What do you mean we? We literally cannot cede to a foreign power without a unanimous vote, which will never happen. You desperately need to read our charter of ~~rights and freedoms~~, if you actually are Canadian.
E: see below for where it actually came from, I'm a wee bit daft.
It is a real thing. Very few people have identical ears on both sides of their head, and almost no one shares the same shape with another person. There's a few active implementations of this on truly wireless earbuds, but the latency makes it irrelevant for most things except music. Depending on just how unique the ear shape is, it can drastically change how things sound.
In no capacity should it be a paid feature in a game, though. In a more competitive game with a lot of value placed on audio like Escape From Tarkov, this would completely change the game and how it is played.
TLDR: Your ears are unique, and your brain spends your entire life from the moment your ears are hearing things, tuning to them.
That is certainly true, I guess I needed to specifically call out that he actually does reply. And this has been a constant recurring "rediscovery" every few years that GabeN personally responds to that email.
That also wasn't the particular point I was even talking about. The point was that a previous dev would most likely still have connections inside Valve given how easy it is for outsiders. And that even if they had zero connections, again, it would be super easy to get a response.
This is all just speculation, but a relatively confident one.
Honestly, knowing how easy it is for just about anyone to contact GabeN (his email is publically accessible) and that this was a previous tester, I would say there's decent odds they're already contacted someone to make sure or already had permission to do so in some roundabout way. I have no way of knowing for sure, obviously, but it is super weird for this to pop up without the finder messaging anyone in Valve about it.
Damn I'm blind huh. Thank you for the correction.