Open-World Inflation

**Brad Shoemaker** (0:10)
Hey, it's The Nextlander Podcast for September the 2nd, 2026 I am Brad Shoemaker.
He is Alex Navarro.

**Alex Navarro** (0:18)
Look who's hosting now.

**Brad Shoemaker** (0:19)
It's Brad. Yeah, sure.
That's me.

**Alex Navarro** (0:22)
I mean, you've hosted the show before.

**Brad Shoemaker** (0:23)
It's not unheard of. I've heard so much about hosting a podcast. I thought I should take a shot at it myself one day.

**Alex Navarro** (0:29)
I think you can do this. I believe in you.

**Brad Shoemaker** (0:31)
Yes. Perhaps I've got the fire in me. Jordan Middler.

**Jordan Middler** (0:35)
Hello.

**Brad Shoemaker** (0:36)
Joining us in Vinny Caravella's stead from?

**Jordan Middler** (0:40)
Paisley, just outside of Glasgow, Scotland. Okay.

**Alex Navarro** (0:44)
We were also referring to the outlet you work for, but either way.

**Brad Shoemaker** (0:47)
That's less important. Your online brand is all that matters these days.

**Jordan Middler** (0:52)
No, I'm from VGC Video Games Chronicle.

**Brad Shoemaker** (0:56)
That's right.

**Jordan Middler** (0:57)
The name you know in news.

**Brad Shoemaker** (1:00)
Yeah, I'm just going to be real, both honored and a little intimidated to have you on this podcast. Finally, considering how much your website powers, about 40% of this podcast.

**Jordan Middler** (1:11)
That's very kind of you. As anyone will know, I am the biggest kind of Nextlander GB game spot mark there ever was. So this is like fantasy football stuff for me.
Yeah, I always appreciate it. Nintendo Podcast has taste when they actually cite the VGC version of a story and don't just go to any Tom, Dick and Harry website that has scraped us.

**Brad Shoemaker** (1:34)
It's the finest vintage of video game news.

**Jordan Middler** (1:36)
It's just the news. It's the BBC of games. It's just what happened.

**Brad Shoemaker** (1:41)
That's exactly what it is, is that everybody else got so far away from that. That was the model. 15 years ago, all the blogs were just like, here's the news. If you say we're in the business of running a video game podcast and needed to see what was going on, you could go to anywhere for that. But everybody else is rotten with guides and TV recaps. I have to sift through 80% of stuff that is not about just video game news to find the news, but you guys are still doing it.

**Jordan Middler** (2:08)
Yeah.

**Alex Navarro** (2:09)
I mean, I still got guides, but I get it.

**Brad Shoemaker** (2:11)
Right, but your feed is pure. You've got the distilled pure stream.

**Alex Navarro** (2:16)
Easy to find.

**Jordan Middler** (2:17)
The farthest we get away from it is when I, every six months, go on a Pokemon pilgrimage and just flood the website with that stuff. But Pokemon is the biggest game that ever was. So really you can't complain if the website has Pokemon on it.

**Alex Navarro** (2:28)
Well, and it's your website. So you should feel the need, like every once in a while, you should be allowed to just populate the site with whatever bullshit you feel like writing about. Like that is your prerogative as one of the people who runs it.

**Brad Shoemaker** (2:41)
Quite. Speaking of Pokemon, it seems like we missed maybe getting you on this thing in person by like a day or two. Is that right?

**Jordan Middler** (2:49)
From last Sunday until yesterday, I have been in the beautiful city of San Francisco, California at Pokemon XP and the Pokemon World Championships. Every August, the world descends upon a random city.
It's basically the finals of their eSports, their Pokemon Unite, Pokemon Go, the Pokemon Trading Card Game and Pokemon Video Game Championships, which is routinely abbreviated to Pokemon VGC, which is great for Google.
So yeah, I was there for a week. This year was different because they also had Pokemon XP, which was their fan convention Comic Con adjacent thing. Because in recent years, it was just... Well, it's always just been the World Championships, but there have been things for fans to do around it. That got overstuffed to the point where actual players were like, hey, I'm playing for a quarter of a million dollars here. I don't want all these yahoos running around this convention centre, like distracting me. Can we separate this? So they did that this year, and I thought it worked pretty well. There were some issues with like lots of queuing for like fans that were trying to get into things and there was like 50,000 people that attended across the weekend. So it was extremely popular. The Pokemon Centre was sold out for slots to even get in for months before. And then the slots were all delayed by two hours because it's all well and good giving someone a time slot. But once they're actually in the thing, it's hard to police how long they stay in there while they kind of mill around and buy all their stuff. But yeah, it was a pretty fantastic weekend. I mean, I came away happy. I've got my Pokemon XP. We got a King Pikachu right here. We got a King Pikachu and see this one represents the Pokemon World Championships because he is a competitor. He has the Pokemon Champions crown on his head, but this one represents Pokemon XP because he's an explorer, you see?