PopinFRESH

Shocker, no mention of KSP2 at all. EDIT: in the Q4'24 earnings call referenced earlier in the thread

It's a Bloomberg paywalled article but here is a quote except from it. That was from anonymously interviewing 5 of the devs who remained at StarTheory. In regards to prior to that I'm basing that on personally following the Planetary Annellation kick starter and the failed Human Resources kick starters and seeing who was involved in Uber Entertainment's development team. They were consistently around 30 developers (used in the more broad sense of engineers, designers, etc.) with not much turnover. (I was a fan of MNC and SuperMNC; and Jon Mavor having played thousands of hours of TA growing up at lan parties with friends. I really liked what they did prior to deciding to shaft PA kickstarter backers). If you want to go back an login to linked in via the wayback machine and look at their company profile and then view the insights about employees you'll see they were about that size prior to 2017. http://www.linkedin.com/company/1513137 That is the now defunct company profile for Uber Entertainment.

I'd hardly say what we've "received" points to "business as usual". It points toward winding down involvement by ensuring their code is commented reasonably well, finishing up any technical design docs that hadn't been fully fleshed out in regards to their near-term planning, etc. Akin to "getting to a stopping point" when reading something so you don't have to do as much overlap when you pick up the book again later. That isn't what I'd call business as usual in development. I'd highly doubt we (well you guys, as I refunded the game at launch) get anything further from Intercept Games in regards to actual development. The only hope you have at even getting some level of patches to resolve some of the more egregious bugs in the current version, let alone actually getting a colonies update or any of the other features on the roadmap is if Take Two does in fact decide to task another team with fixing the mess that Intercept Games has left behind.

In regards to that timeline; Nate's story regarding how he learned they'd be working on KSP2 and coupled with when his title changed at Uber Entertainment would point toward the beginning of development in Q4'17. Regarding the two referenced games and their credits listing roughly 18 developers and 1 engineer; Uber Entertainment still had multiple teams working different projects as they were in the process of spinning off Planetary Annihilation Inc. to continue their work on PA Titans and future support separately from Uber Entertainment. The head count at Uber Entertainment when they started KSP2 was reported to have been approximately 30 developers. The Uber Entertainment rebranding to StarTheory in 2019 was due to losing/settling with Uber the ride sharing service in regards to the Uber trademark. When StarTheory failed to deliver the game within the contracted timeframe they began negotiations to extend the contract. To which Take Two attempted to purchase the studio and the resultant events unfolded with the contract renewal being denied and Intercept Games being formed. They poached roughly half of the development staff (around 15 developers) including all of the teams leadership, Nate R., Nate S., and Jeremy A. whom immediately left and moved to the new studio. Roughly 2 months later after StarTheory failed to find new contract work in March 2020 the owners closed the studio and a large portion of the staff that remained at StarTheory initially then rejoined their former colleagues at Intercept Games after the studio closure with some portion of the rest of them moving on to other endeavors. So they were roughly around that 25 - 30 head count during the original contracted development at StarTheory and the beginning of Intercept Games; largely being the same individuals. This is further evidence by comments made by Paul F. (former engineering lead) when he was laid off last year around the time of the EA launch. He noted being proud of building a team up from about 25 engineers to 45 engineers. There is/was definitely a significant level of continuity in developers from before & after the studio change as you noted; and the core leadership team was those same individuals up until shortly after the EA announcement when Nate R. left and went to Epic Games.

Not at all; and I highly doubt they mention anything in regards to plans for KSP2 specifically on the earnings call; other than the potential for more clarity on the closures and the reduction in costs related to it. KSP2 was already dropped from their quarterly reports last year where it was previously still noted as having an expected console launch... checks date... Oh, it was already supposed to have launched on console. In this call, they talk numbers not specific details of future plans; and any forward looking statements they do make are going to be focused on positive outlooks, such as expected revenues from GTA6.

Speaking of Shapez.io; Shapez 2 is available now and is a pretty interesting evolution. Good god man; there are only 336 total hours in two weeks... You would have only slept 6 hours a night and spent every waking hour in game. I guess thats one hell of a way to spend a two week vacation

I'd second @PDCWolf, if you like factory / building / management type games then its worth every penny.

I think it is obvious that the game was supposed to launch as a feature complete game in 2020. It started development at some point at the end of 2017/beginning of 2018. I think more than 4 years of additional time, nearly 3 times longer than the original projection, is certainly "giving them a chance to finish it".

I think @MechBFP was just pointing out that Intercept Games and Roll7 were wholly owned subsidiary studios of Private Division, which is as stated in the quote you've posted. Some other studios, such as Obsidian, they don't own and are solely the publisher of one or more projects that were done by those studios.

Pretty much the point I was making in response to Sure it was an improvement and there was some actual content finally after a year of development; but it is far from what I would refer to as "extremely polished".

Did you miss Nate posting proudly the massive spike in bug reports after the FS update? That seems counter to what you're saying.

^this. Implement the UI elements as vectors so they are scalable and independent of render resolution, and make the UI element zones configurable so users can scale and arrange the different UI elements to suite their own preferences. I get this is not always feasible in some games where the UI is integral to game assets, but with the KSP UI there is little reason this couldn't have been implemented.

Well, specifically regarding Roll7 the games they launched since moving publishers to PD weren't exactly run away financial successes. They were well received, at least initially, by their fans but that player base was fairly small and did not appear to be growing very quickly. However, they at least were delivering on the things they were developing. IG on the other hand has continually failed at meeting their own timeline projections.

Steam's EA policy is specifically intended to NOT be "for those financially needing it" to complete development. It is specifically not intended to be a crowdfunding system. https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/earlyaccess

Enjoy!

Your definition of successful is wildly different than mine (and I'd argue the majority of people).

If you say so; In my opinion the state of the game after 6+ years of development would say otherwise. in·com·pe·tent lacking qualities (as knowledge, skill, or ability) needed to do something well I don't think anyone being honest can look at the development of KSP2 and say that it was done well. If those individuals posses the knowledge, skill, or ability required to successfully deliver what was proposed for KSP2, then the alternative is laziness or malice (which I don't think is the case). com·pe·tence the ability to do something successfully or efficiently KSP2 was neither successful nor efficiently developed.

Maybe someone with a competent team? EDIT: For clarity in regards to the actual content of Scarecrow's post. If Take Two sold off the IP to another developer/publisher who actually had both the vision/drive and the competence to deliver a proper sequel to KSP as a feature complete product; and that 3rd party not associated with Take Two was asking to be paid for their labors I'd personally not find fault in them doing so, however, I'd also consider it a very easy win for said hypothetical 3rd party to "throw the community a bone" to give anyone who had KSP2 a small discount. If KSP2 is "1.0'd" and/or abandoned; and then subsequently anyone associated/affiliated with Take Two begins development of a hypothetical KSP3 asking for more money then I'd whole heartily concur with @Scarecrow71

You can get procedural parts (including wings, fuel tanks, etc.) with mods on KSP1 as well.... Just as an FYI.

Short answer, no. Long answer; In my opinion, it should be abundantly clear at this point that the intention in 2019 was to release a feature complete game; to which the development team failed miserably at. Take Two / Private Division gave them three years worth of additional development time which still was not enough time for them to get anywhere close to a shippable product. I don't think we will ever know for sure due to those with knowledge being unable to disclose any details, however, I believe Take Two gave them (Private Division and/or Intercept Games) an ultimatum to start generating revenue or stop incurring expenses; so they elected to hastily try to patch it up to get anything they could shove out the door in 4 months and slapped an Early Access label on it in hopes they could generate enough revenue to sustain them through completion (e.g. what your essentially saying in the above quote). The EA announcement was largely where they lost me in terms of communication as the rational regarding launching as EA in that video seemed completely hollow and disingenuous to me. It made no logical sense in context with all of their prior communications, even the ones made just a few short months prior to that video. Watching all of the "delayed" and intermediate update videos sequentially upto the EA announcement video it is hard not to come to the conclusion that they were either lying or substantially misrepresenting things in all of their prior videos; or they were being very disingenuous in their stated reasoning for launching it in Early Access. To me the latter is far more likely in my opinion.

Except this ignores the repetitive failures to meet milestones within the developers own timelines; Take Two gave them plenty of runway, far from a "quarter by quarter" analysis you suggest. They've racked up the development and studio costs for 50 - 70 people + all of the associated studio expenses for 6+ years. Judging things on the pace of their deliverables they'd easily still be 3+ years out from being anywhere close to the roadmap features; let alone getting it optimized to a point to be able to port it to consoles. It is very easily rational that the long term costs were at or exceeding their revenue projections from PC and Console. Meaning very little potential gain with all of the risk based on a development team that has repeatedly failed. Have you attempted to actually do that 5 or 10 year analysis of estimating the studio costs and then extrapolating the sales estimates to see what that looks like? Even with very imperfect data it does not look like it has very much potential margin to be worth the risk of failure after continuing to incur further costs.

The courts can't compel a company to do something, they can only restrict them from doing something. No court would be able to compel Take Two to continue development of anything so anyone thinking that is dreaming. Secondly, they could also take it away regardless as afaik it was only available on Steam and you must agree to the Steam Subscriber Agreement every time you make a transaction; which clearly outlines you are paying for a license which does not confer ownership. Obviously Valve does as much as possible to dissuade that but that is the contractual agreement you've agreed to when completing the transaction on Steam. Concurred with the rest of your post. No different as to why Double Fine wasn't sued for Spacebase DF-9, or any of the plethora of failed early access games that were never delivered as hoped.

They aren't the ones who consistently failed to deliver on milestones within their own projected timeframes.

He wasn't the creative director on PA; he was working on their other title at that time, Human Resources, which was canned before releasing.

I don't think it is some "arbitrary deadline". They aren't working for free; and thus the time/pace of delivering on their milestones needs to be at least at a rate that is forecastable to be a net positive with rational sales projections. You have to keep in mind that it should be clear that the original intention was the be releasing a feature complete game in 2020. They (IG being largely the same individuals from StarTheory at the time) failed to deliver that within their projected timeframe. After moving to IG, they extended that projection by another year and failed to deliver within their projected timeframe yet again. Rinse and repeat multiple additional times. The game has been in development since roughly the end of 2017/early 2018. That is more than 6 years of development costs and they are/were still moving at a glacial pace with likely at least another 3+ years needed at their current pace to deliver on what was pitched. To me, that doesn't sound like "doing something successfully or as it should be done".