chefsbrian

I'm inclined to agree with LGG's opinion, both from my career developer experience, and my hobby gamedev experience. The problem isn't so much any single piece of code in the base, or any individual trend in the base, but the overarching nature of how its been assembled, based on what Shadowzone is presenting. The starting point for KSP2 is apparently a relatively undocumented rip of the KSP1 source code, with no access to the original developers to explain why certain things went the way they did, which is incredibly important when it comes to just upgrading that codebase and its associated dependencies to newer versions of Unity. Furthermore, the goal at the time was effectively to polish it up, make it handle some newer shinies and features, and call it a day. That screams a light touch in most areas to make the deep investment places work, and with the limited timescale and budget, odds are the joins between the two are duct taped together. This isn't explicitly 'wrong' or 'bad' so much as it is the nature of the beast. Then, the great Yoinkening happened, and after the dust settled, they had a handful of original mid and junior developers, and patched the talent with whoever else they could get in on relatively constrained payscales. At the same time, the proposed scope of the project ballooned. Suddenly, this minor upgrade with a few new pieces bodged into place until "It worked well enough" was expected to deliver on a significantly larger scope of work, including aspects it wasn't even fundamentally suited for anymore, mainly multiplayer. I cannot stress enough how significant the sudden expectation of multiplayer from the engine was to the codebase - True, no questions asked multiplayer is pretty difficult from the ground up in the best of scenarios, and a heavily physics and simulation driven game is already one of the worst scenarios possible. Trying to retrofit that into the build would require an extremely talented, driven team with a lot of time to do it, and a huge familiarity with the existing codebase. Not to demean anyone from the studio, but they didn't have any of that - Nor would it be realistic to expect that, in all honesty. Despite now having a project scope that was about as close to incompatible with the existing code design as you can have while still having the game boot up at all, the mandate was thrown that No, you will use this, and no it won't be heavily refactored or majorly rebuilt from the ground up. Combined with the lacking senior leadership (Not any individual on this aspect, the general mix of tech and creative and implementation and QA and the whole nine yards) this sort of stew is all but guaranteed to generate even more spaghetti and quick patch code, and the rapidly approaching deadlines and project bloat mean that spaghetti duct tape is probably poorly documented at best, and undocumented at worst. This lines up with some of the extreme difficult on bugfixing as well - Bugs are a pain in the butt at the best of times, but with an undocumented codebase they're practically nightmarish. Now, suddenly and with barely any warning, the entire development team is gone, every piece of knowledge they had with them is out the door too. Stuffs half finished, incomplete, sitting in various staging and testing branches. Trying to collate all relevant information from 70 employees isn't too hard, trying to collate all relevant information in any sort of organized useable fashion is a complete impossibility, a lot of stuff is probably lost in various documents, now cancelled meeting notes and invites, and generally a lot of incredibly important knowledge about various decisions is likely gone to the wind - if you're lucky, the final decision itself is documented somewhere, but good luck explaining "why" for most of them. So you have an old codebase fit for a completely different scope of project, that has had not one, not two, but three cataclysmic events thrown at it, all while consistently underresourced or unreasonably constrained from achieving what they're trying to do with it, and then its been ripped outta its last set of safe hands right in the middle of what is likely some major surgery, and want to throw it to what has to be the third explicit, if not fourth in practice team that'll try and do the same with all the same mistakes and baggage? You're just gonna get the same result. Assuming Take2 wants to deliver on the KSP2 roadmap as advertised on steam right now, then I am in agreement with LGG that the KSP2 codebase as it exists right now is a massive sunk cost fallacy, and needs to be sent out to die, unless you want to give it literally years of rehabilitation before its fit for purpose, and its still gonna struggle with the scars where its been stretched too far.

Great work @ShadowZone - I can't say I'm much of a channel fan, but this is pretty good. Awful subject matter obviously, but good reporting on it. If even a fraction of this is really representative, and I have no reason to believe it isn't, then I'm confident at this point saying KSP2 is dead dead, proper dead. If Take2's manglement and misunderstanding of the people they'd assigned to it went this deep, then they're not going to give it another dance. We're fully into cost cutting season and will be for years, such is the entertainment cycle in a downturn. I also don't want to deflect any blame from Nate - Its equal between him and Take2. Take2 obviously takes blame for being bizarrely over involved in various aspects of the project as if they were making some world changer, rather than a niche sequel, and for placing Nate into a position of power and authority he clearly wasn't equipped to handle. But that doesn't deflect Nate of the blame for not learning to control his dreams and visions in favor of viable scope. He knew the budget and expectations better than anyone, and yet he evidently never let that stop him. That's not a good thing, that's a very bad thing, because stuff exactly like this happens. Take2 should have recognized this, good leaders don't put people in positions they can't handle, but that doesn't absolve Nate, just makes Take2 complicit in his failings. That's not to say he's evil, or a bad person, or needs to be brought before the Hague. He's just a bad project manager, who doesn't seem to be able to compromise on his vision. I will, however, say that if the whole "Multiplayer comments were based on playing KSP1 mods" statement is true, then I am officially considering him a malicious liar as opposed to just a naive one. That is clear as day misrepresentation.

Best for you, maybe, but its probably the worst possible idea for Take2. Look at it purely from their perspective for a moment - If another developer picks it up and fails, it proves reasonably that they were way too ambitious and screwed up even greenlighting KSP2. If another developer picks it up and succeeds, it proves without a shadow of a doubt that they completely messed up something that could have been a profit generator. Either way, letting someone else have it is a decisive affirmation that they have failed, at a time when industry wide investor confidence is very low. That would be an extremely bad idea for them, and the backlash could quite possibly force their hand on even more closures and cancellations. Meanwhile, if they just sit on it internally then it cannot get any worse for them. If they later hand it off to a new team when resourcing permits, any success or failure continues to be theirs, but doesn't draw any further major negative implications to themselves - they can more easily mask the cause of failure and just chalk it up to vision differences or transitional complications. We're a minor party at best in the games equation now - The review score is already zero'd, so inaction can't get the community sentiment to be any worse. Any purchase that could be refunded already has been in all likelihood, so financially it can't get any worse for them. Franchise wise, KSP isn't very valuable to them if they can't make a successful series out of it, so us abandoning the franchise or similar isn't any worse for them. Simply put, we can't make a meaningful impact to them now, so we're not really being factored in.

Schrodinger's Development Team could really do to work on their PR, because this is a bit absurd.

Is it doomed? Well, opinions will vary and expect this thread to be a bit spicy. What I can say, is that if its not doomed, it is about as physically close to appearing doomed as it possibly can be. The only two ways its doom becomes more definitive at this stage is if Private Division Shuts down, or if they announce explicitly and in no uncertain terms that "Kerbal Space Program 2 is cancelled". The next step back from that line is "Entire team is gone nobody says anything", which is where we are, but it offers the slim chance that there is an unspoken transition plan, that they don't want to speak about for some reason. I personally consider that unspoken part the damning part at this point, as the most common reason a company wouldn't say more is that they don't want to commit to a promise they may not want to keep. As in, they are willing to bring on a new team with a pitch to save/finish the game, but they're not 100% confident it'll happen.

Yes, but from Deans comments around this, they decided to do it anyway when they didn't get the IP - So Rocketwerkz won't take over KSP2 because they got their own KSP competitor style game in progress. If anything, they have a huge incentive to not pick up KSP2, fan sentiment about the franchise is probably at an all time low right now, so interest in a potential competitor is going to be through the roof, at the same time that their only other major competitor quite literally crashed and burned.

No - Squad still exists as far as I know. They were a marketing company first, and back to a marketing company when they cashed out from gamedev with the IP sale, and their devs went off and over with it. If they did reconstitute their game development portfolio (Terrible idea considering how the industry is treating studios right now) it'd just be all new hands under an existing name, nothing of the old guts preserved. I have to caveat with "as far as I know" because their website did update as recently as 2022, so at least someone there has involvement enough to keep their site up to date and reason to want it. But goddamn, is it a crusty site. Definitely didn't retain any native development staff, a website this old school would physically hurt any coders

Updates require knowing what they are doing. Hard info tells us there's layoffs amounting to the entire studio, statements have been made indicating 'someone' is responsible for continuing KSP2 but nobody has actually said "its me", and speculation is that the statements are just PR cover for there being no team, either as an interim or permanently for a void. From that, the most likely conclusion is there is no update or statement to it because there is nobody to make that update or statement - Either the remaining elements of the dev team have nothing to say because their work is now "spin down and document what you can before leaving", or the teams already full boot across the board and Take2 hasn't actually bothered to put anyone into the transition role yet. My personal opinion is that the team is full boot and the successors have not yet been selected, as in this nebulous state of the gaming industry, the last thing you want to do is work quietly - it makes you easy to fire. Any team transitioning into the project would be shouting it to the stars themselves, just to make it harder for another gutting to take place in the next couple months. Take2 similarly has little incentive to try and gag a transition team, as its nothing but positive PR for them to be able to confirm that someone is indeed picking up the game, if that really is their intent.

Despite my disdain for how everything turned out, no - They met the expectation of letting the community in during development of the project. They delivered updates and patches (Glacially) and took input and bug reports from the community and actioned at least a few of them. They were terrible at it, but as far as spirit goes? Achieved. Yes. They treated the roadmap as a guarantee, repeatedly promised improvements to engagement, and promised that they were fully funded and development would not be pulled. While there is argument to make across all of them about their ability to even control it, making promises you cannot keep is still a false claim regardless of intent or belief. No, they failed to achieve those standards, simple as. They aspired, certainly, but missed. While I understand the sentiment driving this, this is also the last thing you want for accessibility in the games market. The entire point of the early access program changing from its early "vote driven" approach to the "Buyer beware" free for all is explicitly because its simply not viable to oversee everything, nor does steam actually have the tools and authority required to act on anything. Steam has no realistic method to recoup any financial implications - Once a developer has collected their payout the only funds steam has theoretical access to is future purchases, which presumably they'd also be banning in the case of a violation. So There's no money for them to take and refund. Steam would be stupid to refund out of their own pocket, as it'd become an easy scam to sock buy games made with a throwaway company, get the payout, then get the refund later. And trying to debt it forward on the studio just means you'd ditch an indebted studio name, at best - at the worst, you'd be financially punishing a failed developer to discourage ever trying again. Whether you think that's a good thing or not is up to your discretion, but it will objectively reduce the ability for developers to bring games to the market. Attempting more aggressive contractual terms for early access will just discourage developers from ever touching it - Why would you sign a document saying that the mob can bankrupt your company in two years if things go sideways and EA doesn't work out? You might think "Oh but the terms will define what is and isn't acceptable" but then at best it'll be gamed to irrelevance and at worst it'll harm the unfortunate but natural failures. Besides, you can't really squeeze blood from a rock, and most EA failures are studio failures as well. As awful as cases like KSP2 can be for EA, every other outcome is it doesn't exist and many projects die lacking that early financial lifeline. The only and most drastic action steam could take would be to forbid a developer from publishing further early access titles, but studio drop and rebuild would negate it anyway. Going after a publisher is no better as it'd all but guarantee publishers drop EA options entirely, which again constrains projects as an entire avenue of early funding and market testing is just removed from their toolbox. It sucks to say it, but nebulous "accountability to spirit" is just translated in business speak to "Someone can arbitrarily torpedo a project based on how they feel", which is a contract you never sign, no matter how confident you are that you won't intentionally screw someone. Believe me, my KSP2 review has been like 6+ paragraphs documenting how terrible the state of the game is for the last year, with edits over the science update, and only just got another paragraph edited in to explain the studios dead and shuttered. I'm not defending anything they've done and I've been burned on many EA games before. I own Godus, Sheltered 2, Embark, and so forth. I know what its like to be at the end of the dev cycle and just feel so absolutely done with the kind of treatment that comes from the end of the line, all while being glaringly aware of how you paid for the privilege to be fleeced. But the last thing you want to do is burn down the EA house. For every KSP2, you have games like Project Zomboid, Manor Lords, Cosmoteer, Blade and Sorcery, Nebulous: Fleet Command, Terra Invicta, Valheim, and thats just the ones in my library I've played since the start of the year . Some games like Kenshi or Blade and Sorcery would be incredibly hard to find traditional funding for due to their niche markets and spaces, and instead found great success through early access, becoming games well beyond what they could have been without it. What we just experienced sucks, but I wouldn't change it for the world if it risked any of the other things sharing the same opportunity space.

Mentioned this before and I'll mention it again, don't assume branch updates are indicative of anything. Continuous Integration/Deployment and Nightly builds are a normal thing, especially in multi-branch development. Using steam to sync and distribute them saves a huge pile of headaches for testing, so a lotta the pipelines point right into it. Even if the system is 'smart' and only builds on changes and not schedules, downstream requirements from any of the various sources they're likely integrating themselves would trigger as much. While I wish that activity meant anything, it unfortunately really doesn't tell us a single thing about the state of operations.

Welp, that's that then isn't it. An entire business week, for anyone of any relevance to say or do anything in the community to explain just exactly how the game is going to persist, and not a single peep. What an awful way for a game to die. Not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a forlorn cry, never answered.

I highly recommend the WOLF colonization system from the USI mods, it provides a lot of the general promise of the KSP2 colony system - resources over time, ease of access and use, etc. It does so by teleporting the colony elements into the void, and using depots to pull resources out of it. Very performance friendly, takes some investment and setup, and interfaces well with most other major mods like EL to build ships off the homeworld.

Unfortunately, that's not likely the case. I made this argument in another thread and I'll repeat it here, but its not just about it making money right here and now, but the publisher expectation of when they can stop funding development for this and shift resources. Short of the game becoming the next minecraft in sales volume, the beancounters need to have both good sales projections, and good termination of development projections to run the math to see if the project is worthwhile. KSP2 has five to seven years of development time under its belt, depending on how you count any pre-announcement production, and is in an extremely lackluster output position for being such a matured product. Manpower to run all these projects is a limited resource as much as money is. If KSP2 is turning into a complete timesink for X revenue, but if you could generate the same revenue instead by allocating that headcount to a different project and do so in a more predictable time window, its far easier to keep approval for that.

While I'm not optimistic of this outcome, the explanation here is plausible - You absolutely do not want to speak a single loveing iota outta line in any mass layoff scenario, because the wrong statement opens your company to a lot of very expensive liability, across multiple parties. And if your an affected party and speak out of line or authority, it also opens consequences to you personally if you end up accidentally misleading people - As someone being laid off, that can be grounds to lose your severance package. As someone retained, that can be grounds for termination. Nobody would want to risk stepping out of line without review in triplicate by legal, until you know where you stand on either side. I wouldn't expect a single team member to risk their termination package to tell us anything, and the retained elements if any aren't gonna risk their jobs to rush to the post.

Not to be too pessimistic on this detail, but its likely they have a CI pipeline into steam for their testing. IE, its just building and pushing new versions on its own, nightlies are a common thing.

Speaking from my experience in the corporate world, its not revenue that's the issue so much as development pacing. KSP2 looks to have entered preproduction around 2017 or so, ramping up to full production around 2018-2019. Assuming preproduction was two dudes and a pizza, they have been funding a full sized team on the game for five years now, over which the team evidently got one extension via the studio shuffle, one extension when they delayed the release date, and another near indefinite extension with the Early Access program. While cost is certainly a factor, the bigger concern is when that cost stops accumulating, and when the recoup period begins and ends. Despite all the extra time given, the project is still woefully behind both community expectations and likely corporate expectations, and there is no sign to either party that things are improving. There's no evidence that giving them another one, two or three years of funding would actually get us to a stable product. On the other side of that table, the evidence is that much of what's already been done is not fit for purpose. We're already talking about replacing major guts of the rendering and simulation pipelines, the entire UI has a developer and community sentiment of needing to be reworked, and the bug pipeline is still fighting fundamental issues from before launch, when we got that early media build event. None of this indicates "we just need more time and money" because all the prior time and money got them to barely nowhere. Its hardly cold corporate dickishness to cut it when you look at it from that space, compared to most of their other projects and studios this has been an absolute disaster.

To add to the prior statement from Dakota saying it'll stay up - on the scale of any corporate endeavor, a volunteer moderated forum is the next best thing to free. The long tail from KSP1 certainly still covers the forum costs, not to mention the value of retaining a core audience of the IP if they ever decide to move forward with it again - I'm sure all of us would be extremely doubtful of a KSP reboot again after this excrementsshow, but we'd be doubtful about it here, and that's still useful.

Probably not an issue actually, you can't really IP ideas. The idea of making a scaled down space program management game isn't patented or anything, as long as they didn't start blatantly copying their prior work they'd be fine. Same non-issue for noncompete. I honestly doubt Harvester wants to actually do that, the limiting foundation is probably the current technology and his own interests. None of the off the shelf engines do a great job at the sheer scale of a KSP style design, and Harvester isn't an engine dev, he's a game dev. And speaking from personal experience, game devs don't usually like retreading the same problem spaces over and over, he's probably done what he wants to do with spaceflight sims as a whole, probably for a long while. Why square up for yet another terrain rendering fight for planetoids when you can explore a new problem space you do find interesting. And while Harvester isn't exotically wealthy, he's well off enough from KSP that he can go off and explore these things and not worry about market limits or the like too much.

At this point, my do or die line is end of office hours Friday here. IF there is still any hands left at Intercept, and they don't post an update before end of day on Friday as a heartbeat to the actual community, then its buried and done. If we get some rando new blood account, its over, just like the publisher controlled PR twitter doesn't count for much, we're looking for the known names. Anything short of that is basically standing confirmation that everyone is gone, meaning further comms are at best a smokescreen for a completely FUBAR situation behind the scenes, or just straight up deceitful. Banishing the entire team in preproduction is already a near project killer, banishing the entire team in the middle of a public development cycle is assuredly one. Even a full "We've decided the code team is the problem" nuclear hammer would still retain designers and artists, and do a transitionary phase of devs in and devs out, quietly in the background. Its already extremely pessimistic of a perspective for them to have not said anything here yet, but if there's one thing that Intercept has always been reliably good at, its completely clamming up when they need to speak the most.

A feeling I know all too well. Depending on the kind of experience, a heavily modded bannerlords can provide some of it, adding new mechanical depth to the build up and existence of kingdom management, alongside its combat and army management elements. You did mention rimworld, but if you're looking to really deepen that, you could open the sealed curse of the HardcoreSK modpack. Turns huge parts of the game towards a much more involved and invested crafting and combat system that encourages inventive and new forms of play. The highly tiered production chains also heavily encourage exploration for the purposes of scavenging, and by extension all the support infrastructure to keep people fed, as advanced stuff like walk in refrigeration becomes something you often enough can't afford to set up right away. I call it a sealed curse because if it turns out to be the right kind of detailed management for you, its almost impossible to go back to a vanilla experience. As for something that hasn't been mentioned yet, you might find some fun in Avorion. Its got basic plot and lore to drive you towards an objective, its base gameplay is satisfying, there are fleet management elements around support ships both directly and indirectly, offers both very detailed voxel shipbuilding and a workshop to download other peoples very detailed ships.

Short answer, no Long answer, if the publisher was interested in selling the IP and associated projects, they would have. Not that its likely it'd see a buyer - the games already dipped heavily into its sales bucket with early access, and when you buy it the publisher isn't going to just hand over all the revenue it already made, defeats the point of selling it. So any potential buyer would be looking to sink tens of millions of dollars into something that is already out one major sales opportunity in the core fanbase, has terrible public sentiment, has mediocre bones (as extrapolated from the intents to replace many core systems already) and just potentially scattered its dev team to the four winds. Simply put, there's nothing of value here to sell or buy with it in this state. It'd be infinitely more likely and sensible that Musk buys a random ailing indie studio, and makes his own KSP if he was so inclined, it'd be cheaper and a safer bet. Still pretty unlikely though.

The forums themselves are being weird about it. I found that if I open the widget source directly, it loads just fine, but completely dead on the forum. Its not deliberate at any rate, that integrations always been janky.

Nah, its pretty standard corporate speak, and not even "meaningless" corporate speak. Rationalization from a company perspective is the act of figuring out how much something will cost you, and how much value it will provide you, either in revenue directly, or saved expenses. Rationalization of buying everyone an adjustable standing desk would be comparing health and strain related costs and loss of productivity that might be attributed to sitting all day, and measuring it against the price for the desks. Rationalization of your pipeline means taking all the projects and products that were underway, and forcing them to reevaluate their value vs costs. This is usually done when a company is seeing that their predicted costs are significantly off (some overage is expected) and their predicted returns are consistently off (This one is expected to only be off in a positive fashion, underdelivery is a big bad). You may also be introducing new minimum return differences that now need to be met - like expecting cost saving related projects to have a shorter recoup period than was previously agreed upon. Basically, their stuffs been too expensive, not earning enough return, or some combination of both, so they want everyone to go back and rebalance their books based on this new real world data rather than previous estimates. In that process, some projects are identified as no longer viable, and axed.

Request denied, speculation is fun Granted, anyone attacking someone else for their opinion, belief or perception of the situation has lost the plot. Debate and discussion is fine, but some folks get way too heated and too fixated on being "right" or the ironclad belief that the evidence that convinced them of something MUST be able to convince everyone else of the same, and anyone who doesn't accept it is being [Malicious/Copium/Hateful] and must be attacked. Its really good to talk about this, a lot, it brings attention to the matter, shares information and conclusions, and lets people get an understanding of things. But we're not enemies here, two corpse in one grave and all that

Clearly, they were stuck in an intense KSP2 multiplayer session, jousting around the moons of Jool. But in all seriousness, the one I would be pinging would just be Nate. Regardless of what's going on, both in this immediate disaster and the long roll of the game, the CM's only know what they're told for the most part, Nates the one who can actually speak more. And if some fragment of the team did survive to be used to rebuild, the CM's are unfortunately not likely to be among them and so they are probably NDA'd out of being able to say anything at all, even from the outside. Nate and a few of the senior devs would probably be the retained Cadre for a handover if nothing else, assuming that continued updates actually means still developing the game.