NH4Cl Enthusiast

No, the question is did Nate have assurances other than someone at T2 saying so when, as you all have admitted, such verbal promises from T2 are worthless? If he knew what you know that they can't be trusted, then he knew if T2 decided to stop the funding they could and would, then him trusting that word and relaying it to us as assurances is dishonest. He gave us info he knew was rotten. Edit: I find this argument bizarre. I said I trusted Nate when he said they were funded and consider it was a false promise. Now I'm being told he's not a liar because I should have known not to trust him?

What's the unfounded part? Where I assumed that when he addressed the community concerns that game will be canned by ensuring they're funded and we don't need to worry that this means he has assurances that the game will reach 1.0? What's the alternative then? When he said they're funded and we don't need to worry was I supposed to assume they're not funded and we need to worry? Please tell me what was the correct interpretation?

I don't think I said they could've prevented it or even knew about the studio being shut down. What they did know was that their funding was not guaranteed at all, yet Nate said to us that it was. Whatever the circumstances are around that, it's still a lie. I mean if you want to split hairs and go through the statements with a fine comb then it's probably possible to lawyer around it and find some kind of a spin where it can be argued he didn't lie, but my argument is that the implication was all along that the game would reach 1.0 and Nate promised us they had funding secured because people at the time were worried about T2 just canning the game. Which they did and Nate's assurances were demonstrably empty words and untrue. He had the option to not lie and he chose to do otherwise. It's simple as that.

I'd say as counterpoint that it's probably more about the location and field of business how these go down. I'm in medical industry myself in Europe and have seen some layoffs happen but it's always negotiated beforehand and absolutely nobody is ever escorted out on the spot unless there's something exceptionally bad happening. Practically everyone on every level of the organization has so many dependencies and responsibilities tied to various compliance requirements that it would be disastrous to just drop someone. Same goes for more traditional industries, if you shut down a plant or processing facility due to layoffs, a big chunk of workers will spend the next 3-6 months shutting down the operation while being allowed to search for the next job. You do not tell a chemical engineer responsible of waste management safety compliance to just leave the premises and not come back. I can however definitely believe this is common in companies dealing with less regulations and mostly immaterial properties, especially in countries with less worker protection laws. But this is of course just a small handful of my personal experience, my point is that as a customer who just buys the game and takes the director's words as coming from a point of authority, it's not my responsibility to analyze that in any sort of industry spesific context. If Nate says they're funded and moving along with roadmap, the implication is that he's sure of that or otherwise he would not make the promise.

They really did a nasty on you But honestly kerbals are still really cool so even if you had that tattoo done it wouldn't be so bad! I have to say I've been surprised and enlightened about how brutal the industry is, on my field something like this could never happen. From that perspective though, given that this sort of blindsiding is the industry standard, given that Nate knew how the funding works and how precarious everything is, it doesn't make his statements any less of a lie. He convinced us (people who don't need to know how the industry works) that funding is secure and development will continue. Reality was that funding was there but not secure and development continued only until T2 decided unilaterally that it suddenly doesn't anymore. This is where the lie was - he made a promise with no grounds and no way to keep it. I was under the (admittedly naive) assumption that he had some sort of binding legalese to promise that the studio will be funded until 1.0 is finished with all the features of the roadmap. I want to add another point about Nate just so I get it off my chest. I've read several times that he was the blue sky dreamer but seriously where the heck is that blue sky? Just to begin with the parts were almost entirely copy-paste, part progression path was copy-paste, craft building mechanics were copy-paste, no ground-breaking technical improvements but lots of issues instead, no integrated mod support, no kerbal customization, no resources, no integrated craft file sharing or in-game "store" or anything, no multiplayer, no new planets, no colonies, no interstellar, nothing that hasn't been present via mods or discussions for years already, science was copy-paste with a minor change and almost everything else was just scrapped. I guess the cartoons were nice? There's no blue sky with cotton candy clouds, rainbows and kerbals in rocket powered hot air balloons dropping candy on marshmallow fields. There's just a glitchy placeholder skybox downloaded from the free section of the asset store.

There's the Chief Executive Officer and then the less known Chief-Execution Officer.

Thanks for bringing this up. It's a big misconception that the company is legally obligated to maximize profits but all they need to do is to act in the shareholders best interest and this can and often is not just maximizing share value at all costs. They can and often do just that, but it's not like a swat team busts through the roof if the CEO chooses the second cheapest provider due to say ethical reasons or whatever. It's exactly what you said, the devil is not in the legislation but embedded in the practices and structures of how companies work.

Thank you for writing down your thoughts, it was a very good read with lots of perspective on leadership roles in general, not just relating to games industry spesifically. Especially the last line is what encapsulates a lot of the responsibility you have when you're in a leadership position. The higher you go, the more you lose the privilege of saying it's someone else's job to do this or that. You need to know your limits and especially you need to recognize what it is that you don't know and be humble about that. Most of all if you choose to commit to doing something you're not sure can be achieved, then it's 100% on you if that fails. And even if something just goes wrong and there was nothing you could have done about it, as a leader it's still your responsibility and nobody else's. Sometimes things go bad in multiple ways (which was clearly the case with KSP2) and all you have left is to choose the manner in which you fail. It can be incredibly unfair at times but it comes with the role. As for Nate, I'm a little less harsh on him now after watching the video but I think he should have known he was going to fail and choose a better way to go about it. But he chose dishonesty over integrity and in the end it doesn't matter how much of the failure can be attributed to him, everyone who wears the title of a director or a manager is at least partially responsible, fair or not. After all the real damage was suffered by everyone in the studio who lost their jobs in an already precarious job market.

Exactly and if the dataset is just two points (as it was when @Lisias originally posted about it) going ballistic over the statistical accuracy of a conversational observation or which analysis method you use makes no sense at all. Even with 4 sources, Gamelytic showed as high as 21.2% and the fourth was 12.1% which just further goes to show that the variation is big and with only four points you can of course calculate all you want but if the next site showed 38% and the one after that 1% it would not be surprising at all. It just says you'd need to have another look at your data and what are they actually reporting. Only reasonable claim to be made is just that KSP2 seems to have sold a lot less, probably around 10-20%. The 3.8 from Play Tracker was a bit of an outlier but PD's own blurb says KSP1 has sold over 5M copies so we know for sure that it does not align with Steam Spy numbers which shows only 3.58M. What would in my opinion be more relevant than the numbers alone would be when the sales were made. My hunch is that majority was before and around launch and then many people like me were dumb enough to play for 10 hours and can't get a refund anymore. But again it's just speculation and as such we have almost useless data.

Hey, stop it with the reasonable and constructive posts already! In this thread we don't explain our terminology, allegations or claims, let alone try to make others understand our point. We go straight to thinly veiled ad hominem attacks and never, I mean NEVER change our own viewpoints. If you keep this sort if thing up, someone might actually stumble upon a fruitful conversation and where would that lead us?

Well, you seem to have caught on to point of the conversation at hand much better than some participants

The fact that it leaves you confused is a problem for you. Being uninformed about something doesn't make you less wrong when you say something incorrect. In fact, that's usually the cause. But if you are then demanding that I must explain it to you until you understand why these things work, I have no words. It doesn't change the fact that you're wrong. So you didn't figure out your error, I take it?

Lol, are you trying to lawyer some kind of win for yourself? Unfortunately your logic here is flawed so what you said doesn't have any meaning. I would normally consider it bad manners not to explain where the error is, but since you have created a very good exercise for reading comprehension and basic logic, I'll leave it to you for now to figure out where you went wrong as you need the practice. I can explain if you want, but then I'll assume you really tried to figure it out but couldn't. Oh on another note, I think I also realised why I was somewhat confused about the things you said. The reason being that the formula you quoted is simply wrong for this purpose and I dismissed it since I didn't realise what you were trying to say with it. But now that I had a look at it, I understand you just didn't know how to use it. But now that we have established you were wrong, we can just move on.

What you fail to understand completely is that what I said to you originally and what I've told you since has no bearing with whatever argument you're rolling around in your head. All that huge brain of yours and yet you lack the basic argumentative skills and basic reading comprehension. Maybe you should go to high school again for a quick refresher and some practical exercises? No, you really haven't given any definition. If you go back and read reeeeeaalllly carefully what I asked from you and what you've since said, maybe you'll catch on to it. As refresher, you said "close" is very strictly defined in your field but you have yet to tell me where this definition actually is and what it actually is. So until you point that out to me, at which point I'm happy to concede to misunderstanding, I will just assume you're obfuscating because you've said something stupid and can't admit to it or alternatively that you cannot understand basic sentences. This would be easier if you understood that throwing jargon and saying it's too complicated to explain is not answering the question. Also now you're accusing me of moving goalposts and assuming something about my ability to understand mathematics, of which you have yet to actually give any kind of actual explanation as to what you're talking about. Instead you're using a lot of energy to explain all the various ways by which I'm not understanding the thing you're not explaining. See, you didn't answer my question at all, you just answered a question that you proposed to yourself. Given how much you're boasting here I'd say I'm not the one with ego problems... So far all you've done is blow a lot of hot air and dodged almost every argument while telling everyone else they're wrong but not actually why they're wrong. Seriously, I'm sure you're good at maths and statistics and I'm sure you're better at it than me. I have no problem with people being better at maths than me. You're just not making much sense and have probably the worst argumentative and discussion skills that I've seen in a while, backed up with a looooot of hubris and bow you're just projecting it all on me. I engage in this conversation out of some kind of morbid curiosity (again) and it hasn't failed to entertain so far. It's funny because all I've done so far is just try to get you to actually just explain your argument and you're throwing a tantrum and then saying I'm doing it. My 6-year old niece does something similar.

I find this funny because I kinda left that there on purpose knowing you'd probably get hung up on it. However if you read my comment again, I didn't say that 0.1% of 10 million is 500, I just referenced the same number you used and said that's "pretty much where my percentages land." I'll happily admit it's not very accurate if you think this is not "pretty much" the same in this context but as far as your original claim goes, it's absolutely irrelevant whether we're talking about 500 or 10 000 sales here. The fact that you did not understand this just highlights exactly how far above your head the entire point flew of you being totally unable to even comprehend what it is that you're so wrong about. I'd argue anyone with a brain would say that if GTA 6 sells 10 000 copies it's closer to selling nothing at all than it is to their sales target. If you truly don't understand why you're wrong about your entire logic through this example, I can't help you but please stop spewing vitriol at people who disagree with you. Your math is here, but it has absolutely nothing to do with this discussion. You just repeat that this is the only correct way to define the word "close" in this context and not actually making any kind of argument as to why. Since the rest of your post is just being aggressive, condesceding and attacking my intelligence and character rather than actually spending even one word defending your actual argument, I'll just leave you with your self affirmations but heartily recommend you take a breather and just learn how to be a bit nicer to people. I can recommend a few books. Maybe in a few years from now you'll behave like an actual adult, who knows! If you put in the effort.

[snip] What you just said is that in your opinion then if GTA 6 sells 500 copies instead of over 10 million, it's closer in every practical way to their sales targets than "Nobody bought the game" which is pretty much where my percentages land. But maybe you could share that very strict definition of "close" that apparently is present in your highly specialised field of work? For us ignorant, confused, uninformed, wrong and dishonest lay-person armchair philosophers who just communicate using common language in a game discussion forum it's pretty vaguely defined.

By your logic 0.1% is closer to 99% than it is to 0.0000001%. 0.1% is approximately 0.1% of 99%. 0.0000001% is 0.0001% of 0.1%. So with your reasoning it's several orders of magnitude closer! You don't understand that "closer" is not well defined but instead just go ahead guns blazing claiming anyone who disagrees with your subjective interpretation is dishonest or ignorant. Do you often find that people back out of arguments with you? Here's a tip: you're not winning the argument, people just don't bother.

Yeah I agree, I don't even understand what people think they would be doing with it but then again some people have been incredibly excited about it so what do I know. Obviously without a doubt back before starting development they did a comprehensive market analysis and actually confirmed that the multiplayer crowd is big enough to warrant such an investment...

If I remember right Nate said somewhere in the early days that they check with the multiplayer devs constantly how everything should be built from the ground up to accommodate it, but there was never any indication of what it's going to even look like. Local hosts or IG hosted servers, just 2 players in the same world or a hundred or how does timewarp work or anything like that. To me that was a sign that they had no design plan whatsoever and were just hoping that they can somehow cobble it together when the time comes.

The whole maneuver planner was always a huge red flag for me. Disclaimer first though as I don't know exactly what the maneuver planner was doing and I have played very little so I'm basing this entirely on how it looks, a couple of hours of gameplay and what other people have said about it so I'm 100% willing to admit being totally wrong is someone proves this is not the case. But if it works the way I think it does, it proves the devs building it had absolutely no idea why it was originally built the way it was (in KSP1) and what it was supposed to be doing. It looks as if they just took what was in KSP1 and started bolting on a functionality that doesn't belong in that tool with the grandiose idea of making it better. In the end they didn't understand why it doesn't work because they didn't understand the basics of what they were supposed to build.

Well difficulty in terms of weapon damages, prices and such is pretty much set, but the pacing is almost entirely up to you and how you want to play. It is slow paced regardless but if you don't actively engage in any wars yourself the major NPC factions are happy to all just trade with you and be friends. There are some villain factions and pirates that may cause trouble (sometimes big trouble) but part of the gameplay is that you will lose ships and even stations occasionally to them and have to solve economical problems like wares being overproduced or not available at all and stuff like that. The Xenons (evil robot faction) sometimes get a bit too aggressive but that's pretty much the only time you're not in control and every other faction will also fight them so it's a rare event. They still provide a good amount of fighting since they also drop good loot and you'll probably want to protect your own stations against them so it won't be boring either. The combat is not particularly difficult and as you progress from small fighters up to having fleets, it becomes more and more a game of logistics and fleet composition. Even in fighters it's more a question of who has more and better ships than any kind of microing or twitch skills. It resembles much more of management game than 4X type. You can play just as a trader, space trucker, industrial magnate, pirate, affiliate with a faction and participate in their war efforts or go full on war maniac against someone by yourself and conquer the galaxy. I mean it can sometimes be frustrating and the AI does dumb things a bit too often but overall there's no other game like it. Plus there's always a mod for most problems. For DLC you probably want in this order: split vendetta and cradle of humanity (both very good and worth getting on day one), tides of avarice, kingdom end.

Have you checked out X4 Foundations? It's very good, though learning curve is pretty steep and the user experience can be a bit clunky at times. I find there's a nice mix of management, a bit of story but not overwhelming amount, deep deep deep sandbox and fantastic mod community. There's an entire Star Wars overhaul mod available if you're into that. There's also another big update just about to drop any day now but your save will be compatible.

Completely different thing from casually calling people psychopaths. Just to debunk this particular paper's relevance here it says very clearly that for this field of study: "Definitions of narcissism in organizational psychology draw on the criteria indicated above, but define narcissism as a personality trait rather than a mental illness. It is seen as relatively stable and existing in all individuals, albeit to varying degrees." So it's about certain personality traits being more prevalent in leadership roles, which should not come as a surprise to anyone. I would still not go around calling people narcissists either though, it's an equally insulting thing to do.

You're arguing semantics over the words you used which is just splitting hairs, but as I said you're still spinning the narrative where "lots", as in a sizeable number that could easily in the context be interpreted as most (over half) of them are actual psychopaths. If I told you lots of Europeans drink coffee in the morning, then another person says most Europeans drink coffee in the morning, you would not go on a tantrum saying you've been mislead. Lots can mean most and most means lots while they're not completely interchangeable. It's a matter of what kind of narrative you're creating. I'm assuming you have read at least one credible study where C level executives have been psychiatrically evaluated in statistically relevant numbers in order to make claims on their psychological condition? Because calling people psychopaths on a whim is incredibly immature and pretty insulting to boot. I take some personal offence at this as I've worked in an advisory role with big corporation executives and a very good colleague of mine also rose through the ranks into such a position. I hope you take a moment and come down from your unwarranted stance where you don't actively consider the thought that you might actually be in the wrong and take a moment to consider how you'd feel if I claimed that "lots" of your colleagues and friends who you personally like and respect are psychopaths. If you can't see the problem in that then that's on you and I'm not interested in teaching you how to think, but I also feel the need to call you out on this. Nice strawman, but I never said any of that and you do know that yourself too as you're literally trying to put words in my mouth by saying so. I never even said anything about maximizing profits. I'm talking about bog standard financial decisions that happen in every single industry on the planet in every single large corporation. Bad projects shut down all the time, even good projects shut down all the time due to sometimes incredibly stupid reasons and people are laid off all the time and most of them don't deserve it. It sucks a lot for the affected people and generally speaking nobody likes it and I'm not defending the system at all which enables this. It's demotivating, soul crushing, all manners of wrong and burns people like me out very quickly, which happened to me too and I wasn't even in the big seats but just a highly specialised senior engineer. Reality is though, that IG is a company which secured funding but failed to deliver the product. Nobody else is responsible for their failure but themselves. You can be butt hurt over it as much as you want, but it's the publisher's money and they deemed IG not to be viable. Is it fair for us consumers? Not at all. Is it fair to the individual developers? Not at all. Is it fair to IG management? Well, they could've certainly done a better job. I don't want anyone to lose their jobs, but this is where the failure sits. Is it fair to expect that T2 keeps pouring money down into a project that won't return a profit? I don't think so, they too bought something. The state of this game has been clear enough since launch and I very much doubt the people at T2 would be cutting off a profitable studio. It's possible since morons exist at every level, but typically there are also smart people who stop that from happening. Sometimes they fail. Sometimes they're too risk averse. None of that makes them psychopaths. Yeah for example if you had a developer called Star Theory and it became apparent they're not able to hit their target release, internally they have nothing to show for their work so far that even remotely resembles a playable game and then you decide to restructure that company under closer scrutiny and call it Intercept Games and offer the old developers a job at the new company. Does that sort of move sound good for you?

For once I 100% agree with you. The end truly is nigh.