TLTay

Really reaching here, mate. You're willing to admit that out of all the projects they've got in the pipeline, this was right at the bottom of their list in terms of revenue outweighing cost, but you're not willing to admit that they have the alternative of just coming up with other options in the future instead of coming back to this. Why even come back to it later when you can just, you know... not? You don't need to try to school me on the money part. It's pretty clear they don't think there are enough possible future sales to justify funding it anymore, or they would have funded it. At the end of the day the finance and accounting people made the projections and this one got the axe. No need to come back to it when they can develop something more financially promising. Besides, they already got your money.

It appears to be over, but some people with certain psychological profiles often caused by complex parental abandonment or abuse issues are likely to continue to need to hold on to belief and feel supportive, even if only to prove to themselves that they are not like the person whose behavior caused their complex.

Sounds like management wants to keep the product page up and just not have to talk about it again. It got full funding for as long as it was going to. It just isn't worth it anymore compared to other places to put money. So unless the cost of carrying financing drops to nearly zero again, I'd say they've put their money where their mouth is by firing the developers. They just want it to stay on the books to pad the portfolio for investors.

Their earnings call covered a period that ended before the layoffs legally take effect. They are within their right to list the project for a time period it was ongoing. Sales continue, so it remains a product. That may change for the next earnings call in 3 months.

They can't seriously be considering funding this any further. It would just be a poor business move. I guess they want to quietly put it out to pasture to die a withering death now that it has extracted some of the failed development cost out of the fanbase. Maybe they'll keep Nate onboard to try and sell some more copies. I wanted to believe. I waited eagerly for each update up to the EA release, but it became obvious toward the end that they were just dumping it to recoup expenses, and it's clearer every day. Sad.

Looks like no useful info. Still in the dark. They should have hired HarvesteR as their lead. Then this wouldn't have happened.

They don't need to explicitly cancel it, it's in EA, they can just let it wither on the vine as they have been so far. That's less of a legal liability, and the compelling trailer might still pull in a few sales. In the meantime, they are sacking the staff working on it, so that says enough by itself. Some people really want to cling to hope, but this was their chance to tell everyone it was being moved to a new studio and it looks like they didn't bother. Shadow cancellation looks like the order of the day. Minimal work, forever in development.

Where is it listed in this report? I find no mention. Give a keyword please.

When do the layoffs go into effect? End of June, right? Is the studio still technically open at the time the earnings call takes place then? Yes. That says nothing of continued survival of the game. I'm sure one of the youtubers has bothered to listen to the call and will give us info later.

T2 earnings call tomorrow. You can listen in realtime if you want to hear any news. The only people the company actually cares about is the shareholders, we folk are just the livestock. If anybody will get the info, it'll be the shareholders.

It doesn't matter. Only the money matters. Money spent up to this point is irrelevant. Whether the game is good or not is irrelevant. It's a simple assessment of whether the game is expected to make more money going forward than it's expected to cost going forward. (Ok, it's not simple, but that's what the finance team is for). Early access was a means of recouping money on a failed product. Do the realistic sales figures at the end of several more years of funding a 70 employee team exceed the cost? That's the only question that matters.

Steam needs to change EA policy to where a developer, publisher, etc with over X revenue may not release a title into EA. EA should ONLY be an option for those financially needing it, and not for big players to dump an incomplete product to cash out on a failed development cycle... looking at you KSP2 and CS2.

I thought about it, but I have slow rural internet and don't want to waste 20 hours downloading excrement just to pinch out a freshly steaming pile of disapproval.

No option applies. I wanted what was initially promised, in a functional state, without major bugs, and full of innovative new features with a solid foundation to grow on. I kept my money because: 1. The above product was not provided. 2. The dev team was not a small team charging a reasonable amount to keep the lights on while working on a passion project, but was instead a large and well funded team of pros who charged what amounts to nearly full price for a pre alpha build dumped into EA in a sorry state.

Last I checked, nobody knows anything and nobody from the company is talking at all. I presume at this point the next major news will be given at the T2 quarterly earnings report in two weeks, and that any info given will be carefully scripted and tailored to the only group of people the company actually cares about at the end of the day: the shareholders.

I think at this point the best it could hope for in the way of continued development would be a small team of (maybe 3 to 5) teleworkers from a very low income country getting tasked to attempt to work on it as long as sales money keeps covering their meager pay. That could keep the game on the books as an "asset" and completely avoid hassles until it's forgotten about. A handfull sales a week from grandparents and 6 years olds bestowed with steam credits who are bedazzled by the trailer on the store page would be enough to fund such a team.

Generally, when you want to work on something, you don't usually fire the people working on it.

The "WARN Act" is a law. The notice is legally required to be given by employers over a certain size when layoffs are going to occur. The employees ARE being laid off. They ARE losing their jobs.

The WARN notice is not a hoax, neither is the employees saying they are being laid off.

Everybody give some space, there's some strange kind of gymnastics going on here.

What country? Just curious. It's common right now for programmers etc in the US and higher paying western European countries to have extended periods of unemployment. I'm going to guess you might be in a country the corporations outsource those jobs to, and thus have no issue finding an abundance of work.

My guess on what happened: 1. The "for science" update underwhelmed in sales and reviews and financial projections for future cost to benefit were poor. 2. The other title intercept was probably spend the bulk of their hours working on probably slipped for the exact same reasons KSP did. Corporate saw this team as the underlying problem in a way that could not be corrected, and decided on the sum of the evidence to axe a serially nonperformant group of employees, while bringing an end to a hopeless project with minimal future revenue and large future expenses. Just a guess.

We may not get an "official" word until the quarterly report in 2 weeks, but what more do we really need to see?

If they were going to transfer development to another studio, you'd think they would have said so in order to calm the mood and avoid tarnishing a product they still intended to sell.

Yeah Yeah, but then there was that thing about future offerings or whatever. They might just ice it and let it quietly go over the years. We'll see what they say on the quarterly call.