ok, i stand corrected about them not showing their salary breakdown for their Foundry 42 office, but that still does not negate the premise of my argument, which is we only know for one studio and that cannot be extrapolated for the other 3 studios outside of the UK.
Ortwin and Roberts have both said they get money back from the government, which is so much so that they were able to expand the UK studio to become the largest studio in the company because of it, so that is all we know about the scale of the rebate. Chris also mentions this in one of the interviews he gave at Citizencon this year. both of these guys say that the company is in great financial condition, but i am supposed to believe someone random on the internet who does not even work for the company over the ones who run it instead, because he has generalizations? no.
facts matter and speculation does not help anything when it comes to giving people accurate information on which to make informed decisions. and excuse me but how does an argument that is not accurate somehow gain the merits of one that is valid? if your information is wrong then any conclusion you derive from that information is also wrong, it's not a hard concept.
i will respect Lucetia's warning and stop this discussion as it is inconclusive with the limited information we have at this point anyway. so let's just agree that we don't know definitively either way objectively, all we have are the words of the company heads and information of one dev location out of 4 (5th one is in UK so the same rules would apply), so until we do, there is no need to bring it back up.
Back on topic:
Cargo looks like it's shaping up really nicely for its first iteration. they just need to clean up some animations (have total confidence in them after the animation showcase at Citizencon) and local grid transfers (though they are markedly better than they were at Gamescom in the same Cutlass Black) but i am more looking forward to the totality of all the related systems affecting each other once they all go live and the frequency, consequence and gameplay considerations for the player from their interactions.