Sup everybody, and thanks for sitting down for the ACG side podcast where I'm going to answer questions about gaming, discuss some of the topics of this last week, week or two, I think talk a little bit about some stuff that's happened after last Friday when we did the major podcast.

So if you have questions for these, you can always ask them either in the comments here on Spotify or iTunes or in the Discord or just send me a tweet on Twitter.

First up, RAC is asking, do I have any reviews planned?

Well, I got some planned, but getting codes actually been quite difficult.

December 1 of the things that people, I think when you look at how games are handled, don't really recognize is that for a lot of companies, December isn't the greatest time frame for them to release anything.

They're doing a lot of the PR and promotion for games in the later year or the prior year.

There's the Game Awards, there's other stuff that occurs in December as well as the actual target for your entertainment dollar is spread around other entertainments in the Christmas time frame.

And there's a lot of disposal possible income you may see when it comes to games and you may see for December and you may think, oh, this game might do really well in December.

I wish somebody had release it.

But you got to realize that there's other things that other topics, other gaming, you know, board games, hobbies, industries that a person might be interested in.

And so that gaming dollar doesn't spread as wide.

So you don't see a lot of video game releases in the December timeframe.

Even though I've asked for it at times and I've joked around about, I wish a company would try it out because I see your Black Friday to your Christmas Day as being a pretty huge part of the year.

But obviously I think we've seen that that's just really not necessarily the case anymore.

So at the same time, because there's not a lot coming out, there's not a lot to cover.

But I do have a bunch of previews on the way.

You've been seeing one, about two a week, I think average.

I've got some coming up that are actually quite interesting when it comes to what the game is doing.

The last one was Phantom Blade.

I had to I uploaded that and then had to down down turn it off and then download it and change something that was on it and re upload it.

So if you got an alert and you haven't seen that 1 yet and you thought maybe I just deleted it, I did, but you can go back and you can check it out now.

So phantom Blade 0 is quite interesting to me.

It's not really a Dark Souls kind of game at all.

It's not really a black myth kind of game.

It's its own thing.

And I think that that shows how difficult it can be to categorize games right now, even in discussions all have somebody will be like, hey, what type of game is it?

And you're like, well, it's sort of its own thing, You know, it's not necessarily anything that overlaps with anything else a great deal.

You'll get something that overlaps a little bit with the Dark Souls, overlaps a little bit with a Metroidvania.

And it's easy, I think, for us to say, OK, it's a genre or a sub genre.

But I think when we're looking at games now in the mixing of different abilities in games, the different presentation formats we get in games, it can be quite unique.

Look no further than like old CRP GS, where for the most part they were either turn based or real time.

You did your stuff and there is usually, let's say an interlude at the starting, maybe a middle CGI and then an ending CGI.

Now you have something like Baldur's Gate, which has cut scenes that are in game for the most part, as well as some that are just CGI outside of the game happening at all times.

And a lot of people wanted CRPGS to really change their genre when that stuff started to happen.

Because of course Baldur's Gate, regardless of what people think, wasn't the first to do that.

But it's quite difficult to really just continually sub generalize things.

So when you look at it, I would say a lot of these games I'm covering for previews, they're primers as well as previews.

There's information that I've found or adjustments that I think need to be made towards the expectations of the games.

And some of the previews, you'll hear me say we've heard this, but I'm hearing this, that kind of stuff.

I always like to do them if I get a chance.

And lately I've had a great deal of chances to really put some together.

So that's why I'm doing them.

Hopefully you guys understand that, you know, that's just because right now there isn't a lot to review and even what I'm asking for is held off because a lot of PR companies are also going to be on vacation for I believe two weeks.

So that's your long answer.

I want a software suggest something real quick and just get this out of the way.

You guys know me.

I'm always looking for hacks on whatever operating system I'm using.

And one and again, no sponsorships here, but one I've always talked about was everything.exe.

Really happy with that.

Basically it's a search that can either replace or go alongside Windows Search, but it's got its own database that it builds of your files and then just does a differential change when those file locations or names either aren't there or have been moved.

So your search results are insanely fast, way faster than Windows.

However, randomly in the middle of the night.

Somebody suggested I take a look at another one and this is it's almost as good.

It might even be better in the long run, as long as you don't want to run something else that's in its own window all the time, and that is something called Fluent Search.

So I randomly installed this and was like, here we go, it's going to be another one of these search parameters.

Nothing's going to beat everything.exe.

Well, I got to say it's space and alt to open it up.

Or you can just have it in your taskbar and click on it and it opens and it searches everything.

So you can turn this off so it only searches your hard drive.

But you can, yes, have it actually search online, but you can have it search your clipboard.

You can do all kinds of crazy shits in the options and it is lickety split fast.

It is ridiculously fast.

It also uses its own database and that database checks against its main database to where it's finding files.

So those file updates are just insanely fast.

Again, faster than Windows.

And I was messing around with Fluent search for the last I would say 5 or 6 days and I found myself not yet removing everything.exe because I do like the way that works.

I actually do like the large database style window you get or File Explorer let's say style window where fluent search is a little bit more of a search bar that extends.

It gets larger as you get results and again, you can go in there and turn different results off.

If you don't want a certain searching certain places, you have to search the web as well, which I know a lot of people don't want in main window search.

I've found that turning that off in main window search inhabited on influence search is actually really nice because then I just sort of know which one I want to use.

But well, I don't want to use the Windows 1.

I have been blown away at the speed of this thing, absolutely stunned at what it can find and how quickly can find it.

And also the idea that when it gives you the results, it also gives you options like open it in the folder, open it in the parent folder, open the parent folder, open it in command, open it in whatever other terminals you have installed.

So it's almost like its own right click context that exists in fluent search.

And so far that thing has been Primo.

It also offers a bunch of customizations for your look if you want to do that.

But anyway, I just like to use those kind of things because it's somebody with a ton of files on a drive.

One day I might be looking for a movie file and typing that in, you know, final destination or whatever.

Maybe.

I have AD and D RPG that's also final destination in Windows Search will take forever to parse both of those, but everything.exe and Fluent Search don't.

So anyway, that's another one.

If you don't like the way everything.exe works, you should check out Fluent Search.

You might end up loving it.

And like I said, somebody with multiple hard drives.

It's a goddamned godsend.

Moving on from there, so I want to talk a little bit about the news.

Amazon sold Amazon Games Montreal to Ubisoft.

Amazon is going to be handling much of the publishing and financial coverage and advertising support, so I want to point that out.

This news popped, I believe it was yesterday, and people were like, oh, that's interesting that Ubisoft bought somebody because they've been paring things down as they split.

But be aware that in the old days it used to be 5050 percentage for your development in your PR.

So if you spend 100 million, you were pretty much assuming you were going to spend 80 to 100 million in your PR and advertising support.

Because the the more and bigger the game is, the more you want to spend on PR and advertising and getting eyes on it.

It's a little less than that probably now with digital services.

But Amazon keeping a hold of that and actually handing, handling some of the coverage and advertising.

That is a unique element that I think makes sense now of why Ubisoft got it.

Because the price point there probably would have been, you know, another one, half another 3/4 of the cost over again if that wasn't handled by Amazon.

And it seems to me like Amazon divesting themselves of some of these game studios, moving things around and other companies doing the same.

It doesn't really surprise me that they were looking for a sale.

This is a MOBA that Amazon is purchasing and or sorry that Ubisoft is.

And Ubisoft believes that it's one place that they don't have something and they want to sort of hit it.

So the idea of getting it, let's say for half price upfront and then having the company actually handle the advertising for the most part and a lot of the financials, it's quite smart.

You don't see that a lot of times.

You'll sometimes see publishing, but that won't include the advertising to be more like just publishing, like just getting it out, you know, put it in on stores, stuff like that or a split.

This is actually interesting because to Amazon it probably doesn't cost them a ton and it keeps that team together.

Now under Ubisoft, it also brings back some of the people who had left Ubisoft to work at different companies who then came together at Amazon.

And that includes the heads of some of the major games that you to work at Ubisoft who who left and are now back.

And it sounds like all of that is kosher.

Nobody seems to have any issues with it.

It seems like they're pretty happy to, you know, have that adjustment.

I think it makes sense too, because when you realize that the grass is greener on the other side, what you don't realize is they may just have watered it.

And that's one of the things I want to point out with these game development changes where you see leadership change and people like, Oh my God, it means something bad over here.

It means something good over here.

The bad, it's possible.

The good, though, I think good entices more than bad.

What I mean by that is people have a tendency a lot of times to mire themselves and they'll be like, yeah, today was a bad day, but tomorrow might be better.

But if somebody says, hey, here's a bunch of money and then really you feel like it's a new place and new money and more money.

However, what happens is the grass is always greener, just is really just like I said, indicating it's been watered more recently.

And that's really what happens is it seems financially that oh, Amazon's doing this and that let's jump to them.

So somebody jumps to them and then doesn't realize that, you know, Amazon maybe six months down the road will do financials and decide not to do it.

This happened when Ninja went to another streaming platform that seemed like it made total sense.

Got paid like 50, $1,000,000 to do it, and it was Mixer.

And then less than six months later, Microsoft looked at it, cancelled it, and we're just like, pay him out.

You know, it doesn't make any sense.

It's like we're the ones, you know, deciding that we want to change.

And he ended up getting back to Twitch in one of the best deals, I think financially you'll ever hear of.

So, yeah, that kind of stuff can happen all the time.

Not too surprising to see Ubisoft, you know, look at an area where they don't necessarily have a game that they feel is strong or maybe they feel this game in particular is strong and wanted to go there.

Some other news this week that was awesome.

Dead Island 3 is being made so Dan Buster released their financials, showed some financials and it indicates that Dead Island 3 is coming out as a big fan of Dead Island one and two, I can't wait for this.

Think about Dead Island 2 for instance, though it sold 1,000,000 copies in less than three days.

I think it had sold like 2,000,000 by the next month and within about a year it had sold three.

Those were the sales, right?

But they also offered it in different ways.

I believe that was on Game Pass.

There were some digital trials and over 10 million people played that game.

And then and that was in 2024 and I think at the starting of this year, No, no, no, it was a couple months ago they announced 20 million people had played that game, 20 million.

So the sales are probably higher than the three, which is a great deal of sales for that game, especially as many developmental issues as that game ended up having had so many development problems, it was ridiculous.

But also with Game Pass, they get money from that and then you have all these free games that people might jump into.

There's a DLC that is just absolutely insane.

It did really well.

I think they stated within the first month that it already made its money back.

So that's crazy.

I mean, that is absolutely insane.

20 million, that is nuts for the amount of people playing it and different ways in which you can get it.

Even if it just means jumping in and playing it, you know, that can help the developer show that hey, there's people interested and must have worked because like I said, Dead Island 3 is coming.

And I would assume a Dead Island 3 because two had those issues.

And if finally got made, if finally got put together, got finally at the right developer, you're looking at Dead Island three most likely having a much shorter development period, probably half the development period, if not a fourth of the development period of Dead Island 2.

But also, I would assume probably a slightly larger footprint.

I think Dead Island 2 was great.

I really liked it.

I thought the Co-op was a blast.

Fun game.

But we'll just have to see how that all you know boils out.

I'm excited as hell for it though.

Vapor Vapor says explain time dilation and why it's important to Exodus and why you're excited for it.

So I I did some previews for Exodus that are coming up and as some primers about some of this information.

But I'll just go over a little bit of it.

Let's see the first thing time dilation when it comes to why it matters in the whole story, because I've also been asked about aliens versus evolved humans, and I know why people are asking about that.

So think of Exodus like this.

I think it's the year 20.

It's the year 2200 on Earth.

And there's a climatic problem of some kind.

They don't really say exactly what it is, but everybody needs to leave Earth.

And so they create arc ships to escape Earth and they go to the Sagittarius cluster.

So the Sagittarius cluster 16,000 light years away.

OK, so it it they're going to the cluster itself that is many thousands of light years.

And as age is relative to the speed of light, the Earth and the planet, you're going to age at a much faster degree than the people on the ship.

So think about it this way.

If you really think about it, when you have some glorious graphics on your screen, you can only update it at a certain FPS, right?

Your FPS goes lower and lower.

The faster, the more you want, the lower and lower.

So when the ship is traveling at .99999% the speed of light, it's data that it gets about age is very slow.

It's only updated.

Age is really only updated on that ship at a slow speed.

I'm describing this in game terms versus like all the physics involved, because I think for a lot of people it's a little bit easier that way.

So that super fast to thing that you're demanding do super fast things can't be updated at the same speed as everything else.

So while the Earth and the planet that they're going to or the planets in the cluster they're going to are aging incredibly fast because they are slower, the spaceships are not.

Now this matters for two reasons.

One as each ship leaves, unless they're leaving at the exact same millisecond, years can pass.

The faster you go towards lightspeed, the less data for age is updated on your ship, the less the people age on the ship.

So the ship gets to the Sagittarius cluster, the first of them, and sets up a planet and then begins to expand.

And as each arc ship ends up going there, the same thing can happen.

Your main character is on the last arc ship to arrive, which means it's 10s of thousands of years later because as everybody else was actually in lightspeed and traveling, this last group was the last to actually have left Earth or there was a mistake of some kind, but I believe they were the last to have left Earth.

So when this player character ship arrives, they arrive into a cluster that is actually not only populated heavily with many planets populated, but also evolved humans.

Those are in the form of celestials, so you might have seen those in some of the trailers or pictures.

They're actually evolved humans because hundreds of thousands of, well, not hundreds of thousands, 40 thousands, 40,000 years has evolved them into other things and split them into different versions of these celestials, meaning their technology.

They landed.

And even though it might have been a year or two years or three years in relative terms for that last ship to get their ship prepared and take off, the actual other races have been stopped and in the Sagittarius cluster and able to expand for 10s of thousands of years.

So when you arrive, there's celestials.

There are also aliens, but we'll talk about the celestials.

Mostly they're evolved humans and they've had 40,000 years to spread and do things and evolve and change and create technologies.

So what happens is the player character's family ends up arriving and one of the characters in the game world ends up taking over a planet, becoming ultra powerful, and they create basically children by merging celestial DNA with human DNA.

And there's a reason why, because basically what happens is every later arc ship that arrives usually ends up at a planet that's got some issues and they have to send out these travellers and these travellers go to the celestials, old planets, planets they've left, and they want to gather artifacts.

Now the problem is, is if a human touches the artifact that basically get blown up or destroyed, it's a little bit like you would say one of the stones in The Avengers movies.

And so by merging, getting some of that alien, well, we'll call it alien, but it's really just celestial DNA up inside of one of these children that ends up allowing for them to touch it and allows for them to bring it back.

So there are certain characters that have this ability and you are able to go out and do these travels by going to other planets, celestial planets where you know these items are there and able to pick them up and use them and able to bring them back to your planet and help update your planet.

Now the reason why this matters isn't really up to this point that really just solidifies the background, the story, the lore that not only are there possible alien races, but that a lot that looks alien is just what a human would look like evolved by 3040 thousand years.

However, what's interesting here, let me describe it as this.

Let's say you start out on your planet and you decide to go on your first trip and it's light years away.

That information on that planet will be old for your heist.

So let's say you know that there's some kind of attack you need to do.

There's some base your, your family tells you, hey, you need to go on this trip and there's some base.

Well, that data, whatever data they got won't travel faster than the speed of light because they don't have that ability yet or at all.

But it can travel very close to it.

But that means that planet, its location, everything will have aged a particular amount by the time you get there.

So what I'm interested in is how that's taken into effect because what if somebody tells you, hey, there's a planet a light year away and, and it's got laser defenses and it's got these automatons that are on it and we want you to go grab the celestial item there, the remnant.

So you jump in your ship, you travel there, but the planet is aged hundreds of years and now they've got quantum, you know, lasers that fry your nuts, right?

Because that's kind of stuff has changed.

I don't know if the developers are handling that side, but it would be an interesting plot point.

What they are handling is going back.

So you go on your trip, you grab your item, you come back and you're trying to help your planet.

Basically all these planets can be moved it within the orbits of stars.

So some of these different planets were not in the original orbit that they're in now.

They've been moved into the Goldilocks zone and apparently one of the planets you're on is like this.

So you're going back there to bring these remnant, these items back to help fix some of the problems on your this planet.

When you go back, the age of the people there will change.

So they might be 100 years older, they might be 50 years older, 60 years older.

So that means if you take a companion and the companion just had a child, that child may be a grandmother or grandmother's mother when you show back up a grand grandmother or a great great grandmother or a just an old fucker.

It just depends 'cause they might have chosen not to have kids.

We don't shame, so all this stuff can change.

So when you come back, not only were will your life change and be different and the people that you know or see will be different, but so will your companions and those people on those planets will have aged that you go back to.

They state that they're going to write this in and one of the things that I'll talk about in the preview, but I'll talk about here that could be quite difficult for this is not only really just saying, OK, how does it affect the traveler themselves?

Now you can see this replicated when you watch, I believe it's a secret level on Netflix.

They actually have an episode directly around Exodus, so you can go check that out.

And they show a father searching for his daughter.

And by the time he finds her, she's old and hurt.

And it's it's a pretty cool idea of how time travel works.

Not time travel, sorry, time dilation works.

But what I'm interested in, what I don't know if they'll be able to handle is really the replication of the actual planet that you're going to evolving.

Which is why I believe there's probably a chance that they're not going to really take into account, let's say the places you're going to having changed either.

The reason why I say this is as we see political, you know, upheaval in different nations change.

You see entirely different focuses for the civilian populace as well as the political and the military one.

What we see in the 1960s is dramatically different than two thousand 20s.

So if you're 60 or 70 years later, what if you show up and nobody believes in the travelers anymore at all and you show up, there's nobody there to talk to you.

You know, what are they going to do to make sure that when you go back, you're not relearning about this planet every time?

Because that may sound cool, but Can you imagine how really ultimately confusing that might be to come back to your major planet?

And it's completely, utterly different each time because people built on top of this and built on top of that.

So we're going to have to see how that's handled.

Are they going to handle it like Clockwork Revolution where it's a complete change and but maybe there's some structural agreement between the different time periods?

We don't know.

The reason why I'm interested in this is because it's a lot to bite off.

And I think that that's cool.

You know, we always hear this stuff about, oh, these guys never try this or these guys are always trying that, or Indies do this, or AA's or AAA's, whatever.

This is a AAA game.

They are trying something that is distinctly different and the idea and how much they're able to parse that is what's going to matter in the long run.

I'm excited for it.

I like the idea of the time dilation.

I like the idea of, you know, the differences between you and your group and everybody else's.

Why you're going back.

Does that continue to drive you forward?

What if you show up and somebody's already fixed the issue back at your planet and you're like, dude, I just wasted like my child.

Or, you know, maybe you have a kid and you wasted their entire life and there are, you know, some kind of middle-aged adult by the time you come back.

They also state that the player characters or the player character is going to have a bunch of companions that can go with them.

And it'll be interesting to see how that works out if those player characters actually, you know, what they have, what their experiences are, that kind of thing.

So a lot of stuff that we're going to see, we're also going to see some characters that can go with you on events and down, and then also ones that stay in your ship or are more, I would say, of your peripheral style of party members.

So yeah, Exodus, it's got a lot going for it.

It could be absolutely a mess.

I personally believe they have a plan for their release.

They've stated it was 2027.

I think that could easily be pushed to 2028.

I'm going to do a preview primer in the next couple days.

You guys will be able to see all the data I have on that.

There's a lot going on in that title and you know, I'm pretty excited for it see through 25259259.

Is that an ampersand?

Anyway, wants to know what I think of the RAM situation and if there's been any changes in the last two or three weeks.

I don't think there has.

I think technically we see a couple rumors that are going on around tech.

The prices continue to rise.

I will say this, I talked about that this this morning actually with another group.

When you look at how games are delivered to gamers, I do think that there is a slight chance that you'll see streaming come up.

You know, Ubisoft just announced that they're handling more streaming because of the Microsoft deal that went through where they basically took on the streaming of some titles from Microsoft due to the United States government having some issues with monopolization.

But and, and, and that will definitely end up increasing.

But I do think that we're just seeing many ways to play your games and we're seeing gamers that as long as they're smart and they understand what they're getting, what make play games that you know technically aren't on the best equipment and may just ultimately have a little bit of a settling effect.

If you think about it this way, hardware chasing is pretty normal.

And RAM is always been really one of the last things you see people updating.

There's a lot of stories that oh, I'm not going to get RAM.

RAM is fine.

I only need 16 for this, but I need, you know, a ton of RAM for a video card or something like that.

Well, that actually isn't true.

We've seen it.

Now you do benefit from getting a bit more RAM and we have for a while, especially with all the stuff we do, many people who game don't just game and many apps that people run while they're gaming do take or SAP some of the available RAM space, whether it be Steam or Discord you are in.

You are ultimately using RAM on your PC.

So having a little bit more RAM has been beneficial for a while.

Having a bunch more is not as beneficial unless you're somebody like me who's doing a lot of things at the same time.

So we've been chasing for a long time video game cards.

You know, we're looking at the video cards.

We're like, I need this certain amount of RAM, I need ACPU and a GPU that are performant in these ways.

It's unfortunate because for the longest period of time, RAM wasn't really talked about.

It was like, oh, you need speed, you don't need this, you don't need size or whatever.

And so a lot of people held off and then what's happening is because they held off, we're getting a run on RAM, meaning we're getting a larger run than the actual allotted price really is reflective of.

It's so high, but people are still buying RAM.

And then that's actually forcing the RAM out of the channels.

And now when we have some companies not making RAM anymore, you get issues.

But we do have other companies coming forward and talking about putting together RAM fabs, so and RAM or RAM lines.

So that'll be cool.

We'll just have to see how it goes.

But be aware there's prices, you know, they'll probably raise to a certain amount and then sort of stick at that amount where, you know, different companies feel comfortable with different ways.

But I also do believe we will start seeing a run of different deals that are starting to occur where you're going to get a company who maybe has old RAM in the channel or when additional RAM is entered back into the channel, some changes there.

People been asking why this is.

Is it just AI?

Yeah, most of it's, most of it is AI, But it's also the fact that so many companies, companies opened up at different times.

So you have like open AI who's like, hey, we need a ton of systems and RAM.

But you also see other companies with other ways in which they're doing inference or which they're doing LLMS, which they're doing AI that is not as RAM required.

And we're also starting to see a change in AI.

So something to be aware of, 99% would probably be LLMS, your ChatGPT.

And then additionally on top of that would be your image generation.

Image generation is notoriously the bad guy right now.

LLMS have sort of lost the bad guy status.

Oh yeah, they hallucinate, whatever.

But people seem to deal with those fairly well.

And the idea of copywriting and stuff like that.

There's some lawsuits, but people are like, you know, a little less perturbed by that than art.

So we'll say, we'll go, we'll say eighty, 2080% is probably your GPT normal, 20% is your image generation.

And you have some websites that of course, you know, specialize in that like mid journey.

However, what we are seeing, especially on the LLM front is a massive, massive changeover from different styles of models that require less RAM and a change to how it's all used.

You're starting to see, well, not starting.

This has happened prior, but you're starting to see more of the idea of offsetting different things, not only to RAM, but NVME.

You're basically, I'll say NVME versus SSDs because people will get those confused, but your NVME, which is your M2 form factor, that kind of thing.

And those are still plenty fast.

You know, you can get ones that are above 10,000 in speed where an SSD can top out, you know, 5-6 hundred, I think for, for a normal SSD, right?

It might be faster than that, but you get my drift.

It's a, it's a magnitude in change.

So we're getting changes to LLMS that are trying to figure out the, the RAM situation situation, the actual and the video memory situation.

Training is also changing.

We're starting to see companies using different styles of training where they can train with a great deal less memory on their larger models.

So it's, it's different companies are trying different things, but there's also world models, which is completely different than what we're seeing right now.

And a world model, there's already been one or two preliminary ones released, I believe.

I haven't tried one, but a world model is basically the idea of the future that gets away from what you're seeing right now and what you're hearing about right now.

That is a world model that's actually trained on the world itself versus just writing and then trying to figure out the world from that.

And world models are the ones that you probably see if you maybe follow meta, where they have a, a, a model that can do little bits of video graphics and create a world as you're walking around through it.

And they're starting to actually show more and more this.

I think they showed something just yesterday, something about two weeks ago.

And world models are probably the shrunken world model would probably be something you would want in your futuristic, you know, self driving cars, maybe as a hypervisor, that kind of thing.

We'll just have to see.

But we're seeing changes in that, which might mean less memory.

We're also seeing different models that require less memory because they split it between multiple cards.

There's all kinds of different stuff that you can do and we'll see that actually accelerate for a reason.

Here's one of the cool things about this.

Yes, the consumers getting hammered by RAM prices and the unavailable of, you know, the unavailableness of that RAM.

However, there are actually LLM slash model creators that want to create models that are also waiting in line.

So what they're doing is they're looking at the models themselves and trying to figure out ways around that.

So this is a 2 edged thing where people forget that side.

They forget that not every model company can say I want the RAM and I get it today.

In fact, we know that's not not the truth because Meta is waiting, multiple companies are waiting to get RAM and GPU's and all that kind of stuff.

So as they wait, they also look at other ways to not wait because if they figure that out, they'll beat everybody else.

And so we're seeing that already.

So I don't know if that means a lowering of price within 2027, probably not in 2026.

I think your RAM is going to be expensive and I think that there's ways to mitigate that, whether it be streaming, whether it be not updating your RAM or side updating your RAM.

I know a lot of people when they buy RAM, they hate to get like double the RAM at the same speed.

They think, oh, if I'm going to buy RAM, I need to buy super fast RAM.

You can go online even with AMD chips that are more RAM specific than Intel.

The difference is not going to be something that's going to absolutely be a travesty.

If so.

If you're somebody who has for whatever reason 8 gigs of RAM, if you had that in Windows, I don't know what you're running, but if a 16 you want to get 32 or something like that, you could look at a side upgrade.

There's going to be people trading, there's going to be all kinds of stuff and they'll be deals from companies, whether it be, you know, PC deals, stuff like that where they try to get you into it.

But yeah, it's going to be a rough time.

It's going to be a rough time.

But be aware that even though it's being sucked a lot into AI, there's other places that are being impacted as well.

And because of them wanting it all, it actually behooves them to figure out ways in which they don't need it all.

Be aware of that.

This is just a little bit of business on the side, but I like to talk about that stuff so that people understand sort of how the future goes and why they may see a change that we don't really anticipate.

You know, it's it's sort of not necessarily as deterministic as we think it is.

And Huber Schuber says Carrick, I saw somebody complain that you were alter negative about the Game Awards right after somebody complained that you guys were too positive about the Game Awards.

What do you think?

Which one is right?

Which one is wrong?

Pros and cons of being right and wrong.

I can't give you I can't give you pros and cons of being right and wrong.

I feel like that's pretty much just all cons if you're wrong.

But yeah, I saw that as well.

It's just one of those things, man.

You have to be aware that if just because you don't like something, if that really does match up as a complete opposite with somebody else, there's really only two ways to take it.

One, you take it and you're comfortable in your own skin and you're like, well, I disagree with Carrick.

And then there's people who just aren't comfortable that I don't know any other way to describe it.

They're just not comfortable with whatever they're saying.

So they get mad at everybody else and it's like you're talking to somebody who's is probably one of the most positive towards gaming people there is and is excited about gaming.

So when I say I was ultra disappointed in it, I mean it.

And it's funny because I saw somebody else saying something about, yeah, Carrick.

I was surprised he was.

I was surprised he was negative about it because they showed so many trailers for new games.

Admittedly most was CGI.

And I was like, OK, that explains it.

Like, I don't, I feel like you shouldn't be surprised.

It's like that's the way it goes.

A CGI trailer means nothing to me.

A CGI trailer should mean nothing to you.

A CGI trailer, it doesn't even look at how bad it was.

Johnny was saying that they didn't even show what was it fantastic races or something like that in or he didn't know what races or whatever was was going to be in a Divinity 3.

And they were shown in that CGI trailer.

And no disrespect to him because we corrected him right there.

I was like, no, that was actually in there.

And that goes to show how easy it is when you watch a CGI trailer to not pick up on anything because not only one is just a CGI trailer, meaning it's not interactive, you can't stop it and look.

But secondarily, it's just a lot of times a visual like idea of the atmosphere.

So he's somebody who was watching the trailer at the time and didn't see it, you know, it's and maybe doesn't watch him multiple times.

I watched it multiple times and there, I'm sure there's stuff I still missed, but it's ACGI trailer, man.

I don't care, you know.

And yeah, I was towards that event between The Muppets, the CGI trailers, all that kind of stuff.

Yeah, I wasn't impressed.

That's just the way it is.

I mean, somebody may like Muppets, I guess, and CGI, but ultimately what it is is a single event in time that other than talking about it like with you right now, you know, I don't talk about it much.

I was in the Discord and somebody was asking me like a bunch of questions about the Game Awards, and at one point I just had to be like, listen, I mean, you can ask questions, but I don't have much more to say.

Like I'm tapped out.

Like I don't get engaged in those in depth for a great deal of time unless it's gameplay.

And there wasn't a lot of gameplay for the games that interested me or enough to really discuss.

Usually I've been through enough of these events that they come and go and I'm excited all year round.

I think that maybe people are still reacting to these events as one offs of the most exciting time and they're not to me anymore.

There's so many events.

There's directs and there's the independent games that we see videos for.

Microsoft does the indie, you know, developer, I guess you would say show and then PC Gamer, they do a show and Devolver does a show.

Sony does multiple shows a year.

Microsoft does multiple ones a year.

Nintendo does multiple ones a year.

So I no longer really fat fascinated by that particular show, by one particular show.

So yeah, it it was one of those things, you know, it didn't surprise me.

It was pretty much exactly as we anticipated.

And I honestly was a tiny bit surprised.

Well, you know, I wasn't surprised.

I was going to say I was surprised by Johnny and Silver's excitement, but there wasn't a lot of excitement.

They were just saying I was, I was pretty, you know, they were pretty happy with that event.

But what I found out was it's because, and once we talked, I realized it's because they fixated on one or two announcements, one being like Lords of the Fallen 2 and then for Silver it was more Warhammer stuff.

So they took the one or two games and we're like, OK, the entire event I've enjoyed or it's worth it.

And which Silver explained quite easily.

He was just like, I don't don't ever stay up for these.

I did, and they showed some Warhammer.

So to him, as somebody who doesn't see a lot of them, it was like, OK, that was worth it to see Warhammer, which I understand.

If they had shown something else, I might have been more interested.

Maybe we'd just have to see.

I was sort of interested in the Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic game.

But hey, it was a chick with a lightsaber who turned it on and it was CGI.

What are you going to do?

I will say that as a big fan of Knights of Old Republic's time frame versus, let's say, the New Republic or well, nothing against the Vader time frame, I did really enjoy that.

But I've always felt that the Old Republic has a feel to it that's just different.

There's something about it, and I'm sure somebody will be able to describe it eloquently.

I'm just off the cuff here, but there's something about it that I like.

It's a more mechanized age.

Vibro blades pop up a little bit more and you there's the ability, I've talked about this, there's the ability of wonder.

See, here's the problem that I've always had.

And I talk about it with sci-fi.

I talk about with fantasy.

They're like, hey, here's the last dragon, here's the last Jedi, here's the last, here's the last.

There's only two left, blah, blah, blah.

And the prequels, at least you got to see a lot of Jedi, right?

And whether you like that or not, I do like the wonder and the chaos of more.

And I would say with the Old Republic time frame, at least most of the parts of the Older Republic time frame that we're probably going to visit, there is more and the chance is a little bit higher.

Even role-playing D&D, if you were trying to role play Star Wars during the Jedi phase that we saw and grew up with, with Vader and Luke, you would always have people going, well, I want to be a Jedi, but I mean, apparently there's just one fucking lightsaber out there or everybody gets killed or whatever.

And there was always this sort of weird democracy that had to pop up for somebody to, to be able to play a particular thing.

And some games didn't even have the really the rules for it or they engaged with it later, or they were like, oh, no, you can't do this.

It's about the world around it.

And while that is fine in and of itself, that's just my explanation for why Knights of Republic's time frame is exciting to me.

Next up, Dio.

Oh, Ronnie James.

Yeah.

RJ Dio.

OK.

Ronnie James Dio says, what kind of keyboard do you use?

Do you like clickety clacks?

So the key, let's see, what do I use?

I use a Rocat and I use two RK, I think is what they're called.

RK is the brand.

They're very clickety, clickety, clackety.

The Rocat is not so much.

Rocat feels really good.

I'm not a big believer whatsoever and spending a ton on a keyboard I can masturbate myself.

I don't need to do it over a keyboard's price, so if it feels good, it's good.

I also have a membrane keyboard for 5 bucks from Microsoft which I use religiously.

Got first place in a couple Modern Warfare games so obviously it works well enough.

But you know the better mechanized ones will give you a faster response time.

But technically, when you start looking at the refresh rates in FPS we play at, you are getting some pretty diminishing returns regardless of what the hardware industry wants to sell you.

It's so interesting too, because the hardware industry would love to sell you these things.

And then they get people who are around other areas of gaming and hardware, quite intelligent.

But then you'll hear them talk about a keyboard or whatever and you're like, Oh my God, this person has been taken in with this fakery that's gone on or this.

It's not really even fakery.

You could say it that way, but these negligible returns, these insanely low returns.

Also, while I play a lot of games, I do a lot of work on my PC, so I need one that does sort of double duty.

So what I do is I find one that feels good, and it can be a $2.00 keyboard or $200 keyboard.

I guess I've never owned a $200 keyboard, but there you go.

And I I got to give a shout out man, because Rocat surprised the hell out of me.

I've talked about this before.

I had gotten 1 from a company at some point in the past and it was in a box.

Probably been prepared or maybe now that I think about it, maybe they gave me one and then I bought 1 to return that 'cause I like to do that if a company gives me something and they'll give you stuff without you asking sometimes and then buy one.

Bet you that's what happened.

But so I got this rocat and my keyboard died.

I ended up spilling MAM 2 on it, which has been the ultimate death to a couple keyboards.

So while it was drying out, went back and was looking for my membrane.

I found a box of Rocat and I was like, well I'll check this out.

And I plugged it in and God damn, I was quite surprised how good the Rocat keyboard felt.

I was like damn, this keyboard just feels genuinely really good and it's not super clicky.

It's not not clicky and it's got some shortcut keys, but I don't use those at all.

I use a separate USB.

There's some keyboard, I guess you'd call them add-ons that I've got for cheap or USB add-ons for like 10 bucks off of the Amazon that work really well if I need a shortcut for editing or anything like that or games, I guess don't really use them in games, but if that came up.

So Rocat of the Clutch is the other ones.

I think they're arcade clutch.

And you know, in all honesty, man, I saw him on Amazon one time and super sale, they were like 2999 off from 89 I think.

So I bought one that was I think it's a 98 or a 95% size.

I'm not a big fan of any kind of reduced size keyboard because I do need all the keys and you know, yeah, they're shortcuts on on them, but I just I like a full size keyboard with a numpad and in particular the numpad because I use the NUM numpad all the time.

So I got one of those and honestly it might have been a step up from the Rocat.

In fact, I would say it probably is.

Some accuracy was increased the way the game, the way the games or the typing felt was increased.

So I've ended up going with the Clutch brand keyboards on 2 PCs and then the Rocat on the main PC.

So basically I have APC that's in the living room that's a super low power one for streaming TV shows and stuff like that.

And then I've got a second office in another room in this house that just lets me sit down at a monitor and basically pipes in from the main PC and that one is a clutch.

And then at my main PCI have a Rocat.

And so those are the ones I have.

I would say in total, I've spent probably 99 bucks in total on keyboards in the last 9-10 years.

And I think, and that's adding the Rocat.

If you ignore the Rocat, then probably 50, no 40 maybe yeah, maybe 40 bucks on keyboards.

Haven't spent a ton and been quite happy with a mouse.

If it matters, I think it's AG5O2X.

Yeah, it's AG5O2X.

I've got two of those one in one Office 1 here.

I like the form generally not a big fan of the DPI soft button that you have, which helps for like scoping and games, but it's really set way forward and the way I hold the mouse is back and so I can use two of the side thumb buttons and then the two main buttons and that kind of stuff.

But I can't really take advantage of that that one.

What I use it for, weirdly enough, is Discord touch to talk.

So in Discord you have a lot of people in there and we're really, we try it still doesn't work, but we try to get people to understand that rampant background audio in voice chat is one of the worst things that can happen.

It's super uncomfortable for everybody involved.

It is just not fun to deal with.

So haven't push to talk on a mouse is insanely cool because literally I've got up, got a pop or whatever and had the mouse in my hand, just pressed a button when I wanted to talk and sitting down typing, whatever.

Just have a button that's just for that.

You know, I'd actually be interested to see what everybody else used.

We don't talk about this too much.

I don't like to get into anybody's personal what you spent on this or what you spent on that kind of thing.

But if you want to pipe off on what keyboard and mouse you have, feel free, or what game pad you end up using the most.

For me, I use a generic or Xbox.

I mean, I do have a couple.

I got a flight Digi and I've got a, well, I got rid of the game, Sir, but I had one of those got some generic Power A's, but you know, that's the way it is.

What else has been going on in gaming?

Been enjoying the hell out of double exposure, replaying that Life is Strange double exposure because we now know that there is a life is Is Strange three technically coming and that was an interesting deal.

Basically, the company took on Life is Strange double exposure and said regardless of the sales, we want our deal to indicate that we also get to make a three and they got the acceptance.

So regardless of how double exposure sold, which I don't think it's sold great.

They're going to have a, you know, Life is Strange 3 and you know, can't I can't wait.

I I actually enjoyed the hell out of true colors, enjoyed the hell out of Life is Strange double exposure.

We were also talking about Bloom and Rage, which, you know, sort of a spiritual successor, I guess.

Just was not as much of a fan of that one as I thought I was going to be.

I was actually pretty excited.

Well, I was genuinely somewhat excited for it.

It looked like it had been a little bit losing its way in my brain or maybe losing the connection with me when I saw more of it.

But you know, I was sort of excited to check it out.

And then when I played it, it definitely did not resonate with me at all, which is, you know, it's fascinating to know what games are going to resonate with you or not.

And that one just, yeah, it didn't set the world on fire for me.

So here's a shout out.

Let's talk a little bit about Dom.

Dom's probably sitting back or somebody sitting back going, did Carrick really just say, let's talk about Dom?

But no, this was a conversation I had with one of our Discord chaps named Dom, who's talking about the different monitors in which he had, how many different displays he had.

And we were laughing about how easy it is to add a display, whether it be APC display of the normal monitor type, whether it be ATV, whether it be tablets using one of the various different Blu-ray or sorry, Bluetooth or wireless ways in which you can do that.

And I always wanted to know, you know, what is everybody's perfect sort of idea of how many monitors I guess to have.

I have a pretty big monitor, so I can use one and split it up with any of the 55,000 different, you know, programs that allow for splitting.

But sometimes having one on a second is quite nice.

What I've been telling people though is, you know, regardless if you have multiple monitors, check out virtual desktops on PC.

You know, it's built into Windows 11.

It's a one click button to switch between desktops and you can have virtually an unlimited number, I think of virtual desktops and it actually works quite nicely, especially if you're working on something that having a second monitor might fuck up whatever you're doing, whether it be background reporting, whether it be metrics, whether it be a a full screen game and go into the virtual desktop system.

Man, it worked really well for me.

And it's basically just simply the same way that the second screen works, but it's in the same screen.

And by hitting, you know, a shortcut, you can do your own shortcut.

I think mine is alt left and right allow for me to go up one or down one desktop and it's instant.

It's just like boom, switches to a different desktop and you can.

So you can have like your Premiere in one Windows Explorer and another to look for images or look for whatever data you're doing.

Another one that's got GPT, another one that's got ATV Show and all this stuff.

The cool thing is it pipes in any audio and stuff like that into all the desktop.

So if you've got ATV Show playing on desktop 3 for some reason and you're normally watching something, but maybe you have a database running on a different desktop, you can just alt tab over to that one, check it out and then jump back.

But you can obviously, you know, have more real estate with a second one.

I always tell people if you're going to do this, you know, at first, see if it's going to be useful.

If you have a big tablet, use one of the free desktop extending apps that are out there that lets you plug into Windows and try a tablet.

I've actually found that a tablet works much better as a secondary monitor for me personally than a secondary monitor.

Now be aware, I've got a secondary monitor and I do use it, but I'm saying that what I've found is sometimes I won't turn it on because I have the tablet under it on a dock and that tablet is not small.

It's 11, maybe it's 11 or well, you know, small to some people, but no 11 to 13 inches.

So it's a quite sizable dock and the ability to use that and touch screen is actually quite good.

Secondary screens, I actually have found a great deal of usefulness having it be touch.

So the tablet really taught me that I have it closer to me than my main screen.

So I can look down, see Discord, whatever, join Discords, move around, bounce around, see stuff by just touching it versus moving the mouse off the the the primary screen.

But I do have that secondary monitor, but I'm always interested to see because I think he said he had five or something crazy like that.

4 Maybe, maybe, maybe it was 4.

The most I've ever ran was 123456 as a joke, you know, setting up in my house.

But that to me was overkill.

Really what it was was just having, you know, ATV show on one an app and it's apps on another and then the main screen was doing one thing and then the other two were probably just showing desktop.

That is one thing I've found that is nice though, is a tablet having that touch and, and getting up and just walking around the house and being able to interact with Windows right on the tablet as if it's a, you know, a mouse and walk around, do different things with that tablet.

Then come back down, sit it down, put it in its perch.

But anyway, regardless of that, I'd like to know how many, you know, monitors that you like.

I would say I've heard a lot of people say that their efficiency raised dramatically with a second screen and then progressively from there goes down.

And that seems to be somewhat generally indicative of the typical experience of gamers slash workers.

But then I have heard a lot of people who have been enjoying 3 where maybe they have entertainment on one, work on another and then another running, you know, programs or something like that that they have in the background or whatever.

I don't really need that kind of thing.

But you know, having three on has is definitely not something I'm alien to.

It just depends on exactly what I'm doing.

When you're running a Discord or you're streaming, it can actually be sort of nice to have all your streaming stuff on one monitor showing, you know, your Discord, what you're streaming, that kind of thing, and then your main monitor, the game.

That's actually quite useful.

It definitely does seem with Discord to hit the FPSA little bit.

You notice that there's more issues with sync or more issues with getting that screen on to Discord sometimes because Discord's a little hedgy in that way.

Discord would happily tell everybody in the game industry that you're on text editor, You know, it'll just be like, this is the game you're you're working in Comet or you're working in Evernote and you'll be like, no, I'm not, I'm playing the game.

So it's not the smartest app in the world anyway.

But yeah, how many?

How many many monitors do you have?

How much do you run from what?

Where did you see your efficiency go?

Or do you do it just for games?

Anyway, that'll be it for me.

I hope you guys like these.

If you do give it a thumbs up, you know, comment wherever you can check out the sub stack where I drop some news, some behind the scenes, my thoughts on stuff, as well as YouTube.

You'll be seeing more previews and like I said, getting back to reviews when code is available soon.

Peace out, everybody.