Gaming Chatty Chat

Speaker 1: Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b a. Select start. Scott, do you know what time it is?

Speaker 2: Time for Hack's First Gaming episode?

Speaker 1: I think it's time for Hack's First Gaming episode where we talk about people hacking games, people playing games, and games we've been playing. Is that I mean, does that sound like a plan?

Speaker 2: I it sounds plausible. We'll see if the audience likes it or if people yell at us online, but I'm I'm into it.

Speaker 1: Blow the dust out of your cartridge, boot up your old tube television. It's the hacked gaming special. Let's get into it.

Speaker 2: And we're back. And we're back. Every time every time we start making a pot, I feel like we make a morning show. And I'm like, and we're back. And we're back. And we're back. It's like we're always back. We never kind of really go anywhere, but I guess we are back.

Speaker 1: It's back for us. If you're listening to these in a row, we haven't gone anywhere. But if you're us, well, welcome. Welcome.

Speaker 2: Just gonna have an episode dedicated to gaming today.

Speaker 1: That's it. A little

Speaker 2: bit of fun. We kind of talk about it passively in the pod, and we thought, you know what? Why not? Why not make a hack gaming episode? So it's gonna be some, like, traditional hack content, but we're also just gonna talk about gaming a bit.

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: If you have feedback on the concept in the episode, if you did like it, didn't like it, liked parts of it, please let us know. Yeah. Hit us up on our Patreon. Hit us up on our Discord. Hit us up on socials that we rarely visit, but we'll still visit them if you add us or DM us.

Speaker 1: Mhmm. So there's this Twitch clip that I think we're gonna we should maybe talk about.

Speaker 2: Oh, definitely.

Speaker 1: And it shows a Apex Legends player, Noyen Jenburton Ozcose, a member of the team Dark Zero. He's playing the game. It's the North American finals for the Global Series championship. I think that had a $1,000,000 prize pool in the Global Series five, so a bunch of money is on is, you know, at stake right now. He's playing the game, and out of nowhere he starts he shouts, I'm getting hacked. He throws his hands up in the air to show he's no longer in control. And on the screen, we see the UI interface for an aim bot appear on a screen at the same moment as this message shows up, Apex hacking global series by destroyer two thousand nine and random. This message just starts spamming the chat. And all of a sudden, this $5,000,000, esports tournament is being hacked. I think we gotta talk about that, Scott.

Speaker 2: I I think we have to talk about that.

Speaker 1: The clip's pretty nuts.

Speaker 2: As as as a as a as a first person shooter, as an FPS player, yeah, it is fascinating. There's been a lot of conspiracy around what happened, and I think we'll we'll we'll dive into that. So we'll see. We'll have we'll have the we'll have the discussion.

Speaker 1: We'll have the dis we'll teach the controversy controversy. Yeah. So it was two very prominent players, Jen Burton and Imperial Hall.

Speaker 2: Hal. Imperial Hal.

Speaker 1: Imperial Hal. So you can you tell that I'm, like, wading into a part of gaming that I'm it's like I I play a lot of video games. I make video games. I'm not any sports guy. I'm out of my element.

Speaker 2: Imperial Hal is probably the most notorious, most renowned. I think he might be the leader in, like, championships, and he, you know, he's kind of the leader of team TSM, and he's has one of the largest Twitch followings, massively successful player, big personality in the scene. Jen Burton again, big Twitch following, massive, like, streamer. Also, like, a a very notorious player, very respected, plays for Dark Zero, the team. So it was two two of, like, the two of the biggest audience players in the ALGS, which is the Apex League global series, which is what they were playing in the tournament. So You could tell that I might follow it.

Speaker 1: You sure can. So admins shut down the game lobby when players realize this aim bot has been applied to this game that is in progress. Random, kind of one of the two, purported hackers. Not much is known about them, but destroyer two thousand nine is sort of recognized as being involved in some questionable stuff that's been targeting Apex Legends players like Imperial, HAL, and HAL? HAL. Got it. Nailed it. I'm hip to it, dude. Destroyer two thousand nine is is a known variable. Friend of the show Lorenzo Franceschi Bicarai over at TechCrunch interviewed destroyer 2,009 who talked about the hack as being, I think it was, quote, just for fun, and the goal was to highlight a security vulnerability inside of Apex Legends. They didn't want to reveal the exploit details in full until there had been a patch, but clarified that the hack was confined to the game's process without affecting servers or players' computers. There's been no details provided about the cooperation with Respawn Entertainment, who makes it electronic arts, regarding a bug bounty pro program. We haven't really heard much from Apex Legends other than they have apparently pushed a a series of layered updates that they say addresses this, though. Whether that is the case remains to be seen.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So this is where a lot of the conspiracy early on came on. Amazing. People immediately jumped to the fact that it was a a remote code exploit, so they were actually injecting code and executing it through the Apex or through the anti cheat itself. A more likely scenario is that there was malware on the computers for Jen Burton and Imperial Howl.

Speaker 1: Oh, interesting.

Speaker 2: But but the fact that through the interviews with Lorenzo as well as the fact that Apex and our EA I was gonna say Activision, but we're talking about different game here. EA haven't said that it there wasn't an RCE is kind of indicative to me. Kind kind of indicative. So there's been a lot of discussion, a lot of interviews. Thor, kind of a well known hacker and YouTuber at Pyra Software, did an interview and a breakdown on this good YouTube watch if you wanna go watch that. See, he has the same kind of theories. Like, when it initially happened, it kind of looked like like there's this massive I don't know if you know about this, and you probably don't because you don't play in the FPS world, but

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: There's a massive subculture of people that think that pros and streamers and anybody that's super good at the game is a cheater. Sure. And there's been enough confirmations of that to kind of make it from being a wild conspiracy to a potential probability. Like, there have been a lot of streamers and people get caught cheating. Nobody of, like, the the imperial Hal gen burden levels, but in the smaller kind of upstarts, people looking to make a name for themselves.

Speaker 1: Right.

Speaker 2: So there's so there's this, like, whole subculture of people that just, you know, get, you know, owned in these games and immediately think that everybody's cheating, especially the people that are good at it. So so I think this really leaned into that where it's like the second the cheap menu popped up on his screen. It looked like he accidentally triggered his cheap menu in the middle of a game. But but if you know anything about how streamers set up their streams and stuff, I'm sure if you were a cheater that or a streamer that's cheating, you would make sure that your cheats would never have the ability to be visible on stream. Like, you're not gonna do a desktop capture, but you'll do a window capture for your stream, etcetera, etcetera. So so I think and, plus, not to mention the fact that instantly in the chat log, destroyer started taking credit for it.

Speaker 1: That to me seems like the best argument that this wasn't a slip of the finger revealing, you know, this professional player's cheating rig on the same computer that they were playing in a multimillion dollar tournament for. Totally. Interesting. Yeah. There was also I I'm curious for your take on this because there's another theory that I've heard floated, for the attack vector. Apex we've talked about these on the show before. These different, you know, multiplayer games employ different anti cheating software. Mhmm. Apex Legends employs one of the most popular ones, which is which is called Easy Anti Cheat. It is designed to prevent cheating. There's been a lot of speculation that it could also have been the potential attack vector for an RCE type vulnerability attack, whatever you wanna call it. Does that seem plausible to you?

Speaker 2: I guess it's a you can't rule it out. Yeah. Like, easy anti cheat is gonna have essentially root level access to memory and all the rest of those things, as well as easy anti cheat is pretty good at identifying cheats and removing them. Like, it's it's been proven. We'll talk a bit more about that later. But, like, it's been proven that it's it's quite good. So if if if easy anti cheat is gonna not notice something reading the memory, there could be a chance that it's a subprocess of easy anti cheat that could they I wouldn't rule that out.

Speaker 1: Interesting.

Speaker 2: I don't know nearly enough about it, and I by no means would I make a libelous statement and say it's a strong potential, but I think if you're analyzing it and going through the data, there's there's you can't rule that out.

Speaker 1: The thing that I find interesting about this was that the second the aim bot appeared on screen, the thing that gave this all away, if you rewatch those Twitch streams, and I highly recommend everyone does because even to a layperson like me, they're very entertaining. It's almost like watching a track runner in the middle of the race have someone sprinting towards them with steroids threatening to it's like, no, I didn't take the steroids. Get those away from me. I will be disqualified and my career will be ruined. It is entertaining. It was interesting to watch that the moment these exploits started working, the aimbot appears everyone watching can see. So you can't really argue that this was a this obviously wasn't someone attempting to cheat. This was someone using cheating as basically a prank.

Speaker 2: Yeah. A troll.

Speaker 1: In the middle of this very it's a troll in the middle of this super high stakes tournament. And that's just that's a different interpretation of cheating or a different use of cheating in that space.

Speaker 2: So you're talking, like, almost specifically about Jen Bergens' dream where he realizes he's cheating.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: You see, the cheat menu pops up and then something called walls. It's not aim bot. He he obviously has aim bot too, and there's actually an interesting breakdown of how he has aim bot because he actually shoots the bow and arrow at a player directly kind of downside from him, but that's behind, like, a, like, a pillar, and the arrow hits somebody like way over in the other side of the map and like 45 degrees to his left. Like Sure.

Speaker 1: He just Hawkeyes someone Yeah. Yeah. Through a wall around a corner.

Speaker 2: So at this moment, and then the cheat menu pops up and then bang all of a sudden he has walls and he can see the positionality and the health of everybody on the map. And he, like, his his if he was a cheater and this was like an accidental thing, his performance of selling that he is, like Right. Anxious and concerned and afraid of what's going on is is, like, Oscar worthy if he's actually a cheater. Because he he looks like a deer in headlights, as you said, a track runner getting sprinted at by a guy with a needle full of steroids. It's like It's

Speaker 1: like, no. I don't want them. I don't want them. Not me.

Speaker 2: And the the funny thing is is so, like, the Imperial Howe one is more subtle, which is actually, like it's such a it's such a it speaks volumes to how good these guys are at the game because Hal realizes through a shot that he he thought should miss when it hits, he goes, I have aim bot. Like, he literally like, he knows that he shouldn't have connected with the shot, but immediately is, like, connects with it. And his is an instant trigger is like, oh my god. I have aim bot. So Jen Burton just jumps out of the game. Hal, on the other hand, stays in the game because he doesn't have walls, so he's not, like, cheating on behalf of his team and doesn't know where everybody is. And he's just kind of doing something, and he actually goes on to trying to think of the polite, non first person toxic way of saying this. He destroys another pro player that, like, pushes in on them using the aim bot. But it's just like his natural reaction is to, like, fight because they're being pushed. So he but but but it's it's, like, it's just an interesting it's it speaks volumes to how good these guys are at the game, but also, like, how wild it is that, like, people have access to these cheats, and and these cheats do exist in, like, a lot of lobbies. Like, I know Apex is pretty good in regards to their their anti cheat, but lots of other first person cheaters are just full of cheaters.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I'm fascinated by how a lot of these cheats I mean, there's there's there's a lot we can talk about with this, and we have before on the show, but a lot of these cheats require pretty intense access to systems to employ, and that is sort of a response to the arm race of video game developers locking down their games further further for to prevent cheating. You know, every every cheat begets a response, which begets a response from the cheaters and so on and so or so forth until you end up with cheating software that has, like, root level access. And as we'll talk about even custom hardware, another relevant story on that front is a recent, so Activision, big ginormous video game company. We've talked about them on the show before. You've heard of them. You've heard of them. Digging into you've heard of them. They're digging into a hacking campaign aimed at stealing players' credentials, passwords, gaming accounts, even crypto wallets, which is fascinating, rooted in some malware that infiltrates victims' computers and has been linked to the use of, call them unauthorized third party tools, which is to say cheating software. So this whole massive hacking campaign that Activision Blizzard has been digging into, actively investigating, putting out press releases for, was first identified by a cheating software developer named Zeblir, who creates software for the game Call of Duty, who was the first person to notice that gamers, including those using the cheats, were being targeted for their login credentials. Zeblir discovers that some of his customers' accounts have been compromised, starts to investigate, locates a database of stolen credentials, and this sort of discovery prompts them to alert Activision Blizzard and all these other affected parties. So it seems as though this third party cheating software might have been both the vector and the point of discovery of this hacking campaign.

Speaker 2: I wonder if you got a bug bounty for it. Right. The yeah. Activision, like Call of Duty, you know, be it Modern Warfare or, any other multiplayer games or Warzone, I know it's quite common that cheaters buy stolen accounts. So, like, so instead of just creating accounts, there is an option to buy accounts that have, like, everything unlocked, all the camos, all the guns, all the all the things that people that play the game put time into, hackers can just unlock. So they'll steal an account, unlock it. The account has a track record and a history of not being a cheating account. And then you buy that account, and it might avoid detection for longer, especially because there's probably like, I don't know what the active user base on on Call of Duty is, but I know during the the pandemic, it got massive. So there's probably a lot of dormant accounts, like piles of them. So there's probably probably I could see them going after and targeting accounts that have history and track record, as I'm sure the Activision anti cheat, Ricochet Mhmm. Probably takes that stuff into consideration, like age of an account, if if it's a new account or old account, things like that.

Speaker 1: I remember a while ago if people are interested in this, they should check out the chicken drumstick episode we did a a little while ago. But I remember as part of that conversation we were talking about, it's reminded me of a Reddit comment I saw. We were talking about the idea of, you know, it's so strange, the amount of effort you would go to, the money you would spend, the time you would invest in compromising your own hobby. The idea that, like, this game is your fun hobby and look at the lengths you have gone to to not have to be good at it. And I saw a Reddit comment while I was doing research for this. The basic it was someone bringing that up, and they use that lens of, you know, all the work you're putting in to not put work into your hobby. And then the first response to it was hacking these games is the hobby. And I, like, sat back in my seat, and I was like, oh got it. Mhmm. That actually makes a ton of sense to me. It's like, I'm never it's like I'm not trying to be the best in the world at Call of Duty, but I really enjoy breaking Call of Duty. That's I'm not saying that's good. I'm saying I understand the, like, root psychology that goes into choosing to spend your time doing that.

Speaker 2: I think that, like, you know, I've I've made this parallel a lot, but, like, hacking is problem solving and puzzle solving.

Speaker 1: A 100%.

Speaker 2: Hacking a game is solving a puzzle. And, you know, you've got dynamic participants. You've got anti cheat software that's trying to catch you, and you've got to figure out ways around it. And you've got teams of developers and security analysts who are going through and trying to make sure that the code's safe and the memory's secure and blah blah blah. But I totally understand it from the cheat creator side. It's the cheater side that I don't understand. It's like I get that lots of these games, to be good at them takes time. Like, you need to Yep. There's there's it's like I was playing truthfully, I was playing Warzone with my brother the other day, and he is not a big first person shooter player. Doesn't really play.

Speaker 1: Is Light him up. He's

Speaker 2: he he the he his understanding of the nuances that you have to do in the game just aren't there. Like like if you're a good player, like if you're a two plus KD player, and I hope everybody understands what a KD is, kills to death ratio. So, like, on average, you're getting at least two kills for death per per your death that you understand that like certain animations add to delays in the game and like if you are in a tactical sprint it means that you're gonna take longer to be in a state of firing on an opponent movements to avoid getting hit by bullets from combatants. You know, there's like all of this nuance that you, like, literally need to train and make instinctual to be good at these games. And there's people and like game I can't remember, like game awareness, game knowledge, like I shoot at a person over here and I see them run behind that building. The likelihood is is that they're gonna move through the building back towards me to shoot at me using the building for cover, and they're gonna pop up in this window three seconds later. So all of a sudden, I'm pre aiming at that window waiting for them to reappear to shoot them again. And it's like those tactical nuances come from repetition. They come from playtime. They come from understanding how people respond in certain situations. And people that are pros like Imperial Hal and Jen Burton know those things. Like, they're instinctive to them. They're second nature. And it's like, so if you are not willing to commit the time to getting good at the game, like, if you don't treat the game like a sport, which is a reference that I made to my brother, it's like you need to train to be good at it. If you're not treating it like that, but you still wanna be as good as the best players, then hacks are your only output. And it's like to me, it's just like, what's the fun in that? Like, why even bother playing?

Speaker 1: I, I don't do either, but I imagine there's something there's a difference between wanting to beat other players at Call of Duty and wanting to beat Call of Duty. And there's something about, like I'm not saying it's a good use of your time or money to spend a $100 a month on some subscription hacking. It's so much, but on some subscription hacking service. But I get that it's different than wanting to be good at the sport. And, again, I don't wanna do either, but I'm fascinated by the, like, psychological fork that happens where you're like, I'm just simply never gonna be as good at this as I want to be. And then you kinda start going down this other rabbit hole. Before we started recording, you were telling me a little bit about so there's cheats that you can install. There's cheats that you can subscribe to. But all of those are occurring inside of the same computer. And therefore, if you if the software that you're cheating at requires enough access, it can detect those, and that's the armor race we were talking about. I know. But there's this other thing you can do, which is rooted in the fact that in order to play these games you have to plug in external hardware, you have to plug in a mouse, you have to plug in a keyboard. The game has to receive that external input, and some crafty devils, through something called direct memory access have cooked up a a a way of compromising that fact. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Speaker 2: Sure. Yeah. So the oh, where to start? So, like, software, like, I'll use the term software cheats to just refer to, like, I'm on my gaming PC, and I download a cheat package for Call of Duty. Mhmm. It ties into the memory and pulls the locations of the of the enemy combatants. It renders them onto an overlay that goes over my game, so I can see where everybody is. You know, aimbot, soft aim, there's like a whole bunch of different pieces that make up these cheating packages now.

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: But they all kind of occur inside of the computer, and it requires the cheat software to be reading the live memory of the game, which is where the anti cheat kind of comes in and tries to block that and detect things that are doing that. But the DMA stuff, direct memory access cheats, often run on a separate computer and then interface into your gaming computer through hardware, and then that hardware spoofs something and has access at the hardware level. So it's much harder to detect. It's much more expensive. But, like, I'll say that if I was a pro big streamer that's cheating

Speaker 1: Sure.

Speaker 2: That's making $50.60, $100,000 a month from my my streaming career, if I was to look at cheats, I probably wouldn't care that this was gonna cost me thousands of dollars to make sure that I was still the best player.

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: So so yeah. So there's this this it's I would say it's nowhere near as common just given the barriers to entry, but it's it's what these poor anti cheat teams have to be dealing with. Like, they're gonna have to start looking at, like, hardware signatures and things like that to make sure that there's nothing compromised in the computer, let alone just running in the software side.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I'm I'm I'm seeing a bunch of posts in different esports subreddits of people saying, okay. I'm a Valorant player, and, oh, no. DMA cheats are being prevented. They're doing something to try and prevent this. My DMA isn't working anymore. So it seems like these anti cheat like, they obviously know that this stuff exists.

Speaker 2: Hell, of

Speaker 1: course. But given that it's it's it's spoofing external hardware, I'm like, oh, that's just a really fascinating that's a whole new arms race you're now engaged in.

Speaker 2: Well, there was, there was an there's an interesting YouTube video that I watched a few few weeks ago. It was that there's the so there's a warzone streamer. One of the war zone streamers that got caught cheating, is I think he goes by Itzapa, or Itzapda, something like that. Anyway, he put out a video where he actually had an interview or apparently had an interview. I'm not gonna allege that it's the real person, but where there's a big war zone cheat called Phantom Overlay, which is apparently one of the most popular and has like evaded the anti cheat substantially. So he apparently interviewed the creator of Phantom Overlay, and he and it's full of really interesting insights and details about how to tune the anti or to tune the cheat to make it look like you're not actually cheating, and it's also he talks about DNA cheats. He talks about, you know, how the thing that I thought was most interesting is that the the war zone anti cheat ricochet didn't pick up on Phantom Overlay, but the Apex anti cheat easy cheat actually saw even though it's on a totally different game, it saw the piece of software was interfering with memory, and it literally blocked the Apex account without even knowing that it was, like, a cheat for a different game. So I thought that was an entertaining and odd twist and, sadly, probably not the best look for Activision.

Speaker 1: Jumping a little too quick. Yeah. Yep. People sure do love to cheat at those online competitive video games. And meanwhile, I'm playing Leesville company with my friends, and I don't really get why or how you could cheat at that. Yeah. The sportsification of video games. It's interesting.

Speaker 2: Like, I've been playing a decent amount of, like, retro games and Yeah. You know, the the developers built the cheats into those. And and if they didn't, I don't know. I gotta look this up. Nintendo used to have

Speaker 1: GameShark? Tell me it's GameShark.

Speaker 2: Is that what I'm thinking of? It's that thing where you put the cartridge into it, and then it applied cheats to the game. Was that GameShark?

Speaker 1: Yeah, dude. Yeah, man. That thing was so you know what? I take it all back. I totally know why you're cheating video games because, like, 12 year old me being like, listen. I have a Mewtwo, and this is kind of a big deal.

Speaker 2: Game Genie. Yeah. GameShark and Game Genie.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Game Genie.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Back for the Nintendo Entertainment System, they released an external hardware cheat for NES games. Like, how crazy is that?

Speaker 1: I don't think I don't think Nintendo made it. I think it was made by MadKats. Yeah.

Speaker 2: I think GameShark was made by MadKats, but, Game Genie was Code Masters. Oh. I remember a friend of mine had one of these, and you used to be able to, like, buy them at the store. Like, they weren't It was yeah.

Speaker 1: I got it for Christmas. It was you could buy it at the superstore. Like, it it it's just like a product you could purchase because who gives a shit? Like Exactly. What's what does it matter if, you know, I didn't have to do level four in Marvin the Martian on Sega Game Gear before I did level five because I couldn't beat it because it was very difficult. Like, it just didn't matter. There were no stakes. It wasn't online. It wasn't a shared experience. There was definitely no tournaments, and there were certainly no multimillion dollar prizes. So you could sell a product preloaded with thousands of codes. Yeah. It was dope.

Speaker 2: So as long as there have been

Speaker 1: What a time to be alive.

Speaker 2: As long as there have been challenges Yes. There have been there have been people cheating their way around them. It's like script kiddies. It's like the script kiddies of games.

Speaker 1: Totally.

Speaker 2: Yeah. A 100%. I'm not gonna lie. Like, if I'm playing a first person shooter and I get owned by somebody who's made their own cheat, I would oddly respect that more than somebody who is paying $90 a month to a cheat provider.

Speaker 1: Sure. Yeah. Yeah. It's different when it's competitive. Like, there's something about if I bought a video game and I can't I've simply reached a point where I'm not gonna be able to advance any further because I'm 13, and I'm just not good enough at it. And it's between cheating to keep going or not playing this video game anymore, and I'm not gonna get another one till next Christmas. Like, oh, I'm cheating, friend. But Yeah. It's just different.

Speaker 2: I think the the the the modern day cheater and first person shooter is probably considerably older, has way more disposable income

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: And maybe just isn't that good at the game and wants to be good at the game. I think actually the entire subculture of people that believe everybody cheats is the creator of the cheating subculture, because if you assume everybody else is cheating

Speaker 1: Yeah. Right. And you

Speaker 2: still wanna play the game, that becomes your moral justification for why you should start cheating.

Speaker 1: Sure. I saw that guy sprinting towards my competition with the needle full of steroids, so I best take some steroids.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So I got my own needle full of steroids. Exactly.

Speaker 1: Exactly. It's not the best metaphor, but it's working so far.

Speaker 2: Why

Speaker 1: don't we kick it over to kick it over to some ads, and then when we come back, even talking about hacking games, let's just talk about some games.

Speaker 2: Sounds good.

Speaker 1: Scrabody boop bop. Boom. I brought it up earlier, but I've been playing a lot of Lethal Company. Are you familiar with this video game?

Speaker 2: I am not. Tell me. Give me give me give me the goods.

Speaker 1: Lethal Company rules. I highly recommend everyone check it out. It was the, like, sleeper indie hit, I think, of last year, and it kinda came out of that COVID era, new gaming habits. People wanna play co op. People want social experiences in their games. Uh-huh. But a lot of those games are ruthless. They are competitive sports. It's like I want to learn how to play basketball and just immediately you're playing against like the hardcorest people in the world. Lethal Company is sort of a response to that. It's this co op kind of horror game. You're scavenging on an abandoned moon, and it's it's social. You're you're embarking with a little crew of three of your friends. You have, like, kind of a short little day cycle to go out, find a bunch of stuff, bring it back to the ship, try and get it out, and try and meet your quota. And the whole time you're just getting hunted by terrifying monsters. And I I can't recommend it enough. It's such a nice twist on co op gameplay. It's it's more collaborative than it is competitive. And the result is you just spend end up spending a lot of time, like, cackling and laughing laughing as your friends get picked off by monsters.

Speaker 2: The I just looked it up, and it it is one of those games that has wild variation in its reviews. Yes. So Steam has a 10 out of 10. Google users, 97% like it. Yep. Google Play, 2.4 out of five. So I'm assuming it has an an Android issue.

Speaker 1: It's not great.

Speaker 2: IGN, seven out of 10. It's like it's all over the map.

Speaker 1: It's all over the place. I really get that. I could see not enjoying it, especially if you didn't have a a the right, like, crew of people to play it with. But it also feels like it's feeding into, like, video game meme culture in a really great way. You end up with all these videos of people screaming and running and laughing. Yep. Because the game the kind of core gameplay loop incentivizes that so much. Like, you are not a powerful it is not Call of Duty. You are not a, like, murked up person with all these guns and stuff. Like, you are extremely vulnerable, and the world is very scary. And the result is just, like, it's just a different a different energy.

Speaker 2: I I I like that. I like I like the big fan of the new coop game style. Yeah. Big fan. I don't play a lot of them because I tend to lean more competitive. Like, the Mhmm. Closest thing that I would say that I've been playing recently is ready or not, which is

Speaker 1: like a SWAT team game where you

Speaker 2: Cool. But it's like I know I know a good friend of ours and friend of the pod, mister Satchel, also plays ready or not, which should come as no surprise. The but, yeah, same same thing. Ready or not, it's like a SWAT team thing. You have a team of SWAT members, and then you go through these, like, puzzle missions that have some dynamicness to them. So, like, where the enemies were the last time you went through it. You're very vulnerable. You, like, can die really easy. There's a lot of, like, puzzle y aspects to it. Like, when you go into a room, you, like, wanna wanna close the doors behind you so that if the doors are ever open again, you know if somebody's come through that space, there's movement to the to the combatants, and it's I don't know. It's it's a it's a fun game. I'd say it's not but it's still competitive in the sense that, like, you're trying to overcome rather than the fun, co op games where you're just trying to trying to survive.

Speaker 1: Mhmm. I'm frantically trying to think of the name of the game that I'm play that I'd played a little bit with the same person, and it's not the try it's not the tournament. It's not the exit. It's not the show. It's an online shooter where the the conceit of it is that you are being broadcast on, like, essentially a game show. Do you know which one I'm talking about?

Speaker 2: I have no idea.

Speaker 1: Shooter game show. This is quality content. The finals.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I was gonna say the finals. Yes. The finals is yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Yeah. It's

Speaker 2: it's like the, what's the Hunger Games for video games?

Speaker 1: Like a battle royale. Well, I mean, they're all battle royale games, but it is, yeah, it is the the, like, film conceit of battle royale that it is this, like, ruthless game show type thing.

Speaker 2: Have you played the finals?

Speaker 1: I have, and I don't normally go for those types of games. And I I I quite enjoyed it, not so much that I kept playing it. So I guess I can't say I liked it that much, but it's quite fun. I think a lot of what worked about it had to do with, like, the aesthetic wrapper around that. It's like there's the the gameplay loop is cool. I don't know enough about those games to know what's different about it, but I really just loved the Mhmm. The game show skin they put on top of all of it. I thought that was just impeccably well done. I wanted to spend time in that world. It was great. Yeah. The Really well done.

Speaker 2: Announcers and all the rest of it. I was, I was part of the open beta for the for the finals.

Speaker 1: Oh, cool.

Speaker 2: And let me tell you, that was a sweat fest. If you don't know what the term sweaty means, it means that, like I don't. Good players make your hands sweat when you're playing the games, so your controller is wet because you're, like, trying so hard. The finals beta was a literal sweat fest, like it was so hard, and I think it was like the people that got the open beta and were like, Yeah, I'll give this a go, were like all the hardcore Call of Duty, hardcore Apex, all are like all the hardcore first person shooter players. We're like, I'll try out this new game and see what it's gonna be like. And I remember, like, being like, oh my god. Yeah. But it is it is it is it is a cool world. It is a cool concept, and I do dig it. I do dig it. I do have it installed. I will say I don't play it a ton, but I do like it.

Speaker 1: A sweat fest.

Speaker 2: Sweat fest.

Speaker 1: This is an aside I saw I got a Steam Deck recently, and I've started buying I've started buying caps to go on the joysticks of new controllers and systems whenever I get them because my partner

Speaker 2: Mhmm. Mhmm.

Speaker 1: Has a tendency when a game gets intense to, attack the joystick with her nails, like to sort of plunge the nail into the joystick, harder and harder. And it has resulted in me having a bunch of video game controllers where the rubber, like, kinda cap on top of a joint is just just it's just gone, man. And on something like Steam Deck, that's not really replaceable. So not quite not quite a sweat fest, but more of a a claw attack fest going on in my household.

Speaker 2: Like a so like a scratch fest. Scratch fest. Yeah. Scratch fest.

Speaker 1: Exactly. That being said, the Steam Deck, that that thing rips. I got the OLED one.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Tell me more about it. I've been intrigued by the the microconsole, the handheld world.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty well I really like it. It has big second gen. It's mid cycle refresh tech energy rating off that thing. Like, it's it's got this great new OLED screen with the smaller, bezels on it. Battery lasts a little bit long. Like, it's just all those little quality of life improvements that address all of the stuff I'd heard about the original Steam Deck as being a bit wanting. Mhmm. It's still a big big chunky boy. Like, it's a big console, but it's also pretty affordable as those things go compared to some of the like the ROG Ally, I think it is. It's pretty reasonably priced and the Steam OS on it is just lovely. Like it it's basically a Nintendo Switch if you want it to be. You crack open the store. Right. But it's a Nintendo Switch that is plugged into Steam. So say I'm playing Lethal Company. I bought it as a Lethal Company machine to play social co op games with pals, and boy is it good at that. You know, you it's like you plug in a pair of headphones, and you're you're gaming with your pals, and it's it's a pretty great experience.

Speaker 2: The it it runs SteamOS. Right? Like, it runs a I think it's like a like a version of Unix. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Right. I was gonna say Linux, but you would know better than I would. BS. Exactly.

Speaker 2: Yeah. We'll share Linux, Unix, whatever, POSIX, however you wanna define it. The the RogAlly and I think the MSI Claw are

Speaker 1: both Windows.

Speaker 2: Windows 11 PCs. Right? Like, they're essentially mobile PCs Yeah. With game controllers permanently mounted to the sides of them.

Speaker 1: Which is cool. And I think that that makes them maybe marginally better for if you wanna do mods or if you wanna play I think the big thing is games that have that kind of intense anti cheat root levelly type stuff we were talking about earlier. It's like those don't play super well with Steam Deck. They're kind of the only stuff that doesn't play really well with it. So I guess if you're you're a big COD person, maybe it's not for you. But

Speaker 2: But I think the I think the reality is is if you're a competitive gamer, you're probably not gonna be playing on a mobile Probably not. Mobile anyway. The your field your field of view might be wide, but your screen size is limited and and, latency added between, you know, Internet connections and things like that. This is actually an interesting like, just to transition from, like, interesting hardware things is, Call of Duty Warzone released their mobile version, so they now have an Android and iOS version of it. I saw that. Which is crazy. Like, they like, because I consider Warzone to be like as a game developer, it's amazing. Like, it's this massive open world level. You've got all of these dynamic elements happening. Like, every time somebody on the Internet complains about something in some of these games, I'm just like, you have no idea how much of a masterpiece these things are, given the fact that there's so much complexity in them.

Speaker 1: Sure. But

Speaker 2: the, they released the original Warzone one map, Verdansk for the for the gamers out there Sure. On mobile. I

Speaker 1: have played that one.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We actually played it. I think you and I played a couple games.

Speaker 1: Yes. Yep. Yep. No. I remember that.

Speaker 2: Anyway, so they released it for mobile. So now you've got all these, like, pro ish y, competitive, sweaty players playing mobile, but, like, they're not playing it using well, there are a group of people that are playing it with the touch interface, but there's a lot of, like,

Speaker 1: classic or

Speaker 2: non mobile gamers that are playing it, and they're they're buying iPad Pros so that they have the best hardware and rendering engines for it there to reduce any kind of, like, on screen latency. They're pairing up, like, wireless, you know, Xbox Pro controllers and Elite controllers. They're they're essentially treating it like it's a PC game, but it just happens to be on a mobile interface. They're buying docks.

Speaker 1: Sure. Sure.

Speaker 2: So so that they don't have to use Wi Fi. They can use hard lined Internet so that they have a lower server latency, which is a big deal in first person shooters. And it's like it's just interesting to watch this, like, competitive world. Like, they built this beautiful mobile game to, like, let people on their mobile phones play these, like, fun games, but then there's a whole coop of sweaty players, like, being like, okay. How do we metagame this? How do we optimize it from a hardware perspective to make sure that we have the competitive advantage?

Speaker 1: Yeah. Right. We wanna bring our game to all the iPad kid generation players that aren't able to access it, and then you do that. And then this the the PC players just descend on it like locusts, just optimizing all of the fun right back out of it. That rules.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. I would I would say something critical if I weren't one of those people.

Speaker 1: Totally. The,

Speaker 2: Oh, that's pretty good. Anyway, just cool cool things kind of happening. I do I do like I I I love that the that triple a world is coming to mobile because I just think from an accessibility perspective, it's such a huge thing.

Speaker 1: 100%.

Speaker 2: Like, the the you know, you see these people with their $8,000 gaming PCs, and it's like not everybody has those. Like No. But like I would say in today's day and age, like most people have a phone, and it's like Yeah.

Speaker 1: Most people have a tablet. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And like phones are great. Like, the like, we were talking and this is, I think, another great transition is, like, I recently bought a retro gaming console, like a handheld. I did buy a handheld, but instead of going, you know, Windows 11, Steam OS, I went

Speaker 1: sure

Speaker 2: I went retro emulator, but it's an it's like an Android device. It's like an entire Android phone.

Speaker 1: Yep.

Speaker 2: It has an OLED screen. It's got an Android operating system, runs Android emulation software that you can get in the Google Play Store. Like, it's not locked down, like the iOS stuff. You slap an SD card full of ROMs in it that you legally attained, and and you

Speaker 1: you backed up from the cartridges you own. Of course.

Speaker 2: Of course. Yeah. Of course. And you go to town. It's like it's it's it's amazing how, like, I even when I was looking at it and researching and reviewing which one of these comps handhelds to buy, the best version of it is actually just getting a really high quality phone because they actually have the best chipsets.

Speaker 1: Mhmm. I remember when a couple years ago, I I'm not an Android person, but I've always been fascinated by the emulation that you can do on them. I always thought that was so cool, and I remember a few years ago when the flip the book style folding phones came out. One of the first use cases someone figured out was that if you turn it on its side, it's just the greatest Nintendo DS emulator ever created because now you have a top screen and a bottom

Speaker 2: screen. Totally. Totally.

Speaker 1: I was like, that is that is a 2,000 Nintendo DS emulator, and I love it. I couldn't be happier that you you figured this out. There's four people that are gonna get a lot of joy out of this. Totally.

Speaker 2: Totally. I did. But, like, the the fact that, like, in the Android, in the Google Play Store, you can pretty much get the emulators for, like, every console

Speaker 1: For sure.

Speaker 2: Including Yep. Well, I know there was a bunch of this is another great topic that we should've added to the list, but we can move to it smoothly through this conversation is is, Nintendo Switch crackdown. They've been cracking down on people making the emulators.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yuzu.

Speaker 2: But because there was and there's I believe there still are a few that are available, like, publicly. But, like, I know that that, Nintendo's been cracking down on people that have been making Switch emulators because some of these phones and devices are powerful enough that they can literally just run Switch games, which are relatively recent.

Speaker 1: No. When I first got that Steam Deck, I had a buddy, hooking me up with the Yuzu. I did not end up installing it. That's just true. But, hooking me up with the build of Yuzu for emulating Nintendo Switch on it, and the fascinating thing was a couple weeks later, that emulator gets sued for, quote, facilitating piracy at a colossal scale, and they just, like, no one don't get into a legal fight with Nintendo. They immediately fold and pay out a $2,400,000 settlement, and, you know, that's a wrap on Yuzu. There's still bills of it floating around on the Internet, but the project's done. Mhmm. It was a very fascinating about face on a product that was very, very popular, just, like, open source emulator that people, you know

Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, they really love. The the Switch is such a recent like, I'd consider it to be a recent console as there's not really a new version of it. Like, there's the OLED, which is, like, the same as the Steam Deck. I think yours might have had a bit of a hardware upgrade rather than just a screen upgrade,

Speaker 1: but I

Speaker 2: think the the Switch OLED didn't really have anything on the hardware side. I know there is a lot of rumors floating around about the new Switch two and about how powerful it's gonna be Super Switch. Which I think is gonna be pretty interesting to see.

Speaker 1: It's gonna be a lot of fun. Yeah.

Speaker 2: The, but, yeah, the the Androids, like I was shocked at how coming from the iPhone world where these things don't exist to me, the just simply having a good Android essentially opens that entire retro gaming world up to you.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: And, like, you can buy beautiful little controller sets that clip onto your phone. Like, your phone sinks into the middle and you get a full functioning hardware controller. You can you can turn your if you've got a good quality Android device, you can turn it into a retro gaming console for, like, a $100, which is pretty cool. Pretty cool.

Speaker 1: Hey, everybody. It's Jordan from the future, like, a like, five days after this was recorded because the day that we recorded this, no joking, ninety minutes later, Apple puts out an announcement that they are going to be opening up the App Store to retro game emulators, thus rendering the whole thing we were just talking about kinda null and void. You haven't been able to get retro game emulators on iOS for a really long time. They were banned on the App Store. There's a bunch of antitrust cases against Apple right now in Europe and The US. We haven't talked about them a ton, but they were a big part of the argument in Europe that these game emulators are part of why people might want to be able to seek out third party app marketplaces. Apple is sort of acquiescing on some of these things and they loosened that restriction allowing, retro game emulators, you know, pretty exciting. One of the first ones that went live was called IGBA and in a funny twist, that first one to go up on the App Store has since been pulled down. It turns out, the developer, Matteo Luspina, didn't actually upload it and it was a ripped off version. So that's a fun little twist on this whole story. Those are now available. If you're listening to this, you, and you got an iPhone, go give it a check. Check the App Store. Maybe there's a good one up. Be careful downloading it because this is a whole new product category, but, it is very interesting and an interesting about face for a company that was previously not very down to have gaming leaders in the App Store. Anyhoo, let's get back to the conversation. Yeah. I remember when I ordered my I won't say the name the the brand name of it, but I ordered my, small retro gaming handheld. And, I order it. It was a little Game Boy form factor one. I'm hanging out waiting for it to show up in the mail. And while I'm waiting for it to show up, I'm I'm doing all the research of where the where, you know, a person can find how where the ROMs come from, basically. The content How

Speaker 2: you pull backups from your cartridge Precisely.

Speaker 1: I was I was investigating a lot of time into that side of things, waiting for it to show up. And I've come up with my plan. I've started figuring it all out. The device shows up. I turn it on and immediately I'm going to go, you know, get my my legally owned games onto it. And I turn it on, and it immediately just has, like, a felony's worth of ROMs already pre installed on it from the manufacturer. Kinda just sat back like, oh, no one's paying attention to this. Alright. Cool. Game on. Totally. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Thanks, AliExpress.

Speaker 1: Totally. Literally.

Speaker 2: I I would be lying if I said mine didn't come with the exact same thing.

Speaker 1: They all do.

Speaker 2: Which is what makes the exact

Speaker 1: same thing. So fascinating is that that's a that's a software project. And meanwhile, there's a factory somewhere that's just just putting Rayman on this on every single one of these things off the factory floor. You know, it's fascinating to me that you can ship a product with Pokemon on it, and no one's busting that. But, you know, you develop some software that lets a person play Pokemon, and the lawyers show up.

Speaker 2: Well, the the thing I found is, Ching, I don't know if yours had the same, but mine didn't have any of the Mario games on them.

Speaker 1: Oh, mine sure did.

Speaker 2: Mine sure didn't. And I wonder if if that's not, again, a little bit of muscle from Nintendo coming out.

Speaker 1: There's just some lines you don't cross. You don't you don't rock the plumber. Like, it's just like don't. Okay. It had

Speaker 2: it had all the Zelda games. It had it had a bunch of other, like, key games, but it didn't have any of the, like, Nintendo, like, Mario games, which are, like, I you know, their showcase franchise. So Interesting. Interesting.

Speaker 1: You've been playing anything else?

Speaker 2: Well, I've been playing little touches of things here and there. Mostly first person shooters. That's my bread and butter. Play have a good group of of friends that I play with, and that's mostly it. So the one game that I have been playing a bit of, I've been playing a little PGA on the PlayStation. I've been playing a little, Spider Man, the new Spider Man game. Very good. Yeah. Very cool engine. Very nice. Big shout out to them for that. It's a great game.

Speaker 1: First one was incredible. Have.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The PlayStation five Pro. You done any reading on some of the leaks about this thing?

Speaker 1: No. I saw that they were coming. I don't have a PS five, so I I'm not, like, on the I'm not in Sony for this latest gen, but I'd seen that there was murmurings of it. Is it did they make it faster? Like, what what's the plan?

Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, like, it's been because so I have a, you know, professional responsibilities, of course, given that I make games for these things. I have a PS five and I have an Xbox Series X. I actually I've been in the PlayStation world for, like, decades or, like, since since the PS three and, like, the starting of the PSN. Like, I that's been my principal home. But I think that the Xbox has got a better like, Microsoft disagrees with this, and they've been changing their strategic direction. But I I actually bought a Series X because when you work in game development, you see how similar Xbox game development is to PC game development where the PlayStation development requires more overheads and more like, it's way more customized. So if you if you're a if you're a AAA studio and you're making a PC game or a game that's going to launch on PC, adding features and functions and things like that for PC are really easy to port over to the Series X because it's essentially just a PC where if you need to then add those functions and features and and new firmware stuff from the PlayStation, it's more of a development process. So I bought a Series x simply because I wanted to see the difference between updates for the same game across different platforms. So that's a a weird hobby, I know, but it's it's what I choose to do. Oh, I

Speaker 1: spend my time.

Speaker 2: But but the, the PS five Pro, all hypothetical and all leaks, but they're talking about something like like a substantial increase in performance. Like, I've seen numbers as high as, like, two to three x the performance of the existing PS five, which is wild. That's Like, that's in in one Yeah. One step and one generation of improvement. That's crazy.

Speaker 1: Not even a gen, a mid cycle refresh. Like Yeah. The only thing I've I'd I'd read one thing about it, which was basically talking about the only real reason you would need this. Like, it's so much headroom

Speaker 2: If I don't.

Speaker 1: Is, PSVR two. They've got this next gen hardware, and it's still capped with really like, it's frame rate stuff. It's just trying to optimize the hardware to make the most of, you know Mhmm. That peripheral. And I was like, oh, that's that's interesting as we're seeing, like, Apple Reality Pro, you know, sprint past in a couple key metrics. Just just just a bigger engine. You know?

Speaker 2: Well, I think I think there's gonna be an interesting like, every time I think that we're done evolving TVs, you know, I get put in my place by the TV industry. Sometimes I'm right, like, with three d TV, but but, like, I wonder if we're not pushing to a world of 240 frames per second, like, 240 hertz TVs. Like, you know, one twenty is like a premium TV now, but gaming monitors now see the push. Like, some of the high end FPS monitors now are are 500 hertz. Like, they're 500 frames a second. And it's like, are you sure your eye can only see, you know, 29 or something? But I

Speaker 1: was gonna say.

Speaker 2: But but for game smoothness and latency in game, you know, everybody that needs a competitive edge seeks out that competitive edge. And, like, I have a 240 hertz OLED, and it's beautiful, like a fourteen forty p two forty hertz OLED, one of the new newer generation of gaming monitors, and it's amazing. And I wonder if we're gonna see that same step forward in televisions. Like, if you could buy a 85 inch eight k 240 hertz TV and push games at that frame rate and resolution, that would be amazing.

Speaker 1: I mean, if it's happening PC side, it's gonna trickle down to console eventually. Like, it it's just they they Totally. They're they're on this track, it seems like. And then it it almost feels like we used to have the fork of console and handheld. Handheld kind of withered and died for a little bit. Mhmm. It feels like it's coming back. Like, I could see we make the box, and the box powers the ridiculous television that kicks out a signal that is 10 times what the human eye can perceive. And that's what we're doing over here in the living room. But then we have, you know, like, put out a new PSP. Like, give me the handheld version that lets me play the same game. Like, we're there. We can do it again.

Speaker 2: Well, they and they kinda are doing it, but they're doing it in, like, a weird streaming way. Yeah. Right? Like, what's PlayStation's

Speaker 1: Yeah. That thing

Speaker 2: PlayStation's got that that handheld thing.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: But when I saw it initially, when I first saw, like, a photo of it in, like, a news feed, I thought it literally was a new PSP.

Speaker 1: Yeah. That thing was disappointing, I personally. The idea of just, like, a a screen that you beam the portal. It's like okay. That's that's fine. It's an expensive peripheral, but it's not it's not what I Want it to be. I would love it if when the next Xbox comes out I can decide whether or not I'm probably gonna primarily play it sitting on the couch or if I want it to be portable. And it's the Switch version version versus the kind of traditional Xbox version. I think that sounds dope.

Speaker 2: Yeah. That does, but I I I can't see them going that way. And I just because because I think that they're probably gonna go the other way where they're gonna go eight k two forty. They're and there's no way they're gonna be able to pack that kind of power into something that has remote capabilities.

Speaker 1: Feels like acquiescing a lot of ground as PC all those PC manufacturers are, like, coming up with these sick handhelds that are moving units for console games to just like, for them to just not give a shit. I'm I'd be I'm curious.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I I guess that, you know, it's gonna come down to a lot of money on market research and market segmentation Yeah.

Speaker 1: Because the Totally.

Speaker 2: The thing for me is if, like, if we're gonna say that consoles are to be TV bound, then we're gonna make that the best TV bound experience that you can have.

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: It's like PCs like, you can't use well, I guess you could, but you wouldn't want to use a Steam Deck for competitive PC gaming. Like, if you're playing No. Things that require even like MMO RPGs. Like, if you're playing, like, World of Warcraft, like, that would be harder to play on a handheld. So, like, the I think the distinction between what games get played on what is gonna become bigger. Like, when I play PGA Masters on my 85 inch TV and have surround sound and all the rest of it, it's amazing TV console gaming experience, even the Spider Man. But I wouldn't play a first person shooter on there because I'm not close enough to the screen. I can't see enough screen real estate, you know, things like that. The refresh rate's not high enough. The latency is too much, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. All of the meta things that you hate to hate

Speaker 1: to love. Mhmm.

Speaker 2: So so I think it's it's gonna be interesting when they start to break up the market segment about who's using what for what, and even game developers need to look at that. Like, if I'm if if I'm targeting a game principally to Steam Deck users, how am I gonna increase that experience for people on PC and TV console, etcetera, etcetera?

Speaker 1: Yeah. I know there's a lot of ink spilled about the Series s, which is the less powerful version of the Series x Xbox, as being, you know, a lot of people have made the argument that it it is basically functioning as a ceiling on all development for Xbox. That, like, oh, by having to make it run on this kind of almost last gen feeling hardware, last gen and a half call it, you know, we're not getting all of the, you know, advancements we could get if it only had to run on the Xbox, Series x. And I I hear that argument and then I played Alan Wake two on my Xbox Series S and I I can see the compromises that they've made in order to get it running on that system and I'm like, those are pretty okay compromises. And it doesn't seem to have affected the sort of flagship marquee version available on the main stretch of consoles, and it makes the game available to a much larger audience of people. I think about these consoles that are these they're just they're supercomputers powering, you know, multi thousand dollar televisions. And I'm like, that's dope for people in their thirties and forties, but, like, I started playing games when I was a teenager. Totally.

Speaker 2: So

Speaker 1: are you gonna make anything that's accessible as, like, a Christmas present for a kid? Mhmm. Because that sucks if not. Like, that's just that's not that's not great. So I hope I hope there can be a a broad spectrum of hardware that games can be deployed to, I guess, is what I'm trying to say.

Speaker 2: When the when that when Xbox originally did that, when I saw the the series s and series x and the differences in the hardware capabilities, I thought that was a really odd call for them because they are putting an onus on the developers to then handle conditionals based on what it's running on. The but but in in thankfully, like, the engines that lots of game developments occurring in, like, notably Unreal like, I'm an an Unreal developer. Setting the configuration on a per deployment basis for what kind of console and, like, setting, you know, graphic resolution, etcetera etcetera, controller layouts, things like that, it's not that hard. And the engine the engine does a lot of the heavy lifting. Like, granted, it is more work, and it does require extra builds, etcetera, etcetera, but it's not it's thank god for engines. Let's just say that.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Totally. It's extra work for extra builds to address a larger audience is the, like, nice thing about it. It's like you you do have to do that work, but it's a bigger potential addressable audience because if the console is only available to people that have $600 that's a smaller portion of people that can play your game. Totally. There's a version that's available that costs $400 It's like it just is. So it's it's an extra burden, but it's a larger potential audience

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: Which I think is, like, net positive probably. Because, again, if Alan Wake two, highly recommend, was only available on the Xbox Series x, I wouldn't have given them my $80.

Speaker 2: Mhmm. Mhmm. The I'm just thinking about it strictly from a development headache. I guess the

Speaker 1: Totally.

Speaker 2: That, like, when you think about a state space for quality assurance, like, when you go to game testing side, like, during development

Speaker 1: Totally.

Speaker 2: Having another console adds in another dimension to the state space of testing for the like, you have to test everything on series x, then you gotta test it all again on series s, and then you gotta test

Speaker 1: Yeah. Sure.

Speaker 2: Which I guess would be, like, one of the bigger headaches. But but I do agree with you that gaming, in that sense, is getting less accessible. But also on the flip side, I think just given the fact that mobile gaming is is I wouldn't say so accessible as phones are still very expensive, but I think that the priority of people's spending habits Totally. Prefers to spend on a phone. So as as you're seeing Android releasing some, like, key like, there's there's amazing games, honestly, that have come out, on both iPhone and Android, have amazing graphic resolution and big gameplay loops. You know, some of these games are living games. Trying to remember what the big RPG on Android is called. They're like it's like one of the top games, and it's, like, super like, everybody loves it. I can't remember, so we won't talk about it.

Speaker 1: No. I think it it you're probably right that that becomes the way in for a lot of people. And now you can run really powerful cool experiences. And because of these engines, a lot of the time these games are pretty transferable. It's pretty remarkable when you can basically outsource porting a game to a whole new platform to external company because they just need to crack open an Unreal or a Unity project and do some Do

Speaker 2: some configs.

Speaker 1: Do some real labor, but, like, it's like it's not you know, it's a it's a different scale of thing than it would have been a generation or two ago. And that rules because it means more people can play dope games.

Speaker 2: I remember what it's called. And, of course, by remember what it's called, I mean, I looked it up. Genshin Impact. Oh, yeah. Totally.

Speaker 1: Which is kinda that one.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And it's been kind of referenced as, like, the JRPG version of, like, Breath of the Wild.

Speaker 1: Cool.

Speaker 2: And, like, I think that they're still literally building out. Like, this is a living game. They're on version 4.5. Like, they're adding content to it. They're expanding the game while you're playing it. So it's, like, a totally different game model. Like, it's not just you buy it and play it till you're finished it. It's like they're adding chapter and content. Like, it's becoming a living,

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: Kinda live service game, which is awesome, I think.

Speaker 1: Wanna see more of that.

Speaker 2: One more one more thing I wanted to hit. One thing I thought was funny, and then we didn't talk about it in all the conversation about Xbox and PlayStation, but I don't know if you saw the April fools joke from NVIDIA.

Speaker 1: No. I didn't. They didn't. Was it good that someone do a good April fools joke on the Internet? Because that's tough.

Speaker 2: I'm I was excited about it until I realized it was April fools day.

Speaker 1: Oh, no.

Speaker 2: NVIDIA announced that they had taken over the rights for Xbox and that NVIDIA would be the creator of the new Xbox consoles. And I was like, oh, yes. Like, if they

Speaker 1: were to break That was NVIDIA's prank was that they acquired Xbox? I think it

Speaker 2: was Nvidia's prank. Maybe maybe it was somebody trolling Nvidia, but I thought it was

Speaker 1: Oh my god.

Speaker 2: Nvidia's prank. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe I just saw it on a Reddit and gave it more credibility than I needed to.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Because NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Xbox, like, they've they've worked together on stuff. I think there's Xbox games on GeForce Now, which is NVIDIA's, like, cloud thing. So they they do have a relationship as a company. Of course. That's What? That's pretty good.

Speaker 2: Like, I know a lot of the, like, PlayStation five generation and, Xbox Series x. I think AMD, and, again, this is just me going off of memory. I think AMD is principally the hardware provider for those. K. So but the issue is is now is, like, the looking at the performance gains that are coming from NVIDIA and their AI research, Like, they're doing frame generation in real time. They're actually generating frames that look better than the frames that they're rendering sometimes. Like, there's there's insane things going on inside of NVIDIA's world, and and if they were to bring that insanity

Speaker 1: Sure.

Speaker 2: From the $7,000 gaming

Speaker 1: PC world

Speaker 2: back to the to the $700 console world, they would be I got, like, I got excited. When I saw the headline, I was like, oh my god. This is gonna be amazing.

Speaker 1: This console will use AI to, like, optimize weird frame rate stuff that wouldn't have been possible and smoothing. Like yeah. Using it essentially is, like, really lush filters for games. Yeah. Interesting.

Speaker 2: So

Speaker 1: the prank can be traced back to publisher Tweak Town. So it was not NVIDIA that did it. It was someone else, but it was plausible enough sounding.

Speaker 2: So we've just given Tweak Town some free advertising because, obviously, they did this to get free promo. So you've again baited us and we have taken the bait.

Speaker 1: We've taken the bait. We always try to do it at the end of the episode. Fall for a ruse and then catch ourselves right at the finish line. That rules. Interesting.

Speaker 2: I think that puts a button at the end of that first hacked gaming episode.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Save your progress. You know, I'm trying to think of a gamey way to close this thing back out. Be sure to like and subscribe. I don't know.

Speaker 2: Be sure to like and subscribe. Visit hackpodcast.com. Redirect to our Patreon. We love all of our patrons. Not that we don't love all of our listeners. We love you all. But, the other thing, store.hackpodcast.com. Grab some merch if you want. If you don't want, all good. Yeah. We'll see you in the next one.

Speaker 1: Catch you in the next one.

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