Steam, Spotify, Discord. Whoops, all Chromium.

In the mid-early days of reddit, upvote/downvotes were noticed as a method to hide the algorithm that was used to promote to the front page.

If you can see the exact counts, you can game the system. So the system threw fake up/downvotes into the mix to make it harder to reverse engineer. This could be something similar.

I waited to get involved until after the Echoes update last summer, and I truly enjoyed 100+ hours of the game.

It still does suffer from inevitably feeling really empty, with billions of copies of the same 4 different coloured/temperatured planets and 8 creature types, but it was still a heck of an experience.

This has always been the method. I’ve worked in startups for years, and there’s always a game-changing pivot that causes a staff exodus. They replace the with contractors until the company succeeds in the pivot or crashes and burns.

Return to office is just a pivot. If the talent leaves and gets replaced, hopefully their leadership can right the ship. Otherwise it’s those who departed who made the right call.