This game popped the f*ck off

But no, this this game went crazy. This game popped the [ __ ] off. There is nothing that I love more than watching a 60 person indie team absolutely body a company that burned 10 years, 400 developers, and half a billion dollars trying to achieve the exact same thing. Quadruple a gaming, a Ubisoft. One of the most interesting things that I think that I've seen over the past couple of years is how often the games industry will just let opportunity pass them by. some of the most obvious opportunities pass them by. I'm talking about free money, free engagement, free players, gamers that are telling these guys exactly what they want in full detail, but blinded by their arrogance, the industry just walks in the opposite direction. Wind Road. I think what I think is funny is that the fact is that like a true developer will not give the players what they want because like if you listen to what the players wanted with Elden Ring, it would have been way harder. But they made the game at a low baseline so that way anybody could play it. A a great developer will be able to listen to what players want and turn it into what players need. A terrible developer won't do either one. they'll just make the characters non-binary has been absolutely dominating. The players keep going up. The sales keep going up. People are loving it. And they are I view this as like one of the most obvious successes, one of the most just landed on a silver platter successes that we've seen in years. But a lot of people are caught surprised by it. What? How could this have happened? Can you believe that they made a good game and people played the game? How could this happen? How could the thing that players have been asking for been the thing that they wanted? Who would have guessed? You have games journalists that are out there that are talking about how it's a surprise indie hit, saying that this game just essentially came out of nowhere. You got a games industry that would have never looked in the direction of a game like this. And I'm sitting here wondering how anybody could have thought that this was anything but inevitable at this point. This game sold 500,000 copies in its first two days because Wow, what a surprise. No, players were asking for it. You weren't listening. People have wanted a proper pirate game ever since uh Black Flag. And Sea of Thieves is too gamey and too cartoony for it to give you that authentic like gritty pirate experience that I think people want. So, people have been waiting on this for a bit, for a while. I want to talk about why the games industry was caught by surprise when it comes to wind rose. I want to talk about well why the players actually saw this game from a mile away and how I think games like this are exactly how this industry gets replaced. But before that, a word from today's sponsor, Displate, who actually sent over a custom Display Plate of my very own today. Was that we got one? Today's video is sponsored by Displate. And by now you guys already know the deal. These guys have been a regular on the channel for a reason. This time I want to talk to you guys about custo stick these to a flat surface. They mean it. Trust me. Displates because I think this is one of the coolest things that they offer. You can upload your own images and you can turn it into a high quality poster, which is actually the really easy way to be able to make your space feel a little bit more personal. Whether it's personal artwork or artwork you like, a favorite screenshot, a photo, or just something stupid that you and your friends keep laughing at, you can turn it into something that actually looks good on your wall. And if for whatever reason you're new here and you haven't heard me talk about them before, Displate makes high quality metal posters that mount magnetically. No tools, no wall damage, no annoying setup. You just stick a magnet to the wall, line it up, and you're done. Super easy to swap out, too. Flat surface. So, if you're interested, go ahead and check out the millions of designs that they already have on offer, or go ahead and use a design of your own. Just go to displayplate.com and use my code legendary at checkout to get the best deal. Thank you to for sponsoring today's video. You know, for all the complaining that I do about the games industry, I think the reason why it gets under my skin so much is because I just cannot stand watching somebody leave the front door wide open and just watching their customers just walk right out. especially in the games industry where they have to be the most easiest audience to be able to sell to. These guys will tell you everything that they want. Well, yes, I know that not every single customer is going to say the exact same thing. I get that. Uh pretty much like, uh guys, uh do you want to have a a boarding process where you get on the other ship? Uh would you rather have it to be where your character uh like uh swings over on a rope or a cutscene? Oo, we're going to have to ask the gamers about this. But when you have enough of these guys that are saying the same thing, when they're asking for the same thing, and they're also spending their money the same way, I think it becomes pretty obvious where the problem is. And man, indie games, they are more than happy to take those complaints off your hands. Actually, the producer of Windro, one of the reasons why they're indie games, probably because they had the same complaints. That's probably this contrast out earlier this month in an interview with Automaton where they were asked how the game had started as a free-to-play MMO and then later shifted to a buytoplay survival game and what had motivated that change. The producer Phil had said that the game was always going to be survival focused, but they weren't sure that they'd be able to handle the costs or the ambition with live service. And more importantly, he then went and said the one thing that I think the games industry is apparently allergic to hearing, which is the players wanted something else. Quoting him directly, he said, "More importantly, it seems that the majority of players who were attracted to the game initially preferred to have it this way, too. A buytoplay PvE adventure. We are very happy that the players requests in our own vision over overlapped here." I think that you want to have a server where people can go and maybe play like have like ship battles or something like that. like making net code and like servers that you're able to run and do that is really cool, but at the end of the day, there are already a lot of multiplayer games out there. Like I think that there is becoming a growing desire for single player games and the reason why is that they don't expire. Like a lot of multiplayer games expire. Like whenever I play Marvel Rivals yesterday for example, uh I get good at the game, I quit playing that power and that experience expires. Like that's it. No need for yet another Rust. Exactly. Yes. MMO multiplayer for the Exactly. Yeah. That is a massive choice for any project to make. Crimson Desert almost perfectly in this case because both of these games were initially aiming at that live service MMO territory, but then both of them pivoted away from that. Both of them ended up doing the one thing that the games industry keeps pretending is the most terrifying gamble ever, listening to players and selling them a premium game that they actually wanted. And in both cases, that decision paid off. I would have never done that. Windrose launched into early access on April 14th. It sold 500,000 copies in its first two days, and then it just kept climbing. The player counts kept going up, the sales kept going up. The game pushed past 220,000 concurrent players on Steam, hit 1 million copies sold in under a week. And now it looks like it's on pace to be able to crush those numbers by the time that this game reaches its full release in the next year or so because man, what a game they made. Mhm. You guys already know how much I enjoy early access games. There is something I don't really know exactly what it is. It's just something that's really charming about playing these. Here's what I like about early access games is it is I was born too early to explore the world or to explore the space. I was born too late to explore the world, but I was born just in time to explore a world made in a survival game that there's not 50,000 YouTube tutorials for. When you discover and you find something in a new video game like this, there is a sense of actual discovery where it's not something that is on like 50 different strategy guides. It's not explained in 10 different ways. One of the coolest things about like Crimson Desert, for example, was that you had everybody collectively exploring and discovering all these features and cool things in the game together as a community. And I think that early access games have that and that's the reason why people like them rather than things that have like a million [ __ ] beta points and releases and everything like that. Unshrouded's going full release this year. I'm waiting for it. I actually I redownloaded in Shrouded like uh 3 weeks ago while I was banned. I was going to play it, but I I was going to wait for full release. Games in their earliest state when it's a little unbalanced, maybe a little bit wonky, probably a lot of wonky in some cases. and you're getting to throw feedback into the mix before everything is locked in. That's supposed to be the whole point of early access. It's a period where these developers should be the most open to feedback because, well, it's when the game is still taking it shape. Please die. I'm just going to be straight up with you guys. Windows has to be one of the most polished early access games that I have played outside of the usual monsters like Slay the Spire or Hades. You got to keep in mind too that they already did a demo on the game and a lot of the so like Windrose has a few nuts and bolts problems, but overall the combat is good. It's passable. Like is it like it's it's definitely not up to snuff in terms of like an action combat game. Like every action combat game is basically better than Windows, but you know, they're working on it and that's good. This game has pretty much everything that you would want out of a survival game. And it just goes even further with that with its pirate fantasy. The base building is so intuitive and flexible. It kind of reminds me of a in a lot of ways, though it's not nearly as involved in that. The exploration is packed with a ton of stuff for you to be able to find. You have hidden objectives, bosses, encounters, dungeons, caves, hidden chests, and world events. All kinds of different things to do. It has actual build diversity. You can find different weapons and weapon effects and rare weapons and gear sets and a bunch of different ways to upgrade, craft, buy, and build out your character. There are reputation systems with pirates and smuggling factions, bounties, main quests, side quests. And on top of all that, this game has some of the best naval combat that I think that we have seen since Assassin's Creed Black Flag. This definitely has aura. It does. Hearts of hope wears push. Man, I think the best man way that I can describe why so many I think that the naval combat in the game, they have to add a couple more um like uh like like for example using the bololises in order to disable the sails doesn't really have a lot of functional value like towards the like like maybe you do that on like the first two ships, but there's not really a lot of value that that creates. So I think that like basically like they have so many options that they can go with because they have a really really strong foundation like a great foundation for the game. People have connected with this game on such a broad scale is because Windrose it kind of feels like a game that was made by people who have been dressing up like Jack Sparrow every single Halloween for the past 10 years. Yeah. This is not a game with a pirate. I'm gonna be honest like you know who it's really made for. I'm going to show you right here. We're going to zoom. We're going to go a little bit a little bit before. And there it is. It's made for every [ __ ] guy that looks like this, which turns out to be a lot of guys. A a tremendously large amount of men. That's right. And if you go and you looked at like whenever this game came out besides like the VTubers and [ __ ] almost every guy playing it was just a bald man with a beard. Oh my gosh, this is great. This is not a game with a pirate skin stretched over it. This is a game made by people who were fully bought into the fantasy. It feels like it was made by people who just really love pirate [ __ ] really love video games, and then just manage to smash those two things together in just the right way. Whether it's the art style, whether it's sailing across the water, whether it's the sound design, the playlist of absurdly good sea shanties that are on the ship that I could never turn off, or the souls adjacent combat that they put in where even a level one board can just send you into the shadow realm. This game just keeps delivering because none of it feels fake. None of it feels like it's some type of hollow marketing angle. All of this feels genuine. I feel that. The players feel that. And that's exactly why this game has been doing so well. A lot of people were asking for a game like this. These developers showed up and they answered that call and the players showed up for it immediately. The rest of the industry somehow didn't see this coming. Maybe it's just me. It's almost like if you make a game that just simply caters to players interests, people will buy the game if they're interested in that kind of a game. I know maybe I'm just living in my own little bubble and the algorithm just isn't feeding me what it's supposed to. But I thought it was really strange how games media was kind of silent when this game dropped. There was some demo coverage, some light demo coverage at the very beginning, mostly from smaller outlets. But once the full game hit and it started exploding, the response to this felt weirdly muted for whatever reason. And that only really stood out to me as the days went on because this game was selling like crazy. It was pulling huge player numbers. It was sitting in the top five most played games on Steam for almost an entire week. and the coverage still barely matched what was happening outside of cont. It's not even people talking about how to play the game either. Like I was looking for like videos and stuff about this for the game. Like there's a lot of videos on YouTube, but like there's no articles written like you know this is the way the game plays like is nothing. It's so crazy calling the game a surprised hit which from my perspective it's only a surprise if you're not paying attention. But most of these bigger outlets What's wrong with AAA? They've been infested by a bunch of uh identity driven retards that should never have been able to uh they probably should never be allowed to use a computer period. Right? Just to do everybody a favor like uh that that that's my opinion that that that's the that's the problem that I think that there is. And I think that they uh they lowered the uh quality of the people like basically you had executives and like you know finance people fire all the big dicks and they replaced them with losers and a lot of those losers were hired through discriminatory hiring practices that basically created openings for people that were subpar that should never be working there. It should be at McDonald's. And so now you have a bunch of people where it's like the ship of the Thesius, but uh every other ship is balsa wood and the ship's sinking and there's one [ __ ] piece of plywood there and they're like, "Oh, look. See, it's the same." No, it's not. That's what's happening. Really didn't move on this until after the game had already crossed a million copies sold. Once it did, and you can listen to the develop if you listen to like Jeff Kaplan or um like I'm trying to think like any any of the other like original WoW devs or any developer of like Chris Wolson from POE, they talk about video games on like a deeper psychological level that is a lot bigger than just simply killing the dragon. Kevin Jordan. Remember we had Kevin Jordan on AllCraft and like this is like listening to like it's like you okay wait a minute let me write that down right like that's there's a level of understanding that whenever you listen to like the newest AAA wow this game's so good it's going to be garbage. uh you listen to them talk about their game, it's like they're talking about a Marvel movie they've seen. But these other guys, they talk about the emotional, the psychological, the uh you know, like the the structuring of like the way the world looks. Like everything matters in a way that is considered by everything else. And there are small developers that are able to do that now. And that's why they're able to bring these projects to light and succeed on such a huge level. That's the reason why You're talk. Yeah. Like Yeah. You're talking to wizard, right? Yeah. You talk to these guys and you realize that you're talking to a wizard. Like this is a guy with 30 years of experience. Like think about like how much you wouldn't understand from talking to somebody who has like 30 years of electricians experience, right? And they're like swinging circuit board to you. That's what it feels like talking to these guys. Well, then it became impossible to ignore and we started seeing the PC gamer articles, the IGN writeups, and the reviews in progress. all this stuff coming after the audience had already made this story obvious to them. And I think that says a lot about how out of step games media has become with the people that are actually buying and playing these games. And honestly, I really didn't take much notice of this. And the disconnect really didn't hit me too hard until I had started looking at the games trailers and I saw that IGN's upload was sitting at 245,000 views, which I felt was really low for a game this big. But then I started scrolling down a little bit further and I saw that Asmin Gold's reaction was sitting near a million views and holy [ __ ] this game. Holy [ __ ] this is the game. And then I went and I played the entire [ __ ] thing. I was right. By the way, it was in fact a game. This is a lot more than just big streamer is getting views. It's a lot worse than that. This is an issue. At least I mean it's not that much of an issue for us. is definitely an issue for them. But the issue is what one guy in a room reacting to a trailer is feeling a lot more relevant and a lot more worth listening to than an entire media machine that is supposed to be built around covering these games. This is what it looks like when the conversation no longer involves the press. This is what it looks like when these guys are on the outside. Now, the the press have alienated the public and they've also alienated the developers. uh the press trying to interject their own viewpoints into media and also use media to push their viewpoints I think has alienated a lot of uh a lot of developers. And I think the other issue is that the the the things that they focus on like for example like you know how like was it Kotaku was like talking about like you know or Polygon talking about like pirating Nintendo games like when you're openly advocating for stealing the games and the products of the people that you're trying to have give you credit and give you credibility like yeah that's not going to work. The other thing that I took notice of too is that nearly all the coverage over the past week has gone to Pragmata, which to be fair, it is an incredible game. I absolutely love it. But Windows sold the same amount, at least so we know so far. It's just as popular, maybe even more popular in some cases. And still, it felt like this game had to claw its way into the conversation. And I think part of that is just coming down to the fact that Windrose is not really giving these guys the kind of angle that they like to run with. They can't squeeze out headlines about how Pragmata's twitchy mode is a dog whistle or write another piece about how they're tired of quote seeing men protecting little girls to prove their masculinity. So instead of getting in front of Win Rose instead of recognizing it for what it was when it was happening, they waited. The players are the ones that forced these guys to respond. They didn't support it. They reacted to it. And the more obvious these successes start looking and I think that he's totally right about this, by the way, he's completely right. is that what happens is that the media doesn't want to the games that the media loves are games that reinforce the media. They don't really love video games. They love their role inside of video games. And you'll notice this whenever you start paying attention to it. The more they find them first, the worse this industry looks for not seeing the same as in politics, too. By the way, so much of that intentional. Now, while I'm sure some of this has likely something to do with the fact that these guys are not getting review copies of these games or early access games, you're really not going to get that. But it does go to prove that the less access they get, the less likely you are to be able to get any coverage. And you know, in the background over the years, I've been talking to a lot of people that are in games media, just because of everything that's been happening in the games industry. And a lot of these guys will tell me straight up that the reason things look like this is because, well, a lot of this stuff is in the editor's hands. stories that they find games that are breaking out or whatever it might be because the priority isa unless something comes along and forces them to pivot basically has to be something that's making a big So it's corpo like the whole thing is corpo it it's basically a corpo circle jerk like I I I find this to be so problematic you can't clickbait win rows you actually have to write an article that's why yeah true right and like honestly the game was really good and like yeah they're built around shilling and pushing corporate uh games because and here's the reason why the reason why they want to shill and push corporate games is because corporate games have a symbiotic relationship with them. Corporate games give them privileges and then they give privileges to the corporate games. That's the problem. And uh it's it's act you could say it's access media, but it's just ass media. I'll be right back. All right. Excuse me. We're back. Sorry about that. Okay, enough of splash for these guys to be able to take notice of it. And yeah, none of it's organic. None of it's based on instinct. None of it has anything to do with what players are talking about or what players are interested in. In a lot of cases, these guys are just ignoring it. That is not a good way to do business. That is definitely not a good way to do journalism. I'll tell you that right now. because it's not. But, you know, I also think the other problem that these guys are running into, especially when it comes to just general relevance at this point, is that with how indie games have been taking over the games industry, games media is just not built to be able to follow them. They don't get the early access. They don't get a lot of access to begin with. They're basically on even footing as the players. And because they're not listening to the audience, they're always a mile behind us. You know, I didn't really take notice of all this until over the last week. I was like, man, Pragmata is all over the news. And a lot of this stuff is culture war clickbait more than anything else. So, I reached out to a couple of writers and these guys just told me straight up, oh yeah, we're trying to squeeze water from a stone right now. None of it's real. What? What is the point? You know, this also makes me think that like this is not just a media issue. This is an industrywide issue. you're seeing a I think it is a mass media issue collectively. I think it's a media issue with TV shows. It's a media issue with movies, with anime. It's a media issue inside of politics as well. And as you have media becoming more democratized and you have the barrier to entry into media that is being basically evaporated and disappeared. Now you have anybody who's able to go out and make a movie. You have anybody who's able to go out and you know be a journalist like Nick Shirley or somebody like that. So whenever there is no barrier to entry, these people can't rely on institutional advantages that they've inherited. They have to actually earn their place. And the reality is they don't want to have to do that. It's hard to do that. So they would much rather, you know, try to reinforce institutional advantages, systematic advantages, so they don't have to compete with other people on even playing field in a meritocracy. And that's the issue is that the internet and media and information is becoming a meritocracy. And I think this is happening. And there are negatives with this, by the way, because it means misinformation is more powerful. But I would say that misinformation isn't really that much different than media's disinformation. But my point is that you have a lot of people now that are able to just get a message out there and there's no noise in between it, right? You can just immediately speak to people and have them listen to you. There's no middleman. There's no editor. There's no control. There's no control. You can just do what you want to do and say what you want to say. And that has been absolutely destructive to media because media is built around the idea that they have control over a narrative. And when they lose control over a narrative, number one, the first thing that you noticed is that the control was there. And that's what's happened. And it's happened with games media, it's happened with politics, it's happens with uh with TV shows, it happens everywhere. That doesn't make sense. Why would misinformation be more powerful in in a meritocracy? Can you explain that? Sure. Uh, it's because a meritocracy is fundamentally democratic and the people are [ __ ] Insane disconnect between the audience and the industries at large because I think a game like this goes to prove that the people that are writing about games, selling games, and funding games have absolutely no clue what players are interested in or what they're actually playing. And when you have an industry that is that disconnected, eventually you're going to start leaving gaps, big gaps, like, I don't know, 200,000 views on a trailer versus a million views on a trailer or in the case of the games industry, well, an entire market that's up for grabs. Well, it's also like another thing is that a lot of people that follow me like the same kind of games that I like. So, they know that if I review a game or I talk about a game positively like that, it's probably going to have X, Y, and Z. And I think that's the reason why people watch me and they want to know because basically like a magazine or like a like a a publication doesn't have like a taste, but an individual does. So if you can find an individual with your tastes, then you'll probably be able to find other games that they like that you'll discover as well. And I think that's what's happened, right? is that like there's like streamers that for example when I see them playing a game I think to myself, oh okay, I'm going to start playing that game too. I bet it's a good game I don't think of Windows is just another hit game. I view this as one of the clearest examples that we have seen in years of an industry that's just been completely left wide open for anybody else to take. I mean I think the demand for a game like this is more than obvious. It's Assassin's Creed Black Flag, which for a lot of people they view it as the peak of the franchise. That came out back in 2013. And by 2026, Ubisoft had said that game had reached 34 million players. Now, in this case, I'm actually going to give Ubisoft a little bit of credit here and say that number is probably not all that far off from the actual copies they moved because I bet no, Black Flag was a massive success and it's been out for 10 years. Video games sell a lot of copies uh towards their tail end. Like the majority of sales happen early on, but you know, you go out 10 years and you're going to see a lot of copies sold. Well, the game did sell 11 million copies in its first year. Notice how they still used copies sold back then. Sea of Thieves announced 40 million players across all platforms back in 2024. I mean, pirate games have always kind of been a big thing for a lot of people. Survival games have been huge for years. It's been one of the most popular genres in gaming. So, a survival pirate game kind of feels like it's one of the most obvious combinations possible right now. Which raises the question, why the hell is an indie studio the one that's leading the charge instead of the AAA companies that were in a perfect position to be able to do so? Well, as you probably guessed it, it's because those companies have spent years trying to tell their players what they want or because they can't make a good game. AAA companies are too big. they're completely bogged down by administration and by HR and by useless uh daycare jobs that those people you should just fire them. Like not only are they useless, but they actually make things worse. Like it's like you have more people in a boat and then eventually the boat sinks. The graph. Yeah, exactly. I was thinking about the graph. Right. administration and like logistics and things like that, like managerial roles are overwhelming. They're using data analysts to try to predict what they think that they want instead of actually just paying attention to what the audience is actually asking for. Ubisoft is the perfect example. In my eyes, they were the king of pirate games with Black Flag. They set the standard in a lot of cases and they clearly saw interest when they made that game. But instead of giving players more of what they actually wanted or building on that foundation in a meaningful way, these idiots tried to force a square peg through a round hole with Skull and Bones, the first quadruple AAA live service game, one of the most aggressively monetized games in recent memory. I heard that this game got released because of some pressure from like the Singaporean government. And it actually had nothing to do with them actually wanting to release it. And it was like a very weird development hell that they got put inside of. And basically everything went wrong for tax reasons. Yeah, exactly. So like I mean I'm not justifying it, but what I'm saying is that there were a lot of secondary like effects that caused this game to be bad that didn't have anything to do with the development team specifically. And well, it was a pirate game that locks players into naval combat only and still somehow manages to screw that up. The naval combat in Black Flag is so much better than Skull and Bones that it genuinely doesn't even make any sense that this actually came from the same publisher. Now, to Ubisoft's credit, and I can't believe I'm saying that twice in one video, they do seem to be seeing the light a little bit. Guys, I think bullying these companies might actually be working. Even I'll say that the Black Flag remake looks like it's shaping up really well, as long as you don't look at the trailer too closely and realize how cartoonish and wonky some of the animations look. And also take too long to think about that it's also being made by the same people that made Skull and Bones, but that's neither here nor there. But surely there's not going to be only five NPC types that you fight for the entire duration of the complete game. Surely surely there's going to be more than that. Surely strongholds won't be defined by their level and they'll actually have different types of encounters. Surely there's no way they're going to do that, right? Man, I just want to say look at what it takes for these guys to be able to answer player demand. Either you're gonna get a soulless live service mess or you're going to get a remake of a game that came out over a decade ago. And I think a lot of this, a lot of their problems, a lot of the industry's problems is coming down to not only these guys just not being able to read the room, but also how absurdly slow they are to move when demand is right in front of them. You guys know that Windrose was supposed to be an MMO and then they just turned on a dime. Within a year, they shifted to a premium survival game because they saw what players were asking for. They also saw live service games fall. That's what happened with Crimson Desert, too. On their face all over the place, and they made the right paid off for these guys. The wider industry just seems incapable of learning from the people that are doing it better than them right now. They can't learn from these indies. They can't learn from the past that built their own companies and they just keep steering straight into icebergs like it's something that they can't avoid. It's like these guys are convinced that we are the ones that are wrong and eventually we are going to come crawling back to them. I mean, hell, as I'm saying this right now, Xbox is turning the canceled Halo Battle Royale that they were making, Halo, now is going to be an extraction shooter. It's like they probably wanted to make a Halo Battle Royale in like 2019, but they realized that by 2024 the trend is over. So now in 2025 or six, they want to make a extraction shooter. So by the time that it's 2030 and it's done, well then the shift will happen again and they're going to have to remake the game again. Like it's just it's embarrassing. Who the [ __ ] wants that? Nobody. I think you should have a mode like this. It's a great idea, but it shouldn't be the focus of the the focus of the game. Like I I'm a big supporter of a Halo Battle Royale, but I think that this should not be the main focus. These guys just won't stop hitting themselves. You know, honestly, now that I think about it, I don't even think the problem is the genres these guys are chasing. I don't think that it's pirate games or extraction shooters or survival games or anything else on paper. I honestly think the real problem is just there's no authentic desire behind anything these guys are making. Like, I can already hear some of these executives at Ubisoft going like, "Oh man, what the hell? Why is Windows doing so well when we made a pirate game, too?" question mark question mark. The answer I bet the guys that work at Ubisoft that are not morons know exactly why that happened. I bet they know just as well as we do. Probably better. It's the same as like I bet over at like Nintendo when POW World came out, I guarantee you there was some [ __ ] executive at Nintendo that slammed down a sheet of papers and said, "I told you they wanted this. I told you this. Why can't we just do why can't you do this?" And yeah, you're going to go out and sue them later on and say, "Oh, well, you can't do this. You can't steal our stuff." Yeah. Yeah, sure. Right. I get it. But actually, you wish you had done this yourself. Is so simple. Windrose was trying to deliver an experience that the player values while Ubisoft was trying to deliver an experience that increased their value. And those two things only drift this far apart when the company's bottom line matters a hell of a lot more than the game or the customer. Windrose delivers on a fantasy. It's not chasing a trend. It's not trying to reverse engineer engagement or anything like that. It's just a well-made game, even in early access, a lot better than a lot of games that was sold at a fair price. Players are going to connect with that a hell of a lot more than they're going to connect with a game that's asking whether or not they want to spend $50 on premium currency so that they can change the color of their ship cannons. Like, how do these guys not? Can you do that? Is that real? That's not real, right? See this? There's no way that's real. I think this is how they lose the industry. Not in one big dramatic moment where we're all going to wake up overnight and all the old guard is gone, but just slowly, piece by piece, as these guys continue to surrender ground that they already had. I think that's what makes this all so embarrassing to me. These guys are not getting beaten out of space they never touched. They're giving up territory that they already owned. They were already making these games. They had that audience. They had the money. And another thing, too, about this game is that here's how I know this game is made by people that aren't [ __ ] the lighting. Any game that has good lighting, I can tell that like because that that's the difference to me between somebody who's like using Unreal 5 because they're a [ __ ] dummy versus somebody who really understands like and I'm not saying this I don't even know if it's made with Unreal 5, but like I like whenever I see a game with very good lighting, I think of the best games ever made. I think about Elden Ring. I think about Expedition 33. I think about Valheim. I think about Bloodborne. I think about um I don't know, I could come up with some other ones. A Twilight Princess. Uh you know, Resident Evil. Uh you know, like this is it's in intentional lighting versus directing. Yes. This is it's it's beautiful. Truly beautiful. And and I think that this is like lighting and art direction lap fidelity. It doesn't m And and Valheim's the proof of that. Like fidelity is great. Things looking good is great. And it should be both ideally, but art direction like this is what really matters the most. And the history, they had the proof of concept for the games that they were already looking for. And instead of building on any of that, they kept walking away to go chase somebody else's bag, somebody else's trend, somebody else's fantasy of infinite growth and impossible potential that they could get out of live service. And every single time they do that, all they're doing is just leaving another opening behind them. Another huge stretch of empty waters for these smaller studios to sail right into. See, there's the pirate reference for the video. This is not just an indie win. I think this is a living example of how relevance is changing hands right now. These big guys are way too slow. They're way too safe. They're more artificial. They're all into forecasting and risk management. Nothing that has anything to do with the audience. Well, the thing is also these small studios are doing risk risk like this studio did forecasting and risk analysis. Every a fivep person studio does forecasting and risk analysis. Like I've worked with games publishers before. I know this like everybody's making these decisions. The problem is that the amount of people making those decisions, it's a lot easier to do that whenever it's two versus 20 smaller teams. These guys are actually hungry. They're focused. They are in love with what they're making. And I think that difference shows. I think that you can feel it in the games almost immediately. And the truth is indies, these guys are just going to innovate a lot harder in these spaces because these guys simply just want it more. Their teams are so much smaller. Their vision is so much more focused. There are fewer hands in the pot. Fewer people trying to turn a fantasy into a monetization model before that game was even made fun. So, the final product is feeling a lot more honest, a lot more direct, and a lot more alive. And honestly, I feel like it actually feels like older games in a lot of ways. This is how these guys are losing their relevance. This is how they lose their territory. And if these companies keep ignoring people, the people that are actually buying these games, then Windrose is not going to be some exception. It's just going to be another warning of what's coming next. I think that the big studios are too big in order to shift focus and to try to do something that's new. That's the big issue. And I think also they legitimately just simply have people that work there that are incompetent. Like they're just simply not good workers. They're not good at, you know, like they're not good at their jobs. Like they they're not creative. They're not smart. They're not inventive. They're just bad. Why do you think that's the case? Uh I think it's the case because of number one, you have large company uh entropy where you just hire infinitely more people. I think also you have the Peter principle that's taking effect with larger companies where people get promoted until they reach a position of incompetence and then they remain at that position because they're not competent at that position so they don't get a uh promotion. Uh I think also you think that selective hiring processes DEI and other quotas have caused this to happen too. And I think that also you've had a culture shift inside of uh you know western journalism and western gaming that the focus of a game needs to have a broader meaning. And I think there's another thing is that this is another big component is that the last of us has done irreparable damage to gaming. And what it's done to gaming is it's allowed a bunch of failed theater kids, failed actors, and failed writers to think that they have their second chance to relive their glory days in high school or [ __ ] college. by well now I can't be a Hollywood writer but I'm going to write a even better story for a video game and so they take their shitty college art projects and they turn it into a video game and then they sync a studio so yeah that those are some of the reasons but I I do think that structurally somebody said chain of command decisions too long yeah structurally it's primarily simply that the companies are too big like they're it's a bureaucracy and it's too big for them to adapt apt to consumer demand with how fast it changes. Now, that's the main reason. Everything else is secondary to that. I'll put it into perspective for you guys. This would be like if Bungie say it. I I said the game created it damaged the industry. The game itself for all like for everything. I've never played it. I've never played The Last of Us. I've heard it was amazing in Destiny and just left that space wide open for anybody else to just slide in and steal that audience. It would be like if Borderlands was absolutely garbage and now the looter shooter genre is wide open for anybody else to just walk in and take it. It would be like I don't know if Boware couldn't make a good game and now all of a sudden you have companies like Laren that have come in and basically taken away the entire Dragon Age audience and then you have Alcat that's waiting in the wings looking to take their Mass Effect audience as well. This is already happening. It's been happening for quite a while now. These guys have been ask why did Capcom adapt? Because they didn't. Uh Dragons Dogma 2 did not adapt. Monster Hunter Wilds for most instances did not adapt. Resident Evil 9 was not an adaptation. They simply have a very good video game model and then they apply that model. It's the same as Nintendo. Nintendo doesn't need to adapt because and great studios like they marched to their own drum beat. Like whenever Miyazaki said, "We're not going to make another [ __ ] you know, Elden Ring because you already made 10 of these [ __ ] Dark Souls games. We're going to make another mech game." I said to myself, "Thank God. Now we're going to get a really good mech game." And we did. So the reality is that the people that are making the game, like Overwatch is a great example of this. Overwatch was so hyped up and so many people were excited for Overwatch because it was being made by Blizzard and Blizzard only printed money and made W's, right? And at least at the time besides Wards or Rainor, but otherwise it was insanely good. So the real thing is that if you have these studios that are run by people and and why is Capcom like that? Capcom is a Japanese company. I don't understand Japanese company culture. It seems like they are more resistant to the corporate entropy than we are. But I'm speaking as somebody who's not familiar with it, right? But my point is that I think that's the reason why. And I think that's the reason why it's not a coincidence that Capcom from Software and also Nintendo that are all studios that march their own drum beat and they make very good games are all Japanese. I think also Chinese studios are manifesting this way too, but it's too early in their life cycle. You know, Capcom and Nintendo have been around for when Nintendo's been around for like what 130 years, but like really like 40, 50 years. Capcom's 40 years. I think it was recently their anniversary. Territory at an alarming rate. And it's something that's going to really come back to bite these guys in the ass, especially because they're the ones that left the door open. They're the ones that let the wolves in. And now the wolves are in. These wolves are hungry. Luckily enough for us. They're all so friendly. It's probably not the best analogy for me to be able to use, but they're all right. It's crazy to see how much wasted potential there is here. I think that's probably the thing that bothers me the most because these guys had the money, they had the infrastructure, they had the experience. Most importantly, they had the talent in a lot of cases and they squandered it. These are spaces that these guys pioneered. These are genres that these guys pioneered and they walked away from. They fumbled the bag all because they were more worried about what somebody else had rather than what they already had. Mhm. Avarice greed. That's what their issue is. Largely being piloted by people that have no idea what they're doing. But I think this is only going to get worse because game development has become that much more accessible to more and more people. It's getting cheaper to do for a lot of people as well. Even though the industry likes to pretend it's not that way. And you're seeing a lot of these smaller by the way like AI with game development like is just going to cut costs probably by you know 20 if not 50%. Be massive teams that are popping up that are able to do incredible things with the technology that they have access to today and they're doing it for a hell of a lot less money a hell of a lot faster. Unreal 5 like everybody like I don't like this but like there's like a meme to hate Unreal. I don't hate Unreal. I think Unreal is amazing. Um, I think that there are a lot of people who have, uh, you know, underdeveloped skill sets that use Unreal and they make Unreal look bad because they're bad. But I think that if you actually look at some of the best games that have been made in the recent years, they're made with Unreal. And so, uh, I think that also like having an engine like that that has become basically like the benchmark, I think that's really helped game development as well. And they're also making the players happy. Yeah. And their engine looks amazing. You know, I also just don't think that a lot of these companies even have what it takes anymore to be able to take back what was once theirs or for them to be able to hold on to whatever they have left. You know, I saw a lot of people that have been talking lately about how like Xbox and PlayStation are going back to console exclusivity and things like that, cheering it on like it's 2010. When was the last time either one of those companies sold a game that you would view as a system seller? something that you would now uh I bought Demon Souls remake for PS5. But the thing is also to me like I'm a streamer so like my my view on this is distorted. Like Halo 3 like Halo 3 was a system seller for sure. What after Halo 3? Bloodborne. Yeah, I got a PS4 for Bloodborne. Okay. All right. What after Bloodborne? after Bloodborne. Bloodborne was 2014, right? Something like that. Uh, God of War. Yeah, God of War. Okay. Yeah. No, no, a good one. Yeah, definitely. Red Dead 2. Yeah, very, very infrequent. And for me now, like this is a good example is that whenever there's a game that comes out that I uh you know, like I want to play, like this is Rise of the Ronin is a great example. So this game came out on the same day as Dragons Dogma 2, but it was only released on PC probably somewhere right before April last year. I waited for an entire year to play this game and it was worth it. It was a great game. Amazing game. I will just simply wait for a game to leave exclusivity. That's it. I'll walk out to go and spend what, $1,000 on a console to be able to buy. I don't think there's a single game I don't have in their library that'd be worth me doing that. Not for the normal person. I'll tell you that right now. A lot of these companies just do not have the juice. Somebody else has come in for the squeeze. There you go. There's the good analogy for the video. Cool. There you go. Anyway, Wind Rose is a blast. If you guys haven't played it, give it a shot. It's well worth the money. It's only 30 bucks right now in early access. You get a little bit cheaper. That's the benefit of early access. One thing I'm really surprised with though, and I didn't really talk about it in the video, performance in the game is like basically perfect somehow. I don't understand. I I really hope and like I almost even thought about messaging Jeff about this is that if he could add in a category for the best optimized game. I would really like that because I think that right now optimization is becoming a lost art and it's becoming like for for like game awards or something like that. Um, and like I'd like to see optimization be heralded as a achievement once again. Like, and again, I'll give three examples. Crimson Desert, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, and Windows. All three of these games were massively graphically intensive, and they were able to manage it at a level that was, you know, not to be predicted, right? And I think especially the the out of the three, I think Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 was the real the real success story there. Like that was incredible. Infield maybe, right? I mean, I I didn't I only played on my phone like once. That was it. That worked. I got rigor for some people, but for the most part, most people say it's been working really well for them. It's a hell of a lot of fun. There's a ton of game to be able to play. You can probably get well over a 100red hours in it just as it is right now. And this is Let's see. [ __ ] 91. Yeah, I I could do like probably five more things in a game. It take me over 100 hours. Only half the game that we're getting so far. So, go give these devs your support because they're looking to support you. All right. Anyway, thank you guys for watching the video. If you guys did enjoy the video, like the video, subscribe to the channel, comment down below. Let me know if you guys have played the game. Let me know what you guys think of the video. Follow me on Twitch. Follow me on Twitter. Also, if you guys might have noticed, there's also some merch for sale down below now. So, yeah, you not going to bend your arm. You can buy it if you want to. Okay, I'm not going to about as far as the plug's going to go on that to be honest with you. Anyway, stay cool, stay, stay safe. I'll catch you guys in the next one. Peace. Legendary drops a true grammar. Yeah. And I think also like here's the thing is that why would somebody want to watch like video games are primarily visual media and I think that text like there's a big problem with text and so uh you got merch. I don't really sell merch. Uh you know you can buy other people's merch. You can buy his merch, right? Uh I'm just I'm not a big merch guy. It's just not for me. Not something I'm interested in. And uh so one of the reasons why I think that um you know media is having problems is that text media is I might even make a long- form video about this is that text media is becoming less popular. And the reason why text media is becoming less popular is because of like four or five different reasons. Now you have number one, one of the big reasons I think is because straight up people don't want to main monitor something. They like most people are multitasking. How many of you guys are listening to this stream right now and you know you'd have to tab out to say me, right? For example, there's probably a lot of them and like you're doing something else. Maybe you're you know doing something at work, right? Yeah, there's a lot of miis. Look at that. Look at all those [ __ ] Miis. It actually [ __ ] crashed the chat. Holy [ __ ] Okay, there's a lot of you [ __ ] out there. So, you're not even watching. You're not even paying. You're just listening to the stream. And uh, you know, that's the reason why I try to talk all the time and make it interesting and, you know, do all that is because I know that sometimes people aren't actually going to be watching, you know, main monitor all the time. And I think this is normal. Like, most streams are second monitor content unless there's like a big event. And even then, you're usually doing something else at the same time anyway. And that's not a bad thing. That's just simply the way that people process content nowadays. So what's happened is that you know you have uh you know people that are you know whenever you're reading text you have to main monitor an article. You have to read the entire article. And then also let's talk about the big one. People can't [ __ ] read anymore. People are [ __ ] There was a study that came out recently that said the majority of adults in America are functionally illiterate below or sorry above a sixth grade level. like or sorry they read and they process words at a sixth grade level. So like when was the last time like we have articles written sometimes like and we've seen this like a resurgent is this on Twitter now but I think that overall text is the it is the best way to transfer information I think because it is it removes the person it removes the voice it removes the intention and it just simply presents the idea now obviously you know like movies can be great now I'm not saying movies are But I think that whenever you're talking about having the purest distillation of an idea, text is the way that you can do it with as little noise as involved. So imagine those same people trying to recursive. Yeah, exactly. More than more than half of uh US K- through2 students do not meet or exceed reading and math standards. Yeah. Cuz they're stupid. And uh again, they're stupid because the education systems tailored towards making sure the bottom 5% graduate. They shouldn't graduate. they should be sent to the [ __ ] mines and then nobody can have to worry about them. That's what I think. But uh you know besides that, so text media is failing in like bunches of different ways. And also fundamentally, why would you write an article or read an article about a video game when you can just simply watch a video about a video game? It doesn't make sense. Like you you you want to have like a direct media comparison and a requisite. And so if you don't have that, then what's the [ __ ] point? So that's I think another big reason why text media has been receding. But I think that the main reason is just simply because people don't have the attention spans and people even worse don't have the reading comprehension. It's scary. It's genuinely