My understanding is that Google charges for use of their API. The game could switch to a traditional flat price model, but the moment they stop making enough in sales to pay Google for API access, the entire game is dead for everyone.
The subscription sucks but it's basically a requirement to continue running. Would be nice if there was any sort of open map standard with even half the street view data Google has so they wouldn't need Google at all.
They're mostly contracted services, but I meant more that it wasn't the services managed directly by the big food delivery companies like Grubhub/Uber Eats/Doordash etc.
If I don't order through Doordash, I would expect no involvement from a Doordash driver whatsoever.
It's been a hot minute since my college days, but I do remember learning about singing as one possible avenue of speech therapy in one of my classes. Something about using different parts of the brain I guess.
For what it's worth, this is the latest among several prominent Microsoft-owned teams to unionize. Bethesda is union, Raven Software is another former-Activision studio that unionized, and even at Blizzard, the World of Warcraft development team has been union for a bit.
There are lots of problems at Microsoft, but it doesn't seem like they've continued Activision's old union-busting strategies at least.
Can't say I've ever left reviews online, either. Not looking to shame or name drop a struggling restaurant, just to commiserate about the flawed and exploitative system of gig labor.
Outlier maybe, but definitely something that only happened because of the fact that delivery drivers are allowed to walk right up to wherever prepared orders are kept and take whatever is there with no questions asked.
I'm a fairly nonconfrontational person so I just took my cold food without argument and heated it up again at home. The restaurant at least comped part of the bill by way of apology.
I'll say I live in a big city and have never once used Doordash/Uber Eats/any other exploitative meal delivery app for that reason. But even then you're not safe.
I once placed an online order for takeout, ordered on the actual site for the restaurant (not any of those branded online order services hosted by the meal delivery companies), picked the option that said I'd walk over and pick it up, and then was told when I got there that Doordash already came by and grabbed it.
I then get a call on my phone from a Doordash driver asking where I live, because it wasn't included with the order for some reason (gosh I can't imagine why that would be). After spending 5 minutes explaining that I would not give them my address because I was at the restaurant and never ordered delivery, they show up 10 minutes later and hand me a cold bag of takeout.
Sometimes. Probably should more often, but when you cook something enough times to know when it's done, it makes it a bit redundant.