PDCWolf

I mean, I know the legal side perfectly... I was one of the first to mention it when this discussion came up that I gave nobody but t2 the right to publicly host my posts from this forum. Still, my post on that other thread was not about so much archival, as it was for ensured continued existence of this forum. Archiving the knowledge is one thing, keeping it up in case the new owners decide to take it away is another thing.

No need to downplay yourself when you just typed facts Yeah, if the new owner is some VCA who knows nothing about KSP, they could absolutely come here and say "sorry guys, forum is not in our plans, join us at Discord.gg/* see you there". So every day I'm leaning more and more towards the fact that we need a functional mirror of the forum, or to migrate to the subreddit. Sadly without the DB that mirror thing is not happening, and obviously we aren't getting the original DB ever, so all we can have from this forum in case someone decides to pull the plug, is what Lisias and others have managed to back up (mostly everything) in static, plain-ish text. And these are just the things we're slowly realizing as the franchise gets yet another new owner... I wonder what are the things going on behind the scenes about what to keep and what to throw away.

I know this is a joke but hey, I'll ride it to say something: I love discord. I much prefer real time communication than deferred communication, even if the latter tends to allow for much more thought out messages to take place in an easier way. My problems with discords are, first and foremost, that it is not part of the indexed internet: whatever discussion, feedback, mods, or whatever is posted to it is forever lost to anyone who doesn't have a local copy if a mod decides to go rogue, doesn't like something they read, or the server gets deleted. It also means whatever is posted there can't be searched from outside, so you're forced to be in the discord if you want its contents. Live channels also means discussions are much more ephemeral and topics are forgotten as soon as they're out of the live section of the screen. This makes it bad for discussing stuff at length, giving proper feedback, bug reports and so on. It's just bad for these kinda things. Lastly all of this also means moderation is much more over-reaching (specially if it's the only platform available officially!). Discord is chosen by corporations precisely because of its "outrage quelling" capabilities. Mute the discussion, ban the wrongdoers, and resume the live chat with a complete change of topic. This allows you to silence discussion at root rather than to have to take the work to keep it going in a controlled way. Add to that being a non-indexed place and any overzealousness of mods, any wrongly administered moderation action is completely unverifiable by people outside. It's exactly why every dubious corporation... like our previous benefactors, would rather hide in a Discord than host a forum.

Whilst there's zero benefit to saying you're not doing anything KSP, I think if things changed, it's not as bad. As we've learned with these amateurs making KSP2, "something can be truth and then not be". Maybe it was true when he said it but then they managed to secure an easy deal through a third party buying the whole pack for chops like we've been speculating.

Considering they don't have a forum themselves, and neither do rocketwerkz have forums for Icarus or Stationeers... I just don't think forums are something they do. Neither did dean answer my question for a forum but I did ask pretty snarkily about it on what was a reply to a reply on the subreddit so no surprise.

If the problem is hypotheticals... this whole thread is at fault. If this thread is supposed to be all "I hope this or that entity bought it" which is still a hypothetical, or "this makes me happy/sad", then I'd really be needing a thread to have the big boy discussions because for me it sounded pretty natural that the discussion of an abandoned product being acquired by a new owner is gonna be nothing but what's it exactly been: does it create opportunity to ask for a refund, does it mean it's abandoned for good, what would be the obligations of the new owner regarding the product, and so on. So yeah, I'd much rather have those discussions moved to a place where they're deemed appropriate rather than skirting some imaginary line of off-topic that I really can't draw.

Can we move the discussion to another thread or point me to one where I can continue? I really don't see how discussing around the refunding of KSP2, the obligations of the new owner and possible routes the development or abandonment of KSP2 might take are not precisely what this thread is for, but I'm up for moving it to another if I can somehow be shown how this is not related to the literal acquisition of the studio and rights to the franchise... which is what opened the thread.

There's no anger and resentment, for starters, I've always been nothing but calm when writing here and when talking about this topic. Remember that someone on the Discord photoshopped my comments to try and pin racism to me, and even when Dakota himself told me about it, I was calm. Now, the guidelines have been cited numerous times: if you post an EA game you have three options: You finish the game to 1.0 (which really doesn't require anything but changing the version number, they could simply just do that), you retire your game from Early Access, or cancel the game initiating mass refunds and a perpetual delisting from Steam. As per Steam's own guidelines, they're indeed obligated to take one of those roads. This is not asking the original owner to pay for gas for some hypothetical car, this is much more complex. I licensed access to an early access title on a platform where EA titles can go three ways (read above), not only did the title not go any of those three ways, but the ownership of said title has now been passed to someone else. Who the money comes from for my refund is something that has to be talked between Steam and the two owning parties, not me, the obligations to me haven't changed and neither have the guidelines. To exemplify this, imagine someone bought the game right a day before the sale was finalized, and then well within 14 days and 2 hours of playtime asks for a refund, a totally legal refund then... who pays? You've got your answer. On the other hand the conversation of who has to push the title onto one of those three roads is also between Steam, TTwo and whoever bought the thing now. Once again, that is not my problem, that's a problem the new owner has inherited and hopefully knew before purchasing the title. Steam tries to be as hands off as possible, that's why the store is filled with adult games with questionable themes, or why they reinstated HATRED for example. In this regard is the same. We're all calm, we haven't gone to Steam with mass flagging or refund requests, and so they don't perceive there to be a problem with the title. They also technically have no deadline for how long between updates for an EA title to be considered abandoned, so really Steam won't perceive a problem until someone raises it, and the KSP community lacking a backbone and passively waiting for things to magically fix themselves has done nothing but help TTWO keep the money they scammed off them. Again, I'm very thankful I managed to pay next to nothing for it, otherwise I would indeed be angry and resentful as you think I am. There's a big difference here: I may be wrong, but asking for what I rightfully believe to be mine doesn't make me salty. Salty is not the opposite of passive. As for the rest... I've seen you on the subreddit, you know what the larger community thinks of KSP2. It's been 6 months since the last update, almost a year since the only feature update, and you'll still get downvoted into oblivion for mentioning the thing. When you buy a business, you acquire its assets, its capital, its debts, and its legal obligations. That's what the new owner acquired. There's about 20 to 40 people posting recurrently on these topics. 15 of us are international to the US and can easily get refunds with our local laws backing us. From the remainder, most are okay with KSP2 being what it is, others don't think $50 was a big loss, and others don't think the effort of going through years of legal battle for a $50 refund as worth it.

I did not get to read because it was... barely enough time to process the image but I'm sure I saw a different error in a single instance before the page switched (not refreshed, switched, or redirected itself) to the usual 502.

"that owe themselves to" "obligated to" "bound to" I mean yeah, getting laid off does throw a wrench into the wheels of life, but if those people really want to try the gaming industry again, I don't think they're gonna expose themselves to the big players again. This has multiple layers. Of course all of this is speculated, but I do see multiple advantages of NDAs being held by TTWO vs PD or even IG itself: You don't need to escalate legality up the chain: TTWO has their legal team on retainer and they can directly seek legal routes by themselves. PD and IG most probably don't have their own legal departments, except for basic business stuff, since they're all under TTWO at the end of the day. In that same way, it keeps the chain of command simplified. It frees TTWO to do as they please with PD and IG without instantly losing the enforceability of those NDAs by virtue of PD or IG being dismantled or sold. And that's just off the top of my head.

This is not even going into how most of that "you're buying the game as is" text isn't even binding, it'd be illegal for it to be binding, and even if it's in an EULA there's still multiple angles to make a case about this and very probably succeed, not just in the EU but many countries, USA included. T2 doesn't seem like getting terminated any time soon, and considering PD is a subsidiary, it'd be smart to sign NDAs beholden to T2 and not to it, and what the mods say confirm this. So yeah, what will end up applying here is the limit date. And more to come, considering some recent big failures. Hopefully we get a ton of them going back to what gaming studios actually were, guerilla places working off passion, and not publicly traded companies beholden to shareholders. Suddenly crunching for something -you- want to get out doesn't sound as bad compared to getting vored, chewed, and spit out by some giant entity that won't even keep your name on the records if your product doesn't make it or doesn't sell as much as they expect... or worse, ends up that way because they decided to inject stuff or change processes to stroke their egos or some shareholder's ideals.

You'd probably have similar clauses regarding discussion of things that happen in private channels I'd guess, but that's mostly where the similarities will end since you wouldn't be part of non-competes... If your NDA was provisioned only for your position as a mod then it wouldn't include clauses and such about developed technologies, techniques, and other things considered similarly to trade secrets at least until the game was out. Of course, this depends on your level of access, which I wouldn't know.

I couldn't tell you... in fact probably no one but them can. NDAs can be independent from contract or have a period that extend past employment. Generally an NDA is set for a period of x amount of years... If I had to bet, that includes all the way until their planned launch date (4, 5 years since launch) and then some. I'd love to believe there's a good five or six people eager to throw T2 and whoever set them up for failure and even their own coworkers (maybe not with names), under a bus. Remember that most of the final breakup of news came from "sources" and "friend of a friend" but it ended up being all correct so there's clearly some people up for talking once it doesn't mean losing their careers.

There is a clear obligation to develop or cancel, and Steam does take action (at no warranted time, which is why people really get confused about this) against perpetual EA games that don't get updates, specially if refund pressure or flagging pressure gets higher. Of course, Steam is not going to mass-refund automatically because that money needs to come out of the publisher, but they'll definitely kick a game off the store and have done so plenty of times in the past. Good luck getting that view across the general KSP audience. In fact, as it always ends up being the argument at this point, why don't you go anywhere where the most hard-headed fans don't hang out at, like the subreddit, steam forums, twitter, and so on... and have a check at what the general attitude towards KSP2 is? Not saying you can't be happy at anything... just that you shouldn't expect your mindset to be echoed by all the people who lost $50 to a glorified tech demo that got soft-cancelled.

This sets up a nice thought experiment actually. Imagine all this rights thingamajig goes as imagined, and suddenly RW owns the franchise... and they decide to send an update that completely replaces the existent KSP2 with a KSA build (a future build, that works and is actually playable)... Would anybody complain? In some cynic part of my mind, I'm sure someone would. In my defense, I was ONE when that came out... and wouldn't dive into PC games until a whole year later when my dad would C:\>cd princeofpersia | princeofpersia.exe for me. And from there, it'd take... 5 more years for me to first try a flight simulator (FS98)... and then about 10 more to discover Orbiter. There's tons of late 90s and early 2000s titles I never got to experience... and from Microsoft I only ever played Age of Empires 2 and then Dungeon Siege 2 until after the 2010s where I'd get full on into PC gaming. I don't see Microsoft as negatively as others... though they do and have done pull off some stuff I don't like. I'd rather have them than... a long list of others. Technically I could go full baddie and get consumer defense involved in my country and mail Steam a court order for them to refund me, but I value my time and Steam much more than the little money I spent on KSP2. That does nto mean, however, I'm gonna let whoever owns the IP off, after all they're the new owners of the scam and what I firmly believe to be an obligation to ensure the continued development of KSP2 or refund me should still be upheld. If it worked like that, we'd have a million ghost enterprises passing IPs around to clean the slate after producing scam after scam because hey, it's a new developer/publisher/whatever, let's give em a chance! The reality is someone new owns KSP2, a game that either needs to get back onto development (even if just to slap a 1.0 tag on it as per steam requirements), or be cancelled and refund its players. That they'd do anything without first fixing that would be a huge vote of no-confidence.

This is my utmost worry. Most "backing capital" available to get for almost any indie project is Epic money, or direct Tencent money. I dislike either. Even if the game was good, being an epic exclusive is a no-buy for me... and we've seen that it's the same for many people, with a game as expected as Alan Wake 2 not having broken even yet after a year since launch thanks to being hidden in the chinese store. But hey, from the dev team's own words, accepting that kind of failure is much easier since Epic themselves almost entirely financed the game. However for fans, it means a game they won't purchase, and since the franchise didn't make money, probably a franchise they won't see again. Just finishing it is not gonna bring back the spooked customers. The campaign required for that is probably gonna be more expensive than whatever work they have to put into the game and I doubt it is even possible. Not to mention that the game is most probably internally garbage considering the repeated technical headbutting they were running into. Cancelling KSP2 without proper mass refunds is gonna trigger another backlash, and now whoever bought the thing has that backpack on themselves: The game is out there, if they cancel they'd have to refund out of their pocket, not T2s. That was a masterplay from T2, they dropped one last excrement on every customer's plate one last time before saying goodbye, because whoever bought it is not gonna take that economic hit for free and T2 ran away with the money. From my own anecdotal, I would not be buying another KSP without them giving me back my money for KSP2, unless the loyalty discount is something like 90% or some other stupidly low number for a final price. If this was the KSA guys, they got themselves that same problem, and that's me potentially knowing the whole picture of how things came to be this way. What are they gonna tell customers when they launch a KSP3 after the scam that was KSP2? How do you sweeten someone that's at -$50 on KSP2 to potentially spend that number again, more, or even less, on the same franchise?

I'll speculate they're gonna follow KSP's demo model, where every couple of big updates, they update the demo (this free version) to a further point in development that more accurately reflects the state of the game.

I didn't criticize anything but the word. No need to dig further than that... I seriously doubt Microsoft is involved, if they wanted the franchise they'd have probably bought it as soon as it went up for sale, they're not the kind to shy away from dropping money on the table.

Ah yes, Minecraft, so niche that it only ever became the most sold indie game in history, in the very niche genre of... open world survival games. Also Microsoft bought it well into its life, after becoming a hit. That's 2 people that misuse the word niche now.

PD does not own The Outer Worlds. Being a publisher is not owning the franchise, exactly why Outer Worlds 2 will be published under Xbox. The only things PD really owns properly, to the point they can be included in the sale are KSP, OlliOlli, Rollerdrome and probably No Rest For The Wicked. The only one with sales in the millions is KSP. KSP is -not- a niche game, it's got a niche appeal and a niche theme, but it outsells most indies out there, and KSP2 was clearly in the AAA budget territory. In fact, if you check Private Division's website, the only thing they sell merch for is KSP.

There's word that part of the team uses Macs to develop, which is actually limiting things like max texture size they can work with. He also mentioned the "core" team using Linux and Mac internally. So, no confirmation to the level of Linux, but certainly already taken into account.

From their Discord:

The sale is probably not finalized yet, so T2 still.

From the man himself:

Earnings call from August: You know the current KSP2 holds zero value for me so that's not my uhh... motivation? Whatever. We do know things, they've said things clearly, others not so clearly but it's always come back in the end like finally confirming Intercept and Roll7 were actually closed. No one is harassing you, if you don't want to be quoted, block people or stop posting. You're not the victim of some conspiracy here and I promise I have no ill will.