh you know like exclusive to Marathon Nation is known for spending heavily on their marketing but this might be one of their most aggressive campaigns that I have ever seen. Honestly, I would not be surprised if they spent over $200 million just on their marketing campaign. They sponsored nearly every content creator under the sun. They ran a full suite of ads. They built out an ARG experience so that players could hunt down lore and real clues and stuff like that in real life. They have an entire song that was written and recorded by Poppy, and they ran an advertisement presenting the game's prosthetics and shells as real technology to prank unsuspecting guests. Now, honestly, I'm not even going to throw shade at any of this other than the money that they spent. But a lot of this stuff was genuinely cool. I think it gets the community involved almost immediately, and it all fits the theme of the game really well. But you guys just got lapped seven times by a studio that's now walking back their own track. I'm going to be honest. Like all these marketing boys are And the people that do them are just basically uh it's like these are the you know like the girls that post like their videos of like them going to work and like all they do is like get boba tea and have meetings. Like this is like where it's like basically adult daycare. These are adult daycare projects. Nobody gives a about this Nobody cares. This is stupid. This is stupid. Anybody who's focusing on this is wasting your money. You need to make a good video game. That's what your focus needs to be. You need to be making a good video game. Make a good video game. Make a good video game. That's it. That's the only thing that matters. And like this overfocus on marketing in these marketing events, like some companies, like I actually think that marketing is probably the lowest competency uh like field that I've noticed inside of business. Like I'm not a big finance guy, so like I could be missing probably a lot there. But like outside of that, I feel like it's marketing. Like there are so many people that are just so stupid that that work in marketing that I mean I I don't know why. Like I mean you should put them in jail. I mean really I mean like I mean you basically stole $50 million, right, for this marketing budget and you turned $50 million into $3 million. Like yeah, you should just go to jail. Asht talk because they look like a bully for outerping you. All this does is prove that money can buy attention but not interest. PlayStation spent a lot of money here and the market just didn't care. No, because nobody cared about that. It was a stupid decision made by a person that should be fired. Anybody who thinks like that or has that type of a mentality, if you're running a company, just fire them. It's worthless trash. When you look at the reception of both of these games, I think the outcome makes a lot of sense. Slay the Spire 2 is a sequel to one of the most beloved and widely played indie games in the entire scene. It's $25 and even less if you actually buy the first one. They give you a discount on it. The studio has a great reputation and every day more and more people are choosing to actively support indie developers. It's a known quantity in every sense. Should I try this? What do you Marathon on the other hand is a pile of uncertainty. It's a $40 live service game dropping into a free-to-play market, which honestly I don't really think would be much of a deal breaker if it wasn't for the fact that Bungie has spent years thoroughly torching their own reputation. Egregious monetization, removing paid content that players had already paid for, repeated controversies over stolen artwork, and essentially sacrificing Destiny 2 on the altar of this new game, turning their own audience against them in the process. It's literally and then that will hurt the uh longevity and the trust with Marathon because what I think is probably going to happen is that Blizz Bungie will recalibrate and then make content for Destiny 2 and then the Marathon players will perceive the same thing and it will create a toxic relationship with the developers and their fans. That's where I think things are going to go. The meme of the shiny new favorite. Yeah. And even with the game out now, I still don't think that Marathon is a known quantity. I mean, PlayStation themselves don't actually seem to be completely sure of what the game is. They've been asking reviewers to hold off their coverage until late March when Bungie plans to release the Cryo Archive, a raidelike scenario reminising. Wait, they don't want people to review the game when it releases? What the What? What do you mean you don't want them to review the game when it comes out? audacity that some believe is the final piece is going to make the whole experience click. The argument being that judging the game without it just isn't a complete picture. And my question you shouldn't have sold the game without it. idiot. stupid. Stupid idiot is well then why did you guys sell an incomplete experience? Look, asking reviewers to hold off is only going to build this trust. It's going to make players feel like this game is getting preferential treatment that it wouldn't be getting otherwise. And honestly, those players would be right if critics are either delaying their coverage or carving out caveats for content that doesn't even exist yet. Well, one, that's unfair. And two, that is useless to anybody that is trying to decide whether or not to buy the game right now. And even if the cryo archive is that genuinely transformative, all you're really doing is telling players that it's going to get better later. content that a new or casual player is unlikely to see for a long the review asking asking people to hold back a review is fundamentally consumer unfriendly. And I think this goes to talk about more of the toxic relationship that developers have with game journalists where the focus is not about being in the best interest of the player. It's about being in the best interest of either the journalist or the developer. And the players benefit is seen as like a secondary, you know, serendipitous outcome if possible. Time if ever, especially given how much more demanding marathon is and how much more competitive Marathon is compared to something like Arc Raiders. What players need to know right now is what the game feels like on a day one or day two basis, not what this game is going to feel like a month from now. Yeah. Why would you do that? And also, the game like that content isn't even out. How do you know how that content's going to affect the player base? There's so much emergent player behavior inside of a a big live service game like this that you can never really predict what's going to happen. Every single sale starts with the first day and every single return happens in just a couple hours. What are we doing? What I think everybody is missing in this conversation is that players do not need a complete picture. All they need is a snapshot. And most people have already made up their minds on this game before it even came out. I think that's exactly what the numbers are telling you right now. Marathon's audience didn't grow over the weekend. It declined and then stabilized. The people that were on the fence gave the game a shot and didn't come back. The people who were playing it right now are the ones that were always going to be playing it. I took the headphones off. It's hot as hell in here. So hopefully this still sounds good. Contrary to popular belief, I actually do not think that Marathon is a failed game. nor do I think that it's necessarily an objectively bad game. And honestly, I also think that it has dodged out on being Concord 3. So far, kind of. All this depends on whether or not PlayStation sees this level of success and says, "Yes, this is acceptable. This is what we were looking for." They have to see the numbers and say that it's worthy of their investment, their initial investment, and also their future investment. And as we have learned multiple times, many, many times by now, these companies are not necessarily fair when it comes to the expectations that they put onto these games. And this isn't even just talking about the right now. We're also talking about when this game starts to lose players. When this game starts to cool down a little bit, when the content creators walk away from it for a while, it's like when this game has like 20,000 players, which I think could happen within like a couple of months. Um, I do think that you could see like I I I do like you can't run a AAA studio the size of Bungie with a player base that is this that is 20,000 people. You just can't do it. Like I I I it's it doesn't matter like cuz you can't monetize on that level. You don't have that many microtransactions. you can't do uh you know other types of you know like pay to win stuff so the amount of money you can make is minimized what we were trying to measure I'm just saying in general sponsor it anymore when there's a content law and I saw Shroud talking about it and he had said oh well they put too much money into it wouldn't abandon it even if it had three players brother didn't you have a game that also failed Well, not only I mean and also like by the way that's just Shroud is wrong. He he he's wrong about that. Uh there are two examples I can give to show that he's wrong. The first example that I would give would be the fact that they shut down Bluepoint Studio that made one of the most successful remakes of all time, which was the Demon Souls remake. That was one of the release cases for the PS5. And the second instance that I would also give for him being wrong would be uh actually I forgot there was another one. I forgot what it was. Okay, that's the first one. Oh, Concord, right? Of course. How am I not thinking? Yes, Concord. Concord was a completely new IP and they they tabled that after hundreds of millions of dollars. Like they even planned out an entire universe for Concord and as soon as it came out and people hated it. Like PlayStation basically like it's like this is what they did in the '8s. They buried all the ET Atari games out in like a Mexican desert. Like that's if if this if Concord came out and it was 1985, you would have a Mexican desert full of Concords. That's it. I think that this game has found its core audience. And I think that audience is they refunded the players. That's I think this is a real extraction shooter, which kind of ends up being a problem. It does make sure that that audience is incredibly passionate and it also does at the same time make that this audience is probably going to be much smaller than Sony probably originally thought it was going to be. This game is incredibly difficult. It's not very forgiving. And when you have this raid style content that's being extraction shooters by definition are extreme hardcore games. The people that want extraction shooters want a hardcore game. That is they are by definition hardcore touted as the endgame. Well, it's going to be really hard for a lot of players, the wide audience, the majority audience to be able to enjoy that content when they're constantly losing their stuff all the time. And I can't imagine that that raid is going to be all that fun if you do not have some of the best equipment available to be able to take it on. Now, I don't know if Sony is okay with this game being a Hell Divers 2, a game that is hot in a season but colder for the year. That's something that we're going to have to wait to find out. I mean, H Divers 2 had such a huge ceiling and it was massively more successful than Marathon. It wasn't even close. It had cultural relevance. There are a lot of collabs that they've done that have done very well also and they've managed to find their own footing later on. And also the studio is probably a fraction of the size of Bungie just based off of just studio entropy where like a studio over time just accumulates more people. Bungie's been around for 20 years. They've probably got a ton of redundant jobs and redundant positions that you know probably they could use some layoffs. And I think that if Marathon keeps going in the direction that it's going, we're going to see that happen. Genuinely, I'm not on Marathon, okay? Good lord, the amount of people for like the last week that I have had that have been flowing into both my DMs, on my comments on Twitter and in my videos that have been trying to call me out thinking that I'm trying to attack their game. Look, it has been some of the most insecure behavior that I think that I have ever seen. But something I realize something in that that insecurity has a source. It's coming from somewhere. that insecurity is a self-defense and I think that it's it's something that is working to both the negative and also the benefit of Marathon but also the same for Slay the Spire. For me personally, I have been trying to give Marathon a fair shot and I'll be honest with you guys that has been a struggle as somebody who is predisposed to hating Bungie. But the game does have things that I love for Jaden as the thing for me is like I'm predisposed to liking Bungie but not liking Marathon. That was like my vibe from it. I am as a Destiny player who lost content for growing up. I cannot deny that this game feels incredible to play. The movement, the gunplay, their take on science fiction, the worlds that they built, all of that stuff that's all still here. That's all still Bungie that's showing up in Marathon. But Marathon, man, this game is so overdesigned. It's like one of those pretentious fashion shows where it's all fashion and no function. The game looks incredible. It drips with a distinct like a Kanye West fashion show. Yeah, exactly. style menu. So needlessly confusing. I get that buying specific items from specific factions is lore accurate. But I should be able to sort this stuff by what I actually need, meds, ammo, whatever else, without feeling like I need to go on a damn treasure hunt. There's no crafting in this game. So outside of that's a blue item, that's a green item. There's no real framework for any decision-making that you're making out in the field. Players and NPCs are blurring together in the moment. Sound feels like it's tight in some areas and then loose in others, which is just creating this lowgrade constant confusion that just never really lifts from me. And the neon colors everywhere. Again, I understand it's on theme, but your eyes are drawn to nothing. Basically, your eyes are looking at just big random red objects and pink objects and yellow objects. It just it's like basically uh if you took uh Killzone and Fall Guys and you put them together. That's the art theme of Marathon. Visual noise. Now, the problem that I'm having is is that I don't know how much of that is the game and how much of that is me. I have never had this happen before, but I cannot tell if these things genuinely bother me or if it's just that I have nothing left to give. I don't trust Bungie. I'm exhausted with live service. The rate that these games launch and die every single year has me just completely tuned out of the whole thing. Then I sat down with Slay the Spire 2 and yes, I know that these games are entirely different, but the feeling is not different. Playing a game shouldn't feel this different. I was immediately in a flow state. every single mechanic was so curious and inviting the tool. It's also that it's a video game like you spend time like you're not dealing with like a thousand menus. It seems like this is another big issue that games have is that there's so much there there are so many like things in a video game sometimes that it's just overwhelming and it again it's like it's a distraction that takes you away from the actual gameplay. It's a this is a video game explaining themselves right there on the card. menus to be able to navigate. I'm getting that little hit of reward every time I take down an elite or something else clicks. I just couldn't stop. And when I finally put the game down, I didn't feel exhausted. I didn't feel like I was committed to anything because I knew that that game would be there whenever I came back to it. There is this simple bliss in that, that simple sense of security. This is something that I think returns to what a lot of classic games used to feel like where the experience was all about discovering things on your own and taking your time where the tools were simple but everything just felt limitless. And then I started wondering maybe there's a lot of other people that are chasing that exact same feeling. Something that the games industry just hasn't come to terms with yet is that while they love gambling, I think that a lot of people also just they they want to be able to play a video game. And I think the big issue of what happens is that you have a game like Marathon and there are just so many extra bells and whistles and complications with the game that they're getting in the way of you just being able to just play the game. Like I feel like that's always what I want to do in games. I just want to play the game. I just want to go and play the game. And there's like, oh wait a minute, wait a minute. There's something else. There's something else. There's something else. There's something else. Oh jeez. Five service games upside is insane. one successful game is going to effectively just make them immune to all the failures that they had before, wiping the slate clean. What they don't account for is that while those failures may not hurt them, they absolutely hurt the players. Live service games ask a lot from us. Marathon is not just some $40 purchase. It is a game that is going to continue to ask for more and more money. And it's also time. Time is a huge thing. Like I have a rule with myself. I only do dailies in one game. I only do dailies in one video game. Now, it might be a different game every day, but I will never do dailies on two games, faith in the studio, more faith in a road map, more faith in a future that is genuinely unclear. And that ask lands a lot differently when players have watched so many of these games just too much effort. Yeah. Every time a live service game shuts down, real people get hurt by it. And I'm not just talking about the developers in this instance because while we can sit around and we can meme all day and while a lot of these games we can say are not made for you and I or honestly the vast majority of people, there are a few people who genuinely do enjoy these games and the number of those players is just acrewing over time. I guarantee that there are people who bought skins in Multiveres in the cycle frontier in Concord and Suicide Squad Kills the Justice League in Highguard. Skins have been vanished into the void. Actually, I know that's a fact because I just recently jumped into a match of High Guard just to grab some footage before the games eventual shutdown and there were people that were wearing paid skins, people who cared, people who were invested and that all just gets taken away because these games are not hitting a benchmark that has nothing to do with them. Well, it's also that that's done over time is it's the fact is like in my opinion, this is just my opinion, I just think Arc Raiders is a much better game. I I I do like I think it's just it's just a better game. Like there's more to it. It's more interesting. The style is better. Like I just rather play it. Like I look at Marathon versus Arc Raiders and it's like you just ask me which game do you feel is like more appealing and it's Arc Raiders every single time. The audience too. You have people who will go nowhere near a game like Marathon because they don't know what it is. They don't know what it will become and they don't want to find out the hard way. And then you have people who are genuinely I don't I don't agree with that mentality, by the way. I think that whenever a game comes out, there's nothing wrong with playing it and just seeing what it's like for fun. I think that we should normalize just trying something out rather than making playing a video game a commitment. I think that really it's like you try out a game like this, if it's not very good, you just quit. Who cares, right? I mean, you just refund the game after two hours. It's pretty simple. And they're terrified that it's going to suffer the same as a lot of these other games. So they go out there, they start defending it like crazy from any and all criticism just to try to keep it alive. That's how you end up with this money. Yeah, I feel like a lot of games have demos, you can refund them, but yeah, I mean, maybe if and if that's the case, I mean, obviously that's different. Wild swings where you have these devout players that are preaching the word on one side and everybody else that's skeptical on the other. It's also how you end up with a launch that genuinely you can't really call a success or failure. It's just kind of sitting in limbo, which is exactly where Marathon is sitting right now, I would say. Yeah, actually, you know what? He's probably right about that. Yeah, it's probably in. Now, on the other hand, you have Slay the Spire 2, which isn't asking you for anything beyond the $25 that you had already spent on it like any other single player game. These developers have already come out publicly stating that they are microtransaction haters, a stark contrast to basically everybody else in the industry. They have a positive reputation. They have no barrier to entry. I'm pretty sure you can run this game on a potato. So, of course, this game got seven times the players. I posted on Twitter celebrating the launch of the game, and I saw somebody had responded, "To be fair, this is the most casual of casual games. Literally, anybody could play it." What is that supposed to mean? Like, a video game has to be good. Like, really? Like, what are you talking about? Like, that was supposed to be criticism or some Yeah. Like what about Bellatro, Vampire Survivors, Fortnite, Minecraft? All of these games could be played on a on like a Nokia phone. And I said, to be fair, that smells like success because what they're describing as the negative, low barrier to entry, accessible to everybody, no steep learning curve that's going to keep people out. That's exactly why more than 2.8 million people bought it almost immediately. industry keeps trying to lock down, stretching out these player realistic, and it's just not working. Slay the Spire, too. Yeah. And that's another thing, too, is that there's a lot of games that they want to extend play time by adding in like just random goals that you have to just basically get you to play the game more. And I feel like really nobody wants to do that in a lot of cases. Nobody wants to do any of this like dailies, activities, like and also it's like just adding in extra tasks just to extend play time. It's not going anywhere. It doesn't need to hold a hundred million thousand players just to be able to justify its existence. It already has made its money cleanly from a $25 purchase and no servers to maintain. And all they got to worry about is just keep building on the game from its early access. While it's already a smashing success, Mega Crit didn't have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing or anything. Mega Blanc, I think, which means that they just basically get all the money in return that they spent. And it's just it's an enormous payoff for these guys. They get to keep making games and the game itself just sits there permanent waiting for whoever wants it next week, next year, 5 years from now. You cannot say that about a lot of these live service games. I think that permanence is a form of trust and trust is something that is in very short supply in the games industry. When I look at how a lot of these indie games are getting support and they're just snowballing year after year with every single one of these releases seeming to land harder than the last, I don't think that that's people that are just discovering good games. I think that's a signal players are tired. They're tired of the indifference towards the future of their hobby. They're tired of games disappearing. tired of money that they're spending on something that is just being taken away. Tired of There's also a component to it too where like a lot of these bigger video games have like a scope that's just so large that it's hard for a casual player to get into it. So like for example like where winds meet has this problem and also Marathon has this problem and it's like there are so many complex systems that are hard to understand that you immediately have to interface with that you don't discover in like organically that it just is overwhelming for a casual player and you compare that to like something like Mugenics for example which is another really popular successful indie game recently or you look at you know maybe Slay the Spire I don't know a lot about that game. So, I can't really compare it. But Mega Bong is another good example. These games are very simple. And I think that that's another element is that a lot of video games now are overdesigned. They're completely overdesigned with no real purpose or value attached to that. It's just more stuff for more stuff. As to put faith in studios that just haven't earned it. And every single time they open their wallet up for a mega crit over a bungee, they're saying so. Yeah. I had to motivate myself to play Marathon. I could not peel myself away from Slay the Spire 2. I have not felt compelled to play Marathon at all since I played it on stream. I've not even considered it. Damn, is that game addiction. Once you start unlocking stuff, once you start figuring out new builds for some of the characters, I played the first game. I think I beat it in like 50 hours or something like that. I got 10 hours into this one. I'm probably just going to burn straight through it. I have a problem with rogue likes. I'm going to be honest with you guys. Once I'm in, I don't come out. It's mostly because of the fact that like I don't know if you guys run into this, but when you play rogue likes, like they all play so differently. There's that initial adjustment phase that you kind of got to get over and once you get past that, you're kind of locked into it. You know, I saw this guy post on Twitter. This had me dying. And he had said that I am a indies good AAA bad grifter. These people have Is it grifting if every chart agrees with you? Is it grifting if it's being represented in every form of data representation that you have like Yeah. I I don't know about that. Lost the meaning of that term. It is forever the developer of Slayer. Oh, I'm an idiot. I thought he was talking about supporting indies over billion dollar AAA companies turn into a grift. That's what I would like to know. But I'll tell you what I told him and I'll say it proudly again. I am a naturalb born hater, baby. I am too. I'm I am somebody that is jaded by an industry and I have no probleming an industry that I see that's trying to bring it back. Super bad. Am I picking sides? You better bet I am. You know, I I don't want Marathon to fail. I see that people Why are we advocating for games to be lazy and stupid? Oh, it's overdesigned for casuals. No, it's overdesigned for people who want brain dead games. I don't get why you'd act like it's a good thing for to be lazy and entitled. Lazy and entitled, bro. Like, it's a video game. What are you What are you even thinking? Lazy and ent. It's a video game. What do you What? like just on a like the the basic premise of what you're saying is just so foundationally disconnected from the way that people see video games. I don't even know what to tell you. Like really like I it's people aren't people play these for leisure. They're not playing these to, you know, leave their mark on the world. This isn't the most important thing in their life. if it's their entertainment for the evening. Holy man. Relax. Calm down. It's way different from the way modern gamers see games. Sure. People used to have fun losing and not auto winning. People lose in What do you mean like you lose 50 times in in like Vampire Survivors? You lose constantly in Mega Bonk. You lose constantly. I don't know about Slay the Spire. You lose constantly in mugenics. Like rogue likes are built around losing. Like if you what like the entire gameplay loop for rogue lights are losing. They like the game. And while I definitely have a jaded history, I can still see that there's some of that Bungie magic that's ring being squeezed out of it. And I would kind of like to see them try to iterate on that. The question just becomes whether or not that's what Sony wants, whether this game success is what Sony sees as a success. Now, the one thing that I will say is is it does seem like Sony did just greenlight another project with the company. So, maybe that means all clear. I don't know. I'm still going to try to give the game another fair shot. I need to try to play it with people and stuff like that, too. But so far, the I've just been bouncing straight off the game every try every single time I try it. Now, the other thing I'm going to say is in times of uncertainty, people look for certainty. People look for something that they can find security in. And right now in the games industry, honestly, in all walks of life, I think a lot of people are just feeling really uncertain right now. So when you look at a game that you can just buy one time, a game that you can afford most importantly that has a fixed future, it makes a lot more sense to be able to invest in something like that than something that you just can't see the future for. Doesn't make a lot of sense for these players to want to invest in live service right now. Yeah. I can't see like for example like I can't see where Marathon is that's like unique or different in like two years from now. Like I I think that's an interesting way to look at it. Like that's the way I look at a lot of MMOs like is that I see this game and I see the player base. It's like okay well where is this game going to be in two years? Uh well it's going to be on a Kira TV video about it going end of service. It's going to be my lazy peon react. Uh you know why did X or Y game die? I think people have kind of had enough. Anyway, hope you guys enjoyed the video. If you did enjoy the video, like the video, subscribe to the channel, follow me on Twitch, follow me on Twitter, follow me on YouTube, subscribe to the channel if you haven't for whatever reason. That doesn't even make any actual sense. Make sure you guys comment down below and like the video. Like it twice. Is that possible? No. If you like it again, you'll unlike it. Don't do that. Dislike it. Catch you guys in the next one. Stay cool. Stay right. Stay safe. I I I do agree. And I think the reason why it happens is that video games that have small teams are designed with a core gameplay loop in mind. And video games that have large teams, the focus is disconnected between a lot of people. You have uh designed by committee. You have decisions like that made. Make sure to give the video a like. I mean, Legendary Drops, I've watched his videos ever since he started basically making videos, right? And uh I love it. I think it's great. And uh big companies get slowed down by bureaucracy while indie games often move uh win by moving faster. Exactly. Right. And that's another big reason too is that you have these new video games and like they're they're being developed iterated on everything extremely fast. Right. Highg guard for all of its faults was actually a pretty like agile game in terms of it being reactive to like player feedback. It's just that the game was too far gone for it to be improved. But overall, I think that's what happens with a lot uh no woke artists and successful indie companies. Well, I think that there are a lot of woke artists inside of successful indie companies, but they're not running the entire company. They're just doing the art. And also, like the problem, I think, is it's not even about woke stories. Like, I think that woke stories could be okay. But the problem is that when you have design by committee and a story is being written by 17 people, you lose the human element because it's not being written by a human. It's being written by a group. And I think that's what happens. Like no, I mean I I I don't I don't really necessarily agree that every woke story is bad or every Chud story is good. I mean, like I obviously I I'm massively biased, but that doesn't mean that it's 100% one way or another. Boulders GK 3 is woke as hell. Well, I mean, woke in my opinion is like performative identity stuff. Uh, you know, stuff like that, not just simply, oh, there's somebody who's gay. Like, I don't think anybody really thinks that's woke other than like maybe three Dumbos on Twitter. So, uh, yeah. I don't know. What's the name of the video again? How the hell? It's called How the hell does this keep happening? Which I definitely think is a good question, right?