Holy crap someone else who actually remembers the days where people were mad that Valve were the arbiters of what got released on PC.

there used to be something like that...but people complained about Valve “Gatekeeping”...so they changed it to $100 and you can put up your game.

I think it’s clear they planned to dump it and run with whatever they got. You don’t drop everything a few days after release if it was a lack of funds, you can’t launch a game if you’re that close to bankruptcy. It might not have started as a scam, but that’s what it became.

It was often the most wishlisted game on Steam for much of 2023. A lot of people thought a no-name development team could build a AAA open world MMO.  It didn’t help that the dev team CLEARLY LIED about what features would be in the game.

So you want money because they stole your likeness, the likeness you stole from a movie.... >.>

Casablanca used people with Dwarfism in the last scenes so they could use a scale model of the plane Ilsa and Viktor leave on instead of a full sized one.

And you save fabric because their pants aren’t so long. 

Yeah, that was stupid of me, it was Scott not Cameron.  Fixed!

Short extras don’t eat as much from craft services - this is a no brainer.

Scott did the same thing on Alien. From Wiki:

That was a very thorough and informative reply... glad someone around here is willing to do the work rather than just assume that something nefarious has happened. 

Many years ago, I worked in a gas station / convenience store and had a co-worker who was a 17-year old girl with a shitbag abusive boyfriend. One night she broke up with him at the store. He threatened to kill himself and then went and drove his car into the dumpster (at a decent speed, but definitely not enough to…

I work in game shows. It is standard operating procedure to not pay out any winnings until after the show airs, typically 90-120 days after the contestant’s final episode (with some rare exceptions like Ken Jennings, whose “Jeopardy!” streak carried over from one season into another; he got a partial payout during the…

I believe that this is standard game show practice not to give the prize until the show airs. For instance, I know that The Price is Right won’t give you your winnings until the show airs to avoid spoilers. 

Play squid games, win squid prizes.

Right.  Otherwise, there’s a risk that the last few contestants agree (either openly or secretly) to share the prize money, destroying the tension and drama of the end of the show.  Lots of people would take a 100 percent chance of getting $500,000 over a 50 percent chance of getting $1 million.

I like how the key takeaway from Netflix from the dystopian show about people dying in a reality competition was “Hey this was popular, let’s make it a real show!”

They aren’t paid enough to do investigative journalism.

Yeah, there’s definitely a handful of super obvious questions for which they ought to have at least tried to get answers. Like even a “we reached out but no response” effort.

Man, remember when this was a site where they’d try to even attempt to investigate why they haven’t received the money yet rather than spin an article out of a single quote.