Unreal Engine royalties only start after you make $1 million from a project. Even then, it’s 5%, and waived for sales done on the Epic Store (whose 13% cut is almost a third of what Steam takes). If you are a small indie dev, you won’t be paying Epic a dime unless you start rolling in some serious dough, and even when you do, 5% of your revenue for using one of the most powerful 3D game engines is pretty fair
Reddit’s decision about 3rd party apps and API changes actually made business sense. Not only was their content being pilfered on Reddit’s expense, but a decent portion of their user base were using 3rd party apps that didn’t collect as much data nor serve Reddit ads like the official app. At the expense of losing a decent portion of their community, moderators, and any goodwill their userbase had towards them, Reddit now has all their mobile users on a single, add ridden app that they own and can collect as much data as they want going forward as well as ensures that they get paid for AI API usage
Developers are on the hook for potentially infinite losses without gaining revenue in a per install fee system. Expenses are entirely unpredictable for developers and bad actors can run basic install scripts to cost the company a lot, so if Unity stays their current course for a few more weeks, many of the larger developers using Unity will begin switching engines even if it means delays. It’s absolutely worth it for a developer to port their game over no matter the cost, because they are easily looking at no limits to their costs if they don’t
Countries have the right to expel foreign diplomats and embassies as long as they don’t arrest them or go through their stuff when they leave. The newly couped Niger junta requested the French ambassador leave and revoked his visa, but the French are still refusing to leave, claiming that because they don’t recognize the legitimacy of the new junta, they don’t have to follow the junta’s orders to leave. Regardless of your opinion of the new junta, in how does a former colonial power be in the right when they are blatantly ignoring the legal rights and sovereignty of their independent former colony’s government that is doing things by the book? They stopped sending the ambassador food and are confining him to his embassy until he leaves, especially given the current junta that is extremely gentle treatment
Unironically this is the one area where Epic Games is absolutely in the right. They have a 12% royalty on games sold on their platform and a 5% royalty on sales over $1 million for games made with Unreal Engine, with the UE royalty being waived entirely if it’s sold on the Epic Games store. They get a reasonable cut for maintaining one of the most powerful game engines and charge nearly a third of what Valve does for their storefront. If the Epic Store wasn’t so dog shit, they’d be an actual competitor to Valve
What’s even more mind boggling is that despite Starlink being so critical to Ukrainian communications, neither the Ukrainian government nor the US entered into a contract with a clause obligating Starlink to maintain service. Musk can just legally turn off Starlink for them with no legal repercussions because they never negotiated something against that into a contract with him. Even if they had to pay a premium rate for Starlink, for a service that critical to the Ukrainian Armed Forces it’s worth it
The value of their investments is lower because they’ve been pulling out of Russia. The article you sent says they’ve slashed the value down by 90%, and they’re still going. Liquidating hundreds of millions in stocks while getting a decent value out of them takes time, and so far they’ve done a pretty good job selling off 90% of their Russian holdings with just a few more millions to go
They’ve beefed with a few other instances they tried federating with too such as Lemmy.ee and lemmy.blahaj.zone. Their user base tends to be a bit more abrasive than most Lemmy instances, making federation controversial even among similarly minded instances such as lemmy.blahaj.zone
If there’s one place I’d expect to have trouble hiring, it’s the Pentagon’s IT team. They regularly deal with the most sensitive information about the US military, and need to have clearance to see all of it. That gives them an incredibly slim hiring pool, so it’s no surprise their IT team sucks
Salt 2 is a pretty good indie pirate game. You sail around a procedurally generated archipelago doing quests for various factions while building up your ship, and it’s pretty relaxing. It’s still in development so it’s missing features like ship to ship combat, but it’s the closest thing to a single player sea of thieves
Barely anyone uses Linux, and among those who do, distros vary wildly enough between each other to the point of breaking viruses that it’s just not worth the effort to make viruses for them compared to Windows or Mac
They didn’t intend for there to be a war. They fully expected to just walk in without much resistance, take over the country without much hassle similarly to how they took over Crimea, install a puppet government, and have the west barely react just as we haven’t been reacting to their annexation of parts of Georgia, Crimea, and their conflict in Donbass for years
Trump was exposed to large amounts of highly classified information as president for four years, and has shown a willingness to sell it to the highest bidder. He’d 100% throw the US under the bus to stay in Russia, and his supporters will deny he ever did such a thing just as they deny he publicly called for storming the Capital or as they deny the current charges against him
Any country, US or not, spying on other countries’ citizens ought to be taken as a matter of national security in the target countries. China does take it as a matter of national security, which is why, among other reasons, many foreign social media sites and services are blocked, run as separate instances from the rest of the world, or restricted heavily
NASA’s budget isn’t the only reason SpaceX has been able to innovate faster. NASA is incredibly risk averse, as their failures reflect onto the US government and by extension their budget. Even when safety isn’t important such as with unmanned rockets, NASA doesn’t want news headlines blasting them for their rocket’s tendencies to blow up. SpaceX, by being a private company, is free to take risks and have rockets explode (if they’re unmanned that is) without much repercussions as they’re a private company, not the US government. They’ve had 7 unmanned rockets explode and several more reusable lander’s fail in their course to develop cheaper, reusable rockets, which had NASA done themselves would have been a national embarrassment, but because it was a private company they were free to take those risks to learn from their mistakes
The most insane part is that they never even entered into a contract with Starlink to provide service. Starlink is the backbone of Ukraine’s communications infrastructure, and it’s shocking that the DoD and the Ukraine Armed Forces never thought “hey we should get a contract with Musk so we can ensure he keeps Starlink available throughout the war”. For such a critical service, they were content with dealing with Starlink directly and having Elon subsidize it personally, giving him a large degree of control over one of the most vital components of Ukrainian communications, rather than what they eventually did by going through the DoD to negotiate a contract with Elon using taxpayer dollars
Noise cancelling headphones don’t work against babies. They are designed for cancelling ambient sound by playing frequencies to cancel out the noise, but can’t predict sudden noises like children crying very well. Earplugs or earbuds do a better job at drowning those out by plugging your ears from outside noises
They’re volunteers running the instance personally, not a corporation with a legal team who can advise them how to best handle piracy related communities without being sued. Especially since their instance has to cache content from instances they federate with, it’s hard to blame them for being overly cautious with piracy communities on instances out of their control to avoid being sued by litigation happy media corporations
Even the premium Peacock plan gave ads for Peacock content
People are homeless not because the government lacks funding, but because the government doesn’t give a damn. Those billions being given to Ukraine were never going to be spent addressing poverty had the war not happened, and if Congress suddenly had a change of heart, they’d have zero problems finding and allocating as much money as they want to anti homeless programs Ukraine war or not