The Besties - The Ghost of E3s Past (And Present, And Also Future)

Episode Date: June 3, 2022

Sure, E3 isn't "officially" happening this year, but there's still a lot of hot, hot gaming news dropping over the next couple of weeks! Join us as we discuss the evolution (and de-evolution) of the industry's (former) big summer event, and what we can expect from The Triple in years to come. 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!

You want to do this? Yeah. Back to the throne. We kept it warm for you. Oh, there's just one throne? Travis kept it warm for you. Yeah. And he has a sort of residue that you're just going to love, I guarantee.

If you have my cellar water, that'll actually take it out right away. Your what? My cellar water! What the fuck is cellar water? I think you meant to say seltzer water, but he left out. My cellar water what the fuck is cellar water i think he meant to say seltzer water but he left out my cellar water it's not my cellar my cellar water is that like a regional thing my cellar water the water from your cellar my cellar water my cellar water. My cellar water. This is, I am fully dissociating right now. Hey, Griff.

Yeah. My cellar water. Yeah, you can say it as much as you want. Holy shit, you guys don't know anything about anything. Is this the new season of Twin Peaks? Y'all fucking, my cellar water. M-I-C-E-L-L-A-R. That's not how it's spelled.

Micellar. M-I-C-E-L-L-A-R. K-E-Y-W-A-T-E-R. It just cleans me. What the fuck is that? It just cleans me. You guys have killed me. You've killed me.

I'm slain. There's an article that'll lower the 19 micellar waters that remove your makeup in one simple step. Why do we need so many? And why do you guys have to know about micellar water? You know what else removes makeup in one simple step? Hot water. Hey, everyone. It's me, Griffin McElroy.

Let's get back to basics, y'all. What comes from the earth is of the greatest worth. White cellar water. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know that... It's not even applicable. The best show of the summer. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best caffeine guy of the guys. My name is Russ Froschik, and I know the best game of the week. I can't believe i called

him caffeine guy yeah that's what people know him as is caffeine just friends though no yeah friends call him caffeine guy mr caffeine is my father uh welcome to the besties which is a video game club and just by listening you my friend are a member Normally we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive inter game meant, but today we're it's sort of a bittersweet episode, I think with lots of prognostication and what's the opposite of that fornication, I guess about E3, probably not the electronic three.

I have no plans to fornicate about the Electronic Entertainment Expo on this fine morning. Russ, real quick, what's E3? It was this show that existed for a while since, like, I don't know, the mid-90s, where they'd show, like, all the coolest and hottest and latest video games. And over the last couple years, it's had a bit of a downturn, a bit of a rough patch. And now it's kind of just roasted and toasted. And despite that, there are still a bunch of announcements

happening in the next week or so. So we thought maybe this would be a good opportunity to not only lay the reef on its grave E3, but also make some predictions about what we can expect. That is what we are doing this week. But first we're going to take a quick break, then we'll get right back to it. Welcome.

First off, before we begin this discussion, B3, welcome to the show, Chris Plant. Oh, thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

Our special E3 correspondent. Sounds great. I was going to ask where you've been, but you sound like a dog's dinner. So I think that answers itself. You're not well. I've been eating a lot of dog's dinner. Yeah, you sound sexy.

Thank you. I can't handle it. Oh, I appreciate that. I actually did this just for you. Eat some vitamins dude well so that's actually the problem is i was i was given a lot of vitamins and i i ate i like chewed on like just a ton of them not supposed to do that no you gotta pick and choose no okay so if you've been out of the loop with e3 here's the let me give you the like past

five years sum up uh exhibitions were dwindling there are fewer and fewer companies that were pulling out the all the stops for e3 some were doing press conferences adjacent to it many had left the show floor entirely uh and many were predicting the death of v3 and then the novel coronavirus well there was some other shit that they did before then go on i was trying to get the the the big moments oh i would say this is a pretty big moment especially for our own christopher thomas plant uh when they uh fully fully doxed the entire gaming industry oh yeah yeah yeah that part sucked shit um yeah i wasn't a fan of that i was gonna talk about when they went full packs and they were like hey you know what what if we just let people pay to go to e3 and then didn't show anything yeah what year

was that where that was like two years i think think that was 2018, 2019. The last two years, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is – I want to give a little bit of context here because I think that it's interesting because I was looking into it. Because in my head, I was thinking like, boy, the attendance has really been dwindling for E3. That's not actually true. So 2014, 15, 16, it was around 50,000 people in attendance. And then for the three years after that, 2017, 2018, and 2019, the attendance was in the high 60,000s, 68, 69, 66. But, well, hold on. What that belies is the exhibitor count went from 300 in 2016 to 280 in 2017 to 200 in 2018 and 2019.

So the show got 33% fewer exhibitors and what would that be like? 30% more attendees at the show. I think that it was 2019 that they opened it up. No, it was before that, that they opened it up to 10,000, like, attendees when they tried to make it, like, a fan. Maybe that was 2017. Maybe that accounts for the jump.

Yeah, that might be it. It also doesn't... If you went back to, like, 2005, 2006, the exhibitor number would probably be, like, 10,000 because of Kensha Hall, 2006 the exhibitor number would probably be like 10 000 because uh of kensha hall which was this amazing hall down in the basement of e3 and there'd be like tiny little like hobbit hole booths showing tiny little games but there were thousands of them yeah i mean also e3 kind of already died once like yeah e3 2005 had 70 000 people in attendance dropped to 2000 or to

60 000 the next year and then the year after that 10 000 5 000 after that was the weird santa monica year right yeah we're there in the the high school yeah yeah 2017 was the so that tracks that that number increasing uh in 2017 and then you had a huge fall off of exhibitors after the first year it was open to the public, which I think is very, is very telling to go from two 80 to 200. Yeah. Uh,

if the show's, it's, I always worry whenever like people on our side of the industry talk about the change of V3, we sound like fucking snobs because, uh, you you know they open it up to the public and then it was just kind of a different thing but i think there's something to be said for having a a show that is more intimate with the like uh you know press side of things

so that you can actually do an interview and play a game and try something out like behind closed doors as opposed to waiting in a line for three hours to play you know super mario galaxy for 10 minutes yeah and i think that there was a lot of that criticism of the press when e3 first opened and people had not gone yet yeah but i think after people actually went and i mean it's just bad packs it was it was never designed to be packs so it's not good at it yeah that's actually the frustrating thing that was the frustrating thing as a journalist and i was at the tail end of my my journalism when when they opened it to the public but like it was the last year i think that i went and the the problem is that they didn't build the show or I,

I don't, I, I wouldn't not mind it having the public there. If there was things for the public to do, there's just nothing for them to do. I mean, I, I really looked at it from a consumer facing perspective.

Like it wasn't worth going, like it was just a rip off to go and they, and the people that were there didn't have anything fun to do. So they were just kind of like waiting eight hours for a game and making it harder to see anything they added stores like that was their solution was not to like add more video game demo stations it was like the same number of video game demo stations and then lots of places to buy splatoon t-shirts when you're when you're covering it from the press you almost never or at least historically you know back when we were doing that uh like the show floor was not where you did the work like usually you would go into like a back room in the booth where you could

sit down with a developer and like play the game and like actually talk to them about it which like you just can't scale out to 50 000 like non non-industry people right it kills discoverability too there you there was a time in e3 where you could just walk around the show for and you'd see games and just go play them like you see a stand like just check it out nothing didn't have a line towards the end i mean there was nothing like that it was everything had had a line to just as a point of comparison, two points of comparison really quick. Gamescom, which is the biggest sort of show in the world in Cologne, has basically press and exhibitor only days.

I think like the first two or three days of the event are that. And then they open it up to everybody. But that shit is like 11 halls, chock a block full of games. There's tons of stuff to do. So the scale is totally different. But also, as a, like, more, I don't know,

relevant point of comparison is, I don't know when they started doing it, but EA started to do EA Play. Is that what it was? What was the event that they did? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was right next door. It was very, very close to the the la convention center and they would just

fill a huge building with games and they would do live streams and press conferences and shows and shit and if you went to that you play whatever you wanted because they had they'd scaled it up they had the appropriate scale for the crowd that they were trying to get and e3 just never hit that sweet spot so okay you guys are some of the smartest people i know in games given what we've been talking about and given that um do you think i mean the esa for the record says that they are coming back in 2023 with uh an event um i actually looked for this and couldn't find it. I don't know how long their contract with the LA Convention Center is. I'm assuming that they have some sort of insurance for the past couple of years where that's been an issue, but I don't know how much longer they are wedded to doing something

during that timeframe. Yeah. I mean, so I can say a few things here. One, there had been rumors even before I believe the last contract negotiation with the Los Angeles Convention Center that they wanted to move to Vegas or another venue, which like honestly, frankly, better for both parties at this point. Like the Los Angeles Convention Center

has like the YouTuber convention as an anime convention around the same time. It has better things for a large chunk of the audience that has overlap. And it's time to start E3 over from scratch. Maybe being in a totally different venue makes more sense. That said, I think Vegas is a pretty crappy place to put a convention that is going to largely be targeting a whole bunch of teenagers. Sorry, I thought you cut out right after you said it's a crappy place, end of sentence.

I will say just to that point, Los Angeles lost out, according to one report I read, lost out on $83 million in revenue. That's according to the Los Angeles city tourism department in 2019. So there is like, there's definitely a hit 29,000 hotel rooms were, were, you know,

rented out by, by E3 attendees. So like, it's a big, it's a big blow not having, and they may not be so happy to let it go. I think it's just a bad way to see games at this modern time we live in, quite honestly.

I think the format of going to a convention and present, like if you're a publisher and you're presenting games, the return on investment for creating a demo that's playable for this small portion of people that are gonna play it is terrible compared to release a trailer, release a gameplay video,

do a live stream, whatever it is, have your own event and don't have to fight for tooth and nail for attention is a much better proposition. So I am not surprised that they are effectively moving away from all that and just having like show presentations in, you know, with summer game

fest and microsoft and bethesda doing their press conference like effectively that is the most effective way to spend something like e3 the idea that that like again there would be a show floor always felt like decadent to me and now especially so given the fact that like with the internet everyone can experience all that stuff from home and you'll get more eyes on it yeah the the one other thing that i'll say that's kind of building off what fresh said is the esa's goal is to advocate for the game industry right it's a whole bunch of publishers throwing money into this thing that in theory is like making sure that you continue to get to play video games you know are the people who fight against the Supreme Court, making sure that games are not censored.

I mean, it's a battle that is effectively over now, but progress can always regress. But they're also fighting for things that maybe we don't like. They're defending for publishers. So I'm saying that upfront. The other thing is the reason that the ESA existed with E3 way back in the past was nobody cared about video games. So they needed to have one event every year that the New York Times, the New York Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Kansas City Star, every newspaper would send its one curious reporter to

so that for one point a year, they could guarantee that they got coverage of video games. And the other thing here, they could bring in all the people from game shops. So Toys R Us, GameStop, all the buyers, and then they could see what was going to come out and know how they want to do their end caps all that stuff the press was especially the games press was a tiny tiny tiny reason of what to do this for the fans was effectively negligible reason of what to do this for so what's weird is the entire reason e3 needed to exist all like those reasons are gone you can do those things without e3 now people are going to cover games without e3 buyers are able to learn about games through directs or any other other method yeah and like fresh said all what you're left with is this enormously expensive thing that doesn't really have a purpose anymore i i want to say because i think up to this

point we have sounded um at times like a dog's dinner a bit cynical and a bit like a dog's dinner about this show i want to make it abundantly clear that it i think it sucks the moon out of the sky that we no longer have this like anchor for the the year's gaming news. And obviously, like, E3 was never completely that. But I would always get excited, for one thing, to, like, you know, go to LA and hang out with my, you know, the people I worked with that I liked so much. But also just to, like, get that much new information and announcements and just the excitement around that was was palpable

and i i genuinely look forward to it every year even after you know we we stopped going for for polygon uh it was the most sort of exciting you know week and a half gaming wise out of the whole year and it's it's still kind of that because because we still get lots of, like, you know, Nintendo Direct and press conferences and stuff like that. But I think it's not quite as, I don't know, it doesn't pack a punch. It's more just evenly dispersed throughout the year. I think people don't necessarily...

Yeah, and I think more publishers will just have their own events, you know, Sony having its Sony event and EA having its EA event. I ea having its ea event um i it's i i get what you're saying griffin but i also get the other side which is just like it just does not make sense for these big publishers to just fight each other for attention in the busiest week of the year so i'm not at all surprised but that being said i do think there will still be this period of two weeks and probably um the video game awards are two essentially at this point 10 poll announcement moments for the video game industry um so if you care about new video games like those are the two times to like really tune

in and pay attention because that's when most of the big stuff gets announced so still kind of a moment and uh maybe that's a good segue into seeing if we could guess some of the stuff that will be well should we also mention that you mentioned the game awards which have i mean we've done i think an episode about the game awards and how fucking far it has come yeah but also keely is getting the summer game fest 2022 going which is like trying to be, I think, the heir apparent to the E3 kingdom. Yeah, that's certainly his goal, and he's well positioned for it, and I think if he recreates something

on the level of the Game Awards, he definitely has the potential to do that. Traditionally, Summer Game Fest has been a slower, more contemplative kind of event, but I do think he is a very smart driven person yeah i think his intention will probably be to slowly usurp this week and just

make it you know another jeff week which uh he's certainly capable of doing hey you're tuning in to another jeff week i'm here i'm down for as many jeff weeks as that gentleman wants to provide. Yeah, I like Jeff. I mean, Jeff complicated figure in the world of games, but at least with Jeff and all of the Keeley stuff. Jeff and all the Keeley stuff is my new band. Thank you. You know what you're getting, you know?

Like, it's just going to be a fun marketing binge. Yeah, man. And I will say this, he genuinely cares. Like, it might seem like he doesn't, but he super actually cares about the industry and video games in general. So that having someone that is, like, emotionally invested in the thing helps a lot. And I think having somebody,

it is essential that somebody play on giant bomb they always call them traffic cop like like play traffic cop yeah in this time frame if we're not going to have a a single event that everybody's scheduling off of you do need somebody who's like you go now okay and you do this i just don't know if it makes sense to i don't know if it's a good time frame for people to uh fight to announce i mean like i i think it's great i will be very interested to see if doing a physical event becomes part of keely's purview like something that he wants to i don't think he needs to i think it can remain what uh the game awards is which technically a physical event but close to a very small percentage of people predominantly it's a streamed event like that's his audience yeah yeah i yeah i

i i think keely also ran pre-e3 in the past yeah which is where we could all do demos before e3 and i think like i think he seems very keen on hey everybody wants to do uh like the press will do that that will help them cooperate with me and then I like to make tv like I think he just likes making tv I I don't think he wants to be in the the event business because that's not making tv something like a junket circuit would make a lot of sense for, like an E3 event where a lot of people got together, but are really just like, you know, running through a bunch of different interviews

and had more of that like one-on-one time with the press for a day. Sony did that every year where they had like a hotel space rented out that was not official for it. And you would just go and they would, it was fucking dope if you were a journalist because they would literally just like

take you into a conference room for 30 minutes with all the other journalists there. They would show you, you know, some wild Sony game that maybe, or like Puppeteer that was not getting like a bunch of coverage on the show floor. And then they would, or Tokyo Jungle. And then you would walk out and they would reset

and then you'd walk back in like 10 minutes later and they would have another game. It was very efficient. It was an efficient use of time. I forgot about that. Should we talk about predictions? Yes. People are just clamoring.

Tell me about the video games that are coming right now yes chris plant we will do just that uh let's take a quick break and then we will uh we'll come back and talk about some of our predictions okay this is not my prediction this is one that you're seeing in a lot of the less reputable outlets i'm loving it uh that we might get the announcement of a dreamcast mini this uh this this season sega tweeted that they had an this is the translation from a video gamer urgent notice live broadcast to announce sega's new project will be delivered at 8 p.m on june 3rd so like that's specific i mean that's specific y'all it's gonna be on sega's

youtube eastern time but but but hey didn't it have like a photo of a really ugly sega genesis controller cake with it they did but they've already done a mini console of that particular and they did a terrible job if i recall oh yeah Yeah, have you met Sega? They will release it over and over again. Yeah, I think we're going to stick with Dreamcast Mini, and you guys actually could come up with your own fucking predictions and not try to shoot me down. No, no, dog. I think you're right.

Dreamcast Mini, and what are the five games that are going to be on it? Who was it? Are you kidding? I get Power Stone, Shenmue to be on it who was it are you kidding i get power stone shin mu sonic adventure who was it it was somebody we worked with at vox and i think that he was on the verge side who like in 2009 e3 was swearing up and down that they were about to announce dreamcast 2 that he was like it, it's 2009, 999, it's happening again. We're doing it again. God, it's so funny.

All right, guys, seriously, come on. What do you got? Well, I'm going to ask maybe the group a couple questions, and maybe you'll answer. So question A, do we think we'll see gameplay of the Elder Scrolls game? Or at all? Do you think it's even going to show up no i don't think you can show that until you get starfield gameplay shown to people that's

actually coming out do we think we'll see starfield gameplay yeah yeah because it did it did get delayed so yeah but like you they want to they don't want it to seem like vaporware i think so i i would not be surprised if they if they showed a little something something yeah um okay i i don't know where it would appear but i feel like uh a dlc announcement for elden ring feels kind of yeah i was gonna suggest that as well um just because it is still the fucking hottest game out there what for four months after i'm trying to remember how much i would love a reason to return i'm trying to remember that's the idea which of the major publishers had the announcement for elden ring or at least the latest trailers

because usually mic or Sony has the tight relationship and it'll probably be during that press conference, if I have to guess. It was announced at E3 2019, but who did it? Do you want me to just

start listing off some predictions? Yes. I got something. I'm just ready to burn. I'm going to dump a lot. Okay. I think Capcom is best positioned to just blow up the show. Because Capcom's on a hot streak, right? Yeah.

They just keep making bangers. They had an amazing last year. It was spectacular. Yeah. They've had it that past few years. And we know that Resident Evil Village has DLC coming, right? We know that Street Fighter VI MMA, we haven't seen gameplay of it,

but we've seen a trailer for it. There's still the Resident Evil 4 remake is still supposed to to be. The Resident Evil 4 remake, something Monster Hunter. It was Xbox, by the way. Elden Ring was Xbox. Oh, okay. Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, there's got to be something Monster Hunter. Well, Monster Hunter has Sunbreak coming out in like a minute.

So that's probably the Monster Hunter announcement. So they'll have something to show, yeah. The other huge thing that I think will be like the big thing even though i don't know how many people care about it is the sony's vr stuff like they've been developing games for that in quiet for years um and it feels like it just was getting delayed i assume because of the pandemic or maybe because it was tech shortage um but it feels like it just was getting delayed, I assume, because of the pandemic or maybe because it was tech shortage. But it feels like they have, from what I've heard on background about that, like, there's just a ton of stuff that has not been shown publicly.

And I wouldn't be surprised if they come out with a bang for State of Play and just be like, here it is. Here's everything. We're going to have, like, this is effectively a second console launch. Yeah. The only weird thing is like, who cares if you can't get the PS5? Yeah, fair. Yeah.

Oh yeah, it's true. Do you think maybe that is a potential thing for them? I don't know what it looks like, whether it's like a new light model. Well, I mean, if you can't get a PS5, you probably can't get a ton of PSVR either. So if they match the install base of the existing PS5 owners, that is probably the bulk of how many they could even make in the first place. Yeah, that's true.

Also, I'm curious what y'all think, but I feel like Half-Life Alyx has to be their killer. Oh, that would be interesting. Yeah. Which is, they have all these other games i'm sure they're excited about but if they're smart val is smart like vr orange box two how tight would that be oh i mean that would be that would be a lot um a lot of a lot of chatter about that alex thing it'd be it'd be nice to see that actually come to,

more people playing that would make a lot of sense. Do you think we'll see God of War? I feel like we have to, right? I think we'll see God of War get a, okay, you're gonna see a new trailer for God of War Ragnarok, and then it'll say coming in early 2023. There, I think there is,

if I'm Sony, I do wonder how much of this is happening. But like if you're Sony, don't you just keep – and you're selling consoles so fast that you can't – not so fast, but so – your supply is so constrained. Don't you keep as much dry powder as you can? Oh, no. Do you know why you released God of War? Keep as much dry powder as you can. Oh, no. Do you know why you released God of War?

Because your sales on the PS4 and on PC are out of this world. Yeah. Is it coming to the PS4? It's coming to PS4. It is. And it'll come to PC at some later date. Probably a year later. I guess that's true, yeah. And you don't want to waste time keeping, you know,

the longer you sit on it the longer it's not on pc well and also like they are positioned to effectively own the holiday season because so many games have gotten pushed so this can be the big game for the holiday season um yeah it's interesting the idea too that like if they're still working on a constrained supply for ps5 maybe you reissue in a year you know to get like another wave of people who want to play it on ps5 you reissue with some dlc or something um when ps5s are more plentiful yeah they also have to be careful not to start over stocking up because they have spider-man 2 which is going to have to be a i assume a fall release

and then they have the the wolverine video game so i figure like spider-man 2, which is going to have to be, I assume, a fall release. And then they have the Wolverine video game. So I figure Spider-Man 2 is what? Maybe 2023? Wolverine is 2024? I don't know. They don't have a ton of studios, but the ones that they do have make good games. I have another question for the group. Yeah.

And we've gotten this wrong in the past. another question for the group yeah yeah and we've gotten this wrong in the past will we see will the words even be said hollow knight silk song i was just thinking that will it even be mentioned as a thing that exists i don't think it will because i don't think nintendo is going to be a part of this it wouldn't have to be nintendo's gonna do hold on you don't think nintendo's gonna do a june nintendo direct i think Nintendo. Hold on, you don't think Nintendo's going to do a June Nintendo Direct? I think they'll do one, but I don't think it'll be anywhere near any of the other stuff. I think that

they're now smart enough to be like, okay, they'll either do it like, I mean, it would be this week. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they're too smart for this. And again, it wouldn't, I mean, it's coming to PC too, so technically it wouldn't have to be during Nintendo's. Yeah they announced it like the pc gamer show instead or fucking keely the the summer game fest that would be like a huge pickup right it's coming to pc too so

nintendo clearly has i don't know slept on it not that it's probably their decision to do so i'm sure it's not i'll be real though, though. I think a Nintendo Direct gets a bigger audience than all of Keeley's stuff. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, you're right. I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but I doubt it. I mean, the focus of, you know, not only Nintendo Direct,

but also the Microsoft and Bethesda press conference, you know what you're going to get. Whereas with Summer Game Fest, there hasn't been like a, quote year of summer game fest yet so this is kind of like year to demonstrate it um and i think once it's more of an established thing people will know what to expect but right now people don't so it's a harder thing to sort of lock your time into uh i got a question for y'all okay persona it's the big persona anniversary year are we going to see a new persona game i mean are we counting like spin-off they're playing

soccer now no like a core a core persona game yeah uh when when would that be announced right i don't know mike so here's here's here's my theory we finally get persona 4 for switch or something that's like everybody's been asking for and we get that now for the year persona right and then at the game awards at the very end of the year that's when we get persona 6 announced yeah i could say it's like two years out yeah yeah but we're like due for it right like it's it should be yeah and they already released the like re-release of it with the new content for five i should say so and they've done the spin-off the mozu spin-off they more or less have mined persona 5 a lot. As much as they did 4.

I mean, well, that's not entirely true. But yeah, they've done a lot. I'm trying to think of other stuff. I mean, again, getting into Japanese publishers, Square Enix is sitting on a fair amount of stuff that we know about, right? Final Fantasy 16. Yeah.

Might make it into a trailer. Yeah, Final fantasy 7 part 2 where's the embracer group you know oh yeah that's very good question yeah so so square just lost for people at home that for people at home square just sold a large portion of their western developed franchises to as justin said, the embracer group, which is an enormous conglomerate of, uh, publishers at this point.

Cause it's just, I mean, yeah, it's, it's, it's mind numbing. I mean, it's a Swedish group and they hold most of the,

a very large portion of the games industry is now owned by the embracer group. So if it sounds a little dystopian, that's because it is. Uh, but that does leave square with like i think it's traditional certainly final fantasy's personas of the world wait that's atlas anyway it leaves it with those traditional uh square franchises but not necessarily with the like deus ex or tomb Raiders of the world. Yeah. Yeah, and this is THQ Nordic. If you remember the discussion of THQ Nordic, that is the Embracer Group. Which is not THQ, to be clear.

It's not the original THQ, which is dead. Yes, they bought THQ. They called themselves THQ Nordic, and then they changed it back. Yeah. It's like a Nazi Emi embracer group which holds like thq nordic all those holdings the thq stuff that they bought things like dark uh stalkers is that the fighting game no no dark fighters yeah um gearbox dark horse uh lots i mean just

tons of stuff tons of stuff yeah dizzying amount speaking of very very very large companies i am curious if we see much from tencent um tencent is the uh chinese everything company right amazon is like close to what you could compare them to except they own tons of software companies they own a riot they own a large stake of fortnight uh not fortnight of epic um they they just made a tomato yeah they they have their hands in a ton of stuff but they also have been making a very aggressive push into uh opening studios in america uh honestly like a lot near where I live, including acquiring the studio Turtle Rock

that made Back 4 Blood and effectively made Left 4 Dead before that. So I know that they want to start having kind of that brand recognition that EA or Ubisoft has here. But they've been working on some games already for, I think, a couple of years, but that still might be a couple more years out before they make that huge push. I will say the company that I'm most excited to see stuff from during the E3 period is

probably Devolver. Just by nature of like their hit to miss ratio has been so excellent in recent years yeah really good taste level with that company i feel like i completely agree i mean last year you know inscription and um death's door uh some like really excellent games coming from devolver and i think they have very good taste um so i uh and i don't know if they're doing like their normal very meta insane uh although well yeah it would be wild for them to stop doing that now but uh yeah i'm always that's always very entertaining is that did you guys realize they're still making pixel games? Sorry, I just saw that on the Devolver website.

I guess the only question we haven't really gone into is whether, you know, again, we don't know the extent to like Nintendo's plans for E3 period, but I do think that there will be certainly a summer direct, if not a June direct, whether something like a Metroid Prime would show. because at this point it's been so long yeah who knows man i don't know man i because then it's like is breath of the wild 2 gonna be there as well like do they just like say do they just do both yeah i think you're

breath you're stupid i think with breath of Wild, they are so confident that they could wait, and given the fact that it got delayed until next year, they could wait into the fall for a Breath of the Wild 2-like gameplay, like really showing a lot of gameplay, and be fine. So I would be shocked if there was very much Breath of the Wild 2

during E3, quite honestly. No, I imagine if they do, they have to do one. I imagine there's more... They just did a Pokemon trailer this morning, but honestly. No, I imagine if they do, they have to do one. I imagine there's more. They just did a Pokemon trailer this morning, but you know, there's a lot to talk about there. Splatoon 3, seems like

they always do a ton of stuff about that every time it comes out. Yeah. There's, yeah. Kirby DLC? I think I'd be the only person who'd be excited for that. Did Bayonetta 3 come out? Oh my gosh.

So I do think we should talk about Xbox because in theory they should have a ton of stuff, right? They have their own event and they have roughly all of the studios now. They have a lot of studios. Yeah, they could talk about Activision stuff stuff so they could talk about call of duty they could talk about blizzard you know with overwatch 2 which i guess sure um bethesda with yeah starfield which we mentioned which for people who who don't know what that is starfield is their like sci-fi version of uh you know i don't know elder scrolls it's skyrim in space i think skyrim in space skyrim's 10 10 years old

at this point and people know it so yeah and and this game has been in development for about all of those 10 years yeah um uh yeah i'm curious for y'all like what do you think we actually see from them oh god yeah i mean we talked about biggest xbox has evolved to the point where it is the most unpredictable of all the of all the shows because i feel like there's some like tried and true stuff that you can anticipate seeing right like more halo infinite content in some form um probably a ton of shit from bethesda i think they would be foolhardy not to do that they usually do like you know a uh a sports block but then they'll come out and be like and platinum games is doing a fucking popeye beat him up it's like what the fuck um so i i could not i also don't own an xbox so like you know i'm a full sony crony and that's where i'd rather sort

of oh my god my energy yeah i don't i don't know you're right it's it's tough to predict because uh even though they have a lot of studios i do think they also bring out like a surprise like classic franchise that they're rebooting or you know a psychonauts 2 equivalent um so i don't know yeah i i just in talking this through it kind of explains why e3 it has changed and will have to change too is the massive consolidation in the industry really has just made it that like four or five companies can do directs and you see basically everything that the industry has to offer outside of indie games like people who operate outside of that system but yeah i mean you remember like we used to go see Activision do a thing and Blizzard do a thing. And if you wanted to go attend their booth, King, the mobile game manufacturer, make a thing, and then Microsoft and Bethesda. And now all of those are just the same company. Yeah, it's just weird.

um yeah i i think in terms of microsoft that the stuff that i i i feel like we can kind of count on i feel like they have to do a mea culpa for the halo infinite multiplayer rollout and maybe they give us a like plan uh for how they're going to that back on track infinite something is is a good it's a good way a place to like start fresh or something some sort of or maybe uh co-op they'll they'll announce yeah i may i think well here's the deal they they have i i've been sort of staying on top of the halo infinite stuff just because i continue to play it here and there and they have released things like um roadmaps and like when to expect like co-op multi co-op campaign stuff. They've like all, they've already revealed a lot of that stuff.

The, the problem is their pace is still glacial just in terms of what they're releasing. So like the current season is another six months. So if they were to announce something today, anything significant probably wouldn't happen until the next season. And then we're looking at december at that point um so you know i think they could tease like campaign dlc or something

like that to like further the story along but in terms of the multiplayer you know i think they don't want to do a big big push until they feel like this is something that they can really support on the level of an apex or on the level of uh fortnite um is that it i think we predicted everything oh i think we did it feels pretty thoroughly predicted at this point yeah yeah we predicted it's balls off i have an audible mention and it's for a book I wrote. Is that okay? Oh, you're going to steal mine.

This is going to be mine. Justin, you do it. I'll feel more comfortable if you do it. I am so excited that I have a book coming. It's kind of a coauthorship where I wrote some of the book. It's called the book of fun. It's it's, I don't want to spoil too much of it by describing it in detail,

but it's like a lot of different stuff about fun things and it's a book i wrote a co-wrote and uh it's coming out like june probably 13th or something like that and maybe 14th now i think oh my god flag day flag day is an easy way to remember but um i'm really excited about some of the different chapters like chess and Leisure Suit Larry are two of the different chapters I have in it. Russ, you have – You contributed something to the book, right, Russ? You contributed to it, right? I did.

Justin? No, no, no. Sorry. Before Fresh goes, I should also mention that the book is inspired by an idea that I created for a podcast. Oh, sorry, plan. No, no, no. It it's okay it's due um but yeah sorry fresh i you did and also i just wanted to mention that every night when he was working on the book russ would text me and be like you're the wind beneath my wings i couldn't do any of

this without um without you um i and i was like don't put me on the book don't put me on the book it would be too embarrassing um but go ahead russ what were you gonna say it's called the book of fun uh it is a history illustrated history book about various fun things from roadside attractions to video games to festivals and and other things that you do uh in your spare time uh i wrote it with an illustrator the illustrator who did stellar, amazing, gorgeous art in this 128-page book. There's tons and tons of art. His name's Sonny Ross, and Justin very generously contributed a foreword to the book. Chris Plant, as he mentioned, Plant and I hosted a podcast called The History of Fun, which helped inspire us doing this book.

With Allegra Frank. With Allegra Frank, of course. But I would say if you like history, if you like really dope art, you can buy it. It's at, you know, wherever books are sold kind of thing. Amazon and Barnes & Noble, but also small indie bookshops it's out on june 14th uh it's awesome i'm very very proud of it it took a really long time to do and uh now it's like a physical thing that exists so uh please check it out yeah i've actually been reading a copy and it just reminds me of how great my ideas are. It's delightful how good Russ's book is. Yeah, it's a really good book.

And you should go buy it. You can preorder it and then go to your, like, go to stores when it comes out and just buy all the copies. Yeah, that'd be good. Oh, yeah. That first week is really important for book sales. Go in and then sign Russ's name inside the copies. That's so helpful.

I want to do it. Russ, can I do a signing event here tonight? Absolutely. Just sign your one page. That would be great. I do want to mention real quick, if you have struggles buying gifts for your dads, Father's Day is coming up in a couple weeks,

and it sucks to buy gifts for Father's Day because no one knows what the fuck to buy a father. If they're into history stuff, this is a good option. And dads love pre-orders. Oh my god. They love being prepared. They love rain checks. High socks. They love it.

Anybody else want to do something that's like less shilly than this? Yeah, I can do that. I've been playing a lot of Yoshi's Yarn. what was the yoshi switch game called oh man yoshi's epic yoshi switch yoshi's crafted world craft maybe that's a good one that new one yeah i played that with rachel playing that mosey discovered it um while he has been sick and now he's a million times better and i'm the sick one and he just belligerently

demands that i help him play this game um do you have to play as poochie no i right now he he hasn't quite grokked aiming the eggs yeah like into the foreground and background that's a little puzzling to him uh he he likes me to help him do it at the same time he slowly been revealing that he actually knows how to do most of the stuff he asked me to do but just thinks it's very funny because i think he can tell i'm a little irritated at a certain point um love my child love him i love playing video games with him this is my dream but at a certain point you know you can only play the same fifth level of Yoshi's Yarn Adventure for the, like, 300th time.

It just... Gotta get all the frog coins. Yeah, man. You got... I don't think they have frog coins in this game. But I will say this. Hey, you know what? Nintendo makes really good games for kids.

They sure do actually going and playing these games now with a kid a lot of stuff where i was like too dismissive of them i was wrong and i'm i'm here to admit that these games are excellent in the way that like a great kid's book is excellent and the writing is charming in a new way to me. The like pacing is great in a different way to me. And watching him play this especially true with Kirby. There are so many things in these games that I just straight up did not know existed where you can engage with the environment and like cute little ways that the designers know a four-year-old or a five-year-old or however old is going to like instinctively want to try but me being a like scummy adult i'm just gonna zip

right past um so i've really fallen in love especially with that new kirby game that new kirby game is like it's fan fucking tastic uh as the kids would say i uh that is my game i've been playing is is the kirby game uh because i thought i'd beaten it i talked about it last week but there there's a there's a lot more there's i did not know that the game would have a sort of uh post post game content but it does and it's uh it's pretty good so thank you kirby for for your thank you kirby as we say at the end of every besties thank you kirby uh anything else that anyone wants to honorable mention shout out no just more verizing from me verizing uh yeah so i wanted to thank the following people for writing reviews for the besties on apple

podcast uh womp soy diosa lynn ultrama ultrama oh yeah it's josh and i brought back a returning favorite who wrote a review uh brego stink lord welcomeor we've missed you thank you so much next next week the devil gets his due when we bring the discussion laser over to Diablo Immortal and we'll be

talking about that one no matter what not too many Diablo games come out it's a big deal it's a big deal and It's a big deal. And I heard it's good. Yeah, I've heard it's good. I heard it's good. Thank you so much for listening to our podcast.

We hope you've enjoyed yourself. Thanks for spending this time with us. We love you very, very much. But that is going to do it for us for this week. So until next time, for all the other guys, my name is Justin McElroy. Thank you for listening to The Besties. Be sure to join us again next time for for all the other guys, my name is Justin McElroy, and thank you for listening to the besties.

Be sure to join us again next time for the besties, because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games? Besties!