This goes much deeper than we thought..

This goes much deeper than we thought. This is that mixtape game. Okay, let's see it. The western gaming industry is sick, and nothing has made that clearer than mixtape. A 3-hour walking simulator that's barely interactive with mini games designed to be impossible to fail. Rated M for ESRB descriptors including boners sticking out and sexually deviant and kind of deepthroating it. and gagging for characters who are high school teenagers. A creative director whose proudest technical achievement is a saliva particle system for a tongue-kissing scene between miners. Getting the Wait, what is this here? We spent ages getting like the ropes of saliva to work in a particle system and Oh my [ __ ] god. What the [ __ ] is wrong with them? A story that frames a father wanting his daughter to succeed as the villain. Yeah. A straight A athlete abandoning achievement for parties as liberation, weakness, and aimlessness. Romanticized as authentic selfhood. True. A same-sex relationship between teenagers as the emotional core. This is the game that just received the only Perfect 10 IGN has given all year while sitting as the highest rated game on Open Critic. We've already covered just how absurd the institutional press bias around this game's coverage has been in the last video, so we won't go into that again here. But since then, new information has surfaced that makes this whole thing much worse than we thought. All right, let's see. It's been blowing up across social media and I think every gamer needs to see it because the company behind this game is Anna Pererna Interactive, founded by Megan Ellison, the openly queer daughter of Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle Corporation, a man who in September 2025, he's worth 240 billion person on Earth with a net worth peaking near $400 billion. That's a lot of money. who even after market fluctuations remains worth well over 200 billion. One of the wealthiest human beings who has ever existed with his children reportedly receiving $200 million trusts on their 25th birthdays. That's nice. Which is relevant because Ellison founded Anna Pererna in 2011, the same year she turned 25 after dropping out of USC film school in under a year with no formal business education. I can see that. from which point what followed is one of the most ridiculous runs of sustained failure in modern entertainment history. Yeah, I I I didn't know about her first distribution effort was Katherine Bigalow's Detroit, a film about white police officers killing black men during the 1967 riots. So, it's a Wait a minute. So, this is exactly what I said it was. It was a failed art project. You couldn't make it making actual film or media and so you had to try to make a video game instead. I [ __ ] knew it. Which flopped immediately at 24 million on a $40 million budget. That's bad. From there, it only got worse. Vice budgeted at 80 million when insiders said it couldn't cost more than 35 while losing at least 15 to 20. Jesus. If Beiel Street could talk, losing 8 to 10. Uhhuh. Destroyer losing seven, the Sisters Brothers costing 40 million while returning barely a million at the domestic box office. Oh my god. Revisionist western critique critiquing toxic masculinity, frontier capitalism, greed, and patriarchal violence while exploring emotional vulnerability. They put they spent 38 to $40 million on it and they made $3 million. Where'd you go, Bernardet? Opening in 2,400 theaters. to $3.45 million. What a [ __ ] cumulative damage according to Deadline being $200 million in costs. While the entire slate combined for less than 40 million back. Wow. Which means for every dollar that came back from audiences, they spent five. Roughly five had been spent trying to reach them. It's embarrassing. Compounding this, the internal collapse matched the external one. Mhm. Her CFO alongside her president leaving at the same time. Her head of production let go. Soderberg losing 23 million in funding 12 weeks before cameras were set to roll. Alexander Payne left hanging after she offered to partner on downsizing, then went silent while ducking Brad Gay. At a certain point, you have to acknowledge that maybe you're not meant to do this. Like a a after how many failed films and failed art projects are you gonna have until you realize that maybe I'm not very good at this? Calls her for weeks. Her own adviser Skip Brittnam one of the most respected in Hollywood walking away reportedly because she wouldn't listen. Insiders describing her to the Hollywood Reporter as mercurial. Exactly. And and by the way, this is exactly the kind of game that somebody like that would make where they were right about everything. All the older generation was wrong. They were just cool and misunderstood while everybody else was stupid. Oh yeah, this is so [ __ ] perfect. Until when things got bad enough dreams, she retreated to wake up her father's private island in Hawaii to regroup. Which is the professional track record of the person behind the top rated game on Open Critic. Yes. Those films all have something in common, though. Because the losses weren't random incompetence. They were ideologically consistent. That's right. Detroit, about systemic racism in policing. Vice, a political takedown of Republican power. Sorry to bother you, an anti- capitalist satire by activist director Boots Riley. With even that, Annaperna's only profitable film. It follows a black telemarketer who adopts a white voice to succeed at his job. Holy [ __ ] From that era, returning reportedly minimal profit. Neimona acquired after its studio shut down specifically because in Ellison's own account, she liked its LGBT elements. See, A Strange Loop, a musical about a young black queer artist grappling with identity for best musical. How'd that? While on the gaming side, right, the same playbook runs from Gone Home through the artful escape through mixtape. Every major title built around identity as the central axis. And again, the reason why these people are so obsessed about identity is because they're narcissistic. They're narcissistic and self-obsessed and they want everything to revolve around thinking, discussing, and talking about them or the way that they feel or what they think or what their sexuality is or some other vision that they have. That's the reason why it's not even about the sexuality. The sexuality is just a manifestation of the um of basically just the narcissism which once you see the pattern across films, games, theater makes the picture very clear. Yeah. This isn't a businesswoman who happened to lose money. This is an ideologue with infinite capital who uses that capital to fund identity politics projects where losing money isn't a failure of the model but irrelevant to the model. Because the money was never supposed to come from the market. It was always going to come from daddy. Well, it's more that and also people that get hired for these different studios, this is the way that they feel about it, too. is that this is the reason why they don't care about having low sales. It's because they don't really care about the media to begin with. What they do care about instead of that is they care about being able to use that platform to push a from daddy. Well, yeah. I mean, it's it's her dad that's paying for this. I mean, obviously that's what's happening. So, uh yeah. And so that's really the issue is that these people have no problem poisoning and killing a piece of media in order for it to reinforce the way that their ideology is. That's it. Exactly as Variety confirmed when an insider was asked why these losses had been tolerated with the answer on the record being, have you ever seen a parent with their kids? Yeah. Which brings us to the financials because by 2019 the whole thing had spiraled to the point where Annaperna defaulted on over 200 million in debt burned through most of a $350 million credit facility with Chapter 11 on the table. Oh my god. The banks involved JP Morgan alongside Wells Fargo furious because according to deadline sources, bankers felt betrayed on account of Larry Ellison's family office having been portrayed as backing the loans in the marketing documents implying the family stood behind the venture. Of course, except when the actual contracts were signed, there was no formal commitment from Larry Ellison, meaning the banks had lent hundreds of millions partly on the implied guarantee of a sention who technically hadn't guaranteed anything. So, when the debt went bad, Ellison submitted what Deadline called a last and final offer at 80 to 85, forcing the banks to absorb a 20% loss. Mhm. Not because they wanted to, but because Ellison holds billiondoll personal credit lines with both institutions. Yep. As Deadline sources put it, putting the daughter of one of the richest men on the planet into bankruptcy would have been political suicide for the bankers involved. I mean, I don't really see how this is like really that outrageous or crazy. Like, yes, obviously this person's getting preferential treatment and they're getting opportunities and money that they wouldn't naturally have because their dad's rich. I mean, that's just what happens, right? I mean, it's just the way it is. It's literal corruption. Well, it's not corruption. It's just simply the way of doing business. Like, this is just this is the way business is done. Whether you like it or not, this is the way people do business because you don't alienate a man worth hundreds of billions over his daughter's projects if you want to keep doing business with Oracle. So, the banks swallowed it and Aperna survived. A company that wouldn't exist without the gravitational force of one family's wealth bending the financial system around it lived to see another decade. And keep in mind that like this is a great example of what I was saying about how a lot of this like woke narrative and like all these people this is completely a top-down ideology that's being manufactured by people with a lot of money in order to sigh up the public into believing something that's not true. Somehow parallel to all of this, Ellison had also launched a gaming publishing division in 2016 called Annaperna Interactive, extending the same ideological playbook into a new medium. Gone Home: The Artful Escape, Mixtape, identity first narratives published alongside titles like Outer Wilds, Stray, What Remains of Edith Finch that gave The Division enough critical credibility to mask the same identity politics obsession running underneath alongside the same. And also, by the way, this is the reason why I will always do this for these games. I will do my best to kill every single one of these woke ideology games. I will I will kill them. I will laugh whenever the studios get shut down. I'll post memes about it. Like I I will do everything that I possibly can to kill this entire ideology because this is something that's being infected into society in a completely non-organic way. This is not something that the public is simply beginning to shift perspectives on. This is a manufactured uh changing of opinions that's being done by literal billionaires trying to push a narrative that doesn't exist. And the funny thing about it is that we do have the power to do that and we continuously exercise that power every single day. Eventually her studio will fail. Eventually her dad will get tired of paying for this. I don't think her dad probably agrees with a lot of this. He probably thinks it's pathetic. Like, what do you think the probability is? Like, how many times do you hear Larry Ellison talking about his daughter? Basically, never. It's always about his son. I wonder why. Probably because the daughter's a [ __ ] [ __ ] That's the reality. So, I bet like in his mind, like if you were to read Larry Ellison's mind, he's probably thinking, "Why can't she just get it right? Why can't she just do something normal?" Like that's pro her brother, too. Yeah. Exactly. And so that's really probably what's happening here. Financial dysfunction. I mean, he's not stupid except the team running it. They watched the film side's dysfunction for years. The losses, the debt, the mercurial leadership, the retreat to Daddy's Island. They'd seen what Ellison's management produced when left unchecked, which is precisely why in 201 get out. Nathan Garry, the president, alongside co-heads Deborah Mars with Nathan Vela, spending months negotiating to spin off the gaming division as an independent. I guess this is the reason why games devel games journalists resonated so much with this game is it was about a person that was you know the person that made the game that was involved with this was a career failure that constantly was surviving off of other people's good and best intentions that created nothing of value ever that was just a constant black hole of money and that never experienced any degree of hardship trouble or any level of actual friction in their entire life. So this is the manifestation of that ideology and I think that it makes a lot of sense now. It does. That a clean break from the centi billionaire's daughter whose film operation had burned through 200 million while theirs had built something people actually respected only for Ellison to enter the negotiations then pull out triggering what can only be described as a mutiny. Every single member of the team resigning within 2 weeks. their statement to Bloomberg reading, "All 25 members of the Annaperna Interactive team collectively resigned. How much of a [ __ ] do you have to be to let something like that happen?" This was one of the hardest decisions we have ever had to make. Oh my god. 25 out of 25. Development partners left scrambling. Bladeunner 2033, one she didn't have to pay for. None of which mattered to Ellison, who simply replaced them. Bringing back Hector Sanchez from Epic, hiring new staff, continuing operations. Because that's what infinite capital allows. It makes a fullscale mutiny feel like a staffing hiccup. From there, who she brought in to replace them tells you everything about where this publisher is heading. Because earlier, we mentioned that the gaming arm, despite everything wrong with the film side, still managed to publish some genuinely good games under Gary's team. titles that weren't all ideological projects, which is partly why the division built credibility the film arm never had. But the person Ellison hired to run it after the mutiny is Leanne Lumbi, who came over from Netflix in January 2025. And Lumbie sat on the board of Wings Interactive, an investment fund for teams where women and gender marginal Oh my [ __ ] god, bro. Oh my god. How what is this? Another [ __ ] ideologue, bro. I know. Developers hold key positions with a selection committee composed only of women. While currently a wow. This, by the way, this is the reason why you have to be so aggressive against these people is that if you don't, they have so much institutional influence that they'll be able to push whatever narrative they want. That's the against them. And if you don't do that, they'll just keep doing this more and more. And I'm very proud of you guys. I am. and the gaming community at large for being so aggressive and hostile towards this. And I think that we've killed a lot of these games and ruined these studios. And I feel like again, it's kind of like chemotherapy for a cancer. And it's not over yet, but it's not in stage four anymore. I'd say it's still in stage two. Things have gotten a lot better. We've improved dramatically. So it'll take more time, but things are going in that direction ultimately. And I I'll explain like my my mindset with this is that you have to go after these people in a multifaceted way. And so what that means is destroying not only their companies but also their personal reputations as well. And if you do that and you take a multifaceted approach to them the way that for example people are doing with an Anita Sarkeesian you make these people themselves radioactive and so it's not enough that you know for example they try to move past it never let them move past it they can't move past it because them moving past it allows them to just simply control more capital to do more and then they'll go back to doing the same thing. That's it. And so non-binary. Exactly. And so uh how does one improve dramatically? Well, I think that we've done we've improved traumatically. Well, we've done that, too. But I meant dramatically. And this is this is great. It It's amazing. I'm very happy. sitting on the board of Wiggi, Women in Games International, a nonprofit with a no woman no panel policy that serves women, fem identifying and non-binary professionals. There you go. Two separate DEI organizations. Someone whose entire professional identity is built around identity politics advocacy. I want to say that this is something that probably might not sound good, but my main motivation for doing stuff like this is my pure hate for these people. I'm not motivated by making the world a better place. I'm motivated by making the world a worse place for them. That's my main goal. That's what I I I wake up in the morning. I get up. I get motivated. What gets me to go on every single day? They said the strongest thing is not hate, it's love. I would disagree. I would disagree. I I I I never get tired of it. I I Where do we sign up? I mean, plenty of places, right? And uh that's it. Maybe clarify who you hate so you avoid getting shot. Well, I I think it'd be hard for me to do that. I mean, there's such a long list. And it's not hard to see where this is going. It's just the truth. With Gary's team gone and someone like the helm, Interactive is likely heading the same direction as the film arm, more ideological projects, more identity first publishing. The approach that burned through 200 million in costs for 40 million back. It's probably more than being by the way, it's probably more to gaming. Funded by daddy, accountable to nobody. Mhm. Which brings us back to the mixtape itself. Didn't work very well because this is where Anna Perna's money meets the product. This walking simulator is loaded with licensed music from the Smashing Pumpkins. That's right. Joy Division, Iggy Pop, DVO, Cure, the Jesus and Mary chain, Lush. Licensing tracks from artists like these doesn't come cheap. And 28 of them across a 3-hour game is an enormous amount of money. On top of It probably isn't. They were probably able to leverage connections that they had through other like tangential relationships through Paramount and that allowed them to get this at a much cheaper rate and probably what I would assume they did. I mean there's a chance they could have said that they were doing it at the base rate and then you know written it out that way for balance sheet purposes. is I mean there's a lot of ways that you could take advantage of this right that Annaperna shipped custom press kits to journalists with functioning retro CD players and cost headphones inside I didn't get one all for a 3hour walking simulator made by 12 people in Melbourne and at some point you just have to ask what you're looking at because when a centiionaire's publishing operation pours that kind of money into a game that peaks at 2,000 players on Steam while walking away with the only perfect 10 of the year. The instinct gamers had from day one that this is an industry plant starts looking less like instinct and more like a reasonable conclusion when you trace the money. Which raises most of the time the thing that makes sense is true. It's the way it is. The obvious question, what is the industry plant actually planting? Understand everything we've covered. How is it getting good steam reviews? I think that the Steam reviews are not authentic. The reason why is because the review, let me think of a way to say this. Uh the ratio of reviews to players is outside of the standard expectation. And it's so far outside of that standard expectation that without some sort of third-party explanation for it, something went wrong. Something happened. I don't know what it is, but I know something happened. Video hasn't made it clear enough. The answer is identity politics. A billionaire's daughter who's never experienced economic hardship in her life using Oracle money to publish entire lineups of products where she's the oppressed. The white male gamer buying her product is the oppressor. Because when you strip it all down, that's all wokeism is, isn't it? Collectively, Larry Ellison is actually based. He invested a billion to help Elon by Twitter. He just can't say no to his woke daughter. I think that you're right. I do. I think you're right. I think I every single time I've heard of Larry Ellison doing something with like any of his kids, it's always that one son that does everything. I mean, I I Yeah. And I bet he knows what's a poor guy. It is what it is. It is what it is. And if I was him, if I was Larry Ellison, would I keep funding my daughter's [ __ ] like this? I can't promise that I wouldn't. You know, when it's your kid, I get it. I'm not blaming him. I'm blaming her. Guilt dressed up as social justice, an oppressor versus oppressed framework. Where your race, like Hunter Biden, Yeah. sexual orientation is all that defines you. Just being honest. where the white heterosexual male carries the guilt of the dominant group regardless of whether he's rich or poor, powerful or powerless. Where oppression has nothing to do with economics and everything to do with identity. Meaning, it doesn't matter how much money you have or how little. What matters is what you are. Which is why a billionaire's queer daughter paying off 200 million through Oracle connections is the oppressed. While a gamer paying off a mortgage through 500 a.m. alarm clocks 5 a.m. Why a millionaire Middle Eastern Twitch streamer out earning his audience a hundfold can invoke racial persecution. Why a Hollywood superstar actress can claim gender discrimination from inside a career most men couldn't dream of. It's actually insane how hypocritical these people are. It is like I don't know why. Like I'm so glad that there is such a culture now of hating them. There is. And like that there it like we've created such an uncomfortable and and bad environment for them. It's something that like I whenever I see it in like in on the internet and I realize that I helped make this slightly worse, I feel so happy. I do. I think to myself it's like, you know, it's like you're seeing a house that you built. Well, this is like seeing a house that's on fire with a fire that you started. Feels good. Now, I might not have started the fire, but you know, I maybe I threw a couple of matches in there. That's the framework. It does. That's what Ellison's entire catalog from Gone Home to Mixtape functions as a syllabus for. Cosplaying as marginalized, performing oppression as entertainment. Yes. Bankrolled by daddy, crowned by the press, defended by the platforms, while the audience that pays for all of it is told to shut up, stop questioning, consume. Game after game after game. That is, without a shred of exaggeration, the state of the Western gaming industry in 2026. Not a good place to be in. I'll leave it there. If you got something out of this video, I'd really appreciate a like, subscribe, drop a comment if you've got thoughts. If you want to support how every industry membership and Discord are both linked in the description, and thank you to everyone who's already joined. How much credibility do you think IGN lost? One last thing before I go. Quick, I think IGN has I've said this before, right? is that, you know, they should really be getting interviewed by like CERN and like uh, you know, [ __ ] MIT. Like, you thought that it was impossible to divide by zero, but somehow they just keep cutting their credibility in half. It's impressive. To today's sponsor, Instant Gaming, I'm sure most of you already know what a key reseller is at this point, so I won't bore you with the pitch. Just know if you want to grab games cheaper than Steam, there's a link in the description. Thanks to Instant Gaming for supporting the channel. Until the next one, take care. This a good video. I like this. I I'll link you guys the video. I've seen a couple of these. I think that he made a video about uh what the [ __ ] was it? Um Crimson Desert. Crimson Desert. That's what it was. Can't spell IGN without ignorance. IGN makes good decisions sometimes, but not other times. I would say most of the time they don't. Uh I would say that pretty much for sure. And uh yeah, I'm much more likely to play a game IGN gives a five to a seven or anything to give it a 10. I mean, I generally try to play new games that come out regardless of what they are. But overall, I'm really happy to see the community pushing back against this and not allowing people to just keep pushing this like [ __ ] narrative and like [ __ ] narratives in general, things that are just like actively hostile towards players. And just overall, I think that things have gotten a lot worse for these people.