Scarecrow71

I wish people would stop saying this is the end of KSP2. Truth be told, we have no clue what is going to happen with the IP. Any number of different things can happen. If people want to leave before we get official word, then so long. But just stop saying the game is dead or canceled or that this is the end. As of right now, none of those are true.

You must have missed the part where I literally said: I'm not trying to be difficult, but you seem to not read all of what I post. I was pretty clear that I'm not a lawyer, that I didn't talk to one, and that whoever takes this up needs to. Please make sure you read what I write instead of making assumptions to drum up drama.

After doing some research this morning, a class action lawsuit against Take Two is viable. While both the EULA and the Terms of Service both indicate that you must use a mediator or 3rd party arbitrator to sort out differences before going to court, there is legal precedence in multiple states that allow for this clause in the Terms to be thrown out, with action moving through the legal system without mediation. The big issue here becomes what state to file a lawsuit in. You have 3 choices: The state the company is headquartered in (New York); The state the game was developed in (Washington); The state you purchased and play the game in (for me, Nevada, as an example) Because we are talking about a potential class-action lawsuit here, the state in which an individual purchased and/or plays the game is nearly irrelevant. And considering that a lot of gaming (in a general sense) happens over the internet, no one state where a person plays a game has jurisdiction. So that option is out. Filing in the state the game was developed is a viable option, provided you can prove that the majority of the work was done in that state. Again, the internet and remote work - especially during and because of the COVID-19 pandemic - make this difficult to ascertain without getting cooperation from the company/developer you want to sue. So this option is probably not the best one. This leaves filing in the state that the parent company is headquartered in. This is the best option for class-action lawsuits as you are trying to gather as many people as possible together who have a common interest and/or complaint about the product they received. New York General Business Law section 350 allows for the protection of consumers against false, misleading, or misrepresentative advertising in products that are sold to the general public. While it doesn't specifically call out digital media, it is considered to be included in this section. Furthermore, New York Civil Practice Law and Rules sections 901-909 deal with class-action lawsuits, providing the framework for how and when consumers can get together and file a class-action. I would like to point out that all of my research stems from a host of Google searches, as well as getting clarification on things from ChatGPT. Yes, I talked to the bot this morning because that is the easiest way to get definitions and information these days. How accurate that is remains to be seen, so take everything I stated above with several grains of salt. But if you really want to go this route - and I'm going to be frank and say that I doubt this would lead to anything substantial in the long run - what I've stated above is probably the best information you'll get from a non-lawyer. So talk to a legal professional before going anywhere else on this.

I never said it will come. I said I have hope that it might.

No more wrong than companies reporting record profits and then telling their workers they can't afford to give them raises. Happens in the company I work for every 3 years.

The real issue is 88 miles per hour and 1.21 gigawatts. What bug? And did it ever get resolved?

Are we still on this? The worst possible thing that could happen is for the franchise or IP to be sold to someone who has zero experience with gaming, game development, spaceflight, orbital mechanics...all of it. I get that the original was created by an amateur who had a major passion. But that's the whole thing here: passion. Which I seriously doubt Elon would have for taking on a large project like this just to create a game. Even if he used his money to buy a studio and populate it with coders, do we really want that to happen when there would be as little direction there as we got with TT? Just no. Stop the insanity. Please. If TT is going to sell this to someone else, I sincerely hope it's someone already in the gaming industry who has a passion for creating good games and wants this to succeed instead of someone who would be buying it simply for the notch in his belt.

I agree with everything you said in your post, but I'd change one thing in what I quoted here. Instead of "...to anyone in the software industry..." I'd say "...to anyone who has a job...". Regardless of your career choice, we all face the possibility of being laid off or fired several times over the course of our careers. The company I work for recently (within the last 2 weeks) announced a series of layoffs that will impact ~1000 people across the org. And it's not the first time they've done it; my wife (yes, she and I worked for the same company for many years) was let go in April 2023. And while she got a nice severance package AND a boatload of unemployment, a lot of her co-workers weren't so lucky. So yeah, anybody is subject to this. It's a terrible but harsh reality of the corporate world we live in.

@Nate Simpson, @Nerdy_Mike, @Dakota, @blackrack, @Nertea, and anybody else who is impacted by this that I failed to outright mention: Thank you. For your hard work, your dedication, your commitment to the project as a whole. It hasn't been easy, and we haven't been the nicest when it comes to our criticism of the game. Or, rather, because I cannot speak for everyone, I haven't been the nicest. But you guys did what you could, and we couldn't thank you enough. I hope you all land on whatever celestial body you aim for next, and I wish you nothing but the safest of flights from here on out. It's been a distinct pleasure to have interacted with you, gentlemen.

So, for anyone who cares... Dead Island 2 was in development hell for more than 8 years and went through 3 different studios before getting a release in 2023. And it sold 2 million copies by May 2023 and has generally positive reviews. Dead Island 1 came out in 2011, and DI2 was supposed to come out in early 2015...but then, as I said, went through 3 different studios (Yager, Sumo Digital, Dambuster) before getting serious development work started in 2019. And at that point it took them 4 years to release. Side note - Dambuster is the studio that finished the product, and they are an internal studio owned by Deep Silver. You can read about the game here: Dead Island 2 - Wikipedia Now, what does this have to do with KSP2? Mostly nothing...apart from showing that sometimes games eventually do come together in spite of all the garbage going on with corporations. DI2 also had to deal with stuff due to the pandemic in 2020/2021, but they eventually got through it. I guess what I'm saying is that I still hold some small ray of hope that the game gets finished. I am hoping that TT turns this over to a studio that is competent and capable and that finishes this thing the way it should have been done originally. I'm a realist, and I know that this is a long shot and may not happen. But a guy's gotta have hope, right?

This situation is getting worse. The community is now starting to be impacted, including the mods.

Are you simply going to stop supporting your KSP2 mods? Or are you taking them all off SpaceDock so nobody can use them any longer?

Make sure to include the AMA's in that clip and/or your notes. Lot of stuff buried in those that might be useful. Let us know how this all turns out.

It can. And I hope it does. Fly high, little bird. Fly high.

No worries. I actually had a situation last summer (23) where I need to look this stuff up. Don't ask why - I'm enforcing my own non-official NDA on the topic. Just know that the terms and EULA both indicate a 3rd party mediator. With that said, there's nothing that says you can't engage a mediator and then sue if that doesn't work out. The big problem will be getting enough signatures on a petition or other legal document to show cause for mediation.

Perhaps not critical to you. But certainly life-altering to the guys who lost their jobs.

This is patently false. TT's terms of agreement AND their basic EULA both state that any legal disputes must go through a 3rd party mediator to be resolved prior to initiating court action.

Correction: while blackrack did confirm his newfound lack of employment, Dakota indicated that he was probably on the way out. Dakota did not confirm unemployment status.

Like the majority of the community, I am sickened by what is happening. I feel like we got bamboozled, even worse now than when TT put the game on sale 3 months after selling it at a premium price. I was pretty vocal then that it smelled fishy, and that it reeked of greed that the company would sell it at $50 to those of us who wanted it right away, but then decreased the price as a "sale" to get more buyers. It sounded like they were fishing for more revenue to justify keeping the lights on, and some of us were pretty loud about that. Couple that with the complete lack of communication we had to go through. EA, at its core, is supposed to be a way for developers and consumers to interact while a product is being developed, right? They push out an incomplete game, we buy it, we give feedback, they communicate that they've received feedback and are implementing x fixes, we get the updates, we give more feedback, they talk to us, round and round we go. Right? Not here. Not with KSP2. We begged for the company to talk to us. Tell it to us straight; we aren't going to be upset if you have to delay or come back and say that things aren't going the way you wanted them to. Just talk to us. That's all we asked. And they refused. They got our money and then left us in silence. Sure, we got a dev blog about this lighting issue, or eclipses. We had, at one point, the KERB to tell us what they were working on...but then they took issues off that list before stopping it altogether. All told, we were taken for a ride. And we paid for that privilege. The company said "Hey, we've got this thing that isn't done yet, but give us cash and we'll call it EA and you'll eventually be rewarded". And like horses to water, we lined up and shelled out our hard-earned money. Which they took, and then gave very little - if anything - in return. We paid for the right to be ignored and shut out of development news. We paid to have the community fractured, friends yelling at each other, and the company laughing at us the whole way. We paid to go through this. This exercise is exactly why I didn't get into EA releases with other games that are in my library. I only 1 time before entered EA or a beta-playing phase of a game before, and that was for Harebrained Schemes' Shadowrun. Which went off without a hitch, by the way. But even with that good experience, I had read too many times where things just fell apart and didn't work. Heck, I was close to going in on Cyberpunk, and I'm glad I didn't. But KSP? I couldn't resist. My better senses were telling me to wait, but my heart over-rode them. And Take Two broke it. All told, and to finally respond to what you wrote (I took long enough to get there, didn't I?), I doubt anyone gets a refund. Doesn't matter if you went Epic or Steam, the refund "rules" are pretty clear: less than 2 hours played, less than 2 weeks after purchase. And TT will hide behind that as a way to make sure they don't have to fork the cash back over to Steam or Epic. It would be a nice gesture if they did...but it won't happen. That money is already pocketed and spent (so to speak). So what can we do? Nothing. Not a damned thing. Sure, we can post and protest. Sign one of the petitions going around right now. Take up coding and try to create your own game if you must (even I downloaded the Unreal Engine last night and am going to give it a whirl). But nothing we do is going to amount to anything. We aren't going to change their minds, we aren't going to get our money back, we aren't going to be able to save the franchise or the studio or the employees who are out of jobs. Nothing we do in the end will matter. Where does that leave us? Hopefully being cool to one another. Perhaps talking about KSP1. Maybe finding other games to enjoy. But KSP2? Gone before your time, and we barely knew ye.

@Dakota tweeted this morning that he might no longer be employed. @blackrack tweeted and confirmed that he was let go. I doubt we actually get any official word from the organization. We will instead have to wait for the unfortunate nuggets getting dropped by former employees. Sigh.

Those are both some hard announcements to hear. The guy they hired to fix graphical performance is gone, and now one of the CM's is on the way out. I might actually throw up.

Hard disagree here. A self-moderated community only works when all members are treated equally. And we can all agree that this is not the case here.

I'm...not? And I'm not sure why you think I am? You made a statement about SZ and his being impartial over MP, and I countered that. Simple. No anger there. Well, none other than the anger you brought to the table, because I have none.

Nope. I'm saying that a large portion of the forums and user-base called FOUL upon seeing the images, and there were doubts even before those images came out that multiplayer was a joke. Me, I don't give a rat's patootie about multiplayer; I don't do MP games because they all, without fail, invariably turn into some form of PvP where veterans lurk near spawn points and shoot down unsuspecting new players and then laugh about it. But back on topic - I never said I knew anything. I said what is common knowledge - a large part of the forums were skeptical. Right here on the forums. Considering I have zero idea who you are, I'm gonna say I was probably smack-dab in the middle of I-don't-even-know-you-and-have-no-clue-what-you're-talking-about-ville.

Which is no different than half the people on this forum. A lot of people have serious doubts about whether or not multiplayer was ever going to make it, or that it was in development. It literally became a joke and a heated talking point (yes, at the same time) over images that were shown in...gosh, I don't remember if it was in an AMA or just a video or even a dev blog. But the point is that we were shown multiplayer screenshots, but since then...zero. SZ calling out the developers for this isn't a new thing; you can go through multiple forum posts from multiple people and see the same things.