PDCWolf

My guy, at this level you're just nitpicking semantics to have something to be right about and can't be discussed, you're not arguing a point or sharing an opinion. I really fail to understand what you want from people discussing this topic. The sentence literally says that substantially all of Private Division's live and unreleased titles are part of the deal, that group includes KSP 1 and 2 as both games are currently live for sale and playable. I'm not attacking you or getting mad at you, I'm just confused at what your point even is. I've been spinning something up after what happened to palworld. Pure, wild speculation, obviously, but please do follow me: burnout for the AAA/MTX/DLC/SEASONPASS formula is very real, people are flocking away from it to the point about 500.000 people actually went and bought a game as bad as Veilguard hoping it'd give them something as fresh and away from the usual slop like BG3 did. Seeing this trend, corporations are moving towards trying to capture their own mega-franchises: Sony is pursuing Palworld. They're stepping in to defend them against Nintendo and have actually worked out a deal for rights to the franchise because they want the whole pokemon package, like plushies, spinoffs, anime and so on. They also shot their shot with Destiny, though that went horribly. Microsoft has Halo, they've reworked 343 to not repeat the mistakes of Infinite, worked to bring the MCC for easily accessible legacy titles, and are now looking towards the future. They tried the TV series, hopefully learned from that. Minecraft is Microsoft's other horse, much more family friendly, already well established, got expanded into as many devices as they could, will probably launch on steam at some point, already has merch, and a movie coming up. Gearbox was trying really hard with Borderlands, the movie was a huge flop, BL4 is expected to be that as well. They got bought off, keep reading. Nintendo has Pokemon, the literal highest grossing media franchise in history. Take Two can't really do this with GTA, as big as it is, nor RDR or anything else, as these things clearly have to be all-ages. Also games like GTA and RDR clearly take way too long to produce, and even if they're well established, they're a huge risk that drags profits down really hard, as T2's stock and earning calls have demonstrated for about three years now. So they wanted to try this with Kerbal, what they thought was a cheap, easy to make indie that could make it big. Obviously they shot themselves in the foot by hiring a bunch of amateurs and cutting their stubby wings off, making them completely unfit for what the already existing Kerbal community expected. They've now bought Gearbox, probably to try again with either Risk of Rain or Borderlands (movie came out, BL4 soon). Now, some other player with big money saw the opportunity and really wants to try again at making KSP into a mega franchise. This is probably why people like @Lisias thought of Tencent. They have the money to do it, they have multiple studios they could easily throw the work at, and they have China, where KSP still doesn't have a marred reputation and it's also a market with plenty of money for the taking. So yeah, my money is on some really big player that's gonna completely turn KSP into something entirely different to sell it to people who aren't us. Of course the pipe dream is that some charitable soul with tons of money bought it to make KSP2 into what it should've been, but that's really a pipe dream. As an extra, since it got lost in the other thread. Private Division owns the following IPs: KSP OlliOlli Rollerdome No Rest for the Wicked (not entirely sure about this one) So really... out of those, only one has an established name and following, and I really doubt someone bought the whole package just to make OlliOlli 2.

How is "As part of this transaction, the buyer purchased our rights to substantially all of Private Division’s live and unreleased titles." not saying exactly that?

A hypothesis is not a guess, that's science 101. What differentiates our hypotheses from simple guesses is a boatload of environmental information and previous experiences, and literal word of T2 that Private Division owns the IP. But hey, just like with the 2k marin comparison, let's just wait and see who's right.

From that list, they do not own Hades, Ancestors, Outer Worlds, they never owned Eternal Shards, and I could bet a good sum they don't own whatever Game Freak is working on. There's also indication that they're only publishers for Tales of the Shire. That seems most probable. Tencent buys a whole indie publishing label, and uses one of its funded studios to pursue the development of one of its titles. They're gonna hit us with that tencent-mtx-store stare:

Yeah, like saying our current events being T2 repeating what they did to 2k Marin with IG was speculation . Private Division is a subsidiary of Take Two. The legal definition of that is that they're legally beholden to and controlled by Take Two. Now, going a bit further back, in 2017 Take Two acquired Kerbal Space Program, the full IP, And from their own investor presentations, they've clearly given ownership of the IP to Private Division. So it's clear that internally, the IP ownership was passed on to their own subsidiary. Private Division owns the IP. It'd be very weird for them to retake ownership of the KSP IP before selling it. In reality, you can be sure no one cares about Private Division for the name Private Division or the talent therein, what sells is the IPs they own.

If only people had a backbone and had properly come at steam with mass flagging of the product, we might've had automated refunds by now. Edit to clarify: This isn't aimed at you so much as your post prompted that thought in me. I'm already trying to get a proper refund for this.

That'd be one way to make sure I do not purchase their games. God, that'd be even worse.

Hopefully our new benefactors get to make themselves known and say a couple words soon.

Well, I'll eat some of my words. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/zelnick-on-private-division-sale-those-projects-were-smaller-were-in-the-business-of-big-hits

We were discussing about the opposite scenario: T2 buying KSA to rebrand it, to "sweeten" the sale of PD, which my opinion is pretty clear on. Now on what you propose... yeah no, I definitely don't see why would the KSA guys lump their hard work under a franchise that's burnt and crashed. Like yeah, there's people who worked in both KSPs working with them, but the saving grace is that they don't have T2 on top to make dumb decisions (which is a double edged sword but hey). So I really don't see why would they try and acquire the brand other than some fans wanting to see the product carry the official naming and the little green men.

Yes, all of them were sold working, or exchanged for newer cars hand-to-hand with some cash to balance. Never did I sell a car without an engine, or without wheels... and neither did I fix them up for sale because that'd be less money I'd have for a new car versus adding money to a rapidly depreciating asset like a used car. No one buys used cars to get a fresh paintjob and new rims/tyres. In this case: PD is empty, it's only a managerial body with mixed-to-bad results. IG and Roll7 are empty, literally just names at this point, a prospective buyer would still have to go through hiring processes and really no one wastes money buying a studio name, the general public care little about which studio is behind what game save for the absolutely biggest franchises. The rest of PD's published games are through exactly that: publishing deals, the association of studios to PD ends after the game is published, except for support or updates. So really PD only comes with IG and Roll7 in the package. The only thing left to give any attractive to PD is their Game Freak partnership and whatever might come off that, and I'm very sure it is also the reason why PD wasn't sold for pennies, because that deal was in the bag already and since the money had already been gambled, might as well stick to your gamble with the developers of the most profitable media franchise's games on earth. Obviously, the first way to "sweeten" this possible deal is by making PD and its comboed assets cheap. Either they didn't make it cheap enough, or nobody wants it even for cheap. This also means that if this Game Freak game works, it's not gonna get cheaper either. Now we come to this maybe-license-KSA-as-KSP mess, but that'd also require goodwill from T2 to try and get burned again, and a huge ego-hit from having to buy out one of PD's rejected pitches.

I still believe they're vastly different scenarios. Right here you'd be talking about buying product X to bundle with your brand Y to sell the Z combo. That'd be like trying to sell land based on a bushel of rotten apples with a good one on top that's not even from the aforementioned land. Even PD's other titles are really not that attractive. And before someone mentions Roll7, their two games were played by a cumulative total of 1000 people on Steam.

This is overly simplistic, and I think it's missing some important nuances: People on PC got burned by KSP2. We know it didn't pass 100.000 sales at release, and nowadays estimates place it from 200.000 owners to 670.000. That means out of 5.000.000 KSP1 purchasers, 4.800.000 to 4.330.000 decided to not get involved with the sequel, and we know from those 200.000 to 600.000 purchasers, about 60% of them refunded it. And that's after a 4 years long hype campaign with ads on youtube banners and even TV. People on console got burned by the horrible PS4 port and by probably never ever getting KSP2. People using it professionally got burned by KSPEdu being abandoned -long- ago. The brand got a huge hit from it, that's >60% of KSP1 purchasers giving KSP2 a no confidence vote. The difference is we know PD+its IPS+IG+KSP2 and even PD+IPs alone were offered to multiple parties, even Paradox, and nobody wanted it. It's already failed at getting sold. Personally, I'd be really happy to not have them waste money on acquiring the brand (unless it was dumb cheap, like goodwill cheap), and also if T2 kept their now bloody hands off of this project as well.

I'd love to hear how that's pitched to T2 after losing however many millions on a game that not only failed but also made the franchise, the studio and their subsidiary PD completely unsellable.

I dislike both their previous games, however I can attest that user accessibility is pretty much the opposite in ICARUS, where the game explains most things, or they're easy to understand from the information you get. So I think in time they've gotten the experience of not making a game just be a mute wall of difficulty... they just haven't gone back to apply that to Stationeers. Dean in some posts mentions they're making Stationeers at a loss and it's a very hard to revert trend, which is a vicious circle on why they really don't make much progress on it.

Nah, I think it's important to set the tone right, and if that tone is that this is a game with consequences and that you have to take seriously, I couldn't be happier. It's one of the biggest holes in KSP1, where not taking itself seriously suddenly infected everything so much that serious, deep mechanics pretty much fell out of scope for a "silly green men exploding simulator".

Since I've been quoting Dean, I'll quote him some more: Q: is this real? Q: whenever I see a project like this, I'm always very skeptical. I think we're gonna see a very noticeable difference between how they conduct themselves towards a critical community vs what the "professional studio" did, at least in the handling feedback department. The mature thing is understanding salt is feedback, and that shielding developers from criticism is bad for everyone, even the game itself. That's why the KSP1 devs ran to 4chan for, to get actual criticism rather than a hugbox madhouse, you can't grow in those. Just like in real life, it's a loss, it's probably a worthy life being lost. You should be attached, you should be invested, it's what makes you try to be better at building safer and more complete craft. Still, depending on how they handle death, it might not even matter.

I think that's the point: They're not death-happy disposable green humanoids. You're supposed to take care of them. It's a good change in tone I think, maybe one of the things they learned is that taking "lol so kerbal" too seriously can actually ruin the direction of your game. Plus judging by what I've played of Stationeers, Dean does like to take it somewhat seriously.

I've been digging some (not much) and here's some quotes from Dean about KSA. Of course, don't take anything as set in stone: On using kittens: On scale and patched conics vs NBody On getting something playable (not specified if public or not) On whether the orbital sim is moddable: On axial tilt: On the possibility of off-focus thrust: Another one about operating craft off-focus, for simultaneous launches or landing boosters: On a bigger solar system and life support: On multiplayer: On a native vs modded implementation of something like kOS: On why the hell would they use XML and C#: On when does Dean think modders can start touching his baby: Another confirmation for life support, and some about the building of craft: On why the screen looks so busy on the orbit sim video: More on parts and the technical direction of the BRUTAL framework: On some of the pillars for their design:

Don't take it as hype, take it as a signal that they're indeed thinking of the long term and not just building another KSP1. In fact, since it's so early and there's no roadmap, it's good to know they're thinking about this stuff in concrete terms. Funny. Rather than full circle, I'd say it's an ascending helix: KSP was posted to Orbiter's forums, now KSA is posted to KSP's forums. It's a circle but we're also apparently going up.

They mention: Jolt physics - Mentioned before but yeah, they're not using physX, havoc or other known prepackaged physics for this. Robotic parts - "Our robotic parts are gonna be more stable..." - 0:58 Layered physics, "Keplerian > Simple > Detailed", where keplerians are used for orbits, simple physics for "when nobody watches" (unloaded vessels? they mention simple colliders, rigid bodies, bounding boxes as examples of simple stuff) and Jolt detailed physics kick in for focused stuff. "we might not even need to do this, Jolt might be performant enough" - From 2:30 Multithreaded - 4:20 - "I thought it was gonna be harder to multithread it." "Interstellar" - 4:53 - Mentioned as part of how they can go the other way with more complex physics layers. "The advantage is we don't have a game scene like Unity or Unreal, we have no context like a traditional app to do anything. You've seen our simulation [...] we pass a delta time and simulate a hundred thousand years like that [...] We get to abstract stuff out." "We're learning from the mistakes of the past" - 8:40 - Arguably the best feature.

Icarus was actually mostly positive, until they finished their DLC releasing cycle, pushing the price of the full experience from $17 (in my region) to $94, $41 if you don't mind the cosmetics (yes, that's $36 of cosmetic DLC for a game that's $17, and by SteamDB, those prises are +64% for normal US Dollar, madness.). Plus calling them "expansions" was very controversial compared to the content they bring in. Mind you all of that was without emitting a single judgement on whether I think the game is good or bad, which I've already stated before. Not like trusting Steam reviews is any indication of intelligence. Yeah, having the KSP1 team, and part of the KSP2 team is a -huge- boost on experience, not just on systems and mechanics... but on knowing how to do and not to do things. They all got to watch KSP2 and cringe at it, some from inside even.

The post I quoted from them reads So I take it they've taken XNA and 'looked at' their homework and built up from there. Blanket statements are always bad. You shouldn't get your hopes up if all you're shown is hype and not the technical background to make those work. With KSP2 it was always smoke and mirrors and they could never talk about anything technical, save for the heating blog, which the only thing they had to show for it was paint drawings. That was a huge red flag and it flew under a lot of people's radars. I think my skepticism comes from two places: 1. Icarus is hot garbage, and 2. Stationeers has been for the best part of a decade in Early Access and they never even bothered showing a roadmap, it feels like it's a forgotten project they throw some feature in when they remember about it. They're using Solar System data because it already exist and is apparently easy to import into their system for quick testing. You can clearly see they've also scaled it down to KSP neutron-star densities.

I'm sure when we mod in Kerbals in place of Cats (or whatever it ends up being, Capybaras?), it'll be what KSP2 should've probably been. They haven't revealed any long term plans so far that I know of.

There's an unofficial subreddit that's rehosted some of the info they've posted on Discord. Including: 1. A dev stream! 2. Images! 3. "Very rough concept, the animal or its appearance might change"