TheSixthAxis Podcasts

We love to have a beer down the pub, and we love to talk about games. Like early man combing some dry twigs with a bit of sparking flint and discovering fire, we worked out that if you put these things together you get a pubcast. And so we have done one, in August, at the height of the summer. Only it’s not. We waited too long and now the heatwave is gone. It’s tipping it down, and frankly being indoors playing games is the best thing any of us could possibly be doing, apart from having a drink down the pub and talking about them. I guarantee it (note: TheSixthAxis does not guarantee anything of the sort).

This podcast may feature strong language (it does), jokes in poor taste (it does) and adult themes (or audio memes even). If you’re offended by any of that then we recommend that you don’t listen to it at all.

You can also follow some of us on that there Twitter, where we will probably be talking utter rubbish – apart from Cael who’ll be insulting politicians.

Dom – @domleighton

So, we’ve been a little lax with the pubcast (I say ‘we’ when I mean ‘I’) but we’ve dusted off our microphones, picked up our beer-drinking glasses and sat down to talk about a little thing called E3. Maybe you’ve heard of it? Anyway, it gave us the chance to break down the conferences and pick out a few of our favourite things – as well as some things that were definitely not our favourites – all the while sounding like we’re sat in a tavern in The Witcher thanks to some lovely Irish folk music.

This podcast may feature strong language, jokes in poor taste and adult themes. If you’re offended by that then we recommend that you don’t listen to it at all.

If you’ve not had enough of us after listening to all that, you can follow us on The Twitter at the links below, apart from Ant who very sensibly isn’t on there.

Dom – @domleighton

It’s time for a drink! Or at least it was a few days ago when we sat down to talk about lots of sad things, oh, and Soul Calibur VI’s lizard penises. We even had some cake this time to help line our stomachs, but it was at the end of the recording so perhaps we did that wrong. Anyhoo, we hope you enjoy!

Note, we recorded this before any Red Dead shenanigans had time to occur. If you’re not into living out cowboy fantasies, then you can consider this a safe space.

This podcast features strong language, jokes in poor taste and adult themes. If you’re offended by that then we recommend that you don’t listen to it at all.

You can find us on the Twitter, if you’ve not tired of our inane ramblings already.

Dom – @domleighton

Another month, another pubcast. It’s a tad late in being delivered to you, but we’ve taken yet another tough month to task by having some drinks and putting the world to rights, with some major things going on in the gaming world for us to sink our teeth into. We also tried to work out why everyone still loves Crash Bandicoot, though I don’t think we found the answer. It’s funny how alcohol makes you forget things.

This podcast may feature strong language, jokes in poor taste and adult themes. If you’re offended by that then we recommend that you don’t listen to it at all.

You can find us on the Twitter, if you fancy knowing our innermost thoughts.

Dom – @domleighton

It feels as though we end up apologising in this intro every month. Who knew that the idea of drinking and doing the site’s podcast would prove to be so challenging? A big thank-you to Kris for putting up with this inane rambling every month while he wrestles it into some kind of listenable shape, and thank you, the listeners, for letting it anywhere near your ears. This month we started off with a serious subject while we discussed gamer entitlement and then slowly devolved into talking about other things while Cael does impressions of Jar Jar Binks and the Marvel vs Capcom 2 music. I said sorry, didn’t I?

This podcast may feature strong language, jokes in poor taste and adult themes. If you’re offended by that then we recommend that you don’t listen to it at all.

You can find us on the Twitter, if you fancy knowing our innermost thoughts.

Dom – @domleighton

What could be better than drinking [insert favourite beverage], heading down to [insert favourite venue], and talking about [insert favourite subject]? Nothing right? And if you think that’s wonderfully specific to you, this month’s pubcast is all about guessing what’s going to happen at E3. Some of that guesswork is vaguely based on the fact that we think we know about games, while some of it is based on the number of beers we’ve consumed. Either way, you can look forward to us hanging our heads in shame next month when we’ve got it all completely and utterly wrong.

This podcast may feature strong language, jokes in poor taste and adult themes. If you’re offended by that then we recommend that you don’t listen to it at all.

You can find us on the Twitter, if you fancy seeing our random bleetings all the time.

Dom – @domleighton

Ade – @adewritesstuff

Cael – @AmpleTea

Steve – @earlymodblood

I’ll be honest. It’s not exactly a hardship recording our pubcast, (though we still managed to skip the month of March). Getting a bunch of friends together, drinking beer, and talking about computer games is what the pub should be for, though this time out we were without the academic grounding of Steve to keep us above board. As such don’t be offended by the rude words that some of us use (mainly Cael), or get upset when Ade says he writes for The Sixth Access, and try not to get too angry when I confuse Dragon Quest X with Dragon Quest XI. I blame the drink.

We did manage to mostly coherently talk about the main events of the last couple of week, like EA removing Shadow of War’s micro transactions, and the announcement of a Spyro The Dragon remaster. Oh, and we got to be grumpy and talk about games we weren’t excited about, because everyone likes being grumpy, right?

This podcast may feature strong language, jokes in poor taste and adult themes. If you’re offended by that then we recommend that you don’t listen to it at all.

You can find us on the Twitter, even Cael who has decided he isn’t too cool for it.

Dom – @domleighton

Ade – @adewritesstuff

Cael – @AmpleTea

OK, OK, so the February pubcast is coming out in March. Blame the drink and the bad weather. You can imagine the hardships we’ve had to face by going to the nice warm pub, drinking beer, and talking about games. Still, it’s finally here, and the next one will probably only be a couple of weeks away so that’s a bonus right? Right?!

This time round we talked about the Switch’s one year anniversary, how gaming is seen by people outside of gaming, the best/worst snow levels in games and our top indie picks for 2018. We may have had one or two pints by the end.

This podcast may feature strong language, jokes in poor taste and adult themes. If you’re offended by that then we recommend that you don’t listen to it at all.

New year, new podcast! Except that we’ve decided in our infinite wisdom to turn it into a “pubcast”. So if you hear the clinking of glasses and folk music in the background, it’s because we’re down the pub, drinking a few pints of Oakham Citra, and nattering about games.

This is the pilot episode so it overran a bit, please do let us know what works, what doesn’t, and what you want us to be talking about! It’s going to be every month for now, but if you want more then tell us!

This podcast may feature strong language, jokes in poor taste and adult themes. If you’re offended by that then we recommend that you don’t listen to it at all.

You can find some of us on the Twitter too, although Cael is far too cool to have an account.

For future episodes, please send us questions via email to podcasts[at]thesixthaxis.com, and you can also tweet questions to @TSAPodcast.

The first half of 2017 has really highlighted the shifting sands that indie developers face in trying to turn their passions into a living. The landscape is constantly evolving, from Steam’s replacement of Greenlight with a more direct system, Xbox touting numerous impactful indie games as (timed) exclusives at E3, Nintendo courting their so-called Nindies, and then Jim Ryan’s statements about a decreasing importance of indie games for PlayStation.

Today marks the release of Unbox: Newbie’s Adventure for PS4, Xbox One and with an updated version on PC, an indie platformer about the last word in parcel delivery… self-delivering boxes! We spoke to Prospect Games MD Andrew Bennison about the problems facing indie developers in this climate. You can listen to our 30 minute chat as a podcast, or keep on reading below.

Jim Ryan’s comments to GamesIndustry.biz that sparked our chat with Andrew said, quite plainly, that while “There was a time and a place” to foster indie gaming on stage a few years ago, “it is less relevant now.” Sony’s focus during E3 was particularly narrow, with a string of trailers and announcements for a short 60 minute presentation, which surprisingly omitted the likes of Gran Turismo, Knack 2 and PlayLink. It meant there wasn’t space for indie gaming either. “We have VR to talk about now, for example,” Jim Ryan said.

It’s a case of the public position starting to reflect the behind the scenes changes in attitude that I have long heard of and suspected. “I think the public statements come about because things are changing internally,” Andrew said to us. “I think that for all of the platform holders and for everybody in the industry, right now is an extremely difficult time. The market’s just flooded across the board and the sort of indie goldrush has really come to an end. The accessibility of the mobile market has been completely saturated now, the accessibility of Steam has been saturated.

“Every platform has had their Indie phase – Nintendo’s kind of having it now, to be fair. There are market trends that come and go, and so absolutely, some platforms are now more into indies than others. Sony’s flat out said it after E3 when people went, ‘Well where are all the indie titles?’ and they’ve gone, ‘Well, VR’s our thing.’ It would be very easy to have a knee jerk reaction and say Sony’s kicking indies to the kerb and they don’t care about them, but to be fair, they’re a gigantic business with a huge amount of responsibility and they also have one of the only VR peripherals out on the market that’s actually selling. They need content for that hardware to drive further sales.”

There is, however, a hint of irony to this shift away from championing indie games, as much of the game library for PlayStation VR and virtual reality as a whole has come from the experimentation and willingness to risk livelihoods on developing for these platforms. Ryan highlighted that VR is a key focus, and there were a number of VR titles at E3

Andrew said, “They’ve got to focus on VR, so maybe indies will be their primary content creators for the platform, but that cuts out all the indies who aren’t doing VR, have no desire to do VR or have recognised that VR across the board is not making anybody any money right now in the way that we all thought it would by this point. Why would I as an indie dev want to take that risk? Investing in very specialised hardware and trying to target a very niche target in the grand scheme of things, when there’s so many more potential options out there, with the biggest one right now being the Nintendo Switch. That is the most fertile land for games developers in the market right now. It looks great and there’s no content on a platform that’s selling out in every region across the world!”

Perhaps one of the catalysts for this shift is the change in personnel at Sony, with both Shahid Kamal Ahmed and Adam Boyes having been real champions internally of indie games during the PSP, PS3 and PS Vita eras. Both have moved on from the company in the last few years.

“We know that there’s been a lot of changes internally, with Strategic Content basically completely shut down and quite a few influential figures from that department having left ahead of time anyway,” Andrew recalled. “The guys who basically created the indie renaissance for Sony, who brought in all those indie titles, they’ve all moved on to different companies. Those points of contact have even gone.”

It’s not just a step away from highlighting indie developers, but also the fact that what was once a simple market with just a single set of hardware to target for Sony and Microsoft has suddenly become more complex with the PlayStation 4 Pro and the soon to be released Xbox One X.

“With Unbox: Newbie’s Adventure, we’re essentially just leveraging that extra power to make it run a little better. On both platforms it will still be capped at 30fps, but we’re able to do a bit more on those beefed up platforms than on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. […]

“The advantage of a closed system is you know what the baselines are. You know what that platform can handle, so that’s great, and I actually think that the fact that we have beefed up PlayStations and Xboxes in the long term is a bad thing. […] All of a sudden now we have two versions of every console; these are closed systems that are fragmenting to the point that all their advantages, in my opinion, are kind of slipping away. I understand why they’re doing it, to try and keep up with a rapidly moving technological scene, but I do wonder for the future of these platforms if they’re going to keep doing iterative upgrades, because as developers it can make our lives very hard.”

Emphasising what all of this actually means, Andrew stated powerfully that “Most indie developers at our level can only afford to work on one thing at a time. That thing has to sell or our companies are gone, we’re done. Most indie developers are passionate enough that our livelihoods, our lives are on the line with this. You had the Cuphead developers remortgaging their house, we [Prospect Games] have taken out loans, invested our own money into this and done friends and family rounds. There’s a lot riding on this. We need to see success, we need to see that we’re going to make a profit.

“If a platform is basically coming out and almost saying you are yesteryear, all of the people who could help you get on that platform are gone, then I’ve got to go where the money is, as with any business.”

Thanks to Andrew for speaking with us. You can catch up with Andrew and Prospect Games on Twitter @ProspectGames. Unbox: Newbie’s Adventure is out for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and being updated on PC today, with a Nintendo Switch release planned for later this year.