PDCWolf
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Posts posted by PDCWolf
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9 minutes ago, Scarecrow71 said:
That's not news, though. We've known for a month now that 70 employees at Intercept Games would be laid off.
AKSHUALLY, as the highest quality hopium inhalers were saying, the only fact was that it was "an office in Seattle", and then the CEO said "the studio is not closed". This would be, I believe, the first, official confirmation that what we all were sure happened did in fact happen.
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23 minutes ago, Mutex said:
Direct link to Quinn Duffy's post on LinkedIn:
Lmao, I really want to believe there's 2 to 3 meanings to what he said. The first thing people are gonna see when they check the game out is the overwhelmingly negative reviews, and god forbid Matt is the first personality they find, telling people to refund the game.
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Seems someone officially broke the silence.
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7 minutes ago, Lisias said:
From the consumer's rights point of view, I agree with him.
But there's something else to consider: imagine I'm a youtuber that earnt some money on videos about KSP2 (completely unrelated subject...
). If this dude ask for a refund, they are still entitled to have their videos using KSP2 being published and monetized?
After all, any agreement about the subject had ceased to exist with the refund.
KSP2's EULA have this nasty bit, which has never been put into practice AFAIK:
QuoteUSER CREATED CONTENT: The Software may allow you to create content, including, but not limited to, a gameplay map, scenario, screenshot, car design, character, item, or video of your game play. In exchange for use of the Software, and to the extent that your contributions through use of the Software give rise to any copyright interest, you hereby grant Licensor an exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, fully transferable, and sub-licensable worldwide right and license to use your contributions in any way and for any purpose in connection with the Software and related goods and services, including, but not limited to, the rights to reproduce, copy, adapt, modify, perform, display, publish, broadcast, transmit, or otherwise communicate to the public by any means whether now known or unknown and distribute your contributions without any further notice or compensation to you of any kind for the whole duration of protection granted to intellectual property rights by applicable laws and international conventions. You hereby waive and agree never to assert any moral rights of paternity, publication, reputation, or attribution with respect to Licensor's and other players' use and enjoyment of such assets in connection with the Software and related goods and services under applicable law. This license grant to Licensor, and terms above regarding any applicable moral rights, will survive any termination of this Agreement.
As you can see, monetary benefit from these works is not regulated by the EULA, and neither is production of those when you haven't acquired the right to play the game. After the refund, Matt would've already ceded his rights to those works for T2/PD to use as they see fit, yet since monetization was never regulated, they can't do nothing about it. On the other hand, youtube being youtube, if T2 hits the claim button, they'll oblige, and I doubt Matt would go legal against them.
As a personal remark: Companies that think they own gameplay videos or livestreams are cancer. EULAs regulating what I do with a product I purchased beyond copying it to re-sell should be illegal, and in most civilized countries they tend to be.
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5 hours ago, Meecrob said:
I cannot word my point properly, so I'm dropping it. I'm not trying to say you need to be some sort of crazy person who must hand fly everything to be a dev.
You can all relax.
Lol, I didn't say he was successful
Don't worry, I kinda agree with the idea so I'll gladly say the controversial take myself, and then you can compare to your take:
If you don't know how to play the game, you have no hope of making it fun for the people who do.
Now, being bad is different and kinda excusable. Most devs @ KSPTV were horrid at playing the game, but this is not a game where you need to be skilled at to have fun. On the other hand they refused to use mods and I think IIRC they even prohibited using mods on official dev streams so that included mechjeb... up until about Skunky joined as CM.
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15 hours ago, Tony Tony Chopper said:
I actually don't quite understand why one would care about the money loss. It's a day of cheap work at worst.
Because the game got sold outside the US/EU.
$50 for me at release was between 30% and 50% of my paycheck. Of course I was lucky enough to live in a place where they regionalized prices, but still, even $8 was a good chunk of money I could've gotten some other really good games for.
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5 minutes ago, Scarecrow71 said:
The biggest lesson I learned is to never get involved in early access again.
Bad lesson.
Don't get involved in Early Access when it involves big publishers. A real studio needing early access would be overjoyed and communicative regarding feedback and progress respectively, devs in those projects hang around the community having useful discussions and develop their product knowing how much the customer is worth. On the contrary, these clowns just wanted to farm exposure on every update with a marketing campaign to try and get more sales, whilst they had a rigid vision with zero room for wiggle, and clearly had no regards with misleading about their progress or their future.
On the other hand, your own responsibility lies on being critical and analytic. DO NOT huff the hopium, do not exhale copium. Positivity does literally nothing for a project other than keeping you tied to it when the red flags start to show up. Early Access is a business, and contrary to what people too deep to accept they got scammed say (or that undervalue their time and money), you do buy games based on what they can be and not what they are, so be careful with your money, and know when to step out.
Also it should be pretty clear that no Early Access game (and even most full release ones) aren't worth anywhere near $50.
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As for the OP, I'd really note down:
- Most people aren't happy with just the same game with a coat of paint. Lift up what's good, re-do it professionally, but also add up new things.
- Unity is insufficient, this is why people don't want it. You'd need to rebuild enough systems around it (multithreading, physics joints, rigidbody physics). I don't know about Unreal but those are things to consider.
- Do not ignore veterans. Most of the community has been playing for a decade. If you release your product and there's nothing new for them to do, yeah, you just alienated a good chunk of the playerbase.
- Don't dumb down stuff. Part of the charm was the learning curve. Try-Fail-Improve doesn't work if you remove the first 2.
- Deeper features > more features.
- Learn how to make a UI. An indie dev making a bad UI is one thing, professionals being unable to make something usable is laughable.
- For the love of god just stop with the tech trees. Again, an indie not getting it right is one thing, professionals having no idea how to balance one is another.
- Precursor spacefaring race "lore" is not innovative, or even fun. It's the most overused, predictable cliche in almost every space game.
- Colonies do not need physics. Destruction is one thing but why both SQUAD and IG decided that ground buildings need physics simulated is beyond me.
- Think long and hard on why players would want to go interstellar after the first time they do so. Interstellar flight is so far the ultimate challenge for space exploration, so what are players supposed to do after that?
- Life Support is obligatory, as is any other form of danger for real spaceflight.
- Between 11 and 5, those systems need to be interconnected to allow not just engineering challenges, but multiple solutions. If every system just resolves to "add part to not die" then it's not fun.
I could probably think of more but I need to go to work.
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Lmao @ some people acting like the game was free. $50 is $50 and most aren't seeing those back. Thankfully I didn't pay anywhere near that so I not only feel vindicated but can look back and laugh. Other people really don't have that luck.
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7 minutes ago, MechBFP said:
No wonder they are pretty much canning all of PD
Source?
PD is already mostly occupied on their most recent launch and their upcoming project.
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Writing as I watch so this is more a disorganized stream of consciousness:
He should not have said the "you won't feel validated if you think the devs suck" and only 10 minutes later state how they were forced to hire juniors with no experience that didn't even play the first game. It's also very funny to see how it indeed was prohibited to ask the people that knew, much less consult with someone like HarvesteR. This also explains why they hit pretty much the exact same walls. It's HILARIOUS to me they might've pitched a re-engineering of the original game code with none or little knowledge of it and much less asking the people that worked on it about it. Talk about overpromising and underdelivering, something Uber was known for from previous titles.
It was also really easy to guess that T2 really did see Kerbal as a golden egg goose, good to have confirmation. I still believe it was... until they absolutely ruined it by believing overpromising amateurs on their bid and then placing the dumbest restrictions upon them. Add Nate being a serial overpromiser, and them banning scott manley! It's like they took every step and precaution to set themselves up for failure. It's no wonder some of us saw them as completely arrogant when they refused or were prohibited to consult or ask anyone with a smidge of knowledge of the franchise, and then proceeded to make the same or worse mistakes.
Continuing with hilarity. "This focus of visuals resulted in more fundamental design and gameplay decisions to take the back seat" AHAHAHA, as if the game looked any good. Yes, it has some modern fx and shaders, but to be a mess just to look like that? Incredible.
"Nate believed the difficulty introduced by wobble would be necessary to have a fun game." Absolute clown. At least ShadowZone understands wobblyness in real rockets, even if he uses that to make a dumb case about "teaching engineering". No, enabling parts to clip into each other or otherwise exploding out of the blue does not teach engineering, it teaches cheesing. Couple that with the statement saying he was actively steering stuff away from realism specifically to dumb it down... yeah... no wonder.
At this point (16 minutes) we arrive to the public reveal, yet there's no mention of any feature being complete even by the original Uber Entertainment, so either they did believe they could finish before the release, or they were already in the cycle of misleading that they had a full game when in reality they, at this point, had a bad frankenstein of KSP1. This is also known to be the point where the revolving door starts at, even after the transition from ST to IG. A revolving door filled with amateurs and juniors, hired under secrecy and now, we know also hired for minimum price.
At last we also have confirmation that they were working with the original codebase ST was using, so pretty much another "I told you" to the clowns stating they magically started a new game from scratch after the merge. To further pile up on this, it seems I also was right on pointing out the "multiplayer build" we got screenshots from was indeed the original one, and not some magical new build they started after the merge. By minute 28 we get a second confirmation of this... They really didn't, at any point have a single one of the features developed.
It's also a good warning story that, with multiplayer engineers being fired so early on... the long term product was dead long before these current days.
My key takeaways, in comparison/opposition to SZ:- Read the forums. It was impossible to miss what the community wanted... yet somehow T2 and then IG/PD/Nate did horribly.
- Early Access is for customer integration and feedback. If you don't care about feedback, then don't do Early Access. It seems we'll never get that font changed now...
- Dumb down accessibility, not the game itself. Games are hard because systems are most times loosely explained, or in the case of KSP1 have literally no explanation. Fix onboarding and you don't need to make everything inconsequentially easy to the point your game is a mediocre mess that elicits no emotional response.
- You can't make a product this complex with amateurs.
- You can't work on someone else's code without the ability to consult them... specially if it's the mess we know from KSP1.
- Stop using Unity. Unless you come out with something revolutionary, the public perception is always negative when you announce your project is in Unity, specially from a fanbase that's been dealing with its limitations and misuse for 10 years.
- Stop listening to Nate.
- KSP2 is dead.
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Whilst I admire HarvesteR for what he did. He grew a little side project he was forced to do overtime at work if he wanted to progress on, to a massive behemoth that the literal biggest publisher in gaming wanted to purchase. On the other hand, it's also possible to recognize he wasn't the greatest at a lot of stuff.
I still do firmly believe that if we give him an intercept-sized team, he'll have a much better vision than Paul Furio on the engineering side and Tom Vinita on the feature lead side. He knew the mess he made, and he definitely is the most informed person to not repeat it. In fact, not only has he not repeated the same mess, but also evolved its systems on a much better product which is Kithack. It'll forever be the shame of ST/Intercept that with probably nearly 10 times the budget and alleged professionals, they couldn't even make the first milestone without their "sequel" breaking down and getting their studio closed.
On the other hand, KSP2 is unfixable, and even if you "fixed" it, it'll still be trapped in Unity, with the subpar joint physics that plagued 1. KSP2 has no fix other than being deleted.
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13 hours ago, Superfluous J said:
but the whole point of KSP2 was a whole game rewrite!
From our position. For IG/PD/T2 it was, I'm pretty sure they thought, a golden egg goose with a very quick turn around and minimum budget for the numbers T2 oversees.
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5 hours ago, Scarecrow71 said:
Might not last that long. Rocketwerkz has already reached out to him.
Sadly.
Tom Vinita had similar roles on 4 other sub-mediocre games... Not sure I trust Rocketwerkz's version if they just shotgun hire everyone like this.
2 hours ago, MARL_Mk1 said:By Matt's words on his two tweets, we may get actual, real information by the end of the week?
"I have learned a lot these past few days, and it definitely wasn't their fault. By the end of the week you'll understand why."
https://x.com/Matt_Lowne/status/1793376610684641541I don't think whatever they'll say we'll ever get enough level of detail to justify the 2020-2023 mess, and their subpar performance after releasing the game regarding speed and quality.
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22 minutes ago, never_do said:
Just adding my 2 cents here because in a certain way the discussion was entertaining. Insert "that escalated quickly" meme.
But I think people were not really talking about the same thing. I think the discussion went something like this:
Someone: Here are some values. So the real value X could be close to 1%
Someone else: I think X is closer to 1% than 10%
Someone: But from my reasoning X is close to 1% (not comparing it to 10% at all). Uses the term "margin of error".
After that it was popcorn time and everybody wanted to look like a maths/physics genius.
Maybe one of the problems was the use of the term "margin of error". I am not a native english speaker. But interestingly in my language there is a term which if you directly translate results in "margin of error". However the original term in my language is pretty loosely defined and not a technical/mathematical term. We also have "margin of error" but it uses slightly different words. Interestingly the wiki page for "margin of error" does not have a translation linked into my language which is pretty rare. Probably because of the slightly different meaning of the term although it is a direct translation.
So maybe it was just people talking about different things and also maybe a translation problem.
And at the end of the day... 1% or 10% is still insufficient for what this game was supposed to sell by using a budget at least 10 times bigger, and
streamliningdumbing it down for a wider audience, so either number is still a good enough argument to understand T2's decision of cancellation and to consider it a commercial failure that they might never touch again even if the economy granted them the possibility of infinite virtual money. -
3 hours ago, NexusHelium said:
*sigh*
Tom gone too. Why does this have to happen…
How did you not expect everyone to be fired? If anything, probably only Nate made it.
Also, in case someone hasn't seen it yet. Tom confirmed he was fired (TW: don't read the rest of his profile, yikes).
So, to recount: We've confirmed they fired the Multiplayer Engineer (Wes), they fired the Feature Lead (Tom), we also know they fired Blackrack which was part of the graphics team. Even if you just consider those 3 layoffs, you know they're no longer planning any long term development because... you kinda need a feature lead for features, and a multiplayer engineer if you want to reach that milestone in the roadmap.
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15 hours ago, K33N said:
Some things are better. The load times are significantly faster. Everything else is worse. Game breaking bugs are still everywhere, time warp doesn't work, dV calc doesn't work, you can still fall through the ground, docking has a high chance of bugs, etc etc
Akshually , KSP2 lacking 4 out 6 features from the roadmap, and only when no saves are created, loads barely 15 seconds faster from launching the game to a rocket on the launchpad.
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2 hours ago, Superfluous J said:
I believe it was this:
Not one single person arguing about this "gave" 7 years of their life to KSP2. The only people who did that are now laid off and are far too busy trying to secure a livelihood to argue on the Internet about how much it sucks that they can't play a fun game they were hoping to.
Disrespecting the time of your customers and even prospective customers has been shown to not be a good business model, even by KSP2 itself. Very few people (less than 100 here, another maybe 200 on discord) really have the dedication to follow and keep up with a project that's gonna be that long.
Still being here is a demonstration of brand loyalty. That they did nothing with that is gonna do everything but help the franchise further.
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10 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:
And has Kitbash helped figure out how to make crafts with thousands of parts run well while colonies run in the background? No, of course not.
Yes. Big part of that is the handling of non-owned vessels in multiplayer, to make the physics of N-parts aircraft manageable in a game that allows you to shoot off every single part individually. The solution they found "sacrifices" wobble (lol) amongst other stuff, to make offloaded vessels a single integrated part, but keeps the capacity to calculate hits and damage to individual parts. It's very probably an iteration of the KSP1 proto-vessel method. Mind you all vessels are still able to grab fuel/battery from their containers correctly.
Like really, at this point you're just throwing vitriol around with zero knowledge of what you talk about. You hate HarvesteR and KSP1? fine. But don't try to pass your hate as anything more but your personal views.
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13 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:
Or, like others, not make video game announcements the centerpiece of your life. I'm not sure who was actively suffering from a lack of development updates, but it's hyperbole to imply those years hurt.
Ah yes, I post a source for the date, and you edit the comment to say something else, and then reply to something I haven't even said which is that those years hurt...
Game development doesn't start at the trailer reveal.
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The only update we will hear is when the current stuff they're working out is ready to push, and they'll call that 1.0 and move on. They've done this before already. Go in there, have a read, and tell me how that doesn't line up exactly with what happened here. So all that's left to do is cover their legal side by "launching" and then forget about what for them is a failure of an IP, and move on.
If, like some people peddle, T2 starts growing again when the economy turns, and you hope they'll touch KSP again, consider the following:
- Do you really think they'll touch the IP again after the failure this iteration has been when they have so many other IPs in better situations? Remember this little joke costed them 8 to 9 digit dollars.
- Will you actually believe them and whichever PR mouthpiece they hire this time? The previous one told us that velocity was good, that everything was great, and they were having so much fun with the internal build where everything was in progress already.
- Will you give them another 7 years of your life since they announce a game is in the works only to be met with a broken tech demo so badly done it has no hope of supporting its own promises? Remember, KSP2 started being worked on in 2017. (Here's the source, because people still keep saying work didn't start 2017).
- How removed will the people making the game be from the community and the history of the IP at the time? This time we were lucky to get some modders to step in and do some real work (save for the heating system) on what was a revolving door of a studio. We might not have that luck twice.
So yeah. Unless a hypothetical KSP3 happens to go in the right direction and is somewhat revolutionary at the time it happens to come out, provided I'm still alive, I'm not giving it the time of day.
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12 hours ago, FloppyRocket said:
The game industry is incredibly mismanaged.
The general figure of manager, or group lead, started as a way to have a person in common a team could deal with without directly talking to each other, and that would oversee and organize the progress towards the different goals a team might have. Nowadays every manager position is just a megalomaniac narcissist interested in the preservation of his position even after convincing higher ups that they do not need to have any knowledge about the skills required for the tasks they manage, or that they need to be above other managers in a hierarchical structure, which somehow also needs other managers to coordinate managers.
Now, you add publicly traded companies that seek shareholder profit maximization, and gaming being the most profitable media out there (making more than music and movies combined, and even more than adult entertainment), and yeah, you've got a recipe for disaster. And that's just one way the well is poisoned. There's many reasons AAA companies have been consistently failing to produce good games in recent years. KSP2 is just another victim of the current zeitgeist.
However, I'll sustain it's not "mismanaged" per se, we're just on the wrong side of what they're managing for. They're managing projects to make fast profit, whilst we expect good games, and they certainly do not align. This is not to say that good games don't make a profit, but rather the business mentality is to make the most widely accepted product possible to increase sales, using the least effort and resources possible to increase profit. And that model certainly has a much harder time at producing good games, and heavily favors monetization, yearly releases, DLC, GaaS and so on.
On the other hand, it's a simple truth that you can't have a good game whilst also having wide reception and critical acclaim. You can only have two of those. The best games tend to have smaller audiences (or outright happened at a time when the gaming market was much smaller), and generally not that good critical acclaim, as a good chunk of those critics would not fit the target audience. We also have the other cases, where widely accepted games are destroyed by critics, and where critics and wide audiences love a game but accept that it's a mediocre product at best.
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2 hours ago, K^2 said:
The PD's not being closed either way. Private Division, while taking a significant chunk of the overall T2 layoffs, is still very much an operating entity with live projects and upcoming releases. So they can continue selling KSP2 Early Access and generating revenue this way. (Ethics aside, we're talking purely de jure here.)
So the reasons for keeping Intercept open are more interesting. Just off the top of my head, there are a few possibilities.
- Intercept is involved in a legal dispute of some sort (or there is a risk of it) so it needs to be kept around as a legal entity for legal reasons. (Sounds plausible, but I think we'd have heard something by now...)
- Under WARN act, the Intercept team is still formally employed, so it makes sense to keep them part of Intercept rather than transferring them to PD directly. (Definitely part of it, but would that stop announcing upcoming closure in June? MS did that with Arkane Austin...)
- Some number of Intercept employees are remaining as a skeleton team continuing support of KSP2, primarily for bug fixes, etc, and to keep the knowledge intact. (In which case, Intercept not closing is the truth, but it's down to maybe 5-10 people?)
- Intercept is being kept around as an entity because PD expects to expand it into a full studio again, and it's easier to do this rather than spin up an entirely new studio. (But then again, why not make that public?)
That's just some of the options that bubbled up from the past couple of days, but it could also be some combination or none of the above. Either way, the denial that studio is closed doesn't provide us with much information. A lot of options are still on the table, and I guess we'll just have to wait until some of the former Intercept employees are free to speak about their situation. I still don't expect us to get a full picture from that, but we might at least get a better count on whether this really was absolutely everyone, or just most of the studio.
I still sustain we should be wary of what T2 has actually done to "everyone fired but not closed" studios in the past, as even if speculation, it's much less wild to base ourselves on what we know has happened before:
- Fire all the people.
- Keep the studio "Open".
- Do literally nothing with it.
Why would they act this way? No idea. Maybe publicly saying they're actually closing studios would tank their stock further, or they keep the entities around to not deal with IP transfers, or whatever. But we do know what they do when they "Hit a studio with massive layoffs", "Shift employees to other studios"... and they've gone so far as to say "Don't worry, that studio will make games again" only to give the IP to some other studio of theirs a decade after the fact.
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2 hours ago, Ker Ball One said:
There's a bit more.
The layoffs are near 100% of the company, and all the devs that were on these form forums have stopped all communications.
If this were a crypto company I'd be more than just worried.
And T2 mentioned they were incurring about $160 million dollars in title cancellations, but have not mentioned which projects. We also know the Intercept office in Seattle was closed thanks to the WARN notice and posterior confirmations.
That's the facts.
If you wanna worry, just remember that 2k Marin has remained "opened" for 11 years after all its members got fired, and never rehired anyone, and never made a new game. T2 will never say they closed or cancelled anything.
EDIT: SUGGESTED READING - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2K_Marin
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1 hour ago, VlonaldKerman said:
It’s more like you fired all of your employees and sold the building your store is in, but you might let your little brother sell lemonade next summer under the name of your store.
The owner of RadioShack still owns the brand, even if there's not a single store or employee. Then last year someone bought the RadioShack brand and opened stores in central and south america.
We'd be very lucky if we get the later instead of just stopping at the former.
). If this dude ask for a refund, they are still entitled to have their videos using KSP2 being published and monetized?
Take Two Interactive (Rockstar, 2K, Private Division) canceling games, ending projects and laying off 5% of its workforce
in KSP2 Discussion
Posted
The answer is Yes. At any point in development you're just allowed to say "yep, that's it, this is 1.0." For proof, look at StarForge (the game, not the celeb prebuilt pc brand) and other games by the same developer. The only process by which Steam would care is a proper delisting. If you cancel development AND THEN delist an EA game from Steam, they will offer automatic refunds.