 This is Game Chat with Buona Episode 135. Don't resist or the transistor. Game Chat with Buona, welcome to the show. Now, here's your host, Buona McCall, with all the gaming news of this week. By the way, that's me. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Episode 135 of Game Chat with Buona. The great show lined up for you. I got a funny story. You want to hear it like that? Here it here. Go. I was recording Tech Talk on my other podcast on Sunday and I got the dates mixed up. So I was here for stories for Game Chat with Buona. And I was actually supposed to record Tech Talk with Buona and all the stories ready. And I was about to hit record and it hit me. I was like, wait, today is Sunday. It was Sunday at the time. And I used to record Game Chat with Buona Wednesdays and Tech Talk with Buona Sundays. So I basically had to shelve all that stuff I researched and then I had to go and research and find the Tech Talk with Buona story stuff. True story. How are you guys doing today? I hope you had a great week. It's been a little bit since the last Game Chat when I took last week off and we're back again with another great episode. Got about five stories to talk about, ranging from free games to mobile gaming and some dying games and console stuff. I haven't talked a lot about console stuff, but we're starting to get some new news about consoles and hardware and some future stuff. So it's getting to be exciting time again to be a console gamer. All right, guys, let's get right to it. And for our next story, we're going to talk about the free game department. Free game, free game. That's right. From the makers of Bastion, Supergiant Games is offering Transistor. This was there. I believe this was their second game that they offered. It's an isometric RPG type turn based game. I believe it's turn based because a shame in Lili Li and I'm ashamed to say this and in a shameful, shameful way shame, shame bells that I have not finished nor have I played Transistor for an extended amount of time. But it is free right now on the Epic Game Store up until May 2nd. Now, if you haven't heard of Supergiant Games or you haven't heard of a game called Bastion, let me tell you something. It was one of the best storytelling games, both sound, voice and music wise, immersion wise, graphics wise that I've ever played. The only thing I have is that the controls were a little iffy sometimes. But, man, that game shocked me so hard. I was like, I can't believe this game is real. And to this day, I still listen to the soundtrack. I still yearn to play the game. And from what I've been told by the people who get mad at me when I tell them that I haven't played Transistor, they're like, hey, Buona, you probably need to go play Transistor now. You know, Transistor is over there, especially when I get to my gaming funks and I'm like, I don't know what I want to play. I don't know what I want to play. You know, Transistor is over there. You got Transistor. And I just never did it. But if you haven't tried it and you don't own it, you can now go over to the Epic Game Store, get it for free. All you have to do, I know you have to install the Epic Game Store launcher, Epic Game Launcher. Wow. Oh, gosh. So, yeah, if you don't want to do that, if you don't want to deal with Epic, and I know a lot of you don't, and you listen to this podcast, you're like, Buona, I'm not touching anything epic for the rest of my life. Then you don't have to. But those of you who don't care about that kind of stuff can get a free game over on Epic Games Store right now up until May 2nd. So you got a little bit of time. Check it out, guys. Rock Paper Shotgun has a story. Transistor is free on Epic Games Store right now. And for our next story, we're going to talk about mobile gaming. Mobile gaming, something that has been one of the most misunderstood markets in the general gaming community that I can ever, that I can think of. A lot of times with mobile gaming, people tend to misunderstand the importance or just to misunderstand the grandiose amount of money that gets spent in that industry. This next story kind of puts a pin in that particular statement. Global mobile gaming revenue to hit 14 or hit 14.6 billion dollars in Q1 of 2019. That's in one quarter. Global app revenue soared 16.9 percent. That's almost 17 percent year over year to hit 19.5 billion last quarter. Sensor Tower reports that mobile games revenue hit 14.6 billion in Q1 of 2019, growing 12.3 percent year over year, accounting for the 76 percent of total app revenue. This comes by way of pocketgamer.biz. And Apple ruled the show. Fifty nine percent of their revenue came from the app store at 8.6 billion at 10.3 at 10.3 percent year over year increase. So 10 percent year over year increase in mobile games from Apple. Google saw a bump as well. Fifteen percent year, but they only had six billion. These are billions of dollars in one industry. One little, I won't call it a niche, but an industry that's heavily dominated by Asia, according to the article, eight of the top 10 mobile games in Q1 hailed from Asia led by Tencent's Honor of Kings and PUBG Mobile. And managed to enter the chart despite rival Fortnight. And that's one thing I didn't see in this list is that Fortnight's not in the top 10 list. Now, that's probably why I mean, I talked about just the misunderstanding of the of just mobile gaming in general in I think in the gaming community. And I'm talking about mainly the Western gaming community because I think a lot of Western gamers associate mobile games with with like Farmville and, you know, really, really cute graphics and stuff like that. And, you know, pay to win markets and stuff like that. A lot of that stuff rings of truth. But at the same time, it's a huge market and the companies that we know and love, they just they're going to they can't ignore it. And the big one that comes to mind is Blizzard with Diablo, the new Diablo that they announced that's mobile. And a lot of people, you know, took it as a joke from from the meme with the guys like, is this an early April fools joke? But from a business perspective, it makes sense. The thing that got me, this is why I was upset is that that was their big announcement at their biggest conference, which is BlizzCon. This is a PC gaming centric company. Right. That's branching out a little bit. The consoles really didn't see that much of mobile, so for Hearthstone, right? And, you know, companion apps and their biggest announcement at BlizzCon, their last thing there, their climax was a mobile app. And that's why people, I think that's why I was a little bit perturbed. You know, if they were to live with that, cool, you know, hey, you're going mobile, but that was their big thing. And a lot of other companies, you can see Activision, you can see EA, a lot of the beloved franchises like Command and Conquer and others, are getting mobile versions. Taking that universe, taking that IP and they're putting it on mobile with the whole mobile economy in mind. People spending, absorbing them, it's ridiculous how much money is spent on mobile. The same issue for marketing, like as a content creator myself, I realized that there's a lot of missed opportunity on platforms like Twitch because mobile games, you know, they generally get shunned on Twitch. You know, the audience, they usually make fun of them. Like I said, it's that Western gaming audience. Of course, the Asian people don't care. That's their, that's, you know, that's their jam. They love that stuff, they embrace it. But the Western audience, they just, they trash it. So there's a missed opportunity from content providers because there's so much money that's not being spent in marketing on Twitch. A lot of the money is being spent on YouTube. Like a lot of the YouTube content providers up there that do mobile stuff. You know, they're raking in millions of views. They're making a lot of, you know, they're making some good money there. They're probably getting really good deals with the companies. But man, Twitch, if you go to Twitch and you look up some of the biggest mobile titles, they don't, they don't match. They don't match what you would see with other games. And you would think they would. I think mobile games are easier to watch than most PC and console games. They're easier to, to, to, to kind of, you know, and easier to, to, to take in and understand the intent of the game and what's going on, even if you don't know what the universe is about. It could be Dragon Ball Z, it could be some other anime, it could be Star Trek, it could be Star Wars. At the end of the day, you probably got some units and you probably got to level them up and you can buy cosmetics or you can buy power-ups and, you know, there's probably some kind of an energy drain or something like that. And it's probably pay-to-win, you know. That's one of the monikers that mobile games get, that they're always, you always pay to advance. But people, I think I heard some, I heard some of the day from a Twitcher and it made so much sense. He said, he says, when you become an adult, it's like there's a ratio of time and money. When you become an adult, you usually have more money than time. When you're a child, you usually don't care about that stuff. You got all the time in the world. But when you're an adult, you're a working adult, a responsible adult, you know, doing other things other than just playing games all day like this guy at Twitch.tv. You have more money than time. So that's why a lot of these games are catering to adults a lot of times. They don't cater to kids all the time. They cater to adults because adults will whip out $5 to keep playing because he's not going to be able to play for another two weeks because he's going to be on the road or something. So, hey, I'll play, I'll pay five or ten bucks to play another hour or two, whatever, because I'm not going to be able to play again for a long time. It's that weird balance that game developers have to juggle with mobile gaming. And I respect mobile gaming. I've streamed it. Excuse me. I've streamed it from time to time on Twitch. I've done some sponsor stuff on Twitch with mobile games because I used to review them all the time on YouTube. Those of you who know me know about that. I even talked about some on podcast. I'm not ashamed of mobile games. But I do see a missed, excuse me, another missed opportunity on Twitch. Check it out, guys, over on pocketgamer.biz. They got the details. Global mobile gaming revenue hits 14.6 billion in Q1 in just one quarter. It's amazing. And right next door, we got some sad news from the folks over at Atlas Reactor. I would say Triumph, but Triumph is Triumph still. They were bought out by another company a while ago. And when that happened, I kind of knew this was coming. I was like, oh, great. And I heard that they were being bought out. I was like, yes, probably the last we'll see of Atlas Reactor. This is, I think it's Gimigo. Yeah, they're bought by Gimigo. So they put out a letter over on atlasreactorgame.com. So this was a heavy heart that we announced today that the Atlas Reactor servers will be shutting down. This is not a decision that we have taken lightly, but we have come to the conclusion that the game could no longer sustain itself. Mervyn Lee Kwai, Vice President Development at Gimigo and a former executive producer, Atlas Reactor was truly an innovative game built by a passionate group of highly skilled developers. It was, I was lucky enough to watch our team breathe life to the world of Atlas on a daily basis. They broke the mold of samey games and a dedicated community rallied around the title. Despite the support of a great group of fans, Atlas Reactor never grew big enough to fund this continued development. It's a shame to see this chapter come to a close, but perhaps we'll have to change our chance to visit the innovative spirit of Atlas in the future. Let me tell you, if there's one game I want to rise from the ashes, rise from the ashes is Atlas Reactor, because man, that game was good. It molded turn-based gameplay and multiplayer and abilities, like ability-based, class-based gameplay into one game, into something I've never seen before. And into an experience I've never experienced before. I streamed it for a good month, like almost straight on my channel. And I got a lot of the community members involved. And from time to time, people still ask about it. What happened to Atlas Reactor? That game was so good. And again, I will emphasize that I have not seen another game like it. And we probably never will. I don't know if anybody's gonna take this formula again, but man, I was hoping that some big personality on YouTube or some big streamer would take it up for more than a couple of days. I only know of a couple of a thousand plus viewer Twitch streamers that played it for more than one day. But I really wish it would've took off, but it didn't. Sadly it didn't. And it's gonna be shutting down. So all purchasing has been shut off as of April 17th. And let's see. For all players who have logged into Atlas at least once between January 1st, 2018 and April 16th, 2019, we have a small parting gift for you. So that's cool that they're gonna be trying to give the players something for supporting them for so long. Check it out, guys. Over on theatlasreactorgame.com. Sad news, Atlas Reactor is shutting down according to Mervyn Lee Kwai, Vice President of Development. And for our next story, we're gonna talk about some console news. The Xbox One S is getting a new piece of hardware. Introducing the newest member to the Xbox One family, the Xbox One S, all digital edition. That's right. Microsoft has decided to create a variant of the Xbox One S without a disk drive, without an optical drive. It's gonna be completely digital. I mean, if you've been playing video games, if you've been using consoles, you saw this coming. Microsoft has been kind of pushing towards that. You know, that all digital for quite some time. You know, a lot of the things that we take for granted, and a lot of things that we look at, you know, a lot of times these companies are focusing on. You know, we don't pay attention that they're adding more hard drive space, or you know, they're adding bigger ethernet ports, and you know, with wider pipes, and that the disk drives are getting cheaper and cheaper, and they're not focusing on Blu-ray, and all this other crazy stuff, as much. So the next gen, you best believe, the next gen is probably going to be light on the optical. Physical media, if anything, I think it's gonna be limited. I think future games may even be provided on the USB stick, of some sort of copy protection or something like that. I don't think physical media is going away completely. I think it's gonna be very limited. I don't think they're gonna stick with optical. And I think they might go with a sort of on-board memories type thing, since that stuff, the price is coming way down. You know, Nintendo had to bite the bullet because you know, a lot of their stuff was on that media, then RAM prices shot through the roof, you know, and they had to pay the price, no pun intended. But this is over on Xbox.com. It says, at Xbox, we're inspired by gamers. They're at the center of everything we do. We're constantly listening to your feedback and look at the new ways to provide the best value and choice in gaming. Today, we're excited to announce a new choice we're bringing to gamers. I like how they said choice. The Xbox One S All Digital Edition. Consumer appetite for digital content experience are stronger today than ever before. Gaming and technology have changed quite a bit since the first Xbox debuted in 2001. Yes, it's been that long. Coming up on 20 years really fast. During this time, we've seen digital transformation across gaming, music, TV and music, I'm sorry, movies, and closer to home, the success of Xbox Game Pass, which gives members access to over 100 great games, is just another example of how consumers today have grown to expect great digital content. Man, it's a cross promotion. You go Microsoft. The Xbox One S All Digital Edition was created for those who prefer to find and play their games digitally and looking for the most affordable way to play Xbox games. It's going to become bundled with three games, Minecraft, Forza Horizon 3, and Sea of Thieves. Not a bad bundle. These new players can join us, can get a head start on their digital collections and discover their new favorite games through Xbox Game Pass. If you haven't tried Xbox Game Pass, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, they talk about that stuff. It's going to be, it's available for pre-order today for $250, which is $50 less than the Xbox One S, which is to be expected, and they're going to be sold everywhere, pretty much beginning May 7th. Pretty interesting, pretty interesting that they're going all digital with an option. I mean, I'm glad it's an option, because if they announce that the next Xbox is going to be all digital, people are going to lose their mind, because rightfully so, I think physical media has its place still. I mean, digital is all about convenience these days, if you ask me. But I think the smarter choice is physical, especially in the console market. I think it's smarter to go physical for a lot of reasons. But that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about the Xbox One S, man, all digital, $250 coming May 7th. Check it out, guys, over on news.xbox.com. They got the details over there. And for our final story, we're going to talk about Sony and the PlayStation 5. The next generation PlayStation details have emerged from an exclusive article from Wired.com and it's kind of hard to read. I like, when they talk about new hardware, I like just get to the point, tell me what the hardware is and give me a summary. But it's like, this thing is very wordy. So let's just get that out of the way. But the next generation console is going to have a pretty, as you probably guessed, it's going to have a much better CPU, much better GPU and much better specs overall. I'm going to try my best to find the meat and potatoes of the article, which talks about what to expect from Sony's next-gen PlayStation. So the console's CPU and GPU come more powerful, able to deliver previously unattainable, okay, that's marketing. And system memory increases in size and speed and the game files grow to match. This has to take larger downloads or higher capacity physical media like this. Next generation console, PlayStation's next generation console takes all those boxes. Starting with the AMD chip at the heart of the device. So they're going with the AMD. The CPU is based on the third generation of AMD's Ryzen lines and contains eight cores. It's the new seven nanometers into micro architecture. The GPU is going to be also for AMD, a custom variant of Radeon's Navi family. It will support ray tracing and some other stuff. Now, one thing that was removed from this article, and I managed to core it before they removed it, they said ray tracing is a staple of Hollywood's visual effects and they had in parentheses a $10,000 CPU. I was just like, oh, I mean, I have a 2080 that can do it and 2080T, I don't know. I don't know if they were just confused about just the whole thing. So they took that line out, the $10,000 CPU line got taken out. So ray tracing RTX is going to be in PlayStation 5. I don't know what to call it other than PlayStation 5. Lots of other stuff. The AMD chip also includes a custom unit for 3D audio. Bunch of words, man. PlayStation VR, he says, I asked him about PlayStation VR, the peripheral. System has sold more than 4 million units since 2016. I asked if there's going to be a next-gen PSVR and he says, I won't go into details of our VR strategy today, beyond saying that VR is very important to us and that the current PSVR headset is compatible with the new console. Also, I think it's stated somewhere in here that this thing will be backwards compatible with PlayStation 4, which is good. So new CPU, new GPU, the ability to deliver unprecedented visuals. It says that that's all great, but there's something else that excites him even more, something that he calls a true game changer, something that more than anything else is the key to the next generation. It's a hard drive. Wow, we just talked about digital. The game gets last year's Red Dead Redemption 2 clocked in at a horse choking 99 gigabytes for the PS4. The longer it takes to download just about anything, loading screens, yada, yada, yada. Solid-stage drives have been available on budget laptops and he points out, I have an SSD in my laptop and when I want to change from Excel to Word, I can wait 15 seconds. What's built in the Sony Next-Gen's console is something a little bit more specialized. He says, so many words, man. What took 15 seconds now takes less than 1.8 seconds to be exact. So he's talking about the benefits of SSD, which if you're a gamer, serious gamer, PC gamer, you know about SSDs. I've been using SSDs for a few years now and I can't go back. It's just a big deal. So load times are definitely gonna be increased with SSD support. And of course, it's gonna have great graphics. At the moment, Sony won't cop the exact details about the SSD who makes it whether it utilizes the new PCI Express 4.0 standard, but he claims that it has raw bandwidth higher than any SSD available for PCs. Uh-huh. We'll see about that. Yes. As you notice, this is all hardware talk. Cerny is ready to chat about the services or other features. So look for more details coming later. So it sounds like a big, it sounds like a powerhouse. It's good because consoles have to last a long time. Just like when I buy a new PC, I want it to last like five years. And current consoles barely reach that. You know, they started to grade after like two or three years and in terms of like the technology and lagging behind and visuals and frame rates and stuff, it doesn't take very long. Although it's getting better. You know, PlayStation 2 was a good example of how just visuals weren't all that demanding back then. And then when we got to the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4, we had some huge leaps and visuals fidelity and all kinds of stuff, which the consoles begin to lag behind a little bit and you could barely get 30 frames in a lot of cases. Open world games became a lot more common, big landscapes, large field of view, larger field of view, larger view distances and stuff like that became more common. So the hardware began to choke and you have to be very careful about optimizing stuff, which is like games like Spider-Man is one of my favorites because it has a really huge feel to it and it runs really well. So check this story out guys. Why it has exclusive, it's a lot of words, man. Like I said, I didn't count the words, but it's a lot to say only a few things. I think that's, they just wanted to get, they wanted to get the most out of this exclusive because the meat of the article is probably two paragraphs and there's a lot of marketing speaking stuff like that. So naturally they have to pimp the Sony brand. But check it out, the next PlayStation, man. You getting one? And that concludes episode 135 of Game Chat with Buona. Thank you so much for coming by, please, please. Check out this podcast and others at Buona.tv slash podcast, where I run this one, Tech Talk with Buona and a new podcast I just started called B Rances on anchor.fm, independent feed. But it's a mobile bite-sized podcast that I just recorded on my phone with Little Rants. You know how I like to rant about certain topics. So that podcast is dedicated to that. I've only got one episode so far talking about D Live and PewDiePie. So you can check that out over on Buona.tv slash podcast. Check me out on YouTube, youtube.com slash Buona where I cross post this and all my other podcasts, as well as the game news and reviews that I can dig up and review and talk about all the time in short form and in some cases long form format. Also I stream almost every day except Wednesdays and Sundays where I produce this podcast over on Twitch.tv slash Buona where we hang out, play games, talk about stuff and I give you some analysis. We have fun, we laugh, we giggle and all that. So if you wanna support any and all this stuff, please head over to Patreon.com slash Buona and contribute as little as $1 a month. This is my full-time job, full-time living. And you guys make it happen. So thank you so much. Also you can purchase some stuff. We've moved over again in merchandise over to Design by Humans. I believe it's designbyhumans.com slash shop slash Buona. You might wanna check the show notes to get to real late. I believe that's it. Same stuff we had on Spreadshirt pretty much. Design by Humans, I've always vouched for their materials and stuff, they got good stuff. The only reason I didn't wanna use them is because I didn't like their coffee mugs as much as I like Spreadshirts. I think Spreadshirt had better coffee mugs. But I found out Spreadshirt does not ship internationally unless you do some crazy stuff that I wasn't willing to do. You have to jump through a lot of hoops to get international shipping. And I have quite a few of international viewers that want to buy stuff and I was like, I can't do that. So I went back to Design by Humans so that we can get better international support so you can check that out. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. We're growing. I'm noticing we're getting more and more downloads. And once I hit a certain threshold, I'm gonna be looking at some more sponsors and stuff, see if I can get some for this podcast and others. Thank you so much for listening everybody. Spread the word, tell your friends and please download the podcast. Even if you listen to it on YouTube, download the podcast, download it to your mobile device. Those numbers help me. And you can listen to it again on your mobile device. See if you can catch something you missed or listen to it while you're at the doctor's office or something. Say hi to the doctor for me. All right guys, have a great day. That's Game Chat One and I'll see y'all next time. Bye bye.