SPEAKER_1: Hi, I'm Morgan Freeman, and you're listening to the Scene World Podcast.
SPEAKER_3: Hey, it's the Scene World Podcast.
SPEAKER_3: I'm over here and he's over there.
SPEAKER_2: Hello.
SPEAKER_3: I think I'd much rather be over there right now.
SPEAKER_2: But really, he would like to be in Germany rather than the US.
SPEAKER_3: I don't know if you've been watching the news.
SPEAKER_2: Not the American ones.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, anyway.
SPEAKER_2: All right.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, in a minute, we have Fearzine.
SPEAKER_3: So that's coming up shortly.
SPEAKER_2: Exactly.
SPEAKER_2: Dan Morris and Maria Kinnun.
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
SPEAKER_2: So number one and number two, as they refer to them themselves.
SPEAKER_2: We will talk about a frantic future of paper mags for horror games especially.
SPEAKER_3: Yes, indeed.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: That's coming up shortly.
SPEAKER_3: Before that, we've got a few bits of news.
SPEAKER_3: I've got a couple of bits of news.
SPEAKER_2: Actually, yes.
SPEAKER_3: I'll start off because that ties into my current complaint.
SPEAKER_2: Sure.
SPEAKER_3: Which is that-
SPEAKER_2: Bless you, by the way.
SPEAKER_3: Huh?
SPEAKER_3: Bless me.
SPEAKER_2: Bless you, by the way.
SPEAKER_3: For what?
SPEAKER_2: For the sneezing.
SPEAKER_3: Oh, that wasn't sneezing.
SPEAKER_3: That's her making noise.
SPEAKER_2: I know.
SPEAKER_3: This is our new little buddy.
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: He's also in the thumbnail of one of the other shows.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: So Core I64, who is a Canadian hardware designer for the C64, he has, firstly, he has unveiled, I think in the last intro that we did, we talked about that he was working on a 1750 XL, I think, REU.
SPEAKER_3: He has since released the finished product, which is the options for selling this would be bare PCBs, where you'd have to put everything on yourself, partially assembled units, so you would need to, everything would be on there, but you would need to put on your own 8726 chip.
SPEAKER_3: That's the chip that makes the 1750 REU be an REU.
SPEAKER_3: A complete unit with the case and everything without the REC chip, the 8726, and just the reproduction case.
SPEAKER_3: So that's coming along.
SPEAKER_3: It's a two megabyte REU.
SPEAKER_3: It's based on the CMD 1750 XL.
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_3: So that's cool.
SPEAKER_3: I wish that, I wish, you would think that, so the big thing with these REUs, even to this day, is that chip that makes it a thing.
SPEAKER_3: Right.
SPEAKER_3: That big 8726 chip, that, I guess, I don't know exactly what it does.
SPEAKER_3: I'm not a hardware engineer.
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_2: But it can also be used as a co-processor, as we learned for the interview of Sam's Journey with Chester Colshan.
SPEAKER_3: Right.
SPEAKER_3: Well, it does fast transfers and stuff, like bank flipping.
SPEAKER_2: Switching.
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
SPEAKER_3: Now, there are products such as the Ultimate 1541, which emulate that in FPGA.
SPEAKER_3: Right.
SPEAKER_3: So that is set up as a 16 megabyte 1750 REU.
SPEAKER_3: It works fine.
SPEAKER_3: So, I feel like you could do a lot more with including an FPGA to replace that, because those chips are getting harder and harder to find, because they only made them for these RAM expansion units, as far as I know, which they didn't sell many of.
SPEAKER_2: But let me ask you, is there also a version completely assembled with the ship?
SPEAKER_4: No.
SPEAKER_3: Nope.
SPEAKER_3: There's bare PCBs partially assembled, which is the board, but without the chip.
SPEAKER_3: Complete unit, which is with the case and everything, but no chip.
SPEAKER_2: Okay.
SPEAKER_2: What is the ship called again?
SPEAKER_3: The 8726, REC.
SPEAKER_2: 8726.
SPEAKER_3: I think it's-
SPEAKER_2: RTC.
SPEAKER_2: RTC, you said, right?
SPEAKER_3: REC.
SPEAKER_2: REC.
SPEAKER_2: Okay.
SPEAKER_2: Let's see on eBay how much that costs.
SPEAKER_3: It's a DMA controller.
SPEAKER_3: They were used for fast memory transfer using DMA.
SPEAKER_2: So you said it's from MOS?
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
SPEAKER_3: There's both a DIP version and a PLCC version.
SPEAKER_2: eBay doesn't even list it.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, no, they're not common, because again, they only put them into the RAM expansion units and they didn't sell that many of them.
SPEAKER_3: You know, I got one sitting around here somewhere.
SPEAKER_3: I don't know where exactly, oh, actually it might be down here.
SPEAKER_2: I don't know where it is.
SPEAKER_3: There it is.
SPEAKER_3: These things.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, mine is smaller because it's from CMD.
SPEAKER_3: Right.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, you've got the 1750XL or whatever.
SPEAKER_3: This is the original 1750.
SPEAKER_3: It's a 512 megabyte, not megabyte, good lord, it's a 512K RAM expansion.
SPEAKER_2: Oh, it's actually called 8726R1.
SPEAKER_3: Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_2: Well.
SPEAKER_2: Or the 8726REC.
SPEAKER_2: So, okay, let's see if the second name is more common on eBay.
SPEAKER_2: Let's see that, because I wanna know.
SPEAKER_2: Can I get it with the other?
SPEAKER_3: It would be a chore.
SPEAKER_2: Nope.
SPEAKER_2: So what is it good for if you buy a half-assembled version, if you can't get the IC to complete it?
SPEAKER_3: You would have to dig out, find that IC somewhere.
SPEAKER_3: We're talking about-
SPEAKER_2: Which is in a row that you try to-
SPEAKER_3: We're talking about right here, this guy.
SPEAKER_3: This is the dip version of it, because that's the version of the REU that I have right there.
SPEAKER_3: There is a PLCC, which is the square thing.
SPEAKER_3: It's not long like that.
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_2: Well, no way.
SPEAKER_2: No way.
SPEAKER_3: Right.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, they're not common.
SPEAKER_2: So it's actually useless.
SPEAKER_3: Well, I mean, if you've happened to have.
SPEAKER_2: Oh, I found one.
SPEAKER_2: Wait, no, no, wait, it's an ICR360R2.
SPEAKER_2: No, no, okay, okay.
SPEAKER_2: It's a different one.
SPEAKER_2: Okay.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, okay, okay.
SPEAKER_3: So like if I wanted, because this is a 512 megabyte REU, if I wanted a two megabyte version, I could buy this and put my chip from this into that, and then I'd have the bigger REU.
SPEAKER_3: But it feels to me like the better idea would be to use an FPGA to emulate that.
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_2: Because it has been done before by C and Spicer.
SPEAKER_3: I've got an NTSC machine, and Sam's Journey runs just fine with the Ultimate 1541 version of it.
SPEAKER_3: So it can do the stuff.
SPEAKER_2: But there isn't a third name for that.
SPEAKER_2: CCG8726R1.
SPEAKER_2: So there are three names for the same EC.
SPEAKER_3: Well, I mean, so Commodore Software Group was producing, or Commodore Silicon Group, whatever, whatever it was called.
SPEAKER_3: They were the name on chips later on.
SPEAKER_3: But that's MOS, it's the same thing.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, I know.
SPEAKER_2: MOS Technologies.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, I like, I mean, I don't know if you can, it's tough to tell in the video here.
SPEAKER_3: This has seen a lot of use.
SPEAKER_3: It's very, very yellow.
SPEAKER_2: I see it, yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_3: From being plugged in to my C64 for, and my 128 for years and years and years.
SPEAKER_3: It's a thing that, until I got that, the 1541 Ultimate a couple of years ago, this had been plugged in continuously for probably 30 years, you know?
SPEAKER_3: Well, it plays nice with the Super Snapshot Cartridge, which the 1541 Ultimate also emulates.
SPEAKER_3: That was my Fastload Monitor utility cartridge of choice for many years.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Well, but no way of sourcing that, I see.
SPEAKER_3: Right.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, it's a difficult thing to come across because they didn't make that many of them.
SPEAKER_3: I'm sure they made more than they used because-
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, because CMT bought all the other.
SPEAKER_4: Right.
SPEAKER_3: Right.
SPEAKER_2: But I mean, there is a technical ship data layout available.
SPEAKER_4: Right.
SPEAKER_2: So it could be reproduced.
SPEAKER_3: Yes, it's been retro-engineered because obviously it's been reproduced on a software level anyway, because again, the 1541 Ultimate did it.
SPEAKER_3: There's other things that emulate it just fine without using that chip.
SPEAKER_3: Using the chip is the easier way to do it obviously, because it already exists, just pluck it in a thing.
SPEAKER_3: But it's doable.
SPEAKER_2: Oh, let's see, AliExpress.
SPEAKER_2: If AliExpress can source it.
SPEAKER_2: Let's see.
SPEAKER_2: That's interesting, I never actually thought about it.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, it's a relative rarity.
SPEAKER_2: Nope.
SPEAKER_2: No idea.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, because that's the only time it was used, was in the RAM expansion.
SPEAKER_2: Wow.
SPEAKER_2: Okay.
SPEAKER_2: Wow.
SPEAKER_2: Okay.
SPEAKER_3: It was produced between 86 and 90, and the Super 1750 clone also used it.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, so that's a bit of a hindrance on that.
SPEAKER_2: So actually, you can buy it, but it's useless because you don't have the ship.
SPEAKER_2: That's so bad.
SPEAKER_3: Right.
SPEAKER_3: Well, I mean, but again, like I said, it is useful.
SPEAKER_3: For me, for instance, if I wanted a bigger REU, and I've already got an REU, I could just take the chip out of this one, stick it in that one, and it works.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, and you can have somebody on Amiga Bay asking the forums, anyone got one to sell?
SPEAKER_3: Right.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: So it looks like they can get faulty, obviously.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Anyway.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: So that's enough about that.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: But we will stay within the range of Core I64, because I mentioned that they were Canadian.
SPEAKER_3: And they just announced the other day that in response to the BS from the US, their default currency will be Euro from this point.
SPEAKER_2: That's from a Canadian company.
SPEAKER_3: Now, I don't know, because since that came out, they have halted the tariffs that they were going to place on Canadian imports.
SPEAKER_3: I don't understand any of why this is occurring, aside from the fact that the president of the United States is a raving jackass.
SPEAKER_3: I don't want to be political, because I know that there's people that feel different ways, and we try not to bring that into this, right?
SPEAKER_3: But, okay, Canada is not an enemy.
SPEAKER_3: Mexico is not our enemy.
SPEAKER_2: Depends on who you ask.
SPEAKER_3: Canada has volunteered troops and thanks to every military conflict that we have been in.
SPEAKER_3: Okay?
SPEAKER_3: They are our closest and longest ally, and now we're trying to fricking attack them in a trade war with fucking tariffs that are only going to hurt the people in the US.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, like I said, it's the same with the X prizes, you know, people forget that even farmers are using high-tech nowadays.
SPEAKER_2: So if you make the machinery more expensive because it uses part from China that has tariffs on it, obviously, eggs and milks and so on will get cheaper, which is interesting because I actually did some calculation.
SPEAKER_2: I figured out our eggs are actually $2 cheaper than the ones in the US., despite we are always taken as a prime example here in Germany of having a 100% increase on food products.
SPEAKER_3: Things are lunacy here.
SPEAKER_2: Since the Ukrainian-Urussian conflict.
SPEAKER_3: The last two times I went shopping for groceries.
SPEAKER_3: This was a major campaign thing that was run on, that we're going to lower the price of groceries.
SPEAKER_3: Things cost too much.
SPEAKER_3: Groceries are too expensive.
SPEAKER_3: Before, I used to think, wow, that's pretty expensive.
SPEAKER_3: I'm spending like 30 bucks at the grocery store.
SPEAKER_3: That's for like a day or two of food.
SPEAKER_3: I went out yesterday.
SPEAKER_3: I got ingredients for dinner last night.
SPEAKER_3: One meal, I got ingredients for.
SPEAKER_3: Seventy dollars for one.
SPEAKER_3: I have to go shopping again two nights.
SPEAKER_3: Now is the time.
SPEAKER_3: Anyone out there?
SPEAKER_3: So my fiance is vegan.
SPEAKER_3: Okay.
SPEAKER_3: She does not eat meat products.
SPEAKER_3: Okay.
SPEAKER_3: Now is a good time to do that because cheese was like twice the price that normally is.
SPEAKER_3: Vegan cheese, two dollars.
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_2: Normally, the vegan products are more expensive because they are more complex to process because they have to taste similar than the non-vegan.
SPEAKER_3: But now, most of the vegan stuff is made in the US.
SPEAKER_3: So it's cheaper.
SPEAKER_3: And it's made by stuff that is grown here.
SPEAKER_3: So it is ultimately cheaper than buying a thing of provolone or something.
SPEAKER_2: And here's a shocking thing for most Americans, by the way, about eggs in Germany.
SPEAKER_2: Our eggs are longer fresh, and we don't put them in the refrigerator.
SPEAKER_2: Why is that?
SPEAKER_2: Because Americans wash the eggs before they put them in the stores.
SPEAKER_2: But our eggs sometimes have shit on them.
SPEAKER_2: Literally, all feathers, because our eggs are never cleaned before putting in the cardboard box.
SPEAKER_3: Let me tell you something, okay?
SPEAKER_3: My neighbor has chickens, okay?
SPEAKER_3: I get our eggs from my neighbor, okay?
SPEAKER_3: They are straight from the cloaca.
SPEAKER_3: They got poop on them, they last forever.
SPEAKER_3: They're better than anything I've ever bought in a store.
SPEAKER_2: I know.
SPEAKER_3: You don't have to worry about them going bad.
SPEAKER_3: They're sitting on a counter in a basket for weeks.
SPEAKER_2: I know.
SPEAKER_2: That's actually the thing of our eggs.
SPEAKER_3: But of course, when you're done with them, when you use them, the shells, don't throw the shells away, you throw them back outside and the chickens eat them.
SPEAKER_2: I know.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: It's amazing.
SPEAKER_3: I've got one.
SPEAKER_3: Miss Hen comes over here all the time.
SPEAKER_3: She thinks she's a dog and she thinks she's my dog.
SPEAKER_3: She just follows me around all the time because she knows I'll give her seeds and stuff.
SPEAKER_3: But I mean, it's fantastic.
SPEAKER_3: I will never go back to buying eggs in a store as long as I can.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Anyway, that's the vast difference between eggs in Germany compared to eggs in America.
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
SPEAKER_2: But obviously, when you touch the eggs, you clean your hands afterwards.
SPEAKER_3: Of course.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: Oh, no.
SPEAKER_3: Scrub the eggs off before you crack them open.
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_3: Clean the egg before you crack them open, crack it open, throw it away, you're good.
SPEAKER_2: But actually, I never understood why does America do that?
SPEAKER_2: Why do you remove the protection of the eggs, the protection layer, on purpose so they are shiny, so they have to go to the fridge just because they look nicer in the supermarket?
SPEAKER_3: Yes, that's exactly it because people equate that with, oh, my guess, salmonella.
SPEAKER_3: No, wash your fucking hands.
SPEAKER_3: Cook the egg thoroughly, wash your hands, you don't worry about it.
SPEAKER_3: But people, they don't want that.
SPEAKER_3: I also have a sneaking suspicion that it is because, because if you get a dozen eggs, 12 eggs, you might not use all those eggs within the allotted span that you have before they go bad.
SPEAKER_3: So now you got to buy more eggs.
SPEAKER_3: We have a long history in this country of subsidizing.
SPEAKER_3: There's a great story with cheese.
SPEAKER_3: A lot of cheese for places like Pizza Hut and Domino's, it comes from government cheese caves.
SPEAKER_3: I don't remember what state they're in.
SPEAKER_3: There's a state with government cheese caves.
SPEAKER_3: But the problem is that the demand for dairy has decreased.
SPEAKER_3: Sorry.
SPEAKER_2: Now I'm sneezing.
SPEAKER_2: Thank you.
SPEAKER_3: The demand for dairy has decreased over the last many, many years throughout the 20th century.
SPEAKER_3: It kept going down.
SPEAKER_3: Meaning that dairy farmers were not getting the income that they used to get.
SPEAKER_3: The government paid the dairy farmers to produce dairy.
SPEAKER_3: The easiest way to store that dairy is in the form of cheese.
SPEAKER_3: Then the government bought this dairy from the farmers, turned it into cheese, put it in a cave for 15 years because nobody wants it.
SPEAKER_3: Now we have a surplus of cheese in caves that they sell to like restaurants and places that need like bulk cheese orders.
SPEAKER_3: Because, and it's all just because just so that farmers could get paid.
SPEAKER_3: Don't get out of the dairy farming business.
SPEAKER_3: Don't move on to a different thing because the demand is low.
SPEAKER_3: No, we'll just pay you to keep doing stuff that nobody wants.
SPEAKER_2: Holy crap.
SPEAKER_2: Okay.
SPEAKER_3: It's ridiculous.
SPEAKER_3: I'm surrounded by corn fields.
SPEAKER_3: Okay.
SPEAKER_3: A lot of those corn fields are animal feed.
SPEAKER_3: All right.
SPEAKER_3: They're going to go to feed cows or whatever the hell it is.
SPEAKER_3: There's corn, there's soybeans, there's all this stuff, but it's almost all animal feed.
SPEAKER_3: Some of it, however, is biofuel, which again, the reason, the amount of corn-derived biofuel that we use is insignificant.
SPEAKER_3: But we do it so that people can still make a living by growing corn.
SPEAKER_3: Grow something else.
SPEAKER_3: It boggles my mind that we continue to use money, use taxpayers' dollars.
SPEAKER_3: People get real angry.
SPEAKER_3: All right, my tax dollars could go into whatever.
SPEAKER_3: Well, they're using your tax dollars to pay farmers to produce stuff that nobody wants and nobody needs.
SPEAKER_3: They could be growing stuff that people actually need or want.
SPEAKER_3: That would make a lot more sense.
SPEAKER_3: 95% of mushrooms, or 94% maybe, of the mushrooms that are sold in stores come from China.
SPEAKER_3: China is the largest producer of mushrooms on the planet.
SPEAKER_3: If we made 10% of that, that's something that is useful.
SPEAKER_3: People want that.
SPEAKER_2: Anyway, we derived from tech to groceries.
SPEAKER_3: So anyway, I don't know if the Core i65, if Thomas Christoph from there has changed his stance since the tariffs were delayed.
SPEAKER_3: But yeah, I don't blame him for going with that because it is a shitshow at the moment.
SPEAKER_3: And another news not related to this.
SPEAKER_3: We talked to Fritz Phillips a while ago about GUI 64.
SPEAKER_1: Exactly.
SPEAKER_3: As of the end of the year, I think it was the 29th of January, GUI 64 now supports the SDG-
SPEAKER_2: End of the year?
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, end of 2014.
SPEAKER_2: But the 29th of January is the end of the year.
SPEAKER_3: Oh, you're right.
SPEAKER_3: What am I talking about?
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: See, the whole government tirade messed my brain all up.
SPEAKER_3: I don't even know what I'm talking about anymore.
SPEAKER_3: End of January, the end of January, beginning of this year.
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
SPEAKER_3: Fritz Phillips has updated GUI 64 to now include support for SD2IEC devices.
SPEAKER_3: So you can access directories on an SD card.
SPEAKER_3: There was something else.
SPEAKER_3: I get maybe, you can set the device number for each of the two drives that are active.
SPEAKER_3: So that's something we talked about in the podcast.
SPEAKER_3: We talked about SD2IEC as swapping drive numbers.
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_3: That has now been added to it.
SPEAKER_3: So.
SPEAKER_2: Awesome.
SPEAKER_4: Awesome.
SPEAKER_3: There is a demonstration video online.
SPEAKER_3: We'll link to that.
SPEAKER_3: It's not the greatest quality.
SPEAKER_3: It was kind of just under the phone, but yeah.
SPEAKER_3: So he's connected to an SD2IEC device.
SPEAKER_2: Awesome.
SPEAKER_3: So that's that.
SPEAKER_3: And finally, from my end, there is a new open source Kickstart module for the Amiga 3000 and 4000.
SPEAKER_3: It's called KickSmash32.
SPEAKER_3: So I don't exactly know.
SPEAKER_3: I think there's eight different banks, so you can have different versions of the Kickstart in memory, and you can switch them.
SPEAKER_3: And maybe you could, I don't know, there's a lot of stuff here in this.
SPEAKER_3: I don't really understand what I'm looking at.
SPEAKER_3: It's a lot of like Linux.
SPEAKER_3: So I don't know exactly how it works, but it is an open source ROM replacement module designed for the Amiga 3000 and 4000.
SPEAKER_3: Yep.
SPEAKER_3: Flexibility in managing multiple Kickstart ROMs with ease both within the system and externally.
SPEAKER_3: So that's the thing.
SPEAKER_3: That's which is useful if anyone that uses the Amiga knows that sometimes when you want to do something, like play a game or a demo or something, it wants a certain Kickstart ROM.
SPEAKER_3: And if you haven't got that ROM, it ain't working.
SPEAKER_3: That's one of the cool things about the ACA 500 plus.
SPEAKER_3: I think that's what this thing is called, from individual computers, is that it has all the different Kickstart ROMs on it.
SPEAKER_3: So you can store, like I've got, I've got the 3.1.4 Kickstart ROM in the machine.
SPEAKER_3: And this guy has the Kickstart ROMs like 1.3 through 3.1 on this.
SPEAKER_3: And when you start up the Amiga, you can just select which ones you want.
SPEAKER_3: And also select the configuration, because I've got like an Amiga 1200 accelerator on this thing, which I can then turn off because some things don't want to work with it.
SPEAKER_3: Some things want like a basic Amiga 500 with the Kickstart 1.3, and the OCS chips and all that stuff.
SPEAKER_3: And you can do that with the ACA 500.
SPEAKER_3: But now this gives you the option to do that on an Amiga 3000 and 4000, which you can't hook an ACA 500 to because it doesn't have the right thing.
SPEAKER_2: Hence, it's called 500 and not 3000 or 4000.
SPEAKER_3: Well, you can hook the ACA 500 up to an Amiga 1000.
SPEAKER_2: Okay.
SPEAKER_3: Because it's got that Xoro slot in the side.
SPEAKER_3: It's just, I think you just have to connect it upside down and backwards or something.
SPEAKER_3: I've seen it done because it's similar hardware.
SPEAKER_3: I've actually on mine, I don't know if you can really see it.
SPEAKER_3: I've got an extender, so I have ACA 500 and then I have a Xoro slot right there for plugging in another Xoro card.
SPEAKER_3: I've got an RTG card, the graphics card over there that I can't get.
SPEAKER_3: I can't figure how to set it up because I suck at the Amiga.
SPEAKER_3: But I do have it.
SPEAKER_2: I'm pretty sure somebody could help you out.
SPEAKER_3: I've got, there is a web page that explains in miniscule detail how to do it and I tried it and it didn't work.
SPEAKER_3: So I don't know what happened.
SPEAKER_3: But it's okay because I don't really need it that much.
SPEAKER_3: It would be fun to play with, but I don't see myself like, most of the stuff I do with the Amiga is like games or demos or stuff, which aren't going to use that RTG graphic card.
SPEAKER_2: Anyway, my news, right?
SPEAKER_3: Those are my news.
SPEAKER_3: Go on to you.
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_2: So, news number one, we released Scene World Issue 35.
SPEAKER_2: Right back there.
SPEAKER_2: You have the intro there.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: The intro is actually called Bouncy Bouncy by Richard, and it has graphic on it, a splash screen before the screen you see behind AJ there, and it's actually done by our newest member, Schesser from Hungary.
SPEAKER_2: He's our new graphic artist, and he just joined two days ago when we released the latest issue.
SPEAKER_2: So yeah, there we go.
SPEAKER_2: So that is actually his first contribution to the team there.
SPEAKER_2: And the one you see right now behind you, the graphic is actually done by Shine who used to be a member for Time with Us, and now contributes his graphic skills to us still, as you can see there.
SPEAKER_3: Excellent.
SPEAKER_3: Andy is an excellent graphics guy.
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, that's basically the news.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, also Victor Retromantis, our graphic artist from Peru, also did the disk cover this time.
SPEAKER_2: It's actually a pretty unique style because it combines black and white scanline graphics, sprites with orange as a color scheme.
SPEAKER_2: So it's actually pretty unique there.
SPEAKER_2: I enjoy it a lot.
SPEAKER_2: So check it out.
SPEAKER_2: You can get it from sceneworld.org, download it, play it in Wwise or actually on the web page.
SPEAKER_2: If you're prouder, it's lucky enough, and doesn't throw a buffer overflow error.
SPEAKER_3: Or on your real C64.
SPEAKER_3: Play it on that.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_4: Right.
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_3: Works on all of them, even the NTSC ones.
SPEAKER_4: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: As you can see behind you, yes.
SPEAKER_2: Other news actually is the Ancrow Video Game Nerd announced a new NES game coming up called the Ancrow Video Game Nerd 8-bit NES game.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: It's actually the name of the game.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: There is a trailer, but not much meat behind it.
SPEAKER_2: But there you go, it's happening in a bit.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, it's a homebrew NES platform game.
SPEAKER_3: So it's what you'd expect.
SPEAKER_3: I think there was another Ancrow Video Game Nerd game.
SPEAKER_3: It might have been just for-
SPEAKER_2: Really?
SPEAKER_2: I don't recall that.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: It might have been on Steam or somewhere.
SPEAKER_3: There was a game already, Ancrow Video Game Nerd game.
SPEAKER_3: We need someone else to sit here and pull things up for us, so we don't have to sit there looking like idiots trying to do this.
SPEAKER_3: Okay, so there was-
SPEAKER_3: Oh dear.
SPEAKER_3: There's been a few.
SPEAKER_3: There's Ancrow Video Game Nerd Adventures, Ancrow Video Game Nerd 1, and Ancrow Video Game Nerd 2, Deluxe.
SPEAKER_3: Okay.
SPEAKER_3: There's a few games that were put out.
SPEAKER_3: I don't know.
SPEAKER_3: I feel like it was just Liquid New Jersey.
SPEAKER_3: It's funny.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, I don't know where the actual game is or what it was.
SPEAKER_3: Other media.
SPEAKER_3: Video game.
SPEAKER_3: So it was 2013, Adventures came out.
SPEAKER_3: 2016 was a video game near 2, Assimilation, and 2020 was the deluxe version.
SPEAKER_2: But not an NES game.
SPEAKER_3: No, it was on Windows via Steam.
SPEAKER_2: Well, as is understood from the trailer, there will also be a stream release of the game and stuff.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_3: And then the second one was Steam and the Nintendo Switch.
SPEAKER_2: Nice.
SPEAKER_3: With ports for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
SPEAKER_2: Okay.
SPEAKER_2: Other news.
SPEAKER_2: The racing game, Arsato Corsa is actually getting an successor.
SPEAKER_3: What game?
SPEAKER_2: Arsato Corsa.
SPEAKER_2: It's a racing game for the PC, and it's actually having an successor called Arsato Corsa Evo, and it has been released on Steam as early access.
SPEAKER_3: Okay.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: And also released for pre-order, and the trailer announcing the pre-order of Tempest Rising has been happening.
SPEAKER_2: And yeah, and the interesting thing here is that that Tempest Rising, it's actually not that expensive.
SPEAKER_2: So if you look at the store page, for example, and you want to buy it, the normal version of it is 39.99 euros.
SPEAKER_2: And the Deluxe edition with seven days access ahead of release is actually 49.99, which is interesting because there have been discussions that the upcoming GTA would be the first game where $100 or euros would be the default price for AAA games.
SPEAKER_2: So the industry is actually hoping for Rockstar making that example.
SPEAKER_3: Right.
SPEAKER_3: Okay.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: So it's actually nice to see the Deluxe version would actually cost half of that.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Because I remember two years ago.
SPEAKER_2: So around two years ago in December 2023, it actually was that games in Germany started being 80 euros for AAA games like Need for Speed, Unbound.
SPEAKER_2: It was like, holy smokes, 80 euros for a AAA game, and now we are talking about 100.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Wow.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, to get up there for a while, the argument was that these are-
SPEAKER_2: More expensive to produce.
SPEAKER_3: Expensive to produce, and also they've become an art form in themselves.
SPEAKER_3: Like you had TV, movies, books, stuff like that, and games are a form of storytelling, and very, very time-consuming, because it's not just take a video of some people doing something, reading some lines, this is like having to render things, and write code, and all that stuff.
SPEAKER_3: So there's a lot more time-consuming than just filming a movie or writing a book.
SPEAKER_2: Open world also.
SPEAKER_3: Right, yeah.
SPEAKER_2: GTA 6 will be an open world game again.
SPEAKER_3: If that ever happens.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, well, they say, of course, that the PC version will be heavily delayed.
SPEAKER_2: As always with Rockstar, I mean, one of the earlier intros of the podcast, we spoke about how Red Dead Redemption took 14 years to make its way from the PlayStation 3 to the PC.
SPEAKER_2: So at that point, people thought it would never happen.
SPEAKER_2: And of course, you still pay a premium for the game despite it's 14 years old.
SPEAKER_2: And you were actually at the standpoint, why not?
SPEAKER_3: Right, yeah.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, if you want to play the game, if that's important to you.
SPEAKER_3: Again, you know, No Man's Sky came out in what, 2014?
SPEAKER_2: 2016.
SPEAKER_3: 2016, yeah.
SPEAKER_3: It came out on Mac not long ago, a couple of years.
SPEAKER_3: And, you know, I purchased it.
SPEAKER_3: I got it on Mac because I wanted the game.
SPEAKER_2: So you are also fine with being 100 bucks the new norm for AAA games?
SPEAKER_3: I mean, it's a lot.
SPEAKER_3: But if I really want to play the game, then I think it will ultimately hurt gaming studios because it will discourage people who might be on the fence.
SPEAKER_3: If it was 50 bucks, you know, I might be like, hey, I'll give it a shot.
SPEAKER_3: I don't really know if I want to play it, but I'll try it because it's not that much money.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, with Steam, you have the possibility to return it within a few hours.
SPEAKER_4: Right?
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: But it's one of those things where it's like, like if I'm on the fence and it's 100 bucks, I'll stay on that fence.
SPEAKER_3: I'm not going to spend that to get something I might not play.
SPEAKER_3: But if it's 30, 40 bucks, yeah, I can throw it on a game and not think twice about ever playing it again.
SPEAKER_3: You know, that's, that's, you know, it's.
SPEAKER_3: So I, you know, I think ultimately more people might be like that, where if you sold it at 30 bucks or 40 bucks, you might sell, say, a million copies.
SPEAKER_3: Okay, just just throwing out a number.
SPEAKER_3: But that might be down to like, like 700,000 if you've got it at 100.
SPEAKER_3: Because because that there is a pretendage of people that 30% who are just like, I don't know if I really want to play it, and I don't want to spend the money to find out.
SPEAKER_2: So people would wait for Steam or Goxail rather.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: Like how much was, how much was Cyberpunk 2077?
SPEAKER_2: Good question.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, you could look at the Steam DB.
SPEAKER_3: Would that still have it from when it first came out?
SPEAKER_2: I mean, I have the Steam DB plug-in in my browser, so I can actually look at the price change of games.
SPEAKER_2: Okay.
SPEAKER_2: Because Steam DB is open.
SPEAKER_2: I don't know if it's open source, but it's not an official Valve product.
SPEAKER_2: But it's a plug-in where you can actually see what the price of games were, what was the lowest number, the highest number.
SPEAKER_2: So let's see if I can actually do that.
SPEAKER_3: It looks like it was $59.99.
SPEAKER_3: It was $60.
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_3: I'm looking at it right here.
SPEAKER_3: So, yeah, so I bought, I purchased the game.
SPEAKER_3: It's in my Steam library.
SPEAKER_3: I've played it once.
SPEAKER_3: I tried it a couple of times.
SPEAKER_3: I didn't really get that much into it, and then I just walked away.
SPEAKER_3: And it's at a price level where it's like I'm not, it doesn't bother me to not have lost that $60.
SPEAKER_3: I still got the game if I want to play it.
SPEAKER_3: But I think if it was $100, I probably would not have even spent it on the game because I didn't know if I wanted to play it or not.
SPEAKER_2: Okay, it says current price, $59.
SPEAKER_2: It says on release date for, it says converted price is also same, $59.99.
SPEAKER_2: Lowest recorded price was $26.
SPEAKER_3: Right, that was probably on a sale.
SPEAKER_2: On a sale, yeah.
SPEAKER_2: But it doesn't actually say what it was on release.
SPEAKER_3: $59.99 sounds right.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, that sounds about right.
SPEAKER_3: So again, it was a price point in which I didn't mind losing that money, and I didn't worry about getting it back.
SPEAKER_3: I would have been, if it was $100, I probably would not have bothered buying it.
SPEAKER_2: All right.
SPEAKER_2: Well, that's the way it goes, right?
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Yes.
SPEAKER_2: Well, there we go.
SPEAKER_2: Anyway, I think it's a fair price for temperature rising, and I'm really looking forward to it.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, I can't spoil it here because we already did record the interview.
SPEAKER_2: We will also have a follow-up interview about that RTS topic, about Dying Preet.
SPEAKER_2: So there we go as well.
SPEAKER_2: So we will stick to the topic of new game releases.
SPEAKER_2: Another news in that regard is actually that a while ago, we did an interview with Francesco Gonzales, Krandeslav Games, one of those that AJ wasn't a part of, unfortunately, and he actually announced that Rosewater will be released on March 27th for PC, Mac and Linux.
SPEAKER_4: Okay.
SPEAKER_2: And so that's actually nice.
SPEAKER_2: So yeah.
SPEAKER_2: That's yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Another announcement has been done that SIDFX actually has between 40 and 75% of price decrease because they are cleaning their stocks.
SPEAKER_4: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: So if you want to have spare parts and accessories, now is your last time because SIDFX will be discontinued.
SPEAKER_2: No more units will be made from this point.
SPEAKER_3: It's been discontinued for a while because they were just selling out the remaining stock.
SPEAKER_3: I actually got a second one.
SPEAKER_3: It's sitting over there on top of the 128.
SPEAKER_3: I've got a second just in case.
SPEAKER_3: I'm not using it because I want to put something in my 128, but I'm going to do the, I think it's over there actually.
SPEAKER_3: The FPGA SID is going to go on the 128.
SPEAKER_2: Okay, yes.
SPEAKER_2: And last bit of news, the South African streamer, Joey Bear, who we also interviewed.
SPEAKER_2: And one of those interviews again where AJ wasn't part of, unfortunately.
SPEAKER_2: She released her first song called Swoosh.
SPEAKER_2: And we will put a link to all that stuff there as well.
SPEAKER_2: So that's it from my side.
SPEAKER_2: And I would say now let's jump over to the US or stay in the US compared to where you're sitting like AJ.
SPEAKER_2: And talk about Fearzine.
SPEAKER_3: Fearzine, yes.
SPEAKER_2: Fearzine.
SPEAKER_2: Wonderful.
SPEAKER_2: Today, we have another podcast, obviously, another episode with two guests this time from Fearzine.
SPEAKER_2: And this would be Maria Kinnun and Daniel Morris.
SPEAKER_2: And just so I get this right, Dan Morris, you are actually, according to the homepage, the Editor-in-Chief.
SPEAKER_2: And Maria, you are Head of Staff, also, aka Number 2.
SPEAKER_1: I am the poop of the team, yes.
SPEAKER_2: Oh, awesome.
SPEAKER_2: So welcome to the podcast.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, thanks for having us.
SPEAKER_4: Hey, thanks for having us.
SPEAKER_2: We will try to not be so fearful this time.
SPEAKER_2: All righty.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, well, I mean, I got to know you guys from one of your staff members, Alex McCumbers, who was like, yeah, perhaps you can contribute.
SPEAKER_2: So far, I couldn't, but I thought at least we can talk to you guys and learn about it, because all I know is you actually took it over from a different staff after issue 1.
SPEAKER_2: So perhaps, let's talk a bit about that later.
SPEAKER_2: But first of all, let's start with our common question.
SPEAKER_2: What was your starting point with computers and games?
SPEAKER_2: I don't know who wants to start.
SPEAKER_4: Yeah, Bert.
SPEAKER_1: Well, I actually started with an Amstrad in the UK, Amiga, which I see in the background.
SPEAKER_3: I'm fighting with about 20 minutes now.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, I see it there and I recognize it straight away.
SPEAKER_1: I was going to ask, yeah, I had an Amiga for many, many years and then went on to PlayStation, Genesis, Mega Drive and stuff.
SPEAKER_1: So yeah, basically been gaming most of my life and started up from there.
SPEAKER_1: Always been a horror game fan, always been a puzzle game fan and stuff.
SPEAKER_1: So yeah, pretty much like most of my life, I've been a gamer of some sort.
SPEAKER_1: Obviously, as you get as an adult, you don't get as many games, but I'm starting to get back into it now, because now I'm doing more game reviews and working with developers and stuff.
SPEAKER_1: So yeah, it's pretty much gaming most of my life.
SPEAKER_4: Awesome.
SPEAKER_4: Let's see, I definitely started off with like an original Nintendo for sure, was one of my first gaming platforms.
SPEAKER_4: I know I messed around with someone's Commodore 64 at one point in time.
SPEAKER_4: Like, I don't know where or how we had one, and I used to mess with it and think it was the coolest thing to be like, screen color blue.
SPEAKER_4: Oh, you know.
SPEAKER_4: And then our first home computer, I remember being a Packard Bell back in the day, like, original before it became Hewlett Packard and getting, like, Windows 95 and playing Doom on shareware.
SPEAKER_4: But I've always typically preferred consoles for the majority of my life until I got older and started feeling more confident with PCs.
SPEAKER_4: And now I play on literally everything, and I've been called, like, an Omnivore gamer because I play anything and everything as much as possible.
SPEAKER_4: But I do have a preference in joy with horror and the genre when it comes to video games.
SPEAKER_2: Awesome.
SPEAKER_2: And now the question is, what was the point of making the jump, taking over a magazine from another staff?
SPEAKER_2: I mean, that's quite an undertaking.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, the only thing I know is that you told me on Discord prior to the interview, you didn't like the printing quality and stuff and decided at some point you can improve the quality starting from Issue 2.
SPEAKER_2: But perhaps you can talk a bit about what led to that?
SPEAKER_4: Yeah.
SPEAKER_4: So this is the story.
SPEAKER_4: We were invited to contribute to the original Fearzine when it was started by the original creator.
SPEAKER_4: Both Maria and myself were brought on as writers.
SPEAKER_4: I was one of probably the ones who've written more for the original magazine, and I had some of our bigger previews with Howl Body and Ground Zero and that issue.
SPEAKER_4: Maria had plenty of contributions there and wrote some really cool pieces, especially one about the suffering.
SPEAKER_4: Then it took, I don't know, what was it, maybe nine months for Issue 1 to go from inception to delivery and actually getting it out.
SPEAKER_4: Then at that point, the original creator told everyone that he didn't want to continue running the magazine.
SPEAKER_4: He basically made it an open call to see if somebody else wanted to step in.
SPEAKER_4: That was one of the first people to chime in and be like, well, I don't want to see this go away.
SPEAKER_4: I don't want to see this die.
SPEAKER_4: But I also wasn't sure if I could take it on.
SPEAKER_4: I wasn't sure if I could handle it or be able to do it.
SPEAKER_4: That's where I conferred with my cohort here, Maria, and she was just like, you need to do it.
SPEAKER_4: Just shut up and do it.
SPEAKER_4: Like, you need to do this.
SPEAKER_4: I was like, as long as I have you along with me, Maria, I'm down.
SPEAKER_4: Let's do it.
SPEAKER_2: Interestingly, the person you are referring to, Sam Marshall, he isn't unknown in the scene.
SPEAKER_2: He's also co-creator of other magazines like the Reload magazine, for example.
SPEAKER_2: Perhaps he was a bit overloaded running three magazines at once or something.
SPEAKER_1: Well, he also does work with Perp Games and he also does Dos Man Games and stuff.
SPEAKER_1: So he moved more into the game development time.
SPEAKER_1: Running a magazine is a lot of work.
SPEAKER_1: So I can understand that it's just like when the other things take your priority, it's like, I can't handle this anymore.
SPEAKER_1: So it's like, it's nothing against him.
SPEAKER_1: It's just one of those, we understood it.
SPEAKER_1: So it's like, if your passion is not in it, then that's fine.
SPEAKER_1: He said, I don't want it to die either.
SPEAKER_1: So he was like, I want to give the call out to hand the keys over to someone.
SPEAKER_1: And that's when we were like, okay, we'll take it over because it's just, it's a lot of work and if you don't have the full dedication of it, you can't do it and you can't do it to the quality that you should be doing it.
SPEAKER_1: So it's better if you can stand down and let someone else do it.
SPEAKER_1: So I think that was the problem.
SPEAKER_1: It wasn't he abandoned ship, it was more that he had other things that he needed to focus on.
SPEAKER_4: Yeah, I wasn't trying to say anything beyond that.
SPEAKER_4: He just was offering for someone else to take it over.
SPEAKER_4: Like you said, he started doing other projects.
SPEAKER_4: It was just one of those things where I think he just felt it was better suited that somebody else take over things.
SPEAKER_4: Then when he essentially handed everything over to myself and Maria, that's where we took a hard evaluation of what the magazine was and where it was going.
SPEAKER_4: We said, well, if we're going to do this, let's do it the way we want and let's make it as awesome as we can possibly do it.
SPEAKER_4: As Maria always says, hold my beer, we went nuts and we're trying our best to make it as awesome as possible.
SPEAKER_2: Well, Jay and I, we are mostly coming from the Disk Magazine scene, and there are a lot of demo scene magazines, especially in the European scene, where they just stopped after the first issue being released because they were overwhelmed with how much it took to release the first issue.
SPEAKER_2: So it's actually a problem or an issue that I can understand, to be honest.
SPEAKER_2: So that's actually something that happens a lot.
SPEAKER_2: From our own experience, it's always a struggle to release the next issue, but it's always also a relief and a feeling of success when you finally did it.
SPEAKER_2: I saw the Kickstarters for the first and the current second issue, that it was actually pretty successful.
SPEAKER_2: People were not hesitant to back on the project.
SPEAKER_2: It's not like you almost or barely made it.
SPEAKER_2: It was actually a pretty good contribution, at least from my feeling as an outsider watching what's going on.
SPEAKER_4: We've seen pretty substantial growth.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, like we pushed it real hard because we pushed our social medias and stuff.
SPEAKER_1: It tripled like three times.
SPEAKER_1: We had 300 followers on TwitterX at the time when we took it over, and we got 1500 by the time we made issue two.
SPEAKER_1: And so we knew that for this to be successful, we were going to have to push this really, really hard because it wasn't a fact that people didn't want the product.
SPEAKER_1: It's just people didn't know about us.
SPEAKER_1: And so we hit Twitter and the socials real hard.
SPEAKER_1: Like we were looking for developers.
SPEAKER_1: Like we would look for indie game developers and stuff, rather than waiting for them to come to us, we would search for them and pull them into the thing and be like, hey, we can help you, blah, blah, blah.
SPEAKER_1: So it became a source of we started building this community of we were supporting these developers and showing them that we cared about their projects and that we wanted to help elevate them.
SPEAKER_1: So it was so important for us to get a back in, knowing that if we were going to release Issue 2, we were going to have to get a backing.
SPEAKER_1: So we pushed it so hard.
SPEAKER_1: So that when we launched the Kickstarter, we knew we had a community behind us that wanted this to succeed.
SPEAKER_1: So yeah, that's what it was.
SPEAKER_1: It was just 24 hours of us just saying positive things on the Internet.
SPEAKER_1: Oh, your game is amazing.
SPEAKER_1: But it was a genuine thing.
SPEAKER_1: We did play their games and we did find them amazing.
SPEAKER_1: So it wasn't just a false positives to get a community.
SPEAKER_1: It's like it was something we did believe in.
SPEAKER_1: And so that's something we had to do to make this a success.
SPEAKER_1: Because if we didn't, it wouldn't have made, it wouldn't have happened.
SPEAKER_1: And pretty much me and Dan were like, it's all or nothing.
SPEAKER_1: If we can't, if we can get issue two out, we can go on with this.
SPEAKER_1: If we can't, it's dead in the water.
SPEAKER_1: So basically, it was just basically, you know, do it or die, hold my beer.
SPEAKER_2: Now, perhaps a question to Dan.
SPEAKER_2: I guess the interesting part is, it's actually a physical magazine.
SPEAKER_2: So is that really worth it in 2025 where other magazines like other magazines in the gaming field are actually closing down because they are not able to gain enough readers anymore to...
SPEAKER_4: Not sustainable.
SPEAKER_2: Sustainable, exactly.
SPEAKER_2: That's the word, yeah.
SPEAKER_4: I think the answer that I want to hope and believe in is that this is opening the door for us because of these bigger magazines are shutting down.
SPEAKER_4: And I think people are going to have this realization of how much they appreciate it.
SPEAKER_4: It's much like DVDs are becoming super expensive.
SPEAKER_4: Physical games are becoming more rare and expensive when you do find them.
SPEAKER_4: And I think that we're jumping into an early starting point where we're very niche at the moment.
SPEAKER_4: But I think the more exposure we get and the more we establish ourselves, people are going to start to lean into it and realize that this is something that they like and they appreciate.
SPEAKER_4: But we're also trying to do it with an approach of a modern mindset of, how do you make a physical print magazine sustainable with technology the way it is nowadays?
SPEAKER_4: And the big focus going into the magazine when we built it was adding as much depth as possible, especially with QR codes.
SPEAKER_4: So every single game featured in the magazine has a QR code that you're able to scan and immediately link you to the game that we're talking about in some way.
SPEAKER_4: So that it's an instant gratification thing.
SPEAKER_4: You know, because that's what most people are used to now in the digital age.
SPEAKER_4: With a magazine, you don't have that.
SPEAKER_4: But it's also the ability to flip through the pages, see the layouts that we designed, read the words that we've written, and then scan that QR code and it takes you right to the page for that game.
SPEAKER_4: And you can buy it, support the developers, and if you've already bought the magazine, you're supporting us, but you're also supporting those developers by continuing our ability to share and then spread the messages and the words to everyone else.
SPEAKER_3: What is the business plan for the magazine?
SPEAKER_3: Because printing out a physical magazine and sending them out to people, that's not cheap in the long run.
SPEAKER_3: No, not at all.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: So how does that work?
SPEAKER_3: Do you do advertisements or does the revenue come in?
SPEAKER_4: Currently, we're pretty much stuck to a Kickstarter model that we're working to get out of, relying on a Kickstarter model.
SPEAKER_4: So issue one was 100% dependent on Kickstarter, where the only people that received the magazine were people that backed the Kickstarter.
SPEAKER_4: And it made like just enough money.
SPEAKER_4: That issue, the first issue was very limited.
SPEAKER_4: There was maybe 50 copies, I think, give or take 60 copies.
SPEAKER_4: And that was kind of it.
SPEAKER_4: But with what we did in the marketing that we were doing, that positivity that we were pushing, which I was going to call this out for Maria, she's basically coined this term that we use now, horrifically wholesome.
SPEAKER_4: We call our community horrifically wholesome, because they're the nicest bunch of horror fans you've ever met.
SPEAKER_4: And it's something that we're continuously working on and developing the best way to make things as sustainable as possible.
SPEAKER_4: But our big challenge right now is continuing to provide the magazine in some way that helps us continue to make money and have revenue coming in so that we can continue to grow and expand.
SPEAKER_4: So again, the issue 2 Kickstarter was pretty much, we need to get the money first, then we create the magazine and then we ship the magazine.
SPEAKER_4: And we're asking, you know, not a small amount from our backers to enable us to do that.
SPEAKER_4: And we had certain tiers that were higher value that we would offer certain things.
SPEAKER_4: So we actually had like an advertisement tier in Kickstarter.
SPEAKER_4: So a developer could purchase the advertisement tier for more, and we would put an advertisement for their game in the magazine.
SPEAKER_4: And we've talked to some other partners.
SPEAKER_4: We've had a good relationship with Dread XP, which is a small indie publishing studio for horror games.
SPEAKER_4: They've been very helpful and they did help us a little bit financially with helping us kind of meet a little bit of extra in our Kickstarter.
SPEAKER_4: So we definitely are humbled and thank Dread XP for their assistance on that side.
SPEAKER_4: I say Dread XP, but it's more like Henry Hoare and Hunter over there.
SPEAKER_4: Those guys are the ones that have been really supportive of the project and want to see us grow and expand because they believe in what we're doing.
SPEAKER_4: So right now, our margins are real thin, but we've got a lot of interest.
SPEAKER_4: I'm at the point now where we've received all of our magazine.
SPEAKER_4: We've got all the prints from the Kickstarter.
SPEAKER_4: I'm in the process of getting these all packaged up and shipped out to our backers right now.
SPEAKER_4: Then I want to start printing more copies.
SPEAKER_4: But the problem with the printing ones is I don't have the money to get them printed because these were printed, but with the money the Kickstarter backers gave us, like this is 100 percent thanks to them.
SPEAKER_4: This one exists without them.
SPEAKER_4: It's from them that this exists.
SPEAKER_4: So going forward, we need to find a way to keep that moving forward.
SPEAKER_4: The cost and the expenses is we're looking at like a pre-order system, where maybe if we allow people to buy the magazine, but then we don't actually print them until we hit a certain threshold, that allows us to keep the cost down because if we buy in bulk, it's way cheaper.
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_4: If you buy one magazine at a time, it's really expensive and we make no money.
SPEAKER_2: Well, there's one example that I know from like 10 years ago, where I participate in the Kickstarter for the New Zealand magazine, Polytronic.
SPEAKER_2: And what they did do is they were like, okay, we are running this magazine for like six issues max.
SPEAKER_2: And they actually printed and shipped from Singapore to all over the world because it was cheaper to send the print data over the Internet to Singapore and let the Singaporean printing company ship out all the issues all over the world.
SPEAKER_2: So perhaps that's also a possibility to not do the logistics.
SPEAKER_3: It's like letting eBay handle your customs.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, perhaps it's cheaper to actually outsource that.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, you have the advantage for Singapore, for example, that they also are native English speakers.
SPEAKER_2: So, but I guess nowadays there isn't so much of a language barrier anywhere.
SPEAKER_4: I'd have to look into that, do some research and see if it's still sustainable, because I feel that 10 years ago, shipping rates were probably a lot better than they are nowadays.
SPEAKER_2: So I don't know how the postal service in Singapore works now, but that's just my…
SPEAKER_4: I mean, unless they're able to print a magazine and ship it, like a cents of the dollar compared to now.
SPEAKER_2: That's what they actually did.
SPEAKER_2: They let the printing company also ship the magazine.
SPEAKER_2: The interesting…
SPEAKER_4: Is that like slave labor at that point?
SPEAKER_4: That's a real shady…
SPEAKER_4: If you're paying people pennies for their work, that's…
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, interestingly, the biggest issue was that the quality of the envelopes used was shit.
SPEAKER_2: So, suddenly, you…
SPEAKER_3: The little kids licking them right out of spit.
SPEAKER_2: So, sometimes, the magazine would…
SPEAKER_2: I don't know…
SPEAKER_4: I mean, all things…
SPEAKER_4: The whole thing is like, if we were able to get ourselves big enough and get enough exposure where we could print in much larger volumes, the cost get really low.
SPEAKER_4: And that's where we're hoping to get to in the future is printing thousands of copies.
SPEAKER_4: Because if we're printing thousands of copies, each magazine only costs a couple of dollars if that's print, and we're able to make a solid profit that we can then use to continue to grow and expand the company and do more and offer more and all the other things and dreams that we have cooked up that we want to start doing.
SPEAKER_1: Well, we have actually a distribution in the UK, you know, so we do actually have someone who is connected to Royal Mail, so we actually use the UK printing service and directly ship to him, and then he distributes for Europe.
SPEAKER_1: So that put the cost down quite a bit for us, and so that's better than us shipping from the US, which is astronomically expensive.
SPEAKER_2: I know, yeah.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_4: Yeah, that was a key thing.
SPEAKER_1: We do have connections there, so that's something as well that like, when we started taking this magazine on, we had such a good reaction with people coming to us and going, hey, we can help you with this, we can help you with that.
SPEAKER_1: And so there's a lot of people with interests that we feel like there is a market for it.
SPEAKER_1: And there's a lot of people that are coming in and saying, like, we want to help you with this and giving us advice, because like Debug Magazine is a physical indie gaming magazine.
SPEAKER_1: And they're basically doing the same thing we are.
SPEAKER_1: And they're on like their seventh issue now, and they sell thousands of copies.
SPEAKER_1: So it is a viable thing.
SPEAKER_1: And I feel like with us, like people say, why would you make a physical magazine in this day and age where physical magazines are shutting down?
SPEAKER_1: Well, it's also like, if you buy it, you own it.
SPEAKER_1: You know, it's not on a service, and it's not something that can get deleted.
SPEAKER_1: Once you have it, you have it.
SPEAKER_1: And that's something that we're going on that, you know, devs can get their games printed in a physical media, and it's there forever.
SPEAKER_1: You know, it doesn't get, you know, shelved or deleted when the website goes down or something.
SPEAKER_1: And so we also would like to do, you know, demo disks, like from the old, like those PlayStation magazines you'd got.
SPEAKER_1: Like people loved those where it was like you'd get a magazine.
SPEAKER_1: So we're kind of pushing on that nostalgia feeling a little bit where people are like, oh, man, this reminds me of 90s gaming mags.
SPEAKER_1: And it's like, yeah, it does.
SPEAKER_1: I mean, we have the digital version as well.
SPEAKER_1: So it exists in digital form, but I feel like there's something about having it in your hand and having that just, like the devs are just like, oh, my game is in physical print.
SPEAKER_1: So them it's like a massive thing that they've just like.
SPEAKER_4: Especially nowadays.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, like they've made it.
SPEAKER_1: They're like, oh, my game is getting featured with Silent Hill 2 in a magazine and stuff.
SPEAKER_1: And so it's just this big deal.
SPEAKER_1: And so I feel like that we have a community of developers now that are back in the project and they're invested in it.
SPEAKER_1: And so I feel like we've issue free.
SPEAKER_1: A lot of them are gonna be like, we wanna see you to succeed.
SPEAKER_1: So we're doing it for them and we're giving them a platform and this is something they've never had.
SPEAKER_1: So it's basically like they're rallying behind us and going, well, we'll do whatever we need to do to make this succeed.
SPEAKER_1: So it's kind of getting this community behind us.
SPEAKER_1: So yeah, it's kind of like we're going against the grain with what we're trying to do.
SPEAKER_1: And people are like, why would you make a physical magazine in this day and age?
SPEAKER_1: It's like, why not?
SPEAKER_1: So, you know, and we're not losing anything.
SPEAKER_1: As long as we ain't losing money, you know, it's like, it's been funded by Kickstarter and as long as we can keep it going, we'll keep it going.
SPEAKER_4: And there is a demand for sure.
SPEAKER_1: There is, yeah.
SPEAKER_3: Are you looking at a, obviously not right now, it isn't.
SPEAKER_3: Like the first issue I think was released in May, am I right?
SPEAKER_1: May?
SPEAKER_1: February.
SPEAKER_4: February.
SPEAKER_3: Oh, February, okay.
SPEAKER_4: Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_3: I don't know where May came from.
SPEAKER_3: And now you're getting the second issue is, you've got that and you're sending that out.
SPEAKER_4: Yeah, I'll be shipping those out very soon.
SPEAKER_3: Are you guys looking to eventually hit like a schedule of like, twice a year or seasonally or however it's going to be done?
SPEAKER_4: Yeah, we were going into 2025 with the hopes and intentions that we would go quarterly, but that's probably going to get pushed back a little bit.
SPEAKER_4: Not to say that we can't keep it quarterly, but not quite on the timeline we were hoping for, but that's mostly due to the setbacks that we had with issue two, because issue two got delayed longer than we would have hoped because of certain factors here and there.
SPEAKER_4: This is also the first time we made a magazine ever.
SPEAKER_1: Me and Maria have never made a magazine before.
SPEAKER_4: We learned how to do it together over the past six months.
SPEAKER_4: There was a lot of hurdles that we now understand and know better, and things will get smoother and easier for us going forward, and we'll be able to hit faster timelines and deadlines, and we've got a way better approach already going into the next issue, and we already expect a much faster turnaround.
SPEAKER_1: Well, it was also just like when we took this over, we didn't know what we were doing at all.
SPEAKER_1: So it was a-
SPEAKER_2: It's always the best.
SPEAKER_1: Mag, Kickstarter.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_1: I was like, Dan, take this over, and he's like, all right, let's call, and I said, I'll support you.
SPEAKER_1: It's like, all right, we have a magazine.
SPEAKER_1: How do we make one?
SPEAKER_1: And it's like, guess we have to learn.
SPEAKER_1: We learn in design and affinity publisher ourselves.
SPEAKER_1: We don't have any experience.
SPEAKER_1: We learnt the entire thing.
SPEAKER_1: All of those layouts that you see in the magazine, we made them, all of it, me and Dan, together.
SPEAKER_4: Maria and I made everything in here.
SPEAKER_1: I've wrote almost half of the articles in that magazine.
SPEAKER_1: It's me and him.
SPEAKER_1: We call ourselves the Army of Two.
SPEAKER_1: It's basically, from start to finish, it was me and him that made it.
SPEAKER_1: We learnt a lot.
SPEAKER_1: Going forward, we know what to expect.
SPEAKER_1: The way we look at it, as long as me and Dan are on the project, this magazine will come out.
SPEAKER_1: That's good to hear.
SPEAKER_1: It will come out.
SPEAKER_1: We have a promise that we will make it, whether it's me and him doing it ourselves, it will happen.
SPEAKER_1: While we want to grow the team, we've got a lot more writers now, we've got a lot more people coming on board.
SPEAKER_1: But it's me and him that are basically guaranteed.
SPEAKER_4: Regardless, at the end of the day, if no one else does it, we're doing it.
SPEAKER_1: It's going to come out.
SPEAKER_1: That's a promise that Fearzine will live, as long as one of us doesn't get hit by a car.
SPEAKER_1: We're okay.
SPEAKER_2: Awesome.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, let's hope so.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_4: Or has a tree fall in your house?
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_1: My house basically got destroyed at Christmas time.
SPEAKER_1: I'm in temporary accommodation right now, but Fearzine lives.
SPEAKER_4: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: As long as the Internet works, you are there.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Well, that was actually one of my first feedbacks to Dan, when I saw the second issue, I was like, you did really do a step up on the quality of Refuse and the layout.
SPEAKER_2: So it's amazing saying it's your first time and learning everything that you actually managed to improve over the first issue regardless.
SPEAKER_4: Yes.
SPEAKER_4: Thank you.
SPEAKER_1: That was a big thing for me.
SPEAKER_1: We sold three times as many, we grew the community three times as many, like it was a massive success and it literally was.
SPEAKER_1: It's just us and people don't realize, they think we're a small team or an office.
SPEAKER_1: No, it's me and Dan, that's it.
SPEAKER_3: This is the right.
SPEAKER_1: This is Fearzine.
SPEAKER_1: You're talking to him right now.
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_2: But if you talk about growing and having a staff and so on, and not this being a hobby, but a commercial project, you also run into the issue.
SPEAKER_2: I think I asked Dan about this on Discord once.
SPEAKER_2: How do you plan to sustain a staff?
SPEAKER_2: I mean, people obviously they want, I don't know how it is, probably something like payment per word or something, or per page.
SPEAKER_2: I don't know how it goes in the publishing world.
SPEAKER_2: But I guess that is also the problem in the long run.
SPEAKER_1: Well, we always, we started this project with, you will get paid something.
SPEAKER_1: It might not be a lot.
SPEAKER_1: It will be, we don't want to have people working for free.
SPEAKER_1: That's, we've done it.
SPEAKER_1: It's not viable.
SPEAKER_1: And it's like, people's passion only pays so much.
SPEAKER_1: And eventually people are like, this is a, I call it feeding the machine.
SPEAKER_1: It's like you're just feeding the machine.
SPEAKER_1: You're not getting anything back in return.
SPEAKER_1: And so it might be a case of like, I don't know, one cent a word or it might start off low, but you will get something.
SPEAKER_1: And as we grow, we can give you more, but it's, we're not going to start out with, oh, you're going to do it through the love of it.
SPEAKER_1: No.
SPEAKER_3: The exposure, the exposure.
SPEAKER_2: Sorry.
SPEAKER_4: I'm never going to pay anyone an exposure because I've been put on that hook before and it's never rewarding.
SPEAKER_1: I don't like people dangling carrots to me.
SPEAKER_1: I don't like people.
SPEAKER_1: I'm an artist.
SPEAKER_1: I've been paid an exposure many times and so it doesn't put food on my table.
SPEAKER_4: I'm paying myself an exposure right now.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_1: We went into this with the full process of like, anyone that comes on board, we're like, the pay isn't much, but we will give you something.
SPEAKER_4: We'll give you something.
SPEAKER_1: We'll give you something and with the promise that the more it does, the more you'll get paid as it goes on.
SPEAKER_1: But we are, it's definitely not a, oh, do it through love because love doesn't pay the bill.
SPEAKER_1: I'm sorry.
SPEAKER_4: I do want to touch on that too, because for anyone who's listening, if you are interested in working with us, this is where it's at right now.
SPEAKER_4: We only make the money that we've made off of Kickstarter right now.
SPEAKER_4: So we don't have a lot of money, but any money that we make that's not used to actually produce the magazine is what's paid to our staff.
SPEAKER_4: Our staff makes what's left over from the production cost, and that's where we will decide pay rates from there.
SPEAKER_4: Everyone will be getting paid equally at this point, just based on how much they've actually contributed, such as word counts.
SPEAKER_4: But we have the complete, utter desire and sense that when we're able to, we can start setting pay rates when we start making more money.
SPEAKER_4: Then there's also the more people that buy the magazine, the more money we will pay our staff, the more money we will pay our contributors and our writers and anyone else who contributes.
SPEAKER_4: We will always bring it down the line to everyone.
SPEAKER_4: The more money that we earn for the magazine goes to everyone who worked on it.
SPEAKER_4: It's like I'm literally not paying myself for this magazine so that everyone else can get as much as possible.
SPEAKER_1: Basically, our writers, it comes first, the people contribute.
SPEAKER_1: If there's anything left over, we'll deviate out between the rest of the staff or anything who goes into the project.
SPEAKER_1: But me and Dan are not benefiting from this really at all.
SPEAKER_1: The writers come first and the people to contribute come first.
SPEAKER_1: We actually give our writers a copy of the digital magazine for free.
SPEAKER_1: Also, so they can put on a portfolio and say, I wrote for a magazine, here's a thing.
SPEAKER_1: It might help people get a job.
SPEAKER_1: It has for me before because you can go, you got published.
SPEAKER_1: It's like you give them something to say, here's a part for your portfolio, like this is you in a magazine, it looks good, the magazine looks cool.
SPEAKER_1: People are like, this is awesome.
SPEAKER_1: We're giving them something back.
SPEAKER_1: It definitely isn't a do it for the love, because that's bullshit, sorry.
SPEAKER_4: And that's the other thing too, that anyone will tell you that being printed is so much more meaningful than being digitally out there.
SPEAKER_4: Like I wrote digitally online for years.
SPEAKER_4: The first time I ever saw my words appear printed on a magazine, it was just like, oh my God, this is like a whole another level of like, oh my God, this is me, this is a thing.
SPEAKER_4: And now this is a thing that I did that has my name on it.
SPEAKER_4: And ah, like it's a physical, tangible thing that I can hold.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: Hey, Jörg, you mind if I write for another magazine?
SPEAKER_2: I mean, I was also asked if I can contribute.
SPEAKER_2: That's how I got to know them.
SPEAKER_2: The problem is, and I tackled this before the interview with Maria shortly, while you were troubleshooting, Dan.
SPEAKER_2: That is the question, how much do you cover of the horror genre?
SPEAKER_2: Because, for example, when we released this, we had an interview prior to the head of the company that is actually working on a new, a vampire story successor.
SPEAKER_2: Now the thing is, it is, it's called a vampire story.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, but is that horror, or is it?
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, just wanted to say.
SPEAKER_4: I'm okay with things that are horror-adjacent.
SPEAKER_2: It's more comedic horror, not really scary horror.
SPEAKER_2: And Maria, perhaps you can repeat it slightly.
SPEAKER_2: You actually said you are not so stiff on the definition of horror, right?
SPEAKER_1: It's basically, if it has any aspects of horror, like I mean, Scooby-Doo can be horror, you know, it doesn't have to be disgusting, vile, you know, the cult of the land is horror.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, so I like it really, really bad.
SPEAKER_1: Most gruesome, the worst.
SPEAKER_1: I'm basically a serial killer.
SPEAKER_1: But like, if it's got, like Luigi's Mansion can be classed as a horror game.
SPEAKER_1: So we want to cover all aspects of like, if it's got slight, you know, there's a borderline to it where it's like, oh, if it's a murder mystery game, it's like, okay, it might be a little bit on the edge, but it's like, it can, it's down to the discretion of like, yeah, I mean, it's such a broad horizon.
SPEAKER_1: It doesn't have to be the worst.
SPEAKER_1: It can be just...
SPEAKER_4: I want to go as far as saying like, I'm open to anything if you can give me a good angle on it.
SPEAKER_4: If you can give me a good pitch to like, that really emphasizes the aspects and elements of what could be considered horror or at least entertaining or enjoyable to someone who is more of the horror mindset and focus.
SPEAKER_4: Cause like Maria mentioned, like Luigi's Mansion and Call to the Lamb, these are cute horror.
SPEAKER_4: There's cute horror, there's funny horror, there's hidey horror.
SPEAKER_4: There's so many little like subcategories within categories when it comes to the genre of horror.
SPEAKER_4: And that's what's great about it.
SPEAKER_4: I don't like hidey horror games.
SPEAKER_4: I'm not going to play them, but I don't think that I'm not going to not cover them though, because I know there's lots of people who do like those games.
SPEAKER_4: I don't like the asymmetrical horror games like Dead by Daylight, but so many people love those games.
SPEAKER_4: So absolutely, we need to talk about it.
SPEAKER_4: I want to talk about all of them.
SPEAKER_1: The magazine is called Fearzine.
SPEAKER_1: So it's horror, but it's also any kind of fear related stuff.
SPEAKER_1: So like you're saying, vampires, werewolves, anything that's kind of in that spooky, spooky, it can be covered.
SPEAKER_1: And so we want to cover...
SPEAKER_4: I mean, we covered Cabernet.
SPEAKER_1: Exactly.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_1: We want to make it...
SPEAKER_1: We had that were cleaner, the little cute werewolf.
SPEAKER_4: That's super cute horror game.
SPEAKER_1: So exactly.
SPEAKER_1: So yeah, anything that can be cast as a horror game.
SPEAKER_2: So perhaps that is where I could contribute, because obviously for the interview, I already did all the research.
SPEAKER_2: But then I'm not doing anything with the research, other than asking our guests, but I never wrote it down in form of text, like, hey, this is the background story of this and that series.
SPEAKER_2: And interestingly, for example, for the vampires' story, it's actually that Bill Taylor, who used to work for Lucas Film Games, Lucas Arts and later on, also for, if I'm not mistaken, also Sierra Online, that he lost the rights to the IP and regained it back two years ago.
SPEAKER_2: And that is now why he can actually finish the story, because the first part actually had an open ending.
SPEAKER_2: So perhaps an article about the background about that could be something I could contribute, because...
SPEAKER_4: That would be like an interesting, like a franchise deep dive, a retrospective.
SPEAKER_2: Right, right, a retrospective that is with like 15 years in between the first and the second part, because many games just die because of franchise problems.
SPEAKER_1: Yes.
SPEAKER_2: And so perhaps that is something I could shed a light on, because I did all the research.
SPEAKER_1: And that's something that like we are looking into for issue three as well, which we're bringing on a lot of more diverse writers.
SPEAKER_1: Issue two is very review preview heavy, because it was just me and Dan.
SPEAKER_1: But this one, we're doing these op-ed things where we're bringing in people to give their insights into making music for games, making this, we're doing a lot of dev stories where it's like bring your opinions in, bring your experience, because the idea as well is we would like to have people read this magazine and maybe be inspired that if they wanted to get into the game industry, like how do you do it?
SPEAKER_1: There's many aspects of game industry that's beyond making games or art, there's loads.
SPEAKER_1: So it's like if people can read it and go, that's interesting, or a point of view from someone in the industry.
SPEAKER_1: So yes, something like what you're doing is an interesting read.
SPEAKER_1: I wrote for Issue 1, I did an article and it was like banned to the bone.
SPEAKER_1: It was just basically about censorship of games around the world and how they were banned and how these days it looks.
SPEAKER_1: It's kind of, yeah, there you go.
SPEAKER_1: How it's just kind of like weak source now.
SPEAKER_1: We're just like, why did you ban that?
SPEAKER_1: But back then, it was bad.
SPEAKER_1: It was this censorship.
SPEAKER_1: So yeah, we're looking for different voices in gaming and we're looking for these different articles that can explain the history of gaming and how it came about.
SPEAKER_1: And so yeah, that's definitely a place to, it's not just all about reviews and previews of games.
SPEAKER_1: We want insights and people's opinions on the gaming industry as a whole.
SPEAKER_1: Like as long as it's kind of horror related.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, definitely.
SPEAKER_4: Yeah, I mean, even still, like we have our own developers that we've been covering, and not all those developers strictly make horror games.
SPEAKER_4: Okay.
SPEAKER_4: You know, so developers, you know, then they may make like a multiplayer shooter, and then they make a horror game, or they make a horror game, and then they go on to make a Zelda like, you know, there's no hard line there.
SPEAKER_4: And to kind of self promote a little bit here, I'm currently working on my own podcast that I'm calling Building Horror, where I talk to developers of horror games.
SPEAKER_4: And a lot of that conversation that I end up having with them is trying to humanize developers, especially because a lot of people are so used to video games as being this thing that is suddenly there for them, and they don't think about the process and the people behind creating these things, and discussing this with the developers, talking about their origins, how they got in the game design, why they got in the game design, their biggest influences.
SPEAKER_4: Most of the time, we're not talking about horror strictly, but it's a lot of what leans in to it, or weaves around into that path, and then I'll bring it around and be like, you know, let's talk about like your favorite horror game, or like the things, what we love about their game.
SPEAKER_4: And, you know, we're trying to talk about their big project that they have now, or a game that they just released, and help promote that project.
SPEAKER_4: And I'm like, I'm really excited to get those out there.
SPEAKER_4: I love these conversations I've been having with some developers.
SPEAKER_4: I've got a really cool lineup already, and people who've signed on to do this podcast with me, and I love hearing their stories.
SPEAKER_4: I love exploring these backgrounds of these developers.
SPEAKER_4: And I hope that other people will find them as fascinating as I do, and want to listen to these shows, as well as the articles we're going to write.
SPEAKER_4: And we're asking some of the developers to write articles.
SPEAKER_4: Give us a deep dive on a specific topic that you're really interested in.
SPEAKER_4: We already have one lined up for issue three.
SPEAKER_4: A developer is going to write an article for us about developing like old school games for the Sega Mega Drive slash Genesis.
SPEAKER_4: And I think that's like some of the coolest stuff that we can do.
SPEAKER_2: It's interesting.
SPEAKER_2: So perhaps there is something I could write about if it's not strictly fearful horror.
SPEAKER_2: It's interesting, of course.
SPEAKER_4: There's always options.
SPEAKER_4: There's always room.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, because you know, when Alex asked me, my first thought was like I don't want to purely recycle what I already did for Scene World, you know?
SPEAKER_2: I don't think...
SPEAKER_4: Yeah, we would ask that you don't do something like that.
SPEAKER_4: We don't want to have any kind of rehashing or reiterating, because we want our content to be as bespoke as possible, not to mention, like we want it to be something that somebody else hasn't seen before.
SPEAKER_4: And this is something that I've been pushing with our writers recently, is give me...
SPEAKER_4: Like, put yourself in your writing, you know?
SPEAKER_4: We want people to understand you as a writer.
SPEAKER_4: It's not about being like hyperfactual, or you're not turning in a thesis paper for a degree program.
SPEAKER_4: You're telling a story, or you're telling your opinion on something, and you're trying to give the reader a different POV or insight, something that gives added value to the topic and what you're talking about, especially if you're like super passionate about it.
SPEAKER_4: And this is where I've been seeing a lot of great responses from our writers, that they're coming at things with their passion, especially when it comes to things that are like, it might not be the horror video game specifically, but it's something that has to do with it or relate to it, especially for them personally, and how it intertwines with their lives.
SPEAKER_4: You know, you never know what you're going to get when you give people the freedom to write like that.
SPEAKER_2: Okay, interesting, interesting.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, it's also interesting what Maria just mentioned with censorship.
SPEAKER_2: I just learned two weeks ago that the game yesterday, which is a point-and-click adventure, a thriller, a murder thriller point-and-click adventure, that actually in Germany, for example, it was rated for 16 plus, so 16 years or older.
SPEAKER_2: But for the re-release on Steam and GoG, they actually removed a screaming and blood scene where somebody was murdered, because they found it was too horror-like for Steam and GoG.
SPEAKER_2: The thing is, by censorshiping it later on for the digital re-release, they actually broke the soundtrack, so the voice acting and so on.
SPEAKER_2: So they actually partly broke the game by doing this censorship in a wrong way.
SPEAKER_2: So that would also be an interesting perspective, like belated censorship while breaking games that were originally-
SPEAKER_4: You can also look at censorship across the world, because censorship is different in different parts of the world, especially in Germany over there.
SPEAKER_4: I know they censorship violence and gore very heavily over there, but not nudity.
SPEAKER_4: In America, nudity is heavily censored.
SPEAKER_2: Which is-
SPEAKER_4: We don't care about violence and gore though.
SPEAKER_3: Your intestines could be hanging out, but don't show a boob.
SPEAKER_1: Murders find boobs back.
SPEAKER_2: Exactly.
SPEAKER_2: Which is why on Steam, as a German, you can't get any game having nudity.
SPEAKER_2: It's not displaying in the region.
SPEAKER_2: Despite by law, it would be possible.
SPEAKER_2: It's so weird.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_2: And for, you know, Second World War science and so on, that was actually just lifted 2017, if I'm not mistaken.
SPEAKER_2: So not so long ago.
SPEAKER_2: And it's interesting that because of this, for example, Wolfenstein too would actually have a re-release.
SPEAKER_2: So if you buy it in Germany off Steam, you actually get the German uncensored version as well.
SPEAKER_2: Which is super weird because some people, like from Ukraine and so on, asked how they can get it outside of Germany.
SPEAKER_2: And you can't because it's automatically added when you are in Germany.
SPEAKER_2: But if you're outside of Germany, it's not.
SPEAKER_2: So yeah, perhaps that's also article versity.
SPEAKER_2: Now you're giving me ideas what I could write about.
SPEAKER_1: It's kind of a unique perspective that we wouldn't know.
SPEAKER_1: So it's definitely things that we, it's stuff that you can write and it's stuff that, people would be interested to read that because people would go, I didn't know that was a thing.
SPEAKER_1: I didn't know, I know it's a thing, but a lot of people reading game is like, I didn't know Germany had these rules, I didn't know the UK is pretty big with censorship, they go crazy with it.
SPEAKER_1: But it's just if you don't know these things, so having these different voices around the world, that can give you an insight into that.
SPEAKER_1: It just makes the whole, kind of brings the gaming community together and gets people talking, really, because you get to know what different restrictions that are around the world.
SPEAKER_2: And here's the best thing about Wolfenstein 2 on the Switch, for example, because there are two versions, as I just said, an uncensored version of German, and a censored version of German, and the uncensored version is actually meant for Austria, which also speaks German, and the German part of Switzerland.
SPEAKER_2: But when those physical retail copies were sold out, they actually sent those customers the censored version.
SPEAKER_2: So, yeah, perhaps, so I know a little bit of such things because I make research, mainly for the interviews of the podcast, but I never do anything with what I learned.
SPEAKER_2: So perhaps that's an option.
SPEAKER_3: So now you mentioned your community and the readership and everything.
SPEAKER_3: How is the interaction with your community?
SPEAKER_1: It's very positive.
SPEAKER_1: We base our interactions on positivity and stuff like, our discourse is very about like, and it's not false positivity.
SPEAKER_1: We're not like, oh, you have to be nice all the time, but we're just like, be supportive.
SPEAKER_1: You could be constructive criticism of things.
SPEAKER_1: You don't have to like everything, but we always just say, come at something with construct.
SPEAKER_1: Don't just be a hater for being a hater.
SPEAKER_1: We don't tolerate it.
SPEAKER_1: If we're reviewing games for our magazine, if we don't like the game, we ain't going to review it.
SPEAKER_1: We only review stuff that we like, but we'll be honest about it and say, we ain't reviewing this.
SPEAKER_1: We don't like it.
SPEAKER_1: We think it's trash.
SPEAKER_1: But it's all about positivity and we're always reaching out.
SPEAKER_1: On our Twitter page and stuff, we're constantly commenting on people's games and being like, oh, we want to see more.
SPEAKER_1: We want to see what you can do.
SPEAKER_1: There's been a number of devs that are just so downtrodden and they're just like, oh, I got a bunch of negative reviews on Steam and people are review bombing.
SPEAKER_1: And we're just like, don't listen to them.
SPEAKER_1: It's fine.
SPEAKER_1: We'll play your game.
SPEAKER_1: We played it and stuff and we've commented on these things.
SPEAKER_1: And they're like, we've had DMs where people have reached out to us.
SPEAKER_1: And me and Dan have just spoke to these people and gone, don't listen to them.
SPEAKER_1: You know, it's not, it's just people be negative and they just want to crap on people that make anything.
SPEAKER_1: Like I always say, don't take constructive criticism from people that don't construct things.
SPEAKER_1: You know, so it's just like, it's that sort of thing.
SPEAKER_1: So we're all about the positivity and boosting people up because we, me and Dan know how hard it is to create something.
SPEAKER_1: Like we get it.
SPEAKER_1: So it's, it's all about like giving them a support system to go like, keep going, keep doing what you're doing.
SPEAKER_1: It's good.
SPEAKER_1: You know, it's just, you might not have your audience yet, but just keep pushing it.
SPEAKER_1: So we're all about that kind of horrifically wholesome thing and all about kind of supporting people because I personally know how powerful encouragement can be.
SPEAKER_1: People don't get it.
SPEAKER_1: People don't give it.
SPEAKER_1: So it's just having someone go, good job.
SPEAKER_1: You're doing a good job.
SPEAKER_1: Can push people like beyond the stars, you know, just giving someone that go for it.
SPEAKER_1: You got this type thing.
SPEAKER_1: And that's what we try and do.
SPEAKER_1: We're always just trying to boost people up and just be like, look, you're making things most of the people in the world aren't, go for it.
SPEAKER_1: You got this sort of thing.
SPEAKER_1: So it just gives them a little bit of a boost.
SPEAKER_1: So yeah, we're all about positivity and support as much as we can.
SPEAKER_4: Literally Maria in a nutshell and why I'm even sitting here right now, because she did that to me.
SPEAKER_4: Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_4: You know, she was like, you got this, you can do it.
SPEAKER_4: Like, all right, cool.
SPEAKER_2: That's actually an interesting question.
SPEAKER_2: Now, AJ asked about the community feedback.
SPEAKER_2: Now, the question is, what is the feedback of the industry as a whole, the gaming industry?
SPEAKER_2: Because I know from our early steps with the podcast, companies like Nordic, before they were called THK Nordic, they were like, who are you and what do you want?
SPEAKER_2: You know, so the beginning is very, very hard from what I learned, because there are tons of YouTubers and influencers and other fan magazines, review home pages and so on.
SPEAKER_2: So how do you approach that?
SPEAKER_4: I was going to say, this is actually an interesting topic, because when I was first handed off things, and I kind of got a little bit of like an on-boarding session, and I was told that talking to devs is easy, but getting review keys is hard.
SPEAKER_4: And we learned really fast that it's not that hard.
SPEAKER_4: I was going to say, yeah, that's hard for us.
SPEAKER_1: They were throwing them at us eventually.
SPEAKER_1: We're like, you need to stop sending us keys.
SPEAKER_4: Basically, just try to be as human as possible.
SPEAKER_4: We just try to be as transparent as possible, and just being as friendly as we can, and just saying like, hey, this is what we're doing, and we just want to communicate with you.
SPEAKER_4: And if you want to help us out to feature your game, cool.
SPEAKER_4: If not, we're probably going to cover it anyways, because we're not trying to get things for free.
SPEAKER_4: We're just trying to get easier access if we need to.
SPEAKER_4: And we're trying to actually push forward on that notion of not relying on review keys.
SPEAKER_4: But devs are just throwing them at us at this point, because they want us to cover their games, which is fine.
SPEAKER_4: But also, we want to do better.
SPEAKER_4: We're trying to work out ways of helping support these developers as much as possible, even to the point where I would ideally buy every game if we can financially afford it, just to support the developers that we're covering.
SPEAKER_4: That being said, I've had hit or miss when it comes to reaching out to bigger studios, the AAA studios.
SPEAKER_4: I've been working with in games journalism for a couple of years, and I've been seeing how hard some of them can be.
SPEAKER_4: Sony specifically is one of the hardest studios and companies to work with when it comes to trying to do review keys and things like that.
SPEAKER_4: You ask anyone, anyone who works in the gaming journalist space, they'll tell you that.
SPEAKER_4: Nintendo is a bit tough, but I have had relationships with Nintendo, and I've been pretty decent with most that I've reached out to.
SPEAKER_4: But then again, a lot of the coverage that we do is smaller teams, smaller games.
SPEAKER_4: We haven't had a lot going on when it comes to bigger studios and teams, but frankly, we're not concerned about those, you know?
SPEAKER_4: And it's also a shift that I hope to see in our magazine that we're not relying on timely articles.
SPEAKER_4: We're a magazine in a space of the digital world of internet, and people can get, you know, people are publishing reviews for games days, weeks or more in advance.
SPEAKER_4: There's constant leaks.
SPEAKER_4: You can read anything about a game well before it's available.
SPEAKER_4: We're never going to compete with that, and we're never going to beat that.
SPEAKER_4: So I'm not trying to.
SPEAKER_4: I'm trying to provide people real human experiences.
SPEAKER_4: And this is something that I'm trying to make sure that like all the writers that we work with are understanding that this isn't about being the first one to the market to cover a brand new game, because it's never going to happen, first of all.
SPEAKER_4: Second of all, we want to make sure that you're conveying to the reader the real true experience you had with that game, and not just like pandering or not.
SPEAKER_4: I don't want to read an article in my magazine, in our magazine, A Fearzine, that's the same thing that the YouTuber said three months ago about that game.
SPEAKER_4: I already told my staff recently, I was pushing this, is if there's a big game that just came out, like let's say Silent Hill 2, or let's say Resident Evil 9 is coming up, and people got approached like, oh my God, Resident Evil 9, Resident Evil 9.
SPEAKER_4: I don't want anyone to be like, I got to blitz through that game as fast as possible so I can write a review about it.
SPEAKER_4: I want people to take their time with that, just like I would if I was going to write that review.
SPEAKER_4: I want to take my time enjoying that game and not feeling pressured and not feeling rushed.
SPEAKER_4: And then I can craft a review or an article or something around that experience that I felt as a gamer and a fan that is me and my voice and my personal passion for the genre.
SPEAKER_4: And it's not about being the first one out there to tell everyone, this game is great, this game is great, because everyone's going to know that game is great by the time I get it out there.
SPEAKER_4: Or the game is okay, whatever.
SPEAKER_4: But maybe the game is not great, but I loved it and I want to tell people that I loved it and why I loved it.
SPEAKER_4: That's even better, honestly, to me, because I think that some of the best pieces is when someone feels differently about something and they can explain very well why it's better to them or why other people are maybe being too harsh on something or should look closer at something.
SPEAKER_4: Because in this day and age with instant gratification and influencers and YouTube and Twitch and TikTok, everyone is making snap judgments immediately.
SPEAKER_4: This is also why we don't do review scores.
SPEAKER_4: Our reviews, our final paragraphs, our final paragraphs are the summary of what we think about a game.
SPEAKER_4: There's no score, there's no number, there's no letter.
SPEAKER_4: You have to, as a reader, decipher how we felt about the game based on the words that we use.
SPEAKER_4: Because I don't want anyone going for that instant gratification of, it's a nine, cool, it's a ten, cool, this game's a seven.
SPEAKER_4: I'm never playing it because it's a seven.
SPEAKER_4: But how do you know?
SPEAKER_4: Why are you passing on a seven because it's a seven?
SPEAKER_4: What if there's something in that seven game that you love, and that game for you is better than a seven?
SPEAKER_4: You'll never know because you just.
SPEAKER_1: That's usually what we'll do.
SPEAKER_1: We have a conclusion paragraph like Dan was just saying, and I usually, like most of our writers will go, if you're a fan of Resident Evil, this one might be for you.
SPEAKER_1: If you're a fan of point and click adventures, this one might be for you.
SPEAKER_1: But it's not a, well, this is a nine, so everyone's going to love it because some people just don't like those kinds of games.
SPEAKER_1: And so when we review games as well, like we'll go for, we'll play the demo.
SPEAKER_1: And if we don't, if it's not a game that vibes with us, we're not going to review it.
SPEAKER_1: I'll give it to one of our other writers to review.
SPEAKER_1: Like I'm not going to review a JRPG.
SPEAKER_1: They're just not my kind of games.
SPEAKER_1: Dan doesn't like point and click adventures because it's just not his kind.
SPEAKER_1: So there's no point in him reviewing it because he's going to go, this is boring.
SPEAKER_1: I hate it.
SPEAKER_1: And that's not fair.
SPEAKER_4: I was going to make that point earlier too, that we won't assign a game to a writer who doesn't like that style of game.
SPEAKER_4: We're just going to hate it.
SPEAKER_1: So we give them a list and go, these are the games and then they can put their name to go, oh, I'd like to try this one.
SPEAKER_1: I'd like to try that one.
SPEAKER_1: We also let our writers be like, if you like a game, if you own a game you want to write about, pitch it, tell us about it or something.
SPEAKER_1: So we're not going to go, you have to write about this game.
SPEAKER_1: Because if someone said to me, oh, you need to write about this JRPG, I'd be like, I hate this game.
SPEAKER_1: I don't want to play it on board.
SPEAKER_1: It's just no point.
SPEAKER_1: So that's not fair for the reader to go, well, this game sucks.
SPEAKER_1: It's like just because I don't like it.
SPEAKER_1: That's what's not fair about review scores.
SPEAKER_1: You have one person summarizing it for everyone in the world.
SPEAKER_1: It doesn't work.
SPEAKER_4: No matter what, you're always going to have that one reader, or I say the one reader, but there's going to be the fraction of people who, even if a game gets a 10, they're going to be like, oh, this game got a 10, I need to play it, and then they get it and they start playing it.
SPEAKER_4: They're like, this game sucks.
SPEAKER_4: I hate everything about it.
SPEAKER_4: How dare they give it a 10?
SPEAKER_4: It's like, well, it's not meant for you.
SPEAKER_4: It's not the type of game that registers with you.
SPEAKER_4: It's a 10 because that person loved that game, which is fine.
SPEAKER_4: But you as a player and a consumer, you need to be able to read those reviews and look past the number and go, oh, it has tactics.
SPEAKER_4: I don't like tactics.
SPEAKER_4: I'm not going to play that.
SPEAKER_1: Well, it's also as well, if you make a review score and someone doesn't agree with it, they will then tie your entire reputation.
SPEAKER_1: They'll go, yeah, but I gave this game a 10 and it's such, so I'm not going to listen to anything else Fearzine says.
SPEAKER_1: It's like it was just a review score.
SPEAKER_1: It's like people will do that and go, well, but IGN gave it this and so they're lying or they're paid off or they're being, it's like, no, we're not ever going to take money to review a game or we're not going to be bought out.
SPEAKER_1: It's our own personal take.
SPEAKER_1: So yeah, that's the start with review scores and stuff.
SPEAKER_1: It's just like it doesn't, it's not good.
SPEAKER_3: What do you think of the general review environment now?
SPEAKER_3: Because it used to be, long ago, you'd get your magazines and you'd read, and the reviews in there are what you use to decide whether you wanted to buy something or play a game.
SPEAKER_3: Now you've got, again, on Steam, you've got user reviews right off the bat.
SPEAKER_3: You can see what people think of the game.
SPEAKER_3: Do you think that has skewed people's, how they perceive this rather than, like, you know, because obviously, they're not looking just in the magazines and what not for reviews.
SPEAKER_3: Do you think that's changed like the landscape kind of?
SPEAKER_4: I don't think it's the landscape or reviews.
SPEAKER_4: I think it's the readers.
SPEAKER_4: I think it's instant gratification, nature and sensibilities that people have grounded themselves in.
SPEAKER_4: Because I've been saying this for ages.
SPEAKER_4: I think all reviews matter.
SPEAKER_4: All reviews are helpful, good or bad.
SPEAKER_4: Because I was going to say, I actually love user reviews because A, a user review might reveal to me something about a game that I love.
SPEAKER_4: I go, oh, I'm interested in this game now because this person liked it for these reasons.
SPEAKER_4: But on the flip side, you're going to get the person who is like, this game was amazing and I loved everything about it.
SPEAKER_4: It was so incredible.
SPEAKER_4: This was the best game ever, but I'm giving it a one star out of 10 because my Amazon driver kicked my dog.
SPEAKER_4: It's like, what?
SPEAKER_3: What does that have to do with it?
SPEAKER_1: I mean, I literally saw a review score once and someone, review scores can hurt Steam games because if you get too many negative reviews, it can show us what mixed reviews or do not recommend, and that can push down the algorithm for Steam games so they don't get as much seen.
SPEAKER_1: But then when you read the reviews, there's like what Dan was saying.
SPEAKER_1: I read a review and it said, the game was great, it was amazing, but it had some stuff in it that kind of triggered me.
SPEAKER_1: It's like the game was good and it made you feel things, so you don't recommend it.
SPEAKER_1: It's like maybe you're just sensitive and you need to grow up a little bit.
SPEAKER_1: Right.
SPEAKER_1: You know, your review bombing is saying, and they put like a do not recommend, so that affects the overall score of the Steam game.
SPEAKER_1: Could have been, I actually made me want to play it more because I was like, oh wow, a game that's storyline is so good, it touches on sensitive subjects.
SPEAKER_1: That's what games should do, that's what art does.
SPEAKER_1: It makes you feel things.
SPEAKER_1: But you're going to downgrade a game because it made you feel things.
SPEAKER_1: It's just, even though you said it was a great game.
SPEAKER_1: And it's like, so there's a lot of things with review scores that you have to look into them and be like, what is this person trying to say?
SPEAKER_1: And that's obviously a problem.
SPEAKER_1: We get things with the console wars that someone will just downgrade a game because it came out on PlayStation rather than Xbox.
SPEAKER_1: And it's got nothing to do with the game, it's just fanboys going, you don't like PlayStation.
SPEAKER_4: This is bringing me back to my notion of where I say, I don't think reviews are the problem, it's the readers and their interpretation of them, because I was going to mention review bombing.
SPEAKER_4: Review bombing, I think is a terrible thing, but it also allows for fans and a user base to incite change.
SPEAKER_4: I don't want to go too hard on it, but what happened with Helldivers and the whole thing with requiring the PlayStation Network thing for PC players, by review bombing the game, those fans were able to get something changed for the better for that game, which is good.
SPEAKER_4: On the other hand, you get people review bombing games just because they're petty and it's bad.
SPEAKER_4: It's like, all right.
SPEAKER_4: But then this is also where there's a fine line of you need to be able to decipher the differences between these types of scores.
SPEAKER_4: A lot like Maria said, you see something getting review bombed, and then you're like, well, why?
SPEAKER_4: This is where you can usually find like a diamond in the rough kind of thing.
SPEAKER_4: You have to weed through some of that stuff.
SPEAKER_4: We're not going to be able to do that as a magazine.
SPEAKER_4: It's just a matter of we're going to try to give you the best, most genuine experience and understanding from the individual.
SPEAKER_4: This is also the part of the reasoning why I want people to write and put themselves in their words because that's exactly what it is.
SPEAKER_4: It's a person's opinion, no matter what.
SPEAKER_4: This is how a single person felt about their time and experience with this thing.
SPEAKER_4: It's not an end all to everything.
SPEAKER_4: Gamers, readers, people as a whole need to have a better understanding of how to consume in a responsible way.
SPEAKER_4: People need to be able to look at these things and make decisions for themselves.
SPEAKER_4: That's the point of a review score is to help you understand.
SPEAKER_4: If the review score is high or low, and how you interpret that depends on your point of view, like Elden Ring.
SPEAKER_4: Here's a good example.
SPEAKER_4: When Elden Ring came out and it got a bunch of rave reviews, tens out of tens, and then there was this flooding of people running out to buy Elden Ring because it got tens everywhere.
SPEAKER_4: And then that whole lot of people went screaming to the internet, like, this game sucks.
SPEAKER_4: It's so hard.
SPEAKER_4: I hate this.
SPEAKER_4: And it's like, because you didn't actually read the review, you don't understand what this game is.
SPEAKER_4: And then they're like, they need to put an easy mode in it.
SPEAKER_4: It's like, no, they can't do that because that breaks the game.
SPEAKER_4: It defeats the point of that game.
SPEAKER_4: That's what makes it great for the people who like those kinds of games.
SPEAKER_4: I don't want to play the easy mode Elden Ring.
SPEAKER_4: I want the game that chews me up and spits me out.
SPEAKER_4: You know, it's just like, Kirby, do you want me to tell you to make an ultra hard mode, Kirby?
SPEAKER_4: Those games are made easy for a reason.
SPEAKER_4: They're meant to be that way.
SPEAKER_1: And that's the thing with our writers as well is that a lot of publications will personally write their article and then the editor will just come in and just chop it up, change it.
SPEAKER_1: And in the end, it's a completely different article.
SPEAKER_1: You know, it's like they'll just do it with us.
SPEAKER_1: We won't do that.
SPEAKER_1: We will edit the articles to make it grammarily correct and to make it readable.
SPEAKER_1: But we want the writers to have their own voice.
SPEAKER_1: We want them to say what they want to say about it.
SPEAKER_1: We're not going to change anything.
SPEAKER_1: We'll go for the editing process and we'll make suggestions and go maybe rewrite this section to make it clearer.
SPEAKER_1: But it's a suggestion.
SPEAKER_1: And if the writer is like, I don't want to change it.
SPEAKER_1: It's like, okay, well, you know, that's fine.
SPEAKER_1: But we're not going to change it for them because we want it to be their voice.
SPEAKER_1: We're not going to...
SPEAKER_4: The only thing we'll be hard on is making sure that it's clean readability.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_4: Beyond clean readability, we will maintain everything else.
SPEAKER_2: I wanted to step on something that you mentioned earlier before Ajay asked his question that was there is actually a good example of such a game.
SPEAKER_2: I think the most famous example I can think of is actually the game Myst which is the first game that was released on the CD as a media.
SPEAKER_2: I remember that those professional magazines refused.
SPEAKER_2: They were totally negative with the game.
SPEAKER_2: But the gamer community in I think it was 1993, yeah, they actually loved the game.
SPEAKER_2: So a year later, all those magazines, at least here in Germany, they actually were forced to reiterate their previous reviews and raise the score because the game series got so famous.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, then we got the second part, Riven, The Sequel of Mist, and now they are still doing new games in the series.
SPEAKER_4: I think about how many games are cult classics nowadays that were hated originally, but people love them now.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, people are very, very quick.
SPEAKER_4: This is why we have retro reviews.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_1: I mean, for example, just recently when the Silent Hill 2 remake trailer came out, when it first was revealed, people hated it.
SPEAKER_1: People were like, what did you do to James?
SPEAKER_1: What did you do to the combat?
SPEAKER_1: What did you do to that?
SPEAKER_1: And then the game was released, the Bloober, they said Bloober doesn't know how to make a game, it's one of the best horror games that's ever been made now.
SPEAKER_1: It's amazing.
SPEAKER_1: People were so quick to jump on it and be like, this sucks, what did you do?
SPEAKER_1: It's just like, give it a chance.
SPEAKER_1: It's not the full game, it hasn't been released yet, chill.
SPEAKER_1: So yeah, so it's just like, it is, people take people's reviews with a grain of salt, but it's just like, we want to try and be as honest and as kind of human as possible.
SPEAKER_1: There are people behind the keyboard making our reviews and we don't want to make it into a...
SPEAKER_1: like, we don't want to make it look like a machine is reviewing these games.
SPEAKER_1: These are real people, they're real fans, they want to like these games.
SPEAKER_1: And so it is, we'll just say, I had fun running around shooting zombies, blowing their heads off.
SPEAKER_1: It was great.
SPEAKER_1: There you go.
SPEAKER_1: That's what I liked about it.
SPEAKER_1: That's an honest review.
SPEAKER_4: So there's also the other caveat of our magazine is the simple fact that there are literally thousands of games released on Steam every few weeks, every few months, every year.
SPEAKER_4: And the horror genre especially is getting incredibly saturated, which is insane.
SPEAKER_4: It's great for us.
SPEAKER_4: So we have a lot to do.
SPEAKER_4: But at the same time, it's like, well, how do you know what to look at?
SPEAKER_4: How do you know what to pay attention to?
SPEAKER_4: And that's kind of why we're doing this.
SPEAKER_4: Like I can literally show this magazine to people and people will flip through the pages and then be like, I've never heard of any of these games before.
SPEAKER_4: And it's like, perfect, here, read this and look at it and see which ones you like and then go download them or play their demo.
SPEAKER_4: That's the whole point is we're basically creating a curated list of things for you to take a look at and see what works for you.
SPEAKER_4: It's a weird, weird time to be in, especially with how many games are coming out nowadays.
SPEAKER_4: It's just, it's so much, like it's overwhelming for us just to be putting this together and to be trying to create this list.
SPEAKER_4: And we miss stuff all the time.
SPEAKER_4: It's nuts.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, we basically fill up our list and then we're like, okay, we're going to write these.
SPEAKER_1: And then it's like, I really wish we could have put this game in there.
SPEAKER_1: So I actually like, the reason why issue two is a hundred pages is probably partly my fault.
SPEAKER_4: Because we kept adding and adding and adding and adding games.
SPEAKER_1: And I was like, let me put this game, and Dan's like, we have to cut it off at some point.
SPEAKER_1: And I'm like, yeah, but we can just squeeze this last one in.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, a hundred pages later, we're like, yeah, maybe we need to cut it back a little bit.
SPEAKER_1: But that's what happens.
SPEAKER_1: You want to include everything, because you're just like, oh man, I saw this game, it's great.
SPEAKER_1: And I saw this game, it's great, because there's so many of them, and we're excited for it.
SPEAKER_1: We want to cover them.
SPEAKER_1: And so it is, it's just, what do you choose?
SPEAKER_1: Where do you pick?
SPEAKER_1: And like Devs will send us games.
SPEAKER_1: And we're like, okay, yeah, it's a consideration.
SPEAKER_1: And we have a pitches channel in our Discord, where we're like, if you see a game, pitch it to us, and we'll look at it and see if it's.
SPEAKER_1: So we're always keeping a lookout for games, but there's always going to be games.
SPEAKER_1: We can't cover everything, but we're going to try.
SPEAKER_4: When we get the training wheels off and when we're in full production mode, we could probably easily do a monthly magazine with 50 plus games every single month.
SPEAKER_4: Yeah.
SPEAKER_4: If we had the ability and the power to do it.
SPEAKER_1: Right.
SPEAKER_1: If there was more than me and Dan to work on the stuff.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: A question you mentioned earlier, Dan, that you really don't mind not covering games from big publishers.
SPEAKER_2: But then I think the more Fearzine will be successful and have a more broader audience because you have more readers and so on.
SPEAKER_2: Isn't that also a good sign when those AAA studios and publishers want to have their game covered by you?
SPEAKER_2: Isn't that kind of a milestone to reach?
SPEAKER_4: Oh yeah, that'd be great.
SPEAKER_4: I mean, I'm going to prioritize them, but that'd be great.
SPEAKER_4: I would love to have like Capcom or Konami knocking on our door like, we need you to talk about us like you do.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, I mean, we love that.
SPEAKER_1: Obviously, that's a dream.
SPEAKER_1: We want to do that.
SPEAKER_1: We want to cover big games, but we don't want to take the focus away from indie developers.
SPEAKER_1: We don't want to seem like it sells out.
SPEAKER_1: We had somebody wrote a review for Silent Hill 2 Remake.
SPEAKER_1: We have it in issue 2, and it was like, yeah, if we can do the game, we'll do it, but we're not going to overshadow indie developers.
SPEAKER_1: We're not going to put Silent Hill 2 on the cover because it's the big game.
SPEAKER_1: It's like, sure, we want to put the game on it.
SPEAKER_1: The idea of this is to elevate indie developers and get them out.
SPEAKER_1: We don't want to be like, well, screw you guys.
SPEAKER_1: A bigger game came along and pushed you out, because that's what's happening in an industry anyway.
SPEAKER_1: They're being overshadowed by AAA games.
SPEAKER_1: This project is about elevating indie developers and helping them get up.
SPEAKER_4: They're going to share pages with Silent Hill 2 Remake.
SPEAKER_4: They're going to share space with the bigger AAAs.
SPEAKER_1: We're not going to push devs out for it.
SPEAKER_4: I can even go as far as saying there was at one point an internal discussion with us about, what game are we going to feature on the cover?
SPEAKER_4: One of our writers was saying, why don't we do the thing remastered?
SPEAKER_4: Because everybody knows the thing remastered.
SPEAKER_4: That's a big deal in the space.
SPEAKER_4: People know this game, people know Night Dive.
SPEAKER_4: I don't want to put a well-known game on the cover because everybody already knows it.
SPEAKER_4: What's the point of that?
SPEAKER_4: Also as well, if you want to highlight other things.
SPEAKER_1: If you've got a big game like Silent Hill or something like that, people are not going to come to us for Silent Hill.
SPEAKER_1: They're going to go to IGN, they're going to go to the big magazines, they're going to go to PlayStation magazine.
SPEAKER_4: They're going to go to their YouTubers.
SPEAKER_1: But if somebody wants Indie developers, Indie games, they're going to come to us.
SPEAKER_1: So it's like, yeah, we'll feature them, but we don't treat them any more special.
SPEAKER_1: They're not a special guest, they're not a celebrity to us.
SPEAKER_1: We're like, oh yeah, Silent Hill 2.
SPEAKER_1: It's like, yeah, it's cool, but it doesn't prioritize for us.
SPEAKER_1: We're not going to go, get lost Indie devs because the big boys are here now.
SPEAKER_2: True, no, no, I wasn't about to say that, that you have to shift the focus on the AAA.
SPEAKER_2: But if I learned something in the recent years that even Indie studios can make a successor to a big IP, I mean, just an example that I often put down is, for example, Robocop Roach City, which was done by a double A studio, not a triple A studio, but it's still considered one of the best Robocop franchise games ever, despite not be done by a big studio.
SPEAKER_4: That's more and more common nowadays.
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_2: Despite with Nacron, of course, they have a big publisher, but still the developer studio is a small one.
SPEAKER_2: So it's also sometimes how you tackle a big IP.
SPEAKER_4: You could say the same thing about Ninja Theory when they did DMC, because Ninja Theory has never been a big studio.
SPEAKER_4: They've done some big games, but they also did things like DMC, which was a Capcom property that they were given the task of making a new game within the series.
SPEAKER_4: I personally love that game.
SPEAKER_4: I think they crushed it.
SPEAKER_4: There's disagreement of that.
SPEAKER_4: I'm sure I'm going to get people like, oh, that's the worst.
SPEAKER_4: There's so many things to love about that game.
SPEAKER_4: I could defend it forever, but I think it stands against all the other Devil May Cry games.
SPEAKER_4: But what you're saying, though, I think that's a common thing, that you see these bigger franchises end up outsourcing to smaller teams because they see these smaller teams doing things that other bigger teams either won't or can't, because they're able to take bigger risks.
SPEAKER_4: That's the beauty of the indie scene, too.
SPEAKER_2: You have such examples where a big publisher is teaming up with a smaller indie studio and giving them the big IP to continue.
SPEAKER_2: So that's quite interesting there.
SPEAKER_2: So perhaps let's talk a bit about the future perspective.
SPEAKER_2: What's next?
SPEAKER_2: What's the next plan?
SPEAKER_2: I mean, what you said so far is you want to be not reliant on Kickstarter backing exclusive for the future.
SPEAKER_2: You said you want to not have staff that isn't paid and want to pay more the more successful the magazine is.
SPEAKER_2: So what are other plans apart from those two that you mentioned?
SPEAKER_4: Just to be clear, everyone that's worked on the magazine has been or will be paid.
SPEAKER_4: There's never been a part where anyone doesn't get paid except for me, because I'm trying to make sure that everybody else is getting paid.
SPEAKER_4: That's not to say that I haven't taken some like, oh, I need equipment or I need to like expend certain things for the business to help making sure that we're able to do the things we need to do and get the magazine out there.
SPEAKER_4: But we definitely have some stuff that we're working on, things that we're talking about, ways to grow and expand.
SPEAKER_4: Right now, our main focus is continuing to push the magazine and get the magazine really nailed down.
SPEAKER_4: Once we have things really stable there, we're working on other things.
SPEAKER_4: Obviously, like I mentioned, the podcast, so I'm going to be launching that podcast soon.
SPEAKER_4: That's going to be another way for us to try to expand our reach a little bit and hopefully bring in some more readers, etc.
SPEAKER_4: We're looking at and considering partnerships with other folks.
SPEAKER_4: Like we've been talking to the Horror Game Awards, which we want to collaborate with because we don't want to compete with them.
SPEAKER_4: We want to work with them because they're in the same boat as us.
SPEAKER_4: They're doing much the same thing.
SPEAKER_4: We've already had great conversations with them and talked about ways for us to collaborate.
SPEAKER_4: And we've talked to content creators.
SPEAKER_4: We have a content creator spotlight in our magazine.
SPEAKER_4: So we're trying to have this notion of supporting small content creators that make content around horror games, whether they're YouTubers, Twitch streamers, etc.
SPEAKER_4: And help them and help us, you know, kind of continue to build that community of the horrifically wholesome, everyone like helping each other and being supportive, getting the developers working together.
SPEAKER_4: We've talked about doing game jams, expanding the way that developers work and talk with each other.
SPEAKER_4: And of course, one of the other things that we're looking at is expanding beyond the magazine.
SPEAKER_1: But right now, the magazine is the primary focus.
SPEAKER_1: We do have a website.
SPEAKER_1: The website is very limited right now.
SPEAKER_1: The website does feature issue one.
SPEAKER_1: So if you're listening to this, you can see and read all of issue one for free on our website.
SPEAKER_1: Issue one will always be free on the website, but it also will no longer be available in print after this point.
SPEAKER_1: Issue one is being retired because of the new direction that we're taking everything.
SPEAKER_1: If you look at issue one and issue two side by side, you'll see what I'm talking about.
SPEAKER_1: It's leaps and bounds different from one another.
SPEAKER_1: We're going to continue to grow and build on what we're doing with issue two and evolve the magazine as we grow.
SPEAKER_1: Again, once we've settled with the magazine, that's where we're going to start trying to stretch out into other avenues and look at other forms of content that we can provide and or magazine projects.
SPEAKER_1: I don't want to give away too much.
SPEAKER_1: We're talking about some other possible magazine projects, etc.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, and it's also like we were thinking about doing a Scream team, where we'll have possibly streamers streaming on our behalf, and we can get exclusives for, devs can go give us their keys and we can do a world exclusive, or one of the Fearzine team is going to be streaming this game, like thinking with the devs can come in the chat, and there's a lot of avenues that we can go where it's just little ways to be like, how else can we promote the community?
SPEAKER_2: Because the magazine keeps the lights on, it's the only revenue we have, and so we're going to push that obviously because that's the only way we can get any money.
SPEAKER_2: But it's also we're looking at ways where we can include the devs in the magazine, make it more worth their while we're constantly communicating with them and going, how can we make this best for you?
SPEAKER_2: We want to eventually, it'll be nice to be invited to Comic Cons to go as like press pass or something to do interviews.
SPEAKER_2: I know sometimes indie devs are at Comic Cons that we can just go there and represent them and be like, hey, we'll just be a presence to go, we're here, we're around and maybe do a panel or something.
SPEAKER_1: I don't know.
SPEAKER_2: But there's a lot of avenues, but it's one of those like we have big ideas and we're working at how to try and get there because again, we don't know what we're doing.
SPEAKER_1: Tackled the magazine now everything else comes next.
SPEAKER_2: It's like we know we have the ability to do it.
SPEAKER_2: Me and Dan know we can do this.
SPEAKER_2: We're workhorses, we don't stop working.
SPEAKER_2: We have the dedication to pull it off.
SPEAKER_2: We know we can do it.
SPEAKER_2: It's just finding the way to get there.
SPEAKER_2: We have a lot of ideas, and we have ideas to where we go, but as long as we can keep the community behind us, and inspire them, and get their trust to say that we're serious about this.
SPEAKER_2: This is not just we want your games to get money, and then we don't care about you.
SPEAKER_2: We want to keep helping you.
SPEAKER_2: We want to help you grow.
SPEAKER_2: The bigger we grow, the more connections we get, the more connections our devs get.
SPEAKER_2: If we know publishers, we can go, hey, there's a dev that has this game.
SPEAKER_2: Are you interested?
SPEAKER_2: So it's building a community for them as well as us.
SPEAKER_2: And so, yeah, we have ideas of places to go.
SPEAKER_2: Like we don't have a fixed direction, but we're tapping into anything to be like, where could we go with this?
SPEAKER_2: Sky's the limit type thing.
SPEAKER_2: And, you know, we are very much of the whole, my beer generation.
SPEAKER_2: So we're just like, bring it on.
SPEAKER_3: So where can people go to follow along with what you're doing?
SPEAKER_1: Hmm, Fearzine Magazine.
SPEAKER_1: So it's a good start.
SPEAKER_1: fearzinemagazine.com, I should say.
SPEAKER_1: The website, like I mentioned, is a little bit bare at the moment, but that's where we're trying to make sure to keep things there for everyone.
SPEAKER_1: Hopefully, by the time you've listened or watched this episode of this podcast, I will have the digital version of the magazine for issue two available to purchase, which is one of the best ways to support us.
SPEAKER_1: Sadly, it doesn't get you the physical magazine, but it gives us help, it gives us support, it gives us funding to continue growing and pushing things forward.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, you're always welcome to download it and print it yourself.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_1: Which, you know, we want to sell magazines because it helps us do more and continue to grow.
SPEAKER_1: I'm trying to work on the best ways to make the magazine available for purchase for the physical magazine, which I'm looking at possibly like pre-orders and wishlisting because even like we mentioned, debug a bit, they have a system where you can order a magazine, but they don't ship it until they hit a certain threshold of volume to print, but they get really high numbers.
SPEAKER_1: So that's easier for them, whereas we're still quite small and I'm trying to sort out the best way to garnish interest.
SPEAKER_1: And if I know I can sell 100 magazines, I'll order 100 magazines and then I can provide them and the more that we sell, the bigger and cheaper everything gets.
SPEAKER_1: So it helps us a lot.
SPEAKER_1: We do have a Discord that's open that you can get to via our social profiles, whether it's Blue Sky or X slash Twitter.
SPEAKER_1: We are very active in there.
SPEAKER_1: It's a growing community.
SPEAKER_1: Our developers are in there.
SPEAKER_1: Our fans, our readers, our backers are in there.
SPEAKER_1: We will launch a Kickstarter again for the next issue of issue three.
SPEAKER_1: You can still find us on Kickstarter.
SPEAKER_1: We still have an active page on there where I update it regularly with where we're at with the magazine.
SPEAKER_1: And then we'll continue to update our Kickstarters as we launch them.
SPEAKER_1: We're looking into other avenues.
SPEAKER_1: We're on all social presences.
SPEAKER_1: We have Facebook, Instagram, Threads, BlueSky, like we're on everything.
SPEAKER_1: It's just Maria and Maria doing it, so we may not be the most active when it comes to updating those platforms.
SPEAKER_1: Maria basically mans the X account, I man the BlueSky account and try to post here and there.
SPEAKER_2: Well, it's also as well that with the accounts, me and Dan are manning them, like these are that you're talking to.
SPEAKER_2: So people are welcome to reach out to us, send us a message in the Discord.
SPEAKER_2: If you come in to the Discord, we're in there, you can ping us.
SPEAKER_2: If you want to chat with us, you can chat with us.
SPEAKER_2: We're open to the video calls.
SPEAKER_2: We're not hidden behind a wall.
SPEAKER_2: If you want to talk to us, you can talk to us and it's not a, oh, well, you need to book an appointment to talk to the CEOs.
SPEAKER_2: It's like, well, if we have time, you can talk to us.
SPEAKER_2: It is us that you're talking to.
SPEAKER_2: So if you're DMing us and you have a conversation, it's us.
SPEAKER_2: We're the leaders, we're the heads.
SPEAKER_2: We've always wanted to do that, make it very transparent to say, you can talk to us.
SPEAKER_2: We're not hidden.
SPEAKER_2: So we are who we are.
SPEAKER_2: And if you have any questions, concerns about like, oh, we don't think these people are honest, talk to us.
SPEAKER_2: We'll tell you.
SPEAKER_2: We'll play your games, we'll do it.
SPEAKER_2: So we've always maintained that.
SPEAKER_2: We are reachable.
SPEAKER_1: I also add that on our website, there is a contact form that you can fill out, and it's a simple fill in your name and email address and why you want to get in touch with us.
SPEAKER_1: Those emails come directly to me, and I try my best to get to them and respond in a timely fashion.
SPEAKER_1: You can always reach out to us at contact at fearzinemagazine.com.
SPEAKER_1: That's where we're trying to do all of our official communication.
SPEAKER_1: So if you're a writer, a developer, someone who's interested in the project, someone who's interested in supporting us, even if you're like, I really want a magazine, but I missed the Kickstarter.
SPEAKER_1: Can I still get one?
SPEAKER_1: We can try to figure something out.
SPEAKER_1: We're always open to solutions and helping people in any way that we can.
SPEAKER_3: That was actually a question I had.
SPEAKER_3: You mentioned earlier that once the physical magazines are printed, they are gone.
SPEAKER_3: But also, I wondered because in the Kickstarter for the second issue, you actually made it possible to get the first issue also reprinted.
SPEAKER_3: Are you trying to do that also for the third issue and the issues coming, that you actually can order back issues as printed?
SPEAKER_1: Ideally, we won't have to.
SPEAKER_1: Ideally, the whole notion is that we're going to make the magazines available to purchase regularly without Kickstarter.
SPEAKER_1: This is again, like I said, we've talked about getting off of Kickstarter.
SPEAKER_1: Hopefully, in the coming months, I will figure out the best way to provide the magazine so that you can go to our website, you can click a button, you make a payment, and then we ship you a magazine.
SPEAKER_1: Once that's available, we won't have to do those catch-up bundles anymore.
SPEAKER_1: You can just go to the website and order a back copy of the magazine.
SPEAKER_1: The only magazine that's not going to be available going forward is Issue 1.
SPEAKER_3: But that will be the one people are the most sought after.
SPEAKER_2: That will be the collectible one.
SPEAKER_1: Perfect.
SPEAKER_1: Then it will be worth money, and I have them all.
SPEAKER_3: Because that's actually how things are.
SPEAKER_3: As HJ said, people want to know how it all started, you know?
SPEAKER_2: But you can download it for free on the website.
SPEAKER_2: People can read it.
SPEAKER_2: It's for free.
SPEAKER_2: You just won't have the physical copy.
SPEAKER_2: And the reason why that is is because it's just a lot of money to print.
SPEAKER_2: And so if we do backholders and there's only like 10 issues, it's a lot of money to print just 10 issues for a backholder thing.
SPEAKER_2: So it's like if there was a demand for it, we would do it.
SPEAKER_2: And what we were thinking about doing is maybe way down the road, is remaking issue one and then releasing it as kind of like a collector's edition thing, like a catch-up one.
SPEAKER_2: But it's just not viable right now for us to warrant doing limited release thing is because it just, it costs too much money for us to print like 10 copies.
SPEAKER_1: And there's also justifying the amount that we're asking people to pay on Kickstarter because if I'm, like I did it with issue two for the catch-up bundle, we had a base catch-up bundle.
SPEAKER_1: It's just issue one, issue two.
SPEAKER_1: I think we were charging $30 for plus shipping.
SPEAKER_1: That's like us completely breaking even on the cost to print those.
SPEAKER_1: It's like Maria was saying, it's not very viable for us to do that, especially at the low volumes that we're at.
SPEAKER_1: If we were to get a crazy uptick in sales that we were hitting thousands of copies, it makes it a lot more justifiable for us to have those expenses.
SPEAKER_1: But either way, issue one is going to be retired for other reasons beyond that.
SPEAKER_1: We mentioned the idea of remaking or remastering issue one, where we would basically redo the entire magazine from the ground up in our new style and form.
SPEAKER_2: Oh, we lost the Dan.
SPEAKER_3: The content would stay, I guess.
SPEAKER_1: For the most part.
SPEAKER_1: There's some things in the issue, ones that need to be fixed, but yeah.
SPEAKER_3: OK, he's back with his voice, at least.
SPEAKER_1: Yes.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: But yeah, actually, you went.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, you froze up.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, you froze up and you disappeared totally for a few seconds.
SPEAKER_1: Oh, you guys all disappeared for me.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, before Issue 2 was released, we actually did a call out to say, if you want to get Issue 1, sign up, put your name down, and we can order.
SPEAKER_2: We wanted a minimum of 25 copies, but we didn't make that number, so we never actually went ahead and ordered them, because it needed to be at least 25 for us to warrant print in them.
SPEAKER_2: And it wasn't about profit, it was about like, we need to be able to print this without us being out of pocket.
SPEAKER_1: Out of pocket.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, we don't want to lose money.
SPEAKER_1: I said I wanted at least 25 people to say that they would purchase this, and when I did the sign up sheets, I did an interest gauge, like I did polls and I was asking people who did this.
SPEAKER_1: I had a minimum of 30 people say, yeah, I'd want to get this.
SPEAKER_1: So then when I created the option, only I think seven people actually signed up and paid for it.
SPEAKER_1: So I ended up having to refund a bunch of people money.
SPEAKER_1: So I'm like, I'm not doing this.
SPEAKER_1: And that cost me money.
SPEAKER_1: I had to pay out of pocket to do those refunds.
SPEAKER_3: Well, hopefully it was better with the Kickstarter because I also ordered the double bundle.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_1: And that should be on its way to you in the next few weeks, my friend.
SPEAKER_1: Awesome.
SPEAKER_3: Awesome.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: We will put links to everything in the podcast description down below.
SPEAKER_1: Awesome.
SPEAKER_3: Thanks a lot.
SPEAKER_3: Thanks for taking the time.
SPEAKER_2: Yes.
SPEAKER_2: Absolutely.
SPEAKER_1: You're welcome.
SPEAKER_1: Thank you for having us.
SPEAKER_3: You're welcome.
SPEAKER_3: And keep in touch.
SPEAKER_3: Talk to you then, right?
SPEAKER_3: Have a good one.
SPEAKER_3: Bye-bye.