The Besties - Most Anticipated Video Games of 2020

Episode Date: January 3, 2020

The Besties are looking ahead at the coming year and asking themselves: Which are the true bangers of 2020? They'll even look ahead and make some prognostications about what to expect from the coming year. Will they be right? Probably not! Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

so close your guys's eyes and imagine uh it's a sort of like post-apocalyptic sort of uh industrial future and it's a bunch of gamers and they're all like there's actual literal chains that are connecting them to their big heavy consoles sure and they're all and a big man is yelling at them to keep gaming keep gaming but they can't move because of all the chains that they're connected are people Are people playing Donkey Konga drums to maintain the pace of the market? It's heavy drums, heavy peripherals, thanks to Russ. But then there's a big plate,

I should have mentioned the whole time there's a big plate glass window of the aforementioned chains and the big consoles, and Kaz Harai smashes through that big window, and he's holding the Sony Cloud Boy 360. And wait, wait, just to be clear, the system itself is about five inches wide but the antenna is about eight feet tall it's a huge radio antenna uh he uses that to the big

antenna to kill the big man uh and then light shoots out of the sony cloud boy 360 and explodes all the chains so that's my commercial. I love it. Let's get it made. My name is Justin McElroy, and i can see deep into the future of gaming my name's griffin mccarroy and when i put on this hat it shows me visions of gaming future my name is christopher plant and the crystal ball knows all my name is russ frederick and i know the best game of 3031 welcome to the besties where we discuss the latest and greatest in video gaming. It's like a video game book club that goes all year long, except we've taken a

break from that well-established formula to talk about our games of the year previously, and this week we're actually, before we get back into our regular groove next episode, we're going to do a bit of uh prognosticating oh boy into the future witchery of video game yes a sin against god in the name of mario

we're gonna look into the future of gaming and we're gonna talk about one sort of what we're looking forward to and then uh in the second half we're gonna to talk about, one, sort of what we're looking forward to. And then in the second half, we're going to make bold, incredible predictions. I'm sorry, I'm looking at Griffin's prediction. My eyes glance down to Griffin's prediction, and it's very powerful. You're going to feel ashamed of your laughter when you hear what I have to say about my prediction. So exciting. A very true prediction. Now, Russ, I do want to discuss something very briefly before we go into this we each were

supposed to list in the run in the rundown for the show a game that we're looking forward to in 2020 and you put in some placeholder games just kind of were they placeholders or were they very accurate uh they just kind of well let's talk about that okay you kind of put in a game for each of us that you thought we might be looking forward to. And the game that you listed for me, Justin McElroy, your friend of a decade, was Gears Tactics. Are you fucking high?

I have not completed a Gears of War game for 10 years and now because it's slower and more boring i'm gonna nut over it are you basically russ that was preventing you from doing it was i thought before you couldn't get into doms basically like his family oh i'm into doms i'm not into gears of war yowza you know he prefers that funko pop shit russ that Yes, that's my whole thing. I'm sorry, Justin. That was a long miss. I thought an AI had generated it.

Not my dear friend, Russ Frush. Oh, I should mention this episode is brought to you by Gears Tactics. When you've got to be slow and your armor's got to be big, it's got to be Gears Tactics. Justin, why don't you talk about the game that you are actually... This isn't The Order of Sengurfen.

I won't do this. I won't do this. I mean, I made The Order up. It was arbitrary. Cyberpunk. That's mine. Cyberpunk. Cyberpunk is a new game from the...

What's it? Witcher fellas. The Witcher people cd project red they gotta change it though it doesn't mean anything they gotta change it it's a cd no let's break it down they've got a cd they're working on it and it's a red cd it sounds like how my like my grandpa would refer to games development oh yeah my my grandson he's he's uh he's making one of them cd projects the witchers just i am very much looking forward to this game but i am not necessarily i think it has the faintest hint i think okay i think it will probably be great i'm really looking forward to it i love the uh i think it'll be so cool to see what they do with a different setting a different point of view uh i love the idea that think it'll be so cool to see what they do with a different setting, a different point of view.

I love the idea that there's going to be so much depth and all the story stuff for people that don't know what cyberpunk 2020 is real quick. I don't know. I've only kind of watched the commercials, but it looks cool. It's like got Keanu Reeves in it. Just looks cool as shit. I don't know.

I try not to look to the April 16th, 2020. We're going to be joining Keanu on his adventures. I would say it's sort of plain and first-person perspective is V, a mercenary whose voice and hairstyle and body type are all customizable. And there's different stats you could do. And he's got arm blades and he can climb walls. Oh, that's cool.

He's got arm blades and he can climb walls. That's neat. This is all off the dome, right? You're definitely just sort of um there are the open world metropolis night city california consists of six regions the corporate center immigrant inhabited watson okay wikipedia god there's probably other features okay i don't know why that's the it's gonna be cool it's like open world rpg but it's like it's just exactly like witcher 3 but with uh the car like cyber with arm blades do you like i i've never known you to be a big witcher head no thank god they're putting away the swords and they're putting them in people's arms and no more of this fantasy

bullshit which are which are three i definitely like much like every game critic i adored witcher 3 i thought it was a high watermark didn't quite get to the finish line on it did kind of bail what was it two hours the way through but like what an accomplishment and this one is going to be better because it's kind of like future stuff and i like that better than fantasy stuff i think it's really neat it all aesthetically looks great um johnny kiana reeves plays Johnny Silverhand. And I'm very excited about this game. I will say this,

I think, and I'm not, I don't know. And tell me if I'm wrong. Cause this is like literally just based on like, since it feels like the faintest hint of a chance of debacle. Like it might just barely be like, right. Do you guys get that vibe? Whenever things are like super grandiose in vision and scope i start to get that little bit of like in the wind

maybe there's a chance of debacle i mean they did nail whatever whether you liked it or not they did nail the witcher 3 so they know how to do an open world game. But I will say it does feel like, I don't think it would be a feature problem or a gameplay problem necessarily. I could very easily see it being a technical disaster just because it seems very ambitious what they're doing and it is a very big game. I also think they might just constantly delay it until next year or 2021 for that matter.

I would feel this way probably about anything that's super interesting and and far-reaching right like i it's it's just the idea that like oh i don't know maybe there's like a chance and that's what makes it cool partially is like i don't think we've had something like this for a long time i mean even deus ex is not like the sort of scale in any way that they are talking about it's basically like that third batman movie like you feel like, they've done this before. They could probably nail this. And then that third Batman movie came out.

It was like, oh. Well, or alternatively, it could be the second Batman movie, which was extremely good, right? This is essentially, you know, for all intents and purposes, like their sophomore sort of project, the first being like the Witcher series, which they cut their teeth on. By cut their teeth on, I mean like that was the series where they sort of came to prominence in the games

industry and by which are three they'd hit a critical mass and everybody like knew who they were and now it's like okay that was the thing that you built your house upon like let's see the let's see the house i'm i'm super super excited i think that this game's gonna be fantastic to justin's point though the demos especially the most recent three demo i wouldn't say they were received well um entirely unanimously they were controversial i i don't think uh so far it doesn't seem like they are nailing representation in the best ways possible um and i think that's the thing that they didn't have to worry about as much with witcher 3 where it was like i don't know fantasy yeah white people it also doesn't look

super fun but we'll see who wants to go next i'll go speaking of games that look super fun and have i have a lot of confidence in this being a good game and will be like internally crushed if it is not it is ori and the will of the wisp how do they fuck this up like i don't know i don't know it's from the company that brought you gears tactic ori and the will of wisp is a sequel to ori and the blind forest okay um which was a metroidvania that came out uh i want to say like three or four years ago spectacular game i'm sure we talked about it on the podcast because at the time when it came out it was my favorite metroidvania i had ever played um it is now number two behind hollow knight but really a spectacular game a game that actually like managed to combine like incredible art with incredible

gameplay with incredible like heart moving story like i was just very emotionally invested in the story which almost never happens in metroidvania games and so now they are making a sequel here's the thing about the sequel i don't know anything about it apart from the fact that it's made by this team that made an incredible game the first time around and the twisted minds behind brute force um yes i guess it's probably an internal team at microsoft right it's not like moon moon studios i don't know if they've been yeah i don't know if they got bought but oh i guess it came out on pc2 eventually uh but yeah i i just really dig on metroidvania as i talked a lot about them previously. And I think that one of the areas that it's like a little hit or miss with them is like art and story.

And again, the first game just like nailed it so hardcore. I don't know what I would be looking for necessarily in this apart from just like more and bigger. Maybe I guess if I were to critique the first game, I would say it was a little too linear. Like it kind of like held you by the nose to like direct you to where to go. But some people like that. So I don't know. I'm like torn, but I'm like super pumped.

It's the kind of game I'm gonna play the second it comes out. My prediction is second character that no one likes as much. That isn't as fun to play. The Blind Forest. That's not playable. Here comes Zane.

He's a moody raccoon hey what's up this forest is crazy man oh you can shoot fire out of your legs that's cool is he wearing overalls with like one of them like undone he's got one yeah he's going to be wildly out of place he's vaping also the whole time and that's bad that's a good segue for yours griffin because talking animals yeah i guess so uh i am after talking about that though russ i kind of want to change mine to silk song the new holiday jam because god i can't wait for that yeah but uh no mine is uh surprising nobody animal crossing new horizons coming out on the switch it is a game that I just will occasionally Google it now, like once a week, just to see like what kind of hot new features people are plucking from screenshots from like international Nintendo Twitter accounts. And it's like they've got knees.

These villagers have knees now. Holy shit. Wait, do the knees bend? The knees. I don't know if they bend or not. They may just be cosmetic. it's just a line it's just and you can it's a line and you can get loot boxes with new knees in them uh and there's customizable noses now and the peaches are different now they look more like peaches one of the sprouse twins tweeted a screenshot of all the new fruits in animal

crossing new horizon and said something like i would risk everything for that peach and i thought Rouse Twins tweeted a screenshot of all the new fruits in Animal Crossing New Horizon and said something like, I would risk everything for that peach. And I thought that was a very funny, very funny tweet. It doesn't occur to me yet. They never looked like peaches. What was that driven by? They looked like hats. Anyway, this doesn't matter.

I am so excited for this game. I played New Leaf for a very very very long time uh sort of on and off for like a couple years i remember the e3 like when it first came out like trading furniture with everybody just trying to get like a full set and and investing a lot into that town it's it's like this is super my aesthetic like this is my the life sim genre is is my favorite type of game and animal crossing does it better than uh any of them i love what other life genres do you play though uh i mean stardew valley i mean that's its own sort of thing right like it's a it's a it's similar uh farming sort of situation but the

nobody does the like real time aspect of uh animal crossing that really makes it feel super special and the the idea of it being on Switch, like, since Switch was, like, first announced, I was like, oh my, like, an Animal Crossing is perfect for that, being able to, you know, drop it on the TV, and then play, like, local multiplayer on TV, and then, you know, hop off and take it on the road is perfect. The Switch, for me, is, like, ideal for that type of game that I can just have on there, like have downloaded on there, and I can return to...

I've been playing Slay the Spire a lot. Slay the Spire will never leave my Switch because it's a game that I just like. I feel a certain comfort just having it there and knowing that it's there that I can return to, and Animal Crossing is that, and everything that they've announced about New Horizons just looks absolutely fantastic and uh what's the achilles heel what do you think is the best chance of them uh fucking it up i mean the online services uh nintendo has proven

time and time again that they're not especially great at that uh but like new leaf had okay like new leaf if you were uh 3ds friends with somebody it would like show you whenever they logged on like you would get a little a little flash anytime somebody hopped on an animal car like if they take a step back from that i guess it would be bad like i don't think that i it would be pretty hard to fuck up griffin just laughed as though nintendo taking a step back in an online service is the wildest thing that's fair they're also doing something new with the crafting stuff uh which i know some like fans of the franchise are a little bit hesitant about. It just seems like a new sort of vector to get furniture or customizable stuff for your town,

but it is a new thing. Should we be at all concerned about the fact that they royally fucked up the mobile version? That really burned the enthusiasm for me on this game. And I know they're totally, totally different, and I shouldn't let one influence the other, but I was so hyped for the Switch game and then that mobile version.

The mobile. It's its own, but they have proven that it's like wildly its own ecosystem. Like regardless of what you think about Fire Emblem Heroes, like it had no impact on Three Houses. So like I feel pretty confident that it ain't gonna touch Animal Crossing

because I think that they, there are a few franchises that they treat sort of core releases for as like fairly sacred. And I think that, I think Animal Crossing having not been out since what, 2013? Or was it even before that? I can't remember. Like, I don't think that they're going to, I joke, they're not going to have loot boxes with knees in them. Like it's, it's. Well, they also had that weird Wii U spinoff.

Yeah, they had the... Well, they had Happy Home Designer for 3DS, and then they had the Amiibo Festival. Don't mess with it, guys. You know what you're doing. Just have a raccoon who's a jerk. That's all you need. Just have a raccoon who's a jerk.

Hey, the raccoon is not... I think Tom Nook gets a bad rap. That's true's true he doesn't charge you interest which does yeah very it's like when i when i got my when i bought a house like and they were like here's how much the house cost i wasn't like okay dick y'all can i tell you about my game yes yes please game i'm most excited for uh half-life alex which is not a a true sequel it's a vr game set in the half-life universe i think it follows up on episode two kind of but it's not the official conclusion i don't know if we'll ever get that i thought it was a a prequel yeah they've said prequel that's okay so you're certainly not getting closure but that's okay because that's not what i'm excited for i'm excited because valve is making a single player

campaign again for the first time in like 12 13 how many years forever yeah it's been a long time right yeah um and they they're using lots of talented people. They just accumulate, but then seem to never allow you to do much. Like the Campo Santo team who did Firewatch. And you know what? This game better be good because we're not getting that Firewatch follow-up because they are busy with this. At least we're not getting it anytime soon.

So I'm excited about that. I'm excited to see what a VR killer app looks like. Like, it looks like they're borrowing from lots of good things, like stop talking and everybody explodes and budget cuts. The way the game's interface is, it's first person, but you have effectively like a Nintendo Power Glove that has your health on it and all of your UI. And it feels like you're like very very tactile yeah lone echo did something similar and it yeah there's a lot yeah there's

there's a ton of games who are like experimenting with like endemic sort of uh ui like that yeah and i think there's this like nice kind of narrative of half-life 2 got Steam off the ground, that Steam wouldn't necessarily be what it is today if Half-Life 2 hadn't launched shortly after it and got everybody excited about it. And maybe that's what this is for VR. That said, I don't know, because holy cow, it's going to cost a ton of money to play this game.

Yeah, the required specs are absolutely insane. Yeah, the minimum specs are absolutely insane yeah the minimum specs are intense um is it gonna work on quest no almost certainly not big no no i mean maybe with the link the the link cable like hooked up to a a beefy rig yeah but you i think you need basically a graphics card that was like from the last year and a half or something um and a shitload of memory i mean forget about it at least two usb sticks worth of memory yeah questing is a bummer because i feel like that's the best opportunity for for uh wide penetration like critical mass for vr yeah And it seems like if those two aligned,

it would be a net positive for VR in general. It does. That's never been Valve's priority. Right. Like, Valve's, the index has always been like, this is where the real gamers play. Yeah, but they did make it exclusive. I mean, they could have.

That's fair. Yeah, I love the Quest, don't get me wrong, but I do think in certain cases, when games are specifically made with the quest in mind, it does take a pretty significant dive because it's capable of specific things that most, you know, it just needs to be pretty low impact. Star Wars, the Vader game, for example, is like a cool game. I had a lot of fun with it, but it's very clearly like they pulled a lot of punches to make it work on there. And even if you're playing on like an Oculus normal, it's not like it turns into like a gorgeous visual splendor thing.

Why did they name it Oculus normal? I've been wondering that. It's not in any way a good name. I like it. Hey, let's go before we tear open the fabric of space time and peer into the future. Let's go to a quick break. We are back, and we're ready to crack open this crystal ball, drink the goo inside, and gain its incredible powers.

I want to know that thing that they use where they crack eggs into a bowl, and then they look in the eggs and that tells the future. Oh. Yeah, I saw the most recent Bon Appetit video where they were trying to make pizza rolls and then they accidentally saw the meteor that was going to strike the Earth. Nixon's back.

Yeah. Russ, tell me about 2020. What's going to happen? Give me your big prediction. My big prediction is the rise of boutique hardware. And why this is sort of instigated is by this new handheld that is coming out. It's called the Analog Pocket. This is made by the folks at Analog, predict predictably who have made a number of consoles previously, basically for like ultra nerds that have a lot of old NES games and want to play those

NES games on like an HDMI connection. But the analog pocket is a new handheld that they're making basically an ode to the like GBA era of handhelds, uh, where you'll be able to play all these like retro games in this like really nicely created you know it looks like it looks like a Game Boy Color kind of in terms of design but like really looks like an Apple an Apple Game Boy Color an Apple Game Boy Color exactly and this that era is the error I don't know if it's because of what age I was when that happened but that's the era I keep like thinking back to with the most fondness. I think about those Castlevania games that came out.

I think about those Zelda games that came out. I have just like such an effect affection for that era of handheld gaming. And for whatever reason, Nintendo is like not putting those games on the switch ever. And I want like an outlet to like play all the great fire emblem games that came out from that era so like this seems like a really good uh way to like reboot those games how is this how is this a vision of the i think you looking at the commercial for the analog pocket saying that that is a vision of that's a fair fair critique i think this will genuinely be the start of something where we see a lot of um enthusiasm for these kinds of boutique uh

handhelds so it's already happened too i i don't think it's just the handhelds right like there's so there's there's a growing boutique market around converters for like dreamcast hdmi converters or boutique soldering you know the upgrades effectively that make them more playable today what's we're also seeing i mean um i think you could lump in if you wanted to to look like more of a trend you could maybe lump in panics thing the uh the crank yeah play date uh that made such a splash earlier in 2019 back in may um a lot of people seemed excited about about that um and it might end up being something worthwhile who knows okay so i'll go to the next point which is my point that everybody laughed at and thought was so funny but now i'm going to explain it and you're going to think wow

actually gr Griffin, that makes me think. Let me read what it says here. Okay. And then you can elaborate. It says next gen is here for number four, the gamers. Next gen is here for the gamers. I want to walk everybody back in time to the E3 presentation surrounding the launch of

the Xbox one and to a lesser extent the PlayStation 4. Particularly I want to hone in on the Xbox One and Xbox 360. Microsoft's been banging this drum for a while now but Xbox One it got particularly egregious. Do y'all remember even fucking Wii U

had a TV remote. Everybody was like it's more than just games now. Now it's baseball on your television. This is more than just games. Now you can stream the latest movie like Fantastic Four with Jessica Alba. You can change the television volume with the power of your yelling voice.

It's going to be the future of entertainment and homes. The Xbox One presentation was over an hour long of your yelling voice. It's going to be the future of entertainment and homes. The Xbox One presentation was over an hour long, and I think it had four or five minutes of video games in it. And one of those minutes was that dog from Call of Duty, and everything else was like, UFC apps. UFC, yell. Yell. Connect.

Show me big men fighting and hurting. And then it would show you UFC fights on it. And that is so cool. And did I tell you about the Fantastic Four movie you can watch on PlayStation? It's going to be so much fun and great. And all of that stuff is gone. The Kinect, Microsoft was like, we tried little Kinect, but it's time to die now. Whoopsie.

And the Wii U, I mean mean that was a badass television remote we can all agree that they crushed that one uh and i am wondering i'm not wondering i am putting my flag in the ground and saying that when we next c3 is going to be a wet and wild one for uh sony when they talk about the hot new shit. The grand finale. You mean the serious finale of E3. Of E3. I'm wondering what the opposite of that kind of presentation is going to be.

What the opposite of like, this is a TV remote that you can watch Jessica Alba on, and how do you go so hard in the opposite direction? I think we already saw that with the ps4 pro and xbox one x era uh and then like even like publishers like bethesda did it where they came to e3 and they actually supplicated before like the ire of gamergate and i mean last year bethesda had that video where it was like all of the developers just like direct to camera saying thank you so much fans for all of your incredibly harsh feedback thank you so much for hating us and reminding us of how awful we are and sending us those threats oh thank you you're so good gamers

i want the more benign like super nintendo era like somebody fucking skateboarding into the tv and being like now they're hanging out with donkey kong like that level of like uh somebody like sitting in front of their tv and actually being blown backwards by the force of the gaming coming out at them you just trashed the xbox one announcement and you're somehow forgetting that what you described literally happens in that where somebody holds up a skateboard deck to the Kinect and then a skateboard gets thrown into the video game. Yeah, I want that, but for real this time. I don't want any more fucking phony baloney marketing lies. I'm going to share something more positive because I know Justin's is going to be really just the apocalypse.

I'm excited for justin's oh wait can i ask one thing do you guys think that the um new consoles just while we're talking about that are they do you find them sort of depressingly unambitious so okay that's that's related to what i'm was gonna chat about oh perfect okay excellent so i i think um i think justin's inspired idea of a cloud gaming boy with an 8-foot antenna, that cloud gaming will change how we play games

in the next generation. But I don't think it's going to be just for how everybody assumes. I don't think it's going to be like, oh, great, now I can play my vid games wherever I want, just like a Kindle. I think it's going to be now it's going to sound actually boring. I think it's going to be... Now it's going to sound actually boring. I think it's going to be data, y'all.

I think they're going to use AI and deep learning from all the data that's going into cloud gaming, and they're going to start figuring out things based off of how people play. So in the past, you had to have people QA games with their normal people brains. But now if everything we do in a video game is fired back into the cloud and they can harvest all that data, then companies can figure out like,

oh, here is how the majority of people experience a game second to second. Anytime a character goes up to a door, they're always going to open it. We don't need a button for that anymore because we know if people approach a door door this way it's just going to automatically open that's a really boring version of it but i think that deep learning is going to make it much much easier to play video games so i ask gaming what is the difference between learning and deep learning learning is what humans do deep learning is what robots do because it's better in every way yeah it's just better in every way it's deeper have you talked to a robot they're very smart um but yeah i i think that will i i don't even know what that

looks like but i i i think we've seen deep learning be applied to things outside of video games and they're already starting to change how everything works and seeing them applied in virtual worlds will be huge that is very interesting i never thought about the idea that like every time you're streaming oh i should have but every time you're streaming a game on like stadia or whatever like you are beaming probably not stadia but something else you are beaming literally every input that you make yeah so here's here's why companies like google care about this think about this google photo is useful to google because it taught their computers how to read images not because like oh great we all get free photos right they learned how to read images and

now they can sell that back to anybody and now they're going to have an army of people who are playing in virtual 3d spaces and they're going to learn how humans navigate 3d space and then they can use that information to build an ai that can help me beat this destiny 2 raid yeah like the rest of these human flesh scrubs get me a robot master chief that's what i need that is terrifying and awesome fuck yeah speaking of terrifying just let's try it take us into the into the bright future of of yours i don't mine's not a bad i i don't understand why you guys are so dire about this i mean it's all the people losing their jobs is sad no i mean obviously yes that is sad i was when we were thinking about future stuff i started thinking like and then this is a thought i've sort of like had idly

a few times how is gamestop still around i was like looking at a gamestop yesterday and think like how are y'all still around i'm gonna quick quiz you guys and this is not a get it right or get it wrong thing when i started thinking about this i decided to get some data to try to back up my bullshit. If you compare the, the newest like physical versus digital game sales data available is from 2018. So I can compare 2009 to 2018. If you guys had to guess the split between physical and digital in 2009 versus 2018 real quick,

don't ever think it. What would you guess like 15 digital in 2009 to whatever 85 yeah i would say yeah about that 20 to 80 okay and 20 to 80 and then what would you guess these like in 2018 no no that's what i mean it started digital was 20 in 2009 and now it's in 2018 it's pretty i mean you, I mean, you're exactly right for 2009. And then 2018, 83% digital, 17%. And that number, that physical number in the past five years has gone 31, 26, 21, 17.

So you have to imagine in 2019, you're going to see even lower data. GameStop had a 26% sales decline year over year over year in 2019 they are taking a fucking beating they lost a dollar in their share they're on a five they're trading at 540 right now i don't know that much about finance and socks shit but i know it ain't good in a lower november 2015 they were uh trading at 46 a share so five dollars a a share, it's very different than $46. Yeah, that's a lot lower. This isn't like bear baiting.

It is a wild shift in the way that we acquire video games. And my thinking is this, and this is why I'm sort of thinking about it right now. I think that we are entering a very awkward period for game sales because we are sunsetting these old consoles bringing out the new consoles and i just don't think you're gonna see i just don't think you're gonna see like a big physical hit that and you gotta imagine a lot of those physical things are the big mainstream things that are popping off right it's your fifas your call of duties your maddens like things that a lot of people buy that just haven't gotten into the digital space yet and i don't think you're

going to have many of those in 2020 i think it's going to be really hard for gamestop to stay afloat now okay good news for gamestop and i was looking at this article on the the motley fool about about like ideas for saving gamestop because one they do have like cash on hand. It's not necessarily like they're, they're like completely broke as I am predicting. But they had a pretty good idea of like, and I think that this is actually why GameStop will close or not close in 2020, but start to shrink stores.

The idea of making it a space where like, like, you know how Dick's sporting goods, the example they use and Dick's sporting goods is like a place where like, if you like sports, it's like fun to go. There's experiences in the store that make it worth it. Batting cages, driving ranges, stuff like that.

The idea of making it a place where you can come play esports or hang out with other fellow gamers as a way to get people into the stores. I think GameStop has mistreated gamers for so long, and that is why they will actually love it. Well, not just gamers. They've mistreated the stores. I think GameStop has mistreated gamers for so long, and that is why they will actually- Well, not just gamers. They've mistreated the industry. Like the fact that they built, the reason they were so successful for the last figure of like five, 10 years ago was because they were abusing the idea

of used game sales in like a pretty predatory way, not just for gamers, but also for the games industry, where they were essentially buying a used game for $5, reselling the same game for $45, that on that resale, they were not giving a cut to the game publisher. So effectively, they are clearing up so much more revenue that doesn't exist anymore, because the physical games don't exist. The idea that like, like the fact that most people i know do not have a dvd player in their house is an indication of like we are past this era predominantly of physical media

and um they you know definitely saw the writing on the wall but i don't think they had any ideas of how to address it well i would say two things first the the motley fool thing of like oh it's gonna be a fun place for gamers to hang that's just a strategy that's being used across retail in general because people don't know what to do with retail anymore so if you go to like borders or barnes and noble it's like i don't know board games are fun laser tag like barnes and noble we have all this space please hang out but the one thing i would say for uh people who i don't know are interested in investment if you look at like the actual trends of the market for game stop and this is where i would say i do think in the long term they're not well for this world but the market dips so hard

right before new consoles so like in in uh before the xbox 360 it was selling around like 15 per share and then a year or two into the ps4 ps3 or ps3 uh 360 area 57 and then before xbox one ps4 it's down to like 20 a share and then those consoles come up and it's up to 50 so it's low again but i think when all that hardware comes out, we're going to see, it'll probably be like, they call it the dead cat bounce. That like, even a dead cat bounces.

CNBC up in here. The early adopters of these new generation consoles, what I'm arguing is that they are not in that 17% of people still buying physical media. Well, they'll buy the console, but. They'll buy the console and the margins on those are not great. Right. And they the consoles but like i'm i'm saying like in 2020 if you're an early adopter one of these consoles are you going to start building a physical library probably for these games and we're i don't think we're actually disagreeing plant i think it's like

not at all a question of of speed i do think that like i just don't think the bounce back yeah and that's why i say dead cat bounce because like what that refers to is you see the market bouncing, but the company's dead. So, like, you know, people buy those consoles, people boost their stock on it, and then they'll be like, wait, what did we just do? I also think, I mean, we talked about this, I think, in a previous episode of cloud gaming is going to change this for so many people when that year two or year three of a console generation where people finally want to play the new Grand Theft Auto and they realize, hey, I can just pay 50 or 60 bucks and play this without getting new hardware. What's that going to do to the console market?

I mean, there's just no precedent for it. There's nothing moving in the good for GameStop direction. It's all sort of moving in that direction. I want to say, if you're listening to us and you are for GameStop, I really, I don't mean this to sound as callous as it, as it probably does to you.

I hope for our sakes that we are wrong and for your sake that we are wrong. And you have many more years of, of continued. Anecdotally, I will say literally two blocks from me. My local GameStop is actively closing. It fully shuts its doors at the end of January.

They shuttered 200 stores. Anyone that works for GameStop right now I think is well aware of the precarious nature of their current employment situation. Sorry. It sucks. I feel bad. I worked at Babbage's. I worked at GameStop. Yeah.

That is the future. Wow. We've opened the door to the future, everybody. Let's do one worked at GameStop. Yeah, like, yeah. That is the future. Wow. We've opened the door to the future, everybody. Let's do one more round robin. Super quick. Okay. How do you think these console launches are going to go? You know the one I'm weirdly most excited about?

I don't have an Xbox One in this house. Everything Microsoft has done since I got rid of my Xbox One has been like, oh, okay. You guys are starting to, you made some good acquisitions. You're talking some good game. This could be neat. Your console looks like a, you know, a wild New York apartment.

I'm on the same page. Phil Spencer, I think is very smart. I don't think like every decision he's made is great, but it takes, I think, about a console lifecycle to really figure out what leadership can do just because video games move slowly and especially hardware moves slowly. And the most promising thing about Xbox is Spencer is like effectively on the board. I mean, he is a VP level of the company now, which shows that Microsoft for the first time

truly sees Xbox as part of their brand, brand which i mean i don't think people understand this in the past software and hardware were not even united at microsoft the xbox the games and hardware were separate it was wild in the old days like even back like i mean a deck like what maybe not a decade ago a little more recent than that but like it was you would talk to phil spencer at one of these things and like you talked to him for five minutes even as a cynical games journalist you talk for five minutes like oh just let this guy run everything like he he was so excited about actually excited about games he would like be pulling out games on his phone to show you like at a party or something like oh you have to see

this you have to check this like he legitimately gets it in a way that like i think that they're finally sort of respecting and like getting out of the way and just letting uh letting phil be phil also his lieutenants i think are like solid i mean you you speak to so many people across that company and it seems like they know what they're doing the only problem is at the end of the day they are so committed to gears and halo yeah they don't have the franchises necessarily. And that's what PlayStation has, right? And we have, I feel like we don't know, until we know what the launch lineup for PS5 looks like.

Right. You know, Mark Cerny out there, like, it's gonna load so fast, that can only get you so horny. And for me, it's not that horny. I need to see, you know, fucking Sly Cooper. I need to see his individual hair follicles. Astro Bot, baby. God of War 2 at follicles astrobot baby at launch god of war

two at launch um i do want to mention i think uh microsoft real quick is god of war two i know justin you're very excited at launch i think um microsoft is the best positioned to do the like and they've been promising this for 20 years but i they've slowly but surely been making good on it to do the well you buy games on your pc and you buy games on your xbox and this is effectively at this point a desktop tower like it looks like a desktop tower i think they're going to release it like a desktop tower where i don't know if it'll be expandable necessarily but certainly like probably close to annually that's going to be like an a series z whatever the hell the next one is i wish they'd called it series two that would have made a lot of shit a lot better throwing another x in there is so baffling it's not even called series x it's

just called xbox series x is like a model of the new xbox right but if you're gonna have something on the back of the box that says this runs on series x why not have it say this runs on series 2 so then when there's a 3 you can say this runs on three and then just like use that convention because you already did whatever i don't care listen one more thing i want to say before we move on you know how in gears tactics you're looking at them from above and looking down and controlling their actions yeah they should have called that god of gears of war that would have been a better that would have been great that would have been so good so good should we wrap up yeah do you want to do some listener mail? Yeah, we had a few people respond to us on Twitter

about what they're excited for. Let's see. Oh, Ben said Doom Eternal, which is very, I think that would be great. That's the same day as Animal Crossing New Horizons, so you're really scratching both itches there. Yeah, we have a lot of people who want animal crossing uh daniel at daniel b tweets i'm sure everyone's saying animal crossings so let me add to the

masses animal crossing because it's about time there are a lot of people who strongly agree with that uh at soap ie said silk song which i think oh hell yeah holiday rep james elliott at symphony man the only thing that could make me feel anything again is the Elder Scrolls VI. I'm sorry that you probably won't feel anything for 2020. Enjoy not feeling anything for another calendar year. Someone said Horizon Zero Dawn 2. Is that supposed to come out in 2020? Is that happening in 2020?

Maybe. What's the PlayStation big launch game going to be? God of War 2. We just talked about it. it's not coming out this year yeah but i already got a demo russ he drank the juice from the ball oh from the egg next week we're going to be talking about shovel knight king of cards so if you have played it and you have thoughts you want to share or a question about it you want to ask us you can send that to mail at besties.fan.

Russ, do you want to tell people the Spotify thing? Yeah, absolutely. Well, congratulations. If you are listening to this episode, you are already listening on Spotify. You are in the right place. If you haven't yet, on Spotify, there's a little button that says follow. Click on that. It'll follow the podcast and let you know whenever there's new episodes coming up.

And recommend the show to other people. They don't need a premium account or anything, just a free account on Spotify. And we'll be back next week. Right, Justin? That's right, Russ. So until next time, for all of these fellas, my name is Justin McElroy. Be sure to join us again next week for the besties, because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games the besties is a spotify original podcast in association with Vox Media. The show is edited by Jelani Carter.

And our theme song is by Ian Dorsch. Besties!