I’m not very familiar with TotK and I’m not sure how familiar you are with game development, but just in case you’re not very:

When making something like a shadow puzzle it is very unlikely they’re actually checking shadow conditions, and if they are it’s probably very sparse/only a couple of pixels.

For instance, if you know the position of the light source, the position of the shadow catcher and the position of the shadow receiver you could approximate the shadow casting with much simpler geometry. If Link is just treated as a box then you only need to check where each corner would cast a shadow and see if that overlaps the area you care about.

When done correctly the player would think it’s link’s shadow that’s being tested but in reality it’s nothing to do with the shadow, it’s just a much simpler estimation of a shadow that works well enough to trick players.

Game development is all smoke and mirrors. Tell the players one thing such as “This NPC is always at this location” then unload them when the player isn’t looking. It’s all sweet lies and I love it.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen ‘vise’ written down before, I always just assumed it was spelled ‘vice’! You learn something new every day

Worth noting that harvesting organs from non-consenting people would also be logical from a business perspective, provided it were legal. Free high value produce!

Not to put words in the mouth of the previous commenter, but logic is an extremely different argument compared to their argument of ethics- I don’t think they were confused about why it happened but rather concerned that it happened despite the ethical issues around (potentially, Im not familiar with the Rocket League situation) removing a game from a platform that many people bought it solely for :)

Regardless, I think it makes sense for people to be upset as, to your point, the most logical business decisions often run counter to the ethical or emotional considerations of the customers.

This sounds like how you get a resonance cascade… Experiments so powerful they make the sky glow as only our star can!

If you’re talking about FaceTime and iMessage… They might technically not cost any money, but if I wanted to use them I’d first have to pay for an overpriced badly designed phone, which means they’re debatably free. They’re used to enrich the iPhone- just look at the whole blue/green text bubble thing. ‘If you don’t also have an iPhone you get treated differently’ hardly sounds like something a totally ‘free’ software would include. It just feeds into their ‘exclusivity’ bubble.

I recently learned that one method for companies to get around data selling laws is to give the data away for free in order to attract certain types of advertisers, then, they sell ad slots for people with specific demographics or interests.

They don’t sell the data because that is harder to do with laws restricting it, so they just use it as advertiser bait in ways that bypass the law.

Further reading: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/google-says-it-doesnt-sell-your-data-heres-how-company-shares-monetizes-and