Factually! with Adam Conover - The Video Game Industry is in Crisis with Jason Schreier

Episode Date: October 16, 2024

The video game industry is raking in more money than ever, but it's also in complete crisis. In the past couple of years, we've seen countless development studios shuttered and tens of thousands of workers laid off, all while the cost of making and buying games keeps skyrocketing. How did one of the world's most successful industries end up in such a state of instability? This week, Adam sits down with Jason Schreier, a Bloomberg reporter covering the video game industry and author of Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment, to break it all down. Find Jason's book at factuallypod.com/booksSUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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I don't know what to say.over, thanks for joining me again. You know, I've played video games my entire life. I think they're one of the greatest new mass art forms of the last hundred years. Playing video games for the last couple decades has been like being around for the first decades of film as incredible creative talents figure out how to tell stories and create new experiences

in a brand new artistic medium in real time. And something that I am incredibly grateful that I got to be alive on earth for. And when it comes to revenue, video games have left movies in the dust for the last couple of decades. The video game industry recently had five times more annual revenue than the entire film industry did

at the box office. But while the video game industry has been making more money than ever, lately it also appears to be in absolute crisis. Tens of thousands of workers, the people who actually make the games, have been laid off in just the last few years. A lot of that coming in the wake of wave after wave of corporate mergers, like Microsoft's $68 billion takeover of Activision Blizzard, a merger that has had catastrophic results.

And on top of that, it seems as though it's harder for the studios to simply make games that people actually want to play. I mean, Sony's recent game Concord took eight years and hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, but when it came out, it was a total flop and was literally pulled from sale within weeks. But Concord's failure is just indicative of the massive problems the industry is now facing. Huge games are now super expensive and take forever to make. And that means risk-averse publishers might just want to recreate something that has already been popular in the past, but then the game can take so long to come out that by the time it comes out it is out of date and no one

wants to buy it anymore. The business and creative dynamics in this industry are just fucked. Sony and Microsoft are in turmoil and Nintendo seems to be the only company that is doing well at all. So what the hell is going on in this industry that so many of us love so much? What is to blame and what can be done about it? Well to answer those questions today, we have an absolutely incredible guest. But before we get into it, I just want to remind you, if you want to support the show, you can do so on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Cahn over five bucks a month gets you every episode of this

podcast ad free. I also have a new standup special out. It's called Unmedicated. You can get it at dropout.tv. Use the code adam33 to get 33% off a yearly subscription. And if you like standup comedy, please come see me on the road. I'm bringing a brand new hour of material,

stuff you have never seen before. Almost no one has ever seen it before. Coming up soon, I'm taking it to Portland, Seattle, Denver, Austin, Batavia, Illinois, San Francisco, Toronto, Chicago, Austin, Batavia, Illinois, San Francisco, Toronto, Chicago, Boston, and Providence, Rhode Island. Head to AdamConover.net for tickets and tour dates. And now let's get to this week's guest.

Today I'll be speaking with Jason Schreier. He's one of the smartest and most deeply sourced reporters on video games on the entire planet. He is the guy who finds out the shit happening behind the scenes that nobody else knows about. He's a reporter covering the video game industry at Bloomberg and the author most recently of Playnice, the rise, fall, and future of Blizzard Entertainment. Please welcome Jason Shryant. Jason, thank you so much for being on the show.

Hello, Adam. It is a pleasure to be here. I don't think I've ever done a show with you in person. Last time we did this, I was on video. This is your second time on the show, but your first time we did it remotely over Zoom and it was audio only. And today you are in our brand new studio. This is so cool. And everyone can see what a video game reporter, what the, what the world's greatest video game reporter looks like.

Yes. Yes. Adam told me before we started recording that I looked like first a Jets employee, which okay I'm auditioning to be the new head coach of the dressing the audience. Yes Ever do this talk about me in the third person to the audience second thing that he said before we recorded was that I looked like a sharp a gambling sharp Here to provide my NFL picks for the week. So I will say, Broncos, no I haven't looked at the lines yet this week.

This show is brought to you by DraftKings. It absolutely is not. It's not brought to you by DraftKings. No, we, okay, let's move on from that. We're here to talk about video games, completely different type of gaming. We are, we are, which also break the fourth wall. They're like, you're interacting with the audience

in a video game, just like we're interacting with the audience right now. Absolutely true, but despite my knowledge of video games, growing up with them, one of my favorite entertainment mediums, the industry is fucking collapsing. It's like every week there's a new horrible headline about what is happening in video games. There's people on Twitter saying, I just got laid off.

Me and my 500 friends all got laid off. If anybody has jobs for 500 people, please at me. I wouldn't say it's a collapse. I would say it's a correction from like a glut of like, so what happened was like during 2020. So there are a couple of factors behind this. Yeah, what happened? Correction and yes, like more than 13,000 people

have been laid off this year so far. Couple of things happened. That's a lot of people. A shillet of people. 13,000 people. But the kind of the asterisk there or the kind of other part of that equation is that there were more people working

in the video game industry than there ever had been. Because in 2020 pandemic hit, everyone was just stuck at home playing video games. So all the numbers swelled and a lot of companies were like, oh, this growth will certainly last forever. And so they hired a lot of people to account for that. And then we got to the point where people went back to their pre pandemic habits.

And so weren't playing as many games and also interest rates spiked and they had been playing as many games. And also, interest rates spiked. And they had been like 2020, 2021, they were super low. And when interest rates are high, it's harder to borrow money and it causes also, it can lead to like VCs shutting their, closing their wallets or like it can make it harder to get funding as a video game company. So those two things combined with a bunch of other factors like the market is much tougher now.

There's this over saturation of games. A lot of people are playing older games like Fortnite and GTA online instead of buying new games. So all these factors combined to create this kind of carnage here. But the reason I call it a correction is because like it's's not that, like the total number of video game employees still isn't that much different than it was, it's probably close to what it was four years ago, five years ago. So it's the industry kind of correcting itself

to pre-pandemic levels. The problem is that because of the sheer numbers of people involved, there are more people on the job market than there ever have been. And so all those people are competing for the same jobs and finding that it takes months, if not years, to actually get anything, which is driving people out of the industry

and is just creating this massive talent loss and attrition and brain drain. Which, I mean, to be fair, last time we talked, we were talking about my last book Press Reset, which was about this phenomenon way before this current correction. So this is something before this current correction. So this is something that has happened before. It's just the numbers are much, much bigger this year

than they were. There's some similarities, it seems to me, to what happened in my part of the entertainment industry, because I'm called video games, they're entertainment. So I had breakfast with Cohen, your partner the other day. Sure, one of my producing partners, yeah. And he was like, we're all saying,

this was a few months ago in June, he was like, we're all saying, this was a few months ago in June, he was saying, we're all saying, survive till 25. And I was like, that's what the video game industry is all saying, survive till, it's like become a slogan among both industries. Yeah, like survive, we're having a bad year, survive through to next year, and there'll be more opportunities

because the industry has to pull itself out of this crater. But there was a similar bulge of hiring in a way in Hollywood because with streaming, they started making less, they started making more series, each of which had less episodes. What do you need if you do that? You need more individual people working, right? You need like, you have a lot of different writers rooms,

so you have to hire like a lot of different people. Then when they correct to, all right, actually hold on, we wanna go back to making more episodes of less series or less series overall, suddenly there's a lot of different people, then when they correct to, all right, actually, hold on, we wanna go back to making more episodes of less series or less series overall, suddenly there's a bunch of people who came into the industry in the last five years and are now looking for their next job. There's a little bit of a similar.

Oh yeah, same exact problem. All right, here's a business pattern that caused things to get a little hinky and hopefully it'll work itself out. But another similarity between the two industries, there's also been waves of merger in both industries. I think I'm saying waves of murder. Waves of murder?

I don't know about that one. There's been waves of murder throughout Hollywood as well. If you listen to some, I don't know, old Hollywood true crime podcasts. But I'm talking about companies murdering each other, buying up each other. That's happened obviously, you know, Warner Discovery, AT&T, Time Warner, throughout Hollywood,

leading to tons and tons of layoffs. How much have the huge mergers that have happened in the video game industry affected, you know, what's happening? Well, I wrote a book involving one of the stories involved. Yeah, it's a huge part of it. Microsoft is probably the biggest player in that front. They have been buying up tons of companies.

Most notably, they bought a game publisher called Bethesda in 2020 for like seven and a half billion dollars. And then Skyrim, a bunch of the other big series, fallout, doom, a bunch of other stuff. And then in the end of last year, they closed on a deal for $69 billion, a staggering amount of money, to buy Activision Blizzard, which includes the makers of Call of Duty, the makers of World of Warcraft, the makers of Candy Crush. And almost immediately after, I actually cover this in my new book Play Nice,

almost immediately after the deal closed, it was about two months later, they laid off 1,900 people. So that is what these mergers do. And this is part of why the government sued to stop the merger over the course, right? Lena Kahn's FTC sued to stop it, partially for this reason, right?

Yeah, I mean, well, their case was pretty weak, unfortunately. I think in another world, I think that they could have done a better job of making their case, and I don't know if they would have won necessarily, but at least kind of had a stronger argument. Yeah, so the FTC and also the CMA in Britain

both pushed pretty hard against the merger. And a large part of their argument was that it would lead to Call of Duty being made exclusive on Xbox platforms, which Microsoft continually said, no, we're not actually gonna do that. Well, they said they wouldn't do it because they knew that would be the argument that the regulators would make. Yes, but also it would- So it's easy for them to say, oh, well, we won't do it because they knew that would be the argument that, you know, the regulators would make.

Yes. But also, it would be, oh, well, we won't do it. And here's a signed letter. It wouldn't make market sense for them to do it. Like the PlayStation is a huge part of that audience. Like it doesn't actually hold up to much scrutiny. In fact, this year they've been releasing more of their own other games on PlayStation platforms because they need more money. And I'll get into why Xbox is in this place right now in a second. But that was part of the argument. It didn't really hold up to much scrutiny. They have this precedent with Minecraft, which they actually bought many years ago,

2014 or so, and kept on all current platforms. It's like on everything, Switch, PlayStation, phones, whatever. And so they could be like, look, if it doesn't make business sense, we're not going to keep this exclusive. And so they could be like, look, if it doesn't make business sense, we're not gonna keep this exclusive. And that holds up. But what happened was, and this is really interesting, I think we've reported this at Bloomberg. As a result of the merger,

the higher ups at Microsoft looked down at Xbox and said, hey, you just spent $69 billion on this thing. You better get those PNLs in shape. You gotta get those profits up. Where's the money? And so a lot of this year, Xbox has been in this state of just cost cutting and trying to boost profits.

And what they've done was they have that mass layoff in January. They've shut down two game studios earlier this year. One is called Arcane in Austin. Another is called Tango, they made this game called Hi-Fi Rush all the people liked. Arcane also made a lot of games people loved, they sold well. Pray, Dishonored they worked on, and they've been kind of quietly cutting some other jobs, they had another big round of layoffs just a few weeks ago, they were offering buyout

agreements to people. It's just been. And then also on top of that, they're like putting there's these games that they once said would only be exclusive to Xbox. They're putting them on PlayStation to make more money. And so Xbox is in this position of constant cost cutting and kind of chaos, really, as a result of them buying Activision Blizzard. So the merger has caused a lot of devastation. Folks, today's episode is brought to you by Alma. You know what I think is one of the toughest challenges out there?

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That's helloalma.com slash factually. What is the positive, if a merger is causing that much devastation? Right. And if after the merger, the higher ups at Microsoft are like, kind of like, why did you do this? Or it needs to turn a profit immediately. Like, why, why do it? That's one of the things I sort of have trouble understanding. Apart from, you know, when like David Zaslav does it in my industry, it looks like he's just house flipping, right? Like that's sort of the basic conclusion.

He's buying some stuff. He's going to try to spruce the numbers up by laying off a lot of people and then resell it. The private equity approach. Yeah. Make a couple hundred grand off of, you know, buying a house and painting the door orange, you know, kicking the original tenants out. Yeah.

I get that. I don't really think that's probably Microsoft's strategy because they're a much bigger company that's like, you know, much publicly traded on a wider scale. So like, why do this if the result was, you know, shuttered studios laid off developers, canceled games and just, you know, devis. I mean, it's been crazy to see how there were gamers who were cheering for the merger and like, ha ha, fuck you, FTC.

And then like six months later, those same people are going, oh no, my favorite games and developers have all been murdered because of this merger, what happened? Yeah, oh no, I let the face eating leper, I voted for the face eating leper party and they ate my face, what? Yeah, I mean, there are a couple of factors here.

One is that I think this is the biggest one. In January of 2022, really the end of 2021 is when Microsoft started talking to Activision about making this deal about buying them. Money looked a lot different than it did in October of 2023 when the deal closed. The interest rates, like I mentioned before, I mean, I bought a house at the end of 2020 and was incredibly lucky to get the mortgage rate I did.

Like the interest rates are crazy. It was like you could borrow money essentially for nothing. And so making a mega deal like that looks a lot different at that point than it does two years later when the interest rates are spiking and mortgage rates went from like sub 3% to like 6, 7%. It's a monstrous difference. It's like a lot of people who bought houses

like when I did during the pandemic would not be able to buy those same houses two or three years later. And that's just kind of the reason I bring that up is because it's kind of the consumer point of view on what interests look like. If you're in the finance world and you're trying to borrow money,

it's the same sort of thing. So that's the biggest factor. And as the months went on and the regulatory process lasted as long as it did and kind of dragged on, I think that I wouldn't be shocked. I mean, I don't know this for certain. It's a little bit of speculative, but I wouldn't be shocked if certain if some people at Microsoft are like, wait a minute, why did we agree to this in the first place? So that's a part of it. at Microsoft are like, wait a minute, why did we agree to this in the first place?

So that's a part of it. Another part of it is that they, from Activision's perspective, from the people who work within Activision Blizzard, there was a lot of optimism about it because they felt like Microsoft would be a better home for them than the regime of Activision Blizzard C-suite that they had been working under.

A lot of people had lost complete faith in Bobby Kotick, who was the CEO of Activision Blizzard and his kind of C-suite. So from them, there was a lot of excitement and optimism, at least until the big layoffs happened. From a business POV, Xbox has kind of made their bones over the last decade of just buying as many companies as possible, because they traditionally, over the last couple of decades,

have really struggled to make games internally that keep up with their biggest rival PlayStation PlayStation has had the stable of internal game companies that are able to make a lot of hits like The Last of Us and the spider-man and ghosts of Tsushima God of War God of War xbox has not been able to do that Their games have not they have not built the same level of right like. And a lot of the public I think could list some of those games that you just mentioned, Horizon Zero Dawn, they've sort of popped in general consciousness and I can't, with the exception of like Halo, which is a very old franchise. Yeah, what else can you name for Microsoft? Yeah, exactly. The Last of Us, of course,

everybody knows now because of the HBO show too. So yeah, Sony has really, PlayStation has really kind of gotten a lot of these franchises to penetrate the cultural consciousness and yeah, Microsoft does not. So their strategy has been to buy and so they bought Bethesda and hey, now they have fallout and that's an acquisition rather than an internal cultivation, so they see Activision Blizzard and what happened was there was the whole

sexual misconduct and discrimination lawsuit, and Activision was going through crisis, and Microsoft looks over and is like, hmm, these guys are in crisis now, can we buy them? And so they did. They were subject to an enormous sexual harassment lawsuit by the state of California, endemic sexual harassment and abuse happening at Blizzard

for many years. Yeah, which was just settled last year for like $54 million, something like that. I actually just heard that like some people are starting to get notifications about settlement checks. So it's going through that process right now. So Microsoft has that kind of logic in mind that they can buy these companies and kind of rather than doing it internally, they can buy companies and bring them on and have those franchises that way. Activision Blizzard has some plum franchises like I mentioned before Call of Duty, Warcraft, Candy Crush is a big one. Microsoft didn't have a huge presence on mobile games and so getting Candy

Crush in there is very helpful. They also a lot of part a big part of Xbox's strategy traditionally the last few years has been their kind of Netflix-like subscription program which is called Xbox Game Pass. And Xbox Game Pass, you pay whatever a month, $10, $15, something like that, for access to all these games. And so part of the logic here is

we're gonna get more people to subscribe by putting Call of Duty and Diablo and Overwatch, all these games on Xbox Game Pass so then we get a ton more people to subscribe by putting Call of Duty and Diablo and Overwatch, all these games on Xbox Game Pass, so then we get a ton more people participating, like paying us monthly for this service. So that was part of their logic as well. But it hasn't gone that way. Well, we don't know, it's too early to tell.

We're less than a year in, or just about a year in, we're about to hit the one year anniversary of the closing. This first year, I mean, you can kind of objectively, definitively say it has not gone well, but I don't know. Like, it's way too soon to say if this will be a disaster on par with like AT&T, AT&T Time Warner, or if this will just kind of have had a rough start and then actually pan out pretty well, because suddenly people at Blizzard, for example, and I mentioned Blizzard because I know them the best

having written a book about it, people there were really excited because under that Game Pass model, they can actually kind of make smaller games, make maybe more experimental stuff that wouldn't fit into the billion dollar franchise mold that Bobby Kotick had wanted from them. And so it could lead to good things.

I don't know, it's hard to say, but I think it's too soon to tell right now. But the first thing that's happened is what happens after almost every merger, which is cutting cancellations, like business devastation. And I do wonder, look, I don't know exactly why the FTC made the argument that they did, but they have to make an argument to appeal to the courts.

The courts have a particular way of thinking about mergers that's 40 years of jurisprudence, which I and Lena Kahn would argue is a mistake. Like that legal understanding is incorrect. They still have to play to it. And maybe if they were able to make their argument more directly, they would have just said, hey, this kind of merger is just going to be bad

for the industry. It's going to hurt workers and it's going to hurt consumers. But in ways that like the courts historically have not like agreed with the argument on even though the courts are wrong on that point. Yeah, yeah, I don't really know what happened there. I've touched on some people were involved in the just kind of I won't get into all the nitty gritty of like the court, like arguments or anything like that.

But I've talked to some people who were like disappointed with the way that it all played out. People were on the FTC side of things. That said, something that is really striking about these layoffs is that a lot of times when you have a merger and you have layoffs as a result of that, it's because of redundancies and it kind of makes logical sense, right? You bring in, you swallow up a new company. They have a finance team. You have a finance team. You don't need both. they have a finance team, you have a finance team, you don't need both.

They have a legal team, you have a legal team, you don't need both. That kind of, that makes logical sense at least. In this case, it was a lot of cut costs, a lot of cost cutting this year that are not redundancies. It's like development teams that were working on other stuff or like teams just getting shrunk and it's a lot of just very clear cost cutting.

And it just happens. I mean, it's like the merger is obviously a big part of it, but it also happened to happen at this time. That's just kind of this bleak climate for the video game industry because there's no growth in the games industry right now. Most companies are not seeing growth. And so from Xbox's point of view, it's certainly whatever redundancies were caused by the merger as part of it,

but the biggest part of it, I think, is just the kind of the bleak industry climate. Well, and that's what's shocking to a lot of people that they're cutting studios and employees that are not redundant. It seems that they're cutting down to the bone. Wait, those people were gonna make something good. Hold on a second.

There's also the example of Sony purchasing Bungie, right? And the makers of the Destiny franchise and the reports being, oh, this company will be able to now do what it does best. They'll have more freedom. And then just a couple of months back, they laid off a huge number of people from that company. Like the exact same story happened again. Are people ever going to stop falling for the merger? off a huge number of people from that company. Like the exact same story happened again.

Are people ever gonna stop falling for the merger story? It's really wild. Okay, so let me play devil's advocate here for a second. Please, I would love somebody to do it. So there's this amazing YouTube documentary series called Psych Odyssey, and it's about the development of Psychonauts 2, and it's about the company Double Fine. Yeah, made by a couple friends of mine actually.

Asif Siddiqui, one of the guys who worked on that is an old, old, old friend of mine. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, he's a great dude and he goes, you see his path from behind the camera to actually working on the game in the documentary. This documentary is one of the most incredible pieces of media I've ever seen.

It's one of my favorite things ever. I've watched it entirely, despite it being 32 parts, I've watched it and it's entirely like five times. Cannot recommend it highly enough. And something that it kind of shows, it kind of, if you read between the lines, is that Double Fine was always this kind of struggling indie company that really could not find a hit,

but somehow managed to keep the lights on. Gets bought by Microsoft in 2019. It's still working on this game, it worked on this game for like six years. 2020, COVID hits, and people are asking, if we weren't bought by Microsoft, will we be shut down right now? And there's no clear answer,

but the subject is yes, absolutely. And so they were kind of given a lifeboat by Microsoft and able to stay stable and not lay people off through the pandemic because they had corporate money above them paying the bills. So sometimes it works out for the better, but to kind of contextualize things here, that was a case of a big company buying

a like 60 person game studio, not merging or swallowing another publicly traded company with 10,000 people. So the scale is very different there. And when an indie company gets bought, sometimes it can actually save the company. Sometimes it can give them more freedom. But these mega mergers never seem to lead to good things. The freedom is that you might get is temporary, you know? Oh yeah.

You might get freedom. But everything is. Hey, they said they're going to treat us real nice. They said that they're going to let us do whatever they want. Yeah. They're like, OK, well, wait until the person told you that gets fired. Until they switch CEOs. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But freedom is always temporary, right? Of course. If you're a startup, it's like temporary until you make one bad bet, and then you all get like, yeah, the company shuts down anyway. So I think there are good, compelling reasons you make one bad bet and then you all get like, yeah, the company shuts down anyway. So, um, I think there are good compelling reasons for like a game studio owner to sell their company to a corporate, uh, to a corporation, even if it's not like, even if, I mean, once again, the Blizzard story,

not to keep shilling here, but take us through the Blizzard story because I think it's a good example of, you know, a company starting small, making a series of games people loved, one at a time becoming a beloved company, and then everything becoming bigger, everything crashing down and, you know, bringing us to the moment that we're in. So just walk us through that. It's a saga. How much time do we have? It's quite a saga. I mean, you can read a book about it. I also want to talk about Nintendo and some other companies.

Okay. I'll give you an abridged version of the story. Give us an abridged version of this tale. Blizzard Entertainment is formed in 1991 by these two UCLA students named Alan Adham and Mike Morhaime. And they're basically like, hey, why don't we just try this startup thing and make some games and see what happens. And they spend about three years making mostly what's called conversions or ports where they like will take someone else's game and bring it to a new platform or be like, hey, we're

going to bring Battle Chess to the DOS PC or whatever. That was a popular thing at the time. Until 1994 where they do where two things happen. One is that they release a game called Warcraft, which winds up setting them on this path toward an empire, becoming an empire. I remember playing this on my uncle's PC. It was a fantastic game.

Warcraft 1 and Warcraft 2 really, really was exponentially bigger. And the second thing that happens is that they sell the company to this company called Davidson and Associates, which you may remember as the maker of Math Blaster. Yeah, Math Blaster. Yeah, did you know that the people who made Warcraft were also, were part of the same company that made Math Blaster? I did not.

Fun fact that you can read about in Playnice, the rise, fall and future of Blizzard Entertainment. Okay. Available in stores now. Okay, you know, I plug at the end of the show too. Well, I mean, not everybody stays till the whole, till the way I am. You really do work for Bloomberg, don't you?

You're a capitalist through and through. Let's keep going, keep going. So, hey man, I don't know. People can get it from the library, I don't care. Books, if I was like a capitalist through and through, you think I would write fucking books? Like books don't make money. I would be like, I got, in New York,

I got buddies who are in banking and private equity. Like that's what I would be doing if I was like, oh, I want to make as much money as possible. Come on, man. If I divide the amount of total like advanced money for this book divided by the number of hours I spend on it. Look, I interview authors. I don't write the books.

It's a sucker's game. Exactly. Man. You do a lot better bringing the authors in to tell you about the book. Exactly, exactly. You get the Cliff sucker's game. Exactly. You do a lot better bringing the authors in to tell you about the book. Exactly. Exactly. You get the Clifford's version.

Anyway, so 1994, Mike Morhaime and Alan Aham are kind of like in debt, maxing out their discover cards to pay the bills and like pay rent and pay salaries. And they feel like they're always like on the verge of some big hit, but it doesn't happen. It seems elusive. And then they get this offer to be bought by Davidson. And so they take it. And I think it sets them on this path of being shuffled between corporate owners, including one called Sendent that winds up investigated by the SEC for massive accounting fraud.

And their CEO, Walter Forbes, goes to jail. He's prosecuted by Chris Christie. And this is all happening above, like Walt Blizzard's trying to make StarCraft and stuff. They're going through all sorts of corporate drama. And it's kind of interesting because it sets them on this path. It gives them stability.

It allows them to publish their own games. Davidson has these warehouses where they can actually like print the games, which was, I mean, in 1994, that's what we needed to do. You need to print the boxes, as opposed to our digital world today. And so Davidson gave them these resources. It allowed them to be stable

and not have to worry about payroll, made the two founders very rich at the time, and set them on this path of juggling through corporate parents that eventually, it went pretty well, actually. I mean, so you mentioned this freedom being temporary. In this case, they were always traditionally able to manage up pretty well. They were always able to say to their corporate parents, hey, you give us some time, you let

us delay our games a few times and we will just reward you with these consistent hits. And for Blizzard, that happened for many years. They came out with Warcraft, Warcraft 2, Diablo, Starcraft. It all kind of culminated with World of Warcraft, which was the biggest thing on the planet because it was an online game where you paid monthly for subscriptions. And so it wasn't just that you just sold it once.

It was you kept making money from players. It became, it peaked at like 12, 12 and a half million subscribers all paying monthly to pay hundreds of billions of dollars. And let me ask, this is, you just mentioned, hit after hit after hit. I mean, Warcraft II, Starcraft, Diablo, World of Warcraft. That's crazy, right?

Those are one after another. That's like peak Pixar. Pixar is the best comparison. New thing one after another. So what is the creative secret sauce, right? Like what came together? Cause whenever you look at a creative period like that, there's always some coalescence of a something, right?

Like what was it in this case? Yeah, a lot of it was that, I mean, talent is a big part of it, of course. You have a ton of talented artists, engineers, designers, but a lot of it is these kind of business philosophies about being run by people who really care about games. Every single person at that company was like a gamer through and through, which I think can have some downsides

too, but at least at the time, it allowed it so they could all be constantly playing and testing out their games and talking about what worked and what didn't work. And a lot of their best games, like World of Warcraft came because it originated because a bunch of the people who worked there were all playing this game EverQuest, which was the most popular MMO at the time. And they were like, you know, this is cool, we all really like it,

but there's so much we would do better and differently, and why don't we just make our own version that is like, sands off the rough edges and fixes what we don't like about this? And that's how World of Warcraft came about. So a lot of their success was just because they hired the right people, they hired people who really cared, as opposed to just being run by suits, like people from other industries. They really cared about, I mean, I played so many of those games

and the games were just the most fun games that you could play. They were phenomenal. Yeah, and they were super polished. Starcraft was incredible. Another key was that they were willing to take their time and they didn't, because, you know, it's interesting. So if they weren't owned by a corporate parent, if they were willing to take their time and they didn't because, you know, it's interesting. So if they weren't owned by a corporate parent, if they were independent, they might've struggled a little bit more with that

because they might've been under financial pressure to release a game earlier than they wanted to. But because they were able to manage up and just kind of convince these corporate parents, hey, you give us some more time and we'll give you a hit. And they always delivered on that, at least until much later. So this all-

I remember StarCraft II taking like forever to come out as an example. Yeah, the games after World of Warcraft are kind of a different story because World of Warcraft just vacuums so much of the company's attention and resources for those first couple of years that it wound up just causing delays for StarCraft II and Diablo III, where the two big ones that were slipped because of that. And this kind of... So their kind of honeymoon period lasted, I don't know, 15, 20 years.

And then in 2007, they merged with a company called Activision. So they were owned by this company Vivendi, and Vivendi's games unit merged with Activision to form Activision Blizzard run by Bobby Kotick. And that is when the problems started, and really a few more years before the problems started. They had some more honeymoon time. And so it would be a while of corporate ownership

before they really started running into just kind of the interference from above. And then the book details how and when and why all that happened. Basically that promise of like, you let us cook and we'll give you a good game. We'll give you a hit. That kind of, they had to break that promise of like you you let us cook and we'll give you a good game We'll give you a hit that kind of they had to break that promise with this big hyped project called Titan That was canceled in 2013. It was supposed to be like the next big

Thing fun fact the wreckage of Titan would then be turned into overwatch a few years later But at the time Titan was a big problem. And Bobby Kotick and his kind of cadre of lieutenants came down and were like, you need some adults in the room. They forced Blizzard to hire a chief financial officer and they wound up hiring this guy who came from Procter and Gamble and was basically basically remember how one of their secrets of success was only hiring gamers. Now they have this guy running their

Soap consumer goods guy he will he like gets and I have stories in the book about how like he's in a room with People and he'll be like why don't we do? Like open a new office the way that we did to ship laundry detergent in Brazil and people look at him like what? What are you talking about? then he had I mean there were all sorts of other kind of personality clashes and he was not a beloved guy at Blizzard. Yeah. And yeah, that's when the problems really started for Blizzard, at least from the business POV. From the culture standpoint, I mean, the book traces some of their cultural kind of quirks from the very beginning. Like what?

Well, so in the 90s, it was all dudes, almost entirely dudes, a couple of women here and there. And even the women had to be like, we are working in a frat house. Yeah, it was very much casual environment. A lot of guys in their 20s, a lot of drinking, a lot of pranks, a lot of like nerf guns, and a lot of them liked it. But as a company kind of got a little bigger, did wind up hiring some more women for the work for a lot of the women, it was, it could be really uncomfortable and not pleasant to work there because it was so testosterone driven. I mean, it was like, there was, and nerd testosterone, which is the worst kind of testosterone.

Because because I am a nerd, we tend to overcompensate, you know, I've been in those environments, you know, like, like out, alpha males are bad enough. Alpha nerds? Oh my God, the worst. Yeah, and then there was this point when they were working on the UC Irvine campus. They had an office there. And they're in Irvine?

Oh, that's rough. Oh, Irvine. That's a big part of it, right? Yeah. Oh boy. Yeah, they're in Irvine. And they converted, they had one women's bathroom. They converted one of the women's bathroom

to a men's bathroom because they didn't have enough women to like you and then they got a little. Well no one's using this, we might as well just tear the wall down. I describe it as like they went from like a frat house to a college campus as they professionalized a little bit. They brought in more women but even then it was just kind of, it could be, I don't know, I spoke to a lot of women who were like,

I loved so much about Blizzard and hated so much about Blizzard. Like there was so much good stuff about the culture. It was a culture where like people were such close friends and so tight-knit and like, it was really college-ish. People would like, you would show up in your Blizzard hoodie like after spending, they literally, they have these apartments near Blizzard's campus

that were like affectionately called the Blizzard dorms because so many people would just like live there together in packs. And so you would walk over from the Blizzard Dorms after a long night of playing World of Warcraft, wearing your Blizzard hoodie, and then you'd show up and you'd get to work on cool games all day. And then after work, you'd go to the clubs on campus, like the fencing club with your friends or play D&D with people. I have to say, I feel like that came out in the games. you'd go to the clubs on campus, like the fencing club with your friends or play D&D with people.

I have to say, I feel like that came out in the games. Like one of the things I think about with those games is they, from the peak years, you could sort of sense that the people who made them were having fun. Yep, 100%. Like it came through, there was a lightness and a just, yeah, like a vibe.

I mean, yeah, and to be fair, I think there's nuance to all this, right? Like that frat house environment I described with like pranks and Nerf gunfights and stuff, that is like part of how you get to that as opposed to like a more professional environment where it can maybe feel a little bit more sterilized. So it does kind of like, they're tied together.

But you can have a fun creative environment without like abusing or excluding people, right? I mean, you can also have a fun creative environment and have women working there. Exactly, yeah. That is kind of the crux of it all, is that Blizzard started out as male-dominated and still to this day is mostly men.

To be fair, same is true of most video game companies. Most video game companies in the 90s were entirely men, and then even today, the average across video game companies is something like 20%. So this was not a Blizzard specific problem, but it was a problem. And then there were some Blizzard specific kind of unique aspects of its culture, for example,

because they're all in Irvine and they have nothing else to do and they're all just hanging out with each other. The personal and professional lives just get totally blurred. And you have this campus where like, like I said, college campus, I mean, a lot of people are dating each other or married to each other. And that can be great for people,

but it can also create some weird environments, especially when, as was the case at Blizzard, a lot of the higher ups are dating or married to people below them at the company. And they try to be up on the up and up about it, sign these contracts, remove people from their direct lines of reporting, but still it creates this atmosphere.

It makes things, if you have a complaint about someone and you know they're dating the chief whatever officer, are you really gonna file that complaint to HR? It just creates an environment that is very, I don't know, I don't wanna say unprofessional, but certainly different than a lot of other companies. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that probably takes us to this historically large sexual harassment and abuse lawsuit by the state of California against Activision Blizzard. I mean, this was a massive story. Just tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah, so in the summer of 2021, there were these lawsuits, including the biggest and the most prominent one was the California government sued Activision Blizzard in a complaint that like a lot of it focused on Blizzard. It was very sloppy and misleading, the complaint. I have to note, because it kind of conflated some things, it got some things wrong,

but the overall vibe I think resonated with a lot of women who worked for Blizzard who were like, yes, I was harassed. Yes, I was discriminated against. A lot of it was kind of industry wide issues. People, women feeling like they were not able to succeed, they couldn't file, or their HR reports were not listened to or not acknowledged or not dealt with. They were paid less than men in equivalent jobs or were not promoted as quickly because they felt like, I don't know, if you're a woman and you work in this team that is mostly men and you don't get promoted, you're kind of like, is it because I'm like not good at my job? Or is it because I'm not going to the cigar clubs

with the boys on the weekend? Like, there's always that kind of nagging feeling. So a lot of this stuff is kind of endemic to any male-dominated industry. But there was also some specific stuff that happened at Blizzard, some people who were in positions of power who were abusing that power and really taking advantage of people.

And there was this large whisper network of people saying, hey, stay away from this guy. He's a creep. And so that lawsuit was set off this chain of events eventually leading to the Microsoft acquisition. And people were, right after it hit, people started protesting on Blizzard's campus. They took all these signs and were just like really speaking out.

They started a discord. They started talking about like, kind of, they wanted to talk about issues privately away from like company channels. And it was, a lot of the seeds for what would become a union effort a couple of years later actually started with that lawsuit, like in the wake of that.

And then a lot of people spoke out on social media and were like, here's my story about like the shit I had to go through at Blizzard. Wow. And then that takes us to the merger, the layoffs, and the current like sad state of the company. So going all the way from like these two guys starting the company and like making,

oh, just we love to make games and like, oh, here we are some guys. To now it's like the wreckage of corporate America. Yeah, to some extent. I mean, they are still a thriving company. So these games that like World of Warcraft and Diablo four both just got like new expansions that people seem to dig. So they are to some extent they're doing well, but they're certainly not

the like hit factory that they once were. Right. They're not the Pixar video games anymore. And they're also not as beloved as they once were. Their reputation has been really just has a lot of blemishes on it now. Yeah, I've seen it happen just over the past ten years. It used to be the kind of company where everybody, on the consumer side, all the gamers were like, oh, whatever Blizzard puts out is going to be good.

And people don't really feel that way anymore. I mean, even Overwatch, which I remember when that came out was like a huge hit. Oh yeah, humongous. Is now sort of considered, at least vibes-wise, like a failure in a way. Yeah, so they came out with a sequel. I mean, so yeah, they had a lot of issues and all of their projects had issues,

but yeah, they came out with a sequel, Overwatch 2, that was not what it was supposed to be. Essentially, there was this big grand vision for it that just didn't come to fruition for various reasons. And so yeah, Overwatch 2 is not, it's not, I wouldn't say it's a failure, because a lot of people play it and like it, but it's not quite what they hoped it would be,

that's for sure. Yeah, well, the way that the public feels about it has retreated a bit. I mean, even if you look at the height of height of like they used to have a eSport Well that I mean so they have this thing called the overwatch league I mean, that's one of the reasons that the game kind of declined actually because it took so many Professional teams playing against each other as a spectator sport. Yeah, this started this is like I'll tell you a funny story which there's this guy Nate Nanzer

who really started pitching the idea, and this idea was like, we're gonna take this game overwatch, it's pretty cool, it's a shooter, everybody likes it here, we're gonna pitch it as like a NBA style or Premier League style, city, team-based league,

or city-based team league, where we have the New York Excelsior and the San Francisco Shock and all these teams based in cities and they'll all be paid full-time salaries. It'll be this professional level thing. And he takes that pitch and he brings it to Activision. And Bobby Kotick looks at it and he's like, this is a good idea. But he has one condition. Well, he had many conditions.

But one thing he said was, so Nate Manzer had pitched that each of these teams have an owner the way they do in sports. And the owner could get in on it by paying 250 grand to invest in one of these teams have an owner, the way they do in sports. And the owner could get in on it by paying 250 grand to invest in one of these teams. And Bobby's like, granted, yeah, but instead of 250 grand, it should be $20 million to own an Overwatch team. And his thinking was he wanted to bring in his billionaire buddies to run these teams,

people with experience owning sports teams so they could take that and really blow it up and make it as big as possible. And so Robert Kraft, the owner of the Patriots was like a big advocate for this and he came in and owned his team. And it started blowing up and getting so big that it just took away a lot of resources from the Overwatch team and required just a lot of attention. And it never really had a proven revenue generator that justify all this money they were spending. So naturally it fell apart. It didn't really work as a spectator.

I knew people who... It's not fun to watch. Yeah. I knew people who were fans because they played Overwatch. I was like, here's high level play. Yeah. Like even I as a casual player, I'd watch it. I can't... you can't follow what's happening. You have no idea what's going on.

And that was like the original sin of this league, but nobody thought to be like, wait a minute, is this actually gonna be fun to watch? Yeah, it's really, and then you combine that with, of course, a pandemic preventing these big arenas that they were setting up from actually having people inside and then also Overwatch 2 not hitting like it might have. And yeah, it just was this recipe for disaster and they shut it down last year actually.

Yeah, and that story of like big, big, big plans, lots and lots and lots of money, we're gonna blow this up. Oops, couple years later it's canceled. That seems to me to be the story of the video game industry for the past couple years. So it's the same as the streaming industry. Absolutely same as the streaming industry.

So I'm not, yeah, I'm not trying to cast aspersions that the video game industry is the only place that this happens. But why, like why is it that this, what is with the addiction to bigness, right? There was a Sony just had their game Concord that they spent a huge amount of time on and then they pulled, you mentioned Project Titan,

that's 10 years prior, but at Blizzard, I would think that if I was in charge of one of these companies, I'd say, hey, maybe spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a single game that needs to do really well is not a great strategy. What if we try to hit some singles every now and again? Okay, what you just described is like the fundamental

like question, like conflict in the center of the video game industry. That's so many companies, any entertainment industry, right? And what happens is with a company like Blizzard, you get hit this home run with World of Warcraft and World of Warcraft is making even on its off years, hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue every single year.

And it, like, in this kind of system of pursuing growth at any cost and wanting to watch the number go up and to the right, you look at that and you're like, why would we bother spending money and resources on these little things when we could be making World of Warcraft? Or failing that, something that tries to be

as big as World of Warcraft. And in fact, Blizzard, so Blizzard did have a couple of hits in recent years. In the post-Wow, if you kinda look at the eras of Blizzard, there's the pre-Wow, when they were nonstop hits, and then the post-Wow. In the post-Wow, they had a couple of original new hits. Overwatch is one, and Hearthstone is another.

Right, I played a lot of Hearthstone until- It's a great game. Until I realized I was no longer making decks. I was just like dragging mindlessly. I was like, I gotta stop. I gotta get off my phone. So Hearthstone was made, I have a chapter about this in the book, by 15 people. It was kind of like this little indie garage band within the massive Blizzard Corporation. They're kind of under the radar doing it on their own.

Everyone was kind of looking down on them and it almost got canceled like three different times because people were like, why are we doing this little thing? These guys are talented. They could be working on World of Warcraft or Diablo or whatever comes out is a massive sensation, reaches a hundred million players and is a home run. I used to get trouble. I used to get in trouble at college humor because I was working. We had an open floor plan office and the year that Hearthstone came out and I would forget to turn my sound off before I opened it on my work laptop and the voice would go, welcome back!

Really loud and I would get made fun of by all the other writers for playing Hearthstone during work because it was addictive. It was short game time, short gameplay time. You could like just get, I just got one round in. Yeah, yeah, yeah, It was so good. Short game time, short gameplay time. You could like just get it. I just got one round in. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So good. And of course, when that comes out, it was a big success. Instead of going and like taking that team and being like,

let's try to do some other cool experimental small thing. The Hearthstone team has to keep working on it because it becomes this like never ending service game that is still they just came out with or just announced a new expansion just a couple of days ago. So it's like it's this kind of, the other part of the equation here is not only do you feel like you have to scale up once you hit a certain level in order to grow,

you also, once you create something, it becomes this ongoing game that has to be supported and updated and monetized for years to come because it's just, they're not a company, after World of Warcraft, Blizzard was not a company that would just like release one game and then move on to the next game anymore. It was a company that was making live services,

forever games. So yeah, you have these kind of factors and yeah, it's just like if your goal, if you're part of a publicly traded company and your goal is to watch the chart like this, then taking your resources and spending them on like potential singles is not like worth the time. And then the other part of the equation here is that like Blizzard actually did. They started this kind of incubation department and did try to work on a bunch of small projects, but a lot of them failed for various reasons, and it proved really difficult to create new things

in an environment that was run by Activision, and Bobby Kotick, a guy who was very much about predictability and about annualization and about kind of taking a franchise and milking it for all it's worth, rather than just kind of like exploring new ideas and incubating. He was like, he would like celebrate when Blizzard released a new hit,

but like didn't seem to understand how you actually make one and that you need people working on it instead of just feeding the world of Warcraft machine. Yeah. What is, how much of the game industry's problems are? Due to like the changing business model of the industry because you mentioned live service games. Yeah that the big Sony failure I mentioned Concord was a live service game and It almost feels as though that was already dated when that game came out that they had a business model that

Were gamers had already moved on from but they were like locked into. It feels like for the last maybe 10 years, the gaming industry has been going, hey, no one's going to buy $60 big games anymore. We need to find something different. But then that other thing never actually coalesces for any part of the time, but only for like a few lucky winners. Like it's like you're playing roulette and everybody has a different number. And if your number gets picked, then you're great. Then you're Fortnite.

But if not, then you're screwed. Then you're Concord or Suicide Squad or Redfall or all these other games that have been kind of like. And this is also actually reminds me of the entertainment industry. To answer my own question a little bit. The problem with a live service game is well, if it relies on people logging in like every single week

to play the game, then the then player time becomes something you're competing over more than it was for a single experience. Exactly. And so like people who are already playing Fortnite and Minecraft don't have time for a third game. And so it really is like, yeah, you're trying to launch Macs, but people are already subscribed to Netflix. Yeah. Someone who already subscribed to Netflix. Someone who's subscribed to Netflix, they might go buy a ticket to a movie

or they might buy a video game, but they might not be like another subscription service either there's not enough hours in the day. But it's even worse than the streaming industry because in the streaming industry, there are a lot of people out there who might be like, oh, I'm just gonna pay for Max and whatever, my Netflix subscription is still going, no big deal.

To Netflix, it doesn't even matter that much if you're not spending time on it, as long as you're still paying for it and not churning out. In the gaming industry, many of these games, most of these service games are not charging subscriptions the way World of Warcraft is. World of Warcraft is kind of an exception to that rule. Most of these games are relying on you to keep playing and then spending money because, like, you see your friends, I'll have this cool new outfit, so you want to spend it too. So they need you to keep playing and then spending money because like, you see your friends all have this cool new outfit and so you wanna spend it too.

So they need you to be in there. I'm sorry, it's just, it is, at the end of the day, it is such a stupid industry. I mean, I felt- Incredibly stupid. I have felt that myself. I wanna cool outfit in the game like my friends, but it's, please go on. It makes me feel so dumb.

This part of it is incredibly stupid. There are still plenty of companies that are just like, we're gonna just sell you a $70 game. It's 70 now instead of 60. We're gonna sell you a $70 game. And then if you wanna like play it or move on to the next thing, whatever you want. But the point is to want to spend money in the game

for the live service. You need to play it enough that your desire for more is like activated. Yes, you need to play it enough that your desire for more is like activated. Yes, you need to keep playing every single week if they're going to hook you into spending money. And there's like all sorts of people who work on this and have charts showing correlation between number of hours spent in the game and like willingness to spend money or like

the number of people like the number of total minutes you have in the game versus the amount of money you're making. It's all very mathematically planned out. And so it's not like Netflix where it's like, oh, I forgot to cancel and I've been accidentally paying for six months on Netflix, even though I don't use it. Like, there's no model like that other than the rare world of Warcraft. So, like if the live service games, if they've sort of realized that these are, that this business model has its limitations, is there anything to replace it? Is that part of what is sick in the industry? Well, I wouldn't say the live service is kind of,

it exists in like, as a compliment to the other models. Like Sony, for example, they just, they put out Concord and it was a massive failure, but they haven't only been making live service games, they've been chasing the dragon and trying to make a lot of them, but they're also still making new God of War games, new Spider-Man games, new, they just announced

a new Ghost of Tsushima game, like that. They're still making the $70 traditional games as well. And the companies that are kind of healthiest these days are companies that try to find a balance between all of the different models. And then there are obviously the smaller non-publicly traded companies can still make a living. Like you sell a single smaller scale game.

And when you don't have thousands of people working on it, the way some of these companies do, the threshold for what makes it a hit is a lot lower. That's another big thing, by the way, that I haven't brought up, which is team sizes. And that was kind of one of the biggest points, if not the biggest point, of contention between Bobby Kotick and Activision and the people who ran Blizzard, which is that Bobby was all about bigger, bigger, bigger. And that's how you make stuff is like you play, plug in people to this mathematical

formula and you create content. And Blizzard was very much anti that and they were under to like kind of run things their own way, have their own cultures, have their own team sizes, yada, yada, yada. And the way that Bobby like to operate when you do have thousands of people or hundreds of people working on a game,

you have to sell a lot more to break even because all that money, all those people are costing, like that's where the biggest costs of these budgets are. And so games budgets wind up in the hundreds of millions, if not more, if not like astronomical amounts. And so you're not even a hit if you sell. I mean, look at, okay, so a game called Star Wars Outlaws just came out a couple months ago from Ubisoft.

That game reportedly, I think it was Insider Gaming or something like that, reported that they sold about a million copies. They've said publicly, this game was a flaw for us, did not hit expectations. Imagine selling a million copies of something and it not meeting expectations.

Yeah, at 70 bucks a pop. That's the scale we're talking about. Because so many people worked on that game, because it was a licensed game, because of all these factors, your expectations are so high that you, there's just no sustainable way to meet them. And the question for me is like, look,

I love a good single player game with a lot of content, right, but the amount of time that I actually get through all of the content is very low. So if you look at even the million people who bought that game, how many of them saw more than half of the game? Probably a small fraction. I'm sure a lot of people probably bought it, had a great time, but they played it for 10 hours.

That happens to me with games all the time. And, uh, and so even in single player games, the old model, there's this like overbuilding, right? Um, and it makes me wonder if like, bigness is somehow like this attractive nuisance that these companies always are pulled towards. If you look at that, the companies buying each other, getting bigger and bigger companies, investing

more money into the game, putting more content into the game. Yeah, you can also see it in the movie industry. I was wondering why are movies so fucking long? Why is a three hour movie better than a two hour movie? It's better for nobody. The audience thinks it's too long. You can air it less times.

It costs more money to make. It benefits no one to have too much of something. Yeah. And yet we see it everywhere in this industry. Well, I think some people do, or at least companies think that some customers do associate the amount of content with the value. And I've certainly seen people on the internet being like,

oh, this game is only 10 hours. I'm not gonna spend $70 I do know people who they're like give me a new Assassin's Creed game I want to spend 200 hours of my life doing everything on a map. I know those people Yeah, I would say that those people don't dominate Like the video game audience as I know it to be like I would say one out of every four gamers I know is like that. Just as many people say, oh, my God, this game is like five hours long.

Let me add it. I can pay $20 for a nice, clear experience that I can play beginning to end like in between me, you know, having to pick up, pick up my kids. Yeah, like let me add here. I mean, that's also an age thing. You're talking about, of course, friends in their 30s and 40s because life speeds up as you get older. So you have less time to play video games.

Yeah. When you have kids to pick up, you have less time for those. Absolutely. But I understand the argument that there are some there are some gamers who they go look at time. How long to beat. Yeah. And then they say they divide it by the number of dollars and they say, oh, I'm getting 10 hours per dollar I spend on this goodie. But is that really such a powerful force that it is going to make, you know, these companies spend an extra 50 million dollars putting content into a game only 10 percent of the audience is going to see?

Yeah, I don't know. It's a good question. I think these people have their marketing, like metrics and like whatever, telling them that they have to make games bigger and bigger. Then again, Ubisoft is in a serious crisis right now and is considering buying itself out to get away from, because stocks, its share prices have plummeted so much. So, and they've become the pioneers of these thousand hour games like Assassin's Creed. So who knows?

One thing I'll say is that I think a big crisis in the video game industry that doesn't get talked about so much is that so many younger people are not buying games anymore because they're just playing Fortnite and the equivalent, these kind of service games where they just hang out with their friends. And so the appeal. They're going to the Travis Scott concert.

They're just like. Exactly. I mean, it's just, yeah, Fortnite is really just a place to chill out after school. Yeah, dressing up as Thanos or whatever. And I think that the appeal of those hundred, thousand, whatever, hour games might have been to younger people in past years but is less so these days

because people aren't doing those anymore. So yeah, like when I was a kid, I mean there was nothing I loved more than like when a new, I don't know, like Baldur's Gate 1 or Baldur's Gate 2 came out or like some other meaty, like a new Final Fantasy game. And I was like, hell yeah, I'm gonna spend like a month doing nothing but playing this. I'm gonna spend hundreds of hours playing Diablo 2 from Blizzard. All these games that just like never end.

I was so stoked about it as a kid. And of course you get older, you get more responsibilities, you have less free time and things change. And the question is what happens when those younger people no longer have interest in these kind of mass like dense games because they're just playing Fortnite with their buds. Because the actual like what the audience wants has shifted over the past couple years. Exactly. Pretty wild.

In terms of the hardware, like there's also, just in terms of talking about bigger is better Yeah, that's been a longtime trend in video games Whereas you know most of the console manufacturers and the PC people are like let's make the consoles more and more powerful The Sony recently unveiled the PS 5 Pro is the first time I've ever seen a console be released saying it's bigger It's better the graphics are better and the video audience, the portion of it that I see online all said, who cares? Right. Because they demoed like they were like, here's the last of us, too.

It looks even better. Yeah. People were like, I played that four years ago on my PS4. And I finished it. Why would I play it again and have it look better? And they people looked at the side by side and said it looks the fucking same So who gives a shit yeah? That I find to be a very bizarre trend that like that's when I was really felt something is going seriously wrong Because Sony I feel like has always had a pretty good handle on what they're doing yeah, but the fact that they're really

Yeah, sure, but the fact that here's the new console, we have nothing to motivate you to buy it, I thought was a pretty big gap. Well tell me about it. It's really, it's wild, yeah. I guess they feel like there's enough of a market for tech spec enthusiasts, aficionados who don't have PCs, who knows? I don't know, I don't really see

what their thinking is here. It doesn't really seem like it's for many people. I think what that really shows is the kind of lack of progress in this console generation, and that's for a host of reasons. Games are so slow to make now. They take five, six, seven years in some cases, and there just aren't a ton of them being made

on the same level, on the same kind of like big budget level that there were in the previous generation and the PS4 generation. And so there is nothing to show. There are no like huge games to show. I have a feeling that they were hoping that Grand Theft Auto six would have come out alongside the PS5 Pro, because that's the one game that would have been the selling point for that thing. But yeah, that was delayed till next fall. So who knows what's going to happen

with that. But yeah, I mean, PS5 sales have been kind of flat with PS4. Like if you track where they are, where they were at this point in their lifespans, PS5 is like almost a little bit lower than the PS4. So not exactly what they wanted. And a large part of that is because most of the games you can play on there are old Yeah, are just older games or you can just play them on a PC and PCs audience has gotten much much bigger like a lot Of a lot more people are playing games on PCs than they were a few years ago Which also makes the PS 5 Pro feel obsolete. I think technically like a PS 5 Pro is like $700 So if you get that you you can get games like that. If you pay for $700 for that, it is stronger than what you could get with a $700 PC.

But still, I mean, I think people are willing to spend a little bit more to have that kind of the access to the PC library. And also, if you play games on Steam, the PC platform, you can buy games on sale for much cheaper than you can on PlayStation. So it all adds up to this ecosystem that just like is not making sense. Yeah, it feels like the value proposition of the Sony and Microsoft console has sort of fallen apart that it used to be you'd get this. It looks better every year. We have exclusive games that you're going to want to buy the console to have to play.

Yeah, the exclusive part of that component is like no longer there. Xbox doesn't even do it anymore because all their games are on PC now. And some of them are coming to PlayStation 2. And Sony, some of their games have also been coming to PC. And then also they just have not released enough PlayStation exclusives to justify. Like this year there were maybe two total PlayStation exclusives.

So very hard to justify getting something like the PS5 Pro. And it seems like that sort of like eternal business model rhythm that we had in the video game industry since I was a kid of new console every couple years bundled with some new exclusive games that you're going to buy one at a time. There's going to be new experiences has really gotten really hairy around the edges that you've got live service games, you have people playing old games, you have things being available on a multiple console,

you've got PC as this sort of disruptive force where the PC is, it's both a computer and it's the Steam Deck, so it's like a console and not a console. The Steam Deck is so cool. I've been playing mine on this trip. And I literally just now was like, do I buy this new RPG everybody's playing? Metaphor.

Metaphor, do I buy it on my PS5 or do I get it on my PC where now I can play it on Steam Deck or I can play it on my PC? It's a complicated decision. It does not run great on Steam Deck, I will warn you now. It does not run great.

I've turned on my framerate counter and I'm like walking around this village. This is a game I've been playing nonstopstop. I love it. It's awesome. But it's like 15 frames a second in this village. Well, my point being, video games have gotten much more complicated and confusing as a business model. It seems like these companies had trouble finding their footing. There's one exception to this. There's one company that has not changed its business model since literally before I was born, and that's Nintendo.

They continue to simply release, every couple years, they got a new piece of hardware that is outdated, that is what they call withered technology, like some old hardware that people are like, this is way past its prime, and then they just make original, wonderful games that everybody wants to play, because the games are so good,

they put a smile on your face and they just do that over and over again. And, you know, six or seven years ago, people were saying Nintendo sunk, the cell phone is gonna kill, you know, the smartphone is gonna kill them, et cetera. Who's gonna wanna play their games? And now, like they are sitting high on the hog, right?

By doing the exact same thing that they've always done. And I've been trying to figure out why that is because the other companies have lost the thread and Nintendo has not even adapted. They're just doing the same thing again. Yeah, they're producing a lot more games. Their games are cheaper to make because they aren't trying to make

the highest graphical fidelity possible. And even when they are cheaper to make, they're such mega hits that it's fine because they release games on their store, I mean something that all these first parties, Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft have as an advantage is that when they sell games digitally, digital stores tend to take a 30% cut on games.

But if you're Nintendo and you're selling games through the Nintendo store, that 30% is going to you. So that's a huge, huge financial advantage. But even, yeah, I mean the new Zelda game took. That was a wisdom. Yeah, well, no, I mean Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom both took six-ish years to make. So expensive projects, but still they sold

20 plus million copies each. So like for Nintendo, it can take these big bets because it knows that they're going to be justified. And it's just producing a lot more. I mean, even when it makes smaller games, it's just kind of got this consistent output every year. There hasn't really been in the switch era, which is like 2017 to now, there hasn't been a dry year. Like they have really just put together this plan

or they're just able to release so many more games than their competitors. Sony is not doing that. Microsoft is not doing that. It's really quite something to behold. And it seems like they've resisted a lot of the impulses that have fucked up the rest of the industry, like the impulses towards bigness. Like Nintendo has not had a merger. They have not bought or been, I mean, they've bought like tiny companies, but you know, they've not had some mega merger.

People used to speculate that like Disney was going to buy an apple. Apple buys Nintendo. Yeah, that hasn't happened. They've kind of. Yeah. I mean, they had some rough patches for sure, and they did try to release games on phones, which the less said about that whole process, the better. And the Wii U era was obviously a big struggle for them. But yeah, they've managed to just consistently grow these past few years with the Switch.

And I think a large part of it is just the Switch is just such a, it's so easy to sell. It's so easy to see that and be like, oh, yes, I can see myself enjoying this because I can just take it anywhere with me. And so many people love that idea, that portability of it all. And then you combine that with like the massive number

of awesome games on it, and it's just an easy buy. I'm very curious, I don't know, I think it'll be a really interesting test for them to see what happens with the new Switch, the Switch 2, whenever that gets announced and revealed. Because if it's just the same thing as the Switch, but more powerful, I'm very curious to see how much of a selling point that'll be to people or if people will just kind of stick with the Switch one.

Because one of Sony's problems is that a lot of people are just sticking with their PlayStation 4s. And you know why that is? Because you can still play Fortnite on your PlayStation 4. You don't need a PlayStation 5 or Grand Theft Auto Online or Minecraft or these other kind of mega service games. And I mentioned GTA 6 before that is kind of seen by a lot of people, a lot of industry watchers as like it's going to be a big test of a lot of things. And it's a lot of people are hoping that that thing will sell a lot of PS5s because it will you won't be able to play that on a PS4. And so people who play GTA online now, GTA 5 by the way has sold 200 million copies.

I don't know if you know that. It has sold more copies than pretty much any game in history. Maybe Minecraft has sold more, but still it's pretty remarkable. There is a hope industry-wide that when GTA 6 comes out, a lot of people will move over to that, play the online portion of that instead of the old one, buy PlayStation 5s as a result,

and that will help build up the software all around. That's rising tide lifts all ships. This is the same problem of staking everything on one giant release though. Isn't that the problem? Well, Adam, I don't know if you know this, but a lot of companies don't seem to learn lessons from history. They all think, oh, it's like Tobias interested development.

Like, oh, it's never worked for anyone else, but it could work for us. Yeah, it's crazy. I just think about the fact that the Switch, like, they are so pushing against that trend of new, bigger hardware that like the, why even release the Switch 2 when the Switch is still selling?

Even though I literally, I remember when Breath of the Wild, when the first Zelda game came out, because it was how I like, I remember playing it at like around Trump's inauguration. Right? Like that's how long ago it was. And that- March 2017. And that same console is still on sale.

And like why release something new when you the value proposition of the old thing is just as good. It's so in contrast to what the rest of the industry does. I think sales have gone a little downhill for them. I think that they've kind of hit the peak of what their potential audience is for the switch. And also some of the games, I mean, the new the actual news, Michael's of Wisdom, it chugs on the Switch one. Like, there's some noticeable, like, framerate drops and it can get choppy and it's the kind of game that could really use,

like, a more powerful system. And yeah, I mean, there's more stuff they want to do. Like, they want to make games that are prettier and look better, even if they're not, like, pursuing the same kind of crazy high fidelity as some of their competitors, I think they still do want to make games that are more powerful, that can run on more powerful hardware. So, for example, it's been a long time since they released a new big 3D Mario game. I wouldn't be shocked if they were waiting for new hardware because they have some innovations in mind

that can only be done with new hardware. And by the way, it's not just graphics. I mean, I think it's worth noting here that the PS5 era, the PlayStation 5 and also the new Xbox came with solid state drives, which has severely reduced loading time, which is actually pretty noticeable and pretty good, I would say, pretty good improvement.

And so there are kind of other innovations beyond just more graphical power that these consoles can bring. And those innovations were huge. And I remember when I got the PS5, it felt a little bit like getting a new iPhone rather than getting a new console. I was like, oh, all the stuff I was playing runs better.

Yeah, well, that's the problem is that there aren't a lot of games that can only, even their new Horizon, their new God of War, those were both released on PS4 and PS5. So it's really, yeah, it's, um, I think Spider-Man two was one of the few exclusive PS5 games, but still we're at this point where, um, uh, there aren't a ton of compelling reasons for a lot of people to upgrade if

they're still enjoying their PS4. Here's my last Nintendo question, because there's something I think about all the time that Nintendo does. Nintendo does what other companies don't. Nintendo don't. Whatever is that old Sega slogan. I'm going to ask, is Toad wearing a hat or is that his hat? I'm so bored of that shit.

No, like when I think about Nintendo, their roots is as a toy company. And I think when I think about them, that helps me understand them. They are actually not a video game company. They think about how you are going to play with things. That explains all of their weird hardware innovations like the Wii. They just announced an alarm clock. Did you see this?

Yes, they announced an alarm clock, which is just like a fun object to have in your house. So I think about the Wii and about the fact that the Wii was played by old folks in nursing homes. The idea for a way to play that they came up with was so universally appealing that 85-year-olds were playing it. And that is why it was so massively selling. And that was such an interesting blip in the video game market because that only lasted a couple years. Like, 85-year-olds are not playing the Switch

in the same numbers, I would imagine, right? No, I don't think so. But Nintendo at least is trying to go for a larger, more expansive market like that. Like, they show in their ads, you know, parents and children playing together, people playing together after school, et cetera. Yeah.

Whereas Sony and Xbox have been going after this, like, core gamer market. And I feel like a lot of what we've been dancing around here. Sony just released Astrobot and that game can be played by anybody. Oh, absolutely. Yes, I don't. I'm not talking about like for kids or not. I'm talking about like coming up with new verbs,

new ways to play video games that appeal to people who have never held the standard controller that we're all using. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it seems like such a, like what we're dancing around is that core audience, their tastes have changed, they don't have as much time as they used to, there's a bigger and bigger competition for their time. It seems so odd that no one other than Nintendo

is going for that larger market. I mean, there's the mobile game. VR and AR, I think a lot of stabs at it have just ended in failure. I think that's the problem. VR less people want to play it than regular games. Nobody wants to do VR. And also, there are only so many ideas for like, motion control was a big thing for a bit.

Remember Microsoft did the Kinect? That was a big thing for a bit. Remember, Microsoft did the connect. That was a whole thing for a while that fails. Like, I don't know. There are only so many gimmicks that you can actually make work without just like getting into the weird. I mean, remember Google Glass? Like, how many different ways can you play games? Like, I don't know what the answer is.

I don't know. There's an example, like, for instance, Pokemon Go type games. Right. So many people tried to do that and then know. There's an example, like, for instance, Pokemon Go type games. Right. So many people tried to do that and then failed. Like Pokemon Go was this like one time. But it did establish like a new market, right? Like there are people who play Pokemon Go or that type of game who don't play other games. Yeah, I think they're only playing Pokemon Go. But yeah, I think that's definitely.

But again, that's eight years ago, like once in a once in a decade thing that someone discovers one of these. I just don't know how many potential innovations there really are. But yeah, that said, who knows? I mean, yeah, mobile is definitely up there. But in terms of how to control it, it just seems like, to me, it's at least,

I think there's a lot more that can be done in the actual game space in terms of, talking about inventing new verbs. We were talking about, I know a game that you love is Case of the Golden Idol, which to me is like one of those games that are like Return of the Overdine, those kind of like brainy, like, detectivity games, which to me felt like, when I played those,

I was like, wow, we like don't even know the full extent of what games are capable of, because this is like, even playing this is unlike anything I've done before. Yes. And so that to me is where there's a lot of room for innovation I think. Where you could just have gameplay types that have not been explored before instead of the same old like combat and skill trees and open world exploration. Yeah, that I think there's probably room for innovation as opposed to the hardware where I'm not so sure that there is even much more you could do. Yeah I mean I

wasn't talking about hardware I was just talking about expanding the notion of who the audience is. Yeah, of what they would want to play. Yeah, yeah I mean I do think that there's like a lot of room for that but like a lot of these companies are run by extremely conservative or KC people who just would not want to take risks because nobody can afford to these days because everything's so expensive. Making games is so expensive. You have this checklist of like boxes that you have to tick. You got to have your crafting system. You got to have your towers that you scout. Like it's it's a lot of people complain about like creative

bankruptcy about this void of innovation. And I think a large part of that is that games are taking six years and costing $200 million to make. So nobody wants to take the risk because they will all lose their jobs if they release something and that risk doesn't pan out. And so it is about that growth and that unwillingness to be small

because if you're a publicly traded company, it's not worth it to hit singles. Like you need to hit home runs. Well, you could be the company that it's not worth it to hit singles. Like you need to hit home runs. Well, you could be the company that enables all the other companies to hit singles. You could be like Valve and like create a platform that enables small companies to sell. Sure.

If you want to make a ton of money. Sure, and there's some, I mean like, there's some companies that make like middleware or like tools for people to make games with and that can be lucrative for sure. But in the game space, if you're an EA, if you're at Ubisoft, or like tools for people to make games with and that can be lucrative for sure. But in the game space, if you're an EA, if you're a Ubisoft, there's really no point

in like going and incubating some small project the way the Blizzard did with Hearthstone because like if it's a single, then that was a waste of everybody's time. Then because you made a bit of money but it's not gonna move the balance sheet enough for people to get promoted or for people to get giant bonuses or for Wall Street to reward you.

Exactly. Like why? So there's this publicly traded company called Take Two. They make GTA and many other things. And they have this label that I guess technically they're still around, but there's this label that called Private Division within them that was designed to like kind of release smaller games that didn't have to be home runs. And over time, they just got kind of squeezed because it turns out that like that doesn't really fit in the confines of a publicly traded company. People look over and they're like, why are we bothering?

Why are we spending any money on this? Would we could put that money towards whatever GTA Online Borderlands for whatever it is. or whatever it is. It just doesn't make logical sense for these people who are charged with keeping investors happy every quarter and showing consistent growth. Right. So instead, Take-Two spends $12 billion to buy Zynga,

and that doesn't pan out and leads to a lot of problems, but it's just kind of reflective of that strategy, of that just kind of number go up. Is there something that has protected Nintendo from that kind of logic, you know? Yeah, I mean, I think a large part of it is just the way that they're structured and they can make numbers go up regardless

because even if they release something and it's a single, like I don't know, they have like this new Mario role-playing game coming out in a few weeks. Even if that only sells like a million copies instead of the 10 million that like a traditional Mario game would. It's still so much more profitable

because they own the store than it's on because every single copy is on one of their hardware devices because it helps sell switches, it helps add to the growing library of the Switch and creates more value for the Switch itself that it's all just one ecosystem that kind of, they all feed in together really well in a way that if you're Tick-Doo or EA or something,

you don't have those same mechanisms, those same kind of incentives in place. Is it part of it also like the culture of the? I'm sure, yeah. I mean, Nintendo is still, it's a company that like, Miyamoto is still there and you have this kind of, a lot of people there who, that's another, yeah, that's a good point about Nintendo and their culture is that like a Lot of people in Nintendo have been there for 30 40 years

Which yes can cause problems and that like people get set in their ways and can kind of like be resistant to change but also you have that know-how and that veteran talent and that experience and those kind of design chops and like Imagine like you get a job in Nintendo and I'm sure their downsides to working in Nintendo But like one upside is that you get to literally learn from shigero Miyamoto Like that's crazy. No other company can offer that right Blizzard used to be that way Blizzard used to have people who would say They're 20 25 30 years, but that has kind of died out This is one of the big problems in the industry is that amount of burnout. So we have to, we're going long, but it's because I love talking to you.

Let's talk quickly about what video game workers are doing like to sort of push back against all these negative trends. There's been a wave of unionization sweeping the industry. I actually, when I did a bunch of shows recently in outside of Baltimore, a bunch of folks from Bethesda who are part of their organizing group, shout out to the wonderful organizing committee members at Bethesda who came out to my shows

and solidarity to you guys. But, you know, just to say like, hey, you know, good, nice to meet you. And, you know, they gave me a t-shirt and stuff. It was very nice. But yeah, what has caused that and has it, you know, shown any fruits so far? Yeah, I mean, it's still early days for unionization.

I'm still waiting for the first really big monumental contract to kind of like, I suspect that'll be the first domino, because the way it works, as I'm sure many of your viewers know, is that once you form a union, that isn't really giving you, there's some legal protections involved, but it's not really giving you the kind of, that isn't really giving you, there's some legal protections involved, but it's not really giving you the kind of perks that a union would give you.

What you have to do is start negotiating a collective bargaining agreement or a contract, and that's what, once you have that in place of management, then it'll give you whatever benefits you're getting. So X percent raises per year, like this, this, and this guarantee of benefits or severance or whatever else it is.

Like that's the union contract. And that can take years in the negotiation process, depending how like hardball your management is playing. And so some of these companies have formed unions, Bethesda, World of Warcraft team, Raven and Activision, a few others. But as far as I know, I think there might be one contract at Sega, but I don't think there are a ton just yet. And certainly not like big public spectacles of like, oh, we can all look at this contract

and then kind of learn from it and be incentivized to union at our own shot, to form a union in our own shop because now we see what you can get from this. So that I think will be the first domino to fall is like when the Bethesda team forms a, like strikes a contract and it can show everybody like, oh wow, we can get this, this and this.

But it doesn't seem like it's a coincidence that during, in this time of layoffs, when the workers at these companies are having a harder and harder time that they would start trying to unionize. Yeah, although I think it's like, it's worth noting unions are not a panacea. Like you cannot like stop a company from laying people off. You could put protections in place.

Maybe you say you must give X amount of severance or you must offer buyouts to the union, voluntary buyouts, before you take the step of layoffs or give us warning or whatever it is. You can get that, but no company is gonna agree to never lay people off. But it at least gives the workers for a company or an industry some amount of democratic say and power.

Yeah, and more agency. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's having a seat at the table. I remember when we were unionizing at Gawker Media in 2015, having more agency and having a seat at the table was always a big part of it. And just like, we were like, we have reasonable demands here. We just want to be included in whatever processes

are in place. And a lot of what we asked for back then was just kind of protections and try men of like stuff we already had and just liked and didn't want to go away in case we got sold or something like that. So those can be pretty beneficial in terms of unionization. And yeah, I mean, with layoffs, I think that like there have been cases, a lot of layoffs this year at the big companies, there were, with layoffs, I think that like, there have been cases, a lot of the layoffs this year at the big companies, there were severance given out,

but there have been cases, I wrote about in Press Reset my last book, 38 Studios, they shut down, and people not only did not get severance, they also like, were stiffed out of their last paycheck. Wow. So it's, having some sort of guarantee of severance can be really helpful. And, yeah, I mean...

And just anything you can do to make these businesses more sustainable places for the workers to be in so that they can stay there longer and pass down the information to the next generation and make better games. Like, these are the people who are making the games. If they are burned out and leaving the industry, the games aren't going to be very good, you know? Something I've never understood, by the way, if they are burned out and leaving the industry, the games are going to be very good. Yeah. You know?

Something I've never understood, by the way, in capitalism is like, why wouldn't you want to create a system where like every single worker has shares in the company and participates in the value of the company? Because wouldn't that incentivize everybody to work harder and like everybody to have be aligned toward like if you're if you are kind of like pursuing growth, pursuing infinite growth, like wouldn't you be more likely to achieve that if every single person in your company

benefited from the results? You would think so. I would think the problem is that the people in charge of the companies don't actually want the companies to do that well. They want to extract money in the short term and leave. Which is like what Bobby Kotick and all these other CEOs do, right?

Bobby Kotick was ran activism for 30 years. I don't even think that's a new one. Maybe not the best example, but say David Zoswab, right? Yeah, well. That type of owner, I'll buy it, I'll extract some money, and then I'll split, you know?

I don't actually- Yeah, the private equity model. I'm happy to burn it down and run away, you know? And that private equity model has taken over the economy in the last couple of decades, and I think that's part of why. But I think that's exactly your point, right? And that is, model has taken over the economy in the last couple of decades. And I think that's part of why, but I think that's exactly your point, right? And that is, I don't know,

a real communist would be like, that is the internal logic of capitalism that causes it to crumble and we don't have to go there, but that is the tension at the heart of that. Why do capitalist companies make decisions that cause them to lose money? Yeah, it just doesn't, yeah, there's a lot of it that just doesn't make logical sense, even if you believe that

like exponential growth forever is possible. Part of it is that the other piece that I think is far underrated is that the people who run our biggest capitalist companies and the economy are not super capitalism geniuses who are really great at like making money all the time. They're fucking morn on. Right. And they make bad decisions that cause at like making money all the time. They're fucking morons. And they make bad decisions that cause them to lose money and lay waste. And they have too much power for how dumb they are. And then they keep failing up.

We see this in the video game industry a lot where it's like the traditional way to get in the CCD of a video game company is to like fail at a different video game company and move over or to, you know, run Procter and Gamble for a little bit. Exactly. yes. Yes, yes, yes. Work in CPG. Do you find, bringing this in for a landing, given all of these mistakes

that almost the entire industry has made of bigger is better, merger, chasing bad business models, et cetera, trying to go for a home run every time that then collapses, is there any conversation among the C-suite people of like, oh shit, we got it wrong, we need to do something a little bit more sustainable or any of the other things that we've been talking about

that would be better? Is there, are things starting to shift in any way? Yeah, I don't know. Cause I think you can always kind of justify the circumstances that led you to have to make cuts at your own company. I don't know. I mean, I haven't heard any contrition from people, but I'm also not like,

C-suite people, it might shock you to hear, don't exactly call me up and try to, don't talk to me very much. In fact, they try to stay away from me. They call you a two-and, they're like, Jason, I made a lot of mistakes, man. Yeah, God, I fucked up so badly. Put this in Bloomberg, I fucked up bad, man.

Yeah, right? Yeah, God, I fucked up so badly. Put this in Bloomberg, I fucked up bad, man. Yeah, right? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's always, you always see the same sort of email where it's like, we regret that it came to, like we regret that we have to make, we're always sorry to say bye to farewell, say farewell to beloved colleagues, and it's always just the same kind of like

nonsense corporate speak. And there's never like, it's always just the same kind of like nonsense corporate speak. And there is never like, it's never like you never see a CEO being like, well, we had to make job cuts. I'm cutting myself because I shouldn't have overseen this. And it was a failure for me to have to cut 500 employees. So I'm gonna, I'm going to leave. Bye guys. I could almost imagine a Nintendo guy doing that. Right? Like that's, that's a little bit more the... Well, the most infamous example, and there's a little bit of kind of urban legend to this, is that the late Satoru Iwata in like 2015,

like peak Wii U era, was like, took a salary cut to kind of show his contrition for the poor state of Nintendo at the time, and there's been a lot of people just being like pointing to that as like, Nintendo doesn't do layoffs, look what they did instead. Although there isn't 100% truth to that because like around the same time, Nintendo was like laying people off in their Europe office.

So a little bit different. Yeah, I mean, I think you need to know, and I'm the kind of like future tenability, sustainability note, something that, I don't know how viable this is, but like labor laws and protections are something that I would love to see more people fighting for and more people lobbying for

because that helps protect a lot of people in Europe and Japan is that it's a lot harder to do these mass layoffs. In the UK, for example, you have to like go through this whole process of like informing people they're at risk of redundancy is what they call it. And it takes a long time before people actually lose their jobs. They have a lot of heads up and a lot of opportunities to go look for jobs elsewhere. So that sort of thing in the US you can do

it tomorrow. And you know what? In California there's what's called the WARN Act, which is ostensibly meant to force you to notify employees 60 days in advance if you're gonna lay them off. But what you can do in lieu of that is just give people two months of severance, which I mean is good, like not a bad thing. And more states should definitely have that,

but they're still gonna find out tomorrow that they lost their jobs. It's not like they're getting an ample heads up. And the business owners would say, well, if we inform people they're losing their jobs, they're not gonna work as hard and they're all gonna quit and yada, yada, yada. So it's, but like making it more difficult

to lay people off, I think would help. Or making labor laws that would make it easier to unionize and organize. Yeah, it's all part of the same thing. And it's like, it's so detrimental because not only, when you lay people off, not only are you hurting your company by losing people, you're also like devastating morale

for the people who stay behind. And it just is like creating chaos at your company. And it's just like, it's just stupid. It's just bad decision making. It's any sort of, anytime a company does a mass layoff, it's just a failure. Well, I agree with you. I hope that, I hope the industry pulls itself out

of the fucking trash can. It's been very frustrating to watch, you know, something that I love so much. I've loved my entire life, like have such a difficult period for seemingly no good reason, right? There's more people playing games than ever yet. It's this bizarre processionary period. But they're all playing Fortnite.

I'm not playing Fortnite. I play a little bit of Fortnite, it's a good time. What are you playing right now? Metaphor, the game I mentioned. I've been playing that on this trip on my book tour tour. I've been playing metaphor on my Steam Deck, which is awesome. It's really cool. It's like, it's fantasy persona, basically.

I just finished, I'll answer the question myself. I just finished the Riven remake, the remake of Riven, one of my favorite series, the Myst series of all time. Are you playing Bellatro on your phone and just like losing sleep? No, I fucking did everything in Bellatro on my Steam Deck. I have nothing more to accomplish.

Unless I was gonna be a real completionist about it. I did all the challenges. I got all the way to the highest ante on one of the decks. And I was like, that's enough for me. I broke the game up and down. I did all the strats. Well, once you do, yeah, for me, it was like, once you do that stat of like having Baron

and like single high card decks and then just nothing but Kings. Do you know what I'm talking about? Yes, I know what you're talking about. You kind of break the game and you make it less fun for yourself. So you kind of kill the addiction that way by being like, oh, I don't have to,

like no other strategy can compete with this. I might as well just stop playing. I mean, it's really funny that this is a general interest podcast, but there was no way to avoid discussion of strats in a particular deck building card game. See, here's the thing. This is why I had to plug the book earlier, because a lot of people are just going to tune out now

when we start talking about Bellatra strategies. And so this is why I need to mention Play Nice earlier, because nobody's going to get to now when you say like, oh, I'm going to plug the book at the end. OK, yeah, sure. After our Bellatra talk. OK, well, let's play it one more time for the 10 people who made it through the Bellatra talk Thank you to you 10 people the book is called play nice play nice It was pick up a copy at our special bookshop factually pod comm slash books. Where else can people get it? The book is incredible. Yeah, thank you. It's

Bookstores, although Barnes and Noble got I have a bone to pick up Barnes and Noble because they friggin stick my books Next to the Minecraft strategy guides instead of like in the business section where they belong. To do the business section, yeah. Don't get me started, it makes me so mad. So get it from your local independent bookstore if you can or you can buy it digitally or you can buy the audio book which a lot of people are into.

The audio book is like, for this book it's been selling super well, like almost as well as the hardcover. If not, like on par with the hardcover. So people are really into the audio book read by Ray Chase who is an awesome voice actor So check that out And yeah It's a really wild story that I feel like I've only scratched the surface of talking about it earlier And you have a podcast in a newsletter really yeah triple click podcasts check it out and

Yeah, we have the Bloomberg we have the game on we have the Game On newsletter, it's pretty cool, check it out. If you wanna read weekly gaming industry news and analysis for me. Jason, thank you so much, it's been a thrill moving out with you. Thanks for having me, Adam. Yeah, we gotta do this more often than every three years. Absolutely.

Well thank you once again to Jason for coming on the show. If you wanna pick up a copy of his book, head to factuallypod.com slash books. If you wanna support the show directly, patreon.com slash Adam Conover is the URL. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of this show ad free for 15 bucks a month. I will read your name in the credits of the show and put it in the credits of every single one

of my video monologues. This week, I want to thank Rick J. Nash, Birdie Coat, GD Cillia, Howard and Kevin, Faith Mercan and Michael Lurer. Thank you so much for supporting the show. Patreon.com slash Adam Conover. If you'd like to join them, if you want to come see me do a brand new hour of stand-up comedy in Portland, Seattle, Denver, Austin, Batavia, Illinois, San Francisco, Toronto, Chicago, Boston or Providence,

head to adamconover.net for all of those tickets and tour dates. I want to thank my producers, Sam Roudman and Tony Wilson, everybody here at HeadGum for making the show possible. And thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next time on Factually. I don't know anything. That was a HeadGum podcast.