• 4 Posts
  • 59 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 30th, 2023

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  • Yes, but it’s essentially incremental engineering, made possible by ginormous funding, including NASA money, and a private company doing things that NASA can-t politically afford.

    NASA spent about 50 Billion today-dollars developing (not launching) the shuttle program and that went to private contractors (Boeing, Lockheed, United Space, etc.) Starship has a long way to go to hit those numbers.

    I really don’t find anything SpaceX is doing revolutionary

    Really? Nothing? Many people said what Falcon 9 now does on a regular basis could not be done. No one was even trying. The closest plans were still going to land horizontally and went nowhere. Now, you have to explain why you’re not landing your booster, and what your plans are to fix that going forward: https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/international/2024/09/11/china-wants-to-replace-jeff-bezos-as-musks-greatest-space-threat/

    They quite literally revolutionized the space industry in terms of the cost to launch to orbit.

    Imagine NASA crashing 4 Shuttles before getting landing right. There’d be no NASA by now.

    Yet another way they’ve revolutionized the industry. Almost everyone is doing expendable tests now so that they can move forward quickly. Columbia started construction in 1975, launched for the first time in 1981. When they launched it, it was a fully decked out space shuttle and they put the whole thing on the line - including two astronauts. Imagine NASA trying to do that now. They’d be grounded so hard they’d be jealous of Mankind having a table to land on.











  • As a woman, I look at “Body Type A or Body Type B” and think “Well, I’m a woman, not a Body Type B, and isn’t it kinda misogynistic that the secondary option is the female one? Like A+ for Men, B- for Women?”

    This really pissed me off, I have to say. Why are you calling the “secondary” option “the female one”? To me that seems a bit presumptuous.

    If I have body type B with he/him pronouns, are you saying something about my body? Is it too “feminine” for you?

    Honestly, you seem to be looking for something to complain about. The developers have taken an extra step to try to be accommodating and inclusive and your complaining about the order the choices are listed in… Smh







  • Usually, when it’s a one-off like this, the video game gets “paid” to put the stuff in their game. That payment may be in-kind advertising campaigns, etc.

    For something like Need for Speed, Forza, etc, the game will be licensing the likeness of the vehicles and the company logos in the game. I don’t know the costs, but the fact that it’s also advertising will factor in.

    In this case, there are a few likely scenarios:

    1. The game director or art director or someone high up at Epic has a hard-on for the Cybertruck and really wanted it in the game. So they pursued Tesla and made a deal.
    2. Epic wanted to add vehicles to the game and decided to go with licensed vehicles. Their merchandising people reached out to merchandising people at all the auto companies and then figured out some deals.
    3. Someone high up at Tesla (maybe even Musk) loves, or has a kid who loves, Fortnite and decided they want the Cybertruck in the game. So they pursued Epic to make a deal.

    Number 2 is most likely, but I don’t know the game well enough to know the vehicle situation in it.

    For all of them, you have to factor in a bunch of details to figure out who is paying who:

    • who wants it more (/ power imbalance)
    • how much money is it going to cost to make the models, animations, etc
    • how much is it going to cost players to get the item
    • are there aspects that either company finds undesirable (E.g. sometimes car companies don’t like their cars shown with damage)
    • who will be doing the bulk of the marketing, and who has the marketing budget to spend on the venture
    • probably a lot more

    So, it’s hard to say without more inside info. Games I’ve worked on have had 1 and 2, but not 3 as far as I know. I think it was pretty much an in-kind deal for the 1 situation though (like we got the likenesses, they got advertising through the game, ostensibly we sold more games with the likenesses, but I think it just stroked someone’s ego…) All of the 2 situations were done to bring in money for the game’s marketing budget / or were in-kind marketing deals, possibly bringing money directly to the bottom line, but I don’t know.