How Growth Is Killing Video Games

Summary

Episode Summary: "How Growth Is Killing Video Games"

Better Offline, hosted by Ed Zitron of Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts, delves into the pervasive influence of the tech industry on society. In the episode titled "How Growth Is Killing Video Games," released on March 5, 2025, Ed Zitron is joined by Geeta Jackson and Nathan Grayson from the independent gaming site Aftermath. They explore the burgeoning issues within the video game industry, examining how the relentless pursuit of growth is undermining the quality and sustainability of game development.

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1. Introduction: Setting the Stage for Industry Decline

Ed Zitron opens the discussion by highlighting the paradox of the video game industry's growth. Despite exceeding Hollywood in size and revenue, the industry faces significant internal challenges that threaten its long-term viability.

Ed Zitron [03:08]:
"So today we're talking about the games industry, which I think we can all agree is going well."

2. The Shift Towards Bigger, Riskier Games

Geeta Jackson and Nathan Grayson explain that many game companies are transitioning to developing fewer but larger-scale games. This shift is driven by the desire to create blockbuster hits akin to Fortnite or League of Legends. However, this strategy is inherently risky, as it places immense pressure on each project to succeed.

Geeta Jackson [03:30]:
"Well, right now a bunch of games companies are realizing that they need to make fewer, bigger games. And so they're laying a lot of people off in pursuit of that."

Nathan Grayson [04:12]:
"They define it by Hollywood terms. Fortnite is a very good example because literally every child plays Fortnite and you can play it on every device."

3. Financial Pressures and Studio Mismanagement

The trio discusses how the financial realities of game development exacerbate these challenges. Games are more expensive and time-consuming to produce than movies, with high failure rates. Successful titles often see revenues quickly consumed by development costs, leaving little room for profit or reinvestment.

Nathan Grayson [05:02]:
"Games take a lot longer to make than a movie and require a lot more people to make them."

Geeta Jackson [12:05]:
"Execs are making poor decisions while siphoning away millions and millions of dollars from a project."

The conversation touches on Jason Schreier’s reporting on mismanagement within studios, highlighting how executive decisions often prioritize short-term gains over sustainable practices.

4. The Role of Executives and Lack of Unionization

A significant issue identified is the disconnect between executives and the creative teams. Unlike Hollywood, where many creatives are unionized, the gaming industry largely lacks such structures, leaving developers vulnerable to exploitative practices without collective bargaining power.

Nathan Grayson [12:19]:
"The people who work on games are not unionized craftspeople."

Ed Zitron [13:09]:
"The gaming press is not a big needle mover there. But what a lot of people want the press to be, whether they are executives or whether they're gamers, is this like mouthpiece for the industry."

This lack of unionization leads to precarious job security and stifles creative freedom, as highlighted by the shutdown of studios like Monolith despite critical successes like Bioshock Infinite.

5. Fandom Culture and Hate Movements

The episode delves into the toxic aspects of gaming fandoms, where tribalism and reactionary movements thrive. Geeta Jackson discusses how hate mobs, often fueled by extremist ideologies, target individuals and projects within the gaming community, undermining the social and artistic value of games.

Geeta Jackson [22:07]:
"Online forums like Kiwi Farms are dedicated to doxing people, finding their personal information, and outing it."

Nathan Grayson [25:30]:
"Clipping out of context can haunt creators forever, fueling hate."

They explore the origins of Gamergate, a movement that sowed distrust and hostility toward game developers and journalists, illustrating how such conflicts reflect broader societal tensions.

Geeta Jackson [42:02]:
"Gamergate was the first real reactionary movement in video games."

6. The Importance of Games as Art and Positive Examples

Amidst the critique, the hosts emphasize the enduring artistic potential of video games. They cite exemplary titles like Hades and Dwarf Fortress that showcase innovative mechanics, rich narratives, and emotional depth, proving that games can transcend mere entertainment to become profound artistic expressions.

Ed Zitron [71:00]:
"These games are mechanically perfect. They sound incredible. Voice acting's amazing. They look, they feel amazing."

Geeta Jackson [37:41]:
"Games are an incredible vector for creative expression that cannot be done anywhere else."

Nathan Grayson shares insights into Dwarf Fortress, highlighting its complex systems and storytelling capabilities, while Geeta lauds Hades 2 for its emotional narratives and diverse character portrayals.

Nathan Grayson [75:44]:
"Dwarf Fortress allows characters to have memories and personalities that evolve, creating a living world."

7. Aftermath's Vision for Games Journalism

Geeta Jackson and Nathan Grayson present Aftermath as a beacon for responsible and in-depth game journalism. They critique mainstream outlets like Kotaku for prioritizing advertiser-friendly content over genuine reporting, advocating instead for comprehensive coverage that includes hard news and cultural analysis.

Nathan Grayson [38:50]:
"We own the company and we try to structure it in such a way where we all have a relative amount of control over the work we do."

Geeta Jackson [45:19]:
"Aftermath focuses on contextualizing news, especially hard news like WB layoffs, giving it the attention it deserves."

Their approach aims to bridge the gap between industry developments and the broader societal implications, ensuring that the cultural significance of games is thoroughly examined and understood.

8. Conclusion: Hope Amidst Challenges

Despite the numerous challenges discussed, the episode concludes on a hopeful note. The hosts acknowledge that while the industry's growth-driven model has detrimental effects, there are still passionate creators and quality games that demonstrate the medium's true potential. They advocate for continued support of independent journalism and creative endeavors that prioritize artistic integrity over commercial success.

Ed Zitron [81:05]:
"There's still cool shit happening everywhere, and there is hope to be had."

Nathan Grayson [74:58]:
"Games can really make you confront within yourself what you believe about something."

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Geeta Jackson [03:30]:
  "Games are in their minds a hits driven business."

• Nathan Grayson [04:12]:
  "They define it by Hollywood terms. Fortnite is a very good example because literally every child plays Fortnite."

• Geeta Jackson [12:05]:
  "Executives making poor decisions while siphoning away millions and millions of dollars from a project."

• Nathan Grayson [12:19]:
  "The people who work on games are not unionized craftspeople."

• Geeta Jackson [22:07]:
  "Online forums like Kiwi Farms are dedicated to doxing people, finding their personal information, and outing it."

• Nathan Grayson [25:30]:
  "Clipping out of context can haunt creators forever, fueling hate."

• Ed Zitron [71:00]:
  "These games are mechanically perfect. They sound incredible. Voice acting's amazing."

• Nathan Grayson [38:50]:
  "We own the company and we try to structure it in such a way where we all have a relative amount of control over the work we do."

• Geeta Jackson [45:19]:
  "Aftermath focuses on contextualizing news, especially hard news like WB layoffs."

• Ed Zitron [81:05]:
  "There's still cool shit happening everywhere, and there is hope to be had."

---

Key Takeaways

1. Risky Growth Strategies: The shift towards developing fewer, larger games increases financial risk and job insecurity within the industry.

2. Financial Mismanagement: Mismanagement by executives, often prioritizing profit over creative integrity, leads to project failures and studio shutdowns.

3. Lack of Unionization: The absence of union support leaves developers vulnerable to exploitative practices and stifles their ability to advocate for better working conditions.

4. Toxic Fandoms: Reactionary and hate-driven movements within gaming fandoms contribute to a hostile environment, undermining the social value of gaming communities.

5. Artistic Potential: Despite industry challenges, games continue to evolve as a powerful medium for artistic expression, with titles like Hades and Dwarf Fortress setting high standards.

6. Necessity of In-Depth Journalism: Independent outlets like Aftermath play a crucial role in providing comprehensive and honest coverage of industry issues, fostering a more informed and resilient gaming community.

7. Hope for the Future: While systemic issues persist, the passion of creators and the support of ethical journalism offer a pathway toward a more sustainable and artistically fulfilling gaming landscape.

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Final Thoughts

"How Growth Is Killing Video Games" offers a critical yet hopeful examination of the current state of the video game industry. Ed Zitron, alongside Geeta Jackson and Nathan Grayson, provides insightful analysis into the economic and cultural forces shaping the future of gaming. By highlighting both the pressing challenges and the inspiring examples of artistic excellence, the episode underscores the need for a balanced approach that values creativity, fair labor practices, and meaningful storytelling.

For listeners interested in the intersection of technology, culture, and media, this episode serves as an essential exploration of how unchecked growth and mismanagement can jeopardize an industry's integrity, while also celebrating the enduring power of games as a transformative art form.

Transcript

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[Ed Zitron]

All right, I think it's time we blow this scene. Get everybody on their stuff together. Okay? Three, two, one. This podcast welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host Ed Zitron. Better Offline Today I'm joined by the esteemed Geeta Jackson and Nathan Grayson of independent gaming site Aftermath. And Nathan of course has a new book out called Stream the Triumphs and Turmoils of Twitch and the stars behind the screen. Both of you, thank you for being here.

[Geeta Jackson]

Thank you for having us.

[Nathan Grayson]

Yeah, no problem. Super fun.

[Ed Zitron]

Hell yeah. So today we're talking about the games industry, which I think we can all agree is going well.

[Nathan Grayson]

Yeah, it's going super good. Bigger than Hollywood, as we all know.

[Ed Zitron]

So to that point, Nathan, what is actually going on right now? Because it feels like over the last few years, I used to be a games journalist, but I've kind of dropped out of the industry stuff. What's going on?

[Geeta Jackson]

Well, right now a bunch of games companies are realizing that they. Well, at least they've decided that what they need to do is make fewer, bigger games. And so they're laying a lot of people off in pursuit of that. Because games are in their minds a hits driven business.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Geeta Jackson]

And so in order to achieve that, they're just like, okay, let's put all of our, all of our eggs in these increasingly smaller baskets and if one of these lands, then great, we have the next League of Legends or the next Fortnight or whatever. And if they fail, then it's a catastrophe and we're going to lay a bunch of people off. And the only people who will not suffer from this are the executives who are making these bad decisions. And that keeps happening over and over and over.

[Ed Zitron]

So what is a hit though? How do they define a hit?

[Nathan Grayson]

They define it by Hollywood terms. Right. Which are, which are you want to be. Have a level of cultural impact, one that is inescapable. Fortnite is a very good example because literally every child plays Fortnite and you can play it on every device. Everyone suddenly understands the terms through which that game is sort of made and played at birth.

[Geeta Jackson]

Every child is given an iPad with Fortnite on it.

[Ed Zitron]

It's that or Minecraft.

[Nathan Grayson]

Yeah, one of those. Two. And then also there is a saying that a lot of executives love to tout when they talk about the financial success of their industry, which is that video games are a bigger industry. More by more. There's more money in video games than, than Hollywood. And I don't really think that that's true.

[Ed Zitron]

Is there any proof behind that?

[Nathan Grayson]

Well, I mean, they might. Games that are very, very, very successful, like Elden Ring, is another great example of it. Just a smash hit where millions upon millions of games were sold. Um, but the thing is that money that you make often goes immediately back into recouping all the cost of development because games take a lot longer to make than a movie and require a lot more people to make Them and.

[Ed Zitron]

A lot more things can go wrong.

[Nathan Grayson]

Yes.

[Geeta Jackson]

A lot of projects. A lot of projects in this day and age are rebooted repeatedly over the course of their development. Like that happened recently with Dragon Age, the valeguard, a game that was originally meant to be like a live service multiplayer game, which is a weird for that series to take and for the.

[Ed Zitron]

For the listeners who are not like avid gamers. So a live service game is.

[Nathan Grayson]

It's a game that sort of exists in perpetuity. Right. The idea is that it has seasons of narrative and gameplay.

[Geeta Jackson]

Not even necessarily narrative, just like new stuff coming out.

[Ed Zitron]

Like you play a monthly fee.

[Nathan Grayson]

Again, Fortnite is a very good example of this. Fortnite refreshes the maps that you use to play the game on. They refresh that every occasionally they call it seasons, like seasons of television. And they. There's always just new skins, new items, new things to spend your money on.

[Geeta Jackson]

Collaborations with major brands. On the way over here, there was an ad for like cowboy bebop skins in the game now, which is sick.

[Ed Zitron]

But Destiny, so Destiny 2 is the one I remember with that.

[Geeta Jackson]

Destiny 2 is a live service game.

[Ed Zitron]

And that's Owned by Sony PlayStation Now, Sony Interactive Entertainment, technically, but it's. And so this is kind of from my experience at least, gaming a shit ton when I was younger, by which I mean like two years ago. But the fact is that games now aren't just allowed to be good once. They have to be good forever.

[Nathan Grayson]

Yes. You have to be the biggest game ever in order to be considered a success forever, though. Forever. Like not just when the game comes out, but also every single month after that for the next year.

[Geeta Jackson]

Well, which also, I think works very much in conjunction with kind of like the line go up mentality of business in general. Like, your game also has to be a line that's always going up.

[Ed Zitron]

Yes. And it can't simply be successful in a linear sense. It can't just be like a game you sell. It is a game you are constantly rebooting. Like, even with Marvel Rivals, I heard a very successful game boned by Netsy and they just laid off a bunch of people.

[Nathan Grayson]

They laid off all of their other American.

[Geeta Jackson]

It was like under.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, so it wasn't a huge layoff.

[Geeta Jackson]

Yeah. So this was also like, it was part of a larger NetEase plan to kind of divest from outside of China.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, okay.

[Nathan Grayson]

Yeah.

[Geeta Jackson]

And so like, I think they were planning to do this even before Marvel Rivals took off.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Nathan Grayson]

I can see what you're getting at. Though my favorite example of this phenomenon is Bioshock Infinite, a game that was incredibly successful, hugely critically acclaimed. Right after the game came out, the studio shuttered like it was over immediately. Immediately. They couldn't recoup the costs essentially. Like there was no amount of money they could make on that game that was financially successful and was critically acclaimed to give back to the studio in order to make it like financially a financially stable institution. And then all those developers scattered to the winds. That was kind of the end of major game development in Boston for very.

[Geeta Jackson]

Long time until like literally now with CD Projekt root over there, are they.

[Ed Zitron]

Starting up a Boston arm?

[Geeta Jackson]

That's where they're making the next Cyberpunk.

[Ed Zitron]

And what's weird is CD Projekt is like they've. They were a very cyberpunk. 2077. 27, right.

[Nathan Grayson]

2077.

[Ed Zitron]

I did play it. I don't know why I'm acting like I like don't have a gaming PC. I have like a gaming PC with like two motherboards inside. It's beautiful. Anyway.

[Geeta Jackson]

Yeah, you also sitting right behind us is one of the widest monitors I've seen in my whole life.

[Nathan Grayson]

It's a beautiful, really cute CG9 there.

[Ed Zitron]

It's amazing. But that one was really tortured because the game was rushed out. And I don't think I've seen in a while like a game that rushed and it ended up being dog shit.

[Geeta Jackson]

I mean if we're talking about the broader state of video games, another characteristic I think is that most big games these days get rushed out in some capacity. It's just less glaring than it was for cyberpunk. Cyberpunk was a lot of functional issues. Now what you get is a lot of games that are rushed out but polished. So they have all of these like mechanical problems and like other more deep seated issues that where they could have solved it just by like, you know, giving the developers more time to cook. But they know that people will be off put by a game that doesn't work, so they make sure it works.

[Ed Zitron]

But it's not good.

[Geeta Jackson]

Exactly.

[Ed Zitron]

What can you give me an example?

[Geeta Jackson]

Dragon Age. Dragon Age. The Valegard is amazing.

[Ed Zitron]

Was it bad?

[Nathan Grayson]

Okay, so I'm like huge, super duper mid. I'm a huge Dragon Age fan and I was really looking forward to this game because I'm like invested in the narrative and the characters and Dragon Age Inquisition. I think like a lot of people who, if you've played, are listening to this and played Dragon Age Inquisition, you know, the experience of you're incredibly fucking depressed. You completely just mainline a game and the writing and the characters are so good, it becomes your entire world and you can just live inside that fandom. And that was me for a little bit. So I waited like 10 years for this game to come out. And the longer a game stays in development, generally speaking, the worse it will be when you actually get your hands on it. And when the game came out, it worked and it functioned, but it was not finely tuned. You could tell and feel when you played it there were things that should have been there that were not there and it felt empty and like it was missing things.

[Ed Zitron]

And with role playing games, it's extremely important to get the mechanics right.

[Nathan Grayson]

Yeah.

[Geeta Jackson]

And like, this was a byproduct of just like how the game was made. So again, it started, it started many years ago, it began development like nearly a decade ago as one kind of game, as a multiplayer live service game. And then over time, EA and BioWare were like, this isn't working. Let's reboot it mid development and try something else. That didn't work. They had key personnel leave. They're like, let's reboot it again into something else. And that's what became the game that came out, which is like this mishmash of all these mechanics and assets they came up with over time. And so internally, the way this played out is they were like, well, again, it needs to reach a certain, like, quality and review bar for it to sell. So let's just make sure that it feels polished. Like, let's cobble all this stuff together, but make sure it looks nice.

[Ed Zitron]

It has the smell and the taste of a AAA game without actually being fun. So, Nathan, what is it that makes them so expensive, though? Like, what is the cost center? Is it people? Is it compute? Is it something we don't know?

[Geeta Jackson]

So this is the thing. There's been a lot of discourse around, like, the increasing, you know, level of fidelity that you need for a triple A game and like all of these various concerns about the number of people that you need to create all these assets and maintain that. But I think that Jason Schreier in particular has done really good reporting on the real problem, which is mismanagement at every level. Executives making poor decisions while siphoning away millions and millions of dollars from a project.

[Ed Zitron]

Siphoning it from to where?

[Geeta Jackson]

Themselves.

[Nathan Grayson]

Themselves? Yeah, often themselves.

[Geeta Jackson]

How does that go? Check out, like the kind of money that straw selnick.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, okay. So it's like the CEOs are making obscene Amounts of.

[Geeta Jackson]

In a lot of cases, yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Fucking hell.

[Nathan Grayson]

So often in at E3, rest in peace and other video games sort of industry conferences, they will make comparisons to Hollywood between themselves and Hollywood. They want to be a part of the entertainment industry.

[Ed Zitron]

Well, they want to be paid like David Zaslav.

[Nathan Grayson]

Exactly, exactly. But there's huge differences between what how Hollywood operates and how the video game industry operates. And the main difference is these are not. The people who work on games are not unionized craftspeople.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Nathan Grayson]

With a culture of unionization in their workplaces. So they really can. You are a contract worker, you sign on for a gig and if you aren't there when the game is completed, you don't get your name in the credits and you just have to move in a herd from studio to studio to studio.

[Ed Zitron]

And all those credits important.

[Nathan Grayson]

I'm guessing they're very important in order to get better paying jobs.

[Ed Zitron]

You know, just put it on your LinkedIn.

[Nathan Grayson]

No, I mean especially if you're working on a project like at Monolith, the studio that shuttered this week. They were two years into development on a Wonder Woman game. And Wonder Woman. Ed, I think you're a DC Comics person.

[Ed Zitron]

I'm more of a Marvel person, but I'm familiar with Wonder Woman.

[Nathan Grayson]

Yes. I hope so. Well, it's interesting that you say that because like Wonder Woman, in comparison to the other two big heroes at dc, I'm a big DC Comics person. Superman and Batman, they've both had cartoons, movies, the gamut, like video games, everything. Even Superman had an extremely bad series of video games.

[Geeta Jackson]

Superman 64.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, yes, a classic.

[Nathan Grayson]

Oh God. But there's. With Wonder Woman, there's been no cartoons. There are a couple of flagship comics, but they've had a lot of a harder time finding really good writers to write really good Wonder Woman books. And there have been zero games. This would have been like the first game there. They worked on it for two years and there's a lot of people now who cannot even talk about what they did on these games. They can't show the art that they.

[Ed Zitron]

Made is where they don't have the assets. They can't.

[Nathan Grayson]

Yeah, assets don't belong to them. They haven't been publicized. And these are also contract workers, so they don't have the rights to anything that they have worked on.

[Ed Zitron]

And I just want to say none of these are actionable legal threats. But Monolith Studios made one of my two of my most favorite games. Gita. We were talking about this when we came in. Lord of the Rings, Shadow of Mortal and the Shadow of War. Two of the best games ever made. I have not returned. Only Hades is a. Hades is a game I think I will be playing until I'm an old man.

[Nathan Grayson]

Yes, absolutely.

[Ed Zitron]

Shadow of War. Especially like these are amazing games. And these are games that the systems are perfect and they're beautiful and they.

[Nathan Grayson]

They give you that feeling that I think these major studios are trying to chase in these enormous games like Cyberpunk 2077 and this game. This world is a living world. This world. Things are happening inside of it even when you are not. There is the feeling you get when playing.

[Geeta Jackson]

The orcs are talking shit about you.

[Ed Zitron]

And that's the thing. So to explain this game to people who've not. Who even don't play games, I really recommend it. So what it is, is it's kind of a open world game where you run around. You're some Lord of the Rings fellow. I do not remember the story. Not going to try and remember. But the big thing about it is something called the Nemesis system. And there are these orcs and various troll creatures that will. And they're all generated procedurally, even flawlessly. Said that word. And where they come up and they're like someone of biles. And they'll come up and they'll be covered in pustules and they'll be like, oh man, filth. You pissed me off. And then you're able to. It kind of mirrors my real life and that some horrible creature comes up to me and goes, you don't. You pissed me off, Citron. And then I convert them to my side. So you can convert these orcs and they follow you around and they have these org charts.

[Nathan Grayson]

Yes.

[Ed Zitron]

Of like.

[Nathan Grayson]

And if you die to an orc in a combat encounter, that orc will then go back to his little orc friends and be like, I fucking fucked up, Ed Zitra.

[Geeta Jackson]

And they'll talk about it and they'll talk to you later and they'll recount specifically like how they killed you and stuff. Like they keep that in mind.

[Ed Zitron]

And it's quite literally what I love about video games writ large. It's just like a weird freak system full of weird goblin creatures. You can send them each other.

[Nathan Grayson]

Have you played Dwarf Fortress ever?

[Ed Zitron]

I've tried it never really stuck.

[Nathan Grayson]

I'm gonna. I'm gonna teach you how to do it. You're gonna teach me? It's because it' right. There are characters with memory, right. And they learn things and they have personalities that change. Like this is a game that's made by two guys, two brothers. Until very recently, it was literally just the two of them.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Nathan Grayson]

And, like, it is so fascinating how you can have that same sort of magical black box experience of there's magic inside of this, there's a personality inside of this. One of them comes from two brothers that have worked on this thing on and off for like 20 fucking years of their life. And the other is an enormous studio using the IP Lord of the Rings.

[Ed Zitron]

And I just want to be clear about a few things. One, this is one of the few games I've heard, like, unilaterally loved by games journalists. Like, sure, there are people who don't like the genre, but anyone who has even a smell of RPGs loves this shit.

[Nathan Grayson]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

I also want to add the WB Games CEO J.B. perrette and WB Games former CEO David Haddad. You are enemies of. Better offline. You are enemies of this show. Your growth, all cost rot, economy bullshit. You will be hated by all the people who listen to this show. So the reason that this. I'm literally looking at Nathan's story about this. The reason that Monolith got shut down is just that Warner Brothers cannot run a fucking studio. They're stupid and bad in any industry.

[Nathan Grayson]

Yes.

[Geeta Jackson]

Yeah. I mean, you know, they've also been tanking tons of, like, television and movie properties, too.

[Nathan Grayson]

Yeah, no, the Warner Brothers. Ever since Zaslav, Warner Brothers Discovery is on my shit list and has been for a long time. It's an incredible. It's an incredible Hollywood studio with so much incredible history.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Nathan Grayson]

The whole story of Coyote vs. Acme has been. I just want to jump off of Bridge when I can.

[Ed Zitron]

You run me through that for the listeners.

[Nathan Grayson]

There is. There was a movie in production, Coyote vs. Acme, an adaptation of the Looney Tunes cartoon. You know, the Coyote Roadrunner and the Coyote. And it had John Cena in it. And it, by all accounts, everyone who worked on it said it was incredible. It used the.

[Ed Zitron]

It's a James Gunn movie.

[Nathan Grayson]

Yeah, James Gunn. Mo. He. It was also what's the movie?

[Ed Zitron]

And James Gunn, by the way, for the listeners, Guardians of the Galaxy, Suicide.

[Nathan Grayson]

Squad, upcoming Superman movie. Upcoming Superman, which I'm freaking psyched about.

[Ed Zitron]

I love it.

[Nathan Grayson]

I'm so. Anyway, anyway, I watched. Yeah. But you know, it was a. Going to be a Roger Rabbit type thing. A mixed media animation and. And real life stuff. Like a lot of the stuff that moviegoers actually really, really love seeing. Real stunts in real effects, not cgi, not vfx, that kind of thing.

[Ed Zitron]

I'm chipping the Chippendale's movie did really well as well on Disney plus very similar thing. Anyway.

[Nathan Grayson]

Yeah, yeah. And they. The movie's wrapped. It's totally fully completed. Shelved it.

[Ed Zitron]

Literally for tax reasons, Right?

[Nathan Grayson]

Literally for tax reasons. No one will ever see it.

[Ed Zitron]

And David Zaslav, if you go back to the shareholder supremacy 2parter, you will learn all about him. Jack Welch, the CEO of GE who created the modern culture of layoffs. Literally, the guy who didn't invent layoffs. But if you go back to those episodes, there's a story of Jack Welch, CEO of ga. Well, upcoming CEO. One of the candidates for it was running several divisions and came up with this idea, what if we just laid people off to increase profits? And at the time, layoffs were considered something you only did as a last resort. But Jack Welch. Jack Welch thought, what if we did this? He did it. And everyone else went, that's a great fucking idea. Number go up. The reason I'm bringing this up is that David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery, once referred to Jack Welch as like a big brother to him. I think I just want you to know everything I've been doing for the last few years has done driven me insane.

[Nathan Grayson]

I'm turning into the Joker in real time.

[Ed Zitron]

No, the makeup is appearing on our faces. But Coyote vs. Acme was like, Will Forte was going to be in it. It was like going to be a very, like. It very clearly would have done really well.

[Nathan Grayson]

Like, really, really well.

[Ed Zitron]

And they just shelled it for tax reasons. This is the same company that owns Warner Bro WB Games, which owns Monolith, which shut down Monolith.

[Nathan Grayson]

This is the like. It is like the tech industry ification of the entire entertainment.

[Geeta Jackson]

Pretty much everything.

[Nathan Grayson]

Just disastrous for art in general. You can see it very visually in film, in cinema. Just sort of. I used to be a person that just fucking loved Block. Like blockbuster action movies. I love them.

[Ed Zitron]

Nothing wrong with that.

[Nathan Grayson]

In the summer, when it's hot out, nothing better you can do than go to a theater for two hours with air conditioning and just enjoy mindless action. Except they all started to suck when Disney realized that you can feed people, like, not like the suggestion of a plot, but not actually a story. Essentially, you just sort of allude to things that will happen in the future. And you can make billions of dollars off of that. And you don't actually have to shoot on sets. You can just put people in front of a green screen and then Un unionized VFX workers can fill in everything else for you. Right.

[Ed Zitron]

And this is also something that fed into the creation of one of the worst things, fandoms.

[Nathan Grayson]

I mean, I love the experience of being in a fandom, but there is this tribalistic thing that is disturbing to me.

[Ed Zitron]

Let me be a little more specific, because I'm a huge fan of many things. Like, I am. I've seen Queens of the Stone Age 16 times. I'm like, I'm a nasty freak when it comes to that person of interest. Like, I really love my shit. I consider fandom, or at least perhaps I'm just describing the worst elements of it as something separate, where it's not really about liking something. It's about memorizing facts.

[Nathan Grayson]

It is about being a defender of the thing.

[Geeta Jackson]

It's about being in a tribe.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Geeta Jackson]

And, like, this comes up a lot in my book is, like, yeah, you know, the ways that fandoms can behave. One of the things that I found especially interesting in the course of reporting it is that there are also fandoms around just, like, pure hatred. One of my chapters is about Keffals, who is a streamer.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, yeah.

[Geeta Jackson]

Pretty controversial. You know, did some dumb bullshit, but also, like, managed to attract this hate mob from Kiwi Farms.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Geeta Jackson]

And when I interviewed her while she was still, like, on the run, what.

[Ed Zitron]

Was Kiwi Farms, Sorry?

[Geeta Jackson]

They are an online forum dedicated to, like, doxing people, so finding their personal information and, you know, outing it and then coming.

[Nathan Grayson]

And, like, of course, they particularly target marginalized people because they. The goal. And the goal of most hate fandoms is to get a reaction out of the person that you.

[Geeta Jackson]

Right, right.

[Nathan Grayson]

It's, like, to cause them pain and then to use that pain as your personal source of entertainment.

[Geeta Jackson]

Right. What I was gonna say.

[Ed Zitron]

Keffos. Yes.

[Geeta Jackson]

Yeah. Is that in her particular case, you know, she was, like, showing me some of the things that these people were doing in their free time in addition to directly harassing her. And these involved, like, making what were effectively, like, fan art and even fan songs about her just from the perspective of someone who despises her instead of somebody who likes her. But the mechanics were all really similar. And so, like, fandom can be this thing that coalesces using the exact same, again, like, sets of tools and behaviors, but around despising someone as opposed to liking them.

[Ed Zitron]

So this is the thing that really gets me, because I have to wonder if the reason I brought up fandoms other than just despising them is I have to wonder if they're not part of not saying that it's their fault. But I feel like the entertainment industry and by extension the games industry is really trying to sell to them. When Marvel. I love the first run of Marvel movies. I'm a little pig. Show me if it's the charming Iron.

[Nathan Grayson]

Man movie is fucking amazing. It is a really great film and it's because they let Favreau be Favreau.

[Ed Zitron]

You had the charming people doing the things and they were talking and it was enjoying enjoyable to watch them. But it feels like it really got into the Hogslop era where it's just you like this guy, look at this guy. Look, we've got Jack Black and we've got Lizzo in the Mandalorian. Look. You remember that thing from that thing.

[Geeta Jackson]

Look, it's.

[Ed Zitron]

It's the dark troopers from the Star wars game. You remember Dark Forces we remake in.

[Nathan Grayson]

Dark Forces of Ren. They fly now, blah blah blah. You know, it's like, yes, but it's.

[Ed Zitron]

The reason I bring that up is that's a commodity at this point. It's if it stops being about telling a story, when it's more symbolic, when it's more about just people being factions against or for something, it's just can I sell you a fucking product? And when it comes to. I actually wanted to ask with Twitch, the cultures around streamers, are those different to like forums culture or social media culture? Like more asynchronous culture? Is there something about the live experience that changes things?

[Geeta Jackson]

Oh yeah, completely. Because I mean for one there's just the basic fact that if you are in a Twitch chat you can say something that the person who's on screen might immediately react to. Right. And the people in that chat might immediately react to. And that immediacy changes everything about it. Because I mean just think about like how we have conversations. If somebody is able to immediately react, they are not going to consider what they're saying very much.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Geeta Jackson]

They're just going to go for it. Especially if it's like a fast moving Twitch chat. Everyone's just trying to say the most incendiary thing possible because that's all that gets noticed.

[Nathan Grayson]

Yeah.

[Geeta Jackson]

Something measured or interesting.

[Nathan Grayson]

The perfect example of this is Hasan Piker saying off the cuff, America deserved 9 11.

[Geeta Jackson]

Yeah.

[Nathan Grayson]

Which I know is not what he meant to say. Well, but he meant to say America created the conditions that created the people that delivered 911 to us.

[Geeta Jackson]

Yeah, even that.

[Nathan Grayson]

Right.

[Geeta Jackson]

Like he explained that during that same stream he like it already happened. Well, and also what happened is that people then clipped that out of context.

[Ed Zitron]

Yes.

[Geeta Jackson]

And then, you know, surfaced it on all these other platforms.

[Nathan Grayson]

And now this clip will haunt him forever. Every time someone is mad at him. He has a similarly sized, like hate fandom that is.

[Geeta Jackson]

Oh, yeah.

[Nathan Grayson]

He's constantly, constantly trying to get a rise out of him and really. Yeah.

[Geeta Jackson]

Destiny.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, God.

[Nathan Grayson]

Wild.

[Geeta Jackson]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Different kind of destiny to the game.

[Nathan Grayson]

Yeah. Destiny. That sucks. Instead of a destiny that infuriates me for other reasons.

[Ed Zitron]

I'm gonna get him and Norman Finkelstein on Mr. Boyardee. When you, you, when you speak, it's like Wikipedia read to me by Satan. Holy.

[Geeta Jackson]

That was incredible.

[Ed Zitron]

I've been thinking about that too much.

[Nathan Grayson]

During tax season, your sensitive info does.

[Geeta Jackson]

A lot of traveling to places you.

[Nathan Grayson]

Can'T control, stopping off at payroll, your accountant or tax preparer, and countless other data centers on its way to the irs.

[Geeta Jackson]

Any of them can expose you to.

[Nathan Grayson]

Identity theft because they all have the info on your W2. Just the ticket for criminals to steal your identity.

[Geeta Jackson]

No wonder the IRS reported tax fraud.

[Nathan Grayson]

Due to identity theft.

[Geeta Jackson]

Went up 20% last year.

[Nathan Grayson]

You need Lifelock. They monitor millions of data points per second and alert you to threats you could miss. If your identity is stolen, LifeLock's US.

[Geeta Jackson]

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[Nathan Grayson]

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[Geeta Jackson]

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[Nathan Grayson]

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[Geeta Jackson]

You guys know I'm always up for a good MVP story. And one of the best is the story of Wasabi Technologies. Wasabi is purpose built to free businesses from skyrocketing storage costs and unpredictable egress fees from old and top heavy legacy providers.

[Nathan Grayson]

You know the big guys.

[Geeta Jackson]

Wasabi is the world's hottest cloud storage company, becoming the go to provider for professional and collegiate sports teams and leagues around the world.

[Nathan Grayson]

And here's why.

[Geeta Jackson]

From Wasabi's AI enabled intelligent media storage, Wasabi Air to the industry's only cloud storage service with triple protection against cybercriminals.

[Ed Zitron]

Data deletion and ransomware.

[Geeta Jackson]

Wasabi's taken the lead in driving innovation in data storage, eliminating overhead where it matters to deliver you results you can count on and won't break the bank. In fact, Wasabi is up to 80%.

[Ed Zitron]

Less than those other guys and doesn't.

[Geeta Jackson]

Charge a cent for businesses to access their own data. Wasabi Another championship story. Check them out for [e-mail] you're a hustler.

[Nathan Grayson]

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[Geeta Jackson]

Vanta can help you start or scale.

[Nathan Grayson]

Your security program by connecting you with auditors and experts to conduct your audit and set up your security program quickly. Plus, with automation and AI throughout the platform, Vanta gives you time back so.

[Ed Zitron]

You can focus on building your company.

[Nathan Grayson]

Join over 9,000 global companies like Atlassian.

[Ed Zitron]

Quora and Factory who use Vanta to.

[Nathan Grayson]

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[Ed Zitron]

It's funny as well, because as a just a gentleman podcaster with a decent sized fandom, I don't get as many insane I don't get people threatening or hating me other than everyone because they wish I was dead. But it feels like there's something altogether different specifically about games because I left games journalism in like 2008. Oh, man, you I know. I like. And even then someone fucking doxxed me. I got doxxed because there was someone. I reviewed a game I'm not even gonna name just because it also leads to the funniest YouTube in the world, but there was a MMORPG review that fucking sucked. And they claimed I didn't plan, of course. And then someone like posted my parents address and I'd moved to New York and I really had to stop myself being like, missed me, bitch.

[Geeta Jackson]

But.

[Ed Zitron]

But then I emailed the developers and I was like, fucking take this shit down now. But now it's constant.

[Nathan Grayson]

I reviewed the most recent Final Fantasy game, Final Fantasy 16, which is a game that I said has some of the. In the review, this is what I said, that the combat was thrilling and incredible. You fucking go to space and punch a dragon in the head. Like, it is so fucking cool. But the story is dogshit and I hated it. I hated every second of it.

[Geeta Jackson]

I am gonna say that most stories that involve going to space and punching a dragon don't really cohere. Otherwise it's hard to make that into a compelling narrative.

[Nathan Grayson]

Yeah. And especially it was a game where there was a subplot with slavery and it was handled really, really, really poorly.

[Ed Zitron]

I personally thought the whole game was bad, but that's why I don't review games.

[Nathan Grayson]

No, I. I just like when you give me a combo meter, I just go into sicko mode. It's something that just happens to me. But no, I. I said those things and I tried to be fair and complimentary to it. The first thing that happened was someone found my email address and told me to kill myself.

[Ed Zitron]

Jesus.

[Nathan Grayson]

Yeah, well, it's like I. I similarly gave the Harry Potter game a pretty dismal review. And there is a reaction. There is an entire culture devoted to trying to seed reactionary politics into young minds through the fandom of video games.

[Geeta Jackson]

Video games are like the easiest mark for that. Because I think that, I mean, for one, a lot of people have based their identity on games. That's the starting point, Right? And then the other element of that is that a lot of that identity comes out of this perceived persecution complex.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Geeta Jackson]

This idea that games were once for nerds who are bullied constantly.

[Nathan Grayson]

Not only that, though, there was a real reactionary movement against video games. Columbine. Right, right. With Jack Thompson, there are congressional hearings about whether or not games were evil and were destroying the minds of youth, which is obviously not true. When I. I recently went to the un.

[Ed Zitron]

Look, at all of us?

[Nathan Grayson]

Yeah, you know, we're normal people.

[Geeta Jackson]

I mean, my mind has been destroyed.

[Ed Zitron]

My, my mind was, my mind's perfect. Anyway, so you went to the U.N.

[Nathan Grayson]

I went to the U.N. and I was on this panel to talk about terrorism and, and extremism in gaming spaces. And the one thing that many of the panelists made sure to say was that this idea that it's violent video games that cause violence is not true. And in fact, often games are pro social spaces. They encourage isolated people to interact with other people and form friendships. It's just that those people are so vulnerable and extremists know how vulnerable these people are. It's very easy to say join a Discord server and then start spreading dog whistles about like extremists, like white supremacist thought. And then you normalize these things, these expressions and these phrases and these images and then you can take those people out of that bigger Discord server and funnel them into more and more extremist spaces.

[Ed Zitron]

What's insane is it seems to get back to a point I was getting at as well is that they're trying to monetize this. They're trying to monetize it by making the games less about being good games, but symbolic of stuff. And then the right wing types seem to see games that are not doing that. Like Dragon Age, the Veil Garden being like, ah, woke wokeness has begun. Purple. It's purple. Which means black. I guess. Like, like.

[Geeta Jackson]

Well no, there's a, there's a new one every week too. Like there's a new DEI in video games controversy every week. Yeah, and like it wasn't always this way. But after like there was a conspiracy movement last year around a consulting firm called Sweet Baby Inc. That is when this sort of became a well oiled machine. That's when all these content creators started.

[Nathan Grayson]

Laughing at this constantly. Their biggest crime essentially was that the head of the company, Kim Belair, is a black woman. And like that's it. That's literally just it.

[Ed Zitron]

Something she controlled.

[Nathan Grayson]

Yes, absolutely. She chose to be born to be a black woman, the character creator.

[Ed Zitron]

So what were you saying about as well.

[Geeta Jackson]

But yeah, and so like now you just have these people, you have content creators who've made this their entire identity and like their entire brand. And so like Gita was saying, you know, games can be really pro social, but you'll have these people come in and sort of say, okay, well these games that you like are being taken away by this evil DEI woke mob. And so your purpose the underlying purpose that maybe you as a person have been looking for is now to fight a battle against these people who are taking your toys away. And like, that works really well on a lot of people who, you know, feel purposeless, directionless, always. That we all commonly feel under capitalism.

[Ed Zitron]

And I feel like. And I feel like as well, games are an incredible vector for that. Not just because there's things to rely around, but also there's a satisfaction to them. The reason I play Hades all the time. I have Hades on my. I'm not playing it right now, I promise I would though. The reason I play Hades is it feels good. It feels like you have industry over something you have. You can get good at something when you.

[Geeta Jackson]

I'll take this a step further, please. I think that the core fantasy of a lot of video games, no matter what their setting is, whether they are sci fi or fantasy or set in the present day, is what if capitalism was fair? What if every input gave you a fair output?

[Nathan Grayson]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

A consistent one.

[Nathan Grayson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Geeta Jackson]

Oh, I like something. You get better and better over time.

[Nathan Grayson]

Look at like SimCity, right?

[Ed Zitron]

Yes.

[Nathan Grayson]

You in SimCity you are essentially the mayor of a city. You are the developer of the city, you're the engineer of the city. You design the entire city. And you also have control over its taxes. And it is like just a equals a shit. Basically. When you look at how the tax system works in Sin City, it assumes that taxes are always fair and consistent. And consistent. And they don't. You won't get a huge lobby from the people in the highest tax bracket asking for their taxes to be lowered.

[Ed Zitron]

I wonder if they would add that. There should be just a Sim City which is real.

[Geeta Jackson]

I mean, I'm sure the modders have gone into like the tax system and just like torn out all the wires.

[Ed Zitron]

Was that city skylines.

[Nathan Grayson]

Oh, city skylines.

[Ed Zitron]

I love watching the Cities by Diana. Cities by Diana. One of the endorsed better offline best Instagram accounts.

[Nathan Grayson]

I do love Cities by Diana so much. I wanted to interview her for a long time, but just the same thing she does.

[Ed Zitron]

She's amazing. Diana, you're always welcome on the show.

[Nathan Grayson]

A beautiful and unique mind. I love her.

[Ed Zitron]

So let's change topics to something I actually really a positive thing. Aftermath. So how long have you been going?

[Geeta Jackson]

A little bit more than a year.

[Ed Zitron]

So how is the company structured exactly?

[Geeta Jackson]

Well, we.

[Nathan Grayson]

Okay, so it's called Aftermath because we all used to work at Kotaku, right? Right. And none of us really had much editorial control at Kotaku. Even Riley who was managing editor there like he, his, like the story of his life is having strong opinions and wanting to enact the plans based on his opinions and then being told no that he can't do it essentially. So we are the aftermath of all of that. The slow dissolution of Geo Media and our own just losing our brains working there with the conditions there.

[Ed Zitron]

Geo Media was the former holding company of Gizmodo Kotaku iO9 and it came.

[Geeta Jackson]

Out of Gawker being sued suit into oblivion.

[Nathan Grayson]

Right? Yes. Yeah. And we, we own the company and we try to structure it in such a way where we all have a relative amount of control over the work we do and what we want to do. We are not technically a co op but we try to behave as if we're co op.

[Geeta Jackson]

But you're not a fun fact is that a lot of, a lot of like co ops are not co ops because it's a, it's weird on taxes and everyone's just like yeah, morphing into.

[Nathan Grayson]

One one of our guys work.

[Geeta Jackson]

And it's better to just, just be an LLC or something else.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, but it's worker owned.

[Nathan Grayson]

It's worker owned. Worker owned.

[Geeta Jackson]

We have no outside investment, no outside capital. We literally just rely on subscriptions and nothing else for now. We might incorporate a small amount of ad based stuff in the future but that'll just be on like a podcast that we.

[Ed Zitron]

And there's nothing wrong with ads. I mean I definitely can't because some, someone listening to this is probably going to email me and be like Ed, did you hear there's an AI ad? There's an AI ad that ran. Did you hear the AI ad? It ran off the AI ad. If you are emailing me or messaging me about the AI ad, I have hurt you over 150 times and every single person. I'm not bitter, I'm just like at this point if you think it's novel to mention this to me, it isn't. And every time I kind of roll my eyes and if you're trying to hurt me, which you would love, then keep going but please don't. But nevertheless it's good that it's good that this exists though because my experience of games journalism was Future Publishing and Dennis.

[Nathan Grayson]

Oh no. So I want a little bit of.

[Ed Zitron]

Zitro Law for all of you. So I was a games journalist from the age of 16. I interned at computer and video games magazine Esteemed out there owned by Dennis Publishing, sold to future publishers. Really like out of the toilet, into the toilet.

[Nathan Grayson]

Situation the worst, shittier toilet. Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

And I worked at PC Zone as well and it was definitely, and there's British libel laws which will stop me being fully honest here. It was a challenging corporate environment with many incentive structures that affected the output and structure of the work regulator. And it's funny because games journalism feels like something that could be bigger and better than it is, but it just won't be.

[Nathan Grayson]

So the example that I think is really useful is Kotaku. Essentially we all worked there in a certain era where we had an editor in chief who was an old school magazine guy, went to the Columbia School of Journalism, really wanted us to get scoops and we had for at least a short while management that understood the value of actually reporting news and not caring about the reaction from quote unquote gamers.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Nathan Grayson]

However, that did not make us very advertiser friendly. So now where we are at with Kotaku after everyone that we worked with has left, essentially they're in an environment where they're like what advertisers want is not news on how badly the industry is doing. What they would prefer is guides and hype. And what are gamers want? What are gamers talking about? You know, I like reporting on fandom because I do think that the cultural impact of gaming is really fascinating. And frankly, I did not realize when we started aftermath that we'd be doing journalism that is actually quite important in understanding the slow dissolution of democracy in America. But it certainly seems like it has been.

[Geeta Jackson]

I think that it's worth contextualizing that gaming has often been a canary in the coal mine for the slow disillusion of democracy and of these cultural movements that.

[Ed Zitron]

Can you elaborate?

[Nathan Grayson]

Well, Elon Musk, Gamergate.

[Geeta Jackson]

Yeah, literally Gamergate.

[Ed Zitron]

And actually Nathan and both of you split this question, I think would be good. Can you describe Gamergate for people that were outside of it?

[Geeta Jackson]

Gamergate was kind of the first like real reactionary movement in video games, basically. I mean, I had a lot of personal experience.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, you had a little bit of a. Part of it.

[Nathan Grayson]

Yeah, that version gazed upon you.

[Geeta Jackson]

There was a prominent indie game developer named Zoe Quinn and she and I ended up dating for a minute. And gamers took this to me or, well, not gamers, basically. She had a jilted X who published a manifesto about her in which he claimed, among other things, that she had, you know, effectively slept with me for positive coverage of her game when that never actually happened. There was no such coverage. It was all bullshit. But a lot of people, a lot of gamers who were already after her. There had been this whole like hate movement against her even before this. But they latched onto this and it became their plausible deniability. And so they started saying, oh, it's about ethics and games journalism. We got to fix this. And then all of these other people from outside of video games latched onto that. That's where you got people like Milo Yiannopoulos. That's where you've got a lot of like Breitbart's notability in that era.

[Nathan Grayson]

Yeah.

[Geeta Jackson]

And I think that's when a lot of these people in the conservative movement realized, oh, like this is a perfect seedbed for the future of conservatism and the future. We can grab people right here.

[Nathan Grayson]

No, you can literally brute force a reality is what they learned you the things that they claim. And you will still see people claim these things on the Internet. None of these things are true. None of them are provable. None of them are anywhere near provable. There is no review of Zoe's game that Nathan wrote. It does not exist and they will never show it to you.

[Ed Zitron]

And what's ins. What's insane as well is there are actual issues in games. Like, I mean, like, I. If I'm not saying what magazine I'm talking about or indeed who this was said to, but I know multiple different games covers of games magazines for certain PC games magazines that were bartered with drugs and that where scores were raised to please publishers and raised to please advertisers. These are the actual fucking issues.

[Nathan Grayson]

Or even just sort of the like parasitic relationship game devs, especially the higher up in management you go, they consider the game games press to just be a PR wing, their same industry. So the idea that we are journalists and we do not have the same goals as they do, which is to please developers and help make sure that their games sell. That is considered like really, really hostile. And it is something that you have to explain and re explain over and over again. I don't care if your game sells well. Like, I'm sorry, I want games to do well, but I'm not doing PR for you. That is not what I want to do.

[Geeta Jackson]

Also, there's already like a lot of these games already have these massive marketing budgets anyway. It's like the press is not a big needle mover there. But what a lot of people want the press to be, whether they are executives or whether they're gamers, is this like mouthpiece for the industry. Like going back to, you know, those like law or those court cases against games. As a whole, they want industry advocates. They're still stuck in this mindset from like 30 years ago of like the industry needs defending. It's just a little guy and it's.

[Nathan Grayson]

Like no, no, you can't simultaneously be quote bigger than Hollywood and just. Just be a little guy. Yeah. You know I love video games. I love the culture of video games in a lot of ways. I love. I think play is a fundamental part of human life that we all need more of. Especially the more bleak it. If you have imagination then you can imagine a better world.

[Ed Zitron]

It also feels like we fundamentally got away from the fact thing that games is which is escape.

[Nathan Grayson]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Like I don't. I. It's not that I'm ashamed of being a gamer. I have plenty of other things I'm ashamed of. But it's this sense that like I do this to try and not like, not think about it. I will say however, like Balatro. If anyone knows the Balatro developer. Developer, welcome on better offline official endorsement. Balatro is incredible.

[Nathan Grayson]

Such a good Balatro.

[Ed Zitron]

I also like got me through like mental health things just I was able to. There's an EMDR effect I think. But nevertheless these games are meant to be, if not a distraction, something you escape into even if you're not escaping life. But it's like people. People want them to mean something else almost.

[Nathan Grayson]

Fiction is transformative. I was thinking there's a big indie game hit that is really depressing and sort of about the experience of living under lay capitalism. Mouthwashing. It's an indie game, it's a visual novel. It's not mechanics heavy, it's very story heavy. But it became an enormous indie hit with a very big sort of unexpected fandom because it describes an experience that people have and they love feeling like the misery and stress and pain that they are being told by so many different forces doesn't exist and doesn't matter. They love being told. Yes, it does matter. Your personhood does matter. The things you experience in the world do matter and have significance. Being able to experience that is something that brings us closer together as a society and allows us to again just start to imagine what if the world didn't have to be like this?

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Nathan Grayson]

You know, that's what all media, all entered forms of entertainment can give you. And I do feel like by becoming an industry that is chasing a bigger and bigger number more than anything else, you do lose sight of that. That like art can't just be measured in dollars. Art is something that touches you and.

[Geeta Jackson]

Changes you Yeah, I mean, I think that the. Yeah. The big issue is that games aren't supposed to be anything, especially not at this point.

[Ed Zitron]

Like, yeah, it's a full. An awful game of sorts.

[Geeta Jackson]

And also, like, there are so many of them. So last year, almost 20,000 games came out on Steam. Jesus, 20,000. And with that in mind, like, the fact that there's this reactionary movement going around saying, oh, you know, this game can't be this. It can't have, like a black person. It can't portray trans issues. It's like, well, why does that matter to you?

[Ed Zitron]

There are.

[Geeta Jackson]

There are 19,999 more games over there that aren't doing that.

[Ed Zitron]

So we have like 30 years of games which were not.

[Nathan Grayson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Geeta Jackson]

On top of that, you were talking about this idea of games as escapism. And it's so funny because this reactionary movement essentially posits that, yes, games should only be escapism and nothing else.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Geeta Jackson]

They shouldn't have, quote, unquote, political topics in them. For example, trans people or black people. People.

[Nathan Grayson]

No games stops.

[Geeta Jackson]

People have dedicated their lives to fighting a political battle about games, in effect, shoving their politics into games. That's all they do anymore. So they're like, games should be escapism, no politics. Except for all the time, on my terms.

[Nathan Grayson]

You know, for me, a great level of escapism would be imagining a world where I don't have an annoying conversation with a white person. It like, you know, like, that would be.

[Ed Zitron]

That is completely imaginary.

[Nathan Grayson]

You know, that would be a wonderful escape for me. But you do, when you get down to. When you see one of these viral posts that comes across your dash or, you know, whatever social media figure you're on, and they are so upset about a promo image for a game because the example character they've shown is a black person, you realize that the escapism that these people want to experience is an escape from black people. And it's just. They don't want to have to see a black person. And that is like an inherently political things to say. That is an endorsement of white supremacy.

[Geeta Jackson]

Yeah, it's an endorsement of an ethno state.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, it's very fucking frustrating as well because I don't know, maybe they could learn to be in a situation with a black person, but they're like, no, no, I couldn't possibly. Wait, wait, wait. There's an option buried in these menus that allows me to have trans, like, features and fuck, no. Yeah, I can't even consider a world where that's an option.

[Nathan Grayson]

Yeah. Being given the choice of a they them pronoun is something that terrifies them. Just seeing it. Yeah.

[Geeta Jackson]

No, like there are YouTube videos where these people.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Geeta Jackson]

Are reduced to like actual tears because of how upset they are.

[Ed Zitron]

I love how masculine that is in.

[Geeta Jackson]

Yeah. Oh, it's crazy. I mean I could like so.

[Ed Zitron]

So back to Aftermath though, on a more positive note. What are you trying to create with it? You don't need to have like a big vision, but what are you trying to do differently to like Kotaku for.

[Nathan Grayson]

Example, not destroy our brains and bodies, number one. Sure.

[Geeta Jackson]

Yeah.

[Nathan Grayson]

Ye. I also think we want to acknowledge and embrace the both editorial and hard scoops and reporting that was not something I think we did very well. Embracing the duality of that. You need news and then also you need to help people interpret and understand the cultural impact of this news. Nathan has been doing an incredible job reporting, like just really fucking killing it. I currently have two full time jobs, so I've been writing less than I'd love to, but really my interest is understanding industry trends and looking at them as sort of long term research projects and understanding the way that the world moves as we understand how money flows and moves.

[Geeta Jackson]

Yeah.

[Nathan Grayson]

And I think that those both of these things are equally important essentially. Just even though video games tell like as an industry, people just lie about how. How much money they make and how culturally important they are. They are now a massive and indelible part of the American entertainment industry and our economy.

[Geeta Jackson]

They are mainstream, especially for like, you know, Gen Z millennials, like we all grew up playing them. They are as much a part of the cultural fabric as any film, as any TV shows. Anything else.

[Nathan Grayson]

Yeah.

[Geeta Jackson]

You know that they need to be covered that way. And it's so weird to look at like major publications, major papers, having almost nobody dedicated to them, which like Washington Post has one person, Gene Park. Yep, yep. And even then, Gene doesn't really do hard report. He just does like criticism, which is important, but it's not the whole thing. Like you need a team for that. You guys know I'm always up for a good MVP story. And one of the best is the story of Wasabi Technologies. Wasabi is purpose built to free businesses from skyrocketing storage costs and unpredictable egress fees from old and top heavy legacy providers.

[Nathan Grayson]

You know, the big guys.

[Geeta Jackson]

Wasabi is the world's hottest cloud storage company, becoming the go to provider for professional and collegiate sports teams and leagues around the world.

[Ed Zitron]

And here's why.

[Geeta Jackson]

From Wasabi's AI enabled intelligent media storage Wasabi Air to the industry's only cloud storage service with triple protection against cybercriminals.

[Ed Zitron]

Data deletion and ransomware.

[Geeta Jackson]

Wasabi's taken the lead in driving innovation in data storage, eliminating overhead where it matters to deliver you results you can count on and won't break the bank. In fact, Wasabi is up to 80%.

[Ed Zitron]

Less than those other guys and doesn't.

[Geeta Jackson]

Charge a cent for businesses to access their own data. Wasabi Another championship story. Check them out for [e-mail] get this.

[Nathan Grayson]

Adults with financial literacy skills have 82% more wealth than those who don't. From swimming lessons to piano classes, us parents invest in so many things to enrich our kids lives, but are we investing in their future financial success?

[Ed Zitron]

With Greenlight you can teach your kids.

[Nathan Grayson]

Financial literacy skills like earning, saving and investing. And this investment costs less than that. After school treat start prioritizing their financial education and future today with a risk free [e-mail] iheart greenlight.com iheart homeowners if you want to sell your house fast for all cash, stop what you are doing and listen to this because Osborne Homes wants to buy your house right now. I'm Alex from Osborne Homes and we want to buy your house. Nobody buys more homes in California than Osborne.

[Ed Zitron]

Whether it's a total fixer upper or.

[Nathan Grayson]

In perfect condition, Osborne Homes is the easiest way to sell your house fast.

[Geeta Jackson]

All cash. Best of all, when you sell your.

[Nathan Grayson]

House to Osborne Homes there are zero commissions, zero fees plus no banks, no.

[Geeta Jackson]

Realtors, no repairs and no waiting to close.

[Nathan Grayson]

We buy your house as is.

[Ed Zitron]

All cash.

[Geeta Jackson]

Just go to osborhomes.com right now to.

[Nathan Grayson]

Get your free no obligation all cash offer. We are here and ready to buy your house 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Just go to OsborneHomes.com go to OsborneHomes.com right now. Don't wait. Sell your house to Osborne Homes and put the cash in your pocket right away. Just go to OsborneHomes.com that's Osborne Homes.com OsborneHomes.com OsborneHomes.com ready to prioritize yourself in the new year, your skin is a great place to start. Dime Beauty, founded by a master esthetician, is more than just a skincare company. With four skin conscious categories, Skincare, Beauty, Body care and fragrance. Dime offers simple, spa worthy products that will help you enter 2025 with confidence. Whether you're revitalizing your regimen with nourishing products or Building one from scratch. Daim makes it easy. The work system Our all in one best selling routine includes a cleanser of your choice, toners, serums and moisturizers. Taking the guesswork out of skincare for your healthiest, happiest skin yet. Dime's commitment to clean ingredients and sustainable packaging ensures every product is as gentle on your skin as it is on the planet. With thousands of glowing five star reviews and a loyal community, the results speak for themselves. Revive your skin and give yourself the routine refresh you deserve by visiting dimebeautyco.com that's dimebeauty co. Your best skin awaits.

[Ed Zitron]

Well, something I like about like you. You did this one about Steam. The Steam uses an AI.

[Geeta Jackson]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

And it was specifically the story is about how actually you know, walk it through the Next Fest games part. Why, why would I read your story to you?

[Geeta Jackson]

Yeah, so basically right now Steam is running this promotional event called Next Fest where there are a ton of demos. Everybody like is play is getting prominent placement for the demos which will in turn cause people to go check out their games and maybe buy them. That's really important. And so this time around people have been scrolling through and seeing a lot of AI art and they're like, oh, that's not good. Because that means that a bunch of AI slop is potentially crowding out deserving good games that have been development for a long time and that have a chance of attaining real success. And so the thing about that is that, that yes, it looks bad but then at the same time Steam has this hyper complicated algorithm that they've been tuning over the years. And so they basically tuned it to change the way that games are seen in the first few days of something like Next Fest.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Geeta Jackson]

So that you end up seeing a random kind of scattering of them in the first few days, then it becomes personalized. And so basically that sorts out the AI garbage because those games people don't really interact with much. They see them, they move on, want. And so they've built a system that sort of anticipates AI slop, which is good. But they still have this larger problem that I think that you see in a lot of industries now in this era of peak content, which is that there's tons of good stuff coming out on Steam all the time. Too much of that for most people to find what they're really looking for. And then on top of that you're also competing with all of the old good stuff which is still on Steam, constantly goes on sale, has bigger name recognition than you do. And so that's the real battle that people need to be fighting. Whereas I think looking at AI on Steam as this major issue is tempting, and it is to an extent, but it's not kind of the core problem that a lot of developers face.

[Ed Zitron]

So the reason I brought up this story was to compliment you is because this is exactly why Aftermath rocks and why I actually think the future of journalism is more. Yeah, it's like better offline. Of course it is. But it's things like Aftermath as well. Because this isn't just the story story about games culture, which is the anxiety over AI slop, also the anxiety over indie games not getting the attention they need. It's also an industrial analysis because you've got numbers here and actual view counts. And actually because to cover the games industry, it seems like much like tech, you need true domain expertise, but you also need industrial Jason Schreier style.

[Geeta Jackson]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

And Jason Schreier, by the way, over at Bloomberg Legend. Got to get him on the show. It's my fault. Jason.

[Nathan Grayson]

Do you want to know something amazing about Jason?

[Ed Zitron]

Yes.

[Nathan Grayson]

This one great Jason story that he told me right before we left Kotaku. I used to sit next to him every day and he told me when he first started there, he asked if there was a dress code. He said, and his boss told him no. So to that effect, he wore basketball shorts literally every single day. And at his yearly review, his boss came up to him and said, jason, I did not know that I had a line for dress code, but I realized that my line is please don't wear basketball shorts literally every day.

[Geeta Jackson]

If anyone didn't he counter this one online at some point, I feel like he added some particulars that muddy the waters of that story a tiny bit.

[Nathan Grayson]

Oh, I see. I see. I just love every time you see Jason tweet something that pisses you off. I just love imagining him in basketball shorts. That's all.

[Geeta Jackson]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

But also I'm remembering if any of the British games press are listening to this. We don't f. We never dress that. I dressed like a. I was in like a dirty jeans. I'm actually in dirty jeans now.

[Geeta Jackson]

I resist.

[Ed Zitron]

We just like, people dress like. I guess we didn't see their legs because it's England and it was cold. But I feel like that would. That's the difference of the British gaming press. They would just look like creepiest.

[Nathan Grayson]

No, what Kieran Gillan said is about. I love Gillan. He's such a sweetie pie. He said in what when his little manifesto he wrote like, I don't know, it's like 20 years ago, New games journalism.

[Ed Zitron]

He said, I love Kieran, but I fucking hate it.

[Nathan Grayson]

Anyway, he said something about there were two models of games journalism when he was working there. And it was the US model, which was a lot like car journalism, which is also pretty fraught. And there was the UK model, which is a lot more like music journalism, which now does not really exist in America anymore. And the US model, which was all about stats and statistics and numbers and products and products. That model won out eventually and you can see how much it has. Has went out because now it's. It's only about toys. Like, we talk about games as if they are toys and disposable and nothing else.

[Geeta Jackson]

And that's pretty much it.

[Ed Zitron]

I remember why it pissed me off, because he worked at PC Gamer, which was exactly what you just described.

[Geeta Jackson]

That's why. That's why he left and made Rock.

[Nathan Grayson]

No, no.

[Ed Zitron]

And now he. And now he writes amazing comics.

[Nathan Grayson]

The Power Fantasy is so.

[Ed Zitron]

I haven't read it yet.

[Nathan Grayson]

Really good. It's great.

[Ed Zitron]

Sorry, we're.

[Geeta Jackson]

But no, I was going to say in line with a lot of that and the way that I think games journalism kind of continued to mature along those lines of mostly considering games to be these disposable products. And a lot of sites consider posting about a trailer to be news. The thing that I think Aftermath does that we really focus on doing is contextualizing a lot of the news, especially the harder news. Something like the WB layoffs and contextualizing it, I think with the kind of feeling it deserves. Something that I think you also do really well with all of your different projects.

[Nathan Grayson]

You know, well, people. People find it very cathartic to have people confirm what they feel about the world, which is things are sucking up.

[Geeta Jackson]

They sometimes don't. Yeah. With facts. But also sometimes they don't recognize how bad things are. They need to be told. That was my point in that WB piece, which the headline, for those who don't know is Just Fuck WB and.

[Ed Zitron]

Fuck wb by the way.

[Nathan Grayson]

Yeah, literally just Fuck wb.

[Geeta Jackson]

And it goes into all the reasons why they deserve to be fucked. Because they've been mismanaging their business horribly and treating people and their various properties as disposable and like doing it in these ways that are very avoidable.

[Nathan Grayson]

They are an expression of the way that the tech industry as a whole has changed how employment works and changed how companies understand value. And it is disgusting to watch it happen in something that's Very important to me, which is the world of art. Like, I. I was a cinema studies major in college. I had these old highfalutin dreams of being a gall curator, et cetera, et cetera. These things really matter to me. Like, human expression really, really matters to me. And they're the. The wonderful history of American cinema is just being flushed down the fucking toilet.

[Ed Zitron]

And it feels like they're doing the same thing in games and in tech and everything.

[Geeta Jackson]

Because.

[Ed Zitron]

Not to tie it back to my own bullshit, but it's. It's the Google search thing, it's the Facebook thing. It's the thing that we fell in love with. The idea of games. I guess it's more what I. It's more death by a thousand cuts. With games, sometimes the cuts are larger, but it's like watching like Monolith, for example. Monolith also, I like. I swear Monolith had something to do with like, free space as well. It was like Volition entertainment. Like, we've watched it. It's been this slow burn where you'd see these amazing games come out and then the studio would just disappear or they'd be dog. And it seems like it's just this problem of CEOs. It's these executives who have nothing to do with games. They don't play games. They wouldn't dare touch these games. They've got important things to do, like go to lunch and write emails or.

[Geeta Jackson]

I mean, okay, so actually this is a good example. There are CEOs who at least, like, pretend to or do, but they still make the same decisions. Somebody like Phil Spencer is a great example of this. He's like the gamer CEO. He's at Microsoft.

[Ed Zitron]

But is he actually, like a gamer, though?

[Geeta Jackson]

Yes. I mean, his Xbox Live stats were like, public for a long time. You could see how many hundreds of hours he's putting into games.

[Ed Zitron]

That makes it worse.

[Geeta Jackson]

Yeah, exactly. It makes it way worse.

[Nathan Grayson]

Make it way worse.

[Geeta Jackson]

Because what that suggests is that, like, the problem is that these. Is not that these people are not gamers.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Geeta Jackson]

The problem is the structural incentives that accompany being an executive that you will still even appreciating the art form, cut thousands of people loose from their jobs and like, make decisions that actively harm games and their quality.

[Ed Zitron]

Isn't the problem also that games are just insanely expensive to build, though the AAA gaming is. Are we not running towards this unsustainable point?

[Geeta Jackson]

Putting aside, it's already unsustainable, sustainable.

[Nathan Grayson]

There was that New York Times article about graphics in games that I I read a few weeks ago, maybe last month that was about like there is so much money being pumped into. They use the Spider man games for as an example, realistic one to one fidelity of the world we see outside of our window, including physics systems that replicate real life physics.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Nathan Grayson]

And there we are at a point where that last 10, it's like self driving cars that last 10% may never be solved because our human brain interprets and processes things so much faster than a computer program. And a computer can just in general. And we, these studios put so much money into creating that thing and players don't notice or care. Players literally don't care whether or Not.

[Geeta Jackson]

Spider Man 2 in particular, which is a really good game. Yeah, it's a good game. But Insomniac, the developer of that game suffered a leak a little while ago and in some of their own conversations about the game they were like, yeah, our budget for this sequel was $300 million or somewhere thereabouts, almost double what the original game cost. But we don't think that players actually notice just how much better the graphics are. We actually think that they take either version and be fine with it. And so at that point, why are we spending all of this money on increasing the fidelity? Why? What, what is the end that we're trying to achieve here and then meanwhile the other wild part about all of this to me is that the current like video game juggernauts for Gen Z are like Minecraft and Roblox. These games do not have high fidelity graphics at all.

[Nathan Grayson]

No Roblox. In fact it is a kind of disgusting, exploitative model where they rely on community developers to make games for them.

[Geeta Jackson]

Oh yeah, they get child labor.

[Ed Zitron]

And children.

[Nathan Grayson]

And children.

[Ed Zitron]

Mostly children.

[Nathan Grayson]

Yeah. And the split is the one of the most predatory in the industry in terms of how much money Roblox will make off of your game versus how much money you make.

[Ed Zitron]

What's insane is Roblox only loses money as well. They're horribly unprofitable.

[Nathan Grayson]

It's just ridiculous.

[Ed Zitron]

I feel like we need to like have a referendum on the CEOs on a very basic level of put aside all the moral stuff that's very obvious. Let's just be like, you suck at this, right?

[Nathan Grayson]

No. When we started our own company, what we marveled at for a long time was like, no, we don't have MBAs. And yes, the money stuff is kind of difficult. But actually getting people to visit our website and trust our reporting was extremely easy. Like the actual like day to day put blogs on the site, run a business, promote ourselves. That's so, so, so easy. And there were so many people at Geomedia that made so much money that couldn't do things. Like there was a HR lead that couldn't attach, she couldn't put an attachment on an email and she made a quarter million of a dollar. A quarter million of dollars a year. I hated her so much.

[Ed Zitron]

That is insane.

[Geeta Jackson]

Yeah. It seems like being a published author, not even making close to that is so cool.

[Ed Zitron]

What's insane as well is it's like this is the larger problem. This is. I know that someone's going to email me, like, the problem's capitalism. Wow. By the way, if you're one of the. I don't know, I'm acting like I have derision, but I love my listeners. Like for the most part, it's just, I get one person.

[Geeta Jackson]

I'm start emailing you like this all the time. Like actually capitalism.

[Ed Zitron]

I know, but it's just this is actually something that really frustrated me at a former games publication. It may have been where it was just like the people writing were fucking amazing. They loved games. I mean, I can talk about Log, for example, disappointment on Blue sky or Steve Hogarty. A PC Zone.

[Geeta Jackson]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Will Porter as well. Like, love games was so. It was a real joyous energy to it. And then there was just this mandate from above where it was just. Yeah, well, we got to make sure we sell more issues. So you got to put this on the COVID It was never something fucking interesting. You get an occasional one. Like I did my one cover about the third World of Warcraft expansion. That was fun. But it's like the, the incentives, the people driving the incentives are not people that even understand the customer so much. They're just like, I need to resemble the thing that my boss wants me to. And then I will be the best at my job, even if I'm not good at it at all. Like David Zaslav, I have a lot of thoughts about what could happen to him that I won't be sharing.

[Nathan Grayson]

Have I introduced you to my concept of the well based system of justice?

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Nathan Grayson]

You got a deep, deep well.

[Ed Zitron]

Okay.

[Nathan Grayson]

And like you just throw him down there. I mean like Samara from the ring. Like she lived down there. She didn't die right away. Right.

[Ed Zitron]

She had a nice time down there.

[Nathan Grayson]

You know, we'll feed him sandwiches, a little picnic basket every once in a while and he can try to get, get out. Maybe he'll succeed.

[Geeta Jackson]

But disclaimer. This is, this is all happening In Minecraft and. Or Roblox.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, this is all parody. This is parody. Yes, this is parody. But it's just fucking frustrating as well because despite all this frustration and annoyance, we've had some incredible games the last few years. Like Hades and Hades 2, man, super giant.

[Nathan Grayson]

It's an incredible, incredible studio.

[Geeta Jackson]

They're having like a weird dust up about voice acting and not working with like SAD for reasons that they want. I actually. Super Giant, a bit of quick insight I like because they put out this statement. Basically a voice actor came out and said that supergiant was considering not renewing with them over their insistence on having a SAG contract. And so then supergiant put out a statement saying, actually we have some of the best protections against AI and things like that in the industry and we're just not working with SAG for reasons. And they did not state those reasons.

[Nathan Grayson]

And SAG currently is on strike, specifically in the video game industry over AI protections and acting.

[Ed Zitron]

I'm just reading this statement. Yeah, we have respected and will continue to respect any actor needing to pause work during the ongoing SAG AFTRA AFTRA video game strike. While none of our games have ever been subject to the SAG AFTRA contracts for a variety of reasons.

[Geeta Jackson]

There we go. Which we wish.

[Ed Zitron]

We wish that for me, the best.

[Geeta Jackson]

What means nothing. I reached out to Greg Cassavin, who's the like creative director over at Supergiant and who I've known for a lot of years, and asked that I was like, can you provide any of the reasons sentence? And he was basically like, no.

[Ed Zitron]

I was like, oh, thank you, man, I appreciate the comment. And it's just like, it's frustrating because Super Giant, I assume, makes a ton of money.

[Nathan Grayson]

Oh, I mean, Hades was at a massive.

[Geeta Jackson]

They're also a very small studio relative to. I mean they have.

[Nathan Grayson]

There's not a lot of overhead essentially.

[Ed Zitron]

Saving the money there. Where's that going? It's not even like the CEO makes more money if they, if they do that. If it's.

[Nathan Grayson]

It's confusing.

[Geeta Jackson]

Well, and also it's like, it's a real bummer because otherwise they've been amazing in terms of like making games the right way. Like they are a very people focused studio. I interviewed them years ago about like all the ways that they like, for example, they have mandatory vacation. So if you reach the end of the year and you haven't taken your vacation time, you have to just like take a month off. And they do that kind of a.

[Ed Zitron]

And just to describe for the Listeners who haven't played Hades or Hades 2, which is coming out next year probably.

[Nathan Grayson]

Yeah. Isn't really Access right now. You can play it and you can play it.

[Ed Zitron]

This game is both mechanically perfect. Hades 2, I would argue isn't. I think Hades 2 tried.

[Geeta Jackson]

I actually really like Hades 2.

[Ed Zitron]

I love it. No, I love it.

[Nathan Grayson]

I love you.

[Ed Zitron]

I love it in that there are.

[Geeta Jackson]

Some bits that also isn't finished yet.

[Ed Zitron]

Nevertheless, the point is these games are mechanically perfect. They sound incredible. Voice acting's amazing. They look, they feel amazing. There are tiny little systems and on top of that they're. They're incredibly diverse. Like they prove that you can do diversity in this way that's very like sincere and it doesn't feel.

[Geeta Jackson]

And it fits the setting. The setting is like Greek mythology and it's really cool.

[Nathan Grayson]

Yeah. Yeah. The whole plot of Achilles and Patroclus in Hades just melts my heart. It really is affecting. Nathan and I are both big fans of the game Pyre, which is the game that came out right before which.

[Geeta Jackson]

Is like still the best super genic game.

[Nathan Grayson]

NBA Jam essentially.

[Geeta Jackson]

With Wizards.

[Nathan Grayson]

With Wizards. And then also it's a story of sincere revolution that asks you, the player what it would mean to overcome oppression and why you would fight for it. And it is really affecting and meaningful. Meaningful storyline. One of the most amazing things about Supergiant is they have this like bespoke relationship with Darren Korb, a singer, songwriter.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh my God.

[Nathan Grayson]

Music he makes for these games drive me to tears and I love them.

[Ed Zitron]

I actually really want to talk about Darren Corbriel real quick. So Hades 2 has a boss against this band of sirens and there are two different metals like like metal adjacent.

[Geeta Jackson]

So one that's about how much they hate. Hate you for killing and how bad.

[Ed Zitron]

Your hair looks and what they're going to do to you like and it's. And these songs are bangers. They have blast beats in one.

[Geeta Jackson]

Sick bear in mind too that they had to write these songs with the expectation that because of the game's run based structure that you like do the same thing over and over and over. Yeah, they will hear these songs like a hundred times. So they got to write something that they know you're not going to be irritated by hearing this many times. Which unto itself is this like level of crap craft. It's so different than just writing a song.

[Nathan Grayson]

There's like a little bit of a crossover with like musical theater with Darren Korb where the songs are. People sing in these games when they are called to such a high level of emotion. And then they anticipate that level of emotion also from you, the player. So that by the time you get to Scylla and the Sirens in your run again, your blood will be pumping so hot that you just want to hear them burst into some.

[Ed Zitron]

And it's fucking great. And also, I'm ranting about this. I don't care, you little pixel, slop this up. But what's also great about this boss fight is it's three different things you're fighting. And as you. One is the drummer, one is the guitarist, one is the singer. And if you kill off the drummer, you no longer hear the drum or when they do.

[Nathan Grayson]

And it's like, it's beautiful.

[Ed Zitron]

And the reason I bring this up as well is it's proof of what you can do in games and with technology, when you just fucking think about what the medium is. And it's so expertly done and it shows so much love. Love. And it frustrates me because I know we've been quite negative today, but there are so many signs that games can be so much better and that there are these incredible, like Hades 2 is even in early access has so many bits to it. You're just like, wow, not only do you love games, but you want this to be cool. You have genuine creative expression that cannot be done anywhere else.

[Nathan Grayson]

Yes. In no other form. Like, I mean, this is why I talk about Dwarf Fortress. Like, Near Constant is like, this is a game made by people that are clearly just obsessed with Lord of the Rings, but they also are obsessed with fantasy and building a world and just native narrative experiences. Like the way that you as a human being create a story inside of your mind.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Nathan Grayson]

Like you. You have this little group of dwarves and they all have distinct personalities that are all procedurally generated. They all have memories, they have all lived in a world that has built itself up over, you know, in game like 250 in game years. So there is history. When you ask your dwarves to engrave carvings into the fortress you build inside of a mountain, they will build carvings of things that they remember from life, like when your mayor got elected, et cetera, et cetera. So as that's what I'm going to.

[Geeta Jackson]

Do before I die, I'm going to carve Eric Adams into something.

[Nathan Grayson]

Oh, God, yes. Just carve this.

[Geeta Jackson]

My main memory.

[Nathan Grayson]

Your number one memory is Eric Adams. But no, I remember I played a game once and there was a dwarf child that was just mad all the time and I was like, dwarf Child, you can't. You can't keep hitting people with an axe like you have. What's going on with you?

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, God. Wokeness gone wild.

[Nathan Grayson]

Well, it was because after a big Orc attack at my fortress of Goblin attack. His father had been in the military and his father died. And there weren't enough dwarfs after this attack to clean up all the corpses. So this dwarf child had to watch his father rot away at the floor. And that permanently changed his personality. So now he's angry all the time.

[Ed Zitron]

All within this game.

[Nathan Grayson]

Dwarf Fortress, Yes.

[Ed Zitron]

And I think that this is the thing. I refuse to be fully nihilistic about this stuff, because even with the slop kings in power, it seems like cool shit is still being built. And so, as we wrap up Gator first, is there anything you're really looking forward to? Is there, like a game coming out or something very recent you've played? You've kind of.

[Nathan Grayson]

Obsidian. It's Avowed. I'm playing Avowed now. What is Avowed is the new game from Obsidian, the most recent game that people learned from them. I mean, they've made tons of incredible RPG Follow. New Vegas is just a precious jewel. I love that game. It is. I. It is worth fallout. New Vegas is worth the three hours I spent modding the game so it would not crash when I tried to play it on my PC.

[Ed Zitron]

So it wasn't an Obsidian game anymore.

[Nathan Grayson]

Sorry. But Avowed is. It takes a lot of the systems that they developed for the outer worlds and refines them. And then also you get really, really excellent character writing all of the time. There's a character you meet right away in Avowed named Kai, who is like a fish person, and he's always got a little sarcastic quip to say about something. But he's also like a deeply empathetic. He has a real, real tangible personality traits that make me excited to talk to him and hear him react to the things that I do. And another wonderful thing about this is the combat stuff is really, really fun. But the choices in the quest that you're forced to make, they do not present a path to you that will not piss someone off. So you have to sit there, yeah, sorry. That's the fate of the smiling man. You just have to think to yourself, what are my convictions? And that is something that games can really make you confront within yourself. What do I believe about something? And you play as an envoy of an empire. And I found that what I have been doing in this game is just, you know, I met up with the Rebels, I had the option to kill someone who attempted to assassinate me or not. And when I heard that he realized that assassinating me wasn't the right choice to then write the right way to defeat the empire that is trying to take over the living land lands, I decided to forgive him because I don't actually have any beef with them. And I don't think the things that the Empire are doing in this land, me, the person, me, Geeta. I don't think the things that they're doing, they attempt at colonizing this beautiful lush landscape that is fighting against them. I don't think that that is right. And so other characters have judged me for this. But I decided, you know what? I side with the rebels. I want the empire to dissolve. And. And that is how I'm going to play this game. That's the way this character is going to play this game.

[Ed Zitron]

And this is on PC and Xbox?

[Nathan Grayson]

Yes. It's fantastic.

[Geeta Jackson]

Yeah, it's really good.

[Ed Zitron]

So, Nathan, what about you? What game?

[Geeta Jackson]

So I recently played a demo for a game called Skin Deep. And Skin Deep is, I would describe it as a slapstick, stealth, immersive sim game. The idea being that you are somebody who works in a very wacky form of insurance where basically you get frozen and stored aboard ships that have important cargo on them. And if somebody breaks into that ship, then they unfreeze you and you run around and take care of whoever's on there.

[Ed Zitron]

Okay.

[Geeta Jackson]

And it's really. It's just really clever. It's one of those games that again, it could only be a game. So like, it thinks about all these things that other games of this sort don't. So like, your character is barefoot for whatever reason. And so like, if there's glass around, you can step on the glass and then you can like pry it out of your foot and use it as a weapon if you want to. But also, like, the combat is so different from what you expect in these games and that. That instead of you being this master of martial arts, you have to briefly incapacitate somebody with any number of comedy items. You can throw a banana peel and they'll slip and fall on you, and then you go jump on their back and you're trying to wrestle them into something and they're trying to push you off. You're not physically stronger than them. And so it descends into just lunacy and madness almost every time that you are trying to bring somebody down.

[Ed Zitron]

And just to be clear, what platform is this on? It's PC, so it's not VR or anything you're just doing this with. Yeah, that's hum bonkers.

[Geeta Jackson]

And it's from this one studio that actually they're called Blendo. They've been around for a while.

[Nathan Grayson]

I love Blendo games.

[Geeta Jackson]

Yeah, they're amazing.

[Nathan Grayson]

Blendo's amazing.

[Geeta Jackson]

And they've always been really smart about like integrating cinematic techniques that other video games don't. They made this one game forever ago called 30 Flights of Loving that relies a lot on like jump cuts.

[Nathan Grayson]

Yeah.

[Geeta Jackson]

In a first person setting, which feels, I think, unnatural to gamers who are used to continuity in a first person game.

[Nathan Grayson]

30 Flights of Loving is an experience worth having. It's a very short, short narrative game and I. If you want to understand just like how games work, how the moving image creates narrative, creates associations, it is very instructive. And it's also really affecting.

[Geeta Jackson]

Yeah, cool. And so these developers are also really good, surprisingly good at not making just like on rail cinematic experiences, but also like these really intricate systems. And that's what Skin Deep is. It's this game where so many funny, weird things can happen. Been like, you know, and you can, you can replay levels and figure out all this stuff. Like the first time that I played the demo level I nearly like lost and you know, I sucked at it. And the second time I realized, oh man, I can break the glass on this spaceship and open it to the vacuum of space. And so I can go around like wreaking havoc on these guards by just like subjecting them to like a James.

[Ed Zitron]

Bond, like a Moonraker situation.

[Nathan Grayson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

That's so beautiful. So. And that's the thing. I really want to leave the listeners here with the sense that there's still cool shit happening.

[Nathan Grayson]

Oh yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Everywhere. And there is hope to be had. Geeta, where can people find you?

[Nathan Grayson]

You can find me on Aftermath site. Mainly I'm Xoxo Gossip Gita on social media, Instagram and Blue sky basically is where I post at this point. But yeah, everything I write will be on Aftermath. So look after me there.

[Geeta Jackson]

Nice Aftermath Psy as well. And then I'm Nathan Grayson on Bluesky. I'm Glorious Curly Mop on Instagram. And then I also have a book called Stream Big the Triumphs and Turmoils of Twitch and the Stars behind the Screen. And you can get that wherever books are sold.

[Ed Zitron]

Now I'm going to kind of force you all to do this. I need you to go to Aftermath site. I need you to pay them. I need you to buy Nathan's book. Ideally I need you to go and make your friends buy it as well. And you also subscribe to Aftermath. I say this from the bottom of my heart to leave this episode Games journalism. Jesus Christ, I'm not cutting. I'm not cutting it. Games journalism genuinely made me who I am and like people like Will Porter, Steve Hogarty and Log. Of course John Blyth really changed and even Kieran Gillan, who's become more of a friend since I left. Anyway, and it's lovely to have you two here because games journalism is very meaningful and I still don't think it's where it needs to be, but I think that Aftermath's bringing it there. You all love me though, so you know where to find my shit. Please keep downloading this show. Please tell people to download it too. I need the downloads. If I don't get them, I'll die.

[Nathan Grayson]

I love you all wasting away in front of my eyes.

[Ed Zitron]

I'm literally dying.

[Geeta Jackson]

But I do love you all.

[Ed Zitron]

Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osawski. You can check out more of his music and audio [e-mail] m a t t o s o w s k-I.com you can email me at ezetteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat.where's youred app to visit the Discord and go to R betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

[Nathan Grayson]

Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. The battlefield is set, the stakes are high. The only thing standing between you and victory. Nothing Ascend to the pinnacle of gaming greatness with Lenovo Legion lap laptops, towers and the new award winning Legion Go, the world's first officially licensed handheld. Powered by SteamOS, Legion relentlessly pushes gaming technology forward with towers built for raw untamed power laptops with best in class AI tuning that sharpen your reflexes and the Legion Go, a handheld for serious gaming on the go. Stay ahead with lightning fast responsiveness on a stunning 16 inch PureSight display. Keep your cool with cold front thermal technology engineered for marathon sessions and with all day battery life. The game never stops until you say so. So check out lenovo.com legion empowering creators everywhere during tax season. Your sensitive info does a lot of traveling to places you can't control, stopping off at payroll, your accountant or tax preparer, and countless other data centers on its way to the irs.

[Geeta Jackson]

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[Nathan Grayson]

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[Geeta Jackson]

Hey, what's up y'all? This is Eric Andre. Well, I made a podcast called Bombing about absolutely tanking on stage.

[Nathan Grayson]

I tell gnarly stories and I talk.

[Geeta Jackson]

To friends about their worst moments of bombing in all sorts of ways. Bombing on stage, bombing in public, bombing in life.

[Nathan Grayson]

I want to know what's the worst.

[Geeta Jackson]

Way they've ever bombed? Or have they ever performed way too drunk or high? Or was there ever a time where they thought they were going to crush and they stunk it it up? Listen to Bombing with Eric Andre on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Bombing Bombing with Eric Andre.

[Nathan Grayson]

In a world of economic uncertainty and workplace transformation, learn to lead by example from visionary C Suite executives like Shannon Schuyler of PwC and Will Pearson of iHeartMedia. The good teacher explains the great teacher inspires.

[Ed Zitron]

Don't always leave your team to do.

[Geeta Jackson]

The work that's been the most important part of how to Lead by Example.

[Nathan Grayson]

Listen to Leading by Executives making an impact on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.