Big companies are self-insured. They pay an insurance company to manage the plan, but the premiums pool up internally and claims are paid out by the employer, not the insurance company. Not that there isn’t still to some extent an incentive to not pay things out, but that is also balanced with making sure your…

Bungie is large enough that they’re almost certainly self-insured. Most companies over 500 employees (and even a good percentage of companies under 500 employees, something like 30%) only pay a healthcare company to manage the plan for them - the claims are actually paid out by the company themselves (and that’s where…

Yea, I tend to think this is true also. Hiring, retaining, and developing talent is getting harder, primarily because games demand more of it than ever. Remakes are a great way to let a new team get up to speed (especially if you’re trying to internally generate new leaders in order to have a fully-functional new team…

This leads me to ask what the distinction between “cash grab” and “not a cash grab” is. Where’s the line? When I think of a cash grab I think of like a get rich quick scheme. If the game isn’t up to par then we don’t have to buy it - do we as gamers not have any agency over our purchasing decisions at all? What’s with…

Maybe they do today. They sure as hell didn’t when Destiny 2 came out. The entire concept of what a live service is today was in the process of being invented by that very game when people started buying Destiny 2. In fact, if you look back at Destiny 1, everything is still there and playable (servers are still up and…

I don’t think they’d ever do such a thing. That’d be a huge detriment to a lot of business models, both real and theoretical - basically that would amount to saying that you cannot ever sell something digital unless you commit to keeping up distribution servers for it for the rest of eternity. In fact, I’d go so far…

This is a bit of a different case, as in the Forza case we’re talking about game distribution servers (which are centralized, and they aren’t going anywhere without the entire storefront disappearing). In the Assassin’s Creed case, there isn’t a centralized service for the online servers or DLC checks - they’re…

Not much you can do, even with piracy, when the DRM check involves a server. I guess in theory someone could crack the DRM and host a dummy replacement server, but if a game is big enough for someone to bother with that it’s probably big enough to not have its server go down in the first place.

It is definitely a single display. It’s been confirmed many times over and you can see it pretty clearly in all of the video reviews that are out there.

The climate controls are all physical buttons...

It is some kind of soft touch injection molding. I wish it were leather too (Mercedes with MSRPs almost $10k less than this even have leather there), but it’s surprising enough that they’ve been able to make an EV this nice for that price (it’s cheaper than a Tesla Model Y!)

They shouldn’t be worried about bringing down the cost of the parts in a Cadillac. They should be striving to get to the point where they can demand such a markup because of the plush exclusivity of the interior, that they actually make more money keeping it exclusive than they do lowering the cost (like Mercedes can…

The Lyriq will also be available with GM’s excellent Super Cruise hands-free driving assistant, but my tester was not thusly equipped

Technically, yes, a gas station could add chargers if they wanted to. But there’s something to be said for the fact that the country is covered in gas stations (140k-some) that are all designed in roughly the same fashion, with respect to parking lot layout - and not many are really large enough to shift from stops…

I thought the Tesla style plug (and access to the stations) was already technically open to any auto manufacturer, and it’s just that nobody but Tesla decided to go that route? I recall that part of the reason is because it wasn’t quite as altruistic a gesture as it first appeared, but in either case, if “using the…

Every supercharger I’ve ever seen in MI was wide open. Part of that is probably because for the longest time they weren’t even technically allowed to sell cars here, but in either case, more cars being able to use them also means more incentive to keep building more of them and get the lines down everywhere.

It’ll be interesting to see how they make the themes of the cards interesting, given the game is set in an era that predates witchers (and, by extension, really any of the characters we know). Part of the fun of gwent in the witcher 3 was completing the deck of heroes that you know and care about, like geralt and…

Except that they are also making a full blown Diablo 4 which so far is looking like exactly the game Diablo fans want it to be.

That’s kind of the story with F2P games in general. All of the old ways of measuring success are out the window, and with them so are the old ways of voicing distaste for the quality of the product. If you’re not the big spender then they don’t really care about your opinion, and they need far fewer big spenders than…

They don’t do it for fun. I’d imagine there’s plenty of data suggesting that this kind of engagement drives up eventual sales. It takes away time, and opens them up to increased risk from the backlash of a delay or a “downgrade” between when the game is shown off and releases, etc. Why would they continue to take the…