They're announced months in advance and can either trigger on a set date, or at a set stock price. It's more complex than that, and can involve taxes and shit, but the sale itself was above board(ish).
They likely delayed the announcement of the fees to ensure a higher stock price for the sale, which starts getting into a gray area.
It was a scheduled sale. There's a term for it, but it's a fairly normal thing to have set up.
What it really sounds like is they looked to see that they had a scheduled sale, and then delayed the announcement of the new fees (and the planning of how they'd work) so that the sale price would be higher.
Or, another alternative here. They looked at the sale price, and thought "gee whiz this is low, how do I boost the stock price higher?" and since this idiot worked on microtransactions for EA, he thought that adding those to Unity made some sort of sense.
Mine was 19 years, but I was military and got sent overseas for a few years. When I came back, I hadn't actually logged in for the entire time and my account had been reset.
My dream is a fallout game set in New Orleans, but made by Obsidian.
Give them permission to have greenery in the game as you run around a massively overgrown swamp (there's some lore from unpublished games about an over-abundance of GECK testing in the area,)
Helping people actually build new shit from the abundant trees. The people would be that fun mix Creole and Americana.
We could have new enemies, like snakes and gators and shit. Maybe assassin vines and man eating trees.
My dream enemy would be a splinter group of Caesar's legion and remnants of the Enclave.
As for music, dig deep into New Orleans history. There's more than enough to put together a kick-ass soundtrack.
Cloud Imperium is not a tiny company. I believe it has about 1000 employees at this point, which means that the 600m has mostly gone to keeping the company going.
Chis Roberts is burning the cash rather than pocketing it. He loves his feature creep, and which forces devs to redo work. They've thrown most of the game out and coded it from almost scratch twice?
Every single Chris Roberts project has been like this. Development hell with new shit being added and no deadline in sight.
A grift implies that someone is making bank off of it.
No, Chris Roberts is instead burning money by having devs do work, then redo work to add in some last minute shit that he thought of, then repeat until the feature creep completely overtakes their lives. It's the Chris Roberts way.
Work is being done on the game, but remember that treading water is also a lot of work.
What happened to Elite Dangerous? I used to play quite a bit before I had to move and ended up on horrible internet. I've finally got good internet but haven't gotten back into it yet.
They aren't laundering money. No. They're basically just setting it on fire.
See, Chris Roberts is the king of feature creep. He keeps wanting to add in the new shiny while not paying attention to finishing the shit that's already on the list.
They've also thrown out previous work to start over again more than once.
I really don't think you played New Vegas much if you think it wasn't about exploring and finding new shit all over the place.
Fallout 3 had the quest hubs. Also, the fact that water was super important to the story, but aside from one beggar, no one seemed to care about it much.
But New Vegas, well, everyone wanted power from that dam.
It comes down to, what do they eat? Fallout 3, nothing. NPCs don't eat, so there's no need to actually put that into the game, and since that part isn't in the game, a lot of other shit likely isn't.
New Vegas, they have farms and ecology and all sorts of other shit, and it's all over the place.
The main issue with the pre-war food is that it's been 250+ years. Sure, you might find a cache or two, but overall, it will have been scavenged already.
The honest truth is, food and water sources for anyone in the capital wastes was never seen as important to the writers of the story, So it was cut. Well, it was cut if it was ever written at all in the first place.
The story of Fallout 3 is very linear. Which means that it can be tightened up and polished, and it was. But if you go even a little bit off the rails, it starts showing cracks that are immersion breaking.
New Vegas didn't have that fully polished main story. Instead, it had a polished game world. One that felt alive and vibrant.
It's the reason why people have x amount of time playing Fallout 3, and three or four times that amount playing New Vegas.
Evidence of farming, or any food source for the NPCs shows that the makers of the game were actually thinking about the world as a livable space.
Fallout 3 devs were just thinking about a world where the story happens, nothing more. And it often shows. You run into little immersion breaking moments, especially if you go too far off the rails. Stay on the rails and it was a solid game.
New Vegas had devs who really paid attention to the details of the world, and if you went off the rails, it became an amazing game.