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Episode 139 - Waffles!

Eclectic Gamers Podcast·podcast_episode·46m 8s·analyzed·Apr 18, 2021
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.035

TL;DR

Pinball stagnation amid industry growth claims; Spooky expands, switches boards; gaming news on Square, LOTR MMO, Twitch bots.

Summary

Tony and Dennis discuss pinball's stagnation despite industry claims of resurgence, highlighting supply issues, lack of new announcements, and playfield problems. They cover Spooky Pinball facility expansion, board set changes away from P3 Rock, and Multimorphic's 15-ball Heist update. The conversation shifts to video games, including Square Enix acquisition rumors, Amazon's Lord of the Rings MMO cancellation, and Twitch's bot purge affecting major streamers like xQc.

Key Claims

  • Pinball hobby feels frozen despite claims of resurgence; distributors say pinball is popular but no one can get games except Stern

    high confidence · Dennis reports feedback from distributors and collectors indicating disconnect between claimed industry growth and actual product availability

  • Spooky Pinball is moving to a larger facility in Wisconsin to increase production capabilities

    high confidence · Direct announcement by Spooky; Dennis confirms this is significant news in a slow news cycle

  • Spooky is switching from P3 Rock boards to a new custom board set designed by Ben Heck

    high confidence · Dennis heard interview with Ben Heck confirming Spooky's board set switch; motivated by cost concerns

  • Spooky's coding team has struggled with P3 Rock systems, with reported issues in games like Alice Cooper's Nightmare Castle

    medium confidence · Dennis spoke to someone with P3 Rock homebrew experience who attributed problems to Spooky's coding team rather than hardware

  • Multimorphic board sales to Spooky, Haggis, and American Pinball are significant income; Spooky departure could pressure company finances

    medium confidence · Dennis's analysis of Multimorphic's business model; speculation about future financial impact

  • Spooky announced adoption of Molex connectors instead of hot glue for board connections

    high confidence · Direct announcement; Dennis calls it 'finally' and confirms he observed hot glue issue on Total Nuclear Annihilation and TNA

  • Multimorphic announced 15-ball multiball update for Heist to surpass Apollo 13's 13-ball record

    high confidence · Direct announcement noted by Dennis; characterized as gimmicky and pursuit of headline rather than gameplay improvement

  • Original themed pinball games don't sell compared to licensed IP; licenses are the only way to achieve significant sales

    high confidence · Dennis and Tony consensus opinion based on market trends; supported by industry observation

Notable Quotes

  • “This whole hobby feels like it's frozen in carbonite.”

    Tony @ ~07:30 — Encapsulates community sentiment about pinball's stagnation despite claimed resurgence

  • “Everyone tells me, all the distributors, other hobbyists, other collectors, other players, they're all saying pinball's in the resurgence. Pinball's never been as popular as it is right now... and then it's like, no one's getting any games.”

    Dennis @ ~08:00 — Highlights disconnect between industry narrative and consumer reality

  • “I'm personally, I'm glad that they're increasing their production capabilities because I felt that all the signs were there that they needed to. I still have to go back, you know, pandemic and all the slow shipping aside. I think most human beings don't feel like they should have to preorder and wait 18 months to get something.”

    Dennis @ ~12:30 — Identifies key market frustration: 18-month wait times for pre-orders

  • “It looks really amateur so I'm glad they're finally going with a connector. I don't know why it took them this long to go to a serious connector that can withstand shaking and movement.”

    Dennis @ ~14:45 — Confirms quality-of-life improvement in Spooky's manufacturing process

  • “With $50,000? Yeah. I can think of enough other machines that I'd load up first... I still wouldn't have a P3.”

    Dennis @ ~28:00 — Critical assessment of P3 platform desirability despite personal praise for its innovation

  • “Avengers is the 15-ball multi-ball of Square Enix. It is, and they just keep throwing more and more stuff at it, and it's like they hope that suddenly it's going to become something, and I don't think it ever is.”

    Tony @ ~50:00 — Uses Multimorphic/Heist analogy to criticize Square Enix's approach to failing IP

  • “If you guys refuse to ever say anything negative and you only say positive things you actually hurt the company you're actually hurting sales because it feels so artificial that something could be that good that there's not a single negative to ever bring up.”

Entities

Spooky PinballcompanyMultimorphiccompanyStern PinballcompanyBen HeckpersonDennispersonTonypersonCharliepersonAmerican PinballcompanyCGC (Chicago Gaming Company)company

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: P3 platform modular design creates secondary market friction; players unable to sell individual modules independently, reducing upgrade flexibility

    high · Dennis: 'if you had a P3, Tony, you couldn't sell a module to me because I'd need a whole P3 to play it'; limits used market liquidity

  • ?

    business_signal: Spooky Pinball expanding production facility in Wisconsin; indicates growth trajectory and production capacity constraints

    high · Direct announcement; Dennis notes this is significant news in otherwise quiet cycle

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: P3 platform fanboys criticized for uncritical support that harms rather than helps manufacturer; artificial positivity damages credibility

    high · Dennis: 'when you guys refuse to ever say anything negative... you actually hurt the company... because it feels so artificial'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Multimorphic's 15-ball Heist update characterized as gimmick-driven headline-seeking rather than gameplay-focused development; industry perception issue

    high · Dennis: 'This is not going to sell any P3s or heist modules... It feels like reaching for a headline to try and stay relevant'

  • $

    market_signal: Massive Twitch bot follower fraud exposed; major streamers inflated follower counts by millions (xQc: 2.6M, Soda Poppin: 3.3M)

    high · Twitch announcement of 7.5M bot removal; xQc 8M→5.5M, Soda Poppin 6.5M→3.3M

  • $

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.138

0:00
Welcome to the Collective Gamers Podcast. Today is Sunday, April 18th. This is episode 139. I'm Tony. I'm Dennis. You like that big pause I put in there for no reason at all? That pause might get cut down. Sometimes I'm like that when I do the edits. You just like to create challenges for me. I just throw in the halfway to William Shatner discussion. I just don't know what is happening in Pimble today. Do you think most people listen to us at 2X?
0:53
Honestly, probably. I've never listened to us at 2x i think someone told me and i i'm probably going to misquote but i think he said he listened to us at 3x wow i've been i've listened to a lot of podcasts at one and a half and 2x i've never listened to 3x no i think the furthest i've pushed anyone is if you are a southern podcast i can probably push you to 2.5 because y'all talk slow but right other than that most of the time i'm at 1.5 to 2 anyway whoever i mean whatever speed it was the same person at one point had uh sent me a correction on something I had said, except I had not said it wrong. It played so fast, they didn't hear that I had said it right. Oh, well, I mean, that's a plus. I was just like, burn. Pay attention. I can't imagine listening to anything at 3x. Some of the stuff I've listened to at 2x is barely intelligible. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty scary. But what isn't scary, perhaps, is what's happened over the last couple weeks. Have non-scary things happened for you? No. No, not at all. I have played almost until yesterday, literally yesterday, I've played like zero video games in the last two weeks. Wow. And then yesterday I installed Dragon Quest XI, and I started it up and got through the opening animatic, and then I had to go take care of some stuff so I shut it down without really playing and then yesterday I fired up Wasteland 3 and started playing through Wasteland 3 but it's just been things have been crazy and between track and work and just family stuff I've not really played anything I've just watched a few shows and read and done actual stuff stuff well but at least you've stayed busy I have definitely stayed busy that's for sure well I last night finished the main story in Assassin's Creed Odyssey finally so you've been playing that for quite a while I have. I usually only play it like Friday through Sunday. But obviously it's stretched out and consumed a lot of time. I've done a lot of side quests, not all of them. Right now, actually just before we started recording, I was in the process of cleaning up some stuff. There were still some, I guess, what weren't the main story but were major plot threads to the game. So I've wrapped those up. And I think I'm just cleaning up some arena battles right now to, I think, in theory, hopefully get rewarded with an achievement if I can win them all. And I'm so well geared at this point. I think I shouldn't have too much of a hard time achieving that. And then I will move on to something else I haven't decided yet, but I've got more games in the pile, so I'm not worried. I might go back to Ghost Recon. I haven't decided. and then separate from that a little bit after the last episode or actually around the time we did the last episode i had already technically started a youtube channel up to do the watch collecting hobby which while i don't buy a lot i have fallen down the rabbit hole of trying to understand watch manufacturing and what goes into all of that and as was the case with pinball it's like oh well i think i would like to do content creation as a motivating factor to help me learn more and so I have a link in the show notes if anyone wants to see the YouTube channel but that way I can keep it segregated from my gaming stuff because it doesn't belong in gaming at all and it's it's so weird for me because it's like back when we started the podcast it's like how do you how do you grow a channel and I've never done YouTube so how do you do YouTube and hey look at all the stuff I don't know because not to sound snooty but I'm kind of at the point where there just feels like there's nothing left for me to learn about pinball from like a historical perspective everything i want to know about pinball historically at this point is too hard to learn like i would love to know more about playmatic and their designers and how they you know the spanish manufacturers and i just can't find the information anywhere and i can't be flying out to spain and do interviews and stuff so this is just it's like it's at the point where okay let's move into a hobby where there have been hundreds of manufacturers and see if that can keep me busy i think i can i believe in them at least for a little while and it gives you something to uh collect because there's no new pinball machines to collect oh gosh yeah of course you could always buy used but that's true for watches and anything i suppose there's always a vintage always a vintage category or and then actually the nice thing about working on like doing content is it keeps me busy so i don't look to spend money buying things because honestly i don't need a whole bunch of watches i have like eight as it is i don't really need a ton i mean i i'd be fine with more but i don't you know at some stage it's like okay let's uh let's keep things a little sane here so this is an interesting thing and i i think what what appeals to me about it other than i've always worn watches since i was a little kid is just you know there's a mechanical nature to them which is part of the attraction of pinball. I'm sure there's a lot of overlap with those two audiences for obvious reasons. Well, that's true for a lot of things. Same for a lot of people who are gearheads, into just how the engines and all that integrate, even if they're not mechanics and work on them. They just find it fascinating. Yeah, no, it's a pretty common interest. Well, let's go back to our first love, pinball, because there's barely any news. As you noted, we can't get any new games. This whole hobby feels like it's frozen in carbonite. Yeah, it's been weird. At first, I thought things were going okay. We went through 2020 itself with some good stuff and some interesting, and then it just kind of fell apart. Yeah, I mean, everyone tells me, all the distributors, other hobbyists, other collectors, other players, they're all saying pinball's in the resurgence. Pinball's never been as popular as it is right now. the pandemic only helped pinball. And then it's like, no one's getting any games, except I guess Stern's still turning things out. There's play field issues all over the place. There are companies that are teasing announcements, but not doing announcements. It's like everyone, the mum's the word. We're not hearing anything. We're at a point now where everyone's like, why hasn't Stern announced their next game? Where's CGC's next game? Where's American Pinball's next game? What in the world is going on with Deep Root Pinball?

  • xQc lost 2.6 million followers (from 8+ million to 5.5 million) due to Twitch bot purge

    high confidence · Twitch announced bot detection; specific follower counts cited by Tony

  • Twitch's machine learning algorithm detected and removed 7.5 million bot accounts

    high confidence · Official Twitch announcement cited by Tony

    • Dennis @ ~26:00 — Critique of uncritical P3 fanboy culture; argues that zealotry damages rather than helps manufacturers

  • “He went from over 8 million to 5.5... Soda Poppin... lost half of his followers. He went from 6.5 million to 3.3.”

    Tony @ ~57:30 — Demonstrates scale of Twitch bot follower fraud among top streamers

    • Deep Root Pinballcompany
    Haggis Pinballcompany
    xQcperson
    Soda Poppinperson
    Twitchcompany
    Square Enixcompany
    Amazoncompany
    Total Nuclear Annihilationgame
    TNAgame
    Alice Cooper's Nightmare Castlegame
    Heistgame

    market_signal: Licensed IP essential for pinball sales; original themes proven non-competitive despite community enthusiasm

    high · Dennis and Tony consensus: 'original themes... never going to get the kind of sales a license theme is. It's just not going to happen'

  • $

    market_signal: Pinball market experiencing severe product availability crisis despite industry claims of resurgence; multiple manufacturers silent on new announcements while Stern continues production

    high · Dennis: 'everyone tells me pinball's in the resurgence... and then it's like, no one's getting any games, except I guess Stern's still turning things out'

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Potential impact on Multimorphic from loss of Spooky as major board client; company may need to raise prices or find alternative revenue

    medium · Dennis analysis: 'if Spooky's no longer a client for them moving forward is that going to put a lot of pressure on Multimorphic'

  • ?

    product_strategy: 18-month pre-order wait times cited as unacceptable market friction

    high · Dennis: 'I think most human beings don't feel like they should have to preorder and wait 18 months to get something'

  • ?

    product_concern: Spooky's P3 Rock platform struggles attributed to coding team rather than hardware; suggests technical debt and skill gaps

    medium · Dennis spoke to P3 homebrew developer who identified Spooky's coding team as source of problems (e.g., Alice Cooper memory leaks)

  • ?

    product_concern: Widespread playfield issues reported across multiple manufacturers; Spooky addressing connector reliability through Molex adoption

    high · Dennis: 'There are play field issues all over the place'; confirmed hot glue connector problems on TNA

  • ?

    technology_signal: Spooky Pinball switching from Multimorphic P3 Rock boards to custom Ben Heck-designed board set; represents significant platform ecosystem disruption

    high · Dennis heard Ben Heck interview; Spooky motivated by cost; board set will be third-party available

    • 7:43
    And I only have news on one company And it wasn't any of those. Spooky. So Spooky Pinball has announced that they are moving to another larger facility because they are planning to increase their production capabilities. Didn't they just build a place? It felt like it was only yesterday that they built a place, but they're building another place because let's have more places. I mean, I guess as off air, as you were saying, it is Wisconsin. It's probably pretty cheap to build. So I guess that makes sense. I'm personally, I'm glad that they're increasing their production capabilities because I felt that all the signs were there that they needed to. I still have to go back, you know, pandemic and all the slow shipping aside. I think most human beings don't feel like they should have to preorder and wait 18 months to get something.
    8:37
    Right. Which is potentially how long you might have had to end up waiting to get Rick and Morty. So I'm glad that they're doing this. And it's interesting that it seems like they just throw up a whole new building every single time that they want to do that. But again, if the cost is the way that it is, and that's how Charlie likes to operate in terms of being absolutely positively sure that his company is ready to do that next step and do it. I do kind of wonder how long he can stay in that town if he keeps growing. I mean, it's a really small town, but that's a spooky problem, not a dentist problem. So I only quasi-wonder. It doesn't really impact me.
    9:15
    Related to this were a couple of other announcements, not directly related to the build, but related to their future plans. One is, and I thought this is really exciting, they're finally going to adopt doing Molex connectors instead of the hot glue gun approach to keep all the connections in their games. I can say finally, thank you. I actually haven't I didn't have a problem with connectors popping loose on my total nuclear annihilation but it is interesting to lift a play field and it looked like mozzarella cheese is strung everywhere I had heard it was like that and then when I got my TNA and I'm like no it's real they really do use a lot of hot glue in these things it looks really amateur so I'm glad they're finally going with a connector. I don't know why it took them this long to go to a serious connector that can withstand shaking and movement. Why would you need to withstand shaking and movement in a pinball machine? I mean, that doesn't even make sense. Maybe the thought was that they don't get moved a whole lot, but they do. People saw them all the time. And of course, as shaker motors have become more and more popular, that causes its own issues. So anyway, it's a welcome change. Now, here's a change I don't know is welcome. And that is, I heard an interview with Ben Heck, and he is designing a new board set because Spooky is going to switch to that rather than continue to use the P3 Rock that Multimorphic provides. And for those that don't know or don't remember, I believe it was with TNA, which was designed on the P3 Rock system, that Spooky went ahead and adopted using that board set rather than what they were using at the time, which was called Penhek, which was already really pushed to its limit, I think, as of really the game it was designed for, America's Most Haunted. But going to P3 Rock was a way that you already had an established board set. As I remember, they just added $50 to the game prices at the time, I assumed, to cover the cost of the boards. Now, hearing Ben Heck's interview, it sounds to me like the motivation to switch to this other board set is a cost motivation But I know a lot of people have wondered if it also perhaps or in part or in any way related to there have been a lot of reported issues with, like, I remember with Alice Cooper's Nightmare Castle, there was a, it seemed like a chronic memory leak issue that they never seemed or took a really long time for them to sort out. There have been complaints about like flipper behavior and how they're working with the system. And I've just, I've wondered if Spooky's coders are struggling with getting the P3 Rocks to work in the way that they want them to work, and that it'll be easier with the new board set, like if they're trying to solve some technical problems with it, or if it really is just all about money. Like, pocket that additional $50 increase you did a few years ago at this point and just start using cheaper boards. Right, but I mean, could that be as simple as just a programming difference between what the P3 Rock can accept and what they've been used to building? It could be. I don't know. I spoke to someone who has developed on P3 Rock Systems homebrew style and has noted that in their judgment, the problem that Spooky has had is with Spooky's coding team not being able to figure this out, not knowing how to solve the issue. It's not a hardware issue. It's a programmer issue. But regardless, it's an issue. So if this gets that solved, I think it will ultimately make people happier. I guess we could kind of transition this a little bit and say, so do we think this has a significant impact on Multimorphic? So Multimorphic makes the P3 platform, but I've often theorized for quite a while now that that system is not sold at a rapid pace. But it's been okay because Multimorphic actually does a lot of business selling boards to Spooky, Haggis, and American Pinball. and I think they've sold the most to Spooky so if Spooky's no longer a client for them moving forward is that going to put a lot of pressure on Multimorphic to up their income some other way?
    13:34
    Maybe but they were doing alright even before Spooky was using them at all as back in the day because like you said Spooky's only used them for the last couple of machines so the question there is Is it going to be worth the headaches of getting the bugs worked out of the new board set and those issues? Will that be worth the time and money? Yeah, I don't know. You bring up a good point about Multimorphic, and that's true. They were just selling to Homebrew and stuff, and what money they were making off of P3 sales, they did seem okay. I wonder how long you continue. How long can they want to invest time into the platform? Or will they eventually have to raise the price on the platform? Because it's been at the $10,000 price point for a while. And another thing is, in the interview with Ben Heck, Spooky, or excuse me, he noted that this board set would be available for other people to buy and use. It's not going to be exclusive to Spooky. If other people want to have access to it, they can buy the boards. So, right. But the question is going to be how good is the board? Because right now it's a theoretical board. It's right. Nobody knows what its specs are. Nobody knows what it can handle. It needs to be better documented than Penhek was. I have only heard complaints about poor documentation with the old Penhek board set. So this one needs to be done up a lot better, not just in terms of as a design of a board, but actually written in a way that people can understand and work on it. But assuming that those things are achieved, if the price is cheap enough, it's like, is Spooky positioning itself to be a competitor on selling third-party board sets at this point? I mean, could that be why they need a bigger facility to increase their production to include producing boards? And this is, of course, me assuming that this board that Ben's designing is actually going to be quote-unquote spooky-owned. Maybe he's the third party and Spooky's accessing it. I'm not entirely certain on the chain of ownership regarding the board, so only that Spooky's planning to use it. Anyway, it's interesting. Speaking of Multimorphic, I guess I should go ahead and note that they announced an update to Heist with 15-ball multiball play. Wow. That's, oh, what's the word I want?
    16:01
    ambitious kind of just grabbing, I think, for a headline there. Does it need a 15 multi-ball play? Okay. Yeah. Thank you. Ambitious is generous. I found it quite, quite, quite gimmicky. And so I guess that it clearly, when it was noted as it was announced that, hey, it's what had the most multi-balls before this?
    16:26
    Apollo 13. Exactly. Apollo 13. So it was done to take a record away from another game. And I don't have any problem with that. My only problem with it is, other than the neatness of seeing the balls come out, I've never heard anyone say that Apollo 13 was a fun game, especially with 13 balls in play. Not at all. It feels like you're just reaching for a headline to try and stay relevant.
    16:49
    It does. It really has that kind of... Let me put it in a direct way. This is not going to sell any P3s or heist modules. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. I would be surprised if the majority of the people who are deeply interested in the P3 and heist don't already have the machines.
    17:09
    Yes. And it's interesting when I saw it because I saw I saw one of these announcements. I think this one was on Facebook and someone criticized it. And people that I know already own the heist module came in and started defending the decision. and but i love him no i don't know i wouldn't put it i won't go to that extent but let me just because i know we have a lot of p3 fanboys that do listen to the show i know because they write in and we don't we don't give enough coverage let me be really clear when you guys refuse to ever say anything negative and you only say positive things you actually hurt the company you're actually hurting sales because it feels so artificial that something could be that good that there's not a single negative to ever bring up. That's my perspective, but that's the way I get a read. That's why I think in most hobbies, fanboys of companies actually end up in the long run hurting what they are a fandom of more than they help because they come across like zealots, not people that are actually rationally, sanely assessing things. I think that it's a very good argument to be made for that. It's a system that, do not get me wrong, I enjoy it. It has very interesting things in it. and if somebody gave me $50,000 right this second to go buy any pinball machines I wanted, and that's the only thing I could use that money on, I still wouldn't have a P3.
    18:38
    With $50,000? Yeah. I can think of enough other machines that I'd load up first. I don't know. I'd have to think about it, but it wouldn't be a good— You have a lot more machines than I do. I do, and I don't want this to turn into it, Because, again, I like the system. I praise it a lot for its innovation. In fact, it was on the last The Pinball Show episode that I was on where we were talking about Internet connectivity. It's the first one that comes to my mind. Yeah. But there are some other obstacles involved with a P3 that I think make it a challenge for people. Namely, that if you get bored with the games, you can't get out of a module easily. You'd have to get out of the entire system. Right. which in theory makes a lot of sense because it should keep really good retention and uptake and allow them to sell more new units to people rather than there being a flush used market. But regardless, I think that's a part of the – it's like people say it's so cheap to get into a new game because you can buy a new module. It's like, yeah, but what if I hate heist? Who can I sell heist to if I want to keep my P3? Not a lot of people. Right. well and then it also comes up to the whole argument like when Highway was around and people were talking about changing the play fields and swapping everything out on the cabinet and it gets to a point where it's like but where do I want to store the extra stuff and if I want to play this game why do I have to go through all the trouble to change everything out do I want to play that game enough to make that amount of effort and they've tried to make it really simple I think they've achieved it a lot better than Highway ever did. But, you know, they're just obstacles with anything. But anyway, yeah, it's an interesting gimmick. I don't think that they shouldn't have done the 15 ball. It's just, you know, like from a programming engineering standpoint, like it's a, hey, why should we climb Mount Everest? Because it's there. So like doing it because it's there. Totally understand that. But the high promotion of it, I mean, I'm sorry. If you guys think this is going to sell games, you went down the wrong path. This is not the way to do it. You need a license is what you need. Not adding more gimmicks to what's already a pretty popular game that didn't need it. Yeah, and I think that's something that you always hear in the pinball echo chambers is how everybody wants the original theme stuff, but we've proven time and time again that it doesn't sell. Yeah, it's all fine. And that licenses are the only way to actually get sales at this point. As much as you talk about it, as much as you love the idea, and don't get me wrong, I love the idea of original themes. And some of them that have been made lately are really enjoyable to me. But at the same time, they're never going to get the kind of sales a license theme is. It's just not going to happen because pinball does not have a high enough cachet for it to come in with just whatever. It has to have a bigger hook. And the other aspect, which unfortunately its modular design works against, is the big attraction for a lot of people with pinball. The rationalization that they do when they're buying new games all the time is that they can get out of them easily. If they don't like them, if they lose interest, and they're not going to lose a lot of money. And I'm not saying you'd lose a lot of money selling your P3 system, but because all the games are modular, you can't just sell them. You can, if you had a P3, Tony, you couldn't sell a module to me because I'd need a whole P3 to play it. So if you ended up hating cosmic cart racing's module, he was like, I hate this. I hate the stupid ball lock magnet. It's just way too innovative and cool. I can't stand having it around me and my children. I must get rid of it. And we're like, sorry, bro. I can't, I can't buy this. I'd have to spend another $10,000. just to make the thing work. Good luck selling it to someone who already has a P3 module or P3 system and you finding someone that doesn't have that module and just happens to want it at the same time and is willing to take your used version rather than just spending the additional money for the new one. Right. And then there's the whole question is that when a brand new machine is $10,000, how much are you going to be able to sell a new machine or sell your old machine even with all of your modules for? How much are you actually going to be able to get everything out of it? So that's just the reality of things. Anyway speaking of reality there I stretched pinball by throwing in a multimorphic discussion on top of a spooky discussion So I know we got more in video games though than we do in pinball Tony So guide us Guide us through the light The way we're going, we're working ourselves well towards having, like, our shortest episode ever. Every week, it seems like.
    23:17
    There were a bunch of reports, and I had that there were several companies looking to purchase Square Enix. Really? and there were enough reports about it coming out that Square had to put out a statement saying that it was not based on any announcement by Square and they have not received any offers and are not considering selling the company or parts of the company.
    23:43
    So whatever caused the initial information to go out, they squashed it pretty hard. Wow. they've had a pretty rough year because they're with some, with certain of their divisions. Let's go with that. Because I know Avengers was one of their big courses. Oh, God, I knew you were going to bring up Avengers. And it's so good. The moment I saw this topic in the list. It's so good. Tony's going to work Avengers into this discussion. It's the greatest Square Enix game of all time. That's why nobody plays it anymore. I can't. It's such a visible failure. Avengers is the 15-ball multi-ball of Square Enix. It is, and they just keep throwing more and more stuff at it, and it's like they hope that suddenly it's going to become something, and I don't think it ever is. Again, that's why I think my analogy holds true. It's not that the changes that they're adding to it are necessarily bad, but it's not what actually would sell games. Right, right, and I think they've already lost it. They're too far back at this point to continue to keep it up. You are too old to begin the training.
    24:54
    And Amazon has canceled their Lord of the Rings MMO. My precious. Which is interesting to me, not because they've got so much other Lord of the Rings stuff in process right now with the whole new TV series based around it. but the fact that Amazon was directly working with a Chinese company that got purchased by Tencent, which is, as we've talked in the past, the largest game developer in the world. And after the purchase, something happened in the contracts between it, they couldn't cut a deal and it was just over. Wow. I actually, I wasn't aware that this was being worked on. I'd heard about it. They first announced it in 19, There hadn't been a whole lot of stuff put out about it other than, hey, we're doing this.
    25:50
    It's one of those things that I thought was, well, that's ambitious to create an MMO in this day and age. Because the question is always, are they going to be the old school MMO where you have your monthly payment? or is it going to be the free-to-play style, or is it going to be the one-time purchase style, or what? Because that's where, to me, all the interest in MMOs go, is they've all changed so much to try and survive in the modern economy. Yeah. And then we're also going to talk a little bit about Twitch. Twitch has... DMCA? It's not DMCA. Wow. For the first time, we're talking about Twitch that has nothing to do about DMCA.
    26:36
    And, I mean, that's all we talked about last year with Twitch, it felt like, was DMCA and sex abuse. Yeah. That was Twitch last year. Yep. That's a good Twitch recap. That's better than my EGP Twitch analytics work.
    26:54
    The Twitch announced that they decided that they are cracking down on the view bots and the follow bots. And their new machine learning algorithm had detected and identified 7.5 million bot tocals. Holy crap.
    27:19
    Yeah. I never, this is how naive I am, I never would have assumed it was that many. I never would have thought it would. See, and to me, this brings up my... Where were mine? Why couldn't I have like 100,000 of those? Well, I remember when Overwatch was on Twitch, that was all the talk that the Overwatch League was pure, had massive view-botting and follow-botting. See, when I heard that, I always assumed that was slang for people saying people that would go in and start it up to get their Overwatch League tokens, but they were still humans. They weren't actually there, though. It was a bot because the monitor was playing Overwatch and no one was watching it. But that was still a real person who went in and really connected their account and really, you know, in theory was watching. You just, you know, they weren't at their chair. That's what I assumed. I didn't know it was like a real bot. And I thought the same thing as you did because there were times when two teams were playing that I didn't care about. That's exactly what I did. Yeah, no, I did it. I still do. You did it and just minimized it and did something else. I'm going to do it here later today. By the way, Overwatch League started back up on Friday. It did start back up. Get your view bots going. But I guess these aren't real view bots. These are human view bots. Nope. So these are real ones. 7.5 million are real bots. 7.5 million real bots. Holy cow. And they put out the warning that with the removal of the bots, could see some streamers having a sudden decrease in followers and viewership. Really? Okay. Well, I mean, I imagine so. I don't know. Sudden seems obvious if they're going to kill them all. kill them all off at once but i'm like yeah but we're talking like maybe i guess some really big streamers might see a couple hundred people go maybe a thousand that was my thought no xqc not a fan personally but he's extremely popular he is but he's probably not as popular as we thought because he lost 2.6 million followers. Oh.
    29:29
    He went from over 8 million to 5.5. Wow. While not as large, quite, well, it's in the same ballpark, Soda Poppin, who I don't recognize at all, lost half of his followers. Wow. He went from 6.5 million to 3.3. Oh, wow. Oh, so he lost over 3 million. Yes. So it's just gone.
    29:59
    And a lot of the other big names had hits bigger, more like I would have expected going into this, like Ninja and Shroud and all of them. But most of them lost hundreds of thousands of followers.
    30:14
    So what is this? I mean, I don't want to be accusatory just because I don't like XQC in particular because I find him extremely toxic. So did he buy these? Why would there be bots following him? Well, that was my thought. And as I looked more into it, it's entirely possible that they've been bought because there are whole services that do that. But another thing is a lot of times they will hit a streamer, especially when a streamer is smaller.
    30:47
    They'll hit them as part of the first big boosts, and then they will use their chat to spam and to just have stuff in there to help make the bots seem more real.
    31:03
    Okay. But at the same time, that doesn't mean that they didn't purchase it because I saw one interview with a streamer who was trying to figure out. She went from 33,000 viewers. Or followers. Okay.
    31:23
    When she ended her stream one night and when she started streaming the next day, she had 90,000 followers. Oh, wow. and she didn't know where they came from and then suddenly her chat was just completely overwhelmed with people or with all these other all these new people spamming stuff oh buy followers buy view buy prime and subs buy subs blah blah blah and she reported it all to twitch but twitch just never really did anything about it so i will say we have i know i know you're surprised given our high levels of fame, but we have actually experienced something sort of like this on our SoundCloud platform where we host the podcast. So once in a while, I have seen in the analytics where all of a sudden we will get a huge surge in listens on a single episode, all on the same day. and when I look at the analytics in SoundCloud, there will be a link showing that, oh, these came from a referral site. So they're not RSS subscribers. It's like Facebook counts as a referral site. Pinsight counts as a referral site. So I normally see those sites listed with a few people that don't follow us in a podcatcher, but listen to us through the web. Right. And so if I click on the link, it would take me to a place where I could buy more listens. So what I'm assuming they do is they go in and they find channels or music stations or podcasts or whatever, and they give you a surge of like 100 people. And then when you go and you check your analytics and you're like, where did these come from? And you're doing your investigation. You're like, oh, what's this website? Did someone mention my podcast on a blog or something? You click, and then it takes you to a site to try and say, hey, look what we can do for you. We gave you $100. Would you like $1,000? We can make you a star. A star. And I'm like, but Tony and I are already a star. We're superstars. Exactly. Superstar. But, yeah, no. And I can see where some people might have the interest in the jumpstart of having a bunch of followers. Because if you've got a bunch of followers, if you have a bunch of viewers, people are more likely to follow you or to watch your content. Because, hey, there's like a thousand people watching this dude. Let's watch this guy. Instead of like there's three people watching this. And followers to an extent. I mean, for example, if you were starting out on Twitch and other than it's such an easy bar, at least in pinball, and you wanted affiliate, I could see people buying like, that's like 75 followers or 50 followers. It's like, you know, that's why it's not a big deal. Versus, you know, setting up the watch thing I'm doing on YouTube, you know, looking at that, I think that it's a lot higher. Like you need 1 followers before you can monetize and like 3 hours of views So I wonder if that a problem on the YouTube system Probably a problem everywhere Yeah I assuming it a problem everywhere in systems like this What interesting on this though is while the follower counts have taken big hits, the actual counts of concurrent viewership has not. So the bots weren't watching, they were just following. In a lot of cases, well, it's not necessarily that they're not watching. A lot of times they're watching uh but there are twitch does have systems in place so when they show your analytics certain types of stuff will be removed automatically like it won't show up okay because there were certain things going on where at one point in time uh some people were would like embed their stream to their Twitch channel into a website so that it would play if somebody was there reading the website. So say I have a blog where I talk about video games in my blog, and I've got a lot of people who follow my blog. Well, if I had a window that was playing my stream there, everyone who looked at my blog would now count as a viewer. even if they weren't actually viewing me, even if they were ignoring it,
    35:57
    it would count as a view. And they'd worked some stuff in a few years ago that canceled a lot of that type of stuff out. Because there was stuff like that going on where some of the bigger video game magazines would input their Twitch stuff onto their webpages. So while people were reading articles, they were also hitting their Twitch analytics. I thought it was interesting. Twitch making interesting changes. And just the sheer number. That 7.5 million is one of those things where it's just like, wow. I never would have thought that it would have been that high. Or that people would have had that many in one account. I could see there being 7.5 million and they were spread out. oh, this guy's got 100 and this guy's got 1,000, not XQC has 2.6 million and Soda Poppin has like literally half of his followers.
    36:57
    Is Soda Poppin toxic? I don't know. Could be. I don't know if XQC is. I'm not making an accusation, but XQC seems like the sort of person who would buy 2.6 million followers. Oh, yeah. It wouldn't be a surprise to me at all.
    37:16
    Because he's a toxic person. Yep. So, continuing our conversations of toxic stuff. Mmm! Outriders. No! Everyone loves Outriders. People do love Outriders. It's just unfortunate that it's a looter shooter because it currently has a bug that wipes your inventory. But the inventory is the entire point of a looter shooter, Tony. exactly they have put out a patch for it on Friday though this bug has been known about for several weeks it took them this long to patch it so they are watching it to be sure that the problem is corrected but yeah this is a game a problem that Outriders has had where it is just completely wiping inventories and And the big thing is, it's a looter shooter where people are going after their really hard to get, like, hundreds of hours of playtime to get perfectly statted special items for your build, and then it's all wiped out and gone.
    38:32
    But, they are planning on restoring people's items that were wiped out. unfortunately they cannot promise to restore them with the stats that the item had when you got it I'm amazed they can even know what the items were from the wipe honestly I was amazed to hear that they even thought they had a way to do that let alone have any dream of getting one that are statted exactly alike I mean, anybody who's played any of these looter-type games, I mean, Borderlands or Diablo or any of those looter games, you can get the same weapon 12 times, and it's got different stats every single time. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's the whole thing with the genre is you're always sitting there, and you're opening your inventory and looking over those stats. And you're like, oh, do I want fire damage on this now? Yeah. because I mean it gets to the point where you're sitting here it's like well I have this sword and this is the sword I want it's got the special ability I need to make my skill set for my build work but you know I could have this be a point higher where I wouldn't mind it having this stat instead of that stat and you just keep grinding and getting more of those swords and comparing them until you get the one you want that perfectly matches your build. And then you lose it. And then you lose it. Because of a bug.
    40:10
    The game's still getting good reviews. Everyone I've talked to who's played it is like, you know, I really enjoy it.
    40:17
    So, it's got to be doing well. It just has an issue that has affected some people more than others. And to end on a happy note of our discussion today of video games. Cyberpunk 2077. Oh, I haven't thought about that in weeks.
    40:42
    Well, all of the preliminary numbers are coming out for 2020 from CD Projekt Red. And, you know, there was bad press and launch issues, and that game has been pulled from the PlayStation Store. And it's still not back. Oh, is it not? Wow. No.
    41:03
    CD Projekt Red had their best financials ever. I'm not too surprised, actually. I'm not surprised that they had good financials. I'm a bit surprised that's their best ever.
    41:15
    The preliminary numbers out are showing a net profit, not gross, profit of $303 million. Wow. So all that, all the drama, all that stuff, and it's still, it's like double the Witcher 3 release. You gamers and your opinions are irrelevant.
    41:44
    If you've got enough, if you've got enough in it, you're going to make the money. If you've got a big enough following, it doesn't matter the bad press or anything else. We don't put our monies where our mouths are. We put our monies in the hands of developers. That's what we do.
    42:01
    And CD Projekt Red has flat out come out and said that they're not abandoning cyberpunk. Why would they? Look at this. There's probably more money to be had. Get it back in the PlayStation store. Add a few more million to it. Yeah. And they're talking about they're shifting. Originally, they were going to make a multiplayer one as a standalone separate thing, and it sounds like they're not going to do that anymore. they're going to just put it into the base game.
    42:28
    But they're making the Witcher franchise and the Cyberpunk franchise the tentpoles of CD Projekt Red because they're already starting production of more games in each franchise.
    42:43
    Well, I mean, overall, I am glad that the company is able to recover from the problems with Cyberpunk. it's just I don't know if they're really taught a lesson with this much profit right and that's the thing it's kind of like with Blizzard where Blizzard's like hey we made more money this year than we ever did before for laying off some huge percentage of our workforce because the numbers weren't quite as high as we told our investors to expect or we want to tie it Back to the other hobby we cover, you know, with pinball, this is the same thing where people complain about all these play field issues manifesting again. But y'all keep buying games, so what lesson do you really think you're sending to anyone? Yep. Just like all the issues with pre-ordering pinball machines or video games and then having the game be terrible when you receive it. But you still turn around and pre-order the games. Yep. You still buy. So you get what you pay for. I mean, it's just one of those things that I can, at a certain point, you have to stop feeling sorry for the people who keep getting burned by the same thing over and over. Eventually, even the dumbest kid learns not to touch the stove. But I want waffles. You don't make waffles by closing your hand in a waffle iron.
    44:11
    That's a, words to live by, Tony. Words to live by. We reached the end of the episode, Tony, and it is not our shortest episode ever. We have had several episodes shorter than this. Yeah, it's true.
    44:22
    There's just so much. I mean, we've always concentrated so much on pinball. There's been so little. No one's been complaining about the links. I've had zero complaints of people going, pat it out, pat it out.
    44:37
    Well, if they want to pat it out, there's plenty of other shows out there that somehow still get five hours of content every week out of somebody saw that somebody tweeted a picture of them eating Raisin Bran this morning. And they only eat Raisin Bran when they're programming the new code for a certain type of game. That's the only time they eat Raisin Bran is when they're doing the programming for this certain game. Or they talk about code updates. and as much as I would enjoy covering the latest Munsters code update for all two of our listeners that own that game I just don't see the point and no, there's no code update for Munsters so you two people, sorry that I teased you there's not an update the true reality is all the coverage a code update ever needs is hey, there's new code for blank that's it and I don't even do that because I just don't care but what I do care about is assuring everyone that we plan to be back in two weeks. Regardless of how much news there is, we're going to tell you what we know. That's what we do. We'll find something to talk about. If you'd like to suggest topics for us to talk about, you can always email us at eclecticgamerspodcast at gmail.com or reach out to us at facebook.com slash eclecticgamerspodcast. We are available on Twitch, Twitter, and Instagram as eclectic underscore gamers. And we'll see you again in two weeks. But until then, I am Dennis. And I'm Tony. Goodbye, everybody. See ya.