 Oh, did you start the recording in the audio? Yep. Or never stop the other one. Hey, everyone, welcome back to the Nintendo Prime podcast episode 105. I am your host, as always, Nathaniel Ruffalojansk, joined to my left in your right. Bye. Eric Moore. And we are excited. We've got three big-ish topics to talk about. Maybe some controversial topics. We'll see kind of how it goes. Before we get into that, you can find our podcast on iTunes, Podbean, Google Play through the Google podcast app, nintendoprime.net. And as always, on Patreon through patreon.com slash Nintendo Prime. In fact, for $20 a month, you can be on an episode of the podcast. Once we run $10 a month, you get to actually watch us record the podcast. $5 a month, you get a day early access to the audio version. Otherwise, our podcast always goes live publicly on YouTube at 10 AM Central Standard Time. Now, on Mondays. Did I say Monday? Yeah. Anyways, we got some topics, man. Yeah. First, let's get into one that feels like we're beating a dead horse. Yeah. Switch Mini, Switch Pro, Switch Something. This past week, a new report came out at Nikkei Japanese publication. And this new report really said two, well, three things. One, the Switch Mini is, or whatever it's called, Switch Lite, whatever. It will be here this fall. And it will be dockable. So you will be able to dock it, OK? That's just what they're claiming. Nikkei is a Japanese publication. And so they are closer to where things are being made. So who knows? I don't know if that provides any more context. They've been writing about stuff in the past. But next, this is one that's really interesting. So the more powerful Switch will be coming after the Switch Mini. So they're not really set at the same time. We don't know what after means. Could be winter 2019, but it's probably in 2020, my assumption. But they're specifically calling it a next generation switch that will replace the current switch. Huh. All right. Which is interesting because the Mini's not being called that. So it might replace the current switch. But in the Mini, you could argue it replaces the current switch, especially if it's dockable. It's just smaller. Yeah. I don't know. The point is that they are suggesting that this is a much bigger upgrade or maybe even a whole new generation of Switch. And just saying that out loud, how do you feel? Say a next-gen Switch 2020? I don't know. I don't know how you can really go next-gen Switch besides making things just more powerful. Well, that's usually what next generation is. Just more powerful hardware. It's just when things are called next-gen, it's because it's usually a significant leap. I mean, that'd be nice. As long as they fix, again, some of the problems that we've caused. Well, sure, some design things to be fixed. But I think when I hear next-gen Switch, for starters, I love technology, so I'm just tickling my fancy. But I also think the current switch is going to be, what, three years old, a little bit over three years by the time we get to when this one might potentially be coming out. That's not very long to talk about, oh, a next-gen that replaces that. Now, if it was just a Switch Pro, that's fine. Three years in, an upgrade, mid-gen upgrade. That's cool. But this is like, no, not a mid-gen, an end-gen upgrade. We're just done with the gen. Yeah, yeah, that's... I wonder, though, I've talked in the past about how phones, you're the upgrades, every other year for Apple, it's like a new generation of Apple devices. I'm wondering if, instead of looking this like a traditional new generation, like the PlayStation 5 coming out, or the Xbox Two or whatever, maybe we're looking at it wrong in how we think about next-gen because a next-generation Switch, it might be a significant bump. It might be a completely custom chipset, fully backwards compatible, uses the same cartridges, and all that stuff, but what if it's more like phones where it's like, okay, so this comes out and that leads to phasing out the old one. But in general, everything's probably still going to work on that old one for the next two to three years. Like phones out on the platform. It just happens to be that they don't gonna make that platform anymore. Yeah, I mean, that's definitely a possibility. Because the more I think about it, the more I'm like, what, that one that can make the OG Switch kind of a collector's item, especially if you have one of the special edition ones. Which, by the way, we're giving away one of those. The Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Bundle Edition. Gleam.io link down in the description. But I just, my thoughts on this are kind of all over the place. I'm excited, but then I'm like, I can see why people might be worried because what if it gets exclusive games? Right. And like, are they doing this because of PlayStation 5? Because we heard some specs for that. But then my whole thought process is, I don't think there is a good response for PlayStation 5 for Nintendo, because PlayStation 5 is gonna be using like the new Ryzen processors. It's using the new Navi GPUs with Ray Tracing and some new, I shouldn't say new SSD technology, but it's upcoming SSD technology that likely supports the new PCIe 4.0 standard. That's why they're so much faster, because PCIe 4.0 is gonna be much faster. And this all sounds great and dandy, but there's nothing you can do as a tablet to come anywhere close. So, sure, they can build one that surpasses PlayStation 4 in power and maybe get it to us for 400. Yeah. But at that point, like, but the PlayStation 5 destroys the base PlayStation 4. It'll be a bigger gap than the current PlayStation 4 and Switch has. So, to me, like, it can't be a response. No. If this is real, because your response is, oh, hey, we're giving you a more powerful version of what you already have, but hey, by the way, it's still getting wrecked and you're still not gonna get third-party games, though. I guess the question should be, what do you see as the point to release a more powerful Switch, basically, in your four of Switch? The technology's there. Sure. And as we've noted, the Switch does have its issues. Oh, yeah. There's a lot of issues, but I'm just talking about games. Games-wise? What's the point of the new hardware? Because the more powerful hardware, that's affecting any of it. All the issues we talk about are little things. Right, right, right. Right. But power, that's games. Right. Directly affects games. Right, right, right. And then Nintendo games don't ever seem to need the power. Correct. The thing is, if you can somehow convince third parties that you can now run, you know, I mean, even though you can now, you can run their games to a little bit higher quality. Maybe they're looking at the quality and maybe it's just borderline on where they see their games being in the quality that they want and maybe that's why they don't wanna bring it to Switch. But if you can have just that much more power and get the quality just that much better, maybe you might see some more third-party party games jump on. I mean, the most obvious reason is obviously third parties, like try to get more AAA games. And I'm just gonna be honest, like this week we heard that Jedi Fallen Order, no surprise, is not coming to Switch. No one really expected it to, but you know, they didn't announce platforms when they announced it, so you kinda hoped. But I don't know that just having a more powerful Switch is gonna get us those games. Because I think part of the reason we don't get all the AAA games on Switch isn't just power. I think it's reputation. I think it's companies don't think their games will sell because the bottom line is, if a company thinks their game will sell on your platform, they don't care what the hardware is, they will make it work on that platform. We're seeing this with a lot of console games now trying to go to mobile phones because they think they can get more money from a market that has billions of users. Which is understandable, you figure billions of users, you gotta be able to get all the sales off that market. But I'm just not sure what this is supposed to mean in general, podcast. Yes, can you talk to me? Okay, I'll be right back. Good thing we can cut this out. Yeah. We're not liable for this. Yeah. Oh geez, all right. Um, I can share a stream. Woo! I see nobody in the chat, so, hooray. Unless I can't actually see the chat. I'm gonna go grab my phone. And if anybody's watching, hey, guess what? This is what you get to pay to see. You get to see the stoppages and random stuff that happens during the middle of recording the podcast. So, fun. Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. And a, a prime, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. Podcast, podcast, anybody watching? Anybody watching? Do, do, do, do, where is our podcast? Oh, that's right. I can't go to the comment section because, yeah, I don't have the $10. Do, do, do, do, do, again. All right, well, box one, brewer's one. Great game, or great day in Milwaukee in Wisconsin Sports. Hooray. Yes, Tab Sports Baseball. Hello, everybody. Yeah. I still see nothing in the chat. So, hooray. Yeah, buh-buh-buh. Ah, come on, game. Come in. Yeah, come on, game. Yeah, come on. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Hooray, do, do, do, do, do, do. Hooray, winning. Kind of surprised Edward's not here. Oh, anybody out there? I think I can see the chat. I'm pretty sure that's the chat, but I don't see anybody. Eh, do, do, do, do. Yeah, cheer stream. I know, it's like, I'm sitting there looking over the chat, I'm like, nobody's in the chat. All right. I've been talking about the Eric podcast forever, and I thought I had a chance to have them. Yeah, all right, yeah. I need Eric only, Seth. Yeah, and I went to go pull up the podcast, and I'm like, oh yeah, I can't see it. All right. Oh, goodness gracious. I think that's it for me there on that one. Yep, that is, all right, all right. I don't even remember where they were at. No, it's okay. Okay. I'll get us back into it. I just think that the next gen thing is just, I'm confused. Yeah. It almost feels unbelievable to be completely honest. Yeah. Mid-Gen upgrades is something Nintendo has done many times. Right, right, right. Yeah, for sure, for sure. They did it way back in the NES days. But this, and why are people, like if this is true, why are people freaking out? I don't know. The freaking out part I don't understand. That part I don't get at all, period. I think it's, well, maybe it's because they're too used to traditional generations. I buy my system, I play everything for five to six years. Yeah. Oh, okay, yeah, you're right. I guess so the whole, you know, if they get, if it gets console-exclusive games, then yeah, I can kind of see where your panic is at. But I don't, I don't see that happening. Then again, it is Nintendo. Well, I was not gonna get Nintendo exclusive, not like, not in their major games, not for a while. Right. But I mean, obviously, you know, we talked about it was third parties would be the reason to recreate the power. Right, for sure. But if we're literally about to get PlayStation 5, like, doesn't that feel like a Wii U situation again? Kind of. Well, hey, look, we're releasing something that's as powerful as the current gen that's being replaced in a few months. Very true. Now granted, this is a lot more appeal than the Wii U ever did and already has an audience. Right. So that helps, but. I know you said that the power may not be a draw for third-party games and that it's kind of more of a, I can't remember exactly what you said, more of a, what did you say? Short-term memory loss? Yeah, oh God, my short-term memory is terrible. But whatever you said, my question is, is do you think it's the reputation of Nintendo as well? Cause what they've done to third parties in the past? Probably. I think a lot of third parties don't come because of the reputation. Like, even when you think about it, right? The NBA 2K, 18 and 19th com, FIFA 18 and 19, you know, Wolfenstein and Doom, and they've obviously sold okay enough to keep bringing more of them for now, but is that gonna be true when next gen hits? I don't know, because we're not, typically when games are selling extremely well on a platform, the publishers tout how well the sales are doing at the quarterly reports and they're not touting how well the Switch sales are doing, which tells you they're probably not doing as well as the other systems. They'll be like, oh yeah, we sold 3 million on Xbox, but like, oh yeah, it did better than expectations what were your expectations? Right. Better than expectations? Well, it wasn't 3 million then. But the thing is though, is that if it's better than expectations, that still means better than expectations. That still means it's selling better than you thought it would. Or, or it's just a positive buzzword so investors don't freak out that you blew all your money on a such version. I mean, that's possible, but still, I see that as it's better than thought of, you know, so which is a good thing. So, I mean, if your expectations are here and you sell here, how is that a bad thing? Because even with it being higher than expectations, if you don't see growth year over year, like NBA 2K, NBA 2K 19 so worse, why would you bring the next one? I've argued in the past, right, that like getting full AAA support on Switch would require the AAA games that do come to sell well. And to me, selling well would have to be a number you can't ignore. So a million, million copies, you can't ignore a million. You can ignore 500,000 if it's selling eight, nine million on the other platform, that's a point. That 500,000 might not be worth the investment to you. But, if you're selling a million units, like Call of Duty was doing consistently and we back in the day, that's why they kept bringing every Call of Duty to we for crying out loud. Because it kept selling a million. So like you can't ignore an audience of a million people. That's just throwing money away. Very true, very true. But we're talking about games that aren't indie games. So they can look at 500,000 copies of selling of anything and be like, oh, that's nothing. And then they'll look at, well, what third party AAA game was really killing it? Oh, Autopat Traveler at 1.5 million. That didn't have a huge budget. You could argue it's not even AAA. Right. So why invest all this money now? We could just make smaller experiences like that that'll sell more that cost us a lot less money to make. Like Square Enix probably looks at it as, man, look at the budget on this, it's only 1.5 million. Oh, we'll port all the old Final Fantasy games over, but we're not giving you the new one. We're not giving you the full Final Fantasy 15. The amount of money can cost us to port it compared to how many we can just sell of making another Bravely Default or another Autopat Traveler that's way cheaper. Why would we do that? Fair enough. And now Autopat Traveler had the advantage of it was an exclusive. And obviously at the time, when you are an exclusive to a platform, you kind of get extra advertising from the platform. And that helps. Being an exclusive will usually help with sales on an individual platform because you can't buy it anywhere else. But still, do you keep seeing more success stories like that? You see the Mario plus Rabbids Kingdom battles being touted as a success. And I bet you that sold more than any other AAA game has sold on, so it's a multi-platform game on, so. The only other games that perform really, really well from the AAA are ones that are free to play like Fortnite because it's free. Right. So, of course it's gonna do well. Of course it's gonna be installed on more than half the switches out there, which is like 15, 16, 17 million plus switches because it's free. So, I just worry that if Nintendo is doing a power upgrade just to get their parties, that it's not going to work. Now, will it make current third party games run better? Sure. A lot of them use dynamic resolution as an example. More power means it's gonna run at the higher resolution more often or if not all the time. Having a little frame rate hiccups here and there, while more power will make the frame rate steadier. Maybe you can hit 60 FPS on some games right now. But if it's a next-gen Switch landing next year that already by the end of that year is so far out of touch compared to what third parties are trying to do now with the new-gen systems. Right. Then what? I've argued in the past that PlayStation as an example, a lot of third party games that come to PlayStation 4 kept coming to PlayStation 3 for a couple of years. Sure. But if you have to downport from that to another Switch, like you're doing two downports, they're not gonna pay for that. Right. Especially when they have all this money invested in next-gen. And you can be like, well, that's why we need the more powerful ones for the next two years. Okay, so now maybe over the next two years we get some games, but then again, we probably won't because what's been the excuse on or the common excuse why, oh, we're getting some third party in Mortal Kombat. Now, we went to get Mortal Kombat two years ago. All games are on a three to four-year development cycle. Okay, so we get the more powerful platform and just then they start to consider the Switch. So by the time we get that game, it's three to four years out and they're no longer making the old-school versions anymore, so now it's even next-gen exclusive. So it's, you're in this conundrum where just releasing a more powerful Switch isn't gonna get you the AAA games now. They're just gonna get them in two to three years and by then they're not even making games for PlayStation 4 anymore. Right. So that's my thing. So looking at this conundrum where I want a more powerful Switch and I wanna see like what Zelda can do with that kind of power. I wanna see, you know, Mario and Metroid Prime and Pikmin as an example that mimics a lot of real life objects in the game. Like, I wanna see what these games can do with more power. But Nintendo games never feel like they need that power for them to be great. No, for sure. They are pretty. Breath of the Wild, Odyssey, they're all pretty. HD is here with Nintendo, thank gosh. Everything looks pretty except with Yoshi because Yoshi doesn't run in HD. But. Sure. Right. It's still, I'm just, I'm kind of miffed a little bit at as much as I want, there's been a lot of talk about around more powerful hardware, not a lot of talk around what the hell is the point of the more power. Right. The only other thing I could think of too is that it's gonna run the AAA third party games that are on the Switch already better. Sure. Which may cause a spike in sales for the ones that are already out. No. You don't think so? No. Cause those games are already out of print. Cause they're not selling. The people that would be interested in those games have already bought it. So maybe they'll buy an upgraded Switch for the games they already own. But even then, that's just increasing Switch sales. That's not gonna really do it for much or anyone. Like, I wanna, I wanna evolve. Like, to make it clear, I want a more powerful Switch. Give it to me now. I want it at E3. Let's play it. I want it now. I want it now. But like, the reason I want it now is cause I'm a techie and I wanna see what Nintendo can do with it. But I have been arguing for, well, six months now, that Nintendo Switch is not selling because of third parties. And if it's not selling, watch it say AAA third parties. So it's not selling because of AAA multi-platform third party games, then why does it care about power at all? Cause of that, if they're selling on the back first party, second party, third party exclusive contracts like Bayonetta and a whole bunch of really high quality indie games, then why do they need more power? I mean, I'm not saying never get more power, obviously. But it's like, why? I think there's other things that could, more storage would be better. More, I don't know. That's like the number one thing that possibly has more storage. Like, I want more powerful hardware, but I just wanna make sure that it's being done for a reason that makes sense. Now, if Nintendo wants to say, look, we need more powerful hardware to do a better VR experience, that's Nintendo saying, look, we, Labo VR is great, we have the next step for VR, but we need more powerful platform. Oh, fine, cool. But I don't think Nintendo is that dedicated to VR. Cause I think they would have released VR as a standalone thing and not made it Labo if they wanted it to really blow up. Cause you can't even, it's not even a headset. I know, but part of me is, again, wondering if they didn't shoehorn in Labo because they wanted Labo to sell better. No, no, because they showed, they showed some concepts for that's in this kit, like way back before Switch even came out. So they've had Labo, and apparently they had a VR thing in the work four years ago. So like, they've been thinking about this for a long time and it just became Labo. I, and I think it's still not a headset officially because you can't wear it on your head. Right. Officially, people are Jerry-rigging things of course, but. I knew they would. I mean, come on, you can't tell me, oh, all the Breath of the Wilds playable on VR but you need to hold it to your face. Face for three hours, yes. Like they don't expect you to play for three hours, but it's the kind of game you play for three hours. Yeah, you sit down and play, you sit down and play for three hours. Actually, because it's in VR on the Switch, it's probably two hours of battery life that it actually has, but. Possibly, yeah. Now you say that, I'm just gonna put a hole in the bottom and put a battery pack on my chest and just keep it pop. There you go, there you go. Yeah, actually, honestly though, the next gen Switch thing, the biggest question for me is, why are you releasing the Switch Mini in the fall? And then. And then turning around and basically making it. Obsolete. Obsolete because you have the next gen of Switch. It, well, how long did we go with just a 2DS without a 2DS XL? I don't know. A long time, years. Okay. Even though the 3DS XL existed before the 2DS did. Yeah. The reason is that the Switch Mini's meant for kids. That's the target audience of children. Yeah. A more powerful avid gamer platform is not targeting children. So that's the logic is, the Switch Mini is just replacing the 3DS, not the Switch. Fair enough. $200 entry points. Right, right. No, no, no. For sure. Especially if the alternative is a $400 device. Right. No, it's, yeah, it's very true. I mean. And if they're pretty much getting the same games, at least from Nintendo side of things. So they're gonna do great. So it's one of those situations where I just want to make sure I'm all for a more powerful platform. I'm not one of those people that's scared of all my Switches and laptops. I don't mind from day one. I'm totally ready for a new one. I'm not one of you guys that might've just recently bought one. I literally bought it from day one. I'm ready. Right, right. But I want to make sure that Nintendo knows why they are making a more powerful platform. Because I firmly believe they're not competing with PlayStation 4 and Xbox right now. Now, sales wise you can argue they are, but they're not getting the same games. Let's just be honest here. It's not getting the same games. Yes, we get some. Yes, in a day, everyone's gonna have Mortal Kombat 11. That's great. But we didn't get Kingdom Hearts 3. That went to the other platforms in January. We didn't get that game on Switch. It sucks. Sucks, but we didn't get it. Even though I've never played a Kingdom Hearts game. A vast majority of the triple day multi-platform games this year we're not going to get. And we're not gonna suddenly get them because the Switch Pro exists. Because again, two to three years to even start getting those games on the platform. And by then, they're not making those games anymore for these older platforms. So you're left in this conundrum where I honestly don't think the next gen Switch is trying to compete with PlayStation 5 and Xbox 2, at least not directly. It's trying to compete in a, we are the hybrid handheld home console and we are gonna own that and no one's gonna be able to beat us at it. We're gonna make sure no one does it better than us. And I could see how they wanna have a more powerful and come out if there was competition for them. But there's like no competition in the space they're in. No one else is doing it. There's not another portable PlayStation coming out. There's not another. No, that we know of. No, they literally said they're not doing it. Okay, so. Well, I will believe it when I never see it. So. I believe it because Sony has already said that PlayStation 5 is probably their last home console. They're looking at networking. They're looking at streaming. That's what they're looking at. So like, they're not looking at all this really seem more physical hardware when we can just put our games on everything. That's the future is get your games on everything. So, as much as you guys might hate that future, that's kind of what we're staring at. But Nintendo's like in their own market. It's kind of like the 3DS. Vito really wasn't that relevant outside of Japan. So 3DS is basically its own market without competition. So Nintendo, I think it's starting to look at, well look, it's Switch. Nothing does what Switch does exactly. So it's kind of it's own thing. So. Yeah, it's obvious. It's his own thing. Now if they had competition. Don't get me wrong. There are hybrids like GDP, Win2, stuff. Like there's some that are out there, but there's so unpopular that it's not really a competition. I mean, that's like saying that Game Gear really posed a threat to Game Boy. It didn't. It was really cool, but it really was never a real threat. I love Game Gear. I know what you do. I love Game Gear too. But as a point I was making, it was in the really nice platform. It was another PSP, 80 million units. Woo, what a threat to Nintendo. You would think, you would think, except that generation, the DS did 150 million. You think Nintendo ever felt threatened in that, Jen? Probably not. Point is that Nintendo isn't worried about it because as long as it's a handheld that also does other things, Nintendo knows we do this better than everyone. And we have a reputation of doing this better than everyone. So we're not direct, like I think this is a tough pill for some people to swallow because Nintendo has been advertising Switch as a home console, home console, home console, home console. And if you're a home console, obviously you're competing with other home consoles, right? But we all know the Switch is using portable tablet hardware. And because of that, and because it, when you open it in the box, you're not holding a thing you plug into your TV, you're holding a tablet. It makes you start to realize that Nintendo might be calling it a home console because of mind share. They want people thinking of it as a home console. But they know deep down, especially if the Switch may end up being portable only, like they know deep down that, dude, like where it's handheld technology and nobody does it better. We're just gonna call it this so we can get those avid gamers to maybe try us out. But, I mean, come on, no one can touch us here. Well, we're just doing what we do best. So I, and that gets back to the whole, do we really need the new Nintendo 3DS upgrade? And to me, that's a different argument because the new Nintendo 3DS wasn't just about, it really wasn't even about getting games that we've come up before, like Xenoblade Chronicles to run on. There was exclusive games, or there's games that run better on it, but that to me was never the point of the upgrade. Point of the upgrade was Miiverse. Miiverse on the OG3DS was impossible to use, basically. You're talking, it felt like you're back on dial-up to do anything. It was bad. And the OS on the OG3DS was already slow. So then the new Nintendo 3DS comes along with this more powerful hardware, and suddenly the UI is snappier. Suddenly Miiverse is actually almost as usable as it is on Wii U. Again, they had UI and base functionality of the system that needed that power for improvement. But you look at Switch, everything snappy, everything works, not really any delays in anything, besides just waiting for servers to respond. I'm actually kinda wondering if there's something Nintendo has in the backs of their minds that they wanted to do with this original Switch that they never... I talked about that before, how maybe this Switch that we have now isn't the original vision. It has a lot of the original vision. I have no doubt what the Joy-Cons are is what Nintendo always wanted them to be, but I think maybe the Switch hardware and I'm like, isn't exactly what they wanted, but it's what they did because they needed something out at that time. And I've talked about that, but then it's like now that we have it, besides fixing the numerous issues to talk about the kickstand and like a zillion things like, yeah, you can redesign things and make a better platform, but none of that involves better hardware. So why do we need the better hardware? It doesn't seem like it would fix any base functionality of the system because the base functionality of the system doesn't feel like it needs fixing. It just needs more features, but that's software, that's not a hardware thing. Right. I mean, there's some hardware things you can argue like an Ethernet port and all that, but again, that's not how powerful the system is. That's just an, it's basically an additional feature. And that's also. Built-in feature. But that's also a dock feature, not an actual. Well, you would assume, I assume there'd be a redesigned dock, maybe that's right, but presumptuous of me. Do you think it would need more? No, it shouldn't need anything more power related for like having an Ethernet port on the dock. So I was thinking, maybe there's some, I don't know, maybe there's some feature that they just haven't announced yet that they need the more powerful. And this has been like, I haven't had this conversation. I've done a bunch of videos covering all the rumors and how excited I might be and what the power might be comparable to, but I've never sat there and thought like, why? What is the benefit to us as consumers? It's kind of like the upgrades of phones, right? There's pretty much year-to-year upgrades of phones. There's almost no benefit to these consumers. That's why most people, I'd like to think most people that have phones aren't buying a new one every year. They're waiting at least two or three before they finally see a reason to it. Usually it's because their battery is degraded. The battery's not holding as well. That's always a big one. Or it's just becoming sluggish over time, which happens. And then you want to get a new one charting. Yeah, basically the phones. Die. The physical part. $1,000 phones are literally just failing. The physical parts are just blowing up. Yeah. And obviously anyone that's on those two-year contracts you just get a free phone every two years. So I look at this as a situation where I'm not sure what the purpose of the new hardware would be for. I know all of you guys are screaming obvious third party, but I'm just explaining why that wouldn't make sense. But my question is, do you think it would hurt? Hurt third party? Yeah. No. Right. It's not gonna hurt. But if it's not gonna help, if it can't hurt, I don't see, hold on, stop. It can hurt. We're not taking one thing into consideration. Let's say that they have dev units right now and they're like, oh cool, we're gonna be mad and we're only gonna bring it to this new switch, right? That means they have to forsake 40 plus million people that own the current switch. And they're not gonna do that. Right. So they're gonna have to now make, how many versions of Madden just to run on switch? Docked and handheld for the old school, docked and handheld for the new one? Yeah. Like, now you're talking about how third parties who are already struggling to wanna bring their games over and now you're telling them, oh, but now I gotta support all these different switches because I'm not gonna not support the old switch. And then if you're like, oh, if I'm gonna support the old switch, then I'm not gonna do anything new with the new switch. It's just gonna be the same game. Yeah. And then they're not gonna take advantage of the power. Anyway, so it's kind of like left in the same conundrum where Nintendo might take advantage of it. Sure. Yeah. They might have a big, like the Xenoblade make it, like, okay, they might take advantage. But of course they are because they're the ones that made it more powerful. They gotta justify the power. Just like they did with the new Nintendo 3DS when they ported Xenoblade over. It's like, hey. Hey, are they finally bringing skins? The OS? No. Themes. Themes? No. Not the wordware of any of it, nothing else. Hey, that's the extra power for it. They did update 8.0.0 this week that did add a few features. Oh, yeah. There's now different ways you can sort your games. Oh, yeah, yeah, that's right. You were telling that. I don't like them. Well, the one didn't work. Yeah, the one that you sort by, you're most, you know, you sort by play time based on the games you played the most top to bottom. It's wrong. And it's not wrong because like, oh, I miss remembering my times. No, you can literally go on my profile and look at my times and see. It's not lining up correctly. It's not going from least to most or most to least. It's like, it's got my top three, like in the top three, but they're like all mixed up. I think one's the root. One's two. I have one that I have like 35 plus hours in that should be in my top 10. That's like down in the 18s, while games that I've only played for like a half hour are up in my top 10. And it's like, this is not working. This is broken. This part, all the other sorting, but this particular sorting is not working. Even my top three, they're the right three, but in the wrong order. Now, does that matter? Nope. I mean, I guess at least to recognize that, oh, all of those are over a hundred hours, but something's not right. Right, right, right. Yoshi's Craft of the World apparently is one of my most played games on Switch. No, it's not. It should not be. I know I'm reviewing it, but it absolutely should not be one of my most played games on Switch. A more recent game I played, yes, but question for you with the search function or with that sort function, does it take into somehow for some odd weird reason, does it take time played across all profiles? It shouldn't. It really shouldn't, no. It shouldn't, but is that what's going on? Good question. Because I know your kids probably play a ton of Yoshi's Craft of the World. My son has played a bunch. Right, and if they just set the, if they leave the Switch on and walk away, that's three hours right there. No, they never just left on them after that. You know what I'm saying. You know what I'm saying. You know what I'm saying, though. Well, you know what might be a telling sign for that? Yooka Laylee. Yeah. Where does that rank? Because my son, I think he's put $100 in the Yooka Laylee. I might have been kidding. Nice. You can't even get our world one, he doesn't care. And Herokey, I know he's probably put like 30 hours in Herokey. Yeah, yeah. That's a fair question. Because I want to see, he doesn't care about his save. So if I delete their profiles, I wonder if that's going to change the order. Another thing you could, yeah, yeah. Another thing you could do is just create another profile and then just play for an hour, hour and a half, two hours. Yeah, but the Switch doesn't really have to show things for like five days after you start the game, so. Oh, OK. Yeah. So that's not going to help them with something that weren't really, really true. True. I think what I'll do is, because my kids don't care about their game saves, they don't even save the game most of the time, so to be honest. There's that. What you can do is, I can go and wipe all the profiles and then reset up to, well, I need to reset the profiles anyways, because right now it's like Yulia and then Aiden. And then everyone plays in their Aiden. That should just be kids. Yeah. And Yulia doesn't even need her own, to be honest. She would just be under mine. But so, and do that and wipe all that gameplay out and just see if it goes back to what it should be for just me. Right, because I can see how they would make that mistake of, you know. It's not even a mistake, it should just be how it works. Right. Because all the profiles are there. Right, but you'd figure it'd be Switch gameplay then. Not profile, I mean. But all the profiles play on Switch. I get that. But what I'm saying is that you'd figure it'd be a Switch. Are these all Switch sorts? Like full Switch sorts? Or are they profile specific sorts? They're not profile specific. So then I'm wondering if it's not. Damn it, you figured it out. Maybe. All right, let's move on to the next topic. Yeah. Because we're going to spend the whole podcast on all this. So Phillip Musin's back. Hey. Former plagiarist. So he claims. He used to be an editor at IGN, got caught plagiarizing for the Dead Cells thing. This is like a Dead Cells review from Boomstick Gaming. Found out he plagiarized a bunch of stuff on his YouTube channel before he was hired by IGN that just wasn't caught at the time. He called out Jason Schreier saying he's never plagiarized anything before I dare you to find anything. And then he found all this stuff on his channel. Internet one. The internet one. You don't dare the internet. Let alone a journalist who is just calling you in your crap and offered to interview you, by the way, and you wouldn't do it. And then issued the, he didn't even apologize. I might even call it a non-apology. He literally never pretended it was. Everyone else called it a non-apology, but his video was not named anything about apology. And he never apologized anywhere in it. So it was not an apology. Right. More maybe an explanation. And the explanation he originally gave was I did nothing wrong. Everybody does it. Everyone does it this way. Everyone from YouTubers to IGN to everyone does it this way. Yeah. So now I'm just getting a bunch of crap. Poor me. I'm tired of my family getting threats. I'm tired of this. I'm tired of that. But I didn't do anything wrong. So none of this is warranted and it's all your guys' fault. And that's basically the end of it. And then he tried to make other videos and all those videos got dislike bombed, which by the way, YouTube doesn't care if a video is dislike bombed or liked bombed. It all means the same to them. So really you guys are kind of helping these videos. Which makes no sense to me whatsoever. But helping this video gets spread. That's just how it works. So I look at it as a thing. Well, my most viewed video ever as Nintendo Prime has like a 42% like to dislike ratio. Didn't matter. Go ahead and dislike bomb. You're just spreading my video. That still makes no sense. Right, right, right. That's not what we're here for. He came back finally after eight months. His last video made was about three months ago. And eight months after everything went down, he finally released a 2 minute and 11 second apology video. In this video, to his credit, he finally fesses up. He fesses up to the gaming situation. He fesses up to four of his alleged plagiarism things. He's actually been accused of like a dozen or more. Those were probably the four biggest ones to happen to him. He was getting hammered for the most. Right, right. And it's interesting because if you're going to go out of your way to name those four, you're not going to acknowledge all the other ones. Because then you're actually not apologizing to each person that you affected. In addition, OK, moving on, even giving him benefit of the doubt, he then goes on to apologize to everyone at IGN, which of course. And then that's kind of where he leaves in. He just says, oh, I promise never to do this again. You'll see. I'm going to make nothing but original content moving forward. For starters, the first reaction for me is eight months. Right. And someone said, well, it could have been legal reasons because maybe IGN was suing him. And I'm like, this might be true. But his lawyer, the first thing he would have told him is not to say all the things he was saying before in the wake of it in the first place. That other non-apology video wouldn't have come out. That would not have flown with the lawyer. You can't do that. You stay silent. We take care of this before you ever speak publicly. And he wouldn't have been making content still on his channel like nothing was wrong. So still, it's still a possibility. I'm sure IGN pursued something. But the point is that I don't think that legal reasons are why it took him eight months to fess up. It's a possibility. And it could be just a very big possibility that he had a really crappy lawyer. That's possible. But even if we want to give him the benefit of the doubt that he couldn't fess up for eight months because of legal reasons, he didn't fess up to everything. He didn't apologize to everyone. He never apologized to Jason Schreyer. God, he blasted Jason Schreyer. And Jason Schreyer was right the whole time. And all these things that he admitted to were things Jason Schreyer dug up. But he never apologized to Jason Schreyer. That, to me, was huge. You acknowledged he was right on all of his accusations and on everything extra he found. But you would not acknowledge him specifically when you specifically attacked him on Twitter when he wasn't attacking you. He was just saying what happened, reporting the news. In addition to that, you didn't apologize to all the other people you threw under the bus. You apologized to your IGN staffers. But you said, everybody does it this way. You were accusing the entire industry of plagiarism. You didn't apologize to the entire industry. Apologize to the IGN. So Nintendo YouTubers that you give a bad reputation to, like me? No, I'm still waiting for an apology. I mean, he did give a blanket apology at the beginning. He did say he wanted to apologize to everyone that he has hurt with this situation. It's a blanket. It's a blanket. It covers technically. But yes, specifically, yes, he did not specify out some of these certain people. And the thing is, the only reason I say it is because he specified it in the first place. If he didn't specify who he was calling out in the first place, then I wouldn't care. But he specified every reviewer does what I do. Right. No, I know. Then you need to apologize to everybody. You don't do it by name. You can do a blanket apology to all journalists and reviewers. That would have been clear. Not even an apology, a redaction of that statement. He's not gonna redact it. It's saying my statement of everyone does this. He didn't address anything from that. Right, right, right. I get that. But a redaction of everybody does it this way would have been, even if he didn't apologize for saying that, just backtracing on it, saying not, I made a mistake in saying that it was he to the moment, again, I'm sorry. Not everyone does it this way. So my thing with all of this is, if you can't tell, I'm not necessarily forgiving him right now. And it's not because he didn't apologize to me. I really don't give a crap. He doesn't need to apologize to me. I mean, he doesn't even know who I am. It's fine. It's because not just the too little, too late idea because it's been eight months, fine. Give him the benefit of the doubt and say apologize. A lot of people, the reason I found out about this is because I saw people on Twitter and everywhere was talking about, man, it took so much courage and this and that. And I'm like, courage to admit something that you're already caught red-handed doing. Courage would have been admitting the things you played your eyes that we're not aware of. Right. You just admitted the things that were already known. Yes. So the courage to admit that you did something that everyone already knows you did is not courageous to me. It is the only thing he needed to, put it this way, he wants to continue to make YouTube videos but he doesn't want them to keep getting dislike bombed. I'm sure that he doesn't like that. He doesn't probably like his family getting threats. So for him, like just on a completely selfish level, he has to make this video to keep making other videos and potentially get to a point where there's not dislike bombed anymore. So it literally could all be fake just so he can start making videos again and get back to normal. And a lot of you guys might be like, that's fine. And that's fine too, right? Even if that's the reason. I think it's better this video exists than it doesn't exist both for him and for others that want closure. Although there are some people, like the people from Nintendo Life that wrote the FIFA review that says there is absolutely no closure and I do not forgive you because you made a bunch of accusations towards me and my review and all you did is just acknowledge, oh yeah, I stole your review. You didn't apologize about all the crap that you said. So it feels like an apology that is being made so he can continue to make videos. Now I'm fine with that, make videos, do what you can. All I will say about it is this. What annoyed me is I saw all these people saying we forgive you, you're awesome. Keep making that amazing content. And I sat there and I said, so wait a second. I know forgiveness and trust are not the same thing. Okay, you know, you can, this is a dumb example I gave someone on Twitter but like say my fiance goes and cheats on me or whatever. I can literally be upset about it. She could be remorseful, she could apologize and I can accept that apology and I can maybe someday forgive her for making that mistake. But it doesn't mean that trust her. Right, that has to be earned. And I think trust always has to be earned. I don't think you should ever just hand out trust as a benefit of that out. You should not meet or find a new YouTube channel. Say you've never watched Spawnway before and you go watch one Spawnway video and suddenly you're like, man, I really trust this guy. No, you need to watch that content for a while. Before, that's my viewpoint anyways. Trust should always be earned, not given. So, that's the way it is relationships. You don't just like meet someone and all of a sudden I'm gonna tell them everything, all my life start to see, that you don't want other people to know about it. No, you gotta trust them. And that's built up. Yeah. Unless you're drinking and we're out. Right, right, right, yeah, yeah. Then you're not thinking straight. But the point I'm making here is, it's fine if you wanna give him another chance, be that person, give him another chance. Human race is all about, second, third, fourth, fifth, a zillion chances. My only hope is that all of you guys that are saying we forgive you aren't also saying in the back of your mind we now trust everything you're doing. We're gonna blindly follow you again. Yeah, like that he's gonna release a new video and you're gonna stop checking to make sure he didn't steal it from somebody else. Because you know what was the worst thing about his non-apology video he made? The entire format of it was stolen from another video about how to deceive people into forgiving you. So like he literally plagiarized again to try to manipulate people. And we're just supposed to forget this happened. Yeah. And someone's already out there trying to dig up if his format on this one was also stolen as a way to manipulate people. Because it was scripted, but all his videos are scripted. So he does scripted video. You could tell he was reading it. Right. And I have no problem with that part. I don't mind that, obviously in a serious situation you kind of maybe wanna write it down instead of trying to come from the heart because if you try to come straight from the heart you might say something stupid. I know he can control it and edit it out but it makes it just a lot harder to control. It's easier to be concise and professional in that manner. Maybe some people don't want them to be concise. There was a lot of people that said two minutes to apologize for everything you did. That's not enough. Right, right. Like people, a lot of people have questions of, fine, you're sorry for what you did but why did you think it wasn't okay? Still not answered. Why did you think that everyone does it? Still not answered. And you talked about well I could be a lesson for people not to take shortcuts. What you did was common sense. You can't steal. You can learn this as a kid. You can't steal. So like you're not a lesson for anyone. What you have, anything. If anything, you know what lesson I get out of the Phillip Mutant situation? If you can steal all the people's work and get away with it, you're gonna get hired by a major publication and make lots of money and get paid for stealing people's work. That's what I learned. Yeah. That's what I learned. And then once you get hired by, I'm sorry, here's what I learned. Steal to get to a high position and then once you're there, stop doing it so you don't get busted. Right. Because he would have never, ever got busted if he wasn't still doing it when he was at IGN. He could have happily worked at, he'd still be working at IGN if he had never did the gaming thing or any of the other works it turned out that he also played at IGN. So like it gets to this point where you're not an example of what not to do in terms of career success. You're an example of how to cheat and get successful. Everyone knows you shouldn't steal. And yes, plagiarism, college happens everywhere but it's supposed to be, once you get to that professional environment you shouldn't be doing that kind of crap. Shouldn't be doing it then either. But it's my boggling to me that he thinks that he's almost trying to turn, he's not a victim, Cardin. He definitely tried that the first time around. Right. But he is trying to make it out like, look, I made all these mistakes, I'm truly sorry, use me as an example, other content creators of what not to do. And it's like, but they know not to do this. We don't need that example. We didn't need you to provide an example to not plagiarize. That right there almost again, goes under the assumption that everybody does this. So use me as an example not to do this. We're already not doing this. Yeah, that's the thing, it's already not happening. I mean, it's not the majority of things happen. At the level he was claiming. Right, at the level he was claiming. Right, that's again under the assumption that everybody does this. And most people, like someone said in the comments on my video about it, they said, hey, what's really the difference between you and him? And I said, well yeah, both YouTubers, you don't know if I plagiarized or not or a little while, but here's the difference. If I did plagiarize and I was caught red handed, I wouldn't say that everybody does it and I did nothing wrong. I would just say I'm sorry I plagiarized. I wouldn't take eight months to tell you the truth. Yeah. That's the difference. And I can say that because I have gotten new stories wrong and I've made mistakes and I misquoted and mis-sourced things sometimes and I made it to it literally within days. I haven't, you know the difference is I'm not busting for plagiarism and lying about it. He did. Yeah. Like if you want to trust him because you view him on the same level as me, that's your prerogative. And I'm not saying that Phil Muson's a bad guy. I don't know him. And maybe this is why I can talk this way and I think this is why I've seen people like Dreamcast guy talk about how this is such a positive thing for him. Well they were friends. So I don't have that personal connection to be like, oh yeah, I know him. So I'm happy for him. I'll be happy for him if he somehow turns this around and still makes a career out of doing this YouTube thing and makes a following and never steals people's content again and ends up doing a bunch of original work. It's amazing. And yeah, I'll eventually be like, you know what, it's kind of a nice story about how someone could make the biggest mistakes ever and bounce back and recover. I think that's a nice story. It can inspire some people who might make similar mistakes at some point in their life. But another person brought up, you know, oh, we should just trust him because when you wanna become a lawyer, if they find out you plagiarized, it might take you three to four years of busting your butt to get back to you past the bar and blah blah. Okay, that's fine. But he hasn't had three to four years and he hasn't done anything. My whole point is he needs to rebuild the trust. Don't just hand him that trust right back. Watch his content, enjoy it. He's a very good video editor. He's a lot prettier looking than me. He takes better care of himself, takes better care of his body. And he in some ways is very good at scripting. I suck at scripting. That's why I don't script a lot of videos. He's a lot better at it than me. I don't know if he's better at research per se because he doesn't source anything. It'll be interesting to see if he changes that moving forward since he'd never sourced before, but because yeah, we all get information from places. It's important to let people know where the information come from, especially if you end up being wrong. You'd be like, okay, well, it came from this place. Now I know, don't use that place and they're culpable. Like if I got all my information, like I'm reporting on a rumor and I don't tell you where it's from, that makes me the source to that person watching the video because there's no, how do you know any of it? Well, people are saying what people? Right. Where? You know, how can we trust this? Just because you're talking like. Right, right, right. And so there's a lot of channels that are like that. So I wish him luck. I don't want any more attacks on his family happening. I don't, I don't. That was never called for to begin with. His family isn't part of it. You shouldn't really attack him on a personal level anyways. A professional level, be my guest. Right. You know, you wanna keep reminding him that he's a plagiarist. You wanna keep bringing up the things he didn't admit too fine. I think that's all fair. That's fair game. This stuff happened publicly. That's fair game. Private life stuff, leave alone. Like people bringing up the fact that he used to be a used car salesman. Who cares? Who cares? Who do with this? That's his, that's his own business. You let him, he's probably doing that right now. He's probably back at selling cars. Like who cares? Possibly. Doesn't matter. And I know people use it as an insult, but I mean, hey, I'm making a living. He's like, let him do whatever. Like it, stay away from the personal. I don't personally think any ill will on him or think that he's a bad person because I don't know him. All I know is when it comes to his work on YouTube, he's gonna have to earn it back from me and he should have to earn it back from you. Even if you're the biggest Phillip Mutant fan ever. There were people defending him because he said he never did anything wrong. So they were all defending him and he never did anything wrong. But now he's admitted to it. So now everyone knows, matter of fact, he plagiarized. Yes. Many times. Because of that, we need to be wary of anything in the future. It's good he admitted to it. But you need to, don't just forgive him. You can decide when you wanna forgive him or when you wanna trust him. But make sure that it's after he's already done what you view is enough to not have to start rechecking every video with every other outlet. Now, not everyone has to do that. Most people aren't going to do that. But there may come a time when people stop checking and that will be when he's rebuilt trust. Right. If he can. For some people he'll never be able to rebuild trust. Oh for sure. Because there are people that just, hey, look, once a plagiarist always plagiarist. Yeah. And that's, I mean, reality is he committed one of the worst things you can do as a journalist. And multiple times and denied it and attacked everyone else for it. And literally everything he has done along the way has been the worst possible way to handle the situation. Until now. And even then, there's still questions of is it sincere or is it a career move? Because it's eight months. It wasn't an instant mess up I screwed up. It was after denying, after accusing, after this and that. None of this stuff works. Let's try this. Nothing else is worth. Okay, you know what? I'm gonna take a few months off to give people a chance to breathe. And then I'm gonna be like, okay, hey, I'm really sorry. There's no excuse. Like, okay. But that's what a PR person would say at this point too. That's kind of, I'm kind of wondering if he didn't get advice from somebody. Well, I'm sure he's got plenty of advice from a lot of people. Family and whoever. But like actual professional advice on kind of because it's scripted, you can always wonder was it written by somebody else? Was it? Sure, well, I mean, that's just like a lot of PR statements you get from players. It's like, we know your agents and other people weren't well on that. Right, and that's not, I mean, technically it's plagiarism to a certain extent. That's not because they represent you. Right, right, right. So that's not considered plagiarism. Right. But, yeah, right. So even if someone has wrote this form, if it's represented above them, it's fine. Right, right. If it's literally written for him, to say that yes. But that's the thing. People want to know that it's sincere and you can believe it's sincere. And I'm not saying that it's not sincere. I'm just saying it's convenient for him. In the video though, I didn't get any tones of voices that made me believe it wasn't, per se. Well, that's the same Tony used in the last video. It was kind of, well, he didn't really use a whole lot of Tony. He kind of, it was kind of just a flat. It's a serious tone as well. Right. If you watch his other videos and you watch that, it's a serious tone. And he used that the last time he did a non-apology video. So it's like, okay, so you were serious in that one, you're serious in this one, same tone. That could just be who you are. But, context of it too. Are you acting in just bad at it? The tone and the context. The tone with the, The tone with the, Personally? Context of the last video? I know this would have been really difficult for him. Because he had so many people blasting him. And maybe he could have had some moderators, but I think almost he should have livestreamed the apology and actually talked to people. That's, yeah. Yeah. Get it raw. Get it raw, catch him off guard. Yeah. See if he actually means it. Yeah. And that's just me, because that's how I deal with it. Oh, people don't believe in my video. Let's stream, let's talk about it right now. All my accusers come at me. Let's go. I'll address you one at a time. Things get out of hand. I'll have a couple of mods that kind of just make the chat not be, you know, like toxic. Blowing up the text. Yeah, right, right, right, right. Yeah, obviously. But in general, like, you know, I'm going to, I want to address everyone directly. You know, if Boomstick or anyone else wants to show up, great, but I'm just going to look and like, you know, he could address the tweets by the guy that said that he doesn't forgive them. And like, it's just, it's something that I think would have helped him out. Would have helped it definitely look sincere, because you can't fake it then. Right. You can't fake it live. Right. He's not that good of an actor. He ain't faking it live when new accusations come up or people, you know, say all these mean, he can't fake what he, what he, when he reads it. And what happens? Right. So that, I think that is what. There is that. What I think could have made this sincere. And he still might do it, but he's never been known as a streamer really besides sponcast. So I wish him luck and I hope he's for real. And I hope that he makes it. Because like, he's too good at making content, I think, not to make content. I just, I always wondered if he would have been best joining another YouTube channel and being an editor, instead of being the face of the channel. Because he has skills that are still useful in this profession. But it can't be his words, I don't think. At least for now. He's gonna do his own stuff. He's gonna try to come back and I know that. But it's, I don't know. If it just be nice for him to try to, like, let's let him rebuild his reputation before we just say, oh yeah, he's good now. Everyone makes mistakes. I'm like, he, this wasn't one mistake. Right. We've been talking about a series of mistakes over many years. It's the same mistake, repeated. Justifying to himself, it's okay. I mean, we need to then see justified and repeated time of no mistakes and doing it the right way for us to trust him again, right? That's all it says to me. If he did had years of doing this, then he needs years of not doing it. I think that's fair. Yeah. All right, so the last story. We're gonna briefly touch on this one, because it's, let's put it this way. It makes journalism like look bad again. That's what the problem with these two stories is I hate crapping on the field of the game journalism, but a lot of people want me to do it because yeah, they do make a lot of mistakes. But so do I. This mistake though is something that is borderline inexcusable. Not to explore it, but. Right. Oh no. Definitely exploring this is something that needed to be done. But here's what happened. Laura Cadedale, she is a writer for Kotaku UK. Put up an article that accused the persona franchise in Super Smash Bros. of including a song in the recent DLC that is harsh to mentally ill people we're talking about the word retarded. I can't remember what the exact lyrics were that they claimed were in it. Because it didn't make any sense in the way that they claimed it, but you know, and they included the clip. And sure, if you listen to the clip, you could infer that the word retarded is in the song. However, however, what wasn't done before publication is contacting the company who released the song to say, hey, what are the lyrics? What wasn't done before researching it was figuring out who is singing this in English. Turns out it was somebody who's native Japanese, so they have a thick accent. Right. So that accent could lead to mispronunciations. Right. And it not sounding perfect. So that's another thing, like that's why some people thought that this was maybe racist on their part for not understanding accents. Again, you're kind of going in circles with that argument, but the point is like, there was no benefit of the doubt. There was no attempt to confirm anything or do additional research to figure out why this might be in there. Because here's the thing, this exact same song, this is the funny thing. You're right. This exact same song's in the Persona game that was on the other platforms and no one thought anything of it. It just wasn't sung by a Japanese person. So like, literally the accusation is a lyric change for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate that have retarded. This is basically what you're accusing. You didn't bother to look up the song lyrics on Google. You literally can type in the name of the song and look up the lyrics, the right there. You can see other versions of this song that clearly do not say it, but they do say a word that if it's kind of mumbled a little bit, sounds like retarded. You could have easily figured this out without even contacting Alice. That clearly it was just the singer with the accent. Yeah. I mean, I haven't heard a clip of it. Well, wasn't the original retardando or something? It's a musical term? There's retardando, which means to slow down. Yes. It's a musical term. Yes. Otherwise, there was another thing that said it might be retorted. Yeah, and here's the thing. This is according to Kotaku's article, right? So... No, that was a Kotaku tweet. Yes, well, yeah, but basically what they're saying is they contacted Alice. Alice didn't respond. So Nintendo contacted Alice, and then Nintendo told them, no, it's not in there. That's not the word. Of course, they wouldn't tell Kotaku what the word is. And it's like, because you don't need them to. This song is all over the internet. Right. Google it. So the point is that they threw up an article making an accusation of Super Smash Bros. and the Persona series. So making the accusation of Alice and Nintendo, that they willfully put a song in Smash Bros. that is offensive to mentally retarded people. And that, my friends, isn't as bad as plagiarism. It's up there. Yeah. Like as a journalist, you didn't Google it. You didn't bother to, by the way, this isn't Kotaku. This isn't me, a little YouTuber that won't get a response. This isn't Kotaku. This is a major news source. They have contacts, obviously, because they asked Alice to answer. So Nintendo, they got Nintendo's attention. Like, obviously, you could have did more research. And this story should have never been published. No, probably not. And yeah, they've redacted and done this and done that. The original article's still up, but now there's a note in it and then go to the updated post and blah, blah, blah. Okay, did they actually have? They still don't really do a very good job apologizing because in the apology post, oh my gosh, it's embarrassing. Oh god, another non-apology apology? It's a, we were wrong, but there's no but in this, by the way. We were wrong, but we don't know what the word is. And we still think it kind of sounds like it. So that's not an apology. No. You were wrong. Done, you were done. You're wrong, we will never do this again. We will do better. We care about our, I'm not trying to crap on Laura Kate Dale because she has been a pretty good journalist over the years, but when it came to this, it felt like there was an agenda. It did. And that's what sucks about this. And this is why people are starting to really mistrust games journalism. And it doesn't help. And this is no fault of herself, but it doesn't help that she is trans because people start associating, you are already something that people have a problem with some people. And they think that you are even more likely to push an agenda and then you do this. It sucks, but this is what I'm seeing on the internet. I'm like, this, it's not fair, but this article wasn't fair. Right. It gave no benefit of the doubt. You didn't bother to check with anyone. And it's not even just her fault, the editor let her publish it. Right. Because it goes through an editing process and someone has to check everything before it goes up. Right. So. And that somehow sidestepped, but I had to go with that. No, no, no, no, no. Like I said, I had to go with that. All these kind of, every piece at Kotaku, just like when I worked at Zeldinformer, everything had to go through me at Zeldinformer. Everything goes through the senior editors. Right. And then goes through the Steffan de Tilo kind of detailed it out that he literally approves of everything he gets posted. Like there's other people that goes through, but he's at the final say on it. So that's why he takes her. That's why the job of the editor-in-chief is you are responsible for everything. So you must approve of everything. You must look at everything. Right. It's a lot of work. You don't have to do all the research. So you're not gonna still be fact-checking it. But you could easily look at this and be like, why isn't she saying. But again. But why in this article didn't say that she reached out to Atlas for comment and waited for comment. Where's the sources? Where is, so the source on this is the lyrics she's hearing in the song, but where is the actual lyrics from the song? Yeah. That are publicly available. How come we didn't talk, how come it wasn't brought up? Why we didn't talk about this when the song came with the original game in the first place? Right. Cause all these songs came from other persona games. So there wasn't really a full in-depth research done. Now I'm not saying don't go attack Laura Kate Dale. No. Attacking doesn't solve anything. No. Be critical that she didn't do enough research but mocking her like that's not gonna fix anything. No. What needs to happen is games journalism is kind of in this place where they kind of need to look in the mirror and start slapping themselves. What are we doing? Mm-hmm. And this isn't just hiring people who don't have journalism degrees. There's plenty of professional journalists out there that don't have journalism degrees. It's the process you have in place to currently publish an article is not good enough. And you need to figure that out. Right. Because this is not a kind of piece that needed fact-checking. This is the kind of piece that you can just look at it until there's not enough research done. It's not ready. And if you're going to, and here's the thing, another thing I think about it is you know this is a sensitive topic. Oh, for sure. So especially if you are going to make a sensitive accusation like this, you better be damn well sure you've crossed your knees and dotted your eyes. You have it, it is 100% real. Yeah, like you cannot just, you can. You can do it, but you shouldn't. Right. So that I think, and again, this is also not entirely Laura Kate Dale's fault because the other editors should have told her this, should have caught this, should have been like, should have told her that, hey, look, this is a nice start, but now let's get the more facts. Let's actually make sure that we are 100% sure. Google the song quick at least. Right. See what it's supposed to be. Google who's singing it and I mean, and try to understand the accent that's being said. And how other words are probably mispronounced too in this song. Blinded by the light. Oh, jeez. It's clear as day, you know what it's, what one word sounds like, but it's not actually what it is. And then that happens all the time in music. Yeah. And in this case, if the original lyric is retardando, well, okay, yeah. Obviously it can come across as the R word, like. I can understand more instead of retardando. I can understand more of retorted. But either way, you can understand how just with the slight accent. Right. It's not a big deal. Accents change the lyrics or change the sound of the lyrics all the time in songs, but no one gets mad about it because they look up with the lyric and it's not controversial. It's just not, it's never, like unless it actually is what it is. So I just think that I feel bad in a sense that, I feel bad for Laura in the sense that she's getting hate that goes a little bit beyond what she should be getting. Critical of the work, not critical of the person. I always believe that. You don't know her as a person. Critical of the work, not the person. Also be critical of Kotaku the Eldet for their process for getting articles up. Clearly, someone failed her and failed all of us readers. And whoever concocted that response just, you can't apologize, non-apologize on something you are factually saying you got incorrect. Again. You are factually incorrect. Don't feel it musing it. Again, we go back to our last topic. I know. I honestly, I mean here's the thing, I should be happy this happened because this is what legitimizes people like me because we can't trust game journalists so why would we go to YouTubers? Can't trust, because YouTubers, most YouTubers aren't doing this and the YouTubers that do YouTube get sort of. Yeah. So like, it's kind of that world where this benefits me but I actually like game journalism and I don't want it to go away. A lot of the stuff I talk about comes from game journalists. I think we can work together. I think that a majority of game journalists are actually really good at what they do. But, and again, this isn't me saying Laura Kate's not good at what she does. But this is me saying that clearly Kotaku has a problem in their process of how articles are done and how they are fact checked and how they are looked at before they go live and that there's nothing in place to maybe do extra checks on a controversial topic. Right, oh God yeah. And this just furthers the narrative that the reason those extra checks don't exist is because it's all the clicks. Oh, it's controversial, we'll get the clicks. And the thing is, it's one of those things that you can always apologize later. No, we get the clicks now? That we've already benefited off of it. Then we get more clicks on the apology. Yeah, exactly. It's almost like Kotaku are untouchable. Right. Not really untouchable. Your company that owns you has been sold like four times in the last five years. Right, but I mean, we can throw it out there, get the ton of clicks, benefit from that. Yeah, you money your face a little, I mean, you money your face. Well, and it's always one of those, oh, if it's too bad, we'll just let that person go. Right. What do we care? We got the clicks. Exactly. That's not how this is supposed to work. By the way, I don't think she's actually been let go. Last I checked, she hasn't been let go for it, which I don't think she should be because it's not just on her, it's on the entire process they have for these articles. Right. Yeah, you can always point to how she should have did better and I'm sure she thinks that now because she probably feels like an idiot. But, but I'm not giving an excuse for this happening. I'm just saying that there's multiple people at fault and we need to hold the whole of Kotaku, especially Kotaku UK in this case, because I don't think Steffen Dutila runs Kotaku UK. I think it just runs the US branch. We need to hold them responsible for how they're doing their stuff. And this is the kind of thing like I've been telling people for years that Kotaku's been getting better. But then something like this happens. It's like, you know something like the dead cells things happen. They're supposed to be getting better. There's actually another embarrassing, oh my God, I didn't even bring this up. There's an article at GameStop, or on GameStop. Not GameStop. Gosh. It's that other major game, see look at this, GameSpot. I was just gonna say, there's an article on GameSpot about the PlayStation 5 specs. And in the first paragraph of that article, they mis-put specs and technology terms like 17 times. Oh, good lord. As an example, did you know the storage inside of a PlayStation 4 is an optical drive? Okay. And they repeat that throughout the entire, they consistently repeat that the storage inside PlayStation 4 is an optical drive compared to the SSD that's going to be in the PlayStation 5. Okay. Optical drives are not storage devices. Now the CDs, you can argue are storage because you have our data on them, but it doesn't write to them, it reads off of them, and then puts it in storage. Standard 3.5 hard drives, like we know what they're using. So like, they're using mechanical hard drives. The proper term is the storage inside the PlayStation 4 is a mechanical hard drive. It is not an SSD, so you're still right that it gets faster, but it's not an optical drive. And then all these mistakes, and I'm just like, why? These are basic terms. Yeah. And I know that like, oh, you don't even need to be a tech head that don't like, wait, an optical drive. What the hell is an optical drive? And go Google an optical drive. Oh geez, that's not what, it's a CD thing. That's not, what? No. I mean, they might assume you're right because people do insert disks. It has an optical drive. It does have an optical drive. It's not a storage device. And it's just, right now game journalism is just taking such a hit. Yeah. All the major outlets. And I feel bad for them, but what am I, I mean, I'm almost getting to the point that I don't know what else to say. You guys are just, you're burning your, you are making people like me relevant. I shouldn't be more relevant than people that have years and years and years of experience in the tech field with access that I can only dream of. Right. But me and my basement of my house and my homemade studio with a table with stains all over it and a random gaming collection that keeps having to sell the Switch games to pay bills, me shouldn't be able to better cover this stuff than you. But I talked to him with the PlayStation 5 specs on a primaries episode and they make mistakes like this. Yeah. My brain just hurts on that one. I, I, in fact, I already know that I'm gonna be making a standalone video just about what's happening with game journalism in general. I'm gonna talk about the Kotaku, the game as well. Right. Like the IGN thing. And by the way, I'm not throwing like individual people under the bus. It's just a everything wrong with game journalism. Again. Probably what the video title is gonna be. Everything wrong with video game journalism. Wow. And it's not gonna cover literally everything, but it'll cover enough things with enough examples that you can be like, man. Well, then I mean, they can come back and catch it, that was everything. Oh, I'm gonna yell at you. You know what someone's gonna do? Someone's gonna go dig through the old uploads on my channel and they're gonna be like, ooh, you have a stolen video on your channel. Does that do? I do have a stolen video. So you look fully admit, there was a video on my channel from like seven years ago that was a jacked video off of Kotaku. Oh boy. We jacked, not even, I jacked back then. Their Wii U video. They had a Wii U video on their website that was basically just a look at the Wii U. And I even put Kotaku in the article and I linked in the video title and I linked to their article on it. So I gave all the credit, but technically I took their video off their website, which took me a long time to figure out digging through a lot of code and I put it up on YouTube. And now you're like, well, that's plagiarism. It is. The reason I did it, the reason that I did it, wasn't because I wanted to do it. It's because we wanted to show the Wii U on Zelda Informer and their video was not shareable. It was not embeddable. And when you go to their website, it was broken in half of the internet browsers. I had to use like Opera. Nope, nobody uses Opera. I had to use Opera to play the video properly. So the thing is that being the case, I didn't know what else to do to get people to view this thing. So I found a way through the co-pays to find the original video file. I downloaded that SOB and reuploaded it so people could actually enjoy the content Kadako created. And you actually sourced it too. And I sourced it and linked it in. And that's the thing. I put them in the title of it. And I'm just like, I'm not trying to, I don't even think I monetized the video. I didn't want, no, I know I didn't monetize it. So like, I didn't monetize it. I just wanted a way to show your work. I even, when we reported on it on Zelda Informer, I linked to you guys. I just wanted people to be able to see this thing that you, really cool thing that you did that you just made so hard to see on your website. You guys should have been using YouTube back then for your video hosting, what are you gonna do? And I understand, I tried the private hosting and stuff. It was never, it never at all sucked. It all sucked. So I just, and this is why YouTube's around and all those, all those kind of hosting things aren't. So, and Kadako, to their credit, they knew I had the video because I emailed them after I put up the post and they said it's all good back then. I don't know if they even think it's all good today but I don't think they care about that video this way. It's got 400,000 views. If they would have put it on YouTube, they probably have millions. So again, I was not, I didn't make a cent off it. So that gives me peace of mind too that I didn't make any money off it. So even if they're like, oh, take it down. Why don't I take it down? I don't need any money. I don't even care. But the point is, is like, I could see, like you could dig through my channel and find that. And I get it. But you know what, as I just explained, there's a difference between intent. I wanted to share theirs and they made it not possible. So I made it shareable. And what the biggest, biggest, biggest, biggest thing and the biggest difference is, again, creditation. Oh yeah, creditation and sourcing. I've always, I've, you guys know I'm big on accreditation and sourcing regardless of where you get stuff from. Like even when I did, when I did my video on the Phillip Musen thing, linked to his video in the description. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I showed his entire video in my post and commented on it and broke up the video in parts. But linked in the description. You guys don't have to go to his channel. Hey, that's what we're talking about. So you need to, you shouldn't have to search for it. Here you go. And it also, there are things that if people didn't trust you or anything, there's ways to edit things, to make things look completely one way. And by linking to his original video, you can go see it in its entirety. Unedited by you. Un, you know, unbiased, whatever. And you could tell, and I made it really obvious in my video too, because some people were like, oh, why didn't you make the video full screen and stuff like that? Because I did it where, here's the webpage, here's me hitting play and pause on the video in real time with no edits. And I did that because you could tell, I'm not messing with the video. Right, right, right, right. Playing it off of YouTube for you. If I had done a full screen version of the video and talked over it, you don't know what I cut out. Exactly, yeah. But here's ways to spin things. This is when I know I'm going to show the entire video of someone, because it was short, that to me was the best, the most honest way to do it where you don't need to worry that I'm just jacking his video. So at the end of the day, I'm not saying that I'm perfect and I'll fully admit that that Kotaku thing was not probably the right thing to do. I didn't, you know, I could have just not ever wrote the report on it, to be honest. It's on the forums that screw it. I guess no one cares. Well, obviously 400,000 people cared about it, but it's still, I feel like the only big difference for me, I don't consider myself a freaking journalist or a professional, I wasn't even a YouTuber. I wasn't anything. I was a guy working at a fan site, putting up content that other fans might want to look at. Only other thing that you possibly could have did was wrote the thing and say, go here to look at it. Go here to look at it, but make sure you use it in this browser, yeah, this browser. And if you don't have the browser, then I don't know anything. Right, down the link, yeah. I mean, that would be neat. I just thought it was too much of a hassle. Yeah, and again, I told Kotaku and they just said it, whatever, don't worry about it. Yeah, so, and maybe it was because I sourced everything because I've always been big on sourcing. Always, always, always being me. It's so clear. Like, not my video, not my video, not my video, not my video, not my video. Like, whatever. I don't know. So you go ahead and call me out on that if you guys want it. I'll be fast up. So the bottom line, again, what's the difference between Philip and me? Yeah, you guys didn't even know about that mistake, did you? Yeah. Didn't even know. Some might have, but. If you go to my most popular videos, you'll see it because it's got like over 400,000 views. Yeah. That being said, thanks for tuning in. Yeah. It's been a lot of fun. It's been a very interesting podcast, a lot of serious topics. I think that the theme of this podcast, serious business, oh no, just be better. Just be better. I learned from that one. Everyone should learn. Yeah. And fortunately, it just feels like things are getting worse for game journalism. Heck, I can argue it's probably getting worse for some YouTubers too, but. I don't know, just be better. Like, a lot of this stuff is just common sense. Don't steal people's stuff. Research the things before you make really, really hurtful accusations about other people or other games. Just go new. Companies, like I'm not saying don't report controversial things. Just make sure you crossed your eyes and dotted in your T's. Make sure it's fact. Dotting in your T's and crossed your eyes. Yes. Make sure you have your ducks in a row and make sure it is. Because you are making accusations in the case of, you know, the Kataku article, you're making accusations that could hurt people. You could make people with mental deficiencies suddenly hate Smash Bros. When it never happened. And that hurts Nintendo. It hurts them because then they're being lied to. So again, just be better, please, for the sake of my livelihood. Actually, you know what? The worse you are, I guess the better for me. But be better for the sake of just being better people. Golden rule it. Go, oh geez. Golden rule it. All right. Yeah. I think we're gonna leave that. Thanks for tuning in, guys. It's been a lot of fun. We'll catch you in the next video. Podcast. Podcast, yeah. Yeah. Peace.