I buy a short $5 indie game. I give it away afterwards digitally to a friend. The next guy does the same thing. And the next guy.
Now the developer has to primarily make money by selling merch or ingame ads. No thanks. If the game is good, people will buy it.
You could argue people did this with physical media. But it was not nearly as impactful; I couldn’t click a few buttons in seconds and hand the game away.
It’s one of many things they could do just like how security is a layers thing.
They could inject random zero width non joiners to help detection too. Easy to defeat, but something a layperson would have to go through extra effort to filter out. Kinda like how some plagiarism cases have been won by pointing out identical misspelled words.
I like how that’s actually an image of Zeus from Age of Mythology
I don’t know if that headcount I listed includes contract employees. They typically get compensated far less, and anecdotally I’ve been told by a former Meta friend that there are more contracted developers than salaried there. And what’s the ratio of software developers compared to other personnel? HR, QA, marketing, sales, etc? Employees in other countries? I figured a more conservative estimate was reasonable for cost overall.
Well, about half of that is probably salary. There are apparently 17,000 Reality Labs employees. If you assume the average salary is 100K or more, which is reasonable for tech jobs in high COL areas, you’re already looking at a couple billion after benefits that the company has to spend on headcount. The other spend is probably third-party contracts, hardware, etc.
How many open source projects have 50 million lines of code like Windows, or legal agreements related to backwards compatibility and version support guarantees?
A for-profit company is going to focus on whatever generates revenue, sure. But crappy software will lose customers in a non-monopoly scenario. They’re not exactly incentivized to make broken things nobody wants.
That’s…a gross oversimplification. Super popular open source projects tend to have few bugs from the sheer number of contributors available to fix them, but active proprietary software has dedicated teams working fulltime every week to deal woth issues. Proprietary stuff is often way wider in scope than open source, so more surface for bugs to creep in. Scope and team size have a lot more to do with bug density than open vs closed source.
It’s…phone call handling. What about that needs to be in a specific room?
Property acquisition costs and legal fees are immensely more expensive in the US. Have to obtain those thousands of miles of land for rail development from somebody.
Diphenhydramine, melatonin, neck pillow, and EYE MASK. Critical to block out light. Bonus for noise cancwlli headphones playing noise.
Linux still is not a main gaming OS yet. Stop being an asshole; you know this is true.