Gadgetory

hello and welcome to awesome Hardware episode 171 I'd be if you missed side a you can check it out on Paul's channel Paul's hardware or youtube.com slash Paul's hardware or you can find the link in my video description this is a technic News live show thing that pollen I stream every single Tuesday at 5:30 p.m. Pacific time right here on Twitch on TV / awesome hardware or our respective YouTube channels which as I sort of already alluded to is broken up into two halves so Kyle made the news [Laughter] lousy sounds like something in our Google Doc with a bitly link that I'm afraid to click on link know what you click on it maybe you should click that into it sure can you is it I mean I could what even is it it just looks like is that just a link to our stream anyway you you continue doing that Paul area Walmart Nicole tech spot or hello Walmart pulls its overpowered gaming desktop PCs from the sale following following quality consist do we have already proven this false that we proved this false on my half of the show but maybe not entirely because it is now updated with a newer price ok well it is low Wow well hello embedded right there Kyle's hey take that gamers nexus is 2.6 million view video yeah who's on the text box article he wrote this text bar what's up Cohen Cohen thanks for the article yes thanks for featuring Kyle's so appreciate it we're getting immediately distracted wait wait wait what this means is we need a breaking news ticker at the bottom of our breaking finally change other words so and stuff like this comes in we are ready we are ready for the for the taking but yeah we're wait before we dive into that sure we drink beer on the show occasionally because yeah word of warning and you should advise device or service I have a new Blaster design for for mouse mats as hoodies and we have the new awesome hardware design that was a fan made its glorious it's so cool I like it I'm gonna buy one for myself actually I'm you buy two mugs and do a double blessing that who doesn't want that great Paul store my button by the way - Paul bit with tech tech and then yours is Paul soccer net for me he also sells some amazing things olive green and quality classic thumbscrew logo and all of green now available on Green Bay both of our stores right now have holiday sales if you're buying for your loved ones for the holidays 10% off orders over fifty twenty percent of orders over 100 on both of our stores and if you happen to buy awesome Harbor stuff don't worry because we its we split the profits for those so that's that's really cool that's true also shout out to our store manager John he's awesome and we love him we love him also a shout out to sell who's our good friend moderator in chat yeah I'll be nice to him or he will pen you and we give him full authority to do so yes also uh we have a charity lion hillary charity let's charity livestream oh my god December 8th that's this Saturday in four days four days holy smokes we're gonna be doing a 12-hour charity livestream Paul and I my gum just we're just gonna be gaming for 12 hours straight raising as much money as freaking possible for for some kids in need I think last year we raised over $13,000 it's kind of crazy we could raise that much money for actually sick people by playing video games the only real OHS my mind only reason we can do that is because of the generosity of the viewers at home why of course and the only way that you could do like help us anyway is to tune in and tune in and sig member and to give you guys a bit of an intent and incentive a little bit of extra you know possible reason to kick in hmm we're gonna have actually three computers three we're giving away three are you giving away two I'm not giving away two I'm giving away one so am i but the second one was for NB 67 oh that's right yeah yes yes that's right we had a fan meetup this past weekend MB 67 aka lenticular yeah we interact with him like during the show and on all the time is names Mike he's from San Diego he sent me a mini computer and a damn case I haven't picked up picked it up yet it's in my p.o box but we're gonna get one exactly Justin that's one section way assistant I built yesterday and then we're going to be giving away it's just in the Kyle built already built it nope I'll be there breathing I will be giving away the dtw one wall getting away the Walmart PC I'll be it a modified one customized by myself to make it infinitely better with a revamped motherboard and some other really nifty tweaks that I'll have an idea I'll have a video out on that very soon that's for the stream yeah excellent it's it's a good PC now so many reasons to join us and watch and also enter those giveaways coming up on Saturday and thanks to all of you guys who do that December 8th December 8th December 8th we will be screaming yeah well we also will stream to awesome hardware right here where you're watching this you'll probably be able to watch both streams there and then we're also going to be individually streaming as Kyle and I play on our individual twitch channels to write my twitch channels Paul's hardware mine's bit wit KY KY ok someone else took bit with Kyle screw them but we'll have links to all that and then he means hello we're not streaming to YouTube she's lying I saw some other people saying ripped friends maybe maybe she's lying Vsauce you're such a liar I have a computer Jeff uh yeah I mean people are still commenting in chat and stuff so it's my is this it's my laptop plug what my laptop actually what the hell you just restart this is that extension cord a plugged into not actually that makes me really think that I should have another beer oh yeah what do you want we got a fat tire sam adams winter variety I'll take good fat tire sure why not alright um so uh yeah come out to the stream we'd love to see you there and there's gonna be hella prizes you for the children all right let's good luck our first story here is from Nvidia themselves from the horse's mouth about a new battlefield 5 update an GeForce driver that is going to improve DXR rate racing performance by up to 50% this has been all over the place on the web this morning the windows update oh geez always listening thanks computer I wasn't using you right now or anything at least it wasn't the streaming system so today that actually launched a date December 4th the doesn't work hasn't been tested I don't know I don't know about that but the battlefield 5 tides of war chapter 1 overture update brings new single-player war story and a new multiplayer map and a bunch of other stuff but mainly it includes the DX r ray tracing optimizations that improve performance up to 50% which which which also suggests that RT x gamers can now enjoy ray tracing at over 60 FPS garlis of which GPU that you're using now they have a fun video here with Gino choy which is a dev Technic engineer from Nvidia and yessing which is a rendering engineer from a more dice yes and then you Ladon coded out gula duck from from from dice and they talk about the various optimizations that they've made with with drivers and the game itself - to bring higher performance to bring improve performance for people who are using ray tracing who have this feature enabled so it's actually kind of interesting they're saying that RT X xx atti users will see a 60 FPS performance a little they'll be able to yield about 60 FPS or higher at 2560 by 1440 with DX DX r ray tracing reflections set to ultra which is actually pretty sweet before I feel like they were probably you know hovering around 30 or 40 FPS so that's actually a massive uplift r-tx 2080 users will be able to get 60 FPS and over with a 1440p resolution using medium DXR retraced reflections so I'm sure that's that's that's not too far off and then our TX 2070 users will be able to see 60fps albeit at 1920 by 1080 so you have to dump down your resolution a little bit and that'll be with medium DX our ray traced reflections so at any rate you can see 60 FPS at you know with with medium or higher ray tracing so that's actually not too bad the video features that these guys are talking about oh and that was not plugged in to anything okay how long is it and could it reach over there okay yeah mine's fine I I have a blade Pro so I have at least five minutes of battery power I should actually be fine for the rest of the the rest of the screen I'm gonna turn the membranous down a little bit so we can we can just like plug in every 10 minutes I will just keep siphoning power do people are people still saying unlisted because my video is still almost oh your videos unlisted not anymore well there's your servers alright it is now nice unlisted yes I'm a dumbass who sometimes enlists my videos thank you very much I mean this was such a problem in YouTube chat that it carry over to twitch chat it's fun it's nice it's nice to see how one platform can help the other get our attention and I feel like you know Jesus Christ dude you're drunk Jesus Christ go home you're drunk well you know what soon enough I will be streaming from the self even selves pissed off about effing time mad as well so I'm as mad as you are you just found out about this the same time I did that's why I'm so mad and yet the rage yes so quickly and yet so how I'm able to compose myself oh don't know I'm just I'm yeah I mean I guess okay sure all right sorry about that guys you know it's awesome hardware you expect absolute belligerence to take over any sort of reasonable functionality of the stream at any moment so thank you very much for for understanding but hey you know what some some pretty cool uplift here that we're seeing with the the dice update the beat of the battlefield 5 update and some geforce drivers they've managed to increase performance in this way without sacrificing quality by a number of ways shader optimization they're also implementing variable rate racing so they're only like you know creating only placing rays where they matter so maybe when you're looking at a specific scene or when you're looking at a specific part of a scene those those rays will be rendered a lot more than the surrounding rays it kind of reminds me of what's the actual term for for VR when they're only rendering the actual part that you're looking at ghostbusters it's not ghostbusters something similar to that though so I would never ever people say rate racing I think of Ray from ghostbusters this is varied I'm sure that everyone thinks that - you're probably not the only one you go you gone yep no totally totally the same ghostbusters I got you so you know there they found some optimizations they've removed a bug apparently that was tanking performance during environment destruction so anytime a building would blow up a primary tank that was due to a bug apparently that they have since removed foliage and grass has been optimized and that sort of thing so yay and I think this goes to show that ray tracing is still so early on it's still very much in its infancy there's gonna be a lot of optimizations that will need to happen in in the near future that will hopefully uplift the performance continually and I don't think this is the last time we're going to see ray tracing get some serious gains in the performance field yeah it's a it's really early developers don't even know what to do with this technology and I said so I feel like the longer that it becomes the longer that it's here the more the better that games will be optimized for it and eventually we can see performance actually get to more mainstream friendly levels because right now you if you have if you have an RT X 2070 for example you're not really gonna be able to take advantage of ray tracing unless they really optimized the hell out of it which it looks like they're beginning to so it's gnarly technology I think it's also a technology that Nvidia was very quick to get out the door to be the first ones there and to say hey we have this cool thing that the competition doesn't and there are certain pros and cons to that the pro is that you are the first on the scene the the con is that you may not have optimized it fully to the best of its capacity or best of its ability at that moment so I feel like obviously the market is very impatient when you're advertising when your whole product stack is banking on a single feature like ray tracing as very much was demonstrated by the Nvidia press conference people expect it to work just like like it's been here for years like it's been here for a decade and that it's fully optimized and it's not that's the fact that it's not and that's not the consumers fault for thinking that way in fact it's it's really Nvidia who should who should be able to bring a full product to market that operates exactly as intended the way that they've advertised it to and I think I think it's just going to take some time so what do you say to those who would say that they're passing the game and getting a 50% in performance improvements that that would clearly indicate that they were premature in their promotion and publication of ray tracing in general because obviously it was ready if they're able to get this much performance improvement just a few weeks after or like a week or two after the launch of the Windows Update that even enabled you to turn on ray tracing in general in the game then I mean from from my perspective I might say well I think they could have gotten a much more positive response from the community with this if they hadn't changed from GTX to RTX because of ray tracing if they hadn't said ray tracing ray tracing ray tracing it just works and all the stuffs that Jensen said it it's sort of eased off on that a little bit and said like here's our next generation graphics processor here's the performance improvements we're expecting and the more fundamental areas of framerate and improvements that people would expect and by the way it's also got this ray-tracing feature it's not ready for the mainstream yet but it's there for developers to work with and make games and maybe as time progresses we'll see a lot of cool games that implement this for our realistic experiment right experience yeah Heather if they had done that rather than B ray tracing our TX ray tracing ray tracing are you proposing that Nvidia be honest and time Jay tell it how it is I'm just saying what a preposterous pitch oh we talked a little bit about on my half of the show but I I don't I don't know if anyone from Nvidia watches this show maybe from time to time but like I totally agree musician ined and messaging is is very important for stuff like this and I am I am I am definitely one who would say that I think ray tracing is good I think ray tracing is definitely something that when you look at the future of video games will be implemented more widely and lead to more immersive experience and more realistic rendering of you know virtual 3d environments absolutely but obviously right now and I just tested this the other day if you're playing with a $1200 r-tx 2080 TI and getting 70 or 80 frames per second in battlefield 5 at 4k and then you turn on ray tracing and suddenly your framerate drops to 20 to 25 frames per second and it's choppy mess that you can't even legitimately play you're like well this feature that I was sold on that was pitched so much I'm not really feeling right now so you you get disappointed so I think the way that's set up and the way it's sold the people will you know will affect their response to it when they actually try it and I think that that was 10 some what then Nvidia wouldn't be dealing with this whole like the r-tx on our TX off me meme and everything ring and Rob performance is good enough for most gamers let's let's be honest you don't need fancy new technologies for most gamers most gamers just want higher FPS they want smoother frame rates they want to rock up 165 Hertz monitor you know at 1440p Nvidia could have just come out with that right out the gate and like you said just said you know we have this ray-tracing thing it's kind of cool it's not fully developed yet and whatever but it's coming and these cars are gonna be able to support it yeah because at the end of the day isn't performance the only thing that Nvidia really needs to prove themselves over AMD like AMD doesn't even compete in the high-end space right now why did Nvidia have to harp so hardly on rate racing when the performance isn't even there from the competition what was the point you know that they're getting ahead of themselves a little bit maybe get a little cocky maybe be trying to up the prices of their cars a little bit more in trying to find you know what we can't sell these cards for you know these cards are faster but we can't sell them for the insane prices we want unless we add something more than just performance let's add great racing to the mix and say that it's way more equipped and wait way more ready than it really is so you know they all greedy there but I completely agree with you Paul it is it is quite a situation that people are you know it's unfolding in its own way but the good thing is how that if you bought an RT x card not all is lost optimizations are coming they're here and they're gonna continue this is just sort of tip of the iceberg there's gonna be further improvements and further optimizations for ray tracing and things like that DX are that you will start to feel a bit more of your money's worth I think as time goes on and that was also gonna say just that the market has spoken to some degree when it comes to Nvidia and I would say this is a combination of things both the reaction and response to the RT X launch but also they're sort of miscalculation with speculating with the future of the GPU mining market and the reason they're having to take a lot of losses right now for that yeah and and this was this was last month in the middle of November that Nvidia's stock took a big old a big old dick it's recovered somewhat since then but it still definitely nowhere what it was so you know I have to imagine that internally that they are reflecting on their decisions of last year and maybe figuring out what they could I don't know do different or whatever but yeah it's a hard time of the year to drop your stock that that dramatically tail right right into the holidays but let's move on we have a lot more to talk about here we have an article from just buy it Tom's Hardware talking about a Athlon 200 GE overclocked 23.9 bina hertz buy them with the new msi bios hey this is insane this is a youtuber tech epiphany initially posted a video on thursday showing that he had overclocked an Athlon 200 g 55 dollar this is a 55 dollar locked multiplier GPU it's a dual-core CPU it has a lock multiplier but yet this youtuber uploaded video saying he overclocked it to 3.8 how how did how did he manage to do that well it was it was an msi bios that had apparently upgraded or apparently supports the 1.0.0 point 6 firmware that inadvertently unlocked the chips multiplier so this is not an official support of overclocking from msi msi has since released a statement saying we do not officially support overclocking on the Athlon 200 GE it just so happens that this BIOS update unlocked the multiplier and now enthusiasts can go in and tweak it so that's that good actually kind of cool you get some free performance there it's it remains to be seen whether or not this this freedom this new freedom will will continue to exist or if a future BIOS update will sort of can it or whatever but you could always revert back to that BIOS update and overclock the hell out of it if you wanted to so it's kind of interesting Tom's Hardware found that when overclocked the 200 GE performance improves its standing amongst other Intel competitors more so in single threaded performance than multi-threaded because it is you know only limited to two cores and four threads so far for thread processor yeah two core dual core four threads so you know more so on the single threaded gains less on the multi-threaded performance but it still is is able to sort of compete with some CPUs on the Intel side that it otherwise would get beaten out by so that's kind of cool um it specifically had some high marks in photo editing video conferencing and video editing within the PC mark 10 benchmark so that was actually kind of cool it beat out some intel competitors there it still trails behind elsewhere and other and other in other tests and stuff there were no gaming tests interestingly enough in this Tom's Hardware article I would imagine that you might get a few FPS gain from from from such an overclock how could you not however I don't think it would be enough to beat out some of the some of the more expensive some of the more pricier more pricey Intel CPUs just as Intel Intel Architecture at the moment is just a bit faster for gaming more higher instructions per clock and that sort of thing but it's interesting that this is the we don't really talk about we haven't really talked much about the Athlon 200 G it is currently the only non overclockable Zen based model from AMD so it's actually you know every other every other SKU that you know that that's then based is overclockable except for this one I guess until now if you have that BIOS update so that's kind of interesting it doesn't even have it's very it's a very basic chip as well it doesn't even have support for things like precision boost so instead of like you know gathering you know what what kind of temperatures and and power limitations your CPU is that it'll just run it at a static 3.2 gigahertz frequency so it doesn't even have precision boost and things like that the fact that you can overclock this thing now to 3.9 gigahertz potentially even further if you had like some exotic liquid cooling solution or whatever is actually kind of cool and could maybe give you a bit more value to to a rather cheap CPU the III when I spotted this in the past few days I was initially kind of like oh that's really cool if there's a 55 dollar processor that you know you can do do a few tweaks to this reminds me a little bit of like some of the early skylake stuff and some of the be clock unlocked bios's that you could do with that but there's some definite caveats and limitations to this particular thing I mean if you're in a serious budget and you're really limited and like fifty five dollars for CPU makes a lot of sense to you then you can consider it but you have to bear in mind you cannot overclock the memory with this so you're stuck with 2666 memory and we all know or probably know that faster memory is Verizon is very helpful yeah for the overall performance and then you're you're basically stuck with these msi BIOS releases they did a BIOS release for pretty much their entire motherboard line-up I believe for for both 300 series and 400 series motherboards that enables this however it means that if you want this you're gonna have to use that BIOS and so that means that any future updates any future at G's updates that and AMD launches you're not gonna be able to get there if you do that then you'll you know you'll lose the or go the overclocking ability that you had so right it's kind of cool but it's pretty Miche if the memory thing wasn't an issue that or if like msi was saying yeah we're just british allah we're just gonna leave it this way now then that would be a little bit more yeah interesting to me but yeah i mean friend it for someone who's who's looking to dig in there and do some tweaks and only wants to spend 55 bucks on a processor then there you go it's gonna breathe new life into your chip yeah next up we've got an article from overclocked 3d about Silverstone's smallest the world's smallest kilowatt class PS use the strider Platinum pts nice this is actually pretty impressive a thousand watt and 1200 watt units are now available in a hundred and forty millimeter long ATX form factor uh-huh do you realize like I first I thought these were sfx power supplies they are not they are ATX power supplies but a mere 140 millimeters long that's a very small power supply commonly found with like 650 watt - you know 750 watt units but with kilowatt level performance guys a thousand watt and 1200 watt model damnit Silverstone is just insane to me I'm angry why did you wire the blue poor girl the power PCI Express graphics power plug still all blue fine we have we have we have power supplies shrouds with PSU shrouds we have basements it's 2018 Paul so I usually find in most case I used the Silverstone Strider platinum series power supply on my wife's Mini ITX system yeah and I had to physically go in here and like modify the spray seems it's like color it to try to like be it so that blue doesn't stand out it was quite annoying there's there it's not like they're saving money by doing this there's plenty of blue peg connectors like that they could swap in there just damnit Silverstone just frustrating that doesn't need to be like that just make it all black its power supply I agree I would have zero caveats about this entire thing but like damn it if you if you're building and like specifically in a situation rather like I needed a really short power supply there's probably a higher chance that you're building something where your space limited and maybe you're doing water cooling or something like that sure and you're concerned about aesthetics and you don't want some random-ass blue shit in there yeah yep messing up your entire thing so that's true I love this power supply that's true I'm amazed that they're able to fit 1200 watts into this thing but ah okay I like how they've managed just like this industry first achievement and you're like fuck that blue though yeah I just credit everything there's a ton people building like a smaller system with a really cool water cooling loop who's like oh I'm doing black white and blue we're like like blue is part of my theme that'll match but I mean for anyone else like that it's not even a blue that really matches anything either it's not of course Sarah blue it's not if it was like a corsair blue because you know of course here has like like their vengeance line sometimes love that blue lighter blue it's kind of like a baby blue it doesn't even match it with anything it really it really doesn't but you know what I would hope that if you have a thousand watt PSU that you're probably plugging in a bunch of stuff you're connecting a bunch of peripherals and things like that and that hopefully the other cables around those ports would sort of mask would sort of mask those hideous ports a little bit but if what I said a little fan is here and the fan is facing down then this would be the most obvious vector on near power so that would be the first thing just saying but also if you have a PSU shroud that's PS Rouge but all right continues that everything there is to write PC Gamer has has been talking about the steam bug that recently cut some indie dev developers revenue in half just kind of a big deal if you're if this is how you make a living this is your life you this is your job you make a living selling videogames that you develop this is a huge deal people many developers have been claiming that in October there was a bug that allegedly crawled into steams discovery feature causing it to recommend only large popular games instead of more relevant games that's it that's an issue indie developers took to Twitter actually posting graphs like the one ones that Paul showing up here posting graphs featuring the units sold which showed a dramatic drop right after the October bug was introduced developer Jake Burkett said that full price sales before and after the October bug have nearly halved or they have in fact have revenue has dipped further since their most expensive game has dropped to 36% of previous unit sales a huge huge game kingdoms and castles huge indie game their designer Peter egg Scott said the daily sales dipped by 30 to 40 percent when the bug appeared and their sales still have not recovered so whether or not this is a bug things have seriously been a detriment to to steam to indie Steam sale indie games view sale developers lately and there has not been a solution in fact a lot of these developers have reached out to steam personally and have received zero response it seems like steam is staying completely silent on the issue and they are not issuing any sort of official statements they're not replying to any developer's emails there seems to be zero support whatsoever zero voice coming from steam so is there also seems to be a significant amount of indie developers or lesser-known developers who are concerned about discoverability on Steam absolutely yeah who have not yet been established um how do you break break into like such a saturated market when there's a bug that's preventing you from even being advertised to the to the masses or to anyone to any steam user in fact when it's really just the top 1% of games game developers who have their games you know front and center it's it's really kind of a it's kind of broken right now the developer threat on Steam right now is 55 pages long there's this huge ongoing discussion about it the issue has been going on for two months developers still don't even know if it is in fact a bug maybe the after-effects of a bug or just a feature that's been designed to sort of shine a spotlight on different kinds of games so at the very least what they can all agree on is is that valve is not discussing the algorithm they're being very tight-lipped about the whole thing which reminds me a lot of YouTube you know I felt like there was a moment there after the ad pocalypse where I wasn't getting like our channel wasn't bringing in the same amount of ad revenue that it had been I mean and you noticed you know when you've been doing it for years and you see sort of a trend like okay we're you know every month we make at least this much every month we're making at least this much and then something happens and everyone's talking about it hey there's this weird thing and then you noticed your ad revenue just tanked by 30 40 50 percent you you're like what the hell I haven't been in my formulas the same I haven't changed anything I haven't tried to reinvent the wheel but yet my revenue is down a significant amount and it impacts your daily life and then you know I've tried reaching out to YouTube in the past hey what's going on here is there anything that I'm doing wrong they could be doing better and to not receive a response is just as it's the most sort of frustrating thing ever you feel so helpless and you know what can you do and these are people's livelihoods we're talking about you know Paul and I make a living doing YouTube videos these developers make a living selling video games on the biggest digital platform for games right now which is steam and if there's a bug that's preventing them from getting their game seen by the masses that is going to impact their daily lives to a huge degree so it's quite unfortunate but let's move on hopefully they figure that out this is another article from PC gamer about Epic Games the fortnight developer massive massive massive I mean Epic Games was already pretty huge and now they're just now they're like well with fur tonight oh my god with fortnight it's just on a whole nother level and that I think maybe if they've just gotten maybe it's gotten to their heads a little bit they're trying to take on steam now with their epic game store they're planning an epic game store how are they gonna plan to beat steam how in the hell do you ever compete with steam they figured it out seemingly seduce the devs seduce the devs and also seduce the players how do you seduce the players by giving them free games give them free stuff so in all of 2019 there will be a new game every two weeks that all players receive for free it's all funded by epic and that's that's two games a month that's 24 games that you will get for free for the year of 2019 that's pretty compelling again depending on the games that you're that you're getting right if there's some cheapo Humble Bundle five dollar indie games that rules shit I wasn't even interest in that game where I had since like two bucks whatever then that's something else but if they're triple-a games if they're good games they're highly reviewed games that people are interested in they're all the hype then hey that could be a really compelling offer that could bring a lot of people over to at least check it out to at least give this new platform a chance at the very least so it's kind of compelling there it's kind of interesting for for the developers they they also have some incentive to check out epic game store including a much higher split much higher revenue split of 88% to 12 percent so developers will keep 88 and epic will keep 12 percent do you know what the current split is for steam no what's that what's the current split 7030 so you only keep 70% as a developer right now on Steam that's 18% more yes yes it is oh sorry my brain stops 6278 absolutely and you know that's that's a pretty significant amount for a lot of people every every every dollar counts you know we're just trying to make a buck these days and you know that's that I think that's that's a fair fair scene it seems very fair to me or split a fair split and I think that by appealing to the to the players as well as the developers that is the only way that they're gonna be able to take on steam in any small you know in any small to any small degree them and they need to make half-life 3 I think once they make half-life 3 yes epic epics half-life 3 half-life 3 an epic that's really that's life 3 confirmed I think even wouldn't allow that or that he wouldn't mind cuz he's completely given up on it sniff sniff so there's also going to be a support a creator program which which says these are the most interesting thing to me here this their support a creator program aims to bring developers and marketers together it's designed to reward influencers like twitch streamers cosplayers youtubers for making things that are related to developers games so if you're a twitch streamer that you know I don't know or a cosplayer that made a fallout helmet or something like that then there would be a better way to connect you with that game developer so that you could get paid out for potentially by the game developer and that you as a creator would also be bringing traffic you know your audience your audience is traffic to the game itself so that it's kind of this mutual thing going on this sort of ecosystem of game developer me creator meets viewer or consumer you know it sounds interesting you know what I'd like to see which I feel like there's sort of a window for it here although I don't and there's there's there's a middle steps that I think is still in the ether but like if you take somebody like who like like who makes YouTube videos or a twitch streamer or like even somebody who like does cosplay or something like that and and and post their stuff online like they can get a following and they can get an audience and they can get people who will invest in them and who will donate or or whatever to help support them because they like what they do I don't see that with game developers right and yet game developers often develop products and as in video games that people use extensively right that I feel like people could easily devote that same level of yeah patronage to so it'd be cool to see something like this yep taken to the extent where somebody could go and like oh I want to I want to support my favorite game developer right rather than like my favorite absolute streamer youtuber or something like that why not why should they be excluded from the from the pop especially for anything else are any developers I feel yeah totally so hopefully it like if you know if and that's a great point is that if epic game store can can sort of integrate sort of like let's say a developer based patreon inside of their platform that's something truly unique to that platform that steam just doesn't have it all that I feel like a lot of developers up-and-coming developers or even more established ones might be attracted to that platform you know tenfold because of a sort of an opportunity to capitalize on their work so that's that's actually really interesting but we'll have to keep a closer eye on this there's some you know some other you know some other details here but whatever they're not as important let's move on to the games report okay and talk about weight before that oh you got a sponsor sponsor sponsor spot yeah this sponsor spot is brought to you once again by Toshiba closed Shabbat don't ya give up all right we're gonna flag for that at some point but hey you know this is their OC OC z RC 100 with a BICS flash which again is the SSD that was so compelling and the nvme and but to drive that I was so infatuated by that I had to take it out of the box and put it into my own personal system which is why we have nothing here but a an empty clamshell case on the third day that's not look the end got to drive had risen look here's the product page for the RC 100 yes see how tiny it is yeah I actually kind of want to find a small like a mini MDOT to enclosure for it that supports that just just the maximum of that size I did have a super super tiny external MDOT two external drives yeah that'd be nice yeah just usb3 it but yeah 22:42 is the form factor look at this we're giving more specs on the RC 100 than we ever had before read and write speeds sixteen hundred megabytes per second reads an eleven hundred megabytes per second race it's well over thanks to the nvme interface available in capacities up to four hundred and eighty gigs with a three-year warranty this is one of many products that toshiba has based on v.i.c s NAND flash memory but TR 200 is also a really great option if you're looking for a budget level MD I'm sorry a two and a half inch drive maybe that's a great save three Rev 6rf 3.0 SATA rev3games excuse like a bit percentage mmm alcohol is really doing a number on man mmm those are all also great drives what was the external drive model I forget that one that was the I know what that is it is the uh they have an external drive if you're looking for a external USB 3.0 SS XS 700 of course XO 700 which we've both committed to memory at this point right here um also delivers great speeds great transfer speeds over USB 3 and I've seen a Type C interface as well yep you can find links to all that stuff in my description I just copy pasted the links from Paul so you actually probably will get a kickback affair that's fine because like when we first started this ad campaign I copied and pasted yours so it's a trade off pure communism beautiful all right thank you see before sponsoring awesome hardware thanks to Shiva Toshiba moving on to the games port this article is from hot hardware things hot hardware about Bethesda oh my gosh Bethesda Bethesda Bethesda do you know you know what's going on with Bethesda lately right know what's we talked about this I think on a previous episode not too long ago so they had they had fallout 76 right there launch was the launch for fallout 76 was abysmal it was absolutely it was terrible it was one of the worst launches in videogame history especially for a game with soumitab lished history absolutely with many fans from a reputable developer yeah like it was that's very surprising I was very surprised with the like I don't have any dirt I never played football at 76 but I read lots of feedback from lots of people oh yeah at it and it was the same surprising and you know Bethesda games have always been sort of buggy here and there people just have learned to accept it but pathetic but but fallout 76 was buggy like no other I mean it was virtually unplayable for some people in certain parts of the game there was just random crashes you know characters would freeze just random bugs everywhere it just made the game so unenjoyable and it was such a disaster of a launch and they were there stilling they were releasing massive patches almost on a daily basis to rectify these issues which were only rectifying some of them the game was still so broken that so many people requested refunds and Bethesda only only honored a very small portion of refunds and so people blew they're late like people were pissed off like I don't like this game it doesn't even work it it's it's broken I want a refund and Bethesda would not honor refunds for so many people so much to the point where there's actually a law firm who's considering filing a class act lawsuit a class-action lawsuit for what are they calling it deceptive trade practices that's how broken this game is and then and then there was a a $200 fallout 76 armored edition that people bought they bought this armored edition for Fallout 76 for $200 never spent $200 on anything video game related unless it's like a dedicated concert or something like that the power the power armor Edition included the base game itself with a try Centennial steelbook it had a glow in the dark world terrain map 24 collectable Fallout figurines a bonus bonus in-game items a full-scale wearable t51 power armor helmet which is probably the the image that you're seeing right there Oh unless unless it's not being shown and then a westtech canvas carrying bag now this westtech canvas carrying bag that's that was included in the armor the power armor edition for fall of 76 looked just as advertised it looked right there like that's a nice looking bag never mind the fortnight loading page and there are people out there who like collecting swag from their favorite video games or their favorite anime or their favorite pop culture whatever and they're just like closing this shit also says canvas right there canvas this is canvas that's so that's specified and so people were expecting a bag that looked exactly like that because that's the one that they were advertising rightfully so they should be expecting that but cut but customers rightfully so also lost their minds when instead they received not canvas bags but these nylon carrying bags that look more like trash bags than anything else they they looked so utterly different and just pathetic quite frankly I saw some pictures of it I'm like no absolutely no I don't know there's no picture of that in the article from what I could tell but these are totally not the same sexy canvas bags that were advertised within the fallout 76 power armor Edition package so people lost their effing minds and Bethesda said that they had to resort to these nylon shitty carrying bags due to unavailability of materials which is not a great excuse to say the least and so what did Bethesda do to make things right instead of giving them the bags they want any fun or easy or instead even this one in sash I would hatch money doubt actor hand of the customers who they misled in order to maybe recoup maybe Bethesda I didn't possess the needs you Paul because that was the furthest thing that they did in fact what they did was they gave every affected customer of these power armor Edition packages five hundred atoms five hundred atoms that's in game credit for fall at seventy six halogen atoms as is like as in like an atom of hydrogen or helium or something like more or less but five hundred atoms in Fallout seventy six equates to five real dollars my very old world money so for paying a two hundred dollar fee for this package where you were gonna get this awesome canvas bag they gave you you know what we're sorry here's five bucks of in-game credit people customers were not happy to say the least so now Bethesda has finally owned up to it and they're now sending out replacement canvas bags to power armor Edition owners now customers have to provide proof of purchase of course they have to submit a ticket to the support site to the developer support site by January 1st of 2019 blahdy blahdy blah to receive their bag replacements will be sent out as soon as the bags are ready that could be one month from now that could be ten months from now we don't know but I feel like even though it was the right move eventually for Bethesda to make it's also a little bit too late and the damage has already been done between the failure of a launch to the refusal of refunds and to this whole bag debacle Bethesda has lost the trust of thousands hundreds of thousands of people I think with this single launch alone and it's it's quite unfortunate so so to me like whether I think if you want to boil it down to the fundamental issue that people are pissed off about it's not about like a nylon bag versus a canvas bag like that's a that that's that's a that's a detail that's a nuanced day it's about Bethesda as a company with one of their premier products being the Fallout series and the premiere edition of that product being the $200 version of it that people are who with with the disposable income and the passion for that game were able to say like yes I'm gonna drop this much money on it are getting something that essentially is like a like a monetized they're basically like trying to make as much money as possible out of this sure they're like making it they're giving you the cheapest possible products for the most possible price right because of your enthusiasm for this game right they're taking advantage of its it's a cheap and terrible way of treating customers so good that they replacing them but like I would they should just send out replacement canvasbacks to anyone who bought him without having to go through any yeah you know yep their hoops to get them replaced or something like that but exactly obviously that would cost more money and you know they're only doing any of this because the backlash has been so severe yeah you know they're not doing it out of the kindness of their hearts or because they felt it was the right thing to do they're doing it to save face because they're trying to put out fires right now they're in full mode they're in full damage control mode and they're just trying to save whatever bit of reputation I have left with with their consumer base it's it's really quite sad it's also frustrating because Bethesda in the past at least in my memory has not pulled this type of shit before Yeah right so it makes me wonder is that you know Sherman there are certain developers who you kind of have some level of trust in like like the ones that you expect it's not a direct relation like Rockstar for example yeah I have some level of trust in Rockstar sure I think they make good products and good games you can look at Red Dead Redemption you can look at Grand Theft Auto 5 does Rockstar monetize their games and try to make money off of them yes does GTA 5 have a you know purchasable system of in-game purchases that you can make for real money that they make lots of profit on yes but did they make some sort of reasonable assessment of that to make sure that you're you're buying mostly cosmetic items and that there's some sort of some level of balance between the grind to get into that that cosmetic thing versus just pay for it outright right you know you're trying to find that balance yep and and and it's it's a tricky it's not an easy thing to do as a game developer but Bethesda I think has lost a lot of trust um with this with what's happened in the past month or so to that so I think they know how big they are they realize the weight that they carry and they're taking advantage of it to a degree yeah and they're they're doing the lying greedy on enough people who have played Fallout games in the past feel like I love fallout I've always had fun with it I'm gonna buy this next one too and yeah that's what happens when you try to exploit people for as much money as possible as they start realizing hey I'm being exploited yeah right for my money and I'm not getting something valuable in return Bryton that's theoretically how and capitalism would have been fine if they just gave you gave people the bag that they paid for that they advertised there would be no stink people would see the picture like this is exactly the bag that I paid for be no issue but for you to try to slide one under the gamers to slide them under your own customer base just to turn a profit maybe even more than you already were it is just dishonest and just shows how good you guys have gotten in that in that instance so hopefully they can turn it around something at some point but let's move on we have another article here from Windows Central about GameStop being a little bit in trouble here they reported a seven sorry a 488 million dollar lost last quarter for q3 of 2018 holy moly now physical game sales physical game sales were pretty strong in 2013 but since then they've been slowly taken over by digital downloads of course which have taken up a massive slice of the pie I was gonna say 2013 was five years ago it was five years ago and you know it's a game stock is slowly dying it seems this is a report by game rant that's who reported this crazy loss of almost 500 million almost half a billion dollars of loss in just the last quarter alone despite having a solid growth from from hardware sales and accessories there's also been a thirteen point four percent decline in pre-owned game sales so pre-owned games haven't been doing so hot either I can't even remember the last time I went out to go buy a pre-owned game to get a great deal on game it's also become harder and harder to actually resell a pre-owned game when little digital you know if you're if you're doing with digital copies that are tied to your steam accounts or or just DRM techniques in general that have tried to prevent you from right taking a physical copy and passing it on to somebody else who buys it from you yeah and and they're also I think with digital downloads when you cut out that the overhead cost of physical shipping physically shipping a product you're able to give bigger discounts on digital sales and digital purchases and I feel like that has also sort of competed with the used games market where it's like hey I can buy this game brand-new on Steam for 30% off or I could buy like a used physical game at gamestop for the same price and you know obviously you're gonna go with the digital one it's more convenient it's it's brand new technically you have to worry about like physical imperfections about the game not working and stuff in your console whatever in your PC so there's there it feels like Game Stop is slowly going the way of blockbuster or those like you know physical video outlets I have video rentals it seems like that's that's the that's the the way that it's going but who's to say it'll be interesting to see if Game Stop eventually gets sold off to a bigger parent company I'm thinking acquired or something like that absorbed into a bigger company but at the very least right now it doesn't seem good for Farrokh gamestop basically I used to go to Game Stop when I was like in high school and stuff for you know when I was like gaming on GameCube and PlayStation 2 and stuff they were great but now that the landscape of gaming has changed so much you know I bought an Xbox one and about an Xbox 1x recently I downloaded all of Red Dead Redemption to in its entirety within you know like an hour or something like that didn't have to go fight for you know the last copy at some store and I was just like this is this is the future this is where we're headed this is where we're at and yeah it just seems like I don't know game stops gonna seriously have to implement some sort of game streaming service or I don't know what they're gonna have to do to stay competitive I'd I'd like to see something in between because I don't want to see all the retail locations like Game Stop go away because I think there is some social aspect to a store like Game Stop sure people going in there and talking to the people who work there write about games they like and getting advice or like hey try this out or whatever is in it place yeah I think that's beneficial so I'd hate to see it go away entirely yeah but definitely they need to modify their business model if they're gonna stay competitive definitely sure yeah all right so next up our life circle here's from polygon about Rockstar actually we were speaking about roxtor just earlier and this talks about their Red Dead online so Red Dead Redemption online just launched its beta very recently and he has part because he's going crazy the most part it was okay but the economy was a big talking point a lot of people took to Reddit and Twitter and social media and they were really upset about how the economy was looking so far mainly because that the the payouts of in-game currency for various activities are we're too low compared to the extreme cost of certain things like weapons or even like essential needs like you know your your camp your your camp upkeep or your food maintenance items and things like that but weapons and upgrades were so expensive have you played online I have not played online yet I haven't had a chance you have played single-player there I have played single-player and my god it's it's great actually wifey sauce has really been enjoying it too we've been switching off like I'll play a mission and then she'll watch me and then and then she'll play a mission and then I'll watch her because the cinematics in between are such a great storytelling element that sort of ties all the gameplay together that it really feels like you're just a part of this immersive story this narrative and it's movie that she really enjoys that that storytelling aspect I'm looking forward to playing it like I'm planning to at some point but I haven't yet but all of everything I've heard about like playing through the game has been incredibly positive absolutely you know and hopefully you know banking on that PC port at some point you'd have to think with the amount of cash that rockstars brought in and take twos brought in from from making GTA 5 go online or I'm sorry go via PC that they would also bring that same support for Red Dead Redemption to and that they would see just tremendous tremendous sales and stuff like that from from it from expanding their platforms but it remains to be seen so hopefully the economy will be more balanced within with a future update that Rockstar has already planned that's the great thing about Rockstar also is that they listen to user feedback very intently they take a lot of feedback to heart and they've already issued a statement saying that they're gonna be releasing a pair of updates that are gonna be rolling out soon that that will certainly a balance that'll sort of rebalance the economy so that you're not gonna feel like you're just doing all these missions and activities for pennies you'll actually be getting paid a generous amount that you can that you'll feel you know like you've achieved something you'll be able to buy weapons with it upgrades and you'll be able to have a bit more spending power than you originally did in the online beta so that's really cool and that is the end of my half of the show whenever there's discussion of video games and in game economies I always default back to Diablo 2 which I played along long ago right and how the economy became based around the stone of Jordan which was a ring a unique ring you can get in the game yeah be it but it took a lot of work to build up to the point where you could get a stone of Jordan and then you could you know trade that for other stuff anyway yep ensued the tsuj that's it the Saudis go so damn that and yet spam then trade chat alright so that's all for this half of the show that is it thank you guys so much for watching but don't go anywhere so fun we're gonna do we're gonna do a after-party in just a bit yeah be sure to toss a like on this video and feel free to do timestamps in the comments whoever does is my precious little angel it's not creepy at all I'm gonna play for tonight in the after party Paul's gonna play for tonight you guys want to see what Paul looks like playing for tonight it's gonna be gonna be terrible sanely awkward and interesting event you should be there though I think you guys will be are back and will also be doing duration shout outs and Johnson's and all that yes so click the link in the description to go do