Pulstar

In case the worst happens I'll just say I want to thank everyone for all the interesting posts that I read over the years, especially those regarding recent space developments in the Science & Spaceflight subforum.

I believe the level of familiarity in question was far from what could make a significant difference. There's a difference in complexity between making a better sequel (regardless of exact scope) where fundamentals need to be reworked, as opposed to updating the game to not crash on a newer version of unity and adding features on top of an existing framework. Just because you can build an extra floor in an existing house doesn't mean you can build a whole new house that's a better version of it.

That would take too long in the corporate AAA world, they bought something, bragged to shareholders how much potential it has, they needed to get a return on the investment. In any case the team at Squad is such a theseus' ship that IMO there wasn't any guarantee that Squad would succeed with a sequel, regardless of how many bad assumptions or what flawed logic T2 was running under (which apparently were plenty from what I read in a summary of SZ's video) when they made that call. If HarvesteR and a few others were still around my view on Squad not being the obvious choice have been different.

I believe they don't list EA released titles in that. That was my impression after reading the prior quarter releases 2-ish weeks ago. My memory could be playing tricks here. Still there is so far nothing more specific than just vague references to "reorganization" and "cost reduction program".

Anyway it seems the financials are out and they reported an over 2 billion impairment loss in Q4 and total loss of near 3 billion that I am quite sure wasn't there in Q3. https://ir.take2games.com/static-files/c189ec33-cb0d-44a0-8d20-2d3352836999 Page 17 shows 2.7 billion loss in Q4 alone. That's rather eyebrow raising to say the least. This guy is restreamimg the conference call now, it's live now:

I think the financials angle is a likely reason for the silence regardless of what exact plans they have, since the annual results will be made public next Thursday. Better to sit quiet than fuel stock market speculation ahead of the report's release. On the other hand it might just be a corporate culture/PR things specific to Take Two. Just yesterday Microsoft bluntly said they are shutting down some game studios, but Microsoft has a fiscal year ending in June and their Q3 figures are publicly available since late April. Although granted a simpler explanation is that xbox/gaming is just a small part of microsoft - not even 9% by revenue so they don't care as much.

In addition the price should have been lower and the system requirements also. The launch was a perfect storm that severely damaged public perception. And this is before factoring in a big publisher using early access and the feature list/roadmap that also didn't win hearts and minds. Sadly KSP2 will become a case study on how to not manage game brands.

How long was it before PD clarified the situation back when the Star Theory shutdown happened? My memory is foggy but I think that also took a while and PD/T2 was also very tight-lipped. Not saying it is the exact same situation (I assume it is worse), just that you should look into that when trying to guess how long it will be before we get new less vague information officially. I mentioned in the other topic that its possible they won't say more until after their annual report is released in about 11 days.

Unusual depends on what the currently ongoing situation really is. It's not at all unusual if you assume the worst. Whether one bases this on a bunch of EA games or game devs that go out with a whimper with people guessing they're dead because the website etc. has not seen a single update in ages, or on the typical hiding head in the sand until the problem goes away (media buzz dies down) this is rather typical in such scenarios. It is unusual only if there are concrete plans to continue development. The absolute best case scenario would be that PD is still fishing for or in negotiations with another studio to "handle" (which might not necessarily mean "finish the roadmap") the game and they don't want to say anything without being certain (having a contract). But honestly if that was the case PD would outright clarify the situation since there is PR fallout from it. The only reason why one would not bother to minimize PR fallout is if there is even worse PR fallout on the horizon. It's possible T2 is waiting until after the annual report goes public on the 16th of May so that it overshadows any other news related to them for one reason or another lessening the impact of the news (either because the figures are good, so why complain or they're so bad that IG getting closed is not the same order of bad new magnitude). I already mentioned earlier ITT that the timing of the job cuts rumors mentioned in the first post of this topic is not coincidental. The leak might have been deliberate to pre-emptively soften the impact of what is in the annual figures, after all why do job cuts if figures are great? FYI their Q3 earnings release indicated a 842 million USD net loss for the 3 quarters. Projections for Q4 also have a loss with the lower (worst case) bound being slightly over a billion year to date, now the market is aware of that, they have been given explanations which are no doubt somewhere in the transcript. Most of this seems to be from impairment on on some intangible assets (IPs, brand value, goodwill etc. of something they overpaid for like another studio possibly, need to check) that clearly had way more value initially posted into the books than in reality and needed a correction. Page 15 and 16 of the below is where I got this from: https://ir.take2games.com/static-files/2f8bd105-3bb8-4f05-97a2-36749e251a27 In any case if they say nothing next week I'm quite certain there will be radio silence until they publish their annual report on the 16th IIRC.

Don't get your hopes up without a proper official announcement stating as much (and even then I would be skeptical about it resulting in more than bare minimum support to keep the game from being delisted on steam). For all you know he could be simply making sure all the paperwork, keys, accounts, backups, concept art, cutscene master recordings, marketing materials etc. are accounted for and handed over to PD for mothballing and spending the next years forgotten in some closet, deep storage or archive.

There could also be tax reasons. In any case the numbers didn't add up to what the bare minimum target was in some spreadsheet. Hard to dispute if the decision was right or not without seeing the figures from their accounting system. I think a general problem is how bad the EA launch was. Even if colonies were added with science in december it wouldn't be enough to offset the negative image/reception accrued in feb 2023, pricing, EA roadmap etc. also did not help. Science helped but it was too little to late for T2, over a full fiscal quarter later that's probably what they saw in the figures.

I'm skeptical about this possibility as Take Two does not strike me as a chatty company, consider how much under the lid GTA6 was being kept. Sure PD is supposed to be "different" less corporate a more daring/niche etc. label with a different strategy/approach, but going back to how Star Theory shutting down was handled I believe it took a while before the whole thing was clarified and I do not believe Dean Hall being chatty fits that old pattern. Sure patterns can change, but I am unwilling to wager in favor of this being the case here. Just my 5 cents.

I'm interpreting this more as something that developer happens to coincidentally still be working for, despite the original pitch losing out to Star Theory. For one I think he would be less chatty about the whole thing if he did have a contract with Take Two, because then he would certainly have a gag order/NDA on it. It's certainly a good marketing opportunity for him, I would do the same in his shoes. Not the first time somebody tried to capitalize on a disappointed, to put it mildly ,fanbase. However I do agree that the vague PR "continue to support/hard at work" statements and other scraps of information we've got do allow the possibility that a developer switch is taking place, giving us a deja vu or flashbacks to the Star Theory shutdown. Still it depends how honest PR is being with us and how much you trust them, support/worked on sadly can mean a lot of things and the new developer is the best or least bad of the many possibilities allowed by such wording.

From a business POV this kind of situation of having a loss-making division is not as clear cut as you think it is. I've seen multiple restructuring attempts of loss-making divisions or plants, firing everyone is a last resort, usually you try to salvage as much as possible, cut fixed costs (including cutting admin/support jobs), centralize/consolidate/move staff around, reduce shifts, shutdown one production line etc. Severance packages cost money, hiring new people costs money, preparing layoffs costs money, union negotiations cost money etc. so it must all be worth the end result and the alternative cost. As for how this connects to the topic at hand, well T2 says "support" will continue (YMMV on what they mean by this or how much you can trust PR as such), so we have an odd case where they supposedly are not axing the project but feel no need to keep the production staff around, which is odd to say the least. I would expect retaining an engineering handover team if this is a switch of studios responsible is happening at a minimum (well unless they want to start over, which normally is what happens, here it is hard to say, again PR is vague), but even that doesn't guarantee better results than merely keeping IG around with new management. AFAIK studios versed in making orbital mechanics games with the KSP2 roadmap feature set are not exactly growing on trees... This is before going on a long tangent about how much value added a CEO actually provides as compared to his salary, and how good are prospects of a company that sells the output of "knowledge workers" skilled labor rather than one of production machinery, if one just fires all the staff with their know-how. Or one about how much actual business need there really is to lower costs in the company and how much is purely artificial based on bonus targets the CEO has, because big investors want to squeeze their lemons dry. Or one about how good of a manager the mentioned CEO is. Or the social responsibility impact of his salary cut vs people losing jobs etc.

Yeah pretty much, I doubt it's a coincidence this happened in late April when their fiscal year ends in March. Newest numbers in the spreadsheet didn't add up, overall company numbers might not have been good enough (this is hypothetical, the T2 annual report will be released in mid-May, but they no doubt have the full picture/data internally already for some time) and actions were taken to make the bottom line prospects look better for the new fiscal year, which also explains the other news about layoffs in T2 in general from the first post ITT breaking on the 17th-ish of April. This in my experience is just business as usual in large publicly traded companies, for better or worse.

I just checked myself and you are right, this type of restructuring where there is an option for transfer wouldn't qualify for WARN and wouldn't trigger it. Per page 4's bottom half: https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ETA/Layoff/pdfs/_EmployerWARN2003.pdf

There's also a hypothetical possibility that IG stopped existing because it got restructured/folded into some other studio (this is how IIRC EA closed Westwood 20-ish years ago, some staff moved to EALA). Cutting down on offices is one way to cut cost and T2 does have something in the suburbs as people mentioned, an option of consolidating locations/studios would be at least considered by upper management at some point unless they were dead set to write off the whole project and cut their losses. People still would get fired outside of the dev team in such a case, the redundant back office functions like accountants, facility manager etc. Not sure if the same notice on the state website would apply in such a case though. And finally I would imagine the communication would be more transparent and pre-emptive from T2 if that was the case "don't panic, we're just merging offices to optimize cost" rather than let rumors about full closure run around freely. Just food for thought.

My hope if they aren't on gardening leave would be they push mod tools out or something (this is what Space Base DF-9 did years ago when Double Fine pulled the plug and rushed a 1.0 out of early access suddenly), But even if there was no gardening leave they would still need to do what T2 tells/allows them to do and I doubt it would be that or something like Deb-Deb or another "extra" thing from the dev builds getting added in fast. It just doesn't fit typical corporate MO and sadly is not a matter of merely what the devs want to do.

The thing from January 2023 that was bumped up yesterday-ish on the dev tracker happens to be oddly fitting current context though... if you know what I mean. Could be coincidence and just discord being garbage (I'm not a fan of using it for communication instead of forums, call me old and cranky if you wish, I agree I am ;)).

In my experience the subsidiaries affected are the least prepared always, these decisions are made at the top (parent company/group HQ) first avoiding the impacted party at all unless it's unavoidable (for instance local HR in a foreign country needs to chime in on labor law regarding severance packages as nobody in regional HQ/parent company has the right knowledge etc.). As for being prepared for this, not just regarding communication but on the business side... well without knowing what T2 exactly will do (partial layoff, merging with other studio Westwood to EALA style, a full on it's over etc.) it's hard to plan, you cross that bridge when you get there even if rumors are swirling around things might get bad (there are always signs, like more pressure from the parent company on something etc.). You can't plan when you are in the blind, not really. And this is before factoring in the human tendency to hope for the best. IMO a lack of a plan in such cases is the expected thing.

Pretty much, I've seen my fair share of game shutdowns and cancellations unfolding online over the years and I also have over a decade of experience working for large multinational corporations that did their share of mergers, layoffs, restructurings, criminal investigations, legal squabbles, whistleblowers and other bad news(tm) etc. in my professional career, even managed to dodge one mass layoff by correctly seeing a major red flag for what it was, and I saw how PR/internal communication was done in all those cases. My personal experiences sadly force me to join the pessimists on this one, as much as I don't want to. This rings too many familiar bells, the dementi would have been very clear and swift from PR if it wasn't at least partially true.

This looks very bad and unless you see PR rushing to intervene and set things straight today (within the next 24-ish hours) when it blows up on social and later gaming media, it means unfortunately what the pessimists think it means. I wish this wasn't the case and I personally don't like having to agree with the pessimists and admit they were right all along, but the state government website is pretty hard to refute and nobody managed to find anything else that convincingly fits that listing. Maybe there is a super secret squirrel T2 studio in Seattle with exactly 70 people working on some very secret thing that is the one getting closed instead of IG, but that seems just very unlikely given what is public knowledge and unfortunately I have to assume the worst here until proven otherwise.

The complexity is orders of magnitude smaller compared to the planet terrain rendering itself. I imagine a lazy "correctly looking" implementation of an actual dynamic "blobby image" would need the game to render the planet mesh first to a texture, then draw that texture with a pilxelation+blur+other distortion shader applied. But I can't speculate how much of an issue fitting something like that into the current scene drawing code would be. I'm not that familiar with how to optimize rendering in Unity nor with the relevant KSP2 scene drawing code, all I do know from other engines is that using just one more shader at some point can break your optimizations/require a rewrite. So it really depends if the scene rendering code already was written with something like this in mind or not. If not then the issue is not so much can it be rewritten and optimized to include it, but rather are there resources to spare at any given moment to do such a thing, including cleaning up any new bugs that the changes might cause.

Yes, this also works with Kerbals boarding a different vessel in EVA. It's a very convenient system.

Nice idea regarding the heatshields up top, I'll try it on my design to see if it fixes the stability issues.