 All right, everyone, we got four big stories set for you guys today. One of them dealing with Nintendo's future, in particular, what might be happening with Nintendo Switch 2 and some other stuff surrounding the story of Switch 2. We have some updates on the PlayStation 5 Pro as well. A popular game that's really gaining a lot of attention over on Steam as well. And more, we got four big stories. So without further ado, let's dive right in because I'm sure you've seen some headlines by now and if you haven't, well, hey, here's that news. We're talking about Nintendo not attending Gamescom this year, even though they did attend last year and before COVID we're attending all the prior years from 2019 on backwards. Now, when we look at the release slate for Nintendo, we do know that upcoming in May, we have Endless Ocean Luminous along with the Thousand-Year Door. And then at the end of June, we obviously have Luigi's Mansion 2. Now, we've been waiting patiently for our Nintendo director, I guess impatiently is probably the correct way to say that. And unfortunately, it hasn't arrived at least a general one to give us an idea of what Nintendo's doing in the second half. Now, the Gamescom event that Nintendo typically attends is where they end up demoing and marketing a lot of their future games. Now, last year, they were doing that for their holiday slate of games along with a little bit of behind the scenes stuff with Switch 2 with certain developers. But that's all fine and dandy. So we fully suspected that they would be at Gamescom again this year because again, Nintendo always attends so they could market their holiday games besides the COVID years. Well, here's the thing when talking about Nintendo this time around. They're not attending Gamescom. Nintendo UK and Nintendo Germany both gave us reasons and quotes that we're gonna go over. So this is an official thing. But I do think that this all plays into Nintendo's current plans with Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2. So first let's dive into what Nintendo UK had to say. Gamescom is a great event. In each year we evaluate whether Nintendo should participate or not. And this was said by a Nintendo UK spokesperson to Eurogamer. After careful consideration from all perspectives, we've made the decision to not be present at Gamescom 2024. Players will have opportunities to try out Nintendo Switch games at other events throughout the year. Now again, I did also mention that Nintendo Germany responded Nintendo of Germany because hey, they are literally the host country of Gamescom. Here's what they had to say. Gamescom is a central event in Nintendo's event calendar. A Nintendo of Europe spokesperson told German website Games were shaft. This year, however, after careful consideration, we decided against taking part in Cologne. Instead, players can try out the games for Nintendo Switch as part of other Germany wide events. That's all fascinating. But what does this have to do with Nintendo and their future? Well, I think the general takeaway is that, one, there's not gonna be a lot of major games coming out in the second half of this year. I'm not saying Nintendo won't have anything. They'll have some ports, they'll have some remasters. Maybe we get a Wind Waker or Twilight Princess or Metroid Prime 1 and 2 or sorry, 2 and 3 I suppose. And who knows what else? There's gonna be something. There could also be smaller games. I think what this confirms is Nintendo's first half of this year is gonna be mimicked in their second half. And honestly, this might have been the expectation the moment we saw that Pokemon Legends ZA was actually being promoted as a 2025 game when people thought that would actually be a holiday game this year. That being a 2025 game, it really left the slate kind of bare for the second half of this year. Now we know Metroid Prime 4 has obviously been announced but I do feel like if Metroid Prime 4 was coming this year, they would have wanted to market it at this event. But you gotta remember, to go to games can cost Nintendo millions of dollars and so to make it worthwhile, they have to have major games to market that are going to make them well, millions of dollars. And if they don't have those major games, then Nintendo may not wanna actually participate. And when you read some of the exact words here where they said the European slash German spokesperson saying hey, after careful consideration we decided not to be part of it, then the UK spokesperson saying careful consideration from all perspectives, it really looks like Nintendo kind of looked at their entire slate of what's coming and just decided you know what, Gamescom doesn't make financial sense for us this year which tells me they don't have big games to promote and wanna put at this event. Remember, Gamescom is sort of like an E3 just for Europe. So I find this to be quite fascinating that Nintendo is dipping out and not participating. Now that being said, what's gonna happen because Nintendo is not gonna wanna leave their investors high and dry by having practically nothing coming. They already feel a little bit high and dry right now. No major games to promote. This sounds like it's gonna be kind of the worst year of Switch overall. Well, here's the thing that probably will be true but I think Nintendo has a plan and I think the plan is gonna become clear this summer because I do fully believe Nintendo will be unveiling Nintendo Switch to this summer and the moment they unveil it, everything about Nintendo shifts to that next platform and we will see games. We will see exciting stuff where it's all gonna be for things happening in early 2025 or later, AKA I do think the system will be releasing in March of 2025 and being heavily promoted this year. Now you might go, damn isn't that gonna kill their holiday sales? And yes, but if they don't have major games coming, their holiday sales were already gonna be pretty bad anyways. That being said, I don't think that's the end of Nintendo Switch's holiday sales. I do think Nintendo's got a number of things they can do. Obviously lower the price of the system, create a lot more bundles that they haven't done before. Hell, we've never had a Zelda game bundle than as an example, maybe release some more special edition systems, you know, like a themed Zelda OLED or some sort of, you know, I'm on that Zelda kick but it can be whatever. They could theme whatever they want to try to move more units. Also, I think it might be the ideal time to maybe drop an N64 classic this upcoming holiday season and that could really help them boost their holiday revenue as well and that would make investors happy as they prepare to launch a new system with an event this summer and then they do a direct in, you know, in September that does market a bunch of stuff, you know, a bunch of their ports and remasters and all that for this holiday season but then also market some of the games coming to Switch too and then they have a big blowout event in January along with a Nintendo live event in January where fans get a chance to go hands-on with Switch two games both in Japan and here in the United States. I think that that makes for a solid marketing plan and again, a lot of that is just guesswork on my part. We're just making some assumptions here but assuming that them not attending Gamescom indicates they don't have major games coming this year, I don't think that means it's gonna be a dry year for news, excitement, speculation and talk but I do think that just in terms of things to play. Look, if you really enjoyed Nintendo's first half of this year for six months then you're probably gonna enjoy their second half but if you're like me and waiting for those brand new exciting games, well, it's gonna be a dry year and I think that's what we learned at least from this news. So let me know what you think about this and let's move into something that might be a bit surprising but I'm glad we're talking about it and this is one of the reasons why I'm really glad we have this VG news segment because it allows me to talk about the whole of gaming and this would be something that normally wouldn't get attention at my channel but I wanna bring attention to it because we're shouting out an upcoming Steam Early Access game on the 26th. It is called Manor Lords and yes, April 26th it's available on Steam Early Access. The game has 2.5 million wish lists right now which is insane because this game is made by a single developer and that developer's girlfriend back in 2020 told them that she thought the game would only get maybe 7,000 wish lists on Steam and instead 2.5 million with Early Access beginning next week that is pretty insane or April 26th. Now, what's really fascinating about this game and why we're talking about it is obviously it's the type of game I'm interested in. It is a medieval city builder. You get to be a lord. You build your city up. It's even got a mode where you can go as your lord and walk through your city which is really cool. You can also combine that with tactical battles and stuff like that, expand your territory and sort of a cross between a real time strategy game and city builder which I find to just be really awesome. Maybe a bit of a tactical strategy aspect as well. And I just, I'm really excited about it. The trailers look really good. At this game holds up as well as the trailers do. Man, this game's looking to me almost as good as a lot of the other RTS games and city builders out there that have much larger teams. So I think this is really exciting. This can end up being a million. So this developer is about to have their life absolutely changed and it's through creating a game that many, many people wanna play including myself. In fact, I have gone ahead and added myself to that Steam wish list because look, I've never actually wish listed a Steam game before. This is the first one I've done it for. Manor Lords, check it out. Let me know what you think. Really glad we get to cover a game like this on VG news. This is why this show exists. I have other interests and this is one of those interests. All right, diving into more of this stuff we gotta go into, well, Moore's law is dead or really we're talking about PlayStation 5 Pro. That's right, folks. We're diving back into PlayStation 5 Pro because Sony did something that I guess should have been expected but maybe is a little strange because it only really happened due to how YouTube's copyright system works because all the articles with the information haven't gone down. We're talking about the fact that Sony ended up copywriting the Moore's law is dead video who originally leaked all the PlayStation 5 Pro specs. So what that has done is obviously confirm those specs are legit and real. And yeah, while it was corroborated by IGN and it's seen legit this entire time, there's no doubt now with Sony copyright claiming the video it's very clear that this stuff is real. So what were some of those specs? Well, just to kind of go over here there was going to be a high CPU frequency mode. So the CPU in the PlayStation 5 Pro was gonna be the exact same as in the base PS5 but you were gonna be able to increase it by 10% with this mode if you wanted to 3.85 gigahertz which is pretty cool. But if you use that mode it actually would lower the GPU performance by 1%. This is likely just due to the increase in heat and dissipation. They decided to downclock the GPU just a smidge. But that is GPU performance 1% decrease over the increased GPU performance which was reported in his video to be 33.5 teraflops which is a huge leap compared to the 10.28 teraflops of the PlayStation 5. But teraflops is a misleading metric in measuring this stuff especially with AMD here too because AMD's technology has evolved a lot over the years. So while that seems like a three X jump over the original GPU which would be massive it's actually more akin to say 17 teraflops if you want to think of it as a traditional same architecture jump. Unfortunately it's not the same architecture or maybe fortunately because using newer architecture is usually a better thing. AMD's architecture has had massive shifts in the GPU space. So the stuff being used in the PlayStation 5 Pro is using newer architecture than what's in the PS5 which means that the teraflops are not one to one. In fact Moore's law is that, and basically said that the GPU would be 45% faster with rendering which gives you that indication of how much better 45% that the GPU really is not that three X performance that the teraflop number might tell you. Gamers, we need to stop staring at teraflops and acting like that tells the whole story. It absolutely does not. Now that being said there was some other stuff that ended up happening because while the Verge got access to I think the same documents that Moore's law did and gave us some additional details and those additional details are a little interesting anyways. It's nothing major but just a few little specs. As an example the memory is gonna be increasing speed from 448 gigabytes per second to 576.7 gigabytes per second which is roughly a 28% increase. In the documents it does say you might be able to get more than 28% increase depending on the circumstances but that is roughly the numbers that it shows and again these are development documents. More than that because the system is more efficient developers will also gain an additional 1.2 gigabytes of RAM essentially, system memory, increasing to 13.7 gigabytes available for developers versus the 12.5 originally there and the documents really spend a whole lot of time just talking about ray tracing and how they really want people to take advantage of the ray tracing with this increased power and performance and all of that. Basically the idea of this entire system existing is to take better advantage of ray tracing and to use Sony's internal resolution increasing system. They're a resolution bump. So I think that that's important just to consider that this is what Sony's really focused on is hey we have this upscaler to get higher resolutions, 4K as an example and we really want ray tracing to be a thing. Also the documents say that any games that are seeking approval after August should be approved for both PS5 Pro and PS5 so take that for what it is. I don't know what's going on. That's just what the internal documents report are they say. And again, kind of BS that Sony could copyright videos but again it's only because of YouTube and how YouTube functions. They're not actually striking the channel as far as we're aware. They're not going after them. They're not attacking them and they can't take out all these editorials because of freedom of press. Freedom of press to me does extend to YouTube but hey good luck fighting Sony. It's really expensive. So hey Moore's Law is dead. I think it's just gonna let it go but it does prove that Moore's Law is dead does have some legit sources. We've actually cited him in the past over switch to related stuff. So it's important to know that while he doesn't get everything right he clearly has some legit sources and Sony basically just confirmed that. So I was actually sitting here editing the VG news and we went through all of our stories today originally just for but we need to add on a fifth bonus story here since the video hasn't gone out yet because Nintendo has announced a brand new indie world happening tomorrow. I got the details right here. So student tomorrow 417 at 7am Pacific time for roughly 20 minutes of announcements and updates on indie games heading to Nintendo switch in 2024. So we will definitely be live streaming that event tomorrow and look the indie world happened. If you guys remember this rumor we had originally that the guy kind of backed off from Brazil. He put out there that we were supposed to get indie world last month and then a Nintendo Direct this month and now he believed that we weren't gonna get an Nintendo Direct anymore and the latest update was there wasn't gonna be a Direct this month or at least he didn't think there would be but now the indie world's here. So what does that mean for a Nintendo Direct? Well it could mean that potentially there's still an Nintendo Direct gonna happen. Could be next week. We have gotten several indie worlds a week before a general Nintendo Direct or the Nintendo Direct might have got pushed and maybe everything got pushed back a month and it's indie world this month Nintendo Direct in May and then maybe a Switch 2 reveal in July and I'm throwing that all out there because all of those events were tied together from an original rumor from Brazil who's been a reliable insider. I find this just to be really fascinating. Again, this could mean nothing. It doesn't mean that there's a Direct happening this month or next month at all but it does mean that we are getting an indie world. That's really exciting and you know what's really, really exciting about this particular indie world? You know a game has been getting rated all over the world? Hollow Knight Silk Song. You know what game doesn't have a release date but it's supposed to be coming to Nintendo Switch and is an indie title? Hollow Knight Silk Song. For once folks, I don't think we are over exaggerating to say that we should actually expect Hollow Knight Silk Song to do is a release date information tomorrow. Woo! Man, I feel so great to be like man, that's not actually like an over exaggeration to be excited. So that just makes me extra excited for this indie world tomorrow because that's what, dude, Hollow Knight was amazing. I love the hell out of it. Beat it a long time ago. Really glad to dive back into this. I actually played Silk Song back in 2019 at E3. So like, man, I'm just, we have an indie world tomorrow and this might indicate Directs are coming. So cool stuff, cool, cool stuff. Doesn't mean that Direct's gonna necessarily, if it does happen, have a bunch of new stuff in it as we saw with Gamescom not happening but still, there you go. How to slip this one in there back to the end of the video. That being said, we gotta dive into our last story because Atlas has an event going on next week. You guys know Atlas. We all love him. Shimigami Tensei, Persona and others. Well, Atlas has gone ahead and announced a new live stream for their upcoming game, Metaphor Refantazio on April 22nd at 6 p.m. Eastern. It's gonna be a live stream event. We may or may not react to it, we'll see. But the game is due to release in 2024 and chances are we'll probably get a release date in this event and it's a role-playing game developed by Studio Zero, which are the folks that basically handle all the Shimigami Tensei games. Now, that being said, the game's concept is about exploring the themes of the ideal reality while overcoming anxiety and it has an interesting setting as well, dealing with a medieval fantasy world that mimics the contemporary real world. The game has been development for at least eight years with the original announcement dating back to 2016. We don't really know much else about the game as details have been pretty scarce. They haven't given us a lot of updates for it over the years, but hey, I guess that's what next week is for and we're gonna have a blowout. Just wanted to shout this game out because, look, Atlas just makes good games and they deserve more attention than they typically get. I mean, they were just celebrating, what is it, what is it, the Persona 3 reload due selling a million in the first week across all platforms. It's the fastest selling Atlas game of all time. One, congratulations, that's really exciting. Or also two, only a million? Man, Atlas games deserve way more sales than that. So I just wanna make sure we're giving proper attention to that game. You guys are awesome. Even if we don't end up live streaming it, we'll obviously give you all the news updates right here on VG news the day after it happens. So thank you guys for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed this episode and I'll catch you guys in the next video.