279: $30,000 to Take Off a Pair of Glasses

00:00SPEAKER- Okay, I have chosen to roll the dice.

00:02SPEAKER- I love gambling.

00:04SPEAKER- Okay, well, I don't know about this kind of gambling.

00:06SPEAKERI left dinner out on the stove last night.

00:08SPEAKER- What was dinner, Brad?

00:10SPEAKER- Dinner was courtesy of my lovely partner.

00:13SPEAKERIt was a concoction of, let's see, chickpeas, broccolini.

00:17SPEAKER- Okay.

00:18SPEAKER- Some shredded coconuts.

00:19SPEAKER- Yeah.

00:20SPEAKER- Some walnuts.

00:21SPEAKER- Okay.

00:22SPEAKER- Spam.

00:23SPEAKER- Okay.

00:24SPEAKER- Over brown rice.

00:26SPEAKER- I'm kind of anti the walnuts, just to be clear,

00:28SPEAKERbut I'm pro the Spam and the broccolini.

00:31SPEAKER- It was a light dusting of walnuts.

00:32SPEAKERLet's see, you don't like walnuts?

00:34SPEAKER- Walnuts taste, they have a filmy taste to me

00:37SPEAKERthat gives it real bad mouth texture that I don't like.

00:41SPEAKER- Is that a mealiness, would you say?

00:42SPEAKERAre they mealy?

00:43SPEAKER- No, no, they're mealy when they're bad

00:45SPEAKERand you shouldn't eat them anymore,

00:46SPEAKERbut there's a chemical in them

00:49SPEAKERthat is part of that walnutty flavor

00:52SPEAKERthat just makes my mouth feel weird

00:53SPEAKERand makes the skin inside my mouth slough off

00:56SPEAKERto the point that I'm probably mildly allergic to it.

00:58SPEAKER- Oh, okay, well that might be a separate issue,

01:00SPEAKERa medical issue, rather than a culinary one.

01:03SPEAKER- No, I just think that, but as a result,

01:04SPEAKERit's an unpleasant culinary experience for me, I avoid it.

01:07SPEAKER- Fair, fair.

01:08SPEAKERAlso, when you get down to it,

01:09SPEAKERall food is just chemicals, really.

01:11SPEAKER- Everything's chemicals, all the way down.

01:13SPEAKER- Anyway, so yeah, it was a little stir fry,

01:14SPEAKERlike broccolini chickpeas and Spam and stuff

01:17SPEAKERover brown rice.

01:18SPEAKER- That sounds delish.

01:19SPEAKER- I fell asleep sitting up on the couch last night.

01:22SPEAKER- Yeah.

01:23SPEAKER- And then woke up about an hour later.

01:26SPEAKER- Oh, just an hour?

01:27SPEAKER- No, no, no, no, it was like I woke up an hour later

01:29SPEAKERand was just like, oh my God, I just fell asleep sitting up.

01:31SPEAKERI should probably go to bed.

01:32SPEAKERSo I went straight to the bed.

01:34SPEAKER- Oh.

01:34SPEAKER- Forgot to put up the food

01:36SPEAKERthat was sitting out on the stove.

01:38SPEAKERPut it up about 12 hours later.

01:40SPEAKER- Yep.

01:41SPEAKER- I just had it for lunch.

01:42SPEAKER- Well, you're gonna have an exciting 36 hours.

01:46SPEAKERI'm usually like, look, I was the person in college

01:49SPEAKERwho would just take the pizza off of the counter

01:51SPEAKERand chuck it in the oven in the box

01:53SPEAKERand then come out and grab a slice

01:55SPEAKERand dip it in the congealed Papa John's

01:59SPEAKERgarlic butter goo opened the next day.

02:02SPEAKER- Did that ever go poorly for you?

02:04SPEAKER- Nope, always fine.

02:05SPEAKERRock solid. - Really?

02:06SPEAKER- Yep.

02:06SPEAKER- I feel like kind of fast food type stuff

02:08SPEAKERand I consider that chance sort of chain pizza

02:10SPEAKERto be fast food is probably so preservative to out.

02:14SPEAKER- Oh, yeah.

02:15SPEAKER- They're probably always gonna be fine in that case.

02:16SPEAKERLike home cooked food is a different ball game.

02:19SPEAKER- So I often will like eat dinner

02:21SPEAKERand then put dinner up at like,

02:23SPEAKERif we eat at like 7.30 or eight,

02:25SPEAKERI'll put it up at like 10 if I'm not thinking about it.

02:28SPEAKER- I do that kind of thing all the time.

02:29SPEAKERBut again, this was cooked at like--

02:31SPEAKER- 12 hours is a lot.

02:32SPEAKER- This was cooked at like six or 6.30 PM around there

02:36SPEAKERand then got put up the next morning

02:38SPEAKERafter we were out of bed.

02:39SPEAKER- Yeah, but like there's no eggs, right?

02:41SPEAKER- No, no eggs.

02:42SPEAKERI mean like the spam I think has gotta be totally fine,

02:44SPEAKERright, there's so much salt in that.

02:46SPEAKER- Look, yeah, you could put a can of spam

02:48SPEAKERopened on your windowsill for three days,

02:50SPEAKERcrack into it later and you're fine, no problem.

02:54SPEAKER- It was a pretty dry sort of stir fry.

02:57SPEAKERLike it was not a lot of moisture in there to propagate.

03:00SPEAKERIt was not a culturing medium in there so much.

03:02SPEAKER- I do love a good dry stir fry.

03:05SPEAKERYeah, I think you're fine.

03:06SPEAKERI mean, look, let us know next week.

03:08SPEAKERWe can talk about it on the patron episode.

03:09SPEAKERLike if you end up laying on the floor of the bathroom,

03:13SPEAKERhaving regrets for your choices,

03:15SPEAKERI want you to think about things that you're gonna do

03:17SPEAKERand not do again in the future

03:18SPEAKERand we can talk about them later.

03:19SPEAKER- Yeah, I know we talked about food safety lately

03:21SPEAKERin the abstract, but here we are now

03:23SPEAKERand here I am with an experiment.

03:25SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, look,

03:25SPEAKERsometimes you gotta do the science, right?

03:27SPEAKER- Sometimes you gotta put theory into practice.

03:29SPEAKER- Yeah, and the only way you're gonna,

03:31SPEAKERyou know, it's like you always say you gotta,

03:34SPEAKERsometimes you gotta let the kids touch the stove,

03:36SPEAKERget a little burn.

03:38SPEAKERSometimes you gotta eat some potentially rancid food

03:41SPEAKERand maybe spend 12 to 18 hours

03:42SPEAKERlaying on the floor of the bathroom

03:44SPEAKERand that's the only way you're gonna learn.

03:45SPEAKER- Sometimes you just gotta do the work for the people

03:47SPEAKERand give yourself food poisoning.

03:49SPEAKER- Yeah, it's what the kids crave.

03:50SPEAKER(funky upbeat music)

04:19SPEAKERWelcome to "Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod."

04:21SPEAKERI'm Will.

04:22SPEAKER- I'm Brad.

04:23SPEAKER- Brad, I'm coming at you straight from GDC,

04:26SPEAKERthe Game Developer Conference this week.

04:28SPEAKER- Yeah, you've been there way more than I have.

04:30SPEAKERI keep wondering if you're going to get sick or not.

04:33SPEAKER- I wear, I've worn masks a fair amount.

04:37SPEAKER- That's fair.

04:38SPEAKERWell, and when I say sick, I don't just mean COVID.

04:39SPEAKERI also just mean a cold or flu.

04:41SPEAKERYou know, conventions are tremendous vectors for disease

04:44SPEAKERin my experience of going to many, many conventions.

04:47SPEAKER- The thing, not to belabor the spending time

04:49SPEAKERon the floor of the bathroom point,

04:51SPEAKERbut the thing I want to avoid more than anything

04:53SPEAKERis norovirus right now.

04:55SPEAKER- Is it a foot?

04:56SPEAKER- That's, I mean, it's always a foot this time of year,

04:58SPEAKERbut yeah, the conventions are a good place to get norovirus

05:00SPEAKER'cause like hand sanitizer doesn't kill it apparently.

05:04SPEAKERSo you have to wash your hands a lot and you know, it's fine.

05:07SPEAKERI did good hand washing while there.

05:09SPEAKER- Have you ever had it?

05:10SPEAKER- Oh yeah.

05:13SPEAKERI'm gonna go and tell you.

05:14SPEAKER- Just let that pause hang in the air.

05:17SPEAKER- Yeah, it's bad.

05:18SPEAKERYou don't want that.

05:19SPEAKER- I'm pretty sure I've had it.

05:20SPEAKERI had something about 15 years ago, closer to 20 now.

05:25SPEAKERThere was a norovirus outbreak in town at the same time

05:27SPEAKERand I never got diagnosed,

05:29SPEAKERbut it was possibly the sickest I have ever been.

05:32SPEAKERIt was like three straight days of unable to eat.

05:34SPEAKER- Oh, that's probably not,

05:35SPEAKERnorovirus is usually like 24 hours in and out.

05:37SPEAKER- Is it?

05:38SPEAKERHuh.

05:39SPEAKER- So we had norovirus, my daughter was born in January

05:44SPEAKERand Gina and I got it the day before Christmas

05:49SPEAKERand she woke up sick the day of Christmas.

05:52SPEAKER- Oh no.

05:53SPEAKER- And like, of course she's also like nine

05:55SPEAKERand a half months pregnant, about to explode.

05:58SPEAKERAnd it was really, really horrific.

06:01SPEAKERReally bad. - That's a bad scene.

06:02SPEAKER- Yeah, no, it wasn't what you want.

06:04SPEAKERYou don't want like a real pregnant lady

06:05SPEAKERon the floor of the bathroom just retching.

06:08SPEAKERIt's bad for everyone involved.

06:09SPEAKER- Yep, yep.

06:10SPEAKERSo yeah, so yeah, I wear a mask.

06:15SPEAKERI took Bart in most of the days I went down.

06:19SPEAKERWore masks when I was walking around the floor

06:22SPEAKERanytime I was in a dense area.

06:23SPEAKERThe thing is the convention center itself

06:26SPEAKERis a pretty big area.

06:28SPEAKERLike the ceilings are big,

06:28SPEAKERthere's lots of airflow through there

06:30SPEAKERand they redid it a few years ago.

06:32SPEAKERAnd there aren't that many, it's not like old school E3

06:35SPEAKERwhere you're just walking through mobs of people

06:38SPEAKEReverywhere you go or Comic-Con or PAX or whatever.

06:41SPEAKERIt's pretty loosely populated.

06:43SPEAKERAnd also these days, a lot of the kind of casual socializing

06:48SPEAKERthat used to happen downstairs in the convention center

06:51SPEAKERor in the areas outside talks and stuff,

06:53SPEAKERpeople go to Yerba Buena Park

06:55SPEAKERand it's the kind of park above

06:57SPEAKERone of the halls of the convention center.

07:00SPEAKERAnd it's a really lovely park

07:01SPEAKERwith a lot of really nice grass.

07:02SPEAKERThere's tons of benches and places to sit and little tables.

07:05SPEAKERAnd there's even like chessboards and stuff like that.

07:08SPEAKERAnd a couple of restaurants and a tea room.

07:11SPEAKERAnd it's a lovely place to kind of hang out,

07:14SPEAKERespecially for our friends from parts of the country

07:17SPEAKERand world that get colder

07:19SPEAKERand are excited to consider Northern California

07:22SPEAKERand March to be a warm climate.

07:24SPEAKER- Wait, this is warm compared to some places?

07:26SPEAKER- Or a lot of places.

07:27SPEAKERYeah, like, man, the people from Boston and Quebec

07:30SPEAKERare thrilled to be here.

07:32SPEAKER- Yes, understandable.

07:33SPEAKER- Yeah, I have not been through the GDC show floor

07:35SPEAKERsince probably the late 2000s.

07:37SPEAKERBut yeah, I always remember it being

07:39SPEAKERpretty sparsely populated.

07:40SPEAKERI'm not saying it was a ghost town

07:42SPEAKERlike nobody was at the show,

07:43SPEAKERbut you could just kind of walk wherever, whenever.

07:46SPEAKER- Well, it's not like the dense parts

07:49SPEAKERof a big, big giant trade show,

07:50SPEAKERbut it's busy for like an industry show, right?

07:54SPEAKERIt's big for an industry show.

07:56SPEAKER- Yeah, people are excited to go see Speed Tree.

07:59SPEAKER- Not anymore at Speed Tree.

08:00SPEAKERI went looking for Speed Tree.

08:01SPEAKERI always go looking for Speed Tree.

08:02SPEAKERIt's part of my annual pilgrimage.

08:04SPEAKERI did not see Speed Tree, Brad, I'm sorry.

08:05SPEAKER- Speed Tree, man.

08:06SPEAKER- No.

08:07SPEAKERWell, Lumen and Mega Geo take care of Speed Tree these days.

08:12SPEAKERThey've eaten their lunch, I think.

08:14SPEAKERThey got Sherlocked.

08:15SPEAKER- Did Speed Tree get bought by anybody?

08:17SPEAKER- I don't know.

08:18SPEAKERI feel like they did.

08:19SPEAKERI feel like that's the thing that happened in like 2018.

08:21SPEAKERBut one of the things that they do now that I love at GDC.

08:25SPEAKERSo this week we're doing a potpourri.

08:27SPEAKERWe've got a couple of variety of topics,

08:30SPEAKERa couple of two, three topics.

08:32SPEAKERWe've kind of got like a potpourri within a potpourri

08:35SPEAKER'cause you've got a little mini GDC report

08:39SPEAKERon some stuff here.

08:40SPEAKERAnd then another topic besides.

08:42SPEAKER- Yeah, so one of the things that they do now that I love

08:46SPEAKERis they take both indie games.

08:49SPEAKERThere's an indie games pavilion

08:51SPEAKERwhere there's like all the stuff that's nominated

08:54SPEAKERfor the, is it the IDGAs or IGDAs?

08:58SPEAKERI never can remember.

08:59SPEAKER- I want to say IGDA.

09:01SPEAKERInternational Game Developers Association.

09:03SPEAKER- That's it.

09:03SPEAKERThe Indie Game Awards basically.

09:07SPEAKERAnd they have all those folks set up with like little kiosks

09:09SPEAKERwhere you can just walk up and play the game.

09:11SPEAKERAnd like this year it was,

09:12SPEAKERit's always an interesting mix of like wildly popular

09:16SPEAKERindie games like Bellatro and I'm completely blanking now.

09:23SPEAKERAnd then stuff you've never heard of before.

09:26SPEAKERBut this year, I don't know, it was a good crowd of stuff.

09:33SPEAKERA lot of the games that were there,

09:34SPEAKERI'd already have already spent time playing

09:36SPEAKER'cause they've been out for a while.

09:38SPEAKER- Yeah, that's kind of been a change over time

09:41SPEAKERsince indie games just became video games.

09:43SPEAKERYou know what I mean?

09:44SPEAKERSince they stopped being indie games

09:45SPEAKERand just became games like every other game.

09:47SPEAKER- Yeah, it's more about budget I think these days

09:50SPEAKERthan kind of budget and whether you had like a developer

09:54SPEAKERor publisher giving you money to make your game.

09:58SPEAKERLike whether you were working from inside a publisher

10:01SPEAKERor outside a publisher, I guess,

10:02SPEAKERis maybe the way to think about it.

10:03SPEAKER- Yeah, but it's so much different than like 15 years ago

10:05SPEAKERwhen I did IGF judging for a little while,

10:08SPEAKERwhich is a different awards set, but same concept.

10:12SPEAKERI think I had probably talked about this before.

10:14SPEAKERThere was one year, it was kind of early to mid giant bomb.

10:17SPEAKERThere was a year where my IGF judging,

10:19SPEAKER'cause you would just go download demo builds of the games,

10:21SPEAKERright, and it would just be like some Unity launcher

10:24SPEAKERor XNA or whatever.

10:25SPEAKERIt was just like, hey, here's a zip file

10:27SPEAKERwith a runaway, you know, a playable build of this game.

10:30SPEAKERI think it was all in the same batch of stuff

10:32SPEAKERI was judging for the finalists.

10:33SPEAKERIt was like Limbo and Super Meat Boy and maybe Fez?

10:38SPEAKERI'd have to go check.

10:39SPEAKER- Super Meat Boy was the year before.

10:41SPEAKERNo, they might've been the same year, but yeah.

10:43SPEAKER- They might've all been entered at the same time.

10:44SPEAKERBut the point is like, I had never heard of Limbo

10:46SPEAKERor Super Meat Boy before I downloaded those demos

10:48SPEAKERand played them.

10:49SPEAKERSo like, that's not like- - Oh, wow.

10:50SPEAKER- It was very different than in terms of indie games

10:52SPEAKERbeing able to build a cache and hype and visibility

10:55SPEAKERprior to launch than it is now.

10:57SPEAKERSo like, I didn't know what Limbo was

10:59SPEAKERuntil I downloaded a zip file of it

11:02SPEAKERto judge it for a competition and played it.

11:04SPEAKERAnd it was like, holy shit.

11:06SPEAKER- Yeah, that's a surprise.

11:07SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, things are quite different there now.

11:09SPEAKERBut anyway, like, do you wanna start

11:12SPEAKERby just talking about the general vibe?

11:15SPEAKER- Yeah, we can.

11:16SPEAKERIt was, well, okay.

11:19SPEAKERSo I had multiple conversations with people about this

11:21SPEAKERand the people who've been going every year,

11:22SPEAKERas I have for the last five or six years,

11:26SPEAKERwere like, wow, this year feels a lot better

11:28SPEAKERthan previous years.

11:29SPEAKERAnd then last night I went and saw a friend

11:30SPEAKERwho hadn't been to GDC since like 2019.

11:33SPEAKERHe was like, wow, it's like a funeral around here, right?

11:35SPEAKERSo, you know, things are, for folks who don't know,

11:39SPEAKER2023, basically from the start of the Ukraine war

11:44SPEAKERuntil now has been a bit of a downtime

11:48SPEAKERdue to a bunch of stuff, like interest rates going up,

11:50SPEAKERimpacted the flow of money into video games.

11:56SPEAKERPlatforms like Xbox and Epic have kind of slowed down.

12:00SPEAKERPreviously, there was a lot of money

12:03SPEAKERgoing into the games industry from Game Pass deals

12:05SPEAKERand those Epic exclusive deals

12:08SPEAKERthat they were signing for a while,

12:09SPEAKERwhich, to be clear, they weren't giving enough money

12:15SPEAKERthat you could build like an Assassin's Creed, right?

12:17SPEAKERBut they were giving enough money

12:19SPEAKERthat you could absolutely build a big indie game

12:25SPEAKERif you were smart about how you funded your game

12:27SPEAKERand how you did stuff.

12:28SPEAKERSo, you could end up with,

12:32SPEAKERif you did your deals right across all platforms,

12:36SPEAKERyou could end up with a couple of million dollars of money

12:38SPEAKERthat basically had no strings attached to it,

12:42SPEAKERespecially if you'd had a successful title in the past.

12:44SPEAKERAnd that's all gone now.

12:46SPEAKEROr not all gone, but it's mostly gone now.

12:48SPEAKERThat money's a lot harder than it was before

12:51SPEAKERto use the business person parlance.

12:53SPEAKER- Yeah, hearing no strings attached is kind of shocking

12:56SPEAKER'cause it seems like now, at a minimum,

12:58SPEAKERyou would have to give some kind of exclusivity

13:00SPEAKERor something like that?

13:02SPEAKER- Okay, so the string would have been exclusivity,

13:05SPEAKERbut no recoup, just to be clear.

13:07SPEAKER- Those kinds of strings.

13:08SPEAKER- Yeah, so you would say,

13:10SPEAKERokay, Epic gets to have my game for X period of time,

13:13SPEAKERand they're gonna give us this amount of money for that,

13:15SPEAKERand you're gonna use Epic services for their,

13:19SPEAKERfor whatever backend stuff you use or whatever,

13:22SPEAKERbut then you wouldn't have to pay them back the money,

13:24SPEAKERwhich like, if you take out money from,

13:25SPEAKERif you take money from,

13:28SPEAKERI'm just gonna pick Activision here

13:29SPEAKER'cause they're owned by Microsoft and nobody's gonna care,

13:31SPEAKERbut if you take money from Activision to publish your game,

13:33SPEAKERwhich is not a thing that they do anymore

13:35SPEAKER'cause they really basically just make Blizzard games

13:37SPEAKERin Call of Duty at this point,

13:38SPEAKERthey would say, okay,

13:41SPEAKERwe're gonna give you X million dollars to make this game,

13:43SPEAKERand you have two years, and we want these milestones

13:45SPEAKERto be delivered at such and such and such and such

13:48SPEAKERand such and such, and each one's gonna contain

13:50SPEAKERdifferent key components of the game,

13:52SPEAKERand then at the end of that time period,

13:56SPEAKERwhen you put the game on sale,

13:57SPEAKERthen they're gonna take all of their money back

14:00SPEAKERbefore you see a penny from the game,

14:03SPEAKERand then once they recoup their investment,

14:06SPEAKERthen you'll have a shared split, typically.

14:09SPEAKERJust to be clear, this would be a bad deal.

14:11SPEAKERYou shouldn't sign a deal like this

14:12SPEAKERif you're a game developer.

14:13SPEAKERIf you wanna know how to get better deals,

14:15SPEAKERplease send me an email and I can help you out.

14:18SPEAKERThis is what I do.

14:20SPEAKERBut yeah, so there was a lot of unrecouped money

14:27SPEAKERfrom PlayStation Plus, Xbox, Epic, a bunch of other places.

14:33SPEAKERThat went away.

14:34SPEAKERThe interest rates went up.

14:36SPEAKERThe venture capitalists,

14:37SPEAKERthe first wave of venture capital funded games,

14:39SPEAKERwhich also have no recoup,

14:40SPEAKERbut you give equity in your company to them

14:42SPEAKERin exchange for that.

14:44SPEAKER- Which is probably an even worse deal.

14:45SPEAKER- Actually, no, because the thing that gets

14:49SPEAKERa lot of even successful first time developers

14:51SPEAKERis you have to be able to float your payroll

14:55SPEAKERbetween the time your game comes out

14:57SPEAKERand the time you have enough money coming in

14:58SPEAKERfrom your recoup.

14:59SPEAKERAssuming you have a successful game,

15:01SPEAKERyou have to be able to survive for at least three months,

15:03SPEAKER'cause that's how long it takes anybody to pay you,

15:05SPEAKERand you have to be able to survive through the recoup often

15:08SPEAKERto get to a point that your game is building

15:10SPEAKERa sustainable revenue.

15:12SPEAKERSo unless you have something that's just wildly successful

15:15SPEAKERout of the gate, in which case you go,

15:16SPEAKERyou get a short-term loan, pay your payroll, and it's fine,

15:20SPEAKERlike it's hard.

15:22SPEAKERIt's easy to have a game that like everybody

15:24SPEAKERknows the name of, and a lot of people played,

15:27SPEAKERbut didn't sell a million copies,

15:30SPEAKERand you can't make your payroll two weeks after you launch,

15:33SPEAKERright, if you didn't budget your stuff well.

15:36SPEAKERSo like VC, essentially you're giving a venture capitalist

15:43SPEAKERa small percentage of your company that's worth very little.

15:48SPEAKER- Okay, I mean, small percentages,

15:50SPEAKERI guess that's the part I wasn't expecting.

15:52SPEAKERI assumed it would be like a pretty healthy chunk

15:54SPEAKERthat they would want.

15:54SPEAKER- I mean, it's a double digits, but it's not half.

15:56SPEAKERIt's, you know, it depends on, and again,

15:59SPEAKERthis is one of those things that the deal's very wildly

16:00SPEAKERbased on a bunch of different factors,

16:02SPEAKERbut typically for a venture deal,

16:05SPEAKERit's based on the value that your company's created.

16:07SPEAKERSo if you have a bunch of smart people making a game,

16:11SPEAKERyou can get a pretty good, with like, with pedigrees,

16:16SPEAKERyou can get a pretty good valuation,

16:18SPEAKERwhich means you can raise 10, 20, 40, $80 million

16:21SPEAKERin some cases on not a whole lot of work actually done,

16:27SPEAKERyou know, the hopes and prayers.

16:29SPEAKERNow, a lot of those studios have folded by now, right?

16:32SPEAKERAnd that started in 2023, and the VCs kind of cooled,

16:36SPEAKERand as the interest rates went up,

16:37SPEAKERthen their interest in borrowing money

16:39SPEAKERto pump into new ventures kind of cooled.

16:42SPEAKERAnd then the Ukraine war happened,

16:44SPEAKERand that made interest rates go up higher,

16:46SPEAKERand then, and then Embracer dis-embraced

16:50SPEAKERa whole bunch of studios, and suddenly there's a flood,

16:53SPEAKERand then there were a bunch of layoffs,

16:55SPEAKERand there's a flood of labor,

16:56SPEAKERand the money completely dried up in like 2023

17:02SPEAKERto the point that people who had successful enough games

17:05SPEAKERthat they would have signed a game two deal

17:07SPEAKERpretty easily with a publisher were being sent away.

17:11SPEAKERWe're starting to see that change now, is the good news.

17:14SPEAKER- That's good to hear.

17:15SPEAKER- People are signing small deals.

17:18SPEAKER- Okay, 'cause previously, like especially on social media,

17:20SPEAKERyou would see there was like kind of a mantra repeated

17:22SPEAKERlast year quite a bit that you would see survive to 25.

17:26SPEAKER- Yeah, that's, I mean, yeah,

17:27SPEAKERthat's the thing that people say on social media.

17:29SPEAKER- I mean, I'm on game developers to be clear.

17:31SPEAKER- Yeah.

17:32SPEAKER- It's not a broader society, you know,

17:34SPEAKERbut financially or, you know,

17:35SPEAKERprofessionally survive in business terms.

17:38SPEAKER- Yeah, cockroaching was the strategy

17:40SPEAKERfor the last two years.

17:41SPEAKER- Right, and then, and then we got here,

17:42SPEAKERand then I feel like I saw quite a few people saying like,

17:44SPEAKER"Okay, we made it to 2025, now what?

17:46SPEAKER"Things don't seem much better,"

17:48SPEAKERbut maybe they are finally slowly shifting.

17:50SPEAKER- I think the realization this year

17:52SPEAKERis that everybody's getting to is that things

17:54SPEAKERaren't going to be the way that they were

17:56SPEAKERin 2020 and 2021 and 2022.

17:59SPEAKERLike we're thinking about the good old days of the pandemic

18:01SPEAKERwhenever we was at home,

18:02SPEAKERand there were billions of people playing video games,

18:04SPEAKERand there was a lot of money pouring in as a result of that.

18:08SPEAKERJust to be clear, I'm not saying 2020 and 2021

18:11SPEAKERwere the good old days.

18:11SPEAKERWhat I'm saying is it was a real boom time

18:14SPEAKERfor the game industry,

18:15SPEAKER'cause it was one of the few industries

18:16SPEAKERthat was almost completely unaffected,

18:19SPEAKERand that everybody being trapped at home

18:20SPEAKERwas actually really good for business, it turns out.

18:23SPEAKER- In fact, it was not unaffected, it was boosted.

18:25SPEAKERLike it was affected in a positive direction.

18:28SPEAKER- Yeah, but the place that I'm worried about

18:32SPEAKERand the thing that I think is happening

18:34SPEAKERis that we had a kind of burgeoning...

18:39SPEAKERSo in games, there's been a lot...

18:42SPEAKERAAA big stuff has been relatively stable for a long time.

18:46SPEAKERThe budgets have ballooned pretty dramatically,

18:49SPEAKERbut a AAA game like Indiana Jones or Alan Wake

18:57SPEAKERor something Star Wars Outlaws or Cyberpunk,

19:01SPEAKERsomething that people spend 100 to $300 million

19:05SPEAKERprobably making in marketing,

19:07SPEAKERthose games have a pretty well established market

19:09SPEAKERand they know how to market them and people come out

19:12SPEAKERand you pay 60 or 70 or 80 bucks

19:14SPEAKERdepending which version of the game you get,

19:16SPEAKERand there's a path in place for those games.

19:21SPEAKERAnd then at the far other side of the spectrum,

19:23SPEAKERthere's single one, two, three person dev team games

19:27SPEAKERthat you make for maybe $300,000.

19:30SPEAKERMaybe in spare time after your normal day job

19:33SPEAKERwhile you're working at Sears selling washing machines,

19:34SPEAKERbut maybe you get like $300,000 from a small publisher

19:39SPEAKERand you figure you're gonna do this in 18 months

19:41SPEAKERand you and a few friends are able to put together a game.

19:44SPEAKERAnd that has a place too.

19:46SPEAKERIt's harder to market those these days

19:47SPEAKER'cause there's not as much money being put into them.

19:51SPEAKERBut the thing that happened in like 2017, 2018, 2019

19:55SPEAKERis we saw a bunch of established developers

19:58SPEAKERleave big AAA studios and start small,

20:01SPEAKERI'm air quoting small, but small indies

20:04SPEAKERthat were anywhere from like 10 to 30 or 80 people, right?

20:08SPEAKERAnd I think that those people are feeling the squeeze now

20:11SPEAKERbecause the market for games that cost more than 10 bucks

20:16SPEAKERand less than 60 bucks has essentially evaporated,

20:19SPEAKERit feels like to me.

20:20SPEAKER- Really?

20:21SPEAKER- Yeah.

20:22SPEAKERSo things like Dead Game Phenomena on Steam,

20:26SPEAKERwhere if you have a multiplayer title

20:28SPEAKERand people hit the queue button

20:29SPEAKERand it doesn't queue in three tenths of a second,

20:31SPEAKERthey start talking about it being a dead game

20:32SPEAKERand then they go post on the reviews

20:34SPEAKERand they post on the Steam forums

20:35SPEAKERand then there's a downward spiral

20:36SPEAKERthat ends with people watching Steam DB

20:38SPEAKERand being like, this says there's only two people

20:40SPEAKERplaying right now, which is often bullshit

20:42SPEAKER'cause everything's cross-platform now,

20:44SPEAKERis incredibly toxic to games.

20:49SPEAKERI love Lethal Company and Phasmophobia and those games,

20:53SPEAKERbut like those kind of low investment,

20:56SPEAKERlow fidelity $10 titles have just absolutely,

21:03SPEAKERthey're games that you can play a ton for 10 bucks

21:05SPEAKERand if you're a value purchaser of games,

21:09SPEAKERyou're like, well, Lethal Company's all I need

21:11SPEAKERat this point, man, and it was only $10,

21:13SPEAKERwhy would I buy a $30 multiplayer?

21:15SPEAKERLike, why would I buy Helldivers, right?

21:18SPEAKERNo, Helldivers and PoE2 are probably

21:21SPEAKERthe exceptions last year, they're the two $30 titles

21:24SPEAKERthat I can think of that came out that actually moved units,

21:27SPEAKERbut most everything else is having a really hard time

21:30SPEAKERon Steam in that $10 to $60 range.

21:34SPEAKERThe other thing is just there's a fidelity expectation,

21:38SPEAKERlike the players have, there's a fidelity,

21:42SPEAKERwe talked about fidelity contracts before,

21:43SPEAKERbut it's the idea that the attractiveness of the art

21:48SPEAKERin your game makes players have an assumption

21:51SPEAKERabout how good the rest of your game is gonna be.

21:55SPEAKERIt's why-- - Interesting.

21:57SPEAKER- So for example, if you have really lovely environment art

22:00SPEAKERand then you don't have a bunch of animation

22:02SPEAKERand VFX and sound design stuff to back that up,

22:05SPEAKERplayers are gonna, they'll look at your game,

22:08SPEAKERthey'll look at the way the guns work in your game,

22:10SPEAKERthey'll be like, oh man, these guns suck.

22:11SPEAKERThey won't say, hey, the sound effects and the VFX

22:14SPEAKERdon't support the quality of the models

22:16SPEAKERand the environment art in the game.

22:17SPEAKERThey'll just be like, this, I expect,

22:19SPEAKERthis game looks like it should shoot a battlefield

22:22SPEAKERor a Call of Duty and you're shooting a boomer shooter

22:25SPEAKERbecause that's the end of the budget.

22:27SPEAKER- Yeah, so since you put it in those terms,

22:28SPEAKERI have absolutely experienced this

22:30SPEAKERand I think the advent of, like you said, asset stores

22:33SPEAKERand off-the-shelf engines that can generate

22:35SPEAKERvery nice looking visuals with, I'm not gonna say no work,

22:38SPEAKERbut you know, like modern Unity and Unreal can do quite a bit

22:41SPEAKERfor your game to make it look very good out of the box, right?

22:45SPEAKER- It's real easy to make a game in a forest,

22:48SPEAKERin a basic forest these days, right?

22:50SPEAKER- Right, and so it's not hard to find games on Steam

22:51SPEAKERthat just from the screenshots look fairly excellent,

22:54SPEAKERyou know, like you're like,

22:55SPEAKERman, that's a very professional looking game

22:57SPEAKERand then playing it is kind of a different experience.

23:00SPEAKER- So we hit this with the Anacrusis, right?

23:02SPEAKERWe had really, we had an incredibly talented

23:03SPEAKERenvironment artist and we were working

23:05SPEAKERwith really smart people and they made

23:07SPEAKERreally great environment art and then we got to the part,

23:10SPEAKERthrough no fault of anybody on the team,

23:12SPEAKERbut it was a team of like eight people

23:14SPEAKERmade most of that game, so we didn't have,

23:17SPEAKERyou know, if you look at what Destiny has

23:19SPEAKERin terms of animators, they have dozens and dozens

23:21SPEAKERof animators and like one person's job will just be

23:24SPEAKERto make gun animations for the 3,000 games,

23:26SPEAKERguns in that game for their entire time at Bungie, right?

23:30SPEAKERCould be.

23:31SPEAKERThere'll be other people, so I like to use gun stuff

23:35SPEAKERas an example for this 'cause it's really instructive,

23:38SPEAKERbut if you think about like, and it also explains

23:40SPEAKERwhy there's so many boomer shooters these days,

23:43SPEAKERbut if you look at like a gun,

23:45SPEAKERlike the act of shooting a gun in Call of Duty,

23:48SPEAKERyou know, there's, it's very multidisciplinary,

23:51SPEAKERthe sound engineer, you know, it involves the modelers

23:53SPEAKERwho make the models of the guns,

23:55SPEAKERthe texture artists who skin the guns,

23:57SPEAKERthe VFX people who make the thing that happens

23:59SPEAKERwhen the muzzle, when the bullet leaves the muzzle

24:01SPEAKERand then again when the bullet impacts

24:03SPEAKERand it's on different surfaces, different kind of VFX fire,

24:06SPEAKERso you get like different kind of sparks on metal,

24:08SPEAKERthen you get a puff of smoke on concrete

24:10SPEAKERand you get a puff of blood on a person.

24:14SPEAKERThere's sound, there's like screen shake

24:17SPEAKERoften when you shoot, there's a little bit of a,

24:21SPEAKERthere's an interesting thing that people expect

24:23SPEAKERthat you've never noticed before

24:24SPEAKERand I'm gonna tell you about it,

24:26SPEAKERyou're gonna see it every time now,

24:27SPEAKERbut when you turn the camera in a first person shooter,

24:29SPEAKERpeople expect the muzzle of the gun to track

24:31SPEAKERjust a little bit inside a small box in the center

24:34SPEAKERand if you don't do that, all of this leads to,

24:38SPEAKERhey man, these guns suck.

24:39SPEAKER- Yeah, that was the Goldeneye thing,

24:41SPEAKERthat was the thing coming from PC shooters

24:43SPEAKERthat for as much as I thought PC shooters

24:47SPEAKERdid better than Goldeneye, the one thing

24:48SPEAKERwhen I came to that game was like, oh my God,

24:50SPEAKERthe gun moves independent of the viewport,

24:52SPEAKERso I mean, in that case, you could actually aim independently

24:54SPEAKERand shoot in different places,

24:56SPEAKERso it's not quite the same thing,

24:57SPEAKERbut like a little bit of movements on the gun,

24:59SPEAKERyeah, I absolutely know what you mean.

25:00SPEAKER- Goldeneye accentuated it to way more than modern,

25:02SPEAKERlike most modern games are really subtle with it,

25:04SPEAKERGoldeneye was like, it was pretty pronounced if I remember,

25:07SPEAKERit's been a long time since I played Goldeneye.

25:08SPEAKER- Yeah, that's true.

25:09SPEAKER- But yeah, so then you have sound

25:11SPEAKERand there's a bazillion other things that go into it

25:13SPEAKERand all these people from all these different teams

25:15SPEAKERacross the company have to work together

25:17SPEAKERand if you're on a, if you work in a bungee

25:21SPEAKERand there's 300 people there,

25:22SPEAKERthere's a whole team that just does gun feel stuff, right,

25:25SPEAKERand it's probably a mixed team of like texture modelers,

25:28SPEAKERsound, VFX folks, animators, a couple of programmers

25:34SPEAKERand like all these people that work together

25:36SPEAKERon this one project,

25:37SPEAKERbut if you have a 20 person indie studio,

25:39SPEAKERthen you're, when your animator's working on guns

25:42SPEAKERand they're not working on characters,

25:44SPEAKERoh, and we didn't even talk about hit reactions, right,

25:46SPEAKERhit reactions are when you shoot the enemy

25:48SPEAKERand they stagger or they move

25:50SPEAKERor they react to the impact of the bullet on their body.

25:53SPEAKER- I mean, in my mind,

25:54SPEAKERthat's probably the most important aspect of gun feel.

25:57SPEAKER- Yeah, well, it's really weird

26:00SPEAKER'cause having watched people react to this

26:02SPEAKERas you're turning each individual component on,

26:05SPEAKERliterally any one of these things

26:07SPEAKERwill jack up the whole thing if you do it wrong.

26:09SPEAKER- Sure.

26:10SPEAKER- So, I mean, in this, like I said this earlier,

26:13SPEAKERthis is why we have so many boomer shooters

26:15SPEAKERis 'cause when you're playing a game that looks like Quake

26:18SPEAKERbut runs on a modern game engine,

26:21SPEAKERyou don't expect there to be hit reactions

26:23SPEAKERwhen you shoot somebody,

26:24SPEAKERyou expect them to just explode into gore and goo,

26:27SPEAKERyou don't expect there to be,

26:29SPEAKERI mean, I guess there's probably screen shake,

26:31SPEAKERbut like you don't expect there's a level of fidelity

26:33SPEAKERbecause your expectation as a player

26:35SPEAKERwhen you see that kind of muddy graphics is,

26:37SPEAKERoh, this is supposed to be reminiscent

26:39SPEAKERof something from a pastime,

26:40SPEAKERit's not going to be like Call of Duty

26:42SPEAKERor Battlefield or whatever.

26:44SPEAKERSo a lot of the interesting stuff I saw this year

26:46SPEAKERis people who are building tools to kind of,

26:51SPEAKERlast year there was a lot of obvious bullshit

26:54SPEAKERabout AI replacing people's like entire parts of workflows.

26:58SPEAKER- Yes, was it last year that Nvidia debuted that demo

27:02SPEAKERof it was like a character in a bar?

27:04SPEAKER- The ACE thing?

27:06SPEAKER- Yeah, is that what it was called?

27:07SPEAKERThat had like kind of generated text and speech?

27:09SPEAKERI mean, it was generated writing and speech I should say,

27:12SPEAKERit was generating dialogue on the fly

27:14SPEAKERand generating the voice samples for it.

27:16SPEAKER- Yeah, Nvidia has a thing that they do,

27:20SPEAKERit's an ACE hotel demo where you go in

27:22SPEAKERand have to kind of solve a mystery.

27:24SPEAKERThey didn't show that this year, weirdly.

27:27SPEAKERThe TLDR on that stuff is,

27:31SPEAKERI think everybody realized after spending some time with it,

27:34SPEAKER'cause Ubisoft had a couple of demos

27:35SPEAKERthat they were showing as well

27:37SPEAKERthat utilized the same backend for different purposes.

27:42SPEAKERAnd the thing that became clear is,

27:45SPEAKERit was pretty good at parsing player intent

27:47SPEAKERwhen you would speak to it

27:48SPEAKERor when you would have a conversation with it,

27:51SPEAKERbut the outputs were universally pretty bad

27:53SPEAKERand weirdly unbelievable, like full on uncanny valley,

27:59SPEAKERlike a bad interaction with Siri or whatever.

28:03SPEAKERThe stuff that we saw this, and it all has,

28:08SPEAKERlook, I think everybody who listens to the podcast

28:09SPEAKERknows how I feel about generative AI stuff,

28:12SPEAKERbut it had the problem of essentially

28:17SPEAKERevery time you played the game,

28:18SPEAKERyou were feeding a kitten into a wood chipper

28:20SPEAKERto generate the AI juice

28:27SPEAKERto make the characters talk to you badly.

28:29SPEAKER- AI runs on kittens, huh?

28:31SPEAKERFinally, the shocking truth can be revealed.

28:34SPEAKER- Keep chucking those kittens in, baby.

28:36SPEAKER- Somebody get the weekly world news on the phone.

28:39SPEAKER- So yeah, so the kitten aspect of it is bad.

28:42SPEAKERThe fact that they're replacing,

28:45SPEAKERhey, we're gonna replace all these expensive mouths

28:48SPEAKERthat are on your team,

28:49SPEAKERbut also it wasn't the expensive mouths,

28:51SPEAKERit was the, it turns out writers and entry-level artists

28:55SPEAKERand stuff like that are relatively,

28:56SPEAKERlike in the game dev scale of who's cheap

28:59SPEAKERand who's expensive, they weren't the expensive people.

29:02SPEAKERSo you're not just replacing the thing

29:06SPEAKERthat's the least expensive part of your pipeline,

29:10SPEAKERyou're also killing off the jobs that let people go

29:13SPEAKERfrom being inexperienced to build mastery

29:16SPEAKERin their chosen fields.

29:19SPEAKERSo like getting rid of voice actors,

29:21SPEAKERwhich most games have like three days of voice acting,

29:25SPEAKERwhich is gonna cost like 30 or $40,000 at the outside.

29:29SPEAKERThey have a bunch of artists who are doing work

29:34SPEAKERthat is not expensive.

29:36SPEAKERThe artists are inexpensive, no knock against artists.

29:40SPEAKERIt's some stuff's not just.

29:44SPEAKERAnd so it didn't make a lot of sense is the TLDR

29:48SPEAKERand the copyright status of the whole thing

29:50SPEAKERis still up in the air.

29:51SPEAKERAnd like, if you build a $10 million game

29:53SPEAKERon assets that you probably don't own, that's good luck, man.

29:58SPEAKERSo nobody did anything with this stuff.

30:01SPEAKERAnd this year I've seen people looping back around

30:03SPEAKERand I saw a couple of things that were really interesting

30:06SPEAKERthat were like AI work that replaces

30:09SPEAKERa lot of the drudgery work of game dev.

30:12SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, that seems like the ideal,

30:14SPEAKERespecially when you're talking about a funding

30:15SPEAKERand budgetary crisis in game production,

30:17SPEAKERlike there's something that increases the efficiency

30:20SPEAKERof the humans doing the work has got to come about.

30:23SPEAKERI mean, obviously those two tools have existed

30:24SPEAKERfor a long time, but something that can accelerate

30:26SPEAKERthat trend.

30:27SPEAKER- Well, yeah, and like we've seen stuff

30:30SPEAKERthat does this stuff before, like Houdini is a tool.

30:34SPEAKERIt's not an AI tool, but it's a tool that lets you

30:36SPEAKERprocedurally create procedural, create variations

30:41SPEAKERin stuff that is repeated often in video games

30:44SPEAKERso that it doesn't look so samey

30:45SPEAKER'cause human brains are really good at picking out things

30:47SPEAKERthat are the same.

30:49SPEAKERAnd it's been around for a long time.

30:50SPEAKERPeople, you know, it's a technical arts tool.

30:52SPEAKEREverybody loves it.

30:53SPEAKERYou, if you have a big, if you have a budget,

30:55SPEAKERyou get somebody who does Houdini stuff in your world

30:58SPEAKERand they make your, they make your stuff look more real

31:01SPEAKERjust by adding variations.

31:03SPEAKER- Yeah, I've wondered, I don't remember

31:04SPEAKERwhen the shift happened, but there was a,

31:05SPEAKERthere was a very pronounced point, 10, no more than 10,

31:09SPEAKERprobably pushing 15 years ago when the classic problem

31:12SPEAKERof you pull the camera too far out from a landscape

31:14SPEAKERand the grass texture has just tiled

31:16SPEAKERin the most obvious way.

31:17SPEAKER- Yeah.

31:18SPEAKER- That just kind of went away and I assume tools

31:20SPEAKERlike you're talking about are why.

31:22SPEAKER- Sometimes it's just that like the cards are more capable

31:25SPEAKERand there's more RAM on the cards.

31:26SPEAKERSo instead of having just one grid of, you know,

31:31SPEAKERvertex shaders applied to your terrain,

31:34SPEAKERyou put multiples on top so that the noise,

31:37SPEAKERso that like the interference patterns

31:38SPEAKERof the two things working together doesn't,

31:40SPEAKERisn't so immediately obvious.

31:42SPEAKER- Sure, or I guess like virtual texturing,

31:44SPEAKERlike, you know, the vaunted mega texture

31:46SPEAKERis probably also part of what solved that.

31:48SPEAKER- Yeah, that kind of stuff too.

31:50SPEAKERSo one of the things I saw, NVIDIA had this demo

31:53SPEAKERof a thing in their booth that we talked about

31:56SPEAKERa little bit on the full nerd this week,

31:58SPEAKERbut they had a procedurally generated animation tool

32:04SPEAKERor sorry, a text to AI, a text to animation tool

32:09SPEAKERthat used AI in Maya and Unreal.

32:14SPEAKERI believe they announced this at CES.

32:15SPEAKERThat was part of the 50 series reveal

32:17SPEAKERthat Jensen did on stage, right?

32:19SPEAKERLike I believe text to animation

32:20SPEAKERis something that popped up in that presentation.

32:23SPEAKER- I think they talked about it.

32:24SPEAKERI was a little skeptical if I recall at the time.

32:27SPEAKER- Yeah.

32:27SPEAKER- But so they, first off,

32:29SPEAKERthey licensed a library of mocap data,

32:31SPEAKERwhich is a thing that is, there's a bunch of them.

32:34SPEAKERYou can pay $50,000 and get access

32:36SPEAKERto an incredible amount of mocap data.

32:39SPEAKERThat's basically collected by putting,

32:42SPEAKERby paying people to put the mocap suits on

32:44SPEAKERand then do a bunch of tasks over and over and over again.

32:48SPEAKERWe used one of these for FUVR years ago.

32:52SPEAKERWe hooked it in as our legs.

32:56SPEAKERThe reason we had legs that animated better

32:57SPEAKERthan Zuckerberg's in Meta Horizons in 2017

33:02SPEAKERis that we were doing, we had multiple things happening,

33:10SPEAKERpushing and pulling against the joints

33:13SPEAKERto like make them be believably human.

33:15SPEAKERAnd one of them was we had a big giant library of mocap data

33:18SPEAKERthat we trained again on an early kind of AI library,

33:23SPEAKERAI technology to serve as a counter

33:27SPEAKERto the springiness of IK.

33:29SPEAKERSo we didn't have like chicken wings and stuff like that.

33:31SPEAKER- Can I, I'm gonna fill in some acronyms here,

33:34SPEAKERIK and inverse kinematics.

33:35SPEAKERAnd is that, is that a generative adversarial role?

33:38SPEAKER- Generative adversarial network, yeah.

33:40SPEAKER- Network, yeah, okay.

33:41SPEAKER- Yeah, good, yeah, I couldn't remember what GAN was.

33:44SPEAKERSo that was, it's good that you pulled that,

33:45SPEAKERgood that you had that one, Brad.

33:47SPEAKER- That's just rattling around up there.

33:49SPEAKER- So yeah, they said they use a library,

33:50SPEAKERlicensed library of mocap data.

33:52SPEAKERThey showed this in what I kind of feel like

33:55SPEAKERis maybe the least interesting context.

33:57SPEAKERSo they were pitching it as, hey, you know,

34:00SPEAKERyou typically, if you're a studio,

34:02SPEAKERyou buy time in a mocap studio and obviously like Rockstar

34:06SPEAKERand Naughty Dog and studios that are enormous

34:09SPEAKERjust have full-time access, multiple mocap studios,

34:13SPEAKERthe whole deal, this isn't for them.

34:16SPEAKERThis is for the people like your big indies,

34:19SPEAKERyour $10 million indie game, or your small indies

34:23SPEAKERthat have one day of mocap or two days of mocap

34:25SPEAKERand then they get, you get back to the studio,

34:27SPEAKERyou're cleaning up all the data, you're putting it,

34:28SPEAKERyou're ingesting and you're like, oh shit,

34:30SPEAKERwe forgot to get a transition between point A and point B

34:33SPEAKERwhen we were in the mocap studio.

34:34SPEAKERAnd then the choice is do you spend another 10 grand

34:36SPEAKERgoing back in the mocap studio for another day

34:38SPEAKERto pick up the handful of things you've missed

34:40SPEAKERor is there some other better way?

34:41SPEAKEROr do you just do it by hand?

34:43SPEAKERWhich is what I think a lot of people often do in this case.

34:45SPEAKERI mean, the real answer is maybe try to be more organized

34:48SPEAKERand not put yourself in this situation.

34:50SPEAKERBut it's not always, sometimes things change.

34:54SPEAKERYou know, writers write something about

34:56SPEAKERyou're taking your glasses off your face

34:58SPEAKERand then you're like, oh God,

34:59SPEAKERwe gotta get an animation for that.

35:00SPEAKERAnd next thing you know, you spent $30,000

35:03SPEAKERtaking some of these glasses off.

35:07SPEAKERBut so they have a Maya plugin for this

35:09SPEAKERthat basically gives you a timeline and you can connect,

35:14SPEAKERyou can basically set key frames at the beginning and end

35:19SPEAKERof a motion and you can say, okay, I have a character,

35:24SPEAKERmostly where I think it works with bipedal characters

35:26SPEAKERonly right now, so no animals or whatever.

35:28SPEAKERBut you have a character and you say, okay,

35:29SPEAKERI want this character, start the character here

35:33SPEAKERand the character here.

35:34SPEAKERAnd then there's a text field that you can describe

35:36SPEAKERhow you want them to move.

35:37SPEAKERYou can say, I want them to run

35:38SPEAKERor I want them to do a big giant leap

35:40SPEAKERover a small obstacle, right?

35:42SPEAKERAnd then you hit the generate button.

35:46SPEAKERIt goes up to the cloud, uses some GPUs

35:49SPEAKERin a cloud someplace, and then spits out a number

35:52SPEAKERof variations on that animation you requested.

35:55SPEAKERAnd you can kind of spread them all out,

35:57SPEAKERsee which one you want to do, use, pick the one that you want

36:00SPEAKERand then you can make further adjustments to that.

36:02SPEAKERSo you can move individual joints on the model

36:06SPEAKERor you can change the starting and finishing locations.

36:10SPEAKERYou can change, you can lock down all sorts

36:12SPEAKERof different things at all sorts of different paths

36:14SPEAKERin this timeline, and then you generate it again

36:17SPEAKERand get four more variants based on that

36:19SPEAKERand you pick the one that you like and so on and so forth.

36:21SPEAKERAnd the demo that they had showed a cut scene type situation

36:25SPEAKERwhere a character jumps over a little bench

36:27SPEAKERand then sneaks around a fountain

36:31SPEAKERand then jumps up and transitions

36:33SPEAKERinto a mocapped animation that they had before.

36:36SPEAKERAnd it was very seamless.

36:39SPEAKERLike it was a really good demo

36:41SPEAKER'cause everybody I talked to who saw it was like,

36:43SPEAKERoh my God, I can't believe that thing.

36:44SPEAKERThat was really cool.

36:47SPEAKERThe neat thing I think about for this

36:49SPEAKERand the thing I asked them about,

36:50SPEAKERwhich they didn't have a great answer for him,

36:53SPEAKERis this seems like the kind of tool that could,

36:56SPEAKERlike that ability to generate five variants

36:58SPEAKERof the same animation very quickly is incredibly exciting

37:03SPEAKERfor generating things like hit reactions

37:06SPEAKERand like movements, gun anima, reload animations,

37:12SPEAKERall that kind of stuff.

37:13SPEAKER- Okay, 'cause I was waiting, I was sitting here waiting

37:15SPEAKERto ask what is always the fundamental question

37:18SPEAKERabout emerging AI tools?

37:20SPEAKERWhere does this fall on the spectrum

37:21SPEAKERbetween allows a worker to do more

37:24SPEAKERin their allotted work hours

37:26SPEAKERor just takes that person's job.

37:28SPEAKERAnd it sounds like maybe like,

37:29SPEAKER'cause the stuff you're describing, like hit reactions,

37:31SPEAKERlike you, I think you said this before we recorded,

37:34SPEAKERso I'm kind of stealing your line,

37:36SPEAKERbut also I absolutely agree with you.

37:37SPEAKERLike you can never have enough of those, right?

37:39SPEAKER- You can never have too many of those, yeah.

37:40SPEAKER- Like in a perfect world, you would have some way

37:42SPEAKERto somewhat randomize every single hit reaction

37:45SPEAKERthat ever occurs in your game

37:46SPEAKERbecause you want it to feel naturalistic

37:48SPEAKERand believable, right?

37:49SPEAKERAnd that's maybe not still not entirely feasible

37:51SPEAKERfor different reasons,

37:53SPEAKERbut to functionally be able to get closer to that

37:56SPEAKERby allowing, again, a human artist to sit there

37:58SPEAKERand curate and generate and tweak a much wider array

38:02SPEAKERof something that you've been kind of a gated on

38:04SPEAKERin the past in terms of quantity

38:05SPEAKERseems like probably a good thing.

38:07SPEAKER- Yeah, 'cause like hit reactions are an interesting,

38:10SPEAKERare a good example for this, right?

38:11SPEAKERBecause you have different types of,

38:14SPEAKERyou're gonna have, if you're making,

38:16SPEAKERI'm gonna talk about zombie games

38:17SPEAKER'cause I know about zombie games.

38:18SPEAKERIf you're making a game with zombies

38:20SPEAKERand they get shot in the head,

38:22SPEAKERthey're gonna have a different reaction

38:23SPEAKERthan if they get shot in the shoulder or the hand

38:26SPEAKERor the knee or the groin or whatever.

38:29SPEAKERAnd they're gonna have different reactions

38:32SPEAKERto different kinds of weapons.

38:33SPEAKERSo like, if you have a beam weapon,

38:35SPEAKERthat's gonna be less impactful,

38:37SPEAKERbut they're gonna kind of sizzle or shake or something.

38:39SPEAKERIf you have a small caliber handgun,

38:41SPEAKERthey're gonna have a different reaction

38:42SPEAKERthan if they're shot by a shotgun

38:43SPEAKERor a large caliber gun or a machine gun.

38:46SPEAKERAnd you ideally wanna do all of those,

38:49SPEAKERbut in the real world, what ends up happening

38:50SPEAKERis that your animator does as many as they can.

38:54SPEAKERAnd this is one of those forever jobs.

38:56SPEAKERAnytime your animator has some downtime,

38:57SPEAKERthey're gonna make some more hit reactions

38:59SPEAKERbecause it's money in the bank for all intents and purposes.

39:04SPEAKERAnd if you can speed that work up

39:08SPEAKERand use a tool like this that doesn't have,

39:11SPEAKERthis is one of the handfuls of AI demos that I've seen

39:15SPEAKERthat I was like, oh, this is actually worth

39:18SPEAKERbuying carbon credits to use, right?

39:23SPEAKER'Cause it is actually, it's going to let you,

39:25SPEAKERas somebody who's making a relatively low budget game,

39:29SPEAKERinstead of having to boomer shooter your game down

39:31SPEAKERso that your fidelity contract lines up

39:33SPEAKERwith the actual game that you're able to make,

39:35SPEAKERyou might actually be able to make

39:37SPEAKERbetter looking animations and better looking hit reactions

39:39SPEAKERand more, a wider variety of them

39:42SPEAKERbecause you have access to these tools.

39:44SPEAKERAnd that's really exciting.

39:45SPEAKER- Yeah, that sounds promising, honestly.

39:48SPEAKERDo you know, is it just taking those specific mocap sequences

39:52SPEAKERand inserting them?

39:53SPEAKERLike, it couldn't be, though.

39:54SPEAKERIt has to be customizing them.

39:56SPEAKERIs the model just trained on those animations?

39:58SPEAKERIt's not using those exact animation routines

40:00SPEAKERevery time it generates something, right?

40:02SPEAKERLike you're not gonna see the exact same walk cycle

40:04SPEAKERpopping up in multiple games

40:07SPEAKERbecause that cycle was utilized

40:08SPEAKERby a bunch of different prompts, I hope?

40:11SPEAKER- You shouldn't.

40:12SPEAKERI mean, if you give the same prompts,

40:14SPEAKERI asked if it was deterministic and they said no

40:16SPEAKER'cause nothing AI is ever deterministic.

40:18SPEAKER- Sure, yes, true.

40:20SPEAKER- The thing to remember is that the animations

40:23SPEAKERat this point coming out of the munged up data

40:27SPEAKERthat they use to train the AI is just a series of vectors.

40:31SPEAKERSo what the machine knows is that when you have this vector

40:34SPEAKERfollowed by this vector followed by this vector,

40:37SPEAKERwhen you have these three vectors in a row

40:38SPEAKERmoving in this direction, then usually the next one

40:41SPEAKERis one of these several different things.

40:43SPEAKERAnd it's giving you variants based on those.

40:45SPEAKERAnd at some point along the way,

40:47SPEAKERthey have a large language model that ties in

40:49SPEAKERand breaks down what a character running across a courtyard

40:56SPEAKERversus a character sneaking across the courtyard,

40:58SPEAKERhow those differ, which I assume probably is them going in

41:01SPEAKERand hand coding one of these paid data sets

41:04SPEAKERthat they bought, that they licensed.

41:07SPEAKERBut I don't, I should have asked about that,

41:09SPEAKERI didn't think about it.

41:09SPEAKERI didn't actually ask if they're training based on vectors.

41:14SPEAKERI have to imagine they're training based on vectors

41:15SPEAKERin skeleton, I can't imagine they're training

41:17SPEAKERbased on the point cloud data that you get from,

41:20SPEAKERor the ping pong ball tracking data

41:23SPEAKERthat you get from a mocap studio.

41:25SPEAKER- Sure.

41:26SPEAKER- But then, and then the other stuff that it,

41:27SPEAKERthis should let you do really easily,

41:29SPEAKERand we didn't talk about this at all

41:31SPEAKER'cause the person I asked didn't know the answer to this.

41:34SPEAKERBut a lot of like when you take a mocap,

41:37SPEAKERwhen you do a lot of mocap,

41:39SPEAKERone of the things you end up having to do

41:40SPEAKERis normalize your idle ins and outs

41:44SPEAKERthat when you blend those animations together,

41:46SPEAKERyou get the hands start in the same place

41:48SPEAKERand they're not skipping around.

41:50SPEAKERAnd I assume that this would let you do that pretty easily,

41:53SPEAKERbut I don't know for sure.

41:55SPEAKER- 'Cause you're always starting from those same points

41:56SPEAKERwhen you-

41:57SPEAKER- Yeah, you want to have basic starting,

41:59SPEAKERsame starting points as much as you can.

42:01SPEAKER- Use the same starting key frame or whatever.

42:03SPEAKER- Yeah.

42:03SPEAKER- Yep.

42:04SPEAKERThis all kind of reminds me of the debate

42:06SPEAKERthat's been going on.

42:07SPEAKERLike there's been a discourse taking place, let's say,

42:10SPEAKERover the last-

42:11SPEAKER- Oh, I love a discourse.

42:12SPEAKER- Yep, who doesn't?

42:13SPEAKEROver the last like a year, maybe, I don't know?

42:15SPEAKERLike this idea has emerged

42:16SPEAKERthat games look too good these days

42:18SPEAKERand that's what's killing the industry in a fiscal sense,

42:22SPEAKERwhich I increasingly think is kind of a fallacy

42:24SPEAKERor like the wrong target to direct your eye at.

42:27SPEAKERAnd like I've seen other developers comment on this

42:29SPEAKERin the last few months.

42:30SPEAKERLike I think the perspective might be shifting on this,

42:33SPEAKERbut I read this really good illustrative blog post

42:37SPEAKERby Joe Wintergreen, who is a long-time game developer,

42:40SPEAKERwho I had never heard of before.

42:42SPEAKERThis blog came across my feed, but it's about tools.

42:44SPEAKERIt's about tools and hardware.

42:46SPEAKER- Okay.

42:47SPEAKER- It's about like why better engines

42:49SPEAKERand also better hardware to run them on matter

42:51SPEAKERto game developers in ways that players will never see

42:54SPEAKERor imagine because they don't make the games.

42:55SPEAKER- Is this part of the why do games that came out in 2015

43:01SPEAKERlook the same as games that came out in 2025,

43:04SPEAKERbut they won't run on my 1080 Ti?

43:06SPEAKER- Yes, that's part of the, what he addresses in here.

43:08SPEAKERLike the title of the blog is kind of,

43:10SPEAKERit's a bit flippant of a blog,

43:12SPEAKERbut if you want shorter games with worse graphics

43:14SPEAKERmade by people who are paid more to work less,

43:17SPEAKERgraphics tech advancements should please you,

43:19SPEAKERis the title of the blog.

43:20SPEAKERI'll link it in the show notes.

43:21SPEAKERBut again, it's responding to this idea

43:24SPEAKERthat like the labor costs of making games look very good

43:27SPEAKERthese days are what is causing the funding

43:30SPEAKERand budgetary crisis in games.

43:31SPEAKERAnd his counter to that is it's never been easier

43:34SPEAKERto make games look as good as they do now.

43:37SPEAKERAnd that's a good thing because that allows developers

43:39SPEAKERto do more with the time they previously would have spent

43:41SPEAKERworking very hard to make games look better

43:43SPEAKERor make them load faster or X, Y, and Z things

43:46SPEAKERthat tech, that hardware and software have improved on.

43:49SPEAKER- Well, just making a game that runs now

43:51SPEAKERis easier than it ever has been before.

43:53SPEAKERLike literally you can download the shooter.exe template

43:57SPEAKERfor UE5 point, whatever the current version 5.3 or something

44:01SPEAKER5.5.3 and install that and then download some trees

44:06SPEAKERand free trees and free grass and free rocks

44:09SPEAKERthat are mega scans from the unreal asset store

44:13SPEAKERand put those in there and then put a path down the middle

44:16SPEAKERand you can have something that looks like a video game

44:19SPEAKERin like a couple hours pretty easily.

44:22SPEAKERIt won't do anything.

44:24SPEAKERThere's no logic, there's no game, there's no collision.

44:26SPEAKERLike you'll walk right through the trees,

44:27SPEAKERall of that stuff you have to build.

44:29SPEAKERBut the barrier to entry is very low.

44:33SPEAKERThe tricky thing is that the kind of third rails,

44:40SPEAKERthat like there's still as many or more third rails

44:42SPEAKERin video games now as there were before, right?

44:45SPEAKERLike you can make decisions the first day

44:46SPEAKERthat you start working on a project that will absolutely,

44:49SPEAKERthat will prevent you from ever shipping on a console

44:52SPEAKERif you don't know to avoid them, right?

44:54SPEAKEROr will cost a fortune to change,

44:56SPEAKERto go back and refactor everything to make them work.

45:01SPEAKERAnd it's not like this isn't one of those things

45:04SPEAKERwhere there's like a series of small choices.

45:06SPEAKERIt's literally every choice you make

45:08SPEAKERis gonna close some doors and open some others.

45:10SPEAKERSo it's hard.

45:13SPEAKERI love his point about the tool,

45:16SPEAKERthe writers needing better tools for this

45:17SPEAKER'cause like often the writers do their writing

45:22SPEAKERand then put everything into spreadsheets

45:24SPEAKERand then those spreadsheets get ingested into video games.

45:27SPEAKERAnd when I see games that do that

45:30SPEAKERversus when I see games like Firewatch,

45:33SPEAKERthey built a really cool database system

45:36SPEAKERfor lines of dialogue, the voice line,

45:40SPEAKERthat gave them a ton of voice acting for 2016,

45:43SPEAKERwhenever it came out.

45:45SPEAKERAnd they kept the assets, the original assets,

45:49SPEAKERthe munged up and ready to go in the game assets.

45:51SPEAKERAll that stuff was built in a tool that made it easy to run.

45:56SPEAKERSo there wasn't an enormous list of files

45:59SPEAKERon a server someplace that had the text line

46:02SPEAKERfor the subtitle and all the translation lines

46:05SPEAKERfor the different languages and the original audio

46:11SPEAKERand the generated audio,

46:13SPEAKERlike the file names in a spreadsheet someplace.

46:16SPEAKERIt was just a database that contained all the stuff you need

46:18SPEAKERand when they hit the compile button,

46:19SPEAKERit just got spat out in a way that the game engine

46:21SPEAKERcould understand.

46:22SPEAKERAnyway.

46:23SPEAKER- That's very neat.

46:24SPEAKERTools are neat.

46:25SPEAKER- Doing more work in less time with,

46:30SPEAKERto Joe's point, you can use that for good or for evil, right?

46:32SPEAKERIt can be a, hey, we're gonna fire half the people

46:36SPEAKERand then expect the people who remain to do double the work.

46:39SPEAKEROr you can, I mean, if you're starting off from scratch,

46:42SPEAKERyou could hire half the people

46:44SPEAKERand do twice as much work, I guess.

46:46SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, that point is made

46:47SPEAKERvery explicitly here after two paragraphs

46:50SPEAKERof extolling the value of easier and better graphics.

46:54SPEAKERWhen you see a big company grind their workers into paste,

46:56SPEAKERforcing them to deliver more and more

46:58SPEAKERon tighter and tighter schedules,

47:00SPEAKERplease be aware it has nothing to do with graphics

47:01SPEAKERor hardware or gamers demands for anything

47:04SPEAKERand everything to do with the capitalist thinking that says,

47:06SPEAKERoh, you can work twice as fast now,

47:08SPEAKERI will give you half the time.

47:09SPEAKER- Yeah.

47:10SPEAKER- So anyway, the reason I bring this up

47:12SPEAKERis just because the type of tool you're describing,

47:15SPEAKERI mean, I was skeptical too at CES

47:18SPEAKERwhen the words text to animation popped on the screen,

47:20SPEAKERbut like the way you describe it

47:22SPEAKERthat still involves an artist

47:24SPEAKERwith like a functional working expertise

47:27SPEAKERin basic human locomotion and like kind of the ins and outs

47:30SPEAKERof what makes good animation and like a critical eye

47:33SPEAKERfor filtering good from bad and all that sort of thing,

47:35SPEAKERlike you said, like that's the type of thing that,

47:38SPEAKERI mean, I feel like the term force multiplier

47:40SPEAKERis kind of buzzwordy, but it does feel pretty applicable

47:44SPEAKERas something that lets somebody who already is good

47:46SPEAKERat their job and has expertise

47:48SPEAKERdo more with the time that they have

47:50SPEAKERand like the blog feels like it dovetails

47:53SPEAKERwith the type of tool you were talking about here

47:54SPEAKERpretty directly.

47:55SPEAKER- That's exactly it.

47:56SPEAKERI like, it's not gonna,

47:58SPEAKERlike this tool is not gonna make me into an animator

48:00SPEAKERthat can make tools, make animations for a video game, right?

48:03SPEAKEROr even for like a prototype

48:05SPEAKERthat I'm gonna use to sell a video game.

48:09SPEAKERBut if it makes the kind of, you know,

48:14SPEAKERthe hard heavy lifting work of building animations

48:18SPEAKERfor computer games easier,

48:19SPEAKERthen that's really interesting to me.

48:20SPEAKERAnd I think that's worth spending more time on.

48:23SPEAKER- Right, and that's just the nature of progress, right?

48:24SPEAKERTo have better tools that allow you to do more stuff.

48:26SPEAKERI mean, like frankly, it goes back to the SpeedTree example,

48:29SPEAKERlike SpeedTree is the same type of thing of,

48:32SPEAKERif there had been an industry of people making trees by hand

48:34SPEAKERand making good livings on it,

48:35SPEAKERSpeedTree would have put those people out of work.

48:37SPEAKERYou know, it's just that SpeedTree is algorithmic built

48:41SPEAKERby human hands and not by feeding datasets

48:44SPEAKERinto a weird computer black box

48:46SPEAKERand having it iterate on itself a million times.

48:48SPEAKER- Well, and just to be clear,

48:50SPEAKERso this was like trade show tech demo,

48:53SPEAKERnot something I could sit down and spend a lot of time with.

48:57SPEAKERSo we saw, the thing that they were demoing live

49:00SPEAKERwith the connection to the server

49:02SPEAKERwas making a model jump over a bench

49:05SPEAKERand then walk to the transition point for the next model.

49:08SPEAKERAnd then the rest of it was canned.

49:09SPEAKERSo who knows how well this actually works in real life?

49:12SPEAKERThey said it's tech preview maybe later this year.

49:14SPEAKERSo it's not actually a shipping thing right now.

49:15SPEAKER- Yeah, like I should also say,

49:17SPEAKERI'm not even bullish on this particular tool.

49:19SPEAKERLike maybe this tool is not it at all,

49:20SPEAKERbut like hardware is not going to slow down in improving.

49:24SPEAKER- Yeah.

49:25SPEAKER- So like we are going to have to have better tools

49:27SPEAKERthat meet the needs of new hardware capabilities.

49:29SPEAKERAnd so like some new types of tools are critical.

49:33SPEAKER- One of the things I heard,

49:35SPEAKERI had multiple conversations about this throughout the week

49:39SPEAKERis GTA 6 is going to cost Rockstar a billion dollars

49:43SPEAKERto make reportedly.

49:44SPEAKER- Oh, at least.

49:45SPEAKER- Plus marketing money and all the other stuff

49:47SPEAKERon top of that.

49:49SPEAKERBut like that's an unfeasible,

49:52SPEAKERthere's one game that can support that kind of investment.

49:54SPEAKERAnd people are a little skeptical that even GTA

49:57SPEAKERcan support that level of investment.

49:59SPEAKERThe conversations I had ranged from,

50:02SPEAKERI mean, look, I had some conversations

50:04SPEAKERthat were a little funny because people were like,

50:05SPEAKERoh, nobody's buying games that cost more than $10 on Steam.

50:08SPEAKERLike, yeah, so that's a problem for a lot of people.

50:11SPEAKERIt turns out, I think GTA should cost,

50:13SPEAKERthis is not me just to be clear.

50:14SPEAKERI think they should launch GTA way more than 60 bucks.

50:17SPEAKERI think it should be a hundred dollars

50:18SPEAKER'cause it's a billion dollar game.

50:19SPEAKERAnd I was like, okay, don't ever say that out loud

50:23SPEAKERwhere people will hear you person I was talking to

50:25SPEAKER'cause you'll get fired into the sun.

50:27SPEAKERBut like there's a lot of general concern

50:33SPEAKERabout what a billion dollar Grand Theft Auto

50:36SPEAKERis going to look like and what it's going to do

50:38SPEAKERin terms of player expectations for graphics

50:40SPEAKERand stuff like that.

50:41SPEAKERAnd we're already seeing it with like Indiana Jones

50:43SPEAKERand Outlaws and other stuff that really leans

50:45SPEAKERinto the modern hardware.

50:47SPEAKERBut anyway.

50:48SPEAKER- Or particularly these six games

50:50SPEAKERthat are making all the money, you know, like theater.

50:52SPEAKER- Yeah.

50:53SPEAKER- What are they?

50:54SPEAKERIt's Fortnite, Minecraft, League.

50:56SPEAKEROh yeah, League is still in there.

50:57SPEAKERFortnite, League, Minecraft, Roblox, Call of Duty.

51:00SPEAKER- Maybe Valorant or Counter-Strike, I don't know.

51:05SPEAKER- I mean, those are the games that make the kind of revenue

51:07SPEAKERthat allow legions of people to make them

51:09SPEAKERcontinue looking amazing, right?

51:10SPEAKERLike the smaller games and smaller teams of the world

51:13SPEAKERhave got to have some leg up to try to compete with that

51:17SPEAKERwithout the same level of funding, right?

51:19SPEAKER- Yeah, Counter-Strike 2 is the biggest thing

51:20SPEAKERon Steam right now by 3X.

51:23SPEAKERSo yeah, probably Counter-Strike and League and Valorant

51:26SPEAKERand Fortnite and not so much Apex these days, it seems.

51:34SPEAKER- The other thing I got to see was games that don't care

51:37SPEAKERabout graphics in many cases at all.

51:41SPEAKER- Or in, yes, like in a literal sense,

51:43SPEAKERI think some of these games barely have graphics, right?

51:46SPEAKERThey're much more tactile.

51:47SPEAKER- Some of these are only video games

51:49SPEAKERin the sense that a computer runs them.

51:52SPEAKERSo one of my favorite parts of GDC

51:54SPEAKERis always the alt control GDC section, which is-

51:57SPEAKER- Yeah, I've never heard of this before.

51:59SPEAKER- Oh, we've talked about it before.

52:00SPEAKER- Have we?

52:01SPEAKER- Oh yeah, it's fabulous.

52:02SPEAKERSo they've been doing it for quite a few years now.

52:04SPEAKERIt started before the pandemic, but it's student projects,

52:09SPEAKERbut mostly student projects that use weird,

52:15SPEAKERnon-traditional controllers to control games.

52:20SPEAKERAnd so there've been some bangers in the past.

52:23SPEAKEROne of my favorites was this game that was like a,

52:26SPEAKERyou had to solve a mystery by using a,

52:29SPEAKERlike an old school, old timey phone switchboard,

52:33SPEAKERthe kind that you plug a quarter inch jack

52:34SPEAKERand you pull it out and you plug it into a different one.

52:36SPEAKERYou're getting different messages each time

52:38SPEAKERyou plugged into a different jack.

52:40SPEAKEROver here, different parts of conversations and stuff.

52:42SPEAKERIt was amazing.

52:44SPEAKER- You know which one that was?

52:45SPEAKER- I can't, that was from years ago.

52:46SPEAKERI can't remember what it was called, unfortunately.

52:47SPEAKER- That was not this year.

52:48SPEAKER- That was not this year.

52:49SPEAKER- I was gonna say, I watched a bunch of these videos,

52:51SPEAKERbut I didn't see that one.

52:51SPEAKERWe'll link this, all videos for most of these are up.

52:54SPEAKERI'll put that in the show notes.

52:56SPEAKER- Yeah, on the GDC site.

52:58SPEAKERA lot of these go to festivals.

53:00SPEAKERLike a lot of these, if you have like indie game festivals

53:02SPEAKERin your neck of the woods,

53:03SPEAKERyou'll often see these folks bringing their games there.

53:06SPEAKERAnd they typically, like I said,

53:08SPEAKERthey typically use non-traditional controllers.

53:10SPEAKERSometimes it's just like a straight motion control

53:12SPEAKERor some buttons.

53:14SPEAKERLike there's badger, badger, badger

53:16SPEAKERis one of the things they had this year,

53:17SPEAKERwhich uses, I think NFC cards as the controllers.

53:22SPEAKERSo you have, there was just a big panel in front of players

53:26SPEAKERand they had to put their player badge

53:29SPEAKERon the thing that they wanted to do next and move it around.

53:32SPEAKERAnd it ended up being kind of frenetic and space teamy.

53:35SPEAKER- Sure, also maybe it's 'cause I've been watching

53:37SPEAKERa lot of severance lately,

53:39SPEAKERbut there's a lot of like corporate influence stuff

53:41SPEAKERat this thing, this one.

53:42SPEAKERAnd what was the other one?

53:44SPEAKER- Chroma Corp.

53:45SPEAKER- Like Chroma Corp is extremely severance.

53:47SPEAKER- There was a lot of severance.

53:48SPEAKERLike that's a new, relatively new development.

53:51SPEAKERThe severance vibes often,

53:53SPEAKERlike there were often like steampunky or kind of like,

53:57SPEAKERjust like often follows trends.

53:59SPEAKERThe old controlled GDC is what I'll say.

54:01SPEAKERBut I was surprised that there was so much

54:02SPEAKERseverance stuff this year.

54:05SPEAKERChroma Corp is, Chroma Corp kind of reminded me,

54:08SPEAKERI didn't actually get to play this,

54:10SPEAKERbut it kind of reminded me of,

54:12SPEAKERthere's a board game called Captain Sonar.

54:14SPEAKERThat's basically, it's kind of in between space team

54:18SPEAKERand Battleship, the old board game,

54:21SPEAKERwhere you have a bunch,

54:23SPEAKERlike you have a team of four or five people

54:25SPEAKERthat are all trying to pilot your submarine.

54:28SPEAKERAnd each person has a defined role.

54:30SPEAKERSo like one person is the sonar operator

54:32SPEAKERand listens to other players.

54:34SPEAKERAnd one person is the captain and tells everybody where to go.

54:36SPEAKERAnd one person is the engineer

54:38SPEAKERand controls the health of the ship.

54:40SPEAKERAnd one person is the torpedo operator

54:41SPEAKERand shoots the torpedoes.

54:43SPEAKERAnd while your submarine is playing,

54:46SPEAKERthere's another submarine that's playing too.

54:48SPEAKERSo you're listening,

54:49SPEAKERlike your sonar operator is actively listening

54:51SPEAKERfor the other team's captain so that they can map.

54:55SPEAKERIt makes me wish we still had offices

54:59SPEAKERso we could go play this

55:00SPEAKER'cause it would be such a fun stream.

55:01SPEAKER- That sounds rad.

55:03SPEAKER- But this is not at all like that in theme,

55:06SPEAKERbut it's the same kind of vibe.

55:07SPEAKERSo like there's four people or five people in the room.

55:10SPEAKERThey each have different specified tasks.

55:12SPEAKERThe tasks are very severance-y

55:14SPEAKERin that like you're sucking the color from the world.

55:17SPEAKERYou're like working at a company that owns all the color.

55:19SPEAKER- Yeah, I might say there's definitely

55:21SPEAKERsome like aperture science vibes

55:23SPEAKERto a lot of the visual design of this.

55:25SPEAKER- 100%, but the controller for this one was a,

55:30SPEAKERthey literally took a cubicle, a series of cubicles

55:34SPEAKERand like cel-shaded them by painting the corners

55:37SPEAKERso that they look cel-shaded.

55:39SPEAKERAnd they built a bunch of stuff out of foam core

55:41SPEAKERand cardboard and like all their controls are buttons

55:45SPEAKERjust in the world.

55:46SPEAKERThey're like normal ass buttons that you have to press

55:49SPEAKERand everybody sits down at the station

55:51SPEAKERand they all have to kind of do their stuff

55:52SPEAKERand communicate and work with each other.

55:54SPEAKERAnd it was really fun to watch.

55:55SPEAKER- Yeah, like they built these big,

55:57SPEAKERlike a custom kind of control surfaces, control decks.

56:00SPEAKERThat's just basically like three big light,

56:02SPEAKERor I have four big light-up buttons

56:03SPEAKERand a joystick basically.

56:04SPEAKERAnd there's this, again, very aperture looking

56:08SPEAKERcontrol box sort of interface on the wall

56:10SPEAKERwith these little like light-up tubes coming out of it

56:12SPEAKERthat they're having to, I would pay money.

56:14SPEAKERI would, I can't believe I'm saying this,

56:15SPEAKERbut I would probably pay money to go to a place

56:18SPEAKERand play a game that has you sitting in a cubicle farm.

56:22SPEAKER- To me, the thing on the wall looked almost

56:24SPEAKERlike an Among Us mission, like an Among Us task.

56:27SPEAKERLike there was definitely Among Us vibes

56:29SPEAKERis the vibe I got watching people play that.

56:31SPEAKER- Sure, I could see that or a little bit of Space Team.

56:34SPEAKER- A little bit of Space Team, yeah.

56:35SPEAKERI mean, I think Among Us tasks and Space Team tasks

56:37SPEAKERbasically the same, just it's the frequency and intensity.

56:40SPEAKER- Sure, there's almost, I don't know why this drifted

56:42SPEAKERinto my head when I was watching this,

56:44SPEAKERbut it almost reminded me of like,

56:45SPEAKERdid you ever go to a BattleTech center

56:47SPEAKERor do you remember those?

56:47SPEAKER- No, I always wanted to, but I never got to go to one.

56:50SPEAKER- I got to realize my dream when we went to Las Vegas,

56:53SPEAKERwhen we drove out West one summer, we went through Vegas

56:56SPEAKERand I got to go to the Vegas BattleTech center,

56:58SPEAKERbut it just, that was to be clear,

57:00SPEAKERthat was in the mid nineties, '95, '96.

57:04SPEAKER- Okay.

57:05SPEAKER- '95-ish, it was basically a network land game,

57:09SPEAKERbut like, you know, with a bunch of BattleTech

57:10SPEAKERlike military robot trappings inside,

57:12SPEAKERyou were sitting in a big pod,

57:13SPEAKERbut it was basically just a networked kind of PC shooter

57:16SPEAKERthat was not available.

57:17SPEAKER- Back warrior two, right?

57:18SPEAKERNot a big projector screen.

57:20SPEAKER- Yeah, but not available commercially.

57:22SPEAKERYou can only play it against other people in these centers.

57:24SPEAKERI actually came across the score sheets from that visits

57:28SPEAKERin the basement a few months ago.

57:30SPEAKER- Wow.

57:30SPEAKER- But the point is it was a big location,

57:33SPEAKERdestination based multiplayer setup

57:35SPEAKERthat with a bunch of custom hardware

57:36SPEAKERand software built for it,

57:38SPEAKERthat you had to go to a thing to play with other people.

57:40SPEAKERAnd I look at something like this and think like,

57:42SPEAKERmaybe there's room for something like that to come back.

57:44SPEAKER- LBEs, man.

57:45SPEAKER- What is that?

57:46SPEAKER- Location based entertainment.

57:48SPEAKERPeople love, millennials love experience,

57:50SPEAKERthey don't like buying things.

57:51SPEAKER- Totally, totally.

57:52SPEAKERI mean, I know like escape rooms and rage rooms

57:54SPEAKERand all that stuff are big,

57:55SPEAKERbut you don't see a lot of like video game

57:57SPEAKERor like custom bespoke, you know,

57:58SPEAKERinteractive software type experiences like that.

58:02SPEAKER- There's VR stuff, but not really beyond that.

58:05SPEAKERAnd the escape rooms are often, like escape rooms are this,

58:08SPEAKERlike a good escape room is this.

58:09SPEAKERThe ones out at the Palace of Fine Arts

58:12SPEAKERare literally, you're inside a room that's all computerized

58:15SPEAKERand it's just, they just make it look not computerized.

58:18SPEAKER- Apparently I just need to go to an escape room.

58:20SPEAKER- You need to go to good escape rooms, yeah.

58:21SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

58:22SPEAKERI mean, this thing has very explicit

58:24SPEAKERcomputer trappings in it.

58:25SPEAKER- Yeah, this is a little different.

58:27SPEAKERI understand what you're asking for.

58:28SPEAKERThis is not exactly what you're,

58:29SPEAKERI mean, this is what you're asking for.

58:31SPEAKERI've never seen anything that's exactly like this before.

58:34SPEAKER- Yeah.

58:35SPEAKER- Let's see, should we talk about

58:36SPEAKERhow to pet your cat, Brad?

58:37SPEAKER- Yes, I saw actually, I saw other people posting videos

58:40SPEAKERfrom having played the game with a large cat butt controller.

58:45SPEAKER- Yeah, so the controller is like

58:46SPEAKERan enormous stuffed cat ass and you have to,

58:50SPEAKERyou have to, oh, I broke him finally.

58:56SPEAKERYou have to, you have to pet the cat.

58:58SPEAKERIt's really, it does like, on the bat.

59:01SPEAKERBut sometimes cats like being petted on the butt,

59:03SPEAKERapparently, sometimes they don't.

59:05SPEAKERI'm allergic to cats,

59:06SPEAKERso I don't really get this experience very often.

59:09SPEAKER- Yeah, I didn't see much in the video for that one

59:13SPEAKERabout what tech is driving that giant cat butt controller,

59:15SPEAKERbut-

59:16SPEAKER- I think it was just accelerometers

59:17SPEAKERand pressure sensors and stuff like that.

59:20SPEAKER- Some of the other videos on here

59:22SPEAKERhad a little more behind the scenes info

59:24SPEAKERon how they're doing things.

59:25SPEAKERThe pirate ship game, Back Off Me Booty.

59:29SPEAKER- Back Off Me Booty, yes.

59:30SPEAKER- Is a seesaw based game.

59:33SPEAKER- It's the first seesaw based controller I've ever seen.

59:36SPEAKERYou and your matey, I think it was how they pitched it,

59:40SPEAKERhave to sit on opposite sides of a seesaw

59:43SPEAKERand you rock the ship back and forth on the video game

59:46SPEAKERto aim and like have your cannons aimed at the right spot.

59:50SPEAKERSo it's basically a rail shooter on a ship,

59:52SPEAKERbut one person's looking on one side of the ship

59:54SPEAKERand one person's looking on the other side of the ship

59:56SPEAKERand you shoot when the angle of the ship

1:00:00SPEAKERis the right way to hit the target.

1:00:02SPEAKERLike when you get the lob on the cannonball

1:00:04SPEAKERto hit the target that you want.

1:00:06SPEAKER- So I presume you were constantly having to communicate

1:00:09SPEAKERwith your seesaw partner as to when to move up and down.

1:00:12SPEAKER- And when to slow down and when to go fast.

1:00:14SPEAKERAnd yeah, it was quite good.

1:00:16SPEAKER- And anyway, I bring that up because that video,

1:00:18SPEAKERthey actually do go into pretty extensive detail

1:00:21SPEAKERabout how they built the seesaw controller,

1:00:23SPEAKEReverything from the type of wood they use

1:00:25SPEAKERto like what sort of Arduino is in there.

1:00:27SPEAKERAnd they actually go into some specific detail about like,

1:00:32SPEAKERthey said, for example, the angles they are using

1:00:34SPEAKERfor that thing are narrow enough that they don't have

1:00:36SPEAKERto constantly recalibrate the accelerometer on the Arduino.

1:00:40SPEAKER- But that makes sense, yeah.

1:00:41SPEAKER- Because they don't need a very wide range of motion.

1:00:43SPEAKERSo like some pretty interesting detail.

1:00:45SPEAKERLike there's definitely a lot of like maker vibe

1:00:47SPEAKERto all this stuff.

1:00:48SPEAKER- I was gonna say the thing that happened when Arduinos,

1:00:52SPEAKERlike this all started to get really interesting

1:00:54SPEAKERwhen Arduinos and motors got cheap

1:00:55SPEAKERbecause people were able to do a lot more interesting things

1:00:58SPEAKERwith their projects than just being good

1:01:00SPEAKERat electronic circuits.

1:01:01SPEAKERIt becomes, you know, the power,

1:01:03SPEAKERsuperpower of the Arduino is it turns a physical world problem into a software problem if you know

1:01:10SPEAKERthe right sensors to use. Also, these are large teams for student projects. This one,

1:01:18SPEAKERback off me booty, is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 people

1:01:27SPEAKERbetween producers, engineers, artists, tech artists, designers, user research person,

1:01:35SPEAKERand music editor. It's a lot. In fairness, a lot of these games are,

1:01:40SPEAKERand I say this lovingly, fairly bare bones on the software end, but that one is the most

1:01:45SPEAKERsort of professional looking. Well, many of these are senior projects or your thesis projects for

1:01:51SPEAKERyour game design program or game school program. All I mean is back off me booty probably had

1:01:57SPEAKERgreater art needs than some of these other projects.

1:01:59SPEAKERYeah, that makes sense. Let's see, do we want to talk about Clench the Stench?

1:02:07SPEAKERYes, that one was hard to get my head around until I finally realized what they're doing,

1:02:12SPEAKERbecause the controller for that is extremely not obvious.

1:02:16SPEAKERI walked up to this one and there were four people sitting in office chairs

1:02:19SPEAKERbehaving like absolute maniacs. I couldn't figure out what they were doing,

1:02:22SPEAKERbecause they were swiveling back and forth on the spinny part of the chair. They were slamming the

1:02:28SPEAKERarms. They were leaning back. They were doing all sorts of stuff. The upshot is they had hooked a

1:02:33SPEAKERbunch of sensors up to these office chairs, and they were the controllers for what looked like

1:02:38SPEAKERCrazy Taxi in an office chair. You accelerated by swiveling the chair back and forth in a little

1:02:45SPEAKERbit of a rhythm-y thing. Then you could attack other players by whacking either chair arm.

1:02:52SPEAKERThere was other stuff that I don't exactly understand what happened. It's a little crass.

1:02:57SPEAKERThe gist of the game is that you're working in an office and the only bathroom available

1:03:01SPEAKERis a single porta potty for the entire company. Yet again, another example of a game about the

1:03:12SPEAKERrigors of surviving capitalist employment. Yeah. Well, look, man, bathrooms are expensive

1:03:17SPEAKERand people can just hold it, right? But I think the idea is you ate something that maybe didn't

1:03:21SPEAKERagree with you and you're racing Jim from accounting to get to the portal at first.

1:03:27SPEAKERIt was fun. It looked like a lot of fun to watch people play. I did not wait in line to play that,

1:03:32SPEAKERunfortunately. Yeah. All controlled GDC is always fun. It's worth checking out the website. We'll

1:03:37SPEAKERput it in the show notes so that you can see the videos. I think these are probably people's

1:03:44SPEAKERsubmission trailers that they did for the project, for their projects when they were submitting them

1:03:51SPEAKERto GDC. Very cool. Brad, I think we should table the third topic.

1:03:57SPEAKERYeah, I think you're right. I think we were a little on the fence about looping it in the

1:04:01SPEAKERfirst place. I think it's interesting, but also it's a topic that's been discussed quite a bit

1:04:06SPEAKERover the years. Yeah. As Apple lost it. Well, but not just that it's specifically Apple has said,

1:04:12SPEAKERHey, we're they're delaying the Apple intelligence, LLM stuff, or maybe not doing it at all. It's

1:04:18SPEAKERunclear or I guess maybe, maybe to be more explicit, they announced the AI driven Siri

1:04:24SPEAKERupgrade last year with the phone or go close to the phones for launch on the new phones.

1:04:30SPEAKERAnd they have basically delayed it pretty dramatically into what it looks like next year.

1:04:34SPEAKERAt this point, I would describe it as indefinitely at this point is what it sounds like to me.

1:04:38SPEAKERRight. And like coming right off the heels of vision pro basically doing what they said it

1:04:43SPEAKERwould do, but not selling particularly at all. Like it's kind of it's, it's, it's incited a fresh

1:04:48SPEAKERwave of people going like, okay, what's going on with what happened to the old Apple? Where

1:04:52SPEAKERis the innovation? Is there a real problem here? I mean, we can talk about it maybe another time,

1:04:56SPEAKERbut I think I don't think Apple vision pro not selling, not changing the world at $3,500 a pop

1:05:04SPEAKERand a kilogram or whatever it weighs. Some enormous weight is a huge surprise, but I do

1:05:09SPEAKERthink delaying like the continual announcement and delay of features that are slated for fall and

1:05:16SPEAKERthen being delayed later for, for phones is, is I think that's the signal, not the, not the Apple

1:05:22SPEAKERvision pro thing, but we'll talk about that another time in the meantime, what we will talk

1:05:26SPEAKERabout. Well, first off next week is a patron is a, as a Q and a episode rather. So if you have

1:05:31SPEAKERquestions about stuff we've talked about or other things you can send them to techpot at content.town

1:05:35SPEAKERand we will, or post them in the questions seeking answers channel in the discord and we will do our

1:05:40SPEAKERdamndest to answer them next week. As always, if you want to find out how to get into that discord,

1:05:46SPEAKERyou can go to patreon.com/tech bod, where for five bucks a month, you get access to the discord,

1:05:51SPEAKERyou get access to the monthly patron exclusive episodes. You you help support Brad and I,

1:05:59SPEAKERso we keep making the show indefinitely, which we appreciate greatly. We absolutely do. And you

1:06:05SPEAKERknow, cause as, as we've said, we don't really take ads here. So if you want to, if you want to

1:06:09SPEAKERhelp support the show, if you want to make, if you want to make all of our podcasting dreams come

1:06:14SPEAKERtrue, consider checking five bucks a month at us at patreon.com/techpod. So a huge thank you

1:06:20SPEAKERto all of our patrons, but a very special thank you to our executive producer, dear patrons.

1:06:25SPEAKERWe thank every week, including Jason Lee, Andrew Slosky, Jordan Lippett,

1:06:30SPEAKERBunny Fiend, Twinkle Twinkie, David Allen, James Kamik, and Pantheon makers of the HS3

1:06:37SPEAKERhigh-speed 3d printer. Thank you all so, so much. Thank you. And I guess that will do it for us this

1:06:42SPEAKERweek. I will see you next week for a Q and a brand. I'll be there. And in the meantime, I'm sorry,

1:06:48SPEAKERwhy are you holding up a dental implement? I was, I had to scrape something off of a

1:06:53SPEAKERpiece of electronics the other day. So it's been sitting on my desk here for a while,

1:06:56SPEAKERa terrifying hook just entered the frame of your video. You don't look, I dental tools are so good

1:07:01SPEAKERfor like getting stuff out from under motherboards or, or like positioning positioning of SMT

1:07:09SPEAKERsoldered device on the board precisely. So you can hit it with the solder just, just a little bit.

1:07:14SPEAKERYeah, sure. I didn't know those were available to civilians though.

1:07:17SPEAKERLook on Amazon, anything's available to civilians. Fair. It is just metal. I guess they can make

1:07:21SPEAKERstuff out of metal. You don't have to get a prescription. You don't have to get a license

1:07:26SPEAKERto be a dentist. It's a, you know, Barbara's used to do it. It's yeah. So thanks everybody

1:07:31SPEAKERfor listening and we will see you next week. Please consider the environment before printing

1:07:35SPEAKERthis podcast.