The State of the Games Industry with Nathan Grayson

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Speaker 16 Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, EdZitron.

Speaker 16 And today I'm joined by the esteemed Nathan Grayson, co-founder of the worker-owned gaming website Aftermath. Nathan, thank you for joining me again.

Speaker 7 Yeah, thank you for having me.

Speaker 16 So you just hit two years. What's it been like?

Speaker 16 What have you learned in the last two years from doing this?

Speaker 7 Yeah, just nothing. You know, we came in as experts.
We were, you know, we didn't need to learn anything at all. We were perfect.

Speaker 7 Yeah. No, we have learned so, so, so, so, so much.

Speaker 7 You know, we entered it as five people who wrote for a living, who never really had much experience with the business side of things because that wasn't really our purview.

Speaker 7 And when you go from being at a major publisher of any sort, whether in our cases that was GeoMedia with Kotaku or the Washington Post or Vice or whatever else,

Speaker 7 you know, a lot gets handled for you, whether that is payroll or promotion or in some cases social media, things of that nature.

Speaker 7 We have to do all of that ourselves now, in addition to expanding the business, finding ways to grow, finding ways to support ourselves and keep it sustainable or even make it sustainable in the first place.

Speaker 7 So part of the reason we decided to do a relaunch was to kind of plant our flag and say like, yeah, you know, we're

Speaker 7 a real grown-up business now. Whereas when we first started, we kind of just were cobbling things together and learning as we went along.

Speaker 16 So tell me about the relaunch. What you've been doing? You moved to Ghost, right?

Speaker 7 Yeah, yeah. We moved over to Ghost.

Speaker 7 Yeah, so we relaunched the website.

Speaker 7 We think it looks better and nicer now. There are more design possibilities.

Speaker 7 And also, like, we can accept more kinds of payment and have more ways to reach readers and let them know, like, hey, your subscription is expiring, all this nitty-gritty stuff.

Speaker 7 But yeah, we just decided to move over there because it offers more flexibility. Sites like 404 and Hellgate are on Ghost and have nothing but good things to say.

Speaker 7 And like, you know, we appreciated lead, which is what we were using before. That's what Defector is on.

Speaker 7 But yeah, they're just a few things that we felt like we were not going to be able to get from lead within a semi-reasonable timeframe. And Ghost already offered them.

Speaker 7 So we're like, yeah, makes perfect sense.

Speaker 16 It's also grown into like a vibrant website.

Speaker 16 At first, you were kind of testing things out, but now you've got a very developed stack of people. You've got freelancers now, right?

Speaker 7 Yeah, yeah. We use freelancers or we accept freelance submissions.
We also have two regular contributors, Nicole and Isaiah. They are in our Slack.
They write for us, you know, every week.

Speaker 7 Yeah. You know, we're, we're going places.
We're still a core staff of five.

Speaker 7 But in the near future, you know, should we accrue enough subscriptions, we'd like to hire people on full-time and grow our staff.

Speaker 7 Again, similar to what we've been seeing with, well, I think 404 now has regular contributors as well. I'm not sure if they have anyone new full-time yet.
Hellgate, I know, has grown.

Speaker 7 So yeah, you know, again, we are following in the footsteps footsteps of, at least relative to ourselves, giants, and we would like to keep doing that.

Speaker 7 But that requires growing more, making more money, all that stuff, you know, typical challenges of a small business, but mapped onto independent media.

Speaker 16 So, and coverage-wise, you're fairly wired now. Like you cover games, but kind of in the dead spin before the bullshit happened style thing, where it's like gaming can mean many different things.

Speaker 7 Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, and also like, I think from the get-go, what we wanted to do was cover games in the way that Defector covers sports, which is to say that, you know, we can cover a lot of things.

Speaker 7 A lot of things fall under that umbrella. And on top of that, like, you know, games are relevant to many different areas as well.

Speaker 7 Like, and so I think that compared to other video game websites, for example, we spend a lot of time covering politics.

Speaker 7 For a long time, there's this refrain that, like, oh, you know, games are escapism and like you should keep politics out of them, blah, blah, blah, which has always been bullshit, of course.

Speaker 7 But I think that even relative to our coverage at other places, like before we made Aftermath, you know, all of us have been fairly politically minded in our careers.

Speaker 7 But Aftermath, like, we really go in on that.

Speaker 7 And I'm very proud of what we've accomplished on that front in terms of just covering that overlap, especially as it's become more and more relevant to the modern day.

Speaker 7 You know, like when Trump was running for president again, he was meeting with gaming influencers.

Speaker 7 Like, you know, you have all of these things where now the people who used to be considered just like outcast nerds are in incredible places of prominence.

Speaker 16 Yeah, and it's weird. I don't like seeing games bleed into politics at all.
I think we really, I think we were good in about 2011 with Home Front,

Speaker 16 which was the, I think, the only necessary political game where what if North Korea radiated the Mississippi River?

Speaker 16 Classic game. I'm sure I'm going to get some great emails about the fact that there were political games before that.
And you're wrong. But

Speaker 16 it is interesting where you are where aftermath is at in the current milio of like politics and digital culture because it does feel like streaming and gaming have just kind of meshed into everything now outside of politics you've got a bunch of tons of like nba players and nfl players who game and stream regularly but you've also got these particularly vile and not vile streamers who do it too yeah

Speaker 7 Well, yeah, and I mean, we just recently, this week, in fact, we ran a story about kind of the aftermath of one person, the aftermath, haha, dot say.

Speaker 7 But anyway,

Speaker 7 about

Speaker 7 an employee at a company called Sucker Punch, they made a ghost of Yote recently

Speaker 7 getting fired as a result of a joke about Charlie Kirk. They are one of the people who got swept up and all of that.

Speaker 7 And so we ran a story about kind of what has happened to them since that occurred and also just sort of like what that moment actually was versus what you might be able to misconstrue it as.

Speaker 7 So, you know, at the time, there was all of this furrer over anybody saying anything negative about Charlie Kirk.

Speaker 7 And so this person got fired for a relatively innocuous joke that was probably in bad taste, but whatever.

Speaker 7 And so what she's contending now is like, you know, two months down the line, she's like, this wasn't actually about the joke.

Speaker 7 It was because there was a harassment mob that already existed that decided to weaponize this person's death to get some people fired and to, you know,

Speaker 7 basically instill silence in them and anybody else who witnessed that happening.

Speaker 7 And, you know, just generally taking the games industry to task for not defending its people better. Because when this occurred, you know, the company in question,

Speaker 7 at least she says, did not really like come to her or give her a warning or really do anything. They were just like, yeah, you're fired.

Speaker 7 And, you know, as long as the games industry continues to let that happen, which they've been basically doing since the original Gamergate back in 2014.

Speaker 16 As you would well know.

Speaker 7 Right. Then these kinds of things, like that will just continue to let these mobs run rampant and kind of dictate the pace of conversation around games and even in some cases, how they get made.

Speaker 16 It is so strange.

Speaker 16 As a child, I dreamed of the day that gaming would be a normal thing that everybody talked about. Now I feel like that was a monkey's paw situation.
Maybe we should have less discussion of it.

Speaker 16 You know, no, I don't even mean in a mediated sense, in the sense that something happened as games came to prominence that dragged up a ton of stuff within gamers that wasn't anything to do with games at all.

Speaker 7 Yeah. Well, I mean, I think a few things happened.
One of them is that, you know, for a while, games were considered this thing like for nerds and for like outcasts.

Speaker 7 And so there was always that bit of a chip on people's shoulder.

Speaker 7 And that like once the mainstream started to care about games, they're like, hey, well, you know, these are ours.

Speaker 7 And if you do anything to them, if they get altered to fit your tastes and your needs, then we're going to like do an uprising or like get really mad.

Speaker 7 But also that kind of energy.

Speaker 7 That kind of like, you know, faux victimhood is very easily, easily weaponized by other forces. And I think that the the far right seized upon that quite early, again, with Gamergate.

Speaker 7 They noticed that there's this latent kind of resentment running through games-seeking audiences, whatever you want to call them. Yeah, like, yeah, yeah, we, we need to find a way to seize upon that.

Speaker 7 Um, and Gamergate was the perfect flashpoint.

Speaker 7 And ever since then, you know, people much smarter than me have said this, but like Gamergate was the canary in the coal mine for a lot of the modern alt-right.

Speaker 7 And that's sort of just how it all started. started.

Speaker 16 And I wish that they would get angry at the real villains, which is electronic arts.

Speaker 16 And the actual, because can you imagine if any, even an iota of this vile poison in their veins was a

Speaker 16 like, I know this is somewhat of a tangent, but I swear I'm going somewhere. Playing Madden last night because I hate myself.
And it's just, this game has been broken in the same way for 15 years.

Speaker 16 There are little, you can play a game and without fail, we'll see a bug.

Speaker 16 Menus will hitch, menus won't load.

Speaker 16 And it's just see, like these harassment campaigns, I think, are so, as you've well put, so nakedly not about video games, but just aggression against woman, aggression against any outliers, which is ironic considering gamers' historic outlier status.

Speaker 16 Oh, yeah, absolutely. Well, yeah, you know.

Speaker 7 Again, as with a great many things, obviously the real villain, especially in the case you're describing, is capitalism. Yes.

Speaker 7 And like, you know, if you look at Madden, sports games in general, as you're saying, they've been broken in fundamental ways for like decades, but what's changed about them is that they're just more heavily monetized now.

Speaker 7 Yeah. These companies have found more ways to extract money, yep, to extract tons of money from them.

Speaker 7 And like there is anger at games changing in that way, but not to this degree where it's like we're going to, you know, harass people.

Speaker 7 I mean, there are in some cases harassment mobs that have gone out of the game.

Speaker 3 Which they shouldn't do to anyone, just to be clear.

Speaker 7 No one should. But also a lot of the developers who end up in those crosshairs are also just marginalized, and that's the main reason people are going after them.

Speaker 7 Yeah, it's very odd because you would think that games would be this kind of, could be this hotbed for like resistance to the ravages of capitalism in that, you know, so many games present effectively what are supposed to be fair structures, right?

Speaker 7 You get out what you put in.

Speaker 7 Like, you know, you gain experience for all of your work. You gain rewards, things like that.

Speaker 7 And so in a lot of ways, gamers' brains are tailored to expect a certain degree of fairness and like egalitarianism.

Speaker 7 And so you would think that gamers would look at like all these structures and say, okay, well, there's a problem with this structure. It's not fair and we should do something about it.

Speaker 7 But, you know, again, they've been misled by a bunch of various forces, including the powers that be, including the people.

Speaker 7 who are like are in charge of making the games, not the developers, the executives.

Speaker 7 And so they just never quite get there but it is kind of funny to think about like you know this could be the place where it all starts gamers could start their revolution

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Speaker 16 But I think the aftermath does a really good job of that because you have the social stuff. I hate the term social justice.
It's the correct one, but it's been bounced around too much now but it's

Speaker 16 it's a place where I think you have done you have done some of the best labor work I have like you have a labor section and I think that people need to real I think people need to see games developers as laborers far more because I think there are plenty of people who are like oh these game how much do game developers make 700,000 a year like they they have these they see them as this ivory tower job versus a pretty brutal working stiff job at times

Speaker 16 And then even more so in things like QA, you know, as long as that still exists as an industry.

Speaker 7 Yeah, right. Until it gets replaced by AI in Square Enix's case.

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 16 I could not remember the company. Thank you for being here.

Speaker 7 They want to replace 70% of their QA or have 70% of their QA done by AI. I'm sure that they have some like bullshit line about how that won't displace labor, but it's like, but you just

Speaker 11 explained.

Speaker 16 Thinking this out loud, that doesn't make any fucking sense. First of all, QA, from what I understand, is a lot of repetitive tasks.
So I assume that that's why they think AI will work.

Speaker 16 But is it going to play the games?

Speaker 7 Because that's not a problem. So another big problem with that whole line of reasoning is that QA is like a relationship, right? Yeah.
And that you don't just need QA people to do the job.

Speaker 7 You also need them to be effective communicators to the rest of the studio in terms of what they should be looking for, in terms of how to reproduce various bugs and other issues.

Speaker 7 And another like big element of QA that is is super underappreciated is that typically, because a game is made in bits and pieces, QA is the part of the studio that earliest and most often gets a full picture of what the game is like to play in its totality as like a complete product.

Speaker 7 And so they can most often answer the question early on, like, is this good? Is it fun?

Speaker 7 Admittedly, they're playing it in a very specific way. So they're not necessarily playing it to enjoy themselves, but they do have that like broader overview of what it is kind of turning out to be.

Speaker 7 And they're all of those things that I just mentioned, AIDS.

Speaker 16 QA is

Speaker 16 quality assurance. I probably should have led with that.

Speaker 16 But no, you're right. And it's, I think seeing games as a labor thing is, so it's genuinely one of my favorite things about Aftermath is that if you talk about, I know this is a little bit

Speaker 16 copium, hopium, whatever you call it, but it's if you do want to change things, you need to educate people about what's going wrong and why.

Speaker 16 I'm not saying that vile alt-right people are finding aftermath and going, oh, I'm changed, but it's, I feel like you have to build a body of work to explain the overall problem.

Speaker 16 And it is a label one. It is the fact that, so I'm paraphrasing my girlfriend here, but it's like with movies, it's like there are movies that are $100 million, there are movies that are $1 million.

Speaker 16 And I feel like games is in this weird position too, where it's everything has to be triple-A, everything biggest, most hugest game. And then there are indie games.

Speaker 16 And it's, I feel like that, like the capitalism problem you've been discussing is there too, where it's the way games are made is broken.

Speaker 16 And I feel like Aftermath does a good job of explaining how the breaking has happened, but also the consequences of that fracturing. Yeah.

Speaker 7 And then also, like, I think people just don't understand the scale of game making in general either.

Speaker 7 Like, you know, certainly there's AAA and there's indie, but there's all sorts of stuff in between.

Speaker 7 A lot of indie games, you know, because like there's been this larger thing happening in video games where like it's been hard for companies to secure investment. A lot of games have gotten canceled.

Speaker 7 A lot of studios have had to break up or go their separate ways.

Speaker 7 And so for a moment, there was this refrain of, okay, well, like, you know, as a result of all of that and all these layoffs happening in the AAA space, you know, pretty much every major AAA game company, be it Microsoft, Sony, EA, Ubisoft, Square Enix, whatever, has had major layoffs in the past couple of years.

Speaker 7 And so a lot of people saw that and said, well, you know, AAA is collapsing. It's going to go away in five or 10 years.
Indies will save us, though.

Speaker 7 But, you know, indies are facing their own problems, again, in terms of securing investment.

Speaker 7 And also, like, a lot of indie games are not just, you know, one person in their garage or a few people making a game for, you know, pocket change.

Speaker 7 These are also full-scale productions. These can have 30, 40, even sometimes 100 people working on them.

Speaker 7 And they all require paychecks. And so quickly the price for that on a per annual basis goes up to, you know, over a million dollars easily.

Speaker 7 and so it's like you know indies can't save us because they're facing a lot of the same headwinds as everybody else um and recognizing how games are made i think allows people to better get a grip on that and be like okay well then the games industry is actually facing very different challenges than it might seem on the surface Yeah,

Speaker 16 even I, in my own ignorance, didn't even think of the kind of messy middle of what 100 people working, 100 people would be an indie game studio, I guess.

Speaker 15 It It can be.

Speaker 7 It depends on the studio. I mean, some of them are, you know, owned by, again, Microsoft.
Microsoft owns like half the games industry now, which is also bad.

Speaker 7 But others are, yeah, doing their own thing and either working with publishers or securing outside funding.

Speaker 7 And, you know, for every one Claire Obscure Expedition 33 you get, which that studio is allegedly around 30 people, but they had tons of other folks touch the game over the course of its development.

Speaker 7 You know, you don't get a lot of other games. They're like, others just get canceled.
They die on the vine. They can't secure funding.

Speaker 7 And, you know, studios either lay people off or cancel games or both.

Speaker 16 Yeah. I mean, even my favorite game of the year, Dead Zone Rogue by Prophecy Games, which I love, even that one, they did Tribes 3 rivals and just appear to have stopped updating it.

Speaker 16 Which it's just, it

Speaker 16 almost feels like we're reaching a breaking point with this. And I was just

Speaker 7 going to briefly talk about the number of times that people have tried to bring back tribes and it didn't work.

Speaker 16 It's insane. How many tribes get 17, 25, 100 of them? I've been playing tribes games since I was like in my teens.

Speaker 7 Yeah. Why? Like, in theory, tribes should be able to find an audience.
Like, we live in a time now where people are always looking for a new multiplayer game.

Speaker 7 Tribes is really interesting and different compared to pretty much every multiplayer game.

Speaker 7 You can ski around and like, you know, figure out your trajectories and launch blue discs at people it rules it's one of like the best multiplayer shooters ever in my opinion um and like you know giant maps huge landscapes that's what like battlefield is doing now people love that shit and so it's so awesome

Speaker 7 that each and every revival and they've been like relatively well spaced out it's not like they're you know doing these in like staccato rhythm um but each and every revival has just you know been dead on arrival basically like

Speaker 7 it's it's really sad to see

Speaker 16 yeah six of them six of them it looks like my bad I can't count. And it's with that one, maybe it's the indie game thing, which is a giant map is probably not that easy to put together.

Speaker 16 And if you look at,

Speaker 16 I didn't play Tribes 3 Rivals, but if you look at Dead Zone Rogue, which is an FPS roguelike, it's very, I don't want to say small, but it's condensed. It's like a very focused game.

Speaker 16 But I want to change, because I'll just talk about Dead Zone Rogue for an hour,

Speaker 16 to the Steam Machine. How are you feeling? So Steam Machine, as you'll know from the episode before this one with Steve Burke, it's the new gaming console style Steam PC thing.

Speaker 7 How are you feeling about it? I'm oddly hopeful.

Speaker 16 Yeah, I mean, so

Speaker 7 Valve tried to release Steam Machines a handful of years ago as well, I think in the mid-2010s, and they kind of crashed and burned, or rather, they just never took off.

Speaker 7 I think that Valve learned a lot of very important lessons from that.

Speaker 7 And I think that also just the timing is much better now in terms of what people are looking for, in terms of the prominence of PC gaming.

Speaker 7 Back in the mid-2010s, consoles still kind of ruled the roost.

Speaker 7 Whereas now, if we're talking about higher-end video game playing, pretty much everyone does it, or not everyone, but a lot of people do it on their PCs because that also allows them to create content,

Speaker 7 stream, things of that nature. And then Steam itself, which Valve owns and operates, has also become so much bigger than it was even back then.
It was already huge.

Speaker 7 Now it basically is the epicenter, the mecha of PC gaming. And so then you get to the Steam machines themselves.

Speaker 7 And there's long been this perception that the PC is for a lot of normal people kind of impenetrable from a gaming standpoint. You know, you got to install the game and install these patches.

Speaker 7 And then, like, you know, maybe it won't work with your particular hardware configuration, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 7 And so what Valve is basically saying is, okay, well, we will handle all that for you, as you might expect with a video game console. And then, you know, you just click on a game and it'll work.

Speaker 7 And they have a couple of things working in their favor on that front. One is that they have since made Steam OS.
Steam Steam OS is a great little operating system for video games.

Speaker 7 That's the whole point.

Speaker 7 Again, it's super plug and play. It's really easy.

Speaker 7 And then also the entire model they're going to deploy on Steam Machines, they've already successfully deployed with Steam Deck, which is their handheld. Steam Deck is an incredible piece of hardware.

Speaker 7 It is deceptively powerful. It feels really nice in your hands.
And it's all entirely Steam OS based.

Speaker 7 And so you can can just install a game on it um steam os will let you know if it's going to run well or not um valve has this entire system where like they basically like will play games to see if they are deck verified or if they're like you know sort of edge cases where they'll work but they're not optimized or if they're just like going to be a mess they let you know that up front so you can go in with a good idea of how it's all going to function and then you just do it um it's great it's super smart and then you have your saves across like steam deck and every other place that you can install steam so you could theoretically be playing on your steam Deck in one room and decide you want to play on your TV or your monitor.

Speaker 16 Just make your Steam machine.

Speaker 7 Yeah. Yeah.
You can do.

Speaker 7 Yeah. It's so, it's so nice.
It's, it's, I mean, say we will about Valve. They are like a libertarian kind of nightmare company.

Speaker 7 Um, but they do still make cool stuff, unlike every other video game company that's now trying to like cut their way to profitability by laying everyone off.

Speaker 16 I'm, I want it, I was talking to Steve, I want this to kill the egg. I don't know if it will.
It's going to come down heavily to if it's $600 versus $1,200 and if it's sold in retailers.

Speaker 16 But it's, I want it to smash Microsoft. I also think, and this is a somewhat,

Speaker 16 no, people aren't going to like this.

Speaker 16 I don't think Game Pass is good for the games industry. No, no.

Speaker 16 And I think a lot of people would agree with you, at least in the games industry. Yeah, it's, I don't think, I think it create...

Speaker 16 I don't know. I have a weird thing with streaming services in general.
I think that they create a race to the bottom and actually make things way more unfair, but I like that Steam charges per game.

Speaker 16 I think it's good to do that and I think a variety of games is good and a variety of prices as well. I don't know.

Speaker 16 I know they're a deeply imperfect company, but I genuinely think Microsoft might be walking away from the Xbox. Or at least they're not sure why they have it anymore.

Speaker 7 Yeah, well, I mean, they have their whole like campaign now where

Speaker 7 they're basically saying like anything can be an Xbox. That's their marketing line.

Speaker 7 So the basic concept is like, you know, now Xbox is more of an ecosystem, an app-based ecosystem that lives on not just the gaming platform that you have, you know, in your living room, but like it could be on your smart TV.

Speaker 7 It could be on your phone. It could even like be in your car.

Speaker 7 And like,

Speaker 7 it just seems in general that they don't really know what the brand is anymore. And that also goes back to like the game selection.

Speaker 7 What is the last major first-party Xbox game that came out or that became the face of the platform?

Speaker 7 The fact that everyone still associates Microsoft with Halo is on one hand a testament to the enduring power or nature, I guess, of the Master Chief.

Speaker 7 But on the other hand, that game came out in the early 2000s. And still, it is the main thing that people are like, oh, yeah, that's Halo, or that's that's Xbox.

Speaker 16 So I actually just had to look this up for the first party games. Doom of the Dark Ages?

Speaker 7 Yeah, yeah, because Microsoft bought id Software and Bethesda a while ago. So they own those companies now.

Speaker 7 That's the other thing is in order to have more recognizable IP, they just bought a bunch of studios.

Speaker 7 And then in recent years, because of the Activision Blizzard purchase and how expensive that was, and also just, you know, trends in gaming, Microsoft has been laying everyone the fuck off.

Speaker 7 They've laid off over 4,000 people in the past two years in games alone.

Speaker 7 And that's like a significant chunk of, you know, workers at those studios.

Speaker 7 It's like a really bad situation over there.

Speaker 7 I mean, on the upside, due to other stuff that takes a while to explain, they did let a lot of people unionize, but then also the most recent layoffs cut into the unions pretty badly, too.

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Speaker 1 10 athletes will face the toughest job interview in fitness that will push past physical and mental breaking points.

Speaker 18 Someone will be eliminated.

Speaker 9 Pressure is coming down.

Speaker 11 Trainer Games on Prime Video, January 8th. Watch the trailer on trainergames.com.

Speaker 21 It's the gaming event of the year featuring T-Pain's Nappy Boy Grizzlies versus Neo's Gentleman's Gaming.

Speaker 21 It's a 4v4 matchup featuring Call of Duty, Tetris, Track Mania, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 Plus 4, and Tekken 8. Season 0 of the Global Gaming League is live streaming on YouTube and Twitch.

Speaker 21 Head over to GlobalGamingLeague.com.

Speaker 22 Did you know Microsoft has officially ended support for Windows 10? Upgrade to Windows 11 with an LG Gram laptop.

Speaker 12 Voted PC Mag's Reader's Choice Top Laptop Brand for 2025.

Speaker 22 Thin and ultra-lightweight, the LG Gram keeps you productive anywhere. And Windows 11 gives you access to free security updates and ongoing feature upgrades.

Speaker 22 Visit lgusa.com slash iHeart for great seasonal savings on LG Gram laptops with Windows 11.

Speaker 5 PC Mag Reader's Choice used with permission.

Speaker 12 All rights reserved.

Speaker 16 I don't think Microsoft knows what the fuck they're doing because you talk about you're correct in saying, yeah, they want to build the ecosystem, but the ecosystem fucking sucks.

Speaker 16 I remember it used to be a while ago that I went like a couple years ago, I'd say, I'd use the Xbox to be like, oh, this is kind of clean and functional. It's got a few doodads to it.

Speaker 16 Now every time I load it up, it feels like I'm on the fucking Las Vegas strip. It's like an ad for a movie.
Right. But it's trying to make me download a kid's ad, like it, it's fucking bizarre.

Speaker 7 Well, and it's about to get way worse because, you know, Microsoft, as you well know, Microsoft is now obsessed with adding AI to every potential product and feature they can possibly get their hands on.

Speaker 7 And so, yeah, they're going to load, you know, the Xbox ecosystem down with AI products as well.

Speaker 7 Yeah, it's just like, and then on top of that, I guess like the best example here is, again, to go back to Valve and Steam.

Speaker 7 I think that if Microsoft had been building the kind of platform that Steam has been for the past, you know, well over a decade, then they'd be in a good position to do what they're hoping to do with the Xbox now, which is to put it to ensure that it's basically everywhere.

Speaker 7 But, you know. So like the Microsoft recently put out their own version of the Asus ROG Ally, which is a handheld.

Speaker 16 I like my ROG ally, but like

Speaker 16 everything I've heard about the new one, I thought they were going to do something special with it.

Speaker 7 No, they just put like a fucking shitty version of Windows on it where you still have to, like, you know, because again, you want that to be like a plug-and-play product out of the box.

Speaker 7 You're ready to go. And instead, I guess like when you first open it up, you've got to install all this stuff and do all these updates.
And it's just like tedious and horrible.

Speaker 7 And all for an interface that still pales in comparison to Steam in terms of just usability and versatility and like cleanness.

Speaker 16 It is so weird. Like compared to the Steam deck, is what I'm talking about.
The Rog LAX before the Xbox One. It's just front ends on front ends.
It's just, hey, we've got an ASUS,

Speaker 16 but we've got another fucking layer here. Oh, and now you can load up an Xbox thing, which is a different layer.
And if you hit the wrong button, it will load a completely separate menu.

Speaker 16 And it really seems to be that no one sat down and went, What if this worked? Like, what if this just took because the Steam deck, I bought one of those early on it is it's chunky.

Speaker 16 It's too chunky in fact. I think it's a little bit too big However, it just fucking works.
You just did the button that did load the game log in by game play game. I don't have to fucking do

Speaker 16 algebra to make it it's not gonna I'm not gonna brush a button with my hand and have it kick back to the Windows desktop. It's just it feels almost loathing for the customer at this point.
Right.

Speaker 7 Right. I mean, it's a mix of loathing for the customer.
And then like, hey, if we're talking about Microsoft and like, yeah, just maximal, you know, at least attempted profit extraction.

Speaker 7 But as you're saying, they didn't really think all the way down to the level of what will the end user experience be like and how does it compare to this other thing that's already out there and is already setting the standard for what people expect.

Speaker 7 And like, if that's where you're coming from, then you will forever. And I think this is also part of Microsoft's problem in general.

Speaker 7 If that is the way that you are thinking and approaching the creation of your video game devices and services, you will always be at least in second place, if not third.

Speaker 7 And Microsoft has always been in third in the gaming space. Yeah.

Speaker 16 And they're like, I don't even know how the economics of buying these studios even works out for them because didn't they lose money when they bought Activision?

Speaker 7 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 16 People weren't buying.

Speaker 16 Is Mr. Bean running Microsoft gaming? It just feels insane to me.
Every time I see them do something.

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 7 Yeah. And I mean, like, again, you know, the, the question now is, what is the strategy? Because I think for a while, the strategy was very much all in on Game Pass.

Speaker 7 That's why they bought so many studios. That's why they bought Activision Blizzard and everything else.

Speaker 7 Because they're like, well, we have this service that is going to be the backbone of everything else we do. And we need to populate it with content.
We need regular new games to be coming out.

Speaker 7 So if we buy a third of the fucking video game industry and have them pump out new content, then we'll be set. But the problem with Game Pass is that the economics of it just aren't great.

Speaker 7 Yeah. Like, I mean, for one.

Speaker 16 How could they ever? Yeah.

Speaker 7 Like, Microsoft will repeatedly insist that Game Pass is profitable.

Speaker 7 But that's only if you don't pay attention to the upfront costs of the studios under Microsoft's umbrella making the games or the costs of the studios themselves.

Speaker 7 Once you get past Microsoft's fake math, it's like, oh, no, this thing is not profitable at all. And so Microsoft, I think.
And $10 billion

Speaker 7 for Activision Blizzard alone.

Speaker 7 Yeah. But no, once you realize that, and I think Microsoft did, then they're like, ah, okay, we got to, you know, diversify this further.
We got to figure out something else to do.

Speaker 7 And so they started saying, okay, well, then we're going to have our big, you know, first-party games on other platforms.

Speaker 7 We're going to sell them on PlayStation and other places as well because that'll help us recoup some costs.

Speaker 7 We got to crank up the price of Game Pass because that might help absorb some of the cost.

Speaker 7 And so they just are slowly and shittifying everything, like, you know, as with every other company, to make up for the fact that

Speaker 7 this gamble is not paying off.

Speaker 16 Well, I'm hoping that Valve can overtake the entire Xbox. I want them to take Xbox down because

Speaker 16 I also want, I'm weirdly getting onto like death to streaming, death to game pass, and all this. I think it's bad for everyone, but also they make good user interfaces.

Speaker 16 It feels not, I don't feel like I'm being smacked in the face when I use the products. I mean, I like my my Sony PlayStation.
I sound 100 million years on my Sony PlayStation.

Speaker 16 But even then, my Switch 2 as well, partly because I load them and they work.

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 7 They turn up like it's a very low bar to clear, but in this day and age, it is a necessary one to like clarify, well, it's a product or like it's a piece of hardware and it functions.

Speaker 7 It's just like you, you can, it does what it says on the 10.

Speaker 16 Yeah, I, yeah, it's I have hope for it. And I mean, I want I want a Steam machine.
I want a Steam frame. Yeah,

Speaker 16 Vision Pro truther.

Speaker 7 Yeah. Although I will say, like, I don't know if the Steam machines will necessarily compete directly with something like the Xbox.

Speaker 7 Valve has already said that they don't plan to subsidize the hardware in a way that would bring the price down so that it's comparable necessarily to a PlayStation or an Xbox.

Speaker 7 A lot of people are guessing more wheel be in the territory of like the PlayStation 5 Pro, just a little bit pricier.

Speaker 7 My personal guess, because they've said that it will be comparable to if you were to buy all of the components for a PC of similar power and assemble it yourself, which that does bring the price down in the world of PC gaming a lot, right?

Speaker 7 You know, you buy a mid-range PC pre-built, that's going to be $1,500 or more.

Speaker 7 If you assemble it yourself, you could be looking at, you know, $800, $1,000.

Speaker 7 My guess is that that's where it lands, probably somewhere in the 800 to 1,000 range.

Speaker 16 That would be that's about the price of the

Speaker 16 Rog X Ally and stuff. Yeah.

Speaker 7 And like, again, you know, we're still in a time of tariffs and things of that nature. So,

Speaker 7 you know, I don't think Steam machines are necessarily going to be, at least price-wise, as accessible as an Xbox, at least out the gate.

Speaker 7 You know, maybe Valve will

Speaker 7 evolve their strategy over time. They've certainly done that with a lot of other products.
But, you know, we'll see.

Speaker 7 Valve is something of a black box, so they only tell you as much as they want to at any given moment.

Speaker 7 And the rest you either divine through their actions, or they eventually come out and say, okay, well, that was kind of a miss. We're going to change things up now.

Speaker 16 All right. So to wrap us up, let's go positive.
What are you playing at the moment? What games are you enjoying? What have you enjoyed this year? Let's get to the mista.

Speaker 7 Okay, okay, let's see. What have I enjoyed this year?

Speaker 7 Let's see. I mean, Hades 2, although I feel like narratively, it's narratively, I feel like it's a lot weaker than the first game, but gameplay-wise, it is is so much better.

Speaker 7 It is one of those games where, you know, every time that you finish a run, you're like, well, I could do one more. And then suddenly 45 minutes or an hour or three hours have disappeared.

Speaker 7 So obviously front runner for game of the year for me.

Speaker 7 Let's see. I was thinking about this game the other night.
Eternal Strand. It's this game that I played earlier this year from a bunch of ex-BioWar people.

Speaker 7 It's kind of like an indie take on, I would say, a mixture of like Monster Hunter and Dragon's Dogma.

Speaker 7 It's on PC. And I think it might be on other platforms too.
I played it on PC.

Speaker 7 Yeah, it's just really cool.

Speaker 7 It's one of those games where you're taking down gigantic enemies all the time and you're doing it by like climbing on them and having these like battles that span these huge maps where like

Speaker 7 everything lots of things are destructible. So like, you know, you're fighting a dragon, you're like leaping on its back, it's flying away with you on it and trying to shake you off.

Speaker 7 It's burning everything

Speaker 7 in

Speaker 16 3D third-person situation? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 7 Yeah, it's really cool.

Speaker 7 It came out at the very beginning beginning of the year. And so I was like, what games have I really liked that sort of, you know, maybe I have forgotten about?

Speaker 7 And it's like, oh, yeah, Eternal Strand. That game rocks.

Speaker 16 That's so cool. I'm so glad they're still, because

Speaker 16 I'm not saying you're being negative. There's a lot of negativity out there.
It's nice they're still making funny, fun games. Like Hades 2 really.

Speaker 16 I played that all through Early Access and then in the full one. And you can just see the love.
I like the ending. I'm not going to say what it is.
I like what they did. I think it was strange.

Speaker 16 But you know what? The amount of

Speaker 16 the amount of game I got out of that game.

Speaker 7 Oh, yeah. Oh, I mean, there's no doubt that there is tons of game crammed in that game.

Speaker 16 The best value.

Speaker 7 Yeah, it's kind of like Slap's hood. There's so much game in this game.
This game can fit so much game.

Speaker 16 It's so weird to play a game like that and be like, wow. You really love making game.
You really thought about this.

Speaker 16 Because when I first played it, I got kind of pissed off because the systems were so different. Of course.

Speaker 16 But you can see that they've thought for hours about the intricacies of different meta or different combinations it's just i love super and also

Speaker 7 um you know if we want a happy kind of like games industry labor story at least as far as i understand it like the last time i talked to them and it has been a minute like super giant is really well run on that front um like i don't think they have had much employee attrition at all since they started everyone who ends up at super giant just stays at super giant um and like

Speaker 7 when i interviewed them about this years ago they mentioned, you know, like they, they have things like mandatory vacation.

Speaker 7 Like if you don't take your vacation by the end of the year, you have to just take time off.

Speaker 7 Like, you know, people are generally, oh, yeah, they also have policies around like emails. Like if it's Friday at 5 p.m., you're not allowed to email people anymore.

Speaker 7 Even because they're like, you might be really excited about something you're working on. If you want to keep working on something, that's fine.
But like, don't drag other people into it.

Speaker 7 Like, let people have their free time and their space to, you know,

Speaker 7 not be embroiled in this process.

Speaker 16 I'd love that as well, because the game is so tight and good and perfect. You don't have to hurt people to do this.

Speaker 7 Right. And also, you can just, as you were saying, you can tell that the people who made it care.
And I think more than that, you can tell they were having fun when they were making it.

Speaker 7 They were enjoying the process of creating this thing they cared a lot about. And ultimately, when it comes to art, commercial art, especially, that's what you want.

Speaker 7 is, you know, on one hand, you want people to get paid. You want them to be compensated well for their labor.
But on the other hand, like in an ideal world, you want them to be enjoying themselves.

Speaker 7 If we're going to be locked into jobs for our whole lives, then we may as well enjoy the process.

Speaker 16 Well, I couldn't agree more. And I must say, Aftermath gets the better offline thumbs up.
We will have a link to everything in the get in the episode notes.

Speaker 7 We are also having a, we're having a sale on subscriptions right now. $1 for your first month.
It's a great deal if you want to come check out the site, see what we're about.

Speaker 7 Yeah, you should absolutely take advantage of that. That'll be going until the end of, well, middle of December, basically.

Speaker 16 Yeah. Cool.
And this will be out by then.

Speaker 16 And I have subscribed to Aftermath since the beginning, and I will continue to do so. Please support independent media, myself included.
But really,

Speaker 16 give them a look. The new redesign is awesome.
Nathan, thank you so much for joining us.

Speaker 7 Yeah. Again, thank you for having me.
It's always wonderful to come on.

Speaker 15 Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osowski.
You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com.

Speaker 15 M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I dot com.

Speaker 4 You can email me at easy at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter.

Speaker 4 I also really recommend you go to chat.where's your ed.at to visit the Discord and go to r/slash better offline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

Speaker 23 Better Offline is a production of CoolZone Media.

Speaker 23 For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 10 athletes will face the toughest job interview in fitness that will push past physical and mental breaking points.

Speaker 19 You are the fittest of the fit. Only one of you will leave here with an IFIT contract for $250,000.

Speaker 20 This is when mindset comes in.

Speaker 18 Someone will be eliminated.

Speaker 9 Pressure is coming down.

Speaker 11 Trainer Games on Prime Video, January 8th. Watch the trailer on TrainerGames.com.

Speaker 21 It's the gaming event of the year featuring T-Pain's Nappy Boy Grizzlies versus Neo's Gentleman's Gaming.

Speaker 21 It's a 4v4 matchup featuring Call of Duty, Tetris, Track Mania, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 Plus 4, and Tekken 8. Season Zero of the Global Gaming League is live streaming on YouTube and Twitch.

Speaker 21 Head over to GlobalGamingLeague.com. Com, com.

Speaker 22 Did you know Microsoft has officially ended support for Windows 10? Upgrade to Windows 11 with an LG Gram laptop.

Speaker 5 Voted PC Mag's Reader's Choice top laptop brand for 2025.

Speaker 22 Thin and ultra lightweight, the LG Gram keeps you productive anywhere. And Windows 11 gives you access to free security updates and ongoing feature upgrades.

Speaker 22 Visit lgusa.com slash iHeart for great seasonal savings on LG Graham laptops with Windows 11.

Speaker 5 PC Mag Reader's Choice used with permission.

Speaker 12 All rights reserved.

Speaker 1 Season 2 of Unrivaled Basketball is here, and the talent is unreal. The best women's players on the planet are running it back with even bigger moments and bigger stakes.

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