 This is Game Chat with Buona Episode 132, Sony's PR, VR, R. Chat with Buona. Welcome to the show. Now here's your host, Buona McCall, with all the gaming news of this week. Uh, by the way, that's me. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Episode 132 of Game Chat with Buona. We got a great show lined up for you. Got some great stories today. PlayStation and Sony had some announcements. It was kind of like a short little thing they did, but we got some stories from that. Also, some games being updated, as well as some cuts at some massive companies out there in the form of jobs and layoffs. And we hate to talk about that, but, you know, we do need to report this news as something that happens. Today is Wednesday, March 27th. I believe it is. March 27th? Yeah, March 27th. March is over. And, uh, it seems like, I guess the older you get, you just realize the passage of time. And he's like, man, time is just going so fast. It just seems like it was my birthday. And then it seems like, oh, happy birthday, Buona. You're welcome. It seems like it was just the beginning of March. We were in February. We were saying happy new year. And now here we are. But anyway, Game Chat Buona, Episode 132, coming at you right now. And for our first story, we're going to talk about EA Electronic Arts. Yeah, that's the company. That's the one I was talking about. EA has cut 350 jobs in marketing, publishing and international offices. This story comes by way of rock, paper, shotgun. And I've found on other outlets on the web that this was actually expected. And the people in these departments knew that this was coming. They knew a reorg was coming. They were travel bands and, you know, a lot of stipulations put in place that kind of is like writing on a wall. I think if you've worked in a cubicle job or for a big company, there's like little things that happen like, well, we're about to have layoffs. And apparently they've known about this for years. And some people even said that they tweeted that it was like a relief. It's like, oh, finally, you know, because, you know, you're working every day, and you're like, oh, am I going to get laid off or am I going to lose my job? But finally, these people, you know, are set free. Hopefully they had something else lined up. And, you know, and true form. And this is something that the gaming industry does that I'm really proud of. Lots of other companies have been putting out tweets that they're hiring. So if anybody lost a job in these different areas, community management, marketing, whatever it have you, other gaming companies out there who are who are hiring in those areas are trying to recruit these people, get their resumes and get them a job. So I really like to see that even amongst competing companies. So it's like, you even see like Activision or like Ubisoft and, you know, people who are really in direct competition with EA, they'll put up these tweets and things like that and say, hey, we're hiring. You know, it could be some competitive intelligence going on. No, I'm just joking. I think it's in true form. I think they're really sincerely trying to get these people jobs. So the article points out, it's not too long after Activision laid off 800 people a month ago and GOG cut 10% of their staff, Telltale one other, Guild Wars two has some massive cuts. So we're seeing this trend across all of the gaming industry, which is why I like to I like to downplay people who say that they did this, you know, because when Activision had their layouts are like, yeah, we showed them when we didn't buy GameX and when we boycotted that, yeah, that's right, go under. And they're cheering on these companies, you know, negative financial impacts, which I can understand from a certain perspective, but you have to look at it from another perspective. These are actual people that don't make these decisions that are losing their jobs and livelihood, livelihood, and you're rooting for them to lose their jobs. So that's you got to think about that from that perspective that you got to take some tact in that and say, well, well, I don't want EA to be rewarded for their negative business practices. At the same time, I don't really want people to lose their jobs. We have nothing to do with those decisions. Check it out, guys. Over in Rock Paper Shotgun, they got the details. EA lays off 350 marketing and publishing employees. And for our next story, we're going to talk about Sea of Thieves. Sea of Thieves, the controversial game that came out in Xbox and PC. This is an open world, I guess kind of open world pirate game that came out about a year ago. It's actually been a year. That's a long time. So Rare, the developers of the game, they're releasing an anniversary update that's going to bring a bunch of new features to the game. Now, before I get into it, Sea of Thieves was in the news a lot. Sea of Thieves was in the news a lot during that first year, simply because they had, I guess some people say they had a lack of content. And I know that's relative. To some people, that's not an absolute fact that a game doesn't have content. But overall, I think the general consensus from players is that the game could use more. There was a great foundation. There was a great base, kind of like a clean slate or like a ground. I guess I can't think of the right word. It's almost like a foundation. A foundation for a great game. They just needed to add some things on top of it. And I think that's what a lot of players wanted from Sea of Thieves. They thought the game was empty considering, but it had some good core gameplay things. So this new update, this new anniversary update is going to be bringing a bunch of new stuff. New story adventures, a new trading company, a new competitive mode called Arena, and some improvements such as fishing. You got it, fishing. This competitive mode first is called the Arena. It drops players according to the article on Engadget. It drops players right into the action of a purely and a purely competitive setting without the need for cooperative grinding. And I've watched some Sea of Thieves streams of some PVPers, and a lot of the frustration from them is that, sure, they like to gang people. That's part of the thing, you know, you're a pirate. But sometimes finding a fight can be a little challenging. Even Sea of Thieves, they had this thing where players would have purely PVE servers or PVE instances, and if you did any kind of PVP, they would react negatively to you. So people just want to grind in peace. So I guess segmenting off a competitive PVP area would be a good idea in theory, but we're going to see how it turns out. I know for a fact that sometimes the thrill of PVP is not necessarily in a structured PVP environment, but the thrill and the adrenaline of, you know, an unexpected PVP encounter, which is why Open World PVP is so popular in a lot of MMO and Open World games is because it's kind of different from a structured PVP environment. So simply because you can go in and PVP doesn't mean that that's going to be the same. I guess a good example would be in Elite Dangerous. I play that game a lot. Elite Dangerous has its own arena mode. It's called actually arena or CQC. And a lot of the prominent PVPers never go there because it's a different type of PVP. It's not necessarily the same type as an Open World dynamic adrenaline pumping thing. You know, you have a lot more to lose in an Open World environment than you do in a structured environment. So we're going to see how that turns out. I don't know how that's going to pan out. I don't anticipate it doing very well. I really think a lot of the hardcore PVPers are probably going to stay in the Open World. You also have a new feature called Tall Tales. It's a collection of story rich quests that lead to undiscovered areas and bonus gameplay features. Sounds good. The first collection is called Shores of Gold and Includes Fishing. And you'll be able to cook your food as well. So they're also going to introduce some ship damage improvements. You'll be able to damage certain parts of the ship like the mast, the wheel, the broken wheel, and cap stand and a bunch of parts of the ship that can probably affect the way you drive and steer your ship. So that sounds interesting that you can target certain parts of the ship to disable. So that's good. All of these are good things. And this is coming on April 30th. My issue is that I don't know if it's going to be enough to bring back the naysayers. You never get a second chance to make a first impression. And you're kind of on an uphill battle when you have to win players back. Winning people back is very, very difficult, as any developer probably can tell you. So that first impression with a lot of people is very negative. So if they come into the game and they see this and they go, OK, I can play this for a week or two, but I'm going to leave again, you know, that's probably not what Rage or Rare wants. That's probably not what developers want. They want you to come back and stay. So we'll see. I mean, my gut feeling tells me that this is not going to make that much of a difference. I think current CFT players are going to love it. I think long time CFT players who took a break are going to come back and love it. But the people who shunned the game in the beginning for not having enough content. Rightfully so. I mean, I think it's a valid opinion for not having enough content probably aren't going to come back. Check it out, guys. Overthegudget.com. They got the details. CFT is going to give you the big update, but is it going to be enough? And for our next story, we're going to talk about Squad Stream over on Twitch. This is my primary platform for doing live streaming. Twitch.tv slides. In case you had nerd of you come over there and check us out. Anyway, Squad Stream. Squad Stream is a multi-twitch type of a thing. And there's actually a site out there called Multi-Twitch. Now, what is that? That means that you can watch more than one streamer at once. And you're probably asking yourself, well, why in the world would I do that? Well, a lot of streamers like to collaborate and play games together. And if you want to watch multiple perspectives of those streamers, you can do so at these multi-twitch sites where you can bring up the video of multiple streamers, but listen to the audio of one. And only having one audio usually isn't that big of a deal because they're on comms and you can see or hear them anyway. It also gives you the ability to follow any of the streamers chat. So if you don't like one streamer's chat, but you want to follow another streamer's chat in this collaborative thing, then you can with sites like Multi-Twitch. Now, Twitch did the smart thing and baked this right into the site of a feature called Squad Stream. And the way it works is that you tag your stream with the term actually Squad Stream and you can add players to your Squad Stream using the features that Twitch has given us. And once that's done, you get access to all the different things. Now, I wanted to get access to see them all at once and switch between them pretty easy. Now, one of the things that surprised me when I checked on this this morning is that it actually works on mobile. I was like, wow. Usually when Twitch rolls out a new feature, mobile comes a little bit later. It doesn't work on mobile right away, but apparently they did a dual rollout and there's an intuitive mobile interface as well. And you can use drag and drop gestures on your phone to move and switch between streams, which is actually kind of good. Kind of good. Here's a quote from their blog post. Squad Stream is a fast and easy way for up to four creators to go live and stream together in one window. It's perfect for showing off every awesome moment in a Battle Royale match, which is going to be the primary thing, I think. Saving a virtual seat at a table for a tabletop stream, catching every second of speed running head to heads. So much more. We can't wait for you all to show you this. Unlike hosting or raids, which are excellent, but more hands-off ways to collaborate. Squad Stream let streamers actively team up with other creators to benefit everyone in the channel. Twitch is going to have a special launch event throughout the month, starting today with Shroud, Justin and Skadoodle playing Apex Legends at 4 p.m. today, the 27th. And they're going to be going on to other different streamers. There's a huge list on the blog post. You can check them out. People playing mostly Battle Royale, card games, shooters. I think there's one with Northern Lion and a bunch of people playing Satisfactory, which is cool. League of Legends, that's an idea as well. I think that's collaborative or even competitive. I can see this working. And again, there's sites like Multi-Twitch and Multi-Stream and a bunch of different tools that have been out there for... I'm not joking. They've been out there for years, many, many years. And Twitch has finally embraced that in this feature called Squad Stream. Check it out, guys. Over on blog.twitch.tv, they got the details about their own feature, Squad Stream, the next way to play and watch together. And for our next story, we're going to talk about Sony. Sony recently had a little nice release, press release event. Dog and Pony, whatever you want to call it. One of the things that came out of that, that Sony has now announced that they have sold 4.2 million PlayStation VR headsets, virtual reality headsets. And they also announced they're going to have 25 VR games coming out in the next months. Now, one of the things you probably know about Buana, if you've been following my shows and podcasts and streams and videos and stuff, is that I'm a pretty big naysayer of VR. I've been pretty much against the whole thing. I won't say against. I'm just, I'm not on board with it. I really believe that they have a lot of work to do in that arena. And I've seen VR come and go before. So I'm one of those people that are like, well, it's probably going to fail again, blah, blah, blah. And there's a lot of things about it that make it fit into the niche category that I won't go into in this particular segment. But that's kind of where my stance is. But I was surprised to see this from that perspective. I was surprised to see that Sony sold so many, given that they sold about 100 million PlayStation 4s that now they have announced that they sold over 4.2 million since they came out with the stuff. I think it came out three years, yeah, three years ago. So it's about a little over a million per year that they've sold. And that's kind of a lot. Given that I really have dismissed the PlayStation VR, you know, when you talk about VR, you think about HTC, you think about Oculus Rift, at least I do. And apparently, according to this article, overonengage.com, that, you know, Sony outsold Rift and Vive shipments in the fourth quarter of 2018. Rift sold about 300,000 according to the article, and the Vive sold about 230, meanwhile Sony shipped, they say shipped. I got to be careful of that. All of these are shipped, not sold. They shipped 463,000 headsets in the same quarter. So Sony shipped more than those guys. So the titles are going to be coming out. 25 titles include Blood and Truth, a follow-up to one of the first PSVR games, London Heights, Everybody's Golf VR, and Five Nights of Freddy's, that's going to be interesting. But I think the biggest title that I think is going to attract a lot of people is No Man's Sky. No Man's Sky is going to have a virtual reality, a version that's coming out this summer. And I can anticipate a lot of Twitch streamers and YouTubers putting together some less plays and some live content surrounding that. That might work out well, because, you know, VR is a very, very good thing in Elite Dangerous, and I think No Man's Sky takes the exploration aspect of Space Sims and it expands upon it, which Elite Dangerous has. So I think No Man's Sky would be a very, very good title for the PlayStation VR to actually shine. Out of all these titles, I think that one has the most potential to draw more people in. Has this changed my mind about VR? No, it really hasn't. There's quite a bit that they have to overcome in the technology. I think that I'm one of the things I'm on board with just so I can get this opinion out of the way. I'm on board more with augmented reality than I'm with VR because it's more practical. It fits into current workflows better in the VR. VR is a big shift. Not only in technology, but in workflow and just presentation and how you use it. You're essentially excluding the outside world and a lot of people don't like to do that and a lot of things they do. Augmented reality tends to be a mixture of both and I think that has a better future than VR and it could probably lead to better VR experiences through augmented reality. That's just my opinion on that. It only has, hey, 4.2 million. You can't ignore that. Check it out, guys. Over at engadget.com, they've got details. So I'm just making a big play for VR and some cool games are coming out this year. And while we're on the topic of VR, HTC has put out a new thing called Streamlink which turns VR headsets into big screens for console gaming or whatever. This is a device which allows you to bring in any HDMI signal into your VR headset and one of the use cases for this is you essentially plug in your PlayStation or your Xbox or your Switch and play in a VR, play in a virtual window in your VR. This comes by way of engadget and I looked at this, I was like, okay, that's actually a decent idea. Now just imagine if you're playing a VR game or you're doing something or if you're just doing something like VR chat and you want to either watch Netflix or watch a movie or, I don't know, play another game while you're playing that game, you can multitask. It's essentially a second monitor in your VR headset. That's the way I'm looking at this. I'm like, wow, they put a second monitor in here and it's powerful because it's a capture card so you don't have to stress your existing hardware. All you have to do is capture whatever your additional hardware is outputting. And again, this is HDMI input so you can bring it just about anything that has an HDMI signal, which is kind of cool. The applications are kind of going through the roof for this. So while I am still not on board for VR completely, I think this is a good thing and I definitely see the potential in it. Let me read what the article says to clear up some misconceptions. Just to be clear, HTC isn't here to replace your PSVR nor Labo VR kit. Instead, it's all about playing your usual console games on a much larger virtual screen. So that's another thing. And ideally on a sharp 2880 x 1600 AM OLED display on the Vive Pro and the Vive Focus series. So it doesn't have to be a second monitor either. You could just use it as a virtual monitor. So if you just want to play your existing game, not necessarily multitask, but play your existing game on this device with a really, really huge virtual screen, I can see the appeal of that. I can see the appeal of that. I mean, I'm thinking about Elite Dangerous. Playing on your console and having your Vive headset and just looking around on a huge, huge screen is one way to play it, even though it won't be true VR like in Elite Dangerous. It's kind of a different way to do it. And it might actually solve some of the motion sickness issues. If you're just looking at a big screen and you're not really immersed in the content, then you may get less dizzy spells and stuff like that. I don't know, man. I just thought it was a cool idea. Check it out. Overonthegadget.com. Look at the details. And VR is trying to do some different stuff, man. Check it out. And for our final story, we're going to talk about Google Stadia. We talked about this in the last game chat with one. This is kind of a follow-up story. And this article over on theverge.com brings up some good points about the potential of how YouTube wants to use it in Google. Google wants Stadia to be essentially an extension of YouTube with this crowd play feature, which allows the creators to play games like NBA 2K19 with their viewers. With their viewers not even having to have the viewers not having to have to own the content or own the game. They could just fire up an instance in Google Stadia and play with their favorite creator. And it's a good, good thing for streamers and creators to do this. But this article brings up a good point that I kind of thought about in the back of my head is what about trolls? Because you get your fair share of trolls and people who are trying to ruin their experience and ruin your community for whatever reason. That can come in and cause havoc. And they talked about some of the things that we deal with on Twitch in this article about people just come in and just saying bad words that could get you banned, like racial terms and a bunch of controversial stuff that you normally wouldn't say because you get in trouble for that. Or to play some kind of a music over the microphone that is content ID or copyrighted. These are things that make you go, what kind of moderation tools are in place? How can you control who comes in and plays with you once you enable this Google Stadia crowd play feature? And here's a quote from the article. Imagine a popular YouTube creator with a sizable audience. They have an army of dedicated fans to follow them everywhere and ready to line up to chance to play the game with their favorite YouTuber. Stadia is a perfect way for integrating that community. I don't know why I'm talking like this. Stadia is a perfect way of integrating that community of loyal supporters into a more collaborative space. Live streaming with fans is a digital equivalent of signing autographs for after a show. Hmm. Now this quote got me thinking about the whole Google Stadia marketing and how they're positioning it. Live streaming with fans is the digital equivalent of signing autographs after a show. And when I live stream, that is the show. You know, so on YouTube, you know, there I go saying you know again. I've been saying, you know, so much. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. I love Chipotle. Anyway, on Twitch, the live stream is actually the show. And on YouTube, you produce content. You produce YouTube video, not YouTube gaming. You produce content all the time. You know, pre-built video, edited, fine-tuned, nicely done. And I guess you go live to say, hi guys, how'd you like my video? Here's signing some autographs. It's a different way of looking at live streaming than what I'm used to. I'm used to looking at live streaming as the actual meat and potatoes of the content and the entertainment. And it looks like Google is petitioned to come up with a quote like this. I don't know where to get this from. It seems like they're doing the opposite. I mean, this could be the verges. This could be the verges opinion on this, but if Google is taking that stance, I don't know. Crowdplay does present this opportunity, but neither Google nor YouTube explain how the queuing system work. A popular YouTuber known for gaming streams like DanTDM or JackSepticGuy may attract trolls who purposely line up just for an opportunity to yell offensive and hateful words on stream. When that happens, it's often the creators hosting the stream who have to deal with the consequences. So if a creator is using Stadia, which Google and YouTube want to do, who protects them from flagrant abuse? It's just a life of live streaming. It's uncontrolled. It's raw. It's unmetered. So you got to have good moderation tools in place. I don't know if Google has done that yet. I don't know if YouTube has done that yet. I guess we'll have to wait to see until Stadia comes out to see what kind of moderation tools there are. Or nobody's probably going to use this until they do. I know if I was a YouTube creator using Google Stadia and I knew that anybody could come in from anywhere, anytime, open mic to do anything, I'm not going to use it because I know how the Internet is. People take those opportunities to try to get a reaction out of you for entertainment. Or they're just trying to troll you for some other reason. So check it out, guys. Over on TheVerge.com, they got details. Google Stadia, they got this cool feature called Crowd Play. But man, could it be right with trolls if used the wrong way? And that concludes episode 132 of Game Chat. We want to thank you all so much for listening to the show. Follow me on Twitch, twitch.tv, slash Buona. I stream pretty much every day. We've changed our start time to about 8 p.m. Eastern now. We're doing a night stream. We were doing a split stream for a while, but now we're going to do night. Follow my YouTube, youtube.com, slash Buona. I'm putting up videos, man. They're going up there at a very good rate. Very, very, very fast and blazing pace. Follow this podcast, buona.tv, slash podcast, as well as my other podcast, Tech Talk with Buona, which I produce that every Friday and I produce this one every Wednesday. So both of them are on the same feed. You can check those guys out over there. Join our Discord, discord.gg, slash Buona. That's where we are. And please, finally, if you are enjoying this podcast and any of my other content, support me. Go over to patreon.com, slash Buona. And you can provide any type of monetary support as little as $1 a month to help me out. This is how I make my living. Making these podcasts, making these videos and stuff, and you guys make it happen through contributions such as that on Patreon. Also, you can subscribe on Twitch and do things over there on Twitch as well that are available. Great show today. I really enjoyed it. We talked more about VR than I thought we would. Coming into the show, I didn't think I would be talking so much about VR because I usually am bashing VR, but some actual positive things coming out of the VR camp over there and also Twitch and YouTube are making some inroads into some cool things over there. I'll see you guys next time. Have a great, great day. If you're watching on YouTube, please click that subscribe button and ring the bell for updates. And I'll see you guys next time. Have a great day. Bye-bye.