"There's a lot of Billies" could really be the rallying cry of the heartbroken consumer. Although let's face it, Sebastian's voice is so buttery smooth he could read the phone book to us and it would be the coolest thing ever.

There's a reason they call him, Frost

Yeah this is really good. Could see that segment getting animated and going viral, it really deserves to - maybe a shareholder will see it then.

I kinda want to hear him voice act a villain now. He could absolutely nail the cold, calculating, and ruthless type of character.

@@ProjectXA3 Better Frost than Frosk

"Here, have a dividend and don't think too hard."

Stock is rising: "Catch the wave!" Stock is falling: "Buy the dip!"

"man, we need these award winning games to make us look good." declares brain dead corporation a day after shutting down award winning game.

New exec: Don't worry I'm not here for a golden parachute. Just ignore the backpack it's a coffee maker and totally not a jetpack.

Microsoft would NEVER shut down studios that making profits. Plz guess, why they shut down Arkane?

The line was even smoother. He said "I'm the devil, I don't need advocacy."

I kept getting confused if Frost was talking about Frost or companies. Dang Mondays.

addiction makes things so easy.

We're all apes in the end

It's the GamersTM manifesto.

But companies are made up of humans, you'd think that having so many humans together working in close proximity would cause the organization as a whole to act in a human manner with human traits.

He's not wrong, though.

My only issue with it was I think he's giving the execs too much credits I don't think they're setting out to destroy studios, it's more that they don't care if a game succeeds or fails. Execs are now so risk averse they won't tolerate any degree of creativity, constantly meddle in development and will milk a studio for all it's worth If the game succeeds, happy days. If it fails then just shutter the studio and cut costs, all while holding on to that precious IP so you can get another studio to bleed it for brand recognition some more

@@the_amazing_raisin execs are under incredible pressure to live up to the capital owners expectations, they can’t help it either, but the literally unspendable amounts of money they make probably helps immensely with ignoring any moral stipulations

I read it less as execs and more the concept of a company as a holistic entity. Execs come and go but the company is the real thing.

@@thefallofhousedenari I somewhat disagree. Execs will throw even their big company under the bus as long as they get a golden parachute and quick employment at another big company. If amazon failed tomorrow we'd be seeing bezos as the CEO of American Express or something within the month.

Is that what it was? I've only been watching cold take because I find Yahtzee talks too fast for me since English is my second language, and I found cold take on the escapist like not even a month before they had their second wind, is there a video explaining their shift? I didn't quite get it

Honestly. As much as people talk about how the kids of today are getting parented by ipads and phones, there's def some gamers out here who were clearly parented/raised by their consoles and other electronics also lol.

Excellent observation.

​@@ARantingMarch b-b-but young people bad, old people good

yup... i spent more time with consoles than with my parents. im nearly 40.

I wasn't patented by them, but when I was in severe depression, games were the only thing getting me out of bed

Brace yourselves, 1983 is coming. If anyone needs me, I'll be in the fallout shelter that is indie and nontraditional gaming markets.

Short the entire market if you're that sure.

Cant wait. Let game development go back to the handful of maniacs in a garage making games because they cant NOT make games, AAA hasnt deserved anyone's money for years at this point.

Its not even just the gaming industry. Pretty much every industry is hanging on by a thread cutting costs as sharply as they can, taking any deals, contracts and investments they can riding the coattails of one of the few companies left being profitable. In many ways the state of things is so bad for the average person we're already at the crash, companies and governments are just too selfish to admit the inevitable systemic level failure for themselves

I am old enough to have seen enough booms and busts, each time the productivity increases, the costs go up and the wages stay the same. Too much money gets sucked up into the 0,0001%, they buy all the property and the government prints more, which further devalues the labour and means it takes longer to buy the same small escapist pleasures that made it bearable. As you get older, you get qualified and experience so you might not feel it immediately. Yet, soon enough, the hectic life charges its price, you need to pay for medical bills and your mental state pretty much depends on your small (some not so small) vices. Worse still, once you become a highly qualified professional with over a decade of experience, you see opportunities dry up, companies think you are too old and expensive, so they hire the young ones that will work twice the hours for half the pay. But you still need to pay for the doctor's bill, for the home you rent and the bills of your relatives that rely on you. All so that, when you finally die of the stress, no one remembers you and makes fun of your foolish pursuit of the so called american dream.

The explanation is that it’s a single player only AA game with little franchise potential and no ‘recurrent user spending’ model attached. It makes perfect sense from the corporation’s point of view. Why invest in another one of those, that won’t make nearly enough money to justify it.

>Hey you guys, even though your success is a AA Hack and Slash RythmAction game make a AAA lootershooter now because that's what market analytics tells us you should be making for the most return on investment "No" >Shut them down. Or something to that effect probably. End of the day the suits said they're not profitable enough so they gotta go.

I have a good explanation; it set a bad example by being a simple but infinitely fun and stylish game. You can't have consumers get used to quality products, or else they'll keep expecting quality at every turn. If you can make an aggressively average product then market it successfully, that means you don't have to try as hard the next time you are releasing something. Hi-Fi Rush was probably the best original they had in a long while, so I'm mad but not surprised they axed it. Corpos can't let us have nice things.

What was even dumber is that MicroSmoothBrains later said that they need to make more games like HiFi Rush...after shutting down Tango.

I've seen one theory that the entire reason Hi-Fi was shadowdropped was that MS was expecting it to completely crash and burn. That way, they'd have a justifiable excuse to shutter Tango, and already put the process in motion. Of course, Hi-Fi obviously didn't crash and burn, but the gears were already turning and Tango was already on the chopping block.

Business degrees are, after all, the easiest majors at every college.

Lmao, Soo true. I would love to see their face now.

I mean anyone who was in favour of that deal was an idiot. One giant corporation buying another giant corporation is always bad. Monopolisation is always bad. Gamers have such short-term memories.

And plenty of other people hated redfall, made fun of Bethesda, and ignored hi-fi rush… and now they’re super upset.

When that deal was going down, it seemed like I was the only one with a bad word to say about it. Criticize Microsoft on anything gaming-related and the fanboys rush in. At this point, monopolization just seems to be baked into Microsoft's DNA, and with the state of antitrust regulation in this country, not much hope of stopping them.

Imaginary commodities are weirdly common, especially among the ridiculously wealthy. The stock market, too, is really just a means for the excessively wealthy to trade pieces of companies - and what is a company but an abstract idea given form by the inclusion of a location and a list of employees? Trading the idea that we owe them labor, that we need to make them X amount of money or be fired... it's roughly as mad as paying a fortune for a link to a jpeg of a random cringey monkey.

Nintendo does a good job of pretending to be your childhood friend.

Politicians too.

​@@IzunaSlap nintendo is that old friend who you won't see for years and when you do they're like "listen, can you do me a favor?"

@@jlev1028 I think it's less a problem of people thinking politicians are our friends, and more that folks forget politicians are supposed to be CIVIL SERVANTS. Government is supposed to work for us, but not enough folks can be bothered to exercise their right to votes long enough to see any meaningful change, while simultaneously complaining that nothing ever seems to improve. Or more frustratingly, too many have been conditioned to vote against their better interests; Be it being distracted by culture war nonsense, or being unwilling to vote for the politician(s) who advocates to reign in anti-consumer practices because they have the wrong letter by their name... And then complaining that nothing ever seems to improve.

@@DTFauxClassic 100% agree!

Tee hee hee!

There is nothing to learn. When "be 2nd and shoot the 1st place on the podium" keeps working, why change a single thing? Vote with your wallet means holding when FOMO whispers in your ear that the 50% sale is on.

This doesn't apply. Did you watch the video? The industry execs learned what makes their personal wealth skyrocket and they are laughing all the way to the bank. Company health or product quality is not and never was relevant.

If anything I feel the industry is laughing at us.

You all are reading too deep into a comment referencing something yahtzee used to do when the releases got stale. They haven't learned a thing. Period. If they did learn, then their outlook wouldn't be too be pursuing infinite growth to keep shareholders happy, but to keep the paying customers happy. Microsoft is doing an EA, buying up companies and doing nothing with them and letting them burn themselves. Bullfrog and origin systems come to mind in this case. The only thing that changed is that the hobby got mainstream and therefore have an audience that is ignorant by choice. I feel like that this is an American capitalist problem where investors/shareholders are king instead of the stakeholder. When there is a hit in profits or growth suddenly it's the fucking apocalypse and people start jumping off rooftops. Boo fucking hoo.

That seems like a lot of money for a single bullet

Works. Every. Time

50 million? You're thinking to small.

@@DrReverendJ too*

Don't forget to lay off enough employees to keep from lowering the shareholders' dividends.

But, despite all the fighting, Microsoft still closed down the studios. We need to find an effective way to fight, because fight without results is nothing but token resistance (which doesn't get in the way of business).

Apparently to fight the man you have to be a 30ish year old white guy with long dark hair /s. But for real its starting to get harder to tell them apart.

​@@arturoaguilar6002Not buying their crap/piracy Tho good luck convincing the people not willing to listen

@@carolbaker2773 We were young once, us crusading white dudes, some of us were even teens or college-aged during the movement's genesis in the mid-aughts and during the Great Recession. We just got older and some of us lost our hair.

Realism without some optimism is just unhelpful pessimism. Standing there and showing me a mirror is only gonna show me, and what's already behind me. It's nice to show a crack in a door or even just a window too.

Didn't think I was gonna see a Butthole Surfers quote today. Or this decade.

Some will fall in love with life and drink it from a fountain that is pourin like an avalanche, comin down the mountain

Personally I wished they just merged Arkan Austin With Arkan Lyon. Have the teaming talent there go into more experienced devs. Closing it down wasn’t fair because Bethesda made them make Redfall and Xbox didn’t cancel the game like they should have, most of the devs didn’t want to make the game, when it failed, they got the boot while the higher ups that actually screwed up got a bonus.

The only good news, if you can call it good news, is that the thing they want, infinite growth and ALL the money, isn't sustainable. It will take time but eventually these morons will burn it all to the ground in pursuit of something they can't have. The issue being is that the people at the top of the pyramid will get off mostly scot free while the workers all go down with the ship. Tale as old as time. Until the assholes running the trickle down pyramid scheme feel the heat themselves nothing will change. But nothing is too big to fail, time comes for us all. It's all a matter of WHEN.

The weaponized passion of the masses that let them get away with heinous greed in the past might be the last hope of the masses to stop it, so long as it's directed properly

Just 10 years ago, the idea of unionizing in videogames was laughed out of every company. Now Activision had to cave and accept its QA teams starting. It's never enough, they always overreach and always do it too fast. Eventually, people notice.

Too bad he dropped off badly... last time I checked a video by sterling he wouldn't stop talking about that he/she will get fucked that night... also the wrestling stuff was dumb af

A lunatic for sure, but speaking the truth. Anyone who portrays the Cornflakes Humunculus is certifiably unhinged, but they've covered plenty of stuff I never heard reported elsewhere (admittedly I don't follow much gaming news outside of Jimquisition or Second Wind YT channels)

@@taags What makes them a lunatic? Are you about to expose yourself as a transphobe mayhaps and discredit yourself among civilized and intelligent society?

Exactly. And the anti-woke crowd is just an extension of that because they don't actually want to admit this is a problem within capitalism so they just blame minorities.

@@andrewmartin3671 Oh, an enbie posts ONE video (okay, many videos) of themselves dressed up as a horror game monster based on the bland corn flakes invented by some asylum doctor to avoid overstimulating his patients and later marketed with added sugar and whatnot by his business boy brother, and suddenly you're unhinged? More or less unhinged than the people who eat those asylum patient blandflakes and like them...?

im like Jake Paul's face in the emergency room after watching that

Frost was pulling zero punches this week.

The uninformed masses will continue eating their slop. Unfortunately, videos like this have a tiny audience compared to all people who pay for games. Idk if they just don't know what they are missing or actually can't spare the brain capacity to care. And most depressingly, people will see this video, get recreationally outraged, and forget all of it the next time a shiny AAA title comes around.

​@@Ouvii"they don't know or are stupid" Normal people have lives and jobs and would like a neat distraction from that. Video games are for everyone and statements like that only reinforces the idea that your ilk aren't worth pandering to.

@@thecaptain6520 eh, you are putting words in my mouth. I actually can't spare the brain capacity for some things but that doesn't mean I'm stupid. Please stop projecting. Though you are right I guess? Video games are for everyone and there are all kinds to go around. What a world we live in.

@@thecaptain6520 "videogames are for everyone" so then we agree that everyone buing into modern triple a always online titles IS an idiot or doesn't care, just look at Helldivers 2 and tell me that game is for everyone lol

​@@De_kaid videogames (plural) are for everyone. Every genre and game has it's niche, but the medium as a whole is all encompassing. Also yes, everyone *is* stupid, but unless you legally/physically police their purchases, then "everyone" gets the final say on whether a company lives or dies

Which is literally impossible and super evil!

Thank Gawd for our blessed Cassandra of Video Games cuz she is what this industry needs!

Genuinely surprised that the Commander wasn't mentioned amongst the others at the end.

​@@mrsejanoz523Might be too already known possibly?

The line must go up. …right?

Meanwhile, corporate media: "Latest report: Do boring people whine too much about how bad they are at enjoying big budget triple-A video games? The answer may surprise you, even more than the blatantly leading phrasing of the question! More at 11!"

🤔 did you also see the video about how the form of the paperclip is already perfect and can't be made better?

Not just a thought exercise...there's a game. And it's free. search for paperclip decision problem

ah yes, Universal paperclips

That game is surprisingly dark, ends in consuming the universe to create paperclips

@@aravindpallippara1577 he is talking about the thought experiment the game is based on, but yes.

Indeed. The problem being is the average consumer just doesn't care enough. At the end of the day one truth still stands high above the rest. Entertainment is a luxury, something optional, it's not something we need to live. The big corporations need us to stay in business but we don't NEED them to keep on living.

Well, that's the thing with publicly traded companies. The executive who isn't money-hungry will be desperate soon. It is their duty to do whatever the shareholders require and the shareholders require unsustainable business practices. So if a CEO does not bring in growth they will be fired and possibly sued. Now if I were to put on my red hat I'd start arguing that maybe companies should be owned by the people who work for them instead of anonymous hedge funds but we cant have that can we?

​@@SenorZorros If you're up-front about not chasing literally every profit opportunity and wanting to build a sustainable business, the shareholders probably don't have a leg to stand on in court. Google tried that when it IPO'd with the whole "Don't be evil" thing... but then junked it about a decade later. And they've been slowly but deliberately ruining their search algorithm to hack profits. The reason why this failed is very simple: capital markets. At scale, every business runs on credit. Suppliers and workers all get paid on different timescales, and they all get paid up front, whereas the business only get paid once it has a complete product to ship. If you're a developer working on a AAA game that requires a hundred people working over two years to ship, which isn't uncommon, that means you need to burn hundreds of millions of dollars before you can sell even one copy. And even if the game sells really well, you probably don't earn enough to self-fund another game project, so you have to go back to the publishers for a second loan. In the case of Google, they learned really early on that they're actually terrible at building things. The only successful products they built in-house were Search and Gmail. All their other successes (Android, KZfaq, etc) were acquisitions they scaled up, while their long and continuous stream of shut-down services (Google Video, Google+, etc) were built internally. The tech industry is unusual in that because they were able to grow so quickly and with such hype, they were able to sidestep a lot of shareholder pressure. Facebook, for example, is structured as an autocracy. Mark Zuckerberg has a bunch of special shares that he can use to outvote literally all other Facebook shareholders, so they can't fire him just because line go down. But that doesn't mean they can't sell their shares. Mark Zuckerberg might not personally care what the value of those shares are, but the banks he's borrowing money from to satisfy Facebook's ordinary capital needs definitely do want those shares to remain valuable. Otherwise, their loans have no collateral. And everyone needs those loans in order to continue operating their business. So everyone has to care about the stock price, not because of lawsuits, but because a bunch of quirks of how things are made have conspired to make shareholders into kingmakers.

@@SenorZorros No cause that's SeWshElliZumM!1!

The indie scene is thriving, not a better time then now to break away from tripple A tyrany

I remember how much Dunkey got shit on when he first announced Big Mode, so happy to see him win like this.

@@Toksyuryel Yogscast too with their publishing company

@@Toksyuryel Those of us who have been around awhile still remember the debacle that was the Extra Credits attempt at venturing into publishing, which both nearly killed The Escapist (not the last time, as it turned out) AND demonstrated that well-meaning people can badly, horribly screw up a well-intentioned venture. That Dunkey actually pulled it off was always going to be "I'll believe it when I see it." Well, I see it...and I believe it!

​@camoking3609 if the indie scene is thriving, then they'll make it big, become just as profit-obsessed as the big guys, and the cycle repeats anew.

Dude, ALL the corporations suck TO THE LAST. If youre big enough to have your stocks be a primary measurement of success then they’re no longer driven by humans with good intentions.

same

yo ho yo ho!

good fucking luck lol. it STILL has not been cracked because of denuvo.

Or hear me out: don't play it at all.

Money can't go to Microsoft now

It's an industry that's never NEEDED to learn anything new. About 1 in 5 gamers are children and more than half are under the age of 36. There's always a fresh crop of rubes coming in to feed to the same old scams.

*Let's all laugh at a community that never learns anything tee hee hee FTFY

System working as designed.

System working as designed.

What you're asking for is self-regulation, and no one in the history of anything has ever self-regulated themselves. It's always about getting the most bang for your buck before the system collapses; government, business, work, life. Any attempt at self-regulation only destabilizes your own power and risks someone else coming in and taking it from you. So you're the one who has to regulate. Once you're on top of the mountain, the only thing you can do is turn around push everyone else down, lest you lose your position and your say in how it all works. I don't like any of it. Damned if I know how to fix it.

Doing a 5 year delay just means these companies would only ever be incentivized to find ways to make line go up in 5 year increments rather than

Imagine if the profits of a business were distributed equitably among the workers, instead of hoarded by freeloaders in suits who've never worked an honest day in their life. Imagine if business decisions were made collectively by the workers, who actually understand what their jobs involve, instead of by business majors who only got their job because their daddy knows people. You can dream about trying to reform the stock market all you want. It won't fix anything, because the root cause of the problem - that the people making the decisions are completely disconnected from the people doing all the work, and can use up and discard said workers with no consequences - will still be right there, rotting away the foundations.

Capitalism is out of control more than ever before, it's a matter of time before the bubble bursts

That's just it - we're actually excellent 'consumers' (which in itelf is a very unflattering term) shovelling down whatever crap that gets served up. The problem is that too many people either don't either realise or are happy to just go with it all. Apathy always ensures nothing changes..not ranting at you personally btw ☺️

@@elone3997 shovelling indiscriminately and making choices about your consumption are different things. You can feed yourself well to keep yourself in good health or you can accept whatever is put in front of you and leave your health in the hands of someone else. But if you go with the latter you can only hope the chef doesn't benefit from making you fat.

Which is why most religions covet money above all else

@@KaneA87 I'm religious myself (non-Christian, that's all I'll say) and while I believe in the gods, I refuse to join a religious group.

hey, my man, THANK you for getting the full verse! seriously, a LOT people cut out 'the love of money' part, it's INSANE how many people refuse a living wage because of a few missing words! SOME not even christian, REGULAR people do it too! make me want to make a quote of my own. 'the people act, only as far as they know.'

Jesus may've been a heretic, but he was one hell of a philosopher.

@@ehhorve857 What most people miss is that Paul the Apostle (whose letters to Timothy are the part of the New Testament that verse comes from) used 'love of money" to refer to raw greed. 2,000 years later, we call such empty-souled sinners "successful". You don't have to be religious to see why St. Paul got it right. But taking care of oneself and one's family and one's community, money is a means to an end. So by all means get what your labors entitle you to, but then use that in service of your spiritual life however that may manifest, religious or otherwise.

6 hours is a gaming session for you? Either you aren't an adult or your list of hobbies is very limited. Or you somehow manage to work little while still making enough to live, have time for hobbies, and get to play 6 hours of games on a given day. Probably a fourth thing, I don't know you. Personally, a play session for me is about 90 minutes, that's about the same for most people I know. Everyone's circumstance is different, could be anecdotal. Also, regarding the percentage, it's long been known that most people don't finish the games they start. It would be hard to come up with an actual number, and of course every game is different. I remember a few years ago some developer for a AAA studio (sorry I do not remember the person or studio) threw out the number 25%. Looking at forum posts and articles and whatever, 20%-30% seems to be a general average. Percentages are kinda weird though. Coffee Talk (PS5) only has an 87% completion for the trophy "start a new game." 13% of players loaded to the main menu and then never played it. In Borderlands 3 (PS5), nearly 20%, 1 in 5 people, never reached level 2. A trophy that you get within the first few minutes of playing because xp is abundant. To my knowledge, neither of those games have been oered as part of PlayStation's subscription service. I'd also like to see the breakdown based on money spent on the game. I'm sure a person would be more likely to see a game through if they spent money on it vs someone who got it "for free" through a subscription. Hi-Fi being 14% at the halfway point isn't shocking since (I'm assuming), the vast majority of people got it for free.

@@Diphenhydra I'm a 46 year old, own my house, and have a good job. Yes, gaming is my main hobby, but I have time for reading, art, and a few other hobbies as well. I just didn't squeeze out a bunch of kids, so I have a lot of disposable income and free time. :) I suppose we could look at the Steam achievements, too, but...hardly anyone bought it on there. 450k units sold out of 120 million active users.

Of course who's selling squares right now? certainly not them...

@@RAFMnBgaming Well I know a few smaller companies that are selling handmade squares. They're a little small to fit in the copy machine but at least they get the job done. Hell, even I'm trying to make my own. Never thought a square could be so complicated. Currently all I have is a trapezoid and 1/10 of a rhombus. Right Ideas wrong angles.

Indie games made by solo devs should be called get-rekt-angles.

Diablo Immortal was a Hit. Call of Duty and Fifa go strong. The customers are dumb. They have proved It time and timw again. If It wasnt for Steam giving their customers the right to return the product outside the original 2 hour margin Sony would have pushed their BS. Gamers are dumb and weak. In the last 15 years companies have destroyed the comunity

​​@@FireFox64000000You know where I could get a few dodecagons?

I wouldn't hire an MBA to flip burgers if I was managing a Jack in the Box, they're too useless for that. I would, however, suggest that MBAs be paid minimum wage in accordance with Marx's Labour Theory of Value for the "work" they do running businesses. I'm not even a Marxist, but I think ol' Karl was on to something with his views on worker compensation.

Most luxury market items are just a way to hide wealth or traffic it without incurring taxes and fees.

Glad I'm not the only one who feels this way =)

With a Shinedown reference to boot!

Cinema's going through a rough time of capitalism ruining things at the moment too so it's not necesarily a problem that ever goes away.

Indies are always going to struggle, it's risky by definition, but they're like a massive part of the industry now

Yeah, it would be nice if that was true but so far it just hasn't been. There haven't been any huge regulatory changes to make the established model's unworkable, big game publishers aren't having anywhere near the same level of difficulty selling familiar genres that the big studios were, and there's no practice of getting creatives from small indie projects to come over and work on massive titles to inject some creative juice like there is in film making.

That's the thing though, they lack self awareness. Look at Morbius, they believe that ironic praise is no different than actual praise. (Then again pretending to be stupid is no different from actually being stupid, so what do I know?)

Elden ring is the most product recycling of the souls series ever made. It's the worst Souls of all From Software game. it's even the easiest for getting the widest audience possible. Elden Ring is the MacDonald of souls. From Software is not different anymore that other big studio now since the cash flow is certain.

@@user-Cata7sti7ma7 no.

Well, since video games are not art and always were products, you're point is moot

​@@thecaptain6520Someone doesn't have any taste.

​@@jlev1028 video games don't need to be art to be considered a legitimate entertainment medium, and the fact that people think that is one of the reasons why companies release bad games. "Because art = good hur dur"

Sony has mobile gaming business that rakes billions at very small cost. Don't underestimate gachas.

​@@Dorrovianyo ok so I'm straight up ignorant on this. What has Sony got going on the Mobile space? Any idea of marketshare? Tbh I thought they dipped after their hardware (Sony phones) weren't doing well, but it makes sense they would transition into software instead but I'm just straight up ignorant and thought they weren't at all involved and would love to know more

@@Dorrovian Not to mention they are still a consumer electronics manufacturer. its a pretty significant part of their business model still. Games and services only make up a quarter of their revenue. Its why they can afford to shit the bed so often. Yeah it will hurt if they don't turn a profit on some stuff but overall the individual quality of the games matter very little. Honestly neither company is in such bad shape they are going anywhere anytime soon.

@@BlindErephon Fully agree, was only talking about their gaming part specifically.

LOL "make an account with throwaway email" doesn't exactly work when Sony demands a scan of your drivers licence like they do for example in UK.

Well do I have news for you, Frost DID talk about this on the Second Wind podcast just a few days ago.