As an engineer, the amount of non-engineering idiots in tech corporate leadership trying to apply inappropriate technical solutions to something because it became a buzzword is just absurdly high.
Windfalls like this cannot be taking lightly and need to be approached strategically. It depends heavily on tax laws and employee finances overall.
Some common got rich quick concerns off the top of my head: Could accidentally knock people into a higher tax bracket and ruin their finances long term for short term gain. Could accidentally give someone collateral to take out a massive loan they cannot afford long term. Could make someone in a low income area a target before they have a chance to move out. Could accidentally get double taxed by doing the payout incorrectly because they're not practiced with handling this much money. Could overinvest it all back into the company and burn too brightly negating all their success. Doing nothing and simply using it as cash reserves is better than making a foolish mistake and ruining it for themselves.
It is absolutely absurd. There have been a lot of games that aren't polished come out in the last half a decade that got a LOT of flack, but this one cannot be played without a connection to the servers and no one can connect to the servers. I have 15 hours logged and probably 4 of that has actually been playing. The game is by every definition LITERALLY Unplayable.
I feel like we hear this every single time though. "Largest tech leap in a hardware generation" very much means "we'll bump the graphics a little, we're still targeting 30fps though"
30/60fps is always a developer choice. Not related to hardware capability.
That being said, every generation console makers will make the most powerful hardware they can for the price point they are gonna charge. It's not exactly like Microsoft have any secret sauce here. It's the same amd/nvidia hardware choices for the price point they think they can sell at that anyone can make a machine with.
Game is 11 years in alpha development, still a buggy mess that requires a supercomputer to work smoothly, only recently got a second star system (dozens more are pinky promised, and hundreds promised since beginning of development), is constantly exploited in all ways possible, barely has any actual content...
...which absolutely didn't stop it from earning over half a billion dollars (yes, billion) by selling in-game ships for hundreds and sometimes thousands of very absolutely real dollars, as well as such monstrous packs.
It's weird, I don't think I've ever heard of anyone actually playing this game. Hell, I don't even know what gameplay looks like, and honestly I'm happy keeping it that way
It's an ethically shitty and exploitative funding model, but if you look at the gameplay, you'll see the appeal of buying the $45 game package. Very few people stop at though. No matter how much you hear that spending more is unnecessary, they've built a system of incremental spending and incentives that draw people ever deeper.
The insane thing is that the supposed final vision sounds incredibly tedious in a way that I doubt most people would ever actually play it. For the sake of immersion, you will have to physically move every item from spare sets of armour to bulk cargo for transport jobs. There is a light survival mechanic of hydration and nutrition, but personal hygiene is also planned. Upgrading ships will mean physically pulling components and replacing them, but the real gains will be in the subcomponents!
Maybe that sounds fun as a vision statement, but I assure you, after losing that hand loaded, hand upgraded ship to bugs or exploits for the third time, the joy will all be gone.
I suppose it's lucky that none of their vision or promises ever come to pass. Anyway. You want my referral code?
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