 Guys, welcome to Video Game News, our first ever episode on this room, we cover Nintendo PlayStation, Sony, Xbox News, obviously your primary on the Nintendo channel. But hey, we're going to cover the whole industry with this show and focus on the stories that matter most to all gamers. And we got to start with this really interesting one coming from Sony's Jim Ryan, or should I say PlayStation and Sony's former Jim Ryan, because he's no longer employed by the company and is now officially retired. But in his whole retirement tour, and he's been quite a tour through Sony, lots of parties and shindigs, and look, the guy's been working for PlayStation since before the original PlayStation came out, so I guess working for Sony since before then, whatever. The point is, he's been the head of PlayStation for a hell of a long time, and Sony's been under a lot of fire over the last couple of years, and he's been taking the brunt of it. Well, in his final day working at Sony, he ended up doing a podcast, the official PlayStation podcast, hosted by, well, employees of PlayStation, and it basically was a jerk-off session for, lack of a better word, for Sony's Jim Ryan. And one of the things he did put out there, though, is a very interesting piece of news. Like, hey, look, the guy worked there for a long time. So regardless of what you might think of PlayStation today and some of the business decisions made and going into more live service games and micro transactions and all that stuff, bottom line is he's been there for like 30 plus years. So he's been a really big figurehead in this industry for a long time, so I do have respect for his career. One thing he noted, though, in talking about some of his favorite moments from his career was updating the sales data for the PlayStation 2. Now, if you're a Nintendo fan like me, you probably think, well, he's clearly updating the sales data for the PlayStation 2 because the PlayStation 2 is being encroached on by the Nintendo Switch. Nintendo Switch recently basically crossing 140 million units, and now it's going to start creeping closer and closer and closer to that 150 million mark, passing the Nintendo DS, and pretty much passing PlayStation 2 a little bit after that. So some people are taking this as, well, on his way out, he wants to give one less chance for PlayStation 2 to maintain his number one spot, or you're just going to look at this as, hey, he just thinks this is a really important part of his career with the system that sold the most units. Now, depending on where you go on the internet today, you're going to see that the PlayStation 2 is quoted as selling 155 million plus units. Now that is the last official statement from Sony, 155 million or more. Now, besides that, you'll see a few sites that say 159 million. You'll hear some insiders such as Nate the Hate put out there that it sold 160, but none of this has been official. 155 was the last time Sony even talked about this stuff way back in the day. Well, not anymore. We have an official number coming from the now former president of Sony Interactive Entertainment, aka the PlayStation guy Jim Ryan, and the PlayStation 2 has now officially been updated to 160 million units. Now, again, could just be a last chance grass to keep PlayStation 2 as the number one selling platform of all time on his way out the door, and it might work or it might not, because we don't actually know what sales for Switch are going to be for over the next two years, because that's probably when Switch would end up passing it. Then again, if Switch is still made and sold for the next four or five years as a cheaper secondary system to the next gen Nintendo platform, then things could happen there as well. My PlayStation 2 took a long time to get the 160 million mark and was boosted by the fact that it could play CDs and DVDs. A really big deal back then, because DVD players were more expensive than a PlayStation 2, and you could play music CDs with the two, so you combine your boombox and DVDs and video games in one platform. That was revolutionary at the time. So create credit to Sony for creating a platform like that and making it affordable for people, but 160 million, man. It's a lot. We'll see if Nintendo Switch has a chance to actually get passed it. Now, speaking of getting past things, we need to get past something that has already happened in this industry, right? Activision Blizzard King is now officially owned by Microsoft. The FTC tried. It's trying to appeal and do its thing. Look, it's a done deal. Microsoft owns the company. Bobby Kotick was kicked to the curb. Good riddance. And now we got to talk about some of the studios that were maintained in this merger or part of this merger or ownership or whatever you want to call this. Well, here's the deal. Toys for Bob is no longer one of them. Now, Toys for Bob announced back on February 29th that they were going independent. And this is really, really big news for Toys for Bob. I kid you not how big of a deal this is, because the reports before then were that Toys for Bob might be getting closed. They were sending employees home, having them do this whole work from home thing. And in the end, Toys for Bob was not in a very healthy place. And it seems like things were pretty dire after the Microsoft acquisition. Now, before Activision had to kind of transition them from working on Spyro and Crash into working on Call of Duty, right? They just put everything on Call of Duty. Everything's all about Call of Duty. Well, we don't know the specifics about how they were able to become independent. Were they able to put up money to buy out themselves? Did Microsoft just grant them the ability through this merger? Hey, we're not really interested in maintaining your company. We are going to offer you to maintain yourselves as an independent studio, or we're going to close you down. We don't really know. And we might never know the particulars, although I suspect questions will come up in a future interview. But what we do know is in that blog post when they announced they were going indie that they actually said their first game was going to be made in partnership with Microsoft, which that makes a lot of sense, I suppose. The company that you just freed yourself from is still the company you're going to work with. But then again, chances are when they went solo, they didn't maintain any IP rights. So the games that they have been working on for a long time like Spyro and Crash are Microsoft IP. So if you want to keep working on those, you're going to have to work it out with Microsoft. Now, this is a Spyro 4 rumor. And I just wanted to give you some of the context of how we got to where we are today because we have some information, or at least a rumor, about the Spyro 4 stuff coming from a YouTuber. And this YouTuber is called, hold on, let me get this right, YouTuber Canadian guy A. Hold on, let me, that doesn't sound right. This is Canadian, right? The Canadian guy A? Something like that. Don't ask, I'm not Canadian. I don't know what's going on with them when they're flapping heads. But he's a mega fan of the franchise, a mega fan of Spyro. So that's kind of his context. Now he's never been the source or a big deal in the rumor mill or leak space before. So this is kind of one of his breaking into it things. Look, I don't really know. I don't know anything about this guy. And I hold no shade to him. And he might have some legit information here. You know, we've got to wait to see it play out. Now the interesting thing is some of the stuff that he noted about this game, like it's been in development since January. And well, after they went independent last month, I guess it would make sense the first game with Microsoft would either be Spyro or Crash. But I want to get into how he breaks it down in his video because I find this to just be very, very interesting and also kind of questionable. So let's talk about this. He said, he's had several conversations with developers before PAX East and heard whispers about Spyro 4, whatever whispers are. That's a weird thing we talk about. We're like, hey, we have talked to developers and they told us something, but we're not allowed to tell you. So it's a whisper. I'm like, no, just straight up say if you talk to developers and they said it's happening, well, then it's happening. I don't, I don't remember the list of that term. But anyways, beyond that, he said he only got more confirmation when he attended PAX East and had further conversations with more developers. And you're going to find out it's the only one particular developer that's a source on this, but we're going to keep going here. Noted that there were already an official announcement about a week ago by Xbox's Matt Booty that Toys for Bob and Microsoft had reached a deal on their first game, which would be similar to things they had worked on before. So there you go. Similar to things they worked on before. Doesn't mean it is the things they've worked on before. They've worked on Spyro and Crash, the wording, and this comes right from Xbox's Matt Booty is similar to things, not literally the things we've worked on before, but take that for what you will. That's just Xbox's official word. He claims he heard about this before that article went up and he had at least one developer confirm it to him. Now, no, no, I don't want to throw any shade at him, but I just kind of say, if you're like me in Going Man, what a great rumor, this clearly falls into the trust me bro category of rumors, as Canadian guy A has next to no track record. But this became an interesting story to follow as it seems that the pack's East trip was important for confirmation, an event that Toys for Bob was not even at while their former employers Microsoft and Activision Blizzard also didn't really participate. So what developer told you this stuff? I'm kind of actually curious because they weren't there. Now that doesn't mean they didn't have friends that were there or that one of them didn't attend packsies independent of their company. That's always possible. And he could be a very well connected person and this could all turn out to be true. I'm just trying to provide you the facts of this story. And it's in that I'm really excited for the potential of Spyro 4 and this could be exactly what they're working on. Could also be working on Crash Bandicoot or they could be working on something completely original that Microsoft is funding. There's just a lot of possibilities here. Now, when all these other websites picked up this story, there's been a few of them that doesn't appear to be anyone who's corroborated this. So whether it was other journalists or whatever you have going on, nothing is official at this point. It's just this one person and claiming he has this one developer but he heard whispers before then. Look, the guy could be right. I don't really know much about him. But I don't want to cast it out by the way that packs east is a way to confirm things. It's pretty doubtful that he heard directly from the developer from Toys for Bob or Activision Blizzard. But it's still one of those things where, hey, we heard stuff from packsies last year. We reported on it. That stuff ended up being true. Granted, we were talking about Zelda and Nintendo related stories at an event where there was the tears of the kingdom statue in literal Nintendo booths and Nintendo employees there. So I think it's, you know, and obviously that stuff ended up being true. But hey, it's not like we can act like we never get things wrong. Remember this beauty of one. You guys still ask me about that GameStop story. I don't really have an explanation for you. There's been no more information to cross my desk about it one way or another. But hey, we don't always get things right either. And we're trying to be better here with this show video game news and actually deep dive into this stuff. So that's pretty interesting, I suppose. What I have to say is that with Microsoft willing to let them go third party, there's a high chance that if Spyro 4 is happening, it's probably going to be coming to other platforms, right? Not only have they let Toys for Bob go third party and become an independent developer, they release a lot of their games. A lot of their plans seem to be about bringing their games to other platforms. So I just kind of want to note here that this game could be coming to Nintendo Switch 2. We've got some prior Spyro games and prior Crash games and Crash Team Racing. So if this is all legit and you guys can let me know if you think it is, it's probably coming to Switch 2 if it just started development this year in January, at least according to that content creator guy, Canadian, eh? So we will just leave it at that. We'll see what happens. It's probably not going to be here for two, three, four years anyways, whatever this project officially is. And yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if it's also on Switch 2. So keep your eyes peeled. Now let's get into something more Nintendo. We started obviously with a Sony and a Microsoft, but what the hell is a Nintendo? You're Nintendo Prime, man. Well, don't worry. We got some stuff here for you because Pokemon TV has officially ended its services on Nintendo Switch. Do you not know what Pokemon TV was or do you? And you already knew about this story because it was previously announced. Let's talk about why this is a fascinating thing that it's actually shut down. So we talk a lot around here about Nintendo Switch 2. And before I dive into this further, I want to tell you we can't actually show anything about this application because it contains Pokemon, anime, and we will be copyright striped. So enjoy some Legends Arceus gameplay that's not even from me because I didn't have time to record any for this video. Services like this ending seem to really support that things are slowly moving on. Now, the Pokemon company announced back in January that the service that allowed you to watch old Pokemon animated episodes on your Nintendo Switch for free would be shutting down on March 28th. And that's exactly what happened. Sure, the show is available in some freeways on YouTube and also via subscription services like Netflix. But this app was only active for around two and a half years originally launching in 2021. But there was never a clear statement given on why it's shutting down. I don't really understand it just to be completely honest here. Looking at my notes, I see that I could not actually figure out why the heck they decided to shut it down. They're just doing it. But either way, let's get into some of my guesses here. I said, you know, either the user base of the app was really small that it no longer warranted existing or the initiative focuses behind the scenes to the next platform. They weren't going to continue to support legacy systems. I can't believe I decided around the Nintendo Switch as a legacy system. Yet it's Nintendo's only system in 2024 without a new system announced. I know. I know. I said legacy systems. I get it. Look, I'm just referencing the idea that Nintendo Switch will eventually be a legacy platform. I don't blame you if you have your pitchforks and torches ready to take down this ogre. Well, I mean me. I'm wearing green, I suppose. It's kind of fitting. But hold on. I said supporting legacy platforms because as a reminder, the online Pokemon servers are going down on April 8th as are pretty much all 3DS and Wii U servers. And they don't seem to have any way to play it. And the funny thing about those servers going down for all those 3DS titles is it totally isn't going to do anything but promote more privacy, correct? After all, you're going to take your saves. You're going to back them up. You're going to keep playing them on emulators and keep playing those online matches with fan-made online servers and LANs. So, um, yeah. You know, that's a great way to keep people from piracy Nintendo and Pokemon. Just take away the things that people still love to play because some people don't like the current modern Pokemon games. Fun story. I don't know. I just wanted to throw it out through that it's kind of sad it's shutting down but so is other things and they don't really seem to care that much about legacy. They care about current. You know what's funny about caring about current, by the way? I just got to throw this out here. What about fixing things? What about fixing Scarlet and Violet? That's something I just want to toss out there. You haven't fixed Scarlet and Violet even though you promised you would. I mean, okay. Nintendo said you would but then you didn't but then you said you were going to shut this down and then you did. You seem to have no problem doing things that you say that are negative but not the things you say that are positive. Pokemon's in the precarious pace and it's not because of PAL World. It's just because of Pokemon itself. But I just got to say after you keep those battles going with your emulators you know, whatever was. To catch them is my real test but I will never train them for my cause. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. I changed the lyrics. Don't copyright strike me. They still copyright strike with any reference to that original song. Again, just I got some issues with the Pokemon Company. You and me, we need to sit in the room and tell you how you should be taking advantage of us content creators for your own benefit rather than hurting us for making classic references to things we grew up with. Now, are you a game developer? I just got a question for you. This is the we're going to destroy number four here. We're getting deep. Are you a game developer and want to label your upcoming game or title as PlayStation 5 Pro Enhanced? Well, my friend, you absolutely can only for the price of the Holy Trinity. And no, I didn't make that reference just because Easter was yesterday, although that's a little convenient. That's because while it's being called PlayStation 5 Pro Enhanced, reporter Tom Henderson from Insider Gaming is using this simply to make it more clickable. And there's because the actual name is pretty strange internally. And all this comes from internal leaked documents. Tom Henderson reportedly has his hands on. It is called Trinity Enhanced. That's right. Trinity. Did I get that right? Yes. Trinity Enhanced. What are you doing, Sony? Because I guess taking advantage of the all new features of the still rumored PS5 Pro requires saying the our father and tossing out hopes and prayers that he responds. Or maybe it's more like just taking a bow before the God is highly and making a wish upon the Triforce that all your dreams come true. I don't know how any more Trinity references we need here. Let's keep this story going. In order for your game to qualify for this Enhanced moniker, it must offer an exclusive graphics mode that applies to three key aspects. I find these aspects kind of funny because these were also key selling points for the original base model PlayStation 5, which I happened to have. Quite fascinating. Let's see what you have to do with your game to get the Trinity Enhanced sticker on the box. I just think this is strange. Well, let's get into these three features. In order for your game to qualify, it must offer an exclusive graphics mode that applies to these aspects. Use PSSR upscale to 4K. Remember, your games were already supposed to be 4K. In fact, there's an 8K on the box for PlayStation 5. I said at the time that 4K, let alone 8K, was pretty wishful thinking, especially natively. And apparently it still is even on the Pro because PSSR is PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, aka their custom version of FSR, which is Super Resolution upscaling by AMD and they use AMD Tech. So this is just a custom PlayStation version. They're using it to upscale your games to 4K meaning that you probably still can't run at native 4K for most titles, even on this, even though we had 4K and 8K on the box. Also, it must constantly hit 60 FPS. Feel like in 2024 that's a pretty big standard with systems like this, but not every game does, including Sony's own games. It also must add in ray tracing or increased current ray tracing effects, you know, something they advertise for the PlayStation 5. That's why I said this is weird. The marketing that you need to use in order, or really the achievements you need to have in order to have Trinity enhanced on your box are just doing the very things they said PlayStation 5 could do in the first place. Almost as if you maybe oversold the original product. Also, it's a little strange talking about PlayStation 5 Pro when we only just got into this generation with exclusive games taking advantage of the original hardware. You know, the thing I'm actually kind of worried about here is this might lead to developers cutting features from the base PlayStation 5 games to hold them for the PlayStation Pro enhanced Trinity Edition whatever they're calling this thing. And just saying that just to get the sticker on the box I it is just to me a legitimate concern that I just I kind of feeling that developers are going to do just because Trinity enhanced is going to sound better even though most of the consumers on a PlayStation 5. Now the thing about those three requirements is we got to sort of air quote the word requirements because you can also get this special Trinity enhanced badge assuming that's the final name we don't know. If the following occurs and this is where it just gets even better if you increase your target resolution for a game with a fixed resolution so let's say it's a 1080p game you increase to 1440p you could qualify for this and that 1440p would have to be obviously on the PlayStation 5 Pro increase the maximum resolution for games with a dynamic resolution increase the target frame rate over the base game or simply use PlayStation 5 Pro ray tracing effects you may also end up being allowed to use the label at Sony's discretion by simply drinking the Sony Kool-Aid I hear they like the flavor what is that blue raspberry something like that look this to me is just extremely fun and extremely weird at the same time because all the marketing or all the stuff they're using internally to say that your game can use this moniker is what they said you could do with PlayStation 5 I guess we'll have to see if you can actually do it this time in fact let's get to the specs because we haven't talked about the specs yet and this might give you an idea of what they're targeting and what we have going on here so here's what the specs are supposed to be according to the internal documents the PlayStation 5 the PlayStation 5 Pro has 28% faster RAM 45% faster GPU due to the die size increasing by 67% however the CPU has absolutely no changes would I like to see some higher clocks at least Sony that would have been nice but what it would be if you're cooler and overclock that thing I'm just saying but yeah the CPU is going to be the bottleneck of all of this anyways if you don't increase all the specs across the board you know we'll have to see how much of these specs matter of course the system isn't announced yet and the fabled Nintendo Switch Pro also never got officially announced and we knew a lot of some of them about including specs so I would venture to say that Sony could still just end up not releasing this platform if they don't want to seems like they would do it because they did the PlayStation 4 Pro before so they're more likely to do a pro system than Nintendo but just throwing out there that since the system hasn't been announced we could be talking about a bunch of gobbly that doesn't happen oh and we gotta toss on the fact that the PlayStation 5 is only recently started to get next generation games of course we should probably stop calling things next generation the system is now almost four years old halfway through its life cycle it's just what the current generation is even though it feels like we haven't even gotten next generation games until now or at least lately in fact what's cool about this if you want to still use that next generation moniker is this summer we're getting visions of mana on the PlayStation 5 and also the Xbox and PC what I find fascinating there is that could actually be a preview of a next generation game for Nintendo Switch 2 if that game goes there because see what I'm doing there Switch 2 would be a next generation Nintendo system okay just go with me I love visions of mana okay I'm excited for it and I'm buying it and I'm placing it because I can't wait now this next story here is something I typically wouldn't cover here at Nintendo Prime because it dies a little bit in the politics and we don't like politics and religious talk around here but we'll make some jokes here and there but most of them I want to stay out of it but this is important because this involves video games in a major way so Russia's president Vladimir Putin I'm sure you've heard of him he's sort of in the news every day has put together a team to look into creating its own series of exclusive video game consoles games cloud gaming services and when he says consoles he means home console and handheld hey Nintendo we're not leaving you out of our our eyes here now the reason is in case you're all unaware is that all these major players Sony Microsoft Nintendo have all pulled out of Russia with the ongoing war they're not in support of what's happening there and they do not want to bring their games or systems there anymore even though there are some obviously some people there that have it also some of you even the shops themselves have been shut down by some of these console places so just throwing out there that this is why Vladimir Putin's even talking about this why would he even care well because their consumers can't buy video games quite easily in that country anymore let alone play them on anything but PC so that's all cool well how do we know this information and this is where we got to be a little careful there's a lot of propaganda out there right now involving Russia but this all came from a Russian newspaper known as Commersant Commersant I'm look I'm not going to bother to actually figure out how to pronounce this and I normally would but I'm only mildly sorry that I didn't figure this out because I don't really know what I can believe when it comes from the Russian news sources but I do know that snapping their fingers and making this happen right now is pretty impossible and they seem to recognize that too that's why this is apparently part of a 10 year plan that's right Vladimir Putin says within 10 years they have plan to have their own systems games and stuff government ran video games and video game systems that's look I don't care if it's uh Russia I don't care if it's the United States I don't care if it's the UK China government ran entertainment media that sounds like a real winner that's where we're going to leave that story our last story now deals with unicorn overlord do you guys remember that tactical strategy RPG well we have some sales data for this game it sold 500,000 units but how do we find out about this was there a press release was there an official tweet was there you know just anything at all was there like a major news outlet who did an interview well no we found out because a Wario 64 over on twitter slash x now who is Wario 64 someone who shares a lot of merchandise stuff like when new merch becomes available it goes in stock for different video game companies whether it's physical editions of games or collector stuff and he just shares it with a bunch of affiliate links makes some money lots of people follow him because hey he's really good at it he's probably even bought it up at this point it's probably a bot mostly running the account but what I find interesting about all this stuff is he shared this as a news story because there's no money to be made on this yet because the game's already out and he didn't even provide an affiliate link to buy unicorn overlord but how does this person or this bot or whatever it is have access to this sales data that has not been reported anywhere well it's because he links to a video that was put up nine days ago by the actual developers of the game about unicorn overlord on the official Japanese account now remember unicorn overlord was made by vanillaware they make a lot of these strategy RPG type games they do a very good job published by Sega and Alice that's awesome but what doesn't make any sense to me is that this is a nine day old video so it took this long for this information to even be found and come out because again it's on a hidden unlisted video on YouTube yes a hidden unlisted video was this for an internal board meeting that they had this is the information in the video even accurate like me is it unlisted because the information isn't accurate I'm very confused on what's going on here and why we if they've hit that 500,000 mark why they haven't put it out there and this was nine days ago the game came out on March 8th on the 8th so you go back nine days we're like a week out from when the game came out and they couldn't have given us the data then it's a little strange to me I have a feeling you know whether it's vanillaware or Sega Atlas whoever might be in wake of this news come out and make a social media announcement on the actual sales so while the headlines are all saying it sold 500,000 units maybe I mean that's what the video says that's hidden and not supposed to be viewed but then also maybe it's sold more because that was nine days ago so even if the information is accurate it's probably sold more since then maybe it's at 600,000 now so the game got really good reviews as well so I wouldn't be surprised if it's sold even more after launch week I'm just throwing out there that it's a very strange story but it is one that we have and that is the last story of video game news so we're going to do this little last segment here no timers no fancy anything I just want to say thank you guys for being here hopefully you continue to enjoy these longer more in-depth video game coverage I want to do every single day we're trying to launch these videos Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday at 10 a.m they're going to be as up-to-date as we humanely kind we're doing most of the legwork the night before but if there's like a breaking story that happens at 7 8 a.m we'll try to get it in if it happens at 9 a.m it's going to be too late for us to add it in we'll have to do a separate video on that we're also still going to do individual videos on big stories like say Nintendo announces a Nintendo Direct today in like a couple of hours at noon hey we're going to get a video about that long before we get the next video game news out although we'll have our more in-depth conversation and deep diving and all the details surrounding it and any possible leaks and all that would obviously happen in the following day so I hope you enjoyed this new new style notes you can hear we're inspired by hardware news by gamers nexus hence the timers and this isn't even our final background this is an old banner it's kind of retro retro to me anyways e3 2021 we're going to have some new stuff going on behind us tomorrow in fact because we're just waiting on things to arrive alright guys thank you so much for tuning in and I'm going to catch you guys in the next video