I never spent a single cent at their store and probably never will, but since Epic is so keen on burning money I am happy to help them with that.
Turning Stardew Valley into Cruelty Squad one mod at a time.
You can just buy them for one year and keep using the perpetual fallback license. Also, they can fuck right off with their planet incinerating automatic plagiarism chat bots.
Yes, my Fairphone 4 was supposed to get monthly security updates until summer 2024 but in my experience they where always late, sometimes by more than a month. They now also missed the Q1 2025 deadline for the promised upgrade to Android 14.
Most of their IDEs you can use for free for non-commercial purposes and even if you need to buy them; when you compare software development to any other profession our tools are incredibly cheap. You can get all the Jetbrains IDEs for less than 300€. Compare that to a HDL simulator or a 3D CAD application like Autodesk. These easily cost several thousand euros each year.
Imagine how successful their store could have been if they had put all that money into improving the launcher and not antagonizing large parts of their customer base instead.
This still fundamentally suffers from the oracle problem like all blockchains solutions. You can always attack these blockchain solutions at the point where they need to interact with the real world. In this case the camera is the "oracle" and nothing prevents someone from attacking the proposed camera and leveraging it to certify some modified footage. The blockchain doesn't add anything a public database and digitally signed footage wouldn't also achieve.
I know the type. Usually the kind of confident know-it-all who refuses to learn anything but delivers changes really quickly so management loves them. I had the misfortune to fix such a project after that 'rock-star' programmer left the company. Unfortunately the lack of professional standards in our industry allows people like that to continuously fail upwards. When I left the project they rehired them and let them design the v2 of the project we just fixed.
The Adobe stock photos link says its generated.