PDCWolf

At the risk of sounding condescending, accusatory or offensive (I'm not trying to, sorry in advance), and not knowing how much you can talk about... You mentioned Shana was still hired and working when you joined, pointing to you joining prior to September 2022 where she says (on linkedin) that she left Intercept (something we never discussed in this forum as it was never mentioned IIRC). This means you saw the Design Director leave. Who else did you see? Didn't those consistent layoffs and/or people just walking not set off any alarm?

We don't know if the talks have ended in general, we know someone from Paradox got to IGN to confirm Paradox didn't want the deal and that they were offered PD too. Also, I highly doubt anyone buying the franchise would continue from such an overwhelmingly bad start as the current KSP2. That anything will come from the current existing product is wishful thinking at best. I like em bulleted. Numbers are for steps or priorities. I'm trying to throw in my two cents that you're talking too much about money, too little about the human factor which I'm sure it's the most important (why I decided to do the math on some arbitrary and very high estimated KSP2 cost number being less than 1% of T2). Whilst I think the money is the reason they stopped, I hard disagree it's the reason things went bad and no one wants the franchise for. I'm basically just pointing out that you might be trying to think this out with what for me is less than half of the total factors. I'm not accusing him on a court of law. I'm merely stating my opinion on a forum for a dead game two dead games actually. Poor little Nate, not being able to post in social media, he must be wiping his tears with the salary of his new position inside PD. He's already come out to lie to our faces, and even though that costed T2 a lot of money, and all of his employees their jobs, that was fine. You can't use that card if we're talking about his integrity. This is not a court of law, so refer to 1. I also did blame T2 and PD for their incapacity to detect problems and even causing them in the first place. I just don't join the "muh corporate greed" bandwagon because money is money and I don't instinctively hate anyone who makes more money than me, which seems to be a very common problem nowadays. I'm gonna cite Pewdiepie's musical hit "Congratulations": "That's not defamation". However, if he's feeling extra petty he can accuse me on a court of law and see if my country extradites me to the US on counts of defamation. And so far, if he doesn't plan on editing his own posts, I haven't accused him of anything he hasn't done. Any accusation outside the very easily provable lying to customers has always been stated clearly as my own opinion, and if he wants to dispute that lying to customers bit, he's gonna have to justify how the things he's said aren't a lie, so I'd be actually doing a favor to the people still tuned in to this mess of a story by digging out more juicy details. "That guy" is Bloomberg's pretty much only writer in what concerns the gaming industry. He's the one anyone with 2 braincells listens to when it comes to the business side of things. He's got some controversial opinions but I'm pretty sure he's yet to be proven wrong when it comes to getting the scoop. For all us in here care about, he just caught T2's CEO with his pants down first, people here just like listen to ShadowZone better because he's been the hopium peddler for the longest time and not some rando or an ignore-list-maker "doomer".

I like lists too! Read the article. T2 was trying to sell PD too, so yeah, there's a non zero chance that someone actually buys Nate. Obviously not if they just buy the IP, but maybe someone wants to try their hand at the whole thing. You maybe own their shares through index funds. Nate was our problem, and is a problem, and will remain a problem for whoever until he retires if my outlook on him is true. I don't need a court of law to validate my judgements, I'd need a court of law if I wanted a nationwide-respected ruling saying that Nate, or IG, or PD, or T2 have broken some law. If I blame Nate, I have my reasons, and you might agree with those or not, but you can't tell me how to judge a person, nor should you or anyone guide themselves based on my judgements unless you happen to work for me. Of course he didn't, he's as guilty as many others, he just happened to be the guy constantly telling us they had funds, experts, everything was going dandy, and this train wasn't stopping. Yes, they definitely are, specially when they're on positions where they hold power over others and happen to also be in charge of communicating with upstream as well. Again, not saying it's his sole fault but damn if I do think he had a massive, central role like he's already had on 4 previous blunders. "Secret sources" are not sources. People didn't believe Jason Schrirer at first when he said IG was getting killed confirmed by unnamed sources, an actual journalist with decades of clean track record of not being wrong. ShadowZone just happens to be closer to the community, and only be confirming what we already believe, also stating he has unnamed sources. We just happen to have a lot of context that makes what ShadowZone said fit almost perfectly with what we see and know. However, he didn't name names, and so his credibility is objectively, journalistically, as much as we want to give them.

Nah, even if you assume no one was there to stop him, he clearly wasn't realistic with his vision whilst engineers were running around trying to make the game playable. He also outright came out and told us things that turned out to not be true. He's also been accused of micromanaging, and clearly now is a ship jumper that's sunk not one but two game studios. Not like actively refusing to judge him would make anyone a better person anyways.

My only two cents to the thought experiment, besides my belief that it's not them trying to charge too much but that just nobody wants the IP, is that we should pay more attention to Nate. People think they'll be the devil for blaming him for this or that, but he can definitely be blamed. See, when the ship sinks, it's not just the captain that's at fault, but the involved crew around the point of failure, all the way up to the people in charge to control them and manage problems or communicate them upwards. However, what did Nate get out of sinking a ship? Apparently a promotion by being absorbed into PD (judging by his linkedin). It is my opinion (by virtue of PA, Human Resources -the game-, Monday Night Combat, SMNC, and now KSP2) that he does not have the talent, but he definitely has the charisma and/or connections to somehow keep sinking games and still land on his feet, now to the point of being hired by PD... that same label his failed project screwed up so bad their owner is looking to shut them down. Where I'm going with this... there's humans inside! Normally the discourse is to dehumanize corporations with things like "bean counters", "managers", "shareholders", but they're people like you and me, and can be influenced, convinced, or really just trust that their vision or instincts are correct... Do not be surprised to one day learn that KSP2 ended up this way because someone really just kept believing Nate was gonna deliver, to the point they overspent on KSP2 to get nothing in exchange, and even then they somehow now believe Nate was the only one worth salvaging from the wreckage. As for Take Two, they're worth USD 27.500.000.000 right now. Even if we assume KSP2 costed them USD 160.000.000 that's... 0.58% of Take Two. This is why I so staunchly believe (and get this message out of the news) that it's not them overcharging for it, they'll happily sell it "cheap" because they have no further plans with a franchise that put them in the red and now hosts an angry vindictive community that would probably boycott them if they tried again or worse, came out with something like Kerbal Kart.

That's not even considering how somehow even though the project is very probably above 9 digits down in cash, somehow they'd consider the IP "valuable". It's not that they don't want to sell, it's that nobody wants the burnt body of the IP after T2 torched it with such a subpar project that didn't even break 100k sales on release day with a known customer base of ~5 million people.

As a reply directly to the title: KSP2 was an attempt at quickly cashing on a beloved franchise by modernizing it and shipping some of the most popular mods as default features. However, it ended up aiming for sub-mediocre quality on everything, not just out of releasing a product riddled with the most egregious bugs that 14 months later hadn't even been fully fixed (remember decay?), but also by making every feature an overly streamlined, puddle depth yawner. All of that mounted on a foundation even flimsier than the first game, with the privilege of letting us relive all the limitations and mistakes made during the prequel. That's what I think about KSP2. "Full Release" might be a thing. I'm still thinking they'll release whatever they can scrap together as "1.0" as soon as they can and call it a day. KSP2 is dead, the KSP franchise is dead, and thanks to IGN yesterday we also discovered that not only is it dead but not even the most parasitic publishers want to buy it and it did so bad it helped take down Private Division. Further on, I don't think I'll ever be ready for whatever garbage might spawn with the name some 5 to 20 years down the line if anything ever does.

Source? I'm definitely only talking about EA projects I've participated in... which is why I highlight the need to be attentive and objective, and not just huff hopium.

I know there's people out there whom this series of events has hit as a train with no lights in the fog. However... for most this was highly predictable. Not to rain on your parade but it wasn't exactly discovering America.

I know this is mostly a joke, but I've gotta ask: And then what? Who from "the community" gets the rights? how does "the community" approve or disapprove licensing? Who even is the "community"? Just the people that fund the purchase or anyone with a forum account?

I mean, it's literally written in the article, didn't do much thinking, much less wishful. The way it's written... it seems nobody wants it rather than T2 wanting lots of money for it. @Lisias KSP2 was the only title to get an aggressive marketing campaign too! their other titles are pretty much unheard of.

It's literally inside the OPs link.

Please people, read the news, it's actually pretty horrible: So the game is dead. They did try to sell the IP with or without the amateur studio, even the most parasitic publisher out there skipped on the deal. Not only did they fail to sell the IP, they failed to sell their Indie uplifting business. KSP2 might've just ruined everything for PD or at least been the straw that broke the camel's back.

[snip] Epic's refund policy is pointless except for the people inside said policy. As those who've exceeded the policy's limits would have to try and go through human Epic support. It's clear to me you haven't tried anything with them before, but believe me when I say there's a bigger chance to get $50 from punching sand in the desert than anything regarding human Epic support. As for the layoffs, that's just clearly not knowing how things work. It's been explained many times that unless the relationship is excellent (and even then), nobody is allowed to come back to work since getting the notice. You don't want someone getting angsty over being fired to have access to the product to sabotage it, make copies, or whatever other destructive practice. If they're allowed back, they're very probably only permitted to finish up whatever task they were doing before not being allowed back in again. If you don't see how what happened to 2K Marin is relevant, that is not a me problem, it's a you problem. As I told someone else, that's the wrong lesson to learn. First off, it is a good lesson to stay away from big publishers engaging in EA, I'm pretty sure when I say there hasn't been a single successful AAA early access project. On the other hand, most indie EAs are successful or at least reach a "maybe worth the money" point. However, you are required to be attentive, and not be positive. Positivity adds nothing. The people making a good job know they're doing it and don't need it, and the people lying to your face will feed off of it to lie more, and use it as a basis to ask for more money and more time.

Some civilized countries (and some very civilized steam employees) do not allow developers to just charge money to say they're going to make a game and then abandoning it. Everyone has the right to ask for a refund, and thanks to Steam, they've got the right to ask many times for a refund, making different or the same case. Which is not the point since most people are way past that, in which case Epic support is definitely one of the worst places, if they even bother replying to you. Steam allows you to talk to a human for refunds after the automatic system fails you. Some people have been waiting since 2013 for an official statement on 2K Marin's situation. You've arbitrarily chosen a date as an ultimatum with almost zero reason, hoping they've chosen the same, or any date, to spend resources responding to the ~120 people still waiting to hear whatever. They've merely respected the law by giving their employees paid heads up time before firing them and have no further obligation with the project or the employees, much less their customers.