Hasta La Gadget!

Amazon has reportedly scrapped a policy that claimed ownership rights to any games that employees created outside of work. Under the previous rules, the company required employees to using Amazon products while working on personal projects and to distribute those games on its storefronts.

Those policies are longer in place, according to Bloomberg. In an email to staff seen by the publication, Amazon Game Studios head Mike Frazzini said the company was dropping the rules immediately. “These policies were originally put in place over a decade ago when we had a lot less information and experience than we do today, and as a result, the policies were written quite broadly,” Frazzini wrote. Engadget has contacted Amazon for comment.

Amazon received a backlash over the rules after an engineer who interviewed at the company disclosed the Amazon Personal Games policy. The rules granted Amazon “a royalty free, worldwide, fully paid-up, perpetual, transferable license” to the intellectual property of games its employees made off the clock. The policy was decried as “draconian” by some developers when a now-deleted tweet from the engineer gained traction.

However, Amazon isn’t the only company to have enacted such a policy. Google has also been accused of claiming ownership of employees’ own external projects.

The president called domestic terrorism “the most lethal terrorist threat to our homeland in recent years.”

Additional American troops are being sent to Afghanistan to assist in the removal of personnel.

When it launched in 2018, Frostpunk quickly became known as one of the bleakest and most difficult city-building simulation games around. Set in a post-apocalyptic world that has frozen over, Frostpunk tasked players with managing the world’s last city, keeping its citizens warm and alive while potentially imposing harsh rules to achieve that goal. Today, we learned that Frostpunk is … Continue reading

BMW’s reinvented Mini was always larger and more luxurious than the classic original, but the Mini Strip co-created by designer Paul Smith pares the car back to the bare necessities. In the process, the small two-door raises some big questions about just how much in modern vehicles is necessary, and whether what we intentionally leave out might be more important … Continue reading