Wow. Who could have ever seen this one coming.

Fuck Phil Spencer

Fuck Matt Booty

Fuck Sarah Bond

Kind of upsets me that the guys beg for patrons, then Jeff buys an Apple Vision Pro.

The problem: Using calendar year as evaluation period for Favorite Games of the Year means that games released in december have very little chance of making the list (Jeff listed Remnant II last year after just a few hours of gameplay, and also said he was basing it on a prediction that it would hold up). There is just no chance for these games to get a fair shake compared to something being released early in the year.

A solution: Offset the eval/competition period by a month or two, for instance November to October. That would make games released for Christmas 2023 eligible for the 2024 competition and so on. And leave enough time for games released in the period to get at least a worthy look.

Or keep it as it is, but also make games released last December eligible.

Just a thought!

In summary, many sites have become “engagement generation machines” mostly devoid of solid analysis and opinion. Gamers as consumers are very different from in the past and now represent a much larger portion of the population and most have very little engagement with “gaming outlets”.

If a publisher wants to get out the information to a target customer, without the bias or clickbait headlines worrying consumers, they are better off handling it like Suicide Squad. I think this is fine and will be more common in 2024 because the purpose and competence of “review sites” is in a very different place. People have better and more reliable sources of information.

My general reasons for believing this is the case:

Reviews of quality is now almost meaningless, Broken as a judgement is now subjective, Fun is always subjective, Mind blowing, new or innovative is always subjective to the consumer.

Clicks drive engagement so there is a saturation of posts with limited content and click bait headlines.

Biases are often just presented as authoritative. - ie Mobile is bad. 30 fps is bad. Walking simulators are bad. Game is not optimized. Not fun. Not colourful enough. To hard.

Generating clicks based on culture war is the norm and dominates the general tone of discussions, rather than celebrating the hobby.

I believe part of the problem is that established sites have a bias based on their past experiences and what they “expect” from the industry. New or casual gamers don’t need everything to be better than the last.

Finally folks engage in hobbies to have fun and enjoy things. When the majority of content is dunking on the industry instead of celebrating achievements and progress, most average folks will tune out.

Are the guys’ lists posted anywhere? I listened to the pod, but would love a written list somewhere for reference!

Howdy!

Has anyone compiled a list of Jeff’s rogue-like of the week? Looking for things that would play well on my new steamdeck!

Thanks!

I can see from various rss feeds and other platforms episode 523 is live. However its not showing on Spotify.

Anyone else the same?

I went to the discord and searched for "Spotify" and got nothing.

It seems like others have watched the latest episode, but I got nothing. I restarted my phone. I uninstalled and reinstalled the app.

Is everyone else able to get the after Thanksgiving episode?

Jeff, you seeing this? https://www.ign.com/articles/blizzard-just-released-a-big-heroes-of-the-storm-patch-and-now-the-community-is-daring-to-dream

I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for this comeback!

On episode 522 with Adam Leonhardt (and Anthony Taormina subbing for Christian), the group briefly discussed the Game Awards nominees, and the absence of Starfield. Jeff was upset that Starfield was snubbed, and said he was unaware that there was any criticism of the game beyond its graphics, which seemed odd to me, since a lot has been said and written about the ways in which many felt let down by Bethesda's newest.

I know Metacritic is not the perfect measure of a game's reception, but it's convenient, so I'm going to use it. The current Metacritic metascore is 83, and the user score is 7.0. If you look at the list of major games released this year in terms of metascore, Starfield ranks 51 out of 457. So, top 10%, but hardly in the running for the best game.

In general the response of critics was warm, but not great:

• IGN 7 / 10
• Eurogamer 3 / 5
• PC Gamer 75 / 100
• Metro GameCentral 6 / 10
• Easy Allies 8 / 10
• GamesRadar+ 5 / 5
• Game Informer 8.5 / 10
• GameSpot 7 / 10

Compare this to the scores for any of the games nominated for Game of the Year, and it seems incredibly obvious why Starfield wasn't included. It has lots of planets, lots of systems, lots of NPCs, lots of quests--but none of them are particularly great. The story has been criticized for being derivative and uninspiring; the majesty of space travel is reduced to fast traveling from a menu, and the clash of systems results in often uninspiring gameplay. Compared to BG3, I can't imagine a world in which this is one of the best games of the year unless we're giving it to the studio that made Skyrim out of nostalgia and loyalty.

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https://www.steamdeck.com/en/oled

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I've been thinking about the Steam Deck for a while but this update is really getting me close to pulling the trigger.

I’m basically done with Spider-Man 2 on PS5, back when Jeff and Christian reviewed it they said they didn’t like the last 25-30% - what were they alluding to?

Has anyone else been hearing intermittent audio glitches/distortion on Christian's audio?

Seems to happen once every few minutes. Figured he'd want to know about it if it's not just me :) I'll try to find a timecode and check somewhere else online. I'm listening to the adfree version, btw.

I'm a few hours in and loving it. I recommend it co-op if possible, but single player is a ton of fun. I attached the trailer below:

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https://youtu.be/mYYaXW4Q6as?si=a_V0Z-YjTK1hmlDx

After a long hiatus i wanted to start listening to DLC again. Both the top Google results and the "DLC Homepage" link on this reddit point to either the 5by5.tv site or the Fireside.fm site (one of which redirects to the other.) However the episode list on that site stops at 491 (April 2023) which caused me a bit of panic. However some searching revealed that new episodes are still being made and are posted to Audioboom.com, more specifically audioboom.com/channels/5104635-dlc

This is old news for current listeners I'm sure, but I wanted to help out any other returning or potentially new listeners who are as confused as i was. (And maybe someone can update the "DLC Homepage" link here?)

Of course now even the name of this reddit is misleading, but given that there have still been intermittent posts here since the website change i'm guessing there's no plans to change the name of/move the reddit.

https://www.polygon.com/23885593/xbox-leaks-aaa-games-phil-spencer

Fascinating viewpoint. It's a quibble, but I'd change the title of the article to "AAA publishers are in big trouble."