379. PS6’s Road to Failure, XBOX Helix Comeback, Physint, Nvidia DLSS 5 | Gene Park

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Tom (0:32)

This is Believe.

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Tom (1:04)

And welcome to Broken Silicon, Gaming Hardware Podcast. I am your host, Tom. Today's lead sponsors are cdkeyoffer.com, where you can get Win11 Pro for $24, and Minisforum in their MS-03 Panther Lake Mini PC that you can get $35 off if you use, again, offer code brokensilicon. Today, I'm joined by somebody that has not been on before, but I've been a fan of his presence on Twitter for a bit now, and did a deep dive on who he was, myself. I'm like, oh, this person has so much experience, clearly a lot of connections in the industry. It's probably a wealth of knowledge when it comes to picking someone's brain about how it feels in the gaming landscape right now, obviously, in PC to some degree, but certainly in the console space.

I think it's quite tenuous for a lot of these players, but if you're someone who's a talking head, this is probably calling a sacred symbol as gracefully on the side under the guest will as well. It's maybe one of the most fun times to talk about what's going on in competition and gaming. But yes, Gene, please introduce yourself to people who you are, where you're from, and what got you into doing what you do.

Gene Park (2:09)

Hey, Aloha. Good to meet you, Tom. First time, a long time viewer. Actually, I don't know if I lie. I've heard of you for a long time. I was saying earlier before we got on that I'm not really too much into the hardware side, although I did just really invest in a nice PC fueled by 5080 So I am firmly feet planet into the PC world of gaming right now. And I would consider PC my main platform at this point.

But yeah, going back to your question of who I am. I am Gene Park. I am a culture critic at The Washington Post. Previously I was the video game critic.

And before that, I was the social media editor. Not the social media editor. I was one of the social media editors for The Washington Post, where I worked at for 11 years. I am a journalist. I have been a professional journalist for 23 years now. Video games is actually the smallest beat I've ever covered. The beat I've covered the shortest amount of time. I've only been covering it since 2019 Before that, the beat I've covered the most is crime, public safety. So anytime there's a murder in the neighborhood, I'd be there. Traffic accidents, fires, that kind of stuff, I'd always be there.

I've covered business, I've covered transportation, traffic, military, education, pretty much everything. I've covered fencing, for Christ's sake. So I've pretty much covered every beat you can possibly imagine.

Tom (3:39)

Fencing as in the sport, or the sport, not the barricade, right?

Gene Park (3:44)

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The fencing as a sport, which I didn't know anything about. So it's like, you really got to just fumble your way through. Well, yeah, I've just been a newspaper man for the past 23 years. And how I got into video games is that The Washington Post wanted to start covering video games in 2019 There was a huge interest in covering e-sports in particular.

And that happened because there was a lot of local billionaires here in Washington, DC. I live in Washington, DC. I had The Washington Post. The local billionaires in the Washington, DC area started to really invest heavily into e-sports, you know, into Team Liquid and blah, blah, blah. I'm forgetting all the names already, for Christ's sake. But it's like, so it's like our managing editor at the time, like he was really into sports and he was like, oh, we should really be paying attention to the e-sports thing. And then so as an advisor, a consultant, a social media audience consultant within the post, that's what social media editors basically were. We were audience analysts and audience consultants. And they're like, well, Gene knows video games, so maybe he can consult on this project. So, you know, I went through and looked through the plan and I came back with my report. I don't think we should be covering e-sports.