Bungie Could Be Involved with the Next Star Wars: Battlefront?

Hey everybody, welcome to Game Mess Mornings with me, Jeff Grubb, your host from GiantBomb.com.

Thank you for tuning in.

In this episode, we're going to be talking about some pretty huge Star Wars Battlefront III rumors. It's going to be a good one because we have Seth Macy on the show. Seth, the founder Macy, how are you doing?

I'm doing well. I'm ready to shift some paradigms today.

Oh, no. The paradigms? I got used to where they were. You're going to move them on me? You got to move them.

You got to disrupt. It's one of the things a founder has to do. We have to disrupt all the time or else we curl up into a husk.

You are, you're, you're, you're found in like a maniac is my understanding. Starting today, you want to tell, ooh, coffee and a donut.

Thanks, Bess.

She says it's not poison, everybody. It's not, it's just regular food, not poison.

Thanks, Bess. I appreciate it.

This is on point. Okay, so while I drink my coffee, tell everybody what you got going on.

Well, I'm just I just want to say I'm glad to see that Grub Runs on Duncan.

You know what, buddy?

We got Spidey D all over this house. We're huge fans of all the Halloween stuff.

Oh, this.

We got the spider donut yesterday. That doesn't have anything to do with why I'm here today, other than the fact that I love. I love being on the show with you. This is my third time. I want to give a shout out to all my friends out there in Giant Bomb Land.

What up to everyone? But yeah. They love you, Seth. They really do. And I love them.

And it's really nice to get messages from people being like, hey, I saw you with Grub this morning.

That was awesome. You should do that. And I'm like, yeah, I'll do it.

Anytime you ask.

Yeah, please.

Much love to the Giant Bomb family. But I'm here today to talk about... Oh, I don't have my manila envelope.

Well, that's okay.

Today is the official launch of a brand new independent video game network called X button.

Yeah. What? Honestly, what a name. So versatile. We were really impressed by that. Good work. Thank you. X button.

It's launching today, right? People have a place to go to tell them that like right up top. Where can they go?

X button show. everywhere.

Uh, that's YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, X blue sky threads. Most importantly, Patreon, patreon.com slash X button show. No hyphens in there. No, uh, camel case. You just put it in X button show one word, all jumbled together. You'll find what you need to get a part of the X button nation. I don't know if that's going to be a thing, but, uh, yeah. So, um, As many of you know, I was let go from my position at IGN.com on September 14th.

Bit of a blow.

Some of my friends were also let go, and we decided, why not just do our own thing? So Brian Altano, Max Scoville, and myself are the three co-founding members of Xbutton. We've got a show coming up every week called Xbutton Show.

Yes, I know. Branding is important. You've got to keep it across all the platforms. That's going to be our.

Weekly video game podcast where we just talk about gaming. And then we have Ninfrendo 64, which is our Nintendo exclusive podcast. Also weekly. Also coming at you whenever you want it. Well, I guess not whenever you want it. You could listen to it whenever you want, but it's going to be once a week, depending on how the Patreon goes. We've got other shows planned. I have a PC gaming exclusive show that I want to start doing called Press F.

For respect, of course.

And then, you know, we've got video content planned. But we're all going to see how it all shakes out. We're actually about an hour ahead of the official launch. So this is an exclusive. This is a GP exclusive. You guys are getting the first taste. But I do believe you can go right now to the Patreon.

It should be live. Everything's live. I'm very excited.

I'm a little frazzled this morning.

Trust me, I understand. Realize what time it was. I happened to look at Discord.

If I hadn't have looked at Discord on a whim, you would be texting me right now. Like, where the hell are you?

You fool.

You know, I I was actually completely expecting that to be the case because I remember what it was like when we were launching this thing. My mind was in 75 places and meetings with all kinds of different people in different various kinds of suits and stuff like that. So I remembered, I'm like, if Seth can do it, great.

If he can't, Jan will be ready. So we were prepared to let you do your thing. We're really happy you're here, though, because again, the people love you. I think they're loving this idea that people are, I can see the excitement for sure. Tell you what, the hints, the teases you guys have been doing, the X-Men style cards with the power levels and stuff, you guys have already nailed it before it even got started.

I was in love with that.

Thank you.

I appreciate your kindness, and I appreciate the support.

Yeah. independent now baby i can.

Swear all i want to but i'm not gonna oh.

Okay keep it in my back pocket just in case.

So when he drops it you know he's serious absolutely uh one more time the patreon and then we'll start moving on we'll talk about again before we wrap up the.

Show so people can go.

There patreon.com slash x button show there it is suck.

It Love you guys. Glad you guys were able to make this happen. I'm very excited. I will be subscribing as soon as we get done here. I cannot wait.

Thank you.

All right, let's explain ourselves. We're Giant Bomb. We just did the Bombathon, everybody. Thanks for all the support. It was really a ton of fun to get together. Out in New Jersey, shouts out to everybody who did all that work to make it happen. But really, shouts out to all of you for your support. That's what we're doing now. We've got communities. We want to leverage that. And, boy, it's nice to have one. You guys are fantastic. We love doing these shows for you. If you want to get all the goodies you get from being a supporter, go to GiantBomb.com. We have all our premium exclusive shows there, new ones in the works, including today. a new Metal Gear Scanlan Peace Rikert. Drew has returned to play through

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All right, we have a lot to get into, so let's start the morning mess with. PlayStation six is memory costs alone exceed $ 680 per console.

It is claimed.

This is from Andy Robinson at VGC Sony's PlayStation six storage and memory components alone will cost the company over $ 680 per console. It is claimed, which could mean a huge price tag for the next gen console. That's according to Kepler L2, an insider who has accurately reported on AMD hardware in the past. As we all know, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4 has used AMD hardware. Everyone expects it to use AMD hardware. Again, in fact, that's basically confirmed at this point. According to a post on the NeoGAF forum, RAM plus a NAND alone, NAND being the storage memory, will cost over $ 680 per console. For PlayStation 6, the insider adds that these components cost They previously costed far less when Sony finalized the console's designs, which probably would

have happened more than a year ago now, Seth. In recent years, the cost of memory and storage has surged, as we all know and have talked about on this show repeatedly. Due to shortages driven by demand for AI data centers across the board, consumer electronics devices have risen in price, with a PS5 now costing over 50% more.

That's $ 200 more than at launch. That PS5 Pro is even more extreme, of course. It's a global component shortage. It's affecting everything. But when I hear these numbers, Seth, I mean, I think when we were originally kind of talking about what could a PS6 cost, and the RAM crisis was getting going for real. Very early on, everyone's like, ooh, next-gen consoles could cost $ 1, 000. That could happen. I think we've moved well past that, and now it's, I think people will be surprised if it's $ 1, 200.

I think it doesn't matter.

Everyone's going to be surprised because it's going to be expensive as hell.

Yes, you're right. Huge, huge bummer.

And I think that this is a position where everyone, consumers, companies, everyone involved is in a really bad place because you can only charge so much. And if you charge more than people are willing to pay, you're not going to sell anything and you're going to be out lots of money.

I think we're in a very... Bad place right now with hardware.

And I would normally say, well, you know, maybe just make a little bit of a nice, you know, make some slim consoles. Where's the, where's our slim consoles? Well, it doesn't matter where the slim console or new slim, I should say rather newer. Right. Yes.

More updates.

Yes.

Yeah.

More, a PS one style PS, five that you can take with you in your car. That's never going to happen. And we can't do that anyway. If it were possible to shrink all these components down, there's still going to be X. I mean, the fact that our six-year-old tech is more expensive now, it is a huge colossal bummer for the next generation. And my advice to everyone is to just buckle up and get used to what you have now and try to just, it's very, very Zen.

Let's live in the moment. Let's appreciate what's happening now because of the future and.

I'm not sure is going to be great.

I will say that there is the possibility that the AI bubble collapse is a very real possibility, which means that the entire market will be saturated with more. RAM memory storage than it possibly needs and prices will plummet. That's the good news if that happens. The bad news, the entire global economy will also collapse.

So, you know. Yeah, exactly. Give and take, you know, is yeah, yin and yang.

Yeah, I see people like somehow it says it's literally months of grocery at that point. I'm like, family of four, it's like a few weeks of groceries, honestly. But still, that number adds up fast when you start talking about $ 1, 200.

And I think you're right.

It has reached, it's surpassed a threshold where it does not matter anymore. It is out of reach for so, so, so many people that it requires a complete rethinking of what video games as a consumer business looks like very, very quickly. That's going to be a requisite for these companies launching these things is they're going to have to rethink how they even present them to all of us.

And I don't know if they're prepared for that. I don't know if they have contingency plans to deal with that. Doesn't feel like it in this moment. They probably are coming up with some alternative ways of thinking about things. This always brings me to my point of, a PS six light that is a reskin PS five pro. I think I talk about it like three times a week at this point. I still think that when I look at things, that's what I see here still, uh, of like, Oh, that's going to be necessary. It also feels like the make good in some ways, um, Because there are like, what do they do with all the people? Like, these are questions that exist outside of the price point. What do you do with all these people that have disc

collections and they want to and they have bought into your ecosystem, but they have not done the thing that you're trying to take advantage of, of buying into your ecosystem on the digital store.

Side of things.

They have a physical disc collection that they want to carry forward. You have not answered the question of will this thing have a disc drive? Those questions were already going to be painful for a company like Sony to navigate. When the price surpasses that threshold of it not mattering anymore because it's so expensive, those questions, those painful questions become like gaping wounds at a certain point. And it's like, oh, these things hurt so much more and become massive talking points of why everyone says, no, I don't even care about thinking about a PS6. So they have these other fires kind of to put out while the price keeps going up and up. And it's just hard for me to imagine, Seth, as someone who's been through this so

many times, of getting excited about a console, getting my NES at five, and then being excited for my entire life about the next thing that's coming down the pike because it was so much more exciting for whatever reason. The FOMO that they sort of deployed to get me excited as a kid.

And then as a young adult and as an adult always worked.

And now it feels like that spell has been broken and i i don't like is it can they find a way to make that make sense for them that the ps5 can just be their console for a very long time or what do you think.

I think that they can if they really you know it's it's it's like magic you just have to really believe and i yeah i kind of think that they don't really have any other choice i mean nobody's gonna buy a 1200 dollar console. I mean, when the Steam Machine came out, when the price was released for that, everyone's like, why would I do that for a lower to mid-range gaming PC? That's a gaming PC versus a console.

People generally don't want to spend PC money on a console, but none of that matters anyway because PC money is crazy now. Everything is just crazy. I say, man, just sit down and enjoy your PlayStation 5 and hope against, I mean, every time I turn on my PS five, which is a launch PS five, by the way, I'm like, Ooh, I, and it has no problems, you know, knock on wood. But, uh, I'm like, if this thing breaks, I'm not going to get another PlayStation because it's so expensive now.

So yeah, yeah.

Just hold onto it and hope that maybe they do some sort of hardware revision that makes it just cheaper for them to keep this going because the next generation is just pricing everyone out. Like it, $ 1, 200 is– that's a lot of money. You could buy a lot of things for $ 1, 200.

Well, I guess not anymore. Yes, exactly.

I mean they will still have that going for them at a certain point where the comparisons are just as awful, like going on a vacation or– a handful of nights out to the movies with like a family adds up to $ 1, 200. Actually not that it doesn't take that long to get there. Like people will do that math. People though have a finite amount of money and I don't think they'll go, well, I'm just going to, no one's going to be getting a PS six on a whim that, that is going to be gone. It is going to require a massive effort from Sony to kind of convince people.

They absolutely have to get one.

And that could backfire where it's like the only card they really have to play there is exclusives, like as in not available on PS5. And then they cut off a massive audience that will not be ready to move on. So it is I do not want to be in their shoes, but at least a chunk of this is of their own making.

Well, of course, not entirely.

Meanwhile, they do have some tech maybe that could improve the PS5 for the future. We talked about Kisser not too long ago. They're QSSR upscaling tech that basically is a slimmed down version of Pisser, PSSR. They're super upscaling tech for the PS5 Pro. Kisser is basically going to take the upscaling that was already happening on PS5 in a lot of these games and just make it look significantly better. Now, They have this new patent here. I'll just kind of read it. Sony has tech that could keep the PS5 relevant. Sony has a new patent that acts as a system that predicts synthetic frames using previous rendered images, potentially incorporating recent controller input, putting that into human language.

Basically, if you press the.

Jump button, the system has a technology that can use that input to help predict what the next synthetic frame will look like. basically making it so there will be less input lag when you use frame generation. That is what this tech is there to do, which is definitely something that is a concern for people. Apparently, I tried to like double check this because I kind of just read this this morning, Seth. It might be similar to the technology used for rollback netcode. I'm skeptical of that.

I need to like look more, but I'm like, yeah, okay. On paper, as someone who's a dipshit, that sounds like that could work to me.

Yeah, why not?

But the idea basically just being, You get the benefits of frame generation.

So it's a smoother image.

Mostly you cannot tell unless you begin to look for that input lag. And then maybe some people can tell, well, this should help with that. And it's yet another small thing that might keep the PS5 around longer than they originally intended. And I keep thinking about that for sure, Seth, like, like if they keep releasing technologies like this, that incrementally improve the games we were already getting on the PS5.

I mean, that was a system that was going to be around for a long time at a certain point. It's like, man, is that thing going to be around and very viable until 2034, 2035?

Like, what do you think?

Well, I do think that the future with the cost of everything is going to be similar to the past where programmers and designers had to get more clever and with how they wrote code and you know deployed tricks for so long the cost of ram the cost of storage was just going down that efficiency in programming really wasn't a thing that people were concerned about and not because necessarily like people got sloppy but.

Just like why would you spend time and money.

Optimizing the crap out of code when it's just like well everyone has whatever you know minimum everyone has like 16 gigabytes of ram in their pc now um but i think with the costs.

Of everything, that sort of style is, it has to come back. The people have to find these tricks.

And I think that's, that's great actually, because then we can get more life out of something that.

We already have.

And in the grand scheme of things, you know, we save money. It's whatever, it's environmentally more friendly to not have to throw your PlayStation on the, on the, on the landfill. It's, I don't want to say, oh, it's a good thing, but for a bad situation, it's probably the best result that we could hope for.

Yeah, it's I mean, to me, it just speaks to like there is a concerted effort at a company like Sony to think about ways to, you know.

Download, you know, download more RAM.

Right.

Let's download some more RAM onto the PlayStation 5, for lack of a better term. And PS5 is great hardware. It has been great hardware since 2020. And that alone will keep it relevant for a very long time. PS4 was shoddy hardware by comparison. I will always stand by that assessment. PS5, very streamlined, very well designed, very well thought out. And if there is untapped potential there through these software technologies, this is something NVIDIA has been pretty good at traditionally. They're less concerned with it these days.

They have NVIDIA Reflex, which is a similar idea, but this sounds like it is going to best that in a lot of ways.

So it's like, yeah, deliver that.

And keep coming up with these tricks because if it's something that can be applied to, you know, if it can't be applied to every game with like a flip of a switch, if it can at least be applied to every game that comes out in the future and then, you know, applied to previous games through a patch and a little bit of extra effort, that will make a difference and make people feel better about a PS5. And we, you know, based on this entire conversation we've had, that might be very crucial to kind of keep people engaged in this ecosystem when they feel a little bit left out by a PS6 that they just can't even begin to afford. All right, let's shift to this next story.

Last week, Electronic Gaming Monthly released its new issue, EGM number 265.

Excuse me.

This is a part of their compendium that they did where like, hey, as part of the bonus here, one of our stretch goals is we'll do a new issue. Which was very cool.

I was so confused right now.

I was like, did I fall asleep in some Rumpelstiltskin style or excuse me, whatever his name is.

Yeah, a little bit. Yeah, it definitely has that effect for sure. Yes, I was a little bit of a part of this. I was on the review crew and I did a review for Metroid Prime 4. Alongside Dan Reichert, I can't remember who the other reviewer was, but go seek that out because that's an incredible spread of scores, everybody.

So if you get a chance, go check that out. You can see Dan's score and my score side by side. And that tells the whole tale there. You know, I think I did one for DragX Drive. God, I can't remember the name of that game and a couple others. Dan did a bunch. It was really great to be a part of it. But there is a new Quarterman, which for people who don't remember, Quarterman was their sort of news sleuth character. It was a pin name for whoever was the news editor at the time. And there is a roster of sort of rumors in there, many of which you could tell, like, oh, these things were shared with.

The magazine or whatever.

They could they found them over the summer when this thing was being put together and like Diablo four coming to switch to. Well, that we know that's true now, but there was one there at the end. And I'll just read this whole thing here. Others are also telling the queue that Disney has big plans for the Star Wars Battlefront series. recognizing how EA's Battlefront 2 has sustained popularity that other Star Wars media can only dream of, like Mandalorian and Groku, you'd think they'd greenlight Battlefront 3 toot sweet.

And you'd be wrong.

According to what your intrepid rumor monger has dung up, the suits at Lucasfilm have been aggressively deploying probe droids for a development partner, take on the task of creating a follow-up. So far, no one has fully stepped up, but yours truly is hearing two major game studios are circling the project like a couple of snow speeders led by the completely unsurprising EA Dice, who we can hope learned from their loot box lesson. Duh, we can expect that one. Here's the other one. There is another. The Q-Man hears that if the Force is not entrusted to DICE, it could land at none other than Halo, Destiny, and marathon developer Bungie.

So that's the end of the rumor there.

And it doesn't sound like the game is in the works yet, but it does sound like there are conversations at the very least about who should take it on. And Seth Jobs, I got to say, I'm encouraged by this idea here that, OK, they do sound like they want to pursue a new Star Wars Battlefront.

And why wouldn't they?

Except for the fact that they haven't up to this point, which is, I think, frustrating to a lot of fans. But God, wake up and smell the coffee there a little bit. It's time to make another one.

And.

Okay. Yeah. EA dice making another one seems like the obvious thing.

If you can make that make sense, but I bet they have a bad taste in their mouth with working from working with EA for a very long time.

So they are looking for other partners, but Bungie, what do you think?

Bungie is a weird one.

I don't know.

I have not played marathon. I have to confess, um, because it just doesn't excite me at all. In fact, um, other than kind of halo bungee doesn't die. Destiny was not anything. I, I, I've tried to force myself. Um, they, they don't excite me like they used to back in halo days. And I think this could go, well, it could go anyway, I guess.

Right. Yeah. Um, The problem here is that.

Then they are constrained with an existing IP and they have to work around all of those limitations of, you know, dealing with a licensed thing.

Right. At the same time, dude.

Yeah, I think real quick, like, that speaks to maybe where Bungie is, right? They never would have considered working in a constraining IP like.

That unless they absolutely needed to, right? Yeah. You know, we've heard those stories. I have definitely heard the stories.

And then Schreier's reporting, echoing all these things I've heard about. Oh, the number they gave for a Destiny 3, excuse me, was massive. A huge, huge number that they told Sony they would need to make that game when they kind of did the math. And it was a non-starter at Sony. They basically like laughed them out of the room. Like, we're not going to give you that amount of money to make this game. And they like looked at, okay, can we make it at different scales? But the number we kind of think we need is way up here.

And then since then, there's been a lot of other talks about what else they could do. And it's, it seems like this is one of those things of like, what else could we do? Well, maybe we can go get an IP and work in that and make a game like that. Maybe what else is what makes sense? I think, you know, to me, this sounds like, I think we've had, I had this conversation before of like, oh, but when a studio is in a position, maybe they turn to something like a Marvel franchise.

It didn't occur to me like, oh, Star Wars Battlefront could be the thing.

But it makes sense from like, oh, they're desperate and they need ground to return to. I think it stops making sense pretty quickly after that because it just feels like, oh, this smells like a zombie version of Bungie just trying to shamble along. And this is the only thing they can really do to kind of keep the doors open.

Right. Yeah. Yeah.

It's you remember like back when film photography was completely dead and all of a sudden you see Polaroid. everywhere like on they were just selling their name and it almost feels like oh we'll use the Bungie name sure Star Wars thing and it'll double the appeal to I don't know no ill will against Bungie I would love to see them make it make it make a Halo 3 again just actually just make Halo 3. Right.

Like, you wonder if that's like ever a conversation that's happened of now that they're under Sony, like maybe we go back and talk to Microsoft about working with Halo and releasing that everywhere. It felt like they were almost on a collision course to like where that would have made sense. And then since then things have exploded and that doesn't make sense anymore. But yeah, boy, that would probably be a better, you know, obviously I think Destiny 3 is the thing that most current Bungie, active Bungie fans would most want.

But yeah. Yeah.

But yeah, that, that also feels like a far flung possibility still, even despite that recent announcement from them that, that destiny is back and they're, it's an active ongoing thing.

And we're sorry to everyone for the vault and everything.

Even with that, it feels like destiny three is just not a real thing that will be happening anytime soon. At the same time, I don't think they're going to make star Wars battlefront battlefront three. No, I think, I think it'll go to dice.

Yeah. Yeah. I've, Yeah.

I mean, that's kind of the first name that's going to pop into your head when you. Once you'd be a weird one, but stranger things have happened.

We shall see. Yep, absolutely.

All right, let's go ahead and take a break. Plenty of headlines to get into after we return. When we do, we'll be talking about stuff like OCO Tay's physical shares and all that. If you want to skip out on ad messages, just go to giantbomb.com slash join to become a premium member. Ad free versions of the audio and.

Video show are there. We will be right back.

All right, we are back. And, yeah, I think Bungie could do a good job with that game. Like, their gunplay, it would feel fantastic, and they would get all the stuff right. But it's almost like that's not the point of, like, talking about that story. It just speaks to so much stuff, like, especially at Bungie, but in the industry at large. There was a time, like five years ago, Seth, where the accepted wisdom at the tops of a lot of these companies was, ah, it takes a lot of money to make a new IP game. let's even if we get the benefits of owning it it's just so much more efficient to to buy something and rent it and use that ip and that flipped really quickly and i bet the lesson learned there is we don't know actually we

got to just do what's safest in the moment and that doesn't necessarily feel like a battlefront 3 from bungie yeah all right next story here ghost of yotei's estimated physical shares gives that debate some numbers this is from ravi sinha at game Bull. It's been more than a year since Ghost of Yotei launched to critical acclaim. And while Sony hasn't updated sales figures, the open world action adventure reportedly sold 5.4 million copies. That's according to Alinea Analytics' Reese Elliott.

Shout outs to Reese.

While behind Ghost of Tsushima's almost 7 million sales, In the same period, Elliott claims its revenue is $ 407 million versus the latter's $ 418 million. Yotei costing $ 70 instead of $ 60 and seeing fewer discounts since launch are reportedly contributing factors for those games basically being even, despite there being a larger gap in sales between the two versions or the two games. There's a bit, let's see here, Ghost of Yotei, In terms of like physical versus digital here, let's see, they do have some numbers. It apparently sold 500,000 copies in this year's third quarter alone.

So it's been. continuing to sell.

As for the complete edition, almost 50,000 players have reportedly purchased the $ 15 upgrade since its launch, generating more than $ 2 million in revenue for two months, October 1st, and peaked at 327,000 copies. When it comes to the actual breakdown, though, according to Reese, who I've heard from him for sure, but I've heard from people inside the industry that Alenia has pretty accurate numbers, like it's within a very acceptable margin of error. about 35% of Ghost of Yotei sales were physical.

And that's very similar to what we heard from Wolverine.

So it sounds like for these big games, especially, the ones that you do expect to see in a store, a lot of people show up in a store and buy that game on a disc.

And it's like, no one would know this better than Sony. And so.

For me, Seth, it's hard for me to read their plan to get rid of discs in January 2020 as anything other than they specifically want to scare those people off of buying discs and want to move them over to digital. It's not about the way they framed it of barely anyone's buying discs. It is they are annoyed that these people are buying discs and want to shift them.

They want to shift the paradigm. And this is their plan to do it.

What do you think?

Yeah. I mean, I think that is a very fair assumption to make, that they do want to scare people. Because, you know, there's just nothing but money to be made with digital. After you recoup the cost of developing the game, the marketing, it's just pure profit, baby. You don't have to print these discs. You don't have to print.

The covers, the cases, rather.

There's a whole logistics behind shipping and different factories and.

All these other parts. Diesel fuel costs. Yeah. Yes. The cost of diesel fuel, which is outrageous right now.

Six dollars a gallon national average.

Yeah.

They say that the numbers support a move to all digital, but I mean, it's very cynically.

It's just it's so much more profitable for them.

To not have to support a physical medium, but also just to not have to make, to keep making parts that run, you know, a disc reader has it's mechanical parts.

It's electrical, electronic, it's mechanical. There's a little worm gear in there.

And fewer, fewer vendors are making them like it's more difficult to source them.

So, and that's annoying to them.

Yes. So, I mean, I do think that they're, They're kind of hiding behind the sales figures when the reality here is it's just, obviously, I mean, their business is a purely profit-driven thing, and they're trying to maximize profits by minimizing costs.

But just, like, say that. Just be like, hey, guys, you know what they could do? Oh, my God.

Here's some free marketing advice, Sony. Just be like, hey, guys, if we go to all digital, your next console will be cheaper. Remember how consoles are super expensive now? Well, we could make them cheaper for you. And everyone would be like, holy fuck, that's great. I'm so tired of everything being expensive.

But instead.

They're making everyone really, really mad about it.

And, you know, that's how it is. Yep.

Like, oh, digital games will never be more than $ 50 or something like that. And it's like, no, the cat's out of the bag with all that. We know that already. They're never going to do that. In fact, we know they are shifting because they want to make more and more money from the same people.

They have told us that.

They have said, you suckers who we already have by the balls, we are going to squeeze you for more money than ever before. That is our financial plan that we are saying to the face of our investors every quarter.

We are saying that repeatedly.

And so it's just hard not to feel like an ATM machine to these people. And and every decision sort of backs that up because it's like, oh, no, they are making a lot of money from people who like to go to stores and buy games right now.

They're making a lot of money from these people. It's not enough to them.

And they found a way to make even more from them or what they believe will make even more because they think a lot of these people will shift. And I think a lot will. But man, the backlash, I think, has been way louder than they ever anticipated.

And it doesn't.

It doesn't take much to shift from one of those Call of Duty, I'm not going to play Call of Duty because there's no server images from that Steam group 25 years ago, whatever it was, where it's like, oh, and then you see everybody.

Playing Call of Duty.

Yeah, that happens because the game comes out and it's basically the same as it ever was and they're all going to buy it. But if that Call of Duty game costs $ 30, Like, if the price on that was twice as much as the one before, that group would have looked very different, I think. And that's, I think, the situation that they do find themselves in, where they have people who are angry about this, are getting a lot of excuses to really stick to their guns. And that is going to be something Sony is going to have to deal with. And meanwhile, Ghost of Yotei is a game where it's like, yeah, it's not like it was...

exploding from one entry to the next, it's staying about even because the audience that they're selling to is about even. They can't afford to really shed any of that audience because their costs are going up to make these games regardless.

Of whether they do physical or digital.

It just keeps going up and up and up and they can make all the claims they want about how AI is going to make this all But it doesn't like at the very least, everyone's going to have access to those tools. So it's going to make it cheaper for everybody.

Right.

So you're going to have to compete in other ways to stay ahead of the crowd, which goes right back to spending more money than anyone else. So your costs are just going to keep going up. You can't afford to shed a single person from your ecosystem. And they seem to be kind of shaking the tree a little bit.

And we're all kind of dangling on and be like, wait, why am I hanging on to this? I was having more fun before. I will just go find another tree to hang on to. So we'll see. I mean, it is like this is going to be the most interesting transition in the history of gaming in terms of the from the business side and then being able to navigate it from our side of being interested in what they are delivering. It could be the least it could be the lowest could be my my hype meter. My game pro face is like I'm not a five out of five for sure.

I'm somewhere much below that.

So this is going to be something I'm going to be paying attention to in an academic way. And that doesn't get me to open my wallet all that fast.

No, not, not particularly. I have to wonder like how people who aren't really in the gaming sort of like culture, you know, just like a mom and dad that they're going to go in to buy.

Their kid a game. And they're going to be like, what do you mean?

I have to go online to buy this game. And then like, well, you could buy this, whatever, whatever, xbox phoenix console and they still sell discs or you know buy the switch three it's a.

Or um it's a pill that you take i mean will they still sell uh codes and boxes or we'll just be like game key cards or like.

That's the other thing that doesn't like, I don't understand because the sort of way that they're getting around, not putting, you know, like Grand Theft Auto is just going to be a code in a box.

Well, they still have the box and you still have to print it. You still have to ship all these boxes.

You've cut out one part of it, but then there's still the cost saving. Isn't completely, you know, you've taken one part of it away, but I don't know.

What do I know?

Nothing, nothing about that.

Yeah, I would imagine the disc part is still the most complicated part of that logistical chain as opposed to the plastic box and the inserts or whatever.

But still, it is frustrating, especially when they see these numbers.

35% of the audience for your major games is nothing to sneeze at.

It is just millions of people.

And to disrupt the way that they are getting things, to get a 5%, Boost your margins feels like a mistake, and it feels like we're.

Seeing that play out right now.

Meanwhile, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4, a game that I am just not really paying attention to. I saw someone post that when some executive at Activision was like, oh, you know, with all due respect to Ocarina of Time, the two big boys this year are Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty.

And I'd say, okay.

And then someone's like, yeah, that's the most, oh, bro thinks he's on the team message I've ever seen. And both are a little bit true. Obviously, Call of Duty is going to be the number two best-selling game of the year. That is true. Ocarina of Time is going to be massive, though. You just can feel it. It is like thick in the air with the excitement for that game. Regardless, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4, the campaign playable now in advanced access.

A lot of people are playing it. Seems like it's deliberate.

A A pretty decent to very good campaign. A lot of people are giving it positive reviews on Steam. I'll read some of the Steam reviews here. Don't know how they effing did it, but they did. Campaign was actually longer than three hours. Campaign actually had some well-paced writing. Dialogue is believable. Fun set pieces. Great memorable experience. They got rid of the stupid open world missions, although there's one that you can kind of skip through. and they pulled out all the stops without spoiling. There is no safe writing here. Okay, it's not woke, Seth. Another review here.

Best campaign in a long time, 10 out of 10. Seems the optimization has been a lot better for the graphics this year, and the story was outstanding. That is something you're hearing a lot. The game looks very, very nice. Call of Duty is stupid. Let's get that out of the way. This one is the best written Call of Duty campaigns in a long time. It's still stupid, but it's actually engaging throughout, and it's constantly doing something fun.

There are a couple of meh missions, but.

It's still way fewer than I'd expect from a Call of Duty.

Is it worth $ 70 alone? No. Did I pay $ 70 for it? Yes. Am I stupid? Huh.

So those are the three reviews I selected here. There's a lot like this. I don't know how much a Call of Duty campaign moves any sort of needle for anyone, but I'm a little bit encouraged by the idea that They delivered one that sounds like it's of some quality. And do they need to do that? I don't know if they do. So the fact that they did is somewhat nice.

I don't know. How do you feel about it?

Yeah, I have not played a Call of Duty campaign since Modern Warfare. Like on 360, because I just don't. That's not why I play.

Call of Duty. I play Call of Duty for multiplayer. And that's what I used. I used to review the multiplayer every year. I remember Cold War. was the last one where I remember.

People being like, Oh, this campaign rules actually.

Um, didn't play that one either, but I have.

I cannot in recent times, remember people just being so almost universally like hyped on a call of duty campaign. Like all that I'm seeing, and this might be confirmation bias. The algorithm might be spiking me with like truth serum that I'm not ready to see. But like, I'm a lot of people are like, saying basically like, oh, actually, this rules. This campaign was really good. And I don't...

You know, that's not going to really bleed through to the multiplayer because the multiplayer is like a whole different animal. But, I mean, if that gets more people playing, you know, poor Call of Duty. It's just struggling out there.

It just needs all the help.

Finally, a good day for Call of Duty. Yeah, it's... Yeah, go ahead. No, I'm just going to say, like, I'm actually.

considering when i finally do get call of duty because i'm going to get call of duty um i am going to probably play the campaign right now so yeah i'm considering i you know a big part of that is uh i plan to get it on switch and i just want to.

See what that's like uh which is interesting right.

That it's good on switch um i'm hoping the x button has some things to say about the switch to edition this is the first time since the wii u the call of duty has been Yes. On a Nintendo console.

I wonder what Nintendo 64 has to say, yeah.

You're going to have to go to patreon.com slash xbuttonshow to find out. But, I mean, I'm going to play it on PC. I only play shooters on PC. I can't play with a controller anymore. I've just lost all that ability.

I understand.

Mike was playing Gears of War with the mouse and keyboard when we played the other day, and I was about to make fun of him for that. And then I found myself reaching for the mouse and keyboard when we played together.

I say, oh, yeah, it's happened to me, too. It's just why wouldn't I? It's right there. And mouse is better. It just is. So it's so much better. Yep.

Uh, but I, I'm going to try this game out on, on the switch. I'm very curious. I also have heard good things. So yeah, I want to play the multiplayer on there as well and see what that's like. If it just delivers like 75% of the experience, which is actually like, you know, a huge gap actually, but it's handheld for me.

That is such a big boon to that.

I'm not going to play a lot of it just because there's so many other games to play, but I'll play some of it.

Before anybody, before anybody says anything in the comments.

Yes.

Switch 2 has mouse controls, but I don't know if it has mouse controls for Call of Duty 4.

I'm sure it does. I'm not going to be using the mouse controls. No. I'm just not going to be doing that. That's not happening.

As I always like to point out, Microsoft is targeted by the BDS boycott still.

Activision is part of Microsoft. So, yeah.

Xbox specifically, not even Microsoft. All right, let's see here. Shrek 2 Remastered leaks through Microsoft Store. This is from Sal Romano at Gamatsu. A Microsoft Store page for the unannounced Shrek 2 Remaster developed by Aspyr has gone live. The game is likely meant to be officially announced during the ID at Xbox Showcase, which is supposed to happen tomorrow, as Shrek appears briefly in the teaser trailer. News of a Shrek 2 Remaster first surfaced during a large-scale Steam Achievements leak in September.

Um, Seth, is it, is it Shrek time? Is it time to return to Shrek too?

I think we should, uh, we should take this chance to get Shrek-cellent.

And, uh, yeah.

I'm, uh, I'm, I'm sure I'm Shrek. I'm ready to Shrek with all my friends out there. Uh, yeah, I look, this is a weird one. Aspire though, I guess they basically ran out of Star Wars games. They, that's what they were doing previously. It's like remastering Star Wars games. Uh, why not turn their powers to this as well?

Yeah, I actually, Many years ago, probably 10 years ago now, I thought it'd be funny to buy every Shrek game for the Nintendo DS, and it cost me a total of like.

$ 8 to get all of them. How many were there?

There were seven that I was able to find. One of them, which, look, I don't know where they are. They're scattered to the wind now. They're in this place somewhere. One of them was surprisingly fun. I just don't remember which one it was. And many of them were really just shovelware.

That's how it always goes.

There's like, you know, for those kinds of licenses, there's one that's like, wait, this one's not that bad. And then the rest are true nightmares that will all eventually be on Blank Club for sure.

All right.

Nintendo Switch 2 game key cards for Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer are reportedly unplayable due to missing download. This is from Mohamed Ali Bari at Twisted Voxel. Mohamed writes, Nintendo Switch 2 game key cards for Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer are currently unplayable due to the download reportedly being missing.

In a post on Reddit, a user reported encountering an error code when attempting to play the Nintendo Switch 2 version of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer using its physical game key card. The error appears to be associated with the game not yet being uploaded to the Nintendo eShop servers. Despite releasing October 16th, 2026, the Nintendo eShop listing for the Switch 2 version shows a download size of just 82 megabytes. In comparison, the Nintendo Switch version is listed at approximately 2 gigabytes, while the Xbox version requires 6.35 gigabytes.

So sounds like there was some placeholder there instead.

And that's still what's there as people went to go insert the game key card into their thing, which, you know, is like.

That's the nightmare scenario, right?

Of what people have been pointed to as one of the issues with game key cards, which have certainly, I think, risen in a lot of people's estimation after the PlayStation getting rid of discs news. Everyone's like, well, at least game key cards, blah, blah, blah. There's a lot of sort of like, okay, I'm ready to compromise to a certain extent. But in the meantime, everyone's like, well, you know, until they turn off the servers or the game's not available for whatever reason. And then this becomes a useless piece of plastic, which we know is always true. To see it happen to a game that just released and wasn't ready, it just speaks to the fears there, I think.

That said, this is a game mill game, which I think everyone will go, oh yeah, game mill.

Yeah, my theory behind this is that they were caught, the publisher was caught completely surprised by the fact that people bought this game and wanted to play it.

It's clearly a money laundering scheme, right? That's all this can be.

I'm thinking right now they're, they're desperately making a video game. Right.

They've got clawed open. They're doing the prompts. They'll get something out there.

Yeah. Uh, it is a producer's style scheme where they could make money by losing money, I think. Um, but shout out to the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, uh, community out there. You guys have suffered long enough.

I think, uh, I think I want to say Louis Garcia in our community, uh, sent us a bunch of, uh, Christmas presents, uh, really blightsmas presents. Um, They sent the Blight Club members a bunch of presents.

I opened mine up.

One of them was the Switch One version of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. So I have that sitting around here somewhere, and I think that'll still work. I'll play that at some point. Maybe we can make that, make that a, yeah, right.

True. I'm wiping my brow. I was concerned there for a second. All right. A couple more stories here.

Soros is Zenith update is now available from Sal Romano and Gamatsu publisher, Sony interactive entertainment and developer house. Mark has released the Zenith update for fast paced cinematic action game Soros, which adds new play, new replayable game modes and various new visual and control options for greater accessibility and Some of those options are like slow game speed, which enables you to toggle slowing down the game speed when it gets too fast, if that will help people have more accessibility for the game. There's an auto fire, so you don't have to strain your finger. when, uh, basically whenever you point at an enemy, the game will automatically fire. Um, and then there's, you know, those, the,

the replayable modes, uh, let's see the Zenith update for Sorrows focuses on adding the replayability. There's the Overlord Rush mode, a boss rush training simulation featuring global weapon filtered leaderboards broken down into Incursion, Ascension, and an eight boss gauntlet named Totality. Um, I liked this game quite a bit. Didn't, like, love it. Never really fell in love with it, but I had a really good time with it. Don't know if I'm going to go back to it, but this is the exact kind of thing.

When I look at Housemarque.

Oh, they're good at delivering these sorts of updates that make their game feel even more full and vibrant over time.

Any chance you'll go back and check this out?

No, because I didn't check it out in the first place.

It didn't look like a Seth Macy kind of game. I'm sorry. No shade. It's not a dad game.

Yeah, this is not a PC, like, get out your big weird controller and start playing it.

Yeah.

Exactly. There's no setup or takedown involved.

If it doesn't take me 20 to 30 minutes to put all my controllers in.

Place, I'm not really that interested. That's where the joy comes from. Let's be real here. Absolutely. Yeah.

I mean, Housemarque is one of those studios, though, that I always pull for. I love their arcade sensibilities. So I hope this is going to find even more of an audience because it seems like that game did all right, but maybe didn't like blow up in any real way.

So.

Yeah, I'm into it and hope they can deliver on this. And then, let's see here, last story. I think this happened while we were gone, everybody, we're doing the Bombathon, but Sega pulls Total War Shogun 2 Complete Edition from store over bugs and obvious AI art. This is from Jordan Midler at VGC. Yes, Sega and Creative Assembly have announced that Total War Shogun 2 Complete Edition is being removed from sale following player complaints over performance issues, bugs, and and AI upscaled graphics. Total War Shogun 2 Complete Edition was released on October 13th. The game, which was already facing player backlash due to the original 2011 release being pulled from sale, has now been pulled from sale itself.

The original 2011 is being reinstated by Sega and Creative Assembly. Now they're going to identify the cause of the problems. Basically, an image was going around of a samurai character from the original game upscaled using some AI technique and his face was like no longer a face. Like in the original, it was like, there was, you could see like a mustache and you know, if it was going through a lower resolution, it's like.

Okay, you can kind of see the face in here.

The AI saw it as like this smooth, like wood carved thing that was like a weird triangular notch in it and, and removed all the facial features. And it was like, Oh, this thing did not understand what it.

Was looking at. It's like that.

Um, the meme of Obama being upscaled into a white guy. It was like one of those things happened here. Uh, and that's the, like what they did across the entire game. And it was very frustrating to people, especially again, because they took down the original version.

Um, it feels like we're going to get this a lot.

And it's like, I keep hearing that these tools are ready to make entire games, Seth. It's, it's just like, you're going to completely replace everything. Epic is moving entirely to workflows involving these sorts of tools.

Why do they keep making these mistakes? If that's the case.

Just, I think laziness, this is a opportunity to point out like designer laziness. I think they, maybe people won't notice, or maybe they think that I don't know what they think. I, you know, if you have to copy paste a thousand lines of code and you can just tell an AI to do that, that's great.

But what AI is not good at is the rest of the.

Stuff, the creative stuff, the interesting stuff. I saw a really cool post yesterday that was talking about how like AI, these AI games that you do see sort of people showing off, like the visuals are fantastic, but the gameplay is garbage.

And then they showed Galactic Racers, like test footage.

Of their game is running amazingly well, but it's just like, like a rectangle instead of a pod racer because they got the game down pat.

Yes.

And then they figured out now we'll make it look amazing.

And you know, so it's like, like there is, um, I, maybe it's a, I want to say respawn that like really developed their method. And the method was you have a certain amount of time to make a game. And half of that time is going to be completely dedicated to prototyping. And that just means like, like testing all these different ideas out, gameplay mechanics, going back to Miyamoto freaking out about getting the feel of Mario and Mario 64 feeling exactly right before they did anything else. And it's like, yeah, we're going to really dedicate ourselves to an entire, like half of the development time just to that.

And then once we feel very, very good about that, we will take the best of the best stuff, spend the rest of the time refining that while building a game around it. And it's just like, yeah, that's the shit that's led to all of my favorite games. And if this replacement method is to bypass all of that work, it sounds incompatible with what I enjoy.

About the hobby.

So, yeah, this is obviously just a very small example of that where it's like even like just you know, it is the switch of it's cheaper and faster. So they did it. And, uh, the shit that came out on the other side was unacceptable and they didn't recognize that.

And what does that say about them?

If, uh, you know, how you do one little part of the development is how you do, excuse me, is how it like reveals how you care about every part of it. And if this is how you felt about that one little image of the samurai, that is a, you know, a couple of pixels tall, That says a lot to me still. And I think it says a lot to the people who buy these games. You know, we're spending our money on it. We want to feel like we're spending our money on true human artwork.

All right.

That does it for the headlines. Let's start wrapping this thing up. God, I don't think we had a poll question because I think the last show we did was.

On that Friday.

There was a bomb 12, but we'll just we'll wrap that bomb 12 into this Friday show. So continue to vote on that one. Everybody will get that to that at the end of this week. Let's see here. I guess let's do this then. I have a new poll question before we get to that, though. Seth, one more time. Tell people where they can find you, what you have going on. Let's get let's get the whole thing again.

I'll tell you what, one of the things I forgot to mention was X button is also on Twitch. And right after I'm done here, uh, we're going to be on twitch.tv slash X button show. We've already, thanks. And I have to, this is the bomb community. We're already at $ 250 on our Patreon. Um, and we haven't even officially announced yet.

Hell yes. All right. Well done to.

Everyone watching other than that. X button show everywhere. Patreon.com slash X button show. X button show YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Blue Sky, Threads, Friendster. We're going to start a BBS on my Commodore 64. Maybe, probably not, but X button show. It is a new independent podcast network. Myself, Max Scoville, Brian Altono, three of your favorite people from that big website who are now completely independent.

We're doing our own thing.

And we have two new shows, X button show, video game, X button, video game podcast, and Ninfrendo 64, two weekly game video game shows. And we're going to add more, depending on how things go. And I am very excited.

Oh my God. I am going to go sign up right now. Let's see here.

Patreon.com slash X button show. Um, again, on my sign into my account. Fantastic.

Uh, I'm, I'm so happy that you guys are doing this. Uh, yeah, really, really. I mean, it is, uh, community focus is the only way to do it right now.

And, um, you guys have your own awesome community and the, I know they're going to show up for you. And by the end of the day, you guys are going to see that of course.

So, Yep.

Looking forward to following along. Like I said, I'm going to subscribe and I'm going to be listening. So well done to all of you guys. And again, looking forward to following. All right. New poll question for you. We'll get to this on Wednesday's show. What do you want from a Star Wars battlefront, a new Star Wars battlefront?

a new one from EA Dice, a new one from Bungie, a new one from a different team, or you do not want one.

Those are your options.

We'll get the results, like I said, on Wednesday's Game Mess Mornings here on Giant Bomb. Speaking of Giant Bomb, we're taking things a little bit easy today after the Bombathon. We'll just send you over to the X-Button Show. We're going to do some meetings. Dan's not feeling well. We're just going to recover and stuff like that. So we'll see you for the Bombcast tomorrow. Then on Wednesday, we'll have the return of Blight Club. There's cool stuff happening on the website. Like I said, you know, Metal Gear Scanlan.

Also, there is the Premium.

Blight with Jan Crochoa playing the Crow City of Angels for PS1, everybody.

Go sign up to check that out.

He looks incredible. So lots of cool stuff happening. Go check that out, please. And we'll be doing cool stuff all this week. We're going to go figure it out right now, in fact.

All right.

I think with all of that out of the way, Seth, thank you so much for hanging out with me today and talking about video games, man.

I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Always a pleasure.

And we'll have to have you on X button sometime.

Please. Would love it. Absolutely. I think everyone at Giant Bomb would love to come hang out with you guys. Hell yeah. We'll do some stuff together. That would be fantastic. All right.

Thank you all for watching and listening. You are the best audience in gaming. Until next time, have a good one. Take care of yourself and goodbye.

Bungie Could Be Involved with the Next Star Wars: Battlefront?

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