Welcome to the Collected Gamers Podcast. Today is Sunday, October 16th. This is episode 178. You're Dennis, I'm Tony. Yep. You got real quiet there for a moment. I completely lost track of what I was saying. Yes. Well, you were doing the introductions. And so normally here, we've got a bit of stuff to go through. But we often open with our introductions. So I'll let you start because you usually do. Okay. Well, I'm going to open with a correction. Really? You don't usually make corrections. I don't normally make corrections. I'll make a correction. Well, last time we were talking about the Steam Deck games that were most popular. And I'd mentioned the Disney Dreamlight Valley as like a fantasy RPG-like game, and that was wrong. That is apparently Disney Mirrorverse. Oh. The game that was actually the popular one is basically Disney's take on Animal Crossing or Harvest Moon and stuff like that. Okay. It's a farming game. Okay. And that was Eric, who's been on the show with us before. Yeah, when E3 was a thing. Yeah, back when E3 existed, sent that correction to me. So I knew there was something Disney-ish. I was just wrong about exactly what it was. So thank you, Eric. Otherwise, it's been busy. Several weeks, Terra Invicta came out, which if you pay any attention to video game, to 4X style video games, is everywhere. I've been playing it. I've also been playing Vampire Survivors. That was on that list. That was on that list. I have that installed, but I have not played it yet. I actually have put in... It is much more enjoyable than I had thought a single-stick shooter type game roguelike would be. I've been enjoying it quite a lot, and it's actually taken some time from playing Terra Invicta. Wow. Because Terra Invicta is... deep. I mean, it is deep, deep. It is like almost a five X. Well, it's more like a combination between a four X and a grand strategy game. Really? Um, it is like, so it's like a combination between like a sieve and like a hearts of iron, but it's very enjoyable. I've been enjoying the heck out of it. Um, I'm getting my pants beat in on my first playthrough. Um, But that's standard. That's pretty standard on, I think, anything like this until you really get into it. But it is very – I wasn't sure if I would like it, so I watched a bunch of videos, and it seems like, okay, this seems like a game I would probably like. And it is. I haven't even gotten into the deeper lore of it. What's interesting about Terra Invicta is that it is a – it is set in the modern world. When I say it's in the modern world, I mean it starts in 2022 and an alien ship crashes. And you are basically the head of a shadowy organization vying for, I don't want to say control of Earth's response. because this is much more you are the puppeteer behind the puppets of the countries as you gain influence over countries and fight against other shadowy entities that are trying to do the same thing to shape the world's response because there's a bunch of different factions, and they go everywhere from humanity first, which is your stereotypical the only good Xeno is a dead Xeno, All the way to the far side, there's another group, the servants, who see the aliens as holy divine beings who are here to free us from the human condition. And they do everything in their power to serve them. and the whole gambit in between from the very shadowy, like straight up in it for you, how much money you can make little shadow cabal government peoples and scientists are like, Oh, they should be friendly. So we'll, we want to, we want to work with them because how can there be, how can somebody travel this kind of distances and have more still? So the game starts completely on Earth, basically working governments, working behind the scenes, using counselors to kind of get governments to side with you and taking over control, but still always staying in the shadows. but it transitions in like the mid game to being a lot more space-based to the point of building facilities and ships and, and, and having combat as you fight the aliens or fight the other factions, both on earth and in space. And it's also got a fairly hard sci-fi bent. So, you know, orbits are important and things take time and there's no FTL and there's no faster than light communications and weapons aren't like weird, crazy stuff. It's, you know, lasers and rail guns and missiles and stuff. So it's interesting. I'm nowhere near mid-game. I'm getting my skull caved in in the early games, so I'm sure I will fail and then start over again. But I've been enjoying it quite a lot. Good, good, good, good. Well, I also have a correction. No one wrote in on this one. I caught it when I was reviewing the episode. So when I was talking last time about Kojima, I misspoke and I referenced a non-existent award show I called the Pinball Awards. The Pinball Awards. Which is probably confusing a lot of people, especially because I was talking about someone named Jeff. And, of course, there is a Jeff who puts together the Pinball Industry Awards. But that is not what I was talking about. I was talking about the Game Awards, which is a video game awards organized and hosted by Jeff Keeley. Jeff with a G, not a J. And so that Jeff has been very, very public about his support of Kojima for years. So and he often actually for multiple game award shows used it as a platform to criticize those who worked against Kojima, which I always thought was a little uncouth. Maybe it would be the way to phrase it. But but anyway, he did what he did. I have mostly been playing Fall Guys and the, of course, from infamous Activision Blizzard Overwatch 2. I was like, OK, I'm going to give it a shot. That has been an interesting buggy experience, and of course we will cover that more in video games. And I did get the vampire game you mentioned, but I also for my birthday got Far Cry 6, which I have installed, but I haven't played it yet. It's the one that's got the bad guy who is the bad guy in Breaking Bad. Who in the chicken place. I forget his name. He's also the guy who uses the dark saber in Mandalorian. Oh, Giancarlo Esposito. Thank you. Yes. He gets to play the big guy. Far Cry is known for having its over-the-top big baddies. He's the guy who has the absolute most, I am the evil mastermind. I'm going to just make you weep in place stare. The stare that makes you know that you've done messed up good. Yeah, basically he's typecast. I feel kind of bad for him. Yeah. Except for the money. Well, I'm sure at this point, given the high-profile positions, acting roles he's being allocated, that it's probably okay. But you never know. I mean, that's one of those things. It's not – you kind of feel bad when you get like a Jim Carrey who's typecast into being comedies all the time or like Robin Williams. He was always comedic, comic roles. He did some that weren't. Yeah. For me, it was always hard to sympathize a lot with Robin Williams because he was a stand-up. I don't remember if Jim Carrey got a star in stand-up. I think he did. But Robin definitely did. And it's like, that's your thing. You aren't a trained actor. You're a stand-up. Now, he did have some good serious roles. He did. But he had to develop that along the way. So I understand when people go in and they bring in, you know, like a Dennis Leary. And it's like, you're going to do comic roles, right? You're a stand-up, right? That's all you know. We're bringing you in because you have comedy name recognition. You're lending credence to our film. When you stick Gilbert Godfrey into a lethal weapon, it's not because he earned his acting chop. This is because he's got a funny voice. So that was always my take. But, you know, your mileage may vary. Speaking of mileage, since our last episode, we have had a number of patrons join our Patreon. And as I have decided would make a lot of sense to do, I wanted to thank them at the start of the episodes. in the intro. And so since the last episode, we have had the following people join our Patreon. And you can all join the Patreon going to patreon.com slash eclectic underscore gamers. And we have three tiers currently available all the way down to $1 a month as the lowest. In terms of who's joined on our high support tier, that's our $10 a month tier. Josh has joined our Patreon. And then at the $5 a month, the intermediate support tier, we have had Andrew, Brett, Delt31, Haas, and Jason. Obviously, some of these are handles. And then at our basic support tier, we have had Aaron, Dylan, GoPooAlready. Sorry. Do it. That's not a handle. That's just what their parents named them. Yeah. They're like, come on. Do it. Do it. Jacob, Peter, Procco, Robert, Trumponchi, and Wendalina. So thank you. Thank you very much for your support. And Tony, I have been continuing to actually before we even started recording, discuss things to sort of incentives or items where we may not promise them, but things that we will do patron only. And so we've been discussing some recording ideas of additional audio content in particular. But let us go to the official show and we will start, as we often do, with the pinball segment. So a few items to discuss. I actually don't think I have a single thing here to talk about with Stern Pinball. So if you were hoping for some sort of Stern update, you're not getting one on this episode. But the first thing I want to mention is a movie. So Pinball, the man who saved the game. Based off that title, Tony, do you know what this movie would be about? Hmm. I don't know. Well, since you don't know, I will explain. It is a movie about Roger Sharp and his work in front of New York City's governing body to undo their pinball ban, which has, as time has gone along, become the – I don't know how much of this is true and how much of this is myth at this point. But that New York City, New York City dropping its ban has been, for whatever reason, elevated onto this pedestal that it saved all of pinball. But I've heard that repeatedly. I'm not sure because pinball was already alive that that was true and that ban had been around a long time. But what I do think is true is that it was really credited when New York City dropped their ban that a lot of other cities also dropped their ban. So I do think it had a cascade effect that got pinball into a lot more places. I don't think it actually saved pinball in the same way that we think of pinball needing to be saved in the mid-80s and then again in the early 90s, that sort of thing. But regardless, it is probably the most famous story in all of pinball. So many people tie everything to this event, the shot that saved pinball, and of course Roger Sharp, who is still active in pinball. So anyway, I've not seen this. It was, there was a link. I was going to have it in the show notes, but it was like a live event sort of thing. It was only available in the U S too. And then if you didn't do it at the certain time, it went away. So I'm assuming it will be available for normal streaming relatively soon. I guess they're kind of doing the promotional circuit thing right now. And they're doing like live event fathom thing going on. But anyway, just FYI, if you're interested in this and want to, uh, they, they got some like serious acting chops involved in the film. So I would say I've heard good things so far, but here's the thing. I've heard it from pinball people, and pinball people were probably going to give this an A+, even if it wasn't good. So I haven't seen it, so I can't tell you if it's good or not. But the names involved with it would suggest that it would be good. But that's all I can say because I haven't seen it. So that's all there is on that. So let's move to another – I shouldn't say another company. Let's move to a company. Let's talk about Multimorphic. So there was a information release from Multimorphic, a sort of a combination of manufacturing update, business update, and development update. And I do have a link to this update in the show notes for people that want to read it. But Multimorphic has indicated that their production team has been growing and their weekly yields on game production have increased. However, they also stated that they do need to hire more people to catch up to where they thought they would be in the hiring ramp up that they've been undertaking, I suppose, ever since Really Weird Al came out. They have now announced that their estimated lead time on a new order would be 12 to 13 months. And as a reminder, if I am remembering correctly, I believe their last update said that they were a year out on production. So I would say that it's about the same or they've slipped an additional month at this point. Those that have ordered multiple game kits, that was also addressed in the update. So some people have been like, okay, I want to buy P3 and get Weird Al, but I also want to get Heist and Lexi Lightspeed, for example, all at the same time. The plan now is that they are going to get the Weird Al game shipped out first. And then a few weeks later, they would send the remaining playfields that were ordered for those that have requested multiple kits. and I'd say the last major thing related to the business that they announced in the update is that they do plan to release two game kits in 2023 and those are the first party ones. That's not counting any third party projects and there are third party projects that are underway right now. So those were the chief update. The update was actually very, very long. Those are the key takeaways I think that are of relevance to the listeners. What are your thoughts? I can understand the sending out the game kits a little later if it's a matter of not having like if they had any backlog of the older game kits and they've gone through them at this point so they're having to assemble game kits and since it's apparent that while they're ramping up they still need more people that they probably will put I can see them putting together some of those other kits on the back end and on the side while they concentrate primarily on machines and Weird Al's because that's, I'm sure, what the majority of their orders are going to be. And the truth of the matter is it's not like people are going to be changing out kits like the two or three times a day the first couple days they get the machine. They're probably going to spend a lot of time on one and then change it out. I don't think that will hurt them too bad. I am kind of surprised that their lead time hasn't really changed any. With how much they've been hiring from reports and from what we've seen, I would have thought they might have been able to start making up time a little bit with training and stuff. Maybe not. Or there's just that many more new orders still coming in. But I don't – I'm going to guess it's probably more of just a getting everything up to speed to where it's going to be run the most efficiently. Those are good points. Let me ask – well, I'll hold and ask the piece I want to ask about at the end because that's probably the one item to explore. So, yeah, I think you're right about my read on and from their updates have been saying, yeah, I do think they've been making more sales. I would assume, and this is a total assumption, but based off of my experience of talking with distributors on other games from other companies, it would surely be like a trickle at this point. We're well past the hype for Weird Al. I would assume so. Because we're well past the announcement. The initial demand is always when the game first is indicated or experienced, and all that already happened like back in March. Right, but that would be my assumption. But why would they be falling farther behind without at least some new orders coming in? No, and I do think there are new orders. Because that would be – I agree. And we have to remember that they did the price increase where you could lock in the module prices, I believe, as long as you put the order in by September 1st. That may not have generated a whole lot of new P3 machine sales, but surely got them a surge of playfields from people that maybe had only committed on a Weird Al or were perhaps for whatever reason not committing on Weird Al but had already committed on other devices earlier in the lifecycle of the P3. The pre-Weird Al orders. I do think – I agree with you about the lead time thing though, which is basically the same as the last update a few months ago. Then it was a year. Now – okay, 12 to 13 months, so about a year. I think on the last update – I probably should have gone back and checked, but it was such a long time ago. It feels like – every update that I remember, they've always phrased it like they're just about to turn the corner. And there was language in this one too where they think they're going to start chipping down. But we heard that months ago, and I think we heard it months before that, and they clearly have never accomplished it. So I'm a little unclear on exactly how many people – and they're not obligated to let us know – but how many people are they honestly onboarding and getting – or how long are they sticking? They're not seeming to make a dent in the time estimate. Right. And that brings me to my question I wanted to ask you. So ordering multiple game kits, getting the Weird Al's out first, on the surface of it makes total sense to me because I'm assuming pretty much every order they're dealing with right now involves Weird Al in some way because it's the hotness. It's the one licensed game they've got. It's also the newest first party game that they've got. Totally makes sense. but remember back when we covered Weird Al Multimorphic has offered an arrangement unlike a lot of other pinball manufacturers where if they miss the shipping estimate by six months then you're allowed to get a full refund is this a method for those that ordered multiple kits to try and like oh no we're getting close and we'll send you part of your order and is the thought that if you get part of your order, does that mean you can't get the refund? Or even saying that aside, logically speaking, I could see the thought that if we give them enough that they can play something, maybe that will hold off on them canceling. Is that the strategy? It could be, but at that point, for them, they will have gotten the machine itself, which is the most expensive bit, so the rest of it shouldn't even matter. yeah unless their thought was well i thought that i was i mean they were told they were going to get everything and whatever date and then you're six months after that and you i don't know i my assumption would be that it will the the strategy would work let me put it like that so i think this if you can't get them everything on time getting them enough that they could play weird al is probably sufficient i would i would assume it gives them something to do right but And most people are going to be less overall concerned with asking for their money back when you're asking for your money back on like $400 worth of different games that you will get eventually because you've already got the big important one. That's true, too. Asking for, hey, I want the whole price of the machine back because you missed the date. they wouldn't get to keep the way it was phrased was never such that you get to keep the P3 and get all your money that would be really silly that would be really silly but I mean I think it's just the people who are in on this the trigger point to get them to ask for the refunds it would be it's been this long and I still don't have the machine as opposed to where it's like yeah okay I've got the machine but I don't have this other table that I'm not going to use for a while yet anyway but I'm going to go ahead and pull the trigger and get my $200 back on that. There might be some, but I don't think it would be a huge deal either way. I think it's more – it still gets me that we had the big announcement of the Weird Al, and technically, since there's still a year behind on getting games to people, That means we're still six months behind getting a Weird Al machine to somebody, technically. Yeah, it depends. I mean, we know someone that they got their game about, I think, 11 months after they ordered. They ordered before Weird Al. Right. I don't remember if they got it with Weird Al at the point. They might have. Because I imagine they're basically going full force on putting together the Weird Al modules because there's so much demand for them. Yeah, no, it's – I mean it's not the longest cycle. Spooky still stands out. Setting aside blunders like Dutch. Right. Spooky going as far out as basically telling people you're going to wait 18 months from an order. That's like the furthest out I know of any kind of established manufacturer, which my own judgment obviously is a ridiculous timeframe to commit someone to, especially when you have to give them money first. You have to give them a deposit. It's not refundable. but I'm not here to complain about spooky strategies not in this segment at least yeah no it's interesting here's a part and again I didn't obviously I didn't read the whole thing it's quite verbose the update but part of it it's kind of a bit of a salesmanship portion which took kind of that period of okay you know you're going to be waiting about 12 to 13 months to get something so order now if you think you're going to be interested in these new kits in 2023 and you don't yet have a P3. So let me ask you a second question. That's just going to come in my head as we've been talking about this. It should have come in earlier because I think it's the more obvious question. Do you think that this plan to release two game kits in 2023 is a smart plan? I think it'll depend upon how in... I'm going to go out on land and say I'm going to be surprised if any of these other two kits are as in-depth as the Weird Al kit. They'll probably be more along the lines of the Cosmic Cart Racer type. Style kit would be my guess. Well, I mean, that had a fancy pants magnet mech. It did. It did. I mean, it's a full – and I'm not saying these are full – I mean, these are full-on kits. These are not software add-ons to existing modules. These are two new modules. This is how I took it. I'm assuming that's why they call them game kits and not games. Which would make sense. And in that case, I mean, maybe it's something that they've got – they've had in line. I don't know. My thing is I think the design section the design and prototyping section for stuff like this would pull from a different work pool than the production section If your designers finish designing a game and then walk out onto the floor and start putting the modules together you already have a problem with your layout of authority and management requirements inside your company. If that's how you're doing your day-to-day stuff. when your guy who designs your games takes time off to start hand-building games. There's a problem. So there's definitely, I think there's going to be a separation there. So it's possible that they've been working on, there's stuff they've been working on, and that's just how the time frames look. My guess is that they might be released in 2023, but I doubt many people will receive them unless they're so far ahead on module production compared to P3 production that they've got, like, module setting waiting for cabs to be finished. Right, right. And, again, part of the update itself, it did address your point about the development cycle. And they note that there's parallel projects. There's parallel aspects to this. They're continuing with development of games in parallel with the production side, which I think is standard. So in terms of coming up with games, I think that's smart. I think that makes sense. I personally do not agree with the idea of releasing a new game if you are still trying to catch up on orders of the previous game because all it seems to me is to add to backlog. I said the same thing about Stern when they had 5,000 games by their own admission behind, and I still say it with so many people waiting for Godzilla Premium, and here you are kind of trying to turn out – well, here I end up talking about Stern anyway. You're trying to turn out Bond, and people are like, what's going on? We talked all about the weirdness of the release, but the bottom line is they still have this huge backlog of games that they've not caught up on. The thing with them, though, is, as they have had it since admitted in at least one interview, there are license arrangements that are forcing their hand in some ways. And I think it wasn't until this year that they finally were able to stagger stuff enough that they skipped a cornerstone because of the backlog. That's why they skipped the cornerstone. Correct. I don't know whether or not these kits are going to be licensed games like Weird Al was for Multimorphic. If they are not, I, as a pinball enthusiast, do not understand why you would reveal the game if you are not yet in a place where you could reasonably, in a reasonable amount of time, get it into the hands of people. And that gets back to what you mentioned. If there's like if production is divided within Multimorphic and they've got some people who build P3 systems and other people who build modules, they might be in the place where they're way behind on P3 systems. But they're caught up on modules and the existing fan base is able to get these within a reasonable time period, in which case the announcement makes sense. Correct. If it's all tied together and it's like this 12 to 13 months is if you order anything, it's 12 to 13 months. I think that is too long of a window. They clearly think they're going to shave this down more. They indicate that in the update. If it's not shaved down in 2023 and it's still 12 months, I would not. I would not reveal. That would be my decision. I would be like, nope, you've got way too much stuff you're still trying to build. Yeah. But I've been very consistent about this with all manufacturers. I don't agree with the long waits, just like I don't agree with Spooky doing build runs where they have to tell people you're waiting 18 months. I think that's silly. Right. It's like if you're telling people you have to wait 18 months, you just shouldn't be selling it. You're selling too many games for what you're capable to do. Right. It's obviously beyond your capacity. And then they've made improvements. A lot of times they've ended up coming in under. So let me not totally throw Spooky under the bus. We can guarantee it'll be to you within 18 months. We can't tell you. It could be 17 and a half months. It could be. Anyway. Look, there's not a lot of news. I got it. Okay. Okay. We had to get what we could. So there's your multi-morphic update. Let's do another company we don't always talk about every episode, American Pinball. Tony, there's an American Pinball out there. They've made hit games. Did they make a new game? Kind of. They kind of made one. Sort of. Like a new, new game? No. No, of course not. Sorry. Well, hey, Galactic Tank Force is getting a lot of hype. I almost feel like it's a Snakes on the Plane style hype, but there are some people that are just like going around and pumping it perhaps unworthily. Let's be honest. This is pinball. You can leak out or announce anything is coming, and you're going to find people who are absolutely in love with it. Except since it's not a license because the rumor is Galactic Tank Force. We ourselves have seen the trademark claim for the name that it's just all of a sudden – it's not a lot of people. There's some that are just kind of like tanks in space and are just kind of going off. Yeah. This is what happens when Stern stalls out their reveal in the sloppiest thing we've ever seen in the history of the hobby. And the only other things we get to talk about are – for them. I've seen sloppier reveals from other companies. Okay. Okay. I will accept that. I mean – Stern's sloppiest reveal ever. But by a lot. By a lot. Yeah, yeah. But we're not here to talk about Star Wars. We're not here to talk about Star Wars. All right. So American Pinballs, non-reveal reveal. Okay. They have, and I have a link to an article from Pinball News in the show notes so people can read up on this because it's kind of hard to explain. Zach and I talked about this on the Pinball Show last week, and it was a bit of a struggle. I have a visual for you to help with this, which we did not have in our internal notes on the Pinball Show. So American Pinball has announced a new classic version of Legends of Valhalla. Here's why it gets confusing. They had said there was going to be a classic version and a deluxe version. They had been building the deluxe version for a while. You and I played the deluxe version at Expo last year. Yes, we did. And it's been almost a year. We're just within a couple of weeks of a year since we got to see them. They had a number of them at the show. I mean, they started to break and go off the floor, but they had like eight of them there. That's painful. I mean, we were able to easily get a chance to play it. Yeah. That was the deluxe. So that's the one that had the mirror back glass and it's got all these molded hand-painted toys on it and all that stuff. Okay. They have been slowly turning out these deluxe games since then. Like the unit count has been 500. I think it was like $250 at first, and they upped it, and no one gave them – at least not very many people gave them grief about changing the total count, but they did. They're not all sold yet. I've spoken to distributors. If you want to get that version, you can still get that version, and you'll probably still be waiting because it's not been built because it's just been slow. It's just been slow. It's been slow. Okay. Other people – production challenges have abounded in pinball. Everybody's got issues. Everybody's got issues. But when they revealed all this, they had said there was going to be a classic version. So we had known there was an expectation of the classic version coming out at some point. I, as a hobbyist, had questioned if they were still going to follow through simply because when you have a run limit of 500, and here we are a year after the reveal, and it ain't still sold out, like why would you do it? Though perhaps you could move more at the cheaper price point. Right. Because if you get T-Dollar signed Ford, Toy Story Ford, on the CE at $15,000, maybe you buy it at $12,000. I don't know. So here's the thing that's been weird. This new classic is not the old classic. That is also happening. But they renamed everything. Everything is renamed, Tony. And that's what makes it confusing. Why would you do that? Okay. So here's the new classic. The new Classic, which is not the same as the old Classic, is $7,400. Okay. It is the same as what the old Classic was going to be, except it doesn't come with the apron light bar. It doesn't come with the interior cabinet art. It doesn't come with the magic glass, which is like the Invisi anti-reflective glass. And it doesn't come with a shaker motor. You can add any or all of those in if you want. If you get the game with all of those already installed, that was what the classic was going to be. But that's not called the classic anymore. That's called the deluxe. But the deluxe is the limited edition. It was. But now that's called the limited deluxe. Oh, my God. Even though the limited deluxe versus the deluxe has significant differences, like the mirrored back glass, the molded hand-painted shield, and the Odin main ramp, and the skull pile. Those are all flat plastics on the Deluxe, but are molded on the Limited Deluxe. They renamed. So they renamed Deluxe to Limited Deluxe. They renamed Classic to Deluxe, and they created a whole new Classic. Why didn't they just leave Deluxe as Deluxe, Classic as Classic, and then pick a new name for something else? You know, I don't know. Classic Light. Yeah, Classic Light. Or, I don't know, Pro. You know, something. Or don't do it at all. Or don't do it at all. How about that? The deluxe old classic was $8,000. So this is a $600 spread. I have executive decision. All of these different naming schemes, the pro, premium, LE, LE, classic, standard, deluxe, limited deluxe, classic. You know what? Here we are. It's real simple. They are Tier 1, which is the cheapo, Tier 2, which is halfway between the cheapo and the expensive one, and Tier 3 is I've got enough money that I can do anything I f***ing well want version, okay? That's it. Now it works. All companies, Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3, one is cheapest, three is most expensive. And if somebody comes in with a Tier 4, like the special limited edition Elvira, whatever anniversaries, they're like $30,000. The, what was it? Was it the Diamond Edition Beatles that were super expensive? Yeah, those are like the Tier 4 edition, the Tier 4 Special Edition. So we can stop playing these stupid freaking name games. Nobody cares. You and I, I like that. That was a very good Tony rant. That should have been put behind the paywall. That was so solid. And I mean, I agree. We have before, not with such passion, but we have before bemoaned that all these companies have to be super little special snowflakes and name their own stuff weird. So it's like, hey, look, Ellie is the top tier normally with Stern, but it's the middle tier with JJP. And CE is the top because, of course, we all abbreviate it. And CE is the top tier, except with CGC, CE is classic edition and is the lowest tier. And it's a who's on first abomination. This, though – so thank you for your thoughts on this, and I do agree. All of that said, AP, figure it out. That's the quote from Pinball Party, which was pulled from when they had Zach Minion. So full credit to Zach for saying figure it out. I'm going to get full-on affected. Figure it out. Because this – I don't expect anyone from any of these companies to listen to these podcasts. If anyone from American Pinball is listening, what are you doing? Who greenlit this? Who in their right mind thought that renaming existing tiers was in any way smart? Because it is not. No. It is not. And they will often hedge, like when we were talking about Multimorphic or when we were talking about Stern and production decisions and stuff, because I have never worked for a manufacturer. I doubt I ever will work for a manufacturer. I'm not looking to work in a manufacturer. That is not my field. As a consumer, I can confirm for you, doing this is confusing. It is confusing to change names on something which honestly isn't moving enough units to warrant any of this. Now, that does bring up the question, are they going to send original Deluxe, now limited to Deluxe owners, new badging to replace their now incorrect badging on their machines? I don't know if it said Deluxe on it or not. I don't remember like what the plate – I don't even know if there is a – I'm assuming there's a plate or something. I would assume so. It's limited, but I don't know if it just says like three of 500, just like a number slash number or what. I don't know. I doubt it. I doubt it. So let me answer your question. I doubt they will send new branding. In fact, I don't even think they're going to change the branding for the ones they haven't built yet. What's that? Take care of our customers and do the proper thing? This is pinball. I do not get. You might just speculate. This is not rumor corner, which could be total fiction. This is total Dennis speculation. So I don't have any sources for this. I'm not saying this is true. I'm saying this is what my opinion speculation is. I think that American Pinball looks here, sees Expos coming up, and they're like, holy crap, we don't have anything. We don't have a new game. Here we have our company has been going around through our spokespeople saying we're going to put out three games a year, and we're still running Legends of Valhalla, a game we didn't even internally develop, a game from a third party like TNA was for Spooky. We have a game that was developed by Riot Pinball here. We just produce it, and it's been a year, and we haven't even been able to build 500 of them, and we don't have Galactic Tank Force ready. So we're going to come to Expo. We're going to arrange for the Europeans to let us borrow their working magic girl to act like we're relevant. And then we're going to turn out and announce a third tier of a game that didn't even sell out of the first tier. And we'll save a whole $600 by letting you drop a bunch of items that – and per their announcement, this classic and deluxe – not limited deluxe. Deluxe and Classic, they're not going to be available to 2023 anyway. So it's not going to be there. It's just an announcement. It seems like a distraction to me. Like, look, don't look behind the curtain. We don't have a new game this year. Sorry, guys. I know we've been promising that we're the next Stern, and we clearly aren't. But here, we'll talk more about this game that I'm rounding, obviously. Nobody cares about it anymore. You thought the hype peak for sales on Weird Al was back when it was revealed. This is even older. It is. No one cares anymore. I mean, I'm sure they still trickle sale like any game does. People still go and buy Deadpools from Stern, too. But it's not like when it was revealed. We're past the reveal. No one cares about this anymore. They want to talk about Galactic Tank Force. But you're not going to have Galactic Tank Force at Expo, apparently. And I don't think they're getting it out this year. Wouldn't surprise me. And so given that, given those failings, I think they're just trying to show something. The problem is this looks poorly executed to me, like poorly thought. Who goes in and says, it feels to me, I hate to do the Deep Root comparison, but I'm going to. In the sense that, not like stealing a little old lady's money, but like, you know, as all the information came out about Deep Root, what did we learn? We learned that Robert seemed to be a micromanager. Like he was making all of the major decisions and all the minor ones too. This looks to me, just based off the renaming alone and the decision to do a $600 less tier and thinking that's going to get people excited. Like one person decided to do all of this by themselves. Like, hey, let's add a third tier to this. Why? Because I want to. And let's rename it. We'll call it what we were going to call the other one. What about everything? We'll just rename all the tiers for this one game. I don't because it doesn't make any sense otherwise. And the closest analogy I have outside of pinball is I work in public health. We had a grant that – not specific to my organization, but there was a grant for health departments in Kansas. It came from the feds. The state, their announcement, their rollout of it was really shaky, like really weird. And there were things that didn't align with stuff that had been basically promised to health departments beforehand. And what I ultimately learned out behind the scenes, super quiet, one person had worked on all of it. And that's why it was so inconsistent. They weren't checking in with anyone else to know what else was being promised and how this integrated with all our other grants and everything else. And it all it because in some ways it looked really illogical. But then when you zoomed out and you realized someone was basically in a bubble creating it all by themselves, I could mentally like get to where they got. Like I was like, oh, OK, if I didn't do this and this and this and this and this and I locked myself in a room, would I think this was smart? I'm like me, probably not. But but I could I could see the logic to it. I'm struggling even with this to see the logic here. But it's the only way I can get to it is if one person. That's what it feels like. One person doesn't have anyone telling them no. Who that one person is, I could guess. I'm not going to. But that's what it looks like. This looks amateur. Very amateur. Anyway, that's my rant. Yeah. No, I think your rant has got a lot of valid points to it. This is very much a – and people keep talking about, oh, we're going to release multiple games a year. We're going to release multiple – you know what? stop saying you're going to do it. Put up or shut up. When you release multiple games in one year, you can say say we release multiple games in one year. But sitting here going, I'm planning on releasing multiple games next year. And the next year you don't release a single game. That's the exact same. It looks real bad. It looks amateur. It's one of those things. It doesn't give off I think that people think Oh we're looking ahead And we're building and we've got plans But yeah But when you say you're going to do something And then not only do you fail to execute on that You fail Or you execute even less than you had previously It doesn't go Oh It looks bad It looks like you can't handle Or do the job and do what you Claim you're going to do Right Those are good points I concur. It's a – and this is not just an American pinball thing. We have talked ad nauseum about Jersey Jack not meeting their clearly articulated build plans where they used to, I believe, be a we're going to do three games a year. And then they became a we're going to do two games a year. And it still has not happened. Maybe. We rumor cornered last week that there was a rumor they would get a game out at the end of this year. But it's rumor corner. With rumors – I mean a rumor is something of doubtful possibility. So I would always hedge against or say it could very well just be pure fiction. Someone may have made that up and sent it to us. That's why we put it in rumor corner. But they have had spokespeople come out and say this is their plan. And I agree with you. I think it's an attempt to convey strength, to convey vision. But when you don't make it, it looks like to an outsider like me, like you're – the plan is falling apart. and you either stay and continue to act like the plan's fine or what I think most often happens is people just kind of ignore it and don't say anything at all. No one ever seems to come back and say that the plan had to get changed. It seems very rare that that happens. But the problem is you put yourself out there. That was the initial – remember the initial toxicity to Deep Root before we knew anything about the money or anything and the issues that are actually truly problematic. was they went with that super aggressive posture of, oh, yeah, we're going to be better than everyone. It's like, but you haven't built anything. Why are you going out saying that? I mean, it's nice that you're confident, but it's kind of scary that you just think like I'm going to just swoop in and I'm going to be bigger than Ford and Chevy. And we might have seen some parallels to this with Tesla. It's kind of like, OK, I get that you're confident. But and in that case, that individual's case, Elon's case, it started to get to the point where people won't buy his stuff because they hate him because he comes across so bad now. Yeah. And what used to be felt like a lot of confidence when you've made so many blunders at this point, it's kind of like, you know what? He got lucky once and now all the rest of the seems kind of sus. Yeah. So. Well, thank you for that impassioned discussion. Any final thoughts? I do have a final thought. I do have a final thought. When the difference between Tier 1 and Tier 2 is $600 and Tier 2 and Tier 3 is $400. So there's a maximum of a $1,000 difference between Tier 1 and Tier 3. When you're talking about something as expensive as pinball, why would you ever not go with the Tier 3 option until they're gone? No, I don't get it. I mean, we've often talked about how it's unfair for people to act like anyone can always do the next upgrade. But, I mean, this spread is silly for three tiers. It is. We're talking a topper. A stern topper is $1,000. Yeah. And we're talking about that between this thing with mirrored back glasses and all these. And the molded hand painted. Yeah. And everything. Gold foil apron. Yeah. It is just insane to me that the price difference is so little. Now, the renaming is dumb, purely dumb. But the fact that the difference between the Tier 1 and Tier 3 is $1,000. Now, when they renamed it and they made the more reduced version, if it had been under $7,000, if it had been like $6,000, it would have been an obvious push to get to the lower end purchase. Right. It would have been great. But when you're so close to your maximum end purchase, it makes no sense. It's literally all the reduction in the cost is the difference, is the optional add-ons. It's the shaker motor and the magic glass and all that. They literally just took that BOM out to make a slightly cheaper version. Yeah. But you cannot tell me that all of this hand-painted, molded, gold foil, gold powder coat, mirrored back glass is $1,000 more worth it. It just makes no sense. No, I – it's – yeah, it's weird. And that's the thing. Okay, so they're assuming eventually the limited one will sell out. Yeah, that's fair. And then you need another option if you still want to sell games. Yes, that's fair. I just don't understand why you're like, you know what, we just need to get the price down by another $600 versus that version, which was, again, within $400 of the limited version And I like I don I just don think you did But yeah setting aside the naming I was like I just don think you did enough And in fact that is an excellent point for you to final thought because we had a message come in through Patreon from one of our Patreon members Procko who wanted us to answer a question And I thought it would be a great discussion for the show because it relates, incidentally, to what you just said. So I'm going to quote the relevant part of the message. And here it is. Why is there no company outside of Stern that can actually produce games in different tiers with meaningful differences in them? I noticed this with the new love, which is a ball, Halloween and Ultraman Cactus Canyon revisited and also with Toy Story 4. It feels like, quote, do you want the full version, the maxed out version or the maxed out version with extras? with only a few hundred dollar differences between tiers. And the differences are mostly extra stuff like shaker motors or glass or cosmetics. Stern, on the other hand, does this twice with premium to pro, lose a few mechs, save $3,000, and premium to pen. He means the home pen thing. Pay half, still get a good game with a few compromises. Also, pro to pen with $2,000. When American Pinball announced that they would make the classic versions of their games, I was wondering about what are they going to take out of Lov or Hot Wheels to get the price down, like removing the spinning car or what? There's nothing else in it. Turns out it's just about cosmetic stuff again. So thank you, Braco, for the question. I think it's a really interesting question. And given it just fits so well with our discussions about American Pinball just now, let's get to it, which it was the very first line. So I'll start with you, Tony. Why is there no company outside of Stern that can actually produce games of different tiers with meaningful differences in them? I think there's two reasons. reason number one is that I feel like a lot of these companies feel like they have to have multi-tier versions of the games because Stern does they feel like people have come to expect multiple tiers of a game they expect to have the lower end missing a couple things but they don't do the big missing mech changes because that would require an actual amount of design change an actual design difference designer setting down and doing extra work to actually make sure that every that the game is still a good functional game with certain mechs taken out and certain adjustments made it requires more work than just changing color or removing what used to be a molded fancy thing and putting just a flat plastic there or just pulling a toy that doesn't actually interact with anything and is just in there out and putting a flat plastic in its place. So they don't do that higher step to be the difference between, like, the pros and the premiums at Stern. Several of the pro Sterns, I believe, are superior to the higher levels. So several of the Tier 1 Sterns are better than the Tier 2 and Tier 3 Sterns, period. Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones Pro, their first level of it, is so much faster and so much more enjoyable than the other versions of it. I have seen multiple people, including myself, who argue the same thing with Black Knight. The version without the upper play field, without the extra, it's the better version. And it's a thing that I believe makes those specific games more fun in tournament play, more fun overall, but is also such a large difference in the actual tier level of the game productions. But for some reason, I don't know if it's that the other companies haven't grasped the difference, that the other companies choose not to make those changes or those quote-unquote sacrifices. we know JJP did their their lower edition that I don't even remember what it was called their new tier 1 edition there for a while that would remove a couple little things but there was always minor stuff that changes like the Wonkavator and some other stuff and they didn't sell nearly as well but at the same time even those versions of their games were more expensive than like a pro version Stern and they're still aimed at a different group overall. I think that's the number one problem with it is that they do it because they feel they have to. They feel that's what pinball is supposed to be at this point. There are supposed to be different tiers for your different level people. But they don't want to put in the meaningful work to make different tiers with actual major differences still functional. Actually, I think I rolled my two items into one item basically overall. So we'll just call it that. Okay. Yeah, you touched on a lot of what I would say. For me, some of it comes down to company. Because you mentioned like J.J.P. sort of did try this for a while with their standard editions. Some of them, like Wonka, didn't feel like they changed very much. That was often a common complaint that the lowest end version of things like dialed in and stuff. They like no one went with those because it's like they were the rarest versions. You know, the biggest one I remember them changing was probably Guns N' Roses, which we played the standard at 403. That's what I believe they write where you don't have all the upper stuff is the same and all of that. But but yeah, they didn't sell well. So they moved away from it. And I think for me, there are probably three reasons primarily why they do it the way that they do it. First one is changing cosmetic stuff is easy. So if you're going to offer multiple tiers and they see places like Stern do it and they see some people who, again, there might be someone who's like, yeah, I really would want to save $3,000 between Toy Story Ellie and Toy Story CE. $3,000 is a lot of money. So even if it's just cosmetic stuff, if it gets them the savings, okay, easy to do, and maybe it gets you more sales. So that would be number one. Another reason why they might a lot of times only do the cosmetics is a lot of pinball enthusiasts, it's not been so prominent lately because Stern's done it for so long at this point, but there were a lot of people who were really pissed when Stern announced the Pro Premium LE and that the pros play different. There was a lot of objections. Like that's not the same game anymore. You've changed how it works. And obviously it depends on the game. Like guardians of the galaxy. I don't feel it seems very different between the pro and the premium, but as you noted game of Thrones, black night sort of rage, they are extremely different. And your experiences can be extremely different. I know someone who a Canadian who has Godzilla pro and he's had a lot of time on the premium. He's like, the pro is a lot harder. It's like, And that's common with a lot of pros. They usually play a lot faster. Like they don't have the building diverter to farm your right ramp shot on Gigan on the pro. The spinner shot for Mechagodzilla is smaller and tighter on the pro than it is on the premium. All those sort of things, you know, stand-up targets on games versus drop targets make the ball bounce faster. It plays faster. You know all these things. Right. So some of it has been when Stern did that. A lot of these other people that when pinball started to get hot again and decided to make their own companies were like, we're not going to do what Stern did to you and say, yeah, you can have the cheap version, which is a different game, an unworthy game, a lesser game. All our stuff will be minor. Like you'll give up the mirrored back glass. You won't get the shaker motor. You won't get the cool art package or we'll pull out some of the LEDs. You know that. So there's that. Also, there are some people that go in and think the public didn't want what Stern did. So we're going to do it this way. Okay. Which on the surface, I think like I agree with their logic that there were a lot of complaints. That said, CERN is still selling because the savings is so significant by what they do. And that's where it gets to the third point, which is really the one I feel you've spent a lot of time elaborating on about the work, about doing it. It is, while it's not designing a whole new game, it is a design challenge to go through. Because we have to remember, it's not just changing the layout. The code versions, what the programming has to do to make the rules work, are different in Stern Premium and LEs than they are in the pros. Because the difference is like, oh, well, this has a physical ball lock. We have to detect that. We have to manage it. We have to have the software handle it. And sometimes there are different modes that are just not accessible anymore because the feature is not there. So you're asking your team to develop multiple iterations and you have to support those multiple iterations. And it all takes time and effort. So it's just, as you noted, it's more work. So I think that's why most of them do it this way is because they don't have the same capabilities. They don't want to have to manage multiple SKUs in the same way. So why not just stick some flat plastics on, knock a few hundred dollars off and hope that it gets you a few more sales versus doing what Stern does, where Stern, remember, has a huge chunk of the operator market. So they're like, we make enough money off of the pro selling to the operator market. And then all the collectors want to buy this fancy stuff. We'll go ahead and we'll maintain two different iterations. And then the difference between the premium and the LE is cosmetic. Right. So they're like, yeah, we really only manage two different things other than the art package and stuff. So for them, it makes a lot of sense because they have this huge operator market. And that's where I thought JJP was trying to go with their standard edition, and it just didn't take. I think in their case, the problem was even with play field changes to Guns N' Roses, for example, they just couldn't get the price down enough. Because to an operator, it's like which game is going to pay for itself first? The Stern Pro is. That's your competition. It's not the Toy Story, if they did a standard, Toy Story standard versus Toy Story CE or LE. That's not the question. It was which one's going to make more money on location. Even if the Toy Story made, like, as a standard, made 10% more, it's still a better deal to buy the Pro. That's the problem. That was the problem. And so that's why they moved away from it. Another example that Procco mentioned was Cactus Canyon. That's a different story. Chicago Gaming has been remaking old games. You can't change the layouts. So they're stuck with, I feel, stuck with basically only doing cosmetic stuff. Right. And they kind of found success by going, oh, yeah, the upsized DMD thing. That really resonates. So they do that, and they do the elaborate topper thing. And that's what they're trying to do. They're trying to show that they're putting a lot of effort into – because they have to redo the dot structure and stuff for that larger display. So that's where they're putting their resources in to try and say this isn't just like a flat plastic difference. We're actually going to give you some mechanical stuff that we did develop or software stuff we did develop. So they're in a bit of a different boat because they can't go around like dropping out the physical ball lock on Cactus Canyon to save you money. Right. It just doesn't make any sense. At some point, you've betrayed the idea that you did a remake. So I think they're in a little bit different situation. But for all the rest, yeah, that's what I think it is. They're trying to figure out a way to offer different pricing. And the only easy way to do it is cosmetic. And yeah, it feels lazy because it sort of is. But I mean, like, if you think maybe you'll get more sales by dropping a bunch of molded plastics, why not try it? Because it doesn't take you a lot of effort. And once you've developed it, it's ready to go. So that's my thought. You know what time it is now, though, Tony? It's time for Rumor Corner. Yay! Mm-hmm. You know what? Let's talk about American Pinball some more, Tony. Heck yeah. I got several. We haven't had enough. I've got several. And remember, you can always submit your rumors to Rumor Corner at eclecticgamerspodcast.gmail.com. So here's an interesting one. Again, as I like to remind people, I think it's pretty obvious. This is called Rumor Corner, but I don't want anyone claiming that I'm attributing things that are not true. It's Rumor Corner. It could be a total lie. Treat it as fiction. We don't know if this is true. That's why it's in rumor corner and not in the news. So here's the rumor, though, that I've heard. American Pinball purportedly has lost its cabinet manufacturer. How? I don't think they, like, literally, like, they're lost in the woods. He's just missing. They went out to get more wood, and they got lost. And it's very sad. Here at American Pinball, we have nothing but the most bestest artisanal handmade cabinets. Our guy goes out and hunts the perfect tree to cut down to turn into the plywood needed to make our cabinets. Okay, so thank you for that. So this is a rumor that they were outsourcing cabinet production, but now because they don't have a cabinet manufacturer, they're actually putting the cabinets together at the American Pinball factory. And the rumor continued to claim that right now American Pinball has just a lot of playfields sitting around waiting for cabinets so they can actually be installed. Now, I do not remember if I have ever heard who American Pinball was using for their cabinets. I would have assumed Churchill cabinets. I want to think I had heard that. I don't know if that's true or not. So my mind doesn't remember very well. I don't know if you – I do not. You probably didn't even listen to whatever podcast I'm thinking I might have listened to that would have said it. Here's the thing. My understanding. Churchill cabinets, that's CGC. so as we reported on last time or maybe it was the time before as again reported in a rumor corner so it could be totally untrue but you know the long-standing rumor about pulp fiction and chicago gaming doing that correct and we had also shared the rumor that they might actually have the game at expo they might actually start selling the game this year and there was some discussion about well they've been busy building cactus canyon what if they have through no no issues, conflicts, or whatever with their contracts had any negative matter. But what if, in order to expand their line capabilities, they've started to refuse cabinet-build projects so that they could spool up doing two games at once? If they were the cabinet supplier to AP and they needed those workers to start building cabinets for Pulp Fiction, it might make sense that they would refuse a contract. that they normally would have accepted. I have not heard that as a rumor. This is a speculation. But regarding the rumor about AP losing its cabinet manufacturer, that would actually perhaps, because I don't know all the details, of course, but that could explain why we're getting these reports that they still haven't built all 500 Legends of Valhalla Limited Deluxe if they don't have cabinets for them. Yeah, no, that would definitely make sense. That would definitely be something that would slow them down substantially. Maybe it impacted Galactic Tank Force. I don't know. The only thing I want to know is, are you rumortained? Yeah, okay. I'll go. Yeah, I am this time. Okay, good. All right. Video games, Tony. Video games. The vacation is over. We're once again going to be talking about Activision Blizzard and their sexual harassment lawsuit. No, we're not. No, we're not. Oh, good. We're talking about the new sexual harassment lawsuit that is coming out about them. They have had a new complaint filed by a former employee that is directed not only at Activision Blizzard, but it directly names the employee's former manager. There are a lot of particulars in this lawsuit that are out there. People can find it pretty easily online if they want to. The interesting things that I have seen are that Activision Blizzard did do an investigation and did terminate this manager after the complaint, 10 days after the complaint, actually. Okay, so it was fast. It was fast, which was just after the initial lawsuit and all the initial reporting had come up. So there was a big focus on them. On the other hand, there are reports that was the second complaint and the first one was ignored. But what I find most interesting in the particulars here is that in addition to the normal punitive and emotional damages and all of that stuff, It includes a request for the removal of Bobby Kotick as CEO. Wow. Specifically named in. Okay. So they actually have a structural change in the lawsuit that they're requesting for relief. So interesting. We'll see how any of this turns out. but the fact that there's a new one in there and it's kind of a rough one with some interesting things, it'll be different. Luckily, absolutely no other issues have happened with Activision Blizzard at all. Because they've had a pretty big game come out. Except for, yeah, Overwatch 2 had a kind of rough launch. Yeah. I mean. Yeah. There are. Yeah. When do you even start? There are a lot of people that are upset because it's using their new, what do they call it? Their new SMS protect system, which is requiring players to put in their mobile phone number to respond to SMS texts to prove that they're the real person for tracking and for playing. This has a lot of people upset. But they upset to the point where they have done a partial rollback of the system for legacy players. So people who played Overwatch prior, who had played any time since the 9th of June of 2021, they don't have to use the SMS system. Everybody else does. And this system is also fully in effect for Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, Call of Duty Warzone 2. and is, from the sounds of it, the current Blizzard plan going forward for any of the free-to-play segments of their games to help prevent cheating and people who have been kicked off from just creating new accounts. Because in addition to you having to have a new phone number to come in, they have restricted it so that prepaid phones don't work. so if you buy a burner phone and try to put it in nope doesn't work it won't accept it yeah I did have to do probably because I tried to sign in before they did the rollback because I think I had played since June but you know and it was annoying because I had to go to the site and mess with it and I'm playing on console so it was a bit of a thing but honestly I don't have a lot of sympathy there was a lot of toxic behavior in Overwatch 1. That's why I quit. And if this solves it, then great. And I will say, since playing Overwatch 2, the most toxic things I have seen are lame. Like, you suck. Or get good. They're like, I actually saw someone one time go suck. Not to me. Not to me. They were in there. And we had a Sombra player, DPS player, for those that don't know. And she was awful. Whoever was playing, I mean, they were like wood tier bad. It was bad. And the Reaper or whoever, the other DPS we had on the team goes, just says in the chat, Sombra, dot, dot, dot. And the Sombra person goes, what? Because we don't have the mics on. You're not hearing anyone talk unless you want to. That's all. You have to choose to toggle it on. He goes, you're damaged. Look at it. And she switched. And we won. And so it worked. It works. It works. The system works. It works. Awesome. Because my biggest thing wasn't even like the nasty chats and stuff. Through the console, sometimes when people would lose or whatever, they'd send you a message afterwards that could be pretty toxic. And I would always just report them. But the problem is if you reported them to Blizzard and they banned the account, because they would, they'd just make a new one. And it's like, you know what? Some of these people just shouldn't get to play. And so – You make poor decisions. You get punished. So I agree it was annoying to mess with the SMS protect system. However, I will say that the environment so far that I've experienced with Overwatch is a lot better than what I remember from Overwatch 1. But your mileage may vary. Yeah, we'll see if it holds. I haven't. You don't have any Blizzard products installed. I haven't done it yet. I have no Blizzard products installed. Once they get past all the sexual harassment lawsuits. There's anyone left. Yeah. I'm interested. I'm definitely interested. Well, there have been some other bugs. Oh, yeah. There have been plenty of other bugs. Let them suss some of this out. There have been some issues. I wouldn't get their battle pass until they quit putting me in queue. Because I was in 2,000 player queues the first few days. I don't know if that's in your lane. Yeah, it is. Because they had massive queues because they were simultaneously fending off two separate DDoS attacks on their servers through that first weekend. Well, yeah, that first weekend was just like, I might fire it up, do something else, get in an hour later and play two games and go to bed. Yeah. I talked to a couple other people who had wait times where it was literally like they watched a Lord of the Rings movie from when they signed in to when they actually got to play. So that's rough. Yeah, that was. That's rough. That does seem to have been resolved at this point. Yeah. But it was bad. That first weekend was basically impossible. And they also had another bug going on. There was like an auto bug where the UI would mistake your typing in the chat window as commands If you were in say like if you were going through the hero gallery and looking at outfits but you popped up the chat window and you were talking to one of your friends, it would assume you were attempting to buy it. So it would just buy whatever you were doing. It wouldn't let you cancel. Oh, I hadn't heard about that one. So there has been a hot fix. That problem has been solved. It happened a few times, but the reports are Blizzard basically told everybody who it happened to, yeah, no, there's no way to refund. Sorry. These are permanent purchases. But, yeah, that was a small bug that was going around. There are still some bugs from people who migrated who had some previously unlocked characters and items that weren't accessible at first. Some of them still aren't. Yeah. My character, it depended on the day, but I, and that's mild. It's like half the roster was locked. I could not play, it was in every single grouping. So it's like, okay, you couldn't play D.Va. Right. For example, you could play Rhyme, but you couldn't play D.Va. There are healers that were forbidden. And I was like – and then I'd go in another time, and it was fine. And then my characters were locked again another time because they had to pull Bastion out of the game because he's broken. And that triggered it all again for people, and they got it fixed again. I don't know if it's permanently fixed or not, but it was really – I mean you lost a lot of characters. Yeah. Apparently part of the problem – at least part of the problem was – Because I did a migration, and I heard it was related to that. A lot of people who did the migrations were accidentally flagged as first-time players. So they migrated everything, but they were flagged as a first-time player. So they were locked into the first-time player experience, which has reduced rosters and reduced everything. And then in other cases, it just has to do with the way the servers spoke to each other that they were not – and they're still working on all of those fixes. Yeah, there's still – I mean I could – I haven't checked for a couple days now. but I looked on Friday and my, my Overwatch time played and stats are wrong. Like I don't look insane anymore. It likes a 600 hours, but, but a friend of mine I play with, he's like, that can't be right. And I'm like, no, that sounds reasonable. And he's like, I have over a thousand. Didn't you play this more than me? Like, we don't talk about what I did. Don't judge me. But then I started going through some of my other stats and it said things like I had a total of 12 minutes on tracer. I'm like, okay, no, that's not true. That's not true. I was like, I tried her once. So I'm like, okay, no. So that's been a bug. Also, I don't know if you had anything about the rank, competitive rank system. No, I didn't. Okay. So you go through. They've changed how ranking works a bit, and they've got like these categories. It is, by and large, it's thrown tons of people, myself included. I'm not a great player, but it threw me into Bronze V, the lowest tier, one tier. and it's like but I won games in my support qualify like I know I think I won most of the games and it's like all of a sudden I'm in the lowest tier possible lots of players are yeah I've read about like very high tier players that found themselves in and and it's yeah yeah it's bad and they've announced a fix for that where it's gonna it like they they have tagged who that happened to supposedly it's not happening anymore and those of you are like that, we get bonuses as we play the games more and it will ideally throw us into the right tier. Because the other thing was, not only were you thrown in the wrong tier, you couldn't move between tiers. Everyone's locked. So if you're Bronze V, you're Bronze V for life. You're just kicking puppies because you're a Master Tier player in Bronze V. Yes. I've been sticking more in Quick Play lately because I'm like, I don't know, Bronze V is full of Smurfs. It's dangerous land. Now Blizzard has announced That to make up for some of these issues They are going to be running some double XP weekends And they're giving out some legendary skins And weapon charm Things It's now a free to play So it's designed around making it's money off of cosmetics Yeah you buy the cosmetics You can buy a battle pass system Which I currently Which is why I haven't started the vampire game Or Far Cry 6 Because I went ahead once they got through the queue thing and got the battle pass for Overwatch was like $10. And then I also had already gotten the battle pass for this season of Fall Guys, and now I feel obligated to do all these dailies, and I don't have time to play anything else because I'm trying to get all my stuff. I'm trying to work my pass. I'm like, I'm going to get my money's worth. Sunk cost fallacy. That's right. I got to earn it. Then I spent like hours yesterday working on my weeklies in Overwatch. So every three you do, you get a weekly tier. And the only way to earn the in-game currency without buying it is weekly challenges. But the way they've done it is it's an inverted pyramid. So every weekly you do actually earns you less. So there's less incentive to get them all. If you get three, you get most of it. If you do six, you get a middle amount. And then you get a little bit more if you do the last three. And they're always nine every week or whatever. or however they've got it tallied up. And it's like someone said, they just made a joke on Reddit and they're like, yeah, when you spend six hours grinding out those last few weeklies and then realize that they had a grand total value to you of 85 cents. I was like, that's how much those credits would have cost you in the store. So it's like, you know what? Maybe just buy them. Maybe just... If you really care, maybe just buy them. Maybe just, you know, whatever you can afford. Maybe it's easier to afford the time than it is to afford the 85 cents. Yeah, I don't. Or you enjoy doing it. So it would be the other thing. I'm trying to, if I didn't have so many shows to watch, I'd spread it out a little bit more. But I have been enjoying it a lot more than Overwatch 1. Part of it's just finally having some new maps and characters to play with. It's like a new game. Yeah. And there's no more 2CP. Which is good. You don't get stuck with Hanamura and be like, oh, I'm never going to take point B. Yeah. And that's good. And I've seen the – I've heard that the new character is fun. Well, they have several. There's Kiriko. There's Sojourn. They have Junker Queen. Specifically, Kiriko is the one I was hearing is a lot of fun. Kiriko is annoying. She's not fun. Okay. Oh, she just throws knives and not heal you enough. Hate her. Have you seen her cinematic? It is. I did. Her cinematic is great. I was like, about time we finally had some – the only thing that makes me sad now because I watch, of course, watch the cinematic is I think when she ults, every one of you, in this moment, gain sense of the listeners who haven't seen the cinematic. Go see the cinematic. Your whole party should immediately pull out fire axes and just start screaming and running at people and just choppy chop chop like the hammer from Mario, from Donkey Kong for the barrels. But you all should scream like demon scream. Little girl demon scream enhanced by the power of the fox. It was so good. That cinematic was so good. It was great. So that's what I want. I was like, where's my fire axe? I've got fox raids. I need a fire axe. I quickly moved it towards one of my favorite of the Overwatch cinematics, which is saying a lot. Their cinematics have always been really good. Their cinematics for Overwatch have been amazing. They've always been. I might actually say my least favorite thing after them announcing Overwatch 2 was coming out was no more cinematics. Yeah, there's been a break of cinematics for several years. That one in 2019 was the last that I know of. Till now. Till Kiriko. So it was very good. Okay. We'll move on. Yay! Now we'll talk about TwitchCon. TwitchCon? With the ball pit of death? I heard there was like a ball pit that broke people's arms or something. Did you hear about the ball pit? I did not hear about the ball pit. I don't know. There was like an adult ball pit. I did hear about it. I don't know. There was bad things happening. I heard a lot of bad stuff about some really, really crappy streamer behavior. Oh, what a shock. Yeah, what a shock. Like people leaving and finding streamers live streaming while laying on their cars when they get out to the parking lot. And then being mad when the person's like, I want to leave now. Can I take my car? And yelling at them. And because, yeah, streamer trash. Yes, streamer trash. I only have one primary thing I want to talk about TwitchCon because it came up in their big thing, their big conversation. Twitch's chief monetization officer was there and talked more about the 50-50 split. Oh, we addressed that last episode. Yes, we did. But after it came up, he had said that they looked at the 70-30 split across the board and said that it would not be viable for Twitch in the long term. They just could not do it. Okay. So he's telling them, if we do what you want, we'll go out of business. Correct. That's exactly – and that's how it came off. It was, we can't do it. The company would fall. and he said that Twitch has implemented other ways to make money, Amazon Prime subs, GIF subs, hype trains, more ad incentive programs. Okay. Other than that, though, all this other stuff is old. It is. I don't know when they put in hype trains. It's been around for a while. It's been around for years. Amazon Prime has been around for years. It has. All of these things have been around for a while. And I found it interesting that he pointed out that once a streamer regularly hits 80 concurrent viewers, ad revenue becomes 20 to 25 percent of their income, which is surprising to me. That's interesting. I'm surprised as well. I thought it would have been much smaller. Yes, so did I. I would have thought it would have been a much smaller proportion than that. but yeah no it was very much laid out one of the comments that had come up a lot was that now that they're owned by Amazon they've got Amazon backing them up so they can handle the 70-30 split and he said in the thing is like we have to be financially successful on our own in fairness to him if I ran Amazon I would be like we didn't acquire Twitch to subsidize it. Correct. It's supposed to carry its weight. Correct. This is not a charity. To me, the only break Twitch should be getting from Amazon is they're obviously going to be getting the cut rate internal pricing for Amazon Web Services that they use. It's no difference than anything else. If you sell something to another portion of your company, obviously, you don't just give it to them for free. No. There has to be money that goes back and forth. But it is almost always, if not at cost, barely over cost. Right. I mean, if you work for a city, you are not – any billing that comes out for, like, water from the water in the city is not going to be the same thing that people in the houses pay. It's going to be at cost because you're doing it both ways. Same thing with the others. Of course, you're going to make it even. The other group is not going to subsidize you. That just makes total sense. So I just thought it was interesting. There is no way that that was the final nail in the coffin of this 70-30. As long as YouTube and Google are 70-30, people will always bring this up. This is always going to be a Twitch thing. I don't fault them for that. It's the right comparison because that's what the competition is doing. The thing is, it's not – I mean, I don't envy Twitch's position either. I think actually they've been – especially compared to like what we see in pinball. I think they're really being honest about this. I really do think that if they did 70-30, they would struggle to survive. Amazon would be like, we are going to cut you loose. And if you stood alone and you didn't get this discount on our web hosting anymore, you'd go out of business. Yeah. And the challenge at this point, though, is because of what the other companies like YouTube are doing. I feel that Twitch longer term needs to be trying to brainstorm a way to get the percentage up higher. And that means coming up with some other monetization structure or something to incorporate into the system. and I think part of the problem is they don't seem to be suggesting that they're really looking at that. Maybe they're trying to by saying they're looking at new ad incentive programs. I think that's the angle. And they mentioned that they're looking at other methods, but just that method, because of the cost of live streaming, the sheer amount of stuff that they live stream at the quality they live stream at, they cannot go to a 70-30 and survive. So I don't I don't envy the leadership for having to deal with that because, yeah, people are going to look on paper. But that being said, most of these people can't just switch to YouTube either or they will feel they can't. Right. Especially the smaller ones, at least for the time being. Qualifying on YouTube is a lot harder. Most of the – I'm going to generalize because I don't know if this is true. Most of the pinball streamers won't make – won't get partner status on YouTube. They don't have enough followers. Yeah. Well, and it's interesting because of the ecosystems and the differences in the ecosystems. We've seen in the past streamers build a following on Twitch, a very loyal following on Twitch, and then they leave Twitch and they go to other things. And a surprisingly small amount of their followers will change ecosystems with them. We've seen it When some people left and went to Facebook Gaming When people went to YouTube Gaming A lot of them did not take anywhere Near the follower stat They had Just look at Overwatch League Overwatch League lost a huge amount of Viewers when they switched to YouTube That's why Mixer had to offer such big contracts To people like Ninja they paid for the difference basically in an attempt to save their platform which didn't work. That was an instance of a company that was willing to subsidize to try and get it to take hold. It didn't work out. It didn't work out. And it doesn't always. It got stadia'd. It got stadia'd. Stadia is dead. We talked about that. We did. We talked about that last week. So Google has announced just recently, about two weeks after they announced Stadia going away, That they're going to be releasing a series of cloud gaming Chromebooks They are specialized Chromebooks For Chrome gaming Designed for that They will come with the GeForce Now Pre-installed and built in support For Xbox, Cloud Gaming, Amazon Luna And Google Play Yay Well they did say While they were closing down Stadia They were maintaining all this background And stuff for other services to use it as a thing. And this isn't, they're not bringing Stadia stuff to it. I think this is primarily them using the behind the scenes stuff they built for Stadia and spinning it off into something that uses other people's. Because I know Xbox is a cloud gaming structure they're pushing pretty hard. They just signed a large deal with Metaverse to come to the new Quest VR helmets. and there's been a lot of work. Will it be any more successful than Stadia? I don't know. I think they have the same issues that people would have had with Stadia. We'll have to see. But there's enough companies trying it now that Google started and shut down, which, again, for Google is not uncommon. They kill popular things. I don't know. I'm still not sold on cloud gaming. I see the promise. I can see the hope and the desires, but it is not something that I'm willing to bury myself into as of yet. Though the CD Projekt Red people should be happy to know that CD Projekt Red did release an official save file transfer method for those Cyberpunk players. Okay, that's good. They put out an official way to do it. so we will see how that goes for them since we started talking about Activision and Blizzard we're going to finish by talking about Microsoft Activision and Blizzard ok, wow it's a lot of Activision it is, we've been skipping it for so long I just find this specific bit is interesting as a lot of you know the Microsoft Activision deal has been up in the courts in several countries, seeing if it is a monopoly or if it's illegal, if it's not too much. Right, right, right, yeah. Well, it's been in the U.K. courts for a while, and the latest round of questioning is concentrating on the fact that Sony is claiming that Microsoft owning Call of Duty would create an unfair advantage to Microsoft in the ecosystem. Okay. Microsoft has countered that claim in the UK courts by saying that if every single Call of Duty player on PlayStation quit PlayStation to move to Xbox, PlayStation would still be a significantly larger player base than Xbox. The numbers they put out is that the current PlayStation install base is reported at 150 million, and the Xbox is reported as just under 64 million. Do you know how many people play Call of Duty? That wasn't said. Oh, okay. Well, I mean, I'm sure it's less than this almost 100 million people. Right. Okay. That's an interesting argument. I mean, and that's the ongoing argument is the fact that – In all of these things, one of the biggest things that Microsoft has been arguing is that even if this purchase goes through, we will still be number three. Right. In the group of, and Sony is number one. And will still be. And will still be. Yeah. I mean, I don't know, obviously, all of the antitrust laws in all these various nations because I know UK, the EU, Brazil, I believe Australia are all examining this in addition to the United States. Correct. But I struggle to imagine any of them rejecting this. I feel like the way it reads is Sony has sour grapes because they've been doing limited exclusive access with Call of Duty in particular a lot. I think they're extra sensitive to it. It is like the most popular FPS, but it's not the only FPS. I mean, like Battlefield is still on every game through EA, and they're already such a larger, more popular console. I just I I know most of the people I see who seem to think like maybe this is going somewhere are just like Microsoft haters that remember the the old. I mean, Microsoft has done some monopolistic. Yeah, they have. So not to be dismissive about it. That all being said, Sony has walled garden big time ever since the last console generation. They have scooped up a lot of things and put a lot of stuff that people really wish was on other things like Spider-Man and everything else. And they vacuum in Bungie and all of this, and they – it's like what's good for the goose is good for the gander sort of thing here. I don't – I get it. Activision is a huge company, but it's still all merged together. Microsoft's just not the – in my – and again, US-centric version. In a world where antitrust groups let Sprint and T-Mobile combine because they're still just number three to Verizon and AT&T, I just don't see how this gaming thing where even separate from the console – it's like it doesn't change that Sony as a console maker can survive or Nintendo or Microsoft. And then there's so many independent game publishers. It's just not a monopoly. The landscape is not – it's not – we see more monopolistic behavior in the wristwatch world with Reshmont and Swatch and Seiko and LVC or whatever, LVMH. They're like the biggest ones that control most of the brands. There's still a bunch of independents. So it's not really monopolies. I just think they're mad and they're trying to stop it. And the government should review it. This should be subjected to review. So I agree that these reviews need to happen. I just don't see how Microsoft doesn't get to have it. I have a hard time seeing it being denied. I 100% would be in complete and utter shock if it was denied in the United States. I just don't. And if it's going to be approved here, I mean, maybe they restructure it a little differently elsewhere, but if they can do it in the U.S., they're going to do it. Right. They're going to buy it. Yeah. So, I mean, they're both, yeah, there's no way I think that it stopped. It's just an interesting set of arguments. Yeah, I just – it reminded me of early on in one of the – it might have been the US side where in one of their letters, Microsoft did the – my point about Call of Duty versus like Battlefield or any of the other FPSs where it sounded extra salty or extra cruel versus what they meant. But Microsoft is saying Activision Blizzard doesn't produce anything unique. It's like – True. Every genre that they do is available through some other company. Yeah. It made it sound like they were super uncreative, which wasn't their intent. But they're sort of like, because all the gamers are like, yeah, you know what? Yeah, they are uncreative. They just might not necessarily be. They aren't unique. They're dumb. They're dumb. I mean, there's stuff that's available. They might not be as good quality, but in some cases they're better. You just never know. It's an interesting thing that is still playing out. that's all I got in video games. Okay, well, then we made it to the end of the episode yet again. So, folks, if you want to reach out to us, you can always email eclecticgamerspodcast at gmail.com or go to facebook.com slash eclecticgamerspodcast and use the messenger tool there. We are on Twitch, Twitter, and Instagram as eclectic underscore gamers. And we should be back in a couple of weeks. As a reminder, Tony and I are not going to Expo in Chicago, so do not come and say hi to us because that It won't be us. Yeah, it won't be us. It'll be an illusion. Don't fall for the illusion. Don't fall for the limited classic deluxe versions of us. Only the true real people, which won't be there. So that's that. Yeah. All right. Until next time, I am Dennis. I'm Tony. Goodbye, everybody. See you.