Lisias

Yes. But I rewrote it in terms the accountants use in order to explain how they take decisions. If you want to understand why some people take some decisions, you need to understand how they think and, so their language.

Operations don't run on loss. They run on expectations of profit, so it's an investment. On the exact moment someone decide that operation is running on loss, someone else calculates the odds of reverting the trend and how much time it will tale to recover the money after the profits are back. If such money can render more profits somewhere else, the axe-man is called.

Today, it's this one: (frankly, the lyrics are perfect! )

The myth of the infinite demand. With ZIRP (the pandemic relief program), suddenly borrowing money became cheaper as hell, so you could literally burn money with impunity if you wanted. So they used the cheap money to hire people from left to right as a strategic move - if I hire this guy, he will not work on my competitor against me - it's someone else paying his salary (the Government), not me!. As well to buy anything that they laid their eyes on. But then the ZIRP is over, and all that buyouts increased the fixed costs of the company. It's interesting, but the budget to buy things is different from the budget from paying salaries. Not only they go on different Cost Centers, but they are classified differently too - buyouts go to the variable Cost Centers, and salaries (and maintenance, and taxes, etc) go to the fixed (recurrent?) Center Costs. Now, fixed Cost Centers are the problem for the Accountants. Profits are calculated prioritizing fixed Costs (as variable costs are easily amortizable over long periods of time, sometimes even as loss on the taxes, while fixed costs need to amortized constantly). Now we have a situation where the earnings are going to shrink and the taxes are going to get higher (see changes on the Section 174 of the corporate tax), so now they have a expenditure that is going to be harder to amortize. So they get rid of the expenditure. Simple like that. Oh, people are going to lose the jobs due this? Too bad, Corporations are not Charity Entities - you need to pull your weight now to so the money they spent on you this month is amortizable on the next. Otherwise, they will get rid of the costs of paying you. The system does not promotes maximizing fair deals with the employees. The system is trimmed to maximize profits. Yep.

Are you talking about the changes of the Section 174 on what can be amortized as R&D and what's not? IMHO the gross of the expenditures were already made. Music, meshes, textures, animations, all of that costs a ton of money, really, really ton of money. Development are not cheap neither, but are done in a faster pace (usually) with a relatively small team. It's the reason corporations like to buy failed project's assets, to save money by grabbing them instead of paying a lot of creatives to do it from scratch.

On an initial moment, fixing the auto-strut bug would be the best line of action. Adding a better mechanism would not be out of question, but initially, we should fix the problem on the features we already have. We build software in layers, one over the other. We left a bug lingering on a lower layer, it will bite our cheeks later for sure.

I beg to differ. Some of the worst problems on KSP¹ were really, really silly mistakes buried into the code that only lived by so many years because nobody were looking for them, preferring to elect escape goats to take the blame instead. As why the devs didn't solved these problems before, well... I will left to an exercise to the reader. A chain is so strong as its weakest link - and corporate culture can be a Sun in your Beach. There're some gunk on KSP¹, but you would be surprised that most of the problems that plagued this scene didn't came from them. --- -- - POST EDIT - -- --- I HAD to quote this here!

As a corollary. he thinks such devs are talented and competent. If he's right about, this raises some very serious questionings about some other things around here. You shifted the targeting reticle to someone else, instead of removing it from the equation.

Would be unwise, as I'm obviously emotionally attached to the subject and I'm pretty sure I going to miss a lot of shots until getting near the target. You see, slandering is a bad thing - and being targeted by it in the past doesn't means I'm entitled to do the same. And if I'm the only one able to see the links, perhaps there's no real links at all - I love a "Conspiracy.Theory" as the any other guy, but this doesn't necessary means I like seeing people unjustifiably getting screwed by it. There's something smelling funny around here, probably for some years already - but some wind may be masking the source. All I can say is that I checked my shoes, and there's nothing stuck on the sole. Forum is too big of an elevator to be able to pinpoint someone farting with certainty!

Finally someone playing ball with me. So: He's not working officially on KSP2, but he's willing to do so. And he's claiming he's working hard on it already, so unofficially. Do some research on his contacts over life. Or he's contracted to do the work, and he's authorized to say it. [he didn't said it - got influenced by the one passing the word, just checked the posts again] Now match these possible conclusions with my previous claims. (I don't want to be the only one reaching into a conclusion - I'm kinda burnt already by my big, wide mouth). --- -- - POST EDIT 25% of the Conspiracy.Theory is over. Let's see how much the remaining 75% lasts!

I had a life before KSP2, and I will still have a life after it. I had a life before KSP¹, but I'm afraid I'm going to be found after passing away trying to push yet another release fixing something, or perhaps debugging some other nasty bug I found bitting my cheeks. You will survive. We will survive. And, believe me, there are good chances that both of us will play KSP again - perhaps even KSP¹ (a certainty in my case). I understand your grievance, because I'm also somewhat fed up about this. But not due the Game (any one of them), but by the increasing vitriol, back stabbing and rug pushing that this Community is victim since KSP2 was announced (not saying there weren't any before, just that these ones are the ones that managed to hit me badly). We lost our ethics. We lost our respect to ourselves. This is what's making me incredibly sad. However... There's always something good about being sad - it's one of the advanced Stages of healing. Don't take it too hard, it's just a Stage. You will be fine. Me too.

There're signs that I.G. was sacked in favour of another Studio in the same way StarTheory was sacked in favour of i.G. You will find something on Reddit , initially mentioned here (but I can't vow for the veracity of the information). So, yeah, apparently development will keep ongoing - but if History had taught me something, is that we don't have a good omen about how things will develop. Time will tell. -- -- DISCLAIMER 2024-0504:13:13Z -- -- I'm talking about signs, not evidences. For all aspects, this should be seen as a Conspiracy.Theory with roots on wishful thinking - but based on evidences from the past that makes the thing plausible.

You get what you promotes. If we promote sociopaths into high management roles, it's a surprise some (if not most) of them will reach the top? We (you, me, and everybody else) are the ones funding this party, that money came from our pockets.

The Conspiracist that lives in me salutes the Anarchist that lives in you! I agree. Problem - the most simple explanation for the info I had gathered until this moment involves a serious breach of Contract at best. Or a kinda of "coup d'etat" at worst (perhaps in the same grounds StarTheory was sacked - you know, we have a precedent already). Problem: talking too much, and I risk slandering someone - and this would be a concrete problem.

I'm just one of the messengers. You can stop one (me), but sooner or later other will pass.

Or he was being lied to, or he is part of the lie. O don't know what would be worst. In a way or another, a coup d'etat was ongoing for about 2 years already. One of the questions still on the open is if the insurgents were only waiting for the fall down, or if they helped on it. But something apparently is clear: some clauses on some contracts were broken. If the aggrieved party is going to take some action, it's uncertain at this point.

Some of these answers already have a question... uh... questions already have an answer. Stay tuned.

At this time, I think we are facing a corporate coupe d'etat.

Interesting! Wikipedia says he is friend with people from Bungie! What a remarkable coincidence!!!

Not a chance for both. There's a huge opportunity to residual incoming on the Franchise, delisting the game would be a huge management screw up. For starters, you would incentive piracy, what added to the incredibly modding capabilities of the game will lead to some less then desirable outcomes, that given the notoriety of the IP will fatally lead to bad P/R and further damages to the IP But there's no incoming enough to sustain a development team for maintaining (and fixing) it. Chances are by trying to do such a stunt, the new releases would only inject yet more nasty bugs - what was happening already when they pulled the plug. Unlikely at this time. Not only there're still some residual incoming to be exploited, as the IP itself at worst still have good value to be used as a bargain chip on a merge or company/subsidiary sale. And frankly, by the time the IP would be affordable enough to be bought by the Community, chances are that the Community itself would not be big enough to withhold the endeavour, and whoever would be the one that had bought it will need to find "creative" ways to gather money - as licensing the IP to pachinkos... True Story. Check what they did with Metal Gear. On a blind guess, two years ago the Community was big enough - but so was the IP's face value, what means that things didn't changed too much about this subject.

Releasing the IP was never the objective. Only the Source Code. As a matter of fact, given the current status quo, Open Sourcing KSP¹ may be their best shot to make the franchise profitable again. See Doom, Quake, Half Life, Descent et all. The IP (including assets, as music, meshes and textures) are still being commercially explored by the current IP owners, besides the source code being released decades ago. See the recent Tomb Raider Remastered series - they even hired the dude from OpenLara to work on it. Things keep going as they are now, it's a matter of (short) time until things get really, really ugly - what may include, even, malicious 3rd parties trying to exploit the Community. There's no respect for the EULA already (between other problems I had detected, but can't disclose publicly), getting malware agents around here is a question of "When" and "Who", and not "If" anymore. Having the Source Code available will push away most malicious agents from the Scene, as everything will be openly available for inspection. Of course, you will still need to trust the tool that will deliver the binaries to you - but, frankly, the Linux Scene proved again and again that it's possible to have reliable and trustworthy distribution channels for such binaries. The worst problem, right now, is to gather trustworthy and competent people around the project. Too much damage was done in the last few years, some of them really nasty. EULAs are contracts, not licenses (no matter what they say to you) - do you will trust licensing your code to people that don't respect your EULAs? Open Source is based on Trust and Chain of Responsibilities. And every time one (or more) of these two pillars are broken, things goes South. Badly. (Jia Tan anyone?) Open Source is a development model, not a business model. Anyone trying to extract profit directly from Open Source sooner or later will try some scammy stunt - and, frankly, we are losing both the Trust and the Chain of Responsibility on this Scene. They need to tackle down this problem before going Open Source, otherwise the initiative will fail.

None of this started on KSP2. You can track down these problems since the days the IP was sold to TT2 in 2017 (more or less the times KSP 1.3.0 was released).

The first time I read it, I thought on "tupperware". I had to read it again to get it right. Gee...

I hardly would call "optimism" seeing the IP being sold in a closed door sale as scrap, and then seeing the assets and lore being used on pachinkos or something like that. disclaimer: this post is entirely a work of fiction. Hopefully.

As a matter of fact, it's what I think it will happen - but not by the Community, but by some competitor. As a matter of fact, I think the take over is already happening.