 Hey everyone. We have another video on the Xbox Series X and the PlayStation 5. I know they launched this week. It's really exciting, but unfortunately there are things that happen that are going to be negative attention to these consoles that aren't necessarily warranted. And yes, there's been some stuff with some YouTubers that maybe I'll get into later. I don't know. I kind of find it but today I'm focusing on Kotaku. You saw the title. I know a lot of you at this point, if you're on YouTube, you have written off traditional video game media for a long time, including outlets like Kotaku. And ever since Jason Schreyer left Kotaku or was fired or whatever happened, there's less and less reasons to really care about the place, but it's still an insanely popular place for video game news. And in terms of this week, we have reviews of consoles. And they did a review of the PlayStation 5 and they've also done post coverage after their review of the Xbox Series X, which their actual review of the Xbox Series X, the legit review was fine. The follow-up coverage a little strange. It's almost embarrassing. Now, I do warn you guys going into this, there's going to be some political-based talk when it comes to one of the articles and there's going to be a phobia when it comes to the other. Neither of these, I think, need to exist on a video game website. And I'll get into why, but first let's go to the articles themselves, starting with the PlayStation 5 review by Kotaku. In general, the PlayStation 5 review, I've read the whole thing, is fine, right? It just reviews the system. But then at the very end of the review, we have this section. And I should know who this review is by. Scroll up here. It's a pretty long, long and lengthy review. It goes into a lot of stuff. Some stuff they admit that they don't care about, like frame rate counting. Where's the author here? So this author is Ian Walker. All right, so let's get down to the end. You know, when you go to the end of a review, you're looking for a summary and all that jazz, you know, because maybe you don't have time to read the whole thing. Maybe a review score if they were doing review scores. Well, here is what Ian said. But does it really matter? This review has spent 3,000 words talking about the PlayStation 5, which is the most I've written about anything. It's a good video game console as there has ever been the combination of ultra high definition video, increased frame rates, high end graphic techniques like ray tracing, and the lighting lightning fast SSD make it feel like a real deal next gen successor to the PlayStation 4. And if you're not ready to give up on the previous console, PlayStation 5 or library runs a vast majority of the PlayStation 4 library with many of those games receiving upgrades to fidelity, frame rate, and loading times. Look, if he ended the review right there, fine, but he didn't. But I'd be remiss to ignore all the reasons to not be excited for the PlayStation 5. Okay, cool. Let's get into some negatives then, right? The world, what, wait, what's the world have to do with negatives? All right, let's give it a chance. The world is still reeling under the weight of the COVID-19 pandemic. There are more Americans out of work right now than at any point in the country's history with no relief in sight. Our healthcare system is in an inherently evil institution that forces people to ration life saving medications like insulin and choose suicide over suffering with untreated mental illness. As I'm writing this, it looks very likely that Joe Biden will be our next president, but it's clear that the worst people aren't going away just because a new old white man is sitting behind the resolute desk. Well, at least not this old white man. Our government is fundamentally broken in a way that necessitates radical change rather than incremental electoralism. The harsh truth is that, for reasons listed above and more, a lot of people simply won't be able to buy a PlayStation 5, regardless of supply, or if they can, concerns over increasing austerity in the United States and the growing threat of widespread political violence supersede any enthusiasm about the Council's SSD or how Ray Tracey makes his reflections more realistic. That's not to say you can't be excited for these things, but I certainly am on some level, but there's an irrefutable level of privilege attached to the ability to simply tune out the world as it burns around you. Now look, I don't care who you voted for, I don't care what party you associate with, or if you don't associate with any party. The politics of it don't matter to me. The point is this is a review of a platform. This is not a review of your personal stance on the world economy. This is not your review of your personal stance on the state of the United States. Believe it or not, and I can't believe I have to point this out, there are people that live in the United States right now that don't actually think the world is in chaos and the United States is on the brink of destruction. Believe it or not, there's like millions of people that don't think that way. So to force your interjective opinions about the state of the United States into a review about a platform and how, well, I can't really care about this thing because of the state of the world, then don't review it. Hand the system to one of your colleagues that is doing their job. Keep in mind that if you work at Kotaku, if you are a writer at Kotaku, you bare minimum right now make $50,000 a year. That is the entry level pay to be an editor at Kotaku, a full-time editor that is, of course, they have part-time editors. And if you're reviewing a system, I assume you are a full-time editor because it would take a full-time amount of work to review a system like this. So the thing is, I don't care what your viewpoint is on the world. I did not click your Kotaku review of PlayStation 5 to read about your personal opinions on the state of the United States and how much you care about this system. Here's the facts. The PlayStation 5 is sold out. You're not going to be able to buy one this year. Period. Sites were selling future shipments of the system. Sony's not having the system available for you to buy in-person day one. They claim because of the pandemic, even though they're going to have it available on Black Friday, and it's going to sell out within seconds. Here's reality. The reason you're not going to be able to buy a PlayStation 5 this year is because you're not going to be able to find one. It's not about supply. You talk about consumerism is that consumerism is going to go away because of the pandemic and everything else going on. Guess what? It hasn't. In fact, spending has increased in the video game realm. Nintendo is seeing record levels of sales because of the pandemic. Like, let's just get our facts straight. People are stuck home. What do they want to do at home? Play video games. They don't just want to sit down and Netflix and chill all day. So the deal for me is when people come into a review of a hotly anticipated platform, the first new platform for a company in seven years, even if it comes out in the middle of the pandemic, no one wants to hear your opinions on this crap. They don't. We don't care. What we care about is all the crap that you listed above those opinions. They did not need to be tacked in there. And shame on Kotaku for whoever edited this because they do have other people look at this before it's published. And Stefan Tatillo that okays every publication at the. Shame on you guys for allowing this review to go out where it's completely sidetracked by someone's political and personal stances on things that are unrelated to the actual review of this product. People don't come to read these articles looking for political opinions. They go to CNN. They go to Fox News, MSNBC, or whatever billions of outlets. So fill up the Franco show on YouTube, wherever they go, wherever they get their news from, wherever they want to talk about politics in the state of the United States, they go there. They don't come to Kotaku to do this, right? I understand that Kotaku has interjected their opinions and agendas into things for years, but they've always kept it out of the actual review of the products except for some personal opinions on where they wish games or systems would have went. There's no personal opinion about where the system should have went. The personal opinion is basically PlayStation 5 shouldn't exist because the world is not in a state where we can afford it even though it's selling out anyways, clearly showing that there's millions of people that can. So that's kind of crappy. Now, Kotaku didn't stop there. They did the review of the Xbox Series X and that review was fine. There was no political agenda ejected into it, but they did a follow-up article. And this follow-up article I want to be very careful here is I'm not saying this person's wrong, but I'm saying that we really need to write this because remember this is the person or related to the person that reviewed the Xbox Series X. So it says the Xbox Series X has too many horrifying holes. Now this whole article is about tripophobia. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly, but the article is basically going on about a phobia that isn't confirmed to be a real phobia, a real mental disorder. It's not really confirmed in the medical field to be real, but I'm not going to say this person doesn't have it. For those who don't know what tripophobia is, so reportedly 16% of people have it. I don't know where that stat comes from, probably from some poll out there that isn't wholly accurate because poll data can be manipulated in millions of ways. But tripophobia is basically about a whole bunch of holes closely put together. So whether it's occurring naturally in nature, like a beehive or something, or whether it's the Xbox Series X, which has a bunch of holes on top, even things like the holes in a microphone can bother people. The holes in a grill on a speaker can really bother some people. So it's a real phobia and this person apparently has it. And what I hate about this isn't that the person's talking about a phobia. Like okay, you talk about your phobia, I don't really think this needs to be on a video game website. I think people that have tripophobia are already aware of the Xbox Series X isn't for them. Like let's be clear here. If you have tripophobia, if you have it, you're already not considering buying something that triggers you. You can already tell by the box that has the top of the Xbox Series X on it that it's not for you. So that's kind of my whole part of this article is if you have this phobia, it's not for you. It's kind of like if you have a phobia of spiders or snakes, you're not going to watch the Discovery Channel feature on spiders and snakes. You're going to avoid it. So if you already know that you have this phobia, you likely were going to avoid the Xbox Series X anyways. But they decided they wanted to put this phobia in this article out here complaining about the design of the system and they even complained about the Series S speaker grill. And when you get to the end, this is what bothers me and shows such a bias at times at places like Kotaku says, I can employ similar strategy for the Series X as I did for that computer. So for the computer that has grills on it, he covered the grills with a piece of paper, which by the way can choke off the airflow in your computer and can actually lead to you overheating your parts and killing your computer sooner. I do not suggest that you do that. I suggest you find a mesh that doesn't trigger you that you could put over it instead of a piece of paper. If you're going to cover holes, never cover holes by cutting off air flow is what I'm trying to say here. But it says I could try to hide it in my entertainment console. So he mentions like, hey, if I really want one, I could hide it in my entertainment console and not even look at it. If I stay on the console vertically, could also obscure the vent. It doesn't. It's actually pretty noticeable vertically. If I absolutely had to have a Series X, I could make it work. But why should I suffer having to trigger an object at my home when I could just own a whole free PlayStation five instead your move Microsoft. Yeah, I don't really get it either. I'm not going to make fun of this person's phobia. I just what's the point of this article besides talking negatively about a design choice that you just don't like because of a phobia like is Microsoft our speaker company supposed to stop using grills because of this phobia like you complain about the speaker grill in your car. I just don't I don't again. I'm not trying to make fun of a phobia. I just what's the point of this article people who have this phobia already know this they don't asking Microsoft to change their entire design because of a phobia that's not even confirmed to be real and only affects supposedly 16% of people. I don't know how accurate that is. It just seems weird when there's other solutions. If you put it on its side and you stick it into an entertainment center, you're not going to see the holes anyway. I'm sure there's a phobia out there for lines to write like PlayStation four has like that sandwich thing going on. I'm sure there's a phobia that exists for that kind of thing too. This is just a it's a pointless useless article on a website that's supposed to be about video games. It's almost as if there's an agenda. You guys don't know what to think about this that to me this is exactly why traditional media like Kotaku even more so than IGN is just going by the way so I don't understand why these articles exist. I just don't want the PlayStation fiber review exist. Why does the end of it have to be there? I'm flabbergasted to be honest. Let me know what you think down in the comments below.