blazemonger

Something something with mole and ant hill.. "tracking to deliver" may not be the best choice of words as some, like yourself, will be ready to pick it apart.. "on track to deliver" would be better and unless proven otherwise is what I'll go for. If you actually read the relevant article, it quite clearly states that the lay offs already happened and so the "hedging positions to prevent getting axed" is pretty much baseless speculation. This was a correction for/on the growth spurt T2 went through, cutting some of the excess fat accumulated as they refocus their goals. Nothing more, nothing less. All the doomsday scenarios now doing the rounds originate from people speculating, stating opinion as fact and basically parroting "what they heard" and not what they actually read. Could the response we got here be a smokescreen? Yes it can be, but at the same time if you just blindly go for that option without any way to either back or justify that opinion, that is just making things worse and not helpful at all. If you would say you thought the wording was a bit unfortunate and you'd love to get a clarification on what "tracking to deliver" actually means then I could certainly agree with that. Just disregarding it based on what your personal experience in your employment seems to be says more about the latter than the actual concern IMO.

Having read some the actual publication, not the speculative remarks posted here by people who appear to not have done the same, It seems to me that what is happening is that after a period of growth, where often a lot of fat is accumulated, said fat is now being cut again. So this has all the signs of being mostly corporate level layoffs which will generally not affect production all that much, if at all.

As a former CM for KSP1 and self proclaimed industry professional, you are clearly and directly drawing conclusions based on at best incomplete data. Game sells on Steam, Epic and direct, you only account for Steam sales. KSP is and always will be a super niche game which will not ever have broad mainstream appeal and the studio as well as Take 2 will know this. I would not be surprised a lot of people bought direct. I'd say the steam numbers alone shows a niche game shortly after EA doing pretty good for what it is, despite the noise which will always happen. My personal take on this is that it is not unlikely at least a part of the noise is due to factors these people are not telling us, for instance them running the game on a Linux platform or older hardware. KSP2 is clearly designed for the future and doe snot cater to 5+ year old hardware all that much , which IMO is perfectly fine when the studio/publisher is in it for the long haul. If anyone makes the argument the game really is not ready for the main stage, even when labelled as "early access" I would not disagree but here we are. In general though, it would seem that the foundation of the game is solid, which is very important and I'm not all that concerned about the current state. How quickly these issue get addressed and patches released with consistent progress in quality and performance is what will tell us how well the team is doing more than anything else. If the scenario now is that the devs go silent for a week or two while they work on fixes and then release a big patch, I'm good with that. It is what eventually turned around NMS, which had a far more disastrous launch and is doing just fine, if not really well, now.

Of course it is valid as, big publisher or not, KSP2 _is_ a niche game and always will be. Nothing wrong with that at all, just a simple fact of life as far as I am concerned.

Also, keep in mind that many will buy direct, I actually refunded on Steam and bought direct instead as I wanted as much of my purchase benefit the studio.. For a niche game like KSP on a "rocky" start of EA like many claim they have, showing 11.5K concurrent on Steam is really not bad at all.